Chapter 3: Lux Brumalis

"To understand the gods is to understand the shape of the world itself—not as it appears on the surface, but as it is structured beneath.

Every deity of the Manifold Pantheon is built upon two pillars: Their Major Domains, which are theirs and theirs alone, the true source of their power and the thing that would unmake them if taken away, and their Minor Domains, which are the spokes that extend outward from that core—shared, overlapping, contested at the edges, and sometimes held jointly by deities who have nothing else in common.

Note, that the Major Domains are not merely areas of influence.

They are what the deity is , in the most fundamental sense.

A god whose Major Domains are taken away does not simply weaken, but cease , in the way that a fire ceases when you take away everything that was burning.

Each deity also connects to a sacred object.

These are the points of closest contact between a deity and their most devoted followers. They are how the faithful are identified, how the connection is maintained, and how, in the darkest of moments, a deity can be called upon directly.

What follows is a partial accounting of the Manifold Pantheon, as best as it has been understood by mortal scholarship to-date:

Roth — The Gaze of Death  
Major Domains: Death, Souls
Minor Domains: Stillness, Passage, Grief, Memory, Oaths
Sacred Object: The Deep-Drawn Hood

Roth is the hand that guides what remains after the body is done with it, and the voice that holds an oath to its promise long after the one who swore it has forgotten.

Memory, in Roth's keeping, is not nostalgia but obligation: To remember the dead is to honour the passage he provides.

His hood is not a symbol of hiding, but of the threshold between seen and unseen—the last thing a Soul passes under on its way to return to the cycle.

Altare — The Beautiful  
Major Domains: Fertility, Growth
Minor Domains: Abundance, Ripeness, Strife, Soil, Children, Puberty
Sacred Object: The Grafting Knife

Altare is not gentle, despite the name his followers have given him.

Growth is not gentle.

It is insistent, relentless, and entirely indifferent to whether you are ready for it. He governs the turning of girls into women and boys into men as readily as he governs the turning of seed into crop, and he makes no particular distinction between the two.

His knife is a grafting knife—a tool for cutting one living thing and joining it to another, making something new from the connection.

His followers carry small versions of it. It is considered both a blessing and a warning alike.

Nezath — The Unborn  
Major Domains: Magic, Potential
Minor Domains: Transformation, Unmaking, Becoming, Possibility, Puberty, Ambition, Power Sacred Object: The Unfired Vessel

Nezath is the only deity in the Manifold Pantheon who is defined entirely by what has not yet happened. His domains are not things that exist right now—they are things that could .

Magic and Potential are, by their very nature, unstable, and so is he—the most difficult of the Pantheon to pin down in doctrine, the most argued-over in theological circles, and the one whose followers tend toward the intense and the restless.

The Unfired Vessel carried by his faithful is exactly what it sounds like: A clay vessel that has never been put to the kiln, fragile and unfinished and full of empty space, ready to be reshaped into anything, filled with anything and bound to anything.

Vraeth — The Fever Saint  
Major Domains: Plague, Healing
Minor Domains: Pain, Disease, Fever, Delirium, Immunity, Mercy, Recovery, Pestilence, Purification
Sacred Object: The Cauterizing Iron

No deity in the Manifold Pantheon is prayed to with more simultaneous desperation and resentment than Vraeth.

She gives the sickness and she takes it away, and her clergy have spent centuries arguing about whether these are two expressions of the same mercy or two entirely separate impulses that happen to share a body.

The Cauterizing Iron is perhaps the most honest symbol in the entire Pantheon: The thing that burns in order to save, that causes a precise and deliberate pain to prevent a larger and indiscriminate one. Her followers carry small irons, never heated, as a reminder that healing and harm are separated by intention  alone.

Names Unknown — The Twins
Major Domains: Luck, Travel
Minor Domains: Crossroads, 50/50 Chance, Thresholds, Strangers, Speed, Weather, Disguise, Coins
Sacred Object: The Worn Boot / The Worn Coin

The Twins have no recorded names.

Whether they ever did is a matter of genuine scholarly uncertainty—some argue the names were lost, others that names were never given, others still that the Twins themselves refuse them as a matter of principle.

They are the gods of the road and the flip of the coin—and make no mistake for their intention is ever-unknown. It is always a flip, always exactly even, always precisely fifty-fifty.

They do not favour the faithful over the foolish, the prepared over the reckless, or the deserving over anyone else. The coin does not care. Neither do they.

They govern the stranger at the door and the fork with no signpost, the threshold you cannot uncross  and the chance you cannot take back, and they govern all of it with the same complete and cheerful indifference to outcome.

They are the only gods inside the Manifold Pantheon with two sacred objects:

A single worn boot and a single worn coin.

The boot is left at crossroads by travellers who have reached the point where the path splits and neither direction offers certainty. It is not an offering so much as an acknowledgement—a thing left behind to mark the exact moment the gods coin went into the air.

The coin, worn smooth from too many flips to count, is kept rather than left.

It is carried by the faithful through every journey, every threshold, every decision with no clean answer, and flipped at each one.

