Smoke curled from the scorched training dummy in thin gray ribbons, carrying the bitter tang of burnt straw and cheap varnish into Wren Tarrow's throat. She tasted ash before she tasted anything else that morning. The dummy's wooden arms had splintered outward in a spray of blackened splinters, and one straw-filled leg toppled in slow motion, thumping against the stone floor. A second later, the training hall's high windows let in a shaft of pale winter light that caught the smoke and turned it the color of old bone.
Ineka Volk stood three paces from the ruin, her left hand still extended, fingers loose and slightly trembling. A thin line of soot traced her jaw where the fireball had curled back on its caster. More telling: the right side of her face was missing the outer half of one eyebrow, the hair burned away in a precise crescent. She did not seem to notice, or perhaps she did and simply did not care. Her eyes, the color of river stone, swept the semicircle of students arranged on the tiered benches along the eastern wall.
"Name yourselves," Volk said. Her voice carried the clipped vowels of someone who had learned Aldermarsh as a second tongue. "First name only. And your most recent scar, if you have one worth naming."
The benches creaked. Twenty-three students in the Cinder intake, the youngest fifteen, the oldest perhaps nineteen. Wren sat near the middle, fingers laced in her lap to keep them from worrying at the frayed cuff of her sleeve. To her left, Pim Drestle had gone the color of whey, his thin shoulders pulled up around his ears. To her right, a tall boy from the eastern provinces whose name she did not yet know kept cracking the knuckles of his right hand in a rhythm that suggested prayer, or panic, or both.
"Nesta Veller," said a girl in the front row, standing with military crispness. "No scars."
"Sit," said Volk. "You will earn one."
A murmur ran through the benches. Wren felt her own shoulders tighten. She thought, briefly, of Eda, her eldest sister, who had warned her on the long road to the Academy that Cinder students were expected to bleed a little in their first term. Eda had said it with a crooked smile that did not reach her eyes. Wren had heard the truth under it: Eda had bled.
"Corin Brem," said a boy two rows up, his voice too loud.
"Quieter," said Volk. "The fire does not require your volume. Only your intent."
Corin Brem sat down.
Volk turned her attention back to the ruined dummy. She walked a slow circle around it, boot heels marking a metronome on the flagstones, and stopped where a blackened hand still jutted from the straw torso, fingers curled as if reaching for something it would never grasp. She nudged it with the toe of her boot. The hand fell away and crumbled.
"The Cinder branch is not a polite study," Volk said. She raised her left hand again, palm flat, and spoke a single word under her breath, a sound like a stone dropped into deep water. A small flame, no larger than a candle's, sprang up from her palm. It burned orange, then white at its heart, then blue. The heat reached Wren's face across ten paces of cold hall air. "We learn fire because fire does not negotiate. It does not care who your father is. It does not care if you wept on the road here. It cares only that you fed it properly and told it where to go. If you fail to do so, it will eat your house, your neighbor's house, and the next three streets over, and it will feel nothing. Neither will the Crown, when it asks why its capital is on fire."
She closed her fist. The flame vanished. The smell of scorched air lingered.
Pim, beside Wren, made a small sound in his throat. His hand, when she glanced sideways, had crept to the inside of his jacket and was gripping something through the fabric. A keepsake, perhaps. A worry stone. She did not ask.
"Your task in this first term," Volk continued, "is not to master fire. That would be arrogance, and the fire knows arrogance the way a hound knows a fox. Your task is to learn the smallest possible flame, hold it for one full breath, and then put it down. That is all. A child of six can kindle. A soldier of twenty cannot always release. You will train the release."
A boy near the back, broad-shouldered and watchful, raised his hand. "Proctor, if we are only learning to put it down, why is the dummy on fire?"
Volk's mouth twitched. It was, Wren realized, the closest thing to a smile she had seen on the scarred woman's face.
"Because I am demonstrating the other half of the lesson," Volk said. "The ruin part. You are Cinder. You will be expected, at some point in your career, to destroy something that needs destroying. A siege engine. A bridge held by the enemy. A barn full of plague rats. A ship run aground. You will do this, and you will do it in the presence of your commanding officer, and you will do it under the eyes of whichever god is watching that day, and you will not flinch. If you flinch, the fire flinchs with you, and then we have what we had at Westmere, or at the Salt Fords, or at any of a dozen other places whose names I will not list because you would not sleep for a week."
