Mourning Vessels

Kiln and Breath

The kiln in Eira Larke's yard held the shape of her life like a bone remembers a song. Clay accepted her fingers with an easy, indifferent gratitude; it did not ask for reasons. She turned the wheel as the city outside turned its ledger and its rules. Morning light came thin and ash-stained through the tall workshop windows. The glaze pooled like a pale lake where her brush caressed it with practiced economy. For years Eira had made reliquaries for the Keepers, each one a small, exact promise. The vessels were not pretty things in the way the market prized beauty. They were measured, weighted, intended to do a job the world would not name aloud. Their rims held the heat of last breath and the quiet geometry of grief. To make them was to play a part in something that kept the ground below quiet. The Presence, a thing everyone spoke around and rarely named, slept under stone and salt. It slept while the city kept its bargains and turned its people like gears. The Keepers commissioned Eira because her glaze kept a consistent tremor that steadied the seal. She liked the work because making meant she still had control over small certainties. Her brother Joran came to the yard with black dust in his hair and his hands like small cliffs. He always smelled faintly of lime and mortar, of the places where stone listened. He kissed the back of her hand like a ritual and left her with a joke she could not hear all at once. The city had started sending more bearers from the households, and the announcements came folded in the Hall's heavy paper. A messenger arrived that afternoon with Magistrate Halden's seal pressed in old bone wax. The envelope was thin but it carried an authority that sat in Eira's chest like a rock. They wanted a reliquary made in three days, glazed in a slate that hummed under certain touches. It was unusual to be asked for a thrumming glaze; it implied a close keeping. Joran's name was in the House roster that night, inked in a hand that did not consider his trade. He accepted the call with a blunt, practical shrug that masked something Eira could not name. He left with his sack and a promise that his turn would be short. After he closed the door, Eira found a marble in a pocket and could not remember who had given it to whom. Tiny absences nested in the house like moths and gnawed at the edges of their days. She told herself the ledger knew better, that the seal was worth small losses in a ledger's arithmetic. Still, when Joran returned from his first night as a bearer, his laughter had been sanded down. There are many small thieveries that are legal and invisible, she thought, and the thought tasted like copper.

She kept the marble polished on a shelf, an object to rub when the air thickened with unnamed things. At night she lingered by the kiln and whispered a name into the cooling clay, half to test a superstition and half because she feared losing names most of all. Names were small anchors in a city whose foundations were stitched with treaties and silence. The kiln answered her with warmth and the smell of lime and did not answer the other questions. She did not yet know how much the making cost.