Winter didn't leave on its own. It needed convincing.
I started at the edges of the farmland, running controlled fire along the ground in steady passes, thawing the frost out of the soil without scorching what was underneath. Slow work. Precise.
Frostina appeared beside me.
"I can help." She said. She was using a particular tone. The one that meant she was trying to make up for something without actually saying what.
The stolen barrel of rum. Still settling that one.
"Fine." I said. "Controlled. Simple. Don't overdo it."
She nodded and shifted into her dragon form.
Then she flapped her wings.
Not gently. Not carefully. With the full, instinctive enthusiasm of a creature that had spent a thousand years doing things at dragon scale and had not yet fully adjusted to the concept of restraint.
The snow exploded outward. So did half the topsoil. And the crops that had survived the winter under careful preservation magic went with it, sailing through the air in every direction.
I was already moving.
I jumped, pulled back my hand, and smacked her on the head.
The sound was solid. Frostina lurched back into her human form mid-shrink, landing on the ground with both hands flying up to cradle the spot where a bump was already forming.
"OW." She sat there for a moment. Then the indignation arrived. "OW. You... do you know what you just did? Do you have any idea..."
"You launched the crops."
"I was HELPING." She flailed both arms, still sitting in the snow. "I was doing exactly what you said. Controlled. Simple. And you HIT me. On the HEAD. In front of everyone." She pointed dramatically at the general direction of the residents. "This is humiliating. This is cruel. You are cruel and heartless and I am a thousand years old and you treat me like..."
I looked down at her.
"I can always take you back to the volcano." I said. "If you'd prefer a heartless experience."
Frostina stopped mid-sentence.
She sat up straight. Her expression reorganized itself completely, settling into something pleasant and cooperative.
"You're the best." She said. "It was entirely my fault. All of it."
She smiled at me.
I left her sitting there and went to collect the scattered crops, picking them up from where they had landed across the thawed ground and the remaining patches of snow.
Footsteps came up beside me. Elder Elka, moving at her own pace, hands folded, that particular smile already in place.
"Leave them, Leigh." She said.
I looked at the crops in my hand.
"We won't be replanting those this season anyway." She said. "It's time for tomatoes. Spring planting. We've been waiting to make the switch."
I set the crops down.
Behind me, I heard Frostina's voice rise again immediately.
"Then he smacked me for nothing." She announced to no one in particular. "He smacked me and I didn't even do anything wrong. In fact I helped. I removed the snow AND the old crops. That's efficient. Leigh, apologize to me."
I turned and looked at her.
She held the look for approximately two seconds.
Then she pressed her lips together, glanced sideways, and made a whistling shape with her mouth that produced no actual sound whatsoever.
The subject was closed.
Benneth had jogged over during this and crouched beside Frostina, offering her a hand up with the easy patience he showed everyone. She took it and stood, still working to recover her dignity.
"If you want," Benneth said, brushing some snow off her sleeve without making anything of it, "we could take a batch of web fabric from the enclosure to the workstation. Oliver and Olivia could probably put together a few things that would help you blend in better. Proper clothes. Your own."
Something shifted in Frostina's expression. Small, but there.
"That's..." She straightened. "Yes. Fine. That makes sense."
She turned to follow him toward the stairs.
"Frostina." I said.
She stopped.
"Don't stare at the tarantula when you go in there." I said. "Last time you did that it stopped producing for three days."
Her jaw tightened.
"I wasn't staring. I was observing." She said through her teeth.
"Don't observe it either."
She made a sound that was not quite a growl and not quite a word and walked up the stairs ahead of Benneth, who was already laughing quietly behind her. She heard it, and her ears went red, and she walked faster without acknowledging any of it.
Eryndor found its rhythm again as the last of the winter retreated.
The farmlands were cleared and turned. The tomato seedlings I had stored from the seed shop were brought out and distributed. Benneth organized the planting with the same focus he brought to everything that touched the soil, directing where each variety should go, which patches had the best drainage, which corners got the most morning light.
I watched him work for a while. Then I went and built three new storage structures.
The existing one was fine. But I had been thinking about cross contamination. Meat stored alongside dry goods was a problem I had been ignoring for convenience and it bothered me every time I thought about it. I built a dedicated cold storage for meat alone, a second one for produce and perishables that weren't meat, and expanded the dry goods storage to double its previous size.
While I was at it I built Celina an ice crusher.
She had been calling me over to crush ice every time someone wanted a Glowfruit scramble, which was frequently, because the Glowfruit scramble had become the settlement's preferred drink for anyone under the age of drinking and several adults who should have known better.
I set it beside the kitchen area without ceremony.
Celina looked at it and then at me with warm eyes.
"Leigh, thank you so..."
"It was annoying." I said. "Being called every time someone wanted crushed ice. This fixes that."
She smiled like I had said something kind.
I walked away before she could say anything else.
The mountain path was next. I had been meaning to smooth the walls on the mountain side for weeks. I worked through it that afternoon, reinforcing the stone, clearing and widening the path through the forest that led toward the main road.
At the end of it, I layered illusion magic thick enough that anyone approaching from the road would see only unbroken forest. No path. No gap. Nothing that suggested anything was back here worth finding.
Eryndor stayed hidden. That was not negotiable.
By late afternoon I was looking at the space beside the main gate.
It had been sitting empty since I built the wall. Flat ground, decent size, sheltered enough from the wind by the mountain face on one side.
I thought about it for a while.
Then I started building.
Swings first. Properly anchored, the right height for small bodies, chains that wouldn't pinch small fingers. Then the monkey bars, spaced for short arms with a platform at each end. A seesaw, weighted and balanced. Two slides, one steep and one gentle because Jenna always hesitated at the top of anything that looked too fast.
Other things came back from the other life. Things I had walked past in parks without stopping and now reconstructed from memory with magic and iron and wood, checking dimensions against what I remembered of children the same size as the ones living twenty meters away.
When it was done I stepped back and looked at it.
Then I went and told no one and let them find it.
It took approximately four minutes.
Torra discovered it first, which was inevitable, and his shout brought the others at a run. All five of them poured through the gate and stopped, staring, and then Rafa was already on the swing before anyone had finished processing what they were looking at.
Within minutes the playground was at full volume.
Favio appeared at my shoulder, watching the children.
"What was it this time?" He asked.
"The space was unused." I said. "Wasted space is inefficient."
Favio nodded slowly in the way that meant he had understood something different from what I said and had decided not to argue about it.
The residents could do that now. Read what I meant underneath what I said and accept both versions without making me account for the gap between them. When I built something and called it a practical necessity, they took the practical necessity and they also took the other thing, the part I wasn't saying, and they kept both without demanding I acknowledge either.
Leigh language, Harold had called it once, laughing.
I had not corrected him.
I watched Torra swing higher than was probably advisable and made no move to stop him.
Somehow, having them understand me without requiring me to explain myself had become the version of things I preferred.
I wasn't going to say that either.
I just let them. Like always.