She stopped at the boundary stones, because she had said that she would.

It was not for any reason that she could have defended. There was nobody to see her do it. The north lawn lay behind her in one unbroken sheet of blue-white under the stars, with a single line of small dark tracks running across it from the arcades, and beyond it the great black bulk of the Academy rose against the sky with its few lit windows, and its long gold string of lamps along the cloister, and its towers. She had walked the whole width of the lawn in a straight line with the lantern held low and her eyes on nothing. She had not been thinking. She had been, for twenty minutes, a pair of legs.

At the stones, she turned round.

The long window at the end of the boys' wing had its curtain drawn back by a hand's breadth. She could not possibly have seen it from there, a mile of snow away, in the dark. She saw it all the same. She stood with the lantern at her feet and her scarf blown out behind her and looked at one small black rectangle among a hundred, and she felt, quite distinctly, someone standing at it with his forehead against the glass.

She did not wave.

She had thought she might. She had thought, on the stair, with her hand on the clock-keeper's rail, that she would wave very big, a great sweeping ridiculous wave like a person flagging down a ship, the way she had on the night of the first of October of her first year, with her mouth shaped round a single word. Come. She had not known then what she was asking. She stood at the stones with her hands at her sides and found that she had none of it left. There was no word in her mouth at all.

"I'm telling you so you'll know," said Elen, aloud, to the window. Her voice was small and flat in the cold. "That's all. That's the one proper thing."

She picked up the lantern and stepped over the stones.

The forest closed behind her with a sound like a long indrawn breath.

She felt the roots knit across the path, a soft crunching, a settling of old wood. She did not look round. She knew exactly what had happened. Somewhere behind her, in the dark, a gap of black bracken and frost had been shut like a door, and nobody in all the world was going to walk her out of it. She had known that when she said it. It was a perfectly simple fact. She stood a moment in the circle of the lantern, with the trunks standing round her black and enormous and quite silent, and thought, with a kind of distant astonishment: oh. I'm going to have to do the whole of it myself.

She was very tired of being brave.

It came to her as she walked. She had been brave, she thought, since she was twelve, in one way or another. She had been brave in a lavender cardigan's office with her hands folded, and in a hall with a ledger, and in a courtyard with four hundred people looking at her. She had been brave at the top of a stair, with her chin up, saying I release you, in the voice of someone reading out a will. And she had not been brave at all. She had been, she saw now, quite simply, very frightened, and extremely good at using her chin.

She walked on. The lantern swung. In her coat pocket, pressed against her ribs, something small and hard and round moved with every step, and she put her hand over it. Bartholomew. She had put him in at the last moment, without deciding, wrapped in his little green cloak, with only his sardonic pewter face looking out. He regarded the dark with the air of a very old and weary soldier.

"Don't," said Elen. "I know."

The path went left. It went left again, in the way that no path had a right to, and the trunks leaned in. A low murmur began among them, high up in the branches, a dry questioning susurrus, like a roomful of old people deciding whom to be polite to. She knew what it was. They were asking each other. They were saying, in the long slow language of wood, who is it, and the answer came back down the rows, the girl, the girl, the girl who asks, and then a different thing, a small cold ripple of puzzlement, alone.

"I'm not sorry," said Elen.

She did not know why she said it. It came out of her all at once, as one coughs. She said it to the dark. She said it again, louder.

"I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry about the ivy. I'm not sorry about the window." Her voice had begun to shake. "I'm not sorry about the jars, or the larder, or the fountain. I'm not sorry that I said it wasn't poison. I'm not."

She was walking faster. She was almost running. The lantern swung wildly, and the trunks went past in long black bars, and she heard a voice in her head, low and level and perfectly steady, saying a thing that she had been told once in a cold dark place, with a cup of tea in her hand. Stay in the light. Do not step anywhere that the light does not.

She stepped off it.

She did it quite deliberately. She put her foot out, over the edge of the little warm golden circle, onto a stretch of dark pale ground to the left of the track, and put her weight on it, and felt it give.

It did not break. It folded, with a soft wet greedy sound, like a mouth, and her boot went in to the ankle and then the knee, and the cold of it struck up her leg so hard that the breath went out of her. She heard herself make a sound. It was not a scream. She had her hand on the lantern. She stood quite still. She felt it close round her, thick and clinging, and begin, with enormous slow patience, to pull.