The hall was very quiet. Outside, a rooster crowed twice, and a far-off bell rang the second hour. The smoke from the dummy had thinned to a pale haze near the rafters. Somewhere beneath Wren's sternum, a cold awareness unfolded: she had not come to the Academy to light candles. She had come because the family ledger, after Marl's death, after Eda's long recovery, after the long quiet that had settled over the Tarrow house like frost on a windowpane, could not pay for the kind of physician Eda would need if the winter sickness came again. The Cinder stipend was a sum. A real sum. Enough to matter.
She did not think about it further. Thinking too much about money made the fire in her chest burn the wrong way.
"Stand," said Volk. "All of you. Bench the floor."
Twenty-three students rose. The benches groaned in unison.
"Pair off. Left and right, however you fall. If you do not have a partner, you are my partner, and I warn you now, I have not been gentle since the Salt Fords."
The shuffling began. Wren turned left. Pim turned right. They faced each other, and Pim's face performed a complicated negotiation between relief and new anxiety.
"Drestle," Wren said quietly.
"Tarrow," Pim said, equally quiet. His eyes flicked to Volk, then back. "She's going to make us light something."
"She is."
"I have not lit anything since I was nine. I set a fence post on fire. My father made me dig the hole for the new post with a spoon."
"I heard."
Pim's mouth worked. He was, Wren understood, the sort of person who made jokes when he was frightened, and she chose not to laugh, because laughing would be unkind.
Volk moved among the pairs, her gait unhurried, her ruined eyebrow lending her face an asymmetry that made her expressions hard to read. When she stopped before a tall boy with a scattering of freckles, the boy flinched too.
"Hands," Volk said. "Show me your hands. Both of you."
Wren held hers out. The right hand was ink-stained along the outside of the little finger from a copying exercise she had done the night before. The left was clean. Pim's hands were rougher, the calluses of a working boy mapping the soft undersides of his fingers.
"You are not yet Cinder," Volk said to the pair. "You are tinder. The fire is not in you. It is around you. It wants in. Your job is to invite it correctly. To do that, you must first know what invitation looks like, and what a forced entry looks like. I will show you."
She raised her left hand. A small flame appeared, cupped, steady. She held it a full breath. Then she closed her fist, and the flame went out, and the smoke that came from her closed fingers smelled of pine resin and the sea.
"That was an invitation," Volk said. She opened her hand again. The flame sprang up, but this time the light was wrong, the color tinged with green, and the heat that reached Wren's face had a different character, sharper, more insistent. Volk held it only a moment before closing her fist again, harder this time, and the flame guttered out with a sound like a small creature complaining.
"That was a forced entry," Volk said. "Notice the smell. Notice the color. Notice the way the heat reaches for you, not from you. If you light your first flame and it smells like iron and looks like a sick frog, you have forced it. Put it down at once. Do not attempt to correct it. Corrections only make forced entries worse. Put it down, step back, breathe, and try again with an empty hand."
Pim, beside Wren, was mouthing the words along with her. Wren found she was doing it too.
"Your turn," Volk said to the hall at large. "You will not light anything yet. You will only form the shape of the invitation in your hand. Cup your left hand as if you were holding water you did not wish to spill. Breathe in through your nose. Breathe out through your mouth. Do this five times. On the sixth breath, imagine the shape of a flame in your palm, but do not call it. Only imagine it. We are not lighting anything today. We are learning how not to."
The hall went quiet in a different way. Twenty-three pairs of students cupped their left hands, closed their eyes, and breathed.
Wren closed her eyes. She smelled the cold stone of the hall, the ghost of varnish, the faint sweetness of Pim's hair pomade. She tasted the ash that still clung to the back of her throat. She felt, in her cupped palm, the cool draft from the high windows tracing the lines of her hand like a fingertip.
On the sixth breath, she imagined a flame. It was, in her mind, a small upright thing, the color of a robin's egg, no taller than the first joint of her thumb. She did not call it. She only saw it.
When she opened her eyes, Volk was standing two paces in front of her, watching. The scarred woman's ruined eyebrow lifted a fraction of a millimeter.
"You did not call it," Volk said. It was not a question.
