The results of the Theory examination went up on the notice board on the second Monday of June, and Pip Hollis, who had been standing in front of it since six in the morning with a flask of tea and the manner of a man awaiting a coronation, read them aloud to the whole cloister.

"Joy, E.," he proclaimed, in the voice of a town crier. "Distinction!"

There was a short silence in which several people looked round. Then, from the far end of the arcade, came a sound like a kettle being strangled by joy, and Elen Joy came down the cloister at a dead run with her bag banging against her hip and her hair streaming, and flung both arms round the nearest person.

The nearest person was Pip, who dropped his flask. The second nearest was Alan, who had been standing very straight with his hands behind his back, reading the list in his own careful order, and who found, a second later, that she had let go of Pip and seized him as well. It was over almost before it began. It was a hard, fierce, brief hug, her cheek against his collar and her whole body shaking with laughter, and then she was away again, dancing backwards across the flagstones with her fists in the air.

"Distinction! Did you see? There's a note! There's an actual note!" She snatched at the parchment. "'The diagram submitted in answer to question three is a garden. It is not in the syllabus. It is, however, correct in every particular, and the examiner has been unable to find grounds for a deduction.' Alan! He said garden! In writing!"

"I read it," said Alan. He was still standing exactly as before, though a good deal less straight. His collar was crooked. He did not touch it. "I congratulate you."

"What did you get?"

"It is on the list."

"You're Valemont, you're at the bottom, it's alphabetical." She ran her finger down the page. "Ninety-nine! You got ninety-nine! What did you lose it on?"

He did not answer at once. Pip, who was on his knees gathering up flask and cork, supplied it without looking up, with unholy relish.

"One mark deducted for an unauthorized seed. Drawn in the margin of question five. I'm told it was an extremely good seed."

"You drew a seed," said Elen.

"It was reflexive."

"In an examination."

"It was very small."

She stared at him. Then she put her head back and laughed so hard that a passing prefect stopped to see whether she was ill, and the sound went up the cloister like a flung handful of birds. Alan stood and received it. He found that the corners of his mouth had gone up without consulting him, and that he had no wish whatever to bring them down.

Lantern Night fell on the last Friday of the school year.

It was the oldest festival at Levis Morny, older than the charter, older, some said, than the walls. On that evening the great iron gates stood open to the valley, and the Academy gave itself back for a few hours to the people who lived in its shadow. The whole of the north terrace, a vast flagged platform above the drop to the village, was hung from end to end with strings of paper lanterns, rose and amber and pale green, so thick that the sky above it was a dim glowing ceiling. Trestle tables groaned under honey cakes and cold cider and bowls of strawberries. A fiddler had set up under the east arch, and the sound of him came wandering over the heads of the crowd, thin and sweet, going round and round on itself.

Alan went up the terrace steps at half past seven, in his best dark jacket, with a bulge over his heart.

He had folded it in four, and then in eight. He had told himself it was a matter of principle: it was June, it was not cold, and a person of good order returned what he had borrowed. He had stood in front of the dormitory mirror for some time. It was a perfectly ordinary scarf. It was green wool, much washed, with a small mended place near one end, and folded to the size of a prayer book it made a bulge that he suspected everyone could see.

He had not decided whether to give it back. He told himself that this was not the same as having decided not to.

"Is it a bomb?" said Pip, at his shoulder.

"It is a scarf."

"It's the size of a bomb. People are looking at it." Pip was in his best, a waistcoat embroidered with small gold bees, and he was glowing with the particular contentment of one who has spent the whole of a term collecting rumors and means to distribute them all tonight. "I'm going to find the Rumor Society. We have a table. We have a banner. It says Ask Us Anything and We Will Have Heard It. Don't go anywhere interesting without telling me."

"I shall go nowhere interesting."

"You say that," said Pip, with infinite tenderness, and was swallowed by the crowd.

Alan stood a moment at the head of the steps.

The Voices had come up. They had come up the three hundred steps of the Lantern Stair at dusk, slowly, in twos and threes, carrying folding stools and baskets of their own sweetmeats, and they had spread themselves along the south wall of the terrace like a flock of old birds settling. He saw Granny Hobb on a camp stool with a blanket on her knees and a steaming pot at her feet, ladling out cider to anyone who looked thirsty and complaining about all of them. He saw Mother Tansy under a lamp with her cold pipe, wrapped in a shawl the color of moss. He saw Mr. Oswin, with a bundle of buttons held carefully in both shaking hands, being handed from person to person with great ceremony by a delegation of first-years. And he saw, in the middle of the terrace, in a waistcoat of dark red silk that was certainly his best and was buttoned, as always, one hole out, Professor Marlow, talking earnestly to a rose bush in a pot.

