The Empty Hearth

Noah touched his own wrist before he noticed the soft bed beneath him. There were no restraints, but a red mark remained. The moment he opened his eyes, he asked, "Who's lying on the hearth right now?" Even after hearing that no one was, he didn't relax.

Three cracks ran across the ceiling. Every time the kitchen flue passed behind the left wall, the wallpaper trembled just slightly. One chimney, two scrapes of a wheel, four sets of feet running down the corridor. When he'd lain on the heating coils of the great hearth room, the sounds of the whole castle had come straight into his body. Now even the sound beyond a single door felt far away.

Noah couldn't yet tell whether that meant safety or being abandoned.

Serena sat beside the bed. The royal auditor hadn't even taken off her coat, and her ledger rested on her lap. The ink had dried, and the teacup sat untouched and cold. Behind her, by the window, stood Cassian. He rubbed the frost off the windowsill with a gloved hand, looking outside.

"No one," Serena said again. "Not Sir Cassian, not any other child."

Noah looked at Cassian.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Take off your glove."

Cassian's hand stopped. Serena didn't speak for him.

"Why?"

"To see if there's a mark from the coils."

"There isn't one."

"Then show me."

After a long moment, Cassian took off only his right glove. His palm bore calluses from a sword and rope, and his wrist showed no fresh mark from a metal ring. But the left glove stayed on.

Noah checked only the right hand. If he demanded answers to questions he hadn't asked yet, adults tended to hide the answer that mattered most.

"What about outside?"

Serena opened her ledger.

"The western barrier is lower than last night. The infirmary is eighteen degrees, the common room inside the castle is sixteen. The first evacuated household in the west was eleven degrees, and the record for the second hasn't come in yet."

Cassian turned around.

"There's no need to tell a child every number."

"I asked."

Noah tapped the window twice with his finger. Six chimneys were visible from inside the castle. Three had white smoke rising. One was the kitchen, one was the infirmary, and the last was the west wing where the noble family used to stay.

"None of the village houses show any."

"The wind is pressing the smoke down low," Cassian said.

"I said none show any."

When Noah lay on the hearthstone, he could feel the windways tremble beneath his shoulders. He could tell which side of the barrier had weakened even with his eyes closed. Last night he'd felt nothing at all. That scared him more. He'd been taught for a long time that when his body went quiet, the village died.

The physician came in carrying a bowl of medicine. The bitter smell arrived first.

"Young master, your fever is rising. You need to drink this and sleep again."

Noah didn't take the bowl.

"If I drink it, how many hours will I sleep?"

"You'll sleep soundly for three hours."

"What if two houses go out while I'm asleep?"

"That's for the adults to..."

"You said the adults would handle it yesterday too."

The physician's mouth shut. Cassian stepped closer to the bed.

"If you refuse the medicine, your body will only get worse."

"I didn't say I wouldn't drink it. I'll drink it when the record comes in."

"The record is late because of the snowstorm."

"Then someone can go and see and come back."

"Someone's already been sent."

"Who?"

Cassian started to say "a soldier" instead of a name, then stopped.

"Orsen and Lisa. They went together."

Noah remembered the names. If he had names, he could ask in the morning whether they'd come back.

Serena set the medicine bowl and the water glass side by side on the bedside table.

"There are three options. Drink it now and I wake you when the record arrives. Wait to drink it until the record comes. Or have the physician explain the ingredients again before you decide."

"What about not drinking it at all?"

"That's an option too, but we'd need to note the risk of the fever climbing higher alongside it."

Noah looked at the physician.

"Will it make me forget things?"

"Not this medicine."

"Will it make me dizzy?"

"A little."

"Then just half."

The physician said that wasn't allowed by regulation, but Serena told him to explain why half wasn't possible first. If the dose was split, they couldn't know how long the effect would last. In the end Noah agreed to drink all of it, on the condition that he'd be woken when the records for both houses came in. Serena wrote that sentence at the top of her ledger.

Noah watched the tip of her pen, then asked for paper.

He drew two different roofs. One was low, like the worker housing inside the castle walls. The other had a slanted windbreak, like an outlying house. Between the two roofs, he drew a long black line.

"It's night."

"Does that mean both houses need to make it through the night?" Serena asked.

"Even without me. And no one else should have to lie down for it either."

"Do we only need to watch the temperature?"

Noah thought for a moment. He remembered Lisa mentioning she'd slept on the kitchen floor last night.

"No. Also who didn't get to sleep."

Serena didn't correct his words, and wrote them down just as he'd said them.

As the medicine began to take effect, his eyelids grew heavy. Noah slid the paper under his pillow. Even if the adults changed the ledger, his own drawing would stay.

"Wake me up when the meeting starts."

Cassian objected.

"Not before your fever comes down."

