The winter that would not be spoken to

Turn 1 of 6

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The lake stretches before you like a slab of uncut slate, flat and featureless, its surface neither glossy nor rough but something in between — the kind of ice that looks thick enough to trust and just thin enough to doubt. The sky above the Fenn range has gone the colour of old parchment, and the light is failing in the way it does in mountains, all at once, as if someone is slowly turning down a lamp. Behind you the village of Kolvenhalt hunches against the slope: a scatter of chimney smoke and shuttered windows, already closing itself off for the night. You can feel the cold through the soles of your boots, through the wool of your coat, through the ledger tucked under your arm. It is not a hostile cold. It is a patient one.

You set down the lantern. It throws a small yellow circle on the ice that quivers with the flame inside. The chair they gave you is wooden, plain, heavy enough to stay put in a wind. You do not sit yet. At the far end of the lake — and it is not so far as you would like — something is already seated. Its chair is identical to yours, or near enough that the difference does not matter. The figure itself is difficult to hold in the eye, not because it moves but because the dusk seems to gather around it preferentially, as though the light leaves that part of the lake first and willingly.

The ledger is heavier than it looks. You open it to the first page and find a hand you do not recognise, the ink brown with age, the script careful and small. The entries stretch back one hundred and forty years. Each winter, a name. Each winter, an offering: grain, livestock, coal, a year of someone's labour, a song composed for the occasion. Each winter, a term accepted. The pages are thick and dry and smell faintly of smoke. You turn to the most recent entry — last year — and find Halda Reik's name in a hand that trembles. The offering listed is simply: a voice. In the margin, in the same shaking hand, someone has written: accepted.

You think of Halda at the door this morning, pressing a folded note into your palm. Her fingers were rough and her eyes were steady and she did not smile. The note said: It keeps its word. That is the danger. Do not offer anything you cannot afford to lose, and do not assume it wants what you think it wants. You had read it twice and then tucked it into your coat pocket, where it sits now against your ribs like a second heartbeat. She had turned away without waiting for a response, which was its own kind of answer.

The figure at the far end of the lake has not moved. It sits in its chair the way a stone sits in a field — without effort, without intention, as though it has always been there and the lake formed around it. The lantern flame leans slightly in its direction, though there is no wind. You have the ledger, the chair, the lantern, and whatever you can carry in your own head. The light is going. You step onto the ice, and it holds.