Chapter 65

The frost found a crack in the wall behind my bench in the second week of January, and by the third week it had pushed out a chip of stone the size of my little finger, with one sharp edge. I found it in the straw. I held it in my palm for a long time, as if somebody had handed me a pen.

Until then I had kept my days in my head. Now I keep them on the wall.

Not in fives, the way the pups in Ashgrove scored their games on the barn door. In columns, the way Gareth ruled his tithe books: one column a month, a short stroke for each day, a longer one for each day Thale came. I worked them low on the wall behind the bench, where the planks hid them from the bars, and went back and forth in October and November and December from my head.

I counted by the light, when there was light, and by the shifts when there wasn’t: the water at six, the change at six, the old wolf with the knee every third morning, telling it to come on, then. I was never once wrong. I checked myself