The council bell did not have a special tone for bad news. It was the same dull iron clang it had always been, beating the air over the square like a slow, impatient fist.

Even so, by the third stroke, people were already saying, “Well?” to one another, as if the sound itself carried the shape of the questions waiting uphill.

Osric arrived at the council house with flour on his sleeves and the ledger under his arm. He’d wiped his boots as best he could, but a thin crust of field mud still clung to the edges. It felt right, somehow, to bring some of the outside in.

The building was a long, low room of plank and stone, with a single door and two shuttered windows. Inside, benches lined the walls, and a thick table took up most of the space in the center. The table bore the scars of a decade’s worth of arguments—knife gouges, spilled ink, the blackened rim of an old candle accident. It was, Osric thought, a more honest record of their decisions than anything he wrote down.

He set the ledger at one end of it and blew out a breath.

“You look like you’re going to your own hanging,” Lys observed, coming in behind him with a tray of tin cups.

“Depends how they take it,” he said. “And how much shouting Farlan’s got in him today.”

“Farlan’s got enough shouting for four men,” she said. “But only one set of lungs. He’ll run out.” She set the tray down. “You want water? Or something stronger?”

“Water,” he said. “If I start on anything stronger, they’ll say I cooked the numbers.”

Lys snorted, but poured for him anyway.

People filtered in by ones and twos, boots thumping, cloaks dripping from the mist outside. They shook off snow, stumped their feet, sat down with the particular combination of weariness and eagerness that came when there was trouble to be discussed and nothing else to do about it but talk.

Farlan the cooper, broad and barrel-chested, claimed his usual place halfway down the table, already scowling. Zora from the river took a seat opposite him, hands roughened by nets and rope. Mara arrived with her knitting in hand, needles clicking even as she sat. Deller, Rowan, Yel— three of the larger farmholders— sat together like a row of stumps, arms folded, mouths thin.

Liora slipped in and took a spot near the far end, candle wax still clinging in pale flecks to the sleeves of her dark dress. She met Osric’s eye briefly, a question there: Ready?

He wasn’t. He nodded anyway.

Ash came last of the Crossroads folk, leaning a little on his staff. He took a bench by the wall, not at the table, but no one mistook that for a lack of interest.

Then the door opened again, and a different kind of chill came in.

Sera, Kalen, and Tavi stepped over the threshold together. They had their cloaks on, but no packs; they had decided, at least for this hour, to belong to the room rather than be ready to leave it.

A murmur went through the benches. Not surprise—everyone knew they were in the village now—but the sound people made when an idea acquired a face.

“They’re really bringing them in,” someone whispered near the back.

“Good,” Ash said, not quietly enough for it to be a secret.

The head of the council, an older woman named Hesta with a braid the thickness of a rope, banged a wooden spoon against the table.

“All right,” she said. “We’re here. The doors are shut. The fire’s lit. Let’s try to be less foolish than the weather for once.” Her eyes flicked toward Sera’s trio and back. “We have guests. They are not to be talked about as if they’re not in the room. We clear on that?”

A few of the more shamefaced voices subsided.

“Good,” Hesta said. “Miller. Your numbers.”

Osric swallowed, took his cup, and drained half of it in one go. Then he opened the ledger.

“We’ll start with what we know,” he said. “And keep our guessing in a separate pile.”

Perrin, the trader, sat on a bench near the door, his pack at his feet, as if ready to be called on for the latest road rumors. He lifted a hand in easy acknowledgment.

Osric ran a finger down a page where the columns marched in neat strokes.

“As of three days past,” he said, “we have thirty-five sacks of good grain in the mill bins. That’s after I’ve removed and burned what’s gone sour or weeviled. I’ve checked the village stores house by house these past days where folk would let me. Best honest counting puts another twelve sacks’ worth scattered in barns and cellars— some whole, some in smaller bits. Call it forty-seven sacks we can trust, more or less.”

“More or less?” muttered Farlan. “That’s a comfort.”

“Less,” Zora said dryly, “if we don’t start keeping the rats out of your cousin’s shed.”

A ragged chuckle.

Osric continued. “On last year’s rations, feeding only the Crossroads, that’s enough to get us to mid-thaw with a little to spare. If the caravan from Marrowgate arrives full and on time, we’d have margin to trade, maybe even send more to Brookfell than we managed last year.”

He shut the book for a beat. It made a soft thump on the wood.

