Same vilge. Same stone houses. Same well in the market square. Same smell of autumn fields and cook fires.

  I stood at the road's edge and felt the gap between fourteen and seventeen like a physical space — not just years but everything they'd contained.

  "Ready?" Tam said.

  "No. Let's go."

  The miller's daughter was the first one we ran into. Nine years old, no hesitation at all. "You're Tam's friend who went away," she informed me, and sprinted off before I could respond.

  The bcksmith, Bress, recognized me from his yard and looked at me with the wariness of a man who'd made peace with complicated things.

  "Kael Dawnridge," he said.

  "I'm back. I wanted to — I want to try to make things right. If that's possible."

  He looked at me for a long moment. Then: "Mirca will want to see you."

  Not sent away. Not turned back at the gate. I took it.

  Elder Mirca was in her garden. Of course she was. She was always in the garden when the weather allowed, working at something with the focused precision she applied to everything.

  She didn't look up when we came through the gate.

  "I heard you coming," she said to a winterberry bush. "Miller's daughter."

  I stopped. Waited.

  After a while, she straightened and turned.

  She looked older. Really older — hair fully white now, more lines in her face. Three years had moved at full speed for her while I'd been standing still.

  She looked at me the way she always looked at everything — like accounting. Tallying the years. Measuring what had changed.

  "You're alive," she said.

  "I'm alive."

  The silence stretched.

  "I've thought about what I said to you," she started. And then she stopped. And I saw something I'd never seen before in Elder Mirca of Harrow's End, who was all granite and unfinished wood on her best days.

  Grief. Real grief, behind everything.

  "I made it worse than it was," she said. The words came out like they'd been worked loose from somewhere very deep. "The winter. I let people believe more of it was your fault than was true. Because I was angry, and I was—" She stopped. "I needed somewhere to put it. That was wrong."

  Tam stood very quiet behind me.

  "It doesn't fix it," I said. "What happened. But I'm not going to refuse what you're saying." I held her eyes. "We both handled it badly. If you want to start over, I do too."

  She looked at me for a long time.

  The garden smelled of rosemary and cold earth.

  "Birn and Cottie," I said. "I need to know—"

  "Fine," she said. "Both of them. Birn apprenticed in Cresswick, Cottie has a family. They don't talk about the fire with any particur feeling." A pause. "It was a long time ago to them."

  I breathed.

  A long time ago.

  Three years of carrying it like it was yesterday, and they'd moved on the way people move on from ordinary bad things — imperfectly but really.

  "Can I stay?" I asked.

  Mirca turned back to her winterberry bush.

  "There's a room in the north quarter. Your mother's, before she came to the south house. It's been empty." She picked up her shears. "It could use someone."

  "Thank you."

  She didn't respond. She didn't tell me to leave.

  I took it.