Tomas Vale's fever broke on the fourth day, and on the fifth he tried to get out of bed, and on the sixth Mara tied his boots to the bedpost.
"You'll open the wound," she said.
"There's a fence down. There's the sheepfold to clear. There's-"
"There's nothing that won't wait a week." His mother pulled the knot tight. "And if you try to untie those with one hand, Tomas Vale, I'll know."
His father lay back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. His right forearm was wrapped in white linen from wrist to elbow. When Mara changed the dressing each morning, Adrian could see the bite underneath, two long ragged rows of scabs, healing clean and pink. And the shadow. A faint, grey, finger-wide bruise running up from the wrist, that did not fade, no matter how much silverleaf his mother packed into the wound.
"It's a scar," Mara said, when Elsie asked. "Only a scar."
Nobody believed her. Nobody said so.
❖ ❖ ❖
The sheep were buried on the second day. All eleven. Jory Keel would not let anyone burn them; he said the smoke would carry. He dug the pit himself, at the far edge of the western field, and Adrian helped, and when they had finished, Jory poured a whole flask of something that smelled like lamp oil over the earth and then made the sign of the circle, which Adrian had never seen him do.
"Eleven sheep," Tomas said that night, when he thought Adrian was asleep. Through the wall, his voice was a dull, flat murmur. "That's the winter wool. That's three silver at market, Mara. Four. And the lambs in spring."
"I know."
"And I can't mow. Not for weeks. Maybe not at all, with this arm." A long silence. "The frost's a month off."
"I know, Tomas."
"He'll pay it. All of it. Thirty-five silver, and the sheep besides. He'd do it tomorrow. You know he would." His father's voice cracked. "He saved my life, Mara. He knelt in the mud and saved my life. And we're treating him like-"
"Like what he is," said his mother.
"And what is that?" A creak of the bed. "Tell me. You keep saying it, with that face. Tell me what he is. Tell me what you know. I'm not a child. I'm not Elsie. I'm your husband."
The silence went on so long that Adrian thought his mother had fallen asleep.
"He's a man who wants something," Mara said finally, very quietly. "And he is patient enough to wait for us to hand it to him."
❖ ❖ ❖
The High Examiner came every morning to see to the wound.
He came on foot, always, up the muddy lane. He changed the dressing himself, with his long careful fingers, and poured a single drop of consecrated water on the bite and watched it - Adrian noticed - for a long moment, to see if it smoked. It never did. He spoke the words in Temple script that Adrian's ears would not take in. Then he drank a cup of mint tea at the kitchen table, and talked to Elsie about cats, and left.
The grey window went dark every morning when he came up the lane, and came back every morning an hour after he left. Adrian had learned to feel its absence like a missing tooth.
On the fifth morning, Crane did not leave after his tea.
"Goodman Vale," he said, turning his cup. "I've been thinking about your son."
Tomas was sitting up in bed, where he could see the kitchen through the open bedroom door. His jaw tightened. "What about him?"
"Nothing alarming. Only that I'm idle." Crane smiled ruefully. "The Inquisitor is still four days out, at least - the roads from Westmarch are flooded - and I've read your chapel records until I could recite them. And your boy, who cut half the barley in this valley and hit a Hollowbeast in the face with a lantern, reads his letters, I'm told, but not well."
"His mother taught him," said Tomas.
"And very well, I'm sure. But he can't read Temple script." Crane glanced at Adrian. "Can you, Adrian?"
"No, Examiner."
"No. Hardly anyone in the villages can. It's a scandal, in my view. The Canon is written in it. Every law of the Temple, every name in the great registry. The people it governs can't read a word." He set down his cup. "So I'd like to offer him lessons. An hour each afternoon, in the chapel, while I'm waiting. Brother Fennick has agreed to sit in, if you'd like a chaperone. It costs you nothing, and it would give me something to do other than stare at the rain."
Adrian felt his mother go still at the hearth, the way a deer goes still.
