Somebody had written on the greenhouse in tar.

It was done in the night, with a broad brush and a firm hand, across the face of the east door and over the broad red bars of the Council's wax, in black letters two feet high that ran down in long glossy tears: POISON CLUB. Alan saw it at ten past seven on Wednesday morning, from the end of the garden path, on his way to the library, and he stopped as a man stops who has walked into a pane of glass.

The club was already there.

Theo stood on an upturned crate with a bucket of turpentine in one fist and a rag in the other, scrubbing at the first O with the furious absorbed energy of a man trying to wipe a stain off his own name. Mira held the ladder. She was in her gray cardigan with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and her small square face set in an expression of such cold, patient, orderly rage that a first-year coming up the path with a satchel took one look at her and changed direction by thirty degrees. Dara stood a little behind with a pail, saying nothing, with his thin ink-stained hands wrapped round the handle and his eyes on the ground. And against the wall of the potting shed, with her arms folded and her long braid wound twice round her head, stood Wren, glaring at the world in general and at the two silent men in gray who guarded the door in particular, as a hawk glares at a pair of well-dressed pigeons.

"At least they spelled it correctly," said Theo, to the O.

"They have omitted the hyphen," said Mira.

"It's not a hyphenated word."

"It is a compound noun in a pejorative context. It wants a hyphen." She said it in a voice like a drawn blade, and Theo, who had opened his mouth to argue, shut it and scrubbed harder. The tar did not move. It lay on the glass in a thick black skin, and the turpentine ran off it in little bright beads. "It will want a week," said Mira, to nobody. "It will want a week and a chisel."

He stood at the corner of the shed with his satchel in his hand.

He had not decided to stop. He had been walking along the path with his eyes on the gravel and his mind on a chapter of Warding Geometry, and then there had been a word on a door, and now he stood five yards from the five people he had spent the whole of a year with, in the thin gray light of a winter morning, and did not know what a person did with his hands.

Wren turned her head.

Her eyes went over him, slowly, from his collar to his boots, and came back up to his face. They were dark and clear and quite without expression, and they rested on him for exactly as long as it takes to read a notice on a board. Then, without a word, she turned her shoulder and looked at the door.

He went on to the library. He did not hurry. He walked as a man walks who has been told that there is a mine under the path and who wishes to be seen to be unafraid, and it was not until he had reached the top of the library steps and put his hand to the great oak door that he realized that his fingers had gone white on the strap of his satchel.

The whole school was talking in whispers.

It had taken only a day to become weather. It was in the Great Hall at breakfast, where four hundred people ate in a low rustling hush and the long table of the Potions Club, in the middle of the third bench, had an empty yard of bench on either side of it that nobody could have said had been left on purpose. It was in the corridors, where a pair of second-years crossed to the other wall as Mira went by. It was in the cloister, where, at ten o'clock, he passed the Rumor Society's little trestle table with its blue and white banner and found it shut.

The banner was furled. On the bare boards, propped against the inkwell, stood a single card in a round hand he knew, with charcoal still on the edge of it. It said: CLOSED. Beneath, in smaller letters, someone had added, with great care, and rubbed out, and added again: There are some things I will not have heard.

He stood a long time in front of it.

She began to light the lamps on Wednesday evening.

He saw it from the library window. It was the tall arched one on the second floor, at the end of the long reading room, which looked down over the whole length of the south arcade, and he had gone to it, at a quarter to five, to rest his eyes. He had been writing since noon. It was nearly dark. The snow, which had held off since the hearing, was beginning again in a few small slow flakes, and in the blue dusk along the arcade the lamps were still unlit.

She came round the corner of the Annex with a can in one hand.

She was small and brown and bareheaded. She wore the old patched coat with its collar turned up, and she carried a can of lamp oil, a tin one, with a long thin spout, and over her arm a folded rag. She went to the first lamp, the nearest, on its iron bracket at the arch of the Annex door, and stood on tiptoe. She trimmed the wick with a small pair of scissors from her pocket. She filled the font. She struck a match, and the flame came up, round and yellow, and she stood a moment looking at it with her head on one side.

He could not hear her. The glass was thick. But he saw her lips move, and he knew the shape of it as one knows a face across a crowded room.