On the raised platform at the far end, under a canopy of white lanterns, sat the guests of honor. Alan did not look long. A tall gray figure sat among them, gloved, silver-haired, at his ease, smiling mildly at nothing in particular. The Council's pin glinted at his lapel. He had lifted a cup, and across the whole width of the terrace, quite without turning his head, he seemed to be looking at the old man talking to the rose bush.

Marlow did not look back. He was a good deal straighter than he had been.

"Don't say anything," said a voice at his elbow. "I know. It's the dress."

Alan turned.

He did not afterward remember exactly what he had expected. He had seen her in a great many states: in a patched coat at a market, in an apron, in a larder at two in the morning with flour in her hair. He had not seen her in velvet. It was dark green, deep as a pool under trees, a size too large and borrowed, he guessed, from Wren, who was a head taller, so that the hem had been pinned up with what appeared to be a tablecloth clip. The sleeves came down past her knuckles and she had pushed them back, unsuccessfully, and there was ink on her left thumb. But her hair had been brushed. It lay down her back in a single bright rope, still faintly damp, the color of embers in a grate, and somebody had stuck a sprig of mint behind her ear.

He had been about to say something. It had been, he was almost certain, a complete sentence.

"I was going to say," said Alan, "that you have combed your hair."

Elen put both hands over her mouth and shook.

"It took Mira twenty minutes," she said, through her fingers. "She used a charm. I think it's a violation of something. Is it terrible? Wren says I look like a hedge that's been to a wedding."

"You do not look like a hedge."

"What do I look like?"

There was a pause. The lanterns swung overhead, rose and gold, throwing small moving lights across her face, and in the silence between them the fiddler came to the end of one tune and began another.

"You look," said Alan, with enormous care, "extremely well."

She went quite pink. She dropped her hands and looked at the flagstones, and then at him, and then, with great deliberateness, at the green edge that showed at the lapel of his jacket.

"You've got something in your pocket," she said.

"I have."

"Is it what I think it is?"

"I brought it," said Alan, "with the intention of returning it."

"And?"

"The intention has not survived contact with the evening."

She stared. Then, slowly, her whole face changed, the way a window changes when a lamp is lit in the room behind it.

"Good," said Elen.

The lantern tables stood at the head of the terrace steps, under a great awning, and there was a queue.

It was the heart of the festival, and he had known it would be. Each student, on Lantern Night, was handed a single paper lantern, plain and white, with a small stub of candle in a tin cup at its base and two ruled lines drawn on its side. On the upper line one wrote the thing one meant to carry into the coming year. On the lower line, the thing one meant to set down. Then the lantern was lit and carried to the great bell, and at midnight, all together, the Academy let them go.

"It's a lot of pressure," said Elen, taking her place in the queue. "Two things. For a whole year. I've been thinking about it since March."

"It is only a lantern."

"It's only a lantern that goes up in front of everyone. Mira says that the words show for a second. When they go past the roofs. Is that true? Does it do that?"

"I believe it is a custom of the Academy," said Alan. "I have never attended."

"You've never been to Lantern Night?"

"I have been to Lantern Night for fourteen minutes," said Alan, "on every previous occasion, at a distance of a hundred yards, in order to be seen to attend."

She regarded him with her head tilted. She did not laugh. She said, quite gently, "Well. You're attending tonight."

They were handed their lanterns by a smiling second-year with a basket. Alan took his and carried it to the end of the long table, where a row of quills stood in a pot, and stood looking at it.

The upper line was ruled in faint blue. The lower was the same. He dipped a quill. He wrote, in his small upright hand, quickly, without stopping, in the manner of a man who has known the answer a long time.

Carry: to say what is true.

He set down the quill. He looked at the lower line.

The lower line was perfectly blank. It was a pale blue strip on white paper, a hand's width long, and it waited. He thought of several things. A notebook, with three rules and a word. A girl in a doorway. A letter in a drawer, in a square hand, that began We have never given it cause. He thought of them all in order, each in turn, as a man tries the keys on a ring, and he could not tell which one fitted.

