Gerald heard the burn before he understood what had happened.

  A quick, wet sound -- skin on hot steel -- and then a sharp intake of breath that cut through the workshop's hum. He was standing at the edge of the yard, near the well, as he did most mornings now after the chickens were fed and the woodbox filled and there was nothing left on the list to keep him elsewhere. The heat pressed against his face. The light inside shimmered and bent everything into something not quite solid.

  Edric had been moving fast. Gerald had watched him for several minutes -- long enough to count three trips between the furnace and the bench, long enough to see the way Edric handled the blowpipe with a quickness that looked like confidence. He gathered with a smooth, turning pull, crossed to the marver with the loaded pipe balanced in both hands, and rolled the gather across the flat iron surface with a rhythm that was almost showy -- the kind of rhythm that said look how easy this is.

  On the fourth gather, Edric turned from the furnace too fast. His left forearm swung wide as he stepped toward the marver, and the soft inside of his wrist caught the near corner of the steel surface where the radiant heat from the glory hole kept the metal above skin-temperature even when no glass had touched it.

  The sound was small. Skin meeting hot iron and pulling away in the same instant, the body moving before the mind caught up. Edric's hands opened and the blowpipe rolled in its cradle on the bench arms, the gather on its end cooling from orange to dark amber as it lost its rotation.

  Edric held his left forearm in his right hand. His teeth were set. His face was flushed from the furnace heat and from something under it -- not pain, or not only pain, but the flush of someone who knows what he did wrong and would very much like to have done it three seconds ago instead of now.

  From across the workshop, Da spoke.

  He was at his own bench, near the glory hole, working a piece Gerald could not see clearly through the heat-shimmer. He had not looked up. His hands had not stopped their slow, continuous rotation of the pipe in the bench arms. His voice was level and carried across the workshop the way the furnace hum carried -- evenly, completely, filling the space without trying.

  "What did you learn?"

  Edric flexed his left hand. The skin on the inside of his wrist was red -- not blistered, but bright, the sharp red of a contact burn that would sting for an hour and be gone by evening. He kept his arm away from his body, letting the cooler air near the wall find it.

  "To be more careful," he said.

  Da did not look up. His pipe turned once, slowly, and the glass at its end caught the light from the glory hole and flared bright orange.

  "No," he said. "You learned that the glass does not care how clever you are."

  The workshop was quiet after that. Not silent -- the furnace hum was always there, and the faint creak of Da's pipe turning in the bench arms, and the settling sound of the annealing oven cycling through its afternoon stages. But the human sound had stopped. Aaron, who had been sorting frit at the back shelf, had gone still with his hands in the bin. Tomis was not in the workshop. Edric stood with his burned wrist pressed to the cooler air near the tool rack and said nothing.

  Gerald did not move. He was standing at the edge of the light, where the yard's air met the workshop's heat, and the shimmer between inside and outside bent him the way it bent everything else. Neither of them had seen him. He was sure of this -- he was part of the wobble, not visible through it.

  He watched his brother hold his wrist and look at the marver as though the flat iron surface had done something unexpected, when what it had done was exactly what iron always did: held its heat, sat still, and burned whatever touched it without asking permission. The marver had not moved. Edric had.

  Gerald looked at Da's hands. They had not stopped turning the pipe. They had not changed their pace. Da had spoken without looking up because he had not needed to look up -- the sound was enough, and the silence after it, and all the years at this bench.

  He left the dooryard before either of them could notice him. His feet were quiet on the packed dirt, and the heat let go of his face one step at a time.

  That evening, Gerald stacked firewood.

  Not the morning box. The sitting-room woodbox -- the smaller one beside the hearth, which was not on Wynn's list but which Gerald had started filling because the shape of his mornings had pressed outward into the rest of his day. The pale strip of plaster was there above the box, where he and Wynn had patched the crack two days ago. The surface was still lighter than the wall around it. It would be lighter for a while yet. Wynn had said the colour would even out with time. Gerald looked at it briefly, and then past.

  He set the first log in the box carefully. Then the second. He fitted the third against the other two so the bark sides nested and the weight sat evenly. The fourth he turned until the flattest face was up, and the fifth went on top of that. He did not rush.

  He had thrown logs into this box three days ago. One had bounced and cracked the wall and he had told Wynn and she had made him fix it and the fix was above him now, pale and visible. Tonight the wood sat where he placed it. Each piece where he placed it. Five logs in a box, stacked properly, the pile holding without leaning.

  He went to the kitchen. Mary was wiping the stove with a rag that had been grey for as long as Gerald could remember. She did not look up. Nessa was stacking the last of the supper bowls in the sideboard, her apron splashed with dishwater.

  Gerald went upstairs.

  The house settled into its evening shape.

