The infirmary lay at the far end of the east wing, down a corridor of green-painted brick that smelled of carbolic and boiled linen, and Alan had never in his life been so aware of the length of a passage.

They had run the whole way. They had come off the ice with their skates still on, clattering like a flock of iron birds across the flagstones of the north lawn, and torn them off at the library steps, and gone on in their stockinged feet through snow and gravel and the dim blue arcades with Theo sobbing at their heels. Elen ran in front. She had not said a word since the mere. Her hat was gone. Her hand, closed round his, was a block of ice, and when the infirmary door swung open under the flat of her other palm, she was white to the lips and perfectly steady.

The ward was long and low and whitewashed, with a row of narrow iron beds under high windows, and a single lamp burning at the far end. The others were already there. They stood in a huddle by the last bed in the posture of people who have been told to wait and cannot: Mira, rigid, in her gray cardigan, with her hands pressed flat against her mouth; Wren, who had gone the color of tallow, leaning against the wall with her braid half unwound and her arms wrapped round herself; Dara, with his back to the room and his forehead against the cold glass of a window. And in the bed, under a gray blanket, with his long loose limbs laid out straight as a child's and his hay-colored hair damp on the pillow, lay Kieran Pell.

He looked asleep. That was what Alan could not bear. His crooked kind face was turned a little to one side, as though he were listening to something very far off, and his lips were parted, and there was a faint smear of lamp oil on his chin that nobody had thought to wipe away. He did not stir. His chest rose, once, and was a long while falling.

His left hand lay outside the blanket.

Around the wrist, close under the knob of the bone, ran a band of silver. It was no wider than a bootlace. It lay on the skin as a thread lies on cloth, wound three times, and it glowed. It glowed warmly, with a faint gold-white pulse, slow and regular, like the beating of a very small heart. It lit the pale hairs on the back of his hand. It lit the blue veins. And in the lamplit ward, among the iron beds, with the night pressing at the windows, it was the only thing in the room that seemed alive.

"Mira found him," said Wren, in a flat dead voice, to nobody. "He'd just refilled Doris. He had the can in his hand. He must have gone down with it, because it was lying on the floor with the oil running out, and she said he looked so surprised."

"Surprised," said Theo, and began to cry again.

Elen crossed the ward.

She did it slowly, and without speaking. She stopped at the foot of the bed, and then at the side of it. She stood looking down at him. And then, with a care that made Alan's chest tighten, she sat down on the edge of the narrow mattress and took the cold outstretched hand in both of hers, below the thread, where the skin was bare, and held it.

"Right then," said Elen, very quietly.

It was his phrase. It came out in her voice, soft and cracked and not quite steady, and it lay in the whitewashed ward like a stone dropped into a well. Nobody moved.

"Right then, Kieran. It's only us." She bent her head. Her hair fell forward and hid her face. "We've come to sit with you. Bartholomew sends his regards. He's very concerned about the lamps."

There was a heavy step behind them.

Healer-Mistress Brandt had come out of the dispensary at the far end of the ward with a basin in her hands. She was in her gray shawl. Her cropped iron hair stood up round her broad face, and her eyes, under their shelf of brow, were red at the rims. She set the basin down. She came to the bed. She stood for a long moment looking at the glowing thread, with her arms folded, and her jaw working, and Alan, who had learned in the course of an assay that this was a woman who rationed her words like a miser, saw her draw breath.

"Forty years," said Healer-Mistress Brandt. "Poisons. Every sort. Hemlock, nightshade, the north-country mushrooms. I have sat up with more of them than I can count." She unfolded her arms. "This is not a poison."

Nobody breathed.

"I don't know what it is," said Brandt. "That's what I don't like." She looked at Elen's bent head, and at the cold hand held in both of hers, and something in her broad closed face gave way, very slightly. "It's the most I've said about a patient in six years. Don't tell Pym."

