Elen sent for them on Saturday morning with five pieces of card.

She wrote them at dawn, cross-legged on the quilt in the clock tower with the great pendulum going over her head like the arm of a slow giant, and she wrote them in a hurry, with a stub of pencil, in capitals, because she had learned that if she wrote them neatly she would have time to think. FOUR O'CLOCK. WEST TOWER. BEHIND THE CLOCK-KEEPER'S DOOR. THE THIRD STEP IS LOOSE. BRING ANYTHING YOU CAN'T LEAVE ELSEWHERE. And under that, on each, the same two words, because she could think of nothing better: PLEASE COME.

She had slept four hours. It was more than she had expected. She had come up the stair on Friday after the Warden's voice had stopped going across the snow, and had sat in the old leather chair with her coat still on, looking at the lamplit dust turning in the beams, and had not cried. She had done something stranger. She had taken the card out of her pocket, the gray one with the watering can at the top, and read what she had written on it by the light of the cold white dawn on the Wednesday before: Not to him. Yet. And below it, so faintly that she had to tilt it to the lamp, I miss the second bowl. And she had thought, quite clearly, with her cheek against the cracked leather: well. It's Friday. They've voted. It's all been decided by a man with a very kind voice, and it will be done on the twenty-first of June.

She had been unable to find anything inside her but a kind of enormous plain tiredness, and under it, like a coal under ash, something hot.

"I'm going to be annoying," she told Bartholomew.

He sat on the arm of the chair in his green cloak, regarding the dawn with an air of grim approval.

"I'm going to be extremely annoying," said Elen, "for a very long time."

She slid the cards under five doors before the first bell. The one for Theo she had to push through the keyhole, because the door of his dormitory was locked, and he was, she understood from the snoring, sleeping on the other side of it with his face in a pillow. She tucked the one for Wren into the handle of her sword-stick, which stood by itself in the corner of the girls' corridor like a very thin and menacing umbrella. She gave Mira's to Mira, who was up, and dressed, and writing a list at six in the morning, and who read it, and looked up, and said only, "Four. Yes." And she did not look for the sixth, which she had written and then torn up. She had left it in the pocket of the quilt, in two neat halves, where it made a small dry crackle whenever she moved.

They came at four.

The third step was loose. It gave a groan under each boot in turn, and the clock-keeper, snoring on his cot with the gray cat on his chest and the tin whistle on his stomach, did not so much as stir. She heard them on the stair for a minute before they came into view: the slow heavy tread of Theo, stopping to breathe at every landing, the quick light step of Mira, the soft uncertain one of Dara, and, last, with a long silent unhurried stride like a heron's, the sound of Wren, who made no noise at all and was therefore the most audible of the lot.

The trapdoor opened. A sandy head came up through it, and stopped.

"Oh," said Theo.

He had come in to the huge brass flower of the clock, with the great wheels turning above him in the cold gold light and the pendulum swinging out past the slit windows and hanging, and coming back, and he stood on the top rung with his mouth open and an enormous round copper object clasped to his chest. It had a dented rim. It had a handle on each side. It had, scratched into its belly with a nail, in letters an inch high, MARGARET.

"Theo," said Elen.

"You said anything I couldn't leave elsewhere." He climbed up into the loft, and set the cauldron down on the dusty boards with enormous care, as one sets down a sleeping child. "I couldn't leave her. They've got the benches. They've got the jars. They had the ladle, and I got it back off a sergeant, and I couldn't think where to put her, with Marlow not here to say." His broad burned face crumpled. "They'd have melted her down. They said she was a hazard."

"She's a very fine cauldron," said Mira, climbing up behind him with her ledger under her arm and her gray cardigan buttoned to the chin.

"Thank you."

"She is also, I believe, responsible for three and a half explosions."

"She's very sensitive," said Theo.

