Chapter Eight: The First Flame

The bell did not ring again that night, and in the morning it did not ring either. The first snow had come down on Greyhithe, and nobody went out in it who did not have to.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The thing that matters happened before the snow, in the back room of Hobb's Pledges and Loans, a little after midnight. I have told this part of the story a great many times since, and I always tell it wrong, so I will try to tell it plainly.

Tansy was sitting on her crate with the dead candle in her hands. Her hands were blue. The cobbler's fire had gone out, and there was no other given hearth on our side of Tallow Lane, and she knew it, because she had just written the list. She did not cry again. I think she had used it all up earlier. She simply sat there in the cold with the candle, as if holding it might be enough.

She did not ask me. That is the part I always get wrong when I tell it. People want her to have asked, because it makes a better story. She did not. She had asked me once, on her knees, and I had said no, and she had not asked me anything since. She was not going to ask again. She was not a girl who asked for things twice.

So I did it without being asked.

I lifted my head out of the scuttle. It was harder than it should have been. I stretched my neck towards her hands, slowly, like reaching for a thing on a high shelf. I could not see the candle. I could smell it, the cold wax and the black wick, and I could feel where her hands were by the faint warmth still in them. Then I opened my mouth, very carefully, and I breathed.

Giving a flame is like giving away a coat on a cold night. You feel the fire leave, and you feel exactly where it was, and you know you won't get it back. For nine hundred years I had kept every flame I had. I had warmed my wizard's feet and a few kings' halls, and I had done it by sitting near them, which costs nothing. I had not given a flame away, not truly, not since a hill above a ford and a few huts.

The wick caught. It made the small sound a wick makes, like a word you hadn't expected someone to say. And the warmth came off it, real and steady, and spread out over Tansy's blue hands.

And something in my chest went out.

Not all of it. Do not worry. I am still here, telling you this. But a part of my fire that had been burning there since before the city had a name went out like a lamp in a window, and the place where it had been was cold. I felt myself get smaller. Not much. A week's worth, perhaps. Perhaps more. My scales settled tighter round me. My breath, when I drew it back in, rattled like a bellows with two holes.

Tansy did not move for a long moment. Then she said, in a very small voice, "Oh."

That was all. Just that. I lay back down in the scuttle, because I did not have the strength to hold my head up any longer. I listened to the candle tick between her hands, and the warmth go back into her fingers.

"You said no," she said at last. "On your shelf. I asked you, and you said no."

"I did say that." I did not open my eyes.

"You said it was yours." Her hands had closed round the candle.

"It is mine," I said. "That is rather the point. You can't give away a thing that isn't."

Quill, on his shelf, had not made a sound. Now he made one. It was not a word. It was the sound an owl makes when it has seen something it intends to remember.

Tansy did not go to bed. She sat with the candle until her hands were pink again, and then she got up and went to the back door. I heard her open the coal cellar, the one with Mrs Hobb's two sacks in it, the coal there had been nothing warm to light with. I heard her fill a scuttle. Not mine. One of the iron ones from the yard.

"Where are you going?" said Quill.

"Next door," said Tansy. "He's been sitting in the dark since Tuesday."

The bell rang. The cold came in. Through the wall, a few minutes later, I heard the cobbler's door, and the old man's voice, and Tansy's. Then I heard a sound I had not heard in that street in all the weeks I had been there. A hearth catching. A real one, from a given flame, with good coal on it. The warmth of it came through the plaster to us, very faint, like a voice in another room.

"Pass it on, love," I heard the cobbler say. His voice had gone thick.

"I will," said Tansy. "I promise I will."

When she came back, she did not say anything about it. She put the candle on the floor between Quill's shelf and my scuttle, exactly between, as she had on the second Thursday. Then she went up the stairs. I heard her stop on the fourth step, and stand there a while, and then go on.

That was before the snow.

In the morning, the back room was colder than it had ever been. You will think that strange, with a given candle burning in it. But a candle is only a candle, and I had always been warmer than I let on. Some of what had been keeping that room above freezing for three weeks had been me, lying by the dead stove, ticking. Now there was less of me to tick. Quill's water had a skin of ice on it when Tansy came down. Mrs Hobb came through the curtain to fetch the coal ledger, and stopped.

She stood there a long time. She was looking at me. I could feel it, the way you can feel a draught.

I knew what she saw. I was smaller. I was a great deal greyer at the edges, the way coals go grey. My breathing was louder. And there on the floor was a candle burning warm, in a shop where nobody had been able to beg a light since Tuesday. Mrs Hobb could add up a column faster than anybody in Greyhithe. She did not need it explained.

She said nothing. For a woman who said "never get attached" six times a day, it was a great deal to say nothing. She went to the cellar and counted the coal. One sack and a half. She did not write it down. Then she went back into the shop, and turned the sign, and the bell did not ring, because of the snow.

Tansy came and knelt by my scuttle. She did not sit on the crate. She knelt on the cold boards, the way she had when she asked me the first time.

"Don't you ever do that again," she said. Her voice was furious, which I had not expected. It was also wet, which I had. "Do you hear me? I can count. I know what it cost. I'm not worth a week of you. Nobody on this street is worth a week of you. Don't you ever do that again."

"I shall do as I like," I said. "I am a dragon."

She made a sound that was not quite a word. I think it was meant to be angry. It did not come out angry.

We stayed like that for some time, the girl on the floor and the dragon in the scuttle and the owl on the shelf. There was one small warm flame between us, and the snow coming down outside on Tallow Lane. Then I said the thing I had been lying awake all night deciding whether to say. I had never said it to anyone, not in nine hundred years. It is a very hard thing for a dragon to say.

"Tansy," I said. "I should like to ask you for something."

She went very still.

"I should like to be taken to see Mrs Fennick," I said. "Tonight, if you would. If you'd be so kind."