Everything Before September

She taught him everything, in the order she had learned it, at a pace that would have been indecent if either of them had been pretending. Four hundred years of Ard Rhun practice, compressed into eleven weeks, six days a week, from before the tide to after the banking.

Some of it he already had. Most of it he did not. She taught him the seven throat forms and why five of them are wrong for a memory vessel and why the guild keeps teaching all seven anyway. She taught him how to read a gather by the sound the pipe makes rather than by the colour, which she said was the only thing worth knowing and took a year and which he had in six weeks because he had no choice.

And she taught him the vault. Not the fact of it — he had that — but the keeping of it: which shelf, which hand, how the seals are checked, what to do about the eleven bottles in the third aisle that have begun, very slowly, to lose their colour after three hundred years and which nobody has yet worked out how to renew.

"You will have to solve those," she said. "Not this year. But someone will, and there is no one else, so it is you." She said it in exactly the tone she used for telling him a bucket was drawn from the wrong place, and Oisín found that this was the only way he could have borne being told.

In July he made a body that she did not break. She turned it over twice, held it up to the window, put it in the annealer, and said, "That is a master's piece and I am not going to say so again, so remember the date." He remembered the date. He also went out onto the causeway afterwards and sat down for a while.

Fell brought Rosaleen on the ninth of July and on the ninth of August. In July she wanted to hold something. In August she did not come out of the carriage, and Cadhla went out to her, and the two hours happened with the carriage door open and the old woman sitting on the step in her apron, and the whole village found somewhere else to look.

That evening Cadhla came in, washed her hands for a long time, and said, "September will do. I had thought October. It will not be October." Then she went to check the annealers, and Oisín understood that this was as much as either of them was going to say about it.

The question of which hour was not decided until the last week, and it was Rosaleen who decided it, which nobody had planned and which afterwards seemed the only possible outcome.

Cadhla had eleven candidates and had written them all out on a slate, in her own shorthand, and had rubbed out and rewritten the list so many times that the slate had gone permanently grey. The January afternoon with the long stretch of silence. The June visit with the coat that had stopped fitting. A morning in April that Oisín had never even known about, when apparently they had gone down onto the flat and drawn a bucket together.

"They are all wrong," she said. "Every one. And I know why and it took me until Tuesday. Every hour on that slate is an hour I am in." She wiped it with her sleeve. "He does not want an hour of his daughter with me. He wants an hour of his daughter. And I have not got one, because I have never once been in a room with that child when I was not also being the woman making the bottle."

"Then it can't be done," said Oisín. "Then it could not be done," Cadhla agreed, "until the ninth of August, when I sat on a carriage step for two hours and did almost nothing, and she talked, and at one point she said a thing to me that I have not repeated to you or to anyone." She was looking at the furnace. "She said: when you make the bottle, put the fire in it. Not me. Da can remember me. Nobody can remember a fire."

Oisín sat down on the bench without meaning to. "She knows." "She is four and three-quarters and she is dying and she has worked out more of the arrangement than her father has," said Cadhla. "Yes. She knows." She turned round. "And she is wrong, and I am going to do what she asked anyway, and I want you to understand why before September, because you are going to be asked about it for the rest of your life."

"Why?" "Because an hour of a fire, given by me, contains me looking at it. Every hour anyone gives contains the giver — that is what makes it a whole hour rather than a picture. Sile Rhun gave the morning of the shoe and what four hundred years of buyers have actually opened is Sile Rhun loving a child at breakfast." Cadhla picked up the slate and put it down again. "So I will give the hour that child asked for. The fire, in this workshop, on the ninth of August, with a small furious person on a carriage step outside telling me what to make."

She looked, for the first time in eleven weeks, tired. "He will open it at seventy and get the fire. And in the fire he will get her, whole, exactly as she asked, and he will never be able to explain to anybody why a bottle of a furnace is the most of his daughter he has ever had."

They did it on the third of September at four in the morning, at the turn of the tide, with the workshop shut and the shutters up and nobody in the village pretending to be asleep.

Oisín drew the water. It took him six goes to find a channel that was right, and Cadhla checked each bucket with a finger and a taste and tipped five of them into the runnel without a word, and the sixth she looked at for a long moment and said, "Yes. That is the one. Well done." It was the first and last time in three years she said those two words in that order.

He gathered for her, because her forearms would not do it any more and both of them had stopped pretending otherwise in July. He turned the pipe and brought it to her, and she took it, and her hands on it were completely steady, which he had expected and which was somehow the worst part.

"Do not watch my face," she said. "Watch the glass. If you watch my face you will remember my face and you will not remember what the colour did, and one of those is useful to the next person and the other is not." Then she gave it the hour.

Oisín watched the glass. The colour came up out of nowhere the way it always does and it was not green with grey underneath. It was orange going through to a red so deep it read as brown at the edges, the colour of the inside of the furnace at four in the morning, and it was not like any saltglass he had seen or read a description of, and he understood that he was the only person alive who would ever be able to say so.

The work took two hours and ten minutes. She did all of it. He handed her tools and kept the glory hole and did not speak, and at the end the vessel came off the punty clean and went into the annealer, and Cadhla stood looking through the little window at it with her hands hanging down.

"There," she said, in an ordinary voice. "Now. What is that a bottle of?" And Oisín, who had been braced for the question for eleven weeks, discovered that being braced for it did not help at all. "The furnace," he said. "The ninth of August." "Is it," said Cadhla, mildly, with polite interest, the way you receive a piece of information about a place you have never been. "How odd. Well. It will hold."

Ardan Fell came up the causeway on the fourteenth with the money and without his daughter, and Oisín met him at the door, because Cadhla was in the back room and had been most mornings for a week.

"She died on the sixth," Fell said, before Oisín could arrange his face. "In the afternoon. It was not bad. I have been told that this is unusual and I have decided to believe it." He held out the purse. "Eleven hundred. As agreed. I would like to be told what I am buying, and then I would like to buy it, and I would prefer those in that order."

So Oisín told him. All of it — the vault, the eight hundred and sixty-one, the First Hour, the four hundred and eleven years, the three names in the right-hand ledger and the fourth that would go in this week. He told it badly, in the wrong order, standing in a doorway, and Fell listened to every word without once interrupting.

At the end Fell was quiet for some time. "The hour," he said. "The true one. What is it of?" "The furnace." "The furnace." "On the ninth of August," said Oisín. "She asked for it. She sat on your carriage step and told Master Cadhla to put the fire in the bottle, because you could remember her and nobody could remember a fire." He found that his voice had gone. "I'm sorry. That's what she said. That's what's in it."

Fell put his hand out and set it flat against the door frame, and stood like that for a while, and Oisín had the sense of a very large structure settling by a quarter of an inch. "She did say that," he said at last. "In the carriage. On the way home. I thought she was being — " He stopped. "I thought she was being four."

He took the bottle in both hands when it came, and did not open it, and did not ask to. He asked instead whether he might go in and thank the maker, and Oisín said that he might, and warned him, and Fell went into the back room anyway and came out eight minutes later with his face entirely composed.

"She asked me who I was," he said. "I told her I was a customer. She said the current commission was going well and that her apprentice was better than she had been at that age and that I was not to repeat it." Fell picked up his hat. "That is the finest thing I have ever heard a person say, in the circumstances, and I intend to tell it to people for the rest of my life. Good afternoon, Master Oisín." And he went down the causeway at the pace the causeway insists on.