But ash, she thought, remembers its roots.

As he worked the curve, she watched his hands—not the hands that had once brushed her hair back from her forehead, but the hands that now knew only the language of leverage and grain. He was casting the wood into a new shape, yes. But she realized, with a cold trickle down her spine, that he had been casting her the same way for over a decade.

But Anisiya heard it. She always had. The first winter of their marriage, she had listened to a green oak stump weeping resin. Pavel called it sap. She called it memory.

He fell without a sound. Like wood.

She did not weep. She had no tears left for men who mistook silence for strength.

She had become his handle. Every burden he could not swing alone—the winter firewood, the slaughtered goat, the silent meals—she absorbed. And like the ash, she had learned not to scream.

The morning light bled through the pine branches like a weak infusion of tea. Anisiya knew the taste of that light—the taste of another day swallowed by the taiga. She had been the woodman’s wife for twelve years, and for twelve years, she had watched him read the forest better than he had ever read her face.

“Hold this,” he said, not looking at her.

Her husband, Pavel, was a man of notches and axe strokes. He could fell a century-old larch so it landed exactly where he wished, splitting open like a gift. But when Anisiya tried to speak of the ache behind her ribs, he would grunt and sharpen his blade. “Wood doesn’t complain,” he would say. “Wood stands still.”

Stand straight. Don’t complain. Bear the weight.