Mother Tansy shut her stall at ten o'clock on Saturday morning, which she had not done since the great frost, and everyone in the Voices market understood what it meant.

They understood it without being told. The long gray valley below the Academy was full of its usual Saturday noise, the rattle of shutters and the ring of the smith's hammer and the brisk cold bargaining of two hundred stalls, and in the middle of it, in her place at the foot of the Lantern Stair, a small bent woman in a shawl the color of lichen was lowering a striped awning with a long hooked pole. She did it slowly. She did not look at anyone. She tied it off, and wedged a stone against each leg of the trestle, and went round the back and dragged a tarpaulin over her bundles of dried herbs, and by the time she had done, the stalls to left and right of her had begun, one by one, to do the same.

"Knees," said Mother Tansy.

She said it to Elen, who had come down the three hundred steps beside Alan with a paper bag of Granny Hobb's hot apple pastries clutched to her chest and an expression of deep contentment, and who stopped dead in the road. The old woman looked up from under her shawl. Her gray eyes went from the girl to the tall dark boy in the awful hat, and back, and something in her seamed face rearranged itself, very slightly, into satisfaction.

"By noon," said Mother Tansy. "Go home. Don't dawdle. And child." She jerked her chin at the sky, which was low and soft and the color of a pearl. "If you've a place to be, be there. That's not the sort that comes and goes."

"How much?"

"All of it," said Mother Tansy. "It's been saving."

They climbed the Stair in a hurry. It was not far, and it was a very long way. The first flakes came at the hundredth step, large and slow and separate, and by the two hundredth the wind had risen behind them, a low steady shoving thing that pressed against the small of the back like a hand, and the flakes had stopped being separate. Elen was laughing. She had lost her hood, and her hair streamed, and she ran up the last steps two at a time with the bag held over her head, and he went after her with a satchel banging at his hip and a hat down over his ears, and neither of them had ever, he thought, been so entirely out of breath.

Professor Marlow was in the greenhouse.

He was kneeling among the benches in his shirtsleeves with a trowel in his hand and a seedling in a saucer on his knee, talking to it in a low urgent voice, and the whole long glass house round him was creaking like a ship. The wind had found it. It howled along the east wall. It shook every pane in its lead, and the door, which nobody had thought to bolt, was banging back and forth against its post with a noise like a drum.

"Ah," said Marlow. "Miss Joy. Mr. Valemont. I have been trying to persuade the marigolds that they are not afraid." He rose, with the saucer, and brushed his knees. "They are not persuaded. I find that I agree with them."

"Sir, the door."

"I have sent for a carpenter. He has sent back a note." He drew it from his waistcoat. "It says that he is under his bed." He looked at the two of them, in the windy gray light, with his pale vague kindly eyes, and appeared to arrive at a decision. "There is a Storm Order. The Warden issued it at nine. It requires that any student found in the open after four o'clock shall take shelter in the nearest building, and shall report to the Warden at first light." He took a key from his pocket, a large black iron one on a loop of string. "I have been thinking about which is the nearest building. I cannot think of a clearer instruction."

He laid it in Alan's hand.

"The potting shed," said Professor Marlow. "Behind the leeks. It has the only stove in the grounds that draws properly, and a very good lock. I shall be at the Warden's, with the marigolds. I do not expect to be fetched." He tucked the saucer under his coat, and a long hand came out and patted the sleeve of a boy in a puddle-colored hat. "I will say it for the record, since the Archivist likes a record. Do not burn it down."

"I should not dream of it, sir."

"No," said Marlow. "But she might."

"I resent that," said Elen, with her whole heart.

The potting shed was a very small building.

It stood in the lee of the greenhouse, behind a row of snow-capped leeks, a low tarred hut with one square window and a door that stuck. They fell in at it at ten minutes to one, in a gust that took the key out of his hand and the bag of pastries out of hers, and he threw his shoulder to the wood, and it gave, and the wind slammed it behind them with a noise like a shot. The roar dropped. It went on, outside, all round them, but it was a thing that was happening to someone else. They stood in the dark with the snow melting on their shoulders, breathing hard.

