The bell woke him before the cold did.
Eryk opened his eyes to the dark and knew, without looking, where his feet would land. He knew how the boards would feel under his soles, where his shirt lay folded by habit at his side, how far his hand had to travel to find it.
His fingers found the cloth without searching.
The fabric had stiffened from too many washings in cold water and too little soap. It dragged over scraped knuckles with a familiar resistance, like the town itself insisting on being felt.
The shed was colder than yesterday. Breath hung pale above each pallet. Someone coughed, and the sound did not swell into a fit. It pushed out and stopped, as if even lungs were learning not to waste effort.
Bran sat already tying his boots, shoulders hunched. His jaw was shadowed with the start of stubble that never had time to become a beard.
"Move," he said without looking up. "You get the buckets, Hala will still find more to shout about."
Eryk stood. The stone under his feet bit, but his body no longer flinched. The first week of winter had taught him there was no corner of Blackstone that offered warmth. There was only motion, and the small heat work could build in bone and muscle if you did not stop long enough to notice how cold you really were.
Outside, the yard was a print already half trampled into the snow from previous mornings. The white was no longer clean. Gray slush filled the paths. Ice crusted the trough edges in ridges that caught the light like broken teeth.
"Water," Hala snapped as they filed out. "Then knives. We have root and bone to see to and I will not have dull work just because your fingers are complaining."
Her own hands were wrapped in cloth at the knuckles. The skin showed through in cracks where old burns met winter's bite. She held her ladle as if it weighed nothing.
The pump handle burned with cold.
Eryk had learned to grip it with the heel of his hand instead of his fingers. The skin there had thickened, hardened by splinters and tool handles. The metal still bit, but it did not own his grip the way it once had. He leaned into the pull and found the rhythm where the pump would protest but not seize.
"Good," Bran said shortly. "You keep that arm straight and we may get through morning without losing more meat to the frost."
Tomas stood beside them with his head down, breath puffing in small, even bursts. He no longer filled the air with words. His eyes stayed on the bucket, watching for the moment the surface filmed over.
"Change on three," Tomas muttered. "One, two, three."
They switched without spilling. Some of the water slid over the sides anyway and froze where it landed, turning the ground into a patchwork of dull, slick stone.
Eryk took the first bucket to the kitchen. His arms remembered the distance better than his thoughts did. The weight settled into shoulders, then back, then legs in familiar lines. His fingers did not tremble on the handle.
By the time he reached the fire, thin ice had formed across the surface.
Hala smashed it with the flat of her hand before tipping the water in.
"You carry before it sets, not after," she said, though he had moved as fast as he could. "World will not slow for your feet, Eryk."
"No, mistress," he said.
She did not waste breath on approval. She pointed her ladle at a table and a pile of roots.
"Get to it."
The knife felt different now. Not lighter. Just known. The handle sat into the grooves his palm had made for it. The first day he had cut in thick, clumsy pieces because his hands had been too uncertain to trust the blade near his fingers. Hala had watched him then with narrowed eyes and said nothing, which had been worse than shouting.
Now the motion came almost without thought.
Knife down. Twist. Slice.
He reduced turnips and onions into small pieces that would break down in thin stew, then reached for the next without pausing long enough for stiffness to creep in. The cold tried anyway. It lived under nails and deep in finger joints. It waited for hesitation.
Across from him, a boy from the lower sheds hacked at a marrow bone with another knife. He had been brought up for the morning because Hala needed hands. His name was Fen. Eryk had heard it once and filed it away the way you filed away the location of a loose stone in a path.
Fen held the bone wrong. His grip kept sliding as the knife struck and glanced.
"Hold near the joint," Bran said as he passed behind him with a basket of dried herbs. "You strike the thinner part and you will slip."
"I am holding," Fen muttered, jaw tight.
The bone rolled under his palm anyway. The knife's edge skidded, then bit where it should not.
