Gerald saw him from the workshop step.
The day’s work was finished. Da had banked the furnace an hour ago, and Tomis had completed his evening circuit — thermocouple, glory hole, annealing oven, the rune channels dimmed to their overnight glow. Aaron had racked the last of the punty rods and gone. The workshop door was closed behind Gerald, the heat pressing through the wood against his back, and the yard was quiet in the way the yard went quiet after the working day ended — not silence, but the sounds that lived beneath the work. The waterwheel. The river. A wren somewhere in the eaves of the stable, repeating itself.
Gerald had stayed on the step because the stone was still warm from the afternoon and because the light at this hour went long across the yard, stretching the shadows of the buildings and the greenhouse into shapes that reached further than the buildings themselves. The greenhouse shadow lay across the packed dirt in a dark line that nearly touched the wall.
Edric was on the Rainbow Wall.
Not the yard side. The road side. He was sitting on the flat stone near the gate, his feet hanging over the edge toward the road, his back to the estate. He was not moving. He was not talking to anyone. He was not doing anything Gerald could see, which was strange in a way Gerald could feel but not explain, because Edric was always doing something. Edric moved through rooms the way the river moved through its channel — constant, pushing, looking for the next bend.
Gerald watched him from the step. Edric’s shoulders were visible above the stone. His head was turned toward Strathcove, toward the road that led down to the docks and the city, and he was looking at something or he was looking at nothing.
Gerald got up. He crossed the yard. His boots were quiet on the dirt. The greenhouse shadow passed under his feet, cooler where the sun had lost it. A cat — one of the barn cats, the grey tabby Nessa had been feeding since spring — crossed the path ahead of him at a trot, tail high, going somewhere with the certainty cats carried when they were going nowhere in particular.
He reached the wall.
Edric did not turn.
Gerald put his hand on the stone. The mortar between the river stones was rough under his palm, the glass pieces pressed into it smooth and warm from the late sun. He climbed. The wall was four feet along most of its length, taller at the gate pillars, and the flat stone where Edric sat was wide enough for two. Gerald settled beside his brother, his legs hanging over the road side, his feet well above the packed earth below. Edric’s feet were closer to the ground. Edric’s feet were closer to the ground for most things.
They sat.
The road was empty. The last cart had passed an hour ago, its wheel tracks still drawn in the dry surface in shallow lines that would hold until rain came. Left toward the docks, right toward the market square. Both directions still. A bird called from the hedgerow past the road — a single note, flat, unanswered.
Edric’s hands were on the stone beside his legs. Gerald looked at them without meaning to. They were larger than his by the measure of a grown person’s hands against a child’s, darker across the knuckles, the skin reddened and rough from the furnace. The burn scar on the inside of Edric’s left wrist was visible — pale against the tan, a smooth stripe the width of a finger where the marver’s edge had caught him. Edric had been nine. Gerald had been five, standing in the doorway, watching his brother hold his arm and look at the iron as though it had done something unfair.
The scar sat on Edric’s wrist the way the glass sat in the mortar. Settled. Part of the surface.
Gerald did not speak. He did not know what to say to Edric when Edric was quiet, because Edric was not usually quiet and Gerald had no practice with this version of his brother. The version who sat on walls. The version who looked at roads. He sat beside him and let the minute pass.
Edric spoke without turning his head.
“When I was ten, Da made me watch for a whole month before I touched anything.”
Gerald looked at him. Edric’s face was in profile — Da’s jaw, the wide set of the shoulders, the same build carried at fourteen that their father carried at forty-eight. His eyes were on the road. The light was low enough that the road’s surface had gone from tan to something closer to the colour of the walls themselves, grey and warm at the same time.
Gerald had not known this. He had known Edric started in the workshop at ten. He had known the workshop was Edric’s place — the thing Edric talked about at supper, bragged about to anyone who would listen and some who would not. He had assumed it had always been that way. That Edric had walked in and picked up a pipe and the glass had answered.
“A month,” Gerald said.
“A month.” Edric shifted his weight on the stone. His feet swung once — a short arc. “Every morning. I came in and I sat on that stool and I watched Da work and I was not allowed to touch a pipe or a jack or the marver or anything. A month of sitting.”
Gerald knew the stool. He had sat on it. Three days had felt long, and a month was longer than three days by a distance he could count but not quite feel.
“I hated it,” Edric said. The word came out flat, without softening. “I thought he was punishing me. I thought I had done something wrong and this was what wrong got you. A month of watching everyone else do the thing you wanted to do.”
The evening air moved across the wall. It carried the river smell and the grass smell and the faint mineral trace from the workshop — the furnace still giving off warmth through the stone walls even after banking. Gerald felt it on his arms, the warm and the cool meeting at the surface of his skin.
“Was he?” Gerald said.
Edric gave a sound that was almost a laugh. Short, pushed through the nose. The shape of a laugh without the weight of one.
“No. He was showing me what I was getting into. So I would take it seriously.” Edric’s hands pressed flat against the stone, fingers spread, arms straight. He was holding himself up or he was holding himself still. “I did not understand that at the time. I thought it was about patience. I thought Da was testing whether I could sit still.”
