“The spider offers the fly a silken thread, not a path to freedom.”

  — An Arch-Mage’s Warning to Apprentices

  The croft hunched alone on the edge of Winter Claw, a spine of roof broken beneath the black weight of snow, its windows clouded with salt-rimed frost. In the pale hours, when even the crows picked elsewhere, Amonvae let herself into its hollow. The door yielded not with welcome, but with a reluctant sigh—as if the house itself, aware of the world’s cruelties, had learned the wisdom of lying low. It would do. Not for comfort, but for purpose.

  Within, the stale musk of rotted straw and disuse lingered, woven deep in the wool of the mattress, stitched into the boards where old mice had gnawed and new spiders had strung their thin, hopeful nets. The hearth was cold; the soot in its throat had grown furred with years of silence. Still, Amonvae moved lightly, a shadow folding comfort into corners rather than claiming it. She circled the small front room, fingers ghosting over forgotten tokens—a chip of pottery, a pitted iron pot, a bone-button clinging by a thread to a coif abandoned on a hook. Everything catalogued, every weakness noted: the warping of the shutters, the draughts under the doors, the places dust gathered in drifts like tiny snows.

  Secrets, she reminded herself, are bred where warmth is most wanting. Here, she would be unseen by the villagers, free from the keep’s watchful halls and sliders of ledgers. Free, too, from the stain of official kindness. In this cold, every offer gained weight.

  She unpacked her satchel, laying out the tools of her quiet trade: copper spoon dulled by old magic, bundles of dried herb sharp as needles, a stub of blue wax, a twist of green twine. Under it all, a letter—Adenar’s script crawling over handmade paper in lines cold as old law: Observe. Do not intervene. Catalog all variations. Trust, never; act, rarely. She weighed it down with her signet ring, as if the words might stir to mischief were they left untethered.

  Amonvae worked by habit, feet moving on silent arcs across the uneven boards. She salted the windows—three grains at each corner, traced with a nail curved into a broken sigil. She hung a sprig of larch on the lintel, more to please habit than to ward off rumor. A kettle fetched water from the ice-well out back; a fire nursed from rasped kindling, coaxed to sullen life. When it drew, she let the smoke twine through the air, muddying the earthy stink with a note of pine.

  From the sack, she unfurled small bundles wrapped in linen. Here—a handful of dried berries, pressed last year in a warmer valley. There—scraps of honeycomb, broken but still rich with captured light. Not gifts, she thought, but instruments. The fly’s hunger brings it to the thread; the web is merely patient.

  Her methods were careful, precise. A drop of word to a boy at the well—“Old Murda’s croft, that’s where the healers sometimes go, when the sick outnumber the hope.” A stray coin pressed into a barrow-girl’s palm: “Tell Eike there’s a foreigner who knows old sickness, hidden in the north field, when the moon wanes thin.” A scarf left hanging on Grayna’s latch, green as spring, scent unknown but not wholly unfriendly.

  The game was not to frighten, but to tempt. Never on the first day—too clumsy. Instead, let rumor swirl, settle into certainty. Let need, sharpened by desperation, light the way to her door. The spider’s thread spun best when the wind was up and the house near empty.

  In the evenings, Amonvae stood by the lone window, watching the distant figures drag themselves across the hard-packed yard, their shadows blue in the dusk. She traced Eike’s movements—fetching water, ducked low beneath suspicion, shoulders hunched as if the cold had wormed through flesh to clutch at bone. He kept to the lanes where no voice greeted him, no gesture offered comfort. Only the little one—Lucy—served as anchor to his tattered world, her cries sometimes lifting over the fields, thin and insistent as the calls of starved lambs. Each day, rumor thickened around him, painted by the brush of fear and memory seldom faced.

  She watched, measured, and judged the moment would come soon enough—when Eike, corroded by worry, might grow desperate enough to knock upon a stranger’s door.

