Bly Tamblin and the Bottled Storm

The Smallest Tamblin

It was raining in Drizzleby, which was not news. It had been raining in Drizzleby for as long as there had been a Drizzleby, and a good while before that to get the practice in.

It rained on the moss-furred roofs and the green-shouldered chimneys. It rained on the cobbles until they shone like the backs of beetles, and it rained down the gutters in busy little brooks that carried off bottle-tops and lost buttons and the occasional unwise snail. It rained sideways on Tuesdays, when the wind came over the Wether Hills in a sulk. It rained soft and grey most other days, the kind of rain you could walk through for an hour and only notice when you got indoors and began, gently, to steam.

The people of Drizzleby were quietly proud of all of it. They said mizzling for the fine rain and siling for the hard, and spitting for the in-between, and they had eleven words for the colour of a wet sky and not one for sunshine, because there was hardly ever call to use it. They wore their boots to weddings. They grew the best moss in the valley. And every last one of them, from the Mayor down to the cats, owned an umbrella made by the Tamblins.

That was the trouble.

A Tamblin umbrella did not break. It did not turn inside out in a Tuesday wind, or leak at the joint, or lose a rib in its third year and go lopsided like a tired old crow. A Tamblin umbrella was oilcloth and ash-wood and patience, and once you bought one it kept the rain off you for the rest of your natural life, and then, very often, off your children too. Which meant that the people of Drizzleby loved Tamblin's Umbrellas the way you love a thing you never have to think about, and bought a new one roughly never.

"We make them too well," Da liked to say, holding one up to the lamp so the oilcloth glowed amber. He said it the way other men said isn't she lovely. "That's the curse of it, Bly. Make a thing properly and you do yourself out of a customer for fifty years."

Bly thought about that a great deal, more than was probably good for them.

---

There were seven Tamblin children, or there were five and then a long pause and then two more, depending on how you counted, and the household above the shop was never, ever quiet. Mornings went off like a kettle. There was Huw, who was sixteen and built like a doorframe and could carry six umbrellas under each arm without thinking. There was Carys, who was fourteen and did everything as though a crowd were watching and just out of view — she could not pass the butter without it becoming a small tragedy. There were the twins, Bryn and Bron, who were nine and shared one idea between them and used it mostly for harm. There was baby Mo, who was sticky in a way that defied all known soap. There was Mam, Ivy Tamblin, quick and warm and forever doing four things, and Da, Gethin Tamblin, slow and warm and forever doing one thing very carefully.

And there was Bly.

Bly was eleven, and small for it, and easy to miss — which, in a kitchen the size of a cupboard with nine people in it, was both a talent and a wound.

Breakfast was where you saw it best. Bly would open their mouth to say a thing — a true thing, a thing they had noticed, like the front step's gone slippery or Mo's got the jam in his ear again — and the sentence would get about three words out before Carys announced she could not POSSIBLY go to school looking like THIS, and the twins began a war over the last good sausage, and Mam said eat up, eat up, the lot of you in a voice that swept the whole table like a broom, and Bly's three words went under without a ripple.

It was not unkindness. That was the part Bly could never explain to the worry-list notebook later, in the dark. Nobody in the house was unkind. They loved Bly fiercely, in a blunt, busy, doorframe-and-butter sort of way. Huw saved them the heel of the loaf because Bly liked it best. Carys did their hair into a plait when they let her. The twins, on the rare days they were not at war, would have flung themselves under a cart for their smallest sibling and called it nothing.

It was only that there was so much of everyone else, and so little of Bly, and a small quiet person in a big loud house is a candle in a wind. You have to lean close to see them at all.

The photograph proved it.

It hung in the front room by the till, in a frame Da had made, taken three summers ago by the man who came round once a year with the box on legs. All the Tamblins, ranked on the shop steps in their Sunday boots, squinting into the rare and miraculous sun. Mam holding Mo. Da holding Mam. Huw and Carys and the twins in a stair-step row.

And, at the very edge of the frame, where the man with the box had not quite known to look, a smudge. Half a shoulder. A bit of hair the colour of wet straw, cut off by the white border. Bly had been there. Bly was always there. But the moment got taken without them, the way moments mostly did, and afterwards nobody noticed the gap, because the picture looked perfectly full.

Bly noticed.

Bly noticed everything.

---

That was the thing about the worry-list notebook. The family thought it was a joke — a sweet, slightly sad little joke about their nervous middle child who lay awake fretting and wrote it all down. It was a stub of pencil and a battered penny notebook with a cover gone soft as cloth, and across the front, in Bly's careful small hand, it said:

THINGS THAT COULD GO WRONG

And inside, it did say things that could go wrong, hundreds of them, in numbered lists. If the front step ices over Mam will fall carrying Mo. If the kettle's not descaled by Friday it'll burst at Midwinter. If Bryn keeps standing on the loose stair he'll come through it and land on the cat.

