What They Brought to Be Lit, Not Blessed

The frost reached Temple Walk an hour before it reached the Bazaar’s stones tonight, and the braziers along the processional path stayed lit past the hour the sacristan usually banks them, because no one is coming tomorrow to bank anything until the fourth day after this one. They came from the middle hour onward, in ones and twos, each carrying something already finished.

A woman off Guild Row brought a stub of beeswax no longer than her thumb, wrapped in a scrap of the same red wool a midwife ties nine mornings running and then takes away again. She did not say whose child the wool had counted. I did not ask. I had already heard, from a source that owes me nothing, that the counting finished a full hour before anyone thought to send for me. A boy from the chandler’s stall brought three jars already filled — his master’s oil, correctly pressed, correctly weighed — and wanted none of it blessed. Only lit, once, from the sanctuary flame, so that what burns in his own house through the dark days shares a kindling with what burns here. An old woman from past the cooper’s wall brought nothing at all, which I noticed only because she stayed the longest, warming her hands at the brazier and leaving before the bell without asking for anything to carry home. I have reason to think she keeps a flame tended already, on a stone ledge nobody pays her to keep, and had come only to watch the larger version of her own small work.

I lit what they brought. I finished none of it. The oil was already correct. The wool had already counted what it was sent to count. What I gave back left Temple Walk in cupped hands, past the braziers, into three days during which I will keep a flame that nobody will ask after — exactly as I have for thirty-one years, for a city that does not stop needing it simply because the Bazaar does.