Dara came after, thin and careful, with a folded paper pressed to his chest. And last of all, without a word, in her tall dark way, with her braid wound twice round her head and her arms folded in front of her and her sharp face a closed door, Wren came up the stair and stood at the top, and looked around her at the wheels and the beams and the thousand pressed leaves along the rafters, and the cat's-cradle of chains.

"It's the loudest place in the school," said Wren.

"It doesn't mean anything by it," said Elen.

"No." She looked at the pendulum. "It's just counting."

Elen could have wept. She had never told any of them. She stood in the nest of quilts, with her heart going, and understood, with a rush, that they had known, all of them, for some time, where she went when she went away.

They sat on the floor.

There was nowhere else. Elen had the armchair and would not use it; she sat on the crate by the lamp, with the card on her knee, and the four of them made a ring on the dusty planks, cross-legged, in a little pool of gold with the huge wheels turning round them. Margaret presided from the middle. Bartholomew, in his green cloak, sat on the rim.

"I've got something to tell you," said Elen. "I'm going to say it in order. It's a thing I learned."

She told them.

It took a quarter of an hour. She had thought it would be harder. She read it off the card, her own quick hand, in a steady voice, as one reads out an account, and she found that the form held her up, that it was a handrail, and that if she kept her eyes on the lines she could say the words. Date, twenty-eighth of January. Hour, a quarter to one. A black carriage with no lamps. Two gray horses. A silver mark on the door. One man out, tall, in gray, gloved. Something on a leather loop at his belt that caught the light. The guards at attention. East door, 00.52. She read it all. She read the last line, which said Witness: none, Self, and her voice did not shake, and she looked up.

Nobody moved.

"How did you know to be there?" said Mira, at last, very quietly.

"I had a source."

"What source?"

"I won't say. It's a very old lady, in the forest. She's never been wrong." She did not look at Wren. "She said that the thread under the school was tied by a cold hand with a smell. Lavender water and iron. And that it would come loose on the ninth night unless the hand that tied it came back." She drew a breath. "And it's the margin. In Lissa Marren's book. Dara read it to us. Fades in nine nights, unless renewed."

"I read it," said Dara, in a thread of a voice, and put his thin hand over his mouth.

"Nine nights," said Mira.

She had her ledger open on her knee. She had taken out her pencil, with a small determined click, and was ruling a line down a page, and Elen watched her do it with a rush of love so enormous that it frightened her. She was counting. Her lips moved. The pencil went down the margin like a very small and very quick bird. "The nineteenth, Friday. Tied. The twenty-eighth. Tied again. That's nine. The next would be." She stopped. She looked up, and her small square face was perfectly white. "The sixth. The sixth of February."

"Tuesday," said Theo.

"In the small hours. About the same time. Nine nights from a quarter to one." Mira put down the pencil. "That's the night after tomorrow."

"I know," said Elen.

"If it isn't renewed," said Dara, "it comes undone."

"I know."

"And Kieran wakes up."

Nobody said anything. The pendulum swung out. A small gray cat, hearing something, put its head out of the trapdoor, and withdrew it.

"We should be there," said Theo, in a voice that cracked a little. "All of us. Shouldn't we? On the lawn. When he comes." He wiped his nose. "We should see him. We should all see him. Five of us, in a hedge."

"Five children in a hedge," said Mira, "saying that the Chair of the Standards Committee came to a hospital at one in the morning." Her voice was dry and gentle. "Against a sergeant and two guards and a man with the kindest voice in the Council. Theo, my dear. We need an adult."

"We need three," said Elen.

They looked at her.

"Healer Brandt. The Warden. And somebody who can write it down who isn't me." She held up the card, and put it down. "It's no use if it's only mine. I know that. I sat in the reeds and I knew it. A girl with three notes on her file, and a funny hat."

"You don't have a funny hat," said Mira.

"I have four."

"None of them is funny."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week," said Elen, and her voice wobbled, and she heard it, and stopped.

It was Wren who had not spoken.

