The coach climbed the mountain road the way Alan Valemont did everything: steadily, without complaint, and with its back perfectly straight.

Outside the lantern-glass windows, the world had gone white and gray. Pines stood shoulder to shoulder along the cliff, their branches heavy with the first snow of the year, and below them the valley fell away into a mist so thick it looked like something a careless spell had left behind. The wheels hummed against the enchanted road in one low, even note. Every so often a ward-stone flashed past at the edge of the track, glowing faintly blue, marking another boundary of the Academy's protection.

Alan sat alone on the left-hand bench with his trunk strapped to the rack above him and his hands folded over his knees. He was seventeen, tall and lean, with black hair cut neatly above his ears and gray-blue eyes that people often described, unkindly, as disapproving. He did not think they were disapproving. He thought they were attentive. It was not his fault that most things deserved a second look before being trusted.

Ahead of the coach, a second carriage rattled up the road, and a third came behind, each loaded with trunks and first-years. Through the thin enchanted walls Alan could hear snatches of chatter: wild guesses about which floor of the dormitory they would be given, a boy swearing that the Academy kept a dragon in its cellar, a girl insisting that the headmaster had once turned a student into a teapot. Alan listened to all of it with the mild patience of someone at a very poor concert. He had spent the previous week reciting the Academy charter, all forty-one articles of it, and had come to the conclusion that it was an admirable document. Article nine alone was a model of clarity.

His uniform was new and pressed flat: dark jacket, silver buttons, the crest of Levis Morny Academy stitched in thread over his heart. His mother had straightened the collar three times before he left. His father had not come to the gate at all. He had left a letter on the breakfast table instead, sealed with the Valemont wax, written in the same square handwriting that had signed every report Alan had ever brought home.

Alan took it out now, though he had already read it twice.

The Valemont name has stood in the Academy's records for nine generations, it said. We have never given it cause for correction. We trust you will not be the first.

That was all. No wish for a good year. No question about whether he was nervous. Alan folded the paper along its crease and put it back in his pocket. He was not hurt. A letter like that was simply how his family spoke. In the Valemont house, love had always arrived in the shape of expectation, and Alan had learned long ago to read it that way and be grateful for it.

Be an example. Be correct. Be worthy.

He could do that. He had been doing it all his life.

The coach rounded a bend, the mist split open, and the snow began to fall in earnest.

It was nothing dramatic. Fat, slow flakes drifted past the windows as though they had all the time in the world. A passenger in a better mood would have called it pretty. Alan went very still.

He had always been able to sense it coming, not the snow itself but the particular cold that arrived just before a heavy fall, a thin metallic edge on the air. It crept in through the seams of the window now. The back of his neck prickled, and without any decision on his part, the coach and the mountain road and the pressed jacket fell away.

He was seven years old, and he could not feel his hands.

The storm had come out of nowhere. That was what the innkeeper kept saying afterward, over and over, while Alan's mother held a cup of something hot to his lips. A summer storm, in the high north, in the one week of the year when the passes were supposed to be clear. The villagers called it a winter-sulk and said it came once in a generation. Alan only knew that his family's coach had stuck in a drift on the road below the village, that the adults had hurried out to argue with it, and that someone had told him to wait in the storehouse where it was dry.

The door had swung shut behind him. The wind had packed the snow against it. By the time he understood that it would not open, the lantern had gone out too.

The storehouse was full of sacks and crates and a cold that felt alive. He remembered shouting until his throat was raw. He remembered pounding on the door until his fists stopped hurting, which he had not known was a bad sign. He remembered sitting down against a sack of grain with his knees pulled up, crying quietly at first, because Valemonts did not make scenes, and then not quietly at all, because there was no one to hear.

And then there had been a voice.

It was small and high and entirely unafraid, muffled by the wood. "Hello? Is somebody in there?"