It was a trap. It was so clearly a trap that it was almost insulting. And it was a trap with no door out, because the man who had set it had knelt in the mud a week ago and poured light into Tomas Vale's arm, and was even now sitting at their table having changed his dressing for the fifth morning in a row, and there was no way on earth to say no to him that did not sound like exactly what it was.
"That's very kind, Examiner," said Mara. "But he's needed on the farm. With his father laid up-"
"Of course. An hour only. In the afternoon, when the work is done." Crane turned to Tomas. "Goodman Vale?"
Adrian watched his father's face. He watched the rope in Tomas's shoulders pull - the debt, the sheep, the arm, the frost, the mud - and bend.
"An hour," said Tomas. "In the chapel. With Fennick."
"Excellent." Crane rose, and brushed his robe, and smiled at Adrian. "Tomorrow, then. Bring a slate."
❖ ❖ ❖
Mira Coll left Harrowfield on the morning of the first lesson.
The Temple carriage from Veyrholt, six days late because of the same floods that were delaying the Inquisitor, was not black. It was white, with blue wheels, and it had windows, and it was driven by a cheerful Sister with red cheeks who gave Elsie a sugar plum. There was no iron on its wheels. Adrian looked.
The whole village came to see her off. Mira wore a new grey dress that the Temple had sent, and carried a small wooden trunk, and stood very straight while Brother Fennick blessed her. Her mother was crying. Her father was pretending not to. Hollis stood at the front of the crowd with his fists jammed in his pockets and a face like thunder.
When the blessing was done, Mira walked down the line of her friends and neighbors and shook hands, the way she had seen grown-ups do. When she got to Hollis, he pulled one hand out of his pocket and pushed something into hers - a copper coin - and said gruffly, "For the bet. You won. Idiots, you said. You were right." And Mira laughed, and hugged him, and Hollis went the color of a beetroot.
When she got to Adrian, she held out her hand, and he shook it. There was something folded in her palm. A small square of paper. He closed his hand over it without looking.
"Goodbye, Vale," Mira said, very correctly. "Be good at your lessons."
"Goodbye, Coll."
She climbed into the carriage. The Sister clucked to the horses. The white carriage with the blue wheels rolled out of the square and down the eastern road, and Mira's small face was at the window until the road turned behind the mill.
Adrian unfolded the paper in the privy behind the Plough, where no one would see.
It was a list. A perfectly ordinary list, in Mira's neat hand, of things she had packed:
Warm stockings, two pair All my chalk Tallow for boots Charcoal and paper Hairpins Ribbons, blue Old slate
He read it twice before he saw it. Then he laughed out loud, alone in the privy, and had to put a hand over his mouth.
W. A. T. C. H. R. O.
Watch Ro. Watch Rowan.
He did not know what it meant. He did not know what Mira had seen, or heard, or worked out, in her clever, frightened way, in the ten days of the harvest. But he folded the paper very small and put it inside his boot.
❖ ❖ ❖
The chapel was cold in the afternoons. The candles from the harvest supper had all burned down. Brother Fennick sat in the front pew with a blanket over his knees and his prayer book open in his lap, and within a quarter of an hour of the first lesson he was snoring gently.
Crane taught at a small table beneath the round window, where the light was best.
He was a good teacher. Adrian had not expected that, and did not like it. He was patient and precise, and he never raised his voice, and he knew exactly when to explain and when to say nothing and let Adrian work it out. By the end of the first hour, Adrian could write the thirty-one letters of Temple script on his slate. By the end of the second, he could read simple words: light, law, name, circle.
The grey window was dark the whole time. Adrian had expected that. It was lonely, working without it. He had not known how used to it he'd got - the faint flicker at the edge of his sight, the silent presence behind his eyes. Sitting at the table with the High Examiner was like sitting in a room where the fire had gone out.
But he noticed something, too, in that cold silence. The letters of Temple script did not slide off his eyes the way the carved script on the Sounding Mirror's pedestal had. He could read them. They were only letters. They were only lines of ink on paper.
It was the other thing - the old script, the carved script, the words Crane had spoken over his father's arm - that his mind refused.
