Foundations of Magical Theory met on the third floor of the west tower, in a lecture hall shaped like the inside of a bell, and Alan arrived ten minutes early.

This was not unusual. He arrived ten minutes early to everything, a habit his father called courtesy and his mother called nerves. What was unusual was that he did not sit down at once. He stood in the aisle with his satchel in one hand, looking along the curved bench of the third row, where each seat was marked by a small brass plate fixed to the desk. Row three, second desk: A. Valemont. Row three, third desk: E. Joy.

The third desk was empty.

He sat, took out his book, his ink, and two quills, and laid them side by side at precise intervals. He did not look at the empty seat. He was not waiting for anyone. He had resolved over breakfast, in the calm of a boiled egg and a cup of tea, that Elen Joy would be treated exactly as he would treat any other classmate: with courtesy, with distance, and with no particular attention. Pip, who had spent the whole meal explaining that Alan's resolutions were famous for lasting until the first interesting thing happened, had been told firmly to be quiet.

"She's late," said Pip now, leaning over the back of the bench from the fourth row, where he had settled with a stack of parchment and an inkwell he had already managed to tip over once.

"Who?"

"Nobody. Everybody. The empty chair next to you." Pip dabbed at the spill with his sleeve. "I'm only observing. You've looked at it four times."

"I've looked at the clock."

"The clock is on the other wall."

Alan opened his book to the first page and read the title three times without absorbing it. Around him the hall filled with the rustle of first-years, the scrape of benches, the low nervous hum of two hundred people who did not yet know where to put their elbows. The late-morning light fell through tall arched windows in long pale bars across the desks, and in each bar dust turned slowly, like something being thought about.

The bell rang. The seat beside him stayed empty.

The professor arrived a heartbeat later, as if he had been waiting in the corridor for the final chime. He was a lean, dry man with chalk permanently ground into the cuffs of his black coat and the expression of someone who had heard every excuse for tardiness ever invented and had filed them alphabetically. He climbed to the podium, laid down a single sheet of notes, and surveyed the hall for a long moment.

"You have all," he said, "been told that magic is a gift. This is true in the way that a sword is a gift. We will spend this year learning which end to hold."

A few nervous laughs. Alan did not laugh. He dipped his quill and wrote the date at the top of a clean page in his small, upright hand.

"The first principle of the discipline," said the professor, "is the Law of Intent and Consequence. Every spell answers to the intention that shapes it. Every intention answers, in turn, to its consequence. A spell cast without understanding of what it will do is not courage." He paused. "It is noise."

Alan wrote noise and underlined it twice.

Fifteen minutes into the lecture, something scraped against the window behind the professor's left shoulder.

It was a soft, rustling, leafy sound, and it came from the outside of a window three floors above the ground. Alan was the first to turn his head, because he was the only person in the hall who had been half-listening for it. The professor continued to speak about the structure of intention for several more seconds, with the serene deafness of a man who had once taught through a minor fire.

Then the casement swung open from the outside, and a rope of ivy poured over the sill.

It was real ivy, thick and glossy and green, and it was not behaving like ivy at all. It slid in over the stone with the careful grace of something that had been asked very nicely, curled around the edge of the window frame, and lowered a girl onto the floor of the lecture hall as gently as a mother setting down a child. The girl landed with a small bounce, patted the ivy as one might pat a horse, and whispered something to it that sounded very much like thank you. The ivy shivered once and withdrew, folding itself back out of the window and into the morning.

The professor stopped speaking.

The entire hall, two hundred heads, turned toward the window. Elen Joy stood in the stripe of sunlight with a pine needle in her hair, a smear of green dust across one cheekbone, and her scarf trailing over one shoulder like the tail of a kite. She looked at the professor. The professor looked at her. She smiled, bright and unrepentant, and dimpled.

"Miss Joy," said the professor, with the tired precision of a man who had seen her file. "The door is on the opposite side of the room."

"I know, sir. The window was closer."

"It is on the third floor."

