The inn always smelled of more than it had.

Ash had noticed that even in better years. Somehow Lys could take thin broth, a heel of bread, and an onion, and make the room smell like a feast. Today the trick felt sharper, like a memory pretending to be a meal.

He sat at a corner table, both hands wrapped around a warm mug. Whatever was in it had more water than anything else, but it was hot, and his fingers were grateful. Outside, the morning dragged itself along the street in low clouds and muffled hoofbeats. Inside, voices rose and fell, ordinary and anxious in equal measure.

Across the room, near the hearth, Sera and Kalen from Brookfell sat with their cloaks still on, as if they hadn’t decided yet to stay. Tavi squeezed in between them on the bench, back straight, shoulders braced like a small soldier.

Their table held three bowls, scraped nearly clean, and one tiny remaining strip of bread. Ash watched as Sera tore it in three careful pieces, weighing each sliver with her eyes before handing them out.

There was a particular way people moved when they were down to their last pieces. He’d seen it on a dozen roads. It lived in their hands and their faces, a tightness that never quite relaxed, even in warmth.

Lys bustled past with a tray, saw the state of their table, and made a face.

“That’s nothing,” she chided. “You’ll catch your deaths on ‘almosts’.” She slid a small dish of something onto the table— mashed beans, maybe, with a drizzle of oil. “This one’s on the house. And don’t argue,” she added, forestalling Sera’s protest with a look. “You’ll hurt my feelings, and then I’ll sulk, and no one wants that.”

Sera managed a smile. “We wouldn’t dare.”

Tavi’s eyes lingered on the dish like a cat on a bird, but she waited until her elders had taken a bit before dipping her own bread in it.

Ash felt something shift in his chest.

He’d shared plenty of rough meals on the road. He knew the difference between people being polite about hunger and people dancing around the edge of it because they’d rather not trouble anyone.

He finished his drink, set the mug down, and pushed himself to his feet.

His knees argued. He told them to save their complaints for real hills.

Sera looked up as his shadow fell across the table.

“Mind if I steal your bench?” Ash asked. “The other ones seem to be full of people pretending not to listen to us.”

She blinked, then waved him down with a small gesture that tried to be casual and didn’t quite manage it. Kalen nodded, a rusty dip of his head. Tavi’s eyes went wide, then she dropped her gaze to her bread as if afraid to be caught staring.

Ash eased himself onto the bench opposite them, staff resting against his knee.

“Met you yesterday in the mill,” he said. “Properly, I mean. Osric puts names to sacks more easily than faces, but I try to keep up. Sera, Kalen, Tavi, wasn’t it?”

“That’s us,” Sera said. “And you’re Ash. From the stories.”

“From some of them,” he said. “The ones about sore feet and bad decisions.”

That coaxed a small, surprised laugh out of Tavi. Kalen’s mouth twitched.

“We heard you last night at the Circle,” Sera said. “About… the hill. The steps that never were.”

“Ah,” he said, rubbing his thumb along the rim of his empty mug. “That one.”

“You made him sound…” Tavi began, then faltered.

“Like a person,” Sera finished for her gently. “Not a saint.”

Ash tilted his head. “Did you want a saint?”

Tavi looked up, eyes suddenly bright. “I wanted someone who knew what to do,” she said. “Who didn’t… guess.”

The word shook a little.

Ash saw, as if the air between them had thinned, a small kitchen in Brookfell: low ceiling, smoke-stained beams, a table with too many elbows around it. Tavi at the end of it, watching her mother measure flour that wasn’t there and pretend not to count the bites each child took. Listening to grown-ups say we’ll see and maybe and it depends when she asked questions she thought should have clear answers.

“I’ve known a lot of people who pretended not to guess,” Ash said quietly. “Their guesses didn’t turn out any better than the honest ones. They just lied about it after.”

“Crumb didn’t lie,” Kalen rasped. His hands, wrapped around his own mug, had the knotted look of roots that had dug deep and then been cut. “When he said he’d send flour, he did.”

“I know,” Ash said. “I was there.”

“That’s why we came,” Sera said. “Because you knew him. Because this is where he ended. Because he said—” Her voice caught on the remembered words. “He said as long as the mill turns and the ovens burn, the Crossroads won’t let Brookfell starve. We wrote that down. We said it to our children. We carved it on the beam over the door.”

