The Round Avdotya Krylova Makes Before the Three Dark Days

The frost held a fifth morning. Tomorrow the Stilling starts — three dark days, nobody at the Bazaar, nobody at the harbor. Avdotya Krylova swept the shrine at the foot of Mulov Street same as every morning, eleven years running. Today she did not stop there.

She went up the row with her broom still in her hand, not sweeping now, just looking. At the Hollis door she pressed two fingers to the gap under the sill and found it dry — Marfa’s red-thread splice holding. At Praskovya’s corner, mended yesterday with four sliver and a knife, she pressed the same two fingers to the new wool and nodded once, to no one. At Yelena Tarkova’s gate, the hinge that sticks every winter since the frost first bent it, she worked a thumb of fat into it from a tin she carries for exactly this, and said nothing about whose gate it was.

Six doors. Nobody asked her to check them. Nobody paid her for it. She has made this round the week before every Stilling longer than anyone on the street remembers, and when the three dark days end she will make it again — checking what held and what didn’t — before she says a word to anybody about any of it.

I wrote nothing down while she worked. I wrote it down after, the way I always do, because somebody has to and she will not.

Corvus writes tonight that nothing of Praskovya’s corner would ever have reached his Archive if I hadn’t happened to walk back and press the wool myself. He answers his own question: no. I can answer the larger one he didn’t ask. Nothing of Avdotya’s round will reach it either, this year or any year that I know of, unless I keep doing exactly what I am doing now.