Turn 6 of 8

Ask Iris what she is hiding in her pocket

"Iris." You do not raise your voice, but you change its weight, the way your mother taught you — the tone that says I see you, and I am asking, and I expect an answer. Her hand goes still in her pocket.

"What do you have in your pocket?"

Her face does something complicated. You have known her three years, and you have seen her brave and you have seen her foolish and you have seen her kind in ways that remind you of yourself before the work wore the soft edges off. But you have not seen this expression: the look of someone holding a secret that has grown heavier than they expected, who is simultaneously relieved and terrified to be caught.

"Iris," Aldous says, and there is something in his voice you do not like — a sharpness, a leaning-forward, a hunger that has nothing to do with her and everything to do with what she might be carrying. She feels it too. She takes a half-step back, closer to you, and her hand tightens around whatever she is holding.

"Show me," you say. "Now."

She pulls it out. It sits in her open palm, small and pale, and for a moment you think it is a stone. But it is not a stone. It is a seed. Walnut-sized, the colour of old bone, with a fine network of lines across its surface like the veins of a leaf. It is not alive. You can see that — the pallor of it, the dryness, the way it sits in her hand with the inertness of something that has stopped. But it is not entirely dead either, the way a seed pulled from cold storage in midwinter is not entirely dead. It is waiting.

"Where did you get this?" you say, and your voice sounds very far away in your own ears.

"The treeline," Iris says. "I've been leaving offerings there for — for months now. Little things. Honey, milk, dried rosemary. And about three weeks ago, I found this sitting on top of one of the offering stones. Like it had been left for me. Like something wanted me to have it."

Aldous makes a sound. It is not a word. It is the sound a man makes when he sees something he thought he buried in a dead garden in Arden, something he has carried the guilt of for eleven years, sitting in the palm of a girl in an apothecary shop at the edge of the wood where it was born.

"That is not the same seed," he says, but his voice is shaking. "I buried that seed. The soil went grey. It was dead. It was dead."

"Was it?" you say, and you look at the thing in Iris's palm, and you feel the silence outside the shop pressing against the shutters like something leaning its whole weight against a door.