The notice appeared on the pantry door at breakfast, pinned with a single brass tack at precisely the height of a very small, very dignified person.

It was written on a scrap of the best cream paper, in a minute and furious hand, and it read:

*BY ORDER OF THE UNDERSIGNED. THE SPRING TEA CEREMONY WILL BE OBSERVED THIS AFTERNOON AT THREE O'CLOCK, IN THE COMMON ROOM, BY ALL RESIDENTS AND GUESTS WITHOUT EXCEPTION. ATTENDANCE IS COMPULSORY. LATENESS WILL BE NOTED. SLOUCHING WILL BE NOTED. DISCUSSION OF THE GOAT WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. (SIGNED) A. PETTIBONE, MASTER OF TEA.*

"A. Pettibone," said Fenn, reading it over her shoulder. "He never signs with the A."

"He signs with it when he's very serious."

"Is he very serious?"

"He's put a tack through the door," said Linn. "He is as serious as a man can be."

She had come down early, as she always did, and she had come down with a plan. The plan was to be very busy, and very polite, and to avoid the north room's occupant for the whole of the day, as she had successfully avoided him for three. It had not been difficult. The morning after the quarrel, she had found the satchel gone from the hook and a faint dent in her peace of mind where it had hung. He had said "Good morning" at breakfast. She had said it back. He had thanked her for the porridge. She had said it was no trouble, and had heard herself, and bitten down on the end of it, and he had looked at his bowl with an expression she could not read.

They had been exquisitely, painfully courteous to one another ever since.

It was dreadful. She would have preferred a good honest shouting match.

"The Master of Tea," said Oda, from her chair, "has not held a ceremony since the year of the big frost. I believe he was provoked."

"By what?"

"I haven't the least idea," said Oda, with perfect innocence, and went on knitting.

It was Mister Pettibone's one great vanity, and the household had learned to indulge it. He kept the rites of tea as other men kept the rites of a church. There was a proper way to heat the pot, and a proper way to warm the cups, and a proper way to sit, and sip, and pass, and be silent, and in forty years Linn had never known him to forgive a single lapse. Since he could only speak when he held something warm, the ceremony was also, by an old and tender conspiracy, the only occasion on which Pettibone could hold forth at length without anyone having to fetch him a refill. It was his sermon. It was his stage. He could not be denied it.

By three o'clock the common room had been transformed.

Brammer had dragged the long table to the middle of the floor and covered it in the good white cloth. Fenn had scrubbed himself pink and combed his hair into a shape that Linn privately thought would last four minutes. The Hearth was banked low and bright, its warm red light picking out the gleam of the china. And in the middle of the table, on a small stand of three stacked books, sat the Master of Tea himself, in a clean waistcoat, with a warming stone beneath him and a thimble in each paw.

"Seats," said Pettibone.

They sat. It took some time. Brammer's chair complained. Oda was installed with two cushions and a rug and a firm rebuke for the draught. Fenn, who had been told that he was to sit upright, sat so upright that he looked as though he had swallowed the poker. And Corvin Ashdell, who had come down from the north room at the last possible moment, with his sleeves buttoned to the wrist and his satchel on his shoulder, stood in the doorway for a moment as if working out a way to leave, and was seen.

"Mister Ashdell," said Pettibone, severely. "You are late."

"By one minute."

"Lateness is lateness. Sit."

He sat. The only free chair, naturally, was the one beside Linn's.

She did not look at him. She folded her hands in her lap and looked with great attention at the teapot. She was aware of him as one is aware of a stove in a cold room, as a presence with a temperature. His sleeve was very close to hers. She smelled soap, and wood, and, faintly, hawthorn. She had an unfortunate recollection of the way his shoulder had felt against her own at the kitchen window, through two layers of linen, and she moved her chair an inch to the right.

He moved his an inch to the left.

"Posture," said Pettibone, to the room at large. "The back is straight. The shoulders are loose. The feet are flat upon the floor. The hands rest, so, lightly, as if one were holding a baby bird. Mister Gulloway, you are holding the bird too tightly."

"It's a cup," said Brammer.

"It is a *concept*."

The first hour went by in a haze of small humiliations. There were three sips to a cup, and no more. There was a particular way of turning the handle to the left before one drank, in honor of the guest on one's right. There was a rule about silence, and a rule about the weather, and an exhaustive rule about the proper treatment of biscuits. Fenn made a mistake with his little finger and was made to begin again. Brammer, overcome, dropped a biscuit into his own cup, and Pettibone looked at it for a long cold moment and said only, "We shall pretend that did not happen." Oda, who had been appointed the Honored Elder, drank her tea in the manner of someone who had seen the whole thing before and thought very little of it.