Not to ask the Twins for guidance—for the Twins do not guide—but to remember that the outcome was always going to be exactly what it is, and that the coin was always going to land the way it landed, and that this is not cruelty but simply the shape of chance.

Together, the boot and the coin say the same thing in two different ways: You are here, the path is unknown, and the outcome is fifty-fifty, same as it has always been.

—

[Excerpt from "The Manifold Pantheon: A Compendium of the Divine - The Pantheon (Part 1),"  author unknown. Year 263, Era of Strife.]

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The longhouse was already packed when we arrived.

The tables and benches had been moved aside, same as every twelfth-day, clearing space for the pelts and straw mats spread out across the floor.

I started counting heads out of habit as we filed in, quickly got to nineteen, and had to stop.

‘ Still need  to ask the Old Crone about that…’

I would have asked father normally—he was half a step to my right—but I was not feeling like talking to him this morning.

The Old Crone was, of course, not here. The pattern established over the last several summers had already told me she wouldn't be before we even reached the door.

She had never once  come to church-day, not in any twelfth-day I could remember—and if I had to take a guess, none of the ones I couldn’t either .

‘Another thing to ask her about…’

There were a lot of things about the Old Crone that made no sense to me, and I had long run out of fingers to count them on.

The church-day absences were just one item on a list that kept getting longer and longer.

When I had mentioned at the end of yesterday's work that I would be coming in later on account of it, she had given me that look —the one she used whenever I asked something where it felt like she had a great deal to say and made a deliberate decision not to say any of it.

Father did the same thing, whenever I asked about the world outside the village or what his life as a soldier had actually looked like.

‘Grown-ups and their silences,’ I thought, having to fight to not roll my eyes—supposedly Roth would be upset if one did so on church-day.

We all took our seats together, like the rest of the families inside, and waited for the Parson.

Father settled beside me, looked at me and was quiet for a moment, which was his way of giving me the chance to start talking first.

When I didn't, he tried anyway.

"Cold morning," he offered.

"Yes."

I did not say more than that, and let the silence reign.

"Your hands feeling  alright? From the stitching?"

"They're fine."

There was another, longer stretch of silence, before he tried again.

" The  Old Crone treating you well enough?"

"Yes."

He looked  at me then, and I could see from the corner of my eye that his expression had gone the way it went when something was bothering him—the small crease between his brows, the way his jaw sat slightly different.

I noticed, but I registered it the same way I registered the packed benches and the missing Old Crone and the number nineteen I'd gotten stuck on.

I did not feel  anything particular about it.

That was strange, and new. Or maybe it wasn't new, and this morning had simply made it visible to me in a way it hadn't been before.

He had always been the only one.

The fire-side chat in the mornings, the markets, the numbers, the way he crouched down to be level with me when he had something real to say, or the many stories and thoughts he shared with me, when we found the time. Without him, I would not have known that any of it was possible—a different way of being treated, a different shape  a family could take.

And that, I was realising with a certainty that surprised me, was the worst part of it all.

If he hadn't done any of that, the pattern would have made complete sense.

Mother, Aisha, Sharon—that would simply have been what life was for someone like me, and I would have understood it as the water understands being wet, or the night understands being dark and cold.

It would have hurt, no doubt, but it would have been consistent; whole.

Instead, he had broken the pattern every single day, and only ever just enough to show me the cracks, never enough to shatter it entirely.

He had shown me there was a different life  possible , and then he had gone right back to standing next to mother while she blamed me for what my sisters had done.

He had gone back to looking puzzled in the doorways.

His support had softened the blows without ever stopping them, and I was beginning to think that softened blows over a long enough stretch of time were worse than blows that were just simply blows, because at least those you could learn to expect and didn't also come with hope attached.

I could feel my heart going faster than it should be, sitting still on a straw mat in a longhouse, as an unnamed heat moved through my chest that I pressed down carefully, the way I had learned to press things down many summers ago.

I had never  felt this way about my father before. Not quite like this.

But something had broken open this morning in the bedroom, and what had spilled out of it was this: I was not a mouse. I had never been  a mouse. I was the rat they had always called me, which meant I would never fit the pattern of the Fieldend family no matter how many summers passed, because the pattern had never been built with space for me inside it.

The train of thought did not continue.

The Parson stepped up onto the one table that had been left standing in the centre of the longhouse, and turned slowly, looking across the room—nodding at some faces, offering a small smile to others, moving from family to family with the particular ease of a man who knew every person in front of him and had already sorted them into their proper categories.

His eyes passed over me without stopping for long. There was no nod nor smile.

Just the brief, neutral passage of a gaze that had somewhere more important to be.

I, meanwhile, took a closer look at him .

The Parson was a tall and thin man, with a long face and a neat grey beard that he kept trimmed close like my father.

He dressed the same every twelfth-day: The deep, undyed wool—I could recognize this now, thanks to the Old Crone’s teachings—robes of his office, worn smooth at the elbows, with the small symbols of many of the Manifold Pantheon’s deities embroidered along the collar in thread that had probably been brighter once.

He was not old , exactly—not like the Old Crone was—but he had looked the same exact age every single time I had seen him in my life. Which told me that he was not young, because young people changed rather quickly.

