Chapter 25: Thessaly Recants Half a Theology

The cold arrived in the night between the convention's third and fourth days, the kind that came down from the north without announcement and settled into the bones of the settlement like a creditor finally tired of waiting. By dawn the ash-fields east of the Blackwater were white with frost, and the grey residue that had been accumulating on every flat surface for two weeks — the residue Mara had been logging privately, saying nothing, noting only that it tasted faintly of iron when the wind shifted — had mixed with the frost into something that looked, in certain light, like crystallized smoke.

Mara was awake before the frost. She had been awake since the third hour, the same hour that seemed to be claiming everyone in the settlement lately, as though the cold were a summons nobody had agreed to answer. She was transcribing the second day's convention proceedings from her shorthand into clean record when Pia arrived with a sealed note and the expression she wore when the news was precise and bad.

The note was from Cole. It had no greeting. Cole's notes never did.