Chapter Three: A Light Next Door

On my second Thursday at Hobb's Pledges and Loans, the bell rang nine times, and not one of them was Mrs Fennick.

I counted. I had not meant to. I lay on the front shelf in my scuttle and told myself I was listening to the street, but every time the bell went I lifted my head an inch to smell the doorway. A coal merchant. Two women with a feather bed between them. A boy with his father's watch, who came back an hour later and asked for it again. No lavender. No pipe. At closing time Mrs Hobb turned the sign and said, to the room in general, that Thursdays were always slow.

Tansy carried me through to the back room, as she did every night now. She always asked first. I never answered, and she always took that as a yes.

It was colder that night than it had been all week. The frost had got into the back room through the walls. I heard it working in the plaster like a mouse. Quill had fluffed himself up on his shelf until he was twice his size and half as dignified. Even the stove seemed colder, which should not have been possible for a thing that had been dead for years.

Tansy went up to her room. Her room was over the shop, at the top of a stair that creaked on the fourth and ninth steps. I heard her sit at her table. I heard her open a bottle and dip a pen. Then I heard her say something under her breath that was nearly, but not quite, the word Mr Abel had used.

"Ink's frozen," said Quill, to me. He said it with great satisfaction, as if he had predicted it. "It does that in a hard winter. Last time it did that, she was nine."

The stair creaked on the ninth step and the fourth. Then the shop door opened, and the bell gave its cracked little note, and the cold came in and the door shut behind it. She had gone out.

I listened for her. It was not difficult. The shop on our left was a cobbler's, and its back room shared a wall with ours. Through the wall I heard a knock, and a door, and an old man's voice, rough with sleep.

"Can you spare a light?" said Tansy.

She said it the way you say a thing you have been taught. It had a shape to it, those five words, a shape that was older than the girl, older than the cobbler, older than the street. I had not heard it in a long time. Wizards do not need to borrow a light, and Master Fennick and I had kept our own.

"Gladly," said the cobbler. That was the shape of the answer, too. Then there was a rustle and a scrape, and I felt it, even through the wall: the small warm push of a candle being lit from a hearth. Fire passing from one hand to another, freely, the way it should.

"Thank you kindly," Tansy said.

"Pass it on, love," said the cobbler, and shut his door.

She came back in with it cupped in her hands. The bell rang, the cold came in, and then the warmth came in after it, small and steady and real. A candle lit from a given hearth is only a candle. It does not heat a room. But it is warm the way a hand is warm, and in that shop, in that winter, it felt like a bonfire.

I waited to hear her go up the stairs with it. She had a frozen bottle of ink up there and a room with frost on the inside of the window. Instead she came through the curtain into the back room and set the candle down on the floor. She set it between the owl's shelf and my scuttle, exactly between, as if she had measured.

"There," she said. "Now it's nobody's, so it's everybody's."

"What about your ink?" said Quill.

"It'll keep till morning." She sat down on her crate and held her hands out to the flame, but not too close, as though it belonged to us and she was only visiting.

I noticed that. Let the record show that I noticed it, on the second Thursday, long before anything else happened. She had gone out into the cold to ask for a light, and then she had given it away to an owl and a pledge.

We sat like that for a while, the three of us, in the small round of warmth. I am not proud of what happened next. The candle had made me feel better than I had felt since Ferrier Street, and when a dragon feels better, it boasts.

"That cobbler's hearth," I said. "Do you know where it came from?"

"From his father's, I expect," said Tansy. "And his father's from somebody's."

"And theirs from somebody's, all the way back," I said. "All the way back to a ford in a river, and a few huts, and a hill above them with a dragon lying on it. The people in the huts were cold. They had come a long way. They had nothing to trade. The dragon lit their first hearth for nothing, because they asked, and because it was a hard winter. That fire was passed from hut to hut, and then from house to house, for nine hundred years. Every warm fire in this city is a cousin of that one."

The candle ticked softly between us.

"That's a story," said Tansy. "Every child in Greyhithe knows it. The Founders' Fire."

"It is a story," I said. "I was in it."

I had expected her to laugh. Or to say "Were you?" in that voice that meant she would check it later. Instead she went very quiet. She sat on her crate and did not move at all, and I could hear her thinking, the way you can hear a kettle that is about to boil.

"You lit it," she said at last.

"I did." My tail curled round the inside of the scuttle, the way it used to when I was young.

"The first one. Every fire in the city. Mr Abel's grandmother's, and the cobbler's, and this one." She looked at the candle. I could not see her look at it, but I heard her turn her head. "And your fire's going out."

I had not told anyone that. I had not told the owl. I had certainly not told her.

"How do you know that?" It came out louder than I meant, and the owl flinched.

"Because you're smaller than you were on Thursday," she said. "I picked you up every night. You're lighter. Not by much. By about as much as a candle burns down." She did not say it unkindly. She said it the way she'd say that a pledge was due. "I keep the ledger. I notice what things weigh."

Quill said nothing at all, which in eleven years he had perhaps never done before. The candle burned on between us, a cousin of mine, nine hundred years removed.

Tansy did not ask me anything else that night. She sat with her hands held out to a flame she had given away, and she stayed until it guttered. Then she said good night to us both and went up the stairs, the fourth step and the ninth, to her frozen ink.

In the morning, when she came down to open the shop, there was a card on the mat. She picked it up. I smelled it from the back room before she had read a word of it. It smelled of lamp oil and of starch.

"The Lamplighters' Guild," she read aloud, slowly, "presents its compliments."