A silent, biting frost had seized the high ridges during the dark hours before sunrise, riming the ironwork of the smithy in thick, feathery needles of ice and locking the lower soil of the orchard into dark stone. Down in the river basin, the water moved under a thin skin of shore-ice, murmuring with a hollow, muffled echo against the granite piers of the lower footbridge. The morning sky had settled into a hard, cloudless sheet of pale azure, immaculate and cold, casting sharp-edged, bluish shadows across the terraced slope.
With the draft-doors secured and the interior envelope of the main hall sealed against siphoning air currents, our focus turned toward the outer agricultural perimeter—specifically, the timber storage frames of the root cellar’s upper ventilation caps. When the seve