Carys had found it once and read three pages aloud in her tragedy voice before Mam took it off her, and for a week the twins had called Bly Doom and pretended to faint. Bly had wanted to die. They had wanted the rain to come up through the floor and carry them off down the gutter with the lost buttons.

But here was the secret the family had never quite worked out, because to work it out you would have had to lean close.

Every single thing on those lists was true.

The front step did ice over, the very next Tuesday, and Bly had got there first with a fistful of ash from the grate and gritted it, and Mam had not fallen. The loose stair did give way, eventually, but Bly had wedged a folded card under it months before, so when it went it only sagged, and Bryn landed on his bottom and not on the cat. The kettle got descaled on the Thursday because Bly left a note on it that nobody read but the note was enough to make them.

Bly did not lie awake imagining disasters because they liked disasters. Bly lay awake catching them — reaching out in the dark and catching the small bad things before they could fall, one by one, and writing them down so they would not be lost, so that someone in this loud bright house would be keeping watch.

It was the one thing Bly was good at. Noticing. The crack before the break. The look before the tears. The way the cat went stiff a full second before the door slammed.

The worst of it was that Bly thought it didn't count. You couldn't carry six umbrellas under each arm with noticing. You couldn't make the butter a tragedy with it. As far as Bly could tell, the world handed out its prizes to the loud and the large and the brave, and gave the quiet, careful, worried ones a pat on the head and asked them, kindly, to fetch something.

Which brings us to the errand.

---

"Bly can take it."

Carys said it without looking up from her own reflection in the dark window, which she was studying as though it might run off. There was a long thin parcel on the counter, oilcloth-wrapped and tied with string: a re-ribbed umbrella, mended good as new, bound for the top of Tinker's Lane.

Nobody else in the family would go up Tinker's Lane if you paid them in sausages.

"You can't send the little one up to Bellows' in the dark," said Huw, frowning, in the way of someone who has not the smallest intention of going instead.

"It's not dark, it's afternoon," said Carys.

"It's Drizzleby," said Huw. "Same thing."

"She's peculiar, that old woman," said Carys, with a delicious shudder. "Mira Penny says she's a witch. Mira Penny says she keeps lightning in a jar."

"Mira Penny," said Mam, sailing through with Mo on one hip and a stack of folded oilcloth on the other, "would say the moon was made of cheese if it got her an audience. Who's taking the Bellows mending?"

And the whole kitchen, in the way of kitchens, turned for half a second toward the small quiet person by the stairs.

"I'll go," said Bly.

They had been going to say it anyway. They always said it. But it landed in one of the rare pockets of silence, and Mam actually looked at them — properly, both eyes — for almost a whole moment, and her face did something soft and worried at the edges.

"You're a good one, Bly," she said. "Mind the hill. And mind her. Be back before full dark." She shifted Mo, and the moment closed over like water. "And someone fetch the line in before it siles, these sheets'll be wetter than when I hung them—"

The kitchen roared back to life. Bly was already lifting their coat off the peg.

Here was the thing none of them knew, the secret Bly kept folded small inside their chest where even Carys's prying could not reach it:

The errand nobody wanted was the thing Bly loved most in the world.

Because at the top of Tinker's Lane, in the crooked tall house that leaned over the town like it was trying to hear a secret, lived old Mother Bellows. And Mother Bellows — crusty, snappish, witch-or-not — was the only grown person in all of Drizzleby who ever looked at Bly as though they were exactly the size they ought to be.

---

Bly took their umbrella from the stand by the door. Not one of the beautiful amber ones in the window. Theirs.

The runt of the shop. Too small even when it was new — a child's umbrella, made years ago from the off-cuts, the bits of oilcloth too short to be anything grander, the rib that came out crooked. It had been mended so many times that mending was most of what it was now: a darn here, a splint of fresh ash-wood there, a button sewn where the catch had failed. Da had offered, a dozen times, to make Bly a proper one, a good one, sized right.

Bly always said no.

They could not have told you why, exactly. Only that the runt umbrella fit their hand the way nothing else in the house quite fit them, and that there was a kind of company in a thing that had been overlooked and patched and kept going anyway, and refused, stubbornly, in its small lopsided way, to let the rain in.

They stepped out into the mizzle and put it up. It opened with a sound like a sigh.

