[While the Winter Sun Rises] - Chapter 1: First Snow

[u/Byrhtnoth_Byrhthelm]

The first snow came to the Ankou's Wood in the hour before dawn, and I felt the wood go quiet under it.

That is the only way I know to say it. Every living thing in the wood is a small sound in me, and has been for longer than I can count: the slow pull of sap in the oaks, the hearts of foxes curled down in theirburrows, the mice under the frozen leaf-litter, the owls coming home to roost with full bellies. In summer it is a murmur, like a great hall full of people talking behind a heavy door. When the frost sets hard and the snow comes down, the talk stops. The sap thickens and slows. The small hearts drop their beats to a whisper. Everything holds its breath and waits to learn whether thegods will permit it another dawn.

I lay in the dark on the straw tick of my bed and listened to that vast, held breath. Then I got up, because the first snow is Lugern's holy day, the day of reckoning and inventory, and inmore thanfour hundred years I have never missed one.

Morvran was on the bedpost, where he always sleeps, his head tucked under one wing. He opened an eye when I lit the candle and made the low sound in his throat that means he thinks I am being unreasonable.

"You needn't come," I said.

He came. He always does. He dropped from the bedpost to my shoulder with a heavy clap of black wings and settled there, digging his claws into the wool of my cloak until he found his balance. I put my hand up to touch his breast feathers, the way I do every morning, because I can. He is old and ragged and smells of cold earth and carrion, and I do not think there is anything in the world I love more than the weight of him. Lugern's birds do not wither. It was theone kind thingthe Brân priests left me when they forged my life into a lock, and I have never been certain whether they meant it as a mercy or merely as a pair of eyes to watch their handiwork.

I dressed by candlelight: the linen shift, the rough wool gown, the grey cloak, the veil. The veil is not for Morvran, who has seen my face more mornings than any living thing, or for the wood, which knows every knot of my bones. I wear it because I have worn it so long that my skin feels flayed without it, and because there are mirrors still in Kerbran that I have never had the courage to shatter.

Gloves last. I do not need them in the house, where nothing lives that I can hurt, but I wear them whenever I step past the lintel. Through wool, a touch takes longer to kill. Through three layers of boiled wool, a moment's brush is almost safe. I have had centuries to learn the cold arithmetic of the Ankou—how many heartbeats of contact it takes to pull the green out of a leaf, how many to turn a sparrow's blood to ice.

The horn cup hung on its iron nail beside my door. It is black cattle-horn, worn smooth and yellowed at the lip where my mouth has pressed it winter after winter, with Lugern's raven carved into its curve with a hot needle. I took it down, felt the bitter chill of the horn against my palm, and went out through the hall.

Kerbran is not what it was. I am told it was a fine manor once, and I still carry scraps of it in my head: wolfskins on the hearth, long ash-wood tables, the great tallow torches smoking in iron brackets, my father's hounds baying at the turnspit. The tapestries rotted away generations ago. The roof over the east end of the hall collapsed during a winter gale I can barely date, and the snow was drifting through the rafters now, laying a clean white shroud over the flagstones. The house stands only because the Brân built its foundations into my own marrow. They were master craftsmen of oaths and stone, and what they joined does not easily fall.

I went out by the kitchen door into the dark.

* * *

On the morning of the first snow I walk the bounds of the wood, because the grey shows plainest against white.

It was a long walk and a bitter one, and I was glad of the cold. The snow fell fine and dry, the kind that drifts against the roots and stays until midwinter. It squeaked under my boots like crushed salt. Morvran hunched on my shoulder, his feathers puffed against the wind, muttering low raven-talk into my ear. The sky through the canopy went from black to iron to the color of wet slate, and the wood stayed motionless around me, keeping its watch.

I found the first grey an hour out, in a stand of birch near the old charcoal-burners' hearth. Three trees, their white bark curdled into the color of chimney soot from their roots to the height of my shoulder. I knew them. I had drunk from them last winter and the winter before that, and the rot ran deeper each time. One more season, perhaps two, and their wood would turn to powder, brittle asancient bone.

