When the Mountain keeps Secrets

Knots that keep

Morning comes sharp enough to nick a finger.

When I open the shutters a hand’s breadth, the air that slips in has teeth to it—iron on the tongue, smoke and frost and the faint sour of old apples stored somewhere close. The ridge is pale with leftover dusk, the sky rinsed clear. My shawl waits on the peg with the eryngium sprig pinned at the shoulder, the little blue heads turned outward like a row of watchful eyes.

Nonna has already been up for hours. I hear the tiny metallic complaint of her mending tin and, beneath it, the soft murmuring she does when she counts stitches. When I come out, she doesn’t greet me; she weighs me. Her look runs from my hair to my hands to my mouth, as if last night might still be clinging somewhere visible.

“Coffee,” she says, and slides a mug across the table.

I drink too fast and scorch my tongue.

“You’ll go to the market,” she adds, busy with a hem. “And you’ll take these to Signora Ferretti.”

“These” turns out to be a bundle of herbs she’s laid out on one of the good cloths: rosemary, thyme, yarrow, a little lavender sprig for kindness. She adds a last twist of bay and ties them with red thread, then knots the tail of thread into a clover shape so fast I barely see the motion.

“For her kitchen?” I ask.

“For her winter,” she says. “And take the red scarf—the one people notice.”

“The red scarf makes me look like I’m trying to be seen.”

“I want you seen,” Nonna says, and bites the thread free with a firm snap. “There are things you do in quiet and things you do in public. Today is for the public ones.”

I don’t argue. I tuck the herb bundle into the wicker basket and knot the red scarf around my neck so it sits like a flame against my coat. Outside, the lane shines faintly where a dusting of frost hasn’t yet surrendered to the sun. Chimney smoke tumbles close to the rooftops before a small breeze remembers to carry it away.

Signora Ferretti’s door, old grey wood with an iron latch, opens before I can knock. She fills the doorway in that sovereign way older women have, her hair coiled like an intention, eyes as quick and assessing as a sparrow’s.

“Artemisia,” she says … “Entra, entra. Come in before the cold turns your hands into spoons. I’m Signora Vittoria — you call me that, not Ferretti. ‘Ferretti’ is for the tax man.””

Her house smells of rosemary oil and beeswax polish, with a sharper thread underneath—orange peel, I think, charred at the edges. She clears a space on the table with one sweep of the arm, and I place the bundle down. Steam from someone’s kettle curls in the air like a question waiting to be answered.

“From my Nonna,” I say. “For your winter.”

“A proper girl,” she says, and the approval lands like a coin in a cup. “She remembers the season, not the day.” Her fingers—thin but certain—touch each herb as if calling it by name. “Rosemary for remembrance, thyme for courage, yarrow for wounds that don’t show. And lavender for being kind when you’d rather not.”

“Nonna added the lavender,” I say.

“She would.” Signora Vittoria calls toward the back room, “Lucia, vieni! Bring your eyes—we have generosity on the table.”

Footsteps: quick, sure, carrying the easy rhythm of someone who knows exactly where all the furniture lives. A girl about my age appears, and the room shifts to include her without asking anyone’s permission. Her hair is dark enough to drink the light, pinned half-up with an old bone comb; a copper streak catches where the sun finds it. Wool sweater the colour of ash, skirt layered over thick stockings, boots scuffed like they’ve been telling the truth for years. She has the look of someone listening even when she is not being spoken to.

“My granddaughter,” says Signora Vittoria, with the pride of a trump card. “Lucia.”

Lucia offers her hand. It’s warm and dry, and she holds on a heartbeat longer than politeness requires, as if feeling the bones inside it. “You’re the girl who lives with Signora Maria,” she says (and it takes me a second to remember she means my Nonna). “You walk light for someone who grew up in a city.”

I blink. “And you—have been here always?”

“In one way or another,” she says, and smiles, and somehow the smile carries both mischief and sincerity at once.

We sit because Signora Vittoria tells us to sit. She fetches three clay cups and pours hot water over dried lemon peel and a pinch of thyme. The scent rises with a cleanliness that feels like good manners. While the cups steam, Lucia leans over the herb bundle, nose almost touching the rosemary, and inhales.

“Who tied this?” she asks.

“My Nonna,” I say. “She knots faster than I can see.”

Lucia nods. “But you turned the bay leaf,” she says, and I feel it like a tap between my shoulder blades. “Left-handed, not right.”

“Lucky guess,” I say, too quickly.

“Mah.” She tips her head. “Not luck. The thread lies that way when a left hand turns it.”

So it can be explained. I tell the jump in my pulse to settle. It doesn’t.

Signora Vittoria slides my cup across. “Drink before you begin scaring each other,” she says dryly. “And you”—she points at me—“tell your Nonna that if she wants cuttings from my rosemary before the frost takes it, to come today, not tomorrow.”

I promise to tell her. The cup is hot enough to pinken my fingers, and I welcome it. The heat drives the morning out of my knuckles. We talk about small things: the market being thin this week because of the cold, the baker’s son wearing his father’s coat now, sleeves rolled twice. I find myself watching Lucia’s mouth as she speaks, not for any reason I can name except that she’s careful with words in a way I recognise.

“You were on the ridge last evening,” she says, not exactly interrupting but changing the channel with the practiced touch of someone who has owned the radio all along.

My hand pauses on the cup. “How do you know that?”

“You brought the dusk in with you,” she says simply. “Your hair smells of frost, and there’s a line from a scarf on your cheek that the morning sun hasn’t had time to erase.”

There are rational explanations for both. I wait for her to offer a third.

“And,” she adds almost as an afterthought, “there’s grass sap on the heel of your left boot. The path above the chapel is wetter than the lower lane.”

Ferretti snorts approval. “Eyes like a hawk,” she says.

“A hawk is loud,” Lucia answers. “I’m better at being a stone.”

I set my cup down carefully so it doesn’t clatter. “We heard…” I begin, and stop, not sure I want to say the rest where someone else can examine it.

“The ridge breathing,” Lucia finishes for me, mild as sunlight. “It’s a good sign. Or at least, not a bad one.”

“What does it mean?”

“That the giant is restless but not yet turning,” she says, and from her mouth the legend sounds like recipe instructions. “If the sound had been a hum instead of a breath, I’d have told Nonna to bank the fire higher.”

“Don’t take advice from this one unless you intend to follow it,” Signora Vittoria says, but the fondness in her voice softens the scold.

Lucia glances at the window, toward where the ridge would be if the wall were kind enough to be glass, and then back to me. “I’m walking to the square,” she says like a suggestion she has already decided upon. “Come with me?”

Signora Vittoria waves us off with a queen’s dismissal. “Take the bundle to the kitchen first,” she says to Lucia. “Hang it high where the cat can’t reach.”

We step back into the cold. The door shuts behind us with the comforting sound of a thing that knows its work.