The work at the gap had settled into the shape the rotation gave everything that fall. Counts at dawn. Water hauled. The crew's thrown tops cleared off the stations' feet, limb by limb, and stacked for burning where their burning could do no harm.
June was up the slope above the drag road that morning, alone with her report book, counting stumps for the examination. From the twelfth tree's channel Rowan could see her against the sky, doing it the warden's way: every stump numbered, every crown read. The crowns told their own story and she was writing it down — forty years of pruning, in lopped wood, for any clerk in Dunmere who cared to learn reading.
She called down once, not loud.
"Rowan. Off the slope. Both of you."
He looked up from the twelfth tree's channel. June was standing very still above the drag road with her pencil stopped, looking at a thing in the living birch at the slope's edge that he had walked under for days without seeing. A dead spruce top, grey as bone, killed years back and caught fast in the living tree's arms when the crew's dragging had knocked it loose. It hung there over the slope like a held breath.
"Widowmaker," June said, quiet and clear, the way she named weather. "A dead tree hung up in a living one's arms. It's shifted in its seat since the crew dragged through. It's coming down today or some day, and either way it isn't—"
The wind came over the ridge then, the way it had been threatening all morning, smelling of snow. The living birch bent. The dead wood in its arms grated once, like a tooth in a jaw.
June got two steps.
She was not under it when it came. That was the two steps' worth. The dead top came down through the branches in a rain of grey limbs. The trunk's butt end rolled as it landed, the way round wood rolls. It took her across the ribs and pinned her left leg at the shin, before it spent itself against the drag road's bank.
Pip had her head up and her shoulders clear before Rowan got up the slope. Rowan counted her breaths against his own heartbeats the way he'd counted everything that year, and the count was wrong in the way he'd feared on the run up. Thirty breaths, short and shallow, in the time of sixty heartbeats. A body breathing like that is a body spending itself to breathe.
He got his coat under her head. He put his hands flat at her back, where the ribs had taken the blow, and he gave what a Sapling gives. Counted. Rationed. Ten beats of warmth and sharing into what was torn small around the hurt. Then rest. Then ten again. At the second ten his fingertips began to tingle. He took his hands away and flexed them in the cold air until the tingling stopped. A man who spends his hands on the first hour has nothing left for the carry. He knew the price of that arithmetic better than any man alive.
"I'll say the limit out loud," he said, "so nobody carries a wrong story down this slope. The breath can warm her. It can ease what's torn small, a hair's width, and that's a real thing on a bad rib. It cannot knit a bone. It cannot carry her home. If it could, boy, I'd have spent my hands to the elbow by now and not thought twice."
"Noted," June said, through her teeth, from the ground. Her face was the colour of old snow. "Now the leg, Marlowe, before I talk myself into doing it badly alone. It's broke below the knee. It wants straightening and a splint, and I've talked deer through worse. Pip — the two straight poles off the stack, and cloth, and my belt for her—" she caught herself "—for me to bite. Rowan. Your hands on the ankle. Pull till it lengthens. You'll feel it want its line. Then hold it there and don't you dare let go when I make a sound."
He pulled. The leg lengthened under his hands and found its line the way she said it would. The sound she made through the belt leather was one sound, once — and she did not forgive herself for it in his hearing for the rest of the day. Pip bound the splint above and below the break with hands that shook only after the knots were done.
The breathing eased a fraction with the leg straight. Pain is a tax a body pays in breath, and some of it had been refunded. Twenty-six, counted. Still shallow. Still spending. But level.
"And Pip," June said, when she could say it. "The tree goes in the report. Dead, hung, and left, over a work ground. The company's signature, in dead wood. Write it in your hand under mine, in case mine's not fit for clerks by the time it matters."
The stretcher was two poles and two coats, and the carry down took the rest of the day, in rests.
Slope to the line. Line to the cabin path. Path to the door. Four rests, counted. Her breaths were counted at every one of them, by whoever had the free hand and the steadier heart. Silas came down from the cabin as far as the flat when he heard the crack carry — sound travels in cold air like news in a village. He took the light end across the flat stretch without being asked. At the start of the rise his knee folded under him once, clean and final as a gate shutting. He gave up the pole without a speech. He took the kit and her report book instead, and carried those the rest of the way like they weighed what they weighed.
At the second rest, with the snow beginning to sift through the spruces the way it had the week before, June counted under her breath for a while. Eyes shut. Keeping her own books the only way she could still keep them.
"You're walking shorter than your spring count, Lark," she said to Pip, at the stretcher's foot. "Mind you don't write my paces in that book with your legs."
"Wouldn't dare, warden," Pip said, and lengthened his stride, and did not write it down, because some counts are only for carrying a person through a bad hour.
By dark she was in the keeper's cabin in the dead man's bed, with the fire built up and the ribs bound and the splinted leg laid straight on a folded blanket. Rowan sat where he could see her breathe, and counted the night the way he'd counted the slope.
Twenty-four by dark. The warmth held. The torn small places around the ribs took the easing the way a cut takes a stitch — a hair's width of help, exactly what he had said aloud on the slope, and not a thread more.
At the deep of the night he gave the second small ration, counted, and stopped at the tingle. He sat back with his hands in his lap and his eyes open. Eighteen breaths in the time of sixty heartbeats. Even ones. She slept in pieces between the counts, and the pieces got longer.
He wrote it in the notebook by the lamp, in the slow hand, under the day's other count:
June Mercer. Leg broken below the knee, set straight and splinted. Ribs hurt, breathing eased from thirty short to eighteen, even, by the deep of the night. Stabilized. Not healed. The bone is the bone's own work now, and the ribs', and it will take the weeks it takes. Nobody's breath buys them shorter, and I did not try to make it.
Pip had taken the dawn counts before the slope work, the way the roster said. He took them again the next dawn while Rowan kept the fire and the breathing watch. And every dawn after that — out in the dark with the slip, back with his knees muddy to the thigh and the numbers in his hand.
On the sixth evening Silas came back up the path from Rowan's cabin, slow as thaw water, Rosa's parcel on his back and his knee bound double. He laid a folded sheet on the cabin table beside Pip's slips, without a word about the road. It was Nora's fair hand. The near line's counts, copied clean: the grove stakes, the kept trees on the home side, her dawns and Rowan's dawns-that-weren't, every date filled, none missing. She had taken the school's south end the way she'd taken the ledger — like it had always been hers to keep straight.
Rowan spread the two sets side by side under the lamp. Pip's slips: the twelfth at twelve, its hole down to seven; the first, steady; the seventh, held in turns, unbroken. Nora's sheet: the near line, day for day, in her ruled columns. Between the two of them, and the old man carrying paper up a frozen road on a knee that had finished its arguing, the roster page was whole. Not one dawn on it was empty. Not one count on it was his.
June breathed eighteen, even, in the dead man's bed, and slept.
"The ring didn't notice I was gone," Rowan said.
"It noticed," Pip said. "It just had other hands." He was asleep on his feet by the time he'd finished saying it, and Rowan sent him to the loft with the last of the lamp, and kept the fire himself till the next count came due.