He had tried to answer and found that his mouth would not work. He remembered the thump of someone small throwing their whole weight against the door, a pause, and then footsteps pounding away through the snow. After that came a child's voice, furious and carrying, shouting across the whole village. "Come quick! Somebody's crying in the storehouse! Come quick, come quick, he's crying!"

He had not known whether to feel ashamed or saved. He had felt both, and then he had felt nothing at all.

The door had opened at last, in a burst of white light and shouting. He remembered that clearly, though little else. Grown-up hands everywhere. A lantern swinging. And in the doorway, a smaller shape than the others, dusted with snow from head to foot, kneeling down to look at him.

She had hair the color of embers. That was what he had thought, in the strange slow way a half-frozen mind thinks: that she had brought the only warm color in the world with her. It had been tangled and soaking wet, plastered to her cheeks, and when she saw that he was awake she had smiled, a quick, lopsided, reckless smile, and a single dimple had appeared in her left cheek.

"You're okay now," she had said. "They're here."

Then the dark had come down, and that was the last he saw of her.

When he woke, there was a fire, a bed with too many blankets, and his mother's face swollen from weeping. His father stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, not speaking. The physician said the boy had been minutes from the point where magic could not have helped him.

Alan asked about the girl before he asked about anything else.

The innkeeper had scratched his head. A family of travelers, he said, a mother and a father and two children, who had been passing through the village on the same road. The little girl had raised the alarm. They had stayed through the night until the physician pronounced the boy out of danger, and until the Valemont carriage finally dug its way through the drifts. Then they had gone on, before dawn, without leaving a name. They had a long road ahead, they said, and no wish to be thanked.

His father had promised that a gift would be sent. It never was, because there was no one to send it to.

Ten years had gone by. Alan had grown tall and serious and excellent at everything he was supposed to be excellent at, and through all of it he had kept the girl with the ember-colored hair somewhere very near his heart, like a lamp left burning in a window.

Somewhere along the way, he had stopped thinking of her as a person and started thinking of her as a measure. Whatever a good person was, she was it. Brave, kind, gentle. In his memory she had been soft-spoken, a small angel of mercy in the snow, though the voice he had actually heard through that door had been anything but quiet. Memory, it seemed, had sanded off the edges. Alan had never noticed, and he would not have wanted it any other way.

The coach shuddered, slowed, and stopped. Alan blinked, and the storehouse was gone, and the mountain road was just a mountain road again, white and ordinary beyond the glass.

He drew a long breath through his nose, straightened his cuffs, and stepped down.

Levis Morny Academy rose out of the snow like something a very patient giant had built. Towers of pale gray stone, connected by covered bridges strung with lanterns that burned without flame. A great gate of black iron stood open, and beyond it, in a courtyard dusted white, hundreds of students in dark uniforms milled and shouted and hugged and dragged trunks across the flagstones. Trunks that could levitate bobbed overhead like confused geese. A few first-years stared up at the towers with their mouths open.

Carved into the stone above the gate, in letters worn smooth by four centuries of weather, was the Academy's motto: LEARN FIRST. THEN DARE. Alan read it twice, and approved of the order of the words.

He did not stare at the towers. He found his name on the board by the gate, collected his room key, and followed the stream of new students into the Great Hall, where a long banner above the high table read WELCOME, FIRST YEARS in letters of drifting silver light.

The Warden of the first-year hall was a narrow woman with a voice that carried without being raised. She waited until the room fell quiet, which took remarkably little time, and then she began.

"Levis Morny has stood for four hundred years because it is built on rules," she said. "Not because we enjoy rules. Because magic without them is merely a very fast way to get hurt. You will observe three of them above all."

She held up one finger. "Curfew is at eleven o'clock. Every student is in their hall by the final bell. No exceptions."

A second finger. "The Enchanted Forest is closed to any student who is not accompanied by a teacher. The trees are not friendly, and the paths move."

