Firedog

The girl found Nyra at the cold hearth with a firedog in each hand, the pair of iron stands that held the logs up off the stone, their feet set and their tall fronts curved like a hound sitting back on its haunches. The girl asked why a fire wanted iron in it at all, when it was the wood that burned and the flame that gave the heat, and the firedogs themselves never so much as glowed. Nyra set them in their places, a span apart, and laid a log across the two. “The firedog does not burn,” Nyra said. “It carries no flame, and it never will. It only lifts the wood off the stone and holds it there, and that lifting is the most of the fire.”

The girl pushed a log straight onto the bare hearthstone, with no iron beneath it, and watched how it sat dead and dull and would not catch. “A log flat on the stone smothers,” the girl said. “The underside has no air, and the fire starves there and goes out. So the firedog settles whether the wood burns at all, before a single flame has touched it.”

“It does,” Nyra answered. “The firedog holds the log clear of the stone so the draught can run beneath it, and a fire fed from below takes the whole log and not just the top. Lay the wood flat and the air cannot reach it, and you will coax a weak flame all evening and warm nothing. The iron is what lets the fire draw, and the finest dry wood on a bare stone is worth little.”

The girl wanted the firedog set down in the book, the curved iron front and the span between the pair and the way it held a fire it would never feel. Nyra let her write it, and watched the slow letters fill the row. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

“You can set down the height of the firedog and the span you leave between the two,” Nyra said, “but not the sense of how much air a log wants, nor the reading of a flame that has started to sink. Those live in the hands, and the hands learn them only by banking one fire and then the next.” The girl looked from the page to the cold iron standing on the stone, and she let it be. The book keeps the measure of the firedog, and you keep the tending of it.