From the Keeper's Ledger: Pell, Dunstan. Cooper. Ten years taken. Entered eight winters past.

Rhys had read exactly three lines before the hand came down.

He thought about it all afternoon, in the workroom, with a chisel he did not use, because the memory kept arranging itself in front of him whether he wanted it or not. The archive. The lamp. The great leather book with its spine gone gray, and the page he had been turning toward for a quarter of an hour with a thumb that did not feel like his own. Then the leaf had fallen open at the right year, and there it was in that cramped, upright, official script: Alder, Marek. Stonecutter. Twelve years taken. Entered four winters past.

He had been expecting it. He had known it for four years. It still went into him like a nail into green wood, slowly and then all at once, and he stood there reading his brother's name in the Keeper's handwriting and feeling the room tilt a little to one side.

Beneath the entry there had been something else. A short line, three words perhaps, written in a different hand from the rest. It was scrawled, not formed, the letters leaning against each other like drunks. He had bent closer to read it.

And a long gray hand had come down flat across the bottom of the page.

He had not heard Ambrose cross the room. The Keeper stood at his shoulder, close enough that Rhys could feel the cold coming off the black coat, and the stone fingers lay spread over the lower half of the leaf, perfectly still, as though they had been set there by a mason and mortared in. The other hand, the living one, held the lamp. It was not quite steady.

"You may read any ledger in this room," Ambrose had said. "I told you that you could ask me anything, and I meant that you could read anything. I would only ask that you ask me first."

"I'm asking now."

"Not about this." The voice had been low and very even. "Not here, with the page open. Ask me at dinner. Ask me whatever you like at dinner, and I will tell you what is true."

"And that?" Rhys had looked at the gray hand. "What's under there?"

"That," said Ambrose Kell, "is the thing I may not answer."

It had been so plainly said, with no pretense that the thing did not exist, that Rhys had found he could not be angry at it. He had straightened up. He had closed the book himself, because it seemed wrong to make the man do it, and Ambrose had taken his hand away at once and stepped back, and the two of them had stood on either side of the lamp not looking at each other, like men who have both just heard the same thing break in another room.

So now it was evening, and the bell for the meal was ringing somewhere down in the stone, and Rhys was washing the dust off his hands in a basin that had been filled for him with warm water, which he resented, and he was going down to dinner because it was the third rule and because he was too curious to stay away.

The hall was round, like everything in the tower, with a high conical roof lost in shadow and a hearth big enough to roast an ox. Someone had lit every candle in the place. They stood in iron sconces along the walls and on a great black table that ran down the center of the room, a table that could have seated thirty. It seated two. They had been laid at the far end, one at the head and one at the foot, so that anyone sitting would have the whole length of the oak between them.

Ambrose was already there. He sat very upright at the head, with his hands on either side of his plate, the gray one and the living one, and he rose when Rhys came in. It was a small, stiff, entirely unnecessary courtesy, and it threw Rhys so badly that he stopped in the doorway.

"Sit," said Ambrose.

Rhys looked at the table. "There's a mile of wood between those chairs."

"It is the arrangement that was used."

"By whom?"

"By every Keeper before me, and every named." A flicker crossed the long face. "I did not think to change it."

"We'll have to shout."

"Yes."

Rhys considered this. Then he picked up his plate and his cup and his knife, and walked the length of the table with all of it clinking in his hands, and set it down on the near side of the chair next to the Keeper's right. He sat. He tucked his boots under him. He did not say anything. He simply began to arrange his knife and cup with elaborate care, as though this had been the plan all along, and he heard, behind him, a very small silence, and then the sound of a man sitting back down.

A woman had come out of the kitchen with a tray. She was broad and red-armed and past fifty, with a kerchief tied hard over her hair, and she set down a tureen and a platter and a basket of bread, and she did not once raise her eyes above the level of the Keeper's collar. When he said, "Thank you, Bess," she made a noise in her throat like a pot coming to the boil and went out again without a word.

"She does not speak to you," Rhys said.

"No."

"What did you do?"

"I signed her husband." It was said at once, flatly. "Nine winters ago. She has cooked in this tower every day since. I do not know why. I have never asked."

Rhys stared at the door the woman had gone through. He had grown up with Bess Hale's bread, the whole village had, a dense brown loaf with seeds in it that she sold on market days out of a basket and never once smiled over. He had never thought about where she went in the evenings.

"That's a terrible thing to find out before you've had your soup," he said.

"You asked."

"I did." He picked up the ladle. "Go on, then. Pronounce it."