Tinker's Lane went up the side of Catchwater Hill in a series of cobbled steps slick as soap, between leaning walls dripping with fern. Bly climbed, and as they climbed they did the thing they always did when their heart got loud, which was to make a list, quietly, under the breath, against the dark.

Things That Could Go Wrong On The Way Up Tinker's Lane, Bly thought.

One. I could slip on the wet steps and go down all the way to the bottom like a barrel.

Two. The parcel could come open and the rain could get the new ribbing before it's even delivered.

Three. She could be in one of her tempers and not open the door.

Four—

But four would not come, because halfway up the hill, Bly stopped, and looked, and the list went clean out of their head.

The light had gone strange.

It was late autumn, and the afternoon should have been doing what Drizzleby afternoons always did, which was to give up slowly and grey, the way an old dog lies down. Instead the sky over the Wether Hills had gone the colour of a bruise just starting — a deep, low, coppery green at the rim, shading up to a purple Bly had no word for, though they had eleven for the others. The drizzle had stilled. The whole valley seemed to be holding its breath, the way the cat did a full second before the door slammed.

And on the wind, faint and far, Bly caught the murmur the grown-ups had been passing back and forth all week over the tops of children's heads, in the shop and the market and the queue at the baker's, low, the way you'd speak of someone poorly.

Midwinter's coming.

Aye. Soon now.

Reckon she's ready for it, up the hill? She's getting on.

She's always ready. She's the Weathersmith.

Bly did not know yet what it would all come to mean. They only knew, the way they knew the crack before the break, that something in the air had changed its mind — and that they were the only one on the whole grey hillside who had stopped to notice.

They gripped the runt umbrella tighter and climbed the last steep steps, fast now, the parcel hugged to their chest.

At the top of Tinker's Lane the crooked Weatherworks leaned over Bly like a question, and before Bly could lift the runt umbrella to knock, the door swung open all by itself.

The House That Brewed Weather

The door swung open on a smell Bly would carry for the rest of their life: rain on warm stone, and cold tin, and somewhere underneath it all, the green ghost of summer.

Bly stood on the step with the runt umbrella still half-lifted to knock, which was a foolish thing to do at a door that had already opened, and they knew it, and they did it anyway. The drizzle pattered on the brim. Inside, a warm dark waited, breathing.

"Well," said a voice from the warm dark, dry as a struck match. "Are you coming in, or are you going to stand there letting the wet in like a chimney with manners?"

Bly came in. The door shut behind them with a small, satisfied click, the way a cat settles when it has finally got you where it wants you.

It was the most crowded room Bly had ever seen, and somehow it did not feel crowded at all. It felt like the inside of a clock that had decided to be kind. Shelves went up and up into shadow, climbing past the reach of the single lamp, and every shelf was full of jars, and every jar was full of weather.

Bly had imagined the Weatherworks a hundred times on the long climb up Tinker's Lane. Bly had imagined it wrong.

The fog jars purred.

That was the only word for it. A whole low shelf of them, fat green glass with brass collars, and inside each one a slow soft turning of grey, like milk poured into tea, and from them came a sound — a steady, contented, sleeping-cat thrum that Bly felt in the soles of their boots before they heard it in their ears. Bly's fingers itched to touch one. Bly put their hands behind their back, which was Rule One of being in a shop that wasn't yours, and Bly knew about shops.

Higher up: thunder. Bly knew it was thunder before they knew how they knew. Squat black bottles, corked and wired, the wire wound twice and twisted tight, and each cork strained gently up against its wire the way a dog strains at a lead it has not yet decided to disobey. One of them gave a small, sulky grumble as Bly passed. The whole shelf grumbled back, the way a row of old men will all clear their throats when one of them starts.

And in the middle of the floor, on a black iron stand, a copper kettle the size of a washtub sat over a low blue flame and simmered. Not boiling. Simmering — that lazy, golden, just-about-to-be-bothered sound, and the steam that came off it was warm and gold and smelled of cut grass and tar-melt and a beach Bly had never been to. Summer. Somebody had a kettle of summer on the boil, and had it turned down low so it would keep.

Bly's eyes stung, and it had nothing to do with the steam.

"Don't drip on the Reckoning," said the voice, and Bly jumped, and looked, and found Mother Bellows at last.

She was smaller than her legend. That was the first surprise. The town spoke of the Weathersmith the way it spoke of the Wether Hills — as a fixed feature, ancient, weather-beaten, not quite to be argued with — and Bly had built her tall in their head, tall as the house. But she sat in a great cracked leather chair by the cold hearth, no taller than Carys, wrapped in about nine cardigans, and her hands on the chair-arms were knotted as old rope, and her eyes were the pale, polished grey of rain about to start. Beside her, leaning against the chair, was an umbrella.

