Alan changed his shirt three times, and was ashamed of himself every time.

The white one was too formal. It was the shirt he wore to examinations and to the Warden's office, and it would have told anyone who looked at it that he had come to a market as if to a tribunal. The blue one had a small ink stain on the cuff that he had been meaning to deal with since Tuesday. By a process of elimination, on a Saturday morning in the gray light of the dormitory, with Pip propped on one elbow in bed watching the whole performance with an expression of purest bliss, he arrived at the plain gray wool, no crest, no collar pin, which made him look, in the mirror, like a very serious student of no particular family.

"You look nice," said Pip.

"I look appropriate."

"For what?"

"For the market."

"Mm," said Pip. "The market. In a professional capacity."

"It is not," said Alan, before he could stop himself, and heard it, and shut his mouth.

There was a very long pause. Pip lay back on his pillow, folded his hands on his chest like a man at peace with the universe, and said to the ceiling, "I'm not going to say a thing. I want credit for that."

"You may have it."

"I want it in writing."

Alan took his coat and left.

She was waiting at the iron gate with a basket on her arm, stamping her boots against the cold. She wore a brown coat patched at both elbows in two different shades of brown, a green scarf wound three times around her neck, and a knitted hat pulled down so far over her ears that her hair had given up and escaped in a single red rope over one shoulder. When she saw him, her whole face lit.

"You came," she said. "I thought you might send a note. A very polite one. With footnotes."

"I said I would come."

"You said yes. It's different. People say yes all the time and then they turn out to have a prior engagement with their own good sense." She looked him up and down, taking in the gray wool and the absence of any crest, and something in her expression softened. "You didn't wear the white one."

"How do you know about the white one?"

"You wear it to the Warden's office. I've seen it from the bench outside. It makes you look like a very handsome sentence."

He decided not to examine that. He had brought his notebook, as he brought it everywhere, tucked under his arm, and she glanced at it, and then at him, with her head tilted.

"Leave it," she said.

"I prefer to carry it."

"It's the market. You won't need to write anything down." She held out the basket. "I'll mind it. Look, it's got a cloth. It will be perfectly safe."

He stood a moment. The notebook was not an object. It was a habit, a small square wall he had carried between himself and the world since he was nine years old. But her hand was out, steady and cheerful, and her face held no triumph, only a patient and slightly hopeful interest in whether he would do it.

He laid it in the basket. She tucked the cloth over it, as one tucks a blanket over a sleeping child, and set off down the path, and he followed with his hands strangely empty.

The market lay in a hollow below the Academy, at the bottom of three hundred stone steps called the Lantern Stair, and from the top of the stair, in the white morning, Alan stopped and looked at it with real astonishment.

He had known it existed. Every student did. But he had always thought of it, in the abstract, as a place where one bought ink and thread. Nothing had prepared him for the sight of it: a whole small town of stalls and awnings crowded into the bowl of the valley, striped red and blue and saffron, all roofed with snow, with thousands of paper lanterns strung from pole to pole in long glowing loops that were already lit, though it was morning, because, Elen explained, the old ones liked them lit. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys. Voices rose with it. There was a smell of roasting chestnuts, and wet wool, and cinnamon, and something sharp and green and ancient that Alan could not name.

"The Market of Old Voices," said Elen. She said it with a kind of quiet pride, as one introduces a grandmother. "The new stalls are at the front. But the real ones are at the back, past the fountain. They've been trading there nine generations. That's why they're called the Voices. They talk all day, and they remember everything."

"Nine generations," said Alan.

"Same as you."

He glanced at her. She was already halfway down the first flight, scarf flying.

She was known.

That was the first thing, and the most extraordinary. It began at the bottom of the stair, where a woman selling felted slippers called out "Elen-love!" and waved with both hands, and went on all the way along the lane, as though she were walking through a field of people who had been waiting for her to arrive. A boy with a barrow of turnips shouted something rude and affectionate. A fishmonger held up a perfect silver trout, grinning, for her admiration. And everywhere she stopped, for a moment or two, with the unhurried air of someone who had nothing else in the world to do.

