The Archivist administered the oath in the room behind the Reading Room, at twenty-six minutes to three in the morning, from a small black book that had been used for the purpose perhaps four times in two hundred years.

It was a plain thing, bound in worn calf, with a brass corner gone green. She held it flat on her left palm and kept her right hand raised, and her gray hair stood in its coil under the pencil, and her spectacles hung on their chain against her gown. At her elbow, in the lamplight, stood the Warden, narrow and upright, with a pen in her fist and a sheet of foolscap squared before her. Beyond them, along the wall, stood the others, in a ragged line that nobody had arranged: Elen, with her hair down and her face blotched with cold; Wren, with her sword-stick; Theo and Dara and Mira, who had come from somewhere in her cardigan with her ledger under her arm and had not said how.

"A soldier should go first," said the Archivist. "It is the custom."

Sergeant Rackham came forward. He had walked across the court with them in the dark, with his cap crushed in his fist, and he stood now in front of the small desk with his heels together and his weathered face the color of tallow. He raised his hand. It shook.

"Say it after me," said the Archivist. "I swear that what I say is what I saw and heard in that room, at that hour."

"I swear that what I say is what I saw and heard in that room, at that hour."

"That I have added nothing to it."

"That I have added nothing to it."

"And that I have left out nothing that I know."

The sergeant said it. Alan heard it go round the room. It was a very small sentence. He stood with his own hand lowered, waiting his turn, and thought of a box on a printed form in a greenhouse in November, a long narrow box headed Deviations, and a single word in it, in his best script. None. He had written it with a steady hand. He had believed it. He had believed that a thing which had not been asked for was a thing that did not need to be said.

Brandt swore. She did it like a woman reading a bill of lading, in a voice that did not rise or fall, and added, at the end, quite crossly, "So help me."

He was the third.

He lifted his right hand. He had held a pen in it for three hours, in the dark, in a cupboard, and the fingers were stiff. He said the words in order. He said them to the Archivist's thin gray face, and when he came to the last clause, and left out nothing that I know, he did not hurry it. He let it go down into the room like a coin into a well. And he thought: that is the whole of the matter. That is what I should have said in the Hall on the twenty-third of January. Not four things. All of them.

"The Clerk will countersign," said the Archivist.

The Warden signed. The pen went across the paper with its small hard angular stroke, and she blotted it, and held it up to the lamp, and for an instant her narrow face was quite unguarded.

"I have never lost a document that I did not intend to find," said the Warden, dryly. "Proceed."

The Archivist closed the black book. She straightened. Her voice, when she spoke, was perfectly flat, like a clerk reading a deed.

"By the Statute of the Third Order, Article Nine, I, the Archivist of Levis Morny Academy, with the Clerk, having received the sworn testimony of three persons who were in the room at the hour of the tying, one of whom is an officer of the Academy, declare the binding upon Kieran Pell wrought on the sixth of February, and all that preceded it, void." She drew breath. "Let it be broken. Let the bound be set free. And let the binder answer."

Nobody moved.

"Now," said the Archivist, and for the first time that he had ever seen, something that was almost a smile touched the corner of her thin mouth, "we shall go and see whether the law has been telling the truth for two hundred years."

The guards on the step did not stop them.

There were two. They were young, and cold, and half asleep, and they saw a narrow gray woman come across the frozen forecourt at the head of a procession with a lantern in her hand and drew themselves up to attention. "Warden's night round," said the Warden, without slackening. "I am entitled." And they went in.

The ward was as it had been. The lamp burned low. Twelve beds, eleven bare, and at the far end, under the high black window, a long still shape under a gray blanket, and three turns of dull white light on a wrist. Sergeant Rackham took his place in the angle of the door and stood to attention. He did not face the wall.

Elen was at the bed before any of them.

She did not speak. She sat on the edge of the mattress and took the long white hand in both of hers, below the thread, and looked up, and the Archivist came and stood at the foot with the small black book in one hand and a folded paper in the other. She read it aloud. It was the declaration. It was in her flat dry voice, in plain English, with the Old Court words of the Statute set in the middle of it like stones in a wall, and as she read, the thread, which had lain on the wrist for eighteen days, began to change.

It went the color of breath on a window.

