By dawn, the whole day already felt like a held breath.

Liora woke before the bell, eyes open to the dark rafters of her narrow room above Pathfinder’s Crumb. For a moment she didn’t know why her chest felt tight.

Then she remembered the date.

Seventeenth day of Deepfrost.

Crumb’s day.

The Vigil of the First Pathfinder, people were calling it now. An entire phrase where once there had only been a night of fear and fire and too-thin bread.

She pulled herself out of bed and dressed by habit: wool dress, thick stockings, apron. Before she tied her hair back, she took down the little scrap of parchment pinned to the beam by her bed.

The ink had faded, but she knew every line.

No path is ours alone.

He’d written it in a hurry once—on the back of a flour tally, of all things—when they’d been arguing about the Circle. She’d stolen the parchment when he wasn’t looking and kept it ever since, tucked away where she could touch it on mornings like this.

“Happy sainthood,” she muttered at the scrap, and set it back.

Downstairs, the bakery felt different.

Every morning had its own rhythm, but Vigil mornings carried a wary excitement. People wanted special loaves, fresh sweets, something to bring up the hill that said: We remember.

This year, the ovens would turn out less.

She checked the dough she’d started the night before. It had risen obediently in the cold, domes of pale promise under cloth. There was less of it—by design. Yesterday afternoon, the council had met again in the long house. Hesta had banged her spoon. Voices had risen and fallen. When Liora stepped into the bakery afterward, Osric had come straight from the mill, chalk still on his cuffs.

“They chose?” she’d asked, not even bothering to pretend she didn’t know what “they” meant.

“Half loaves,” he’d said. “For us and for Brookfell. From today on.”

No one had cheered. No one had cursed. Hesta had simply said, “We’ll say it at the Vigil. To both hills at once.”

So now Liora measured carefully, dividing dough by feel into smaller rounds. Each one would bake up shorter than people were used to. She imagined their hands closing around them tonight, thumbs brushing crust, minds doing the quick math of loss.

“We start as we mean to continue,” she told the dough. “No surprising them after the firelight makes everything sound prettier.”

The bell over the door jingled earlier than usual.

She glanced up, expecting some overeager customer ready to beg for sweet buns they couldn’t afford. Instead, Ash stood there, cheeks pink from the cold, staff in hand.

“You’re not open,” he said.

“You’re not bread,” she countered. “We can both be here anyway.”

He stepped inside, shutting the door quickly behind him. Kindle darted past his head at the last instant, slipping in through the narrowing gap like a streak of brown mischief. It flared its wings once and claimed its perch on the rafters.

“You can take that one back,” Liora said, nodding at the bird. “It’s been underfoot all morning.”

Ash tilted his head, as if considering arguing that he had nothing to do with where the sparrow chose to be. Then he sighed.

“I won’t stay,” he said. “I just… wanted to see your face before we go up tonight.”

“That sounds ominous,” she said.

He leaned his staff against the wall and came to the work table, watching as she divided another portion of dough.

“Half loaves,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” she replied. “I heard. The flour agreed with you?”

“It didn’t argue,” he said. “People will. Flour only clumps or doesn’t.”

“People clump as well,” Liora said. “Just noisier.”

He smiled faintly.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“For half loaves?” she said. “No. For tonight?” She hesitated, thumb pressing a dimple into the dough. “As ready as I’m going to be. I know the stories I’m not going to tell.”

“Which are?” he asked.

“The ones where he never doubted,” she said. “The ones where everything he touched turned to rightness and warm bread.” She looked up at him. “I can’t stand up there and hand them a statue. Not after this week.”

He nodded. He’d been at the crooked-story gathering the night before, leaning against the bakery wall while she told a hill and a bird and a girl back to themselves.

“What will you tell instead?” he asked.

She thought of the first winter’s Flame Circle, the night after Crumb had died. The way the fire had seemed to shiver with them, as if it, too, were not sure it could keep burning. His empty place at the edge of the stones. The way people had looked at her as if words might be able to reassemble him.

