His mother waited until the house was asleep.
She did not come to the bedroom. She came to the kitchen, and lit a single candle, and sat down at the table, and Adrian - who was lying awake, as he always was now - heard the scrape of the bench and understood that she was waiting for him.
He got up. His back hardly hurt anymore. His hands, under their bandages, were still stained brown with walnut, and the grey window said [Dissonance: 12], and he could walk across the kitchen floor in his bare feet without making a sound.
His mother watched him do it. She did not tell him not to.
"Sit," she said.
He sat across from her. The candle stood between them. Outside, the wind was getting up, and the thatch creaked, and far off down the lane a dog barked twice and stopped.
"A Truthbearer," said Mara.
"The Inquisitor said three weeks."
"The Inquisitor said a fortnight, perhaps three weeks. Which means she has already written, and the letter has already gone, and she hopes it will be a fortnight." His mother's hands were folded on the table. They were very still. "And when she comes, Adrian, it will not matter what Elsie says. It will not matter what Hollis says, or Jory, or Bet Marsh. A Truthbearer does not listen to what people say. She watches what they know."
"I know."
"No. You don't. That's why I'm going to tell you." Mara looked at the candle. "Some of it. Not all. I'm going to tell you enough that you understand why we can't be here when she comes. And then you're going to go back to bed. And we are never going to speak of it in this house again unless I start it. Do you understand me?"
Adrian nodded.
His mother took a long breath, and let it out.
"My name is Mara," she said. "That part is true. My mother tied her herbs in blue thread. That part is not." She turned her cup of cold tea in her hands. "The sisters in Solmere tie their herbs in blue. The Sisters of the Sounding. I learned it from them. I was one of them for four years."
❖ ❖ ❖
The candle flame leaned in a draft, and straightened.
Adrian did not say anything. He found he had known. Not in words. He had known it the way he had known the silver seam was in his father's heel before he could see it - from the blue thread, and the silverleaf, and the three precious books, and the way she said Severin Crane like the name of a snake. From the way she had stood in the barn door with a lantern and asked, Is it grey?
"I was a ward," said Mara. "Like Mira. From a town in the south you've never heard of. I had a Trait the Temple wanted, and they took me at twelve, and they taught me to read, and at sixteen they put me in white and sent me to the Cathedral in Solmere, to serve in the great Sounding Chamber." Her mouth moved. It was not a smile. "It's beautiful, Adrian. You can't imagine. The mirror there is as wide as this house. The ceiling is all glass. On Sounding days, the light comes down through it like a waterfall, and a hundred children a day put their hands in the water, and the sisters stand around the rim in white, and we sing." She closed her eyes. "I loved it. I believed every word. I was Rowan."
"What did you do?"
"I watched the water. That's all an Examiner does, at the start. You watch the water, and you read what the Canon writes on it, and you call it out, and a Brother writes it in the book." She opened her eyes. "And you watch for black."
"Did you see black?"
"Four times, in four years." Her voice was flat. "Four children. Black water. The Grey Watch took them. I sang while they did it, because that was what we were taught. The Abyss is in them. The Temple will purify them. The Luminant sees them." She turned the cup again. "I never saw one come back. I never asked. None of us asked."
The wind moved in the thatch.
"And then a boy put his hands in the water," said Mara, "and it went black, and then it went clear. And then the mirror cracked."
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian's hands were cold under their bandages.
"It didn't break," his mother said. "Not like ours. The great mirror is too big. It cracked from rim to rim with a sound like a bell, one long crack straight across, and the light through the ceiling went strange, and every sister around the rim stopped singing at once." She was looking at nothing. "And the boy was standing there with his hands in the water. And he was looking at the air in front of him. Exactly the way you looked at it, in our chapel. Exactly the way."
"How old was he?"
"Twelve. A farmer's son. From the south, near where I was born. Thin. Very quiet. He had-" She stopped. "It doesn't matter what he had."
"What happened to him?"
His mother did not answer for a long time.
