The Council's annual inspection of the Potions Club took place on the second Friday of December, and it went off so perfectly that Wren Ashby had not slept properly since.

It had lasted thirty-five minutes. Councillor Aldric Voss had walked the length of the east greenhouse in his gray kid gloves with his hands clasped loosely behind him, admiring the benches, the jars, and the crooked string of dried chilies over the door. He had said please twenty-two times and thank you nineteen. He had praised the labels, which had been done by Elen with a card in her pocket and a very small pewter frog watching, and were, for once, correct. He had inquired after the Professor's health. He had stopped for a moment before the strongbox under the seed shelf, and looked at it with a kind of mild, courteous interest, and moved on. And at the door, drawing on his gloves, he had said that it was always a pleasure to see a club so well conducted, and had been driven away in his black carriage, leaving behind him a smell of lavender water and a silence in which nobody breathed.

"He didn't find anything," Wren had said, that afternoon, standing at the long bench with her braid wound round her head and her arms folded so tight that her knuckles had gone white. "He walked straight past a jar of unlabeled frostroot and he did not find anything. You do know what that means."

"It means we're very tidy," said Theo.

"It means he already knows where everything is."

Nobody had answered her. Professor Marlow, tending a seedling at the end of the bench, had said gently to the plant, "Marigold, you are doing very well," and then, without lifting his head, "Miss Ashby is quite right to be uneasy. It is a healthy instinct. I should like it to be put to some other use for a day or two."

It was put to use on Saturday, which was the Frost Fair.

The Frost Fair was the Academy's second oldest festival, and by common consent its silliest. It was held in the great courtyard on the first fine Saturday of December, under a sky the color of a pearl, with the snow swept into banks along the arcades and the fountain wrapped in garlands of holly. The gates stood open. The Voices had come up the Lantern Stair at dawn with their carts, and set out their stalls along the south wall in a long cheerful clutter of striped awnings, steaming urns, strings of dried apple and tin bells, so that for a few hours the whole courtyard smelled of cinnamon and woodsmoke and hot sugar. Every club in the school had a stall. The Dueling Society was giving demonstrations of the gentle art of being hit with a cushion. The Choir had set up a booth that sold kisses on credit, redeemable in song. And in the corner by the east arch, under a blue and white awning with a hand-lettered sign that read THE POTIONS CLUB: WINTER CHEER, THREE PENNIES, DO NOT TOUCH THE FROG, stood the best-attended stall of the day.

Alan was the treasurer.

It had been put to him in the greenhouse on Thursday by Mira, in her calm voice, with a cashbox in her hands, and he had found, to his private astonishment, that he could not think of a single reason to refuse. He wore an apron. It was dark blue, tied twice round his waist by a hand that smelled of mint, and across the front, in what he suspected was Elen's best brush lettering, was written TREASURER (SUPERVISORY). He sat behind a trestle table with a ledger, a cashbox, a pewter frog, and an expression of perfect gravity, and took in pennies, and gave change, and noted every transaction in his small upright hand.

"A cup is three pennies," he said to a first-year, who had held out a sixpence and a hopeful face. "A second cup is three pennies. There is no discount for loyalty."

"I'm not loyal," said the first-year. "I just want another one."

"That is the standard motive," said Alan, and gave him his change.

"You've been doing that for an hour," said Elen, beside him.

She was ladling, at a copper urn that took up half the stall, in a patched apron with sleeves pushed to the elbow and flour, for no reason that anyone had been able to ascertain, in her hair. Her cheeks were pink. Her nose was pink. She had been laughing since nine o'clock. "You haven't smiled once. Not once. It's the Frost Fair, Alan. They sell kisses on credit."

"I do not wish to purchase one."

"You could at least look festive."

"I laugh," said Alan, with dignity. "Occasionally."

"When?"

"I do not recall."

She gave him a long, sideways, speculative look, and then, with a small private smile, turned back to the urn.

