Ash-glass and the long apprenticeship

Turn 1 of 7

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The staircase to the upper workroom is one hundred and seventeen steps, and you have counted them every morning for nine years. Today the counting feels different — not habitual but desperate, the way a person counts the beats between lightning and thunder. Your hand finds the black-glass railing without looking. The stone is cold, as always, but something in the air has changed. A pressure behind your ears, like descending into water. The tower is listening.

Yrenne is bent over the long bench when you enter, her grey hair pulled back with a wire that might be silver and might be something else. She does not look up. Her hands move inside a lattice of pale light, adjusting something you cannot quite see — threads or tendons or the edges of a wound in the air itself. You have learned, over nine years, to read her silences. This one means she has been working since before dawn and will not stop until she chooses to. The fact that she called you here anyway makes your stomach tighten.

"You've been good," she says, which she has never said. "Better than the last one. I want you to know that before we start." Her voice is the same as always — dry, measured, absent in the way of someone speaking to a part of their own mind. But the words themselves land like stones dropped into still water. Before we start. You stand at the edge of the bench and she straightens, finally, and looks at you. Her eyes are the colour of ash, and they are tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

On the bench between you: a key you have not seen, and a bowl of something that is only pretending to be water. The key is iron, or was iron once — now it has the sheen of something that has been handled for a very long time, the metal worn soft at the teeth. The bowl is stone, shallow, and the liquid inside does not reflect the overhead light correctly. It shows the ceiling, but the ceiling it shows has stars. You do not touch either of them. You have served this woman for nine years and you know the difference between an invitation and a test, even when — especially when — they look identical.

From somewhere below, in the rooms you are permitted to enter, you hear Cassiel moving. Footsteps without weight, the particular sound of someone who exists in this tower on different terms than you do. Yrenne's gaze flickers toward the stairwell and then back to you, and something crosses her face that might be affection or might be calculation. She sets her hands flat on the bench, fingers spread, and waits. The morning light through the narrow window is grey and thin. The bowl of not-water shows stars where the ceiling should be. The key sits between you like a question that has been waiting ten years to be asked.