The third step was loose, and he stepped over it.

He did it without thinking, as a man steps over a puddle in a road he walks every day, and then he stood in the dark of the narrow stair with one hand on the cold stone wall and understood that his body had learned the way before his mind had given it leave. Round and round the tower the stair wound upward, past the slit windows with their blades of last light, past the smell of oil and iron and old dust. The ticking filled it. It was not a sound any longer but a pressure in the stone, slow and regular, like a very large heart in a very large dark room. And above him, a thin gold line round the edge of the trapdoor, was light.

It was a quarter past seven on Saturday evening, the twenty-seventh of January. He had come by way of the clock-keeper's room, where the old man lay snoring on his cot with a gray cat on his chest and a tin whistle on his stomach, and he had not knocked, and the keys had not rung. He had a page in his pocket. He had been carrying it for ten hours. He had read it, in the end, seven times, and he knew by heart each of its five clauses and the pencil word beside the signature, and he had worked out, on the long walk across the white courtyard, exactly how it should be said.

Whole. In order. Without a thing left out. It was the only way he knew to give a person a hard thing. He had thought: I will put it into her hands as one puts a bowl of water into the hands of someone who is going to carry it a long way, with both of mine under it.

He put up his hand and pushed the trapdoor.

The great room opened above him like the inside of a brass flower.

The wheels turned slowly in the half-light, each as tall as a man, meshing their golden teeth with the unhurried patience of a mill, and the pendulum, long as a ship's mast, swung out across the pale slit windows and hung, and came back. Tock. Tock. In the roof beams the great bell hung silent and black. And in the angle between two wheels, in the nest of cracked leather and quilts, with a lamp burning on an upturned crate and a thousand pressed leaves hanging in rows along the rafters, sat Elen.

She was sewing.

He had not expected that. She sat in the old armchair with her feet drawn up and a patched quilt round her shoulders and her red hair twisted up in a rope, and in her lap, held with great care between a finger and thumb, was a very small square of green wool. She had a needle. She had a reel of black thread. And on the arm of the chair, perched at an angle of profound and sardonic patience, sat a pewter frog, with a half-finished garment draped across his shoulders like a cloak.

"It's cold up here," said Elen, without looking up. "Bartholomew's been complaining."

She did not say anything else. She drew the needle through, and drew it out, and bit off the thread with her teeth. Then she lifted her head, and her eyes came round to the trapdoor, and rested on him. They were tired. There were violet shadows beneath them, and her cheeks had gone thin. But there was a small, grave, unguarded flicker in the back of them, like a lamp in a window at the end of a long road.

"Four minutes ten," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"From the clock-keeper's door. I counted, out of habit. I thought, I won't, and then I did." She tipped her head. "You didn't file a form."

"I did not," said Alan.

"No. I could tell. You came up much quicker."

It was the nearest thing to a smile that he had seen on her in five days. It was a very small, very wry, very private thing, at the corner of her mouth, and it went into him so cleanly that for a moment he could not speak. He stood at the head of the trapdoor with the pendulum swinging at his back and the whole of what he had meant to say gone out of his head. And she saw it. She saw it, as she saw everything, and let the little smile widen by a hair.

"You can come in," she said. "The chair's free. I only sit in one half."

He came in. He did not sit in the chair. He stood in front of it, in the lamplight, with his hands at his sides, and she looked up at him over the green wool and the frog.

"Elen," said Alan. "I have something to show you. I should have shown it to you at once. I did not know how."

The smile went. It went slowly, and left behind it a kind of stillness.

"Is it the slip?"

"No. That was the hearing." He put his hand into his breast pocket. "This is another."

She took it. She unfolded it on her knee. He watched her read, and he did not look away, because it seemed to him that a person who brings a thing of this sort has no right to look away, and he saw it go into her, line by line, as one watches water rise in a glass.

That the said Club be dissolved. She read it with her lips. That Ambrose Marlow, Assayer of the Third Class. She read the fifth clause. She read the pencil word, in the margin, in a clerk's round hand.

