From the Keeper's Ledger: Garrow, Tobin. Miller. Entered in ink. Refused by stone. No years taken.

The water in the basin was cold. Ambrose Kell knew this the way a man knows facts about a country he has never visited: by report.

He sat on the edge of the narrow bed in his room at the top of the tower, sleeves rolled to the elbow, with his right arm submerged to the wrist in a copper bowl of water he had drawn from the well an hour earlier. A skin of ice had formed along the rim. He watched it creep inward. Beneath the surface his right hand lay on the copper like a thing dropped there, gray, heavy, motionless, the knuckles thick as river pebbles. His left hand, resting on his knee, was red from carrying the bowl and ached with a clean bright ache that he was, absurdly, grateful for.

He tried to feel it. This was a habit, and a bad one, and he did it every night anyway. He closed his eyes and bent his mind toward the right hand the way one bends toward a faint sound in another room, and waited for the sharp bite of the cold. There was nothing. There had been nothing in the fingers for six years. The palm had gone four years ago. And in the last winter the gray had crept up past the wrist and taken the forearm to the elbow, so that now when he touched his own arm with his left hand he felt a stranger's, hard, smooth, faintly warm only where his other hand had held it.

Eleven years. Nineteen names. He knew the count the way he knew his own pulse.

He opened his eyes. The water was still, and the ice had reached the middle of the bowl.

Outside the narrow window the valley was dark. A few lights burned in Hollin Cross, far below, small and yellow and defiant, and he could not stop himself from looking for the one at the end of the lane where the stonecutter lived. He found it. It burned late.

He drew his arm out of the water, dried it on a cloth with his left hand, and rolled his sleeve down over the gray. Then he crossed the room to the desk, where the ledger lay open under the lamp.

He did not need to read the new entry. It had written itself, as entries did, in the minutes after the Naming, in a hand that was supposed to be his and was not quite: Alder, Rhys. Stonecutter. Twenty-five years. Years to be reckoned. Beneath it, a faint gray line that he knew from long habit was the Stone's own mark, a small, patient underscore, the way a clerk underlines a sum.

He turned back one page. The black seam was still there, in the middle of the leaf, where the ink had drawn itself away from Tobin Garrow's name and never quite smoothed over. T, O, and half of a second O, dissolved to a stain. The miller would be at home tonight with his wife and his three children, and they would be holding each other too hard, and they would be alive and whole and spared, and the reason for it sat on this page, in a gray smear, and Ambrose looked at it for a long time without feeling anything he was willing to name.

Then he turned back further, past eleven winters of names, past the pages he had trained himself not to read, to the leaf that had been in his mind all day. He did not read it. He did not need to. Alder, Marek. Stonecutter. Twelve years taken. And beneath it, in his own hand, three words, written the same night with his left fist shaking so badly the letters leaned.

He closed the book on them.

Four winters of quiet. That was the thing he could not forgive himself, in the end, more than the rest. For four winters the Stone had slept, and he had let himself, at the edges, in the long dark hours, begin to hope. He had walked the Rise road with his hands in his coat and begun, God help him, to think of it as a thing that might hold. A promise made in a terrible hour could be a promise kept, if only the Stone stayed asleep long enough.

Then the note had come up through the floor of the tower that morning, and he had understood at once, before the bell, before the ledger, before anything, that it was over.

He had walked down the Rise with the pen in his pocket and a decision made, and he was not proud of the decision. He had chosen Tobin Garrow. A good man, a miller with flour in his knuckles and a family that depended on him, whose only fault was that his name came to Ambrose's mind first when he was looking for someone who was not the boy. He had been ready to put a father of three in the ground a decade early to spare a stranger with chisel dust on his hands. He had been ready to let the ink stand. That was the arithmetic of the man he was, and it did not become any easier to look at for having failed.

He remembered the boy. Not the one from today. The other one, four winters younger, standing in the road outside the village gate with both hands full of stone dust and his mouth half open, watching his brother walk up the Rise without once looking back. Ambrose had stood at the edge of the lane that morning where he had no reason to stand, with his hands in his coat, because he had needed to see it done, and because he had thought no one would look at him. The boy had looked right through him. Twenty-one years old and already wearing grief like a coat that did not fit.

