Most people find the forestfrightening, believing the old tales of fairies who will freeze the time in your blood, or witches who can spill your years out over the snow with only a whisper. Even the spirit of the Alchemist himself is said to wander these woods, trapping whole eternities in a breath.

I know better than to be afraid of stories. The forest holds real danger—thieves who lie in wait, crude knives and alchemic powder on their belts, to steal time from anyone venturing outside the safety of the village. We call them bleeders. They’re why Papa doesn’t like me hunting, but we have no choice. Luckily, in the winter, there’s no undergrowth to hide the thieves from sight, no birdsong to muffle their footsteps.

Besides, I know these woods better than anyone else. I’ve always loved it here, the way the tangled branches overhead shutter out the sun and block the bitter wind. I could stay out here all day, or just keep walking through trees glittering with webs of fine ice, through the sunlight sifted into daggers. Good-bye.

Fantasy. I would never leave my father alone, especially not if he’s—

“He’s not,” I tell myself.

The lie freezes in the winter air, falls to the ground like snow. I kick at it with the toe of my boot.

Papa says some of the trees in the forest are a thousand years old. They were here before anyone alive now was born, even the Queen, even before the Alchemist and the Sorceress bound time to blood and metal—if there ever was such a time. These trees will be standing tall long after we’re gone. Yet they aren’t predators like wolves or people. The roots beneath my feet don’t live for centuries by causing other plants to shrivel and turn gray. And their time cannot be bled from them.

If only we were more like trees.

Papa’s old musket weighs heavy on my back, useless. There’s been no game for miles, and in just a few hours it will be dark and the market stalls will draw their shades, one by one. Soon I’ll have to go into town and face the time lender. I’d hoped hunting would calm my nerves, prepare me for what I must do. But now I only feel more afraid.

Rent is due tomorrow for Crofton. Like every month, the Gerling family will replenish its coffers with our blood-iron, claiming we owe them for their gray. And their time cannot be bled from them.

If only we were more like trees.

Papa’s old musket weighs heavy on my back, useless. There’s been no game for miles, and in just a few hours it will be dark and the market stalls will draw their shades, one by one. Soon I’ll have to go into town and face the time lender. I’d hoped hunting would calm my nerves, prepare me for what I must do. But now I only feel more afraid.

Rent is due tomorrow for Crofton. Like every month, the Gerling family will replenish its coffers with our blood-iron, claiming we owe them for their protection. Their land.

Last month, when we couldn’t pay, the collector let us off with a warning—Papa looked so sickly, and I so young—but it was not a kindness. This month, he’ll ask for double, maybe more. Now that I’m seventeen, legally allowed to bleed my years, I know what I have to do.

Papa will be furious, if he has his wits.

Just one more try, I tell myself as I come across a small creek running through the trees. Its trickle has gone silent, frozen over—but underneath, there’s a quick flicker of green and brown and gold: a trout,wriggling alone, along some invisible current. Alive under all that ice.

I kneel quickly and smash the skein of ice with the butt of the gun. I wait for the water to settle, for the flash of scales, sending up a silent plea to the Sorceress out of desperation. The blood-iron this trout would fetch wouldn’t make a dent in the rent Papa owes, but I don’t want to enter the market empty-handed. I won’t.

I focus, willing my racing heart to calm.

And then—as sometimes happens—the world seems to slow. No, not seems. The branches really do stop whispering in the wind. Even the almost inaudible crackle of the snow melting on the ground stops, like the world is holding its breath.

I look down, at a pale glimmer in the muddy water—it too is caught in the breath of time. Before the moment can lapse, I strike, plunging my bare hand into the creek.

The shock of the cold travels up my wrist, dulling sensation in my fingers. The fish remains still—stunned—as I reach toward it, as though it wants to be caught.

When I close my hand around its slick body, time speeds up again. The fish flails in my grip, pure muscle, and I gasp, almost losing it. Before it can fling itself to freedom, I yank it from the water and dump it into my bag in one practiced motion. For a second I watch, a little nauseated, as the fish flops around inside, making the burlap twitch.

Then, the bag is still.

I don’t know why time sometimes slows like that, completely at random. Heeding Papa, I keep it to myself—he once saw a man bled twenty years for simply claiming he could make an hour flow backward with a wave of his hand. Hedge witches, like Calla in our village, are tolerated as an amusement for the superstitious—as long as they pay rent. I used to go and listen to her stories about time rippling, slowing, sometimes even causing rifts or quakes in the earth, until Papa forbade me from visiting her shop, leery of drawing attention to us. I still remember its perfume—spice mingled with the blood of ancient rites. But if Papa has taught me anything, 

it’s that keeping my head down means staying safe.

I stick my hands in my underarms to warm them and crouch over the river again, trying to slip back into focus. But no more fish come, and slowly the sun lowers its arms through the trees.

Anxiety knots my stomach.

I can’t put off the marketplace any longer.

I’ve known for years it wouldeventually come to this, but still I curse under my breath. Turning back toward town, I sling my dripping satchel over my shoulder. I’ve gone farther out than usual, and I regret it now with the snow soaking through my worn-out boots, the trees intercepting what remains of the day’s warmth.

