I’d decided three things about the Glade. Firstly, I was calling it the Glade, and second, it didn’t matter what I called it because I wasn’t ever gonna tell anyone else about it. It was all only for me: the name, the place, and what it gave me. My escape from the world.

  And I decided the third thing more or less as I wound my way up to it, climbing the stone steps in the birch avenue and cresting a starkly snowless hill. The ruins of whatever had once been here still sat stoically, still framing the spring pool in the centre, the yew tree upon the island grand and ancient and bare and skeletal. I took the stepping stones across and ate what I’d brought, letting my robe out halfway through as even up here, out here, white capping every tree around the Glade, it felt like a brisk verdance afternoon. Cool, yet not cold. A flitting of rabbits gathered by the waters and lapped silently as I ate. Something weird was happening up here. Something magic.

  My personal sliver of tranquility in the ardour of the week.

  Frozen gripweed didn’t pack much fight, and on the way back down the forest road I chopped up enough to fill my bag. I was only aware of it melting when I set it down at the fence of the odd little cottage to take a moment to admire the foxgloves, still beautiful and perfect and endless in the snow blanket. My back must have warmed the bag, but I didn’t feel an ounce of cold or damp through the robe, the first thing Kaspar ever bought me. Maybe I should take his offer? It wasn’t like I wasn’t working hard on my own, and a little help was always nice. I realised I wanted to ask the owner of the cottage for their own thoughts, a strange urge, yet I felt I’d developed an understanding of them all the times I’d passed their abode. A kind of kinship founded on nothing more than how much I wanted this place, this house, this garden… I felt we’d get on well.

  The light was already dipping. I kicked my way down the path, the snow on the road mostly slush this late in the day, precious few other sets of footprints marking it in either direction, and I guessed the city must have some of its own gatherers or trappers, likely far hardier than I. The world was quiet, eerily so. Like someone was holding their hands over my ears. I glanced around, both shoulders, then again just to make sure. No one.

  I kicked some more, rounded the corner, and almost bumped into a woman who didn’t look quite right. Stumbled back. Shook myself out of it. And she stopped as well, regarding me, so I did the same to her. She looked a portrait of a woman, and it shook me somewhere deep.

  “Be wary of the city watchmen if you’re out this late,” she said in a voice like polishing glass with a rag, “for you never know exactly what time they are.”

  I felt my body tense. “Huh? How can they… be a time?”

  “For they are watchmen, of course! They give you the time! You can tell it in their hands and their faces! An entire watch, as a man!”

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  A shiver ran through me and I edged to the right, shuffling slightly in case I needed to run. “But, no, wait, they’re people. Normal people… That’s just the title of their job.”

  “Of course! And while on duty they are awatch, so a watch they are! I ask you this: when is a watchman not a watch?”

  Her gaze split me like a hatchet and I chased at an answer. I swore I’d read stuff like this in a book a long, long time ago. “Uh… A watchman isn’t a watch… when he’s off the clock?”

  Her face splintered into a toothy smile. “Excellent!” she chortled, and set about on her way as if she’d never stopped.

  I forced my boots onwards too, allowing myself a single glance back. She still didn’t look right and I’d worked out how. She sure looked like a portrait of a woman: a portrait come to life. A majestic interpretation of a person but still an interpretation nonetheless. From the front, from the right angle, she looked pristine and perfect, but as you moved your head, the features didn’t quite line up as they should, and it got more distinct the further I’d shuffled. And from the back? She looked just like any other portrait from the back: flat and grey and entirely void. Like she’d been painted onto the air itself.

  *

  Dropped the gripweed off at the apothecary, mentioned the funicular while Robin counted up my payment, and he said he didn’t trust new machines of that kind at all. One unrestful night later and I was by his side again – or across from his side, really, starting treatment on the one I began with every week. The large, broad, strong one who lay unspeaking, barely moving, still alive but sometimes I could only tell that from the fact they were still warm in the bed. Others healed up and moved on, new bodies in their places. This one barely changed.

  I imagined the nurses must feed this patient somehow, when the bandages were changed around their head. Delicately unwrapping them from around the shattered horns, peeling them off the skin, examining what waited underneath. Half of me wished I knew what they did. Half of me wanted never to see.

  I worked along my row, carefully applying the antiseptics to the bits of the bodies I really didn’t want to look at, and sponging them with the anodyne to take a little of the sting away. The cloth mask helped repel the unholy stench in the same way a fishing net helped repel the tide, but I persevered. Sometimes checking back at Robin’s progress across the aisle. Would I still be doing this necessary care if he wasn’t helping out too? A dreadful voice in the back of my mind told me what I didn’t want to hear.

  Again, I couldn’t last the whole day by his side, and as I took the icy Hill Road back, frozen to a sheet since last night, I chastised myself the whole way for dipping out on him, and cursed as I slipped and cracked my knee on the cobbles.

  I dropped onto my bed as soon as I was back, alone in the room, knowing too well I had History work to finish for tomorrow but knowing equally well I couldn’t get the damned thing done with any sort of real effort. What was the fucking point? I worked till exhaustion and I didn’t get anywhere. So Professor Fletcher could, as the Clearlanders said, cap it. What had I learned in all the weeks that was actually useful to me – could actually help me in the world, could actually do some damned good for someone who wasn’t one of my professors? I couldn’t fix anyone in the forsaken tent hospitals – inexorably growing week on week, another wing added since I last visited. I couldn’t fix the war and the attitudes that caused all of this. I couldn’t fix the way basically everyone still looked at me like I was a phantom that haunted the halls. I couldn’t even fix myself. And I hadn’t the slightest idea where to start.

  I heard Holly come in, heard her mumble something, and appreciated her not trying to help while I kept pretending to sleep.