The mill always had a smell to it—dust and stone and the faint, nutty sweetness of grain ground fine. Osric knew that smell the way he knew the lick of his thumb before he turned a page, the weight of a good sack in his arms.

Today, something was wrong with it.

It was small, at first. A sour thread under the usual scents, like a bad note in a song he’d heard his whole life.

He stood just inside the mill door for a heartbeat, nose wrinkling.

“Not you too,” he muttered.

The wheel outside creaked and sighed, water running sluggishly under its paddles. Inside, the great stones hummed in their slow circle. Dust hung in the lamplight in soft curtains.

He shrugged off his cloak and hung it on the peg, listening as he moved. Stones sounded true. Belts weren’t slipping. The strange note wasn’t machinery.

It was the bins.

He crossed the floor to the big storage bin on the north wall. The boards there were old but sound; he’d checked them a dozen times since the blight news had started filtering in. The top layer of grain looked as it always did: a pale, uneven sea of kernels, some a little shriveled, most solid enough.

He leaned in and scooped up a handful, let it run through his fingers. It felt right. It smelled… almost right.

Almost.

The sourness was stronger up close, not sharp enough to make him recoil, but there.

Osric frowned.

He found the ladder and dragged it over, climbing up so he could see deeper into the bin. The boards creaked under his weight. He swung one leg over and eased himself carefully down, boots sinking ankle-deep in grain.

It gave way under him with a dry hiss.

The smell rose around him.

From up top, it had been vague, an annoyance. Down here, chest-high in the harvest they were trusting with their lives, it was unmistakable.

Rot.

Not the honest, earthy smell of wet grain destined for mash or pig feed. This was sweeter, cloying, with a mold edge that made the back of his throat tighten.

Osric cursed under his breath.

He started wading.

At first it was like walking through thick sand. Then, near the back left corner, the feeling changed. The grain there clung more, stuck to his boots, dragged.

He knelt, heart thumping harder than his age strictly warranted, and dug with both hands.

The top layer gave way to a darker, clumped mass. Kernels fused, slick, some with grey fuzz feathering their edges.

He didn’t need to taste it. He knew.

“Saints preserve us,” he whispered.

He dug further, fingers numb with cold and dread. The bad patch ran deeper than he hoped, shallower than he feared. The boards behind it were damp to the touch, not dripping, but cool and clammy.

He pressed his thumb against one, hard. A bead of moisture welled up along a hairline crack.

“Roof,” he said to the bin, as if it could answer. “Or wall. Or both. And I missed it.”

He sat back on his heels, breath fogging the air inside the bin. The smell of rot crowded his nose.

He could picture it too easily: snow melting and refreezing along the outer wall, water seeping through old mortar, finding the back of the bin, soaking just enough to wake the wrong kinds of life in the grain pressed against it. Mold, invisible at first, spreading like gossip through the kernels.

He ground his teeth.

Forty-seven sacks we can trust, he had told them.

He dug his hands into the bad patch again, using his fingers like a measure. One, two, three hand-lengths wide. Two deep. The rest, outward from that soft center, was dampened but not yet gone—kernels softening, not yet feathered.

He climbed back out of the bin, flinging handfuls of bad grain over the side into a waiting empty sack. It hit the cloth with a wet thud.

By the time he was done, his shoulders ached and his hands stank of mold. A dark, heavy patch lay in the sack—half a sack’s worth, maybe more.

He looked down into the bin.

A hollow yawned near the back corner where sound grain had been. The smell was better now, but not gone; the damp remained, seeping in, biding its time.

As he watched, a few loose kernels from higher up rolled down the slant of grain and nestled against the damp boards, as if looking for trouble.

Osric cursed again, more fluently.

He fetched planks from the corner, wedged them in to brace a temporary false wall a hand-width away from the damp boards, making a dry barrier. It wouldn’t stop all the moisture, but it would slow it.

Then he started the tedious work of shoveling.

He shifted grain away from the danger spot into smaller bins, spreading the remaining risk around. It was like moving water in a leaking barrel: shift it, lighten the pressure, hope the cracks hold.