She did not make a sound. She laid the page on her knee. She laid Bartholomew on the arm of the chair, with his little cloak, quite gently, and she stood up. She stood in the circle of lamplight in her patched brown coat, small and straight, with her hands at her sides, and her face had gone the color of the whitewash in the infirmary.

"Destroyed," said Elen.

"That is the fourth clause."

"They're going to destroy it. The jar. A year and a day, and, and the forty-one minutes. They'll put it in a fire, and they'll say it was an examination." Her voice shook. She did not seem to notice. She had begun to walk, up and down, between the great wheels, in the long pale bars from the windows, with her hands twisting in the front of her coat. "And Marlow. Marlow, on the second of February. They'll take his rank and put him out of the door at the end of term, a man who's talked to seedlings for forty years. And the club. They'll just, they'll just take it away."

"I know."

"It's Friday. It's next Friday. It's six days." She whirled. "But we've got it. Haven't we? We've got the sample, in the Archivist's keeping, with the record. We've got Healer Brandt, who said it wasn't a poison. We've got Dara's grandmother's book. We've got Lunt's page, and you said it was the wrong flower, the marsh one, a thousand miles away. We've got a margin, in a dead woman's hand." She drew a ragged breath. "We stand up. At Candlemas. All of us. And we say it."

"Elen."

"We say all of it. We say it to his face."

"Elen," said Alan. "Please let me tell you what is possible."

She stopped.

She stood in the lamplight with her arms wrapped round herself and looked at him, and he saw that she had heard it. He had said it very gently. He had said it as he said everything, with great care, as one lays a plank across a ditch. And she had heard, under the care, the shape of the thing, and her eyes went wide and dark and very still.

"Go on," said Elen.

He told her.

He did it in order. He had it laid out, as a good clerk lays out a case, with the facts in one column and the procedure in the other. Candlemas, he said, was a session of the Council, not a hearing. It was not a place where evidence was received. No one might speak at it unless the Chair called upon them, and the Chair would not. The Rule of Deposit was clear: the sealed sample could be released only on a joint request of the Archivist and the faculty member who had deposited it, and the faculty member who had deposited it was under guard in a tower. Healer Brandt's findings were reserved. Dara's herbal was in the keeping of the Archivist under a restricted article, and its production would require a petition, and a ground, and the grounds were, for the present, not such as the Committee would accept.

"We have no standing," said Alan. "That is the whole of the difficulty. We are students. We have a margin and a thimble and a Healer who has been forbidden to speak. If we stand up on Friday and say it, we shall be removed, and the herbal will be taken from the Archivist, and Dara's grandmother will be sent for. And nothing will have been said."

"So what do we do?"

"We petition." He heard how it sounded. He went on, because it was the shape the thing had to take. "A petition for leave to be heard, under the Charter of the Council, Section Twelve. It must be drawn up in proper form, and countersigned by a member of the Academy's faculty, and delivered through the Warden. I have the form. The Warden has indicated that she will see it forwarded. It would take perhaps ten days to be considered."

"Ten days," said Elen.

"And we should need an advocate. A member of the Council's own Bar, who might speak for the club. I do not know of one. I am looking."

"A petition," said Elen. "Sent to him."

"Through the Warden."

"To the Chair. Who has the key. And the seal." She was smiling. It was a dreadful little smile, small and bright and quite without mirth. "Alan, he'll say yes. He'll say yes so sweetly. He'll write back in his lovely hand, 'Please. By all means. With the greatest pleasure.' And it'll be a Tuesday in May. And they'll have put Marlow on a cart in March."

"It is the only way that cannot be refused."

"It's the way that can be waited out."

"It is the way," said Alan, quietly, "that leaves us something to stand on after."

She was looking at him.

She stood very still, with the great pendulum swinging in the dusk behind her and the dim gold bars of light moving across the floor, and he saw something go through her face that he could not read. It was not anger. It was a quiet, tired, bewildered attention, like that of a person who has been told the answer to a riddle and finds that it is not the one she was looking for.

