Volumes

Goldie

A healer who believes only in what she can name — and a faraway hamlet where broken bones knit in weeks instead of months.

For twenty years Zora has mended bodies with clean hands and hard sense, and she has never once believed in miracles — only in what can be named, measured, and counted. So when word comes down from the Combes of wounds closing too soon and bones healing too fast, she packs her bags looking for a cause, not a blessing.

The hamlet calls it a gift. A little girl named Inka wears a small, warm, golden thing on a string and calls it her goldie. Zora means to learn what it truly is — and finds that some answers ask you to give up the comfort of being certain.

A warm, quiet story about being right and still not being able to fix everything — and how that isn't the same as failing. The first, gentle glimpse of a world more beautiful, and far stranger, than the people in it let themselves know.

Better Boots

A quiet boy who always chose the safe side. A girl who ran into the deadly wild. And a handful of autumn days to reach her before the frost does.

Early autumn in Holmford smells of forge-smoke, wet leaves, and market apples. Bren is nineteen, his journeyman's mark only days away, and he has spent his whole life on the safe side of things — good with iron, good with forest tracks, and far too quiet to say the things that matter.

Then Maris runs.

Rather than be traded into a marriage she never chose, she flees into the marshes beyond the village — wild country that takes what it's lent and rarely gives it back, where great beasts move between the trees and the first frost is already coming. Bren can read her trail. What he doesn't yet know is whether he can do the harder thing: leave the safe side, walk into the dark after her, and say — in time — the words he's spent years swallowing.

Because in this small, warm corner of the world, growing up isn't a mark earned at the forge. It's going after someone before it's too late.

A cozy tale of a quiet boy, a hard autumn, and the long walk it takes to become brave — first in a series of standalone stories set in a world far older and stranger than anyone in it lets themselves believe.

Starter

A cook who feeds the whole town and never sits at her own table has eight days to cook a wedding meant to end a ten-year feud — and to learn, at last, how to accept help.

The first snow comes early to Sowerby, and Olma has eight days to set the starter for the wedding bread and feed the whole town. She's the finest hired cook in Sowerby — working other people's kitchens, at other people's feasts, and never once sitting down at a table she has set herself.

This wedding is meant to mend two households split for ten winters by an old wrong nobody says aloud. Olma can feed anyone alive. The one thing she can't do is take help when she's the one who needs it.

A short, warm story about the kind of pride that feeds everyone but the person carrying it — and about how, sometimes, the hardest dish to make is letting someone else stir the pot.