From the Keeper's Ledger: Corley, Ilsabet. Dyer. Eleven years taken. Entered ten winters past.

Dagny Orme examined people the way other women kneaded bread, with her whole weight and no apology.

She had come up to the east room on the third morning after the storm, with her satchel on one shoulder and a face like a shut door, and she had said, "Shirt," and Rhys had taken it off. There was no sense in arguing. He had learned that much in four days. The woman had been bleeding the village's cows and setting its children's bones for thirty years, and she regarded modesty as a luxury for people with time on their hands.

Now he sat on the edge of the bed with the blanket round his waist and the pale winter light falling across his bare shoulders, and she walked slowly around him, tapping.

The little silver hammer she used had a head no bigger than a hazelnut. She struck it lightly against the point of his collarbone, then the shoulder, then the top of the arm, and each time she bent her head to one side and listened, like a woman checking a row of wine casks. The sound that came back was not the sound of bone. It was a flat, dry, faintly musical note, the note of a stone dropped on a stone, and it went through him in a cold little shiver that he could not stop.

"Mm," said Dagny.

"Is that good or bad?"

"It is a sound." She set the hammer down and took up a brass rule instead, the same sort of rule he used himself for measuring lintels, and laid it along the line of gray that ran from his collar across the shoulder. "Four days ago it had your elbow. Two days ago, after the storm, it reached the point of the shoulder. And today?" She squinted. "It's holding at the collarbone. A finger past it, no more."

"Holding?"

"Not retreating. It never does. But inside these walls it creeps at about a tenth of the pace it would outside, and tonight and tomorrow it may not move at all, and then it will lurch forward a little and stand still again." She wrote a figure in the small black notebook that she carried in her apron. "Like the tide coming up a flat beach. It goes in slow and doesn't come out."

Rhys looked at his own shoulder. The gray was beautiful, in its way. That was the infuriating thing. It was not a bruise or a blight. It had the fine, branching, delicate look of frost on a windowpane, a fern pattern of pale lines that thickened toward the center and thinned toward the edges, and in some lights it seemed to have a faint silver sheen. If he had found it on a piece of marble in the yard he would have called it a fine vein and priced the block accordingly.

"What is it?" he asked. "Truly. Not what the village says. You've seen more of it than anyone."

Dagny did not answer at once. She pulled the stool across the floor with her foot and sat down heavily, with her knees apart and her forearms resting on them, and for a moment she looked very old.

"The village says the Stone eats you," she said. "The Keeper says the Stone takes what it is owed. I say it reads."

"Reads?"

"Mm. I've been looking at it for thirty years, and I don't say this to anyone, because nobody wants a healer who has theories. But I've never seen it go the same way twice. In Alis Fenwick, the weaver, it went to the hands first and stayed there. In a cooper named Dunstan Pell it went to the shoulders, where he'd spent his life lifting. In a woman who sang in the church, it went to the throat. It goes to where you're strongest." She tapped her own breastbone. "It goes to the thing you are. I think the Stone remembers every name that was ever written in the ledger, and that when it marks someone, it goes through them the way you'd go through a pocket, to see what's inside."

"To see what it can use," Rhys said slowly.

"Aye." She looked up. "That's what I'm afraid of."

He waited. The fire ticked in the grate. Out in the passage something creaked, a loose board, and went quiet.

"Give me your hands," said Dagny.

He held them out. She took the right in both of hers and turned it palm up, and then she did something he had not expected. She did not look at the gray. She looked at the calluses. She ran her thumb slowly along the thick pad at the base of his thumb, the ridge along the side of the forefinger, the hard yellow plate across the heel of the palm where the mallet rode, and her eyes went narrow and distant, like a woman reading a letter in a hand she had known once and not seen for years.

"You hold the chisel in the left," she said.

"I do."

"And strike with the right."

"Yes."

"Nobody cuts chisel-left anymore. They all want the steel in the strong hand, and the mallet in the weak. It's tidier." She did not release him. "Who taught you?"

"Marek."

The name dropped into the room like a coin down a well. Dagny's thumb stopped moving.

"He said it was the old way," Rhys went on, a little unsteadily. "He said that when you cut chisel-left you can see the line you're cutting, because your good eye is behind the steel, instead of the hand blocking it. He said it was how they used to do it, in the first days. Most people thought he was being contrary." He swallowed. "He was a little."

"He was a great deal," said Dagny, in a voice that was not quite her own. "The first time he came to my door with a split thumb I told him that I'd never seen a man handle an edge so badly. He told me he'd never been taught, he'd only listened to the stone. I said that was a fool's answer. And he said, yes, ma'am, but it was a fool's answer that worked."

Her fingers tightened round his wrist for a moment, hard, and then let go. She stood up so abruptly that the stool rocked. "Hands for a chisel," she muttered, to no one, and turned away to the window, and stood with her back to him and her arms folded across her chest.

Rhys sat still. He had a very clear sense that something had gone past him in the room, large and quiet, like a heron lifting from a pond, and that if he moved suddenly he would never see which way it flew.

