He found the can at six o'clock on Monday morning, which was a quarter of an hour before he had any business to be anywhere near it.

He had not slept. He had stopped counting the nights some time ago. He had lain on his back until the window went gray, and then he had risen, and washed, and made his bed with its sharp corners, and gone out into a world the color of pewter with no clear idea of where he was going, and his feet had taken him by the long way round the south arcade to the arch of the Quiet Annex. He told himself that he wished to see whether the lamps had burned through the night. They had. They stood along the whole length of the passage, forty small pale flames, gone thin and cool in the first of the daylight, and at the foot of the Annex steps, in the place where he had set it down on Sunday afternoon with his hand wrapped in linen, stood a small tin can with a long thin spout.

There were two papers under the handle.

He had left one. It was the slip that said Back at nine. (Water.) in a quick loose uphill hand, which he had put back with great care, at exactly the angle at which he had found it, and which he had not written upon. Now there was a second beside it, folded in four, and the first had been turned over. He saw that from a yard away. The clean side was covered in small quick writing.

He did not pick it up at once. He stood on the cold stone with his hands at his sides and the whole bare gray arcade round him, and looked at it, as a man looks at a letter from the one person in the world that he has most feared to hear from. Then he bent, and took it, and read.

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

He read it twice. There was a P.S., smaller, underneath.

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

Something happened in his chest. It was a small thing, quick and entirely involuntary, and it came up through him and out of his mouth before he could stop it: a short, startled, cracked huff of breath that was almost a laugh. He put his hand over his mouth. He looked along the arcade. At the far end, by the library door, a small bent lamp stood on its bracket, leaning a little to one side, as it always did, and on its iron arm two tin discs turned together in the wind. He could not read them at that distance. He did not need to.

He unfolded the second paper.

It was a card. It was the rough gray stock of the Annex, soft with a day in somebody's pocket, creased in four. It began To A. Valemont, Recorder, in a hand that was, for once, nearly neat. It said that the undersigned, Applicant, requested his assistance. And then it said Please. And below that, in a different pencil, in letters that sloped steeply uphill, it said:

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.

He sat down on the step.

He did it quite slowly, as if his knees had made the decision for him. The stone was cold through his coat. He held the card between his two bandaged fingers and read it again, and again, and a feeling went through him that he did not at once know how to name. It was not relief. It was larger and a good deal more frightening. It was the feeling of a man who has walked for nine days in the dark with his hand out in front of him and has just touched, with the tips of his fingers, something warm.

She had called it a form.

She had known, of course. She had known the whole time exactly how to ask. She had taken the only language in which he could be asked for anything at all, and she had used it, and then, as though she could not bear to leave it as it was, she had written underneath, in pencil, It is not a sorry. And she had been right. It was not. It was something he had not been given before. It was a door, drawn up in the correct form, with the lamp lit behind it.

"There are rooms," said Alan, aloud, to the empty arcade, in a voice that was not entirely steady, "that remain cold."

He sat there for a long time, with the paper in his hand, until the rooks began on the roofs.

He was at the Annex at ten minutes to four.

He had been at the library door since three. He had put the time to use, or he had told himself so. He had sat at the long table with a sheet of paper in front of him and his grandfather's pen in his hand and written, over and over, in his best script, an apology in proper form. It had a heading. It had numbered paragraphs. It acknowledged, in the first, that on the twenty-seventh of January, in a tower, in the presence of no witness, the undersigned had made a statement to the Applicant concerning the cause of certain events. It acknowledged, in the second, that the statement had been accurate. It was perfectly drawn. It was, he thought, the best thing of its kind that he had ever made. And at half past three, with the third paragraph half written, he had put down the pen and looked at it, and understood that a girl who had said I'd rather lose all of it would have found it, in about four lines, exactly the thing she had been talking about.

He had turned it face down. He had folded it once, and put it in his pocket. He had taken out of his notebook the other thing, the soft folded sheet with the crease worn white, and had put that in his breast pocket where he could feel it against his heart. Then he had gone to the dormitory store, and signed a form, and been looked at by a prefect, and come away with a heavy brass lamp with a green glass chimney.