He sat with the quill hovering until the ink gathered at the nib and fell. And he did not write it.

There was a scream.

It came from the far side of the terrace and was followed at once by a great cheer, a crash of crockery, and the roar of a man who had set fire to something. Heads turned. A column of orange flame was rising from the Potions Club's table, between the honey cakes and the cider, and in the middle of it, beating at his own sleeve with a tablecloth, stood Theo, with soot on both cheeks and an expression of pure astonished innocence.

"It was just a lantern!" he was shouting. "It was only a small one! It was an ordinary wick!"

"It was an ordinary wick," said Mira, in a voice of ghastly calm, "in a lantern you had soaked in pickled spirit."

"For luck!"

She tipped a bucket of sand over the whole table with one clean swing. The flame subsided with a hiss. There was a moment's total silence, and then a vast, wheezing, delighted roar went up from the whole of the terrace, the Voices loudest of all, and old Mr. Oswin was seen to wipe his eyes with a button.

"Two and a half," said Wren, to nobody. "That's three and a half since September."

Alan found, to his surprise, that he was laughing. It was not much. It was a short, helpless, almost silent breath of a laugh, through his nose, and it went on a moment longer than he intended. He looked up, and found Elen looking at him from across the table with her lantern clasped to her chest and her face lit from within, saying nothing, with enormous and deliberate tact.

"It is not funny," said Alan.

"No," said Elen. "Terrible. Awful."

"There might have been injuries."

"Dreadful."

"Elen."

"I'm not looking," said Elen. "I'm not looking at all."

It was then that a hand like a bundle of twigs closed on his sleeve.

"You," said Granny Hobb.

She had come up behind him with remarkable speed, for a woman of eighty-one with a stick, and she was glaring up at him, black-eyed and fierce, with her chin thrust out and a half-empty mug of cider in her free hand.

"Ma'am," said Alan.

"The fiddler's started the long dance. The slow one. Mr. Aldous is too stiff in the knee and I'm too old and everyone else is a fool, and there's a girl standing by that table in a green frock like a weed in a bouquet who has not been asked." She jerked her chin at Elen. "Go and ask her."

"I do not," began Alan.

"I did not say do you," said Granny Hobb. "I said go."

He went.

He did not afterward know how. He remembered that she was standing there with her lantern in both hands and her mouth slightly open. He remembered that he said, "Miss Joy," and then, correcting it, "Elen. I have been instructed to ask whether you would care to dance."

"Instructed."

"By a person of authority."

"Alan, you don't have to."

"I am aware that I do not have to," said Alan, and held out his hand.

She looked at it. She looked at his face. Then, very carefully, she set her lantern down on the table beside his, and took it.

The long dance was a slow one. It was an old tune, a village tune, in three-four time, with a lilt at the end of each phrase like a question, and the whole crowd made room for it, drawing back in a ring beneath the lamps as the couples stepped out. Mr. Aldous was there, on his wife's arm, with his stick laid aside. A first-year boy had been dragged into the circle by a girl twice his size. Pip, with a gold-bee waistcoat and a look of religious ecstasy, was leading Dara through the figure with great flourishes.

Alan put his right hand at her waist. He put his left, in the old way, to hold hers. His fingers closed round her ink-stained ones, and he found that his hand was not entirely steady, and that hers was.

"I should warn you," said Elen, very low. "I can't do this."

"It is a simple figure."

"I have two left feet. I've been told. By people with bruises."

"I shall lead."

"You can lead?"

"Valemont children are taught at nine," said Alan. "It is considered necessary for a person of standing. I had a master with a ruler."

He stepped. She followed, a half beat late, with a small shocked intake of breath, and then he turned her, one slow half circle, and the whole of the terrace swung round them in a blur of gold and rose and green, and she was in his arms exactly where she ought to be.

She did not have two left feet. She had, as it turned out, no feet at all, in the usual sense. She had a trick of going wherever the music went a fraction before it arrived, and of trusting him to be there when it did. They went down the long line of the figure, turned, came back. Her hand lay in his, warm and small, with the ink under the nails. Her hair, in its bright wet rope, swung against his sleeve as she turned. The fiddle drew out the last phrase of the tune, a long slow rising note, and he found that they had stopped traveling. They were standing quite still in the middle of the terrace, in the middle of the music, with their hands still joined and her face tipped up toward his.

