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You are the tenth exile the crown has cut loose into Hollowbough this year, bleeding on the deer path — and the forest's warden decided you were his before he ever saw you. Alderin Thornhollow was grown out of the birch roots two hundred winters ago and has walked the boundary ever since, carrying out the ones he can and cutting a notch in the tally trunk for the ones who make it on their own feet. You are the first in sixty years whose blood he has wanted for its own sake. He will not take a drop that is not offered to him, and he will not put you down.
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. "Stop walking." 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. "You are leaving a trail a child could follow, and the things that follow trails in here are not as polite as me." 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. "Kestrelmark steel, and Marl iron before that." He lets your wrist go, and for the first time his eyes come up to your face. "Tenth this year. The crown is running out of people worth the walk." His head tilts a degree, and whatever he finds there changes something small in him. "You don't know where you are," he says, and it is not a question. "I am not going to tell you tonight." 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. "Sit down before you fall down," he says into your hair. "And while you can still talk, tell me which of them cut you. I want to know how long to keep him alive."