“But the caravan,” he said, “is not full and on time.”

Heads turned toward Perrin. Hesta gestured with her spoon. “Perrin?”

He stood, hitching his belt.

“As I told some of you at the inn,” he said, “I saw three wagons bearing Marrowgate seals stuck near Hallow Bridge about ten days back. Broken axles. Short on beasts. Weather was closing in. Make no mistake, they’ll try to get something through. There’s profit enough in it, and pride. But if they’re coming, they’re limping. And there’s talk of blight two valleys east. Nobody’s sitting on full barns this year, least of all the big cities.”

“So we should assume,” Osric said, “no caravan. Or at best half a one, very late.”

Silence edged in around the words.

Hesta nodded once. “Better to be surprised by extra than by emptiness,” she said. “Go on.”

Osric reopened the ledger.

“I’ve run it three ways,” he said. “One: We feed only the Crossroads, at last year’s ration. No cuts. No extra. We make it through the winter tight but whole, assuming no further spoilage and no new mouths arriving.”

“Brookfell?” Sera asked quietly.

He met her eyes. “On that path,” he said, “you die.”

No one asked him to soften it. The word dropped into the room and stayed there, cold and hard.

“Two,” he went on, forcing his voice steady. “We feed the Crossroads and Brookfell at last year’s share. That means sending near as much as we did before, with what we have now. We all eat well enough for the next month. Then we start cutting. Hard. We likely hit empty bins before the thaw. Maybe the caravan makes up the difference, maybe not. If it doesn’t, we’re looking at a late winter of boiled bark and shoe leather.”

Deller swore softly. Mara’s knitting stilled.

“And three.” Osric ran his thumb along the edge of the page. “We feed both villages at lean rations from the start. Half loaves. More porridge, less bread. No one feasts, no one starves outright so long as nothing else goes wrong. We all live hungry until spring. If the caravan comes, we breathe easier. If it doesn’t, we still likely make it, but with nothing in hand for planting or trade after.”

Hesta tapped the spoon thoughtfully on the table. “So our choices, plainly,” she said. “Keep our hands closed and our bellies reasonably full. Open them wide and risk all of us going hungry later. Or open them half and plan for a long, mean winter.”

“Those are the numbers,” Osric said. “They don’t care what we promise or who we like. That’s what they say.”

“They don’t say anything about Crumb,” Farlan muttered.

Osric’s jaw twitched. “Numbers don’t record ghosts,” he said. “They record grain.”

“Crumb,” Farlan said louder, “would have picked the second. He would have said we feed Brookfell like we did, and trust the road to rise to meet us. He said—”

“We know what he said,” Kalen cut in. His old voice rasped, but it carried. “Some of us have it written on our houses.”

All eyes swung to him, the stranger who wasn’t quite a stranger.

“He also said,” Kalen went on, “that he didn’t know if he was right. You were there, Osric. Ash. You saw him stare into empty bins like they were graves. If you’re going to invoke his name, do it honestly. Don’t pretend he was so sure of his own wisdom that he never lost sleep.”

Farlan opened his mouth, then shut it again, glaring down at the table.

“We are not here,” Hesta said, “to guess what a dead man would do with a winter he never saw. We are here to decide what we will do with the one in front of us.”

“I know what we should do,” Zora said. “We should stop talking about three neat choices as if the world ever gives us that. Osric, you said forty-seven sacks we can trust. How many mouths, counting Brookfell, if they come in full?”

Osric ran quick sums in his head. “Crossroads, eighty-four souls, give or take a newborn,” he said. “Brookfell, Sera?”

“Ninety-three,” Sera answered at once. “If old Harn makes it through the week.”

“That’s—” Zora waved a hand. “Call it a hundred and seventy. We are not talking about bins and sacks. We’re talking about a hundred and seventy mouths. Children. Old folk. People who know how to plant and mend and keep this valley from turning into a story about a place that used to be.”

“That’s more reason,” Farlan said, “to make sure the hundred and seventy don’t all starve together because we were too proud to say ‘we can’t.’”

“Pride,” Mara said sharply, “is keeping your neighbor’s name off your lips when you talk about your own safety. Not sharing.”

Liora had been quiet, fingers curled around a cup she’d barely sipped. Her gaze flicked from speaker to speaker like someone watching a storm roll over the fields, gauging where the lightning was most likely to strike.

“Osric,” she said suddenly. “Put it in stories.”

