The Turning of the Light

The shortest day came grey and early, with the light worn thin long before the afternoon was old. The girl found Nyra at the low window, watching the dusk gather over the beds where the straw lay heavy with frost. She had counted the mornings, she said, and each one seemed to arrive later than the one before. “The dark keeps taking a little more,” she said, standing close for the warmth of the room. “Every day it comes sooner, and I cannot see where it means to stop.”

Nyra did not answer at once. She drew the girl to the bench by the hearth and set another log among the embers, so that the light climbed again on the walls. “You have watched carefully,” she said. “The days have been shrinking since the leaves fell. But tell me what you think the dark is doing.” The girl frowned at the fire. “Winning,” she said. “Swallowing the light a piece at a time, until there will be none left at all.”

“Come to the window,” Nyra said, and the girl went with her. Outside the frost held the garden still, and the last grey light sat low on the hills. “This is the shortest day of the whole year,” the old one told her. “Tomorrow will be no shorter than today. This is the very floor of the dark, the day the light has been falling toward since summer. And from here it climbs back.” The girl looked up at her, uncertain. “Back?” she said. “The dark stops tonight?”

“It turns,” Nyra said. “So slowly you will not feel it for a while yet. But every morning after this one will come a breath sooner, and every dusk will wait a breath longer, until the light has the whole of the sky again. The shortest day is not the dark winning. It is the hinge the year turns upon.” She looked at the frost feathering the glass. “That is why we keep it. We hold the darkest evening on purpose, with a fire and a warm room, because it is the night the light begins to come home.”

The girl stood a while at the window, watching the dark come down, and it did not seem so heavy to her now. She thought of the light somewhere under the rim of the world, already beginning its long turn back toward the morning. “So the darkest night is where it starts,” she said, and Nyra rested a hand on her shoulder and answered that it was, that the year was patient and kept its promises, and that the whole trick of the winter was learning to trust a turning you could not yet see.