"Dagny," he said, as gently as he could. "What did the Stone want with my brother's hands?"

"I couldn't say."

"Couldn't, or won't?"

"I'm a healer. I mend what's mended. I don't read the mind of a lump of rock." She spoke to the glass. "And I'd thank you not to put words in my mouth. I said it goes to where you're strongest. I didn't say a word about Marek."

"You said his name first."

"I did not."

"You did. You said, 'Hands for a chisel.'"

She turned. Her face was quite composed, but the skin around her eyes had gone tight, and Rhys, who had spent his whole life watching other people's faces for the first sign of the grain turning, saw it as plainly as a flaw in a block. He did not press. He had learned from Marek that you did not strike a stone at its weakest point. You struck beside it, and let the crack find its own way.

"You were at the tower," he said, instead. "When he was here."

"I was at the tower every day of my life."

"When he died."

A long silence. Out in the valley a church bell struck the hour, thin and far away.

"Yes," said Dagny.

"Nobody told me how. They only said the Stone took him. They brought him down the Rise in a box and the lid was nailed, and the sexton wouldn't let me open it, he said it wasn't fit." The words came out of him very evenly. They had been waiting for four years. "I've never known whether he was afraid. I've never known whether he was alone."

Dagny came back to the stool and sat down. She did it slowly, like a woman lowering herself into cold water.

"I washed him," she said.

Rhys had not breathed.

"The night before they nailed the lid. I did it myself. The sexton's wife would have, but I told her I'd see to it, and she was glad enough to be rid of the job." She looked at her own hands. They were large and scarred and red from the soap she used, and for the first time he saw that they were trembling. "He was very light. At the end. The gray had been through him by then, down to the bone, and there was almost nothing of him left to wash. But his face was quite peaceful. I'll tell you that, and you can hold on to it if you like. He wasn't frightened. He had the look of a man who had finished a piece of work."

"What work?"

"I don't know."

"Dagny."

"I don't know, boy." She lifted her head, and her eyes were wet, which astonished him, because he would sooner have expected the mountain to weep. "He spent his last weeks in the study with the door shut. He was always cutting something small and closing his hand over it, as if he were afraid someone would take it. I asked what it was. He said, 'Insurance.' And then he laughed, the great fool, as if he'd said something very funny."

Rhys sat quite still. A cold had settled in his chest that had nothing to do with the gray. *Insurance.* He turned the word over and over, and could make nothing of it, but it had the clean hard shape of a thing that was going to matter.

"Was Kell there?" he asked. "At the end?"

"He was there for all of it."

"Every day?"

"Every hour," said Dagny, "that your brother would let him."

It was not an answer that settled anything. It lit a lamp in a dark room and showed only that the room was larger than he had thought. He thought of a black coat standing in a ditch by a village gate. He thought of a gray hand spread across the lower half of a page, and a leaning scrawl of three words, and the dreadful steady courtesy of a man who said, *I may not answer.*

"I'm going to ask him," he said.

Dagny closed her eyes.

"I know you are," she said. "I knew it the moment you walked up the road. You've got your brother's face and his temper and his way of going straight at the thing everyone else is walking round. It's a very fine quality, and it will drive me to an early grave." She opened her eyes. "I'll tell you this, and then I'll say no more. Don't ask him about the four years. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because he'll tell you."

Rhys stared at her.

"Think about it," she said wearily. "You've sat at his table. You've heard how he answers a question. If you ask what he did, he'll tell you what he did. If you ask why, he'll tell you what he can, and he'll refuse the rest, quite politely, and you will go away with half a truth in your hand like a broken plate. And you'll lie awake at night fitting the pieces, and some of them won't fit, and you'll fit them anyway, because you'll have to, and you'll get it wrong. That is what he does to people. He doesn't lie. He leaves a door shut and lets you imagine the room."

"That's worse than lying?"

"In a way." She rubbed her face. "It's honest. That's the devil of it. He has made a religion of never saying a false word, and I don't believe he has the least idea that silence can be a kind of falsehood too."

Rhys sat with this for a while. He found, to his irritation, that she was right about the lying awake. He had done it for four nights running, with his eyes on the ceiling and his hand on the blanket, fitting and refitting the shape of a story that had a hole in its middle. He had not put it into words. She had put it into words for him, and he did not thank her for it.

"I don't want to like him," he said at last, stiffly.

"No one asked what you want."

"I mean it. I've tried. It's like trying to dislike weather."

"Mm." There was something very like a smile at the corner of Dagny's mouth. "He's better than he looks, you know. And worse, in all the right places."

"That doesn't mean anything."

"It means that if you're waiting for him to turn out to be a monster, you'll have a long wait, and you'll be sorry for it." She slid the notebook into her apron. "Did he tell you he was in my kitchen at the third hour after midnight, the night you ran? White as milk, with his knuckles bleeding on my floor?"

"You told me."

