It started, as so many good things do, with Berta complaining about money.
She came through the kitchen door one spring morning, slammed it hard enough to rattle the pans on their hooks, set her market basket on the table with a thump, and announced to the room: four coppers. Four coppers for a bunch of sage no bigger than her thumb, and half of it wilted. When she was a girl you could get a whole armful for one copper, and the woman would throw in a sprig of thyme for luck.
I was at the table on the stool Tomas had built me, with a bowl of porridge and my wooden sparrow. I was three, and a few months past it. My legs didn't reach the floor; I swung them, and my heels knocked against the stool's rung. Four coppers, out of a wage of sixty a month. I didn't need the treatise on coinage to know that was a bad trade.
"Expensive," I agreed solemnly.
"Expensive! It's robbery, that's what it is." She began unpacking, banging things down one after another. Bread. A wedge of cheese. Onions, their papery skins flaking onto the table, the sharp smell of them catching at the back of my nose. A very small, very sad bunch of sage. Mint, sage, thyme, chamomile for her knees, calendula for my scrapes, which I collected at a rate of about four a day, she listed, slapping each item down: some months she spent near half her wages on herbs, and every one of them would grow in this garden like weeds if anyone gave them half a chance.
She stopped with an onion in her hand and looked out the kitchen window at the overgrown tangle.
"Like weeds," she said again, more slowly.
I followed her gaze, then looked back at her. I didn't say anything. But I think she saw something in my face, because she put the onion down and set her hands on her hips.
"Well," said Berta. "Why not?"
Tomas was enlisted that afternoon.
He grumbled about it, as he grumbled about everything, but he came out with a spade and a hoe and a pair of stiff leather gloves, and he and Berta walked the garden together, poking at the old stone-edged beds and arguing about which to clear first.
I followed them with my wooden spoon, which I was still using as a trowel.
They chose the bed nearest the kitchen door, a long rectangle against the south wall where the sun lay longest and the old stones held the heat. It was buried under knee-high grass and nettles and a sprawling mat of bindweed with pale pink trumpet flowers that had threaded itself through everything.
It took three days to clear.
Tomas did the heavy work, hacking out the worst with the hoe and levering out roots with the spade, his bald head shining with sweat, grunting with every stroke. Berta did the pulling, kneeling on a folded sack with her skirts tucked up, ripping out bindweed hand over hand and muttering at it as if it had personally insulted her mother.
I helped. Or tried to. I pulled small weeds with my small hands, shook the soil off their roots the way I'd read you should, and stacked them in a pile. I put the worms back into the cleared ground. I carried pebbles to the edge of the bed one at a time, each one gritty and warm from the sun. Every time I brought Tomas a pebble, he received it with absolute gravity, told me I was a good lad, and observed that pebbles were very important; couldn't get anywhere without them.
By the third evening the bed was bare: a long strip of dark, crumbling soil, freshly turned, smelling of earth and rain. Berta stood at the edge with both hands pressed into the small of her back and a smudge of dirt across her nose, looking enormously satisfied. "There," she said. "Now we'll see."
I stood beside her and looked at the empty bed, and something in my chest loosened, exactly the way it used to every spring on my balcony.
Berta bought the plants from a woman at the market who sold cuttings and seedlings from an old handcart. She came back with a basket of small green things in little clay pots and twists of damp cloth, and that afternoon she sat me on the edge of the bed and gave me my first lesson.
The first thing she held up was mint. A small, bright plant with square stems and soft, crinkled leaves. She pinched a leaf and held it under my nose, and the smell was sharp and cool and clean, so exactly like mint on Earth that I blinked. "Mint," she said, and I repeated it, and she went on: good for bellyache, and for tea, and for keeping mice out of the larder. "But you never, ever plant mint straight in the ground with other things." She wagged a finger at me. "Mint is greedy. It sends roots out underground, all sneaky-like, and before you know it it's taken the whole bed and strangled everything else. You put it in a pot, and you sink the pot in the soil, so its roots can't get out. Remember that."
