Chapter 74: What She Liked

Selda Varne knew nine ovens in the basin, and Thor knew how to break down a gate.

By the end of the morning, the difference between those kinds of knowledge had become the most important thing in the map room.

Selda sat with both hands around her tea. Her brother stood beside her chair, his bandaged hand resting on its back. Thor had seen soldiers make that same arrangement around an injured companion, placing themselves close enough to help without making the offer aloud. Neither sibling appeared aware of doing it.

“Nine in the outer settlement,” Selda said. “Three bake for the long building. Two for the guards. The others feed the workers and the families.”

Mary began to write. Adeline watched Selda rather than her own page.

“Which one supplies the courtyard?” Thor asked.

“The big oven by the east well. Marta Quill’s.” Selda turned her cup a little. “Two carts every morning. One for the long building and one for the inner hall. Marta takes the second herself.”

“Does she have someone inside?”

Selda looked at her brother.

Thor wished she had asked the question more gently. She had meant to establish something useful about the deliveries. Instead she had watched the room acquire another absence.

“Her son,” Selda said. “A porter. He went in two winters ago.”

Her brother’s fingers tightened against the chair.

“He didn’t come out. She drives to the inner gate every morning. Stands there while they unload.”

Thor waited.

“She says he might smell the bread. If he’s near enough. Then he’ll know she’s still there.”

Mary’s pen stopped moving.

Thor looked at the table, at the neatly arranged papers that had seemed sufficient for beginning the work. She tried to imagine measuring two winters in the time required to unload a cart. Waking before dawn. Kneading. Watching dough rise. Making something that would be carried through a door she could not follow it through.

Every morning, another attempt to tell someone she had not left him.

Caldris spoke into the silence.

“Nothing written.”

Mary put down her pen.

“No letters,” he continued. “No messages hidden in oil jars. No marks intended to mean something else.”

Adeline lifted her head.

“Not shorthand either,” he said.

She closed her mouth again.

Thor had expected the objection and agreed with it. That did not make the empty page in front of Mary less unsettling. They depended upon records because records could be checked. They were about to depend upon words passed from person to person, each exchange happening beyond their sight.

“Sallow knew the jars,” Caldris said. “Others can learn.”

“Then how do we get anything there?” Adeline asked.

“The way the carters already speak. At a trough. Beside a broken wheel. On a stretch of road where two people happen to meet.”

Selda nodded slowly.

“That’s how a kitchen works anyway. Nobody stops to write every conversation down. You’d burn the bread.”

Thor looked at her.

“Then tell us what to say.”

Selda’s fingers went still around her cup.

“Me?”

“You know Marta.”

Selda looked toward Uriah, as though he might explain that a misunderstanding had occurred.

Thor continued before he could answer.

“I know how to break a gate. I don’t know how to ask a woman I’ve never met to put honey in a loaf for a child she’s never seen.”

She had offered the example without certainty. Honey had already entered their discussions as the sort of small kindness a baker might choose. But Selda’s reaction made Thor understand that even this was too much like an instruction.

They needed something Marta would recognize as belonging to her own life.

Uriah agreed with Thor.

Selda looked from one to the other. No one gave her an official title. No one asked her to stand beside the map or describe herself as part of a plan. They simply waited for an answer she was better placed to find than any of them.

“I need to think,” she said.

“Of course,” Thor answered.

Selda glanced toward the door.

“Could I use the kitchen?”

Four days later, Lexander found Thor checking the straps on an empty saddlebag.

“Are you going?” he asked.

“No.”

He waited while she pulled one strap through its buckle, inspected the leather underneath, and loosened it again.

“Then whose is that?”

“Someone who should have noticed this was splitting.”

There was a narrow crack close to the hole most often used. Lexander took the bag when she handed it to him and held it toward the light.

“Repairable.”

“Yes.”

“And an excellent reason to avoid answering the question I haven’t asked yet.”

She looked at him.

“You asked whether I was going.”

“I know you.”

For a moment she seemed inclined to object. Then she leaned against the table behind her.

“Small party,” she said. “Selda, her brother, Rhenna, Elyan. Uriah.”

Lexander considered the last name.

“He intends to listen.”

“That is what he says.”

“You believe him?”

“I believe he’s trying.”

That earned a small smile from her brother.

“Are you?”

Thor folded her arms.

