Alan woke before the bell, which was not unusual, and lay for a full minute staring at the plaster ceiling, which was.

He did not usually lie in bed. Valemonts rose, washed, and made their beds with corners sharp enough to cut paper, and Alan had done exactly that every morning for seventeen years. But the dormitory ceiling above him was pale and cracked in a pattern like a river delta, and he found he could not stop tracing it with his eyes while his mind ran in a loop he did not want to follow.

A flash of red hair. A burst of laughter. That was all it had been.

It was a perfectly ordinary hair color, he reminded himself. Half the students in the Academy had some shade of red or copper or auburn somewhere in their family line. Last night he had been tired from the journey and primed by the snow, and a mind in that condition would see a dimple in a shadow. He would think no more about it.

"You're doing the thing again," said a voice from the other bed.

Alan turned his head. His roommate was sitting cross-legged on top of his blankets, still in yesterday's shirt, with a quill behind one ear, a second quill in his hand, and ink on three fingers, a thumb, and, somehow, his left eyebrow. Pip Hollis was round-faced and freckled, with sandy hair that stuck up at the back no matter what he did to it, and he had been talking, with brief pauses to breathe, since the moment they had met.

"What thing?"

"Staring at the ceiling like it owes you an apology. You did it for ten minutes last night too, right after the bell." Pip pointed the quill at him. "Also, you slept like a plank. Completely flat. Not a single toss. I checked."

"You checked."

"I wanted to know if you were alive," said Pip, with dignity. "It's a reasonable thing to want to know about a roommate."

Alan sat up, swung his feet onto the cold floor, and made his bed in six efficient movements. Pip watched this with open fascination.

"Do you do that every day?"

"Yes."

"With the corners?"

"They're called hospital corners."

"They're called a cry for help," said Pip cheerfully, and went back to scribbling something on a sheet of parchment that Alan decided, on balance, not to ask about.

The first-year assembly was held in the main courtyard at eight, in the kind of bright, brittle cold that made everyone's breath hang in front of them like small ghosts. Overnight the snow had stopped. The flagstones lay under a clean white skin, trampled in places by hundreds of boots, and in the center of the square stood the Academy's great fountain, a ring of weathered stone lions around a basin frozen solid, with frost sparkling over everything like spilled sugar.

Alan stood in the third row, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders square. Pip stood beside him, hopping gently from foot to foot, narrating the crowd in a low continuous stream.

"That's the prefect of the east hall. She once reported a boy for walking too loudly. That one teaches potions, he's actually nice, but don't tell anyone I said so. That one is, I'm fairly sure, a ghost, or possibly just a very tall professor who doesn't blink."

At the front of the assembly, on a low platform, the Warden of the first-year hall waited with her hands folded and her narrow face arranged in an expression Alan recognized from every strict teacher he had ever respected. She was waiting for silence, and she was getting it, because it was impossible not to give it to her.

"Last night," she said, when the courtyard had stilled, "between the half-hour bell and the final bell, fifty-three ceremonial banners in the east gallery were inverted. A portrait of a former headmaster was altered with the addition of spectacles. The spectacles, I am told, cannot be removed without damaging the painting."

A small and distinctly unprofessional ripple of amusement went through the older students at the back. The Warden's gaze moved over them like a lighthouse beam, and the ripple died.

"This is not a prank. It is a breach of conduct, committed on the Academy's very first evening, by a student who has apparently decided that the charter is a suggestion."

Alan nodded once. It was exactly what he had thought.

"If the person responsible would step forward now, the matter will be settled with a month of library duty. If I must find you, it will be considerably longer."

Silence. Alan found himself glancing, without wanting to, at the faces around him. A tall boy two rows ahead was studying his shoes with the intensity of a scholar. A girl near the front was biting her lip. And at the edge of the crowd, close to the fountain, stood a small first-year boy, pale as parchment and shaking slightly, who had the misfortune to be standing nearest the east gallery doors, and on whom the Warden's gaze had now landed and stayed.

"You." Her voice was not loud. "You were first through the east door last night. You were seen."

"I only went to find the washroom," the boy managed, high-pitched with terror. "I didn't, I wouldn't."