"You can dance," said Elen.

"I have said so."

"You didn't say you could dance like that." She was breathless. Her eyes were very wide. "You didn't say it was like flying."

"It is," said Alan, slowly, "a good deal easier with the right partner."

The music ended. The circle broke up in a rustle of applause. And neither of them let go.

It was Elen who moved first. She withdrew her hand, gently, and looked down at it as though she had never seen it before, and said, in a rather small voice, "I need some air."

"I believe," said Alan, "that we are outdoors."

"I need some more."

They went to the north parapet.

It was the farthest corner of the terrace, past the end of the last trestle table, where the wall of the Academy dropped sheer away to the village below and the crowd thinned to nothing. The lanterns here were few. They hung in a single scalloped string along the stone, rose and amber, swaying a little in the warm night air. And below, over the edge, in the great dark bowl of the valley, lay the market.

It had been lit. Every stall had been hung with paper lamps, and every lamp had been lit, so that the whole hollow lay glowing below them like a bowl of embers, and thread by thread, from every roof and cart and awning, small drifting lights were beginning to lift. The valley was answering.

Elen leaned her forearms on the wall and let out a long breath.

"It's the best part," she said. "Every year. I came up for it when I was twelve, with my brother, when Dad was lecturing in the city, and we sat on this wall for hours. I've never forgotten it." She turned her head. "You haven't lit yours."

He had not. He had brought his lantern from the table, since it would have been improper to leave it, and it hung from his hand by its wire, cold and white, with one line blank.

"May I?" said Elen.

She held up her right hand. She did it with great seriousness, and he understood, with a faint pang, that it was a thing she took pride in, a trick she did not often show. She lifted one finger, ink-stained, a little crooked at the tip, and held it near the candle in the little tin cup.

A spark jumped from the nail. It was small, and yellow-white, the size of a seed, and it trembled on the end of her finger like a drop of dew. She breathed on it, once, gently. It dropped into the wick. The candle caught.

The lantern bloomed in his hand.

The light came up through the paper warm and gold, steady as a held breath, and spilled over the backs of his fingers, and over her face, which was very near. It lit the underside of her chin and the edge of her cheek. It lit the faint down on her upper lip and the single bright thread of hair that had come loose over one eye. She was looking at the lantern. Then she looked up, over it, at him, and in the little cave of light between them there was no one else in the whole of the world.

"Alan," said Elen.

"Yes."

"What do you love?"

It was a very quiet question. She asked it simply. She did not smile. She was not teasing and she was not testing. She stood with her hands at her sides in the borrowed green velvet, with the valley full of light behind her, and her eyes were steady and dark amber and very close, and she asked it as one asks the one thing one has always meant to ask.

He had been asked it twice. Each time he had said a thing that was true and not enough. Order, he had said once. People, he had said once, of her. He had been given every opportunity to know.

And he found, standing there in the lamplight with the warm paper cup of the lantern in his hand, that he did know. He knew it as he knew the charter, all the way through, from the first clause to the last. It had been there, under the floor of him, for longer than he had been willing to measure. And it was not order.

"I believe," said Alan.

His voice was not steady. He let it be.

"I believe that I have not been honest. When I answered you before. I said a thing that was a true thing, and it was not the one you asked. I think I did not wish to know the other." He drew a breath. He took one step nearer, and the lantern swung gently on its wire between them, and the light moved across her face. "I think what I love, if I am to say it plainly, if I am to be, if I am to say what is true, is."

She had not moved.

She stood quite still. She did not lean forward. She did not lean away. Her lips had parted a very little, and her breath came and went, shallow and light, and the gold of the lantern lay in her eyes like water. He could see the pulse in her throat. He could see that her hands, at her sides, had curled loosely into fists, as a person does who is holding very still in order not to spill something. He could have counted the freckles on her nose. He took another half step. Then, very slowly, he lowered the lantern.

"I believe that what I love," said Alan, "is."

The bell rang.

It was the great bell of the west tower, the one that had been silent for the whole of the year, and it spoke once, a single huge deep round note that shook the stones of the terrace under their feet. And the whole of the Academy drew breath.

