By evening, the council’s words had thinned into rumors.

They slid down the hill and into the square, changing weight with every mouth that carried them.

“They’re cutting us to half-bread.”

“They’re going to feed Brookfell first.”

“They’re going to slam the gate in Brookfell’s face.”

“They’re going to decide at the Vigil.”

“They don’t know what they’re doing.”

All of it was a little bit true. None of it was the whole of it.

Liora heard the fragments as she wiped down the long counter at Pathfinder’s Crumb. The bakery was quieter than usual. Winter did that, pressed even the noisy ones into smaller shapes. The lamps threw soft yellow over the loaves that remained—fewer than she liked, but enough to keep people from going home empty-handed.

The bell over the door jingled. Two children tumbled in on a gust of cold air: Mara’s boys, cheeks red, mittens dangling from cords at their wrists. Behind them came Tavi, hesitating a little, as if she was never quite sure if she belonged by right or by grace.

“Candlekeeper,” Mara’s middle boy declared, “they said you told everyone that Crumb nearly killed Gerren with a staircase.”

“That’s not how stairs work,” the youngest said earnestly. “You can’t kill someone with stairs. You can only fall down them. Or off them. Or into them.”

“Or under them,” the middle one added ominously. “If they move.”

“Who told you that?” Liora asked, setting the cloth aside.

“Farlan’s boy,” the youngest said. “He said his da says you’re making up bad things about Crumb.”

Tavi flinched.

Liora felt a small, tired anger stir.

“Your Farlan’s boy,” she said, “has never met a story he didn’t chew wrong. And if he thinks I need to make up bad things about Crumb, he hasn’t been listening very well.”

The boys giggled. Tavi did not.

“He was brave,” Tavi said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant. “We carved his words over our door. You said so. You said he… walked paths for people.”

“Yes,” Liora said gently. “Both can be true, Tavi. That’s the trouble.”

Mara’s boys had already rushed over to the glass, pressing their noses against it. “Is that today’s honey crust?” one breathed. “Ma says we have to wait till newmoon to get one.”

“Ma is wise,” Liora said. “Honey waits better than you do.”

She cut each boy a very small end slice and a smaller one for Tavi. “That’s for standing upright while the wind tries to knock you over,” she said. “Not for rumors.”

They took the pieces with the solemnity of people receiving treasure, then scampered to a corner bench. Tavi lingered by the counter, turning her bit between her fingers before taking the smallest possible nibble.

“Did you really say he nearly killed someone?” she asked.

Liora leaned her elbows on the counter and looked the girl in the eye.

“Yes,” she said. “He nearly did. And then he didn’t. That’s important, too.”

Tavi frowned. “Why tell that part?” she asked. “Everyone already knows the sleds worked.”

“Because,” Liora said, choosing her words like stepping stones in a fast river, “if you only ever hear the part where he was certain, then when you feel doubt, you’ll think you’re broken. And you’re not. You’re just… where he was, before he worked it out.”

Tavi nibbled again, considering this. “Ma said in the meeting,” she murmured, “that you’re tired of putting him on a pedestal.”

“I am,” Liora said. “Are you?”

“I…” Tavi hesitated. “I liked thinking he always knew what to do,” she admitted. “When Ma and Grandda argue, or when the bread is thin, it… helped. A little.”

Liora’s throat tightened.

“I know,” she said softly. “And I don’t want to take that from you. Not the part that helps. I only want to… move it a little. So that the thing you stand on is something that can hold the weight.”

“What do you mean?” Tavi asked.

Liora flicked a crumb from the counter. “It’s one thing,” she said, “to think, ‘There was a man who always knew the right path, and if I just try hard enough, I can be like him.’ It’s another to think, ‘There was a man who took wrong paths and still kept walking, and maybe I can do that too.’ One of those is impossible. One of them is hard, but possible.”

Tavi chewed her bread, brow furrowed.

“Still sounds like you’re telling people he was wrong,” she said at last.

