Osric looks up, squints into the mist. He’s looking for his ducks, calling them in for the night. One keeps wandering down the bank where it’s too steep for him to follow, not with his leg.
“Ruby,” he calls—half anxious, half exasperated when he catches a glimpse of her. Her white feathers are like a streak of vapour. Why she wants a drink when the river is half out of its bed to meet the field makes no sense to Osric. The duckhouse is halfway up the ridge. “Come on, yer sisters want their bread,” he mutters, and when he finally catches her, wedges her under his arm. She daubs his cloak with mud, kicks twice, then settles.
Back in their lean-to, beside his cottage, he dumps the remains of a grain sack. “Tomorrow’s missed bread,” he calls it. Shuffling into his cold home, he stokes the fire and doubles his cloak around him, muddy and damp though it is.
“Ruddy mist,” he says to himself. “Picks its moment, that one.”
The next day is the same. But when he can’t find Ruby at all, and goes to feed the others their bread, he finds her there already, the door shut. He’s not sure he’s let them out at all. Can’t read the sky to tell the time.
He realises he hasn’t prepared for market, so he does, carefully, muttering the list aloud—but when he wakes the next morning, he puts all the things away again, feeling inexplicably enraged.
Later, he’s some distance from home, headed downriver with his largest basket. But on the straw lie feathers instead of eggs. He picks up any he finds, tucks them into his palm, then puzzles over whether he wants just duck, and how to tell whose feather is whose. He sits on the bank, hands flat in the mud, and wonders at a floating silver aura drifting above his head—only the moon through mist, though he doesn’t know it.
Night folds into morning. The defiant determination that comes with first light jolts Osric back to himself, and eventually, back home. He tosses the ducks their grain, lets them out, and collapses into a deep sleep that drags through most of the day, and on and off through the night.
The confusion begins to lift, though he keeps losing the thread. He finds himself thinking of people he used to know, the chatter of the market. He unsteadily packs his basket with the few eggs he’s gathered, removing the feathers though it feels like a small betrayal to do so—not that he could say why. He tucks one into his belt as a talisman.
Worrying about his scant wares, he looks about his tiny home for something else of worth and packs a carved and engraved wooden cup, bowl, and spoon.
When he gets to Crumble Top it isn’t market day. He sees no familiar faces, and the eyes that rest upon him seem to exclaim an unknown word. The air feels too transparent, too clear—he’s brought with him a cloud of silence, something clinging, some trailing mist that conceals him and dulls the sound of his own name.
He goes into the Quarryman’s Rest, hoping to barter for a night’s stay in exchange for whatever work his body will allow. The innkeep has none. Osric begins to unwrap the cup—but here it looks lumpy, too worn. What had he been thinking? “Never mind, then,” he grunts, and barters five eggs for an ale and some soup.
He spends the night in the woods, and wakes with a crow watching him, chirruping softly.
“After an egg, aren’t ye?” Osric says, glad he’s covered his goods with a cloth. A tear pricks at his eye; he could do with a friend right now, but he has less than no eggs to spare.
He goes to the market and is quiet, counting the eggs aloud as he passes them over, but nobody meets his eyes. Was it always like this? he wonders. I do keep quiet, he reminds himself, but the end-of-day chatter seems to flow around him, his attempts at conversation slipping past unheard. Nobody says his name.
He wonders, do any of these people even know who I am?
The morning broke clean and pale, the sort of light that sits quiet on slate and never quite warms the hands. Kiln Green filled slowly—barrows creaking, the first shouts of trade carrying thin over the damp air.
There was a new egg stall by the well. Two brothers, folk said, or cousins maybe. One called, the other smiled, and between them they sold out before noon. The eggs were watercolour blue, freckled fine as a young girl’s cheek. “A shame to crack ’em,” people said, admiring the colour. By midday it was a joke, by dusk a saying.
Lowen heard it three times before they looked up. A customer was bartering for dried nettle, but something in the chatter snagged, wrong in its place. They turned, scanning the green for the old lean-to stall that usually stood near the cider press. It wasn’t there.
The new sellers laughed like men with soft hands. Their baskets were lined with fine straw, the sign freshly painted. No trace of the rough old one that used to lean, half-rotten, against the pump.
When the customer had gone, and Sib — whose stall stood beside theirs that day — had the children busy teasing knots from fleece, Lowen caught her arm lightly.
“Who’s that?” they asked, nodding toward the stall.
Sib squinted. “Don’t know. New face, maybe from uphill.” She paused, half-remembering, a frown starting as she opened her mouth — but one of her pupils tugged her sleeve, and the moment slipped away.
By the time the bell rang to close the market, Lowen had packed away their wares but lingered a while, watching people leave with their neat blue shells wrapped in straw. The phrase floated again—“a shame to crack ’em”—and someone laughed.
A rising wind kicked at their cloak, urging them to find a place to spend the night.
They followed the track beyond Kiln Green until it met the old quarry ponds, water dark and still under the fading light. Sitting on the bank, they watched the surface shift with each breath of wind. A single feather drifted past, black as ink, circling once before catching in the reeds.
Lowen watched it settle, then turned away, pulling their hood close against the chill.