The river sounded different in winter.

In summer it muttered and chuckled along the stones, easy and full. Today it whispered under ice, a tight, secretive sound that made Osric think of teeth chattering behind closed lips.

He followed it out of the village anyway, boots crunching on the frozen path, breath streaming in front of him. The mill sat behind him like a sulking animal, wheel turning slow in the low water. He didn’t like leaving it for long. But numbers scratched on a slate were only half the truth. The rest lived in barns and in rows under snow.

He needed to see it with his own eyes.

Joran had offered to come. Osric had sent him back to the grain screens with a wave of his hand.

“Someone has to keep the stones honest,” he’d said. “And I walk faster alone.”

That last bit wasn’t true anymore, but the boy hadn’t argued. There was work enough in town. Out here, the work was mostly looking.

The Crossroads didn’t sprawl, exactly. The cluster of houses and shops sat in a dip by the river, with the hill and its Circle rising behind and the fields rippling out from there—terraces and strips that wrapped around the valley’s contours. In winter, it looked like someone had brushed the land with white and left the darker patches where it caught.

Osric turned off the main track toward the first of the outlying farms, the one the Dellers kept. Their field ran along a low ridge that caught the wind; the snow there was thinner, scoured down to reveal the stubble of last season’s grain.

He climbed the slope, boots slipping on hidden ice, and paused at the top to catch his breath and take it in.

From here he could see nearly the whole sweep of the Crossroads lands: the patchwork of fields, fallows, and rough scrub; the dark line of the forest beyond; the thin plume of smoke from Brookfell’s direction barely visible on the far hills when the light hit it right. It had always comforted him, this view. Every strip of earth had a story: who had turned it, what had grown there, how many sacks had been hauled from it to his mill.

Today, the comfort was thinner.

Snow lay patchy, especially where the wind had worried at it. In places it had curled away entirely, leaving the soil bare and exposed. The stalks that poked through were brittle, some blackened near the base.

He crouched and snapped one off, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. It crumbled too easily, a dry, hollow sound. When he broke the head, the kernels inside were shrunken, with a faint gray dust clinging to them.

“Smuts,” he muttered.

He was no scholar of plant-plagues. He knew what the old farmers told him and what his own years had shown: sometimes the grain grew wrong. Sometimes damp in the wrong week and warmth in the wrong one invited things into the heads that did not belong there. Most of the sick heads got winnowed out before they reached his stones.

But sometimes they did not. Sometimes you only saw it when you cracked the sacks.

He straightened slowly, feeling that familiar knot tighten beneath his ribs.

Deller’s daughter, Anet, came up the ridge path a moment later, a woven basket on her arm and a shawl half-pulled over her hair against the wind. She saw him and stopped short.

“Miller,” she said. “Didn’t expect to see you out this far.”

“Thought I’d come see where your share of the bins began,” he replied. He lifted the ruined stalk. “You had much of this?”

She made a face. “Enough to curse at,” she said. “We burned a lot of it after harvest. My uncle said it was better than letting it near the good grain. Still, some ends up in the piles. Hard to catch every head when your fingers are numb and the light’s going.”

He nodded. He hadn’t had manpower enough at the mill to check every bundle before it went into the threshing. They’d done their best. Their best, it seemed, had left gaps.

Anet shifted the basket on her hip. It held turnips and knotted roots, dull and misshapen. “You out here to count how badly we’ve done?” she asked. Her tone was lighter than the words, but only just.

“To count how badly the year’s done,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“Feels small from where I’m standing,” she muttered.

He looked past her down the slope, to where their little barn huddled by the line of hawthorn that marked the field’s edge. Smoke rose from the house chimney beside it. A dog barked once, then settled.

“You’ve still got the last of your sheaves in the loft?” he asked.

“Some,” she said warily. “We threshed most. Why?”

“Because I’d rather find out now if rot’s taken them than in a month when we’re counting crumbs.” He jerked his chin toward the barn. “Show me.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Fine. If you’re going to bring bad news, might as well get it over with before dinner.”

They walked down together. The snow squeaked underfoot, not deep but treacherous. Osric tried not to think about the way his knees complained. At least out here there were no curious ears. Only Anet’s, and she’d never been shy about saying what she thought.

Inside the barn, the air was warmer, thick with the smell of old straw, animal breath, and dust. A ladder led up to the loft where the last, unthreshed bundles of grain were stored, tied together in neat sheaves and stacked above the reach of mice.

Osric climbed, lantern swinging from one hand, Anet close behind.

At the top, he ducked into the low space. Light pooled across the bundles. He knelt and untied one, fingers careful, then rubbed a few heads between his palms.

Some grain spilled out clean and hard. Some came with that same gray smear, the faint sourness riding underneath the straw-sweet.

“How much of this went to my bins?” he asked.

“Not these,” Anet said quickly. “These are from the last cutting. The lower field. We knew it was worse there. We kept them separate, like you said. Didn’t want to risk the main stores.”

That was something, at least. He set the spoiled bundle aside.

“Still,” he said. “You’ll need to be careful if you use any of this for seed. Sick heads grow sick stalks.”

“If we grow anything at all,” she said. “The ground feels tired. Like we’ve pulled too much from it.”

He’d heard similar murmurs from others. The soil wasn’t a ledger. You could not simply put down rock dust and manure where you’d taken grain and expect it to balance perfectly every time. Some years it let you get away with your greed. Some, it did not.

He checked a few more bundles, sniffed them, broke them open. Enough were clean that he could say, truthfully, “You’ve done what you could. Keep the worst for burning. Thresh the rest slow, in small batches. I’ll mix it thin with better grain at the mill. No one will thank you for gray bread, but no one will die of it, either.”

“That’s cheerful,” Anet said. But the corners of her mouth twitched as if she appreciated the honesty. “You think we’re worse off than the others?”