Bly noticed the umbrella the way Bly noticed everything: by accident, and completely. It was small. It was mended — mended carefully, with a ribbing of fine waxed thread along one panel and a new tip whittled to match the old ones. It was, panel for panel and mend for mend, the runt umbrella's twin.

Bly's own runt umbrella dripped a small cold ring onto the floorboards. Bly moved it onto the mat.

"There," said Mother Bellows, and something in her face eased, just a hair. "You see? That's the whole of it, right there."

"The whole of what, missus?"

"The mat." She watched them with those rain-grey eyes. "Five children come up that lane this winter on a dare, to see the witch. Not one of them moved their dripping to the mat. You've been in the room a minute and a half and you've already worried about my floor." She made a sound that might, in a younger woman, have been a laugh. "You notice, Tamblin. Nobody in this whole wet town notices but you."

Bly's whole chest went hot and strange. People said things to Bly all day. Mind the baby. Where's the small one got to. Bly, you're standing in the light. Nobody had ever said you notice as though it were a thing worth being.

"I just deliver the umbrellas," Bly said, because someone in their family always said it for them and they had got into the habit of saying it first. "Da sends me. Nobody else'll carry one up the hill."

"For two years," said Mother Bellows, "you've carried an umbrella up that hill in weather that wanted no umbrella, because you'd noticed I'd be cold. You've stood in that doorway and watched me cork thunder. You think I didn't see you watching? I'm old, child, not blind. I've been watching you watch for two years." She tipped her head toward the lamp, and the light slid into all the creases of her. "Question is whether you've been watching well enough to learn anything. We'll see."

"* He* won't learn anything," said a third voice, sour as crab-apples, and Bly looked all round the room for who'd said it and found nobody, because the speaker was no taller than a thumb.

On the mantel stood a tall slim glass on a brass foot — a storm-glass, Edda would have called it before Bly could open their mouth, a sealed glass of spirit and camphor that crystallises with the coming weather, very old, quite reliable — and inside it, up to its waist in clear liquid, floated a little man made all of brass and quicksilver. He had a face like a walnut that had received bad news. He had his arms crossed. He was glaring at Bly with the particular venom of someone who has been disappointed many times and intends to keep the score.

"They," said Bly, before they could stop themself. "Not he. They."

The brass man blinked. So, very slightly, did Mother Bellows.

"They won't learn anything," the storm-glass corrected himself, with enormous bad grace, and turned his back, which set the liquid swirling and a few small white crystals tumbling down through it like the world's worst snow-globe. "Two years of mooning in the doorway and the great noticer can't tell a fog-jar from a pickle. We're doomed. I always said we'd be doomed. Nobody listens to the glass."

"That," said Mother Bellows, "is Grizzle. He lives in the glass. He reads the only weather that can't be lied to — the weather that's truly coming, not the weather some fool wishes for. He's a misery and a marvel and you'll mind him." She leaned forward, and the nine cardigans creaked. "And he's right about one thing. There's no time to do this the slow way. So you'll get it fast, and you'll get it wrong, and that's the craft. Come here."

Bly went.

"Rule the first," said Mother Bellows, and held up one knotted finger. "Weather is borrowed. We don't make it. Nobody makes it. We catch it where it falls free, and we hold it, and we give it back to the valley in its proper season, and what we take from the sky we put back into the sky, every drop, or the whole vale tips and spills." She watched to see if it landed. "Take nothing the sky won't give back. Say it."

"Take nothing the sky won't give back," said Bly.

"There's five rules and you'll break every one of them," said Mother Bellows, almost cheerful about it, "but that's the one that matters. The other four are just that one wearing hats." She levered herself up out of the chair, one hand on the chair-arm, one on the twin umbrella, and stood swaying a moment like a candle finding its flame. Then she crossed to the great desk under the window, and Bly followed, and Grizzle's glass turned slowly on the mantel so he could keep glaring at the back of Bly's head.

On the desk lay a book.

It was the biggest book Bly had ever seen — bigger than the parish register, bigger than the umbrella-shop ledger that Da pretended wasn't full of red ink. Its cover was cracked black leather and its pages, where Mother Bellows opened it, were ruled in two long columns down every page, hundreds of pages, thousands of lines, written in a hundred different hands going back and back into brown ink and faded ink and ink the colour of dried rain.