Evening, Doris.

She went on to the next.

It took her twenty minutes. She did the whole of the south arcade, forty lamps, one by one, trimming and filling and lighting, with the can swinging at her side and the rag over her arm. She did the Annex door, and the long cloister, and the north colonnade, and as she went she was humming. He could not hear it. He could see it in the set of her shoulders. It was a slow tune, a swinging rolling tune, with a lift at the end of each line like a question, and she was getting it wrong. He knew that too. Her head went up where it should have gone down. She stopped at one lamp and shook her head, and began again, and he heard it, as clearly as if she had been standing at his shoulder: the song of the woman who married a lighthouse.

She was doing his job.

It took him a good while to understand it. She was not doing it for the lamps. They were perfectly good lamps, and had been trimmed on Monday. She was doing it because it was a thing that had to be done at a quarter to five every evening of the year, in all weathers, by somebody tall and loose and humming, who was now lying cold in a whitewashed ward with a thread of silver round his wrist. And nobody else had thought of it.

She stopped at the last lamp, at the corner of the infirmary wing, and set down the can. She did not light it at once. She stood in front of it with her hands at her sides, looking up at a dark window on the first floor, and the snow came down on her bare head and settled in her hair.

"You should go down."

Pip had come up silently beside him. He stood at the other end of the window seat with his waistcoat unbuttoned and his round face pale, and his hands, for once, quite still.

"I am working," said Alan.

"You've been looking at the same line of Warding Geometry for forty minutes. I watched you. You turned the page twice and it was the same page." Pip's voice was low. "She's done it for two nights. She does it at five, and then again at nine, because he did it at nine. Mira says she's not eating. Wren says she's sleeping in the clock tower. She told Theo it was quiet there." He drew a breath. "I'm not neutral anymore. I want that known. I withdraw it. Go down."

"I cannot."

"You can. It's forty yards. There's a stair."

"A witness," said Alan, in a level voice, to the window glass, "who is seen to keep company with the accused will be discounted."

Pip did not say anything.

"The Chair has said that my testimony will be remembered. I mean to be remembered. The only hope that any of us has of being heard, in the end, is that someone should be heard whom the Committee has no reason to dismiss." He turned the page of the book he had not read. "If I am seen on the arcade with her, in the dusk, with the Council's men at the doors, then in a week I am the Treasurer of a poisoners' club who has been quietly walking out with its most notorious member. I am not a witness. I am a party. It is a matter of credibility."

"That," said Pip, quite softly, "is the stupidest sentence I have ever heard anyone say. And I once heard a man explain why the sun might not come up."

"It is sound."

"It's sound," said Pip, "and it's wrong, and I can't tell you why, because I'm not clever enough. I only know that she's down there with a can of oil." He turned and went away down the long room between the tables, with his shoulders bowed, and at the door he said, without looking back, "I'd go anyway. If it were me. I'd be a very bad witness."

The door closed.

He stayed at the window until she had gone. She lit the last lamp at ten to six. She picked up the can, and walked away along the arcade toward the west tower, a small brown figure in a ring of gold, and the lamps came on behind her one by one like a trail of small yellow flowers, and he sat with a book open on his knee and did not move until the dark had taken them.

Wren caught him on Thursday, in the Annex, by the long table, at four o'clock.

He had not seen her come in. He had been bent over the folio he was copying, with the lamp pulled close, and he lifted his head, and she was standing at the other side of the table with her arms folded and her braid wound round her head and her tall dark figure outlined in the light. She did not sit. She looked at him as she had looked at him across a courtyard on a cold January morning, over a hundred yards of snow.

"You listed them," said Wren.

He laid down his pen.

"One, two, three, four," said Wren. "I counted. You said it in order. You had a little bow in it, at the end, where you said it wasn't relevant." Her voice was flat and low and perfectly even. "I've been in a good many rooms with a good many people who were being asked a question, Valemont. I know the difference between a person who's lying and a person who's telling the truth. I know the difference between a person who's afraid and a person who's, I don't know. Comfortable."

"I was not comfortable."

"You looked it."

"I assure you that."

