On the third morning, Alan woke to the smell of woodsmoke, wet moss, and the unmistakable sensation of being watched by five people who were trying very hard not to hover.

He lay for a while with his eyes closed. The hollow beneath the ledge was dim and cool, and a thin grey light came in at the mouth of it, the pale undramatic light of an ordinary overcast dawn. Beside him, Tobias was snoring in a series of small contented snorts. Crumb had crawled out of his breast pocket in the night and curled up on his collarbone, and was glowing softly, the color of a banked coal. The fog was gone. There was only the damp, and the quiet, and a faint high singing of birds.

He put his hand on the rock beside him, and opened the windows.

It happened all at once. A warmth came flooding back into the corners of his mind, the soft familiar press of five presences arriving together, like a family coming home through a door. None of them spoke. For a moment he lay very still in the middle of it, with his throat tight, and thought that perhaps nobody would, and that the silence would be a gift.

-- I was angry, -- said Helga.

It came out gruff, and low, and entirely without heat. She sounded as though she were speaking through a mouthful of nails.

-- I was extremely angry. I said that I would be angry later. It is later. -- A pause. -- I have finished. I did it in the hour you slept. I made a very detailed list of the things I would say to you, and I said them all to the wall of the Lobby, and now I am done. -- Another pause, shorter. -- You are an idiot. Eat something.

-- Thank you, Senior Helga.

-- There is a cracker in your left pocket. I counted. It is the last.

-- I will split it with Tobias.

-- You will not. -- She sounded almost strangled. -- You will eat it yourself, and he will eat his own. He has an apple.

-- You have been counting his apple?

-- I count everything that matters, -- said Helga, and snorted, and was quiet.

-- You did not say halt, -- said Valeria.

It was not an accusation. It was said low, and level, and very carefully, as though she were laying a delicate instrument on a table.

-- No, Senior.

-- I said it three times. I counted. It did not work. -- A short breath. -- I wish to understand why. Not to rebuke you. To understand. Because it is a flaw in the system, if the word does not hold when it is most needed. I have thought about it for an hour. I believe that I understand it. -- A pause. -- It is not that you refuse to call it. It is that, in the moment, you cannot. The word is a door, and the door is locked from your side.

-- ... Yes, -- said Alan, slowly. -- I think that is right.

-- Then we will have to find a way to unlock it. -- Her voice was crisp and bruised and quite steady. -- It will take time. I am prepared for that. I only wished you to know that I do not consider it a failure. I consider it a problem to be solved. -- A very small, stiff silence. -- Together.

-- Together, -- said Alan.

-- Good.

-- I am here, dear, -- said Seraphina.

That was all. She did not say anything more. It was not necessary. He could feel her, warm and quiet and entirely present, pressed against the front of his mind with the careful stillness of a person afraid that if she moved, she would be sent away. He did not say that he was glad. He only breathed in, and out, and let her feel it.

-- Hm, -- said Priscilla. -- Well. We are all very emotional. It is a statistical anomaly. -- A pause. -- I am pleased to see that you are alive.

-- Thank you, Priscilla.

-- It is not a compliment. It is an observation.

-- I know.

-- I have also made a note, -- said Priscilla, in a very small voice, -- that I did not enjoy the hour. In a scientific sense. It was, ah. Extremely quiet.

He laughed. It came out unexpectedly, a short cracked helpless sound, and Tobias, beside him, snorted and sat bolt upright and said, in a loud, bewildered voice, -- Bread! -- and then looked around at the hollow, and the ledge, and Alan, and went quite pale.

-- Where, -- said Tobias, -- am I?

-- The Greywood. Day three.

-- Oh. -- He thought about it. -- I was cold.

-- You were.

-- I slipped in a stream.

-- You did.

-- And then I was, I think I was in a, I had a very strange dream, -- said Tobias, slowly, frowning, -- that somebody was hugging me. Rather firmly. And saying something about honey cake.

-- It was a dream.

