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“Warm,” she says.

“Yes. It will stay that way.”

“Good,” she says, against my throat. “Because I’m going to want somewhere to put my hand for fifty years.”

I have to stop. I have to stop and breathe, with my wife astride me and her hand on the door in my side, because fifty years is a thing I have now, and I have never once had to stop and breathe about anything.

She waits. She does not take her hand away.

Then she lifts herself and takes me in hand and guides me into her, slowly, with her forehead against mine and her other hand on my shoulder, and settles all the way down, and stays there, breathing against my mouth, and I make a sound I did not know I had.

“That one,” she says. “I want that one again.”

She moves. I have room to meet her here: a lift of my hips, her hands on my shoulders, the slow drag of her until she finds the angle she wants and stops talking in sentences. I give her my hand where she asks for it.

She is loud. There is nobody in this house to be quiet for but Malo, who has heard worse, and a bell-founder at the woodpile pretending to be deaf, and she has never in her life been quiet for anybody.

She comes with her mouth against my cheek, saying my name badly, with her fingers spread over the warm line in my side.

I hold on. I wait until she has stopped shaking and kisses me, and then I take her hips and move her, and she lets me. It does not take long. When I come I have to stop kissing her to breathe, which has never happened, and she puts her hand flat on my chest and says, “There. Breathe, then,” and I do.

Afterward she sits beside me with her legs over mine and her hand flat on the warm line, and we stay like that until the light goes off the water.

Thursday the gate bell comes down.

It takes the four of us, a borrowed ladder, two hours, and more swearing from my wife than this yard has heard in my time. Malo holds the ladder and says, at intervals, “Mind yourself, madam,” in the voice of a man who has already decided how this ends. Corentin sits on a stool in the yard with a blanket over his knees, directing, which he cannot help.

The iron strap comes off in one piece and keeps its bend.

The oak goes on. I lift the whole bell on my own, because I can, and it costs me something now, in the shoulders and the back, and I feel it cost. She sees it and says nothing, and I see her decide not to.

She sets the stock and pins it, and Corentin says, “Left. Left. Now left,” until she tells him she will come down there.

Then she takes the rope, and she rings my bell.

One clean note, out across four miles of standing water, with the whole fen under it. It holds, and holds, and comes back off the house half a beat late, and Corentin puts both hands over his face.

The month came and went.

I was at Lannoz that night with a dying child and her mother. Enora was asleep in a bed under a window. Corentin was asleep across the corridor with the shutters open, because he wanted to hear the water. Nobody in this house counted anything.

The market’s letter came up from Trevern with Malo on the Thursday: the term had run, the house would pay out on both signatures, Morlac presented its compliments.

That is how I found out what day it had been. Nobody voided anything.

I stand at the gate with the letter in my hand and the bell humming over me, where she has just rung it again for no reason, and I find I am not surprised. Then I am surprised at that.

EPILOGUE: ENORA

I found the grey hair in March.

At his temple, with the lamp on, one hair, white as lime, in all that black. I said nothing for a full minute, which he noticed. Then I said it. I have mentioned it four times since March and he has heard about it four times and has not once told me to stop.

He sleeps six hours a night beside me and wakes hungry. He gets cold in the wind now, which he never did, and I have made him a scarf, badly, and he wears it. Nobody in the fen towns has said one word about any of it to his face.

Anna hangs at Morlac. I have heard her rung every Sunday I have been in Morlac since. The strike note is true and the hum comes through under it. Corentin says the strike is a shade sharp, and then the hum comes through and he stops talking.

Nine hangings in the hall at Kerlann, and the hall has a note. Malo lost the wager and did my week of fires without once calling the ninth hanging an insult to the carpentry, though he looked at it.