"Then who's going to say my conditions?"

"The auditor will say them."

"They're my words."

Serena closed her ledger.

"If your fever rises further, you won't attend. If it comes down, you can listen from the doorway. And you can leave partway through."

Noah added one more thing to that.

"If I don't want to talk, just show them the paper."

When he woke again, the morning bell had rung twice. His temperature had dropped, and Orsen and Lisa had returned. The second evacuated household's temperature had fallen to nine degrees before dawn, but the people had been moved inside the castle and were unhurt. It wasn't the proof Noah had wanted. If a house had to be emptied, you couldn't call it warm.

A chair was set by the dining hall doorway. Noah sat there, wrapped in a blanket. At the long table inside, Serena, Cassian, Eda, six resident representatives, and representatives for the maids and soldiers sat spaced apart. Two empty bowls sat in the middle. One bowl stood for the worker housing inside the castle, the other for a household living alone on the outskirts.

Serena laid Noah's drawing out as the first page on the table.

"I propose the test criteria. Two different houses must last through the night without Noah. No other lone hearth keeper will be put in place. Temperature, fuel input, and the names and hours of whoever stayed awake will all be recorded together."

A resident with a graying beard pressed his palm on the table.

"If we test two houses for the sake of one child and they both freeze, who takes responsibility?"

Noah folded a finger under his blanket. One.

Another woman spoke.

"Picking two houses near the manor would be easy. The firewood and the people are both close by."

Two.

Cassian pointed at two dwellings inside the castle on the map.

"The first test should be somewhere quick to reach, to keep losses down."

Eda pushed an empty bowl over his pointing finger.

"Those two houses share the same chimney. You can't count them as two."

Cassian's brow moved.

"Rescue reaches the outskirts too late."

"That's exactly why the outskirts can't be left out. Would Noah trust a record where the test only succeeded inside the castle? Would the residents trust it?"

Eda pointed to a small dot at the edge of the map. It was the house of Bern, a shoemaker who had lost his wife. The chimney was low, and one shutter was broken.

"One will be the worker housing behind the laundry. One will be Mr. Bern's house. But I won't take on the recording for both."

"You know the ledgers best," Cassian said.

Eda's voice grew more measured.

"Regent Cassian Riven. If I spend all night going back and forth between two places just because I know the ledgers well, that's not a test, that's feeding my own sleep into the fuel supply. One recorder per house, plus one relief. I'll only draft the forms."

Noah didn't fold a third finger. Eda hadn't just objected, she'd also struck her own name out of a column.

The resident representatives argued over who would fix Bern's broken shutter and why the worker housing's firewood should be counted the same as the outskirts'. Serena didn't offer an answer first. Bern said he'd put his own house forward for the test once someone came to repair the shutter. The maids' representative suggested drawing lots for who would record at the housing. Orsen the soldier agreed to handle the outskirts transport, but asked for a relief after two hours.

Bern pulled a rusted hinge from inside his coat and set it beside the empty bowl. One of the screw holes had worn wide.

"Last night I nailed the cotton blanket up over it. If I take it down again today, the blanket won't be usable either."

Cassian said he'd send two carpenters, but Bern shook his head.

"If both of them are stuck with the night record too, the one doing the repairs won't get to sleep. Just one person for the shutter. I'll do the recording myself, and if my hands start shaking, I'll stop the test myself. Even if you have to write it down as a failure, don't make me empty my house again."

Serena made a column for "housing after stopping" before she made one for "success." Only after Bern wrote down the empty room by the laundry inside the castle in that column did he set the rusted hinge down on his own house on the map.

Names were attached one by one beside the empty bowls.

Noah spoke from the doorway.

"Write down when to stop too."

The talk quieted down.

"At what temperature?" Serena asked.

"When a person's hands shake. Even if the number still looks fine."

The physician wrote down both the temperature threshold and the physical stopping criteria together. Someone muttered whether the domain was being run on a child's word now, but Bern said his own hands were his own to stop.

Serena wrote the official sentence beneath the black line Noah had drawn.

With Noah Riven not lying on the hearthstone, we will confirm the night of two different households and the person who paid for that night, together.

"Can we start with this sentence?"

Noah nodded because the word "safe" wasn't in it. It was a sentence that didn't put forward a word it hadn't proven yet.

Near the end of the meeting, Eda returned from the storehouse. Black powder clung to her sleeves and cheek. She said that before reading the numbers off the ledger, she'd gone down to the floor herself and counted the sacks.

"Six with the seal unbroken, two half full. That's after setting aside what the kitchen and infirmary need."

Eda took off her gloves and set them on the table.

"That's three days' worth."

Cassian recalculated the actual consumption per sack. His finger stopped at the last column.

"One day."

Between the two empty bowls, the night Noah had drawn suddenly grew longer.