I thought of my shiso on the balcony, trying very hard to take over the entire planter, the way shiso always does. Two worlds, two plants, exactly the same problem.
I smiled so widely that Berta gave me a strange look and asked what was funny.
"Greedy," I said. "Like the goat."
She laughed. "Exactly like the goat. You're a clever one."
She went through every plant, one at a time, settling each into the soil as she talked.
Sage, its soft grey-green leaves like velvet under my thumb, for sore throats and for cooking with pork. Thyme, tiny-leaved and woody, for coughs and soups. Chamomile, feathery, with little white daisy flowers, for sleep and for her knees. Calendula, which she called marigold, bright orange, for scrapes and burns and rashes. Lavender, for the drawers and for headaches. Feverfew, small and daisy-like, for fevers, and bitter as anything.
And one I didn't know from Earth. A low, sprawling plant with narrow leaves, dark green on top and silver-white underneath, so that when the breeze flipped them the whole plant seemed to shimmer.
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"Silverleaf," Berta said, with particular reverence. The best wound herb there was. Crush the leaves onto a cut and it would close twice as fast and never go bad. Her granny had sworn by it. Every house in her village had kept a patch by the door.
I knew silverleaf from Plants and Herbs of the Temperate Lands. There was a full page on it, with a careful drawing, its properties, where it grew, how to dry it.
But the book hadn't said anything about the way it shimmered in the wind. Or that you planted it by the door. Or that you picked it in the morning, after the dew dried but before the sun got hot, because that was when it was strongest.
Berta said all of that without thinking, pressing the soil down around the little plant with the heels of her hands.
"How do you know?" I asked. "Morning?"
She looked surprised by the question. Her granny had said so, she told me, and her granny's granny, she supposed. It was just what everyone knew. She patted the soil one last time. "Doesn't matter how we know. It works."
That night, in the Reading Room, I didn't read anything.
I took a fresh stack of paper and the black ink and began writing down everything Berta had told me that afternoon. Every plant, every use, every scrap of advice. Mint in a pot. Silverleaf by the door, picked in the morning after the dew. Chamomile tea for knees, steeped long, with honey. Feverfew is bitter, so give it to children in milk. Calendula flowers close when rain is coming.
None of it was in the book. As far as I could tell, none of it was in any book.
I thought of O's note in the margin of the herbal. Add a pinch of meadowsweet. The book forgets it. Every herbwife knows.
And I thought of the shelf in the Library where I'd found Kazuko Fujita's garden notes. Tried coffee grounds in the soil. Must tell Hideo, he will say it's nonsense.
Every day, somewhere, a library burned quietly, one person at a time. Berta was one of those libraries. Everything her granny had taught her, and her granny's granny before that. Hundreds of years of knowledge, carried in one tired old woman's head and never written down anywhere.
I wrote until my hand cramped around the pen. Then I took a clean sheet, wrote a title across the top in careful Japanese, and laid it on top of the stack.
The Book of Berta.
It was the first book I ever began to write in that place. It would not be the last.
At the end of that first lesson, Berta did something I hadn't expected.
She led me to the corner of the cleared bed nearest the apple tree, a small square of soil about the size of a tablecloth, and knelt beside me with a grunt and a crack of her knees. "This bit," she said, "is yours."
I stared at her.
My very own patch, she said, since I loved this garden so much. I could grow whatever I liked in it. She dug in her apron pocket and brought out a twist of paper, and when she unfolded it there were a dozen round, wrinkled seeds inside, pale green. "Peas. They're easy. Even you can't kill peas."
I took the paper very carefully, in both hands, the way the Keeper had held out the little brown book to me.
"Mine?" I said.
"Yours, sparrow." She smiled. "Sparrow's Corner."
I planted them myself. I made each hole with my finger, exactly as deep as the first knuckle, the way the book said and Berta confirmed. One seed per hole, twelve in two neat rows of six. I covered them, patted the soil down gently, and poured water over them from a little tin cup.
Then, because I couldn't help it, because it was what I had always done, I leaned close to the soil and spoke to them.
"Hello," I whispered. "Hang in there. You can do it."
