He found it on the forty-third day.
He had been running his palms along the boarded balcony doors — not searching for escape, nothing so dramatic as that; only looking for sensation, for texture, for the particular reality of wood grain and nail heads that reminded his hands they still belonged to a living body — when his fingers found the gap.
It was nothing. A crack between one plank and the next, where the wood had contracted in the cold, leaving a seam no wider than two fingers pressed together. Too high to see through standing, which was why no one had found it worth boarding over. Gerffron stood on the edge of his pallet and pressed his eye to it.
Gray winter sky.
A wedge of the rose garden, brown and frost-burned, the canes stripped to bare thorns.
And beyond the far garden wall, a distant line of hills under heavy cloud.
He stayed at the crack for a long time.
He was not certain why it mattered as much as it did. He had seen sky from the northern window every day for forty-three days — that narrow slot of gray, that unchanging elm. But the window faced north and showed him only the dead part of the grounds, the utility yard, the backs of outbuildings. The crack in the balcony boards faced south and west. It showed him the heart of the estate.
He could see the path between the rose beds. The stone bench where he had sat on winter mornings in his first year as consort, drinking tea and reading import records while the cold made his breath visible and the gardeners moved between the frozen canes with the careful reverence of men who understood that dormancy was not death.
He had brought Styrmir to that bench once.
The boy had been twelve. It had been a Tuesday in deep winter, the ground iron-hard, and Gerffron had been walking the outer path of the garden in the way he sometimes did when he needed to think without walls around him. He had rounded the eastern hedge and nearly walked into the boy, who had been crouching in the frozen flower bed with both hands buried in the soil as if taking the earth's pulse.
Gerffron had stopped.
The boy had looked up without startlement, with the particular calm of someone accustomed to being found in places they were not supposed to be. His hands were blue with cold. There were dirt streaks on his face.
Gerffron had said nothing.
He had sat down on the stone bench and opened his book again.
Styrmir had stayed crouching in the flower bed for another few minutes, then straightened and stood beside the bench without invitation. They had sat there — one on the bench, one standing with cold-dirty hands — for the better part of an hour while the light thinned and the cold deepened, and neither of them spoke a word, and it had been the least lonely Gerffron had felt since arriving at the Wadee estate.
Now he pressed his eye to the crack in the boards and looked at the stone bench.
It was empty. The cushion he had requested from the household stores was long gone. The stone was bare and white with frost.
He stood at the crack until his legs ached.
Then he stepped down from the pallet's edge and sat on the floor with his back against the boarded doors and looked at the ceiling.
He was not sorrowful. He catalogued the feeling carefully, the way he catalogued everything now, and found that it was not sorrow precisely — it was something more specific. The particular weight of a memory that has become the last of its kind. The feeling of holding a thing you cannot put down.
He took the smooth gray pebble from his pocket — the first one, the one from a seven-year-old's inexplicable generosity — and set it on the floor in front of him.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he picked it up and pressed it to his chest, just over the left ribs, and held it there.
Outside, the winter light was failing.
The crack in the boards let in a sliver of it — a thin blade of pale gold — that moved across the floor as the sun descended, and Gerffron watched it travel until it reached the wall and vanished.
He put the pebble back in his pocket.
Tomorrow he would stand at the crack again.
It was, improbably, enough.