Turn 7 of 8

Check on Iris — if she's been leaving offerings, she may know something about the treeline the ledger doesn't

You tell Aldous you'll be back, and he nods without looking away from the window. Iris's room is above the shop, up the narrow stair at the back of the workroom, and you climb it with the ledger's torn page still sitting in your mind like a splinter. The door is ajar. You knock twice, and when there is no answer you push it open and find the room empty — bed made, lamp cold, the window facing the treeline latched from the inside but with a folded cloth on the sill as though someone has been sitting there watching. On the small desk beside her mortar and pestle there is a row of jars, each one unlabeled, each one half-full of something different. Salt. Dried petals. A dark powder that smells, when you lean close, like turned earth after rain.

There is a notebook as well, thin and soft-covered, pushed behind the jars. You hesitate — Iris is your apprentice, not your child, and her notes are her own. But Bett's words sit heavy: if you are going to mix something for the Underwood, you need to know who in this town is already on speaking terms with it. You open the notebook. The first page reads, in Iris's careful hand: *The treeline takes what is offered but does not ask for more. It is not hungry. It is waiting.* Below that, a list of dates spanning three months — every fourth night, an offering left at the edge of the wood. Bread, salt, a copper coin, a lock of hair. Beside each entry, a single observation. *The trees leaned in.* *The ground was warm where it shouldn't be.* *I heard something breathe, and it was not afraid of me.*

You close the notebook and set it back where you found it, but your hands are not steady. Three months. She has been going to the treeline every fourth night for three months, and she heard breathing and was not afraid — wrote it down as though it were a finding, a result, something to be noted and catalogued. She is nineteen and braver than sensible, and you have been so caught up in Aldous and his grandfather's promise that you did not see what was growing under your own roof. The cloth on the windowsill is still warm.

You go back downstairs. Aldous has not moved, but he turns when you reach the bottom step, and you can see the question in his face before he asks it. Through the back window, the treeline is still there — dark, patient, closer than it has any right to be. You think about Iris's notebook, about the breathing she heard and did not fear, and about the breathing Aldous heard three nights ago in a sealed room. The same sound, heard by two different people, from two different directions. One heard it as something tired. The other heard it as something waiting.

"I need to find my apprentice," you say. "She has been going to the treeline. Leaving things. Hearing things. She may know something about the wood that the ledger doesn't — something it only tells to people who come to it with their hands open." Aldous's expression shifts, and you watch something complicated move through it — hope, and beneath the hope, a fear that has nothing to do with the thing that follows him.