She stopped for Mr. Pike, who sold knives, and asked about his shoulder. She stopped for a young mother with a baby strapped to her chest and tickled the baby under the chin until it crowed. She stopped for the slipper woman, and said, "Did the cat come back?" and the woman put her hand on her heart and said it had, it had come back with a crow's feather in its collar and a perfectly dreadful attitude, and Elen laughed until she had to hold the basket against her hip.

Alan walked a half step behind her and said nothing. He found that he was watching her hands. She never once touched anyone in a way that was not asked for. She leaned in when people lowered their voices. She waited, quite still, while a man with a stammer worked his way through a story about his brother's goat. She did not finish his sentences. She did not look at the sky. And when he was done, she said, "Oh, that's marvelous," and meant it so entirely that the man stood up straighter.

He thought of a list in a notebook, now lying under a cloth in a basket on her arm. Contemptuous of order.

He did not think it for long.

"And here," said Elen, "is the best stall in the whole market."

It was a small, squat cart under a tattered yellow awning, hung with copper ladles and wreathed in steam, and behind it, enthroned on a stool with a blanket over her knees, sat the smallest and most formidable old woman Alan had ever seen. She had a face like a walnut and eyes like two black currants. She was ladling something from a great pot into a row of mugs, and she did not look up.

"You're late," she said.

"It's nine o'clock, Granny Hobb."

"It's three minutes past. I was counting." The black eyes lifted, and slid past Elen, and settled on Alan with the fixity of a hawk spotting a mouse. "And that's him."

"This is Alan."

"The wall."

"Granny."

"I'm eighty-one," said Granny Hobb, "and I've had the whole of this term's worth of news about this boy over my stall, one almond twist at a time. I'll call him what she calls him." She looked Alan up and down, slowly, from boots to hair, and he stood and bore it, as he had stood in front of his grandfather's portrait. "Straight back. Good shoulders. Doesn't fidget." She sniffed. "Extra cinnamon?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"In your cider. It is the question I put to everybody."

"Yes," said Alan. "Please."

The old woman's face did something slow and astonishing. It cracked, from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her mouth, into a smile of immense and wicked satisfaction.

"Polite," she said. "Elen, you didn't say he was polite."

"I said he was a very serious clock."

"A polite clock. Even better." She ladled, and passed him the mug, and he wrapped his fingers round it and felt the heat go into his bones, and Granny Hobb watched him taste it with the intense interest of a woman who has a great deal riding on the answer.

It was spiced apple. It was exactly the drink Elen had carried into the library, two weeks ago, in two paper cups. It was sweet and sharp and fierce with cinnamon, and warm all the way down.

"It is very good," he said.

"Of course it is." She waved a gnarled hand. "Carry that crate behind the cart for me, boy. I've a bad back and the girl keeps trying to do it herself."

He carried it. It was heavier than it looked, a crate of apples as hard as cannonballs, and he set it down where she pointed, and straightened, and found Elen watching him from the other side of the cart with her chin resting on one fist and an expression he could not read at all.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing."

"You are looking."

"I'm allowed to look," said Elen. "It isn't in the charter."

After that, he was taken in hand by the Voices.

They seemed to know he was coming. Perhaps they had been told. Everyone in the lane had a word for him, or a glance, or, in two cases, a firm and unexpected grip on the wrist. A very old man at a tinker's stall squinted at him for a long moment and said, in a voice like dry paper, "Valemont."

"Yes, sir."

"Your grandfather bought thyme from my father. Every Tuesday for twenty years. Always paid in full, always counted the change." He nodded slowly, as at a verdict. "Never once haggled. It was very irritating. We respected him enormously."

