The ice formed in a single night, smooth and black as a cooled bloom. For half a year the river had fed and protected the mire. Now it had become a road for the enemy.
The road brought news, each piece grimmer than the last.
Hort had bought the clan's freedom. The jarl meant to take "winter feed" from the hamlet for his camp, and the priest gave him every hidden store: the clan's grain, concealed even from themselves against a year of famine. He gave it all, down to the last pit, on one condition: that not a single person from the hamlet be taken in payment. The jarl agreed and kept his word. He always kept his word, which made him all the more frightening.
As they opened the last store, a fire broke out in one of the houses. No one knew who had knocked over the lamp, or whether it had been an accident. Kres suspected the fire served the jarl's purpose, but he had no proof. Half the hamlet burned down in one night. The Northmen fought the blaze beside everyone else: the fire was destroying their spoils, and the jarl did not care for needless losses.
The fire-stricken came across the black ice to the mire. The clan that had cast out the smith now came to him for help. People carried children on their backs and bundles snatched together in haste. Old Gostena walked at their head. She clutched to her breast the charred ritual cloth on which the whole hamlet had offered bread to guests.
The clan stopped at the gates. These people did not know how to ask. On the priest's word alone, they had condemned Kres, turned their backs on him and afterwards gone on living as before. Now they had to ask for help from the man they themselves had declared dead. So they simply stood on the ice and waited.
Kres went out through the gates and bowed first. From the waist, as one bows to elders.
"Come in," he said. "The hearth belongs to us all. It has always been yours too."
Gostena was the first to sob aloud. The others followed. By evening there were one hundred and twelve souls in the mire, while according to Vyun's tally stick there was only enough food to see sixty through to the end of winter. Vyun counted three times. The number did not change.
That night the reckoning from his dreams returned to Kres: water, warmth, food, reserves. But now it offered to count people too. The old could not work for their rations, and the sick might not live until spring even with food. If they were no longer fed, the rest would have enough for longer. In the dream the calculation seemed beyond dispute.
Kres sat up on his sleeping bench in a cold sweat and stared into the darkness for a long time. He realised he was beginning to reason like the jarl. The jarl too divided people by their usefulness and sacrificed those he deemed surplus without a thought.
"I will not divide people into those we need and those we do not," he said aloud, so that he could hear his own voice.
The reckoning fell silent. Kres knew the same thought would return. But now he knew how to answer it.
In the morning he announced the new ration himself, aloud, looking the people in the eye, and added only this: "We will go hungry together. We will be full together too. I have no other bargain to offer."
That same evening Soroka brought news with a show of sympathy. The jarl's men had seen a bareheaded woman in northern dress near the camp. She had been admitted to the jarl's tent. "Hold fast, smith," Soroka added, lowering his eyes to hide his pleased smile.
Then Milava spoke before them all. The same Milava who at Kupala had watched longest as Kres and Jorunn held fast to each other's hands.
"I nursed her with these hands," she said, level and angry, loud enough for the whole yard to hear. "I saw her in fever and delirium. People do not pretend when they are delirious. Let anyone call her a traitor in front of me, and I will wash their mouth out with wormwood myself. She does not go downstream. Wait until spring, then be ashamed."
The yard said nothing. Not because they all believed her. It was simply that no one argued about people with the herb-woman who had delivered half the mire and closed the eyes of its old folk.
That night Kres went to the smithy, but did not light the forge. There was enough charcoal left for three smeltings, and no reason to spend it: the ore was frozen, and there was no one to forge with him. Across the river the jarl's fires burned all night. He had no need to count firewood. But the smithy was dark and cold. For the first time since spring, Kres sat beside the dead forge and could find no rest.
The next day brought the longest night of the year, and despite everything the mire celebrated Kolyada.
It happened of itself, without any word from him. The children pulled a goatskin over the eldest, horns pointing upwards, smeared their faces with soot and went from dugout to dugout singing an old, eternal song about how the sun had died and would be born, had died and would be born, as it was and ever would be.
"Bear fruit, earth, in the newborn year, rye to the knee, honey to the brim…"
People brought out what little they had left: a rusk, a handful of soaked cranberries, a piece of dried bream. They gave away part of their meagre ration and laughed all the same. The goat's muzzle peered through every door, the children shrieked in feigned terror and the old folk sang along. Each person sang as the custom had been in their lost hamlet, and no one corrected anyone else.
Kres stood in the darkness between the dugouts and suddenly understood something simple: this was what he had been building. Not the palisade. Not the bloomery. This: when people were frightened and hungry, yet still sang and shared.
Vyun found him at the gates. The boy came running from the hamlet: he had been roaming the burned ruins without leave again. Now he stood before Kres, trembling with cold and excitement, holding out a mitten from which steam rose.
Inside the mitten, dusted with ash, an ember smouldered.
"From under the oak," Vyun managed. "It is the clan hearth, smith. The ember survived under the ash. It lay beneath the cinders for three days and it is still warm… The fire did not go out, smith. Do you hear? It did not go out."
Kres took the mitten in both hands, as one takes a newborn child. He stood for a moment. Then he walked across the yard to the black smithy, and the whole mire followed him in silence, from old Gostena to the horned goat mask.
He laid the ember on the kindling in the cold forge and blew. The fire caught on his first breath, as though it had been waiting.
"Tomorrow we will take our axes," said Kres without turning. He knew the whole mire stood behind him. "There are birches enough in the Forest. We will burn our own charcoal. And the sun, as the song says, will return."
The people went back to their dugouts in silence, but the old despair was gone from that silence. Kres remained alone by the forge. He waited until the footsteps had faded, then took Ari's buckle from inside his shirt. He breathed on it, polished it with his sleeve and hung it in its old place above the keel of the unfinished ship.
"When you return, you can take it down yourself," he told the darkness. Then he went to sleep: at dawn they had to go for birchwood.
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