One Does Not Stand Alone

Kathleen Shea had been listening to trees fall for most of the night. There was a particular sound they made just before they went, a cracking deep enough to be felt through the floorboards, followed by a rushing through branches and then the impact, which was sometimes surprisingly soft. The ground had been wet for days before the storm arrived, and by midnight it seemed there was nothing left beneath the roots to hold them.

Winifred slept through the first one, or at least Kathleen thought she had. She went upstairs after the second and found her lying diagonally across the bed, one foot uncovered, her dark hair spread across the pillow. The windows rattled hard enough to make the lamp chimney tremble, but Winifred had always possessed the enviable ability to sleep through anything she had not personally decided was interesting. Kathleen pulled the blanket over the exposed foot and stood listening to the rain strike the roof until another gust made the house complain around her.

Downstairs, Michael was putting another piece of wood into the stove. He had stripped to his shirtsleeves despite the chill, and his dark hair, usually persuaded into some order before breakfast, had been raked backward often enough to stay there by itself. He was a lean man with long forearms and a face that looked younger when he smiled, which was inconvenient because he smiled most often when Kathleen was trying to remain annoyed with him. He had moved the kitchen table away from the windows earlier in the evening and objected when Kathleen suggested that this represented the full extent of his emergency preparations.

"I brought the chickens in."

"You brought six chickens into my woodshed."

"They seemed grateful."

"They shit on the kindling."

Michael closed the stove and looked at her. "Fear affects people differently."

Kathleen was deciding whether that deserved an answer when the third tree came down somewhere close to the house, close enough that both of them were on their feet before the sound had finished rolling through the ground. This one was different. The first two had announced themselves through wood and earth; the third seemed to pass through Kathleen as well, a brief wrenching sensation low beneath her ribs, as though something tightly drawn had suddenly given way.

A moment later Winifred appeared at the top of the stairs, barefoot and carrying the quilt from her bed around her shoulders. At eight she was still narrow as a reed, all knees and elbows when she ran, with Kathleen's dark hair and Michael's brown eyes in a face that had not yet decided which of them it intended to resemble. Her hair was wild from sleep now, one side flattened and the other standing away from her head. "That one was ours."

Michael glanced toward the kitchen windows, although there was nothing to see beyond the rain. "I expect quite a few of them are ours by now."

"No. I mean one of ours."

Kathleen looked at her daughter. Winifred's face held no excitement, only the grave certainty Kathleen remembered from her own childhood, before she had learned how often adults preferred a child to be mistaken. "What did you feel?"

Winifred blinked. "I don't know."

"Try."

The child came down two steps, still wrapped in the quilt. "Like something opened."

Michael's expression changed. He did not understand the words, but he understood Kathleen well enough to know when she did.

Kathleen crossed the kitchen to the rear window and pushed back the dark braid that had worked half loose down her back. At thirty-three she had her mother's strong hands and, increasingly, her mother's habit of narrowing gray-green eyes at a problem as though poor behavior on its part were a personal affront. Beyond the glass lay only darkness, rain and the occasional wild white outline of the yard when lightning broke over the hills. The north woods were invisible from there, but she knew what stood in them: the old wall, the rowan, the hawthorn, the great beech whose roots had grown around the western place for longer than anyone in her family could say.

Her mother had taken Kathleen there for the first time when she was nine. She had not called it anything grand. There were places in the world where the distance between ordinary life and the Fae was not as dependable as people liked to think, and one of them lay in the woods beyond the north wall. Three places along that wall had been tended for generations: the old beech to the west, the rowan at the middle, and the hawthorn farther east. Her mother had taught her to walk all three because none of them did its work alone.

"Was it the beech?" Michael asked quietly.

"I don't know." Kathleen rested her fingers against the cool glass. The old work along the north wall had been sound when she walked it the previous autumn. A hurricane could tear up a tree in a night, however, and magic had never made wood less subject to wind. "And nobody is going out there to find out before daylight."

Winifred came the rest of the way down. "What's the north-wall work?"

Kathleen turned. She had not used the word in front of her before. That had been deliberate, although at the moment she could not remember why eight had seemed too young when her own mother had waited only another year.

