By the last week of May, the Academy had stopped being a place and become a weather system, and the weather was examinations.

It was in the corridors, where first-years walked with their lips moving and their eyes fixed on nothing. It was in the Great Hall at breakfast, where nobody ate and everybody recited. It was in the long gold evenings, when the windows stood open to the first warm air of the year and the whole school sat in doorways and on stair-heads with their books on their knees, groaning softly, like a field of cattle waiting for rain.

Alan was not afraid of examinations. He had never been afraid of them. They were the one form of weather in which he knew exactly how to dress.

The winter had gone by in a manner he could not entirely account for. The Marrowfield paper had come back in December with an A and a comment in the professor's flowing hand: The final paragraph is the first honest sentence I have read about the Assay Board in nineteen years. Please do not let it go to either of your heads. The Council's annual inspection of the Potions Club had taken place on the second Friday of the same month, and it had gone off flawlessly. Aldric Voss had walked the length of the greenhouse for forty minutes in gray kid gloves, said please and thank you eleven times (Wren had counted), found not one irregularity, and gone away again in his black carriage. Wren had said afterward that it frightened her a great deal more than a fire would have. Professor Marlow had said nothing at all. He had gone out to the seedlings and talked to them for an hour.

The six Saturdays had been served by the middle of January, with the glass of the east greenhouse left so clean that a bird had flown into it. Elen had sung through every one. The silver jar slept on in the ice-store under Marlow's key, entered in the club ledger as Experimental, E. Joy, under supervision. The Board of Assay had sat in April and risen in a week. The deadline for filings had fallen on the first of March, and Alan, who had spent nine nights in the appendices of the Assay Charter hunting for a clause, had found it in the second week of May, six weeks too late.

"Next year," Marlow had said, quite gently, when they told him. "It is a long road. We have the whole of it."

And on Tuesdays and Thursdays, since the night of the blizzard, Alan had taught Elen Joy the Foundations of Magical Theory in the Quiet Annex, by lamplight, with tea.

It was not at all what he had expected. He had thought it would be a chore. It had turned out to be the hour of the week he waited for with the least dignity. She arrived late, always. She brought two cups, always, and something in a paper bag. She sat with one boot hooked on the rung of her chair and argued with him, cheerfully and without mercy, about every line of every framework, until the lamps dimmed in reproach. And the green scarf, which he had meant to return on the first Monday of December, hung folded on the back of his desk chair in the dormitory, where it had been for five months. Pip had not said a word about it in all that time, with the exhausting eloquence of the deliberately silent.

The examination in Theory was on Friday. On Wednesday night, in the Quiet Annex, with the window open to the dark and moths beating at the lamps, Elen put her head down on her arms and said, in a muffled voice, "I can't do it."

"You can."

"I can't. I've got six of them. I've got Intent. I've got Consequence. I've got Proportion and Precedent and Sanction, and then there's one with an R."

"Remedy and Review."

"Remedy and Review." She lifted her face. There was ink on her chin and a crease from her sleeve across one cheek, and her hair, tied up in a length of kitchen string at four o'clock, had by now entirely abandoned the cause. "It's always going to be Remedy and Review. I've written it four hundred times. And then I sit down in the exam hall and I know it's two things, and I know they start with R, and I can't tell you which is first. Alan, the framework paper is a third of the mark."

"I am aware."

"I'm going to fail."

"You are not going to fail."

"I'm going to get a number so low the professor will frame it."

He set down his pen. They were on the fourth round. He had tried every method he knew. He had tried the mnemonic: I Can Predict Probable Sanction, Remedy, Review. She had stared at it and said, kindly, that it sounded like a sentence in a language she had once been told about. He had tried the table, with the seven rows ruled and labeled. He had tried reciting the pillars aloud in order, forty times, in a steady level voice, and had watched her eyes go glassy and soft, like a horse in a field that has decided to think of something else.

"It slides off," said Elen. "That's the trouble. I understand the thing. Truly. If you ask me what happens when you cast a spell and it goes wrong, I can talk for an hour. I can tell you who's to blame and what's owed. But if you ask me to say it in the right order, I just see it all at once, like a, like a field, and I can't put it in a row."

He sat very still.

