MAREK STOOD SOLITARY WATCH that morning while the rest of us slept past sudore and well into evening. Without fire to melt ice, we slaked our thirst by sucking on bits of frozen water we chipped from the rain barrels. We knew that soon after the high places froze, so followed the low, and ice would make the river impassable for ships. We pulled extra toques onto our heads and burkas over our wools. When Ping discovered a crate of slime onions he had thrown under the stove we cut off the rot and sucked on what was left. Dragomir said he felt like he had swallowed a crate of nails.
The days passed in a smear of gray hunger and exhaustion. By the thirtieth of the month of Boreal, we had gone without food for fifteen days. We were wasting weight.
Marek sent me to Fremantle on that morning to deliver Thebes’s body count. He made me wear a mam-line as he knew I would faint on the way. “Tell them Thebes contains now only four hundred twenty-one guilders, fifteen apprentices, eighty-nine kelps. Three elders have died since Beklemek began, their bodies sent to the guild morgues. And tell them”—here Marek hurled his quill over the edge—“seven foundlings are gone from the unnumbered throng. We have fifteen runners on the roof, plus myself. One of my runners is too ill to rise. We could put feverfew to good use.”
Marek would not let us look when he brought seven burlap sacks up and rolled the foundlings over the edge. Five were small—the size and weight of tiny kelps. Two were our size.
We told no stories that day, gave each other no lessons in knotting, rehearsed no lines for any plays, and did not study. I stayed in my sack in my tent, trying to stop shaking.
The next day we moved the stone to Rhagfyr, and it was a new year. The sun arced lower in the sky and snow came. My tent sagged and dripped during the day, froze into a solid triangle at night. Marek Thebes shoveled the paths himself and came around to our tent flaps in the mornings, whispering tendernesses.
“Get the hel out of bed, Odd Thebes.”
“Why? Is there hope?”
“You worry about your breath. I’ll worry about hope. Do I have to come in there and drag you out like a kelp? Do I look like your mother?”
“A bit. Yes.”
“Come out here and say that.” I didn’t care that he was trying to cheer me.
“I don’t want to come out. When did they reverse the flags?”
“In the night.”
“I hate it.” He did not answer. He hated it, too. “We ate a fool’s meal, that Beklemek feast. We would still have food if we had meted it out—”
He was into my tent in a split second, his face in my face. “We were never fools. You know why we did it,” he said, his teeth bared.
“I forget. Tell me again.”
“We can’t tell the damned ships when to come,” he said. “We’re at the mercy of a fleet of strangers from a world that walls us in. And so we hold that feast and eat everything we have because it is the one decision we have agency to make.”
When had my ears begun to ring? They hurt so much. “But—” I put my face in my hands.
“But what?” he demanded.
“Was one of those foundlings Jamila Thebes?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I could not look.”