Carry My Flame

He went into the workshop the way a man goes into his own kitchen after a long time away: not slowly, not solemnly, but looking about him, noticing things.

The Remnant crowded in the doorway behind him and did not dare come further. Wren and Mira and Tobin came in, because nobody stopped them; and Cinder came in first of all, because nobody ever stopped Cinder.

It was the same long low room that Wren had found alone, days ago, with the dark coming down. The cold forges. The workbench. The tools hung neatly along the walls, each on its own peg, as if somebody had tidied up one evening meaning to start again in the morning. But it did not feel the same. It had felt, that first night, like a room holding its breath. Now it felt like a room that had let it out.

He hung the toasting-fork back on its peg, between the tongs and the little hammer. It fitted exactly.

Then he walked along the wall, slowly, and touched the tools as he passed them — not taking any down, only touching them, a fingertip on a handle here, a palm flat on the head of a mallet there, the way you might touch the heads of children in a row. He stopped at the bench and looked at the half-finished lamp lying on it, with its brass body and its empty top where the chimney should have gone. He picked it up and turned it over in his scarred hands, and set it down again, very gently, exactly where it had been.

And then he turned round and looked at the racks.

A hundred small brass lamps, row on row, every one of them finished except for the last part: no chimney, no wick, no flame. They stood on their shelves in the grey light from the doorway like a choir that has been waiting a very long time for somebody to give it the note.

The Lampwright looked at them.

He did not say anything. He stood in the middle of his workshop with his hands at his sides and looked at the hundred unfinished lamps for a long, long time; and then, slowly, he smiled. It was not the laugh from the toast. It was quieter than that, and it went deeper, and it was the kind of smile a person smiles when he is looking at something he has been looking forward to for years and years, and it is nearly here.

Tobin opened his mouth.

Mira put her hand on his arm, very lightly, and he shut it again.

I have often wondered what he was thinking, standing there among his lamps. I believe I know, now. But this is not the place to tell it; the children only knew that whatever it was, it made him glad.

The iron door at the back of the workshop stood open, the way Tobin had left it the night he fitted his mother’s compass into the lock. Mira went to the Lampwright with the Chronicle in her arms. She had wiped the ash off its cover with her sleeve.

“This is yours, I think,” she said.

He took it from her. He did not open it at the beginning. He opened it near the end, as if he knew exactly where to look, and found the last written page, and read the last written line. Wren could not see it from where she stood. She did not need to. She knew it by heart, and so did all of them. On the third morning, the fire woke.

He read it. He smiled at it, the same smile as at the lamps. Then he closed the book and put it back into Mira’s arms.

“Look after it,” he said.

Mira held it tight against her chest and nodded, and could not say anything.

Wren had been standing by the cold forge with the lamp in her hands, working up to something, the way she had worked up to Tobin. It was no easier the second time.

She went to him and held it out.

“Here,” she said. “It’s yours. It always was. It’s your own lamp — Ash said so, the one you carried down the Mountain. You should have it back. You can do far more with it than I can. I nearly—“ Her voice wobbled. “I nearly let it go out. In the tent. I had it right up to my mouth.”

“I know,” said the Lampwright.

“So you should have it.”

He did not take it. He put out his hands and folded them round hers — round her hands, and the lamp inside them, both together — so that she could feel the scars, warm and rough, against her knuckles.

“It was given, Wren. Not lost.”

Wren stood very still.

She was in her garret in Soot Lane, on a night a very long time ago, with the grate cold and the lamp sitting on her windowsill where it had come back to her yet again, and she was telling it off for following her about. And a voice had come down the chimney. Low and kind. It was given, child. Not lost. She had been frightened then, for the first time she could remember, and comforted at the same time, and she had never told anyone, not even Ash.

She looked up at him.

He let go of her hands. The lamp stayed in them, burning gold, leaning a little towards him the way it always would now, and warm against her fingers as it had been the very first night, when she had stuffed it inside her coat in a sealed-up flue and run.

“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll want it. You’ve a long way to carry it yet.”

They stayed on the Hill that day, and that night.

It was a quiet sort of day, and quiet days are hard to tell. The Lampwright mended Sister Hale’s crutch, which had cracked in the scramble down the Hill, with a strip of brass from his own bench, and told her it would now outlast her, and she told him that was not saying much. He walked round the top of the Hill with the smallest of the Remnant’s children holding on to two of his fingers, and showed her where the green things were coming up out of the ash, and let her give them names. Cinder followed him everywhere. If he sat down, she sat on his feet. If he stood up, she stood up. Once he stepped over her, and she was so offended that she sneezed a shower of gold sparks onto his boots, and he apologised to her very gravely, and she forgave him at once.

