Every Thursday the kitchen bakes twelve more loaves than the school eats. They are left on the step behind the pantry. No one has asked for them, and no one has complained that they are gone by the next morning.

The Kitchen Household Book, entry by a new kitchen maid

Chapter 11

Razolní

Professor Haltora was standing by the main door of the castle, waiting for us. He was the only one. It was early evening, and the rest of the school was sitting in the dining hall, and his wolf lay at his feet with its eyes closed. The grass behind us was wet with dew, and a smell of fried fish came out through the door that made my stomach clench.

"You're the first to come back," he said. His voice was flat. Not impressed. Not surprised. Just flat, and that was almost more frightening than anything else.

"Ahra's hurt," said Retia. "His leg."

Haltora looked down at Ahra's leg without changing his expression. His wolf got up and sniffed at the bite, calmly and methodically, and Ahra pulled his leg away and then let it be.

"Follow me," said Haltora.

He took us to the infirmary, a bright room with white beds and a smell of herbs and something medical I didn't recognise. A woman in a green robe took charge of Ahra and laid her hands on his leg, and her hands began to glow a faint green, and Ahra drew in a sharp breath but said nothing.

"All of it?" Haltora said to Retia and me.

"Three scrolls," said Retia, and put them on the table by the door.

"Good." He looked at me. The black eyes. The smell of iron and night air. "Godrand. The Headmaster wants to speak to you tomorrow."

Then he turned towards the door. "Your team has come home," he said. "So the island has had its say. Come."

He said no more. He just walked, and the wolf walked beside him without a sound, and Retia and I looked at each other and followed.

It wasn't the way to the guest dormitory. We went up a wide staircase, then a narrow one, and along a corridor high up under the roof, where the floor was of old boards and the air was cold and dry and smelt of lime and of rain that had lain on the roof tiles all day. Along the corridor there were doors a few metres apart, all alike, dark wood with iron handles.

Haltora stopped at a door and nodded to Retia. Then he walked three doors further on and nodded to me.

"Eat something, once you've seen it," he said. And then he was gone down the corridor, and I was standing alone in front of a door.

The room was small. Two beds, a narrow window above each, two wardrobes and a table with a lamp in between. The walls were limewashed, so thickly that the corners were rounded. Through the window above one of the beds I could see the mountain, black against a sky that was still light at the edge.

At the head of each bed stood a small wooden plate, painted with white lettering.

I went over to the first one.

Chris Godrand, Razolní.

I looked at it for a long time. The paint was dry. The letters of my name had been painted by a steady, calm hand. The word after the comma was written in something else, an ink that was darker and a little more crooked, as if it had been written later and by someone else.

My name. And a word that said where I belonged, which no one had said out loud.

I didn't even know the word. Edrin had mentioned the paths in the dining hall, and Ahra had said on the ship that the island decided everything, and I hadn't asked.

Then I went over to the other plate.

Nihil Mathson.

And after the name a comma and then nothing. An empty space on the white wood, just as long as my own word.

"It means the ones who find the way."

Retia was standing in the doorway. She hadn't knocked. She had Fulmen on her shoulder and her arms folded, and she wasn't looking at me but at the plate.

"Razolní," she said. "It's on my bed too. The ones who find the way, when there isn't one."

"How does the island know?"

"Nobody knows." She shrugged. "My mum says you shouldn't ask a river why it runs the way it does."

She left again. I heard her footsteps along the corridor, and a door closing, and then there was only the sound of rainwater dripping from a gutter outside the window.

I sat down on the bed. Alôpex jumped up and curled into a white ball on the pillow. The cold ring round my wrist, the one the stone oath had put there that first evening, was where it always was. I turned it with my fingers, even though there was nothing to turn.

I looked at the empty space on Nihil's plate until the light in the window was completely gone.

The Headmaster's door was the same door as on that first evening. Pale oak, smooth, with no sign.

I stood in front of it on Friday morning with a knot in my stomach that had nothing to do with breakfast. The corridor smelt of candles and old parchment, even out here, and the painting of the man with the narrow hands hung where it hung. I didn't look at it.

I raised my hand to knock. Then I put it on the handle instead.

The door aged under my hand.

Not just the handle this time. All of it. The wood darkened from the handle outwards, like water spreading through paper, and cracks came in the grain, and the hinges went green with bronze, and somewhere up in the door a knot hole appeared where there had been nothing. It took two seconds. Afterwards I was standing with my hand on a door older than any door I had seen, except one. The one in the bank. My own.

It opened before I had time to push.

Headmaster Edrin was sitting in his chair at the long table. The cat sat on his shoulder, looking at the door and not at me. Edrin was looking at the door too. He said nothing about it.

"Sit down, Chris."

I sat down on the chair opposite him. The room smelt of the same thing as the corridor, and of the other thing, the one that came from him: a room someone has just left. His hands lay folded on the table.

"Tell me about the island."