A third. "No student will attempt a new potion recipe, spell formula, or ritual that has not been reviewed and approved by faculty. Innovation is welcome. Unreviewed innovation is how we lost the east wing in my second year of teaching."

A small ripple of nervous laughter went through the hall. Alan did not laugh. He nodded once, slowly, with deep and complete approval. Reasonable rules, clearly stated, with reasons attached. That was how a place like this ought to be run.

"Is that really him?" whispered someone behind him. "The Valemont?"

"Ninth generation," someone else whispered back. "His grandfather's portrait hangs in the east gallery. They say none of them has ever had a single mark against them."

Alan kept his eyes forward and his expression perfectly still. He had been hearing that sentence since before he could read. It sat on his shoulders, as familiar and as heavy as a winter cloak. He did not resent it. He simply wondered, from time to time, who exactly would be left if you took it off.

The Warden finished. Chairs scraped. The hall dissolved into noise, and Alan, caught in the crowd streaming toward the dormitory stairs, realized with a faint sense of alarm that his eyes were moving.

They were skimming the room. Not randomly. They went from head to head to head, searching, and settled on every flash of warm color: a boy with orange hair, far too curly; a girl with auburn braids, too dark, too tall; an older student with a copper-colored bob who turned around and revealed a face that was nothing like the one in his memory.

Dimple. Left cheek. Alan caught himself looking for a dimple on the left cheek of a stranger and felt heat creep up his neck.

"Looking for someone?"

The boy walking beside him was his assigned roommate, round-faced and cheerful, with ink on his fingers and a trunk that had given up levitating halfway across the courtyard and now trailed behind him on a strap.

"No," said Alan.

"You've checked every head in that hall twice."

"I was counting exits."

"Right," said the boy, in the tone of someone politely declining to argue. "Very thorough. There were eight."

Alan said nothing. There had, in fact, been eight.

"Relax," the boy added kindly. "Everyone's looking for somebody on the first day. Mostly their own trunk."

But it was foolish, and Alan knew it. There were nearly four hundred students in this Academy. The girl in the doorway had been six years old, perhaps seven. She could be anywhere in the country. She could be a healer in some distant village, or a merchant's daughter, or a student at some entirely different school. And even if she were here, in this hall, in this crowd, ten years would have changed her face beyond anything a child's memory could recognize. A dimple. A color of hair. That was all he had.

And yet his heart had been beating a little faster ever since the coach had stopped, and he told himself it was only the climb.

The dormitory halls of Levis Morny were gathered around a covered cloister on the north side of the Academy. Alan left the crowd at the first archway and walked the long way round, alone, with snow ticking softly against the lantern-glass. He needed to think, and he thought best in straight lines.

He could look for her. He could spend the year scanning faces, asking questions, haunting the registry office, and perhaps even find her.

And then what?

He tried to picture it. A stranger approaching a stranger. Excuse me, ten years ago you rescued a boy from a storehouse. She would not remember. Why would she? A child who raised an alarm for a crying stranger had done a small and ordinary kind thing, and children forgot small kind things within a week. She would be polite and puzzled, and he would be standing there with ten years of weight in his chest and no idea where to put it down.

Worse, she might not be what he remembered. People changed. He knew this in the abstract, the way he knew that the sea was salty and that dragons were extinct. It was simply not a fact he wanted to apply to her.

He stopped at the end of the cloister, where an arch opened onto the main courtyard, and for one weak moment his feet turned toward it. Four hundred students, hundreds of faces, a whole year in which to look. The wind carried laughter from the lamp-lit square. He stood there long enough for a lantern-wisp to drift past his shoulder and examine him with polite curiosity, and then he turned deliberately away from the arch, and the wisp, sensing no drama, went elsewhere.

No. Better to leave it as it was. The memory was whole and shining and finished. It had carried him through every long night and every unforgiving examination. If there was any design in the world at all, if fate was a real thing and not merely a word people used when they did not want to take responsibility, then fate could do its own work. It could knock on his door.

