The Cloud Catcher's Apprentice

• Chapter 1 The Help Wanted Sign
• Chapter 2 Cumulus Farm
• Chapter 3 Rules of the Weather Vane
• Chapter 4 Glass, Cork, and Barometers
• Chapter 5 The Master Cloud Catcher
• Chapter 6 A Whiff of Ozone
• Chapter 7 The Shelf of Sealed Storms
• Chapter 8 A Crack in the Glass
• Chapter 9 The Escaped Spark
• Chapter 10 Thunder in the Hayloft
• Chapter 11 The Fog-Bound Trail
• Chapter 12 Chasing a Stray Lightning Bolt
• Chapter 13 The Whispering Wind Network
• Chapter 14 Into the Stratus Cellar
• Chapter 15 Static on the Roof
• Chapter 16 A Pocketful of Hail
• Chapter 17 The Anvil Cloud Incident
• Chapter 18 Trapping a Tempest
• Chapter 19 The Copper Net
• Chapter 20 High Pressure on the Ridge
• Chapter 21 Midnight at the Lightning Rod
• Chapter 22 Bottling the Voltage
• Chapter 23 The Great Seal
• Chapter 24 Rumblings in the Dark
• Chapter 25 The Calm After the Storm
• Chapter 26 Apprentice of the Sky

The summer began with a heat so stubborn it turned the town of Oakhaven into an oven. It was only the second day of vacation, and nine-year-old Milo Finch had already exhausted every indoor amusement permitted by his mother. He had lined up his lead soldiers by height, sorted his copper marbles by clarity, and balanced his wooden ruler on his nose for twelve seconds before it fell and bruised his upper lip. Outside, the dust in the street lay thick and motionless, waiting for an invitation from the breeze that never came.

His mother, wiping a bead of sweat from her neck with a flour-dusted apron, had pointed a wooden spoon toward the front door shortly after breakfast. She informed him that idle boys inside the cottage were a hazard to good temper and dry bread, and that if he could not find something useful to occupy his time, she had three bushels of limp green beans behind the wash-house that needed snapping. Milo possessed a healthy respect for his mother’s voice when it took on that particular dry, iron edge, so he had slid his boots on, pulled his linen cap over his cowlick, and vanished through the screen door before she could change her mind about the beans.

The village square offered little comfort. Old Man Gidley was snoring on the bench outside the post office, his wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down so low that only his whiskers were visible. The butcher’s dog lay under the awning of the pork shop, panting rhythmically and eyeing a dry bone with total lack of enthusiasm. The fountain in the center of the square—a stone cherub clutching a lead fish—merely trickled, producing a thin, dispirited sound that made the air feel warmer rather than cooler.

Milo scuffled his boot soles against the sun-baked cobbles, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his canvas trousers. He had four smooth river stones, a length of twisted twine, and a rusted key that opened nothing he had yet discovered, which was standard equipment for a Tuesday morning, but none of it promised any great adventure. He made his way toward the market cross, where the municipal notice board hung beneath a sloping cedar roof.

The board was usually home to predictable papers. There were notices about missing milk goats, descriptions of stray hounds with half-bitten ears, announcements from the parish vestry concerning road taxes, and water-damaged posters advertising horse auctions that had taken place the previous October. Milo knew most of them by heart; he had read them three times the week before school ended while dodging an errand to the tallow-chandler.

Today, however, an unfamiliar square of paper fluttered weakly against the splintered pine board, pinned by a single copper nail that looked entirely too clean for the rest of the post.

The paper was thick, uneven at the edges, and possessed a faint, damp grayish tinge like a linen handkerchief that had spent a night outdoors in heavy fog. It was not printed with standard printer’s ink, which always smelled of fish oil and lampblack. Instead, the letters were drawn in a deep, indigo fluid that seemed almost to sit slightly above the paper’s surface, sharp and vivid against the pale gray pulp.

Milo took a step closer, squinting against the glare of the noon sun.

