The Kindling

The girl came back in the gray before full morning, her breath showing in the cold air of the room. The ash on the hearth lay undisturbed, smoothed the way Nyra had left it the night before. Under it, if you knew where to look, a faint warmth was still living.

“Is it still there?” the girl asked, kneeling close to the stone. “The coal you saved.”

Nyra knelt beside her and drew back a corner of the ash with the poker. A single ember sat glowing under the gray, small and steady, no bigger than a berry. “It waited,” Nyra said. She laid a few slivers of dry kindling against it, and bent low, and breathed on it, once and then again, until the ember brightened and a thin flame climbed up into the wood. “A whole night of cold, and it kept just enough of itself to begin again.”

The girl looked from the young flame to the two books on the shelf, still shut, still cool as the morning. “The books kept everything,” she said slowly, “but they cannot start a fire.” “No,” Nyra agreed. “They keep, and they wait to be opened. The coal keeps only a little, and it spends that little the moment it is asked.”

The flame took hold, and the room began, very slowly, to warm around them. The girl held her hands toward it, and Nyra watched her do it, and neither of them said aloud that this was an answer, though both of them felt that it had come to rest very near to one.