Turn 7 of 7

You do not ask him to describe her. You do not need to. The shape of her is already in the room — in the coin beneath your grandmother's cloth, in the treeline walks no one asked about, in the word *weight* spoken with such flat certainty that a child knew never to press. Your grandmother stood at the edge of the Underwood and she moved something out of it, or moved something back, and the coin was not her payment but her receipt. A marker that said: this was carried, this was set down, this debt is held. And Aldous did the same thing, or tried to, except he opened the leaf and understood, and the understanding broke something that was meant to stay whole.

Iris's hand goes back to her apron pocket. This time you do not let it pass. You hold out your palm, and she looks at you with the expression of someone who has been caught at the treeline, and she pulls out a small folded leaf — green, fresh, still faintly damp with the deep-forest dark that is not Little Halloway's mud. Inside the leaf is a tooth. A milk tooth, small and brown at the root.

"I found it at the river," she says, barely above a whisper. "Last month. I didn't know what it was. I just — the wood wanted me to take it, so I took it. I've been leaving things at the treeline since spring. Little things. Berries, thread, a lock of hair. I thought it was — I thought it was friendly." Her voice breaks on the last word, and you realize how young nineteen still is, and how the Underwood does not punish kindness so much as redirect it.

You take the tooth from Iris and set it on the counter beside the two coins. The three objects sit in a row — tooth, coin, coin — and the warmth from the metal seems to reach toward the tooth as though recognizing something. You understand now what your grandmother knew: the Underwood does not trade in death. It trades in circulation. Things must move through it and out of it and back again, teeth and coins and promises, and when the circuit breaks — when someone drops a thing in a river instead of carrying it through — the thing that follows is not a predator. It is the weight itself, looking for a place to rest. Aldous did not need a remedy. He needed to complete the circuit his fear had severed.

You wrap the tooth in a fresh leaf, the way your grandmother would have, and you press it into Aldous's hand. You take one of his coins and place it in the box beside your grandmother's, and you give him the other.

"Carry it back," you tell him. "Not to the river. Into the wood, past where the trees stop being trees. Find the place where the roots break the surface and bury it there. Leave the coin on top. That is the weight, and that is where it belongs." Aldous looks at the small bundle in his palm and his shoulders lose a tension they have carried for weeks, and he nods once without speaking. Iris touches your arm, lightly, and says she will walk with him to the treeline because she knows the path — she has been walking it all spring without understanding what she was walking toward. You let her go. Some circuits are completed better by the hands that broke them.

The epilogue is quiet. Aldous Vane did not come back through Little Halloway, but the following stopped, and three mornings later a coin appeared on your doorstep stamped with the bare tree and its open roots. You put it in the box with the others and latched the clasp. Iris never went to the treeline alone again, but she became your apprentice in truth — serious now, careful, with a respect for the wood that was no longer curiosity but craft. Bett Harrow, when she heard the shape of it, nodded and said only that the Harrow women had always carried the wood's weights, and it was right that you should know. And on autumn evenings, when the light was going and the air smelled of bark and wet loam, you walked the treeline yourself, not because anything needed carrying, but because some debts are kept not by payment but by presence, and the Underwood does not forget the people who show up.