By the time Liora reached the hill, the first sparks of the fire were already climbing the dark.

She stood a moment at the base of the slope, hands wrapped around the bundle of candles at her chest, and watched the tiny tongues of flame lick up through kindling and catch. The Circle stones were black humps in the snow, their tops bare where the afternoon’s weak sun had melted what it could.

Breath smoked from the handful of people already there. Shadows leaned long and thin.

“Candlekeeper!” someone called. “We thought you’d lost your way.”

She started up the path, boots squeaking in the crusted snow. Each step pressed the day down into the earth. Thirty days until the Vigil. Twenty-one, now, until the new year. The numbers lined themselves up in her head like wicks waiting to be lit.

A ring of faces turned as she came into the light.

Not the whole village—not tonight. This was a small Circle, the kind that had started happening on their own after Crumb died, people drifting up the hill with lanterns and bread ends whenever the cold in their houses grew louder than the cold outside. A dozen souls, maybe a few more: Mara and her boys; Lys from the inn, scarf pulled up over her nose; old Tam with his bad leg, perched on a stone; two of Osric’s apprentices, stamping their feet for warmth.

And on the far side of the fire, near one of the outer stones, the three faces she’d first glimpsed yesterday in the bakery: Sera, Kalen, and the girl from Brookfell, cloak wrapped tight. They looked smaller in the circle’s light, as if distance had given them some size she could not see now.

Liora let a smile find her. “You started without me,” she said, setting the bundle of candles on a flat stone near the fire.

“We can’t burn stories,” Mara replied. “We’d have had to talk about each other.”

There was a ripple of laughter. It wasn’t loud, but it was genuine.

“Don’t tempt me,” Liora said. “I’ve got a whole trove of tales about that time your boys—”

“Traitor,” Mara cut in quickly. “Tell us something about Crumb instead. We came up here to get warm and remember why we’re still bothering to get out of bed.”

“Bread’s gone thin,” someone else muttered. “Memory’s thicker.”

Liora straightened the candles out of habit, even though they weren’t needed yet. Tonight’s fire was all they’d have; she’d save the candles for the Vigil and what led up to it.

Ash was there, she saw, sitting just inside the ring of light with his staff across his knees. He gave her a nod that was half greeting, half warning: I’m listening.

She nodded back. Good.

Osric was not there. That, too, said something.

She settled herself on a low stone near the front, where the fire’s warmth touched her face but did not singe her boots. The flames were still small, licking between branches. Someone had stacked the logs cleverly; they’d climb and settle into a good bed of coals soon.

“All right,” she said. “If we’re going to steal the warmth from this poor fire, we might as well give it something worth listening to.”

“Tell us the one about the first winter,” a boy piped up—Mara’s middle one, cheeks raw from the cold.

“That’s not one story,” Lys objected. “That’s a hundred.”

“The night with the sleds,” someone chimed in. “When he made the path through the drifts so we could get the grain down from the ridge.”

“Or the time he tricked the traders into leaving us more than we paid for.” That was old Tam, voice scratchy with age and pipe smoke. “I like that one.”

“Or the—”

“How about,” Liora cut in gently, “we start in the middle and work our way out?”

There were murmurs. Acceptance. She could feel their hunger—the kind that lived behind the ribs, not in the stomach. The need to be reminded that they had survived something once already.

She took a breath, tasting smoke and cold, and let the story find its shape.

“It was not the coldest night of that winter,” she began. “Though it felt like it, for those of us who forgot there were worse nights still to come. The snow had been falling for three days, on and off, and the drifts were high enough that Tam here decided he was too old to risk his hip on the road.”

“I decided I was too smart,” Tam grumbled, but there was a smile at the corner of his mouth.

“The mill,” she went on, “was nearly cut off. The little path along the ridge—do you remember it? Narrow as my patience, with a drop on one side—”

Mara snorted.

“—was clogged with blown snow. Osric said it would take a week to dig it out by hand, and by then we’d have eaten the last of what we had in the bins down here. No path, no grain. No grain, no bread. No bread…”

She let the sentence trail off. She didn’t have to finish it.

“The thing about Crumb,” she said instead, “is that he hated being told something couldn’t be done. He hated it more if it was the weather doing the telling. So while the rest of us were swearing at the sky, he was staring at the hill.”

She could see it in her mind as she spoke: Crumb in his winter cloak, hair tied back out of his face, eyes narrowed at the white slope as if he could bully it into behaving.

“He watched the children that morning,” she said, “sliding down the smaller hills on old planks and bits of board. He watched the way they flew on the snow. And then he said the words that always meant trouble. Do you remember them?”

Several voices chimed in over the fire: “‘I have an idea.’”