Fen's breath hissed out sharp. The blade sank into his thumb.
Blood sheeted over his knuckles and dripped onto the board.
Fen swallowed a curse. His eyes shone with sudden wet brightness, but he did not cry out. Not because it did not hurt. Because crying out cost.
For one instant the world narrowed to the sound of that drop hitting wood.
Eryk's hands did not move on their own. They did not jerk back. They did not freeze. They did not try to flinch him away from the table like they had once flinched him away from fire and beams and bootsteps.
He looked at the blood.
Then he cut the onion.
Knife down. Twist. Slice.
The sting brought water to his eyes, and that was all.
Hala was there a heartbeat later.
"Off the board," she said to Fen. "Before you ruin the marrow."
She wrapped a cloth around his thumb and yanked it tight. Fen hissed again. She let go long enough to inspect the cut as if judging its usefulness.
"You will live," she said. "You bleed on my food again and I will send you to the pigs so they can find a use for what comes out of you."
Fen clenched his jaw and nodded once.
Hala jerked her chin toward Eryk.
"Show him where to strike next time."
Bran took the knife from Fen's other hand, found the seam, and brought the blade down with a practiced movement. The bone split with a clean crack.
Fen watched like he was trying to memorize it fast enough to keep his place.
Eryk chopped another onion.
He did not look away from his work until the cloth on Fen's thumb had soaked through and he had been sent to the wash trough.
Later, when the vegetables had been reduced to neat pieces and the pot began to smell like onions, salt, and something faintly like meat, Hala stopped beside Eryk and held out a folded scrap of stiff paper.
"Take this to the steward's outer room," she said. "Do not open it. Do not look at it. You so much as crease it wrong and I will have you scrubbing my floor until your fingers forget how to hold a spoon."
Eryk accepted it carefully, as if it were thin glass.
"What is it?" Tomas asked, watching from the pump with his hand braced against the handle.
"Counts for the month," Hala said shortly. "Bowls, pigs, flour, bones. Things the steward claims to care about. Move."
Eryk moved.
The steps to the upper yard were worn in the center where feet had passed most often. Snow had been beaten off them in places, but the edges still held ice. He kept his eyes down like Bran had taught him, but let them slide just enough to map the space.
Men crossed his path in quick angles, shoulders hunched. Foremen shouted in short bursts, then stopped shouting as if saving the rest for later. A cart rolled past with its wheels wrapped in cloth to keep the noise down. Even sound was managed here.
The steward's building sat like a stone block in the center of the upper yard. Its door stood open a crack. Eryk knocked once on the wood.
"Come," the steward's voice said from inside.
Eryk stepped in.
The room smelled of ink and cold dust. Shelves lined the walls, holding bundles of leather, folded papers, small wooden boxes tied shut with string. A brazier gave off a weak warmth that did not reach the corners.
The steward sat at a table with a ledger open. Ink stained his cuffs. His quill moved with an ugly certainty.
He did not look up.
He held out his hand.
Eryk placed the folded paper into it.
Only then did the steward lift his eyes.
They did not settle on Eryk's face. They dropped to his hands.
They paused there, long enough for Eryk to feel the inspection like pressure.
Steady, the steward's gaze seemed to decide.
Not clean. Not safe. Not innocent.
Steady.
"Back," the steward said.
Eryk backed out without turning, the way he had learned to do around men who owned rooms and consequences. The door clicked softly behind him.
Outside, the air felt colder after that brief brush with the brazier. His hands tingled where blood returned to them.
Bran met him halfway down the steps.
"Lose it?" Bran asked.
"No."
"Good." Bran's gaze dipped to Eryk's hands. "You did not spill either."
"Spill what?"
Bran snorted faintly.
"Ink. They put more weight on that than your bones."
Back in the lower yard, Hala had the boys forming a line for the midday meal. Bowls moved from hand to hand in near ritual. No one rushed. There was no point. Hala would stop serving when the pot was empty, and pushing only meant she saw your face longer.
