What She Must Learn Alone

The girl came to Nyra with her own book open, one finger pressed to the outer edge of a page. Near a line about the first frost sat a short stroke and a small dot, set clean into the blank border. She had not made the mark herself, and she wanted to know whose hand had.

“That one is mine,” Nyra said. “But only the sign, not a single word inside your lines. I set it there to say one thing: look here again.”

The girl read the line beside the mark. It named a day for the first frost that did not match what the season had done, a day too early by a good stretch. She saw the error now, and she asked why Nyra had not simply drawn a clean rule through it and written the true day above.

“Because the book is yours,” Nyra said. “If you wake to find your wrong days quietly mended by my hand, you learn nothing from the mending, and in time you come to trust my reading over your own. A keeper who leans that way stops looking. So I point, and the setting of it right stays with you.”

The girl took up her pen. She drew the rule through the false day herself, wrote the true one above it in her own careful hand, and then, after a breath, made a fresh stroke and dot of her own beside a second line she meant to weigh again by daylight. Nyra watched her do all of it and said nothing more, for the book had already told her what she hoped: the girl had learned to point before she mended.