"Tell Pym what, Healer?" said a voice from the door.

It was a soft voice. It came from the shadow of the doorway, and it was warm and level and wonderfully courteous, and every head in the ward turned. Mr. Pym stood on the threshold in his gray coat, with his ledger under one arm and his narrow smile fixed in place like a thing pinned to a card. Behind him stood a stout bland man in a gray traveling cloak, carrying a black leather bag, and behind the stout man, filling the corridor, two silent figures in the Council's livery.

"I do beg your pardon," said Mr. Pym. "Please. I did not wish to intrude on your grief. May I present Doctor Lunt, physician to the Committee? The Chair has sent him with all possible speed." He drew a folded paper from his breast and held it out, between two long white fingers, to the Healer-Mistress. "And this. I am so very sorry. It is only a formality."

Brandt took it. She read it. Her face did not change, but her thick fingers closed on the paper until it crackled.

"By order of the Standards Committee," said Mr. Pym, gently, as though reading a lullaby, "the patient is to remain in this ward, under the care of the Committee's physician, and under the guard of the Committee's men. There are to be no visitors. The Healer-Mistress is of course invited to attend him as she sees fit. Her findings, however, are reserved to the Committee." He tilted his head. "It is for his own protection. We are all so anxious about him."

"He is a student of this Academy," said Alan.

He had not known he was going to speak. It came out low and level, in the voice he used for ledgers, and the pale eyes of the clerk came round to him, mild and entirely empty.

"He is," said Mr. Pym. "And a most helpful young man. A great believer in slips." He bowed from the waist. "Please. If you would be so good as to leave. Dr. Lunt will be some time."

They went. They went out, one by one, down the long green corridor, past the two silent men, and nobody said a word, and at the door Elen turned back. The stout physician had set his black bag on the bed. He was unbuckling it. In the lamplight, over his shoulder, Alan saw the thread of silver on the pale wrist pulse once, warm and gold, and go on.

Marlow was in his study.

It was a small round room at the top of the staff tower, lined with books and smelling of apples and dust, and every inch of the windowsill was crowded with saucers of seedlings, which turned, as one, toward the lamp. He was sitting in a wing chair with a rug across his knees and a cold cup of tea at his elbow. He was fully dressed. His waistcoat was buttoned correctly. And when they came in, at a quarter to midnight, the five of them in a tired ragged line with the snow melting on their shoulders, he did not look surprised.

"Sit," said Marlow. "All of you. There are not enough chairs. I am so sorry. Mira, the kettle. Mr. Valemont, you had better tell me about the Chamber. In order. I should like it to be exactly as it happened."

Alan told him.

He told it as he had told it to Elen, in the snow, but more exactly, and in the plain steady voice of a man giving evidence. He told him about the ring of silver and the stand and the key on its hook, and the kindness. He told him of the offer. Marlow sat quite still with his long hands folded on the rug and his pale eyes on the lamp, and when Alan came to the sentence about the remarkable, his jaw moved once, very slightly, and was still.

"A reading," said Marlow, when he had done. "In his own presence. With the third volume." He nodded slowly. "And you declined it."

"I said that you must be present."

"A very good answer." His voice was gentle. "A very proper one. And a most unsatisfactory one, from his point of view, which is why I am not surprised that this evening has gone as it has." He turned his head. "Mr. Dara. The herbal."

"It is with the Archivist, sir," said Dara. His voice was a thread. "I carried it down myself. At noon, when you sent for me. In the basket. Under a sheet."

"Under a sheet," said Marlow, quite softly, and something moved at the corner of his mouth. "As it came to us. It seemed fitting." He looked round at them. "I did not like the look of a day that began with a notice, you understand. It is a small thing, a laundry basket. But it is not one that the Committee would think to open."

He was silent a moment. In the dark window behind him a small seedling leaned toward the lamp.

"Tomorrow," said Marlow, "they will say silverbell."

Nobody moved.