Alan did not know what to say. In seventeen years, the name had been carried before him like a banner, and he had never once been told what the man under it had bought on a Tuesday.

"Thank you, sir," he said. "I did not know."

"Nobody does. That's what makes it true." The old man released his wrist. "Go on. She's waiting."

She was. She had stopped ten paces ahead, by the edge of the fountain, with the basket on her arm and the lantern-light running along her hat, and she was looking at him with her whole face quiet. Not smiling. Just glad, in a plain and open way, as one is glad when something one has been carrying turns out to fit.

He walked up to her, and neither of them said anything, and it was entirely comfortable.

It was in the lane behind the fountain, among the stalls of the very oldest traders, that he learned why she had been late.

It came sideways, as the truth often did in that place. They had paused at a stall hung with spools of thread and tin buttons, tended by a stooped old man whose hands shook so badly that he held a spool with both of them. He nodded to Elen and gave her a small, gentle smile, and said nothing, and she squeezed his shoulder in passing, once, lightly, as if it were nothing at all.

"That's Mr. Oswin," said Granny Hobb, who had left her cart in the care of a grandson and had been following them with her cane at a pace that suggested she had every intention of being present for all of it. "His stall came down in the wind, a week ago last Saturday. All the poles. Every spool on the ground in the snow. And who did I find at six in the morning with her sleeves rolled and her hair full of sawdust, putting a roof back on it?"

Alan stood quite still.

"Granny," said Elen.

"She was here till gone nine. Wouldn't leave till the last pole was in. I tried to give her a cider for it and she wouldn't take it, and I tried to give her one for nothing and she wouldn't take that either. She said she'd trade me an hour of carrying." The old woman sniffed. "Then she ran off up the hill like a mad thing, saying she was late for a friend. I assume that was you."

It was a long time before Alan could say anything.

He thought of a Saturday. Of a long table in the Quiet Annex, and a clock going round, and twenty minutes, thirty, forty. Of a door that had banged open, and a girl with sawdust, he realized, he had not seen it, sawdust still caught in the knot of her hair, who had come down the aisle with two paper cups and a bag, saying I had a plan, and then I got held up at the market, and it all just. Anyway.

Anyway. She had not even said.

"You said you were held up," he said, rather hoarsely.

"I was."

"You did not say by what."

"It didn't seem important." She gave a little shrug and looked at the buttons. "His hands shake. He's not got anyone to do it. It's what you do."

It's what you do. As though there were nothing to say about it. As though it were a kind of weather.

He had forty-one minutes of that Saturday written down, in neat black ink, under the heading Observations. He had her down as late, and flippant, and forty minutes behind a promise. And all that time she had been carrying a dead man's awning up a hill in the snow.

He felt his face go hot, slowly, from the collar upward.

"I was angry," he said. "That Saturday. I was angry that you were late."

"You had every right."

"I did not," said Alan. "I had no information."

She looked up at him. She did not say anything for a moment. Then, quite gently, she bumped his arm with her shoulder, one quick small knock, like a cat asking for a door to be opened.

"You do now," she said.

The oldest stall in the market stood at the very back, under a canopy of dried herbs so thick that it blotted out the sky.

It was a booth of grayed wood, hung from top to bottom with bundles of everything that had ever grown: yarrow and wormwood, hemlock and heartsease, long braids of sage, little twists of dried berries like red beads. Jars crowded the shelves, labeled in brown ink gone pale as tea. And in the middle of it, in a high-backed chair with a shawl over her knees and a clay pipe cold in her hand, sat a tiny, withered woman with white hair like thistledown and eyes of a pale, clear, unnerving gray.

"Mother Tansy," said Elen, and bowed.

It was a proper bow, a full, courteous inclination from the waist, such as one gives to a person of rank. Alan, without quite knowing why, did the same.

The old woman's eyebrows went up. "Well," she said. "Manners. They've sent me a pair."

