By the time the first pale strip of morning slid over the rooftops of the Crossroads, the bakery was already full of ghosts.

Not the kind that rattled chains or whispered in corners—Liora told herself she didn’t believe in those. These were quieter ghosts: a worn wooden peel leaning in the corner where Crumb used to prop it; a scorch-mark on the oven door in the shape of his hand; a flour-sack patched with a scrap from his old cloak. Little fragments of him, arranged by the simple fact that no one had found the heart to move them.

Liora stood alone in the front room of Pathfinder’s Crumb and watched her breath cloud in the air. The ovens were banked low. It was early yet.

The candles watched her back.

Dozens of them, unlit, lined the counter and the narrow shelves by the windows—fat pillars and thin tapers, stubby ends saved from old vigils, fresh wax poured into clay cups. Some were smooth and perfect, made by careful hands. Others were lumpy and uneven, made by children who brought them in with proud, frost-reddened cheeks. All of them waited for her.

Thirty days until the Vigil.

Liora pressed her palms flat on the scarred counter, feeling crumbs of old wax under her fingers. Thirty days until they rang the bell and called it by its full name—the Vigil of the First Pathfinder. Thirty days until the whole village and half the countryside tramped up the hill in their best boots to stand around the Flame Circle and ask her to speak—really speak—for him.

If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the first Flame Circle, the one that hadn’t had a name yet. The night they’d put his body in the ground. No neat rows of candles then. Just rough torches and smoky firelight and too many people trying not to sob where anyone could see.

Her throat tightened. She pushed the memory back down where it belonged.

“Right,” she murmured to the empty room. “Candles first. We start with what we can hold.”

She moved along the counter, sorting the candles into small neat groupings—by size, by color, by who had brought them. Old habits of the Candlekeeper’s trade. Here, a cluster of thin blue tapers from the mason’s wife, poured from leftover beeswax she swore was too smoky for the good table. There, a large squat candle in a chipped mug, the handle gone; Liora smiled faintly, recognizing the mug as one Crumb had cracked years ago, declared “too ugly for company,” and then refused to throw away.

Beside it lay a candle that wasn’t really a candle at all: a bundle of wax-dipped twine tied around a small iron nail.

Liora picked it up carefully. The nail was bent, hammered straight and bent again, its head flattened into something vaguely like the shape of a small bird. Elen’s youngest had brought it yesterday, eyes shining, declaring it was “for Kindle, so he’ll see the light too.” Liora hadn’t had the heart to correct the child; she had set it with the others, where it had glinted in the dim light like something waiting to be remembered.

The door latch rattled.

Liora set the nail-candle down and straightened her spine just as the front door swung open, letting in a slap of cold air and a flurry of snow-dust from the street. The bell above the frame gave a half-hearted jingle—someone had tied a scrap of red thread to it for luck, and it tangled when it swung.

“Leee-OR-a!” a voice sang, chiding and fond all at once. “Up with the dawn again, I see.”

It was Mara, from the weaver’s lane; she stamped the snow from her boots and stepped inside in a cloud of steam and wool. Her arms were full—a basket wrapped in a knitted shawl, and a cloth parcel on top.

“You’ll freeze yourself to the floor if you don’t get those ovens hotter,” Mara said, closing the door with her hip. “You look like a candle that’s forgotten how to burn.”

“I’m working on it,” Liora said, but her lips tugged toward a smile. “You’re early.”

“You’re late. The whole village is talking about your Vigil story already. Wanted to make sure you had this.” Mara nudged the cloth parcel toward her. “Leftover stubs from last winter. Thought the Candlekeeper could make something of them.”

Liora unfolded the cloth to reveal a tumble of old candle-ends—some white, some yellowed, a few dyed red. The kind people usually burned down to nothing, then tossed. Mara had saved hers.

“This is… more than a few,” Liora said.

“We’ve all been saving,” Mara replied lightly. “Ever since the council set the date. Seems wrong to throw away any light in a year like this.”

