Rejected Luna

"Any Fool Alive Can Write Forty"

The water in the jug had a skin of ice on it, and I broke it with the heel of my hand.

For a moment I did not understand what I was looking at. I had slept at the kitchen hearth for eleven winters, where the fire does not go out until the bread is done, so I had never once woken in a room that had frozen while I lay in it. The back room was four steps by six and had no window, and in the night the water had turned to glass two feet from my head, and I had slept through all of it, and that was the first thing that hurt.

That was the frost's first lesson, and it gave it before the bell. A room of your own is a room nobody comes to warm for you, and I had wanted one for eleven winters, and I had not known that part of it.

I put my boots on and found that my fingers did not want to close. The cracks across the knuckles had opened in the cold and gone the grey of wet ash, and I had to hold the flint the way you hold a thing you do not trust, and my hands hurt, and I did not stop.

By the time I had the fire lit, the doorway had changed colour. It had gone white.

Frost had come up the valley in the night.

It lay on everything — on the yards, on the fence rails, on the slate of the hall roof — thick and even and entirely quiet, and it had not been there at midnight, and looking at it made my chest ache, and I could not put it down to the frost.

Snow comes later and comes loud; you hear it arrive. Frost does its work without asking and is finished before you wake, and by morning the terraces had gone from green to grey, and the river below the gate had begun to take at its edges.

Bram was at the salt store before anyone else, as he was every morning of his life, with his broom in both hands and his head tipped back, saying something quietly to the doors.

"Thirty-two," he said, when he saw me. "That is how far back I count a frost this early. Ninety-four." He tapped the doorframe with the flat of the broom. "The pass shut that year before the Long Night was even down the ridge. Old Rennick — not this one, the father — he stood in this yard and told us the road was patient, and then he went home, and we ate the seed grain in February. I grieved for a winter I had never seen, which is a thing this valley does to a person."

"You remember the year."

"I remember the year." He went back to looking at the frost. "I do not recall it being this early. But I do not recall a lot of things, and one of them is whether I have said that already."

Maeve caught me on the way back with the empty bucket still in my hand.

"The elders set it at first light," she said. "Fourteen days. The pass closes fourteen days after the first frost, and the first frost was last night, and nobody argues with it. It is not a decision. It is just the shape of the year."

"Fourteen days to what?"

"To the last wagon." She pulled her shawl up over her mouth and spoke through the wool. "After that the road stops at the gap and turns itself around. Nothing comes up it and nothing goes down it — not a trader, not a runner, not a letter. Whatever is standing in this valley when the snow shuts that gap stands in it until the thaw." She looked at me, and her eyes had the thing in them that comes over them when she has worked out what I am going to do before I have. "And that includes whatever is standing in the salt store."

"Who decides fourteen?"

"The mountain." She let the shawl drop. "Ask it for the reason, if you like. It gives the same answer every year."

"Maeve. If a wolf wanted a number to come out smaller before the road comes back — where would he start?"

She did not have to think about it. "At the back," she said. "Nobody reads the back of a book. The back is where a pack keeps the names it is finished with."

I stood there with the bucket and did the sum I did not want to do. Fourteen days to turn a hole the size of a room into a thing a road could not argue with. Fourteen days for the one wolf who had filled that hole to fill it in, now that the frost had given every hand in the valley a reason to be writing in the book, and the neatness of it made me angry at a man I could not name.

"I need something that stands up without me in the room," I said.

"Then find it before the man who made the hole does." She looked at the white valley, and then at me. "What are you going to do?"

"First I am going to fill the bucket," I said, and went, because that is what you have in this valley when you have nothing else — the part of the day that is already written down for you.

The hall was cold in a way it had never been cold in summer, and the store book was where it had always been, and I had a key now, and the key made no difference to how my hands felt taking it down, and my hands were sore on the cover.

I opened it at the back, where Nessa had told me to begin, and drew a clean line under the last entry of the old year, and put the date at the top of the new page in the hand I had been taught — small, and plain, and not fast.

Frost, I wrote. And under it the losses, one to a line, the way you write a debt you mean to pay. Two pens of lambs on the east terrace, too new to stand the frost. One barrel of fish, split by the ice in the night. Eleven hurdles down at the river, to be mended before the ground went hard.

The numbers came easily. They are the one thing in this valley that have never once asked me who my mother was, and I was ashamed of how much I loved them for it.

Bram came in for the oil measure and found me at the table and did not ask what I was doing there, because Bram has never in his life asked anybody anything, which is the reason a pack keeps a man like him in the store room and not on the steps.

"You have the key now," he said.

"I do."

"That is a great deal of counting." He set the oil on the shelf and looked at the page upside down. "I counted three in the north eaves on Sunday. Three. Then I counted them again on Tuesday, because I could not recall whether I had said it out loud, and there were still three."

"Three," I said, and wrote it, because he would stand there until I did.

He did not leave. He stood by the shelf and watched the pen.

"You write small," he said, "and so does Nessa, and so does every person in this valley who has something to hide from the ones who read."

"Bram. The crates. How does the store tell one from another?"

"Size," he said.

"By the mark," I said. "The cut in the end of the board."

He looked at me the way he looked at a column he could not read, which is to say, for a long time.

"Cooper's mark," he said at last. "Every crate that comes up the coast road has one. The coast men cut their own sign into the face of the end board, and the store counts by the sign and not by the column, because any fool alive can write forty in a column, and no fool alive can cut his own hand. I feared the hand that had, and wanted to see it." He said it slowly, out loud, because that was how Bram learned a thing. "That is how we know what came up and what never did."