He lit the lantern. It was hanging on a nail by the door, and it caught at the third try, and the little room came up round them in a yellow ring.

It was perhaps eight feet by ten. There were shelves of clay pots in towers along one wall, and sacks of bonemeal along another, and a work-bench under the window with a vise and a row of hung tools, all of them clean, all of them in order. There was a folded horse-blanket on a stool. In the corner, no bigger than a bread bin, squatting on a hearth of three loose bricks, stood an iron stove, cold as a stone.

"It's freezing," said Elen. "It's wonderful."

She went to the stove and knelt before it. She did not look for a match. She laid a handful of kindling in the firebox and a few split logs on top, and held out one hand, and he watched a tiny bead of orange light come up at the tip of her forefinger like a coal in a draft, and she laid it to the shavings, and they caught. She sat back on her heels. The little iron door shone red. And the warmth came out into the room, by degrees, like the warmth of somebody's face when they have forgiven you.

"Right," said Elen.

She got up and sat on a barrel of potting soil with her feet swinging, and unwrapped the paper bag, and held out one of Granny Hobb's pastries. It was still faintly warm. It smelled of apple and clove and an extravagant amount of cinnamon.

"A storm," said Elen. "A shed. A stove. Pastries." She took a bite, and spoke through it. "Alan Valemont. It's story time."

He sat down on the stool with the horse-blanket, because it was the only other seat, and took the pastry. He had not thought that it would feel like this. He had been quite prepared for it, a week ago, in the Hall, with the whole of the thing laid out in three paragraphs in a good clear order. He had thought: I shall tell it as one tells a fact. I shall begin with the date.

"I have prepared," said Alan.

"Of course you have."

"I have an exhibit."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It is in the satchel. It will be produced at the proper time." He turned the pastry over in his hand. "I wish to say, before I begin, that it is not a very good story. It has no villain. It has a very small plot. Nothing happens in it, except that it is the most important thing that has ever occurred to me."

She had stopped chewing.

"In order," said Elen, softly.

"In order," said Alan.

He had been nine.

It was the week after the winter solstice, in the year that his grandfather died, and the Valemonts had gone to the Voices market as they went every winter, in the long black family carriage, to collect the year's silver. It was an ancient business. It was done by a great-uncle, Tobias, in a stone forge at the bottom of the valley, a vast red-bearded man who talked to nobody and made, by hand, in a day and a night, the twelve small plain silver rods that the Valemonts used in their work. His father went in to see him. His father always went in alone. There was a parlor at the back of the forge, with a fire and a great deal of dark wood, in which the two of them spoke for an hour about weights, and the price of metal, and the correct bearing of a man in his position, and nobody under the age of twenty-one had ever once been invited.

"You will wait," said his father.

He said it in the yard, in the snow, in the tone of one stating a law of nature. He was a tall man, with a thin handsome face, and he wore his black coat buttoned to the chin. He had never struck his son. He had never needed to. "There is a shed behind the forge, with a door. You will wait in it. You will not touch anything." He looked down. "You will not look at anything. A Valemont does not look at what he has not been given."

"Yes, sir," said Alan.

"Good."

"There it is," said Elen, very low, from her barrel.

He stopped. He had not known that he was going to say it aloud. "There what is?"

"The first rule." Her eyes were enormous. "Do not look. It's in your notebook. I wondered where it came from."

"I believe that it began here," said Alan. "I had not, until this morning, put the two together." He drew a breath. "I went into the shed."

It was a tool-shed. It was a good deal like this one, but darker, with a dirt floor and a single high window crusted with frost, and it smelled of cold iron and old sacking. There was nowhere to sit. He stood against the wall with his hands behind him and his back straight, as he had been taught, and looked at nothing. He looked at nothing for a very long time. He counted the planks, and then he counted the nails in the planks, and he learned in the course of an hour that it is possible to be so still that one hears the snow.