There it was, tucked in a casual sentence: the year like this.

Liora didn’t need Mara to spell it out. She’d heard the grain talk in the lines at the well, seen the pinched look on Osric’s face as he passed the bakery without stopping for his usual crust. Winter had come early and hard again, and the harvest hadn’t been what anyone hoped. And that was before the news of the late caravan, riding rumor like a lame horse through the streets.

Bread thinner. Stew thinner. Smiles thinner, too.

She poured the candle stubs onto the counter, sorting quickly, fingers nimble despite the cold. “Thank you,” she said. “These will stretch what we have.”

Mara nodded, eyes roaming over the rows of prepared candles. “You’ll have enough?”

“For the Circle?” Liora glanced toward the shuttered windows, imagining the broad ring of the Flame Circle beyond, on the slope above the village—stone seats, scorched stones, the place where they’d first stood shoulder to shoulder as the snow came down. “We’ll make enough.”

“That’s what he used to say,” Mara murmured. “‘We’ll make enough, somehow.’” She swallowed, throat working. “You’ll tell that one, won’t you? At the Vigil. The story of how he fed us all with nearly nothing? My boys still talk about the taste of that bread as if it was the first thing they ever ate.”

Liora felt something inside her shift.

“That story?” she repeated carefully. “Yes. It’s… part of him.”

“Part of him?” Mara huffed. “That is him. The Pathfinder who turned flour-dust and frozen roots into a winter that didn’t kill us. If you ask me, that’s the one you end with. Let people go home remembering their bellies full.”

Mara’s eyes were bright, far away. Liora could almost see the shape of her thoughts: a warm night, a roaring fire, Liora’s voice braiding into the crackle as she told the tale neat and simple, with a clear lesson at the end. Crumb as savior, miracle-worker, easy story.

Liora swallowed the words that rose in her own throat. The ones that tasted like ash: that the bread had not been a miracle baked out of thin air but a patchwork of hard choices and harder sacrifices; that Crumb had argued with Osric about how much to grind and how much to keep, about which families could bear to share a little more and which could not. That there had been nights she’d seen him at the dough table with his head in his hands, whispering, What if it’s not enough this time?

Those weren’t the bits people brought their children to hear.

“I’ll… think about where to place it,” Liora said instead.

“Good.” Mara reached for a stubby candle, turning it between her fingers. “Do him proud, Candlekeeper. We only get one first Vigil.”

Only one first Vigil, Liora echoed silently, sinking the words deep. As if that made it something fixed and fragile, like glass.

As if they wouldn’t need another one next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, until Crumb’s name was something children knew but did not feel.

Mara chattered for a time about wool orders and a neighbor’s new baby; Liora listened with half an ear, answering where she could. The other half of her mind traced invisible paths over the future night on the hill. How long to speak. Which stories to choose. How much truth to pour, and how much to leave unstirred at the bottom of the cup.

When Mara finally wrapped her shawl back around the empty basket and left, bringing a fresh draft of cold into the room, Liora let herself sag against the counter for a moment, alone again with wax and wood and the slow tick of the cooling ovens.

She moved to the back to stir up the coals.

The bakery’s heart was a wide, brick-lined belly of an oven, its mouth dark and still. Liora knelt and opened the iron door; the faint orange pulse inside breathed warmth against her face. Embers shifted, sending up a few lazy sparks.

“Still with us?” she murmured.

Sometimes she talked to the fire as if it could listen. It felt less foolish than talking to the air.

She took the poker and worked the coals, bringing the hotter ones to the center, feeding them a careful scoop of dry wood from the box. Flame licked up, tentative, then settled into a steady burn. The smell of old smoke and baked bread clung to everything, woven into the bricks like another kind of memory.

This was Crumb’s domain, really. Even now, months after he’d gone into the ground, it still felt like standing in someone else’s ribs.