Ash winced inwardly. He’d seen that beam once, on a visit years back. The words had been rough-cut, but they’d been carved there with belief.

“And now?” he asked.

“And now the mill still turns,” Sera said. “The ovens still burn. But he’s in the ground. And the snow is deeper on our hill. Our well’s lower. Our last harvest…” She shook her head, a short, helpless movement. “It barely deserved the name. We brought what we could to grind. We burned what we knew was bad. We stretched. And still…”

She spread her hands, palms up.

Empty.

Tavi’s fingers tightened on the edge of the table until her knuckles went white.

“We’ve been promising them help,” Sera said. “Not tomorrow, not in a dream—here, from the Crossroads. We told them the Pathfinder said, and they believed us because he’d never given them reason not to. If we were wrong to hang hope on that promise, I’d like to know it before we carve our own lies in wood.”

The inn’s noise hummed around them: clink of crockery, a burst of laughter from Farlan and his mates, Perrin’s voice somewhere in the back bargaining over the price of rope. It all felt oddly distant.

Ash thought of Osric’s face at the mill, lined and stubborn. Of the way his hand had rested on the ledger as if it were both shield and burden.

“Osric will do the counting,” he said. “He’ll tell you how the grain stands.”

“We know how the grain stands,” Sera said. “We walked past your bins yesterday. We can count sacks same as any.” She glanced toward the window, where the faint outline of the mill’s roofline could be seen between buildings. “What we don’t know is how your hearts stand.”

Ash opened his mouth, then closed it again.

There it was. The question behind all the others.

“How’s Brookfell?” he asked instead. “Truly. Not just in what you need from us.”

Sera’s gaze drifted away for a moment, as if she were looking at something none of them could see.

“Dry,” she said. “Inside and out. The spring on the east side’s a trickle. The soil up on the south ridge turns to dust if you look at it wrong. We planted twice in some plots and got half the seed back as stalks.” Her mouth twisted. “The children cough more. They fall asleep in the middle of chores. The old men sit around the big stove and argue about whose fault it is this time—the weather, the traders, the saints, themselves.”

Kalen snorted softly. “And they’re all right,” he said. “Is the trouble. A little bit each.”

“There are more lean faces,” Sera went on. “We’ve taken to cutting bread into thinner and thinner slices, so they look the same on the plate even as they give less. We trade where we can. We trap. We boil what we used to throw away. We’re not helpless.” She looked at him sharply, daring him to think it. “But we have run out of tricks that don’t cost us pieces we’d like to keep.”

Ash nodded slowly. “You didn’t bring any sacks with you,” he said. “Yesterday. Just that one little loaf.” He remembered it on Osric’s table, small and dense, like a fist made of flour.

“That loaf,” Tavi said suddenly, “was supposed to be for my little brother’s name day.” Her voice wobbled, but she pushed through it. “We saved sugar for months, little pinches at a time, to sprinkle on top.”

Sera’s hand went to the girl’s shoulder. “Tavi—”

“It’s all right,” the girl said fiercely. “He can have another name day, if he’s there for it. He can’t have another chance at being full.”

Ash’s chest hurt. He had no clever words for that.

“You’re not empty-handed,” he said at last. “You brought more than a loaf. You brought this.” He tapped the table between them. “The courage to come. To look us in the face instead of sitting on your own hill talking about what the Crossroads ought to do. That counts for something.”

“We can’t grind courage,” Sera said. But there was the faintest hint of something in her tone. Not hope. Not yet. Maybe just relief at not being told to go home and be patient.

“No,” Ash agreed. “But it’s the first thing that’s walked through that door from your side since he died. That matters.”

He glanced at Kalen. The old man’s eyes were sharp under the sag of his brows.

“You were there that night,” Ash said. “When he made the promise.”

Kalen nodded. “He stood on a crate in the hall above our main room,” he said. “Said his piece about mills and ovens and not letting neighbors starve. Everyone cheered like he’d handed us gold.” His mouth thinned. “He looked at me after and said, ‘If I’m wrong, you can come shout at me in my own bakery.’”

“Did you?” Ash asked.