"It was very sturdy ivy."

Somebody in the back row made a sound like a strangled kettle. The professor closed his eyes briefly, as one might at the first bar of a familiar and unwelcome song.

"Fifteen minutes late. A mark. Sit."

She sat. The desk beside Alan was suddenly occupied by a person, and by a smell, and the smell was pine and crushed mint and something faintly bitter and green, like a garden after rain. It was not what he expected. He had no idea what he had expected. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the professor and his back perfectly straight.

She did not take out a book. She took out a single sheet of rough, grayish parchment, folded in quarters and creased with use, spread it flat on the desk, and began to draw.

Alan did not look. He wrote, in neat clear letters, the words intention shapes consequence. But the desks in the third row were close together, and the edge of her parchment lay a hand's breadth from the edge of his book, and without ever turning his head he could see, out of the corner of his eye, what she was making. Spirals. Long looping spirals crossed by finer, quicker lines, like the rings of a tree or the currents in a stirred cauldron. In the margin, a tiny, careful sketch of a leaf, labeled in a cramped slanted hand. It looked, to Alan, like the aimless scribbling of someone with no interest in the lesson.

He was nearly certain it did.

She tapped her pencil against her teeth, frowned at the board where the professor had begun to chalk an elaborate diagram, and leaned toward him.

"Which page?"

It was barely a breath. It was a whisper pitched for the space between two desks, warm and rough with the hint of a laugh, and it went through him as quickly as a draft through an open door. He did not turn his head. He did not breathe.

Which page.

There was a correct response, and he knew it. The correct response was a murmured forty-one, a nod toward the board, and then silence, as befitted a person with no business assisting someone who could not be bothered to arrive on time. It was not as though she had earned it. She had come in through a window. She had not even brought a book.

Alan looked down at his hands and found that they had already moved. His textbook was turned. Open to page forty-one, its margins crowded with his careful notes, it lay between the edges of their two desks, angled so that she could read it without leaning. He had not decided to do it. He simply found it done.

"Thanks," she whispered.

He heard the smile in it, and then, because he could not help it, he looked. She was bent over the page with her hair falling forward and a crease between her brows, reading with the quick ferocious attention of someone for whom the words were not homework but something to be chased down and caught. Then she glanced up, caught his eye, and grinned. The dimple came and went like a spark.

Alan turned back to the board so quickly he nearly cricked his neck.

His pulse was ridiculous. He fixed his gaze on the professor's chalk and thought, with great firmness, of the Academy charter, article nine. He made it as far as the second clause.

For the rest of the lesson she kept the book. She never wrote in it, as far as he could see. When the bell rang she slid it back across the gap, said, "You're a lifesaver," cheerfully and without weight, and was gone in a flurry of scarf before he could decide what his face should be doing.

She had not looked at him as though he were anyone. He knew this. She had said a lifesaver to a stranger the way one says it to a passing waiter.

He closed the book and put it in his satchel and did not open it again that day.

On Wednesday, the third desk was empty. Elen Joy missed Foundations entirely, and the professor, noting the absence with a small precise tick in his register, said nothing at all, which Alan found more eloquent than any scolding.

On Thursday she arrived on time, by the door, looking faintly dazed by her own virtue, and slept with her cheek on her arm through half the lecture. Alan took notes for both of them out of a pure and abstract sense of order. He told himself so.

On Friday she was absent from Practical Ward Drills, and the instructor, a sunburned woman with a voice built for shouting across moors, announced that if the missing student did not appear by next week she would be reported to the Warden in person. Someone near the back muttered that it was the third time. Someone else muttered that it was the second, and that the Warden had been counting wrong.

Alan said nothing. He was assembling a set of wards at the time and was thoroughly occupied.

It was not that he looked for her. It was simply that the Academy was not large, and the facts of Elen Joy had a way of arriving in his vicinity whether he wished them or not. On Thursday evening, in the library, he lifted his eyes from a thick treatise on warding geometry and happened to glance through the tall west window, and there she was: a small figure at the edge of the Enchanted Forest in the blue dusk, lantern swinging in one hand, standing at the line of boundary stones with one foot, quite clearly, on the wrong side of it.