"Why did you say it?" said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"In the Hall. The four things." Her voice was low and level. "I've been trying to understand it for five days. I've tried and tried. I know why you didn't, why you couldn't say the other. But the four. Why did you say them?"

"Because they were true."

"I know they were true. I know. I stood there and I thought, every word." She drew a breath. "But why? He asked a question. You could have said anything."

He had known she would ask. He had known it since the library window, and the cold room in the tower, and he had worked out, with all the care of which he was capable, exactly how it should be answered. It was not that he had been afraid. It was not that he wished to be credible. He had never in his life been able to say what he did not think, and he had stood at the foot of the platform and been asked a plain question about whether a thing had been done rightly, and he had answered it. And it seemed to him, in the lamplit tower, with the wheels turning, that if he could only explain it in the right order, so that she saw how it was made, she would not mind. She would see it as he saw it. She would see that it was a way of loving her.

He took a step toward her.

"I should like you to understand," said Alan, "that I do not say that you deserved it."

She did not move.

"I want that to be quite plain. I do not think it for a moment. I have never thought it. I think that the whole of what has been done to Professor Marlow, and to the club, and to Mr. Pell, is unjust, and that it was done by a man who knew exactly what he was doing." His voice was gentle, and very steady, and entirely sincere. "I say only this. If the club had been more careful, in every particular, if the Regulations had been observed to the letter, the Council would have nothing to hold. It would have no door. That is the cost of an irregularity. It is a thing that can be walked through. And the cost is in proportion to what was done."

He stopped.

It lay in the air of the great brass room like a stone laid on a table. He had said it as kindly as he knew how. He had said it slowly, and with the whole of his care, and he stood in the lamplight with his hands open and his heart going quietly in his chest, and waited for her to see.

She stood quite still.

"If the club had been more careful," said Elen.

"If it had."

"If the club."

"I do not mean you in particular."

"If I had." Her voice was very low. "If I'd been more careful."

"If any of us."

"If any of us." She said it slowly, trying the weight of it, as one tries a floorboard. "If I'd been a little less."

He felt it, then. It was a small cold touch at the back of the neck, as of a draft from a door he had not known was open. "I did not say that," said Alan.

"No."

"I did not say anything of the kind."

"No. You didn't." She turned her head. She looked at the lamp on the crate, and at the green wool and the frog, and the faint gold streaks of the late light. "You never do. That's the thing, Alan."

"I do not understand."

"I know you don't." There was no heat in it. It was said so gently that it went through him like a blade through silk. "You never say the cruel thing. I've been waiting, for a year and a half, for you to say a cruel thing, so I'd know what to do with it. And you never have. You say the true thing. In order. In the kindest voice there is. And you're careful to say that you don't mean me. And it's the same."

"Elen."

"It's exactly the same." Her mouth shook, and steadied. "I told you about Miss Pargeter. In this room. In that chair. I told you all of it, and you listened, and you said a plant has the right to refuse the shears. I thought, oh. He gets it. He's the only person who's ever got it." She drew a long breath. "And she'd have said that, you know."

"I beg your pardon?"

"What you just said." She lifted her eyes. They were dark amber, and quite dry, and very bright, and they looked at him with a terrible clear gentleness. "She'd have said it exactly like that. She'd have put her hand on my shoulder, and said, 'Elen, dear, I'm not saying you deserved it. I'm only saying that if you'd been a little more careful, there'd have been nothing for them to hold.' She'd have said it so kindly."

The pendulum swung out. It hung. It came back.

He could not breathe.

It had gone into him all at once, entire, like a key into a lock. He stood very still on the dusty boards of the tower floor, among the great turning wheels, and saw it as one sees a thing in a flash of lightning: a lavender cardigan, and a desk, and a very soft voice, saying a perfectly true thing. He heard the whole of what he had said, in his own level voice, and every word of it was just as it had been, and it was a different thing altogether.

"I said," said Alan. His voice cracked. "I said that you were worth the cost. I said it under oath."

