Chapter 69

The idea came to me in my third winter, at noon, from the wall.

On the lower row the grating laid its strip of grey on the flags of the passage, between the cells, and never came further. But in the dead of winter, when the sun was at its lowest and the light came down the shaft aslant, for as long as it takes to say a short prayer at noon, the edge of it reached in under my bars and up onto the wet wall at the back of my cell. Most days it was only a stripe. That winter the sun had come round to some new angle, and for a week the light lay on the wet stone in a shape with a broad middle and five uneven fingers, and a thumb that reached away to one side.

A hand. A water-mark in the shape of a hand.

I sat on my bench and looked at it and felt the whole of my skin go cold, because I had seen that shape before, in brown, on page twelve.

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I had been a copyist for eight years before I was anything else. I could not read the old Seelie script; I had told C