The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Winter

"A bag of hinges," I said.

"They're good hinges."

"Do I get a say in which doors they go on?"

"You get every say." He was trying very hard not to smile. "It's your post."

"Then yes," I said. "Bring the hinges."

He picked me up off the road and swung me round, box and all.

Hettie, fifty yards ahead with the pup on her shoulders, turned and shouted, "Put her down, she's a council member!"

He didn't put me down.

He moved in that afternoon.

It took one trip. A coat, a knife, a whittling stick that had never turned into anything, and a canvas bag that clanked.

He hung the coat on the peg beside mine.

Then he stood back and looked at the two coats side by side for so long that I threw a dish rag at him.

The snow came for good the week after.

It came over the ridge in the night and didn't stop for three days.

When it stopped, the Gap was white to the eaves, and the only sound in the world was the stove.

I learned the post in winter.

The window frosts over on the inside, so you scrape a hole with your thumbnail to see the valley.

The spring never freezes, because it comes up warm out of the Line.

Conall snores louder in the cold.

He makes coffee before I wake up and leaves it on the stove lid. He never says he's done it.

I bake bread on Thursdays.

Nobody told me to. I just started.

On the first Thursday, the post filled up by dark.

The big bald woman smelled the bread from the stones and came down through the snow with her boots full of it.

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