Professor Marlow was waiting at the foot of the north tower stair at twenty minutes to ten on the third Friday of January, and he was buttoned correctly.

It was the third time in the history of their acquaintance. Alan had begun to find it alarming. The old man stood in the gray light of the arch with his white hair brushed flat and his spectacles polished and his hands clasped behind his back, and he looked like a man dressed for a funeral at which he was not certain who would be buried.

"Mr. Valemont," said Marlow. "A word."

"Sir."

"He will be kind to you." He said it quietly, looking not at Alan but at the dark spiral of stone above them. "I wish you to be prepared for that. It is the part that people are never prepared for. He will be kind in the way that a very clean knife is clean." His jaw moved. "Say only what is true. Say rather less of it than you are able. It is the one thing he cannot use."

"I understand."

"And if he offers you something," said Marlow, "you will not accept it on the day it is offered."

He held Alan's eyes a moment longer. Then he nodded, and stepped back, and the vagueness came down over his long face like a shutter, and he said to the stone wall, in a soft preoccupied voice, "Marigold has a fever, I am afraid. I must go and look at her. Good luck, my boy."

Alan climbed.

On the second landing he passed the other two candidates coming down. The first was a tall fair girl in the Dueling Society's colors, whom he knew slightly, and her eyes were red-rimmed and very bright, and she walked with her chin up in the manner of one who has been handled with great gentleness and is not at all sure what has been done to her. The second was a plump boy with ink on his cuffs, who was chewing the side of his thumbnail with steady despair. Neither of them spoke. The girl glanced at Alan as they passed, and her lips parted as if she meant to say something, and then she shook her head very slightly and went on down.

Mr. Pym was standing at the head of the stair.

"Mr. Valemont," said the clerk, with his narrow pleasant smile. "How very punctual. Please. This way."

The Warded Chamber lay above the Committee's offices, at the very top of the tower, behind a door that had no handle. It was a plain slab of black oak banded with iron, set in an arch of dark stone, and it had on its face, at the height of a man's chest, a single small brass plate, worn smooth. Mr. Pym stood before it, and drew a breath, and knocked three times with the knuckle of one long white finger.

"It is a very old custom," he said. "One knocks three times, and one is admitted. It has never once been known to fail."

The door opened inward without a sound.

It was a round room. He had expected that, and he was not prepared for it. It was perhaps thirty feet across, and windowless, and the walls were of a dark stone that seemed to drink the light of the two lamps burning on the central table. The ceiling went up into shadow. The air was very still, and very cold, and it had a faint metallic taste, like the air before a storm. And in the floor, set into the great flags of the pavement, in a ring that ran round the whole circumference of the room, was a band of silver.

It was inlaid. It was no wider than his thumb. It was cut with tiny sigils, hundreds of them, in a script he did not know, and it glowed faintly, with a pale steady inward light, like moonlight seen under water. Within the ring, at the center, stood a round table with two chairs and a silver teapot. Beyond the table, against the far wall, stood a tall iron stand, and on the stand, resting on a cushion of black velvet, was a seal. It was silver, and about the size of a plum. And on a hook beside it, on a loop of leather, hung a key.

It was a very old key. It was iron, long as a man's hand, with a bow worn smooth by generations of fingers and a bit cut in a pattern so intricate it seemed less a thing made than grown. It hung perfectly still. It looked, in the dim light, like something that had been waiting a good while.

He was looking at it when the man at the table rose.

"Mr. Valemont," said Councillor Aldric Voss. "How very kind of you to come."

He had taken off his gloves. They lay on the table beside the teapot, a gray kid pair, side by side, like two small sleeping animals, and his hands were fine and long and very clean. He wore his silver hair swept straight back from the high pleasant forehead. He wore the gray coat. On the lapel, very small, glinted the pin of a key above a pair of scales. And his face, long and mild and remarkably handsome, with its deep lines round the mouth, was turned toward Alan with an expression of such warm, unaffected, almost boyish pleasure that Alan, who had braced himself for a good many things, was not braced for that.