"I know."

"I meant it. I mean it."

"I know you do." She smiled. It was very small. "You've said it twice now. Once in the Annex. Once here."

"It is true."

"I used to think it was the nicest thing that anyone had ever said to me." Her voice did not shake. It was only quiet, and clear, and entirely without reproach. "I thought, he'd pay it. He'd pay any cost. I thought it was the whole of love, in a clause. And I've been turning it over, for five days, on the stair, with a can of oil. And I think it's the worst thing anyone's ever said."

"Elen," said Alan, "I do not."

"A cost is a thing you wish you hadn't had to pay."

The wheels turned. The long light moved across the floor and up the nearest cogwheel, turning it gold. And in the great slow throb of the tower, in the deep warm ticking, he heard it, quite distinctly, in a small clear cracked voice in a lantern-lit sky: Set down: being sorry for how I am.

"I do not wish to hurt you," said Alan.

He heard how it sounded. It was the plainest thing in the world. It was the truest word he had spoken in a week, and it fell into the air of the tower like a coin into a well, and he listened to it go down.

"I know," said Elen.

"Then."

"That's what I mean." She said it very softly. She took a step back, and sat on the arm of the cracked leather chair, with her hands between her knees. "You don't wish to. You don't have to. It's not a thing you do. It's built in. It's in the way you think. It's the way you were made." Her eyes were wet, now, and quite steady. "You're made so that you can't see the knife, because you'd never pick it up. And you hand it to me, so gently, handle first."

He did not answer. There was nothing to answer. Every true word that he possessed was a thing that would go into her like a splinter. He had learned that. He had learned it, in a tower, in four minutes, at the cost of everything that mattered. He stood in the lamplit dusk with his hands open at his sides and his mouth shut, and understood that the only honest act left to him was silence.

"I'm not sorry," said Elen.

She said it in a different voice. It was low, and not quite steady, and it had in it, quite suddenly, something that was not hurt at all. It was bright and hard and clean, like a wire drawn tight.

"I'm not sorry for the ivy. I'm not sorry for the window, or the larder, or the forest, or the jars. I'm not sorry for climbing on a fountain in front of four hundred people and making birds out of snow. I'm not sorry for the formula. I'm not sorry that I tasted it. I'm not sorry that I stood up in the courtyard and said it wasn't poison." She lifted her chin. Her eyes were swimming. "I spent four years being sorry for how I am. I got very good at it. I'm never going to do it again. I'd rather lose the club. I'd rather lose all of it. I'd rather they put me on a cart than say it one more time."

"Elen," said Alan. "I would never ask."

"I know you wouldn't." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "That's the part I can't, I can't get past. You wouldn't ask. You'd just think it. Quietly. In a very nice voice." She drew a breath that shook. "And I'd feel it, every time. I'd feel it in the way you looked at the clock. I'd feel it every time I was late."

"I should not."

"You would. You couldn't help it." She was not accusing him. It was said in the same low gentle voice, with a kind of sorrowing exactness, as a person states the temperature. "And one day I'd start saying sorry again. Under my breath. To doors."

The silence went on.

It was the longest he had ever known. The pendulum swung out and hung and came back, and the wheels ground quietly round, and somewhere in the beams above them the great black bell, which had been silent all the evening, gave out the faintest thread of sound, a hum so low and thin that it might have been the blood in his ears.

"I think," said Elen, "that I'd like you to go."

"Elen."

"Please."

It was only the one word. It was not loud. It was said in a small level cracked voice, quite without anger, and he heard in it, with perfect clarity, the whole of what it cost her. She was sitting on the arm of the old leather chair with her hands clasped between her knees and her head up, and her face was entirely open, and it was wet.

"I want to say something," said Alan. "One thing."

"All right."

"I am not ashamed of what the club did." He heard how it sounded. He went on. "I want you to know that. I am ashamed of what I said. I do not yet understand it. But I am not ashamed of you."

She looked at him a long moment. Something moved at the corner of her mouth. It was very small, and very tired, and did not reach her eyes.

