Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Here is why not, because people in the warm had begun to ask, and a reason is a thing you give people once they have the telling.

It had not been asked of Stone-First. It had been said to the dark. Stone-First was in the dark; Stone-First was not the dark, and had said so to Went-Round, and had meant it. If a small one, going to sleep, says a thing to the roof, you do not answer for the roof. You would be surprising them. You would be putting yourself in a place you had not been asked into, and there is a word for that, and the word is not answering. It is interrupting. A telling interrupted has a hole in it that never quite closes, and an asking is the beginning of a telling, and Stone-First was not going to be the hole in it.

So Stone-First stood, and heard the dark asked, and kept still, with the whole body, the way the old ones listen, so that nothing Stone-First did while listening became part of it by mistake.

And began, without meaning to, to count.

The Told do not count much. There is nothing below the roof that needs counting; the light does not change and the warm does not run out and the tellings are as long as they are. But a thing that happens every working time is a thing you can wait by, the way you can wait by a telling, and Stone-First found that the askings had a number, and that the number went up, and that Stone-First knew what it was.

It was not a large number yet. Stone-First did not tell anyone what it was. A number is not a telling. But it was the first thing Stone-First had ever counted, in a whole life of keeping the margin, and Stone-First noticed that, and put it aside to think about on a time when nothing happened, which was every time.