From the Keeper's Ledger: Alder, Rhys. Stonecutter. Twenty-five years. Years to be reckoned. Entered in the Stone's own hand.

Nell had not gone to bed. Rhys found her in the kitchen an hour before dawn, sitting on the bench by the cold hearth with her coat buttoned over her nightdress and her boots on the wrong feet, holding a roofing slate against her chest like a shield.

"You should be asleep," he said.

"So should you."

It was a fair point, and he did not argue it. He set his roll of tools on the table, and the little iron clink of them in the dark seemed to him the loudest sound in the world. He had dressed in the clothes he worked in, the brown wool with the patched elbows, because the Keeper had said to bring whatever would make him feel like himself, and he had found, standing in front of his own chest of drawers, that there was nothing else he could bear to put on.

Maggie Thorne was waiting by the door with a lantern, her shawl pulled up over her gray hair. She had said she would walk them both as far as the bottom of the Rise, and then she had said nothing else, which for Maggie was a kind of eloquence.

"I did the sanding," Nell said. She held out the slate. It was a good one, a clean rectangle of blue-gray with the edges rubbed smooth and the face polished to a dull shine, the kind of slate that a roofer would have been glad to find. "All night. I did it with the pumice and then with the felt. It's for you. So you've got something to cut on."

Rhys took it. It was still faintly warm from being held against her. For a moment he could not make his hands do anything useful with it.

"It's the best slate I've ever seen," he said.

"I know." Her chin wobbled, and she set her jaw against it with a ferocity that she had certainly not learned from him. "You have to cut me something on it. When you can. Not a name or a flower. Something that's really difficult."

"Something really difficult."

"So that you have to stay alive to finish it."

He knelt down on the flagstones and put his arms around her, slate and all, and she held onto his neck so tightly that his collar cut into his throat. She smelled of woodsmoke and pumice and the sourness of crying that has gone on too long. He had practiced this part in the night, lying awake, and every speech he had made up had been a lie of one kind or another. In the end he said only, "I'll be at the top of the Rise. You can see the tower from the doorstep. If you stand on the step and look, I'll be there."

"That's not the same as being home."

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

He had to unpeel her fingers one at a time. He did it slowly, the way he would have lifted a fragile piece of carving off a bench, and with each finger he felt something small and necessary come away from him. When the last one let go she sat down hard on the bench and stared at the floor, and Maggie crossed the room and put a heavy, bony hand on the child's shoulder, and said gruffly, "Go on, lad. Don't stand about. It doesn't improve with standing."

He went.

The lane was black and silver with frost. His boots rang on the cobbles, and the sound came back to him off the shuttered house fronts, a lonely, careful sound, like a man tapping on a wall to find out whether it was hollow. He carried the roll of tools over one shoulder and the slate under his arm. He had been up and down this lane ten thousand times, to the quarry, to the church, to the well, to the tavern where Marek had once got into a fight over a girl and lost. It was a different place now. It had turned its face away from him.

There were people awake. He could tell by the way the shutters moved as he passed, a hand drawing one back an inch and letting it fall. A woman stood in the doorway of the bakery with her arms wrapped around herself and watched him go by without a word. A man he had once built a chimney for was sitting on his front step in the dark, plainly having sat there for hours, and when Rhys drew level with him he stood up, and took off his hat, and held it in front of his chest.

"Thank you," the man said, so quietly that it was barely a sound. "I'm sorry. Thank you."

Rhys could not answer him. He nodded, once, and walked on. A little way further a loaf of bread had been set on a windowsill, wrapped in a clean cloth, and he understood that it was meant for him, and that whoever had left it had not dared to stay and watch him take it. He took it. He did not know what else to do. It was heavy and still warm, and he carried it up the street under his arm along with everything else, a funeral procession of one, and the terrible thing was how kind it all was, and how it did not help.