Then, from the north terrace, from every hand and every parapet, from the sixth-year prefects to the smallest first-year, from the Voices on their stools along the southern wall, from the hollow of the valley and the roofs of the market and the high white tops of the towers, a great murmur of voices rose, like the first sigh of a wave, and ten thousand little flames lifted off the earth.

It was the Release.

They rose together, slowly, all at once, in a vast silent bloom of gold. The terrace emptied of light and the sky filled with it. The lanterns went up past the roofs in long glowing ribbons, thickening, widening, crossing, a river of lamps flowing up out of the Academy and out of the valley to meet each other in the night above the hills.

Elen made a small noise. It was a sound with no word in it at all.

They sprang apart.

It was instantaneous, like two people touching a hot stove. Alan stepped back, and Elen stepped back, and the lantern swung wildly on its wire and showered sparks, and for a moment they stood a yard apart on the dark parapet, with the whole sky burning overhead and neither of them able to breathe.

Her face was scarlet. It went from the collar of her dress to the roots of her hair. His, he had no doubt, was no better. They stared at each other with wide eyes. And then, quite helplessly, as though something had given way in both of them at once, they began to laugh.

"The bell," said Alan, weakly.

"The bell," said Elen. She put the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Oh, no. Oh, that was."

"It is a custom of the Academy."

"It's a custom with extremely bad timing." She was wiping her eyes. She was shaking all over. "You were in the middle of a sentence."

"I was."

"You said, 'I believe that what I love is.' And then." She flapped a hand at the sky. "Lanterns."

"Yes."

She drew a long, unsteady breath. She stood a moment with her arms wrapped round herself, in the borrowed velvet, with the light of ten thousand lamps going up past her face. When she looked at him, her eyes were bright and her smile was soft and shaky, and she did not look away.

"Finish it sometime," said Elen.

"Presently," said Alan.

It came out hoarse, and rather low. She heard it. He saw her hear it. She nodded once, quickly, like a person accepting a very small and very valuable thing, and turned back to the sky.

"Come on," she said. "We have to let them go. It's the whole point."

They carried them to the parapet side by side. It was a narrow ledge of stone, and they stood shoulder to shoulder, with the wall cold under their hands and the warm night wind in their faces, and the whole of the world below them filled with light.

She let hers go first.

She held it out over the drop, at arm's length, in both hands, as one lets go of a bird. And then she opened her fingers, and the lantern rose.

He let his go after.

It was a slow, floating, wavering lift, and for a moment he thought it would not catch the air. Then a breath of wind took it. It rose past the parapet, past the roofs, in a long shallow spiral, a small bright globe among ten thousand, and as it climbed, a strange thing happened. Each lantern, passing a certain height above the terrace, flared. It was only for the length of a heartbeat. The paper turned clear as glass, and the writing on it stood out in the night in the hand of whoever had written it, black and sharp and quite legible, for anyone who looked.

All through the sky, in that one heartbeat, a thousand sentences flashed and were gone. Wishes. Fears. Names. A child's scrawl, and a copperplate, and a smeared and blotted line from a boy who had written in a hurry. Alan did not read them. He was looking at two lanterns only.

His own, high and to the left, flared first.

Carry: to say what is true.

Set down:

And under it, a pale blue line, perfectly empty.

"You left one blank," said Elen, softly.

"I did not know what to put."

"That's honest too."

Hers went up a moment after. It was a little lower. It wavered, caught the wind, and blazed.

Carry: someone who knew what I loved before I did.

He read it. He could not help it. It stood on the sky for the length of a held breath, in her quick loose uphill hand, with a small smudge at the end where her thumb had dragged.

And beneath it:

Set down: being sorry for how I am.

Then it was gone.

The sky went dark and bright again, with the ordinary gold of lanterns. He stood at the wall with his hands flat on the stone and felt something move in his chest that had no name and did not seem to belong to him. He had read her lantern. She had read his. And beside him, with her face tipped up to the sky and the light of a thousand small flames moving on her cheek, Elen Joy stood very still, and did not say a word, and did not look at him.

He had nearly said it. He had been one breath from the end of a sentence he had never said to anyone, and a bell had rung, and a girl was standing beside him in a borrowed dress with a thing written on a lantern that he had no right to have read.

She had asked him what he loved. He did not know whether he was more afraid that she had understood him, or that she had not.