"Clara. Wake up. You got frost on your eyelashes."
She did not wake up. She sat against the wall of the lean-to with a fine white rime on her lashes and her glass eyes on the dark, exactly as she had sat all night. I brushed the frost off with my thumb.
"Don't look at me like that. I know. It's cold."
I knelt over the dead embers and held my hands above them. Behind me, the lean-to creaked and let the wind in through nine different seams.
"Here is where we are," I told her. "I'm going to say it out loud, because it helps, and you're going to listen, because you always do. The bear ate our food. All of it. The racks are empty. We have a dagger, a saw, a pair of pliers, a roll of carving tools, eleven feet of wire I am not touching! one marionette, and you. We have a month. Maybe. Then the cold starts doing the work the bear couldn't."
I waited.
"I'm not asking you to solve it. I'm asking for your opinion. We need a house. A real one, with a roof that holds. So I want you to tell me what you'd want in it."
The wind moved in the trees. Clara's painted face regarded the morning with serene patience.
"A window," I said. "Of course. You'd want a window. Facing east, so you get the sun first thing. Yes. That's good. I hadn't thought of that."
Day 44.
"Come and look at this."
I carried her to the workbench, which was a flat stone, and sat her where she could see the model. I had spent three days on it. It was a tenth the size of the house I wanted, built from scraps of the old lean-to: notched corners, a pitched roof with deep eaves, a little door on leather hinges, a hearth of river stones in the corner.
"I can't afford to guess," I explained. "I have one winter and I don't know if this roof will hold snow, and I won't find out by building the real thing. So I built this. Watch."
I dropped a handful of wet gravel on the roof. It sagged on the left side.
"Yes, I saw it too. We'll fix that. Steeper pitch. You'd prefer a steeper pitch? I thought you might."
I rebuilt the roof twice. When I set the last shingle, I put the marionette inside, on the floor by the tiny hearth, and the way he sat with his bent arm and his faintly surprised face was so perfectly right that I laughed out loud.
"Don't be jealous. He's only the first resident. You'll have the big one."
The air lit up.
Deed recorded: Crafted a dollhouse.
Experience gained: 0 XP
Skill improved: puppet craft (Lv. 2)
"Did you see that? It filed the dollhouse under puppets. It thinks a house for small figures is in the same family as the figures." I looked at her. "I think the Registry has a crush on you."
She did not comment.
"I know. I can see how the joints will bear weight, now. I can see where the snow will sit. It's uncomfortably useful."
Day 51.
"Don't laugh."
I was dragging a log. I have a Strength of four, and I had worked out that a person with a Strength of four should not be moving logs. I had also worked out that a person with a Strength of four and a great deal of arithmetic could move them anyway.
"Here is the plan. We cut every log in half, so each piece weighs half as much. We peel a dozen saplings and lay them down like rollers. We build a ramp, a gentle one. I'll lever each log up with a pole. It will take four times as long and I'll hate every minute. What do you think?"
I waited, panting, with my palms bleeding.
"You think it's too slow. I know. But look at the alternative."
The alternative was a month of frozen nights in the lean-to. She seemed to see my point.
Day 63.
"Where do you want to sit?"
The walls were up to my chest. I stood in the middle of the room, which was four strides across, with a stick in my hand, pacing out the floor.
"By the fire, probably. I'll build a bench against the north wall, where the stone will hold the warmth. And a table. I know you don't eat. But I think you'd like to sit at a table. I'm going to make two stools. One of them is yours."
I knelt and drew the table in the dirt with the point of my dagger.
"Round or square? Round, I think. Round is friendlier. You'd want everyone to be able to see each other's faces."
I paused.
"Who's everyone? I don't know. Just in case."
Day 85.
The house took forty-one days, which is exactly twice as long as it should have taken. I have a callus on every finger, and a bad back that I think is permanent. But on the eighty-fifth day, I carried Clara across the threshold, and sat her on her stool, and lit the first fire.
The smoke went up the chimney. It went up the chimney, and not into my face.
Deed recorded: Built a shelter with a hearth.
Experience gained: 0 XP
"Look at that," I said. "Look at that. We did that."
