The cold sat between her shoulder blades the way it sat there most mornings, quiet, present in the wall of her back. Brynhyld ran the second sequence of her drill at the eastern wall and did not ask the cold to leave. It had not left in seven years. The practice blade moved through its line. The dust under her boots had thawed since first light. The smoke off Walt's forge ran east on the morning wind in a long thin ribbon she could read at the edge of her sight without turning her head.
Pruitt was at the southern fence with Gao Lin and two of Gao Lin's mercenaries one pace behind, and that was why the drills today were running at the cleaner tempo the security man asked for when somebody from the outer settlement was inside the compound. Gunnar struck the corded posts at the yard's center with the dedicated strike a young man laid down when he knew which eyes had crossed the fence. Brynhyld kept her sequence at its own pace. She did not strike harder for the eyes. She did not strike softer. The eyes did not set her tempo.
Her gaze caught on the forge mouth at the south edge.
She had not asked it to. The eye moved across the yard between sequences at its usual rate — the security man's corner, Gunnar's strike, the smoke off the kitchen chimney — and paused at the open mouth of the forge for the half-beat that was enough to find him.
He was at the south doorway with two empty water skins over his shoulder. He had come for the cistern run between Walt's first and second pieces and was rolling the yoke off to pick the skins up properly for the carry. He was not at the yard. He had no reason to be. Whatever was in him that was in him at the secondary anvil was already inside the forge, and the rest of him was the rest of a boy who carried water in the cold.
Her throat tightened.
It traveled to the place between her shoulder blades where the cold lived, and the cold woke. What woke was not the cold of the yard. It was the cold from inside the bus.
The diesel smell came up first. The hum of the engine through the floor under her boots — they had told her to keep her boots flat on the floor because the floor was where the heat from the engine came through. The window glass cold against her cheek when her mother had set her at the window seat so her mother could shield her from the aisle. The sound of her mother's voice telling the long story of the Allfather hanging from the tree, told one piece at a time across the long hours so the story would last the route. The story had not lasted the route. The route had been longer than her mother had counted on. The story had run out and her mother had begun another, and the second story had run out at a stop somewhere in the Adirondack pass where the next bus had not come.
They had stood in the snow at the stop.
Her father had given her his crackers there. He had told her he had eaten his already on the bus while she had been sleeping, which had not been true, and she had known it had not been true, and she had taken the crackers anyway because she was old enough to take the lie when the lie was what you had been given.
A second bus had come. The second bus had taken them as far as a station outside what had been Albany. Her father had not gotten on the third bus. Her mother had stayed at the station with her father and had put Brynhyld on the bus with Gunnar and Gunnar's mother. Gunnar's mother had taken her under the coat. The coat had smelled the way the coat had smelled for the rest of the route and through the area of the dome and into the long warm room beyond it.
Her mother had not come on a later bus. Her father had not come on a later bus.
The bus had gone west across what had still been roads. The roads had been getting harder to read. The cold outside the window had been getting harder. The light through the window had been the wrong color where the Shroud had been thickest, the color that had no name in any language her mother had taught her stories in. The Allfather in her mother's story had hung from the tree for nine days. The Allfather in her mother's story had given his eye for the wisdom and had taught the wisdom to his people.
The bus had traveled for days inside the warmth of the dome before it came to the gate of Cutter's Bend. Gunnar's mother had carried her through the gate inside the coat. They had been given bread and broth and a place to sit on a bench against a warm wall in the receiving hall, and Brynhyld had eaten the bread and had not cried because the crying had been spent at the window of the bus and had not had any left for the hall.
The years afterward had taught her what to be angry at.
That was the part she carried now and had carried since she had been old enough to listen at the second-ring tables when the second-ring wives had not realized she was old enough to listen. The talk had told itself the same way at every table. The Allfather had come back. He had come back and was in a Sanctuary in New York State. He had built Hearths for followers in the old country. He had not come back to where the New Sweden line had waited. He had built Hearths in the old country and had not for the children his ships had carried away from the old country a thousand years before. The five hundred souls of New Sweden who had kept the names and the words and the small private rites — the rebuilding had reached them inside the dome and the Allfather had not. The grandmothers who had survived had lit the candles in the long halls and the candles had stayed lit, and no Allfather had stood at any of them. He had been elsewhere. He had had his own to keep.
She did not know whether the talk was true. The talk had to come from somewhere, and the talk told itself the same way at every table, and the telling did not make it true and did not make it false. What the talk had done was put a name on a question her mother had not lived to put a name on, and the name on the question was the Allfather, and she had carried the name through the years as the name of the question she would not stop asking.
She did not ask the question now. She had stopped asking it out loud at twelve. She asked it now at the place between her shoulder blades where the cold lived, and the cold did not answer, and the question stayed where it had been since the bus.
