With an illusory slowness, the vibrant summer gave way to a late autumn, which in turn gave way to a dry and mild winter. The days flowed around me, a river with an implacable course, and if I got used to this new rhythm, I could not find any peace. Dera had left before the cold arrived, far too quickly for my taste. I had gone back to the Basin as much as I could but it had seemed fugitive and insufficient.

By default, my life refocused on Castle-Horn, where I felt too cramped - when I didn't feel like I was losing ground. The rumors and information circulating in the primate's circle evoked our domestic turmoil, but also more distant troubles, and I had come to perceive life at the castle as something special, a strangled refuge that paradoxically placed its inhabitants as close as possible to the unleashing of the world. I couldn't help but take the measure of these waves, because I was beginning to understand how distant waves could break right up to our doorstep and magnify the storm that was already swelling up there.

Thus, during the winter, a series of worrying news came to feed the conversations of legates and lords, adding to the natural effervescence of Horn-Hill. Guild riots had spilled blood at Sand-Port, where supporters of the shipowners' union had attacked merchants of the Consortium of Sarp, suspected of financing the activities of the freebooters of Black-Tower. A complex war had broken out on the other side of the Strait, between Rajja, the concordat of Akiij and the oasis city of Ak'Jale. And, closer to our borders, the primacies of Wadd and Hill bought iron, and strengthened their strongholds of brown-hornian granite. In this context, the Belmo festivals, which took place after the moon of Glas, seemed dull and lifeless.

The Short-Cap calendar, modelled on the one of ancient Sarp, is a luni-solar calendar, and the Belmo announced by the Orospices of Short-Cap every three years is a period of festivities placed outside the calendar. The time lost by the moons, in connection with the revolutions of the sun, is made up for. The Belmo festivities last about fifteen days, and the Brownians spend this time celebrating the coming of the new year. It is customary to hang lanterns from the windows of houses, to prepare dishes for travelers, or orphans, and to welcome all those who do not have the chance to spend the Belmo with their families. Like most brownian holidays, the celebration of Belmo rhymes with alcohol, in generous quantities, energetic dances and bawdy songs.

Caught off guard by this influx of free time, I didn't know what to do with it at all. If it was pleasant not to endure Holen for two whole weeks, the clowning of the histrions and troubadours rang hollow to my ears. I ate my fill of peppered meat on the tables of the great hall, but the celebrations themselves only succeeded in inspiring weariness and indifference, and I soon resumed my solitary habits.

I spent hours and hours reading, whether in my room or around the fireplace in the tower. Reading became so natural to me, that I could hardly remember a time when there wasn't the texture of vellum under my fingers, the alkaline smell of the ink and that farandole of calligraphic miracles to go through. At first Narsilap was concerned about my sudden introversion, but a sincere discussion allowed us to set the record straight. I told him for the first time in detail what I was experiencing at the Lemis estate (I think he had perhaps never really thought about it) and how his scrolls allowed me to forget my dull chores and the quibbles that accompanied them.

From then on, Narsi saw to it that I always had two or three books at my disposal, and even insisted to the intendant - a notorious stingy man - that my room should be provided with an extra candle.

During this year-end period, dreams came and went, their intensity increasing to the point that it sometimes took me a while to adjust when I woke up to make sense of reality. I had the impression that I was living two separate lives. I would spend the day in a body, plowing the alleys of Lemis estate or assisting Narsi in the infirmary, and my hands would be covered with cracks, stains from manure and medicinal dyes.

When night came, I left my envelope, calluses and attrition dissolve in a whirlwind of strangeness in which the concrete world had no hold, and little meaning. A presence outside of everything I could imagine surrounded me with its excessiveness and erected in my mind its fragmented universe. It carried me away, sometimes possessed me, and then left me panting, shaken by the foreign whispers and the undulation of a moving thing that looked as much like shadow as light.

I had finally gotten used to the idea that I was alone in front of the phenomenon, alone and misunderstood, and for that reason I had stopped trying to make sense of it. Maybe I would have reacted differently if the dream had been painful, or fundamentally frightening, or if the recurrence had altered the tranquillity of my sleep. As it was, if my nights were chaotic, my body would still be rested when I woke up, and so the oddity of the dream and the curiosity it generated in me would take precedence over everything else. I was almost certain that a great mystery - and that was an understatement - must be palpitating somewhere under the surface of these dreamlike storms, and so I set myself to endure them, convinced that with practice and familiarity I would one day soon be able to take the true measure of it.