When I looked up, Berta was staring at me, and she asked, in a voice halfway to laughter, whether I was talking to the seeds.
My face went hot. But I nodded, and told her it helped them grow.
I expected her to laugh. She did, but not the way I expected. It was soft and surprised and a little wistful. Her granny used to say that, she told me. She'd talked to every plant in her garden; said they grew better if they knew someone cared. Berta shook her head slowly. "I haven't thought about that in forty years."
She reached out and ruffled my hair with her dirty hand, leaving soil in it.
"You're a strange one, sparrow. But you're a good one."
Four nights after we'd planted everything, I noticed the sky.
It was early evening. I was sitting on the back step with Berta while she shelled beans for supper, the empty pods piling up in her apron. The day had been warm, almost summery, but now the sky had turned a hard, clear, pale blue without a single cloud, and the wind had dropped to nothing. The air smelled thin and sharp in my nose, and the back of my neck, which had been sweating at noon, was cold. The calendula in the new bed, I saw, were still wide open.
Clear sky. No wind. Dry air after a warm day, in early spring, in the north.
I knew what that meant. The Common Calendar had a whole chapter on weather signs for farmers, and the almanac upstairs put this region's last frost two or three weeks later than this. Usually.
"Berta," I said. "Cold tonight."
She glanced up and allowed that it might be a bit chilly; they'd bank the fire.
"No." I pointed at the new bed, at all the little plants she'd paid for with her precious coppers, still soft from the market cart. "Cold. For them. Ice."
She frowned at the sky, then at me. Frost? This late? She didn't think so. It had been warm all week.
I didn't argue. I couldn't, not with the words I was allowed. Instead I got up, went into the storeroom, and came back dragging an empty grain sack bigger than I was, its coarse weave scraping my palms. I hauled it across the garden, very slowly, and draped it over the silverleaf. Then I went back for another.
Berta watched me make three trips. Then she sighed, put down the beans, and went to fetch Tomas. She told him the lad thought there'd be frost; she didn't, but he'd got that look. Tomas squinted at the sky for a long moment, then grunted that his knees said I might be right.
Between the three of us, we covered every plant in the bed with old sacks and straw before the light went.
In the morning the grass was white and stiff and crunched underfoot, and the cold came up through the soles of my shoes. The water in the goat's trough had a skin of ice that Tomas broke with his knuckle. Out on the lawn toward the main house, a gardener stood over a row of blackened, collapsed flower seedlings, shaking his head.
Under our sacks, every one of Berta's herbs was green and perfectly fine.
Berta stood at the edge of the bed for a long time with her hands on her hips, looking at the frost, then at the plants, then at me. She asked how I'd known.
I thought about it. Then I gave her the only answer I could. "Calendula," I said, and pointed. "Didn't close."
It wasn't the whole truth. But it wasn't a lie.
Berta looked at the bright orange flowers for a long moment. Then she shook her head slowly, something between a frown and a smile on her face, and called me her little old monk, watching everything.
The peas came up nine days later. Twelve tiny green hooks pushing through the soil and unfolding their first round leaves toward the sun.
I sat beside them every morning after that, cross-legged in the damp grass, and told them about my day.
Then one morning in early summer, while I was sitting there, Berta came out with the washing and stopped dead beside the apple tree. "Well," she said. "Would you look at that."
I looked.
At the very base of the dead trunk, where I'd found that single thin strip of living bark nearly two years before, a shoot had appeared. Small and green and tender, no longer than my finger. Two oval, finely toothed leaves were uncurling in the morning light.
I'd been clearing weeds from around the tree's roots all spring. Watering it when I watered my peas. Talking to it when no one was listening. I hadn't used a single rune or spell; my rules didn't allow it. It was only care. Ordinary, patient care.
Berta crouched to look closer, one hand braced on the trunk, and murmured that it wasn't dead after all. After all this time. Well. She never.
I didn't say anything. I looked at the small green shoot and thought about the young tree growing in the window of the Reading Room, with its oval, toothed leaves.
And I smiled.