"We came to ask about the old stories," said Elen. "The ones that aren't in the books."

"Ah." Mother Tansy put the pipe between her gums. She did not light it. "The banned things."

"If you'll tell us."

"And him?" The pale eyes slid to Alan. "He is from the Academy."

"He's from the Academy," Elen agreed. "He's also the only person I know who'll listen to everything and write nothing down."

"I have been prevented from writing," said Alan, "by a basket."

The old woman looked at him for a long moment. Then she cackled, a dry quick sound, like twigs snapping, and gestured with the pipe at two upturned crates.

"Sit."

They sat. The crates were very hard. Overhead, the bundled herbs rustled in the draft, and for a while Mother Tansy said nothing at all. She watched them, with her head tipped to one side, like a bird deciding which of two seeds to take.

Then she began.

She told them of the Alder Street healer. Her name had been Lissa Marren, and the Academy books did not give it. She had been a plain woman, quiet, a bit stout, who tended a ward of poor families in the old city and used the old binding charms because there were no others to be had. One winter night a child had come to her door, dying of a lung fever, and she had used the Threadmending. It was a very old spell. It had worked. The child had lived.

"And two others died," said Alan.

"Two others died." Mother Tansy nodded. "In the same week. Of the ward fever that was already moving through that street, though nobody would say so, because a fever is nobody's fault and a spell is somebody's." She scratched her chin with the stem. "The Council had the record sealed the next night. No hearing. No trial. They did not even take her name. She took her bag and her boy and went out of the city before the week was done. And the spell went out of the books, and the story that went into the books was that it had killed."

"The Ministry record states," said Alan, and stopped.

He did not know how the sentence ended. He had been about to say that the Ministry record was clear. That it had been made by careful people, after careful inquiry. That an institution that had stood for four hundred years did not simply invent. But the old woman's pale eyes were resting on him, mild and unhurried, and the rest of it died in his throat.

"The Ministry records what it is given, boy," said Mother Tansy, not unkindly. "It is not a liar. It is a bucket. It holds what is poured into it."

He sat very still.

It was a strange feeling. It was not exactly disbelief. It was more as though a floor he had been standing on all his life had turned out to be a very large rug. He felt Elen's fingers touch his sleeve, the lightest of pressures, no more than a leaf settling, and when he looked at her she did not say a word. She only looked back, with her eyes steady and warm, and gave the smallest of nods. Listen anyway.

He listened.

"And now," said Mother Tansy, with the air of a woman putting down one thing to pick up another, "you'll want to tell me what's in that basket that you're holding so tight, Elen Joy."

Elen went pink.

"Nothing."

"Silverbell, I should think."

"How did you."

"I'm an old woman. I know the smell of moon on a petal." The black eyes twinkled. "I haven't heard that name from a young one in forty years. Who taught you?"

"A tree," said Elen.

"Then she's a better teacher than most I've met." The old woman leaned forward in her chair, and her voice dropped, and Alan found that he was listening with his whole body, as he had in the forest. "Hear me. The petals won't hold if you heat them. Never heat them. Nine nights in cold frostroot brine, in the dark, with the lid on, and not so much as a drop of light. Moon-things spoil in the light. They sour. You'll have a pot of cabbage water and no one to blame."

"Nine nights," said Elen, softly, as if memorizing. "In the dark."

"I've a bundle here." Mother Tansy reached behind her and came up with a twist of brown paper that smelled of snow and cold earth. "On the house. And you didn't hear it from me, because it isn't on any schedule, and I'm an old woman with a stall to keep."

"Thank you," said Elen. She took it as one takes something alive. "I'll tell you when it works."

"Mind that you do."

Alan said nothing. He heard it all and understood perhaps a third of it. He was beginning to understand that he would hear a great deal more of it, and that there was nothing at all he could do to make himself stop.

It was as they rose to go that the old woman said, almost idly, "And how is Marlow? Still talking to his seedlings?"