"It's something the women in this family have tended for a very long time," she said. "And if what you felt was what I think it was, tomorrow you can come with me."

Michael raised an eyebrow. "I assume that means I'm coming too."

"It means you're going to spend tomorrow clearing the road, repairing the chicken house and doing all the useful things that don't require knowing why a hawthorn has iron under it."

"Good. I was afraid marriage had changed my position."

"It has. Mother wouldn't have told you about the iron."

"Your mother barely told me about dinner."

That made Winifred smile, which Kathleen suspected had been his intention. Outside, the storm continued its assault on western Massachusetts without regard for either magic or family arrangements. They spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, where Kathleen made tea they did not need because the kettle was comforting, Winifred watched lightning whiten the windows, and Michael twice tried to persuade her to sleep on the settle. She insisted she was not tired and sometime after four fell asleep with her head on her folded arms.

Kathleen was covering her with the quilt when she realized Maggie was missing. The cat had belonged to Kathleen's mother before she belonged to Kathleen, which made her at least twenty years old and possibly older, although she remained a small gray creature with clear eyes and an appetite suggesting nobody had fed her since 1917. Kathleen found her eventually in the pantry, pressed behind a sack of flour and staring toward the rear of the house.

"You felt it too," Kathleen murmured.

Maggie flattened her ears.

Michael had followed as far as the pantry door. "That reassuring?"

"No."

"Thought not."

By morning the wind had gone, leaving an absence almost as unsettling as its presence had been. Michael went outside first and returned wet to the knees, reporting that the chicken house had lost part of its roof, one apple tree was split down the middle and the road was blocked in both directions. He had barely finished before someone began shouting from beyond the front gate.

It was Tom Daley's oldest boy, a long-legged boy of perhaps twelve whose wet fair hair had plastered itself to his forehead. He was running hard enough that Kathleen knew before he reached the porch that whatever had brought him was not about a damaged roof.

"It's Ma," he said, bent over and trying to catch his breath. "She fell. Pa says she's all right, but there's blood, and he said to come get you."

Kathleen was already reaching for her basket. Mrs. Daley was seven months pregnant, which made the blood more important than anything waiting in Kathleen's woods. Michael took the saw and went with the boy to clear what they could of the road while Kathleen dressed, gathered clean cloth and the few things she might need, then looked for Winifred.

She was standing at the kitchen window. Maggie sat beside her, no longer hiding but unwilling to go farther than the kitchen.

"That's where it was," Winifred said.

"The tree?"

Winifred nodded. "Farther in."

Kathleen put a hand on her shoulder. "We'll see to it. But first we see to Mrs. Daley. Being able to feel something doesn't make it the most important thing in the world."

Winifred looked up at her. "Even magic?"

"Especially magic. People who think magic excuses them from ordinary obligations are generally people you don't want practicing it."

Michael, passing the doorway with the saw, said, "I feel there may be a lesson in there for me."

"There usually is."

The road to the Daleys was passable only if Kathleen was willing to be generous about the meaning of the word. Water crossed it in several places, carrying leaves, branches and household debris toward the creek. Three cows stood beneath the remaining half of a shed looking personally offended by the weather, and Winifred stopped long enough to watch a wooden bucket sail past in the ditch before Kathleen reminded her that anyone who had lost a bucket during the night was unlikely to be waiting downstream for its return.

Mary Daley was in the kitchen when they arrived, furious at having been put there. Seven months of pregnancy had rounded a woman who was otherwise small-boned, and her fair hair had escaped its pins in damp wisps around a face still flushed from fright and temper. Her blue eyes were perfectly clear, however, and so was her opinion of being fussed over. She had slipped on the back steps and cut the inside of her leg on a broken milk bottle. The blood Tom had seen came from the cut rather than the pregnancy, which Kathleen established quickly enough to relieve everyone except Mary, who had not been particularly worried in the first place.

Kathleen cleaned the wound while Mary complained that three men had now ordered her to sit down in her own house, and if Kathleen intended to make it four she could at least have the decency to bring coffee.

"I brought bandages."

"I can't drink those."

"Then you'll have to survive on gratitude."

