The weather settled into not-quite-cold, cool while still muggy, but Ren knew it was coming, winter and all the nightmares it brought. Already there was a frost in the air, made worse every time Dale switched on the radio and the lines in his face deepened. Anna no longer allowed the news if she was home.

But often in the mornings she was gone before anyone else so the grim reporters punctuated the breakfast noise, the signal wavering in and out with static. "...reports this morning that the Leader has postponed elections till spring of next year."

"You've got to be kidding me," Ren said above the noise, forgetting the children were here, forgetting she didn't want to be like Dale.

The Leader was literally the leader of the little country, and had been so for over three years now. Broad-shouldered with red hair--a color Ren despised--the Leader had been appointed temporary rule by the military until the country was organized enough for an election, an event pushed forward in time over and over again. Ren stopped counting after the fifth incident.

"It's mad," Dale said. "You get rid of one and they give you another."

Darius and Anna were not here to calm him, and Ren said nothing, but his anxiety seeped into her skin. She pushed to her feet, the grains from her bowl knotting in her stomach. "Take your bowls to the sink."

"I can't reach," Lark whined.

"Clover, get her the stool. And Hollis, hurry!" Hollis, who all his life had left first, not waiting to help or say goodbye, had made them all late to school two days in a row.

Clover and Patch raced down the street while Lark galloped after them, shouting that she was winning, and Ren watched for traffic though it was rare, and Hollis plodded behind. "Ren," called Patch breathlessly in a pause between games, his jacket unzipped, his black hair swept off his forehead, "I forgot to tell you, last night I decided to one day open a toy store and call it Bells and Whistles."

Ren's mouth lifted. "Why?"

"Because it would be cool."

He returned to Clover, who said, "Ready?" and scuffed her shoe on the ground, but Patch whipped back around. "Ren!" he yelled again. "Do you know what that was? That was inspiration!"

"What did I tell you?" she said.

She smiled despite herself, despite the fact that this somehow made her impossibly sad. Her heart always hurt from loving Patch because he would forever be the tiny quizzical boy with the patchwork dog, but this was different. It made her feel like she was somewhere else and something horrible was about to happen. She jogged forward and caught Lark's hand to ground herself.

***

The dreams still came every night, most of them about Gabriel bloody and pale and cold, but some made no sense, swirls of snow and blackness and shapes. Her ears rang as they did when she went deaf and when she awoke she was in a panic, snapping her fingers to assure herself of her restored hearing. Once, she heard her mother's laugh. Her mother laughing at her. Sometimes they lingered all night, one after the other after the other, torturing her until the morning sun came, but other times they jerked her up as soon as she'd fallen asleep, and she was soaked in sweat.

You killed him, said her mother in Ren's ears, not angry, not even disappointed, but amused, delighted that Ren was no better a person than she.

"Ren."

Ren came awake with a gulp of air. The blurry ceiling came into focus. She listened to her own labored breathing and reached out, snatching the first thing she found. A little hand.

"I had a bad dream," said Lark.

They stared at each other, Ren's heart beating a hole in her chest.

"Okay," she said, making room on her mattress.

At the market she felt she had not slept in days, the pain in her head, the grogginess throbbing behind her eyes. She did not understand what was wrong with her, and that alone made her anxiety worse. Maybe it was the coming of winter, the season that brought so many horrific memories. She gritted her teeth against whatever it was.

Her table rattled and she looked down upon a little helmeted head. "Hello, Ren."

Her jaw relaxed. "Hi, Kit."

"My mom said to tell you thank you for the helmet. She said it makes me look brave." Kit tugged the brim out of her face, squinting in the sunlight. "Do you make your bracelets? Topper says you do."

"Now you see the real Kit, the Kit who's warmed up," said Topper, coming behind her.

Ren turned her eyes back to the little girl. "I think it makes you look brave, too."

"She won't take it off," said Topper, and there was a sharp edge to his smile, and Ren was not sure which Topper Flanders was worse, the one who fell over words and stood in doorways, or this one, looking at her like he wanted to say something unkind but masked it.

"Would you like a bracelet?" asked Ren, because now she knew the child and it was a token of affection, not sympathy. "They never sell."

