From the Keeper's Ledger: Fenwick, Alis. Weaver. Eleven years taken. Entered seven winters past.

Ambrose had written the rules in the night, and then rewritten them, and then, at the hour when the lamp began to gutter and the study grew gray around its edges, he had burned the second draft in the grate and copied the first out fair in his best hand.

It came to nineteen articles. He saw the number when he blotted the last line and did not like it. He had not set out to make it nineteen. But a Keeper who wrote rules wrote them the only way he knew how, in the dry, careful, ceremonial voice of the ledger, and the voice had a way of multiplying clauses, and by the end of the night the page held a small and orderly tyranny that he could not have pointed to any single word of and said, here, this is where I went wrong.

He set the sheet in the center of the desk. He squared its edges. He stood behind the chair with his left hand resting on its back and the right at his side, and practiced his face.

This was a thing he did. He had done it before every Naming Day for eleven years, in the long hours before the bell, standing in front of the narrow mirror in his room until the muscles of his jaw did what he asked. It was not a mask, exactly. It was closer to a bandage. You tied it on to keep the wound from being looked at, and after a while you forgot there was a wound underneath, and only remembered when someone pulled it off.

He had not yet decided what he would say if the boy pulled it off.

The second bell rang at the hour after sunrise, and Rhys Alder did not come.

Ambrose waited. He waited through the whole length of the third bell as well, listening to the tower: the faint tick of cooling stone, the sigh of the wind in the stair, the small domestic noises that a building makes when it has someone new in it and has not decided how to feel. A servant brought up a tray, left it, and went away. The tea went cold. It was the first time in eleven years that he had waited for anyone in his own study, and he discovered that he was not good at it. He read the rules over once more, and the word *shall* appeared on the page seventeen times, and he thought: that is a great deal of shall.

The door opened without a knock.

"Sorry," said Rhys Alder. "I got lost."

He did not look sorry. He looked like a man who had slept badly and got up angry, and was holding the anger carefully in front of him like a tray of something that might spill. His hair was tousled on one side from the pillow. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. There was a smear of gray dust along his jaw, and Ambrose, who had no business noticing such things, noticed that it had been left there since yesterday, and that the boy had plainly been in the workroom since before dawn. He had the right hand wrapped loosely in a rag. In the left he held the heel of yesterday's bread.

"You are late," Ambrose said.

"It's a very large tower."

"It has one staircase."

"It has several staircases. They all go to the same place by different routes, which I'd call dishonest." Rhys came in and dropped into the chair opposite the desk without being asked, and looked at the sheet of paper. "Is that mine?"

"It is the Rules of the Tower."

"There's a lot of them."

"There are nineteen."

"Is there one against smiling?"

Ambrose looked at him. He did not know what his own face did. He knew only that Rhys's eyes had gone to it at once, with that quick, unforgiving attention of a man who worked with his hands and was accustomed to judging a surface by the first flaw, and had seen whatever he was looking for, and had not looked away.

"No," Ambrose said.

"Pity. I was hoping to be fined for it."

"There are no fines."

"There's a clause about penalties on the back. I can see it through the paper."

"Those are not fines. Those are consequences."

Rhys made a sound that was not quite a laugh, a short, startled breath through the nose, and covered it at once by looking out of the window. Ambrose, who had not heard anything resembling it in the study since his predecessor died, found that his fingers had closed around the back of the chair.

He took up the paper. He read from it in the voice he used at the Slab, level, clear, unhurried, a voice with nothing in it to catch hold of. It had always been the right voice. It made the thing said into a fact, a piece of the weather, no more arguable than rain.

"The first article. The named shall reside within the tower for the term of the tithe, and shall not depart its walls without the Keeper's knowledge."

"Yes, I got that one at the gate."

"The second. The named shall rise at sunrise and shall present themselves to the Keeper at the first bell."

"I did not present myself at the first bell."

"No."

"Which means I've already broken it. Is that a consequence?"

"The third." Ambrose did not let himself pause. "The named shall take their meals in the hall at the hours appointed, and shall eat what is provided."

"Provided by whom? You?"

"By the kitchen."

"Who's in the kitchen?"

"A woman named Bess, from the village. She does not speak to me."

"I'm not surprised." Rhys turned from the window. The light fell across the side of his face and picked out a thin gray line at his temple that Ambrose had not seen the day before, a hairline thread running up out of his collar, and Ambrose's chest went tight. "Go on. I like the sound of you reading. It's very soothing. It's like being sentenced by a clock."

He read on. He read the fourth and the fifth. He read the one about the staircase, which forbade the named to descend after the evening bell without a lamp, and Rhys said gravely that he would sooner break his neck than ask permission. He read the one about visitors. He read the one concerning the Stone room, and here the boy's mouth thinned, and Ambrose felt, rather than saw, the question forming behind it, and kept on reading as though he had not.

