From the Keeper's Ledger: Penhallow, Garreth. Farmer. Fourteen years taken. Entered six winters past.

The storm came down off the mountain on the eighth evening, a full month before any storm had a right to.

Ambrose knew it before the shutters began to rattle. He knew it the way he had learned to know most weather, which was through the left side of his body. The right had told him nothing for years. But the left shoulder ached whenever the glass fell, a deep, dull, grinding ache like a tooth being worked loose, and at the third hour after noon he had stopped in the middle of a column of figures and put his hand to the joint and thought, with weary certainty, that someone was going to die.

He was not a fanciful man. It was only arithmetic. A storm out of season, in a valley where everyone had already learned to keep their eyes on the ground, meant a roof left unmended, a gate left unlatched, a child sent to look for a goat. There was always one. There had been one every storm for eleven years, and the Stone, mercifully, did not count them, and Ambrose had written a handful in the margins of his private notebook where no one would ever see, because it seemed wrong that a man should die in the snow and be recorded nowhere.

The boy came at dusk. He came at a dead run up the Rise road with his scarf trailing and his face scarlet, and he hammered on the gate with both fists until the iron rang. Wick Hale was twelve, Bess's grandson, a thin, freckled child who ran the tower's errands for a penny a week and was the only person in Hollin Cross who would look the Keeper in the eye, because he was too young to know better and his grandmother was too proud to teach him.

"Keeper," he panted. "It's Edric Vane. The shepherd. The flock came down by itself an hour ago, with the dog behind, and Joss says he's never once in forty years let them come down without him. She's frantic. She sent me, because she says you know the high paths."

"Which pasture?"

"The top. Beyond the Rise."

Ambrose looked at the sky. It had gone the color of a bruise, the cloud lying heavy across the mountain's shoulder and the first flakes already beginning to fall, large and soft and almost kind. In an hour it would be a white wall.

"Go home," he said. "Tell Joss that I am going up. Tell her to keep her fire lit and her door open, and not to come out for any reason, whatever she hears."

The boy hesitated. "Is it, you know. Is it the Stone?"

"No," said Ambrose. "It is only the winter."

He did not add that it was far worse, because the Stone at least had a name and a ledger and a measure. He sent the child down the hill and went inside to find his oilskin.

It was a thing he did. He did not think of it as duty. No one had ever asked it of him, no Keeper before him had ever been expected to, and the valley, if it had known, would have been puzzled and faintly embarrassed. But in the first winter, a week after he had taken the pen for the first time, a boy of ten had gone through the ice on the river, and Ambrose had stood on the bank with his stone hand clenched around nothing and listened to the mother, and had gone into the water himself too late. Since then he went. Whoever was lost, in whatever weather, the Keeper went up to find them. It was not kindness. It was a small, stubborn, secret payment in a currency the Stone did not accept, and he made it every time, and he had never once told anyone why.

He was pulling on the second boot when he heard the step on the stair.

"Where are you going?"

Rhys was standing on the bottom tread, in his shirtsleeves, with his bandaged hand held against his chest and the firelight behind him. He had been working. There was dust in his hair. He looked thinner than he had a week ago, and paler, and the thread of gray at his jaw had thickened and crept a little way up toward the ear, and yet his eyes were bright and entirely clear, with that dry, level, watchful look that Ambrose had begun to dread more than any shout.

"The upper pasture," he said. "A man is missing."

"By which way?"

"The Stair."

"You'll never find it." Rhys came down the last step. "Not in this. The Cutters' Stair's got a cairn every twenty steps, and half of them go down every winter, because nobody builds them back. After the snow's an hour old it'll look like a slope. You'll walk straight off the second turn. There's a drop there of twenty feet onto the quarry spoil, and I'd rather not have to carry the pieces home."

"Then I shall go by the road."

"The road's two hours longer and the shepherd will be dead."

"Rhys."

"I know the Stair, Kell." He said it very softly. "I've been up and down it ten thousand times. I know where every step is, in the dark, with my eyes shut. I proved that to myself rather painfully two nights ago."

