She had not slept well in weeks. This was not new information. Sleep had been difficult since the funeral, arriving late and leaving early, giving her just enough to function and not enough to feel rested. She had accepted it the way she had accepted the other inconveniences of grief, as a condition rather than a problem, something to be managed rather than solved.
But tonight was different.
Tonight she lay in the dark and listened to the cottage breathe around her, the particular sound of a small space full of living things, the almost imperceptible movement of air through leaves, the occasional small settling of soil in a pot, the quiet persistence of things that were alive and did not know to be otherwise, and she could not sleep because something was moving through her that was not quite a thought and not quite a feeling but somewhere between the two.
She got up.
She moved through the cottage without a light, which she did not need. She knew the shape of every plant in the dark, knew where each one was by the particular quality of the air around it, the slight warmth of living things, the way her power moved toward them the way water moved toward low ground, naturally and without instruction.
She stopped in front of the veronica.
In the dark it was just a shape. A small shape, thinner than it should be, its stems not quite holding themselves the way stems were supposed to hold themselves. She put her hand near it without touching it and stood there in the dark cottage among all the other shapes of all the other plants and felt, in the particular language of her power, the state of things.
They were not well.
She knew this. She had known this for weeks. What she had not known, what arrived now in the dark and the quiet with the particular clarity that things sometimes had at three in the morning, was the texture of it. The specific quality of what was wrong.
She pressed both palms flat to the soil of the nearest pot and closed her eyes and let her power move through it fully, not the quick habitual check of her morning rounds but something deeper, something that went all the way down through the roots and into the earth beneath and spread outward through the floor and into the garden outside and kept going.
She felt the garden.
Empty. Bare. The beds she had cleared still holding the shape of what had been in them, the roots of things she had moved still leaving their impressions in the soil, the earth remembering the weight of what it had held.
She felt the plants inside.
And she felt, for the first time, what was moving through all of them. Not a deficiency. Not a pest or a disease or anything with a name in the notebooks she had been keeping. Something older than any of those things. Something that moved through the soil the way weather moved through air, present everywhere at once, neither here nor there but simply a condition of the whole.
She sat with it for a long time.
She thought about a thing she had known since she was very young, since before she understood her power or what it meant, a thing that had simply been true the way the oldest things were true, without requiring explanation or proof.
Nature did not grieve by stopping.
A tree did not cease to grow because the tree beside it had fallen. A forest did not hold itself still out of respect for what it had lost. When something died in a living system it became part of the system's continuation, decay feeding the soil, the soil feeding the roots, the roots feeding the next thing and the next thing after that. The loss was real. The loss was permanent. And the living went on anyway, not despite the loss but through it, incorporating it, making it part of what came next.
She had known this. She had always known this.
She opened her eyes in the dark cottage and looked at the shape of the veronica and felt the condition of the soil under her palms and understood, slowly and incompletely and not yet all the way, that the thing moving through her plants was not a problem she had failed to solve.
It was her.
She was in the soil. She was in the air. She was in the particular quality of the light that passed through her hands before it reached anything she touched.
And whatever she had been carrying for the past month was in there too, moving through everything she loved with the same patient indiscriminate presence as the weather, and she could not fix it from the outside because it was not coming from the outside.
She sat back on her heels.
The cottage was quiet around her. The plants held their dark shapes. The veronica stood in its pot by the window, small and pale and still retreating, and Lisa sat in the middle of the floor with her hands in her lap and the beginning of something she was not yet ready to call an understanding moving through her like the first light of a morning that had not yet fully arrived. She sat there until it did.