By morning, last night had already started turning into something else.

Liora could feel it in the way people spoke when they came into Pathfinder’s Crumb—the slight lean to their words, the way facts had stretched overnight like dough left too long to rise.

“Did you hear?” whispered one woman as she traded coins for an oat flat. “The Brookfell girl tried to run home in the dark. Would’ve made it, too, if the hill weren’t so treacherous.”

“I heard she was halfway to Hallow Bridge,” said another, overlapping. “Had to drag her back from a snowdrift, poor thing. The strain they’re under…”

Hen, Farlan’s boy, came in for his family’s loaf and announced, loud enough for the whole shop, “They say she nearly threw herself off the cliff so we wouldn’t have to feed her. That’s what happens when you promise too much to people. They start thinking they have to be heroes, too.”

Liora set a bread knife down harder than she meant to. It thudded against the board.

“Is that what they say,” she replied, voice flat, “or what your father says when he thinks you’re not listening? Because Crumb used to tell me he never said anything he wasn’t ready to hear shouted back at him by a twelve-year-old.”

Hen flushed a blotchy red. “Well, it’s true,” he muttered. “She went out there. In the dark. For us.”

“For us?” Liora’s brows climbed. “She told you that, did she?”

He faltered. “Everyone knows—”

“Everyone knows,” Liora cut in, “that a frightened child went where her feet should never have taken her because grown-ups have been throwing words around like stones and not worrying about where they land.” Her gaze sharpened. “If you want to blame someone, blame the people whose talk made her think the valley would be better off without her at our table. And unless you’re secretly forty, Hen, that’s not you.”

The boy shifted his weight, suddenly fascinated by the knot in the counter.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she said, a little gentler. “I also know your father’s tongue runs quicker than his sense. Go home. Tell your ma your loaf’s getting cold.”

He snatched up the bread and beat a retreat. The bell over the door jangled his embarrassment all the way into the square.

Silence hung behind him for a moment. Then old Rellen, on his usual stool in the corner, cleared his throat.

“Never liked straight stories,” he remarked. “Always trip you up on the ends. Better to know where the bumps are.”

Liora glanced at him.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means,” Rellen said, “folk like Farlan’s boy want everything tidy. Hero dies. Village saved. Brookfell grateful. End of the tale. No room in that for a child nearly freezing on a hillside ‘cause she thought taking herself off the ledger was some kind of gift.” His faded eyes flicked toward the door. “Life’s crooked. Stories that pretend otherwise are lies, even when they tell some truth.”

Liora’s jaw eased just a little.

“My father used to say that,” she murmured. “‘If you’re telling it straight, you’ve skipped something important.’”

Rellen snorted. “He was a sharp one,” he said. “Never trusted a tale you could see through end to end without getting your feet wet.”

A customer at the window—Zora, smelling faintly of fish and river—spoke up.

“People are talking, Liora,” she said. “About Tavi. About you. About Ash and his road.” Her mouth curved wryly. “Mostly with their mouths half-full of bread you baked, I might add.”

“I’d noticed,” Liora said.

“You going to let their talk stand as it is?” Zora asked. “Crooked in the wrong direction? Or are you going to bend it yourself?”

The question sat on the counter between them like an extra loaf.

Liora wiped her hands on her apron and looked at the racks. The last of the morning’s rounds was already claimed. The next batch dozed under cloth, puffing with slow, patient breath.

“I’ve got dough to shape,” she said.

“That’s not an answer,” Zora replied.

“It’s an honest delay,” Liora said. “Ask me again by dusk. See what sort of story my hands have worked themselves into by then.”

Zora smiled, eyes crinkling.

“Fair enough,” she said. “If we’re all going to be hungry together, we might as well be honest together too.”

She took her loaf and left, the bell marking her exit with a soft, thoughtful chime.

By late afternoon, the sky had lost its color again, sinking toward that bruised blue that never quite made it to black this time of year. People moved faster in the square, shoulders hunched, eyes on the nearest door. The cold had teeth tonight.

Inside Pathfinder’s Crumb, Liora set a pot of something thin but savory—bean and onion, mostly—on the back of the oven to keep warm for whoever lingered at closing. Between rounds of kneading and shaping, she dipped her hands in warm water more often than she needed to, chasing the chill from her fingers.

Her mind kept circling the same tracks.

Tavi’s cracked candle in small, rigid hands.