"No."

"You said the gray runs faster outside."

"It does. You saw it."

"Then you'll have to carry me again," said Rhys. "I'm told it's habit-forming."

It was a joke. It was a bad one, and the corner of the boy's mouth had gone tight with the effort of making it. But the words struck Ambrose in the chest like a thrown stone, and he stood with the boot half on and the oilskin over his arm and could not speak.

"That is not amusing," he said, at last.

"It's a little amusing."

"I carried you up four hundred steps in the dark and you weighed nothing, and I thought you were dead."

"I know." Rhys's smile had gone. "I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be glib. But there's a man out in the snow, and you'll go whether I come or not, and you'll get yourself killed on the second turn trying to be noble about it. If I'm there, we find him. If I'm not, you don't, and then we've two dead men and a mourning valley and you'll write both our names in your private notebook." His eyes flicked up. "Yes, I know about the notebook. Bess talks. Not to you, but she talks."

Ambrose shut his eyes. When he opened them he had made the only decision that was open to him.

"A rope," he said. "Tied at the waist, and tied to me. You will wear the sheepskin and the wool cap, and Bess's mittens over the bandage. We take the short way, from the back wall, and no farther than the pasture fence. If the gray reaches your shoulder, we turn. If I say turn, you turn, and I do not wish to hear one word of argument."

"Understood."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." Rhys's mouth quirked. "You'll be very frightening about it. I can see you getting ready."

Ambrose did not trust himself to reply. He went to find the rope.

The snow fell all the way up. It fell in thick, silent curtains that wrapped the lantern's glow in a ball of white and swallowed every sound but the creak of their own boots, and within ten paces of the wall there was no tower behind them and no mountain ahead, only a roaring, soft, blind whiteness shot through with the black stems of tussock grass. Ambrose walked with the rope looped twice around his waist and the other end around Rhys's, and the line between them hung slack and swayed. He kept his eyes on the shape in front of him. A small, bundled figure in a sheepskin coat, going steadily upward on the old stone steps with one mittened hand trailing along the rock, never hesitating, never once looking round.

It was a curious thing, to follow someone he trusted. He could not remember when he had last done it.

"Cairn," Rhys said, over his shoulder. His voice was muffled by the scarf. "Left. Now there's a gap, mind the gap. Give me your hand."

Ambrose gave it. The left one. It was taken, firmly, in a mittened grip, and used to cross a gap he could not see, and then released. He found that he was holding his breath.

The gray ran faster outside the wall. He saw it each time the boy turned his head. It climbed the side of his neck in a thin dark thread, and by the time they reached the first turn it had reached his ear, and Ambrose said nothing, because he had promised to say turn when it reached the shoulder and it had not yet reached the shoulder. But he found that he was counting. He counted the steps and he counted the shape of the gray against the pale skin, and he thought, very distinctly, I will tell him to turn at the next cairn. And at the next cairn he did not. He thought, the next. And the next.

Edric Vane lay at the bottom of the second turn, on the narrow shelf of rock just above the drop. Rhys had been right about the drop. The old man had gone over the edge of the Stair in the dusk, with the flock below him, and had been caught by a spur of stone before he reached the spoil, and he had lain there with one arm flung out as if to catch himself, and the snow had settled on him very gently, like a blanket drawn up by someone who did not want to wake him.

The dog lay beside him. It was an old collie, gray around the muzzle, with ice on its whiskers, and it did not growl or move when the lantern fell on it. It only lifted its eyes and looked at them, and then put its head down on the shepherd's chest again and let out a thin, shaking sigh.

"Oh," said Rhys. "Oh, Bracken."

Ambrose went down on one knee in the snow. He did not need to feel the throat for a pulse. The face was the color of old candle wax. But he laid two fingers of his left hand against the jaw anyway, and held them there, and said, in a low voice that he did not usually permit himself, "I am sorry, Edric. I should have come sooner."

The dog whined.

"He's been dead a few hours," Rhys said gently. "You couldn't have. Nobody could."

"That is not the same as should."

