By midmorning, the whole Crossroads seemed to have climbed the hill with them in their mouths, even if only a dozen souls had actually gone up to the Circle.

Osric heard it first in the mill, in the way his apprentices whispered when they thought the stones were louder than they were.

He was tightening a band on the drive shaft when Joran’s voice drifted down from the upper platform.

“…said he was wrong,” the boy murmured. “About the cliff path. Said he nearly killed Gerren before he thought of the sleds.”

A second voice—Hett, the younger—answered in a conspiratorial hiss. “My da says that’s not how it happened. Says Crumb knew what he was doing the whole time.”

“Your da wasn’t there,” Joran retorted. “Ash was. And Liora. They both said it, right in front of everyone.”

Osric slid the wrench into place and turned it with just a little more force than necessary. The metal squealed.

“Stop chewing your tongues and check the grain feed,” he called up. “You want the wheel throwing stones because you’re too busy picking at old bones?”

Joran appeared at the edge of the upper floor, face dusted with flour and pink with cold. “Yes, Miller,” he said. “We were just—”

“Gossiping,” Osric said. “I can hear gossip over a grinding stone, boy. That’s how loud it always is.”

The boy flushed deeper. “It wasn’t—I mean, we were only talking about what they said at the Circle. About Crumb.”

Osric straightened slowly, stretching his back until it popped. “Is that so.”

Hett clambered up beside Joran, nodding eagerly. “Ash said Crumb nearly made them cut steps into the cliff. That he got it wrong first. Liora backed him up. Mara’s ma says they shouldn’t be telling stories like that in winter. Says people need to remember the strong parts right now, not the shaky bits.”

He said it like it was a joke someone had told him, testing it on his own tongue.

Osric wiped his hands on a rag, thinking of Liora’s face around the fire, the way she’d chosen each word as if it might cut on the way out.

“He did nearly get Gerren killed,” Osric said. “I was there.” Both boys blinked. “And he did think of the sleds after,” he added. “Also there.”

“But shouldn’t the Candlekeeper… I don’t know… make it sound better?” Hett asked. “Isn’t that what stories are for?”

“No,” Osric said, more sharply than he intended. “That’s what lies are for. They’re different things.”

The boys exchanged a glance.

“Besides,” he went on, softening his tone a fraction, “if you think a man who never made a mistake is the one you’re supposed to walk after, you’re going to stand still your whole life waiting for the ground to stop moving.”

It was the sort of thing Crumb would have said with a grin and a clap on the shoulder. Osric heard only the flat, practical weight in his own voice. The boys looked unsure whether they’d been given wisdom or a scolding.

“Check. The. Feed,” he repeated, pointing toward the hopper.

They scrambled to obey.

When their footsteps had faded upward again, Osric leaned both hands on the railing and watched the grain pour from the upper bin. A thin stream, steady but not as fat as he would have liked.

He remembered that night on the ridge. Remembered the hollow around his heart as he’d watched Gerren’s boot slip on the half-carved step, the sudden scramble of hands and rope, the ice shearing away under them in glittering plates.

He also remembered the way Crumb had sat down hard in the snow afterward, white-faced and sweating despite the cold, and said, quietly for once, “I misjudged. That could have gone worse.” No jokes. No bravado. Just admission.

The villagers loved the sled part of the story, because it ended with grain and laughter and children trying to copy Crumb’s reckless run. The first part—the misjudgment, the near-accident—that was the part Osric lived with. The bit that made him triple-check knots and never quite trust an idea just because it had come out of the Pathfinder’s mouth.

Telling both halves felt… right. Necessary, even.

But he understood why Mara and others flinched. When the world outside the valley seemed to have turned more teeth than tail, people wanted their dead heroes smooth and simple. They didn’t want to know that he, too, had stood on ledges with his heart hammering and no assurance the ground would hold.

The mill wheel groaned as a clump of ice in the race broke free. Osric shook himself back to the present.

“Hold her steady,” he called up. “And for all the saints’ sakes, don’t get flour in the gear teeth again. I’m going down to the Square.”

Joran’s muffled “Yes, Miller!” followed him down the stairs.

The square at midday was a knot of wool and smoke and white breath.

Market stalls that would have been riotous with color in warmer seasons stood subdued under winter’s hand—more baskets than cloth, more patched cloaks than new ones. People moved close together, less for company than to steal each other’s warmth. The smell of roasting roots from a brazier near the well fought a losing battle with cold air and the faint, sour tang of too many bodies in too small a space.

