She chose the Long Keel herself, and that was the first mistake.

She knew it was a mistake only afterward, in the way you know about the step you missed once you are already at the bottom of the stair. At the time it felt like a decision made with a cool head. She had spent eight days at the bench with a magnifying lens and a dish of fish-glue, going over the Sennet page inch by inch, and the seam that ran down the middle of it had closed by the width of a thumbnail. Not much. But it had closed. And on the ninth morning, when she pressed her palm flat against the repaired sheet and held it for a count of sixty, it had breathed in time with her, in, out, as steady as a sleeper, and she had felt a small hot flush of triumph go through her that she had not felt since her first fully rebuilt book at nineteen.

So she thought she understood the rules.

A page held what was held honestly. She had that. She knew the shape of it now: that the quality of the repair depended on the quality of the trust between the people at the sill, and that every secret between her and the Warden was a hairline fracture that would not take the adhesive. She had been careful. She had been honest, where honesty was cheap. She had told him about her binder, and her flat, and the hymnal she was never going to deliver. She had not told him about the notebook, and its name, and its little blue message in the dark. She had not told him about her fingers, which were colder every day, or about the tune.

She had it all in a box, in her head, with the lid on. She thought it would hold.

"The Long Keel," said Tavian.

He was standing at the foot of the workshop table, with the grey light behind him and a paper in his hand, and he had said it flatly, as though the words had weight. It was the afternoon of the twelfth day, or perhaps the thirteenth. She had started to lose count. Sixty-nine, she thought. Sixty-eight.

"It's the one that nearly dropped you," said Maren. "It's the one that's actually failing, not one that might be. If I'm going to learn anything from this, I'd rather learn it from the page that's going to matter."

"It is the oldest in the set."

"All the better. Old paper has more to teach you."

He did not answer at once. She watched his face, as she had learned to watch it, for the small tremors that told you where the break was coming. A flicker at the jaw. A narrowing of the eyes. A way of looking not at her but at a point just above her shoulder, as though the page itself were hanging there in the air.

"I would rather you began with a smaller one," he said at last.

"Why?"

"It is a question of risk."

"Whose?"

"Yours." He said it quickly, and a shade too evenly. "I have not worked out what it costs, when you mend. You have not either. You are cold in the mornings. You will not say so, but I have seen it. I would prefer to know the price before we pay it on the greatest page we have."

It landed, and went in. She had not known he had seen. She had been so careful.

"I'm fine," said Maren.

"You said that on the first night, with blood on both hands."

"And it was true then, too." She came round the table and stood in front of him, with her hands tucked into her sleeves, because she did not want him to see them. "Ask me," she said. "You said you'd learn to ask."

He looked at her.

"Conservator," he said slowly, "may I ask that you choose a smaller page?"

"No," said Maren. "But thank you for asking."

Something crossed his face. It might have been exasperation. It might have been something much warmer, and much more tired, that he was too good at hiding for her to be certain. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he had the look of a man laying down a hand of cards he did not like.

"Then it will be the Long Keel," said Tavian. "On the sill, at the fourth bell. And I will hold it."

*

The Long Keel was larger than any page she had touched.

It came down through the water on its cord like a great pale sail, twice her height and nearly as wide as the sill, and when it settled into the shallow trough with a long slow sigh, she had to take a step back to see the whole of it. It was an old sheet. She could see that at once. The paper had a deep ivory cast, close to the colour of a piano key, and the fibres in it were so fine and so densely felted that it had the look of cloth. The ink was darker than the others, a blue-green that went almost to black at the centre. It did not branch in tides, as the other sheets did. It ran in long confident curves, great sweeping strokes from edge to edge, like the wake of a ship across a bay.

It breathed. But the breath caught at the top, a tiny hitch, as a sleeper's does who is about to wake.

"May I?" said Maren.

"You may," said Tavian, and laid two fingers of his right hand on the upper edge of the sheet.

The page quieted. She felt it in her own chest, a loosening, like a held note let go. She bent over it with the lens clamped to her eye, as she always did, and began where she always began, at the edge, along the line of the worst of the damage.

The ink had begun to spread. She could see that. Grey haze crept in from the margins, a hand's breadth deep on three sides. A long fracture ran down the left fold like a seam in a coat. She worked the damp brush down it, patient, even, breathing through her nose. She laid the first strip of tissue. It took.

She let out a breath she had not known she was holding. That was good. That was very good.

