And there it was. The moment a man answered her right back instead of getting his dander up, why, she flashed a smile fit to charm the warts off a toad. “I don’t recollect you having much to add or subtract anyhow,” she said. “Naught plus naught is naught, I think.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Peggy,” said Taleswapper. “I own this whole world, and folks haven’t been keeping up too well on the payments.”

She smiled again, and set aside the doctor’s account book. “I keep his records for him, once a month, and he brings me things to read from Dekane.” She talked about the things she read, and Taleswapper began to see that her heart yearned for places far beyond Hatrack River. He also saw other things—that she, being a torch, knew the folks around here too well, and thought that in faraway places she’d find people with jewel-like souls that would never disappoint a girl who could see clean into their heart.

She’s young, that’s all. Give her time, and she’ll learn to love such goodness as she finds, and forgive the rest.

After a while the doctor came in, and they chatted a bit, and it was well into the afternoon by the time Taleswapper was alone with Peggy again and could ask her what he came to ask.

“How far off can you see, Peggy?”

He could almost see wariness fall across her face like a thick velvet curtain. “I don’t reckon you’re asking me whether I need spectacles,” she said.

“I just wonder about a girl who once wrote in my book, A Maker is born. I wonder if she still keeps an eye on that Maker, now and then, so she can see how he fares.”

She looked away from him, gazing at the high window above where the curtain gave privacy. The sun was low and the sky outside was grey, but her face was full of light, Taleswapper saw that right enough. Sometimes you didn’t have to be a torch to know full well what was in a person’s heart.

“I wonder if that torch saw a ridgebeam failing on him one time,” said Taleswapper.

“I wonder,” she said.

“Or a millstone.”

“Could be.”

“And I wonder if somehow she didn’t have some way to split that ridgebeam clean in twain, and crack that millstone so a certain old taleswapper could see lantern light right through the middle of that stone.”

Tears glistened in her eyes, not like she was about to cry, but like she was looking into the sun straight on, and it made her water up. “A scrap of his birth caul, rubbed into dust, and a body can use the boy’s own power to work a few clumsy makings,” she said softly.

“But now he knows something of his own knack, and he undid what you did for him.”

She nodded.