The coach climbed the mountain road, and it was the same coach, and the same bench, and the same pines standing shoulder to shoulder along the cliff with their branches bowed under the first snow of the year. The wheels hummed against the enchanted road in the same low even note. Every so often a ward-stone flashed past at the verge, glowing blue. Nothing had changed. Alan sat on the left-hand bench with his trunk strapped overhead and his hands folded on his knees, exactly as he had sat a year ago, and it was only himself that felt as though it had been taken apart and put together again by someone working from a diagram.

The summer had been sixteen weeks long.

He had spent it as Valemonts spent summers: in the library, in the garden, at dinner. On Midsummer night his father had spoken with him in the study for eleven minutes on the conduct expected of a Valemont, and had observed that a family was known less by what was said of it than by what was not, and Alan had said, Yes, Father, and that had been the whole of it. His mother had asked him once, in the morning room over the tea, whether he had made friends. He had said that he had one or two. She had looked at him for rather a long time over the rim of her cup, and said, "Good," in an odd voice, and gone back to her letters.

There were three postcards.

They had come forwarded in Garrick's careful hand, one in July, one in August, one in September, and he kept them in the back of his notebook, between the last page and the cover, where he also kept a number of other things. The first showed a ferry, very badly painted, crossing a very blue strait. A sprig of pressed sea-lavender had been stuck to the back with a smear of what appeared to be jam. Grey Strait, it said, in a quick uphill hand. Ethan went into the wardrobe again, on principle. Dad says the tide tables are a mood. Hope the corners are sharp. — E.

The second was a monastery on a crag, with a flat white star-flower pressed beside the stamp. Took the wrong road. Cheese festival, again. I am beginning to think it follows us. Mum read an entire chapter aloud in the rain. I thought of you and the weather. Not in a professional capacity. — E.

The third was a lake, perfectly still, and a small oval leaf gone brown at the edge. Ethan's horse is called Doubt and has earned it. There is a lake here as flat as your bed. Eat something. I have bought a hat. It is ugly. I could not knit it. It has been in my bag for three weeks and will be yours when you ask for it. — E.

He had read them eleven times. He would have said a sufficient number. Somewhere around the fifth reading he had noticed that she had never once asked him anything. Not how he was. Not whether he would write. Each card said what had happened, and where, and that she had thought of him, and stopped. It was like being handed a lit lamp by someone who had then stepped back out of the doorway.

He had written nine letters.

The first had begun Dear Miss Joy, and had been burned in the grate by the fourth line. The second had begun Dear Elen, and had survived as far as a paragraph about the weather. The fifth contained a footnote that was longer than the letter. The seventh was a single line, I believe that what I love is, and nothing after it, because he had written it and sat looking at it until the lamp burned down. The ninth began, Dear Elen. I do not know how to begin, and shall therefore begin at the end, and then it had ended, because he did not know what the end was either.

He had sent none. They lay in the back of the notebook under the postcards, nine folded sheets, in his small upright hand, like a deposition to a court that had never been convened.

The coach swung round the last bend, and the Academy rose out of the snow, gray towers and covered bridges strung with lanterns that burned without flame, and the great iron gate stood open on a courtyard full of arriving students. He sat quite still with the scarf folded in his coat pocket and felt his heart do something entirely unreasonable. It was a fortnight past a year since he had first looked up at that gate. He had been seventeen. He was eighteen now. He had expected to feel older.

He was out of the coach for perhaps three seconds before he was struck at the level of the breastbone by a cannonball in a waistcoat.

"I have missed you," said Pip Hollis, into his collar, "with an intensity that I find deeply embarrassing. I want it noted that I wrote you four letters and you answered none of them."

"I received two."

"You received two because the other two were drawings." Pip leaned back, beaming, with his hair in three directions and a new smear of charcoal on his chin. "You've grown. No, you haven't. You've just got more upright. How is that possible?"

"I have been practicing."

"Terrifying," said Pip fondly, and relieved him of his satchel.

