Chapter One: Pledged

I was pawned on a Thursday, in a coal scuttle, for eleven crowns, and I would like that on the record.

The bell over the door of Hobb's Pledges and Loans rang as we came in. It was a thin, cracked little bell, and it has rung at the start of everything that matters in this story, so you may as well get used to it now. I did not see the shop that first morning. My eyes had been going for thirty years, and by then they were good for light and dark and not much else. But I can tell you exactly what it was like, because a nose is worth ten eyes if you have been alive long enough to train it.

It smelled of brass polish and old wool. Under that was ink, and soap, and the particular sour cold of a room where nobody has lit a fire in years. Somewhere high up to my left, something feathered shifted its weight and sighed. A pencil was being chewed.

Mrs Fennick set the scuttle on the counter. The counter was glass, and it was so cold I felt it through the iron.

"I would like to pledge this," she said. She had a voice like a good pair of gloves gone thin at the fingers. "It's for the rent."

That was a lie. I knew it was a lie the way you know a step is missing in the dark. Mrs Fennick smelled of lavender and damp and, very faintly, of her husband's pipe, and when she said "rent" the lavender went sharp. I said nothing. I had been saying nothing for a fortnight, since the day they carried Master Fennick out of the house on Ferrier Street, and I did not intend to break the habit for a pawnbroker.

"And what exactly is it, Mrs Fennick?" said the pawnbroker. Her voice was dry and quick, a voice that counted things.

"He is a dragon, Mrs Hobb," said Mrs Fennick. "He was my husband's. His name is Aldevar."

Aldevar the Undimmed, if we are being formal, and I generally am. Nobody in the shop asked about the second part. I did not offer it.

"It's very small for a dragon." The pencil further along the counter stopped being chewed.

"He used to be a great deal bigger." She did not say when.

I want to explain that, since nobody in the shop did. A dragon is roughly the size of its fire. When I was young and the fire was young, I was the size of a barn, and I could lie along the ridge of a hill and warm the whole valley under me. Every hundred years or so since then I have been a little smaller. By the morning I was pawned I was about the size of a large and disappointed cat. My scales were the colour of old pennies, and my breathing sounded like a bellows with a hole in it. I fitted in the scuttle with room for my tail.

The pawnbroker leaned closer. She smelled of brass polish, as if she had been polishing the shop's door handles for forty years and some of it had soaked in.

"Does it bite?" she asked. "I charge more for the ones that bite."

I bit the ticket. She had just written it out and was holding it over the scuttle, and it was right there. It tasted of ink and of the word "eleven". She took her hand back very fast.

"I'd put that down as a yes," said a third voice, from further along the counter.

It was a young voice, a girl's, careful and level. It belonged to the chewed pencil. I had not noticed her come over. She moved lightly, with small quick steps, and she smelled of ink and soap and of being cold all the time, which was something I would learn about her later.

"Thank you, Tansy," said the pawnbroker, without warmth. "Write it up. One dragon, name of Aldevar, elderly, small, bites. Eleven crowns against it." She turned back to the widow. "Redeemable at any time before Midwinter, Mrs Fennick. Eleven crowns and the interest. After that it goes to the Reckoning with everything else."

"I know how a pledge works, Mrs Hobb."

"Everybody says that," said Mrs Hobb. "Hardly anybody does."

Mrs Fennick laid her gloved hand on the rim of the scuttle, not quite touching me. For a moment I thought she was going to say something to me, the kind of thing you say at a door. Then the lavender went sharp again, and she took the torn half of the ticket, and the bell rang, and she was gone.

So that was that. I lay in the scuttle on the cold glass and decided that I would sulk until she came back for me or until my fire went out, whichever came first. I did not much mind which. I had been alive for a very long time, and the one person who had known what I was had been carried out of Ferrier Street feet first.

"Right," said Mrs Hobb. "Back room. Mind your fingers."

She reached for the handle of the scuttle. I showed her my teeth, which are still very good, and I made the noise. I can't make much of a noise these days, but I can still make that one. It is the sound a chimney makes just before it catches. Mrs Hobb took her hand back for the second time that morning.

"Well," she said, "it can stay on the counter, then, and frighten the customers."

There was a pause. Then the girl spoke, quite close to me, and not to Mrs Hobb.

"May I?" she said. "I'm going to pick you up by the handle and carry you through to the back. It's no warmer, but it's quieter, and nobody will poke you."

I want you to understand how rare that was. In all my years of being carried about, by wizards and apprentices and porters and once, memorably, by a bishop, nobody had ever asked. People ask a dog. They don't ask a scuttle.

I did not answer her. But I did not make the noise either, and I kept my teeth to myself. She took that for the yes it was. She lifted the scuttle carefully, both hands, and carried me through a curtain that smelled of moth and into the back room, and set me down beside the stove.

The stove was cold. I could tell from a foot away that it had been cold for years. There was old ash in it, gone hard as a pavement.

"That's Quill," said the girl, and the feathered thing above us shifted. "He's an owl. He's been on the shelf for eleven years. Don't let him tell you about it, he'll never stop."

"I heard that, and I shall tell him about it regardless," said the owl.

"You were meant to hear it." She was doing something with a cup. I heard water poured, and then nothing for a while, and then I understood she was holding the cup between her two hands to take the chill off it before she gave it to him. Her hands were not much warmer than the water. She did it anyway. Then she set the cup on the shelf, and the owl drank. He said thank you in the grudging way of a creature who has been saying it for eleven years and resents every one of them.

"The thing to know about this shop," she told me, settling her skirts on an upturned crate, "is that everything in it is for something. Mrs Hobb's father used to say never get attached to stock. She still says it. You're stock now. So am I, more or less. It's not as bad as it sounds."

"Fire is not a thing one lends," I said.

It was the first thing I had said aloud in a fortnight, and my voice came out rusty and much too loud for the room. The owl flinched. The girl did not.

"No," she agreed, after a moment, as if I'd told her the price of coal. "I don't suppose it is."

She went back into the shop. I lay with my nose against the cold stove and listened to the afternoon. The bell rang four more times. A man pawned a clock. A woman bought a coat. Once, under her breath and to nobody, Mrs Hobb said that one should never get attached.

When the shop was shut and dark and colder than ever, I heard the ledger open on the counter. It was a big ledger, and its pages turned with a sound like a slow wing. Then the girl's voice, very quiet, as she did with every new pledge, counting the days to Midwinter.

"Forty-two," she said. Then she stopped, and the pencil went still, and I heard her count again, more slowly, as though the number had come out wrong the first time and she wanted to be sure.