It was one of those moments in which a thing he had known for a long time turned over and showed him its other side. He had been teaching her for five months. He had been teaching her a list. He had taken a person who could walk through a forest at night and talk to a tree and read the mood of a root, and he had been putting her at a desk and asking her to climb a cliff. It was not that she could not learn. It was that every time, without once thinking about it, he had insisted on the shape that suited him.

He looked at the lamp, and at the moths, and at her face. She was watching him with a small anxious frown, as though she suspected he was about to say something kind and dreaded it.

"Give me that," said Alan.

He took a large sheet of the Annex's rough gray paper, the kind kept for diagrams, and spread it flat on the table. He dipped his pen. He did not rule it. He drew a line, a long uneven wandering one, and then another, and a small round shape at the bottom, and Elen, leaning over, said "What is that?"

"A seed."

"Why?"

"Because that is Intent." He kept drawing. "It is what you put into the ground. It is small and it is private and nobody can see it until it comes up." He sketched a stem, rising. "This is the plant, and this at the top is the fruit. That is Consequence. It is what actually grows. It does not care what the seed meant."

She was very quiet. She had stopped breathing through her mouth.

"Water," said Alan, and drew rain, in short strokes. "Proportion. Too little and it starves. Too much and it drowns. It is the question of how much. Beneath, the roots." He drew them, long and branching, down the bottom of the page. "Precedent. What has grown in this soil before. It tells you what the ground will take." He glanced up. "And across the top, there. Frost."

"Sanction," said Elen.

He stopped.

"That's Sanction," she said again, slowly. "It comes whether you're ready or not. Nobody plans for the frost." She had taken the pen out of his fingers without his noticing. "And the graft, that's Remedy. When it goes wrong, you cut a piece from something healthy and you bind it on. And the last one. The last one's pruning." She drew a small neat pair of shears. "Review. You go back, after, and cut away what didn't serve. So it grows better next year." She looked up. Her eyes were enormous. "Oh. Alan. Oh, it's a garden."

"Yes."

"It's a whole garden. It's the whole thing." She sat back, pressing both ink-stained hands to her mouth. Then she took them away. "Intent, Consequence, Proportion, Precedent, Sanction, Remedy, Review. Seed, fruit, water, roots, frost, graft, shears." She said it without drawing breath, and again, and a third time, with her eyes shut, like a person walking a path she has known for years. "I've got it. I've actually got it. It's not even sliding."

"Elen."

"I could say it backwards. Review, Remedy, Sanction."

"That will not be required."

"I could say it in a different language." She was laughing, and the lamps dimmed, and she clapped a hand over her mouth with her eyes dancing above it. "How did you do that?"

"I did not," said Alan. "You did it. I only drew the paper."

It was true. He knew it was true. It had been in her, entire, from the start, and he had spent five months handing it back to her in the wrong shape. He sat with the pen still wet in his fingers and felt something he could not name, a kind of humbled, baffled warmth.

"Your turn," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Now you. If it's a garden, you have to be able to garden in it." She pulled the paper toward herself and tapped it with one inky finger. "Alder Street. As a gardener's problem. Go."

"That is not a method."

"It's the best method I've ever heard. Go."

He went. It was a great deal harder than he had thought. He began, as he always began, with the procedure, and she held up her hand and said, "Seed first," and he started again. A woman, he said, had planted an old seed, in poor ground, in a plague winter. And the ground was not hers. And the seed was one that the Council had forbidden. He stopped, and frowned, and said, "Proportion. Was the water in proportion?"

"What do you mean?"

"Was the response proportionate to the harm? She saved a child. Was it proportionate to risk a forbidden working for one life?"

"For one life," said Elen, "in a ward where she was the only healer. That's all the water there was."

"It does not follow that it was enough."

"It follows that it was what she had." She leaned across the table. "And Precedent? Go on. Roots. What was in the ground?"

"The Council had struck it from the curriculum."

"That's not roots, that's pruning. Roots are what grew before. And Threadmending's older than the Council. It's older than the Academy. It was growing in that ground for four hundred years before anyone cut it down." Her voice had quickened. "You can't call it a foreign seed. You can call it an old one that somebody pulled up."

