The storm broke over the Academy at nineteen minutes to ten, which Alan knew because he was looking at the clock on the library tower when it did.

Elen had been talking about footnotes. He would not remember, afterward, which footnote, only that she had been waving the pewter frog for emphasis, and that the courtyard around them was full of running students with their coats pulled over their heads, and that in the middle of a sentence the wind picked up the whole night and threw it at them.

It came out of the northwest with a sound like a great door slamming. The lamps along the arcade lurched on their chains. A sheet of snow, not falling but flying, level as a thrown blanket, struck the two of them full in the face, and the courtyard vanished. There was no courtyard. There was no tower, no fountain, no sky. There was only a roaring white dark with the faint amber smear of a lantern somewhere inside it, and Elen's voice at his elbow, delighted, shouting, "Oh, it's a proper one!"

Alan said nothing. He had stopped on the library steps with one hand on the stone, and the cold had gone into him in a single clean stroke, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, and stayed.

"Alan!" She had his sleeve. "Come on! We'll be blown to Marrowfield!"

He let himself be led. He could feel his legs working. It was a curious thing, to watch from a little way off while his body walked through the snow, matching her stride, keeping to the wall, with his chin tucked into his collar and his eyes fixed on the back of her hat. He counted steps. Eleven, twelve. It was something to do.

The boys' wing was dark. Its great oak door stood open, and in the doorway, with a pillow clutched to his chest and a heap of blankets dragging behind him like a defeated flag, stood Pip Hollis, hair on end, bellowing into the wind.

"There you are! I've been out here for ten minutes! They've shuttered the whole wing! There's a prefect with a whistle!"

"What has happened?" said Alan.

"Storm Night!" Pip's face, in the lantern light, was alight with the purest joy. "It's tradition! First blizzard of the winter, wards too thin in the wings, so everybody sleeps in the Great Hall! Four hundred people and a hundred kettles! Mira says it's the best night of the whole year!"

As if on cue, from somewhere across the courtyard, a whistle shrilled, and a stern female voice cried out over the roaring dark, "By the custom of Levis Morny! All students to the Great Hall! Bedding, lamps, and no argument!"

"That's the Warden," said Elen, delighted. "She does the voice every year. I've heard about it for months."

Pip thrust half the blankets at Alan. He took them without a word, and they went on together, the three of them, shoulder to shoulder across the howling dark, with the other students streaming past them in clumps and strings and bobbing lanterns, all of them laughing, all of them shouting, all of them headed for the single square of golden light at the far side of the garth, where two enormous doors stood open to the storm.

The Great Hall had been transformed.

He had known it only as the long high room of lunch and assembly, with its gray windows and its three rows of benches. Now the benches had been dragged against the walls, and in their place, from end to end, lay hundreds of pallets and bedrolls in crooked rows, heaped with quilts and coats and cushions, strewn with books and playing cards and half-eaten bread. The four great hearths blazed, one at each corner, banked with logs as thick as a man. A few dozen enchanted lanterns hung under the roof beams on invisible threads, giving off a low warm shine, and from the kitchen end came the clatter and bang of a hundred cups, and the smell of cocoa, and roasting chestnuts, and wet wool drying.

It was a good place. It was a loud, warm, ordinary, cheerful place, and he could not make himself walk into it.

"Alan," said Elen, softly.

He moved. He found a corner, and he found it by the simple expedient of walking until his feet stopped. It was at the far north end, a narrow alcove between the last hearth and a thick stone pillar, in the wall that faced the weather. He did not choose it. He understood only afterward that it was the one place in the hall where the wind sounded loudest, and that some small deranged part of him had gone to it as a man goes to meet a creditor.

He put down the blankets. He sat with his back against the pillar and his knees drawn up and his hands, with a certain deliberation, clasped round them. Pip, behind him, was arranging pillows with enormous ceremony and talking without pause. A tall girl's braid swung into view, and a dark head, and a sandy one: Wren, Theo, and behind them Mira with a vast steaming urn in both arms and Dara carrying a book. Mira set down the urn. She looked at Alan, once, for perhaps a second and a half. Then she looked at Elen, and something went across her square face, quick and quiet and understanding, and she said to nobody in particular, "We'll take the left side of the pillar. Plenty of room on the left."

"We will?" said Theo.

