From the Keeper's Ledger: Hale, Tam. Carter. Ten years taken. Entered nine winters past.

On the sixth night Rhys Alder decided to run away, and he made the decision the way he made most of his decisions, with his hands first and his sense somewhere well behind.

It began with a light.

There was a window on the second landing of the tower, a slit no wider than a hand, cut slantwise through nine feet of wall. If a man put his cheek against the cold stone and squinted down the long throat of it, he could see, very small and very far off, one corner of Hollin Cross. Not the whole village. Only the end of a single lane, and a roof he knew, and a step.

Every dusk a point of yellow appeared on that step.

Nell had said she would stand there, and Nell kept her word the way other children kept stray dogs, fiercely and without regard for sense. Five evenings running Rhys had stopped at the slit on his way down to supper. Five evenings running he had watched the little flame come on, and hold, and shiver in the wind, and burn until the cold drove her indoors. On the fifth evening he stayed until his cheekbone ached and his supper went cold, and he understood, with a lurch, that he was timing her. Forty minutes, the first night. An hour, the third. Tonight the church bell had struck the eighth hour and the spark was still there, a stubborn nail of light driven into the dark, and he had thought: she is eleven years old, and she is standing in the frost waiting for me to come home, and I cut stone for a living, and I cannot even carry myself down a hill.

So he sat on the edge of the bed in the east room, boots on, and did his sums.

He was good at sums. A stonecutter had to be. He took the right hand out from under the blanket and turned it to the firelight and measured, as he had measured it each night, with the brass rule from his tool roll. On the first night the gray had stood at the wrist bone. Now it had passed the wrist by a finger's width, and there was a thread of it at the jaw that he did not like to touch. Five days, one finger's width. Inside the walls, where the old stone slowed it. The Keeper had said that outside the walls a man might have weeks, if he were lucky. Rhys was not a lucky man, so he said days. He said that the gray might run three times as fast, or five, or even ten. He did the sum for ten. Ten times a finger's width in an hour was nothing at all. It was a crumb. He could be down the hill and back again before the second bell, and the Keeper would never know, and Nell would have a hand on her hair for the space of one breath, and the spark on the step would go out, just for tonight, because she would know.

That was all. One hour. He told himself the number again so that it would stay true.

There remained the matter of the third rule. You will not leave the walls without telling me.

He had considered asking. He had even rehearsed it, in the workroom, over the wren, with the chisel going tap and pause and tap. Kell, I would like to see my cousin. And he had known exactly what the answer would be, because he had heard the man say it at the gate. I would not stop you. I would follow.

He could see it as plainly as if it had already happened. A tall black shape at the end of the lane, hands in its coat, standing in the dark beside a child's doorstep. Nell, small and sleepy, looking up from the step and seeing that shape and understanding all at once who had put her cousin's name in the book. She was eleven. She had screamed at that man in the square until her voice cracked. Rhys could not bring the two of them to the same patch of ground, not for an hour, not under any rule in the world.

So he would go alone, and he would go quietly. And there was only one way out of the tower that did not pass beneath the Keeper's window.

He took no tools. He took the stub of candle from the chest, and the sheepskin coat that Bess had hung on the peg by the kitchen door, and he went down in his stockinged feet, holding his boots against his chest like a thief. The tower slept. It did not sleep well. The stair creaked in the places where he had learned it would, and he put his weight on the outer edge of each tread, as Marek had taught him to do on the scaffolding at the church. At the second floor he turned away from the archive and the workroom and the study with its single line of light, and followed the passage the other way, to its end.

The door there had no latch. It had a ring of black iron, and when he pulled, it opened on a long dark gallery that smelled of mouse and mildew and ancient grain. Dagny's boy had called it the cold wing. It was a lean-to range built against the flank of the tower in some earlier age, a granary perhaps, or a barracks, and it had been abandoned so long that half its roof had come down and snow had drifted in through the gaps and lay in pale tongues across the flags. He stood in the doorway, and a wind came down the gallery and found his bare ankles.

The far end was walled up. He had noticed that on the second day, while hunting for dry sand to rub his chisels, and he had noticed it as a mason notices anything, with annoyance. There had been a door there once, a low arch cut into the outer wall, and somebody had stopped it with a single course of loose blocks, dry-laid, without mortar, in the worst coursing he had ever seen. A boy's work. A man in a hurry, or a man who had never been taught.