"I am as sure of it as I am of my name. The thread at the wrist. The color. The word itself, so convenient, lying in the Committee's own files, on page nineteen of a very handsome report." He looked at Alan. "You wrote it very well, Mr. Valemont. It was complete. It had the compound, and the method, and the place of keeping, and the number of the key. I told you that it was the one thing he could not say we had hidden." His voice did not change. "I did not tell you that he would not need to. He need only say what it means."

"Sir," said Elen. It came out of her in a whisper. "It can't. It doesn't. I've, the reed, the gauge was clean, it was in the log, Healer Brandt said."

"The gauge," said Marlow, "is ninety years old and was kept in a cupboard in a greenhouse under the authority of a man who is, as of tomorrow, the Council's difficulty. The Observer is a woman whose findings are reserved. The compound is an unreviewed infusion in the keeping of a student with three notes on her file." He said it without any heat, as a man reads out a bill. "It is a very good case. It has been very well made."

"Then we say so," said Elen. She was on her feet. "We say it tomorrow. In front of everyone. We stand up and say it isn't, we say it's not the silverbell, we say it's a, we say what it is."

"And what is it?"

She stopped.

"That is the difficulty, my dear," said Marlow, gently. "We know. We have a margin, in a dead woman's hand, in a book that we were not supposed to have. We have a Healer who does not know what she is looking at. And we have a young man in a bed who cannot say a word." He put out his long hand and laid it, very lightly, over hers. "If you say it before you can prove it, you will lose the herbal, and Mr. Dara, and his grandmother, and the one door we have left. And he will thank you, so very sweetly, for your help."

Elen sat down. She did it slowly, with her mouth shut.

"As for me," said Marlow, "I shall not defend myself."

"Sir," said Mira, in a small cracked voice, from the hearth. It was the voice of a girl who had predicted it, and was sorry to be right.

"The stores are mine. The key is mine. If harm has come of what was kept in them, then I am the proper person to answer." He smiled. It was a very tired smile. "It is not heroism, Miss Brandt-Mira. I am only an old man who has found, over a long life, that it is a good deal easier to answer a question than to quarrel with the person who asked it."

There was a silence.

"Sir," said Alan.

It had been forming in him for an hour. It had come out of the long cold corridor of the infirmary and the pale thread at the wrist and a clerk saying, Please. It came to him, whole, in the plain clean shape of a thing that could be done, and he heard his own voice say it before he had finished thinking.

"If the jar is taken, we shall have nothing to say that it was clean."

Marlow looked at him.

"The Committee will take it. It will be examined by their physician, under their seal, in a room we are not permitted to enter, and whatever is found in it, we shall have no means of contradicting. It will be whatever they say it was." His voice was very steady. "But there is a Rule of Deposit. It is in the appendix to the Charter, under the section on the Archivist. A member of the faculty may deposit any sealed article in the Archivist's keeping, for safety, to be released only on a joint request. The Archivist does not examine it. The Committee cannot say that it has been tampered with, if its drawing is witnessed, and dated, and recorded."

"A second sample," said Marlow, slowly.

"Drawn tonight. By an Independent Observer. Sealed in her presence, with her mark, and the hour, and the names of those who stand by. Deposited before dawn." He drew breath. "It would be a very small thing. A thimble. But it would be a thing they did not choose."

The old man was looking at him. His pale eyes in the lamplight were very bright and very still.

"Mr. Valemont," said Marlow, "I believe that you have just found the clause."

The ice-house was as cold as it had been a year before.

They went down by the back stair, at one in the morning, in single file, with a dark lantern, and the great kitchen lay silent and warm above them like a sleeping animal. On the long table, under its cloth, stood a covered bowl with a note propped against it, and Alan did not look at it, and knew without looking that it said something kind. At the back of the larder, behind the shelf of preserves, the iron-banded door stood on its latch, and the frost lay in the corners of the stone vault like salt. In the narrow niche at the end, in its small iron box, under its black cloth, the jar slept as it had slept for fourteen months.