“A simpler thing,” she said. “About bread and hands and how neither of those were ever just his.”

Ash studied her.

“And you?” she asked. “Are you going to say anything at the Vigil, or are you saving all your foolishness for the next council?”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I’ll speak if I’m needed,” he said. “Tonight is for him. The council is for me. And for all of you.” His gaze flicked to the smaller rounds. “Once they’ve seen these, the half-loaf talk will feel less like an ambush.”

“That’s the plan,” she said.

Kindle dropped to the table in a blur and pecked at a scrap of dough that had escaped.

“Oi,” Liora said. “You want a beakful of raw flour sitting in your throat? Wait till it’s bread.”

The bird ignored her and hopped closer to the stack of proofing baskets, as if checking her work.

Ash watched it, then Liora.

“Tonight,” he said slowly, “someone’s going to ask. Out loud. The question everyone’s been thinking.”

She didn’t pretend not to know which one.

“Who do we turn to now,” she said. “After all the stories.”

“Yes.”

She dusted her hands off.

“Then we’d better have an answer that isn’t just a shrug and a look at your notebooks,” she said.

“Or at your oven,” he returned.

“Or at the mill,” she agreed.

They stood in companionable silence for a moment, three people and one nosy bird, the oven’s warmth reaching for their knees.

“Go on,” she said at last. “Let me work. If I stop moving, I’ll start thinking too much.”

He touched the edge of the table with his fingertips, a small, wordless blessing, and left.

The bell jingled. Kindle took off with him, beating its wings hard to keep up as he stepped into the cold.

Osric hadn’t slept well, but then, he hadn’t expected to.

The night had been full of numbers. He’d rolled from side to side, mind chewing through the same loops: forty-seven sacks, one hundred and seventy mouths, the caravan, the blight, the unknown.

By morning, the sums had not improved. The only thing that had changed was his willingness to say them aloud.

He spent the first part of the day doing what he knew best: work that didn’t care about politics or saints. Grain came in. He checked it, weighed it, ground it if it was worth grinding. He listened to the tone of the stones. He scraped mold from the corners of bins. He shook weevils into the river for the fish to deal with.

Around mid-day, Perrin appeared in the mill doorway, stamping snow from his boots.

“Well?” Osric said, before the trader could even open his mouth.

“Still stuck,” Perrin said. “Last word from Hallow Bridge is bad. One wagon broke a wheel completely. Two turned back for the city. The one that’s left is lighter than a gossip’s promise. If it makes it here at all, it won’t be carrying enough grain to change our sums. Maybe a few sacks. Maybe just news.”

Osric closed his eyes briefly. He’d known. He’d already planned on half-loaves. Still, hearing it pinned in place something he’d been keeping free to wriggle.

“Any better word on the blight?” he asked.

“Only worse,” Perrin said grimly. “Four valleys over, they’re talking about grinding acorns.”

Osric nodded once.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll be at the Vigil?”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” Perrin said. “Good way to hear what folk actually think instead of what they say in the market.”

He left in a flurry of cold air and road-stink.

Osric stood in the quiet hum of the mill and let the new facts sink in.

Half-loaves. No phantom rescue from the city. No last-minute miracle grain to make him look foolish for planning lean.

He went to the ledger and drew a line under the last column of sums.

Beside it, in a rare moment of indulgence, he wrote:

No hidden sacks. No hidden saviors.

Then, under that:

Half bread. Shared ache.

The words looked strange on the page, like a prayer disguised as arithmetic.

He shut the book and hung his apron on its peg.

Hesta would want him up the hill early, to stand with her and Liora when they spoke. He dreaded that part almost as much as he dreaded the taste of boiled shoes. He was comfortable with numbers. Less so with eyes.

On his way out, his gaze snagged on the little clay dish on his sill.

The green shoot from the hillside had grown another inch. Its blade leaned toward the window, stubborn and pale.

He hesitated.

He could bring it, present it at the Vigil like a minor miracle. See? Something’s still willing to grow. It would make a fine counterpoint to all the talk of scarcity. People would eat that story like honey.

