Finn threw the front door wide like he was unveiling a surprise.

  “Mind the step, Brenna. Ice there last week,” he pointed with his whole arm.

  Brenna’s fingers tightened on my forearm. Her other hand clutched the wool blanket around her shoulders like armor.

  “If I slip, it’ll be because you lot dragged me out too soon,” she muttered. “A touch of winter cough and the whole village starts rehearsing funeral hymns.”

  “Pneumonia,” I eased her over the threshold. “Not ‘a touch of winter cough’. Your lungs were losing the argument.”

  “Lungs like bellows, me.” She squinted at the sunlight. “You fuss like a novice healer with her first patient.”

  Exy shot between our feet and landed belly-first in the slush on the path. The kitten froze, ears flat, then lifted one paw, offended at the cold wet clinging to her fur.

  Finn doubled over, laughing.

  “You’re supposed to be the Executioner, not the Sponge.”

  Exy hissed at the ground and patted it once, then again, claws pricking, watching the dirty ice break apart. She pounced on a melting lump with the focus of a predator meeting its mortal foe, then bolted a few steps when it soaked her chest.

  We shuffled Brenna to the bench under the Founder's Oak. The old tree dripped steadily, each drop punching tiny craters into the snow below. Someone had brushed the bench clean; a knitted cushion waited there, bright red against worn wood.

  Brenna eyed it.

  “You’re all conspiring to keep me alive. It’s suspicious.”

  “Humor the conspiracy,” I guided her down. “Fifteen minutes in the sun. Then we drag you back into your lair.”

  She leaned back, face tilted up. Deep lines around her mouth eased as the light hit her skin. Her eyes closed.

  “Feels… almost like the year Kael married his forge.” Her eyelids fluttered. “Hot summer. Dust everywhere. People still wandered in and out like the mapmakers hadn’t forgotten us yet.”

  Finn hopped from one bare stone to another, careful to miss the deepest puddles, then misjudged and planted a boot straight into brown slush. It splashed up his trousers.

  “Ugh. It went through.”

  “That’s because your boots are as old as Beakly,” I reached for his leg, checked the cracked leather.

  “Beakly’s older than the mountains,” he protested.

  The revelation of Beakly's true identity to the village had been something of an anticlimax, at least for me. First, then was the expected long silence. But it was followed quickly—too quickly, in my view—with everyone agreeing that it was kind of obvious that he was something extraordinary, what with the murdering legendary creatures and majestic bearing and all. I got the distinct sense—though none of them came out and just said it—that they thought I was the idiot for not noticing earlier, and naming the Eternal King something stupid like Beakly. Fair point, I admit, but the lack of support still stung.

  Across the square, Kael hauled open the shutters of his forge. The clang of metal rang out a moment later, bright and sure. Elspeth beat a mat against the inn’s step, sending a cloud of dust into the cold air. A pair of women carried a basket of tools toward the fields, heads together, talking about furrows and seed stock.

  The village stretched, like someone with a stiff back testing how far their spine still went.

  “Listen,” Brenna murmured.

  Children shrieked as one of them slipped and skidded on a patch of ice, arms flailing. He landed on his backside, stunned, then laughed when the others cheered instead of scolding. Two little girls tried to scoop snow into a lump, hands bare and red, determined to wring one last game out of winter before it vanished.

  “I hear wet socks and future colds,” I watched them. “So yeah. I’m listening.”

  “Always a healer.” Brenna cracked one eye at me. “When I was a girl, first thaw meant counting what was left. Grain, kindling, people. You learn what winter took. Then you get on with it.”

  Her words carried numbers I couldn’t see. Names of those who’d not made it to their own first sun.

  In the hospital, first time we wheeled someone off oxygen, we wrote notes, updated charts, moved on to the next room. Lives stacked into lists, patience measured in minutes, not seasons.

  Here, Brenna sat under a tree that had watched her whole life. Her breath moved in and out, slow and steady, each inhale a small victory. No chart. No monitors. Just the solid weight of her arm against mine and the damp wool smell of her blanket.

  If this world was still a game, it had patched in too many details.

  Exy stalked a drip sliding from one of the Oak’s low branches. It dropped, hit her nose, and she jerked back with a tiny sneeze. Finn clapped once, delighted.

  “Told you the tree would win,” he crowed.

  Brenna’s mouth twitched.

  “Write that down somewhere, girl. Tree: one. Kitten: nought. Someone has to keep a proper history.”

  My hands twitched with the old reflex—reach for a device, for notes. Nothing there but the worn leather of my gloves.

