They took the herbal to Professor Marlow on Thursday, before breakfast, wrapped in its gray shawl and carried by Dara in both arms like an infant at a christening.

It was not yet seven. The east greenhouse was cold and gray and smelled of wet earth, and the old man was already there, standing in his shirtsleeves among the seedlings with a watering can, humming something that stopped when he saw the size of the delegation. There were five of them: Dara with the book, Alan with a folder, Elen with her hair in a rope and a paper card sticking out of her pocket, Mira with a flask of tea, and, because he had been waiting by the door with a tray of oil cans and no discernible reason, Kieran Pell.

Marlow read the account first. He read it standing up, in Alan's clear upright hand, from the heading to the last of the signatures, with his pale eyes moving slowly down the page and his long jaw working. Then he held out his hands. Dara gave him the book as though handing over a living thing. The old man sat down on an upturned crate among his seedlings, opened it on his knee, and turned, without being told, to the margins.

Nobody spoke. A drop fell from the roof. Somewhere along the bench a small green shoot, which had been leaning toward the light with the whole of its heart, gave up and straightened.

It took him a long time. When he had finished, he took off his spectacles and held them in his lap, and his face, without them, looked bare and very old.

"Who else has seen this?" said Marlow.

"The five of us, sir," said Alan. "And Dara's grandmother."

"Six." He nodded slowly. "And now a seventh. That is the right number. It is large enough that it cannot be lost, and small enough that it cannot be sold."

"Sir," said Elen.

"Yes, Miss Joy?"

"Did you know her?"

The old man turned the spectacles over in his fingers. "I heard her name once," he said. "At a dinner, a long time ago, from a man who was laughing. A story about a woman in Alder Street who had made a fool of herself with a forbidden charm. I laughed too. I did not ask what became of her." He looked down at the brown ink, the cramped slanting lines. "It is a small thing. I have thought of it a good deal."

No one answered. After a moment he stood, put on his spectacles, and carried the book to the back of the greenhouse, where an iron strongbox sat beneath the seed shelf with a padlock the size of a man's fist. He unlocked it. He laid the herbal inside, on a bed of folded sacking, as one lays down a sleeping child. He turned the key twice.

"You will speak of this to nobody," he said, without turning round. "Not to the Warden. Not to the market. Not to the lamps."

"I'd never tell a lamp anything, sir," said Kieran. "They gossip."

"Quite so." Marlow dropped the key into his waistcoat pocket and straightened, and for a moment the vagueness slid back over his face like a curtain. "Now. Which of you is Mr. Theo's chaperone this afternoon? I understand there is a practical."

The practical took place at four. It went off, under the eye of Professor Marlow and a small fire extinguisher shaped like a goose, with a single modest and fully sanctioned flame, and Theo received a round of applause that he did not entirely deserve.

The letter came on Friday.

He was at breakfast. The post had arrived in its usual white whirl of paper swallows under the high gray windows of the Great Hall, a hundred of them at once, each homing on a name, and one came down in the porridge bowl in front of him and shook itself and unfolded with a sigh. It was heavy cream. It was sealed in dark green wax with the Valemont crest.

He knew whose it was. He broke the seal with a thumbnail and read it standing up, as he always did, in the noise of four hundred people not eating.

The Ministry's Bureau of Regulation and Statute opens in the spring a single cadetship to a student of the third year. It has been held by a Valemont in four of the last six decades. Your grandfather served as Under-Registrar. I have put your name forward.

The nomination requires an attestation from the Warden of your hall that no mark has been entered against you in her book at any time during the course. I do not doubt that she will be able to give it. I trust that the company you keep this year is such as will bear examination.

Your father.

It was a very short letter. It was, as always, perfectly courteous. It contained no reproach, and no inquiry, and not a single word that could be quarreled with. And it sat in his hand like a stone he had been given to carry, and he found that his fingers had gone cold.

Something slid out of the fold and landed on the table.

It was a slip of paper, no larger than a playing card, folded once. He picked it up. The handwriting on it was round and slanting and small, in violet ink, the hand of someone who wrote very seldom and had made a great effort to be brief.