-- It felt remarkably real.

-- Dreams do, -- said Alan.

-- ... Was it you?

-- I would never.

-- Oh, -- said Tobias, and his round face cleared with a sort of sleepy relief. -- Good. I would have been so embarrassed.

He stood up, and stretched, and looked down at his own bare feet, and then at his ember mouse, and burst into tears.

-- I am alive, -- he said thickly. -- Crumb. We are alive.

The mouse opened one bleary eye. It sneezed.

A single bright spark landed on the toe of Alan's boot and went out.

They set off at eight. It was a strange, shaky, bright little march, through a forest that had come back to itself overnight, as if it had never been anything else. The trunks were pale and tall. The leaves hung heavy and silver. Water dripped from every branch, and the moss was green and wet and thick underfoot, and in a patch of weak sun, a squirrel sat up and looked at them with an expression of mild reproach.

They had gone perhaps a mile when Nyx said, sharply, -- Stop.

It was a clipped, sudden, dry command. He stopped. Tobias walked into him again.

-- Left, -- said Nyx. -- Two paces. Look at the ground. The leaves are too neat. -- A breath. -- That is a pit. A covered one. Someone dug it, and laid a lattice of sticks over it, and scattered leaves. It is a student's trap, from last year's trial. Nobody filled it in. You would go straight through. It is eight feet deep and lined with stakes.

-- Oh, no, -- breathed Tobias.

-- Step right. Slowly. Along the roots. There. Good.

Alan stepped. His boot found the hard knotted ridge of a root and held. He took another step, and another, edging around the camouflaged hollow with his arms out like a rope-walker, and it was only when he stood on firm ground a body's length beyond it that he looked down, and saw, in the dark mouth of the pit, between the leaves, the pale point of a sharpened stake.

His stomach turned over. His knees went loose.

-- Nyx! -- he said. -- That was, thank you, Nyx.

It came out quite loudly. It came out without thought. It was not Senior Nyx, and it was not a formal acknowledgment, and it was not a careful, measured courtesy. It was the plain, startled, unguarded cry of a boy who had very nearly fallen onto a stake and had been caught by a hand he trusted.

There was a pause.

It was not a long one. It was perhaps a second and a half. But in that second and a half, he felt the whole Lobby go still.

-- ... Ah, -- said Nyx.

It was very small. It was not at all the tone of her usual drawl. It was the voice of a person who has put down a heavy thing she did not know she was carrying, and finds her hands strangely light.

-- Did you, -- said Priscilla, delicately, -- just say Nyx?

-- I said thank you.

-- You said thank you, Nyx.

-- I, ah. -- His ears went hot. -- It was a reflex.

-- It was a reflex, -- repeated Priscilla, with interest. -- In moments of acute stress, the subject drops the honorific. Interesting. I shall note it.

-- It was the pit.

-- Of course, dear, -- said Seraphina, brightly, a shade too brightly. -- It was a very frightening pit.

-- It was a very good pit, -- said Helga, with some grudging respect.

-- I do not see what is so remarkable, -- said Valeria, rather stiffly. -- A man in danger will say what he says. It signifies nothing. -- A sniff. -- I would only observe that he has never once dropped mine.

-- Valeria, -- said Nyx, in the odd light voice, -- are you jealous?

-- I am not.

-- You are.

-- I am an officer. I do not become jealous. I merely record discrepancies.

-- Record this one, -- said Nyx. She sounded, suddenly, very happy. -- Write it on a very big piece of paper.

-- I will do no such thing.

-- You will. In bold.

Alan walked on, with his face aflame and Tobias gazing at him in perplexed fascination, and did not say anything. He kept his eyes on the trail. In the back of his skull, in the warm dark where the five of them lived, a small bright hum of laughter moved like a current, and he found that he did not have the strength to be embarrassed. It was only a name. It was only a word. And for the length of a mile through the dripping trees, a woman who had spent a thousand years making jokes so that nobody would look at her closely kept very, very quiet, and said nothing at all, and glowed.

