During his keynote speech at Dragonsteel Nexus this year, Brandon read from The Fires of December, one of the five books included in Hoid's Storybook Collection launching March 3rd on BackerKit.
Cover art by Tran Nguyen. Design not final.
Chapter 1
The girl was born in the last cold hour of the last cold day of the last cold month of an unseasonably cold winter. Her mother, so very pale from blood loss, was a woman with beautiful dark brown eyes of the storied variety which made people say that within them you could see the very stars. She held the babe close beside the hearth’s angry flames and named her after the month, imagining the peace of a gentle snow that muffled sounds and cares, for the child was even then abnormally quiet and refused to cry.
It was a different word in their language, naturally, but I shall use a translation and call the child December.
The mother kissed her babe and whispered her love, even as those stars faded from her eyes, seeming to join the teardrops as they fell. For all her love for the child she’d borne, the mother was soon forced to depart for a grave cut shallow in the frozen earth. The girl would never know her mother’s vibrant smile or soft voice; when picturing her years later, December could summon only the image of a solitary gravestone. People did say that December had inherited her mother’s eyes, quiet and thoughtful, with a sense you could see lights deep within.
The mother was an outlander who had come to the town as a youth working a ship, then stayed through chance of fate. There was talk in town that she had fled from somewhere far away, though she never said where. The father had been a passing sailor with the charm of a sonnet but the moral character of a limerick. As the mother was not native, no next of kin were available to take the child. Fortunately, the people of Rivershore were as pragmatic as the town’s name and had provisions for children like December. The town reeve allocated a small stipend from the orphans’ fund to pay for a wet nurse to raise December to age five, whereupon she was fostered by the innkeeper and his wife.
At the inn, December was not exactly treated as a member of the family, but neither did she go without affection. She had a bed in the corner of the common room with the dogs, which was not an insult as you might imagine, for the family bed was overripe with children clinging to the vine. The dogs kept December warm, as did the family’s barn cat, who had seventeen secret entrances into the house, and soon discovered that December was the only one who didn’t periodically throw her out. If one were to wonder at December’s general affinity for animals over people, this childhood corner was a likely culprit.
Not that the girl was rude or impersonable; she merely had a way about her. (If you are unfamiliar with the terminology of rural folk, this polite descriptor indicates oddness or quirkiness.) December’s way was to stare. You’d catch her watching the inn’s patrons, her brown eyes dancing with reflected light, and you would wonder what it was she had noticed that you had not. Though she would never have described herself as unhappy, sorrow was her heritage, and she spoke its tongue without accent.
When December was young, society knew what to do with her: call her “girl” and set her to sweeping floors. A fosterling child was to be nurtured but also made to labor—for in the kingdom of Mountaincrest, as in most lands with harsh winters, active appetites best manifest active hands. Remarkably self-aware as a child, she quickly learned this role and performed it willingly.
As December grew, people continued to refer to her as “girl,” but their tones changed, and the word delivered a different connotative payload. The eyes of young men followed her, only turning aside if noticed. Upon seeing this, the innkeeper’s wife set December to serving tables—which was effective at increasing patrons, for while she was not of the chatty type who usually drew customers, there was something fascinating about December: an almost ethereal, even unobtainable, magnetism.
Part of her mystique, certainly, was due to how she looked. Pale of skin, even beyond the norm for the region, she had thick black hair where blond was common. She wore it unbraided, falling just past her shoulders. When it blew in the wind, it would move in clumps instead of frizzing, making her seem as if she were wearing a dark hood to shade her eyes. Her features were angular, her forehead high, her eyebrows wide and wild, her cheekbones prominent, her nose slightly pointed like the cut of a diamond. It was a face composed in a minor key.
Society knew what to make of her at this age, for Rivershore was (again) a pragmatic place. It attracted single men from along the river to work the nearby mines, and could not afford to discard a young woman simply because of a questionable heritage. As she grew older, December began to understand the reason for this attention, because—again—her defining feature was becoming her ability to hear that which was not said. She went to her foster mother and asked if she could perhaps move to the kitchen instead of waiting tables, as she wished to avoid being watched in such a way.
“Being watched, December,” the foster mother explained, “is the point. The dressmaker does not hide his wares in the back of the shop, but hangs them in the window.”
This metaphor never sat right with December, but she could not find the words to object. Regardless, she did not return the attention of the young men as they came in rising numbers for meals at the inn, trying to engage her in conversation, bragging or otherwise working to draw her eye. She served them, but did not linger, and did not smile.
Now this was not from lack of interest on her part, conceptually. There were some young men she’d admire from afar, at least when she couldn’t hear them speaking. It was the situation, the expectation, that she rebelled against. The fact that none of these men seemed interested in her so much as in the idea of her. The coin the young men spent on meals and drinks kept her foster parents from pushing her for a few years past when a young woman in their society was expected to have found a match.
In this, she began to feel strangely alone. She wanted to do as was expected, and she did like men—just none of these men. Perhaps, she reasoned, she was being too picky. If she was not a dress to be hung in the window, then she did not know what she actually was.