He waited until the room had fully settled before he spoke, which never took long—there was something about the way he stood on that table and looked at everyone that made people finish their conversations quickly.

"Winter is coming," he began, which was not exactly a revelation, but the way he said it had enough weight behind it that nobody looked around or fidgeted. "And the Manifold Pantheon watches how we prepare for it."

He moved his gaze slowly across the room.

"Firewood. Prepare more than you think you need. I want every family in this village to look at their stores this afternoon and then go cut more regardless, because the gods are fickle and the cold does not negotiate."

He let that sit for a moment.

"Your walls—mud them. Every crack between every board in every house, before the first real frost. The warmth you let out through a crack in the wood is warmth your children will miss at the second hour of the night."

He turned around in a circle as he spoke, making sure to give everyone a certain amount of time to be spoken to directly—it seemed very effective at keeping everyone’s attention but mine.

"Grain. Flour. The soups that fill and warm from the inside—start making them and keep making them. A village that eats together through winter comes out the other side together. A village that doesn't plan its stores finds out what together  really  means when there isn't enough to go around for everyone."

I thought about our firewood pile that I had looked at just yesterday.

We had three piles of ten and one pile of five, and I wondered if that was enough.

‘ Probably  not, if the Parson  is this serious about it… I have never really paid attention to how much wood we need for the winters. I hope father knows. ’

He moved on then, his voice shifting into the particular cadence he used for prayer—slower and quite a bit more deliberate, each word placed carefully.

"We address Vraeth first," he said, "as we do every year when the cold begins to bite."

The room bowed their heads. I followed, albeit a half-second behind.

"Vraeth, we ask that your iron remain cold in our village this winter. That no wound you send us goes unpurified. That the fever breaks, that the sickness passes clean, that when your cauterizing iron has to touch us, it does the merciful work and not the other kind. We ask for immunity where it can be given and recovery where it cannot be avoided. Your mercy and your pestilence are the same hand, and we ask that this winter, that hand be gentle."

“ Vraeth, may your hand be gentle, ” we all repeated together.

"We address Orianna," the Parson continued, "who holds the storms."

Another collective stillness in the room.

"Oh, Hollow Mother, we ask that your winter storms be short and pass cleanly. That your lightning find  no roof in this village. That the hunger you carry in your domain moves through us like a tide that turns before it settles. The sea is yours and the storms are yours and we do not ask you to withhold that which is yours. We ask only that your wrath finds its measure before it finds our doors."

“Orianna, may your wrath find its measure before our doors.”

I had always found Orianna's prayer the most uncomfortable one.

There was something about the way the Parson said ' we do not ask you to withhold what is yours ' that made it feel less like prayer and more like negotiation with someone who had already decided and might be talked down slightly if you were very polite about it.

‘ Like mother, ’ I thought, grimacing slightly.

"We address Anineth," he said, and his voice dropped slightly, the way it always did for her.

To me, Anineth was the one that felt the most like winter to me, more than the cold or the storms. Winter was the time of darkness, the rest were simply side-effects of it, in my mind.

"Anineth, we ask that the shadows of winter remain only shadows. The darkness must exist, we know this, we accept this. Contrast requires it. But we ask that what lives in the dark stays in the dark this year once again."

His eyes moved across the room slowly as he turned in a circle.

"That the whispers stay quiet. That the isolation does not grow teeth. That the lies we might tell ourselves in the long nights do not take root before the light returns. Keep the village's peace, Anineth. Let no heart grow so dark this winter that it cannot find its way back when spring comes."

“ Anineth, may no heart grow so dark, it cannot find its way back. ”

I thought about this morning.

About the bedroom, and Sharon's hand twisting in my hair, and the feeling of the wall meeting my face. About Aisha on the bed above me, kicking me and being downright methodical about it, like it was simply a chore she was completing.

“The whispers that live in the dark,”  the Parson had said. “ The isolation. The lies we tell ourselves in the long nights.”

I looked at the back of Sharon's head, two people to my left. At Aisha beside her, sitting perfectly straight with her hands folded in her lap like a girl who had never done anything wrong in her life and fully intended to keep it that way.

‘They were never whispers,’  I thought with a pang of heat in my chest.

I wasn't entirely sure Anineth was the right god for what happened in our bedroom.

Anineth sounded like something that crept in slowly, something you didn't notice until it had already taken hold. What lived in our bedroom didn't creep, it just grabbed you by the hair and introduced itself very  directly.

I pressed my fingers against the sore spot on my scalp, gently, just to confirm it was still there.

It was.

“Keep the village's peace,”  the Parson had asked her.

I wondered if our house counted as part of the village, or whether Anineth, like most adults, had simply decided not to look too closely at what went on inside it.

"We address Yrsolva," the Parson said, and straightened slightly, which was the tell I had picked up on last summer and had asked father about—the one that meant this was personal for him. The goddess he revered the most, apparently.

"Yrsolva—who holds the very cold itself in her keeping—we ask, as we ask every year, that the Dark Winter stays away from us for one more year. That what she sends us is hard but fair. That her children—and we are her children, all of us, every one of us who has endured a winter and come out the other side—may prove worthy of endurance once again."