The finish line was a rope stretched between two pale trunks at the edge of a meadow. A little crowd had gathered around it, instructors in grey robes, a few white-cassocked acolytes, an old man selling hot chestnuts from a cart that had no business being there. A long board had been set up on trestles, and on it, written in chalk in Hale's small neat hand, a list was growing. Students crossed the rope. A clerk shouted a number. The chalk squeaked. A cheer went up, thin and tired.

Alan crossed at midday. He had not meant to hurry. He had meant only to arrive, quietly, in the unremarkable center of the line. But when he looked up at the board, he found his name already written, in the middle of the third column, in a clean white scrawl.

Sixteenth.

It was exactly what he had wanted. It was precisely the rank he had planned to take. It was the broad, safe, forgettable middle of the class. He stood and looked at it for some time, and was surprised to find that he felt nothing at all.

-- It is a very good number, -- said Priscilla, thoughtfully. -- It is a prime. It is a power of two. It is the number of ounces in a pound.

-- It is the middle.

-- Yes. -- A pause. -- You did not need to be so accurate.

-- I did not do it deliberately.

-- No, -- said Priscilla. -- That is the curious thing.

Cassian had come first. His name stood at the head of the list in thick chalk. He was sitting on a tree stump at the far edge of the meadow, in a ragged, filthy shirt, with the silverfang cub asleep in a sling across his chest and his arm around it, and there was an expression on his face that Alan had never seen there before. It was not triumph. It looked more like exhaustion, and awe, and a dazed gratitude. When he saw Alan, he did not rise. He only raised two fingers to his forehead, in a tiny, formal, awkward salute.

Alan returned it.

That was all. It was a very small thing. A boy on a stump, and a boy at a rope, and a gesture that said, in the language of the young, I remember.

-- Alan! -- cried a high voice. -- Alan Frost!

Tobias had gone off to give his name to the clerk, and had stopped, halfway across the grass, to address a crowd. He stood on a hummock, with Crumb in his upraised hand, and a look of wild dramatic purpose on his face. A ring of students had gathered around him, some curious, some amused. He had a very carrying voice.

-- He carried me! -- he was saying. -- Out of a ravine! In the fog! I was dead! I was a block of ice! I could not feel my own legs! I had a dream about a honey cake! And he lit a fire, and he put me in a blanket, and he, he lay on top of me, and, no, beside me, it was a matter of survival, and then he carried me, on his own back, for an hour and a half, up a cliff! He is a hero! He is a saint! He is a, a, he has the best blanket in the whole world!

-- Did he, -- said somebody. -- Really?

-- I would not lie! I was there!

-- It was only luck, -- said Alan.

He had come up behind them without meaning to. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground, and the little crowd turned and looked at him with the pleased curiosity of people examining a rare animal.

-- He is being modest, -- said Tobias, tearfully.

-- I am being accurate. The ravine was close. The fog was thin at the top. Anyone would have done it.

-- Frost got lucky again, -- said a boy in the crowd, with a good-natured laugh.

-- He does seem to get an awful lot of it, -- said a girl.

-- Luck, -- said somebody else, comfortably, and the little knot of people drifted apart, satisfied, and went to find chestnuts.

Alan let out a breath. It was exactly right. He had been seen, and filed, and set aside, under the heading Lucky, and nobody would think to look any further. It was a perfect result. It was the thing he had worked for. And he stood on the damp grass in the thin autumn sun and could not for the life of him understand why it made his chest ache.

-- Mr. Frost, -- said a mild voice.

He turned. Professor Hale stood beside him, in shirtsleeves, with a clipboard under one arm and a pencil behind his ear, looking out over the meadow rather than at him.

-- Sixteenth, -- said Hale. -- A fine result.

-- Thank you, Professor.

-- A remarkably typical one.

Alan did not answer.

-- I should like to ask, -- said Hale, in the same mild, absent tone, -- whether you are aware of what is to happen this afternoon.

