Wren Hollins Asks Whose Light

The last link was barely forged when the bell on House Via’s floor at Brackle Edge rang again, and Wren Hollins, nine years old and sent up with her father’s dinner, nearly dropped the pot. The stokers laughed at her. One said the Veil had blinked. Another said it was the oil Hesper Quill had been saving, finally earning its keep, which got a harder laugh because everyone knew how little of it there was.

Wren wanted to know what had been caught. Hesper Quill, who did not usually let children near the manifest, turned it round on the desk for her. Most of it was lines, a name-mark and a sum each, tight as stitching. Two lines were fat and blank. Two great bands in grey, the purser said, carried as one entry apiece.

“Whose light is in them?” Wren asked.

“Theirs,” said Hesper.

“But which of them?”

“I don’t know. Neither does the Glare, which is rather the point.” Hesper held out the pen. “Write what you can see.”

Wren held it over the margin for a long time. She could have put a guess, thirty souls or fifty, rich or poor; the purser would not have scratched it out. In the end she wrote only “two bands, grey,” in letters too big for the column, and handed the pen back. Her father ate his dinner cold and said she had the makings of a Wakeful, which he did not mean entirely as praise.