"I'm not saying you were wrong," said Wren. "Don't look like that. I'm not saying it wasn't true. Every word was. I sat there and thought, he's doing it very well. I thought, he's got the right order and the right pauses, and he's said none of it a hair out of place. I thought, a clever lawyer couldn't have done it better." She drew a slow breath. "And I thought, he could have said it better. And he could have said it worse. And he chose to say it exactly."

The lamps burned.

"You could have said, I will not answer, because the question's unfair. You could have said, Elen is a student with a clean heart and I'd put my hand in the fire. You could have said any of a hundred things. And you stood up in front of the Council with your hands at your sides and said it like a man reading out a bill." Her mouth twisted. "You looked like someone reading a bill, Valemont. And she looked like a girl being read."

He did not speak. He found that he could not. It had gone into him, as a thin cold blade goes in, so cleanly that for a moment he felt nothing at all.

"I'm not angry," said Wren. "That's the strange part. I thought I would be. I came down here to be." She unfolded her arms and laid her palms flat on the table, and leaned on them, and he saw that her hands were not entirely steady. "I've been angry since Saturday. I've been angry with the Council, and the physician, and a man in a gray coat, and a cauldron called Margaret, and me. Mostly me. I gave Theo the moss. I handed it to him, and I said, a pinch won't hurt. I think about that. I think about it in the night." Her voice cracked, very slightly, and steadied. "So I know what it is to say a true thing, and have it be the wrong one. I know exactly what it feels like."

She looked up.

"She hasn't said your name," said Wren.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Not once. Not since the hearing. Mira said something about you on Tuesday night, and she just looked at her, and Mira stopped. She doesn't say it. She's not cross. She doesn't talk about you at all." Her dark eyes held his. "She talks about Kieran. And Marlow. And what the label on the silverbell jar said. And she's very polite. It's the politest I've ever seen her. She eats a little, and sleeps a little, and lights the lamps. And she doesn't say your name."

He was silent.

"That's the worst part," said Wren. "I'd rather she shouted. I know what to do when she shouts." She straightened. She stood a moment longer, tall and dark and weary in the lamplight, looking down at him with a face from which all the sardonic flicker had gone and left behind only something tired and honest and very young. "I'm only telling you because nobody else will. Somebody should. You're the only one of us who can fix it, and you're the only one who thinks he can't be seen to."

She went. He heard her boots go down the long corridor, quick and quiet. He sat with his hands on the table and the lamp burning at his elbow and a line of Old Court in front of him that he had been copying for an hour, and could not read.

The Fellows' Stair was the narrowest in the Academy.

It wound up the inside of the staff tower in a tight stone spiral lit by slit windows, and the walls were so close that a man of any bulk was obliged to carry his shoulders turned. Alan climbed it on Thursday evening at six, with the Warden's pass in his pocket, a small stiff card in her own angular hand, Admit the bearer, A. Valemont, on the business of the Academy, and the dryness of the signature said more than the card. She had given it to him in the corridor outside the hall that morning, with her eyes on the ceiling, in the manner of one who has not given anything and does not recall the incident.

There was a guard at the head.

He was a large silent man in the Council's gray, who sat on a hard chair beside an oak door with his arms folded and an expression of enormous, bovine, courteous boredom. He looked at the pass. He looked at it a good while, as a man looks at a puzzle. Then he opened the door, and nodded, and went back to his chair.

It was a small room under the roof.

It was round, and very bare, with a narrow bed and a deal table and a single chair, and a window that looked out over the white roofs of the Academy and the dark line of the forest. The books were gone. The shelves stood empty, with pale oblong marks on the plaster where rows of spines had been. There was no stove. The air was bitterly cold. And at the table, in his shirtsleeves, with a rug over his knees and his white hair brushed flat and every button of his waistcoat in its proper hole, sat Professor Marlow, bent over a saucer.

In the saucer, in a thumb of earth, a seedling.

"Marigold," said Marlow, without looking up. "They let me keep one. I put it to the Warden that it was a matter of conscience. I believe that she thought I was being comic." He raised his head. His pale eyes, in the dim light, were perfectly clear. "Mr. Valemont. How good of you. I am afraid that I can offer you nothing but a draft."