He watched her for the space of three breaths. She crouched, touched something on the ground, and said something to it. Then the trees swallowed the light, and he returned to his book and read the same sentence eleven times.

"Second mark," Pip reported cheerfully on Sunday morning, sprawled on his bed with a half-eaten roll. "Her file's at three now. The Warden's furious. Apparently she told the ward-drill instructor that she'd been, quote, studying the practical applications of moss."

"Moss."

"Moss. And the instructor said, and I'm paraphrasing, that she should apply some of it to her mouth." Pip chewed meditatively. "You know, you know her timetable better than your own."

"I know it because it's posted on the board."

"Mine's posted on the board too." Pip swallowed. "What do I have on Tuesday?"

Alan opened his mouth. "Alchemy," he said. "Second bell. Then Charms."

"You know that because I told you."

"Yes."

"Hm," said Pip, with infinite gentleness, and said nothing more, which was somehow worse.

That night, Alan could not sleep.

It was not an unusual condition, not since Monday. He lay on his back with his hands folded and his blanket squared, listening to Pip's soft whistling snore, and at some point after eleven he gave up, put on his coat, and walked down the corridor to the landing at the end of the hall, where a long window looked out over the courtyard.

The courtyard was silver and black. The snow had been swept into low banks along the arcade, and the lamps that ringed the fountain burned low and steady, ghostly under their frost. The great stone lions crouched around the frozen basin like cats at a hearth. The final bell had rung forty minutes ago. No one was supposed to be out.

He was about to turn back when something moved in the shadow of the arcade.

It was a small shape, bent low, moving fast and light along the base of the wall. As it passed through a patch of lamplight, he saw a basket held tight against its chest, and heard, faintly, the delicate clink of glass. Jars. A great many jars. And hair, dark with the night but unmistakable, a deep red where the lamp touched it, tied back with a ribbon and already coming loose.

Elen.

He was gripping the windowsill. He did not remember taking hold of it.

At the far end of the arcade, a second light appeared, a lantern swinging on a long pole, accompanied by the unhurried tread of boots on stone. A prefect, on night patrol. The light swept slowly over the snow, along the wall, across the shadow where the small figure had flattened itself against the stone. It was close. It was extremely close. Alan found that he had stopped breathing, which was ridiculous, since he had no stake in the matter at all.

Elen lifted two fingers from beneath the basket. She did it casually, almost lazily, as one might flick a crumb from a table.

The prefect's lantern flame dipped. It turned a pale unsteady blue, guttered, swelled and sank again like a candle in a draft. The prefect swore, quite colorfully, and shook the pole, and tapped at the glass, and in the confusion of his own wavering light turned back toward the guardhouse. By the time the flame steadied, the shadow by the wall was empty. A slim figure had already crossed the open ground in four light bounds, caught the trellis on the girls' wing, and swung herself up and over a ground-floor sill without so much as dislodging a jar.

The window closed. The courtyard was silent.

Alan stood where he was, with his fingers aching on the stone, and a feeling in his chest that he could not at first identify.

It was not surprise. He had been given every reason to expect this. It was something more like the cold sinking feeling of picking up a letter written in a familiar hand and finding the contents wrong.

He ought to report her. That was the plain, correct course. He had seen a student out after curfew, with unknown materials, tampering with a prefect's light. The Warden's tower was across the courtyard. In the morning he would say what he had seen, in clear sequence, without embellishment, and the Academy's orderly machinery would do the rest.

He went back to his room and sat at his desk.

He took out his notebook. He opened it to a clean page, dipped his pen, and wrote the word Observations in the neat upper corner. Underneath it, he wrote:

One. Arrived to Foundations fifteen minutes late, by a third-floor window. Did not bring a book.

Two. Absent from two lessons in one week.