Marlow unlocked it. Brandt, in her gray shawl, took the lantern from Elen and held it up. She had said nothing the whole way down. She had come out of the infirmary, at midnight, under the very eyes of the Council's men, by the simple expedient of walking past them with her arms folded, and when one of them had begun to say, "Madam," she had looked at him, and he had stopped.

The silver light came up in the dark.

It was the same as it had been, cold and clear and entirely still, the slender veils of the petals hung in their brine like moonlight in glass. It lit Brandt's broad face from beneath. She stood looking at it. Her eyes, in that cold shine, were quite unreadable. Then she turned her head, very slightly, in the direction of the infirmary, a hundred yards of stone and dark away.

"Not the same light," said Brandt.

Nobody spoke.

"The boy's was warm. This is cold. It sits still. His moves." She said it flatly, to the jar, in the voice of a woman who has made a note and means to keep it. "I've seen both now. They're not the same."

"Will you say so, Healer?" said Elen. Her voice shook. "At the inquiry?"

"I'll say what I'm asked." The heavy jaw moved. "I've been told my findings are reserved. I've never yet been told what I'm allowed to see."

She drew from the pocket of her shawl a small glass pipette, long as a pencil, and a slender stoppered vial, and a stick of dark green sealing wax. She laid them on the lid of the iron box in a row. And Alan, who had been standing in the cold with his back against the stone and his heart going like a drum, took out his notebook, and opened it at a clean page, and began to write.

It was a form. It was one he had drawn up in his head on the stair, from nothing, out of the plain principles of the thing, as one builds a bridge out of a few rules about weight. He ruled it on the page by lantern-light. RECORD OF CUSTODY, he wrote, at the head. Article: infusion of silverbell petals, one year, one day, and thirty-one days in darkness, under seal. Location: the ice-house, beneath the kitchens, in the keeping of A. Marlow, Assayer. Date: the twentieth of January. Hour: one o'clock and nine minutes in the morning, by his own watch. Purpose of drawing: deposit with the Archivist under the Rule of Deposit.

"Quantity," said Alan.

"Thirty measures," said Brandt.

"Thirty measures. By pipette." He wrote it. "Drawn by: Healer-Mistress Brandt of the infirmary, Independent Observer of the Phase One assay. In the presence of: A. Marlow, Assayer; A. Valemont, Recorder."

"And me," said Elen.

He looked up.

She stood against the cold wall with the dark lantern at her feet and her arms wrapped round herself, small and white in the dim, with her eyes enormous. "I'm the Applicant. I know I can't witness. It's against the rule. But I'd like it written down that I was here."

"It shall be written," said Alan. "Under Remarks."

He wrote it. Applicant present, and did not touch the vessel. And as he wrote it, he heard a very small, indrawn, shaking breath, and looked up again, and saw that she was holding the dark lantern with both hands, to keep it from trembling, and that the tears were running down her face in two straight lines.

"They'll take it," said Elen. She said it quite softly, looking at the jar. "Won't they? Tomorrow. Fourteen months. And nine nights and a year and a day. And forty-one minutes." Her mouth quivered. "They'll just come with a box."

"They will take the jar," said Alan.

He set down the pen. He crossed the cold floor and took the lantern from her hands, gently, and set it on the iron box, and stood in front of her, not touching her, with the silver light on his face.

"They will take the jar. They will not take the record. They will not take the thing that Healer Brandt is about to do with her own hands, in the presence of two witnesses, at one o'clock in the morning, with her seal on it and my name beneath. They may say that the compound was anything they please. They will not be able to say that they were the only ones who looked." His voice cracked. "It is the whole of what I know how to do. I am very sorry that it is so small."

"It's not small," said Elen.

"It is a thimble."

"It's the whole garden," said Elen, through the tears. "It's a seed."