Liora smiled. “Those are the ones. Three hours later, half the village was in the yard behind the bakery with every board we could find. Old doors, broken tables, that bit of fence you never replaced—”

“That fence was already falling down,” Tam protested.

“Exactly,” Liora said. “We hammered them into long, rough sleds. Not pretty, not smooth. But strong. Then Crumb walked that narrow ridge path himself, tied a rope around his waist and handed the other end to three of the strongest folk he could find, in case he slipped. Osric muttered the whole time that it was madness and he’d freeze his backside off, but he went behind him anyway.”

Bits of the night came back in smell and sound: the creak of wood, the crunch of boots, Osric’s disgruntled curses floating on the wind.

“He marked the edges of the cliff with branches,” she said, “stuck upright where the snow was shallowest. Then we loaded the first sled with sacks of grain and prayed we’d tied them on tightly enough that they wouldn’t fly off and crush Tam’s good leg.”

“His only leg,” someone called.

Laughter rippled around the Circle. Even Tavi, the Brookfell girl, smiled a little.

“Crumb went first,” Liora said. “Of course he did. He sat at the front of that sorry excuse for a sled, wrapped the rope around his hands, and looked down that corridor of white he’d just carved. And he said—”

She paused, feeling the words he’d spoken then curl up from memory like smoke.

He’d said, If this works, you’ll all say I was a genius. If it doesn’t, somebody tell Ash I’m sorry I stole his idea.

She glanced across the fire. Ash’s eyes met hers, dark and steady.

She could tell them that version. Or she could tell the one they expected.

“He said,” she went on, “ ‘Hold tight. And if this doesn’t work, Osric, don’t you dare tell me you told me so.’”

There was a little ripple of amusement, the kind that came more from habit than real mirth. They could all hear Crumb in that line, or thought they could.

“He pushed off,” she said, “and the sled flew. Faster than any of the children’s toy ones. The snow that had seemed like a wall turned into a river carrying him where he needed to go. He whooped the whole way down.”

“Like a madman,” Mara added fondly.

“Like someone who’s found a path where there wasn’t one,” Liora said. “He made two more runs himself that night, to make sure the ropes and the path held. Only then did he let anyone else try. By dawn, we’d hauled down enough grain that none of us went hungry that week.”

She let the image sit: Crumb, the firelight of his lantern bouncing off the snow, rope burns on his hands, face split in a grin that was half relief and half sheer delight at not being dead.

“He always trusted the snow more than was wise,” Tam said, shaking his head. “One day the hill will teach us a lesson about that.”

Liora almost said, It already has. She bit back the words.

“What do you remember?” she asked instead, turning the story outward. “Not just of him. Of that night. Of what it cost. Of what it gave.”

People shifted, glancing at one another.

Lys spoke first. “I remember my mother cursing him,” she said. “Said if he broke his neck on that cliffside, she’d climb down and drag his body back up just so she could hit him for being an idiot. But she was slicing thinner bread the next week, not scraping the crumbs from the cupboard.”

“I remember the sound,” Mara said. “The way the sleds hissed. Like… like the hill was singing.”

“I remember,” Ash said quietly, “that he was wrong about the path the first time.”

Heads turned toward him.

“What do you mean?” one of Osric’s apprentices asked.

Ash shifted his staff, leaning it against his shoulder.

“Well,” he said, “if we’re telling the whole tale… his first idea wasn’t sleds. It was to hack steps straight down the side of the ridge and lower the sacks on ropes. He took one look at that drop and decided we could cut a stair into it. No one could talk him out of it.”

“That sounds like him,” Tam muttered.

“So we tried,” Ash went on. “Three hours of work with numb fingers and blunted tools. Cut maybe six steps before the ice started shearing away in chunks. Nearly lost Gerren over the side when his footing went. Crumb called it off himself after that. He sat on a rock, shivering and swearing, and said, ‘I’m an idiot. The hill doesn’t care how clever I feel.’”

There were chuckles at that.

“And then,” Ash said, “he watched the children on their little sleds. And then he had the second idea. The better one.”

Liora felt the night sharpen around his words.

It was a small change, in the shape of the story. Before, it had been about Crumb as the man who saw a path no one else did and took it first. Now it had a stumble in it: a wrong turn, a backtrack.

“It’s a good story either way,” Tam said. “First, second—does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” Ash replied, voice mild. “Because I remember the look on his face when he realized he’d nearly led us to carve a stair into our own graves. He was ashamed. And he was relieved he’d seen it before it was too late.”

“And you think people need to know that.” The words came from the far side of the fire, where Sera sat with her cloak drawn tight around her. Her voice carried the round vowels of Brookfell. “That he guessed wrong before he guessed right.”

Ash’s gaze slid to her. “I think if we’re going to set him up as an example,” he said, “we should remember what kind of man he was, not just the ends of his stories.”