He was not looking at Rhys while he read. He was careful about that. He kept his eyes on the paper, and so it was only at the edge of his vision that he saw the way Rhys sat, with one boot hooked behind the leg of the chair and his chin lifted a little, tilted a few degrees to the left, as if the whole room were a proposition and he was waiting to be shown it was wrong.

Ambrose knew that tilt.

He had seen it once, a long time ago, in a cold room much like this one, on another face. A broader face, a heavier brow, a man ten years older and with a great deal more silence in him. But the lift of the chin was the same. The refusal to be handled was the same. The way the eyes narrowed a little at the corners, not with anger, exactly, but with something drier and more patient, the look of someone testing whether a floor would hold.

He lost his place in the article. He caught it again. His voice did not change, because he had spent eleven years making sure it never would, but something cold and quick turned over beneath his ribs, and for a moment the room seemed very small and Marek Alder sat in it, with his big scarred hands folded and his gaze level, saying: *Are you going to look at me, Keeper, or at your ink?*

"Keeper?"

He blinked.

"You've stopped," Rhys said. "It's the ninth. 'The named shall not enter the lower cellars.' I wanted to ask what's in them, but you seem to have wandered off."

"Wine," said Ambrose. "And nothing else."

"A tower full of wine and nobody to drink it. It's the saddest thing I've ever heard." Rhys shifted in the chair. "May I ask something?"

"You may ask anything. I will answer or I will tell you that I won't."

"Is that one of the nineteen?"

"It is not a rule. It is how I conduct myself."

Rhys regarded him for a long moment. The smile had gone out of his face, and what replaced it was harder to name, a steady, sidelong, unexpectedly serious attention. He unwound the rag from his right hand and laid it on the desk between them. The gray had advanced. It reached the knuckles now, a delicate tracery as fine as the veins in a leaf, and a bruise-colored stain had started in the web of the thumb.

"Yours is worse," he said. "I saw it. I saw it yesterday, at the Slab. And again at the gate. What does it cost you? Every time you sign."

It was not the question he had prepared for. Ambrose had readied himself for *why me*, and *did you know my brother*, and the hundred other things that a man might ask of his jailer. He had not thought of this. He stood very still behind the chair, and the lamp-flame, which had no reason to move, moved.

Then he told him.

He did not soften it. He had spent a decade unlearning the habit of softening things, and he found now that the habit did not come back when he wanted it. He said that the first time he had signed, the tips of two fingers had gone numb by nightfall, and he had told himself it was cold. He said that by the third name the numbness had spread to the whole hand, and that by the seventh the skin had begun to change color, and by the eleventh he had stopped being able to tell whether he was holding a pen or merely holding his hand around the shape of one. He said that it did not hurt. He said that this was the part no one believed. It did not hurt, and that was the horror of it, the long, painless drift out of his own body, the way he reached for a cup of tea and found he had pulled it too hard, or too soft, and had to learn each morning again how hard a thing was by looking at it.

"Nineteen names," he said. "I have written nineteen names in eleven years. The gray took the fingers first, then the palm, then the wrist. It reached the elbow this past winter. Dagny thinks that in another ten it will reach the shoulder. After that I do not know."

"And when it reaches the heart?"

"Then there will be a new Keeper."

He had said it as plainly as he said everything. He looked at the boy, and saw that Rhys was staring at him with his lips slightly parted, as though the answer had not been the one he was braced against.

"You don't hide any of it," Rhys said.

"I have no reason to."

"Most men would."

"I have found," said Ambrose, "that it makes very little difference what a man hides. The Stone writes it all down regardless."

A silence fell. Outside, the wind combed the roof tiles. A very small, hollow sound came from the hearth, the sound of an ember settling into ash. Rhys did not say anything. He looked at the gray hand where it lay on the desk's edge, the long stone fingers resting on the grain of the wood, and then up at Ambrose's face, and for the first time since the Slab there was nothing in his eyes that was trying to win.

It was very hard to be looked at that way. Harder than anger. Ambrose would have taken anger gladly. He had a place prepared for it. He did not have a place for this, the quiet, level, appraising stare of a man who had come to find the villain and found only another tired person standing in a cold room with a stone arm, and who was now, with visible reluctance, adjusting the whole shape of his hatred to fit.

"All right," Rhys said at last. His voice was rougher than before. "I think I believe you. I'd like to say I don't, but I do. It's very inconvenient."

"I am sorry for the inconvenience."

"You aren't, though."

"No," Ambrose admitted. "Not entirely."

There was the sound again, that short, surprised breath through the nose. This time it ended in something that was very nearly a smile before Rhys caught it and tucked it away behind his teeth. Ambrose felt it land somewhere under his breastbone with an odd, slanting weight, like a stone dropped into a deep well, and he listened for the splash, and heard nothing, and went on listening anyway.

"Right," said Rhys. He picked up the paper, which Ambrose had set down without noticing, and turned it over, and ran his eyes down the back. "I'll take the rule about meals. I'll take the one about the cellar, I don't want to be killed by a barrel. I'll take the staircase. I won't take the second article."