He left it where it was.

“Not yet,” he told it. “You’re still more question than answer.”

He stepped into the cold and turned his feet uphill.

By the time the sun gave up on the day and slid behind the western ridge, the path to the Circle was a slow-moving river of people.

They came wrapped in wool and hope and obligation. Crossroads folk, Brookfell folk, a few from scattered outerholds who’d walked in by lantern-light. Some carried loaves, wrapped in cloth to keep them from freezing. Others carried candles—straight ones, crooked ones, stubs saved from other nights. Most had nothing more than their own breath and the weight of a name on their tongues.

Ash climbed with them, taking his time.

He refused the offer of a hand from three different people and took the fourth, because it was Liora and she’d smack him if he didn’t.

“You all right?” she asked.

“I’m spectacular,” he said. “If I fall over, just roll me into the fire and tell them I volunteered.”

“You’re not allowed to die until after you’ve made your council speech,” she said. “I’m not wasting all that worrying for nothing.”

Ahead of them, the Circle stones rose out of the snow like old shoulders. The central pit was a dark bowl waiting.

On a small makeshift platform—two crates pushed together and covered with a plank—Hesta stood like a sturdy post, shawl wrapped tight, spoon in hand. Beside her, Osric hovered near a barrel that held a stack of smaller-than-usual loaves. Liora’s oven-coal sat in a lidded iron pan at their feet, faint red glow leaking around the edges.

Brookfell had claimed one side of the circle; Crossroads, the other. The invisible line between them made Ash’s teeth itch.

Kindle did not seem bothered. The sparrow swooped over heads, pausing sometimes to sit on a hood or a stone as if counting, then taking off again. It circled the unlit pit twice and then settled on the rim, head cocked.

Hesta banged her spoon against the edge of the crates. The sound cut cleanly through the murmur.

“All right,” she said, voice carrying in the cold. “You made it. That’s the first miracle of the night. Let’s see what we do with it.”

A few chuckles. Breath steamed from faces.

“This is the first Vigil since Crumb died,” she went on. “He wouldn’t like that sentence much; he hated the idea of us making a habit out of anything that started with his death. But here we are. We’ll do our best not to make him spin in his grave.”

She nodded to Liora.

“Candlekeeper,” she said. “Light us.”

Liora stepped forward with the iron pan.

She knelt by the fire pit, lifted the lid, and coaxed the ember inside to a brighter glow with a twist of bellows. Then she placed a small bundle of kindling over it, hands sure. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the ember found a dry edge, licked, and caught.

Flame curled up, cautious and then bolder, catching the waiting logs. The Circle filled with the first, sharp scent of burning wood.

Liora stood, face lit from below.

“Last year,” she said, “this fire burned while his body cooled on the hill behind us. We didn’t know yet how we were going to live without him. Some of us weren’t sure we wanted to.”

Ash remembered. The way the air had tasted like smoke and disbelief. Hesta crying openly for the first and only time he’d seen. Liora standing here with her mouth set like iron, telling stories as if the world depended on the next sentence.

“We told stories,” Liora continued now. “Some of them were true. Some of them were flattered. Some of them”—her mouth quirked—“left out parts I wasn’t ready to say.”

A ripple of acknowledgment moved through the crowd. A few looked at Tavi, who stood between Sera and Kalen, candle cupped in her hands.

“Since then,” Liora said, “I’ve been thinking about what we do when we remember someone like him. Whether we turn him into a statue. Whether we polish the rough edges off his memory until he stops looking like a man and starts looking like a miracle. Whether we put him on a pedestal so high no one can ever expect to stand where he stood.”

She looked around the ring, meeting eyes on both hills.

“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I don’t want to live in a village where our heroes are impossible. I want to live in a village where they are inconvenient. Crooked. Where they make us mad and tired and inspired in equal measure. Because that’s the only kind of hero that teaches us anything we can actually do.”

Ash felt the words settle into him.