"No, Professor."
"Good. You will find it harder than you think to wait. The fire does not enjoy being imagined. It enjoys being real. But a Cinderman who cannot wait is a corpse who wonders why." Volk's gaze moved to Pim. "You, boy. Your palm is shaking."
"I am nervous, Professor," Pim said, in his smallest voice.
"Good. You should be. The fire does not respect the calm. It only respects the ready. Nerves are readiness. Make friends with them." She paused. "Drestle. I knew your uncle."
Pim blinked. "You knew Master Drestle?"
"I served with him at the Salt Fords. He was the only man I knew who could light a cooking fire in a rainstorm without swearing. I was the only woman he knew who could swear loud enough to drown the rain. We came to an arrangement." The corner of Volk's mouth twitched again. "He wrote me once, after, and asked if I would take his nephew if his nephew ever came up to Cinder. I told him I would take any Drestle who had the sense to show up. You have shown up. That is some of the sense. We will find the rest."
Pim's eyes went bright. He nodded, once, hard, and did not trust himself to speak.
Volk moved on. Wren let out the breath she had not realized she was holding.
Outside, the rooster crowed a third time. The bell in the distant chapel tower tolled the half hour, a low note that rolled through the hall's high windows and faded into the smoke still drifting beneath the rafters. Wren's palm, when she looked down at it, was empty. The imagined flame had left no mark. But her skin, she realized, was warm. Warmer than it should have been, given the draft.
She closed her hand. Opened it. Closed it again. The warmth did not leave.
Across the hall, Volk had paused beside the ruined dummy. She regarded it the way a farrier regards a horse she has decided not to buy. Then she turned, raised her voice, and said, "Tomorrow, you will light a candle. The day after, you will put it out. The day after that, we will see what you are made of. Dismissed."
The benches groaned a second time as twenty-three students sat back down, exhaled, and began, in small low voices, to compare what they had imagined.
The yard at dawn smelled of wet rope and lamp oil. Frost had drawn a thin white script across the flagstones, and the breath of twenty-three students rose in small pale columns that the wind kept tearing apart before they could meet the sky. Wrought-iron braziers ringed the practice square, their coals low and sullen, throwing a wash of amber light that made the shadows long and the faces longer.
Pim Drestle stood at the chalk mark nearest the eastern rail, his hands shoved deep into his sleeves. He had not slept. The bunk in the junior dormitory had felt like a slab set over a river, every creak of the frame a reminder that the building was old, that the building was full, and that he was the smallest kind of particle in it. He had lain on his back and listened to the breathing of the other boys, three to a room, the way you listen to a thing you cannot change. At the first grey line along the window, he had got up, dressed in the dark, and come down to the yard. The cold felt honest. The cold did not pretend to be a friend.
Wren Tarrow took the mark opposite him. The chalk had been measured out by a Proctor's assistant the night before, and the distance between the two marks was, by tradition, exactly the span of a tall man's outstretched arms. Tradition, in the Academy's casting yard, was a kind of geometry. The students learned early that geometry was not their friend either.
"Today," said Ineka Volk, "we stop imagining."
She stood at the yard's center, her boots planted on a stone that had been worn smooth by the boots of a hundred Proctors before her. She wore no gloves. Her hands were bare, and the air around her fingers had the faintly warped look of a road seen through summer heat, though the morning was nowhere near warm. A long leather strap crossed her chest, and from it hung a small leather roll that Pim had been watching for the better part of a quarter hour. He could not see what was inside. He wanted to.
Volk went on, in the clipped way that Pim had begun to recognize as her way of spending no more breath than a sentence cost. "You have been imagining. Some of you imagined well. Most of you imagined badly. The candle on the desk, the cup of water, the stablehand's missing earring. These are useful lies. They teach the hand to look before it reaches. They do not teach the hand to hold."
A wind moved through the yard. The coals in the nearest brazier ticked softly, like a clock running down.
"From today," Volk said, "we hold."
She lifted her chin toward the Proctor's assistant, a broad-shouldered woman Pim did not know, who went down the line with a basket. In the basket were spheres of pale glass, no larger than plums, each one clouded on the inside and warm to the touch. The assistant gave one to each pair of students without speaking, and when she reached Pim and Wren she gave them two, one apiece, and moved on.