I found the second grey at the stream, where the ice had frozen thick over the blackened reeds. The third was a fox, curled in a hollow of snow beneath a fallen oak, its pelt fallen away in mangy clumps and its jaw locked open on nothing. It had died starving and blind, wandering far from its den. I had felt its small thread snap two nights before, a faint spark extinguished at the back of my mind, and I had not come. I cannot come for every dying thing. The wood is too vast, and the grey is always moving beneath the roots.

The fourth grey stopped me where I stood.

It was a rowan, standing by the western ditch a quarter-mile south of where the cart-road from Plouvilin comes into the trees. A young tree, no thicker than my wrist, still clinging to a few shriveled scarlet berries that the thrushes had left behind. The grey had climbed its trunk overnight. It had ringed the lower bark and was crawling into the heartwood.

Rowan is a warding wood, the wood of thresholds and binding knots. The Brân planted them in a ring around the estate when they hammered the boundary stones into the earth, so that whatever crawled in the dark beneath Kerbran would never cross into the fields of men. In all my centuries I had never seen the rot touch a warding tree.

Morvran made a low, unhappy sound.

"Yes," I said. "I see it."

I knelt in the snow and took off my right glove.

My hand is not something any living eye would choose to rest on. The grey begins at the fingertips, where the skin is as hard and black as bog-oak under the nails. It creeps up the wrists, through the tendons of the forearms, past the elbows and over the collarbones, and when I pass the dark glass in the hall I can see it climbing my neck like frost on a tombstone. In the winter air it has the dull, leaden sheen of slate. The rowan felt me draw near. I felt the tree's panic through the soles of my boots: a sick shudder, a tightening of the bark, the sap shrinking back toward the deep taproot away from my fingers. All things that grow know what I carry. They know the Ankou's touch before the hand even lands.

I did not lay bare flesh to the bark. I set the horn cup against the knot of rot and pressed my palm flat to the horn, and I spoke the terms of the binding.

"Under the Long Hand, by the Winter Sun, what is owed I take."

The Brân gave me no prayers. Lugern does not bargain in prayers; he is a god of tallies, contracts, and iron measures. The words are an extraction, and the grey answers them the way water answers gravity or an apprentice answers his master. It seeped out of the rowan's wood in thick, sluggish drops, black as wet ash, pooling into the bottom of the horn. The bark beneath paled as the stain drew back, shifting from bruised slate to dry grey, until the wood looked only winter-starved rather than poisoned. When the horn was half full of that cold, shadow-thick fluid, the tree gave a long, shuddering sigh in the sap, and went quiet.

I lifted the cup to my mouth and drank.

It tasted of burnt hearth-soot and old graves, and beneath that, the raw, terrified taste of the tree's living green. It slid down my throat like liquid frost, settling heavy and sour beneath my ribs where the centuries of rot were already banked.

And deep in that dark vault, my Guest stirred.

It opened its gaze inside me—not with eyes of flesh, but with that vast, smoldering awareness that has lived behind my heart since the priests first shut the stone. It uncoiled slowly, tasting what I had swallowed, turning its terrible, patient attention upon my bones.

There,its voice said, whispering in the chambers of my blood.A fine draft. A little more of the house given over to the tenant. Isn't that better, girl?

I did not answer. I have had centuries to learn that to answer the Guest is to give it a hinge to turn on. I knelt with my knees in the snow until the burning cold in my chest subsided into a dull ache, and then I pulled the boiled-wool glove back over my fingers. That was the Brân's reckoning, and there was no appeal from it: if I refused to drink, the rot broke through the wards and drowned the countryside; if I drank, the Guest grew fatter on the decay, the slate crept higher on my neck, and the wood bought another season of borrowed breath.

* * *

I was getting up out of the snow when I felt him.

