He woke with his hand closed. He did not know at first why it was closed. He lay on his back in the grey light with the river on the ceiling and Yseult's arm across his chest and Elsie's back against his shoulder and Mira's head on his ankles, exactly as he had left them, exactly as he had come back to them at some hour of the night he could not now name. And his right hand was shut tight on the blanket, so tight that the fingers ached. He opened it. The flower was there. Pressed, and pale gold, and brown at the edges, with a small crease across one petal. He looked at it for a long time. Then he closed his hand again, very carefully, and lay still, and listened to the house waking up underneath him. There was his father's tread on the stair. The third one creaked, because his father had never once in his life stepped over anything. There was the scrape of the kettle on the hearth, and the back door going, and a bird somewhere. He had expected to wake and find that it had not happened. He had half hoped so, if he was honest. It would have been simpler. It would have been a dream about a girl on a fence, brought on by Gregor's honey bread, and he could have laughed about it at breakfast. He opened his hand again, and the flower was still there, and that was that. Elsie woke first. She woke the way she did everything, all at once and completely, with no stage in between. One moment her breathing was slow against his shoulder and the next it had stopped. He felt her go perfectly rigid along the whole length of her back. She lay there for some seconds, motionless, and he could hear her working it out: the bed, the room, the light, whose shoulder. And then, he was nearly sure, the exact position of Mabel Ruck's gate relative to the only road between this house and her own front door.
ELS: Oh, no.
ART: Morning.
ELS: Arthur. What time is it.
ART: Early. About six.
ELS: Mabel gets up at half five.
ART: I know.
ELS: She's been at that gate for half an hour.
ART: I know.
ELS: I am going to have to walk past that gate in yesterday's dress at six o'clock in the morning coming from the direction of your house, and she is going to see me, and by noon the whole of Hollowell is going to have an opinion, and by supper my mother is going to have heard all of the opinions, and I am going to have to move to a different province.
YSE: Which province?
Yseult had not opened her eyes. She had not moved her arm off his chest. She spoke from the pillow in a voice of perfect, untroubled interest.
ELS: You're awake.
YSE: I've been awake for some time. I was enjoying the arrangement. I'd recommend Eskandar, it's very far, though you'd have to cross the Serenity, which you can't. I'm afraid you're going to have to stay here and be talked about. It's not so bad. I've been talked about my whole life. You get used to it.
ELS: You haven't been talked about by Mabel Ruck.
YSE: No. That's fair. Nobody has been talked about the way Mabel Ruck talks about people. I've met her twice and I'm frightened of her.
Mira woke last. She woke slowly, with a small frown, and found that she was lying across the foot of a bed in her boots with her head on a pillow that had been put there in the night, and that she was still holding the letter. She looked at it. Then at the three of them. Then she sat up, put the letter carefully away inside her coat, and said that she had slept very well, thank you. She did not appear to find anything about the situation in need of further comment, and her not finding it seemed to settle the matter for everybody.
Nobody noticed what was in Arthur's hand. He got up while Elsie was looking for her other shoe, and took his jacket off the back of the chair, and put the pressed flower into the inside pocket, the one over his heart. It was where he kept his father's letters, and Sutton's note about his shoulder, and nothing else. It went in among them flat and weightless, and he buttoned the pocket over it.
On the sill, the other flower stood in its cup, gold and fresh and a little open in the morning light. He had given that one to nobody. He looked at the two of them, the one in the cup and the one over his heart, and thought that he now owned both ends of something, and did not know yet what it was.
His sister was on the kitchen floor eating his boots. She had got one of them over onto its side by the back door and was working at the lace with great purpose and both hands, making a small low sound of concentration, the noise of somebody with a clear plan who did not intend to be distracted from it. Arthur stopped in the doorway and looked at her. I'll be on the kitchen floor trying to eat your boots. He crossed the kitchen and crouched down, and took the lace out of her mouth, very gently, and she looked up at him with his mother's eyes.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
ART: Yes. Hello.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
ART: I know. I know you are.
