Gerald's basil row grew slowly.

  By the fourth morning in the greenhouse he could see the difference -- or thought he could. The soil where he had replanted was darker than the surrounding beds, still damp from the careful pour he gave it each day, and in three places along the row a pale curve had broken the surface. Not a leaf. Not yet. A bent stem, pale green and almost translucent, pushing up through the soil with the blind persistence of something that did not know how small it was.

  He watered it first. Before the circuit, before the other beds, before he filled the large can and started the slow walk down the rows that Maren had mapped out for him on his first morning. His basil row got the small can, half-full, poured close to the soil in a thin stream that barely darkened the surface. Maren had not told him to water it first. She had not told him to water it separately. He did it because the row was his, and because the three pale stems were evidence that what he had ruined was not gone forever -- only set back six weeks, which was a punishment he could hold in his hands and measure.

  The rest of the morning was the circuit.

  Sable was already working when Gerald arrived. She came in earlier than he did -- she had no chickens, no woodbox, no morning list to finish before the greenhouse door -- and by the time Gerald pushed through the heavy wood-and-glass door with his can in both hands, Sable was three rows deep, her sleeves at her elbows, her hair tied back in the same strip of cloth she used every day. She did not look up when he entered. She did not need to. The greenhouse door had a particular sound -- the wood swelling in the humidity made it stick, and the pull-and-release when it opened was distinct from any other door in the house. Sable knew who had come in before she saw him.

  Gerald started his circuit. First row, near wall: the lettuces, dense and low, their leaves overlapping in tight rosettes that held water in their creases if he poured too fast. He had learned this on the second morning -- the pour that worked for the basil beds was too heavy for the lettuces, and the water sat in the leaf-folds and attracted the small pale slugs that Maren picked off with her fingers and dropped into a jar of salt water she kept under the workbench.

  He poured lighter. The stream thinned until it was barely a stream -- more a directed trickle, the can tilted just past the point where the water's own weight carried it over the lip. His wrist ached. The muscles along the top of his forearm had developed a specific soreness, different from the general ache of the first two days: a focused burn that lived in the tendons and flared when he held the tilt for too long. He had started switching hands at the halfway point of each row, which helped the burn but made the pour uneven -- his left hand was clumsy with the angle, and the water came in surges that he had to correct by pulling the can back and resetting.

  Sable, four rows ahead, poured with either hand. Gerald had watched her switch. There was no pause, no adjustment. The can moved from right hand to left hand in a motion that was part of the pour itself -- a transfer that happened mid-row, mid-stream, the water unbroken. Her left hand poured the same thin, even line her right hand poured. Gerald did not know how long that had taken her to learn. He suspected it was not something she had learned at all, but something that had accumulated -- like calluses, or like the knowledge in Pim's feet that found solid ground in mud without Pim telling them where to step.

  He finished the first row and moved to the second.

  The beds had a geography Gerald was learning to read.

  The near wall, where the morning sun hit first, held the lettuces and the greens -- plants that wanted light but not too much heat, that grew fast and low and needed replacing every few weeks as Maren and Mary harvested them for the kitchen. The middle rows held the herbs: basil, thyme, rosemary, sage, a bed of parsley that grew so densely it looked solid from above, like a single green surface rather than individual plants. The far rows, closest to the Hot House wall, held the things that wanted the most warmth -- the tomato seedlings tied to their stakes with cloth strips, the peppers in their clay pots, the long bed of something Maren called cress that grew flat against the soil and tasted sharp when Gerald pinched a leaf and put it on his tongue.

  Each bed watered differently. Gerald was keeping track of this without writing it down or organizing it -- held in his body as a set of physical adjustments that his hands and wrist made without his thinking about them. The lettuces: light pour, low angle, avoid the leaves. The herbs: moderate pour, close to the soil, move steadily. The tomatoes: deep pour at the base of each stake, let the water pool and soak before moving to the next. The peppers: less than he thought they needed, because Maren had told him peppers liked dry feet, and Gerald did not know what that meant but he knew it meant less water.