A heartbeat crossed the treeline by the Plouvilin road, a quarter-mile to the north. A man's pulse, heavy, steady, and stubborn. That in itself was not strange. Woodcutters come to the edge sometimes for kindling, hunters track hares to the ditch, and the village boys come on winter nights when the ale at the Black Hen makes them reckless. Plouvilin mothers hang rowan-twigs over their cradles and sing songs about the bone-woman who walks Kerbran with an empty cup, but there is always someone foolish enough to test the old rhymes. I turn them back before they take ten paces.

But as I rose from the snow, the beat caught in my ear, and I stayed frozen with one hand braced against the frozen crust.

It was marked.

Not whole, not yet. A thin, dark seam ran through the strike of the pulse, a dry, rhythmic scraping like iron dragging on gravel. I knew that sound. It was the same rot that lived in the birch trees and the black spring beneath Kerbran.

And deeper than the rot, I knew the cadence of that heart. I had heard it once before, when it was twenty years lighter, rapid as a trapped thrush, and sick with childhood terror.

Twenty winters ago, on the day after the frost fairs, five boys had come down from Plouvilin to throw stones at the treeline. They had dared each other in high, cracking voices, shoving and laughing until one of them—smaller than the rest, with tangled dark hair and a scabbed chin—bolted across the ditch alone. I had come through the hazel thicket to head him off. When he saw me standing between the white birches in my grey veil, he had skidded in the dead leaves and stopped dead.

He had caught himself against the trunk of a dying birch, his small bare palm pressing straight against a weeping knot of grey rot.

I told him to run. I remember the other children screaming from the cart-track, their voices shrill and thin in the cold air:Cian! Cian, run!But the boy had stood his ground for three long beats, looking straight into the black gauze of my veil with dark, defiant eyes, his jaw clamped shut to keep his teeth from chattering. He was terrified, but he had not wept, and he had not screamed.

I could have stripped my glove and drawn the poison out of his skin before it took root. But to take the grey I would have had to clasp his living hand, and the Ankou's grip would have emptied him like a split waterskin before the cup was half full. So I commanded him to flee, and watched him sprint back to the road, telling myself that the touch was brief, that his blood was young and hot enough to burn it away, that Lugern would overlook one stray mark at the edge of the bound.

Now I stood in the snow and listened to that same heartbeat marching into the wood, twenty years older, bearing the rot inside its core like an iron nail driven into an oak. It had not burned away. It had waited.

He's come back,my Guest murmured, and its voice was thick with ancient, cruel amusement.The little stray who looked at you. Look how faithfully he brings his rot home to the master.

"Be quiet," I whispered through the veil.

You kept his name,the Guest said, turning its heavy, unblinking gaze upon the small, secret corner of my memory where I had hoarded that boy's face for twenty solitary winters. It stroked the thought with cold malice.You listened at the road every first snow. You wondered if the seed had sprouted. Did you think I could not see what you cherish, little lock?

"I said be silent."

The presence withdrew an inch, but it did not go far. It lingered behind my ribs, smiling with that terrible, ancient patience that knows time belongs entirely to the dark. It did not need to press me. It only needed to show me what I wanted, and wait for me to reach for it.

* * *

I warned him. I want that set down. I did everything I knew how to do.

I sent Morvran first, and Morvran gathered the flock. Forty ravens rose from the pines in a sudden, ragged cloud, beating their wings against the snowfall until the air over the road was thick with their cries. They dived through the grey light, snapping their beaks at his head, their black wings brushing his cloak. I felt his pulse leap, skip once in shock, and then settle into that hard,steadycadence. He did not run. He ducked his head, drew his collar higher, and kept walking straight through the storm of wings.

The doe was not my doing.

She broke from the alder thicket thirty yards ahead of him, staggering into the ruts of the road. I had felt her sickening for a fortnight, the rot eating through her sinew until her joints were full of chalk. She was moving with that hideous, disjointed gait the grey brings—her spine bowed sideways, her left hooves dragging limp through the drift, her head lolling so far to the shoulder that the tendon strained against the skin. Her pelt had peeled back in long, dry strips, revealing slate-colored flesh beneath, and when she swung her muzzle toward the road, her eyes were milky and blind as river stones.

