I had no class on Wednesday, and a free morning in a place like Aeloria is not a gift. It is a room with the door left open and nothing inside it. If I stayed in my chamber I would either weep again or do something that could not be taken back, so I went to the only space on the island whose air did not feel borrowed from someone else's lungs.

Father Aldric was at his desk when I came in. He looked at my face the way a teacher looks at a student who has been crying, which is to say he decided, in the space of a breath, not to mention it.

"The northern alcove is empty," he said. "There is a window-seat. Selma Lagerlöf on the third stack, second shelf — no one has touched her in years. Take her down. Don't register it. Stay until I leave for dinner."

"Thank you."

He went back to his ledgers and did not ask me anything else, and I understood that this was the kindest thing anyone on Aeloria had done for me since the ferry.

The library opened past the front gallery into a long vaulted hall, light falling in slanting columns from the clerestory windows, thick with dust. It smelled of old paper and beeswax and, underneath, very faintly, of the iron the fog dragged up off the cliffs. The northern alcove was set into the far wall — one tall leaded window, one window-seat deep enough to fold a body into, one small table. I sat. I drew my knees up. I took out my mother's notebook and did not open it. I only held it.

And after a while, without deciding to, I began to hum.

I had not hummed in years. The tune came up out of me the way a laugh had come up in the corridor with Lucien — without permission, on a frequency I had not chosen. It was an old Maine fisherman's song, The Boys of the Sou'wester, the one my mother sang while she cleaned fish for chowder on our porch in Camden the summer I was five. She sang it off-key on purpose, the way fishermen did, because it was a working song built to keep time with a knife, and the knife's job was to be fast and not careful, so the tune had been made for people who could not afford to listen too closely to themselves.

I hummed the first verse. The second. The third — the verse where the young man goes down — and my eyes closed, and my breath found the fourth without me, the verse where his mother lights a candle. My mother had always cried at the fourth verse, very quietly, and always pretended she had not, and so had I.

I sang it to the porch. To the summer I was five. I sang it through the small instrumental break the fishermen filled with a low whistle and a stamp of the boot, and I did not whistle and I did not stamp, because I was sitting on a window-seat on an island that smelled of iron — but I held the rhythm in my throat where the whistle should have gone, and I let the last note land where it belonged.

I had not known how much of her I had been keeping shut behind my teeth. That was the thing about the song. It did not let you carry it carefully. It made you open your throat all the way or not sing it at all, and so for the length of four verses I had been, without choosing to be, entirely undefended — a thing I had not allowed myself to be in any room since I was six years old and learned what it cost.

It was very quiet. The library was very quiet.

I opened my eyes.

And I knew, the way I had begun to know things on this island — in the bone, before the mind — that I was not alone, and had not been for some time.

I did not turn at once. I made myself unfold from the seat slowly, made myself put the notebook in my coat, made myself stand. When I came out of the alcove into the central aisle, he was three stacks down, in the cathedral light, with a book in his hand he was not reading.

Cassian.

His hair was loose. He had a volume open against his palm, but his eyes were not on it, and when I stepped into the aisle they came to me and stayed, and the look in them was not the measuring look from his study. It was something with the guard struck off it — something that, for one unbalanced second, looked very much like a man who had been hit.

Neither of us spoke. The dust hung in the columns of light between us and did not fall.

I should have walked the other way. I went toward him instead. I did not decide to; my feet decided. Three stacks down. Two. The space between us narrowed to the width of an arm, and the air in it changed weight, the way a room changes when a fire is lit somewhere you cannot see. He did not step back, which surprised me — he was a man who measured distance like a science — and for the length of one held breath we simply stood there, too close, the iron-and-paper smell of the library gone thin and the only thing in it the cold-clean scent of him, and I felt the pull of it down the whole front of my body like a hand laid flat.

He looked at the book in his hand as though he had forgotten it was there. "Lagerlöf," he said. His voice was not steady. I had not, in four days, heard it not be steady.