Mary snorted and held still. Ellen Daley appeared in the doorway, a sturdy little girl with two pale braids, a gap where one front tooth had been, and a smear of something dark across one cheek that suggested the storm had not interrupted her interest in mud. Winifred immediately abandoned the adults. The girls were nearly the same age and had spent most of the summer disputing ownership of a blue marble neither could remember acquiring. The hurricane apparently suspended hostilities; within minutes they were outside investigating whatever the creek had washed into the yard.

Mary watched them through the window. "She's getting tall."

"Unfortunately. I keep feeding her."

"I've heard that encourages it." Mary shifted carefully in her chair. "She was out here last week asking Ellen about the old pasture behind your place."

Kathleen looked up. "Was she?"

"Wanted to know who used to live there. I told her there'd been a house, but it was gone before I was born." Mary hesitated. "Your mother used to go up there every autumn. Mine told us not to bother her."

Kathleen smiled. "That sounds like Mother."

"We followed her once anyway. She caught us before we'd gone fifty yards and sent us home. I don't think I've ever been so frightened of a woman carrying parsley."

"It was probably rue."

"That improves the story considerably."

It did, although Kathleen was thinking about the north wall now. Her mother had never hidden the north-wall work from her; she had simply kept its tending private, as the women before her had done. Kathleen had continued the habit after her mother's death. Michael knew the broad truth because a husband who shared a house and land eventually noticed that his wife disappeared into the woods with iron, herbs and a shovel every autumn. Winifred had not known because Kathleen had not yet begun teaching her.

Apparently Winifred had begun listening anyway.

When they returned home, Maggie was sitting beside the well facing the woods. She came when Kathleen called but would not cross the invisible line between the yard and the first trees. Winifred noticed.

"Is she afraid?"

"Maybe. Or maybe she's sensible."

"What's out there?"

Kathleen set down her basket. "The north-wall work. Come wash your hands. Then I'll show you the grimoire before we go."

Michael, carrying a broken fence rail toward the shed, stopped. "The grimoire?"

"You've seen it."

"I've seen a green book your mother once threatened to hit me with."

"That's the one."

"I didn't realize it had a title."

"It doesn't. Grimoire is what it is, not what she wrote on the cover."

The grimoire lived in the pantry, not hidden but kept high enough that grease, flour and children were unlikely to damage it. Its green cloth cover had faded almost gray along the spine, and generations of hands had softened the corners. It was not particularly impressive to look at. Kathleen had seen books in shops that worked much harder at appearing mysterious.

Winifred sat beside her at the kitchen table while Kathleen laid her left hand on the cover. The ring warmed almost at once.

"Grandma's book," Winifred said.

"Her grimoire. Mine now."

"What's in it?"

"Five hundred years would be an ambitious answer before lunch."

Winifred leaned closer.

Kathleen opened it. The pages held the accumulated work of the women before her: remedies, plants, animals, family history and magic, none of it arranged for the convenience of a future reader. The ring was part of that inheritance. Without it, the grimoire protected itself. With it, Kathleen could reach what she needed if she knew how to focus well enough to ask.

She did not begin by searching for the fallen tree. She showed Winifred an old entry about rue instead, then one concerning a sick ewe, because those were things a child could understand without imagining that magic existed only for extraordinary occasions.

"Is the ring making the words appear?" Winifred asked.

"It helps me reach them."

"Can I try?"

"No."

The answer came quickly enough to make Winifred sit back.

Kathleen softened it. "Not because I don't trust you. The ring and the grimoire belong to a particular inheritance, and there are rules about when they pass. You're eight. For now, you have better things to learn."

"Like what?"

"How to know when something is there before you decide what it means."

Winifred frowned at that.

Kathleen smiled. "Exactly. It's harder than it sounds."

She turned her attention to the north wall and let the ring rest against the page. She knew the place in the woods. Her mother had taught her what grew there and what should not be disturbed. She knew why rowan and rue appeared in the old work and why iron sometimes did. What she wanted from the grimoire was not an explanation of her own craft but whatever an earlier woman might have recorded about the great beech.

The page changed beneath her hand.

There it was: a spare notation in an older hand, the beech described by location rather than name, its roots to be left undisturbed and the ground beneath it watched after hard weather.