The others were coming across the cobbles in a loose and cheerful flock. Theo, bigger and more sunburned than ever, with a fresh scorch across one eyebrow and an expression of wounded innocence. Wren, tall and dark and sardonic, with her long braid wound twice round her head like a crown. Dara, a step behind, holding a very large and very old book against his chest and looking, for him, almost talkative. And Mira, small and square in her gray cardigan, who put out a hand and shook Alan's with great firmness and said, in a low voice, without any preamble:

"Marlow bought a pound of mugwort in July."

Alan stopped.

"He went down to the market on a Saturday, by himself, and came back with a pound of it in a paper bag. He stood in the greenhouse for an hour smelling it. Then he made tea." She said it as one reports the movements of a large and delicate animal. "We have not discussed it. We are not going to."

"Understood."

"It was a very good pound," said Wren, "I'm told."

"I've only blown up one," said Theo, to nobody, "since June."

"On the train," said Wren.

"It was a small one."

He was smiling. He found it out after a moment, with a little shock, like finding a coin in a coat he had not worn in a year. He had not realized how long it had been since someone had spoken to him as though he belonged to a thing. And then he lifted his eyes over Mira's shoulder, and saw her.

She was standing at the foot of the steps with her bag on her shoulder and a trunk at her feet, and she was brown.

That was the first thing. The summer had put gold across her nose and cheekbones, and bleached the front of her hair a shade lighter, and she had grown, a very little, in the way of someone who has spent three months climbing things. She wore the patched brown coat. There was ink on her left thumb. It was entirely possible that it was the same ink. She had seen him. He knew it by the particular stillness that had come over the whole of her, as over a deer that has smelled something on the wind, and then she did something he had not expected at all. She lifted her chin, and smiled, and came across the courtyard in a perfectly ordinary walk, without running.

The group around him fell silent.

"Good afternoon, Alan," said Elen.

"Good afternoon, Elen."

"I hope you had a pleasant journey."

"It was adequate. I hope your summer was."

"It was lovely. It had a goat."

"A goat," said Alan.

"At the cheese festival."

"I received the postcard."

"I'm so glad. I wasn't sure about the postal service. In the north."

"It is very reliable."

"That's marvelous," said Elen.

There was a silence. It was a long and extremely bright silence, in which a great many people stood in a ring in the winter sunlight and stared at the cobblestones with the fixity of those who have been told not to look at an accident. A snowflake landed on Alan's sleeve and sat there. Elen smiled at him with her whole face, warmly and steadily and entirely without meaning it.

"That," said Wren, to the sky, in a clear carrying voice, "is the worst performance I have ever witnessed. And I have been to the Dueling Society's amateur theatricals."

"Wren," said Mira.

"I'm being supportive."

"Should we leave?" whispered Theo.

"Stay," said Mira. "It's educational."

Alan put his hand into his coat.

He had planned it. He had planned it on the road, on the coach, and in the long gray hours of the summer: a short sentence, correct, composed. He drew the green wool out of his pocket, folded to the size of a prayer book, and held it out to her on both hands, as one presents a document.

"It is now cold," said Alan. "I return it, with thanks."

Elen looked at the scarf.

She looked at it for what felt like a very long time. Then she raised her eyes to his, and something in her face changed at last, not the polite brightness but something underneath it, quick and warm and rueful, like a lamp coming on in a room one thought was empty.

"Alan," she said. "It's October."

"Yes."

"It's cold in every room."

"That is the principle."

"No, I mean you keep it." She laid two fingers on the wool and gently pushed his hands back toward his chest. "Until April."

"April is still cold."

"Then May."

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

"There are," Elen agreed. Her mouth had begun to shake. "I'm told. It's a well-documented phenomenon."

Pip made a noise like a tire going down. Theo collapsed onto Dara. Wren said, "Oh, thank God," and Mira put a hand over her eyes, and the whole ring of them went to pieces at once in a single helpless roar of laughter. Alan stood in the middle of it with the scarf in his hands, and for the first time since the carriage had come to the gate in June, he felt the strange stiff thing inside his chest come loose a quarter of an inch. Elen was laughing, really laughing, with her head tipped back and her hair blowing. Then she caught his eye, and the laughter went soft, and neither of them looked away.

He put the scarf back in his pocket. He did not argue.