Mirewort.

She knew it at once. She had been told. It was in the paths where the forest did not want one to go, a warning, a kind of word. It lay all round her in the dark, pale and soft and innocent, and she stood in it to the knee and felt the whole of her left leg go numb.

She did not call out.

She thought of it. She thought of it very clearly, with a kind of cold amusement. She thought: I could shout. There's a window, a mile away, and a boy at it. He'd come. He'd come in about four minutes, without a form, and he'd have a rope, and he'd say in a perfectly even voice, I have you.

The lantern shook in her hand.

"Nobody has me," said Elen.

She said it very quietly. It was the truest thing she had ever said.

"All right. Fine. Then I'll have myself."

She got her free hand round the lantern bail and tried to pull. It was useless. The more she struggled, the deeper she went. She was in to the thigh now. The cold was climbing her like water up a wall, and she thought, rather clearly, in the small bright centre of her fear: I'm going to be stupid about this. I'm going to die of being proud, in a bog, in the dark, in a forest where I've been a hundred times. Ethan will never get over it. He'll tell people I was killed by moss.

She began, quite helplessly, to laugh.

It was not a good laugh. It came out in wet gasps, and she bent over the lantern with her shoulders heaving and tears running down her face, and the mire sucked at her thigh. And then, behind her, with a sound like a very old gate being drawn open, something took hold of her by the back of the coat.

It was a root.

It was thick as her arm and rough as a rope, and it came up out of the black earth under the dead bracken as a hand comes up out of a pocket. It took her round the middle, quite gently. It was not at all sudden. It heaved, once, with the slow careful strength of a very large animal lifting a very small one, and the mire let go with a long sucking sigh, and she was out. She was dragged backward through the bracken and the frost, and set down on her back on a bed of dry leaves with her wet leg stretched out in front of her and the lantern, miraculously, still lit, lying on its side beside her head.

She lay looking up.

It was the clearing. She knew it at once. There were the black trunks standing close in a ring, and the open circle of sky above with its hard small stars, and in the middle of it, enormous, hollow, split by a tall dark seam from which a faint pale light spilled, the tree. The great one. It stood over her like a cathedral. On its lowest branches hundreds of small closed buds hung in the starlight, pale and tight as clenched fists, waiting for a moon that was not yet up.

A long low rustle ran through the whole crown of it, like wind in a field of barley.

"Grandmother," said Elen.

It was the voice of a very small girl.

The leaves moved. She could not have said that it was a word. It was a slow, dry, faintly amused shifting of the whole of the tree, from the topmost twig to the roots, and she did not need it to be a word. She had been listening to it for a year and a half.

"I didn't ask," said Elen, thickly. "I'm sorry. I didn't ask for anyone."

The tree moved again.

"What did she say?" said Elen, aloud, to Bartholomew, and then, because it was perfectly obvious, to herself. "She said, you asked no one. She said, I am not no one."

It took her a moment.

Then she put both hands over her face and began to laugh again, and this time it was not at all the same. It rose out of the middle of her like a spring, helpless and bright and entirely without defense, and went on and on, until her ribs ached. She lay on her back among the dry leaves and shook with it, and the huge dark shape above her swayed very slightly in the windless air, as an old woman sways who is very much enjoying a joke.

"You're a tree," said Elen, between gasps.

The leaves rustled.

"She says she is a grandmother."

She got up in the end. She did it slowly, with her wet leg stiff and shaking, and she crawled the last few yards to the great hollow roots and sat down against them with her back to the bark. It was warm. It was always warm, and smelled of earth and cold and a very faint sweetness, like honey in the dark. She drew her knees up. She felt in her pocket and brought out a small twist of paper, and unfolded it, and spilled the coarse gray salt in a careful ring round the base of the trunk.

"I should have brought it first," said Elen. "I'm very rude. I came in at midnight and fell in a hole and made you pull me out." Her voice wobbled. "I wanted to say sorry. For the, for coming like that. But I've said I'm not going to say it. So I'm only going to say that I wish I'd come better."

The tree sighed.

She put her cheek against the bark. She shut her eyes. And it came up out of her all at once, as it always did in this place, as it had done on a winter night a year and a half ago, kneeling in the snow with a basket of silver flowers. She told the whole of it. She told it in no order at all.

