Chapter 5 - Arrival of the Unseen

  “When the distant hand reaches into your hearth, the season of quiet is done.”

  — Prognostications of the Star-Weavers

  Morning bled into night—both gray, both cold, both muffled by a silence thick as unspun wool. Snow pressed against the window, every breath in the cottage tasting stale and close, as if the air itself remembered better seasons. Eike huddled beside Lucy’s pallet, a ragged bnket wound tight about her shivering body, his hands fumbling for whatever warmth he could offer. Her skin glistened with fever, sweat collecting in the hollows above her eyes, mouth parted in restless panting.

  He coaxed a spoonful of water toward her lips, as careful as his mother’s hands once had been in winters past. Lucy choked and turned away, water slipping down her jaw—the same as before, always before.

  “Luce.” His voice cracked, softer than a crow’s wing against gss. “Try for me. Please.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, shes pale with sleep and fever. She blinked at him, recognizing—he thought—the ache in his voice. “It… tastes bent,” she managed. “Like barrel-wood.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  He slipped a cold palm over her brow, counting out the beats of her pulse—swift as rabbit-foot, too quick for comfort. Her breathing rasped, shallow, frighteningly insistent. The slim shield of hope Amalia’s medicines conjured had slipped away in the deep hours; the bitter tea, the honey, the bark—charms and cures—had run their course. Now there remained only this—Eike, sapped and stumbling, his hands twisting one of Lucy’s rags, mumbling half-remembered prayers that tasted hollow on his tongue.

  Old fears prowled just beyond the fire’s failing glow. The Shroud, sickness that slithered beneath skin, debts called in by winter herself—he’d seen enough loss to know the scripts by heart. Feet numb, arms leaden, Eike crouched lower, so he would not have to see Lucy’s lips grow any paler.

  If I’d dug deeper. If I’d fought, stolen, begged.Useless. Words freeze before they leave your mouth.The world narrowed to Lucy’s small form, her breaths thin and scattered—a field stripped bare to the stones.

  A faint pop from the fire. A draft snaked in, making the shadows dance along the walls, fretful and thin. Eike’s head drooped, eyes burning with exhaustion. The urge to sleep—just to close his eyes for a moment—crept closer, shoving aside sense with the false comfort of surrender.

  A ctter outside—the scrape of iron-shod hooves, the deep-chested snort of horses, muffled voices too precise for any of the vilge kin. Winter Cw was not a pce for visitors, not in the grip of such a season. No taxmen came twice, not unless called by trouble or ghosts. Eike stiffened, the cold knot of fear finding new room beneath his ribs. He stumbled to the window, knuckles white against the frost-limned pane.

  The ne, usually churned by the boots of hunger and resignation, had changed. Horses—sleek, dusted in white, fnks shining with a gloss foreign to vilge eyes—stood in disciplined rows. They pawed at the snow with impatience, leather tack gleaming with unfamiliar sigils, their breath rising in graceful plumes.

  Riders, wrapped against the cold in cloaks of green and russet, bore filigreed pins and fur mantles bright as spilled wine. No patchwork famine crouched in their dress; every stitch bespoke a kingdom with options—a world Eike had only heard of in hard-luck stories muttered at the baking ovens.

  Children skittered to the ne’s edge, their faces peeking from behind battered shutters. A burst of whispers, then hush—excitement bitten off and swallowed, repced by the old vilge caution.

  In the midst of it all, a figure dismounted with a step too sure for snow. Tall, robes gathered in folds that shimmered between forest-dark and night-oiled sheen, she glided rather than walked. Her hair, bck as drown-logs, was bound up in a style Eike had never seen—too intricate for any field, too stubborn for wind to unravel. Her eyes—gray, hungry, oddly steady—swept the ne like the bde of a reaper, missing nothing, letting no detail slip by unattended.

  He shivered, not from cold.

  Lucy wheezed—another angry fit, jaws clenched against the ache. Eike turned from the window, jaw set. Let the world do as it pleased outside; here, the business of survival owned every inch.

  He fetched the sage Amalia had left—a few stems now, half-crushed, their scent bitter and faint. He gnawed at old pns—could try the woods, hunt roots, chance the tally-men’s wrath. He filled his hands with small chores, stripping old leaves from the sage, counting bowls and cups, anything to keep fear from sinking its teeth in deeper.

  A pounding at the door. Not the tally-stick’s sp, nor Grayna’s hurried code. Two quick raps, measured and deliberate. Eike’s pulse drummed in his ears.

  He snatched the poker from the hearth, moving careful as a mink. Another rap—light, authorless, insistent.