He picked her up. He had not done that much, in sixteen days. He had been careful with her, the way you are careful with something very small that you have only just been introduced to, and she had always seemed to him to belong more to the house than to him. He picked her up now and held her against his good shoulder, and she put one damp hand flat on his cheek and left it there, and he stood in the middle of the kitchen with his sister and did not say anything for a while. His mother was watching him from the hearth. He could feel it.
WRN: You're up early.
ART: So's she.
WRN: She's always up early. She gets it from you.
She came across with the kettle and stopped beside him. She looked at Nami's hand on his face, and then at his face, and something passed across her own that he did not have a name for. Then she reached up past him to the shelf by the hearth for the big book her mother had written recipes in, because she wanted the measures for something, and opened it to somewhere in the middle.
The flower was there. The one from yesterday. Flat between the pages, a little crushed, a little damp still, with a small fresh crease across one petal where somebody had bitten down on it. His mother looked at it and smiled to herself and turned the page past it, looking for the measures, and did not know that there was another one exactly like it, fifteen years older, buttoned into her son's jacket six inches from her elbow. Arthur stood very still.
WRN: What?
ART: Nothing. Can I have that bit of bread.
WRN: It's yours. Everything on that table is yours, it's still very nearly your birthday. Put your sister down and eat something.
He did not put his sister down. He ate one-handed, with Nami on his shoulder, and she went to sleep there about halfway through, heavy and warm and entirely certain of where she was. Elsie came down in yesterday's dress with her shoes in her hand and said goodbye to his mother with tremendous dignity. She went out of the front door into the bright morning and up the lane toward Mabel Ruck's gate like somebody walking to their own execution. About forty seconds later, faint and very clear across the village, came the sound of Mabel's voice saying something that began with ELSIE TANNER.
YSE: She'll be all right.
MRA: She won't.
YSE: No. She won't. Pass the honey.
He sat down that afternoon to write the letter to Seraphine Wysteria. She had asked him to. She had called him to her study on the last morning of term, and not sat behind the desk, and asked him, if anything happened over the summer that he could not explain, to write to her about it rather than to anyone else. Not because he was in any difficulty, she had said, but because she would like to be the person who heard it first. And something had happened that he could not explain. He did not think anybody could explain it. A girl with his mother's eyes had sat on his father's fence at one in the morning and told him that in fifteen years he was going to lose, and then given him a flower and vanished. He took a sheet of paper and dipped the pen, and wrote, at the top, in his careful school hand:
Headmistress,
And stopped. He sat there with the pen over the paper for a long time. The ink dried on the nib and he dipped it again, and it dried again. He thought about the girl on the fence saying if I tell you what happens, you'll do something about it. He thought about what Wysteria would do with a letter like this. She would read it four times in her study, and she would be very kind about it, and she would want to know more, and then she would know something that it was not his to give her. It had been given to him. It had come a very long way, on its own, at a cost he did not know, to one person. It was not a thing for a headmistress's desk.
He thought it was perhaps the first thing in his whole life he had ever decided to keep entirely to himself. Not because he was ashamed of it, or frightened of it, or did not know how to say it. Only because it was his, and hers, and nobody else's.
He put the pen down. He folded the sheet of paper with the one word on it in half, and in half again, and put it in the stove. Then he took another sheet, and wrote to Corin Ashby instead.
Corin, Thank you for the letter. It came on the day. I don't know how you managed that and I'm not going to ask. You're told right. I would know. I was afraid the whole time, in the air, in front of all of them. I didn't stop being afraid and then move. I moved while I was afraid, and the moving didn't care. I think that's the only way it's ever done. I think you found that out this summer, and I'm sorry you had to find it out the hard way, and I'm glad you're the one who did. Whatever it was, I'm glad you came back from it. The rivalry stands. I'd like it on record that I've got better at chess. I haven't. Mira will tell you. See you soon. Arthur.
He read it through once. He did not read it twice, because he knew that if he read it twice he would start taking things out of it. He sealed it and gave it to Mabel Ruck the next morning to send, and Mabel looked at the name on the front and then at him for a long, considering moment, and said nothing at all, which from Mabel Ruck was very nearly a speech.
