Maren was awake before the bell, which she counted as a victory, because it meant that for the first time in three days she had beaten the thing at its own game.

She had not slept well. She had slept the way you sleep on a night train, in pieces, surfacing at every station to check that her bag was still under the seat. But somewhere in the fourth hour of the dark a decision had settled in her, quiet and solid, like the sediment at the bottom of a jar of paste once the water has finally drained off. When she woke it was simply there. If she could not leave, she would not drift. A conservator did not drift. A conservator drew up a treatment plan.

She washed at the basin under the window, in water so cold it made her teeth ache, and pulled on the grey shirt over her jeans. She had given up pretending it was borrowed. She braided her hair with fingers that were nearly steady, and looked at the notebook lying under its row of sea-stones, and said, "Not today. But I haven't forgotten you."

Then she went down to find the Warden of the Tide and negotiate with him.

He was in the kitchen, as he was every morning, standing at the long window with a cup of the green tea going cold in his right hand. The grey light off the water lay across his shoulders. He did not turn when she came in. He had heard her on the stairs; she was learning that he heard everything in this tower, the way a sailor hears weather.

She stopped on the far side of the table, with the whole length of oak between them, and waited.

He turned. He looked at her, at the braid, the set of her chin, the way she had placed both hands flat on the wood. Something at the corner of his mouth shifted, very slightly, like a man who has recognized a posture.

"You said you would answer in the morning," said Tavian.

"You said you wouldn't ask me to stay."

"I did not. I asked whether you could mend it."

"Then ask me again."

A pause. The sea breathed in through the stones, and out. "Conservator," he said gravely, "could you mend it?"

"Yes," said Maren. "On terms."

"Terms."

"I need paper and a pen. Not a nice pen. Something you won't miss." She was already pulling out a chair. "And I need about ten minutes of your complete and undivided attention."

He went to a dresser by the wall, took down a sheet of coarse grey paper with a column of tally marks down one edge, and turned it over. It was the paper the fish were counted on. He set it in front of her with a stub of pencil, looked at it, and went away again and came back with a steel-nibbed pen and a small pot of ordinary lamp-black. "Not the Ledger's ink," he said. "Keep it away from that."

"Noted."

"You are going to write it down."

"When a client asks me to take on a job, I write it down. If you don't write it down, it's a favor, and favors get argued about." She uncapped the pot. "I'm not doing this for a favor. I'm doing it because I'm good at it, and because I'd like to leave this island on better terms than I arrived. Sit, please."

He sat. He sat the way he did everything, with the straightness of a man at an inspection, but his eyes went to the page, and she saw that he was curious. She had not expected that. She had expected resistance, and the first plain evidence that he was not going to give it to her made her stomach go light and strange.

"Clause one," said Maren, writing. "The Conservator will examine pages of the Ledger and, where she judges it can be done without harm, will attempt to repair them. The method is hers. Nobody overrules the method."

"I will overrule it if it endangers you."

"Clause one, subsection a. The Warden may halt a treatment if he believes the Conservator is at risk. He will say why."

"I will say why."

"And I'll listen. Sometimes."

"Sometimes," he agreed, in a voice so dry that she bent over the paper to hide her mouth.

"Clause two. The Conservator does not enter the vault, touch a page, or take material from the basin without the Warden. That's your rule. I'm keeping it. I'm writing it in because I'd like you to know I'm keeping it."

He was quiet. "You did not need to put that in."

"Yes, I did. You'll feel better if it's on the paper."

He did not answer, which she was beginning to learn was how he said yes to things that had caught him off guard.

"Clause three. In return, the Warden will see the Conservator safely to the Hollow Shallows on the night of the next Blank Tide, and will not obstruct her passage. Until then she will have lodging, food, and a place to work."

The pen was still in her hand. He had gone still in the way she had seen twice now, the stillness of a bird when a shadow crosses the grass. He said, "Dry bread and fish are not the terms of a contract."

"Then add something."

"Wages."

"I don't want wages. Where would I spend them?" She lifted her eyes. "A bench. Decent light. Tools that haven't been used to gut anything. That's what I want."

"And a promise that I will take you home." He said it to the tabletop, not to her. "You have written it down. You need not. I would have done it without paper."

"I know," said Maren, and was surprised to find that she did. "I'm writing it for me. So that on the eightieth day, when I'm standing at the edge of some water and I'm afraid, I can take this out of my pocket and read it."

There was a silence in which the only sound was the scratching of the nib.

