Alan brought all of the forms.
He had spent the afternoon gathering them. There were eleven, and he carried them up the clock tower stair at two minutes to eight in his grandfather's leather satchel, in the order in which they had been made, each in its own folder with a ribbon. The Record of Custody for a sample drawn at nine minutes past one on the morning of the twentieth. The Petition under Section Twelve, with a flourish of Professor Hale's ink at the foot and a space beside the second name. The Archivist's reply of last June, with its stamp on the back. A fair copy, made that afternoon in the library from the memory of a single reading, of three blank lines in the margin of a black book. A sheet headed RECORD OF OBSERVATION. And in the front pocket, where he could reach it without looking, two small papers that had been folded in four and unfolded perhaps forty times since six o'clock that morning, one in a quick uphill hand that said Doris says thank you, and one that said This is a request for assistance. It is not a sorry. It is a form.
He carried the second lamp under his arm.
The third step groaned. He stepped over it. It was a thing that his legs did now without consulting him, and he thought, going up through the dark with the great ticking of the machine coming down to meet him like a slow tide, that it was an odd thing to have learned. Eight days ago he had gone down this stair with his heart in his boots and a girl's cracked voice in his ears, and he had told himself that he would not climb it again. He put up his hand and pushed the trapdoor, and the gold light came down over him.
They were all there.
They sat in a ring on the dusty boards beside the cracked leather chair, in the pool of the lamp on the upturned crate, with the great wheels turning above them and the pendulum swinging out past the slit windows and hanging and coming back. There was Mira, with her ledger on her knee and her gray cardigan buttoned to the chin. There was Dara, thin and careful, with a sheaf of papers on his lap. There was Theo, who had a smear of paraffin on his nose and the air of a man who had been told to be quiet for an hour and was not certain that he could manage it. And there was Elen, on the crate, with her chin on her fist and her coat buttoned over a flat gray card, who looked up as his head came through the floor and said, in a voice that was perfectly level and not at all steady, "Four minutes ten."
"I beg your pardon?"
"From the clock-keeper's door." Her mouth moved. "I wasn't going to count. I did."
"I did not file a form."
"I know. You'd have been slower."
He climbed in. He set the brass lamp on the boards, a little to the left of the crate, where it would throw its green light across the middle of the ring, and straightened. And it was then that he saw the person who had not looked up.
Wren sat at the far side of the circle with her long legs folded and her arms wrapped round her middle, in her usual attitude of cool, dark, sardonic composure, which was, he now saw, a great deal more like a held breath. She did not move. She had her eyes on the planks. And when the silence had gone on for rather longer than it could be borne, she said, in a flat voice, to the floor:
"I owe you an apology."
Nobody said anything.
"I said you looked comfortable." She lifted her head. Her eyes were dark and clear and quite without evasion. "In the Annex. On the Thursday. I said you looked like a man reading a bill. I came down there to be angry and I was, and I said the cruellest true thing I could think of. It was a rotten thing to say. It was also, I think, not entirely correct."
"It was correct," said Alan.
"It was correct as far as it went." She drew a breath. "I looked back, you know. At the end of the corridor."
"I am aware that you did."
Her eyebrows went up. "Who told you?"
"Nobody. I have been informed since that I am an extremely poor observer in some respects. In others I am passable." He kept his voice even. "I was not comfortable, Miss Ashby. I was frightened. I am told that on me the two look the same."
There was a pause.
"It does," said Wren, "look exactly the same."
"I have been asked to work on it."
"I should think you have." A thin gleam came into her eyes. It was not quite a smile. It had in it something that had been a long time away and had found its way home. "All right. Then we're even. You can stop looking at me as if I were going to bite."
"I was not."
"You were bracing."
"I was bracing," said Alan. "It is a habit."
Theo gave a loud wet sniff. Mira put a hand on his arm without looking round. And Elen, on the crate, with her chin on her fist, was looking at the lamp as hard as she could, and he saw that her ears had gone pink.
He sat down in the circle.
He opened the satchel on his knee, and took out the folders, and laid them on the boards in front of him in a row, with the ribbons tied. It was a thing that he had done before an examination a hundred times. He found, to his surprise, that his hands were not quite steady, and that the rest of him was perfectly calm, and that for the first time in nine days the two matched.
"Miss Ashby," said Alan. "I should like to take your statement."
She stared at him.
"As a witness. It will take about a quarter of an hour. I should like to record the particulars of what you perceived in the ward on the night of the nineteenth, at the bedside of Mr. Pell, and I should like to do it in your own words, as nearly as I can." He drew out a clean sheet and uncapped his pen. "I shall not interrupt. I shall not correct. If I do not understand a term, I shall ask you what it means. And at the end I shall read it back to you, and you will tell me what I have got wrong."
"I'm not licensed," said Wren.
"No. It will be recorded as a statement of observation by a student, and not an opinion of an expert. I do not claim for it more than it is." He looked up. "I do not think that it needs more. It needs to be written down by someone who is prepared to treat it as a fact."
She did not say anything for a moment. She sat very still with her arms round herself, and the lamplight slid along the dark line of her braid, and something went across her sharp narrow face that he could not at first read. It was a look of bare and startled attention, like that of a person who has been handed a thing that she had stopped expecting to be given.
Nobody, he realized, had ever written down what she had smelled.
"Right," said Wren, rather hoarsely. "Ask."
He asked. He did it as he did everything, in order, with care. What was the hour. Where did she stand. How close was her face to the wrist. What was the first smell, and what lay beneath it, and how would she describe it, and to what, in her experience, might it be compared. She answered shortly, and then, as he went on asking in the same level voice, less shortly. She said that it was like a key in a pocket on a winter morning. He wrote it down, exactly. She said that it was not the smell of a metal, precisely, but of a cold in the metal, and he asked whether she would prefer that to be recorded as cold iron or as the smell of cold, and she thought, and said the first, and then said, "No, the second," and he wrote both, with a bracket. She said lavender, and that it was faint, and that it was not lavender from a flower but the other kind, from a bottle, with a sweet dead undertone, like a handkerchief in a drawer. He wrote that. He did not smile. He heard her breathing change as she went on, slowly, as one's breathing changes when one is being listened to.
"That is what I have," said Alan, at the end. He read it back. It was a page and a half, in a small upright hand, with a bracket and two crossings-out, and when he had finished there was a silence.
"Is it right?"
"It's right," said Wren.
She had her hand over her mouth. Over it, her dark eyes were very bright.
"It sounds," she said, in a muffled voice, "like I know what I'm talking about."
"I believe that you do."
"Nobody's ever written me down." She took her hand away. "Sign it, I suppose. Where do I?"
She signed. It was a hard, black, thin signature with a flourish at the tail, like the stroke of a sword. He blotted it. And Theo, who had been watching with his mouth open and his eyes enormous, said in a hushed voice, "Can I have one?"
"You may have a statement, Mr. Theo, concerning the effect of a pinch of echo-moss upon a cauldron."
"I'd like that," said Theo, with deep feeling.
"It is not relevant."
"I'd like it anyway."
There was a snort from the direction of the crate. Alan did not look. He took a fresh sheet, and, to the general surprise, began to write.
It took them two hours.
They did it as he had said they would, in order, with the lamps burning. Mira had the ledger and the practical side. She read out, in a small flat voice, the whole of the club's assets: fourpence, a cauldron, a pewter frog, a very small quantity of tea, and Dara's grandmother, whom she entered as a reserve. Theo was appointed Runner, which meant that he would carry messages across the Academy in his boots at a pace that nobody could keep up with, and he took it with such solemn joy that Wren said it was the first time she had ever seen anyone promoted from a cauldron. Dara had the herbal in his head. He recited the margin, line by line, in a thin steady voice, and Alan took it down, and checked it against the copy in his notebook, and found, at the end, that there was a difference of two words, and that Dara's were right.
And Elen sat on the crate with her chin on her fist and watched.
He was aware of it as one is aware of the sun on the side of one's face. She did not speak much. She put in a sentence when it was wanted, sharp and quick and always to the point, and sat back. But she watched him work. She watched his hand go down the page. And once, when he stopped in the middle of a line and said, to nobody, "There is a difficulty," he looked up and found that she was smiling at him, at the very corner of her mouth, with her eyes on his pen, and that she looked away at once, and bit her lip, and the dimple came and went like a small gold coin.