It did not pulse. It did not sing. It loosened, simply, the three turns easing one from another like a knot that has been talked to, and a thin cold light ran along it from end to end and went out, and it came away from the skin. It lay in the air for the space of a breath, a hair of silver, and curled, and fell. The Archivist had a small glass vial ready in her palm. She caught it. She stoppered it with her thumb, and held it up to the lamp, and inside, very small, a loop of silver thread turned slowly once and was still.

"Evidence," said the Archivist. "I keep one."

Elen was holding the hand. She had stopped breathing. They all had. Brandt had her fingers on the wrist, over the pale bare mark where the thread had been, and her lips were moving, counting, and her broad face had gone as still as a stone.

"Sixty-eight," said Brandt. Her voice cracked. "Seventy. Seventy-one."

"It was fifty-two," whispered Wren.

"It is going up," said Brandt. "It is going up like a, oh, it is quite ordinary. He is quite ordinary."

The eyelids moved.

It was a very small thing. They flickered, as eyelids do in sleep, and flickered again, and the long loose body on the bed gave a sigh, and the mouth, which had hung a little open for eighteen days, closed, and opened, and said, in a hoarse cracked whisper like a hinge:

"Right then."

Elen made a sound.

"Is it Tuesday?"

"It's Wednesday," said Elen. She was laughing and crying at once, with her forehead against the back of his hand. "It's very early Wednesday. It's twenty to four."

"Oh." His eyes had opened. They were mild and gray and entirely confused, and they traveled slowly from the white ceiling to the lamp to the face above him. "I've missed the lamps."

"Somebody did them."

"I know." He frowned. It took him a moment, as if the sentence were a long way off. "I could hear. I was a long way down, and I could, somebody was saying good evening. To them. All along. In a very stiff voice."

There was a pause.

Several heads turned. Alan felt the blood go up his neck and into his ears, and found that he was studying the plaster with great attention.

"Someone," said Kieran Pell, with the faint, vague, delighted air of a man who has just discovered a joke in a dream, "said it to Doris like a funeral."

"I regret," said Alan, "that I was not informed."

The boy on the pillow turned his head. He looked at the tall dark figure at the foot of his bed with its ears the color of a brick, and the long loose crooked kind face broke into a smile, slow and wondering and as wide as a gate.

"You did it quite well," said Kieran.

The night cook had left two bowls of porridge on the dispensary step at five.

Nobody had asked her. They found them under a cloth with a note propped against the salt, in a round floury hand: One for the lad. One for the other lad, he'll not have eaten. Kieran ate his sitting up, with a bolster at his back and a gray blanket round his shoulders and the spoon held in a hand that shook so that Elen had to steady it. He ate the whole bowl. He said that it was the best thing that he had ever tasted and that somebody had put too much honey in it. Nobody argued.

The carriage came at ten minutes to six.

It was a plain closed vehicle of the Council's gray, with two horses and a stretcher strapped to the roof, and it stopped at the foot of the infirmary steps in the first thin light. Doctor Lunt got down, stout and bland and rumpled, with his black bag. Mr. Pym followed him, thin and gray and smiling, with a sheaf of papers. They came up the steps. They passed the privates on the door, who saluted. They came into the corridor, where a square gray sergeant sat on a hard chair beside the ward with the Watch Book on his knee.

"Sergeant," said Mr. Pym. "Please. We are here for the patient."

Sergeant Rackham stood up.

He did it slowly. He put the Watch Book on the chair. He drew himself to his full height, which was not great, and his weathered face was as steady as a wall. "I have my orders, sir," he said. "To see the patient removed at six."

"Then if you would be so good."

"I find," said Sergeant Rackham, "that there is no patient fit to be removed."

"I beg your pardon?"

"He is eating porridge."

There was a long silence in the corridor. Doctor Lunt's mouth had fallen open. From within the ward, quite distinctly, came the faint scrape of a spoon against the bottom of a bowl.

"Please," said Mr. Pym, faintly.

"I have it in writing," said the sergeant. "The Healer-Mistress will give you a copy." He took off his cap. "And the Archivist's compliments, sir. She asks me to say that the Chair is summoned to answer, under the Ninth Article, in the Great Hall, at nine o'clock. In person."