It was a good stall. It was a very good stall. In the center of it, on a trestle over a spirit burner, stood Theo's cauldron, which was a squat copper thing with a dented rim and a name, Margaret, and in which, since seven that morning, there had been simmering the thing the sign called Winter Cheer. It was Theo's. It was the first recipe he had ever devised entirely alone, and Marlow had read it, and examined it, and tested it on a sealed apparatus, and stamped it, personally, with the club's seal. It was a spiced cordial, dark gold and cloudy, with apple and clove and a little something from the back shelf that Theo would not name. It did exactly one thing, which was to make anyone who drank it feel, for about ten minutes, as though they had just come in out of the snow to a warm room full of people who were glad they had come.

The queue was forty feet long.

"Is it always like this?" said Alan, after the fortieth cup.

"It's never been like this," said Mira. She was perched on a stool at the back of the stall with a very long list, ticking off jars, and her small square face wore the glazed expression of a general in the middle of a successful campaign. "Eleven pounds, so far. It's more than the whole of last year. Theo's cried twice."

"I've cried three times," said Theo, from the cauldron. He was in a clean shirt, for once, with the sleeves rolled and his sandy hair slicked flat with water, and he was stirring Margaret with the solemn reverence of a priest at an altar. "It's the clove. It's moving."

"You are moist," said Wren, who was leaning against the pole of the awning with her arms folded, watching him with a cool dark eye.

"I'm emotionally nourished."

It was ten minutes before noon when the Warden came.

The queue went quiet. It did so gradually, from the front backward, like a ripple in reverse. She came across the courtyard with her list in one hand, narrow and upright in her gray gown, with her face arranged in the expression of a woman who had been reading rules all her life and found them, on the whole, unsatisfactory. She came to the front of the queue. She did not wait. The first-years in front of her divided like water.

"A cup," said the Warden, "of the Winter Cheer."

"Three pennies," said Alan.

She laid three pennies on the table. He took them. He entered them in the ledger. Elen ladled, with a hand that trembled very slightly, and put the steaming cup into the Warden's hand, and Theo, at the back, with Margaret's spoon held across his chest like a drawn sword, stopped breathing.

The Warden raised the cup. She sniffed it. She looked at it with great suspicion, over the rim, at the whole stall, and then, with the deliberation of a woman performing a legal act, drank.

Nothing happened. The queue held its breath. Theo's knuckles went white on the spoon. The Warden lowered the cup and stood a moment with her eyes closed.

"Adequate," she said.

Theo made a small sound like a squeezed bellows.

But the Warden was not finished. She stood, with her eyes still shut and the empty cup in her hand, and Alan, who had been trained from childhood to read the edges of a face, saw something happen at the corner of her thin mouth. It moved. It twitched. And then, slowly and with a kind of grave astonishment, as though it had not been used for a number of years and was not sure of the direction, it turned up.

She smiled.

It was not a large smile. It lasted about as long as a match. But it was entirely, undeniably there, and every person within forty feet saw it. Wren's mouth fell open. A first-year at the front of the queue dropped his sixpence. Somewhere behind them, a very small boy said, in a whisper that carried to the arcade, "She's got teeth."

"I did not know," said Wren, faintly, "that she had those."

The Warden opened her eyes. The smile was gone. She looked at them all with a stern, gray, composed face, and handed the cup to Alan, and said, "That will be all," and went away across the courtyard, upright and unsmiling, with her list held in front of her like a shield.

Theo sat down on an upturned crate and put his head in his hands.

"I want it recorded," he said, in a muffled voice, "that I have been smiled at by the Warden."

"It is in the ledger," said Alan. "Under miscellaneous."

It was Wren who did it. She did not do it with any malice. She did it, as she explained afterward, with the warm and generous impulse of a sister whose brother has just been smiled at by a gorgon and ought, in justice, to be encouraged. She was standing by the burner with a small paper twist in her hand, which she had taken from the back shelf that morning for reasons of her own, and she looked at the cauldron, and at Theo, and said, in her cool sardonic drawl:

"You know, you could do with a little extra luck for the afternoon. Go on. A pinch."

There was a pause.

"What is it?" said Theo.

"Echo-moss. It's ceremonial. It's perfectly harmless. People put it in the Midwinter cake for luck. There's not enough in it to do a thing." She shrugged. "A little luck wouldn't hurt."