"Sir." He stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides. "I should not have come."

"You should certainly not. It will be remarked on." He gestured, with one long hand, to the bed. "Sit."

He sat. The mattress was thin as a sheet.

For a little while neither of them spoke. The seedling leaned toward the window with the whole of its heart. Outside, a long way down, a bell was striking the quarter, and the snow fell past the glass in slow thin lines.

"You said it very well," said Marlow.

"I have been told so."

"I meant it. I do not wish you to carry the other thing." His mouth moved. "I have been a teacher for forty-one years, and I do not think I have ever heard a student answer a plain question so cleanly. I was proud of you. I was also very sorry. It is possible to be both."

"Sir."

"Mr. Valemont." The old man laid down the saucer. He folded his long hands on the table, in the dim light, and his face was quite still. "I should like to tell you a small thing, if you will bear with an old man. It is not a secret. It is only that I have not told it."

Alan waited.

"When I was a very young man, I had a friend." His eyes were on the window. "We shared a room, in the old Fellows' House, and we argued. About everything. About sage, and about sovereignty. He had a most beautiful mind. It was quick, and clean, and entirely without mercy for a muddle. I used to think that he could see right to the bottom of a thing." His voice was dry. "One night, at two in the morning, over a very bad candle, we had an argument that we have never finished. I believe it was about a clause. It began about a clause. It ended, as such arguments do, about everything."

The wind moved at the glass.

"He said that a rule is a mercy." Marlow spoke slowly, without hurry, as a man lays a thing down one piece at a time. "He said that it is a mercy for those who cannot bear to decide. That the world is full of people who are not strong enough to weigh each case, and each person, and each sorrow, and that a rule is a kind of kindness to them. It takes the weight off. It says, you need not choose. It says, it is already chosen." He drew breath. "I said that a rule is a promise."

Alan said nothing.

"I said that it is a thing that people make to one another, so that the weakest may not be left to the whim of the strong. I said that it is not a mercy at all. It is a debt." The pale eyes came round. "And we were both right."

"Sir?"

"We were both entirely right. That is the worst thing about it. It is the worst sort of quarrel there is, Mr. Valemont, because neither of us could prove the other wrong. And so, in the end, with no one else to prove, we set about proving ourselves." He smiled, very faintly, and without any pleasure at all. "It took us thirty years."

The room was cold and quiet. The seedling shivered in its saucer.

"You and Miss Joy," said Marlow, "have begun the same quarrel."

He had known it was coming. He had known it, he thought, since a night in a gallery with a pewter frog on a table, since the lamps had dimmed and a girl had said, in a small level voice, Fair enough. It went into him all the same, as a cold hand goes into a glove.

"It is not a quarrel that either of you can win," said the old man. "I want you to understand that. It is not a thing to be won. It is only a thing to be survived. And the way to survive it, I have found, though I learned it too late, is to keep very close to the person with whom you are having it." His voice was gentle. "Not to be correct in her presence. Only to be there."

"I have a reason," said Alan.

"I know. I heard it from the Warden. She was most amused." The old man's mouth moved. "A witness must be credible. It is a very good reason. It is an excellent one. I could not have bettered it myself." He leaned forward. "It is not the true one."

Alan sat very still.

"What is the true one?" he said.

His voice came out low and hoarse and not at all like his own. He had not meant to ask. It lay in the cold room like a stone dropped into a pond, and the old man regarded him a long moment, with his head a little on one side, as one regards a very young and very promising plant.

"You are afraid," said Marlow, "that if you go down, you will say another true thing."

The wind had dropped.

He sat on the thin bed in the freezing round room with his hands on his knees and heard it. It was so simple. It was so exactly, so impossibly what he had been unable to find, in two nights, in a library window and a long dark corridor. He had been afraid. He had gone back over it a hundred times, the Chamber, the hearing, the four small points. He had been afraid, and had found a better word. A reason. A sound one.

"I do not know," said Alan, "what it would be."

"No," said Marlow. "That is why it is dangerous."

He put out his hand and, very lightly, touched the seedling, as one touches the cheek of a sleeping child. "Go down, my boy. Not for me. I am quite comfortable. I have a window and a friend." He smiled. "For the girl who is lighting my lamps."