  

  


  

  Eike’s world had grown small as a burial pit. He moved through it with the care of the shunned, every errand weighed against the risk of being noticed. Those who looked at him did so quickly, as if expecting something rotten to sprout where his shadow passed. The snow, once merely frozen and indifferent, now felt complicit—pressing close, chewing up his tracks as soon as he’d left them.

  Inside, the cottage was shuttered against both cold and more intrusive drafts. Lucy tossed, fever twisting her small body to knots beneath blankets Eike could no longer lift without flinching from her heat. Her hands—clenched around a blue thread amulet—trembled in sleep, lips murmuring commands too old for dreaming.

  He pressed a scrap of linen against her brow, watched the pulse flutter at her jaw. “Just hold out. Just another day. Amalia will come, or somebody…” The words choked; he could not make them fill the room.

  Grayna poked her head in, boots trailing the raw print of worry. “Any change?”

  “Hotter.” Eike’s voice stuck. “I tried the last of the bark, and the broth, but—“ He stopped. The rest coiled in his throat, bitter and silent—a scrap of hope he no longer trusted himself to offer.

  Grayna stood silent a long moment, lips flattening. “Hear there’s someone new on the north field.” Her tone was studied, neutral. “Folk say a healer out there, foreign. Might know about shroud-sickness. Might not. I don’t set store by such tales, but, well…” She trailed off, gaze scraping sideways, unwilling to be seen wishing for hope in front of him.

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  He braced an elbow against the table. “Just the usual gossip?”

  She shrugged, pushing a loose braid back beneath her hood. “Who can say? Desperate times, desperate ears. Sometimes strangers help. Sometimes they bring worse.”

  Eike nodded, jaw set. He could feel the village, tight and cold, circling beyond the door. Fear had made him mean. Now it made him reckless.

  After Grayna left, he sat a while, eyes fixed to the cracked bit of crockery holding the night’s scrap of broth. Stay. She needs you here. Go. What’s left by dawn if you don’t? The logic turned and turned, never settling. The thread of rumor itched behind his ear.

  He pressed a kiss to Lucy’s brow, set a battered candle by her head, and gathered his coat. “Won’t be long. Lock the door after.” She mumbled, half asleep, hand tightening on the amulet.

  

  


  

  Outside, the dusk bit through to the marrow. Smoke from distant chimneys tumbled low; the snow was loose now, glassy, drifting in pale sheets across the fallow ground. Eike trudged north, bones aching in the yielding dark, boots heavy with cold and the suspicion of being watched.

  No living soul crossed the field between the last hut and Old Murda’s croft. The drifts here curled high against the broken porch, wind worrying at the eaves as if seeking a way in. The croft’s eyes—windows—squinted out, unblinking, the faintest smear of light behind sagging curtains.

  He hesitated at the gate, hand clenching the latch, some part of him still ready to return, to curse the fools who sent him chasing ghost-cures in the teeth of night. But then Lucy’s cough rode out on a gust, faint but unmistakable.

  He entered.

  

  


  

  Amonvae waited by the fire, her silhouette unassuming—a wisp wrapped in gray wool, hair coiled tight beneath a scarf whose green was not of local dye. The room smelled of smoke and boiled herb, with a sharper, unfamiliar undertone—a tang that called up old forest growth, or the bruised scent of thunder before rain. Behind her, the hearth flickered low, but its heat was focused—drawn about her in a pool that did not reach far.

  Eike stopped just inside the door, all senses sharpened. His glance flickered, weighing paths to the threshold, ways out if the promise here soured.

  She studied him a moment—face open, unadorned, not local, not quite foreign. There was nothing familiar in her bearing, yet nothing exactly threatening.

  “You came,” Amonvae said. Her voice unwound itself gently, the accent sharp at the edges, soft as a knife kept in cloth.

  Eike moved no further in. “If you’ve help, give it. I’m not here for talk.”

  Amonvae indicated the bench by the fire, the gesture neither order nor invitation. “You are spent,” she observed, not unkindly. “Grief wears the face of anger, sometimes. Sit, before you fall.”