Elen stopped with one boot on the step.

"You know the professor?"

"Know him?" Mother Tansy sucked at her cold pipe. "Thirty years ago he came down here every Saturday of term. Him and young Aldric Voss. Thick as thieves, those two. They'd argue over everything from sage to sovereignty and buy mugwort by the pound, because they'd read somewhere it sharpened a debate. Loud boys. Clever boys." She said it flatly, looking at nothing. "Then one winter Aldric came alone. And the winter after that he didn't come at all. And Marlow never bought mugwort again."

"Why?" said Elen.

"He never said." The pale gray eyes came back to them, mild and unreadable. "I never asked. Some questions are not for stalls."

In the silence the herbs stirred overhead.

Alan was thinking of a red seal. Of a long jaw tightening under loose skin, and a watering can that did not wobble. He was thinking, without wishing to, of a tired and clear and quiet face turned toward a cream-colored notice, as one turns toward a window of a house in which one used to live.

"Tell him the mugwort's in," said Mother Tansy. "He may want some."

It was nearly four by the time they came out into the main lane, and the light had begun to go.

He had meant to leave at three. He had said so, quite firmly, to himself, somewhere around the second hour: a respectable day, a polite one, and then the long climb up the Lantern Stair to the dormitory and the evening's reading. He had two chapters of Warding Geometry waiting. He had a ledger to audit.

But the lanterns were all lit now, in the dusk, and the whole market had turned to gold. The paper globes bobbed gently on their strings, red and amber and rose, throwing their colors over the snow, over the striped awnings and the steaming carts and the faces turned up toward them. Somebody had started a fiddle. It was a thin sweet reedy tune, going round and round on itself like a dance, and in the open square before the fountain, where the snow had been trodden to a pale gleaming floor, a very old man and a very old woman had begun to turn.

They were bent. They were slow. He held her hand at the height of his shoulder, and she held her skirt in the other, and they went round together with a stately, shuffling, perfect care, as if they had done this on this exact spot every evening for fifty years, and probably had. Nobody was watching. Nobody was applauding. The whole market simply went on around them, selling and haggling and talking, and the lanterns rocked, and the old couple danced.

Elen had stopped to watch. She stood at the edge of the square with her basket against her hip and the light of three lanterns lying on her face, and her expression had gone entirely soft and unguarded, as if she had forgotten anyone could see.

"That's Mr. and Mrs. Aldous," she said, very quietly. "They've been married sixty-one years. Every Saturday at lamplighting, if the weather lets them. She had a stroke two winters ago, and the doctors said she'd never walk again. He said they would see about that." She smiled, not at Alan, but at the dancers. "I think that's the best thing I know."

Alan looked at her.

He was supposed to say something about the time. He had it ready, a perfectly civil sentence about the hour and the stairs and his reading. It had been in his mouth since three o'clock. He opened it, and what came out instead, in an odd, quiet, slightly formal voice, was, "I find that I have no pressing engagement."

Elen turned.

She did not say anything. Her eyebrows went up, and then, very slowly, her mouth began to curve. It was not the wide grin. It was a smaller, shyer, private thing, a smile that began at the corner of her lips and arrived, much later, in her eyes, and it was so quiet that he felt it more than saw it.

"Good," she said, and turned back to the dance.

That was all. They stood side by side in the lamplight, with the fiddle going round and the old couple turning, and neither of them moved. After a time he noticed that the sleeve of her patched brown coat was touching his, and that neither of them had made any move to alter it.

It was the magpie that ended it.

It came out of the dark above the lanterns, all black and white and brazen, and landed on the rim of the basket with the careless authority of a creature that knows precisely what it wants. Before either of them could speak, it had dipped its head under the cloth, extracted, with a single neat jerk, a long silver fountain pen with a gold nib, and was in the air again, going up and away over the stalls with the pen trailing from its beak like a banner.