She was on the second fold when she saw the stitches.

She almost missed them. They were fine as hairs, finer than any thread she had ever handled, and the same pale ivory as the paper itself. They ran along the line of the fold in a tight, regular, tiny pattern, a fraction of an inch apart, so close that without the lens she would have taken them for a seam of the paper's own making. She drew back. She bent again. She moved the lens along, a quarter inch, another, and saw that the pattern did not stop. It went on, down the whole length of the fold, and then along the top edge, and then in a long delicate curve around a patch of old damage that had been closed, healed, and sealed over so cleanly that no one, in all the years since, had ever noticed it was there.

Someone had mended this page.

Someone had sat where she was sitting, and bent where she was bending, and taken a needle finer than hers and a thread she could not name, and stitched the paper's edges together around the original writing, without touching a single stroke of ink. It was a conservator's repair. It was exactly the kind of repair that she would have made, if she had been a hundred times more skilful than she was.

"Tavian," she said. Her voice came out strange. "Did you know this had been repaired?"

He did not answer at once.

She turned her head. He was holding the page with his right hand and looking not at her but at the stitches, in the green light, with an expression she could not interpret. It was not surprise. She would have known surprise. It was something more like the look of a man who has been waiting for a particular sentence for a very long time, and has just heard it, and wishes that he had not.

"It was before my time," said Tavian.

It was a good answer. It was clean and quiet and precisely level. It had all the weight of a true sentence. And it was, she thought, with a small cold feeling under her ribs, an answer to the question whether the repair had been made in his time. It was not an answer to the question whether he knew.

She did not say so. She had told him a lie of her own that morning, with her hands in her sleeves. She turned back to the page.

"Whoever it was," she said, "they were better than me."

"I do not think that is possible."

"Mm." She lowered the lens. "I want to see how it's attached. I'm going to lay one finger on the join. Just one. I won't press."

"Conservator."

"I know the rule. I'm not touching the page. I'm touching the repair."

"That is a distinction a lawyer would make."

"It's a distinction a conservator makes. They're different things." She did not wait for him. She reached out with her right hand, and laid one fingertip, very lightly, on a stitch.

The page woke.

*

It did not happen all at once. It began as a taste.

Salt, and old lamp oil, and under it, very faintly, a warm brown smell that she knew in her bones and could not place, like bread, or the inside of a coat. Then a sound. A scratch of a nib. A low flat sound of someone breathing, close, steady, intent. Then the colours came, and she was not in the vault.

She was looking down.

She was looking down at this same page, in lamplight, from a little distance and a little above, the way you look at your own hands when you are working. The light was yellow and warm. The paper was whole. Its great ink-wake ran from edge to edge, deep and clean, and across it, over it, in front of her eyes, moved a pair of hands.

They were small hands. They were strong. They were stained at the fingertips with the same blue-black that lived in her own, and one of them, the left, wore a ring on the smallest finger, a thin band of dull silver, and had a small pale crescent scar at the base of the thumbnail.

Maren knew the scar.

She knew it the way you know a word in a language you have not spoken for years. She had last seen it across a kitchen table, when she was nine, curled around a teacup with a crack in its handle, while a voice that she could not hear now said, stay still, hold it there, I've nearly got it. She had watched that thumb press glue along a break, and a small stained fingertip hold it, a count of sixty, a count of sixty, without trembling.

She was looking at her mother's hands.

They moved with a sure quick care across the page, a needle in one and the end of a thread in the other. They paused, and tied off, and bent again. And as they worked, there came into the air above them a sound.

A tune.

It was low. It was rough. It was hummed, barely, under the breath, by someone who did not know she was humming. Three notes, and a fourth that came late and slid sideways, like a foot finding a stair in the dark. And then a fifth, and a long turning phrase, and the first bar of something that opened out into a whole.

She knew it.

She had lost it in the cold workshop, with the water running, standing at the trough with her hands going numb. She had stood there trying to remember, and found a space where it should be, clean and white and smooth. And here it was. Here, in the green vault, in the dark of a page, it came whole and unbroken, as though it had been waiting, the way she had waited, for someone to turn the light on.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to press her hands against her ears and hear it forever.

