Turn 2 of 8

Walk toward it now, while there is still light to read its face

You leave your chair where it stands. The lantern stays in your hand. The ice accepts your weight with a sound like a held breath, and you walk toward the far end of the lake where the figure sits. Thirty paces become twenty, become ten. Each step is distinct. Your boots find the roughened surface and the cold comes up through your soles as if the ice is conducting something intentional into your bones. The light is going, but there is enough yet — a thin, blue-grey wash that lays everything bare.

At five paces you stop. The figure's chair is made of dark wood, or something darker, and its grain moves the wrong way when you glance aside. The figure itself resolves the longer you look: a face like carved alabaster, narrow, sexless, with eyes the colour of frozen mercury. Its features are arranged with the precision of something that has never needed to eat or sleep. It wears no coat, no furs. Its garments are the grey-white of deep winter cloud, and they do not move in the wind because there is no wind. Its hands rest flat on the chair's arms. Its stillness is not the stillness of patience. It is the stillness of a glacier.

"You are early," it says. The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, from the ice and the air and the space behind your ribs. It is not loud. It is the opposite of loud — it is the sound that exists underneath silence, the hum a frozen lake makes in January when no one is listening. The winter's lips do not move. Or they do, but the movement is so slight and so perfectly timed that you cannot be certain you saw it.

"The last one came later. She was afraid."

"I am not late," you say, and your voice sounds small and strange on the ice, a sparrow in a cathedral. The winter inclines its head — a gesture so precisely measured it might be a nod or might be an acknowledgement or might be nothing at all. Its mercury eyes do not blink. They hold you the way a mirror holds what is placed before it: without interest, without judgement, with absolute fidelity.

"Sit," it says. "We have terms to discuss. I have brought my chair. You have brought yours. It is thirty paces behind you." The statement is not a joke. It is not an invitation. It is a fact, stated with the same flat exactness a notary might use to confirm a date. The winter does not deal in implication. You understand this already, the way you understand that the ice beneath your feet is three feet thick and will not break: not because someone told you, but because the knowledge is in the cold and the cold has put it there.

You do not turn around. The ledger presses against your ribs, and Halda's note presses against your hip, and between the two of them you feel the weight of a hundred and forty years of bargaining settle onto your shoulders like a yoke. The winter waits. It has waited since November and it will wait until April and it will wait beyond that if need be, because waiting is what winter does. The last of the blue light is fading. Soon you will need the lantern to read.