From the Keeper's Ledger: Brandt, Peder. Tanner. Nine years taken. Entered five winters past.

Ambrose was reading Dagny's report when the first crash came, and for a moment, with the page in his hand and his mind still among the figures, he took it for a stone falling from the roof.

It was not that. It was too sharp. It was the sound of wood, a heavy splintering crack, followed by a second, and then a long drawn-out clatter of something rolling along a floor. Then a silence. Then a third crash, so violent that the lamp on his desk shivered, and the pen rolled out of its groove and fell to the floor.

He was on his feet before he knew he had risen.

The report said that the gray stood at the collarbone. It said that inside the walls it advanced at a tenth of its usual pace, and might be expected to stand still for days at a time. It said, in Dagny's cramped and furious hand, *The boy is stubborn, frightened, and a great deal stronger than he looks. You will not tell him I said so.* He had been reading it for the third time, with a sensation in his chest that he did not choose to examine, a loosening, as of a fist that has been closed for a week and has just been allowed to open.

He dropped it on the desk and went out at a run.

He took the stair two steps at a time, with his left hand on the wall and the right swinging stiffly at his side, and by the second landing the sounds had begun again. A thud. A grunt. The ugly crack of something being broken that did not want to break. He did not call out. He had never in his life learned the trick of calling out. He reached the workroom door, and it was standing open, and he stopped on the threshold with his heart going like a drum.

The room was wrecked.

The bench had been shoved across the floor, and one of its legs was gone. The stool lay in three pieces. Shavings of pale stone covered the flags like snow, and the north window had been flung wide, and the cold came in in a long steady stream and moved the loose papers on the sill. In the middle of the floor, with his back to the door, stood Rhys Alder, in his shirtsleeves, with the leg of the stool in his left hand. He was breathing in great shuddering gulps. His whole body shook. And as Ambrose watched, he lifted the broken leg high over his head and brought it down with all his strength on what was left of the bench.

The wood broke. A long splinter flew across the room and struck the wall.

"Rhys."

The boy did not turn. He raised the leg again.

"Rhys," said Ambrose. "Stop."

"Don't tell me what to do." It came out in a raw, cracked voice that he hardly knew. "Don't you dare. Don't you stand there in that coat, with that face, and tell me what to do."

He swung. The wood met the bench with a crack like a rifle shot, and this time the whole top split from end to end and fell away in two pieces, and the boy stood over it, shaking, with his chest heaving. Then he spun round.

Ambrose had never seen him like this. In six days he had seen him angry, scornful, amused, frightened, grieving. He had seen him laugh until he could not breathe. He had not seen this. The face was white to the lips, and his eyes were blazing, black in the pale skin, with a wild dry fire that had nothing to do with the man in front of him. There was a smear of blood on one cheekbone where a splinter had caught him. His right hand hung at his side, wrapped in its bandage, and the fingers of it were curled and trembling. The gray had gone down to the very tips.

And on the floor at his feet, among the wreckage, lay the wren.

It had been so nearly finished. Ambrose had passed the door of the workroom every day since the storm, and every day the bird had been a little nearer to life, the small round breast, the cocked head, the alert curve of the tail. Now it lay on its side in the dust. The head had snapped clean off at the neck. It lay a hand's breadth from the body, with its beak a little open, as if it had been about to sing.

"It slipped," Rhys said. His voice dropped, flat and low. "The chisel. I was doing the feathers. I had it, I had the line, I was just coming across the wing, and my hand, it just. It wouldn't. It wouldn't close right. I couldn't feel where the steel was. I couldn't feel it." He held up the bandaged hand. It shook so badly that the linen rustled. "Twenty years I've been cutting stone. Twenty years. I could do it blind. I could do it in my sleep. And I sat here this morning and I couldn't hold a bit of steel against a bit of rock."

"Rhys."

"You took it." He said it quite quietly. "You took my hands."

Ambrose stood very still.

"Not you. The Stone. Whatever it is." The boy's mouth twisted. "But it's you with the pen. It's you who writes them down. You took my brother's and now you're taking mine, and you stand there with yours made of stone and I'm supposed to feel sorry. I do feel sorry. That's the worst of it. Every time I look at you I feel sorry, and I hate it, I hate it, I want to hate you and I can't, and I've nothing left to do with it, so I broke the bloody bench."

He flung the stool leg down. It clattered across the floor and fetched up against Ambrose's boot.

"Say something," he said.

The Keeper looked at the leg. It was a stout piece of ash, snapped through at the joint, and the broken end was pale and raw and splintered like a bone. He did not pick it up.

He was aware, with the part of his mind that never stopped watching, of what he ought to do. He ought to use the voice. There was a voice for this. It was the voice from the Slab, level, formal, bleached of everything, and he had used it at deathbeds and in doorways and a hundred times at the foot of the Rise to a hundred weeping faces, and it never failed. It put a wall between the man speaking and the thing spoken of. Under its shelter a Keeper could say, *The tithe has been taken,* and *It is the Stone's will,* and *I am sorry for your loss,* and mean nothing at all. It was the kindest cruelty he knew. He could have used it now. He could have said, *The destruction of tower property is a breach of the eleventh article,* and gone quietly away and left the boy to his wreck.