"I believe you," said Elen. "That's the awful part."

He went.

He turned, and crossed the dusty floor, and reached the head of the trapdoor. His hand found the iron rail. He put his foot on the first step down.

"Alan."

He stopped.

She had not risen. She sat where she was, small and straight in the old chair, with the lamplight on one side of her face and the dusk on the other, and she was looking, not at him, but at the pendulum. Her voice, when it came, was quite quiet and quite clear.

"Condition number one. The first one you made. In the forest. 'You will not enter this forest alone again.'"

He did not breathe.

"I release you from it."

"Elen."

"I'm going into the forest. Tonight. Alone." She said it without any heat at all, quite gently. "I'm telling you so that you'll know where I am. That's the one thing I'll do properly. It's what I owe you. I'm telling you." She turned her head, then, and looked at him, at last, across the dim gold room. "I know it's a thing you'd never do. I don't think you can help it. But I can't, I can't just be careful, Alan. Not any more. Not for anyone."

"You are not," said Alan, in a voice he did not know, "to go alone. It is not safe. The paths shift. The mirewort."

"I know what's in the forest."

"If you are lost."

"Then I'll be lost," said Elen. "And it'll be mine."

She turned back to the pendulum.

He stood a moment at the head of the stair with his hand on the iron rail. He could have said a great many things. They were all of them true. He felt them go through his mind in order, a clause for every case, a form for every door, and he knew with a cold clarity that if he opened his mouth, he would say one, and that it would be the wrong one, and that she would hear it.

He went down.

He did not look back. He heard, above him, as he went, a very faint dry rustle, the sound of a girl drawing her quilt closer round her shoulders. And as his foot found the third step, the loose one, and he stepped over it in the dark, the whole tower seemed to take a breath. High in the roof beams, among the great wheels, something black and enormous trembled, and gave out, very softly, as of a breath drawn through a very large throat, a single low note. It was not a stroke. It was only a hum. It went down through the stone and the iron and the old oak, and filled the stair, and he felt it in his feet and in his teeth, and then it was gone.

The clock-keeper stirred on his cot as Alan passed through the little room. A gray cat lifted its head. The old man's eyes opened, one at a time, pale and clouded, and fixed on the ceiling.

"Odd," said the clock-keeper, to the cat. "Not the hour."

He was asleep again before Alan reached the door.

The night had come down in the courtyard. It was black and clear and bitterly cold, with a hard white scatter of stars, and the snow, trodden to a gray crust along the paths, rang under his boots. The lamps burned along the arcades. He walked a few yards, and found that he could go no farther, and stopped beside the dry fountain with his hand on the cold rim and his face turned up to the dark.

He stood there a long time.

He was aware, in a distant way, of the cold, and the stars, and the faint far murmur of the school at supper. He was aware that his hands were shaking. He looked at them. They were quite white. They were the hands of a man who has been in a house when the roof came down and has walked out, quite whole, into the open air, and cannot understand why nothing hurts.

He had said a true thing.

He went over it. He went over it as he had gone over every document, in order, slowly, hunting for the flaw. If the club had been more careful. It was true. There was no part of it that was not. He turned it over, and over, and each time he came to the same point, a clean blank, as of a page on which there is nothing to find. It was true. It was proportionate. It was kind. And a girl he loved, who read the amendments for sport, had sat in a cracked chair among a thousand pressed leaves and said, in a voice like a drawn wire, I'd rather lose all of it.

"You said it, then."

He looked round.

Pip was sitting on the step of the library, with his coat wrapped round him and his knees drawn up and a lantern on the stone beside him. He had been there, apparently, for some time. His round freckled face was blue with cold. His hair stood up in three directions. And he was not smiling.

"I waited," said Pip. "I thought someone ought. I saw you go in, at seven, and I thought, well. That's either very good or very bad. I thought I'd stay and find out which."

Alan did not answer.

"It was bad," said Pip. It was not a question.

"I said a true thing," said Alan.

