Chapter One — The Salt Child

There were three good ways to tell how much of a person was left in a piece of glass, and Wren had learned all three before she learned to read words.

The first was the weight. A long life, well remembered, came out of the body heavy as a river stone, dense and cold and certain in the palm. The second was the color: the good glass ran gold, deep gold, the gold of a thing that had been loved and had loved back, while the thin lives came out pale as weak tea, and the truly empty ones came out clear as water and worth about as much. And the third way, the way Mistress Cole said no one could teach and Wren had never had to be taught, was simply to hold the glass to your cheek in the dark and wait, and feel whether anything reached back.

The shard in Wren’s hand right now reached back so faintly that she had to hold her own breath to feel it.

“That one’s done,” said Cole from across the dead-house, not looking up. “Pale as piss. Bin it.”

Wren did not bin it. She turned it in the lamplight instead, this last sad splinter of the old man they’d laid out that morning, and felt the small warmth of him press against her cheekbone — a smell of pipe-smoke, a woman’s laugh from very long ago, the particular ache of knees on cold stone — and then it was gone, spent, and the glass in her hand was just glass.

It was always the smell that got her. You could harden yourself to the faces and the cold hands and the way the recently dead all looked faintly surprised. But the smells came up out of the glass without asking, pipe-smoke and bread and somebody’s hair, and for half a heartbeat a whole stranger’s whole life would be more real to you than your own, and then it would be nothing, and you would be standing in a dead-house at the edge of the world with your hands full of someone who used to be afraid of the same dark you were.

“Wren.” Cole’s voice had an edge now. “I said bin it.”

“It’s not nothing,” Wren said. “There’s a — there’s still a bit of a laugh in it. Some woman.”

“A bit of a laugh won’t light a lamp for a watch, and the Light’s on ration, and the factor’s coming Tisday for the tithe.” Cole straightened up from the body she was working, pressing a fist into the small of her back. She was not an old woman but the work had made her one, gray and square and chapped, with forearms like a dock-hand and eyes that had stopped expecting much a long time ago. “Sell it pale or burn it for what it’s got. We don’t keep laughs. We can’t afford to keep laughs.”

So Wren put the pale shard in the selling-tray with the others, where it would go to a broker who would sell it to a lamp-house who would burn it down to the last of that long-dead woman’s laugh to light some richer person’s supper, and that would be the end of her, whoever she had been, gone to warm a stranger she’d never met. That was what happened to the poor, in the end, in Lowmere. You spent your whole life being poor and then you spent your death the same way.

Wren wiped her hands on her apron and tried not to mind. Minding was a thing she could not afford either.

The dead-house sat at the low edge of town, downslope and downwind of everything, because the dead were cheap but they were not pleasant, and Lowmere — what was left of Lowmere — liked to keep its unpleasantness where the wind would carry it out onto the Pale and away. From the dead-house door, if you stood in it, which Wren was not supposed to do because it let the cold in, you could see the whole sorry shape of the town climbing the slope above you toward the Well.

It had been bigger once. You could tell from the dark houses. For every window in Lowmere with a lamp behind it there were three with nothing, gone-cold houses with their doors swinging, where families had either died out or sold up or simply walked west to a town with a deeper Well, leaving the empty houses to lean against each other in the dark like old men too tired to fall down. Lowmere was a mouth with most of its teeth gone. And at the center of it, where the throat would be, stood the Little Light.

You were supposed to love the Beacon. The factor said so, and the old prayers said so, and once a cycle a Lumenate man came out from somewhere that mattered and stood on the steps of the Little Light and reminded them all that the dead watched over the living as light, that to burn glass was holy, that the Sundering had been a judgment and the Beacons were the only mercy left in a judged world, and that they should be grateful, and tithe generously, and not listen to wicked talk.

Wren did love it, a little, the way you love a thing you’re afraid of losing. The Little Light was not much of a Beacon — a stone drum the height of four men, with the furnace-grate in its belly where the town’s set glass burned down to keep the whole valley warm and lit and unfrightened. But it was the warmest place in Lowmere and the brightest, and when she was small she had believed, the way children believe, that as long as it burned, nothing truly bad could come up out of the Dark and into the town. She had pressed that belief to her like a coal.

The trouble was that lately the Little Light kept going dim.

Not all at once. That was the thing that frightened the grown-ups, Wren had come to understand — not the dimming itself but the way of it, the wrongness of it. Glass burned down slow and even; everyone knew that; you could set your whole life by how slow a good Beacon burned. But the Little Light had started to gutter. Whole nights it would sink to a sullen orange and the cold would come creeping back into the high streets and you’d hear, under the wind, the long brassy groan of the ration-bell, which meant the keepers were closing the upper vents and the warmth was for the center of town only now, for the houses that mattered, and the edge of town — the dead-house, the salt-pickers’ rows, the places where Wren and people like Wren lived — could see to its own warmth or do without.

They said it was the tithe. They said the factor was taking too much for the Hearth and there wasn’t enough left to feed the Light. They said it quietly, because saying it loudly was the kind of wicked talk the Lumenate man warned them about, and the factor had a long memory and a longer ledger.

But Wren, who handled the dead, knew something the rest of them only suspected. She knew that it wasn’t just the Beacon.

It was the glass itself. It was going dark.

She’d been finding it for half a cycle now, in the dead-house, in the bins, among the leavings: good glass, gold glass, the dense heavy lives of people who had been properly mourned and properly kept — going pale. Going clear. Going to nothing, faster than any glass had a right to. A grandmother’s whole long life, kept on the family shelf for two generations, brought in by weeping kin because it had simply stopped one night, gone cold and clear as water, as though she had died a second time and taken everything with her. Wren had held that one to her cheek and felt nothing reach back at all, not a smell, not a laugh, not the ghost of a ghost, and she had understood, in the pit of her, that something was wrong with the world in a way that the prayers did not cover.

