The Last Coal

A palm's width of black powder was all that remained on the floor of the coal store. Eda said the ledger showed three days left. Kasian corrected her: at actual consumption, it was one day. He picked up the key to the hearth chamber without taking off his glove. "This time, I'll be the one who lies down." Serena looked at his face before she looked at the key.

Those words fell to the floor before the last sack left in the store did.

No one picked them up right away.

Kasian didn't count silence as permission. The hearth chamber key, taken back from Serena, was cold. He'd only reclaimed it briefly for the meeting after handing it over the night before, but the moment it sat in his hand, the weight felt familiar. Lock the door, send everyone out, fill the empty slot with his own body. In war, that order of operations had rarely been wrong.

Eda crouched and turned an empty sack inside out at the seam. Black powder spilled over her glove.

"This one's logged as a full sack."

"That was the portion that clumped from damp, shaken loose and used," the storekeeper said.

"Then someone used it."

"A little from the kitchen, some from the ward..."

"'A little' isn't a unit."

Eda's voice was too polite. Kasian recognized the tone. It meant someone had handed her, yet again, a task that should have been obvious to everyone.

Serena propped eight empty sacks against the wall. In front of them she laid out the scale, the ration ledger, the ward temperature chart, and the night roster.

"Let's count the nights we have left, not the sacks. The ward, the kitchen, the two common rooms, the two-household trial. And for each one, who's tending the fire and how many hours of sleep they're getting."

The storekeeper held out the ledger for the sale of the silverware.

"If we sell the ornamental brazier and the silverware, we can buy coal. But they're on the royal seizure list, so without the auditor's approval..."

"Can it be sold today?"

"It's five days before a trading company arrives."

"Then it's not fuel for tonight."

Serena pushed the ledger aside. Kasian gave her this much credit at least: she didn't let easy hope onto the chart.

"What about military reserves?" Serena asked.

"None."

Eda looked up.

"There are three sacks under the north stable."

Kasian looked at his niece.

"It's for emergency evacuation."

"Evacuation for who?"

"The patients and the children."

"There's no one from the laundry room on that list."

Kasian didn't answer. The evacuation plan had been drawn up around horses, carts, and the escort. Laundry and kitchen staff were meant to stay behind in the castle, preparing the last meals and bandages. He had folded two facts into the same sentence: that leaving them out kept the column moving, and that this meant it was fine to leave them behind.

Serena asked.

"If we use the three sacks, how much does the evacuation window shrink by?"

"Half a day."

"If we don't use them, what do we shut off tonight?"

Kasian spread out the map. Twelve empty guest rooms. One family bathroom. The gilded stove in the banquet hall. The west corridor. Shutting all of them off would free up heat for the ward and the two common rooms. Keeping the two-household trial running as well would mean cutting back the kitchen fire.

"We cut the soup to once a day."

Eda spoke up immediately.

"No."

"Bread instead, then."

"There are seven patients with no teeth left to chew frozen bread. Cut the soup and it won't be the physician who suffers, it'll be the kitchen staff, boiling porridge and carrying it around separately all night."

"Then cut the laundry fire."

"Wash bandages in cold water and infections rise, and drying takes twice as long. Who takes on that extra time?"

Eda pulled out a new chart. Laundry pot: two hours. Ward porridge: three hours. Water carrying: four people. Splitting firewood: two people. None of these columns had existed in the original ration ledger.

"I only agreed to make the record forms for the two households. And now I've made this chart too. From now on, please have whoever's responsible write down any care work that's missing, themselves."

Serena wrote her own name at the bottom of the chart.

"I'll handle checking for gaps this time. Eda, just hand off the forms and rest."

Eda didn't say thank you.

"Write down your rest hours too."

Serena wrote it down right away.

Kasian crossed the family bathroom off the map first. Then the empty guest rooms and the west corridor. Shutting off the banquet hall stove would leave the noble quarters cold, but that heat could be shifted to the ward kettle and the common room hearths.

"The banquet hall too."

The storekeeper's face hardened.

"If the gilded stove cools, the pipes could crack."

"Log the repair cost."

"It's ducal property."

"The people in the ward are the duchy's responsibility too."

Kasian paused, hearing his own words. He used to think protecting the assets was how you protected the people. Now the asset he was supposed to protect was eating people's nights.

When he went up to the banquet hall, the gilded stove still held glowing coals. Two servants stood there with fire tongs, hesitating. Kasian opened the ash pan himself. The smell of fire cut through his glove, and his breath went shallow.

One, two.

He counted the seams in the marble floor instead of the flames.

"My lord, let me do it."

"No. I'll..."

Before the order left his mouth, Serena picked up the empty bucket beside them.

"Two people, splitting the load. No one finishes this alone."

