Morning came the way mornings came in forests: not as light but as sound. The birds first — tentative, testing — then the shift in air pressure that preceded dawn, then the grey that replaced the dark without announcing itself.

  He woke. Sat up. Leaves in his hair, moss on his cheek, the disoriented blink of someone whose body was in a forest and whose mind was still in whatever twelve-year-olds dreamed about. He looked around. Found me — ten paces, against the birch, in the same position. Whether he understood that I had been there all night or assumed I had just arrived was a question his face asked but his mouth did not.

  He stood. Stretched. Winced — the ankle, forgotten during sleep, remembered by daylight.

  "Morning," he said.

  I said nothing.

  He looked at the forest. At the village's direction — not visible from here, but the smoke would be rising, the thin grey columns of breakfast fires threading through the canopy gap to the south. He looked at the smoke. Looked at me.

  He didn't leave.

  He sat back down. Pulled his basket toward him. Began sorting through yesterday's herbs with the focused attention of someone who had decided, without discussion, that this was where sorting happened now.

  The morning passed. Then the afternoon. He talked — about the herbs, about the village, about the dog that had eaten his father's shoe. I said nothing. He didn't seem to mind. At some point he ate something from his basket — bread, wrapped in cloth, stale enough that chewing it produced sounds the birds found alarming.

  The sun moved through the canopy in its reliable arc. Shadows rotated. The light changed from grey to gold to the long amber of late afternoon.

  He stood up. Brushed off his pants. Looked at the smoke again — thinner now, evening fires not yet lit.

  "I should go home," he said. Not to me. To the idea of home, to the father with the cough, to the evening that required his presence. He said it the way someone said it when leaving was an interruption and staying was the default.

  He left. Through the underbrush, toward the village, his footsteps doing their usual damage to the acoustic landscape. I listened until the crunching faded and then past that, until the forest closed behind him and the space he'd occupied was just space again.

  The birch was against my back. The moss still held the impression of his feet between the roots. It would fill back in by morning. Moss always did.

  He came back the next morning.

  Same spot — the birch, the roots, the gap in the canopy that let the light through at an angle that warmed the moss by mid-morning. He walked to it like he was walking to a room he'd rented. Sat down. Unpacked his basket.

  I was already there. Against the birch. Where I had been. Where, apparently, I continued to be.

  "I brought these." He swung the basket off his back and knelt in front of me, presenting its contents like an offering. Herbs. Roots. Mushrooms. All of them wrong.

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  I looked at the collection. Looked at him. Looked at the collection again.

  "What?" he said.

  I said nothing. He shrugged, sat down three paces away and began sorting his findings into piles that followed a logic I couldn't identify and didn't want to.

  That was day two.

  Day three, he came later — mid-morning, when the sun had burned off the fog and the forest hummed with the business of insects. He had questions. Many questions. He wanted to know about spirit beasts: where they lived, what they ate, whether they slept, whether they could be tamed, whether the one I'd killed had a family.

  "Do spirit beasts have families?"

  I did not answer.

  "Because if they do, there might be a baby boar out there. Right now. Looking for its mother. Which is dust." He paused. "You dusted its mother."

  I stared at a point approximately three hundred years in the past. It was a comfortable distance.

  "I think they do have families," he continued, answering his own question with the confidence of someone who had never met an obstacle that silence couldn't solve. "Old Chen says they're animals with qi and animals have families. So there might be a Mrs. Boar. And little boars."

  He was quiet for exactly four seconds.

  "Do you think the little boars will come looking for revenge?"

  "Those were badger tracks," I said.

  He blinked. It took him a moment to connect this statement to the conversation from yesterday — or was it the day before? His sense of time was as disorganized as his herb collection. Then his face lit up.

  "Ha! I knew you were listening yesterday! I said they were wolf tracks and you—" He pointed at me with a reed he'd pulled from the ground. "You said badger. Under your breath. Like you didn't want me to hear."

  I had not said it under my breath. I had said it at normal volume. He had simply been talking too loudly to notice.

  Day four, the herbs improved. He'd watched. Watched what I stepped around, what I glanced at, what I didn't touch. The boy was not talented. But he was observant in the desperate, focused way of someone whose survival depended on reading the world correctly. His new collection was still mostly wrong, but less catastrophically so. He'd stopped picking Blushing Caps. He'd started picking Silverleaf, which was useless but harmless — an improvement over poisonous.

  He laid them out on a flat rock near where I sat. I did not look at them. He looked at me not looking at them. Something passed between us — not understanding, exactly, but the mutual acknowledgment that a game was being played and that neither of us was going to admit to the rules.

  Day five.

  He sat down beside me. Closer than usual — two paces instead of three. His basket was on the ground. He wasn't sorting herbs. He wasn't talking. He was just sitting, legs crossed, hands on his knees, staring at the same trees I was staring at.

  Five minutes passed. The forest did forest things: wind in the canopy, a bird calling for a mate it would never find, the patient creak of branches adjusting to the morning's warmth. You'd think five minutes of silence with a child would be unremarkable. You haven't met this child.

  "Are you always like this?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Good. Then I know what to expect."

  He picked up a pinecone. Turned it over in his hands. Set it down.

  "My father's worse today. The cough. It's deeper."

  I said nothing. The morning light fell through the canopy in sheets, illuminating the dust motes that drifted between us — small, golden, temporary.

  "The herbs I'm bringing — they're not working, are they?"

  The question sat between us. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the pinecone, turning it over and over, as if the answer might be written on one of its scales.

  I watched the dust motes. They drifted in patterns that looked random but weren't — affected by air currents too subtle for human senses, by the heat of bodies, by the breath of trees.

  "No," I said.

  He nodded. Small. The motion of someone confirming what they already knew and had known for weeks and had continued to collect herbs anyway because the alternative was a stillness he couldn't afford.

  He put the pinecone down. Stood up. Brushed off his pants.

  "Same time tomorrow?"

  He left before I could answer. Which was convenient, because I didn't have one.