"Clause four," she said, more quietly. "The notebook. The one I came with. It stays mine. Nobody opens it, handles it, or tests it without my leave."

"Agreed."

He said it at once. He said it before she had finished the last word, and the speed of it went through her like a draught under a door. She looked up. His face was perfectly composed, a face of lamplit stone, and she thought: he has been waiting for me to ask that. And she thought: he is relieved.

She did not know what to do with the thought. She set it aside, carefully, the way you set aside a fragment whose place in the text you have not worked out yet, and went on.

"And the last one. Clause five." She heard herself slow down. Her pulse had begun to knock at the base of her throat, and she could not have said why. "No hidden pages."

"I do not understand."

"It's a working clause. It means that if either of us knows something that bears on the work, we say so. If a page is failing faster than you've told me, I hear about it. If a treatment hurts me, you hear about it. Neither of us keeps a page from the other." She made herself finish. "I can't mend what I'm not shown, Tavian. That's not a rule about paper. It's a rule about people. A bad repair always starts with someone who didn't say the one thing that would have changed the method."

He did not move.

It was not a long pause. A man who did not know him would not have noticed it. But Maren had spent twelve years reading the faint tremors in a surface that told you where the break would come, and she saw the clause go into him and stop. His right hand, resting on the table, closed slightly. His eyes went, for the quarter of a second, not to her but past her, up toward the stairs and the round room and the small tea-coloured book on its board.

Then he breathed out, and was whole again.

"That is a broad clause," said Tavian.

"It's a fair one."

"It is," he said. "Yes." He looked at her, and what was in his face, she would think later, was not guile. It was something much worse than guile. It was a man agreeing to a thing he knew he could not keep, because the alternative was to say no to her face. "Write it. I will keep it."

She wrote it. Her hand was steady, and the ink was black on the grey paper, and her own mouth was dry as paste. Because she had asked him for a promise she had no intention of keeping either, and a part of her had known it when she wrote it, and the part of her that was watching his face knew that he knew.

Two people at a table, each guarding a locked door, and each solemnly inviting the other to see inside.

"One more," said Tavian.

"Mine?"

"Yours. I have a clause." He turned the page around, took the pen from her without touching her fingers, and wrote below her last line in a small, upright, extraordinarily neat hand: *The Conservator will not work to the point of collapse. If she cannot name the hour at which she last ate, she has worked too long.*

"That's not a clause. That's a nag."

"It is a safeguard."

"It's both," said Maren. But she was smiling, helplessly, at a sheet of fish-tally paper, in a kitchen at the bottom of the world, and she took the pen back and signed her name under his clause with a flourish so deliberate that it nearly tore the page.

He signed beneath her. *Tavian Orrel, Warden of the Tide, Orrel's Rest.* It was the first time she had seen him write more than a number. The letters were exact and slightly cramped, as if he had been trained to waste no ink.

Then he stood, and she stood, and there was no more table between them than there needed to be.

"By custom," said Tavian, "an agreement is sealed with a hand."

He held out his right. It was bare, and long, and ink-stained at the first two fingers, with a thin white scar across the knuckles that she had not noticed before. She looked at it for a moment longer than was strictly polite. It occurred to her that it was the first time he had offered it to her, and not merely held it out as a barrier or a shield, the way he had at the rocks with the coat.

She took it.

His palm was warm, and dry, and calloused along the base of the fingers. His grip was firm and brief and exactly as formal as she had expected it to be. She felt the pulse in the heel of his hand, steady and slow, and underneath it a faint dull ache of fatigue that had no business reaching her through the skin, but did. It lasted perhaps two seconds. It was the shortest handshake of her life, and she stood afterward with her fingers curled around the shape of it as if she had been handed something small to carry.

"Eighty-one days," said Tavian, and let go.

He looked, for just a moment, as though he had forgotten what to do with his hand.

*

The workshop stood at the foot of the tower, built into the base of it as a barnacle is built into a hull.

She had not seen it from the shell path. It lay on the landward side, in the lee of the rock, a long low building of the same pale stone with a roof of grey slate and a single door of weathered oak, banded with iron. A gutter of carved granite ran along the eaves, feeding a series of stone troughs beneath the windows. Over the lintel, nearly eroded, someone had cut a sign she could not read.

"The old store," said Tavian. "It was where the keepers worked when they came to the Rest to write for the Warden. Nobody has used it in nineteen years."

He lifted the latch and pushed the door inward, and stood aside.