The Annex was warm and quiet.

It was just as it had always been. The long table lay under the west window in the pale light of a February afternoon, with the dust turning in the bars of the sun, and the silence lay over it like a quilt. The lamps along the walls were lit, though it was not yet dark. Somebody had put them on. Over the door, in its green glass, burned the one that was called Doris. And at the far end of the long table, with her back to the window and her chin on her fist, in the old patched brown coat, with a sheaf of papers spread in front of her in a hand he knew to be Dara's, sat Elen.

She did not rise.

She looked up. That was all. Her face was thin. It was thinner than it had been on the arcade at dusk, and there were shadows under her eyes the color of bruised plums, and her red hair, which she had pulled up in a rope, was coming down on one side. She looked at him for a long moment, as a person looks at a thing that she has been waiting for and is not quite sure she is permitted to believe in. And he saw, in the back of her eyes, something small and bright and wary, like a lamp in a window at the end of a long road.

"You're early," said Elen.

"I always am."

"I know." Her mouth moved. It did not quite become a smile. "I thought you might be. I told the others four."

"The others are not here."

"They've gone to see Brandt. All four. I asked for the room." She said it levelly, to the papers. "I thought it would be easier, with fewer people. If it went badly."

"Elen," said Alan.

"Did you bring it?"

He looked at her.

"The lamp," said Elen.

He had it under his arm. He carried it down the long room, past the shelves, and set it on the table at her elbow, a little to the left, where the light would fall across the page. It stood there, heavy and handsome and absurd, with its curved handle and its green chimney, like a witness who has been called and has no idea of the charge.

"A conditional," said Alan, "is a conditional."

She made a very small sound. It was not a laugh. It was the breath before one, drawn in and held. She looked at the lamp, and at the wall, and her chin came down on her fist again, and she said in a level voice, "Sit."

He sat. He took the chair across from her, the one he had always taken, and put his hands on the table. They were not quite steady. The bandage on his right had gone gray. He saw her eyes go to it and rest there, and then move away.

"I prepared something," said Alan.

She waited.

"It is in order." He drew the folded sheet from his pocket. He laid it on the table between them, face down, and squared it to the edge. "It has numbered paragraphs. It has, I believe, a good deal of merit. I find that I am not able to read it to you."

"May I?"

"No."

"I'd like to see how bad it is."

"It is not bad," said Alan. "That is the difficulty."

She did look at it then. She looked at the folded paper for some time, with her head on one side, and the very faintest tremor went across her face, like wind across a pond. Then she lifted her eyes.

"I know," said Elen. "It's got a heading."

He did not answer. He put his hand into the breast of his coat. He drew out a sheet of rough gray paper, folded in four, with the creases gone soft from nine others that had lain against it, and he held it for a moment between his fingers, because he did not know how to let go of it. Then he laid it on the table in front of her.

She did not touch it at once.

She sat looking at it. Her hand came out and rested beside it on the wood, not on it, an inch away, the fingers a little curled. He saw the ink on the knuckle. He saw that her nails were bitten. Then, very slowly, as one lifts a thing out of the water, she took it up and unfolded it, and read.

It did not take long. It was four lines. He had written them on the Friday, at the long table in the library, with the Council's gray words ringing in the air above him and a burned hand in his lap, in the plain unsteady script of a man who has stopped trying to make it look like anything. Dear Elen. I do not know what I said. I know what you heard. I should like to find out.

She read it. She read it again.

She lowered it to the table, and smoothed it flat with the heel of her hand, and sat looking down at it with her lips pressed together.

"That's a very bad letter," said Elen.

"Yes."

"It hasn't got a heading. It hasn't got a single clause. It doesn't explain anything."

"No."

"It doesn't even say sorry."

"I was not certain," said Alan, "what for. It did not seem honest to say it until I knew."

