Chapter 84

The slate came back to me the next morning by the hand of a page, wiped clean on both sides, so that for a moment I thought my name had gone with Terwil’s four words. It hadn’t. Someone had chalked it in again on the front, carefully, in my own capitals, and got the W very nearly right.

Tucked into the frame was a slip in a small upright hand with a d that leaned back like a man refusing a chair.

I would like, one day, to see you write on your own.

I kept the slip. The slate went back to Rowan, where it lived.

***

There was a terrace at the end of my mother’s room, a half-moon of pale boards along a branch you could have driven a cart down, with a willow rail and nothing beyond it but the tops of other trees, going away west. In the afternoons the light moved on the boards like water on the bottom of a ford.

Rowan and I sat there most afternoons, he on the boards with his back to the rail, because he said Ellisar’s chairs were