He took the blocks down one at a time. He folded his spare shirt on the flags and set each stone on it as he lifted it free, so that nothing would ring, and he did it with a care that was almost tender, the way he would have handled the stones of a church. There were nine. When the ninth came out the night poured through the gap, black and cold and full of stars, and he stood with his hands hanging and his heart pounding and smelled the open air for the first time in six days.

He pulled on his boots. He went through.

Outside there was a shelf of frozen rubble, where the old outer wall had slumped down the face of the Rise, and below it a slope of tussock and scree falling away into a dark that smelled of snow. The moon was in its last quarter and rode low and small and cold over the mountain. He knew where he was. He had been on this hill since he could walk. Twenty paces to the left, hidden by a spur of rock, the Cutters' Stair began, the steep flight of steps that some forgotten quarryman had hacked into the back of the Rise so that the stone could be carried down to the yard without going all the way round by the road. Four hundred steps, more or less. Nobody used it now but boys, goats and Rhys Alder. It would bring him out above the quarry. From the quarry it was a quarter-hour to the lane.

He crossed the waist-high wall that ran round the tower's foot. It was not much of a wall. He swung one leg over and then the other, and dropped to the frozen turf on the far side, and the world changed.

It was like stepping through a skin of ice into a pond. The cold took him in the right hand first. It went in at the knuckles and ran up the back of the wrist in one bright shock, as if somebody had pulled a wet rope tight around the bones, and he heard himself gasp and clamped his teeth shut. He stood absolutely still. He counted three breaths. The cold did not go away but it did not worsen, and he thought, I can do this, I've done the sum, and he started down.

The first thirty steps of the Stair were nothing. The rock was dry and gritty, and the old cuts took his boots like the rungs of a ladder, and he went down with one hand on the wall, whistling very softly through his teeth, as he had done as a boy. The numbness was at the elbow by the fortieth step. He noticed it the way a man notices a stranger in a crowded room, with a small cold prickle at the back of the neck. By the sixtieth it had a shoulder. He told himself that this was the sum, the tenfold, the crumb. He kept going.

At the second turn he missed his footing.

It was a simple thing. His left foot came down, and his right leg, the one that should have followed, was not there. It was there in the sense that it was attached to him, but it had gone thick and dull and far away, a limb borrowed from a statue, and it dragged across the step with a scrape of leather and then folded under him altogether. He went down hard on one knee. The shock of it ran up his spine and did not stop.

"Up," he said aloud. "Come on. Up."

He could not. He tried to push with the right hand and found that the fingers would not close. They lay on the frosted stone like five dead roots. He looked at them and tried again, and still nothing, and the cold that had been so bright in his wrist was spreading across his chest now in a slow, flat tide, so that every breath came in shallow and clear and stinging, as if frost were forming on the inside of his lungs.

The sum had been wrong.

He understood it all at once, with a perfect, dreadful clarity. He had measured a finger's width in five days and called it a rate. But it was not a rate. It was the inside of a wall, a cup of still water. Out here it was the sea. The gray had not been creeping. It had been held back, and the hand that held it was gone, and everything that had been waiting behind it was rushing in.

He thought, very calmly, I am going to die on a step, and nobody will know why.

Then he thought of Nell, and the calm broke.

He tried to shout and what came out was a thin wheeze. He tried to crawl. He got his left hand onto the next step down, and dragged, and his body followed an inch behind it, like a sack being hauled along a floor. Somewhere below, through the dark and the long fall of the Stair, he could see the lane. The step at the end of it was dark. The lantern was out. She had gone in hours ago, because it was past midnight, because she was a child and had to sleep, and he had known that, he had known that when he started, and he had run anyway.

He lay with his cheek on the cold step and wept, in short dry gasps that hurt his ribs. It was not courage. It was not anything that Marek would have recognized. It was only fear, the plain animal kind, and the worse thing was that it was so small. It had no reason in it. It was only a boy on a hill in the dark, wanting to be home.

Then there was a light above him, and a sound of boots.