Her shoulders moved. She did not look up. In the stillness of the long room, with the dust turning in the sun, he heard her draw a small sharp breath, and let it out, and a single tear dropped on the gray paper, quite silently, and spread.

"It's the first letter," said Elen, thickly, "that I could have been given."

"That was my observation."

"Was it?"

"I have written ten. This is the only one that I could have sent." He had meant to say it evenly. It came out hoarse. "I did not send it. I was not certain that I had the right. I put it in my notebook, behind the postcards, and I did not know how to bring it up a stair."

"You didn't have to bring it up a stair," said Elen. She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. "There's a form. I did one."

"I received it."

"I know." She almost laughed. "I saw the can. You'd taken the slip out and put it back at exactly the right angle. I thought, he's put it back at the angle. It was the nicest thing anybody's done to me all week."

He could not speak.

She folded the letter again, along its creases, with exquisite care, and set it on the table between them, on top of his folded apology, so that the two papers lay one upon the other, the correct one under and the incorrect on top.

"Then find out," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said you'd like to find out. What I heard." She lifted her eyes. They were dark amber and swimming and quite steady. "Find out."

He sat very still.

He had known, of course, that it would come to this. He had sat in a cold library and in a dormitory in the dark and on a stone step in the dawn, and he had known that if he were given the chance there was only one question left to ask. It was not a thing that he had ever done. It was not, he thought, a thing that anyone in his family had done in nine generations. He had been taught how to state. He had been taught how to explain, to lay out, to make a case. He had never been taught how to say a thing and then stop and listen.

"What did you hear?" said Alan.

It came out quiet and quite bare. It lay on the table between them like a thing that has no handle.

Elen looked at him.

She did not answer at once. He saw her gather herself, in her small straight way, with her hands pressed flat on the wood on either side of the folded papers and her eyes on the middle distance. And when she spoke it was in a voice that he had not heard from her before: low, very even, without any heat in it at all, like a person reading a thing aloud that she has been learning by heart.

"I heard 'if the club had been more careful.'" She paused. "And the club's me. I mean it's all of us, I know that. But it's me. I'm the one who tasted it. I'm the one who stood up. I'm the one who said it wasn't poison." Her mouth shook. "So I heard: if Elen had been a little less. And then I heard the rest. I heard: and that's why Marlow's going to be on a cart. And that's why Kieran's in a bed."

"Elen, that was not."

He stopped.

He felt it in his mouth. It was already there, whole, in order, a clean white clause: that was not what I said. That was not what I meant. It was a defense, and it was entirely true, and it had risen in him like water in a well, and he sat with it behind his teeth and looked at the girl across the table. And he understood that it was exactly the thing. He was about to explain.

"I was about to explain," said Alan.

"Yes."

"I shall not." He shut his mouth. He drew breath. His voice, when it came, was not at all certain. "Please. Go on."

She looked at him a moment longer. Something went across her face that he could not read. It was very quick, and soft, and it might, in another light, have been astonishment.

"And then there was the other thing," said Elen. "The cost." She said it carefully, as one handles a hot dish. "I heard 'you're worth the cost,' and I heard 'I'll pay it.' And I thought it was the loveliest thing. And then I thought, a bill. He's put me on a bill. I'm something that's got to be settled." She wiped her eyes. "I know you didn't mean it. I know that. I know you meant, I don't know. But that's what it sounded like. It sounded like I was something you'd decided you could afford."

There was a very long silence.

In the corner, by the window, a bar of the pale sun had moved onto the wall and turned the dust gold. The lamp over the door burned steadily. The sound of the great clock came faintly through the stone, a long way off, slow and patient, like a heart.

"I have been looking for that word," said Alan.

It came out slowly.

"For nine days. I went over it a great many times. I thought that I had said something wrong, and I did not know what. I looked for it in the Charter. I looked for it in my notebook. I read the Council's papers by a stranger's lamp." He drew a breath. "I found it on Friday, in the library, when I had been told that your petition would be heard in the spring. I had said the word cost. I had said it twice. And I realized that it was not the word I meant."