“My father used to say,” Liora went on, “that a fire is not one big log that burns forever. It’s a lot of small ones that take turns. Crumb was a big log, if you’ll forgive the image. He burned bright and hot. He left ash and warmth behind. But if we stand around that memory with empty hands, we’ll freeze just the same.”

She gestured toward the loaves on the barrel.

“So tonight,” she said, “we’re going to do two things. We’re going to remember him. And we’re going to decide, together, what kind of pain we’re willing to share this winter. Because if his path meant anything, it meant that the remembering and the deciding don’t live in separate rooms.”

She stepped back and nodded to Hesta.

“The numbers,” Hesta said, “belong to the miller.”

A low murmur ran around the circle: here it is.

Osric swallowed, straightened, and stepped up beside her.

Ash, watching from the edge of the ring, saw the way the younger man’s hand shook once before he gripped the edge of the crate to still it.

“We have forty-seven sacks of grain we can trust,” Osric said. No preamble. No apology. “If we feed only the Crossroads as we did last winter, we will make it to spring with a little to spare. Brookfell will not.”

The words were blunt as stones.

“If we feed both villages at last winter’s share,” he went on, “we will eat well for a month or two, and then we will all go hungry. The caravan is not coming full. The blight is not staying away. Waiting for a miracle wagon will not change what’s in our bins.”

A few Brookfell faces tightened. Sera’s mouth was a line.

“There is a third way,” Osric said. “We feed both villages from today on at lean rations. Half loaves. More stew, less bread. No one here feasts. No one here starves. We all carry the same ache.”

He let that hang in the cold air.

“The council met this morning,” he said. “We argued. We did more than argue. Some of us shouted. Some of us cried. We counted and recounted. We listened to people from both hills. And in the end, we chose the third way.”

A sound like a long, collective exhale went around the Circle.

“From this day,” Osric said, “every household in the Crossroads will receive half loaves. From this day, every sack we send to Brookfell will be smaller than last year’s—but enough, if they stretch it as we will, to keep mouths from closing forever. There will be nights when your stomach is hollow and your temper is short. There will be days when you curse my name and Hesta’s and Crumb’s while you’re at it. You are allowed.”

A faint laugh, bitter and real.

“But hear this,” he added, voice firming. “We are not doing this to please ghosts. We are doing this so that when spring comes, there are still hands on both hills to plant seed. We are doing this so that when your children go to the river to play, there are children from the other side to meet them. We are doing this so that when we light this fire next year, we are not remembering a valley that used to be full.”

He glanced across the ring.

“Sera,” he said. “Kalen. Tavi. Brookfell. We are not giving you charity. We are keeping a promise. We are asking you to carry the pain with us, not sit under it while we watch.”

Sera stepped forward, candle in hand. Her breath smoked in the air.

“We accept,” she said. “Not like beggars. Like neighbors. We will write it on our beams. We will stretch our pots thinner. We will send what we can when we can. Wood. Hands. Whatever this hill needs that we have.”

Her voice barely trembled.

Kalen cleared his throat.

“And we will remember,” he rasped, “when the thaw comes, that you did not close your fists. Old men are very good at remembering who opened doors when the snow was high.”

A soft, rueful murmur of agreement.

From somewhere in the Crossroads cluster, Farlan called, “And when our children complain about thin slices, we’ll send them up to your hill for a week to see how you stretch soup.”

Laughter broke out, rough but welcome. It cracked some of the ice.

Hesta lifted her spoon.

“Half loaves, shared hunger,” she said. “That’s the path we’ve chosen. If you have curses, bring them to the council house. If you have ideas for stretching oats, bring them to Zora. If you have extra, quietly or not, share it.”

She stepped back. The fire popped.

For a moment there was only the sound of wood and wind.

Then a voice piped up from the Brookfell side.

“What about the Pathfinder?”

The words hung there, clear as a bell.

The speaker was a boy hardly older than Tavi. Ash recognized his face from Brookfell’s last visit—a child who’d once been caught eavesdropping on a conversation about sleds and nearly fallen into a barrel.