He reached into his robe then and produced a large iron nail, which caught the firelight as he held it up. He walked to the doorframe, placed the nail against the wood, and drove it in with the heel of his bare hand—once, twice, three times, until it was flush with the frame.

He did this every year.

Showing Yrsolva where the threshold was.

This is where the warmth lives. This is where your cold should stop.

I had always thought it looked very painful, yet he never flinched.

‘ I wonder how often he did this, before it stopped hurting…? ’

"That she may preserve us," he said, returning to the table, "as she preserves all things that are strong enough to endure."

“ Yrsolva, may you preserve us, as you preserve all things strong enough to endure. ”

He turned last to the Twins, and something in his expression shifted—not quite a smile, but an acknowledgement that the Twins generally responded better to being addressed without too much solemnity.

"And to the Twins, whose names we do not speak because we have never known them and they have never offered them—" a small ripple of something almost like amusement moved through the room, the same as every year—"we ask for clean weather and a favourable coin. We know the flip is always fifty-fifty. We know you make no promises. We ask anyway, as we always do, because asking costs nothing and the coin has come up in our favour before. We ask them to stand beside Yrsolva this winter, and help keep the Dark Winter at bay for one more year. The road through to spring is long. We ask for the luck of travellers."

The room murmured in collective assent—individual words, not a unified call.

I noticed, as I always did, that Roth was not addressed once again.

It made a certain logical sense to me, even at seven summers—you did not want to die this winter, so you would think the God of Death was the most important one to ask.

But I had learned enough by now to understand why nobody did.

You did not call Roth's name in prayer unless you were absolutely  certain you wanted his attention, because his Gaze, once given, went where it went.

He was the only god who had physically answered humanity’s collective prayer at the end of the Era of Divinity—had stood next to Alveric on that hill, had appeared beside Aevindra at the very end—and if his Gaze had fallen on his own mother without blinking, it would fall equally on anyone.

‘You do not ask for his attention, ’ I recalled. ‘ You hope, very quietly, that you have not already earned it… Or so father  said.’

The Parson stepped down from the table and the room exhaled collectively, the way it always did when the formal part was done.

That was my cue.

On any other twelfth-day I would have stayed, tucked in beside my family while the adults talked and the children ran between the benches and someone inevitably produced food from somewhere.

But the mere thought of sitting next to father's worried sideways glances, mother's flat indifference and Aisha and Sharon's carefully arranged innocent faces for another hour made something clench hard in my chest.

‘ I got work to do anyway… ’

I slipped out through the gap near the side wall while everyone was still shifting and stretching and finding people to talk to.

Nobody called after me—I hadn't expected them to.

The walk to the Old Crone's hut was cold and fast, and I arrived breathing hard, cheeks stinging.

The door opened the moment I knocked.

"Girl," the Old Crone greeted, already turning away.

I stepped inside into the warmth and the smell of the gruel and the comfortable press of fabric on every surface, and something in my chest unknotted itself, very slightly.

Girl.  Just that.

Every single day, the same flat, indifferent syllable.

It was, I was realising then, one of my favourite things anyone ever said to me.

I ate my gruel, got settled with my work, and the hut fell into its usual rhythm—the soft sounds of needle through fabric, the crackle of the fire, the Old Crone moving between her desk and her shelves with her walking stick, and the intermittent math questions landing without warning.

"Fourteen plus three?"

"Seventeen."

"Eleven minus four?"

"Seven."

About an hour in, I decided it was finally time.

"Ehhm..." I kept my eyes on the stitch I was working . "What comes after nineteen? How do I count higher? I was trying to count the villagers at church today and I got stuck…"

"That's something your father should be able to tell you, no?" the Old Crone replied, without looking up.

I flinched.

She always knew.

I had no idea how she did it—whether she read it in my stitching or my posture or the particular way I asked questions when I was avoiding something—but she always  did.

"I'm asking  you ," I said, and the heat from this morning was still sitting somewhere in my chest and it put an edge into my voice that I hadn't entirely planned on.

She turned around from her table.

Her eyes found mine and I put on my most earnest, most stubborn  face and held it there, because I had meant  what I said and I was not going to take it back.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she sighed and said, "Twenty. It's easy after the first nineteen. Those are the hardest ones and you've already learned them. Now you get to enjoy the easy patterns."

She turned back to her table but kept talking. "Twenty is followed by twenty-one, then twenty-two, then twenty-three—"

My eyes widened.

"Twenty-four, twenty-five—"

I joined in then, sitting up straighter, elation inside my chest—this really was  easy!

" Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten—"

"No." She cut in cleanly. "That's where you need the next word. Think about it."

She set down her work and turned around properly. "If two tens is twen-ty , and two plus ten is twe-lve ... then what comes after twenty-nine? Think about thir-teen ."

I went quiet and worked through it carefully, pulling the words apart the way she'd laid them out.

‘Twen-ty comes from twe-lve. Two and ten. So the -ty part means ten of something… What is the n for…? Thir-teen would give you... thirn-ty, then? But thirnty  isn't a word I've ever heard anyone say…’

I frowned at my stitching.

‘Thirty, though... I think I've heard thirty. Maybe.’

