The masons who restored the east wing of Déynáir in the school's hundred and twelfth year found seven doors that had been bricked up from the inside. Behind one of them stood a pair of shoes, neatly placed side by side.

Building accounts for the east wing, appendix 9

Chapter 3

The One Who Walks on Water

Ahra walked fast, and I walked after him, dripping.

The Fonté Hall went on and on. There wasn't just one pool but eight or ten, each with its own steps up out of the black water, and people were coming up out of all of them. Two old women climbed out arm in arm and were completely dry, as if the water had let them through without touching them.

"How do they do that?" I said.

"You can keep the water out, when you're good enough." Ahra looked down at himself, at the coat clinging to him and at my hoodie hanging underneath it like a drowned dog. "I'm not."

The stones under my shoes were warm, and every step made a small wet sound that echoed up in the vault. The air tasted faintly of copper, the way your mouth tastes when you've had a coin in it as a little kid.

At the far end the vault grew lower and narrower and turned into a long tunnel, where water ran in a channel down the middle of the floor, black and still, and along the channel lay ships. Above each quay hung an iron sign with a name on it, and I could read them all, even though I had never seen the letters before. Tés Aváir. Nordmark. The Sun Coast.

The ship Ahra went to was moored at the innermost quay, right down where the tunnel opened onto something grey.

It was narrow and long, built of almost black wood, with no mast, no sail and no oars. At the bow and at the stern hung a lantern with a blue flame, and on the sign above the quay it said Déynáir.

A man with a wool blanket round his shoulders stood by the gangway. Ahra held his ticket out to him with both hands, and I held out the letter. The man looked at the single word on the envelope and then at me. Then he stepped aside.

We sat at the stern on a bench along the rail. There were perhaps twenty others on board, most of them our age, in little clumps that already knew each other. The ship pulled away without anyone doing anything I could see. A faint hum came up through the bench and into my thighs, the same hum as in the stones of the hall, and then we were out of the tunnel, and everything went grey.

The fog was so thick that I couldn't see the bow. It settled on my face like wet fingers and smelt of salt and of something cold and mineral, like a stone you have turned over in a stream. The water said nothing against the hull. We glided.

I started to shake. It wasn't the cold. It was that my trousers were wet through to the skin, my shoes were full of the Little Belt, and my body had apparently decided that now was the moment to react to all of it.

Ahra looked at me. Then he looked over his shoulder, as if to make sure nobody was watching, and held his hand out over my knees.

"Here it's allowed," he said.

Steam rose off my trousers like from a pan just taken off the heat, and it smelt of wet wool and warm stone and a little bit of him, of bark and grass. After ten seconds the cloth was dry and warm right through to my skin, and my shoes were dry, and Ahra leant back against the rail and went white around the mouth.

"Thanks," I said.

"It was nothing." He took a deep breath. "It was a bit of something."

"What did you do?"

"I used some Dherak." He said the last word as if I ought to know what it meant. I didn't.

"Dherak?"

"The energy that drives all magic. All Engle and Drúir have it. It's sort of like..." He stopped. Opened his mouth. Shut it again. "My grandmother could explain this in ten seconds, but she's also fifty years older than me and terrifyingly clever. For me it's more... what do you call the little things you have in your torches?"

"Batteries?"

"Battery." He lit up. "I learnt that this week. Think of it as a battery. Inside your chest. It recharges itself while you sleep. All the magic you do uses up some of it. If it runs dry, you can't do magic, and you get really tired." He pointed at his own pale mouth. "Like now. That's what my grandmother said, only better."

"Everyone has it?"

"All Engle and Drúir, yes. Ordinary people don't." He looked at me with a sudden uncertainty in his eyes. "I mean, you've probably got it too. You got in, after all."

I said nothing. I didn't know whether I had a battery in my chest. I knew that ten boys had lost their voices in a changing room because I wanted them to shut up, that the air had caught me when I fell five metres, and that I had beaten the record by a whole minute without my pulse going up. Whether that was Dherak or something else, I had no idea.

It had happened today. PE last lesson, and now here I was.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"Anything."

"Why did you say 'pray' to me on the jetty?"

Ahra went red up to his ears and pulled the sleeves of my hoodie down over his hands. "That wasn't me. Well, it was me. But it was the barrier." He looked at me. "You understand me now, don't you? You understand everyone here."

I nodded. He didn't sound the way he had on the jetty. He just sounded like Ahra.

"It's the same the other way round. When you come over to your side, you can suddenly speak your language. But the barrier teaches you the language the way it was spoken when the barrier was laid."

