Chapter 1: The Joke of Lanternhall
By half past nine, the betting slate in the great hall of Lanternhall stood at forty-one steps.
It hung on the pillar beside the duty board, where the junior Wicks had chalked it in the first week and nobody senior had bothered to wipe it off. How far up the stairs today? Below the question ran three weeks of guesses, initials and copper stakes, and below those, in Pip Quill's cramped hand, the record: fifty-eight.
Brynn Holloway came through the east doors at nine thirty-two with a man in her arms.
He was not small. Standing, Emrys Vale was a head taller than most of the room, but he weighed about as much as a rolled winter rug, and his long legs hung over her forearm at an awkward angle. His black hair had fallen across her shoulder. One hand still held a fistful of her coat, where he had caught at it on the outer staircase around the thirty-fifth step, just before his knees gave out.
The hall went quiet in the way it did when people were trying not to laugh.
Brynn crossed to the bench under the east window and set him down, propping his head against the stone. His lashes moved. His eyes opened, grey as rain on slate.
"I'm sorry," he said. It was always the first thing he said.
"Sit still." She pulled off one glove with her teeth, pressed two fingers under his jaw and counted. Slow, but steady. Then she walked to the pillar, read the slate and held out her hand to the nearest junior. "Thirty-five. Nobody guessed thirty-five. The house takes the pot."
"You're not in the pool, Warden."
"I carried the stake."
She pocketed the coppers. Behind her, Emrys made a sound that might have been a laugh if he had had the breath for one.
Day twenty-one, she thought. Sixty-nine to go.
She had found him on a night of hard rain, in a fish alley in the Dusk Quarter where a half-blood cooper had vanished an hour before. The Compact called the disappearances the Grey Hours, because nobody ever saw anything, only an empty bed and a door left open. That night there had been something to see: a young man face down by the gutter, barefoot, with a raw red ring around each wrist, as if he had pulled free of something. He had no papers. He had a name, which he gave her before he fainted, and a pulse too slow for a human and too warm for a Nocturne.
Dusk-born. Unregistered. Under the Treaty of Glass, that meant a cell in the Undercroft, unless a Warden took him under a Writ of Keeping.
She had read him the terms herself the next morning in the infirmary, every clause, because she did not trust the clerks to do it properly. Ninety days. Her name on his file. Her responsibility for anything he did. And the clause she read twice: The Kept may dissolve this Writ at any hour, by his own word.
"You understand you can walk away," she had said.
He had looked at the paper, then at the window, then at her. "Not very far," he said, and signed.
Pip arrived at the bench now with his spectacles taped at one hinge and his suspicion in good working order.
"Morning, Warden. Morning, Mister Vale." He crouched. "Pockets, please."
"Pip."
"Standard procedure for unregistered persons on Compact premises."
Emrys emptied his coat without comment: a stub of pencil, a folded sheet of paper, and a small book with its spine removed, the pages held between two boards with linen thread.
"What's that?"
"A hymnal from 1702," Emrys said. "Someone used it to level a table. I'm rebinding it."
Pip checked every page for hidden writing, found a water stain shaped like a duck, and handed it back looking disappointed.
The doors of the Law wing opened. Elder Corvin Thistlewood came out with a stack of ledgers under one arm and an Archive clerk hurrying beside him.
"Salt-silver," the old man was saying. "Again. Four requisitions this quarter, for a department that polishes nothing and fights no one. I want the dockets on my desk by Friday. Not a summary. The dockets."
"Yes, Elder."
His silver-headed cane struck the floor in time with his steps, and it stopped in front of the bench. He looked at Emrys the way he might look at a water mark on good paper.
"Warden Holloway. Lanternhall has been entertained for three weeks. I had assumed you would tire of the act."
"I haven't."
"You are a Pyre-rank Wick. One of four in this city. You carry him up staircases. You feed him from a spoon, I am told."
"Only his medicine."
"You sit up with him when it thunders." Someone near the duty board laughed. Thistlewood did not turn around. "Mercy is a fine thing among our own kind. Spent on something that is not human, it becomes a weakness. And weaknesses get Wicks killed."
Emrys had gone completely still on the bench.
Brynn stood up. She was an inch taller than the Elder, and she did not step back.
"Half of him is human, Elder," she said. "The other half isn't a crime."
Nobody laughed now.
Thistlewood studied her for a long moment, the scar through her left eyebrow, the silver candle badge on her coat. "Then the law will say so, in sixty-nine days," he said. "Until it does, he is your responsibility. So is anything he does."
He walked on.
* * *
The Seat of Records kept a tea room at the top of the Glasswater Archive, where the windows looked across the fog to the great lamp of Lanternhall's tower. Odette Lark poured chamomile into two cups with great care.