"It's got a, I think it's got a warning," said Theo, taking the twist. "Hasn't it? On the label?"

"It's a very small warning."

"Theo," said Elen, from the urn, in a voice that rose. "Theo, no."

"Just a pinch!"

"Theo!"

"Sand," said Mira, calmly, rising from her stool with the bucket in both hands, and was one second too late.

The pinch went in.

It sank into the dark gold surface of the cordial, and for a moment nothing happened at all. The queue leaned forward. Theo stood over the cauldron with the empty twist in his fingers and an expression of dawning hope. Then, from the very bottom of Margaret, in a deep and ominous and entirely unmistakable voice, there came a sound.

It was a burp.

It was a long, slow, profound, resonant burp, such as might issue from a very large and contented animal after a very large meal, and it rolled out over the courtyard and rang off the arcades, and every head in the Frost Fair turned.

And Margaret exhaled.

It came up out of the cauldron in a single enormous silent bloom: a great shimmering silver cloud of bubbles, not hundreds but thousands, each as round and clear as a soap bubble and as large as an apple, rising out of the copper mouth in a column that spread, at the top, like the crown of a tree. They were beautiful. They caught the pearl-colored light and threw it out again in rainbows. They drifted over the stall in a lazy glittering fountain, and out across the heads of the crowd, and up along the walls, and a tall second-year in the Dueling Society's colors, who was standing at the front of the queue with his mouth open, said, in a voice of absolute and careless wonder:

"Oh, my word."

"Oh, my word," said the nearest bubble.

It said it in his voice. It said it, in fact, in a thin high squeaking falsetto, like his own voice drawn out through a keyhole, but it was perfectly clear, and perfectly his, and the whole queue heard it, and for one stupefied instant nobody moved.

Then a second bubble, floating past Mira's shoulder, said calmly in a tiny squeak, "Sand."

And a third, by Theo's ear, said, "Just a pinch!"

And the whole courtyard erupted.

It was the most extraordinary pandemonium that Alan had ever witnessed. The bubbles were rising everywhere, in drifts and clusters and long wavering strings, and every one of them had a voice. They repeated, as far as he could make out, the last thing that had been said near them, in a squeaky parody of the speaker, and as the cloud spread over the fair, the whole crowd began to hear itself. Fragments of a hundred conversations burst out of the air in a high shrill chorus. "Adequate!" shrieked a bubble over the Warden's departing back, in her own thin stern voice raised an octave. "That will be all! That will be all!" A fat bubble that had drifted into the Rumor Society's stall said in Pip's voice, with an air of terrible secrecy, "I have it on excellent authority that the Warden has pink slippers," and Pip himself, standing behind the counter in a waistcoat embroidered with bees, went the color of a boiled beet and made a dive for it with both hands, and missed.

"Right then," said a bubble, above the head of Kieran Pell.

"Right then," said another.

"Right then," said a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and Kieran, who had come running across the courtyard with a fishing net in one hand and a can of lamp oil in the other, stopped dead in the middle of the flagstones with a cloud of tiny Kieran voices dancing round his head, and began, helplessly, to laugh.

"Extra cinnamon?" said a bubble, in a cracked and querulous croak, and across the courtyard, behind her stall of steaming cider, Granny Hobb rose in her blanket like an offended tortoise and swung her stick at the air, and missed it, and roared "I'll give you extra cinnamon, you little blister!" and eleven bubbles roared it back.

Alan sat at the treasurer's table with the ledger open in front of him and his pen in his hand and did not move.

He was, he told himself, entirely composed. It was a nuisance, certainly. It was a breach of the festival regulations, and probably of three or four articles of the charter, and the proper course was to restore order, take names, and enter the damage in the ledger under Incidents. He drew breath to say so.

A bubble drifted down in front of his nose.

It was a very large one. It hung there, a hand's breadth from his face, shimmering, with a small distorted reflection of himself in it, upside down, with a pen in his hand. It trembled. And in a tiny, high, clipped, perfectly accurate voice, a voice that was undoubtedly and horribly his own, it said:

"There is no discount for loyalty."

He stared at it.