She continued in this uncertainty until one day when Bark lingered after dinner. He was a thick-armed brute who had been appointed assistant foreman in the mines primarily because nobody wanted to pick a fight with him. He was a dinnertime regular at the inn, as he had no wife to fix it for him at home. In December’s experience, he was as sharp as mud and as thick as topsoil, but he paid his tabs on time, so the innkeeper and his wife were fond of him.
This night, after eating his usual dinner of stew and fresh bread with his usual hunched posture, he sat a long, uncomfortable time. Finally, he took December’s foster mother by the arm as she passed.
“When is the girl’s birth date again?” Bark asked.
“Tomorrow. She’ll be twenty-one.”
He grunted. “I’ll come calling.”
“I’ll see that she’s ready.”
There.
That rising scream, as if from a rat pinched in a closing door, in the back of December’s mind.
She quieted it, telling herself that she misunderstood Bark’s intent, and distracted herself by taking the order of an odd stranger who had come in on the river that afternoon. The town often got strangers, though not many were as strange as this one; they were, instead, an ordinary kind of strange. Merchants, sailors, the occasional fine lord or lady from the capital, where they wore vibrant clothing of garish colors. These sometimes traveled downriver toward the distant plain where the blood river eventually evaporated.
(Don’t worry—the river wasn’t made of human blood. That would be highly impractical; I mean, imagine the clotting. Besides, it would take thousands upon thousands of humans to make a river of blood this size, but here it was accomplished with just one demon.)
Regardless, this new stranger was strange. He had pure white hair, despite not looking much older than . . . Well, his age was difficult to place. Certainly not twenty. Certainly not fifty. Yet of all the options lined up between, he didn’t fit any of them. He wore bright colors like a lord, but his were in patches, and somehow even more loud. Each alone would have been garish; together they gave the impression of an overturned vegetable cart, its wares smashed together. (I will note that this time, my awful costume was not influenced by any lack of personal taste, but was rather inflicted upon local jesters by royal tradition.)
The stranger had refused the evening stew for the meat it contained, and sat idly humming to himself and writing with a quill in a small book. He was quite handsome and had a prominent nose, which I would prefer be described as “incredible”—and I’ll have nobody suggest otherwise, since it’s both my nose and my story. (You wouldn’t be hearing this if something terrible hadn’t happened to me during it, so kindly pretend to show at least some hint of empathy.)
“Sir?” December asked. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No thank you,” I replied.
That was it. She withdrew, and we did not speak again during her lifetime. You might have been expecting more from me: a tale, some advice, at the very least a joke. Well, you’re in the first currently, the second isn’t until the end, and you won’t find the third until you brush your teeth later. None of the three were for December, because I didn’t find her relevant. She went about seeing to other customers, and I retired for the night.
I didn’t have any idea how important this woman was, but I’d like you to be better informed. To accomplish this, the next sequence will go on longer than you might think requisite. I ask your patience: these details are relevant, I promise.
When the doors to the common room were finally locked that fateful night, December tried to find her bed quickly. By this point, the innkeeper had made for her a place in the storage room where she could string a hammock and have some measure of privacy. Unfortunately, she could not avoid her foster mother, who refused diversions and continually steered the conversation straight toward Bark. With the repetition of a quilt made from a single fabric, she told December that Bark was an important man, would provide for her well, and that she should listen to his offer when it came the next day. The implication was that her options, from delaying so long, were limited—and she would never do better than this one.
You’re probably expecting December to run; it’s how these stories normally go. The young heroine sneaks out at night to find her fortune, leaving the town and avoiding marriage to a man clearly her inferior. Alas, in the real world, such escapes are too rare. December, spilling tears in her pillow that night, acknowledged the truth: she hadn’t the money or knowledge to travel, and she’d well overstayed her welcome.
Her foster parents did love her. They had kept her on long past getting money from the reeve for her upkeep, but they also were practical people. It was time, her foster mother explained, to move on. The next phase of December’s life had cued with obstinate firmness; even her hammock needed to be given to one of the couple’s older grandchildren, who would be taking December’s place in the serving room.
December and Bark were married two weeks later. It would have happened sooner, had the poor reeve’s wife not choked on a breakfast sausage, necessitating a funeral and a little time before a wedding. December was not happy with the marriage, but the other options for a husband weren’t any better. Nobody in the town—not even December, despite delaying this long—considered no husband to be a valid choice.
She tried her best to learn her new role, to make a home of a house and find love from a lover. All was, if not pleasant, tolerable for the next few years, though news from upriver was unsettling. Something had happened at the capital a few months after the wedding. The stories coming downriver were disturbing, tales of the demon making a fire in the sky—and of a war for the throne, the king dead, betrayed by one of his dukes.
Such distant troubles, both theological and political, were of little immediate relevance to such a small town. Though only a month away from the capital by riverboat, Rivershore was a great distance from it philosophically and mentally, in the same way you might find a prologue quite distinct from the rest of the story. December had her own issues, because it soon became quite clear that she could not have children. At least, none manifested, and in these sorts of societies, they never wonder if it’s the man’s fault.