“I am,” Liora said. “Because he was. Sometimes. I’m also telling them he kept going anyway.” She smiled, a little crooked. “We’re used to thinking heroes are people we can’t be. I think… I think that’s part of why we build them too tall. So we don’t feel bad for not standing where they did.”

Tavi glanced at the boys on the bench, now engaged in a whispered argument about whether you could build a sled that flew.

“What if some people don’t want to hear that part?” she asked. “The wrong part.”

“Then I’ll tell them anyway,” Liora said quietly. “And they can be angry with me if they like. I care more about the children listening at the edge of the fire. They’re the ones who will pick which pieces to carry along.”

She did not say, And sometimes I don’t know which parts to tell yet. That was the part she kept for herself—the nights when she lay awake, paragraphs of stories running through her mind, wondering which truths would free people and which would crush them.

“Go sit,” she said gently. “Eat the rest before your brothers steal it.”

Tavi managed a small smile and slipped away.

Liora watched her go, then turned back to the counter. For a moment she simply stood there, palms flat on the worn wood.

Every story had holes. Spaces between what was said and what was left on the cutting-room floor.

At the Circle, she’d left out the way her own stomach had twisted when Gerren’s foot had slipped on the ice. She’d left out the argument afterward, Crumb’s voice hoarse with fear as he’d said, “If I get you all killed following my nonsense, I want someone to drag me back from the grave and shout at me.” She’d left out the night she’d gone home and wrapped her hands around a candle and whispered, “If he keeps doing this, I won’t have enough wick to name all the parts of him.”

Some things you didn’t tell because they belonged to you and someone else, not to the fire.

Some things you didn’t tell because people weren’t ready to hear them.

And some things you didn’t tell because you were not yet sure where they fit.

She picked up the cloth again and wiped in slow, tight circles.

Outside, the sky was the color of stale dough. Snow threatened but did not commit.

She would have to find new words soon. Not just for Crumb, but for what they were choosing without him.

If we do this—half loaves, shared hunger—what do we call it? she wondered. Fairness? Folly? Faith?

She didn’t know yet. So she told no one.

Ash’s room at the inn was small enough that if he stretched his arms, he could almost touch both walls.

It was more space than he’d had on most roads.

He sat cross-legged on the pallet with his notebooks spread out around him like strange, leathery flowers. The pages were crowded—lines and lines of cramped handwriting, a lifetime of tracks pressed into paper: villages, names, weather, arguments, jokes, places where he’d snorted ink laughing at something and smudged the sentence into oblivion.

Tonight, he wasn’t flipping at random. He was looking for something.

His fingers found the entry by feel before his eyes did.

It was wedged in the middle of a winter two years before they’d ever heard the words Brookfell and promise in the same sentence. The ink was darker there. He must have had a fresh bottle that week.

We came to a fork in the road, the entry began. Crumb says left. I say right. He has that look that means he’s decided already and only asking me out of politeness. We argue. The wind does not care.

Ash read on.

We go left. The stream is higher than he remembered. The bridge is gone. Two planks in its place. One of them breaks. He nearly goes in with it. I grab him by the back of his cloak and end up with a handful of wool in my fist and him on his knees on the bank, cursing.

Later, by the fire, he says, “You were right. We should have gone right.” Then, “If you start thinking I always know which way to go, I need you to remember this.”

Ash’s own comment followed, in smaller letters, squeezed into the margin.

Note to self: Remember this.

He closed the book.

He had remembered, in his own way. That was the trouble.

At the Circle, when he’d told the story of the sleds and the cliff, he’d given them the misstep. The almost. It had felt like betrayal and loyalty in the same breath.

He had not told them this one. The river. The plank. The way Crumb’s hands had shaken afterward when he thought no one was looking. The way he’d spent the next day listening more closely when Ash said, “I don’t know about that, friend.”

“Why?” he asked the rafters now. “Why that one and not this one? Why that hill and not that bridge?”

The rafters were unimpressed.

Because the hill involves all of them, he answered himself. Because they remember sleds and they think they know that story already. Because it’s safer to crack an idol with a chisel stroke where everyone can see than to take a hammer to it in a quiet room.

