A garden of borrowed years

Turn 1 of 7

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

You count them again. You close your eyes, open them, and count a third time because the number does not change and you need it to. Sixty-one. The stems hang above you on the oldest bough like small accusing fingers — three of them, pale where the wood has been opened to the air, each cut at a precise diagonal. Not snapped. Not weathered. Cut with a blade honed thin and held at exactly the right angle to do no harm to the bark around it. You have tended this tree for eleven years and you know the difference between a loss and a theft. This is a theft committed by someone who loves what they stole from.

The garden is still. The hour is early enough that the bell for Lauds has not yet rung, and the Abbey sits around you in its grey pre-dawn hush, the old stones holding the last of the night's cold. Mist hangs low over the herb beds. The wall encloses everything — stone on three sides, the Abbey's south face on the fourth — and the single iron gate is latched from inside, as it always is through the night. You latched it yourself. Whatever happened here happened within these walls, among the eight of you, and the thought settles in your chest like a stone dropped into still water.

You climb the short ladder and bring your face close to the cuts. The wood is pale, barely oxidised — no more than a few hours old. The tool marks are consistent and clean, the angle identical on all three stems. One hand, one blade, one unhurried pass. Whoever did this knew exactly where the fruit-bearing stems were weakest and cut just above the second node, where the tree would heal fastest. It is the cut of a gardener. There are two gardeners in the Abbey: you, and Sister Ilde, who has pruned this tree since before you took your vows.

The Abbey bell rings for Lauds, thin and certain in the cold air. You hear the back door of the dormitory open and close, soft footsteps on the gravel path. Sister Ammet appears around the corner of the cloister, the ledger tucked under her arm, her face drawn and pale in a way that sleeplessness alone does not explain. She stops when she sees you on the ladder, and her eyes go to the cut stems, and something moves across her face that you cannot read — not surprise, not guilt, but something adjacent to both.

"You've seen," she says. She does not ask it as a question. She holds the ledger against her chest like a shield and does not come closer. Behind her, in the corridor that leads to the Abbess's quarters, a candle is already lit — Corrin is awake, as she always is, as she has been every morning for the nine years since she began refusing her share. The fruit on the remaining stems glows faintly in the strengthening light, pale gold against dark leaves, each one a year of someone's life waiting to be given or kept. Sixty-one years left to distribute among eight women who are not, any of them, getting younger. Three of those years are already gone.