“The ice takes what the earth cannot give. And the snow remembers every debt.”

  —Winter Claw Saying

  The air tasted of iron and old frost, as though somewhere, deep underfoot, the earth was bleeding slow and silent beneath its ice-bound shroud. Each breath caught sharp at the back of Eike’s throat—raw, unforgiving—and turned to vapor that vanished above the battered fields before him. He shifted his grip on the haft of his spade, cracked fingers protesting, already numb despite the threadbare gloves. Daylight here was a grudging thing, leaking over the distant slopes in dull bands, more a threat than a promise.

  He worked by habit—arms moving, knuckles stiff, each motion etched by winters past and the dull ache of repetition. Hope had frozen out of him long ago. The patch of earth he scoured would yield little—thin roots, knotted turnips stunted by the bite of an early snow. He nudged one loose, globes like stones, and tossed it onto the wooden sledge. It thudded against the others with a hollow finality. Beside him, Grayna grunted—a wordless, exhausted note—and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “Bleeding hard as fence-posts this year,” she muttered, eyeing the meager harvest. “Frost’s cursed us twice over already.”

  Eike shrugged. The gesture felt too big, an extravagance of warmth he could ill afford. “So it always is,” he replied. His voice emerged dull, as if cracked by long disuse. Might freeze before it reached her, he thought, biting the words back behind lips already cracked by the cold.

  A sound carried across the frozen field—iron on wood, boots crunching, the sour note of authority sharp as a hawk’s cry over empty snow. The Duke’s men, moving through the rows with their tally-sticks slapping gloved hands and their voices harsh, impatient. Furs patchworked and stained, mail gleaming in uneven strips where the sun found bare metal. One of them, broad-shouldered and red-cheeked, worked his way down the line, following the slow procession of cold and labor.

  Grayna glanced sidelong at Eike, lips thinned to white. “Reckon they’ve come hungry,” she whispered. “That, or looking for a soul to make an example of.”

  He snorted. “Let them. Snow’s not likely to cough up more for their troubles.” He regretted the words as soon as they slipped free; Grayna’s teeth worried her lip, eyes scanning the slope beyond the nearest heap of straw. Words, here, could carry farther than sense.

  The tally-stick cracked against Eike’s sledge—sharp, impatient. “This shite all you’ve dug, boy?”

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  Eike straightened, felt the small bones in his back pop. He measured the man’s gaze, weighed responses as carefully as a trapper picking clean bones from last season’s spoils. “Soil’s stone past the top. Roots won’t give more.”

  The man’s lips twisted. “So dig deeper. Or would you have me tell the Duke you’re lazy on his land?” The words carried easily in the cold, slicing through the field until hands stilled, backs hunched a little deeper.

  Grayna kept her eyes on the ground, hands tightening around her own tool. Eike flexed his grip, the cold grinding along each knuckle. Don’t answer, he thought. Don’t give him more to remember you by.

  The tally-stick landed again, softer this time, as if measuring weight rather than harvest. “You hear me?”

  “I hear,” Eike said, voice clipped as a bitten reed.

  The man studied him a moment, perhaps searching for defiance or the hint of something worth breaking—a tradition among the Duke’s men. But the cold made everything small, even scraps of anger. With a snort, he turned, boots churning up snow, and moved on to the next row, like a crow picking through carcass remains after a failed hunt.

  Eike watched him go. For a heartbeat, the ache in his hands faded, replaced by that bitter knot tightening inside him—a resentment that lay heavy, as relentless as the drifted snow. Hope was brittle here, liable to snap in the first frost.

  Behind, Grayna risked a glance. “Shouldn’t test ‘em, Eike.”

  “I’m not testing. I’m surviving.” He knelt, struck iron to earth, the motion steady, practiced—like prayer, but colder.

  The others resumed their scraping and gathering, the field echoing with the dull, dead rhythm of men and women working not for life, but for the promise of avoiding something worse. A thin flurry began—small, stinging flakes like ash. The world shrank as the gray press of snow closed down.

  Eike’s mind slipped for a moment—remembered another winter, another harvest, hands smaller but already raw. His mother’s voice, quiet and unyielding: The snow never forgets, Eike. Work as if it’s watching. The years since had proven her right.

  Above the fields, the mountains crouched, unbroken and remote, their slopes wrapped in the colorless shroud of endless cold. No paths led through them, not for folk like Eike. Prison walls, white and pitiless.

  The Duke’s men gathered up what little they cared for—hoisting bushels, counting, never shivering. They called over the village elder, barked orders that skittered across the packed snow like stones over a frozen pond. Eike caught words like “quota” and “shortfall,” the syllables heavy with consequence. A girl beside him, no older than twelve, stifled a sob when one of the men snatched their only sack of barley.

  Debts, thought Eike. Paid in blood, in broken fingernails, in another day’s breath wrung from the frozen air. The snow remembers each one, clinging tight to the field’s buried bones.

  When the men departed, they left bootprints punched deep into the crust, marking the field with a line of wounds that would not heal before the next storm. Silence pressed in, heavy and close. Grayna shouldered the sledge, already moving toward home. Eike waited, the cold sinking through flesh to the marrow, rooting him in place. He watched the Duke’s men vanish into the pale blur, their furs dissolving into the falling snow.

  He would remember. If the mountains stood sentinel, unblinking and indifferent, then so would he.

  The ice takes what the earth cannot give. And here in Winter Claw, memory was colder than any wind.

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  Book?1 is complete