Osric threaded through it all, nodding when nods were given, accepting a crust here, a quick word there. He kept his ledger tucked under one arm, a small shield of obligation in case anyone tried to waylay him into a longer conversation than he had time for.

He should have gone straight to the council house—little more than a room with benches and a table where decisions were argued until they overheated it—but the path there bent past the inn. And from the open door of the inn’s common room came a familiar rise and fall of angry voices.

“…don’t see why we have to drag his name through the mud to make ourselves feel better,” someone was saying. “He’s gone. Let him be our rock, not our—whatever Ash is trying to make him.”

Osric recognized the voice: Farlan, the cooper. Loud by nature, louder with a mug in his hand.

He hesitated a heartbeat at the threshold, then stepped inside.

The common room was a pocket of warmth stolen from the weather. A fire in the hearth snapped and spat. The long table down the middle of the room was crowded: Farlan at one end, broad shoulders hunched; Mara beside him, weaving a bit of yarn between her fingers; Lys moving between chairs with a tray of bowls; half a dozen others from the Circle or their friends.

And at the far wall, near the window, Sera and Kalen sat with their backs to the plaster, Tavi between them, their travel-cloaks still on. They looked like people who were not sure yet if they were welcome or merely tolerated.

“… I’m not saying Ash is wrong,” Mara was saying when Osric entered. “I’m saying there’s a time to tell half a story, and a time to tell all of it. Midwinter, with a lean harvest, is an odd time to start pulling your own rug out from under your feet.”

“It’s not a rug, it’s a man,” Lys retorted. “And he had his flaws same as any of us. Maybe it helps some people to know that.”

Farlan snorted. “Helps them how? Helps them decide they don’t need to try as hard because ‘oh, even Crumb messed up’? Next we’ll be saying he didn’t know how to bake.”

“Blasphemy,” Mara muttered lightly, though her eyes were troubled.

Osric edged in, trying to make himself smaller than his frame allowed.

He almost succeeded, until someone spotted him.

“There he is,” Farlan said. “The man himself. Osric.” He slapped his palm on the table. “Come settle this.”

“No,” Osric said, automatically. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you can fight it to death without me.”

That got a few chuckles. It didn’t deter Farlan.

“We’re talking about your friend,” the cooper said, tipping his mug toward him. “About how to remember him. Ash and Liora up on the hill last night, telling that business about the cliff steps. Making him look like… like some fool who stumbled his way through and just happened to land on his feet.”

“Fools don’t keep villages alive through winters like that one,” someone else said quietly.

“Exactly,” Farlan said. “So why dig up every misstep? Why not tell the straight stories? The ones where he saw the path and took it and saved us, instead of the ones where he nearly didn’t?”

Osric took the mug Lys thrust into his hand—something hot and thin, more broth than stew—and turned it between his fingers.

He could have said, Because they’re all parts of the same story. Because if you cut out the doubts, you cut out the courage it took to walk anyway.

What he said instead was, “Why are you asking me? I’m the miller, not the Candlekeeper.”

“You were his friend,” Mara replied. “You walked with him. You argued with him. If anyone knows how he’d want to be remembered, it’s you and Ash.”

“And Ash seems determined to remind us that he was human,” Farlan said, “when I’d quite like my heroes to be something more than human if I’m going to hang my hope on them.”

Tavi spoke then, so softly they nearly missed it.

“In Brookfell,” she said, eyes on her hands, “we don’t have any heroes that were more than human. Only the ones who kept us from starving once or twice.” She swallowed. “We remembered Crumb because he sent us flour when no one else would. We don’t much care whether he slipped on a cliff first.”

The room shifted. A few faces turned toward the wall where the Brookfell trio sat.

“I care,” Farlan said, though without as much heat. “Not about the cliff, necessarily. About this… chipping away. He’s all we have, some of us. The idea of him. If we start pulling that apart…”

Osric set his mug down carefully.

“Here’s a thought,” he said. “What if what you have isn’t ‘the idea of him’ at all? What if what you have is what he actually did? The grain he hauled, the promises he made. The way he showed up at your door when the river froze and you didn’t think anyone had even noticed.”

Farlan frowned. “Exactly. That.”

“Those happened,” Osric said. “Those are solid. Nobody’s taking those away with a story about him misjudging a hill. If the only way your faith in him holds is if he never once misstepped, then you don’t have faith in Crumb. You have faith in statues.”

He hadn’t meant to say that last word, but once it was out, it sat there, heavy as carved stone.

“Statues stand still,” Kalen rasped from the wall. “Men move. I’d rather follow footprints than stare at stone.”

