The apprentice of small suns

Fen had the glass turning just as Master Oren called his name.

The globe glowed orange at the end of Fen’s rod. One more breath and it would be wide enough to fit the brass frame hanging over his bench. He could already picture the winter parade coming down Bell Street beneath it, every face tipped up toward a sun big enough to turn the frost on the shop windows to water.

“Fen. Reading lamp.”

“Now?”

“Mrs. Teal is here now.”

Fen took his mouth from the blowing tube. The globe sagged on one side. He caught it before it folded, rolled it across the bench, and reached for the cooling rack. Soot had worked its way under his thumbnail. He tried to scrape it out with another nail as he went to the front of the shop.

Mrs. Teal stood beside the counter in a coat with two different buttons. She had brought her lamp in a box padded with wool. The navy glass was cloudy near its base, though a lime colored point still shone inside.

“It brightens when I lift it,” she said. “I’ve spent three evenings holding it over my book like a thief with a lantern.”

Fen picked it up by its handle. “The hinge is loose. I can tighten that.”

“You said that last week.”

“Last week it was loose.”

She looked at his stained thumbnail. “Your big frame is coming along, then.”

“It would be further along if Oren had another pair of hands for these.”

Oren set a tray of brass collars on the counter. “The repair is yours. I’m going to the square.”

He left with a measuring cord around his neck. Fen heard the shop door bell rattle behind him.

Mrs. Teal took off her gloves. She was old enough to remember the winter before the sharing wire was laid beneath the streets, and she remembered it often. Her hands, bent at the knuckles, were steady when she held a lamp.

Fen turned hers upside down. “The sun is fine. It’s borrowing badly.”

Every lamp in the town held a pocket sun, a small bright bead sheltered in glass. When a lamp had more warmth than it needed, some traveled through the sharing wire to lamps that had less. A little brass tooth in each socket stopped any one lamp from taking too much. Fen had filed hundreds of those teeth. He had never liked the work.

Mrs. Teal pointed to the cloudy patch. “What’s that?”

“Old soot. It won’t hurt anything.”

“Then put the lamp down and see if it stays bright.”

Fen set it on the counter. The light shrank at once. He lifted it; the glow returned.

He turned the base toward the window. The socket tooth sat where it should. When he tipped the lamp, something inside the cloudy glass shifted with a faint tick.

“It has a crack,” he said.

“On the inside of the collar.”

Fen held the lamp closer. Mrs. Teal knew its sounds and moods better than he did, but a crack inside the collar was awkward to reach. He started to unscrew the globe.

“Wait,” she said. “Warm your spare first.”

“The spare can take it.”

“The little sun can’t.”

She showed him what she meant. Fen warmed a clean sleeve of blown glass in the light of another lamp while Mrs. Teal held hers steady. When he lifted the damaged collar, its sun settled into the warm sleeve without dimming. A fleck of soot came loose with it, black against the glow. The crack beneath had widened enough to let the collar rock whenever she put the lamp down.

Fen fitted a sound collar, settled the sun back inside, and set the lamp on the counter. It remained bright.

“There,” Mrs. Teal said. “I can leave it on the table again.”

Fen tightened the handle as well. She watched him work, then opened her box.

“You’ll be at the parade?” he asked.

“If I can get down the hill before your enormous sun comes rolling along and flattens everyone.”

“It hangs from the arch. You’ve seen the drawing.”

“I’ve seen six drawings. Each one got larger.”

“It has to clear the wagons.”

Mrs. Teal tucked the lamp into its wool. “Come by afterward. I’ve kept our checkers game laid out.”

Fen had lost to her three times in a row. The board had been waiting on her kitchen table since autumn, when he’d promised to come back with a better opening.

“After the parade,” he said. “I’ll make you regret leaving it there.”

“We’ll see.”

---

By the next afternoon, the grand frame filled the back of the shop.

Fen had bent its ribs from brass himself. He had shaped each socket to hold one of the twenty small suns he had rescued from broken and retired lamps over the past year. All twenty were awake behind their little glass sleeves. Alone, each could warm a reading lamp. Together, Fen hoped, they would light the square from the baker’s door to the frozen fountain.