Kit turned from poking her fingers into the wire box next to Ren's table. "Why do you have a chicken?"

"Because it's a rooster. My brother's wife doesn't want to keep all the roosters." She turned to Topper. A customer was a customer. "Does your mom want one? Good meat."

"I don't want to eat him," Kit protested, her mouth and chin--the only things visible beneath her helmet--tilting up to Topper.

"No chicken tonight, Kit the Bit."

"Can I have a bracelet for Charlie? That's my little sister," said Kit, pulling back the helmet to gaze at Ren's table.

"You can have one for all your sisters," said Ren, pushing the jewelry closer.

"Tell her thank you," said Topper, and as his sister chorused it, he reached into his pocket for a handful of coins. "Run and get Mama the peppers she sent us for."

Ren watched her leave at a gallop, helmet crooked. She liked everything about this child. Her wrinkled blue dress, skinny legs sticking out from under it, her creamy skin, her fair hair cut at her ears, all the things that made her look completely different from Clover and Lark, but she shared their spirit.

"Are you entertaining the notion?" asked Topper.

Several seconds passed before she comprehended what he said. "What?"

"When I asked you to go to the wizard show with me, you promised to entertain the notion."

"I didn't promise anything," said Ren without hesitation.

"But will you?"

She desperately wanted him to leave. "The wizard show left town weeks ago."

"There are other things, Ren." She did not like hearing her name come from his mouth. It sounded too weird. "We could do anything."

"How much for the chicken?" asked a male voice at her left.

She whirled around. "Thirty doles. And worth it. He's quiet and good-natured because two little girls raised him."

The man had white eyebrows. He stooped and squinted. "Not very fat."

"We have lots of chickens. He didn't get his fair share. Keep him around a few months and fatten him up."

She saw Topper across the marketplace, watching her. Kit held his hand and waved with her other one.

"I don't have thirty dole," said the man.

"We won't take any less. If you had as many kids as we do, neither would you."

The man straightened, looked at her. "I can trade you a goat."

Ren realized he was serious. She leaned over her table and there it was, a scrappy brown and white goat on a rope, chewing something, its tail flicking at gnats.

"Why are you getting rid of it? What's wrong with it?"

"I have more goats than feed. The same problem with your rooster here." The man knelt on one knee. "Her name is Granny. And I can't give her to anyone who aims to eat her."

"Why would I make that promise when you're about to eat my rooster?"

"What else can I do with it? Roosters don't give milk, do they?"

The little girls would love milk. It would be good for their bones. And milk was so expensive from the shops. The edge of the table bore into Ren's stomach as the goat made eye contact with her.

"You realize if you're lying, and she's dried up, I'll cook her," said Ren.

"Honest, lady." He was old, but he looked like a little boy. "Granny is almost a child to me. I just can't feed them all."

Topper was gone. This realization distracted Ren for a moment. She asked herself why on earth she was looking for him.

"Okay," she said.

***

She and Anna built a pen of chicken wire, three sides, for the outside wall of the house served as the fourth. The windows were heavy, but Clover used her shoulder strength to hoist open the one in the kitchen, sticking her head out to watch the goat and laughing when it sniffed between her eyes.

"Isn't she lovely, girls?" asked Anna, her whole face bright. "Doesn't she remind you of our Margo?" The girls could not possibly remember Margo the goat, but Lark, who was not even alive then, smiled and nodded and leaned on her mom's shoulder.

"Why do they call her Granny?" asked Patch, to which Ren had no answer, and he ran inside and returned with his blue metal cup to milk the goat. He did not know the first thing about milking. The goat wrenched away and nearly kicked him over, lowering her head at whoever approached next, but Clover, who had followed Patch outside, glared back even harder and seized the animal by the stubby horns. "Mom can milk you," she said fiercely.

Anna laughed, a sound Ren loved, because it calmed her down inside. "Granny will learn to like it here."

She did give milk, a whole creamy pitcher of it for dinner, and it made the biscuits and beans and jerky feel like a feast. Afterwards the adults sat on the porch in the twilight. Patch drew on the back of an old school assignment, and the girls used his scraps to make paper dolls, and Ren looked over the reading for Patch's class on Monday, because some days she never had time to stop working. Hollis sat with her at the table, his head on his arms.