"What is the difficulty?" said Mira.
"I have been trying to say a thing." He laid down the pen. "I should like to do it properly. I shall need a clear piece of floor."
Wren held out the chalk.
He took it. He knelt on the boards, and drew on the gray wood in long plain strokes, as she had drawn a poison and a hill, a line across the middle, from side to side. On the left he wrote a word. On the right, another.
RECORDS.
WITNESSES.
"There are two kinds," said Alan. "Of what we have."
They gathered round.
"On this side," he tapped the left, "are documents. They were made by persons who had no reason that I can discover to agree with one another. A soldier, writing in a margin that he had been told to leave a space. A Healer, writing the hour that she was sent from her ward. A clerk, copying a register. A woman dead for thirty years, in an herbal. They were not made for us. Nobody wrote them to prove anything. They were made because it is what the hand does, when it has been trained." He wrote under it, in a neat column: Watch Book. Day-book. Margin. Custody. "The Council can call them irregular. It cannot call them interested."
"And these?" said Dara, pointing right.
"These are ours." He wrote: Miss Joy, 28 Jan. Miss Ashby, 19 Jan. A source in the forest. "They are what we saw, and smelled, and were told. They are alive, which is their strength. They are also, as any member of the Council will point out, extremely interested." He drew a small bracket. "Three students and a tree."
"A very old tree," said Elen.
"A grandmother," said Alan. "I have recorded her as such."
There was a splutter.
"Neither side is enough," he went on, steadily. "The Council can dismiss either. It will say that the records are fragments and the witnesses are children. It will say that all of them are explicable by a poor night's sleep." He drew a third line, from the left column to the right, in a long curve, like a bridge. "But if they agree. If a Healer writing in a day-book and a sergeant writing in a margin and a girl writing on a card, none of whom conferred, set down the same minute, then it is not an anecdote. It is a thing that has been seen from three sides."
"We conferred," said Wren.
"Not before we wrote." He sat back on his heels. "The order of events is the point. Miss Joy wrote on the night. I wrote on the Thursday. Healer Brandt wrote in her book at seven minutes past two. At the time that each of us put the number on the paper, no one of us knew what the others had. That is the whole of the thing. It is called corroboration."
"It's a very pretty word," said Mira.
"It is an extremely strong one." He looked at the chalk bridge. "And it is still not enough."
Elen had come off the crate.
She knelt beside him on the boards, with her coat sleeves pushed back and her hair coming down, and looked at the chart, and he felt her shoulder an inch from his. She did not touch it. "Because it's still only a story," she said slowly. "It's a very well-told one, and it's got a good shape, and a man with a lovely voice can still say, it's a coincidence of times. It doesn't do anything."
"No."
"We've got two kinds. We need a third." She tapped the floor, between the two columns, where the chalk bridge made a gap. "Something that turns what we know into something we can do."
"A law," said Alan.
They were all looking at him.
"A rule. One that says that when a person has been seen to do this thing, in this manner, at this hour, then there is a remedy, and here is how it is obtained." He heard his own voice, quite level, and under it, quite distinctly, a very small shake. "It may not exist. It may be in the third volume, which is not available. But the second volume is called Of Binding and of Marking, and it is the one that the woman in the herbal had read. I should like to read the whole of it."
"We've asked," said Mira. "I wrote on Saturday."
"I know." He did not smile. "I have been waiting for the answer."
It arrived at ten past ten.
They heard it coming before they saw it: a quick light patter on the stair, and a gasp, and a creak, and a thump as a person who has stepped on the third step without being warned about it discovers that it moves. A small round head came through the trapdoor, red in the face, with a muffler trailing from it and a satchel bumping at its heels.
"I'm sorry," said Percy Tuck. "I knocked. On the stair. It was a soft knock."
"Percy," said Elen.
"I have a letter." He scrambled up into the loft and stood in the middle of the ring, breathing hard, with his small chest heaving and an expression of unspeakable importance. "It's from the Archivist. She said I was to give it to nobody but the Recorder. I said I knew who that was. She said I was not to tell the Warden. I said I wouldn't tell Philippa." He drew himself up. "It's very sealed."
It was. It was a small flat envelope of gray paper, closed with a dot of the Archivist's dull wax, and it said on the front in her own dry hand, To Mr. A. Valemont, Recorder, and Miss E. Joy, Applicant. He broke the seal. He read it aloud, because it seemed to be a thing that should be heard.
Reading of Commentaries on Prohibited Workings, Vol. II, Of Binding and of Marking, is granted under Article Twenty-seven. Tuesday, the sixth, at seven o'clock in the morning, in the Reading Room. Applicant and Recorder. The countersign of the Clerk of the Academy is required.
Your names will be entered in the Reading Book. The Reading Book is open to the Chair, as to all keyholders.
I have no discretion in this matter. I find that I have somewhat less of it than I had.
The Archivist.
He lowered the paper.
"Seven," said Mira.
"Tomorrow," said Dara.
"The Chair will see the names," said Theo. His voice was a whisper. "He'll know. He'll know you're reading it."
"He knows already," said Elen.
She was quite calm. She had risen, and stood in the lamplight with her hands in her coat pockets and her chin up, looking at the brown paper in Alan's hand. "He's known since November. It said so. As is customary, the Chair has been informed. He knew when we put in the first request, and he's known since, and he's let us. I don't think he minds." She turned her head. "I think he thinks we're being very good. I think he thinks we're doing it properly."
"We are," said Alan.
"That's what he likes."
"It is also," said Alan, quietly, "the only road that is left. We proceed correctly." He folded the letter. "It does not seem to me that the name of the road is the thing that matters. It is what we find at the end of it."
"The Warden's countersign," said Mira.
"I shall ask her tonight."
"She'll lose the form."
"She will lose it," said Alan, "in the right drawer."
Wren made a sound that was almost a laugh.
He asked the Warden at a quarter to eleven. He did it in her office at the foot of the north stair, standing, with the form held out before him in both hands, and she took it without a word, and read it with her pen between two fingers. She laid it on her blotter. She looked at it for some time, in the lamplight, without expression. Then she dipped her pen, and signed, with the small hard angular stroke of one who has signed a good many things, and blotted it, and held it out without raising her eyes.
"I have lost another," said the Warden. "This is a spare."
"Thank you, Warden."
"I did not do it," said the Warden, to her ledger. "Shut the door as you go."
The clock tower was dark when he came back for the lamp.
He had told them that he would. They had gone home by ones and twos, down the stair in the dark with their voices going away below, Mira with her ledger and Wren with her sword-stick and Theo, shushing himself, down the third step in a long groan like a ship's timber, and Dara last, who had stopped at the trapdoor and looked back at Alan and said nothing, and then, very quickly, bowed, and gone. The lamp stood on the boards where he had left it. In the gold ring of its light, on the third step below the trapdoor, with her knees drawn up and her chin on them and the whole great ticking dark of the tower going round behind her, sat Elen.
She had not gone.
She did not look up. She had her hands locked round her ankles. There was a quilt over her shoulders, the patched one, and a very small pewter frog sat on the stone beside her in his cloak, regarding the dark with an air of profound sardonic patience. The pendulum swung out. It hung. It came back.
"Sit," said Elen.
He sat.
It was a narrow step. It was cold, and curved, and there was not room on it for two persons of ordinary size without a certain adjustment of the shoulders. He sat on it, at her side, with the brass lamp on the step above and his hands on his knees, and the cold came up through his coat, and for a time neither of them said anything at all.
"You're wearing it," said Elen.
He looked down. It was at his throat. It was green, and long, and much washed, with a small mended place near one end, and it smelled very faintly, in the cold, of mint. He had not thought. He had put it on at some point in the course of the evening as one puts on a thing that one has put on every night for a month.
"It is February," said Alan.
"It is."
"There are rooms."
"That remain cold," said Elen. She said it to her knees. Her mouth moved. "I know. It's a very well-documented phenomenon."
The pendulum went out again, and came back.
"I wanted to ask," said Elen, after a while. "What it was like. The lamps."
"They were difficult."
"I meant the, I mean what did you." She stopped. She took a breath and began again, with great care. "I heard about the key. And the chimney. And Percy told me what you said to the first-year." She turned her head against her knee, and her eyes, in the lamplight, were very large and dark. "He said you said you were the lamp monitor."
"It was the truest thing that I could say."
"It's a good job."