She had not moved since she sat down. She sat with her long legs folded under her and her arms wrapped round her middle and her eyes on the boards between her knees, quite still, as a heron stands in a stream, and the light of the lamp slid along the dark line of her braid. Elen had not noticed. She had been too occupied with the card. But there was something in the quality of the silence at the end of the ring that had slowly become impossible to overlook, as one cannot overlook the particular hush of a room in which a clock has stopped.

"Wren?" said Elen.

"I smelled it," said Wren.

It was said to the floor. It was very low, and flat, and it did not sound like her voice at all.

"I beg your pardon?"

"On the night." She did not look up. "In the ward. When we came in. When Mira had said he was cold, and Theo was crying, and everybody was looking at the thread. I leaned over the bed to see if he was breathing." Her mouth twisted. "I had my face about four inches from his wrist."

Nobody breathed.

"I have a nose," said Wren. "You know that. It's the only thing I've got. I'm no good at cauldrons. I'm no good at ciphers. I can't talk to a tree. I can tell you what's in a pot from the other end of a corridor, and I've never been wrong, except once, with a cheese." She laughed, a short, dry, awful sound. "I've been in Healer Brandt's poison cabinet forty times. She lets me. She says it's the only way to learn. I've smelled everything in it. I've smelled hemlock. It smells of mice. Nightshade smells like raw potatoes and a cold cellar. Nightroot's sweet. It's like fruit going off. Silverbell smells of snow and mint, and I'd know it in the dark."

She lifted her head.

Her eyes were quite dry. They were dark and clear and very bright, and they fixed on Elen's face with a kind of terrible steadiness, as a person looks at a thing she has been trying for a fortnight not to see.

"He didn't smell of any of them," said Wren.

"What did he smell of?"

"Lamp oil. He'd been refilling. It was on his hands." She drew a breath. "And under it, something cold. Not a coldness. A smell. Like a key you've had in your pocket on a winter morning. Iron. Cold iron. It was in his skin, in the wrist, in the thread." She swallowed. "And very faint, almost nothing, behind it. Lavender."

"Oh," said Elen.

It came out of her in a whisper.

"I told no one," said Wren. "I'm not licensed. Nobody would have listened. A girl who wants to be an apothecary, who's seventeen, who hasn't a certificate. I thought, it's the room. It's carbolic. It's Brandt's soap. I told myself that for nine days." Her voice cracked. "And then I stood in front of that Council with my arms folded and heard the Chair say, in that voice, that it was the silverbell. And I knew. I knew it was a lie. I knew it as I know my own name. And I said nothing. Because I'd been wrong once with a cheese."

"Wren," said Mira.

"And I gave Theo the moss." It came out of her all at once, broken, very quiet. "I handed it to him. I said a pinch wouldn't hurt. And I've been thinking, all that time, that I did it. That I've, that some part of this is. That I'm the sort of person who hands things over and says it doesn't matter." She put the back of her wrist to her mouth. "I've been walking about for two weeks with my nose telling me one thing and my conscience telling me another. And I thought, if I say it, and I'm wrong, I'll have done something worse than the moss."

Elen had crossed the ring on her knees.

She did not remember doing it. She was there, on the dusty boards, in the pool of gold light, with both her arms round a tall stiff dark figure who did not put her own arms round anyone in a general way and was now, with a small furious shaking effort, permitting it. She held her. She said into her shoulder, quite fiercely, "It's not your moss."

"It was my moss."

"It was Theo's pinch, and Theo's cauldron, and it made some very nice bubbles." She drew back. She took Wren's face in her two hands, as one takes a thing that is very breakable, and looked into it. "It was a perfectly good nose. It's been a perfectly good nose the whole time. And you've told us. You told us the very first night it mattered. That's what a nose is for."

"I've done it a disservice," said Wren. Her eyes were swimming. "I'll never do it again."

