Chapter 22: Overruled

The cellar door was gone from its hinges.

It leaned against the kitchen wall, with the bolt still on it, and the open stairwell breathed cold air into the room.

Caleb stood at the top with a lantern.

"I'll go first," he said. "Or you will. Whichever you want."

"Me."

I put my hand on the rail and went down the steps.

My legs held.

The floor was dry.

Someone had swept it, and where the drain had been there was a flat new slab of stone.

I turned to the back wall, where the iron ring had hung at the height of a woman's wrists.

The ring was gone.

In its place was a patch of fresh grey mortar, rubbed smooth, and a shelf bolted above it with jars of Ida's pickled beets.

"Every afternoon since the Moon Court," Caleb said from the stairs. "My grandfather's chisel. I'm not good at it."

"It's crooked."

"I know."

I put my palm flat on the patch.

It was cold, and it smelled of lime and not of anything else.

I stood there a long time, and my breath came easily, and I understood that nobody was ever going to put me back in the cellar I remembered.

"The beets are a nice touch," I said.

"Ida's idea."

I laughed.

It came out of me before I could stop it, and it echoed off the new walls, and I turned around and he was looking at me.

"Come up," I said. "I want to be somewhere with a bed."

His bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of the passage.

I had not been in it since the first life.

It was plainer than I remembered, a wide bed, a chair, a window onto the ring of stones.

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