Alan looked up.

"Oh, I hear things," said the old man gently. "Even here. The guard is a talkative creature when it rains. He says that a small person with red hair goes round the arcades every evening with a can. He says it is rather a sad sight. He says that he saw her stop at the infirmary, last night, and put her hand on the glass."

There was a long silence.

"I will try," said Alan.

"That," said Professor Marlow, "is all that anyone can do."

He went down the Fellows' Stair in the dark, with one hand on the wall, and at the foot of it, in the cold open air, in the thin falling snow, he stood a long time with his face turned up. There was a window, high in the staff tower, with a small light in it. A seedling stood in the glass.

He went to find her on Friday.

He had meant to do it properly. He had written out what he would say. He had written it on Thursday night, by a candle, on a clean page, in three short sentences, and he had read it over several times until it sounded entirely sincere. He had walked to the Annex at a quarter to five with the page in his pocket, and he was standing at the foot of the steps in the blue dusk, under the first lamp, when she came round the corner with the can.

She stopped.

She was ten feet away. She stood quite still on the trodden snow in her brown coat, with the can in her hand and the rag over her arm, and her face under the lamp was thin and pale and very quiet. There were shadows under her eyes like thumbprints. A bright flake had caught on her lashes. She looked at him, and her eyes did not move, and for a moment there was no sound in all the world but the soft tick of snow on the iron lamp-shade.

He had had a sentence. He opened his mouth for it, and it was gone.

"Miss Joy," said Alan.

It came out of him like a stone out of a sling. It struck the cold air between them, and lay there. He heard it. He had said it in a larder, and in a carriage, and on a bright frozen morning in front of a thousand eyes, and he had never, until that moment, understood what it was. It was the thing he said when he was afraid. And she knew it. She had always known it. She stood in the lamplight and looked at him, and he saw her know it, quite slowly, with no change of expression at all, as one reads a line of a letter one has had by heart for months.

"Elen," she said.

It was a very gentle correction.

"Elen." His throat was dry. "I wished to say. I have been considering my position."

"Your position," said Elen.

"As a witness." He heard it come out, level and orderly, in the voice of a clerk. It was not the sentence he had written. It was a worse one, and it was coming out of him in a long even line, and he could not stop it. "The Chair has indicated that my testimony will be remembered. It is, I believe, my only means of being heard. If I am to be of use to the club, and to Professor Marlow, and to, to Mr. Pell, then it is important that I remain credible. That I be seen, I mean, to stand apart. It is a matter of the Committee's good opinion. I should not wish to forfeit it."

"Credible," said Elen.

"Yes."

"So that you can be heard."

"Yes."

"For what?"

He could not say. It lay in him like a coal. A sealed vial in the Archivist's keeping; a dead woman's margin; a book that had been read by a girl in a laundry basket. He had been told, not twice but ten times, by an old man in a cold room, say nothing of it. He stood in the snow and found that every single true thing that he possessed was a thing he could not say.

"I cannot tell you," said Alan. "Yet."

"Yet."

"It is not that I do not." He broke off. "There are matters that have to be kept."

"I know," said Elen. Her voice was perfectly quiet. "I was there. I'm the one who held the lantern."

He flinched.

She did not see it. She was looking at the can in her hand. She turned it a little, so that the lamplight ran along the tin, and her voice, when it came, was low and clear and without any heat.

"You're keeping away from me on purpose."

"I am keeping a distance."

"On purpose."

"Yes."

"Because of what he said. About being careful."

"Because of what I said," said Alan.

It was out before he could stop it. It hung between them in the snow, bare and true, and he saw her eyes come up. They were very wide. They were dark amber, and quite steady, and in them, for the length of a single breath, there was no hurt at all, only a small, grave, astonished attention, as of a person who has put out her hand in the dark and touched, to her surprise, the thing she was looking for.

"Oh," said Elen. "I see."

"I do not think that you do."

"No. Probably not." She smiled, very slightly. It did not reach her eyes. "But I think I see enough."

She put her hand into her pocket. She drew out a strip of gray paper, creased, with a watering can drawn on it, and looked at it a moment under the lamp. Then she put it back.