"I am treasurer," said another bubble, at his left ear, in the same squeak, with great dignity. "In a supervisory capacity."

"That is the standard motive," said a third.

"Alan," said Elen. She had put down the ladle. She was standing at the end of the stall with both hands pressed over her mouth, and her eyes above them were enormous, and brimming, and perfectly shining. "Alan. Alan, look at your head."

He looked up.

There were thirty of them. They had gathered above him like a cloud of small shining planets, a slowly turning halo of bubbles, each one reflecting his face. And they were speaking. They spoke one after another, in a long rolling squeaking chorus, all in his voice, all in the careful grave level tones that he used for ledgers and the charter and the Warden, every sentence he had said in the last hour, taken up and handed round.

"A second cup is three pennies."

"A second cup is three pennies."

"I am merely thorough."

"I do not give change in sentiments."

"I laugh," said the cloud of Alans, with the most terrible and exquisite gravity, in perfect unison. "Occasionally."

Something went off in his chest.

It was a small thing at first. It was a huff, through his nose, a single short breath, such as he had given on a terrace the previous June, with the whole of the Academy looking the other way. He pressed his lips together. He put the back of his hand against his mouth. It came again, harder, and this time it did not stop at the nose. It climbed up through his ribs like a bubble from the bottom of a deep well, and swelled, and broke at the top, and out of the middle of Alan Valemont's solemn, composed, upright, well-brought-up person came a sound that nobody in the courtyard had ever heard before.

He laughed.

He laughed out loud. He laughed helplessly, in a great ringing undignified whoop, with his head thrown back and his shoulders shaking, and when the first wave had passed and he tried to speak, the bubbles overhead said, in a chorus of tiny squeaks, "There is no discount for loyalty," and he went again. He bent over the table. He put both hands flat on the ledger, and the tears ran down his face, and he could not stop. He laughed until his ribs ached. He laughed until the pen rolled off the table and the frog fell over. He laughed with a kind of astonished joy, like a man who has been carrying a heavy weight so long that he has forgotten it was not part of his body, and has suddenly been told he may put it down.

The courtyard had stopped.

He was aware of it dimly, between the waves. The whole of the Frost Fair had turned to stare. A hundred faces looked at him over cups and stalls and ladles, with the same gaping, delighted, uncomprehending astonishment, and across the flagstones, in her stall, Granny Hobb had slowly lowered her stick. The bubbles still floated and squeaked. Nobody listened to them.

"Oh," said Wren, quietly, by the awning pole, in the voice of a woman watching a comet go by. "There it is."

He looked up through his tears.

Elen had not moved.

She stood at the end of the stall, in her flour-dusted apron, with both hands still pressed to her mouth. She was not laughing. That was the strange thing. Every other face in the courtyard was alight, and she alone stood perfectly still, with a stillness he had seen before, on a window seat, in the snow. Her eyes had gone wide and soft and very bright. She was looking at his face. She was looking at it the way a person looks at something she has waited a long time to see, and has just been shown, and cannot yet believe.

She lowered her hands. Her lips parted. And in a very small voice, which he heard only because the bubbles had paused, she said:

"Oh."

Then her face went slowly and completely pink, from the collar of her apron to the roots of her hair, and she turned round, and very busily began to rearrange a stack of paper cups.

"WHO," said a voice, "IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?"

The Warden had come back.

She stood in the center of the courtyard with her list crumpled in one fist and a large silver bubble sitting on the crown of her head like a hat. There was foam, a good deal of foam, on her shoulders and her sleeve and in the folds of her gown. A bubble drifted past her ear and said, in a high tremulous shriek, "That will be all!" Her left shoe, he saw, had left a long sliding skid mark on the flagstones, and she had the white, rigid, awful composure of a woman who has fallen over in front of four hundred people and intends to find someone to blame for it.

There was a silence. It was an extremely long one. And then, one after another, with the slow gathering inevitability of a landslide, every person at the Potions Club's stall pointed, in perfect unison, at Theo.

"Thank you," said Theo, faintly, from behind the cauldron.

"It was me," said a voice.