"I did not do it well."
"You did it every night," said Elen. "That's most of it."
He did not answer. He found that he could not. He sat on the cold step with his hands on his knees and the whole machine ticking round him like a heart, and heard a very small voice say, beside him, in a tone he had not heard from her before, so low that he thought afterward he might have imagined it:
"Is this allowed?"
He turned.
She had not moved. But her head was tilted a little toward him. It was very close. He could see the faint smudge of ink along her jaw, and the way her hair had come down on one side, and the pulse in her throat. She was looking at the lamp. She was holding herself very still, as a person does who has put out a hand toward a bird and does not mean to frighten it.
"It is not prohibited," said Alan.
"That's not what I asked."
"No." He drew a breath. "I know it is not."
"I want it to be allowed by you." Her voice shook. "It's not a, I'm not saying it means anything. It's noted. It isn't closed. I just. It's been a long week, and you're warm."
"It is allowed," said Alan.
He said it very quietly.
It went into the cold air of the stair like a coin into a well. And she let out a long, unsteady breath, and her head came down, quite lightly, as a leaf comes down, onto his shoulder.
He sat perfectly still.
Her hair was against his jaw. It smelled of mint and old dust and lamp oil. He felt the weight of her, small and warm and entirely unguarded, along the whole length of his arm, and he did not move, because he thought that if he moved she would stop. He kept his hands on his knees. He looked at the lamp. He looked, for a long time, at the great slow arc of the pendulum going out and hanging and coming back, and he thought: I have done a great many things in my life that I was told were correct. This is the first that I have not needed to be told.
"I'm not asking you to say anything," said Elen, into his coat.
"I know."
"That's what makes it easy." She shifted a little. Her hand came up, and laid itself on his sleeve, not holding it, simply resting, as a hand rests on the rail of a ship. "I can lean on a person who isn't asking."
"I am not asking."
"I know you're not." She was smiling. He could feel it, against the cloth. "It's the loveliest thing you do."
They sat there.
The tower ticked. Far below them, in the dark, a door shut, and the old clock-keeper turned on his cot and muttered to a cat. A thin pale line of moonlight came down the slit window and lay across the boards, and moved, very slowly, as the night went on. He did not know how long. It might have been a quarter of an hour. It might have been the whole of an age. When she lifted her head at last, her face was pale and clear, and she was looking at him quite steadily, with her eyes enormous and dry.
"Seven o'clock," said Elen.
"Seven."
"Don't be late."
"I am never late."
"I know," said Elen. "It's one of the things."
She got up, and shook out the quilt, and tucked the pewter frog into the pocket of her coat. At the head of the stair she turned, with the lamp-glow on one side of her face, and for a moment he thought that she would say something more. She did not. She only smiled, small and crooked and a little shy, and went down into the dark, and he heard her step on the third stair, the loose one, and her voice, soft and exasperated, saying to a plank, "Oh, honestly."
The Closed Stacks were as cold as he remembered.
They went down the spiral stair at one minute to seven, three of them, in single file, Alan first with the brass lamp, and Elen behind, and Dara a pace after, with his hands clasped in front of him and his thin face the color of candle wax. The smell came up to meet them, old paper and cold stone and a faint dry metallic edge, like the air before rain. At the foot of the stair, in the lamplit arch of black stone, the low iron door stood shut, banded with its three wards, the blue and the amber and the thin cold green that he did not like. And beside it, at her small desk with its single lamp, with her gray hair coiled under a pencil and her spectacles on their chain and her hands folded before her, sat the Archivist.
She did not look up.
She had the Reading Book open on the desk in front of her. It was a very large book, bound in black, with a brass clasp, and a pen lay across it with a steel nib. She dipped it. She wrote, in her thin dry hand, with a faint scratching sound, three names. A. Valemont, Recorder. E. Joy, Applicant. D. Hollis. She blotted them. She looked at the clock on the wall.
"Seven o'clock and one minute," said the Archivist. "You are on time."
"Yes, ma'am," said Alan.
"You have the countersign."
He gave it. She read it. She laid it, with a quiet precision, on a small pile at her elbow.
"The Chair," said the Archivist, to the paper, "will see these names by noon. It is the rule of the Reading Book. He may inspect it at his pleasure." She looked up at last. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles went from one face to the next, dry and level and entirely unreadable. "I have never in forty years been able to make an entry in that book without its being seen. I do not suppose that I shall begin now." She took a key from her belt. "I do not apologize for it. I mention it so that you do not think that you are the first."
She unlocked the door.
It was the same small room. It was no larger than a pantry, with its long dark table and its two straight chairs and its single lamp hanging from the ceiling by a chain, and the brass grille along the back wall with ten thousand spines behind it going away into the dark. He set the second lamp on the table. It threw its green light across the polished wood. And he heard, behind him, a very small quick breath, and turned, and saw Elen standing in the doorway with her hands pressed under her chin, as she had stood the first time, gazing along the grille with an expression of such hunger and reverence that he had to look away.
"Sit," said the Archivist. "I will fetch the book."
She brought it in her two hands. It was the same, large and flat and heavy, in dark green cloth gone gray at the edges, with the gilt on the spine cracked. Of Binding and of Marking. She laid it on the table in front of Alan and squared it with one fingertip, and withdrew to her chair by the door.
"One hour," said the Archivist. "You have, I believe, a good deal to find."
He opened it.
It was Old Court. He had known it would be. He turned the pages carefully, one after another, in the green light, through the long dry paragraphs on the nature of knots and the properties of silver, through a section on the First Order that began Of the simple tie and a section on the Second that began Of the healing knot, and he felt Dara lean in at his left shoulder, and Elen at his right, and heard her breathe. He found the heading he had been seeking on page forty-one.
Of the Third Order.
"Read it," said Elen, in a whisper. "Out loud."
He drew breath.
He had read aloud in that room once before. He had done it with a girl's shoulder at his arm and the first snow of the year at the window, and he had not known then what his voice was doing. He did not know now. He only knew that it came out low and level and careful, in the old cadence, as his grandfather had read to him by the fire, and that as he went on it settled into the stone like a thing that belonged there. He gave each sentence first in the old form, and then in plain speech, and he heard, beside him, a very small sound, and did not look round.
"'Of the Third Order,'" read Alan. "'Whosoever, being of the Council or holding its Seal, shall bind a person within the walls of the Academy, shall bind him in the Warded Chamber only, and in no other place. And he shall enter the binding in the Seal-Book at the hour of its making, with the name of the one bound and the term.'"
He paused. His throat was dry. Dara had taken out his pencil.
"'A binding wrought elsewhere, or not so entered, is no binding in law, but an assault.'" His voice did not change. "'And it is void, if three persons who were in the room at the hour of the tying shall swear to it before the Archivist and the Clerk of the Academy, of whom one at least shall be an officer of the Academy. Let the binding then be broken, and the bound set free, and the binder answer.'"
Nobody spoke.
The lamp burned. The hum of the great old building came faintly through the stone, a long way off, like the sound of the sea in a shell. He sat with his finger under the line, and read it again silently, and then a third time, because it did not seem possible that it was so plain.
"Void," said Elen. It came out of her in a whisper.
"If three persons," said Alan, "who were in the room."
"At the hour."
"At the hour of the tying."
"And an officer." She was on her feet. She did not seem to know it. She stood with her hands pressed flat on the table and her face white and shining. "Healer Brandt. She's an officer. She's the Healer-Mistress of the Academy. She'd be, and the Warden, she's the Clerk, she'd take the oath. Alan. It's a law. It's an actual law. It was in the book all the time."
"It has been," said Alan, slowly, "for two hundred years."
"Is there more?" said Dara.
There was.
It was at the foot of the page, in a smaller hand, in the manner of an afterthought, as the best things are set down in the bottom corner of a document, where only a patient person will read to the end. He read it very slowly. He had to stop in the middle, and begin again.
"'And that the binder may not deny his hand.'" The words went into the quiet of the little room like drops of water into a well. "'The Seal, in the working, leaves in the thread an impression of its own device, small as a grain of barley, and it shall be found by any who look closely with a glass. So that he who has bound shall not say that he did not.'"
He put down his finger.
Elen was staring at the page. Her lips parted. In the green light, her eyes had gone enormous and dark and still.
"A seal on wax," said Elen.
"A seal on wax."
