Pell was sitting on the low yard wall when she came back through the gate.
The wall ran along the side of the yard between the forge and the store, waist-high, built of old firebrick that the yard had pulled out of its first furnace and never thrown away. Pell sat on it with his legs hanging down and a folded sheet of paper in his lap. The plank of bowls was gone. He must have taken them inside. His hands were red with cold and he had not put his gloves on.
Mara sat down beside him on the wall. The brick was cold through her trousers.
For a while neither of them spoke. Across the yard, the forge door stood open, and the light from the fire came out of it orange onto the frozen ground. Inside, the crew moved back and forth past the opening. The bellows breathed.
“She cut my bread into ships,” Pell said.
Mara looked at him.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at the forge door, at the light, and his voice was the voice he used for lists. Flat. Careful. One thing after another.
“In the mornings,” he said. “Before school. She’d cut the bread into a ship shape. A hull and a mast. Sometimes a sail, if there was enough crust.” He held up one finger. “One. The bread.”