At the end of the street the lane narrowed between two stone walls and ran out through the old village gate. The gate itself was only a pair of gray posts now, one of them leaning, the iron long since stolen for plowshares. Maggie had stopped a few paces behind, as promised. Rhys went through alone.

He stopped on the far side. He had not meant to. His feet simply would not go any further, and he stood there in the gravel with his breath smoking and the bread under his arm and looked at the crooked post.

This was the place. Four winters ago, on this exact spot, he had been told to stop, and he had stopped, because it was Marek who had told him. His brother had walked on up the road without looking back. He had not looked back once, and Rhys had always taken that to be a kind of courage.

He looked down the road now, to the left, where the lane bent and a few dead thistles stood in the ditch. That was where the figure had been. He could see it as plainly as if the dark had been cut open: a man in a black coat, tall, collar turned up against the cold, standing alone with his hands in his pockets, watching Marek go by. He had stood so still that Rhys, at twenty-one and blind with misery, had taken him for a post, or a shadow, or nothing at all.

The Keeper had stood there. Of course he had. The man who had signed Marek's name had come down the Rise at dawn to watch him walk up to be taken, and had stood in the ditch by the gate and said nothing, and Rhys had looked straight through him.

He did not know what to do with that. It sat inside him with its edges turned the wrong way. A man who did that might be a monster, or he might be the sort of man who could not stop himself from watching the thing he had done, and Rhys, standing on the frozen gravel with a loaf of strangers' gratitude under his arm, found that he could not make himself decide which.

He turned his back on the post and began to climb.

The Rise road was steeper than it looked from the village, a series of long switchbacks cut into the mountainside, paved here and there with slabs that someone had laid centuries ago and no one had mended since. The frost had settled in the cracks. Twice he slipped. By the third bend he was breathing hard, and by the fourth he noticed that his right hand, the hand with the slate, was no longer cold but numb, a thick, wooden numbness that spread from the wrist toward the knuckles and made his grip uncertain. He looked down. In the gray half-light the veins under the skin had darkened and reached out, one hair-fine branch at a time, past the middle joint of each finger.

It was moving. Not much, not quickly, but he could feel it, a small, patient pressure, like a root working its way through soil. He shifted the slate to his left arm and kept climbing, and told himself it was only the cold.

The sky behind the mountain had begun to pale by the time he reached the top.

The tower stood on the lip of the Rise like something that had grown there. It was round and narrow and built of stone so dark it seemed to drink the dawn, and no window in it was wider than a hand. It had been a watchtower once, or a granary, or something older than either, nobody in Hollin Cross could say, and for as long as there had been a Keeper there had been a tower. There was a wall around the base of it, waist-high, with a single arched gate. The gate was open.

Ambrose Kell stood in it.

He held a lantern in his left hand. The black coat was buttoned to the throat, and his right hand hung at his side with its gray fingers curled slightly inward. He was entirely still, in the way that he had been entirely still in the square, and Rhys knew, with an unpleasant lurch of recognition, that he had been standing there for a long time. There was frost on his shoulders.

"You said you'd carry me," Rhys said. His voice came out hoarse.

"I said I would, if you did not come." The Keeper's eyes moved over him, over the roll of tools, the slate, the loaf of bread, the hand held stiffly at his side. "You came."

"Disappointed?"

"No."

It was the same flat, unadorned answer as before. It should have been easier to bear the second time. Rhys walked forward and found that he was angry, with a clear, clean anger that was almost a relief after the long, shapeless dread of the night. "You've been waiting out here."

"Since the bell."

"That's three hours."

"Yes."

"Why?"

The Keeper considered the question as if it were an honest one. "I did not want you to climb the road and find the gate empty," he said.

Rhys had no reply. He took the last step up to the gate, and his boot caught on the edge of the old threshold stone, and the numbness in his right hand chose that moment to spread into his wrist. The slate slid. He lunged for it and overbalanced, and a hand closed round his elbow and held him up.

