Dawn came copper-soft, as if the sun had been polished by the river before rising.
Mist clung to the water in low ribbons. The cathedral's shard-window held a gentle glow, not judgment now but recollection — a memory that had learned to breathe.
Leona walked the embankment with Jonas at her side. Her pocket was light: the glass-tear from the bleeding frame had gone quiet, no longer throbbing like a small second heart. The night of the moon's reflection had shifted something inside the valley. Birds traced more precise arcs. Doors no longer echoed as they closed. Even the wind sounded deliberate, like thought.
They turned the bend at Water's End and saw a figure sitting cross-legged on the stone jetty, palms open to the air. A little girl. Barefoot. Hair like soot-smudged gold. She was watching her hands with the grave attention of an apprentice surgeon.
Between her palms hovered a small, steady light.
Not flame. Not quite. More like a candle's idea of itself.
Jonas stopped. "Do you see that?"
"I do," Leona said, though the word came out as breath.
The child looked up, eyes clear and bright as fresh tin. "You took a piece of the mirror," she said to Leona with the calm of someone naming weather. "It remembers you."
Leona's hand went to her pocket by instinct. "Who are you?"
"I'm the one who knows its name," the girl said, glancing at the hovering brightness. "I'm keeping it from forgetting what it is."
Jonas knelt, careful to lower his voice the way one speaks beside a nest. "Is that a candle?"
"It's the before of a candle," she answered. "The breath that waits for a match." She tilted her head. "But it thinks it's fire, and fire gets lonely."
The not-flame wavered and steadied again, as if reassured by being described.
Leona sat at the child's level, the stones cool through her dress. "Who taught you to hold it like that?"
"No one," the girl replied. "It found me when the house on the hill finished praying."
Jonas and Leona exchanged a glance.
"Whit said the windows glowed all night," Jonas murmured.
The girl cupped her palms and the hovering light descended, resting just above her skin like a bird agreeing to land. "I asked it its name," she said. "It told me a sound. Names are never just letters."
Leona felt the pressure in the air change — the way it had inside the nave when the Lens of Grace shattered. "What sound?"
The girl listened outward, as if to a far bell. When she spoke, the syllables didn't burn; they clarified. The river brightened by a shade. The jetty seemed newly carved.
It was not a word Leona knew. It was a tone. It meant: rise without consuming.
The hovering light answered with a small tremor of joy.
"What's your name?" Leona asked gently.
The child frowned, puzzled by the hierarchy of questions. "Everyone keeps asking that, but the river doesn't. The river says names are what you lend to a moment." She considered. "Sometimes people call me Miri. Sometimes Ember. I like Ember when I'm hungry."
Jonas sat back on his heels. "Ember, what brought you here?"
"The moon turned its face and forgot a few things," Ember said matter-of-factly. "I'm returning them in little pieces."
Leona's throat tightened. Children always knew how to make the infinite domestic.
"Can I see?" Leona asked, palms up.
Ember studied her the way a hawk studies thermals. Then she tipped her hands and the light drifted toward Leona with the tentative trust of an animal learning another scent. It hovered above Leona's waiting palm, warm enough to remind, not harm.
Heat moved up Leona's wrist — not pain, not even warmth as such, but a direction. Fire as intention. She saw, briefly and without warning, a room full of canvases; a desk scorched in a perfect circle; a small, brass-handled box that smelled of beeswax and theology.
She withdrew a breath. "This belongs to the Painter."
Ember nodded. "He tried to paint a candle that could remember the dark without becoming it." She glanced at Jonas. "He needed someone who could listen to fire like you listen to walls."
Jonas startled, then laughed once, almost shy. "The house is truly still praying."
"It's teaching itself to," Ember corrected. "Houses have to learn every living thing the long way."
A heron arrowed low above the water, its shadow stitching the river to its reflection. The air smelled of rasped cedar.
"Ember," Leona said carefully, "did the fire tell you its other name?"
The girl shook her head. "You have to find that one. It won't tell me because I'm not done being a child yet." She was unbothered by the boundary. "The other name is what lets it stand in a room without asking for praise."
Leona felt the truth click into place like a lock that had been waiting for the right pressure. "Steadfast," she whispered.
The hovering light brightened, delighted.
Ember grinned. "See? It likes you."
A delicate knocking sounded from the far side of the jetty: three taps, then two, then one. Jonas rose and followed the pattern to a weathered mooring post wrapped with old prayer cords gone salt-stiff. As he touched the knots, the cords hummed the way the copper loops had hummed in the listening wall.
He leaned close. The cords spoke in the micro-voice of tight fibers: "Do not build the bridge the same way twice."