"What did you mean?"

"I meant that there is nothing that I would not give." His voice cracked, and he let it. "I meant that I would pay the cadetship and the name and the house. I meant that I would stand in front of the Chair of the Committee, in a ring of silver, and answer any question that he asked, with the whole of my life. I meant that you were the one thing in the world that I would not refuse." He looked down at his hands. "And I called it by the name of the thing that people wish to avoid."

Elen did not move.

"You are not the cost," said Alan. "You are the reason. I have been four days in finding it out. It is a very small distinction. It appears to be the whole of the matter."

"That's more like it," said Elen.

It came out in a whisper. She had put the back of her hand against her mouth.

"There is more," said Alan.

"I thought there might be."

"I do not have all of it." He was speaking carefully, trying every word before he put his weight on it, like a man crossing ice. "I shall say what I have. You may tell me if I am wrong." He lifted his eyes. "The Warden said to me, in the Great Hall, after the hearing, that accuracy is not the same as justice. I thought she was speaking of the Council. I have since come to believe that she was speaking of me."

Elen's lips parted.

"I explained a door," said Alan. "That is what I did. In the tower. I stood there and explained the door that the Council had walked through, very carefully, in order, with every hinge accounted for. And you were not standing at the door. You were standing in the room."

The whole of the Annex was quite still.

"You told me that it was the only place where nobody corrected you. You told me that in the first hour you showed it to me. I sat in your chair, among your leaves. I heard it. And then, on the one night that you most needed it to be true, I walked into it, and I corrected you." His voice had dropped almost to a whisper. "I did it very gently. I took great care to tell you that I did not mean you. And I did it in the one room in the world where you had been promised that no one would."

He heard a small sharp breath.

"That was the part," said Alan, "that I could not bear, when I understood it. I do not think that I have ever done a worse thing. And I did not know that I was doing it. That was the worst."

Elen put both hands over her face.

She did not make a sound. Her shoulders went in, once, and stayed there, and a very long moment went by in the golden quiet of the Annex with the dust turning and the lamps burning. He did not move. He had thought about moving. He had thought, in the dawn, on the cold step: I shall put my hand out. It had seemed a plain and obvious thing. And now, with her sitting there with her face hidden and her shoulders shaking, he understood that it was not his to do, and that if he did it she would feel, once again, that something had been settled for her. So he sat with his hands flat on the table, and waited.

"I am sorry," said Alan.

He said it very plainly. It was the thing he had come to say. He had not planned how. It simply came, and he let it, and it sat in the room like a stone laid on a table.

"I am not sorry that it was true. I should not say that. It was true, and I shall not pretend it was not. But I am sorry that it was all I said." He drew a breath. "I am sorry that I answered the Council's question, in the room where you needed a person."

The hands came away from her face.

She was crying. She did not seem to mind. Her cheeks were wet, and her eyes were swimming, and she looked at him across the long scrubbed table with an expression of such naked and astonished and entirely undefended attention that he could scarcely meet it.

"There is one thing more," said Alan. "And then I shall stop."

"Go on."

"I may do it again." He heard how it sounded. He went on, because it was the shape the truth had to take. "You said that it was built in. That it was the way I was made. I have thought a good deal about that. I believe that you were right. I do not think that I can promise not to be correct. It is a habit. It is, I think, more than a habit. It is the thing that I do when I am afraid." He met her eyes. "I should like to be able to stop. And I do not think that I can do it alone."

"What do you want me to do?" said Elen, very low.

"When I begin to be correct," said Alan, "in a way that hurts you, I should like you to say a word. One word. And I shall stop."

"What word?"

"I consulted a friend," said Alan. He found that the corner of his mouth had moved. "Pip suggested one. I believe that he considers it his greatest contribution to the literature of the subject."

"What is it?"

"Footnote."

There was a pause.

