The day wore itself thin. Wind came down from the ridge with a bite like metal, and the light on the fields went the color of old straw. By evening, doors unlatched in a staggered chorus and the village flowed toward the square as if the fire there pulled on some small, buried iron inside every chest. It was the night they hung the first winter lanterns—nothing like the city festivals with their glass bells and gilded frames; these were made from rind and reed and thrift, from jars scraped clean and skins cured thin as a whisper.
Children carried the soft-lit things like captured moons. Some were carved with clumsy stars, others with fish or birds or names cut so uneven they read as prayer more than letters. The hedge-woman's lantern was a plain, perfect circle of scraped horn that threw a steady halo. The ring-fingered seller had bought a slice of polished mica from his own pack and made a lantern that glittered; people watched it and did not like themselves for wanting it.
The boy came last, as he always did, shoulders stiff from the day's mending. He had traded for a thin sheet of tallow and stretched it over a willow frame he'd shaved until it bent true. In the skin he had cut a single round hole, no flourish, just a clean mouth for light. He set a chip of candle inside and watched the pale glow gather, then steady, then begin to breathe.
"Small," a child said, meaning simple.
"Steady," the hedge-woman corrected without turning, which meant she had looked and knew whose hands had made it.
Old Jaren took the storyteller's place without asking, the way a river takes the deepest channel. He sat crooked on his stool, beard wearing its scorch as if it were a medal. He warmed his hands over the fire and looked out over the lanterns bobbing like pond lilies in a night of wind.
"Lanterns," he said, as if testing the word for cracks. "They remember what we can't hold in our fists. That's their work. If you don't like remembering, you can blow them out and stumble home."
Someone snorted. Someone else patted a child's shoulder in time with the snort, laughing softly. Jaren smiled without teeth. When the noise settled, he set his palms on his knees and leaned forward as if the story were a small thing that might run if he raised his voice.
"There is a mountain that leans," he said, "and it leans on purpose. Not because the ground failed it, but because the sky drew it and it could not help straining toward what called. It climbs with a twist to the right, a spiral like the grain of an old tree, and at the top it crooks back like a hook. That hook points down, not up. Points to a spot the way a mother points: here. Here, not there. Here is where the thing you need is buried."
The wind touched the lanterns. Little light-circles stretched, shrank, found themselves again. A baby breathed in its sleep with the soft squeak of a hinge that wants oil. The boy held his plain lantern low and felt its heat seep into his fingers, as if it remembered for him that warmth could be close and quiet.
"In the earth at the end of that hook," Jaren went on, "there's a ring of stones. When I was young—and I was, once—I counted nine set in a circle, old as any name we keep. They're plain to the eye. It's the tenth that you cannot see. That stone is made out of a thing we forget quicker than we should. That one wakes only when someone puts down what the world keeps taking—fear, pride, loneliness—and lets tears fall out of the fist that's been holding them."
Laughter came thin and uncomfortable. "Tears?" Bram said from the bright edge of the fire. "If we need tears, fetch my uncle a cup."
"Fetch your own ears," Jaren shot back, not looking at him. "Some things are made to be softened by water. Stone among them. Hearts, sometimes. There is a pond in that ring. Clear enough that the moon mistakes it for her own eye. I saw it once from a distance. I saw the way the air changed around it, as if breath wanted to be held and held a little longer."
"Did you drink it?" a child asked. Her lantern had a fish cut into it, its belly round with light.
Jaren's mouth worked. For a moment even the wind held itself still. "No," he said, the word rough as rope. "I had a hand on the elbow of a friend who needed pulling back more than he needed pushing forward, and there are times when the good you do is the door you close. I watched another go, though. He was thin as a truth nobody wants. No magic in him and no name worth a second look. The ground woke under him like a dog under its master's step. The ring showed ten stones for him. He put his face in the water and came up right in himself for the first time I'd ever seen him."
"What gift?" someone called. "What trick?"
Jaren rubbed thumb against forefinger as if testing grit. "Not a trick," he said. "A trueness. He could grip a thing and it wouldn't break him first. He could lift what nobody thought could be lifted. I saw him climb a cut-bank wall with his hands and a rope as if the earth had grown rungs for him and was grateful he took them. He ran like a deer on a day the dogs were tired. When the city folk saw him, they tried to make his back their stair, as they will, and he left them and didn't look back. Went into the hills and was mostly wind after that."
"Lying old man," Bram muttered, but not loud. The ring-fingered seller smiled to himself and spun a coin between knuckles in a way that looked like listening, like patience. The hedge-woman did not smile; she looked at the boy's hands where they cradled that steady circle of light and then at his face, which was learning to keep still.
"What if you're not…forgotten?" a woman asked from the circle, eyes flicking to her daughter, who had a seamstress's neatness in the set of her mouth. "What if you are seen enough? Is the pond for you?"
"It is not for the fat of spirit," Jaren said mildly. "It's for bones. For starved places. For the ones who would vanish even from their own mirrors if the glass didn't insist." He lifted his shoulders, let them fall. "But I am a poor man to tell rich folk what table they should eat from. It is not my pond. It is not anybody's. That is the first truth of it."
"And the second?" asked the hedge-woman, because stories like to be asked into their next breath.
Jaren took his time. The lanterns breathed. The fire coiled on itself and found new ways to burn. "The second," he said at last, "is that the pond asks something back. Every making has its unmaking and its price. I don't know the count of it, but I know the shape. You get remade and the world moves to fit you, but the world is made of people who like it better when their chairs stay where they left them. If the pond wakes you, you'll rise. If you rise, someone will notice. And not everyone who notices kneels."