The party had been deliberately kept small. She and Caldris had agreed on that before the final arrangements were discussed. No escort that would draw attention. No extra divine presence entering a place where they hoped an ordinary conversation could remain ordinary.

Agreeing to stay behind had been easy while it was still an abstract requirement. This morning it had become a procession of practical details in which everyone else seemed to have a destination.

“They’ll remain at the shelter for a time after the meeting,” she said. “In case Marta brings someone who needs to leave.”

“Not to wait for a report.”

“No.”

Lexander understood the distinction. Waiting for results could become pressure, and pressure might reach a woman who had never agreed to undertake a mission for a king.

“What did Selda decide?” he asked.

Thor told him about the dough.

Helena had given Selda space by the oven, flour, and the courtesy of leaving her alone with the work. By afternoon she had found the difference between another rumor and something Marta might hear.

“Tell her what the child likes,” Thor said.

Lexander’s expression changed.

“The honey?”

“It’s true. The Keeper told Vaust. Lirien used to have bread with honey before they moved her mother. She still asks about it.”

He looked down at the cracked strap.

“Whether they still make it?”

Thor nodded.

She had been angry when Uriah repeated that detail to her. Not the useful kind of anger that steadied her before a fight. Something smaller and more helpless, which had made her want to leave the room until she could speak without frightening anyone.

A child had been taken from her mother and deprived of enough ordinary things that she no longer knew whether her favorite food still existed.

“Selda will tell Marta,” Thor said. “Then Marta decides.”

Lexander ran his thumb beside the split in the leather, careful not to widen it.

“Good.”

Thor watched him.

“That sounded easier for you than it feels for me.”

“It wasn’t.”

He set the saddlebag down.

“Come home after they leave. The children are expecting you.”

“For what?”

“I wasn’t entrusted with the details.”

“Should I be concerned?”

“They asked whether you could lift a table.”

Thor sighed.

“I should have gone north.”

The table required lifting because Seraphina had pushed a wooden bead beneath one leg and discovered that retrieving it was more difficult than putting it there.

Thor lifted the table.

Ignatius recovered the bead.

Seraphina, who had been prepared to offer a detailed explanation of how the bead had arrived there independently of anyone’s intentions, accepted the result without further testimony.

Lexander watched from the doorway.

“You’ve saved the afternoon.”

“Was this the entire emergency?” Thor asked.

“So far.”

She lowered the table carefully. One cup rattled against its saucer. Ignatius immediately steadied it, then looked toward Io to see whether he had helped in the correct way.

“You did,” she told him before he asked.

The little boy smiled.

Thor sat down with them because they had made it clear that lifting the table was only the beginning of her visit. There was a picture to examine, a dispute about the color of a horse, and a request that she explain why grown people liked vegetables when they could choose not to eat them.

“That,” she said, “is a question for your father.”

Lexander did not thank her.

Later, while the children argued over the picture somewhere within easy hearing, Io asked about the departure.

“They’re on their way,” Thor said.

“And you’ve eaten?”

“Eventually.”

Io passed her a plate.

It held bread, cheese, and something sweet in a small dish. Thor looked at the dish longer than she intended.

Io noticed but did not take it away.

“We can’t stop eating things because someone else misses them,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

“Knowing doesn’t always help.”

Thor took a piece of bread.

Across the room, Seraphina began explaining why her horse required six legs. Ignatius accepted that extra legs might be useful but objected that she had put four of them on the same side.

Lexander went to inspect the anatomical difficulty.

Io remained beside Thor.

“Evelyn?” she asked.

“Wanted him home before the observance.”

“He will try.”

“He’d better do more than try. Adriana wants honey.”

Io’s eyebrows rose.

“For herself,” Thor added. “Evelyn apparently had to establish that point.”

Io laughed softly. Thor found herself smiling, and for the first time since the party departed, being somewhere else seemed less like a failure.

The first lamp Lexander noticed had been placed in a kitchen window at Greykeep.

He had crossed through the gate for an ordinary discussion and taken the longer route toward the rooms where Mary was working. The lamp stood behind a pane clouded at its lower edge by steam. It was broad at the base, the sort of lamp meant to survive being nudged by an elbow.

A kitchen worker moved it slightly so that its flame showed clearly from the courtyard.

The observance was still days away.

He did not stop to ask whose idea it had been. The woman was carrying a tray, and he had learned that people balancing hot food rarely welcomed a royal inquiry into their intentions.

By the time he returned that afternoon, there were lamps in three more windows along the same wall.