Sweat prickled under his shirt despite the cold. Dust coated his throat, turning each breath into a scrape.

By the time he stopped, his arms shook with the effort. The sour reek had faded to a faint warning at the edge of his senses, but it was still there.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve and looked at what he’d pulled out.

The sack of visibly rotten grain sat heavy and wet. Beside it, three other sacks held the not-quite-rotten stuff—the softening kernels from just beyond the mold bloom. Not fit for bread. Maybe fit for beasts, if he didn’t mind them getting sick. Mostly, fit for the river.

Four sacks’ worth.

Four sacks out of his precious forty-seven.

His stomach turned.

“Forty-three,” he said aloud. “If that. And maybe more half-dead, waiting to bloom.”

A draft crept through the mill, bringing with it the faintest hymn of cold and the distant murmur of village life. Somewhere a child laughed; somewhere a pot lid clanged. It made the quiet of the mill feel suddenly hollow.

Osric climbed the ladder again and surveyed the remaining bins with a hunter’s eye.

Two more showed the early signs at their backs: a slight discoloration at the line where grain met wood, a hint of dampness if he pressed his palm there. Not yet rotted. Not far behind.

He marked them in his mind. Those sacks would have to be used first, turned into half-loaves and porridge before rot could claim them too.

He climbed down and went to the small sill where the clay dish sat.

The green shoot had grown.

It was taller now, a thin blade with the beginnings of a second leaf unfurling, pale and stubborn. Its roots, thin and white as spiderwebs, pressed against the side of the dish.

It smelled… clean. Like wet stone and new things.

Osric stared at it, jaw clenched.

“You picked a good moment to prove yourself special,” he told the sprout. “A week ago would’ve been better.”

He had taken the grain for it from the same hill that had given them blight and thin husks and strange softness. A curiosity, he’d told himself. See what grew from a field that had tried to fail. Now, here it was, living proof that not everything in the valley was rotting from the inside out.

He should be delighted.

Instead, the sight made a small, sharp anger prick behind his eyes.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked it. “Show them one green blade and four missing sacks? Tell them, ‘Never mind the rot, look, something’s still growing?’ They’ll throw both of us in the river.”

The sprout, being a sprout, said nothing.

He sagged onto the nearest stool.

His mind started to work the way it always did when given a new number: running the sums.

Forty-seven had given them a path—narrow, but walkable. Forty-three, with the risk of further loss if the damp spread, squeezed that path thinner. The half-loaf plan, built on those forty-seven honest sacks, suddenly had less room for error.

He reached for the ledger on the high shelf, thumbed it open to yesterday’s page.

47 safe sacks (verified).

Underneath, in the same neat hand, he wrote:

43 safe (for now). Rot in north bin. Damp in two more.

Margin gone.

He sat back and stared at the words.

He could have lied. To himself, if no one else. He could have pretended that what he’d taken out of the bin didn’t count, that the little hollow near the back wasn’t worth rewriting plans over.

But every time he’d tried ignoring a bad number in his life, it had found him again later, bigger and meaner.

He shut the ledger with a soft thump.

He had three choices, as he saw it.

He could keep his mouth shut, adjust quietly—shave crusts thinner, grind more oats, hope the caravan Ash was walking toward existed and arrived laden enough to make his anxiety moot.

He could tell Hesta alone, keep it within the council, let them decide when and how to tell everyone else that the road to spring had just lost a plank.

Or he could do what he’d stood up on the hill and promised in front of the Vigil fire: tell the truth, even when it made everyone’s stomachs twist.

He rubbed his temples with the heels of his hands until the skin reddened.

“Rot in the bins,” he muttered. “Rot in the talk if I don’t. Rot in my own head if I do and they look at me like I’ve cheated them.”

The mill wheel creaked, indifferent.

After a while he got up, wiped his hands perfunctorily on a rag he kept near the door, and shrugged his cloak back on.

He paused only long enough to cover the green shoot’s dish with a bit of gauze—to keep the worst of the dust off—before stepping out into the cold.