He found that he could not.

It was not a decision. The voice simply would not come. It was like reaching for a coat that had hung on its peg for eleven years and finding that the peg was bare.

"You have the right to be angry," Ambrose said.

It came out low and unsteady, in his own voice, the one he had not used in years. He heard how strange it sounded in the broken room.

"That's it?" Rhys stared at him. "That's all?"

"It is true. I do not have anything else that is both true and of use."

"I'd rather you shouted."

"I would not know how."

"Then try. Please. Say it wasn't your fault. Tell me you had no choice. Tell me it's the valley, it's the Stone, it's the way things are and a man can't be blamed for it. Tell me you're sorry. Tell me you're not." The words were falling over each other now. "Anything. Anything but standing there like that, looking at me as if I'd done something wrong."

"You have done nothing wrong."

"I've wrecked your bloody tower."

"It is not my tower. It is the Stone's." He did not know where the answer came from. "And it has been wrecked in worse ways. By better men. And by me."

The boy drew a breath that shook. For a moment Ambrose thought he would strike him, and he found he did not wish to move aside. He stood and waited with his arms at his sides and the cold wind from the window on the back of his neck, and let it come.

It did not come. Instead the boy's whole face crumpled, slowly, like paper held to a flame, and he put the heel of his good hand against his mouth, and turned away.

"Oh, God," Rhys whispered. "Oh, I've broken it."

He was looking at the wren. He had gone down on his knees in the dust, as though his legs had been cut from under him, and he reached out and touched the body with one finger, very lightly, the way a man touches the cheek of a sleeping child. The shoulders began to shake. There was no sound at all. He knelt there in the ruin of the workroom with his hand over his mouth and wept silently, with his whole body, and Ambrose, standing at the door, felt something tear in him that had been sewn shut for a great many years.

He did not decide to cross the room. He found himself on his knees on the floor beside the boy, with the cold seeping through his trousers, and the dust on his sleeve. He did not speak. He did not touch him. He turned instead to the wreckage, and began, with his left hand, to pick up the pieces.

There were a great many. He gathered the splinters of the stool first, since they were nearest, and laid them in a pile by the wall. He lifted the shattered top of the bench and set it upright, propped against the leg. He found the chisel under the window, a good flat blade with the edge bright from its last grinding, and put it on the sill where the light fell. It was a small, ordinary, entirely meaningless task. It was what a man did in a house where something had gone wrong. He did it slowly and carefully, and with his whole attention, and he did not look at the boy.

After a time he heard a rustle behind him, and a sniff, and the scrape of a knee on the floor. Rhys had begun to pick up the pieces too.

They worked side by side in silence. The wind moved the papers on the sill. A cloud crossed the sun and the light in the room went gray and then gold again. There was a long splinter of white ash lying near the leg of the bench, and Ambrose reached for it at the same instant as Rhys reached from the other side, and his gray hand closed over the wood, and a warm, dusty, trembling hand closed over his.

He stopped.

He could not feel it. He never could. But he could see it, the square brown fingers, the short nails rimmed with stone dust, the faint tremor in the knuckles. He could see how small it looked against the gray. And this time the boy did not pull away. He did not look up either. He knelt there with his hand lying over the Keeper's stone one, as though he had forgotten it, as though he were too tired to take it back, and the splinter lay between them like a small white bridge.

Ambrose thought, I must not move. If I move he will remember.

He did not move. It lasted as long as a long breath.

Then Rhys drew his hand away, slowly, and picked up the splinter, and set it on the pile. He sat back on his heels and wiped his face with his sleeve. His eyes were swollen and red, and the splinter had left a thin bright line of blood on his cheek, and he looked about fourteen years old.

"Sorry," he said hoarsely.

"There is nothing to forgive."

"There's a bench to forgive."

"It was a poor bench," said Ambrose. "I have always disliked it."

A breath of sound came out of Rhys that was nearly a laugh. He pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. "You're a terrible liar."

"I am not a liar at all. You may ask Dagny. I merely have strong opinions about furniture."

"Ambrose Kell, who's never said a false word in his life, and has views on benches."

"I would not call them views. They are more in the nature of convictions."

The laugh came out properly then, a wet, cracked, exhausted little sound, and the boy bent over his knees and gave himself up to it, and Ambrose, kneeling opposite, felt the muscles of his own face move with it, a strange stiff upward tug at the corner of the mouth that he had not felt in so long that he did not at first recognize it. He looked down at his hands. He did not know what to do with his face.

He found the head of the wren.

It had rolled under the edge of the sill. He picked it up in his left hand, and it lay there, a small gray weight, no larger than a walnut, and he turned it carefully to the light. The break was clean. It had gone through the narrowest part of the neck, the place where the stone was thinnest, and the two faces of the fracture were smooth and sharp as glass. He could see the grain run through them in a thin silver thread. He could see the beak, and the little carved eye, and the faint, fine, delicate lines on the cheek where the boy had begun the first of the feathers and stopped.