Is she kind? — M.

He read it twice. His ears went hot. He folded it along its crease with great care and put it into his breast pocket, behind the notebook, and sat down on the bench with the letter in his hand and the porridge cooling and the swallow, which had finished its business, hopping about on the cloth demanding a crust.

"Your ears," said Pip, across the table, with enormous gentleness, "have gone a very particular color."

"It is warm in the hall."

"It's not warm in the hall." Pip looked at the letter. He looked at Alan's face. He put down his spoon, which for Pip was an act of notable seriousness, and said nothing more at all, and passed him the bread.

Alan did not eat lunch.

He sat through the morning's lessons with his pen moving at the usual rate and the whole of his attention folded in on itself, like a man holding a door shut. Across the Great Hall at noon, three tables down, he was aware of a head of red hair bent over a bowl of soup. He did not look. She did not look at him. And at the end of the meal, as the benches emptied, she got up, crossed the room, and sat down opposite him, quite casually, with a card in her hand.

"I'm doing my card," said Elen.

"I see that."

"It's got three things on it." She held it up and read it aloud, very gravely, in the voice of a clerk reading out a sentence. "'Return Mira's cardigan.' Done. 'Tell Theo sorry, again.' Done, he cried. 'Orionids, Spindle, tonight.'" She looked up. "That's a promise I made myself. At about two in the morning. It's meant to be fun. It's the one thing on here that is."

He said nothing. She turned the card over in her fingers.

"It's the best night of the year for it. The meteors come out of Orion. Mum says you can see them from the Spindle all the way to the sea." Her voice was very casual. "I thought you might come. Not in a supervisory capacity."

"I have a letter to answer."

"You could answer it after."

"It is not that kind of letter."

She did not ask what kind it was. She only looked at him, across the scrubbed table, with her chin on her hand and her eyes steady and warm and, he thought, entirely without pressure, the way a person looks at an unlit lamp that is perhaps going to be lit. Then she shrugged.

"Half past nine," said Elen. "If you want to. The slip has to be in by three. They won't let anybody up without one. You'll have to do the form."

He did the form. He told himself, in the corridor, in the stairwell, and again at the long oak counter of the Warden of Towers, that it was merely a matter of correct procedure. The form was printed on pale blue paper and required his name, year, hall, the date and hour of the proposed ascent, the number of persons in the party, and the purpose. He filled it in with great clarity. In the last box, after a moment's hesitation, he wrote: Observation of the Orionid meteors.

The clerk read it. She was a plump gray woman with a pen behind each ear, and she looked at the paper, and then at him, over her spectacles.

"Number of persons: two," she said.

"Yes."

"Supervisory?"

"No," said Alan, with feeling.

She stamped it.

The Spindle was the Academy's slenderest tower, a tall gray needle at the south end of the garth, and the stair inside it wound up through the dark like a corkscrew through a cork. There were two hundred and ten steps. Elen counted them aloud, cheerfully, in a whisper, with a lantern in one hand and a flask in the other and a rolled blanket under her arm, and Alan came behind her with his hand on the cold wall and the letter folded in his breast pocket, and did not tell her that he had counted them already.

At the top was a round chamber under a great copper dome, cold and dim and smelling of brass polish and old cat. A long telescope of dark wood and burnished metal stood in the middle on a tripod, angled toward a slot in the roof where the sky showed black and enormous. In a deep leather armchair beside it, wrapped in a plaid, with a gray tabby the size of a loaf asleep on his stomach, a very round, very old man was snoring.

Alan advanced and held out the slip.

One eye opened. It was a clear, mild blue. It looked at the paper, at Alan, at Elen, and closed again.

"Orionids," said the old man, in a voice like a bee in a jar. "Splendid. Do not touch the brass. Parallax will bite." And he was asleep.

"That's the astronomer," whispered Elen. "He's been up here for fifty years. They say he's only awake on nights of significant events."

"It is a significant event."

"He's asleep."

"He is conserving himself," said Alan.