Pim took his sphere in his right hand. It was heavier than it looked. The glass was cool and faintly gritty, as if it had been rolled in dust, and the cloud inside it moved when he tilted it, slow and reluctant, like something that had been waiting a long time and did not particularly want to be hurried. He glanced across the span at Wren. She was looking down at her own sphere, turning it in her palm, her mouth set in the careful line he had begun to associate with the way she prepared to do something she was not sure she could do.
"You will hold the sphere between you," Volk said. "Not in your hand. Between you. Suspended, if you can manage it. The first student to drop it cleans the braziers. The first student to break it mends whatever it breaks. The first student to set anything on fire that is not the sphere is dismissed from the yard and will explain himself to me in my office before noon. Begin."
Pim swallowed. He raised the sphere to the height of his shoulder, the way he had seen the older students do, and tried to remember what the day before had felt like. The candle had been easy, in the end, because a candle is meant to be lit. The sphere was not meant to be anything. It was meant to be held. Holding was a different kind of problem.
He looked at Wren. She looked back at him. In the amber wash of the brazier light her eyes were darker than they should have been, almost the color of the glass in his hand.
"Ready," she said, and he nodded.
He tried.
The first push was too much. He had been warned, in the lecture hall the day before, that the first push was always too much, and he had nodded politely and not believed it. He believed it now. The sphere left his palm as if it had been flicked from a sling, crossed the span in less than a heartbeat, and struck Wren's raised hand with a crack that was half glass and half something lower, the sound a bowl makes when you set it down too hard on a stone step. She caught it. Barely. The glass wobbled in her grip, the cloud inside it roiling, and the yard went quiet in the way yards go quiet when something has almost happened.
"Softer," Volk said, from somewhere behind them. "Pim, you are not throwing a stone at a fox. You are placing a thought in the air. Try again."
Pim tried again. This time the push was not enough, and the sphere dropped six inches and hung there, trembling, in defiance of the law that said it should have hit the ground. He could feel it up his arm, a fine rapid shaking, like the purr of a cat held too long in the lap. Sweat ran down his temple and into the corner of his jaw. Across the span, Wren lifted her hand to meet it, her fingers cupped, and the moment the two fields touched he felt the sphere settle between them, held aloft, breathing.
"Good," Volk said, and the word, coming from her, was a small piece of luck. "Hold it. Breathe. Do not think about the sphere. The sphere is not interested in your thinking. It is interested in your attention. Pim. Your attention. On the sphere, not on the girl."
Pim dragged his gaze away from Wren's face. He had not realized he was staring. The heat in his cheeks was not entirely from the brazier.
The sphere hung. The cloud inside it turned slowly, the way milk turns in a cup when the last of the tea has been poured. Pim counted his breaths. He got to seven before the sphere dipped an inch. He got to eleven before it rose again. He got to fifteen before the cloud inside it began to move faster, and he understood, with a small cold lurch, that the cloud was not moving faster because the sphere was moving faster. The cloud was moving faster because he was.
He could not say when the warmth began. He could not say, later, when the older students asked, whether it had been there from the start and he had only just noticed, or whether it had come upon him all at once, the way a wave comes upon a boy standing in the shallows. He only knew, in the way a body knows before the mind does, that the sphere was getting heavier in the air. Not in his hand. In the air. The glass had not changed. The cloud inside had not changed. The yard, the frost, the braziers, the faces of the other students, all unchanged. Something in him had changed.
"Pim," Wren said, very quietly. "Pim, you are pulling too hard."
He heard her. He tried to answer. What came out was a sound, a short tight breath, the kind of sound a man makes when the bone of his arm is being pressed against a wall. The sphere shuddered. The cloud inside it spun up into a grey vortex, the way water spins down a drain. Wren's hands came up, both of them, fingers spread, and for a heartbeat the two fields of attention met around the glass like two hands closing around a coal.
Then the sphere was gone.
It did not drop. It did not break. It went out, the way a candle goes out when a hand closes over it, except that the hand in this case was Pim's, and there was no hand, only the field of his attention, and the field had grown too large and too hungry. The glass crumpled inward with a small wet sound, the cloud inside it bursting out in a thin grey veil that smelled, for one strange half-second, of wet wool and tallow and something sharper underneath, like a struck flint. The veil hit Wren's sleeve, and where it hit, the linen began to smolder.