It was falling fast. That was what he remembered. It had begun at noon, and now it was thick, a soft heavy relentless whiteness against the window that put out the light by degrees, and the wind was getting up. He heard the forge hammer stop. He heard, far off, the long wail of it in the valley, going round the corner of the building like a person looking for a way in.

And the door flew open.

"It didn't fly," said Elen.

"It did."

"Ethan says I kicked it."

"You kicked it," Alan conceded. "It flew subsequently."

It had burst inward on its leather hinges and struck the wall, and a roar of white wind came in with it, and snow, a great spinning gust of it, that went to the rafters and fell. And in the middle of the doorway, in the blizzard, with the gray light behind her, stood a very small person.

She was perhaps eight. She was wrapped in a hooded coat that had been cut for someone larger, and it had slid off her head and hung down her back, so that her hair stood out round her face in a great wild cloud, and it was red. It was the red of a coal. There was snow in it. There was snow on her eyelashes. There was a smear of something on her chin and a gap in the front of her mouth where two teeth had been, and she had one hand in a red wool mitten and the other bare and clenched, and she was shouting.

She was shouting with her whole body. She had her head thrown back and her feet planted and her small chest going like a bellows, and what came out of her was neither a word nor a song, but a perfect high pure shriek of defiance, at the top of her lungs, straight up into the storm.

"I'M NOT SWALLOWED!" screamed the girl. "I'M NOT SWALLOWED! I'M NOT SWALLOWED! DO YOU HEAR? I'M STILL HERE!"

Elen had put both hands over her face. She was shaking. It was not clear which way.

"And behind her," said Alan, steadily, "at a considerable distance, there was a voice. It was a boy's. It was shouting, 'Elen! Elen, come back, you'll freeze!' And she did not turn her head."

"Ethan," said a muffled voice through fingers. "He was twelve. He was awful. He'd told me."

"What had he told you?"

"That the snow eats quiet children." She lowered her hands. Her eyes were swimming, and she was laughing. "He said that if you stand still and don't make a noise, it just comes down on you until you're a, you're a bump. He said it was well known. He said that was why the whole valley was so loud." She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. "I believed it. I'd been loud for an hour and a half."

"It was an extremely effective method," said Alan. "I can attest to it."

She had seen him.

He remembered it exactly. She had stopped in the middle of a scream, with her mouth still open, and looked straight across the dim shed at the boy against the wall. He was nine, and tall for it, and thin, in a dark coat buttoned to the chin, with his hands behind him and his face quite white. She had looked at him for a very long moment, with her head on one side. And then she had closed her mouth, and walked in, and the wind slammed the door behind her.

"Why are you so quiet?" said the girl.

It was a plain question. He had never been asked it. "I was told to be," said Alan.

"By who?"

"My father."

"Well, that's silly," said the girl. She came and stood in front of him, and tipped back her head, and regarded him with great frankness, with the snow melting on her face. "You'll be swallowed. Ethan says. You have to shout."

"I do not know how."

"Don't you?" She was astonished. "Everybody knows how. You just open it." She demonstrated. "Aaaaah. Like that."

"I could not."

"You could. Try."

He tried.

It was a very small sound. It came out of him like the creak of a hinge. It was a croak, a dry, apologetic, strangled thing, hardly louder than a breath, and he stood against the wall with his face burning and his eyes on the floor, and waited for her to laugh.

She did not. She considered it, gravely, with her head on one side, as a doctor considers a cough.

"That's a whisper in a hat," she said. "Do it again. But say something rude."

"I do not know anything rude."

"Anything? Not even, not even a bit?" She frowned. "Say turnip."

"Turnip," said Alan.

"Louder."

"Turnip."

"LOUDER!"

"TURNIP," squeaked the boy against the wall, in a voice like a mouse in a trap, and the girl shrieked with laughter, and clapped both hands over her mouth, and bent double, and he stood there with the sound still going round in the rafters and thought, with a kind of horrified wonder: I have said it. I have said it out loud. And nothing has happened.

