Osric always thought best with dust on his hands.

Not the soft, drifting kind that gathered in the rafters, but the honest dust of ground grain—fine, pale, clinging to his knuckles and the creases of his fingers. It gave weight to things that otherwise lived only as scratches on slate and worries in the dark.

This morning, his hands were very white.

The mill creaked and hummed around him, an old beast stirring itself into motion. The wheel outside turned steadily in the narrow winter stream, water muffled by a lace of ice at the edges. Inside, gears groaned and settled; the great round stones rolled against each other with a low, grinding purr. The smell of flour, wood, and river damp filled the air.

Osric stood by the main bin and watched the stream of ground grain pour from the chute into a waiting sack. It hissed as it fell, piling up in a soft little hill, the fabric of the sack ballooning and sagging with the weight.

“Slow it,” he called up to Joran, the apprentice perched by the lever.

The youth eased the wooden handle back. The flow lessened to a trickle.

“Good,” Osric said. “We’re not in a race with anyone but ourselves.”

Joran rolled his eyes just enough that Osric saw and pretended not to. “Seems like everyone else thinks we are,” the boy muttered. “My ma says Brookfell’s already asking when their flour’s coming. Says they’re counting on it like a sunrise.”

Osric’s jaw tightened.

“We’ll talk about what Brookfell is and isn’t getting after we know how much we have,” he said. “And not before.”

He tied the sack off himself, fingers moving with years of practice. Then he hefted it—one good heave to get it over his shoulder, step and drop onto the weighing platform. The scale board bounced and steadied.

“Too light,” he said, more to himself than to Joran. “This should be five more.”

He untied, shook out, re-hung. The boy watched, fidgeting with the hem of his sleeve. Outside, a gust of wind sent a groan through the mill walls. Snow ticked against the shutter.

“Go check the wheel,” Osric said without looking up. “Ice’ll slow it if we’re not careful.”

Joran was only too eager to be sent on an errand. His boots clattered down the stairs, door banging behind him into the raw morning air.

Osric poured again, watching the grain fall.

He had been avoiding this count for days.

Not the day-to-day tally—that he did without thinking: how many sacks ground, how many loaves ordered by which household, how much bran set aside for the hens. The village ran on those little numbers the way a clock ran on cogs.

No, what he’d been putting off was the other kind of count. The quiet, unforgiving one that looked all the way from the bottom of the bins to the imagined end of winter and asked, Will this stretch?

The Vigil had given them a date. Thirty days. A neat circle of time to hang everything on. Thirty days until the whole village dragged themselves up the hill with candles and bread and remembered Crumb as if remembering alone could warm their hands.

Thirty days was a useful span for stories.

It was a dangerous lie for grain.

He tied off the sack again and stepped back to the chalked board beside the scale. He added a mark to the column: Weight. Another to the column: Fine. He wished he had a third column labeled Miracles, just to see the empty space stare him in the face.

“Twenty-seven,” he murmured, tallying the sacks stacked already against the wall. “Plus today’s… call it thirty, if we’re generous with sweepings.”

Thirty full sacks in the main bin. Another dozen in the side storeroom, darker and not yet fully checked for spoilage. A few more in private barns and root cellars around the Crossroads, hoarded or shared, depending on who you asked.

Too many numbers to hold in his head at once, and not enough in any one of them.

He wrote them down, mark by mark, until the board was a forest of small white strokes.

When he stepped back, his stomach sank the way it sometimes had on the road, looking down from a height and realizing the path ahead was steeper than it had seemed from below.

Last winter, with Crumb breathing down his neck and the fields just as unforgiving, they’d survived on just a little more than this. And that was with the caravan’s late arrival in midwinter—they’d been able to open sacks stamped with some town’s crest upriver and feel, for a week or two, that the world beyond their valley still turned in their favor.

This year, the caravan was late again.

Late, or simply not coming.

