A/N: I've been maintaining Christmas spirit for over a year now trying to write this monster. What do I do with my life now? I have completely fudged the timeline, and also probably made up Seekings having a library. God help me.

Tatchester is beautiful in the wintertime. Something about the bleak, cold air – how clear it is, maybe, or how strange and empty it feels – makes the old buildings feel older, giving them weight and their lines an odd sharpness. Even on the busiest days, the clack of heels on the cobblestones seems to echo, and the sky looks very high and far away against the bare black branches of the trees. Susan feels a kind of kinship with all of this. Occasionally, she goes out in one layer less than she really needs, just to feel the bite of the cold and the clear air, watches the puff of her breath. She runs errands for her elderly cousin Catherine and listens to the sound of her own footsteps, a sharp percussive rhythm carrying her along.

The bright glimpse of an early snowdrop sends a thrill of fear through her, a shiver she brushes away with a tiny toss of her head, shifting the scarf wrapped around her neck. She does not anticipate spring.

Today she is in the cathedral, and the organist is practicing. The light through the stained-glass windows is pale and cold. She should be running another errand: she needs to buy bread for Catherine. The dust motes play in the light filtering through the rose window, as the theme of a Bach fugue catches itself and repeats, over and over again. She likes the rose window because it's geometric. Some days all the windows seem lovely to her, but there are days – like today, she never knows why these particular days – when the ones with figures in frighten her, a little. Maybe it's something in the eyes.

She looks up, instinctively, feeling someone approach, and sees a familiar face. A young man is standing by her, wearing the same tweed jacket he almost always does: he isn't handsome, but his face has a pleasant look to it. She has no name to put to it, although she remembers vaguely that he has a rather nice voice.

"Hello," he says, and she was right: his voice is low and light at once, with a warm timbre. "Sorry to approach you out of the blue – I've seen you before, I think at one of those volunteering events the cathedral holds, but I never got your name."

"I've seen you, too, and never got your name either," Susan says, mouth tilting into a smile that she knows from the mirror is gentle, if a little wan. "It's Susan, Susan Pevensie."

"Susan." His eyes crinkle at the corners. "I'm Kay Harker."

A few days later, she's walking a little way away from the market, the sky shifting through strange colours as it grows darker above her and the stall owners begin to pack up their wares. Somewhere far off she thinks she hears the ring of bells. She whirls around, the tail of her scarf flying after her, staring after the flash of bright hair she saw, the bell-bright laughter chiming out. A sound comes up into her throat and chokes there.

An old farmer is making his way slowly home from the market, back towards the station. There is no sign of what she saw, but the afterimage feels burned into her. She closes her eyes quickly, tightly, and swallows down the sound she almost made. There was nothing there, of course. It's only that she still almost expects there to be.

Her basket is growing heavy on her arm. She rearranges it, and quickens her steps as the voices of carol singers drift upwards into the winter air. They're singing an old French carol, slower than the correct tempo. The melody wanders upwards, high and pure, almost too pure to be poignant. The streetlights are beginning to cast golden shadows on the street.

On a grey day when the air is heavy with rain, she meets Kay Harker again, this time in an old bookshop where she's looking for second-hand books. Soon enough the real cold will come, and with it the snow, and she'll need something to read. It's funny, she was never much of a one for reading, before; but this isn't before, this is now, and in the evenings the tick of the clock is loud in the dim light… He's still wearing the same tweed jacket, she realises, as she greets him.

"Susan Pevensie," he says. His voice sounds a little different, although still pleasant, in the closeness of the bookshop. "It's nice to bump into you again." There's that same crinkle at the corners of his eyes. Susan turns a little more to face him, putting her books down. His smile is quiet and easy. "What brings you here?"

"Just picking up some light reading." She tends to go for non-fiction, these days, books on history, or other cultures, or languages. There's a stack of fiction on the bookshelf by her bed that she keeps promising herself she'll read sometime. "How about you?"

His eyes dart away for a moment, and in a flash she realises that he's almost embarrassed. "Maps," he says. Susan peers at the maps in his hand: there are some run-of-the-mill Ordnance Survey ones, but others with strange lettering and a funny way of drawing lines. "I, ah, I'm rather keen on old maps. It's interesting, looking at what used to be there, and how things have changed."

"Putting together a picture of the area across time, as well as space," Susan says, and knows she's hit home when his eyes suddenly turn sharp and bright.

He nods. "These are mostly of the local countryside – the Chester Hills – I don't know if you've ever been walking there? I used to explore them, as a boy. Very wild country, some of the wildest left in England: just ask the Bishop."

Susan has spoken to the Bishop of Tatchester in passing, but they're only acquaintances, if that. It does sound like the sort of thing he'd say. "I haven't been into the hills, no," she replies: "I used to live in London until not that long ago. They did seem wild when I saw them through the train window, if I'm thinking of the right ones."

Another hit. "They surely are," he agrees. "Would you – I still go walking in them often, or I shall, now I've got these –" He holds up the maps in explanation. "Would you like to see some of them, maybe when it's warmer?"

It doesn't take as much energy as usual to lift her head and smile at him. "I'd rather go now, I like the winter." She hasn't been out walking in the countryside for an age, although it's true that being in London made that difficult. It used to be that she had no time, in any case, December the season of ever-larger Christmas parties, but… well. Playing the good guest seems to have lost its charm, lately, let alone playing the good hostess. The idea of tramping around the hills in the dead of winter is an appealing one.

She's surprised him a little, but he recovers quickly. "Then let's go walking together soon," he says, still quietly, but with enthusiasm. "The Chesters are lovely in the winter – all bare, but that just brings out the shape of the land, if you see what I mean. You could believe all sorts of things had happened there."

"And are happening still, perhaps," Susan says, letting her tone approach a whisper. She intends it half as a joke, but it seems to mean more than that. His look turns oddly intent.

"Who knows," he says. They exchange addresses and telephone numbers: he lives at a house called Seekings – Susan recognises the name, though she can't remember quite where it is.

"I'll see you soon – do you ever go to the Sunday service at the cathedral?" he asks, as they part.

Susan shakes her head. "I don't go often. Only at Christmas and Easter." She's been wondering whether or not to go to the Christmas service lately, just as she has been for the past few years. It would feel strange not to, though.

Kay smiles at her. "I only go for the choir," he says conspiratorially, and with that they take their leave.

The curtains are drawn, and Catherine is knitting. Susan isn't sure what, but it's most likely socks. She's meant to be reading, but it all just washes over her without her absorbing anything, so she's given up for the moment. This is a domestic scene: the both of them tucked up in armchairs, the click of Catherine's needles and the heavy tock, tock, tock of the grandfather clock, and the poinsettias on the mantelpiece nestled among branches, and a glimpse of stars through the gap in the curtains.

It should feel warming. Susan opens up the book again, tries to get back into reading about Chinese poetry.

"Interesting book?" Catherine has looked up from her knitting, which is starting to take shape. It is indeed a sock.

Susan makes a noncommittal noise. "I'm not sure yet, I can't seem to get into it," she says.

"Some might say that's an indication that it isn't interesting," Catherine remarks, and Susan's lips curve into a smile, almost unwillingly. Thank God Catherine has a sense of humour. It was her or Harold and Alberta, heaven bless them.

"No, it's just very dense," she says. "Or I'm very dense. At this point it's hard to tell which."

Catherine laughs. "I was thinking of putting on the wireless: there ought to be some carols playing just now, and I like a quiet evening as well as anyone else, but this is a little quiet, even for me."

Susan shrugs. "I don't mind," she says, and she knows the tone is perfect, but Catherine must be able to tell, because she doesn't push it. That's one of the things Susan likes about her.

"I'll go and check on dinner," she says, leaving Susan to her book. The grandfather clock chimes loudly before returning to its usual tock. Susan sinks down in her chair, and sighs.

There it is again, that feeling of distance. She can almost feel it around her like a physical thing, every time she breathes, so heavy. A hopeless distance between an arrow and a target. It's not Catherine, either: it's her, all her.

The gulf without, reflecting the gulf within. Morbid, as well as bad poetry, she thinks, and turns a page in her book. She has all the right words ready on her tongue, and they always come out hollow. Hollow space inside where the sound should be.