There was a low door in the side of the dome, and beyond it a narrow iron gallery that ran around the outside of the tower like a bracelet. They stepped out onto it, and the night struck them in the face.

It was enormous. It was the largest thing he had ever stood inside. The whole of the sky was a black bowl poured out over the world, and it was so thickly sown with stars that it seemed to have been spilled, a river of them from horizon to horizon, white and gold and faintly blue, and beneath it the Academy lay silent and small, a handful of lit windows among the dark. The wind was bitter. The iron rail under his hand was so cold that it burned.

Elen spread the blanket on the gallery floor. She sat on it with her back against the stone, and patted the space beside her. He sat. She poured tea into the flask's cup, and handed it to him, and poured another for herself, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.

The first meteor came in less than a minute.

It was a thin white scratch drawn from the shoulder of the sky down toward the dark hills, so swift and silent that he was not certain he had seen it. Elen drew in her breath.

"One," she said.

There was another, and another. They came out of the constellation of the Hunter one by one, quick bright pale strokes, some short as a blink, some trailing long glowing tails that took a full second to fade. She counted them aloud. She called out the long ones, and gasped at the bright ones, and told him, in a whisper, which part of the sky to watch. He drank his tea and watched. It was very quiet. The cold seeped through the blanket. Somewhere below, a long way down, a door shut.

He was aware, with great clarity, of the letter in his pocket.

"Twenty-two," said Elen.

A silence.

"What's the weight?" said Elen.

He did not turn his head. "I beg your pardon?"

"The thing you're carrying. Pip says you've looked like someone carrying a very heavy tray since breakfast. He said it was a tray with a great many glasses on it and you were afraid to put it down." She said it quite lightly, to the sky. "I'm not asking you to say. I'm only saying that I noticed. I notice quite a lot."

"It is nothing."

"Okay."

She let it be. She tipped her head back against the stone and watched a long bright meteor draw itself across Cassiopeia and go out, and said, "Twenty-three," and drank her tea. And the not-asking sat on the cold iron between them, so patient and so warm and so entirely without reproach that he felt his throat begin to ache.

"Condition number nine," said Elen, in the same light tone.

He looked at her.

"You made seven," she said. "And I made one, I think, in the gallery. Eight was the lamp. Nine is yours, though you haven't said it yet. I've been waiting for you to say it. It's the only one I'm sure of." She turned her head against the stone and met his eyes. "No carrying it alone."

He did not say anything.

He put his hand into his breast pocket. He drew out the cream envelope with the green seal, and held it, for a moment, between two fingers, as one holds something that might go off. Then he gave it to her.

She read it by the dim light of the lantern, with the wind pulling at the corners of the paper. He watched her read. He watched her lips move, very slightly, through the words: the Bureau, the cadetship, Under-Registrar, no mark. The company you keep. When she came to the end she did not say anything. She held it a moment longer. Then she folded it along its crease, precisely, and handed it back, and put her hands in her lap.

"Is there a second one?" she said gently. "You've got something else in that pocket. I can see the corner."

"It is from my mother."

"May I see?"

He gave her the little violet slip. She read it, and her whole face changed. It went soft all over, as a field does when the cloud passes.

"Oh," said Elen. "Oh, Alan."

"It is only a note."

"It's the best note I've ever read." She held it carefully by the edges. "She wants to know if I'm kind."

"She does not know that there is a you. She has inferred it."

"She's inferred a she. That's even better." She handed it back with great care, as though it were made of glass. Her eyes were very bright. "What are you going to say?"

"I do not know."

"Is it a hard one?"

"It is the easiest question in the world," said Alan, "and I cannot answer it."

The meteors went on falling. It was a very silent shower. They came and went across the great dark bowl of the sky, bright and quick and endless, and under them the two of them sat with their shoulders against the stone and the blanket pulled over their knees. And somewhere in the middle of it, with his eyes on the stars, he began to speak.

"In my family," said Alan, "love arrives in the shape of expectation."

He heard the sentence as it left him. It was not one he had ever said. It was not one he had known he knew. It came out in his level clear voice, into the cold night, and sat on the iron like a thing set down.

