[Issue 2025.73]

‘Born of the Mountain's Chill’, Louise Hughes

Art © 2025 L.E. Badillo

---

I was born on a day of deepest cold, on a mountain wrapped in ice, and lived there without worry for the first fifteen years of my life. Then came the newcomers and their village, fires, and judgement.

They came up onto the high pasture in the thaw season and stood among our silk tents. They sat and shivered and said, “are you not cold?” a lot. They walked around making suggestions to my mother, who was our trader and went to market. She knew the most about talking to other people and she was used to shaking hands with them, which made the rest of us flush.

Wriina, the youngest daughter of our chief silk weaver, wondered if they must be very anxious in some way, constantly in need of another’s touch like preening birds.

A week later, they brought up wood in a cart, and little iron baskets to burn it in. They took no money for these things even though my mother offered it. They brought thick itchy blankets and set about making fires and boiling water and instructed my mother in doing both.

She said we should humour them. There was no harm in that. And put out the fires with handfuls of snow when they trundled off again, down to the new road they had built along the valley floor.

Even I, who had listened all my life to my mother’s trading tales of far-off places, thought the new villagers were very odd. I asked her why we allowed them to build in the valley at the foot of our mountain, and my mother told me, with that grim smile she has, that the mountain wasn’t ours and neither was the valley.

We belonged to the cold wind, not it to us.

Six months later, I went to work in the village down in the valley. They had put a toll on the road, for anyone wishing to travel or trade, and were being what my mother called “awkward”. They met with her and her sisters at the point of three rivers.

I was my mother’s eldest daughter. She told me to be strong, like her, to serve my people. She told me I would get used to their strange ways if I tried. Like she had. I would learn how to be around them. It would be a valuable lesson for when she was no longer here.

Wriina didn’t want to go. She came to our tent the night before and asked me to speak to my mother. She wanted to be a silk weaver and had already started her apprenticeship.

“Sometimes, we have to do what the wind asks us, even if it doesn’t blow in a way we would like,” I told her. Everyone knew my mother was wise. She knew more about the valleys than we did. Of course she did. We had never been there.

Wriina snapped her fingers under my nose. “It isn’t the wind that’s asking this of us. It’s your mother. I’m not going to go. I’m going up to the high mountain to look for osprey feathers to trade.”

I caught her wrist and twisted it down. “You won’t. I’ll tell them where you’ve gone. This is too important.”

I’d seen my mother’s worry in the way she crushed the herb mix that we added to melt water before drinking. I’d seen it in her silence and her climbs up to the pinnacle to greet the dawn.

This was important. If we and the village were going to work together then we shouldn’t be strangers to each other.

The next morning, Wriina didn’t wait to walk with me. I went barefoot through the hoar frost, cold air whispering to the tip of my nose. I carried my boots laced together around my neck and gloves in the pocket of my coat, which I slung over one arm.

They were gifts from the village trade guild, so I treated them with care. As my mother had carefully folded their offered blankets, wrapped them in silk and stored them in a chest inside our tent.

At the stream, where the path joined the lane, there was a ford with a new bridge beside it, wide enough for wagons. I took the ford. The water danced a jig of pretty blades over my feet.

I stopped to put my boots on at the point where the lane turned into the village. Be strong, my mother had said, so although I didn’t like the way they squeezed my feet, I laced them up as I’d been taught.

I slipped into my coat and gloves as the corner turned into the straight street. Packed earth beat the soles of my boots. People turned their heads to watch me pass and I held mine up. I’d been gifted a hat as well, but there were limits to my tolerance. How could I hear the wind if I didn’t feel it through my hair?

The drapery store, when I reached it, baked like a stone in summer and Mrs Kellison waited. We had met a week earlier, in the talking circle, and then as now she was bundled in layers of scratchy wool. Stiff collar up to her chin, cuffs tight about her wrists.

“Two minutes late,” she said to the pocket watch in her hand. “You’ll have to work on that.”

“Yes, miss.”

“You remembered to bring your dinner?”

I had some silk-wrapped cheese and fennel leaves, and strips of salted fish. She tutted and shared a glance with the lass sweeping the front step.

“They don’t even have ovens,” Mrs Kellison said. “But the new houses will be fitted with them.”

I was concentrating on finding air to breathe but I looked up at that. This wasn’t anything my mother had mentioned. “New houses?”