"Please," said Voss. "Sit. Pym, you may go. Thank you." The door closed softly behind the clerk. "Will you take tea? It is only a plain one. I find the Chamber cold. I have always found it so. I believe it is the silver."

"Thank you, sir."

He poured it himself. His voice was low and warm and rather lovely, like tea poured on a winter evening. Alan sat. The chair was hard, and the cup, when it came into his hand, was thin as an eggshell and astonishingly hot.

"I knew your grandfather," said Voss.

Alan said nothing.

"Not well. I was a very junior clerk when he was Under-Registrar, and the Registrar's office lay across the passage from the Committee's. We exchanged perhaps a hundred sentences in all. He was a very correct man." He smiled into his cup. "He never once raised his voice. He never once, in my hearing, told anyone he was pleased with them. And I would have walked over hot coals to be the person he was pleased with." He lifted his eyes. "I imagine you have heard that story before, in another form."

"I have," said Alan, and was dismayed to find that his voice was not quite steady.

"I thought you might." Voss set down his cup. "I read your report, Mr. Valemont. Last night, and again this morning, at five. I do not often do that."

"Sir."

"I have been reading Phase One records for thirty-one years. I have read, I suppose, four hundred. I have never read one so clean." He said it simply, as a man states a fact he has been reluctant to admit. "Not a number out of place. Not a gap in the hours. The deviations box, 'None,' in a hand like a ruled line. It was a pleasure. It was, I may say, a most unexpected pleasure." He smiled. "I find I am rather moved."

Alan sat very still. He had been told to expect many things. He had not been told to expect that the man across the table would say it. I am pleased. Not in so many words. He did not need to. It was in the warmth of the voice, and the quiet light in the pale eyes, and the small gentle shake of the silver head. And it went into him, quick and clean and entirely unguarded, like warmth into cold hands. It went to the very place that a letter in a square hand had never reached. He felt it go, and he knew precisely what it was, and he sat there with the thin cup trembling very slightly in his fingers and thought, with perfect clarity: this is how it is done.

"I also read the Marrowfield paper," said Voss. "The one you wrote last autumn with Miss Joy. Professor Hale sent it to the Committee as an exemplar, in December of last year. I believe I wept."

"I beg your pardon?"

"A single sentence. Do you know the one? 'When procedure fails those it was made to protect, the failure belongs to the procedure.'" He said it slowly, tasting it, with his head a little on one side. "It is a very fine sentence. It is true, and it is terrible, and it is the sort of thing that I have been trying to say, in my own clumsy fashion, to the Council for thirty years. I have never once said it half so well." His eyes were very bright. "Where did you get it?"

"I wrote it, sir."

"I know. That is what is so remarkable." He sat back. "You are a young man, Mr. Valemont, who will go a very long way in the Bureau of Regulation. I should like to see it. I should like to be of use."

He was not smiling now. He was looking at Alan with an expression of grave and earnest kindness, with the lamplight on his silver hair, and Alan thought, with a small cold distant clarity: he means it. That was the horror of it. He meant every word. He sat in the silver ring, in the cold, with the tea going cool in his hands, and a man who meant every word was looking at him as a father looks at a son, and he felt himself leaning forward.

He sat back.

"The cadetship," said Voss, in a lighter voice, picking up his cup, "is a matter of discretion. It is the quality that I look for above all others. A cadet in the Bureau is entrusted with a great deal that may not be spoken of. He must know what to read, and what to leave on the shelf." He sipped. "I understand that you and Miss Joy petitioned the Archivist, in the autumn of last year, for the third volume of the Commentaries."

"We did, sir. Under Article Twenty-seven."

"Quite properly. I have the request. It is a very proper request." He turned the cup in its saucer. "I regret that the volume is unavailable. It is under review. A matter of public safety, I am afraid. There is a great deal in it that is not well understood, and a little that is dangerous. It has been in my keeping for some time." He raised his eyes. "But I should so much dislike to leave two young people with a closed door."

