Fen ice bears from Martinmas. It does not bear in February and it has never borne in February and the children go on it in February. Bircher, parish note
The second winter at Cadder Fen was the good one and she knew it while it was happening, which she had never once managed before in her life.
Bircher’s heart got worse in November and better in December, which he said was typical of it and which he described at some length as a character flaw. She spent four evenings a week in his kitchen and he taught her a card game she was bad at and she taught him what to do about his own ankles, and neither of them made anything of it.
Vasse wrote twice.
The first letter said that the schedule book line remained a single line in an unrecognised hand and that he had exhausted the province, and that he would not be writing again about it, and that he wanted her to know he had stopped rather than let her wonder for ten years whether he was still going.
The second letter, in January, said: There is a woman at the north who has finished what she went for. I do not know what was agreed and I do not want to. She will come south after the thaw. I have this from a chapter clerk who thinks I am a man interested in horses.
Su’inn read it twice and put it on the fire.
“After the thaw.”
Yes.
“You said a year in a leat.”
I said I would ask her for a year and that I thought she was right to come back, and she has given me nineteen months, which is more than I asked for and about which I have some feelings. A pause. Su’inn, I have been thinking about this since June and I want to tell you now, in a kitchen, while there is nothing happening.
“Go on.”
When she comes, I am not going to trade anything.
She stood with the letter ash on the shovel.
“You have nothing left to trade.”
I have four or five things left to trade, said Azaelis. I have been going through them since June and there are five, and two of them are very good, and I am telling you in January that I am not going to use them, because if I tell you in the moment you will not believe me and you will be right not to.
The ice went on the fourth of February and the children were on it by the sixth, because they were children and because the fen froze about one year in four and there was no version of the world in which they were not.
She was at the Ferrels’ with a boil when she heard it.
It was not a scream. It was a lot of children making a sound at once, which is a completely different noise and carries much further, and she was out of the door and running before she had put the knife down.
Four hundred yards. She was forty-five and she covered it in a way she paid for afterward.
There were six of them at the edge and one of them was pointing, and out on the white there was a hole about the size of a door with black in it, and a boy of about eleven in the middle of the hole with his arms out on the ice and his face going under and coming up.
Su’inn.
“Not now.”
I am not asking for it. Listen to me and keep running. Very fast. Flat. Do not stand up on it, you will go in at ten feet and then there are two of you. Get on your belly at the reeds and go out flat and go slowly, and take one of those children’s coats and throw him the sleeve.
She was already down.
She went out flat on her front on the ice with a coat in her right hand and the burned arm doing nothing at all, and the ice made the noise that ice makes, and she got to about eight feet from the hole and threw the sleeve and missed and pulled it back and threw again and got it across his forearm.
“Both hands,” she said. “Both. I am not going to pull yet.”
He got both hands on it.
She went backward on her belly for four feet and the boy came up over the lip of the ice on his chest like a seal, and there was a long moment where he was half out and going nowhere, and then he came, all at once, and she kept going backward and dragging and the ice held and held and held and then, about nine feet from the reeds, it did not.
The water was not cold.
That was the thing nobody tells you and she had known it professionally for nine years and had never once been in it. It was not cold. It was an enormous flat hand that closed on the whole of her at the same instant and drove every particle of air out of her chest, and there was no cold in it anywhere, there was only pressure and a noise in her ears like a room full of people.
She had the boy’s coat sleeve in her right hand.
She did not let go of it and she was never afterward able to say whether that was courage or a hand that had stopped taking instructions.
Somebody had his shoulders. Somebody had him. She felt the weight go off the sleeve and heard, a long way off, above the water, the specific sound of a child being got onto something solid.
Then she went under.
Su’inn. Su’inn, listen to me.
She came up once and got half a breath and about a third of a lungful of the fen with it.
You are eleven feet from the reeds and there is a man coming out on a hurdle and he is going to be about ninety seconds. You have to give it to me. Now. While you can.
She got her right arm up onto the ice and it broke.
She got it up again and it broke again.
Su’inn.
“I am.” She had no air. There was nothing in her to make words with and she made them anyway and the water went in. “I am trying.”
She was trying. That was the part that came back to her afterward, in the years, at odd moments: she had tried. She had reached for it the way she had reached for it a dozen times on roads and in yards, the small letting go that had become so ordinary that she did it while thinking about something else, and it was not there.
There was nothing to let go of. Everything in her was holding on.
Su’inn, you cannot do it frightened. You have never once been able to do it frightened. Stop swimming. Stop swimming and give it to me and I will do the rest.
She could not stop swimming.
Her head went under and came up and there was a great deal of white above her and somewhere in it a man was shouting about a rope.
And she thought, with an enormous and completely useless clarity, in the last few seconds she had: there is a paper in a drawer at the provincial office with my description in the margin, and it activates on notification, and he does not have to do anything at all. He only has to let me finish.
Su’inn, please.
That was the last of it.
Not the water and not the cold and not the boy on the hurdle. That. The word please, from a man who had asked her for exactly one thing in nineteen months and had asked for it in a kitchen and been refused.
She went down into the black with it.