"We will," said Wren, and put a hand flat between his shoulder blades, and steered him away.

They arranged themselves with great tact, thirty feet off, behind a barricade of quilts, and Alan did not look at them, and did not say thank you, and was grateful with all his heart.

Then the storm came in properly, and he stopped being able to think about anything else.

It had been a rumor at first, a long low pressure against the stone. By ten o'clock it had become a voice. It rose from the north, from the moors and the black forest and the high white passes beyond, and as it came it gathered itself in a series of long swelling shrieks, each higher than the last, that tore at the great windows until the lead sang and the glass bowed inward. The wards in the walls groaned. He could hear them, deep in the stone, a slow strained note like a ship's timbers at sea. Hail hit the high panes like flung gravel. Down the length of the hall, a thousand little flames in a thousand lamps leaned over all together, as though a great invisible breath had passed along the room.

And he was seven years old.

It came all at once, without warning, the way it always did. The storehouse door at his back, the wood swelling in its frame, the wind packing the snow against it with a long dry hiss. The lantern guttering out. The cold coming up through the floor into his legs, and the dark pressing in on his eyes, and his own voice, small and cracked, shouting until the shouting turned into something else. He felt it in his hands first. They were shaking. He pressed them harder around his knees and the shaking went up his arms.

Article nine, he thought. Article nine, clause one. All students of the Academy shall conduct themselves with such courtesy.

He could not remember clause two.

Article twelve. Article twenty-seven. He ran them through his mind like beads, one after another, and the storm screamed over the top of them, and under his ribs his heart was going like a hammer on a door.

"Is this seat taken?"

He looked up.

She was standing in front of him with a quilt around her shoulders like a cloak and a bundle under one arm, and the firelight at her back put a halo of red through her hair. She had lost her hat somewhere. The pewter frog was tucked under her elbow. And she was looking at him, without the faintest trace of the bright eager curiosity he had come to expect, with an expression of such plain, steady, unhurried kindness that for a moment he could not breathe.

"It is a pillar," said Alan. "Not a seat."

"Then I'll sit on the floor next to the pillar." She did. She folded herself down beside him, cross-legged, with the quilt drawn up round her, near enough that their shoulders were an inch apart, and did not say anything for a while. She set the frog on the flagstones between them, where it regarded the storm with an air of stern disapproval. Then she said, quite casually, as though she were asking whether he took sugar:

"Do you want me to talk, or be quiet? I can do either. I'm better at one than the other, but I can do both."

He thought about it. The wind hit the windows, and he flinched, very slightly, and hated himself for it.

"Talk," he said. It came out hoarse.

"All right." She settled back against the pillar. "Did I ever tell you about Ethan and the wardrobe?"

"You have never mentioned an Ethan."

"My brother. He's twenty. He's six foot of complete nonsense. We were on a ferry, a few summers ago, going across the Grey Strait, and the crossing was meant to take two hours, and he decided to hide in the wardrobe in our cabin to jump out at Mum." She was grinning at the dark hall. "But the ferry had old latches. And when the ship rolled, the wardrobe door swung shut and locked itself. And Ethan, who is six foot, was in a wardrobe about as deep as a loaf of bread, with his knees round his ears, and he didn't dare shout because he'd have had to admit what he was doing. So he lay there for an hour and ten minutes and said nothing. And Mum came in and said, 'Where's Ethan?' and Dad said, 'Perhaps he's gone to the deck,' and the wardrobe went, very quietly, 'Mmf.'"

Alan's mouth moved. He was not sure why.

"And Dad looked at the wardrobe," said Elen, "and Mum looked at the wardrobe, and they sat down on the bunk, and Dad got out his maps, and Mum got out her book, and they just carried on. They talked for forty minutes about the tide tables. They said things like, 'I do wonder where Ethan has got to.' And the wardrobe said, 'Mmf,' every ten minutes, like a clock."

"They left him there."

"They let him out at the end, eventually. He had marks on his knees. He's never hidden in a wardrobe since." She laughed, low, and it fitted into the noise of the hall as a coin fits a purse. "That's what my family's like. We go everywhere. Dad has maps, and Mum has books and sandwiches, always sandwiches, and every summer we get on some ferry or cart or whatever's going, and we just go. We've been in about forty storms. I counted once. Dad says a storm is just the sky explaining itself."

"Explaining what?" said Alan, before he could stop himself.

