“Can you hold a chain and keep quiet at the same time?”

Ignatia Rooke asked it from the door of the Long Pour. The Good Light had just ended and the whole yard was letting its breath out. Blake had kept the hour on the bench outside, daisy in their lap, not knocking, because nobody else was knocking. Now the brick shed stood open, the fire was going like a train, and a Sheep in a leather apron was looking at them the way you look at a tool you didn’t expect to find.

“I can hold a chain,” Blake said. “Why does it have to be...”

“Inside.”

The heat met them on the step. The daisy folded over at once, like it had heard bad news. The floor was sand, raked into a pale fan around a mould the size of a stool, and the crucible hung on its chain over the fire with a light at its lip.

They were asking before they’d decided to ask. Why rake the sand in a fan? Ignatia said the lines showed where a spill would run, so you saw it coming. How did the naming work? You said the name, the metal heard it, and then you poured. Why not pour first and name it after, when you could see what you’d made?

Ignatia didn’t answer that one. They swung the crucible off the fire with a long hook, and the whole shed seemed to lean toward it.

The chain was greasy and warm against their paw. Blake took the end Ignatia pointed at, and the weight pulled down through their arms into their knees. Something in the crucible shifted like a slow animal turning over. In a minute there would be a thing in that mould that hadn’t existed this morning.

They had a question ready about why the chain was greased, and another about what the metal actually heard.

Through the open door, Zinnia Copeland crossed the yard with a full paint pail. A Pooch, walking away from Varnish Lane. They were heading for the old road, toward the stretch where the lamps had stayed out since Lights Out. Ignatia didn’t look up. Nobody said a word.

Blake opened their mouth. They shut it again and kept the question, and it sat in their chest like a swallowed stone.

“When I say it, you lean,” Ignatia said. “Not before.”

The lip of the crucible went from yellow toward orange.

“Old Patience,” Ignatia said, to the metal and nobody else.

Blake leaned. The pour came out slow and bright and heavier than anything they’d ever held. Most of it went where it should. A thin thread jumped the mould’s edge and ran off across the sand, along one of the raked lines, exactly where the fan had said it would go.

Ignatia watched it go dull, then set the crucible down.

“We’ll know when it’s cold,” they said. They looked at Blake, then at the drooping daisy. “You talk a lot.” A pause. “You stopped, though.”

Blake let go of the chain. Their arms were shaking. Out in the yard, the cobbles were empty except for one wet drip of paint, and past it the old road ran on into the dark.

“So that’s North Bend, and that one’s Under the Bridge, and if you want to know what colour they are, you’ll have to ask the stone.”

Thessaly Quarrington set the jar back with the others. Every label in the Colour Mill said where something had been dug up, and none of them said what it was. Blake had asked why three times. Thessaly said it was the honest way, and went back to grinding.

It was after dusk in the cold week, and the Mill was shut to everyone but them. Thessaly had left the wash trough running warm and the lamp lit. They worked at the far bench, a Raccoon like Blake but greyer about the muzzle, with pigment in every line of their paws.

Blake had carried up a sack of brushes from the crate at the foot of the Portrait Steps, borrowed and returned and stiff with somebody’s afternoon. They scrubbed each one under the lamp until the water ran clear, and the water never said what had been in it. Something rust-ish. Something like wet slate. Most handles still carried Vesna Kade’s chalk, a tick for every sitter.

The crate said forty on the bottom step. That morning Paz Ilunga had pulled them aside and said it was thirty-one. “Tell no one. Maud least of all.” Then Paz walked off before Blake could ask why.

So they knew what the sack was for. Fill the crate by first light and the chalk on the step didn’t matter, and no painter at the top had to look down at a pale walker and say sorry, nothing to paint you with. Nobody had given them the job. It was lying there, so they picked it up.

They had the rest planned too. The daisy was tied to the sack’s neck with string. In the morning the crate would be full with one white daisy on the lid, and everyone would ask whose it was. Their momma would hear it, a long way off, and know.

The trough steam had got to the daisy. It hung over the string like it was embarrassed for them.

Near the bottom came a bundle in Vesna’s ribbon, the Big Idea batch. The ninth brush was wrong. Its bristles held a flat grey that didn’t move under the water. It didn’t cloud the trough. It just stayed.

Blake held it against jar after jar under the lamp. North Bend. Under the Bridge. Old Kiln Road. Thessaly drifted over and stood close, the way a maker waits to hear that’s the one. Nothing was. Thessaly looked a long while, said nothing, and went back to the bench.

Blake wrapped that brush in a rag by itself.

The door let in cold air. Ignatia Rooke stood there in the leather apron and set a can of lamp-oil on the sill, because the flame had gone thin enough to see from the yard.

Blake started to explain: the crate, the count, how many they’d done, Paz... and heard where the next sentence went. Maud counted everything. If anyone knew how many brushes came up this hill tonight, somebody would do the sums against the step.

They shut their mouth.

Ignatia looked at them, then at the trough. “You stopped, though,” they said, flat, and went.

Blake filled the lamp and finished the last of them while the cold got in and the wet bristles stiffened in rows on the board. Then they untied the daisy from the sack, shook the steam off it, and tucked it inside their coat, where it wouldn’t sit on any lid.

It was a small thing to do. It felt like putting down something heavy they’d been looking forward to carrying.

They shouldered the sack and went out. The path to the Steps ran downhill past shut doors, the frost not here yet but thinking about it. The brushes clicked together at every step, stiff as twigs. The rag-wrapped one rode on top, and Blake kept a paw on it all the way down, wondering whose paw had held it last, and what it had been painting.