She looked at him. It was a long look, wide and wet and unguarded, and he saw it go into her, slowly, as the first thin light goes into a room. Her lips parted. The corner of her mouth trembled, and went up, and came down, and went up again. And a sound came out of her that he had not heard for nine days. It was small and damp and cracked down the middle, and it was, quite unmistakably, a laugh.

"Footnote," said Elen.

"I shall stop at once."

"You'd stop."

"I should stop. And I should ask what you had heard." He drew breath. "I believe that I could do that. It is a very simple clause."

"It's a safe word," said Elen. She was laughing and crying at the same time, with her hand pressed to her mouth. "You've made a safe word. You've made a clause for the thing. Oh, Alan."

"It is a procedure," said Alan, stiffly. "I thought it might be easier to enforce."

"Footnote," said Elen again, helplessly. "He said it'd be in a footnote. He said it'd be at the wrong time. And it's in a footnote." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I'm going to kill him. I'm going to kill Pip. And then I'm going to give him a bun."

"I should recommend the second."

She laughed again, and the laugh turned into something else, and she put her forehead down for a moment on her folded arms on the table. He waited. When she lifted her head, her face was blotched and red and radiant with tears, and there was a look in it that he had not seen since a night in a gallery, under a hundred thousand stars, in the first snow of the year.

"I'm not going to say I forgive you," said Elen.

"I did not ask."

"I know you didn't." She sat up. She pressed the damp from her cheeks with both hands, and drew a long unsteady breath. "I want to say it anyway. Because it's the truth. I don't know that I do. I don't think it's a thing you can just do, because someone's said a very good thing at a table. I think it takes a little while." She looked at him. "But I heard you. All of it. I want you to know that I did. It went in."

"Thank you."

"I'm going to take it," said Elen. "The sorry. And I'm going to put it somewhere. And I want to put a, I want to write something next to it." She took the stub of pencil from behind her ear. She took the card from her breast pocket, the creased gray one with the watering can at the top, and turned it over, and wrote, quite carefully, with her tongue between her teeth. She held it up for him to see.

It was in her quick, uphill, perfectly legible hand. It said: Noted. Not closed.

"Noted," said Alan.

His voice was not entirely under his control.

"It's the nearest I've got," said Elen. "It's how I feel."

"It is an extremely accurate description."

"I know. I learned it from a master." She tucked the card away. "Ask me again."

"When?"

"Presently," said Elen.

He heard it. It was a small thing, one word, in the golden air of the Annex, and it went through him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet like a bell going through a tower. He had said it, in a courtyard, in a carriage, in a library, in a hundred rooms, as a form of evasion. He had been told once, on a Monday, in a corridor, by a girl with ink on her thumb, that it was her favorite phrase in the whole language. At present. Not forever.

"Presently," said Alan, and had to stop.

She drew the two papers toward her, the letter and the apology, one on top of the other, and her eyes went to the second. It lay beneath, face down, folded, with a corner of paper showing.

"I'll keep that one too," said Elen. "The correct one. I won't read it. I'm only keeping it in case I ever want to be proud of you." She tucked them both into the inside pocket of her coat, over her heart, with the gray card, and the seventh letter, and a small hard thing wrapped in wool. "I'm keeping all of your bad letters. I'm going to have a whole box."

"I believe that there are eight more."

"I know. I want them all." She buttoned the flap. "There's a hat in there too. It's very ugly. I'll give you it when you ask."

"I should like to ask for it," said Alan, "presently."

She was smiling at him. It was a wet, shaky, crooked smile, with the dimple coming and going at the corner of her mouth like a small light in a window. It was not yet the whole of one. But it was the first that he had been given in nine days, and he sat and received it with his hands on the table, quite still, as one receives a thing that one has not earned and has no intention of refusing.

"I said something awful too," said Elen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"In the tower. I said you handed me the knife handle first. I said it was built in. I said it was the way you were made." She was looking at her hands. "That was unfair. I'd like to take that one back."

"It was not unfair."