"Okay," said Elen.

It was not fair enough. It was something smaller and a great deal worse. It was only the one flat syllable, laid down very gently, as one lays down a thing one has been carrying for a long way and finds one cannot carry any farther.

"I'll light the lamps," said Elen. "You be credible."

She went past him.

She went up the Annex steps, quite slowly, with the can swinging at her side, and reached up to the bracket by the door. She trimmed the wick. She filled the font. She did not look round. He stood at the foot of the steps in the snow, with a page in his pocket on which three short sentences had been written, and heard the small dry rasp of the match. The flame came up, round and yellow.

"Evening, Doris," said Elen, very softly, to the lamp.

Then, without turning her head, in the same low even voice, so quietly that he thought afterward he might have imagined it:

"I'm still waiting, you know."

He did not move.

"Not on your account." The flame wavered. "I told you that. In the gallery. I'm waiting on mine. I only wanted you to know that it hadn't stopped." She put down the can. "That's all. You don't have to say anything. I just thought somebody ought to say it out loud."

He opened his mouth.

He had a hundred true things. He stood at the foot of a flight of snowy steps in the blue dusk with the whole of them crowded in his throat, and he knew that if he let a single one of them out it would be the wrong one. It would be a form. It would be a clause. It would be an account, in order, of why he could not.

He said nothing.

She went on along the arcade, a small brown figure in a ring of light, to the next lamp. And he let himself believe, as he turned away, that silence was a way of keeping his word.

He sat down at his desk at ten that night and tried to write the sentence.

It was a thing he had been meaning to do for a week. He had put it off, and put it off, and told himself that it was not time. The Trials were in sixteen days. He had given his word. After the Winter Trials, in order. He sat down in the quiet dormitory, with Pip's bed empty and the lamp turned low, and took out the notebook. He opened it at a clean page. He dipped his grandfather's pen.

I believe that what I love is

He stopped.

It was where he had always stopped. He knew what came after. It lay behind the pause like a room behind a closed door, entire, with the lamp lit, and he had seen it, he had stood in it, he had told it to a girl in a clock tower with his eyes on a bell. A person. A list. It was only that he had said every other thing in the world, and could not, tonight, with a pen in his hand and the dark at the window, make the one word go onto the page.

He looked at the line a long time.

He turned the leaf. He did not know why. He turned back through the dark pages of the book, through the Observations and the rules and the word Closed, to the last leaf with writing, the clean one, where a girl had sat in a warm kitchen in the dawn and written, in a quick loose uphill hand:

Elen Joy. Sixteen, then seventeen. Observed by A. Valemont for fourteen months (and counting). Findings: bears examination. Remarks: has been known to be late.

She had drawn a very small star.

He read it. He read it through three times, and then he laid the pen down, very carefully, on the open page, and put both hands over his face.

He was at the library window at nine.

He had told himself that he was going to the Annex to fetch a book. It was a quarter to, and then it was nine, and he found himself standing at the second-floor window at the end of the long reading room with the lamp turned low behind him and his forehead against the cold glass. The scarf was round his neck. He did not recall putting it on. It was green, and long, and much washed, with a small mended place near one end, and it smelled, very faintly, in the dark, of mint.

The snow had stopped. The arcade lay beneath him in a long gold string, every lamp lit. They burned in the blue dark like a row of small steady suns, forty of them, evenly trimmed, with not one flickering. He knew whose work that was. He knew it as he knew his own hand.

She was coming along the south arcade with her can.

She was a long way off. She walked slowly. She was bareheaded, and the lamplight ran down her hair, and she was not humming. She walked as a person walks who has done a thing so many times that her hands know it without her. She came to the corner of the infirmary wing, where the last lamp hung, and set down the can on the flagstones, and straightened.

She did not light it. It was lit already.

She stood a while under it, with her hands at her sides, looking up at the first-floor window. It was dark but for a faint steady glow, the cold white shine of a ward lamp turned low. Then she went to the wall. She laid one palm flat against the glass of the ground-floor pane, below the sill, where the dim light came through. She stood so for a long time. He could see the small pale shape of her hand against the lit window, with the fingers spread, as a child lays a hand upon the glass of a shop.

