The foundry looked like a sleeping animal when it wasn't roaring—big doors shut, chimneys breathing slow, tools laid out in rows like ribs. Jes Toller stood by the main furnace with her sleeves rolled and her living hammer bound to her wrist by that band of black iron, hair tied up in a knot that could have held a roof beam.
"You brought it?" she asked by way of hello.
I set the small pouch of slag on the bench. The shard inside glittered like night trapped in glass.
"Good," Jes said. "We're going to teach your fire to remember."
"The furnace has a spirit," I said. "It remembers being hot."
Jes snorted. "Furnace remembers being hot. I want it to remember how. Curve, not number. And I want your ember to hold the same curve and give it back on command."
"Like Bank," I said, patting the emberling under my coat, "but with…shape."
"Bank holds more. Memory holds right." Jes tapped the furnace brick as if knocking on a door. The brick sounded satisfied. "Blades temper best when we follow a line—up, rest, down, rest—same every time. You're going to write a pocket that learns that line. Quill will call it 'Recall.' I call it not ruining a month's work."
She tossed me a canvas apron. I tied it on and tucked the emberling into the crook of my elbow. It hummed a little, banked and polite, veil close to the rind.
Apprentices rolled carts out of the dark: a rack of blanks waiting for edge, a tub of oil tempering bath, scabbards stacked like waiting mouths. The bellows spirit grumbled the way old men do when they are right and know it; the traveling crane creaked in a language that meant "don't swing me like a toy."
Jes nodded at a table where she'd chalked a neat ladder of lines. "Crownspire degrees," she said. "We won't sing numbers. We'll breathe counts." She tapped each rung. "Up on four, hold eight, down six, hold four. It's the shape that matters. Your fire will want to be clever. It needs to be dependable."
"Bones," I said.
"Before bolts," she answered, grim and pleased.
We lit. The furnace woke with a yawn. I wrote the furnace a Vent it already liked and nested a Bank where Jes indicated, not mine, hers—barbed in the corners where she'd learned over thirty summers to catch slop before it became spill. The emberling hopped to the lip, not nervous, but aware. I set my palm near its core.
"First try," Jes said. "Write a Recall pocket in your Bank. Don't name it that yet. It'll get proud."
I sketched a pocket like a cupped hand inside the familiar Bank. Then, instead of simply filling it, I braided a binding line along the inside edge: hold this as you felt it. The formula was simple on slate; in a lattice it wanted to argue. Memory is a kind of cost no one teaches you to price.
"Breath," Jes said. "Four up."
I fed a narrow thread. The emberling warmed, the furnace rose, and I felt the pocket flex—first too loose, then too tight—before it settled. "Hold eight," Jes said, beating a tempo on the table with two knuckles. The pocket swelled and tried to slop. My barbs caught. "Down six." Hardest part: heat wants to fall like stone. I bled through Vent instead of yanking through Cost. "Hold four." The emberling wanted to hum—pleased with work. I let it, a hair.
We quenched a run of test-strips Jes kept for exactly this—little tongues of steel that told truths. The first set sang too high for too long. Jes nodded once. "You overshared at the top. It remembered bright and forgot boundary. Again."
We ran the curve until the bellows stopped complaining about our rhythm. The emberling learned to swell without getting drunk on its own heat. The pocket—the not-yet-named Recall—held better. On the fourth lap, one of the apprentices got greedy with coke and snuffed the draft for a moment; smoke put its finger where air should have been. I drew a thin cut and a Vent and let the bad air out the cheek of the furnace instead of its eye. The crane creaked approval. Jes didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
We laid the tempered strips on the bench. Jes ran a file across them. Clean bite on the soft backs; smooth run on the edges. "Closer," she said.
The emberling's channels hummed quieter. I slipped the slag shard from the pouch and set it on the lip of the furnace where fire could lick it without eating it.
"Quill says," I began.
"I know what Quill says," Jes said. "Fire that chose to be stone sits well with fire that hasn't decided yet. You'll use a whisper of slag when you write the memory notch—teach the pocket to hold shape, not just heat. Don't stuff rocks down its throat and call that craft."
I pressed the shard—just for a breath—against the outer edge of the Bank. The emberling leaned, curious the way Lark leans into sun. A new barb formed where the slag had kissed, sturdier than chalk. The Recall pocket—there, I'd named it in my head whether it liked it or not—stopped trying to balloon at the corners.
We ran the curve again. Jes watched with her arms folded, a judge pretending not to be proud of her favorite student because that would be undignified. When we quenched, the strips sang the note Jes wanted. She allowed herself the smallest sound—a grunt unfolding into a hm.
"What do you call it?" I asked, because names stick.
Jes shrugged. "Heat Curve. Curve-Hold. It doesn't need poetry. But if Quill asks, tell him you wrote a Trace. He'll clap in his pocket."
The emberling pulsed in my elbow as if it had learned a new trick and was trying not to show off. The seal over my heart warmed, then warmed again.
"Level?" Jes asked without looking. "I don't keep a needle in my nose. I measure with my ears."
