Breakfast by the Fire

The first piece of toast was black.

It was not a little brown at the edges. It was black all the way through, as black as the inside of a chimney, and when the man lifted it off the toasting-fork it was still smoking gently, like a small wet bonfire. He turned it over and looked at the other side, which was blacker.

Then he laughed.

He laughed out loud, sitting on his heels by the fire — a real laugh, a helpless one, the kind that comes up from under the ribs and will not be stopped — and Wren, on a stone across the fire with her arms round her knees, heard a sound come out of her own mouth that she did not recognise.

It was a laugh. A small cracked one, like a door that has not been opened all winter. She clapped her hand over her mouth, but it was too late. It was out.

“Well,” said the man, “that one’s yours, Cinder.”

Cinder took it from his fingers with great delicacy, carried it three steps away, and ate it, crunching loudly and looking at nobody, as if burnt toast were exactly what she had wanted all along.

They had come up to the top of the Hill together, slowly, in the cold bright morning.

Tobin could hardly walk. He leaned on Ash’s pole, and on the man’s arm; and Wren walked a little behind with the lamp, not helping and not going away, and not taking her eyes off him once.

At the top, by the workshop wall, was the little ring of stones where the Remnant had made their fire. The ashes were long cold. The man knelt down by them and raked them together with his fingers, and blew on them, once, quite gently, the way you blow on a spark you want to keep.

They caught.

I am not able to tell you where the basket came from. Wren never found out, and I do not think she ever asked. It was simply there by the fire when she next looked: a wide, flat basket with a cloth over it, and from under the cloth came a smell of new bread and a little drift of steam. Beside it was a heap of apples, so red in the morning light that Wren stared at them as if she had never seen an apple before, which in a way she had not.

The man went into the workshop and came out with a long iron toasting-fork from the wall. He had not looked for it. He had gone straight to it.

Now the second piece of toast was golden, and the apples were roasting in the edge of the fire, splitting their skins and hissing; and he held the toast out across the fire to Wren.

She looked at it. She looked at the hand holding it.

“How much?” she said.

It came out by itself, from Soot Lane and Mott’s yard. It was the oldest thing she knew how to say.

“No charge,” said the man.

“Everything’s got a charge.”

“Not this,” he said. “It’s given.”

Wren did not take the toast. She was looking at his face. At the lines at the corners of his eyes. At the eyes themselves, deep-set and kind, looking at her — at her tufty cropped hair and her sharp chin and her ash-black hands — as if she were somebody worth looking at. She had been hungry, once, outside a pawnshop in Crookback Market, and somebody with kind eyes had put a warm loaf into her hands and said those very words; and she had gone three steps, and thought of something cheeky to say, and turned round.

And he had not been there.

He was here.

Wren took the toast. She did not eat it, and she did not say anything at all, because her throat had closed up altogether. The man did not seem to need her to.

It was Cinder who heard them coming.

She sat up with her ears pricked and her mouth full of crust, and stared down the far slope of the Hill; and a moment later Wren heard it too — feet in the ash, and voices, and somebody laughing and crying at the same time, very loudly.

Then over the brow of the Hill came Mira, running.

She had the Chronicle clutched to her chest in both arms, which is not a good way to run uphill; and behind her, more slowly, came the Remnant, grimy and scratched, staring at the colour coming up out of the ground as if they were walking into a dream. In the middle of them, on her crutch, with her left arm strapped up in a sling made of somebody’s shawl, came Sister Hale. She was laughing and crying so hard that two people had to hold her up.

Mira did not stop running until she got to Wren. Then she dropped the Chronicle in the ash, which she would never have done in her right mind, and threw both arms round her.

“I heard it,” she said into Wren’s neck. “At dawn it sounded like the whole Hill breathing out. And then the colour came down the slope towards us like water, and we ran—“ She pulled back and held Wren at arm’s length and stared at her. “Your ribbon,” she said. “Wren, your ribbon. I didn’t know red could go as far as that.”

“Nor did I,” said Wren. Her voice was thick.

“And Tobin—“ Mira had seen him, sitting by the fire with Ash’s pole across his knees and his toast in his hand, pink and ink-stained and blinking. Her face crumpled up again. “Oh, Tobin. Oh, you idiot. We thought—“

“I know,” said Tobin. “I’m sorry. I’m — I’m all right, I think. Mostly.”

“There’s room by the fire,” said the man, behind them. “Come and sit down, all of you. There’s plenty. There is always room.”

Mira went quite still.

She did not turn round. She shut her eyes and tipped her head a little on one side, and Wren knew that she was not hearing the words at all. She was hearing the voice underneath them: low and warm and a little rough, like mist lying on a slow river.

Mira opened her eyes, and turned round, and looked at him.

He was sitting by the fire, turning an apple with the end of the toasting-fork. His hands were busy. She looked at them for a long moment — at the round old scar across the back of the one nearest her — and Wren saw her lips move, very slightly, as if she were counting.

“Your oar,” said Mira, in a small voice. “It creaks on the left.”

The man looked up at her and smiled.

