The vellum leaf felt colder than the river gravel.
Elin Hale pressed the tip of her forefinger against the dry, black stroke of ink beside young Lark Harl’s daisy. She pressed so hard that her nail blanched white, as if physical pressure might force the calfskin to give up an echo—a giggle, the slap of small bare feet on wet flagstones, the high-pitched hum of a child singing an old shearing tune while carrying hot rolls across the square.
There was nothing.
Inside her head, where the memory of thirty winters in Harth was stored like dried herbs in an attic jar, there was only a vast, drafty void. She closed her eyes, searching the dark behind her lids. She could picture the south curve of the churchyard wall. She could see the stone mounting block. But when she tried to put a house on the corner, when she tried to remember the woman who had knelt beside her in the parish choir for twelve winters, her thoughts slipped away like water through a wicker basket.
“I can’t see them, Jon,” Elin whispered, her voice shaking with a terror that cut deeper than any wound she had dressed on the border war front. “I look at this name... and my mind gives me nothing. Just empty air. Just a hole.”
