“The belly’s emptiness is a sharp blade, and it cuts deepest when others depend on it.”

  — A Hunger Proverb

  Dawn seeped into the room like bruised water—no sunrise, only a thickening from black to gray. The air coiled close, heavy with the stink of boiled rags and old sweat, as if the very walls had begun to rot from within. Lucy’s breathing had changed. Not the shrill, defiant coughs of last week, but something smaller—each inhalation thinned, each exhalation escaping her mouth like a secret, half-formed and half-swallowed. Eike lay next to her, arm outstretched on the rough wool of the pallet, counting the shudders at her ribs as if intention alone might keep her heart thumping.

  She made no sound beyond breath. Her lips glossed with fever, eyelids fluttering, lashes glued by sleep. Her small hand curled tight about the sodden blue thread—his mother’s old amulet, now so frayed it barely served as a loop for Lucy to clutch. Each time she gasped, it was as if the world caught on its own hinge and waited. Each time she stilled, some part of Eike’s own lungs forgot its work.

  He brushed the hair from her brow. Not damp, but sopping, wild with fever. When he pressed a rag to her cheeks, it sucked away the sweat with the same voracity the cold stole warmth—ruthless, unthinking.

  Amalia crouched by the hearth, knees hugged to her chest, hair sticking out from beneath her scarf in tangled hanks. The fire, such as it was, had burned low, unable to fill more than the ring of stone about it. She crushed dried leaves between her fingers—sharp mint, camomile, bark—what precious little remained in her pouch. Her hands shook, the tremble as much from exhaustion as from cold. She watched Lucy through the veil of steam, brow tight, shoulders hunched.

  Eike heard Amalia swallow, the sound slow and brittle. He rubbed his palms together under his arms, trying to heat numb fingers. “She worsened in the night.” His voice barely broke above a whisper, rough as ground cork.

  Amalia shook her head, eyes fixed on the dying fire, jaw clenched. “It was coming. You can see it—settling in the joints, that cough gone dry. Fever’s old, now. Has roots.” She ground the herbs with renewed ferocity, as if violence might wring potency from what had already failed. “She’s fought longer than some grown men. But the remedies...” Her gaze fell away, fingers folding tight around dead leaves. “They only buy time.”

  Eike’s stomach knotted; hunger flared—sharp for the empty space he could hardly remember not feeling. The loaf by the door had dwindled to a rock-hard clot, shared in thimble slices, savory as dust. He’d given Lucy the last broth two nights ago.

  Amalia pressed another toast end into his palm, guiding his fingers closed around it, her own bitten through but uneaten. Her touch lingered, gentle but insistent. “Take it. No good to starve yourself too.”

  He crumbled the bread to fragments, resisting the urge to grind it finer—anything for the illusion of more. He glanced at Lucy, saw how the flesh had melted from her cheeks, how the corded blue vein stood out at the arch of her wrist. “Seems a waste to feed me now,” he muttered, crumbs catching at the cracks in his skin.

  Amalia lifted a lock of Lucy’s hair, tucking it behind the child’s ear with a hand that shook faintly. “You’ve more use left,” she whispered. “Besides, hunger cuts sharpest where it lingers. Doesn’t make you generous, just hollow.”

  Eike tried to muster a smile, managing only a sour twist of his lips. He bit the toast; it tasted of nothing. His eyes lingered on Lucy’s flickering pulse. “She ever mention dreaming?”

  Amalia’s eyes flicked to him—gray and bleared with worry. At first she only shook her head, then drew her knees closer, one heel scuffing the ash near the hearth. “Dreams?” The word hung between disbelief and hope. “Don’t talk much these days. If she’s dreaming, it’s her secret. That, or... the fever keeps her. Just a flitting, maybe—never full enough for tales.”

  The words hung uncertainly. Eike stared at the half-crumbled bread in his fist, knowing it was near to a lie. Fever dreams showed more than a child should bear, he thought, his attention drawn back to Lucy, who twitched in restless sleep. If only Amalia would name that softness aloud.

  Lucy coughed, a thin, splintered sound, then stilled, jaw working. Eike bent low, his breath barely stirring the heat at her temple, repeating the old comfort: “Breathe, Luce. Just one more. With me.”

  She managed, barely, a flicker of response—her hand weakly squeezed his thumb, as if to anchor herself there out of sheer will.

  The room chilled each hour further from dawn. Snow crept at the seams of the window, packing crooked lines of blown rime into every groove. No fire could hold against such hunger; no blanket could fend off the sharpened edge of air.

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  *

  Later, as day middled—though the light pressing under the lintel never changed shade—Amalia knelt by the chest, refilling her pouches and snapping each drawstring tight. The motion was sharp, almost impatient. Eike watched, fighting a strange mix of horror and gratitude.

  Amalia’s hands hovered, then dropped, resting on her knees. “I’ve nothing left that works.” Her voice cracked on the words. “Some sicknesses... run deeper than any leaf can reach.” She gestured, helpless, toward Lucy—a shuffle of her fingers, as if about to tuck the girl under, but stopped short.

  Eike pressed his palms to the rough wall, stone biting through rag and skin until his joints throbbed. “There’s still the...” He hesitated, voice raw. “She spoke to me, the foreigner. Amonvae. She said there’s a way—if I take it.”

