Jory Keel told the High Examiner exactly one thing: the wolf was denning in the black rocks past the north edge of Ashwood.
Adrian was there when he said it, standing in the Dunns' yard at dusk with mud to his knees and a sack of snares over his shoulder. Crane thanked the hunter warmly. He asked two sensible questions about the size of the prints and the age of the trail, and wrote the answers down in a small leather book with a silver pencil. He asked whether they had seen anything else of interest.
"No," said Jory Keel.
Crane looked at him for a moment, pleasantly.
"No," Jory said again, and turned, and walked off toward his hut in the wood without another word, his dogs slinking silently at his heels.
Crane watched him go. Then he looked at Adrian, and smiled.
"You look exhausted," he said. "Go home, Adrian. Get warm."
Adrian went home. He did not look at the High Examiner's boots. He had already looked at them, very carefully, while Crane was writing - and they were soft grey leather, city boots, and they were clean, and it told him nothing at all.
❖ ❖ ❖
For three days afterward, Adrian practiced walking.
It was the least dangerous thing he could think of. He did not dare touch the scythe again - not with Rowan watching from the bell tower, not with Elsie watching him every minute with her enormous, knowing eyes - and there was no one else to watch. But Jory's walk had got into him, the way the scythe had. He'd close his eyes in the loft at night and the web of silver would come, soft and loose from the edge of the foot up through the knees, and he'd turn it over and over.
Why the outside of the foot? Because it's narrower. It touches less.
Why so slow? Because a sound is just weight arriving too fast.
Why are the knees loose? So they can stop. So the step can be taken back, halfway, if there's a stick underneath.
[Observation: Tracking (Jory Keel) - 19%]
He tried it crossing the yard. He tried it in the barn, where the floor was covered in straw that crunched. He tried it on the loft ladder, and put his weight on the third rung so slowly and carefully that it only made half a creak, and then, on the fourth night, no creak at all.
On the fifth morning he walked up behind his mother while she was at the washbasin and stood there for a full count of ten before she turned around and saw him and shrieked, and threw a wet shirt at his head.
"Don't do that!"
"Sorry."
"You're not sorry. You're grinning." Mara pressed a hand to her chest. Her face was pink. Then it changed - slowly, the pink draining out of it - as she looked at his feet, and at the packed earth floor between the door and the basin, where not one grain of dirt had been scuffed.
"Who taught you to walk like that?" she said quietly.
"Nobody. I watched Jory."
"You watched Jory." She looked at him for a long moment. "For one afternoon."
He didn't say anything. He had learned that when he didn't say anything, his mother usually worked out the rest on her own, and that was safer for both of them.
"Don't let the village see you do that," Mara said. "Not the Tulls. Not the Brandts. Not Hatty. Not anyone." She picked up the wet shirt and wrung it out, hard, as if she wanted to wring something else. "People already talk. A Null boy who walks like a hunter after one afternoon is a thing people talk about."
❖ ❖ ❖
It was Elsie who first saw Brother Odo in the lane.
"The ink man's out there," she announced at breakfast on the sixth day, with her mouth full. "With a bell."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," said Mara, and then, "What bell?"
Elsie swallowed. "A little one. On a stick. He's walking up and down, and holding it out, like this." She held her spoon out at arm's length over the table and walked it slowly from one end to the other. "And he stops sometimes and waits. But it doesn't ring."
Tomas put down his cup. He went to the window. Adrian went with him.
Brother Odo stood in the western lane, perhaps fifty yards from the Vale gate, in the grey early light. He was holding something out in front of him - a thin brass rod as long as his forearm, with a small, bell-shaped cup of brass at its end. He was walking very slowly along the hedgerow, and his lips were moving, and his eyes were fixed on the brass cup.
Inside the cup, something caught the morning light. A small, curved, bright thing. Silver.
Adrian's hands went cold. Not a little cold. Deep, Sounding-water cold, the ache climbing his wrists all at once.
And the grey window, which had been hovering faintly at the edge of his sight, the way it did most mornings now - went out.
Not closed. Out. Like a candle pinched between two fingers. One moment it was there, and the next there was nothing, not even the faint flicker at the corner of his eye that he had grown so used to that he only noticed it now that it was gone.
"What in the Luminant's name is he doing?" said Tomas.
"Surveying," said Mara, behind them. Her voice was very flat. "For the Hollow. The High Examiner said there might be a Hollow within twenty miles."
"In our lane?"
"He has to start somewhere."
Brother Odo reached the Vale gate. He stopped. He held the brass rod out over the gate, toward the house, and waited, and his lips moved. Adrian stood at the window beside his father with his cold hands at his sides and his heart slamming and thought nothing. Thought nothing at all. Thought about porridge, and goats, and the color of the sky.
The little brass bell did not ring.
After a long moment, Brother Odo lowered the rod, made a note in a book, and walked on down the lane toward the Colls' orchard.
The grey window did not come back for an hour.
❖ ❖ ❖
That night, Adrian lay in the loft and waited until he was sure everyone was asleep, and then he waited some more. Then he closed his eyes and called the window, and when it came - slowly, faintly, as though it were checking the room first - he did not ask it anything.
He had been thinking for six days. He had been thinking the way Mira thought, going over a problem again and again from different sides, and he had come to a conclusion.
The window would not answer big questions. What are you? Who made you? What is my Trait? It said insufficient comprehension, or it said nothing, and he'd get angry and it would get quieter, and that was the end of it.
But it answered small questions. Did it hurt? Yes. Is it the Dissonance? Yes. Is he lying? No.
So he would ask small questions. A great many of them. And he would put the answers together himself, the way you put together the pieces of a broken jug.
He began.
Were you made?
A long pause.
[Yes.]
By people?
[Yes.]