Alan was not going to go looking.

He nodded once to himself, firmly, the way he did when he finished an equation, and felt a little better. A decision, properly made, was the most reliable comfort he knew. He would be a model student. He would honor the family name and the Academy's rules. He would be, in every way he could manage, a person worthy of the one who had once taught him what goodness looked like.

By the time dinner was over, the snow had thickened and the Academy had settled into the low, contented noise of hundreds of students comparing schedules. Alan slipped away from the common room before anyone could draw him into conversation and found a long gallery on the second floor, empty except for portraits and banners and tall windows that looked out over the valley.

He stood at the nearest window. Below him the snow fell silently on the courtyard, on the iron gate, on the black road down the mountain, covering everything in a clean and uncomplicated white.

It had never occurred to him before tonight how strange it was. He had carried one person in his heart for ten years, and he did not know what to call her.

Not her name. Not her family. Not even the exact shade of her eyes, which he could not recall, only that they had been bright. All he knew was that she had come out of a storm for a stranger, that her voice had not shaken, and that she had smiled at him when he had been too frightened to smile back.

He had never said thank you. That, more than anything, was the splinter that remained. He had been seven and half-frozen, and by the time he could speak, she had been miles down the road. Ten years of gratitude had piled up with nowhere to go, like unsent letters.

He had rehearsed it over the years, in a hundred different versions. In some he was dignified and brief. In others he was eloquent, and she wept. In the worst ones he simply stood there with his mouth open while she looked at him politely, and he woke in the dark, annoyed with himself. Not one version had ever survived contact with the dawn.

"Thank you," he said to the glass, very quietly, to no one at all. His breath fogged the pane. "I hope you're well. I hope you're happy."

It sounded absurd out loud. He did not take it back.

The Academy bell chimed once, a deep, round note: the half-hour before curfew. Alan turned from the window, straightened his jacket out of habit, and started down the gallery toward the dormitory stairs.

He had gone perhaps a dozen steps when the first banner flipped.

It was a long silk banner hanging from a ceiling beam, one of dozens that lined the gallery, embroidered with the crest of the Academy. It simply turned itself upside down in the air with a soft whump. Then the next banner flipped, and the next, and the next, a rolling ripple of silk and thread running the entire length of the gallery like a row of dominoes falling toward him. At the far end, a very dignified portrait of a former headmaster acquired a pair of spectacles it had not been painted with.

Alan's first reaction, which he was proud of, was indignation. This was, by his rapid count, a violation of at least three articles of the charter: tampering with Academy property, disturbing the peace within half an hour of curfew, and, judging by the headmaster's new spectacles, something that could only be described as defamation by portrait. His second reaction, which he was not proud of, was to wonder how it had been done. The banners had flipped in sequence, with a precise and delicate rhythm, which meant the spell had been timed. Whoever it was had not simply broken a rule. They had composed it.

And then someone began to laugh.

It was bright and breathless and entirely unrepentant, the kind of laughter that had no interest in being quiet. It came from somewhere beyond the far corner, growing closer by the second, accompanied by the sound of running feet and a very distant, very furious bellow of, "Who did that? Who did that?"

Alan stopped dead in the middle of the corridor.

A figure darted across the far end of the gallery, so fast that it was only a blur: dark uniform, a streaming scarf, one hand trailing a thin spark of fading light. It crossed the lantern-glow at the corner for no more than the space of a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat, above the blur, a streak of hair the exact color of embers caught the light and was gone.

The laughter went with it, fading down some other corridor, and the furious voice promised that someone was going to be reported.

Alan Valemont, who had never once broken a rule, who had never once let his composure slip, stood alone in the swaying gallery with his heart pounding in his ears, and could not have said which frightened him more: that someone had just broken half the charter before curfew, or that for one impossible instant, the hair that had fled around that corner had been exactly the color he remembered.