She was small, silver-haired, her bun fixed with a pin shaped like a key. Gold spectacles, a grey robe, white silk gloves. When she set the pot down, the right glove slid a finger's width along her wrist, and Brynn saw the edge of the old scar, thin pale lines spreading outward like a web. She had seen it all her life. Odette had never said where it came from, and Brynn had learned young not to ask.
"Corvin means well," Odette said. "He simply means it loudly."
"He means it in front of Emrys."
"Then be kinder than he is. You always have been." Odette slid a small brown bottle across the table. "From the infirmary. Hearthmoss. It should help him through the storms. Is he sleeping, Brynn? Properly? The whole night through?"
"Mostly. Not when it thunders."
"Give it to him before bed, then. Every night, without fail."
Brynn put the bottle in her coat. "I need something else. A blank Heartwick vial, from the Archive stores."
Odette's eyebrows rose over the gold rims. "For the boy?"
"For my ward. He's twenty-three."
"For your ward." Odette smiled, opened a drawer and took out a vial no longer than a finger, clear glass with a brass cap. She wrote the requisition slip herself and tore it off. "Glass remembers what it holds. Be careful what you put inside."
Outside, the great lamp was wrapped in scaffolding and canvas. Workmen hung on ropes around it like spiders in a gale.
"Renovations," Odette said, following her gaze. "Before the storm season ends, it will shine brighter than it has in thirty years." She lifted her cup. "And after the storms, the Circle votes on the Fifth Seat. You will have mine."
"Even with a Duskling living in my house?"
"Especially then. Someone on that council ought to remember they are people."
* * *
The house on Tallow Lane was three storeys tall and one room wide, with a staircase so steep that the landlord called it a ladder with ambitions. Emrys insisted on the first flight. He managed it, one hand on the rail and one on the wall, and stood at the top breathing hard while Brynn waited below. Then she carried him up the other two.
Supper was porridge. It was the only thing she could make, and she could not make it well. The bottom of the pot had gone black again.
Emrys tasted it and considered.
"It has a very distinctive charcoal note," he said.
"That's the oats."
"I'm sure it is."
She was scraping the pot when he spoke again, quieter.
"I remembered something today. From before the alley."
Brynn put down the spoon.
"There was an eye," he said. "Glass, I think. The size of a plate. Someone held it over me, and it looked at me, and it turned blue."
The candle between them dipped. Its flame lay nearly flat, as if in a draught, though every window in the room was shut. When he stopped talking, it straightened.
Brynn looked at it, then at him. She took out her notebook and wrote glass eye, turned blue under the date, and underlined it twice. The candle she put down to the old house.
* * *
The storm came in off the harbour a little before midnight.
She found him on the top step of the stairs in the dark, knees drawn up, shaking hard enough that the old wood creaked under him. He did not explain.
"It passes," he said.
She sat down one step below him. After a while, his hand found the hem of her coat and held on.
Brynn took out Odette's vial and pulled off her glove. She closed her fist, and Saltlight gathered in her palm, white-gold and warm, the light every Wick carried bound to their own pulse. She fed a single drop through the neck of the glass and sealed the brass cap with her thumb. Inside, the drop settled and began to beat. Slow. Even. Her heartbeat.
"It's called a Heartwick," she said. "Wardens give them to the people they keep. It's tied to me. Hold it to your ear."
He did. Thunder broke directly overhead. His shoulders jerked, but his hand stayed where it was.
"That's you?" he asked.
"That's me."
"It's very steady."
"It's meant to be."
She threaded it on a leather cord and hung it around his neck, tucked under the collar of the cream jumper that had been hers before it was his. Then she gave him the Hearthmoss in a spoon of honey. He said thank you. He always said thank you. He was asleep within a quarter of an hour.
Downstairs, she dropped into the armchair by the door with her boots still on. Her fingertips had gone cold, the nails faintly grey. She flexed them twice, blamed the weather, and was asleep before the next roll of thunder.
* * *
The horns woke her.
Every Speaking Lamp on Tallow Lane blared at once, the brass mouths on their iron posts giving three long blasts: an attack on an officer of the Compact. Then the dispatcher's voice came through the pipes.
"All Wicks. Thistlewood residence, Harrow Square. Repeat. Harrow Square."
Brynn was through the door before the second repeat. She did not look up the stairs.
Harrow Square was grey with dawn and fog. The Elder's house still stood, but its roof had been torn open like the lid of a tin, the slates flung across the cobbles, the rafters bent outward, from the inside. Pip was already there, holding back a crowd in nightclothes. Thistlewood was alive, he told her. Unconscious. Carried out on a door. Nobody had seen anything.
Brynn climbed into the ruin of the upper floor. A scorch mark ran along the main beam, a pattern she did not recognise, like links burned into the wood. Below it, in the broken plaster, something caught the grey light.
She crouched and lifted it out.
A Heartwick, split cleanly in two. The leather cord snapped. And inside the larger half, a single drop of white-gold light, still beating.
Slow. Even. Fading.
Hers.