Leo and pisces green's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

The storm hit the red house at dusk, and Leo started to burn. He was four days old and weighed less than a bag of flour. His brother Pisces slept in the same basket beside the hearth, breathing fine. Leo was not. His skin went gray between feedings, and his cry thinned into a sound like paper tearing. Nova held him against her chest and counted the seconds between breaths. Someday these twins were meant to grow into the frozen realm together and rule it as brothers. Tonight one of them was trying to die before the week was out. Brock fed the fire. The wind pushed snow through the gap under the door and hissed on the hot stones. If the hearth failed during a feeding, both boys would go cold in minutes. He had split the last dry wood that afternoon. There was enough for the night if he did not sleep. Nova pressed her hand to Leo's forehead and pulled it back. "He's hotter. Brock. He's hotter than an hour ago." Her voice stayed level, which was worse than crying. Leo's small mouth would not latch. Milk ran down his chin and pooled in the crease of his neck. Nova wiped it with her thumb and looked at Brock across the basket. She did not have to say the rest. Brock pulled on his coat. He remembered an old woman down the road who sold tinctures out of her back room, tundra work, roots and bark and things people did not ask about. He had never spoken to her. He went out into the storm anyway. The wind knocked him sideways twice before he reached her porch. She opened the door before he knocked, looked at his face, and said, "Twin. The small one." She poured a dark liquid into a glass bottle, corked it, and pressed it into his glove. "Three drops on the tongue. Not four." She shut the door. He ran back with the bottle inside his shirt so it would not freeze. Nova had Leo on the hearthstones, stripped to the skin, trying to keep him awake. Brock counted three drops onto the baby's tongue. Nothing happened for a long minute. Then Leo swallowed. Then he cried, a real cry, thick and angry. Nova put him to the breast and this time he took it. Pisces woke and joined in from the basket, furious to be second. Brock sat on the floor with his back against the wood box and watched the fire hold. Outside, the storm kept on. The rented house was too small for four people and two hearths were what they needed, not one. He thought of the bigger house they had bought and could not yet move into, the one with a chimney at each end. Come spring, if they lived to spring, he would carry his sons through that door himself.