Binding of Smoke and Fire

The nursery at the top of the Kramer house had once been a storage room for imported silks, and it still smelled faintly of cedar and old paper, which Tegan decided was better than the smell of most nurseries, since at least it reminded him of money instead of reminding him of how little of it was left.

His daughter did not care about cedar. His daughter cared about nothing in the world except crying, and she was very, very good at it.

"Come on, little ember," he murmured, walking her back and forth across the narrow room, her small body hot against his chest in that way the midwife had said was normal, newborns run warm, master Kramer, she comes from fire-blood on both sides, and he had laughed at that, three weeks ago, when laughter still felt like something a man could afford. "You've been fed. You've been changed. Your mother's mother swaddled you so tight you look like a roll of pastry. What else is there?"

She answered with a wail that went right through his skull and rattled around in it.

He was forty-six years old, and he had led the Ashwrights' Guild through a fire, a flood, two price wars, and the slow, grinding collapse of the trade routes to the southern cities, and none of it, none of it, had prepared him for the specific torture of a baby who would not stop crying at the hour when his own bones were begging him to fold up like a chair.

* * *

She had been born on a Tuesday, in the last week of the harvest month, and the birth had nearly killed his wife, though nobody in the house had said that out loud, because in the Kramer house you did not say the frightening things, you simply let them sit in the corners and collect dust until they either left on their own or didn't.

He had waited in the hallway for eleven hours. He had worn a groove in the floorboards, or so his brother-in-law claimed afterward, and he had been handed cup after cup of broth that he never remembered drinking. When the door finally opened and the midwife emerged with her sleeves rolled up and her face wearing that particular expression that healers get when things have gone badly and then gone well again, his legs had nearly given out.

"Your wife will live," the midwife said. "She's sleeping, and she'll sleep for a day and a half, and you'll let her."

"Yes!"

"And you have a daughter."

"Yes!"

"Master Kramer, breathe."

He had not realized he was holding his breath until she said it, and then he laughed, a strange cracked sound, and she smiled at him the way older women smile at foolish men, fondly and with a certain amount of pity.

They brought him the baby wrapped in grey wool, because grey was the Kramer color, grey wool and ash-grey banners, a family that had built its fortune on fireproof cloth and had decided somewhere along the way that they might as well dress like a chimney while they were at it. She was tiny and red-faced and furious about everything, and her eyes were closed, and her fist was clenched around nothing at all, gripping the air itself as though she intended to hold the whole world responsible for the inconvenience of being born.

"Hello," he had said to her, in the corridor, with the birthing room still warm behind him and his wife's exhausted breathing just audible through the door. "I'm your father. I'm told I'm important, though I promise you won't believe that for at least ten years."

She had opened her eyes then. Just for a moment. Dark eyes, nearly black, with something in them, some flicker, that he would think about later, much later, when the letters started arriving from Lord Vane's solicitors, but in that moment it was only a flicker, the way a coal holds a light in it long after the fire has been banked.

"Well," he had said, and his voice had broken on the word, which embarrassed him then and which he would give anything to hear again now. "Well then."

* * *

The crying went on. He paced. He hummed, badly. He told her about the guild ledgers, in a low droning voice, on the theory that nothing on this earth puts a child to sleep faster than accounts receivable, and for one hopeful minute her wailing dropped to a hiccupping whimper, and then it climbed right back up again, past where it had been, as though she had taken the ledger as a personal insult.

"You are your mother's daughter," he told her grimly, and kept walking.

The house was quiet around them in that heavy midnight way, the servants asleep, the watchman making his rounds along the outer wall, the great hearth on the ground floor banked down to a dull red glow that showed through the gaps in the stairwell door like a drowsy eye. His wife was sleeping downstairs in the good room, the one with the wide bed and the southern window, because she needed the sun and the space and the quiet more than he needed his own bed, and that arithmetic had never once felt like a sacrifice to him, though it had certainly felt like exhaustion.

There came a night, around the second hour past midnight, when his knees simply quit. He sank into the old rocking chair by the nursery window, the one that had been his own grandmother's, with the baby still against his chest, and he stopped pacing, and he stopped humming, and, without deciding to, sang a few slow lines of the old song his grandmother had sung in that chair, the last lines too, and then he stopped and just breathed, and somewhere in that giving-up she decided, in her small tyrannical way, that surrender was acceptable, and her crying wound down through sniffles and shudders into a slow, wet, even little breathing that was, he realized with something close to religious awe, sleep.

He did not move for a long time. He was afraid that breathing too loudly would undo it.

The moonlight came through the window and lay across the floor in a pale stripe, and the house creaked its ordinary creaks, and his daughter slept on his chest with her wool-wrapped weight rising and falling, and Tegan Kramer, master of the Ashwrights' Guild, holder of contracts in four cities, a man who had looked creditor lords in the face across negotiation tables without blinking, sat in his grandmother's chair and was quietly terrified.

Because he knew the arithmetic. He did it every night now, lying awake, the way other men did the drinking.

