The sentence for the crime, as pronounced by Professor Marlow on Friday evening in the east greenhouse, was six consecutive Saturday mornings of scrubbing glass.

He had delivered it without any particular ceremony. They had come to him at six o'clock, after the club had gone home, six nights into the nine, because Alan held that a record ought to be shown while it was still being kept, carrying the notebook, the formula, and a speech Alan had written out twice and then left folded in his pocket. The old man had been sitting on an upturned crate among the seedlings with his waistcoat buttoned wrong and half an apple in his hand. He had listened to all of it, with his pale eyes on the middle distance and his jaw working slowly. He had read the six entries in Alan's upright hand and Elen's slanting one, line by line, with a finger moving down the margin, and when he reached the last page he had closed the book and asked a single question.

"Who has tasted it?"

"I have," said Elen. "A drop of the brine, each night. I wrote it down."

"Only you."

"Only me."

"Then you will not do so again." He said it mildly, but for the first time since Alan had known him, he did not say it vaguely. "Not one drop. Not for the Board, not for Mr. Oswin, not for me. If it is to be tasted, it will be tasted by someone licensed to do so, in a room with a physician in it, and not by a girl of sixteen in a larder."

"Yes, sir."

"Mr. Valemont. You were the witness."

"Yes, sir."

"You knew it was against article thirty-four."

"I did."

"And you wrote it down regardless."

"I believed it better that it be written than not," said Alan. "I would do so again. But I do not think that makes it correct."

Something moved at the corner of the old man's mouth. "No," said Marlow. "It does not."

He had stood, then, with the apple in his hand, and for the length of a long breath he was neither vague nor kind but simply grave. "A rule is a promise a group makes to its weakest member. You have kept the second half of that promise very well. You took care of the one at risk. But you broke the first half, and I cannot excuse it, because if I excuse it for you, I excuse it for the next student, who will not have a Mr. Valemont." He rubbed his chin. "I cannot decide that you did not break it. I can only decide what it costs. Six Saturdays. Glass, inside and out. You will report to me at eight."

There had been no shouting. There had been no report to the Warden. The jar would stay in the dark where it was, he said, and he would hold the key and enter it in the club ledger under his own name, with a note. In the spring, when the Board of Assay sat, he would put the formula before it himself.

"As for the fee," he added, and the pale eyes had turned on Alan, "I understand Mr. Valemont has a theory about a clause."

"There is always a clause," said Alan.

"Then find it."

They had been at the door, with their coats half on, when Elen turned back. "Professor. One more thing. Mother Tansy says to tell you the mugwort's in."

The old man's hand had stopped on the apple. For a moment the greenhouse was entirely quiet, the stove ticking, the seedlings dripping. Then he said, in a voice quite unlike his usual one, "That was kind of her. Thank you," and nothing more, and he turned back to his plants with his shoulders very straight.

Alan had thought the sentence just. He thought so on Saturday morning, at eight o'clock, standing on a ladder in the cold with a bucket of soapy water and a rag, scrubbing the outside of a glass panel that had not been cleaned since the previous spring. Elen thought so too, apparently, since she was singing. She was on the next ladder along, with her sleeves shoved up and her hat over one ear, and she was working her way through an old marching song with total conviction and about half the words. A good deal of soap had arrived on her nose.

"Doesn't it feel strange?" she called over, squeaking a pane clear. "To be punished and be glad about it?"

"It feels correct."

"It feels like Tuesday to me," said Elen, and sang the chorus again, louder.

He went on scrubbing. It did feel correct. That was what unsettled him. He had been braced, for two days, for the sinking in the stomach that had always followed any mark against his name. And it had not come. The sentence had been fair, and it had been given by a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why, and there was a kind of clean cold relief in being measured against something that was true.

He thought of it again on Sunday evening, in the Quiet Annex, when she said what she said.

The Marrowfield paper was due on Thursday. It was the last week of November, and the annex had turned into a kind of siege-works: four folders open on the long table, one blue and bulging, a heap of crumpled drafts, a mug of cold cider with a skin on it, and Elen's pewter frog, which had apparently been adopted as a paperweight and had taken to the role with grim dignity. Outside the west window the snow had begun again, in thin steady flakes. The lamps burned low and gold.