"It was a bit unfair. Because you can learn." She lifted her eyes. "I was told. In the forest."

He went still. "You went into the forest."

"I did."

"Alone."

"I released you from the condition," said Elen, a little defensively.

"You did."

"It was the right thing to do. I think. It was the only thing I could do." She hesitated. "I fell into some mirewort."

He was on his feet. He did not remember rising. The chair had gone back with a crash that rang through the Annex, and every lamp along the wall dimmed, and the little brass bell in the ceiling tinked once, reproachfully.

"It's all right," said Elen, quickly. "It's fine. I'm fine. A root got me. A very kind one. It put me down in the clearing."

"A root."

"It belongs to a very old lady," said Elen. "She's about forty feet high. She says she's a grandmother."

He stood quite motionless, with one hand on the table. He was white to the lips. He opened his mouth. He shut it. And, very slowly, he lowered himself back into the chair, and picked up the lamp's cord, and put it down again, and said, in a voice of great and terrible calm:

"I should like to know the name of the root."

"It hasn't got one."

"I should like to thank it."

"I did," said Elen. "I brought salt." And then, because he looked so exactly like a man who has been handed a live coal, she began to laugh again, helplessly, and put out her hand across the table, and laid it on his bandaged one. She did it lightly. It was a warm small hand with an ink-stained thumb, and she did not look at it. "She's the one who told me," said Elen. "About the nine nights."

He was quite still.

"The thread under the school. That it was tied by a cold hand with a smell. That it had to be tied again, every nine nights, at the owl-hour, or the boy would wake. She felt it from the roots. She said she could smell it." Her voice was low and steady. "Lavender water. And iron."

"I counted them," said Alan.

He said it slowly. He was looking at her hand.

"From the margin. In the library, on a Thursday, at two in the morning. I had a line from a dead woman's herbal and I had a date, and I did the sum." He lifted his eyes. "Nineteen and nine. I went to the Warden. I found a gap."

"You found a gap," said Elen.

"In the Watch Book. Three lines. The twenty-eighth. It said that the Chair's visit was not to be entered, by order."

She did not say anything. She was staring at him with her mouth a little open, her hand still lying on his, and he watched her take it in. It went across her face in stages, like the light going across a field. It was something like wonder. It was something like fear. And at the very bottom of it, so deep that he almost missed it, there was a leap of pure unreasonable joy.

"We got there separately," said Elen.

"It would appear so."

"I got there by a tree. And you got there by a ledger." She was laughing, and her eyes were wet. "We've come at it from opposite ends. We've come at it from, Alan. Alan, we've got two."

"Two what?"

"Two halves," said Elen. "Give me your notebook."

He gave it to her.

She did not open it. She laid it on the table between them, and put beside it, with the same care, a strip of gray paper, creased in three places, with a watering can at the top. She turned it over. It was written on the back, closely, in pencil, in a quick uphill hand. And he took, from the notebook, a page that he had marked with a ribbon, and laid it next to hers, and they sat for a moment, the two of them, with the long scrubbed table between them and the dust going down in the sun, looking at what they had.

Hers said RECORD. His said RECORD OF OBSERVATION.

They read each other's.

He read hers first. He read it slowly, with his finger moving down the margin. A black carriage, no lamps. Two gray horses. A silver mark on the door. One man out. Tall, thin, upright. Gray coat, gray gloves. Something at his belt, on a leather loop, long and thin, that caught the light. East door, 00.52. He read the line that said Left by the same door, 02.07, and the line that said Ward window: glow brighter. Same color as the thread on K.'s wrist. And at the very bottom, in letters that were smaller than the rest, as though the hand had hesitated:

I think it was tied again.

He read it a second time. His throat had closed.

She was reading his. She had his page in both hands. She read it with her lips moving, hunting down the lines like a person following a track. The nineteenth. The twentieth, 05.10, Chair attended. Sat one hour. And then, the twenty-seventh: 00.30, All quiet. A blank. A note in the margin, in the sergeant's hand. Chair's visit: not to be entered. By order.

