The candle stub was no longer than Nell’s thumb. She had kept it from the Stillness lessons, wrapped in a strip of rag under her blanket, where the jailers did not look. She set it on the stool and looked at it for a long time before she lit it.
Her cell had a cot, a bucket and a slit window too high to see out of. At night the lamp in the passage made a thin yellow line under the door. Nell had been counting that line since the last round of footsteps went past.
The cold came in after the lamp went out. It crept up from the stone floor and into her shins. She pulled her feet up under the blanket.
She struck the flint twice. The wick caught on the second try, small and yellow, and the cell smelled of tallow.
Nell kept her bandaged arm in her lap, where it did not hurt. Her other hand stayed on her knee.
Calen had said to ask before any magic. Small magic, too. Magic nobody would see.
He had said it on the first day of the Stillness lessons, and she had thought he was being strict.
Now she thought he was being careful. That was different.
“May I?” Nell said.
She said it to the air, quietly, the way he had taught her. It was a small word. It let somebody else be the one who said no, if they wanted to.
Then she waited.
Nothing happened for three breaths. The flame stood up straight. Nell counted the breaths and did not look away from the wick.
She remembered the first lesson. It had been ten counts, with a candle held still in a tin dish, and her hands had shaken so hard the wax ran down the side.
She remembered the lessons. On the fifth day she had held her hand over the flame for fourteen counts, with Calen’s hand over hers. Then he had lifted his hand away, and she had held it for nine.
Calen had counted both numbers out loud, and she had heard him say them.
She remembered the fourth day, when someone had opened the passage door and the candle had gone out. It had come back into her palms before she thought to ask.
She had not asked first, then. She had been very frightened, and she had not been sorry.
She remembered the third day too. The flame had leaned that day, toward her hand, with no draft in the room.
Calen had seen it. He had stood over her with his arms folded and said nothing for a long time.
Then he had put his pen away without writing anything down. She had watched him not write it.
On the fourth breath, the flame leaned.
It bent toward her slowly, the way a plant bends toward a window. Nell watched the tip go over until it pointed at her palm. Her hand rested on her knee, open, a finger’s width from the light.
There was no draft. The window did not open. She knew that because she had looked at the cracks in the stone twice, the first night, and found them in the same places both times.
Nell did not reach.
Her fingers wanted to. She could feel the wanting in her wrist, a small pull, like a cord tied somewhere under the skin. She kept her hand where it was.
She counted slowly, the way she had counted for Tobin in the guardroom. In. Out.
Ten.
On the eighth breath the flame began to straighten. On the tenth it stood tall and still, and the wick hissed once, as if it had finished something.
Nell let her hand fall back to her knee. Her palm was warm.
It was only the candle, she told herself. Candles were warm.
Across the corridor, a pen scratched.
Nell heard it stop. It was a small sound, the sound of a man who had heard something he did not expect. The scratching began again a moment later, slower than before.
Calen had not come out. She had thought he might. If he had come to the door, she had decided, she would tell him everything, in order, from the first breath to the last.
He did not come. The pen only moved, and paper rustled when he turned a page.
She wondered what he wrote. Numbers, she thought. He liked numbers the way Liss liked words, and he never looked up while he wrote them.
She looked at the line of light under her door. It did not change.
“You can see it,” Nell said quietly, to the flame, to the wall, to the man behind it. “I know you can.”
The pen did not stop again.
She sat with the candle until it burned down to the length of her finger. She did not ask the air for anything else.
She did not need to. The question had been asked.
---
Morning drill was in the yard, in the cold. Ministry guards stood along the wall with their hands behind their backs. Captain Hoff stood at the gate, looking at nothing in particular, the way he did when he was waiting for someone to make a mistake.
Nell had not slept much. She was dressed before the grey light came up over the wall.
At the hatch she took her half of the bread and ate it in small bites. She gave the crust to Dorran. Dorran said sorry for taking it, and then he ate it.
The class lined up by the water trough. Liss stood on one side of Nell, copying the guard’s cough under her breath. Dorran stood on the other, asking each person in turn whether they were all right.
He said sorry when they said yes. Hesper stood at the end and asked the guard on the wall whether he was cold.
Tobin stood in the middle of the line. He had held six counts in the hall the day before. Nell had counted his breaths the whole time.
He had breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, slow, without anyone telling him to. She had not taught him that. She had only counted along.
