Blythe caught Keir Aveling by the front of his coat before he crossed the copper line, and wished, with immediate and considerable irritation, that she had a different reason for holding him.
“Your wrist,” she said.
He looked down at her hand. “I had noticed yours.”
“The coil. It isn’t capped.”
His expression changed. He stepped back at once, taking her hand with him for half an inch before she let go. A narrow thread of gold slipped beneath his cuff. He caught it between two fingers and pressed the copper lid over it.
Behind Blythe, every glass flower in the first bed shivered.
No sound. That was the worst thing about still-light failing. The glass remained, and the thing you had spent your life putting inside it departed without even the courtesy of breaking something.
She turned. The amber flower by the arch still held its small, uneven glow. The pink bells beyond it stood full of an afternoon eighteen years old.
“Nothing lost,” she said.
“I am sorry.”
It was the promptness of the apology that made her look at him again. She had prepared for an argument. Running-light people were particularly fond of explaining that nothing should be kept for ever, usually within reach of something expensive they had not made.
“You saw the sign.”
“I saw the line. I thought I’d closed the cap at the square.”
“You thought.”
“Yes. That’s the part I’m apologising for.”
At the garden entrance, two visitors stopped pretending to read the little card beside the door. Blythe moved aside so they could pass. Keir stood well clear of the copper, hands visible, like a man who knew how quickly a mistake became a performance when there was an audience.
The woman of the pair looked from his wrist to Blythe.
“Are you letting them in now?”
“Visitors with capped light have always been welcome.”
That was true of her published visiting hours. It was less true of her enthusiasm.
“Well,” the woman said, and left the word to do whatever work she wanted it to do.
Blythe waited until they had gone through the arch. Beyond the old wall, Caldris was enjoying its annual open-garden afternoon with the usual combination of reverence and poorly supervised pastries. Someone had dropped a sugared crust on her front step. Someone else had tied a coloured ribbon to her gate.
“I can go,” Keir said.
“You have paid for a ticket.”
“I didn’t pay for permission to damage your work.”
The irritating man kept taking away the replies she had ready.
She had seen him at the river stairs three evenings earlier, sending a running thread of light through the spokes of an old cart. Everyone had laughed when the thread became a fish and swam up the wheel instead of around it. Blythe had disliked the applause. The fish had been imprecise. Its tail had become a leaf halfway through.
She had stayed until the end.
Now he was in her doorway, with the same loose collar and the same worn copper on his wrist, and she could still remember the brief warmth of his coat beneath her hand.
“Keep the cap on,” she said.
“I will.”
“And don’t tell me the flowers would be prettier moving.”
“Would they?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t.”
He entered behind her.
The garden was small enough that first-time visitors invariably looked surprised. They expected acreage, fountains, something suited to the number of years it had taken. Blythe had made seven turns of a path inside a high stone wall. Each turn showed a different light: a rose dawn, a blue hour after rain, the green beneath a leaf held against the sun. Between them stood flowers of clear glass, every petal shaped in her own workshop, each holding a moment she had chosen not to lose.
No roots. No soil except in two ordinary pots by the kitchen window, where an entirely unmagical rosemary plant was doing its best to die.
Keir stopped at the third turn.
“That isn’t morning.”
“Which?”
“The pink one. People will call it morning. It’s the inside of a closed eyelid in the sun.”
Blythe disliked how quickly pleasure moved through her.
“It is possible to recognise a colour without announcing it.”
“I wanted to know if I was right.”
“You were.”
He nodded, accepting the answer without claiming more from it.
A little group came through the arch. Blythe gave them the explanation she had given six times already that afternoon. Still-light was a maintained composition. It needed the nightly circuit, the artist’s attention at each connection, the boundaries kept whole. The flowers were not alive. They felt nothing. No, she could not preserve an animal in glass. No, the house was not heated by the light. Ordinary lamps were far more useful.
“Then why do it?” a man asked.
“Because useful is a rather small country to spend your whole life in.”
His companion laughed. He did not.
Blythe moved them along to the green bed and turned back to find Keir crouched beside the crooked amber flower.
It was the only flower she had set at an angle. Everyone assumed she was going to correct it. On inspection days she placed a taller stem in front.
“Don’t touch that.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“People often say that with their hands already out.”
