The village did not have a name on any of the kingdom's maps.
It had a name in the village. The village called itself Lowwell, after the well that sat at the centre of its small clay-paved square. The well had been there longer than any of the older grandparents could account for. It served the dozen houses that ringed the square, the small flock of sheep that wintered in the larger of the two barns, and the slightly larger flock of goats that wintered in the smaller. The well was, by the long careful reading of the village's older women, cold — cold all year, cold in the heat of the dry summer, cold even, on the rare occasions a village child was lowered into it on a rope to retrieve a dropped bucket, in the long bright days of high summer. The cold was, by the village's reading, the well's virtue.
Auren was sixteen years old.
She had been drawing water at the well, every morning of her life she could remember, since she had been tall enough to lift the bucket to the rim. She drew, on the average morning, three bucketfuls — one for the house, one for the goats, one for the small kitchen garden.
On the morning that mattered, she had drawn the first bucket.
The first bucket had been ordinary. The water was cold. The clay of the bucket, where it had been against the rope, was wet. She had set the first bucket on the rim of the well, at the small wooden ledge the village kept for that purpose, and had returned the rope to the well, and had begun to draw the second.
The second bucket was lighter than it should have been.
She drew the second bucket up. She brought it over the rim.
She set it on the ledge.
Inside the bucket was a small flame.
It was no taller than her thumb. It sat on the surface of what should have been water in the bucket. There was no water; the bucket was dry. There was no soot at the rim; the bucket had not, by any external measurement, been used to carry anything but water.
The flame was the colour of an ember after the wind has gone.
She watched it for a long count. She did not, on the watching, drop the bucket. She did not, on the watching, call out.
She spoke once, very softly, to the bucket. She had been raised in a village whose long careful instrument for unfamiliar things was the simple discipline of speaking a question to it once and seeing whether the asking changed it.
"What are you."
The flame did not answer. It did not flicker. It did not, in the small breath of wind that came through the square that morning, lean. It sat on the bare clay of the bucket's bottom as if the clay were the place it had been sitting for some time and intended to continue.
She tried a second question. She did not raise her voice for it.
"Are you for me."
The flame did not move.
She watched it for a long count more.
Then, without thinking — her hand moved before her mind had decided what her mind would do — she reached into the bucket and took the flame in her hand.
The flame did not burn her.
She did not, on first feeling, understand that it did not burn her. She felt, in the palm of her hand, a small steady warmth — the warmth of a hot stone that had been sitting in the sun for an hour. She felt no pain. She did not flinch.
She held it.
She closed her fingers, slowly, around it. The flame, between her fingers, did not change. She opened her hand. The flame was on her palm, the same size, the same colour, the same small steady self.
She sat down, slowly, on the wooden ledge of the well.
She held the flame for ten minutes.
She spoke once more to the flame, in the small low voice she would, on the rest of the day, use only inside her own head.
"I am not afraid of you. I do not know what to do with you. I am going to carry you home."
The flame did not answer. The flame did not, on the answering, give her any of the small private signs the village's older women would have read for. It sat. It waited.
She rose.
She picked up the first bucket, which was full.
She walked, with the bucket on her left and the flame in her right hand, the short walk to her own house. She did not, in the walk, hide the flame. She did not, in the walk, draw attention to it either.
At the door of her house she paused.
She looked at the flame in her hand.
She had been carrying it, by her own count, for the better part of twelve minutes. It was the same. It was the same colour. It was the same size. It was the same small steady warmth.
She thought, for the first time in her life, about the well.
She decided, in the small careful way of a girl who had been raised by women who had been raised by women, that the flame had used the well; and that the using of the well had been the using of the coldest place in the village by a thing that needed, on the morning of its arrival, the cold to land in.
She thought about her own name.
Her name was Auren. Her mother had given her the name. The name had been, in the village, a name the older women had read with a small private tilt of the head; the name had not been a village name; the name had been carried, by Auren's mother, from a town that had been burned in a war Auren had never lived through. The name had been the name of a girl Auren's mother had known in the burned town. The girl had, in the burning, not survived. Auren's mother had given the name to her daughter on the night her daughter had been born. She had told the story, in the small careful version her mother had always given, on Auren's thirteenth name-day.
Auren stood at the door of her house with a flame in her hand, and she thought, with the small steady honesty of a sixteen-year-old who had been raised to read her own name, that the flame had not, in arriving in the bucket of the coldest well in the village, arrived for the well.
It had arrived for her.
She spoke, once, into the flame in her hand. The speaking was the small private speaking of a girl who had never, in her life, addressed a thing she could not see.
"If you came for the name, the name is Auren. I have not been called by it by anyone but my mother since I was twelve. You may, if it is useful to you, call me by it now."
The flame did not answer. The flame did not, on the answering, leap or grow or take any of the shapes the village's older stories gave the flames of stories. It sat on her palm in the small steady self it had been since she had taken it from the bucket. The not-answering was its own answer.
"If you do not need a name from me, I will carry you anyway."
She did not, at the door, weep.
She opened the door. She went inside. She set the bucket of water on the kitchen table. She went, with the flame still in her hand, to the hearth. The hearth, at this hour of the morning, was at the small banked low of the night-coal her mother had taught her to keep. She knelt. She set her hand, with the flame, into the hearth. She opened her fingers.
The flame did not stay in the hearth in the small steady self it had had on her palm. It became, on contact with the night-coal, an ordinary hearth-flame. It curled. It leaned. It took the small breath of wind from the cold flue and bent toward it.
She watched it for a long count.
She did not, on the watching, name what had happened.
She did not, that day, tell her mother.
She did her ordinary work. She drew the third bucket — which was, when she returned to the well, an ordinary bucket of cold water, with no flame in it. She fed the goats. She fed the sheep. She walked to the small terraced garden at the back of the house and she pulled the early weeds.
By evening she had not told anyone.
She lay down that night in the small bed at the back of the kitchen. She did not sleep at once. She thought about the burned town her mother had carried the name out of. She thought about her own name. She thought, in the small loose way of a sixteen-year-old who had not yet been required to make any of her thinking into a sentence, about the question of what kind of girl gets handed a flame in the cold of a well at the dawn of the first day she has been given to look up.
She did not, on her bed, decide.
She slept.
The flame, in the kitchen hearth, was an ordinary hearth-flame. It burned through the night the small steady honest way a hearth-flame burned, and at dawn the next morning, when Auren came back to the kitchen to bank the coal, it had banked on its own — without her, without her mother, without the small ritual of the household that had been the household's method for thirty years.
A flame, the chronicler will record, that knows whose hand it is in is not a flame mortals were ever meant to hold. The well in the centre of the square had, by the long careful reading of the older women of the village, always been cold. The cold, on the morning of the dawn after the first day, had been used. The user had not, in the small careful way of users that knew their materials, broken the well. The well was cold the next morning. It was cold the morning after. The village did not, in any of its long careful instruments, register a change.
The girl who had drawn the second bucket carried, in the small private place a sixteen-year-old's chest can carry a thing too large for it, the change.
She would carry it, in the small steady way a girl carries a thing she has not yet been ready to name, for two more weeks.