Alan felt a flicker of discomfort. The boy was clearly innocent. He also had no way to prove it, and in Alan's experience that was how the charter was meant to work: one waited for the evidence rather than assuming. He folded the discomfort away and kept his eyes forward.

Which was why he saw it start.

At first it was only a glitter at the corner of his vision. A single flake of snow rose off the flagstones, quite deliberately, against all natural law, and hung in the air at the height of his shoulder. Then another. Then a dozen, then a hundred, lifting off the courtyard in a slow upward drift as if the ground were exhaling, and as they rose they drew together, folding, swelling into shapes. Wings. A beak. A round white breast no bigger than a walnut.

Snow-birds.

They poured up out of the courtyard in a hundred tiny rustling flocks, light as dandelion seed, and before anyone could do more than gasp, they swooped. Over the heads of the first-years. Over the heads of the prefects. Straight toward the platform, where a stout professor in a magnificent feathered hat suddenly found his hat occupied by a family of six, all chirping, one with an expression of distinct disapproval.

The courtyard exploded.

Laughter first, a great ragged roar of it, then shrieks, then the thud of someone's trunk landing on someone else's foot. A snow-bird perched on the Warden's shoulder. Two more settled on the platform rail and regarded the crowd as though preparing to take attendance. Pip made a noise like a kettle.

And there, atop the stone rim of the frozen fountain, standing on tiptoe with one arm raised like a conductor, was a girl.

Alan did not know, afterward, what he had expected. He had spent ten years not knowing. But somewhere inside him, some careful architecture of expectation that he had never once looked at directly was already in place, and it did not look anything like this.

She was small, but only by a little. She wore the Academy uniform as though it had been handed to her in a hurry: jacket unbuttoned at the throat, scarf trailing, one sleeve pushed to the elbow and the cuff stained with ink and something green and powdery. Her hands were the same. Ink on the knuckles, a smear of herb dust along the heel of one palm. Two of her fingers were raised in the air, and the snow-birds wheeled in orbit around them, answering the smallest flick of her wrist the way a chorus follows a baton.

And her hair.

It was the color of embers. Not copper, not auburn, not any of the polite shades he had been scanning the day before. It was red the way the heart of a fire is red, a color that seemed to hold its own light, and it had come loose from whatever she had tied it with and tumbled over her shoulders in a wild, wind-snarled mass. She was laughing, her head thrown back, and the sound reached him across the courtyard, bright and breathless and utterly without shame.

It was the voice from the gallery last night. It was also, he realized with a slow cold drop of his stomach, the voice that had come through a storehouse door ten years ago and refused to be quiet.

Then she turned her head, still grinning, to check on the pale boy by the fountain, and the grin tilted, and in her left cheek, as clearly as a coin pressed into soft wax, a dimple appeared.

Alan stopped breathing.

It was a small thing. It was a very, very small thing, a shadow in the skin that came and went in a heartbeat. But it was the one detail no one could have invented, the one he had carried for ten years without being able to test, and it was there, on the left side, exactly where memory had placed it.

His hands closed on each other behind his back, hard enough that his knuckles ached.

It cannot be, he thought, quite clearly. And in the same moment, with equal clarity: it is.

Everything about her was loud. That was the first thing his mind caught, stumbling like a man on ice. In ten years, in ten thousand silent repetitions, the girl in his memory had been gentle. A hush in the snow. A small bright patient presence kneeling in a doorway with a soft voice and a steady hand.

This girl was standing on a fountain.

The Warden had shed the snow-bird from her shoulder with one flat gesture, and the little creature dissolved into powder. Her voice cut through the noise like a blade through silk.

"Down. Now."

The courtyard quieted, though not entirely. Someone at the back was still hiccuping with laughter. The girl on the fountain looked down at the Warden with every appearance of delighted surprise, as if a friend had arrived early to a party.

"Good morning, Warden!" she called. "Lovely assembly. Very bracing."

"Down."

She hopped lightly to the flagstones, landing in a small puff of snow, and sketched a bow so exaggerated it was almost a curtsy. Around her, three or four students had edged in as if by accident, forming a loose and quite deliberate ring. Alan noted it the way he noted every irregularity in a room. They were not hiding her. They were simply standing a little nearer to her than to anyone else, the way a flock stands nearer to its own.