"You will," said Elen. "You'll doubt it all the time. We all do." She was laughing, and crying. "Just don't ever say it was a cheese."

Theo made a sound. It was somewhere between a snort and a sob. He had crawled across the boards, scattering Margaret's ladle, and put one huge scorched arm round both of them at once, and Dara had come after, and Mira, with her ledger still in her hand, and for some time, in the great gold clanking silence of the clock, five people sat in a heap on the floor of a tower and did not say anything at all.

It was Mira who spoke first, from somewhere in the middle, in a muffled and very practical voice.

"May I ask what it does?"

"What what does?"

"The smell." She drew back, with her cardigan crooked and her hair on end. "Wren. You said, not a poison. I should like to know why. It is not enough that it smells of iron. I should like the argument."

"Yes," said Wren. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She was, Elen saw, quite herself again, in the space of a breath: tall and dark and sardonic, with her chin up and a thin gleam coming into her eyes, like a hawk that has remembered how to hunt. She took a stick of chalk from her pocket. "Give me a clear bit of floor."

They cleared it.

She knelt on the boards, in the lamplight, and drew. She did it with long quick certain strokes, in white, on the gray wood, with the stick held like a pen. It was a line. It was a graph, a rough one, a plain cross of two axes, and on it she drew a curve, rising, like the side of a hill.

"That's a poison," said Wren.

She tapped the curve. "A poison gets worse. Not at once, mostly. It builds. You take the dose, and it works, and you go downhill. The pulse goes up, or down, and it keeps going. The skin changes. The breathing changes. It's a slope." She drew its end. "And then you either go over the edge or you come back. You die, or the Healer gets to you, and it comes down the other side. It's a hill. Every poison I've smelled has a hill."

"Yes," said Mira, writing.

"That's Kieran."

She drew a line. It was perfectly flat. It ran straight across the graph at the height of a pencil mark, level, unwavering, like the edge of a ruler. She tapped it.

"Fifty-one," said Wren. "I held his wrist for a full minute on the first night. Fifty-one. I asked Brandt on the Thursday, when she wasn't looking. Fifty-two. On the Friday, fifty-one. It's been fifty-one and fifty-two for two weeks. It doesn't climb. It doesn't fall. It's as steady as a metronome." She sat back on her heels. "Nothing alive does that. Not a sick thing. A sick thing wobbles."

"And the thread," said Dara. His voice was a breath.

"The thread pulses with it. Same beat. Slow. Like a heart. Which means it isn't a mark of something that's happening to him." Her sharp face was fierce. "It's a mark of something that's being held. It's a hand, round a wrist, only the hand's not there. It's been tied, and it's holding, and it keeps the time of whoever tied it."

"Poison doesn't know how to count," said Mira, slowly.

"It doesn't know what day it is," said Wren. "And this does. It knows exactly. It's been renewed on a date. On the ninth. Like a library book."

Theo said, in a high small voice, "So it's not poison."

"No."

"It's not the silverbell."

"It's nothing that ever grew," said Wren.

"It's a working," said Dara.

He said it quietly. They all turned. He was sitting very straight, with his thin hands clasped on the folded paper in his lap, and his gray face was alight. "That's the word. It's the word in the margin. She used it, the woman. The mark of the working." His voice shook. "It's not a harm. It isn't a, it's a, I've been trying to say it for a fortnight. It's a binding."

The wheels turned.

It was a very simple word, and it went through the room as a bell goes through a church. A binding. Elen sat on the boards with her hands in her lap and heard it, and heard, behind it, a clear flat Old Court voice in a warm room with two lamps. Every binding of this order leaves its mark upon the one bound, as a seal upon wax.

"Of the Third Order," said Elen.

"Which can only be wrought," said Dara, "by someone who holds the key."

There was a long silence.

"We need to read it," said Elen.