  Gerald lay in bed with Sable's field guide open across his chest and listened. Mam's footsteps in the upstairs corridor, lighter than Wynn's, moving toward the bedroom she shared with Da. A murmur of voices below that could have been Tom and Mary in the kitchen or could have been the walls remembering. The hum from the Hot House, low and steady, unchanged by darkness.

  He was not reading. The book was open to a page about sandstone -- its grain, its layers, how river water carved it into shapes that looked intentional but were not -- and he had read the first three lines twice without the words staying. His mind was in the workshop. Not the workshop of the morning, bright and hot and shimmering, with Edric's quick hands and the sound of skin on iron. The other workshop. The one that existed after the workers left and the tools were racked and the furnace was banked and the building sat in the dark with its heat and its silence.

  He put the book on the table beside his bed.

  He lay still for a long time. The house made its sounds. The furnace hummed. A breeze came through the window that was cracked against the late-spring warmth, carrying the green smell of the kitchen garden and the fainter mineral edge that was always there, always underneath.

  Gerald got out of bed.

  He did not dress. He was still in his day clothes -- he had come upstairs after supper and lain down without changing, as he sometimes did when the day had been long and undressing felt like an unnecessary distance between standing and lying down. His feet were bare. The floor was cold. He went downstairs.

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  The main house was dark.

  Not fully dark -- the kitchen fire had been banked but not killed, and its glow reached the corridor through the gap under the door, a thin orange line across the flagstones that Gerald stepped over. The front hall was empty. The oak chairs under the coat pegs sat in their places against the wall, and Gerald passed between them as he did every morning with the broom, but the hall in darkness was a different hall, its proportions shifted, the ceiling higher and the river-stone floor colder under his bare feet.

  The front door was not locked. It was never locked -- Gerald had heard Tom say once that the door had not been locked since the year before Gerald was born, and Gerald had not asked what had happened that year, because something in Tom's voice had suggested it was over and did not need revisiting.

  The yard was silver. Not moonlight -- there was no moon, had never been a moon, only the God-Ring's pale arc across the sky, and tonight the Ring was bright, a band of faint silver-white that stretched from horizon to horizon and cast enough light to make shadows. Gerald's shadow on the packed dirt was thin and grey and moved when he moved. The workshop's shadow was large and did not.

  He crossed the yard.

  The Hot House door was shut. Not latched from outside -- it had no exterior latch, only the interior bolt that was never thrown because the furnace inside could not be left unattended in a sealed building. Gerald put his hand against the wood. It was warm. The door carried the day's heat, and the warmth under his palm was the same warmth he felt every morning standing in this spot, except that every morning there were voices and light through the cracks and the sound of tools and the knowledge that people were on the other side.

  Now there was only the hum.

  Gerald pushed the door open.

  The heat came first.

  Not the fierce, pressing heat of the working day -- a lower heat, a banked heat, the furnace holding its temperature through the night as it did through every night, steady and patient. The air inside was warm and dry and tasted of mineral and iron and the faintest chemical trace that Gerald could not name -- the ghosts of the day's colourwork, cobalt or copper, lingering in the still air.

  The light was different. The furnace's working aperture was shuttered, and the only light came from the inspection port -- a narrow slit low on the furnace dome that gave off a steady amber glow, the colour of heated stone rather than flame. No flicker. No breath. The rune furnace did not burn; it was warm the way a river was wet. The glory hole was dark. The annealing oven gave off its own quiet red through the corridor door, the colour of something cooling slowly with no intention of stopping. In this light the workshop was enormous. The ceiling was higher than Gerald had thought, the far wall further away, the spaces between the benches and the tool racks wider and deeper than they appeared through the doorway when the workshop was full of bodies and noise.

  He stepped inside.

  The stone floor was warm under his bare feet. Not hot -- warm like the hearthstones after an evening fire, an even, held warmth that came up through the soles and into the ankles. Gerald took three steps and stopped.

  The marver was to his left, its flat iron surface catching the rune-glow in a dull gleam. He could see the near corner where Edric's wrist had caught that morning, and the surface looked the same as every other part of it -- dark, smooth, polished by years of glass rolling across it, with nothing to say about what it had done. The tool racks lined the far wall, dark shapes hanging from dark pegs. The punty rods stood in their rack beside the furnace, their tips dark with glass residue. The frit bins on the back shelf were just shadows, their colours lost.

  Gerald walked to the bench. Da's bench -- the one nearest the glory hole, with the smooth, concave arms that Da's blowpipe rolled across for hours every day. The wood was dark with age and polished by use, and in the amber glow it looked like something that had grown in this spot rather than been built.

  On the bench arm, a punty rod lay cooling. Left from the day's last piece, its working end dark with glass residue, its shaft still faintly warm. Gerald reached out and picked it up.

  It was heavier than he had expected. The weight was concentrated in the rod's length rather than at any single point -- a distributed, even heaviness that pulled his arm down and needed both hands to hold level. The iron was smooth under his fingers, and warm, and the warmth went into his palms the way the workshop's warmth went into his feet. He held it with both hands and felt the weight of it and understood nothing about it except that it was a tool that belonged to someone who was not him, in a room he had not been asked to enter.