-- I was not told.

-- The Holy See has asked that a number of first years be called in for what it terms pastoral guidance. A conversation. A little spiritual support, after a difficult trial. -- He turned the pencil in his fingers. -- It is entirely voluntary. In the sense that a request from an Inquisitor is voluntary. There is a list. It was drawn up this morning. I was, ah, shown it.

-- Is my name on it?

-- It is. -- Hale looked, for a moment, at the horizon, where a pale thread of road wound away over the hills. -- I thought you should know. I thought you might like to prepare.

-- Why are you telling me?

-- Because I am an old man, Mr. Frost, and I have spent thirty years in a basement with a stack of forms, and there are very few things left that I can do that are of any use. -- He tapped his pencil twice against the clipboard. -- I find I would rather like to do one of them.

-- Professor...

-- I did not say anything, -- said Hale. -- I was admiring the meadow.

He walked away. He did not look back. And Alan stood among the trampled grass with his heart going slowly and heavily, and looked at the tall figure in the long grey coat, a long way off at the edge of the field, speaking to an acolyte with a notebook in his hand. As he watched, the figure turned, as though aware of the weight of the regard, and looked across the green distance, and smiled.

It was a small, courteous, patient smile. It did not reach the eyes. It was the smile of a man who has set a table and is quite willing to wait.

The pastoral conversation lasted forty minutes. It took place in a tent, with a kettle and a plate of shortbread and a young white-cassocked acolyte who asked him, in a gentle, sing-song voice, whether he had been sleeping well, and whether he had any anxieties, and whether he had ever felt that he was not alone. He answered each question with a polite and perfectly empty answer. He ate a piece of shortbread. He said that the trial had been very tiring. He said that he missed his mother. This was true, and it cost him nothing, and the acolyte wrote it down.

He walked back to the dormitory through the late afternoon, alone, with his pack on his back, and the window of his mind wide open and warm. Nobody spoke. The Lobby was full of people being tactful. He went up the stair to the room, and shut the door, and sat on the edge of his bed with his hands between his knees.

Tobias had gone to the infirmary, for a blanket and a hot drink and an enormous quantity of soup. The room was quiet. The light through the window was long and gold.

-- Priscilla, -- he said.

-- Yes?

-- I would like to ask you something. -- He kept his voice level. -- You told me on Tuesday to talk to you before I decided anything. About the unbinding. I am talking to you now. I have not decided. I only want to know. -- He took a breath. -- Is there enough data to say whether it is safe?

There was a pause.

It was a long one. It was heavier than the others, and strange, and he felt in it a fine tremor, as of a very taut string.

-- No, -- said Priscilla.

-- No, there is not enough data?

-- Not enough data, -- said Priscilla. Her voice was careful and dry and quite steady, and he heard that she had chosen every word. -- There is not enough data to say that it is safe. I am afraid that is the only thing I can say with confidence.

-- Is it unsafe?

-- I did not say that.

-- Then it is safe.

-- I did not say that either. -- A brief, taut silence. -- I said that there is not enough data.

-- You said before that you had a thought.

-- I have, -- said Priscilla. -- It is not a finding. I will not say it until it is.

-- I see.

He did. He saw it clearly. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands between his knees and saw, with perfect and miserable clarity, a woman who knew something and would not say it, a door held shut by a very polite and unyielding hand. It was the old shape. It was the shape of a drawer in a pharmacy, and a man who shook his head. It was not fair, and he knew it was not fair, and he could not stop the cold from spreading through his chest.

-- I understand, -- said Alan.

-- Do you?

-- You will tell me when you are ready.

-- Yes. -- Her voice cracked, very slightly. -- That is all that I am asking. A little time.

-- Of course, -- said Alan, in the flat quiet voice. -- Of course. Thank you for your candor.

