Alan had never before found a Sunday difficult.

He knew how to do a Sunday. He rose at six, washed, made the bed, ate breakfast at the early sitting when the hall was quiet, and spent the rest of the day in whatever combination of reading, writing, and walking a person of regular habits arranged for himself when the timetable let go of his wrist. It was a good day. It had edges.

This one had no edges at all. He read the same page of Warding Geometry four times. He walked to the library and then, at the door of the Quiet Annex, remembered whom he had met there the day before, and walked back again. He took out his notebook and looked at the three rules and the word beneath them, Closed, and found that his eye kept sliding sideways to the margin, where a smudge of green ink, from some stray fingertip at the annex table, had transferred itself to the page and would not rub off.

I've decided about you.

What could a person decide about another person? That was the question that circled him all through Sunday like a patient bird. A verdict, perhaps. A resolution to avoid him: he had been cold to her for a fortnight, and a sensible girl might at last conclude he was not worth the trouble. He examined this theory on the stairs, at supper, and again lying in the dark, and found it perfectly reasonable and no comfort whatsoever.

By Monday morning he had prepared. The bibliography was finished and sat in a clean folder, tied with a green ribbon, at the top of his satchel. His shirt was pressed. His collar had been straightened twice. He stood in front of the dormitory mirror with the stern, resigned look of a man about to present himself to a tribunal, and Pip, propped up on one elbow in bed with his hair standing in three directions, regarded him for a long moment.

"You've polished your buttons," Pip said.

"They were dull."

"They've been dull since Friday. You didn't mind on Friday." Pip yawned enormously. "Is this about the Joy girl?"

"It is about a joint paper."

"Right. Of course. A paper." Pip flopped back onto the pillow. "Good luck with your paper. I'll be here, being a thoroughly neutral roommate, who has absolutely no opinions."

"Pip."

"I have so many opinions," said Pip into the pillow. "You have no idea."

Alan took his satchel and left.

The east cloister was the long way round to the lecture hall, which was why he took it. At that hour it was almost empty. The morning was gray and still, with the snow lying clean and undisturbed in the garth, and the lanterns under the vaulted arches had not yet been put out, so that each pool of pale light lay on the flagstones like a coin. He walked quickly, head up, rehearsing a calm civil sentence for any occasion. Good morning. The bibliography is finished. I trust you have your half.

A hand caught his sleeve.

It came from the shadow between two pillars, quick and firm, and pulled him a full step sideways before he had time to resist. He found himself in a small stone alcove at the end of the cloister, where an old bench stood beneath a narrow window and the vaulting came down low enough to make the space feel private. Elen Joy let go of his sleeve at once, as though she had only meant to borrow his attention and not his person. She was out of breath. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, and her scarf was wound twice around her neck and still had managed to trail on the floor.

"Good morning," said Alan, because he had rehearsed it. "The bibliography is finished."

"Great," said Elen. "Wonderful. Thank you. Can I say something before I lose my nerve?"

"Have you ever lost your nerve?"

"No, and I'd hate to start now." She drew a breath so deep that her shoulders rose with it. "I'm going to say this fast, because if I say it slowly I'll start making it clever, and it's better not clever."

"Miss Joy," Alan began.

"I like you."

The cloister was very quiet. Somewhere far off, a door closed. A single lantern, at the end of the arcade, guttered in some draft and steadied again.

"I like you," Elen repeated, a little more steadily, now that the first words were out and the sky had not fallen. "I'd like to get to know you properly. Not just on Saturdays with folders. I'm going to try to make you like me back, and I wanted to tell you first so it wouldn't be a surprise. I think surprises are rude when they're about people's feelings."

She said it all with her chin up and her hands clasped in front of her like a student reciting a poem, and her eyes were fixed on his face with an open, unguarded directness he had never in his life seen on anyone. There was no coyness in it. There was no game. She looked, if anything, like a person who had stepped off a high ledge and was now waiting, with interest, to see how the water was.

Alan stood perfectly still. He was aware, quite distinctly, of every one of his limbs.

"That," he said at last, "is not a thing one simply says."

"Why not?"

"It is irregular."

"Is it against the rules?"

He actually searched. It was an absurd and automatic reflex, and he was powerless against it. The Academy charter ran through his mind from the first article to the forty-first, all the clauses on conduct and speech and courtesy and the proper use of the library, the section on the maintenance of dignity in the common rooms, the long amendment about unauthorized enchantments. Article nine. Article twenty-two. Not a line in it concerned the matter at hand.

"No," he said, with great reluctance.

"Then I'm not breaking anything." She smiled, and the dimple appeared, small and deliberate, like a signature. "I thought I'd better check. I looked it up last night, in case. It's not in there. I even read the amendments."