Liora sat back on her heels, rubbed her chilled fingers together, and let herself imagine him there beside her. Not the Crumb of the songs, but the man she’d known—the one who grumbled about splinters and forgot where he put his own apron, who burned the first tray of loaves every first snow because he never believed winter could surprise him.

“Tell the truth about him,” she whispered into the fire. “That’s what you’d want, isn’t it?”

The coals popped in answer. It could have been agreement. It could have been nothing.

A soft scrape sounded above her, near the rafters.

Liora glanced up.

At first she saw only beams and shadows: the low ceiling of the back room, strung with drying herbs and the last of the braided onions, the faint sway of a hanging ladle. Then, between two hanging bunches of thyme, a small shape shifted—sleek feathers the color of toasted crust, head cocked, bead-bright eye watching her.

“Oh,” Liora said quietly. “So you’re back.”

The sparrow—if it was only a sparrow—hopped forward on the beam, claws scratching wood. It had a smudge of dark along its breast that always made her think of soot. It blinked once, twice, then gave a quick, trilling chirp.

Kindle, the children called it, as if there were no other sparrows in the Crossroads. As if this one, alone, understood something about paths and fires that the rest of them did not.

It had been there on the worst days of the last winter, weaving in and out of the smoke above the Flame Circle. It had been there on the morning of Crumb’s burial, perched on the shovel handle as if it too were bearing the weight. It vanished for weeks at a time, then reappeared in a doorway or on a hitching post, tilted head as if listening for something only it could hear.

Now it watched her, utterly still.

“If you’ve come for crumbs, you’re still too early,” Liora told it. “No loaves yet.”

Kindle ignored that. Its gaze slid from her face to the open oven, then to the doorway that led back into the front room where the candles lay.

The path from ashes to wax. From what had burned to what might yet burn.

“Don’t you start,” she muttered. “I have enough people telling me what I ought to say.”

The bird fluffed its feathers against the draft, then, with a flit of wings, launched itself from the beam. For a heartbeat, it dipped toward the oven mouth; Liora’s hand flew up, a useless reflex, as if to catch it before it could tumble into the heat. But Kindle veered lightly at the last instant, riding a puff of warm air up and out through the doorway into the shop.

Liora’s heart thudded in her chest, silly and fast.

“I hate you,” she told the empty air.

She didn’t.

She stood, dusting off her knees, and followed the tiny tracks of its passage—an overturned wooden spoon on the prep table, a faint flutter of wax shavings where it had hopped near the trays.

In the front room, Kindle was nowhere to be seen, but the candles were all where she’d left them, patient and unlit. Outside, through the frost-fogged windowpanes, the village was beginning to stir: a cart wheel creaking in the lane, a woman calling to a child, the far-off thump of someone hauling kindling.

Thirty days.

Liora stepped behind the counter and pulled one candle toward her, a plain white pillar with a slightly crooked wick. She took out her small knife and began to trim and tidy, shaving away uneven edges, smoothing the top, making it ready.

She imagined standing at the Circle with this candle in her hand, or one like it, the flame dripping wax over her fingers as she spoke.

He was not a saint, she would say.

He was not a story that fits in the space between one bell and the next.

She imagined the faces turned toward her: Mara’s boys, eyes wide; the Brookfell folk who had trudged so far last year, clinging to Crumb’s promise; Osric in the shadows, jaw tense; Ash, if his bones held him through another winter, listening with that tired half-smile.

What did they want from her? What did they need?

They wanted the story where everything made sense.

They needed the story where it didn’t—and they went on anyway.

Liora realized her hand had tightened; the knife slipped, nicking her thumb. A bright bead of blood welled up, startling red against the pale wax.

“Hells,” she hissed softly, putting her thumb in her mouth. The sting grounded her, brought her back to the smallness of the room, the weight of the knife, the smell of tallow and smoke.

Start with what you can hold.

