Yseult Marchant

Arthur's roommate from his first morning, and the first person at Solmere to have already decided what he is.

The introduction

Ch. 257. Arthur wakes to her unpacking a trunk across the room.

ART: I think there's been a mistake. YSE: Was there? I was told room fourteen. Is this not room fourteen? ART: It's room fourteen. I just thought- YSE: You thought they'd give you a roommate who matched your general shape and disposition. Understandable assumption. Wrong one.

She explains the dormitory policy herself, and gives the administration's reasoning as she reads it:

YSE: Sorted by anything so old-fashioned as gender? They're not. Solmere sorts by academic merit and administrative convenience, and apparently the administration decided the boy who does the impossible and the girl who intends to invent the impossible belonged in the same room.

She is tall and blonde, dressed already at an early hour, with "a smear of something faintly metallic across one knuckle that she hadn't bothered to wipe away".

She already knows who he is

YSE: I know. Everyone knows. You're the one who parried lightning with your bare hand and no ability to speak of. You're rather famous, in certain circles. ART: I didn't realize the story had traveled this far already. YSE: Astoria's not a large province, in the ways that matter. [...] And I care very much about that sort of thing.

That is the first evidence in the saga that ch. 250 travelled. It reached the provincial capital six years later and is still current.

What she is like

She narrates her own observations without apology.

YSE: I'm simply making an observation. I make a great many observations. You'll get used to it.

Her assessment of Arthur, offered as a scheduling reason:

YSE: I intend to walk into my first Alchemy lecture beside the most interesting person in this entire academy, and I'd rather you weren't late for it. ART: Is that what I am? YSE: Currently, yes. Ask me again in a year. I reserve the right to revise my assessment.

The water

She spends Instructor Vance's first lecture giving Arthur a running critique of Vance's own demonstration.

YSE: She's underselling it. That's a much finer thread of control than she's letting on [...] that's someone who's spent years refining a much simpler trick until it looks effortless.

Vance detaches the coil of water she is holding and empties it over her head from the platform.

VNC: There. Now you have opinions AND a demonstration to compare them against. I find that's usually the more educational combination.

Yseult's response, dripping, is the measure of her:

YSE: Well. Now you've seen me at my absolute worst. ART: I don't think that's your worst. YSE: No? ART: I think your worst would involve considerably more talking.

She laughs, "loud and genuine and entirely unselfconscious despite the water still dripping from her chin".

YSE: Careful. Keep that up and I might have to revise my assessment of you sooner than a year.

Ch. 259

Arthur's working theory after a week:

Yseult Marchant did not experience embarrassment the way ordinary people did, and possibly did not experience it at all.

Her method, which the chapter is explicit is deliberate:

YSE: I've decided you should walk me to breakfast. ART: Isn't that what we already do? YSE: We happen to leave the room at similar times and end up walking the same direction. That's different from you deciding to walk me. I'd like the deciding part. It matters more than you'd think.

She delivers all of it "so plainly and without any of the coy hesitation Arthur might have expected from someone flirting" that he has nothing to answer with, "which was, he suspected, precisely the effect she was going for".

When he does decide, she is briefly caught out:

YSE: Look at you. Learning. ART: I have good teachers. YSE: You have one excellent teacher and several adequate ones.

The refectory scene that follows is played for comedy, and its point is that she knows exactly what she is doing while appearing not to.

YSE: Arthur. You've gone very red. ART: I haven't. YSE: You have. It's rather sweet, actually.

Against Elsie

Ch. 261. Sutton pairs them, and Yseult opens by saying what she thinks a duel is for, with a pointed glance at the sidelines.

YSE: I find duels tell you a great deal about a person. Their instincts. Their priorities. Who they're really performing for. ELS: I'm not performing for anyone. YSE: Neither am I. ELS: You just said duels reveal who people perform for. YSE: I said it reveals things. I didn't say it was flattering.

Both of them then spend the duel checking whether Arthur is watching, which Arthur notices with "faint horror" and Briar with delight.

ELS: Your surroundings are a training yard. Arthur is not part of your surroundings. YSE: Isn't he?

She concedes the skill assessment without hedging:

YSE: You really are good. ELS: I told you. YSE: You did. I chose not to fully believe you. That was likely an error.

Sutton calls it an even match. Afterwards they cross the yard together, "the earlier tension of the contest dissolved into something closer to mutual, grudging camaraderie", and Elsie repeats Sutton's footwork note back to her.

