Auren of Embers woke before the bell, which was not unusual. She had been waking before the bell for most of the autumn, the way a body that holds a small fire at all hours learns to wake when the fire wakes, and the fire on the morning of the rent woke her in the dark before the cathedral bell began. She lay on her back on the cot the cathedral had given her in what had been, in another season, a side-chapel for the lighting of candles, and she felt the flame in her cupped right hand stir without her hand stirring around it. She did not, at first, open her eyes. She knew, by now, what colour the flame would be at this hour. She knew, by now, the small quiet way it sat in her palm when she had not yet asked it to do anything.
She lay still. She listened. The cathedral above her settled, the way old buildings settle in autumn, with the small sequenced creaks of beams readjusting against cooler air. Outside the side-chapel, in the long nave, somebody had been awake for some time — Silas, almost certainly, since Silas no longer slept in any way that mattered — and was moving across the stone with the muted, methodical step of a man who had measured the room often enough to know which flag bore weight without echo.
She moved her left hand to her chest.
She did not, for a long second, understand what she had done.
She had moved her left hand to her chest. That was what the thought said. Her left hand had come up, found the rough wool of the cathedral's blanket, settled. The thought was correct. The thought was complete. But beneath the thought, where the small private confirmation usually came from — the part of a body that says yes, the hand is here, I am the one who moved it — there was nothing. There was no answer from the hand. The hand was a hand, in the way the cot was a cot. It was a thing in the room. It was no longer a thing of hers.
She opened her eyes.
She sat up — slowly, because the right hand was holding the flame, and she had learned in the first weeks not to jolt the flame even though the flame did not, by any measurement she could see, mind being jolted — and she looked down, in the grey predawn light through the side-chapel's narrow window, at her left hand resting on the blanket.
It was her hand. The veins were where they had been. The small white scar on the third knuckle from the time she had cut herself on a tin pail at twelve was where it had been. The fingers were curled the way her fingers always curled when she was not asking them to do anything, slightly inward, slightly soft. The hand looked, in every visible way, as it had looked yesterday.
She tried to make a fist.
The fingers did not close.
She tried again. She watched her own fingers the way a teacher watches a student who has not done the work, with the patient, expectant, slightly disappointed attention of one who is willing to wait and is not yet ready to be unkind about the waiting. The fingers did not move. They did not twitch. They did not, on any inner channel she could find with her thought, register her at all.
She tried, very slowly, to lift the whole hand.
The hand lifted.
It lifted because she had ordered the arm to lift, and the arm, which still answered, had brought the hand with it. The hand was passenger. The arm was the thing that had risen. She lowered the arm. The hand rode it down. She held the hand against the blanket again and looked at it for a long time, and the flame in her right hand, sensing nothing in particular, sat in her palm at its usual amber and waited.
She did not panic. That was one of the things, she had begun to notice over the autumn, that the flame had taken without her knowing it had been taking — the small clean reflex of panic. She had panicked, in her old life, the way village girls panic, briefly and loudly and with their hands up by their faces. She had not panicked since the third week. She did not know whether the flame had taken the panic from her on purpose or whether it had simply been one of the small things one did not have anymore when the body was being borrowed for fire. Either way, she did not panic now. She sat in the predawn quiet of the side-chapel with a dead hand on the blanket and a live flame in the other hand, and she waited until her heart settled, and then she went to find the angel.
She found Phaeren on the ridge.
Phaeren was usually on the ridge in the hours before dawn. The ridge was the long low spine of land that ran east of the cathedral — the same ridge from which the four angels had stood, in the first week of S16, in the configuration the mortals below had not understood — and Phaeren had taken to standing on it alone, in the hours when the wind carried the most heat from the eastern downs, where his element could speak in the carrying. He was not, by now, surprised when she came up. She had learned the path. She had learned the time of day. She had learned, also, that of the four angels Phaeren was the only one who would tell her the truth without softening it, and she had begun, slowly, to prefer his telling.