(In this case, it was indeed due to an ailment of December’s, but that wasn’t possible to confirm with their technology. A doctor occasionally came through town to provide medicines and train the local midwives, but he was unable to find the reason.)
Losing the option to have children can be, for any couple, a deeply personal situation, and difficult for many. It should be approached with nuance and understanding. Unfortunately, Bark was not capable of nuance because words with that many vowels in them sounded foreign to him. Instead of making the right choice and assuring December she was no less valuable because of a medical ailment outside her control, he grew increasingly difficult over the years: at first sullen, then simmering, then eventually turning to shouting and raving.
During these years, December would often find herself walking the banks of the river, away from a house that had not only failed to mature into a home, but had instead evolved into a kind of prison.
Now, I did promise you an explanation of this river, and I keep my promises—save where it’s narratively more interesting to break them. The three blood rivers were the defining feature of the kingdom of Mountaincrest, and one flowed past the town: a waterway wide enough for even the largest barges, but not so deep you could navigate a true oceanic vessel through it. December could see the other side easily, and the gentle current allowed a modestly accomplished swimmer to reach the opposite shore without difficulty.
Assuming they’d been willing to step into the blood.
Thick, with the consistency of paint, the demon’s blood was safe to touch, though most people in rural towns avoided doing so. December tried once or twice, and was surprised to discover that it refused to stick to her fingers, running off as she pulled them out, leaving her skin perfectly dry. Conferring with others indicated this happened when anyone touched it.
The river was that mysterious shade of violet that was quite nearly black. It had a glossy sheen, not unlike oil. During those lonely years, December would look upriver, imagining the distant corpse in the capital that bled out this highway, and wonder if what the priests said was true, if a prophet had truly come to save the land three centuries before. She imagined his sword, said to still be lodged in the demon’s beating heart, holding it imprisoned like a pin held a butterfly to its board.
If it was indeed true, what should she make of the newer stories saying the demon was free? Would the prophet return? If so, would he do as he had last time, healing those who were afflicted with diseases?
Society was no help with her problem, because for once it didn’t know what to do with December. Children it cared for. Maidens it presented like dresses in the shop window. Mothers obviously had a clear purpose. But what to do with a woman of the age and in the position of a mother, but who just . . . wasn’t one? And likely never would be?
The people of the town alternated between commiserative and uncomfortable. When she complained of Bark, they said they understood . . . but she wasn’t certain if that meant they understood her situation or his. She therefore stopped talking to them, instead seeking the river and sometimes the birds that flew along its length. She thought this must be the most lonely time of her life: living in a house with a husband who was growing to detest her, ignored by people who lacked words to comfort someone whose problem they deeply feared.
She was wrong though, for it could indeed get worse.
One night in her twenty-fifth year, Bark came home drunk. It was another of his bad nights. He’d gone searching again for Winter’s Cache, a vein of silver he insisted that he and an old friend named Tap had happened across years ago while hiking the foothills. He often went looking for it when the inn and tavern turned him away for being too rowdy. Well, Tap had been killed in a landslide before December had married Bark, and she’d never believed in this mythological cache—a reasonable opinion considering Bark had searched ten years without yielding fruit. In fact, such searches only seemed to have one result: to ruin his mood even further.
Dinner was cold, as it was nearly eleven when he arrived. He blamed her. Not just for the food. She quietly began warming the stew while he raved about why he thought she’d been cursed with a barren womb: claiming that she’d secretly been a whore and caught some disease. What else would one expect from a bastard daughter of foreigners?
December quietly placed his food in front of him, then gathered her coat to leave, intending to walk the chill darkness while he ranted himself to sleep. That night, instead of letting her leave, Bark stood and seized her by one arm. She looked at his hand, a horror rising within her, and time itself seemed to recoil at what they all knew was coming: a step that Bark—despite his yelling—had never yet taken.
He hit her.
A backhand across the face, with the force to throw her against the doorframe.
Now, Bark was the sort of man who expected certain things from those he abused. He was big enough and important enough that when he hit you, you either stayed down, or you came in screaming and earned yourself a full thrashing. He was unprepared, therefore, for the stare.
December, looking up from the floor where she’d fallen, affixed him with that gaze of hers. Eyes like the night, with . . . what seemed to be distant stars deep within, or fires on a far-off hill. An expression with a striking lack of fear. No tears, despite the reddening cheek where she’d been struck. There was a dare, a confidence, in the way she stood back up, smooth and graceful as a mountain cat, holding his eyes the entire time.
In that haughty, perilous silence that followed, Bark somehow knew that if he hit her again, the demons of night would claim his soul.
He let her leave.
It was wintertime, a season that oft overstayed its welcome in Rivershore, and December had no recourse but to return to the inn. There, she begged her former foster parents for a place to stay. They listened to her, comforted her as the tears finally came, and gave her a cold cloth for her cheek. But they did not offer to let her stay, for they had an older granddaughter living with them, and the unspoken fear was that whatever ailment December had might spread.