He held out a folded paper. After a moment, Mr. Pym took it. His thin white hand was not quite steady. He looked at it. He looked at the seal. And Alan, who was standing in the door of the dispensary with a bowl in his hand, saw, for the first time in all the months that he had known him, a clerk who had run out of the word.

They made a court of the Great Hall for the second time in a fortnight.

It took three hours. The benches were dragged to the walls, the black cloths hung at the windows, the platform of new planks set up at the end with its green baize table and its tall carved chairs. But it was not the same room. He knew that as he came up the aisle at five minutes to nine with the long green ledger in his arms. Four hundred persons sat packed along the walls in a silence so complete that he heard the tick of the clock above the door. And they were not looking at the platform. They were looking at the stool.

It stood in the middle of the scrubbed boards, alone, as it had stood on the twenty-third of January. And on the left-hand bench, in the front row, between a short round woman in a gray shawl and a square gray sergeant with his cap on his knee, with a seedling in a saucer on his lap and his white head very straight, sat Professor Ambrose Marlow.

He had been brought down from the tower at eight. Nobody had told him why.

He did not look round. But Alan, passing, saw the long hand on the saucer move, once, very slightly, in greeting, and he bowed as he went by.

There was no little table for the Treasurer, now. He went up the aisle to the front of the left-hand rank and sat down, at the end of the row, beside a short red-haired girl in a patched brown coat who did not look at him. She moved along. It was an inch. She put her hand on the bench between them, palm down, with the ink on the thumb, and he laid his beside it, and for a time neither of them did anything about it at all.

The Council came in at nine.

There were only two. The old man came first, in his black gown, led by a footman, with his trumpet in his fist, and was lowered into the left-hand chair with great ceremony; and Madam Quill came after, in dove-gray silk, with her lorgnette, and sat in the right-hand one, and arranged herself like a bird. The center chair stood empty. It was a tall dark carved thing, with a cushion, and nobody sat in it.

"Eh?" said Lord Haldane, loudly. "What? Where's Voss?"

"He is answering, my lord," said Madam Quill. "It is the Statute. I explained it in the carriage."

"You did?"

"At some length."

"I never heard of it," said Lord Haldane. He leaned on the trumpet and peered about him with the baffled and indignant dignity of a very old lion. "Fifty-one years on this Committee. Never heard of an Article Nine."

"Nobody has, my lord," said the Archivist, from the foot of the platform, without a flicker. "That is why it was written."

He came in at five past.

He came in at the great double doors at the end of the hall, quite alone, but for Mr. Pym half a pace behind him, and the whole of the Academy turned its head. He wore the long gray coat. His silver hair was brushed. His gloves were in his hand. He walked up the aisle with his slow gliding heron's step, between the two long ranks of faces, and he did not look to right or left. His face was calm. It was long and mild and lined, and it wore an expression of gentle and sorrowing patience, as of a man called away from a deathbed to deal with a trifle.

"Please," said Aldric Voss. "I am so sorry to be late."

"Sit down, Aldric," said Lord Haldane.

He looked at the stool.

It was a very small hesitation. It lasted, perhaps, the half of a breath. Then he smiled, and sat, as a man sits on a stool who has decided to treat it as a throne, and crossed one long leg over the other and laid his gloves upon his knee.

They took the objections first.

He made them well. He made them in his low warm voice, without heat, to the Council and the Hall and the little gray woman in the front, as one points out to a kind and rather slow child the places where a sum has gone astray. The Statute, he said, was unknown. It was a curiosity. It had been drafted two centuries ago by a boy with a grievance, and had not been invoked in living memory, and he should not like to see the good order of this Academy overturned upon a paragraph in the footnote of a commentary. The witnesses were three. One was a student who had broken the Committee's order. One was a soldier under his own command. And one was a Healer-Mistress who had been, as every person in the infirmary would agree, put out of the ward at half past twelve.

"I should be the first," said Voss, gently, "to say that I admire their zeal."

"Sir," said Alan.

He had risen. He had not known that he would. He stood at the end of the front row with his hands at his sides, and every head in the Hall turned, and he heard his own voice, level and clear and quite steady.

"I did break the order. I wish that to be recorded. I entered the ward of the infirmary at ten minutes to eleven last night, against the express direction of the Standards Committee, in a basket of linen. I remained in a cupboard for two hours and forty minutes." He drew breath. "The Statute does not say lawfully. It says in the room."

