Alan carried the second lamp across the courtyard at ten minutes to four with the gravity of a man bearing something to an altar.

It was a heavy brass thing with a curved handle and a chimney of green glass, and he had obtained it from the dormitory store by the proper method, which involved a form, a signature, and a short interview with a prefect who had looked at the lamp and then at him and said, "For what purpose?" He had said, "Supervisory." The prefect had written it down with the expression of a man who suspected he was being made a fool of and could not work out how.

The afternoon was cold and clear. The snow of the night before lay in a thin bright skin over the flagstones, and the Academy had settled into the second week of term with the air of an animal that has found its old hollow in the ground. Alan went up the library steps, along the corridor behind the botany stacks, and through the narrow door at the end into the Quiet Annex, and the silence settled over him like a warm coat. It was good to be back in it. It was very nearly as good as it had been a year ago, before he knew what it could hold.

"He brought it," said Elen.

She was at the long table by the west window with her chin on her fist and her boots hooked on the rung of her chair. She had been drawing something on the back of her hand. She was looking at the lamp, not at him, with an expression of such concentrated and deliberate innocence that he knew at once that she had been waiting for it since the moment he left the gallery.

"It was a conditional," said Alan.

"It's a very handsome lamp."

"It is on loan from the dormitory."

"I can see the form," said Elen. "It's tied to the handle."

He set it on the table beside the first, a little to the left, where the light would fall across the center of the board. Mira, who was pouring tea from a large brown pot into four mismatched cups, did not look up. She had the look of a person who has seen a great many things in a short time and has resolved to remark on none of them. Dara sat at the far end with a bundle on the table in front of him, wrapped in a gray shawl and tied with string, and his thin ink-stained hands resting on it as one rests a hand on a sleeping animal.

"Is that the herbal?" said Alan.

"Yes." Dara's voice was barely above the whisper the annex required. "I have not shown it to anyone. My grandmother made me promise. She said it was not hers to show."

"And she has permitted you now?"

"She said if it was for the truth, it was permitted." He swallowed. "And she said that if the boy with the straight back was with you, I should let him read the hard parts, because he would not make a fuss."

"I did not know she had heard of me."

"She has heard of everyone," said Dara. "She is eighty-three."

He untied the string.

It was a small thick book, bound in green cloth gone gray at the corners, with a spine split and mended with a strip of what appeared to be a bootlace. The cover was warped, as books are that have lain long in an attic. When Dara opened it, a smell came up out of the pages, dry and faintly sweet, like pressed roses and dust and a very old drawer. On the flyleaf, in brown ink, someone had written a name and then scratched it out so firmly that the pen had torn the paper. Only two letters survived the scratching, at the beginning of each word, like the last two stones of a collapsed wall.

L. M.

Alan stared at them. He had spent the whole of a summer in his father's library, and the habit of finding patterns had become a kind of second sight. He felt it now, a small cold stir at the back of his neck.

"Who was she?" said Elen, in a very low voice.

"My grandmother does not say her name," said Dara. "She lived across the lane in Alder Street. They shared a well. She was a healer. When the Council came, she left in the night, and she left this behind in a laundry basket on my grandmother's step, under a sheet. My grandmother has kept it in the attic for forty years. She never dared burn it. She says it belongs to someone who might come back."

No one spoke. The lamps burned steadily. A single flake of snow tapped against the window and slid down the glass.

"Let us begin," said Alan, and sat down.

It was Dara who read first. Alan had thought about that, on the walk across the courtyard, and had decided that it was correct. He said so. "You have the right. You found it. I shall follow and verify." The thin boy flushed to the roots of his hair, and then, with fingers that shook only a little, he bent over the first page and began to murmur.

He was good. That was the surprise. He read the old script slowly and a little haltingly, with his finger moving under each line, and now and then he stopped and frowned and went back, but he did not make mistakes. When he came to a word he did not know, he said, "I do not know this one," quite calmly, and Alan supplied it. They fell into a kind of rhythm: the low voice, the correction, the voice again, like two people carrying a heavy thing up a stair. And on the other side of the table, with her elbows among the teacups and her face lit gold by two lamps, Elen listened with her whole body, her lips parted and her eyes shining, as if each line were a door being opened onto a lit room.

"I do not know the next word," said Dara.

"Binding," said Alan. "It is a verb form. Of the second order."

"Thank you."

"You are doing very well."

