“Wick! Barrels!”
That’s Hettie. She owns the tavern, and the attic I live in, and about half of my waking hours. She’s got a laugh you can hear from the harbour and a voice that comes straight up through the floorboards like it’s looking for you.
She took me in when Aldo didn’t come back. She never said that’s what she was doing. She just started leaving two plates out instead of one and shouting at me a bit more. That’s Hettie.
I went down. My hand was still the wrong colour. I kept it in my pocket.
The yard behind the tavern was full of barrels, and it was my job to roll them down the ramp into the cellar without letting any of them get away and kill me. I’ve done it a thousand times. That morning I nearly did it asleep.
I’d got about six in when I noticed the girl sitting on the yard wall.
She was my age, maybe a bit older. Dark hair cut short like she’d done it herself with a knife. A coat with too many pockets, burnt at the cuffs. She was eating an apple and watching me the way you’d watch a dog that might do a trick.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“You caught it,” she said.
I rolled the next barrel. It made a lot of noise. I was hoping that would be the end of the conversation.
“This morning. First light. The flare, on the fish-shed roof.” She took another bite. “I was on the ropewalk roof across the water. I go up there to practise before anyone’s about. I saw the whole thing. The flare went off and you put your hand up and then you were holding a fireball, and then you threw it at a man, and then the man fell in the harbour.”
“I didn’t see any of that.”
“You were there.”
“Lot of fog this morning.”
She hopped off the wall. “Do it again.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t, because I didn’t, because I’ve got barrels.” I pointed at the barrels in case she’d missed them.
She stood there and chewed and looked at me, and then she did something that made my stomach drop.
She held up her hand, palm up, and said a word under her breath, and a little flame stood up out of her palm like a candle.
A wizard. A kid wizard, in a burnt coat, in Hettie’s yard.
And after the flame, the sparks. Dozens of them, tiny and gold, lifting off her hand and drifting up past her face.
I looked at them. I couldn’t help it. I’ve spent my whole life not looking and that morning I was too tired.
She saw me do it. Her eyes went narrow.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking at something. Above my hand.” She waved her other hand through the air there, right through the sparks. They swirled and settled. She didn’t feel a thing. “There’s nothing there.”
“Then I’m not looking at it.”
“Wick!” Hettie’s voice, through the back door. “If I come out there, there’d better be no barrels left!”
The girl closed her fist and the flame went out. “I’m Ilsa,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
She waited through fourteen barrels, which I thought was very annoying of her. Then she followed me to the pump, and that’s when she saw the white hand.
She didn’t say anything stupid. She just looked at it for a while.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not now.”
“Did it hurt when you did it?”
I pumped water over it. The cold water felt warm, which tells you something. “Why were you up on a roof doing spells before the sun was up?”
“Because I’m not allowed to practise them in the daytime.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Guild threw me out.”
The Guild is where the wizards live, up the hill behind the big brass doors. They train you, and then you can sell spells and get rich. Nobody gets thrown out of the Guild. People would kill to get in.
“What did you do?”
She shrugged. “Set fire to the guildmaster’s beard.”
I stopped pumping.
“By accident,” she said.
“Right.”
“Mostly by accident.”
“How do you mostly set fire to a beard?”
“He said girls from the mudflats shouldn’t get their hopes up. So I did a fire charm to show him. It was supposed to be small.” She looked at the sky. “It was not small.”
And I laughed. I hadn’t laughed in about a week. It came out of me like a cough.
“So,” she said. “You can’t do spells. I can see you can’t, you’ve got no training, you can’t even hold your hand right. But a spell goes off and you pick up the leftover bit and throw it. Which nobody can do. Which doesn’t exist.” She leaned in. “I want to know how.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Then I want to watch you not know how. Up close. Lots of times.”
I thought about it. Mam, in my head, saying what she always said.
And then I thought about the letter in my shirt, and a riddle I couldn’t solve, and three masked men who knew where I lived.
“I need something too,” I said. “I’ve got a riddle. From my brother. I can’t work it out. You’ve been to the Guild, you’ve read books, you know things about the city I don’t.”
