Chapter Ten: Pencil

The bell rang on the sixth Thursday for Mr Strand of the Lamplighters' Guild, who had come to settle the reserve.

Nearly two weeks had gone by since Ferrier Street. I will tell you about those two weeks quickly, because not much happened in it, and all of it was cold. Tansy did not talk about what I had said in the snow. She did not talk about Lot nineteen. She talked about other things, quite cheerfully, in the voice she used for customers, and I hated it more than if she had shouted.

She kept her promise to the cobbler, though. She passed it on. She took a light from his hearth, the hearth I had relit through her candle, and she carried it to the house across the lane. And from there, by the end of the first week, it had gone to two more. Three warm houses on Tallow Lane, from one given flame. She marked them on her list. I heard her pencil make three small ticks, and stop, and not make any more. There were twelve houses still cold, and Mrs Hobb's coal was nearly gone, and nobody else on the lane had any to spare.

I was smaller by the end of the fortnight. Not because I had given anything else. I hadn't. It was simply going, the way it had been going since before I came, only faster now, as if the flame I had given had taken a stone out of a wall. I could no longer lift my head out of the scuttle for long. When Tansy carried me through to the back room at night, she said I weighed about the same as a loaf.

The Guild had taken back their lamp from the counter on the Monday. Mrs Hobb could not pay the two shillings. So the only light in the shop at night was the given candle on the back-room floor, and me.

I should explain that. A dragon glows, a little, when its fire is low. Not brightly. About as brightly as a coal does when you blow on it. It is not a warm light. It is the fire showing through the scales where they have worn thin. I had been glowing all week. I did not like to think about why.

Mr Strand wiped both boots on the step. He took off his gloves and folded them one inside the other. He put a paper on the counter, and Mrs Hobb read it, and I heard her pen.

"Two hundred crowns reserve," said Mr Strand. "The Guild will bid at the Reckoning, and if no one bids higher, the creature is ours at noon on Midwinter Day. Thank you, Mrs Hobb. I know this isn't easy."

"You don't know anything about it, Mr Strand," said Mrs Hobb. But she had signed.

When he had gone, she went down to the cellar. She stayed there a long time. I heard her counting the coal, and then I heard her not counting anything, just standing.

Tansy did the accounts until closing. Then she carried me through to the back room, and set me down by the dead stove, and fetched the old ledger from the shelves at the far end of the shop. The one from the year of the flood.

"I want to look at it properly," she said. "I only saw it by the Guild lamp, and the Guild lamp's no good for pencil."

She knelt on the boards beside my scuttle and opened the ledger on the floor, so that it lay in my light. I could not read it. But I could hear the page turn, and I could hear her finger find the line. One girl, aged five. Pledged against four crowns.

"There's something beside it," she said. "In the margin. In pencil."

I heard her lean closer. I felt her breath on my scales, because she had put her face down almost into the scuttle to see by me.

"It's been rubbed out," she said. "Lots of times. It's the same few words, over and over, one on top of another. Somebody's written it every year and rubbed it out every year. Eleven times, I think. The paper's gone thin." Her finger moved, very slowly. "It's Mrs Hobb's hand. I'd know it anywhere."

"What does it say?" My tail had gone very still.

She was quiet for a long time.

"I can make out the end," she said. "It says for sale." Her finger moved back along the line, and stopped. "There's a word in front of it. Short. I can't read it. The rubber's taken it right through, it's worn a hole." She sat back on her heels. "For sale. Every year. She wrote it every year, Al."

It was the first time she had ever called me that, the first scrap of my name, Aldevar, with the rest of it left off. It was ridiculous. Nobody in nine hundred years had ever called me anything so short. I found I did not mind.

"You don't know what the other word was," I said.

"I know what it says, though." Her voice was very level. It was the voice she had used on the morning of Lot nineteen, the voice that said of course. "Every year she sat down with the ledger and thought about it. She wrote it down. And every year she rubbed it out, because it wasn't time yet, because I was still useful. And now I'm sixteen, and it's the law, and she doesn't have to rub it out anymore." She closed the ledger. It made a soft brittle sound, like a wing folding. "That's all right. I always knew. I'm stock. I said so myself, on your first night."

"You said more or less," I said. "I remember it distinctly. Stock, more or less."

She did not answer that.

I lay in my scuttle and glowed and did not know what to tell her. I could not read the word. Nobody could read the word. It had been rubbed out eleven times, by a woman who said never get attached six times a day.

And then I made myself think about my own word. The one I had been telling myself for nine hundred years, and especially since Ferrier Street. Mine. The fire is mine, and it ends with me.

It would end with me. That was quite true. In a week's time I would be carried to the Reckoning in my scuttle and sold to the Guild for two hundred crowns. At noon on Midwinter Day, Mr Strand had said, the creature would be theirs, and all fire arising from it. Whatever fire was still in me at noon would belong to the Guild. Mr Strand would take me home to a yard with a cage in it, and every morning he would put his thermometer under my wing. He would try to light his lamps from me, and they would burn cold, because they were bought. He would not understand why. And then, in a month or two, quietly, in that cage, my fire would go out. All of it, the last of the fire that had lit the first hearth in Greyhithe. It would end with me, exactly as I had always said it would.

And it would warm nobody. Not one house. Not one pair of blue hands.

I had kept it for nine hundred years so that it would be mine at the end. And at the end, it would be the Guild's.

I tried to lift my head out of the scuttle, then. I do not know what I meant to do. Go somewhere. Do something. I got my head perhaps an inch above the rim before it came down again, and my breath rattled in my chest like a bellows full of holes, and I lay there.

That was the coldest night of the winter. I have been told since that it was the coldest night in Greyhithe for forty years. The river froze at the edges right across to the Corn Bridge. Frost grew on the inside of the shop window until it met in the middle. Quill's water froze solid in its cup, and he said nothing about it, which frightened me more than anything.

Tansy went upstairs late. Then, through the ceiling, I heard her moving about her room. I heard a drawer open, and close. I heard cloth being folded, carefully, the way she folded everything. One cardigan. Another. A pair of stockings. A hairbrush. Not much. There was not much.

She was packing her bag for the Reckoning.

I lay in the cold dark of the back room, glowing a little, and listened to her pack. I listened until she had finished, and lain down, and stopped moving, and I knew she was not asleep.

And that was when I made up my mind.

I will not tell you yet what I decided. You will find out at the Reckoning, the same way everybody else did. But Let the record show that I decided it there, that night, in the cold, on the floor of Hobb's Pledges and Loans, and that nobody asked me to.