“Don’t do that,” Rosethorn said, not unkindly. “You’ve gotten them all excited.”
“Gotten who?” He looked to see if his shakkan was all right. To his surprise, there were fresh green buds on some twigs. Glancing around, he saw new leaves on the plants by the windows.
“You know better,” Rosethorn told the miniature tree. “You know very well you can’t keep most of those.”
“You talk like it understands,” Briar complained.
Rosethorn’s eyes laughed at him. “It does understand. After a hundred and forty-six years, it knows more about how it must grow and not grow than we do.”
Taking his hand, she put it on the shakkan’s trunk. A tickling like fire shot through him, making him wish he could roll in gravel and scratch like a dog. He yelped and pulled away. The tickling faded.
“You felt unrestrained growth, the dark side of the Green Man,” Rosethorn said. “If you let that go, the whole plant is weakened. It’s in such a hurry to throw out new twigs that it doesn’t take the time to build them strong. We have to cut off most of this new growth, then clip a few branches and roots. What’s left will be hardier, and longer lived.”
He grabbed the pot and hugged it to his chest. “You’re going to cut it?”
The tree protested: he was bending its twigs. Briar held it away from him.
“Cutting shapes a shakkan. It scratches the itches. Put it on the counter.”
He did as she ordered, warily.
“More than anything else, it needs a new pot. Even Crane should have seen this one is no good.”
That at least made sense. “A bigger one, right?” asked Briar, scratching his itching knuckles. “That one’s too small for a tree.”
“No—a flatter and broader one.”
Gently he touched one of the branches he’d bent, stroking the wood. “But it won’t have room to grow.”
“It’s not supposed to grow, not like you mean. It’s how you fit a mature tree of a century or more into a pot in the first place. Hm.” She thought for a moment, arms crossed, foot tapping.
Briar put his left palm on the tree’s trunk and closed his eyes. He could feel something inside the living wood, like soft fire. He prodded it toward the cold spots that were the shakkan’s withered branches, where its fire was somehow blocked. The fire tried to obey, but the dead areas were too strong.
“I need you to go to the potters’,” Rosethorn said. “And—you’re sweating. Are you all right?”
Dazed, Briar let go of the shakkan and wiped his forehead on his arm. “I’m fine. I was just—thinking.”
“Hmpf.” She looked unconvinced. Pointing to a stack of slates and a box of white lumps beside them, she ordered, “Two slates and a piece of chalk.”
Briar got them. Using the chalk, Rosethorn sketched a long rectangle with holes at each end, then a short rectangle, both on one slate. He guessed that these were for the dish that she needed, though he couldn’t read the writing she put next to each drawing.
As she wrote on the other slate, he rested his fingers on the shakkan’s trunk again. Before he’d itched with raw new growth. Next, he’d felt its pulse. This time he found patience, the slow and steady wait over years in sun and cloud. Eyes closed, he breathed deep of the heavy, green smell that filled the workroom once again. His nerves steadied.
“You need to keep your shakkan outdoors, but close to you. A shelf on your front window will do nicely.” Rosethorn gave him the slates. “This one for Dedicate Watergrass at the potters’, this for Dedicate Lancewood at the carpenters’. Wait for their reply, then come back. I’m not trimming this shakkan—you are.”
Briar gulped, and fled.
All afternoon Sandry labored to spin thread. Carefully she nursed her spindle, usually remembering to twirl it again before it spun in the wrong direction and undid all her work. Her attention—as much as she could spare from the spindle—was locked on her fingers as she tried to feed only small amounts of wool to the thread. There was just one more thing she wanted to do, if only to see whether she had dreamed her last days in the cellar or not.
Taking a deep breath, she tried to think only of calling light into her thread. The turning of the spindle, like a flat top at the end of a string, drew her eye, making her drowsy. She imagined bits pulling free of the sun’s rays, coming to tangle in the wool, twisting to form a thread that was both fiber and light. Here was a glowing patch; another bit of light winked from the work just coming from her fingers. It was time to stop and wind nearly two feet of gleaming thread onto the shaft—
When triumph at her success flooded her mind, the light in her thread flared, blinding her. The wool in her rolag, uneven in the middle, parted. The thread dropped through her fingers. Down fell the spindle, whirling counterclockwise, undoing all her work. Every bit of light in it went dark.
Lark, who was putting a new web of thread on her floor loom, saw the girl cover her face with her hands. “You need a rest,” she told Sandry. “Go outside. Look at the colors you see, and the flowers, and the people. It will go better if you relax.”
“I feel so stupid!” Sandry collected what had once been nearly two feet of light-thread; now it was pieces of carded wool that unspun themselves where they lay. “I know children spin well—why can’t I?”
“Perhaps children practice for longer than a week before they expect to have a proper thread,” suggested Lark. “And they don’t try to work magic at the same time.”