The Midnight Pact

Astrid jerked her fingers back, as if she had brushed the glowing iron plate of a bakery stove.

The pewter salt cellar rolled across the bare oak, leaving a pale trail of coarse grains before bumping against the notched rim of her bowl. In the gap left between them, the black circle of ash on the tablecloth was still smoking with a dry, almost metallic coldness, as if the linen had decided to forget it ever existed.

"Clumsy," she said, her voice an octave higher than usual. "I’ve... pewter always slips with the brine. It happens to me every winter."

No one believed her.

Severin did not move immediately. He kept his bare hand suspended in the air, four fingers away from the wood, his knuckles still. A very brief trace floated in the air, barely a sigh of pressed snow and cloves, which vanished as soon as the duke closed his fist. Astrid rubbed her palm against her coarse wool skirt, still feeling that ridiculous tingle, a warm vibration that wouldn't go away.

At the far end of the hall, beneath the shadow cast by the limestone arch, Walpurga had not blinked.

The old woman held an earthenware pitcher against her apron, motionless as a rural parish gargoyle. Her small eyes, veiled by the mist of old cataracts, were not looking at the ash on the tablecloth or the overturned salt cellar; they were staring directly at Astrid's curled fingers.

Severin reached out his other hand, the one still wearing the mineralized cloth mitten, and picked up the iron mesh glove that lay folded next to his plate with the feigned calm of someone pretending not to have seen a tower collapse.

"Pick up the salt," he ordered. His tone was back to being that of a barn inventory: flat, scraped, without a single sharp edge to betray the pulse dancing at the base of his neck.

"My grandmother used to say that spilling salt brings seven weeks of east wind," muttered Astrid, sweeping the grains together with her palm without looking at the duke.

"Your grandmother said too much nonsense about the wind, I'm afraid."

"She died at ninety-two without a leak in her roof, my lord. She must have known something about the wind."

"Walpurga."

The old woman stepped out from the shadow of the arcade. The soles of her birch clogs crunched on the cold flagstones with a dry snap. She did not approach the table; she stopped three yards away, holding the earthenware pitcher against her raw hemp apron.

"The fine linen tablecloth won't recover, sir," said the woman, in a voice that sounded like dry leaves stepped on in November. "We'll have to write it off as a loss on the laundry bill."

"Write it off," said Severin, adjusting his second glove with a methodical tug of his teeth on the raw leather strap. "And take away the salted meat. It has no taste."

"It tastes like October salted herring," replied Walpurga unblurry. "If you wanted fresh trout, you'd have to send three lads to chop the ice on the Klint until their backs broke."

"I only said to take it away."

Silence.

The silence between two liars is the only contract that is never signed.

Astrid knew it as well as he did. Both of them pretended that Severin's frayed sleeve had snagged on a loose nail, that the tablecloth had simply burned from an errant spark from the fireplace, and that she hadn't just touched the skin of a man who, according to all chronicles and fiefdom rumors, turned anything living into dust that dared approach him.

The old woman bent down to pick up the earthenware dish. Before turning around, her watery eyes settled on Astrid again, heavy as a sack of wet rye.

"Watch the edges of the table, girl," Walpurga dropped before disappearing down the service hallway. "Old oak splinters go deep and take weeks to come out."

Outside, a broken branch of snowy pine beat against the leaded glass of the high window, making a regular, dry sound: tap, tap, tap.

Severin stood up without looking at her. The man's bulk suddenly blocked the dying light of the iron chandeliers.

"Tomorrow at first light you will go down to the woodsheds," he said, adjusting his linen sash over his short mail coat. "Walpurga insists that beer vat number three went bad because the barley came in frozen, but I think someone has been keeping green wood under the dry straw and the ovens aren't drawing."

"If it's green wood, you'll notice it in the smoke," she said, raising her eyes. "Freshly cut birch weeps sour resin. Anyone who has ever lit a fire in their life knows that."

Severin paused for an instant with his gloved hand resting on the back of his chair. The iron mesh scraped slightly against the polished oak.

"You seem to know too much about how things burn, Astrid of Hede."

"I come from a mill. If you don't know how wood burns, you freeze to death before the feast of Saint Jude."

The duke barely twisted the corner of his mouth. It didn't quite become a smile, just a tense wrinkle on his razor-shaved cheek.

"Make sure there is hot water at six. If I have to shave with frost, it will cost you half a thaler."

"It was a quarter of a thaler in the original contract."

"Midnight inflation," he settled, and crossed the oak door without turning back.

The quarters assigned to Astrid in the west wing smelled of old soot and neglect.

It was so cold that her breath formed a thick little cloud every time she untied a lace on her bodice. The only light came from a heather-wax candle stub wedged into an earthenware saucer, its wick sputtering with a pungent peat-smoke aroma.

Astrid took off her mud-hardened clogs and left them by the empty washbasin.

She sat on the straw mattress.

The straw crunched under her weight, plaintive and hard. The ceiling beams gave a dull creak, that elastic groan that northern timbers make when the frost squeezes the joints until they almost burst.

She looked at her right hand.

During dinner she had convinced herself that it had all been a mirage, a trick of exhaustion after three days on foot and a whole afternoon hauling her chest. But there, in the thick gloom of the room, she brought her fingers close to the trembling flame.

On the back of her hand, right at the base of the index finger where Severin's bare skin had brushed her, there was neither blister nor burn of any kind.

Her skin remained intact, pink and alive under the wick's light, without a single grain of ash. Only that warm pulse persisted deep within her knuckles, a static ember refusing to dissipate against the bastion's cold.