Sana put her palm flat against the stone, because that is what one does, because her grandfather had done it and his mother before him, and because the cold of it was famous and she wanted, once, to feel something famous.
It was warm.
For a long moment she did not take her hand away. She thought about the salt in her coat pocket and the ledger and the mild voice, and about the twelve winters her family had counted since anyone last claimed the stone had moved.
Then the frost on the shape began, very slowly, to run.
Down in the village, Idren was arguing about fish. He had the good end of the argument and no interest at all in winning it, which is a luxury, and he was enjoying the luxury when the bell on the ridge rang once and stopped.
One ring is nothing. One ring is wind, or a bird, or a rope gone slack in a thaw. Every man in the room knew that. Every man in the room put down what he was holding.
The gate had been shut so long that the village stopped calling it a gate. They called it the wall with a shape in it, and children were told the shape was where a door had died.
Sana went up the ridge before light, the way she had gone every winter morning since the year her mother’s hands failed. The path was frozen in the ruts the salt carts left, and each rut held a thin lens of ice that broke like a held breath.