Juran's fever stayed away.

  By the third morning after the break, he was sitting up on his own, eating properly, and complaining about the splint with the specific energy of a man who felt well enough to be annoyed by his situation. Theron took this as an excellent sign. Patients who complained were patients whose bodies had redirected resources from survival to comfort, which was a significant upgrade.

  He'd told Juran: still. Many days. Don't. He'd done it with enough firmness that Juran had nodded in the way people nodded when they understood both the instruction and the consequences of ignoring it. Whether the nodding would hold when the itching started was a separate question, one Theron was trying not to borrow trouble about yet.

  For now: stable. Good.

  He left Sora watching the healing spot — she'd taken to sitting there in the mornings even when there was nothing to do, organizing and reorganizing the herbs in arrangements that were slightly wrong but showed she was thinking about the logic of them, which was more important than getting it right immediately — and went to find Dorn.

  He found him at the river's edge, looking at the forest on the far bank the way he sometimes looked at things he'd made a decision about before anyone had asked him.

  "The woods," Theron said, and pointed.

  Dorn glanced at him. Then at the forest. Then back. "Honeywoods," he said.

  "You've been before?"

  "Many times." He was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was doing some internal weighing. "Not the deep part. The edges. The deep part—" He made the gesture that meant complicated or requires thought or sometimes simply I'd rather not, but I will if asked. "Takes full day. Going, coming."

  "Tomorrow?" Theron said.

  Dorn looked at the trees again. Something moved in his face — not reluctance, exactly. More like the expression of a man deciding which of his feelings about something was the right one to act on.

  "Tomorrow," he said.

  They left before the camp was fully awake.

  Theron had his foraging bag — a hide pouch he'd traded two good poultices for, well-made, with a long strap he'd adjusted to sit at his hip where his hands could reach it without thinking. He had his bone knife and his water skin and the small notebook he'd started keeping, which was not a notebook at all but a stretched piece of thin hide with marks scratched into it by a sharpened stick and charcoal, indecipherable to anyone but him and barely legible to him on cloudy days.

  Dorn had a spear, which he carried with the unconscious ease of a man who'd been carrying one since he was old enough to walk, and a short knife at his hip, and an expression that said he was prepared to explain the Honeywoods to this strange man who tested plants on himself and called it medicine, and had quietly made his peace with what that was going to be like.

  They crossed the Silver Run at the shallow crossing Theron had learned on his third day, stepping stone to stone, the water cold around his ankles. The far bank smelled different immediately — darker, richer, the smell of old leaves and damp earth and things growing in the particular way of things that hadn't been interrupted in a long time.

  The Honeywoods started as forest and deepened from there.

  The edges were ordinary enough.

  Birch and alder, mostly, the understory open and light. Dorn moved through it with the particular economy of a hunter — no wasted steps, each foot placed with half a second of consideration, eyes on the middle distance rather than the ground. Theron tried to match it and mostly managed. He'd been getting better at walking quietly. His surgeon's body, built for long hours of careful stillness, had translated reasonably to careful movement, once he'd stopped trying to rush.

  Dorn pointed things out as they walked. A scratch on a tree trunk at shoulder height — something had marked it, something with claws, and the mark was old enough that whatever it was had moved on but recent enough to still matter. A cluster of red berries on a low bush: don't. He drew his finger across his throat. Theron noted them and gave them a wide berth. A place where the ground was soft and wrong-looking, a depression that didn't match the terrain: thin, Dorn said, tapping his foot carefully at the edge and then stepping around it.

  Theron filed everything. The berries went into the notebook under a rough sketch and the word no in three different languages, because that felt sufficient.

  "There," Dorn said, pausing.

  He was pointing up. In the crook of a wide oak where two branches divided, something had been built — a mass of grey paper and hexagonal structure, the unmistakable architecture of a hive. It hummed faintly, even from here, a sound more felt than heard, a low vibration that Theron registered in his chest before his ears caught it properly.

  "Bees," Dorn said.

  "I noticed."

  "Good bees. Honey." He looked at the hive the way hunters looked at things they knew how to approach. "Later. Not now."

  "I wasn't planning on it," Theron said.