Hen’s eager face, hungry for a tragedy he could recite later as if he’d been there.

Ash’s tired eyes when he’d admitted, this morning, that he meant to stand in front of the council and ask to walk one more road.

Crooked, all of it.

When the last customer left and the door’s bell fell quiet, she slid the bolt halfway and turned the sign to the side that, in summer, said CLOSED. In winter, people knew it meant, If you knock, we’ll see.

She dimmed the lamps but did not snuff them. Then she took a deep breath and went to the cupboard where she kept the extra stools.

If stories were starting to twist on their own, she thought, then it was time she started twisting back.

They came more easily than she’d expected.

She hadn’t sent word, exactly—just mentioned to Zora and Mara, in the way of a casual remark, that she’d be “keeping the oven warm” after dusk. She’d told Lys, too, that if any of the inn’s regulars wanted “something other than Farlan’s voice to listen to,” she could point them up the hill.

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. A handful of children, perhaps. Sera and Kalen, if they weren’t too tired from the strain of almost losing and then not losing Tavi. Ash, because he had a nose for any gathering where a story might wander through.

In the end, there were more than that, and less.

Mara arrived first, her two boys in tow, hats askew, cheeks chapped. Hen was conspicuously missing. Liora suspected that was on purpose.

Zora came next, smelling of river and stew, with Rellen shuffling in behind her, leaning heavily on his stick.

Lys slipped in a little later, apron still on, wiping her hands as if she’d run up in the space between serving tables.

Sera and Kalen came together, shoulders touching, Tavi between them. The girl held her candle again, now with the crack sealed in beeswax that Liora had carefully smoothed over.

Ash came last, of course. He slipped in on the edge of their chatter, staff in one hand, the other already reaching for his mug.

Liora looked around the room.

It wasn’t a Circle. Not properly. No stones, no open sky, no formal invitation. Just a bakery, too warm by half from the lingering heat of the ovens, and a scattering of stools and benches facing the back table where she usually worked dough.

It would do.

“All right,” she said. “You’re here. That’s already something. Sit where you like, but if anyone pulls at the bread on the racks before I say so, I will assume you wish to donate a finger to the stew.”

That got a smattering of laughter and eased the tightness in a few faces.

They settled. Mara’s boys ended up on the floor near the oven, cross-legged, hands already primed to snatch at crumbs. Tavi chose a spot on a low stool close to the counter, candle in her lap, eyes fixed on Liora. Sera and Kalen sat behind her, flanking each other like bookends. Ash leaned against the wall near the door, one shoulder to the wood, staff within easy reach. Zora and Lys claimed spots along the counter. Rellen sat where he always did, close enough to see, not so close he’d be tempted to talk over.

Liora wiped her palms on her apron and exhaled.

“My father,” she said, “used to say that all the good stories are crooked.”

Rellen grunted approvingly.

“What’s crooked?” Mara’s youngest asked, predictably.

Liora reached for a loaf on the “ugly” shelf—a round that had baked lopsided, one side higher than the other.

“This,” she said, holding it up. “Crooked means it leans. It’s not straight. If you put this on a table, it tilts. If you draw this path—” She traced a curve in the air with one finger. “—you have to pay attention when you walk it, or you’ll fall off.”

“Why would you tell a story like that?” Mara’s older boy asked. “Ma says stories are supposed to teach you something. How can you learn if it’s all… bent?”

“If it’s straight as a plank,” Liora said, “you’ll walk right along it without thinking. You’ll think, ‘Ah, yes, I know this road, I know how it ends, I don’t need to look where I’m putting my feet.’ And that,” she added, “is how you end up in a ditch. Or off a cliff. Or freezing on a hillside because you thought the hill was smaller than it is.”

Tavi flushed, her fingers tightening on the candle. Liora didn’t look at her directly, but she saw the movement from the corner of her eye.

“So tonight,” Liora said, “I’m going to tell you a crooked story. And if you think you know how it ends, keep it to yourself.”

She set the ugly loaf down on the table between them and rested her hands on either side of it.

“There once was a hill,” she began, “very much like ours. Stones on top, paths down both sides, wind that liked to pull people’s hoods off just for mischief. And on one side of the hill was a village very much like the Crossroads. On the other was a village very much like Brookfell. For the sake of argument, we’ll call them… Crosshollow and Brookrise, so no one gets confused and starts thinking this story is about them.”