"No." A pause. "It isn't."

They lifted him together. It was an awkward business on the narrow shelf, with the rope tangled round their legs and the old man stiff as a fallen tree. Ambrose took the shoulders. He had meant to take the whole weight and send the boy home, but Rhys said, flatly, "I'll take the feet. Don't argue," and he did not argue, because the gray was at the collarbone now and there was no time. He got his arms under the dead man's armpits. The left held, a good strong grip. The right clamped over the cloth and did what he told it, and he could not feel the weight.

This was the thing. This was the ordinary, daily, unremarkable horror of it, and he had never grown used to it. He knew, as a matter of reason, that Edric Vane weighed perhaps ten stone. He could see the shoulders. He could see the stone fingers clutched in the old wool. But the hand told him nothing. It did not say heavy or light, slipping or sure. It simply held, or did not hold, according to some blind obedience of its own, and the only way he could tell whether he had the man was by looking, and in the dark and the blowing snow he could not see his hand.

He felt the body begin to slide.

He did not feel it in the fingers. He felt it in the left arm, a sudden terrible lurch as the whole burden swung to that side. He caught it with a grunt, and heaved, and the right hand clenched on the cloth, and there was a dreadful soft ripping noise as the old wool tore under the stone fingers. He had not known how hard he was gripping.

"Kell," said Rhys.

"I have him."

"You've torn his coat."

"I have him."

"You didn't know. You couldn't tell."

"No." It came out harsher than he meant. "I cannot tell. I never can. That is the nature of the thing."

The boy said nothing. He had come around the body, and now stood with his shoulder against the other side of the shepherd's chest, taking half of the weight without a word, and Ambrose saw his face in the lantern's wavering circle. It was not pity. He had braced for pity, and he could have borne it far less well. It was something more steady and more difficult, the look of a man watching another man do a hard thing and refusing to help him pretend that it was not hard.

"Count with me," Rhys said. "I'll tell you when it's slipping. You'll feel it in your left. Trust that. I'll watch your right."

They went down the Stair like that, step by careful step, with the dead man slung between them and the old dog padding at their heels. Rhys called the weight out softly, *steady, steady, shift, now*, and Ambrose obeyed. It was the strangest hour of his life. Never, in eleven years, had he let anyone watch his hand.

Osric Penhallow was waiting at the foot of the Stair.

There were four of them. They had come up from the lane with lanterns and ropes and a hurdle for a stretcher, the way people did in that valley when someone had been lost, and they stood in a half circle in the quarry yard with the snow settling on their hats. Two of them Ambrose did not know. One was Maud Penhallow, a small, plain, tired woman in a man's coat, with a blanket over her arm and a basket of bread. And in front of them, planted squarely in the path, with a lantern in his fist and a face like a closed gate, stood her husband.

He was a big man, forty or a little more, slow-spoken and slow-moving, with a farmer's wrists and a gray-shot beard that had once been red. Ambrose knew his face. He had known it for six winters. He had last seen it at the bottom of the Rise, on a morning in January, turned up toward the tower as a man's face turns toward a sky that has taken something from him.

"Give him here," said Osric.

They laid Edric Vane on the hurdle. The two strangers drew a cloth over his face. The dog lay down beside the stretcher and would not be moved.

"Joss is at home with the door open," said Ambrose. "I told her to stay inside."

"She'll thank you." The words were flat as a plank. Osric turned his lantern, and it passed over Ambrose, and over the torn coat on the hurdle, and over the stone hand hanging at his side, and then it moved on to the boy beside him, and stopped. "And you," he said. "The Alder lad. You're out of the tower."

"Mr. Penhallow," said Rhys.

"I'd heard you were kept up there. Behind the wall, the way they kept your brother." The big face did not change, but the eyes did. "He went up that road one morning and came down it in a box, you'll remember. I carried my father down that same road, in the spring. They're all on the same road."

"Osric," said Maud softly.