Thor found him looking at them.

“Nobody seems interested in waiting,” she said.

“Have they been told the names?”

“Yes.”

“And the distinction?”

Her expression became serious.

“That we aren’t opening the courtyard by lighting lamps here? Yes. As clearly as we can say it.”

Lexander nodded.

A child in a nearby window pressed both palms against the glass while an adult adjusted a wick behind him. The flame rose, smoked briefly, and settled after a careful correction.

“They want something they can do,” Thor said.

“So do we.”

He looked at the lamp again. No one standing behind that window could carry Lirien out. That did not make their attention meaningless. He was beginning to understand how much of ruling involved learning which distinctions had to be kept intact without using them to dismiss everything people could offer.

Inside, Mary had work waiting that had nothing to do with lamps.

He spent the next hour over deliveries, available workers, and an argument about which set of measurements had been taken before a doorway was widened. It was useful work. It was also the kind of work that could absorb a whole afternoon without requiring him to imagine a child behind a locked door.

When he stood to leave, he saw that Mary had placed a lamp on her own sill.

The wick was trimmed. The oil had been filled to a sensible level. There was nothing decorative about it.

He found that more moving than he expected.

Io received the food in three baskets and a parcel that appeared to have been tied by someone preparing it for a siege.

She stared at the arrangement on the table.

Lexander stood beside her with the accompanying list.

“Forty-one,” he said.

“There cannot be forty-one things in those baskets.”

He checked the list again.

“Several have smaller things inside them.”

“Of course they do.”

Lisbeth’s interest in their hope for another child had developed into a campaign with extensive provisions. Io had thought the earlier recommendations sufficiently comprehensive to leave little room for invention. Apparently she had underestimated both Lisbeth and the number of foods that could be credited with desirable effects.

Lexander reached the second page.

“There are instructions.”

“I assumed the baskets were not meant to be eaten.”

“These are more specific.”

Io held out her hand.

He gave her the pages.

She read in silence while he carefully untied the outer parcel. Inside were several smaller packets, each labeled in the same determined hand. He laid them out in a row, then began a second row when the first reached the edge of the table.

Io lowered the list.

“I am going to eat all of them.”

Lexander looked up.

“Not together, I hope.”

“Out of spite.”

“That seems a difficult ingredient to measure.”

“She has measured everything else.”

He laughed, then stopped when Io’s expression shifted.

Beneath the absurdity was something they had not entirely learned how to carry in public. They wanted another child. They had allowed themselves to say so. That did not mean Io wished every meal to become evidence submitted to a waiting audience.

Lexander set down the packet he held.

“We don’t have to turn it into a project for everyone else.”

“I know she means well.”

“Yes.”

“I would still like to eat breakfast without wondering what my breakfast is expected to accomplish.”

He moved around the table and stood beside her.

“Then tomorrow it will accomplish breakfast.”

Io leaned against his shoulder for a moment.

“Brenna has the morning again.”

“Good.”

“And I’m not going to invent a reason to inspect everything before she begins.”

“Better.”

She looked up at him.

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Only because you’re making such ambitious promises.”

She nudged him with her elbow.

When Thor arrived later, she found three opened packets, two children negotiating for samples, and Io insisting that the remainder of the list should not be read aloud within their hearing.

“What happened?” Thor asked.

“Forty-one more foods,” Lexander said.

Thor looked at Io.

“I’m eating all of them,” Io told her. “Out of spite.”

Thor’s face brightened with the unmistakable pleasure of someone who had acquired excellent news to share with an absent friend.

“Uriah will want to know.”

“Then tell him,” Io said. “Perhaps he’ll bring something less instructive back with him.”

Over the next several days, Thor learned that waiting could be crowded with useful tasks and still remain waiting.

She trained. She checked the arrangements that needed checking. She listened when Caldris spoke and resisted the temptation to turn every silence into a question about the north.

There was no message she could demand from Marta Quill. The woman was not one of their officers. She had not agreed to report at intervals. She was a baker with a son behind a gate and a cart to drive every morning.

That was the reason the attempt might work.

It was also the reason Thor could not hurry it.

One afternoon, Lexander crossed to Greykeep and found her standing beneath a window while someone above attempted to position a lamp where it would be visible without setting the curtain alight.

“Further from the cloth,” Thor called.

The lamp disappeared.

It returned on the other side of the window.

“Better.”

Lexander stopped beside her.