Pathfinder’s Crumb was busier than he’d expected for this time of day.

The doorbell rang twice as he approached, bodies going in and out on a current of cold and warm air. The smell of baking hit him before he even touched the latch: yeast and browning crust and a hint of something sweet from a pan at the back.

He waited for a pause in traffic, then slipped in with a cluster of others.

“Next!” Liora called, not looking up as she slid a half-loaf across the counter. “If you complain about the size, the price goes up for the privilege.”

That won a tired laugh from the woman on the receiving end.

Osric stood to one side, watching.

The line moved steadily. Some hands reached out eagerly, some reluctantly. Half-loaves looked wrong on the shelf—stout, stunted versions of what people were used to—but they smelled as good as any bread he’d ever known.

“Osric,” Liora said finally, catching sight of him. “If you’re here to tell me to shave them thinner, I’ll hit you with a pan.”

“Not yet,” he said.

She took one look at his face and jerked her chin toward the back door.

“Rellen, you can mind the counter for a minute,” she called over her shoulder. “If anyone tries to pay you in gossip instead of coin, charge extra.”

Old Rellen wheezed a laugh and hauled himself up with his stick.

Liora ushered Osric into the little storage room behind the ovens. It was warmer here, crowded with shelves of flour and jars of spices, baskets of yesterday’s loaves waiting to be turned into crumbs or toasted or something inventive.

“Tell me fast,” she said. “I have a tray in and a line that looks ready to mutiny if I sneeze.”

“Rot in the north bin,” he said. “A patch against the back wall. Damp boards. Four sacks gone, maybe a little more. Two other bins showing early signs.”

She stilled.

“What?” she asked, very calmly.

He repeated it, more slowly this time. Damp, mold, the heavy sack of ruined kernels, the hollow in the grain where good food had been.

“And you’re sure it’s not just…” she groped for a kinder word, failed, “you being paranoid?”

“I dug it out with my hands,” he said. “It clumped. It stank. If you want to come sniff the sack and argue, I’ll happily open it for you, but I don’t recommend it.”

She leaned back against a shelf, knocking a jar of fennel seeds askew.

“Saints,” she breathed.

“I thought I fixed that leak,” he said, pacing a tight line between two stacks of flour. “Last thaw. I patched it. The boards were dry come summer. The grain went in clean. I checked. I checked.”

“I know you did,” she said at once. “This isn’t because you were lazy.”

“It’s because I was confident,” he snapped. “Which is worse. I counted forty-seven safe sacks in front of half the valley. We made a plan. We chose a path. Now I’m telling you it’s really forty-three, and some of those might be waiting to turn on us.”

He laughed once, short and without humor.

“I can’t even comfort myself with the thought that Ash will come back in ten days and tell me I was right to worry,” he added. “He’ll come back and say, ‘You should have said something sooner.’”

Liora was quiet for a moment, chewing the inside of her cheek.

“Can we salvage any of it?” she asked. “The not-rotten bit near the edges?”

“For us?” he said. “No. I won’t put it in bread. Not with the children already skinny. Maybe for animals, if we watch them. Maybe for compost, if we’re feeling optimistic enough to plan for the spring that far out.”

She swore under her breath.

“All right,” she said. “So we have less than we thought. The question is… do we tell everyone yet?”

“Do you want the short answer or the honest one?” he asked.

She shot him a look. “You’ve spent too much time around me,” she said. “You’re starting to sound like a storyteller.”

“I don’t want to tell them,” he admitted. “They just swallowed half-loaves. They just stood on that hill and agreed to shared hunger based on numbers I gave them. If I stand up and say, ‘By the way, we miscounted, the path is narrower than we thought,’ some of them will say, ‘Then why did we give Brookfell so much? Why did we let Ash walk out of here based on faulty sums?’”

“Some of them will say that anyway,” she said. “Whether we tell them now or later, when the bread runs thin.”

He rubbed his face with both hands, palms grinding into his eyes.