Dara looked up. He looked at Alan with an odd, startled, shy expression, as though a door he had been leaning against had been opened from the other side. He did not say anything. He bent his head again, and went on, and Alan noticed that his shoulders had dropped half an inch.

The door behind them opened at ten past four.

It did not bang. It opened with a creak, and a cheerful tuneless humming came in ahead of its owner, a sea shanty by the sound of it, something about a woman who had married a lighthouse. The owner followed. He was a very tall, very loose-limbed young man of perhaps nineteen, with hair like a haystack that had been in a high wind and a long, kind, crooked face that seemed to have been assembled from three or four different and extremely amiable people. He wore a gray monitor's badge pinned crookedly at his breast, a jersey patched at both elbows, and he carried a tin tray loaded with oil cans, spare wicks, and a rag, which he set down on the nearest table with a bang that made every lamp in the room dim.

"Right then," said the young man, and noticed them. "Oh! I beg your pardon. I thought it was Tuesday."

"It is Wednesday," said Alan.

"Is it? That explains the cheese." He smiled at them with great and uncomplicated goodwill. "Pell. Kieran Pell. Third year. I do the lamps. I mean, I'm the lamp monitor, I make sure they don't go out, or blow up, or tell the Archivist you've been laughing. Which they do." He glanced up at the ceiling. "That one is Doris. She's got a temper."

"You name the lamps," said Elen.

"Everyone names the lamps. They're company." He had come closer, drawn like a moth, and was peering at the green book in Dara's hands with enormous interest. "Is that Old Court? With the little crowns? Oh, I love a cipher. I'm absolutely useless at them. I once spent a whole term trying to read a recipe for rhubarb and it turned out to be a funeral hymn."

Dara actually laughed. It was a short, startled sound, and he looked quite as astonished by it as everyone else.

"And this is your supervisor," said Kieran, turning, and he stopped. His eyes had gone to the second lamp, and widened with joy. "Is that a Vickery brass? With the green chimney? I haven't seen one of those since I was a first-year. They don't make them anymore. They get frightfully hot, mind, you've got to watch your sleeve." He looked at Alan. "Are you supervising?"

"In a supervisory capacity."

"Splendid. I've always wanted to meet a supervisor." He pulled up a stool, sat on it with a creak, and folded his long legs. "May I stay? I'm not supposed to leave my post. But my post is this room, so technically."

"You may stay," said Mira, handing him a cup of tea, "if you do not touch the lamps."

"I never touch the lamps. I merely guide them." He took the tea. He peered at the table. "Is that a frog?"

"He's a paperweight," said Elen, delighted.

"Has he a name?"

"Not yet."

"He looks like a Bartholomew."

Elen looked at the little pewter creature, which had been sitting grimly on the corner of the Marrowfield paper for a year, and her face lit with the radiance of a woman who has been waiting twelve months for the correct answer. "He does," she breathed. "Oh, he does look like a Bartholomew."

"Bartholomew," said Kieran, with great ceremony, lifting his teacup to the frog. "A pleasure." Then he looked at Elen, and his crooked face did something rather gentle. He reached into the pocket of his jersey and drew out a flat paper packet, and set it down beside her elbow. "You look like someone who forgot lunch."

Elen opened her mouth. She shut it. "How do you know?"

"It's a talent," said Kieran. "It's the only one. It's a biscuit. It's got a bit of lint on it, but it's the good kind."

She took it. She looked at it, at him, and at the ceiling. And then, at his insistence, she ate it, and the others watched with the quiet satisfaction of people who have just seen a stray cat given a saucer. He sat back with his tea. In three minutes he had learned all their names and the name of the frog, and the whole room, which had been tense with the weight of the thing in the middle of the table, had somehow come loose, like a knot that has found its own slack.

Alan found, with some surprise, that he liked him very much.

They went on. Kieran stayed, as promised, without touching the lamps, and hummed very softly, and refilled the oil twice, and was no trouble at all. The light in the Annex slid from gold to deeper gold. Dara read. Alan checked. Mira took notes. And at the end of the first hour, when they had worked through the herbal's long middle sections, the remedies for coughs and fevers and bad nerves, each with its small precise diagram of leaf and root, they came, on a page near the back, to the first of the margins.

It was a different hand. Alan saw it at once. It was smaller than the printed script, quick and slanting, in a brown ink that had faded to the color of tea, and it crowded the white edges of the page as though its owner had been in a great hurry, or had been afraid of being found. It ran up one side of a paragraph and across the top and down the other, in lines that grew steadily more cramped.

