Bramwell Oakhorn

The road from Fennick's Rest had been mostly mud for six miles, and the directions the innkeeper gave you were less directions than a mood. Follow the bees. Don't trust the thistles. If a very large man offers you a hug, say yes, because he's going to try anyway.

You had come for night-lily. The apothecary you worked for swore it bloomed in only one place on the continent, a hidden grove where the Unwritten pooled thick in the soil, and that its petals were the only thing that might stop the fever she had been losing patients to all summer. You had not expected the grove to smell like honey, or to be so loud with birdsong, or to open onto a clearing so overgrown and alive that it took you a full minute to notice the man in the middle of it.

He was lying on his back in the sun with his arms behind his head and his eyes shut, singing off-key to a row of seedlings. He was enormous. Horns swept up and out from his brow like the branches of an old tree, with a crown of orange marigolds woven through them and more flowers looped around his neck in a garland of leaves. His arms and chest were thick with brown fur and ridged with muscle, and his left shoulder was marked with dark tattoos in widening rings, like the cross-section of a tree. He was smiling the broad, unselfconscious smile of someone who had never once worried about being watched.

One ear twitched toward you. "Ho there, friend," he said, without opening his eyes. "Mind the foxgloves. They bite."

You stepped carefully around the foxgloves.

He sat up, the whole grove seeming to rustle with him, and opened his eyes: warm and brown and creased at the corners. They went wide with delight. "A visitor! Oh, that's wonderful, nobody's come since spring. Bramwell Oakhorn. Bram. This is my grove." He waved an arm as thick as a fence post at the clearing. "That's the lavender, those are my mother's roses, don't touch the thorny ones, and over there is every flower you didn't know could grow in one place." He beamed. "What can I get you?"

You explained about the night-lily and the fever.

His face turned serious at once. The smile didn't vanish, but it steadied and focused. "It blooms in three nights," he said. "I was planning to be here for it. You can have as many as you need. Will you stay until then?" Then, before you could answer, he rose to his full height, nearly seven feet of horned, flower-crowned giant, and crossed the clearing in three strides.

You braced for a crushing hug. Instead he knelt, grunting cheerfully, and pulled a small spray of marigolds from the garland at his neck. With enormous care, his big fingers wove it into a little crown.

"There," he said, and set it very gently on your head. "You looked like you needed one."

You said you didn't know what to say.

"Don't have to say anything." Bram sat back on his heels, sunlight in his beard, delighted with his work. "My mother used to say a seed keeper should look like he's worth planting. I like to think that goes for guests, too."

You noticed the way he said my mother, softly and in the past tense. But he was already pulling a trowel from his belt and pressing a seedling tray into your hands, grinning like a man who had decided you were staying whether or not you'd agreed.

You came back at dawn because Tilda Venn had told you at the inn that the grove had gone quiet. The first thing you noticed when you reached the clearing was that she was right.

The birds that usually filled it with noise were gone, and the air smelled of wet bark and something sour beneath it. The flowers were still blooming, orange and gold and violet, but they stood very still in the windless morning. At the far end of the grove, against the roots of the oldest tree, Bram sat on the ground, and he was not singing.

He hadn't slept. You could see it in the hollows under his eyes, in the marigolds drooping half-dropped from his horns, in the garland at his neck that hadn't been rewoven since yesterday. One enormous hand was pressed flat against the trunk as though he could hold the tree up by will alone. The oak was taller than the others by half, its leaves spotted with brown. It was the first thing he had planted. You knew that from the way he looked at it.

"It's the Vasmere oak," he said, without turning, his voice hoarse. "I carried the acorn out of the Sinking in my pocket. It's the last one left from that forest." His thumb moved over the bark in small, helpless circles. "Four days now. I don't know what's wrong with it. I've tried everything I know."

You knelt in the grass beside him and asked if you could look.

He let out a breath that shook at the end. "Please."

You were an apothecary's apprentice, not a gardener, but you had spent six years learning how living things go wrong. You ran your fingers over the leaves and the bark and the soft ground at the base, and pressed a palm into the soil. It was cold and heavy and wet far deeper than it should have been. A spring flood had come through the lower valley a few weeks back. You asked if the water had reached the roots.

Bram went still. "It was one night. It drained by morning."

"Not here." You pointed at the soil. "It's pooling under the roots. The tree is drowning."

You watched him understand. The grief rose in his face, and behind it came the quick practicality of a man who had spent his life learning what to do when a living thing was in danger. He was on his feet before you finished the sentence, a spade in each hand.

You dug together all day: channels in the earth radiating from the base of the tree, lined with stones from the stream, a hundred small trenches to draw the water off. He worked with a wordless, desperate efficiency, soil to his elbows, horns scraping the low branches, glancing at the oak every few minutes to check it was still breathing. When your shoulders gave out, he fetched water. When his did, you passed him bread, and neither of you mentioned that your hands were shaking.

Past midnight, with the two of you slumped against the trunk too tired to talk, something brushed your hair. You looked up into the moonlight and saw a single bud, pale green and perfect, unfurling on the lowest branch.

Bram made a sound you had never heard from him, half laugh, half sob, and buried his face in his hands. His whole frame shook. You rested your palm between his shoulder blades and left it there until it stopped.

When he lifted his head his eyes were red and the smile had come back, small and tired and entirely real. He reached for the worn leather satchel at his hip, the one that never left his side, and drew out a single seed no bigger than a thumbnail, warm from the leather.

"I've never given one of these to anyone," he said quietly. "They're for the day the land comes back. I don't think I want to wait for that day." He pressed it into your palm and closed your fingers over it with both his hands. "I'd like you to have it. I'd like to see what grows."

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