Gerald woke to the hum of the Hot House's rune furnace.

  It sounded just like his dream. He could still feel it -- the heat on his face, the bright gather of molten glass turning at the end of the pipe, the way his father's hands moved it through the air like it weighed nothing. In the dream he had been standing beside him, close enough to see the colour shift from orange to something deeper, and his father had said now and Gerald had reached for the pipe and the glass had been waiting for him, and he had known exactly what to do.

  He opened his eyes. The ceiling was grey -- the kind of grey that meant the sun had not cleared the ridge behind the Smithy. He lay in bed and listened. The furnace hum was there, real and steady, and nothing like it had been in the dream. Footsteps downstairs. A pot banging against a pot. The deeper creak of the front stair that could have been Tom or could have been the house settling.

  He pushed the blanket down and sat up. The floor was cold under his bare feet -- spring cold, the kind that started sharp and faded. He did not need to check the calendar scratched into the inside of his wardrobe door. He had been counting the days since the middle of last week, and the count was finished.

  He was eight.

  Gerald went to the window. He had to stand on his toes to rest his forearms on the sill, which he did not like thinking about, because Edric at eight had not needed to stand on his toes for anything. The glass in the window was old, thick at the bottom -- you always framed the heavy end down, Da said, because that was how the pour finished and the glass was strongest there -- and through it the world outside had a faint wobble, as though the morning were not yet certain of its own shape.

  The Rainbow Wall ran along the road below, four feet of river stone and mortar with glass pressed into every gap and seam. Hundreds of pieces. He had counted them before -- started from the fat amber chunk nearest the left gate pillar and worked his way along, numbering each shard and sliver and disc of colour. He had lost count three times. Twice because someone called him to supper. Once because a crow landed on the wall and he watched it until it flew away and by the time he looked back he could not remember whether the green triangle near the drainpipe was forty-seven or forty-eight.

  He started again now, in the grey light. One: the amber chunk, big as his palm, with the crack that ran through its middle like a frozen river. Two: a thin blade of blue wedged vertically between two stones, so dark it looked black until the sun found it. Three, four, five -- a cluster of pale green ovals, pressed in together so close their edges almost touched.

  He got to thirty-one, further than he had ever managed from the window. Thirty-two was a piece of red glass, very small, nearly round, and Gerald paused on it because the grey dawn light had shown him something that was already there. The red was not one thing. At the center it was almost black, deep as a well, and at the edge it went thin and bright and something between orange and not-orange that he did not have a name for. Each time he looked at it, it showed him more. He had looked at that wall his whole life and never looked at it like this, and he thought about the men inside the Hot House who looked at glass all day, who knew what he was only beginning to see, and he wanted --

  Below, the kitchen door opened. Mary crossed the yard toward the well with a bucket in each hand, moving in long strides that made the buckets swing, and one of them caught the edge of the rain barrel. The clang carried up sharp and bright in the still air, and Gerald's count broke.

  He let it go. Thirty-two. Better than last time.

  Above the wall, above the road, above the roofline of the houses on the far side that had not been there when his grandfather was young, the sky was lightening from grey to the thin, washed blue of early spring. And there, high up, already fading as the light strengthened: the God-Ring. A pale scratch across the sky, a silver thread pulled so thin it barely held. Gerald looked at it the way he looked at the wall -- it was there, it had always been there, and he could not imagine the sky without it. By the time the sun was fully up it would be gone, swallowed by daylight. But it was there now. Faint and certain.

  Gerald turned from the window.

  The shirt was laid across the chair beside his door, folded once, pressed flat. It smelled of hot iron and the clean pressed scent that meant Wynn had taken the trouble, which she did for occasions and for no one's birthday but the children's. His good shirt: the one he wore to visit Grandfather at the store, the one Mam made him put on for the winter feast.

  He pulled it on over his head and felt the seams catch at his shoulders. The shirt was tight. He could wear it, but only just -- the sleeves stopped a finger's width above where they used to sit on his wrists. His body had done something since the last time he wore it, grown in some direction the shirt had not been consulted about, and the shirt was taking the matter personally.

  He rolled the cuffs once -- he had seen Edric do the same when Edric outgrew things -- and went downstairs.

  The smell reached him on the stair. Warm flour and honey and something under both that was darker and sweeter -- the cinnamon Mam kept in a jar on the highest shelf in the pantry, the one Gerald could not reach and Sable could only reach if she stood on the stool. Honeycakes. She had made honeycakes.

  The dining hall was filling. The community table ran the length of the room, scarred oak darkened by decades of elbows and spilled broth. The bread board was out with the knife laid across it at the angle Mary insisted on, the handle toward whoever sat nearest, because Mary had opinions about where knives pointed and did not keep them to herself.

  Nessa was laying out bowls of porridge, almost keeping up with the calls from behind the kitchen partition -- "Two more, two more" -- and not quite managing. She set one down too hard and the oat milk slopped over the rim, and she wiped it with her apron without breaking stride. Tom was at the sideboard with the small beer, filling cups and placing them at intervals along the table. Pim came in through the side door smelling of hay and horse and the cold air outside, said "Morning, morning" to nobody in particular, and dropped onto the bench hard enough to rattle the salt cellar nearest his elbow.

