of reason or passion but of different planes of being.
He never knew what Dagmar would do next and for the first time in their long life together he considered what might come of her rage. He looked down at the dirt he had taken absently from under Norea’s hard nails and listened. He rubbed the tiny flecks between his thumb and forefinger.
Dagmar stared at his closed face and howled in an ecstasy of violent sorrow, Get out. Don’t come back. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Things change from one moment to the next. Colin got up and left Dagmar alone beside the corpse of her mother lying in her yellow hat and old boots on the kitchen table.
Dagmar wanted to stab him, strangle him, burn his sinews. She was judged for the crime of wanting her daughter. She breathed rage beyond breath, larynx, tongue, teeth, palate, lips. The old language was dead and her dead with it. She would stop the bend of time. She would not relent. The ice would fall.
After he slipped away Dagmar sat up and keened “The Mother’s Grief,” a song she’d learned from Norea:
By the time Colin came back in, Dagmar was gone. Not even a candle in the chill room. He looked at Norea’s face, waxy and still, and said softly, There’s no moon at all. I’ll sit with you. I’ll see you out of the world. I wonder what you hear there where you are. I wonder if you can see?
He held her hand, cold-bitten and old, in his thick fingers, then set it down and looked at his own hands. Dirt under his nails.
That night the people in the settlement could have wandered outside their rooms and felt the chill falling out of the air. They could have heard the ice cracking and beginning to melt. They could have looked up and watched the clouds disappearing across the sky. But they did not know the storm was over. They slept on, waiting and enduring.
One truth and the world split open.
Philosophers posit modes and means, construct a world of all things subject to limits beyond which they cannot rightly exist. For centuries men have grasped at such truths. But those Nolans of Millstone Nether subsisted heedless of such laws in the frolic wind, their souls spilling outside mode and mean, making babies from tears and ice from rage and melody from the monochord.
Dagmar found Nyssa crawling away from Moll’s hole back toward the old farmhouse and she cried out and wrapped her daughter’s arms around her neck and carried her on her back through the subsiding ice and took her through the half door, past her mother on the table, and into her own big bed. Her feet were naked and frozen. Her clothes had disappeared. Her body was bruised. But her lips still moved with a bit of breath. Dagmar called the women of the settlement and they wrapped Nyssa in warm blankets and bathed her fingers and toes in cool water. They fed her warm broth and untangled her hair. They restored her. Nyssa slept on and on without dreams. She opened her eyes and felt the movement around her and could still see only from her left eye. She sank back into sleep and the women put poultices on her right eye and willed her back whole and complete to them. On the morning of the third day she awoke wrapped in thick quilts, her feet and hands bundled in fishermen’s mitts, a warm hat pulled down over her hair and ears. She shook her body out like an old net under the heavy blankets. Dagmar wiped her with clean cloths, pressed fresh warm poultices on her nose and fingers and toes and on the strange bruises over her body.
What has happened to her? thought Dagmar. She sat beside Nyssa, drinking in her face, imagining her green eyes moving behind their lids, rubbing over and over each toe and finger, examining her body as a newborn’s for all signs of life. When she was tired, she let the others take over. She paced around the shivering, awakening bawn. She shook the apple trees. She rapped on the beehives, disturbing their dormant life. She wandered into the warming sheep sorrel, plucked up a dead leaf that lay cracked on the ground and ran her tongue on the lingering frost along its veins. The cold sun waned and she walked through the greenhouse rubble, lined up pots, picked up glass, returned to Nyssa.
Slowly Nyssa