"The Reckoning," said Mother Bellows. "Every weather ever taken from this valley." Her finger ran down the left column. "And every weather ever given back." Her finger ran down the right. "Balanced. Always balanced. A Weathersmith who lets those two columns drift apart has murdered a valley, slow, and not noticed doing it." She turned a great wad of pages at once, to the back, to the last page that had writing on it, and the writing there was her own — Bly recognised it from the careful labels on the umbrella-repairs — and the last two lines were dated this very week.

The right-hand column was a little shorter than the left. Just a little. A few lines shy.

Bly noticed. Of course Bly noticed. But Mother Bellows had already turned away, to the wall beside the window, where a single sheet of stiff yellow parchment hung in a frame on its own brass peg, and Bly's eye was pulled off the book and onto the parchment.

"The Charter of the Vale," said Mother Bellows. There was a different weight in her voice now. "Older than the town. Older than my name and every name in that book. It says the weather of the Mizzle Vale is held in trust — for the town, by the Weathersmith, never owned, never sold, not by me nor anyone. It's not a key, child. It's a promise, with a wax seal on it." She touched the frame, light, the way you'd touch a sleeping baby's foot. "There are folk in this world who'd give their teeth to get this off its peg. Remember that it isn't mine to give them. It isn't even mine to keep. It's only mine to mind."

She crossed the room again — slower now, Bly thought, leaning harder on the umbrella — to a tall cabinet against the coldest wall. Frost laced its glass doors. Inside, on shelves packed about with sawdust and dull grey blocks of ice that wept slowly into copper trays, stood jars. Winter jars. Bly could feel the cold rolling off them from three feet away, a clean, knife-edged cold that made the petrichor in the room go sharp and bright.

And on the very top shelf, alone, in a fat round jar no bigger than Bly's two fists, was a quietness.

Bly didn't have a better word. The fog purred and the thunder grumbled and the summer simmered, but this jar did nothing, said nothing, and somehow Bly's eyes went straight to it and stayed and didn't want to leave. Inside the glass turned a slow, soft, falling whiteness — not snow, not yet, but the idea of snow, the held breath before the first flake, the hush a whole valley makes when it looks up and sees the year has turned.

"First-snow," said Mother Bellows, very quietly. "The last of it. The true seed." She did not take it down. She only looked at it, and for a moment she looked every one of her hundred years. "In four days it's Midwinter. The great Brewing. The one night of the year a Weathersmith earns her keep — when we take this, and the kettle, and the deepest fog, and a dozen things you've no names for yet, and we set the whole winter loose over the valley at once, in its right measure, so the cold comes gentle and the snow comes clean and the spring is promised inside the freeze." She turned to Bly. "If the Midwinter Brewing is done right, the valley sleeps warm under the snow and wakes green."

"And if it isn't?" said Bly. They didn't want to ask. The whole evening had been pulling toward the question and Bly's worry-list was already writing itself somewhere behind their ribs, neat and terrible, Things That Could Go Wrong, number one.

Mother Bellows smiled. It was a small smile, and far too light for the words it carried, the way you'd toss a heavy thing to someone and pretend it weighed nothing so they'd catch it before they thought to brace.

"Then the cold comes wrong," she said. "And the valley freezes. And it doesn't thaw."

She let that sit in the warm purring dark.

Then she clapped her knotted hands together, brisk, and the spell broke, and she was a crusty old woman again shooing a child to the door. "Enough. You've had more in one evening than my last apprentice got in a year, and look how that —" She stopped herself. Something closed in her face like a door. "Go home. Your mother'll think the witch has eaten you."

Bly went to the door. Their hand was on the latch — cold iron, worn smooth by a hundred years of hands — when Grizzle made a noise.

It was not one of his sour noises. It was a small, strangled sound, the sound a kettle makes the instant before it screams, and Bly turned.

The storm-glass had clouded.

Bly had watched it all evening swirl clear, with its little tumbling crystals and its glaring brass man. Now a grey was coming up through the liquid from the bottom, a dirty, curdling grey, fast, faster, climbing the glass like ink dropped in water, and Grizzle was scrambling up through it with his walnut face gone white, up and up ahead of the dark, until there was nowhere left to climb.

"That's not —" the little sprite said. "That's not a reading. In ninety years I've never —"

The grey closed over him.

The storm-glass turned slowly, completely black, and Grizzle went very still.

Across the room, Mother Bellows had not moved. But her hand, where it rested on the doorframe by Bly's shoulder, had tightened until the knuckles stood up white as the first-snow, and her rain-grey eyes were fixed on the black glass, and for the first time all evening the Weathersmith of Drizzleby looked afraid.

"Come back at first light, small one," Mother Bellows said, soft as Bly had ever heard her. "And tell no one."