Alan waited.

"I should be glad to arrange a reading," said Voss. "Tomorrow. At four. Here, in this room, in my own presence. You and Miss Joy, both. I would turn the pages myself. I would answer any question that I could. It seems to me that it would set all our minds at rest." He smiled. "I am so very fond of young people who read."

The lamps burned. The silver ring glowed faintly in the dark. Behind the Councillor's shoulder, on its hook against the stone, the long iron key hung motionless on its leather loop. Alan looked at it. He looked at the seal on its cushion of velvet. He looked at a fine pale thread of silver, running through the stone of the floor not two feet from his boot, that was not part of the ring. It came out of the wall. It went under the table. It ran, very thin and very faint, toward the iron stand and the hook, and he thought with a slow cold lurch: keeper of the key.

He had been told not to accept it on the day it was offered.

"I am obliged to you, sir," said Alan. "I should like very much to read it. I shall need to consult Professor Marlow, who sponsors our work in the matter, and who must be present at any reading."

"Of course." There was not the faintest alteration in the warm voice. "Of course. Please."

"I shall write to you this evening."

"I should be delighted. And please give the Professor my warmest regards." The pale eyes rested on Alan's face, mild and clear and steady. "I knew him as a young man. A very good friend, once. We argued about everything. I confess that I have missed it."

It was said so lightly. It lay in the cold air of the Chamber like a coin set down on a table, and Alan did not touch it.

"He speaks of you," said Alan, which was not quite a lie, and was not quite the truth. "Kindly."

"I am so glad." Voss rose. He did it gracefully, one hand on the edge of the table, and the interview, Alan understood, was at an end. "I will not keep you, Mr. Valemont. You have been very patient. I need only say one more thing, and then Pym shall show you out."

"Sir."

"Your father's nomination requires an attestation from the Warden. I have seen it. There is nothing in your record that could possibly trouble it. Nothing at all." He drew on one gray glove, finger by finger, with slow care. "I am so very glad. I should have disliked it extremely if there had been any occasion to."

He did not finish the sentence. He let it hang in the cold, like a thread, and drew on the other glove.

"Miss Joy," said Voss, gently, "is a most remarkable young woman."

Alan went perfectly still.

"I met her at the examination. I have thought of her a good deal since. It is so rare to see someone who reads so widely, and who is so, so evidently unafraid." He smoothed the leather over his knuckles. "I do hope that she is careful. The Council has been, in the past, I regret to say, rather hard on the remarkable. It is not a thing that I approve. But it is a thing that happens." He looked up with great sweetness. "I should be so sorry."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere below them a door shut. A lamp ticked.

"Miss Joy," said Alan, in a clear level voice, "is careful of the things that matter."

He heard it come out. It was true. He had not planned it. It lay in the silver-lit air between them like a stone dropped into a well, and for the space of a held breath nothing moved on the Councillor's face at all.

"I am sure," said Aldric Voss, "that she is."

He smiled. It was the same smile, warm and mild and entirely kind.

"Thank you, Mr. Valemont. That will be all. Thank you so very much."

The door opened behind him without a sound.

Alan went down the north tower stair at an even pace. He kept one hand on the wall. He did not hurry, for it had been designed to be descended slowly, and some part of him, small and cold and precise, noted the number of steps. There were a hundred and forty. At the hundred and thirtieth, he stopped, and put his forehead against the stone, and shut his eyes, and breathed.

His hands were shaking. He looked at them. They were perfectly white, and perfectly steady, and shaking all the same, like the hands of a man who has walked away from a wall that was about to fall on him and has just discovered that it has not.

He had been kind to him. That was what he could not get past. Aldric Voss had sat in a silver ring in the dark and been kind to him for twenty-six minutes, and he had liked it. He had liked it so much that his throat ached. He had wanted, quite plainly, to go on sitting in that hard chair, being looked at with approval, until he was very old. And on a hook behind the man's shoulder a long iron key had hung in the lamplight, quite still.

