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ENORA

The bell is named Anna, she weighs more than a horse, and she is hanging four feet off the foundry floor because I want to hear her one last time before the cart comes.

She has been up on the trial frame twice already, once in the spring when she was rough and once after I cut the inside down to bring her into tune, and both times we had the apprentices on the block and tackle. Guen and the Le Bihan boy.

They left in June, because Corentin stopped coming out to the shop, and an apprentice with no master in the shop is an apprentice with nothing to learn.

Tonight it is me and a winch that sticks two thirds along, so I lean my whole body left and haul right with the rope over my shoulder, and it stinks of tar.

“Almost,” I tell her.

The rope burns through my palms in the sticking place. I get my shoulder under the crossbar, brace my boot on the frame, and put my back into it, and the winch gives all at once. Anna swings. She bumps the pillar, and the sound goes through my teeth and down into my hips.

From the back room, not loudly: “That’s my bell.”

“That’s your bell being sounded.”

“At five in the afternoon?”

“The cart’s at dawn.”

I get her up the last two feet and lock the pin. My arms are shaking. The floor is grit and casting sand. The shop smells of scorched loam and tallow and cold ash.

I take the mallet off the bench and strike her once, soft, on the shoulder, where you test them.

She rings.

“Listen to you,” I tell her, and my voice cracks on it, which I don’t let it do in front of people.

She is better than good. She is the best thing either of us has made in three years, and at dawn she goes to the chapter house at Morlac.

The chapter’s man came out a fortnight ago to look at her on the frame. He walked round her twice with his hands behind his back. Then he looked through the door at Corentin’s bench with the dust on it, and said he’d take her at a lower price, given the circumstances.

I didn’t have room to argue.

I put my palms flat on her until she stops. Cold bronze is the only thing that helps hands like mine.

Corentin is in the chair again, not the bed. He has a blanket over his knees and his hands folded on top of it, and he watches me come in with the patience of a man who has listened to me swear at metal since I was a child.

“You look terrible,” I say.

“You look like you’ve been fighting.”

“I won.” I drag the chair over with my foot and sit on it backward, arms across the back, which is the only way I have ever sat on anything. The fire has gone down to a red line in the ash. I lean over and feed it two blocks of peat, and the smoke comes back at me before it finds the flue.

His skin has gone the color of candle wax. That started in the spring and it has kept going, and I have stopped being able to see it unless I make myself. Katell saw him on Sunday and went white in the doorway, so it is worse than what I have got used to.

Maela’s cup is still beside his on the shelf. His wife. We buried her in February, and he has not been right since, and I keep washing her cup though nobody uses it, and I have never asked him why he leaves it there.

“Eat,” I say. “Katell brought the soup with the bacon in it.”

“I ate.”

“You moved it round the bowl. There’s a swirl.”

“There’s a swirl because I stirred it.”

“There’s a swirl because you’re a liar.” One corner of his mouth lifts, and I take it.