She told it about the hall, and the stool, and the three gray chairs. She said, in a voice that went up and down, that every word she had spoken had been true and every single one of them had put a brick in a wall. She told about the little table to the right of the platform, and a boy in a dark coat sitting very straight with his hands folded, and not looking, and how she had known exactly how he was not looking, as one knows a draft in a room. She told about four things, in order. She told about a gloved hand on a shoulder.

"And then he said," said Elen, "the thing. He said it so kindly. He said he didn't mean me."

The leaves were quite still.

"He said that if the club had been more careful, there'd have been nothing to hold. And I thought, oh. It's Miss Pargeter. It's her, with her hand on my shoulder. It's exactly her, and she's in his voice." She wiped her face on her sleeve. "And he's not. That's the thing. I know he's not. I know. He's the only person who's ever sat in a larder at two in the morning and thrown his coat on a jar. He's the only one who's ever said the plant gets to vote. And I said, I said it was built in. I said it like a, like I was reading out a, I said it was the way he was made." Her voice cracked. "That's an awful thing to say to someone. I said he handed me the knife handle first."

The tree said something.

It came down through the dark very slowly, in a long dry cadence, and she lifted her head and listened with her whole body, as she had listened a hundred times, with her lips parted. It was a hard language. It was all in the spaces. It had a way of saying a thing by not saying the thing next to it.

"She says," said Elen, slowly, "that a thing can be true, and be a very small part of the truth."

She was quiet.

"She says he is not Miss Pargeter." She was speaking slowly, a clause at a time, as the sound came down. "She says Miss Pargeter wanted me smaller. And this one only wants me safe. She says the two sound alike, in the mouth. She says they are not the same, and one of them can learn."

The wood creaked.

"I don't know if he can," said Elen. It came out in a whisper. "I don't know. I've been waiting a year and a half and I keep thinking he's going to turn a corner, and then he stands in front of me and tells me what's reasonable. I don't know if it's, if he's built like that."

The leaves moved.

"She says she doesn't know either." A small laugh broke out of her, wet and surprised. "She says she's a tree. She says all she knows is that orderly things grow slowly. She says they grow straight. She says when I stood on the stair and said 'not for anyone,' she heard it, in all the roots, a mile away, as one hears a door." She swallowed. "And she says it wasn't locked."

She put her forehead down on her knees.

"A closed door is only a question with a lock on it," said Elen, into her coat. "My mother says. Did I tell you? I think I tell you every time."

The tree said nothing. It sat above her, enormous, and warm, and silent, in the starlit hollow, and she sat against its roots with a pewter frog in her pocket and a wet leg and her face hidden, and cried for a long time, quite quietly, without any particular grief at all. It was only a very large, very tired, very clean sort of crying, such as comes at the end of a long road. When it was done she felt hollow and light. She felt as though someone had taken a stone out of her that she had not known she was carrying, and she lay with her cheek on her knee, breathing, and the wood breathed with her.

It was a long while before the tree spoke again.

When it did, it was different.

She knew at once. The whole great body of it had gone quite still, from the roots to the topmost branch. The rustle had died out of the leaves. There was a long, dark, listening silence, such as comes over a wood when a fox goes by, and she lifted her head. The buds hung motionless in the starlight. Far down in the earth, under her spine, through the warm bark, she felt a slow deep tremor, like a great bell being very gently struck.

"What is it?" said Elen.

The branches stirred.

"A thread," she said, slowly.

She was listening so hard that her ears hurt.

"She says there is a thread under the school. A strange one. She says it isn't ours. It's not from any wood or water or earth that she knows." She was whispering. "She says she felt it sing. The night the boy fell. She felt it from here, from the roots, a mile off. A high, thin, warm note, like a wire under a bow. It's still singing. She says it's been singing nine nights."

The tree was shaking, very faintly, all through.

"She says it was tied by a hand. A cold one. She says she could smell it, when the thread was drawn, on the wind, through all the walls. Lavender water." Her voice cracked. "And iron."

She did not breathe.

"Lavender water," said Elen.

It went through her like a cold hand into a glove. She sat in the dark clearing with her back against a tree and was not in the clearing at all. She was in a long glass house, in the afternoon, in the second week of December, with a smell of mint and wet earth and warm clay, and a tall silver-haired man walking down the length of the benches with his hands behind him, saying please. She remembered it. It had hung in the air for an hour after he went, faint and fresh and clean, over the smell of the seedlings, like a drop of oil on water. Wren had wrinkled her nose. She had said, he smells like a dowager's drawing room.