Kalen’s gaze slid toward the fire. “Once,” he said. “That first winter after his words. When the sacks came late and thin. I walked down here in snow up to my knees and told him everything I thought about men who promised more than they could carry.” He chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. “He listened. Then he showed me his own bins. The empty corners. The ledger. And he said, ‘I thought I was talking about bread. Turns out I was talking about pain. How much of it we’re willing to share around.’”

Ash could almost hear Crumb saying it, hands moving as he talked, face more tired than he’d let most people see.

“What did you do?” Ash asked.

“What could we do?” Kalen said. “We took less than we’d hoped. You here in the Crossroads ate more shadow than bread for a season. No one died. No one feasted.” His eyes met Ash’s. “We went home angry. We did not go home betrayed.”

Sera’s fingers had found the edge of the table and clenched there.

“I don’t expect miracles,” she said softly. “I expect to know where we stand, even if where we stand is up to our ankles in hunger.”

Ash sat with that a moment.

The Pathfinder would have stood on a table right now, he thought. He would have swept his arm wide and spun words that made people feel bigger than their fear. Maybe he would have promised more than he could see. Maybe that was why people loved him.

Ash was not the Pathfinder. He had never had that ease with promises. He had only the habit of walking beside people who made them and trying to pick up the pieces afterward.

“I can’t speak for Osric,” he said. “Or for the council. Or for Liora and her candles. But I can say this much: if something is being decided about Brookfell in this village, it won’t be decided without Brookfell in the room. Not while I can still walk to the door and open it.”

Sera studied him, measuring the value of that vow.

“That’s… something,” she said.

“It’s a beginning,” he replied. “And beginnings are all roads are made of, as far as I’ve seen.”

Tavi’s mouth twitched. “Is that in your little books?” she asked. “The ones Liora looks at like they’re holy?”

Ash snorted. “They’re full of blisters and bad nights,” he said. “Doesn’t sound very holy to me.”

He paused, then pushed himself up from the bench.

“Come,” he said.

Sera blinked. “Where?”

“You’ve seen the mill,” he said. “You’ve seen the inn. You’ve seen the hill. Time you saw the rest of what you’re asking a share in.”

He turned toward the door, leaning on his staff. After a moment, curiosity and something more pulled them up after him.

Outside, the cold bit sharper than it had that morning. The sky was a blunt, cloud-clotted gray. The street, churned by boots and cartwheels, had turned to a frozen mess of ridges and grooves. Ash set his feet carefully and led them toward the square.

They passed Pathfinder’s Crumb. Warmth breathed from its windows. Liora moved inside, a shadow behind glass, carrying a tray of something pale and round. The smell of baking slipped under the door, stubbornly generous.

Tavi slowed, nostrils flaring.

“Later,” Ash said gently. “If we go in now, you’ll never come out again.”

“I could live on the floor,” she said. “Sweep up crumbs. Sleep under the table.”

“You’d get stepped on,” he replied. “Though you might still think it worth it.”

The girl’s lips quirked despite herself.

In the square, a few stalls still stood, though there was less on them than in better years. A woman sold carved wooden toys with more care than demand. A fishmonger’s boy hawked thin river fish, their eyes dull, their bodies shrunken from the cold. The brazier by the well sputtered with a mixture of wood and whatever else people had been willing to toss in.

Sera’s gaze roamed, taking it all in.

“You look disappointed,” Ash said.

“I look… surprised,” she replied. “Your stories make it sound as if the Crossroads is always full. Always loud. Always…” She searched for the word. “Sure of itself.”

“We only tell those stories on market days,” Ash said. “This is what we look like most of the time.”

“Tired,” Kalen said.

“Trying,” Ash countered.

He led them past the square, down toward the lower edge of the village, where small gardens slept under snow and the path bent toward the river.

“Why here?” Sera asked.

“Because this is where our fields start,” he said. “You saw your own on the way in. Time you saw ours with clearer eyes than just longing for what they might hold.”

They stopped at the low stone wall that marked the beginning of the first terrace. Beyond it, the land sloped gently, rows faint under the snow. Osric’s footprints from the day before still scarred the thin white, leading out and back.

Ash gestured.

“There,” he said. “That’s where your flour comes from when it’s not coming from Marrowgate carts. That’s where Osric was this morning, checking for rot. That’s what people here see when they talk about promises and risk. Not just sacks in a mill. These strips. This soil.”