Winifred read Kathleen's face rather than the page. "Is that the tree?"

"Yes."

"What does it say?"

"That we're going to look before I tell you anything else."

That earned a sigh, but Winifred slid off the chair and went for her coat.

They went into the woods after lunch. Michael came as far as the fallen beech because Kathleen needed another adult around storm-damaged trees even if she did not need him to tend the north-wall work. Maggie followed to the well and stopped there.

The hurricane had opened the forest. Sky showed through places that had been solid canopy the day before; ferns lay flattened beneath limbs, and the ground smelled of wet earth, torn leaves and wood exposed before its time. Kathleen had walked these woods since childhood and normally moved through them without thinking. That afternoon every familiar route required attention.

Winifred stayed beside her. "Did Grandma bring you here?"

"Yes."

"How old were you?"

"Nine the first time I remember."

"I'm eight."

"I can count."

Winifred gave her a look. Michael, walking ahead with the axe, said, "She's got you there."

"I don't recall inviting either of you to evaluate my teaching."

They reached the beech and stopped.

Kathleen had known the tree all her life and had never understood its size until she saw it on the ground. The trunk was wider than Michael could have reached around with another man helping. Its roots stood higher than he did, carrying a great wall of earth and stone into the air. The newer fieldstone wall had been crushed beneath it.

The storm had torn open the ground beneath the roots.

Kathleen stopped before she reached it. The ring was no longer merely warm. It vibrated against her finger in a slow, insistent rhythm, recognizing magic before she had consciously sorted out what she was seeing.

Nothing beyond the uprooted tree should have surprised her. She had walked that slope since childhood. The ground fell away gradually on the other side, thick with maple, birch and hemlock. She knew where the stream bent below it.

Yet when she looked through the great lifted roots, there seemed to be more woods than the hill could hold.

She blinked and the impression disappeared. Wet trunks, torn earth, gray September light. Nothing impossible. Then the wind moved through the branches and brought a scent she could not place, green and sweet and completely untouched by the hurricane. For a moment the woods beyond the roots seemed both very near and immeasurably far away.

Winifred drew a breath. "That's what opened."

Kathleen touched the ring with her thumb. She knew what a thin place was. Her mother had taught her that the Fae did not live in some distant country reached by traveling far enough east or west; the distance between their world and this one was not measured in miles. Most people could walk through a place like this a hundred times and notice nothing. Sometimes that was because there was nothing to notice. Sometimes it was because nobody had taught them how.

"I know," Kathleen said.

It was the first time she had said those words to her daughter about something magical, and she saw Winifred hear the difference.

Michael crouched several feet away. "Can it be repaired?"

"Yes." Kathleen hoped the answer was true. She had renewed parts of the north-wall work. She had replaced rue, rebound rowan, reset a marker after frost heave and helped her mother replace the eastern hawthorn when blight took it. No one had ever taught her what to do when a tree older than the instructions had been pulled bodily from the ground.

Winifred was looking at the opening. "It feels wrong."

Kathleen closed her eyes.

At first there was only the ordinary aftermath of the hurricane: dripping leaves, the scrape of a branch shifting in the wind, Michael's breathing, Winifred's boot moving against wet soil. Beneath that she found what she had been avoiding since the tree fell, a sensation not of danger exactly but of absence. Something that had always pressed gently against something else no longer did.

"Open," she said.

Winifred slipped her hand into hers.

Kathleen opened her eyes. "Yes."

The first lesson, then, was not going to be about herbs or iron. "When you feel something like this, you don't rush toward it because you're curious. You don't assume it's calling you. And you don't assume that because you can sense it, you understand it."

Winifred nodded.

"What do you do?"

"Tell you?"

"For the next several years, that's an excellent answer."

They walked the rest of the north-wall work together. The middle marker still stood, mossy and almost invisible, with its rowan bent by the storm but rooted. Kathleen showed Winifred how to stand quietly near it without touching anything. The child waited, serious now.

"What do you feel?"

Winifred thought. "Nothing."

"Good."

"Nothing is good?"

"Often."

At the eastern place the hawthorn had lost leaves and one small branch, but its roots held and the marker beside it had not shifted. Kathleen stood there long enough to feel the same quiet steadiness she had found at the rowan.