“My father used to say,” she said slowly, “that rot never stays where you leave it. You ignore it in the bins, it climbs. You ignore it in beams, the roof falls in. You ignore it in talk, it finds someone who can’t carry the weight and sits on their shoulders.”

She lifted one hand and tapped his forehead.

“And you,” she said, “aren’t a bin. You can’t keep that knowledge in there without it leaking into every loaf you count. You’ll start shaving without telling anyone why. You’ll start looking at Brookfell’s faces like they’re sacks instead of people. You’ll start resenting Ash for walking somewhere you can’t see.”

He exhaled, long and shaky.

“So you’re saying I should tell Hesta,” he said.

“I’m saying,” she replied, “we should tell Hesta. I am not letting you sit with this alone and stew like a batch of bad mash. Then Hesta will decide how much needs to be said to everyone else and how quickly. That’s her job.”

He bristled.

“It’s my job to—”

“It’s your job,” she cut in, “to count honestly and tell the truth. You’ve done the first. You’re about to do the second. You don’t have to carry every consequence on your own back.”

He stared at her.

“Sometimes,” she added, softer, “the path is ‘go tell the person who’s better at taking punches than you are and let her swing the spoon for a while.’”

He let out a sound that was almost a laugh.

“I hate that you’re right,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I try to make it as tolerable as possible.”

She straightened, hands already moving in her mind back to dough and ovens.

“I’ll close early,” she said. “Rellen can live without his afternoon crust for one day. We’ll go up together. Tell Hesta. Osric…”

“What.”

“Bring your ledger,” she said. “And a handful of the rotten grain.”

He recoiled. “Why on earth—”

“Because some people only believe in what they can smell,” she said. “You can wave numbers at them all day. A sack of ruined kernels will do more to persuade them than ten neat columns.”

He grimaced.

“I’ll bring a small handful,” he said. “No more.”

“Fine,” she said. “Now get out of my pantry. I need to get those loaves out before we have ‘burnt in the ovens’ to go with ‘rot in the bins.’”

Hesta’s house sat near the council hall, a modest stone building with a roof that had seen more repairs than anyone could count. Smoke curled from its chimney, thin and steady.

By the time Liora and Osric reached it, the sky had bruised toward evening. The hill wind cut down through the lane, making their cloaks snap.

Osric carried his ledger under one arm and a small sack at arm’s length in the other, as if it might decide to bite him.

Liora rapped on the door with the side of her fist.

“Come in,” Hesta’s voice called.

They stepped into warmth and the smell of lentil stew.

Hesta sat at her table with a needle in her hand, darning a sock with brisk, efficient jabs. She looked up as they entered, eyes flicking immediately to the sack.

“If that’s a gift,” she said, “I’m not sure I want it.”

“It’s not,” Osric said. “It’s a problem.”

“Of course it is,” she said. “Sit. Close the door. Tell me.”

He set the ledger on the table, the sack on the stone hearth, as far from her stew as possible. Then he told her—about the sour smell, the damp boards, the hollow in the grain. The four sacks gone. The two bins that were already frowning at him from their corners.

Hesta’s face didn’t change much as he spoke. Her eyebrows climbed once, but that was all.

When he finished, she held out a hand toward the hearth.

“Let me smell it,” she said.

Osric made a face but did as he was told, opening the sack and peeling back the top.

The odor puffed out, thick and sweet and wrong.

Hesta’s nose wrinkled.

“Good,” she said. “If we need to convince Farlan this is real, I’ll shove that under his chin and watch him recoil.”

Liora made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh.

“So,” Hesta went on, “our forty-seven just became forty-three. Maybe forty-two if the damp spreads more than you can see.”

“At least,” Osric said.

“You sure it was forty-seven to begin with?” she asked. There was no accusation in it, just habit.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m many things. I’m not careless with counts.”

“I know,” she said.

She set the sock down and folded her hands on the table.

“Do you have new sums yet?” she asked.

“Rough ones,” he said. “Half-loaves still get us to thaw. But there’s no more margin. If the caravan is worse than we thought, if Brookfell’s fields don’t give anything at all come spring, if any more sacks turn on us, we’ll be cutting slices so thin you’ll be able to see through them.”