“An unexpected application of your talents.”

“Preventing fires? I’ve always been versatile.”

Above them, the curtain was drawn back and fastened securely.

Thor gave a satisfied nod.

They walked together for a while. In one passage they stepped around two people comparing the merits of different lamp oils. In another, a little girl carried a saucer with both hands, her concentration so complete that she did not notice either of them.

Lexander moved aside before she needed to ask.

“Do you think it will reach her?” he asked quietly.

“The intent?”

“Yes.”

Thor considered her answer.

“I think Lethan moved a lamp to his window because he believed it could. I think Vaust knows more about this than I do.”

He looked at her.

“And I think,” she added, “that if I keep asking whether it is enough, I’ll miss the things we can actually do.”

Lexander accepted that.

They reached a place where the passage widened. Thor stopped there, looking toward the rooms farther along.

“I’ve been thinking about Marta,” she said.

“Her son?”

“Her cart. Standing there every morning.”

Lexander waited.

“We can make people wait for us without realizing what it costs. One delayed answer. One door they’re told to come back to tomorrow.”

“This is more than a delayed answer.”

“I know. But I keep thinking of her standing there while someone unloads the bread. The guards knowing she comes every day. Nobody bothering to wonder why.”

Lexander looked down the passage, where the little girl had reached her destination without spilling anything from the saucer.

He thought of the petitions on his desk and made himself resist the easy resolution of promising never to keep anyone waiting again. Some requests required thought. Some required a refusal. What he could change was the habit of seeing the waiting person only when the paper reached his hand.

“I’ll remember her,” he said.

Thor nodded.

That was a promise he could keep.

Two days before the observance, Merek changed his hands.

Thor reached him after the change had already begun to reverse. She had been nearby when the disturbance drew attention, close enough to arrive while the fright was still visible in his face.

He was staring at his fingers.

The last of the altered shape withdrew. His breathing remained quick. One hand closed, opened, and closed again as though he expected it to disobey him.

“I stopped,” he said.

Caldris was watching him carefully.

“Yes.”

Merek looked up.

“I stopped it.”

“Yes.”

Thor stayed near the door. There were enough people close to him already, and she knew the difference between offering help and filling every available space with concern.

Merek looked at his hands again.

Then he laughed.

It was a startled sound, too abrupt to be mistaken for ease. He looked almost offended by it. Another laugh followed, shaking out of him while his eyes remained frightened.

Caldris let him have both things.

Thor appreciated that. Relief did not require fear to finish first.

After a while, Merek managed to ask what it meant.

Caldris’s answer was careful, but the important part was clear.

The last fragment was gone.

Thor felt her shoulders lower.

She had not realized she was holding them so rigidly until the tension eased. Merek had a long way to go before a change could feel ordinary again. This morning had not erased what had been done to him. But the choice had been his, and he had stopped.

She remembered Tavia’s letter. The lamp by the stream. Three dogs waiting at supper.

Merek was still looking at his fingers when Thor spoke.

“Shall I tell Uriah?”

He glanced toward her, then nodded.

His laugh escaped again, smaller this time.

“Tell him I stopped.”

“I will.”

Outside, Thor stood for a moment before walking away. She wanted to go north and place the news directly into Uriah’s hands. Instead she found paper.

There were messages that could safely be written, and this was one of them.

Before she finished it, she heard about the second lamp.

Lethan had asked for another for his window.

Thor did not ask for an explanation of how long the request had taken him to make. She had learned enough from the first lamp to understand that a small finished action could conceal an evening’s worth of effort.

She went to see him when it would not interrupt what he needed.

For a little while she spoke about ordinary things. The lamps in the windows. The households that had begun before the appointed day. A curtain she had helped preserve from the enthusiasm of its owner.

Lethan listened.

Thor looked at the window.

“I’m telling Uriah about your second lamp.”

The answer was small but clear.

She nodded.

When she left, she found herself less impatient with the distance between Greykeep and the northern road. The distance remained. So did the absence. But news was beginning to accumulate that she wanted Uriah to return to, and that felt different from merely wanting him back where she could see him.

She sat down and completed the message.

Merek’s hands. His fear and his laughter. Caldris’s conclusion. Lethan’s request.

Then she added Lisbeth’s forty-one foods and Io’s declaration.

That part would make him smile. It belonged beside the rest.

For the final news, she looked out of the window.

There were lamps everywhere she could see.

Nobody had waited.