Winifred looked back toward the beech. "So these two are all right."

"Yes." Kathleen looked west through the wet trees. Her mother had always made her walk all three, even when there seemed to be nothing to inspect. As a girl Kathleen had thought it excessive. Standing there now, with two places sound and the third torn open, she understood the habit differently. Three points along one boundary, each answering the others. One was never meant to do the work alone.

"And the beech?" Winifred asked.

"That one is why I'm going to need the grimoire."

There was no shame in that. Kathleen wanted Winifred to understand the difference between knowledge and omniscience before anyone taught her the dangerous idea that a witch should pretend to possess the latter. Kathleen knew the north-wall work. She knew what it did and how it had been tended within living memory. What she did not know was how the western place had first been made.

They left the east marker where it had fallen and went home before the afternoon light began to fail.

Abram Bell arrived while Kathleen was making coffee. He lived on the other side of the ridge and had known her family longer than Kathleen had been alive. He was past sixty, spare and slightly stooped, with a weathered face, a white mustache yellowed faintly at the ends by his pipe, and pale eyes that missed very little while appearing to be in no hurry to notice anything. Mud reached his knees, one suspender had been repaired with twine, and he carried his hat because he belonged to a generation of men who would go bareheaded through a hurricane before wearing one inside a woman's kitchen.

"Thought you'd want to know part of your north wall came down," he said.

"I know."

Bell accepted the coffee she handed him. "Beech came down?"

Kathleen stopped. "You knew it mattered?"

"Your mother caught me fooling around near that tree when I was fifteen. Told me there were things in those woods a man didn't have to understand before he left them alone."

Michael leaned against the sink. "That sounds like her."

"You were afraid of her," Kathleen said.

"I respected her ability to make fear educational."

Bell's mustache lifted at one corner. "She went up there every autumn. Your grandmother before her, I expect."

"So do I," Kathleen said.

His eyes came back to her, and something in his face relaxed. "Then you know."

"I know the place. I know what Mother taught me to do there. I don't know what she would have done with the beech on the ground."

Bell set down the cup. "Then I suppose that's the part she expected you to work out."

Winifred had been listening from the other end of the table, her chin propped in both hands and her sleep-wild hair now combed but already escaping again around her face. "Did you know about the Fae?"

Bell looked at Kathleen.

"She's learning."

"Then no," he told Winifred. "I knew your grandmother had reasons for things and that life went better when I didn't make her explain all of them."

"That's not the same as knowing."

"No," Bell said. "It isn't."

Kathleen liked him for the answer.

After he left, Kathleen brought the grimoire back to the table. This time she was not teaching. She slipped the ring more firmly onto her finger, rested both hands on the book and thought of the uprooted beech: not the tree as it lay now, but the place beneath it, the impossible depth she had sensed through the roots and the sweet green scent that did not belong to a storm-stripped September wood.

The grimoire opened to a page she had never seen.

That did not surprise her. No woman in the family could read five centuries of accumulated knowledge from beginning to end, and the book had never behaved like an ordinary book. You reached what you could reach when you knew what you were asking.

The entry was brief. An ancestor had written of the three places along the north wall and of the living things rooted there. They were to be walked together and tended together, because a weakness in one altered the strain on the others. The writing did not call the place anything Kathleen had not already been taught to understand: here the Veil lay close enough to be felt without crossing it. The language was old, practical and notably free of drama.

Kathleen read it twice.

Winifred, who had been coloring at the other end of the table, looked up. "Did you find it?"

"I found something."

"What?"

Kathleen turned the ring slowly with her thumb. "Something I should have understood sooner."

She had been thinking about the beech as though its failure were a problem by itself. It wasn't. The rowan and hawthorn still held, but they had never been separate protections. The three living places belonged to the same stretch of boundary, each helping the others keep its shape. Nor had the iron her mother used there been laid like a weapon. Her foremothers had not been fortifying Massachusetts against an invading country of Fae.

They had been caring for a boundary, together.

That was different.