  "Steady," Tom said, without looking up.

  "I'm steady," Pim said. "The bench is old."

  Gerald took his seat. Sable was already there, her own porridge half eaten, reading something -- a list or a letter, Gerald could not tell. Edric was across the table, leaning back on the bench despite a hundred corrections, eating an apple he must have taken from the kitchen on his way through.

  "There he is," Edric said, looking Gerald up and down. "Eight years old and the shirt's already too small. Mam, he needs a new one."

  "He needs breakfast," Mam said, coming from the greenhouse corridor with a tray in her hands and her hair escaping the cloth she tied it back with when she worked. A smear of soil on the inside of her wrist. She set the tray on the table, and there they were.

  Honeycakes. A dozen of them, small and round and golden-brown, glazed with honey that had gone dark and glossy in the oven. The smell of them up close was so good that Gerald forgot about his tight shirt and Edric and everything else.

  "Happy birthday, love," Mam said, and kissed the top of his head, and Gerald endured this because it was his mother and the honeycakes were still warm.

  Edric reached for one. Mam moved the tray half an inch and his hand closed on air.

  "Birthday boy first," she said.

  Edric made a noise of theatrical suffering. Sable, without looking up from her reading, said, "You had three last year on yours."

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  "I was fourteen. That's practically a man. Men need more honeycakes."

  "That's not how honeycakes work," Sable said.

  Gerald took one. The outside cracked under his teeth, thin and crisp, giving way to the soft warm interior where the honey had soaked through the crumb. He closed his eyes. Sweet and deep and faintly spiced, with the richness that came from real honey -- not the watered kind. It tasted of clover and wildflower and something Gerald could not name but thought of as the colour gold, if gold had a taste.

  "Good?" Mam asked.

  He nodded, his mouth full.

  The table filled around him. Mary brought a second round of porridge, calling "Move" as she came through the kitchen door with a pot that was clearly too hot, the handle wrapped in a folded cloth, and Nessa scrambled to clear a space on the sideboard. The Wood Guard arrived -- John first, moving through the room without speaking, and Junior and Harrold behind him, mud on their boots from the dawn patrol. Junior thumped Gerald on the shoulder as he passed. "Happy birthday," he said, already reaching for the bread. Harrold nodded. John did not say anything, but his eyes rested on Gerald for a moment -- steady, measuring -- and then moved on.

  Tomis was already at the far end of the table, eating in silence, his dark hair tied back. Gerald was not sure when he had come in. Tomis arrived like that sometimes -- present before you noticed, as though he had always been there.

  His grandfather came down last. Grandfather moved slowly in the mornings -- his knees, Mam said, though Grandfather never mentioned them. He made his way to the head of the table, past the empty chair to his left that nobody sat in and nobody talked about, and lowered himself into his seat. He accepted a bowl of porridge from Nessa with a nod and looked at Gerald.

  "Eight," Grandfather said.

  "Yes, Grandfather."

  Grandfather considered this, as though eight were a weight he was measuring in his hands. Then he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and set something on the table: a boiled sweet wrapped in waxed paper, the kind he kept in a jar at the market store.

  "Don't eat it before lunch," Grandfather said, which was what he always said, and Gerald put it in his pocket, which was what he always did, and they both knew he would eat it before lunch.

  Sable folded whatever she had been reading and slid something across the table. A book. Not large -- narrow-spined, with a cloth cover the colour of river mud. The title was stamped in letters that had once been gold and were now the memory of gold: Stones of the River Valley: A Field Guide with Illustrations.

  Gerald picked it up. The cover was rough under his fingers. He opened it to a drawing of a stone -- pale, round, speckled with dark flecks -- and beside it, in small neat type: River quartz (common). Found in alluvial deposits below moderate current.

  "I found it at the bookseller's," Sable said. She was not looking at him. She was buttering her bread with the total concentration of someone for whom bread required her entire attention. "It has the ones from our river in it."

  He turned the page. More stones. More drawings. He recognised the grey-blue one on the third page -- he had three of those in the jar by his bed.

  "Thank you," he said.

  Sable shrugged, which was her way of saying you're welcome when she was pleased with herself and did not want anyone to notice.

  Gerald set the book carefully beside his plate and ate another honeycake, turning the pages between bites. He was deep in a section on sandstone when he became aware, without looking up, that his father was watching him.

  He looked up.

  Da sat straight-backed and still, his hands around his cup. He had taken a honeycake when Mam offered the tray, eaten it without comment, as though enjoyment were something that happened internally and did not need his face to know about it. But his eyes were on Gerald, and they had been for some time.

  His father's look was something Gerald did not have a word for. It was the look his father wore when he held a finished piece up to the light and turned it slowly -- not hoping to find flaws, not hoping not to. Just looking. Seeing what was there.

  Gerald looked back down at his book.