She opens the book again. Catherine hums tunelessly in the kitchen.

By the time Catherine returns, the book has switched period: the poems, too, have switched their focus, with less of daily life in them and more of the urgency of wartime. The previous poems were engaging, and at times cryptic, but these are something different. Good wine of the grape: cup of night's brightness, the poet writes, but the pleasure of drinking gives way to a blunt question: From all these frontier wars, how many have returned? The directness is disquieting. Even the landscape poems hit harder. The birds in the mountains at night, the boat on the river in winter, the heady flowers under the stars, the cries of the apes. Susan keeps the book open, balanced carefully on her lap, and finds herself unsettled and yet untouched.

Catherine gets up to check on dinner again. The grandfather clock gives out a loud tock. A new section, now, a poem by a master of whom the author speaks very highly. Susan reads it through once, then again, eyes searching the lines. The man on the mountain, old now and worn out, looking over the valley in the dying light and wondering, wondering; then setting a hand on his sword, a song in his mouth, ready to go back down.

She lifts her head slowly, though it feels too fast. There's something caught in her chest, an awkward shape, all angles: a sound that wants to come out, and can't. It feels as if there's an air lock in her throat. She stares ahead. Distantly, she lifts her hand to her eyes, and finds them dry. Something about that feels like betrayal. How can they still be dry?

She wants to make a sound but the space inside her is hollow.

She breathes out slowly, and snaps the book shut, leaving it in the chair as she goes to join Catherine in the kitchen. The image remains in her head. Something about it, or the phrasing of it – the old man high on the hill, weary of war but his hand still on his sword, as the sun sinks below the valley – is clanging inside her, in the hollow barren space where something should be.

In the kitchen, she switches on the wireless.

She meets up with Kay outside the bookshop where they met before, early in the morning when the air is sharp and the sky shifts through strange colours. Her rucksack is a little heavy, but well-balanced on her back: it won't cause her any trouble. Kay turns up in his car, a rather ancient one with an odd sort of charm to it. Susan, surreptitiously comparing her clothing to his, decides that she did come sensibly dressed after all. He greets her with a delighted grin.

Susan smiles back almost before she wants to, finding herself charmed. It's been a while since anyone looked delighted to see her. One of the downsides of spending most of her time with Catherine, with whom her relationship is simply a comfortable one, no surprises in it.

"Good day for walking," Kay says, as they drive away. "The weather forecast says it'll be cloudy, so not too cold, but there's not much chance of rain or snow. The Chesters are lovely on a clear day, but I'd rather save those for spring, when they won't come with the cold."

Susan rummages in her rucksack, checking the sandwiches she packed are intact, out of habit. "I prefer grey skies, really, for something like this," she says, on a whim, not even knowing if it's true. Does she? "Blue skies are so – final. On a grey day it feels as if anything could happen."

"Yes." The car judders as Kay makes a difficult turn. "Especially on a walk in the Chester Hills." There's that spark in his eyes again. Susan wonders why it seems familiar.

"I wonder what they look like in the snow," she murmurs.

Almost as soon as she's spoken, they pull into a little space by the side of the road and get out, both with legs slightly stiff from the drive. "The Chester Hills in snow," Kay says, heaving his rucksack onto his back, "are very strange indeed. Everything's so quiet, and white… That sounds stupid, everywhere's like that in the snow, but I don't know how to put it… It gets difficult to tell what time you're in."

"As if you might not be in the modern day at all," Susan suggests, following along this thread, "and any moment, a knight of old might come riding by, or a Roman legion, or some Celts painted blue with woad. And the hills would belong to them and their time, and you'd be a stranger."

This time when Kay turns from the hills to look at her, his gaze lingers. "Yes, like that," he says softly. "Or as if these hills are outside time altogether. You can step into the Past, here, because here it isn't Past, and you aren't Present. But it's also… The Chesters are a very secret-keeping sort of landscape. Under the snow, you could believe anything was buried."

Susan looks up at the hills curving around them, a sea of shifting colours, some flecked with yellow gorse, ridges cresting them almost like foam on a wave, caught in an instant of time. What's the name of that mountain range in Scotland? Druim Alban, the Spine of Britain. The bones of the land. Yes, it's easy to believe that this place might have its own secrets, might be outside of time's reach. She thinks she understands what Kay meant when he said this was some of the wildest country left in England.

"Well," Kay says, gesturing, breaking her out of the dream for a moment. "There's our path."

As the sky slowly passes through its cycle of colours, the sun gaining a little more hold as light filters through the clouds, they walk the hills. Susan finds it easy to fall into the rhythm of walking, into the tramp, tramp, tramp of their boots, the steady weight of her rucksack, the changing ground beneath her feet. There are a couple of moments where she almost falls; that breaks the spell, but only for a little while. She clambers over ridges and makes her way carefully down rough slopes, her eyes fixed on the silhouette of Kay ahead. Her breath fills the air around her, a wreath, a cloud.

The hills really are… they're something else, at this time of year. Kay was right, in ways she can't articulate. Something about how bare everything is, the sleeping world beneath their feet. Everything is bared to them. Everything is intimate and spacious all at once. And the colours spreading across them like light on the sea, and the shape, as he said, the shape of the land, rising out of it like the curve of the back, the bone… Bone washed and worn clean by the sea. The grass, grey-green, a dreaming colour. The sense of oneself as a part of the landscape, a figure within the curve of the hills. A flock of birds swarm and churn in the air above them, for a moment, forming and re-forming into shapes with no name, like a soft storm.

They stop for lunch, laying out a picnic on the rug Kay helpfully thought to bring and cheerfully trading sandwiches. Kay expresses admiration for her sandwich-making skills – Susan laughs, then sharply pulls back the urge to press a surprised hand to her mouth. It's… been a while. She used to organise garden parties in the summer, hanging garlands from trees and making sandwich after sandwich with industrial precision, each one just right. It feels strange to be reminded of that time, as if it's another person's life she happened to step into, like stepping into borrowed shoes for a time.

She likes this winter landscape better, just now, at any rate. The cold air and the unadorned rock and grass, the rough-and-ready picnic on Kay's coarse blanket.

They walk on for a while, eventually beginning to circle back as the sky darkens. A cold wind is picking up. Susan lets it shudder through her and almost wants to hold her breath. There's something about this place, at this time. It really does feel as if everything is sleeping, as if they have to move quietly and speak in whispers, or maybe they've already wandered into the dreams of the hills. A strange thought, that. Unlike her. It's not eerie, though, just… quiet. So quiet, even with the sounds of the wind, the few calls of the birds. A bright grey winter's day in the hills. That feeling of holding one's breath, of treading softly, of something, secret, unable to be spoken aloud. The bleakness of the landscape, the total bareness of it. The naked branches of the trees, the bared bones of the land. And through all of this, a constant thread, the rhythm of their feet over the ground like a slow heartbeat.

She's slipping into poetry again. Careless.

She doesn't say anything for a while, in the car. Kay doesn't either. The silence is only a little charged, not enough to be uncomfortable. The sky grows darker still as they judder on the country roads back towards Tatchester in the distance, turning the strange, dark blue-grey of a clouded dusk, a few small stars gradually and hesitantly appearing. They're in the car, heading towards the city, and yet Susan can still almost feel the dreamlike quiet of the hills around them.

"Thank you," she says, at last. "For showing me that. I'm glad I came."

Kay looks at her. His gaze is… thoughtful, maybe a little wondering: Susan thinks she can still feel the silence of the hills in it. Somehow it feels more honest than his smiles, even though his smiles are so hearteningly genuine. "I'm glad, too," he says. "It wouldn't have been the same without you."

Outside the window, the sky is that strange dark, fiery whitish colour that means snow. And snow indeed is falling, blown this way and that, but silently, so that in the library in the dim lamplight the only noise Susan can hear is the crackle of the fire. It's cosy, in here, with Kay. She leaves her position by the window to kneel down and crawl into the fort they've built out of chairs, a table, and cushions and thick hangings: Robber Tea, Kay calls it. He proffers a plate of toast spread thick with honey.

