Chapter 19: The Furnace Room

The Furnace Room

Wren came out of her room with her socks in one hand and stopped halfway down the hall.

She knew fire when it was in a house. She lived with two of them. Her mother carried it around the way other people carried their phone, and Rennie had it worse, and between the two of them the living room ran about four degrees kinder than the rest of the county. Wren had never minded. It was just the weather in there.

That morning the weather had something under it.

She came to the doorway. Her mother had the good chair and a cup of coffee, and on the end of the couch, in the spot where you put people you’ve decided to keep, there was a boy.

Seventeen, maybe. Big hands, still knees, sitting like somebody had told him to wait and hadn’t said how long. Fire, all the way down, and not the kind she was used to standing next to.

“You don’t have to be here at seven,” her mother said.

“I’d rather start.”

Rennie spun around, all of her at once. “Wren! Look. Mom took an apprentice. This is him.”

Wren had heard about the apprentice. She hadn’t heard it was today.

She took one step back, as far as the doorway allowed, and left it at that.

Something warm landed on her shoulder.

“That’s him,” Wick said, very small. “That’s the fire from outside. Rennie might bind with him, so if you—“

Wren had heard about the outsider at Uncle Ives’s. Nobody had sent her out of the room that day, and their father didn’t keep things from her when he could help it, so she knew something had come into the district that didn’t belong here. What she hadn’t had was a face for it.

Now the face was on their couch with its hands on its knees, in the middle of the warm her mother kept for family.

She looked at the two of them. Rennie was talking fast and bright, with a smile that wasn’t going anywhere.

The room dropped about four degrees.

Wick peeled off her shoulder and crossed the floor in a hurry and put himself on the arm of Mom’s chair, which was where Wick went when it got cold.

Wick said something from over there. Wren let it go past her.

The boy had turned his head.

He looked at her and went still, the kind of still people get when they hear a noise at night and are working out which room it’s in. Then he put one hand down flat on the seat cushion, like the couch had shifted under him. Then he made himself stop looking at her, which took him about a second and a half.

Wren watched him do all of it.

“Wren.”

Her mother didn’t raise her voice. She never did. She just said the name.

Wren pulled it back in.

“Morning, Mom.” She got it out the way she got things out in front of guests. “I’m going to go find Dad.”

She was around the corner before anybody could turn it into a conversation. Behind her, in the living room, her mother said something low and easy to Rennie, the voice she used when a thing needed handling and she didn’t want anyone watching her handle it.

“Got it,” Rennie said.

Her mother got up. Wren heard the chair, and then footsteps in the hall, coming her way.

She sat down on the back step to put her socks on. The boards were cold. She took her time with them.

“The furnaces are in here,” Rennie said, and went, and left him to keep up.

He followed her in.

The room had one window, one bulb, and a smell he knew better than the house did. Cabinets stood along two walls, and most of the glass in the doors was still glass, and behind it were furnaces, shelf after shelf of them. Small ones up top, the size of a fist. Bigger ones under those. One on the middle shelf set square in the middle with room around it, which meant hands went to it and not to the others.

On the floor under the window, in a row, the serious ones. Waist-high, chest-high, one standing as tall as Rennie and change.

He knew what they were for. He’d been close to one before, and not by choice.

And among the furnaces, on the same shelves, in the same rows:

A frying pan. A pot with a warped lid. A pressure cooker, dented at the handle, at eye level.

He looked at the pressure cooker for a while. Nothing about it resolved, so he left it.

“See?” Rennie had her hand on the tall one by the door. “I told you she has a lot.”

“Wren and I both came out of one of these,” she said, to the furnace as much as to him.

He waited for the rest of it.

There wasn’t any rest of it. She had already moved down the row.

“When I get my own hearth-fire, Mom’s going to give me one. A good one.” She looked back at him to make sure he had the next part, because it was the important part. “You’re her only apprentice, so she’ll give you one too.”

A furnace, as a gift. He filed it, next to the pressure cooker.

“You really want a hearth-fire,” he said.

“Of course I want one,” Rennie said. “Everybody wants one.” She got her chin up the way you do when you’ve been carrying a thing around and you’re tired of being laughed at for it. “I’m going to get strong first, too. Before we bind. So I don’t turn out to be a little fool about it.”

A little fool about it. He had said that to her once, in another room. She had kept it, and now she was handing it back to him.

“Do you know they aren’t born that way?” he said.

“Who isn’t?”

“Hearth-fires.” He kept his voice flat. “They aren’t born hearth-fires. Somebody catches them. Somebody strong enough to hold one comes along and takes it, and after that it works in a furnace, and that is not the same thing as wanting to.”

Rennie thought about it. She was not a kid who could think about something and keep her face out of it.

“Is that true?”

“Mm.”

“But Uncle Wick likes Mom,” she said. “He says so all the time. He’s glad she’s his partner and he likes the work. Every day. So it can’t be like that. Not for all of them.”

He let that stand. She had lived her whole life next to the answer; he had spent his on the other side of it.

“I’ll tell you about one,” he said.

He told it to the row of furnaces as much as to her.

“There’s a fire I know. From the day it had anything you could call a self, there have been people after it. Practitioners. Families of them. Somebody has been working out how to catch it every day of its life. So it got strong instead. It ate the guild’s greenhouse beds and everything growing in them, and anything else it could reach, and it got big enough that holding it stopped being a plan anybody would buy.”

He stopped.

“That’s all of it. Get too big to hold.”

He had told the whole of it without once saying whose fire it was. She didn’t ask.

“It must be popular,” Rennie said.

“Popular.”

“With that many people after it.”

Popular. He turned the word over and it didn’t break. Take away the running and the years, and what was left was a fire everybody wanted, and she had a word for it. He had never heard it said out loud.

Her hand was still on the tall one. She said the next part to the furnace and not to him.

“It’s too bad it doesn’t want to. Because if it did, I’d ask it. To be mine.” Her hand stayed where it was. “We’d be really good friends.”

He had heard the reasons before. A lot of them. From people with licenses and people without, and every one of them had started in the same place, which was how strong it was.

He wanted to hear hers.

“Why do you want it as a hearth-fire?” he said.