Mara frowned. “What kind of man he was is the one who got the grain down, not the one who nearly killed Gerren on the cliff.”

“And both of those were the same man,” Ash said.

The air around the Circle changed. Not dramatically—no one leapt up, no one shouted—but something in the way people held themselves shifted, as if the wind had turned a few degrees colder.

Liora felt all their eyes, and the weight of the candles she had not yet lit.

She could smooth it over. She knew how. Tell a joke, offer another comfortable anecdote, close the circle on a warm note. People would walk back down the hill thinking about sleds and laughter, not near-misses.

But if the Vigil was going to be more than a night of stories that left them unchanged…

She looked at Ash across the fire. His face was unreadable, but his hand rested on his staff like a man bracing for either blow or blessing.

“He doubted himself,” she said slowly. “More often than people like to remember. He was… brave, yes. Stubborn, absolutely. But he wasn’t born knowing which paths would hold. He learned as he went.”

“Some of us,” Mara said, “would rather put our trust in the part of him that got it right.”

“And some of us,” Sera murmured, “need to know it’s allowed to get it wrong and keep walking.”

Her hand had found Tavi’s, fingers laced tight.

Silence settled for a heartbeat.

The fire crackled. Snow shifted in the dark beyond the stones, sliding from a branch.

Liora took a breath.

“That night,” she said, “the hill didn’t care whether we’d chosen steps or sleds. It would have taken us either way, if we weren’t careful. What saved us wasn’t his first idea or his second. It was his willingness to admit that the first was bad, and to try another. To listen, when the ice started to speak back.”

Ash’s eyes softened, just a fraction.

Someone—Lys, maybe—sighed, the sound full of something Liora couldn’t name. Fear. Relief. Both.

“Stories don’t change what happened,” old Kalen said, voice rasping. “Only how we carry it.” He tapped his staff on the ground. “I’d rather carry the weight of a man who learned than the weight of a man who never stumbled and yet somehow lived in a world that looks like this.”

Mara made a face. “Just don’t go putting the part where he nearly killed Gerren in the children’s version.”

“They hear more than you think,” Liora said gently. “And they’ll face their own ledges. Perhaps it will help, knowing even Crumb had to step back from one.”

The circle loosened around the edges then. Someone passed around a cloth-wrapped bundle of toasted bread, thinner slices than last winter, but still warm. Fingers brushed as people took pieces. Tam told a short, rude story about the sleds that made the boys giggle and their mother swat them lightly on the back of the head. Sera and Kalen spoke quietly to Lys about rooms at the inn.

The moment of tension didn’t break, exactly. It sank in, lodged somewhere beneath their ribs alongside hunger and habit.

As the night wore on and the fire settled lower, Liora found herself watching the way the flames left black scars on the wood. The fire did not care if they told the story of the first idea or the second. It only burned what it was given.

“Another?” someone asked, nudging her when a lull came. “Something lighter. When he tricked the traders.”

She obliged, because she could not crack all their illusions in one night without knowing what to replace them with. The tale that followed was one of Crumb’s funnier ones: sleight of hand with weights and measures, a merchant taught a lesson about cheating. People laughed fuller, then. They needed it.

But when the Circle finally broke apart and people started their slow, careful way down the hill, Liora saw more than one set of shoulders hunched against something beyond the cold.

She lingered, helping Lys stamp out the last embers and cover them with snow.

“Reckon you’ll tell it that way at the Vigil?” Lys asked as she worked, not looking up.

Liora brushed ash from her fingers. “I reckon I have to decide what ‘that way’ is by then,” she said.

Lys snorted softly. “You could always just tell them he walked on top of the snow without sinking and carried three sacks on his back.”

“I’m sure someone already does,” Liora replied.

They shared a brief, tired smile.

On the path down, she saw Ash ahead of her, moving carefully with his staff. Kindle flitted just above him, a darting shadow against the snow, catching stray bits of lamplight from the village below.

Ash paused at one point and looked back up at the Circle. Liora saw his face turned toward the dark stones, thoughtful, as if he were trying to measure the distance between the man he remembered and the man whose name people would carve deeper in the days to come.

He has ashes in his footprints too, she thought. We all do.

She shifted the bundle of unlit candles in her arms as she picked her way down the hill, feeling their weight. Wax that would soon be fire. Stories that would soon be spoken aloud.

Below, the Crossroads waited: the mill with its turning wheel, the bakery with its low, steady glow, the inn with its warm windows. Above, the sky stretched hard and clear, a scatter of cold stars that had watched men doubt and learn and promise before any of them had names.

The winter had already begun. The Vigil was coming. And somewhere between those two truths, Liora would have to find a way to tell the story of a man without turning him into something he had never been.