She went in slowly. She went in the way you enter a church or an operating theater, with your hands at your sides and your breath held, and for a moment she did not see anything at all but the light. It came in through four tall windows set high in the south wall, clean and grey and even, the best working light she had ever seen in a room. It lay along the floor in long pale bars. It lit a table.

It was an enormous table, twelve feet at least, made of a single honey-coloured board of some dense local timber, planed so smooth that she could see the high window reflected in it. Its edges had been eased by hand. Along the wall behind it ran shelves, and on the shelves, in rows, were things: brushes of every size, with handles of pale driftwood and heads of what looked like gull-down and fine goat hair; shallow ceramic dishes; stone weights; coils of waxed linen thread; a row of fine bone needles, laid out on a cloth, with their eyes all turned the same way. There were two deep stone sinks. A rack for drying sheets. A long shallow trough, lined with tile, with a drain at one end. A small iron stove squatting in the corner, already laid with kindling.

She stood in the middle of the floor with her hands pressed to her mouth.

"The brushes are not new," said Tavian behind her, carefully. "I did not know what you would want. I have collected what the Rest could spare. If something is wrong, you will say, and I will have it altered."

"It's perfect," said Maren, in an odd, small voice.

"It has not been used."

"It's perfect."

She crossed the floor and laid one palm flat on the table, and felt, under her skin, the clean, cool, faintly oiled surface of a thing that someone had taken real care over. In twelve years of professional life she had worked on tables that were warped, tables with a chewed corner, tables that wobbled and had to be shimmed with a folded sheet of blotter. She had never once worked at a table that had been made for her.

She turned around. He was standing just inside the door with his hands behind his back and his face carefully blank, and he looked, she thought, exactly like a man who has put a great deal of effort into a gift and does not wish to be seen waiting for the response.

"Thank you," she said.

"You are contracted," said Tavian. "I owe you a bench."

"You owe me a bench. You don't owe me this." She gestured at the brushes, the needles, the stove. "This is something else."

He did not answer. He looked at the floor, and his mouth did something complicated, and he said, "There is a room above. It is small. The stairs are on the left."

*

The room above was small, and warm, and smelled of cedar and new straw. A narrow bed stood under a sloping ceiling. A shelf held a candle in a dish, a stack of folded linen, and a mug. A round window looked out over the harbor and the long grey curve of the shell path, and beyond it, the open sea.

She unpacked, such as it was. Her phone went on the shelf, face down. Her boots went under the bed. The notebook, wrapped in a clean cloth, she carried up in both hands as though it were a sleeping animal and set on the sill beside the window, where she could see it from the bed.

The afternoon went to cataloguing. She walked the length of the workshop with a lump of charcoal and a strip of fish-paper, noting what was there and what was not. There was no bone folder, but one of the needles, laid flat, would do. No wheat paste, but there was a jar of a clear amber gel at the back of the shelf, and when she dipped a finger in it and rubbed it between finger and thumb, she thought of agar and sea-moss and something fine and faintly sweet, a plant-based adhesive that would not stain or cockle. There was no tissue. There was no sizing. There was a whole cupboard of failed sheets, folded and stacked, smelling of damp and brine, and she stood in front of it for a long time with her hand on the latch, thinking: these were burned. These are the ones that should have been burned. And someone kept them anyway.

She made a list of eleven things she would need and four she would have to invent.

It was close to dusk when she went down to the sink to wash the charcoal from her hands and heard, from somewhere on the other side of the wall, a sound she knew better than her own breath.

It was steady, and rhythmic, and it was very, very small: the sound of metal moving across stone. A thin patient whisper, in, out, in. A whetstone.

She went to the door and eased it open an inch.

He was sitting on an upturned crate in the lee of the tower wall, in the last of the light, with a lap full of her pen. Not the steel-nibbed one he had given her at the table. The other. The slim ivory-handled crow-quill she had carried out of her old workshop in her breast pocket and never thought to look for after the sea. It had been in the pocket of her coat, in the round room, and he must have taken it that morning, while she was washing. He had it clamped in a small vice improvised from two blocks of wood, and he was working the nib across a fine grey stone with his right hand, drawing it long and slow, a single stroke at a time, checking it after each against the failing light. A bead of oil gleamed on the stone. His left hand, in its glove, held the vice steady.

She watched him for perhaps a minute. His face, in profile, was absorbed and unguarded, the face of a person doing a small thing wholly. He tested the nib on his thumbnail. He frowned. He bent and went back to the stone.

She thought: I did not ask him for that.

