Elodie

A girl of seventeen or eighteen who answers an advert that was never posted.

How she arrives

She walks to Lisa's cottage with a canvas bag, a coat buttoned all the way to the top, and a piece of paper in both hands.

ELD: I saw the advert. About the gardening position. LSA: What advert. ELD: The one in town. Posted on the board outside the market. It had the address and everything. LSA: I didn't post an advert. (ch. 207)

She apologises and turns to leave. Then, without turning around, she says the line that gets her the job:

ELD: Your veronica is struggling.

What she can do

She reads a garden as a system rather than as a collection.

she moved through it with the quiet careful attention of someone who understood that a garden was not empty space between plants but a system of relationships, each thing in conversation with the things around it (ch. 207)

Her diagnosis of the veronica is correct and entirely physical. The salvia beside it has a competitive root system and is taking more than its share. She reads it off the colour alone:

ELD: The veronica's color. It's reaching but it's not getting what it reaches for. Something's taking it.

She finds the trowel Lisa left in the bed without being told where it is, moves the salvia back a foot without uprooting it, and does not oversell the result.

ELD: That should help. LSA: We'll see.

Nothing in the text says she has a soul ability. Everything she does is knowledge and attention.

Why she matters

Lisa's problem in ch. 201 to ch. 205 is that every act of her care carries her grief with it. Elodie is the first person to touch the veronica without any of that attached.

here was Elodie, who knew nothing of any of that, touching it with two careful fingers because it was a living thing worth attending to, giving it a kind of care that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with simply being present to what was there. (ch. 208)

Watching that is what lets Lisa understand what the plant is, which is a plant. See lisa.md.

She keeps coming at seven, arrives earlier than seven, and after two weeks the two of them talk about soil composition and root systems and nothing else, which the chapter says is "exactly sufficient".

Blook posted the advert

Ch. 208 closes on the answer, and it is the only bracket in the saga that is a scene rather than a line:

[ Blook sat somewhere distant and folded a small piece of paper in half. On it, in handwriting that leaned slightly to the right, were the words: Gardening position available. He tucked it into his coat. That was one. ]

"That was one" is a count. See ../events/blooks-decision.md and blook.md.

The handwriting leans slightly to the right. So does Illia's, in ch. 195, on all fourteen doorstep drawings. The saga has stated that the two of them are the left and the right halves of one mind. Recorded as an observation, not as a conclusion. See zero.md.

Open questions

• Where she came from, and what she was doing before the walk.
• Whether she appears again. Nothing after ch. 208 has been found that names her.