“It’ll get easier once you’ve fully recovered.” Runt slid Bastiaan’s glove toward him.

Bastiaan held it for a moment, then tugged it on. “Thank you.”

He picked up the dipping pen. The ink might as well have been his own blood for all the pain it caused to return to the beginning and write. The goal, the hopes, the hatred he felt for the old man . . . and how drastically everything had changed as the years slid by.

He didn’t stop writing when Runt put a plate of stew in front of him, nor when he set a bowl of water at Bastiaan’s dirty feet for a soak, nor when the sun set and Runt lit the candles and the women left the tulip fields.

Bastiaan forced himself to remember everything and to write it . . . in order that he might forget.

Chapter 3
Bastiaan

Bastiaan was neither dead nor fully alive.

He’d been so long in the Stillness that he’d forgotten the sounds and feel of daily life. The mere hum of Runt and Mother conversing in the garden startled him his first few days back. Then the memories of what had happened in the Stillness threatened to cripple him.

He kept waiting . . . waiting for the announcement. The news to come.

It didn’t come.

Life and time rumbled past, feeling painfully disjointed. When Bastiaan had found himself lingering in bed one morning, dreading the interaction with his own mother, he finally took action and headed to the Fairhoven summer markt on the day it opened—the loudest day.

That was two days ago.

He’d yet to return home. Yet to eat, really. Bastiaan sat in the dirt, barefoot and unshaven, his head back against a wood post that held the edges of a markt tent tight against the early season wind gusts. Eyes closed.

Waiting.

Summertime had hardly tiptoed its way into the breeze—cautious about being swept away by its vicious cousin, Winter. Gossip from the washerwomen floated through the air as smoothly and fine-tuned as the canal ships up and down the Vier. The country of Winterune’s notoriously long winters often trampled any evidence of spring. Even the summer breeze through the markt still carried a chill, but the sun sent down splashes of warmth when the drifting clouds allowed its rays through.

“Don’t stab me for coming too close.” The voice was soft like the approaching colors of the new season.

Bastiaan opened his eyes. A young woman, pale as a shell bleached from the sun, stood before him with a loaf of dark, round bread. Unlike the others who had mistaken him for a beggar, she met his gaze with her own—not with pity but with curiosity. As if she desired to know his story.

She held out the bread. “For you.”

“I’m no beggar,” he said. “And I certainly wouldn’t stab you.”