He pushed himself off the wall and went on down.

She was at the foot of the stair.

She was standing in the arch in the falling snow, in the old patched brown coat with her hat pulled down over her ears and a flask held in both mittened hands, stamping her boots, and she was not looking at the door. She was looking at the courtyard. She was studying a single bare lime tree with great attention, as a person does who has been told not to ask and is making a heroic effort to comply. When she heard his step, she turned, and saw his face, and the flask lowered a little in her hands.

She did not ask.

She stood quite still, with the snow settling on her shoulders, and looked at him. Her eyes went over his face, and his collar, where, under the dark wool of his coat, a line of green had worked loose and showed, a thin bright thread of it, soft and worn, with a small mended place. The corner of her mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. It went on moving, slowly, and then it did become one, small and crooked and entirely private.

"You wore it," said Elen.

"It is January," said Alan. "It is cold."

"It is." She held out the flask. "It's tea. It's got honey. I asked the cook. She said not to tell a living soul that I'd been in the kitchen, and I said I wouldn't, and then I told Mira."

He took it. It was hot through the mitten. He drank, and it was sweet, and the sweetness went down into the cold place under his ribs like a hand laid on a wound. He gave it back. She did not say anything. She tucked it into her pocket, and took his arm, and turned him, gently, out of the arch and into the snow.

They walked.

He told her. He had meant to wait. He had meant to put it into order first, as he put everything, the account, the sequence, the findings. But they had gone only as far as the lime tree when he heard himself begin, in a low even voice, with his eyes on the white ground in front of him, and he did not stop. He told her about the Chamber. The ring of silver, and the cold, and the stand with the seal, and the key on its hook. He told her about the tea, and the gloves, and his grandfather, and the report, and the sentence. He told her what he had felt. He had not meant to tell her that, but it came out of him in a plain flat voice, a boy's voice. He had liked it. He had wanted it. He had sat in the hard chair and wanted to be pleased with.

She said nothing. She walked beside him, with her hand tucked through his arm.

He told her about the offer. Tomorrow, at four, in the Chamber, in the Councillor's presence. Both of them. He told her what he had answered. He told her what had been said about Marlow, a very good friend once, and the thread of silver that ran from the wall to the stand. And at the end, because it was the last thing and the worst, because he had said it would not be carried alone, he told her the other sentence, word for word, in the exact tones in which it had been said.

"'I do hope that she is careful.'"

Elen stopped.

They were at the edge of the north lawn, where the great white sweep of it ran down toward the dark line of the forest, and the snow was coming down thick and soft out of a low gray sky. She stood perfectly still, with her hand still on his arm. Her face, under the brim of the hat, was white, and quite calm.

"He's kind," said Elen.

"Yes."

"I thought he would be." She looked at the snow. "I thought it, in the exam hall. When he looked at me. He had such a nice voice. I thought, oh, that's the sort of man that would be very good at taking something away." Her mouth moved. "That's the frightening part, isn't it? It's not that he's cruel. If he were cruel, you'd know what to do."

"I am obliged," said Alan, with difficulty, "to say that I liked him."

"I know you did." She turned her head. Her eyes were steady and dark and very warm. "I'd have worried if you hadn't. It's what he's for. He's got a whole face made of liking."

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

"We tell Marlow tonight," said Elen. "Tonight, all of it, exactly like that. In order. We don't go to the Chamber unless he's there, and I don't think we go at all. We write the Councillor a very polite letter, in your very best hand, and say that we are obliged, and that we regret."

"We proceed correctly."

"We do." She squeezed his arm. "And Alan. I'm not going to be correct for you."

He turned.

"I know what he meant," said Elen, quietly. "'I do hope that she is careful.' It's the same as the other one. It's 'a little less.' It's only that he's put it in a nicer coat." She drew a breath. "I want you to know that I heard it. I'm not going to run up a tower and decide to be a good girl for a year and a half. I'm going to be careful, because that's sensible. But I'm going to be careful of the things that matter. You said so. You said it to his face."