  He had imagined this. Had imagined holding the tools, standing at the bench, being inside the workshop rather than at its edge. In his imagining, picking up the tools had felt like being here. What he felt instead was the weight of the rod and the quiet of the building and the rune-light on the floor and the knowledge, clear and immediate, that he was holding something without permission, in the dark.

  Then footsteps.

  Not from the yard door. From the back -- from the short corridor that connected the Hot House to the annealing room, where the finished pieces sat in their oven cycling down through the night's cooling stages. A door opened. Boot-steps on stone, steady and unhurried. The warm orange light from the annealing room spilled briefly into the corridor and then narrowed as the door was pulled to.

  Tomis came around the corner of the furnace carrying a slate in one hand. The kind the workshop used for temperature notes -- chalk marks on dark stone, numbers that meant something about the annealing cycle that Gerald did not understand.

  He saw Gerald.

  He took in the scene. Gerald could see it happen -- the eyes moving from Gerald's face to the punty rod in Gerald's hands to the bench to the furnace to the door Gerald had come through. It was quick and complete, the way Tomis looked at everything: once, thoroughly, and without the need to look again.

  His face showed nothing.

  The silence was long. Not empty -- full, the kind that had weight and texture and sat in Gerald's stomach beside the rod's weight and pressed down. Tomis stood with the temperature slate in his hand and Gerald stood with the punty rod in both of his and the furnace hummed between them and neither of them moved.

  Then Tomis said: "Set it down."

  Gerald set the rod on the bench arm, exactly where it had been. He placed it rather than dropping it -- laid the shaft across the concave wood and made sure it sat in the smooth groove where Da's pipe rested, because the rod had been there before he picked it up and it should be there after.

  "Pick up the broom."

  The broom was in the corner near the marver. Gerald had not seen it when he came in -- leaning against the wall in the shadow beyond the tool racks, a plain straw broom with a worn handle, the bristles dark with glass dust. He crossed the workshop and picked it up. The handle was warm.

  Tomis moved to the furnace. He set the slate on the bench and knelt beside the dome, running his fingers along a seam in the refractory lining where the rune channels were set. Gerald could not see what his hands were doing -- only that they moved slowly, deliberately, fingers reading something through touch. Tomis shifted to the far side of the dome and did the same thing there, his chalk marking something on the slate without looking at it. His back was to Gerald.

  It was the most deliberate back Gerald had ever seen. A back that was choosing not to watch.

  Gerald swept.

  The glass dust on the stone floor was fine and pale, almost white, and it moved ahead of the broom in thin drifts that caught the rune-glow and glittered faintly. He swept from the near wall toward the furnace, moving carefully between the bench legs and around the base of the marver, pulling the dust away from the tools and the buckets and into the centre of the floor where it gathered in a long, pale line. The broom's bristles scratched softly on the stone. It was the loudest sound in the workshop.

  He swept around the frit bins, where spilled granules of colour had mixed with the dust. He swept along the base of the tool racks, where the shadows were deepest and the dust was thickest. He swept under the bench -- Da's bench -- reaching the broom beneath the heavy wooden legs and pulling out a small drift of dust and glass flakes that had gathered in the angle where the legs met the floor.

  Tomis worked at the furnace and did not look at him. Gerald swept and did not speak. The furnace hummed. The annealing oven glowed its quiet red behind the corridor door. The workshop kept them both in its banked heat and said nothing about either of them being there.

  When the floor was as clean as Gerald could make it -- sweeping around things he did not dare move and into corners the broom could only partly reach -- he brought the collected dust to the sand bucket near the door and swept it in. The pale glass dust settled onto the darker sand and disappeared.

  Tomis took the broom. He did it without looking at Gerald -- reached and took the handle as Gerald brought it back toward the corner, his hand closing over the worn wood an arm's length above Gerald's hand, lifting it free. He set it against the wall where it had been.

  "Good night," Tomis said.

  Gerald left.

  The yard was the same silver it had been when he crossed it. The God-Ring's arc had shifted -- too slow to see and too steady to doubt. Gerald's shadow on the packed dirt was thinner than before. The workshop door closed behind him -- Tomis pulling it shut from inside, the wood settling into its frame with a sound that was soft and final.

  Gerald crossed the yard and through the front door. He climbed the stairs. The house was asleep around him, and nothing in it had noticed he was gone, and nothing in it would know where he had been unless Tomis chose to tell.

  He lay in bed. He did not pick up Sable's book. His hands were warm from the broom handle and the punty rod and the workshop floor, and they smelled faintly of iron and glass dust, and he held them against his chest under the blanket and felt the warmth go out of them slowly, the way heat goes out of everything that is not a furnace.