Brandt, behind them, with her broad gray back turned, cleared her throat with great firmness and began, very slowly and with enormous steadiness, to draw the pipette through the brine.

The courtyard was gray at six.

It lay under a low sky the color of slate, with the snow trodden to a dirty brown paste along the arcades and the lamps still burning, pale and small, against the coming day. They had been called by the great bell. It had begun to ring at a quarter to six, without any warning, and gone on and on, and four hundred people had come stumbling out of their dormitories half dressed, with their coats thrown over their nightclothes, and stood now in ranks on the cobbles in the bitter cold, blinking and whispering, with their breath going up in clouds. Nobody had told them why.

Alan stood near the fountain with the Potions Club.

They had formed up without being told, in a small rigid group, with Mira at the center and Dara and Theo on her left and Wren on her right, and Elen a little apart, at the end of the line, in her patched brown coat with her hands clenched at her sides. She had not slept. None of them had. Her eyes were swollen and dark, and her face under the dirty gray light was entirely colorless. She did not look at him. She stood staring at the arch of the great gate, where the road ran out to the mountain.

And the black carriage came through it.

It came slowly, at a walk, without lamps, drawn by two gray horses, and the sound of its wheels on the cobbles, in the great silence, was the loudest thing in the world. It was lacquered and handsome. It bore on its panel a crest in silver, a key above a pair of scales. It drew up before the fountain, and a footman in livery sprang down and opened the door, and from it, with great care, one hand on the frame, stepped a tall, spare, silver-haired man in a gray coat.

He wore his gloves. He stood a moment on the cobbles with his head bowed, like a man at a graveside. Then he lifted his face. It was long and mild and extraordinarily handsome, and it was lined with a grief so quiet, so unaffected, so exactly proportioned to the occasion that Alan felt his stomach turn over.

"Please," said Councillor Aldric Voss.

His voice was not raised. It did not need to be. It carried across the whole of the great courtyard as a bell carries across water, low and warm and lovely, and four hundred people fell silent at once.

"Please. I am so sorry to have called you out in the cold. I know that you have not slept. I have not, either." He drew off one glove, and held it in his hand. "I have very grave news, and I did not wish you to hear it from a rumor."

He paused. He looked down at the glove.

"Last evening, at about nine o'clock, a student of this Academy, Mr. Kieran Pell of the third year, was found insensible in the library annex. Some of you will know him. He is the lamp monitor. A most gentle, most helpful young man." His voice trembled very slightly, and steadied. "He is in the infirmary. He is quite comfortable. I sat with him for an hour this morning. He sleeps."

A murmur ran through the ranks like a wind through grass.

"The Committee's own physician, Doctor Lunt, who was at the Academy within two hours, has examined him. I will not trouble you with the particulars. I will say only that there is a silvering of the skin at the wrist, a most distinctive mark, which Doctor Lunt, in the light of the Council's formulary, believes to be characteristic of poisoning by an infusion of a certain plant." He looked up. His eyes were very pale, and very kind, and swept the courtyard like a lantern. "Silverbell."

The word went through the crowd like a dropped stone.

Alan did not move. He stood quite still, with his hands at his sides and the cold running down his spine, and heard, beside him, a faint, strangled intake of breath, and did not turn his head.

"It so happens," said Voss, gently, "that on the twenty-fourth of December last, this Committee received from the east greenhouse of this Academy a report. A Phase One report, under Section Nine of the Assay Regulations. It was a most remarkable document. It was forty-one pages long. It described, in the fullest and most honest detail, the preparation, the quantity, and the place of keeping of an unreviewed infusion of that very plant." He smiled, sadly. "I should like to say how much I admire it. It is the cleanest report I have read in thirty-one years. And it is to the honesty of its author, I may say, and of the Assayer who sponsored it, that I owe the fact that this Committee has been able to act this morning with a speed that I trust will be a comfort to all of you."

