"Eve," Eve and her mother came back the very next day, and the day after that, and after that too. "We don't have to see the horse, but how about I show you Fafi? She's like Semolina you have there, just bigger and fluffier."

It had been about a month that Eve and her mother had been coming here and Ivian had disappeared.

I wonder what happened. It must have been something to do with Aian or Vis. I hadn't seen either of them since the shaman's visit. I asked Eve about her aunt, but Eve just shook her head saying she didn't know.

I wouldn't usually see Vis anyway, so he might just be in the stables, where I first met him.

Aian, on the other hand, I used to see and hear in the house quite often before, even though I only found out his name recently, but now he seemed to have disappeared.

"Bigger and fluffier?" Eve brought me back to the important things in life. I think I had got to her.

"Yes. Fafi's the mage's doggie. They're both really cool."

"Maju doggie?"

"Auntie Veredith!" I called out to Eve's mother. She was a few years older than Ivian, but quite pretty too. In fact, I had gotten into a fight with Eve last week when she claimed her mother was prettier than Ivian, but that was obviously untrue.

"What is it Tilly?" Veredith looked up at us. She had been doing some kind of crochet while sitting near the fire.

That's what the strange holes in the wall were for, fire, I had learned as it started to get colder. I had panicked the first time I saw mother light one a few weeks ago, but the smoke all went up a pipe in the wall behind it and it was so warm beside it.

I really liked the fireplace now. It was cozy to sit beside, much more than the unseen, if perhaps more efficient heating systems that I saw in ephemeral shapes like the white haired people.

"Can we go outside and see Fafi, Aunty Veredith?"

"You want to go outside?" She asked with a smile. "It's so chilly though, don't you think you might get a cold?"

It really was chilly, which was why the fire was so nice.

"I don wanna cold," Eve decided to shout now.

"Eve, wait! Fafi is really warm. You won't be cold if you put your hands on her." And you'll wear a coat and jump around, so you won't even notice.

Fortunately, the lure of cute, fluffy, warm Fafi was too strong, and Eve nodded.

All I wanted, to be honest, was to get out of this boring room and go see what Mr. Barker was doing again before it got even colder, as Ivian warned me it would.

My sarcastic remarks and teasing also started to be ignored by Eve who seemed to get used to them while we continued to eat and play all the same.

In any case, it was easier for me once I told Eve about Fafi and we would go sit with Mr. Barker and his dog.

"Stop that," Veredith whispered as I wriggled in her arms.

She held me on our way outside, but it was oh so uncomfortable. I wanted mother or Ivian to carry me, not this lady. Or at least let me go on my own, like Eve who was running ahead of us. I was slow, but I could walk, kind of.

Veredith had wrapped a heavy little cloak around me that looked like my size, but it was too hot. My neck and back felt like they were boiling hot while my nose was getting cold.

Fortunately, Mr. Barker was there, and so was Fafi.

Not only was Fafi much fluffier than Semolina and the other plushies, but I got to watch Mr. Barker as he hammered barrel lids shut. I wanted to check on them so I asked Veredith. She held me near and I curled my nose a bit at the spiky smell. Mr. Barker seemed to have put a bunch of vegetables in some kind of soured wine.

It looked foul, so it was probably a good idea to put a lid on those and toss them. Why the chef man from the kitchen came out to roll one inside was beyond me though. Maybe the garbage was put on the other side of the house?

"Wowahaha," Eve fell over as Fafi found her and brought her to the ground. She could be very slobbery.

It seemed Eve liked Fafi though, so I asked Veredith to let me go play and stumbled over in my oversized boots.

"Noo! Like this," Eve shouted and got up, ignoring Fafi to show me how to stomp back and forth and pull me around by the hands.

I think Eve didn't understand why I couldn't run around with her. I was just starting to be able to walk, but it was hard with oversized boots in the mud and with Fafi threatening to knock me over as she nosed me and jumped around us.

Eve, on the other hand, seemed clumsy enough inside, but once we were in our gear, she sped around everywhere behind Fafi and thought I should do the same.

"Eve, wait," I told her, pulling my hand away from her grasp.

"Don give up!" She told me, misunderstanding.

"No, look," I said, pointing at the sky.

There were white dots swirling through the air, like white rain but floating gently down from the sky.

"Snow!" Eve exclaimed, trying to catch it as it fell down. We both shouted the word and watched as the unfamiliar flakes melted on our cheeks and hands.

Then Aunty Veredith came and brought Eve away, saying they had to leave early today to go back to the village.

It wasn't long after that before I stopped playing outside altogether, the snow mixing with the cold that now descended over Olwick as winter began.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The winter was dark. The shutters were always closed and even the sunlight through the glass windows downstairs never lasted until dinner.

My winter days were bright. Every waking moment, I was surrounded by fire and candles, the flickering flames sometimes becoming an obsession of mine as I stared or waved at them and played with the shadows.

Eve came a few more times to the manor while the snows were still light on the ground. Mother seemed to be spending most of her time in the kitchen and the larder down the stairs I had never been down.

A lot of the days were pretty boring, sitting around inside. Veredith seemed happy to let us do what we wanted while she went to help out.

One of the bright sides of having Veredith and Eve here is that I started eating more interesting stuff.

