Flora-Tech Gardener

The Flora-Tech Gardener is on the Tribal Alliance river-clan rolls under the recognised title vor-ethu, 'one who keeps the slow garden' — a title the river-clans give to growth-practitioners whose work has settled into a recognisable pattern, and which they gave to Tender Anouk Brede, age twenty-nine, river-clan-born, over the objection of three elders who held that her pattern was not slow. It is not. Anouk spent two semesters at the Arcane Syndicate's southern vault on a river-clan bursary and came home with a backpack: a mist-sprayer that runs an accelerated-growth tincture through the tubing of a field suit, with vines she raised herself threaded through the tubes so that the suit and the garden are one plant. The elders called it artifice. She said the vine did not mind. The vine has not, in three years, given any sign of minding.

Her combat-grant is the green-cage form, raised in an engagement rather than a season: a burst of growth-mist on the enemy's ground brings the lattice up through it fast, and the lattice denies a formation the ground its doctrine requires, and the formation goes the long way round, which is where the Bolt Thrower's cradles are. The river-clans' record of her closed lattices — engagements in which the enemy's ground was entirely enclosed — stands at four in three years, which is one more than the previous vor-ethu managed in eight, and the elders have recorded the four as 'doctrinally instructive' and have not formally taught what the lessons are. The valve at her left hip drips. She bleeds it every morning and it drips anyway, and the vines nearest it flower first.

She is in regular contact with Eilwen Tarn on the southern ridge, whose cradles move with Anouk's lattices and whose family's fourteen trail-cypresses now have vines on them the surveyors have recorded as 'incidental,' and the two of them have between them defined this season's clean corridor for the Alliance's rider regiments without either of them having been invited to the meeting that was supposed to define it. The Syndicate's southern vault has written twice offering to buy the tincture's formula. She has replied twice that the formula is the vine's and the vine is not for sale, and has sent, with the second reply, a cutting, which the vault has planted and which has, the vault reports, done nothing at all in their soil. The garden, she says, waits for the right ground. So does she.