Dissonance, it turned out, felt a great deal like being slightly drowned.
For two days after the south meadow, Adrian's hands would not get warm. He held them over the fire until his mother asked him if he was trying to cook them, and they stayed cold anyway, a deep, stubborn chill in the bones of the fingers that no heat could reach. His nose bled again on the first night - quietly, into his pillow - and Elsie, without being asked, took the pillowcase down to the river before dawn and scrubbed it in the cold water until her hands were red.
On the second day he forgot the word for "bucket."
It was a small thing. He was standing at the well with the bucket in his hand, and his mother said "Fill that, would you?" and he looked down at it and the name simply wasn't there. He knew what it was. He knew what it did. There was only a smooth, blank place in his mind where the word should have been, like a missing tooth.
It came back a moment later. But it frightened him more than the blood had.
[Dissonance: 9]
"Is that why?" he asked the window that night, silently, in the loft. "The bucket. Is that the Dissonance?"
[Yes.]
"Will it get worse?"
[If you let it.]
"What happens if it gets very bad?"
The window was quiet for a while.
[You would not like it.]
That was all it would say. But Adrian had grown up in a village where everyone knew what happened to people who had the Abyss in them. Hollowed, they called it. First the cold hands. Then the forgetting. Then the grey in the veins, and then the forgetting of everything, even your own name, until the Temple came and took you away.
He lay very still and held his cold hands against his chest and did not sleep for a long time.
❖ ❖ ❖
By the fourth day the number was down to three, his hands were warm, and every word he tried to remember was exactly where he had left it. And his mother, who had watched him with her quiet, careful eyes the whole time and said nothing, handed him a basket of cheeses wrapped in cloth and told him to take them to the Crooked Plough.
"Old Hatty's paying two copper for the lot," Mara said. "Bring back the coins, not ale. And come straight home."
Adrian took the basket. At the door he paused.
"Mother. Is the High Examiner still there?"
"He is." Her face didn't change. "Brother Odo says he's up in his room most days, reading. Walk past it. Don't walk around it." She looked at him. "If you avoid a place, people wonder why."
❖ ❖ ❖
The Crooked Plough was the only building in Harrowfield with two floors, and it leaned. Not dangerously - it had been leaning for a hundred years and would lean for a hundred more - but enough that a marble set down on the floor of the common room would roll steadily toward the fireplace, which Adrian and Hollis had discovered at the age of eight and had been using ever since to win bets against travelers.
Today there were no travelers. There were three old men by the fire, arguing about rain. There was Old Hatty behind the counter, who was Null and eighty and had fists like knotted rope. And there was Mira Coll, sitting alone at the table in the corner with a slate and a stick of chalk and her tongue caught between her teeth.
She looked up when he came in. For a moment neither of them said anything.
It was the first time he'd seen her since the Sounding. The Colls had kept her home, the way the Brandts had tried to keep Hollis home - except that Hollis had climbed out the window. Mira did not climb out of windows. Mira did what she was told and then thought about it very hard afterward.
"Vale," she said.
"Coll."
Adrian took the cheeses to the counter. Old Hatty unwrapped each one, sniffed it, and grunted, and counted out two coppers into his hand with her big swollen knuckles. Then she looked him up and down with her faded eyes.
"You're peaky," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're peaky. You've got a look." Hatty leaned on the counter. "I had that look, when I was a girl. After my Sounding. Everyone staring and whispering. Clear water, they said. What's she good for, then?" She sniffed. "Seventy years later, I've buried every one of them that whispered. Null's not a death sentence, boy. It's just a long walk without a horse." She jerked her chin at the corner. "The Coll girl's been in here every morning this week, doing sums. Says it's quieter than home. Go and sit with her. She's peaky too."
Adrian hesitated. Then he went and sat.
Mira did not look up from her slate. It was full of letters. Not sums. Temple script, the looping formal hand in which the Canon was written, copied out over and over again.
"They're sending me to Veyrholt," she said. "In three weeks."
"Hollis said. For a wardship interview."
"It's not an interview. It's a wardship. They just call it an interview so the parents feel like they chose." She scratched a letter out with her thumb. "The Temple school in Veyrholt. For [Kindled Palm]. They say I could be a Temple forgemaster one day. Making consecrated steel for the Grey Watch." She said it in a flat voice, as if reading it. "They're giving my mother six silver a year while I'm gone. For the loss of my hands."
Adrian did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
"I asked Brother Odo if I could come home at Midwinter," Mira said. "He said wards don't go home until they've taken their first vows. That's four years." Her chalk stopped. "He said it kindly. He's kind. They're all so kind."
Then she looked up, and her clever, frightened eyes fixed on Adrian's face, and she lowered her voice.
"You saw something," Mira said. "In the chapel. After it cracked. I was right there, Adrian. You looked at the air in front of you exactly the way Oren did. Exactly the way I did, when my Interface opened. You were reading something."
The grey window flickered in warning at the edge of his sight. He didn't need it.
"I was dizzy," he said. "My hands were freezing. I didn't know where I was looking."
"You're lying."
"I'm not."
"You are. You do this thing, when you lie. You go really still, like you're trying not to spill a bucket." She leaned in. "I won't tell anyone. I swear on the Luminant. I just want to know. Because if the mirror can go black and then clear, then maybe the Temple doesn't know as much as they-"
A shadow fell across the table.
They both looked up.
Tam Fenwick stood over them, swaying. Adrian hadn't heard him come in. He smelled of old ale and old sweat and something sour underneath, like milk left too long in the sun. His beard had grown out ragged and grey, though he was not an old man, and his cooper's hands, which had once shaped barrel staves as smooth as glass, were shaking.
"Vale boy," Tam said. His voice was a rasp. "Mara's boy."