So I told him. About the moss on the north side. About the cold that came into the clearing and dragged the fire down. About Ahra's leg and Scutum. About Retia finding the old stones, a path that wasn't on the map, and about the barrier and Defluo. I told him I had been gone for ten seconds.

I didn't tell him where.

I didn't tell him about the cave with the black walls, or the footprints in the dust, or the wreath of hawthorn that was warm under my fingers. It lay in my mouth the whole time I was talking, and I let it lie.

Edrin listened without interrupting. When I had finished, he sat for a moment looking at me, and his thumb moved slowly over the knuckles of his other hand.

"Was there anything else?" he said.

"No," I said.

It was the first time I had said no to an adult and known it was a lie. Not a little lie about homework. It was holding a door shut on purpose. And I felt it in my body, in the back of my neck and in my hands lying in my lap, and I knew exactly what it was, because everyone had been doing it to me for fifteen years.

Edrin nodded slowly.

"Nobody here will ask you to tell them anything you don't want to," he said.

He said it to me. But he didn't look at me while he said it. He looked down at his own hands on the table, and it didn't sound like a sentence he had just thought of. It sounded like a sentence he had said many times. To himself.

"Thank you, Headmaster Edrin."

"Go down and find your friends."

When I closed the door behind me, it was pale and smooth and new again. I stood for a long time with my back against it, feeling the wood cool through my jumper.

For the rest of the week we waited for the other teams.

They came back one at a time, in groups of three, scratched and exhausted and silent. A boy had broken his arm and was helped in by his two teammates, one of them with short red hair, who was called Torin, and Torin kept saying all the way up the stairs that it was all right, it was all right, even though nobody had asked. A girl with black hair in a tight plait came alone and walked past us without looking at anyone. Her two teammates came half an hour later, and the three of them didn't speak to each other. One team came in so quietly that I only noticed them in the middle of the floor: a girl with hair that was almost white, and two others, and they went up a staircase in the corner of the hall that I had never noticed, and that I couldn't find again afterwards.

In the mornings there was a new number on the board by the door to the First-Year Room. River: 102 m. River: 100 m. A little less every day. I started walking past the board to look at it before I went down to breakfast.

And every evening, when I came up to the room, I looked at the plate by the other bed. Nihil Mathson. Comma. Nothing.

On the second evening I discovered that I was hoping they would make it. I had talked to him for ten seconds. But I lay in the dark listening for footsteps in the corridor, and the bed over there was so smooth and empty that it shone.

The people who had been through the test together sat together in the dining hall and walked together in the corridors. The test had taken away the social layer of "who knows who from where" and put something deeper in its place: "who stood beside me when it got dark."

Chris, Ahra and Retia. That was us now. Three people who had chosen each other by a fire.

Ahra came out of the infirmary on Saturday morning with a leg that was whole again and a smell of herbs and something sweet that the woman in the green robe had rubbed on him. He didn't want to eat first. He wanted to see his room.

It was two doors from mine, and there were two plates in his as well. One was empty after the name: Will Mathson. The other:

Ahra Retonk, Razolní.

Lynx sat down at his feet. Ahra's shoulders sank, the way they do when you put something heavy down, and then lifted again.

"Razolní," he said. "Grandmother always said I would be Ästonie, because I keep getting in the way of things." He touched the plate with one finger. "I stood in between. It was the only thing I did right out there."

"You did more than that."

"No." He smiled. It wasn't an unhappy smile, but it wasn't entirely happy either. "It wasn't my shield. It was Retia's stones." He took a breath. "And your jump. The island saw it. I'm just glad I was there."

Retia was standing in the doorway behind us. She said nothing. Then she turned and walked off along the corridor, fast, and a door opened and shut. Ahra and I looked at each other and said nothing about it.

When she came back ten minutes later, her eyes were completely dry. Her nose was a little red. She smelt of salt wind and of cold water, as if she had washed her face.

"Breakfast," she said. "Now."

Nihil's team came on Saturday evening, a few hours before the deadline.

I saw them from the stairs. Nihil was the one in front when the three of them came in through the main door, and his face showed signs of something that wasn't exhaustion. It was pride. Hard, quiet pride, from a boy who had proved he could manage something difficult.

Will ran over to him and took hold of his shoulder. Nihil let him, but his face didn't change.

Marcus walked quietly over to the bench and sat down and closed his eyes.

All the teams had come home. The test was over.

I went up to the room before him. I don't know why. Perhaps because I didn't want to be standing in the corridor looking at him when he saw it. I sat down on my bed with my back against the cold lime and Alôpex in my lap, and waited.

He came ten minutes later. He opened the door and stopped in it, because he hadn't expected anyone to be there. He smelt of smoke and wet forest, and underneath that of winter wind and bare iron. He looked at me. Then he looked at the bed, and at the plate.

I saw it happen. The word didn't come slowly. It was simply there, the moment his eyes hit the wood, in the same dark ink as on mine.

Nihil Mathson, Gistónu.