"I told you he wanted boots sharpened. I didn't tell you that he sat down on my bench afterward, and put his head in his hand, and said nothing at all for the better part of an hour. He's a man who doesn't sit. I've known him eleven years and I've never once seen him sit down in someone else's house." She looked at Rhys steadily. "He sat in mine for you."

Rhys felt the blood climb his throat.

He had not meant it to. It was a stupid, traitorous, involuntary thing, a heat that began under the collar and ran up behind the ears, and he could do nothing about it. He thought of a long dark head bent over his frozen hand. He thought of a breath on his knuckles, warm and unhurried, and the way he had not moved away. He kept his face turned to the fire and prayed that the light would be kind.

Dagny watched him. She said nothing for as long as it took a log to settle in the grate.

"Hm," she said.

That was all. She picked up her satchel and slung it over her shoulder, and went to the door, and did not look back. Rhys was almost grateful to her. "Put your shirt on, you'll catch your death," she said from the passage, in a voice so ordinary it was a mercy, and her boots went away down the stair.

He sat where he was for a long time.

The room was warm. He could smell the clean cold smell of the old stone under the lime wash, and the faint sweetness of the apple wood in the grate, and under both of them, a very faint smell that he had begun to notice and could not identify, a dry, quiet, mineral scent, like the inside of a church in winter. It was the smell of the tower. He had thought, the first night, that he would never get used to it. He realized now that he had stopped noticing it three days ago, and that the loss of the strangeness was a small defeat of its own.

He put on his shirt. He buttoned it wrongly and did it again. He went to the window, the narrow one that faced the Rise, and put his forehead against the cold glass, and made himself look at the thing that he had been avoiding for four days. Far below, beyond the wall and the frozen turf and the long switchbacks of the road, the lane ran down between the houses to a gray roof with a smoking chimney. The step was empty. It was only mid-morning. Nell would be at school, if Maggie Thorne had her way, or at the market stall, or running along the river with her braid coming undone.

He put his right hand against the glass and spread the fingers. The gray had reached the third knuckle of each. It was fine and delicate and very cold.

There was a knock at the door. It was a light, apologetic little rap, not at all like Dagny's, and when he opened it Wick Hale was standing on the mat with his cap in his hands and his freckles standing out like nutmeg on his white face.

"Beg pardon, sir," the boy said. "Dagny said I was to bring it up, and I wasn't to read it, and I didn't. Only the ink's smudged at the edge, because I dropped it in the snow." He held out a folded square of paper, much creased, and a very small bundle wrapped in a scrap of cloth. "It come with the carter. He said it was for the Alder lad, and there was a note on the outside, and I'm to say it was from the little one."

"Thank you, Wick."

"You're welcome, sir. Are you really going to be all right?"

Rhys looked at the boy. He was twelve years old and as thin as a rake and had no business asking such a thing, and his chin was lifted, and his eyes were enormous.

"I think so," Rhys said. "I'm told I'm very stubborn."

"That's what Gran says, too." Wick bobbed his head, and fled.

He closed the door. He sat down on the bed with the letter on his knee and the bundle in his left hand, and for a moment he did not open either. The cloth was a corner torn from an old flannel petticoat. It was knotted at the top with a bit of red wool. He undid the knot.

Inside lay a feather.

It was small, no longer than his finger, brown and cream and barred with a darker brown in tiny, close, exquisite stripes, and it was perfect. It had not a barb out of place. It lay on the gray flannel as lightly as breath. Nell had found it somewhere, in a hedge, in the frost, on the way to school, and she had known at once what it was. A wren's. He did not need to ask.

He unfolded the letter. It was very short.

*Rhys. I found this by the pump. You said it will have feathers so here is how they go. The little ones on the front go like this, the stripe goes across, not down. I looked for a long time. I am not sad. Maggie says you have to eat. Do you eat? Your cousin Nell.*

*P.S. I am only telling you what the stripes look like.*

He held the feather in his left hand and looked at it until the shape of it blurred. He had been carving the bird for a week. He had been carving it badly, in a hurry, cutting the feathers in ruffled rows like fish scales, because he had not looked carefully at a wren since he was a child and had only a muddy memory of a small round brown thing that hopped. And she had gone out into the frost and found him the answer, and brought it back in a bit of flannel, because she was eleven years old and would not be told that it was impossible to help.

It came upon him all at once, the way a wave comes upon a man standing in shallow water. It was not the fear and it was not the cold. It was the plain, enormous, stupid ache of being homesick for a place six hundred yards down a hill. He could see the lane as clearly as if he stood in it. He could smell the woodsmoke and the pumice and the boiled-cabbage smell of Maggie Thorne's kitchen. He could hear Nell's boots on the cobbles, running.

He wrapped the feather up again, very gently, and held it against his chest with his bandaged hand, and sat there on the edge of the bed with his shoulders bowed and his eyes shut.

Nobody saw. It was a mercy. The fire burned. The tower creaked and settled around him in the afternoon quiet, and somewhere far below him, with a faint, regular, patient rhythm like the beating of a slow heart, a hammer fell on a stone, and fell again.