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In a town where a glass-barked orchard once set the rhythm of life, the living heart is stolen and reworked into instruments of frozen mercy. A young steward, a wary mentor, and a streetwise child steal back the pieces, forcing a confrontation with a faith that binds grief into exhibits. The orchard responds as lives rearrange and seasons begin to move unpredictably.
The orchard hummed like a thing that knew how to keep time and also how to forgive itself when it faltered. Glass-barked trees rose in deliberate ranks from the shallow loam, their veins like fine filigree beneath translucent skin. Fruit hung there as if someone had set jars of seasons in the branches — some carrying the tartness of a late spring, others holding the honeyed memory of a long-ago autumn. People came to the orchard to learn the small rituals of living: which fruit to offer for a safe birth, which gleam to read for a fair rain, how to sing the harvest-song so that sweetness would not be stolen by worry. Rowan Vale learned those rituals with his palms and his bones. He had no patience for fancy phrases; the orchard spoke best to the body. A tilt of a bough meant one thing, a shiver in a gleam meant another. He could coax a stubborn blossom into ripeness by holding a cord of the old songs against his cheek and whispering, and the trees would answer, sleepy and obliging.
That morning the orchard answered with absence. Birds kept thin company over the rows, their song clipped into few notes and then silence. Bees circled the edges and refused to land. The usual low murmur — the sound like many clocks breathing together — lay flat, as if someone had pressed a hand over the whole grove. Rowan met Tamsin Morrow at the gate. She had tied a shawl close and moved with the economy of someone who had practiced making calm out of small disasters. Her hands were quick as maps; she could read a broken branch like others could read the weather. Her face, when she looked at him, carried a tiredness that always made his own throat tighten.
They walked beneath the glass-bark. A frost lay upon the trunks where summer ought to have warmed them; the white seemed to gather with a purpose, like powdered salt at the edges of a wound. Fruit that should have been sweet and soft stood shriven beneath a rim of ice. One pod had split and spilled seeds that glittered against the dark earth, uselessly bright. In the grove’s center the oldest trees leaned inward in their habitual embrace, but the circle they made had a bluntness to it, a hollow where warmth should have pooled. The stone crescent where the heart seed sat — Aurel — was bare.