At the top of the barrel, in the lamplit shed, Elen had slid off onto the floor and was sitting with her back against the potting soil and her knees up, weeping with laughter, with the half-eaten pastry still in her hand.

"I said turnip," she gasped. "I told you to say, oh, Alan. Why turnip?"

"I have been wondering that for eight years."

"I don't know! It was just the first, it was the funniest thing I could think of." She hiccuped. "I'd had one for lunch."

"It was the first time," said Alan, "that I had made a noise on purpose."

The laughter stopped.

It did not fade. It simply stopped, and in the quiet she looked up at him from the floor, with her face blotched and bright and her eyes quite still, and he went on.

She had sat down on the dirt beside him, against the wall, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and he had slid down it, after a moment, to sit beside her. She had a ginger biscuit in her pocket. It was a large one, a good deal crumbled, and she had broken it in two with her bare hand and given him the bigger half without being asked. They had eaten it in silence. The storm roared over the roof. It had grown dark, and a bitter little draft came in under the door, and he had begun, without meaning to, to shiver.

"You're cold," said the girl.

"I am perfectly all right."

"You're blue. Look at your hand." She took it. She turned it over in her small gritty bare one, and it was white to the wrist. She stared at it. And then she did a thing that he would not understand for eight years. She pulled the red wool mitten off her left hand, a small, round, lumpy thing, knitted by someone who had loved it and had no particular gift for it, with a darn at the thumb, and put it on him.

It did not fit. It stopped at the knuckles. She tugged it down, anyhow, firmly, and patted it flat.

"There," said the girl. "Keep it. Till it's not cold."

He did not say anything for a moment. He sat looking at it. It was the first thing that anyone had ever given him that was not a thing that he was supposed to have.

"Thank you," said Alan. His voice was not steady. "I shall return it, when it is no longer cold."

The girl looked at him with her mouth a little open.

"That's the longest thing anybody's ever said to me," she observed. And then the door banged, and a boy's voice, hoarse and furious and terrified, said, "ELEN JOY, I will tell Mother," and she was on her feet. She was gone. She went out into the storm with her one mitten and her red hair like a flag, and he heard her shouting again, going away from him into the white, high and clear and entirely unafraid, until the wind took it, and he sat in the dark with his hand in a mitten, quite alone.

"And that," said Alan, "was all."

The stove ticked. Outside, the storm went by the window in long shuddering sheets.

"What happened?" said Elen, from the floor. Her voice was very small. "After."

"My father came out of the forge. He was very displeased. It was after dark. He found me in the shed, and he asked whether any person had spoken to me, and I said yes."

"What did you say it was about?"

"He asked what the person had said. I told him that I had been advised to shout." He found that the corner of his mouth had moved. "He asked whether I had done so. I said that I had not, sir. He said good."

She made a soft sound.

"He did not ask about the mitten," said Alan. "It was in my sleeve. I had put it there, in the shed, by instinct, as one hides a thing that one has stolen. I do not know why. I could have told him. I was not forbidden to be given a mitten. I had simply never been given one." He drew breath. "He did not ask. And I did not say."

"You left it out."

"It was the first thing that I ever did," said Alan. "It was the first time that I knew a thing that no one had asked, and kept it. I was nine. I sat in a carriage for four hours with my hand in my sleeve, and I thought: there is a place in me that nobody has been told about."

Elen was crying again. She did not try to stop. She sat on the floor of the potting shed with her knees drawn up and her arms round them and the tears going down her face in the red light of the stove, and she was smiling.

"Alan," she said.

"I have the exhibit."

He had hung the satchel on a nail. He took it down. It was heavy with the usual things, and he opened the flap, and put his hand into the lining at the back, where there was a pocket that he had sewn himself, with his grandfather's needle, in the dark, on the night of the sixth of February. He had not meant to produce it so soon. He had thought: when it is warm. He drew out a small flat tin that had once held mints, and opened it on his knee.

It lay on a bed of folded tissue.