“Deal,” she said, before I’d finished.
“You don’t know what the riddle is.”
“I don’t care. You said brother like it was a wound. I’ll help.” She stuck out her hand. The burnt one. “But first you show me.”
I shook it. Her hand was warm and mine wasn’t, and she noticed, and didn’t say anything, which I appreciated.
Ilsa said the ropewalk was the best place, because nobody went there on a Sunday, and the way there ran through the spell-market.
I need to tell you about the spell-market, because that day was the first time I walked through it without pretending.
It’s a crooked little street that runs down to the water, with stalls on both sides. Every stall sells magic.
Bottled weather. Little glass jars with a cloud inside, or a fist of snow, or one in the corner with a thunderstorm going on in it the size of a walnut. A woman selling light in jam jars, warm yellow, for people who couldn’t afford lamp oil. A man with a tray of paper charms, wind-charms and luck-charms and one that he said would make you forget a bad dream. A dog trotting past with its tail lit up like a candle, because its owner had paid a penny to always be able to find it in the fog.
And over all of it, the sparks.
Every spell that had gone off that morning had left its leftovers, and nobody had picked them up. Gold ones over the light-stall. White ones, slow and cold, turning over the bottled snow. Green ones from the charms. They hung in the air up and down the whole street like it was snowing upwards, and every single person walked through them without seeing a thing.
I’d walked through it all my life with my eyes on my boots.
“Why are you smiling like that?” said Ilsa.
“No reason.”
“That’s a stupid smile.”
“Thanks.”
The ropewalk is a long shed by the water where they twist rope. On Sundays it’s empty. Ilsa led me round the back to a stone yard with a bucket in it and nothing else to burn.
“Right,” she said. “I do a fire. You do your thing. Go.”
She held up her palm and said the word. The flame stood up.
“Not yet,” I said. “Wait.”
She let it go out. The sparks lifted off her hand, gold, drifting.
Now.
I reached in. I closed my fist. They came, all at once, pouring into my hand, and the cold came with them, up my fingers, up my wrist. I made a noise. I’m not going to say what kind of noise.
And then I was holding fire again. A small apple of it, sitting in my palm, licking at the air and not burning me.
Ilsa said a word that the Guild had definitely not taught her.
“Throw it,” she whispered. “At the bucket.”
I threw it. It hit the bucket. The bucket went whump and fell over and lay there on its side, on fire, in a puddle.
We stood and looked at it.
“Again,” she said.
“My hand is freezing.”
“Use the other one.”
So we did it again, and this time I caught with my right hand. Cold up the arm. Fire in the fist. And I found something out, which is that while I was holding that one I could feel the left hand still cold, still empty, like a pocket with nothing in it.
“I think I can hold two,” I said.
“Two whats?”
“Two lots. One in each hand. I can feel there’s room for one more.”
Her eyes lit up like I’d offered her money. “Then I’ll do another one.”
“Wait, what happens if—”
She’d already done it. Flame, out, sparks. I reached with my left, because I’m an idiot, and grabbed. Both hands freezing, both hands full. Two balls of fire, one in each fist, and me standing there in a stone yard like a boy holding two very angry oranges.
“Now put them together,” said Ilsa.
“Why?”
“To see.”
I want it on record that I did say “why”. I did. And then I brought my hands together anyway, because there’s a part of you that just has to know.
The two fires touched.
I don’t remember the flash. I remember the ground, afterwards, which I was lying on, and the sky, which was a lot brighter than it should have been, and a smell like burnt hair. Which was because it was burnt hair. Mine.
Ilsa was lying about six feet away with her boots in the air. She sat up slowly. She had no eyebrows.
I put my hand to my face. Neither did I.
“Okay,” she said, in a very small, very calm voice. “Okay. So that’s a thing.”
I lay there and laughed until my chest hurt, and so did she, and that was the moment, I think. That was when I stopped being alone in this. I didn’t know it yet.