  Amalia froze mid-motion, eyes narrowing, face stark in the fire’s hush. “Her way.” It wasn’t a question.

  He nodded, refusing to trust his voice further, fists pressed to the cold.

  Amalia shoved her pouches into her coat, then rocked back on her heels by the hearth, thumb tracing a crack along the rim of stone. “My grandmother told it straight—nothing’s free in the Shroud’s shadow.” She kept her gaze fixed on the remaining fire. “You ask for healing, what answers isn’t always a cure—it’s a bargain, and the debt’s never what you’d want to pay. Once, I watched old Jopek beg for a cure when fever struck his youngest. Next day his crops blackened, and the year after, he buried his only daughter. Folk trade three harvests for one hope, then lose a decade of children.”

  Her thumb bit at a splinter. She looked up, eyes fierce and unsteady. “You know what the Whisperers did, when the war went hottest?” Amalia picked at a scab on her knuckle, her voice dropping to a blunt hush. “They came like Amonvae—offering solutions, answers, anything. Maybe one lived, but ten others paid. The west—” she glanced aside—“mostly grave markers now.” Her fingers twisted hard around her pouch, knuckles white. “Power like that—it’s hunger on two feet, Eike. Even with good intent, you don’t get to choose the price.”

  Eike’s head dropped, knuckles white where he pressed against the stone. Hunger raged in him—not for bread, but for a way out that didn’t tear the world to pieces. “If it saves her—” he started, words already breaking inside his mouth.

  Amalia reached, sudden, and caught his wrist, her grip stronger than her voice. Her nails dug in. “Will it?” she asked, breath scoring the quiet. “Or will you just change what it means to lose her?”

  Eike jerked instinctively, anger flaring, surface bright and brief as a struck spark. “Easy for you to counsel patience. You’re not the one feeding hope with empty hands.”

  Her hand fell back, shoulders bowing as though weariness had become another drift of snow inside her. She pulled her scarf higher, voice gone bitter and worn. “No. I’ve buried enough to know the cold doesn’t pity anyone. That doesn’t mean you bathe yourself in it.”

  She turned, gaze fixed down, fingers fluttering at the frayed edge of the hearthstone. “You’re not alone, Eike, even when it feels like it. But if you go to her—Amonvae—don’t pretend it’s only Lucy’s life you’re staking.”

  

  


  

  The day staggered on—long, flat hours, hunger a gnaw at heel and belly alike. Several times Lucy woke, eyes wide and glassy, whimpering for water she could barely drink. Every time she slept, Eike counted each breath, cursing the feeble fire, cursing the blunted sawteeth of fate. Amalia drifted in and out, and each return she wore more fatigue, more defeat, her face grown as wan as the snow beyond the shutters.

  Outside, the cold thickened, wind flaring up bursts of powdered snow that choked the seams and battered the crooked door. Eike listened—every cough from Lucy made him flinch, every clap of wind, every weary rasp of his own useless heartbeat.

  Near sundown, Amalia sat at the end of Lucy’s bed, hands splayed as if to bless or shield. Her voice came muffled, almost a whisper as she watched the frost stitch crawling over the wall. “I knew a girl, once.” Her words caught that old valley cadence, the slow rhythm of folk speech. “High country up past the turn, where winter never lets go. She sickened same—burned from the inside out. Her brother carried her, desperate, up the Dreamer’s Bluff, where the tale says you can find spirits willing to listen—if you’re fool enough. He begged, same as any of us might. Next morning, fever broke. Girl never spoke right again, just muttered strange names, and when he tried to carry her home, the river took him whole. That’s magic for you—a story with hooks in it, not the kind folk tell after dark or sober.”

  Eike let the words settle, heavy as a sodden blanket in the lamplight hush. He squeezed Lucy’s clammy hand until her fingers twitched, as if touch might conjure comfort, though he knew it could not.

  

  


  

  Night slid down, stretching the lamp’s small flame until it guttered at each draft. Eike sat, Lucy’s hand folded in his, her breath now counting less evenly, sometimes skipping whole measures. Amalia slept in a knot beside the pallet, chin on her knees, one hand still resting atop the blue thread near Lucy’s pillow. Eike kept watch, hunger pulsing inside his veins, a double-devil alongside dread. The darkness pressed up against his back; the Shroud was not just a threat, but a presence—woven into every silence, every ragged heartbeat.

  He glanced one last time at the bread-crumb crusts beside the hearth, at the bottomless cup, at Lucy’s bruise-shadowed eyes. Amalia’s breathing rasped, slow and failing. Eike’s own stomach twisted and pitched with hunger and fear. The wind battered the shutter; snow slashed the windowpane in wild, hissing lines. It seemed to him that the darkness pressed close, thick and watchful—as if some old story, older than hunger itself, lingered at the door, testing the frail warmth inside, waiting for a chance.

  He bowed his head, lips against Lucy’s clammy brow. “Hold a bit longer, Luce. Just another night.”

  Eike tightened his grip on her hand, willing them both through the thin hours, breath and hope dwindling with the fire’s last ember. He sat there, stubborn against the dark, caught where choices ran out and only the raw ache of need endured—waiting, refusing to yield, staring into the place where desperation and love bled into each other, thin as the last coil of smoke.