"Pronounce what?"

"The meal. You've got the look. You're about to read me my dinner."

Ambrose regarded him for a long moment. Then, with great gravity, he laid his living hand flat on the table and said, in the voice from the Slab, level, clear, shorn of all color, "Barley broth. Salted trout, river-caught. Brown bread, with seed. A dish of boiled turnip. The sentence is without appeal."

Rhys made a sound. He tried to hold it. It came out through his nose, and then it came out of the rest of him, a helpless, ugly, delighted bark of laughter that bounced off the high roof and rang back down at them. He put his hand over his mouth. He bent over his bowl with his shoulders shaking. "Without appeal," he gasped. "Oh, God. Oh, the turnip."

"It is a serious turnip."

"You can't just do that."

"I have not done anything." But the corner of the Keeper's mouth had moved, a tiny, involuntary tightening on one side, there and gone, and Rhys saw it and felt a sudden strange vertigo, as though he had put his foot on a stair that was not there.

He wiped his eyes. He ate some of the broth, because it was hot and he was hungry and it would have been childish not to. It was not good. It was thin and over-salted and tasted faintly of smoke.

"Is it good?" he asked.

"No."

He looked up.

"Bess is a poor cook," Ambrose said. "She is a very fine baker and a poor cook, and she cooks worse for me than for anyone. I believe it is deliberate. I believe it is the only thing she is able to do." He tore a piece from the loaf. "I eat it every night. I think that if I stopped, she would find something worse."

Rhys put down his spoon. He was not laughing now. He was looking at the man beside him with a very odd feeling, and it took him a moment to place it, because it was so unfamiliar in connection with this person. It was something like respect, and it hurt.

"You could just say it was fine," he said.

"I could."

"Most people would have."

"It would not have been true."

"It would have been polite."

"I have never found," said Ambrose, "that the two are the same."

They ate for a while without speaking. It was not a comfortable silence, quite. It had too much in it. But it was not hostile either, and Rhys, tearing his bread into small pieces and eating them one at a time, noticed that his shoulders had come down from around his ears for the first time since the bell.

He asked about Tobin Garrow because he had to.

"You wrote his name." He did not look up. "All the way to the third letter. You would have finished it."

"Yes."

"His girls were standing right there."

"I know where they were standing."

"So how do you do it?" He lifted his eyes at last. "Not the writing. The face. How do you stand there with that face? I watched you. You looked like you were balancing a ledger."

Ambrose was quiet for long enough that Rhys thought he had overstepped, and something in him, some small coward at the back of his skull, was almost relieved. Then the Keeper set down the bread and said, "I wrote his name. That the Stone refused it does not make me less the man who wrote it. I chose him because he was the first name I could bring myself to put on the page, and that is the whole of the reason. If you are asking whether I thought about his daughters, I thought about them every moment. I wrote it anyway."

"Why?"

"Because someone had to be written."

"That's not a reason."

"It is the only one I have."

"And the face?"

"The face is so that they do not have to watch me suffer it," Ambrose said. "They have enough to carry."

Rhys sat with that. It was a good answer. It was the kind of answer a man gives when he has had a great deal of time to rehearse it, alone, in the dark, and he did not know whether to be moved by it or to hate it all the more for being so tidy. He thought of Tobin standing in his doorway with his hat in his hands. He thought of the Keeper's gray fingers closing round the pen, and the way they had not trembled.

"Why don't you eat with them?" he said. "The village. Even once. A feast day. Anything."

"It would be unkind."

"To whom?"

"To them." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the wood. "Eating alone is easier."

"For who?"

It came out sharper than he had meant. It hung there. The candles shivered in the draft from the stair, and the Keeper's face did not change, but something behind it closed like a shutter.

"You are not wrong to ask," Ambrose said. "But I would prefer to go on to the next question."

"No." Rhys leaned forward. He was angry again, suddenly, and he did not entirely know why, only that the anger felt cleaner than the other thing, the soft, treacherous thing that had been growing in him all through the broth. "They left me a loaf, you know. On a windowsill. Wrapped in a clean cloth. They couldn't even stay to watch me pick it up. They thanked me, they cried, they put their hats in front of their chests, and they were so relieved it wasn't them they could hardly stand. And you know what I thought?"

"No."

"I thought, they look at me the way they look at you." He was breathing hard. "They can't look at either of us. Me, because I'm the one who's paying. You, because you're the one who made me. And I thought, well, at least I'll get to go home when it's done, if there's a me left to go. You won't. You'll just stay here with Bess's turnips and the whole valley not looking at you, for the rest of your life."