"You read the amendments."

"Alan, I read the whole charter. It was horrible. It took me till two in the morning." She was laughing now, quietly. "You're the only person I know who thinks that's normal."

He heard his own name and felt it again, the small, strange jolt, like a stair that was not where it ought to be. Alan, not lifesaver. Not you. Her voice put the vowel in a different place from anyone else's.

"Miss Joy," he said again, because it was all he had.

"Elen."

"This is entirely inappropriate."

"Is it?" She cocked her head. "Or is it only unexpected? Because those aren't the same thing, and I think you know that better than anybody."

He had no answer. It was, he reflected, disturbing how often she did that.

"Why?" he said instead, and the word came out rougher than he intended. "Why would you say such a thing? You have known me for scarcely a month. I have been, by my own account, uncivil. I have avoided you. I am not," he stopped, and began again, with difficulty, "I am not an agreeable person."

"You're not," said Elen, quite cheerfully. "That's the best part."

"I beg your pardon."

"No, listen. Let me say it right." She put up a hand and began to count on her fingers, like someone going through a recipe. "One. You say what you mean. You don't dress it up. When you think I'm being ridiculous, you look at me like I'm being ridiculous, and it's the most honest thing anyone's done to me all term. Two. You like what you like and you hate what you hate, and you don't pretend otherwise. You hate an untidy shelf the way other people hate being lied to. I could see it from across the room."

"I do not hate an untidy shelf."

"Three. You're really clever, and you don't lean on it. The first week I thought you were just one of those people who coast. But you don't. You color-code. You write the weak point in the margin. You work harder than anyone in that hall, and you never once act like it makes you special." Her voice softened. "I don't think I've ever met someone who's so good at something and so quiet about it."

Alan could not look at her. He looked at the stone wall behind her left shoulder with intense and total concentration. It was a very old wall. There was a crack in it shaped like a river.

"And also," said Elen, and for the first time there was a flicker of something close to shyness in her voice, "to be completely honest, since I'm being honest, you're ridiculously good-looking. It's actually quite annoying. I'm not going to pretend I haven't noticed."

His ears went hot. It started at the tips and spread forward, slowly, relentlessly, as though someone had set a lantern behind each one, and he knew there was not a thing in the world he could do to stop it.

"Oh," said Elen, delighted. "You blush!"

"I do not blush."

"Your whole ear is red."

"It is cold in the cloister."

"It's the exact same red as when I said it about the shelf." She was radiant. "That's wonderful. I didn't think you could."

He took a long, deliberate breath through his nose, the way his father had taught him to do when the room was rocking, and fixed his eyes on her. It was a mistake. She was standing in the pale lantern light with her hair half coming down and a streak of something green on her thumb, and her face was so open that it hurt, a little, to look at. She was waiting for him. She was not asking for anything. She stood there with her hands loose at her sides, entirely unarmed, and let him look.

"And I'm not asking you to change," she said, more quietly. "I want to be clear about that. I don't want you to be looser, or louder, or any less like a very polite fortress. I'd just like to be near it. That's all."

Something went through him then that he did not at all know what to do with.

It was not the compliment. He had been complimented before, in the formal and sideways manner of his family, always on his conduct and his marks and his name. It was the other thing: the way she said it, as if it were simply true, and as if the person who was true were someone she would not want rearranged. Nobody had ever said that. Not once, in seventeen years, had anyone looked at Alan Valemont and wished for him to remain exactly as he was.

And she did not even know about the storehouse.

That was what stung. The thought came up through the floor of him, quick and cold, before he could stop it. She stood there with her warm, fearless, unreasonable face, saying kind things about a boy she had known for a month, and she had no idea that she had met him once before. No idea that ten years ago she had knelt in a doorway full of snow and looked at him the same way. He had carried it so long that it had become a part of the shape of him, and here she was offering him the same gift a second time, freely, for nothing, as though it were nothing.

He could not tell her. It would make a hostage of her kindness, and a debt of her good heart, and it would change the thing entirely.

"The bell," he said.

The first bell began, deep and round, across the whole of the Academy.

"You don't have to say anything," said Elen. "Not today. You don't have to say yes. I just wanted you to know." She stepped back and gave him a small, odd, formal bow, and straightened, grinning. "See you in Foundations, Alan."

She left. Her boots rang on the stone, and then even that faded, and Alan stood alone in the alcove under the old window with his hand pressed flat against his own sternum, like a man checking that something had not fallen out.

She kept her word.

It was the most alarming thing about her, Alan reflected as the day went on. She had said she would try, and she tried, in the full, bright, uncomplicated way she did everything else, without a single note of manipulation, in front of anyone who cared to look.