He set the notebook aside and reached for another.

There were other things in here he had never spoken aloud.

The night Crumb had admitted, drunkenly and tearfully, that he didn’t know what to do with all the faith people poured into him.

The morning he’d snapped at a crying child because he was too tired to be gentle, then spent an hour afterward kneading bread so hard he’d nearly broken the table.

The small, stupid argument between him and Liora that had ended with two days of silence, both of them pretending they’d just been busy.

None of those belonged to the Circle. Not yet. Maybe not ever. They were… private. Human. The bits of a life that made it real and particular.

What he did tell—what he was starting to tell—were those moments where Crumb had nearly led them wrong and then stopped, somehow, just in time. The almost-mistakes. The places where the path had seemed clear and then had not.

Because those, he thought, are the ones that touch the choices we’re making now.

He picked up his pen, dipped it in the small bottle of ink, and wrote in the margin of the river entry:

Told them one of these at the Circle. Not this one. Maybe someday. When they’re ready to know how much of the road is built on “I don’t know.”

He sat back and blew gently on the ink to dry it.

What we don’t tell, he thought, matters as much as what we do. The gaps are part of the story, whether we admit them or not.

He thought of Sera and Kalen, standing in the council house, empty hands turned up. Of the way Tavi’s face had tightened when he’d described the half-loaf path. Of Osric, pockets full of numbers and something else he hadn’t named.

They were all holding something back. Small mercies. Small cowardices.

He was too tired, tonight, to decide which was which.

He blew out the candle. In the dark, the room shrank to the sound of his breathing and the faint scrape of the wind outside.

He did not pray. He had tried, in younger years. These days he mostly muttered things at the ceiling and hoped they landed in the right ears.

“Watch over the fools,” he murmured now. “The ones making promises. The ones counting sacks. The ones carving words over doors.”

He did not say, And the ones who keep opening their mouths, half-afraid they’re about to undo everything they’re trying to save.

That, too, he kept to himself.

Osric hadn’t meant to keep the green shoot.

He’d meant to study it for an afternoon, decide it was nothing, and toss it into a stewpot or a chicken’s beak.

Instead, it lay now in a shallow clay dish on his windowsill, its tiny root tucked into a smear of damp earth he’d scooped from the riverbank. The little blade of it had straightened, reaching shamelessly for what light the winter sky gave.

“You’re not helping,” he told it.

The plant, sensibly, ignored him.

He should have told the council about it. If not by name, then by… idea. Some sign that not all their hope rested on old paths and caravans. A little patch of land where the soil still seemed willing to give.

He hadn’t.

When Hesta had asked for what they knew, he’d spoken of sacks and numbers and rot. It had felt… honest. Solid. The green shoot had not fit with the shape of that honesty. It was too small, too uncertain. Too easy for Farlan to seize on and say, “See? We’re saved. No need to go hungry. The fields will provide.”

Osric did not want to give them false comfort. So he’d said nothing.

He wasn’t sure if that was prudence or fear.

Now, in the dim light of dawn, he picked up the dish and turned it in his hands.

“You’re one sprig,” he muttered. “Barely half a mouthful. And I’m talking to you.”

The plant did not apologize.

He set it back, more gently than his tone suggested, and pulled on his boots.

There was work to do: finishing his rounds, checking the last of the outerholds, scraping his sums into cleaner lines so that when the council met again, he could say, with as much certainty as this winter allowed, Here is the cost.

On his way out, he paused by the ledger on his table.

He considered adding a line: Patch of green on the north ridge. Unknown yield. Unknown meaning.

His hand hovered over the page, chalk ready.

Then he closed the book.

It wasn’t that he meant to hide it forever. He just… wanted to know more before he let other people hang their hope on it. Hope was heavier, sometimes, than grain.

He told himself it was the same as not mentioning a caravan until Perrin had clearer word. Don’t put phantom comforts on the table. Don’t let people start counting what might never arrive.

