Edmund did not sulk. That was what worried Alys.
She knew all her brother's sulks. She had been studying them since before she could talk. There was the loud one, with doors. There was the silent one at supper, where he ate everything very fast and left. There was the one where he was extremely polite to everyone except her. She could have drawn each of them from memory, and she knew how long each lasted and what ended it, and she was nearly always right.
This was none of them.
After the night at supper, when he had asked their father where he was born and been told that he was not going to be told, Edmund went on exactly as before. He went to the school. He went, on Thursdays, to the little room off the council chamber, where old Alaric made him copy things, which he thought nobody knew about and which Alys had known about since the first week because his fingers came home black. He ate his supper. He answered when he was spoken to.
But he did not talk. Not the way he used to. Edmund at supper had always been a torrent -- about the school, about the works, about whatever he had overheard and half understood that day, explained at length to whoever could not escape. Now he answered questions and stopped. And twice, in the week after, Alys saw him look at their father across the table in a way she had never seen before, the way you look at a sum you thought you had done right and have just found an error in.
She tried him first, because that was the shortest road.
She found him at the flume, sitting on the stone lip of the channel above the wheel where they were both forbidden to sit, with his feet hanging over the race and something in his hand. He closed his fist when he heard her.
"What's that?"
"Nothing."
"It's the Genoa coin." She sat down next to him, which was also forbidden. "You always get it out when you're thinking."
Edmund said nothing. He opened his hand. The little worn coin lay in his palm, the castle gate on it rubbed almost smooth.
"What's wrong?" said Alys.
"Nothing's wrong."
"Something's wrong. You don't talk at supper."
"I talk."
"You answer. That's different." She waited. She had learned from their mother that waiting was often more useful than asking again. Edmund did not fill the silence. She tried another road. "I'll give you my turn on the swing on Sunday. And the next one."
He looked at her then, and his face was odd -- almost sorry for her.
"It's not a thing you trade for," he said.
"Everything's a thing you trade for."
"Not this." He closed his hand round the coin again. "The old man said what a thing's worth depends on where you're standing. Do you remember?"
"You told me. About forty times."
"I thought he meant the coin." Edmund was looking down at the race, at the water going under the wheel. "I think he meant everything. I think you can be standing somewhere your whole life and think you can see all of something, and then you move a little, and you find out there was a whole side of it you couldn't see. And everyone else could." He stopped. "That's all. That's all I'm going to say."
"That's not anything."
"I know," said Edmund. He got up, carefully, off the forbidden stone, and went back up the lane without her.
She tried their mother next.
She waited until Victoria was alone at the tally-bench, in the hour after the clerks went home, and came and stood by the bench and said, without preamble, the way Edmund would have: "Something's wrong with Edmund. Since the supper. When he asked where Da was born."
Victoria put down her pen and looked at her daughter for some time. Alys held still under the look. She had learned to.
"Edmund's thinking about something," Victoria said. "He's allowed to."
"What about?"
"That's his."
"Is it about where Da was born?"
There was a pause that was very slightly too long. Alys noticed it the way she noticed the knot on a sack being retied, or the miller's girl's eyes going to the left before she lied.
"Your father comes from a long way away," Victoria said. "He doesn't talk about it. That's his right. Edmund wanted an answer and didn't get one and he's cross about it. That's all there is."
"That's not all there is."
"It's all there is for you," said Victoria, and her voice was not unkind but it was absolutely closed, like a door with someone standing behind it. "Go and find Margery. She's supposed to be at the school and she's gone to Maud's workshop again."
Alys went. She did not go and find Margery. She sat on the bench by the kitchen door -- Wat's bench, with the stone under its leg -- and thought.
Her father, she tried last, and least hopefully.
He was in the garden, after supper, with Hugh, building something out of sticks that kept falling down. She sat on the grass and handed him sticks for a while, which he accepted without comment, and then she said:
"Why won't you tell Edmund where you were born?"
Thomas's hands stopped on the sticks for perhaps a heartbeat. Then they went on.
"Because I don't talk about it."
"Why?"
"Because it was a long time ago and a long way away, and there's nothing there for any of you." He set a stick across two others. Hugh knocked it off, delighted. "Nothing's wrong, love. Edmund's cross. He'll get over it."
"You said nothing's wrong when you lost the black stone."
The garden went quiet.
Her father looked at her then, properly, and she saw it again -- just for a moment, like a shadow going over grass -- the thing she had seen at the mill. Not anger. The other thing. The thing she had not had a word for at five and still did not.
"I did say that," he said slowly. "Didn't I."
"You were frightened then."
"I was."
"Are you frightened now?"
Thomas was silent for a long while. Hugh had found a beetle and was holding it up to show him, and he took it, and admired it, and gave it back. Then he said, "No. Not frightened. Sorry, I think. Edmund wanted something I can't give him. That's a hard thing to have done to someone you love." He looked at her. "And now you want it too. And I can't give it to you either. And I'm sorry for that as well."
"Why can't you?"
"Because I can't," said her father. "That's the whole of the answer, and you're going to hate it, and you're right to."
Alys looked at him. Then she got up off the grass, and brushed her skirt, and said, very politely, "Thank you," the way their mother said it to people at the tally-bench who had not given her what she wanted. And she went inside.
That night, in the bed she shared with Margery, Alys lay awake and did a thing she had never done before.
She took the stub of chalk she kept under the mattress for doing sums, and on the underside of the bed-board, where nobody would ever look, she made two small marks. One for the stone. One for tonight. She did not know yet what they were marks of. She only knew that they were the same kind of thing, and that it was a kind of thing grown-ups had, and that she was going to keep count.
She kept that count for a long time. The marks went on accumulating, slowly, over years, under the bed-board and later in other places, a private tally of the times she had been told nothing was wrong by someone whose face said otherwise. She never showed it to anyone. And when, much later, she was the woman the March sent for when it needed to know what a lord was not saying, she thought sometimes of the underside of that bed, and the first two marks, and the father in the garden with a beetle in his hand who had told her the truth about one thing -- that he could not tell her -- and had let her hate it.