"Is it... thirty?" I tried, carefully, my eyes peeking up at her from across the room.

The Old Crone stared at me.

She always did this after a hard question, and it always made me want to snatch the answer back and try again, turn it over, check it for holes.

The doubt crept in right on schedule.

But I pressed my lips together and left the answer where it was.

The pattern she had given me pointed here .

Thirnty  was a word I had never heard, but thirty—I was almost certain  I had heard thirty, somewhere, sometime, and it fit the shape of what she was asking for.

Or maybe Sylden was messing with my memory for his amusement.

But either way, that was the best I had and I was keeping it.

"Thirty is correct," she said finally, with a small smile. "Well done, girl."

A rush went through me from my head all the way down to my feet and I grinned back at her before I could think about whether that was appropriate.

"What comes after thirty-nine, then?" She immediately asked, raising a sharp eyebrow.

"Forty," I answered without pausing, because there was only one answer that made sense and I already had it.

She nodded. "Good. Good."

There was a brief pause, in which she looked at me with something I was becoming able to recognise, even if I still didn't entirely know what to call it. "I'm glad to see I wasn't wrong about you back then."

She turned back to her work, throwing a lazy hand over her shoulder. "Now get back to it."

I nodded several times in quick succession and dropped my eyes back to my stitching, only then noticing that my hands were shaking. I breathed in a couple of deep gulps of air because my head felt strangely light, like it had briefly floated somewhere above my shoulders and was only now finding its way back.

I couldn't explain exactly what I was feeling.

But I was fairly certain I could have carried the entire firewood pile inside of my home by myself at that particular moment, and not noticed the weight at all.

We settled back into the rhythm of the hut without any further conversation, which was exactly how I liked it.

I returned to my stitching—the same scrap of hemp I had been working on since day one, the same hole opened and closed and opened and closed until my hands knew the shape of it, which they almost did now but not quite yet.

I hadn't gotten bored of it.

I wasn't sure I could explain why, except that every time I did it there was something slightly  different about it, something slightly better or slightly worse, and finding out which kept me interested throughout.

The Old Crone worked at her desk on whatever it was she worked on.

I realised, sitting there, that I had never actually asked.

I had watched her hands move over fabric and parchment and strange tools I had no names for, and I had simply accepted it the way you accept the fire in the hearth—present, purposeful, not requiring explanation.

‘I should ask her someday…’

The math questions came steadily through the afternoon, and now they ranged all the way up through the nineties, which made them considerably harder as even my mental fingers were starting to be unable to keep up at the speed the Old Crone required, but also considerably  more interesting.

I got most of them anyway—just barely in time for her to accept them, but still. I got some of them wrong and was told so plainly and moved on—not making the same mistake twice.

At one point I asked what came after ninety-nine.

She shook her head. "Focus on what you have. Too much at once and none of it stays."

I accepted this without argument.

She was the only adult who had never once told me something that turned out to be wrong or convenient or designed to make me stop asking questions.

If she said too much at once wouldn't stick, then too much at once wouldn't stick.

The light through the gaps in the shutters had long been gone when I began gathering myself to leave, rolling my remaining thread carefully and setting my needle into the small piece of cork she had given me to keep it safe.

Then she suddenly stepped closer.

"Girl."

I looked up.

"I will be leaving tomorrow." She said it the same way she said everything—plainly, without softening it one bit. "My work requires me elsewhere over the winter. I will return when the frost ends, and we will continue your training then."

Something dropped inside my chest—heavy and sudden, like a stone thrown into the well in the village center.

I stared  at her, eyes wide.

She reached past me and picked up a bundle from the shelf behind my head—hemp fabric, a wrap of needles, several spools of thread—and held it out to me.

"Take these. Continue your training while I'm gone. When I return, you need to be able to close a hole in minutes , not hours. Without looking at your hands while you do it, if possible." She held my gaze. "If you cannot do the first one by the time the frost ends, I will not continue teaching you. If you cannot do the second one, I will be disappointed."

The air went out of me entirely.

‘ Minutes . Without looking…’

I was currently managing around three hole fixes per day, with my eyes fixed on every single movement.

She leaned in slightly closer, and I caught the smell that always surrounded her—something herbal and calm, unlike anything else in the village—and her voice dropped just a fraction.

"But if you can ," she said, "I will teach you to read numbers. And write them. And then letters, so that you can begin to read the patterns I keep on parchment."

My mouth fell open.

I had no words. I wasn't sure words were even the right response to something like that.

Reading. Writing.  

The patterns on her parchment, the beautiful precise lines I had been stealing glances at since my first day here…!

"Do you understand me?"

I nodded, hard, several times.

"Good." She straightened up. "Now go. Don't die during the winter. It would be a considerable  waste of my efforts here."

I gathered the bundle into both arms and held it against my chest like it was the most valuable thing I had ever been handed, which it was , and bowed as deeply as I could manage without dropping any of it.

"Thank you," I said. "I will try my hardest not to."

She humphed, made a short gesture toward the door, and that was that.

The cold hit me the moment I stepped outside—a different cold from the morning, the sharper, meaner cold of a night already properly underway, finding its way under my tunic immediately.