"It says," said the Archivist, dryly, "in the room."

"Eh?" said Lord Haldane.

"She says it is in the room, my lord," said Madam Quill. "It does not say that anyone was invited."

"Ah," said Lord Haldane. "Hm."

He presented it as he had learned to. He did it in order, and without adjectives, and with the green ledger open on his arm. He gave them the five links. He gave them the mark on the wrist, as read under a glass by a student of Old Court on the sixth of February, and the notch in the left pan. He gave them the Chair's own letter of the eighteenth of January, and held it up. He gave them the Charter, Schedule of Instruments, paragraph four. In person. By no deputy. He gave them a gap of three lines in a soldier's hand, and a Healer's day-book, and the minute, seven past two, that two persons who had never conferred had written down on two different nights.

And then he read them the statement.

He read it as it had been written, from his own notebook, in the dark, in a hand like a drunken spider. Thirteen lines. He did not change a word. He read the hour, and the song, and the click. He read, in a voice that did not alter, what had been said to a sleeping boy by a man on a stool in the light of a silver thread.

"'It is not harm, my boy. It is only a signature.'"

The Hall was perfectly still.

"'Ambrose will understand. In the end. They always do.'" He turned a page. "'It is only until the spring. They will sit in March. They will put an old man on a cart with a pot of marigolds and a letter of regret.'" He lifted his eyes, and the gentle pale gaze of the man on the stool met his and did not move. "'Nobody reads to the bottom of the page, Kieran. That is the whole secret of government.'"

There was a sound in the Hall. It was a long, low, rustling, indrawn breath, like wind in a wood.

"A boy in a cupboard," said Voss, softly, "hears what he wishes."

"I heard it too, sir."

Sergeant Rackham was on his feet. He stood at attention at the end of the second row with his cap under his arm and his square face gray and set. "With respect. I was in the room. I faced the wall. I heard every word." His voice cracked, and held. "And I've sworn it."

"So have I," said Brandt, from the bench. She did not stand. She sat with her hands folded on her stomach and her iron hair on end, and she said it to the baize in a voice like a drawn bolt. "And I should like to say that it is the first time in forty years that I have been in a cupboard."

A ripple went through the Hall. Nobody laughed.

"Mr. Valemont," said Voss.

He had not raised his voice. He sat easily on the stool, with one hand on his knee, and turned his head, and there was in the long mild face an expression that Alan knew. It was the look that he had worn in a pale, warm room, in a ring of silver, offering to read aloud. "I put it to you, as a person of unusual accuracy. On the twenty-third of January, in this hall, under oath, you stated that the Potions Club had not complied with the Charter in every particular. You said that, had it been more careful, the Council would have had nothing to hold. You said the cost was in proportion."

"I did."

"Was that true?"

"It was accurate," said Alan.

He heard it come out. He did not look to his left. He felt a small warm weight against the side of his hand on the bench. "It was not the whole. I said a part of the truth in the wrong room, to the wrong person, and called it by the wrong name. I have been informed since that I used the wrong word." He drew breath. "I should like it recorded that I am extremely sorry."

"He is rather proud of his footnotes," said a clear voice.

It was Elen.

She had risen beside him. She stood at the end of the bench in her patched brown coat with her hair coming down and her chin up and her face as white as paper, and her hand had gone out and found his, quite openly, in front of four hundred people. She held it hard. Her voice was not loud. It was a little cracked, and perfectly steady, and it went up into the dark rafters like a struck glass.

"We did break the rules," said Elen. "I'd like to say that. I'd like it to be in the record that I said it first, and I'll say it again. I tasted it. Six times. The Professor didn't report it. We said so, on oath, to your face." She turned her head. She looked at the man on the stool, and for the first time in four months there was no fear in her at all. "And we paid. We scrubbed glass for six Saturdays. We lost a club. We nearly lost a teacher. Everybody who was in this room knows what it cost."

"Miss Joy," said Voss, gently.

"But you didn't catch us for it." She said it very quietly. "That's what I can't get past. You could have. It was all there. You could have said, you've broken Article Thirty-four, and you'll answer. I'd have answered." Her voice shook, and steadied. "You didn't. You took a boy who trimmed the lamps, and you put your name on him, and you called it a signature."

