Chapter Thirteen: Given

The bell rang very late on Midwinter night, long after dark, and it was Tansy, with a candle in her hands and snow in her hair.

Mrs Hobb had set my scuttle by the stove in the back room, and then she had sat down on the crate beside it. She had not lit anything. There was nothing to light. She had not gone up to bed, either. She had sat there for six hours in her coat, in the cold, and I had lain in the scuttle and listened to her not saying never get attached.

When the bell went, she stood up so fast the crate fell over.

Tansy came through the curtain. I felt her flame before anything else. She had carried it all over Greyhithe, and given it to more people than either of us could count, and it was still burning in her two hands. A given flame doesn't get smaller for being shared. That's the whole point of it.

"Every house on Tallow Lane," she said. Her voice was hoarse from the cold and from talking. "And Ferrier Street, and the Corn Bridge, and right down to the river. They're still going, out past the walls. People came to the door before I knocked." She stopped. "Is he...?"

"Ask him yourself," said Mrs Hobb. "He's your dragon."

Tansy knelt by the scuttle. "Al?"

"I am here," I said. "Somewhat reduced. Don't fuss."

She did not fuss. She did something better. She opened the door of the dead stove, the one that had been cold for years, and she scraped out the old ash, hard as a pavement. She laid coal in it from the cellar, the last half sack. Then she held her candle to it, and she said, quite seriously, as if she were asking a neighbour, "Can you spare a light?"

She was asking the candle, I think. Or herself. And the candle answered. The coal caught, and the stove ticked, and the warmth came out of it into the back room of Hobb's Pledges and Loans for the first time since before Tansy was born.

Then she lifted me out of the scuttle in both hands, and she asked me first, and I said yes out loud this time. She set me inside the stove, on the warm coal, at the back, where I could curl round the fire.

I will tell you how that felt, and then I will stop telling you how things felt, because this is nearly the end. It felt like Ferrier Street. It felt like a hill above a ford. It felt like being given a coat on a cold night.

The next morning, Mrs Hobb paid the landlord at eight, and the coal merchant at half past. She paid the man who mends the roof at nine. All of it came out of two hundred and ten crowns of Guild money. By law most of that was Mrs Fennick's, since she had pledged me. She had told Mrs Hobb to keep it, on the steps of the auction hall, and would not hear another word. Then she opened the strongbox.

She did it at the counter, with Tansy beside her and the bell quiet, because she had not turned the sign. She took out a small square of card, brown with age, with a child's ticket number on it. I heard Tansy stop breathing.

"This is your pledge ticket," said Mrs Hobb. "Your mother's half was never brought back. This is mine." She held it up. "I didn't redeem you yesterday. I won't have you bought, not even by me. You'd have known it every day of your life." She held the ticket a moment longer. "A pledge with no ticket is no pledge. The magistrates can't list what doesn't exist."

And she tore it in half. And then in half again. It made a small dry sound, like a page turning.

Then she opened the old ledger, the one from the year of the flood, at the line that said one girl, aged five. She dipped her pen. She wrote one word in the margin, in ink this time, so that it would never rub out.

"Given," she read aloud, when she had written it. "There."

"The pencil," said Tansy. Her voice was very small. "Every year. I thought it said—"

"I know what you thought it said," said Mrs Hobb. "I know you read it. You left the ledger on the back-room floor." She was quiet for a moment. "It said not for sale. Every year, since your sixth birthday. I'd write it down, and then I'd think, if I write that, she'll know, and then one day she'll go. And I'd rub it out." Her voice was dry and quick, a voice that counted things. It did not quite count them right. "Never get attached, my father said. I was very bad at it. I've always been very bad at it."

Tansy did not say anything. She did not need to. I heard her cross the boards, the small quick steps, and I heard Mrs Hobb's coat creak as she was hugged. Mrs Hobb said "Well," twice. It did not seem to be the beginning of any sentence.

Quill left the shelf that afternoon.

He made a speech about it first. Of course he did. He said that eleven years was a career, and that every career must end, and that he had not been redeemed but had decided, on reflection, to redeem himself. Then he opened his wings. They creaked. He had not opened them properly in eleven years, and he lost three feathers doing it. He flew once round the shop, very low, knocking over the box of spoons. And then he landed on the stove pipe, where it was warmest, and settled his feathers, and stayed.

Nobody listed him. Nobody needed to. He was not anybody's pledge any more.

On Thursday, the bell rang at ten in the morning, and the shop filled with lavender. Mrs Fennick came through to the back room and sat on the crate in front of the stove. She smelled of her own grate now, given and warm, and of his pipe, and she did not seem to mind either. She talked to me about him. I did not pretend to be asleep.

At the end she hummed the three bars of his song, the ones he never finished. And I did something I had never done for him, because I had always thought there would be time. I hummed a fourth.

I made it up. I have no idea if it was right. Mrs Fennick laughed, and cried a little, and said it was exactly the sort of thing he'd have come up with, and that it was dreadful. She has come every Thursday since.

That was a few winters ago now.

I am still here, in the stove at the back of Hobb's Pledges and Loans, on Tallow Lane. I am very small and rather dim, and I glow more than I would like. I am still rude to the owl. Tansy says I will last a good while yet, if I stop giving fire to every customer who comes in with cold hands. I have not stopped. It is mine, and I shall do as I like with it. I am a dragon.

I should say that I am quite comfortable.

It is nearly six. The shop will be shutting soon. Tansy has been out on her rounds, as she is most evenings in winter, with a candle and a list, knocking on doors where the fire has gone out.

Any minute now, I will hear her boots in the lane. And the bell over the door will ring, the thin cracked little bell that has rung at the start of everything in this story, for someone coming home.