It was Kieran. He had come forward, tall and loose and hay-headed, with the fishing net in one hand and a cloud of tiny Kierans round his head, and he had a smear of foam on one cheek and a grin that he was making a heroic effort to suppress. "It was my fault, Warden. I left the oil can by the cauldron. I'm the lamp monitor. It's my job to keep the flammables clear of the, of the hazards, and I put it down, and it must have, you know, reacted."

"Oil does not react with echo-moss, Mr. Pell," said the Warden, in a voice like a drawn knife.

"No, ma'am. But it might have thought about it."

"Mr. Pell."

"I can't help it," said Kieran, miserably. "I'm a very suggestible can."

A bubble over his head said, in a high squeak, "I'm a very suggestible can," and Wren made a noise like a punctured tire.

"The treasurer," said Alan.

He had risen. He did not quite know when. He stood behind the table in his blue apron with the tears still wet on his face and a small crooked tremor at the corner of his mouth that he was unable, for the moment, to suppress, and he said, in as even a voice as he could manage:

"The treasurer accepts joint responsibility, Warden. It was I who set the price. A crowd of that size, at three pennies a cup, was likely to produce an atmosphere of, of excess. I should have foreseen it."

The Warden turned slowly and looked at him.

She looked at him for what felt like a very long time. She had foam on her shoulders, and a bubble on her head, and a face like a closed iron gate. Her gaze went over his streaming eyes and his rumpled apron and the helpless shake at the edge of his mouth, and something moved far back in her gray eyes, a very small, very distant, very dry thing, like the first crack of ice in the thaw.

"Mr. Valemont," she said. "You are laughing."

"I am aware, Warden."

"It is," said the Warden, with enormous reluctance, as though extracting a tooth, "not unbecoming." She turned away. Then, over her shoulder, in the same dry iron voice, "Do not make a habit of it."

"No, ma'am."

"The entire Potions Club," she said, to the courtyard at large, with a gaze that swept the stall like a searchlight, "and Mr. Pell, will remain after the Fair, and clean it. Every flagstone. Every bubble." The bubble on her head said, in a thin falsetto, "Every bubble!" and she went rigid, and put up a hand, and in a single quick furious motion batted it off, and it burst with a soft squeak on the cobbles. "That is all."

She went. She did it, he thought, with remarkable dignity, for a woman who left a trail of foam. At the arch, just before she disappeared, he saw her put her hand to her mouth. It might have been a cough.

It took them until dusk.

They cleaned the whole of the courtyard, with buckets and mops and brooms and two borrowed stable-pumps, and a long-handled net of Kieran's, which proved to be the only truly effective instrument against the bubbles. They scrubbed the flagstones until the foam had gone. They gathered the last of the stray silver globes, which had drifted up into the roof beams of the arcade and the bare branches of the lime trees, and popped them, one by one, with the end of a broom, each with a tiny, faint, squeaking farewell. Wren did the arcades. Mira supervised, and made lists. Theo, in a state of exalted penitence, washed the cauldron by hand, singing to it. Kieran, who had somehow been the first to take a mop and the last to put it down, worked his way along the south wall humming the lighthouse shanty, and was twice seen to stop and quietly sweep a patch of paving in front of Mr. Oswin's stall that nobody had asked him to.

The lamps came on along the arcades, one by one, each in its small gold halo. The Voices were packing up. Carts rolled out under the gate with their awnings rolled and their tin bells chiming. The air smelled of cold and cider and wet stone. And the great courtyard of Levis Morny, swept clean and bare under the first stars, lay quiet and shining as a bowl.

Alan sat on the rim of the fountain.

He was very tired. It was a wonderful, loose, aching tiredness, the kind that comes after a long run, and he sat with his apron still on and his sleeves rolled and the cashbox in his lap, and listened to the quiet. It was, he thought, rather an extraordinary thing, to be this tired from laughing. He did not think he had ever done it before.

"May I sit?"

Elen had come across the paving, with a bun in each hand.

She was a ruin. She had foam in her hair, and flour on her apron, and a long gray streak of mop-water up one arm, and her cheeks were still pink from the cold. She sat down on the fountain rim, an arm's length from him. She did not say anything. She held one of the buns out. It was a fat golden cinnamon thing, still warm, in a twist of paper, and he took it.