  By the fourth morning his body had stopped fighting the circuit. The ache in his knees from the flagstone paths had settled into something duller and more permanent -- not pain, but the awareness of pressure, the stone's hardness registering through his trousers without the sharp complaint of the first day. His lower back still tightened when he crouched for the low beds, but the tightening released when he stood, and the release came faster each day. His shoulders had found an angle for carrying the full can that distributed the weight across his upper back rather than hanging it from his arms, and the discovery had been accidental -- he had shifted the can one morning to scratch his nose, and when he lifted it again it sat differently, and the difference was enough.

  He was on the fourth row, the thyme, when Sable spoke.

  "You're pouring too close on the rosemary."

  Gerald looked up. Sable was kneeling two beds ahead, her hands in the parsley, pulling something -- a weed, or a runner that had crossed from the adjacent bed. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the parsley and speaking in the direction of the soil, her voice flat and informational, the way she might have said that it was raining.

  "The rosemary doesn't want wet stems," she said. "Pour at the base. Keep the water off the branches."

  Gerald looked back at the rosemary row he had already watered. The stems were wet. Small drops clung to the needle-like leaves and caught the light in points that would have been beautiful if they were not, apparently, wrong.

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  "Maren said to pour close to the soil," he said.

  "She meant the soil at the base. Not the soil between the stems." Sable pulled the runner free and set it on the flagstone. "Rosemary gets stem rot if the branches stay wet. You can see it -- the bark goes soft and dark near the base. Look at the plant on the end of the row, the one nearest the door. That one's had it before. Maren cut the affected branches last autumn."

  Gerald walked to the end of the row. The rosemary plant nearest the door was smaller than the others, its growth uneven -- fuller on the left side, sparser on the right, where two truncated stems ended in clean diagonal cuts. He had not noticed this before. He had looked at the rosemary and seen rosemary: green, aromatic, doing what rosemary did. He had not seen the shape of what had been removed.

  "I'll pour further out," he said.

  Sable nodded. She was already back in the parsley, her fingers working through the dense growth, and the conversation was finished as Sable's conversations were always finished -- the information transferred, the next action clear, nothing left unsaid because nothing more needed saying. Gerald went back to the thyme and finished his pour, and when he reached the rosemary on the next circuit he poured in a wider arc around the base, keeping the stream clear of the stems, and the water sank into the soil without touching the branches.

  The afternoons were for hands-and-knees work.

  Weeding. Thinning. Pinching the dead or yellowed leaves from the lower stems of the tomato plants, which grew fast enough in the greenhouse heat that by afternoon the leaves Gerald had checked in the morning had already changed -- curling at the edges, softening, going from green to a pale, tired yellow that meant the plant was discarding what it no longer needed. Maren had shown him how to pinch: thumb and forefinger at the base of the leaf stem, where it joined the main stalk, a firm sideways press that snapped the connection cleanly. Not a pull. Pulling tore the bark and left a wound that took days to heal, and in the greenhouse's humid air wounds attracted the grey mould that grew in soft, spreading circles on damaged tissue.

  Gerald pinched. His thumb and forefinger worked down the row of tomato plants, finding the yellowed leaves by colour and by feel -- they were softer than the healthy leaves, their stems thinner, and they came free with less pressure. The healthy leaves he left. He was not always sure which was which. Some leaves were green with yellow edges, and he did not know if they were going or staying, so he left them and checked them again the next day, and usually by then the answer was obvious: either the yellow had spread and the leaf hung limp and ready, or the green had recovered and the leaf was firm against the stem.

  The pinching stained his fingers.

  He noticed it on the second afternoon -- a faint green-brown discolouration at the edges of his nails and in the creases of his fingertips, where the sap from the stems had dried. He washed his hands at the rainwater barrel afterward, scrubbing with the small brush Maren kept on the barrel's rim, and the stain faded but did not disappear. By the fourth day it was permanent, or felt permanent: the green had worked its way into the skin around his cuticles and along the ridges of his nails, and no amount of scrubbing moved it.