The seating chart for the second year was posted on the great board in the cloister at four, and the whole class crowded round it in a rustling, jostling, anxious mass.

Alan found his name by reading the whole of it, row by row, the way he read everything. He was in the second row, fifth desk. It was a very good position. It was a position, he reflected, at which a person could see the whole board and be seen by no one at the back.

He read the name of the person at the sixth desk of the sixth row. He read it twice.

"Oh," said Elen, at his shoulder. "I'm across the room."

"So I observe."

"That's almost the whole length of it." She considered the chart with her head on one side. "I'm in the back. By the window. With a boy called Ormsby, who, I'm told, snores."

"It is the Warden's design."

"It's always the Warden's design."

"The Warden," said a dry voice behind them, "is of the view that last year's experiment has concluded."

They turned. The professor of Foundations stood in the arch with his hands behind his back and his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and the expression of a man who has long ago given up being surprised by anyone's good fortune. "The record, I regret to say, was not corrupted. The file, on the other hand, has improved. She proposes a new variable."

"I'm a variable," said Elen, with great satisfaction.

"You are, Miss Joy, an extremely volatile one. Mr. Valemont." The old man inclined his head and went away down the cloister, and the corner of his mouth, Alan could have sworn, was twitching.

He stood in front of the board. He told himself that he felt relief. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to feel. A great distance lay between two desks, with five rows of people in it, and he would no longer have to sit for six hours a day at an arm's length from a person who smelled of mint. He examined the relief carefully, as one examines a coin, and found that it was made of something very like grief.

"Right," said Pip, who had been standing at his other elbow with the air of a man at a funeral at which he was the principal mourner. "I'd like to say a thing. Not a neutral thing. A fact."

"Pip," said Alan.

"I may have, over the summer, in the interests of general understanding, exchanged a small number of letters with Elen."

Elen put her hand over her mouth.

"How many?" said Alan.

"Eleven pages."

"Letters, or pages?"

"It's a fair question. Four letters. Eleven pages. There was a diagram." Pip was radiant. He had the look of one who has confessed to murder and been congratulated. "I told her about the weather. And about your marks. And I may have mentioned, in passing, that you were conducting an audit."

"A what?" said Elen.

"I did not say," said Pip, with enormous delicacy, "of what."

"He said you had forms," said Elen, through her fingers. "He said you were measuring something. I wrote back and asked if I could see the forms. He said they were confidential."

"Pip is not neutral," said Alan.

"I have never been neutral in my life," said Pip. "I merely said I was. It's the most effective thing I do."

Alan said nothing. He could not. He stood in the cloister in front of the seating chart of the second year, with the sound of Wren's laughter coming down the arcade like a flung handful of gravel, and an unreasonable and altogether unwelcome warmth spreading from his collar to the roots of his hair.

He did not go to the gallery.

He wanted that understood, by himself, at least. He went up to the second floor at half past eight by the long way round, through the east wing, past the empty classrooms, with a book under his arm, because the library's upper reading room was reached by that route and because he had two chapters of Warding Geometry to prepare. That the long gallery lay at the end of that corridor was an accident of the Academy's architecture. That the lamp at the far end was burning was a matter of general interest.

The banners had been righted. The headmaster's portrait still wore its spectacles, and to them, in the course of the summer, had been added a small and very dignified moustache. No one had claimed responsibility. He found that he was rather fond of it.

She was on the window seat at the end.

She sat sideways on the wide stone sill with her back against one side of the frame and her knees drawn up, her boots off, her hair loose, one hand lying on the sill and the other holding nothing, just resting on her knee. She was looking out at the dark. It was beginning to snow. The first flakes of the year were coming down past the glass in the lamplight, slow and large, and she watched them with that same stillness he had once found so extraordinary, as though the whole of her had gone out to listen.

"You can come closer," said Elen, without turning her head. "The snow won't bite. I'm less sure about the portrait."

He had heard it before. He stood in the lamplight with his book against his chest, and heard it, and remembered precisely what he had said then. I have reading. He remembered the sound of his own boots going away down the gallery.

He crossed the floor. He put his book down on the sill. And, with a care that would have done credit to a man defusing a charm, he sat down beside her, at the far end of the stone seat, with a foot of cold air between them.

