The Girl Who Cast No Light
The square smelled of tallow and cinnamon, of wet wool and woodsmoke, and beneath it all, faint as a held breath, the mineral tang of the first frost that had no business arriving so early in autumn. Zara knelt behind the little wooden stall her aunt Sable had dragged out every year since before Zara could remember, arranging skeins of dyed wool into tidy rows—indigo, rust, the deep green of pine needles crushed underfoot. Her fingers were stained faintly blue from the morning's work at the dye pots, and she rubbed them absently against her skirt as she watched the village come alive around her.
Hollow Bend wore its joy plainly on nights like this. Lanterns of oiled paper hung from every eave and post, their candlelight blooming gold and amber against the deepening indigo of the sky. Children shrieked and darted between the legs of grown-ups, clutching their own small lanterns, waiting for the signal to release them. Somewhere near the well, a fiddler tuned his instrument with lazy, looping notes, and the scent of roasting chestnuts drifted thick and sweet from the brazier two stalls down.
"You've got that wool crooked again," Sable said, not unkindly, reaching past Zara to…
