“Some sort of fire magic?” Sorcha suggested with a lift of her eyebrow. “Pyromancy, perhaps? People do lump that in with firekeeping.”
“Something like that,” Petra admitted, laughing. “But not pyromancy. That’s fortunetelling, isn’t it? No, I mean the other thing. Fire-cunning, perhaps? A sort of . . .” She made an exasperated noise. “A sort of reckoning, isn’t it called?”
The maid gave Petra a long, strange look. “Yes. Fire-kenning, my father called it, though I’ve heard fire-cunning as well. More properly it’s fierekenia: fire-reckoning.” She paused, curious. “People do know of pyromancy and other sorts of divination, but there aren’t many who I’ve ever heard talk of reckonings, by fire or otherwise.”
“What’s a reckoning?” Maisie asked, shuffling through the unused saints for any shown with fire and setting those aside.
Sorcha, still curious, nodded deferentially at Petra. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly define it,” Petra protested. “It’s just a thing I ran across somewhere. Probably heard a story.” She, in turn, looked to Phineas Amalgam. “Aren’t there stories about reckonings, Mr. Amalgam?”
“Certainly,” Amalgam said, wondering, as he had the night before, what the young woman was up to with her little manipulations. “Sorcha, am I right in saying a reckoning is basically a calculation?”
Sorcha nodded. “But more than that. A reckoning is a calculation of the impossible. Not divination, which is either a foretelling or the finding of an answer that cannot otherwise be brought to light, but a true working out of deeply complicated factors to arrive at . . . well, any number of things. Truth, sometimes; but more often potential truth, for there’s often more than one kind.”
She frowned, trying to work out how best to explain, and as she considered, one of her hands, apparently of its own volition and without Sorcha even particularly noticing, reached into the glowing cinders at the edge of the fire. Her fingers trailed through the embers the way a person might trail fingers through the fur of a sleeping cat, and apparently without a shred of pain. But her hand was blocked from the sight of most everyone in the room by the castle of cards that towered before the hearth, and only three people saw. Mrs. Haypotten, who had come to the hearth to take Sorcha’s place tending the toasted cheese, clucked her tongue quietly, but she had seen plenty of stranger things where the maid and fire were concerned and knew she needn’t really worry. Negret Colophon, who had seen and felt the marks of old, long-healed burns on Sorcha’s hands when they danced the night before, now understood how they’d come to be there. Last of all, there was Maisie, whose eyes grew wide with shock but who thought it might be rude to interrupt Sorcha by pointing out that her fingers were about to catch fire. Then, of course, she realized she had noticed those scars too, and yet another secret dropped into Maisie’s lap like a treasure.
Sorcha, meanwhile, had found the words she was looking for. “Probabilities?” she said experimentally. “The likely outcome of otherwise unmappable and incomparable factors that can’t be combined and evaluated by any other means. These are wildly difficult calculations, and there are consequences to the mere act of attempting them. That is a reckoning.”
The guests—half of them, anyway—listened to this in surprise. It was the most Sorcha had spoken at any time, for one thing, and for a second, as she spoke, her voice took on an authority that seemed at odds with the housemaid’s usual deference. A few in the room, however, were not surprised at all. Negret, of course; and the Haypottens, to whom Sorcha was nearly like a daughter, exchanged glances of pride. Jessamy Butcher, who was not in the habit of underestimating anyone, had suspected Sorcha of having something wondrous in her background that she was keeping carefully hidden, concealed under a veneer of ordinariness like hot banked coals tucked away under cold ash. And Phineas Amalgam had known Sorcha for years and, steeped as he was in old, strange lore, had guessed long ago that she came from a line of conflagrationeers. Just then, however, he was more interested in Petra’s ongoing maneuverings.
“And there’s a way to do that sort of calculation using fire?” Petra inquired.
“There is,” Sorcha replied. She thought for a minute more, then realized she had a hand in the fire and withdrew it quickly, wiping her sooty fingers surreptitiously on her apron. She glanced up to find Negret watching the subterfuge with amusement. Ah, well. What’s seen is seen. She risked flashing a rapid wink at him. Our secret? His smile stretched wider, and Sorcha’s heart fluttered. “You asked for a tale with fire, Mr. Colophon,” she said. “Would a fire-kenning do? A story of one,” she clarified quickly.
“You mean you can’t just up and calculate the impossible for us right now?” Antony Masseter asked, amused, as he lifted one of his cigars to his mouth and reached into his pocket for a match.
“No smoking in here, please, sir,” Mrs. Haypotten said in a tone of faint reproach that nobody really thought was about the cigar.
“Apologies,” Masseter replied smoothly, pocketing his smokes again and dropping into the chair at the little table between the sideboard and the window.
Sorcha leaned her chin on the hand that had been in the fire. “What impossible question have you got, Mr. Masseter?”
“I have a few,” he said, his green eye glittering. “But I apologize. You weren’t asking me, and I can manage my own calculations. For the most part.”
He gestured to Negret, who said simply, “Yes, please.”
“Very