It was the left hand. It was warm. He had not expected that, though he could not have said why. The fingers were long and hard and surprisingly careful, and the heat of them came through the wool of his sleeve as if it were an ember held in a cloth, and for the space of a breath Rhys stood where he was with the Keeper of Hollin Cross steadying him by the arm and could think of nothing at all.

Then the right hand moved. It rose, slowly, the gray fingers extended, as if to take the slate before it could fall, and stopped in the air between them. It hung there, a little way from his chest, not touching him. Rhys looked at it. He saw the fine pale cracks that ran across the knuckles, and the way the nails had gone smooth as river stones, and the heavy gray ring on the smallest finger that seemed to have grown into the flesh. It trembled, very slightly.

"I can't feel what I'm holding," Ambrose said quietly. "I might drop it. Or I might break it."

"It's only a bit of slate."

"It was made for you by someone who loves you." He drew his hand back. "I'd prefer not to find out."

Rhys took the slate from under his arm and held it against his chest himself. His ears were hot. "I can stand."

"Yes." The left hand let go of his elbow, and Rhys was annoyed to discover that he missed the warmth of it. "Come inside. It is cold."

He stepped through the gate.

The cold went out of his hand like water from a basin.

It was so sudden that he gasped. The wooden stiffness drained out of his fingers, and a rush of pins and needles raced after it, the awful, glorious pain of blood returning to a numb limb. He dropped the bread. He caught the slate, barely, against his hip, and stood in the flagged yard of the tower with his hand held up in front of his face and flexed the fingers one by one. The gray lines were still there, still fine, still branching across his knuckles. But they had stopped. He could feel them stop, like a tide that has reached the top of the beach and does not come further.

"The stone under the tower is older than the valley's name," said the Keeper behind him. "It slows the gray. Outside these walls you might have weeks, if you were lucky. In here, I don't know how long. Longer." He bent, and picked up the loaf, and wiped the dust from it with the cuff of his coat. "This is not a prison, Rhys Alder. It is the only place I know where you'll last."

"That is what a jailer would say."

"Yes," said Ambrose Kell. "I know how it sounds."

He handed him the bread. His face in the lantern light was unreadable, but there was something in the set of his mouth that Rhys, to his own irritation, found he recognized. It was the look of a man who has told the truth and would give a great deal to have been permitted to tell a more comfortable one.

"There are three rules at the gate," the Keeper said. "The full list will be given tomorrow. These are the ones you need tonight. The first: you may go anywhere in the tower except the room where the Stone is kept, unless I am with you. The second: you will eat what is put in front of you. The third: you will not leave the walls without telling me."

"And if I do?"

"The gray will run faster. I would not stop you." A pause. "I would follow."

Rhys looked at the gate. It stood open behind them, an arch of dark stone with the gray morning in it and the long road falling away. It had no bar. It had no lock. There was not so much as a hinge on the thing.

"A cage with the door open," he said, "is still a cage."

"Yes." The Keeper did not flinch. "I thought you would say that."

He led the way across the yard. Rhys followed, because there was nothing else to do. The tower door was made of black oak banded in iron, and it swung inward at a touch, and beyond it was a round hall with a stair spiraling up along the wall, and the smell of old stone and wax and woodsmoke. Everything in it was very clean. Everything in it was very bare. It was the house of a man who had long ago stopped expecting company.

"I need somewhere to work," Rhys said.

"There is a room on the second floor with a north window. I had it cleared yesterday."

Rhys stopped on the bottom stair. "You cleared a room for me yesterday."

"This morning," the Keeper said. "Before the bell."

"Before I'd asked."

"You are a stonecutter. I assumed that you would ask."

It was perfectly reasonable. It was the sort of thing a sensible man might have said. And yet it made Rhys's neck prickle with resentment, because the answer was too prepared, and too kind, and he did not know how to hold it. He had come up the road braced for a gaoler. He had been ready to hate him cleanly and for the length of his sentence. He had not been ready for a man who had stood in the cold for three hours to spare him an empty gate.

