Off the record. Tender Mira, at her own request, unpublished. Turtle-Groves. Late in the growing season. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(I asked twice. The first time she talked about soil for the better part of an hour, and I let her, because pushing her doesn't work. She covered drainage, the rot that had come through the eastern stands two winters ago, and a long complaint about a cousin who overwaters. I wrote it all down, though none of it seemed to be about placement. Three days later she was pruning and I was holding the basket.)

Mira: You want to know how we choose.

(She said it without looking up.)

Scholar: I do.

Mira: Sit down, then. It's a long answer and most of it is waiting, so you may as well be comfortable.

Scholar: Do you place the same three in every child?

Mira: No. Sablemire does that. It works for them. It's not what we're for.

(She was pruning while she talked.)

Mira: We watch first, for years. I've got a girl now who's been with me since she was six, and I haven't put anything in her yet. She'll be twelve in spring.

Scholar: What are you waiting for?

Mira: To stop being wrong about her.

(She handed me a cutting, and I put it in the basket.)

Mira: Every year I think I've got her, and every year she does something in the autumn that means I haven't. Last year it was the goats. I won't bore you with the goats. The point is I'd have placed for a child who doesn't exist, and she'd have spent forty years living with my mistake.

Scholar: Does that happen?

Mira: Course it happens. It happened to my own tender, and she was better at this than I am.

(She straightened up with a hand in the small of her back.)

Mira: Everyone gets through it. I'd just rather not be the one who caused it, and I think I'm allowed to be selfish about that at my age.

Scholar: How do you know when you're ready?

Mira: When they stop surprising you.

(She thought about it.)

Mira: You don't get a moment, though. You notice you haven't been surprised for a while, then you notice it's been two years. Then you realise you've been ready since the spring before last, and you've been putting it off because you're frightened of getting it wrong.

Scholar: And when you do get it wrong?

(She went quiet here, and she looked uncomfortable.)

Mira: Then it changes. You know that, or you wouldn't be asking me in that tone of voice.

Scholar: I know it changes. I'd like to hear you describe it.

Mira: It takes years and it's horrible, and they think it's their own fault.

(She went back to the pruning.)

Mira: We tell them. Every tender tells them, we've got a whole way of telling them. We sit them down when they're about nineteen and their root's gone strange on them, and we tell them it's normal, that it's the thing correcting itself. They nod, and they don't believe a word of it. At nineteen, when the only remarkable thing about you has stopped working, nobody's reassurance helps.

Scholar: Do they believe it afterwards?

Mira: About fifteen years later they do.

Scholar: Is there a word for it? For a child the placement doesn't suit.

(She snipped two more cuttings before she answered.)

Mira: We don't use one.

Scholar: That isn't the same as not having one.

Mira: No. It isn't.

(She didn't offer it, and I didn't ask again. She's the fourth of five to stop in exactly this place, and I no longer believe it's coincidence.)

The part she asked me not to publish

(She was specific that she meant publication, and equally specific that my own notes were my own business. I've taken her at her word.)

Mira: There are children we don't place anything in.

Scholar: By oversight?

Mira: By decision.

(She'd stopped working.)

Mira: It's rare, once or twice in a whole tending life. You get a child and you watch them the way you watch all of them, and everything you could possibly give them is smaller than what they've already got. So you leave them be and let it come on its own.

Scholar: You let them awaken wild.

Mira: I let them awaken whole.

(The correction came fast, and she was cross about it, which I hadn't seen from her before.)

Mira: Wild is the word the other four use, because they've decided that not placing is neglect. Neglect! It's the hardest thing I've ever done in this grove. You sit on your hands for two years while a child opens up in front of you, and you know, every single day, that you could make it easier and you've chosen not to.

Scholar: Why would that ever be the better choice?

Mira: Because what we put in them has nothing of their own Source in it.

(She said this as an ordinary fact of the trade, the way she'd said the thing about drainage.)

Mira: Same root in a fire child and a water child, same result, works identically. Did you not know that?

(I told her I'd spent four months confirming it, and that nobody had thought it worth mentioning to me.)

Mira: Well, it's just how it is. There's nothing interesting in it.

(She waved the secateurs vaguely.)

Mira: It's useful, obviously. It's why we can teach anyone at all, instead of needing a different grove for every Source. But it means what we hand them comes from us. A three that comes up on its own is made out of the child. Most of the time ours is better, mind.

Scholar: And the rest of the time?

Mira: Then I leave well alone.

Scholar: What do the other Houses make of it?

Mira: Ironvale would say I'd gambled with a child, and they'd say it loudly, and then Stonemantle would buy me a drink about it.

(A short laugh.)

Mira: Sablemire would say I'd left an asset half-finished. Hollowglass would want it written down, and then they'd argue about the wording for a hundred years and produce nothing. Kael would understand it. He wouldn't do it, but he'd understand.

Scholar: And the child? The one you left.

Mira: Grown. Doing well. Better than well, she's got work she loves and a wife who's much funnier than she is.

(She went back to the row.)

Mira: She carries three things I could never have given her. One of them takes something out of her every time she uses it, and she'll have it until she dies.

Scholar: Does that trouble you?

Mira: Every so often. Less than it used to.

Mira: That's what the ones that come up on their own are like. Nobody picked them with the child's comfort in mind.

Scholar's note

Mira is the only tender who has admitted this to me. I don't believe she's the only one who does it. The care she took over the word whole makes me think she's argued about it inside the House, and lost.

Her remark about Source was made in passing while she was thinking about something else. I'd spent a season establishing the same thing and had come to treat it as the largest finding in the enquiry. She treats it as a fact about the job, like knowing when to water. I'm starting to think that gap, between how remarkable this is and how unremarkable every practitioner finds it, is worth a file of its own.