  A voice, smooth and distant as moonlit water: “May I enter? There is no cause for arm.”

  Nothing good rides such horses, he remembered, words stolen piecemeal from the mutters outside.

  He cracked the door, shoulders squared. The woman stood alone in the drift—cloak melting into the twilit edge. Snow clung unmelted to her boots, as if the cold had given its blessing. Behind her, the rest of the party lingered by their mounts, eyes watchful and hands never far from sword or staff.

  She inclined her head, smile thin as morning ice. “You are Eike?”

  He hesitated, jaw working. No use in lying now. “I am.”

  Her eyes swept past him, settling on the shivers in the gloom—Lucy’s form beneath the bnkets. “Your sister is ill.” Not a question, the words heavy with certainty.

  He tensed, body closing the gap in the doorway. “She’s no one’s business but mine.”

  The barest quirk at the corner of her mouth—a fsh of amusement, or perhaps respect. “Much in this world is your business, Eike of Winter Cw, and equally much is not. Yet we find ourselves on neighboring thresholds.” Her voice rang oddly—chilled, musical, as if repeating lines learned long ago.

  “Who are you?” He made it more a challenge than a plea.

  “A traveler,” she answered, eyes flicking once towards the hut’s weak fire. “Named Amonvae. I advise those whose reach extends beyond this dale. My business will touch the vilge, and therefore you, before long.”

  He gritted his teeth. “You ride with power, but there’s nothing here for you. Not unless you’ve come to tally up the bones we’ve already buried.”

  Another short silence. Amonvae seemed to measure him—strip him to sinew and will. “We have come not for what you ck, but for what remains undiscovered. Worry not—your meager table is safe for now. But word travels, even where it ought not. Certain… disturbances are rumored. The Shroud, perhaps. Sickness. New forms stirring under old snows.”

  His heart stuttered. Even among strangers, the old name held power.

  Her gaze softened the smallest fraction. “We healers and witnesses, of a kind. Allow us—allow me—to offer help.”

  Eike shook his head, more from pride than logic. “We have our own, thank you.”

  Amonvae smiled—gentle or mocking, he could not tell. “Your own have done what can be done. Permit me, at least, to see her.”

  Lucy moaned, eyelids fluttering. For a moment, she looked so much like their father near the end—same ragged breath, same sck jaw. Eike’s hand tightened on the doorframe. The world had already grown strange; stranger things had come knocking.

  He stepped aside.

  Amonvae entered, movements measured, each breath of cloak and wool disturbing the dust afloat in the thin sunbeam. She crouched by Lucy’s side—not touching, not yet, but studying, inhaling. Her eyes closed for a heartbeat, and on the next, she reached into her satchel, withdrawing a brass vial engraved with script Eike could not read.

  She angled him a sidelong look. “It will do no harm. Nor will it break your rites.”

  He nodded, uncertain. She turned Lucy’s head—the gentlest of touches—uncorked the vial, and let a single drop fall onto Lucy’s tongue. The scent—sharp, green, a bite of spring in the frozen room—rose up.

  Lucy coughed. Her eyes flickered open, meeting Amonvae’s without fear, but with a wariness learned by hungry creatures.

  “Does it taste of barrel-wood?” Amonvae asked, voice the hush at the center of a storm.

  Lucy blinked, then—miracle or exhaustion—smiled. “No. Tastes like… grass. Or mint, maybe.”

  “Then it is working.”

  Eike pressed a hand to his brow, the motion both relief and disbelief. “Who are you?”

  Amonvae capped the vial, rose, dusting snow from her sleeve. “One who answers calls, wherever they rise. No more, for now. Tend your fire. There is more at stake here than fevers and quotas.”

  She turned at the door, pausing, her presence a wedge of otherness between Eike and the world he recognized.

  “Winter Cw is not as forgotten as it believes itself to be. Take care, Eike. The quiet season is ended.”

  She left, bare footsteps fading into the churned snow, swallowed by the procession’s waiting hush.

  Eike remained, staring into the grit and glow of the fire as the weight of old fears and new possibilities roiled through him. Lucy slept, her breathing already deepened, steadier than before. Outside, the ne was alive with rumor and the unsettled hush that follows a stone tossed in a frozen pond.

  Somewhere, the world had shifted—slightly, but forever. For the first time in days, Eike felt not the tightening noose of inevitability, but the slow, painful stretch of something else. Change, sharp as a thaw. Or the edge of a bde, just beneath the snow.

  He sat, keeping watch over his sister, as the foreign cold pressed in.

  Beyond the door, something clung to the air—sharp, expectant, like the tang of frost before a thaw.