The Counted Nights

When her husband fell sick in the dry year, Mara borrowed forty coins from the grain-lender and told no one. She took him south to the warm springs, and he came home whole. He believed the money had come from an uncle.

Every night after that, when the house was asleep, she sat at the window and spun wool for a dealer in the next village. Her fingers split. Her eyes burned. She wore her old shoes through a second winter and gave up honey, and she hid the coins in a tin behind the flour.

She loved it, though she never said so. Nothing in her life had ever gone from her hands into the world and come back as silver. It felt like walking through a door that was always shut to her.

One evening her friend Hanne came to sit with her. "How much is left to pay?" she asked.

Mara opened her mouth and found no number in it. "I spun all through the winter," she said. "I gave up honey. I never rested before the fourth bell."

"But how many coins?"

"I could not count them," Mara said. "I only know what each one cost."

Hanne said nothing.

Mara laughed, to fill the quiet. "Anyway, it will not matter. Some rich old man will die and leave it to us. These things happen."

That was when the knock came at the door. The grain-lender stood on the step with his ledger under his arm.

He knew to the coin what she still owed. She had never learned to keep that kind of count.