Kathleen looked toward the darkening kitchen window. Somewhere beyond it stood a torn opening in a landscape she had known all her life, and for one instant that afternoon she had known with absolute certainty that there was more woods there than the hill could possibly contain.

The ring warmed.

"Get your coat," she told Winifred.

Michael looked toward the windows. "Now?"

"Now. I know what Mother was doing. I need to find out whether I can do it without the tree."

Bell returned when Michael fetched him, carrying a lantern and a shovel. The four of them went into the woods before dusk, although only Kathleen and Winifred crossed the wall at the beech. Michael and Bell stayed close enough to help if the torn root mass shifted and far enough away not to crowd the work.

Kathleen knelt beside the fallen trunk and put her palm against the bark. The beech was mortally damaged; there was no pretending otherwise. But the wood beneath her hand was still cool and wet with life.

"How do you know which piece?" Winifred whispered.

"I listen."

Kathleen closed her eyes. She had spent years using that word for things that did not arrive through the ears: the slight wrongness in a plant gathered at the wrong time, the difference between a frightened person and a dangerous one, the knowledge that a place wanted to be crossed and the equally certain knowledge that another did not. Adulthood had not taken the ability from her. It had merely surrounded it with chores, marriage, neighbors, weather, bills and the thousand ordinary noises of being alive.

She let those noises remain. A hedge witch did not require the world to become silent for her convenience.

Her hand moved along the trunk until she found a young branch torn but not crushed, leaves still green despite the storm. She cut a length from it with her mother's knife and gave it to Winifred.

"Hold this."

Winifred took it in both hands.

Kathleen gathered rowan from the middle place, asking before she cut and taking only what the damaged tree could spare. From the garden she had brought rue. The iron came from a small jar kept with the grimoire, old square nails her mother had bent inward years ago for exactly this kind of work.

At the exposed western hollow, Kathleen showed Winifred the old bundle without removing it. "This is not an offering."

"I thought offerings were left for the Fae."

"Some are. This isn't. It's part of the north-wall work."

"What does it do?"

"I can tell you what is in it. I can tell you why we use rowan and why the iron turns inward. I cannot tell you exactly what every woman who worked here believed she was doing. Lore changes as it passes through hands."

"Then how do you know it still works?"

Kathleen looked at her daughter. "Because I can feel when it doesn't."

That answer seemed to satisfy Winifred more than a complicated one would have.

Kathleen did not try to rebuild the stone chamber the hurricane had exposed. The grimoire had told her not to close it dead. Instead she worked with what remained. She set the living beech wood where the old roots had broken away, laid rowan across it, placed rue close to the earth and turned the iron inward. The old materials stayed where generations had put them. Stone supported the work but did not become the work.

Then she stopped.

Michael shifted beyond the wall. Bell's lantern threw a warm circle over wet trunks and broken branches. Somewhere farther down the slope, water moved through the stream with the swollen confidence of a river temporarily promoted beyond its station.

Kathleen listened.

The ring vibrated once, hard enough that she felt it in the bones of her hand.

For the briefest instant the woods beyond the roots changed again. Not visibly; she could have sworn afterward that every tree remained exactly where it belonged. Yet she had the unmistakable awareness of distance opening where no distance should be, and with it came something stranger: the certainty that awareness ran both ways. She was looking toward the Veil, and something beyond it knew she was there.

There was no threat in it. No welcome, either.

Simply recognition.

Kathleen understood then why her mother had never spoken of shutting the place, sealing it, or driving anything away. That had never been the work.

The boundary was meant to remain a boundary.

The open sensation remained.

Winifred stood beside her holding the last piece of beech. Mud streaked one stocking and there was a burr caught in her dark hair, but she had forgotten both in the seriousness of the work. "It isn't enough."

Kathleen looked at her, not because the child had surprised her but because she was right.

"No."

"What do we do?"

This was the part no book could give her. Kathleen had followed the inherited form as far as it went. The beech that had stood there for perhaps two centuries could not be replaced in an afternoon by a cut branch and correct ingredients. Something living had to take root in the north-wall work again.

She looked at the torn earth around the fallen tree. Beneath the lifted roots, among stones and broken soil, several beech nuts lay scattered from the previous year. Most were empty or damaged. One had split and begun a small white root before the storm tore it from the leaf mold.

