Stone-First-Who-Waited (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First went back up to the line, because that is where the margin is and keeping it means being there.

Four stones. The up-people's first, worn smooth. Stone-First's answer. Nobody's, at the edge. The up-people's newest, a hand from Stone-First's feet, where the smallest of them had knelt this working time and stood for a telling. And the rock at the edge of the silt, which had had a hand on it for the length of a telling and was a rock.

Above, when the next working time came, the loud came down, and the light came low into the crack, and the smallest of the up-people came out of it and knelt and set a stone down and stood and stepped back and said the thing that goes up at the end, and waited.

Stone-First bent and put a hand on the rock, and moved it. At once. A good one.

Because the telling was told. You do not tell a telling twice to the same people; you tell them the next one, when there is one, and whether there is one is not a thing you decide on the line. The up-person heard the stone, and waited a hand, and went, the way they went, and Stone-First watched them go and thought that they went now the way a small one goes after being told something: not knowing it yet, carrying it up the long passage into the cold, where it would be understood afterwards, for as many working times as it took. Or never. That also happens to a telling, and it is not the teller's.

Nobody had told them anything. Stone-First had said that first, in the warm, to a youngest, and it had been the truest thing anyone below the roof knew, for longer than the small ones' whole tellings.

It was not true any more, and the line was where it was.