I stood there for a moment anyway.

The hut behind me was warm, lit and smelled of delicious gruel and whatever herbal things the Old Crone had… and she was inside it, yet tomorrow she wouldn't be, and the frost wouldn't end for a long  time.

‘Don't be stupid,’  I told myself. ‘ You have work to do, Maret.’

A gust found the gap between my tunic and my collarbone and went straight through me, and I shuddered hard from my shoulders down to my feet.

‘Right,’  I thought, gripping the bundle tighter. ‘ Home. Before Vraeth decides I look interesting.’

I put my head down and walked fast into the dark…

—

The first frost came the very next day.

I had no doubt the Old Crone had known it would.

Whatever means she had for knowing things—and she had them, that much was certain—she had stayed until the very last possible day and then left on it.

Which was exactly the sort of thing she would do.

When I arrived at her hut the next morning, unable to stop myself from checking, it was shut tight. Peering through the gaps in the shutters showed me almost nothing—just the outlines of the bare furniture.

Everything else was simply gone  like it had never existed.

The fabric, the parchment, the contraptions with no names, all of it vanished as cleanly as she had, like it had packed itself up and followed her out.

I stood there for a long moment, then went back home.

My family accepted me back at the table with the begrudging silence of people who had rearranged things and were not entirely pleased about rearranging them back—except my father, who seemed genuinely happy to see me.

The gruel at home tasted thin and watery by comparison to what I'd been eating, which I was careful not to let show on my face.

I was still glad for it. Food in winter was food in winter.

Mother was, to my surprise, agreeable about letting me continue my training at home—no demands that I put it down and help with the housework. I suspected the Old Crone had either sent word or left additional chits behind without telling me.

It was exactly the sort of thing she would also do.

Sharon's annoyance at this was very  visible and sustained.

I found I didn't particularly care.

I kept my head down and worked at the stitching, pricking my fingers more times on the first day than I could count—which stung considerably more than I'd expected, and which I noted I would need to count past ninety-nine for eventually, if I wanted an accurate total.

Around me, the family pushed through the last of the winter preparations.

Even Aisha and Sharon were put to work.

My favourite part of any given day that week was the mudding—specifically, the moment father handed them each a bucket and pointed at the gaps in the outer walls, and the expressions that crossed their faces as they reached into the cold, sticky mud for the first time.

They had very nice hands, my sisters.

Very carefully maintained, soft-palmed, ribbon-wearing hands.

The mud did not  care about any of that and I very much appreciated that fact.

I kept my eyes on my stitching, said nothing, and kept the image of their faces tucked somewhere safe and warm inside my head, where I intended to keep it for a very  long time.

The days got shorter and colder in steady, reliable increments, and the village contracted around itself the way it always did when winter properly arrived.

The longhouse filled up.

It happened gradually at first—a few extra families in the evenings, then more, then most of them, until the benches and floor mats were occupied from mid-morning until well after dark and the air inside was thick with woodsmoke and the smell of people spending a lot of time in close proximity.

The women claimed the tables nearest the fire and settled into their over-winter work—new tunics cut and pinned for the following summer, old ones turned inside out and repaired, sandals resoled with whatever leather was available, small domestic projects that had been waiting since the harvest for enough time and enough light to be worth attempting.

The sound of it was steady and unhurried, needles through fabric, thread pulled taut, the occasional murmur of conversation between women who had been doing exactly this, in exactly this room, for more winters than they could individually count.

The men went out during the short windows of daylight the days allowed—into the forest for firewood and whatever game was still moving, working fast and coming back before the light went, because every log they brought in was a log that didn't come out of the stockpile.

When the weather closed in and the forest wasn't an option, they turned to the indoor work they'd been putting off all year—wood figurines taking shape on bench ends, bronze tools sharpened and turned over in careful hands, houses checked along their joins where the snowfall was making the gaps visible in ways the dry months had hidden.

The guards came down from the palisade towers once the gates went shut for winter as well, which they always did once the first real snow came.

After that, their days were spent keeping the main paths clear—to the outhouses, to the longhouse, between the houses—shovelling and packing and making sure nobody had to wade through knee-deep snow just to answer the call of nature in the middle of the night.

The lookout work could wait.

Nothing was coming through those gates until Yrsolva decided we had earned the thaw.

It was, by all available measures, a perfectly ordinary winter.

Except that I only caught most of it in passing, peripherally, the way you notice the passing of the day when you're focused on something else.

I was usually at the longhouse table with the women most days, which nobody seemed to find strange given that I had a legitimate project and kept my head down and didn't take up much space.

My mornings started long before first light and finished well after the light was gone, and in between I stitched and unstitched and stitched again—the same hole, the same hemp, over and over until my hands knew the sequence without my brain having to send the instructions first.

It was, strangely, one of the most peaceful stretches of my life that I could remember.

The cold was outside, the fire was inside, I had work to do and a reason to do it, and nobody was paying enough attention to me to bother me.

That lasted until the weather turned mean enough that Aisha and Sharon could no longer leave the house as often as they wanted.

The wind had developed a particular cruelty—the type that found every gap in your clothing and every exposed patch of skin and went after both with focused intent—and mother started limiting how long they could be outside in it.