Something in his face fell. Not on the outside. There was no drama, no tears, no shaking hands. What happened, happened behind his eyes, in the place where you keep the person you thought you were, and what I saw was the moment that person cracked. His mouth tightened a millimetre. His jaw shifted a millimetre to the left. His hands, which had been hanging at his sides, slowly clenched, not in anger but in the kind of grip you use when you are holding on to yourself so you don't fall.

He said nothing. He didn't look at me. He went over to the bed and lay down on it, in his clothes and with his boots on, with his face to the wall.

I was the only witness. All I knew was that the last thing you want, when you have been put somewhere you haven't chosen, is somebody saying something.

So I switched off the lamp.

In the dark something moved at his wrist. Out of the sleeve of his robe crept a small white animal, long and supple, with a black tip to its tail. It stayed lying along his forearm with its hindquarters still inside the sleeve, as if that was where it lived.

Alôpex got up on my pillow. The fur on the back of her neck was standing up.

The two animals looked at each other across the floor between the beds. Neither of them made a sound. It lasted a long time. Then Alôpex lay down again, but she didn't turn her head away, and neither did the other one.

On Sunday evening everyone was gathered in the First-Year Room.

The fire was burning with ordinary yellow flames, and the windows at water level were dark, and the river slid past behind them so close that you could hear it, a soft, endlessly rippling rush under all the talk. The room smelt of firewood and wool and of far too many people who had been out in the rain. There was no ceremony. Nobody gave a speech. People just compared plates, the way you compare scratches after a walk in the woods, and the words went round the room and settled with the people they belonged to.

Torin and the boy with his arm in a sling were Ästonie. The girl with the black plait was called Mira and was Gistónu. The fair-haired girl and her team sat by the north window and said nothing to anyone, and somebody whispered that they were Ushenhiener.

The boy from the animal shop sat in the corner with the leopard cub in his lap and his hands buried in its fur. He was called Drax, and he was Toníâs. I heard it from a boy who laughed a little too loudly about it, until Drax looked at him. It hurt to look at, without my knowing why. Burnt wood and warm ash. And under it those flowers on a grave, clearer than in the animal shop.

Will stood in the middle of it all and was happy.

"Gistónu," he said to anyone who would listen, and he raised his arms, and the owl sat on his shoulder looking offended. "The whole team. So the island's got a sense of humour."

Marcus smiled and shook his head. Nihil was sitting in an armchair a little way from them with a book he wasn't reading. When Will said it, he shut the book, got up and walked out of the room. Will watched him go with his arms still half raised, and then he put them down.

Maka came down from the older years' rooms higher up. He stood in the doorway with a grin almost too big for his face, and when he saw Ahra the grin broke, and something softer came out from behind it. He pulled Ahra into a hug that went on far too long, and Ahra's scent of warm bark and honey mixed with Maka's, which was the same but deeper, like one tree that is older than another tree of the same kind. Ahra held on with his eyes closed.

"Welcome home, little brother," said Maka.

A girl smiled at me from the window seat beside the door. She was Razolní too, Ahra had said. Her knitting lay in her lap, and the yarn was blue.

Retia stood by the window, looking out over the river. Fulmen sat on the windowsill beside her, and its golden eyes caught the light from the fire. For the first time since I had met her, her shoulders weren't tense.

The board hung by the door. Someone had written the evening's number, even though it wasn't morning. River: 97 m. The chalk was fresh. I hadn't seen anyone write it.

Nihil came back after midnight. I heard him pull off his boots and lie down, and the smell of winter wind and iron filled the little room again.

I lay on my back looking up at the wall above my bed. It was empty. White lime, thick and rounded at the edges. Just like at Fjordly. Just like every other place I had lived, and not lived, and tried to belong.

But it felt different now. Not like an absence. Like a beginning. Like a wall that was waiting to be filled with things that hadn't happened yet, with memories that didn't exist yet.

Alôpex curled in against my neck, warm and soft, and her breathing was slow and calm, and her heart was beating against my cheek.

"We're home," she said.

"Maybe," I said.

"No," she said. "We're home."

I didn't know then that the wall would be filled before the year was out. Nor did I know that some of the things I would put up would hurt more than the blank surface ever had.

But that evening I knew none of it. And that was good.

Because that evening I needed nothing more than to lie there, in a bed that was mine, with a name on a plate and a fox against my neck and a boy in the next bed who didn't want to look at me, and two people somewhere down the corridor who had chosen me before the island did.

It was enough. Not "the best I can get". Just: it's here. It's mine.

In the middle of the night I woke up because Nihil was talking. One word, low and thick, into the wall. I couldn't hear what it was. He didn't say it again. The white animal put its head out of his sleeve and drew it back in.

I closed my eyes. Alôpex's heart beat against my cheek. And there, in the dark behind my eyelids, there were no empty walls, no blank family trees, no Hanne pushing a bowl of porridge across the table instead of an answer.

There was just this. And I fell asleep before I could think of anything else.