The harvest market

Ch. 269. Elsie deliberately leaves the two of them alone, and Yseult says so out loud:

YSE: She's matchmaking. ART: She's not subtle about it. YSE: No. I appreciate that about her. Subtlety wastes time.

She cheats a strength test

ART: You don't have a strength-based ability. YSE: I don't need one. I have Alchemy, and I have spite, and between the two I've never once met a carnival game I couldn't out-think.

She redirects essence into her forearms and rings the bell.

BTH: That's not- you're not supposed to use Alchemy on the strength test. YSE: There's no sign forbidding it. BTH: It's implied! YSE: Implication isn't a rule. I'd like my prize, please.

YSE: I prefer to think of it as identifying and exploiting an oversight in the rules. Cheating implies I did something wrong. I simply did something no one thought to prevent.

The lantern

At the harbour, with hundreds of paper lanterns rising, she drops the performance entirely.

YSE: I'll tell you mine, if you like. ART: You don't have to. YSE: I know I don't have to. I want to.

YSE: I wished that you'd eventually let me in properly. Not just as a roommate you find amusing. Properly.

Arthur has no answer, and she does not require one:

YSE: You don't have to say anything. I told you because I wanted to, not because I expected anything back.

Then she takes his hand. His own wish is not stated.

This is the first time the chapter drops her armour. Compare her reading of Corin in ch. 264, where she identified exactly this problem in somebody else.

What her Alchemy actually is

Ch. 290, the demonstration arena. She wins three matches and Instructor Vance counts the disciplines afterwards.

VNC: I counted no fewer than five distinct disciplines across your matches this morning. Fire, earth, air, some manner of conjured adhesive substance I don't believe has a formal academic name yet, and, in your second match, something resembling controlled crystallization. Most third-year Alchemists have committed themselves fully to one, perhaps two, disciplines by this stage.

Her reasoning:

YSE: Why would I [commit to one]? Fire's decisive but limited. Air's flexible but requires precision to make it matter. Earth's solid but slow to shape properly. Used together, each one covers what the others lack.

YSE: Specializing is efficient. It's also predictable. I'd rather be difficult to prepare for than simply excellent at one narrow thing.

And her technical answer to why fire beats a wall of hardened air rather than feeding it:

YSE: Most people don't control the ratio properly. Too much fire and you're right, it simply fuels the thing. Get the proportion correct, and the heat differential tears the structure apart from the inside instead.

The slime

The one technique nobody recognises. She anchors an opponent's foot to the arena floor mid-step with "a thick, viscous substance [...] dark and glistening".

DES: That's not a technique I've ever seen taught. YSE: It isn't taught. I built it myself, adapting principles from three separate branches of standard theory into something none of them cover individually.

That is ch. 257's "the girl who intends to invent the impossible", delivered.

The cost

Vance names it, and Yseult does not deny it:

VNC: The essence cost alone, maintaining competence across that many separate applications, must be substantial. YSE: It is. I don't mind the cost.

Vance's verdict:

VNC: You have real talent, Miss Marchant. The kind that occasionally exceeds what formal instruction can properly cultivate on its own. I'd encourage you to keep experimenting.

The rejection

Ch. 301, weeks after the harvest lanterns, in the dark of their shared room.

ART: I don't know if I feel the same way. [...] I care about you enormously. I don't think I could properly explain how much. But I don't know if what I feel is the same thing you were describing.

YSE: That's entirely fair, Arthur. It's considerably more fair than most people would have managed.

YSE: I'm not going to make you responsible for how I feel, Arthur. That's not fair to you and it's not particularly dignified for me.

She turns to the wall and says goodnight. Arthur cannot work out what feels wrong about it.

She had been, in fact, considerably more gracious than the situation had required of her. That was, he realized slowly, precisely the thing that felt wrong.

Then he hears her crying, "so restrained that he might have missed it entirely if the room hadn't been so completely silent".

ART: Yseult?

The sound stopped instantly.

YSE: I'm asleep.

ART: Are you alright? YSE: Yeah. I'm okay.

the particular flawless delivery of someone who had spent considerable practice learning to sound fine.

When he touches her shoulder she knocks his hand away, and he finally sees her face.

Her family

Ch. 302, told from the floor beside her bed, in the dark.

YSE: My mother was ill for most of my childhood. Not the sort of ill that resolves. The sort that simply continues, getting slowly worse, for years, while everyone around it adjusts to a shape of life that keeps narrowing.