It was very small. It was a child's mitten, of red wool, gone the color of a faded rose, shrunk a little with the years and worn thin at the tips. There was a darn at the thumb. It was a clumsy one, in a slightly different red, put in by a loving hand. And there was, at the cuff, a second small mend that was newer, and was done in a tiny, careful, upright stitch, in a thread that did not match, by a person who had learned from a book.

"I have been returning it," said Alan, "for eight years."

She did not move.

She was looking at the mitten. She looked at it for so long that he thought that she had not understood, and he opened his mouth to speak, and she put out a hand. It was shaking so that she could not at first take it up. She touched it with one finger. She drew it out of the tin, and held it in her palm, and it was the size of a tea-cup.

"I lost this," said Elen.

"I know."

"I lost it in a, oh. I lost it. In the snow." Her voice cracked. "I got into such trouble. I came in without it, and my mother said, where's your other one, and I said I didn't know. I said a bear had it." She stopped. A great hiccuping laugh broke out of her. "And I'd completely forgotten. I'd completely, there was a boy. There was a very tall boy in a shed. He looked like a, like a poker. He said thank you as if I'd given him a deed."

"I recall."

"I told Ethan," said Elen. "I said, there was a boy in the shed who doesn't shout. Ethan said he'd be swallowed. I was cross. I thought about him for a week." She was laughing and crying with the mitten in both hands against her chest. "And then it was Christmas, and I forgot. I forgot you completely."

"That is in the nature of things," said Alan.

"The other one's on a nail," said Elen.

He did not follow.

"Mother kept it." Her face was running with tears, and entirely radiant. "The one I came home with. The right one. It's on a nail by the front door, next to the umbrellas. It's been there eight years. She never threw it away. I asked her once, when I was about twelve, why she kept an odd mitten, and she said, 'One mitten's a promise, love. You never know who's got the other.'"

"A hat should be a promise," said Alan, slowly.

"She says that about everything!" She was laughing so that she could hardly speak. "She says it about, she says it about shoes. She's got a whole theory." She pressed the mitten against her mouth. "And you've got the other one. In a mint tin. In a satchel. Mended."

"I did not know what else to do with it."

"You could have given it back!"

"You were nobody," said Alan. "You were a noise in a storm. I did not know your name. I did not know where you lived." He drew a ragged breath. "I kept it, in case the cold ended."

She stared at him.

And then, quite suddenly, with a shriek, she flung her head back against the barrel and laughed. It filled the little shed. It was enormous. It was the wildest, most helpless, most unrestrained peal that he had heard from her, and it went on and on, and she beat her fist on the floor.

"The third shed!" cried Elen. "The third one! It's the third! There was the shed, and then the larder, and the cupboard! And now this!" She had tears running down both cheeks. "Alan Valemont, you are the only man in the world who has only ever met me in storage!"

"It is a regrettable pattern."

"It's fate! It's the stupidest fate! It keeps putting you in a cupboard and me in the door!" She clutched her ribs. "We were always going to. We were just always going to. I don't believe there was any way round it. Somebody up there thought, I'll put them in a shed, and see."

"I should say," said Alan, "that the evidence is considerable."

He was laughing too.

He did not know when it had started. It had come up under his ribs, a warm uncontrollable pressure, and it broke out of him in a breath, and another, until he was sitting on the stool with the horse-blanket sliding off his knees and his face in his hands, shaking, as helpless as she. He had not known it was a thing that one could do on purpose. He had not known that one could laugh at the most important event of one's life, and that it would not be lessened by it. It was larger. It was as though the thing had been waiting eight years in a cold dark place for somebody to open the door and say, you look absurd.

When they were done, she wiped her face on her sleeve, and held out her hand.

"Give it," said Elen.

He gave her the tin. She put the mitten back in it, with the tissue, with enormous care, as one lays down something asleep, and shut the lid. She held it a moment. Then she did not give it back. She slid it into the pocket of her brown coat, over her heart, beside a frog in a green cloak and a gray strip of card.

"I'm keeping it," said Elen. "Don't argue. It's the other half. I'm going to take it home at Easter, and I'm going to hang it on the nail." Her eyes were bright. "Next to the first."