Osric rubbed his thumb along the edge of the slate, smearing chalk on calloused skin. Rumors traveled faster than wagons; he’d heard all the stories second-hand. Flooding near the river bend. A band of opportunistic thieves. An early freeze that had cracked wagon axles like tinder. None of it was solid enough to measure, and he disliked anything he couldn’t weigh.

He turned toward the main store room, the one he’d been avoiding. The heavy door stood half-open, a faint smell of grain and wood and the sharp tang of something else—just on the edge of sour—seeping into the mill’s main chamber.

“Right,” he said to the room. “No sense being a coward about it.”

He took a lantern from its hook, lit it from the small stove by his ledger desk, and pushed the door wide.

The storeroom was a deep, low-ceilinged space under the mill’s main floor, its stone walls sweating the cold. Sacks were stacked three and four high along the walls, some marked with his familiar miller’s symbol, others with crude letters denoting whoever had brought their own grain for safekeeping. Dust danced in the lantern light.

Osric stepped in and set the lantern on an upturned crate, then tugged at the nearest sack’s mouth. A smell of flour and old burlap puffed out. Fine. He pinched a bit between his fingers, rubbed it, brought it to his nose. Still clean.

The next sack, from the back corner, was not.

He knew before he even untied it; the faint, musty stench hit him a pace away. He worked the knot loose anyway, jaw tight, and peeled back the fabric.

Inside, the grain looked wrong. A darker cast, too clumped together. When he plunged his hand in, his fingers came back with more than flour—they came back with little brown bodies, wriggling and scattering from the light.

Weevils.

“Of course,” he muttered.

He grabbed a handful, crushed them between thumb and finger. They popped soft, leaving smears on his skin.

This bin had been the last filled at harvest, grain stored from the fields furthest out, where the soil threw up more stones than stalks. He should have checked it sooner. He’d told himself the cold would hold off insects, that he’d get around to it when there was less milling to be done.

Now it was ruined—maybe not all, but enough that they’d have to sift and risk wasting time they didn’t have.

He checked another sack. And another.

By the time he came back out into the main mill, he felt twenty years older.

The lantern light made shadows under his eyes. His hands shook faintly as he wiped them on a rag.

Joran poked his head in from the doorway, cheeks flushed from the cold air outside.

“Wheel’s clear,” the boy said. “Ice isn’t bad yet. You want me to start the second stone?”

“No,” Osric said. His voice sounded rough, even to himself. “We’ll keep it to one until midday. No sense grinding more than we dare eat.”

Joran frowned. “But the Vigil—”

“The Vigil won’t need bread if we’re dead by then,” Osric snapped, harsher than he meant. The boy flinched. Osric closed his eyes briefly, breathed out. “Sorry. Go fetch more firewood. We’ll need it later.”

When the boy had gone, arms full of kindling, Osric went to his ledger.

Numbers steadied him. They were cruel, sometimes, but they did not lie.

He sat at the scarred table, opened the thick, leather-bound book Crumb had insisted he keep (“If we’re going to promise people anything,” Crumb had said once, leaning over his shoulder with flour on his nose, “we should at least know what we’re doing it with”), and began to write.

Thirty main sacks, minus five spoiled beyond saving. Twenty-five. Another twelve in the side room, two of which had shown early signs of rot last week. Call it ten. Thirty-five sacks he could trust, give or take a handful.

He flipped to another page, where neat columns marked Past Winters. Last year’s starting number sat above today’s like a quiet accusation.

More.

Not much, but more.

He worked through the rest: average loaves per sack; average mouths per loaf; the thin porridge that could stretch flour further at the cost of morale. He counted in Brookfell, because he knew, in his bones and in the ink on the page, that Crumb’s promise to them had never just been words murmured over a fire.

“As long as the mill turns and the ovens burn,” Crumb had said, standing between Osric and Elen that night under the bare winter moon, “we don’t hoard flame while our neighbors freeze. Not while I’ve got breath to argue about it.”

Well. He didn’t have breath anymore.

The promise remained like a nail in the ledger, pinning Osric’s sums to the page.

