When Auri woke, the sky was there again.
It was always there now. That was one of the things about the sky. It did not come and go like lesser things, did not need finding or keeping or winding. It simply stayed, enormous and unhurried, full of its own slow turning. Pale at the edges this morning, deep in the middle, with one last star sitting in the west like a coin left out for luck.
She had been afraid of it once. She remembered that as you remember a fever after it breaks. You know it held you, you know it made the world too large and everything in it too loud, but the knowing has no teeth left. The sky had been too big, before. It had looked at her. Now she understood that it had never been looking at her at all, which was the polite thing about it, and possibly the kindest. The sky simply looked. She could be under it as stones were under it, and the water was. Included, and unregarded, and free.
She rose from her mat and her bare feet found the sand, still cool from the night.
That was good. That was proper. Cool things wanted warming, and her feet were warm from sleep and happy to oblige, and so the morning's first trade was made before she had taken three steps, everyone the richer, no one the poorer. Mornings that began with a fair trade tended to stay honest all the way to noon.
Foxen sat in his dish beside her pillow, his blue-green light gone down to almost nothing, which was how he liked to be when the true light came. She bent and touched his edge with one careful finger.
"Not yet," she told him gently. "It is a sun day. You can rest."
He dimmed, content. Foxen had crossed a desert in a padded box and been very brave about it, and had earned the right to be a small private moon who worked only nights. Everyone should have such an arrangement. Almost no one did. It was one of the things wrong with the world, and someday, when her other work was done, she meant to see about it.
The old grove stood tall at the water's edge, and the trees were already singing.
Their silver leaves caught the first light like cupped hands catching rain, and gave it back as sound. The morning song, thin and sweet, high harmonies turning over one another with no melody on top, because a melody would have been telling, and the trees never told. They only sang. She loved the old grove with a large, respectful, arms-length love, the kind you keep for a grandmother who needs nothing from you. The old grove was not her work. The old grove knew itself, all the way down to its deepest roots, and had known itself since before there were people to be unknown around.
Her work waited in the rows of clay pots lining the water's edge.
Thirty-two saplings, each no taller than her knee. Some had sprouted only days ago and were still shy with the strangeness of being alive at all, holding their two small leaves close, like hands not yet sure they were allowed to open. Others had been growing for months, whole handfuls of tiny silver leaves just now learning what light was and how one caught it and which parts you could keep. No two of them were anywhere near alike. That was the first thing the pots had taught her, and it had not surprised her even slightly, but it was good of them to confirm it.
She went down the row slowly, and she listened.
She always listened. It was the easiest thing and the most necessary thing, and she had given up being puzzled that so few people did it, because being puzzled at people was a use of a morning, and mornings had better uses. You did not tend a thing by telling it what to be. Telling was how things got broken in the first place. She knew a great deal about that, more than she kept on the front shelves. No. You tended a thing by learning what it was, and then helping it be that, quietly, with clean hands. You listened with your fingers and your feet and the soft part behind your eyes that had no name but knew things all the same. Especially you listened to the quiet ones. The loud ones told you their troubles. The quiet ones trusted you to come and ask.
The fourth pot was fretting.
She heard it three pots away. Nothing you could have pointed to, only a smallness in the air around it, a held quality, the sound a room makes when someone in it is trying not to cry. The sapling's roots had pressed against the clay walls in the night, circling, and circling, and binding themselves into their own knot. She knelt in the cool sand and tapped the pot once with one knuckle, politely, knocking.
The sound came back tight. Choked. A door shut from the inside.
"I know," she said softly. "I know."
She worked her fingers down along the rim, easing the soil open, unclenching it, a fist that has been closed too long. Never prying, never pulling, only reminding each part, in order, that it was allowed to let go. The roots came free at last in a pale tangle, and the sapling shivered all through its small silver leaves when the air touched them, and Auri sat back on her heels, and looked at it, and was in no hurry at all.
This one had grown too fast. She had known it for a span or more. It had come up quicker than all its brothers and reached farther, and its roots had gone out grasping to the very walls. And the grasping was not greed. She had listened carefully on three separate evenings to be sure. It grasped because it was afraid. It had decided, somewhere in its small green dark, that whatever it did not take hold of would be taken away, and so it held everything, and so it was strangling in its own grip, and none of the holding had made it one whit less afraid.
She did not tell it any of this. You never told them. They knew.
She found a wider pot, from the shaded row, the clay still cool from the morning shadow. She lined the bottom with dark earth from the good heap, careful and slow, pressing it into a shape that was not tight and was not loose, making it as you make a bed for someone who has not slept well in a long time and does not expect to. Then she settled the sapling in, roots first, spread easy, given room they had not asked for and did not yet believe in, and pressed the soil down around them, firm and light and final, gentle as a word you only ever say to someone you love.
The sapling went still.
Not the stillness of a thing enduring. She knew that stillness. She could have written the book of that stillness, if books were a thing she still had dealings with. This was the other one. The stillness of a thing that has finally been heard, and can stop shouting.
Auri smiled. A grin, really. It got away from her entirely, and she let it.
She did not think about the woman from the west who had come asking questions last season, along the caravan track, looking for someone with a different name. She did not think about the name she'd had before, the one that had been heavy as a crown and just as cold, that had never fit, that she had checked. She did not think about the boy with red hair and clever fingers who had given her the name she kept, the true one, the light one, the one that weighed exactly as much as she did and no more.
She did not think about any of these things, because thinking about them was for evenings, when the trees sang low and thoughts could be taken out and turned over one at a time like treasures, each in its place, each given its due and put away properly after.
And because there were thirty-one pots left to check, and the morning was just beginning.