“What the hand forgets, the earth remembers.”

  — Amalia’s Grandfather’s Saying

  Twilight pressed thick at Amalia’s cottage, turning the patched window to a mirror rimed in dull frost and shadow. The world’s colors had been wrung out by snow and silence, but inside her small, cramped room the candle burned steadily—a pool of gold licking at the edges of a chaos built from old journals, leaf-crisped notebooks, and lengths of twine binding memories to the page. The air was sharp with fire and dried mint, with that other, older scent that came from breaking the seal on something best left buried: generations‘ worth of inked secrets, pressed petals, and thumb-worn margins.

  She sat, cross-legged, beside a heap of her grandfather’s effects—old calendars marked in brown ink, field maps worn thin at the folds, and a strip of birch bark etched with his careful, blotted script, the letters grooved deep enough to catch a fingertip. Her lips moved as she read, voice a scatter of breath for ghosts alone: “What the hand forgets, the earth remembers.” The proverb hovered at her shoulder, sharp as the scent of mint caught in candlewax, infusing every word she read with a heaviness she felt in her chest. The words lingered in her mouth, dry and heavy as old flour, leaving a faint bitterness she could taste against her tongue.

  Tonight, the world beyond the walls had faded to rumor—her mother’s cautions (“Don’t meddle, girl. Folk have long memories and short forgiveness”), Eike’s hollow-eyed passing in the lane, even Lucy’s breath caught thin behind shutter and rafter. She pressed her hand against a page, the fine grain of the parchment rough as stubble against her thumb. When she traced the letters, the words rose in fragments: Children of the green wound, when they touch the root, the land listens... Her grandfather’s handwriting, crabbed and patient, wound a slow spiral about sickness and survival, about magic that was not learned, but recalled—a heritage older than any castle’s stone.

  Amalia steadied herself, gathered another notebook from the heap. The covers smelled of old beeswax and soot—a comfort, almost. She remembered sitting atop her grandfather’s knee as a child, hearing tales of bloodlines too stubborn to fade and earth “that kept score when men would rather forget their debts.” He’d pressed a curl of yarrow between the pages, muttering, “For luck, or failing that, for memory.” She found the pressed herb now, dry as last winter’s grass, a ghost of its summer green trembling in the candle flame.

  Connection. That’s what he always said—never simple force. She frowned, brows knitting. Lately, watching Eike—his hand passing over turnip rows, the way frost seemed to draw back, if only by a finger’s width; his silence, taut as a bowstring at the edge of the field—the pattern was unmistakable. Not all gifts shattered; some coaxed things to endure, roots running deep where the world had only ever expected rot.

  She read on.

  There are those who break, and those who heal, but the rarest have a touch that roots itself beneath the soil. Not by command, but by listening—by letting memory seep up through their skin. Green magic—it stirs in hunger, wakes again in thaw, and answers blood with blood, if the ground hears you ask the right way…

  A chill pinched her spine. Eike’s name was nowhere in these pages, yet every line seemed to etch his shape anew: not a warlock’s fire, nor a hedgewise curse, but something stranger—a bridge, a root system showing its network only when the world has frozen to the core.

  She paged deeper. Tiny symbols dotted the margins—a sun, a tangled spiral, a crude handprint. In one candlelit breath, she spied a passage she’d always thought the ramblings of a man too long in his cups:

  Sometimes there comes a child marked not by scars, but by hunger, and where they walk things do not forget how to grow. Old hills welcome them. Sickness flees when the root is quickened… yet always, the cost remains, for the earth will have its reckoning.

  She closed her eyes, letting the words settle. If Eike bore such a gift... then Amonvae’s interest was no accident. And if the land itself answered him—or listened, at least—he would serve as both cure and warning. Old tales whispered that such power could not be buried; the fields, the rivers, even the stones remembered whose hands had once mended or marred them.

  Outside, a drift slid from the thatch with a muffled whump, startling Amalia back to the present. She set the books aside, rising stiff and slow, her knees crackling in protest. The air pressed close—alive with the scent of candle and the dust of secrets best kept guarded.

  She padded to the battered chest beneath the window, pulling her shawl close against the draft. Through the wavering pane she could just make out the ghostly line of Eike trudging across the common, shoulders bent, sack drawn across both arms. The set of his back—no longer only weariness. The world moved around him, no longer just against him, and that was a thing to both fear and guard. Even in the stillness, she could sense the thread of change he trailed—like water undermining only those stones ready to yield.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  A snap of bitterness rose in her chest. The folk here, proud of endurance, suspicious of anything that grew out of season—how long before the whispers that branded Eike as scapegoat grew teeth?

  She turned from the window, mind spinning through the old stories. If her grandfather’s notes spelled truth, Eike’s power was not merely a storm to be braved, but a hidden root, binding everything together. If roots ran deep enough, even blight could not kill them. But the wrong hand—hungry, or desperate—might turn the living connection to poison.

  She pressed her palm flat over the worn cover of the notebook, as if to seal her fears inside.

