The Watchmaker's Second Winter

Clementine POV

The bell over my door didn't ring. It screamed.

I looked up from the necklace clasp I'd been fighting with for an hour, and a man filled my doorway as if he owned it. Hood up. Rain dripped off the edge in a straight, steady line, like even the weather knew to behave around him.

"You're the one who fixes things nobody else can," he said. Not a question.

"Depends what's broken." I set down my tools. My hands still smelled like oil and burnt thread. "And who's asking?

He didn't answer that. He reached into his coat and dropped something on my counter hard enough to make my whole workbench jump.

A pocket watch. Gold, or something that used to be gold, scratched down to dull metal in places, like it had been carried and dropped and carried again for a hundred years.

"Three mages already told me it can't be fixed," he said. "I'm told you don't like being told that."

I almost laughed. Almost.

"Three mages," I repeated. "From where?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters if they're better than me and just didn't want the job."

Something changed in his face. Not quite a smile. More like the shadow one leaves behind. "They weren't afraid of the difficulty."

I looked down at the watch. It sat there, closed, ordinary-looking except for the hairline cracks spidering out from the hinge like something inside had tried to get out and given up halfway.

"Then what were they afraid of?" I said.

He didn't answer that either. That was becoming a pattern.

I reached for the watch anyway. That's the part people never understand about me, the part my mother used to call stubborn and my grandmother used to call proud- same thing, different word. I have never once in my life left a broken thing on a table just because someone told me not to touch it.

The second my fingers closed around the metal, it bit.

Not cold. Not a spark. A burn, sudden and deep, as if I'd grabbed a coal straight out of a fire, and I yanked my hand back so fast I knocked my chisel to the floor. A thin red line opened across my palm where the watch had been.

"You should have said that first," I snapped, cradling my hand against my chest.

"I told you it can't be fixed." He said it flat, like I'd missed something obvious. "I didn't say it was gentle about being tried."

Blood welled up along the cut, and for one strange second I swore I saw something move behind the watch's cracked face, a flicker, gone before I could look straight at it.

"What is it?" I said. Quieter now.

"A clock that stopped the day someone died," he said. "And hasn't agreed to start again for anyone since."

That should have scared me off. I want to be honest about that, since I'm not going to be honest about much else in my life after this. It should have scared me off completely.

Instead, my hand, the one that was bleeding, reached for it again.

"Don't," he said, and for the first time there was something under the flatness in his voice. Not quite worry. Closer to warning.

"I didn't ask your opinion." I picked it up anyway, wrapping my sleeve around my palm first so the blood wouldn't get on the gears. It didn't burn this time. It sat in my hand, heavy and quiet, like it was deciding whether to trust me.

He watched me turn it over. "You're not even going to ask what happens if you fail."

"You're not even going to tell me your name," I said. "Seems like we're both keeping things back."

That got the almost-smile again. Longer this time. "Osric."

"Just Osric?"

"For now."

I should have pushed on that. I know that now. But I was already tracing the crack along the hinge with one finger, already half inside the puzzle of it, the way I go quiet and far away whenever something in front of me refuses to make sense. My mother used to snap her fingers in front of my face when I got like that. You're not in the room anymore, she'd say. She wasn't wrong.

"I'll need three days," I said. "Maybe four."

"You don't know that yet. You haven't opened it."

"I don't need to open it to know I'm the only one taking the job." I met his eyes for the first time since he'd walked in, and something about the way he looked back at me, steady, unbothered, like he'd already decided how this would go before he ever stepped through my door, made my stomach do something I didn't have a name for and didn't want one.

"Careful," he said. "Confidence is how the last mage lost two fingers."

I froze with the watch halfway to my worktable.

"That's a joke," I said.

He didn't say it was.

"That's a joke," I said again, less sure.

"Three days," he said, ignoring the question completely. "I'll come back for it in three days." He turned for the door, and something about the way he moved- careful, deliberate, like a man used to rooms built for someone taller than him- snagged in my mind and refused to let go.

"Wait," I called after him. "If it's cursed, or dangerous, or whatever this is,"

"It's not cursed." He didn't turn around. "It's mine. That's worse."

The door shut behind him without the bell making a sound again, which should have told me something too. Bells don't just decide to stay quiet.

I stood there a long moment with my bleeding hand wrapped in my sleeve and the watch sitting cold and patient on my counter, and I told myself the only sensible thing to do was set it in the back room until morning and look at it with a clear head and better light.

Instead I lit every lamp in the shop, pulled my stool up to the bench, and popped the back plate open before I'd even cleaned the cut.

That's when I saw it.

Behind the ordinary gears, packed in tight where no gears should be, sat a second mechanism. Smaller. Older-looking. Turning, very faintly, though the watch had no reason to be running at all.

And it wasn't keeping time going forward.

It was counting backward.