Sera rested her hands on the top of the wall. Her fingers pressed into lichen.

“It looks like ours,” she said softly. “Different stones. Same dirt.”

“Exactly,” Ash said. “And that hill over there—” He nodded toward the rise where the Circle sat, just visible. “—looks different from yours, I expect. But it’s got its own old bones. Its own ghosts.”

They stood in silence a moment.

A small movement drew Ash’s eye. Down by the far corner of the field, a brown flicker landed on a fence post.

Kindle. Watching again.

It hopped along the wall, then dropped into the snow, flitting up a moment later with a seed husk in its beak. It seemed to glance their way—absurd, he knew, but the feeling was strong—then shot off toward the ridge where Osric had walked.

Tavi tracked it with her eyes.

“Is that…?” she began.

“Yes,” Ash said. “We don’t know what it is exactly, and I’m not sure I want to. Seems to like being unpinned.”

“In Brookfell they say birds carry prayers,” Kalen said. “If you whisper them right.”

“Here we say they steal your lunch if you’re not looking,” Ash replied. “But perhaps it can manage both.”

Sera exhaled, breath pluming in the cold.

“All right,” she said. “You’ve shown us where your bread begins. Now what?”

“Now,” Ash said, turning back toward the village, “I take you to Liora. And then to Osric, if he’ll unglue himself from his ledger long enough.”

Sera stiffened. “We’ve already troubled the miller more than—”

“Trouble is what happens when people decide things about you without you in the room,” Ash said. “We’re going to try something different.”

He led them back up, shoulders protesting the climb. Liora looked up as the door to Pathfinder’s Crumb opened, the bell giving its thin jingle.

“Ash,” she said. “You’re just in time to—”

She saw the trio behind him and straightened, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Come in,” she said at once, voice shifting into that particular warmth she reserved for people who looked more weary than most. “Close the door. You’re letting the entire sky in, and I haven’t dusted.”

Tavi hesitated on the threshold, then stepped in, eyes going wide at the sight of the shelves and the oven and the rows of cooling loaves.

“It smells like the stories,” she whispered.

Liora’s gaze softened. “I can’t live up to all of them at once,” she warned. “But we can manage a few.”

Ash made introductions. Sera and Liora clasped hands like women who’d both been holding too much for too long. Kalen bowed a little. Tavi hovered, uncertainty and hunger warring in her expression.

“Osric told me you were in town,” Liora said. “I thought I’d see you sooner or later.”

“We were… feeling our way,” Sera replied. “Didn’t want to barge into your hearth and lay our empty plates on your table.”

“You’d be disappointed by how used to that I am,” Liora said dryly. “Sit. Please.”

She ushered them to a small table near the back, where the heat from the oven bled into the wood. Ash hung back, content to let her take the lead.

She cut three slices from a loaf that had clearly not been destined for sale—slightly misshapen, crust a little darker than perfect—and set them on a plate.

“This is mine,” she said. “Not the bakery’s. That means I get to give it away without counting.” She smiled faintly. “Elen would have my head for the shape of it, anyway.”

Sera started to protest. Liora silenced her with a look that could have put out candles.

“Eat first,” she said. “Then talk. One of those things you can do hungry, and it’s not the talking.”

They ate. The bread was plain, but it was bread, solid and warm. Tavi made a noise halfway between a sigh and a sob on her first bite. Kalen’s hands shook around his chunk. Sera chewed slowly, eyes closed.

Ash leaned against the counter and watched. Liora caught his gaze for a heartbeat.

Well? her eyebrows asked.

He tipped his head toward Sera and made a small circling motion with one hand. Keep going.

When the first edge of hunger had been dulled, Sera set the crusts down, wiped her fingers on her cloak, and spoke.

She told the story of Brookfell much as she had in the inn, but here, amidst flour dust and the smell of yeast, the words seemed to sink deeper. Liora listened with her whole body, arms folded, jaw set, eyes bright.

When Sera finished, Tavi whispered, “We carved his words over our door.” It sounded almost like she was confessing.

Liora’s face changed. A shadow passed over it, not quite sorrow, not quite guilt. Something of both.

“Well,” she said softly. “That’s more permanent than his own handwriting. He’d be flattered and horrified in one breath.”

Sera huffed a breath that was very close to a laugh.