Eventually the woods thin out and give way to the dirt road leading into town, which has been churned into frozen mud by hundreds of wagon wheels. I trudge along its side, steeling myself for the marketplace. I’m haunted by thoughts of the time lender’s blade, the vials waiting to be filled with blood. And then the blood waiting to be turned to iron, the wave of exhaustion I’ve heard follows as he leeches time from one’s veins.

Worse, though, is the thought of listening through the thin walls of the cottage as Papa tosses and turns on his straw mattress. Sorceress knows he needs the rest. This last month, I saw him waning before my eyes, like a winter moon.

I swear his eyes are graying—a sign that one’s time is running out.

If only there weren’t such a simple explanation for this morning, when he forgot my birthday.

Papa has never forgotten my birthday before, not once. If only he would just admit that he’s been selling time, despite my begging him not to, and let me give him a few years. If only the Sorceress and Alchemist were real and I could lock them up, demand that they find a way to give him lasting life.

What if—I can’t look at the thought straight on—what if he only has a month, a day?

A memory floats to the top of my mind of an old beggar woman in Crofton who hadbled her last week for a bowl of soup, stumbling from door to door, greeting every person in town and pleading for a day-iron or two, or even just a bit of bread. She forgot the names of the people first—then she forgot the shape of the village entirely, and wandered around the fields, raising her hand to knock on air.

Papa and I found her curled in the wheat, her skin cold as ice. Her time had run out. And it all started with the forgetting.

Thinking of her, I run. My blood urges me on, begging to be turned to coin.

Crofton announces itself first by a few spindly columns of smoke, then the patchwork of rooftops peeking out over the hills. The narrow path leading to our cottage turns east off the main road, well before the village. But I pass it by and keep walking, toward the noiseand smoke of the market.

Inside the low stone wall that roughly marks the village periphery, row houses lean together like a huddling crowd, as if by being close they’ll succeed in keeping out the cold, or the woods, or the slow suck of time. People hurry by me here and there, bodies hidden in layers, heads ducked against the wind.

The marketplace is nothing more than a long stretch of muddy cobblestone where three roads meet. It’s crowded and noisy this afternoon: rent is due for everyone, and the space is thick with people selling. Men in rough farmers’ clothes and women with babies slung across their backs haggle over bolts of cloth and loaves of bread and cattle bones thick with marrow, ignoring the handful of beggars who wander from stall to stall, their refrain—an hour? An hour?—blurring into the general hum of activity. The air is dim with smoke from the oily cook fires.

There’s a long line winding from Edwin Duade’s time lending shop; Papa and I are scarcely the only ones who scramble every month to make ends meet. The sight always makes my stomach hurt—dozens of people grouped up along the walls, waiting to have time drawn out from their blood and forged into blood-iron coins. I know I have to join them, but somehow, I can’t force myself into the queue. If Papa finds out . . .

Better to get something to eat first, to fortify my strength before I sell my time. And I may as well sell my catch, measly as it is.

I start for the butcher’s stall, where my friend Amma stands behind the counter, doling out strips of dried meat to a cluster of schoolgirls in clean pinafores. A pang of mixed nostalgia and envy goes through me. I could have been one of those children. I was, once. After Papa’s expulsion from Everless, the Gerling estate—the flash of anger as I think of it is as familiar as my own heartbeat—he spent his savings on books and paper for me, so I could go to school. But as his sight worsened, the money for books and paper ran out along with his work. Papa’s taught me everything he knows, but it’s not the same.

I push the thought away and wave at Amma when she catches my eye. She smiles, creasing the scar that runs down one cheek. It’s a relic of a bleeder raid on the village where she was born, an attack that left her father dead and her mother with only a few days left in her blood. She clung to life long enough to bring her daughters to Croftonbefore her time ran out completely, leaving only Amma to provide for her little sister, Alia.

To Amma—probably, to many of the schoolgirls I wade through—my hatred of the Gerlings would seem petty. They keep their towns free of bleeders and highwaymen like the ones that killed Amma’s parents, and oversee trade. For their protection, they expect loyalty—and, of course, blood-irons every month. Sempera’s borders are guarded to prevent anyone from slipping away with the secrets of blood-iron, which is why Papa and I stayed on Gerling lands even after we were expelled from Everless for burning down the forge all those years ago.

I remember Everless—its tapestry-lined hallways and gleaming bronze doors, its occupants flitting about in gold and silk and jewels. No Gerling would stalk you in the forest to slit your throat, but they are thieves all the same.

“I heard they’ve set the date, for the first day of spring,” one of the schoolchildren gushes.

“No, it’s sooner,” another insists. “He’s so in love, he can’t wait till spring to marry her.”

Only half listening, I know they’re chattering about what seems like the only topic on anyone’s lips these days—Roan’s wedding, the joining of the two most powerful families in Sempera.

Lord Gerling’s wedding, I correct myself. He’s not the sticky, gap-toothed boy I knew, who would join the servant children in a game of hide-and-seek. As soon as he’s married to Ina Gold, the Queen’s ward,he’ll be as good as Her Majesty’s son. The kingdom of Sempera is divided between five families, yet the Gerlings control over a third of the land.Roan’s wedding will make them even more powerful. Amma rolls her eyes at me.