Jonas closed his eyes. "Daniel."
Leona felt the river shift — a slow inhale. The hovering glow above her palm rotated, revealing, in its heart, a small absence shaped exactly like the wick of a candle not yet placed.
Ember watched, newly solemn. "If you keep it too long, it will think it belongs to you. Then it stops recognizing rooms. You have to bring it where the river can see it."
"Where?" Leona asked.
"The place where dark is honest," Ember said. "Not the place of hiding. The place of rest." She looked upriver, toward the old mill. "That's where it learns its shape."
Jonas exhaled through his nose, a gathered, thoughtful sound. "The mill. Daniel said the last point wasn't a ruin — it was an answer."
Ember stood, brushing grit from her knees as children do when called by tasks older than they are. "You should go now," she said. "This light is patient, but patience frays at the edges."
Leona hesitated. "Will you come with us?"
Ember shook her head, smiling with a gravity that felt like a blessing. "I'm returning the moon its small forgettings. After that I have to teach a stove to stop being afraid." She wiggled her fingers at the almost-fire. "Sometimes fire doesn't want to be born. It wants to be held."
Leona cupped the hovering glow, then released it to float at eye level; it followed her like a tame, attentive thought.
They walked. The path to the mill ran between alder and willow, the ground slick with old industry's sorrow and recent mercy's shine. As they went, the not-flame drifted from Leona's shoulder to Jonas's and back again, settling for brief rests as if testing where it heard itself most clearly.
"Steadfast," Leona repeated under her breath, tasting the sibilants. "A candle that does not correct the dark, only remains."
"Endurance as illumination," Jonas said. "Not conquest."
They reached the mill. Roof caved inward like a kneeling thing; walls planked and bowed; windows empty eye-sockets washed clean by years of weather. Inside, the smell of damp flour and long ashes. A single iron hook hung from a beam like punctuation.
Leona stepped beneath it. The hovering light rose, slower now, as if remembering choreography. It positioned itself where a lantern might have swung, then stilled. The room responded with a tightening of silence — not fear, attention.
She spoke without deciding to: "Name, come to your work."
The glow brightened — then narrowed. A wick formed in its core, not as matter but as decision. Heat became vertical. The faintest thread of smoke appeared, then changed its mind and vanished. Leona saw, as if looking through the Painter's eye, the single brushstroke that had almost solved the problem years ago, the stroke that had lacked a word.
"Steadfast," she said again, and the not-flame agreed by becoming.
A candle burned where none had been: small, whole, unspectacular, unafraid.
The mill changed. Its shadows re-organized around the honest light. Rats paused in their run and reconsidered the route that kept them invisible. Water under the floorboards quieted to listen. A draft that had always bullied the room lowered its shoulders and passed respectfully into the rafters.
Jonas touched the beam. "Do you hear that?"
Leona did. The light made a sound, very faint — not crackle, not hiss, a syllable. It meant: Here, even darkness is accounted for.
Her eyes stung and cleared. "This is the Painter's Candle," she said softly. "Not brilliance. Vocation."
Jonas looked at her, and at the steady flame, and then toward the river beyond the broken wall. "What do we do with it?"
"We let the room keep it," Leona said. "We move through it. We do not claim it."
They stood in the ordinary holiness of a small flame doing its work.
Behind them, at the doorway, Ember appeared once more without sound. She did not enter. She only watched, nodding to herself like a child who sees a teacher finally write a difficult letter correctly.
Then she lifted her hand and drew an invisible curve in the air — flame's secret alphabet — and the candle's light did not grow, did not dim; it settled. A rightness, not a miracle.
Leona bowed her head — not to the fire, but to the steadiness that let it be.
"Thank you," she said to Ember.
"For what?" Ember asked, genuinely puzzled.
"For knowing the name," Leona said.
Ember grinned. "Names like being asked." She tilted her ear toward the river. "It's calling you to the next page." She looked to Jonas. "And it's asking you to listen the way water does — with your shape."
"What's the next page?" he asked.
Ember's eyes shone. "Glass that remembers heat."
She stepped away, and where she had been, a thin line of warmth lingered in the air like handwriting. The river took it and smoothed it as rivers do.
Leona and Jonas left the mill, the candle steady behind them, taking no one's praise. Outside, the day had brightened into the honest blue of work. The shard-window on the distant cathedral caught the sun and returned it properly.
As they crossed the field, Leona felt the word steadfast anchor in her chest the way a keel accepts water. She breathed it once, twice, like a practiced prayer that won't show off.
Somewhere upriver, a bell tolled once, satisfied.