Susan takes it and bites into the toast, savouring the crunch, the warm sweetness. All around the room, even on their fort, there are garlands and sprigs of holly. Kay takes his Christmas decorations seriously. The Christmas tree downstairs is quite a sight, its electric lights blazing out through the room, branches heavy with pine cones and gilt baubles.

It's too warm, too close and bright. She keeps waiting for it to hurt, but instead it doesn't seem to touch her, which is somehow worse. Still, at least there's warmth over the detachment.

Kay holds up the toasting fork triumphantly. "I claim this fort for the fearsome robber band of Pevensie-Harker!" he announces, and it's definitely among the sillier things Susan has ever seen, but there's something compelling about it, something in the exultant line of his arm and – even laughing – the exhilaration on his face.

She raises her mug of tea to him. "Long may they terrorise this land!" she proclaims. It's strange, this make-believe. They're both laughing at each other, and yet, at the same time – the firelight gleams and flickers in Kay's eyes – making it real for each other, too. Setting something alight.

She says as much, and Kay's gaze turns thoughtful, even as his smile remains. "I sometimes think it's something about fire and snow," he says. "Once you're in a cave with fire in it, and snow outside, it takes you back to the oldest part of humanity, when that was all you had against the cold."

"And so you could be anywhere," Susan says, thinking aloud, "and anything could be real. Another time, when we didn't think we knew everything."

"Or perhaps outside of time altogether." Kay takes a gulp of tea. "Maybe when we make-believe, we're not making things up so much as rediscovering them."

A soft thud from the roof: a heap of snow must have slid off it. "Not so much escapism, then," Susan murmurs. "You don't really escape to somewhere else at all. Only to the – the inner world. If you know what I mean."

"The inner world," Kay says pensively. "If it really is inner. I don't know how convinced I am that the inner world stays within the outer."

"Yes, well." Susan puts the plate down. "There's that, too." She restrains a slight urge to shiver. That touches a nerve. Something about the Chesters has brought back images – not quite dreams, not quite memories – only that when her mind starts to wander, she can almost seem to see faint, distant dream-hills, hills she's sure she used to know like the back of her hand… If she stares, distracted, at her surroundings in Tatchester, different buildings superimpose themselves on the familiar spires, more familiar still, unremembered.

Voices change, too, in the marketplace: she hears echoes of birdsong, and of human voices she knows from somewhere, and sometimes a deep rumbling. All echoing over the cobblestones. It's beginning to spook her.

Distracted, she realises Kay has gone to get more bread, and crawls out from their makeshift fort to wander over to one of the bookshelves. A crossword lies abandoned on the table, already finished – she watched him do it in about two minutes. He's strangely good at crosswords, it's as if he's cheating, except he wouldn't.

Even back when she wasn't one for her books, she liked libraries, old and full of what people have left behind. Her eyes flicker over to the window, where the snow is falling quicker still. It's cold and soft outside and she is in here in the warm, surrounded by books and dim light and the holly. She almost thinks she can feel the same quiet she felt the other day, in the hills. Maybe it's the snow, or maybe it's the house. The world is silent as dreams, and here she is with Kay, playing at robber feasts. How far does the inner world stay within the outer?

Her fingers trace old, leather spines, lingering on gold lettering. One in particular catches her eye. The Wood Beyond the World: William Morris, Kelmscott Press, 1894. Ah. This one she knows: she has a copy she found in a second-hand bookshop. It has twining leaves bordering every page, ornate lettering mimicking a medieval scribe, a frontispiece with a graceful lady in streaming fabric in a wood.

It's one of the ones that sit in her stack of unread fiction. She took it up by accident the other day, gave it a try. It was scattered with breath-holding moments – the little ship on the waves, seagulls wheeling above – the golden wood, rich above and underfoot – she had almost been able to picture the moment of hunting on a fresh morning, the clink of harnesses and the dewy air and birdsong in amidst rustling of branches –

She had almost held her breath. Those moments had hurt, and she doesn't know whether the hurt was for presence or absence. Something in her, or something lacking. She gently pushes the book back into place.

She's making a habit of drifting into thought, she realises, when footsteps and the sweep of fabric – why that sound? – draw her attention to the present. She turns to look. A plate of bread is on the window seat and Kay stands by the window, a curtain draped over him like a cloak, head flung back, heroic.

He's trying to play the robber king, the light in his eyes says he's laughing at himself, but still the breath catches in her throat and for a moment she can't move – her eyes are wide, about to spill over – she's caught, frozen – it's something in the arch of his head and the fall of the cloak-curtain, it's stupid – but she can't breathe –

The room is so cold around her and she's still and she can't breathe –

"Susan!" A hand on her shoulder. She flinches, almost jumps back. She's against the bookshelf and half on the floor, how did that happen? Heat gathers behind her eyes, ready to shame her with tears. She squeezes her eyes shut quickly, opens them again, a little moisture escaping. Takes a breath of cold air, then another.

"Susan, are you all right?" Kay helps her up gently. He looks at her with unbearable kindness.

Not with pity, though, at least. "I – I'm so sorry –"

"You've nothing to apologise for," he points out, mildly. "Do you want to sit down?"

She nods, a lump in her throat, and he guides her over to a chair by the desk. It's stupid, this is stupid, but something in the tilt of his head and the look on his face, it was like – it was like –

There aren't words, or if there are, she's too much of a coward to use them. Her heartbeat thunders slowly in her ears, as if underwater. Oh god, that hurt. A sudden hurt and she's like a child, can't bear to touch it, can't stop touching it. Everything feels very far away. Her eyes are wet. Can't speak for fear of what might come out. God. God. It's been years, why is she like this? What's wrong with her?

The light in his eyes, the naked laughter on his face and joy like a blade – the way he stood, so tall with the curtain around him still swinging, blown by the sudden movement – god, it's too like –

Kay is speaking. "Do you want to talk about it?"

She shakes her head. "It's just this bloody time of year – I'm sorry, Kay –"

"Christmas," Kay says, sitting down on the floor by her chair, "is a very dangerous time of year. It takes you right back to the heartland, the landscape of childhood. The oldest bits of you."

Susan smiles wanly at him. He's right, but she wonders if the problem might not be that she can't get back there. Or that some part of her is trying to, wanting to. Fear billows out to fill her, cold as the wind.

The cathedral is large, empty and almost dark, but it's warmer than outside, where the sky spits snow in Susan's face. In the semi-darkness, the stained-glass windows only glow very faintly, with strange sea-colours. Every tiny sound she makes echoes: even when she shook the snow off her coat, coming in, it echoed. She can almost hear the snow falling if she listens hard enough.

Leaning back in the empty pew, Susan lets her eyes roam over the cathedral. The painted, vaulted ceiling, like a great boat upside-down; the stone tracery, clustered and knotted and spiralling; the endless arches, everywhere and everywhere, as if the whole place is entirely a shining structure of arches. Tiny windows, high up, and the great rose window at the other end of the nave, with a Christmas tree under it.

So great and echoing and silent, Susan hardly dares breathe.

Her eyes fix on an animal, one of the wooden ones on the ceiling, and there's something about it that pulls her to keep looking, something on the tip of her tongue. Something she should know… it'll come in a minute.

What is it, what is it…?

Her breath catches in her throat. Was it looking at her before?

She flicks her gaze away to look at the animals in the stone tracery, further down. They, too, have a strangely intent look, as if they were on the point of speaking.

She is trembling, she is very still. She can't tell if this is excitement or fear. This feels close to the bone. Something she's always known without knowing. A feeling that won't go into words when it should be on the tip of her tongue.

The knowledge is home like the lines on her hands, sharp as a knife.

The animals want to speak. They want to speak to you. She doesn't think. A sound, drifting from far off, too faint even to tell if it's music, even to tell if it's real. The animals. The animals. Wood and stone.

The cathedral feels very large, and empty, as if anything could start to happen in it. All that echoing space. For a moment, the space inside Susan almost tries to echo, too.

She picks up her basket and leaves in silence. The snow welcomes her back, and she heads off to bright lights and shopping. She doesn't know what that was. Inside her, something is still ringing, the sound of bells.

