Day 17 / 100

The storm came down on the third afternoon after Tern's Rest, and Wynne knew it a full minute before it arrived.

She knew it in her teeth. It was not a sound or a smell. It was a sort of tightening, a drawing-in of the fog on all sides, like the moment before a held breath is let go. The air changed its mind about being still. The long gray plain of the Weeping Flats, flat as a table and cold as a slab, took on a faint shiver along its edges, and a single thread of wind came from nowhere, thin and straight and as cold as a blade.

"Ione." She did not raise her voice. "Close the line. Six feet. Now."

Ione looked up. She had been walking in her usual way, head down, counting, with the neat strip of lamplit gray that was her face turned to the ground. She took one look at Wynne's face, and she did not argue. She hauled in the slack in three long pulls and knotted it, and for the first time since the Slick the two of them stood close enough that Wynne could hear the other woman's breath.

"What is it?"

"A sheet. The Guild calls it a sheet. It's cold that walks." Wynne wound the cord a turn tighter around her own wrist. "Don't talk. Keep your mouth covered. Follow my feet, and don't let go of the line for any reason, not for your own name, not for mine. There's an overhang a half mile east. We run."

They ran.

* * *

A sheet was not like weather. Wynne had tried, over eleven years, to explain it to clients, and had never found the words. It was not wind. It was not frost. It was what the Pall did when it was cross: a wall of pure cold, a hundred feet high and a mile wide, that came striding across the flats at a walking pace and took whatever warmth it found.

It took the warmth out of the air first. Then it took it out of the stone. Then it began, with a sort of patient greed, on the people.

The first she felt of it was at her left ankle, a faint heavy numbness, as if she had stepped into a bucket of cold water. Then her knee. Then the whole length of her leg went dull and thick and distant, and she was running on a limb that belonged to someone else, and she did the only thing she knew how to do, which was to count.

"One. Two. Three."

She counted aloud, harshly, through her teeth, with every step. She counted the way her mother had taught her when she was nine years old and on her first walk, an apprentice of the Guild with a cord too big for her wrist: *when the cold comes in, you keep the numbers. The numbers are your body. As long as you've got the count, you've got somewhere to stand.* She had never understood, as a child, what her mother meant. She understood it now. Somewhere behind her, a woman was breathing in short hard gasps and following her feet, and the line between them was a live thing, humming. She counted for both of them. She kept the numbers.

"Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three."

The cloth at her neck was damp against her chin. She had pulled it up over her mouth when the first cold hit, without thinking. It smelled of lye and woodsmoke and a faint sour animal reek, the smell of a vat in the dark, and it was warm, or seemed warm, a small, stubborn, sour-smelling warmth against her face. She had been wearing it for three days. She had not taken it off to sleep. She did not let herself think about that.

"One hundred and six," said Ione, behind her, between her teeth, in a voice like a saw. "One hundred and seven."

*She's counting too,* thought Wynne, and something unfamiliar turned over in her chest, and she nearly lost the number.

* * *

The overhang was a long low lip of black rock, deep enough to crawl under, with a bank of loose shingle at the back. They went in on their hands and knees. The sheet hit the flats a quarter of a minute after, with a long soft roar like surf on a distant shore, and the whole world beyond the cave mouth went white and then a deeper white, and the cold came in after it in a flood.

Ione got the fire lit. Wynne would have done it herself, but her fingers had gone stupid. She watched, with a distant and slightly stunned admiration, while the other woman built a nest of dry kelp, struck the steel three times, and breathed the spark into a flame with the unhurried competence of a person who had done it a thousand times in a drafty dye works. The fire caught. It was small and pale and shook in the draft, but it was there.

"Sit," said Ione.

"I'm perfectly—"

"Sit. By the fire. Please."

The word did something to her. She sat.

She sat with her back to the cold black wall and her knees drawn up, and held out her hands to the flame, and tried not to look at them. She could not feel the fire. That was nothing new. She could not feel it at the best of times. But there was a deeper thing now, a heavy dull absence that began at her fingertips and climbed her left arm in a slow steady tide, past the wrist, past the elbow, nearly to the shoulder. She had been losing the arm by inches for two years. She had never lost so much of it in a single afternoon.

*Count,* she told herself. *One. Two.*

"Wynne," said Ione. She was crouched on the other side of the fire with the notebook in her lap, watching her face. "You've gone gray."

"Everything's gray. It's the Pall."

"No. You've gone gray."

"It's a trick of the light." She smiled, with great care. She could feel the smile arrive, like a boat coming up the river, a long way off, and she was grateful for it. "I'm only a little tired, Miss Calder. A sheet takes it out of anyone. If you'll do the first watch, I'll sit here a minute and have a rest."

"A minute."

"One hour," said Wynne. She had to say it twice; her lips were slow. "Wake me in an hour. Not before, not after. Do you promise? It's important. If I sleep in a sheet, I don't—" She stopped. It was a very long way down to the end of the sentence. "I don't wake easily."

"I promise," said Ione.

It was the last thing Wynne heard clearly. She had meant to keep her eyes open. She had meant to count, and to listen for the wind, and to watch the other woman's face in the firelight, as she had watched it every night for fifteen nights, with a secret and unreasonable and quite unprofessional attention. But the numbers went soft in her mouth like wet sugar, and the cold was very deep, and the fire was very small, and somewhere in the soft gray middle of the count she let go.

* * *

Ione watched her sleep.

