Amber Honeywell's Arc

Chapter 4 of 14

Durgan woke before the sky changed. He sat up in the chair so fast the painted fox fell again. His eyes were not the eyes of a man who had slept. They were the eyes of a man who had seen. "All of it," he said. "Every drop. Before dawn. In something that will carry." Amber set down the iron lantern she had been trimming and stared at him. The unfinished batch sat on the table in its crystal vessel, less than a cup. "It isn't done," she said. "You know it isn't done." Durgan stood. He did not raise his voice. "I saw her wake. I saw the room. I saw the hour. The honey is the hour. Give it to me or she dies in it." Amber's hands went cold. Eleven years sat in that vessel. So did a child she had never met. She thought of the ledger, the four ruined batches, the line she had written about finishing what was already here. She thought of the ghost at the edge of the lamp who had said the color held. She did not ask Madrigal. She did not ask herself twice. She took down the wrought lantern from its hook, opened the glass, and lifted out the candle stub. She poured the honey, slow and steady, into the lantern's dry well. The strange color climbed the iron filigree and settled, glowing on its own. It would carry. It would keep. She closed the glass and held it out to him by the chain. Durgan took it with both hands. He looked at the painted fox on the floor, then at her. "I will not thank you," he said. "Thanks are for things that can be returned." He tucked the fox inside his coat. He went out into the dark, past the place where he had collapsed in the snow under the hanging prisms, and was gone before the first gray showed. Amber stood in the empty doorway. The vessel on the table was clean. Her eleven years walked away down the path in a stranger's hand. She closed the door. She picked up her ledger and wrote one line: gave the rest. Then she sat down, because there was nothing left to tend, and for the first time in eleven years she did not know what to do next.