He ran the numbers three ways: Crossroads alone; Crossroads with Brookfell at last year’s ration; Crossroads with Brookfell at half that.

The first set ended with hunger and tight belts.

The second ended with lines scratched through the last weeks of winter and a note in the margin that might as well have read: and then?

The third… the third was a narrow, uncomfortable path. Enough, if nothing else went wrong. If the caravan arrived at last with a clatter of frozen wheels and apologies. If the weevils stopped where they were and did not pass their feast on to the good grain.

If, if, if.

Osric rubbed his forehead, leaving a pale smear of flour.

Someone knocked at the mill door.

Not Joran; the boy would have simply walked in, half-forgetting himself. This knock was hesitant, testing the latch.

“Come,” Osric called.

The door opened a fraction, letting in a gust of cold air and the sounds of the street—hoofbeats on hard-packed snow, a snatch of laughter, the distant clatter of someone dropping a pail. Then a figure squeezed through: a woman wrapped in a faded brown cloak, cheeks wind-burned, a knitted cap pulled low over her ears.

Behind her, two others hovered: a stooped man with a staff, and a girl on the cusp between childhood and whatever came after, clutching a small bundle to her chest like it might fly away.

“Good morning, Miller,” the woman said, dipping her head. Her accent rounded the words slightly differently than most in the Crossroads, softening the r’s, stretching the vowels.

“Morning,” Osric replied, standing. His heart sank in a way that had nothing to do with weevils. “You’re far from home, neighbor.”

“Not so far.” The woman managed a tired smile. “Brookfell’s only half a day, even in this weather. We came early to beat the worst of it. Figured the hill would be crowded on the Vigil, and we didn’t want to miss your Pathfinder’s day.”

Her gaze flicked around the mill—stones, sacks, dust—and Osric saw the way it lingered on the piles of grain. Not with greed, but with a kind of hunger so honest it hurt to see.

“We hoped,” the stooped man added, words wrapped in a wheeze, “to speak with you before the crowds.”

Osric knew he should have expected this. Brookfell was not a rumor on someone else’s tongue; it was a real place, with fields that sloped toward the same river, with children who had learned to walk on the same kind of dirt. In good years, the two villages traded seed and labor and the occasional bottle of shared celebration. In bad years…

In bad years, Brookfell looked to the Crossroads like a younger sibling looking to an older one, remembering every warm night and forgetting each time the older had gone hungry to keep them fed.

He wiped his hands on a rag and forced himself not to glance at the ledger.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

The woman stepped forward, fingers tightening on the edges of her cloak.

“My name is Sera,” she said. “This is my father, Kalen. And this is my girl, Tavi.” The girl nodded, eyes big. “We’ve come to see… well, we were wondering when you planned to send word for the flour.”

There it was. The question measured out like grain.

Osric said nothing for a moment. He could feel the ledger at his back, a silent witness. The numbers on the board. The rotten sacks in the dark.

“Last winter,” Sera went on, as if afraid silence meant he hadn’t heard, “you sent carts of flour the week after the snow settled. Crumb himself walked with them part of the way. He said—it was him, we heard it with our own ears—he said, ‘As long as the mill turns and the ovens burn, we won’t let Brookfell’s tables go empty.’”

Her voice caught on the last word. Tavi’s hands tightened on her bundle; a corner slipped, revealing the end of a rough loaf—brown, dense, hardly bigger than a fist.

“We brought what we could to trade,” the girl blurted. “I baked it myself.”

Osric’s throat worked.

He remembered that night. Crumb arguing with him over the ledger, hands flung wide, saying, “What good is a promise that only holds in easy years?” Osric had thrown back words about numbers and storms; they’d gone back and forth until Elen had stepped in and divided the difference, as she always did. In the end, they’d sent less than Crumb wanted and more than Osric was comfortable with.

And somehow, somehow, they’d all seen spring.

“He’s gone now,” Kalen said quietly. “But the mill still turns. The ovens still burn. We thought… perhaps the promise still stands as well.”