"She says a thing like that is tied to one hand," said Elen. "She says no other can undo it. Or keep it. It's, it's a knot, like the knots of old women. It goes slack. At the ninth owl-hour, it comes loose, unless the hand that tied it comes and ties it again." She was talking very fast. "And then the sleeper wakes. Alan, oh, the, the margin."

She stopped.

She had said his name.

It lay in the hollow like a coin on a stone floor. She did not take it back.

"Fades in nine nights," said Elen, very quietly, "unless it is renewed by the hand that made it."

She began to count.

It took her a long time. Her fingers were stiff, and her head was full of a high bright singing, and she had to do it twice. The night the boy fell. The nineteenth. She had been standing on a stage of ice in a ring of lanterns with her forehead against a boy's, and a man had come running over the mere with no skates. Nineteen. And nine nights. She counted on her fingers like a child, in the lantern light. The twentieth, the twenty-first, the twenty-second, the twenty-third. The hearing. The twenty-fourth. The twenty-fifth, with a can of oil. The twenty-sixth. The twenty-seventh, a stair. The twenty-eighth.

"Nineteen and nine," said Elen. "It's the twenty-eighth."

The wind moved in the crown of the great tree.

"It's the twenty-eighth. It's gone midnight. It's, it's tonight. It's now."

She was on her feet.

She did not remember rising. She stood in the dark clearing with the lantern in her hand, and her leg was still numb, and she was shaking from head to foot, and the whole of her was lit like a lamp. "Can you tell who?" said Elen. "Can you tell me, Grandmother, can you, is it?"

The tree creaked.

"She's a tree," said Elen. "She knows smell and iron. She can't say a name." She drew a ragged breath. "I know. I know. But I know. Oh, I know."

A long low rustle ran down through the leaves, and a single bough, thick as a man's body, lowered itself with infinite slowness until it hung beside her, and moved, and pointed. It was a gesture of such grave and unmistakable clarity that she almost laughed. East. Across the black bracken, between two great trunks, there was a narrow gap that had not been there a moment before. A path. It ran straight as a ruled line, and it was lit, faintly, by a pale silver glimmer, as of moon on water, though there was no moon.

"The Finger," said Elen.

It was the short way. It was a spur of the wood that ran out across the lawn toward the east wing like a pointing hand, and ended in a tangle of hawthorn and reed not two hundred yards from the infirmary door. She had used it once, at dawn, in her first term, coming back from the mere. It was a very old path. It was one the forest did not show to everyone.

"Thank you," said Elen. She put her hand flat against the warm bark. "I'll, I'll bring you something. When it's over. I don't know what."

The leaves rustled.

"She says take salt," said Elen. "She says, always take salt."

She took the whole twist from the ring on the ground, and put it in her pocket, and ran.

The path was waiting for her. It ran out in front of her through the dark in a clean straight line, and the roots lay flat and the branches drew back, and she went down it at a flat sprint with the lantern shuttered to a thread and her boots silent in the frost. Her left leg was not working properly. She did not care. She had never in her life been so entirely awake. She ran as she had run at six, along a beach, with her brother behind her shouting, a long silver streak of joy and terror, with the trees going by on either side like the pillars of a hall, and at the end of it the path simply stopped. The trunks fell away. There was open air, and a cold hard white shining, and she dropped on her stomach among the dry reeds with her heart going like a drum.

The lawn lay before her.

It ran up in one great sweep, pale under the stars, to the long dark flank of the east wing, and the infirmary stood at the end of it, low and white, with a single door in its side. She could see the lamp over the door. She could see the window above it, the long one, the third from the corner, with its curtain drawn and a faint steady light behind. It was the cold white glow of a ward lamp turned low. And beneath it, on the steps, quite motionless, in the blue shadow of the porch, stood two small gray shapes with their hands clasped in front of them.

The guards.

She lay quite flat. The reeds were stiff with frost and smelled of mud. The west clock, on its tower, a long way off, was striking the quarter, one clear silver note, and the sound carried across the lawn in the windless dark like a stone dropped into water. A quarter to one.

