What the lake remembers

The ice records every winter. A warden reads it and finds a winter that should not exist.

The wind comes from the north the way it always does, flat and patient, carrying snow that never quite lands. On the parapet the sentries stamp their feet and talk about anything except the cold. Below them the ice drops seven hundred feet into the dark.

The first watch

Nobody on the wall has ever seen what the wall is for. That is the point of it, the old wardens say. A wall that works is a wall nobody remembers building.

Then the beacon four miles to the west goes up in a column of orange light, and the bells begin.