This is only Tatchester's third Christmas market: the tradition, stolen from the Continent, is not an old one here. It still manages to give off a sense of timelessness, though. Susan supposes it must be the bustle, the stalls, the smell of roasting chestnuts, all the things that bypass the conscious mind and press buttons in old memory. A busker plays a tin whistle on a street corner as she and Kay walk the stalls, feasting their eyes (almost literally in the case of the stall with the pastries, fresh and hot) on thick winter food, counters selling mulled wine, a stall selling woollen goods…

"The very best caps and mufflers!" the stallholder yells, in a practiced market tone, and Kay's head turns to look, very quickly. Too quickly to be casual. Susan's hand on his arm is a wordless query.

"Sorry," he says, giving her a sheepish kind of smile that hangs comfortably on his face. "Thought I saw someone I knew."

Susan lets it pass, and they walk on. It isn't snowing, but the clouds, heavy, grey-white and unrelenting, threaten it any moment. And the air is snow-cold, bitter and sparkling, so that she walks with limbs chilled and a cloud of breath around her like smoke. It makes for contrasts. All the colours seem brighter, the food hotter, scents more pungent.

(And yet, and yet… Still there's something quiet in the heaviness of the clouds, and Susan hears an echo almost like a strain of music, too quiet for melody, and a laugh like bells. She pulls back her own flinch quickly enough.)

"Who was it you knew?" she asks Kay, as they linger by a stall selling waffles in the Continental style, large and generously dusted with powdered sugar. "If you don't mind me prying." Kay buys them both waffles, and Susan's first bite leaves her with powdered sugar all round her mouth, and even some on her nose.

Kay takes a moment to respond: he hasn't touched his waffle. "Oh… this woman who used to stand by a stall very like that, when I was a boy. She always wore plaid, I remember, I thought of her as the woman in plaid. I haven't thought of her in years." He sounds bemused by this. "A plaid shawl and a bright ring."

The way he says it, the words sound almost like some mystic formula. Susan decides to let it go, for the moment: he still looks a little unsettled.

They wander the stalls for a while longer, Susan supposedly looking for a gift for Catherine, without much thought of buying anything. The promised snow arrives after a while, and Susan is glad she thought to bring her gloves. Kay forgot his, and they stop by the stall with the woollen goods again so that he can get a pair. (That, at least, is why he says they're going there, and it's true his fingers seem about to turn blue.) On the other hand, of the two of them he is the one who remembered an umbrella, so they walk in step beneath it as the sky turns dark. The lights of the market seem brighter than ever this way, and smaller, too.

And strange, and poignant. The snow falls soft and cold on the umbrella – on Susan's face, when she ventures her head out from underneath its folds – and begins to melt on her gloves, glistening in this small island of light.

The air feels so still, despite the bustle. Maybe it's the snow. Susan feels hyper-sensitive, attuned to small noises, to hints of bell-laughter from the crowd and a whirl of bright hair in the corner of her eye. She has to swallow to keep back the lump in her throat, a few times. If Kay notices, he's kind enough not to say anything.

Lucy – lux, lucis: light, of light… The thought is still raw, and Susan does not touch it.

Then all of a sudden there is a sound of jingling, of metal, and hooves on cobblestones, muted a little by the snow – for a moment, Susan flinches, seized by a huge fear that the little echoes hounding her have turned to full-blown hallucinations – but no, it's a historical pageant. First come a large group of pseudo-Celts, bearing torches whose light glints off torcs and shows the bright colours of their clothing, some of the men with their faces painted blue in strange, almost hypnotizing spiral patterns. Next a neat column of Romans in shining helms, shields out, bearing their standard with its eagle flying high and marching in step; they're a far cry from the group that follows, a merry lot in heavily embroidered clothing, some on horses and some afoot, dancing their way along to a tune played on wooden instruments not unlike recorders. There's a fiddler, too, and someone playing a cittern, and a young man with his hands busy on a drum, moving frantically…

Susan laughs, delighted breath puffing out into the air around her, turning towards Kay. She almost feels the urge to run dancing after the musicians.

Take me, take me, some part of her whispers, take me with you outside of Time, where I can be more, and the inner voice creaks with disuse. She shivers.

Kay isn't laughing. Kay is pale, the lines of his face showing taut and tense, and his eyes fever-bright; and it occurs to Susan that when she flinched, seeing them, he did too.

"Are you all right?" she says. Kay doesn't say anything. "Are you all right, Kay?"

Kay opens his mouth as if about to say Yes, and then stops, and looks hard at her.

"I –" he begins, and breaks off as if not knowing what to say.

Susan takes his arm, the one not holding the umbrella, and draws him away from the market. "Let's talk somewhere a bit less crowded, at least," she suggests, and is surprised to find her voice isn't entirely steady, either.

They start the walk back towards Catherine's house – Kay hasn't visited yet (must get him to dinner sometime, she thinks distantly), but his car is parked somewhere along the way in any case. Now that they're out of the market, Susan can't decide whether things feel stranger, or more normal. Strange in a different way. They're out of that bubble-world of bright lights and dark sky and music in the snow, but now it really is just the two of them.

"I – don't really know how to begin," Kay says at last. "There isn't any way to explain it that doesn't sound stupid."

"I can start, if you want," Susan offers quietly, surprised at herself.

Kay nods. His expression is strange, under the streetlights.

"It's memories, isn't it," she says. "They keep coming. And they… disturb you. They – intrude."

He drops his head in another nod, huffs his breath out. Susan can't quite tell, but she thinks that's relief she hears in it.

"They're too present to be past," she goes on. "Something about them is as urgent as if they were happening now. Am I wrong?"

"No," he says, sounding almost breathless, "no, you aren't wrong. Except that – I half don't believe they're even memories. Some of them feel almost like dreams, or like those parts of childhood that you aren't sure if you dreamed or not."

"Yes!" She almost skips ahead, turning on her heel to face him, beginning to smile. "It's happening to me, too! And it feels – like something I should remember, but how can I? When I don't remember it – but I do –"

"That's it, that's it!" Suddenly both her hands are enveloped in his, and he's smiling at her, a proper crinkly-eyed smile (his eyes are still very bright). "It all feels – unfinished, somehow."

"Unfinished or unreal." She almost whispers it. "Kay, I – the other day, I was in the cathedral, and suddenly I felt as if – as if the animals in the tracery were trying to speak to me. And I keep remembering hills and buildings I've never seen before. I keep looking around expecting to see something different. Sometimes – sometimes voices change –" Her grip on his hands becomes tight – "I don't – quite trust my own ears, almost. When that pageant showed up I thought I was imagining it."

"And I thought – ha. I thought I was remembering it." He sounds as scared as she is. His eyes don't leave hers. "Those Celts at the front – I thought, I know them, I know the place where they live and what it is like and the animals they keep there. And the Romans, too: they seemed like people I knew. And the musicians – it was all familiar. Just on the edges of remembrance."

"And the woman in the plaid shawl?" Susan asks.

His smile returns for a moment. "You don't miss a trick. To tell you the truth, I hadn't remembered her until just then, and when I did…" They've both dropped to urgent whispers, she realises. "She was important. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember how, or why."

"Do you know if she's still alive?" She looks down, realising the question is a risk, saying too much.

"I don't know," he says. "I can't think of a reason why she shouldn't be… I can't really imagine her dying, somehow." When Susan looks up, he meets her eyes directly. "Why do you ask?"

She bites the inside of her cheek and looks away, again, for a moment. "No reason," she replies softly. Then she thinks better of that – "No, there is a reason. I just…"

He's still holding her hands. Susan breathes out and is relieved to find there's nothing shuddery about her exhaling, as yet. "I just. Wondered if you saw the dead, too."

"You see them?" Kay's voice is soft, like it was in the library, that time – "You've – looked sad today, sometimes."

"Yes," Susan says. Her throat feels tight. "I'll tell you about it sometime. But not today, if you don't mind."

Kay just nods, and they walk on to where his car is parked. Susan's chest feels wide and open, and she can't tell if it's eerie, empty, or somehow freer than before.

The kitchen is warm, and smells of cinnamon. Susan's mother's kitchen used to smell like this, the further it got through December, and the smell would spread all through the house and you almost wouldn't realise it was a smell, it was just Christmas. When it was dark outside and the air was sharp with cold.