"Six," I said, because I could feel it—not like a ladder rung, exactly, but like a breath you can suddenly take without thinking.
"Write it down," Jes said. "Then use it."
We did—on real work, not test tongues. Blades came red out of the furnace and went to oil, one after another, and the hump in my throat that is fear of ruining another person's week dissolved into the kind of tired that knows it has earned the bed it is pretending not to want. Jes never stopped checking. When the last blade hissed and went quiet, she slouched against the bench and glared fondly at me like I had tricked her into caring.
"Council boys came sniffing," she said as we swept unnecessary heat from the hearth with a Vent that knew not to be clever. "Wanted to standardize output. They love a metric like they love their own boots. I told them we make songs, not screws. You can play a song the same way every night. It doesn't mean you sing it to a clock."
"What did they want?"
"A signature curve to buy by the dozen," Jes said. "If they decide they can train a hundred Kaels to cook instead of two Jeses to listen, they will. It works until the first storm comes and their clocks get wet."
I thought of Fitch and his clean boots and clean lies. "The Council put him in a cell."
"They put him in a cell," Jes said. "He'll try a different door when he sneaks back out. That's his skill. Yours is remembering your own."
She shoved a small wrapped packet into my hand. It crinkled with the weight of coin and filings. "Chit for the shift. Copper for the pot. Slag for your Bank. Don't spend any of it on something that sparkles. Sparkle is for people who want to be seen from a distance."
I walked home with the emberling tucked under my coat, the Trace pocket warm and ready like a second heart learning rhythm. Althryn smelled like cold stone and the last of the market. Lark glowed on the sill when I opened the door, petals star-wide. My mother was half-asleep in a chair with a book face-down on her lap; she woke when the hinge complained.
"You're later than late," she said, not unkindly. "Did the furnace ask for a lullaby?"
"It asked me to stop pretending I know the words," I said, and told her about Trace. She listened the way farmers listen to clouds.
"More memory," she said when I finished. "That's what all good craft is. Teaching hands to do the right thing when the heart is busy."
She set Lark on the table beside the emberling. Leaf and coal considered one another. I touched the Trace pocket and bled a thumb's worth of taught warmth into the hearthstone. The old brick hummed in a way that meant its spirit remembered who had carried fires through this room. Lark leaned, pleased. The emberling didn't flare. It glowed like a promise.
"Sleep," my mother said. "Your instructor will invent ways to stack work on your bones in the morning."
She was right. Osk had invented ladders with buckets that hated us. He made us climb them while our familiars held formulas we weren't allowed to look at. "If you can't write with your back screaming," he said, "you will never write when a horse throws you or when you're hungry or when someone you love is talking at you."
We climbed. We did a thousand small things wrong and small things right. Brann's ant sliced rope exactly where it meant to; I suspected he had stood in his kitchen butchering linen for practice, and tried not to be charmed by the image. Neri's wisp learned to carry breath down a lane and return it, a runner who finally liked the loop. Aureline's salamander held a shroud without scorning it, which meant she had asked it to—politely—and it had chosen not to be vain.
"Riven," Osk called when the buckets decided they had made their point, "your eyes are on your hands. Get them off."
"Yes, Marshal."
"And stop pretending Concord is a trick," he added. "You two—" he jabbed a finger at Sera and me, "—can carry a table without arguing. Good. Now carry a table while three people ask you questions and one of them is on fire."
"Which one?" Sera asked.
"Yes," Osk said.
We did not catch fire. We sweated until the salt stung our eyes. We wrote Concord with fewer apology-lines, the barbed link sitting where it should without tugging a rib. When I gave the pot heat through Trace, it stayed level through a pivot that would have slopped it yesterday. Sera whispered thank-you to the line in the way only a brewer can make gratitude sound like an ingredient.
Professor Quill's afternoon ring-room smelled of chalk and iron sand. He had an odd spark in his eye, which usually meant either a new rune or a new way to scold us into loving an old one.
"Three things," he said, turning the board on its wheel. "One: the Council's hearing for Mr. Fitch is scheduled for next week. You are not invited. Two: alley edits have dipped since someone shouted policy in the market with a brewer at his elbow." His mouth twitched. "Three: we are adding a small adjunct rune you will use once a month and never show off—Audit."
He drew it: a loop with two short crossbars. "Audit doesn't rewrite. It asks. When you place it near a formula—yours, not someone else's—it tells you where cost leaks and where efficiency cheats. You will hate it. Good. You will use it anyway." He glanced, not subtly, at the row where Sera and I sat. "If you have been inventing new pockets you're too proud to admit exist, you will show me those diagrams after class."
Sera made an innocent face that would have fooled no one. I did not try.
We spent an hour learning to dislike our own flourishes. Audit is cruel because it is honest and small. It pointed to a wobble in my Concord link I liked to think was personality. It suggested a cleaner barb on the Trace pocket—exactly where Jes had made me kiss the slag. It found a sympathy line Sera had left between two simmer variants that made her pot sulk only on Thursdays.
