Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Here is what the up-person did, in order, because it is the thing the whole season has been about and it is worth getting right.

They were carrying a stone. Stone-First had not seen it in the crack; it had been held to the front, the way you carry a thing you do not want to scrape. A stone of the upper levels, the runners' ground, the size of two hands, held in two. The up-person stood on the silt with the light low and the stone held, and looked at Stone-First for as long as a short telling takes, and Stone-First could see them wanting to go back through the crack with every part of the body that was not the eyes. They did not go.

Then they knelt.

They knelt the way the youngest had said they knelt to the humming stone, and set the stone down on the line. On the silt, a hand from Stone-First's feet, exactly on the line, as if somebody had measured it. It made the sound a stone makes when it is put down on ground, small and plain and complete, and the ground took it, and told Stone-First what the ground tells you, which was that someone was here.

Late. That was the first thing Stone-First thought. The stone was late. The manners say you move it before you are seen, so that nobody is surprised by anybody, and the up-person had come all the way through the crack and stood in the open and been seen, and then moved the stone. Which was exactly what the youngest had done, the very first time, at the bottom of the squeeze, small and late, and Stone-First had noticed and put it aside and said nothing, because a stone moved late is still a stone moved, and a small one who has moved one late has learned the thing that matters.

Theirs. That was the second thing. It was not the people's stone, moved for them, the way the youngest had moved their own humming stone. It was a stone they had chosen and carried and set down themselves. The Told had waited a whole life for somebody else to move a stone, and had not known what it would look like, and this was what it looked like: late, and clumsy, and done kneeling, and theirs.