Eventually, the cold slowly faded, driven away by the spring rains, and the river filled with dark silt and the icy runoff of snow. To the north, torrential downpours rained down on the mountains and tore away mounds of earth and broken trunks. When the weather finally subsided and the first buds began to bloom on the other side of the Brown, on the branches of the beech and oak trees that lined the road to Cover-Pass, I could decipher properly most of the brownian works that Narsilap had managed to obtain. Moreover, I was beginning to master the reading of the rajjan sufficiently well that my master allowed himself to leave me some of his simplest treatises, of which I avidly studied even the slightest sketch. At the same time, I had made good progress in writing and Narsi told me that the following autumn he would introduce me to mathematical sciences. However, I liked writing less than reading, I found the process more laborious and above all I could not practice it alone. My master had quickly restricted the use of the wax tablet to our lessons only, because in private my practice quickly degenerated into drawings and doodles.

In the evenings, Bert Sesh often went to the surgeon's quarters, and then Narsilap and the first-blade would quietly talk about Captain Nad's fate. They made less and less effort to keep me out of their discussions, mainly because their suppositions, supported by a few evasive fragments gleaned from old parchments, were worth about as much as mine. Sesh had succeeded in establishing that, during the two moons following his exile, Nad had taken refuge in a smuggler's camp somewhere on the banks of the Shir, the only affluent of the Brown that has its source in the Highlands. An argument then broke the group in half and it seemed that he had gone west with a few trappers. Nad had only resurfaced the following spring, when he crawled to the city gates.

At first, I had suspected that Sesh was conducting the investigation on his own behalf, and given the time he was spending on it, I found it disconcerting, if not out of place. Nad's death had certainly shaken me, but I was also thinking about the assassin and his sinister mission. On three separate occasions, small groups of hooded men, too richly dressed to be unrecognizable to me as upper-class aristocrats, had appeared at the Lemis estate under cover of night. I had watched these comings and goings through the slit stable door, without thinking for a moment that their whispiring could be linked to the commercial activities of sir Lig. I recognized the doing of the assassin and the political plots of the old families and, seeing Sesh busy with everything else, reading archives and botanical treatises, I couldn't help thinking that he would have had better things to do.

It was only when the first-blade Natime began to accompany Sesh, and to go through the same dusty manuscripts, that I understood that, for some reason I did not know, the primacy was taking Captain Nad's fate very seriously. I made it a matter of honor to keep the two men informed of the night meetings of the aristocrats, to repeat to them also the minced verbiage which I managed to grasp in their passage, but neither of them seemed particularly interested in the matter. Sesh smoothed his moustache and nodded in absentia, Natime scratched his thick neck, letting out a few approving squeaks, but without managing to feign any real interest in my reports. Repeatedly discouraged, I made the decision to let them ridicule themselves and concentrated on my readings.

With the return of the clans, which happened gradually, I sometimes left the city, which I hadn't done since the winter. I shared several meals with Frieze and Vaug, who was constantly growing. He was now two heads taller than I was, and his most recent tattoo, on the inside of his forearm, announced his departure from home and the beginning of his first apprenticeship. The two Chaigs seemed delighted to hear from me, and I felt a little stupid not to have visited them sooner. I discovered Vaug - whom I had reluctantly relegated to the role of big brother - in a new light, and I came to appreciate him for his gentle manners and seductive smile, which contrasted with the sometimes severe manners of Frieze. Dera, Rue and Mesh made their appearance at the Basin as the flowers finished falling from the cherry trees of Castle-Horn, which was much earlier than I had hoped. After having misplaced it for more than five moons, I finally found my smile again.

