Winter did not arrive with ceremony.
It arrived the way hunger did, quietly, and then all at once.
The pump handle was the first thing that told him.
The wood was colder than it should have been. Not just cold to touch, but cold that clung, that took and did not give back. Eryk wrapped his fingers tighter, pulled, and felt the chill bite into the joints as if it had been waiting there all night.
Marek was on the handle opposite him.
He had been coughing for days. Not the loud kind that got you noticed, but a small, wet rattle that he tried to keep inside his throat. Today he looked wrong. His shoulders were hunched too far forward. His eyes were open, but they did not track.
Tomas was beside the trough with two buckets, watching without looking like he was watching.
Marek pulled the handle down again.
His hands slipped on the wood.
He tried to correct it, but his fingers did not close properly. They hovered, slow and clumsy, then landed in the wrong place.
"What's wrong with you now?" Gerrit barked from behind them.
Marek tried to answer.
His lips were blue.
No sound came out.
Gerrit spat into the thin snow that had started gathering in the corners of the yard and waved two guards over.
"Take him off before he drops on the handle and breaks it."
They dragged Marek upright by his arms. His feet barely moved as they pulled him away from the pump. His boots left hollow tracks in the snow, toes scraping shallow lines until the guards lifted him fully and he became weight instead of a person.
No one followed.
Tomas set his buckets down and stepped into Marek's place.
He took the handle without a word and began pumping.
The water kept coming up.
The day continued.
At the quarry slopes, winter made the stone treacherous.
The sun cut shallow bands of light across the stepped ledges. Where melt touched shadow, a glassy skin formed. Men moved more carefully, boots sliding despite the iron spikes driven into their soles. Steam rose from mouths and cracked lips. The chains sang a brighter note in the cold, higher and tighter.
On the upper run, Eryk carried a crate of wedges toward the storage shed. The path had been cleared earlier, but fresh snow was already drifting back across it in thin veils. His shoulders ached with the familiar burn of weight. His breath rasped hard in his chest.
Ahead of him, Kett slipped.
Not far. Not into the pit. His foot simply lost its purchase long enough for his knee to strike stone. He cried out more from surprise than pain.
Eryk saw it happen.
He was close enough to shout a warning. Close enough that a sharp breath from him might have drawn attention to the patch on the path where the snow had melted into slickness.
He said nothing.
Kett tried to stand. His knee folded. He went down again, this time hard enough that the sound carried.
A foreman looked up from below.
"Get him out of the way," he called.
Two men took Kett under the arms and half carried him off the path. His knee swelled visibly through his torn trouser by the time they reached the shed door. He stared at Eryk as they passed. His eyes were wide and bright with cold and pain.
Eryk lowered his gaze to his boots and stepped past the dark wet mark where Kett's fall had struck through the snow.
He delivered the crate.
By midday, the yard moved more slowly.
Breath hung thick in the air. Hala wrapped her hands in cloth between bouts of stirring, then stripped it off again to grip the ladle. The stew steamed harder than usual just for the privilege of staying liquid.
At the pump, Tomas pumped with his shoulders now.
"You hear about Marek?" he muttered without looking at Eryk.
Eryk shook his head.
"Foreman says he's reassigned," Tomas said. "He said it like he was moving a sack of grain."
Eryk took the next bucket and said nothing.
Winter worked on the quarry without mercy.
The cold made stone brittle. Hairline fractures split deeper than they should have. Small shears happened more often now, sloughing off sheets of rock without warning. Not deep collapses. Not disasters that demanded attention. Just enough to break bones and slow production in an endless, irritating way.
The foremen cursed the season as if it were a disobedient worker.
That afternoon, a man lost his balance when a ledge flaked under him. He hit three levels down and struck the wall hard enough that the sound drifted up even over the hammers. His chain bit into the stone and held. He dangled there for several breaths before they hauled him back.
His arm twisted wrong as they pulled.
No one stopped working.
That night, the shed was colder than the yard.
The wind found every gap. Snow drifted in under the far wall and gathered in pale humps between pallets. Breath ghosted with every shift in the dark.
Tomas whispered into the cracks above them.
"Winter sorts quicker."
No one replied.
Three days later, Marek's pallet was gone.
Its straw had already been reclaimed and worked into the others. No one mentioned his name.
Two days after that, Kett was sent to the lower sheds.
He did not come back at night.
By the end of the first full week of winter, Eryk could no longer remember when he had last felt his hands fully warm.
The cold slid into him and stayed. It lived under his nails and deep in the joints of his fingers. He learned how to move fast without appearing rushed. How to tuck his hands into the crook of his arms between runs so the blood would not abandon them too completely.
He learned that stone bit harder when frozen.
He learned that men broke more quietly in the cold.
On the tenth day of winter, a boy slipped at the path again.
This time Eryk was closer. He felt the sound of the fall rather than heard it, a dull knock through the sole of his boot.
He still did not shout.
That boy was reassigned before evening.
That night, when the shed had gone still and the last coughing had settled into sleep, Bran spoke without turning his head.
"You don't look anymore."
Eryk stared at the dark rafters.
"Look where?" he asked.
Bran did not answer.
Outside, the quarry chains creaked once in the cold as the wind shifted against them.
Winter pressed its teeth into Blackstone and found that the town did not resist.
It only adapted.
It let the cold take what it would as long as the ledgers stayed balanced.
Eryk lay with his hands tucked beneath his ribs, the ache in them a familiar weight.
In the quiet dark, he thought of how the system had not changed at all.
Only the weather had.
And the boy he had been in the fall.