She waited.

It was a very long time. She lay on her stomach in the frozen reeds with her chin on her fists and the cold coming up through her coat, and her wet leg began to ache, and she thought she would never be warm again. She thought of nothing. She had learned that from a boy who sat in a library and read the same line forty times. You looked, and you waited, and you did not let the mind go anywhere. It was an extraordinary skill. She had not known that she had it.

The carriage came out of the dark at ten minutes to one.

She did not hear it. That was the dreadful thing. It came round the end of the east wing at a walk, under the stars, black and silent as a thing made of shadow, and there was no sound of wheels on the gravel, no jingle of harness, no creak. It was drawn by two gray horses. It bore no lamps. It rolled up the drive to the foot of the infirmary steps and stopped, with the horses standing like stone, and on its panel, in the faint starlight, a small silver shape glimmered once. A key. A pair of scales.

The footman sprang down. He opened the door.

A man stepped out.

He was tall. He was very upright, and thin, in a long gray coat, with his hands in gray gloves and his hat in one of them. He did not hurry. He stood a moment on the gravel with his head bowed, as a man stands before a church. She could not see his face. It was in shadow, and two hundred yards away, and the light of the porch lamp did not reach it. But she saw the way he moved, a slow long unhurried glide, like a heron wading, and she saw his hand come up, quite lightly, and touch something at his belt.

It glinted.

It was long and thin. It hung on a loop of leather. It caught the lamp for the space of a breath and went dark, and she did not breathe. It was only a gleam. It might have been a watch chain. It might have been any one of a dozen things.

It was not a watch chain.

The guards had snapped to attention. They stood on the top step with their heels together and their eyes front, quite rigid, like toys. The tall man went by them without a word. He did not look at them. He put out one gloved hand and opened the infirmary door, and went in, and the door closed behind him with a small, soft, expensive click.

The carriage stood in the drive. The horses did not move.

Elen lay in the reeds with her hand over her mouth.

She did not know how long it was before she remembered the card. It was in her coat. She felt for it, with fingers that did not seem to belong to her, and drew it out. It was the strip of gray paper, creased and soft, with a watering can drawn at the top and three words in her quick uphill hand. Seed. Water. Fruit. She had a stub of pencil. She had a hooded lantern, shuttered to a thread, and she turned it a little, and held the card down against her knee under her coat, and bent over it with her tongue between her teeth.

She knew how to do it. That was the strangest thing.

She had never been taught. Nobody had ever sat her down. She had only watched, for a year and a half, from the edge of a table, a boy with a grandfather's pen, in a larder, in a greenhouse, on a stool in the middle of a hall, setting down in a small upright hand the things that happened. First the date. Then the hour. Then the place. Then who, and what, and by what means, and in whose presence. It was a form. It was only a form, and it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

RECORD, she wrote, at the head, in capitals.

Date: 28 Jan. Hour: a quarter to one, by the west clock (struck the quarter at 12.45; carriage came about 12.50). Place: the north lawn, from the end of the Finger, in the hawthorn. Distance to infirmary east door: about 200 yards.

She stopped. Her hand was shaking. She went on.

What: A black carriage, no lamps, no sound. Two gray horses. A silver mark on the door (key, scales). One man out. Tall, thin, upright. Gray coat, gray gloves. Face not seen. Something at his belt, on a leather loop, long, thin, that caught the light. (Iron? Cannot swear.) The guards stood to attention. He did not speak to them. He went in by the east door at about 12.52.

She stopped again. She read it over. She did not like the last line. It was not a good line. It was only what she had seen. She added, underneath, in smaller letters, with great care, because it was the part that mattered and the part that she could prove least:

Witness: none. (Self.)

She looked at it.

It was the loneliest thing she had ever written.

She knelt there in the reeds, in the cold, with the card against her knee, and thought, with a clear and entirely unsentimental astonishment: I'm doing it his way. I'm doing it properly. I'm sitting in a hedge at one in the morning being a clerk. And she began to cry again, very quietly, with no sound at all.

"Thank you," said Elen, to the card. "For the form."

The clock struck one.

He came out at seven minutes past two.