You and I both know this to be complete foolishness, but please remember we’re speaking of rural people without access to modern learning. Ignorance is our natural state, and while those who have avoided it by turn of fortune need not suffer its continuance, we should be understanding of those still afflicted, same as with any hereditary disease. The innkeeper and his wife gave December a warm meal, a handful of coins, but were forced by their own fears to turn her out again. She pulled her black coat close and purchased a spot to sleep in the warehouse by the dock, where sailors without the coin for the inn were known to sleep.
She lived there for three years, taking what work she could find. Sewing, washing, carrying water. Hard work, made more unbearable by the ultimate humiliation: the day Bark actually found the Winter’s Cache, a pure vein of silver just as he’d described, and the corpse of his old friend Tap nearby. The discovery of a new vein was cause for great celebration in the city, and the man who found it was granted a huge payment of the king’s bounty, as provided by the reeve.
(The reeve, it should be noted, did not tell anyone that, with the increasing troubles upriver, taxes hadn’t been demanded for years. He had plenty in the reserve, but that was its own deeply troubling problem.)
This payment made Bark the most wealthy man in the town, and an immediate celebrity. The old mine running out had been a constant source of worry for the people of Rivershore, but a new one—of silver no less—meant decades of stability. Never mind that the river was growing darker, losing its violet beauty, taking on a sickly blackness. Never mind that December wondered what had happened to the lords and ladies in their colorful clothing, and that strange man with the white hair who—for reasons she could not explain—she remembered so distinctly.
For now the town celebrated their new future. Bark was elected mayor and married the innkeeper’s granddaughter. Though his marriage to December had never been officially annulled, these things could be ignored for a man of such stature. The fact that Bark’s new wife soon bore him children humiliated December, for it revealed an accidental truth he’d said about her, which seemed to reinforce the accompanying lies.
Spurred on by this victory, one of Bark’s key policies in years to come was making December’s life a living hell. He created laws forbidding migrants and anyone with foreign blood from taking most kinds of work. He gave speeches saying such a step was necessary to protect the town from the refugees pouring in from the capital (which they said had been burned to the ground) and the grand cities near it, still in the grips of the succession crisis years later.
In truth, Bark’s law was targeted straight at December—a contest of wills to force her into the type of work desperate women provide for a society that pretends it isn’t to blame. She refused, for dignity was her only sanctuary, and if she took that step, it would confirm the stories he told about her in the eyes of the townspeople. Instead, she took training from the doctor during a visit to the town, during which he stayed for three months before going upriver to provide aid to the war-torn lands. He would not be seen again in Rivershore.
Doctoring, fortunately, was not a job on the list a migrant was forbidden: otherwise the traveling doctor would have been included in the prohibition, something the town could never condone. In this loophole, December defied Bark. Nobody would pay her for midwifery, as if their fallopian tubes would magically disappear because of fraternization with a woman who lacked them.
After successfully helping a calf be born, however, she was able to find occasional work until, at last, Bark also made this illegal, arguing that only those with a license should be allowed to handle the town’s animals. Without regular ships bringing supplies, he reasoned, Rivershore was on its own for feeding itself. Animals were too valuable to be trusted to the hands of the poorly trained, the migrant, or the foreigner.
That night, huddled in her little corner of the warehouse, December found herself too tired to cry. She thought for certain this was the most lonely a person could feel. She was, unfortunately, wrong again.
The next morning, she realized she had three choices: starve, take the work Bark demanded, or go to the only person in town not afraid of him. Holding to this glimmer of hope, she visited the town reeve.
It was technically a lord’s position—a (very, very minor) nobleman appointed by the king to represent the crown in Rivershore. The mayor and town council provided most leadership; the reeve collected taxes, administered official paperwork, and judged serious crimes. The current reeve was the son of the reeve who had placed December in the inn as a fosterling, and was ten years her senior.
He was also a widower.
His love for his deceased wife, Rema (the woman who had passed on December’s twenty-first birthday) was well known. He had never remarried, but had three children, all boys, the youngest of whom was now twelve. The middle child, at fifteen, was often caught causing trouble in town because the reeve’s duties kept him busy and unable to properly parent. The eldest child was seventeen, and though almost an adult physically, was far from it mentally. He was kindly and eager, but short a few letters of the alphabet—in the way that involved nature giving him extra A’s, T’s, C’s, and G’s to make up for the deficiency.
December, now thirty, visited the reeve with a proposition. She needed a home. He needed a wife. Neither wanted a relationship in the traditional sense, but he was known to be both sensible and goodly. This plan was nothing if not sensible. The reeve, she could tell, had never considered this possibility—but he did not laugh, draw back, or curse her out as her worst fears had imagined.
Instead, he asked a single question: “Two bedrooms?”
“Two bedrooms,” she said.
“It shall make Bark very angry,” he noted, rubbing his chin.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said. “That is an advantage of the proposal.”
In that, December had true hope for the first time that this might actually work.
It did.