Nobody breathed.

"And it wasn't the silverbell," said Elen. "It never could have been. Doctor Lunt read out of the Formulary, page three hundred and eleven. It's a Campanula, but it's the marsh one, from the delta, eleven hundred miles south. It's got a bitter root and it's never grown in this country." She turned. "Doctor?"

The stout physician had gone the color of suet.

"I took the reading," said Doctor Lunt, hoarsely, "as it was given to me."

"By whom?"

"By the Chair."

"How very convenient," said Madam Quill.

"Miss Ashby," said Elen.

Wren had stood. She did it with her arms folded and her braid wound round her head, tall and dark and bitterly composed, and said in a flat voice that it did not smell like any poison that she had ever smelled, and that it did not climb like one, and that a pulse of fifty-two for eighteen days was not an illness but a clock. She gave them the iron. She gave them the lavender, the dead kind, from a bottle. And when Lord Haldane said, "Eh? What's the girl say?" and was told, she said, "I'm not licensed, my lord. I just have a nose," and sat down, and Madam Quill wrote something on her pad and underlined it twice.

"The Archivist," said Alan.

She came forward.

She came out into the middle of the aisle, thin and gray and upright, with the small glass vial in one hand and a brass lens in the other, and stood beside the stool. She did not look at the man on it. She held up the vial, and in it a loop of thread the width of a hair turned slowly in the light.

"The thread that was taken from the person of Mr. Pell at twenty minutes to four this morning," said the Archivist. "I have examined it. It bears, between the second and third turns, an impression of the Silver Seal of the Standards Committee, small as a grain of barley. There is a notch in the left pan." She turned. "Chair. I must ask you to produce the Seal."

The hall was perfectly still.

"It is held," said the Archivist, "in your person, by Schedule Four, and by no deputy. It has not left the Chamber save in your hand. I should be glad to see it."

He did not move at once.

He sat on the stool with his silver head a little bent, looking at his gloves, and a very long moment went by, and Alan, who had watched him for months, saw the thing that he had been waiting to see. It was nothing dramatic. The long mild face did not change. It was only that the hand on his knee, which had lain there easily all the morning, closed.

Then he put it into his waistcoat.

He drew out a short black stem of wood, tipped with a worn disc of silver, and laid it on the palm of his hand, and held it out. The Archivist took it. She bent over it. She raised the brass lens, and a small dry hush went through the Hall, like a held breath. She looked at the face of the Seal for a long time. She looked at the loop in the vial.

"The left pan," said the Archivist, "is chipped, one third of the way round the rim, at the same place."

"Eh?" said Lord Haldane. "What does she say?"

"She says it is his, my lord," said Madam Quill, very clearly.

"Whose?"

"Aldric's."

"Ah," said Lord Haldane. He sat quite still for a moment, with his trumpet in his lap, an enormously old man in a black gown, and something went across his dried-apple face that was neither stupid nor deaf. "I see. Yes. Yes, I see that."

"Yes," said Aldric Voss.

It was said very quietly. He had put his hand over his eyes. He sat on the stool in the gray light with his head bowed, and the whole long fine upright length of him seemed to go slack, as a coat goes slack that has been taken off the peg. And when he took the hand away, the mask had gone. It had not broken. It had been laid down, quite simply, like a thing that one has carried a long way and is too tired to carry farther.

"I used it," he said.

"Aldric," said a voice.

It was dry, and low, and not at all vague. The old man in the waistcoat had risen from the bench with the seedling in his hands. He stood in his clean buttoned waistcoat with his white hair brushed flat, looking at the man on the stool, and nobody else in the Hall existed.

"Ambrose," said Voss. He did not look up. "I never did him harm. You must believe that. He slept. I would have woken him in the spring. I have never harmed a living soul."

"He lay eighteen days."

"It is not harm," said Voss. "It is not. It leaves nothing. It is only a mark, and a mark fades." He lifted his head, and the pale eyes were wet. They were not at all empty now. "You think me a monster. I am not. I am an old man who has kept a promise. I should like you to understand it. I should like, once, to be understood."

"Then say it," said Marlow.

