After another day of travelling, we woke up to the promise of rain. A little late, but not as late as last time, the winds blew up the mountain and dragged grey clouds with them. It felt different this deep in the forest, how the canopy above shook so much, raining leaves, yet the breeze was so mild by the ground.

Over breakfast, I wondered if we would stay here for the day. From the glimpses of the sky I caught, it would only be drizzling for a while and we could pretty much walk from tree to tree—hard to avoid trees in a forest, I wasn’t so worried about lightning strikes now, hadn’t been too sure how worried to be in the first place.

As we finished and she started washing up, my wondering was answered. “Stay here and I shall find a good place nearby to camp through the rain,” she said, her unhurried pace and clear voice as helpful as always when telling me a sentence I wasn’t familiar with.

She had asked me to watch over our things before, had gone to find camps before, and had spoken about the rain, but this was all at once, taking me a moment to understand.

“Okay,” I said. Another word I thought might be more polite than how I thought of it.

While I mulled over things like that, she went off, coming back in half an hour with firewood in her arms. I hurried to my feet, feeling guilty, and brought her my backpack to put it in. The open top made it good for keeping sticks and it only had some food in it otherwise, not as heavy as hers with all the metal stuff and clothes.

“Thank you,” she said and slotted the firewood in, then picked up her backpack. “This way.”

A winding walk, taking us into a patch of older trees, it seemed, bigger with gnarled limbs and thick roots that broke the ground. Few bushes grew here, mostly dirt and rotten branches. My lightning worry returned at the thought of her taking me to the tallest tree around, but that was put to rest when we arrived, what she had found like a willow tree, wide with dangling leaves. It looked like it was a clearing before the tree grew there, woody remains of old bushes in its shade. I couldn’t really say, though, just a thought I had seeing them there.

What I could say was that she had chosen a great spot. By the trunk, the droopy leaves above looked like they overlapped, hopefully acting like roof tiles. I hadn’t really thought about why it stayed dry under trees before. In the back of my head, there was a geography lesson… denying competition? Maybe they wanted to push the water away from the trunk so nothing could grow there and take away nutrients?

Shaking my head, I tried to stop thinking idle thoughts. Wasn’t the time.

We put down our things and, a few words from her, we scouted around for more kindling and fruit. There were some decent pieces of wood and dead bushes around the larger trees, but not much in the way of fruit. A good thing we’d stocked up on hichkle the last couple days.

Nothing else to do, we kept that up until it started to rain. Even if the canopy covered the sky, all of the rain still had to end up on the ground, pouring through the gaps they did find. And pour it did, apparently skipping right past the drizzling stage.

“This way!” Hyraj said, not shouting, but her voice loud and hurried over the rain, making such a noise as it drummed on the leaves above us.

I followed in her footsteps, like we were playing a game how we hopped between dry patches. Fortunately, we hadn’t gone far knowing the rain would start, but not far was still enough to end up unpleasantly damp since I wasn’t wearing my jumper. The woolly yarn was sort of waterproof, but my shirt and vest weren’t, happily soaking up the water and sticking to my skin.

Looking over myself, I sighed. A bunch of splodges where the heavy rain had got me. It wasn’t cold, though, so I sat down by the trunk, knees up and arms around them.

She had other plans. I watched her use a thick stick to sort of scrape dead leaves away, leaving just dirt, then she summoned water to wet around the edge. Once she grabbed the first piece of firewood, I guessed what she was up to and hastily got up to help.

Of course, only after adding a few pieces did I remember she very much didn’t like me helping her with things and, glancing at her, I noticed her eyes were certainly narrowed, mouth thin… more than usual. We had spent so much time together, I could at least tell that much.

But she hadn’t asked me to stop, so I didn’t. Stick by stick, we built our usual-sized fire, another touch of her magic all it took to get it going. Hot. I hadn’t felt cold before, but the prickling heat made me want to sit close enough to catch on fire.

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Instead, I sat just far enough to not catch on fire, getting nice and comfy on the ground. Dancing flames and drumming rain. It was funny to think that I hadn’t experienced them both together before, a tiny room with a straw roof and straw all over the floor not the best place for a fire.

Now that I did, I was completely entranced, clicking together why I’d heard people talk about how they loved sitting by the fireplace on a rainy day.

So entranced I almost jumped when something touched my back, frozen in place until she sat down next to me. It took me another moment to realise that she’d put my jumper over my back, the sleeves hanging down my front. I reached up and tied them into a scarf.

We sat in silence for a while, maybe a minute, maybe an hour, time losing all meaning since I fell back into a daze. Then she asked, “Did you live there for long?”