The guild owed Lord Alaric Vane a sum that had grown like a weed in a cracked wall, quietly and then suddenly and then everywhere at once, and Vane had made it plain, in that soft voice of his, that the debt could be settled in more ways than one, and that he was a patient man, and that patience, in his experience, was always rewarded. Tegan had a son already, grown and gone off to the eastern trade houses with his mother's stubbornness and none of Tegan's caution, and the boy was beyond Vane's reach in every way that mattered. But the daughter. The daughter was new. The daughter was the guild's heir, the one in whose blood the old cloth-secrets ran, a debt settled with wardship papers instead of a ruin, and Vane had looked at the grey-wrapped bundle in Tegan's arms at the naming ceremony with an expression that Tegan still made himself not think about during daylight hours.

She was three weeks old and Vane was already counting.

"Not while I breathe," Tegan whispered into the dark nursery, into the top of her head, which smelled of milk and warmth and something else, something faint and strange underneath it, like a hearth that has just been swept. "Not while I breathe, little ember. I don't care what it costs."

The words felt brave in his mouth and cheap in his stomach, because he had no plan, only ledgers full of red ink and a bitter certainty that there was no honest way out of what Vane was building around his family, and somewhere in the back of his mind, in the place where a desperate man keeps the ideas he is ashamed of, an old story stirred. A story his own grandmother had told him in this very room, in this very chair, about the old volcano north of the city, the dying one, the court that had once kept its fires and its bargains and its thing made of ash and memory, the one you could still call if you were willing to pay in something other than coin.

He had always assumed it was a story.

He looked down at his sleeping daughter, at the flicker he sometimes still caught behind her closed eyelids, in the corner of her small mouth when she dreamed, and he thought that maybe his family had never entirely been in the cloth business after all.

The banked hearth down on the ground floor shifted in its sleep, and for just a moment the dull red glow through the stairwell door brightened, as if something far below had heard him, and had turned over, interested.

The knock came at the third hour past midnight, and it was not the knock of a friend, because a friend would have knocked twice and called out, and it was not the knock of a creditor either, because a creditor would have hammered the door down and come in shouting, and this was something in between, three soft raps, evenly spaced, deliberate, the kind of knock a person makes when they are holding themselves upright with their knuckles and their pride.

Tegan froze in the rocking chair with his daughter asleep against his chest, and for a long moment he simply listened, and the house listened with him, and down in the good room his wife went on sleeping, still weak three weeks on, and in the banked hearth below something shifted again, that same slow interested turn-over he had heard the night before, or thought he had, and he decided, in the way of exhausted men everywhere, that a knock at midnight could not possibly be worse than the arithmetic he was already doing in his head every night, and he rose, slow, careful, the baby balanced against his shoulder with one arm, and went down the stairs with the candle.

He opened the door on the chain first, an old habit from guild days, and what he saw in the pale stripe of moonlight was Sera Dunn, and that surprised him more than anything else could have, because Sera Dunn was the guild's factor in the river district, a woman of about forty-five who kept the tally-books on the western warehouses and who had, as far as Tegan knew, no enemies and no debts and no reason in the world to be standing on his step at the third hour past midnight with blood on the left side of her face.

"Master Kramer," she said, and her voice was steady but thin, like a rope that holds and knows it is near its end, "I am sorry, I had nowhere else, and I could not go to the guildhouse, they will be watching the guildhouse."

"Who will be watching the guildhouse," Tegan said, and even as he asked it he was already unhooking the chain, because the woman was listing to one side like a badly loaded barge, and because his daughter, absurdly, was awake now, awake and utterly silent, her small warm face turned toward the doorway with an attention no three-week-old child had any business possessing.

Sera came in when he opened the door, and she came in sideways, and he saw why at once, because there was a tear in her coat along her ribs and the cloth beneath it was dark and stiff, and her left hand was pressed there flat, and she had walked, he would learn later, nearly two miles like that, on a night with frost on the stones.

* * *

He put her at the kitchen table, because the kitchen was warm and because the kitchen was far enough from the good room that his wife would sleep on, and he sat the baby in the crook of his own left arm where she seemed content to be, watching everything with those unblinking dark eyes, and with his right hand he worked, cutting the coat away, peeling the shift, cleaning the shallow cut along her brow first and then the deeper one along her ribs, which was long but, thank every patient saint, not deep, a slice rather than a stab, the kind of wound a knife makes when it is being swung by someone who is hurrying.

"Hold still," he said, and Sera held still, and gritted her teeth when the spirits bit into the cut, and said nothing, which was its own kind of testimony, because Sera Dunn talked about everything, the weather, the price of grey wool, the poor manners of the western dockmen, and a silent Sera was a Sera carrying something heavy.

The baby, meanwhile, was doing something Tegan did not have a name for yet. She was warm. He had noticed it before, the midwife had said it plainly enough, that the child runs warm from fire-blood on both sides, but this was different, because the warmth was rising off her in a way he could feel against his own forearm, a soft radiating heat, and every time Sera flinched or hissed, the warmth flared, briefly, like a coal breathed upon, and the banked hearth at the far end of the kitchen, the embers banked under grey ash, glowed in answer, a slow pulse of red that no hearth had any business making in a house where the master had done nothing, absolutely nothing, for three nights running, unless wishing counted.

"Your daughter," Sera said, watching the embers with an expression he could not read, "is doing that on purpose."

"She is three weeks old," Tegan said, dabbing the salve along the cut, "she