She thought, and it arrived so quietly that it scarcely felt like a thought: no one has ever sharpened a tool for me.

She opened her mouth to speak. What came out of it, because the second self had taken over, was, "You're holding the angle too steep."

His head came up. He did not startle. He looked at her over his shoulder with perfect composure, and she saw him decide not to be embarrassed.

"The nib was dull," said Tavian.

"It's a crow-quill. It's supposed to be dull, a little. It's a drawing tool, not a razor."

"It was dull," he repeated, "in a way that was making your hand work harder than it needed to. I have been watching you write."

She came and crouched beside him, because that was the only way to see. He did not stop her. She took the quill, very carefully, from the vice, and turned it in the light. It was beautiful. He had taken off exactly what needed to come off and not a hair more. The point was clean and even and she could feel, when she drew it across the ball of her thumb, a fine, perfect resistance.

"Oh," said Maren, helplessly. "That's a good edge."

"I have had practice."

"On what?"

"On pens." He looked at the stone. "A Warden writes very little. But what he writes has to hold."

He held out his hand, and she gave him back the quill, and he fitted it again into its vice and did not look at her. After a moment she realized that she was still crouching in front of him with her knees almost touching his, and that the last of the daylight was lying across his face, picking out the shadows under his eyes. She stood, rather quickly.

When she went back inside, she did what she always did when something was too big to be examined: she looked for the small, practical detail that would let her look away.

It was the shavings.

A heap of them lay swept into the corner behind the stove, long pale curls of the honey-coloured wood, the debris of a plane. She had walked past them four times that afternoon without seeing. Now she crouched and picked one up, and turned it in her fingers. It was not fresh. The edge had gone grey. It was faintly dry, and very faintly dusty, and when she brushed her thumb across the nearest shelf she found a fine film of that dust there too, more than a day's worth. Perhaps two.

Two days. She had been in Halvane for just under three. She had slept nineteen hours of the first.

The table had been planed while she was lying in the round room under a stranger's blanket. Someone had started on this room before he had a signed agreement, before he had a clause, before she had said a single word to him about terms. He had stood in a dead keeper's workshop on the first night, while she slept, and begun to make a place for her to work.

She stood there for a long time with the grey curl of wood in her hand.

She thought of the table, and the brushes, and the sheet of paper with his small upright signature at the bottom. She thought of clause five and the half-second in which his hand had closed. She thought: he has been kind to me since the moment I arrived, and he has been lying to me since the moment I arrived, and I do not know how to hold both at once.

Then, because she was a conservator, and because it was the only discipline she had, she put the shaving down exactly where she had found it, and went upstairs.

*

Night came up from the sea like a tide.

She lay in the narrow bed and listened to the sea breathe, in for ten, out for ten, and the bell at the end of each breath, softer here, farther off, as if the tower were speaking to her through a wall. The window was a pale disc. Somewhere below, in the workshop, the stove ticked as it cooled.

She could not sleep. She did not try. At some hour she could not have named, she rolled over and looked at the sill.

The notebook lay in its cloth. In the dark it was only a shape, a small square blot against the faint grey of the glass. She had not touched it since the morning. She had told it she had not forgotten it, and that was true, in the way it is true that you have not forgotten a tooth that aches.

She was looking at it when it began to glow.

It was very faint. It was not light, quite. It was a kind of paleness, a soft blue-green flush spreading through the cloth wrapping from somewhere in the middle, as if something inside it were warming. She sat up. She did not breathe. The glow pulsed, once, in time with the bell, and the cloth slid open by itself, as a hand opens.

The book lay on the sill with its cover spread. She had left it closed. She was sure of that. It had been closed that morning, and closed at noon, and closed an hour ago when she had glanced at it as she lay down.

It was open now, at a page near the back, a page she had never turned to. And the page was empty.

Not torn. Not stubbed. Simply blank, a clean rectangle of tea-coloured paper, and as she watched, a fine pale-blue line began to rise from the very centre of it, thread-thin, drawing itself upward into the shape of a letter. A downstroke. A hook. A long slanted tail that reached, as every letter in that hand reached, for the next.

She knew the hand. She would have known it anywhere. She would have known it at the bottom of the sea.

M, said the page. And then an a, and an r, and an e, and a last small stroke curling out of the n like a hand held out in the dark.

Maren.

It was the first time in sixteen years that anyone in that handwriting had said her name.

The ink trembled on the paper. Under the window the sea drew breath, and held it, and let it go.