Turn 7 of 7

You leave Ammet on the bench and walk through the cloister toward the Abbess's quarters. The corridor is narrow and cold, and your footsteps echo against the flagstones with a finality you can feel in your teeth. Corrin's door is ajar. You push it open and she is sitting in her chair by the window, her breviary open on her lap, her hands folded over it the way they were folded during Lauds. She looks up, and her face is calm — not the calm of innocence or the calm of concealment, but the calm of someone who has been sitting in this chair since before dawn, waiting for the knock that she knew would come. The candle on her desk has burned down to a stub. The wax has pooled on the wood in a shape like a closed hand.

"You counted them," she says. Her voice is thin but steady, and she does not pretend to misunderstand.

"Sixty-one. I knew you would. I knew the number before I cut them."

You stand in the doorway and do not speak, because the question is already in the room and she will answer it or she will not. Corrin turns her head toward the window, where the garden is visible above the cloister roof — the dark shape of the tree, heavy with its gold, the three empty stems bright against the morning. She is quiet for a long time. Then she reaches beneath the breviary and produces a cloth pouch, small and plain, and sets it on the desk between you. It is heavy for its size. You do not need to open it to know what is inside.

"Ilde's grafts are failing," Corrin says. "The south bough is dying from the inside out, and in two years it will be dead wood, and the fruit it bears will die with it. Three fruit grow on that bough — three fruit that will never ripen, because the branch cannot feed them. I took them before they soured. I took them because they were already lost, and because a fruit that dies on a dying branch is a year of life wasted."

She pauses, and her hand goes to the pouch and rests there. Her knuckles are sharp beneath the skin, the joints swollen, the veins visible in the morning light.

"I have given back nine years to this tree, and it is dying anyway. The south bough will go first, then the east. In forty years there will be nothing left but a stump and a memory. I took Ilde's knife because a cut made with my own hands would have been clumsy and the tree would have suffered. I came in bare feet because my boots creak on the gravel and I did not want to wake Ammet, who I knew was watching. I did not record a vote because there was nothing to vote on — the fruit was already dying. I marked Ilde's name in the ledger because I needed to track which nights she came, so I could go after her and not be seen."

She opens the pouch. Inside, three fruit lie on the cloth — small, pale, not yet golden. Their skins are dimpled and soft, the flesh beneath beginning to brown at the stem end. Dying fruit, taken from a dying branch. You touch one and it gives under your finger like an overripe plum. There is no year of life in these. There might have been, if the branch were healthy, if the grafts had taken, if the sap had risen. But they were already failing, and Corrin knew it, and she cut them free the way Ilde cuts canker from a rose — cleanly, with care, to save what remains.

"I will tell the sisters," Corrin says. "I will stand if I can, and I will tell them what I did and why. And then I will ask them to change the vote — to allow fruit to be taken when it is dying, without a tally, without a record. Because a year of life that is already lost should not sit on a branch rotting while we argue over who it belongs to."

You stand in the doorway for a long moment. The morning light falls across the Abbess's face and finds every hollow, every line, every year she has given back. She is sixty-three and she looks eighty, and she is sitting in a chair holding three dying fruit in a cloth pouch, and she is not afraid. You take the pouch from her desk. You tell her you will bring it to the chapter meeting, and that you will speak for her if she cannot stand. She looks at you, and something in her face shifts — not gratitude, not relief, but a kind of weariness released, the expression of someone who has carried a thing a long way and is finally permitted to set it down.

The bell rings for Terce. You walk back through the cloister with the pouch in your hands, and the garden gate is open, and Ilde is standing at the south bough with her fingers on the loosened binding, and Ammet is sitting on the lavender bench with the ledger open on her knees, and the tree stands in the morning light with sixty-one fruit on its branches and three empty stems that will heal before autumn. You do not know yet what the sisters will decide. You know only that the tree has forty years left, and that every one of those years is now spoken for, and that the counting — your counting, the whole of your office, the thing you have done every dawn for eleven years without error — will have to change shape to hold what is coming. The dying fruit will not be the last. The south bough will not be the last branch to fail. And the vote, which has been the same for as long as anyone can remember, will have to bend or it will break, the way a binding left too tight on a failing graft will strangle the very thing it was meant to save.