The heading had been lettered in broad, steady strokes:

HELP WANTED: JUNIOR HAND FOR LIGHT FIELD WORK.

Beneath that, the script narrowed into a tidy, businesslike hand:

Applicant must be quick on his feet, unbothered by changes in barometric pressure, and capable of holding his breath for twenty seconds without fidgeting. Knowledge of knots an advantage, though willingness to fetch heavy timber is mandatory. Good ears preferred; excessive chatter strictly forbidden. Compensation: one copper penny per day, midday meal provided, and instruction in an honorable, if occasionally loud, trade.

At the bottom, where an address or name usually sat, the notice gave only a set of directions:

Apply in person at the high gate beyond the Old Chalk Cut, where the fence runs upward toward the ridge. Inquire of the overseer before the dew burns completely off the clover, or after the shadow of the church steeple touches the miller’s cart.

Milo looked down at his boots, then over toward the church steeple. The shadow was long and pointed, creeping slowly eastward like an ink stain across the cobbles. It was within three yards of the miller’s cart, which stood empty outside the grain store while the miller took his midday ale in the tavern.

A copper penny a day was not an insignificant sum. A copper penny could buy a paper cone of ginger drops from the confectioner, or three brass fishhooks from the ironmonger, or save up over two weeks toward the second-hand spyglass in the back window of the watchmaker’s shop. More importantly, it was an enterprise that involved neither the snapping of green beans nor sitting on the post office bench watching Old Man Gidley sleep.

The phrase "an honorable, if occasionally loud, trade" stuck in Milo's mind. The blacksmith was loud, but everyone knew where Master Keller kept his forge; you could hear the anvil ringing from the schoolhouse steps, and the notice said nothing about coal dust or sledgehammers. The cooper was loud, too, when he drove the iron hoops down around the oak staves, but coopers didn't care about the barometric pressure, whatever that meant. Milo knew the word only because Mr. Finch, before his ship went south three winters ago, had kept a brass tube full of mercury mounted beside the parlor window and had tapped it with a knuckle whenever the sky turned yellow.

"Holding breath," Milo murmured to himself, testing the requirement immediately. He clamped his mouth shut, pinched his nose between two fingers, and counted slowly in his head. At fourteen, his chest felt tight; at eighteen, his ears began to hum; by twenty-one, he let go with a sudden, wet snort that startled a crow off the roof of the butcher shop. The bird flaps its wings once, gave a disgusted croak, and settled on a chimney pot.

Twenty-one seconds. He met the requirement with a second to spare.

He turned toward the edge of the square, where the high street narrowed into a dusty lane that led out of town. The Old Chalk Cut lay half a mile beyond the village boundary, an ancient, sunken wagon road where the chalk had been quarried out fifty years ago to build the road foundations. It was a steep, pale gully, choked with briars and wild mustard, that climbed steadily toward the high ridge of the downs. Nobody farmed up on the ridge; the soil was thin, the wind never stopped blowing, and the sheep that grazed there were famously lean and bad-tempered.

Milo checked the steeple shadow once more. The sharp point of the slate roof had just touched the iron tire of the miller’s near wheel. If he took the short path through the vicar's meadow and climbed the dry ditch behind the sheepfold, he would reach the Chalk Cut before the shadow moved past the cart tongue.

He pulled the brim of his linen cap down against the glare and set off at a trot.

The heat out on the lane was thicker than in the town, shimmering over the dry ruts like oil on water. Grasshoppers clicked violently in the dead weeds along the ditch, their small, dry bodies snapping through the air as his boots kicked up small puffs of white dust. Milo hopped the low stile into the vicar's meadow, where three cows stood under a single, miserable oak tree, chewing with slow, circular motions and staring into space.

As he climbed, the air began to shift. It was not cooler, precisely, but it had lost the dead, heavy quality of the valley floor. Up here, where the slope steepened and the chalk showed through the grass in pale, chalky ribs, the wind was awake. It did not blow steadily; it came in short, dry puffs that smelled faintly of wild thyme and scorched flint.