She had not moved. She had lain for an hour and a quarter without moving in the frozen reeds, and her limbs had stopped hurting and gone to a kind of dull blue glass. Only her eyes were alive. She saw the door open, and the gray guards come stiffly to attention, and the tall figure step out into the lamp. He stood a moment on the top step, with his head a little bent. He drew off one glove, slowly, and held it in his hand. She thought, for a moment, that he was looking straight at the hawthorn. Her heart stopped. Then he raised his bare hand and passed it over his eyes, a small slow weary gesture, as one wipes away a cobweb, and put the glove on again.

He got into the carriage. The door shut. The horses moved off, soundlessly, and it turned in the drive and slid away round the end of the wing, a black shape against the stars, and was gone.

She let out her breath.

She looked up at the window.

It was the third from the corner, the long one, with its drawn curtain. The faint steady glow behind it had changed. It was brighter. It was a warm gold-white, like the glow of a hearth, and it pulsed, slow and regular, once, twice, a thing like a heart. It lit the curtain from behind, and the sill, and a long pale trapezoid of snow beneath. And then, as she watched, it settled. It softened and steadied, and fell back to a low, even, constant shine, quite unlike the hard cold white of a ward lamp, and lay there, burning gently in the dark.

She wrote it down.

02.07, she wrote, with the pencil shaking in her fist. Left by the same door. Bare hand over eyes. Put the glove back on. Ward window (third from corner, first floor): glow brighter for some minutes (gold, warm, slow pulse), then steady. Same color as the thread on K.'s wrist.

She looked at it a moment. Then, because it was true, because nobody was there, and because she had spent her life being a person who could not leave a thing out, she added a last line.

I think it was tied again.

She lay there a long while after that.

The stars turned. The cold deepened. She had begun to shiver, in long hard shudders that came up from her heels, and she drew her knees under her and pulled her coat round her and put Bartholomew, who had slipped out of her pocket, back into his place. He looked up at her with his old tired face. She thought he looked, on the whole, quite proud.

"I know," said Elen. Her teeth were chattering. "I know. I was very good."

She had a card. She had a time, and a place, and a gray coat, and a gleam on a leather loop. She had a smell, which would convince nobody, and a tree. It was the most miserable pile of evidence that had ever been set before a Council. It would not have stood up for a minute against a man with a warm voice and a tray of tea. She knew that. She knew it as she knew her own name. A girl with three notes on her file had lain in a hedge and seen a man go into a hospital, and it was a thing that could be said in six words and dismissed with two.

It needed a witness. That was the whole of it. It needed someone who could not be dismissed.

She thought, with an ache so sudden that it took her breath: Alan.

She had thought it the whole of the night. She had thought it on the lawn, at the stones, in the mirewort, in the clearing with her face against the bark. It was not a thing she could stop. It had been in her like a held note, from the moment she stood up from the cracked leather chair. She thought of a boy at a window, with his forehead against the glass, who would have come in four minutes. She thought of a small upright hand, and a clean white page, and a voice saying, in the dark, Record of custody. She thought: he'd know what to do. He'd know exactly the form.

And she thought, with the whole bruised honest weight of her, of a level, gentle, careful voice, saying: if the club had been more careful.

She pressed her forehead against her knees.

"Alan," said Elen. She said it to the cold, to the dark, to the empty lawn, very softly. "I'm sorry I said go."

The reeds whispered.

"I'm not sorry for anything else. I'm not. I want you to know that. I'm not sorry that I said it. But I'm sorry that I said go, because I didn't mean it, I only meant I couldn't, I couldn't bear to have you look at me like a, like that, in the voice. I only meant not tonight." Her voice cracked. "And now I've gone and done it alone. And I'm good at it. That's the worst of it. I'm very good at it. I've got a card."

Nobody answered. She had not expected anyone to.

She lifted her head after a while, and wiped her face on her sleeve, and sat quite still, looking at the gray low shape of the infirmary against the stars. She knew what she would do. She had known it since the carriage. It came to her in a clear cold line, like a thread drawn through a needle.

Not him. Not yet.

She could not go to him with it. She had said I'd like you to go. She had put him out of a door. She could not walk into a dormitory at three in the morning with a card in her fist and say, Here. I've done it your way. You were right. It would be a kind of lie, and it would be the wrong thing, and he would take it, with his whole heart, as an order.

But she needed a witness. And there were other people.

