The hours leading up to Shiin’s day transformed small Arable into a colorful feast for the eye. Across the weathered cottages, women hung garlands of dried flowers and red autumn leaves from eaves. Children laughed and darted between houses, arms laden with ribbons and lanterns to be strung across the square outside the church. 

Even the air had changed, thickening with anticipation and the scent of baking bread. 

Hjordis stood in the doorway of her home, watching Catrain Helmbane hang the old wreath of crimson leaves and dried berries beside their entrance. Her mother stood straighter today, more alert than she’d been in weeks. The glazed look that usually clouded her eyes had cleared completely. Shiin’s Day held that power. It roused even the most dejected souls from their drunken stupors. At least for one blessed day. 

“Mam, mind the left side, it’s already droopin’,” Hjordis squinted and tilted her head to assess the arrangement. The sun was setting, a ray of gold hitting her right in the face.

Catrain adjusted the wreath, her fingers steady. “ T’was yer father who weaved this before his travels, picked the lingon berries himself.”

“Mam, I know the story,” Hjordis huffed restlessly. Catrain continued, “Said it would grant us both Shiin’s protection.”

“I know,” she nodded, clapped her Mam’s bony shoulder and steered her away from the tragic wreath, dried up and almost withered to dust. 

“Will ye join the garland weavers in the square? They’ve been askin’ for yer skills with the knots.”

This was a lie of course. Catrain adjusted the wreath one last time, stepped back and brushing a wisp of gray-streaked hair from her face. “Aye. Perhaps I will, little acorn.” 

She turned to look down at the rest of the village where women gathered around trestle tables brimming with harvest bounty. An eyebrow raised. “Might be nice to hear the gossip?”

Hjordis smiled, satisfied, crossed her arms. If Shiin’s Day could rouse her mother, might the Nine also look favorable on her own request?

Might this be the year her red dress could be set aside?

“Go on then,” Hjordis urged. “I’ll finish up in here.”

As Catrain trodded down the hill marking their home. Hjordis returned inside. The Helmbane cottage stood apart from the others: larger, sturdier, a relic of Oskar’s status. But like the wreath, time had worn its edges, and neglect had dulled whatever grandeur it had possessed. Dust gathered in corners where her mother’s listless broom never reached.

Her eyes rose then to the sword mounted above the burning hearth. The Demon Slayer, everyone called it— Oskar’s old blade, forged from some unknown metal that gleamed like silver but was harder and lighter than steel. It glowed even at night, even when the hearth ran cold. 

Strange runes that Tomsun once wisely identified as ‘Ungdo’—  this primordial language snaked along its impressive length. A dragon’s head formed the pommel, a single emerald eye missing. In its place sat a withered cranberry, a bizarre addition. Hjordis and her mother had never understood but feared to change. 

The sword remained their only real treasure, the last tangible piece of Oskar Helmbane that she knew of, beyond stories and rumors of his great deeds. Like how he fought beside Queen Alloria against the Rakatullian barbarians in the south. How he infiltrated their enemies, the Zyrellian empire. Sacrificing himself to ensure the safe passage of Seer Dareth Oakenshield. Hjordis had never really understood that part. 

Why her father would travel so far for one Zyrellian lad, barely grown, whose importance to the Magistracy she’d never been made to understand.

Hjordis recalled how she’d snuck into the glen behind Goria’s church, secretly practiced with wooden sticks, reenacting those epic deeds in her mind, her shoulder-length dark hair whirling in the wind, sweat running down the nape of her neck. In those rare moments she was someone else, not a lass. A lad off to fight the good fight like another young lad from Arable. 

Now here she stood before her father’s legacy, hand reaching up, daring not to touch the actual blade. She had never, once in her whole life. Catrain forbade it. 

The magic within would burn any hand save a true Helmbane heir’s. 

She stood there for a while, hand suspended, heart beating fast. But what if— what if they were all wrong about her and she’d been destined for another life entirely? 

But what if she carried too much of her mother’s blood? What if her hand blistered and burned, smothering her last hope of ever being worthy of the Helmbane name.

 She withdrew the hand quickly, choosing this life suspended in limbo instead. Neither a hero’s daughter, nor a simple farm maid of Arable. Just Hjordis, whatever good that meant.

Since Hjordis could bear no children, the sword’s powers would probably die with her anyway. Another failure to add to her growing collection.

She turned away from the cruel reminder, gathering supplies for the feast. Bundles of herbs hung from the rafters: rosemary, sage, and what Catrain called “Wolfsign” with purple black leaves that wasn’t for eating but for banishing Pain eaters and Grief Spawn and smelled like thunder. Hjordis avoided them by habit, reached up to cut several sprigs of sage, wrapping them carefully for the eve’s communal soup. 

A knock on the open door startled her. Hjordis sighed and rolled her eyes. Trinny stood on the threshold, her massive frame nearly filling the entrance built for shorter people. She’d cleaned herself since her arrival the same morning, hair wet and face flushed from washing.

“Quaint little place,” Trinny said cheerfully, eyes roving over every detail, pausing a breath too long on each one. They lingered on the sword, a triumphant grin crossed her face, gone before Hjordis could decide if she’d imagined it, replaced by that wide easy smile. “Your mother kindly directed me here. Said you might need help with the last preparation. Being a Helmbane admirer and all, I couldn’t say no to that.”

Hjordis straightened, jaw working. “Did she now? Strange that, since she kens fine I manage on me own.” She set down the bundle of twigs on the table. 

“Fye, perhaps she feared such delicate preparations might suffer without a skilled hand. I’ve been told mine are remarkably dexterous.” 

“Fye?” Hjordis crinkled her nose, unfamiliar with the expression.