He stood near the front now, eyes wide, fists bunched in the hem of his cloak.

“We’ve heard all these stories,” he said, louder now that all eyes were on him. “About how he came up and down this hill and said we wouldn’t starve. About how he walked the paths and found wood and work and ways we’d never thought of. About how he stood right there”—he pointed to a patch of ground near the stone Liora usually leaned against—“and shouted at the sky so loud the weather listened.”

A ripple of fond, pained laughter.

The boy swallowed.

“But he’s dead,” he said. “And you’re… you’re doing this—” he gestured helplessly at the half loaves, the two hills— “because of him, you keep saying. Because of his path. Because of his promise. So…” His brow furrowed. “Who do we turn to now? When it gets worse than half loaves. When someone needs to go shout at the road again. Who’s… the Pathfinder now?”

Silence fell over the Circle like a heavy cloth.

Ash felt every eye flicker, almost visibly, from person to person. To Hesta, who managed the council. To Liora, who told the stories. To Osric, who held the numbers. A few, gods help him, to him.

Farlan muttered something under his breath that sounded like “we need a leader, not a committee.” Mara hushed him with a sharp elbow.

Liora’s hands tightened on the edge of the crate.

Ash stepped forward before she could.

He didn’t climb onto the makeshift platform. He stayed on the ground, level with the crowd, staff planted in the snow.

“Boy,” he said, and his voice carried more gently than people were used to from him. “What’s your name?”

“Jari,” the boy said, cheeks flushing.

“Jari,” Ash repeated. “That’s a good question. It’s one I’ve been asking myself since before Crumb fell sick. I asked it the first time I realized he wasn’t going to walk these roads forever.”

He let his gaze travel around the ring.

“If what you mean by Pathfinder,” he said, “is ‘a person who knows what to do, who has the right idea first and never doubts, who stands on a hill and shouts and the world jumps to listen’… we don’t have one. We never did. We had a man who was very good at looking for paths and very bad at admitting when he was tired. We turned that into something shinier in our telling. That’s on us.”

A few winces. Liora’s face was pale but steady.

“But if what you mean by Pathfinder,” Ash went on, “is ‘the way we treat each other in winters like this, the way we share our bread, the way we argue with our own fear and sometimes win’…” He spread his hands. “Then you’re surrounded by them.”

He pointed, staff wagging slightly.

“You’ve got a baker there,” he said, “who tells stories that make our heroes human, so you don’t think you have to be perfect to be kind. You’ve got a miller who stands in front of two angry hills and tells them the truth about their own hunger. You’ve got a woman in Brookfell—” he nodded to Sera— “who walked up here with empty hands and more courage than sense and asked us not to forget her people. You’ve got Hesta with that cursed spoon, keeping us from talking past one another. You’ve got old fools like me who remember when Crumb nearly got us killed and say so, so you don’t walk the same way without looking.”

His gaze softened.

“And you,” he said, “already have more Pathfinder in you than you know. You heard a gap in our story. You were brave—or foolish—enough to say it out loud. That’s the first step. Asking, ‘Who now?’ instead of just assuming someone else will take care of it.”

Jari’s shoulders squared a little.

“So… we don’t get another one,” the boy said. “Not like him.”

“No,” Ash said. “You get a great many that look less impressive up close. You get a valley full of people tripping over their own feet trying to carry pieces of what he did. Some of them will fail. Some of them will make things worse before they make them better. That’s what crooked paths look like.”

A faint, rueful hum.

Liora stepped forward then, joining him.

“If you want a name,” she said, “for what we’re trying to be, you can keep calling it the Pathfinder’s way. But don’t look for one face when you say it. Look around this circle. You’ll see it in lighter loaves shared, in candles lit for someone who isn’t you, in old men walking roads they don’t owe anyone, in children asking hard questions.”

She glanced at the fire.

