The Cost of White Fire

The creaking of the copper tension cables ran down the spine of the keel with the sluggishness of an old animal settling in for the winter. Outside, against the hull of oak and iron, the blizzard lashed the waxed canvas with a dull, dry flapping, as if hundreds of blind birds were crashing in turns against the belly of the airship.

Nora Cifuentes did not lift her gaze from the green felt of her workbench. The pads of her thumbs were numb from the draft blowing in through the bulkhead joint, but lighting the peat brazier cost two copper coins that she preferred to save for Friday's lunch.

She lined up the three jars on the unfinished wood.

They were small containers, hand-blown glass, crude and heavy, sealed with faded sealing wax. The first two held nothing inside except a fine, grayish powder, almost identical to the ash in the communal hearths when the firewood has burned too quickly. They were the remains of the autumn aerostatics exam: a cart journey to the lower valley fairs and the names of two second cousins whose faces she could no longer picture even if they sat right across from her in the tavern.

The third jar, however, held a denser grain, of a milky white that phosphoresced faintly under the murky light of the skylight.

That was the Sunday of the sourdough.

Nora brought her nose close to the cork stopper, even though she knew the glass let nothing escape. If she closed her eyes tight enough she could still smell the burnt cinnamon in the corners of the tray, the warmth of her grandmother's twill skirt against her calves, and the crunch of raw flour between her teeth before the loaf went into the brick oven. It was her sharpest memory. The sweetest one.

And it was the only one she had left to pay for the right to take the exam.

Zephyr's magic demands no blood or oaths; it devours the Sundays you will no longer be able to remember.

It was nail-splittingly cold.

"If you keep staring at it like that, girl, it'll be used up before the boss gets here," said Sancho from the adjoining table, without moving his chisel away from a brass bracket. "And you won't even have enough left to light your father's pipe."

"My father doesn't smoke," Nora replied, straightening her back until her vertebrae popped one by one against the coarse wool of her doublet.

"Well, better for his lungs. Hand me the bone scraper, go on. This whale grease has stuck to the thread as if it had roots."

Nora stretched out her arm and pushed the tool across the plank. The wood was full of old notches and circular stains from chicory cups.

"Is there a fire in the stove downstairs?" she asked.

"There are four pine splinters and a handful of dry pinecones left. If you want hot water for tea, go down before the boiler shift burns them up."

"I don't have time. The dean will be down in ten minutes."

"May the winds catch you confessed."

Sancho went back to scraping the metal with an unbearable screech that rebounded off the woodwork of the hull. Next to the coal basket, a tabby cat with half an ear missing, whom everyone on the keel called Biscuit, dozed in a ball atop an aerial route map folded in four. The map had damp-eaten edges and a ring of lard grease right over the Needle Archipelago.

Nora rubbed her hands together and then blew on her knuckles.

The workshop smelled as it always did at that hour: the pungent vapor of ozone released by the alembics as they primed, pine resin for sealing joints, and that acrid trace of camphor left by the magic distillation bells as they cooled on the zinc tables. Through the frosted glass windows facing outside, the leaden gray of the low clouds made it impossible to guess whether it was nine in the morning or three in the afternoon. Saltpeter and condensation trickled in thin, dirty threads that froze before touching the windowsill.

Nora pulled from her apron pocket the glass bell that the apprentices mockingly called "the blind teapot." It was a squat flask with a spiral neck ending in a tip as fine as a sail-sewing needle. She placed it on the three-legged iron stand, wiped the base with the hem of her sleeve, and uncorked the third jar.

The white ash slid down the brass funnel with a dry whisper.

Upon touching the bottom of the crucible, Nora felt a very brief twinge behind her temples, no greater than the sting of a summer horsefly. It was only a blink: the memory of her grandmother's voice humming a reaping song while pouring chopped walnuts over the mixing bowl began to blur at the edges, like a watercolor splashed with a glass of water.

She clenched her jaw.

No.

Not yet.

She closed the purge valve with a sharp twist of her wrist.

The echo of firm footsteps on the upper catwalk planks silenced the murmurs of the six apprentices occupying the workshop benches. They were heavy footsteps, marked by the rhythmic click of a bronze-ferruled cane on the planking.

Dean Úrsula Mendieta didn't need to raise her voice to freeze the air.

She arrived wrapped in her navy blue cloth overcoat, her shoulder pads covered by a thin layer of frost beginning to thaw in the miserable heat of the workshop. Tucked under her arm she carried the ledger bound in black sheepskin, and in her right hand a polished brass caliper, gleaming like cutlery at a wedding banquet.

"Fifteen minutes to prime the crucibles," Mendieta announced, stopping at the head of the central aisle. "Not one more. Anyone who fails to sustain the white flame for forty heartbeats before the guard shift ends will surrender their enrollment and disembark at the next anchorage in the estuary. Zephyr doesn't need sentimental stokers. It needs distillers."