"I do not think my father is a cruel man. I wish that to be understood. He is not. He has never raised a hand to me or a voice. He has simply never in my hearing said that he was pleased with something, except in the manner of noting that it was correct. I have spent eighteen years learning to be correct. I became very good at it. It was the language of the house. If I was correct, there was warmth in the room, of a kind. If I was not, there was not." He drew breath. "I assumed that was what warmth was."

She did not say anything. She did not move.

"The cadetship," said Alan, "is a very great honor. It has been held by Valemonts for sixty years. My grandfather held the post of Under-Registrar, and I have a portrait of him that I was, as a child, taught to salute. I was never asked whether I wished to follow him. I was told that I would. And I, I want you to understand this, I did not mind. I have never wanted anything that was not already assigned to me. I have never had to. It was all arranged, and I was suited to it, and I was content."

"And now?" said Elen, very softly.

"And now I find that I want things that were not issued." His voice was not quite steady. He let it not be. "I want a book that was left in a laundry basket. I want a clause in a charter that no one has used in sixty years. I want a recipe to be put in front of a Board, so that a man who sells buttons can thread a needle. I want to sit on a window seat in a gallery with a girl who stands on fountains. And I do not know how to want them without betraying what I was given."

The cold wind moved over the gallery. A bright meteor drew itself from end to end of the sky, and neither of them looked at it.

"Do you want to go to the Bureau?" said Elen.

It was a plain question. It was not what he had braced for. He had expected, in so far as he had expected anything, a kind of fire: you mustn't, you're not a clock, break out, be free. She did not say any of it. She asked what he wanted, in a quiet voice, and waited, and he found that no one had ever done that either.

He thought about it. He thought about it honestly, for a long time, with the stars turning over his head.

"Yes," said Alan.

He heard how it sounded. He heard that it surprised him.

"I believe I do. I believe I wish to be there precisely because of what I have seen this year. I have been thinking about fourteen-c all week. Someone wrote it. Someone sat in a room, a very long time ago, and put down a sentence that says, if a person cannot bear the cost, the cost shall be remitted. And that sentence has been lying in an appendix for sixty years, and nobody read it." He turned his hands over on his knees. "I should like to be the sort of officer who writes that clause. I should like to be the sort who reads the appendix. There are a great many rules in this world that were made badly. It seems to me that someone ought to be in the room."

Elen was looking at him.

It was a look he had seen once, in a greenhouse, across a cup of frost-ferns, and in a cold stone alcove under the vaulting of a cloister: wide and open and shining, and so entirely without defense that it felt almost like being struck. She did not smile. Her lips had parted a very little.

"Then go and write them," she said.

"It is my father's plan."

"It's your reason," said Elen. "It just happens to be on the same road." She leaned her head against the stone. "You don't have to choose between being good and being yours. I don't think those are two things. I think you've always thought they were."

He had no answer. It went into him quietly, and settled.

He sat for a time with his eyes on the stars. And then, because it was the last thing, and the worst, and the one he had not said to Pip or to himself or to anyone, he said it.

"I am afraid that if I am not what he made, there is nothing underneath."

The wind dropped.

He had not known it was that. He had not known until the words were out, in the dark, into the cold, a small plain sentence in a voice that sounded like a boy's. He kept his eyes on the sky. He waited for the silence to close over it.

"I've seen it," said Elen.

"Seen what?"

"What's underneath." She said it very simply. She was not looking at the stars. She had turned her head, and she was looking only at him, with her face a pale oval in the starlight and her eyes dark and steady. "I saw it in a larder at two in the morning, when you threw your coat on a jar. I saw it in a market, when you ran after a bird. I saw it on a staircase, when you said you had me. I saw it in the Annex last night, when you rolled your sleeves up and read the labels." Her voice shook, and steadied. "It's not nothing, Alan. It's the opposite of nothing. It's the best thing I know."

He could not speak.

He could not have said, afterward, how long he sat there. The sky went on falling around them in silence, and the cold bit through the blanket, and he felt, very distinctly, something in his chest that had been clenched like a fist for eighteen years begin, very slowly and with a kind of exhausted astonishment, to open.