Tomas joined Eryk in the line, shoulders hunched, hands shoved into his sleeves.
"How was upstairs?" Tomas asked quietly.
"Cold," Eryk said.
"Everything is cold," Tomas said. "More words up there though, I imagine. More counting. Steward says Marek was 'reassigned'. Says it like he is talking about a cracked pot."
The word sat wrong in Eryk's head. It had too much room inside it.
"Reassigned to what?" he asked.
Tomas shrugged without lifting his eyes. The line inched forward.
"Stone. The pit. The pigs. The crows. Does not matter, does it? He is not here. That is what they mean."
Hala slapped a ladle of thin stew into Eryk's bowl when he reached her.
"Eat," she said. "You work better when you are not fainting on my floor."
He stepped aside. The broth steamed against his face. He could smell the onion he had chopped, and something like bone that had been boiled too long to remember what it used to be. His stomach made a tight, ugly lurch anyway.
He lifted the bowl and drank.
Warmth spread outward in a small, temporary circle.
His hands stayed steady. The surface of the stew did not ripple.
That afternoon he was sent to the storage shed with Bran to bring out sacks of old grain. Snow had piled against the lower stones of the wall. Bran kicked a path through it with short, irritated movements, like he was angry at the world for being cold and not ashamed of it.
"Lift with your legs," Bran said as Eryk took one end of a sack. "You ruin your back this young and they put you in the pit faster."
The weight dragged at him. It would have toppled him once. Now his body found the strain and held it. Muscles tightened in the right places without him having to argue with them first.
"Remember when you could barely carry a bucket?" Tomas called from the pump. There was less bite in his tone than there would have been a week ago. "Now look at you. Almost a proper mule."
Eryk shifted the sack higher and pretended he did not hear the note under the joke.
It was not mockery.
It was something thinner. Wary. Almost like approval, the kind you gave a tool that stopped slipping from your grip.
Evening came gray and early. Smoke from the cooking fires mixed with the breath of the yard and settled low. The cold did not let up, but movement kept it from sinking all the way into bone.
Eryk scrubbed bowls until his fingers felt raw again. The stone at the trough had grown slick with grease and sand. He found a rhythm that did not waste motion.
Dip. Scrub. Rinse. Stack.
His hands moved. His shoulders did what they needed to do without him thinking where to place them.
"You work like someone who expects to be here tomorrow," Bran said quietly as they carried the last stack back to the kitchen.
Eryk frowned.
"Do I not?"
Bran's mouth twisted into a tired almost smile.
"Some do not," he said. "They move like they are already gone. Harder for them to stay. Easier for other people to nudge them along."
He did not say Jory's name.
He did not need to.
That night, on his pallet with the thin blanket pulled up to his chin, Eryk flexed his fingers in the dark.
They ached, but they did not tremble.
He thought of Fen's blood on the cutting board, bright against pale marrow. He thought of the way Hala had moved, fast and efficient, annoyed more at wasted work than at injury.
He thought of holding the folded paper. Of walking the steps to the steward's room without fumbling. Of the brief moment when the steward's eyes had weighed his hands and found them useful.
Once, when he had first arrived, his fingers had shaken so hard he could not hold a chipped cup without rattling it against a table. Shock had lived there, in his knuckles, in the tendons that pulled his hands tight whenever memory reached for fire.
Now the shaking was gone.
He had not noticed exactly when it left.
Only that today, when a boy cut himself badly enough to bleed and swallow a shout, Eryk's knife had not faltered. His cut had continued straight through the onion.
He was not sure whether that felt like strength.
Or loss.
Outside, winter pressed its face against Blackstone's walls. Inside, hands hardened, skin thickened, movements smoothed into the kind of efficiency that made people useful.
Eryk closed his eyes and felt the dull pulse in his fingers where new calluses were forming beneath old scars.
His hands did not shake.
The world would find a use for that.