  Dorn looked at him with the mild skepticism he deployed when he wasn't certain Theron's plans were as sensible as Theron believed them to be.

  They kept walking.

  The forest changed when they went deeper.

  It was gradual — the birch thinning, giving way to oak and ash and trees he didn't have names for, their trunks wider, their canopy higher, the light coming through in longer and more considered shafts. The understory changed too, the scrubby brush giving way to fern and moss, the ground softening underfoot, the sound of the camp and the river falling away behind them until there was only forest.

  He noticed he'd stopped thinking about the next thing.

  That was the change. He'd been inside his own head all morning — Juran's leg, the splint schedule, the herbs he was running low on, the conversation he needed to have with Mora about her chest cough that she was pretending wasn't a chest cough — a running catalogue of things to manage, the way his mind had always worked, the way a trauma surgeon's mind worked. Always the next case. Always the next problem.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It stopped somewhere in the deep forest.

  Not because the problems went away. Just because the forest was doing something to his attention — pulling it outward, toward the smell of the air and the particular quality of light through leaves older than anything he'd seen since he arrived. He found himself simply walking. Looking. The way he hadn't looked at anything since before the grave.

  "You like it," Dorn said. Not a question.

  "Yes."

  Dorn nodded, satisfied, as if he'd predicted this. "First time I came here," he said, "I was—" he held his hand out low, child-height. "My father brought me. To learn the trees." He was quiet for a step or two. "I still come when I need to think without noise."

  Theron looked at him. This was more than Dorn usually offered about himself at once — Dorn's personal history came out in pieces, casually, the way a man let things fall when he was comfortable rather than constructing them for effect. He'd learned not to ask follow-up questions when Dorn talked like this. The questions closed things off. The silence kept them open.

  They walked.

  He found the first useful plant twenty minutes in — feverfew, or something close enough to it that his purposes were the same. He collected it carefully, stripping the upper leaves and leaving the roots. Dorn watched the process without comment, which was his version of approval.

  Then something for the gut — he recognized the leaf shape from a patient in his third year of residency who'd brought in a tea her grandmother made, and he'd looked it up later out of curiosity and found it was real, genuinely anti-inflammatory, one of those cases where folk medicine and pharmacology happened to agree. He took some of that too.

  Dorn picked up a mushroom from a fallen log and examined it.

  "No," Theron said immediately.

  Dorn looked at it. "I know this one."

  "How long have you known it?"

  Dorn thought. "Always. Since—" the low hand again.

  "Has anyone ever gotten sick from it?"

  A pause. The pause of a man doing honest arithmetic.

  "...Once," Dorn said.

  "Leave it."

  Dorn put it down with the expression of a man who felt the mushroom had been treated unfairly, but he put it down, which was what mattered. Theron made a note.

  They moved on, deeper, the trees getting older around them, the light gentler and more golden. He'd started to see why people named places. The Honeywoods had a feel to it — not eerie, nothing like that. Just settled. Like ground that had been left alone long enough to become something.

  He was thinking this when he saw the plant.

  It grew in a cluster near the base of an old ash, three or four of them together, in the shade where the light came through one specific gap in the canopy and landed in a narrow column. Silver-green leaves, small and slightly waxy. White flowers barely larger than his thumbnail, in clusters of four. He wouldn't have stopped for it — there were interesting plants everywhere and he'd learned to be selective about what he collected and what he observed and what he simply noted for later.

  But it caught the light wrong.

  Not dramatically. Not in any way that would have been remarkable to someone not looking. Just a faint quality to the leaf surface that made it seem, for a moment, like it was doing something with the light that came to it rather than simply reflecting it. There and gone, a trick of the angle, probably.

  He stopped.

  Dorn stopped beside him. "What?"

  "Don't know yet." He crouched beside the cluster, brought his face close without touching. The smell reached him before anything else — honey, faint and clear, with something underneath it that he couldn't quite name. Not unpleasant. The opposite of unpleasant. The smell of something that wanted to be tried.

  He looked at it carefully. The leaves were healthy. No sign of anything wrong. He touched one gently — it was smooth, cooler than the air, which was unusual. He picked a single leaf and held it, and the smell came up stronger.

  Copper, underneath the honey. Like a coin held in a warm hand.

