It rained for most of a week in the early spring, and nobody left the house who did not have to, and nothing of any importance happened at all.
Edmund was four and Alys was two, and by the third day the pair of them had developed the particular kind of confined madness that settles on small children kept indoors — too much energy, too few rooms, and an increasingly desperate search for something to climb.
"Where's the tower?" Edmund asked, on the third morning, at the window.
"Up on the ridge. Same as always. You can't see it in this."
"I could see it if I was higher."
Thomas, who was reading, said "no" on general principle and went back to reading, which was a mistake he would identify later as the single moment the week turned.
By the time he looked up again his son had constructed, in the corner by the hearth, a structure of some ambition. The low bench was on the bottom. A stool was on the bench. A second stool, smaller and considerably less stable, was on the first. And Edmund was on top of the whole thing, hands against the wall, craning at the high window.
"I can see it," he announced. "Nearly."
"Get down."
"Nearly—"
Then several things happened at once, in the way they do. Alys, who had been watching the entire construction with the grave attention she brought to everything, decided that anything her brother could do she could do also, and began climbing. The bottom stool shifted. Edmund came down one side of the structure, reasonably gracefully, and Alys came down the other, not gracefully at all, and caught her chin on the edge of the bench on the way.
There was a pause of about a heartbeat. Then she screamed.
Thomas had held dying people. He had sat through a plague, and a siege, and a fortnight in which Joan, two years old, had very nearly not lived. None of it helped him in any way whatsoever. He was across the room with the child in his arms before he had consciously moved, and there was blood, a quite remarkable amount of it, and he heard his own voice saying her name in a register he did not recognise.
Victoria came in from the other room, took one look, and sat down.
"Give her to me."
"She's—"
"She's bitten her lip. Give her to me." Victoria took the screaming child, tilted her face to the light, and pressed a clean cloth to it with an unhurried hand. "Mouths bleed. They bleed dreadfully and it means almost nothing. Cecily told me when Edmund did the same thing at eighteen months and you were at the council."
"Edmund did this?"
"On the stair. You were at the council." She adjusted the cloth. "You'd not have been any use then either."
Alys, having established that she was being attended to by someone competent, reduced the screaming to a steady, indignant wail and then to hiccuping sobs.
Edmund was standing by the wreckage of the tower, white and silent, in the particular stillness of a child who has understood that something is his fault.
Thomas went and crouched beside him.
"It wasn't your fault she climbed."
"I built it."
"You did. And you shouldn't have. And she chose to climb it, and she's going to be fine." Thomas put a hand on his shoulder. "Both of those things are true at once. Do you want to go and say sorry?"
Edmund thought about that, and then went, and stood in front of his mother's chair, and said to his sister, very formally: "I'm sorry I built the tower."
Alys, tear-streaked, lip swelling, considered him.
"Do the lights," she said.
Edmund looked blank for a moment, and then understood, and his face cleared.
He fetched a candle from the table. He held his hand in front of it — close, then away, then close — the way Thomas had shown him on a winter evening months earlier, telling him about the towers on the ridge, and the man who had built them, and the signals they used to send.
"One is a wagon," Edmund told her, very seriously, covering and uncovering the flame. "Two is riders. Three is trouble."
"Do three."
"Three is for real trouble. You can't do three for nothing."
"Do three."
He did three.
Alys was entirely satisfied, and stopped crying altogether, and demanded it again, and Edmund — with the long-suffering air of a person who knows the rules but has decided to be generous — did three again.
Thomas stood in the middle of the room and did not say anything.
Elias had been dead for some years. He had spent a lifetime on those sightlines, walking the ridges, working out the burns with a tin mirror and a broken hinge. And here they were in a wet kitchen, in the hands of a four-year-old, being used to comfort a two-year-old with a cut lip.
"You've gone strange about the candle," Victoria observed, without looking up.
"I have."
"Well, stop it. You'll set them off." She shifted the child on her lap. "And put that tower back together as a bench. If I see those stools stacked again I'll use them for firewood and you can explain it to Cecily."
It rained for two more days. Nobody climbed anything. Alys's lip healed in a week and left, for the rest of her life, a very small pale mark at the edge of her chin that she never remembered getting and her brother never forgot.