"I should not dream of arguing."

"You've returned it," said Elen. "It's not cold."

He looked at her.

It was true. He sat on a stool in a shed, in a storm, in the red glow of an iron stove, with a girl on the floor and a pastry on his knee, and he was warm. He had been warm, he realized, for some days. He had been so warm that he had stopped noticing, as one stops noticing the beat of one's own heart.

"The scarf," said Alan.

"Is a different matter. You'll hang on to it." She sniffed. "I'm still in charge of weather. I haven't decided. It might be a bit longer." She tucked up her feet. "I want to ask you something."

"I am at your disposal."

"What did you see?" She tipped her head against the barrel. "That first day. In the Hall. In October. When you didn't know it was me."

He had expected it. He had not expected how it would feel to be asked.

"I saw a hat," said Alan.

"A hat."

"It was on backward. It had a, I believe that it was a ribbon. It was over the left ear." He kept his eyes on the stove. "And a girl underneath it, in a coat that had been mended a great many times, who had come in at the very back of the Hall, after the Warden had begun, through the wrong door. She did not creep. She walked straight up the middle aisle. And she stopped in front of the whole assembly and said, in a clear voice, 'Is this where we're swallowed?'"

"I did not," said Elen, in horror.

"You did. It was a very distinct remark."

"Oh, no."

"The Warden said that it was not. And you said, 'Good. I brought a hat.'"

She put both hands over her face. Her shoulders shook.

"I thought," said Alan, "that it was not you. I thought that you were nobody. And I stood in the third row with my hands folded and thought, with great clarity, that that was a person who had not been told how to enter a room." He swallowed. "I was envious. I do not think that I had known one could be."

The wind boomed on the roof. A shutter clapped. Elen lowered her hands.

"Alan," she said.

"Yes."

"Will you do something for me?"

"I shall do anything."

"You'll like this less." She had got to her feet. She stood in the middle of the little shed, in the red light, with her hair in disorder and her face wet and a smear of potting soil on her cheek, and her eyes were enormous and perfectly calm. She went to the door. She put her hand on the latch. "I want you to shout."

He did not move.

"Properly," said Elen. "Out there. In it. I want you to do the thing that you couldn't. I'm not going to, I'm not doing it for a joke." Her voice shook, a very little. "I think it's what's left. I think it might be the last bit."

"I do not," said Alan. "I do not believe that I."

"I know."

"It is extremely loud."

"Mm."

"There are persons in the greenhouse."

"There's the Warden's cat."

He looked at her. He looked at the little red mouth and the scarlet cloud of hair and the hand on the latch, and he thought of a boy in a dark coat in a freezing shed, with his mouth shut, listening to the snow. He rose. He did it slowly. He took the horse-blanket off his knees and laid it on the stool, and went to the door, and she lifted the latch, and the storm came in.

It came in like a living thing. It hit him in the face. The wind was a solid white roar, so loud that he felt it in his chest, and the snow came sideways, in great stinging sheets, and there was nothing beyond the step but a spinning gray blank, in which, somewhere, there must have been a greenhouse. He stood on the sill with one hand on the frame, and the cold went through his coat as though it were not there.

"Take a big breath!" bawled Elen, at his ear. She had her hand in the back of his coat. "Say something rude!"

He drew breath.

He had never in his life done it. He had never filled his lungs for anything but speech. He felt it go down, cold and enormous, to the bottom of him, and hang there, and he opened his mouth.

"TURNIP!" shouted Alan Valemont.

It was not a good shout. It cracked. It broke in the middle like a boy's voice, and went up, and was swallowed whole by the storm without any perceptible effect. He stood there with the snow in his eyes and the sound still ringing in his skull, and it was, he thought, the most exhilarating thing that he had ever done.

"AGAIN!" shrieked Elen.

"TURNIP!"

"LOUDER! SOMETHING REAL!"

He knew what it was.

He had known for eight years. It had been waiting in him like a stone in a field, and he threw back his head, and opened his throat, and all of him, the whole long taut disciplined length of a person who had been built since the age of seven to stand very still, went into it.