Today he had looked at him. Today the boy had walked up to the Slab with a gray thread creeping across his knuckles and said, in a voice that did not shake, "Will you look at me?"

And Ambrose had looked, and found that it was not at all difficult to begin, and very difficult to stop.

That was a thing he did not intend to think about either.

The knock at his door was a single, impatient rap, followed at once by the door opening, because the woman on the other side had never in her life waited to be invited.

"You've let it soak again," said Dagny Orme.

She was fifty or thereabouts, lean as a fence post, with iron-gray hair cropped close to her skull and the weathered, unimpressed face of a person who had seen every kind of illness a valley could invent and expected to see a few more. A battered leather satchel hung from one shoulder. She was the only healer Hollin Cross had, and the only person in it who spoke to the Keeper as if he were a man with a cold.

"It helps me think," Ambrose said.

"It helps you pretend." She dropped the satchel on the table, pulled a stool across the floor with her foot, and held out her hand. "Arm."

He gave it to her. She rolled back the cuff without ceremony and turned the gray forearm over under the lamp, her thumbs moving along the wrist, then the elbow, pressing, testing, with the look of someone reading a page in a language only she spoke. She took a small silver hammer from her bag and tapped the knuckles one by one, head tilted, listening. The sound that came back was not the sound of bone. It was a clear dull note, like a bell with its tongue wrapped in cloth.

"New crack at the wrist," she said. "Hairline. You'll feel nothing, naturally. The change has reached the elbow joint. You can still bend it?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"I don't know."

"Mm." She did not look up. "Why did it refuse Tobin?"

It was asked in the same flat tone as everything else, and he had known it was coming since the moment he heard her boots on the stair. Ambrose said, "I don't know what the Stone intended."

"That wasn't what I asked."

"No," he said. "It wasn't."

She did look up then. Her eyes were a pale, hard blue, and they had a way of sitting on a person's face like a thumb on a bruise. "You tried to write the miller."

"Yes."

"Knowing what that would do to his wife. To those girls."

"Yes."

"Knowing exactly what you were doing."

"Yes, Dagny."

She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she grunted and went back to the arm. "Good. I'd hate to think you hadn't known." She tapped the wrist once more, harder than necessary. "You are a stubborn, difficult man, and I think the Stone saw that and decided to do something about it."

"The Stone had already decided," Ambrose said quietly. "Long before this morning."

That was true, as far as it went. He had learned a long time ago to say only what was true, to himself as well as to others, because the one lie he had ever told still sat in the bottom of him like a swallowed stone and he had no wish to add to the weight.

Dagny's hands stopped moving.

"The boy," she said. "Rhys Alder."

"Yes."

"He is Marek's brother."

"I know."

The two words sat in the room between them. The lamp hissed. Somewhere below, a shutter banged in the wind and went quiet.

Dagny let go of his arm. She did not say anything for a while. She was looking, he noticed, not at him but past his shoulder, at the long table of pale stone that stood against the north wall of the study, the one that had been there when he inherited the tower and had never moved in the eleven years since. Along its edge ran a narrow channel, no wider than a finger, cut as straight as a rule and ending in a small round hollow at one end. No one knew what it had been made for. He had assumed, when he first came, that it was a gutter for spilled ink. It was too deep for ink and too smooth for any tool he had ever seen.

Dagny's eyes rested on it. They always did, whenever she came into this room. She would look at the groove for a few breaths, with a peculiar fixed expression like a woman looking at a door she'd locked and lost the key to, and then she would look away and say nothing. He had never asked her about it. He suspected, in the way one suspects a draft in a closed room, that he did not want to know the answer.

"Hm," said Dagny, to the groove, and stood up.

He took his arm back and drew down the cuff. "I want the east room made ready."

She turned. "The east room."

"Yes. Aired, and a fire laid. Kept in all night, and every night."

"No one's slept in the east room since your predecessor."

"Then it needs airing."

"It faces the Rise. It's the coldest room in the tower."

"The stone under it is the oldest." He kept his voice even. "It will hold the gray back better than any other. That's the only reason."

That was true as well, and he heard how it sounded, how carefully fitted to the shape of a larger truth that he had left in the dark. Dagny's eyebrows rose a fraction and stayed there.

"And a second blanket," he added.