  

  


  

  The next day dawned dull, windless, the village feeling squeezed between two hard silences. Amalia set out, herbs clipped and bundled tight, eyes sharp above her scarf. She took the long walk, circling near the field’s edge where hardpan turned to frostbitten mud, where the Duke’s boundaries gave way to poorer, older soil.

  She saw Eike kneeling near the ditch, gloves tossed aside, bare hands sunk deep in the earth. His face—turned toward the small, frost-stunted row of carrot greens—wore a look she could not measure: not hope, nor defeat, but deep study, as if the ground itself whispered.

  She crouched a ways off, pretending to busy herself with cutting willow shoots, her gaze never quite landing, her ears pricked to every sound. She watched as Eike pressed his thumb to a curled leaf, eyes half-shut—and in the next breath, the green unfurled, cell by cell, slow and stubborn. The neighboring shoots followed, reluctantly as schoolboys, frost beading then melting at the margin. No incantation, no gesture—just a presence, a persuasion both gentle and profound. The act was small enough to go unseen, but Amalia, with the old wisdom at her back, marked it for what it was: the hand persuading, the earth remembering.

  He stood then, shaking soil from nervous fingers, and caught her staring. His expression flickered—guard up, recognition mingled with guilt. She mustered a thin smile, keeping her tone mild. “Early frost bites the deep roots worst. Even luck’s no cure for that, not always.”

  Eike hesitated, scanning the empty morning beyond her. “Luck’s only for those who wait. Roots don’t wait—they hold, whether the frost comes or not.”

  She met his gaze—searching, curious, no sign of the suspicion carried by village tongues. “Your luck’s been thick of late. The field hears it.” She didn’t ask, only watched. Silence, she’d learned, did more work in folk hearts than any question.

  He shrugged, a balled fist closing at his side. “Might be just the wind’s changed. Or something’s decided to listen at last.”

  Their eyes met, and in that brittle dawn light, Amalia saw truth in the set of his jaw—a truth older than any tale her grandfather ever told. Words felt empty between them, flimsy beside the quiet certainty pressing in from the chilled earth.

  She watched as he left, boots pressing new hollows in the field; frost gleamed in his shadow, but the earth beneath his tread did not flinch.

  

  


  

  That night, unease settled over the village like a new layer of frost. Even the dogs kept to their corners, nursing old grudges in silence. Up at the keep, beneath heavy stones and thicker rumors, Duke Jargev called Master Rend to his council.

  Jargev’s solar was never quite warm, even with the hearth piled high. The flames stuttered against stones old as any legend. He slid a silver coin back and forth across the table—one more comfort gained from Amonvae’s “patron,” though the shine left an aftertaste.

  He leaned toward Rend, voice low and half-mocking. “Rumors have a way of sliding coin from purse to tongue, hem? I wonder—would a little silver cure their tongues, or only loosen them further?”

  Rend shook his head, tally-stick hooked in his belt. “Folk talk more for fear than want. They’ve seen the boy’s house stacked better, and his step less hungry—yet not a one can name honest work or honest fortune for it.”

  Jargev’s mouth twisted. “Prosperity draws as many knives as famine, and half so many friends. I’ve had letters—questions from the capital about disturbances. The grain, that public outburst, this... foreigner.” He bit off the last word, letting it drop heavy between them. “I smell an enterprise that might well slip beyond my hand, if I let it run cold.”

  He pushed back from the table, cloak sliding from one bony shoulder. In his mind, the village was a map of debts and threats: Amonvae, with her careful offers and enigmatic gold; Eike, marked now by both charity and power; the old blood of the land, which, if the stories ran true, owed allegiance to neither coin nor crown.

  He thumbed a half-written letter—coded, unsealed. Suspected magical interference. Locals agitated. Apprentice under influence, possibly unlicensed. Recommend watchfulness. Suggest guidance or—if prudent—quiet removal.

  But he did not sign, not yet.

  Instead, he turned once more to Rend. “Keep eyes near the edges. Not close enough to frighten, but I’ll not have my lands run by roots and whispers. If there’s power crawling up from the old soil, let’s see whose hand it trails, and whose neck may be safest bound to it.”

  Rend grunted, unmoved. “Folk’ll talk, my lord. But they remember hunger faster than new masters. Your rule still holds—until the ground says otherwise.”

  Jargev’s lips quirked—more threat than humor—and for a moment, the two men sat, dwarfed by the high window and the shivering choir of night.

  He would send his letter. But not in panic, and never in ignorance. The new green threading its way through Winter Claw was not yet ripe enough to pluck—nor, perhaps, to be pruned.

  

  


  

  Amalia, window shuttered against the wind, pressed her thumb to the old journal and found herself whispering, half in prayer, half in warning—“What the hand forgets, the earth remembers.” Roots, once quickened, grew of their own accord; bargains struck in hunger lingered long after the hunger itself forgot its name.

  Her gaze settled on the window, searching the snowy dark for a sign—a flicker, a movement, anything to promise hope or warn her of what crept closer. For the first time, she found herself wishing the old stories were nothing more than tales for winter nights. But the wind drummed its lesson on the glass; wishes blew away like dry leaves, and what was rooted in the land endured, whether or not she was ready to face it.