  Interesting.

  He smelled the break in the stem. Clean. He looked at the small white flowers — four petals, symmetrical, a faint yellow at the very center.

  "What?" Dorn said again, with more investment this time.

  "I don't know," Theron said honestly. He took three leaves and folded them into his pouch. "Testing." He looked at the cluster, then at the tree it grew beneath, then at the column of light from the gap above. He'd remember this place. "Not yet. I'll test first."

  Dorn looked at the plant with the mild suspicion he brought to most of Theron's plant interests, which was entirely reasonable given everything he'd watched Theron put in his own mouth over the past weeks in the name of science.

  "Small amount?" Dorn said.

  "Small amount," Theron agreed.

  Dorn nodded with the air of a man who found this answer acceptable while reserving the right to be concerned about it later.

  They made it back to camp by late afternoon, moving faster on the return — Dorn setting a hunter's pace now that they weren't stopping every ten minutes for Theron to examine something on the ground.

  The camp received them with the ordinary noise of late afternoon: fires being started, children being called in, the sounds of the day winding down. Sora appeared at the edge of the healing spot when she heard them, looked at Theron's full foraging bag with visible interest, and then looked at Dorn.

  "He find good things?" she asked Dorn, in their language.

  "Many things," Dorn said. "Mostly small and suspicious."

  Sora looked at Theron.

  "Tomorrow," he told her. He meant: I'll show you tomorrow. After I've looked at them properly. She seemed to understand. She looked at the bag one more time with the focused patience of someone who had decided to want something and was prepared to wait for it, and went back to what she'd been doing.

  Theron ate dinner with Dorn at the fire, the good comfortable silence of two people who'd spent a day walking together and didn't need to make anything of it. He ate the three silver-green leaves with his meal, just folded into the rest of it, less because it was a careful testing protocol and more because they smelled like something that should be eaten and he was hungry enough to follow his instincts.

  They tasted exactly like the smell had promised. Honey first, then the copper note underneath, and something faintly fizzy at the very back of the tongue that he didn't have a word for but that felt like the botanical equivalent of carbonation. He chewed slowly, noting the texture, the aftertaste, the way there was no immediate bitterness that would warn of toxicity.

  Good. Interesting. Nothing yet.

  He went to sleep not long after.

  He dreamed of Emma.

  She was twenty-two in the dream — which was wrong, she'd been twenty when he died, but dreams had their own arithmetic. She was standing in bright summer light in a long dark gown with a flat hat on her head, and she was laughing at something just out of frame, her face turned sideways so he could see the profile of her that was entirely her mother's and the laugh that was entirely his, the one that started quiet and built.

  He stood somewhere slightly behind and to the left, the way he always stood at big events so he wouldn't block someone's view.

  She turned and saw him. For a moment the dream just held them both there, looking at each other in that clear summer light.

  "Dad," she said.

  He woke up.

  The camp was dark and still around him. The fire had burned low. Above, the strange stars moved on without him, the constellations of a sky that had never been his. His face was wet — he lifted a hand to it and found tears there, surprised by them, the way you were surprised by rain that had started while you were thinking about something else.

  He lay still for a while.

  He didn't feel sad. That was the thing he worked out slowly, lying there in the dark. He'd expected to feel sad, or to be missing her in the particular way that arrived like something physical and needed to be waited out. But what he felt was something quieter. The warmth of a specific remembered fact: that she'd had that day, that she'd laughed like that, that somewhere she was twenty and would be twenty-two and would have that graduation, and he'd been her father for all of it even if he hadn't been there at the end.

  She was fine. He didn't know how he knew it, lying on the ground in a stone age camp forty thousand years from Connecticut. But he knew it the way he sometimes knew a patient was going to make it — not from data, just from the quality of a thing. She was fine.

  He closed his eyes.

  The stars went on above him. The fire breathed.

  He slept again, and this time he didn't dream at all, and in the morning he would wake feeling clearer than he had since the grave, rested in a way that had nothing to do with how many hours he'd slept.

  But that was morning. For now there was just the dark, and the cool air, and somewhere ahead in the forest a place where silver-green leaves grew in a column of light and smelled like honey.

  He slept.