Wren did not scream. She made a sound at the back of her throat, a single syllable that was not a word, and she pulled her arm back against her ribs, and the smolder ate a dark ring into the cuff of her sleeve and the cuff began to char and the char began to glow.
Pim staggered. He could not feel his fingers. He could not feel his face. The yard swam in his sight, all the amber light gone to a kind of pale gold, and the shape of Wren's arm was a dark line drawn across the gold. He reached for her, the way you reach for a thing that is falling, and his hand closed on nothing, and the nothing was warm.
Then the cold came.
It came from Wren. It came from her hand, the hand she had raised against the smolder, the hand that was still raised, the fingers still spread, the palm still open. From her palm there rose a pulse of light that was not amber and was not gold and was not the colour of any lamp Pim had ever seen. It was the color of ice at the bottom of a well, the color of the moon on snow at three in the morning when the dogs have stopped barking. It struck the char on her cuff and the char went out, not slowly, not in the way a wet cloth puts out a fire, but all at once, the way a voice is cut short. A thin coil of smoke rose from the blackened linen, uncurled, and was gone. The skin beneath was untouched. Not reddened. Not even pink. Untouched, as if the fire had been only a story told about the sleeve.
The yard was very quiet. Pim could hear the coals in the brazier ticking. He could hear his own heart, which was going too fast. He could hear, somewhere at the edge of hearing, the bell in the distant chapel tower beginning to toll the hour.
Wren lowered her hand. She looked at the blackened cuff. She looked at her palm. She looked up at Pim, and in her face there was something that Pim, in that moment, did not have a word for, something that was not anger and was not fear and was not the careful look she had worn all the morning. It was the look of a person who has opened a door in her own house and found a room she did not know was there.
"Pim," she said. Her voice was steady. Her voice was the steadiest thing in the yard. "Pim, are you all right?"
He tried to say yes. What came out was, "I am sorry. I am sorry. I did not mean to."
"I know," she said. "I know you didn't."
Behind them, the sound of a single pair of boots on the flagstones. Ineka Volk walked around the ruined pair, her hands behind her back, and stopped. She did not look at the blackened cuff. She looked at Wren's palm, the palm that was still open, the palm that was still faintly lit from the inside, as if a small cold lamp had been set behind the skin and had not yet been put out. She looked at it the way she had looked at the ruined dummy in the hall, the way a farrier regards a horse she has decided not to buy. Then she looked at Pim. Then she looked at the place in the air where the sphere had been.
"Well," she said. "That is not in the lesson plan."
Ineka Volk did not smile. She did not scold. She did not reach for Wren's hand, though her fingers twitched once at her side as if she had thought about it and decided against it. Instead she turned to Pim, and Pim felt the full weight of her gaze land on him like a hand laid flat across his chest.
"You," she said. "You are Drestle. The boy from the kitchens who is always in the wrong corridor."
Pim could not tell if that was a question. He nodded anyway.
"How long have you been following Tarrow around?"
It was not the question he had been bracing for. He had been bracing for the bolt, or the cellar, or at the very least for the long walk to Proctor Harken's office. "Since term began," he said, and was annoyed to find his voice came out at its usual pitch and speed, as if he were reporting a missing ladle.
"And in all that time," Ineka Volk said, "have you ever seen her do that before?"
"No, Proctor."
"Have you ever seen anyone do that before?"
"No, Proctor."
Ineka Volk turned back to Wren. "Hold your hand out," she said. "Palm up. Do not close it, whatever you do. Do you hear me? Whatever you do."
Wren held her hand out. The light in her palm was dimmer now, a pale wash rather than a glow, but it was there. Ineka Volk studied it from a foot away, the way she might study a slow bruise or a tricky seam. The brazier ticked. Somewhere in the kitchens a pot lid clattered. The smell of the morning's soup, leeks and salt pork, drifted over the wall and lay across the yard like a rumor of a kinder world.
"You can put it down now," Ineka Volk said at last. "Close your fist. Slowly."
Wren closed her fist. The light did not go out. It leaked between her fingers in thin pale threads, like sunlight through a shutter that would not quite shut.
