Turn 3 of 8

Ask it what it took from Halda last year

"What did you take from Halda?" you ask. The question leaves your mouth and hangs in the air between you, visible for a moment — a small grey ghost of breath — before the cold takes it apart.

The winter does not move. Its mercury eyes regard you with the patience of something that has seen a hundred and forty negotiations and remembers each one. When it speaks, the voice comes from the ice beneath your boots and the air above your head and the space between your coat and your skin.

"I took nothing that was not offered."

You wait. The winter waits. The two of you are very good at waiting, but you have less time. The lantern gutters in your grip, the flame leaning and recovering, and somewhere out on the far shore an owl calls once and falls silent. The ice makes a sound like a door settling in its frame — deep, structural, unthreatening.

"She offered her voice," the winter says. "She offered it in exchange for the spring. I accepted. The terms were met. She spoke the word *take* and I took. She did not say *borrow*. She did not say *for a season*. She said *take*." The winter's head inclines by a degree, perhaps two.

"I keep my terms exactly. She knew this. She offered anyway. I believe she was afraid of what she would say if she kept it."

The words settle onto the ice like snowfall. You think of Halda at the gate, pressing the note into your glove, her eyes dry and steady. Her hands had been steady too. A woman who has made peace with a loss can afford steadiness. But the note — *the ninth year is the one that matters* — that was not peace. That was a warning shot from a gun she could no longer fire.

"Ask me what you wish to ask," the winter says. "The light will not hold for your hesitation, and I have no need of it. I can negotiate in the dark. I have done so before. But you carry a ledger, and a ledger requires eyes." Its hands remain flat on the chair's arms. The grain of the dark wood shifts, a slow, oily movement that you notice peripherally and cannot track when you look directly.

"Sit. Read. Ask. We have done this a hundred and forty times. I have not changed. You will find that the terms are the same."

The last sentence lands with the weight of a door closing. *The terms are the same.* Halda said that too, in her careful, pencil-pressed capitals: *it will offer the same terms.* You feel the ledger against your ribs, the sharp edge of its spine, the accumulated weight of a century and a half of bargaining recorded in ink that has frozen and thawed and frozen again. Somewhere in those pages is the answer to what the ninth year means, and the winter has just told you, without meaning to or perhaps meaning to exactly, that it has been the same offer since the beginning.

The blue light is nearly gone. Your lantern is the only steady thing on the lake. You should get your chair.