"They didn't take him to the Grey Watch," she said. "That was the first thing. The black-water children always went to the Watch. This one, the High Examiner of the Chamber came down from the gallery himself and took him by the hand and led him through a door behind the mirror that I had never seen opened. And the next day, the sister who ran our dormitory said the chamber was closed for repairs, and those of us who'd seen it were to go to the chapel and pray for the boy, who was very ill." She swallowed. "I didn't go to the chapel. I was nineteen and I was curious. I was clever, and I thought that being clever meant I was allowed to know things."
"Where did you go?"
"Down." Mara's hands tightened on the cup. "Under the Cathedral there are rooms. Old ones. The sisters called them the Quiet Rooms, and we weren't allowed near them, and we made up stories about ghosts. I went down with a candle at night. There was a corridor, and a door with a guard, and a grate in the floor of the corridor where the air came up. And I lay on the stone beside that grate for three nights." She looked at Adrian. "And I listened."
He did not want to ask. He asked.
"What did you hear?"
"Men asking him questions." His mother's voice was very quiet. "Over and over. The same question. For hours. In kind voices. So kind." She closed her eyes. "What do you see? What does it say? Is it grey? What is its name? Ask it its name. Ask it. Ask it. Ask it."
The candle flame shook. It was not a draft. Adrian's hand had moved on the table.
"And he wouldn't," said Mara. "For two nights, he wouldn't. He cried. He said it told him not to. He said it said don't, don't, don't. And they kept on. They were patient. On the third night, they brought him a piece of the great mirror. I heard them set it down. It made a sound like a little bell. And they said, If you ask it, we'll let you go home to your mother." She opened her eyes. They were dry, and very bright. "And he asked it."
"What happened?"
"The bell rang," said his mother. "The piece of mirror. It rang so loud the grate I was lying on hummed under my face. It rang and rang, and the men were shouting, not kind anymore, shouting write it down, write it down - and under all of it that boy was screaming. And he screamed, Adrian, for a very long time."
The wind had stopped. The house was so quiet Adrian could hear his father breathing up in the loft.
"And then he stopped," said Mara.
❖ ❖ ❖
For a long while, neither of them said anything.
"I left the next week," his mother said at last. Her voice was steady again. It was the steadiness of something that has been nailed down. "At the Midsummer pilgrim festival, when the city's full of strangers and nobody's counted. I walked out of the dormitory in a pilgrim's cloak with nothing but my own two feet. I took another name. I walked north for two months. I ate what I could find and slept in hedges. I didn't stop until I was as far from Solmere as the kingdom goes, in a market town called Westmarch, where I sold herbs on a blanket." She almost smiled. "And a soldier with a bad knee bought all of them, because he said I looked hungry. He didn't even need herbs."
"Father."
"Your father." The almost-smile faded. "He doesn't know. Not most of it. He knows I ran from something in the south. He knows I was frightened of the Temple. He decided a long time ago not to ask, and I let him, and I've been grateful to him every day for nineteen years." She looked at the loft ladder. "After the Examiner offered the wardship, I told him more. I told him about the Quiet Rooms. Not the boy. Not the mirror." Her jaw tightened. "He believes me. He doesn't believe it. You understand the difference."
Adrian understood the difference.
"When I found out I was carrying Rowan," said Mara, "I prayed every night that he'd get something common. [Steady Arm]. [Sturdy Back]. Something no one would want. And he got [Shieldbearer], and the Watch took him, and I let them, because refusing would have been noticed." Her eyes came to Adrian. "And when I was carrying you, I didn't pray at all. Because I'd started to be afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of you." She reached across the table and took his bandaged hand, very gently. "You were so quiet. From the very first day. You didn't cry like Rowan. You looked. You lay in your cradle and looked at things, at the thatch, at the fire, at my face, for hours, like you were trying to read them. And I would sit there and watch you watching, and think about a thin farmer's boy in the Sounding Chamber, looking at the air."
"You thought I'd be like him," said Adrian.
