"H-here. Here's a, another good p-place."
The early spring sunshine pries its way between the clouds, filters between branches studded with unopened buds, gleams on melting patches of snow and warms the earth between. The squire stands near one such spot, nudging at rich leaf-mould with his boot, squinting up to gauge the thickness of branches overhead, imagining how dense the leaves will grow later in the summer; not too shaded, the trees spaced far enough apart to allow dappled light to reach the ground below. Crows flap lazily from branch to branch meanwhile, watchful and alert.
"Ser C-catch - what do you th-think?"
At his side he carries a bundle of sticks and twigs, each with a little scrap of damp sackcloth bound around one end; not firewood, for these twigs are still supple and green, with fat little buds along their length. Harvested furtively from gardens and orchards and organised, like with like, into little bundles. The boy tugs two sticks carefully free and crouches to poke at the earth with an old knife, rusted and dull, gnawing his lip thoughtfully.
"Which would be h-happier here? Gooseberries or, or c-currants?"
He has had time to think. Has had time to find something like calm, for the terror of the blasted clearing to become anger, frustration, and at last a quiet, fuming defiance with which he returns to the woods.
But not unprepared, and not alone.
Nothing outside his own garden. Nothing from earth he did not till.
His coat pockets bulge with seeds - squash and turnip, beans and peas and fennel; seed potatoes and clumps of winter-dormant rootstock for strawberries and brambles; all begged or scavenged or purchased with reluctant coin.
"Maybe b-both?" Dark eyes lift to the addled man, seeking his council and his aid, and he holds out the cuttings for his friend to take, to examine and decide.