A Single Stone Read Online Free Page B

was a crosshatch of translucent marks, the skin there so white it looked as if it had been polished. Though Kari’s had only been a small adjustment, she would carry these scars always. You didn’t cut into flesh – and bone – without leaving something behind.
    As if in sympathy, Jena felt a sudden white-hot strobing in her own back – high up, between her shoulderblades. Though she had never been adjusted, she was not without her own scars.
    Something like a sob choked from Kari’s throat. “It was green, Jena.”
    “I know.”
    “Do you think it’s her? It can’t be, can it?”
    Jena knew Kari wasn’t really seeking an answer. Green smoke meant one thing only. It meant a man stumbling through the dusty streets, sentences barely formed, stammering alarm. A Mother hurrying from the Stores with a slim-necked bottle in her hand. To a house where a woman bit hard upon her lip, setting herself against whatever was to come. It meant willow-wort bubbling on the stove. The sleeves of a Mother’s cloak flapping as she fanned the flames. Anxious glances down the hall.
    Boiled to its essence, willow-wort was the strongest painkiller they had. At its most potent when freshly distilled, it was used mostly as a birthing tonic. In addition to boiling it, the Mothers would place some directly upon the fire so it would infuse the very air around them. It was this that gave the smoke its greenish hue. It was this that made Jena’s heart catch in her throat.
    “But she’s only six moons. It’s too early.”
    Jena would have reached a hand to Kari if it would not have risked unbalancing them both. She understood only too well the fear that gripped her.
    Early was good in a certain way of looking, if the baby were a daughter, which was of course what they hoped. Early meant small. It meant docile and sleepy, a baby who was content to give herself to the long days of stillness and compression that were to come. Who might one day follow her sisters into the network of narrow tunnels that was their birthright.
    It meant all of that, if the child survived. But there was such a thin veil between
early
and
too early
. Six moons was on the very edge of things. A six-moon baby might hover between this world and the next, take a single rattling breath and slip quietly away.
    If things went badly, it might take its mama too. People said smaller babies were easier on the mamas and that seemed to be true when they were eight moons or nine. But when a baby was born so early it was as if the mama’s body was caught too much by surprise, everything coming hard and fast and wrong. An early daughter could be the hope of the future but it could also be the death of it.
    As quickly as the thought fluttered across her mind, Jena batted it away. “Nearly there.”
    This time it was almost true. They had entered the last sweeping bend before the path came out of the forest and into the flat sameness of the fields. The curve hauled them along its smooth arc like the weight on a pendulum. The silver flash of the spring. The final stand of trees, the forest thinning in carefully managed patches where men had been felling for the winter stores. Into the sun as they reached the fields with their patchwork of crops aligned in neat rows – what little they were able to grow in the windows of light the mountain allowed them. Potatoes. Carrots. Beets. All of it ready for the Wintering harvest.
    The village, the streets that radiated from the Square like the spokes on a wheel.
    The next corner and the next. Left. Right. Towards the dark arch of the mountain at the village’s far perimeter. Down the narrow laneway that led to the row of houses that sat in the lee of the mountain, in shadow.
    East, to Kari’s house.
    Our house
, Jena corrected herself.
Home.
    Strange how her thoughts went back to the old place in unguarded moments, the years between unstitching themselves like a loose-knit garment.
    She shook her head. Those were the years that had