"From Granny Hobb's grandson," said Elen. "He says it's on the house. He says the old woman told him to give it to you, and to say that she hasn't seen a thing like it since the flood."

"I am obliged to her."

"Alan."

"Yes."

"You laughed."

"I did."

"Properly," said Elen. "Out loud. In front of everyone."

"I believe so."

She was looking at her bun. She turned it over in her hands. "I'm claiming it," she said. "The bet. A year ago. In the Annex. I said I'd get you to laugh properly before the paper was done, and you said you didn't gamble, and I said I'd do it for free. And I didn't do it. I know that. It was the moss. It was Wren. It was a cauldron called Margaret, and a, and a very suggestible can." Her mouth was shaking. "But I'm claiming the bun."

"I do not gamble."

"Then I'll eat it for you."

"That," said Alan, with great solemnity, "is a most irregular arrangement."

She laughed. She put her bun down on her knee and put her hands over her face, and her shoulders shook, and when she took them away her eyes were wet. She wiped them with the heel of her hand. And then, without any warning, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a small, creased, ink-stained strip of paper, and held it out to him on her open palm.

It was her card.

He knew it at once. It was the one from the greenhouse, the small paper strip in her quick uphill hand, with the three words at the top and the small drawing of a watering can. Seed. Water. Fruit. Below them, in a smaller scrawl, a few lines of her promises, ticked and crossed. And under the lines, along the whole bottom edge of the strip, where there had been nothing before, ran a row of tiny pencil marks.

They were tallies. They were small, neat, and very close together: little upright strokes in groups of five, each group struck through with a diagonal, like the marks a prisoner makes on a wall. There were seven groups, and three strokes over. And at the very end, after the last one, standing a little apart from the rest, was one more mark, no longer a stroke, but a very small, very careful, five-pointed star.

"What is it?" said Alan.

"It's a count." Elen was not looking at him. She was looking at the fountain, at the dark water, at a single stray bubble drifting very slowly across its surface. "Of the times you nearly did."

He was silent.

"I started in the library. The first time. When you said the thing about the Closed Stacks being closed for a reason, and your mouth went, like that. A little bit." She made a small, sideways, twitching gesture with two fingers at the corner of her own mouth. "And I thought, well. That's one. So I put a mark. I didn't mean to keep it. I just kept putting one." Her voice was very low and entirely steady. "There was the market, with the pen. There was the larder, with the porridge. There was the night in the hall when I told you to try being cold. There was the terrace." She drew a breath. "I stopped counting, a bit, after the summer. I thought, it's silly. It's a card for promises. But it was still going on, in my head. And then today."

She turned the strip over on her palm, very gently, and touched the little star with one inky finger.

"I've been waiting for it," said Elen, "for longer than I'd have thought. More than for almost anything. I didn't know I had until I heard it." She looked up at last. Her eyes were very bright and very open. "I think I've been counting you for a year. I think I've been counting you, Alan, since I first saw you stand in a courtyard and not tell the Warden my name."

He could not speak.

The stars were out. The courtyard lay quiet around them, swept and clean, and the lamps along the arcades threw their small warm circles on the flags. A long way off, in the greenhouse, someone laughed, perhaps Theo. Elen was looking at him with her whole face, and all the brightness had gone out of it, and what was left was entirely naked, and entirely brave.

He took the strip of paper. He held it for a moment between two fingers, in the lamplight, and looked at the tiny star.

"May I," said Alan, and his voice was not quite steady, "keep it?"

"It's a promise card."

"I will promise to return it."

"When?"

"When it is no longer cold," said Alan.

She stared at him. Then her face broke, helplessly, in a wet and shining grin. "It's a tally," she said. "It's not even finished."

"Then I shall add to it," said Alan.

He took out his pen. He bent over the strip, on his knee, in the light of the nearest lamp, and with the careful, exact, upright hand with which he had written a hundred ledgers and nine unsent letters, he drew, at the end of the row, a single small clean stroke. And beside it, after a moment's hesitation, another. And another. Three marks, one under the other, beneath the star.

