"We are hosting a will," Edric murmured into Miren's hair. "Not a pet."
"Good," she said. "Pets get spoken for. Wills get negotiated."
Tobin's trouble arrived with the first hard frost.
A man from the southern road—soft boots, hard smile—found Tobin in the upper pasture and offered silver for "confirmation" that the King had been bewitched by a village witch with red hair and a demon familiar. Tobin listened to the end, asked the man's name, and then walked him into Stonewell under the pretence of better talk by a fire. The man met Sibley's stare, Ysolde's measuring glance, and Ralla's dog in sequence. He left without his silver story. Tobin sat afterward with his hands shaking and let his sister pour him tea.
"I wanted to hit him," Tobin said.
"You brought him to witnesses instead," Ralla answered. "That is the hit that lands in clerks' ears."
Miren heard of it before sunset. She walked the ridge with Edric at dusk and found the soft-booted man's tracks turning south. They did not chase. They reported to Ysolde, who sent a sealed note toward the capital by her fastest rider. Weeks later a quiet letter returned: the man had been a southern lord's cupbearer on leave. He would not be on leave again soon. No drama. Just a door closed.
Still, Miren felt the nearness of how stories could be twisted—witch, demon, bewitchment—until a bargain looked like treason. She began teaching Nessa and Pip, carefully, the difference between a secret and a privacy. "Privacy is the hatch," she said. "Secret is pretending the hatch does not exist. We do not pretend. We also do not invite every stranger to climb down."
Winter deepened. The channel-workers went home for the longest cold, leaving tools greased and trenches braced. Stonewell turned inward: mending nets, carving spoons, quarreling over card games, listening to the wind worry the ruin on the hill. Vetch was seen less. Once Miren found fresh claw marks on the copper crank fitting Osric had sent—testing, tasting metal, approving or not. The water stayed sweet.
Elder Sibley fell ill in the deep cold for three days. Fever made her speak fragments: a girlhood dance in Veyne's courtyard; a wellscale eating cherries from a steward's palm; Osric's brother laughing with ash already in the air. Miren sat with her and wiped her brow. Edric kept the fire. When the fever broke, Sibley gripped Miren's wrist with surprising strength.
"Do not make the King a father-figure in your mind," she whispered. "Or a devil. Make him a weather system you have a treaty with. Weather does not love you. Weather can still be predicted."
"I know," Miren said.