Chapter 16 - A Public Dispy

  “Necessity is the mother of invention. Or, failing that, an excellent excuse.”

  — Cynical Courtier’s Quip

  Dawn limped pale and thin over Winter Cw, the world shackled in frost so deep even the wind had grown reluctant. At the vilge square, men and women heaped straw onto sledges, boots thudding hollow with the bite of ground kept iron-hard by so many lean seasons. Overhead, the hammering cold rang cracks through the gutters and eaves, each pop and sigh a warning—structures, like people, had their limits.

  Amonvae watched from the shadowed margin where the Duke’s officers took their morning roll. Her cloak hunched about her, hands folded beneath its edge. The world below her gaze had tightened—faces set, words terse, every eye tracking first the dwindling stores and then the rumor that spread, lean and quick, as a starving fox. She noted the tremor at the roofline of the vilge storehouse, the faint, bitter warp in the grain beneath its southern beam. She tightened her grip on the small carved stick stowed in her pocket—just enough for a nudge, not so much as to betray her hand.

  It had been easy, in a town starved for fortune, to stoke the right kind of fear. The storehouse, swollen with the st reserves—winter beets, barrelled peas, a shrine of dwindling grain—sat at the edge of colpse, the timbers groaning beneath weeks of load and frost. Too much snow weight, the vilgers muttered, or perhaps a curse, someone daring to say. Even before sunrise, the children had been chased from the yard—the roof grumbled as if haunted, each stray gust wringing another sigh from the old frame. Amonvae slipped a second measure of purchased rot into the split above the lintel. A touch, barely a breath, just enough to break the patience of a beam already worn to hair.

  She let the crowd gather, summoned as for a festival but with the thin-eyed reluctance bred of hunger. News ran quickest on bare feet—Amalia arrived, cheeks burning fever against the wind, Grayna trailing with her thick coat bundled, jaw set. Even the Duke’s retinue—their patched cloaks and tally-sticks—clustered about the square, wary and restless. Inside, Master Rend checked the ledgers, voice clipped as he called for calm.

  Amonvae remained on the outskirts—silent, invisible, but alive with the tension of her plot unwinding. The stage was set.

  ???

  Eike was hard at the work of distraction—a barrow of dirty snow to clear from behind the bcksmith’s lean-to, as if anonymity might warm his bones better than any fire. He’d taken the habit to avoid the press of eyes. Still, when the shouts rang out—a child’s cry ricocheting, the bellows of men running—habit forced his head up, heart a snare drum in the pit of his ribs.

  “The roof!” The cry sliced through the morning—a man near the edge, voice gone shrill with fear, clutching a child to his hip.

  Eike saw the crowd surge—limbs tangled, faces angled upwards, gaping as a wild seam split down the center beam with a sound like bones snapping in the frost. Women snatched children back, men pnted themselves at the threshold, bracing shoulders. Amalia’s tone cut sharper than steel.

  “Get clear! Beams’ll snap, mark me—back, all of you!” she shouted, thrusting her arm to corral the youngest from harm’s path.

  Grayna gestured wild at a clutch of boys, pushing them aside as dust fell—first in feathered swirls, then in heavy, choking clouds. At the eaves, the wood glimmered thin as ice, swaying with a list that threatened every barrel in its belly.

  Eike braced, breath ragged, old ghosts swelling in his throat—hallways crumpling, the memory of power, the feel of half-admiring, half-fearful stares. He tried to step back, shrink to the rut at his feet, but the crowd surged and stalled, funneling him forward without will.

  “We’ll lose the stores!” Rend barked, tally-stick whipping at the air. “If it falls, we’ll be lucky to see out a fortnight.”

  The Duke, drawn by noise and necessity, hunched near the front—face pale, eyes flickering between rage and calcution. “Prop it!” he demanded. “Use beams. Use pike shafts! You—” he pointed, groping at faces, then fixed on Eike, whose retreat had left him exposed. “Boy! Fetch braces, or get out of our way!”

  Eike tried to disappear, failed, and felt the world’s gaze shift, heavy as iron. He saw Amalia’s face, gray with fear—and, just beyond, Amonvae’s slight nod from the shadow by the inn. The little tilt—one brow raised, a question without voice: Necessary, now. Choose.

  He flinched as the roof’s belly flexed, a hiss like pain running through it. The barrelled grain—the hope of days—would be split to spoil, useless come thaw.

  He caught Grayna’s warning look—her mouth twisted in its old wartime scowl. She shook her head minutely, but said nothing. In her eyes: Do what you must, but do not think it will save you from the debt.

  Amalia’s hands lifted, palms trembling as she tried to calm the panic and herd the younger children to safety. “Back, all of you, back!”

  Eike’s muscles locked—caught between cowardice and compulsion. The memory of Lucy—her fevered sleep, the twitch of life in fingers gone sck—rose unbidden, as fierce a spur as hunger. He felt, at once, both more solid and more hollow than flesh—his desire not so much intention as inevitability.

  He pushed forward, ducking under anxious arms, the stares brushing his skin like nettles.

  Rend snapped, seeing Eike near the eaves, “If you’ve a miracle, now’s the hour! Otherwise, shift!”

  Eike’s voice came out rough, stumbling, already betrayed by the ghost of power thrumming through his chest. “Move, then. Make space.”

  The crowd split, suspicion and hope elbowing for space between muddy boots. Eike pressed his palm to the beam—a whisper of contact, barely more than breath—but cold shocked through his flesh, jarring in a way the timber seemed to recognize.