"That is not part of the text," said Dara.

"No," said Alan. "That is her."

He drew the lamp a little closer. He read it first in the old script, silently, and then, because they were all looking at him, aloud, in a low steady voice, translating as he went.

"'They tell the ward that the Threadmending is a working of the Third Order. It is not. I have read the Statute. It is of the Second, which requires neither key nor seal, and any healer may use it who has the training. They need it to be the Third. If it is the Third, I am a criminal. If it is the Second, I am a woman who saved a child.'"

He stopped. Nobody moved.

"Go on," said Elen, very quietly.

"'I do not know who will read this. I hope someone will. I have set down on the last leaf the names of the six who had the fever in Alder Street before I laid a hand upon the child. I wrote them on the Tuesday, by lamplight, and had them witnessed by the baker's wife. I did it so that no one could say afterward that I brought it. I did not bring it. It was in the street before I was.'" He paused. His own voice had gone hoarse. "'The mark of the working is a thread of silver at the wrist of the one who is mended. It rises within the hour. It fades in nine nights, unless it is renewed by the hand that made it. The Council's men look for the mark and call it the harm. They do not understand that the mark is not the harm. The mark is only the signature.'"

"Signature," said Mira, writing.

"Signature," said Alan. "As a seal on wax." He found that his hand was not quite steady on the page. "It is the same figure the commentary used. The one in the Closed Stacks."

No one said anything for a long moment. Down the length of the Annex a single lamp, perhaps Doris, flickered and steadied.

Then Elen stood up.

She did not do it quickly. She rose from her chair as one rises in a church, with one hand on the table, and stood there with her fingers pressed against the wood and her face turned toward the little brown lines. She was very pale. Her lips were trembling, and her eyes, in the double glow of the lamps, were enormous and fierce and brimming.

"She wrote it down," said Elen.

Her voice cracked on it. She tried again.

"She wrote the names down before. On the Tuesday. She had them witnessed. She knew they'd come for her, and she sat down with a lamp and wrote out the one thing that would prove it, and she put it in a book, and she gave it to a neighbor in a laundry basket." She drew a breath that shook. "She wanted someone to find it. For forty years. She wanted someone to read it."

"Elen," said Alan.

"Nobody did."

"We have."

She looked at him. In the lamplight her face was wet, and so open, and so entirely without defense, that he felt the room go very still around them. He did not know he had moved until he found that he had lifted the second lamp, the brass one, with its green glass chimney, and set it down beside her elbow on the table, so that its light fell full across the margin, across the faint brown writing, across her own hands, which had curled round the edge of the page as if to hold it up.

"The light is poor for Old Court," said Alan. "It strains the eyes."

"You brought it."

"A conditional," said Alan, "is a conditional."

She laughed. It broke in the middle and came out half a sob, and she put the back of her wrist to her mouth, and then, with a small wet gasp, she sat down again, close beside him, so that their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved. Mira poured tea into a fourth cup, and slid it across the table without a word. Kieran Pell, on his stool, hummed three bars of something very low and very kind and then, with great tact, stopped.

"My grandmother," said Dara, to the book, "said that she would know whether someone had read it. She said she would be able to tell. She said that when someone finally read the margins, the lamp in her kitchen would burn blue." He looked up. "She did not say what color it was before."

The silence went on for some time. Then Mira cleared her throat.

"We cannot keep this in a laundry basket," she said. "Nor in the Annex. Nor in a dormitory."

"No," said Alan. "It must be copied. In full, with the margins, by a witness. And the original placed in the keeping of someone who has authority to hold it."

"Marlow," said Elen, and wiped her face on her sleeve.

"Professor Marlow. In writing. With a formal account, signed and dated, of how it came to us and what it contains." He heard how much like a clause it sounded, and went on, since it was the shape the thing had to take. "I shall draft it tonight. Dara will make the copy. We shall take both to him tomorrow."

"Properly," said Elen.

"Properly."

"I'm collecting conditions," said Elen, to the frog, and grinned through the wet. "That's number eight."

It was Mira who looked at the clock.

It was a plain round one above the door, and she glanced at it, and then at Elen, and then, with a very small and deliberate cough, said, "Elen. The labels."

Elen was bent over the book. She did not look up.

"Theo's first practical is at five," said Mira, in her calm voice. "Professor Marlow is supervising. You said you would label the jars. All of them. The nightroot, the frostmint, the sleepwort, and the ones from the back shelf with the blue caps. They are sitting on the bench in the greenhouse with nothing on them."