He let the glove fall against his thigh.

"I do not say that anyone has done wrong," said Voss. "I wish that to be very clear. I say only this. A young man is ill. And an infusion which no one had examined, which had been kept in the dark for fourteen months in a cellar under the kitchens, was in the keeping of persons who were fond of him."

The silence was absolute.

"At five o'clock this morning," said the Councillor, in the same low, regretful, caressing voice, "the Warden, who has been most helpful, accompanied the Committee's men to the old ice-house beneath the kitchens. The compound has been removed. It is now impounded under the seal of the Council. The east greenhouse has been sealed. The Potions Club is closed, until further notice. And Professor Marlow, as the officer responsible for the stores, is relieved of his duties with the club, with the deepest regret on all our parts, pending an inquiry."

He bowed his head.

"The inquiry will sit on Tuesday, in the Great Hall, at ten o'clock. I shall preside. All members of the club, and any person who has anything to tell us, are invited to attend. Please. There is nothing to fear. We seek only the truth."

He lifted his face. And the whole length of the courtyard, over four hundred bowed heads, with the gray light on his silver hair and the key and the scales shining on his lapel, he seemed to look at each of them in turn, with an expression of infinite and sorrowing tenderness.

"That isn't poison."

It was Elen.

She had stepped out of the line. She stood three paces in front of the Potions Club in the trampled snow, small and rigid in her brown coat, with her fists clenched and her chin up and her face as white as paper. Her voice was not loud. It was high and cracked and perfectly clear, and it rang across the courtyard like a struck glass. Four hundred heads turned.

"It isn't poison," said Elen. "It's not the silverbell. I know what's in it. I've worked on it for two years. It steadies a hand. That's all it does. We tested it, we did it by the rules, on an apparatus, with an Observer, and the gauge was clean. You can read it in the record. The Healer said. She said, she said clean." Her voice shook. "Professor Marlow has never harmed anyone in his life. He talks to the seedlings. And Kieran, Kieran is my friend, and nobody in that club would have, would ever, you can't."

"Miss Joy," said Voss, gently.

"You can't just stand there and say it was us."

Alan moved.

He did not decide to. It was a thing that happened in the body, below thought, in the place where years of training lay in him like sediment. He took two steps. He put out his hand. And he closed it, quickly and quite firmly, round the sleeve of her coat, above the elbow, and drew her an inch toward him.

"Elen," said Alan, very low. "Not here."

She went rigid.

It was only for a heartbeat. She did not pull away. She did not turn her head. But he felt it through the thick patched wool, a stiffening along the whole length of her arm, like a rope drawn tight, and he saw the color go out of her cheek, and then, slowly, as though against her will, she looked down at his hand.

She looked at it. It lay on her sleeve, long and white and perfectly steady, with the ink on the second finger. It had never held her like that before. It had held her hand. It had held her up. It had never once taken her by the arm.

Her eyes came up to his face.

They were very wide. There was no anger in them. That was the worst of it. There was only a kind of stunned, silent, questioning astonishment, as of one who reaches for a door she has opened a hundred times and finds it, quite gently, locked.

"Miss Joy's loyalty," said Councillor Voss, into the stillness, "does her great credit."

He was smiling. He stood by his carriage in the gray light with one glove in his hand, and his pale eyes rested on the girl in the brown coat, and then, for the briefest moment, on the hand at her sleeve, and on the face above it. Nothing altered in his expression. It was so kind.

"I do hope," said Aldric Voss, "that she is careful."

A thin gray figure had come forward from the ranks of the Council's men. It was the Warden. She was narrow and upright in her gray gown, with her list clutched in one fist, and her face was perfectly stern, and for a moment her eyes went from the Councillor to the girl and back, with a flicker in them that Alan could not read. Then she spoke, in a voice like a ruler laid on a desk.

"Sit down, Miss Joy."