YSE: My father left before I could properly remember him. I've been told several different versions of why. I stopped asking eventually.

YSE: There was a stepmother, afterward. She wasn't cruel. I want to be accurate about that [...] She simply never once looked at me the way she looked at her own son. Not once, in eleven years. She fed me and clothed me and made absolutely certain I understood, without ever saying it aloud, that I was an obligation she had accepted rather than a person she had chosen.

And then:

YSE: And there was a stepbrother.

Her voice changed on the word, something hardening beneath the exhaustion.

YSE: I don't want to talk about him. I'm not going to talk about him. I want you to understand that there's a reason I don't ever intend to see his face again, and I want you to understand that I'm not going to explain it further, tonight or otherwise.

Her account of what she is ashamed of:

YSE: I'm so sorry for asking to be loved. It's an embarrassing thing to want out loud. Most people have the sense to keep it quiet.

What she felt on the first morning

This is the load-bearing detail of the whole chapter, and it is a fact about Arthur rather than about her.

YSE: The first morning. When you woke up and I was unpacking my trunk. [...] I felt something. When I looked at you. Right at the start, before we'd exchanged a single word.

YSE: It felt like hope. That's the only word I've ever found for it. Not attraction, not curiosity, something underneath both of those. Like something in my soul simply looked at you and decided things might be alright after all.

YSE: That sounds insane. ART: It doesn't.

It is the same word ch. 293 uses for what the crowd felt while he ran. See The built ability.

She also names the thing she cannot account for:

YSE: I don't know why I trust you this much. I genuinely don't. I've known you less than a year, and I told you something at that harbor I've never told anyone, and I'm telling you all of this now, and I can't account for any of it.

What Arthur says

He takes her hand, presses it to his own cheek, and says the line the chapter is named for.

ART: Don't worry, Yseult. [...] I'll protect your fragile soul for as long as I live.

She breaks completely, and then asks:

YSE: Can I sleep in your arms tonight? ART: Of course.

Asleep, the chapter says, "she looked younger [...] every carefully maintained defense finally, temporarily lowered".

Her soul ability is Catalysis

Ch. 304, stated by her, after four months of nobody knowing she had one.

YSE: My ability is called Catalysis. [...] Very few people have [heard of it]. It doesn't do anything visible, which makes it deeply unimpressive to demonstrate and consequently rather badly documented. Through physical contact, I can increase both the potency and the abundance of soul essence. In myself, in another person, or in an object.

BRR: You can increase how much essence someone has. YSE: Temporarily. It fades within an hour or so, and there are limits I haven't fully mapped. But yes.

That is why she can carry five Alchemical disciplines and shrug off the essence cost in ch. 290: she is topping herself up.

She demonstrates it on Briar by putting both arms around his shoulders from behind without warning. He goes rigid and scarlet and stops being able to talk.

YSE: You've gone very tense. BRR: I'm FINE. YSE: You're extremely tense. BRR: I'M FINE, YSEULT.

His foresight, spent two hours earlier, answers immediately and holds for four minutes instead of a few seconds, and leaves him not tired at all.

See Soul abilities.

The dream

Ch. 303 is hers, in three parts, and it fills in what ch. 302 left out.

At six. A sickroom that smells of medicine, "until the smell and the woman have become the same thing in her mind". She asks where her father went, and her mother opens her mouth, and no answer comes. "In every version of the dream she has ever had, across eleven years of having it."

At nine. A graveside in the rain, in a dress that does not fit, and a hand on her shoulder that "does not tighten. It does not comfort."

STM: What a terrible fate. [...] I hope that man burns in hell for what he did to you.

In the dream, Yseult does not know which man she means. She has never known.

At thirteen. A room with a door behind her that will not open, and someone in it whose face the dream will not resolve.

the place where his face should be is simply dark, an absence rather than a feature

She can see them [his hands] clearly. That is the cruelty of it, that she can see the hands with perfect, unbearable clarity while the face remains an absence, that the dream withholds everything except the specific thing she would most like to forget.

She has had that one for four years. It is the stepbrother she refused to describe in ch. 302.

She wakes screaming. What ends it is Arthur, with a toothbrush in his mouth, at the washroom door:

ART: You good?

The absurdity is what steadies her, and the chapter says so: "the sheer, stupid ordinariness of it more steadying than any amount of concern would have been".

The quarterfinal against Elsie

Ch. 314. She opens with a plain earth ridge, which is beneath her and which Elsie reads instantly as being handled.