“Oh, yes. We’re going to build you all some lovely houses. Just like ours. That’ll be nice won’t it?”

Did my mother know about this?

Wriina and I weren’t the only ones to start work that day. There were two more mountain girls, my cousins, at the post office and the brewery. “Jobs indoors for the lasses,” the man from the trade guild had said. “Where they should be.”

“This is a community,” he said. “Be part of it.”

We went inside and Mrs Kellison gave me a quick tour of the shelves and cabinets. “You’re not to touch the money,” she warned, which was a relief. The coins were touched by hundreds and covered in their grit. My mother was the only one who dealt with them, and even she kept them in a chest lined with moss and scattered with healwood shavings.

“Go and wash your hands before you handle the fabrics,” she added. “Did you bring a cardigan or shawl? You can’t go about in just that shirt. It’s… perhaps a chemise underneath would…”

The blouse was the thickest I had. Loose, breathable. It let in the air without sticking to my skin. It stopped the snowflakes clinging.

“Cardigan?”

“No, I suppose not. Here.”

She gave me a layer of lemon-coloured wool, which made my wrists and neck itch. I felt its tightness under my arms and on my hips. But I was strong, like my mother. She wore such things when she went trading. One day, that might be me, and I should be prepared.

By eleven o’clock, my hands were red as poppy flowers, up on the high pasture in summer. Where I would stand with the goat herd and my red parasol, drinking from the snow-melt stream.

At noon they let me go to eat my lunch. Mrs Kellison suggested I go through to the back, where there was a gas stove and a kettle and some books, if I could read them. The thought of a tiny room, wood-panelled walls, suffocating, made me shiver.

I went outside instead and as soon as I was out of sight of the front door, ran down to the stream, pulled off my boots and waded into the cold water. It pulled the aching warmth out of my limbs. It brightened my heart and cleared the burning fog in my mind.

I hung the cardigan on a low branch while I ate my meal sitting on a rock, letting the wind talk to my bones. I could do this. My mother was relying on me.

On my way back into the village, just before the corner, I met two boys coming the other way. I did what the trade guild man had told us and dipped my head in greeting, trying to be modest.

They moved apart to block my way.

“Down from the mountain?”

“Must be. Look at her. My mam says they barely even know how to dress themselves.”

I stopped, unsure whether I was meant to say anything. Of course, we had boys like this at home, but I knew them, and I knew what to say.

“My dad says they’re afraid of fire. Are you afraid of fire, ice girl?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t afraid of it; I just didn’t see the point of it.

“They don’t like you touching them.” He reached forward, fingers extended, and I took a step back.

His friend took a small box out of his pocket, removed a small stick, and struck it against the side of the box. Fire flared. A small flame burning on the end of the stick.

The cardigan, which I’d already put back on, rubbed against my wrists and neck. My skin writhed. Small pinpricks of pain. Nothing in themselves but altogether enough to make me grit my teeth.

Tightness. Breathless.

The boy held the flame out to my face, so close I smelt the smoke, but my mother had told me to be strong. I didn’t step back. The fire, even small as it was, ripped at my skin. I looked him in the eye. I’d been told not to, to keep my eyes down, but there was the flame. It burned.

I focussed on the cold in my toes, still wet from the river and bootless. The touch of the cool breeze. I didn’t own the wind. It owned me and it wouldn’t let me go.

The second boy struck another match. He caught my wrist in a grip so tight, skin on mine, that it momentarily blinded me. I saw white. The top of the cold mountain in a thick snowstorm. A spiking, dangerous heat beneath my hand as he brought the flame close.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Nothing. Nothing was wrong with me. His grip fell away in a wave of cold, as I tried to drag the rough, chill feel of the earth beneath my feet up to my head to clear it.

A voice cut through the haze of imagined cold and exploding fire. My name spoken by a voice I knew.

I opened my eyes to see Wriina over the boy’s shoulder. He cried out but not at her arrival, and dropped the flame-stick, jumping back. The fire was out. He rubbed his fingers, still staring at me as if it was my fault.

Didn’t he know the dangers of fire?

Wriina and I walked back to the village together but alone. We didn’t exchange a word. Her face was flushed and her sleeves rolled up. Her hair stuck to her ears and forehead.

I went back inside to the dryness and suffocation, and Mrs Kellison with her eyes on the clock.