It is a strange thing to stand close enough to a man to feel the cold come off him and to know, in the same breath, that he is the most controlled creature you have ever met and that you have done something to the control. I could see it in the small places — the muscle at the corner of his jaw, the hand that had set the book down and not yet decided what to do with itself. He held himself the way you hold a glass you have just realised is cracked, and I, who had spent my whole life learning to read the weather in other people so I could get out of the room before the storm, could not read this one at all, except to know it was about me.

"Father Aldric recommended her."

"He would." He set the book back on the shelf without looking at where it went, which I would think about later, because it was the wrong shelf and he was not a man who shelved things wrong. "Father Aldric has very good instincts about who needs which antidote."

I waited for him to say the thing his face was saying. He did not. He closed it down, deliberately, the way a man closes a hand — I watched the guard come back over his eyes like water finding its level — and he stepped back, restoring the three feet, restoring himself.

"I'm late," he said, which I did not believe. "Forgive me."

He left by the back stair. He did not look at me again, and the not-looking was its own kind of touch, and I stood in the aisle with my heart going like a struck bell and understood that I had just been very near to something I had no name for and no defence against.

I found Mira in the rotunda at noon. She took one look at me and read the whole morning off my face the way she read everything.

"You sang," she said.

"How could you know that?"

"I don't. I'm guessing. Your eyes are doing the thing they do after." She steered me toward the dining hall, and then, lower, in the tone she used for things she was not sure she should say: "There's gossip from the eastern gallery this morning. Lord Cassian missed a Council session."

"Is that gossip?"

"On this island it is a scandal." She kept her voice flat, which was how I knew she meant it. "He has not missed a Council session in living memory. Mine, certainly. The older staff are saying ninety years and more. He walked in twenty minutes late, gave no reason, took his bench, and did not speak. No one asked. No one would dare." She glanced at me sideways. "It was the same hour you were in the library, Lydia."

I did not answer. There was a sentence forming somewhere under my ribs and I did not want to let it out where Mira could hear it, because once it was said aloud it would be a thing I knew instead of a thing I suspected.

He had heard me.

Through how many walls, I did not know. But he had heard me, and a man who had not broken a habit in ninety years had broken one, and then he had come to the library on no errand and stood three stacks away through the whole of a song he had no business hearing, and then he had let me walk to within an arm of him and had not moved.

I ate lunch and tasted none of it.

When I went back to my chamber that afternoon, the silk cover of the bed was as Mira had left it. The two silver pins lay where I had set them on the side table — the one from Mira's brother, the one the wolves had sent. Nothing was out of place.

Except that on the small writing desk, square in the centre of the blotter, where there had been nothing that morning, there was a folded square of cream paper.

No seal. No name on the outside.

I stood at the desk a long moment before I touched it. Then I unfolded it.

Two lines, in ink, in a hand I did not know — even, old-fashioned, the loops on the letters made with deliberation, the hand of someone who had learned to write in a century that took its time.

The fourth verse is the one the singer is not supposed to survive. You sang it as though you intended to.

— —

No signature. A dash where a name should be, as though whoever wrote it had begun to sign and then chosen, at the last stroke, not to.

I read it three times. I sat down on the edge of the bed with the paper open on my knee and read it a fourth.

Someone had heard the fourth verse — the fourth verse, named exactly, the one about the candle, the one that was supposed to be the death of the song. Someone had heard it and understood what it cost, and had wanted me to know I had been heard, and had not been willing to put their name to wanting it.

It could have been the wolf. Lucien had told me he heard the first laugh through three corridors; he made no secret of the listening, and he was not a man afraid to sign a thing. The unsigned dash did not feel like Lucien.

It felt like a man who had set a book on the wrong shelf because he could not look at where his own hand was going.

I folded the note along its crease and held it against my mouth without deciding to, the way you hold a thing you are not ready to put down, and the smell that came off the paper was cold and clean and not the smell of the wolves at all.

I did not know whose name belonged in the place of the dash.

I knew which name I was afraid it was.