Kathleen picked it up.

Winifred smiled. "Living wood."

"Better."

Together they made a small place for it in undisturbed soil just beyond the torn chamber. Kathleen settled the germinating nut into the earth, tucked the last of the rue beside it and laid the remaining beech cutting across the old work, linking what had grown there to what might grow there again.

She put both hands on the ground.

Nothing dramatic happened.

No light appeared. No voice came from the hollow. The Fae did not step out from behind a tree to congratulate her technique. For several moments Kathleen felt only cold mud pressing into her palms and wondered whether she had mistaken the grimoire, the place or herself.

Then the pressure she had noticed missing returned.

Not all at once. It gathered gradually, like a door settling into a swollen frame. The place did not vanish and the Fae did not go away. Here became distinctly here again, while whatever lay beyond the Veil returned to being elsewhere.

The ring went still.

Kathleen let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

Beside her, Winifred did the same.

"You felt that."

It was not a question.

Winifred nodded.

Kathleen sat back on her heels. "Good. Remember it."

"Is it fixed?"

"It's mended. Fixed is a word people use when they want to believe they won't have to pay attention anymore."

Michael laughed quietly from the wall. "There she is."

Kathleen turned. "Were you under the impression I'd gone somewhere?"

"For the last hour you've been talking like your mother."

Bell made the mistake of smiling.

Kathleen looked at all three of them and decided there were too many witnesses to punish anyone effectively.

They left the western place before full dark. Before they turned toward home, Kathleen walked Winifred past the rowan and the hawthorn once more. Both were still sound. The middle rowan would need pruning where the storm had split one branch, but its roots held; the eastern hawthorn had weathered the night with only minor damage. Three places, one boundary. Kathleen suspected Winifred would remember that without being told twice. There would be work before winter, but there was always work before winter. Magic had never altered that.

At the edge of the woods Maggie was waiting beside the well.

This time, when Kathleen crossed into the yard, the cat walked past her.

Winifred saw it first. "Mama."

Maggie continued toward the trees, stopped just inside the woods and sniffed the wet ground. Then she turned around and came back, apparently satisfied with whatever inspection she had made.

Michael watched her return. "I'm not asking."

"A sound policy," Kathleen said.

In the kitchen, Bell accepted coffee and Michael finally evicted the chickens from the woodshed. Winifred sat at the table while Kathleen opened the grimoire to the page containing the entries concerning the beech.

"Are you going to write what we did?"

"Yes."

"So whoever comes after us will know?"

Kathleen dipped the pen and considered the blank space beneath her mother's last notation. "She'll know what we did. That isn't always the same as knowing what she'll need to do."

Winifred leaned on one elbow. "That's not very useful."

Kathleen looked at her daughter and recognized the complaint. She had made it herself, more than once, to a woman who was no longer there to hear how thoroughly Kathleen had become her.

"No," she said. "Which is why I'm going to do better than my mother did."

She wrote the date first. Then she recorded the hurricane, the fallen beech, the exposed thin place, the living branch, the rowan, rue and inward-turned iron, and the germinating beech nut planted beside the old work. She wrote that the rowan and hawthorn had remained sound, that the boundary had settled when the western place was mended, and that all three must be walked again before first frost.

Winifred read over her arm until Kathleen nudged her back.

At the bottom she added one final line.

Winifred heard the west open before she knew what the old work was.

Her daughter read that too.

"Why did you write my name?"

"Because it matters."

"Does that mean I have to do this someday?"

Kathleen put down the pen. There were answers mothers gave because they wanted to comfort children and answers they gave because children deserved the truth.

"It means you may be able to. Whether you do will be your choice."

Winifred considered this with the solemnity she usually reserved for decisions involving dessert or injured animals. "Will you teach me?"

Kathleen closed the grimoire and laid her hand over its worn green cover.

"Yes."

Outside, the Berkshire hills were settling into darkness. The hurricane had left trees down, roads washed out, roofs open to the sky and weeks of work for nearly everyone they knew. Somewhere in the woods, a beech that had stood for generations lay on its side and would never stand again. Beside its torn roots, something much smaller had been put into the earth.

For now, that was enough.