Chapter 5: Three Months, No Sign

Her daughter sat on the cushion by the window, back straight, eyes shut, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she had been taught. Four rounds tonight. She had asked for five and been turned down flat.

Vesper sat on the couch six feet behind her with the phone face down at her elbow. The television was off. Vesper hadn’t turned it off, and she didn’t look around to see who had.

She left it there through the third round. Then she turned it over.

Anything?

The answer came back in a minute and a half, which was the usual minute and a half.

Still working it. Whoever it is has gone to ground. It’s going to take time.

She read it twice.

That isn’t an answer.

It’s the answer there is.

Say something the second you have something.

I will.

She looked at that a while. Then: And don’t forget to call Rennie.

I know.

Her husband had been gone a week.

Three months ago he had come in from the yard with his coat still on and told her there was something in the county. He couldn’t say what it was then, and he couldn’t say now. What he had was the fact of it. Something had come in and stopped, and had been sitting there ever since, not touching anything, which was worse than something tearing around.

She had walked the ward line herself twice that first month. After that she stopped. The line kept coming up clean, and a woman with a child starting school can’t spend every evening walking a line that keeps coming up clean.

Seven minutes past the hour, the fourth round ended. Rennie opened her eyes and looked at the couch first. She always looked at the couch first.

“I did four.”

“I saw.”

“Wren doesn’t have to.”

“Wren’s different,” Vesper said. “Up. Go wash up. I’ll be in the study.”

“But Mom—“

“Go.”

Rennie went, dragging her feet exactly as much as the floor allowed.

Wren’s cup was still on the floor by the couch with an inch of milk in it. Vesper picked it up and set it on the table.

The shop had closed at six. The house was as quiet as it ever got. Vesper set the phone on the arm of the couch and looked at the dent in the cushion where the four rounds had happened.

Her daughter’s attribute had come in the same as her mother’s. You could see it in a child before the child could talk straight — the same pull toward the same materials, the same feel for heat. Half of any class came up neutral, and if they did, you found them something else to do and that was the end of it. Rennie had not come up neutral.

Alchemy, then. Which was good news, and which was the whole problem, because alchemy meant fire, and fire meant a binding, and a binding meant the rest of a life.

In two years the girl would be ready to try. She was better at five than Vesper had been at eight. Two years, and there would have to be a fire, and it would have to be the right one, and there was not one to be had. A right fire was one that would take the work and take the person both, and want to. She had asked four people in the last year, and every one of them had given her the same answer: not this year.

She kept two saved searches going on the trade app. They had been up eleven months and had never once gone off. Fires did come up for sale now and then. That was the thing about fires. The ones that came up for sale came up for a reason, and the reason was never that the fire was good.

So: not on the market, not in this county, and not anywhere she could reach with a phone call. The idea came in sideways, the way bad ideas do, in the middle of something else: can a fire be shipped.

She gave it a full minute, because it was, when you got down to it, a shipping question. What would it come in, who would carry it, and how much of the cargo it would eat on the way.

A fire was not a package. A fire was at minimum a person, and you could not crate a person, and you certainly could not crate this one, because whatever you built the crate out of, the crate was the meal. You could not write FRAGILE on the crate, because whatever you wrote it on was next.

She got up and found the pad in the kitchen drawer. The pad was for errands. The first thing on the page was months old, in her own hand: Find Rennie a fire. She had never crossed it out.

Under it, in the small careful writing she used for things she intended to say out loud, she wrote:

Ask about shipping a fire.

It looked exactly as stupid on paper as it had in her head. She left it there anyway. Stupid questions cost nothing, and she had one person left who might actually know.

She went down the hall. At the end of it, on the shelf, the tablet was lit and the sound was off, and above the tablet a low orange something hung in the air and did nothing whatever that a fire needed to do.

“Night,” Vesper said.

“Mm,” said Wick, and did not elaborate.

In the study she turned on the lamp and took the folder out of the drawer.

The class list had come with the registration packet at the end of the summer. One page, eleven names, and a photocopied note about peanuts that had gone gray somewhere around the fourth copy.

She read it standing up, the way she read everything.

She knew nine of the eleven families on the list without having to read the first names. The trade in this part of the state was not large, and the families in it had been marrying each other on purpose for four generations, which was a separate problem and not one that was hers to solve before the term started.

The council had decided that this year’s children would come up together — one class, one town, one room, instead of scattered across districts and taught at kitchen tables by whichever parent had the afternoon free.

Vesper had signed the form the day it arrived. Not for the council’s reasons, and she had said so on the form, in writing, at the time.

A trade was only as good as the people in it. When Rennie was grown she would live inside whatever this trade had turned into by then, and so would Wren, and Vesper had opinions about the size of that room.

She knew most of the parents on the list. She had spoken to almost none of the children.

She put the folder back, and opened her messages, and scrolled to the top of the thread with her teacher, which was less a conversation than a stack. She had been writing to him on it since before Rennie was born.

Rennie’s enrolled at the school in town. Same attribute as mine.

Then, on the next line, without dressing it up:

Also — can a fire be shipped.

She looked at that one a while. It read better out loud, in a kitchen, with her hands busy. She sent it anyway. The gap between here and there ate a day or a week of every message no matter when it went, and the clock might as well start now. In all the years she had known him he had never once laughed at a question that sounded stupid.

She turned the lamp off and went back down the hall. The bathroom door was shut and the water was running. She stood outside it for a minute, which was the part of the evening she never got tired of, and then she went to start dinner.

Vesper writes “Ask about shipping a fire” on her errand pad, decides it’s exactly as stupid on paper as it was in her head, and leaves it there anyway. That’s the chapter to me — not bravery, just a mother deciding her own embarrassment is cheaper than her daughter’s future. The line above it has been there for months, in her own handwriting, and she has never once crossed it out: Find Rennie a fire. Stupid questions cost nothing. She’s betting her daughter’s whole life on that.

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