They came down the Stair too fast. He knew it from the sound, the skidding scrape of leather on frost, a stumble and a recovery and a stumble again, the sound of someone who had given up caring whether he fell. The lantern swung wildly across the rock face. And a voice said, high and cracked and unlike any voice he had ever heard from that mouth, "Rhys."

He could not lift his head.

"Rhys. Look at me."

The man was on his knees on the step. There was no coat on him, only a white shirt open at the throat and a waistcoat, and his hair had come loose and lay across his forehead, and his face in the lantern light was a color Rhys had never seen on a living person. He had set the lamp on the stone. The gray hand was out in front of him, spread, as if to catch something falling, and the other one was already under Rhys's arm.

"I have you," Ambrose Kell said. "Look at me. Please."

He looked. The eyes were enormous. They were not the eyes of a Keeper. They were the eyes of a man who had run four hundred steps in the dark at the end of the one thing he feared, and had found it.

"I'm sorry," Rhys whispered. "I did the sum."

"I know. I know you did. Hold on to me."

He was lifted. It was done in a single movement, the left arm round his ribs and the stone arm clamped across his legs, and the Keeper rose with him against his chest, staggering, and for a moment Rhys felt the whole of that long body shudder with the weight. Then they were climbing. The world went by in jolts and flashes, a step, a wall of rock, the swing of the lantern, the harsh rasp of breath against his ear. He heard the man counting under his breath. He did not think the man knew he was doing it. Forty. Forty-one. He felt the fabric of the waistcoat against his cheek and the heat that came through it, a fierce animal heat, and he turned his face into it without meaning to and held on.

At the top, at the wall, the cold went out of him all at once. It poured out through his fingers like water from a cracked jar, and the pins and needles came tearing after it, so savage that he cried out. Ambrose did not stop. He climbed the wall with Rhys across his chest, one boot on the old stones, and dropped down inside, and carried him in through the gap in the cold wing, past the nine blocks lying on the folded shirt, down the passage and the stair and into the great round hall.

The hearth still held a bed of embers. Ambrose laid him on the stone beside it, and went down on his knees, and heaped kindling on the red with his one good hand, and blew until it caught. He dragged off his own waistcoat and wrapped it round Rhys's shoulders. He took the sheepskin and dropped it over his legs. And then he took Rhys's right hand, the dead one, the hand that lay in the ashes like a piece of rubbish, and folded it between both of his own.

One of them was stone. It gave nothing back. It lay against the back of Rhys's wrist as cold as the Slab. But the other was alive, and it was shaking, and it closed on Rhys's fingers and held them there and began to rub, slowly, hard, steadily, working the blood back along the knuckles, and the man bent his head and breathed on them. A long warm breath. Then another.

Rhys watched the dark head bow over his hand. He watched the black lashes lower. He felt the heat of the breath on his skin like a small brand, and a thing inside him, a hard lump that he had been carrying since the Slab, shifted and gave a little, and he could not stop it.

"You said you wouldn't stop me," he said. His voice shook. "You said you'd follow."

"I followed."

"You dragged me back."

"You were dying." He did not look up. "I was a quarter-hour late, Rhys. I was at the foot of the stair when I heard the door in the cold wing. I took the wrong passage. I have never been so slow in my life."

"I only wanted to see Nell."

"I know."

"Just an hour."

"I would have walked you down myself." The rubbing did not falter. "I would have stood at the end of the lane, where she could not see me."

"That's what I couldn't stand." It tore out of him. "You, standing there. At her door. After what you did. I couldn't have her look at you and not know. I couldn't have her see it."

The hands went still.

Ambrose lifted his head. The firelight lay along his cheekbones and filled the hollows under his eyes. He was so pale that Rhys could see the faint blue vein at his temple, and his lips, drawn tight, were shaking, and he said, very quietly, "Yes. I see that now. I should have thought of it. Forgive me."

Rhys stared at him. Of all the things he might have said, of all the answers that Rhys had braced for, a lecture, a punishment, a stone-faced recitation of the third rule, there had not been this.

"I do not apologize for the rules," Ambrose said. "They are all that stands between you and what you saw on the hill, and I would write them again tomorrow. I will not pretend otherwise. But I am sorry that you were afraid. I would not have had you afraid." He swallowed. "Not for any reason, not of anything, least of all of me."