That earned a ripple of knowing smiles.

“In Crosshollow,” Liora went on, “there was a baker who talked too much and a miller who worried too much and an old walker who’d seen more roads than any of them. In Brookrise, there was a woman who could stretch a pot of soup until it thought it was a feast and a grandfather who remembered when winters were worse and children who learned early how to count loaves without moving their lips.

“And then there was the hill. The hill listened to all of them.”

“Can hills listen?” Mara’s youngest asked.

“Better than some people,” Liora said. “The hill heard the baker telling stories about a man called the Pathfinder, how he’d walked up and down its sides and said, ‘We won’t let our neighbors starve.’ It heard the miller muttering numbers into his beard and the old walker arguing with him. It heard the woman in Brookrise telling her children, ‘You are not a burden. You are part of the promise.’ It heard the grandfather saying, ‘In my day, we walked barefoot in snow until our toes fell off,’ which was only partly an exaggeration.”

A few chuckles.

“And the hill heard,” Liora continued, “people in Crosshollow saying, ‘We can’t feed them forever. They need to manage their own fields.’ It heard people in Brookrise saying, ‘We can’t keep asking; we’ll wear out their kindness.’ It listened to all of it. That’s what hills do. They hold the sound and wait to see what people make of it.”

She picked up a knife and pressed it lightly into the crooked loaf, not cutting yet—just tracing.

“Now,” she said, “one winter, the hill heard something new. It heard a boy in Crosshollow, who’d listened to his father talk and his neighbors mutter, say, ‘They’re like burrs, those folk over the hill. Stuck on us. If the Pathfinder hadn’t promised so much, we’d eat better.’ He said it with his chest puffed out, like he’d said something clever.”

Hen wasn’t there, but Hen’s absence sat in his place like a stubborn shadow.

“The hill also heard,” Liora said softly, “a girl in Brookrise. She’d listened to her mother count slices and her grandfather talk about old winters and the baker’s stories about the Pathfinder. She’d watched people in Crosshollow look at her with pity and people in Brookrise look at her with hope. She carried all those looks around like sacks on her back.

“One day, after hearing that boy’s words secondhand—words like ‘burr’ and ‘hanging off’ and ‘too many mouths’—she climbed the hill with a candle in her hand.”

Tavi’s shoulders rose, then fell. Sera’s hand moved to the back of her neck, fingers steady.

“The girl,” Liora said, “was not trying to be a hero. Heroes are people who walk into danger on purpose for the sake of others. She was trying to be… less. Less weight. Less trouble. Less mouth. She thought, ‘If I go back to Brookrise on my own, if they don’t have to feed me, maybe they’ll be kinder to my mother. Maybe Crosshollow will feel lighter.’”

She looked around the bakery.

“This is the crooked part,” she said. “On the straight path, this girl would have marched bravely through the storm, died in a ditch, and everyone would have a tidy story about sacrifice to tell. The boy would feel bad for a week. The baker would cry. The old walker would blame himself for not seeing. The next winter, someone would say, ‘Remember little Tavia,* who gave herself up so we could have thicker soup?’ and children would grow up thinking that’s what goodness looks like.”

She let that settle, sour and tempting.

“But the hill,” Liora said, “had been listening for a long time. And the hill said, ‘No.’”

Mara’s youngest’s eyes went wide. “A hill can say no?”

“Sometimes it does,” Liora said. “Sometimes with a rockslide. Sometimes with an icy patch that sends you on your backside instead of over the edge. Sometimes by being bigger and colder and darker than you thought, so you have to stop and sit and think.”

She pressed the knife in, cutting the crooked loaf—not down the middle, but into an uneven wedge.

“The girl walked until her courage ran out,” Liora said. “Until the dark wasn’t a story anymore, but a thing pressing on her ears. Until the wind slapped her cheeks and her fingers stopped feeling like they belonged to her. Then she sat down in a hollow the hill had made, and she held onto her candle as if keeping it whole would make some kind of sense out of the mess she’d made. She meant to light it when she’d made up her mind whether to live or die. The hill, which was wiser than she was, kept her from deciding by making her too cold to think straight.”

Zora’s jaw flexed. Lys blinked rapidly.

