The Glassblower's Apprentice

In the city of Vetreny, where the canals ran the colour of cooled smoke and every third house breathed a chimney's heat into the fog, the glassblowers were the only people who could take a grief out of a person and make it hold still. Eira had been three years in the Master's workshop before she understood that this was what the trade truly was, and that the bowls and goblets and the famous Vetreny beads were only the daylight face of it; that the real work, the work that came in by the canal door after dark, was the sealing of sorrows.

She had seen it done at last on a night in the wet end of autumn, when a woman came to the workshop with a face like a house after a fire, all the windows dark, and the Master had sat her by the furnace and talked to her low for an hour while Eira pretended to grind frit in the corner. Then he had gathered, on the end of his blowpipe, not glass but something Eira had no word for — a gathering of the woman's own held breath and the heat of the furnace and some third thing that came out of the woman herself, drawn up through the Master's quiet questions the way water is drawn up a wick — and he had blown it, slowly, into a vessel no bigger than a pear, a thing of grey and lilac that turned, as it cooled, faintly luminous, as though it had swallowed a little of the moon. And the woman, when it was done, had lifted her head, and the dark windows of her face had filled, one by one, with an ordinary light; and she had wept, but the weeping was different, was the clean rain after a long drought and not the drought itself; and she had gone out into the fog lighter than she came, and left the small luminous vessel behind on the Master's bench, and it was, Eira understood with a lurch that was half wonder and half dread, her grief. Her grief, taken out of her and made to hold still. The woman had walked out of the workshop no longer able to be destroyed by the thing that had been destroying her, because the thing was here now, sealed in glass, and she was there, and they were two.

The Master kept them in the lower room, the sealed griefs, hundreds of them, racked floor to ceiling in the cool dark beneath the workshop, and on certain nights when the city was very quiet Eira had heard them — not a sound exactly, but the felt edge of one, a low chord of held sorrows breathing together in the dark like a cellar full of sleeping animals. He tended them. That was a part of the work she had not expected, that a sealed grief was not a thing you sold or discarded but a thing you kept, and turned, and watched, because a grief shut away from the person it belonged to did not simply die; it waited, and dimmed, and on rare occasions — the Master spoke of it the way sailors speak of certain reefs — it cracked, and what came out of a cracked grief-glass was not a thing he would describe to her, only that she must come to him at once, day or night, if ever she heard a vessel begin to sing.