The Last Breath in the Glass

On Murano the furnaces never went cold, and Lucia had learned to sleep through the roar of them the way a sailor's child sleeps through the sea. She had come to the island at eleven, the year after the fever took her mother, apprenticed to Maestro Orsini because her uncle owed him money and a girl was cheaper to give than coin. That had been four years ago. She was fifteen now, and her hands bore the small white scars every glassworker wore like a guild badge, and she could already do things with a blowpipe that made the journeymen mutter. Orsini's workshop made mirrors — the great clear Venetian mirrors that the French and the Austrians paid fortunes for, smuggled out under the Republic's nose, each one a sheet of silvered glass so flawless it seemed less a thing made than a hole cut in the world. The doges had once forbidden the masters to leave the island on pain of death, so precious was the secret. Lucia had thought she knew all of it. She was wrong about one mirror. It hung in the room Orsini kept locked, the room behind the cooling shed, and she had seen it only once, by accident, when she came at dawn to bank the fires and found the door ajar. It was no larger than a serving tray, oval, its frame plain dark wood, and it did not behave the way a mirror should. The glass held a faint motion in it, a slow clouding and clearing, like breath fogging a cold pane and fading