She had not said so. Wren had learned young that the world did not want to hear what she noticed.

“You’re doing the thing with your face,” said Pip, who had come in without her hearing, which Pip always did, being small and quick and entirely too pleased with himself about both. He hopped up onto the cold end of the laying-table and swung his legs. “The brooding thing. Cole says it puts the customers off.”

“The customers are dead, Pip.”

“The living customers. The grievers.” He produced, from somewhere in his coat, half a salt-biscuit, considered it, and broke it, and held out the larger half to her without seeming to notice he’d done it. That was the thing about Pip. He noticed everything and pretended to notice nothing, and he always, always broke the biscuit the wrong way on purpose so that Wren got the bigger half and couldn’t argue, because arguing would mean admitting she’d been counting.

She took it. They ate in the companionable quiet of the dead-house, which was the quietest place in a quiet town.

Pip was eleven, or near it — nobody had kept the count exactly — and he was the other thing Lowmere had given Wren that she could not afford and kept anyway. He had turned up three winters back, a runt with a sharp tongue and no people, the way Wren herself had turned up sixteen years back with no people, and Cole had taken him on to run errands and pick salt for the same reason she’d taken Wren: because a child you fed cheap was cheaper than a Hollow you had to buy, and because Cole, under the gray and the square and the chapped, was decent in a way she’d have denied to your face.

“Factor’s people are in the Light,” Pip said, around biscuit. “Three of ‘em. Counting glass. Counting everything. Old Hessom says they’re going to raise the tithe again on account of the Hearth needs more.” He said the Hearth the way they all did out here, like a place in a story, a thing too bright and far away to be quite real. “Old Hessom says if they raise it again the Light won’t last the winter and we’ll all have to go west.”

“Old Hessom says a lot.”

“Old Hessom’s scared,” Pip said, and for once he didn’t make it a joke. He stopped swinging his legs. “Everybody’s scared, Wren. You can tell. The grown-ups have started doing the thing where they stop talking when you come in.” He looked at her sidelong, and there was something under the sharpness, something she didn’t like, because Pip was eleven and shouldn’t have it. “Are we going to have to go west?”

“No,” Wren said, with a certainty she didn’t have, because that was what you did for the ones smaller than you. “No. The Light’s lasted longer than any of us. It’ll see out a bad cycle. Eat your biscuit.”

He ate his biscuit. He believed her, or did the kindness of pretending to, which between the two of them was the same thing, and Wren held her own half-believed lie in her chest like a coal and was, for a moment, in the warm lee of the only family she had, almost content.

Then Cole called her name from the back, in a voice that wasn’t her ordinary voice, and the almost-content went out of Wren like a snuffed wick.

There was a new body in the back, on the cold slab — old Marda the Beacon-keeper, who had tended the Little Light’s furnace for forty cycles and had gone to sleep that afternoon between the vents and not woken up, which was, everyone agreed, a good death for her, warm and quick, the way the keepers usually went, married so long to the fire that the fire took them gently.

But that was not why Cole’s voice was wrong.

Cole was standing over the leavings-tray — the day’s small dark shards, the cullings, the worthless and the spent — and she was holding something at the very end of her fingers, holding it the way you’d hold a spider you weren’t sure was dead. It was a shard the length of a thumb. And it was black.

Not clear. Not pale. Black — but not the warm black of polished stone; a black that drank the lamplight and gave nothing back, a black that the eye kept sliding off of, as though some part of you refused to agree that it was there at all.

“Came out of Marda,” Cole said. Her voice was very flat. “An hour gone. I gleaned her clean, like always. Good glass — forty cycles of it, gold as you like, I’ve got it boxed for her sister.” She swallowed. “This came out after. From — deeper. I never saw the like. And Wren — ” She stopped. “Wren, it was warm when it came. Warm as a coal. And then while I was looking at it, it just — ” She turned her hand. The black shard lay in her palm and seemed to pull the light down into itself and not let it back out. “It went out. Like that. Like a life going. But it was already dead, it came out of a dead woman, glass doesn’t — glass can’t — ”

She didn’t finish. There wasn’t a way to finish it that wasn’t wicked talk.

And Wren, standing in the cold back room of the dead-house with the dark above and the dying Beacon beyond the wall, felt the small hairs rise all along her arms, because the black shard was not silent.

She could feel it from across the room. Where every other piece of glass she had ever touched reached toward her cheek, faint or strong, gold or pale, this one reached too — but it reached the wrong way. It pulled. It was a cold mouth open in the air of the room, and it was breathing in, and what it was breathing in was the light, the warmth, the small murmuring leavings of every other dead thing on the tray, drinking them dark one by one; and underneath the pull, very far down, the way you’d hear a voice at the bottom of a Well, there was —

— a word. Or the place where a word had been. In no language Wren had ever heard. And it was reaching for her, by name, the way the dull shard she’d carried against her own skin her whole life had never once reached for anything.

“Don’t touch it,” Cole said.

Wren was already crossing the room.

“Wren. Wren. Don’t you touch — ”

But Wren’s hand was already out, palm up, the way you’d offer your hand to a frightened animal, or to a child in the dark, or to a thing that had been waiting at the bottom of a Well for sixteen years for the only hand in the world it was meant to wake in; and the cold black shard, which everyone in Lowmere would have sworn on the Little Light was as dead as glass could ever be, leaned toward her across Cole’s shaking palm like a flower toward the last of the sun.