Trinny just wiggled her digits, stepped inside and past her without invitation. Her gaze drifted to the sword, openly admiring it now.

“Beautiful blade that.” She crooned, head shaking slightly, eyes gleaming. “Exquisite craftsmanship.” 

Hjordis moved between Trinny and the hearth, arms crossed. “It’s not for handling by strangers.” 

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of touching such a legendary treasure,” Trinny backed up, hand raised in a placating gesture. 

“The craftsmanship alone is enough to make a stoic huntress weep.”

Hjordis glared at her, kept her body firmly planted between Trinny and the sword. 

“What do ye want, really? Ye didn’t come here to help with festival preparations?”

Trinny took another step back, right into the herbs rack, jumped like it was the searing hearthstones, threw them an annoyed look but composed herself quickly. 

“Oh, Wolfsign!” She inhaled deeply, eyes closing in apparent bliss. “What a magnificent specimen.”

When she opened her eyes, they were wide and intense. 

“The blood moon should make for quite an unusual event morrow eve, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Unusual?” Hjordis frowned unimpressed. “’Tis always big and red during Shiin’s day. What of it?” 

Trinny’s face brightened with delight, tasting Hjordis confusion like the sweetest treat. “Drag me backwards and call me a corpse. You don’t know about the eclipse, do you? The moon will vanish entirely for a time tomorrow night. Darkness during the blood moon. Unheard of.” Her eyes gleamed with barely contained excitement. “And none of you knew? How delightfully isolated you are.”

“Tomsun would’ve mentioned such a thing,” Hjordis countered, though her voice wavered just slightly, reaching for the sage on the table again. 

“Would he?” Trinny cocked her head. “Or might he keep such celestial knowledge to himself? From my experience, priests do love their secrets.” 

Her eyes went dark, grin settling to a straight line. She leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. “Star-watching’s not for village folk, is it?”

Hjordis stood still, taking in Trinny’s scent. Despite being newly bathed, she smelled like burnt hair, and of blood. ”That’s what they tell you—Let the learned men worry about the heavens while we, the gentler sex tend to our earthly concerns.”

The words struck Hjordis like something physical. Trinny was right for once. Tomsun had said those exact words one time when she was ten or so, asking about the traveling merchant’s talk of falling stars. 

“Who keeps throwing them away, father? Are they out of fire. Or are the stars more like ripe fruits on the trees?” 

“The Stars’ movement are for priests to understand, simple lass. Ye keep yer eyes on what grows from soil, not what dangles from sky. The nine build man and women different for a reason miss Helmabane.”

Hjordis had tried for twelve years to find peace with that argument, never could. 

Trinny glanced down at her, hips cocked, concerned and amused frown, then stretched her thick biceps and yawned. 

“Right then. To the square. I’ve a feeling the dandelion wreaths are weeping from want of supervision, and I cannot in conscience leave them to suffer.”

She swept out before Hjordis could protest further, leaving behind an unsettling certainty that Trinny wasn’t just up to something. She came from a different world than the one Hjordis had been taught — one where things were, as she said, topsy-turvy.

Hjordis cast one last look back at the sword above the hearth — still, gleaming, the dull berry staring at nothing — then gathered her basket and followed.

The bread smells had deepened into something richer, meat and spiced wine threading through from cooking fires, and women moved between the preparations with the precise fashion of folk who’d done the same thing every year and expected to do it a dozen more.

Trinny stood at the centre of it all with six children attached to her like barnacles.

“Do the rhyme!” Iliidia had both fists wrapped around Trinny’s thick finger, swinging from it. “The toad one! Do the faces!”

“Since you asked so nicely,” Trinny crouched down, which brought her eyes level with the tallest of them, and raised both hands. The children went electric with anticipation. 

Trinny launched into a rhyme about toads and turnips — bibble-bobble, wibble-wobble, toadies in a pot — each ridiculous expression worse and more delightful than the last. The children mirrored her with absolute commitment, their small faces scrunching and stretching, voices chanting in unison. 

Trinny stuck out her tongue. Crossed her eyes. Spread her arms wide and bowed. The children collapsed in hysterics—sliding off each other, rolling in the dust, Iliidia actually horizontal with her legs kicking.

Trinny watched them with a broad toothy grin of someone privately delighted with their own work, then glanced up and caught Hjordis staring. 

The grin didn’t reach her eyes, and Hjordis had seen it on her mother’s lying face, to know what that meant.

“Again!” The children demanded, recovering. 

“Later, my dear sprites.” Trinny straightened, brushing grass from her knees. “There’s plenty of more from where that came from.” 

She turned, saw Hjordis and winked. Sister Dora spotted Trinny, waved with delight and with an arm around her large arms, swept her into the cool shade of the church, where the final decorations for morrow’s ritual were taken shape. 

Hjordis noticed Trinny’s satchel was missing from her shoulders. Remembered Mads’s request. She was still surrounded by children shouting about pots and what not. “Jordie, look at us, we’re teapots!” Four of them was clutching their noses, eyes crossed and making whistling sounds. Madness. Hjordis shook her head. 

“Dinnae let Tomsun catch ye like that,” she said gravely, turned her heels toward the timbered barn close to the Helmbane home where Trinny planned to spend the night in the hayloft 

Mads had asked a favor for the folk. That was all this was. She crossed the square before she could argue herself out of it, which would’ve taken another half-breath at most.

She pushed the old door open, dust and hay falling on her head, she brushed it away with a sharp move, eyes landing straight at the torn old satchel, patched at places.

Sunlight cut between the beams, falling directly on the worn leather like a finger pointing.

Like Trinny had put it there for her to find.

Hjordis jaw set, but her palms grew damp. Dried them on her apron and closed the door behind her with a creak.