At lunch, the Great Hall roared with its usual noon din, long tables crowded and clattering under the high gray windows. Alan took his accustomed place at the end of the third bench, with Pip across from him, and had barely lifted his spoon when a tray landed two seats down with the cheerful clatter of someone who had no intention of being inconspicuous.

Elen Joy, in the middle of a loud knot of laughing first-years, glanced up, saw him, and gave him a small enthusiastic wave. Then she turned back to her friends and carried on a conversation about someone's dubious experiments with pickled newt.

Pip's bread stopped halfway to his mouth.

"She waved," Pip said in a whisper that could have been heard from the high table.

"Eat."

"She waved at you. With her whole arm."

"Pip. Eat."

"Is this the decision? Is this what she decided? Because if this is what she decided, I have so many questions."

"I have no idea what you mean."

"You've gone red again," said Pip with interest. "It's moving down your neck. Do you want me to fetch a cloth?"

Alan ate his soup. When he finished, he found a small twist of paper beside his bowl, which had not been there before. He had not seen anyone put it there. Inside lay three pieces of candied ginger, amber and sugared and faintly sticky, with a scrap of parchment folded around them, on which a loose green hand had written: for the cold. He looked up. Down the table, a head of red hair was bent over a bowl, apparently riveted by the conversation, and not once, in the full minute that he watched, did it turn around.

He put the ginger in his pocket. He did not eat it. He was fairly sure he did not eat it.

She walked him to Charms. That was the other thing. She simply appeared at his elbow in the corridor after the noon bell, matched her stride to his as though they did it every day, and talked, without pressing, without waiting for replies, about whatever occurred to her: the mint in the greenhouse, the ridiculous hat of the Charms master, a beetle she had seen crossing the courtyard that morning with an air of private purpose. She did not touch him. She did not stand too close. She did not look at him in the fond, simpering manner of the girls in the novels his mother kept in the morning room. She looked at him the way she looked at everything, with bright and tireless curiosity, and talked to him as if he were a person who might at any moment say something worth hearing.

He said very little. He was walking at his customary quick pace, and she kept up without effort.

"Can I ask you something?" she said at the foot of the staircase.

"You may ask."

"What do you love?"

He stopped with one foot on the bottom step.

"I beg your pardon."

"What do you love? I don't mean like. I mean love. The thing you'd be sad without."

He thought about it. It seemed the kind of question that deserved an honest answer, and he had always prided himself on those.

"Order," said Alan.

She tilted her head. "No. That's a thing you value. I asked what you love."

"They are not distinct."

"They really are." She smiled, not unkindly. "It's all right. I'll ask again another time."

She went up the stairs ahead of him, two at a time, and he stood at the bottom with his hand on the banister and his mouth faintly open, and found that he could not, for the life of him, name a single thing.

It was not that there was nothing. There had to be something. He had a library he liked, and a way of arranging a desk, and a sort of quiet that came over him on winter evenings when the lamps were lit and the snow was coming down. But those were things that he preferred. They were not things that would leave a hole in the world if they were taken away. He tried to imagine what he would grieve, and what came to mind, unbidden and unwelcome, was a doorway full of white light, and a girl kneeling in it.

He went up the stairs very slowly.

She was waiting at the door of the Alchemy laboratory at the end of the afternoon.

It was the last bell of the day. Students streamed out of the long corridor in a roar of bags and boots and complaint, and Elen leaned against the wall beside the door with her bag on her shoulder and her ankles crossed, and when she saw him she did not wave. She simply straightened and waited, with a small hopeful smile, as one waits for a bus one is nearly certain will come.

Alan made himself walk up to her.

He had been preparing for this since lunch. He had composed it three times in his head, the second version being the best, and now he could not remember a word.

"Miss," he began, and stopped. "Elen."

Her face did something that he would remember for a long time afterward.

It was only that she lit up. She did not grin, or glow, or make any large display. She merely went very still, and then her eyes brightened, and then her whole face opened like a window in the morning, quick and quiet and unmistakably glad, as though he had given her something she had been trying to carry for a very long time.

"You said it," she said.

"It was necessary for clarity."

"Say it again."

"I will not." He drew himself up. "I wish to be clear. I have given consideration to what you said this morning."

"All day?"

"I am a person of method."

"I know. It's one of the things I like."

"I am," said Alan, with iron dignity, "flattered."

"That's good!"

"I am not finished." He kept his eyes on a point exactly one inch to the left of her ear. "I do not presently have any interest in a relationship of that kind. I am here to study. I have a family name to maintain and a standing to protect, and I would not be the proper person for what you describe." He heard how stiff it sounded, how formal, how like a letter from his father, and pressed on regardless. "I will treat you as a colleague on this project. A colleague, and a classmate, with every courtesy. Nothing more."

