The room had been built for one, and it had been built for one when he was considerably smaller, and the four of them got into it by a process that nobody organised and everybody seemed to understand. Yseult took the bed. She did not ask. She simply sat down on it, then lay down on it, flat on her back with her boots kicked off and her hands folded on her stomach, and looked up at the ceiling with the air of a person who had walked six hours that day and considered the matter of where she would lie down to be closed. Elsie took the windowsill, which was deep enough to sit in if you drew your knees up, and which she had sat in at seven, at nine, at twelve, and had apparently never stopped regarding as hers. She sat with her back against the frame and her shoulder against the cup with the last golden flower in it, and moved the cup an inch so as not to knock it. Mira sat on the floor against the end of the bed with Talon's letter in her lap and a plate of honey bread she had brought up from the kitchen on the boards beside her, which she had said was for everybody and which she ate most of. Arthur sat on the edge of the bed, in the eight inches of it that Yseult had not claimed, because it was his room and there was nowhere else. Somebody lit the candle on the sill. It was a short one. Nobody thought about that at the time. For a while nobody said anything at all. It was the warm, full, comfortable kind of not saying anything, the kind that comes at the end of a very long day among people who do not need to fill it. Through the open window the village was going to sleep a lamp at a time. Somewhere down the lane the dog was arguing with the Halloway gate. Then Yseult, without moving or taking her eyes off the ceiling, said what she had been waiting since six o'clock to say.
YSE: Show us the letter.
ART: No.
YSE: Arthur.
ART: It's his. He wrote it to me. If he'd wanted you to read it he'd have written it to you.
YSE: He'd never write anything to me. He thinks I'm loud.
ART: You are loud.
YSE: I'm appropriately loud. That's different. What happened? Something happened. You went the colour of that wall.
He did not answer at once. He had the letter in his pocket, and he could feel the shape of it there, the heavy paper and the broken seal. He thought about what was in it and what was not. It did not say what had happened. It did not need to. Corin Ashby did not write I was afraid about nothing.
ART: Something happened at home. To him. He's all right. That's all he says, and that's all I know.
ELS: Something bad.
ART: Something he got through.
MRA: They're both all right.
They all looked at her. She did not look up from the letter in her lap. She had not unfolded it again since she came in off the porch. She only held it, the way you hold something you have already read enough times to know by heart.
YSE: Both?
MRA: Talon was there too. That's all I'm going to say. It's his to say, not mine. But they're both all right. He wanted me to know that before anything else, so I'm telling you.
Yseult opened her mouth. Elsie, from the windowsill, looked at her. Yseult closed it again, which happened rarely enough that Arthur made a note of it.
ELS: What did he mean, you'd know?
She asked it after some time, quietly. She was looking out of the window at the dark, not at him.
ART: You read it?
ELS: Over your shoulder, in the doorway. Only the end. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.
ART: It's all right.
He thought about how to say it. He found it was not difficult, which surprised him. It had been difficult for a long time, and he had not noticed it stop.
ART: He was afraid. That's what it says. I was afraid. And he says he's told that's normal, and that I'd know. Because of the semifinal. Because of Dane.
YSE: You were frozen.
ART: I was frozen in the air in front of four hundred people and I couldn't move. Not my legs, not my hands, not my breath. I was standing there with my sword out at a stupid angle and I could see everything and I couldn't do anything about any of it, and Dane was talking, and I thought: this is it, this is the whole of it, this is where it stops. I've never been as afraid as that in my life. Not before. Not since.
MRA: And then you moved.
ART: And then I moved. Two fingers. I still don't know how. Nobody does. But I don't think the fear went first and then I moved. I think I was afraid the whole time, and I moved anyway, and the moving didn't care about the fear at all. I think that's what he means. I think something made him find that out this week, on his own, and he wanted to tell somebody, and I'm the person who was frozen in the air.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
YSE: The cave.
ART: What?
YSE: That's mine. The cave, under the hill. When I ran out, and was on the floor, and could hear all of you and couldn't get up to help. I'd never once in my life not been able to do something. I lay there being finished, and I was more afraid of that than I was of the thing in the room. That's very stupid. I'm aware it's very stupid.
ART: It isn't stupid.