The east room was at the top of the tower, under the roof, and it was the coldest place in the building. That was the first thing he noticed, because he was a man who noticed stone: the walls were thicker here, the old blocks fitted so tightly that he could not have slid a knife between them, and the cold seemed to rise out of them in a slow breath. The second thing he noticed was the fire.

It was already lit. It burned in the small hearth with a clear, high flame, and the logs had been stacked beside it in a neat pile that would last the night and half the next day. A bed stood against the wall nearest the hearth, made up with clean rough linen, and on the bed, folded at the foot, lay two blankets. Not one. Two. A wooden chest sat under the window. There was nothing else in the room, and it was, in its way, the most careful room he had ever walked into.

"Who sleeps here?" he asked.

"No one. Not for ten years."

"It's very warm for a room nobody sleeps in."

"The stone is old," said Ambrose Kell, and Rhys had the odd impression that the man had braced for the remark. "It holds the gray back better than the rest of the tower. That is the only reason I chose it."

Rhys looked at the two blankets. He looked at the fire. He did not say anything, and the Keeper, after a long moment, bowed his head very slightly, as one does at the end of a ceremony, and left, and shut the door behind him.

Rhys stood in the middle of the floor with the slate in one hand and the bread in the other and listened to the footsteps go down the stair. They were measured and even. They sounded like someone counting.

He did not sleep, at first. He set the slate on the chest and put the bread beside it and sat on the edge of the bed with his boots on, and told himself that he would not lie down in a bed that had been made for him by the man who had condemned him. He held that line for most of the morning. He ate half the loaf out of simple stubbornness, because the Keeper had said he must eat what was put in front of him and Rhys was not going to be told. He explored the workroom on the second floor, which was exactly as the Keeper had described: a long, bare chamber with a north window, a sturdy bench, a stone block on the floor already roughly squared, as though someone had known what size a man might want. Somebody had even laid out a mason's brush and a lump of tallow for the tools.

He came back up in the late afternoon with the light draining out of the window and his hand aching dully, and the fire was still burning. Nobody had been in. It had been fed, though. It had been fed by someone who moved without a sound.

He lay down, in the end, fully dressed, with the slate on the chest where he could see it. The linen was clean. The blankets were heavy. The warmth of the room closed over him, and he hated it, he hated it with every muscle of him, and he slept like a stone.

He woke deep in the night, and did not know what had woken him.

The fire had sunk to a bed of red coals. The window was a black square with a few stars in it. Somewhere below, the tower creaked as it settled, and a draft moved across the floor and went still. Rhys lay on his back with his eyes open, listening, and his heart began to beat slowly and heavily, the way it does when some part of the body knows what the mind has not yet worked out.

Someone was outside the door.

He had not heard them come. He heard them now, a faint scuff of leather on stone, a breath held and let go. A line of paler dark lay along the foot of the door, where the passage lamp bled in under the wood, and in the middle of it a shadow had fallen. Two shadows, rather, the long narrow ones of a person's feet.

He did not move. He did not call out. He lay with the blanket drawn up to his chin and watched the dark under the door, and the shadow did not shift, and did not shift, and did not shift. A minute went by. Then five. Rhys counted his own pulse and lost the count. He thought of getting up. He thought of what he would say. Who stands outside a door this long, he thought, and what are they waiting for?

At last the shadow stirred. A hand, he thought, or a shoulder, brushed the wood, very lightly, so lightly that he almost doubted he had heard it, a touch so soft it might have been meant to check whether the door was still there. Then the footsteps went away down the stair, one at a time, slow and even, and the light under the door was only light.

Rhys lay awake until the coals had gone gray.

He did not know yet what he was afraid of. But he knew that the man who had stood in the cold for three hours to spare him an empty gate had also, tonight, stood in the dark for the better part of an hour outside a closed door, and had not knocked, and had not gone in, and had not gone away. And he knew, with an unpleasant clarity, that he would have found it much easier to hate a man who was only cruel.