“Down below,” Liora said, “the inn heard, and the baker heard, and the miller heard. People said, ‘She’s gone up the hill.’ They lit lanterns and climbed in the dark. The old walker followed the tracks no one else saw—little feet, sliding sideways at the edge of a broken path. They called her name. The hill echoed it back. The girl sat in her hollow and thought, ‘If they find me, I will have to look my mother in the eye. If they don’t, she will have to stand in front of a fire and tell people why I’m not there.’”

She cut again, wedge after wedge, the loaf falling into crooked pieces.

“In a straight story,” Liora said quietly, “the hill stays silent. The girl dies. The boy grows up to be careful with his words. The villages learn a lesson, maybe. Or maybe they just get a good cry out of it and go back to their porridge.”

She looked at Tavi then, directly.

“In our story,” she said, “the hill sent a bird.”

Tavi’s mouth parted.

“A little brown thing,” Liora went on. “Messy. Nosy. Fond of crumbs and drama. It had been flying over both villages for weeks, listening the way hills listen. It saw the girl on the hill. It saw the lanterns below. It did what birds do best: it went to whoever had the hands to help. It flew down and smacked itself against the inn window until the old walker swore at it and went outside to see what was so important.”

Ash snorted softly. “That’s not how I remember it,” he murmured.

“That’s how I’m telling it,” Liora said, without looking away from Tavi. “The bird led him to the hollow. He and the girl’s mother hauled her out. She was cold and scared and ashamed and very much alive. They brought her back to the top of the hill, where other people were waiting with blankets and questions and hurt in their eyes.”

Liora picked up one of the crooked slices and broke it in half.

“Here’s the part,” she said, “where the story has a choice.”

She held up the halves.

“In one version, the villagers say, ‘How foolish! How selfish! How could you scare us like that? Don’t you know what trouble you caused?’ They make her feel small for the rest of her days. She grows up thinking she is a burden and that the best thing she can do is take up as little space as possible.”

Her face tightened.

“In another version,” she said, holding up the other half, “the villagers say, ‘We see how much you’ve been carrying. We’re sorry we put more on your shoulders than they were meant to hold. We were careless with our words. We talked about mouths and sacks and promises and forgot that children listen harder than saints. We are glad you are alive. We will do better.’”

Her gaze swept the room, catching Farlan in absence, catching Hen in the air where he wasn’t.

“Both stories are crooked,” she said. “Neither is neat. The girl will still have to get up tomorrow and face the hill and her own thoughts. The boy will still have to sit with the knowledge that his half-heard talk helped push someone toward the dark. The villages will still have to decide how to share their bread. No one gets to walk away clean.”

She set the two halves down.

“But only one of those stories,” she said, “lets the girl grow into something other than a ghost. Only one lets the boy grow into something other than a coward. Only one lets the people around the fire say, ‘We hurt each other. We will also help each other.’”

Silence followed her words like cloth dropping over a table.

Mara’s boys were completely still, which was a small miracle. Zora’s eyes shone. Lys sniffed and pretended to adjust the stew. Rellen wiped at his nose and muttered something about “dust.”

Sera had her hands pressed over her mouth. Kalen stared at the floor, jaw clenched.

Tavi’s cheeks were wet. The candle trembled in her lap.

“That’s not how hills work,” Mara’s youngest whispered at last. “They can’t send birds on purpose.”

“Maybe not,” Liora said. “Maybe the birds are just birds, and the hills are just hills, and we’re the ones who decide what it meant when something small and loud led us where we needed to go.”

She smiled then, lopsided.

“My father used to tell me,” she added, “that the valley is full of signs, but most of them are only as wise as the people reading them. You can look at a broken loaf and say, ‘It’s ruined,’ or you can say, ‘That’s two good pieces.’ You can look at a child who nearly froze on a hillside and say, ‘Burdens cause trouble,’ or you can say, ‘We’re not going to let any of ours walk into the dark alone again.’”

She picked up the crooked pieces and began distributing them—first to Mara’s boys, then to Rellen, then to Zora and Lys. Each took their bit with solemn fingers.

When she reached Tavi, she paused.

“For you,” she said, “one piece. And a question.”

Tavi looked up, eyes red but clear.

“Which version,” Liora asked gently, “do you want to live in?”

Tavi swallowed hard.

“The one where… they’re glad I’m alive,” she whispered.

“Good,” Liora said. Her own voice shook a little. “Me too.”

She put the bread in the girl’s hand.

Sera’s shoulders sagged with a breath she’d been holding since yesterday.