"That is," said Alan, and stopped, and thought. He had a rebuttal ready, and found it did not hold. It was a very strange sensation. "That is an extremely good point."

"I know."

"I dislike it."

"I know that also."

They went on. It grew fast, with one remark sparking another, like two people throwing a ball against a wall, harder and harder, until the whole table was covered with scrawled diagrams and a single pewter frog was holding down the corner of a drawing of frost. It was entirely unlike the lamplit hours of December. There was no wariness in it. They interrupted each other. At one point he said, "That is simply not how Sanction operates," and she said, "It's how it operates in a garden," and he said, "We are not in a garden," and she said, "We've been in a garden for an hour," and the lamps, which had been steadily dimming, went down altogether and rang the little brass bell in the ceiling.

They stared at each other. Then, helplessly, they both bent over the table.

It was in the silence after, with the bell still trembling, that she said, "Show me roots again. I keep drawing them like hair."

He leaned over. He did not think. He put his hand over hers, to guide the pen, as his tutor had once guided his, and moved it down the page in a long slow curve, with his thumb resting against the back of her wrist. "Not lines," he said. "They branch. They go down and out, and the thin ones are at the ends."

Her hand was warm under his, and quite still. She did not move at all. A moth beat against the lamp. And all at once he realized what he was doing, what his hand was doing, and the whole of his arm went rigid with a belated horror. He took it away. He did it carefully, as one lifts a hand off something that might spill.

"Forgive me," said Alan.

"What for?"

"I should not have."

"It's roots," said Elen, quietly. "It's fine." She bent over the paper, with her hair fallen forward, and drew a long, slow, branching line, and did not look up. "Thanks. That was better."

He sat very straight. His ears were hot. She did not say anything else about it, and he understood that she was being kind, and loved her for it with a quick, helpless, entirely unwelcome pang, and put the thought away at once, like a man closing a drawer.

"Time," said a voice from the doorway.

It was the night librarian, a stout man with a lantern and the mournful face of a hound that has seen too many students. He stood in the arch with his keys in his hand. "Valemont. Joy. It is gone half past eleven. The annex closes at midnight and I have never yet locked anyone in, and I do not wish to begin with an examinee."

"Yes, sir," said Alan.

"Out, then."

They went out.

The cloister at that hour in late May was a different country from the cloister of winter. The air was soft and smelled of cut grass and warm stone and some night-blooming flower in the garth, and over the roofs a nearly full moon stood very high and white, so bright that the arches threw clean black shadows on the flags. Somewhere a nightjar was singing. The whole Academy had gone quiet, and in the great stillness of it Alan found he could hear their footsteps on the stone, hers quick and light, his measured, two sounds that had somehow come to keep time.

"Did you know," said Elen, "that you still have my scarf?"

He missed a step.

"I am aware."

"It's been five months."

"Five and a half."

"I'm not complaining. I've got three others. I only wondered if you'd forgotten."

"I have not forgotten." He kept his eyes ahead. "I intend to return it."

"When?"

"When it is no longer cold."

"It's May."

"There are rooms," said Alan, with enormous dignity, "that remain cold."

She laughed. It rang off the arches, a warm bright sound, and he found that the corners of his mouth had moved without permission. She saw it. She did not point it out. She walked on a few paces in silence, with a small private smile, and then said, in a different voice, more quietly:

"You've changed, you know."

"I have not."

"A bit. You didn't flinch, on Thursday. At the thunder." She glanced sideways at him. "There was that huge crack right over the library, and everyone jumped, and you just looked up. Like you were mildly interested in it."

He was silent a moment.

"I had not realized you noticed," he said.

"I notice you," said Elen. She said it simply, without any weight, as one says that it is a Wednesday. "I notice quite a lot."

The nightjar sang on. A moth, huge and pale, crossed their path in the moonlight and vanished into the dark. They had reached the fork where the east cloister turned away from the girls' wing, and without having decided it, both of them had slowed, and stopped, under an arch with the moon behind it.

He put his hand into his coat.

He had decided to wait. He had decided firmly, three weeks ago, on the night he found it. He would give it to her after the examination, when she was easy in her mind and had a clear head to spare. But he was standing in the moonlit cloister with the scent of the night flowers in the air and her face turned up to him, and every reason he had arranged turned out, when he looked at it, to have been made of paper.

