Owl had ruffled up at the clatter and the thumping. Owl refused to look at him, perhaps because he had liked the hole into the pigeon loft.

But there was nothing to do for the hole in the roof, which Tristen found far beyond his skill. He went and looked out, and found the hole a new window, on a side of the keep he had never seen, a view of forest that went on and on, and, as he stepped closer, a view of a parapet of the keep he had never seen.

He wondered how one reached it.

He stepped up on the fallen beam, worked higher, with his arm on the roof slates, and from that vantage, with his head and shoulders out the hole in the roof, he saw a gate in the wall that ringed the keep, looking down on it from above. He saw a dark band of water lapping at the very walls of the fortress and, spanning that, a series of arches. From those arches outward into the woods that lined the far shore, he saw an aged stonework which vanished in among the trees.

He was astonished and troubled. He could imagine the course of the stonework thereafter. He saw a trace of a line among the treetops, where trees preserved just a little more space than elsewhere through the forest.

A Bridge and a Road, he thought, in the breathless way of Words arriving out of nowhere. A Road suggested going out, and then-    Then it came to him that if Mauryl went away then the Road was the way Mauryl would go, through the gate and over that dark water and through the woods.

He felt the Book weighing against him as he climbed down, reminder of a task on which Mauryl had hung so very, very much, and in which he had so far failed. But the Road was out there waiting to call Mauryl away and the Book could prevent Mauryl going, so he held it secret that he had seen the Road, as he feared that he had, by accident, seen something Mauryl had never told him, and which, perhaps, Mauryl would tell him only if he could not solve the matter Mauryl set him to do.

It was not in his power to patch the hole the wind had made. He put up a few boards, but for the most part the holes were out of reach. He had at least, for the pigeons, patched the one that would have let their Shadow in, and the pigeons and the doves as well as Owl would have to bear with the rain when it came.

He said nothing of the hole in the roof when he came down from the loft. He thought Mauryl might be angry that he had seen the Road, and it would make Mauryl talk of going away again: that was what he feared. He studied very hard. He thought that he read Mauryl’s name in the Book, and came and asked him if that was so.

Mauryl said he would not be surprised. And that was all. So when he had studied the codex so long his eyes swam, he read the easy writings that Mauryl had made, and he copied them.

Some things, however, came much easier than others.

“Sometimes,” Tristen said, one evening, brushing the soft-stiff feather of the quill between his lips, while his elbows kept his much-scraped study parchment flat on the table, “sometimes I know how to do things you never taught me. How is that, Mauryl?”

Mauryl looked up from his own work, at least to the lifting of a shaggy brow, the pause of the quill tip above the inkpot. The pen dipped, then, wrote a word or two. “What things?” Mauryl asked him.  “How to write letters. How to read.”

“I suppose some things come and some things don’t.”

“Come where, Mauryl?”

“Into your head, where else? The moon? The postern tower?”

“But other things, too, Mauryl. I don’t know that I know Words. I see something or I touch something, and I know what it is or what to do with it. And sometimes it happens with things I see every day, over and over, only suddenly I know the Word, or I know how words fit together that I never understood before, or I know there’s more to a thing. And some of them scare me.”  “What scares you?”

“I don’t know. Only I’m not certain I have all the parts. I try to read the Book, Mauryl, and the letters are there, but the words ... I don’t know any of the words.”

“Magic is like that. Maybe there’s a glamor on the Book. Maybe there’s one over your eyes. Such things happen.”  “What’s magic?”

“It’s what wizards do.”

“Do you sometimes know Words that way, by touching them?”

“I’m very old. I find very little I don’t know, now.”

“Will I be old?”

“Perhaps.” Mauryl dipped the pen again. “If you’re good. If you study.”

“Will I be old like you?”

“Plague on your questions.”

“Will I be old, Mauryl?”

“I’m a wizard,” Mauryl snapped, “not a fortune-teller.”

“What’s am”

“Plague, I say!” Mauryl frowned and jerked another parchment over the first, discarded that one and lifted the corner to look at the one below, and the one below that. He pulled out one from the depths of the pile.

“Mauryl, I don’t ever want you to go away.”

“I gave you the Book. What does the Book say?”

He was ashamed. And had nothing to say.

“The answer is there, boy.”

“I can’t read the words!”

“So you have a lot to do, don’t you? I’d get busy.”

Tristen rested his chin against his arm, rubbed it, because it itched, and it felt strange under his fingers.

“Mauryl, can you read the Book?”

“You have no patience for your studies today, is that it? You worry at this, you worry at that. How am I to finish this?”  “Are you copying?”

“Ciphering. Gods, go outside, you’ve made me blot the answer. Enjoy the air. Give me peace. But mind—” Mauryl added sharply as he sprang up and his chair scraped the stone. He stayed quite still. “Mind you stay to the north walk, and when the shadows fall all the way across the courtyard—”

“I come inside. I always do. —Mauryl. —Why the north walk? Why never the south?”

“Because I say so.” Mauryl waved a dismissive hand. “Go, go, and leave an old man to his figures.”

“What figures? What do you—”

“Go, gods have mercy, take yourself and your questions to the pigeons. They have better answers.”  “The pigeons?”

“Ask them, I say. They’re patient. I’m not, young gadfly. Buzz elsewhere.”

Another wave of the fingers. Tristen knew he would gain nothing more, then, and started away.

But he remembered his copywork and put it safely on the shelf, far from Mauryl’s flood of parchments, which drowned the table in cipherings, with the orrery weighting the middlemost pile.

He hastened up the stairs, then, rubbing at the ink stains on his fingers, searching for wet spots that might find their way to his clothing or, unnoticed, to his chin, which still itched. He supposed he could ask Mauryl to make it stop, but Mauryl was busy, and besides, Mauryl’s work felt stranger than the itch, which went away of its own accord when he was busy.

—Mauryl, said the Win& and rattled at the tower shutters, rattle, bang, and thump-thump-thump.

Mauryl hardly glanced at the sealed shutters this time. It had been a shorter respite than he expected, and a far more surly Wind. There was no laughter about it now at all.

—Gestaurien, let me in. Let me in now. We can reason about this foolishness of yours.

It was worried, then. Mauryl drank it in and, still sitting, reached for his staff, where it leaned against the wall.

You know you can ruin yourself. This is entirely uncalled-for, entirely unnecessary.

It tried another window. But that was simply habit, Mauryl thought, and thought nothing else, resisted nothing, like grass in a gale.

—He’s asleep, the Wind murmured through the crack in the shutter nearest. I passed up and down his window. Do you truly think there’s any hope for you in this young fool? He knows nothing. I’ve drunk from his dreams, I have, Maury! You wish me to believe him formidable? I think not. I do think not. Not deep, not deep waters at all, this boy. He’s all so innocent.

—Sweet innocence, Mauryl said. But out of your reach. Long out of your reach, poor dead shadow. Poor shattered soul.