He put both hands on his knees. “Better?”
“Marginally.”
“You like this one.”
“I made all of them.”
“That’s not what I said.”
She looked at its tilted head. The colour had come from light through a chipped honey jar on the day she first rented the workshop that became her house. She had been nineteen and infuriatingly certain that she knew what she was doing. There had been no furniture. She had eaten bread standing up, because sitting on the floor would have made the place seem more empty.
None of that was in the exhibition notes.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said.
“No.”
“You needn’t agree so quickly.”
“You didn’t ask if it should.”
He stood, and now they were close enough that she could see a tiny dark mark beneath his jaw, a place where he had missed shaving. She wanted, absurdly, to touch it. She had lived thirty-seven years without needing to touch a running-light artist’s badly shaved neck. It seemed unfair to acquire the need on a busy afternoon.
“Blythe.”
Nerida Ostrel stood by the kitchen door with her gloves folded in one hand.
Blythe stepped away before she had decided to. Keir noticed. He said nothing, which was worse.
“The visitors are asking about the final bed,” Nerida said.
“The card is beside it.”
“They would rather hear you.”
Nerida’s gaze went to Keir’s cuff. She was fifty-eight, white-haired and beautifully economical in her disapproval. She had taught Blythe to hold a colour steady while the glass cooled. She had also taught her that a room ought to look as though nobody had ever had to clean it.
“My coil is capped,” Keir said.
“So I see.”
Blythe went to the final bed. By the time she had explained the particular shade of blue, Keir had gone.
She felt his absence as a failure to finish a sentence.
Scene break
At dusk she found the dropped crust, the ribbon and Keir’s ticket on the stone beside the gate. He had turned the ticket over and written, in a cramped hand, The crooked one should stay crooked.
There was no address. Naturally. A man who made things vanish would not consider a reply necessary.
Blythe carried the ticket indoors and put it under the sugar bowl.
Then she moved it to the mantelpiece, where it looked foolishly important.
She was still deciding where it ought to go when Tamsen Brindle arrived carrying two ordinary glass tumblers and a parcel of cheese.
“Sold the blue bowl,” Tamsen said. “Your customer wanted to know if the bubbles were intentional. I told him yes.”
“They weren’t.”
“He liked them better intentional. Shall I tell him he bought an accident?”
“Let him have his evening.”
Tamsen set the tumblers down. At forty-five she had a shop, a great talent for carrying three things in one hand and no interest in being impressed by Blythe’s garden. This was why she was allowed to come in through the kitchen.
“You had Aveling here.”
“Everyone had Aveling somewhere today. He seems to wander.”
“He’s lived in the north quarter longer than I’ve had my shop.”
“I meant professionally.”
“Of course.”
Blythe cut the cheese too thinly. Tamsen took the knife away and corrected the problem.
“Nerida saw him,” Blythe said.
“Nerida has eyes.”
“The high conservatory decision is next month.”
“Also a calendar. A formidable woman.”
Blythe laughed despite herself.
The high conservatory. For years she had managed to speak its name without seeming to want it. A whole winter exhibition under the city’s oldest glass roof, her garden the centrepiece, her name in the book beside the artists she had learned to imitate and then surpassed. She had been shortlisted at last. She was not going to throw it away because a man had recognised an eyelid.
Tamsen followed her glance to the ticket.
“You could have supper with him.”
“I have had supper with men.”
“Then you’ve excellent experience.”
“They were not running-light artists.”
“Were they very good company?”
Blythe put the cheese back on the table.
That was a needlessly accurate question.
After Tamsen left, Blythe walked the seven turns. She touched each copper joining strip. Held each colour. Closed each small gap the day had made. The garden settled around her, beautiful and obedient.
At the amber flower she paused.
Keir had been wrong about one thing. She did not like it because it refused to fit. She liked it because she remembered liking it before she knew whether anybody else would.
When the circuit was done, she took paper from the drawer and wrote an invitation to supper. Tomorrow. The little eating house beside the north steps, where neither of them would be working. She knew where he lived; apparently she had retained Tamsen’s wholly incidental information.
She addressed the note to Keir Aveling, looked at it for a long time, then put on her coat.
If she waited until morning, she would make it sound professional.