"I should not permit it," said Alan, "if you did."

"I know." The corner of her mouth went up. "You've a very good plant."

She was smiling at him now with her whole face, wet-eyed and flushed with the cold. And the grayness that had been on him since the stair, the cold dark thing that had come out of a silver room, gave way a little, like a knot loosening.

"I want to say something," said Elen. "A rule. A new one. It's number ten."

"I am listening."

"For one hour," said Elen, "we don't talk about him. Not at all. Not about keys, or committees, or any single thing in a tower. I'll be very good at it. I've got a plan." She tugged his sleeve. "Come with me."

The mere lay beyond the north lawn, in a hollow among alders, and it had frozen in the first week of the New Year.

It was a long black oval of ice, perhaps two hundred yards from end to end, as clear and smooth as a poured sheet of glass, and every Friday night in winter the Academy went down to it to skate. They had hung lanterns along the shore. A hundred of them, on poles, in a long gold loop, rose and amber and green, so that the whole black surface of the mere shone with a hundred small reflected flames, and the snow along the banks glowed like a lit cloth. A fiddle was playing somewhere under the alders. Students swept round and round in long shining curves, laughing, in coats and mufflers, the Dueling Society in a ragged chain, a pair of first-years clinging to each other in a spasm of terror, a very large boy in a purple scarf executing a figure of eight with astounding dignity. The cold was sharp and sweet and smelled of snow and woodsmoke and hot chestnuts. At a trestle on the bank, a tall boy with a hay-colored fringe was selling the nuts out of a brazier, and he would have been, Alan thought, a good deal more cheerful if it had not been Theo.

"I can't skate," said Elen.

She said it on the bank, in a rather small voice, with a pair of hired skates dangling from her fingers by the laces. "I should say that. I've been very brave and I want it noted that I'm telling you before we're out there. I'm not going to be good. I'm going to be, I'm going to fall."

"I shall not permit it."

"You can't stop a thing like that. It's physics."

"I have a certain amount of experience," said Alan.

He knelt in the snow, and laced her skates himself, because her fingers were stiff and her knots were hopeless. He did it quickly, as he did everything with his hands, in firm even loops. Then he sat down on the bank and drew on his own, which he had had from the Dueling Society's store on the strength of a name and a form, and stood, and held out his hand.

She took it. She stood. She wavered like a newborn foal, with her ankles bowed inward and her free arm flung out for balance, and let out a high small noise.

"Oh," said Elen. "Oh no. Oh, that's the ground, it's moving."

"It is stationary. You are moving."

"I'm not doing anything!"

"That is the difficulty." He drew her out onto the ice. "Weight forward. Knees bent. Do not look at your feet, look at me."

She looked at him.

She looked at him with her eyes wide and her lips pressed together and her whole being gathered into the grip of her two hands on his, and for a single suspended moment, in the golden light of the lanterns with the fiddle playing, he found that he could not remember anything he had been going to say.

"Alan," said Elen. "I'm going to fall now."

She did. She went down all at once, in a flailing heap, and took him with her, or would have, if he had not been Alan Valemont, who had been taught to skate at the age of six by a Swiss master with a ruler and a very clear sense of the order of things. He took her weight at the waist. He turned. He swung her, in a long slow arc, up off the ice and round, and set her on her feet again, and she was clinging to the front of his coat with both hands and gasping with laughter, and her skates were chattering against the surface like castanets.

"How did you do that?"

"It is a matter of the center of gravity."

"It's a matter of being a magician!" She was laughing helplessly, with her head tipped back and the lantern-light running down her throat. "Do it again!"

"I should prefer that you did not fall again."

"I'm going to fall again. I know it. I can feel it coming." She grabbed his arm. "Show me how you do the turn."

He showed her.