The parade committee had given Oren a narrow arch, two nights of work space, and a payment large enough to cover Fen’s winter wages. Fen wanted Oren to see what he could build when he was given more than a lamp that fitted in one hand.

Oren returned from the square with snow melting on his coat. He examined the frame, then the connector Fen had made to join it to the sharing wire.

“It needs its stop tooth,” Oren said.

“I’ve made one.”

“It’s on your bench.”

Fen glanced at the little piece of brass among his tools. “The square has six street lamps feeding the wire. I need to see whether the frame can draw enough to wake all twenty at once.”

“Put the tooth in before you test it.”

“With the tooth in, I can only wake four. I’ve already tried.”

“Then we hang four.”

Four tiny points of light in a frame meant to hold twenty. Fen had spent months looking for sound suns in heaps of cracked glass, carrying each find home in his pockets so it would stay warm. Now they were all there, bright and ready.

“The town has the whole year to read by its lamps,” Fen said. “It gets one night to see this.”

Oren took a box from the locked cabinet and set it on the bench. Inside the wool padding lay three narrow vials of stored dawn. In summer, when the first light reached the east windows, Oren caught it for starting suns that had gone wholly dark. Fen had helped seal the vials. He knew there had been five in spring.

“This is what I can replace,” Oren said. “Three.”

“I’m not breaking any suns.”

Oren looked at him for a moment. “I have a customer waiting. Fit the tooth.”

When he had gone to the front, Fen held the tooth over its slot. If he fitted it, the first test would tell them only what they already knew. If he left it out, he could wake the whole frame for a moment, see how the light spread, and unplug it.

He set the tooth beside his ruler.

The connector fitted snugly. Fen pulled the shop curtains apart, then went round the frame and checked every sleeve. Warm glass met his fingertips at each socket. He reached for the switch.

At first, four suns brightened. Then eight. Light ran up the brass ribs and gathered behind the navy glass. Fen laughed. By the time the last sun woke, the workshop walls shone green, and the crooked globe he had made that morning cast a round shadow all the way across the floor.

The shop lamp went out.

Fen let go of the switch. Its handle stuck under his thumb. Beyond the window, the street lamp opposite blinked once and darkened. A shout came from the house next door.

Fen pulled the connector free.

The grand frame stayed lit for a breath, drawing on the warmth already inside it. Then its twenty points dwindled to the size they had been before the test.

Oren came through the shop at a run. “How long?”

“Only a moment.”

He saw the tooth on the bench.

Across the street, a woman opened her door with her youngest child bundled in a quilt. At the baker’s, a tray clattered onto the pavement. Fen could hear people calling between the houses, asking whether anyone still had a lamp burning.

Oren lifted the box of dawn from the bench. “Bring the small tool case.”

---

Seventeen lamps had gone cold in the streets nearest the shop.

The sharing wire had fed Fen’s frame from every lamp within reach. Most had lent more warmth than their collars could bear. Glass had cracked in some; in others, the little suns had gone out.

The baker, Tavi, had been setting dough beside her warming lamp. By the time Fen reached her kitchen, the dough was stiff in its trays. Her two assistants were carrying them to a coal oven on the far side of town.

“I could use a pair of hands,” she said. Her voice was level, which made Fen wish she had shouted.

“I’ll come back.”

“You can come now.”

“We’re taking lamps to the houses.”

Tavi looked past him to Oren, who stood in the doorway with the tool case. “Then come when they have light. The oven won’t tend itself.”

At Mrs. Teal’s house, the room was cold enough that Fen could see his breath. Her checkers board lay on the kitchen table. The pieces were still arranged from their last game, his red men crowded on one side. Her lamp sat unlit beside it.

“The collar broke,” she said. “I heard it.”

Fen picked up the lamp. Its glass felt cold clear through. He opened it with care, hoping for a point of lime light, but its sun had gone dark.

“I’ll bring another,” he said.

“Good. Bring one that can stand on a table.”

He carried her lamp downstairs. Oren was waiting at the foot of the steps.