He said it.

It was not long. It came out of him in a low even voice, to the old man, and to nobody, and the whole Hall sat with its hands in its lap and listened. A rule, he said, was a mercy. He had said so at twenty-nine, in a room in the old Fellows' House, over a very bad candle, and he had never been persuaded otherwise. It was a thing that took the weight off the weak. It said, you need not decide. It was already decided. And a rule that admitted that it had been wrong, even once, even in a single line of a single page, had ceased to be a rule at all, and become an opinion. And people did not obey opinions.

"There was a woman," said Voss. "A village healer. Lissa Marren. In the winter of the great frost. She mended a child's hand with a thread, in a barn, and the Committee ruled that it was a working of the Third Order." His mouth twisted. "I wrote the ruling. I was young. I thought it was correct."

"It was not," said Marlow.

"No." He said it very low. "It was a Second. You found it. You came to me at two in the morning with the page in your hand, and you said, here. It ends here. And I looked." He drew breath. "And I knew you were right. And I knew that if I corrected it, the Committee would have confessed in front of the whole country that it could be wrong. And I could not. I could not do it, Ambrose. I thought that if one stone came out of the wall."

"So you let her be ruined."

"I let her book be sealed. In your safe. I thought it would be the end of it." He gave a short dry laugh. "It was a very good safe. I did not think that anyone would read to the bottom." He looked at the old man with a kind of bewildered tenderness. "You kept it for thirty years. You never said. I knew that you had it. I knew that one day you would open it."

"I never did."

"You would have." His voice cracked. "You would have, in the end. I could see it in the way you grew those marigolds. And a man who has once been disgraced does not get read. I needed you to be a man that nobody would believe."

The silence was terrible.

Marlow stood quite still, holding the saucer. His long face was gray, and calm, and entirely without anger. It was only very tired.

"You could have asked," he said.

"You would have said no."

"I would have said, show me." The old voice was gentle. "I said it thirty years ago. I said, show me where the Second Order ends and the Third begins, and I will burn the book myself. You could not. I asked you to correct a page, Aldric. It was one page. And you have spent thirty years in the Chamber making sure that nobody else would ever have to."

"I know."

"I never burned it," said Marlow. "I kept it in case you asked."

Voss put his hand over his face.

Lord Haldane struck the arm of his chair with his trumpet, once. It rang like a gong. "I am deaf, sir," said the old man, in a voice that carried to the last bench, "not stupid. I have heard what I need to hear." He drew himself upright. He looked, for an instant, like a judge. "Madam Quill?"

"My lord."

"We find as follows."

He gave it in short sentences, slowly, as a man lays bricks. That Aldric Voss, Chair of the Standards Committee, had wrought a binding of the Third Order outside the Warded Chamber, without entry, upon a student of this Academy, with the Silver Seal, in contravention of Article Nine. That he be relieved, forthwith, of the Chair, and of the Seal, which should be held by the Archivist until the Council otherwise directed. That the resolution of the second of February be rescinded. That Ambrose Marlow be restored to his post and his rank, with the regret of this Council. That the Potions Club be reconstituted, and its compound returned. That the petition of the twenty-sixth of January, under Section Twelve, be granted, without delay and without conditions. And that Aldric Voss answer to the full Council at its Lady Day Session, on the twenty-fifth of March, upon all matters touching his office.

"Please," said Mr. Pym, faintly, from the aisle.

"Sit down, sir," said Lord Haldane.

The Hall made no sound at all for a long moment. Then, from the back, a first-year began, very quietly, to clap.

It spread. It came up the benches like a wind through barley, from the back to the front, from the small and the round to the tall and the thin, until the great high rafters rang with it and the black cloths trembled at the windows. It was a roar. Alan sat in the middle of it with a hand in his and did not hear a sound.

Then the doors banged.

They flew open at the far end of the Hall, both together, and a draft came down the aisle that set the candles guttering. Four hundred heads turned. In the gap, in the white morning light, stood a short round small boy of eleven with a muffler trailing from his neck and a small brass lamp in his two hands, holding it before him like a sacred object, red to the roots of his hair. And beside him, in a gray nightshirt with a blanket round his shoulders, held up on one side by a broad, square, gray-faced sergeant and on the other by a stout woman with iron hair, with his hay-colored thatch standing on end and his long loose bare feet on the cold boards, came Kieran Pell.

