Page 10 of Property of Prophet

He has been watching me from the door this whole time, ears half back, doing his own arithmetic. Then he comes to a decision. He crosses the floor, sets his front paws on the edge of the bed, and hauls himself up with a grunt and a scrabble of claws on wood. He turns a slow circle and drops down the length of me, his weight settling heavy across my feet and shins through the blankets, his head coming to rest near my hand. It is sudden, absurd, and entirely welcome. He looks up at me with the flat patient confidence of an animal that has made up its mind and expects the world to catch up.

She stares at him. “Traitor,” she tells the dog.

He does not move. I turn my hand to him, slowly, because the cold still lives in my fingers, and I work my knuckles into the thick fur behind his ears, and he leans into it. Something turns over in my chest, and for one unguarded moment, I feel my face change. I do not know what it does. I only know that she sees it, because the wariness in her face flickers, like a candle when a door opens somewhere far off in the house.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

“Bear.”

“He’s a good judge.”

“He’s a coward who likes anyone with warm hands,” she says, but there is no heat in it, and Bear stays exactly where he is, on my feet, claiming me.

I try, while she is close, to think back.

Not for the falling, the falling I have, the light, the tearing, and the long, bright agony of it. I reach past that, for whatever came before. For who I was when I still had whatever the silver in my hair replaced.

Something takes shape, for just a moment. A place, voices, and a name that belongs to me, but isn’t the one on the leather she found me in. I reach for it, and it disappears. It’s like closing a hand around smoke.

The memories aren’t locked away. Locked, I could break. This is worse. This is reaching for a step that isn’t there, and feeling the whole body lurch into the gap. The bright place, the voices, the older name, they have the texture of things that happened to someone else and were described to me once, long ago, by a person I have also forgotten. I have a past the way a burned house has a floor plan. You can see where the rooms are, but you cannot live in them.

“It’s like reaching into a fire that’s already gone out,” I tell her. “You can feel where the heat was. You put your hand in, and there’s only the shape of it. Smoke where there should be—” I stop. “Something. There should be something, and there’s smoke.”

She says nothing. Her face does not move, but her hands, busy until now—refold a strip of bandage she does not need to refold—go still in her lap. Briefly. As though some old grief of her own has recognized the sound of mine and gone quiet to listen.

Then her hands begin again, and the moment closes over.

The light has changed while we have been talking.

The pale gray has thickened into something almost like day. Where it strikes the ice grown over the windows, it breaks apart, splinters into color and throws it across the rough plank floor in small wandering rainbows. They lie there trembling, red bleeding into gold, gold into a thin cold blue. The frozen window has broken the light into pieces, and something about that feels familiar.

I watch the little rainbows move on the floor.

Outside, a raven drops out of the white air and lands on the woodpile. It folds its wings with a click I can almost hear through the glass and turns its head, and it does not look at her, still working her sequence inside the warm room. It looks at the door. At the way in. It sits there, black and deliberate against the snow, and watches the door the way something watches a thing it has been sent to find.

A cold that has nothing to do with the cabin moves up the back of my neck, and I do not understand it. I file it away with the silver, the smoke, and the order of her hands, in the growing drawer of things I know without knowing how.

She is rising to go to the wood, to the next task in the sequence, away from me and the dangerous quiet that has built up in the room.

“Wait,” I say.

She waits.

I asked her a few things this morning and took each answer as a gift. This one is different, and we both feel it before I have even said it. It is not a question to fill the silence. The silence does not need filling. She has lived in it for years, and it suits her. I want it for its own sake, the way I wanted the warmth of the broth and would not say so.

“You know my name,” I say. “You found it on me. Prophet.” The word is a stranger’s coat, the wrong size, but I wear it because it is what I have. “You’ve said it. And I don’t know yours.”

Something crosses her face. Not fear. Closer to the look a person wears at the edge of cold water, the half second before they decide whether to go in. She has given me where, how long, the dog’s name, and a tin cup of broth, all of it costing her nothing she will admit to. This will cost her something. I can see her counting it.

“You don’t need it,” she says.

“No,” I agree. “I don’t.”

And I wait. The way I waited for the name she would not let me give her. Gentle, unmoved, and entirely willing to be refused.

She looks at the floor, where the small rainbows shake. She looks at Bear, now asleep on my feet, having staked his claim and trusted it. Lastly, she looks at me, and whatever she finds there, it is enough, or it is not enough to stop her, which out here is the same thing.

“Lily,” she says.