Lys snorted. “There’s a line to put in your little book, Liora,” she said, though Liora wasn’t there to hear it. “The next time you make one of those sayings.”

A few people smiled. Some did not.

“We’re not talking about statues, exactly,” Mara said carefully. “It’s just… the Vigil is coming. The first proper one. People want—”

“A rock,” Farlan supplied. “Something to stand on. Something that doesn’t wobble when you look down.”

“Rocks crack,” Osric said. “Even the ones you set in a Circle.”

“Poet today, aren’t you,” Lys murmured.

He gave her a look. She shrugged.

“Fine,” Farlan said. “Ignore the statues. Call it what you like. The fact remains: it doesn’t sit right hearing you folk talk like Crumb could have gotten us all killed.”

“No one said that,” Ash’s voice came from the doorway.

Osric turned. He hadn’t heard him come in.

Ash stood there with snow on his boots and his cloak open, cheeks ruddy from the cold. His staff leaned against the doorframe. Kindle darted past his head, slipped inside like it belonged there, and shot up to the rafters. The bird’s wings stirred up a swirl of dust and old smoke.

“A man can nearly make a terrible mistake,” Ash said, shutting the door behind him, “and still be a man worth following. That’s all I said.”

“Feels different in the hearing,” Farlan grumbled.

“That’s because you want him on a pedestal,” Ash replied. “Not on the road where he walked.”

The word pedestal seemed to draw itself in the air, a picture to go with the feeling they’d all had but not named.

“You talk about him like a brother,” Farlan said. “We talk about him like… like a banner. Something to rally under.”

“Banners burn,” Ash said. “Brothers mess up and make amends and keep walking. One of those seems more useful to me.”

Osric watched the exchange with a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite identify. Pride, maybe, that Ash still had enough fire in him to push back. Fear, too, that this line of talking would turn the Vigil into a brawl between those who wanted the rough-cut truth and those who wanted the polished memorial.

He had other worries, ones that had numbers attached to them and mouths underneath. Worries that would not wait while they argued about whether Crumb had ever slipped on a hillside.

Before he could steer the conversation there, the inn door opened again. A gust of colder air rolled in, along with a flurry of snowflakes and a figure wrapped in so many layers of cloth it was hard to tell where cloak ended and pack began.

“By all the saints,” Lys exclaimed. “Drop the blizzard at the door, why don’t you?”

“Trying,” came a muffled voice from within the wrappings. “Blizzard’s not listening. It never does.”

The newcomer stomped in, unwinding scarf and hood. A lean face emerged, wind-chapped and creased at the corners of the eyes, dark beard crusted with frost. A leather pack sagged off one shoulder, and a few battered goods—tin cups, a string of dried herbs, a coil of rope—jingled where they’d been hooked for easy trade.

“Perrin,” Osric said in surprise. “Didn’t expect you before the thaw.”

“Didn’t expect to be here,” Perrin said, teeth flashing in a quick grin. “But the road upriver’s been closed by more than snow, and a man’s got to eat. Or at least drink.” He waved a hand at Lys. “You still letting poor souls warm themselves in exchange for the privilege of listening to your singing?”

“You wish you could afford my singing,” Lys retorted, already reaching for a mug.

Several people called greetings. Perrin was one of those traveling traders who was as much news-carrier as salesman; his arrival was always cause for a small stir.

“What’s this I hear about closed roads?” Osric asked, that tightness in his chest shifting its shape.

Perrin thumped his pack down by the hearth and stuck his gloved hands toward the flames. “The usual mess turned a bit more usual than usual,” he said. “Floods early in the season. Then a slide along the east bank of the Graybend—took out a chunk of the road and half a wagonteam with it, from what I heard. Some folk turned back. Some tried going around. Most seem to be sitting in whatever village they happened to be in when the snow hit and swearing at their bad luck.”

“The caravan?” Osric asked. He didn’t have to specify which one. There was only one that mattered to the Crossroads just now—the big grain train from Marrowgate that usually lumbered through once each winter like a late but dependable miracle.

Perrin’s expression shifted. The grin faded. “I saw three wagons with Marrowgate markings stuck up near Hallow Bridge,” he said. “Axles cracked clean, one wheel lost in the river. Teamsters arguing about whether to try to limp back or push on. That was a tenday ago. With the weather since…” He spread his hands. “If they’re coming, they’ll be crawling.”

Farlan swore under his breath. Mara went pale. Lys’s hand froze mid-pour.

“So we can’t count on them,” Osric said.

He had suspected as much. Hearing it pressed flat into words made it real in the way nothing else had.