Ineka Volk saw it. Her mouth thinned. She did not say anything for a long moment, and in that long moment Pim understood, with the particular clarity that fear brings, that whatever had just happened in the yard was not in any book the Academy kept, and that the woman standing in front of him knew it.
"We are going to the infirmary," Ineka Volk said. "Both of you. Drestle, walk behind us and do not speak to anyone you pass. Tarrow, keep your hand closed. If you cannot keep it closed, tell me. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Proctor."
"And if anyone asks, you sprained your wrist on the ladder in the yard. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Proctor."
Ineka Volk set off across the flagstones at a pace that was not quite a walk and not quite a march. Wren fell in beside her. Pim dropped in behind, two paces back, the way he had learned to walk behind Proctor Harken on the days Harken had remembered Pim existed. He kept his eyes down. He kept his mouth shut. He did not look at the ruined pair, though he felt them at the edge of his vision like two crooked teeth.
They crossed the lower court, where a pair of second-years were scrubbing the morning's frost off the steps. One of them looked up, saw Ineka Volk, and looked down again very quickly. They passed under the arcade, where the smell of the soup gave way to the older smell of wet stone and tallow. They passed the door to the scriptorium, which was closed, and the door to the robing room, which was not, and Pim saw, in the brief slice of interior that the open door allowed, a row of green Proctor's cloaks on wooden pegs, hanging very still, as if they were listening.
Ineka Volk did not take them to the main infirmary on the ground floor of the east wing. She took them up a narrower stair, then along a corridor Pim had never walked, then through a small green door that she unlocked with a key she wore on a chain beneath her cloak. The room beyond was small, low-ceilinged, and very clean. There was a single bed with a white coverlet. There was a window that looked out onto a stretch of inner wall and nothing else. There was a shelf of jars, each labeled in a careful hand, each holding something that Pim did not want to look at too closely. There was a woman sitting in a chair by the window, darning a sock.
The woman looked up. She was old. Her hair was the color of iron, and her hands were the color of tea, and her eyes were the kind of eyes that notice when a person has not slept, or has eaten too little, or has been crying in a place they thought was private. She looked at Ineka Volk. Then she looked at Wren. Then she looked at Wren's hand, which Wren was still holding closed, and through which the light was still leaking in pale threads that fell across the white coverlet like the shadows of a grate.
"Sister Maren," Ineka Volk said. "I need the room."
Sister Maren set the sock down. She did not ask why. She rose from the chair, and the way she rose was the way a much younger woman might have risen, with that particular economy of motion that comes from a lifetime of getting out of chairs to tend to people who need tending to. She crossed to the door. She looked, as she passed, at Wren's face.
"Child," she said, very softly. "Sit on the bed. I will be just outside."
Wren sat. The coverlet gave under her weight with a small dry sigh. Pim, who had been told to walk behind and not speak, hovered in the doorway and felt, suddenly, very stupid and very young and very afraid.
"Pim," Wren said, without looking at him. "Stay."
It was not a question. It was not an order. It was the word of a person who had decided, for reasons of her own, that Pim Drestle was to be present at whatever was about to happen. Pim stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
Ineka Volk drew a chair up to the bedside and sat in it backward, her arms folded across the backrest, her chin resting on her forearms. In that posture she looked, for the first time since Pim had known her, less like a Proctor and more like a woman in a tavern waiting for a song she liked.
"Open your hand," she said to Wren. "Slowly. As slowly as you can."
Wren opened her hand. The light was still there, but it was not the light of the brazier anymore. It was colder. It was bluer. It lay in her palm the way water lies in a cup, taking the shape of what holds it. It did not flicker. It did not move. It only was, and the three of them in the small clean room looked at it, and the looking was a kind of weight.
Sister Maren came back in. She had not, Pim realized, gone outside. She had gone to the next room, and she had come back with a clay basin and a folded cloth and a small glass vial of something dark. She set these on the shelf beside the jars. She did not look at Wren's hand. She looked at Wren's face.
"How long," she said, "have you been carrying this?"
"I do not know what it is," Wren said.
"That is not what I asked, child."
Wren was quiet for a moment. Pim watched the light in her palm. He watched it sit there, patient as a cat.