"Exchange," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The professor said the synthesis has to answer the other side. That's the whole point. We each argue our corner, and then we have to say what's true about the other person's corner." She slid a sheaf of closely written pages across the table. "So I read yours, and you read mine. And then we write the end together. Like a treaty."

He took her pages. She took his. It was a strange thing to do, he thought, to sit across a table from someone and read what she believed, in her own loose slanting hand with its crossings-out and its ink blots. He found that he was holding the paper rather carefully, as one holds something that might spill.

Her argument was good.

It was a great deal better than good. He read it with a growing, reluctant attention, forgetting the cold cider. She had not simply said that Hesper Vane was right. She had argued that Vane's intention was not a defense at all, but a measurement. It told the Ministry what kind of person it had punished. And she had set beside it, in a plain and merciless column, the list of what the closed process had cost: three days of assessment, two hundred people already coughing blood, the well running black. It was the kind of paragraph that made one want to put down one's pen. He was halfway down the second page, with his lips pressed together, when he became aware that she had stopped reading.

She was holding his pages. Her finger was on a line near the bottom of the third sheet. The lamplight lay along her cheek, and she was perfectly still.

"Alan," she said.

"Yes?"

"This sentence." She read it aloud, slowly, in a voice that was careful and quite level. "A person who breaks the rule must bear the consequence in full, whatever her intention; and the consequence will fall also upon those who stand beside her." She looked up. "Do you believe that?"

He had written it in a single stroke, a fortnight ago, without hesitation. It had felt like the plainest thing in the paper.

"Yes," said Alan.

"All of it?"

"I do not see how one could believe half of it." He set down her pages. "Professor Marlow did the same on Friday. You broke article thirty-four, and I assisted, and we were each given six Saturdays. The cost fell on both of us. It was not unjust. It was in proportion to what we did."

"It was fair," said Elen, slowly. "I agree. It was fair." She turned the page over, face down, on the table. "But it was Marlow."

"What does that signify?"

"That he's fair." She said it quite simply. "He thought about it. He asked who'd tasted it. He chose a punishment that fit. He didn't go to the Warden, and he didn't make a speech. But that's him, not the rule. The rule would have let anyone do anything to us."

"The rule does not do anything. People apply it."

"That's exactly what I mean."

He opened his mouth and shut it again. The lamps dimmed a fraction, though neither of them had raised a voice.

It went on from there. It was not a quarrel. Neither of them, he thought afterward, had once been angry. It was something more exacting, and a great deal harder to put down. They sat across a long table in the lamplight, with the snow falling past the window, and said to each other, one after another, in low careful voices, the truest things they knew.

"Hesper Vane saved two hundred people," said Elen. "And the Ministry took her license for ten years. Who paid for the closed process? Not the Ministry. The two hundred, if she'd waited. Who pays for it when it's wrong? Someone always does. It's just that nobody counts them."

"A rule is a promise," said Alan. "If every person judges for herself when a promise ought to hold, then no promise holds. That is the whole purpose of making one. It is not for the days when it is easy."

"Marlow says it's a promise to the weakest member."

"He is correct."

"Then what about the weakest member, in Marrowfield, who couldn't wait three days?"

"That is a failure of the rule. It is not a license to break it."

"What's the difference?"

"A great deal." He heard his own voice sharpen, and checked it. "A person who breaks the promise breaks it to everyone. To the weakest, also. The next villager, in the next well, who is told that the assessment may be skipped, because a clever woman in the last village was proved right. He is the one who takes the poison, when the clever woman is wrong."

Elen sat very still. Then she said, quietly, "That's a good point."

"I know."

"I hate it."

"I know that also."

A small silence. Under the table, in the cramped space between their two chairs, her knee had come to rest against his. He did not think either of them had noticed. He noticed. He kept very still and looked at the lamp.