He waited for her to be hurt. He had braced for it, as one braces for a blow, with a tight cold dread in the pit of his stomach. He had never in his life said no to anything that mattered, and he was not at all sure what it would do to him.

Elen considered him for a moment. Then she nodded, slowly and with every appearance of grave understanding.

"Colleagues," she said.

"Yes."

"For now."

"I said presently."

"You said you don't have any interest presently." She was smiling again. "That's the best word you could have used. 'Presently.' It means not forever. 'At present' is my favorite phrase in the whole language."

"It is not an invitation."

"Of course not," said Elen. "I wouldn't dream of treating it as one." And she held out her hand, the same one that had shaken his on Saturday, ink on the knuckles and a streak of green on the thumb. "Colleagues. I accept the terms."

He shook it.

He did not know, afterward, how long it lasted. Not long. A formal handshake, as between two parties to a treaty. But when she let go, a very small warm weight seemed to remain in the palm of his hand, and he put it in his pocket, where the ginger was, and did not take it out again.

"Bibliography," she said. "You have it?"

He gave her the folder. She opened it, glanced at the first page, and made a small low sound of appreciation.

"It has headings," she whispered. "It has sub-headings."

"Footnotes are numbered."

"I'm going to frame it," said Elen, and left him standing in the corridor with the empty air where his folder had been, and a feeling in his chest that was either alarm or something that was not.

That night, Alan sat at his desk with the lamp turned low and the notebook open in front of him.

Pip was asleep, one arm flung over the edge of his bed, a bar of moonlight lying across his blanket. It was very late. The Academy had gone quiet, the great old building settling around him with its small night sounds, the tick of pipes, the creak of beams, the soft push of wind at the glass. Alan held a pen above the page.

There were three rules. Beneath them, in small neat letters, the word Closed.

He did not know what to write. He had meant to record the day in his usual manner, in clear sequence, without embellishment. Monday. Joint paper confirmed. Boundary set. But the words would not come in order. He wrote Four, with a full stop after it, and sat there for a very long time.

Four. Do not be flattered.

He read it. It looked exactly as ridiculous as he had feared. He drew a single neat line through it and began again.

Four. Do not

He could not finish that one either.

The pen hung a moment longer, and a bead of ink gathered and fell. He watched it spread into the paper, a small black star.

The truth, and he did not like it, was that nobody had ever said such a thing to him before. He turned it over in the dark, carefully, the way one examines a coin one is not certain is genuine. People had admired Alan Valemont. They had trusted him. They had said that he was reliable, that he was a credit to his house, that the family could be proud. But it had always been the house they meant. It had been the name, the crest, the ninth generation, the portrait in the east gallery that never had a mark against it. They had liked what he represented.

Nobody had stood in a cold stone alcove and told him that they liked him, and that they did not want him to be any different. And she had said it as if it were nothing. As if it were the simplest thing in the world.

That was what frightened him. It was not that she had said it. It was that for one dizzy second, standing there with his ears burning, he had wanted to believe her so badly that his knees had gone strange.

He closed the notebook.

He sat for a while with his hands folded on its cover, in the quiet. Then he got up, because he could not stay still, and went to the window, and pulled back the curtain.

The north lawn lay below him, wide and silver under the moon, running down to the black line of the Enchanted Forest. The clock in the west tower had just finished striking, a single deep note. It was past eleven. The grounds were empty, and the snow lay unmarked, and nothing moved in all that vast white quiet but one small light.

It was a lantern, swinging low and easy at the end of a slim arm, bobbing across the lawn toward the boundary stones. The figure beneath it was slight, in a long coat, with a scarf blowing out behind. Even from three floors up, even in the dark, he knew the walk. He knew the very particular, unrepentant, confident bounce of it.

She was going into the forest.

At the line of stones she stopped. She turned, and for a moment she stood quite still, her face a pale oval turned up toward the windows of the boys' wing, and he thought, with a lurch, that she could not possibly see him. The room was dark. The curtain was drawn back only a hand's width.

Then she lifted both arms and waved. A great, sweeping, ridiculous wave, like a person flagging down a ship, the lantern swinging wildly over her head. Her mouth shaped something, a single word, too far away to hear, but he knew what it was.

Come.

Alan stood at the window for three full breaths.

He told himself what any sensible person would have told himself. That she was breaking the curfew. That she was crossing the forest line without a teacher. That he had a duty, as a student of good standing, to see that no harm came of it. He told himself that the forest was dangerous and the paths moved and that she had no business going in alone, and that anyone, any classmate, any colleague, would have done the same.

That was why he was going. It was to stop her. It was only to stop her.

He let the curtain fall, crossed the room without a sound, and took his coat from the hook.