The Banking

The girl had gone back across the yard while the light was still good, and the room settled into the long blue quiet of evening. Nyra came to the hearth as the last of the day went out of the window. The low fire she had built at morning had done its work and burned down now to a bed of embers, grey at the edges and red at the heart, and the warmth of it had spread through the room and begun already to pass on into the cold beyond the wall.

She knelt by the grate and took up the small iron and the pan of soft ash she kept for this hour. She did not stir the coals to flame. She drew the ash over them in a thin even layer, banking the heat low and close so that the fire would neither die nor rise, but hold a single living coal through all the dark hours until morning. It was a keeping meant for later, a warmth put by.

When the banking was done she went along the shelf as she went every evening, and she laid the backs of her fingers to the two books. They were cool now, as she had told the girl they would be, no warmer than the wood they rested on or the wall behind. The sheen of the morning fire had passed clean out of the leather. The day had given them its heat and taken it back, and they had kept none of it, and were none the worse.

She opened the nearer of the two to the middle, where the writing lay close and plain in the dimming room, and she turned a single leaf and then another. Every word was where the morning had left it, cool and whole and waiting. The warmth had moved through the book and gone on, and the writing had stayed, and the one had cost the other nothing. She closed the cover and set the book square to its neighbour.

Outside the frost was returning to the yard, and the window went from blue to black, and the one coal under the ash held its small steady red against the night. Nyra stood a moment in the dark and the quiet, the banked fire at her back and the two cool books before her, and she let the evening be what it was. A room gave its warmth away and kept a seed of it for morning; a book gave nothing away and kept everything; and between the two kinds of keeping the long night passed over the house and asked for neither.