What the Winter Kept

Four years at Thornmere have made Fen its custodian in every way that matters - reader of correspondence, keeper of the sorting table's warmth, the one Hedda plans around without needing to say so. But custodianship is easy when nothing is missing.When Commissioner Vane arrives for the fifth charter review, the waystation's independence turns out to rest on a document that was never written - a gap in the founding record, eighty years old, left behind by a fire long before Fen's time. It is the kind of absence that means nothing until someone with the right eyes needs it to mean everything.As the Aedrath jurisdictional process tightens around Thornmere from one direction and the gap in its own history opens beneath it from the other, Fen learns that some of what a person is given to tend was never going to be complete - and that tending it anyway is not the same as failing to fix it.Deep winter asks more of the waystation than the charter can. What the season takes, it does not give back. What it leaves behind, Fen must learn to hold without knowing, yet, what holding it will cost.