"He's never said. He says you only find out if you wait."

The wind hit. A great blow, a fist, against the north wall, and the shutters on the nearest window shuddered, and a gust of cold air went down the hall and set every flame leaning. Alan's hands tightened on his knees.

"Dad says the worst ones are in the north, in summer," said Elen, a little more quietly. "Out of season. They come up of nothing, in the one week of the year when nobody's expecting them. The local people have a word for them. He picked it up in some village years ago, and he's used it ever since. Winter-sulk."

Alan went very still.

It was the same word. It was exactly the same word. He had heard it in an inn parlor, when he was seven, from the lips of a red-faced man with a ladle, saying it over and over while someone held a hot cup to his mouth. A winter-sulk. It comes once in a generation. It was not a coincidence, because it could not be one. It was only a word, passed from village to village through the whole of the north, as a particular kind of rain has a name. And she had said it, quite lightly, in the same voice that she had used for Ethan and the wardrobe, and she did not know.

She did not know.

"Alan?" said Elen.

"Yes."

"You've gone quiet."

"I am listening."

"You've stopped breathing."

"I am," said Alan, with some difficulty, "conserving air."

She looked at him, and she did not laugh.

Then the lanterns went out.

It was not a gradual thing. One moment the Great Hall was filled with a low gold light, and the next, between one heartbeat and another, the whole roof of lamps winked and died, as a single flame goes out in a draft. Hearths flared and fell. A great shout went up from four hundred throats, half fright and half delight. And in the sudden, black, roaring dark, with the storm shrieking at the glass and the cold coming in under the door, Alan Valemont ceased to be anywhere at all.

He was in the storehouse.

The wood was against his back, and the door would not open, and no one was coming. He had stopped shouting. There was no one to hear. His hands had gone numb, and his breath was a small white ghost in front of his face, and somewhere under the sound of the wind he could hear a high thin crying, the crying of a very small boy, and it was a long moment before he understood that some of it was coming from his own throat.

Something closed around his wrist.

It was warm. That was the first thing. It was warm and small and steady, and it did not pull, and it did not let go. It simply closed around his wrist in the dark, a hand, a plain ordinary human hand, and stayed there, like a stone in a stream.

"I'm right here," said Elen's voice, very low, very near.

The lanterns flickered. Once, twice. Then they swelled back to life along the roof beams, one after another, with a long collective sigh from the hall, and the light came down over everything, pale and gold, and showed him his own hands, white-knuckled round his knees, and hers, lying over his wrist.

It had lasted two seconds. He thought it had been much longer.

"Sorry," said Alan. His voice was barely there. "I do not."

"Don't," said Elen.

She let go of his wrist. She did not do it quickly. And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she put up both hands and unwound the scarf from her neck.

It was the long green one. He had seen it in the lane, in the market, in the courtyard, in the forest, trailing behind her like a flag: green wool, loosely knit, much washed, with a small mended place near one end where a moth had got in. She shook it out. It was enormously long. She held one end in each hand and looked at him with her head slightly on one side.

"May I?"

He did not know what he was agreeing to. He nodded.

She leaned across the gap between them and looped the scarf round his neck, once, and again, and a third time, with quick sure fingers, the way one dresses a child to go out. Her face was very close. He saw the faint freckles over the bridge of her nose, and a smear of soot on her cheekbone, and the corner of her lip, caught between her teeth in concentration. She tucked one end into his collar. As she did, the backs of her fingers brushed along the line of his jaw, light, warm, a little rough, and he stopped breathing again, quite separately from the storm.

"There," said Elen. "It's long. It goes over your ears."

"You will be cold," said Alan.

"I run hot."

"That is not a physiological principle."

"It's a very good one." She sat back on her heels and looked at her handiwork with satisfaction. "You look like a very serious wreath."

He breathed in. The wool was soft, and it was warm from her, and it smelled of mint and pine and old woodsmoke, and, very faintly, of toasted sugar. It was the smell of the greenhouse, and the larder, and the Quiet Annex, and a basket under a cloth. It was a smell he knew. It went in through his nose and down into the place where the cold had been, and something that had been clenched in him for a long time, at the base of his skull, unlocked by a single degree.

His breath slowed. He had not told it to.

"Better?" said Elen, gently.

"Yes," said Alan. He heard how raw it sounded. "I believe so."