The pale boy by the fountain had been entirely forgotten, a fact Alan registered without drawing any conclusion from it.

"Are you responsible for this?" The Warden gestured at the sky, where a few stray birds were still circling.

"For the birds? Yes, ma'am." The girl said it at once, with no flicker of hesitation, and Alan was startled to find himself faintly impressed. "It was quite a small spell. I stayed well within the safe radius. No one's hat was harmed."

"The feathered hat," said the stout professor faintly, "is currently occupied."

"Only temporarily, sir."

"And last night's banners?" said the Warden.

A pause. A very brief one. Alan, who had spent seventeen years listening to people decide whether to tell the truth, caught the exact moment in which the girl weighed two sentences against each other and picked a third.

"The banners," she said, with great sincerity, "have been hung upside down for years, ma'am. It's possible they simply took last night to correct themselves."

Somewhere behind Alan, a first-year choked on a laugh and turned it into a cough. The Warden's face did not change at all.

"The portrait of the headmaster now wears spectacles."

"I thought they suited him."

"Name."

"Ma'am?"

"Your name, girl."

The grin widened. It was not insolent, exactly. It was the grin of someone who had heard a very good joke and was trying, out of politeness, not to laugh. And as it widened, her gaze slid sideways, over the shoulders of the students, across the rows of dark uniforms, and landed, quite by accident, on Alan.

He would think about that moment for a long time afterward.

He knew it was an accident. She was only scanning the crowd for an escape route, the way anyone does when cornered, and his was one of hundreds of faces in her line of sight. But her eyes were a warm, clear amber, like tea held up to a window, and for the length of a held breath they rested on him, and he could not look away. He stood in the third row with his back straight and his hands knotted behind him, a tall, pale, stiff boy staring at her as though she were a ghost, and he watched her notice it.

She tilted her head. Her eyebrows lifted, curious and friendly. There was no recognition in her face. None. Not a flicker. She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger in a crowd who happens to be staring: faintly puzzled, entirely kind, and completely unburdened by the past.

Then she winked.

It was quick and conspiratorial and absolutely shameless. One eye closing, one corner of her mouth quirking, one finger lifting to her lips in the universal gesture of shh. Do not tell. As though he were an old friend. As though there were already something between them to keep secret.

Alan's heart did something painful and ridiculous in his chest.

She turned back to the Warden, opened her mouth as if to answer, and flicked two fingers, quite casually, at the flagstones.

The snow-birds, which had been wheeling idly overhead, dropped like a curtain. A great white storm of them, hundreds, swirling down around her in a dazzling, blinding whirl, and when the courtyard blinked and gasped and the Warden's hand came up to shield her eyes, the whirl had already thinned and drifted upward, and the girl was gone. Not a trace. Not even a footprint, though Alan, who was looking, thought he saw a flash of red vanish through the arch beside the east tower.

Delighted shouts went up from the older students. The Warden stood very still in the middle of the courtyard with snow on her sleeves and an expression of such concentrated stillness that the cheering stopped.

"Very well," she said.

She turned to face the crowd.

"There are four hundred students in this courtyard. Someone here knows that girl's name. I will ask once." Her gaze moved over them like a lantern across a dark field, slow and patient. "Does anyone know who she is?"

Silence.

It was not the silence of a crowd closing ranks. Most of them, Alan realized, genuinely did not know. They were first-years, strangers to one another, and the older students at the back were looking at their shoes with the elaborate innocence of people who knew perfectly well and had no intention of saying. A few heads turned toward each other. No one spoke.

The Warden's eyes passed over Alan, and paused.

He was the Valemont. Of course she would look at him. Ninth generation, never a mark against the name.

"Mr. Valemont," she said, not unkindly. "You were watching her."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you know her name?"

And here was the odd thing. Alan Valemont had never told a lie in his life, not a real one, not one that mattered. It was a point of quiet pride. He opened his mouth and felt the weight of the Academy's whole honest, orderly, reasonable world resting on his tongue, and the true answer slid easily into place.

"No, ma'am," he said. "I don't."

It was the truth. Every word of it.

Why, then, did it feel like a door he had just closed on someone?

The Warden regarded him a moment longer, searching his face, and found only the stiff, upright seriousness she had expected. She nodded.

"Then I expect it will come out," she said. "These things always do."