“Crumb used to say the flame isn’t in the lantern,” she said. “The lantern is just what we carry it in. He was a lantern. Bright one, stubborn one. He cracked. The flame didn’t. Tonight, it’s sitting there on those logs. Next week, a piece of it will be in your hearth at home. Next month, it might be in some herder’s hut two hills over. The question isn’t, ‘Who is the lantern now?’ It’s, ‘What are you going to light with what you’ve been given?’”

Osric, who had been listening with his jaw clenched, lifted his chin.

“And I’ll add this,” he said. “If anyone tries to stand up here and call themselves the Pathfinder as if they were a replacement, I’ll personally throw a sack over their head and sit on them until sense returns.”

That got a proper laugh, even from Farlan.

Jari bit his lip.

“So when we go home,” he said, “and people ask, ‘Who do we turn to now?’ what do I say?”

Ash considered.

“Tell them,” he said, “that in this valley, when we say Pathfinder, we mean a way of living, not a single pair of boots. Tell them it looks like half loaves and shared hunger, like watch lights in windows, like not letting frightened girls sit alone in the dark. Tell them if they’re waiting for a man with a staff and a big voice to solve everything, they’ll freeze. If they’re ready to be part of the path, they should come to the Circle.”

Jari nodded slowly, as if committing each phrase to memory.

Liora looked out over the ring.

“If you’re willing,” she said, “we can mark this. Not with a crown on anyone’s head. With a promise.”

She stepped down from the crates and moved closer to the fire, gestures small but sure.

“Hold up your candles,” she said. “Those who have them. Those who don’t—hold up your hands. They’re what matter.”

The Circle shifted. Flames lifted on both hills, some steady, some flickering, some nothing but cupped palms in the dark.

“Repeat after me,” Liora said. “No path is ours alone.”

The phrase rolled around the ring, picking up different accents, different doubts.

“No path is ours alone.”

“Crumb walked his,” she went on. “We will walk ours.”

They echoed that too. Some voices cracked. Some were stubbornly flat.

“We will share what we have,” she said. “We will carry what we can. We will not wait for a hero to save us from ourselves.”

A murmur of uncertain laughter, but they said it.

It wasn’t binding magic. It was just words in cold air.

But Ash felt something ease in his chest anyway.

Kindle fluttered from the fire pit to Ash’s staff, balanced there for a moment, then launched itself upward. It flew a wide circle above the assembled villages, once, twice, then veered off toward the darker horizon—the direction of Hallow Bridge and whatever waited there.

Ash watched it go, a small brown streak against the bruise-colored sky.

Not yet, he thought. But soon.

Beside him, Osric let out a breath he’d been holding since morning.

“We’ll see,” the miller murmured, half to himself. “If we can keep our courage when the bread’s thinner and the fire’s not this bright.”

“We will,” Liora said quietly. “Not perfectly. Not cleanly. But enough.”

Down by the fire, Jari still stood with his candle raised, jaw set, as if daring the dark to try again.

Tavi watched him, fingers resting on the crack in her own candle. Her face was lit from below, making her look like some small, fierce saint of uncertain thoughts.

The Vigil of the First Pathfinder went on: stories told, songs half-sung, tears shed where they could steam and vanish instead of freezing on cheeks. People drifted away in ones and twos, carrying coals in lidded pans back to their hearths, letting the Circle’s fire seed a hundred smaller ones.

When it was nearly over, when only the stubborn and the worried remained, Ash felt Hesta’s gaze on him.

“Not tonight,” she murmured under her breath as she passed him. “Tomorrow. Council house. You can make your mad suggestion about roads then.”

He nodded.

Tomorrow, then, he would stand again and say: Let me go. Let me look. Let me bring back what I can.

Tonight, he stood under the Vigil’s fading light and listened to a valley decide—awkwardly, imperfectly—that it would not put all its hope on one dead man’s shoulders.

It would, instead, try the harder thing: carry pieces of the path together, through a winter that cared nothing for vows.

Above them, the stars finally came out, one by one, small flames pinpricking the dark.

They looked, Ash thought, very much like candles.