Elen stood a moment longer. Then, very slowly, as though each limb belonged to someone else, she stepped back into the line. She did not look at Alan. His hand fell from her sleeve. It hung at his side, and it was cold, and he did not know where to put it.

"Thank you," said Voss. "Thank you so much."

There was a step on the cobbles.

It was a very small sound, slow and uneven, like the tread of a man who has been a long time on his feet. A tall bent figure had detached itself from the end of the Potions Club's line. He was in a clean waistcoat. It was buttoned correctly. His white hair was brushed flat, and his spectacles were polished, and his hands were clasped behind his back, and he came out into the middle of the courtyard, alone, until he stood perhaps ten paces from the black carriage, with the whole of the Academy looking at him.

"Councillor," said Professor Marlow.

His voice was not vague. It was low, and dry, and perfectly steady.

"I wish to say a word, if the Committee will permit."

"Of course," said Voss. "Please."

"The compound was in my keeping. It was under my key, and on my authority, and entered in the club's ledger under my own name. The stores of the Potions Club are mine." He did not raise his eyes. "If harm has come of anything that was kept in them, then it is mine. I accept the Committee's inquiry. I shall answer any question that it puts. I ask only one thing."

"Yes?"

"That the children be left in peace." His voice cracked, a very little, on the last word, and was still. "They have done nothing but what they were taught. I ask that nothing be done to them that is not done first to me."

A silence fell. It was long, and quite empty, and in it, somewhere at the back of the ranks, a first-year began to cry.

"Thank you, Ambrose," said Voss.

It was said very gently. It lay in the cold air of the courtyard like a drop of water on a hot plate. Four hundred people heard it. And Alan, who had been trained to read the edges of a face, saw the old man in the gray light go perfectly still.

He did not turn his head. He stood quite straight, with his hands behind his back, and for a long moment the whole of the yard waited. Then, in a voice so low that it was barely a breath, a voice that did not carry beyond the first three rows, but that Alan heard as clearly as a bell, he said:

"Aldric."

That was all.

Mira, at the center of the Potions Club, made a small broken sound, and put both hands over her face.

They sealed the east greenhouse at eight.

They did it with red wax, in strips as broad as a man's hand, across the door and along the frame of every pane, with the Council's key and scales stamped in each. Two men in gray stood guard. Nobody was allowed within twenty yards. The club stood in the snow along the garden path, silent, in a long ragged line, and watched. Through the fogged glass, beyond the red bars, dim and green and quite still, the benches and the cauldrons and the long ranks of seedlings looked like a drowned country.

And at a quarter past eight, a procession came up the path from the kitchens.

It was small. It was four of the Council's men, in their gray livery, walking in step. Between them, slung on two poles, they carried a long black chest, bound with iron and sealed in red. They carried it carefully. They carried it as men carry something that may spill. It went by at a walk, not ten yards from where Elen stood, and she watched it go. She did not make a sound. She stood quite still with her hands in her pockets and her hair blowing across her face, and the chest swung gently on its poles, and a faint cold radiance, through a crack in the wood, lay for one instant on the snow, and was gone.

She put her hand against her coat, over her heart. He knew what was there. A strip of gray paper, with three words at the top, and a drawing of a watering can, and in a quick uphill hand, near the bottom, Fruit: 41 minutes.

The chest went round the corner of the stable and out of sight.

"You took my sleeve," said Elen.

She did not turn her head. She said it to the empty path where the men had gone, in a small clear voice, quite without heat, and the others had drifted a little away, as they do in the presence of a thing that is not theirs. Mira had taken Dara by the arm. Wren was sitting on the low wall with Theo's head on her shoulder. They did not look round.

"I did," said Alan.

"You've never done that."

"I know."

"You've held my hand. You've held, you caught me on a staircase. You've never taken me by the arm and said not here." She said it quite evenly. She was still looking at the corner. "I want to understand it. I'm not cross. I'd just like to know why."