She said it slowly. She was thinking out loud, and as she did, a plain fact began to take shape in front of her, like a ship coming out of fog. "Everything it says. The commentary. Volume Two, the whole of Of Binding and of Marking. Not the bit we've got. Not the lines Alan copied." She stopped. She had said his name. It lay on the boards in front of her like a stone that she had dropped, and she did not pick it up. "We need to know how it's tied. What it needs. If there's a, if there's a way to undo it. And we can't read it."

"I can read a third," said Dara.

"A third's no good. It needs all of it, and it's in the Closed Stacks. It's in a cipher that nobody under sixty has used since the war. It needs somebody who learned it at seven, with a master and a ruler."

Nobody said the name.

They all looked at the floor. Margaret gleamed, enormous and dented, in the middle of the ring. Somewhere above them in the dark, the great black bell hung in the beams, perfectly silent. Bartholomew, on the rim of the cauldron, had turned his small pewter face toward the trapdoor, as though listening.

"He's the only one who can read it all," said Wren.

"I know."

"He's the only one who can write it in the form the Council wants."

"I know."

"He's the only one," said Wren, in a low even voice, "who sat in a larder at two in the morning with a jar of silver flowers and threw his coat on it."

"I KNOW," said Elen.

It came out of her so loud that the cat in the trapdoor fled. It rang off the great wheels. She sat with her fists clenched on her knees and her face burning, and felt it go out of her, all of it, the whole bright furious week, like air out of a bellows, and she did not know what was left.

"Then," said Mira, gently.

"He said a thing," said Elen.

It was small. It was the voice of a very young person, saying a thing that she knew sounded foolish.

"I know he did," said Wren.

She was sitting very still. She had put the chalk down. She was looking at the graph she had drawn, the flat line and the hill, and her face had gone strange, closed and tired and not at all sardonic. "I told him," she said, "on Thursday week. In the Annex. I said, you looked like a man reading a bill, and she looked like a girl being read."

"You did what?" said Mira, shocked.

"I went down there to be angry. I said it. It was a rotten thing to say." She rubbed her face. "He didn't hit back. He didn't say a word. I went out. And I got to the end of the corridor, and I looked round. I don't know why." She drew breath. "He was sitting at the table with his hands flat on it. And then he put them over his face."

Elen did not move.

"He didn't make a sound," said Wren. "He just sat there, in the lamplight, with his hands over his face, like a man at the bottom of a well. For quite a long time. I stood there, I don't know, a minute." Her voice was low. "And I thought: oh. That's a person who's been hit with something he doesn't have a name for. I didn't go back. I should have. I don't know what I'd have said." She looked up. "Don't tell him I told you."

The pendulum swung out and hung.

"Elen," said Mira.

"I can't," said Elen. "I can't yet. I can't just walk into a room and say, I need your Old Court. Not as if it were nothing. I'd, I think I'd, I'd say something I didn't mean." Her mouth shook. "I'd say it too soon. I'd forgive him before I'd, before I'd finished. And then I'd do it again. I'd go on being careful." She wiped her face. "I said I wouldn't."

There was a long silence.

"May I suggest," said Mira, in her small level practical voice, "a form?"

Elen looked at her.

Mira had closed her ledger. She sat with it in her lap and her hands folded on top, and her small square face was perfectly composed, and there was something at the very corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else. "A request," said Mira. "For assistance in the translation of a text. In the correct form. Under your signature, as the Applicant, and addressed to him as the Recorder of the assay. It requires no sentiment. It makes no apology. It asks for nothing but a skill." She paused. "It is, I believe, the only language in which Alan Valemont can be asked for anything at all."

"It's the only language he speaks," said Wren.

Elen made a small sound. It was a laugh. It came out half a sob, and she put her hand over her mouth, and it went on, helplessly, through her fingers, until her shoulders shook.

"A form," she said.

"A very good one," said Mira.

"With a box."

"Several."

"I'll do it," said Elen. She wiped her eyes. "Oh, I'll do it. I'll do it so well that he'll cry."