"It's a, it's actually a seal. It's a picture. It's in the thread." She drew breath. "The key. And the scales."
"We have not seen it," said Alan. "We shall have to look."
"With a glass."
He was about to say that they had none. He did not. For he had seen, in the corner of his eye, a movement at the door, and he turned his head, and the Archivist had risen from her chair.
She came across the little room, thin and gray and upright, with her spectacles on their chain. She did not look at either of them. She came to the end of the table and stood there a moment with her hands folded in front of her, looking at the open book, at the foot of the page, in the green light, with an expression on her narrow face that he could not at all read.
"Mr. Valemont," said the Archivist.
"Ma'am."
"In forty years, no one has read to the end of that chapter."
Nobody moved.
"It was written by a student," said the Archivist. Her voice was dry and low and perfectly even. "Of the third year. Two hundred and eleven years ago. He had been bound, at fifteen, by a Warden of the Academy, for insolence, in the Warded Chamber, for nine nights. He had been unable to speak above a whisper for a month afterward. He rose, in the course of a long life, to be Chancellor of the Council." She drew a breath. "He had this entered, in the Statute, at the very end of the Order, in the smallest type. He said that a law which was easy to find would be observed by no one, and that a law which could only be found by one who had read to the end would be kept, in the long run, by the right sort of person."
"Was he right?" said Elen, very low.
"He was entirely wrong," said the Archivist. "It has been found by nobody. It has been waiting for a very long time to be found by somebody who was both patient and in need." She paused. "It was drafted for exactly this. I should like it to be known that I think so."
She did not say anything more. She stood a moment longer, narrow and still, with her pale eyes on the page. Then she put her hand into the pocket of her gray gown, and drew out something small, and laid it on the table beside the lamp.
It was a lens.
It was a little thing, of dark brass, no larger than a walnut, with a cap of horn and a small ring for a thumb. It lay on the polished wood in the green glow and gave off a faint dull gleam. And the Archivist stood looking not at it but at the opposite wall, at the grille and the ten thousand spines, with her hands folded, and said, in a tone as dry as a bone:
"I keep one for reading sigils. I do not lend it." She turned and went back to her chair. "It is lying on the table. I do not expect that anyone will notice."
She sat down. She took up her pen. She opened the Reading Book, and bent over it with her gray head, and began to write in it, in her thin precise hand, as though she were the only person in the world.
Elen put out her hand and took the lens.
She held it a moment in her palm, as one holds a bird, and her fingers shook. She looked at Alan. Her eyes were swimming. And he saw her lips shape, without any sound, two words, which were not thank you.
They went up the spiral stair together at a quarter to eight, in the cold, in single file, with the brass lamp swinging in Alan's hand and the dim gray daylight coming down to meet them from the reference hall. Dara went first. He did not say a word. He went up the steps like a man in a dream, with his thin face alight, and at the top he stopped in the empty corridor and turned, and put both hands over his face, and shook.
"It was in a margin," said Dara, through his fingers. "My grandmother kept it for forty years. And it was in a book. And it was the same, it was the same thing. It was all, it was all there."
"It was," said Elen.
She was standing against the cold stone wall in her patched brown coat, with her hand pressed flat against her chest, over her heart, where a little brass thing lay in a pocket. She was white. She was shining. She looked at Alan across the narrow passage, with the lamplight on his face and the gray light on hers, and said, in a whisper:
"In the room."
"In the room," said Alan.
"Three persons."
"At the hour."
They were both very quiet. The thing lay between them in the cold air of the corridor like a stone that has been picked up and found, on the underside, to have a face on it.
"It isn't enough to see him come," said Elen, slowly. "Is it? Not from the reeds. Not from a window. We could watch him go in at a quarter to one and come out at seven past two, all of us, and it wouldn't be the, it wouldn't be the thing. It says in the room. At the tying."
"It does."
"And he sends Healer Brandt out."
"He does."
"And there's a sergeant on the door." She was counting on her fingers. "And a guard on the step. And it's under an order, it's a Council order, nobody's allowed in the ward but Brandt, and Brandt gets put out at ten to one." She stopped. She looked up. "So the only people who could possibly swear to it are the ones who aren't allowed to be there."
"Yes," said Alan.
"That's a trap," said Elen. "It's the same one. It's the same, it's the best one yet." She gave a short, cracked, astonished laugh. "He's got every door covered, and he's never even had to shut one."
"It's a ward," said Dara, in a small voice, lowering his hands. "With a guard on the door. And a Healer who's sent out." He swallowed. "There's a cupboard."
They looked at him.
"A linen cupboard," said Dara, going scarlet. "At the end of the ward, behind the last bed. It's about the size of a. It's not very big. Theo hid in it, in his first year, for a bet. He told us about it for weeks. He said there was just room for two, if neither of them breathed."
Nobody said anything.
"Someone," said Elen, slowly, "would have to be in it."
"An order," said Alan, "would have to be broken."
He heard how it sounded. He heard it go out into the cold passage, in the old level voice, the voice of the form. And he heard, with a perfect and terrible clarity, a thing that he had said, a month and a half ago, in a clear cold voice in a great dim hall, to four hundred persons. If the club had been more careful, in every particular, the Council would have nothing to hold.
He looked at the lens in her hand.
"It is a Council order," said Alan. "It is entirely proper. It has a seal. It was made, as everything in this affair has been made, by a man with the kindest voice in the Academy, within his powers." He drew breath. "And it is the only door."
"I'll do it," said Elen.
It came out of her at once. She had stepped forward, with her chin up, and her hand closed round the lens, and her face white and fierce and entirely alight. "I'll go in. I'm the Applicant. It's my formula, it's my club. It should be me. I've done it before. I've been in a larder. I've been in a forest. I'm very good at being somewhere I shouldn't."
"Condition twelve," said Alan.
"I made it."
"You did. It was that I should be in the reeds, and say nothing. I accepted it." He kept his eyes on hers. "I should like now to amend it."
"You can't amend my condition."
"I have the form," said Alan.
She stared at him. He saw her take it in. It went across her face in stages, like the light going across a field. It was not a thing he had said, in all the time that they had known each other, and he heard it as she heard it, in the cold air, in a voice that was not quite steady. It was the voice of a boy who has put down a heavy thing, and is amazed to find that his hands are still holding something.
"It will be a very small rule," said Alan.
He heard it come out. It was gentle and even and entirely reasonable, and as it left him he felt something stir at the back of his neck, a small cold hand on a rope.
Elen's eyebrow went up.
"Footnote?" said Elen.
He stood quite still in the corridor.
The word hung there in the gray light like a drop of water on a leaf. He thought about it. He thought honestly, for the space of a breath, as he had learned to, and went back over what he had said, hunting for the knife. And he found it, and it was not a knife at all. It was a smaller and a stranger thing. He had spoken in the old calm voice, the voice of the form, because he was afraid.
"No," said Alan.
She waited.
"I was not being correct," said Alan. His voice was not entirely under his control. "I was being afraid."
The corridor was very quiet. Somewhere far away, in the reference hall, a clerk dropped a book. Dara had stopped breathing.
"I do not wish you to be in the cupboard," said Alan. "I should like it very much to be myself. I should like to break the rule, because it is a rule that ought to be broken, and because I have been correct for eighteen years and I find that I should like, once, to be right." He drew breath. "And I am afraid. I am afraid of the order. I am afraid of what it will cost. I am afraid that when I have done it I shall not be able to be a Valemont. And I am more afraid that if I do not, you will go in alone."
Elen did not move.
She stood against the wall with her hand clenched round the lens and her face quite still. And then, slowly, as a flower opens at the end of a long cold night, her whole face went soft. She did not smile. It went open, and young, and bare, and her eyes filled, and overflowed, and she let them.
"That's allowed," said Elen, thickly.
"Is it?"
"It's the best one you've done." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Being afraid. In front of someone. On purpose." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I'd rather be frightened with you than safe without. I've said that. I'm going to go on saying it till you believe me."
"I believe you," said Alan.
It was perfectly true. It was the first time that he had known it.
They stood a moment in the empty corridor, the three of them, with the gray light of a February morning coming down from the high windows and the dust turning in it, and nobody said anything. Then she put out her hand. She did not take his. She held out, on her open palm, a small brass lens with a cap of horn.
"You'd better have this," said Elen. "For the thread."
He took it.
It was warm from her hand.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Alan brought all of the forms.