"Strip it," Quill said when I tried to argue with a ghost. "You are not interesting enough to earn that mistake yet."
The bell let us out into a bladed wind that made the emberling purr. Sera walked me to the tram and shared bread with the greedy calm of a person who feeds everyone within arm's reach when she's thinking.
"Trace is good," she said. "We should chart two curves. Kitchen and field."
"Kitchen's gentler," I said. "Field can spend more cost with the same cadence."
"And we'll use Audit to keep them from eloping in the middle," she said, scowling affectionately at chalk dust in her nails. "Tomorrow at dawn?"
"Quill's west ring?" I asked. "Or your pantry?"
"Pantry," she said. "Quill will sniff it out and pretend to be surprised."
I took the late shift at the foundry again because Jes had written memory run on a slate and underlined it, and because the emberling hummed at the word memory like a cat at the sound of a favorite cupboard. The night crew worked without talking much. We moved like people who had learned the line. I set the slag near the Bank, subtracted the show, and fed the furnace a curve that felt like a hymn it had written and we were harmonizing. Jes did not praise. She set a hand on the furnace brick when we finished and closed her eyes like a farmer thanking a field. It was enough.
On my way out, she said, "Your Council coats sent a boy to watch from the gate. I told him he was welcome to help stack scrap. He declined."
"Strange," I said.
"I told him we didn't make cake," she said. "He didn't laugh."
Althryn slept with one eye open, the way cities do. The door-knocker spirit three houses down tried a new song and got stuck halfway through; its master beat it gently until it remembered the rest. I let myself into our kitchen and found a note in Quill's hand on the table next to a pouch of iron sand and a clean rag.
Riven—Trace diagram. Good bones. Bring it to lab. Do not name it something heroic. —M.Q.
My mother had scribed below with her neat looped letters:
Lark approves of crafts with memory. We are all trying to be better ancestors to ourselves.
I stood in the quiet and the part of me that wants spectacle and the part that loves a good ledger both agreed we were on the right road.
The day after dawn, Sera's pantry smelled like ten kinds of leaves planning a quiet party. We charted the two curves: Kitchen Trace and Field Trace. We let Audit scold us until we stopped making excuses. The emberling learned to "hum the warm," as Sera called it, across a shelf of jars without waking the ones that wanted cold. We wrote a Murmur—Sera's word—for a micro-thread that told yeast to be confident.
At midmorning, a runner with a Council seal on his collar found us and delivered a note that simply read:
Public exhibition: Trace application (approved). Pair: Riven & Tallow. Lane four, high noon. —M. Quill.
"He wants us to bore them out loud," Sera said.
"Perfect," I said. "We're very good at that."
The green was busy for midday: workers on lunch, first-years who should have been in grammar, a handful of city folk with baskets. The inspectors in gray took their seats with faces that would have been carved into door lintels if they had a sense of humor. Quill made a show of laziness, which is how you know he was about to enjoy himself.
"Pair four," he called. "Riven. Tallow. Trace demonstration."
We stepped into the lane. The emberling sat like a disciplined coal. Sera's pot breathed like a kindly dragon. A row of small glass bulbs—brittle and cheap—waited on a shelf: if we failed, we'd hear it.
"Begin."
I wrote Latch, Steady. Then I set Trace—Field—for the first time out where anyone could see it. You don't shout a curve; you whisper it. The line rose and held, fell and held. Sera moved the pot through pivot and step and a turn that would have unhooked us yesterday. The bulbs, filled to marks Quill had scribed, stayed at the marks. Quill nodded once, only with his eyes.
"Perturbation," he said, as if ordering tea. Osk clapped on the far side of the awning, loud enough to make your bones misremember their names. The line bobbed and settled. The bulbs didn't crack. One of the inspectors shifted—almost a flinch; I tried not to feel proud.
"Application," Quill said. He motioned a first-year forward with a knife blank and the polite terror of someone who thinks second-years are half gods. "Heat. Quench. Prove."
We did it quickly and cleanly: brought the blank up on Trace, let it learn the hold, let it come down in the right sigh, quenched in the shallow tray Quill had rolled onto the chalk. The blank sang when the file kissed it. Jes, from the back of the stands with her arms folded like a door, didn't smile, which was how I knew we had done it right.
"Enough," Quill said. "You may sit."
We did, hearts behaving themselves. Brann slid past and, for once, didn't aim a barb. "I'd pay you to stand behind me in a duel and make my blade behave."
"You can't afford me," I said. He grinned, a small one, and for a breath I liked him.
After drills, after chores, after the foundry—because Jes had shoved a slate at me that read MORE MEMORY—I came home to a kitchen that smelled like thyme and the possibility of soup. Lark glittered quietly. The emberling rested in my palm like a warm rock with opinions.
We had done nothing spectacular. We had written a pocket and a habit and a line. We had turned a shape into a skill. We had made our fire remember.
When I finally slept, the dream came like a ledger written in light: lines clean, barbs neat, pockets holding where they should. In the margin, someone had added in a careful hand: Wings later.