"Can it be mended?" he asked.

Rhys looked up. He looked at the head in the Keeper's palm, and something changed in his face. It was not a smile. It was the look of a craftsman who has been shown a flaw and begins, in spite of himself, to see how it might be made good.

"With glue," he said slowly. "Fish glue, or the resin kind. And a pin, a little brass one, through the neck, so it won't go again. And patience." He took a breath. "Not very much of either. It was a clean break. If it had been ragged I'd have said no."

"I have patience."

"Have you glue?"

"Bess keeps a pot in the kitchen. It smells appalling. I believe she uses it on the chairs."

"Then we're in luck." He held out his hand, and Ambrose, after a moment's hesitation, laid the head in it. Rhys closed his fingers over it very gently. "I'll do it tomorrow. When I've slept. My hands are no good today."

"They are very good hands."

"They're gray ones."

"They are very good hands," said Ambrose again, "that are presently tired."

Rhys did not answer. He looked at the head in his palm, and then at the body on the floor, and then out of the window at the blue winter sky, and he let out a long, slow, shaky sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of his feet.

They sat there for a time. The room had gone very quiet. It was not the quiet of the first day, nor the quiet of the dinner table, taut and watchful, with a hundred things unsaid. It was a different kind of silence, loose and tired and oddly gentle, the silence of two men who have come through the same bad weather and are not yet ready to speak of it. Ambrose sat with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, and the boy sat a yard away with the broken bird in his lap, and neither of them said a word. He thought he could have stayed there for a very long while.

"Can I say something?" Rhys said at last.

"You may say anything."

"It's not a kind thing."

"I did not suppose that it was."

The boy turned his head. His eyes, still red-rimmed, rested on Ambrose's face, and there was no heat in them now. They were level, and dark, and very searching.

"In all the time I've been here," he said, "I've asked you a dozen things. About the ledger, and the gray, and the rules, and your hand. You've told me. You never once looked away. But I just worked something out, kneeling on that floor, and I can't make it go away."

Ambrose waited.

"You've never said it wasn't your fault."

The wind moved in the room. Somewhere down in the body of the tower a door closed, and a bucket clanked, and the faint voice of Bess Hale could be heard, shrill and disapproving, upbraiding some unseen kitchen boy.

"I have heard you say that it's the Stone," Rhys went on. "That it's the valley's price. That you can't refuse. I've heard you say you're sorry. I've heard you say you wrote Marek's name, and Tobin's, and mine. But in six days you haven't said, even once, that you're innocent. Not as a plea. Not as an excuse. Not even when I begged you to." He drew a long breath. "Why not?"

Ambrose looked at the gray hand lying on his knee. It looked, in the pale light, like a hand carved by a very skilled man who had never seen a living one.

"Because I am not," he said.

He said it quietly. He did not add anything. He let it stand, and he did not look at the boy's face, because he knew that if he did he would see the question that lay beyond it, the one that was gathering in the dark brown eyes, the one that began with *then what else*. He did not wish to see it. He did not wish to have to say, *That I may not answer.*

Rhys did not ask it. He only went on looking at him, for a long time, with a stillness that was almost worse. Then he nodded, once, as a man nods who has been handed a stone and has not yet decided what it is for.

"All right," he said. "That's the first thing you've said that I couldn't argue with."

He got to his feet. He stood a moment with the wren's head cupped in his hand, swaying slightly, and then he went to the bench and laid the head very carefully on the cleanest corner of what was left of it. He turned back. His face was blotched and exhausted, but there was a kind of stubborn, rueful calm in it.

"I'll fix the bench, too," he said. "Tomorrow. I've seen the kind of work you do with mortar."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The cold wing, Kell. The arch. It's the worst coursing I've ever seen in my life." The corner of his mouth moved. "I stood and looked at it for ten minutes. I think I may have had a small stroke."

Ambrose said gravely, "I was in a hurry."

"It shows."

"I could not feel the trowel."

"I know," said Rhys, more softly. "That's why I'm not going to say anything else about it."

He went out. He went slowly, with his shoulders drawn in against the cold, and Ambrose listened to the footsteps go down the stair, one at a time, and fade into the long noises of the tower. He stayed where he was, on the floor of the wrecked workroom with the wind in his hair and a pile of white splinters beside his knee.

He had been asked one question, and he had told the truth, and he had not been struck. That in itself was strange enough to keep him sitting there for a long while.

At last he got to his feet, and shut the window, and set the broken stool leg upright in the corner where it would be out of the way. He stopped at the door. He looked back at the room, at the white dust and the gold light and the small headless bird on its side on the floor, and he thought, with a kind of quiet astonishment, that it was the first time in eleven years that anything in this tower had been broken in anger and mended in kindness, and that he had been permitted to watch.

He knew what it was he felt. He had been Keeper too long not to know the shape of what it would cost.

He turned the key in his own heart, as he had done so many times, and went down to find the glue.