"Why don't you do something?" she asked, wanting space.

"Why do you care?" he answered, muffled by his shirt sleeves. "It's not like you do anything fun."

"I have fun," she said.

He snorted.

"The market is fun."

"Because your boyfriend shows up?"

Ren put down the textbook. She looked Hollis in the eye. "Who?"

Hollis laughed, but not a real laugh. "For crying out loud. That skinny, nearsighted dipstick."

This was so ridiculous Ren didn't bother arguing. "I don't even like him around." She picked up the book again.

"Who do you like around?"

"Hollis, what's wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with you?"

She looked at him again. He was small and lean, the way all the Draven boys were at thirteen. His hair had never learned to control itself, and Hollis didn't try to teach it. After a moment he turned his face from her.

"What's wrong for real?"

He shrugged, chin tucked in his arms now. "A lot of stuff, I guess."

Ren didn't move. You had to wait Hollis out, she had learned this past year or so. In the next room, the younger ones' voices murmured, rising in argument sometimes.

Ren hated this time of year, too, and all the things the winter's war had robbed her of, and she hated, hated, to think of what she had just a few years ago, but before she could offer this information to Hollis, to tell him he wasn't alone, he spoke again. "I don't understandwhy Brim hasn't come back."

The faucet suddenly began to drip, ready to drive Dale and Darius crazy again.

"He said we would see him again in this life. He promised. So why haven't we?"

"Is that all?" asked Ren.

His head snapped up. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Just...that's all that's bothering you?"

"It bothers me a ton, Ren. I want to see him again. I want to talk to him."

She spoke before she could think, like the day she told Topper no in the rain. "But we don't need him."

"Maybe you don't!" He was yelling now, and she wondered where this anger suddenly came from. Maybe it was always there, and it was what made him stomp off to school without a word, or stay in bed too long. "You never cared about him, anyway!"

"Shhh," said Ren, glancing towards the porch, and then, "We have our own family. We're fine."

"Brim is our family."

"Hollis—" She stopped herself before she could say something else regretful. She evened her voice. "You don't need him to come back. If you get him out of your head, you'll be happier."

"Shut up," said Hollis. He got up, hard, and went up the stairs.

He had locked himself in his room when it was time for bed, and Patch whined that he needed to get pajamas. Ren forced him to wait downstairs while she picked the lock and went in. Hollis lay on his top bunk bed, reading.

"Go away," he said with no expression.

She climbed the ladder and sat down, mattress creaking. "You know Dravens never met a lock they couldn't defeat."

He turned a page.

She took a few breaths. "If Brim is important to you, then you have that right. It's a free country. Mostly."

"Okay, but you're important to Brim, and you don't even care." His eyes moved like he was reading. "I already get nothing but crap at school for talking like this. And who cares, right? Except then I come home, and there's still no one who gets it."

"Patch saw what you saw."

"Patch is a kid. Plus he thinks whatever you think." Now Hollis's eyes lifted over the top of his book. "Do you think Brim is important?"

There was a silence that made Ren want to hide in a helmet like Kit's.

"I think Brim is important to you," she said.

"That doesn't even make sense. Does that mean you think I'm crazy sometimes?"

She opened her mouth and stopped. Just long enough to blink. And Hollis saw the hesitation. "So you do? Just like everyone else?"

"No."

But he was mad. He was challenging her. "Ever?"

Her brain was a mess, going too fast in spots, hopelessly slow in others. She couldn't think. "Hollis, stop."

"No, you stop! Stop being your weird self. I don't care what you think of me. Why should I care?" He was too loud, the book down on his chest now. "Brim knows what I'm like."

That hit Ren in a way she didn't expect. "I know what you're like! Better than anyone."

"Not better than Brim. And you'll never understand that."

He was glaring. Then he pushed the heels of his palms into his eyes and was silent.

"I don't understand why he won't at least talk to me," he said, and his voice cracked.

The sound of it hurt Ren inside. She saw him as the tiny boy he once was, the one who would cuddle up with her at night, and her heart contracted. "Hollis—"

"Get out of my room," he snapped.

She climbed the ladder to her own room. She laid awake most of the night for no reason, and there was silence from the boys' room.