It came out in a whisper. He heard it, and was astonished. It was the voice of a boy of seven in a cold dark place, saying a sentence that he did not understand.

"Yes," said Pip. He got up. He came across the snow and stood in front of him with his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat, short and round and rumpled, with the lantern behind him throwing a long shape across the ground. "I know. I could tell from your face. You've got the look of a man who's just walked out of a church and can't remember what he said to the priest."

"I said that, if the club had been more careful."

"Don't." Pip lifted a hand. "Don't tell me. I don't want to hear it. I don't need to. I know exactly what it was. You said something perfectly reasonable, in a very nice voice, and you meant it kindly, and you were right." He drew a breath. "That's the worst kind, Alan. That's the kind I can never forgive. Because I can't even be cross."

They stood in the cold. A long way off, in the Great Hall, somebody was laughing, and a door shut.

"I'm going to say something," said Pip. "I said I wasn't neutral. I'm not. I'm going to say it anyway." His voice was low and very serious. "You don't have to be right. It's not required. You can be wrong, and kind, and sorry, and it's perfectly allowed. It's more than allowed. It's what the rest of us are doing the whole time."

He put out a hand, and for a moment laid it on Alan's sleeve, quite lightly. It was a small hard round hand, and it was very warm.

"Go to bed," said Pip. "You'll think of it. You always do. It'll be the wrong time, and it'll be in a footnote. But you will."

He picked up his lantern and went away across the courtyard, a short round shape with a long shadow. At the corner of the arcade he looked back once. He did not say anything. Then he was gone.

Alan did not go to bed.

He went up to the dormitory and sat on the edge of his bed in the dark, in his coat, with the green scarf still round his neck, and did not light a lamp. He sat for a long time. Pip came in at ten, and looked at him, and said nothing, and lay down with his face to the wall. The old building ticked and settled. A bell, in the west tower, struck the hour, a plain clear note, and he thought of a hum in the roof beams, and a clock-keeper saying, Not the hour.

He rose at a quarter to twelve.

He did not decide to. He found himself at the window. It was the long one at the end of the dormitory, looking north, and he drew back the curtain a hand's breadth and stood with his forehead against the cold glass, and looked out over the great white sweep of the lawn.

The moon had not risen. The snow lay under the stars like a floor of pale blue ash, trodden here and there with the dark tracks of the Council's men, and beyond it, a mile off, the black wall of the Enchanted Forest stood against the sky. Nothing moved. The whole Academy lay silent. Every lamp on the arcades burned steady, in a long gold string. And in the middle of that vast white darkness, on the lawn, going very slowly and very straight, with a long thin shadow trailing behind it, there was a light.

It was small. It was a lantern, swinging low at the end of a slim arm. It crossed the lawn in a line, past the dark tracks, past the boundary stones where a row of faint gold sigils glimmered along the edge of the trees. It did not stop. It did not hesitate. At the line of stones, for the space of a held breath, it paused, and a small figure in a long coat, with a scarf blown out behind her, stood quite still with her face turned up toward the windows of the boys' wing.

He did not move. He did not breathe.

She did not wave.

She stood a moment longer, a small dark shape in a ring of light, looking at a window that she could not possibly have seen. Then she turned, and stepped over the stones, and the forest took her. The trunks closed behind her. The light went in among them, and dwindled, and grew faint, and went out.

He stood at the window with his hand on the cold glass.

He had made a condition once. He had made it in a forest, in the dark, on a stone beside a dry stream, with a basket of silver flowers between them. You will not enter this forest alone again. It had been the first thing that he had ever said to her that was not a form. And she had released him from it, that evening, in a quiet voice, quite gently, so that he would know where she was.

He did not know whether it was freedom.

He thought it might be the other thing. He stood in the dark with his forehead against the glass, and watched the place where a small light had been, and waited, with the whole of his training, with seventeen years of discipline and every clause of every charter, for the thing that he knew, with a cold and perfect clarity, he was not going to do.

He did not follow her.

She had asked him not to.