She ended with two words.

Come home.

Uriah returned with a stone in his pocket.

Thor noticed the gesture before she knew what he carried. His hand went toward it when she asked about the road, not protectively so much as to make certain it remained there.

He looked tired. Travel sat in the creases of his clothes and the way he paused before answering questions that deserved more than a hurried reply.

Thor let him reach his family before asking for the full account.

Later, when there was room to listen, Lexander and Io joined them.

Uriah set the stone on the table.

It was small and smooth. Thor leaned closer and saw the lantern carved into one side, worn faint as though water had been passing over it for longer than any of them could measure by looking.

Held outward.

Toward a door.

Lexander did not touch it immediately.

“Where?” he asked.

“Beside the trough,” Uriah said.

Then he began with Marta.

Thor listened as Selda’s knowledge of the ovens became a woman with a red scarf stepping down from a cart. Marta had thought Selda lost. She had heard that nobody returned from inside. Seeing her alive had undone something she had held in place for a long time.

Selda had knelt beside her in the dust.

She had waited before speaking.

Thor glanced at her brother. He was watching Uriah, one hand resting beside his untouched cup.

When Marta asked who Uriah was, Dunstan had said he helped with wheels.

Thor’s mouth twitched.

“Convincing.”

“Apparently not entirely.”

“She let it pass?”

“Selda told her about Lirien.”

That brought the room back to stillness.

The lamp in the corridor. The goodnight offered to it. The conversations with the floor. The things the child wanted to do if tomorrow could be different.

Then the bread.

Io lowered her eyes briefly.

Thor had known those details before the party left. Hearing that they had reached someone who could carry them through the inner gate made them feel newly precarious.

“What did Marta say?” Lexander asked.

“She wanted to know who had told us.”

“And Selda told her.”

“Yes.”

The floor. An answer absurd enough that Marta had laughed before discovering nobody else found it funny.

Thor could picture the silence that followed. She could not have constructed it in advance or told Selda how long to let it last.

Marta had gone to the trough.

There, without anyone explaining what she ought to do, she had knelt and spoken her son’s name.

“Tam Quill,” Uriah said.

Lexander repeated it softly.

Porter. Taken inside two winters before. Working near the unloading doors of the long building.

Alive.

Thor put her hand flat against the table.

“He smells the bread,” Uriah said. “Every morning. He stops when the cart comes.”

For a moment no one moved.

Then Uriah told them the part that hurt.

Tam did not know why she drove the cart. He believed she came because she had to. He thought she had forgotten him.

Io pressed her lips together.

Two winters of a mother standing at a gate. Two winters of a son smelling her bread and believing the work had continued without him.

Thor looked at the little stone.

“What did she tell Marta to do?”

“Put something in the bread that only she would put there.”

Lexander understood first. Thor saw it in his face.

“Honey,” he said.

Uriah nodded.

Marta had put honey in Tam’s bread when he was small. He had refused it otherwise.

Selda had asked for two loaves.

One for him.

One for the girl in the east wing.

Lexander listened to the rest with the strange awareness that a story could change the meaning of things already present in a room.

There was bread on the table. Honey within reach of Io’s hand. A lamp beyond Uriah’s shoulder. None of them had altered, and he would never look at them in quite the same way again.

Marta had asked Lirien’s name before she left.

She had carried it back up the road.

Dunstan brought news later that the bakers were talking. Honey had reached the east wing bread. Another oven had made a supposed mistake with the guards’ supply. Twice.

Thor let out a brief breath of amusement.

“Their hands slipped?”

“Apparently.”

More water in the courtyard troughs. Singing that could be heard more clearly. Dried flowers left by the lanterns, brought from cottage gardens by people whose names had not accompanied the gift.

Lexander felt the temptation to ask whether it was enough.

He held the question.

Uriah had not told them that a door had opened. He had not brought rescued captives through the gate. What he described was the beginning of people making decisions Othellos had not intended them to make.

“The workers have another name for the east wing now,” Uriah said.

Thor looked up.

“What?”

“The guest rooms.”

Lexander sat very still.

He thought of Aurelia’s rule, of the agreement at either end of the gate, of the danger of asking a frightened prisoner to believe something that every part of their imprisonment contradicted.

Somewhere inside the basin, people were beginning to use a different word.

They used it when the officers were not listening. That mattered too. The old danger remained close enough to govern their voices.

But they were saying it.

Io asked the question he had been holding behind all the others.