"What are those?" said Elen, in a whisper.

"The three occasions," said Alan, "on which I laughed today. Out loud. Before the bubble." He capped the pen. "It seemed relevant. It is a matter of accuracy."

She made a sound. It was not a word. She put her bun in his hand, in exchange for her card, and in a sudden fierce movement, quite quick, she took his free hand in both of hers, bun and all, and held it hard against her chest.

They sat there, saying nothing, on the rim of the fountain in the dark. After a while he realized that she had put her head against his shoulder. After a while longer, he realized that he had put his cheek against her hair, which smelled of cinnamon and mop-water and foam. He broke the bun in half. He gave her the larger piece. She ate it with her eyes closed.

"Is it good?" said Alan, softly.

"It's the best bun I've ever had," said Elen, "and I didn't even win it."

"You did."

"Mm."

They sat. Overhead, in the black branches of the lime, a last straggling bubble was drifting, silver in the lamplight, trailing a little wisp of foam. It hung for a moment above the fountain. And in a very small voice, with a sound like a sigh, it said, in the Warden's accents, "That will be all," and popped.

"I think," said Elen, into his shoulder, "that's the best thing I've ever heard."

"It is a close competitor," said Alan, "with the earlier remark about the suggestible can."

She was shaking with laughter again. He held her hand, and felt the warm weight of her head, and listened to the quiet, and for the first time in his life, he thought, he had not the faintest desire to be anywhere else.

"Right then!"

The voice came across the courtyard at a run.

It was Pip. He was coming from the direction of the cloister, flat out, with his coat flying and his hair on end and a sheet of parchment clutched in one hand, and behind him, like a comet's tail, a faint iridescent cluster of three or four last bubbles had attached itself to his waistcoat and was following him in a bobbing procession. He arrived at the fountain in a skid, and doubled over, gasping, with his hands on his knees.

"Terrible," panted Pip. "News. I thought you ought. Straight away. Hold on. Breath."

"Take your time," said Elen.

"No time. Look. It's on the board. It went up an hour ago. Nobody's seen it, they're all at the, at the bubbles. I took a copy." He thrust the parchment at Alan. His face had lost every trace of its usual mischief. It was round and white and anxious, with the charcoal on his chin standing out in a dark smear. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to be the one. I wanted to be neutral."

Alan took the paper.

It was a notice, in a clear secretary's hand, on thick cream parchment, and it bore, at the foot, a clean red seal, and beside the seal a signature that he did not need to read. He read the text. It was very short. It said, in the courteous formal language of the Council:

The Standards Committee of the Council gives notice that the Winter Interviews for the Ministerial Cadetship in the Bureau of Regulation and Statute will be held at the Academy on the third Friday of January. The Chair will conduct the interviews in person. The candidates nominated for this year are as follows: A. Valemont (nominated by the House of Valemont); and two others, whose names he did not take in. The candidates are requested, please, to present themselves at the Warded Chamber at ten o'clock. By order of the Chair. With thanks.

He read it twice. His face did not change. It was a perfectly polite notice, and it had been written by a perfectly polite man, and there was not a word in it that could be fault-found.

The warmth had gone out of his hand.

Beside him, on the cold stone of the fountain, Elen had lifted her head. She was looking at the paper. She did not need to read it. She had seen his face, and she had gone very quiet, and the small shining thing that had been in her eyes a moment before was folding itself away. She said nothing. She turned her hand over, under his, so that her palm lay against his, and laced her fingers through his, and held on.

"The Warded Chamber," said Alan.

"Is that," said Pip. "Do you know where it is?"

"No," said Alan. He folded the notice along its crease, and held it very still. "I have read it described. In a margin. It is the room in which a binding of the third order may be wrought."

Nobody said anything.

The stars shone over the empty courtyard. The lamps burned gold along the arcades. And in the black branches of the lime above the fountain, where one lonely bubble still hung, caught on a twig and turning very slowly in the lamplight, a tiny, high, cracked voice, which had been Pip's a moment before, said into the dark, in a thin and trembling squeak:

"Please. Please. Please."

Then it burst, and there was only the cold.