"And now," said Pettibone, in a deep and rolling voice, "the cups."

A hush fell.

"The cups," said Pettibone, "are the heart of the ceremony. They must be arranged upon the tray before service, in a manner that honors the company. It is a mark of the Keeper's care. It is the Keeper who arranges them, as is proper. However." He turned, with some ceremony, and fixed a small black eye upon the end of the table. "This year, in view of the exceptional circumstances of the household, I have decided that the task shall fall to two persons. The Keeper, and the Guest."

Linn went cold.

"Mister Pettibone," she began.

"The Keeper, and the Guest," said Pettibone, relentlessly. "The tray is on the dresser. You have five minutes. I will have the tea at the proper temperature, and the cups arranged with grace and harmony, or I will know the reason why."

They rose. There was no help for it. She did not dare look at Oda, whose shoulders had begun, ever so slightly, to tremble. They walked in a stiff, silent, parallel line to the dresser, where a great round tray of black lacquer stood waiting, and beside it, in a cheerful crowd, the cups.

There were eleven of them. They were all different. They had been gathered over the years, as everything in the house was gathered, from the leavings of guests and the finds of markets, and not two of them matched. There was a tall blue one, and a squat green one, and a wide pink one, and a little yellow one with a chip in the rim. There was a white one with a painted fish, and a gray one with a handle like an ear. Brammer's was a large blue mug the size of a small bucket. Pettibone's was a thimble.

"Well," said Linn, briskly. "I'll start. We'll do it by color."

"By color?" said Corvin.

"Yes. Red to violet, round the rim. It's how I always do it. It makes a lovely arc, and it's very cheerful."

"It's very pretty," said Corvin. "But it won't work."

She turned her head.

He was looking at the cups with the grave, calculating expression of a man surveying a bridge. "By size," he said. "Tallest at the back, smallest at the front. That way the short ones don't get hidden, and nobody has to reach across anyone else to get theirs."

"Nobody reaches across anybody. It's a tray."

"Brammer has arms like a wheelbarrow. He'll knock the yellow one into Mister Pettibone's lap."

"He's never knocked it yet."

"Statistically, he will."

"Statistically?"

"I have been watching him pass things for three weeks."

She stared at him. "You *counted*," she said, in a tone of deepest suspicion. "Again."

"I observed," said Corvin.

"It's *unnatural*."

"It's efficient."

"It's ugly," said Linn, who had never in her life used that word of anything on her own table, and found to her surprise that it felt wonderful. "A tray should be a pleasure to look at. Nobody wants to be handed a cup by a line of soldiers."

"Nobody wants tea down their trousers either."

"That is a *very* unromantic way to look at tea."

"It's a very romantic way to look at trousers," said Corvin.

There was a silence.

Linn blinked. She had not known the man could make a joke. It had arrived so smoothly, with so little change in his face, that she had to run it back through her head to be sure. Then she saw his ears. They had gone faintly pink at the tips, and he was looking very hard at the tray.

She discovered that she was holding the pink cup. She discovered also that she had no idea what to do with it.

"I'm doing it by color," she said, with less force.

"Then I'll do it by size."

"Fine."

"Fine."

They reached for the tray together.

It was not at all their fault. She set down the pink cup and he set down the tall blue one, and each of them, with the best of intentions, moved the other's out of the way. There was a clink. A small shuffling collision of handles and rims. She slid the green cup left, and he slid it back. He put the fish cup in the front row, and she moved it to the end. In the space of thirty seconds they had so thoroughly rearranged each other's work that the tray resembled the aftermath of a small and very polite battle, with eleven cups on it in no order whatever.

"Stop," said Linn.

"You stop."

"You're the one who..."

"I'm the one who..."

"Mister Ashdell. Keeper."

The voice came from behind them, deep and slow and perfectly deadly. They turned. The whole of the common room had been watching. Fenn had his hands over his mouth. Brammer had gone red with the effort of not laughing. And Mister Pettibone, who had climbed off his stack of books and now stood at the very edge of the table with his waistcoat buttoned and his paws folded behind his back, regarded the two of them with a face of stone.

"I have seen disorder," he said. "I have seen negligence. I have seen, in my time, a goat in a ballroom. But I have never, in forty years, seen two grown persons fail to arrange eleven cups."

"Mister Pettibone..." said Linn.

"You will go," said Pettibone, "to the spice store. The both of you. You will clean it, from the floor to the ceiling, every jar, every shelf, every corner. You will arrange it, in order, with care. And you will remain there until you have remembered how to place objects beside one another like adults."

"There's tea," said Fenn, faintly.

"The tea," said Pettibone, "will be served without them."