"I have something," said Alan. "I intended to wait until after Friday. So as not to distract you."

He held it out. It was a sheet of the Annex's gray paper, folded in four, creased and recreased and slightly soft at the edges from living in the back of a notebook.

Elen took it. She opened it under the moon.

It was in his small upright hand. It was copied out in full, with the reference at the head, and he had set it down line by line, the way he set down anything that mattered, with no ornament at all.

Charter of the Board of Assay, Section 14(c). The filing fee shall be remitted for any remedy intended for common use among persons unable to bear the cost of its examination, upon the sponsorship of a member of the teaching faculty, and the attested petition of ten persons who would make use of it.

Elen read it once. She read it again. He watched her lips move.

"Ten persons," she said.

"The Voices," said Alan. "I believe there would be no difficulty. Mr. Oswin. Mrs. Aldous. Mother Tansy would sign twice if permitted. And the sponsor would be Professor Marlow, who has already said he would stand for it." He heard himself speaking faster. "It does not make the Board sit sooner. We have missed this spring. But it means the sixty crowns need not be found, and the application may go in at the first of March, and that there is, there is a clause."

She was not looking at him. She was looking at the paper, with her head bent so that her hair hid her face, and the hand that held it had begun, very slightly, to shake.

"How long have you had this?" she said.

"Three weeks."

"Three weeks." Her voice cracked on it. "You've been carrying this around for three weeks. And you didn't say, because I had an exam."

"It would have been a distraction."

"Alan."

"Yes?"

She looked up.

Her eyes were wet. They shone in the moonlight like two small lamps, and her whole face was open and unguarded and helpless, with something in it so naked that he had to stop himself from taking a step backward. She did not cry. She stood quite still, with the paper held against her chest in both hands, as though it were alive.

Then she reached out and took his hand.

It was only for a second. She did not hold it. She simply folded her fingers round his, hard and warm and a little damp from the paper, and pressed, once, as one presses a hand to say a thing there is no room for in a sentence. And she let go.

"Alan Valemont," said Elen, thickly. "You are the best person I know."

"I am merely thorough."

"You're the best person I know, and you're also thorough, and you don't get to argue."

"I was not going to argue."

"You were going to say it was procedure."

"It was procedure," said Alan, and she laughed, a wet, shaking, delighted laugh, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"You turned a list into a garden," she said. "And now this. I don't know what to do with you."

"I did not turn it into anything. You did. I held the pen."

"You held the pen." She shook her head. "You taught me."

"No." He said it slowly, because he had worked it out only in the last hour, and had not yet found a way to say it that was not too large. "You taught me that a list is not a garden. I had been giving you a list for five months. I did not know there was another way to know a thing. I believed that if one could not say it in order, one did not know it." He drew a breath. "I find that I was mistaken."

She stared at him.

Then, without a word, she folded the paper in four, carefully, along its old creases, and tucked it into the inside pocket of her coat, over her heart, and buttoned the coat over it.

"Good night," she said. Her voice had gone very soft. "Thank you. For all of it. For the paper, and the pen, and the scarf you won't give back."

"It is still cold in certain rooms."

"I know it is." She was walking backward now, down the moonlit passage, with her hands in her pockets and her face turned toward him, shining. "Good night, Alan! Seed, fruit, water, roots, frost, graft, shears!"

"Remedy and Review," said Alan, helplessly, "is the order."

"I know!" she called back, and was gone, round the arch, into the dark. He heard her running, light and quick, down the long stone way, and then he heard her laughing, alone, aloud, and the sound came back to him down the cloister like a bird thrown into the moonlight.

He stood a long time under the arch, with one hand pressed against his coat where hers had been.

The Great Hall, on the morning of the Theory examination, had been rearranged for the purpose of cruelty.

The benches were gone. In their place stood two hundred small desks in perfectly straight rows, each one bearing a sealed envelope, a pen, an inkwell, and a card with a name. The tall windows had all been opened, so that the spring air came in and lay across the room in long cool bars, and the whole place smelled of ink and chalk and the sweat of people trying not to be afraid. At the front, on the platform, sat the professor of Foundations, in his black coat, with his chalk-stained cuffs and his expression of grim and weary anticipation. Behind him, two prefects stood at attention with their hands clasped behind their backs.

