She found Sef at the well. “You don’t fix things,” she said, her eyes pale and clear as winter sky. “You listen to what they need to become whole again. That’s rarer than magic, Sef Sermak. That’s a story the valley will tell long after you’ve carved your last bird.”
Sef shrugged. He didn’t feel like a tree. He felt like a man who just wanted to finish a lindenwood bird for his niece’s birthday. sef sermak
It always did.
“What was closed, be closed again. What was lost, forget its way.” She found Sef at the well
Sef Sermak had never planned on becoming the village of Tarrow’s unofficial fixer. He was a woodcarver by trade, more comfortable with the scent of cedar shavings and the quiet rasp of a spoke shave than with people and their tangled troubles. But trouble, as the old saying in Tarrow went, had a way of finding the patient ones first. That’s rarer than magic, Sef Sermak
It started with a broken wheel. Then a locked granary door with a snapped key inside. Then a dispute about the village goat, who had eaten a wedding shawl she’d found hanging on a line. Sef solved the wheel by carving a new axle in two hours. The lock by tapping the key fragment out with a thin brass rod from his tool chest. The goat dispute? He bought the shawl’s owner a new length of embroidered cloth from the traveling merchant, and convinced the goat’s owner to pay half.
The third week of autumn, a rider came from the high pasture. Elder Mirren’s weather vane—a wrought-iron rooster that had creaked on her barn for forty years—had vanished. Without it, she claimed, the wind could not be read, and without the wind, the planting signs were scrambled. The village half-laughed. Elder Mirren was known for her omens.