YSE: It's a little stupid.
MRA: Every room I've ever walked into. Until this summer.
She said it to the plate of honey bread, very simply, as though it were not much. It was the whole of her life. Arthur looked at her, and then away, because he understood by now that being looked at was the thing she had been afraid of, and that she had just said so in front of three people on purpose. Elsie, on the sill, said nothing. When they looked at her she shrugged.
ELS: Mabel Ruck.
YSE: That's not a real answer.
ELS: You haven't grown up in this village. It's an extremely real answer.
The candle got shorter. Down the lane, one at a time, the last of the lamps went out.
ELS: I'll go in five minutes.
YSE: That's the fourth time.
ELS: Fifth.
YSE: Then go.
ELS: In five minutes.
Somewhere across the village, faint and very clear on the still air, came the sound of a heavy door being shut and a bolt going across it. Elsie heard it. Arthur saw her hear it. She looked out of the window toward the far end of the lane, where the Tanner house stood dark now, and then down at her own knees.
ART: That was yours.
ELS: That was mine.
ART: You could knock.
ELS: I could.
She did not get up. Nobody said anything about it. It was not, Arthur thought, the kind of thing that needed anybody to say anything about it. Yseult found the book after that. She found it the way she found everything, by putting her arm down the side of the bed and coming up holding something that was not hers. It was the book of stories his mother had read him when he was very small, with the cover gone soft at the corners and the spine cracked in three places, and she sat up and opened it and was delighted.
YSE: Oh, no. Oh, this is wonderful. Somebody has written "the sky one" in the margin in a terrible hand.
ART: I was four.
YSE: You were a very bad writer at four. I'm going to read it to you.
ART: Please don't.
She read it to them. She read it very well, in a low, dramatic voice that would not have been out of place in a theatre, and halfway down the second page Arthur heard Mira's breathing change. Mira had slid sideways from where she sat against the end of the bed, slowly, a little at a time, until her head was resting across his ankles where they hung off the edge, with her knees drawn up and her boots still on and Talon's letter held loosely in one hand. She was asleep. She had fallen asleep in a room with three other people in it, on the floor, in somebody else's house, and Arthur looked at her and thought that sixteen days ago she would not have been able to do that, and that perhaps nobody but him and Talon would ever properly understand what it meant that she could do it now.
He moved his legs up onto the bed, very carefully, so that she came with them, and she did not wake. Yseult read on. Her voice got slower. Somewhere on the fourth page, in the middle of a sentence about a girl who could paint with starlight, it stopped. The book slid off her chest and went down onto the floor face first and lay there with its spine cracked in a fourth place, and she did not notice. She had turned onto her back, and one arm had come out across his chest as though she had claimed it in a negotiation, and she was asleep with her mouth very slightly open.
Elsie got down off the sill at some point after that. He did not see her do it. He only felt the bed shift on his other side, and her back settle against his shoulder, the bad one, very carefully not leaning on it, and heard her say into the pillow, already mostly asleep, that she was only resting her eyes and would go home in five minutes.
ART: Of course you will.
ELS: I will.
She did not. He was the last.
He lay on his back in the eight inches that were left to him, with Yseult's arm across his chest and Elsie's back against his shoulder and Mira's head on his ankles, and could not move any part of himself at all, and found that he was not afraid of it. The candle on the sill was almost gone. In what was left of its light he took Corin's letter out of his pocket, one-handed, and held it up over his face and read the end of it again. I was afraid. I am told this is normal. I am told you would know. He did know. He thought he would write back tomorrow and say so. He thought about what he would say, and found he did not know that yet, and that it did not matter, because he could work it out in the morning. He let his hand fall. The letter slid off the blanket and onto the floor beside the plate and the string and the book, and lay there with its broken seal in the last of the light.
The candle went out. In the dark, the last golden flower stood in its cup on the sill, with the moon coming up behind it. He looked at the ceiling. There was the crack in it that ran from the corner toward the window and stopped, which he had decided when he was four was a river, and which had never once in all the years since had any answers. He watched it until he could not see it any longer, and then a little after that. He slept.
At the far end of the plot, some hours later, under a moon that was nearly full and very high, the old fence creaked.