"You're wondering why some of it is hard and some of it is easy," said Crane, on the third afternoon, without looking up from the book he was reading.
Adrian's chalk stopped.
"Everyone does. Every child who learns it." Crane turned a page. "The script I'm teaching you is common Temple script. It's used for letters, records, sermons. Anyone can learn it. The script on the Sounding Mirror, and on the Canon itself, is different. It's called High Canonical." He looked up. "It isn't written in ink. It's written in law. Only those whom the Canon permits can read it. For everyone else, it simply... won't go in." He smiled. "Did you notice that, at your Sounding? When you looked at the pedestal?"
"I don't remember, Examiner."
"No. It was a frightening day." Crane closed his book. "Well. You're doing very well with common script, Adrian. Better than any student I've had in some years. I think you're ready for a story."
❖ ❖ ❖
The book he took from his leather case was very old and very small. Its cover was faded blue cloth, worn white at the corners, and on the spine was a single word in common Temple script that Adrian sounded out: Primer.
"This was mine," said Crane. "When I was a boy. I was a ward, you know, like the Coll girl. A farmer's son from the south. The Sisters taught us to read from this." He opened it with great care. "It's full of little tales. The Founding of the Canon. The Seven Lights. The Maiden Who Would Not Lie. Every child in the Temple schools learns them." He turned the book around and slid it across the table. "Read me this one."
Adrian looked down.
On the left-hand page was a woodcut, very simply cut and very old. It showed a man in a crown, standing on a hill, with his arms raised. Around him, the sky was cracking - lines running across it like cracks in ice - and out of the cracks, black shapes poured down. Beneath his feet were broken tablets of stone.
The man's face had been scratched out.
Not faded. Not worn. Scratched, carefully and deliberately, with the point of a knife. And on the right-hand page, beneath a title in common script, there was a line of different script - the looping, formal carved letters of the pedestal, High Canonical - and it too had been scraped away, until there was only a pale roughened patch of paper where the words had been.
The title said: The King Without a Name.
"Go on," said Crane softly.
Adrian read.
He read it slowly, sounding out the harder words, his finger moving along the lines. It was a child's story, simple and short. Once upon a time, it said, before the Canon, there was a king who was very great and very proud. He had a gift that no one else had. And because of his gift, he said, "No rule binds me. No law was written for me. I will write my own."
And he went up onto a high hill and broke the tablets of the law.
And because he broke them, the sky cracked, and the Abyss poured out, and his kingdom fell into darkness, and his people wept and died.
And the Luminant looked down, and was grieved, and took the king's name from him, and cast it into the dark, so that no one would ever speak it again and no child would ever be born with his gift. And from the broken tablets the Luminant made the Canon, so that every gift would be written, and every rule would be kept, and the sky would never crack again.
And that is why, the story ended, we are grateful for the Canon, and why we never try to be more than we are written.
Adrian stopped reading.
His finger was resting at the bottom of the right-hand page, just below the pale scraped patch where the line of High Canonical had been. And something was happening behind his eyes.
The grey window was not open. He could not feel it at all. But he could feel the other thing - the thing under the window. The black bars. [Trait: ████████]. He could feel them the way you feel a bruise you've forgotten, when someone presses on it. They were moving. Shuddering. Pushing outward, against the inside of his skull, as though something written beneath them were straining to be read.
He looked at the woodcut. At the king's scratched-out face.
The pressure doubled. Something warm ran over his lip.
"Adrian?" said Crane. "Are you all right?"
He looked at the scraped patch of paper where the line of old script had been, and for one instant - so fast he could not have sworn to it - he saw a letter there. Not a Temple letter. Not a High Canonical letter. A shape. A single, sharp, upright shape, like the peak of a roof, or a tent, or two lines leaning together at the top.
And from somewhere very deep and very far away, beneath the black bars, beneath the dark, came the faintest whisper of the grey window - fainter than he had ever heard it, so faint it was barely letters at all, as though it were calling up from the bottom of a well.
