Sect Year 6 · fourth month · night of day 7 · the sixty-first life: the gatehouse, his eleventh year, and then his twentieth
At eleven the count came back.
Idun was sitting on the step with the lantern turned low. The mist had come up off the still water, and beyond the boards there was nothing to see but grey. The voice began somewhere out in it, young and steady, climbing one step at a time. It was the same count he had heard on the first night of his own watch. He knew where it would stop. He held his breath to listen, and something under his ribs turned over, slowly, like a key in a lock that had rusted for years.
The woman with the cart had waited on the stone until the mist lifted that night. Then she had turned her cart round and gone back down the raised stone road the way she had come, not hurrying now, and Idun had not seen her feet again. He had thought about her many mornings since. He had never told the keeper that.
Something of his own came up with the count: his aunt’s kitchen in the thaw, the flour on her wrists, and the same three lines she sang over the dough. He found he could hum them without a single word going wrong.