The Old Chalk Cut opened before him like a wound in the hillside. The banks rose ten feet on either side, their chalk faces pitted with holes where sand martins nested in spring. The path between them was rough with loose stones that rolled underfoot with a hollow, clacking sound. Milo slowed to a walk, his breath coming faster now from the climb.

Beyond the cut, the lane did not level out as he had expected. Instead, it ran directly toward a post-and-rail fence that stretched across the spine of the hill. It was an unusual fence—taller than any cattle enclosure Milo had ever seen, built of stout ash poles that had been smoothed with an adze until they were pale as bone. Along the top rail ran a single strand of thick copper wire, not rusted or green, but bright as a new kettle, humming faintly with the vibration of the breeze.

In the center of the fence stood the gate mentioned on the notice.

It was wide enough for a hay wain, built of the same peeled ash, with heavy iron hinges that had been greased with dark tallow. Above the gate, fixed to an arch of bent saplings, hung a small wooden sign with carved lettering painted in the same dark blue ink as the paper in the square.

It did not say Farm, and it did not say Trespassers Will Be Shot, which was the customary greeting on the high estates.

It simply read: ENTRANCE. MIND THE DRAFTS.

Beside the gatepost hung a length of chain attached to a heavy cowbell, its clapper wrapped in greasy leather so that it produced only a dull, heavy thunk when Milo reached out and gave it a tentative tug. The sound died almost instantly in the dry grass.

Milo waited, his boots planted in the white dust, his cap in his hands. The valley below looked small and flat from here; the church steeple resembled a sharp gray thorn sticking out of a green cushion, and the river was only a silver wire threaded through the willows. Up here, the sky occupied three-quarters of the world. It was vast, empty, and brilliant blue, without a single wisp of cloud to break the blankness from horizon to horizon.

Then, from the other side of the gate, came the sound of approaching footsteps. They were not the heavy, dragging strides of a farm laborer with muck on his heels, nor the brisk, clicking steps of a clerk. They were light, uneven, and accompanied by the faint, dry metallic rattle of many small things bumping together in a deep pocket.

A head appeared above the top rail.

It was an old man, though his age was hard to fix with any precision. His face was the color of a walnut shell that had spent two winters in a dry cellar, mapped with fine, crisscrossing lines around the eyes that looked less like wrinkles and more like the tracks of water spiders on a pond. He wore a waistcoat of unbleached canvas over a coarse blue shirt, and his spectacles—two thick, round lenses set in iron frames—were pushed up onto his forehead, nestled in a fringe of hair that stood straight out from his temples like dry grass.

He did not open the gate. He rested two long, brown hands on the top rail and looked down at Milo through eyes that were pale gray, like pond water under an overcast sky.

"You're small," the man said. His voice was dry and raspy, like two slate shingles being rubbed together.

"I'm nine," Milo said, standing as straight as his spine would allow. "Ten come November. And I can hold my breath for twenty-one seconds."

The man did not look impressed. He reached into his waistcoat pocket, produced an iron-rimmed watch that lacked hands—having instead three tiny silver needles that pointed toward various engraved words Milo couldn't quite read—and clicked the case open with a loud snap.

"Do it," the man said.

Milo blinked. "Now?"

"No, next Michaelmas," the old man said with a slight twitch of his gray whiskers. "Of course now. Start."

Milo took a great gulp of the ridge air, clamped his lips together, and fixed his eyes on the man's silver needles. The man watched the face of the instrument, not looking at Milo at all. The wind whistled softly through the copper wire along the fence, producing a high, clear note that seemed to vibrate in the boy's teeth. His lungs burned. His rib cage felt as if it were being squeezed by an iron band. At fifteen seconds, his left eyelid began to flutter. At nineteen, his ears roared with the sound of surf.

"Twenty," the old man said, clicking the watch shut with a sharp clack. "Breathe, boy. You look like a turnip."

Milo let the air out with a loud wheeze, his hands resting on his knees while he pulled the thin, dry air back into his chest. "I told... I told you," he panted.

