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A Seasonwright apprentice hides a man whose chest holds a living winterstone and pays with a beloved spring-memory to keep him warm. The ritual that frees him fractures public confidence in the guild’s economy of sacrifice and opens a fight over consent, memory, and how burdens should be shared.
The seasons arrived in the market like letters: announced and ordinary, shaping what could be sold and what needed tending. Kaia Roven thought in those subtleties. She measured the lean of April on the vegetables, the thickness of November’s breath in the cobbles, the way a child's hand hugged a jar of warmed essence as if it were a map home. At the east end where she ran her stall, people came with problems wrapped in fat cloth: a cough, a stubborn rash, a sleepless year. Her work was a kind of gentle arithmetic—balancing scent, time, and heat into charms that could coax a patch of life back into being. She kept many small glass vials, each steeped with a scrap of season: a sprig of first green, a spoonful of oven-warm batter, the faint oil from an old rain-soaked cloak. Her ribbons were for binding, not for fashion; they held the charms in place while the season did its slow mending.
Apprentice Seasonwrights were taught two truths: seasons could heal, and all healings asked for price. The guild's writ spoke of exchanges that balanced the world: a month of warmth for a broken bone, a winter's hush against a child's terror. Practiced, it felt like justice. But at home Kaia had grown up on stories of the sharp edge of that justice—the memory her grandmother had traded to mend a neighbor's harvest, the small hole the family kept silent about because some things were held in trust. Those stories sat behind her ribs when she prepared charms: not exactly fear, but an awareness that every kindness could be literal and expensive.
The market at dawn was honest and full of steam. Kaia arranged her line of charms in neat rows: small sachets of sun for sore wrists, jars that tasted of early pears for the listless, slips of citrus peel for courage. A bell clanged and the world began to move. Then a thin frost appeared at the stubborn north corner—one that did not belong to the weather. It moved like a rumor, silvering leaves where the ordinary air clung, and within minutes half a lane was touched with a quick, unnatural sheen. People murmured. Stallholders slapped hands to their bundles and stared.