Three. Gave a flippant account to the Warden, in public, under direct questioning.

Four. Out after curfew, carrying unknown materials. Interfered with a prefect's lamp.

He stopped. The pen hovered. A drop of ink gathered at the nib and fell.

He wrote: Conclusion.

The word sat there. He looked at it for a long time, in the quiet of the sleeping room, with Pip whistling gently in the dark behind him. Then, in small, steady letters, he finished the line.

Careless. Contemptuous of order. And good at it.

That last part stung more than the rest, and he knew why. The flick of her fingers on the lantern had been precise. The ivy had been tender. The snow-birds in the courtyard had been timed to the half second. She did not break rules the way a clumsy person did. She did it with craft, with grace, with a kind of effortless music. He did not like how much that impressed him.

The girl in the storehouse doorway would never have done any of this.

He sat very still with that thought.

It was ridiculous to say would never. He had known her for perhaps four minutes, and at seven years old, half frozen. But the girl he carried in his memory was soft and patient and good. She was a shape that goodness had taken. Whatever goodness was, she was its image. And this girl, scarf flying, ivy rope, jars clinking in the dark, was none of those things.

He closed the notebook.

Outside, the snow had begun again. It fell past the window in slow, wide flakes, and he watched it for a long time, with his chin resting on his folded hands.

Maybe it was only a coincidence. Hair of that color was not so rare, and a dimple was only a dimple. Ten years was a long time, and memory was not a reliable instrument. Perhaps the girl he remembered had never been at this Academy at all. Perhaps she was a healer in a distant village, quiet and good and entirely herself, and the red-haired student in the third desk was a stranger who happened to wear the same colors. That would be tidier. That would leave the memory whole.

And if she was the same girl, and had simply changed?

He did not want to think about that. He folded the thought away, as he had folded away so many others, and went back to the window.

By the time the snow thickened, he had decided to report her in the morning. By the time it stopped, he had decided to think about it.

Pip was still asleep when the morning bell rang, one arm hanging off his bed, an inkpot balanced on his chest like a small black medal. Alan washed, dressed, and made his bed with its sharp corners. Then, because Foundations began at second bell and the reading was long, he took the textbook from his satchel and sat at the desk to prepare.

Pages forty-one to sixty. The assigned chapter. He opened to the first of them.

The page was exactly as he had left it, crowded with his careful notes, in his small upright script, in black ink. Except that in the margin beside the paragraph on intention, in loose looping green ink that sloped uphill, someone had written:

Thanks for the page! — E.

Alan stared at it.

She had never written in the book. He had watched her return it. He had checked the margins, he was certain, he had looked. And yet the ink was as fresh as if it had been laid down a moment ago, still faintly shining, the loops of the E curling at the tail in a way that reminded him of the ivy.

Beneath the signature, in six quick strokes, someone had drawn a bird.

It was a tiny bird, round as a walnut, with a stub of a beak and a suspicious little eye. While he watched, it shivered. Then it lifted itself off the paper, a small white thing made of nothing but frost, and fluttered once in a circle around his head, and burst, softly, into a scatter of cold flakes that settled on the back of his hand.

He sat without moving. The flakes melted slowly into his skin.

A delayed charm. It had to be. She had written the note while he was not looking, or perhaps not even while she held the book. She had set it to lie dormant in the ink through a night and a morning, and to wake only when the page was opened. It was fiddly, intricate, difficult work. It required knowing what he would study, and when, and in what order. It required that she had spared him, a stranger who had passed her a book, a thought.

She had not simply broken a rule. She had composed it, again. And for him.

Alan looked at the green loops on the margin, and at the neat black words beside them, and at the faint wet gleam on his hand where the snow had been.

He closed the book. He closed it harder than was necessary, with a flat dull sound that made Pip stir and mumble something into his pillow.

"Everything all right?" Pip asked, without opening his eyes.

"Yes."

"You said that fast."

"I'm fine," said Alan, and did not wipe his hand.