She took out a pencil and the half of a card. It was one of her own, the gray rough stock, and she smoothed it flat on her knee and bent over it, with her tongue between her teeth. She wrote it with great care, in a hand that was, for once, almost neat.

To A. Valemont, Recorder. The undersigned, Applicant, requests your assistance in the translation of certain passages of Old Court relating to bindings of the Third Order. The matter is urgent. The undersigned is aware that she has no claim upon

She stopped.

She looked at it for a long time.

The pencil hovered. The great pendulum swung out and back, once, twice, and the dust turned in the long bars of the light, and she thought: I have no claim upon his time. I have no claim upon his kindness. I have no claim upon a thing that I put out of a room, in a tower, in a voice like a drawn wire. And she saw very clearly that if she finished the sentence she would be telling a lie.

She wrote, instead, very small, at the end of the line:

Please.

She did not add anything else. She folded the card in half, and in half again, and tucked it into the pocket of her coat, over her heart, behind the gray strip with the watering can, and buttoned the flap.

They stayed until the bell rang for supper.

They stayed to plan, as far as there was a plan. They would speak to Healer Brandt in the morning. Mira would write to the Archivist, formally, in the Treasurer's absence, to ask whether Vol. II could be read under Article Twenty-seven on the Monday, with the Applicant's signature and the Warden's countersign. Dara would copy out, from memory and in his own hand, every line of the margin he could recall, on a single sheet. Theo would carry Margaret to a place of safety, which turned out, after some discussion, to be the clock-keeper's cupboard, where she was received by the gray cat with an air of contemptuous but real interest. And Wren, with the chalk, drew on the clean board of the floor a plain small map of the north lawn, in white, with the Finger marked on it as a thin line, and the infirmary as a rectangle, and a cross. They knelt round it in the lamplight like generals.

"The sixth," said Wren. "Tuesday. A quarter to one. We'll want three on the lawn. Four, if we can stand it. Brandt in the ward, as she's allowed. The Warden at her window. And one of us in the reeds."

"One of us," said Elen.

"With a card," said Wren.

Elen looked at the map. She looked at the cross.

"With a witness," she said.

They did not answer. But nobody, she noticed, said no.

The lamps were lit on Sunday.

She had meant to be early. She had said so, to herself, in the clock tower, at four, with the can in her hand: I'll be at the Annex at half past, and I'll do them myself, and if anyone's been at them I'll know. She had lost track. She had been, in the way that she had always been, absorbed: in a long careful afternoon of Dara's copying, in the strange new gentleness of the club in exile, in a quarrel with Theo about whether Margaret could safely be carried down a stair, which she had lost. She came out of the west door at twenty-five past five with the can swinging at her side, and stopped in the blue dusk at the top of the south arcade with her mouth a little open.

They were burning.

They ran down the length of the passage in a long gold double string, forty small steady flames, each in its own green chimney, each with its little tin disc turning in the cold. They had been lit with care. She could tell at once. The wicks were trimmed square. The fonts were filled to the line and not an eighth over. Not one of them flickered, not one smoked. And at the foot of the Annex step, at the arch, the place where she had left it, stood a small tin can with a long thin spout, and a folded rag laid across it, and a slip of paper tucked under the handle, in exactly the place where she had put it, at exactly the angle.

She had found them lit on Friday.

She had come at nine, hollow, with a face like paper, and found the arcade shining and the can where she left it, and had thought nothing at all. She had been too empty. On Saturday she had found it again, and had thought, quite simply, Mira, and been grateful, and not looked. It was only on Sunday, in the cold clear dusk, with a card in her pocket and a plan in her head, that she stood on the cobbles and understood that she did not know who had done them.

"Excuse me," said a small high voice.

She turned.

