Luna Brightwell's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The trade still hung in the air when the storm hit. Wind slammed the mansion and something groaned overhead. Luna looked up. A dark line crossed the ceiling, and dust sifted down through it. She knew that sound from ruined towns in the war. A roof about to give. Above them lay sixty survivors across three cold rooms, and the winter's first storm was tearing at the rotten beams that held them all. Luna ran for the stairs. Stella pushed off the wall and followed, still weak. Elena came last, her frozen hair dripping as it thawed. In the largest room, water poured through a split seam in the roof. Survivors huddled at the walls. A center beam sagged, bowed under the weight of soaked wood. When it snapped, the whole ceiling would come down on them. "We have to hold that beam," Luna said. "Or move everyone out into the storm." "Out means dead," Stella said. Flat. "So we hold it." Luna needed Frank. She had claimed this mansion with his help; he knew every rotten joint in it. She sent a boy running for him. Frank came fast, tool belt swinging, took one look at the beam and shook his head. "It's split, not broken," Frank said. "If I brace it now, it holds. Five minutes more and it drops." He needed a post to jam under the sag. Luna and Stella dragged a heavy vault door off its frame, the same frost-covered slab that had sealed the flowers away. Frank wedged it upright beneath the beam. It stood too short by a hand's width. "The wood's swollen with water," Frank said. "It won't sit. I need it dry, right here, right now." Luna turned to Stella. But Stella's fire was spent; one flame could kill her again. Then Luna looked at Elena's thawing hands and understood the whole shape of it. The flowers warmed Elena. Elena's cold could pull the water out. "Freeze it," Luna said. "Not to heal. Draw the wet out of the wood." Elena pressed both palms to the swollen beam. Frost spread under her fingers. Water crackled to ice, then to dust that Frank swept clear. The wood shrank. He drove the vault door tight into the gap and hammered a shim beside it. The sag stopped. The beam held. The survivors let out a long breath. Rain still fell through the split seam, but the roof did not come down. Luna sat on the wet floor, shaking. They had held the roof. But she saw the truth now. Stella's fire was too costly. The flowers were promised two ways. And a single ice-doctor could not brace a roof through a whole winter. The mansion had nearly killed them all tonight. Before the next storm, Luna had to make the building itself sound, not patch it one broken beam at a time.