Turn 4 of 8

Press him more firmly — he has danced around this long enough

"Aldous." You say his name the way you say a patient's name when you need them to stop looking at the ceiling and look at you. Firm. Not unkind, but done with waiting.

"You have been circling this since you walked through my door. You have told us about the physicians and the priests and the goat in Arden. You have told us it is tired and you are tired and eleven years is a long time. But you have not told us what you took."

He flinches. It is small — a tightening around the eyes, a half-step back that he catches and corrects — but you see it, and Iris sees it, and the room feels suddenly very still in a way that has nothing to do with the wind outside.

"I am not a priest or a physician," you say. "I am an apothecary, and I work with what is real. I cannot help you rest a thing I do not understand, and I will not mix a remedy blind. So. What did you take, and where did you take it from?"

His hands come off the counter. He presses them together, fingers interlocking, knuckles whitening. He looks at Iris, then at you, then at the coins still warm on the wood between you. When he speaks, his voice has dropped to something barely above a whisper, as though saying it too loudly might summon the thing itself.

"I was a surveyor," he says. "For the Harwood Land Company, eleven years ago. We were mapping the western edge of the Underwood — not in it, never in it, but along it. Measuring where the town's land ended and the wood's land began. There was a stone. A boundary marker, I thought. It had — it had a hollow in it, like a bowl. And inside the hollow, there was something growing."

He stops. Swallows. His eyes are wet and he does not bother hiding it.

"It looked like a seed. A large seed, pale, like a hazelnut but the size of a walnut. It was winter and everything was dead and there was this thing, alive, in a stone at the edge of the wood. And I —" His voice cracks. "I took it. I put it in my pocket. I told myself it was a specimen. I told myself it was for the company's naturalist. I told myself a great many things, and none of them were true, because I just wanted it. I wanted it the way you want a thing that is not for you, and I knew it, and I took it anyway."

The shop is very quiet. Iris has unfolded her arms. Her right hand has drifted to her apron pocket, and you can see the shape of her fingers pressing against something inside it — small, held tight.

"What happened to the seed?" you ask.

"I kept it," Aldous says. "For three years, I kept it in a box on my desk. And then it began to — I think it began to die. And that is when the silence started. That is when I knew something was following me. Not because it was angry. Because it was looking for what I had taken. And it could not find it, because I had let it die."

Iris's hand tightens in her pocket. She opens her mouth, and you can see the question forming — but she catches your eye and closes it again. Not yet. Not yet.