He stopped.

He looked round the Hall. He looked at four hundred faces, at the platform and the black cloth and the green baize, at the stool in the middle with a gray man on it, and a faint puzzled frown went across his crooked kind face.

"Right then," said Kieran. His voice carried. It was hoarse and a little vague, and it went up into the roof like a lark. "Did I miss anything?"

The Hall went up like a powder-barrel.

They were all on their feet. The benches went over. Theo had gone over the back of one with a roar and was pounding down the aisle with his arms out. Wren had her sword-stick in the air. Mira was weeping into her ledger. And Elen had let go of his hand. She was gone. She had run down the length of the hall like a thrown thing, with her hair streaming and her coat flying, and she hit the boy in the nightshirt with her whole weight, and the two of them went down in a heap on the boards with the sergeant swearing and the Healer-Mistress shouting for air, and a small round boy with a lamp saying, with great dignity, over the din, "I brought his lamp. I thought it was proper."

They took the Chair out by the side door.

It was done quietly. Two of the Council's men in gray, who had been on the step of the east door a few hours ago and now looked at the floor, stood one on either side of him, not touching. He went between them with his head up, a tall gray man with silver hair and a pair of gloves in his hand. He did not look at the cheering. He did not look at the old man in the clean waistcoat, who stood by his bench with his seedling, watching him go with his eyes shut.

He stopped at the end of the front row.

He did it without a word. It was only that the long thin figure drew up and stood a moment, and the guards stood with him, and the pale mild eyes rested on a tall dark-haired boy with his ears a faint pink, who was standing quite still with a ledger on his arm.

"You read to the bottom of the page, Mr. Valemont," said Aldric Voss.

He said it quietly. It was not a threat. It was, if anything, a kind of weary courtesy, as between two persons who have been playing the same game on opposite sides for a very long time. "I do not know how. It is a thing that nobody does." His mouth moved. "I hope that you find it was worth the cost."

Alan did not answer at once.

He stood in the roaring hall, with the whole of the Academy cheering behind him and a girl laughing on the floor and a pair of pale eyes on his face. He did not think of a form. He did not think of an order. He thought of a cold stair, and a small voice, and a word that he had looked up.

"It was not a cost, sir," said Alan.

He said it clearly.

"It was the reason."

The pale eyes did not flicker. But something went out of the long fine face, very quietly, like a lamp turned low, and for one second it was only the face of a very old and very tired man. He bowed. He did it from the waist, with grave and perfect courtesy, as to an equal. And he went on between the two silent guards, down the long hall, toward the door.

"Footnote?" said a voice at his elbow.

She had come back. She was standing at his side with her hair down and her face wet and shining, and a smear of dust across her cheek, and a small pewter frog in her fist that she must have dragged from her pocket in the scrimmage. She was holding it up, in his cloak, like a banner, and she was smiling at him with the whole of her face.

"No need," said Alan.

"I know." She laughed. "I just wanted to say it. I think I might say it all day." She slid her hand into his again, quite deliberately, and held on. She was looking up at him with eyes that were enormous and dark and full of light. "Alan."

"Yes?"

"I said presently."

He went still.

"In the Annex. I said, ask me again presently. I said I'd tell you when." She drew a small unsteady breath. "I think it's, I think it might be."

He opened his mouth.

He did not know what was going to come out of it. He had a great many true things, in order, and they were all of them there, crowded behind his teeth, and not one was the right one. He looked down at her in the roaring light, a short girl in a patched coat with a pewter frog in her fist, and thought, quite clearly: I have never in my life been so entirely without a clause.

"Elen," said Alan.

"Oi!" bellowed a voice across the hall. "Valemont! Joy! Get over here! He wants to see the, he wants to see you both!"

It was Theo. He was standing on a bench with a gray-nightshirted figure on his shoulders like a very thin sack of flour, and the figure was waving both arms and shouting something that nobody could hear.

"Later," said Elen, laughing, tugging at his hand. "Later. You can ask me later. I'll be right here." She was already pulling him down the aisle, through the cheering, through the crush, toward a small bright knot of people at the end. "I've got all the time in the world."

And he went with her.