**CHAPTER ONE

  “The Valley of First Snow”**

  Anna Keller had lived in Helvetia for five years, long enough for the seasons to etch themselves into her bones. Here, winter was not simply a stretch of cold months—it was a presence, a personality, a force that shaped the way people breathed and worked and prayed. In late November, when the first heavy snow drifted down through the high peaks, the settlement tucked itself deeper into its own quiet. Roofs bowed beneath white weight. Smoke rose steadily from stone chimneys. The forest stood muffled in silence.

  To Anna, it was beautiful and lonely at the same time.

  Her twins, Lukas and Lena, trudged ahead of her on the narrow path leading toward the clearing where the village’s first lodge had been built. They were quick on snowshoes, their giggles bouncing through the crisp air.

  “Stay where I can see you,” Anna called, though she already knew they wouldn’t wander far. The forest was too dense, and the children of Helvetia learned early to respect its depth.

  The settlement was still young—barely a decade old. Many of the homes were log cabins erected by the first wave of Swiss immigrants who had taken a gamble on a remote valley in the mountains of what was then still a very raw West Virginia. They had come for farmland, for space, for freedom to preserve the old ways. Some came simply because the world they’d left behind was getting too loud, too crowded, too sharp.

  Anna had not arrived by choice. Her husband Markus had brought her after hearing promises of opportunity and prosperity, convinced a new world would mend the grief that had followed them from the old one. Then he died in a logging accident, leaving her with two small children and a cabin full of half-finished dreams.

  The valley had kept her anyway.

  She paused on the ridge overlooking the cluster of structures the settlers called the village center. It wasn’t much—just a few long barns, the communal workshop, and the Festhall, built of hand-hewn beams and decorated with carved patterns reminiscent of the mountains the settlers had left behind.

  Yet even from this distance, the place pulsed with life. Smoke curled from chimneys. Voices carried faintly on the wind. Someone was chopping wood with the steady rhythm of necessity. And there, in the middle of the square, stood the tall pole where the Faschnat banner would be hung in just a few weeks.

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  Lena came padding back to her, cheeks red, blond braids dusted with snow. “Mama, can we help carve masks this year? Frau Bischof said we’re old enough.”

  “Old enough to try,” Anna said, brushing snow from the girl’s shoulders. “But the knives are sharp and the wood is stubborn. You must listen closely.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Lena insisted.

  Lukas arrived behind her, already carrying a crooked limb he had dragged from the woods. “I want to make a scary one,” he declared. “With teeth.”

  Anna hid a smile. “Faschnat is meant to chase away the evils of winter, not frighten your sister.”

  “It can chase winter and scare Lena,” Lukas said matter-of-factly.

  Lena stuck her tongue out at him, and Anna sighed in a way that suggested long practice.

  They continued their walk into the slowly growing village. As they neared the Festhall, a group of men worked on patching a roof beam, pausing only long enough to greet Anna with nods. The Bischof family’s youngest son hauled a sled piled with firewood down the path. Farther ahead, Frau Brunner swept snow away from the bakery stoop, the warm scent of yeasty bread pushing out into the icy air.

  Everything the settlers built, they built with shared hands.

  Helvetia, as Anna had slowly come to understand, was more than a place. It was an experiment of memory. A test of whether traditions could survive an ocean, a wilderness, and the bitterness of loss.

  That was why Faschnat mattered so deeply.

  Long before they came to this strange, beautiful valley, the Swiss had celebrated the festival every year—marking the end of winter with masks, feasts, fire, and revelry. It was a reminder that winter always loosened its grip eventually. That darkness never held forever. That even in a place as quiet and snow-stranded as Helvetia, people could still carve joy from hardship.

  And this year, the festival would be bigger than ever.

  The twins tugged Anna toward the Festhall, where rough-cut planks had been stacked for mask carving. Men and women were already sorting the wood, choosing pieces that would become faces—friendly, fearsome, foolish. The masks would be painted, adorned with straw or bells, and worn during the parade on the night of Faschnat, when the villagers danced through the dark to chase wickedness back into the woods.

  Anna had crafted masks before, but this year the work felt heavier in her hands. Something in the air—something she could not name—made her heart beat slower, made her breath feel tight.

  A chill that didn’t come from the weather.

  “Mama?” Lena nudged her. “Are you all right?”

  Anna forced a smile. “Just thinking.”

  But she kept her eyes on the deep curve of the valley, where snow?capped pines leaned close like listening giants. The sky above them was dimming, thick clouds gathering before dusk.

  Winter had always been harsh here.

  But this year, it felt as if something else was coming with the cold.

  Something watching.

  Something waiting.

  And when the wind shifted, Anna could have sworn she heard—very faintly—the distant echo of a bell where no bell should be ringing.

  A sound that did not belong to any living hands.