"You said twenty-one," the man observed, his gray eyes narrowing slightly behind his bush of brows. "You had half a second left in you, but you would have dribbled it out the corners of your mouth. A waste of good pressure. What’s your name?"

"Milo. Milo Finch."

"Finch," the man repeated, as though testing the word to see if it had a proper ring to it. "Any relation to the Finch that kept the timber yard by the canal?"

"He was my uncle," Milo said. "He moved to Bristol."

"Sensible man. Too much low ground in the valley. Rots the timbers and softens the brain." The man reached down and lifted the heavy wooden latch of the gate with a single, practiced jerk of his wrist. The ash frame swung back without a squeak, moving so easily on its tallow-soaked hinges that it seemed to float. "Come in, Finch. Keep your boots on the path. The clover's sensitive this time of day, and I don't care to have the heads bruised before the afternoon harvest."

Milo stepped through the gate. The ground inside looked no different from the ground outside—the same dry turf, the same pale chalk pebbles, the same low clumps of wild thyme—yet there was an odd coolness against his ankles that hadn't been there on the open road. It was as though a thin layer of cold water were flowing through the grass, two inches deep, invisible to the eye.

He looked around for the barn, or the farmhouse, or the cattle stalls. There was nothing on the rise except a low, long stone shed with a sod roof that seemed half-buried in the crest of the hill, and beyond it, several tall wooden poles that resembled ship’s masts, stayed with long wire guy-lines that hummed in the wind. From the top of each mast hung an empty, funnel-shaped bag of pale gray sailcloth, dangling limp and lifeless in the dry air.

"Where are the sheep?" Milo asked, looking around the empty expanse of grass.

The old man stopped in his tracks, turned slowly, and looked down at him. The iron-framed spectacles slipped down from his hair and settled on the bridge of his nose, making his gray eyes look twice their natural size.

"Sheep?" the man said, his voice dropping into a tone of severe disappointment. "Did the paper say anything about sheep, boy?"

"No, sir," Milo admitted, checking his pockets as if the paper were still there. "It said field work."

"It did. And this is a field." The man pointed with a long, brown finger toward the vast expanse of blue above them. "And that is the crop. But you don't herd it with a dog, Finch, and you don't shear it with shears. You watch it, you wait for the pressure to drop, and when it gets within reach of the tackle, you take it by the tail and you put it in a box."

Milo stared up at the clear sky, which contained nothing larger than a single high-flying swallow chasing gnats. "Put what in a box?"

The old man gave a short, dry chuckle that sounded like seed pods rattling in an autumn gale. He turned back toward the stone shed, his coat tails flapping around his lean shanks.

"Weather, boy," he said over his shoulder, not checking to see if Milo was following. "We catch the weather."

The path leading away from the gate was made of fine, crushed chalk that had been tamped down until it felt as solid as a church pavement under Milo’s boots. To the left and right, the grass grew in curious, tidy squares, separated from one another by shallow runnels lined with glazed red drainage tiles. In each square, the vegetation differed slightly: one patch held nothing but dandelion clocks, their white seed-heads swollen to the size of teacups and shivering in unison; another was carpeted in a dark, fleshy moss that seemed to breathe with a faint, rhythmic sigh; a third was planted with short, stiff grasses that had turned a metallic bronze in the noon heat.

Milo hurried his pace to keep up with the old man, whose stride was deceptively brisk. The man did not turn around, but his coat tails flapped like dark wings against his calico-trousered legs, and every few yards he would bend sideways without breaking rhythm to pluck a dry blade of stem, sniff it, and toss it over his shoulder.

"Cumulus Farm," the man said aloud, the words tossed backward over a bony shoulder into the thin breeze. "Sixty-four acres of high turf, registered with the Board of Works in the fourth year of the late king’s reign, though they’ve forgotten where we are, which suits me entirely. Out here, we don't have bailiffs, and we don't have churchwardens poking their long noses into the barrels. We have pressure gradients. We have dew-points. We have forty-two distinct varieties of local vapor, none of which care a brass farthing for the price of barley in Oakhaven."