There was a Healer-Mistress who had said, in a ward at midnight, that she did not know what it was. There was a Warden who had stood up in a hall and laid down her pen. There was an Archivist with a deposit, and a frightened plump boy called Dara, and a tall dark girl with a razor tongue who had put a hand on her wrist. There was Mira, who kept accounts. There was an old man in a cold room with a seedling, who would be, in four days, a Fifth-Class Assayer on a cart.

Next time, she thought. The sixth of February. Nine nights from tonight.

She would be there. She would not be alone. She would have a Healer on one side of her and a Warden on the other, and a card, and a clock. And whoever came up that drive in a black carriage with no lamps would find, in the reeds at the end of the Finger, exactly the sort of witness that he had always been afraid of: one who wrote it down.

She got to her feet.

Her leg was stiff and her teeth were chattering, and she swayed. She put out a hand to the thorn, and it scratched her, and she did not mind. She stood a moment in the dark, looking back along the narrow silver path into the black wall of the wood, where a great hollow tree was standing in the starlight with its buds closed tight against the cold.

"Thank you," said Elen, to the forest, quite loudly.

A long dry rustle ran along the trunks, from end to end, like a laugh.

She went round by the kitchens.

It was the long way, and she did it on purpose, because she was too cold to go to the clock tower and could not, at four in the morning, face the stair. The back passage lay dark and warm and smelling of bread. The latch lifted under her thumb. She went in, and stood on the flags in her wet boots, and the great kitchen lay round her, black and cavernous, with the ovens ticking as they cooled and one lamp turned low at the end of the long table.

There was a bowl on it.

It was only the one. It stood under its cloth, blue-rimmed, with a thread of steam rising, and a slip of paper propped against the salt, and beside it, with her arms folded on her great round stomach and a lantern at her feet, sat the night cook, as though she had been waiting there for an hour.

"There you are," said the cook. "I wondered. It's gone four."

"I'm sorry," began Elen.

"Don't you start." The round red face creased. She took in the muddy coat, and the wet black boots, and the thorn-scratch across the back of the hand, and a pair of red swollen eyes. "Sit. Eat. I didn't say a word. I never saw a soul."

Elen sat. She took off the cloth. The porridge was thick and sweet and smelled of honey, and her hands, round the bowl, were not entirely steady. She took the spoon. The note against the salt cellar said, in the round floury hand she knew: One tonight, then. Eat it all.

"One," said Elen.

"Aye."

"There's usually two."

"There was." The cook shrugged her vast shoulders. "The thin one's not been down in three nights. I put the bowl out. I put the honey in. I leave a note. And it goes cold, and I give it to the cat, who has never been so well fed." She sniffed. "I'm not asking. It's none of my business."

Elen did not say anything. The spoon had stopped halfway to her mouth.

"I told him to go," said Elen.

It came out very small.

"Aye," said the night cook. "And he went."

She said it without any heat at all, in her comfortable gruff voice, looking at the lantern. "They do, you know. The correct ones. If you tell them. It's their great fault. I had a husband like it. Told him once to go and sit in the garden, and he sat in it for the whole of a winter." She leaned across the scrubbed table, and put a floury hand, very briefly, on the back of Elen's. "It never means they don't want to be told to come back. It only means that they're waiting for the form."

She got up. She went away across the great dark kitchen, a vast round shadow with a swinging light, and at the door she turned and said, with great firmness, "Eat it. Every scrap. And then bed. Your own, mind, not that tower."

The door closed.

Elen sat alone at the long table with the porridge and the single lamp. She ate it. She ate every scrap, in the warm silence, with the ovens ticking, and when it was done she sat looking at the bottom of the blue-rimmed bowl for a long time.

Then she took out the card.

It was soft and gray and creased in three places, with a watering can at the top, and three words, and a row of small pencil marks along the bottom, and, on the back, a record in her own quick hand. She turned it over. She held it a moment between her fingers. She took the pencil stub from behind her ear, and, under Seed, Water, Fruit, below the line that said Wait. (Water.) Fruit: the story., in very small letters, she wrote:

11. Tell the truth, in order. Properly.

She looked at it a while.

She added, after a pause, in a smaller and more crooked hand:

(Not to him. Yet.)

And then, because she was Elen Joy, and could not leave a thing off a list that was true, she wrote a last line underneath, so faintly that she could scarcely read it herself, and put the card away over her heart, and buttoned her coat.

I miss the second bowl.