She looked up. "Brandt?" said Elen.

"A day-book. She was sent out of the ward at ten to one. By the sergeant. By order of the Chair." He drew a breath. "She came back at seven minutes past two. The thread was bright gold. She smelled lavender water and cold iron through the dispensary door."

"Seven minutes past two," said Elen.

"You said that he left at seven past."

"I did." Her voice was a whisper. "I wrote it. Oh, Alan. It's the same minute."

He nodded. He could not speak. It lay between them on the scrubbed pine, a plain small fact in two hands, one slanting and one upright, in pencil and in ink, a girl in the reeds and a Healer in a dispensary and a soldier in a margin, all of them looking at the same door on the same night from a different side. It was not a proof. A proof was a thing that stood up in a room full of enemies and was not knocked down. But it was a shape. It was the first shape that anyone had made out of the dark, and it had been made by four people who had not known they were drawing it.

He looked at the foot of her page.

Witness: none. (Self.)

He looked at the foot of his.

Witness: none.

They looked at each other.

It was Elen who began it. She made a small strangled sound, and put the back of her wrist to her mouth, and her shoulders started to shake. And then he was laughing too, quite helplessly, with his bandaged hand pressed to his ribs, in a great ragged breath that he could not stop. They laughed until the lamps dimmed. They laughed until the little brass bell rang in the ceiling and neither of them cared. It was the most ridiculous sight that had ever been seen in the Quiet Annex: two persons of reasonable intelligence sitting on either side of a table with two perfectly honest records in front of them, each of which ended in the single word none.

"We both wrote it," gasped Elen.

"We both wrote it."

"It's the worst witness. It's the very, very worst. We've got two."

"Two nones," said Alan, with great gravity, "do not make a one. But I believe that they make a very consistent none."

She gave a shriek, and put her head down on the table. When she raised it, she was wiping her eyes, and her face was scarlet and shining, and he thought, with a sudden helpless clarity: there. That is the face. That is the face that I have been looking for since the twenty-seventh of January.

"All right," said Elen, shakily. "All right. We need one that isn't none."

"We need a witness who is independent." It came out of him in the old level voice, the voice of the form, and he heard it, and she heard it, and she looked at him with one raised eyebrow, and he said, with great care, "I am not being correct. I am being practical. There is a difference."

"I'll allow it," said Elen. "For now."

"Healer Brandt will be in the ward. She is permitted. She can attest to the hour of the Chair's entry and the state of the thread." He ticked it off on his fingers. "The Warden has a window that looks on the infirmary drive. I believe that I can ask her to be at it. She is the Clerk of the Academy. What she sees from it is, in law, a record." He paused. "I do not yet know the third. And someone must be on the lawn."

"In the reeds," said Elen. "At the end of the Finger. It's the only cover."

"I shall be there."

She looked at him.

It was a plain statement. He had made it without any weight at all, as one says that the sun will rise. She sat quite still with her hands on the papers, and he watched it reach her. She had said, in a tower, in the voice of a drawn wire: I'm going into the forest. Alone. And he had stood at the head of a stair with his hand on an iron rail and let her go, because she had asked him to.

"Condition twelve," said Elen.

"I am listening."

"You don't talk. In the reeds." Her mouth had begun, very slightly, to tremble. "At all. Not a word. Not a clause. You lie there and you watch, and you write it down, and you don't say anything until it's over."

"I shall be silent."

"You will not explain anything."

"I shall not."

"If you feel an explanation coming on, you'll bite your sleeve."

"I shall bite my sleeve," said Alan, gravely.

"And you bring the second lamp."

"It will be dark."

"It's a conditional," said Elen, and her eyes were brimming, and the dimple came out in her left cheek like a small gold coin, and for the first time in nine days she was smiling at him with the whole of her face.