  “I’m off duty,” I answered. “You’re the historian.”

  “I record disasters. Not… this.” Her gaze swept over the square: Kael’s hammer, Elspeth propping the inn door open for fresh air, Mara crossing toward us with a basket and a frown aimed at Finn’s soaked trousers. “This doesn’t last. Never has.”

  I watched Mara grab Finn by the elbow, scolding his boots while he tried to tell her about Exy’s battle with water. Watched Elspeth pause in her work, look over, catch my eye, and offer the brief, tired smile that felt less transactional every week.

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  “Maybe,” I answered Brenna, “it lasts exactly as long as we keep hauling you into the sun and yelling at kids about wet socks.”

  “That your grand plan?” Brenna blinked twice, slow.

  “No grand plans.” I leaned back against the bench. “Just… small ones.”

  The snow around the bench shrank drip by drip. Exy shook out her paws and climbed into Brenna’s lap without ceremony, damp fur and all. Brenna huffed, but her hand moved to the kitten’s back, fingers gentle. The world felt heavy and solid under my boots, like it was done waiting to see whether I’d treat it as real.

  By midmorning the fields woke up.

  Snow still clung to the ditch shadows and along the hedges, but the open ground lay dark and wet, breathing steam. Men and women moved through it in staggered rows, yanking up last year’s splintered stakes, piling them to one side. Kids trotted back and forth with twine and baskets, shoes already soaked.

  I stood with Mara and Mayor Brody at the edge of the nearest plot, boots sinking a thumb’s depth into mud. Executioner lurked under the hedge behind us, belly low, stalking a bird that had no interest in dying today.

  Brody rubbed his hands together like he wanted to warm them on the sight.

  “Looks good,” I said. “Very… agrarian chic.”

  He blinked at me.

  “It means they’re doing great,” I translated.

  His shoulders eased.

  Across the field, Harn barked orders, pointing with a stake. “Those rows there. Pull the old bean poles, mind your feet. Finn, leave the stones, we’ll turn them under.”

  Finn ignored the last part and started stacking stones into a wobbly tower.

  Mara watched the workers the way she watched a sickroom, gaze sliding over gait, color, the sag of a shoulder. She had her basket on her arm, but she hadn’t opened it yet. No herbs, no jar, just a coil of knotted rope. It felt like a bad sign.

  Brody nodded toward the far end. “We’ll keep this field in barley. It’s done well. The next one, root crops again. And the upper terrace, beans and peas up the stakes. Same pattern as my father’s day.”

  Mara clicked her tongue against her teeth.

  “You keep the same pattern, you keep the same sickness. You know that.”

  He stiffened. “We’ve had lean winters, not plagues.”

  “Not yet.” Her voice stayed mild, which somehow landed harder. “You put tubers in that strip again and you’ll pull up nothing but black mush. Soil needs rest. It needs change.”

  He gestured at the village, the people bent over the ground. “We don’t have rest. We have hungry mouths and one more bad harvest coming if bandits keep raiding. Tradition works. We know it.”

  “Tradition worked,” she corrected him. “Before the summers turned wrong and the blight spread deeper. Before the frost came late and left early. The rot doesn’t care about your father’s notes.”

  I watched their words slide over the field like a weather front. This was hospital politics with dirt instead of tile floors. Same battle: staff versus administration, patient versus budget, antibiotics versus “we’ve always done it this way.”

  “You could alternate,” I cut in. “Grain here one year, roots the next. Give the soil a different set of pests to deal with. Less chance for one thing to get a stranglehold.”

  Brody squinted at the rows. “We’d lose a season of barley.”

  “Or you lose two seasons in a row when the mold catches on,” Mara muttered.

  He rubbed his forehead, fingers digging into the lines there. “If we had more fields…”

  “We have the fields we have,” she answered. “So we treat them like patients instead of granaries.”

  That caught me. “You do crop rotations already?”

  “Of course.” Her eyes flicked to me. “I may live in a cottage, girl, but my head isn’t stuffed with straw. We’ve always given the land time to breathe. He just wants to shorten that time.”

  Brody watched Finn’s rock tower collapse in a clatter of stone and boyish outrage. His jaw worked.

  “I want them to eat,” he said.

  A shout cut across the field.

  “Mayor! Mara! Something’s in the ground here.”

  Not the panic tone. Not yet. Just confusion. Enough to prick every old emergency reflex.