December’s stare shamed the middle son, who returned to his schoolwork at her insistence. He was expected to be learned, unlike most of the town, and December in turn learned letters and numbers to help him. The boys’ tutor had dropped off books during her final visit before vanishing like so many did these days when they traveled upriver. December’s love worked on the youngest son, who had been drifting without direction. He took to his tutoring with renewed vigor, quietly helping December figure out the lessons so she could help the middle son. Finally, December’s kindness worked for the oldest son, who had desperately wanted more attention from a parent, and soon became her persistent companion. He was an “imbecile” according to the doctor’s diagnosis, but strikingly kindhearted, and proof that whatever kind of stupid Bark was, it was more determined than deterministic.
During this time, December discovered she had a talent for learning, and over the following decade, she devoured the reeve’s books. She even, to his surprise, began helping him with housing contracts and taxation numbers, which were in constant need of updating now that it seemed there would be no further direction from the capital. Ships had stopped floating down the river, which was now dark as a mire and barely flowed. In particular, December took on a project of quietly helping her once foster family (the innkeeper and his wife) turn their business profitable. The lack of customers from the river had hurt them soundly, and they’d started relying on a subsidy from the reeve. Helping them was a struggle that took years of December’s effort: changing prices, offering more food options, shifting focus to serve the needs of the town and visitors from closer towns, but was eventually successful.
During this time, December and the reeve maintained two bedrooms, but became quite friendly with one another, to the point that—remarkably—December found she was coming to love the man. The way he would put his hand on hers as they talked of his work, or the casual brush of his fingers on her shoulder, indicated that something might be changing for him as well.
So confident in her new life was December that when she saw Bark’s wife hurriedly shuffling through town with a brand-new bruise on her face, she intervened. It took months of quiet support, counsel, and urging, but one day the mayor got up and found that his second wife and their two children were gone. Moved to the next town over.
Bark stormed into the reeve’s house, ranting. “I know it was you,” he shouted at her. “I’ve seen you talking to her!”
The stare worked on him again, though her three stepsons—now well-grown and possessing physical strength that Bark had lost in his years no longer working the mine—were their own deterrent. When they burst in at the shouting, Bark started to withdraw.
As he did, he muttered to December, “I should have killed you when I had the chance that night.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed.
“If only you knew,” he said, and this time it was his eyes that took on a deadly cast. “If only.”
December was shocked. It sounded like he was claiming to have killed before, but who? There were no unexplained . . .
“Tap,” she whispered. “Your old partner. He found the silver vein, and you killed him before he could claim it. But you’re a fool—you didn’t get the location from him first. That’s why it took you over a decade to find it.”
(In truth, Bark did see the vein once. Tap showed it to him, and Bark murdered him there, then carefully covered the body with rocks to indicate a landslide. But then he got lost on the way back to town and couldn’t find the location again.)
He said nothing, instead leaving with a smile and a glare. December stuck close to her stepsons for the next few months, but the mayor’s anger eventually cooled. All proceeded relatively well, with her stepsons finding brides, save the oldest, who remained her attendant. There was laughter in the reeve’s home: grandchildren, warmth, and even budding love.
Then, the sickness came.
It had been building for years, though nobody in the town had been aware. The river’s curdling following the deadly events far upstream finally reached poor Rivershore. You might have read about similar plagues in your own histories, but here it was arcane in nature—caused not by common disease vectors, but by the deadly river itself, turned poisonous.
The youngest son and his family were first to go. Wasting away, bodies covered in lesions. The scant books and medical knowledge left by the doctor were no help, for this was not an ailment that mundane learning could counter. It moved through Rivershore like a creeping mold, killing family, after family, after family. Some fled. They died in the wilderness. Some boarded themselves in their homes. They died in their beds. Some cried to the Prophet. They died in the church. It left only one in ten, and those who survived carried scars the rest of their lives.
All but December, whom the sickness dared not touch.
She and the reeve buried his youngest son, his daughter-in-law, and their baby—and that day, something broke in the man. He was next to go, and December’s hopes of a future with him were drowned as if in the depths of the river. His middle son and family followed. Then last of all, the eldest son, with his sweet disposition, joined the darkness that enveloped not just the town, but the entire kingdom.
December buried each family member herself, for there was nobody in town with the strength to do so. The graves took her multiple days to dig, placed in a line beside her mother, and when she finished the last she collapsed into tears that did not abate for many hours. But then . . . she was hale, and there were so many suffering. If you need testimony to her character, know that December—despite her hatred—even brought soup to Bark in his sickbed, then changed his clothing and washed him. He died two days later, alone in his grand mansion.
Some might have found this a victory; December, now in her fifties, was too wise to gloat over such a terrible situation. She did what she could for the sick, and slowly, those chosen by fate recovered. But it was a broken people who came out of that summer and tried to survive the resulting winter, with nine out of ten people in the ground, the hearts of the living having largely joined them.
December traveled to nearby towns and suggested consolidation, lest they all starve. The people struggled on, as they tended to do, after the river finally dried up completely. They had no news of what had caused it to fail, but they could guess. The demon must truly have escaped his bonds; what else could explain such terrible events?