A voice murmured over the humming, close, dry and fond. Not hers. Not her mother's. A man's, light, a little breathless. *You will be at it all night.* And her mother's voice, so near she felt it in her own throat: *Count the pages twice, Edric. That's all anyone ever has to do.*

And over her mother's hand, over the small stained fingers with the crescent scar, came a second hand. It was larger. It was bare on the right, and on the left it wore a glove of grey leather. It closed gently over the fingers and the needle, and held them still, and stayed.

They did not move.

The lamp burned. The tune ran on, softer, thinner. She felt the weight of the glove, through the page, through the years, as if it lay over her own hand. She felt, with a sudden dizzying conviction that went through her like cold water, that she was not looking at her mother's hands at all. That she was the hands. That the page, in its slow patient fibre, had kept this one evening for all the years since, and could not tell, any longer, the woman who had made the stitches from the woman who touched them now.

It thought she was her.

Cold surged up her arm.

It came from the fingertip. It came all at once, like a door opening on winter, and it went up through the wrist and the elbow and the shoulder, and she felt every nerve in the hand go dumb. She could not feel the page. She could not feel her fingers. She tried to pull back, and the finger did not move, and she thought with perfect clarity: it is taking the tune.

She felt it go. She felt it pulled, thread by thread, out of the place where it lived. The humming thinned. The fifth note went. The long phrase. The first bar, and the fourth note that slid sideways. It was being drawn out of her like a thread out of a cloth, and every inch of it went with a small clean click, as a lock goes. And behind it, trailing, the little scene around it: the warm brown smell, the yellow lamp, the glove closing over her mother's fingers.

"Stop," said Maren. She heard her voice from a long way off. "Please. That's mine. That one's mine."

The page did not stop.

"Conservator!"

Tavian's voice. Somewhere. Close. She could see a pale shape bending toward her in the green water-light and she thought, very distinctly: I should tell him. I should tell him about the fingers. I should have told him a week ago.

Her knees folded.

She did not feel herself fall. She felt only a pair of arms, hard and sure and warm, close around her before she reached the stone; and a coat against her cheek; and the smell of cedar and cold tea and ink. A voice saying her name, not Conservator, not anything else, the one word, over and over, with a note in it she had never heard from a man's mouth before.

Then the green went dark.

*

She woke in the attic room, in the narrow bed under the sloping ceiling, with a hot brick at her feet and a wet cloth on her forehead and every muscle in her body feeling as though it had been wrung out.

The round window was dark. A candle burned in its dish on the shelf. By its light she saw the rafters, the shelf with its mug, the bundle of cloth on the sill that held the notebook. And a chair, drawn up beside the bed, with a man in it.

He sat very straight. His coat was off. His sleeves were pushed to the elbow, and the glove on his left hand was gone, and she saw, before he noticed she was awake, that he was holding it in his lap, bare, in the candlelight, and not hiding it.

"You are awake," said Tavian.

She tried to answer. Her mouth was dry. He had a cup in his hand, and he held it to her lips, and she drank, and it was the green tea with something sweet and sharp stirred in. When it was empty he took it away.

"How long?"

"Five hours."

"You carried me."

"Yes."

"All the way up the stair. And across the path."

"Yes."

"People saw."

"The boy saw," said Tavian, dryly. "Pell. He was at the corner of the net-shed with a basket of weed. I believe he dropped it. By now the whole quay will have concluded that the Warden has lost his mind."

She laughed. It came out as a croak, and it hurt, and she shut her eyes. When she opened them he was looking at her with such open worry that she turned her face to the wall.

She tried the tune.

She did it quietly, with her lips barely open, like someone trying a stair in the dark. She had it. She had the first note. She was sure she had the first note. And then a second, and a third, and a fourth that slid sideways and arrived late.

And then nothing.

She tried again. The first note. The second. The third. She knew there was a fifth, and she knew it was lower than the fourth, and that after it came a long turning phrase that opened out like a hand. But the space where it should have been was white. It was not blank, as a forgotten word is blank. It was smooth. It had been cleaned.

It had given her the whole tune for the length of one breath, and then taken it back, and taken a little more besides.

She pressed her lips together. She was not going to cry. She was a grown woman of twenty-eight, and a professional, and she was not going to cry in front of the Warden of the Tide over a song she had not thought about in sixteen years.

"Maren," said Tavian.

She did not turn her head.

"I am not going to ask what you saw," he said, very quietly. "I will ask only whether you are in pain."

"No." It was true, as far as it went. "My hands are cold. That's all."

