When the Mountain keeps Secrets

Winter’s Step

The house smells of juniper and old bread when I wake, like a prayer that remembered to be practical. The lamp burned out in the night; the little coin Lucia threaded on red string hangs from the curtain tie exactly where I left it, still as a held breath. I lie for a moment with my eyes open and pretend I am counting beams in the ceiling, not listening for another sound that won’t quite happen.

Downstairs, Nonna is already at the table. She has the willow fan propped against her knee and the brazier nudged to the tiles so the smoke will go up the flue without sulking back. She looks like a woman doing something ordinary. She feels like a woman keeping a promise with her hands.

“Buongiorno,” I say, and my voice sounds like it slept in my throat and hasn’t learned the room yet.

“Eat,” she says. A slice of bread warmed on the hearthstone. Cheese pared to a curl with her smallest knife. “Then you’ll go to the mill for grain. They’ll be open early after the feast.”

I chew as instructed. The bread is the soft kind, yesterday’s heel bribed back into kindness with heat; the cheese tastes like a goat that minded its manners. When I glance toward the stair, like a person checking the weather through a window, Nonna follows my eyes and says nothing. That is worse than any question.

“The juniper kept burning well after midnight,” she says instead, casual as gossip. “The rooms remember how to behave today.”

“Good,” I say, and hope she can’t hear the little thread of relief color the word.

She slices another curl of cheese, watching the knife instead of me.

“Your friend walks early,” she says, as if we’d been speaking of no one at all.

I blink. “He… wasn’t with me.”

She just nods, like she knew that too and only wanted to hear what I’d do with the words.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I blurt, and immediately hate that I have given her something to weigh. “In the night, I mean.”

“Bene,” she says simply. “Hear nothing until you must. Take the red scarf. The wind has remembered it has opinions.”

Outside, frost beads on the well’s bucket rope and spiderwebs copy lace between the fence posts. The lane carries last night’s footprints like a story written in a hurry. I tuck the scarf under my chin and go toward the square because it’s where mornings begin whether you want them or not.

The village has its head down. Shutters are open but narrow, like eyes that haven’t decided about the day. A woman sweeps her step with neat, angry strokes and flicks the brush at a crow bold enough to hop along the gutter. The bird ignores her as only crows can and stares at the church door instead, c*****g its head like it understands Latin.

At the mill, Signor Bianchi hoists the sack of grain onto my shoulder as if I’m stronger than I am. “You’ll manage,” he says. “You’ve got the look of a tall girl, even if you pretend not to.” He lowers his voice as he ties the knot. “Stay to the lower lanes today. People are—how to say—scrubbing their thresholds twice.”

“Because of the feast?” I ask.

He snorts. “Because of what rides along after it.”

On the way back I pass the chapel, the small one half-swallowed by the slope, not the one above the pasture where the stone keeps a bear. Someone has left a bowl on the step. Milk, by the color. A thin rime of frost crystals rims it, delicate as sugar. A cat sits two paces away, facing the wall like a penitent. It does not look at the bowl. I don’t, either.

“Artemisia.” Matteo’s voice, somewhere to my right, not loud. Just my name, spoken as if it belonged here.

I find him by the baker’s stall where the smell of crust tries to persuade the morning to be kinder than it intends. He stands with his hands in his pockets as if thinking has weight and he has to carry it like grain. There is a smudge of white along his sleeve, flour or frost or something that borrowed the look of both.

“Buongiorno,” I say, and it comes out with more breath than it needs.

“Your Nonna will be pleased you went to the mill before it grew a line,” he says. It could be small talk. It feels like he has chosen the gentlest thing he can put between us and everything else.

“What happened last night?” I ask, because my mouth has always been quicker than my caution.

Something tightens at the corner of his jaw; it loosens again. “Nothing,” he says, too mild, and then as if he heard his own lie and disliked the shape of it, “Nothing that wants telling in a square.”

“I could wait,” I say. I mean for speech, not for the day, but the words don’t know how to behave.

He looks past me, not evasive—watchful. Old Grazia has come into the square with a string bag that sings against her skirt. The blacksmith’s son rolls a barrel with too much self-importance for the job. Signora Vittoria (Lucia’s grandmother) stands by the well with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan as if concealing opinions. The morning is full of people pretending they aren’t listening to one another.

Lucia appears the way she does, as if the lane was waiting to wear her for a while. She steps into our triangle as if it always belonged to three. “Winter’s Step,” she says to Matteo, sweet as greeting, sharp as a pin.

He doesn’t wince. “Lucia.”

“You left the square before the last bell,” she says, a statement that sounds like a question if you turn it in your hands.

“I went where footsteps were needed,” he says.

“And they were?”

“They were answered,” he says, and his mouth lets one corner admit he knows how much he isn’t saying.

I want to stamp my foot like a child. I don’t. I press my palms against the sack instead and feel the grain inside answer itself in small shifts. “Why do you call him that?” I ask Lucia, keeping my eyes on his sleeve so I won’t make a plea of it.

“Because when he goes, the air forgets what to do for a moment,” she says, as if explaining why snow falls. “Because the first frost listens to his heels. Because the mountain prefers not to be surprised.”

“That isn’t an answer,” I say.

“It is exactly an answer,” she says. Then her face softens in a way I know means she’s about to be kind. “Come. Nonna wants rowan, and your hands are good at not squashing things.”

“My hands are good at many things,” I mutter. Matteo’s eyes tilt with the ghost of a smile; he looks away quickly like a man who has trained himself not to touch flame.

We take the path that skirts the lower chapel and then turns along the wall where the sheepfold keeps its shape out of habit. A wind comes down from the pass that isn’t in the mood to be decorative. Lucia walks like she’s been assigned a job by it and intends to do it without sulking.

“What did you see?” I ask before I can stop myself.

“Nothing,” she says, cheerfully false. “And what did you dream?”

“Nothing,” I say, and the lie tastes the same.

We find the rowan at the corner where the wall gives up on being straight. A small tree, more twig than branch, brave with red fruit that looks like beads a child chose without asking permission. Lucia tests the pliancy of the tip with her thumb, satisfied when it bends without sulking. She pulls a small knife from her sleeve like a magician finding a coin behind your ear and trims sprigs with the competence of someone who has never once told herself she shouldn’t know how.

As we work, the square’s noises lift up faintly, as if the morning has decided to hum. Somewhere a child practices a whistle he doesn’t know is rude after dark; somewhere a dog argues with a broom. When we turn to go, a patch of ground on the far side of the wall catches my eye. The grass there lies pressed in a shallow curve, not quite a circle, the frost along its rim stubborn where the sun has already persuaded everything else to let go.

“See?” I say.

Lucia sees. She doesn’t look long. “A place that decided to remember,” she says. “We will leave it the dignity of that.”