"It's ten to," said Elen. She said it absently, her eyes on a line of faded brown. "Ten more minutes. I just want to see the last leaf. I just want to see the names."

"Elen."

"Ten. I promise. I'll run."

Mira looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded, and let it go, and picked up her pen.

They turned to the last leaf.

It was a single page of thin brown paper, folded and refolded, with six names on it in the slanting hand, set one beneath another. Each had a street number beside it, and a small mark, and at the bottom, in a larger and firmer hand, a signature that was not Lissa Marren's: Hannah Brewer, baker's wife, witnessed this fourth day of the second month. Elen read the names aloud, one by one, softly, as though they were people sitting in the room. Alan wrote them down. Dara copied them, letter by letter. Kieran, who had been silent for some time, said, "That's a lot of trouble to go to, for a woman who was afraid," and nobody answered him.

It was a very long ten minutes.

It was twenty. It was thirty. It was the careful business of copying six names and a witness and a date in three hands, and checking them, and checking them against each other, and then, because it seemed important, reading the whole of the margin aloud a second time, slowly, to make sure that nothing had been left out. Alan did not look at the clock. He had never in his life failed to look at a clock. He was seized, rather helplessly, by the thing he had once watched happen to her in a forest and a larder and a lecture hall: the total, absorbing, blissful forgetting of everything but the page.

He lifted his head at last because the lamps had begun to dim.

It was not Doris. It was only the evening, which had come down in the windows while they were not looking, deep blue and cold. The clock over the door said twenty minutes to six.

He sat very still.

Beside him, Elen raised her head. She looked at the clock. She looked at it for several seconds. And then all the color went out of her face, in a single quick tide, and she said, in a whisper, "Oh no."

"Elen," said Mira.

"The labels."

"Yes."

"Oh, no, no, no." She was on her feet. The chair went over behind her with a crash, and every lamp in the Annex went out at once and rang the little bell in the ceiling. "Oh, Mira. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll go, I'll go now."

She went. She went at a dead run, with her bag banging at her hip and her coat half on, out through the narrow door and down the long corridor, and her boots were still ringing on the stone when the Annex had gone entirely quiet, and four people and a very large young man sat in the sudden dark, and nobody said anything at all.

It was Kieran who lit the lamps again, one at a time, murmuring to them.

They were in the greenhouse by six. Alan did not remember deciding to go. He found that he had gathered up the second lamp and his notebook and was walking at Mira's shoulder along the garden path in the blue dusk, with the glass roof glowing ahead of them like a lantern forgotten in the snow.

The door stood open. Inside, the long benches were crowded with cauldrons, ready and cold. On the center bench, under a single lamp, stood the jars: sixty of them, of every size, in rows. And at the far end, standing alone in his waistcoat buttoned wrong, with a watering can in his hand and an expression of mild, patient regret, stood Professor Marlow. At his feet, by the stool, Theo sat cross-legged on the floor with a piece of charcoal, drawing a very small and very sad cauldron on a sheet of paper. Wren stood with her arms folded against the doorframe. Her face was dark.

Elen was at the bench. She was writing on the jars. She had a pot of ink and a brush and a roll of paper strips, and she was labeling them at a speed that bordered on the unholy, hair in her eyes, ink to the elbow, her lips moving. NIGHTROOT. FROSTMINT. SLEEPWORT. The paper was damp and the letters were running. She had stuck one strip on upside down.

"A practical without labels," Professor Marlow was saying, to the air, in a mild and meditative voice, "is a practical without a conscience. I should not like to put the first-years' hands anywhere near a jar I could not name. It is a thing I have never forgiven myself for, in the past." He looked up. "Good evening, Mr. Valemont. I was just remarking to Mr. Theo that Thursday will do quite well."

"Thursday?" said Elen, without turning round. Her voice was thick.

"The practical is postponed, Miss Joy. It cannot be helped. There are rules about unlabeled stock, as you know. They are good ones." He did not say it unkindly. He turned back to the seedlings and said, in a soft voice, "Good evening, Marigold. Don't sulk."

"It's all right," said Theo, from the floor, with a brave smile that dropped, at once, into a look of acute discomfort. "It's really fine. It's only Thursday. I had a practice batch, I was going to do a very small one, I had a plan for the, anyway. It's fine."