“Did she get it?”

Uriah looked toward her.

“Lirien?”

“The bread.”

“Yes.”

Io closed her eyes for a moment.

The Keeper had told Hesketh at the trough. Lirien had held it before eating. She had smelled it. She had thought, at first, that she must be dreaming.

Then she had told the floor that someone remembered what she liked.

Lexander looked down at his own hands.

He could see Ignatius holding something he did not yet trust to be his. Seraphina examining a gift with the fierce concentration she gave anything that mattered. He made himself remember that Lirien was another child entirely, with her own gestures, her own face, a voice he had never heard.

They knew so little about her.

They knew what she liked on her bread.

It had been enough to begin.

“She asked the Keeper to say thank you,” Uriah said.

Io opened her eyes.

“To the baker.”

“Yes.”

The Keeper had carried requests for centuries. Directions, lamps, a way home. This had been different.

Marta came down the road on foot afterward, carrying a basket. Two loaves, golden with honey. She left them beside the trough for whoever had carried the thanks.

She did not know whether the Keeper ate.

In her kitchen, someone who did that work received bread.

Thor smiled then, a small unguarded expression that Lexander knew she would not have managed while discussing a plan.

“Good,” she said.

Hesketh had left the loaves untouched. The water stayed warm. On the fourth morning, the bread was gone and the cloth lay neatly folded.

The stone had been resting on top of it.

Lexander finally reached toward it, then looked at Uriah.

Uriah nodded.

The stone fitted easily in his palm.

He turned it once, studying the faintly carved lantern. There was no grand inscription, no statement that would settle every uncertainty they had discussed. Only a small thing left in acknowledgment of another.

He passed it carefully to Io.

They returned to Concordia late enough that the children were ready for their evening story and early enough that neither had accepted the possibility of beginning without them.

Thor came with them.

Seraphina met her first and asked whether she had brought anything. Lexander began to object to the question, but Thor held up one hand.

“A story.”

Ignatius appeared behind his sister.

“About fighting?”

“No.”

“About a horse?”

“Bread.”

Both children considered this a less promising subject.

Io sat down beside them.

“Tell us,” she said.

Thor told the story carefully. There was a little girl far away who missed something her mother used to make. Someone learned what it was and told a baker. The baker made it for her.

She did not describe barred windows or the binding beneath the prison. Those things could wait until the children needed to understand them. Tonight they could understand that someone had been lonely and that someone else had remembered her.

“What was on it?” Seraphina asked.

“Honey.”

Ignatius looked toward the supper things.

“We have honey.”

“We do,” Io said.

“Can we send some?”

Lexander felt the question before he knew how to answer it. Beside him, Thor remained quiet.

“Someone there is already making it for her,” he said. “She knows how to get it to the right place.”

Ignatius considered that.

“Did she like it?”

“Yes,” Thor said. “Very much.”

“Did she say thank you?” Seraphina asked.

Thor’s face changed.

“Yes.”

The little girl nodded, satisfied that the story had attended to its responsibilities.

Io looked at Lexander over their heads.

He understood why she was smiling and why the smile was difficult to hold.

After the children settled, Thor stayed a while longer. They spoke quietly about the observance and the people still waiting. Tam’s name belonged among the names they knew now. The discovery did not prove that they understood the full number of captives, or where every person was held.

Lexander was careful with that distinction.

Thor agreed.

There had been no rescue to announce. No victory to claim on behalf of people who were still behind doors. But Lirien had eaten the bread. Tam had been found alive. Bakers had begun calling prisoners guests.

Those facts were enough to tell plainly.

When Thor left, Lexander went to the window with Io.

Their lamp was steady. Beyond it, Concordia lay beneath the evening, its separate rooms full of people whose lives he could never entirely know. Some were eating. Some were putting children to bed. Some waited for news, or dreaded it, or had begun to believe that no news would ever come.

Io slipped her hand into his.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “I would like breakfast without a list.”

He looked at her and smiled.

“I can arrange that.”

“And honey.”

“Yes.”

They remained by the window a little longer. Lexander thought of Marta returning to her oven, of flour on her hands and a name held carefully in her memory. He thought of a girl receiving something she had been afraid the world no longer made.

Then Io drew him away from the glass.

In the next room, their children were asleep. Two days remained before the observance. There were people to speak to in the morning, decisions to make, work that would require all the patience he could bring to it.

He left the lamp burning.