Chapter 49

I was under the ice for five days.

That’s what it felt like, afterward, when I tried to remember it. Not sleep. Not dreams. A long dark place under a frozen pond, where sounds came down to me through the ice, bent and slow and very far away, and I couldn’t swim up to them.

There was fire, at first. A great deal of fire. Then cold, and people’s hands, and a smell of carbolic and boiled linen, and someone saying a word over and over in a clipped, tired voice. Rumac. Rumac. Three wounds, three doses—I’ve never seen a wolf live through two. Then Nana Odette, very close, saying, She lived through Ashgrove, didn’t she? She’ll live through you.

And a hand.

It was there every time I came near the surface. A big warm hand around mine, holding on, not too tight, the thumb moving slowly over my knuckles in the same small circle, over and over. I knew that hand. I would have known it under any ice in the world. Cedar, and cold, and ink on the fingers.