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.

The storm broke a week after Leo's fever, and the twins turned two weeks old in the rented red house with the walls sweating from one overworked hearth. Leo woke every two hours to feed. Pisces woke with him, angry each time to find his brother already at the breast. Nova counted feedings on her fingers and slept between them on the floor by the basket. Brock stood at the window one morning and watched steam rise off the roof of the bigger house down the road. The chimneys were both drawing. The frame he had cut and joined by hand through the fall was dry inside. He turned from the window and told Nova the house was ready. Nova did not argue. She said, "Today. Before dark." She was already folding the blanket off the basket. They moved in one trip. Brock carried the wood box and the milk crate of clean cloths on the sled. Nova carried both boys inside her coat, one against each side of her chest, and walked the road herself. The wind cut hard at the turn, and she bent her head and kept moving. At the door of the log cabin she stopped and looked up. Seven bedrooms. Two chimneys. A porch wide enough to stack a winter's wood. She stepped inside. The main room smelled of new pine and old smoke from the first fire she had lit weeks ago. She set the twins down on the rug in front of the near hearth and unzipped her coat. Leo blinked at the high ceiling. Pisces started to cry, then stopped, listening to the sound of the room. Brock came in behind her with the sled and shut the door against the wind. He lit the second hearth. Both fires caught. The house held its heat. Nova sat on the floor between her sons and put a hand on each small chest. Leo's ribs moved even and warm under her palm. Pisces turned his head toward the fire. She looked at Brock across the room. "We stay here now," she said. He nodded once. Outside, the road they had come up was already filling with new snow, and the rented red house at the far end of it stood dark and empty for the first time in months.