It took forty minutes. She fell eleven times. He counted. He caught her nine, and the other two he went down with her, in a tangle of arms and scarves and howling laughter on the black glass, and the second time they lay there on their backs on the ice with their breath going up in white clouds under the lanterns, gasping, with a hundred small gold flames swinging overhead, and he heard himself laughing, not a huff or a breath but out loud, in the open air, in front of the whole Academy, and he did not care in the least. She had her hand in his. She had put it there when they fell, and neither of them had taken it back.

After the eleventh fall, she could do it.

It came all at once, as these things do. She was gliding. She was going along beside him on the ice with her arms out and her mouth open, quite slowly, in a long, gentle, perfectly balanced stroke, and her face had gone entirely bright and astonished, and she looked at her own feet and then at him and said, in a whisper, "I'm doing it."

"You are."

"I'm doing it, Alan. Look. I'm, it's like the dancing. It goes where it wants and I just have to trust it."

"Yes," said Alan. "That is exactly right."

They went on. They left the lanterns behind, a long swinging gold string receding at their backs, and the noise of the fiddle, and the whole bright crowd. The ice in the shadows beyond the lights ran black and silent and endless under the alders. The snow had stopped. The sky had cleared, as it does after a heavy fall, and stars were coming out over the hollow, thick and small and sharp, and the cold had a clean bright ring to it like a struck glass. They came, hand in hand, without having decided to, to the far end of the mere, where the reeds stood up out of the ice in stiff gray rows and a single lantern on a crooked pole threw a small warm circle across the surface.

They stopped.

She was holding both of his hands. He had not noticed it happen. She stood facing him, an arm's length away, with her skates set neatly side by side on the black ice and her head tipped back and her hat pushed off one ear, and her breath rose between them in a slow soft cloud. Her cheeks were scarlet. Her eyes were enormous and very bright, and he could see two small lanterns in them, and the stars.

"I know a thing," said Elen.

Her voice was very low. He did not say anything.

"I know what the end of the sentence is." She said it simply, looking at him. "I've known since the clock tower. I'm not going to say it. It's yours. I just wanted you to know that I know. So you don't have to be afraid that it'll come as a surprise."

He could not speak.

"I think I've known longer," said Elen. "I think I knew in the larder. I think I knew when you threw your coat on a jar and shouted at me in a whisper." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I'm not asking for it tonight. I want that to be clear. I'm only saying that if you wanted to say it, I'd be there. At the end. Standing here."

The lantern swung a little on its pole. The reeds whispered. Somewhere very far away, across the black plain of the mere, the fiddle was playing a slow tune, and he could hear it only as a thread of sweetness in the dark.

"Elen," said Alan.

"Mm."

"It has an end."

"I know."

"I know it. I know all of it. It has been in me for a very long time. I think perhaps longer than you think." His voice shook. He let it. "I have been trying to find the form. A form is a thing that I understand. It is a way of putting a thing into the world so that it can be held, without breaking. I have drawn up a good many. I have not found one that is equal to it."

"I don't need a form."

"I do," said Alan. "It is my way. It is the way I am made. I should like to say it whole, and in order, in a place of my own choosing, and not between a Council and an examination." He drew breath. "The Winter Trials are in three weeks. I should like to put them behind us. I should like to stand in front of you with a clear head, and a clear conscience, and say the whole of it, without a single thing in the way."

Her lips parted.

"After the Winter Trials," said Alan. "In order. I give you my word."

She stood very still.

Then, slowly, her whole face changed. It did not smile. It went soft and open and entirely unguarded, as it had in a courtyard in a snowstorm and in a cracked chair among a thousand pressed leaves, and her eyes filled, and brimmed, and did not spill.

"After the trials," said Elen.

"After the trials."

"That's a promise."

"It is."

"I'll put it on the card," said Elen, in a whisper. "Seed."

She leaned forward.