“It always has,” he said.

Mira sat down in the ash where she was, quite suddenly, as though her knees had given way, and looked at him; and her face was so full of light that Wren had to look away.

Sister Hale had got to the fire by now. She stood leaning on her crutch, her old face working, and said, quite helplessly:

“Oh, duck—“

And stopped, with her good hand over her mouth, appalled.

The man laughed. It was the same laugh as at the toast: the real one, from under the ribs.

“Duck will do very well,” he said. “Sit down, Sister, before you fall down. Here. Mind the arm. You’ve been very brave, and you’ve been hurt, and you’ve not had any breakfast. Have an apple.”

Sister Hale sat down. She took the apple. She held it in her good hand and looked at it, and then at him, and two great tears ran down into the wrinkles of her face, one from the bright eye and one from the milky one.

“We only ever had the songs, Master,” she said. “All my life. Only ever the songs.”

“I know,” said the man. “I heard them. You sang them very well.” He paused. “Rather loud, some of them.”

And Sister Hale threw her head back and laughed her great cracked laugh, and the whole Remnant laughed with her, with their mouths full of toast; and the sound went up off the top of Cinder Hill, where, so far as anybody knew, nobody had laughed for three hundred years.

Tobin had not eaten his toast.

He sat a little apart from the others, at the edge of the firelight, with Ash’s pole across his knees and the toast going cold in his hand. He had not said anything since Mira. He was looking at his hands.

After a while the Lampwright came and sat down beside him.

He only sat there at first, with his elbows on his knees, looking out over the Burned Country; and Tobin, who had been waiting for something — a reckoning, a list — found that his heart had begun to thump.

Then the man reached across and laid his hand for a moment over Tobin’s — very lightly, so that it did not hurt.

It was warm, as it had been warm on the end of a cold dock, with the gulls going over and the tide gone out. And on the back of it was an old scar, pale and puckered, running right across it from side to side.

Tobin looked at the scar, and his breath caught, exactly as it had caught then. He did not say anything. He did not need to. He knew.

“Eat your toast,” said the man.

Tobin ate his toast, very slowly, because his hands were shaking; and when he had finished, the man said:

“Tobin, do you love me?”

Tobin looked up. He had thought there would be a great deal more to it than that. He found that the answer was there already, and had been for a long time, and was not at all difficult to say.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then keep my lamps,” said the man.

Tobin’s hand closed on Ash’s pole across his knees. He did not say anything. He only nodded.

They sat for a while. Over by the fire Mira was showing Sister Hale the colour of an apple — red, she was saying, but a different red from the ribbon, Sister; how many reds are there? — and the cobbler was trying to get a burnt crust back from Cinder, and failing.

“Tobin, do you love me?” said the man.

“Yes,” said Tobin. More quietly.

“Then look after the small ones.”

Tobin nodded again. He was looking at the ground now. Something was happening in his chest that he did not understand, a kind of tightening, the way a rope tightens when somebody begins to take up the slack.

And the man said, the third time, gently, “Tobin, do you love me?”

It hurt.

It was not a cruel question, or asked in a cruel way. But the third time it went straight in, under all the places he had been keeping safe, and found the sore place, and pressed on it; and Tobin, who had not cried on the end of the fish-dock, or on the road, or in the Queen’s camp with the grey coming up through his hands, put his face down and cried as if he would never stop.

“You know everything,” he said. It came out in pieces. “You know everything. You know I do.”

“Then follow me,” said the man.

He took Tobin’s hands. He took both of them, and turned them over, palm up, in his own; and Tobin, looking down through the tears and the one cracked lens, saw the two round scars on his own palms, the shape of the bottom of a little brass lamp. And round them, holding them, he saw the scars on the man’s palms.

They were the same shape.

The very same: round, and deep, and puckered at the edge, the shape a burn makes when you hold something very hot for a long time and do not let go. Only bigger, and older, and deeper, so that his own, lying inside them, looked like a child’s drawing of the real thing.

Tobin stared at them.

“They’re the same,” he said. His voice had gone odd. “Exactly the same shape. Only yours are — I’d say about half as big again — no, more, the diameter’s nearer twice—“ He stopped. He looked up. “Sorry. I’m — sorry. I don’t know why I’m measuring them.”

The man laughed. He did not let go of Tobin’s hands.

“I’d be worried if you didn’t,” he said.

Wren waited until the Lampwright had gone back to the fire. Then she got up and went and stood in front of Tobin, and Tobin looked up at her. His eyes were red. Hers were too, probably. She did not care.

She had thought all night of ways round it: a joke, or just giving him back the scarf and walking off, so that nobody would have to say anything.

If you have ever had to say sorry for something truly bad — not sorry I trod on your foot, but the other kind — you will know that it is one of the hardest things there is. It is harder than a fight. In a fight you can be angry, and anger is warm, and it holds you up. Saying sorry is like taking your coat off in the snow.

Wren had never taken her coat off for anybody in her life.

“I said I wished it had been you,” she said.

Her voice came out flat and hard, like a stone. Tobin did not say anything.