He had spent the afternoon gathering them. There were eleven, and he carried them up the clock tower stair at two minutes to eight in his grandfather's leather satchel, in the order in which they had been made, each in its own folder with a ribbon. The Record of Custody for a sample drawn at nine minutes past one on the morning of the twentieth. The Petition under Section Twelve, with a flourish of Professor Hale's ink at the foot and a space beside the second name. The Archivist's reply of last June, with its stamp on the back. A fair copy, made that afternoon in the library from the memory of a single reading, of three blank lines in the margin of a black book. A sheet headed RECORD OF OBSERVATION. And in the front pocket, where he could reach it without looking, two small papers that had been folded in four and unfolded perhaps forty times since six o'clock that morning, one in a quick uphill hand that said Doris says thank you, and one that said This is a request for assistance. It is not a sorry. It is a form.
He carried the second lamp under his arm.
The third step groaned. He stepped over it. It was a thing that his legs did now without consulting him, and he thought, going up through the dark with the great ticking of the machine coming down to meet him like a slow tide, that it was an odd thing to have learned. Eight days ago he had gone down this stair with his heart in his boots and a girl's cracked voice in his ears, and he had told himself that he would not climb it again. He put up his hand and pushed the trapdoor, and the gold light came down over him.
They were all there.
They sat in a ring on the dusty boards beside the cracked leather chair, in the pool of the lamp on the upturned crate, with the great wheels turning above them and the pendulum swinging out past the slit windows and hanging and coming back. There was Mira, with her ledger on her knee and her gray cardigan buttoned to the chin. There was Dara, thin and careful, with a sheaf of papers on his lap. There was Theo, who had a smear of paraffin on his nose and the air of a man who had been told to be quiet for an hour and was not certain that he could manage it. And there was Elen, on the crate, with her chin on her fist and her coat buttoned over a flat gray card, who looked up as his head came through the floor and said, in a voice that was perfectly level and not at all steady, "Four minutes ten."
"I beg your pardon?"
"From the clock-keeper's door." Her mouth moved. "I wasn't going to count. I did."
"I did not file a form."
"I know. You'd have been slower."
He climbed in. He set the brass lamp on the boards, a little to the left of the crate, where it would throw its green light across the middle of the ring, and straightened. And it was then that he saw the person who had not looked up.
Wren sat at the far side of the circle with her long legs folded and her arms wrapped round her middle, in her usual attitude of cool, dark, sardonic composure, which was, he now saw, a great deal more like a held breath. She did not move. She had her eyes on the planks. And when the silence had gone on for rather longer than it could be borne, she said, in a flat voice, to the floor:
"I owe you an apology."
Nobody said anything.
"I said you looked comfortable." She lifted her head. Her eyes were dark and clear and quite without evasion. "In the Annex. On the Thursday. I said you looked like a man reading a bill. I came down there to be angry and I was, and I said the cruellest true thing I could think of. It was a rotten thing to say. It was also, I think, not entirely correct."
"It was correct," said Alan.
"It was correct as far as it went." She drew a breath. "I looked back, you know. At the end of the corridor."
"I am aware that you did."
Her eyebrows went up. "Who told you?"
"Nobody. I have been informed since that I am an extremely poor observer in some respects. In others I am passable." He kept his voice even. "I was not comfortable, Miss Ashby. I was frightened. I am told that on me the two look the same."
There was a pause.
"It does," said Wren, "look exactly the same."
"I have been asked to work on it."
"I should think you have." A thin gleam came into her eyes. It was not quite a smile. It had in it something that had been a long time away and had found its way home. "All right. Then we're even. You can stop looking at me as if I were going to bite."
"I was not."
"You were bracing."
"I was bracing," said Alan. "It is a habit."
Theo gave a loud wet sniff. Mira put a hand on his arm without looking round. And Elen, on the crate, with her chin on her fist, was looking at the lamp as hard as she could, and he saw that her ears had gone pink.
He sat down in the circle.
He opened the satchel on his knee, and took out the folders, and laid them on the boards in front of him in a row, with the ribbons tied. It was a thing that he had done before an examination a hundred times. He found, to his surprise, that his hands were not quite steady, and that the rest of him was perfectly calm, and that for the first time in nine days the two matched.
"Miss Ashby," said Alan. "I should like to take your statement."
She stared at him.
"As a witness. It will take about a quarter of an hour. I should like to record the particulars of what you perceived in the ward on the night of the nineteenth, at the bedside of Mr. Pell, and I should like to do it in your own words, as nearly as I can." He drew out a clean sheet and uncapped his pen. "I shall not interrupt. I shall not correct. If I do not understand a term, I shall ask you what it means. And at the end I shall read it back to you, and you will tell me what I have got wrong."
"I'm not licensed," said Wren.
"No. It will be recorded as a statement of observation by a student, and not an opinion of an expert. I do not claim for it more than it is." He looked up. "I do not think that it needs more. It needs to be written down by someone who is prepared to treat it as a fact."
She did not say anything for a moment. She sat very still with her arms round herself, and the lamplight slid along the dark line of her braid, and something went across her sharp narrow face that he could not at first read. It was a look of bare and startled attention, like that of a person who has been handed a thing that she had stopped expecting to be given.
Nobody, he realized, had ever written down what she had smelled.
"Right," said Wren, rather hoarsely. "Ask."
He asked. He did it as he did everything, in order, with care. What was the hour. Where did she stand. How close was her face to the wrist. What was the first smell, and what lay beneath it, and how would she describe it, and to what, in her experience, might it be compared. She answered shortly, and then, as he went on asking in the same level voice, less shortly. She said that it was like a key in a pocket on a winter morning. He wrote it down, exactly. She said that it was not the smell of a metal, precisely, but of a cold in the metal, and he asked whether she would prefer that to be recorded as cold iron or as the smell of cold, and she thought, and said the first, and then said, "No, the second," and he wrote both, with a bracket. She said lavender, and that it was faint, and that it was not lavender from a flower but the other kind, from a bottle, with a sweet dead undertone, like a handkerchief in a drawer. He wrote that. He did not smile. He heard her breathing change as she went on, slowly, as one's breathing changes when one is being listened to.
"That is what I have," said Alan, at the end. He read it back. It was a page and a half, in a small upright hand, with a bracket and two crossings-out, and when he had finished there was a silence.
"Is it right?"
"It's right," said Wren.
She had her hand over her mouth. Over it, her dark eyes were very bright.
"It sounds," she said, in a muffled voice, "like I know what I'm talking about."
"I believe that you do."
"Nobody's ever written me down." She took her hand away. "Sign it, I suppose. Where do I?"
She signed. It was a hard, black, thin signature with a flourish at the tail, like the stroke of a sword. He blotted it. And Theo, who had been watching with his mouth open and his eyes enormous, said in a hushed voice, "Can I have one?"
"You may have a statement, Mr. Theo, concerning the effect of a pinch of echo-moss upon a cauldron."
"I'd like that," said Theo, with deep feeling.
"It is not relevant."
"I'd like it anyway."
There was a snort from the direction of the crate. Alan did not look. He took a fresh sheet, and, to the general surprise, began to write.
It took them two hours.
They did it as he had said they would, in order, with the lamps burning. Mira had the ledger and the practical side. She read out, in a small flat voice, the whole of the club's assets: fourpence, a cauldron, a pewter frog, a very small quantity of tea, and Dara's grandmother, whom she entered as a reserve. Theo was appointed Runner, which meant that he would carry messages across the Academy in his boots at a pace that nobody could keep up with, and he took it with such solemn joy that Wren said it was the first time she had ever seen anyone promoted from a cauldron. Dara had the herbal in his head. He recited the margin, line by line, in a thin steady voice, and Alan took it down, and checked it against the copy in his notebook, and found, at the end, that there was a difference of two words, and that Dara's were right.
And Elen sat on the crate with her chin on her fist and watched.
He was aware of it as one is aware of the sun on the side of one's face. She did not speak much. She put in a sentence when it was wanted, sharp and quick and always to the point, and sat back. But she watched him work. She watched his hand go down the page. And once, when he stopped in the middle of a line and said, to nobody, "There is a difficulty," he looked up and found that she was smiling at him, at the very corner of her mouth, with her eyes on his pen, and that she looked away at once, and bit her lip, and the dimple came and went like a small gold coin.
"What is the difficulty?" said Mira.
