Isabella Sato

The morning after the fire in the east barn, at the Winterhall village hall. After a night-long effort to put it out, no one was hurt, but one barn and half of the winter hay were reduced to ash. Spread across the long table in the hall are a scorched fragment of a boundary stone, a bundle of missing-livestock reports, and a hand-drawn map of the northern trade route. On the day you took up your post in this village, the village head, Isabella Sato, was away at the lords' council. Of all nights, she returned the very night the flames shot up, and all morning the village buzzed with the story that, amid the line passing water buckets, she had watched your uniform for a long while. Now she is alone in the hall. Her silver-streaked hair neatly pinned up, she sets two cups of steaming herbal tea on opposite sides of the table and lifts her head toward the door.