He could not hear her. But he saw her lips move, and he knew the shape of it.

Right then, Kieran. It's only us.

He stood at the library window with his forehead on the cold glass and the green wool at his throat, and watched her, and did not go down.

It was, he told himself, the correct thing. It was prudent, and honorable, and entirely sound. It was the only way that he could be of use to her, in the end, when it mattered. He was a witness. He was being careful. He had given his reasons, quite clearly, in order, to the person concerned, and she had accepted them.

It was the most correct thing that he had ever done.

And as he stood there in the dark, watching a small figure at a lit window with one hand pressed flat against the glass, it felt, with a clarity that he could neither bear nor refuse, like the exact opposite.

The Warden gave him the paper on Saturday morning.

She did it in the corridor outside the hall, at ten minutes to eight, with the whole school streaming past them to breakfast, and she did it so quickly that he did not at first understand what had happened. She came up beside him in her gray gown, with her list in one hand and her eyes on the ceiling, and her other hand dropped, as she passed, a folded sheet into the open mouth of his satchel. She did not slow. She did not turn her head. She said, in a voice like a ruler, "I have lost a document. I shall not look for it," and went on down the passage with her back straight.

He read it in the library, at the end of the long table, with his back against a bookcase.

It was a draft. It was in a clerk's hand, on thick cream paper, headed with the crest of the Standards Committee, and across the top, in red, in the hand he knew, was written Not to be circulated. He read it once, and the air went out of the room.

DRAFT RESOLUTION of the Council, for consideration at the Candlemas Session, Friday the second of February, upon the matter of the Potions Club of Levis Morny Academy and its Responsible Officer.

That the said Club be dissolved, and the same not to be reconstituted at this Academy.

That Ambrose Marlow, Assayer of the Third Class, being found to have concealed a violation of the Assay Regulations and to have maintained in his keeping an unreviewed compound in circumstances that endanger the public safety, be reduced to the rank of Assayer of the Fifth Class.

That he be dismissed from his post at the Academy with effect from the close of the present term.

That the compound retained from his keeping be destroyed upon conclusion of the analysis.

That the Chair of the Standards Committee be empowered to give effect to the above.

It was dated. It was signed. The signature was a small, narrow, upright hand, as straight as a ruled line, beneath which, in Mr. Pym's clerkly copperplate, a single word had been added, in the margin, in pencil.

Pleasing.

He read it a second time. He read it as he had read every document that had ever been put into his hands, slowly, with a finger moving down the margin and his lips pressed together, hunting for the flaw. There was none. It was clear and correct and perfectly proportioned. It was in order.

The jar would be destroyed.

The old man would be gone by summer. The greenhouse would be empty, and the seedlings would be given away or thrown out, and a thin gray clerk would go through the club's ledgers with a quill. In sixteen days there would be an examination, and after the examination a girl who read the amendments for sport would be asked a question. And on a Friday, the second of February, in the Warded Chamber, in a ring of silver, a man would sit with a key on a hook at his shoulder and a pen in his hand and a smile on his face, and nothing that anyone had ever said or done would be able to stop him.

He sat in the cold library with the paper in his hand.

He would have to tell her. He knew that. He had said, only the day before the hearing, in front of the whole of the Academy, in a clear voice, that he would not carry a thing alone. He had said it in a gallery, to a girl with a card in her pocket. He had said it, in a larder, at four in the morning, with a pen. He would have to go and find her, wherever she was, in the clock tower or the infirmary or the long gold arcades, and put the paper into her hand.

And he did not know how to do it.

He did not know how to say it, plainly and truly and in order, without saying also the other thing: that every word of this was the consequence of a series of small, careful, accurate acts, in which he had himself had a part. That a number of persons had broken a number of rules. That it was exactly what he had told her, in a quiet room, on a Sunday evening, with the snow coming down. That the cost fell on those who stood beside.

He looked at the red word in the margin.

He folded the paper along its crease. He put it into his breast pocket, behind a cream notice and a receipt and a strip of paper with a row of tally marks, and laid his hand flat over it.

He did not yet know what he was going to say. He knew only that when he found her, whatever it was, it would be true.