**CHAPTER THREE

  “Fire Against the Dark”**

  The snow settled heavily over the next week, turning Helvetia into a quiet world of white ridges and narrow smoke trails. The village moved slower beneath winter’s weight. Animals were tended twice a day rather than three. Children’s voices carried like music through the cold. And inside every cabin, hands worked steadily at carving, sanding, and shaping the masks that would soon come alive for Faschnat.

  Anna rose before dawn most mornings, lighting the stove and shaping dough by the dim firelight. Baking had become her way of surviving the long winters—a rhythm, a purpose, a method of keeping fear at bay. Bread rose in warm bowls on her hearth while the twins slept beneath thick quilts. She kneaded, folded, baked, and listened to the wind press against the window shutters as though with an animal’s breath.

  On the fifth morning after visiting the Festhall, she found Lukas sitting cross?legged near the stove, carving knife in hand and his chosen block of maple nestled on his lap.

  “You’re up early,” she murmured, tying her hair back.

  “I want it finished in time,” he said without looking up.

  Anna watched him work—the way his brow tightened in concentration, how he steadied the wood with fingers almost too small for the task. He was careful, deliberate, and more patient than most men twice his age. Markus had been like that. Steady. Certain. Skilled with his hands.

  “What will your mask be this year?” she asked.

  Lukas paused long enough to lift the wood toward the firelight. “A wolf.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Wolves aren’t bad, Mama. Just misunderstood.”

  Before she could respond, Lena shuffled in, eyes still half?closed, a wool blanket trailing behind her like a cape. She perched beside Lukas, watching him carve with her chin resting on her knees.

  “Mine’s going to have flowers on it,” she said softly. “And bells.”

  “Good,” Anna said. “Bells keep the dark away.”

  Lena tilted her head. “Does the dark need keeping away?”

  Anna hesitated. In most years, she would have smiled and told her daughter that Faschnat was nothing more than joy and tradition and noise before Lent—a chance to laugh in winter’s face. But this winter…

  She turned back to the rising dough. “Everyone has a different answer to that question.”

  Lena didn’t ask again.

  By midmorning, the family walked to the Festhall together, carrying the loaf of bread Anna had baked for the day’s communal meal. The path was lined with pine boughs hung from posts, a custom brought by the earliest settlers to honor both the old country and the new land they had come to call home.

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  Inside, the hall buzzed with voices and the scrape of knives on wood.

  Faschnat masks—finished, half?carved, or barely started—covered every table surface. Some were cheerful, with round cheeks and painted smiles. Others were grotesque, exaggerated, horns spiraling, teeth carved sharp. The variety reflected the complicated history of the festival.

  The Swiss settlers had once told Anna that Faschnat existed for three reasons:

  To celebrate the end of winter. To scare away what lingered in the dark. To remind the living they still held power over fear.

  But in Helvetia—so far from their homeland, so close to the wilderness—Faschnat had taken on deeper meaning.

  The celebration wasn’t just joy or superstition anymore.

  It was protection.

  Above the tables hung iron cowbells, each one large enough to echo across an entire valley. They would be worn or rung during the night of the festival to drown out anything that sought to creep close to the firelight.

  As Anna set her loaf down, she heard a familiar voice behind her.

  “You’re looking thoughtful again,” Elder Dietrich said, appearing with the kind of quiet step that came from a lifetime in the mountains.

  Anna folded her hands. “Only tired.”

  “We’re all tired this winter.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Last night I heard something in the trees—far off, but not far enough.”

  “What kind of something?”

  His lined face stiffened. “A cry. But not an animal. Not anything I recognized.”

  Anna felt the chill reach straight into her chest.

  She looked toward the large mask hanging above the hall’s entrance—a fierce, horned creature painted in bold strokes of red and black, its teeth bared in a permanent snarl. The settlers called it the Watcher. It had hung in the Festhall since the second Faschnat in Helvetia, when the valley was still wild and unforgiving.

  “It’s only wind,” Anna whispered, though she didn’t believe her own words.

  Dietrich’s eyes narrowed. “Wind doesn’t groan like a man.”

  Before Anna could reply, Lena tugged at her coat. “Mama, can I show Frau Bischof my mask sketch?”

  “Of course, sweetheart.”

  As the children ran off, Dietrich rested a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Keep them close. Especially after dusk.”

  She nodded, throat tight. “Do you think there’s danger?”

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that valleys hold memories. And this one remembers things long before we arrived.”

  His grip tightened once before he let go. “Listen to the trees at night. They’ll warn you before anything else.”

  That evening, as Anna walked her twins home through the snow, the world seemed too still. No birds. No rustling branches. No distant calls of fox or deer.

  Just the wind.

  And beneath it—deep, almost imperceptible—the faint clang of metal. Like a cowbell swinging with no hand to move it.

  Lena slipped her hand into Anna’s. “Mama?”

  “Yes, love?”

  “Will the masks keep us safe?”

  Anna squeezed her daughter’s fingers, keeping her voice steady. “They always have.”

  But as they approached their cabin, Anna glanced toward the forest.

  And for the first time since she had come to Helvetia, she wondered if the traditions the settlers had carried here would be enough—if fire, masks, and bells could hold back something that didn’t fear cold, or hunger, or death.

  Something that might already be walking beneath the trees.

  Watching.

  Listening.

  Waiting for Faschnat night to begin.