She stopped in front of Nora's station.

The dean smelled of apple cider vinegar and soaked wool. She gazed at Nora's flask with her bulging, watery eyes, which seemed never to blink beneath eyebrows bristling with rebellious gray hairs.

"Cifuentes," she said, tapping the wood of the bench with the end of the caliper. "I barely see three drachms of mnemo-ash in that receptacle. I hope you aren't pretending to fuel the bell with the memories of what you had for snack yesterday."

"It's prime grain, Dean," Nora replied, keeping her eyes fixed on the woman's brass coat button. "Early attachment."

"Early attachment burns fast and leaves too much slag if it isn't tempered with discipline. We'll see if you have enough memory left to recall how to plot a navigation chart after that ash turns to smoke."

Mendieta took two steps toward the next station, but her voice continued to float in the environment like the thick vapor of an uncovered pot.

Nora lowered her gaze to her own fists. The residual ash from the previous evening's trials stained the coarse fabric of her shirt; a whitish dust, rough to the touch and cold as coarse salt, that wouldn't come off even with a boar-bristle brush.

If she burned that last Sunday, the plum orchard...

The thought cut off halfway.

The ash wood stool to her left screeched against the uneven floorboards.

Nora didn't turn around immediately; she figured it must be Sancho looking for another piece of chalk to mark the joints or asking her for the grease rag. But whoever settled next to her was not wearing the patched doublet of the keel apprentices, but rather a pearl-gray cloth riding jacket, impeccably tailored, although the cuffs already showed that subtle fraying of someone who spends fourteen hours a day hunched over a bellows.

Tristán Barral set his own crucible on the table: a superb piece of double casting, heavy, dark as the bottom of a well, with expansion rings forged in old silver.

"The draft is weak today," he said, looking toward Nora's bell without greeting.

He had long fingers, stained with soot at the cuticles, and a recent scrape on his index knuckle that had healed poorly because of the cold.

"It's because of the blizzard," she replied, surprised that he spoke to her. In the two years they had shared the wooden benches of the ship, Tristán Barral had barely been a taciturn silhouette at the back of the lecture hall, the wayward son of a family of northern shipbuilders who refused to pay for his distillations with his father's gold. "If the outer canvas gives two more inches, the duct draft is going to blow back inside."

"I know. The flame will go out on us before twenty heartbeats if we work alone."

Tristán pulled out a horn-handled pocketknife and began to leisurely scrape away a drop of dried wax that had adhered to the neck of his flask. The movement was rhythmic, calm, entirely detached from the dull panic running through the rest of the workshop.

"Mendieta won't forgive even half a second," he continued in a low voice, while the wax remnants fell onto the felt like scales. "And you don't have enough ash left for a second test. You can tell by the level in the tube. It barely covers the elbow of the spigot."

"I have what I need," Nora lied, readjusting the small iron clamp to hold the phosphorus wick.

"You have nothing left, Cifuentes. You're scraping the bottom of the jar. And I..."

Tristán paused, holding the knife in the air. His eyes, light brown like the water of peat streams, settled directly on Nora's face.

They were the emptiest eyes she had ever seen.

There was no disdain in them, no sympathy, no shadow of the camaraderie that usually united those who went hungry and cold on the same workstations since five in the morning. There was nothing.

"I miscalculated the density of my load," he said, pointing with the blunt tip of the knife to his own silver crucible. "I have firepower to spare, but I lack a fixative. My ash burns too fast because it has no root. If I link my crucible to yours with a copper bridge, your attachment will sustain my flame, and my volume will prevent your reserve from consuming itself before the old lady counts to forty."

Nora stood motionless, the wick between her fingers.

Biscuit the cat leaped from the firewood box, dismissively dodged Sancho's muddy boots, and went to rub his back against Tristán's leg. The boy didn't even look down to brush him away; he simply moved his foot to the side, mechanically, with the indifference one uses to bypass a loose splinter on deck.

"If we link crucibles, the dean will mark the test as shared," she whispered. "Half the grade for each."

"A passing mark is enough for me," he said.

Nora looked at him closely. There was something profoundly unsettling about the line of his jaw, the curve of his eyelashes, the way he tilted his head while waiting for a reply. A strange familiarity, like a melody you think you heard in childhood but whose lyrics and instrument you can no longer recall.

"You and I knew each other before coming to the flotilla, didn't we?" Nora blurted out without thinking, her heart doing a clumsy flip beneath her ribs. "At the port of San Millán. At the salt docks. My uncle had the boat carpentry and you..."

Tristán blinked just once. His expression didn't change; there was no start, no discomfort, not the slightest hint of curiosity.

He looked at her the way one looks at a gull perched on a mooring post or a sack of grain leaning against a dock.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said in a flat voice, clean of all weight. "Hand me the copper bridge if you want to save the exam. We're running out of time."