Elen turned her head.

"You sat," she said.

"I was invited, last year."

"It stands?"

"I assumed that it did."

She did not say anything. Something went across her face, quick and bright and very private, and she turned back to the window and put her chin on her knees. For a while they watched the snow.

"I got your postcards," said Alan.

"You said."

"I have read them a sufficient number of times."

"How many is sufficient?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven," said Elen, softly. She was smiling at the glass. "I made them very short. I thought if I made them long you'd feel you had to answer. And then you'd write something that was correct, and I'd have to put it away in a drawer and be polite about it."

"I wrote nine letters," said Alan.

She turned her head very slowly.

"Nine," she said.

"I did not send them."

"Why not?"

"I could not find the correct tone."

She looked at him. She looked at him for a long, long moment, with her lips parted and her eyes gone enormous in the lamplight, and then her whole face broke open, quite helplessly, and she began to laugh. It was low, and silent, and shook her all over. She put her forehead down on her knees and her shoulders heaved.

"Oh, Alan," she said into her sleeve. "Oh, you absolute. Give me the incorrect one."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The wrong tone. The one that isn't correct. I'd much rather have that. I don't want correct, I've got a whole drawer of correct." She lifted her face. It was wet at the corners, and shining. "Let me read one."

"No."

"One."

"I shall consider it."

"Presently?"

He said nothing. He did not have to. She nodded, as though he had spoken, and put her chin back on her knees. They sat for a little in a silence that was not at all uncomfortable, and the snow came down.

"How's the audit?" said Elen.

"Inconclusive."

"That's a good word."

"It is the accurate one."

"Take your time," said Elen.

"I intend to." He was looking at his hands. He had not planned to say what he said next, and said it anyway. "I would ask that you not wait on my account."

"I'm not," said Elen.

He looked up.

She was watching the snow, quite calmly, with her cheek on her knee. "I'm not waiting on your account. I'm waiting on mine." She said it gently, as one states the temperature. "I spent the whole summer on a ferry and a cart and a horse that thinks it's a philosopher, and I had a lot of time to think. And I found out I'm quite good at it. At knowing what I want, I mean, and not needing it to arrive on the day I ask. It's the first time in my life I've been able to." She glanced at him sidelong, with the ghost of the dimple. "So you don't have to hurry. And you don't have to feel guilty. It's not a debt. It's just where I'm standing."

He was silent a long time.

It was the most generous thing anyone had ever said to him. He knew it. He could feel it, settling into the place where something cold and clerical had sat for a year, and taking up room. And because it was so generous, because there was nothing in it of pressure or bargain or reproach, he found, quite suddenly, that he could not go on keeping the other thing.

"Elen," he said. "There is something I did not tell you."

She turned.

He took the notebook from under his arm. He opened it at the back, and from beneath the postcards, behind the nine folded sheets, he drew a small flat envelope of gray paper, creased and re-creased and gone soft at the edges, and held it out.

"It came on the morning I left," said Alan. "It is the Archivist's reply to the request we signed in November. I did not open it until I was in the carriage. I should have told you at once. I did not." He kept his voice level. "Please read the back."

She took it. She unfolded it under the lamp. He watched her read the front, her lips moving slightly: the twelfth of March, the Standards Committee, the keys held by the Archivist and by the Chair. The Chair has been informed of your inquiry. She read the Archivist's small line at the foot of the page, and he saw her mouth tighten. Then she turned the paper over.

Noted. A.V.

She did not say anything. She held the paper quite still, and the snow went on falling behind her, and something went out of her face that had been there all evening, the bright careful ease. What was left was very quiet.

"He knew," she said at last. "Since November."

"Yes."

"The day of the exam. When he said it. 'I understand that you read a great deal.'" She repeated it in a small flat voice, as if testing the weight of the words. "I thought it was nothing. I thought it was just a man being clever at a student. I went and did my paper."

"I know."

"You should have told me."

"Yes," said Alan.

It was a plain word. He did not dress it. He let it sit there between them, bare and true, and she looked at him with her eyes steady and dark and unreadable.

"Why didn't you?"