The spice store was a narrow cupboard of a room, off the back of the pantry, with a sloping ceiling and a single high window the size of a book. It had been built in the time of the old Keepers, for the sake of cinnamon, and it still smelled of it, a deep, sweet, dusty, ancient warmth, overlaid with pepper and clove and the faint green ghost of a hundred dried herbs. There were shelves on three sides, from floor to rafter, crammed with jars and tins and paper packets and little cloth bags tied with string, and in the middle of the floor there was space for exactly one person to stand.

There were two of them.

The door closed. Someone, almost certainly Brammer, turned the key.

"He can't lock us in," said Corvin.

"He can. It's his house." Linn picked up a rag from the nail by the door, and a bucket, and looked at the ceiling. "It's Brammer's key, though. He'll let us out in an hour, when he's stopped feeling clever."

"An hour."

"Or two. The jars alone..."

They looked at the jars.

It was a very small room. There was no sensible way to divide it. They worked from opposite ends, she from the left, he from the right, in a long, stiff, careful silence broken only by the clink of glass and the slap of the cloth. She took down the nutmeg. He took down the mace. She dusted the top shelf and he did the bottom. For a few minutes they managed, like two people trying to pass in a narrow lane, with a great show of courtesy.

It did not last.

She reached for the high shelf, where the saffron lived, and found that she could not quite touch it, and rose on her toes, and felt a hand close, quite lightly, around the jar above her head.

"I've got it," said Corvin.

He was standing directly behind her. She had not heard him move. His arm went past her shoulder, long and bare to the elbow, and she felt the heat of his chest against her back, an inch of air between them, no more. His fingers closed on the little brown jar. He drew it down. And for a single suspended moment she stood quite still, hemmed in by the shelf and the warm weight of him, with the smell of cinnamon so thick that she could taste it, and her pulse thudding in her ears.

"Thank you," said Linn. Her voice had come out very small.

"It's a jar."

"It's a very..."

"Don't say it."

"I wasn't going to."

He set the saffron in her hands. Their fingers touched on the glass. It was nothing, a flick of skin against skin, the most ordinary accident in the world. She felt it travel up her arm like a spark up a wick. When she looked up, she found his face a hand's breadth from hers, shadowed under the slope of the ceiling, his gray eyes very dark and very steady. He was not smiling. He was not anything at all. He was only looking, with the grave, absorbed, startled expression of a man who has put his hand in his pocket and found something unexpected there.

She looked away first.

They cleaned the lower shelves without speaking. It was easier on the floor. She knelt, and he knelt beside her, and they went through the paper packets one by one, sorting the good from the stale, and their shoulders brushed each time she reached, and neither of them said a word. She thought that the quiet had changed. It was no longer the stiff and brittle thing it had been at breakfast. It had softened, somewhere in the dust, into something nearly companionable. She did not trust it.

It was Corvin who found the cup.

He had been working at the very back, on his knees, with his arm thrust deep into a gap between the bottom shelf and the wall, where a rotting board had come loose. "There's something here," he said. "Something wrapped."

"A mouse nest."

"It's too heavy for a mouse."

He drew it out. It was a small bundle in a square of old oilcloth, tied with a length of blue thread gone gray with age, and it came away from the wall with a papery sigh and a drift of dust. He set it down on the boards between them. They looked at it. Then, because it seemed absurd to do anything else, Linn picked at the knot, and the thread parted at a touch, and the cloth fell open.

It was a cup.

It was only a small plain cup, of a pale warm earthenware glazed the color of honey. It had a wide, shallow bowl, and a thin curved handle, and it was perfectly whole. It had been put away with great care. Someone had wrapped it twice, and tied it, and hidden it at the very back of the lowest shelf, where no hand would find it unless it was looking.

And on the base, scratched into the clay with the point of a knife, were two letters.

*A. P.*

"Oh," said Linn.

"Do you know it?"

"No." She turned it in her hands. It was still faintly warm, though it could not have been, and she put the thought away. "I've never seen it. I didn't know we had one." She hesitated. "It looks like one of the old ones. From the shelf of the Second Hand."

"The what?"

"It's only a story." She said it quickly, lightly, a little embarrassed, as one does when one is caught holding a relic. "The old Keepers used to say that sometimes, not often, the Hearth would send a person to stand beside the Keeper. A Second Hand. Someone to share the work. They each had a cup of their own, and when the Second Hand left, the cup was put away. That's all I know. It's a fairy tale. I don't think anyone's been chosen in fifty years."

"A. P.," said Corvin.

"I've never found an A. P. in the Guest Book. Not that I looked."

"Maybe it was before the book."

"Maybe."

They sat on the floor of the spice store in the warm brown dusk, and Linn held the little cup in her lap, and neither of them said anything for a while.