That winter, many who had soldiered through the plague fell to the cold. December, who had worked so hard for them all, was treated differently than she ever had been before. For while society had been uncertain what to do with a mother with no children, it did understand the quiet, solitary, elder woman who possessed knowledge and wisdom that ordinary people avoided. They did not welcome her—indeed, they whispered about how she had not so much as gotten a cough from the plague, and how she was the only woman they knew who could read. How she was not afraid of the angry nor cowed by the epithets of the superstitious.
In truth, she was too old, too tired, and too heartbroken to care for threats. Over the next few decades, she took up residence in a home on the hillside where the old mine had been. The struggling town focused on farming and their animals; silver, and even iron, were of a different time, when there had been a king who needed jewelry and weapons. People finally accepted December as the only living midwife. They would bring her to their wounded livestock, and even accept her mediation in disputes—for as the reeve’s wife, she had some modicum of royal authority.
It was not enough. Over the next decades, the town evaporated much as the river had. Without the coal shipped in from the river, winters were harsh. Few women of childbearing age remained to provide a new generation. The population withered like crops without water.
It was during this time that December finally knew true loneliness. Now eighty, she labored to bolster those that hated her. Those who whispered that she must be the cause of all their troubles, for what prophet-fearing town would harbor a witch? She spent nights alone, for her books had been stolen when she was tending a sick child, used as firewood by desperate people who secretly wondered if those spellbooks (actually medical textbooks) were to blame.
This time December was right.
This was the most lonely she would ever be.
For soon after, she died, alone in her frozen cabin, refused access to the floundering warmth of a town she had loved, then succored, then saved.
You might find this a terrible story to have told. I apologize for its necessity, and hate that it is, unfortunately, not unique. Too many people live lives like December: alienated, rejected. They are often deliberately unseen; their treatment is a blemish upon societies, the type one tries to cover with a makeup of harvest festivals and dances. People like December are in your neighborhood too, likely spending their nights too tired, too lonely, to even weep, for they have nothing left but emptiness.
No, December’s story was not unique. Except for one daunting fact: for the day after she died, December woke up.
And found herself fifty-nine years in the past.
Chapter 2
There is certain dissociation that occasionally strikes a person when they look in the mirror. We grow comfortable with our faces and build a mental picture of ourselves that persists even as our features change with age. At some point, most people have the surreal experience of looking into their own eyes and realizing the person in front of them no longer matches their imagination.
Usually it comes after years of feeling that something is off. Weight is gained or lost. Skin begins to sag. Noses appear to get bigger, or change shape as natural aging alters the way our features interact with our skulls. It culminates in that distressing event when you must acknowledge that the person you once were will never return. That person is an old picture, as lost to time as the smiles of your forebearers who are trapped with stern expressions in their paintings.
December is one of the few I’ve known to experience that dissociation in reverse, finding that the old her had somehow vanished, and the young one returned. She put fingers to her face, prodding at skin gone smooth, hair gone black. The spots she expected were gone, stray hairs having vanished from her face. She looked . . . so distressingly childlike.
“You quite finished?” her foster mother said, peeking in. “Isa needs the bathroom.”
Her foster mother.
Over thirty years dead.
Her foster mother had woken December from her hammock in the inn, a building that—when she’d last visited—had been crowded with four families trying to share heat enough to survive the winter. Outside, the street was bright with sunlight, the river flowing and shimmering violet, and the sky a beautiful blue filled with promises.
“December?” her foster mother asked. “Dear, are you all right?”
“What day is it?” December whispered.
“Your birthday. You’re twenty-one today.”
Her twenty-first birthday, an impossibility. She didn’t once assume it was a dream, for December was an old woman, and didn’t have time for dreams or fancies. She knew what was real and what was not; she’d lived through enough reality to recognize it as the young do not.
This was real. Somehow, it was real.
Her twenty-first birthday.
That day.
Possessing of a sudden, single-minded determination, December cast aside her confusion. She could deliberate later. She could be befuddled later. She shoved past her baffled foster mother, striding, then dashing, then scrambling out into the common room of the inn.
Her twenty-first birthday.
That day.
She shoved past Rold, the baker bringing delivery, and—shocked at her sudden, youthful limberness—jumped off a chair, slid across a table, and reached the corner booth of the dining room.
There, Matin—the reeve, looking so much younger than her mind’s eye remembered him—was beginning to scream for help in terror as his beloved wife lay blue-faced on the tabletop, three young children panicking as their mother noiselessly died.
That day.
December hauled Matin’s wife, poor Rema whom she’d known only in pictures and tender memories told by the hearthside, from her seat and pushed her abdomen against the chair, a maneuver in which December had been trained some fifty years ago by a doctor who would vanish upriver. Heaving the woman’s stomach against the wood, December fought against the future. It was as if time itself tried to fight back, resisting her demands.
Heave.
This can’t be. What is happening?
Heave.
Whatever it is, I won’t let this happen again.
Heave.
You deserve better. We all deserve better!
Heave!
The offending chunk of sausage launched out of Rema’s mouth. The woman gasped through blond curls that stuck to her face and pulled into her mouth, then pallor retreated from her skin and a healthy rose returned. The children clung to her, children December knew so very well, crying and terrified as their mother slumped into the booth and held them tight.
“What is this?” Matin demanded. “What have you done?”