He looked down at his hands.

Hers lay in her lap, small and ink-stained and a little chapped from the cold, with the card tucked between two fingers. They were quite still. She was not offering them. She was not even looking at them. She was only waiting, with that great patient stillness she had, as one waits for a bird that may or may not come to the sill.

"Elen," said Alan.

"Yes?"

"May I?"

It came out in a whisper. He did not say what. He did not have to. She looked at his hand, which had risen of its own accord, a little off his knee, and was hanging in the cold air between them, open and not quite steady. Then she looked up at his face. And she nodded, once, very quickly, with her lip caught between her teeth.

He took her hand.

It was not like the stair, or the forest, or the lamp. There was no stumble in it, and no emergency. It was warm, and it was small, and it fit into his as though the shape of it had been waiting. He closed his fingers round hers. She turned her palm up. And for a long time they sat like that on a blanket on an iron gallery two hundred feet above the sleeping school, with their joined hands resting on his knee, and neither of them said a word.

The great one came a little after midnight.

It came out of the east with no warning, a single enormous silent blaze, brighter than any star, that tore across the whole width of the sky from one horizon to the other. It left a trail behind it like a wound, a long green-gold burning ribbon, and the light of it fell across the roofs and the garth and the faces of two people on a gallery, so that for the space of three seconds every shadow in the world stood up sharp and black. It broke, at the end, into three, and went out.

Elen gasped. Her hand tightened on his. His did the same.

"Did you see?" she whispered. "Did you see that?"

"I did."

"Oh, I wished," said Elen. "I wished. I wasn't even thinking and I wished."

"What did you wish?"

"I'm not telling." She was laughing, soft and shaken, with the light still in her eyes. "It's not a debt. It's just mine."

"I would not ask."

"I know you wouldn't." She turned her face toward him. "Did you?"

"I have never wished upon a star," said Alan. "It seemed disorderly."

"And now?"

He was silent a moment. The afterglow was still printed on the sky, a faint green seam where the thing had been.

"I find," he said, "that I have done so. I shall not tell you what."

"Fair," said Elen, and her fingers curled tighter round his.

They stayed until the meteors thinned. The sky went on turning slowly over their heads, and the cold deepened, and somewhere in the dome behind them the astronomer woke for a moment, grumbled something about the Hunter, and fell asleep again. At a quarter to one, by the great clock of the west tower, she yawned enormously against his shoulder, and said, "I think my toes have gone."

"We should descend."

"We should." She did not let go. "In a minute."

"In a minute," said Alan, and did not either.

It was two hundred and ten steps down, and he counted them all.

She left him at the door of the boys' wing, in the dark, with a quick squeeze of his hand and a murmured goodnight, and a smile so tired and so shining that he stood for some time after she had gone, with his hand held a little away from his side as though it might spill. When he went in, the dormitory was dark and Pip was asleep, one arm over the edge of his bed and a bar of moonlight lying across his blanket.

He lit the small lamp. He sat down at the desk.

He took out the notebook, to put his father's letter between its pages, and the little violet slip fell out and lay on the blotter.

Is she kind? — M.

He looked at it for a long time. It was such a very small piece of paper. He thought of a morning room, and a cup of tea, and a woman looking at him over the rim of it for rather a long time, and saying Good, in an odd voice.

He took up his grandfather's pen. He dipped it. And on the back of the slip, beneath the round violet handwriting, in small steady upright letters, without hesitation, he wrote a single word.

Yes.

He looked at it. He did not draw a line through it. He folded the slip along its crease, and found an envelope, and addressed it, in his best hand, to a house a hundred miles away. He sealed it with green wax. And in the morning, before the first bell, he carried it down to the cloister, and set it in the pigeonhole with the outgoing post, with both hands.

A paper swallow dropped from the arch. It took the envelope in its beak, as though it weighed nothing, and rose into the gray light, and was gone. It was the first letter he had ever sent that he had not first corrected.

He stood a while watching the place where it had been.