"What about Lissa Marren?" said Elen.

"What of her?"

"She used a forbidden spell and it worked. The Council sealed the record, with no hearing, and the whole city believes she killed two people. That's a consequence. It fell on her, and on her boy, and it was a lie. Is that the rule being fair?"

"No," said Alan, at once. "It was not. It was the Council being unjust. I have said so."

"Then the rule isn't safe."

"No rule is safe. A rule is the least dangerous thing we have." He drew a breath. "I do not say that it is good. I say that without it we are left with whatever the strongest person in the room has decided that morning. And that is a great deal worse."

She looked at him. Her eyes in the low light were dark amber, very steady, and he had the odd, dizzy sense of being weighed on a scale a great deal finer than any he had been measured on before.

"You really do think that," she said.

"I do."

"All the way down."

"All the way." He found that he was gripping the edge of the table. "Elen. Intent does not unburn the workshop. Hesper Vane was right to save them, and she was right to be punished. Both. At once. I do not understand why you cannot hold both."

"Because I'm not sure I could bear the second half," said Elen, "if it were me."

The words were very quiet. They hung in the lamplight between them, and for a moment he did not know what to do with them. She was not looking at him. She was looking at her own hand, lying on the table, the knuckles stained with ink, and the fingers curled very slightly inward, as though around something small.

"Is that what you think?" she said. "Of people who break rules? That they're, I don't know. Unreliable?"

It was an honest question. He gave it an honest answer. It was the only thing he knew how to do.

"I think that a person who breaks the rules whenever she judges them wrong is a person on whom the rest of us pay for her judgment. I think she may very well be right. I think she may be a great deal more right than the rules." He stopped. He tried to see the whole of the sentence, the way he saw a proof, and found that he could not see the end of it. "And I think that those who stand beside her will bear the cost. I would not ask anyone to."

"Would you stand beside me, knowing that?"

"I already do."

It came out of him very plainly, before he had decided to say it. The lamps steadied.

"That's not an answer," said Elen.

"It is the only one I have."

"Then am I just the person whose friends pay for her?" She lifted her eyes at last. She was smiling, very faintly, and it was a perfectly pleasant smile, and there was something in it he had never seen before. "Is that what I am?"

"No." He said it at once, and with all the force he had. Then, because it was true and because he had never learned how to leave a true thing out, he went on. "You are worth the cost. I would say so under oath. But that does not make the cost any smaller."

He had meant it as the highest thing he knew how to say.

She did not move. Her smile did not change. But he saw something go across her face, quick and light and very small, the way a cloud's shadow crosses a field, and when it had passed, the smile was exactly where it had been, and did not reach her eyes.

"Fair enough," said Elen.

The pewter frog regarded him from the corner of the table. A lamp, somewhere along the wall, guttered and steadied.

He sat with a feeling he could not name. He had said a true and generous thing. He was certain of it. He had checked every clause. And yet it was as though he had handed her a very fine gift and she had accepted it with great courtesy, and set it down, quite gently, somewhere he could not see. He searched for the flaw in what he had said, and could not find it.

"The synthesis," said Elen, turning over a clean sheet. Her voice was bright and quick again. "We should write it. It's gone nine. If we don't finish tonight we'll be doing it at dawn, and you'll make the corners sharp, and I'll cry."

"Elen."

"Mm?"

He did not know what he had meant to say. He looked at her, in the lamplight, with her head bent over the paper and a smear of ink on her chin, and the words he had were all of them the wrong shape.

"The last paragraph," he said instead. "I think it should say that both are true."

She looked up.

"Both," said Alan. "That the intention was right and the punishment was right, and that neither cancels the other. That a rule is a promise, and that a promise broken has a cost. And that the cost is real, even when the cause is good." He paused. "And that a process which cannot be reached by the people it exists to protect has failed, and the failure is its own."

She was staring at him.

"That last part," said Elen slowly, "wasn't in your draft."

"No."

"You've never put that in a paper."

"I have never believed it in a paper." He picked up the pen. His hand was not quite steady. "I believed it on Friday, in the larder, when you told me about the fee. I did not know where to put it. I think it goes here."

