The ache in Berr’s chest was not the pain of living marrow.
It was older than that. It was the dull, gritty friction of thirty winters spent standing in damp limestone corners, listening to the drip of drainage water and feeling the grey claim-threads pull tight whenever the wind blew from the north. The threads were dry as teased rope, anchored into the notches of his vertebrae and woven through his ribs like twine binding a broken basket.
For thirty years, those threads had held him upright because his watch had never been properly dismissed.
A dead man does not breathe, but he can carry an unfinished tally. In Berr’s mind, the ledger had remained open since the night the sky over Mere turned the color of bruised plums and the sulfur smoke rolled down from the timber ramparts. In that tally sat three hundred and sixty border guards who had stood by their bunks, polishing their belt buckles and waiting for an officer to sign an evacuation order that never came. And on the facing page sat forty-two civilians—bakers, carters, washerwomen, and girls with wool scarves—who had beaten their fists against the locked iron postern until their knuckles split and the heat took their voices.