The key turned.

The door swung open, and a long yellow bar of lamplight fell across the boards. Brammer stood in it with a sheepish face and a tray, and over his shoulder, on the lip of the pantry shelf, stood Mister Pettibone, with a fresh thimble of tea in both paws, and the air of a man who has come to pronounce a sentence.

"The time has elapsed," he began, in his deepest register. "I trust that the lesson has been..."

His eyes fell on the cup.

He stopped.

It was the most extraordinary thing that Linn had ever seen. The little round creature stood quite still on the shelf. The thimble in his paws began to shake, a fine, fast tremor that sent ripples across the surface of the tea and threw tiny bright drops onto his waistcoat. His whiskers drooped. His small black eyes, which could pierce a lie from across a room, went very wide and very dark, and stayed on the base of the cup, where the two letters had been cut into the clay, and did not move.

It lasted perhaps three seconds.

"Mister Pettibone?" said Linn. "Are you all right?"

He did not answer. He set down the thimble. It rattled against the wood. He drew himself up to his full height, which was not very great, and folded his paws behind him, and his face closed over like a door. When he spoke, his voice was perfectly level, and perfectly dry, and so tightly controlled that it hurt to hear.

"That shelf," he said, "is not in order."

"We found this at the back, behind the board..."

"It is not a thing for dusting. It was put there. It should be returned." His eyes did not lift. "Wrap it, if you please. Put it back where it was found."

"Of course," said Linn, bewildered. "If you like. I only..."

"If you please."

He turned. He walked away along the shelf with small, precise, rigid steps, and did not look back. At the end of the pantry he paused for a moment, with his hand against the wall, in the shadow of a hanging herb, and Linn saw that his back was shaking. Then he went on, and she heard the soft click of the kitchen door, and he was gone.

She looked down at the cup in her lap.

"Well," said Corvin, very quietly, "I think we've found out what's wrong with the spice store."

She wrapped the cup in its oilcloth again, with great gentleness, and tied the thread, and slid it back into the gap behind the shelf. It felt like putting a sleeping animal to bed.

They finished the cleaning in half an hour. She was not sure afterward what had happened in it. The anger had gone out of the air. The strange, tight stillness had not. They did the last shelf together, side by side, handing each other jars without a word, and when the final tin had been set on the final rack, they stood in the little room, looking at the glittering order they had made, with their hands hanging at their sides.

"It looks well," said Corvin.

"It does."

"By color?"

"By size," said Linn. "Mostly. With some color on the end."

"A compromise."

"A treaty," said Linn, and, rather to her own astonishment, laughed.

Brammer had left them a plate of the leftover seed cake. They ate it sitting on the floor of the pantry with their backs against the flour sacks and their legs stretched out in front of them, in the green dim light that came through the high window. It was a good cake. She had made it herself. For the first time in three days, she tasted it. He ate in the careful, methodical way he had, and brushed the crumbs from his knee, and neither of them said anything. The silence was not the stiff one of the morning. It was long, and slow, and almost easy, like a held note that has stopped being a question.

She had thought, a few days ago, that she could not bear to be in a room with him. She wondered now what she had meant.

"Linn," said Corvin.

"Mm?"

"What's a Second Hand?"

She glanced at him. He was not looking at her. He was looking at his own right hand, lying open on his knee, with the crumbs still on the palm. There was something very odd about the way he said it. It was too careful. It was the voice of a man asking a question he already knew the answer to.

"I told you. It's an old story."

"You said the Hearth chooses someone."

"It used to." She shrugged, and drew up her knees, and rested her chin upon them. "Long ago. Before the inn had a name. The old tales say the Hearth could tell when a Keeper was too tired to go on alone, and it would send someone to stand beside her. A stranger. Someone with nowhere else to be. But the Keepers have all kept the Guest Book since, and it's never said so. I think it was only a way of telling people that they shouldn't carry things alone." She smiled a little. "Gran says it's the oldest piece of advice in the world, dressed up as magic."

"And no one's been chosen."

"Not in my time. Not in Gran's, I think." She hesitated. "Why?"

"No reason," said Corvin.

It was the same two words he had used on the first night, about the lantern. She heard them, and heard the echo, and felt her heart do something strange and careful in her chest. He had gone very still. He was looking at his open palm as if there were writing on it, as if the lines of it might have changed, and she watched his fingers curl, slowly, closed.

The light through the high window was going gold. Somewhere beyond the wall, in the common room, she could hear Fenn laughing, and the soft clink of a cup being set down, and, very faint, a small dry voice, steady now, resuming the long and solemn business of tea.

She did not ask what he was thinking.

She was afraid that he would tell her.