“We came because we didn’t know if those words still meant anything,” she said. “We thought… perhaps the Crossroads would say, ‘That was Crumb. This is us. We owe you nothing.’”

“We’re not a different village because he’s gone,” Liora said. “Just a shorter one.” She glanced at Ash. “We’re arguing about how to remember him, not whether to pretend he never opened his mouth.”

“We’re arguing,” Ash put in, “about whether remembering him means doing what he did, or just telling ourselves stories about it while we do the opposite.”

Sera looked between them. “And which way are you leaning?”

Liora’s mouth pressed flat. “Depends which hour you ask me,” she admitted. “This morning I leaned toward giving away the whole bakery and letting the council work out how to eat stones. After listening to Osric yesterday, I leaned toward locking the doors and shouting at anyone who comes near with an empty sack. Neither is useful.”

“I need to ask you something,” Ash said. “Both of you.”

He stepped closer to the table.

“Will you come to the next council meeting?” he asked Sera. “Not just sit at the inn and wait for news. Sit in the room where we are shouting at each other.”

Sera’s brows went up. “Is that allowed?” she asked.

“Allowed?” Liora snorted. “Who’s going to stop you? Farlan? He’d have to get up out of his precious chair.”

Ash ignored that. “If we’re going to talk about promises to Brookfell,” he said, “I want Brookfell looking us in the eye when we weigh them. I’m tired of having conversations where you exist as an idea and not as a woman with frostbite on her fingers and a daughter on her name day bread.”

Tavi flushed.

Sera hesitated. Fear flickered in her eyes— not of the Crossroads, exactly, but of being the one to stand up with empty hands and ask.

“I don’t know your ways,” she said. “Your council. Your… politics.”

“Our ways,” Liora said bluntly, “are people talking until they’re hoarse and then doing what they were going to do anyway, but with a bit more guilt. And there is no politics in asking not to be forgotten.”

“That’s the problem,” Ash said. “There ought to be. There ought to be friction. We’ve gotten too used to saying ‘we’ when we mean ‘the Crossroads’ and assuming it covers everyone within shouting distance.”

He put his hand on the back of a chair to steady himself.

“I’m not promising you a yes,” he said. “On anything. I’m promising you this: you won’t have to wonder what we’re saying about you behind closed doors.”

Sera looked at him for a long moment.

Then she nodded. Once. Sharp.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll come. And if your people don’t like it…”

“They can blame me,” Ash said. “They’ve been doing it for years. I’m used to it.”

Liora made a small, skeptical noise. “You realize,” she said to him, “that you’re volunteering to walk them up to the council house and stand between Farlan and whatever he says with his mouth before his brain catches up.”

“I’ve stood between worse,” Ash replied. “And Farlan runs out of steam faster than he thinks.”

He turned back to Sera and Kalen. “The meeting’s on fourthday,” he said. “Just after midday. You’ll hear the bell. Come then.”

Kalen nodded. “We’ll be there,” he said. “Empty hands, full mouths, whatever we have at the time.”

His gaze dropped to his palms as he said it. Ash saw the calluses there, the scars. Empty hands, yes. But not useless ones.

He thought of the little patch of stubborn green growing on the hill, unplanned and persistent.

“Bring your hands,” Ash said. “Full or empty. That’s the point.”

Later, as he walked back toward the inn, Kindle appeared again, winging low over the roofs. It dipped once, twice, then landed on the lintel of the council house, a small, smudged shape against the pale wood.

Ash stopped in the street and squinted up at it.

“You keep this up,” he told the bird, “and people will start thinking you’re a sign.”

Kindle fluffed its feathers, then shook itself and flew off toward the mill.

Ash watched it go, then looked at the council house door.

Inside that room, soon, there would be raised voices and slammed palms and numbers scraped into the table. There would be fear masquerading as prudence and generosity dressing itself up as foolishness.

And this time, when Brookfell’s name was spoken, it would be by Brookfell’s own mouths as well.

He felt very old suddenly, and very tired.

But he also felt—just a little, in the small, unlit corners of himself—like he was doing what Crumb would have wanted him to do.

Not deciding for people. Not promising on their behalf. Just opening the door and saying, Come in. If we’re going to hurt, let’s at least hurt honestly together.

He took a breath that tasted of smoke and snow and bread, leaned on his staff, and walked on.