He stood in the trodden snow with his hands at his sides and his throat very dry, and made himself say it in order.

"If you had said what the mark was," said Alan, "in that place, in front of him, he would have asked how you knew."

She was silent.

"He would have asked it so kindly. He would have said, how remarkable, Miss Joy, how very well informed. And you would have told him, because you do not know how to lie, and I should not wish you to learn. And by noon he would have had the herbal, and Dara, and his grandmother. And there would have been nothing left." His voice shook. "It was not that I wished you to say less. I should have said it myself, in your place, with all my heart. It was that I could see the door, and the man standing behind it, and your hand going out to open it."

"I know," said Elen.

She turned her head at last.

Her face was quite white and quite calm. There was a faint blue shadow under each eye. She looked at him for a long moment, and he saw her put it away, whatever it was, carefully, in some place of her own, as one puts away a thing that is not yet to be looked at.

"I do know," said Elen. "I worked it out. About a minute after. I'd have got there myself if I'd been calmer, I know that. It's the right reason." She drew a small breath. "It's just that it felt like. It felt like."

She did not finish. She did not need to. He had heard it, in a tower, in a flat sweet voice that was not his own. A little less.

"I shall not do it again," said Alan, "without telling you why."

"Without telling me first?"

"Without telling you first."

She looked at him a while longer. Then the corner of her mouth moved, not quite into a smile.

"Okay," said Elen.

It was not fair enough. He noticed that. It was only a very small, tired, honest word, and it did not carry the little polite coin of the other. But she put out her hand, and took his, and held it in the cold between them, hard, as one holds a rail on a ship. And they stood there together in the snow, outside a sealed glass house, and said nothing.

A shadow fell across the path.

"Please," said Mr. Pym.

He had come up behind them without a sound, thin and gray and smiling, with his ledger under his arm and a bundle of folded papers in his long white hand. He bowed to each of them in turn, a small neat movement, and put a paper into Elen's fingers, and another into Mira's, and a third into Wren's. He gave one to Theo, who took it without looking, and one to Dara, who dropped it and bent to pick it up.

"A summons," said Mr. Pym, "to the inquiry. As witnesses. Tuesday, at ten. It is only a formality. Please do not be alarmed." He turned. "And Mr. Valemont."

"Mr. Pym."

"For you, a separate note." He held out a single slip, folded once and sealed with a dot of red. "The Chair was most anxious that it should reach you in good time."

Alan took it. He broke the wax. It was written in a clear secretary's hand, on thick cream paper, and it was very short.

Mr. A. Valemont, as Treasurer of the Potions Club, is requested to bring to the inquiry the stock ledger of the said club, in its entirety, together with the page for the eleventh of November of last year, on which an entry has been amended in his hand. The Chair has taken a particular interest in it. With thanks.

He read it twice. His face did not change.

He stood in the trampled snow beside a girl whose hand was cold in his, with the red wax of the Council's seal on the glass behind him, and the long gray bundle of a chest going away round a corner, and he remembered a Saturday. A greenhouse, and a warm lamp, and a small square woman with a pencil, and six minutes. Three vials of nightroot, entered twice. He had found it. He had struck out the second entry in his own clear upright hand, and initialed it, and dated it, and written beside it, in the margin, Corrected. A. V. It had been the proudest six minutes of his life.

It was an amendment. It was in his hand. It was dated and signed and perfectly honest. And a correction, he thought, with a slow cold lurch, as of a man who looks down and sees the floor is no longer there, was exactly the kind of thing that a careful and very kind man could call by another name.

"Alan?" said Elen.

"It is nothing," said Alan.

He folded the slip along its crease. He put it into his pocket, behind the cream notice and the receipt, with his hand held very flat over it. And she looked at him, with her swollen eyes, and her white face, and did not ask. He had said that he would not do it again without telling her why. He had not said that he would tell her at once.