Raven Meadows's Arc

Chapter 16 of 25

The first frost came before dawn. Raven found ice on the water barrel and breath fogging in the huts. She walked the row and touched each wall. Wind slid straight through the gaps between the boards. Her huts had roofs now, and walls, but nothing to hold the warmth. She stood in the cold and knew the truth. The next hard night would kill someone. She found the old mason at the gate by mid-morning. Borin Stonehewn stood only four feet tall, red beard down his chest, hands scarred from forty years of cutting stone. He had come the week before looking for someone worth teaching. Raven had brushed him off. Now she needed him. "My people are freezing," she said. "I need hearths. Real ones. Stone that holds fire and holds heat." Borin looked past her at the huts. He walked to one and pressed a palm to the wall. "Wood burns," he said. "Stone keeps. You want fire inside these, you build in stone or you bury your people." He paused. "I can teach it. I won't do it alone." That was the price. Raven understood it. "Then teach whoever wants to learn," she said. "I've got proud ones who work for tokens. Give them hammers and chisels." By noon he had six of them at the marsh's edge, splitting flat stones and stacking them dry. He showed them how to lay a base, how to leave a throat for smoke. Raven hauled stone with the rest. Her hands bled and she kept hauling. The first hearth rose slow, one course at a time. But cold walls with warm hearths still leaked heat through every seam. A woman arrived at the gate near dusk, dragging a cart of cloth. Dotty Threadwell wore polka dots and big round glasses, and her thread crawled loose from a spool at her hip like it had its own mind. She looked at the huts and the shivering people. "Stone holds the fire," she said. "The walls still bleed it out. You need cloth on the boards. Heavy weave." She unrolled a thick bolt. "I make things that keep people. Socks that won't let you get lost. Wall-hangings that hold warmth." She set to measuring the first wall without asking. Raven watched the two of them work. Borin's hearths caught the fire. Dotty's heavy cloth trapped it inside. By full dark the first hut glowed warm. People crowded in and stopped shivering. Finn pressed his back to the stone and grinned. Raven leaned in the doorway, spent. She had beaten the frost, for one hut. Six more stood cold behind it, and the tokens ran short, and Borin's stone was slow. She looked at the small warm room full of people who would have died by morning. "How many more can you build before the deep cold?" she asked Borin. He wiped his hands. "Not enough," he said. "Not with the hands you've got."