She's helping Catherine with the Christmas baking – Catherine churns out cakes and biscuits every year around this time as best she can, some for the two of them, some for the cathedral to distribute elsewhere. Elsewhere the house smells of pine where Catherine has brought in pine branches for decoration. Catherine doesn't take Christmas quite as seriously as Kay does, but she's very determined about it, especially since the war.

"Shall you need me for anything tomorrow, do you think?" she asks.

Catherine turns from where she's stirring something vigorously, sleeves rolled up. "I shouldn't think so. Why, do you have plans?"

"I thought I might go over to Seekings again, that's all." She's been going over – quite often, she realises, now that she thinks about it. But it's pleasant, sitting in the library with Kay, each with their respective books. Well, her with a book – one of his ancestors, a ship's captain, left behind a memoir she's been working through – him with his maps. He's been spreading them out over the tables, sketching roughly on enormous sheets of paper, trying to work out how the area has changed over time. Kay has a mind that sees patterns.

In the last section of the memoir she read, there was a mention of Walsingham's code, and she pestered Kay until they both went to look up the code and try to find out more about it. He seemed as excited as she did when she spoke to him, but when he thought she wasn't looking, there was something strange in his face. Susan notices more when that happens, these days.

She hasn't asked whether it's anything to do with the – the dreams. They haven't talked about that since.

"That's nice," Catherine says cheerfully, and takes up the spoon to stir again. "It's nice to see you getting on so well with that young man."

"Catherine!" There's no mistaking that tone, it's – exactly the tone that her – that used to be taken whenever Susan had a young man around, back when her life was one long social whirl. "It isn't like that."

"Like what?" Why did I choose the relation with the sense of humour, Susan thinks grimly as Catherine's eyes twinkle. I could have had Harold and Alberta. "Goodness, Susan, I may be old but I don't think every interaction a young girl has with a man is an immediate pathway to marriage."

That's not it, Susan thinks, but she doesn't know how to say it. It's not that she thinks Catherine is waiting for it to lead to marriage – not yet, anyway. It's just that Catherine thinks it's leading somewhere, and Susan –

Susan likes where they are, it's not that she's opposed to Kay in that light but there's nothing wrong with how they are now. They're not friends because they're only waiting for the romance to start. It's a different kind of closeness.

It's the quiet in the library, the tea, the toast, the hills. The music under heaven. It's the sound of snow on the umbrella. It's looking at Kay and – and almost seeing, half-knowing, what he is, really is, outside of Time, where they're both more. Knowing that he sees her, too.

She can't say that to Catherine, it would sound silly as well as romantic. But it's – they're not waiting to go somewhere else. They're already there. They have what they need. They just need to start, somehow.

Well. Seekings, tomorrow. There's always time to begin.

Outside, the wind blows through the trees, like a wave breaking over the house – but soft, muted. Everything is quieter with the snow.

The dream-memories keep up, and Susan flinches less at them, lets herself see more of them than she can out of the corner of her eye.

The trees are hundred-armed and black against the sky, they sway and sigh in the consuming wind, and she sways with them. She remembers a winter of whispering trees, naked and quiet, and can't remember what woods she's thinking of. The quietness of winter, the animals under the ragged canopy of branches, snow-laden. Under the trees it was a marvellous thing/ to see the deer running.

She goes to visit the old cloisters, in the part of the cathedral that was an abbey, once, and sees the bare garden alight and green with summer – and in the echoes can almost hear the metal ringing in the meeting of swords, the bright voices at their game of fighting, and the breathless laughs as they tumble into the grass – and other voices, inhuman voices, all around… and the pain rises sharp in her throat, and she has to almost hold her breath, for a moment, to keep silent.

Under the fiery sky she hears music so distant she can barely make out the melody, and bites her lip, face ruddy with cold. She thinks of the sea, sometimes.

It's strange, being like this. Adrift in her own head. It scares her, but she keeps letting it happen.

Kay arrives right on time: Susan is just thinking that she'll need to go and check on the toad-in-the-hole in a moment when she hears the doorbell. She rushes to get the door, lets him shake the snow off himself. The past few days have been winter-bright and clear, sun spreading across the sky in great floods, but tonight the snow is back with a vengeance.

Catherine is – conveniently, she'd said with a wry smile – out at a concert tonight: the Something-or-other Philharmonic are in town, apparently, and not to be missed. Susan felt like a quiet night in, and it was long past time she got Kay here for dinner.

"Sherry?" she asks, sending him into the living room as the smell of sausage and batter wafts out of the kitchen.

He nods, seemingly still getting his breath back after coming in out of the cold wind. "Please," he says at last, pulling off his gloves. "I can't remember the last time I knew it this cold."

"Something hot?" Susan offers. "Mulled wine?" She could use some herself: she's more tired than she thought.

"That sounds wonderful." She shoos him into the living room and leaves him there to make himself at home, while she goes back to the kitchen to check on dinner and heat up the mulled wine.

By the time she comes back, bearing mugs, he looks at ease in the living room, as if he's been there many times before. When she hands him the mug he takes a deep draught, closing his eyes. The lamps are low, but it doesn't matter: Susan lit candles earlier, filling the room with fragmented light.

She put one in the old silver butter-boat Catherine never uses, and now the silver looks burnished, full of little liquid gold hollows. The whole room seems to have more colour in it, this way.

"That's better," he says, as she sits down. "The last time I remember feeling this cold, I was a child, and I had better gloves. Gloves for explorers, my foot: I doubt these and their ilk have ever been anywhere near Antarctica."

"Be glad you're not at the South Pole," Susan advises dryly. "I doubt the penguins have any kind of hot drink."

That startles a laugh out of him. "You might be surprised." He takes another sip and exhales slowly, contentedly. "This is a lovely house – very – complete in itself, if you see what I mean."

"Sort of all of a piece?" Susan hazards. "All one thing, with nothing out of place?"

"Yes, that exactly." His eyes are flicking around the room. "It's not – I don't know what I expected the place you lived in to be like, but this makes perfect sense."

Outside, the wind hurls itself at the windows, sighing, desperate; but the plants on the mantelpiece stay still, unruffled. The food will be ready soon. Susan takes another sip of mulled wine. "What do you mean?" she says.

"Well, that – it's that kind of intuition, isn't it, that makes someone a good dresser," he says, putting his own mug down so that he can gesture as he speaks. "Or a good speaker, or even a diplomat – the art of knowing the right place for the right thing."

"It's Catherine's house," Susan retorts, half-laughing, but only half. When she looks around she can almost see the echo of what he means, in the winter plants clustered on the mantelpiece, the holly at the edges of the curtains, the shining things laid out on the coffee table. All the lamps on dimly, just bright enough to gild the room. The picture of the ship – I saw three ships come sailing in – jewel-bright, which she brought (Harold and Alberta's, once, but it had hung in her siblings' room and they'd parted with it gladly), and chose where to hang.

The art of knowing the right place for the right thing. She'd forgotten that was a gift. She has to look away, quickly, to the gap in the curtains where she can see the snow, falling bright from the black heavens.

After dinner he asks about the family photographs, so she decides to show him. Touching each as she names it, as if her finger holds the name: Peter, Edmund, Lucy… They'll always be photographs, now. They'll always have that look of pictures from a dream, that faded, unreal quality, a moment you can't hold. Hair ruffling in the wind, caught still. Eyes bright with unmoving light.

Kay looks at her whenever he speaks, as if gauging her response.

"He looks as if he's on the cusp of something great," he says, of Peter, a golden photograph of Peter in a still moment between laughter and silence. "A lot of them do, to me, the young men from the war, but… They tend to look desperate. Like they're straining for it, but he just looks at home in himself."

"Balanced," Susan says. "Perfectly balanced."

"That's the word for it."

He looks at Edmund for a long time. Says something about the picture reminds him of Susan. "I suppose it might just be the dark eyes" – he looks to her as if to check it's all right for him to say this, and she nods – "but, I don't know… There were always a few like that at school. They didn't always talk much, but somehow just from looking at them, you knew you could count on them to do the right thing, if the two of you were backed into a corner."

She shows him a photograph of Lucy caught in laughter, from when they were on holiday, by the sea. He says she looks bright and full of movement.