  Inside: darkness, frayed and restless. The Shroud didn’t creep like mist now—it was a river, hidden beneath frozen banks, pushing against every seam. Amonvae’s lessons flickered at the edge of memory: incantation, gesture, catalyst. Useless. There was only need. Only the root’s stubborn green, refusing the surrender of winter.

  He shut his eyes. Hunger howled—loud as silence, sharp as yearning.

  He whispered—not a word from her book, but something older, the shape of breath at the end of hope. He saw the crack in the beam, the warped grain, the slow rot at the margin. He willed it: mend, not break. Root, not ruin.

  The power came—violent, hungry, yet now met with a sliver of order, learned by night in the croft. He pressed his palm to the wood: the Shroud shimmered, crawling spiderwise across flesh and frame. Splinters wept sap, the fissures cing together with a whispering pop, as if the world was reknitting its own bones.

  At first, nothing. Then—the wood swelled, fiber upon fiber, old growth knit with new, the crack sealed not by patch or wedge but by green veining bright as unseasonable moss. The dust stilled. Boards that sagged now stood rigid, the roof trembling—and then, slowly, settling. A ripple ran along the truss where the magic passed—grain realigned, knots dissolving, breath returned.

  The hush dropped—not relief, not terror, but the breathless silence of people watching the unimaginable made flesh.

  Eike staggered, the strain washing through him. His heart thudded wild in its cage; sweat scalded his brow though the air bit sharp. He clung to the beam, dizzy, the taste of sap and iron in his mouth. Shadows at the edge of vision thickened, then fled.

  Grayna’s arm caught him as his knees buckled, holding him upright through sheer, battered pride. “Steady, boy,” she muttered, rough. “Let them see you don’t bleed green.”

  Eike snorted, the ache fring in his mors as he blinked hard.

  Around him, reaction unfurled. The Duke, eyes narrow but mouth forced neutral, stood straighter, peering at the rebuilt beam—as if weighing miracle against cost.

  “Well,” the Duke said at st, his voice carried to every listening ear, “seems fortune’s thrown us a bone—if not quite a feast.” He signaled to Rend, whose jaw wagged before words followed.

  Rend cleared his throat, addressing the crowd. “Put your doubts to bed, for the now. Storehouse stands firm. Nothing spoiled, unless you count a beam gone green and strange.” His voice trailed off, bafflement pin.

  A low, wordless murmur ran through the vilgers. Amalia, face pale, stepped forward, voice pitched to hush. “He’s done what none could. Let that count for more than a scared tongue.”

  A boy’s voice piped up near the front—too young to hide his awe. “Did it hurt? Did you speak to it? It looked—looked like it breathed.”

  Eike scraped the back of his hand across his mouth, answering without meeting the gaze. “Doesn’t matter. Only thing that counts is if the beam keeps.”

  The hush that followed bristled—not only with fear, but something stranger. Wonder, raw and hesitant, settling on the edges of old dread.

  The Duke raised a gloved hand, forestalling argument. “Let this be a lesson,” he intoned, voice creaking under the weight of a newfound wisdom. “If the Shroud can rebuild, not just ruin, then perhaps we ought to use it—wisely and well.” His eyes settled heavy on Eike, then—calcuting, measuring—shifted to Amonvae, who smiled without showing her teeth.

  From the back, Grayna grunted—a note of exhausted pride. Amalia pressed her palm to her lips, gaze torn between gratitude and dread.

  Amonvae alone appeared unmoved, her smile private as she watched the pyers slide into their new shapes. The pawn, advanced, now stood in the center—impossible to overlook, impossible to pretend unknown.

  ???

  Later, after the crowd dispersed, Eike sat on the stone step of the storehouse, knuckles white against the cold. The power’s thrum still crawled beneath his skin—roots flexing, rivers pushing through marrow—tamped for now by the leaden weight of exhaustion.

  Amonvae approached, her cloak trailing over melting frost, boots soundless. She crouched beside him—not companionable, not distant, exactly. Her voice was a whisper, meant only for the exhausted:

  “Necessity is the mother of invention. Or, failing that, an excellent excuse. You showed them something they’d forgotten—miracle or not, it holds. Remember the look on their faces; count the cost ter, when you can breathe without shaking.”

  He looked at her, anger and resignation knotted tight behind his eyes. “You staged this,” he said ft, with no strength left for pretense.

  She smiled—sharp, unsentimental. “The world stages itself. I only drew back one curtain.”

  He snorted, looked away, palms ft on the scraped stone.

  “They’ll come for more. They’ll want more. I can’t promise I’ll give it.”

  “That is your right.” She straightened, voice thoughtful. “But a talent hidden fuels only suspicion. A talent revealed—properly—can feed the hands that once hungered for your ruin. Py your role, Eike, but do not forget to write your own lines.”

  She left him with that—her words settling round him like a cloak. Whether warning or permission, he could not tell.

  ???

  Behind him, the rafter’s new grain glimmered, green threading its way through scarred wood—a scar and a seed, both. Hunger’s shape changed in that timber, but had not vanished.

  Snow thickened, steady as judgment, bnketing old anxieties while unearthing debts beneath each drift. At the square’s edge, vilgers eyed the repaired beam—some with awe, some with hands fisted tight, all measuring the price of survival against the comfort of another night’s bread.

  Overhead, wind prowled the broken eaves, scattering half-heard prayers and nameless rumor like chaff into the pale light.

  For the first time, Eike did not shrink from their gaze. He let them see him, tired and changed, the shape of survival remade. The web was set, the game remade; winter would not have the st word. Not while he endured.