"The second article is not negotiable."

"Sunrise. The first bell. I work best at night, Keeper. I'm no good before the sun's properly up. If you want me to cut stone, and I assume you do, because you've given me an entire block of it, I'll be a very ugly sight at dawn and very slow with my hands."

"It is a matter of the Stone. The gray runs slowest in the early morning."

"Then I'll sleep through the slowest part and be extra careful in the quick." Rhys leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You said you don't lie. So tell me honestly whether it makes any difference, an hour or two. To the gray. To you."

Ambrose opened his mouth to say that it did.

He did not say it. He stood with the words at the back of his throat, and what he understood, in that moment, was that it did not, that the rule had been written by the Keeper who came before, and by the one before him, and that he had copied it onto the page the way a man copies a sentence he does not remember agreeing to. It was not a lie, exactly. It was a thing that had gone on being true for so long that nobody had thought to check.

"No," he said. "I suppose it does not."

"Then?"

"The second bell," said Ambrose. "Not the first."

"The third."

"The second. And you will not argue about the breakfast."

"I'll argue about the breakfast." Rhys stood. He was smiling now, openly, a lopsided, fugitive thing, and it did something to his whole face, turned it younger and sharper and unguarded, a flash of someone who had been clever and cheerful long before any of this. "But I'll be there at the second bell. Thank you, Keeper."

"Ambrose," Ambrose heard himself say.

The word hung in the air. Rhys, halfway to the door, went still. He turned his head.

"It is my name," Ambrose said. He had not meant to say it. He had not been called by it, by anyone but Dagny, in more than a year. "You may use it, if you prefer. It is shorter than the title. And you have a great many things to say to me."

Rhys looked at him for a long beat. Something moved across his face, surprise, then suspicion, then a cautious, wary curiosity, as though he had been handed a coin and was not sure whether it was real.

"I'll think about it," he said, and went out.

The door closed.

Ambrose stood where he was. He heard the footsteps go down the passage, quick and careless, the footsteps of a man who did not know how to walk quietly in other people's houses, and he heard them recede, and he heard the faint creak of the staircase, and then there was nothing but the wind.

He let go of the chair.

He had not known how hard he had been gripping it. His left hand ached, and the left was the one that could feel, and he stood flexing the fingers and looked at the sheet of paper that Rhys had left behind on the desk, with its nineteen articles, and the cramped, formal hand that had spent all night making sure no one could come near him. There was a small, dusty smudge on the corner where a thumb had rested. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he breathed out. It was a longer breath than he had expected, and it came all the way up from the bottom of him, and shook a little at the end. He sat down in the chair for the first time that morning. He put his left hand over his eyes.

The tower had been quiet for eleven years. He had not noticed how quiet until it was broken, not by anything large, but by a short, scornful laugh through the nose and a boot-heel on the stair. And the worst of it was that he had wanted to hear it again. Within a minute of its stopping, within a single breath, he had wanted to say something else foolish, merely to see what would happen.

He knew what that was. He had been Keeper too long not to know the shape of things that would cost him. And he thought, with the fierce, unbending clarity that was his only gift, that he had promised a dying man four years ago to keep his brother safe, and had failed, and that there was nothing in the world so dangerous to a person in his position as wanting the very thing that he had no right to take.

He sat there for a little while longer. Then he rose and straightened his coat, and put the face back on, and went to find Dagny, because the slow gray at the boy's temple needed seeing to, and because he needed, desperately, to be doing something.

He was halfway down the passage on the second floor when he noticed the light.

It was a thin, steady line of lamplight, falling across the flagstones from under a door at the far end. The door was not the workroom. It was an old door of dark wood with a plain iron latch, set deep in the curve of the wall, and he had not opened it in a year, because he had not needed to. There had never been any reason to lock it. No one in Hollin Cross would have dared. No one in the tower had ever wished to.

It was standing a hand's width ajar.

Ambrose crossed the floor in silence. He put his left hand against the wood, and the grain was cold and rough, and he pushed, and the door swung inward with a long whisper on its hinges.

The archive was a low, narrow room, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, and on those shelves lay the ledgers. They were the ledgers of every Keeper who had ever served, their spines gone gray with dust, one volume to a lifetime. A lamp burned on the table in the middle of the floor. A stool had been dragged across to it. And Rhys Alder, with his sleeves rolled and his hair falling in his face, stood with his back to the door and a great leather book open between his hands, turning the pages one at a time with a stonecutter's careful thumb.

He was reading by the lamp. His lips moved a little. He had found the year.

Ambrose stood in the doorway and did not speak. He had told the boy that he would answer anything. He had said it plainly and meant it, and for the first time since the words left his mouth he understood exactly what they had cost. Because there was one page in that room that he had never wished anyone to read, and Rhys was turning, leaf by leaf, steadily and without hurry, toward it.