"Like a candle," Susan says, and bites her lip, thinking of the tiny flames in the living room, so easily snuffed out.

"Yes," Kay says. "Like her name. Lucy, from Latin lux, lucis, meaning light."

These days, Susan's walk home is filled with the wind in the trees, a mixture of sighs and rustling, since the streets are lined with bare trees and conifers both. Sometimes she starts to sway and her feet tap on the pavement, until she realises something is bringing snatches of melody to mind. Far away, the sky pours out colour over the clouds like fire, like roses; or some days it turns heavy with cloud, blue and distant, and the cold is wet, and the branches are black, black. But always there's the music.

In the centre of Tatchester, light and shadow play tricks on her: she doesn't realise until she looks up at rooftops and is shocked to find they aren't the forest ceiling.

She comes home and stares at herself in the mirror. Tears gather at her eyelids. She cannot for the life of her say what they mean.

(Not sorrow, not joy: something as big as either, something great and restless, leaking out at the edges.)

It's snowing, the day she meets Caroline Louisa for the first time, in a little teashop in Tatchester, hot buttered muffins on the table and the sky turning deeper and deeper blue outside.

She's heard about his guardian from Kay, of course, although Kay seems to have trouble describing her – of course this woman has been just Caroline Louisa to him, for years, nothing less and nothing more. Who Caroline Louisa appears to be is a woman with dark hair fading silver, of average height, neatly put together. Good-looking, full of presence.

She has this scent Susan can't identify. It's a little like flowers and a little like hearths and warm things and a little like something wild.

"No, I didn't see myself as a housekeeper," she's saying: "not in the way that word's usually taken. It was an odd time when I first came, since I wasn't truly his mother or even his godmother, but he was an odd child. He's always called me his guardian."

"As if he knew you were guarding him?" Susan guesses. Carolina Louisa's gloves are beautiful, the work of craftsmanship. Susan has the sense that she wouldn't want to know what happens when the gloves come off.

Caroline Louisa laughs. "Yes, exactly that. I suppose it's because of how we met…" She does not elaborate. "I kept house, but I guarded the house, as well. I suppose you know what that's like?" She doesn't say why she supposes this, either. "I don't know that house-guardian is the right word, either. In a way, I almost felt I was the house."

"The soul of the house," Susan says. Outside, a flock of birds, swirling in its shape, drops low for a moment before picking up across the sky. They've switched the new Christmas lights on now. It's the oddest feeling, walking through the city after dark and finding it all full of light, full of tangible anticipation.

She sips her tea and takes another bite of muffin. There are small lamps set in the walls here, and something about their little light, against the winter outside, makes the floral wallpaper and the lace tablecloths exciting. Magic, somehow, instead of mundane.

"That," Caroline Louisa says, "is a nice way to put it. Not many people appreciate what it means to run a household, especially when the particular household is under siege." Again she does not specify what she means, but Susan feels she knows, somehow. People always forget that the hearth-fire can burn.

"Oh, we used to have adventures, Kay and I," she goes on, softer now, almost wistful. "Adventures with the midnight folk. He wanted to be a pirate."

"Roaming the high seas?" Susan offers, the hint of a laugh in her voice. If she thinks about it now, actually, she can almost see that impulse in him. Maybe he spends his time poring over old maps, but it's because he has that sixth sense for the stories in them, for the history the land has swallowed, never quite digested, never quite buried.

Except that he seems half-afraid of them, too. It does not look well on him.

"Taking treasure from Spanish galleons and discovering islands," Caroline Louisa says, her tone fond. "But really, I think, at least half for the joy of sailing more than anything else. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and sky; And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…"

"And a something something and a sweet dream when the long trick's over," Susan finishes. For a moment, looking outside at the lights, the way the light turns angular and sharpened – too bright – makes her think of summer sun, almost too bright to bear, pouring out over the sea in silvery glory – and the kick of the waves, and the air so full – the little ship, all colour and the smell of paint on wood, like something from a fairy tale –

Curious. That isn't the ship from the painting at home that she's thinking of.

Splendid, her brain whispers. Something to do with splendour.

Her breath doesn't catch in her throat, but it's a close one.

"I don't think I'm ready for the sweet dream just yet," Caroline Louisa says, taking a sip of tea. "I don't think Kay is either, if he could see it."

"No," Susan says, and wonders if she is herself. If she tilts her head she can see the moon, outside, free of the clouds for a moment: a full moon, so white it's almost incandescent, over clouds that churn. A glowing ship in the sky.

She looks back at Caroline Louisa, and thinks that for all this woman's wool coat and elegant gloves, she would look just as much at home on some great horse, champing at the bit, riding the waves or the wind.

Maybe the horse's reins should have bells. It is the season, after all.

Not all the dream-memories are peaceful. The new Christmas lights blur in Susan's vision and she thinks, for a moment, that fire rages in the sky. Her own mind supplies the crackle and the sparks. Even the sunsets – earlier and earlier these days – bring it to mind, though they split the sky with rose-colours, generous gold, a feigning blush of summer. Her breath catches in her throat every time. She feels a fear and stillness that's somehow familiar – the fear, yes, the terror of fire, but what is she afraid it will destroy? Why does it bring defeat to mind?

She wasn't even in London for the Blitz. And the stillness, that she has no answer for at all. A human feeling, in the face of destruction? Awe, even in the midst of fear? And always, with those two, that other feeling, the one she has no name for, too big for her to hold.

She hears a seagull cry, wheeling overhead, and is suddenly convinced she can smell salt. The thought brings her mingled fear, delight, and – somehow – homesickness. When she looks at herself in the mirror, her eyes are shining, and not just with the tears.

On a very, very cold day, Susan goes over to look something up in the library at Seekings.

Snow is falling. It may not settle: it doesn't need to, since the earlier snow already has, and with a vengeance. It crunches beneath Susan's booted feet. So strange to see the world like this, all white, even when she's seen it this way enough times before. Almost it seems as if everything is under sheets, to be kept safe and out of the way until spring, except that there's something bitter about the cold that doesn't promise safety. The falling snow is very bright, caught in the lights, tonight.

This is wolf-weather, she finds herself thinking, and wonders why she thinks it. Some part of her sees the bare trees and the silent snow, and expects them to come, like golden-eyed shadows, padding over the sleeping earth.

The thought is odd, and it puts her off-balance. She walks faster as if pursued. This snow, will it ever leave?

Kay has left the door unlocked for her, and all the lights are on. Often on days like this when she comes over he's already in the library, so Susan goes straight there after taking off her coat and boots. It's always quiet in this house; yet today it seems stilled, somehow.

The bookshelves are a riot of colour, but muted, the spines faded by age. The curtains have been left open. It's dark outside – Kay must have got lost in a book or something, forgotten to draw them. The lamps are lit. Susan hears something, but it's not footsteps.

It's so surreal in here. As if she's wandered into some scene frozen in time, the only one awake and moving. How can it be so still?

She moves towards the source of the noise, around towards a table in an alcove, and sees a mop of hair and a hand flung out over an open book. He seems to be breathing. Asleep, then – on these days when the sun gives up the ghost mid-afternoon, Susan can't fault him for it. She smiles, goes over to see what the book was.

He twitches violently, and makes a kind of gasping noise of distress.

Susan flinches as if struck – struck by memory, by the sheer familiarity of it, like some terrible echo – before she's moving, reaching out to shake him awake. "Kay! Wake up!" She's half-whispering, but when he won't wake she raises her voice, shakes him harder, sharply. "Wake up!"

She doesn't let go of his shoulders, in between shakes. She isn't sure if that's for her own sake or for his.

When he surfaces, rising out of it, he looks dazed – almost as if he doesn't recognise her. His eyes fill with wetness. It shines gold in the light.

"Kay," she says, brings her voice back down to a whisper, "Kay, what's wrong? What's wrong –" Hands still on his shoulders. There's a chair next to him, she sits down, never letting go of him. All the lights seem dim, and all tilted this way. Outside, snow whirls.

He shakes his head, blinking, still dazed. "It's my fault," he says, voice sleep-heavy, "it's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault –" He doesn't seem to be able to say anything else.

