The Crackle of the Green Birch

The gate of the barbican slammed shut with a crash that rattled the soot accumulated in the ceiling beams. Outside, the messenger did not wait for the bolt to drop completely: the snap of the whips and the hurried crunch of the runners over the dirty snow indicated that the marquess's entourage preferred to risk the mountain pass rather than spend a single night under the shadow of the bastion.

The air grew cold in a matter of seconds. Not in that gradual way the afternoon declines, but with the dry violence of a well from which the lid is suddenly removed.

Kenneth remained standing by the doorway, the sealed parchment still in his gloved hand. The red sealing wax had cracked clean into three fragments that fell onto the flagstones like nutshells.

"This has to be a chancellery joke," Maren said, without letting go of the wooden spoon. The steam from the dark broth over the fire barely managed to rise two spans before dissolving in the frigid air. "Three days. It doesn't even give the brine time to penetrate the old rib racks."

"The court butchers don't use brine, Maren. They bring butchering hooks and flat sleds with straw so as not to stain the snow of the royal road," Kenneth replied. His voice sounded flat, stripped of any inflection, with that worn roughness of someone who has spent years waiting for bad news and only feels relief when it finally arrives. "The marquess doesn't pay for grain to feed an oven that has been out for three winters."

"It's not out. It's sad."

Kenneth let out a dry laugh, a snort that fogged his sparse beard with whitish vapor.

"A fascinating distinction for a carcass that in seventy-two hours will be worth its weight in boot tallow."

Maren ignored the jab and leaned over the cast-iron skillet resting on the side trench of the hearth. She dropped in a generous handful of dried rosemary and a thin strip of lemon peel; the rancid lard, which until a moment ago had been dozing in a whitish puddle, protested with a brief and bitter sizzle, releasing that pungent, resinous aroma that clung to the palate. With her knuckles cracked from chilblains, she crushed a pinch of coarse salt directly between her palms, feeling the hard grains bite into her skin before tumbling down into the grease.

"Old Basile says that if the sweetbread doesn't smell like home, the ash cakes inside," she muttered, more to herself than to the warden.

"Old Basile has spent forty years drinking distilled apple cider vinegar and confuses the seasons. Gather your cauldrons."

"What?"

"I said gather them."

Kenneth tossed the parchment onto the butchering table and strode toward the corridor leading to the bailey. His heavy boots, with iron-studded soles, crunched against the fine frost that was already beginning to creep from the arrow slits.

"The blizzard is clogging the walkway vents," he said, without turning back. "The last provision sled is heading out to the valley before the Thistle pass gets buried. You're getting on it."

"I have a lease agreement."

"You have wet paper in a torn pocket. And it's thirty below out there."

The bailey was a funnel of stone and white wind.

The snow was not falling in gentle flakes, but in horizontal darts that whistled through the blind arrow slits of the watchtower, piling up in the corners in dunes of saltpeter and frozen dust. In the center, wedged between the two ashlar buttresses supporting the base chimneys, the dragon Basile looked less like a living creature than an outcrop of gray slate abandoned to the elements.

His breathing was barely perceptible: a hoarse, salty, and rancid wheeze, which he exhaled through his nasal passages without enough force to melt the snow accumulated on his jowls. Along his flanks, the saltpeter scales—which in the steward's engravings gleamed with highlights of polished pewter—were covered by a whitish crust, hard and rough as flint.

Beside the feeding pit, the old steward was trying to revive a brazier with green birch firewood. The logs, damp with frozen sap, crackled with dry detonations and spat lazy sparks that died before touching the flagstones.

"It's not going to catch, lad," muttered the old man, rubbing his reddened nose with the sleeve of a frayed doublet. "This wood only knows how to cry smoke. If you throw more on, you'll smother it."

Kenneth ignored the warning. He unloaded a bundle of branches onto the dying fire with a dull thud, sending up a cloud of sour ash.

"It will catch because it has to heat the ground-floor flues," the warden spat out, kneeling in the snow to blow angrily on the moss-covered embers. "If the chimneys freeze from the inside, the water in the cisterns will burst the walls before the week is out."