"I AM NOT SWALLOWED!" roared Alan.

It went out of him like a bell.

It was the greatest sound that he had ever made. It was raw, and cracked, and wild, and entirely without form, and it went up into the white, over the roof of the greenhouse, over the black trees, over the whole enormous roaring valley, and he heard, a long way off, with a strange shaken joy, the storm take it and carry it on. "I AM NOT SWALLOWED! I AM STILL HERE!"

She was screaming beside him. She had flung up both her arms. She was shouting, wordlessly, with her mouth wide open and her red hair standing round her face in the wind, and he caught her hand, and held it, and they stood in the open door of a potting shed in the middle of the worst blizzard in forty years, two small figures in the white, and yelled at the sky until their throats were raw.

They got the door shut at last, between them, with their combined weight.

They fell against it, panting, in the dark, and slid to the floor. The lantern had gone out. There was only the red bar of the stove-door across the planks, and the sound of the wind going round the little hut like a great animal that has lost the scent. She was shaking with cold. He pulled the horse-blanket off the stool and put it round both of them, and she tucked in against his side, with her wet head against his shoulder, and for a very long time they said nothing at all.

"Alan," said Elen, at last.

"Yes."

"I'm going to say something."

"I am listening."

"I want to say it properly." Her voice was hoarse. She lifted her head, and he could see her face in the red dark, very white and very near, with the eyes enormous. "I said it once by accident. In a corridor. In December. I said 'because I love you,' and I went scarlet, and I said 'as a friend.' And it was a lie."

He did not breathe.

"It wasn't as a friend," said Elen. "It was never as a friend. I don't know when it started. I think it might have been the larder. I think it might have been the coat." She laughed, shakily. "I'd like to say it on purpose. I'd like to say it when I'm not frightened, and I'm not in a hurry, and nobody's made me. I'd like it to be a thing I did."

"Elen."

"I love you."

She said it quite quietly. It was the plainest thing that he had ever heard. It lay in the dark of the shed like a lit lamp, and the storm went round it, and could not put it out.

"I love you," said Elen again, more steadily. "Alan. I love how you say good evening to lamps. I love that you bite your sleeve. I love that you put a hat on in a cupboard and a, and a thing in a tin for eight years because you couldn't think what else to do with it." Her voice cracked. "I love that you shouted. I love that you're still a bit stiff about it. And I don't want you to say anything. I just want it to be said."

He looked at her.

He had a great number of true things. They were all there, crowded behind his teeth, in good order, and he looked at them, one by one, and found that there was not a single one that he needed. There was no clause. There was nothing to explain. He had said it in the street, in the snow, in the green light of a lamp, a good many times, in a good many ways, and had never said the one that was left.

"I love you," said Alan.

He said it in a whisper. It came out of him like breath. It was not an argument. It was not in any sort of order. It was the first sentence that he had ever spoken that had no beginning and no end and nothing in it but the thing itself.

Her face crumpled. She put her forehead against his, hard, as she had on a frozen lake, and her arms went round his neck, and he held her. He felt her shaking. He felt her laugh against his collar, wet and soundless, and her breath on his cheek, and her small cold hands in his hair. And that was all. They did not kiss. It did not seem to be needed. They sat on the floor of a potting shed in the red dark with a horse-blanket round their shoulders and their foreheads together, and the storm went on over their heads, and the stove ticked, and a very long time went by.

"Turnip," said Elen, at length, into his collar, in a voice of deep content.

"I regret that I cannot improve upon it," said Alan.

The storm blew itself out in the small hours.

He woke to the silence. It was the first thing that he knew. It came into the little shed like a hand laid on the roof, a huge soft muffled stillness, and he lay in the gray dark with his cheek against the top of a red head and the blanket over both of them and did not at first know where he was. The stove had burned down to a bed of coals. A pale thread of light lay along the bottom of the door. She was asleep, with her mouth a little open and her hand fisted in the front of his coat, and she snored very slightly, on the in-breath, like a kitten.

