Ask anyone in Ashvale about Thomas’s chief affliction, and they’d give you a small, dry smile before telling you the same thing: "Ask him tomorrow."
Mend the birch fence? Tomorrow. Haul the winter turf? Tomorrow. Buy salt at the lower ford? Tomorrow.
It was an old joke in the vale. Men said that if the high crag ever split and came sliding down into the longhouses, Thomas would stand in his doorway, look at the sky, and say the mountain could wait until morning.
Yet Thomas was no sluggard. When his boots were in the mud, he pulled as hard as any man. He planted his wheat, he hauled his share of timber, and his iron hook was always ready when a neighbor’s ox stuck in the swamp. But he lived under the quiet delusion that time was a well without a bottom.
Until the first winter rain hit the upper ridge.
It began one afternoon. Aether was looking for Kaelen near the timber yard, but found the shed empty.
"Up on the high slope," a weaver told him. "Working the drainage ditch."
Aether took the upper goat path. Halfway up the rise, he found Kaelen crouched in a deep mud trench, his trousers soaked to the knees, driving a flat spade into the rocky clay. Thomas stood on the turf bank above him, holding a bundle of hazel stakes, looking vaguely apologetic.
"You took your time getting here," Kaelen grunted, not looking up as his spade hit stone.
Thomas scratched his bearded chin. "Had the sheep to fold down at the lower pen. Took longer than I thought."
Kaelen didn't answer. He drove the steel down again—shluck.
Aether stepped over the clay heap. "What happened here?"
"Ditch is choked with mountain slate and dead brush," Kaelen said, wiping mud off his cheek with his shoulder. "If the rain catches it like this, the overflow runs straight down into the lower barley terraces and the winter wood-heaps."
"Then let's clear it," Aether said, reaching for a spare wooden shovel.
Kaelen stopped his blade in the dirt. "I told him three months back this ditch needed clearing before the autumn storm."
Thomas shifted his hazel stakes from one arm to the other. "I was going to get to it right after the grain haul. Then the mill axle broke, and then..." He gave a brief, easy shrug. "Well, there was time enough."
"Aye," Kaelen muttered, bending back over his spade. "There's always tomorrow."
The tone in Kaelen's voice wasn't loud, but it hung in the cold air like frozen mist.
They worked until dusk, clearing the lower turn and dragging brush from the channel, but the upper bend was still packed with slate when the light failed. Thomas promised he would finish it at first light.
Morning came, and so did a lame ewe, a broken pen rail, and a dozen smaller things that seemed urgent enough. Thomas never made it back to the upper bend.
The storm hit two nights later.
It was a black, driving rain that rattled the roof-slates and turned the longhouse lanes into roaring gutters. Aether woke twice to the sound of timber creaking against the gale.
By dawn, the shouting started on the upper rise.
The choked ditch had given way under the weight of the mountain run-off. A wall of gray, gravel-laden water had burst the bank, carving a two-foot trench straight through the lower field and flooding the main timber yard. Half a winter's worth of dry cordwood was sitting in three feet of freezing silt, soaked through to the core.
When Aether reached the slope, half the village was already working in the rain. Men were hauling logs out of the muck, women were clearing the stone debris, and boys were digging a new channel with wooden spades.
Kaelen was there, caked in black mud from his thighs to his hair.
Thomas was beside him, his face pale, frantically tossing wet logs onto the dry bank. "I'm sorry," Thomas kept saying to no one in particular. "I was going to clear the upper turn yesterday evening—"
Kaelen dropped his spade. The wooden handle hit the mud with a dull thwack.
"You said that three months ago," Kaelen said.
The rain had stopped, leaving only the sound of water rushing down the stone channel. The men on the bank went quiet.
Thomas stood with a wet log in his arms, his mouth opening, then closing.
Aether had never heard Kaelen speak like that. Kaelen rarely lost his temper; he was as steady and dull as a slate paving stone. But these words were heavier than a shout.
"I know," Thomas said softly, looking down at his boots.
"No, you don't," Kaelen said, his voice flat as river ice. "If you knew, the ditch would have been dug before the leaves turned."
Kaelen picked up his spade, turned his back, and shoved the blade back into the clay. He didn't look at Thomas again for the rest of the day.
***
By dusk, the water had been turned back into the main stream, and the flooded wood was stacked to dry in the wind. The villagers drifted back to their hearths, leaving Kaelen alone on the slope, scraping the thick, dried clay off his shovel with a flat stone.
Aether walked up the rise and stood beside him. The valley below was turning dark, the first hearth-fires showing bright against the gray turf roofs.
"You were hard on him today," Aether said quietly.
Kaelen didn't stop scraping. Scratch. Scratch. "Aye."
"Was it worth making an enemy over a choked ditch?"
Kaelen set the stone down and looked out over the valley, his gray eyes cold in the twilight. "I'm not angry at him."
Aether blinked. "Then what was that?"
Kaelen wiped his hands on his trousers, his shoulders sloping slightly as he looked at the freshly dug trench.
"I just thought..." Kaelen whispered, his voice almost lost in the evening wind, "...I thought he was a man you could count on when he gave his word."
Aether stayed quiet. Below them, Thomas was still hauling wet cordwood from the mud, one log at a time.
Kaelen picked up his tool cart and started down the track toward the longhouses, his heavy boots making slow, rhythmic crunching sounds in the gravel.
Aether looked back at the dark channel on the hillside.