Kasian looked for a reason to refuse. He found none. He lifted only half the ash pan. The servant took the rest. The coals were split between the ward and the common room's silver brazier. When the gilded stove's fire went out, the glow that had reached the ceiling vanished.

Downstairs, in its place, steam rose from the ward kettle for the first time.

A patient wrapped both hands around a cup. In the common room, wet gloves went up on a line. In the banquet hall, the cooling pipes let out a metallic groan. It wasn't a victory. But at least you could see which room had been given up to warm which hands.

Deeper in the ward, Lisa from laundry took the steaming kettle. She didn't use it for drinking water. She set bandages stiff with dried blood into a basin and poured the water in little by little. An old man on the next bed set down his cup.

"Never mind mine. See to that person's bandages first."

"One cup and bandage water aren't the same portion," Lisa answered. "We use both, and write down whatever time we come up short."

She put the cup back in the old man's hands and wrote on the laundry chart: one shovelful of banquet hall coal, the time the water was boiled, and the time of the next bandage change. Eda took the chart and pointed to the empty shift slot under Lisa's name.

"At this rate, you'll be working straight through until evening, Lisa."

"There's no one to take over right now."

Kasian was about to call for a soldier, out of habit, but stopped himself at the ward door. The strength to carry fire and the skill to handle bloodied bandages weren't the same thing.

"Who can learn?"

Lisa tipped her chin toward the common room. The kitchen child who'd been left out of last night's fire watch was counting blankets.

"Not that child, an adult. If I teach someone once today, I can hand off two hours tomorrow."

Kasian called over two lightly wounded soldiers from the far end of the injury roster. One had a hurt wrist and couldn't lift a water bucket. The other couldn't walk, but could sit and boil and unfold bandages. Lisa started by showing him how to hold the tongs. The first bandage fell to the floor. No one took the task back from him.

The shift didn't shorten right away. If anything, Lisa's workload grew by half an hour while she taught him. Serena logged that half hour on the chart as a hidden cost, and tied it to rest that would be paid back the next day.

One fire from the gilded stove had bought not just the ward kettle, but, for the first time, the time it took to train a replacement. Kasian didn't count that time as his own credit.

Even so, the numbers didn't add up.

Even adding the three military reserve sacks, keeping the two-household trial and the outer barrier running together didn't stretch to three days. A day and a half. If the wind picked up, one day.

Kasian sent everyone else out and went to the hearth chamber. He didn't lock the door. On the cold hearthstone, the small imprint of Noah's body still remained. When he picked up the heat coil, his fingertips went numb.

If he lay down, the output would return. An adult held out longer than a child. It would buy the soldiers and the villagers time to carry firewood. Every loss could be settled with just his own body.

Serena walked in through the open door.

"I was waiting in the meeting room."

"The conclusion is the same."

"Whose conclusion?"

"It's my body."

"I imagine Noah said the same thing."

Kasian gripped the heat coil tighter. Now that he was close to the fire, the old scar inside his left glove pulled taut.

"I'm an adult, and I know the risk. I went three days without sleep back in my army days too. If we finish the two-household trial and the fuel transport while I lie down..."

"And after it's finished?"

"We decide again then."

"You want to hand the decision back to someone who doesn't even know how much memory or feeling will be left in his fingers?"

"Do you have an alternative?"

Serena said no. She admitted it so quickly that Kasian missed what came next.

"There's no finished alternative. Which is exactly why I won't call your body one."

"If you refuse, people on the outskirts could freeze to death."

"If I allow it, then every shortage from now on, the most responsible person is the one who lies down first."

"I'll bear that responsibility."

"If you lie down, your adjutant takes over the night routes, Eda takes over watching Noah's condition, and I take over the ledgers and the villagers' complaints. That isn't bearing responsibility. That's leaving the work behind and pulling your own body out."

The coil trembled in Kasian's hand.

Serena didn't take it from him. Instead, she set the hearth chamber key down on the table outside the door.

"I'm taking it to the meeting room. We'll make it public, who works how many hours and what gets given up. If after seeing that chart your lying down is still the only way, I'll argue against it again then."

"Do you have the authority to argue against it?"

"I have emergency stop authority. And a duty to make public whatever labor your proposal would add."

Kasian looked at the hearthstone for a while. The door stayed open. At the end of the corridor, he could hear Eda explaining the chart to a ward shift worker. Noah was resting in his own bed, not the common room. The two households still weren't warm, and there was only a day's worth of coal left.

He set the heat coil down.

The empty shift chart in the meeting room had six night slots. Kasian wrote his own name in the first one. Not the hearthstone, but two hours of fuel transport. Below him went the adjutant's name, two soldiers, the Bern household's repair worker, and the common room's record keeper, one after another.

Serena left the last slot empty.

"It's the reserve shift. A place for someone who isn't here right now to choose."

Kasian didn't fill it in.

The hearth chamber key stayed at the center of the meeting table.