"It's not," bursts out of Susan, soft and fierce, before she has a chance to think, and she brings him into her arms so the water runs down into her shoulder, and all the light is fragmented, all the light is fractals, the whirling light outside and the low light dancing in and out of shadow. The bookshelves almost seem to curve around them, protective, but maybe that's the blurring, the water in her eyes. "It's not your fault, Kay, it's not, it's not your fault, it's not your fault –" He can't stop saying it so she goes on, "it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault –"

And suddenly she realises her voice has risen to almost a shriek, and her nails are digging into his back. And she can hardly see for water in her eyes. She lets out a long, harsh breath.

"It's not your fault," she says, very quietly, uncurling her fingers from his jumper. She sniffs and wipes her eyes. Then she remembers she has a handkerchief in her pocket and pulls it out, handing it to Kay.

"What are you blaming yourself for?" he says, with those too-bright, too-piercing eyes, softened by moisture still.

Susan shakes her head. "No. You tell me first."

"I'm afraid I can't," he says. He's trying for that sheepish smile, but it isn't working: he's still too close to tears.

"Can't or won't?"

Kay takes a long breath, still shaking. "When I say I can't," he says, quite softly, "I mean that it would be illegal."

Which is as good an admission as any, but Susan hasn't just wept to be put off with that. She stands up. "Then don't tell me, let me guess." That's shocked him a little, broken him out of the daze. "It's to do with the war?"

Nod.

"It's to do with what you were doing at that time?"

Nod.

"It's to do with codebreaking."

That brings a flinch, a widening of the eyes. It occurs to Susan that she could make the lamps brighter, but she chooses to stay where she is and keep this dim stillness.

Kay nods.

"You were working as a codebreaker during the war, and you feel guilty about something that happened involving your work."

Nod, slowly.

"Something you did?"

Shrug. Shake of the head.

"Something that you could have prevented, but didn't?"

A pause; a vehement nod; then a shake of the head.

Kay motions for her to sit down again. "Oh, hell," he says, but he's smiling, crinkly-eyed. His eyes are still wet, and his smile is not wide. "You seem to know enough, I might as well tell you the whole. There were a good number of moments when we couldn't prevent something from happening – including – times when we knew what was going to happen but couldn't let the enemy know we knew –" That's as sharp as she's ever known his voice. He wipes his eyes with the handkerchief and hands it back to her.

"And, well, I had this friend – these friends, when I was a boy, the Jones family. Peter and Susan and Jemima and Maria, we're having a Christmas party soon, as a matter of fact I was going to invite you –" He laughs, mirthless, and wipes his eyes again, this time with his sleeve. "Well, they were all involved in the war in various ways, and Peter of course was a soldier, and – he went to war with two whole legs and he came back with one."

When he does not speak again, Susan says, "He was in an attack you knew about?"

Kay shakes his head. "I don't even know when exactly he lost the leg, I haven't asked. But, in my head, you see, that became tangled up with the whole thing. And now whenever I think of it I feel responsible for it somehow – and it comes into my dreams – I feel I should have been able to stop it. If nothing else I shouldn't have been cracking codes to intercept plans we never even did anything with, I should have been with him – somehow –"

He stops talking abruptly, and Susan bites her lip, considering how much that's illegal he's already told her. She goes over to draw the curtains. Even as she does it, it sends a kind of shot of warmth through her. Such a simple act of closing out the dark…

When she sits back down next to Kay, she puts a hand on his shoulder. She doesn't know where her next words come from.

"Listen," she says. "This is not your fault. You are taking on a more than human burden. You cannot hope to take all the evils of war on your shoulders, you cannot even hope to take a friend's choice to go to war on them. Do you understand me?"

Kay raises his head, and the crinkle-eyed smile is gone, but his eyes are shining, wet and shining.

"No man can ever give more than his best," Susan says, and she feels hollow and echoing, and full of light, a strange hollow light like the light that falls in the cathedral. "And even when he does not, I say even when he does not, the cost of that should not be death, or injury. That is one of the evils of war."

Kay doesn't say anything. He exhales, wetly, and closes his eyes for a long moment. Then he opens them again to look her in the face.

"I understand you," he says. "But now tell me what it is you're blaming yourself for."

Oh, she wasn't ready for this. But if I wait until I'm ready, Susan thinks, I'll never speak again. All the old hurt is back again and twice as sharp, and all she can do is swallow around it, curl around it, try to absorb it. Take the edge off. Even her breathing is shakier now. Outside, she can see through a gap in the curtains, snow is still falling. And always will be, she thinks, nonsensically, unless I stop it.

"I told you I saw the dead," she says, and then it's all very simple to say, like a fairy tale. I had father and mother and brothers and a sister, and now I have none. She has to say it in as few words as possible, so the sharp thing in her throat doesn't get out through them. But still they shake.

"You blame yourself for that?" Kay looks as if he doesn't know what to do, and then his hand is in hers. Susan squeezes it and pretends she doesn't see him wince.

She nods and pushes the words out, like something sharp, like the girl in the fairy tale who speaks and jewels fall out of her mouth. "Because you see they all took the same train. Isn't that funny? They weren't even going to the same place." She feels her mouth pull into a smile. The room is starting to turn wet and blurry again. "And somehow for so long, for so long, I've thought it was my fault. As if I could have stopped it, if I'd just – if I'd just taken that train with them. As if it wouldn't have crashed. If I'd been there."

This time it's Kay who squeezes her hand. He doesn't say anything, for a moment, and then at last all he says is, "Do you need me to tell you not to take the sins of British Rail on your shoulders?"

Susan bursts into wet, astonished laughter, and the sharp thing in her chest seems to shatter, into sparkling fragments like jewels, like tears.

The weather grows worse. Susan takes to reading early Welsh englynion in a shabby book picked up from a second-hand shop, passing dangerously close to that neglected pile of fiction on her shelf. Even in translation, there's something about these, the way they build and build, like light on the horizon, or that Vaughan Williams piece that was on the wireless the other night… One she reads complains of the winter weather, saying that a man can hardly stand up outside. Susan sits indoors and gazes out at the snow in the street, the howling sky, inky blue-black, and smiles to herself.

Loud the birds; wet the shore;

bright the sky; broad

the wave; withered the heart because of longing.

That one, now, a stanza from 'Claf Abercuawg' – that one hits at some deep summer heartstring, and Susan brings a hand to her eyes, feeling that great restless thing ready to leak out at their edges. It's sharper now, more piercing. Withered the heart because of longing. What is it she's longing for? Why does she turn, listening for the roar of the foam, the spray, the wave turning clear over the sand? Where is the place where the light mingles with the sea and holds the seabirds in limbo?

What harbour is she looking for?

She does go to Kay's Christmas party with the Jones family, after all, on a quieter day when the sky seems to have wearied of snow for a while. Peter, for all Kay's guilt, seems to be a merry young man, his sister Susan behind his wheelchair. (Another Peter and another Susan – but it hurts only for a moment, something sharp and wet behind the eyes, heavy as song, and then this Susan can laugh and shake hands and eat another mince pie.) Both Susan and Jemima bear scars, one on her hands and the other on her face.

During the war, it becomes apparent, all the Jones siblings were all dispersed – Peter at the front, and Jemima too, serving as a nurse; Susan in London for the Blitz, volunteering for everything she could. No-one says anything about where Maria was. Maria laughs easily, and jokes, frequently about guns. Her eyes are extremely bright, almost feverishly so. In the changing light from Kay's Christmas tree, standing resplendent in his living room, she seems somehow very brittle.

Susan feels a strange liking for her, and recommends her a book on the history of organized crime in London, although Maria, always moving, does not seem like a bluestocking. Maria's answering smile is genuine, if a little grim.

Later that evening, when the sherry's gone round more than once, Jemima is talking about Maria's proficiency with a pistol and then stops, abruptly; and then Kay says, very deliberately, "It's all right, Jemima. Go on."

"Is she safe?" Jemima asks, sounding worried and too old for her years. Maria says nothing at all. The fire spits loudly in the hearth.

"Safe as houses," Kay says, and shoots a smile at Susan. "Safer, probably."