The weight of those words landed squarely on Osric’s shoulders. He felt it as clearly as he’d felt the sack he’d hoisted earlier, only this one had no scale to tell him when it was too much.

“It isn’t as simple as last year,” he said, choosing each word like a stone he was afraid might crack. “The harvest was poor here, too. Some stores have spoiled. The caravan—”

He stopped. The hope in Sera’s eyes dimmed fractionally, like a candle guttering in a draft.

“We’ve heard talk of the caravan,” she said. “We’ve heard talk of bad weather, and thieves, and all manner of things. Talk doesn’t fill bowls.” She swallowed hard. “We didn’t come to demand, Miller. Only to ask: should we keep telling our children that help is coming from the Crossroads? Or should we start teaching them how to starve properly?”

The girl flinched at the bluntness. Kalen looked straight at Osric, old eyes steady.

Osric wished, suddenly and painfully, that he had some of Crumb’s talent for words. Crumb could have turned that question into a challenge, an invitation, a shared laugh in the face of fear. He would have stepped forward, clapped Kalen on the shoulder, made some bold promise that made people believe the world would tilt to accommodate it.

But Crumb wasn’t here. Osric was, with his slate and his rotting grain and his memory of a man who had sometimes bitten off more than the village could chew and then gone without himself to hide it.

“We’re thirty days out from the Vigil,” Osric said slowly. “There will be decisions made before then about how we share what we have. Those aren’t decisions I can make alone.”

Which was true, if not particularly comforting.

Sera’s mouth tightened. “We walked through snow and left our own work to ask you, Miller. You can’t tell us nothing.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m telling you to stay. For now. Warm yourselves at the inn. Share in the Vigil, if you like. Hear what the council decides when all of us are in one place, with all the facts on the table.”

“You want us to wait a month,” Kalen rasped. “To hear if the Crossroads will let us starve or not.”

Osric’s fingers dug into the edge of the table.

“No,” he said. “I want you close enough that you’re part of the conversation when we decide how to keep both our villages from starving.”

The room hummed with the mill’s steady grind. Dust drifted in the lantern light.

Sera and Kalen exchanged a glance. Tavi hugged her small loaf tighter.

“Will there be anything,” the girl asked in a small voice, “left to share by then?”

Osric thought of the twenty-five good sacks in the main bin. The ten in the side room. The two ruined. The caravan that might be splintered along some icy road. The way the numbers had looked when he’d run them the third way, with hunger shared instead of hoarded.

“If there’s anything left,” he said, “we’ll know it by then.”

It was not a promise. It was the closest thing he could give them without lying.

Sera’s shoulders sagged, but she nodded.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll stay. The innkeeper owes us two favors, anyhow.”

She reached into Tavi’s arms and took the little loaf, then hesitated and set it gently on the edge of Osric’s ledger table instead.

“For the mill,” she said. “If nothing else, let it remind you of our faces when you sit with your council.”

Osric stared at the bread. It was badly risen, probably gritty with whatever they’d had left to grind. The kind of loaf people baked when they were already stretching.

“I won’t forget your faces,” he said.

They left with the quiet dignity of people who had nothing else to bring but their need.

When the door closed, the mill felt emptier than it had in years, despite the steady noise of stone on stone and water on wheel.

Osric sank into his chair. The little loaf sat between him and the ledger, a lump of brown against all that black ink and white chalk. He wanted to move it aside, but it seemed wrong to touch it carelessly.

As the stones turned and the wheel creaked, he picked up his chalk again and drew a new line across the board.

Not a number. Not yet.

Just a mark, straight and pale, dividing the “before they came” from whatever would follow.

“The mill turns,” he said under his breath. “The ovens burn. And I am not enough man to carry a dead man’s promises.”

The mill did not answer. It only ground on, patient and heavy, as outside a small brown bird landed briefly on the wheel’s rim, rode it up and over like a lover of motion, then flicked away again toward the hill where the stones of the Flame Circle slept under snow.