[look away]
[now]
Adrian looked away.
He wrenched his eyes off the page and stared at the stone floor of the chapel, and the pressure snapped back like a bent branch released. His head rang. The floor tilted. Blood dripped off his chin onto his slate and spattered across the neat letters of light and law and name.
"Here," said the High Examiner, very gently.
A white handkerchief appeared in front of Adrian's face. Fine linen, embroidered at the corner with a small silver circle. Adrian took it without thinking and pressed it to his nose, and held it there, and breathed through his mouth, and waited for the floor to stop moving.
"Tip your head forward, not back," said Crane. "That's it. It's the cold. This chapel is like a tomb." His voice was calm and kind. "You've been working very hard, with your father laid up. And the lantern. And the wolf. It's a great deal for a boy."
"I'm sorry, Examiner." Adrian's voice was muffled by the linen.
"Don't be." A pause. "It's only a children's story, Adrian. It isn't true, you know. There was a king, a long time ago, who did terrible things, and the Temple made a story of it to teach children to be good. That's all."
Adrian said nothing. He held the handkerchief to his face and stared at the floor.
"But I am curious," said Crane softly, "why it frightened you so much."
In the front pew, Brother Fennick snored.
Adrian lifted his head. The High Examiner was watching him across the little table in the cold light from the round window, and his pale grey eyes were moving, left to right, left to right, reading his face the way he had read the black lines on Tomas Vale's arm.
"His face," Adrian said. "Someone scratched it out. It looks like the Hollowbeast. With the fire on it." His voice shook, and he let it shake. "I keep seeing it. When I close my eyes."
Crane looked at him for a long moment.
"Of course," he said. "Of course you do. How thoughtless of me." He closed the small blue book and put it back in his leather case. "That's enough for today. Go home and rest, Adrian. Keep the handkerchief."
Adrian stood. He wiped his slate clean with his sleeve, smearing blood across the letters. He folded the stained handkerchief and held it out.
"It's yours, Examiner."
"No, no. It's ruined." Crane's hand closed over his - cool and dry - and folded Adrian's fingers back over the linen. "Keep it."
Then he paused, and looked down at the handkerchief in Adrian's hand, and said, as if it had just occurred to him:
"Actually - no. Silly of me. The Sisters in Solmere embroidered that. They'd scold me for leaving it behind." He smiled, and took it back, gently, and tucked it into his sleeve. "Rest well, Adrian. Tomorrow."
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian walked out of the chapel into the grey afternoon. He walked across the square, past the horse trough where Tam Fenwick sat staring at nothing, and turned the corner by the Plough, where no one could see him.
Then he stopped, and turned back, and walked very quietly - edge of the foot, weight last - to the narrow gap between the Plough's leaning wall and the chapel's side wall, where he and Hollis used to hide, and where, if you stood on the rain barrel, you could see through the corner of the round window.
He stood on the rain barrel.
The chapel was dim. Brother Fennick was still asleep in the front pew. At the little table beneath the window, High Examiner Severin Crane sat alone.
He had taken something out of his leather case and set it on the table in front of him. A thin brass rod, with a small brass bell-shaped cup at its end. Inside the cup, a sliver of silver caught the grey light.
Crane took the white handkerchief out of his sleeve. He unfolded it carefully on the table beside the bell, bloodstain upward.
Then he picked up the brass rod and held the little bell over the blood.
He held it there for a long time. His lips moved. His face, in the dim light, was intent and still and - Adrian saw it, and would never forget it - frightened. Truly frightened. Like a man leaning over the edge of a cliff to look at something at the bottom.
The bell did not ring.
Crane lowered it a little closer. Closer. Until the lip of the brass cup almost touched the dark stain on the linen.
And through the thick old glass of the round window, so faintly that Adrian thought afterward he might have dreamed it, came a sound.
A single, high, thin, silver note. Like the first crack of ice on a pond when you step on it.
Inside the chapel, High Examiner Crane closed his eyes, and let out a long breath, and - very slowly, very quietly - began to smile.