Their friends were across the village, which was not a long walk on a good day, but on the days the wind was really going it was enough to make the trip genuinely miserable and potentially very  stupid.

On top of that, the longhouse had started filling past comfortable capacity, packed tight with the families that didn't have enough bodies at home to generate their own warmth.

Families like ours, with enough people and a decent enough hearth, were quietly expected to stay in their own homes and leave the longhouse space for those who needed it more.

So we were all home. Together. For most of the day.

Which meant Aisha and Sharon were near me more often, every day.

And my sisters, with nowhere to go and nothing they particularly wanted to be doing, had a long-established habit of finding me  when they needed something to occupy themselves with.

I kept my eyes on my stitching and my needle moving and tried to be as invisible as a girl with grey hair sitting in the middle of a small house with nobody else around could manage.

It worked less and less often as the days went on.

It came to a head on one of the rare days when the storms had pulled back enough to let a pale, thin slice of daylight through.

Father had gone to the forest the moment the weather cleared, the way he always did when a window opened up—every log counted when the stockpile was the difference between a hard winter and a bad one.

Mother had taken the opportunity to wrap herself up and head to the longhouse, which she did whenever the village paths were navigable and she wanted adult conversation, which was often. She had looked at me briefly before she left, then at my stitching, then left without saying anything about it.

Which left the three of us alone in the house.

It had been building for days.

I could see the pattern of it clearly—Sharon's mood darkening in steady increments as the cold kept her trapped indoors, as the laundry kept coming, as her hands got worse.

She had shown mother the splits at her nails twice that I had seen, red and cracked from cold water and cold air in combination, and mother had given her salve and sympathy and the laundry had kept coming anyway because it always did.

I kept my head down and my needle moving and said nothing.

Which had been working, mostly, until today.

"Look at her," Aisha said, from across the table. Not to me. To Sharon, the way she always started—like I was a feature of the room being commented on. "Just sitting there like she belongs  here."

I did not look up.

"My hands are splitting open," Sharon said, and her voice had a flatness in it that I recognised as the one that came right before something . She held them up—I could see them in my periphery, the skin cracked at the nail beds, angry-looking. " Look at that . Look at what the laundry does! Every single day. And she just sits  there."

I kept stitching.

"It's your fault," Sharon said, directly at me now. "You know that, right? My hands look like this because you're too useless to do the one  thing you were put here to do."

I said nothing.

Suddenly, everything was violently ripped out of my hands.

I was on my feet before I had decided to stand up, my heart going from nothing to hammering in the space of a single breath.

"Give that back!" I yelled.

Sharon's eyes lit up.

She took a small step backward, holding the bundle up and away from me, and I could see immediately that I had done exactly  what she wanted—that the moment I reacted, I had handed her something more interesting than the alternative.

I knew this. I understood it with complete clarity.

It didn't matter.

That was my work.

The Old Crone had given it to me specifically, had handed it to me herself and told me what it meant. Finishing this meant reading. Writing. The patterns on the parchment.

Everything  I had been working toward through the whole winter was in that bundle of hemp and thread and I was not going to stand here and say nothing while Sharon held it.

"Or what ?" Sharon asked, with a smile that knew exactly what it was doing.

Aisha giggled from her side of the table. "Yeah, or what , rat? Going to nibble through the table with those big teeth?"

I did not have large teeth.

I had seen my own reflection in the water bowls enough times to know—blue eyes, normal-sized teeth, the grey hair that everyone always mentioned.

I did not have large teeth. It was not even a good insult.

I lunged for the  bundle.

Sharon danced backward around the table, holding it above her head, light on her feet, enjoying herself. "Nuh-uh. Rats shouldn't even be touching something like this, everyone knows that."

She kept moving as I came around after her. "It makes sense, actually—the Old Crone taking you on. You're just as messed up as she is. You know what people say about her? That she's hated by the gods . That's why she never comes to church-day."

She raised her eyebrows at me.

"Makes sense she'd find a little freak like you to keep her company."

The heat that went through me then was different from anything I had felt before. Not the contained, pressurised anger I usually swallowed down—something larger, something that moved through my whole body at once.

"Give it back," I growled. " Now ."

"I don't think I will~," Sharon sing-sang, still smiling, still moving, and then broke into a short run around the far end of the table.

I went after her.

My foot caught on something and the floor came up and I hit it hard, chin and palms, and heard Aisha laugh from somewhere above and behind me and felt her pull her leg back as I registered what had happened.

Sharon had stopped moving.

She was standing at the lit hearth that kept us warm.

My eyes found her face and found the dark smile on it and understood what was about to happen in the fraction of a second before it did.

"Don't—!"

She opened her hand.

The bundle dropped into the fire.

I was already moving.

Aisha's feet caught me as I scrambled up, pushing hard against my side, slamming me into the wall, and I pushed back, got free and crossed the distance to the hearth and shoved Sharon out of the way with everything  I had—both of my hands and my entire bodyweight from a full-sprint.

She went sideways with a sharp, surprised gasp and hit the woodpile hard .

Logs scattered and tumbled and she went down with them, a high-pitched scream cutting through the room as she landed.