She pulled her eye off the forge doorway.
She set it on the corrugated wall at her left shoulder. She put her boots into the unrelenting present — the thawed dust, the eastern wall, the smoke ribbon east on the wind, the security man at the southern fence. The sequence under her body had reached the place where the body usually paused before the third sequence, and she let it pause. She set the practice blade against her thigh and breathed once at the low place in her chest.
The pull was not him.
She had figured that out a long time ago and told herself the figured-out version most mornings. The pull was the place he stood in. The place he stood in was a place that had stayed empty since the bus, and her body could not tell the difference between a place full and a place full of the wrong thing because her body had been waiting at the place for several winters and any thing that arrived into the place lit the same nerve.
Or so she told herself.
Pruitt had taken her in after Gunnar's mother had died of Gudrun. She let that thought come up next because that thought was the present, and the present was where she had been trying to put her boots. Pruitt had taken her in because Gunnar's mother had been the kind of woman a politician married when the politician needed a base for the architecture of a new settlement, and Brynhyld had been the small extra in the bargain. After Gunnar's mother had died of Gudrun, Pruitt had retained the small extra because the small extra had shown the kind of movement at the yard that turned an extra into a piece in a column. He had given her a portion at the table, a room, the security man's strip. The giving had not been kindness. The price was her hours and her wall and her wait. She had been paying.
The Allfather had not built the dome. The talk that had been moving through the corridor since she had been small was clear on that piece if it was clear on nothing else. Some other power had built the dome. Some other power had taken in what could be taken in and had kept the cold off the back of forty percent of the country. The names she had heard for the power had been twisted in the telling and she had not put weight on any of them. The names did not matter. She had walked through the gate at the inside of Gunnar's mother's coat. The gate had been there because somebody had built it. The somebody had not been the Allfather.
Sometimes — and she allowed herself this only at the eastern wall, only at the low breath between sequences — sometimes she thought the somebody had at least come. Whoever the somebody had been. The somebody had at least come to where the gate could be built. The Allfather had not come that far, and he had not come the years after either.
She lifted her eye off the corrugated wall.
Gao Lin was watching her.
He was at the southern fence beside Pruitt where he had been at the start of the inspection. Pruitt was speaking to him about the spring grain rotation in the voice Pruitt used at the fence when Pruitt was performing administration for an audience of one, and Gao Lin was nodding at the small dry rate his nods went at when his nods were a courtesy. His eye was not on Pruitt. His eye had been on her at the eastern strip for a stretch she could not measure, because she had been inside the bus and the Adirondack pass and the coat at the gate, and she had not been at the wall.
The eye did not feel like the pull from the forge doorway.
The pull from the doorway lived inside her. It rose from a place she had not given permission, and it had her own temperature.
The eye at the southern fence was outside her, and it had a temperature, and the temperature was the cold of an unfamiliar hand laid flat on the meat of an animal at a butcher's table when the butcher had not yet decided what he was going to do with the animal. The hand was not pressing. The hand had not committed. The not-committing was the part of the temperature she was reading.
He saw the precision of her sequence and the size of her against the size of the yard. He saw the wall around her without having to test it, the years of the security man's strip, the way her body carried the strip. And he saw, with the sort of seeing she could feel from across the yard the way a deer felt the seeing of a wolf at the far tree line, the part of her that was not the yard. He saw the bus, and what was inside Gunnar's mother's coat, and the question with the Allfather's name on it, and the wait. He did not categorize what he saw the way most eyes that had crossed her wall had categorized it. He categorized her as a column he had not yet acquired.
She held the eye for the half-beat she could afford. She did not let her sequence pause. She did not let the practice blade leave her thigh. She gave him the same face she gave the second-ring wives in the elevator corridor when they curtsied at her, and his eye held a beat longer, then released her, and went back to Pruitt's voice at the fence.
She felt the release the way a deer felt the release of a wolf's attention at the far tree line — not relief, the smaller piece of relief, the part that knew the release was not the end. The wolf had marked the deer. The wolf had filed the marking.
She turned the practice blade in her grip and began the third sequence.
The body ran the line. She did not need to be at the line for the body to run it. She put the rest of herself away the way she had been putting the rest of herself away since the bench at the receiving hall.
The cold between her shoulder blades did not retreat. The cold at the front of her chest did not retreat either. She carried them in their separate places and held the wall, and the smoke off Walt's forge ran east, and the boy with the yoke crossed the gravel from the cistern with two full skins and did not turn his head toward the yard, and Gao Lin's voice came across the fence at its small even register, and Pruitt's voice answered.
She did not let her eye go to the doorway again.
She did not need to.