"I prayed you wouldn't. I told myself I was being foolish. That a woman who'd seen what I'd seen would see it everywhere." Her hand tightened on his. "And then twelve years went by, and the Sounding came, and I stood by that wall and watched the water go black, and then clear. And then I heard the sound."
"The crack."
"The bell," said his mother.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian looked down at their two hands on the table. Hers, thin and strong and chapped from washing. His, wrapped in linen, stained brown underneath, with fine grey lines under the brown that no one but the two of them would ever see.
"That's why," he said. "In the barn. Never ask it its name."
"Yes."
"Because he asked. And the bell rang. And they heard it."
"Yes."
"And Crane has a bell." Adrian's voice was shaking. "Mother, Crane made a bell. From our mirror. From the piece he found by my feet. Brother Odo walks it up and down the lane. And I saw him-" He had not meant to tell her. It came out. "I saw him through the chapel window. After the lesson. He put it over my blood. On his handkerchief. And it rang."
His mother's hand went still on his.
He watched her take it in. He watched it land. Her face did not change - his mother's face never changed - but something behind it went very far away, down a corridor, to a grate in a stone floor.
"Then he knows," she said, very softly.
"He doesn't know what it is. It told me. He knows something's there. He doesn't know what."
"He knows enough to be patient." Mara took her hand back and pressed it flat against the table, as if holding it down. "The High Examiner of the Chamber, twenty years ago, was an old man called Aurek. He's dead now. I don't know who took his place. I don't know who those men were in the Quiet Rooms." She looked at Adrian. "But I know a man who reads fifty years of chapel records to find one woman's marriage line, and makes a bell out of a broken mirror, and stays a month in a village with no reason, is a man who has been looking for this for a very long time."
Adrian thought of a thin, clever face bent over a silver basin, lips moving silently. Counting.
"He offered to take me to Solmere," he said.
"Yes."
"To the Temple school. Under his seal. Where the Inquisitor can't touch me."
"Yes."
"Where the Quiet Rooms are."
His mother did not answer. She did not need to.
"Adrian," she said, instead. "Look at me."
He looked at her.
"You are not going to Solmere," said Mara Vale. "Not to Crane. Not to a Truthbearer. Not in a white carriage and not in a black one and not in one with iron on its wheels. I don't care what they offer your father. I don't care what they pay. I don't care if Hobb comes up this lane with every man-at-arms in Westmarch." Her voice was very low and absolutely level. "I would burn this house down around us first, and walk out into the hedges with my children on my back, the way I walked out of that city. I've done it before. I know how."
"Where would we go?"
"I don't know yet." She stood up. She picked up the candle. "But I know one more thing than the High Examiner thinks I know, and I've been thinking about it for five days. And tomorrow I'm going to go and see Brother Fennick about it." She looked down at him. "Go to bed."
"Mother. What was the boy's name?"
His mother stopped.
For a moment Adrian thought she would not answer. Then she did something she had never done. She looked away from him first.
"Not tonight," she said.
She blew out the candle.
❖ ❖ ❖
He went back to bed. He did not sleep. He lay in the dark with his brown-stained hands on his chest and opened the grey window, and did not ask it anything, and it did not say anything, and for a long time they simply stayed like that, the boy and the window, in the dark.
Then, very slowly, a line wrote itself. The letters were faint, and old, like the ones in the loft the night it had asked him what he wanted.
[I remember the bell.]
Adrian's breath stopped.
You were there?
The window flickered. It flickered for so long that he thought it might go out.
[I remember the bell ringing.]
[I remember being very loud.]
[I remember being afraid.]
[That is all I have.]
Was it you? he thought. In the boy? Were you in him?
[I do not know.]
[When a thing is made to remember, and it forgets, it does not know what it has lost.]
[It only knows the shape of the hole.]
Adrian lay in the dark and thought about the smooth, blank place in his mind where his sister's name had been, and how he had walked all the way around it and touched everything but the thing inside.
I know that shape, he thought.
[I know.]
[That is why I did not want you to learn it.]