My listening better than my speaking, it took me a few seconds to reply. “You saw how long.”

“So that is when you arrived at that place?” she said, talking to herself more than me.

I still replied, “Yes.”

“That is it,” she said softly, then spoke up as she spoke to me. “It is just that it would align with the Grahtvith.”

As well as I was doing with understanding her so far, that new word sent me for a loop. I vaguely recognised the second part and remembering that klin’graht was like “hello” didn’t help.

She looked over, then said, “It is… when day and night are as long as each other, and that is when our calendar starts.”

Day and night the same length… so the spring equinox? I didn’t know when that was in my old world, but the solstices… around Christmas and the middle of summer… so halfway between them was… March? Months ago by now, but I had “died” towards the end of March.

I hadn’t believed in magic or witchcraft or anything like that in my old life. No reason to think the equinox or solstice was a more special day than any other. However, it seemed close enough to the right day to use for when I arrived in this world.

All that thinking not quick, I realised I was being pretty rude, so quickly said, “I think I arrived there at the… Gratvifth?”

“Grahtvith,” she said, as patient as ever.

“Grahtvith,” I repeated, a little better at copying than when we had started.

She poked the fire with a stick, then added it to the pile. “So five months.”

It sounded so long when she said it like that, especially since her months were a week shorter, but four “real” months was still a long time too. The days had honestly all blended together, especially by now. I remembered struggling at the start, feeling so overwhelmed until I managed to make that little house, sleeping in a crevice….

“Yes,” I whispered, voice maybe lost amongst the rain, saying it more to myself than her. I had survived four of her months before she arrived, spent a month and a half with her, and now we were here.

Moving. The world didn’t stop, no matter how much I tried to hold it in place.

It felt funny to think that when we were sitting still, but even sitting still could be moving, the harmless question she asked changing me forever. Not a big change, but a change nonetheless.

“Do you do things for Grahtvith?” I asked, hoping to change her too.

“Well, Grahtvith is the first day of sowing, so we—”

Pausing that there, she quickly taught me the verb “to celebrate”, tenses and all, then repeated what she had said, continuing on.

“So we celebrate the day before. Oh, but you asked what things we do, is it that? For most people, it is about vith, giving away things they have made over the year. For older children, giving … gifts is fairly common too.”

I “nodded” along with the clapping gesture, but got stuck on a word she used, so repeated it back to her.

“That word is like… before mother and father are mother and father, father might give mother a beautiful hat and mother might give father a flower she has grown. Romantic gifts,” she said, this time the meaning clearer to me.

Raising my hand, I clapped for her to see. Her gaze flicked down to my hand, then back to me, a touch of a smile on her face. Just a touch.

“For older children, well, among the girls, flower squashing is perhaps the most vithful gift. To choose a flower that represents what you wish to say, to take the seed and grow it into a flower, and to squash it so that it lasts through the cold months—every step is so full of vith.”

The way she spoke of it seemed almost wistful, or maybe just was wistful and I wasn’t used to her being wistful. Either way, it made me curious enough to ask, “Has Hyraj ever… flower squashed?”

She didn’t fidget or scowl or really show any reaction at all. I was disappointed, but had expected as much. It took a lot to shake her.

“Not as such,” she said, lingering there for a moment. “However, I have received some, though I did not dare bring them on this journey. Beautiful squashes.”

I wasn’t great at reading people, but I was getting better at reading her and it seemed like she didn’t want to talk about that more. So I didn’t press her on it.

The fire crackled, rain poured, and we sat, sometimes in silence, sometimes in conversation. She told me about some of the other “holidays”. How, shortly after the winter solstice, they burned a certain wood with a pleasant smell to drive away something like evil spirits, keeping the harvest crops from spoiling.

How, around the autumn equinox, there were often huge storms that would come through, so they would stay inside and knit. Those eventually started to get called “knitdays” and that was where their word for holiday came from, “knit” now sort of meaning “free”. Like, if someone asked if you wanted some cake, you could say, “That’s a knitted question,” because you obviously do.

Well, there was probably a better way to explain that. A good thing she was better at it than me.

The rain fell, fire smouldered, damp clothes dry and no wind to chill us. I already missed the warmth before it had even faded, embers still hot. At the least, the smouldering embers still gave me something to stare at, beautiful in their own way. Especially when she stirred them, the burnt sticks falling apart into a glowing ash of countless fiery pinpricks. If they didn’t burn completely, she held her hand close and made a ring, setting them on fire again until they did, only ash left behind.

A slow day where there was nothing to do but talk, so talk we did.