Arthur woke at half five out of pure habit and could not get back to sleep, and came down to find his father already on the porch step with two cups, one of which had been poured about four minutes earlier and had been sitting there going cold in the certain knowledge that somebody would arrive for it.
CAL: Thought so.
ART: You made two.
CAL: I've made two every morning for eleven months. Wren says it's morbid. I say it's optimism and I've been proved right, so we'll say no more about it.
The village at half five was the thing Arthur had genuinely missed and had not known he had missed until it was in front of him: the light not yet over the eastern rise, the smoke starting on three chimneys, somebody's dog conducting an argument with somebody's gate, and underneath the whole of it the particular silence of ninety-one people who were mostly still asleep. Solmere at half five had eight hundred people being quiet at each other. It was not the same thing at all. They sat for a while and did not say anything, which Arthur had also missed.
CAL: Can I ask you something?
ART: You've been building up to it since I sat down.
CAL: I have. Your mother said to leave it a week and I've made it fourteen hours, which for me is restraint.
ART: Go on.
CAL: Have you learned anything?
ART: At the academy?
CAL: No. That's what I'm asking. I don't mean the lessons. I've had the lessons in the letters, I know about the seven provinces and the essence and the thing your friend said last night about a soul doing an impression, which I'll be using. I mean have you learned anything.
Arthur held his cup and thought about it properly, because his father had asked it properly and because there had been a man on a stone by a beck who had made an entire point about not answering things too quickly.
ART: I've stopped asking whether I'm allowed to be there.
CAL: Is that so..?
ART: I went up that road last September with one question in me and it was that one. Everybody at that academy was going to have something and I wasn't and I'd worked out about four thousand versions of how that was going to go, and every single one of them was about whether I'd be permitted. Whether I'd be found out. Whether somebody would eventually look at me properly and say, right, you, out.
CAL: And?
ART: And I stopped asking. That's the honest version. I didn't answer it, Dad. I never answered it. I just got busy, and about eight months in I noticed I hadn't asked it in a while, and I couldn't work out when it had stopped.
Calder turned his cup on his knee.
ART: And the thing underneath that, which I only got hold of about two weeks ago in a village with one mill, is that I've spent the whole year being asked for things. Not being permitted. Being asked. Elsie asks me things. Briar asks me things. There's a boy who was face-down in the dirt in front of four hundred people who told me a true thing that nobody's ever going to repeat, and I've decided I'm going to keep saying it out loud for as long as it keeps coming up, and that's not because anybody let me. It's just mine to do.
He drank some of the cold tea.
ART: That's what I've learned. I turned up wanting to be allowed and I've come home with things that are mine to do. I don't know if that's what you meant.
Calder Lyerm did not say anything for a considerable time.
CAL: No. That's what I meant.
He looked out at the road and the three chimneys and the argument between the dog and the gate.
CAL: I'll tell you what I was afraid of, since you've been honest at me. I was afraid you'd come back better at things.
ART: I have come back better at things.
CAL: Yeah, but that's not what I was afraid of. I was afraid you'd come back better at things and nothing else. I've seen it. I saw it a great deal, when I was doing what I was doing. Men who got extremely good and stayed exactly the size they'd started at.
He finished his cup.
CAL: You've got bigger. That's all I wanted to know and I've known it since the doorstep and I asked anyway because I wanted to hear you say it.
Yseult came out at about twenty past six with her hair unbound and one of Wren's shawls round her shoulders over her own clothes, which she had evidently been given at some point the previous evening and had not been permitted to refuse. She said good morning to both of them, apologised for nothing in particular, and then stopped at the bottom of the porch step because she had noticed the plot. Arthur watched her cross the grass in bare feet with the shawl trailing, entirely unhurried, and stop in front of his mother's flower bed at the plot's edge, and stand there looking at it with her hands wrapped round her cup and her head slightly on one side. The sun had just cleared the eastern rise. It came flat across the whole of the plot and caught the bed and caught her, and she stood in it for a long time not saying anything and not moving, and Arthur, who had known her for a year and had watched her set a boy's shoulder alight in front of four hundred people, found that this was somehow the thing he was going to remember.
CAL: She all right?
ART: I think she's looking at the flowers.
CAL: I can see that. I'm asking if she's all right.
ART: I don't know. Probably not. She's been all right for about eleven hours which is more than she's used to.
