Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Here is the thought, finished.

Stone-First had kept it for longer than the youngest's whole telling, and had said, more than once, that it was for keeping and not for finishing. That was true. It had also been an excuse, the way a kept thing becomes an excuse if you keep it long enough, and Stone-First had known that too, and had kept it anyway.

Leave it to them until they ask. The whole of the manners for a stranger. Short, because it had never needed to be long. And every word of it assumed one thing so plainly that nobody had ever noticed the assumption was there: that the stranger knew you were there. Of course they did. A stranger is in your place. You have moved a stone. They have heard it. The manners begin after that; they are what you do once the stranger knows. Nobody had ever needed manners for the time before the stranger knew, because there had never been a time before. Not until the up-people.

And now there was a time after, too. Now the stranger knew. Their own stone had told them, at the line where their feet had stopped, and they had come and looked into the dark and gone away, and had not asked, and the manners said leave it to them until they ask, and Went-Round was right that the manners had not been made for a stranger who could not.

But that was not the thought. That was Went-Round's thought, and it went round.

The thought was this. The manners did not say wait for them to ask. They said leave it to them. Leave the place to them. Leave the asking to them. Do not do it for them. And in all this time the Told had been keeping the second half of that and forgetting the first, because they had left the place to the up-people so thoroughly that when the up-people looked into the dark for someone to ask, there had been nobody there.

You cannot ask an empty room.

So it was not a question of asking, and it was not a question of answering. Neither of those was the people's to do. It was a question of the margin, and Stone-First knew about the margin. Keeping the margin means being there. On all the times when nothing happens, so as to be there on the time when something does. And the margin had moved. It was not down in the dark any more, at the place where the deep begins, where nobody could see it and nothing had ever come. It was up at the line, in the open, at the top of the shelving where the up-people's feet had stopped and their stone had stood and their light had reached.

That was where the margin was now. So that was where Stone-First would keep it.