“She . . . she saved me, Matin,” Rema whispered. “By the Prophet’s holy name . . . She saved me . . .”
The reeve looked to December, displaying none of the kind fondness she remembered from him at the end of his life, when they’d finally grown intimate. To him, she was a stranger, and his expression—more than her own features, more than the impossibly rebuilt town—convinced December that she was indeed back in her youthful body. Matin would never have looked at her in such a way had he remembered.
He turned and saw to his wife, holding and kissing her, his terror and helplessness consumed by gratitude. December stepped back as people crowded around, asking what the fuss was about, and what the fosterling had done.
Her foster mother, Gornil, pulled her aside, using her thick hips and solid arms to muscle through the crowd. “I’ve seen that move once,” she explained, “performed by a doctor when I was young. How did you know it?”
“I . . .” December said, recognizing fear in the woman’s terse tone. Had Gornil always looked so young, with only a touch of grey in her red curls? “I read of it.”
“Read of it? You can read? When did you learn?”
December shook her head as a shadow cursed the doorway: the shape of a man with thick arms, a thick brow, and thick ideas.
“Well,” Bark said, glancing toward the crowd around the reeve and his family. “I suppose we can be on with things, then? I have come to take your hand in marriage, fosterling.”
“Oh!” Gornil said, hands to her cheeks. “Oh, that’s wonderful, isn’t it, December? The assistant foreman? He has his own house, you know! Oh, let me tell Yordik.”
“No,” December said.
“No?” Gornil asked. “I’m not to tell him? You wish to tell your foster father yourself?”
December searched Bark’s expression for some sign he remembered their last encounter, when he’d been too weak to lift his own spoon. When he’d lain in a bed pungent with the overpowering scent of his own bowels, so terrible it had overwhelmed even the plague’s stench of decay.
Nothing. He did not remember. He watched her with that same obtuse self-confidence often rampant in the attitudes of men who had never been refused.
She did him a favor and let him experience something new.
“No, Bark,” she said. “I will not marry you.” By the demon’s own blood, it felt good to say that after all these years.
“December,” Gornil said, taking her arm. “Remember what we discussed last night?”
“It has been a long time,” December said, still holding Bark’s gaze. “I’m afraid I have forgotten, foster mother. Bark, I will not have you. If I were to take a hammer to the head, and have pulled from me every other liberty of sense and reason, I would still have the wits to reject you.”
He recoiled as if punched. “Slut,” he muttered. “Too busy whoring to accept a good man? Nobody else will have you. You—”
“Excuse me,” she interrupted, pulling her arm from Gornil’s hands. “I have something very important to do.”
She left them both stunned and carefully pushed through the crowd around the reeve and his family. Her stare, with eighty years of practice, retained its potency like a fine wine of the most valuable vintage. People gave her room, confused at why they were so eager to obey the quiet word of a person only one day into adulthood.
“Matin,” she said, forgetting that nobody in the town dared call the reeve by his first name. “Would you join me outside for a moment?”
“Excuse me?” he said, taken aback. “Fosterling—”
“My name is December,” she said. “Your wife needs fresh air, not attention, following her ordeal and I have something I need to confide to you in private.”
“Is it urgent?” he asked.
“How urgent,” she said, “do you consider a murder?”
He joined her immediately and thought to himself how odd it was that a woman so young was so self-possessed as to speak to a lord—even a minor lord—with such composition. He should have ignored her fanciful claim, he knew, but something about her . . .
Well, she had a way about her. He’d barely paid her any attention over the years, except to check her age and the small sum he paid to the innkeeper and his wife from the orphan’s fund. How remarkable it was, then, that she presented herself in the way of someone educated. How remarkable it was that he listened to her explanation, to the point that he gathered his old bailiff Nathenial and climbed the hillside at her insistence to the place where they found old Tap—dead not by a landslide, as Bark had always told everyone, but by an axe to the head, the wound clearly visible despite the decay.
“There is a silver vein about three hundred yards that way,” she said, and led them to it by way of proof. Stupid Bark had spent over a decade wandering these hills, and must have passed it a dozen times. “The two men ran across it once when drunk one night, then couldn’t find it the next day. Tap eventually did, and Bark killed him to not have to share the prize.”
Matin knelt beside the exposed vein of silver, fingers on the metal, bearing the expression he got when he had to do something distasteful in town; he did always prefer to care for the people as opposed to enforce law upon them. He’d do his duty, but she fondly remembered looking through his ledgers from years past and finding copies of letters he’d written to the king every year explaining how the people of Rivershore were fierce negotiators, and how taxes simply couldn’t be extracted in the rates demanded. Matin had quietly been their angel for decades, with nobody the wiser.
“I’ll need more proof,” he said, standing up. “I can’t judge Bark on one testimony; by the law, I need more.”
“You’ll have it,” she said, because she knew Bark better than almost anyone did. “Simply tell him that I was the one to lead you here after he bragged to me about killing Tap.”
So it was that in the common room of the inn that afternoon—a neutral location where the reeve had decided to interrogate Bark—she had the distinct pleasure of hearing her once-husband make the mistake she’d known he would.