Now he stood still with his hands at his sides. Nell could see his breath in the cold air, even and quiet.
Kade came down the line last. He walked the way he always walked, as if the yard had been built for him and the rest of them were late guests.
“Good morning, candle girl,” Kade said.
He said it loud. Nell heard the words go down the line, from Kade to Liss to Dorran. The guard on the wall laughed once, then stopped, as if somebody had looked at him.
“Did you keep the Keep warm last night?” Kade asked. “Or was that only you?”
Nell did not answer. She counted one breath in and one breath out.
Answering would make it a game. Kade liked games with rules he made himself.
She kept her eyes on the wall in front of her, where a crack ran down the stone in a straight line. It ran the way the cracks in her cell ran.
Two. Three.
“Pairs,” Hoff called from the gate. “Arms out, feet set, hold it for thirty. Nobody talks.”
Hoff walked the line once, slowly. He stopped beside Nell, looked at her arm and then at her feet, and moved on without a word. It was the nearest thing to approval she had seen from him.
Nell turned to her partner. It was Hesper, who looked at Nell’s bandaged arm and then at the stone under their feet.
“Will the count be longer today?” Hesper asked.
“I do not know,” Nell said.
“Do you think the Duke knows?”
Nell did not know what the Duke knew. She knew the count, and the count was thirty. She did not answer that either.
She raised her good arm out to the side and set her feet, the way the guards had shown them. Her other arm came up slower, and the bandage pulled a little.
She did not mind the pull. It was a thing she could count.
“She is not talking to the Duke,” Kade told the whole yard. He had not started his own pair yet.
“How rude of her. Or perhaps the flame has taken her tongue.”
Liss said, very softly, “The flame has taken her tongue.” She looked at Nell when she said it, and then she looked away.
Nell kept counting. Four, five, six.
Beside the water trough, Tobin said, “Six,” under his breath. He was not talking to anyone. He was only keeping his own count, the way he kept everything, and his arm did not move.
Dorran said, “Sorry, Nell,” to nobody in particular, and then he went red to the ears.
Liss stepped on his foot by accident. “Sorry,” she said. Then she heard herself, and her mouth went tight, as if she had swallowed something she had not meant to take.
Across the yard, Calen stood with the older students by the wall. He did not look at Kade. He did not look at the guards.
He looked at Nell, once, for the length of one breath. She saw him decide something. Then he turned back to the drill.
He did not say anything. He did not come down the line. Nell had not thought he would.
Calen did not step into words. He waited until there was something to see.
Nell breathed out, long and slow, and let the count go to ten. Then she started again at one.
At thirty, Hoff said, “Down.” The arms dropped. Hesper shook hers out and said, “Thirty,” as if she were checking a number on a slate.
Nobody else spoke.
They were sent back to the cells in a line. In the passage the class went past the open door of Calen’s cell. He was standing in the doorway with the Hask Book shut under one hand.
Nell slowed. She did not mean to.
He held the book close, with his thumb on the corner, the way someone holds a thing he does not want to lose. She could not read the page from the door. Her mouth opened on the first half of a word, the one she had been saving since the guardroom.
Sir.
She closed her mouth. Calen’s eyes went to her face and stayed there for one count. Then he stepped back into his cell and let the door swing almost shut.
It did not close all the way. She could see the edge of his sleeve, and the corner of the book.
Nell walked on. Behind her, the door did not open again.
She thought about the flame instead. It had leaned toward her when she did not reach for it. It had stood straight when she counted.
She did not know what that meant, or whether it was supposed to happen at all. Calen would know.
He had said he would show her things. That was all he had said, and she had not asked again.
The third line on her wrist said Unbind. She had not asked what that meant. She had asked once, in the guardroom, and he had said he would show her.
She did not like waiting. She was good at it anyway. Waiting was what she had been doing for as long as she could remember.
But this was not the kind of waiting that helped.
She turned her wrist over in the grey light and looked at the third line again. It had not changed since the guardroom. Nell had checked it every morning, the way she checked the cracks.
Nell thought it through in short lines, the way she always did. The flame had leaned. She had asked first.
She had not reached.
The flame had not been hurt, and neither had she. Calen would want the whole of it, in the right order. He would not like to hear it from anyone else.
At the next lesson she would tell him. The leaning, the ten breaths, the pen that stopped.
Not after.
After was when things got written down.