  The table cleared in pieces. The Wood Guard left first, John rising without a word, the other two following. Pim went next, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Barrel's in a mood," he said to no one as he headed for the side door. "If you hear screaming, it's me." Tom began collecting bowls. Nessa carried the bread back to the kitchen and returned for the butter crock and forgot it and went back for it again. Tomis stood, nodded to Da -- a gesture so small it was almost invisible -- and walked out toward the Hot House.

  Gerald stayed where he was. One by one they had gone, each toward the thing that was theirs to do, and it occurred to him that he did not have a thing that was his. Not yet.

  Through the dining hall's window, he could see the Hot House door standing open. Heat-shimmer rose from the vents above, bending the air. The door was a rectangle of warm orange against the grey stone, and through it Gerald could see the glow of the furnace and the dark outlines of men already at work.

  "Gerald."

  He turned. Da was standing beside the table. Gerald had not heard him get up. Wynn was at the far end, stacking plates, but Wynn was always at the far end of something, and Wynn never looked up when she wasn't meant to.

  "Walk with me," Da said.

  They went out through the kitchen door into the yard. The morning air was cool and damp, smelling of the river and the faint dry heat that bled from the Hot House vents. No smoke. The rune furnaces did not burn. They were hot the way the sun was hot, and the heat they shed was clean and carried the ghost of sand in it.

  A broom was leaning against the well where someone had left it. Da moved it without comment, setting it upright against the wall, the correction so automatic Gerald was not sure his father had noticed he had done it.

  Da stopped walking. He turned to Gerald.

  "You are eight now," Da said.

  "Yes, Da."

  "That is old enough to start being useful."

  Gerald's chest went tight. His fingers curled against his palms. Being useful. In the workshop. At the furnace. Beside his father and Tomis and Edric, learning the thing his family had done for generations, the thing the whole estate was built around, the thing he had watched through the doorway and dreamed about and --

  "Starting tomorrow, you will have duties," Da said. "Wynn will tell you what they are."

  Gerald waited for the rest of it. The part about the workshop. The part about the door.

  It did not come.

  The morning air found the gap at his wrists where the rolled cuffs fell short, and Gerald's hands closed at his sides.

  Da was looking at him the way he looked at everything: steadily, without hurry, without the need to fill silence with more words. He had said what he meant to say. He was finished.

  "Do you understand?" Da asked.

  "Yes, Da," Gerald said.

  Da nodded once. He put his hand on Gerald's head -- briefly, the weight of it warm and heavy and rough -- and then he turned and walked toward the Hot House. Gerald watched him cross the yard, watched him step through the open door into the orange glow, watched the heat-shimmer swallow him, as though the workshop ate his father every morning and gave him back every evening smelling of sand and sweat and glass.

  The door stayed open. It always stayed open during the working day. Gerald could hear the furnace, the low drone of it, and Edric's voice cutting across a murmured instruction louder than it needed to be.

  He stood in the yard for a long time. The spring air reached through his good shirt. His wrists showed below the rolled cuffs and the seams pulled at his shoulders and the furnace droned through the open door and none of it had anything to do with him.

  Wynn would tell him his duties. Not Da. Wynn. Which meant the duties would be house things. Sweeping things. Carrying things. Things that had nothing to do with the workshop door that was right there, open, twenty paces away.

  He was eight. He had thought eight would be the age when the door opened for him. He had not planned it out in words. He had just known, the way you know that spring comes after winter and the tide comes in with the Ring.

  But Da had not said "the workshop." Da had said "Wynn."

  Gerald put his hand in his pocket and found Grandfather's boiled sweet. He did not unwrap it. He just held it, feeling the waxed paper crinkle under his fingers, and looked at the workshop door, and the door did nothing, and the morning went on around him.

  He kicked a stone off the path on his way back inside. It skipped once and hit the base of the rain barrel. He took the stairs two at a time and pulled his door shut behind him.

  His room had not changed. The blanket pushed down, the window still open. The God-Ring had vanished with the dawn. The Rainbow Wall was catching the first real sunlight, and the glass in the mortar blazed -- amber, blue, green, red, alive now, burning with the sun behind them. The wall shone.

  Gerald sat on his bed and opened Sable's book. River quartz (common). Found in alluvial deposits below moderate current. He studied the drawing. He looked at the jar by his bed, full of stones he had collected from the riverbank, and found the ones that matched -- three grey-blue pebbles, smooth as eggs, with the dark speckles the book described.

  He held one up to the light. It was not glass. It did not catch colour. It was only a stone, cool and solid in his palm.

  A drop darkened the page beside the drawing -- a small circle, soaking into the paper, spreading at the edge. Then another. Gerald wiped his face with the back of his hand and held the book further from his lap so it would not get wet.

  But someone had written a whole book about stones like it. Sable had found that book and thought of him.

  He set the stone on the blanket beside him, and turned the page, and kept reading.

  LIFE of Gerald Glass, and I have it mapped out - it looks like a total of 12 books, none of them smaller than this first book. In fact, book 2 is shaping up to around 75 chapters. It should be complete before April Fools.