“In Vaelport. On the harbour wall. I said you sold him. I said I wished it had been you instead of him.” She swallowed. “And I’ve thought it was true ever since. I’ve walked all this way thinking it. Only then last night they were — you were going grey, and I was — and I didn’t. I don’t.” She stopped. Her face was burning. This was the worst part, and she knew it was coming, and she could not get round it. “It was the worst thing I ever said to anybody. And I’ve said some things. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Tobin. Will you—“

She could not get the last bit out. It stuck.

She stood there with her fists clenched and her chin up and her eyes stinging, and it was a very long moment, and Cinder came and sat down exactly between their feet, the way she had sat by the fire on the night they all came, and looked up at both of them.

“Will you forgive me,” said Wren. “For it.”

“Yes,” said Tobin.

He did not make her wait for it. That was what she remembered afterwards. Not for one heartbeat, the way she would have made him wait. He said it at once, as if it had been ready in his mouth for days.

“Yes,” he said again. “Of course. Wren, I — it was true. I did sell him. I’m the one who—“

“Shut up,” said Wren. “I’m not finished.”

She took off the scarf. She unwound it from round her neck — twice round, the way it had been all the way from Vaelport — and held it out to him, all of it, in both hands.

“Here,” she said. “It’s yours. I never gave it back.”

Tobin looked at the scarf. He looked at her. Then he got up, slowly, leaning on Ash’s pole, and took it from her; and instead of putting it on, he put it round her neck again, twice round, carefully, the way you would wrap up somebody smaller than you who was going out in the cold. He tucked the end in.

Wren let him.

“It’s striped,” she said, after a moment. Her voice had gone wobbly. “Did you know it was striped?”

“Of course it’s striped,” said Tobin. “Green and blue. What did you think it was?”

“Grey,” said Wren. And then, because she was Wren, and could not help it: “If you tell anybody I said sorry, I’ll push you off this hill.”

Tobin considered the slope.

“Technically,” he said, “it’s a fairly gentle gradient on this side. You’d have to push quite hard.”

Wren hit him on the arm. Not very hard. And then — she was never sure afterwards which of them started it — she put her face against his shirt, and he put his arms round her, and they stood there on the top of Cinder Hill holding on to each other like two people on a roof in a high wind, while Cinder sat between their feet and looked pleased with herself, and nobody round the fire said a single word about it.

Later, when the Remnant were lying about in the warm ash like cats, Wren went and sat by the fire. The Lampwright was turning the last of the apples with the end of the toasting-fork, slowly, so that they did not burn. Wren watched his hands.

“Old Ash,” she said at last.

The man did not look up.

“He’s under the rock,” said Wren. “In Vaelport. At the bottom of the mine. There’s a whole mountain on top of him, and nobody even — there’s nothing. Nobody even got to say anything.” She stared at the fire. “He held the door. He held it so we could get out, and then it all came down, and he’s just gone. Lost. And I never even—“

“Wren,” said the man.

She stopped.

He said, “Old Ash isn’t lost. He’s waiting.”

He did not explain it. He did not say waiting for what, or where, and Wren did not ask him. She sat there with the words in her lap, turning them over like a smooth stone picked up on a beach; and they were warm, the way the ground was warm, all the way through.

After a long time she said, “And my mum and dad?”

She had never asked anybody that. Not Ash. Not anybody. She did not know she was going to ask it until it was out.

The man turned an apple over. He looked at her then, across the fire, with those kind deep-set eyes, and she saw that he knew exactly what she was asking, all of it — everything she did not know, and had never known, and was frightened to know.

“Trust me with them.”

Nothing more. And Wren, who had never trusted anybody with anything in her life, found that she could.

He went back to the apples.

And as he turned them, very softly, under his breath, the way a man hums who is busy with his hands and has forgotten anybody is listening, he began to hum a tune.

Wren knew it before the third note. She would have known it anywhere. She had known it all her life. Morning comes, morning comes — the old Lamplighter song, sung on the walls at the turning of the night, sung by more than one mother. Her mother’s song.

He hummed it slowly. He hummed it past the place where it always stopped for her, past and the dark shall not keep us, on into the part she did not have, the part nobody had ever been able to give her. She had heard it go that far once before, in a dream, by a cold forge, and woken too soon. It was only a hum. There were no words in it. But the tune went on, and climbed, and turned, and she sat absolutely still and held her breath and listened to it as she had never listened to anything —

And then he took an apple off the fire, and blew on it, and the tune stopped. Not at an ending. In the middle, the way a tune stops when somebody has simply put it down for a while and means to pick it up again later.

Wren did not ask him to finish it.

She never quite knew why — except that it seemed to her that it was not a song to be handed across a campfire like an apple. Not yet.

He held out the apple to her.

“Careful,” he said. “It’s hot.”

She took it.

Then he stood up, and stretched, and brushed the ash off his knees, and looked over his shoulder at the long low ruined building at the top of the Hill, where the doorway stood open and the tools hung waiting on the walls.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s go and see what you lot have been doing to my workshop.”