Ambrose did not move. He did not look away, either. He sat with his hands on the table, one of flesh and one of stone, and his face was very pale and very still, and in his eyes there was an expression Rhys could not name and could not bear, a kind of terrible, unguarded gratitude, as though someone had at last said aloud a thing that he had been waiting eleven years to hear.

"Yes," he said, very quietly. "That is accurate."

Rhys sat back.

"I did not know," Ambrose said, "that it could be said so plainly."

"I'm sorry."

"Do not be."

"I shouldn't have."

"You should. Everyone should." He reached for the basket. "Bread?"

It was so abrupt, so entirely a change of subject, that Rhys almost laughed again. He held out his hand without thinking, and the Keeper put the basket into it with his left hand, and their fingers closed over the same warm crust of the loaf at the same moment.

It was nothing. It was the length of a heartbeat, the width of a knuckle. But the hand on his was hot, nearly feverish, hard with sword calluses of some other kind of labor, ink and rope and cold iron, and it did not pull away at once. It stayed. It rested, very lightly, on the back of Rhys's fingers as though to make certain they were there. And the skin of Rhys's wrist, where the gray ran under it, went suddenly, absurdly warm.

Ambrose took his hand back. He did it neatly, without haste, but he looked at the table, and the tips of his ears had gone a dull and unmistakable red.

Rhys looked at the bread. He looked at the candle flame. He found that his heart was beating at the base of his throat, and that he did not have any idea at all what to do with his face.

"You said I could call you something," he said, when the silence had become unbearable. "This morning."

"I said you might use my name, if you preferred."

"I don't prefer." He picked up the cup and drank, to give himself something to do. "I think I'll go on as I am. Your Grace."

"I am not a Grace."

"Lord Keeper."

"I hold no title but the one."

"Master Kell."

"I am nobody's master."

"Warden. Gaoler. Jailer. Kell." He set the cup down. "Pick one."

"Keeper," said Ambrose, "is perfectly adequate."

"It's what everyone else says."

"Yes."

"I'd rather not be everyone else."

He had not meant to say that. He heard it fall into the room and lie there, shining, like a coin dropped on the flags, and he thought, dear God, why did I say that. The Keeper's head had turned. His eyes, the pale gray-green of the ice at the edge of the river, rested on Rhys with unnerving steadiness, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

"I know," said Ambrose, and went back to his trout.

He did not correct him again. When Rhys, a few minutes later, said carelessly, "Pass the salt, Kell," the Keeper passed it, and took no notice, and the name hung unchallenged between them, rude and intimate and somehow a good deal less safe than "Keeper" had ever been.

They did not speak much after that. The soup went cold. The trout was dry. The turnip was, in fact, a very serious turnip, and Rhys ate all of it, out of a perverse loyalty he could not account for. Bess came and took the tray without looking at either of them. The candles burned down. In the vast round hall the two of them sat at the corner of the long black table, close together, like two men waiting for a ferry, and every few minutes one of them would open his mouth to say something and think better of it.

In the end it was Rhys who laid his knife across his plate and said, "Tell me one thing. I'm going to ask you something stupid."

"Ask."

"Are you ever going to lie to me?"

He expected a speech. He expected a flat denial, or an elegant dodge, or a lecture on the meaning of honesty. Instead Ambrose turned in his chair, and looked at him directly, and said, "I have lied once in my life. I have not told another since. I do not intend to."

It was such a strange answer that Rhys sat up. "Once?"

"Once."

"What was it?"

"I will answer you truthfully on any question you put to me," said the Keeper, "with one exception."

"What exception?"

"That is the exception."

The hall was very quiet. Far up in the dark of the roof, a rafter creaked as the night cooled. Rhys looked at the gray hand lying on the table, and thought of it spread flat across the bottom of a page in a lamplit room, and of the line of drunken script that he had not been allowed to read.

He understood, then, that he had been given a gift and a warning in the same breath. The man beside him would not deceive him. He had said so, and Rhys believed him, which was the most dangerous thing that had happened in two days. And because Rhys believed him, every silence the Keeper kept would from now on be a wall with a door in it, and he would know exactly where the door was, and he would not be able to stop himself from standing in front of it.

"Right," he said, when he could. "Good night, then, Kell."

"Good night, Rhys."

It was the first time the Keeper had used his given name without the surname after it. He had said it very low, and he did not seem to have noticed. Rhys went out of the hall and up the long curve of the stair with his heart going like a hammer, and did not look back, and did not sleep until nearly dawn.