She touched a hand to her navel. The tendrils within pulsed once, twice—a heartbeat that was not hers, but the world’s.
In the village of Veranne, tucked in a valley that the winter sun only kissed for an hour each day, the thaw was not marked by a calendar. It was marked by Lisette.
Now, as February groaned its last, Lisette sat on a mossy stone by the frozen stream. Her hands rested on the taut globe of her belly. Inside, she could feel the gerbre shifting: not kicking, but rooting . Tiny tendrils of warmth spread from her navel, melting snow in a soft circle around her feet. Her breath fogged the air, but her skin was summer-warm. lisette, priestess of spring pregnancy
That night, alone in the stone sanctuary that smelled of damp earth and last year’s hay, Lisette felt the gerbre weaken. This was the sorrow and the honor of her calling. Each spring, she grew heavy with life; each equinox, she labored not to birth a child, but to return the season to the ground. She would lie in the furrow of the first plowed field, and as the rain soaked her dress, the green warmth inside her would unravel into the roots of every sleeping thing.
“Soon,” she whispered to the spring inside her. “You will wake them all.” She touched a hand to her navel
She was not the oldest woman in the village, nor the most learned. But when the first crocus dared to pierce the frost-crusted earth, the people looked to her swelling belly. For Lisette was the Priestess of the Spring Pregnancy—a holy condition renewed each year, as mysterious and reliable as the returning light.
Outside, the first crack appeared in the river’s ice. And somewhere deep beneath the frost, a seed remembered how to break. It was marked by Lisette
Lisette smiled. She lifted her woolen tunic just enough to reveal the pale skin of her stomach, where a faint green-gold light pulsed beneath the surface, like sunlight through new leaves. She took the woman’s cold hands and pressed them to her belly.