Down in the village, Idren was arguing about fish. He had the good end of the argument and no interest at all in winning it, which is a luxury, and he was enjoying the luxury when the bell on the ridge rang once and stopped.
One ring is nothing. One ring is wind, or a bird, or a rope gone slack in a thaw. Every man in the room knew that. Every man in the room put down what he was holding.
The gate had been shut so long that the village stopped calling it a gate. They called it the wall with a shape in it, and children were told the shape was where a door had died.
Sana went up the ridge before light, the way she had gone every winter morning since the year her mother’s hands failed. The path was frozen in the ruts the salt carts left, and each rut held a thin lens of ice that broke like a held breath.
She was not going up to open it. She wanted to be clear about that afterward, when the questions came, and they would come — the Warden would send someone with a ledger and a mild voice, and she would have to say what she had intended.
The shape in the wall stood two spans taller than a man and was the colour of wet slate. Frost gathered on it in patterns that were not the patterns frost makes.
Sana put her palm flat against the stone, because that is what one does, because her grandfather had done it and his mother before him, and because the cold of it was famous and she wanted, once, to feel something famous.
It was warm.