"When was that?"

"Two hundred and seventy-five years ago. Roughly. My grandmother says it hasn't kept up since." He sighed. "And the book was hers. It wasn't new either."

I thought of him in Kolding in a coat from another age, saying "pray" to the bus driver.

"You sounded like someone who'd just been let off being a serf," I said.

"What's a serf?"

"Something from seventeen hundred and something."

"Well, then it fits." He nodded seriously. "When my brother Maka was on your side, he called a woman in a shop 'maiden'. She was fifty and she owned the shop."

I laughed. It took me by surprise, and it took Ahra by surprise, and then he laughed too, so loudly that the people on the bench opposite looked over at us.

Ahra had a packed lunch at the bottom of his bag, completely dry, wrapped in a white cloth knotted at the corners. He laid it on the bench between us and untied the knots with long, careful fingers.

"My grandmother," he said. "She always makes enough for two. She says you never know who you'll meet."

I hadn't eaten since lunch break. Hanne's packed lunch was still lying half-eaten on a desk at Fjordskolen, and now that I thought about it, I was so hungry it hurt.

The bread was perfect. Every slice was exactly as thick as the next, the crust was golden all the way round, and the cheese went right out to the edge and no further. I took a bite.

It tasted right. That was the only word I could find. My stomach was glad of it. But it didn't taste of anything. Not of anyone.

Hanne's packed lunches tasted of someone who had got up at six o'clock. The rye bread was always cut a bit crooked, and there was too much butter on it, and the liver pâté went right out over the edge, because she didn't have time to make it neat. You could taste that someone had stood in a kitchen with sleep in their eyes, thinking about you.

"She does it with magic," said Ahra. He chewed and looked out into the fog. "All of it. She says hands are for writing with." He paused, with the bread in his hand. "She does everything right."

He said it as if it were both praise and something else, and I thought he didn't know himself what the something else was.

We ate. Ahra talked about Maka, who was in his third year and played the guitar, and about his grandmother's Dherak lessons, which had made him hate Thursdays. He talked with his whole body. His hands drew arcs in the air, and his face managed to change expression three times in every sentence. It was easy to listen to Ahra. You didn't have to think of anything to say.

Then he went quiet. He folded the cloth into small squares and kept on folding, even after there was nothing left to fold.

"I've never been to school," he said.

"What?"

"Nobody in my family goes before Déynáir. You're taught at home." He looked down at the cloth. "I know all the rules. I know the history of the Council and what a silver talent weighed three hundred years ago. But I've never had lunch with anyone my own age. I don't know how you're supposed to be with people. I've just never..." He stopped. "I've never had a friend."

I had never had a friend I phoned. I had four numbers in my phone, and one of them was my caseworker.

"I don't know how you do it either," I said.

Ahra looked up. "You gave me your hoodie."

"Because you were shaking."

"That's what I mean," he said.

"What happens when we get there?"

"The island." He said it quickly, as if the word had been lying ready. "It decides everything. My grandmother says it sees what you don't want to see yourself." He smiled, but it only lasted a second, and then the uncertainty was back, down at the bottom of his eyes.

I didn't ask any more. Ahra was scared. Not of the school. Of himself.

I pulled my legs up under me on the bench and leant my head against the rail. The wood was damp from the fog and smelt of tar and old salt. The wool jumper was warm. The ship hummed low like a purring cat.

I thought about the family tree on my desk with the phone on top of it, and about Søren waiting for it in vain. I thought about Hanne at the kitchen table with the knife in her hand, and whether she was still standing there.

In the end I fell asleep.

Darkness. Cold. A smell of candles and old stone.

A table. Round. People around it, many of them, in robes with their hoods pulled up. I couldn't see faces. Only shadows and candles and hands lying flat on the table.

"The Thirteen are rising again." A man's voice, at the end of the table. "We must act."

"They are stronger than us, Malum. How could we ever..." A woman. Calm, but not calm enough.

Then a laugh. Low and dry and without humour. "I know exactly how. All we have to do is..."

The darkness took him. The rest vanished. And the last thing I felt before everything went black was a cold that didn't belong in a dream, and a smell of something burning somewhere far away.

"Chris. We're here."

I woke with a jolt. The smell was still in my nose, candle wax and something burnt, and I sniffed my own sleeve to see if it was coming from there. There was only wool.

I tried to piece the dream together in my head. Who were the Thirteen? Who was Malum? Who had been sitting round that table, and who was the man who laughed, and what was the thing he said he knew how to do?