"It's not heating because it's green, hardhead," Maren said, appearing behind him. She carried a battered copper cauldron in her arms, its soot-stained bottom giving off the warm steam of broth with fried peel. "And you're greener than the firewood if you think stone eats splinters."

Kenneth stood up abruptly. The height difference forced her to raise her chin, but she didn't take a step back. Her cheeks were flushed from the kitchen stove and a spot of warm grease had congealed on the lapel of her leather apron.

"Still here?"

"The sled is tied to the outer gate. One of the lads is trying to fit a runner with an oak wedge. They've got at least half an hour."

"Well, go and sit in it. Cover yourself with the flock blankets and wait."

"My feet will freeze if I sit."

"Deal with it."

"Those blankets smell like ferret urine."

"They're campaign blankets, not lace sheets. Get on the sled, Maren."

"No."

A sharp gust of wind shook the walkway beams. Through one of the high embrasures, a plug of snow gave way and plunged into the patio with a muffled crack, covering the dragon's motionless tail under half a foot of pulverized ice.

The beast did not even shudder.

Maren set the cauldron on the nearest stone ledge, protecting it from the wind with her own body. She pulled a filthy rag from her pocket, soaked in warm lard and saltpeter, with which she had been cleaning the copper handles so the freezing metal wouldn't stick to her bare fingers.

"Look at his eyes," she said, pointing her chin toward Basile's scaly snout. "He doesn't even blink when the birch bursts. He's not asleep. He's giving up because there's nothing alive in this tower to snuggle up to."

"He's a saltpeter beast, not an orphan child," roared Kenneth, finally dropping that mask of a pragmatic officer he had worn since dawn. "Do you think you're the first one who arrives with a ladle and a smile to try and save him? Three years ago we buried the female in the cliff pit! I went down there myself with the chains to seal the cave so the vermin wouldn't eat her eyes out. I watched this animal's belly go dark day after day, week after week, while the chimneys grew cold and the garrison deserted because the granite turned to pure ice."

"And your answer was to forbid people to sing?"

"My answer was to maintain discipline at a frontier post nobody cares about!"

"Your answer was to die with him, but on your feet."

The silence that followed was thicker than the snowfall.

Kenneth clenched his jaw so hard the muscles at his temples throbbed beneath his coarse wool hood. He took a step toward her, his hand gripping the strap of the harness hanging from the side of the railing.

"You haven't the slightest idea what it costs to hold this place together."

"Holding onto grief is not protecting memory, Kenneth; is forcing those who are still alive to freeze with you."

The warden opened his mouth to retort, livid, but Maren didn't give him time. With a quick, exasperated motion, she hurled the lard-and-salt-greased rag straight at his chest. The damp, warm fabric struck the hardened leather of his cuirass with a soft thud, leaving a dark, greasy smudge right over the erased emblem of the fortress.

"Clean that off and stop giving orders to those of us who still have a pulse!" she snapped at him.

"Damn you, insolent peasant!" he exploded, ripping the rag off with fury and throwing it against the flagstones. "If you like carrion so much, stay and watch them carve him up! But don't ask me to pretend your bitter bark soups are going to bring blood back to a dead stone!"

Kenneth's words echoed against the ashlar walls with a brutal resonance.

And then, the patio went silent.

Beneath the whitish crust of frost covering the dragon's rib cage, something sounded.

It was not a roar. It was not a whimper.

It was a hollow, dry, vitreous snap, like an earthenware jar cracking under the weight of a frozen lake. A sound that came from the very depths of Basile's chest, dry as the death of a branch.

Maren whipped around.

The dragon's huge golden pupils, which for days had maintained a milky, vague ember behind his half-closed eyelids, blinked just once.

The light went out in them.

A white veil, thick and matte as rancid brine, covered the creature's corneas. His head dropped heavily forward, sinking into the accumulated snow of the patio with a dull thud that shook the copper cauldrons.

A gust of absolute cold burst from his open jaws, instantly freezing the drops of broth on the ledge.

Kenneth stood motionless.

The wind howled in the arrow slits, triumphant, as the frost finished devouring the last gray scale of the spine.