  His right palm had changed, too.

  The watering can's handle was brass, worn smooth by years of use, and the weight of the full can pressed it into the same place on his hand every morning. The skin there had thickened. Not a blister -- nothing that dramatic, nothing raw or broken. A ridge, low and firm, running across the base of his fingers where the handle sat during the pour. He could feel it when he pressed his thumb across his palm: a line of skin that was denser than the skin on either side of it, like a seam in leather.

  His knees had their own marks. The flagstone paths left red impressions that faded within an hour of standing, but the skin over his kneecaps had roughened, the surface going from smooth to slightly textured, the way his elbows had always been textured but his knees had not.

  These were not injuries. Gerald understood this without thinking about it. They were not things that needed fixing or avoiding. They were the greenhouse writing itself onto him the way the workshop wrote itself onto Tomis's forearms, the river path onto Pim's boots. Evidence. Not of pain, but of presence.

  At supper, Gerald sat in his usual place.

  The table was set -- Tom had laid the bowls and Mary had brought the pot from the kitchen, and the room smelled of stewed vegetables and the bread that was always bread, the same recipe Maren had taught Mary years ago, warm and dense and slightly sour at the crust. Edric was already eating. Sable had her book beside her plate, open to a page she was not reading, her spoon moving between her bowl and her mouth without her eyes leaving the table's middle distance. Maren was cutting bread at the board near the kitchen door. Aldric was not at the table yet -- Gerald could hear his boots on the hall flagstones, the heavy, even tread that meant he had come from the workshop and not yet washed.

  Gerald looked at his hands.

  He did this without deciding to do it. He had been reaching for the bread, and his hand had passed through the lamplight on its way across the table, and in the warm yellow light the green at his cuticles was visible -- not bright, not startling, but there, a colour that did not belong to the skin it was on. He turned his hand over. The callus ridge on his right palm caught the light as a faint line, paler than the surrounding skin. The soil under his nails -- three nails on his right hand, two on his left -- was dark despite the scrubbing.

  He held his hands in front of him, palms up, and looked at them the way he had looked at the rope grooves after the bridge. But the rope grooves had faded by morning. These had not faded. The green was in the skin. The ridge was in the palm. The soil was under the nails and would not come out, and when Gerald pressed his thumb along the callus line he could feel the change -- the skin was not his old skin but something that had been made by the watering can and the pinching and the four mornings of kneeling on flagstone in the greenhouse heat.

  His hands were different from the hands he had brought into the greenhouse four days ago.

  He was studying the left one -- the green stain at the base of his thumbnail, how the skin had dried and tightened from the soil and the water and the washing -- when he became aware of Maren.

  She was across the table. She had sat down while Gerald was looking at his hands, the bread board behind her, her own bowl filled. She was not looking at Gerald directly. She was not watching him as Wynn watched -- that steady, constant attention that missed nothing. Maren's gaze had settled on him in the process of settling on the table, moving across faces and bowls and hands the way her gaze moved across the greenhouse beds -- seeing everything, stopping where something held her.

  Gerald met her eyes.

  There was something in her face. Not a smile, though the muscles near her eyes had shifted in a way that was adjacent to smiling. Not pride -- Gerald knew what pride looked like on Maren's face, and this was not it. Something quieter. Something that had no word Gerald knew, but that he could feel the shape of the way he could feel the shape of the callus ridge when he pressed his thumb across it: present, definite, real, and not yet named.

  Maren looked at him for a moment that was longer than a glance and shorter than a stare. Then she picked up her spoon and began eating, and the expression folded back into her face the way the greenhouse's heat folded back into the air when the ventilation shutters closed -- not gone, but no longer visible, held inside the room where it had always been.

  Gerald picked up his bread. He ate his supper, and the bread was warm, and the stew was good, and his hands held the bread and the spoon as they held the watering can and the tomato stems and the soil -- firmly, with the grip of someone whose hands were learning what they were for.

  - Dude! I just wanted you to be one of the first people to get to read it!