It hadn't felt like a dream. It had felt like a room you had been pulled into.

The fog drew back in long, ragged strips. It had been dusk when I walked out into the Little Belt, and I didn't know how long I had slept. But here it was still evening. A low, yellow light came in from the side and made everything long and sharp, as if the day had waited for us.

The ship slid in to a low wooden landing stage and lay still. I felt the air before I saw anything.

Salt water. Withered leaves. Earth cold with November. And something under it all, something I couldn't put a name to, the same scent as in the Fonté Hall, copper and rain, but stronger here. As if the island itself were breathing it out.

I stepped ashore. My feet met grass, soft and wet, and I stopped.

In front of me stood a castle. Not a castle like the ones in the pictures in the history book. A real castle, eight storeys high, with seven towers rising towards a sky that was too blue for November. One tower had a flat roof. The others had pointed roofs that shone like silver in the low light. The castle stood on a hill with fields running down to a river so clear that it glowed.

The river lay between us and the castle.

"We're on the wrong side," I said.

"You always are, the first time," said Ahra, as if it were a rule he had read.

Behind us more ships were mooring. Older students walked in groups up along the bank and disappeared behind a row of willows. Two ravens sat on a post by the landing stage looking at me. A girl with a lynx walked past so close that the animal sniffed at my ankle, and she pulled it away with an apology I didn't hear.

Along the bank on our side ran a low, old wall, as if the castle had once been bigger and reached all the way over here. I noticed something on it, close to the ground, half hidden by a bush that looked as if it had been planted recently. It was a scorch mark. The stones were black and cracked in a circle the size of a grown man, and the leaves closest to it were withered and brown.

Someone had tried to hide it. Someone hadn't done it well enough.

"Quiet!"

The voice was deep and carried well enough to cut through everything else. Every head turned.

A man was standing by the river. He was tall and dark, with black hair and eyes so dark that it took me a second to understand they were black. Completely black. No iris, no white, just black. He wore a thick combat robe with the hood down, and at his side stood a large black wolf with eyes that glowed a strange yellow.

"All first years with me," he said. "Everyone else knows how to get to the school. First years, come with me." He began walking towards the river.

"That's Professor Haltora," whispered Ahra. "Deputy Headmaster. And he teaches combat."

Guvinor Haltora, Deputy Headmaster of Déynáir. His name was at the bottom of the letter in my inside pocket. I followed, with Ahra right behind me and the other new students, who nearly all knew each other, talking in low voices.

And me, who knew one.

Haltora stopped at the riverbank. The river was wide, at least a hundred metres, and the water was so clear that you ought to have been able to see the bottom, but you couldn't. It was as if the clearness itself were an illusion, a glass that only looked like transparency. The low light lay across it in a long golden stripe.

"To reach the school for the first time," said Haltora, in a voice that allowed no questions, "you must get to the other side of the river without getting wet."

Nobody said anything. A girl beside me pushed her hands down into her pockets and said in a faint voice, "But we can't. Not without a boat."

Haltora looked at her. "Yes, it can be done. Let me show you." He stepped forward towards the water, and the moment his foot touched the surface, it parted. It happened as if the river itself drew back from him, and Haltora walked down into the dry channel it left behind, with the sand and stones under his feet, and the wolf followed as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

A girl with long brown hair was the first of the students to follow. She took a step, the water parted, and she walked down onto the bottom with her arms held tight to her body and her eyes fixed straight ahead. Then a boy. Then two more. They all stepped out into the river, and the river opened for them, and they walked along the bottom with the walls of water standing on both sides like glass.

I stayed back on the bank. I was one of the last.

I took a step. Put my foot on the surface of the water.

The water didn't part.

My foot came down on the river as if it were a floor. Not solid, not hard. It gave a little under my weight, as if I were standing on something made of thick glass and air and some third thing that had no name. The water was cold under my soles, not wet but cold, as if the cold were seeping up through a bottom that wasn't there. I could feel the current of the river under me like a slow pulse. But it held me. I was standing on the water.

I had gone down into cold water every single morning for as long as I could remember. It had never held me before.

I took another step. And another. My feet found a rhythm, and it was the strangest feeling: walking on something that ought to give way but didn't, knowing with my whole body that this was impossible and doing it anyway, step by step, in a silence so deep that I could hear my own eyelashes blink.

Below me I could see the others walking along the riverbed between the walls of water. Above them, I walked. On the surface. Alone.

Nobody said anything. Everyone was watching. The only things I could hear were my own footsteps, soft and almost silent, and my heart hammering in my ears.