Elen put her chin on her fist. She did not say anything. She watched him write.

He wrote it out slowly, in his small upright hand, with all the care he gave to anything that mattered. When procedure fails those it was made to protect, the failure belongs to the procedure. He had to stop, midway, to find the verb. She did not help. She only watched, and when he reached the end, and set down the full stop, she reached across the table, took the pen from his fingers, and wrote underneath it, in her quick uphill letters:

And a door should be built, for those who cannot wait. Article 27 shows it can be done.

"That's your door," she said. "You found it. I'm just writing it down."

"It is a recommendation," said Alan.

"It's a very good one." She put the pen back in his hand. Her fingertips lay over his for a half second, warm and inky and entirely steady, and when she took them away she was smiling again, and this time, a very little, the smile arrived.

They finished at half past nine. They tied up the folders, and he carried the blue one, and she carried the frog, and the annex lamps went down behind them one by one as they passed. At the door she turned, with her bag on her shoulder and the pewter frog tucked under her arm like a rather small and bad-tempered baby.

"I like arguing with you," she said.

"I do not argue."

"You were magnificent."

"I was correct."

"Both," said Elen, and laughed, and it was a real laugh, low and warm, and his chest loosened by a degree he had not known was tight. "Goodnight, Alan."

"Goodnight."

He watched her go down the corridor, with her scarf trailing and the little frog winking in the lamplight. He thought of a smile that had not reached her eyes. He turned the thought over, as he would have turned a coin, and put it carefully away, as a person puts away a coin he does not yet know the value of.

It was as they came out onto the library steps that he first noticed the sky.

The snow had stopped. That was the first strange thing. In the half hour they had been working, the thin steady flakes had thinned to nothing, and the whole courtyard lay under a vast and absolute stillness, as though someone had put a hand over the world's mouth. Above the towers, where the stars should have been, the sky had gone the color of an old bruise: a low heavy violet, shot with yellow along the western edge, pressing down on the roofs like a lid.

The air tasted of metal.

Alan stopped on the top step.

He knew that taste. He had known it all his life. A thin cold bright edge on the air, a prickle at the back of the neck, a silence in the birds. His body knew it before his mind did, and the whole of him went rigid, one foot on the stone and the other still lifted, like a deer at the edge of a clearing.

Elen, who had been about to descend, looked back.

Across the courtyard, a bell began to ring. It was the Warden's bell, in the north tower: not the slow round note of the hour, but a quick hard clamor, repeated and repeated, that sent a flight of rooks up from the roofs in a black scream. Along the arcades, lamps flared into life. Doors banged. Somewhere a prefect's voice was shouting, thin and carrying in the cold.

"Storm warning!" it cried. "First blizzard of the winter, expected before dawn! All students indoors! All halls to be sealed by ten!"

"Oh," said Elen, softly. "Here it comes."

She turned to him, brightening, with the sudden unguarded eagerness of someone who loved weather. And stopped.

He had gone white. She saw it at once, in the light of the arcade lamp, the color leaving his face in a single slow tide. His hand had closed on the stone balustrade. He was looking not at her and not at the sky but at some point a long way beyond the walls, and his lips were pressed so tightly together that they had gone pale.

"Alan?"

"Yes."

"You've gone a funny color."

"It is cold," said Alan.

She studied him. The bell rang on, over their heads, and the sky pressed down, and the first slow flake of the storm fell out of the dark and settled on the back of his hand, and did not melt.

"It's a bit more than cold," she said gently.

"I am quite well."

She did not argue. She stood very close, in the yellow light, with the frog under one arm and her hat pushed back, and looked at him with an expression that had gone very quiet and very careful, the look of someone who has seen a door in a wall and has decided not to knock on it. Not yet.

"Come on," she said. "I'll walk you to your wing. It's on my way."

"It is not on your way."

"It is tonight."

And she took his sleeve, lightly, between two fingers, as she had on the first day in the cloister, and led him down the steps into the beginning of the storm.