The fire cracked. A log shifted and sent up a small fountain of sparks.

Rhys looked at the hands that held his own. The stone one lay across his wrist like a shackle he had stopped noticing, and the living one had come up to cradle his fingers, and he saw that the skin of it was cracked across the knuckles, and bleeding a little, where the Keeper had skinned them on the rock. He had not felt that either. Or he had, and had not cared.

"You've hurt your hand," Rhys said.

"It is nothing."

"It's bleeding."

"It is the one that I can feel," Ambrose said, with the ghost of a smile. "I find I am pleased to have it."

It was meant lightly. It did not land lightly. The words sat in the air, and Rhys felt his own throat close, because he knew what they cost, and because there was no one else in the world who could have said them. He turned his hand over, slowly, inside the other man's grip, until the palms lay together. They were warm, now, both of them. He felt the pulse in the Keeper's wrist beating fast against his own.

Neither of them spoke. They knelt there with the fire between them, a man with a stone arm and a man with a gray one, hands joined on the hearthstone like two people at the end of a long night, and in the quiet Rhys discovered that he was not afraid anymore, that the fear had gone out of him with the cold and left only a tired, shaking, enormous gratitude that he had no idea what to do with.

"Thank you," he said at last.

Ambrose bowed his head. He did not trust himself to answer.

In the morning the shutters were open and the light in the hall was thin and gray. Rhys had slept where he lay, wrapped in the sheepskin and the waistcoat, with his hand wrapped in a clean linen bandage that had not been there when he closed his eyes. The fire was banked. There was a cup of something hot on the hearthstone beside his head. Of the Keeper there was no sign, though the cold wing door, he found when he limped to look, had been shut and the nine blocks set back in the arch, row on tidy row, mortared this time, with fresh lime still damp between the courses. Whoever had done it had done it very badly. The coursing was crooked. A stonecutter would have wept.

He was still looking at the wall, with something close to a smile on his face, when he heard the heavy tread on the stair and Dagny Orme's voice, flat as a board, said, "There you are. I've been told you're not to be left alone."

She was standing at the door with her satchel on her shoulder and a folded square of paper in one hand. She did not ask him how he felt. She took his wrist and turned it over and looked at the gray, and her mouth tightened. "You went out."

"Yes."

"You are a fool, Rhys Alder."

"Yes."

"I won't tell you that you were brave." She let go. "But I will tell you that he was in my kitchen at the third hour past midnight, white as chalk and shaking like a dog, to ask me whether I could put a decent edge on a pair of boots. I said what for. He said, so that nobody will have to carry the boy again." She sniffed. "He had not noticed that he was bleeding on my floor."

Rhys did not know what to say.

"And this," said Dagny, holding out the paper. "Is the reason you didn't need to go. Article eleven of his famous nineteen. The named may receive letters. I carry them. I've carried them every second day since you came. He told me to say nothing till he'd had the chance to tell you himself." She raised her eyebrows. "He seems to have been delayed."

"He didn't tell me."

"No. I imagine that he meant to, at the second bell."

The paper was coarse, folded small and sealed with a blob of candle wax. Rhys took it. His hand shook. The writing on the outside, in pencil, enormous and furiously underlined, said RHYS, and below it, smaller, with an ink blot where she had pressed too hard: *Do not read this in the dark. It will make you sad.*

He broke the wax. Inside, in the same slanting, ferocious hand, with the capitals marching about the page like soldiers, he read:

*Dear Rhys. I stood on the step every night. Maggie says I can stay till the church bell. I have not cried except twice. The slate you left on the sill is all right. I cut my thumb on the pumice but only a bit. I saw a light go down the Rise in the night and then it came back up again fast. Maggie says it was the Keeper looking at his walls. I said it was you. Was it you? Do not go in the dark. If you fall nobody will see. The wren had better have feathers. Your cousin Nell.*

*P.S. I am not sad. I am only telling you I am here.*

He read it twice. Then he sat down on the hearthstone with the page held against his chest and the bandaged hand over his mouth, and Dagny, who had not seen a man weep in that hall in a good many years, looked tactfully at the ceiling and counted the rafters until he was done.

He had run from the one man in the valley who had made sure a letter would come.