Arthur Lyerm, who had been sixteen years old for very nearly a whole day, lay on his back in the dark and tried, with great care and no success whatsoever, to work out how he had got here. He knew where here was. Here was his own room, at the top of his own stairs, in the house he had been born in. He knew the ceiling, and the crack in it that ran from the corner toward the window and stopped, which he had spent most of his childhood deciding was a river. He knew the bed. It was the bed he had slept in since he was too big for the cot, and it had been built for exactly one person, and it had never once in its life been asked to be anything else.
It was being asked tonight. Yseult Marchant was asleep on his left. She was asleep in the comprehensive, unapologetic way she did everything, flat on her back with one arm flung out across his chest as though she had claimed it in a negotiation, and her face turned toward him on the pillow, and her mouth very slightly open. Elsie Tanner was asleep on his right. She had fitted herself into the last eight inches of mattress with the efficiency of somebody who had decided it was enough and was not going to discuss it, and she was curled with her back against his shoulder, the bad one, which she had remembered was the bad one even asleep and was very carefully not leaning on. And across the foot of the bed, sideways, with her knees drawn up and her boots still on and one hand closed loosely around a folded letter, Mira Doyle was asleep with her head on his ankles.
He looked at the ceiling. The river in the ceiling had no answers. It never had. He lay there for a while longer, listening to the three of them breathe, three different rhythms that did not line up and did not seem to mind. Then, very slowly, he sat up.
Yseult's arm slid down off his chest into his lap and she said something that might have been a word in any of several languages, and did not wake. He sat in the dark with his hair sticking up on one side, and scratched at it for a while, and looked at the room. There was a candle on the sill that had burned down to nothing. There was a plate on the floor with crumbs on it, and a length of brown string, and a book open face down with its spine cracked, and a sheet of paper with a seal on it he could not read in this light and did not need to. There was a cup on the windowsill with a single golden flower standing in it. He looked at all of it and found that he could remember every piece of the evening, in order, and still could not work out how the evening had arrived here.
He decided he could work it out downstairs. Getting out was a problem in engineering. He did it in stages. He lifted Yseult's arm out of his lap and set it down on the blanket, where it stayed. He drew his left leg up from under Mira's head, slowly, an inch at a time, and replaced it with the pillow, and Mira frowned in her sleep and turned her face into the pillow and held on to the letter and did not wake. Then he went over the foot of the bed in a manner that would not have been allowed in any combat class at Solmere, and stood on the cold boards in his socks, and nobody moved.
He went out onto the landing and pulled the door to behind him, not quite shut.
His parents' door was open a crack. It always was. He went past it in the dark and down the stairs, and stepped over the third one, which had creaked for as long as he had been alive and which had meant, when he was very small, that somebody was coming up to check on him whether he had called for them or not. He had not stepped over it since he was nine. His foot remembered anyway.
The kitchen was dark except for the hearth, which had been banked hours ago and was down to a dull red eye. He stood in front of it and yawned, enormously, the kind of yawn that took his whole face with it and left his eyes wet. He considered a cup of water. He considered sitting down in his father's chair and simply staying there until morning, which was a genuinely attractive plan and which he was halfway through adopting when he heard the sound.
It was a creak. A long one, slow, wood taking a weight it had not expected, from somewhere outside the back door. He stopped yawning.
It was not the wind. There was no wind. It had been the stillest night of the summer, warm and close and silent, the kind of night Hollowell got perhaps three times a year, when you could hear a dog bark at the far end of the village as if it were in the next room. It was not the dog, either. He knew the dog, and it was asleep, and it did not creak.
He went to the back door and opened it, and went out. The plot lay silver under the moon. It was nearly full, and very high, and it lit everything: the rows of beans and the dark heads of the potatoes and the water butt and the path of flat stones, and beyond it the long line of the fence, and beyond that the dark rise of the land going up toward the mountain, all of it washed in the same pale, even, colourless light, so clear he could have counted the stones in the path. There was nothing out there. He stood on the step with his hand still on the door and looked at all of it, the whole plot from end to end, and there was nothing in any of it that should not have been there.
He listened. The village was asleep. Somewhere a long way off an owl said something to another owl and was not answered.
ART: ...Right.
He shrugged. It was an old house, and an old fence, and he had been awake since half five, and he was sixteen and had eaten a frankly unreasonable amount of Gregor's honey bread, and he was prepared to accept that sixteen-year-olds who had eaten that much honey bread heard things at one in the morning. He turned back to the door. He put his hand on the handle and pressed it down.
???: Arthur..?
He stopped. It was a girl's voice. It came from behind him, from out in the silver, quiet and very clear, the way voices came on a night with no wind. It did not say his name the way a stranger says a name she has been told. It said it the way people at home said it, the way his mother said it and Elsie said it, as though it had been said a great many times before and would be said a great many times again, and was simply being said now. He let go of the handle. He turned around, slowly.
She was sitting on the fence. She was sitting on the top rail of it at the far end of the plot, with her hands on the rail on either side of her and her feet hanging down, and the old wood creaked again under her as she shifted, the same long, slow creak. It was the fence he had helped his father rebuild when he was eleven. He had sunk two of those posts himself. She was a girl, and she was no older than he was, perhaps younger, and the moon was behind her so that he could not properly see her face, only the shape of her and the edge of the light along her hair. She was looking straight at him. He could feel it from the whole length of the plot.
She did not look like a thief, or a neighbour, or anybody from Hollowell. She did not look like anybody at all he had ever seen in his life. She looked, somehow, as though she had been waiting for him for a very long time. Let's go back to six hours earlier.
WRN: Close your eyes.
ART: Mum.
WRN: Arthur Lyerm, you are sixteen years old in my kitchen and I will thank you to close your eyes when I tell you.
He closed his eyes. Somebody, almost certainly Yseult, made a small delighted sound. Somebody else, almost certainly Elsie, told her to hush. There was a scrape of a chair, and the warm, sweet, heavy smell of honey bread coming nearer, a great deal of honey bread, more than one house could ever have produced on its own. And underneath all of it, close by his knee, there came a very small and very determined sound. He had learned in sixteen days to recognise it as the noise his sister made when she had decided to go somewhere and was going.
CAL: Nami. No. Nami, that's your brother's- right. Fine.
A small, damp, entirely certain hand closed around two of his fingers and held on.
WRN: All right. Open them.
He opened his eyes.