She did not say anything. She only nodded, and sat down again, a little closer than before, and pulled her quilt round her shoulders. The wind went on screaming. Down the hall someone started a song, a loud ragged one, and the others took it up, and the whole great room filled with the sound of four hundred people singing badly against a storm.

He looked at his hands. He looked at the flagstones, and the frog, and the quilt. And then, with a clumsy and halting gravity, as a man steps out onto ice, he said, "I was left alone in a storm once."

Elen turned her head.

"When I was small," said Alan. His eyes were fixed on the floor. "In the north. It was summer, and it should not have been snowing. I was in a place where I could not get out. For a few hours. It was a long time ago."

He stopped. That was all he could do. It was not the whole of it, not nearly. It left out the door and the voice and the doorway full of light, and the red hair, and the hand. It was the shape of a thing, with the substance cut out. But it was true, every word, and he had said it aloud, in a hall full of people, to a girl who sat very still beside him, and he found that the sky had not fallen.

Elen did not say anything for a moment. She did not say, oh, how awful, or what happened, or were you frightened. She did not ask him anything at all. She only looked at him, with her whole face gone quiet and soft and careful, the way she had looked at the great tree in the forest, and when she spoke, it was very simple.

"Thank you for telling me."

"It is not a thing of any consequence."

"It is," said Elen. "Or you wouldn't be shaking." She said it without any reproach. "You don't have to be brave in front of me, Alan. I mean it. You can be anything. I won't mind."

"I do not know how to be anything else," said Alan.

He heard it as it came out. It was perfectly true. It was the truest thing he had said in months, and it sat in the air between them, bare and strange and small, and he felt his ears begin to burn.

"You could try being cold," said Elen, after a moment. "It's very natural. I understand lots of people do it."

Something went through him then, a flicker, a thread of something light at the bottom of the dark, and his mouth twitched. He pressed his lips together hard. She saw it. She was watching him very closely, with her chin on her fist and her eyes bright, and she did not say anything at all, with enormous and deliberate tact.

"I do not find that amusing," said Alan, into the scarf.

"No. Of course not."

"It is not a joke."

"It's a statement of fact," said Elen. "About cold."

The storm raged on. But somewhere in the middle of the night, it changed. The great shrieks dropped in pitch. The wind that had screamed at the windows settled to a long, low, steady roar, like a beast that has tired itself out, and the hail turned to a hiss, and the hiss to a whisper. The song down the hall died down by degrees. Pallets creaked. Somebody was snoring, a long way off, with deep and sonorous conviction.

Elen was talking again. She had begun softly, in the dark, about nothing in particular: the time her father had taken the wrong road to a mountain monastery and ended up at a cheese festival, the time her mother had read an entire novel aloud in a cart without once noticing that it was raining. She told it in a murmur, a little sleepily, with long gaps in between, and her voice rose and fell like a tide.

He listened. He had not meant to. He had meant to sit very upright against the pillar and endure it, as he had endured every storm since he was seven, with his back straight and his eyes open and his hands folded until the dawn.

The wool was warm against his neck.

His head tilted, very slightly, toward the stone. The fire in the hearth at his shoulder had burned down to a bed of deep orange, and the light of it lay along the floor in a long soft bar. Her voice was saying something about a goat. His eyes were closing. He thought, with a distant surprise, that he ought to stop them. He did not. The last thing he knew, before the dark closed over him, was the sound of her voice, low and slow, telling the story of Ethan and the wardrobe a second time, in a hush, for nobody, and a warm weight at his shoulder where the quilt had slipped.

It was the light that woke him.

It was a different light from any he had known. It was pale and clean and cold, very white, coming in at the high windows in long slanted bars, and the whole Great Hall was drowned in it, quiet as the bottom of a lake. The hearths had burned down to ash. The lanterns hung dim and pale. Down the long room, a sea of sleepers lay in heaps and tangles under their quilts, and the only sound was the slow soft rise and fall of four hundred people breathing.

The storm had gone. He lay for a while without moving, listening to the silence.

He had slept.

It came to him slowly, as one realizes the pain in a tooth has stopped. He had slept through the night. A blizzard, the first of the winter, the one that came out of the north and rattled the windows and put out the lamps, and he had slept through it from the second watch to the dawn, all the way down, without a dream. It had not happened in ten years. He lay there under the weight of the green wool and tried to remember when it had last happened, and could not.