This is the list I started in my head, lying on my back with no eyebrows. I’ll show you every time it grows.
RECIPES (so far)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat.
We sat against the wall afterwards with my hands in my armpits.
“Show me the riddle,” said Ilsa.
I took the letter out. I didn’t give her the whole thing. The rest of it was mine. I folded it so only the last line showed.
Start where the sea keeps a flame. Look at the bottom.
She read it. She read it again. Then she turned and looked at me with an expression I was going to get very used to over the next few weeks.
“You live at the Drowned Lantern,” she said.
“Yes.”
“The tavern. Called the Drowned Lantern.”
“Yes.”
“Because there’s a lantern. Over the door. An old ship’s lantern. Full of seawater. That glows. That has glowed for a hundred years and nobody knows why, and it’s the one thing every person in Saltmire knows about your pub, and you walk under it every single day of your life.”
I opened my mouth.
I shut it again.
Look. You stop seeing what you walk under every day. The lantern was just there, like the door was there. It had been there before Hettie, and before Hettie’s mother. It was the sign.
A flame the sea kept.
“Look at the bottom,” I said. “Of the lantern. Something’s in it. In the water, at the bottom.”
“Your brother’s clever,” said Ilsa.
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
We walked back at dusk. Hettie was in the doorway with her arms folded, which is how Hettie stands when she’s about to be kind and doesn’t want anyone to notice.
“Who’s this?”
“Ilsa,” I said.
“She’s got no eyebrows.”
“Neither has he,” said Ilsa.
Hettie looked at me. Looked at her. Looked at my hands, which I’d forgotten to hide. Then she laughed, the harbour laugh, and said there was soup, and went in.
She went round the bar lamps on her way, lighting them with the lamp-word, the way she does every dusk. It’s the one bit of magic nearly everyone in Saltmire’s got. Not me. I’ve tried, and nothing happens, and I stopped trying years ago. She left a few gold sparks over every lamp as she went, and I watched them, because I’d stopped pretending that morning.
Over the soup she took one more look at Ilsa, a girl with no eyebrows and a burnt coat and no home to go to that she’d admit, and said she could have the floor by the kitchen fire, and if she set fire to it, she was paying. Ilsa said that was fair.
Afterwards Ilsa and I stood in the street and looked up.
There it was. A big brass ship’s lantern, green with age, hanging from an iron bracket over the door. Glass sides. Full to the top with seawater, a bit cloudy. And in the water, with no flame and no wick (yes, I’ve heard that one) and no reason at all, a soft glow. Pale green, like the sea on a sunny day. It lit the step and the first few cobbles, same as it always had.
“We can’t get it down tonight,” I said. “Not with the pub full. Tomorrow. Early. Before Hettie’s up.”
“Fine.” Ilsa was still looking at it. “Does it ever go out?”
“Never. Not once. Not in a hundred years.”
I didn’t sleep. I lay on Aldo’s bed with the letter on my chest and the key in my fist, and listened to the pub empty out below me and the street go quiet.
The attic has one window. It looks straight down onto the step. On a normal night there’s a patch of green light on the cobbles from the lantern, and I’ve gone to sleep looking at it since I was small.
Around midnight I noticed my breath.
I could see it. A little cloud, every time I breathed out, white in the dark. In the middle of autumn. In a room with a chimney running up through it.
I sat up.
The patch of green on the cobbles was flickering.
I’d never seen it flicker. Nobody had. I knelt at the window with the blanket round me and watched it stutter, and dim, and brighten, like something was breathing on it.
Then it went out.
A hundred years. And it went out while I watched, and the street below was black.
Not quite black. The watch keeps lamps lit along our street, one at each corner. I could see both. And as I watched, the far one dimmed, slowly, down to an orange thread, and went out. Then the near one.
And in the dark between them, something was standing in the street.
I couldn’t see it. That’s the only way I can tell you. It was a shape where the fog was greyer than the fog, about the size of a man, and it made no sound at all, and it was looking at my door.
Frost was growing on the inside of the window glass, under my fingers.
I started counting.