Free Falcon in the Glass by Susan Fletcher Page B

week? You’re to put the coin in the alms box. We have none to spare for beggars.”
    â€œBut he’s hungry,” Pia protested.
    Renzo hauled her back down the path, remembering the night this past week when he had risen to go to the glassworks and had found Mama in the kitchen bent over the accounts, moving stacks of coins around the table.
    How much longer could they survive on the dwindling supply of coins and the pittance Renzo made? Even if he became an apprentice, it would be years before he could truly support his family. And what if he didn’t pass the test? How could they keep their house, feed themselves?
    He glanced back to where the beggar had sat crouched against the wall. But he was gone.
    Still, Renzo knew the silent, creeping dread that Mama must have been feeling.
    There but for the grace of God went they.

13.
The Shape of Fear
    I t is possible, Renzo found, to work through fear. You can push it down, hoard it deep inside you, and breathe it into the glass. You can watch the glass swell, grow bubble-thin and gossamer, and know that fear is making it lovely, fear is giving it shape.
    With glass, joy is the preferable medium. But fear is powerful, and it will do, when joy cannot be found.
    He and Letta worked on through the night, though Renzo knew there was far too little time and far too much to learn. The footed bowl, the long-stemmed goblet, the crested wine flask, the eared jug . . . You could spend years coming to know them. You must — to master them. But Renzo did not have years. He had five weeks.
    That first night, when the children had come out into the open, their green eyes had followed whatever he’d done, hardly changing in expression whether the glass shattered at the end of the blowpipe, or slumped to the floor, or formed itself into a perfect, symmetrical bowl.
    They made him clumsy, the children’s eyes. They madehim think too much. Especially with the birds watching too — though, true to Letta’s word, they stayed perched on the children’s shoulders as if fastened there.
    By the next night, he had managed mostly to forget them. He breathed his fear into the glass, and when he looked up, he saw the children curled in a heap together, sleeping like kittens. The cough had swept through them, erupting here and there. But the new coughs didn’t sound so dire as the old ones. Even the marsh boy’s cough had abated, though he still seemed listless, his cheeks aflame.
    The marsh boy. That was how Renzo thought of him. He didn’t want to know the boy’s true name. He didn’t want to know any of their names. He didn’t want to care about them.
    After a few more nights, as the children grew accustomed to warmth and food, they began to stir and move about. The two older boys handed off their birds and began performing acrobatic tricks to amuse the others —cartwheeling across the floor, or somersaulting one over the other, or the younger one standing on the older one’s shoulders and summoning his crow. Renzo cast a worried eye toward the crates and racks of finished glass; Letta barked out an order, and the two boys moved away. Still, there were stubbed toes and bloody feet, pricked by stray bits of shattered glass. There were skinned knees and barked shins. Once, the little light-haired girl shot out of the group and was nearly to the furnace before Taddeo’s long arm reached out to snag her and pull her back.
    Where you find children, Renzo observed, you will also find mud and mucus, vomit and blood. They wet themselves;they poke their fingers where they don’t belong; they babble; they shriek; they cry.
    And through it all the birds stayed close — though they sometimes strayed from shoulders to perch on heads, on wrists, on knees. Birds pecked at cheeks and at strands of hair, they stretched their wings, they scratched their heads, they fluffed out their feathers and napped. Truly, they didn’t seem