He did not afterward remember what he said. He remembered that he said something. It was short and not at all correct. He remembered that the light was going out of the west window, in long gold bars, and that the lamps were burning, and that on the table between them, in the circle of the brass lamp's green glow, two plain pieces of paper lay side by side, each signed with a nothing. He remembered that she put out her hand, and he took it, and that neither of them said anything for some time.

The door banged.

It did not open. It banged, as though someone had put a shoulder to it in a hurry and not stopped to see whether it would give, and every lamp in the Annex flickered. The little brass bell in the ceiling gave a single sharp tink. And into the long gold room, at a dead run, with his satchel banging at his hip and his muffler flying and his round face scarlet, skidded a small figure in a coat that was too large for him.

"Excuse me," gasped Percy Tuck. "I'm very sorry. I did knock. In a way."

"Percy," said Elen. She had snatched her hand back, quite pink. "What is it?"

"I've got a thing." He stood in front of the table, bent double, with his hands on his knees, getting his breath. He was holding something in one fist. "I found it. On the step of the infirmary. I was going to give it to the Warden. But then I thought, no, it's a lamp matter. It's a thing for the lamp monitor." He straightened, and looked at Alan, with great solemnity. "And the other one. The old one. Both. It came out of a soldier's pocket. He was sitting on the step. He dropped it when he stood up, and he saw me see it. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me. And then he went in."

He held it out.

It was a scrap of coarse brown paper, torn from the end of a roll, folded very small. Alan took it. He opened it with a hand that was not entirely steady. It was written in pencil, in a square upright soldier's hand that he had seen only once, in the margin of a book, and it was perfectly legible.

The patient is to be removed on Wednesday at six. By order of the Chair. To the Council's hospital in the city. I thought someone should know. I do not like it. — R.

He read it twice. He did not speak.

He held it out to her. She took it. He watched her read, and he saw the color go out of her face in a single slow tide, and her hand close slowly on the paper until it crackled.

"Wednesday," said Elen. "At six."

"That is the day after tomorrow."

"It's the morning after the sixth." Her voice was a whisper. "If he's moved, we can't. We can't see. We can't, there'll be no ward. No door. No window. No Healer. He'll be in a, in a carriage, in the dark, on a road, and no one will ever, no one will know what." She stopped. She looked up. Her eyes, over the brown paper, were enormous. "Tomorrow night is the last one."

The lamps burned. The great clock in the west tower, a very long way off, struck the half hour.

"Percy," said Alan.

"Yes?"

"You have done something of the greatest importance. I wish you to understand that. I shall see that it is recorded."

The round face lit like a lantern. "Will it have my name in it?"

"In capitals."

"Oh," said Percy Tuck. He drew himself up to his full four feet and a half. "Thank you. I'll tell nobody. Not even Philippa." He bowed, from the waist, stiffly, in an unmistakable copy of somebody's, and went out, and the door closed behind him.

They sat in the golden light with the paper between them.

"It's a soldier," said Elen, slowly. "Rackham. The sergeant." She looked at the note. "He wrote it in the margin. He wrote that he'd been told. And now he's. He doesn't like it."

"No."

"He's on our side, a bit."

"I believe that he is a man who has done what he was told," said Alan, "and has found, in the doing of it, that he cannot quite go on." He drew breath. "It is not a thing that one should despise."

Elen looked at him. Her face, in the golden light, was very pale, and quite calm. She had taken out the strip of gray card, and the stub of pencil, and was writing on it, in a quick small hand, under the lines that said Wait. (Water.) Fruit: the story. and 11. Tell the truth, in order. Properly.

"What are you writing?" said Alan.

She turned it round. It said:

12. Tuesday. Reeds. With him. (He bites his sleeve.)

He could not speak.

"Eight o'clock," said Elen, putting it away. "Tonight. The clock tower. All of us. You'll have to tell Wren that you know about the nose." She stood, and he rose with her. The brass lamp stood on the table between them in its pool of green light, quite still, like a witness who has at last been told what he is for. "And Alan."

"Yes?"

"Bring the form."

"Which?"

"All of them," said Elen. "We're going to need every one."