And the colour went on coming back. All day it spread down the sides of the Hill from the top, slowly, the way warmth spreads through a cold room from a fire: brown and black and rust and green, and the red of the rock showing through. By evening it had reached the empty grey tents of the Queen’s camp below, and gone round them, and on.

Night came.

It came the way nights always came in Gloamhaven, quickly and very dark; and the Remnant settled in heaps round the fire, and Sister Hale sang them something old and quiet in her cracked strong voice, and one by one they went to sleep.

Tobin woke in the middle of it.

He did not know what had woken him. He lay in the warm ash with his head on his arm and looked up at the dark — the real, thick, black dark of the Burned Country at midnight, with no moon and no Ring-lamp for a hundred miles — and waited for his hands to start shaking.

They did not shake.

He thought of his mother’s little night-lamp, and found he could not remember the last time he had wanted it. He had been afraid of the dark every night of his life since he was five years old. And now here he was, lying in the very middle of it, on the hill where the dark had come up like a tide —

And it was only dark. That was all. It was only the night, and the night was warm.

He sat up. The fire had burned down to red, and somebody was sitting beside it, feeding it a stick at a time.

Tobin went and sat down next to him. Neither of them said anything for a while.

“May I ask you something?” said Tobin at last.

“You may.”

“It’s a question I asked Old Ash, in the Leaning Tower, the night he told us about you with shadows on a sheet.” Tobin took a breath. “If you lit a thousand lamps from one flame — and you did, in the story, every lamp in every city — then by the end there ought to be nothing left. That’s just arithmetic. Only there was. There always is. Wren gave it to the whole Beacon in Emberwick and it was no smaller after. And I’ve never been able to make it come out. Ash said to hold the question. To keep it in my pocket. He said it was a good one.”

The Lampwright put another stick on the fire, and watched it catch.

“And have you kept it?”

“Yes. All this time.”

“Then keep it a little longer,” said the Lampwright. “It’s nearly ripe.”

Tobin thought about this. He found, rather to his own surprise, that it was a perfectly good answer, and that he did not mind at all.

They sat by the fire together until Tobin’s head began to nod, and then he lay down again, beside it this time, in the warm, and went to sleep with the dark all round him; and he did not dream of anything at all.

The Lampwright woke them before the sun was up.

He did not shake anybody. He simply stood up by the fire, and somehow everybody on the Hill was awake at once and sitting up, rubbing their eyes, looking at him. The sky in the east was going grey. It was cold, the way mornings were always cold. But the ground under them was warm.

“Come and see,” he said.

He took them to the eastern brow of the Hill, where it sloped away down into the Burned Country. They stood in a ragged line in the half-light — Sister Hale on her mended crutch, the Remnant in their heaps of shawls, Mira with the Chronicle, Tobin with Ash’s pole, Wren with the lamp, and Cinder sitting on the Lampwright’s left boot — and looked out.

The whole of Gloamhaven lay round them, if you could have seen far enough. The plains of ash. The Scarecrow Farms, where grey people stood in grey fields and did not come in. The coast hills, and Vaelport on the far side of them, with its dead stones. Emberwick, and the Greywaste, and Deepholm under the ground. And other cities that none of them had ever seen, each with its Ring of lamps on its walls, burning dimmer every year; and between the cities, all the miles and miles of places that had no Ring at all.

“Carry my Flame,” said the Lampwright, “to every Ring. And past them.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Past them?” said Mira.

“Past the walls,” said the Lampwright. “Into the farms, and the mines, and the boats, and the places nobody has bothered to put a lamp. Anywhere a door is shut. Anywhere anybody is sitting in the grey.” He looked along the line at them, one by one: at the Remnant, and Sister Hale, and Mira, and Tobin, and Wren. “Anyone who asks. Rich and poor. Kind and unkind. And never charge a penny.”

Wren thought of the Heskeths’ kitchen, and the thin soup, and Posy sitting up in bed asking for bread. She thought of the grey man in the field who had turned his head towards the house.

“With one lamp?” she said. It came out sharper than she meant. It always did. “There’s hundreds of people out there. Thousands. There’s one lamp. And there’s—“ she looked along the line — “not twenty of us. Counting the fox.”

The Lampwright looked at her, and his eyes were laughing.

“What is given—“ he said.

And Wren, who had first heard that in a tower on a wall and not believed a word of it, heard herself finish it.

“—grows,” she said.

“Well, then,” said the Lampwright.