He did not move for a long time.

He lay in the cold and the quiet and thought of nothing. It was the oddest sensation. It was like having put down a very heavy thing that he had been carrying for so long that his arms had forgotten what they were for. The light grew. It came through the one small frosted window and turned the pots on the shelves from black to pearl. And somewhere outside, at a distance, he heard a sound that he did not know: a faint high thin crunching, like a small animal coming across a very large field.

It came nearer. It stopped at the door.

There was a knock. It was a small one, hesitant, and rather dignified. Then, with a good deal of grunting, a smaller voice, hoarse with cold, said through the planks:

"Excuse me. It's Tuck. Percival. First year. I did knock."

Elen woke with a snort.

"What? Who?" She sat up, with her hair on end and the blanket round her ears, and blinked in the gray light. She looked at him. She looked at the door. A very slow and brilliant smile spread across her face. "Oh," said Elen, "it's morning."

"It would appear so."

"Percy!" she called. "Come in!"

It took a certain amount of effort. The drift had piled itself against the planks to the height of the latch, and it was a long time before the door gave. When it did, a small round figure fell into the shed in a heap of snow, wrapped to the eyes in a muffler that had been wound round him some eleven times by a different person, with a satchel on his back and a paper in his mittened fist, and rose, and brushed himself down, and bowed.

"Good morning," said Percy Tuck. "I have been all over the Academy. It is buried. The Warden says that nobody is to go out. She says that those who are in shelter are to report at first light, and I said that I knew where you were, and I'd bring it." He looked at Alan, and at the blanket, and at the girl in it, with solemn and unblinking interest. "I haven't told anyone. It's in the Rumor Society. But I haven't told it."

"Percy," said Alan, "you are a person of the first discretion."

"I know," said Percy. "I've got a letter."

He held it out. It was a grubby envelope, much folded, addressed in a large, sprawling, careless hand, and Elen took it, and her eyebrows went up. "It's from Ethan." She tore it open. She read it. She read it again. Her face went through a number of different expressions, one after another, like a field under a running sky, and ended up, to Alan's alarm, scarlet.

"What does it say?" said Alan.

"It's a very short letter." She cleared her throat. "'Dear Elen. Mother says. Bring the lamp boy at Easter. She has questions. Father has drawn a map of the way here. It is wrong. Don't use it. Love, E. P.S. I am six foot of complete nonsense and she says that is no excuse.'"

There was a silence in the potting shed.

"The lamp boy," said Alan.

"I wrote to her," said Elen, faintly. "In January. I mentioned that there was someone doing the lamps. I may have mentioned it, I may have gone on. For some pages." She folded the letter in half, and in half again, and put it in her pocket, and her ears were scarlet. "Mother knows everything. She always has. She'll have worked it out from the handwriting."

"She has questions," said Alan.

"She'll have a great many."

"I have not prepared a form."

"There isn't one," said Elen. She got to her feet, and stood in the gray light of the doorway with her hair in a halo and the whole blazing white stillness of a buried valley behind her, and held out her hand. She was smiling at him, wide and slow and sleepy and helpless, with a dimple at the corner of her mouth like a small gold coin. "You'll just have to turn up. And be exactly as stiff as you are. And my mother will look at you for about four seconds, and decide."

"What will she decide?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Elen, cheerfully. "I never do. But I'll tell you something. She kept the mitten."

He took her hand.

He rose from the floor of the potting shed, stiff in every limb, with the blanket falling from his shoulders and a puddle-colored hat askew on his head, and went with her to the door, and out into the morning. It was blinding. The whole Academy lay under three feet of new snow, smooth and blue and shining, with the black roofs standing out of it like islands and the sky a pale, high, flawless, enormous blue, and not a mark on it anywhere but a single line of small deep tracks going away across the lawn toward the arcade, where a round figure was already taking a short cut with great determination, and the long bright string of the lamps was going out, one by one, in the dawn.

"Turnip," said Alan, very softly, to the whole white world.

It did not swallow him.