Chapter 1
The Failing Well
Sera Vane could feel the emberwell dying the way you feel a person dying, by the changing rhythm of its breath.
She knelt at the well’s stone lip before the town woke, both palms flat against the rim, and listened with the sense that had no name in the guild books because the guild books had not been written by anyone like her. The Coalmother, Ashfen called their well, and the Coalmother was old and she was tired. The heat that rose from her shaft had once been strong enough to keep two hundred hearths lit through the deep of the Long Cold. Now it came up thin and irregular, a warmth you had to lean toward to believe in.
Sera leaned toward it. She always did.
“You are supposed to use the iron for that,” said Pell behind her, meaning the kindle-iron slung across her own back, the guild tool that let an ordinary temperer read a well’s heat without cooking her hands. “Mother Yarrow would skin you.”
“Mother Yarrow is asleep, and so should you be.” Sera did not move her hands. She was not reading the well through the iron because she did not need to. She could take the well’s failing warmth straight into her skin and hold it there, gathered and safe, the way another woman might cup a candle from the wind. It was the thing she had never told anyone in her twenty-four winters, the thing that would end her if she said it aloud. She was a keeper. Heat came into her and it stayed.
