The Mill Beneath

The boy’s name was Iven. He crawled backward through the drain with the cheerful efficiency of someone who had made several poor life choices and learned useful routes from each.

“Sella sent me when the bells rang,” he whispered. “Brann never leaves a forge during an inspection. So someone else would.”

They emerged inside the mill’s wheel pit. Above them, the great wheel stood frozen into the river, its paddles locked beneath cloudy ice. An old woman lowered a rope ladder through a trapdoor.

Sella wore a miller’s apron and carried a sword too short to impress anyone. Its worn grip suggested that impressing people had never been its purpose.

Mara gave her the fragment. Sella closed her eyes.

“Twenty years,” she said. “I was beginning to think Brann had only kept a very expensive guilt.”

She spread a flour sack across the table and sketched a circle with a burnt stick. Three gaps broke its rim.

“The crown was shattered when King Orrel tried to command every hearth in the valley. Its fire recoiled. The Frost Court offered peace afterward, and we accepted their winters in exchange for safety.”

“They’re killing us with safety,” Mara said.

Sella nodded. “At the coming eclipse, Regent Yseld will ring the Still Bell. Every surviving ember will answer it and go dark. No thaw after that.”

“How many days?”

“Four.”

Iven stopped stealing flour biscuits from a tin.

Sella marked two places on her rough map: the sunken glasshouse at Merefen and the old royal observatory on Mount Rill. “Brann kept the brow. I hid the temple band at Merefen. The last piece went with the royal astronomer.”

Mara stared at the marks. She had never traveled farther than the next market town.

“Why me?”

Sella held out a cold lamp. “Not because of your parents, if that’s what you’re wondering. Ember-workers came from all sorts of families. Their gift was listening to what fire remembered.”

Mara touched the wick. She remembered Brann warming her first pair of work gloves, pretending he had left them by the stove accidentally. Copper light filled the lamp.

Outside, the frozen wheel shifted with a groan.

Sella smiled without triumph. “There. Now we have someone to teach.”