The Almost

The watchtower at Callow Gap had a table in it.

Ilse had not expected that. She had imagined, when she imagined her mother up here at all, a bare stone room with a signal fire on the roof and wind through the arrow slits. There was all of that. But against the north wall, under the slit that looked out over the snow-choked pass towards the Osterran fires, there was also a table: a heavy, ugly, scarred pine table, with a bench on either side and a lantern hook above it, and a brass inkwell screwed to the corner so it couldn’t be knocked over in a gale.

“Pay table,” Casimir said behind her. “The garrison was paid here. Every week. Nobody’s moved it.”

Ilse took her glove off and put her hand flat on the wood.

It was so cold it hurt, and she left it there anyway, and…