He turned and looked out to the east, where the grey was getting paler.

“At Midsummer,” he said, “there will be a gift. For all of you. Wait for it.” He looked back at them, and at Wren last of all. “You won’t carry it alone.”

“What gift?” said Tobin at once. “What kind of — how will we know when—“

“You’ll know,” said the Lampwright, and Tobin, for the second time in two days, found that this was a perfectly good answer.

Then the Lampwright bent down and scratched Cinder between the ears, and said something to her that nobody else could hear, and she sat back on her haunches and looked up at him with her tail curled round her feet and her spark burning bright and steady. And he walked away from them, down the eastern slope of Cinder Hill, towards the morning.

Wren ran after him.

She had not meant to. Her feet did it before the rest of her had decided. She ran down the slope in the warm ash, with the lamp in her hand and the striped scarf flying, and she was thinking, the whole way, of a market and a crate and three steps; of a river and a mist and a boat that was not there; of all the times she had turned round to say something and found nobody to say it to.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait—“

He stopped. He turned round. He waited for her.

She stopped in front of him, out of breath, and found that she did not know what to say after all. She had never been any good at it. She had said rot and blast and you great lump all her life, and how much, and everything costs. She had hardly ever said the other thing. It was not a Soot Lane word.

She said it anyway.

“Thank you,” said Wren.

He smiled at her. It started in his eyes, and went down into the lines at the corners of them, and ended up in his beard.

“You’re welcome, Wren,” he said.

Then he turned and went on down the hill, and she stood and watched him. She watched him all the way down the slope, and out onto the edge of the plain, where the ash ran out to meet the sky; and the colour came up behind him in his footprints, brown and green, a thin bright path going east. Behind her the others had come to the brow. She heard them come. She heard Mira catch her breath, and Tobin say oh very quietly, and Sister Hale begin, under her breath, to sing.

The sun came up.

It came up right in front of him, over the far edge of the Burned Country, and for a moment he was a dark shape against it, walking — no bigger than one of Ash’s paper puppets on a sheet, a little figure of a man going on through the towns.

And then he was not there.

Wren blinked. She looked along the line of the plain, and up and down it, and back again. There was nothing on it. There was only the path of colour going out from the foot of the Hill, brown and green, as far as she could see — and then the plain, and the sun.

She did not feel the way she had felt at the canal wall in Crookback Market, with her mouth open and the crate empty. She did not feel the way she had felt on the bank of the Gloam River. She stood there in the warm ash, and she found that she was not frightened, and not cheated, and not even very sad. He was not gone the way Ash had seemed gone. He was gone the way somebody goes into the next room. You know he is there. You can hear him moving about.

Cinder came down the slope and sat beside her, and looked out after him.

She did not whine. She did not run after him. She sat very upright with her tail round her feet, the way she had sat on the harbour wall at Vaelport watching three roads, and the spark at the end of her tail was burning bright and gold and steady, like a lamp in a window that somebody has lit and means to keep lit, for as long as it takes.

They stood on the brow of Cinder Hill for a long time after that, all of them together.

Nobody said very much. There did not seem to be any need. They knew now, every one of them, what Old Ash had known that day on the bank of the Gloam River, when he leaned on his two poles and smiled and would not say why. And they knew, too, where he had been: in the market, and in the chimney, and in the boat, and on the dock — never more than a step or two out of sight.

Tobin was leaning on Ash’s pole. Mira was holding the Chronicle. Wren was holding the lamp. Sister Hale had stopped singing and was simply standing, with her good arm round as many of the Remnant as she could reach, and her one bright eye shining.

And the sun went on coming up.

It came up over the Burned Country, and over the black round Hill, and over the long low workshop with its hundred lamps waiting on their shelves; and I will not tell you it was golden, because it was not. Not yet. It was still the pale cursed sun of Gloamhaven, like a coin seen through dirty water, the same sun it had been for three hundred years.

Wren, who had never in her life liked beginnings, because in her experience they always cost you something later, tucked the lamp inside her coat against her ribs, and wound the striped scarf twice round her neck, and turned to the others, and grinned.

“Well,” she said. “Come on, then. It’s a long way to everywhere.”

Nobody moved, quite yet. Because Mira had lifted her face to the east, and then Tobin, and then Sister Hale and all the Remnant, one by one, and last of all Wren — as if they had all felt the same thing at the same moment, and could not quite believe it, and did not want to be the first to say so.

It was only a little. You might not have noticed it, if you had not been standing there. But it was there, and it was true, and it was a beginning.

For the first time in three hundred years, the sun over Cinder Hill looked a little warmer.