The Scarecrow War

# Chapter 1: Spring Watch

The hum is louder this morning.

Not louder the way a fire is louder when you feed it, not sharper, not more demanding. Louder the way a river is louder in spring, when snowmelt swells it from underneath and the whole channel thrums with a patient, rising weight. I've been awake since before dawn, lying still in the dark of the cottage with my hands flat on the stone floor, and I could feel it through the flagstones. Through the bones of my wrists. Through the quiet animal part of me that has been listening to this sound for three years and still doesn't have a proper name for it.

The garden is humming.

Not just in the way I feel through my palms when I dig or the warmth that rises through the soil when something is ready to fruit. This is audible now, an actual sound, low and continuous, threading through the cottage walls like the memory of a note someone sang in the next room and left behind. If I press my ear to the hearthstone, it resolves into something almost musical, a sustained tone with faint harmonics shifting inside it, the way a plucked string keeps finding new things to say after you've already let go.

I sit up. The room is grey with early light. Bramble is not on the bed.