In the village of Strunga Veche, high in the throat of the last Carpathian pass, you can borrow from the mountain. A mild day out of season. Safe footing on the ice road. A birth that goes right. A fever that breaks a night early. The mountain lends on demand, when God and the government will not, and everything borrowed is written in the book, and everything written comes due.

Ilinca Movarescu keeps the book.

For thirty years she has been the strângatoare, the collector, the one neighbor the lucky cross the lane to avoid and the unlucky wait for at their gates. She reads the debts where they sit on the body and she takes them back: an ache into a knee, an hour of warmth from a stove, sure feet returned to a woman in her eighth month. She has told herself the whole thirty years that being unliked is cleaner than being loved. She has a marriage of her own to prove it.

Then a dead man walks down out of the pass.

Domnul Vadureanu surveyed that road for the King eighty-five years ago, and the winter took him at the high stones, and never gave him back. Now he has come down to argue a case. He carries every fact he ever owed, exact and undimmed, and he has read the mountain's accounts more closely than any collector alive, and he has found the discrepancy of 1926.

He says the village has been paying in a coin the mountain cannot spend. Courage. Love. The willingness to walk a killing season carefully for a life not yet born.

He says the ledger is wrong.

And the arrears of a thousand winters are about to come due, on Ilinca's own bench.

The mountain keeps accounts. This winter, it came to collect.