“How many can you wake with the dawn?” Fen asked.

“Three. I’ve used one at the baker’s, so they can finish packing before they go.”

Fen looked back up the stairs. “Mrs. Teal needs hers tonight.”

“So do the Hales. Their children have been sitting under coats since we came through.”

Oren said nothing more. He took the next lamp from Fen and marked its broken collar with chalk. They still had houses to visit.

By dusk, they had carried seventeen lamps back to the shop. Eleven held suns that still showed a faint glow if the lamps were lifted and held close. Six were entirely dark. Fen laid the damaged collars in a row. Their fractures were different, but he knew what had struck them all.

The grand frame hung above the bench, its twenty suns shining in the dark shop. They could warm it by themselves all night. In the morning, without house lamps to lend to them, they would still be too small to fill the square.

Fen fetched the clean sleeves from the drawer.

Oren looked up from the lamp he was opening. “What are you doing?”

“Taking it apart.”

“The parade committee has paid for the frame.”

“I know.”

Fen climbed onto the bench. The first brass catch was tight. He eased it loose and cupped the sun in a sleeve he had warmed against one of the frame’s lit sockets. It came free, bright and steady. He brought it down to Oren.

“Mrs. Teal showed me how to move one,” he said. “We can put these into the lamps that went out. For the others, we can mend the collars before their suns cool any further.”

Oren held the sleeve while Fen climbed back up. “I’ll start on those eleven.”

They worked until the bench was crowded with collars, handles, sleeves, and scraps of wool. Each time Fen freed a sun, another piece of the great frame went dark. Where glass had cracked, Oren replaced it. Where an old sun still glimmered, Fen kept its new sleeve warm while he fitted it back into a repaired lamp. He dropped a screw twice because his fingers were stiff, and each time Oren waited while he found it.

Six of his collected suns went into lamps whose beads had died. He set the other fourteen in wool-lined boxes for Oren’s reserve cupboard, each in its own warm sleeve. The grand frame held only the empty sockets.

When they had enough lamps ready to carry, Fen put Mrs. Teal’s at the top of the box.

---

The parade began late.

The arch stood over Bell Street with Fen’s brass frame hanging from it, large and unlit. He had asked Oren to leave it there. Its ribs were too firmly fixed to take down before the procession, and the committee had already paid a carpenter to hang them.

Below it, children carried their own lamps. Their tiny lime suns made moving pools of light along the cobbles. The ribbons tied to their handles were cold and stiff; one little boy kept pulling his free because it brushed his cheek. People stood close together to watch. From the far end of the street, Fen could hear the fiddler but could see little beyond the nearest row of hats.

He had told the committee what happened and returned the payment from Oren’s cash box. He would work the winter without the wages that money had promised. At Tavi’s, he signed a separate account for the lost dough and the coal she had bought to finish the next batch across town. She let him repay it in hours at her oven. Her assistants had spent a night carrying trays; he had spent the morning helping them, and Tavi had told him to return after the parade to scrub the oven pans.

Oren stayed at the shop to finish two lamps whose handles had also broken. Fen delivered the rest while the music made its slow way through town. At the Hales’ house, he set their lamp on the floor where the children had built a fort of coats. Its light reached the back wall. One of them asked whether the parade had started, and Fen held the door open so they could hear the fiddle.

Mrs. Teal’s was his last stop.

She answered before he could knock twice. Her lamp was back on the kitchen table, casting a clear circle over the checkers board. She had set a kettle near it to take the chill off the water. Fen could feel the warmth as he stepped inside.

“I came to see if the collar held,” he said.

She bent to look at the base. “It’s held since you brought it.”

From the street below came a burst of applause. Through her window, Fen caught a glimpse of navy lamps passing under the dark frame.

Mrs. Teal sat down at the board. “You left yourself a difficult position.”

“I remember.” Fen took the chair opposite her. “I was going to get out of it.”

“Show me.”

He studied his pieces. The lamp lit every worn square and the small chip in the edge of the board. Mrs. Teal waited with her hands around her cup while he made his move.