Auren Reaches Darklume

She came up the long lane to Darklume on the evening of the eighth day, walking the way a girl walks who has not been walking for very long but has decided not to stop. Her shoes were the soft cloth shoes a shepherd's child wore around a well. They had not been built for a road. The road had not, in fairness, been built for them either; the lane up to the cathedral was old, broken at the edges, more rut than path in the places where the column carts had passed and not, in the four months since, been smoothed. She had pressed her left hand against the inside of her cloak through most of the walk. She did not press it because the hand was cold. She pressed it because the hand was not, by any of the tests she knew for hands, behaving in the way a hand was supposed to.

The flame was still in it.

It had been there for two weeks. It had been there since a morning at the village well, when she had drawn up the bucket and seen, in the trembling water at the bottom of the bucket, a small steady yellow point that did not belong to a well. She had reached for the point with her cupped hand the way her mother had taught her to reach for a moth — slowly, palm flat, the way you reached for a thing you did not want to startle. The point had come into her palm. The point had settled. The point had not, since then, gone out.

She fed it nothing. She had tried, for the first three days, to feed it the small ordinary things flames were fed. The flame did not eat. The flame was not, in the small careful tests of a sixteen-year-old shepherdess who had been trying to understand what she had been given, that kind of flame.

She had told no one in the village she had walked through. She had told no one at the inns where she had taken bread. She had walked east on the morning she had decided to walk east, and her mother had stood at the gate of the small house and, before letting her go, had said the only sentence the journey would, until tonight, get out of any older woman.

"Go. And if anyone asks where you came from, tell them you came from a well."

That had been the whole instruction.

Now she was at the gate of the cathedral. The cathedral was not what she had expected. She had expected, on the strength of the village stories, a building — a tall thing, with the smell of incense and the sound of voices that did not stop. She had not expected a cathedral that looked, in the soft last light of an autumn evening, like a building one of the older men of her own village had once described as quiet on purpose. The walls were pale and patient. The doors were closed. There were no torches at the gate. There was a single oil-lamp set into a niche at the side of the door, and the lamp burned steadily, the way a lamp burns when no one is feeding it but no one is letting it die either.

She lifted her right hand to knock. She did not, at first, knock. She was holding the flame in the left, and the flame had become — for the past several days — a thing she did not, before any unfamiliar door, want to make a sudden movement near. She took a breath. She set her right knuckles against the wood. She knocked three times. The wood took the knock and did not, in any of the small ways doors sometimes did, throw the sound back at her.

The door opened.

The man who opened it was not what she had expected either. He was tall but not in the way the village men were tall — he was tall in the careful way of a man who had been kneeling for a great deal of his life and had learned to stand without looking like it cost him anything. His hair was streaked through with grey at the temples. He had the eyes of a man who had not slept well in some time and had not, in the not-sleeping, lost the work he was meant to be doing in his waking. He looked at her once. He looked at her cupped left hand. He did not, in the looking, become any of the things her mother had warned her men sometimes became when they saw a girl alone at a door.

He did not ask her name.

He looked, instead, at the flame.

He looked at it for a long count. He looked at it the way a man looks at a thing he has waited for a long time to see, and is, in the seeing, not surprised so much as placed — as if the flame had been an item on a list, and the man had, in seeing it, begun to draw a line through the item with a small careful pen. Then he raised his eyes to hers.

He spoke. His voice was the voice of a man who used speech rarely and had, by the rareness, kept the speech clean.

"Where did you carry it from."

She stood at the door for a long moment without answering. She had been walking for eight days. She had been holding the flame for fourteen. She had not, in either of the two periods, been asked a single question about the flame by another person. The first question, when it came, was not the question her mother had told her to expect. Her mother had told her she would be asked her name, or her village, or her father's trade. The man at the door had asked her none of those. He had asked her where she had carried it from, and the question had on it the small specific weight of a man who already understood that the flame had been carried, and was only asking, with great care, for the origin of the carrying.

She answered him in the only way she knew how to answer.

He nodded, once, the way a man nods at a measurement that has confirmed itself. He stepped backward. He held the door wide.

"Come inside."

She went inside. She did not, in the going, lift the flame any higher than her hip. The man did not, in the closing of the door behind her, ask her to. They walked together through the small entry of the cathedral, past a long narrow nave whose pews had been pushed slightly aside to make room for cots that had not, in the building's older days, been there. There were people in the cots. Some of them were sleeping. Some of them were sitting up, watching her pass with the kind of attention people gave to a thing that had not, on first sight, made sense to them but which they had agreed, by some private compact among themselves, not to interrupt.

The man led her to a small chapel at the eastern wall.

He did not light another lamp. The chapel had a lamp already. He gestured her to a stone bench and she sat. He sat across from her on the stone. He did not, for a long count, speak. He let her hold the flame in her cupped hand. He let the flame settle in the chapel's small steady air. The flame did not change. It did not grow taller. It did not lean in any direction.

He looked at the flame again. He looked, for the first time since she had reached the gate, at her face.

He did not, on the saying, smile. He did not, on the saying, soften. He let the sentence sit. He looked at her face. He looked at her face the way a man looks at a face he has not, in his life, been allowed to look at — the face of a girl who had, against every prior architecture of the chronicle, been given a sign.

"You are very tired."

She nodded. Her eyes filled, on the nodding, with the kind of tears a sixteen-year-old's eyes filled with when the body had been carrying something for too long without anyone noticing it had been carrying anything at all.

She used the word the older men in her village used to the priest at the well-stone. She had not, before saying it, decided to. The man did not, on the using, correct her. He did not, on the using, accept it either.

She nodded again. The flame in her hand did not waver. The man rose. He went to a small alcove in the back of the chapel and brought back a folded blanket, and a cup of water that had been set in the alcove for someone, and a small piece of bread on a wooden plate. He set them on the bench beside her. He did not, in the setting, brush her hand. He did not look at the flame again.

He went to the door of the chapel and stopped.

He did not, for a long count, answer. He stood at the door. He did not turn.

"I do not, tonight, have the equipment to tell you. I will, in the coming season, find some part of it. The rest will be told by the country that has begun, on your arrival, to read."

He went out. The door closed behind him with the soft small sound of a door that had been closed many times in its life by the same hand, and had learned, by the closing, to make less noise than a closed door usually made.

Auren of Embers sat on the stone bench in the small chapel of Darklume Cathedral. The flame in her cupped hand was steady. She drew the blanket onto her lap with her free hand. She did not, for some time, eat the bread. She watched the flame, and the flame watched, in its own way, the lamp on the wall, and the lamp on the wall did not bend.

The cathedral, that night, had been opened a second time. It had been opened for a flame whose owner was not yet present. The chronicler does not say, in the line that closes the chapter, who the owner was. The chronicler does not need to. The flame, by its quiet, has begun the saying for him.