Turn 2 of 6

Set the chair down where you stand and wait for it to come to you

You set the chair down on the ice where you stand, twenty paces from shore. The legs make a sound like a knock against a frozen door — flat, final, carrying farther than it should. You do not sit. You stand beside the chair with the ledger under one arm and the lantern hanging from the other hand, and you wait. Behind you the village disappears into blue shadow. Before you, the figure at the far end of the lake does not move. The silence is not empty; it is the silence of something listening, and you have the distinct impression that it has noticed your choice and is considering it the way a card player considers a bid.

A full minute passes. Then another. The cold finds the gap between your collar and your neck and settles there like a hand. Your breath comes in slow white clouds that the air takes apart immediately, without ceremony. The figure has not stood, has not shifted, has not raised a hand or turned its head, and yet the quality of its attention has changed. You can feel it the way you feel a stare from across a room — a pressure against the front of your face, light but insistent. It is aware that you have declined to walk to it. It is deciding what that means.

Then the ice groans. Not the sharp crack of fracture but a deep, tectonic sound, as though the lake itself is shifting on its bed. The figure's chair moves. Not the figure — the chair, sliding forward across the ice without any visible motion of the body seated in it, as though the lake is conveying it. It comes at the pace of a slow walk, smooth and steady, and the ice beneath it makes no further sound. The lantern flame leans toward it as it approaches, bending in its direction like a flower toward sun, though the air is still.

It stops ten paces from you. Close enough to see, if the dusk allowed it. The figure resolves slightly at this distance — a shape that suggests shoulders, a head, the proportions of a person but not the substance of one. It is the colour of the sky behind it, which is to say it is the colour of nothing in particular, and where its face should be there is only a smoothness that your eyes refuse to focus on. It does not speak. It sits in its chair across from yours the way one sits across a table, and the space between you is the negotiation.

The lantern flame steadies. The cold is in your fingers now, and the ledger's weight is a comfort — a hundred and forty years of precedent in your hands. You have set the terms of the meeting without saying a word: not at its end of the lake, not at yours, but here, in the middle, where the ice is thinnest and the light is almost gone. The Winter waits. It has brought its own chair, and it has come when called, and that tells you something you did not know before. It is willing to move.