"A second blanket."

"It will be colder than he expects."

"That," said Dagny Orme, "is not why you asked for a second blanket."

He did not answer. She waited, with the infinite patience of someone who had waited for a great many men to say the thing they were not saying, and when it became clear that he was not going to, she picked up her satchel and slung it over her shoulder.

"I'll have it done by morning," she said at the door. She did not turn around. "Eat something, Ambrose. You look like a corpse, and you've the manners of one, too."

The door shut. Her boots went down the stairs, one hard step after another, and faded into the wall of the tower.

He stood in the middle of the study for a minute with his hands hanging at his sides, one alive and one not. Then he took the lamp from the desk and went up the narrow stair to the east room himself.

It was a small, square room under the roof, with a window that looked straight out at the Rise and the black bulk of the mountain beyond it. It had not been opened in a decade. There was a layer of dust over the floor, and a smell of old stone and cold. Dagny's boy, who did the heavy work around the tower, had already dragged a bed frame and a straw mattress up from the cellar and left them leaning against the wall. There was a wooden chest under the window with a flat top. A small, plain hearth. Nothing else.

He set down the lamp. He did not call for anyone. He took off his coat, hung it on a peg, rolled his sleeves, and began.

He swept the floor with a birch broom, left-handed, and then, because it came out badly, he swept it again. He dragged the bed frame into the corner farthest from the window and the draft, then, thinking about it, dragged it back toward the hearth. He carried the mattress over his shoulder and set it down and beat the dust out of it with the flat of his hand, and sneezed, and was irritated with himself for sneezing. He laid the fire. He laid it three times before the kindling caught the way he wanted, and he sat back on his heels and watched it take, and it burned with a clean, steady flame that he could see and not feel, the heat of it on his left cheek and nothing at all on his right.

He made the bed.

The linen was rough and clean. He tucked the corners down with his left hand and then, without quite deciding to, reached across with the right to smooth the surface flat. The gray fingers moved over the cloth, over the wool of the blanket, slowly, with that terrible, deliberate care he had learned for handling things he could not feel, and felt nothing. He might as well have been smoothing a slab of slate.

He did it again. He was trying to feel it. He knew he was trying, and he knew exactly how foolish it was, the Keeper of Hollin Cross on his knees in an unused room smoothing a blanket for a boy who hated him, trying to feel wool through a hand made of stone, as if there were some use in knowing whether it was soft. He thought of a different pair of hands, quick and square and callused, with the dust of a lintel ground into the creases, the hands that had held a gray-veined arm still as if it belonged to someone else. He thought of the heat that had come up in that man's throat when Ambrose held his gaze, and how it had not been all anger.

Ambrose stood up so fast that the lamp wavered.

He stayed there for a moment with the blood loud in his ears, looking at the bed. Two blankets. A pillow with the dent of no head in it yet. The fire throwing amber across the wall. It looked like what it was: a room made ready for a guest. It looked like the room of a man who had never in his life been allowed to prepare one.

He took the lamp and left without looking back, and shut the door very quietly, as if the room might wake.

Back in the study, the ledger lay where he had left it. He had meant to close it and go to bed, and instead he found himself standing over it with his left hand on the cover, because something about the book was different. It was subtle. It was a quiet in the air around it, the stillness of a held breath.

He opened it to the last written leaf.

Below the entry for Rhys Alder, below the Stone's small gray underscore, a new line had begun to appear. It came up slowly out of the paper, the way frost forms on glass, a single word in that heavy, angular, ancient hand he had seen only once before, on the page, that morning, in the second before the boy's name rose out of the ink.

Sixty.

He knew what it meant. Not hours. Not winters. Days.

Sixty days, then, until the Stone called again, when four winters of silence had just been broken. It had never done this. The ticks came further apart, or they came closer, but never like this, never as a promise written in the margin, never as a countdown. Whatever the Stone had been before, it was impatient now, and it had begun, plainly, to collect.

He stood with his hand on the page and felt nothing in the fingers of the other, and thought of a boy lying awake in a cottage at the end of a lane, counting the notches of the gray along his own wrist.

The lamp burned. In the east room above him, the fire he had laid went on burning for no one. The word on the page held steady, patient and gray, and did not fade.

The clock had begun.