Kalen cleared his throat.

“If anyone from Brookrise ever tells this story,” he rasped, “I hope they tell it the crooked way. The way where the child lives and the grown folk learn something. I’ve had enough of tales where children pay the price for our pride.”

“So have I,” Liora said.

She leaned back against the table, palms flat.

“And as for the boy in Crosshollow,” she added, raising her voice just enough that it might, by some miracle, reach as far as Farlan’s kitchen, “I hope someone tells him he’s more than his father’s echo. That he doesn’t have to talk about people as if they’re sacks to be carried or dropped. That he can decide, right now, that when he grows, he’ll be the sort of man who stands on the hill and says, ‘You are not a burr. You are my neighbor.’”

Mara’s older boy looked abashed and determined all at once. “I can tell him,” he blurted. “Next time he comes fishing with us.”

“Do it kindly,” Liora said. “And firmly. Like taking a knife away from someone who doesn’t know he’s cut himself with it.”

Zora chuckled. “That’s a sight I’d pay to see.”

Ash spoke for the first time, his voice low.

“Your father would be proud,” he said to Liora. “Of that crooked story.”

Liora snorted, blinking too fast.

“My father would say I softened it,” she replied. “He’d have named names and thrown in a thunderstorm.”

“True,” Ash said. “You get your restraint from your mother.”

She looked at him sharply. “Don’t talk to me about restraint,” she said. “Not when you’re about to stand in the council house and propose something half the village will call madness.”

“Three-quarters,” he said mildly. “I’m aiming high.”

Sera shifted, candle in one hand, bread in the other.

“You’re going?” she asked, voice quiet but carrying.

“If they let me,” Ash answered. “If they don’t all stand up and shout me back into my chair.”

“And if they do?” Zora asked.

“Then I’ll sit,” he said. “And find some other way to live with the not-knowing. But I hope…” He glanced at Liora. “I hope we’re living in the version of the story where the village says, ‘We’d rather be brave and wrong than careful and cruel.’”

“That’s a very pretty way,” Lys remarked, “of saying, ‘We’re about to let an old fool walk into a snowstorm.’”

Ash inclined his head. “I’ve been called worse.”

Liora looked around at their faces—the fisher, the trader, the innkeeper, the farmer’s children, the Brookfell family, the old man with his notebooks of memory.

“We don’t get to choose everything,” she said. “Not the weather. Not the blight. Not whether the caravan is lying sideways in a ditch. We do get to choose what sort of story we’re telling about ourselves while we wait to find out.”

She nodded toward Tavi, who sat straighter now, candle steady in her hand.

“We can tell the straight story,” Liora said. “The one where the Pathfinder was always right, we are always generous, and anyone who needs help is an annoyance. Or we can tell the crooked one, where we argue, and fail, and scared children try to solve our problems, and we drag them back, and we sit in a warm room and say, ‘We will not talk about you as if you’re a sack. We will not let you go into the dark alone. We will not pretend our comfort is more valuable than your life.’”

She lifted her chin.

“I know which one I’m going to start telling,” she finished.

Outside, the sky pressed low against the roofs. The first of the watch lights were flickering in windows up and down the lane—small, stubborn flames in shallow dishes.

Liora went to the shelf and took another candle, its wax smooth and straight. She looked at it a moment, then bent it gently between her hands until a hairline crack formed—barely visible.

She held it up.

“This,” she said, “is for Ash. For the road he may or may not walk. For the part of the story we haven’t seen yet.”

She set it in a dish on the counter.

“Crooked,” she said. “So we remember not to tell it too straight when he comes back. Or if he doesn’t.”

Ash’s mouth twisted.

“I’d prefer the version where I’m here to complain about how you describe me,” he said.

“I’d prefer that too,” she replied.

She lit the candle from the oven’s flame.

They sat there a while longer, in the crook of the evening, sharing crooked bread and crooked story, the light from the two candles mingling with the warm breath of the bakery.

Outside, the dark leaned against the windows.

Inside, the story bent, just slightly, in a different direction.

It would not, Liora knew, undo every cruel word or fearful calculation. It would not keep every child from ever being tempted to slip away uphill with a candle and an idea about sacrifice. It would not guarantee that Ash’s road, if he walked it, would bring anything other than cold and clearer bad news.

But it was a start.

And that, for now, was the only kind of path she trusted.