Understaffed & Overbooked

The road shuts in thirteen days. After that, the town has whatever it has.

The Vessin freezes early at Cardwell Bottom, and when it does the weir road drifts shut until the thaw. Thirteen days, by the reeve's reckoning. Then nothing comes in and nothing goes out.

Dean Kestrel has a full shelf and a full ice-house and, for the first time since he opened the door, nothing on his list. It lasts two days. Then a mill saw with a burr in it puts four hands through his room in one morning, the shelf goes down sixteen slots between stock-takes, and the Charter - Tier 3, clerical, always a beat late - counts what is left.

None of that is the hard part. The hard part is a grey tracery on the backs of an old herbwife's hands that the Charter has no box for; a mill hand whose fingers will not lie flat, whose cause column reads no answer; and a renewal form on Registry stock, weighted under a tin cup because the yard window still does not sit true.

An auditor is riding up the north road, and will be on the wrong side of the drifts when it closes. An apprentice is ruling a page down the middle: what the drying loft can put back, and what it cannot. An old cat the size of a dog sleeps in front of a stove that finally draws.

Nobody goes hungry. Nobody is cold. The loudest thing that happens all winter is a signature.

Book 2 of The Frontier Clinic, a complete cozy healer LitRPG trilogy: low stakes, high competence, and a system that only ever fills in forms.