ELS: Don't. YSE: Don't what? ELS: You know what.

Elsie is inside the guard in nine seconds, which nobody has managed all tournament, and Yseult's answer is one word:

YSE: Alright.

Then she stops handling her, and the fight becomes three disciplines at once. When Elsie goes for the seam between them, Yseult does not transition: she holds the earth and layers the fire over it, both together, which costs her visibly and which nobody else has done all tournament.

YSE: You're not going to like the next part. ELS: I didn't like that part.

Elsie spends her whole fourteen seconds and puts a strike into her ribs that drops her to one knee. What Yseult says about it is not a consolation.

YSE: That was very good. ELS: I know. YSE: I mean it. That was genuinely the best thing anyone has done to me all year.

She uses Catalysis on herself

And this is where the ability stops being a workshop curiosity. She gets up faster than she should be able to, and Elsie sees why a half second late: palms flat against her own sternum, the same contact she used on Briar months earlier.

The color came back into her face. Her breathing steadied. [...] Whatever the strike into her ribs had taken out of her simply stopped being gone.

YSE: Sorry. ELS: For what? YSE: For this part.

That is the whole of the matchup in one gesture. Elsie has a fourteen-second ceiling. Yseult does not have a ceiling. See The Trial of Power.

What a year in the workshop bought

Ch. 315. She catches Elsie's arm mid-strike rather than blocking it, stops moving entirely and lets Elsie come at her, and then shows her four things nobody has seen her do. They are itemised under "The combinations" below.

She wins it by firing a slow, heavy, obviously wrong shot into the ground to soak Elsie's legs, then bringing the lightning down through the water. And then she will not let the proctors call it.

YSE: Elsie. You cannot move. ELS: ...I know. YSE: Then yield, or they'll call it for you, and I would genuinely rather it came from you.

What she is actually doing

Ch. 315, in the middle of the quarterfinal, delivered flat and without performance.

YSE: I'm going to be the best Alchemist the world has ever seen.

It was not a boast. That was what stopped Elsie.

YSE: Humans aren't built for it. Everyone knows that. Our souls are too dense, we're made for soulcraft, and every single instructor in this academy has told me at some point that I'd get further specializing in something I was actually suited for.

YSE: I've spent a year in that workshop finding out what happens if I refuse.

And why she shows it to Elsie specifically:

YSE: I'd like you to see it. You specifically. You're the only person who's made me work all year.

The combinations

Four, in sequence, each one built out of the last.

1. Fire and water together flash into "a dense white column of steam" that walls off the whole marked ground.
2. Fire compressed on itself until it is no longer flame: "a small dense point of blue-white that hurt to look at directly [...] Yseult had done something to fire that fire was not supposed to permit." The chapter calls it plasma.
3. Plasma into wind produces lightning, and she does not throw it:

   it did not disperse the way real lightning disperses, it stayed, coiled and writhing around Yseult's raised left hand like something being held rather than something being cast.

4. Earth and water, fired low as a burst that soaks the ground and Elsie's legs in a spreading slick, and then the lightning into the water.

She takes the archer's stance to fire the fourth, "left hand raised with the lightning still coiling in it, right arm drawn back and bent".

Elsie sees what is coming half a second before it lands and cannot move fast enough.

YSE: Yield. [...] Elsie. You cannot move. ELS: ...I know. YSE: Then yield, or they'll call it for you, and I would genuinely rather it came from you.

She also lets the fight run rather than finishing it, and the chapter says why:

Yseult was simply not finishing it, because finishing it would require doing something she had not yet decided to do.

Drennick

Ch. 325 places her childhood, in passing.

YSE: I grew up in Drennick. There was one tree in the whole district and getting to the top of it was the single most contested achievement available to anybody under twelve. FNN: Did you get to the top? YSE: Repeatedly. Loudly.

Drennick is the Iron Reach: mining and metalwork, "harsh country, harsh people" (ch. 243). See Maeris.

The magic at the beck

Ch. 325. Finn promised two children "a considerable amount of magic" and cannot safely deliver any, so she does it instead and makes him carry things.

YSE: Finn, your ability is a coin flip that once left you blind and unable to move in front of four hundred people.

She lifts an arch of water out of the beck and drops it, eleven times, until both children are soaked to the shoulders and shrieking.

TAM: Could you make it stay? YSE: For a while. Not forever. TAM: How long? YSE: A minute, perhaps. It gets harder the longer you hold it. TAM: Why? YSE: Because it isn't what water wants to do.

