The Nightkeeper's Promise

Elowen Fenn had built her life on small salvations. In a corner of the square where clocks and curiosities were bought and bartered, she set up a table of brass cogs, glass spheres, and the cracked gears of devices people no longer knew how to love. She mended things that had been dropped in haste: a child's wind-up bird with one wing glued at an odd angle, a pocket orrery whose polished moons had fallen loose, a music box whose tune had gone thin at the edges. There was a steadiness to the work, a solace in bringing order back to broken motion. When she touched metal, she felt the rightness of its fit; when she listened, a dulled mechanism would tell her what it had been trying to say.
The public orrery that sat in the center of the square was the kind of thing governments commissioned to make their citizens believe in patterns. It was a cathedral of brass and glass, a scaled model of the night that every winter crowd came to admire. Tonight, its central axis had seized. People groused; some children pouted because the small lamps that marked old constellations did not swing in their appointed arcs. Elowen had been hired by the city watch to coax the orrery back into time. She liked how the city allowed her this work: her hands, which had grown used to the intimacy of small repairs, could reach into the larger machinery and make it sing.
It was one of those evenings when the sky shed odd things. Starlight did not fall like rain here very often, but after certain storms the city found glints scattered along alleys and market stalls as though the night itself had dropped a handful of glass. Most of those pieces were dull and cold; they had the look of well-polished ice. Elowen had learned how to tell the difference between a shard that would only shatter further and a shard that still held a warmth, a shard that might hum if coaxed. She kept a small box for the latter on a high shelf above her bench. It was called the finder’s box, and it was where her curiosity gathered.
She was changing a worn pinion on the orrery's inner gear when she heard the soft chime that told her a small piece of the world had arrived. A street-sweeper had called out about a strange glimmer near the eastern gate. Elowen set her tools down, wrapped a cloth around her wrist to protect the sensitive skin she used for feeling the subtle differences in metal, and went to fetch it.