The Green Flame in the Jar

Pell Varrow had sold jars of light at the Sallow Cross gate for eleven years, and he knew the look of a crowd that had decided to be lucky. This one was packed shoulder to shoulder against the rope, the ferrymen shouting that the boat would take no more and then taking more. A woman in a wet shawl held out a coin for a jar. Inside the glass a pale green flame wobbled on nothing. He had made it from tallow, a bit of mirror, and a promise.

“Does it burn?” she asked.

“Burns till you need it,” Pell said, which was true of most things.

Up on the high gallery the House’s bell rang once, and the queue surged the way water goes down a drain. Pell lost his footing and his grip on the crate, and two jars rolled under the rope into the mud. Nobody stopped for them. The Throng went down the ramp onto the boat with cheap passage in every pocket, and the ferrymen cursed them aboard.

Later, when the boat had gone and the gate was quiet, he picked up the jars that had survived. House Sec had caught the link, the runner said, quick as a rat in a barrel. Pell thought about the green flame, useless and bright, and the woman who had walked off holding hers as if it were the Lantern itself. He sold the last jar to a boy for a copper. The boy did not ask whether it burned.