“What’s happening?” My voice is brittle with fear and frustration. “What’s wrong?”
Wick purses his lips, considering. At length, he says, “It’s supposed to burn out. That’ll tell us about how much time you have left—for instance, if it had burned out quickly, you might have less than a year.”
I was meant to have a long life. It’s a small comfort. “So I would have lived a long time. I can afford forty years.” Perhaps I can earn the years back, or some of them.
“No one can afford forty years,” Wick snaps, still staring at the candle flame.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice an old man in line peering curiously at us. I shiver, anxious to be back within the walls of Everless.
“This isn’t right.” He raises the pocket watch, taps a nail against its glass face. “It should have stopped by now, even if you lived to be a hundred . . . Maybe something’s wrong with my powder.” He pulls out a second set of instruments and before I realize what he’s doing, nicks his own finger with the knife. He doesn’t bother with the vial, just flicks the drop of blood into the dish, sprinkles the powder in, and lights the candle. The blood ignites.
While Wick and I watch, I find myself counting—one, two, three, four, five, six—and the flame dies halfway through seven. Wick blinks.
“See,” he says without feeling. “I reckon fifteen years.”
I don’t know how to react to this—Wick’s seeming carelessness about the time of his own death—but my eyes are drawn back to my own blood, still burning. Now Wick is watching me with suspicion and distrust on his face, his mouth flat and arms crossed over his chest. Around us, I see, the few other people in the store have gone still, watching.
“I don’t understand,” I say weakly. Does he think me a Gerling, my blood running with hundreds of years? “I’m not—I’m from Crofton. I’ve never taken time, not once.”
Wick raises his eyebrows, but as the seconds pass, something in my face seems to soften him. “Maybe something is wrong with my instruments,” he says doubtfully.
“But can you still withdraw time?” I press desperately. Have the forty years been taken from Caro’s blood already? “It’s for my friend. She needs it.”
“I can try,” Wick says after a moment. He studies his instruments—an array of knives and needles that makes my stomach contract queasily—and chooses a short knife that seems to be made of blue glass. Next he picks up a small, tarnished-looking tin cup and wipes both objects down with a cloth.
“Hold out your hand,” he instructs, and I obey, suddenly thankful that I haven’t eaten this morning. My stomach is heaving.
Wick holds my wrist down with one practiced hand, and with the other, makes a long shallow cut along the skin of my palm. The pain hits me a second after the blooming blood, a thin line of fire. Wick holds the cup beneath my hand and catches the rivulet of blood inside.
As red splashes against the glass, my strength begins to go out of me—far more than the small amount of blood in the cup would seem to suggest. I feel like I’m aging even as I sit on this stool, watching dazedly as my blood fills up the cup.
When it’s full, Wick tilts my hand up, stopping the flow, and sets the cup aside before wrapping a bandage expertly and neatly around my hand. I realize I’m gripping the table with my other hand to stay upright. My head is spinning, and I remain in the stool as Wick goes about his procedure, afraid to rise.
I’ve witnessed the process of blood minting but now it seems to take eons. I fall into a kind of haze, watching as he pours my blood into the cup on the scale, bright as rubies even in this dim store. He adds a careful spoonful of a different powder, this one dark and glittering like obsidian. As soon as the powder comes into contact with my blood, the contents of the whole cup ignite with a flash of white flame. A blast of heat hits my face, along with the smell of copper.
The flame burns bright for several long moments and then dies down. When it’s extinguished, Wick takes the cup and tilts it so I can see. Through darkness at the edges of my vision, I stare at the bright liquid in the bottom of the cup. It shimmers like oil, shines like mercury—if mercury was red-gold. When Wick moves the cup, it rolls around slow as honey. Pure time. My time.
“Now I’ll make it into coin,” Wick says, his tone a little kinder after seeing my distress. He picks another item, a heavy lead block on which I can see inverted versions of the Queen’s insignia, the symbol appearing on every blood-iron in Sempera. On his desk are molds for every kind of blood-iron, from tiny, flimsy hour-coins the size of my thumbnail to the one he’s holding: molds for year-coins, each circle’s diameter almost as wide as my fist.
Wick carefully pours a bit of my time into the mold, and I watch, dizzily fascinated, as the coin takes shape before my eyes, the metal cooling and slowing even as he pours. The block has ten molds; Wick fills each of them with molten time. Twice, he has to stop to remelt my cooling time over the flame. “Come back later and I’ll take another ten,” he says gruffly. “Don’t want to do it all at once.”
By the time he’s finished, the first of the coins have cooled completely, until they look exactly like the blood-irons I see every day. My stomach turns as I consider the fact that for every coin I’ve ever spent, handled, even touched, someone had to suffer as I’m suffering now. Someone had to sit and watch as their life was bled out of them, to be transformed into coin to buy that night’s thin strip of dried meat or a pint of beer or a thatched roof over one’s head.
When all the coins have cooled, Wick turns the block over and shakes it a little so that the new blood-irons tumble down to the wooden table with heavy clinks. I reach out to take one in hand, eyeing it with equal fascination and revulsion. This time has flowed through my veins for seventeen years. And now it’s outside of my body, and I am diminished. The metal is hot against my skin. If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be almost beautiful.
“How are you feeling?” Wick asks, but I’m already pushing back from the table. I can’t—I don’t have the time, I think grimly—to sit in this shop and ponder the unfairness of life. Even now, Caro’s years might be draining from her. She could be dying, if she’s not already dead. Because of me. For me. Going to the vault for me was more than an act of bravery—or foolishness—on Caro’s part. Something deep inside me knows, it was an act of true kindness. No one has cared for me like that other than Papa. And Papa’s gone.
I have to get these blood-irons to her.
I stand as Wick bags up the coins in a cloth and hands the package to me. They are still warm through the fabric.