That is the Alchemy rule of ch. 257, explained to a nine year old in one sentence.

And what she says to Finn afterwards:

FNN: It was the one thing I had. YSE: You carried a sleeping six-year-old a quarter mile without complaining once. That's considerably harder than lifting some water and you're the only person in this village who could have done it. FNN: That's not magic. YSE: No, it isn't. [...] It's better, though.

The limit of Catalysis

Ch. 328 puts a hard number on what she can hold, and it is one thing at a time.

She raises a curved stone wall about five feet high out of the floor of the ledge, and the light above her palm goes out in the same instant, "because she could not hold both". The chamber goes dark and stays dark for the whole fight. Everything after it happens by the residual glow the crystals kept from her ninety seconds of light.

YSE: I can't do the light and the walls. COR: Then do the walls. YSE: You'll be fighting blind. COR: Do it anyway.

She puts up a second wall, in front of Arthur and Corin, "exactly late enough to be terrifying and exactly early enough to matter". It buckles inward and does not break.

Then she is finished.

TLN: She's finished. MRA: How finished? TLN: Mira, she's on the floor.

She cannot walk out unassisted and goes through the squeeze with Finn ahead of her and Corin behind, "which she complained about the entire way in a voice with nothing behind it".

Ch. 329: carried, and quiet about it

She cannot walk. Corin and Talon take her in turns down two hours and ten minutes of ground they covered in about ninety minutes on the way up, and she "permitted this with a total absence of comment that alarmed Arthur considerably more than complaining would have". Wattpad says forty. The archive's corrected edition of ch. 329 has ninety, by Elsie's count in ch. 326.

The one thing she tries to do is thank Finn for carrying everybody's packs, and he asks her not to, because he is four minutes from crying and would like to choose what about. She lets it go, which Arthur thinks "was probably the kindest thing Yseult Marchant had done all week".

She is asleep in the chair nearest the fire by half past eight and nobody suggests moving her.

Ch. 330: she establishes the facts first

Four lines at the long table, and they are the most characteristic four she has. Mira has just said she had never used her ability on anything that could kill her and walked out onto the rock anyway.

YSE: You could have died. MRA: Yes. YSE: You did it anyway. MRA: Yes. YSE: I'm not criticizing. I'm establishing the facts so I can be properly impressed by them.

She will not let an impression stand in for a measurement, including an admiring one. Everybody else at the table reacts to what Mira did; Yseult first confirms what it was, out loud, in two questions with one word answers, and only then allows herself the reaction.

She is also the person it was done for. Ch. 328 has her on the floor behind a cracked wall, finished, while Mira walks out in front of the arachnid. So the facts she is establishing are the terms on which somebody risked dying for her, and she asks for them plainly rather than being grateful in the abstract.

Ch. 332: what is in Drennick

The table is going round the summer. Everybody has somewhere: Corvane, a village in Astoria, Castelgard, a plan involving Portvale with no funding attached to it.

FNN: Yseult?

Yseult was looking at the fire.

YSE: I'll work something out. FNN: That's not a plan. YSE: No. FNN: What's in Drennick? YSE: Drennick.

She said it exactly the way a person closes a door, and Finn, who was not always quick but was never once cruel, moved directly on to Mira without any visible seam.

Ch. 325 gave Drennick as a childhood and a joke about a tree. This gives it as a place she has no intention of going back to, and gives no reason. Nobody at the table asks a second time.

Arthur notices and does not follow it up, and the chapter is explicit that this is a failure rather than tact:

He noticed and he did not know what to do with it and he told himself he would ask her on the road, and then the following day was a long one and he did not.

Her father left before she could properly remember him, per ch. 302. Whether that is what is in Drennick, or something else, the chapter does not say.

Ch. 333: she reads the notice too

She walks the four hours to Solmere, refuses all assistance, and is "grey by the last hour". Ch. 328 left her on a chamber floor and ch. 329 had her carried down a hill in turns; a week later she is still spending herself and still declining to be helped about it.

Then, at the eastern gate, the last beat of the chapter:

There was a notice on the board by the gatehouse that had not been there on the day they left [...] the eastern coastal routes to the Serenity ports were closed to civilian traffic until further notice by order of the provincial authority [...]

He read it. He kept walking. Yseult, four feet behind him, read it as well and did not say anything about it either, and neither of them mentioned it.