Haltora stood down in the dry channel looking up at me. He said one word.

"Onward."

I walked on, and when I reached the other side and stepped up onto the bank, it was as if the river let go behind me with a sigh. I turned round. The others were standing down on the riverbed, looking up through the water at the place where I had walked.

And then I felt it. My hands were shaking like leaves in the wind, and my knees were weak. I had just walked across a river in front of all of them, and none of them had done the same, and I didn't know why I could.

Haltora came up onto the bank last of all. The wolf shook itself. He looked at me with those completely black eyes, and up close he smelt of iron and night air and something smouldering, like embers still hot under the ash. It was the smell of the moment just before a storm breaks.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Chris Godrand," I said.

It was the second time I had said it out loud. The first time had been to an old woman by a fire, and she had just put a twig on it.

Haltora said nothing for three seconds. His face didn't move. But his scent did. The embers in it flared up, the way they do when someone bends down and blows on the ash, and for a brief moment there was a dry heat in the air between us. Then it settled again.

"Come with me," he said.

He led me up a wide stone staircase and into the castle. The other students were taken another way. Our footsteps echoed off the stone floor, and the wolf walked silently between us as if it were made of shadow.

Portraits hung along the wall, men and women in robes, and they didn't move. But as we walked past them, I noticed that they had a scent. Each painting had its own faint smell, as if whoever had been painted were still sitting somewhere in the paint. Tar and sea from a man with a grey beard. Cinnamon from a woman with a dove on her arm.

The second-to-last painting in the corridor was a man with narrow hands in a silver robe. There was a name and two dates under him on a small brass plate, and I didn't have time to read them. He smelt of candles and old parchment.

I stopped for half a step. Haltora didn't.

At the end of the corridor there was a perfectly ordinary door of pale oak, with no sign and no name. Haltora knocked. A voice from inside said, "Come in."

The room behind the door was large and dim. Along the walls stood shelves with hundreds of maps, rolled up and tied with string, and the few that lay unrolled showed coastlines that perhaps no longer existed. At the end of a long table stood a big armchair with its back to us. Haltora went over to the chair and bent down and whispered something to whoever was sitting in it.

The chair turned.

In it sat a man who was younger than I had expected. Short red hair. Blue eyes. A silver robe with the hood down round his shoulders. On his shoulder sat a white cat with red eyes. The cat looked at me before the man did.

"Guvinor, you may go. You've done what you needed to do."

"Yes, Headmaster Edrin." Haltora straightened up and went out and closed the door behind him, and I was standing alone with a man I had never met and a cat that was looking at me as if it already knew everything he hadn't told me yet.

The room smelt of candles and old parchment. The same as the painting out in the corridor, I thought. Or perhaps that was just how old rooms smelt. But underneath it there was something else, something that came from him. It smelt like a room someone has just left. The warmth of a body that isn't there any more. And a faint trace of something salty that could have been tears, or just the memory of them.

Headmaster Edrin studied me as if he were looking at something he had been waiting a long time to see, and now didn't know what to say to.

"Chris," he said. Not Godrand. Chris. He said it the way you say a name you have been thinking about for a long time without saying it out loud, with a familiarity that didn't fit a man I had never seen before.

"Yes."

"I understand you walked on the water. Is that true?"

"Yes," I mumbled. My hands hung at my sides, and I realised they were clenched, and I didn't know when they had started clenching.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of." He paused. The cat's tail moved slowly back and forth. "I did it myself, the first time I came to Déynáir. And look, now I'm headmaster." Another pause, longer this time. His hand, which had been lying still on the armrest, slowly closed around the edge. The cat turned its head and looked up at him with its red eyes, and he loosened his grip again. "But don't go around boasting about it. Keep your head down. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Headmaster Edrin."

"Good. Off you go down to the First-Year Room and get something to eat."

I went to the door and put my hand on the handle.

It was worn under my fingers, the way a handle gets when a hundred hands have held the same spot, and the metal was smooth and warm, and the wood around it was almost black, with a crack running down from the lock. It wasn't the door I had come in through.

I pulled it open and turned round to say thank you.

The Headmaster sat in his chair looking at me. If he had seen anything, he didn't say so. The cat blinked its red eyes slowly.

I stepped out and looked back at the door. It was ordinary oak again. Pale and smooth and new. Haltora was gone. So was the wolf.

I stood alone in an empty corridor, and I had no idea what floor I was on, which direction I had come from, or who on earth Chris Godrand actually was.