"I have been trying to say a thing." He laid down the pen. "I should like to do it properly. I shall need a clear piece of floor."
Wren held out the chalk.
He took it. He knelt on the boards, and drew on the gray wood in long plain strokes, as she had drawn a poison and a hill, a line across the middle, from side to side. On the left he wrote a word. On the right, another.
RECORDS.
WITNESSES.
"There are two kinds," said Alan. "Of what we have."
They gathered round.
"On this side," he tapped the left, "are documents. They were made by persons who had no reason that I can discover to agree with one another. A soldier, writing in a margin that he had been told to leave a space. A Healer, writing the hour that she was sent from her ward. A clerk, copying a register. A woman dead for thirty years, in an herbal. They were not made for us. Nobody wrote them to prove anything. They were made because it is what the hand does, when it has been trained." He wrote under it, in a neat column: Watch Book. Day-book. Margin. Custody. "The Council can call them irregular. It cannot call them interested."
"And these?" said Dara, pointing right.
"These are ours." He wrote: Miss Joy, 28 Jan. Miss Ashby, 19 Jan. A source in the forest. "They are what we saw, and smelled, and were told. They are alive, which is their strength. They are also, as any member of the Council will point out, extremely interested." He drew a small bracket. "Three students and a tree."
"A very old tree," said Elen.
"A grandmother," said Alan. "I have recorded her as such."
There was a splutter.
"Neither side is enough," he went on, steadily. "The Council can dismiss either. It will say that the records are fragments and the witnesses are children. It will say that all of them are explicable by a poor night's sleep." He drew a third line, from the left column to the right, in a long curve, like a bridge. "But if they agree. If a Healer writing in a day-book and a sergeant writing in a margin and a girl writing on a card, none of whom conferred, set down the same minute, then it is not an anecdote. It is a thing that has been seen from three sides."
"We conferred," said Wren.
"Not before we wrote." He sat back on his heels. "The order of events is the point. Miss Joy wrote on the night. I wrote on the Thursday. Healer Brandt wrote in her book at seven minutes past two. At the time that each of us put the number on the paper, no one of us knew what the others had. That is the whole of the thing. It is called corroboration."
"It's a very pretty word," said Mira.
"It is an extremely strong one." He looked at the chalk bridge. "And it is still not enough."
Elen had come off the crate.
She knelt beside him on the boards, with her coat sleeves pushed back and her hair coming down, and looked at the chart, and he felt her shoulder an inch from his. She did not touch it. "Because it's still only a story," she said slowly. "It's a very well-told one, and it's got a good shape, and a man with a lovely voice can still say, it's a coincidence of times. It doesn't do anything."
"No."
"We've got two kinds. We need a third." She tapped the floor, between the two columns, where the chalk bridge made a gap. "Something that turns what we know into something we can do."
"A law," said Alan.
They were all looking at him.
"A rule. One that says that when a person has been seen to do this thing, in this manner, at this hour, then there is a remedy, and here is how it is obtained." He heard his own voice, quite level, and under it, quite distinctly, a very small shake. "It may not exist. It may be in the third volume, which is not available. But the second volume is called Of Binding and of Marking, and it is the one that the woman in the herbal had read. I should like to read the whole of it."
"We've asked," said Mira. "I wrote on Saturday."
"I know." He did not smile. "I have been waiting for the answer."
It arrived at ten past ten.
They heard it coming before they saw it: a quick light patter on the stair, and a gasp, and a creak, and a thump as a person who has stepped on the third step without being warned about it discovers that it moves. A small round head came through the trapdoor, red in the face, with a muffler trailing from it and a satchel bumping at its heels.
"I'm sorry," said Percy Tuck. "I knocked. On the stair. It was a soft knock."
"Percy," said Elen.
"I have a letter." He scrambled up into the loft and stood in the middle of the ring, breathing hard, with his small chest heaving and an expression of unspeakable importance. "It's from the Archivist. She said I was to give it to nobody but the Recorder. I said I knew who that was. She said I was not to tell the Warden. I said I wouldn't tell Philippa." He drew himself up. "It's very sealed."
It was. It was a small flat envelope of gray paper, closed with a dot of the Archivist's dull wax, and it said on the front in her own dry hand, To Mr. A. Valemont, Recorder, and Miss E. Joy, Applicant. He broke the seal. He read it aloud, because it seemed to be a thing that should be heard.
Reading of Commentaries on Prohibited Workings, Vol. II, Of Binding and of Marking, is granted under Article Twenty-seven. Tuesday, the sixth, at seven o'clock in the morning, in the Reading Room. Applicant and Recorder. The countersign of the Clerk of the Academy is required.
Your names will be entered in the Reading Book. The Reading Book is open to the Chair, as to all keyholders.
I have no discretion in this matter. I find that I have somewhat less of it than I had.
The Archivist.
He lowered the paper.
"Seven," said Mira.
"Tomorrow," said Dara.
"The Chair will see the names," said Theo. His voice was a whisper. "He'll know. He'll know you're reading it."
"He knows already," said Elen.
She was quite calm. She had risen, and stood in the lamplight with her hands in her coat pockets and her chin up, looking at the brown paper in Alan's hand. "He's known since November. It said so. As is customary, the Chair has been informed. He knew when we put in the first request, and he's known since, and he's let us. I don't think he minds." She turned her head. "I think he thinks we're being very good. I think he thinks we're doing it properly."
"We are," said Alan.
"That's what he likes."
"It is also," said Alan, quietly, "the only road that is left. We proceed correctly." He folded the letter. "It does not seem to me that the name of the road is the thing that matters. It is what we find at the end of it."
"The Warden's countersign," said Mira.
"I shall ask her tonight."
"She'll lose the form."
"She will lose it," said Alan, "in the right drawer."
Wren made a sound that was almost a laugh.
He asked the Warden at a quarter to eleven. He did it in her office at the foot of the north stair, standing, with the form held out before him in both hands, and she took it without a word, and read it with her pen between two fingers. She laid it on her blotter. She looked at it for some time, in the lamplight, without expression. Then she dipped her pen, and signed, with the small hard angular stroke of one who has signed a good many things, and blotted it, and held it out without raising her eyes.
"I have lost another," said the Warden. "This is a spare."
"Thank you, Warden."
"I did not do it," said the Warden, to her ledger. "Shut the door as you go."
The clock tower was dark when he came back for the lamp.
He had told them that he would. They had gone home by ones and twos, down the stair in the dark with their voices going away below, Mira with her ledger and Wren with her sword-stick and Theo, shushing himself, down the third step in a long groan like a ship's timber, and Dara last, who had stopped at the trapdoor and looked back at Alan and said nothing, and then, very quickly, bowed, and gone. The lamp stood on the boards where he had left it. In the gold ring of its light, on the third step below the trapdoor, with her knees drawn up and her chin on them and the whole great ticking dark of the tower going round behind her, sat Elen.
She had not gone.
She did not look up. She had her hands locked round her ankles. There was a quilt over her shoulders, the patched one, and a very small pewter frog sat on the stone beside her in his cloak, regarding the dark with an air of profound sardonic patience. The pendulum swung out. It hung. It came back.
"Sit," said Elen.
He sat.
It was a narrow step. It was cold, and curved, and there was not room on it for two persons of ordinary size without a certain adjustment of the shoulders. He sat on it, at her side, with the brass lamp on the step above and his hands on his knees, and the cold came up through his coat, and for a time neither of them said anything at all.
"You're wearing it," said Elen.
He looked down. It was at his throat. It was green, and long, and much washed, with a small mended place near one end, and it smelled very faintly, in the cold, of mint. He had not thought. He had put it on at some point in the course of the evening as one puts on a thing that one has put on every night for a month.
"It is February," said Alan.
"It is."
"There are rooms."
"That remain cold," said Elen. She said it to her knees. Her mouth moved. "I know. It's a very well-documented phenomenon."
The pendulum went out again, and came back.
"I wanted to ask," said Elen, after a while. "What it was like. The lamps."
"They were difficult."
"I meant the, I mean what did you." She stopped. She took a breath and began again, with great care. "I heard about the key. And the chimney. And Percy told me what you said to the first-year." She turned her head against her knee, and her eyes, in the lamplight, were very large and dark. "He said you said you were the lamp monitor."
"It was the truest thing that I could say."
"It's a good job."