He blinked. “What?”

“You just gave them numbers,” she said. “And half of them went deaf as soon as you said ‘forty-seven.’ Put it in loaves. In days. In what it feels like.”

Osric shut his eyes for a moment, then nodded once.

“All right,” he said. “If we close our fists— feed only the Crossroads, at last year’s ration— we keep eating as you’re used to. Thick slices. Bread on the table every meal. Brookfell eats… whatever they can find, and after a while, they don’t eat at all. Some of them walk here and die on the road. Some die at home where you don’t have to see them. In spring, there are fewer hands in Brookfell to plant, fewer backs to trade with us, fewer voices at the Circle. We’re alive. They aren’t.”

He took a breath.

“If we open them wide— share as we did last winter— we have a month where it feels almost like before. Maybe two. We stand a little straighter. Brookfell cheers our name. Then the bins scrape bare. We start boiling the sweepings. Children cry more. You start looking at your seed sacks and thinking, ‘Well, we can plant less next year.’ If the caravan comes, you’ll say it was worth it. If it doesn’t, some of us die who didn’t have to.”

He saw people flinch. Good, he thought. They should.

“And if we… try to walk between,” he said. “If we open them half— we set rations now. Today. Half loaves only, from this week on. More stews, more soups, more days when you go to bed with a hollow in your middle. We send less to Brookfell than before. Enough that no one there has to bury a child for want of crust, if they stretch it as we do. Nobody feasts. Nobody starves clean. We all carry the same ache.”

He let the picture sit.

Mara’s needles started up again, faster now. Deller rubbed at his thigh as if it hurt. Tavi stared down at the table, jaw clenched.

“What you’re saying,” Hesta said, “is that there is no path that does not hurt.”

“Yes,” Osric said simply.

“And that you’d prefer,” she added, “the hurt shared.”

He hesitated. Every eye in the room seemed to lean toward him.

“I prefer,” he said slowly, “that come spring, we do not have to visit Brookfell and pick our way through more graves than houses. I prefer that our children here know what it is to go without, so that if they ever stand where we’re sitting, they have some sense of why sharing is costly and why it matters. And I prefer,” he added, “to be able to look at Kalen and Sera and this girl and say, ‘We did not turn our backs,’ even if all we could give was thinner slices.”

“Sounds like a yes to the third path,” Zora said.

“It sounds,” Farlan snapped, “like a plan to make my little ones chew air because some other village didn’t plan ahead.”

Sera stiffened.

“We did plan,” she said, voice steady. “We saved. We burned bad grain before it poisoned us. We sent three of our men to work for pay in Marrowgate and two did not come back. We did not sit and wait for the Crossroads to rescue us. We did everything we knew to do. It was not enough. If you think we are here because we were lazy, you may keep your bread and your insults and choke on both.”

The room went very quiet.

Farlan flushed, but didn’t back down. “I think,” he said, “that every village in this valley has had hard years, and somehow the Crossroads gets asked to bleed for all of them because we happen to sit on a river and have a mill. And every time we say yes, we make it easier for the next one to say, ‘Well, they’ll save us too.’”

“That,” Ash said, “is not what happened here.”

He pushed himself to his feet with a small, annoyed grunt and moved closer to the table.

“Crumb didn’t find Brookfell on his own,” he said. “He went there because Brookfell sent a man like Kalen to stand in his doorway and shout. To say, ‘We are your neighbors. Our children are your children’s playmates. Don’t you dare pretend our hill doesn’t exist because it’s out of sight from your windows.’”

He rested his hands on the back of an empty chair.

“You’re right, Farlan,” he said. “We can’t save everyone. We can’t feed every hungry mouth between here and Marrowgate. But these ones—” He nodded toward Sera, Kalen, Tavi. “—these ones we made a promise to. Not because they were helpless, but because we decided, together, that we didn’t want to live in a valley where the rule is ‘each hill for itself.’”

“And if it kills us?” Farlan demanded.

Ash’s mouth twitched. “Then we died in a valley I can stand to have my bones in,” he said. “Instead of one where we had full bellies and empty hearts.”

It was the sort of line people would repeat later, Liora thought, even as her stomach twisted. First over firelight. Then in little books. Then, eventually, carved on someone’s stone.

She could already hear how it would be trimmed: We died in a valley I can stand to have my bones in. No one would remember the way his hands had gripped the chair, knuckles whitening, as if he, too, was afraid of that death.