"Since I was small," Wren said. "Since before I can remember. There were nights I could not sleep, and I would lie in my bed and press my hand against the wall and the wall would be warm, and I thought that was just what walls did."
Sister Maren drew in her breath. It was a small sound, the kind of sound a person makes when a thing they have long suspected has been confirmed by a person they believe. She did not sit down. She crossed to the shelf. She uncorked the vial and shook two drops of the dark liquid into the basin, and the basin, which had been empty, gave up a thin coil of steam that smelled of pine resin and something older, something that Pim did not have a name for but that made the back of his neck prickle.
"Give me your hand," Sister Maren said.
Wren gave it. Sister Maren took it in both of hers, and her hands, which were the color of tea, looked very brown against Wren's skin and against the blue light that still lay in the palm. Sister Maren did not start. She did not pull back. She turned the hand over, the way a market woman turns over a piece of fruit, looking for the bruise beneath the skin.
"Proctor," Sister Maren said, without looking up. "There is a scar here. Under the light. Did you know."
Ineka Volk leaned forward. "I did not."
"It is old," Sister Maren said. "It is older than the child. It is the kind of scar that is made on purpose, by someone who knew what they were making. I have seen it before. Once. In the marshes, when I was very young. On a woman who came to us in the winter with her hands burned and no name, and who died before the spring."
She turned Wren's hand in hers. The light shifted with the turning, and the scar, which Pim now saw, was a thin pale line that ran from the base of Wren's thumb to the heel of her palm, a line that was not quite a line but a series of small marks, very close together, the way the marks are close together on the inside of a wrist where a person has been bound with cord.
"Who made this," Sister Maren said. It was not a question to Wren. It was a question to the room, to the small clean room and the window that looked onto nothing, and to whatever in the room might be listening.
And then Sister Maren said a name. She said it under her breath, the way a person says a word in a language they have not spoken in a long time, testing whether the mouth still remembers the shape of it. The name was not a name Pim had heard in any corridor of the Academy. It was not a name that sat well in the air of the room. It sat awkwardly, the way a stone sits in a shoe.
"Vaela," Sister Maren said.
The light in Wren's palm went out.
It did not fade. It did not dim. It went out, the way a candle goes out when a hand is laid over it, all at once and completely. The small clean room was darker for a moment, and in that moment of darkness Pim felt, very distinctly, that the room was larger than it had been a moment before, as if the name had opened a door in the wall that had not been there before, and that through the door there poured a cold that was not the cold of winter but the older cold, the cold that is under the cold, the cold that has no season.
Sister Maren let go of Wren's hand. She stepped back. Her face, which had been the face of a woman darning a sock, was now the face of a woman who has just remembered something she had spent a great many years forgetting.
"I should not have said that," she said.
"You said it," Ineka Volk said.
"I said it. Yes. I said it, and I should not have." Sister Maren pressed her lips together. She looked at Wren. She looked at Wren with the particular steadiness of a woman who has decided, against her own judgment, to be honest. "Child. The scar on your hand was made by a person who knew a craft that is not taught in this Academy, and that is not taught in any Academy I have heard of. The person who made it was a woman who came out of the north, out of the salt flats beyond the pale, and her name was Vaela, and she is dead. She died in this city, in the year I was married. She died badly. She died the way people die when they have been doing, for a long time, the kind of work that kills the worker before it kills anyone else."
Pim felt his mouth go dry. He felt, in his chest, the small cold certainty that the woman standing in front of him was not making any of this up.
"You knew her," he said. He had not meant to speak. The words came out anyway, thin and quick, the way they always came out. "You knew Vaela."
Sister Maren looked at him. For the first time, she seemed to see him as a person and not as a piece of furniture.
"I did not know her," she said. "I tended her. For three nights, at the end. She came to us half burned, half frozen, with a baby at her breast and a mark on her hand that was the twin of the mark on this child's hand. She would not say the baby's name. She would not say her own. She called herself Vaela once, only once, and only because the fever took her and she thought she was talking to someone I could not see. She died on the third night. The baby lived. The baby was taken. I do not know where. I have never known. I have tried, for a long time, not to know."
She looked at Wren's hand, which was now an ordinary hand, pale and faintly lined, with the thin scar running across the palm that Pim could now see clearly, the scar that had been hidden, all morning, under the cuff of the glove that had been burned away.