He had known she would ask. He had spent a great deal of the summer composing an answer, and found, now, that he had no use for any of them. "Because I did not wish to alarm you by letter. And because I did not know how to say it without saying something else." He drew a breath. "I put it in nine letters. It would not fit in any of them."

She was quiet. Then, very slowly, she folded the envelope along its crease and held it a moment against her knee.

"That's an incorrect tone," said Elen.

"Is it?"

"It's the best one I've had all year." Her voice was not quite steady. "Thank you. For telling me now. It's not too late. It's only, I'd rather know, Alan. Always. Even if it's frightening. I can't do anything about a thing I don't know. And I'd always, always rather be frightened with you than safe without."

It landed in him with a small, clear, quite painless shock, like a coin dropping into a well, and he listened to it fall.

"What do we do?" said Elen.

He had thought of that. He had thought of it in the carriage and the study and on the long road up the mountain, and he had thought of it with the cold, level, orderly mind that had never yet failed him. "We proceed correctly," he said. "We do not hide. Every request is written, signed, and dated, as the Archivist said. We tell Professor Marlow what we know, and what we ask, at every step. We do not go anywhere alone, in the dark, where there is no one to say we went." He paused. "That is the first condition. You will say it is not an invitation."

"It's not an invitation," said Elen, "it's a condition. I'm collecting them. I've got a whole list." The dimple came back. "I'm up to six."

"Seven."

"Seven! I'm doing so well." She leaned her head against the window frame and let out a long breath, and some of the tightness went out of her shoulders. "It's a good plan. It's much better than mine. Mine was to go and stand in front of the Council and say, 'Excuse me.'"

"That is not a plan."

"It's a very good opening line."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and the lamp burned between them with a small steady flame.

It was snowing in earnest now. The flakes came down thick and slow past the glass, and the courtyard below lay under a soft white hush, and the first lamps were coming on along the arcades one by one, each in its own small gold halo. It was the first snow of his second year. He had been afraid of it for ten of his eighteen winters. Tonight it only looked like snow.

She had tipped her head against the stone, and her eyes had half closed. She was very near. He had not noticed that he had moved. The foot of cold air between them had somehow shrunk, over the course of an hour, to the width of a sleeve, and their sleeves were touching, her patched brown one against his plain dark wool, and neither of them had done anything to alter it. He did not move his arm. He sat very still, with the lamp on one side of his face and the cold window on the other, and let it be.

The unfinished sentence lay between them like a sleeping animal. Neither of them woke it. They sat in the long gallery under the headmaster's spectacles and moustache, and watched the first snow of the year come down, and it was, he thought, with a clear, plain, entirely unalarmed astonishment, the most peaceful hour he had spent in four months.

It was Elen who spoke at last, with her eyes shut.

"Dara's found something."

"Oh?"

"He wrote to me in August. It's a herbal, an old one, much older than the ones in the library. He found it in his grandmother's attic. It's in the cipher, the Old Court one with the crowns over the vowels, and he can read about a third of it, and the part he can read is about the Threadmending." She opened her eyes. "I wanted to wait till you were back. I said I'd wait for you."

Alan sat up a little.

"Tomorrow," said Elen. "After lessons. The Quiet Library, at four. Dara's bringing it, and Mira's bringing tea, and I thought, if you'd like. If you're free." She was looking at him sideways, very carefully, with the ghost of that grin. "Would you come? In a supervisory capacity?"

"Supervisory," said Alan.

"Very. It'd be extremely helpful. We'd be lost without."

"I shall attend," said Alan, with the gravity of a man accepting a commission, "in a supervisory capacity."

"And bring the second lamp."

He turned his head.

She was grinning, wide and warm and entirely unguarded, with the snow going past behind her and her cheek still pressed against the cold stone. "You said so," said Elen. "Last year. In the Closed Stacks. 'If we return, I should bring a second lamp.' I've been holding that for eleven months."

"It was a conditional."

"Presently?"

"Presently," said Alan, and she laughed, and the sound went up into the high dark vault of the gallery like a bird turned loose, and the headmaster, under his spectacles and his moustache, appeared, for just a moment, to be listening.