It was a very small boy. He was about eleven, round-faced and serious, in a coat that had been bought for him to grow into and had not yet done so. He had a satchel on his back and a muffler trailing from his neck, and he stood a few feet off on the flags, with his hands clasped in front of him, looking up at her with the solemn, interested, entirely unalarmed expression of a naturalist who has come across a rare bird and is anxious not to disturb it.

"Hello," said Elen.

"Hello. I'm Tuck. Percival. First year." He considered. "Percy. Are you the one who does the lamps?"

"I do some of them. I'm, I'm filling in."

"For Kieran."

"For Kieran."

"He showed me where the Alchemy room was," said Percy Tuck. "When I was lost. He said to look for the lamp with the dent." His round face was grave. "I'm very sorry he's ill. I should like to say so to somebody. I told the new one but he didn't seem to know what to do with it."

"The new one?"

"The new lamp monitor," said Percy. "He did them all. Friday, and yesterday. And today at four." He pursed his lips. "He's very stiff."

Elen did not move.

"Stiff," she said.

"Like a poker. He's tall. He's got dark hair and a very straight back, and he says everything like it's in a book." He frowned in the effort of exact recollection. "On Friday he did it all wrong. He didn't turn the key. He took off the chimney, and it burned him, on the Vickery, and he dropped the can, and he said a very small word."

"What word?"

"'Oh.'" The round face was scrupulously fair. "It was a very small one. I think he'd have said a bigger one if he'd known it." He drew a breath. "I told him how to do it. And he thanked me. He's got very good manners. And then he said, 'Right then.'"

The wind moved on the arcade. Somewhere along it, a tin disc turned over on its twine with a faint small tick.

"Right then," said Elen.

"It's what Kieran says," said Percy. "But he said it differently. He said it as though it was somebody else's coat and he was trying it on." He thought. "He says good evening to all of them. He read the tags. He said, 'Good evening, Doris,' to Doris, in a very official way. And he said to the one with the question mark, I heard him, he said, 'I regret that I do not know what to call you.'"

Her hand had closed on the handle of the can so tightly that the tin creaked.

"He wore a bandage," said Percy. "On the first two fingers. It's green underneath. I think it's Brandt's." He added, after a moment, with a faint note of reproach, "He didn't ask my name."

"He doesn't, always," said Elen. "At first." Her voice was not quite steady. "He's, thank you, Percy. You've been very helpful."

"I know," said Percy Tuck, with great dignity, and, adjusting his satchel, he bowed from the waist, a small stiff careful bow that was undoubtedly, she thought, a copy of someone else's, and went away down the cloister.

She stood alone at the foot of the Annex steps.

She was holding the can. She did not know how long. It was a heavy thing, tin, with a long spout, and it had been hers for nine days, and there was something on the handle. She lifted it to the lamplight. It was a smear. It lay across the tin where a hand had gripped it, a small clear streak of something soft and green and faintly aromatic, and it had a smell: mint, and camphor, and something bitter and sweet, like a hedge in rain. She knew it. She had had it on her own knuckles, on a Sunday in her first term, after a cauldron. It was Brandt's. And caught on the rough lip of the spout, so fine that she would not have seen it if she had not been looking, was a single thread of white linen.

She put her hand over her mouth.

He had come down in the dusk. He had picked up her can. He had stood in the cold, with no one watching, and read forty names off forty bits of tin, and said good evening to every one of them, in the voice that he used for the Warden, and burned his fingers, and been told how to do it by a child. And he had put the slip back under the handle, exactly where it was, at exactly the angle. He had written nothing. He had not left a word.

He had turned the key.

"Oh," said Elen.

It came out of her in a wet and shaking breath. It was half a laugh. She sat down quite suddenly on the cold step with the can in her lap and put her forehead down on her knees, and her shoulders shook, and for a good long time she did not make any sound at all. It was not grief. She was quite certain of that. It was too light for grief. It was something that went up in her like a bubble, bright and unsteady and enormous, so that she thought if she opened her mouth she might simply float away over the arcade.

