Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First heard it standing up, at the margin, all of it, from the question to the line in the silt, and did not interrupt, because a telling interrupted has a hole in it that never quite closes.

When it was over, Stone-First was quiet for a while.

Here is what Stone-First was thinking, and it was not a small thing.

For as long as there had been tellings, the people had moved stones for each other. That is what a stone is for. A stone is moved so that someone who can hear the ground knows you are coming, and nobody in all the tellings had ever moved a stone for someone who could not hear it, because there had never been anyone like that. And now the smallest of them had gone and moved a stone anyway. Not the people's stone. The stranger's own. The one thing the stranger listened to.

The manners for a stranger in your place are short. Leave it to them until they ask. Stone-First had kept those manners for the whole time the up-people had been below the roof, and had never once been sure they were the right ones, and had kept them anyway, because manners you only keep when you are sure of them are not manners.

A stone moved first is not asking. Stone-First was clear about that. It is the thing before asking. It is the part that makes the asking possible, because you cannot ask for a place from somebody you do not know is there. The youngest had not broken the manners. The youngest had found the one thing the manners had been waiting for, all this time, and done it.

"You held still," said Stone-First, "when it woke."

"Yes."

"Good."

That was all Stone-First said about the humming stone, and the youngest, who had been braced for a great deal more, found that it was enough.

"The other telling," said Stone-First. "The one you brought down the first time. That they cannot hear the ground."

"You said it wasn't mine yet."

"It is now. You did something with it. A thing you have done something with is yours."

Then Stone-First went down into the warm, where the others were, and told it.

Not the youngest. Stone-First. That is how it is done. A telling is yours when someone has heard it, and it is the people's when the one who heard it tells someone who was not there, and Stone-First had heard it, and the others had not, and so Stone-First told them, standing in the amber with the whole body still. The question. The junction. The long passage. The squeeze, and the waking, and the holding still. The marks in the silt, and the line, and the stone set straight upon it.

Stone-First left out the reason. Not because it was wrong. Because a reason is a thing you tell people once they have the telling, and not before, or they hear the reason and not the thing.

The others listened. And afterwards, when they spoke of it among themselves, which they did at once, because it was the best thing to have happened below the roof in longer than anyone's telling went back, none of them said the one who moved the up-people's stone, and none of them said the one who found the line. What they said, over and over, so that it was already worn smooth by the time it reached the far end of the warm, was: the small one who carried it all that way, and it woke, and they held it, and it slept.

The one who carried it sleeping.