The Shape of the Absence

The forest here radiates its age, much older than the village. I can feel that the moment I step past the last of the fences and into the trees proper. Qi’Quilan’s edge is one of those thresholds I’ve started to notice, the way a banner-line marks where one lord’s authority ends and another’s begins. On the village side, the trees know they are useful to humans. On this side, the trees do not particularly care.

I have my satchel, my gloves tucked under my belt, the small clippers Torkil insists I keep oiled. He showed me how, three days ago, with the patience of a man who has done it ten thousand times. “The cut matters,” he said. “A clean cut and the plant forgets it was wounded. A ragged one and it remembers, and remembers you, and grows less the next year.” He said it in the same tone my mother used to talk about how soldiers remembered their officers. I thought, then, that Torkil understood spirits the way I am trying to. Now I think he understands them the way a good commander understands his men. He cannot read what they feel from across a field. But he knows what they need, and he gives it to them, and thus they do not betray him when he needs them.

He is a better teacher than I expected.

He just is not, I have come to realize, seeing what I am perceiving. If he can see the spirits he does not do so with the way I do.

This morning he told me to find bullseye blackthorn. “There should be patches of it scattered through this forest,” he said. “Look in cool, shaded ground, near stones, where the soil drains well but stays damp. Look for the pattern in the leaves.” He drew it for me in the dirt with a stick. Concentric rings. I memorized it the way I used to memorize crests. Eyes tracing over the lines and the flow from one angle to the next.

I am walking, and I am looking. But I am also seeing in the new way.

The forest’s spirits are not the same as the fire-spirits from the feast. The fire-spirits were quick, leaping, of their element. The forest’s spirits are slower. They feel layered, the way plate armor is layered, linen for the skin, padded gambeson to cushion blows, chain mail to protect the gaps, and at last the plate to deflect the blows. Each part serves crucial functions and depends on the other. There is the spirit of the canopy, attentive and patient, paying attention to wind and birds. There is the spirit of the trunks and standing wood, which moves on a timescale I cannot quite grasp. And there is the soil, which is many spirits, small and overlapping and harder to read. I do not have words for them yet or even the ability to piece them apart. Each one more tightly bound together and functioning in ways I cannot grasp. If the forest is heavy armor then I do not know what the soil would compare to.

I stop near a clearing where light comes down through a gap in the canopy. The soil here is dark, leaf-rotted, the kind that drains quickly. There are stones, small ones, half-buried. The soil’s spirits feel content. Receptive. Welcoming, I would say, if I trusted the word.

But no blackthorn.

This is the lesson I have been trying to learn for three days now, and I think I have it backwards from how Torkil teaches it. Torkil looks for the signs of the plant. The drainage, the light, the soil, the companion species. He has built a model in his head of where blackthorn grows and he applies that model to the forest, and he is very good at it. He finds the plants because he knows where they should be.

I am trying to do it the other way around. I am trying to feel where the plant already is, before I see it. Trying to feel the place where the soil’s spirit and the canopy’s spirit and the slow-moving spirit of the wood are all making room for a particular kind of thing. There is a shape to that space, I think. A blackthorn-shaped hollow in the spirit-fabric of a place, the way a missing tooth leaves a shape in a jaw.

I close my eyes for a moment. Not to see better. To stop trying to see at all.

The clearing has the wrong shape. The soil is good. The light is good. But the canopy-spirit is too generous here. The light is too direct. Blackthorn is a shrub that grows close to the ground in tangled circles. It does not want to be in the open. It wants to be at the edge of the open, where the shade and the light interlock. This clearing is too clearly itself. The blackthorn would not be content here.

I open my eyes and move.

It takes me another quarter hour. I walk slowly, not searching with my eyes so much as letting them blur. I am listening for the shape of the absence. The forest around me is full and busy in its slow way, and I am hunting for the spot where the busyness pauses, where the spirits leave room for something specific.

I find it without realizing I have. I have stopped walking and I am standing at the rim of a small dell, where two old trees have made an arch with their leaning trunks, and the light comes through the gap at an angle, and the slope drains away to a tiny rivulet of standing water at the bottom. The soil is full of small stones. The canopy is broken just here and nowhere else for thirty paces.

The blackthorn is in the dell. I cannot see it yet, but I know. The forest’s spirits have made space for it, and the shape of the room is exactly blackthorn-shaped. Concentric. Tangled. Low. Wanting shade-and-light at once.

I step down into the dell and there it is, three entire shrubs, the leaves with their distinctive pattern just where Torkil drew them in the dirt for me. The shrubs are mature. The berries are present. I would have walked past this dell entirely if I had been looking for signs, because the signs are subtle here and the dell is small. But the absence of the blackthorn in the spirit-fabric of the surrounding wood was loud enough that I could trace it back to the dell where the absence stopped being an absence.

I crouch by the first shrub and I do something I have not done before with full intent. I set down my satchel. I ask.

Not aloud. I do not have the courage for that yet, and I am not sure the spirit would want me to. But I ask, in the silent way one asks a sentry whether one may pass.

May I take from you.

There is no answer. Or, more precisely, there is no answer I can hear. But the shape of the patch is the same as it was a moment ago, and the soil’s spirits are the same, and nothing has gone wary or hostile, and Four, who has been on my shoulder this whole walk and who I had nearly forgotten about, is utterly still. The spirit of the thorns that give the plant its name—the ones that radiated their menace moments before—seems to lessen.

I take that as permission. Or at least the absence of refusal, which is the most you can ever ask of a sentry whose language you do not yet speak.

I draw the clippers. I draw the gloves and don them, lest the spirits of these shrubs think I do not respect them. Torkil’s training is in my hands. Clean cut, just above the highest set of leaf-bud on the stem. Right where you can see new growth starting to form. You take just a few leaves, a few berries and the plant forgets it was wounded.

I take only what I need, and I take it from three different shrubs rather than stripping one, the way Torkil taught me. A plant that gives a little of itself gives more next year. A plant that gives everything dies and gives nothing.

I am not sure if I am doing the spirit-asking part right. I am not sure the spirit-asking part is doing anything. Maybe I am imagining it. Maybe the dell was always where the blackthorn was going to be and I am dressing my own pattern-recognition in mystical clothes.

But I do not think so. I think the dell spoke, in the way the forest speaks, and I am beginning to hear. Torkil’s method works because he has spent forty years building the right pattern in his head. Mine might work because I am beginning to perceive what his pattern describes. Two roads to the same village. He gets there from years of practice; I am trying to get there by listening to the road for where it goes.

When I have what I came for, I sit back on my heels for a moment. The blackthorn is still here. The dell is still here. The soil-spirits are unchanged. The light through the leaning trees has shifted half a finger-width.

Thank you, I think, and I am not sure who I am thanking, but it feels important to think it.

I stand. Four shifts on my shoulder. The forest goes on with its slow business, and I climb back out of the dell and turn toward Qi’Quilan, and I think Torkil will be pleased with the harvest, and I am not going to tell him about the asking. Not yet. He has been generous with me. But I am beginning to suspect that the next part of this craft is one I am going to have to learn on my own.