  He hesitated, but the cold prodded him onwards. Boots scraping, he lowered himself, arms folded across his chest.

  She poured a thin measure of water into an iron pot, set it over the fire, and dropped in a twist of leaf. “There is no cure for some ills,” she said, tone even. “But there are ways to edge back the dark. Sometimes, the path runs through understanding.”

  Eike bristled. “If you want coin—”

  “Coin spends poorly in these snows,” Amonvae replied. “I have use for something rarer—word unvarnished, fear unmouthed. Tell me what gnaws at you, not for her sake,” she nodded towards the lane, “but your own.”

  He looked away, jaw clenched, lips pressed so tight they blanched.

  “The shroud,” he said finally, voice rough and low. “What they call it. I—I did something. Something that can’t be hid again. Folk look at me like I’m already gone.”

  Amonvae stirred the pot, steam writhing up in ribbons. “What you carry is rare. Feared, yes, for few are wise enough to wield it well. But do not mistake rarity for evil, or power for doom. Most who taste that current are changed. Some are drowned, yes, some find the river’s source. Sickness, when untended, festers. Power, when buried, rots. Best to learn its shape before it learns yours.”

  He risked a glance at her—a hunger for hope, checked by old mistrust. “You know of such things.”

  She smiled, lips thin. “I have seen many places where the veil thins. Sometimes a curse is only a talent unshaped, a river denied its course. The gift that shivers in you—I can shape it, if you wish. Not gentle, perhaps. Not safe. But useful—to you, or to her.” Her words snared the air between them, as fine and taut as spider-silk, glinting with both promise and peril.

  Static prickled under Eike’s skin. Behind the offer lurked calculation—her gaze never fully soft, never quite engaged in the manner of those who minister out of love or tradition.

  “Why help me?” he demanded, eyes narrowing. “Folk here hate what they don’t understand. You’ve no place in it.”

  She did not flinch. “I study what the world hides. Sometimes I mend, sometimes I guard, sometimes…” She shrugged, as if to dismiss the very notion of motive. “Let’s call it calculated compassion. You are useful to me. And I am useful to you.”

  Silence thickened, save for the pop of ice sliding from the eaves. It felt as if Amonvae’s web—delicate yet inescapable—stretched from corner to corner, every word bridging the gap with threads too fine to break and too strong to brush aside.

  Eike’s breath clouded in the thin light. He stared into the fire, then up at her face—searching for trickery, the lies of a witch, the angle demanded by debt. But the world had grown too raw for disbelief.

  “If I say yes—if I let you teach me—what’s the price?”

  Amonvae’s eyes glimmered, the barest reflection of the flames. “All gifts bear weight. My price—” she paused, considering, “—is simple. You listen, you learn, you do not turn away from what is asked. In return, your sister has a chance, and you… remain more than the village’s scapegoat.”

  He ran a hand through tangled hair, knuckles red and rough.

  “Not much of a bargain,” he muttered. “But nothing else left waiting.”

  She handed him a mug, the herbal draught steaming, acrid on the tongue, oily with possibility. “Nothing is left by accident,” she said, her voice low as a snow-laden wind. “Choices make their own weather. The Shroud comes for many; few offer it their name.”

  He sipped, gagged, blinked the tears back. No comfort in it, only motion, only heat.

  They sat, neither rising from the bench nor breaking the fragile hush between them. The air felt strung with tension, each breath pulling a little tighter—a single misstep and one or both would be caught.

  The fire spilled twisted shadows along the wall, the flicker of its light pulling Eike’s silhouette long and crooked, as if the room itself strained to reveal what dwelled beneath the surface.

  At the edge of doubt, Eike met her gaze. A flicker kindled—nothing he’d dare call hope, but enough to loosen the ache in his chest, if only for a breath.

  Behind him, snow battered the shut windows, the world held at bay by nothing more than a half-spoken bargain.

  And above all, the web—Amonvae’s, winter’s, the Shroud’s—waited, trembling for what would come next.