  We slogged out onto the nearest furrow. Mud sucked at my boots, tried to keep them. By the time we reached the group, three men had gathered around a bare patch where the snow had melted first. The soil there looked… off. Not darker or lighter. Just… smoother. Less crumbly.

  Harn crouched over a shallow trench. Beside him, his youngest, Jory, knelt with dirt up to his elbows, eyes bright.

  “Pulled this old root ball,” Harn grunted. “Something holding it. Not stone.”

  He levered up a clump with the flat of his spade. The exposed soil beneath shone.

  Fine threads laced through the dirt. They ran between old root fragments and stones, crisscrossed and tangled, a spiderweb done by something with a ruler and too much time. Pale, almost clear, catching the light in thin, sharp lines. They didn’t glisten like fungus. They didn’t have the matte look of roots.

  My skin prickled. The air over the patch felt cooler, like a window had opened on a frost we couldn’t see.

  “Fungus?” Brody’s voice came out tight.

  Mara knelt. Her joints creaked; she ignored them. She reached toward the threads, stopped a fingerbreadth away, and hovered there a moment.

  “Not any that belongs here.”

  I crouched beside her. Up close, the filaments looked uniform in thickness, too even for anything alive, like someone had extruded the ground. I touched one with my gloved fingertip.

  No give. No softness. The thread snapped with a dry, perfect crack, and the piece that broke free lay on my glove like a hair-thin shard of glass. The cold from it sank through leather.

  “Don’t touch it with bare skin,” I heard myself say.

  Jory had already peeled his glove off to scratch his nose. His eyes lit.

  “Is it treasure?” He reached for a thread before I could grab him.

  The filament broke under his finger. A sliver popped up and bit his skin.

  He yelped. “Ow! It’s sharp—”

  Blood welled from a line along his fingertip. No ragged edges, no torn flesh. Just a clean, straight slice, so neat it might have come from a scalpel.

  I caught his wrist. “Hold still.”

  He tried to jerk away. “I’m fine, it’s just—”

  “Don’t move.” I squeezed above the cut until he winced. “You want that open wider, keep flapping your hand.”

  He froze, breathing fast.

  Mara plucked something from Jory’s skin with the tip of a knife. A tiny glitter sat on the blade.

  “Glass,” she murmured. “But not melted. Grown.”

  Brody stared at the exposed trench. “Is it some kind of curse?”

  “Curses usually come with symbols and theatrics.” Mara kept her eyes on the shard. “This… just sits and waits.”

  I pressed Jory’s hand against a clean patch of cloth from my pocket and checked the wound. The cut ran the length of the first joint, edges thin as paper. Blood beaded instead of gushing. No swelling yet. No redness.

  “Any numbness?” I asked.

  He shook his head, eyes locked on his own finger.

  I glanced at the filaments webbing through the soil. They caught the sunlight again, that faint glass glint.

  “How deep?” I asked Harn.

  He jammed the spade in at the edge of the patch, levered up a chunk. More threads ran through the underside. They snapped with that same crisp sound.

  “Deeper than I can reach with this,” he muttered. “It’s all through here.”

  “Mark it off,” Mara said. “No more digging in this section. Not with bare hands.”

  Brody shifted from one muddy boot to the other. “We can’t afford to lose a whole strip of field.”

  “You can afford it less if this creeps into every furrow,” she shot back.

  I wrapped Jory’s finger with a strip from the bandage roll I kept tucked in my belt. He watched my hands with the stunned focus of someone whose day had just taken an unexpected turn.

  “It’ll sting later,” I told him. “Come by Mara’s. We’ll check it again tonight.”

  He nodded without looking up.

  Mara slid the tiny shard off her knife into a small glass vial from her basket. It clicked against the side. She corked it, turned it once, held it up to the light.

  Nothing dramatic. No glow. Just a thin, nearly invisible sliver that had no business growing out of farm soil.

  Brody cleared his throat. “We’ll… move the stakes,” he said. “Plant the barley on the other side this year.”

  Harn spat into the mud, half respect, half frustration. “We’ll make it work.”

  The workers dragged their tools a few paces away and started again, casting quick glances back at the roped-off patch. The steady rhythm of work rose, a little strained now, like a heartbeat with an extra beat tucked inside.

  I watched the marked ground and the thin line of bandage on Jory’s finger. Then I slipped my own glove off, flexed my hand, and felt the echo of cold where I’d touched the thread through leather.

  Mara’s vial clinked once as she tucked it deep into her basket.

  “Come by after supper, girl,” she muttered. “We’ll have a closer look before someone decides it’s nothing.”