Pell woke with her hands in the middle of a loaf.
She knew it before she opened her eyes, because the feel of the dough was still in her fingers: that cool, slack, yielding give under the heel of the palm, the little tug as the gluten took hold and the whole mass began to answer the push. She had been kneading. She had been kneading in her sleep, the way she always did on the bad nights, when the Kitchen was cold and the leash was loose and there was no one to tell her to stop. Her fingers were still pressing the air into a shape. She could feel the shape. It was a round loaf, tight and even, with a good skin on it, and the skin was cold.
She opened her eyes. The road came into them, grey and wet and very cold, and the sky over it was thick with pale drifting flakes that settled on her lashes and melted.
She looked at her hands.
They were blue. She had known they would be. The knuckles were the colour of a plum gone off in the cellar, and the tips of her fingers had gone waxy and pale, and when she tried to close them round nothing, they did not quite obey her. She stared at them a while, and then she spoke to them, quite sharply, the way she spoke to the oven when it would not draw.