"It was my ginger," said Wren, from the doorway, "that I brought for the batch. In my own pocket. At five." She was not shouting. She said it flatly, with a long cool glance at Elen's back. "I'd been looking forward to it."

"I know," said Elen. "I know. I'm sorry."

Mira had come in past Alan, quiet as a shadow. She went to the bench and picked up a strip of paper and a brush, without a word, and began to work down the other end of the row. Her ink was steady. Her strip was straight. She had, he noticed, already done a third of the jars, the small ones, by herself, with a pencil, before she came to fetch them, and had left the rest because they were hard. She did not look at Elen. She wrote SLEEPWORT in square black capitals.

"You said you would do them," said Mira.

It was a very small voice. It was not angry. That was the dreadful thing. It was only tired, and quite level, and rather sad.

"I know," said Elen. Her brush had stopped.

"I did not mind doing them. I do not mind. It is only that I had arranged the whole of the afternoon around knowing that you would."

"I know. It's not that I didn't care."

"I know that," said Mira. "That is what makes it hard."

Elen stood perfectly still at the bench with the brush dripping ink onto the floor. Alan, in the doorway, with the brass lamp in one hand and a notebook in the other, thought he had never in his life seen anyone look so entirely wretched. Her shoulders were bent. Her hair hung over her face. She was biting her lip so hard that it had gone white. She had not run away. She had gone straight to the thing she had broken, and begun to mend it with her bare hands, in front of everyone, because it was the only thing she knew how to do.

He had the sentence ready. He knew it very well. He had never in his life been without it: a perfectly correct, perfectly reasonable, perfectly true observation, concerning promises and the keeping of them. He had said a version of it to her in the Quiet Annex, a year ago, in the lamplight, and he had been right then, and he would be right now.

He set the lamp down on the bench. He took off his coat. He folded it, with exact corners, and laid it on the nearest stool. He rolled up his sleeves. Then he took a brush from the pot, and a strip of paper from the roll, and without a word he went to the far end of the row, and began to read the jars.

It was only a moment before he felt her turn her head.

"Frostmint," said Alan. "This is not frostmint. It is lemon balm."

"It's got a blue cap," said Elen, in a thick voice.

"It has a blue cap and it is lemon balm."

"Oh," said Elen. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. "Oh. That's a terrible mistake. I'd have told Theo it was frostmint."

"He would have been in considerable discomfort."

"I'd have been the reason." She made a sound that was nearly a laugh, and nearly something else. "Thank you."

He wrote LEMON BALM, in his small upright hand, and pressed it onto the jar.

They worked until nine.

They did the whole sixty, in the end. Mira finished her half at seven and went to bed with a headache, after laying her small cold hand for a moment on Elen's, and saying only, "Tomorrow," which was somehow enough. Wren stayed to scrub the benches, in silence, and then, as she left, dropped a twist of ginger into Elen's apron pocket without turning her head. Theo hugged her, mournfully, for a long time, and was told to go and stand in the garden and think of something that did not explode. Professor Marlow watered the seedlings and, at some point, went away, leaving the door ajar and the lamp burning.

They sat at the end of the bench afterward, with the last jar between them and a smear of ink to the elbow on both. The greenhouse was warm and dim and smelled of earth. A small green frog, not Bartholomew but a live one, was sitting on the rim of the sink, watching them with a heavy-lidded eye.

"I did it again," said Elen.

"You did."

"You're not going to say it."

"I am not."

"You've got the face." She turned her head against her arm. Her eyes were red, and tired, and very honest. "You've got the face where you're holding something in. It's like watching a kettle."

"I was about to remark," said Alan, with care, "that I did not look at the clock either."

She stared at him.

"I looked at the margin. I looked at the names. I did not look at the clock once in three-quarters of an hour. I, who have not been late in my life." He turned the brush in his fingers. "It would be a very poor sort of person who said nothing, and allowed you to carry the whole of it."

"It's not your promise."

"It is partly my afternoon."

She was silent for a little. Then she said, in a small voice, "It's not that I don't care. I do. I care so much I can't stand it. It's just that when something's interesting, truly interesting, like a thing in a margin that somebody wrote forty years ago, there isn't anything else. It all goes. It's like the room is on fire and I can't hear the bell." She rubbed her face. "And then I come out of it, and there's a Theo on a floor."

"I understand that," said Alan.

"Do you?"