He paused.

“If we hadn’t sent the last wagon to Brookfell yesterday,” he added quietly, “we’d have more to work with.”

Hesta’s eyes sharpened.

“Do you regret it?” she asked.

He thought of Sera’s face on the hill, of Tavi’s small hands gripping a cracked candle. Of Jari asking who to turn to. Of Brookfell’s houses, beams carved with promises.

“No,” he said. It surprised him, how quickly he answered. “I don’t regret that. I regret not patching that crack in the wall better. I regret not checking it again after the first freeze. I regret that my sums made us feel braver than we had any right to.”

“Good,” Hesta said. “Hold on to that order of regret. It’ll keep you standing up straight when people start shouting.”

He let out a breath.

“So,” he said. “When do we tell them? The village. Brookfell. The people who just agreed to half-loaves. They deserve to know their miller miscounted.”

“You didn’t miscount,” she snapped. “You counted what you had. The bins changed underneath you. There’s a difference.”

“That’s not how they’ll hear it,” he said.

“Some of them,” she agreed. “Farlan will grunt about it until next harvest. Someone will say, ‘If we’d known, we might not have shared as much.’ Someone else will say, ‘If we’d known, we still would have, because that’s who we decided to be on the hill.’”

She rubbed her forehead with her fingers.

“We tell them,” she said. “Soon. Not tonight. They’ve just had one Vigil and one council. If we stack too many blows too close together, people stop listening and start panicking. Let them wake up tomorrow still feeling like half-loaves are possible. Then we’ll call a smaller meeting—the heads of households, the ones who need to plan portions—and tell them the margins are gone.”

“And Brookfell?” Liora asked.

“Yes,” Hesta said. “We tell them too. I won’t have it said that we kept them cheerful on lies while we quietly hoarded extra crusts down here. If the path is crooked, we walk it together.”

Osric’s shoulders slumped in something like relief and dread knotted together.

“I’ll draw new sums tonight,” he said. “Bring them to you in the morning.”

“Do that,” she said. “And sleep, if you can. I need you sharp, not dull with guilt. We’ll have enough of that to go around.”

Liora let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since the mill.

“Rot in the bins,” she murmured. “Rot in the talk if we hide it. At least this way, the only thing that’s festering is that sack.”

Hesta gave her a sharp look.

“You going to turn that into some kind of story?” she asked.

“Probably,” Liora said. “But not yet. Right now it’s just… a fact that makes the bread taste different.”

“Fair enough,” Hesta said.

Osric closed the ledger, fingers lingering for a moment on the worn cover.

“Do you ever get tired,” he asked Hesta, “of always being the one who has to stand up and say, ‘Here’s how bad it really is’?”

“Every day,” she said briskly. “That’s why I make you and Liora do half of it for me.”

She picked up her needle again.

“Go home,” she said. “Both of you. We’ll start again in the morning. The rot will still be there. So will we.”

They stepped back out into the cold.

Night had settled in properly; the lane was lined with watch lights in windows, small yellow eyes watching them pass. The sky above was a low, pale smear, hiding stars.

Osric walked beside Liora in silence for a while.

“Rot in the bins,” he said at last. “Ash on the road. Half-loaves on the tables. Tell me again this isn’t all going to come down like a badly stacked sack pile.”

She bumped his shoulder lightly with her own.

“It might,” she said. “But if it does, at least we’ll know which beams cracked and why. That’s better than waking up under a collapsed roof wondering what you missed.”

He huffed out a breath that could, if one were feeling generous, be called a laugh.

As they parted ways—her toward the warm square of Pathfinder’s Crumb, him toward the dark bulk of the mill—Osric glanced up at the hillside.

Brookfell’s watch lights were visible from here, tiny pinpricks along the ridge.

He counted them, out of habit.

None had gone out yet.

He tightened his cloak around his shoulders and went back to his bins, carrying the knowledge that the valley’s path had just narrowed—and the stubborn, unlovely determination to walk it anyway, rot and all.