Alan sat in the third row, second desk, with his quills laid out at precise intervals. He was calm. It was the calm he had always had in examinations, a clear, level, empty stillness, like a field under snow. On the desk to his right, the third, sat Elen Joy, and she was not calm at all. She was pale, and her hands were clasped in her lap, and her lips were moving, steadily and silently, in a small repetitive rhythm that he had no difficulty at all in reading.

Seed. Fruit. Water. Roots. Frost.

She felt him looking. She turned her head. She gave him a small, tight, dazzling smile, and mouthed, with great care, shears.

He nodded gravely.

The great doors at the end of the hall swung open, and the professor rose.

"Students," he said, "will stand."

Two hundred chairs scraped. Two hundred people stood. And through the doors, without haste, with the unhurried ease of a man who has never in his life been anywhere he was not expected, came a tall spare figure in a gray coat.

He was perhaps sixty. He wore his silver hair swept straight back from a high, fine, pleasant forehead, and his face was long and mild and remarkably handsome, with deep lines around the mouth that made him look as though he had spent a lifetime smiling at small kindnesses. His gloves were gray kid. On the lapel of his coat, very small, caught the light of the high windows, was a pin of silver: a key above a pair of scales.

"The Academy," said the professor, "has the honor to welcome the Council's external examiner for this year's trials. Councillor Aldric Voss."

"Please," said the man in gray, and his voice was warm and low and rather lovely, like tea poured on a winter evening. "Do sit. I would not for the world interrupt anyone's concentration. I am here only to observe."

They sat. He moved up the center aisle, slowly, glancing about him with an air of gentle interest, and as he passed the second row Alan saw that his hands were clasped behind his back, loose and easy, like those of a man strolling in a garden. He reached the platform. He bowed to the professor. He took from the table the long white envelope that held the papers, and drew from his pocket a pen.

"With your permission," he said, "I should like to seal the packet myself. It is a small ceremony. The Council likes to be seen to have done it."

He bent over the table. He turned the envelope face up. And on the flap of it, in the sight of the whole hall, with a slow precise unhurried hand, he wrote his name and the date, and under them, in a clean straight line, three words.

Examined and sealed.

Alan did not breathe.

It was a small, narrow, perfectly upright script. Every letter stood on the line as if it had been drawn against a ruler. Every stroke was correct. It was a hand so disciplined that it seemed less like writing than like a form of obedience. He had seen it on a cream-colored notice in a greenhouse, with a clean red seal at its foot. He had seen it on a card in a drawer, in the cold below the library. He had seen it, and set it down in his own notebook with a question mark, and drawn a single line through the question.

Coincidence, he had written.

The man in gray capped his pen. He straightened. He turned, with his mild smile, and surveyed the rows of bent heads and ink-stained fingers, and his eye passed over them in a slow courteous sweep, and rested, for the length of a breath, on the third desk.

"Ah," said Councillor Voss, softly. "Miss Joy."

Elen looked up.

"I do not believe we have met. I make it my business to know the students whose names are mentioned. I understand," he said, with great gentleness, "that you read a great deal."

There was a pause. It was a very small one. Alan, who had spent seventeen years listening to people decide whether to tell the truth, heard it perfectly. He saw her put her hands flat on the desk. He saw her smile, quick and bright and perfectly polite, and he saw, as he had seen once on a staircase by a market, that it did not reach her eyes.

"When I'm allowed, sir," said Elen.

"I do hope," said Councillor Voss, with the faintest tilt of his head, "that it is not often a difficulty."

He smiled at her. It was a kind smile. It was entirely and perfectly kind. And Alan sat with his hands cold on the desk and the scrap of a word turning over in his mind, a word that he had written, and struck through, and that he found he could no longer believe in at all.

The professor raised his hand.

"You may begin."

Two hundred envelopes tore open. Two hundred pens dipped. And in the third desk, a small figure in a scarfless coat bent her red head over the paper with a smile still fixed on her face, and began, very quickly, to draw a seed.