She set the knife down, wiped the candle clean with a rag, and bandaged her thumb with a strip torn from the hem of an old apron. Then she picked up the candle again—gently this time—and set it with the others in the center of the counter.

One candle for each story she’d have to speak at the Vigil. One for the winter that nearly broke them. One for the promise to Brookfell. One for the night Crumb almost said no.

Maybe she could light them one by one as she told those tales, let the wax run as the truth did.

Or maybe that was foolish. Or too much. Or not enough.

The bell over the door jingled again.

“Liora?” came a new voice—Osric’s, rough and steady as a grindstone. “You open?”

She took a breath, wiped her hands on her apron, and turned.

Osric stood in the doorway, shoulders dusted with snow, the miller’s flour still ghosting his dark hair. His eyes flicked over the rows of candles, then back to her face. There was something tight in his features she hadn’t seen last winter, a strain pulled taut behind his civility.

“Morning,” he said. “I won’t keep you long. I just—”

His gaze snagged on the nail-candle by her elbow. “What in the world is that supposed to be?”

“Kindle,” Liora said, softer than she meant to. “In a fashion. For the Vigil.”

Osric made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sigh. “Even the birds are getting offerings now.”

“They always were,” she replied. “We’re only admitting it.”

He grunted, stepped inside fully, and shut out the cold behind him. “I came to ask how many candles you think you can manage for the hill.”

“Enough,” she said automatically.

He raised an eyebrow. “You and Crumb,” he muttered. “Always the same answer.”

Liora hesitated. “Osric… is it as bad as they’re saying? About the caravan. And the fields.”

He went still.

For a heartbeat Liora thought he’d deflect, the way people did when they didn’t want to worry the Candlekeeper, as if worry was something she didn’t already know how to carry.

Instead, he exhaled, a long white plume in the chilly air.

“It might be worse,” he said quietly.

Liora’s fingers tightened around the candle. Outside, a crow called from a rooftop; inside, the room seemed to shrink around them, the air full of wax and smoke and the unsaid.

“You’ll tell them, won’t you?” she asked. “Before the Vigil. They deserve to know what kind of winter they’re really standing in.”

Osric’s jaw worked. “And send them into the darkest month with nothing but fear? No. Not yet. Let them have their preparations. Let them have their Pathfinder stories.” His gaze flicked to the candles. “You of all people should understand the value of a little light before you start listing the storms.”

“And you,” she said, sharper than she intended, “of all people should know that counting sacks in secret doesn’t stop them from emptying.”

The words hung between them, hot and oddly intimate.

Osric’s mouth tightened. For a moment it seemed he might bite back; then he shook his head, as if setting aside an argument half-formed.

“We’ll have that fight later,” he said. “Right now I just need to know if I can tell the council you’ll have enough candles for the Circle. Too many people, and we’re using torches again. With the wind on that hill, I’d rather not.”

Liora looked at the rows of wax, the piles of stubs waiting to be melted and poured, the bent nail shaped like a bird.

“I’ll have them,” she said. “For the Vigil, and whatever else we need before then.”

Osric nodded once. “Good. Then I’ll leave you to it.”

He turned to go, then hesitated with his hand on the latch.

“And, Liora?” he said without looking back. “When you’re deciding which stories to tell up there—remember that some of us still have to live with the ones you choose not to.”

The door shut behind him with a soft thud.

Liora stared at the empty space he’d left, feeling the weight of his words settle over her like a second apron.

Some of us still have to live with the ones you choose not to.

She looked back at the candles, at the oven glow bleeding faintly through the doorway, at the faint dark smudge of bird prints on the sill where Kindle must have landed on its way out.

Thirty days until the Vigil.

Thirty days to decide which parts of Crumb the world would carry into the next winter, and which would be left behind like crumbs brushed from a board.

Liora drew in a slow breath, reached for the first handful of old stubs, and set them in the melting pan. The wax would soften and surrender to the heat; she would pour and shape and set the wicks straight.

One small, honest flame at a time.