Morning, Again

A body is a kind of archive. For a long moment Yeon Seol lay still and read her own: no ache in the left knee, no scar across the ribs from the ice raid of year twelve, no gray. Twenty-three. The morning of her first day of command, if the bell and the light and the smell of barley porridge were telling the truth, and they had no reason to lie.

She had seen soldiers go mad in gentler ways than this. So she did what she had done every morning for forty years: she got up, she washed, she put on the uniform that was laid out — lieutenant's gray, absurdly clean — and she went out to look at the wall.

The Frost Gate in the first winter was smaller than she remembered, and the men on it were younger, and the granary — she stopped walking when she saw the granary — the granary was already short. Of course it was. It had been short the first time too; she simply hadn't known yet what a shortfall in the tenth month costs you in the second.

A sergeant she would one day bury was shouting at recruits in the yard, getting the drill wrong in a way that would not matter for years. Yeon Seol stood in the snow with her hands behind her back, twenty-three years old, four decades deep, and began — quietly, the way you plan a campaign — to make her list.