August went the way August went in Hollowell, which was slowly, and then all at once. Yseult did not go home. She could not, because the Serenity stayed shut, and the notices that came up the Draymere road every week said the same thing in slightly different words. But she would not have gone if she could. She said so once, flatly, to Arthur's mother over the washing, and his mother said that was fine, there was a bed, and that was the end of it. Yseult did not mention it again. She learned to make Gregor's honey bread, badly, and argued with Gregor about it until he admitted, purple with fury, that her third attempt was not a disgrace.
Mira wrote back to Talon. She did it on the porch step, over three evenings, and did not show it to anybody, and when she gave it to Mabel to send, Mabel looked at it and at her and said nothing in exactly the way she had said nothing to Arthur.
Elsie trained. She went up onto the hill above the village before it was light, every morning, on her own, and came down again at breakfast with her hair full of wind and her face giving nothing away. Nobody followed her. Arthur, who had known her since they were five, did not ask where she went. He understood that whatever it was, it was hers, the way the flower in his pocket was his, and that she would tell him when she was ready, or she would not, and either one was hers to choose.
The shoulder stopped aching, mostly. It still told him when it was going to rain. The fresh flower on his windowsill dried, a little at a time, through the whole of August. Its gold went pale. Its petals curled at the edges, and one morning it was simply a dry stem in a cup of stale water, and he took it out and put it in the stove. The other one did not change. He took it out of his pocket some evenings, and held it up to the window, and it was exactly the same as it had been on the fence. It was pressed, and pale gold, and fifteen years old, and it was not going to get any older now.
They left on the last day of August. His father was on the porch step at half five with two cups, one of which had been poured about four minutes earlier, and they drank them without saying much, the way they had on the first morning, watching the light come over the eastern rise and the smoke start on three chimneys. When the cups were empty his father stood up and put his hand on Arthur's head, the way he had not done since Arthur was small, and left it there for a moment, and took it away.
CAL: Go on, then.
ART: I'll write.
CAL: I know you will. Your mother keeps them in a box. Don't tell her I told you.
His mother held him at the door for longer than she had in September a year ago, and said that she had not braced for it this time either, and that she was beginning to think she never would. Gregor came up the lane at a quarter to seven with four loaves under his arm, wrapped in cloth, and handed them over with the information that they were a bad batch and he was only getting rid of them. Mabel Ruck was at her gate. She looked at all four of them going past, and at Elsie in particular, and said in a voice that carried to the bend in the road that she would see them all at Midwinter, and to mind themselves, and that she knew everything.
And his sister would not let go of his fingers. She had them in her fist when he crouched down in the doorway to say goodbye, two of them, the way she had held them on the morning of his birthday, and when he tried to stand up she did not let go, and when he tried again she held on harder. Her face began to do the thing that came before crying, slowly, the whole of it gathering itself up in the middle. In the end his mother had to unpeel her a finger at a time, while Nami said Ah-fuh, Ah-fuh in a voice of rising outrage, and Arthur stood on the step with his hand still curled the shape of hers.
ART: I'll be back. At Midwinter. I'll be back.
NAM: Ah-fuh.
ART: I know. Be nice to Mum. You're going to be extremely annoying for about fifteen years.
His mother gave him a very strange look. He did not explain it. They walked up the lane. At the bend, where the road turned east past the barn everybody called a mill, Arthur stopped and looked back. There was the house, small and grey in the early light. There was the smoke from the chimney, and the plot behind it, and the long line of the fence running along the bottom of the plot, the fence he had helped his father rebuild when he was eleven. There was nobody on it. Of course there was nobody on it. He stood and looked at it for a moment longer anyway.
ELS: Arthur?
ART: Coming.
He put his hand flat against his jacket, over the inside pocket, and felt the shape of it there. Then he turned, and the four of them walked east together out of Hollowell, with four days of road in front of them and Gregor's bad batch under Yseult's arm, toward Solmere, and the second year, and whatever was waiting for them there.