The Kiss

Ilse woke before light on the twenty-first day and knew, before she was properly awake, what she wanted.

It was not a feeling. She had braced for a feeling. It was more like finding a figure at the bottom of a column that she had been adding for a long time without admitting what it would come to: quiet, exact, and entirely hers. She lay in the dark of the tower room for a minute and checked it, the way she would check a sum, and it came out the same.

She got up and washed her face in water with ice on it and went down.

The kitchen was dark except for the hearth. The maids were not down yet. The rota on the pantry door said, in Wenna’s hand, that Col’s boy had the four o’clock fire, and Col’s boy had evidently done it and gone back to…