She felt him go still. She had told him, then, she realized, without quite meaning to. She had said it to the wall, in a small dull voice, and it hung in the candlelit air between them like a dropped glove.

"How long?" he said.

"Since the first stitch."

"Eleven days."

"Twelve." She shut her eyes. "It's nothing. It's the paper. It's cold paper."

He did not answer. She heard the chair creak. She felt, a moment later, the weight of something warm laid across her hands where they lay on the blanket: not a hand, but a cloth, folded, hot from the brick. He wrapped it around them with great care, one after the other, and tucked in the ends, and sat back.

She thought she would sleep. She did, for a little, in the way you sleep when you are very tired and not yet ready, in short slips like a stone skipping over water. Once, close to midnight, she woke, and the candle had burned low, and she lay with her eyes open a crack and her face turned toward the window.

The notebook on the sill was glowing.

It was very faint. She could see the pale blue-green seep of it through the folds of cloth, and the cloth had slipped open again, and the cover was lifting, as a lid lifts. Something in the dim room moved. He had risen. He crossed to the sill in three silent steps, and stood with his back to her, looking down at the open book.

He did not touch it at first. He only looked, and she could see the line of his back, rigid, the head bent. He stood there so long that she thought he had forgotten her. Then his right hand came out, and he laid it very carefully flat on the cover and closed it, with a gesture so gentle, so reluctant, that it was like watching a man close the eyes of the dead.

He wrapped it in its cloth and tucked the ends. He stood another moment with his palm on it. Then he turned, quickly, and she shut her eyes before he could see that she was awake.

She heard him sit.

She lay with her heart going, and her lids pressed down, and thought: he knows what that says. He knows what's in it. He has known since the rocks.

And she thought: and so do I, a little, now. And I'm not going to ask.

*

It was very late when she spoke.

She had thought he was asleep. He had put his head back against the wall, with his eyes closed and his bare left hand lying open on his knee, palm up, the black line plain in the candlelight. She looked at it for a long time. It was not as bad as she had feared. It was not much better. Beneath the red thread of his cuff, which she had never noticed before, it ran like a river on a map.

"She hummed," said Maren.

He did not open his eyes. But the hand on his knee closed slowly.

"My mother. She hummed when she fixed things. Cups, mostly. She'd sit at the kitchen table with a broken cup, and a tube of glue, and a toothpick, and she'd hum, and she'd never get the tune right. Three notes and a fourth that slid. I used to think she did it on purpose." Her voice was dry and thin. "I haven't thought about it in years. I thought I'd forgotten it. And then today it was just there, and then it wasn't."

He was silent.

"That's all," said Maren. "It's not a secret. It's not a page. It's just a thing I wanted to say."

"I understand," said Tavian.

He did not say anything else. He did not tell her it would come back, which was a thing people said, and which she would not have believed. He did not tell her he was sorry, which she had once told him was what people said when they could not fix it. He only sat in the candlelight with his head against the wall and his eyes shut and his hand open on his knee, and listened, in a way she was beginning to understand was the only gift he had ever really learned to give. She felt the silence settle around them, thick and warm, like wool.

Then, because it was late and she was tired and the candle was low, and because a question had been sitting in her chest like a stone since the moment her knees went, she asked it.

"Why did you carry me?"

His eyes opened.

"All the way back," said Maren. "Up the stair, and across the path, in front of Pell and half the island. You could have shouted for someone. You could have sent for Odda. You could have left me on the sill and fetched a cart. Why did you carry me yourself?"

He looked at her.

The candle guttered. In the long yellow light, he looked older than he was, and younger, and entirely, nakedly tired. There was a pause. It was not a long one. It was exactly the length of time it takes a careful man to choose the truest sentence that will not give him away.

"Because it was faster," said Tavian.

It was a good answer. It was level and plain and perfectly reasonable, and she had spent twelve years learning to hear the difference between a surface that said a thing and a hand that had put it there. She looked at his face and he looked at hers.

She knew it was not the whole reason.

She knew it as she knew the edge of a torn page. She could feel the shape of what was missing. And she lay with her cold hands wrapped in hot cloth and a song she could no longer find, and let him have it, because she had a lie of her own, and because the warmth of the room was a thing she did not wish to disturb.

"Thank you," she said. "For being fast."

He nodded once. He closed his eyes. The candle burned down to a small blue bead, and the sea breathed in the stone, in for ten and out for ten, and neither of them slept, and neither of them said so.