"I did not do it well."
"You did it every night," said Elen. "That's most of it."
He did not answer. He found that he could not. He sat on the cold step with his hands on his knees and the whole machine ticking round him like a heart, and heard a very small voice say, beside him, in a tone he had not heard from her before, so low that he thought afterward he might have imagined it:
"Is this allowed?"
He turned.
She had not moved. But her head was tilted a little toward him. It was very close. He could see the faint smudge of ink along her jaw, and the way her hair had come down on one side, and the pulse in her throat. She was looking at the lamp. She was holding herself very still, as a person does who has put out a hand toward a bird and does not mean to frighten it.
"It is not prohibited," said Alan.
"That's not what I asked."
"No." He drew a breath. "I know it is not."
"I want it to be allowed by you." Her voice shook. "It's not a, I'm not saying it means anything. It's noted. It isn't closed. I just. It's been a long week, and you're warm."
"It is allowed," said Alan.
He said it very quietly.
It went into the cold air of the stair like a coin into a well. And she let out a long, unsteady breath, and her head came down, quite lightly, as a leaf comes down, onto his shoulder.
He sat perfectly still.
Her hair was against his jaw. It smelled of mint and old dust and lamp oil. He felt the weight of her, small and warm and entirely unguarded, along the whole length of his arm, and he did not move, because he thought that if he moved she would stop. He kept his hands on his knees. He looked at the lamp. He looked, for a long time, at the great slow arc of the pendulum going out and hanging and coming back, and he thought: I have done a great many things in my life that I was told were correct. This is the first that I have not needed to be told.
"I'm not asking you to say anything," said Elen, into his coat.
"I know."
"That's what makes it easy." She shifted a little. Her hand came up, and laid itself on his sleeve, not holding it, simply resting, as a hand rests on the rail of a ship. "I can lean on a person who isn't asking."
"I am not asking."
"I know you're not." She was smiling. He could feel it, against the cloth. "It's the loveliest thing you do."
They sat there.
The tower ticked. Far below them, in the dark, a door shut, and the old clock-keeper turned on his cot and muttered to a cat. A thin pale line of moonlight came down the slit window and lay across the boards, and moved, very slowly, as the night went on. He did not know how long. It might have been a quarter of an hour. It might have been the whole of an age. When she lifted her head at last, her face was pale and clear, and she was looking at him quite steadily, with her eyes enormous and dry.
"Seven o'clock," said Elen.
"Seven."
"Don't be late."
"I am never late."
"I know," said Elen. "It's one of the things."
She got up, and shook out the quilt, and tucked the pewter frog into the pocket of her coat. At the head of the stair she turned, with the lamp-glow on one side of her face, and for a moment he thought that she would say something more. She did not. She only smiled, small and crooked and a little shy, and went down into the dark, and he heard her step on the third stair, the loose one, and her voice, soft and exasperated, saying to a plank, "Oh, honestly."
The Closed Stacks were as cold as he remembered.
They went down the spiral stair at one minute to seven, three of them, in single file, Alan first with the brass lamp, and Elen behind, and Dara a pace after, with his hands clasped in front of him and his thin face the color of candle wax. The smell came up to meet them, old paper and cold stone and a faint dry metallic edge, like the air before rain. At the foot of the stair, in the lamplit arch of black stone, the low iron door stood shut, banded with its three wards, the blue and the amber and the thin cold green that he did not like. And beside it, at her small desk with its single lamp, with her gray hair coiled under a pencil and her spectacles on their chain and her hands folded before her, sat the Archivist.
She did not look up.
She had the Reading Book open on the desk in front of her. It was a very large book, bound in black, with a brass clasp, and a pen lay across it with a steel nib. She dipped it. She wrote, in her thin dry hand, with a faint scratching sound, three names. A. Valemont, Recorder. E. Joy, Applicant. D. Hollis. She blotted them. She looked at the clock on the wall.
"Seven o'clock and one minute," said the Archivist. "You are on time."
"Yes, ma'am," said Alan.
"You have the countersign."
He gave it. She read it. She laid it, with a quiet precision, on a small pile at her elbow.
"The Chair," said the Archivist, to the paper, "will see these names by noon. It is the rule of the Reading Book. He may inspect it at his pleasure." She looked up at last. Her pale eyes behind her spectacles went from one face to the next, dry and level and entirely unreadable. "I have never in forty years been able to make an entry in that book without its being seen. I do not suppose that I shall begin now." She took a key from her belt. "I do not apologize for it. I mention it so that you do not think that you are the first."
She unlocked the door.
It was the same small room. It was no larger than a pantry, with its long dark table and its two straight chairs and its single lamp hanging from the ceiling by a chain, and the brass grille along the back wall with ten thousand spines behind it going away into the dark. He set the second lamp on the table. It threw its green light across the polished wood. And he heard, behind him, a very small quick breath, and turned, and saw Elen standing in the doorway with her hands pressed under her chin, as she had stood the first time, gazing along the grille with an expression of such hunger and reverence that he had to look away.
"Sit," said the Archivist. "I will fetch the book."
She brought it in her two hands. It was the same, large and flat and heavy, in dark green cloth gone gray at the edges, with the gilt on the spine cracked. Of Binding and of Marking. She laid it on the table in front of Alan and squared it with one fingertip, and withdrew to her chair by the door.
"One hour," said the Archivist. "You have, I believe, a good deal to find."
He opened it.
It was Old Court. He had known it would be. He turned the pages carefully, one after another, in the green light, through the long dry paragraphs on the nature of knots and the properties of silver, through a section on the First Order that began Of the simple tie and a section on the Second that began Of the healing knot, and he felt Dara lean in at his left shoulder, and Elen at his right, and heard her breathe. He found the heading he had been seeking on page forty-one.
Of the Third Order.
"Read it," said Elen, in a whisper. "Out loud."
He drew breath.
He had read aloud in that room once before. He had done it with a girl's shoulder at his arm and the first snow of the year at the window, and he had not known then what his voice was doing. He did not know now. He only knew that it came out low and level and careful, in the old cadence, as his grandfather had read to him by the fire, and that as he went on it settled into the stone like a thing that belonged there. He gave each sentence first in the old form, and then in plain speech, and he heard, beside him, a very small sound, and did not look round.
"'Of the Third Order,'" read Alan. "'Whosoever, being of the Council or holding its Seal, shall bind a person within the walls of the Academy, shall bind him in the Warded Chamber only, and in no other place. And he shall enter the binding in the Seal-Book at the hour of its making, with the name of the one bound and the term.'"
He paused. His throat was dry. Dara had taken out his pencil.
"'A binding wrought elsewhere, or not so entered, is no binding in law, but an assault.'" His voice did not change. "'And it is void, if three persons who were in the room at the hour of the tying shall swear to it before the Archivist and the Clerk of the Academy, of whom one at least shall be an officer of the Academy. Let the binding then be broken, and the bound set free, and the binder answer.'"
Nobody spoke.
The lamp burned. The hum of the great old building came faintly through the stone, a long way off, like the sound of the sea in a shell. He sat with his finger under the line, and read it again silently, and then a third time, because it did not seem possible that it was so plain.
"Void," said Elen. It came out of her in a whisper.
"If three persons," said Alan, "who were in the room."
"At the hour."
"At the hour of the tying."
"And an officer." She was on her feet. She did not seem to know it. She stood with her hands pressed flat on the table and her face white and shining. "Healer Brandt. She's an officer. She's the Healer-Mistress of the Academy. She'd be, and the Warden, she's the Clerk, she'd take the oath. Alan. It's a law. It's an actual law. It was in the book all the time."
"It has been," said Alan, slowly, "for two hundred years."
"Is there more?" said Dara.
There was.
It was at the foot of the page, in a smaller hand, in the manner of an afterthought, as the best things are set down in the bottom corner of a document, where only a patient person will read to the end. He read it very slowly. He had to stop in the middle, and begin again.
"'And that the binder may not deny his hand.'" The words went into the quiet of the little room like drops of water into a well. "'The Seal, in the working, leaves in the thread an impression of its own device, small as a grain of barley, and it shall be found by any who look closely with a glass. So that he who has bound shall not say that he did not.'"
He put down his finger.
Elen was staring at the page. Her lips parted. In the green light, her eyes had gone enormous and dark and still.
"A seal on wax," said Elen.
"A seal on wax."
