When the Mountain keeps Secrets

Footsteps following

The lane is a ribbon of frost under the kind of pale sun that only wants to look busy. I fall into step beside Lucia, who has a basket hooked over one arm and a cane-handled knife tucked through the ties of her shawl as if she might pause at any moment to harvest whatever the snow has forgotten to hide.

“You slept?” she asks, as if it were a question about the weather.

“I did,” I say, which is not a lie but not the whole truth either.

She makes a sound that could be approval or could be a remark about my face. “The air’s thin above the wall today. Watch your breath.”

I nod. I have my scarf, the red thread, the sprig. I have the sound from last night still tucked in my coat pocket, the way a person keeps a stone to remind herself a road is not empty.

We climb the slope that folds between two terraces, the snow crusted hard where wind has scoured it. Our boots make the kind of sound that doesn’t carry far, a soft breaking and setting, breaking and setting. Somewhere in the folds above us, a crow complains.

It’s only after the second turn that I notice it: the feeling that the world has more footsteps than we’ve made. Not close. Not urgent. Just… persistent.

Lucia notices too. She doesn’t look back—wouldn’t, not if the mountain set its own hair on fire—but she tilts her head as if she’s listening to the rhythm of two different songs at once.

“You hear it,” I murmur.

“I hear what the snow hears,” she says, which is her way of confirming everything and nothing.

We keep walking. The path narrows where a wall has slumped into itself, and we step single file, her ahead of me, my eyes on the marks our boots leave. Behind them, the surface of the snow shows faint disturbances—small scuffs, as though the lightest wind had a body and walked here before us.

“Fox?” I offer.

“Fox doesn’t carry weight in its shoulders,” she says without turning.

The silence between our steps stretches, taut as spun glass. I imagine the sound from last night again, silver drawn across glass, and have to clench my jaw to keep from looking over my shoulder.

We come to the curve of wall where the trough hides under its collar of snow. The air here has a sharper smell—stone and something green that has no business breathing in winter. Lucia pauses, her gaze raking the slope above us.

“Whoever follows,” she says lightly, “wants you to know and not know.”

The hair along my arms prickles. “That’s not comforting.”

“It isn’t meant to be.”

Before I can answer, the sound shifts. Footsteps, now—clearer, closer, the crunch and give of someone deciding not to bother with stealth.

Lucia straightens. “Well, then. Let him step into the day and own it.”

A figure appears between the young poplars, their white trunks framing him like a careless border. Tall, lean under a coat the colour of burnt cedar, scarf drawn high so only the upper half of his face shows. His eyes find us in a way that feels less like seeing and more like reading.

Raffaele.

I’ve seen him in the crowd before—a shadow near the smithy, a man with the stillness of a dog watching a gate—but this is the first time I’ve had his full attention.

“Ladies,” he says, as if the word were a coin he’s decided to spend.

Lucia tips her chin, neither inviting nor dismissing. “You walk early.”

“I walk when I need to.” His gaze flicks to me. “And you walk where the higher line can see you.”

“It’s not the higher line,” I say before I can help myself. “It’s the lower wall.”

A corner of his mouth moves—not quite a smile. “Lower wall, higher wall—it all falls to the same ground in the end.”

Lucia makes a soft sound in her throat, warning or amusement or both. “You’ve been behind us since the second terrace.”

He doesn’t deny it. “Best to know who’s moving toward the Fonte,” he says, like someone mentioning the weather but watching for the flinch. The way his gaze holds mine makes it clear this isn’t the first time the word has passed between us—it’s a thread he’s picking up to see where it’s frayed.

The name lands like a drop of hot water on cold stone. “You mentioned it before,” I say.

“I know enough to keep my boots dry when the melt starts.” His gaze flicks toward the pass. “Some springs don’t only bring water.”

There’s weight in the way he says it—like someone who’s seen what else the flow can carry and learned to bolt his shutters before it arrives.

Lucia’s hand finds my arm, light but definite. “We’re not here to draw from it today.”

His eyes hold mine a moment longer, as if fixing me in place for reasons I’m not meant to understand. Then he nods once. “Keep low, both of you. The snow’s carrying news I don’t care to see in the square.”

And just like that, he moves past—no hurry, no wasted steps, the kind of gait that could follow a scent in the dark and never lose it.

When he’s gone, the air loosens.

Lucia exhales. “That one’s a page you don’t read all at once.”

I glance back at his tracks—deep, deliberate impressions that don’t blur at the edges the way ours do. The wind has no claim on them yet.

“What do you think he meant?” I ask.

She starts walking again. “That he’ll be watching the water. And us.”

We climb another short pitch where brush shows through the drift in knotty brown fists. The trough squats where I left it, snow inside collapsed differently from the snow around it, as if something beneath refuses to behave like winter. I kneel, scrape with a mittened hand until grey ice looks back. Lucia crouches beside me and lays the flat of her palm to the surface, stilling.

“Well?” I whisper, because the cold here feels like a library.

“A seam,” she says. “Tight. Listening.”

“It’s frozen.”

“Frozen water still remembers what it is.” She points to the line of minuscule bubbles strung like a thin necklace through the slab. “When the air warms, this will move first.”

She straightens and steps past the trough, into the little half-bowl of bare edges I showed her yesterday. The ring holds its blank like a breath. She bends to the sliver of red thread, the crossed loops—wings sketched in a hurry.

“Not my knot,” she says.

“I thought of your braid.”

“I know who ties it like this.” She doesn’t pick it up. “Leave it.”

“For who?”

“For the place.”

We follow the fall of ground just far enough to see what the snow wants us to know: a faint depression connecting the trough to the next shallow crease. Lucia tests the grade with the edge of her boot. “When it runs, it will take this way,” she says. “It always does.”

“Then the old stone—”

“Will be where the land lets the water be proud,” she finishes, crisp with certainty. “But not today.”

“Raffaele would—”

“—say to keep low.” She grins sideways. “Imagine the delight of agreeing with him by accident.”