He did not say anything more. He lay down on his back and stared at the ceiling, and in the back of his skull he felt Priscilla go very quiet, with the careful, brittle quiet of a person who has just watched a bridge begin to burn from the wrong side. He did not call her back. He did not know how.

-- Alan, -- said Priscilla, after a long time, very softly.

-- I am going to keep looking, -- said Alan. -- On my own. I do not think you will mind.

-- I would rather you did not do it alone.

-- I know.

-- That is not the same as minding.

-- No, -- said Alan. -- It is not.

It was a bad evening. He did not do anything about it. He lay on the narrow bed in the long gold light while the room slowly darkened, and the five voices in his head drew softly back, one by one, like people leaving a sickroom on tiptoe, and by the time the first stars came out in the square of the window, he was alone with the sound of his own breathing.

At nine, he got up. He knelt on the floor, and reached under the bed, and drew out a battered cardboard box.

It was an ordinary shoebox, grey with age, its corners rubbed soft and its lid mended with tape. It had come with him from his uncle's house in a trunk, and before that from a small brown house on a hill, and before that, he supposed, from a study that smelled of ink and cold tea. He had never been able to throw it away. He had never quite been able to open it, either, in all the years since. He set it on his knees and lifted the lid.

It held very little. A birthday card, much folded, with a drawing of a bird on the cover and, inside, in a small neat slanting hand, the words: To Alan, who is seven. Look closely. A pressed flower, brown as a leaf. A pocket watch, stopped at ten past four. And at the bottom, beneath a layer of tissue paper, an envelope.

It was cream-colored and rather thick, its edges soft with age. It was sealed with a disc of dark red wax, and in the wax, pressed with great exactness, was the impression of a single curved line, a ring drawn in one stroke, with a darkness at its center.

He had seen it a hundred times. He had held it in his hands on the night his mother died. He had slept with it under his pillow, for a year, and then put it away, because he could not bear it, and because he had never understood what the words on the front meant.

He turned it over. They were written in pencil, in the small slanting hand, and they said:

Only when you have decided to stay.

He sat very still.

It was a very ordinary sentence. It had been written, he knew, a long time ago, by a man who had stood in a study with warm light between his fingers. And Alan had read it a hundred times, and had thought each time of a house, or a town, or a school. Stay where? he had asked himself. Stay with whom? He had spent eight years not knowing.

And now, in the dark, with the ring humming on his finger and the whole warm crowded silence of five presences leaning in the corners of his skull, he understood, with a slow cold wonder that rose through him like a tide, that the sentence had never been about a place.

He did not open it.

He held the envelope in both hands, and looked at it for a very long time. He thought of a saucer with a crack. He thought of a woman on a rooftop with her chin on her arms. He thought of a tower that smelled of violets, and a forge full of sparks, and a chapel with a jar of dried flowers. He thought: I have not decided. I do not know how. I am not able to stay, and I am not able to go, and I am only a boy sitting on a floor with a box.

He laid the envelope back in its bed of tissue. He closed the lid.

-- That is yours, -- said a low voice in the dark.

It was Nyx. She was not in the room. She was in the Lobby, at the very edge of it, in the place where a window was open a crack, and she spoke very softly, so softly that it was hardly more than a breath.

-- Whatever is in there. It is yours. -- A pause. -- Open it when you want. Not before. Not for us. Not for her, or her, or me. Only for you. -- Another pause, longer. -- And when you do, I will be here. I will not look. But I will be here.

He pressed his hand against the lid.

-- Thank you, -- he said. -- Nyx.

-- Hm, -- said Nyx. -- There it is again.

-- It is a habit, I think.

-- Good, -- said Nyx. -- Keep it.

He slid the box back under the bed. He lay down. The room was dark, and the town beyond the window was a faint scatter of lamps, and somewhere far off, a clock struck the half hour. The ring on his finger hummed, very faintly, like a held note. And under his ribs, the hollow gave one slow soft chime, as if something very large and very far away had turned over in its sleep, and heard him, and were beginning, slowly, to wake.