"It's a, it's actually a seal. It's a picture. It's in the thread." She drew breath. "The key. And the scales."
"We have not seen it," said Alan. "We shall have to look."
"With a glass."
He was about to say that they had none. He did not. For he had seen, in the corner of his eye, a movement at the door, and he turned his head, and the Archivist had risen from her chair.
She came across the little room, thin and gray and upright, with her spectacles on their chain. She did not look at either of them. She came to the end of the table and stood there a moment with her hands folded in front of her, looking at the open book, at the foot of the page, in the green light, with an expression on her narrow face that he could not at all read.
"Mr. Valemont," said the Archivist.
"Ma'am."
"In forty years, no one has read to the end of that chapter."
Nobody moved.
"It was written by a student," said the Archivist. Her voice was dry and low and perfectly even. "Of the third year. Two hundred and eleven years ago. He had been bound, at fifteen, by a Warden of the Academy, for insolence, in the Warded Chamber, for nine nights. He had been unable to speak above a whisper for a month afterward. He rose, in the course of a long life, to be Chancellor of the Council." She drew a breath. "He had this entered, in the Statute, at the very end of the Order, in the smallest type. He said that a law which was easy to find would be observed by no one, and that a law which could only be found by one who had read to the end would be kept, in the long run, by the right sort of person."
"Was he right?" said Elen, very low.
"He was entirely wrong," said the Archivist. "It has been found by nobody. It has been waiting for a very long time to be found by somebody who was both patient and in need." She paused. "It was drafted for exactly this. I should like it to be known that I think so."
She did not say anything more. She stood a moment longer, narrow and still, with her pale eyes on the page. Then she put her hand into the pocket of her gray gown, and drew out something small, and laid it on the table beside the lamp.
It was a lens.
It was a little thing, of dark brass, no larger than a walnut, with a cap of horn and a small ring for a thumb. It lay on the polished wood in the green glow and gave off a faint dull gleam. And the Archivist stood looking not at it but at the opposite wall, at the grille and the ten thousand spines, with her hands folded, and said, in a tone as dry as a bone:
"I keep one for reading sigils. I do not lend it." She turned and went back to her chair. "It is lying on the table. I do not expect that anyone will notice."
She sat down. She took up her pen. She opened the Reading Book, and bent over it with her gray head, and began to write in it, in her thin precise hand, as though she were the only person in the world.
Elen put out her hand and took the lens.
She held it a moment in her palm, as one holds a bird, and her fingers shook. She looked at Alan. Her eyes were swimming. And he saw her lips shape, without any sound, two words, which were not thank you.
They went up the spiral stair together at a quarter to eight, in the cold, in single file, with the brass lamp swinging in Alan's hand and the dim gray daylight coming down to meet them from the reference hall. Dara went first. He did not say a word. He went up the steps like a man in a dream, with his thin face alight, and at the top he stopped in the empty corridor and turned, and put both hands over his face, and shook.
"It was in a margin," said Dara, through his fingers. "My grandmother kept it for forty years. And it was in a book. And it was the same, it was the same thing. It was all, it was all there."
"It was," said Elen.
She was standing against the cold stone wall in her patched brown coat, with her hand pressed flat against her chest, over her heart, where a little brass thing lay in a pocket. She was white. She was shining. She looked at Alan across the narrow passage, with the lamplight on his face and the gray light on hers, and said, in a whisper:
"In the room."
"In the room," said Alan.
"Three persons."
"At the hour."
They were both very quiet. The thing lay between them in the cold air of the corridor like a stone that has been picked up and found, on the underside, to have a face on it.
"It isn't enough to see him come," said Elen, slowly. "Is it? Not from the reeds. Not from a window. We could watch him go in at a quarter to one and come out at seven past two, all of us, and it wouldn't be the, it wouldn't be the thing. It says in the room. At the tying."
"It does."
"And he sends Healer Brandt out."
"He does."
"And there's a sergeant on the door." She was counting on her fingers. "And a guard on the step. And it's under an order, it's a Council order, nobody's allowed in the ward but Brandt, and Brandt gets put out at ten to one." She stopped. She looked up. "So the only people who could possibly swear to it are the ones who aren't allowed to be there."
"Yes," said Alan.
"That's a trap," said Elen. "It's the same one. It's the same, it's the best one yet." She gave a short, cracked, astonished laugh. "He's got every door covered, and he's never even had to shut one."
"It's a ward," said Dara, in a small voice, lowering his hands. "With a guard on the door. And a Healer who's sent out." He swallowed. "There's a cupboard."
They looked at him.
"A linen cupboard," said Dara, going scarlet. "At the end of the ward, behind the last bed. It's about the size of a. It's not very big. Theo hid in it, in his first year, for a bet. He told us about it for weeks. He said there was just room for two, if neither of them breathed."
Nobody said anything.
"Someone," said Elen, slowly, "would have to be in it."
"An order," said Alan, "would have to be broken."
He heard how it sounded. He heard it go out into the cold passage, in the old level voice, the voice of the form. And he heard, with a perfect and terrible clarity, a thing that he had said, a month and a half ago, in a clear cold voice in a great dim hall, to four hundred persons. If the club had been more careful, in every particular, the Council would have nothing to hold.
He looked at the lens in her hand.
"It is a Council order," said Alan. "It is entirely proper. It has a seal. It was made, as everything in this affair has been made, by a man with the kindest voice in the Academy, within his powers." He drew breath. "And it is the only door."
"I'll do it," said Elen.
It came out of her at once. She had stepped forward, with her chin up, and her hand closed round the lens, and her face white and fierce and entirely alight. "I'll go in. I'm the Applicant. It's my formula, it's my club. It should be me. I've done it before. I've been in a larder. I've been in a forest. I'm very good at being somewhere I shouldn't."
"Condition twelve," said Alan.
"I made it."
"You did. It was that I should be in the reeds, and say nothing. I accepted it." He kept his eyes on hers. "I should like now to amend it."
"You can't amend my condition."
"I have the form," said Alan.
She stared at him. He saw her take it in. It went across her face in stages, like the light going across a field. It was not a thing he had said, in all the time that they had known each other, and he heard it as she heard it, in the cold air, in a voice that was not quite steady. It was the voice of a boy who has put down a heavy thing, and is amazed to find that his hands are still holding something.
"It will be a very small rule," said Alan.
He heard it come out. It was gentle and even and entirely reasonable, and as it left him he felt something stir at the back of his neck, a small cold hand on a rope.
Elen's eyebrow went up.
"Footnote?" said Elen.
He stood quite still in the corridor.
The word hung there in the gray light like a drop of water on a leaf. He thought about it. He thought honestly, for the space of a breath, as he had learned to, and went back over what he had said, hunting for the knife. And he found it, and it was not a knife at all. It was a smaller and a stranger thing. He had spoken in the old calm voice, the voice of the form, because he was afraid.
"No," said Alan.
She waited.
"I was not being correct," said Alan. His voice was not entirely under his control. "I was being afraid."
The corridor was very quiet. Somewhere far away, in the reference hall, a clerk dropped a book. Dara had stopped breathing.
"I do not wish you to be in the cupboard," said Alan. "I should like it very much to be myself. I should like to break the rule, because it is a rule that ought to be broken, and because I have been correct for eighteen years and I find that I should like, once, to be right." He drew breath. "And I am afraid. I am afraid of the order. I am afraid of what it will cost. I am afraid that when I have done it I shall not be able to be a Valemont. And I am more afraid that if I do not, you will go in alone."
Elen did not move.
She stood against the wall with her hand clenched round the lens and her face quite still. And then, slowly, as a flower opens at the end of a long cold night, her whole face went soft. She did not smile. It went open, and young, and bare, and her eyes filled, and overflowed, and she let them.
"That's allowed," said Elen, thickly.
"Is it?"
"It's the best one you've done." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "Being afraid. In front of someone. On purpose." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I'd rather be frightened with you than safe without. I've said that. I'm going to go on saying it till you believe me."
"I believe you," said Alan.
It was perfectly true. It was the first time that he had known it.
They stood a moment in the empty corridor, the three of them, with the gray light of a February morning coming down from the high windows and the dust turning in it, and nobody said anything. Then she put out her hand. She did not take his. She held out, on her open palm, a small brass lens with a cap of horn.
"You'd better have this," said Elen. "For the thread."
He took it.
It was warm from her hand.
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