Two silences from her in two chapters, and the archive does not join them. She closes the door on Drennick in ch. 332 and says nothing about a closure notice in ch. 333. Drennick is the Iron Reach, inland mining country, and the notice is about coastal routes, so nothing in the text connects them. What the text gives is a girl who has stopped saying where she is from and did not remark on a border closing. See The closure of the northern crossings.

Ch. 334: what is in Drennick, answered

The door she closed in ch. 332 is opened, by Arthur asking properly and eight days late. He says the lateness first. See his entry.

YSE: A house with my stepmother in it. A room that was mine and hasn't been for two years and I'd rather not know what it's got in it now. A man who is my stepbrother whose face I have told you I will not describe and I'm not going to describe it today either.

That is as far as the chapter goes and the archive goes no further. The stepbrother is named as a fact and refused as a description, twice in one sentence, and nothing else in the saga touches him.

The relief, which is the part she cannot look at

YSE: When I read that notice at the gate, the very first thing I felt, before anything else, before I'd even finished the sentence, was relief.

YSE: I have a home I cannot get to and my first feeling was relief, and I have spent eight days being unable to look directly at that, and it is considerably worse than the not-being-able-to-go. [...] There are three hundred people in this academy who cannot get home [...] and I read the notice, and I was relieved, and what does that make me?

Arthur's answer is four words and she does not argue with it. She puts both hands over her face and holds them there.

This reframes ch. 333. Reading that notice and saying nothing was not composure. She had already understood what it meant for her and had decided not to find out what it meant properly, which she names as "a thing I'm apparently very good at".

Ch. 336: eleven questions, and the one underneath them

She raises eleven distinct concerns about the visit before lunch on the first day, all of them things a considerate person would think about, delivered sequentially and then restarted with refinements. Mira keeps a count, without criticism, because "it seems useful to know the shape of it".

On the third day she stops being funny about it and walks six feet off to the side, and Arthur drops back.

YSE: I've run out of the ones that are actually about food.

YSE: I've never done this. [...] Stayed in a family's house. As a guest, with the family in it, where the family is a functioning one. I've stayed in houses. I stayed in my stepmother's house for eleven years, which is not the same thing, and I've stayed with a school friend in Drennick for two nights when I was twelve and her parents shouted at each other for the whole of the second one and I remember being extremely relieved because it was familiar.

YSE: I'm not asking for anything. [...] I'm telling you because you asked me a direct question eight days ago and it turned out that being asked directly was worth a considerable amount, so I'm attempting to reciprocate before you have to.

He asked it on the tenth, in the workshop in ch. 334, and this is the third day of the walk, so it was three days ago. Eight days is how long he waited before asking: "then it was eight days and I didn't". The archive's corrected edition of ch. 336 has "three days ago". The line is still wrong on Wattpad.

Eleven years in her stepmother's house is the longest span the archive has for her childhood, and it dates against ch. 302's father leaving before she could properly remember him.

Arthur promises her nothing except that it will be boring.

ART: Nobody will shout. Nobody will do anything, Yseult, that's the whole of what I'm promising you. It's going to be extremely boring and it's going to keep being extremely boring for eight weeks. YSE: That sounds unbearable.

Ch. 337 to ch. 339: the village, and the bracing left over

She had accounted for the mother and not for the village. By halfway down the lane she has been asked her name nine times and given a jar for a chest that has nothing wrong with it. Old Bess Tanner gives her a second jar the next day and declines to say what it is for.

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.

At supper she becomes, within six minutes, the person Wren is principally talking to, and explains Alchemy to a woman who has never left Astoria without any of the sharpness she uses at the academy.

She is also the one who tells the Lyerms about the closure, taking Wren's kind question before Wren can reach the apologising. See The closure of the northern crossings.

Then, at half past ten, in the dark:

YSE: They've gone to bed and nothing happened. MRA: What were you expecting? YSE: I don't know. That's the difficulty. I have been braced since Solmere and I have got all the way to lying down and nothing has happened, and I find I've got all this bracing left over and nowhere to put it.

Ch. 340 to ch. 341: the flowers

At twenty past six she comes out in one of Wren's shawls she was not permitted to refuse, crosses the grass barefoot, and stops in front of Wren's flower bed with her hands round her cup and her head on one side. The sun clears the eastern rise and comes flat across the plot.

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: She's been all right for about eleven hours which is more than she's used to.

On the mountain she conducts a formal inquiry into whether the spot still exists, at hour three, and withdraws it in one syllable when the wood ends. She takes the third flower.