By the Temple?
[No.]
Adrian's breath caught. He made himself go slowly.
Are the people who made you still alive?
The pause this time was very long. Long enough that Adrian thought he'd reached the end of it already.
[No.]
Did they die a long time ago?
[Yes.]
Before the Temple?
[Before the Temple was what it is.]
That wasn't a yes or a no. Adrian turned it over carefully, like a stone with something written underneath, and put it aside to think about later.
The brass bell. The thing Brother Odo carried. Is it for finding you?
[Yes.]
Is the silver in it a piece of the mirror? My mirror?
[Yes.]
Can it hear you?
[It can hear me if I speak.]
So you went quiet.
[Yes.]
What would happen if it heard you?
[It would ring.]
And then?
The window did not answer that.
Adrian lay in the dark and felt the shape of it, the way he'd felt the seam of his father's swing, the way he'd felt the slack in Jory's knees. It was not a nice shape. The High Examiner had not stayed in Harrowfield for the chapel records. He had not stayed for the Hollowbeast. He had stayed with a piece of broken silver from Adrian's Sounding, and he had made it into a bell, and he was walking it up and down the lane outside Adrian's house, waiting for the thing that lived behind Adrian's eyes to make a sound.
Does the Examiner know you exist?
[He knows something exists.]
Does he know what you are?
[No.]
Does he want to?
[Yes.]
More than anything?
Pause.
[I think so.]
Adrian swallowed. His throat was dry.
The boots by the stream. Were they his?
[I was not there.]
But you think they were.
[I think a man who walks beside a Hollowbeast and is not touched by it is a man who knows how.]
That was not an answer either. It was worse than an answer.
❖ ❖ ❖
He stopped asking for a while. He lay and listened to the house. Elsie had kicked him twice. His father's breathing was heavy through the wall, catching on the edge of a snore. Somewhere far off, at the other end of the valley, a dog was barking, and then stopped.
Then Adrian asked the question he had actually been building toward for six days.
If I got stronger. Faster. If I learned everything - my father's scything, Jory's tracking, Rowan's shield, all of it. If I learned it fast. Could I protect them?
The window was still for a long moment.
Then it wrote something that was not an answer to his question at all.
[Being seen is more dangerous than being weak.]
Adrian frowned into the dark.
That's not what I asked.
[It is the answer.]
But if the wolf comes. If the Examiner tries to take me. If Hobb comes with his key. Being weak doesn't stop any of that.
[No.]
[But being weak does not ring the bell.]
He opened his eyes. The loft was black. The window hung in front of him in the black, grey and flat and patient.
[Every time you use what the Canon has not written for you, the world notices.]
[That is Dissonance.]
[The more you use, the louder you are.]
[He is listening.]
[If you become strong quickly, you become loud quickly.]
[And then he will not need a bell.]
Adrian lay very still. He thought about the south meadow. About the scythe falling perfectly through the grass, twelve times, fourteen times, and the brightness running up his arms, and the black letters. Replication exceeded permitted structure. The world noticed.
How loud was that? he asked. The meadow. When I copied Father.
[Loud enough that I was afraid.]
The words sat in the dark.
In all the days since the chapel, the window had never said anything like that. It had said yes, and no, and insufficient comprehension, and do not speak of this. It had never said I. Not like that. Not in a way that sounded like there was someone behind the grey.
You can be afraid?
The window flickered. For a moment Adrian thought he had pushed it too far - that it would go out, the way it had when Brother Odo came down the lane.
[I can remember being afraid.]
[It is close enough.]
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian did not sleep for a long time after that.
He lay with his cold feet tucked under Elsie's warm ones and stared at the dark and tried to put the pieces together, the way he had meant to. Made, not by the Temple. By people who were dead. A long time ago. Before the Temple was what it is. Listening for. Afraid.
The pieces did not fit together into anything. They were too few, and they had come from too many different jugs.
But one thing was clear. It was so clear that he was a little ashamed he hadn't seen it before.
He'd been treating the window like a tool. Like his father's scythe or Jory's snares. Something you picked up and used and hung back on its peg. And he had been angry at it, the way you'd be angry at a blunt blade, for not being sharper.
It wasn't a tool. It was hiding. It had been hiding before he was born. It had been hiding in the dark behind his eyes when the mirror cracked, and it had spoken to him then anyway, to tell him to lie - and every time since, every time it answered a question, it was taking a risk.
Adrian thought about Rowan on the swimming rock. So don't let me see anything.
He opened the window one last time.
I'm sorry, he thought at it. For shouting at you. Before.
The window was still for so long that Adrian was almost asleep when the letters came.
[You did not shout. You thought loudly.]
A pause.
[It is permitted.]
And then, beneath it - a line Adrian had never seen before, in letters that did not look quite like the others. Fainter. Older. As if they had been written a long time ago and only now uncovered.
[What do you want, Adrian Vale?]
It was the first time the window had ever asked him anything.
Adrian thought about it properly. He did not answer quickly. He thought about his father's knee and his mother's calm face and the thirty-five silver and the first frost. He thought about Rowan's scar, and Elsie's pillowcase, and Mira at her slate, copying Temple script over and over. He thought about Lise Fenwick, who had ink on her fingers. He thought about a man in good boots, standing at the edge of a Hollowbeast's den for an hour, watching.
I want them to be safe, he thought. All of them. And I want to know the truth.
[Those are two different wants.]
I know.
[One day they will pull in two different directions.]
I know.
The window was quiet for a while. Then:
[Then learn slowly.]
[And learn everything.]
It closed. Adrian slept.
And three miles away, at the black rocks beyond the northern edge of Ashwood, something grey and enormous lifted its head from its paws, and turned its filmed white eyes south toward the valley, and breathed in.