Hesta rapped the spoon again.

“Enough of throwing each other at ghosts,” she said. “We have three paths. We have two villages in the room. Let’s hear from those who haven’t spoken. Mara? Zora? Deller?”

Mara set down her knitting.

“I don’t want my boys hungry,” she said. “No one here does. But I also don’t want them growing up thinking our comfort matters more than someone else’s survival. We’ve had years where Brookfell sent us wood when our own was wet. Where their men came down to help us raise roofs after storms. We owe each other more than to stand on our own hill and watch theirs burn.”

Zora nodded. “Half loaves,” she said. “I can stretch fish and beans. I can’t stretch my conscience if we shut the door.”

Deller shifted, uncomfortable. “My fields are tired,” he said. “We’ve got blight in the lower ridge. I’ve got three little ones still in arms. I won’t sit quiet while we talk about sending food away we might need.” He rubbed his face. “But I also know how many days my own neighbors helped me dig when my brother broke his leg. I can’t say no and then look them in the eye. So… half, I suppose. If we do it, we all do it. No exceptions because someone cries louder.”

“There will still be fights,” Hesta said dryly. “There always are. But I’m hearing more people willing to be hungry together than to be full alone.”

She looked at Sera.

“If we choose the third path,” she said, “it won’t look like last winter. We’ll send less, and ask you to do more with it. It will hurt you. It will hurt us. And if the caravan doesn’t come, there may still be graves we wish we could have stopped. Are you asking us to walk that way with you anyway?”

Sera’s throat worked. She looked at Kalen, then at Tavi. The girl’s eyes were huge, full of things she couldn’t yet say.

“We came,” Sera said slowly, “ready to be told to go home and dig our own graves. If what you’re offering is to dig shallower ones together, I’ll take it.”

“I’d prefer,” Kalen muttered, “not to dig any. But I’ve lived long enough to know what preference is worth.”

A broken little laugh went around the room.

Hesta sat back.

“All right,” she said. “We’re not voting today. Not yet.” Groans rose. She raised her spoon. “We need a week. Osric will finish his rounds. Perrin will see if he can pry any clearer word from the Marrowgate mess. We’ll all have time to sit with the picture of our own tables looking thinner.”

“And Brookfell?” Sera asked. “What do I tell them?”

Hesta’s gaze softened.

“Tell them,” she said, “that we are not closing the door in your faces. Tell them we’re arguing on their behalf as hard as we argue for ourselves. Tell them…” She glanced at Liora. “Tell them that at the Vigil, whatever ration we’ve decided on, we’ll stand on that hill— both villages—and say it out loud to each other’s eyes, not in back rooms.”

“Tell them,” Liora added quietly, “that some of us are tired of putting Crumb on a pedestal and would rather walk in his footprints, even if they lead across thinner ice.”

Osric’s hand went unconsciously to his pocket, where the little green shoot from the hillside still lay, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. A tiny, stubborn accident of life in a year of rot.

He thought of planting it near the Circle when the ground softened. A patch of volunteer grain, unplanned, as a reminder that paths could grow where they weren’t drawn.

Not yet, he told himself. First the counting. Then the planting.

Hesta banged the spoon a final time.

“We meet again in seven days,” she said. “Until then, no hoarding. No spreading half-truths at the well. If you have a question, bring it here instead of chewing it over in your neighbor’s ear.”

The benches scraped. People stood, stretching stiff legs, voices rising in smaller knots.

Sera touched Osric’s arm as she passed.

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“For not hiding the numbers,” she said. “Even when they point at things none of us want to see.”

He nodded, feeling both heavier and lighter.

As the room emptied, Kindle fluttered down from one of the ceiling beams where it had been lurking unnoticed and landed, bold as you please, on the corner of the ledger. Its tiny claws left the faintest of marks in the old leather.

“Off,” Osric told it, but without much force.

The bird hopped once, then took to the air, darting out through the crack of the door before it shut.

Ash chuckled. “Even the sparrows want a say,” he said.

“They can have it when they learn to eat less,” Farlan grumbled, but there was less bite in it than before.

Outside, the bell’s echo still hummed over the square as people spilled out into the gray day— Crossroads and Brookfell, council and not, all wrapped in the same cold air, all carrying the same new truth:

There was no path that did not hurt. The question now was how much of that hurt they were willing to carry in common.