"I'm only saying it." He turned back to Ambrose. "You've the whole valley paying, Keeper. Every house in it. We pay with our years, and we pay with our fathers and our wives, and then we stand about at the bottom of your hill and watch you sit down to a laid table. You've a fire in every room of that tower. You've a cook. And you cannot even carry a dead man down a path." His voice did not rise. That was the worst of it. It sank, and thickened, and each word fell like a hand across the face. "I saw you tear that coat. I saw. A man with two good arms would have kept hold of it."

Ambrose said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was true.

"Give the boy to us," said Osric. "Maud's got a bed made up. He'll be among his own people. You've had your week." He took a step. "Come down, lad. Come home."

It was like watching a blade turn in the light. Ambrose saw it reach the boy. He saw the faint flinch, the quick helpless softening of the mouth. Home, said the word, and the lantern, and the bread in the basket, and the warm lit kitchen at the bottom of the lane where a child kept a candle on the step. He saw Rhys's eyes go past the man to the dark shape of the lane, and he knew, with a clean, sharp, entirely selfish terror, that the boy was going to say yes.

He made his choice in less than a breath.

"He may go with you," said Ambrose.

Osric stopped.

"He may go wherever he chooses. I will not stop him. I have never stopped any of them, and I will not begin now." He kept his voice level. It was the voice from the Slab, and he had never been so grateful for it. "But I will not lie to you either, Osric Penhallow. I have never lied to this valley, though I have given it good reason to wish I had. Outside the wall the gray runs ten times faster. You can see it on his neck. If he goes down to your kitchen tonight he will be at the heart before the new moon. That is not a threat. It is only what I know."

"It's what you say."

"Yes. It is what I say."

Osric spat.

It landed on the toe of Ambrose's boot, a dark wet mark on the snow, and in the stillness after it the sound of the wind in the quarry could be heard quite plainly. No one moved. Ambrose did not look down. He did not wipe it. He stood with his hands at his sides, and felt the heat rise in his face, and held the man's eyes, and did not look away.

"Do it at me," he said quietly. "If you must. Not at him."

"Osric," said Maud.

It was only the one word. But something in it was a hand laid on a rope, and the big man's shoulders slumped. He turned his face aside. When he looked back, the heat had gone out of it, and what was left was only tired and old and sick at heart.

"The man's dead between you," Maud said. She had stepped forward, and she spoke to her husband and not to the Keeper. "Edric Vane is lying in the snow, and you are standing over him making speeches. Take him home to Joss. Go on."

They went. The strangers took up the hurdle, and the dog got to its feet and limped after, and Osric followed them without a word, with the lantern swinging and his shoulders hunched. Maud lingered. She stood in the swirling flakes with the blanket on her arm and looked at Ambrose for a long moment with her tired, clear, brown eyes.

"Keeper," she said. "Thank you for going up."

"There is no need."

"There is, though." She looked at Rhys. "And you, lad. Mind yourself." She took the loaf from her basket and pressed it into his arms, and was gone.

They walked back up the Stair in silence.

The snow had thinned. The cloud was tearing open overhead, showing pieces of black sky and a few cold stars, and the wind had dropped to a hush. Rhys went in front, as before, with the rope between them, but it was slack now, and he did not turn round. At the wall he stopped. He put one hand on the old stone and stood for a moment with his head down, breathing, and Ambrose saw that the gray had reached the point of the left shoulder, a hand's breadth below the collar, and that the boy was swaying where he stood.

"Rhys."

"I'm all right."

"You are not."

"I know. Just let me do this." He stepped over the wall. His whole body shuddered, once, the way a horse shudders at a cold stream. Then he stood straight, and his breath came out in a long white plume, and the lines of strain around his mouth began, very slowly, to ease.

"You told him the truth," he said, not looking round. "When you could have just let him take me, and had a quiet life."

"It was not a choice."

"It was exactly a choice." He turned. His eyes were dark and bright and very steady. "And you let him spit on you, and you didn't say one word to defend yourself. I've never seen anyone do that. I didn't know it was possible."

"I have had a great deal of practice."

"I know," said Rhys. "That's what frightens me."

He went inside.