She dismissed the assembly, and the courtyard exhaled and dissolved into noise, and Alan stood where he was with his hands still locked behind his back, feeling ill in a way he could not entirely account for.

He had not lied. He had not covered for her. He had answered a direct question truthfully, exactly as a model student should. And some small, mutinous part of him was furious that he had not hesitated, and an even smaller part was furious that he had wanted to.

"Well," said Pip, materializing at his elbow with the speed of a man who had been waiting for this moment all morning. "That was the best assembly of my life."

Alan blinked. "There were birds in the Warden's hair."

"There were birds in everyone's hair! It was beautiful!" Pip steered him toward the dormitory cloister with one inky hand on his sleeve. "Do you know who that was? Of course you don't, you told the Warden you didn't, which, by the way, I admired. Very smooth. Very stoic. But I know. I make it my business to know."

"Pip."

"Elen Joy."

The name landed in Alan's chest like a stone dropped into a well, and he listened to it fall.

"Sixteen," Pip went on, delighted. "Youngest in our year. The board admitted her a whole year early on her practical trials alone, which scandalized half the faculty, because her written paper was apparently brilliant in places and absent in others. And then she was marked lowest in the conduct interview, after she asked the examiners whether she could see the library's restricted shelves. She arrived yesterday and she already has a note in her file, and that was before the banners, which nobody can prove were her. The record for a first-year is five." He lowered his voice with relish. "They say she talked her way past a curfew warden last night by asking about his mother's garden."

Alan said nothing. He was walking, and the courtyard was falling behind him, and he was aware of the stones under his boots and the cold on his face and a small, bright, insistent sound at the back of his mind, repeating like a bell.

Elen.

Elen Joy.

He tried the name against the memory the way a man tries a key in a lock. For ten years he had had no name to say, and he had thought, in some half-conscious way, that when it came, it would fit. It would be a soft name. A hushed name. Something that belonged to a girl kneeling in a doorway with snow in her hair.

It was a good name. It was short and bright and quick, and it sounded exactly like laughing on top of a fountain.

It did not fit at all.

"You've gone a funny color," said Pip, peering up at him. "Are you all right? You look like someone who just found out his favorite teacher is a duck."

"I'm fine."

"You said that very fast."

"I'm fine," Alan repeated, and he meant it to sound firm, and it did not sound firm at all.

It was her. That was the thing he could not get around, though he walked in circles around it for the rest of the morning. Red hair, left dimple, ten years, the right age, the right look in the eyes, bright, unafraid, entirely her own. It was her. And she had not looked at him as though he were anyone. She had winked at him like a stranger and vanished into a snowstorm, leaving him with a name he did not know what to do with and a feeling in his chest that was neither joy nor disappointment but something stranger, a sensation like missing a stair in the dark.

She had been so quiet, in his memory.

Of course she had not been quiet. He knew that. She had shouted across a whole village to save a boy she did not know. But he had folded that part away over the years as an unnecessary detail. The point of her had been gentleness, patience, a kind of luminous, well-behaved goodness. He had built her carefully, over ten years, into the shape he had been taught goodness took.

And that shape did not stand on fountains.

The first-year timetables were posted in the cloister at noon.

Alan had not intended to look. He had intended to go straight to the library and begin the reading list for Foundations of Magical Theory, a course the charter described as essential. But the crowd was thick around the notice board, and Pip had dragged him into it, saying, "If you don't look, you'll have to find out from someone else, and then they'll tell you wrong," which was not logic but was somehow impossible to argue with.

The seating chart for Foundations was pinned in the middle of the board, a neat grid of names in the Warden's sharp handwriting. Alan ran his finger down the third row, found his name, and read it the way he read everything, once, carefully, and then once more to be sure.

Row three, second desk. A. Valemont.

He read the name beside it.

For a moment the noise of the cloister seemed to drop away entirely. Pip, beside him, said something. Somebody laughed. A snow-bird, the last survivor of the morning, fluttered past the notice board and burst gently into powder.

Row three, third desk.

E. Joy.

Alan stood very straight and very still, and read it a third time, as though it might change. It did not. The ink stayed where it was, black and unarguable. Whatever fate was, whatever design there was in the world, it had just knocked on his door in the Warden's neatest handwriting.