He smelled it before he saw any evidence of it.
He had been awake before dawn, sitting cross-legged on the pallet with his eyes closed and his hands in his lap, in the particular state he had developed over months of isolation that was not meditation in any formal sense but was close enough to serve the same function. And in the absolute quiet of the very early morning, before the dawn guard arrived, before the household stirred, before the birds — there were birds now, returned after weeks of absence, he had heard them the past three mornings — began their noise, he smelled the air change.
The cold was still there. The cold would be there for weeks more. But beneath it, as if the earth itself had exhaled after a long held breath, was something green.
Wet soil. The dark mineral smell of frost-bound ground beginning to release.
Spring was not here. Spring was only whispering through the tower's gaps that it was thinking about arriving.
Gerffron sat very still and let the smell come to him.
He could hear the garden now in ways he had not been able to hear it in deep winter. The cold had kept everything compressed, muffled, close. But the slight softening of the air — only slight, only a promise — had loosened sounds the same way it loosened soil. He heard, in the very early morning, the particular drip of snowmelt from the garden wall. He heard the creak of the elm tree expanding. He heard, three days running, the same pair of birds in the rose beds, going through an exchange so consistent and specific that he suspected they were arguing about something territorial.
He stood at the crack in the balcony boards for longer now.
The rose garden was beginning to change. The canes still bare, but the color of the bare canes was shifting — from the flat gray-brown of deep winter to something faintly warmer, a reddish undertone that meant the sap was moving again, that the roses were making their blind decisions about living.
He had thought about Styrmir and the roses often over these months.
Not the older Styrmir. Not the sixteen-year-old who had been put in chains and sold and sent north to become something harder and more necessary. He thought about Styrmir at nine, ten, eleven — the age when the boy had still had some access to the gardens, before the restrictions tightened and the walls of his world contracted to the staff quarters and the kitchen yard.
The roses had been one of the few things permitted.
Gerffron remembered watching him from an upper window. The boy had moved through the rose beds with a strange authority, not the authority of someone who owned the garden but of someone who understood it — who knew which canes were new growth and which were deadwood, which buds would open early and which would wait, which roots went deepest. He had never needed to be told what to do in the garden. He simply knew.
Gerffron had asked him once, through the iron bars at the garden's edge, where he had learned it.
Styrmir had looked at him with those winter-pale eyes and said: Nobody taught me. I just paid attention.
Gerffron pressed his palm against the boarded door.
The wood was slightly warmer than it had been last week. Only slightly. But in the east tower, slight was everything.
He thought about a boy paying attention. About attention as a survival skill, as an inheritance, as the particular gift of people who have been given very little else to work with. He thought about what Styrmir might be doing now — not in grief, but in something closer to wonder. He had been in that northern territory for months. He was not the boy who had been sold at sixteen. He was becoming something.
Gerffron did not know what.
He knew the shape of the becoming, the way you could know the shape of a tree before its first leaves — by the structure, by the branching, by the particular way it had decided to inhabit space.
He touched the crack and let the faint green smell come through.
Somewhere beyond the border, a young man was learning the meaning of his own name.
Gerffron was very patient.
He had, after all, already waited ten years once before.
He could wait again.