She climbed the ridge with her dead hand swinging at her side and her right hand cupped around the flame. The flame did not flicker in the wind on the climb. It never had. Wind was a thing that mattered to fires of wood and tinder; the flame in her palm was a fire of a different species, and weather did not bother it.
Phaeren was held on the ridge with the country to the east in front of him when she came up.
He was burned. That was not a metaphor and not a name. The patterned air around him had the small unmistakable register of a being who had been in fire too long in some other century and had been made, by the fire, into a different category of presence — too tall against the morning, too still in the wind that came off the eastern downs. The presence did not adjust when she came up. There was no need. Her arrival on the ridge had been registered for the last eighth of a mile. Her arrival at the cathedral door, three flights of stairs and a courtyard ago, had also been registered.
She stood beside him.
She did not, at first, say anything. There was no point opening with weather. Phaeren did not do weather.
Eventually he spoke. The presence did not adjust to deliver the sentence.
"Show me."
She lifted the dead hand. She held it up between them in the cold morning air, fingers slack, the small white scar on the third knuckle visible in the first grey light. The patterned air around him narrowed on it. There was no reaching out. There was no touch. The narrowing was the narrowing of a smith on a bar of iron he had watched cool from yellow to grey — the long unsentimental attention of a craftsman whose business was the thing in front of him.
"Yes," he said. "It has begun."
She did not, at first, answer. She brought the hand back down.
"Begun what."
The patterned air came round to her. What met her was not the eye of a man — and this was a thing she had noticed only after the second week — but a low banked ember-attention, not visible unless one looked for it, that found her the way an instrument finds a measurement.
"I told you, in the courtyard," he said. "I told you it would take more than it gave. I did not lie. I did not soften. You heard me. You took the gift anyway."
"I heard you," she said.
"Then you know what has begun."
She said nothing. She knew. She had known since the first week, when the flame had warmed in her palm during the night and she had woken in the morning without one of her childhood memories — the small one, of her mother braiding her hair on a stool in the kitchen of the house she had grown up in. She had known it had been taken. She had not been upset about its being taken. That, too, had been part of what was taken, perhaps. The flame did not remove with malice. It removed the way a tax is removed, methodically, on schedule, from a body that had agreed to pay.
"How long," she said.
He did not answer at once. The patterned air settled back toward the eastern downs. The first thin red was beginning, far out, where the sky met the burnt grass of the country Drexel had come through in S14. Phaeren attended the red. He did not attend her when he answered.
"I do not know how long. The flame does not consult me. The flame is Grandex's. I am only the angel he gave it through."
"Guess."
"I do not guess."
She nodded. She had expected that.
"What goes next."
He was silent for a long time. The light came up. The first true edge of the sun cleared the eastern horizon, and the ridge they were standing on caught it across its long low spine in a single moving line. The line moved across the dry grass at their feet at the speed of the world's turning, and Phaeren waited until it had reached the place where he held before he answered.
"What it needs. Not what is convenient. Not what is fair. It will take what it needs to keep burning. It will keep burning until the warlock is dealt with, or until you are spent. Whichever comes first."
She held the dead hand against her thigh. She did not, for the first time on the ridge, look at the flame in her right hand. She looked, instead, at the eastern sun.
"Will I know."
"Know what."
"When I am spent."
The patterned air came round to her. The low ember in it, which had been banked, was not banked.
"Yes," he said. "You will know. The flame will leave a clean ledger. That is the only mercy in it."
She nodded.
She stayed on the ridge for some time after that, with Phaeren beside her, neither of them speaking, while the sun came up over the country that had begun, two seasons ago, to burn. When she walked back down to the cathedral, the flame in her right hand was the same colour it had always been.
The dead hand, swinging at her side, was the only thing in the world that had begun, openly, to admit the cost.
A celestial gift honestly named had begun, openly, to take.