Still, as he stepped into the cold and pulled the mill door shut behind him, he felt the omission like a small stone in his boot.

In the little room Lys had given them above the inn’s stable, Sera and Tavi lay side by side on a narrow bed, wrapped in blankets that smelled of hay and soap.

Kalen snored softly on a pallet by the wall.

Outside, the wind pawed at the eaves.

“You should sleep,” Sera whispered.

Tavi stared up at the dark.

“What will you tell them?” the girl asked. “When we go home.”

Sera turned onto her side to look at her.

“The truth,” she said automatically.

Tavi’s silence tugged at that word until it frayed.

“Some of it,” Sera amended. “Enough of it to be fair. Not all of it to make them lose heart.”

“What’s that mean?” Tavi asked.

Sera exhaled.

“It means,” she said slowly, “that I won’t say, ‘They’re going to feed us fat and free like last winter.’ Because they aren’t. And I won’t say, ‘They’re going to turn their backs and let us die.’ Because they haven’t. I’ll say…” She searched for words that would sit right in her mouth. “I’ll say, ‘They’re arguing. Hard. For us and for themselves. They’re trying to find a way where no one gets everything and no one gets nothing.’”

“That doesn’t sound like much,” Tavi murmured.

“It’s more than we had before we came,” Sera said. “Before, we had a promise carved on a beam and a lot of wondering. Now we have faces. Voices. Osric’s numbers. Liora’s… stubbornness. Ash’s… whatever it is he carries around like an old cloak.”

“Tiredness,” Tavi suggested.

“Maybe,” Sera said.

She did not say, I will not tell them how scared I was, sitting in that room. I will not tell them how it felt when Farlan said we hadn’t planned and I wanted to jump across the table and shake him. I will not tell them that when Osric said “you die,” I saw your brother’s face.

Some truths lived in the chest. They did not all need to be poured into the village fire.

“Will you tell them about the half loaves?” Tavi asked.

Sera swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “We’ll have to. They’ll need to be ready for it, if that’s what’s chosen.”

“Will they be angry?” Tavi’s voice was tiny in the dark.

“Yes,” Sera said. “At first. At me, maybe, for not getting more. At the Crossroads, for not being Crumb. At the weather, because it’s easier to be angry at clouds than at the ground.” She reached out and found Tavi’s hand under the blanket. “You may be angry, too,” she added.

“I already am,” Tavi whispered. “A little.”

“Good,” Sera said softly. “It means you’re paying attention.”

They lay there, holding hands.

Sera stared at the shadowed ceiling and thought about all the things she would not say when they stood in Brookfell’s meeting hall. She would not repeat Farlan’s mutter about other villages not planning ahead. She would not say, The miller looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than standing under our hope. She would not admit how jealous she had been, for a heartbeat, when Liora had cut that bread and given it to them without counting.

What we don’t tell, she thought, can be a kindness. Or a coward’s shelter. Or both at once.

“Will you tell them Ash said we won’t be talked about without being in the room?” Tavi asked suddenly.

“Yes,” Sera said. That one was easy. “That, I’ll shout.”

Tavi smiled in the dark, small and fierce.

“Good,” she said. “I liked that part.”

Kalen snored, shifted, went quiet again.

Somewhere outside, a small bird thumped against the shutter, shook itself, and flew on into the night.

On the hill, the Circle stones sat under their blanket of snow, patient and indifferent.

Snow had drifted into the footprints from the last gathering. Ash’s claw-marks still traced the ash in the pit, faint but there if you knew where to look.

Between them all hung the unsaid things: the bits of truth people were holding back from one another, from themselves.

They would come out, some of them, before winter was done. In anger. In confession. In tired, quiet acknowledgments over thin bread.

Others would remain in pockets and notebooks and unspoken prayers.

The fire that would be lit there in three weeks’ time would burn whatever it was given: stories polished smooth, stories with rough edges, silences, too.

It would be up to the people gathered around it to decide which gaps to fill, and which to leave open like windows, so the cold could come in and remind them why they’d lit the flame in the first place.