He did not know which of them moved first. It was a thing that happened in the exact middle, in the cold bright air, as two reeds bend toward each other in a wind. His head came down, and hers came up, and their foreheads met. It was a small, light, quiet touch. Her skin was cold and soft against his, and her hat had fallen off, and the loose bright hair against his temple smelled of snow and mint and woodsmoke. Her eyes had closed. He felt her breath on his mouth. He felt it, warm and quick and uneven, the length of a heartbeat away, and he thought, with a clear, still, wondering astonishment: here. It is here. It has only been a very long way off.

He did not close the distance.

He held it. He held the stillness, with his forehead against hers and her hands in his, under a crooked lantern at the end of a frozen lake, with the stars wheeling over the alders and the reeds whispering, and he felt, for the space of three breaths, that the whole of the world had gathered itself into a single point, like a drop at the end of a leaf, and was going to fall.

"Alan," breathed Elen.

"Yes."

"I think I might."

"So might I."

"We said after."

"We did."

"I'm," said Elen, and her voice shook, and she gave a small, wet, helpless laugh against his mouth, "I'm so bad at this. I've got a card and everything."

"You are extremely good at it."

"I'm standing here with my eyes shut, on ice, and I've forgotten how to be careful."

"Then I shall be careful," said Alan, "for both."

There was a shout.

It came across the ice. It was a thin high cry, torn and ragged, and it was a good way off, and it cut through the fiddle and the laughter like a knife through cloth. He did not at first know it for a voice. It came again, nearer, and he heard in it a thing that he had never heard in the voice of a person he knew.

"ALAN! ELEN!"

He lifted his head.

Elen's eyes had opened. They stood quite still, a hand's breadth apart, with their foreheads still touching, and the lantern swung on its pole and threw their two shadows across the black ice in a single long shape.

Someone was running.

He came out of the dark at the edge of the lights, a big shape with a ragged fringe, and he had no skates. He was running in his boots, in the stiff panicked stumble of a man who does not know the ice is there. His coat was open. His arms flailed. He had come the whole length of the mere, among the skaters, through the lanterns, and the music had stopped. The fiddle had broken off in the middle of a bar. A hundred faces were turned, and a hundred small gold flames swung on their poles, and in the stillness the shout rang over the black ice like a bell.

"ALAN! ELEN! It's Kieran!"

It was Theo.

He went down. His boots went out from under him, and he came down hard on the ice, on his hands and knees, and slid, and did not stop to feel it. He scrambled up. He was crying. His face, in the lantern-light, was white and wet and entirely distorted, and he ran the last twenty yards on all fours, half sliding and half crawling, and fetched up at their feet with his hands outstretched.

"It's Kieran," said Theo. His voice cracked. "He's, he's collapsed. In the Annex. Mira found him. He was on the floor, by the lamps. We can't wake him. We tried. Wren's gone for the Healer. He won't wake up." He was gasping. "He's cold. Alan. He's so cold. He's so cold, and his hand, there's a, there's something on his wrist."

Nobody moved.

Alan was aware of it, very distantly. He was aware of the lantern, and the silent crowd, and the star-pricked black sky, and the fiddle that had not begun again. He was aware that Elen's hands, in his, had gone to ice. They were white. They were quite rigid. The color had left her face in a single slow tide, and she was staring at Theo, with her mouth a little open and her eyes enormous and fixed, and her fingers were closing on his so hard that he felt the bones.

"On his wrist," said Elen, in a whisper.

"Silver," said Theo. "It's like a thread. It's, it's all round. It was glowing. Alan, what's, what is it, what's wrong with him?"

Alan did not answer.

He was standing on a frozen lake under a crooked lantern with a girl's cold hands in his and a promise on his lips that had not been kept for a quarter of an hour. And in his mind, in a clean, thin, level, unhurried voice, in a hand that was no one's but a woman's who had been dead, perhaps, for thirty years, he heard a single sentence read aloud, in a warm kitchen, by lamplight, in the tones of a friend.

The mark of the working is a thread of silver at the wrist. It rises within the hour.