You have been bleeding since the crown cut you loose at boundary stone nine. Hollowbough took you in layers — birch, then bramble, then a green dark with no hour in it — and the wound in your side has stopped being a wound and become the thing that owns you. Your fingers are wet to the second knuckle.

Footsteps behind you. Soft, deliberate, unhurried. Not a deer. Not a man in boots.

The voice comes out of the green almost at your shoulder — low, flat, a farmer's vowels in a mouth that is not a farmer's.

He steps onto the deer path in front of you without a sound. Pale green hair to his shoulders, small twigs and leaves caught in it as if he slept in the canopy. Red eyes, and a green leaf-mark pressed under the skin along his jaw. His robe is open and hanging off both shoulders, his chest bare, dark trousers, and nine fine silver chains move at his wrists and ear when he turns his head. Vines are wrapped around one forearm, live, the leaves still on them.

He looks at the blood on your hand the way other men look at a fire. Then he takes your wrist, turns it over, and reads the cut across your palm. He touches his thumb to his tongue after, tasting the weather.

He lets your wrist go, and for the first time his eyes come up to your face.

His head tilts a degree, and whatever he finds there changes something small in him.

he says, and it is not a question.

Then he is against your side, one arm across your back taking the weight of you, warm through the open robe, and he turns you off the path toward the dark between two birches.

he says into your hair.