First it was just semolina with salty and sour carrots and cabbage, the foul smelling things I had seen Mr. Barker putting in barrels in the fall. I had been unsure of eating this the first time, but Eve didn't seem to topple over and die, so I took a few bites and soon the saltiness was growing on me.

Other times, Eve and I snacked on slices of apple. Unlike the round red apples that I saw mother eat sometimes, these had all the red part removed. They were sweet and turned into a mush in my mouth. They were really good, but Veredith said they would be even crunchier next summer when they were being picked off the trees.

One of those days when the fire was warm but I wasn't very sleepy, Veredith perhaps gone to get another bowl of apples, Eve came up to me and proposed we play games.

"Tilly! Let's play gamoz!" still a bit of a lisp on some of her words even now that she turned 4. "Like this. You have da hold my hands."

Uh...

I held up my hands as ordered, wondering what type of game this was that Eve wanted to play.

"Now we walk dat way."

I started walking towards the fireplace where Eve pointed, but Eve tugged my hand and I looked back puzzled.

"It's a gamoz Tilly, we have da walk slowlwy."

I wasn't really convinced, but just went along with it, like so many of the games we played these days. One was much like another, but I didn't have much else to do.

We stopped in front of the metal screen that was placed in front of the fireplace, the warmth blasting against me making me close my eyes in drowsiness.

I flinched and almost fell backwards when Eve leaned forward and planted her lips on my cheek.

"Eve, what are you doing?" Veredith ran up to us as she entered the room.

"Mama! Tilly and me are gonna be like mama and papa. We hada gamoz too!"

"Eve, you can't do that, even if you are playing," Veredith came to scoop up Eve. "Tilly is going to be the lord of Olwick."

She seemed to be looking around to make sure there was no one else in the room.

It slowly dawned on me that gamoz wasn't just a mispronunciation of games. Eve had meant something else. It was one of those gibberish words that were becoming less and less frequent these days as I absorbed all the vocabulary of Ranis, the language spoken in Farand as well as Keiran.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eve came less often to the house after that but father kept on going out daily.

Sometimes father would say he had finished a sweep or rallied a pen or that they lost a house, but as he and mother seemed to be so tired these days, I rarely ate in the dining room with them.

Instead, I focused on drawing, and getting better at caring for myself, two things my mother was only too happy to encourage.

She was a bit surprised when I originally asked for paper and pen, and instead of what I wanted, gave me an old wax board that father had kept, a present he had received from a Southern lord when he was young.

It was quite simple, just a board of wood covered in a thick white wax and a steel pen, but I could do whatever I wanted with it, drawing my family, Mr Barker and the white haired people and all the things they did.

It was while I was thus passing my days in the warmth of the inside of the manor that Ivian finally came back.

She was beautiful, surrounded by dozens of burning candles that she was still setting up with her sister Veredith as mother carried me into the dining room.

"Ivian!" I shouted, reaching out to her, and she turned around and came to tickle me.

"Tilly, I hope you haven't missed me too much over the winter." She said with a smile, marred by the large shadows under her eyes. She looked tired and older, no longer the teenager she was before.

I felt a bit hurt that she didn't seem to want to spend too much time with me, going to sit beside mother as Veredith brought me to sit with Eve. But I guess I shouldn't complain too much. I was just happy to see her again and hoped she would be back with us from now on.

Even Mr Barker, Saul and father came in, though a bit later, their cheeks red from an outing in the cold.

I often played with Eve and Veredith, and had seen Mr. Barker and Saul with father many a time. But it was the first time we had all come together like this for a meal with no distinction for class.

It was beautiful, both the flickering lights of the candles in the room and the warm voices of the people I loved around me. They were my family, my household.

Even Eve, who seemed more interested in the candles and plushies that she hadn't seen in a month, was an endearing sight to see.

I saw mother and father sitting together, watching over all of us from the side with a smile and thought that maybe I began to understand his sometimes reserved demeanour. It wasn't that he didn't like being a family or looked down at the villagers. He looked tired too, like Ivian, with shadows under his eyes, exhausted from a day when he was out in the snow to protect not just us but the whole village.

He was a protector and a lord and perhaps his focus on his duties had made him not know how to just relax and enjoy.

But father too had one of the small squares of cooked and dry semolina that Ivian brought from the kitchen. They dripped with honey, yoghurt, and each had a little hazelnut pushed in on top.

A single bite of it was sticky paradise, the explosion of sweetness unlike anything I'd ever tasted.

I giggled as Ivian tried to feed me another spoon, my pulse rising as the treat made me giddy.

In my giddiness, I remembered the word for sugar, and how it was an extraction from beets or crushed canes grown in the warmer climates to the Ellenic Empire's south.

I licked my lips and reached out, trying to touch the big cake on the table in front of me. Couldn't have too much of a good thing, after all.

"Tilly? What are you doing?" Ivian asked as she lifted me up and took me away from the table.

"Give me!" I screamed, struggling to get out of my captor's grasp, but my sugar clouded eyes slowly cleared as I realised the big cake and the little treats glimmered tantalizingly in front of me were all in the ghostly plane.

I felt a tear come out of my eyes as my father said something and mother and Veredith clapped then each came to kiss me.

Eve was clapping with a big smile on her face too, but I realised I didn't hear what was going on in the end that day.