Milo looked around at the open expanse of turf, searching for anything resembling a customary farm. There was no manure heap, no pigpen, and no trace of an orchard. There were only the masts, fifteen or twenty of them, spaced across the plateau like the bare poles of a fleet at anchor in a shallow harbor. Each tall spar was rigged with pulleys and copper cords, and beneath each one sat a large, octagonal wooden tub, painted lead-gray and fitted with an iron spout at the base.

"If we don't grow barley," Milo asked, trotting along the chalk line, "what do the tubs do?"

The old man came to an abrupt halt before the first tub, causing Milo nearly to run his nose into the small of the canvas waistcoat. The man turned, his iron-framed spectacles glinting with two tiny reflections of the empty blue vault overhead.

"That tub," the old man said, tapping the oak staves with a knuckle that sounded surprisingly like iron, "is a condensary. When the air drifts up from the valley after dark, it’s full of damp linen, boiling greens, and the sweat of seven hundred washerwomen. Poor quality stuff. Muddy. But up here, around three in the morning, the cold ridge draft cuts across the turf. We set the sails, drop the baffles, and catch the dew while it's still pure enough to grease a watch escapement. That barrel holds twenty gallons of three-star mountain mist when it’s full. Do you know what the silk-dyers in the south pay for three-star mist, boy?"

Milo shook his head honestly.

"A silver crown a pint," the man said with a grim smile. "Because if you wash silk in well water, the lime in the chalk turns the crimson into the color of a bruised cabbage. But mist has no bone in it. It’s light. It lets the crimson be crimson. That’s field work, Finch. Not shoveling cow dung into a ditch."

He turned on his heel and continued toward the low stone shed. As they drew closer, Milo saw that the building was much larger than it had appeared from the gate. It was dug deep into the northern brow of the ridge, so that three of its walls were simply the living chalk of the hill itself, cold and damp and thick enough to keep out the fierce noon sun. The sod roof was overgrown with wild thyme and stonecrop, with several crooked clay chimneypots poking through the greensward, each capped with a small, spinning copper fan that whirred with a persistent, insect-like drone.

A set of broad stone steps led down into the shadow of the entrance. The doorway was tall and arched, constructed of dark, unmortared ironstone, and the timber door stood wide open to catch whatever air was moving across the ridge.

"Inside," the old man commanded, gesturing with a hand that had three leather thimbles slipped over the fingers. "Wipe your heels on the mat. Not the chalk—the chalk’s clean enough. It’s the town grit I won't have on the flags. Valley dust is greasy. It clogs the valves."

Milo scraped his soles thoroughly across a thick mat woven from dried rushes that crackled like dry straw. When he stepped over the threshold, the heat of the June afternoon vanished so completely that his skin prickled with gooseflesh. The air inside the shed was cool, smelling strongly of river stones, dried lavender, and something sharp and metallic that made the roof of his mouth feel as though he had sucked on a clean brass button.

The interior was a single, vast hall that stretched back into the hill. High, narrow slits in the masonry near the turf line let in thin shafts of daylight, each beam dancing with motes of pale gray dust. The walls were lined from floor to rafters with heavy shelving made of seasoned oak, groaning under the weight of hundreds of containers.

There were fat, green carboys encased in wicker baskets; slender glass tubes with long, drawn necks sealed with red wax; square boxes made of sheet zinc with brass wing nuts on their lids; and rows upon rows of pale earthenware crocks, each marked with a brush-stroke of blue ink showing an arrow, a circle, or a wavy line. At the center of the hall stood a massive trestle table littered with brass balances, bundles of dry elderberry pith, leather funnels, and coils of gut string.