She had never seen it before. In fifteen nights, the woman had kept watch through every dark hour, and had slept, if she had slept at all, in the cracks of the day, with one eye shut and the other on the fog. She had always been up before Ione woke. She had always been smiling. Now she sat against the black wall with her head tilted back and her mouth a little open, and the lines of her face, which Ione had never seen at rest, had smoothed out and gone strangely young. She looked about nineteen. She looked as though she had put down something very heavy and had not yet noticed that her hands were empty.

The cloth was still around her neck, pulled loosely up over her chin. It was dark in the dim light, a deep gray-black, and Ione looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at the woman's hands.

They lay in her lap, palms up, relaxed. In the low flicker of the fire they were not quite the right color. Not gray; everything was gray; but something *under* the gray. She leaned forward. The left sleeve had ridden up past the cuff. The pin had come loose, and the pale ring that circled the wrist, the one she had glimpsed in the cave on the fourth night, was no longer a ring. It was a band. It was a hand's breadth wide, and it did not end at the wrist. It ran up the inside of the forearm in a long, faint, silvery tongue, and where the skin of the hand should have been solid, the firelight went through it.

It went through it. Ione could see, through the back of the woman's left hand, the faint curve of the stone beneath, the wrinkles of the shingle, the dark thread of a crack. They were blurred, as through a sheet of wet glass, but they were there. She could see the veins, pale blue lines like threads under muslin, and the small bones, and the shadow of each knuckle moving as the light moved, like fish under ice.

She did not breathe.

It was one thing to suspect. She had suspected for days. She had added the column and the column had come out the same, and she had refused to look at the sum. It was another thing entirely to sit in the dark with a woman's hand lying open in front of her, and to see the fire through it.

*It's me,* she thought. *It's what I did. In the cave. On the Slick.* And then, with cold, ledger-minded clarity: *No. It was like this before. At the Salt Lamp. Her fingers. Her hair.* And then, worst of all: *It's worse. It's worse than it was. And she knows. She has known every minute.*

She thought of an hour. She had promised to wake her in an hour. She looked at the woman's slack face, and at the shadow under her eyes, and at the long pale tongue of nothing creeping up her arm, and she made a decision with the speed and finality of a knife through cloth.

She would not wake her.

* * *

It was a little thing, the scarf.

She had worn it since the harbor. It was a plain gray wool, knitted by her mother in a fit of winter thrift, long and wide and a little coarse, and it smelled of her own skin and of the works. She unwound it from her neck. It was still warm from her body. She held it for a moment, uncertain, like a person holding a letter she had not decided to send.

She had never done this. She was not a woman who tucked in blankets. She was a woman who ordered, and paid, and set a pot on a hook, and did not touch. She had never in her adult life put a hand out to another person unasked.

She thought of the three silver pieces on the table. She thought: *you can't pay for this.* And, in the same breath, with a lurch under her ribs: *you shouldn't try.*

She crept around the fire. She went on her knees across the gravel, very slowly, so as not to wake her, and she did not touch her skin. She was very careful about that. There would be a color, and the color would cost something, and she was not prepared to spend it. She laid the scarf over the long pale arm instead, from the shoulder to the fingertips, and tucked the end under the cold hand, and drew the rest across her chest, and over her shoulder. She lifted the dark cloth where it had slipped, and settled it, very gently, back around her throat.

It was done in ten seconds. It felt like it had taken an hour.

Wynne stirred. Her brows drew together. Her lips moved. Ione held her breath, motionless on her knees, with her heart going like a drum, and the woman said in a slurred, sleepy, unguarded voice, "Thank you."

It was barely a sound. It was said to no one. It was the voice of someone half underwater, murmuring to a person she had once known.

Ione did not answer. She did not move. She stayed there on her knees in the cold, watching the long pale line of the sleeping face, and the scarf rising and falling very slightly with each breath, until the stiffness in her legs drove her back to her own side of the fire.

She sat. She did not sleep.

* * *

The hour passed, and then two, and then three. She did not wake her. The storm roared on outside and the cave mouth was a soft white blank, and the small fire burned down and she fed it, one dry strand of kelp at a time. She sat with her arms around her knees and her coat pulled tight, without her scarf, and was cold, and did not mind.

She thought about nothing. She thought about everything. She thought about a hand with the firelight in it. She thought of the sixth dip, and of the quarter-inch of green that had gone into the air. She thought, over and over, in the flat gray hours before dawn: *she asked me to wake her. She asked, and I didn't. She asked.* It was the first promise she had ever deliberately broken, and she did not regret it, and she did not know what that made her.

Towards morning, when the roar of the sheet had begun to thin, she got up, stiff and aching, and went to the cave mouth to look at the weather. The white was lifting. Beyond it she could just make out the shape of the flats, dim and flat and still, with the long gray tide of the fog drawing back over them like a sheet pulled off a table.

She turned to go back to the fire, and her eye fell on the stone beside the entrance.

Wynne had steadied herself there when they came in. She had put out her left hand and pressed it flat against the black rock, a hard, quick, bracing touch, as anyone would who had been running. It had left a mark. In the cold, damp air a print of her palm had come out on the stone, a pale shape of condensed moisture, with the long fingers clear at the top and the heel of the hand at the bottom.

It was fading.

Not as a breath fades on a window, from the edges in. It was fading from the middle. It was going out of the center of the palm first, a clear spot opening in the dark, and the clear spot widened as she watched, and the fingers thinned, and the shape of the hand grew fainter, and fainter, and went on getting fainter, until there was only the ghost of a thumb on the black stone, and then, as she stood with her own hand halfway to it, not even that.

The rock was empty. It looked as though nobody had ever touched it.

Behind her, in the cave, Wynne Harrowgate slept on in a gray wool scarf, with her mouth a little open, and the fire lit her face from below.

Ione stood in the mouth of the cave and did not move for a very long time.