“They weren’t exactly overflowing, either,” Perrin added. “Heard tell there’s bad blight two valleys east. Everyone’s holding tighter. Selling less.”

“This just keeps getting better,” Lys muttered.

“On the bright side,” Perrin said, “I brought… well, not grain.” He nudged his pack with a boot. “But things you can chew around, if not on. Herbs, charms, three very small wheels of cheese I might be willing to part with for a kidney each.”

“Too soon,” someone groaned.

Sera had gone very still against the wall. Tavi’s hand sought hers blindly.

“So,” Farlan said, voice a little hollow. “No caravan. Maybe. Maybe half a caravan, broken and late. More hungry mouths out there, even hungrier than us. Sounds to me like someone’s trying to tell us we can’t afford to be generous this year.”

He looked at Osric.

Osric felt the weight of that look like someone had dropped a full sack of wheat on his shoulders. Others turned too, subtly or not. It was as if every gaze carried the same unspoken question:

Well, Miller? What do we do now?

“I think,” Osric said carefully, “it’s telling us we can’t afford to be careless. There’s a difference.”

“You’re the one with the numbers,” Mara said. “You’ve done your counting. Can we feed Brookfell like we did last year, or not?”

Silence fell in layers.

Osric could feel Sera’s eyes on him now as well. They contained something that wasn’t quite expectation and wasn’t quite dread.

“I’ve done some counting,” he said. “Not all of it. Not yet. I’ll have clearer sums after I’ve gone through the side stores and had word from a few of the outlying farms.”

Zora, the fishmonger’s wife, folded her arms. “You’re dancing around it.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m telling you I don’t have an answer I trust yet. And I won’t give you one until I do.”

“Crumb would’ve said yes,” Farlan said. “He would’ve said we feed them, caravan or no.”

Osric felt something hot flash under his skin.

“Crumb,” he said, “is not the one standing in my storeroom with a sack in each hand, trying to decide whether to hang a ‘closed’ sign on the mill in two months’ time. Crumb is not the one who has to watch the sacks for insects and the bins for mold. Crumb is not the one who will have to look you in the eye in late winter if we misjudge and tell your children there is nothing left to grind.”

“He was once,” Ash said softly.

Osric turned his head. Ash’s gaze was not accusing, but there was a memory in it as sharp as any blade.

“I was there,” Ash went on. “In winters when he stood where you stand now. Stared into the bins until dawn. You’re right—he isn’t here to do it this time. That doesn’t mean you and he stood in different rooms.”

The room waited, breathless.

Osric realized his hands were fisted at his sides. He forced them open.

“I’m not saying he wouldn’t have wanted to help Brookfell,” he said. “Of course he would. I’m saying invoking his name doesn’t add a single grain to the sacks. It just makes it easier to yell at the man doing the counting when you don’t like what he says.”

“That’s not fair,” Mara protested.

“Isn’t it?” he snapped. “Every time I show someone the ledger, they say, ‘What would Crumb have done?’ as if that conjures loaves out of air. Maybe he’d have said yes. Maybe he’d have said, ‘Not this year.’ You know what I remember most from that last winter? Him saying, over and over, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’”

The words came out harsher than he meant. Perrin shifted uncomfortably, tugging at his beard. Lys set down a mug a little too firmly.

Sera rose to her feet.

“We didn’t come to throw his name at you,” she said. “We came because that name… was all that stood between my village and death, once. We came to see if the promise he made—your village made—still stands now that he is under the ground.”

Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t have to. The quiet in it pulled the room’s attention like a weight.

Osric met her gaze and saw the thinness of her wrists, the shadows under her eyes, the way Tavi leaned into her side as if borrowing strength.

“I know what he said to you,” he replied, trying to keep his tone level. “I was there too. ‘As long as the mill turns and the ovens burn,’ and so on. I also know he didn’t write that promise into the stones with magic. He wrote it into us. Which means we have to keep deciding what it means every year, with whatever winter hands us.”

“And this winter,” Farlan muttered, “is handing us rot and late caravans and too many mouths.”

“And if,” Zora added sharply, “we put Brookfell first again, what does it hand us next year when we’ve nothing left to trade, because we’ve eaten our seeds?”

The argument started again then, overlapping voices, fear and anger and loyalty tangled together.

“They’re our neighbors—”

“They’re our competitors for the same crumbs—”

“Crumb wouldn’t have—”

“Crumb isn’t here—”

Osric stood in the middle of it and felt something in him inch toward the edge of his own cliff.

They wanted a Pathfinder. Someone to stand up on a stone, point at a direction, and say, “There. That way. You’ll hate it, but follow me anyway.” They wanted to be able to blame him later if it went wrong and praise him as a legend if it went right.