"My name is Barnaby Orpwood," the old man said, unhooking his spectacles and tucking them into a pocket behind his lapel. "Master Cloud Catcher to the Western Marches, though the title hasn't carried a pension since the year of the frost fairs. You will call me Master Orpwood. You will not touch the glass until you are told to touch the glass. You will not sneeze in the vicinity of an unstoppered jar. And if you hear a whistle coming from any vessel that has a red label on the neck, you will not investigate it; you will lay yourself flat on the flagstones and count to fifty."

"Does it explode, sir?" Milo asked, his eyes wide as he took in the shelves.

"It does not explode," Master Orpwood said testily. "Gunpowder explodes. Firecrackers explode. A damaged harvest merely expands with extreme rapidity until it finds an exit. If you are standing between the jar and the exit, you will find yourself in the parish of High Lea before you have time to remember your grandmother's maiden name. Now, hang your cap on that peg by the lime cask."

Milo did as he was bidden, hanging his linen cap on a crooked iron spike driven into the wall. Beside the peg hung an apron of stiff, dark oilcloth that reached nearly to his ankles when Master Orpwood pulled it down and dumped it over the boy's head. It smelled of paraffin and dry sheep’s grease, and it was so stiff that when Milo moved his legs, the hem struck his shins like cardboard.

"A bit long in the skirt," the old man muttered, surveying him with an eye like a crow inspecting a snail. "No matter. Keeps the drafts off your vitals. A boy with a chilled spleen is no good for hauling timber. Come along."

He led Milo toward the rear of the hall, where a wide set of double doors made of heavy oak planks stood secured with an iron bar. Master Orpwood lifted the bar with one hand—he was far stronger than his dry, bird-like frame suggested—and pushed the doors inward.

They opened not into another room, but into a sunken courtyard open to the sky, carved out of the very heart of the chalk hill. The walls rose fifteen feet on all sides, white and dazzling in the sunshine, but the floor was covered in a deep layer of pale river sand, completely free of weeds.

In the center of the sand stood three extraordinary objects.

They looked like giant umbrellas, nine or ten feet across, but instead of silk or canvas, their ribs were strung with a fine, glittering net made of hair-thin copper and silver wires. The handles of these strange implements were thick poles of ash, mounted on heavy iron swivels that were pegged deep into the chalk floor with iron pins. Beneath each umbrella sat a squat, four-wheeled handcart carrying a zinc-lined wooden crate with a hinged lid.

"The nets," Master Orpwood said, pointing with his thimbled fingers. "Woven from the manes of Icelandic ponies and copper wire drawn through a tallow die. Nothing else holds the charge without souring the moisture. When the drift comes over from the west, it hangs low over this hollow. The chalk draws it down like salt draws grease. That’s where you come in, Finch."

"Do I hold the umbrella, sir?" Milo asked, looking at the towering frames.

"Hold it? You couldn't lift the counterweight if you had three brothers helping you," Master Orpwood snapped. "No. The nets are balanced on gimbals. A child can turn them with the lanyard once they're greased. Your job is the trailing lines. A net that catches a good summer cumulus develops thirty pounds of lift in five seconds flat. If the lanyard snags, the frame tilts, the charge spills into the chalk, and we're left with nothing to show for an afternoon’s labor but three pints of tepid dishwater and a scorched lawn."

He walked over to the nearest cart and kicked the wheel with the toe of his boot. "The line runs through this block here. When I drop the net, you catch the turn around the cleat. Three half-hitches. No grannies, no slip-knots. If your knot slips, the net goes into the valley and I have to go down to the vicarage with an apology and a wheelbarrow to collect the pieces. Are you handy with hemp, boy?"

"I can tie a sheet bend," Milo said, remembering the afternoons spent by the canal basin watching the bargees tie up their longboats. "And a clove hitch. Uncle Finch showed me how to lash two spars together for a raft."

Master Orpwood grunted, though his expression softened by an imperceptible fraction. "A clove hitch will do for the light stuff. For a thunderhead, it’s a timber hitch or nothing, but we won't see a thunderhead today. Too dry. The barometer in the cellar has been sitting on thirty inches since Tuesday like an owl on a roost. Not a sign of a front from here to the Welsh hills."

