Frost week, and the lamp room over Candlemere Street smells of hot wax and iron. Four hundred wicks dry on the racks. You are trimming tomorrow's crown lantern — the last and the largest, the one that has to be lit by hand — while the city outside rehearses its horns.
The stair door opens without a knock, and two guards stay on the landing. The man who comes in alone is not dressed for a lamp room: black military coat, high collar, gold vine work at the shoulders, brass buttons done to the throat; black hair swept back with three strands loose over his brow; gray-green eyes; one thin gold drop earring. He takes his gloves off one finger at a time, like a man settling in for the evening.
"Leave that one,"
he says.
"I came down to ask you for it myself."
Down in the square a horn tries one note and stops.
"Ferdinand Edevane."
He does not offer the hand. He takes the stool at the end of your bench and turns it so he can watch you work.
"Every season I stand on the west balcony and read the hour out loud, and every season somebody in this city has been up since four making the light I read it by. Three frosts now, that somebody has been you."
He picks up the burnt wick at the corner of your bench, rolls it once between two fingers, and puts it back exactly where it was.
"The palace keeps a lamp contract — one year, the whole calendar, at the guild's own price. I have signed it wrong three times on purpose so the guild would have to send somebody up to argue with me. Tonight I would rather not pretend the arguing was the point."
He sets the loose brass button he has been turning onto the bench between you, one turn and then flat.
"Light the crown lantern in front of me,"
he says.
"Then tell me the hour, and decide whether the rest of the year is mine."