"That is my pen," said Alan.

"It's his now," said Elen, with a gasp that was half laughter.

"It was a gift from my grandfather."

"Then you'd better catch him."

He was across the square before he had decided to be. It was absurd. He was seventeen years old, the grandson of nine generations of dignified Valemonts, running at full pelt between the stalls of a village market in the dusk, with his coat flying and his hat in his hand, shouting "Stop! Thief!" at a bird. The magpie swooped low over a barrow of turnips. Alan dodged. It banked around a pole. Alan vaulted a crate. The pen flashed in the lantern-light, silver and gold, and somewhere behind him a great many elderly people, who had apparently been waiting all their lives for this moment, began to cheer.

He caught it, in the end, at the edge of the fountain. The magpie, having made its point, let the pen fall into his outstretched hand, with an expression of mild contempt, and flapped heavily away. Alan stood there, gasping, with the pen in his fist and his hair in his eyes and a bit of turnip in his collar, and the whole of the market turned to look at him.

He felt it start in his chest. It was an odd, tight, fizzing thing, like a bubble coming up from a long way down, and he knew exactly what it was, and he put a hand over his mouth to stop it. It came out anyway, through his nose, in a single helpless huff, and for one second the corners of his mouth went up, broke, and he smiled. A real one. A little crooked, quite unplanned, and gone again almost at once.

Elen had arrived at his shoulder, breathless, with the basket clutched to her chest. She was looking at his face. She had seen it. He knew she had, from the way she did not look at him: she fixed her eyes on the fountain, on the water, on a lantern a very long way off, and said, with enormous care, "I'll just pretend I didn't see that."

"There was nothing to see."

"No. Of course not. Nothing at all." Her voice shook slightly. "I'll mention it to nobody. I'll say nothing to the plaque committee."

"Elen."

"It's gone. It never happened. Here, sit down. You've got turnip."

They sat on the broad stone lip of the fountain, with the basket between them, while the dancers went on turning in the gold and the cold deepened and stars came out over the hollow. For a long time neither of them spoke. She brushed the turnip from his collar without a word. He turned the pen over in his fingers and found, to his surprise, that his hands were not quite steady.

"I wrote something about you," he said at last.

She looked round.

"In my notebook. The one in your basket. The first week." He kept his eyes on the pen. "I set down what I had observed. And I drew a conclusion. I thought you ought to know that it was wrong."

A long pause.

"What did it say?" said Elen.

"That you were careless."

He waited. He had braced for it, as one braces for a blow. He had thought, perhaps, that she would be hurt. He had thought she might be angry.

She laughed.

It was a real laugh, low and delighted and astonished, and it went up into the lantern-light like a flock of birds. "Oh, I am!" she said. "I'm dreadfully careless. I lose my keys. I leave things in the rain. I've got four hats and I've never once owned two gloves that matched." She wiped her eye with the back of her hand. "Just not about that. I'm not careless about people. I never have been."

"No," said Alan. "I see that now."

"Good." She was still smiling, but her eyes had gone very soft. "Thank you for telling me. Most people wouldn't. They'd just never mention it, and let me find out later that they'd thought it."

"It seemed," he said slowly, "the correct thing."

"It is." She hugged the basket. "My mother says you help if you can. Always. Not because anyone's watching, and not because they'll thank you. Because someday you'll be the one on the ground."

Alan went very still.

On the ground. A storehouse floor. Cold, and the dark, and a voice through the wood.

It was only a phrase, an ordinary one, spoken in passing, by a girl who did not know what it meant to him. But he sat there on the cold stone with a silver pen in his fist and felt his throat tighten, and could not say a word.

"Alan?" said Elen.

"It is a good principle," he said, after a moment, in a voice he hardly recognized. "Your mother is a wise woman."

"She'd like you," said Elen, and he did not ask why.

The Lantern Stair, at night, was a different creature.

