Ninka Evertrue's Arc

Chapter 15 of 29

The garden fed them by noon. By dusk, the wind changed. Ninka stood on the cabin porch and watched the meadow grass flatten in one long push. The air off the ridge smelled like iron. She had grown up in this county. She knew that smell. A cold snap was coming, maybe tonight. She went cabin to cabin and counted blankets. Twelve children. Nine blankets from her grandmother's cabinet, most of them thin. The stoves Kaia had drawn were pretty and small. They would not hold heat past midnight if the temperature dropped the way the wind promised. A child with a cough by morning could be a child with a fever by the next night, and she had no medicine and no gift left to fix it. She found Ezra behind the second cabin, sorting the contents of his pack on a folded cloth. Salt. A tin of dark powder. A stepfather's belt, coiled. He did not look up when her shadow crossed him. "I need help before the training," she said. "It's going to freeze tonight. I don't have enough blankets. The stoves won't hold." Ezra tied the cloth closed. "Show me the middle ground between the cabins." She walked him to the flat patch by the well. He stood there a long moment, then bent and cleared grass with the side of his hand. "Stone," he said. "As much as you can find. And any crystal Kaia can spare." "For what?" "A hearth. One fire for all of them. Bigger than a stove. It won't go out." She called Kaia. Kaia came with the sketchbook already open. Ezra spoke to her in short pieces while Ninka and two of the older children dragged stones up from the streambed. A firebox wide enough to sit in. A pole across the top for a pot. A rack. Rainbow crystal set into the seams. Kaia drew as he described, her pen steady, and the shape rose out of the ground the way the cabin once had, stone locking into stone. Ezra knelt at the firebox. He drew a line of salt across the base and laid a pinch of the dark powder at each corner. He struck a match on his thumbnail and dropped it in. The flame caught blue, then settled into a steady orange that moved without wood. "It won't go cold," he said. "Not while I'm here." Heat pushed out into the yard. The children came without being called and stood in a ring around it, hands out. One of the smaller ones started to cry, not from fear. Ninka pulled the thin blankets from the cabins and passed them out anyway, because a child should have a blanket. The wind rose. The fire did not move. Ninka sat on a stone at the edge of the ring and watched the children's faces go pink in the light. She had kept them warm. Tomorrow Ezra would start the training, and she would have to trust a stranger with the only thing she had left to protect.