He walked to the far wall of the courtyard, where a small brass horn was mounted through the chalk, its wide mouth pointed up toward the open sky. He leaned his ear toward it and listened for a moment, his eyes half-closed.

"Nothing," he said. "Dead calm above the trees. A wasted afternoon, unless the valley produces a heat thermal before four o'clock. Sometimes the brickworks in the bottom kicks up a puff of yellow soot that condenses a little moisture along the ridge, but it's poor quality. Third-grade fog at best. Sells for sixpence a keg to the theater people down in the market town for their trapdoors."

"Do people buy fog?" Milo asked, unable to contain his curiosity. In Oakhaven, fog was considered a nuisance that made the washing smell of woodsmoke and caused elderly ladies to slip on the flagstones outside the baker’s shop.

"People buy anything that’s rare enough and tidy enough," Master Orpwood said, turning around with a look of fierce pride. "The apothecaries want morning mist for their eye-salves. The gardeners down in the big houses want low-stratus drizzle for their orchids—tap water has too much lime, rots the roots in a fortnight. And the ironworks... well, the ironworks pay whatever I ask for a good, hard autumn squall. There’s nothing like the water from a northern line squall for quenching steel. Makes the chisels hard enough to cut granite without dulling the edge."

He took Milo by the elbow—his grip was like an iron clamp—and steered him back toward the door of the main hall.

"Before we do any catching, we do the maintenance," the master said. "A cloud catcher who doesn't clean his jars is like an apothecary who doesn't wash his mortars. He ends up selling thunder to an old lady who only wanted three pennyworth of soft rain for her geraniums, and then there's an inquest and a great deal of nonsense in the county gazette."

They re-entered the cool, dim hall. Master Orpwood led him to a long, low workbench at the rear, where dozens of heavy glass jars stood in rows. They were not ordinary preserve jars; they were made of thick, greenish glass with heavy pontil marks on their bottoms, and their necks were ground smooth on the inside to take massive bungs of dark, porous cork. Around the shoulders of each jar was wrapped three turns of heavy copper wire, ending in two little brass loops that projected outward like small ears.

"These are the quart empties," Master Orpwood said, picking one up and holding it to the light. It was as heavy as a flatiron. "They’ve had autumn mists in them since October, and the bottoms are furred with white sediment. Take that tub of vinegar, that horsehair brush, and that box of chalk dust. You wash every jar until you can see the grain of the bench through the base. Then you dry them with the linen rags—not the wool, the wool leaves lint—and you set them upside down on the drying racks."

"Is that the field work, sir?" Milo asked, looking at the long line of dirty jars.

"That's the preparation for the field work," Master Orpwood said, tapping Milo’s nose with one of his leather-covered fingers. "A cloud is ninety-nine parts air and one part disposition. If the glass isn't sweet, the disposition turns sour, and then you have a vessel that kicks its cork out the moment the sun gets warm. Get to work, Finch. I have to read the dials in the lower cellar. If I hear glass clinking together like teacups, I shall come up and make inquiries that you won't care for."

The old man turned and disappeared through a small, low door set into the back wall, which led down into the deeper recesses of the hill. The door shut with a heavy, hollow thud, followed by the sound of three separate brass bolts sliding smoothly into their sockets.

Milo stood alone in the center of the great stone room. The silence was immense, broken only by the faint whirring of the copper fans on the chimney pots above and the distant, dry rattle of the wind through the high wire fences on the ridge.

He looked at the row of jars. He rolled up the sleeves of his blue shirt, dipped the horsehair brush into the tub of sour-smelling vinegar, and took hold of the first heavy cylinder of green glass. As his fingers touched the copper wire around the neck, a tiny, faint prickle ran through his fingertips—not quite an electric shock, but a feeling like the cold fizz of ginger beer when you held the glass too close to your mouth.

Milo Finch set his feet firmly on the damp flagstones, gripped the neck of the jar, and began his apprenticeship.