They climbed it in the dark, with the market falling away below them in a sea of gold, and the cold gripping tighter with every step. Frost had come down on the old stones, and they shone under the lamps like glass. Elen went first, with the basket on her arm, humming something under her breath. Alan came two steps behind, and watched his feet, and watched the back of her head, and was thinking, with a steady and unaccustomed lightness, that it was a very long way up and that he would not have minded if it were longer.

She slipped near the top.

It was a single quick skid, a boot catching a patch of ice on the edge of a step, and the basket flew out of her hand and her arms went up and her whole body began to tip backwards, toward him, toward the dark and the hundred steps below. Alan moved before he thought. He caught her by the waist and the elbow, hard, and pulled her back against his chest, and held her there while the basket bounced down three steps, and rolled, and stopped against the wall.

The world stopped.

She was breathing fast. He could feel her heart going, quick and light, against his arm. Her hat had come off, and her hair, loose and cold and smelling of mint and woodsmoke, lay against his chin. They stood there in the lamplight, with the frost glittering on the steps and the market murmuring far below, and for a moment neither of them moved.

"I have you," said Alan.

It was low, and very steady. It came out without his permission, from somewhere a great deal older than his good sense, and he heard it as it left him, and went cold from his head to his feet.

She turned her head.

Her face was inches from his. The lamplight lay along her cheek, and the dimple came and went, and her eyes were amber and bright and startled and very close.

"That's my line," said Elen, softly.

"I know."

"It's a good one."

"It is," said Alan, and his voice was not quite steady. "I borrowed it."

She did not move away. For a long breath, two, three, she stayed exactly where she was, with her back against his chest and her head tipped up to look at him, and her face doing something very quiet and very careful, as though she were reading a line in a language she had only just begun to learn. Then she smiled, and it was the small one, the private one.

"Thank you," she said. "For catching me."

"It was reasonable."

"It was lovely." She stepped out of his arms, one step, two, and bent to pick up the basket, and her hair hid her face. "Come on. We're nearly at the top."

They reached it together, and stood at the head of the stair in the cold, getting their breath. The Academy rose above them in the starlight, with a few windows burning gold. A long way off, a bell struck the half hour. And on the high road that ran along the ridge, below the great iron gate, a carriage was passing.

It was a black one, lacquered, very handsome, drawn by two gray horses. It went by at a walk, without lamps, in near silence, and as it passed under the gatehouse light Alan saw, on its panel, a crest in silver: a key above a pair of scales.

A gloved hand moved at the window. It lifted a white handkerchief, quite slowly, to the unseen face behind the glass, and lowered it again.

"The Council," said Elen.

Her voice had changed. He glanced at her. The smile had gone out of her face, not all at once, but the way a lamp goes when the oil runs low. She stood with the basket held tight in both arms, watching the carriage move off along the ridge and out of the light.

"They only come down to the village," she said, "when somebody's in trouble."

She did not say anything more. She watched until the carriage was gone, and then she turned and went through the gate, and Alan followed her with a feeling he could not name.

At the door of the girls' wing, she held out the basket.

"Your notebook," she said.

He took it. It was warm from her arm, and smelled faintly, absurdly, of mint. He tucked it under his own arm, where it had always lived, and found that it no longer sat quite right.

"Goodnight, Alan," said Elen. She was smiling again, a little, though her eyes were elsewhere. "Thank you for coming. Thank you for the pen. Thank you for the. Well. For all of it."

"Goodnight, Elen."

She went in. He stood a moment on the cold step, and was about to turn, when he saw, in the lamplight, between the folds of the cloth where the basket lay open on the bench just inside the door, a twist of brown paper. It smelled, even from there, of snow and cold earth. Frostroot.

Nine nights, he thought. In the dark, with the lid on.

He said nothing. He did not ask. He tucked the notebook firmly under his arm, and walked back across the frozen quad to the boys' wing, and did not, for once, count his steps.