I felt Cian's heart hitch. He stopped, his boot half-raised in the snow.

The doe made a dry, whistling sound through her nostrils and took two jerky, unnatural steps toward him.

I was already running between the pines. I came down the ridge without caring about the brush that tore at my skirts, bursting onto the road between them before the beast could close the distance. I stripped my right glove with my teeth and laid my bare palm against the doe's neck.

The grey in her met the grey in me. I felt the last frail spark of her life rush up through my arm like a cold draft—quick, merciful, and absolute. She did not struggle. Her legs folded beneath her, and she sank into the drift without a sound, her head resting against the white crust. Where her flank touched the ground, the snow turned instantly to the color of wet wood-ash, a dark circle spreading out like ink in water.

I ducked back into the shadow of the hemlocks before Cian rounded the bend. Standing fifty paces off behind a screen of frosted boughs, my bare hand aching with cold, I pulled the wool glove back over my black fingers and watched him find her.

He was a grown man now, broader in the shoulder, weathered by sun and sleet. He wore a patched oilskin coat stiff with road-salt, a soldier's hunting recurve unstrung across his back, and a heavy iron knife sheathed at his hip. His dark hair was tied back with a thong of rawhide, but the temples were salted with premature white—not the grey of age, but the dry, faded ash of the curse. He knelt in the drift beside the carcass, his face lean and hard-set, and touched the doe's neck where my palm had been. Then he looked at the ash-colored ring in the snow, and slowly, without haste, raised his eyes toward the trees where I stood.

He could not have seen me through the hemlock branches and the falling snow. But his gaze did not wander. He looked straight into the thicket where my breath was misting against the grey veil, and he held it.

I did a thing then I had not done in many years. I spoke to someone from the trees.

"Turn back, Cian of Plouvilin," I said.

The wood carried the words for me, catching my voice and throwing it from the pines and the stones until it sounded as though the ground itself were speaking with the Ankou's tongue. I have seen armed men drop their pikes and bolt like hare-hounds at the sound of it. Cian did not bolt. He stayed on one knee by the dead doe, his hand resting on her slate-grey flank, and I felt his pulse under the trees. It did not race. It hardened, taking the measure of the voice, enduring it the way an anvil endures the hammer.

He stood up slowly, brushing the crust from his knee.

"You remember my name," he said. His voice was rough from the cold, but steady.

I kept my silence, watching him from behind the veil.

"The singer at the Black Hen said you were the rot wearing a woman's shape," he said quietly, looking down at the dead doe, then back to the thicket. "He said you were just a mouth in the woods that ate whatever crossed the ditch. But monsters don't tell boys to run home." He shifted the strap of his bow across his shoulder, took a long breath of the frozen air, and stepped cleanly over the grey circle in the snow. "That makes you either a savior or a very particular kind of doom. Either way, I've walked since before dawn to find you."

He started up the avenue toward Kerbran, his boots breaking the fresh crust with deliberate, unhurried steps. I stood among the frosted hemlocks and listened to the rhythmic crunch of his boots and the heavy, grey-threaded beat of his heart until the curve of the road took him out of sight. Morvran dropped out of the branches, settled his ragged weight on my shoulder, and stayed entirely mute.

I turned and took the hidden deer-paths through the thickets, moving swift and silent over the ground to reach the gatehouse before him. Behind us, the first snow of winter continued to fall without a sound, filling the deep ruts of his boots, drifting over the dead doe and the ring of ash around her, burying every trace of what had passed until the road looked as white and unbroken as an unwritten contract.

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[u/Chamcook56]

Interesting and well written. Hope to see more.

[u/Byrhtnoth_Byrhthelm → u/Chamcook56]

Thank you! I'm planning to post a couple chapters a week until this one is finished, so keep an eye out!

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This is the first story by u/Byrhtnoth_Byrhthelm!

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