A week had passed since Bruce woke in a new body in a world she did not recognize. Where was she? She couldn't say. But it was winter—of that she was certain—and each day the weather eased a little, the wind less murderous than the day before.
The cottage, as best she could tell, sat by a small lake. On the third day Mother had returned from its edge with a finger-length fish and a running nose. The house itself was rough-cut timber with a straw roof glazed white, stubbornly keeping snow where it belonged. Even the door held its ground when the wind shouldered it, though for days the drift had climbed halfway up the planks before Mother carved it back with a shovel and a curse. From the sounds, trees pressed close on every side—forest and lake and forest again—so that the gale had something to rattle whenever it wanted attention.
Inside was mostly peace. One room, warm, smelling of smoke, wet wool, and stew.
Mother sat by the simple stone hearth and hummed a soft, sad song in her northern tongue, stirring a pot that tried to be many meals at once. Hard brown loaves hung from the rafters on twine, stones until she shaved them thin into the broth. In the corner crouched a few cloth sacks—oats, a mix of grains, some wrinkled apples—tied tight against mice. A jar of dried peas, a string of onions, a crock of pickled greens, a twist of salt. Eggs came from seven hens who dozed wherever they pleased: on the bed-frame, by the footboard, or—disgracefully—on the floor, where a quick, proud cluck often meant breakfast. Mother would slip a hand beneath a warm bird and come away with an egg, and the hens, unbothered, went back to their business of scratching, chattering, and hunting tiny creep-things in the cracks.
The rooster was another matter. Big as a small dog and twice as proud, he pretended not to see Mother's thefts. He had work: patrolling the floorboards like a lord, stabbing silverfish with precise disgust, snapping beetles out of shadowed seams. King of pests and straw. The only man in the house, apparently.
Lili—formerly Bruce—lay under patched furs and watched the world work, her mind worrying questions the way a tongue worries a loose tooth.
Why was the rooster the male? Why were roosters male at all? And how, exactly, did Mother know she was a girl?
The thoughts filled the ceiling and bred more. Mother called her dóttir—daughter—and sang other words that smelled of distance: a far home, kin waiting, things lost and loved. Lili caught meanings the way you catch warmth from a fire: not all at once, but enough to know Mother's songs often ended with a swallow and a look at the door.
Mother knew secrets. That alone should have been enough. But still Lili wondered. Looking down the length of herself—wrapped like a dumpling—she found no obvious proof of anything beyond small, squishy, and unhelpfully baby. In her old world, men were usually bigger, taller, hairier, with voices like truck engines; women were softer and curvier and could do that impossible thing with babies—and, occasionally, convince men to start wars over them like in the old stories of Troy. But how did you tell which was which at this size? What was the rule?
Mother said "Lili" and smiled with her whole face, and he—she—couldn't argue with that smile.
It was still a riddle. All of it.
And riddles beget riddles. The one that never stopped itching—even before the tower—was the oldest of all:
How were babies even made?
Why had Frank laughed at him when he asked? Back then Bruce had half-listened in school and filled the gaps with cartoons. Birds delivering bundles (never seen one). Women "spawning" babies like summoning a mount in a game (convenient, unlikely). The class bit about women having hundreds of thousands of eggs—did that make them factories? Not for cars, but for babies in many shapes and sizes? The facts, such as they were: somehow a baby appeared inside a woman, and nine months later a baby came out. Produced. Or… pooped? (Probably not. Hopefully not.)
She tried to remember being inside—nothing but dark, warm, and the sense of being carried by a sound she now knew was Mother's heart. Then light, hands, a voice. No diagrams. No instructions. Her mind offered a compromise: maybe it was like magic. A wish, some work, a wait, and then a baby. Bad theory. Best on hand.
If she grew up a girl (apparently she was), could she try it and finally solve the mystery? What if thinking very hard about Frank and his family could "spawn" a tiny Frank with a pocket-sized family? Or her level-79 gnome warrior, HappyMan? (Amber… probably not.) The idea was ridiculous and made her snort a baby snort, which was frankly undignified. Still—one day she would learn the real rule. One day she would know.
Mother's spoon kissed the pot rim: tok, tok. The hum softened into a song about something beautiful Lili couldn't yet catch. When stew wasn't enough, Mother cracked an egg one-handed and let a small yellow sun slip into the broth, then shaved a coin of hard fat from the coals—rare—so the whole thing would remember meat. Mostly it was porridge, bread, and whatever dried thing could be coaxed back toward food.
The rooster—true pest-marshal, Mister Terminator (working title)—stalked by, tipping his red crown to peer at Lili with one eye before returning to patrol. He was larger than any sensible rooster, and clever in ways birds only pretended: herding hens from drafts, body between them and the door when the wind shoved, hunting silverfish with professional contempt. Bugs were his enemies. Dignity was his banner. Lili adored him and tried the name on her tongue.
"Teh—mi—"
Mother laughed and answered the babble as if an oath had been sworn.
The wind got into the walls again and moaned.
Mother set her spoon aside and took up the knife. She kissed her thumb, the way she always did before cutting, and went to the smooth plank by the bed. Lili had watched her do this once before, days ago, when the big man and the older woman had left and never returned. Now Mother carved careful lines into the wood and spoke softly to the plank, her voice low and proud:
"Líli, fæddr 25 á Jól, ár 904 eptir Sighard."