It had been a good season if I believed Rue and the other hunters I passed, and there were many skins for sale and chitin in abundance. Nevertheless, in spite of the manna, a nervousness was saturating the air and the discussions around the fires. The atmosphere became more electric as the groups arrived from their winterings: murky silences and fearful whispers accompanied many of them. The peygens and chacts families who ventured further west than most reported strange events, the disappearance of experienced trappers, the inexplicable behavior of some animals, and the dark silhouettes that haunted the night. Dera seemed to me more worried than usual, more serious too, but after a few visits and the arrival of good weather, this tension that did not belong to her vanished of its own accord. As in the previous year, I devoted each of my days off to her, and it often happened that I spent the night under the family yurt.

In the middle of the Quiet Moon, there was a heat wave like High-Brown had not experienced for decades, and it got worse at the next calend. The summer of 623 was truly scorching, with the arable fields clinging to the surrounding hills paying a heavy price for the drought, while their desperate owners were going back and forth between the plantations and the river to save what could be saved, one bucket at a time. As the crops baked in the burning earth, and even the wells of Horn-Hill threatened to dry up, I sometimes thought of the farm and the widow Ronna, whom I wished had been spared by the heat. On these occasions, and on many others, Brindy and Ucar also occupied my thoughts. I had not seen them for more than a year, but I would sometimes talk with old Nep in the refectory, and he would sometimes talk to me about them. Brindy had become the apprentice of the little weaver on the docks (and I liked to think that my money had something to do with it), Ucar was working as a seasonal worker, and there was a good chance that he would one day become a woodcutter. I often missed them, much more than I wanted to admit, but I think it was easier that way.

I slept badly because of the heat, especially in the Lemis stable that the summer had turned into an oven and where the straw that I had cherished during the winter mingled with the sweat into an urticating misery. The horses had gone to their pastures across the river, and I had little to do. Holen would find small, ungrateful tasks for me to do, holes to dig, stones to move around in the garden in the hottest hours, maintenance and cleaning of empty stalls, weeding of the flower beds. I worked shirtless when I was allowed to and, if the stable master was always pestering me, with the stifling temperature, the blows required too much effort from him. So he was content to spit invectives and thick mucus in my direction, before leaving to get drunk in the shade of his hut.

I was bored to death without the animals that I had made friends with, and my solitude was such that I even became attached to the faded gaze of little Crumby, who sometimes stayed behind when I devoured the leftovers she brought me twice a day. Skinny and sickly pale, she had a red nose and black circles under her eyes that gave the impression that she was constantly on the verge of crying. I whispered sweet words to her in the same way I did with horses, and sometimes she would respond with a gesture or a grimace. Seeing the bruises she sometimes had on her arms, I regretted having envied her position in the kitchen. Her eyes were light green, disturbingly clear, and she could stare at me without blinking for an eternity.

Absorbed as I was by sweat and laminitis, I was barely aware of the passing of the days. On a suffocating evening, in the middle of the Low moon, I was finishing dusting the master surgeon's office when I heard the spiral stairs cracking. Sesh, with his sweaty hair, was climbing the stairs to us, and I gave him a compassionate look as he puffed on the landing. Under their padded armors, the civil guard soldiers were suffering from the heat wave, and we already had many severe cases of dehydration in the infirmary.

Narsilap welcomed Sesh while he tapped me on the shoulder as a greeting. Before joining my master, the first-blade sketched out a tight smile for me. "Today I realized that you've reached the halfway point," he said, taking a breath. My bewildered look forced him to complete his words. "Of the sentence that Bard pronounced." I shook my head at first, certain that it could not be so, and yet, after calculation, I realized that it was true.

A year and a half had passed since the morning when I thought I would lose my hand, and I realized that I hadn't seen time pass.

A little later, after Narsi had dismissed me, I laid down on my bed and, sheltered from the torrid atmosphere by the thick walls of Castle-Horn, I contemplated distractedly the sooty concretions that streaked the ceiling of my room. Next to me, my candle was about to burn out in a tiny sizzle and my fingers were playing in the puddle of hot wax that was accumulating on the greasy wood of the chest. Outside, a southwest wind had begun to blow, warm and quiet, and through the stained horn tiles I could see the full moon shining brightly. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, ready to let myself be swept away by the strange chimera of the dream, as I used to do every evening as a preamble to the immersion. Then I slept, unaware of the upheavals that the tranquility of the night carried in its bosom.