“Don’t you have a watch?” she asked.

“No.” It came out too sharp. She pursed her lips but didn’t say anything, only looked at my bare feet. I’d forgotten to put my boots back on.

“Here,” she said after I had done so and gone back behind the counter into my prison. She set me to folding the brown paper packages for each customer’s purchases and thrust a pair of white gloves at me. “Put these on before you touch anything else.”

The prickling in my fingers intensified as I put my hands inside the cloying lace, but I was strong. Mrs Kellison would speak to the trade guild, and they would decide whether we could work together. Mountain and village in agreement.

Each time someone came in, the cold breeze sipped a little of the swelter from my face. My tongue dried to dusty earth. The dizziness started mid-afternoon. Everything bright and sharp. The dull pain behind my eyes crept up quietly enough that I didn’t notice it at first.

The air hung too still, and the wooden walls held the stillness in. The shared glances between every person around me made me want to scream.

“Please,” I asked. “Can we keep the door open, just for a minute.”

“And let the cold in. Don’t be silly.”

Like the cold was a creeping shadow to be wary of, instead of the gloriously natural way of things. These people didn’t know what they were missing, twisted up tight and hiding.

“They’ll learn,” someone said. “It’s the children I feel sorry for. They make them go out in winter with barely a thing on them.”

“I still don’t want them down here. I don’t understand why you agreed to take one on, Bea. There’s just something… not quite right about her. How do you stand it?”

These weren’t people who wanted to work with us. I tasted their hatred in the heavy air. Bitter like a spitberry, enough to make my stomach churn.

I laid my hands on the counter edge and tried to breath. Tears came. Little flecks of frost on the brown paper. I wasn’t strong, not like my mother. How did she do this?

“Stop that right now.”

But how could anyone abide this? Bound tight in air so thick I had to drag my limbs through it. How could they exist, cut off from the taste and chill of the world around them? How could they stand the touch of so many things at once?

“Control yourself.”

I tried to speak up, but my lips were rough bark, stuck together. My tongue like dry leaves. The heat bound itself around my heart and squeezed. When I asked for water, earlier, they gave me only burning tea.

Her slap came from nowhere. A hand like one of their pokers straight across my cheek, leaving a stain of fire. As it did, as if in protest, my heart shot out a blade of ice cold through my chest.

“Get out. Get out of my shop, ungrateful child.”

I tore the cardigan in my hurry to be rid of it and flung it down as I fled. Coat and gloves forgotten. Out into the marvellous cold.

It barely touched me. My bones and skin and hair were fire and furnace.

I stopped and forced myself to breath in deep. Frost crept down my throat. My vision steadied.

Snow fell on the shop roof behind me. A blanket of comfort.

The people in their hats and coats and muffs stopped to stare at me, shirt sleeves pushed back to let the flakes settle on my bare arms.

“What’s wrong with her?” someone said. Again. What’s wrong with her?

I rounded. “Nothing’s wrong with me. What’s wrong with you?”

My mountain sisters joined me as soon as they heard my voice, and we held cold hands together. The chill that had started in my heart exploded out of me, through them, through Wriina with her grim smile, and on.

Snow fell on the village. Cold rose, steady like a flood, claiming every house and shop in its blissful embrace. The fires went out. The acrid smoke smell dissipated. Their coats grew heavy with the weight of ice upon them. Their hearts slowed. Their breath froze.

I stopped in the moment before they stopped.

“This is how it feels,” I shouted to their clear and still ears. “There is nothing wrong with us. Even if we pretend, it’s just a lie. We will never be like you.”

Then I turned, kicked the boots off and walked away.

We went together, out of the village, across the frozen ford and back up to the snowline. My strength sank heavy over the village below as my mother met us. She came out from between the silk tents as the snow drifted against the walls. Children stopped their play and adults stopped their weaving. The boys stopped their game of stones.

“You were wrong,” I told her. I was stronger than her. Look at what I’d done. “They hate us.”

“What did you do?”

What had I done? Refused them. Turned their hatred on them. Crushed their loathsome pity.

Wriina kept tight hold of my hand and we stood tall.

“I showed them how strong we are. We shouldn’t change ourselves for them.”

We were as strong as the mountain, as strong as the wind. When I went trading, I would not hide that I was a mountain lass.

They would just have to accept that.

© 2025 Louise Hughes

[Issue 2025.73]

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.