“What?” Bark shouted. “I never told her about that! I swear it! I never told a soul about what I did to Tap, and she can’t prove otherwise!”
Dear, stupid Bark. Deep as topsoil, sharp as mud, guilty as the demon itself.
The confession, and subsequent conviction, was the talk of the entire town. December attended the hanging, and while she took no joy from it, she met his eyes as he hanged and was not sorry. You might find it odd that she would respond this way after nursing him during the plague, but any doctor will tell you this is no contradiction. There is a chasm between offering some measure of comfort for the terminal and allowing a murderer to avoid justice.
As his body dangled, December was struck by a terrible thought. Could she die? If she were to fall right then, would she be reborn this same morning? It was a daunting concept, but she was not inclined to test it. In addition, something told December that her relife was more than happenstance. It would not happen again, because surely she had been given this singular gift for a reason. If she hadn’t intervened, Matin’s wife would have been destined to . . .
Destined to die.
Two days after the hanging, December sat in one of the tables in front of the inn, enjoying her favorite spiced tea, and watched the people of the town walk past. There, Kom the weaver. She’d burned him and his family in a single mass pyre—for by then, she had been too exhausted to dig. There, Kita dashed past, only five years old. December would help birth her first child, only for both to be lost in a harsh winter, exacerbated by the waning coal shipments from upriver. There, the reeve’s three boys: Kamdon, still a baby. Torrent, wide-eyed and holding his mother’s skirt. And Jamek, with his distinctive features caused by his congenital disease, his sweet smile once December’s constant companion.
She had saved their mother, so would never become their new one. Matin’s true love, over which he had cried so many evenings, would remain his . . . and the singular welcoming place in the town for December had, by her own hand, been surgically excised from the future. There was a sorrow to that, a pain in watching him hold another woman, one he loved more dearly than he ever had December. It was a pain of her own design, and she accepted it.
My family, my children, she thought, are not safe. This town is not safe.
She went to Matin again and tried to explain what was coming: the troubles in the capital, though she only knew of them from vague, untrustworthy thirdhand accounts. The wars, the succession, the souring of the river—and worst, the coming disease.
“It begins,” she said, “a few months from now, with fires in the capital and something involving the demon. It will end decades from now with the deaths of almost everyone in town.”
Matin held to his seal, sitting in the official office of his home, where he took complaints and made his judgments. He looked down at his desk, sloppy as always, and she resisted the urge to straighten the papers and bring his attention to the most important matters so they could converse on how to best deal with them.
A life she would never have.
A life . . . she had lived.
I have that memory, she decided. Those days with him, raising the children, and the peace we knew in grandchildren before the plague. Those memories will never leave me, never fail me.
She realized she could be content in them. She had been given the privilege of this family for two decades, but the children as she knew them, and Matin as she knew him, belonged to another life, another world. They would never exist here, because Rema lived—so December let go, like giving a dove to the sky, and allowed them to live their new life without her. She waited patiently for Matin to process what she’d told him, knowing him well enough to expect that he’d have trouble believing her, but also that he wouldn’t dismiss such a threat out of hand.
“What,” he whispered, “are you? A . . . witch?”
Was she?
“I don’t know,” she said. “But my dream . . . it’s true, Matin. I know it’s coming. Sure as I could tell you that the Givons will have a boy next year, or that the harvest the year after will be slight, or that the mine won’t give out despite everyone’s fears—at least, it will last until we don’t need it any longer.”
To this, he lowered his head. “I do not know what to make of this, Miss December. I cannot fathom what you’ve said. I . . .”
“Give me a letter,” she found herself saying.
He met her eyes.
“Introduce me to the king,” she said. “I have . . . what, a hundred gold to my name now?”
“How?”
“Discovery of a new silver vein,” she said. “Is that not the payment?”
He put a hand to his head. “Of course. Yes. A hundred gold . . . The king’s bounty. I should have recognized that. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been busy, Matin,” she said, with a smile. “I know you’d have gotten to it eventually. For now, payment, then a letter of introduction.”
He wrote it, bemused, and December felt the same. A part of her genuinely could not believe what she was about to do, so she didn’t consider it. No more than a leaf considered the wind upon which it was blown. She returned to the inn, gathered her things—such that they were—and left her foster parents with a suggestion to watch out for their youngest grandson, who was not born yet, because he was going to fall in the well behind the property and break his legs just after his fourth birthday. He’d never quite recover.
Then, her belt laden with the pouch of gold Bark had once claimed, December pulled on her black coat, towing a dark shadow of the future behind her—a cloak, as if made of the space between the stars themselves—as she strode to the docks and bought passage upriver on a passing ship.
Matin couldn’t do anything to stop the disaster, not from his quiet town so far from important places. The troubles had started at the capital. The king had died there, so he would certainly find her message urgent.
Her family might no longer be hers.
Her town might have rejected her.
She loved both regardless.
Therefore December, the fosterling with a second life, would travel upriver to the demon’s corpse itself and speak to the king. Surely he would know how to stop the plague from ever occurring in the first place.