“I think you’re honest enough to show me your worst loft,” he said. “That’s something some folk haven’t managed yet. Don’t make me knock on their doors to ask.”

She snorted. “Lann downriver still swears his grain is blessed,” she said. “Even though I saw his youngest picking weevils out of a sack last week and feeding them to the chickens like treats.”

Osric grimaced. “I’ll be paying Lann a visit,” he said.

He finished his inspection and climbed down, joints protesting more now. Outside, the wind had picked up a little, scouring loose snow across the field in small, hissing drifts.

He thanked Anet, promised to send word if he found anything at the mill that matched what he’d seen in her loft, and headed toward the next farm.

It went like that all day.

At the Rowan place, the bins were solid, but their root cellar had a damp corner where a barrel of barley had started to swell and sour. At Yel’s, mice had found their way into an unwatched sack, leaving droppings and holes that meant they’d lose more than just what the vermin had eaten. At one of the smallholdings up the north slope, there was less grain to spoil in the first place; the family had eaten deep into their own store already, quietly, so as not to show up on his ledger as a problem.

“Didn’t want to be a burden,” the man of the house had said, eyes embarrassed. As if starving in silence was somehow less of a weight.

Osric added each finding to the ledger in his head, lines tumbling over each other until they blurred. By the time the sun had folded itself behind the hill and the cold began to bite in earnest, he was tired in a way that lived in bone and thought both.

He turned toward home across the last of the upper fields, cutting diagonally over a slope the plow never quite tamed. Here the land broke into scrubbier tufts, old stone, patches of wild that no one had bothered to claim.

The snow lay more uneven here, drifting deep in pockets and leaving others bare. In one such bare spot, something caught his eye.

At first he thought it was just another patch of stubble. Then his brain, weary as it was, noticed the color.

The stalks here were a paler gold, almost green where they met the earth, not the uniform gray-brown of the harvested fields. He frowned and altered his path to get a closer look.

It wasn’t full-grown grain—not this late in winter, not with the ground this hard. But it was something. Short blades, clustered thick, thrusting up through the thinnest crust of snow. Old-seed volunteers, perhaps, dropped in some previous season and forgotten.

He knelt, slow, and brushed aside the powder to see better.

The little plants were vigorous, their leaves narrow and strong. A few had the beginnings of heads forming, tight and still, weeks away from anything useful. But their sheer persistence—this insistence on sprouting when everything else had gone to sleep—pricked at him.

“Who planted you?” he asked under his breath. “And who are you trying to impress?”

The wind didn’t answer.

Something fluttered at the edge of his vision. He looked up to see a small brown body alight on a broken fence post nearby.

Kindle.

The bird perched, feathers sleeked tight against the cold, head cocked. Its sharp little eyes seemed to take in the same patch of stubborn green.

Osric let out a breath that might have been a laugh if he’d been less tired.

“Don’t tell me you brought me out here to look at weeds,” he said.

Kindle hopped once on the post, then swooped down in a quick, darting arc. It landed right in the middle of the patch, claws gripping the frozen soil between the shoots. It pecked once, twice, not at the green blades but at something beneath them—stuck grain, perhaps, or a stray seed husk.

When it had had its fill, it flitted back up, hovered, and then zipped off in a straight line toward the village, as if its work here was done.

Osric stayed kneeling a moment longer, the absurdity of it tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“Fine,” he murmured. “You’ve made your point.”

He pinched one of the shoots between thumb and forefinger, very gently, and tugged it free with its little root dangling. Not to waste, but to look closer.

The root was fine, white, clean. No spots, no rot. The plant smelled… alive, in a way that dry grain never did.

Volunteer growth, he decided. Some mishmash of varieties shaken loose from a sack one year and trampled in, finding just enough to cling to when the season turned. No human hand had planned it. No careful rotation had granted it that patch of hillside. It had taken the first chance it saw and grown with it.

He tucked the tiny plant into his pocket, more as a marker than anything else. When the ground softened, he’d come back with a spade and see how deep the soil went here, whether it might be worth sowing more deliberately. It was too small a patch to save a village, but it was an interesting reminder that not all grain followed the tidy rows they scratched into the earth.

On the walk back, that thought turned over with the others in his mind.

The planned paths—the fields, the bins, the caravan routes from Marrowgate—were failing them in small, sharp ways. Rot here, crack there, bad timing everywhere. But here was this little accidental stand of life, springing up where no one had set a plan.

It wasn’t much. Not enough to put on a ledger or bring to the council as anything more than a curiosity.

Still.

When he reached the edge of the village, the sky just beginning to bruise purple, he could see the lamplight in Pathfinder’s Crumb’s windows, warm squares against the cold. He imagined Liora inside, elbows dusted with wax, muttering to herself and the candles, trying to shape stories into something that would hold without snapping.

He touched the lump in his pocket—the little living sprig—and then the edge of his ledger, tucked under his arm.

Numbers, plans, promises. And somewhere in between, things that simply grew because they refused not to.

The wind slipped down from the hill and cut through his cloak. Osric hunched his shoulders against it and lengthened his stride.

Tomorrow he would mark the Dellers’ losses in his book. He would add Yel’s spoiled barrel and the north-slope family’s silent hunger. He would adjust the lines again, bend them into something that resembled a future.

He would not tell anyone about the green patch. Not yet. Not until he knew whether it was a sign or just a stubborn accident.

For now, he carried it alone, a small, fragile secret of life in a day that had been mostly about loss.

Behind him, up on the ridge, the little plants clung to the thin soil as the night settled in. Ahead of him, the Circle stones on the hill waited under their blanket of snow, and the mill wheel creaked on, turning stories and grain alike into something people could eat or live by, depending on which they needed more.