He had turned the key before the chimney. Eventually.

She lifted her head.

The arcade lay before her, in the blue cold, with its long gold double string. At the arch, the lamp above her head burned in its green glass, round and yellow and steady, with a small tin disc tied to the bracket by a loop of twine. She stood up. She put the can down on the step. And she said, quite formally, in a voice that was not entirely under her control, to the flame:

"Evening, Doris."

The lamp burned. It did not seem to mind.

She went down the arcade a little way, slowly, with her hand trailing along the cold stone of the wall, reading the tags as she passed. Philippa. Old Bertram. The Colonel. Mrs. Abernathy. Gerald, and, beneath, Not that Gerald. They turned in the wind. They were lit, every one, and trimmed, and not one was out of true. And she came to the little bent lamp by the library door, the one with the tin disc that had never had a name on it, only a question mark in a hand like a cobweb, scratched with a pin.

Kieran had never named it.

He had told her once, in the Annex, in the second week of December, with his tray of oil cans on his hip. He said it had been there before him. He said it had a lean to it. He said it was the only lamp in the school that he had never been able to get quite right, that it would burn very well for a month and then go out for no reason, and he had held off naming it because he thought it would tell him, in the end, in its own time, what it wanted to be called.

She had a pencil. She took it out. She took out of her pocket a small square of tin that she had cut that afternoon, with Dara's scissors, from the lid of a biscuit box, for no reason that she had been willing to look at. She scratched a word on it with the point of the pencil. It took a long time. She held it up to the lamp.

"I don't know what you want," said Elen, softly. "I think maybe I do."

She tied it to the bracket with a loop of green twine, over the question mark, so that the two tags hung together, the old and the new. It turned in the wind. It caught the light.

Presently.

She stood looking at it for a long minute.

Then she went back along the arcade to the Annex step, and sat down, and took out the card, the old gray one with the watering can, and the stub of pencil from behind her ear. She turned over the slip that had been tucked under the handle of the can, the one that said, in her own quick hand, Back at nine. (Water.) And on the clean side, in letters that were small and quick and entirely steady, she wrote:

Doris says thank you. She also says you turned the key before the chimney, eventually. — E.

She looked at it a moment, and then, very carefully, she added a line underneath.

P.S. The one with the question mark is called Presently now. I hope that's all right with Kieran.

She tucked the slip back under the handle, at exactly the angle, where it had been.

Then she took out the other thing.

It was a folded card, creased in four, soft from a day in her pocket. She opened it on her knee under the lamplight. She read it once, slowly, with her lips moving. To A. Valemont, Recorder. The undersigned, Applicant, requests your assistance. She looked at it for a long time. Then she took the pencil, and under the word Please, in a hand that was quite steady, and not at all formal, she wrote three more lines.

This is a request for assistance. It is not a sorry. It is a form.

The Quiet Annex. Monday. Four o'clock.

Bring the second lamp.

She read it over. It was, she thought, perhaps the worst form that had ever been drawn up. It had no heading and no boxes. It was in pencil, on the back of a promise card, in a hand that sloped uphill. It was, on the whole, entirely correct in the one particular that mattered. She folded it once, and tucked it under the handle of the can, beside the slip, so that the two pieces of paper lay one on the other like two hands.

She got up.

She stood a moment at the foot of the steps in the blue dusk, with the whole long string of the lamps burning behind her, forty small gold flames and a bent one with two tags, and the cold coming up from the flags. It had begun, quite softly, to snow. A single flake settled on the back of her hand and did not melt. She put the hand into her pocket. She felt a small round hard thing, wrapped in wool. A pewter frog, in a green cloak.

"Right then," said Elen.

She said it to nobody. She said it as one says a word that belongs to someone else, to see how it fits. It fitted, rather well. And she turned, with her chin up, and her hands in her pockets, and went away through the dusk toward the clock tower, humming, very badly, the song of the woman who married a lighthouse.