The Glassmaker of Hollowfall

Asha stood with her face close to the kiln as if it were the mouth of a living thing that might cough her secrets back. Heat wrapped around her shoulders in a way that made the outer world—misted lanes, the crooked roofs of Hollowfall, the river's slow smear of light—a distant, indifferent painting. Inside the workshop, glass sang. The sound wasn't language most people could hear: a thin, liquid note that rose and shivered when a bowl took curvature just so, a sigh that let a bead settle into a mood. She tuned pieces the way others tuned string; a delicate tempering of breath and flame, a tilt here, a tick of cooling there. The very edges of her fingernails smelled faintly of flux and soot, and she liked it.

The bead she held on the pipe was almost done—no more than a bright pupil of molten glass balanced on a brass mouthpiece. She leaned forward, cupped her hands to shape the skin of it with air and a practiced hum. There was a private joke she told herself about naming each creation's temperament aloud so she could lie if anyone asked. 'You're sulking, aren't you?' she murmured to the bead, and the bead ticked as if offended.

Outside, a cart rattled across cobbles in the direction of the market. Someone barked a laugh at a joke about the baker's newest tart—Hollowfall's famed mushroom and honey tarts, deep-fried until their edges looked like little gull wings, a town delicacy entirely unrelated to the business of feeling or not-feeling. The dish drifted into the kiln room each Thursday like a promise the town made to itself. Asha never ate more than a corner; she kept her appetite measured the way she kept her glass thin.

A knock, polite and hesitant, came at the door and before she could answer Fenn Marrek's head appeared in the doorway, hair billowed with kiln-dust. He was carrying a wrapped loaf that had the smell of river herbs and a grin that had gotten older but not kinder. 'You tuned something sulky in there? Or does the glass have a new grudge?' he asked, dropping the loaf on the bench as if it were an offering to some fire-god who preferred carbohydrates.

She rinsed the pipe with a practiced spurt and set the bead to cool. 'It has opinions,' she said. Her voice had that dry clearness that made jokes sound like observations. 'Mostly about my choice of apprentices.'

Fenn stepped closer, examining the bead like a man who'd never learned to see the world in such small, honest objects and yet recognized their worth. 'If it's going to have opinions, it'll need a chair and a cup of tea around here. You can't keep giving the town the good moods while hoarding the rest.'

Their banter wasn't all scherzo; it was the easy friction of long acquaintance. He had a way of leaning on her workbench with both elbows, the kind of posture that invited trouble and forgiveness in equal measure.