Three weeks passed after the visit from the Stone family, and it was winter. The lady helper, Aisia her name was, returned from her break in Verlonte, a rural district a few ways away from Flemming village. Aisia was just 3 years older than Ashford and had brown hair and a gloomy looking pair of grey eyes. She was an overall gloomy young lady, shy and timid and full of insecurities.
She never raised her voice, even when Acre and Ash came back from the pens with mud on their feet and dirtied up the house. She would clean after them quietly, I wasn't even sure she could raise her voice. She never looked anyone straight in the eyes and always hung her head. In short, I didn't like her very much. I know that all her mannerisms pointed to abuse somewhere in her life, but I couldn't stand her still.
The sight of her made me feel depressed too and I couldn't help but pity her whenever I saw doing something. Lilicia was no better than I, she would shout at her over the silliest of mistakes and call her really hurtful names whenever something seemed not to have been done right. But even then, I knew that most of the times it was Lilicia who would have screwed up.
Despite all er short comings Aisia was actually a pretty hardworker, and she left not a single speck of dust where would have cleaned. The other two boys didn't have a problem with her and neither did father since it was he who hired her from his home village in Verlonte. We should have been related somewhere up the line of our family tree, I think our great grandparents were cousins or something.
Well anyway that's enough about her. When the month ended, the air turned from dry and hot to dry and cold. Winter was around the corner and I hear the adults around the country side saying how it would be the harshest one ever. There was a bad harvest and no food to go about, and now the cold was coming back and we still didn't have enough food.
Father anticipated this and he immediately took action. He cleared out all the horse sheep, killing every last one dead. With the help of Aisia, mother cut the meat into strips and dried it. Bellitra also helped, i suppose the knowledge was being passed down to the next generation or something. The other meat was given to us three boys to sell around the country side.
There was a marketplace in Flemming, we also sold some of it there. 29 beats in total was how many horse sheep there were in that pen. The meat was enough to last us the whole three months of winter. Tumbleton was a resilient beast, he braved through the winter all on his own. He was our fathers pride and joy after all, a pure breed that was the offspring of the first beats father got from a knight as a gift for his marriage to mother.
She was also the last one of the previous herd and she was like family to us. We managed to make it past winter and into the newyear, and that year was even worse than the last.
There was no rain, not a single cloud in the sky too on any day of the week. I was a year older that year, but others weren't as luck as I was. The village lost 3 families in the winter, from starvation and freezing. The first was an old couple, they couldn't fend for themselves. They died hungry and were frozen to death too, though I wasn't sure what killed them.
They were the oldest inhabitants of Flemming, and my brothers and I used to get all sorts of fruits from their orchard. They were nice, but life was harsher. The others were our very own neighbors, we lived a couple of yards apart but they were the closest ones to our house. They had two daughters that fancied Ash and Acre and they were farmers just like us. However, their father fell sick and they had to sell every last horse sheep in their pen to get him treated.
In the end, the father died. His sick body proved to be a fatal weakness against the cold. He left the family in dire straits, with nothing to their name. Rickhart was friends with the father and Lilicia fancied the mother. At first they donated some of our dry meat and gave them some money for lumber to keep warm, but that was less than sustainable. Our stash just wasn't enough to support two families, and were slowly running out of funds too.
I cant say I did not see it coming, but father decided one day that we were not going to help Stilloaks. That was the name of the family. One day when the two girls came to collect it was with a heavy heart that Rickhart sent them away. We didn't see them again for 9 days until the day the mother came banging at our door, hands black from frost bites and eyes swollen and her cheeks too, and begged for even smallest piece of meat we had.
She even told us that one of her daughters had passed on, it was just the two of them now. She had likely succumbed to the hunger and cold and the sicknesses that came with it. However, it was at this time that I saw who exactly the man I called father was. This was a man who had everything hanging in the balance. I remember him looking at us that day, all of us including myself, my siblings, Aisia and even mother who had a bump in her stomach.
He said something to us along the lines of 'ill be back." He grabbed his fur coat and a lantern as it was night, and went off with the woman somewhere. I imagined a lot of scenarios, but the one I would hear later was how he went from house to house all over the country side asking if anyone could spare even the smallest scraps to that woman.
He came back later in the evening, entering the house with a grim expression on his face and his lantern which had run out of oil was passing smoke. He removed his coat, his sword and placed them on the rack and wall. The sword was stained with green blood, I knew that to be the same colour blood as that of scantlings, green coloured humanoids that roamed the forests. With a grim expression on his face, he made for his room without even a word to us. Everyone had stayed awake, we couldn't sleep, not when we knew what was going on.
They were attacked by scantlings while going from house to house. Ricky fought hard to defend both he and the woman, but their numbers were too much especially in the winters. I imagine what he had to do next, there was no way he could win a battle especially in the dark of night and when it was snowing heavily no less. As for the girl, well, we couldn't afford another mouth to feed. The choice was clear, even though Lilicia was heavily opposed to it.
I imagine that the boys knew what was going on, they didn't utter a word for an entire week. They didn't dare to, father had forbidden anyone from speaking about the matter. And so that's how our neighbors all perished. As for the other family they lived at the edge of family, near where Romilla region lies so we didn't know much about them except that they were a family of 5.