Chapter 4: The Orchard Girl

Gerd had the horses saddled before the sky went gray.

Anke was waiting in the yard beside them, in a borrowed cloak with the hood down.

"You're going to buy another one," she said.

"I'm going to try to keep one from burning."

"With what? The Captain has your ring."

"I'll think of something on the road."

She looked at me.

Then she held out her right hand, palm up, over the iron gate bar Gerd had dragged into the yard.

The bar was twisted and fused where she had melted it at dawn yesterday.

"You need what I can do," she said. "I saw you look at it last night. I'll do it."

"In return for what?"

"You find Lotte. Alive or dead, I want to know where she is."

"I'll look. I can't promise what I'll find."

"Then here are the rules."

She counted them on her fingers.

"I work for you while you look for my sister, and not one day after."

She folded down a second finger.

"You never touch me. And I keep my knife, and you never ask for it."

"You have a knife?"

She lifted the hem of her cloak an inch, and there it was, in a sheath at her belt.

It was a kitchen knife.

It might have been the same one.

"Agreed," I said. "One rule of mine. Don't burn the house down."

"It's stone."

"Then you'll find a way."

Her mouth moved, almost a smile, and she killed it.

"Lotte would like you," she said, and she sounded angry about it.

"She likes anybody who makes a joke. She'd go out in a shift in January and laugh at the snow."

"In January?"

"Cold never touched her. Not once in her life."

Then she turned and went into the house.

Lindhof was four hours up the valley, a dozen cottages on a hillside under bare gray rock.

We came into it at half past ten with the horses blowing.

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