The mill smells of grain dust, wet wool, and worry.

Master Cole’s ledger is a battlefield of numbers. You do not need to be grown to see that the tax term is a mouth and the mill is a smaller mouth. Mira’s father is not a villain. His hands shake when he sets a cup down, and that is a kind of weather too.

Peddler Voss has left a cloth bundle on the table “as a sample of the market,” Cole says. It is not unwrapped. It is shaped like a lie waiting for an audience.

Old Nan Reed is already in the good chair, because Nan is in the good chair in every scene of this village that involves a story. She holds up one finger, then two, then three.

“Unicorns purify water with their horns,” she says. “Also, sea-kings wore teeth that sailors called horns. Also, a white deer comes when the wood is kept. All true. Don’t look at me like that. Stories are pockets. You can keep more than one stone in a pocket.”

Mira mouths we need silver.

You mouth we need the wood.

Outside, frost is thinning. Tracks do not wait for council meetings.