The Junior Wardens

On the last night of summer, when the bracken on the fells had just begun to turn the colour of rust, the Wardens of Thornwick Hold gave Mara a lantern.

It happened in the long hall, the way it had happened for more than two hundred years. The fire was lit in the great hearth at one end, and the Warden-Mother and the eight full Wardens of the Hold sat along the high table in their oiled grey-green coats with the brass lantern badges at their collars, and the apprentices, the wardlings, stood in a row below them on the flagstones in their plain brown smocks, trying not to fidget. There were three wardlings that year. There had been five, once, and before that, in the old days the Wardens talked about, twenty. Now there were three: Isaut Farrow, who was sixteen and the eldest and had already been given her lantern two years before; Bertil, who was thirteen and had been given his last spring and had dropped it twice since; and Mara, who was twelve, and who had been at the Hold for four years, since the winter she came up the Ninth Road on the back of a carter's wagon with nothing but the clothes Mara wore and one small thing from before, and had never once in those four years been allowed to carry a light of her own.

Tonight that would change.

Four years of sweeping the long hall and scrubbing the lumen pots and weeding the lampwort beds with Bertil. Four years of walking the Road a careful three paces behind a Warden, carrying the oil flask and the cage key and the spare wicks, watching. Four years of lessons by the fire in the evenings: the names of every stone between the Hold and Fellbrook, the measure of a draught, the signs of a heartglass going dim, the old stories of the Dimming, the grey fog that came off the moors where the light failed and took people's memories away, one small thing at a time. Mara knew all of it by heart. Mara had simply never been trusted with a flame.

Mara's heart was going so fast that it seemed to shake her whole smock. Beside Mara, Bertil was standing on one foot and then the other. On her other side, Isaut stood perfectly still, with her hands folded and her dark hair in its tight plait, and did not look at Mara. But as the oldest Warden rose at the high table, Isaut's hand moved, very slightly, and touched Mara's sleeve, once, and then was still again.

The oldest Warden was Warden-Mother Seraphine Carrick. She was eighty-two, and small and bent and white-haired, and she had been blind for eleven years. But she came down from the high table without a stick and without help, counting the steps under her breath, and walked across the flagstones straight to Mara, and stopped exactly in front of Mara, as though she could see her perfectly well. Perhaps, in her way, she could. People said Warden-Mother Carrick could hear a waystone failing five miles off.

In her hands she held a lantern.

It was not new. Nothing at the Hold was new. It was an old brass lantern, worn smooth and dark with handling, with a ring on top for carrying and four small panes of thick glass, one of them very faintly cracked across one corner, and a little brass door in its side for the oil. Somebody had polished it until it glowed in the firelight. Somebody, Mara would find out much later, had been Isaut, up until midnight the night before with a rag and a pot of paste.

"This lantern," said Warden-Mother Carrick, in her thin clear voice that carried to every corner of the long hall, "has walked the Ninth Road for a hundred and forty years. It has been carried by six Wardens. The last of them was Warden Ewan Kemp, who carried it for sixty-one years and died in his bed in this Hold last winter, at a great age, with his lantern on the shelf beside him." She held it out. "It has no name now. Its name went with Warden Kemp. A lantern takes the name its Warden gives it. Think carefully. You will say it every day of your life."

Mara took the lantern. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from the fire, and it fit her left hand as if it had been made for it.

"Now," said the Warden-Mother. "The Oath."