Something was leaning against his shoulder.

He turned his head, a very small movement, a quarter-inch. Elen was asleep. She had slid down the pillar in the night, with the quilt half off, and her cheek was resting on the shoulder of his coat, and her hair, wild and tangled and smelling of woodsmoke, had come down over her face. Her mouth was a little open. One hand lay curled loosely over the pewter frog. She looked, asleep, about twelve years old, and entirely at peace.

He did not move. He did not think he could have, if the roof had come in.

"I want it recorded," said a whisper at his ear, "that I'm not saying anything."

He turned his eyes, only his eyes. Pip Hollis was crouched a yard away on his heels, wrapped in an eiderdown like a large and thoughtful bird, with a charcoal stick in one hand and a sheet of parchment against his knee. His hair stood up on one side. His whole round freckled face was alight with a seraphic and terrible joy.

"I'm saying nothing," Pip whispered. "I'm merely drawing a picture. For my own private records. Entitled, Study of Two Persons in a Hall."

"Pip," said Alan, without moving his lips.

"I'll call it art."

"If you show that to a single living soul."

"I'd never," said Pip, with deep sincerity, and drew, with a long slow stroke, what was clearly a very long scarf.

Alan shut his eyes.

The dawn light fell on his face. The wool was soft, and smelled of mint. The shoulder under Elen's cheek had gone quite numb, and he had no wish at all to feel it return. And into the great stillness of the morning, in a voice so low that it was barely more than breath, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the sleeping hall, he said:

"Thank you."

A pause.

One amber eye opened, a slit, against his shoulder.

"I heard that," said Elen, thickly.

"I did not say anything."

"You said thank you. It was very quiet. It was the best one I've ever had." The eye closed again. A small smile crept across her mouth, and settled. "I'm going to keep it."

"You may not."

"Too late. It's mine now." She yawned, hugely, into his sleeve, and stretched, and sat up, blinking, with her hair in her eyes and the print of his coat seam on her cheek. She looked about her at the pale hall, the quiet sleepers, the long bars of light, and Pip, who had hastily put away his charcoal and was gazing at the ceiling with an expression of total innocence.

"Morning, Pip," said Elen.

"Good morning, Elen. Isn't the weather improved?"

"Very much." She turned to Alan. She looked at him for a moment with her head tilted, at the green scarf, and the dishevelled hair, and whatever his face was doing. Then she smiled, a small, lopsided, entirely uncomplicated smile, and some of the weight in his chest simply went away.

"I should tell you something," she said.

"Yes?"

"I'm failing Theory."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I have seen your marks. It is a notice board." He cleared his throat. "You answer the application questions better than anyone in the year. You cannot reproduce the framework. The professor has remarked upon it. Twice."

"It's the frameworks," said Elen, mournfully. "They won't stay in my head. They slide off. I understand the thing, and then I can't say why I understand it in the right order." She looked at him sidelong, through her tangled fringe. She was, he noticed, a little pink. "I was wondering. If you'd teach me. Properly. Not as a favor. I'd bring tea."

He looked at her. He looked at the pillar, and the quilt, and the frog. He was wearing her scarf, and it was warm round his neck, and he had slept the night through for the first time in a decade with her head on his shoulder. It occurred to him, with a distant and rather alarmed clarity, that he had no defenses left. He had spent them all, somewhere around three in the morning, and had not noticed.

"I believe," said Alan, with great care, "that I could manage that."

"Presently?"

"Presently," he said. "Yes."

She laughed. It rang through the hushed hall like a bell, and a sleeper nearby stirred and muttered and turned over, and Elen clapped a hand over her mouth, shaking, and over the top of it her eyes met his and shone.

He did not take off the scarf. He thought of it, later, in the thin cold light of the courtyard, when the prefects had unbarred the doors and the whole Academy had come out blinking into a world made new. The snow lay a yard deep. The towers wore white caps. Every roof and wall and branch was drawn in a single clean line of silver against the blue, and the air was so cold and clear it rang like glass. He stood on the steps with the sleeping hall behind him and the morning in front, and he put up a hand and touched the green wool at his throat.

He would give it back, of course. He would fold it, with exact corners, and return it in the proper manner, with thanks.

He did not take it off all the way to the dormitory.