He paused. The bird called again from the hedgerow — the same flat note, further away now.
“It was not about sitting still. It was about seeing the whole thing — the furnace, the bench, the tools, how it all goes together — before you are in front of it with a pipe in your hands and you cannot step back.”
Gerald listened. The words were Edric’s words — direct, landing where they landed without checking whether the ground was ready. But the voice was different. Not the workshop voice, where Edric spoke loud enough for the room and half the sentences ended with something he wanted someone to notice. This voice was lower. Quieter. Speaking to the road, or to the evening, or to a memory of a ten-year-old boy on a stool who thought he was being punished.
They sat on the wall. The light was changing. The sun had dropped behind the ridge above the greenhouse, and the estate was moving into the long shadow that came before true evening — the buildings losing their bright faces, settling into the cooler colours that arrived when the direct light went. The glass pressed into the mortar around them caught what remained and gave it back slowly, degree by degree.
Gerald looked at the piece nearest his right hand.
It was orange. Vivid even in the fading light — the kind of orange that came from a furnace running too hot or a colourant applied too thick. The colour pooled heavier at one edge and thinned toward the other, the glass not quite level when it was pressed into the mortar. The piece was the size of a plum, rounded at the edges, the surface slightly pitted from weather and years.
He did not know whose it was. It could have been Da’s — a failed piece from a decade ago, broken and pressed in alongside the other failures. It could have been Grandfather’s. It could have been someone Gerald had never met, someone whose hands had held a pipe in this workshop before Gerald’s hands had held anything.
It could have been Edric’s.
Gerald looked at the orange piece and did not ask. The not-asking was not a decision. It was the knowledge that asking would do something to this moment that the moment did not need done to it. Edric was beside him. The glass was between them. The evening was quiet. That was enough.
Edric’s head turned.
Not toward Gerald. Toward the estate — back over his shoulder. Gerald followed without thinking. The buildings were there in the long shadow: the main house with the kitchen windows lit, the greenhouse catching the last high light on its glass panels, the workshop with its door closed. The servants’ quarters. The stable. The Wheel House at the river.
And past the workshop, set back from the yard behind the path that ran along the garden wall, the low stone building with the narrow windows and the heavy door.
The Silver Pools.
Edric’s eyes stayed on it.
Gerald watched his brother’s face. He saw something he had not seen there before. Not the restlessness that Edric carried in the workshop — the energy that pushed him toward the next gather, the next piece, the next thing his hands could do. Not the impatience that made him rush a blow or fight the glass when it resisted. Something else. Something that sat in Edric’s jaw and in the set of his shoulders and in the stillness of his hands on the wall, and it was quieter than anything Gerald had seen in Edric and harder than most of it.
Gerald did not have a word for it. He was eight. The building Edric was looking at was a building Gerald walked past and did not enter. He had seen Steven come out of it in the mornings and Millie go into it in the afternoons. He had not thought about what it meant that Edric did not.
Edric turned back to the road. The expression had not changed. It sat on his face the way the scar sat on his wrist.
“It is going to be different,” Edric said, “when Da is not here.”
The words were quiet. They did not carry — not Edric’s workshop voice, not his bragging, not the easy confidence that filled the supper table and the yard and the rooms where Edric moved as though the rooms had been built around him. They sat on the wall between the brothers, low, close to the stone.
Gerald heard them. He felt the weight of them — heavy, slow to settle. But the place Edric was looking toward was not a place Gerald could see. It was somewhere ahead, somewhere past the road and the evening, somewhere adults went and children did not, and Gerald could feel the edge of it without knowing what was past the edge.
He was eight. Edric was fourteen. They were both looking at the same road. Gerald saw a road.
The light went on fading. The glass in the wall dimmed around them — the bright pieces going dark, the dark pieces going invisible, the wall becoming stone again, plain and solid, the failures hidden until morning.
Edric pushed off the wall. He landed on the road side, his boots hitting the packed earth with the certainty Edric’s boots always hit things, and turned and put his hands on the wall top and looked at Gerald for the first time since Gerald had sat down.
His face carried nothing Gerald could read. Not the dismissiveness Gerald was used to. Not the rare protectiveness he had seen in other moments. Edric looked at him the way a person looks at a thing they are trying to remember while it is still in front of them.
“It was a good month,” Edric said. “I did not think so at the time.”
He pushed away from the wall. Gerald heard his boots on the road, then on the path, then on the yard. The kitchen door opened and closed. Edric was inside, moving at Edric’s pace, the stillness left behind on the stone like the warmth the sun left behind when it went.
Gerald sat on the wall. His hands were on the stone. The orange piece was beside his right hand, its colour gone to shadow, the unevenness invisible now. He could feel the mortar’s roughness under his fingers and the smooth interruptions where the glass sat, each piece a different temperature, each one cooling at its own pace.
The road was empty. The estate behind him was settling into its evening — the kitchen windows brighter now, Mam’s voice from somewhere inside, the furnace holding its low note through the walls. The river moved below the bank. Somewhere in the stable yard, the grey cat had found what it was looking for, or it had not, and either way it had moved on.
Gerald sat where Edric had been sitting, and the stone held the warmth of both of them, and the evening came.