Ambrose followed him, slowly. The hall was warm. Someone, Bess, no doubt, had built up the fire and set bowls on the long table, and a pot of something that might once have been soup hung steaming from its hook. He crossed to the hearth. He sat down on the stone with a stiffness that surprised him. And only then, with the heat on his face and the dark and snow shut out behind him, did he understand that he was shaking.

It began in his jaw. He tried to stop it and could not. It spread to the shoulders and the ribs and the whole length of his left arm, a hard, helpless, rattling shudder, and his teeth would not stay together, and his breath came in short ragged gasps. He had been cold for hours. He had not noticed. And all the while the right arm lay across his knees like a bar of iron, silent and indifferent, with a crust of ice on the fingers that he had not known was there and could not feel.

Something heavy and warm dropped around his shoulders. It was a blanket, wool, still holding the heat of the kitchen. Rhys had come back with it. He did not say anything. He knelt on the flags in front of Ambrose and drew the blanket tight, and then he took the stone hand in both of his own.

"Do not," said Ambrose. "It cannot feel."

"I know it can't." The boy was already working at the ice. He had a cloth in one fist and a cup of warm water in the other, and he poured it slowly over the gray knuckles, and the ice cracked and ran away in rivulets on the hearthstone. He rubbed the fingers dry, one by one. He did it as he had done everything in the workroom, with a mason's careful, unembarrassed attention, as though the hand were a piece of work that had been left in the weather. "You can't feel it. I can. That's the point. I'm doing it for me."

"That is not a sufficient reason."

"It's the only one I need."

Ambrose looked down at the dark head bent over his hand. The firelight picked out a streak of gray in the chestnut hair, close behind the ear, that had not been there on the day of the naming. It was a small thing. It was nothing. It was one pale hair, in a thousand. And he knew that if he lived to be a hundred he would remember it.

"You are shaking," Rhys said, without looking up. "Your whole side. The hand's not cold, it's the other half of you."

"Yes."

"You've got a body, Kell. It's allowed to be tired."

"I have found that it is rarely permitted."

"By whom?"

He had no answer. The fire popped. Rhys finished drying the last finger and laid the gray hand down on the blanket, very gently, palm up, and then, instead of letting go, he moved up onto the hearthstone and sat down beside him. Not near. Beside. Shoulder to shoulder, the blanket drawn across them both, so close that Ambrose could feel the line of heat down his whole left side, the faint tremor of the other man's own weariness, the slow rise and fall of his breath.

He did not say anything. He thought that if he spoke it would break.

"He was wrong, you know," Rhys said at last. He was looking at the fire. "Osric. About you."

"He was not entirely wrong."

"No." A silence. "But he was wrong about the part that mattered."

He let his head tip, a little, until it rested against the Keeper's shoulder. It was a small movement. It was a tired man's movement, the kind a man makes without thinking when the day is done and he has no strength left to be careful. Ambrose sat as still as a stone. He did not breathe. He felt the weight of that head against his collarbone, warm and solid and entirely trusting, and he thought that he had never in his life been given anything so large.

He did not touch him. He kept his left hand on his knee and his right on the blanket and did not touch him. It was the hardest thing that he had ever done, harder than the Slab, harder than the pen. And in a little while the weight eased, and the breath beside his ear grew slow and deep, and he understood that the boy had fallen asleep.

He sat there until the fire burned low.

When at last he rose, with infinite care, and eased Rhys down onto the hearthstone with the blanket tucked round his shoulders, it was past the middle of the night. He crossed to the long window, the one with the narrow slit that looked down the valley, and put his cheek to the cold stone.

The snow had stopped. The lane lay below him, pale and silent. And at the foot of the Rise, in the dark of the road, a single lantern burned.

It was not moving. It stood in the middle of the way, held high, as though by a man who had come to a decision and then found that he could not act on it. The light was small and steady and yellow. Ambrose knew exactly whose it was.

He watched it for a long time. Osric Penhallow stood at the bottom of the hill and looked up at the tower, and the tower looked back, and neither of them moved until the sky began to gray.