"I once forgot an entire dinner. For Old Court grammar. My mother sent a footman. I was found at the dining table with the soup cold and a text in my hand, entirely happy." He looked at the jar. "I believe I was eleven. I was not punished. It was felt that I had been punished enough by the soup."

She laughed. It was wet, and small, and it cracked down the middle, and then it caught, and she put her face down on her ink-stained arm and laughed until her shoulders shook. When she raised her head, she was smiling, tired and crooked and a good deal more like herself.

"I need a method," said Elen.

"A list?"

"A garden."

He looked at her.

"Seed," said Elen, slowly, tracing something in the spilled ink on the bench. "That's the promise. The moment I say it. And water. That's the reminder. It has to come back, or it dries up. And fruit." She looked up. "That's when it's kept. I can't see the fruit when I'm in the middle of the interesting thing. I've never been able to see it. I need somebody, or something, to put the water on."

"A card," said Alan.

"A what?"

"A card. One that you carry. With each promise written on it, at the time that you make it, in your own hand. And that you are obliged to look at, at a certain hour." He was speaking slowly, working it out as he went. "It is not a punishment. It is the water."

"A card with a garden," said Elen.

She took a clean strip of the label paper. She wrote on it, with the brush, in her quick uphill hand, PROMISES, and underneath, in smaller letters, Seed. Water. Fruit. She looked at it. Then she drew a very small, very careful picture of a watering can, and pressed the strip flat, and tucked it into the inside pocket of her coat, over her heart, where a certain gray sheet of paper had once been folded.

"There," said Elen. "I'll look at it at lunch. Every day. And if I forget, I'm going to ask you to be terrifying."

"I shall consider it."

"Presently?"

"Presently," said Alan, and she grinned at him, wet-eyed, and the green frog on the sink blinked once and slid out of sight.

It was a quarter past nine when he came back across the courtyard.

The snow had begun again, very softly. The lamps were lit along the arcades. He carried the second lamp in one hand and his notebook, with its small new pages of copied margins, in the other, and he walked slowly, as one does who has been somewhere a very long way off and is not yet ready to be home.

A light was burning in the narrow door of the Annex.

Kieran Pell was locking up. He was standing on the step with the big iron key in one hand and his tin tray under his arm, humming the lighthouse shanty to himself, and he looked up as Alan came near and smiled, a wide, tired, entirely uncomplicated smile.

"Right then," said Kieran. "Is it all done?"

"It is."

"Dara's got his copy?"

"Two. In different hands."

"Good. That's the way." He turned the key. It was a stiff old lock, and he had to lean his shoulder into it. "Oh. I should say. A thing. Probably nothing."

Alan waited.

"A clerk from the Council came by the Annex desk today. Round about one, before you were in. Thin chap, gray coat, very polite, with a ledger." He tugged the key out and held it on one finger, swinging it. "He asked who'd booked supervised sessions for restricted material this term. Names, dates, that sort of thing. I told him I couldn't say."

"Why?"

"Because it's the Archivist's book, not mine. And because he didn't have a slip." He said it simply, with a shrug. "Everyone has to have a slip. That's the whole point of a slip. He said it was a formality. I said I was very fond of formalities." The crooked face creased. "He went away. He wasn't cross. He said please, twice, and thank you."

Alan was very still.

"I don't actually know who's booked what," said Kieran. "If it helps. I just mind the lamps." He grinned. "But I thought you ought to know someone was asking. You've got the look of a person who likes to know things."

"Thank you," said Alan. It came out lower than he meant. "That was, I am obliged to you."

"Oh, no, no. Don't. It's nothing. It's just manners." Kieran waved it off with the key. He tucked the tray more firmly under his arm and started down the steps, humming again. At the bottom he turned and looked back, tall and loose and hay-headed in the falling snow, with the lamp-glow behind him. "Don't stay up too late. Last year a third-year fell asleep in the stacks and woke up in 1874."

"I shall bear it in mind."

"Good man," said Kieran Pell, and went off across the courtyard, a long thin shape against the white, singing about a woman who had married a lighthouse, until the dark and the snow took him.

Alan stood a long time on the library steps, with the brass lamp in his hand and the notebook against his chest.

There had been a man in a gray coat, with a ledger. He had said please, twice, and thank you. He had asked for names and dates, politely, from a boy who hummed, and had gone away without being cross.

He thought of a slip signed by two people in a cold stone room. He thought of a red stamp on the back of a gray page.

Then he turned, and went up the dark steps, and did not hurry, and did not look behind him until he reached the door.