Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the long house
Date/Time:TC1858.03.12 – TC1858.03.13
Kestrel's spike holes were still in the boards.
Mei found them in the dark with her fingertip, the way she'd found them every night since the planks came in: two square holes a hand apart, the wood around them crushed where the bar had bitten, a splinter standing up from one edge that she had not pulled out and was not going to. The board ran under her pallet from the stove side toward the wall. There were thirty-some boards on the long house floor, doubled, laid over the earth on the Speaker's word the day after the last plank party came home. Some of them still had frost-cracks in them from the flats. Some of them still smelled of the mix.
Mei lay with her finger in the hole and listened to the long house sleep.
