Orla Thistwick coughed into her sleeve and knew the sound for what it was. She had predicted her own bad winter three months back, right there in her almanac, and she was never wrong. The book sat heavy in her lap, its pages thick with forty years of weather. Rain, frost, blight, harvest—all written in her cramped hand. She could read the sky like other people read a face. But a book cannot read itself. When she died, every mark would go silent, and Thornwick would guess at storms it once could name. She had no one to give it to. She carried the almanac out to the ridge that afternoon, hoping the open air might shake a name loose. It did not. The village had bright children, but none who watched the clouds and asked why. She sat on a cold stone and let the truth settle. Her knowledge would die with her body. A shepherd girl worked the slope below. Orla knew her as the orphaned one who slept in the shelter by the road and answered to no family. The girl suddenly whistled her flock uphill, fast, away from the low field. Orla frowned. The sky looked clear. "Why move them?" Orla called. The girl pointed at a pale green lacewing drifting past on the wind. Its net-veined wings caught the light. "They fly low before rain," the girl said. "And the sheep won't graze the far grass today. They know something's coming." Orla's breath caught. She looked at the lacewing, then at the flock crowding the high ground, then at the western horizon. A thin gray smudge sat there, no bigger than a thumbnail. Most eyes would miss it. This girl had read it before Orla did. "Rain by dusk," the girl added, plain as bread. She was not guessing. She had watched, and she had reasoned. Orla climbed down the slope, her heart loud. She had spent years looking for a clever child. She had wanted someone who could memorize her pages. She had never thought to look for someone who already read the world without them. "That lacewing," Orla said. "What else does it tell you?" The girl studied her, wary of adults who asked too much. "That the low field floods first." Orla opened the almanac and turned it toward her. She pointed to a line written thirty years ago: low field floods first, rain from the west. The girl's eyes moved across the words she could not read, then up to Orla's face. "You can't read it," Orla said. "I can teach you that. You already know the harder part." The girl said nothing for a long moment. Then she whistled her flock still and stepped closer. "Elara," she said, giving her name at last. "If you teach me, I stay a shepherd too." "Agreed," Orla said. That evening the rain came, right on the girl's word. Orla had found her apprentice. Now she had to teach a girl who could not read a single line she had written.