He could not do that. He would not.

Not because he cared less than Crumb had. Perhaps because he cared too much about being able to sleep at night after the choices were tallied.

“Enough,” he said.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. The word dropped into the room like a millstone, and voices faltered around it.

“We don’t have the numbers yet,” he said. “Not fully. We don’t have clear word from the caravan, only Perrin’s scraps and rumors. What we do have is a month until the Vigil. We will use that month. We will count, and listen, and argue like civilized people who all have to live with each other in spring, whether we’re full or not. And when we stand on that hill with the candles lit, we’ll have more than feelings to throw at the fire. We’ll have facts.”

“Facts don’t fill bowls,” someone muttered.

“No,” Osric said. “But they stop us from smashing them on each other’s heads while we’re starving.”

A reluctant chuckle went around the room. It wasn’t much, but it loosened shoulders.

“What about the promise?” Tavi whispered. “Will you break it?”

Every head turned to her, then to him. The girl looked like the question had cost her something to ask.

Osric felt the pedestal they were all nudging him toward—a step up from the floor, a place to stand and speak as if he spoke for someone else. For Crumb. For the village. He could feel the contours of it under his feet, tempting and terrible.

“I can’t answer that alone,” he said. “And I won’t pretend to be the man who made it. What I can say is this: I will not hide the numbers. When I know how much we truly have, both villages will hear the truth. And then we’ll decide together how much we’re willing to risk for each other.”

It wasn’t the answer anyone had wanted. It was too small to satisfy faith and too large to calm fear.

But it was the only one he could give and still recognize himself in the morning.

Slowly, people went back to their bowls, to their muttering. The talk turned to smaller complaints: the quality of this year’s wool, the way the river ice creaked at night. The big question sank under them like a stone under water, still there, still heavy.

Perrin cornered Lys to talk trade. Mara squeezed Osric’s arm as she passed him to leave, eyes full of worry and something like sympathy. Ash came to stand by the hearth, feeding the fire a stick at a time.

Kindle dropped from the rafters to the table, pecked at a crumb, and then hopped onto the back of an empty chair. For a moment, its beady eye fixed on Osric.

“What?” he asked it under his breath. “You looking for a new perch too?”

The bird fluffed its feathers, then took off again, darting toward the door as someone opened it. It vanished into the white beyond.

Osric found, to his annoyance, that he envied it.

Later, when the mill’s stones had been stopped and the last of the day’s grain swept and stored, Osric stood alone in his storeroom with a lantern and his ledger.

The stacks of sacks loomed around him, familiar shapes that comforted and threatened in equal measure. He rested his hand on one and felt the solid weight of it. This he understood. This he could measure.

He opened the ledger on an upturned crate and stared at the columns of numbers he’d scratched there, the lines dividing seasons, the little notes about blight and spoilage. They did not care about pedestals or promises. They cared only about what was there and what was not.

“They’ll try to put you on one,” he told the empty room. “Crumb’s stone. Crumb’s shadow. Crumb’s friend, so you must be the next best thing.”

He imagined himself up on that hill at the Vigil, raised on a stone, people looking up with those same mixed eyes: fear, hope, anger.

He imagined himself refusing to stand there.

“We built the Circle level for a reason,” he muttered. “Stones all the same height. Fire in the middle, not under one man’s feet.”

The words sounded like something Liora might someday tie to a candle. He smirked at the thought despite himself.

“I’ll do the counting,” he said, as if the sacks needed the reassurance. “I’ll say what the numbers say. I’ll argue for what I think won’t kill us. But I won’t speak with his voice, and I won’t let them use his name to beat each other over the head.”

The lantern flame quivered. Outside, the wheel creaked as the river ice shifted.

Osric closed the ledger and laid his palm flat on its worn cover.

On some distant road, he knew, there were wagons—maybe three, maybe none—struggling through snow, their drivers cursing the same sky he saw when he stepped outside. In Brookfell, there were empty bins and thinning children. In his own village, there were people who had decided it was easier to build Crumb up higher, into something untouchable, than to accept that they themselves would have to walk some of the path he’d started.

Pedestals were comfortable. You could leave your heroes on them like tools hung on a wall, ready to be pointed at when convenient.

Roads were less so. You had to put your own feet on those.

Osric lifted the lantern and made his way out of the storeroom, past the humming quiet of the mill’s sleeping stones, toward the door that opened onto the cold, bright stars.

Behind him, the sacks sat and waited, patient and heavy, indifferent to saints and statues alike.