"Goodman Fenwick," said Adrian carefully.
Behind the counter, Old Hatty straightened up. "Tam. Leave the children be."
"I'm not hurting them." Tam didn't look away from Adrian. "I just want to talk to the boy. Just for a moment. That's all. Just for a moment, Hatty."
He sat down heavily on the bench beside Mira, who shrank against the wall. Adrian felt the grey window hovering, dim and watchful, but it did not write anything. It seemed to be listening too.
"Your water went black," said Tam Fenwick.
"The Examiner said the mirror was old."
"Your water went black," Tam said again, as if Adrian hadn't spoken, "and then it cleared."
His red eyes were fixed on Adrian's with a terrible intensity. Adrian had a sudden, strange memory of the morning of the Sounding, of Tam sitting on the edge of the horse trough, whispering to nobody. It cleared, it cleared, it cleared.
"So did hers," Tam whispered.
The common room went very quiet. The old men by the fire had stopped arguing about rain.
"Lise's," said Tam. "Last autumn. Her hands went in and it went black - just like yours, black as the inside of a well - and I shouted, and her mother, rest her, screamed, and they all went for her. The squires. Sister Aldith. They all went for my girl." His voice cracked. "But I was watching the water. I was watching it the whole time. And it cleared, boy. Before they got to her. It went clear as spring water. And there was no gold. There was nothing."
Mira had put a hand over her mouth.
"I told them," Tam said. "I told Sister Aldith, look, look at the water, it's clear. And she looked. I saw her look. She saw it. And then she looked at the back of the chapel. At the man standing there."
Something cold went down Adrian's spine.
"What man?"
"Tall," said Tam. "In a grey cloak, with the hood up, like a traveler. I thought he was a pilgrim. Pilgrims come through, sometimes, to see the round window. He was standing in the back, by the door, and when the water went clear, Aldith looked at him. And he shook his head. Just a little. Like that." Tam made a small, tight motion with his chin. "And Aldith turned back and said black water, Abyssal, take her. And they took her. And the water was clear."
The grey window opened.
It did not write anything. It simply opened, fully, in front of Adrian's eyes, blank and grey and waiting, in a way it had never done before - and Adrian understood, with a feeling like a door opening onto a very long drop, that it was paying very close attention.
"The man," Adrian said. His voice sounded strange to him. "Did you see his face?"
"No. The hood." Tam's shaking hands gripped the edge of the table. "But when they put her in the iron carriage, he got in the black one in front. And when it drove off, the wind caught the curtain, and I saw his hand. Holding a book." He leaned closer. "There was blue on his sleeve. A blue stole. With silver circles on it."
"Tam." Old Hatty had come out from behind the counter. Her voice was low and hard. "That's enough. You're drunk and you're talking treason in my house and there's a Temple man sleeping over your head."
"I don't care."
"The children care."
Tam Fenwick looked at Mira, who had gone white as her chalk. He looked at Adrian. Something in his ruined face flickered - a memory, perhaps, of who he had been, the man who whistled at his workbench while his daughter handed him nails.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, lass. I'm not trying to frighten you." He reached out and, very gently, touched Adrian's sleeve with two shaking fingers. "But I've been watching him, boy. Up there. Every night he has Fennick's records out on the table by the window. I can see the lamp from the trough. And every night he goes to the same page. Over and over." He swallowed. "And the page has your mother's name on it."
"Tam!" Hatty's hand closed on the widower's collar, and she hauled him up off the bench like a sack of meal. "Out. Now. Go and sleep it off in the stable before I throw you in the trough."
Tam didn't fight. He let her drag him toward the door, stumbling, his head hanging. But at the threshold he twisted round, and his red eyes found Adrian's across the leaning room, and he said the last thing in a voice that was suddenly not drunk at all.
"They told me she was taken for purification, boy. They told me she'd come home when she was clean." His mouth shook. "It's been a year. Whatever he wants with you, don't let him take you anywhere. Don't get in the carriage."
The door banged shut behind him.
❖ ❖ ❖
For a long moment, nobody in the Crooked Plough said anything at all.
Then one of the old men by the fire said, a little too loudly, "Rain by Thursday, I reckon," and another said "Never," and they went back to arguing, and it was as though nothing had happened.
Old Hatty came back and wiped down the counter that did not need wiping.
Mira Coll picked up her chalk. Her hand was shaking so badly that the chalk rattled against the slate. She put it down again.
"Your mother's name," she whispered. "Why would your mother's name be in the chapel records? She's not from Harrowfield."
"She married here," Adrian said. "Brother Fennick married them. It'd be written down."
"Fifty years of records," said Mira. "And he goes to the same page. Every night."
Adrian didn't answer. He was looking at the grey window, still hanging open in front of him, still blank.
Is it true? he thought at it. What Tam said. Was it him?
For a while, nothing.
Then, slowly:
[I was not there.]
[I cannot know.]
But you think it's true.
[I think a man who looks at the same page every night is looking for something.]
[And I think he has found it.]
"Adrian," Mira said. She reached across the table and grabbed his wrist, and her fingers were hot - really hot, hot like a cup of tea, her new Trait bleeding through her fear. "Adrian, you have to tell someone. Your parents. Rowan. Brother Fennick. Someone."
He looked at her hand on his wrist. He thought about Lise Fenwick, sharp and laughing, with ink on her fingers, copying the chapel records. He thought about the iron on the carriage wheels.
He thought about a silver sliver on a thin pale palm. I was the one who lied for you.
"I will," Adrian said.
He walked home the long way, around the back of the village, past the stable where Tam Fenwick lay snoring in the straw. And though he did not look up, he knew without looking that in the window of the good room at the Crooked Plough, above the street, a lamp was already lit - though it was not yet noon.