I sat on the stool beside hers, with a boar hide around my shoulders, and I was not cold for the first time in forty-four days. The model sat on a shelf above the hearth, with the marionette in its doorway. I looked from the little house to the big one, and back again.
This reproduction came from the author's own posting without consent, while reading the chapter at that source supports the writer.
"Can I tell you something strange?"
Clara's glass eyes held the flames.
"Sometimes I think this place looks like that." I nodded at the model. "Small, and neat, and carefully arranged. The creek, and the roots, and the way the dead are gone by morning. Everything where it ought to be. As if someone with very large hands set it all out."
The fire popped.
"No, don't tell me I'm being silly. I know. I'm tired. It's warm." I smiled at her. "You never think I'm silly. That's one of the things I like about you."
Day 86.
"Clara. Clara, did you do this?"
There was a button on the step of the model. A small brass button, dull and a little bent, in the exact center of the tiny front step, where I had left it on the shelf outside to catch the sun.
It was warm, as though it had been held.
"I didn't put it there. Do you think..." I looked at the trees. They looked back. "Someone wants to trade. I think they want something."
I took a knife and a scrap of oak and carved a little acorn man, two inches high, with a round hat and a surprised face. I set him on the step.
In the morning he was gone. There was a blue glass bead in his place.
"I think I've made friends," I told her. "I'm not sure they're the kind who will let me meet them."
Day 120.
"I put out a second cup. I know. It's for the guests."
I sat at the round table with a cup of boiled creek water in front of me and another in front of her stool. The beads had been arriving every few days: a bent spoon, a pipe bowl, a bit of green glass, a tin button. In return I left carved things, acorn men, a fox, a little boat. It had become a sort of correspondence.
"I think of them as the neighbors," I said. "Don't tell me that's strange."
She did not tell me.
I drank my water. I did not touch hers.
"Clara thinks I should shave."
I am aware of how that sounds. I am aware that Clara has never said anything. But there was a moment, sitting by the fire with the snow hushing against the shutters, when I knew exactly what she would say, in exactly her voice. It was a calm voice, a little dry. She sounded like a patient older sister.
Clara thinks I should shave.
"I don't have a razor," I told her. "Clara says that is not an argument."
I laughed. It echoed in the room, and for a moment I wasn't sure which of us had made the sound.
Day 303.
I had not left the house in nine days.
"I'm fine," I said. "I'm just resting. The snow is high. It isn't safe."
The ledger sat by the door, with a layer of dust on the bark. The marionette sat in his little house on the shelf. The beads on the step went unclaimed. I sat at the table, with both cups, and told Clara about the day I had had, which was the same as the day before.
"What would my supervisor say about all this?" I asked. "She'd say..."
I stopped.
I knew her face. I could see the glasses, the lanyard, the little stapler on her desk. But the name had gone.
"Clara," I said slowly. "What was her name?"
Clara regarded me with her serene, patient, painted face.
I decided that if it mattered, she would have told me.
Day 406.
"Clara. It's frosted again. Didn't we have a frost last week?"
I was standing in the doorway in the gray morning, looking at the white on the ferns. The creek had a skin of ice at its edges. I turned to look at the ledger, and I took it down, and I blew the dust from its cover, and I read the last entry.
Day 406.
Level: 14. Max HP 38.
XP: about 8,400
Level 15: about 10,500. A stat point.
Wire: eleven feet, untouched.
House: holds. Roof holds. Skill: puppet craft, Lv. 6.
Open question: ?
I had levelled four times. Level 11 on the hundred-and-thirty-first day, after an elk that had come down from the high ground. Level 12 on the two-hundred-and-fourteenth, off a fox as pale as ash. Level 13 on the three-hundredth, and Level 14 in the autumn, off a long, bad week and a cat that I do not like to think about. I had done every one of them carefully. I had studied each for days. I had written it all down, and I could not remember a single one of them.
"Clara," I said. "It's been a year."
The air lit up, quietly, with perfect indifference.
Deed recorded: Survived 400 days alone.
I stood there looking at the line for a very long time.
Then I turned and looked at her, sitting on her stool at the round table, with her glass eyes on the door and a faint white rime of frost on her lashes, just as she had sat on the first morning. She did not look surprised. She never does.
"Be honest with me," I said. "Am I all right?"
She said that I was fine.
I believed her.