The letters were a mystery, but Lili could at least guess where her name began. The numbers, though—those she understood: 25 was probably a day, maybe in the twelfth month, because the cold outside proved it was winter. But the year—904—made no sense at all. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe Mother's calendar worked differently. Maybe people in Scandinavia were still pretending it was the year 904, unlike everyone in America and the UK who lived in 2017. Or perhaps it was code—Morse, or some secret answer to everything, like one of those impossible math problems she'd always been bad at.
She squinted at the carving again, brow furrowed, but a far more urgent realization struck her: hunger.
And that reminder brought her back to the three things that made babyhood unbearable.
One: she couldn't go out to poop like Mother did. Her little stubby legs refused to do much more than kick the air, so there was no walking yet. Because of that, she wore a shameful contraption—cloth and leather bound together into a diaper.
Two: she couldn't eat what the room smelled like. Mother ate bread and onions, sometimes peas, sometimes a few sweet berries thawed by the fire, and, of course, eggs. Lili had only warm milk and Mother's tired eyes. No teeth yet, no chewing, no dignity. She wanted to make her own food like a proper, responsible adult, but instead had to be fed constantly like the helpless creature she was.
Three: she was always tired. Every drill—lifting her head, doing "jumping jacks" while lying down, raising the blanket like a baby's version of a bench press, or pumping her legs in miniature squats—exhausted her completely. She wanted to train. She wanted to be useful. But mostly, she slept.
And yet there was one other thing—the not-quite-a-heart. The bead of light the baby godling had tucked into her chest pulsed sometimes, soft and warm beneath her breastbone. When it did, the world seemed larger. Naps shortened. The ache in her neck faded faster. Her nose cleared in the cold. It didn't make her strong; it simply made her sturdy.
The chickens noticed first. The hens—feathered bundles of appetite and clumsiness—loved to roost at the foot of the bed, their soft weight lined up like teapots on a shelf. If Mother allowed it, one or two would sneak closer, settling beside Lili with sleepy little grunts, as if the warmth in her chest comforted them too. Maybe it was nothing—just coincidence. Maybe the chickens were trying to be people, claiming the soft bed instead of their straw piles.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was something magical.
Lili also discovered quickly that winter makes lists—and Mother ticked them.
Wood: bring armfuls from the covered stack until the stack became a suggestion under a new drift.
Fix: wedge kindling in the doorframe where the latch had begun to gap.
Spin: tease thread from flax when fingers were warm enough to feel.
Patch: cut old linen into small shirts for a person who doubled in size whenever you looked away.
Feed: scatter oats for the hens and scold when they bullied the speckled one.
Crack: knock the ice crust off the pail before pouring.
Check: reach under a hen for breakfast and thank her when she didn't peck.
Food logic stayed simple because it had to. Morning was oat porridge—sweet if a spoon of summer jam survived in the crock. Noon was bread shaved into stew with onion and the last of the carrot coins. Night was whatever the pot became after another hour by the fire. Eggs were everywhere: fried in the black pan when there was grease, poached in the broth when there wasn't. On the rafter string, big rye loaves from a friendlier season swung high enough to make mice reconsider. On the shelf: a twist of salt—the difference between soup and sadness.
Pests moved in when weather moved them out. Silverfish unrolled like commas along the baseboards. Tiny black beetles tried to be clever in the grain tub. Once, a coin-sized moth circled the rafters until the rooster leapt and took it with a snap like a secret door closing. Lili loved him for it. She knighted him again in her head: Mister Terminator, Exterminator, Pest-Marshal of the Straw. She told Mother, and the word came out as bubbles. Mother clapped anyway.
When the door creaked open—only a hand's width, only long enough to rake the drift from the step—cold came in like a person. Through the seam the lake showed itself, hard and dark under birches. The wind smelled like iron. The stew answered by smelling richer, insulted into generosity.
Mother lifted Lili into the crook of her arm the way you hold a loaf to cut it, and the room changed shape. From here the knife-marks on the plank by the bed caught the firelight: the cuts that stood for her name, the numbers that made a season real, the scratch-shapes after 904 whose meaning lived somewhere beyond the trees. Beyond that—somewhere a man with a lion in his chest, a forest full of secrets. None of it mattered while Mother's song went on and the warm bead in Lili's chest kept the cold honest.
"Lítla mín," Mother whispered, kissing her brow. She shifted Lili higher, loosened her bodice, and guided her to the breast.
Milk, heartbeat, fire.
Lili frowned at the ceiling one last time and tried the treaty of a name. "Lee—lee."
Mother gasped as if the house itself had settled. Lili didn't correct her. Names were promises; you signed with what you had.
Her plan could begin tomorrow—one inch of neck today, two tomorrow. Fingers open-close, toes flex-release. Watch the rooster. Learn the room. Count the beams. Sleep when the light-heart said so.
Outside, the wind threw itself at the door and failed. Inside, the stew accepted its lot. The rooster stood on one leg and pretended he had invented warmth; the hens confessed gentle crimes and forgave them instantly.
Lili's lashes grew heavy. As she drifted, the carved chain on the plank stood up in the firelight like small, bright teeth—and then the world narrowed to milk and song and sleep.