Calder considered this and did not ask anything further, and got up, and went to do the beans, and on his way past the bed said something Arthur did not hear that made Yseult laugh. Master Hobbes was in his garden, which was the same garden and had the same disgraceful hedge, and he was eighty-one now and had got slower in the ten months and had not got slower in any of the ways that mattered. He looked up and saw Arthur at the gate and put down what he was holding and did not say anything for a moment, which Arthur had not expected.
HOB: Well.
ART: Master Hobbes.
HOB: You'll not call me that.
ART: I've called you that since I was six.
HOB: You were six. Come in, boy, and mind the hedge, it bites now.
He wanted the whole of it, and he got most of it, and Arthur discovered somewhere around the middle that he was giving Hobbes an account he had not given his parents, because Hobbes was the only person in Hollowell who knew what the letter had been and what it had cost him to write it and what he had been risking on a boy with nothing.
HOB: And the ability.
ART: Still nothing.
HOB: Nothing at all.
ART: Nothing anyone can name. Things happen. Things have happened three times now and I can't tell you what they were and neither can anybody who watched, including the headmistress, who told me so to my face last week and then declined to say anything else about it.
HOB: Did she.
ART: She said she'd rather I spent the summer being fifteen.
HOB: That's a considerable woman.
Hobbes sat back on the bench and looked at him.
HOB: Ten months ago I put a letter in a bag on a cart and then I did not sleep for four nights. I want you to know that. I'd written it, and I'd sent it, and then I lay there working out that if it went badly it would be my doing, because you'd not have gone if I'd said nothing, and you'd have stopped in this village and been perfectly content and never once known there was a thing you hadn't tried.
ART: It didn't go badly.
HOB: I can see that. That's not what I'm telling you. Ask me what I was afraid of.
ART: What were you afraid of?
HOB: That I'd send a good boy away and get a clever one back.
Arthur sat with that for a second.
ART: My father said almost exactly that this morning.
HOB: Your father's a fool about a great many things and he has never once been a fool about you.
He picked up his cup, which had a chip in it that Arthur remembered.
HOB: Go on, then. What have you got?
ART: I've got a friend who runs a mill's accounts four days a week now because somebody wrote eleven numbers down for her. I've got a boy who bet against me and told me so. I've got twenty-seven circuits and a shoulder that came out and a headmistress who wants me to write to her, and I have no idea what I am, and I've stopped needing to know before I get on with the day.
Master Hobbes drank his tea and did not answer for a while, and when Arthur looked over, the old man was crying slightly and doing absolutely nothing about it.
HOB: That's the letter. That's what I put in it. I said, this one will be worth watching and he will not know why.
The rest of the day was the village, which was to say it took four hours to walk a distance of half a mile. Gregor came out of the bakehouse before they had drawn level with it and gave Mira a loaf, and when she attempted to raise the matter of the previous day's loaf he informed her that yesterday's had been Tuesday's and today's was Wednesday's and that these were entirely different situations. Mabel Ruck established, in the space of about ninety seconds, both girls' full names, provinces, mothers' occupations where applicable, and the precise nature of the sling, and then told Arthur he was too thin and had said so in September. Ned Halloway wanted to know whether it was true about the sea and Arthur told him it was, and Ned said well, and looked at the road for a bit, and then asked whether the academy really had eight hundred students, which Arthur understood was the same question asked in a manner Ned could carry home. Old Bess Tanner gave Yseult a second jar.
YSE: I've still got the first one.
BES: That one's for the chest. This one's different.
YSE: What's this one for?
BES: You'll know when you need it.
YSE: That is the most frightening thing anybody has ever said to me and I once watched a man freeze the air in front of my face.
They came back at six with two loaves, three jars, a quantity of beans nobody had asked for, and a hen that Arthur was still unable to explain the following morning, and sat down to supper, and it was somewhere in the middle of it, with Nami asleep against Elsie's shoulder and Calder halfway through getting the fish story wrong, that Arthur put his cup down.
ART: Tomorrow.
ELS: What about it?
ART: I'm taking them to the spot.
Elsie looked up.
ELS: Arthur.
ART: What?
ELS: You've not been up there since you were thirteen.
ART: I know.
YSE: What spot?
ELS: He's got a spot.
MRA: That is not an explanation.
ELS: No. It genuinely isn't, and I've been going up there with him for nine years, and I still couldn't tell you why it's the spot. You'll have to see it.