The seller laughed softly, a sound as clean and mean as polished metal. "You're a good market-man, old one. You give a little fear with your promise and call it truth. Folks pay more for a story if it stings."
"Then don't pay," Jaren said, amused. "I don't take coin for this. I don't take thanks. I don't take much of anything but the air my lungs can afford and the fire's heat when it reaches me."
He fell quiet. The square filled the pause with the little noises a village makes when it is breathing together—shifts, coughs, a whistle's two-note call from somewhere in the dark as someone let a dog know it was time to come home. The boy's sister, standing behind him, answered the whistle by habit, not realizing. The dog trotted from shadow to shadow like a piece of night that had learned a man's name.
"How do you find it?" the boy asked. The words were out before he could pass them through any gate. His voice sounded like a stranger's to his own ear—lower, because the night was listening. "The mountain."
Jaren's head turned. His eyes were set deep and bright as coals raked back to life. "You look up until the sky no longer forgets to tell you where it keeps its hooks," he said. "Go north until the pines grow crooked with trying to see what's behind them. When the ridge looks like a jaw and the river sounds like teeth, you've gone too far. Turn east until your shadow keeps trying to walk ahead of you. Then south, a day and a half, if your feet are honest. Or"—and here he smiled with half his mouth, as if to soften the cruelty of truth—"you listen for the part of yourself that has been pointing the same way for years without your permission."
The boy's lantern warmed his skin. The hole he'd cut for its light seemed to look back at him like an eye that was not impressed by excuses. He thought of how his hands were always full of other people's weight. He thought of how his name never stuck to anyone's tongue long enough to be useful. He thought of the moment last night when the words had slipped and landed in the dark: I don't want to be forgotten anymore.
The hedge-woman spoke then, not to Jaren but to the space in which the boy had asked. "If you go," she said, "you don't tell the road where to take you. You ask. Roads are proud. They don't respond to orders from feet. And you don't go angry. Anger burns clean, but it burns quick. Take stubbornness. It lasts."
Bram found a laugh that thought itself braver than it was. "We'll see him next week, smelling of mud, with a story about how the sky was too high to catch," he said, half to his friends, half to the heat of his own voice.
"Maybe," Jaren said, unbothered. "Or maybe he'll come back with a spine straight enough to make even your mouth go quiet. I've seen stranger."
The ring of lanterns glowed. Moths butted the skins and left dust like fingerprints of night. The boy's sister shifted closer until her sleeve brushed his. He realized her hands were empty. She had not brought a lantern. He held his low so its circle of light touched both their shins.
"Don't," she said, and her voice snagged on the word as if a thorn had caught the edge of it. She didn't say more, because there was no more that would not be a plea, and pleas lose their shape in a village like this.
He swallowed, which was agreement and defiance at once. "I have to carry something of my own," he said, almost too soft to hear.
"Then carry it well," the hedge-woman called, which made them both start, because neither of them had meant to be heard.
The wind shouldered through the square and the fire bent before lifting again. Someone began to sing the old road-lilt under their breath, the one that kept feet honest and miles small. Children nodded into sleep, lanterns drooping at the end of their arms until a parent lifted both as one. Jaren leaned back and let his eyes go skyward, finding shapes in the dark he had not names for anymore.
The boy stood until his legs forgot their complaints. He watched the way the lantern holes made little gates the light walked through. He thought: a ring of stones, nine you can count, one you can't. He thought: the ground waking like a dog under a loved step. He thought: a pond that teaches you the shape you were before the world sanded you flat.
When he finally turned away from the circle, the cold bit harder, which felt like permission. He took the long path home, skirting the well and the hedge-woman's hut and the fence line he had set right twice this week already. In the gap where the palings leaned, he stopped and set his lantern on a post. The little circle lit his thumbs and the gnawed wood and the frost making lace of everything that held still long enough to be decorated.
"I don't want to be forgotten anymore," he said again, not as a boy speaking to dark but as a pair of boots asking a road if it meant what it had been promising in whispers. The wind moved in the pines. Far off, something large shouldered past a tree and the bark answered with a tired groan.
At the hut, he hung the lantern from a nail he had driven months ago and never used. Inside, his mother slept, hand open, as if she might catch pain if it leapt but would not go hunting it. His sister lay with her back to the room, shoulders tense with the work of pretending not to worry. He mended a crack in the water jar he had missed yesterday, because leaving small breaks to grow is a way of telling the future you're helpless.
Then he sat on the stoop and watched the lantern make a coin of light on the hard ground. The coin did not spin. It did not need to. It just was, and that steadiness felt like a hand between his shoulder blades, not pushing, not yet, only making it easier to lean forward.
The night had the feeling of a door not yet opened but already unclasped. He could hear the hinge remembering how to behave.
He slept in pieces and woke before the gray, because that was what he was made of. But when he laced his boots, he double-knotted them. When he shouldered his day, he took care to set it on in a way he could take it off again. And when he stepped into the path, he felt the tug of something that was not work, not duty, not habit.
It was small and exact, like the pull of a needle through tight cloth. It came from north and from right and from somewhere that was not a direction at all.
The lantern still burned on the nail by the door. He cupped it once with his palm, letting the light warm the thick skin there.
"Steady," he said, and he could not have said whether he meant the flame, or his hand, or his heart.