I immediately drove my hand into the fire.

The immediate pain was total and I screamed —far, far louder than Sharon—pulling back whatever I could reach, scraps of hemp, the cork with the needle still in it, a spool trailing burning thread, dragging it out onto the hearthstone with my right hand while my left arm screamed where the flames had caught on my tunic, a stripe of heat running from my wrist halfway to my elbow that felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

The fire on my clothes went out quickly and I paid it almost no mind through my blurry, tear-filled eyes.

I crouched on the hearthstone and looked at what I had pulled out: A few scorched scraps of hemp, blackened at the edges and falling apart when I touched them. One spool with most of its thread gone, the remaining strands brittle and ash-grey like my hair. The cork. The needle, still in it, which was  the only thing that had come through completely intact because needles didn't burn.

Almost everything was gone .

The tears came down my face and I let them, because there was nobody to hide them from right now and I didn't have the energy to try.

My hands hurt. My arm hurt—the stripe of it where the flame had caught me throbbed with a deep, insistent heat that my body very much wanted me to pay attention to—but the pain felt distant and unimportant compared to the hollow, empty space that had opened up in my chest when I looked at the ash.

The parchment patterns. Reading. Writing.

All of it had been  right there , on the other side of learning this one thing, and it had been in my hands and now it was in the fire and the frost wasn't going to end for a long time and I had nothing left to work with.

I stared at the hearthstone.

It took me several long moments to register that Aisha had moved to where Sharon had fallen, and that Sharon was crying too—loud, sharp and shrill—somewhere behind me amid the scattered logs.

“Vraeth-cursed…! You’re bleeding, Sharon!” I heard Aisha's voice, high and rattled. Sharon cried even louder.

“You made her bleed, you Vraeth-cursed rat!” She directed at me. “When mother hears about this—”

“ Shut up ,” I replied coldly, cutting her off for the very first time in my life.

“W—What? What did you say?” She asked, over the annoying sound of Sharon’s crying.

I got up from in front of the hearth, my hands burnt in several places and my arm pulsing with a heat I could not put into words if I tried, but the pain did not matter.

I turned around and walked towards them both, seeing for the first time what had happened—Sharon had caught the edge of the woodpile when she went down—head and knees, both bleeding, not badly but enough to see the red clearly.

She was on the floor still, one hand pressed to her head, staring up at me.

Aisha was crouched beside her.

Aisha looked up as I got closer and something moved across her face that I had never put there before.

I merely looked at Aisha, and she recoiled—I did not know why.

Something in the way I looked at her, must have scared her.

I got closer.

“S—Stop! Go away!”

I slapped her across the face with my burnt hand and the bubbled skin burst on contact, leaving a bloody, charred print on her cheek as she hit the floor screaming.

I looked at Sharon.

She had gone completely quiet, hand still pressed to her head, tears still wet on her face, staring up at me with an expression that told me the screaming from earlier had been at least half performance.

It wasn't performance  now.

“W—What do you—”

I didn’t let her finish as I violently grabbed her hair and  pulled  with all the strength inside my body.

She screamed again, real this time, scrambling on the floor as I dragged her toward the hearth.

The Old Crone's gruel had done its work over the past weeks—I was stronger than I looked, and Sharon was only a summer older than me, thin, spindly and nowhere to go.

My vision had gone blurry at the edges from the pain in my hands and arm but I could still see the hearth clearly enough, which was all I needed.

"Stop!" Aisha, somewhere behind me. “Maret, stop! Please !’

Sharon screamed something too, but I did not hear her.

I grabbed Sharon’s hands by the wrists, my bloodied, burnt and charred hands grasping around her thin wrists like bronze tongs, even as she tried her best to wriggle free—but she was on the ground below me, with little leverage.

I pulled her hands into the fire.

Sharon's screaming reached a pitch I had not ever heard before.

" This  is me, Sharon," I said, and my voice came out flat and even in a way I didn't entirely understand. " This  is my fault. Your hands hurting right now? That's truly  my fault. I'll take the blame for this one."

I held her hands into the fire for a few more moments, then let go.

The strength that had been carrying me through the pain ran out all at once, like a bucket with the bottom knocked out, and I stumbled backward from the hearth and kept stumbling until I hit the wall near the door.

Aisha had gotten to Sharon in that  time, both of them on the floor, and she looked at Sharon first—eyes wide, face white under the charred print on her cheek—and then she looked at me.

She stood up.

I turned to face her and she stopped as though she had walked into something solid.

We looked at each other.

"We tell  mother we were playing and my work fell into the fire," I said coldly, my voice somehow even despite the agonizing pain I felt.  "Sharon and I both tried to get it back out. That's how we got hurt."

I held her gaze.

"Nod if you understand. I don't want to hear your voice."

Aisha stared at me for several long moments.

Her whole body was shaking.

Then she nodded.

I nodded back, turned around, and pushed the door open into the cold.

The frost hit my burns immediately and I made a sharp, involuntary sound I had not meant to make and then I pressed my arm against my side and started walking toward the longhouse to find Hilda—because if Vraeth looked down and found these wounds interesting, I did not want to find out what happened next…