Jemima goes on to say that being handy with a pistol came in useful for Maria when she was in France, and Susan understands, at once, what that brittle quality is. She says nothing, but she looks at Maria when Maria lets out one of her piercing laughs, and Maria looks back at her, and knows what she means by it.

Outside, there are snowdrops coming through. For a moment Susan thinks she sees a deer among the trees. In the closeness of the room she feels as if she's inside a hollow jewel, everything bright, liquid, curving around them. Kay's mulled wine is good. She takes a long sip.

How long has it been since she felt this kind of odd, edged warmth, that comes with being in on a secret? How is it she remembers it?

Susan goes out walking far more often than she used to, these days: sometimes with Kay but sometimes alone, since she knows the hills a little better now, armed with a map and heavy boots. Under the snow everything seems slower. The Chesters are a very secret-keeping sort of landscape. Under the snow, you could believe anything was buried. She knows, now, what Kay means by that. Whenever she reaches a house she feels a sudden relief, as if she's just come out of the deep, somehow; but being adrift in the deep, it's not bad, exactly. It's not anything. It's that big nameless feeling, all over again.

Every now and then she thinks she hears bells. She almost jumps, but out of fear or hope, she can't tell.

In Tatchester she walks the cobbled streets, often in the dark as the days grow shorter yet. The carol-singers are out in force now. In the evenings as she walks home she hears their sound grow distant behind her, and shift, turning pure and inhuman. She looks at the trees and feels half-afraid. The hollow space inside her is singing, singing; but what song?

Her mind seems to have lost the concept of statue and sculpture, at least when it comes to animals. Even a stone dog or a wooden stag looks to her as if it's waiting to move, to leap, to take flight as the wild duck do.

The lights look to her like fire, like battle, like singing stars, and she exhales, slowly.

Tatchester Cathedral is dark, and full of light.

Susan is holding a candle. Next to her, so is Kay. It isn't all that warm in here, so they're both still in their coats, bundled up in scarves and gloves. Under the rose window at the end of the nave the Christmas tree is a beacon. Everyone in here – and it's packed – is holding a candle, and the flames send thousands of tiny lights, tiny shadows, upwards, weaving in and out of each other over the endless arches. The very air is awake. In these thousand shadows, the stone tracery could move, uncoil from its knots, if it chose.

Susan thinks for a moment that all the air around them is held breath, glittering and still, and she could breathe it and be drunk on it.

They can see the choir now, coming round to their area of the cathedral, the boys' voices climbing high, high over their older counterparts. They're walking so slowly, Susan almost feels afraid, anxious for them to speed up. The wait is compressing something in her.

She grasps Kay's hand.

There are lessons, then; the making of the world and the beginning of its unravelling; the long slow sleep of centuries, with only a nameless promise to go on. Susan has long given up asking herself whether she believes the story, and anyway she knows it all too well from childhood. But the words have a fearful weight to them tonight. Susan's eyes flick upwards to the walls where they meet the roof, to the highest windows, very small.

The inner world. If it really is inner. I don't know how convinced I am that the inner world stays within the outer. Fire and snow. People in a house against the dark. Tonight it feels as if just by speaking the words the readers are remaking them. As if the story could change all over again.

She looks at the font and wants water, nonsensically. There are pine boughs in the cathedral tonight, their scent fills the air. And winter flowers. A Christmas rose.

A spotless rose is blowing, the choir sings, sprung from a tender root, and Susan looks at the Christmas rose with its white petals turned fiery by the light and thinks of flowers in winter. Those snowdrops, a fearful thing. Does it hurt them to grow? Does it hurt like she hurts?

How can the air in here be so still? Even wolves would leave off motion and be still, in this place. Something is compressing, in her chest, or expanding: she can't tell. She chances a glance at Kay and sees he is breathing slow and quiet.

It's so dark outside, she could drink it like water. Like the sea. Except that the sea is always light, in her imagination, always that rich drowning silver that the sun turns it, waiting for her. The thing in her chest feels as big as the sea.

Cair Paravel, she thinks, and: the Splendour Hyaline.

She closes her mouth sharply.

She feels as if the baritone and the bass voices are going into her bones. How can the young boys have voices so high? Her own can't reach those notes. So high, high as birds. High and pure and inhuman as birds.

Kay grips her hand tightly. His eyes, Susan realises, are tracking the movement of light and shadow on the walls from the candles.

The air in here is too still, held breath, her lungs will drown in it. Her lungs will catch fire. Her lungs can't take this. Stay still, Susan.

Then the organ comes in, in triumph, and the voices of the boys are leading them all into a tune that feels heavy as time, old enough that Susan doesn't even register it as melody any more: Unto us is born a Son, king of quires supernal: see on earth his life begun, of lords the Lord eternal, of lords the Lord eternal.

She sings, and Kay sings, and both their voices are loud enough they're going to crack if they keep this up much longer.

Breathe, breathe, Susan. This did Herod sore affray, and grievously bewilder… She'll keep him alive as long as he's the only one she's got, as a decoy, the beaver had said; as bait to catch the rest of you with. What was that game they used to play as children? Why did they play a game about evading death?

Of his love and mercy mild, this the Christmas story… Kay's grip on her hand is very tight. Stories. Stories and games. Stories and games that mean more than they should. What story is she living in now? The white petals of the Christmas rose are incandescent, like the moon on a cloudless night.

She sings out her loudest – might lead us up to glory! – and can hear her voice shake, not vibrato but real shaking. Kay's voice isn't much better. Her chest is full of something huge. Her chest is full of song.

The organ comes in like thunder.

O and A and A and O, cum cantibus in choro –

And then she can't stand it: she leaps out of her seat, her candle snuffed out as she runs, and her feet echo over the floor but it can't be heard. She hardly even realises she's running until she's out of the building, all before the choir has even reached Benedicamus Domino!

The stars are very bright out here, their light turning diamond, turning bright and wet as Susan feels her eyes fill with tears. She lets out sharp, sharp sobs, and laughs, and laughs.

Kay is out with her not a minute later, breathing hard from the run. "Are you –" he begins, then cuts himself off.

"The dream-memories," Susan says, and her laughter ceases, but the tears are still there. "Kay, they're too much, I had to get away – it's all stories, don't you see, stories and games, but we've underestimated them all this time –"

"You felt it too? You felt that too?"

"I remembered –" She pulls him along with a gloved hand, out to half-run, half-walk under the streetlights, swaying almost drunkenly. "The stories, Kay, they're real, they're more than real – whenever I remember, it's more than real, it burns me –"

"More real than Time," Kay says, pulling ahead of her only to let her past again, almost dancing on his feet; and his eyes are very bright, whether with joy or fever or tears, who can tell. "More real than Present."

"We had this game we used to play, my siblings and I," Susan says. She spins, turning on her heel. "This game, this land where it was always winter, until we brought spring – but it's here, too, and it won't let me go – I think it's more real than I am. I forgot it for so long and now –"

"So many Christmases ago," Kay seems almost to be half-gasping, "I was a boy, and there was a box, and I had to hide it – and I went small, and I went swift – I thought I made it up, but I couldn't make this up, it's too much, it's too real –"

"Real and bright," Susan says. "Real and bright and intense and important, it sinks into you, it's part of you, it's in the muscle of your heart."

"Yes," he whispers. "And the whole world is full of magic –"

"Yes! Like animals that talk – talking cats, talking mice –"

"I knew a mouse that talked," Kay says, "I remember that, we went roaming through cellars together –"

Susan swings a delighted, terrified circle around a streetlight. "I knew one too! I remember, I remember – he was a mouse but he had more courage in his little finger than a lion has in its whole body – a real knight of a mouse – oh, what was his name, what was his name, it started with R –"

"Robert? Rudyard? Reed?"

"Reepicheep!" She shouts it to the sky. "That was him, that was him!"

Kay presses a hand to his mouth. "I knew animals," he whispers. "I was animals. I was a stag and a duck and a fish – with Herne the Hunter – I rode with him in a chariot unicorns pulled –"

"We had unicorns too," Susan murmurs. "Unicorns and mermaids, and the mermaids sang – in our castle by the sea – oh, God, I miss the sea – and trees that sang, and danced, Dryads, you know –"

"There was a whole world inside a tree," Kay says softly. "Tapestries that moved. Living wood."

"Living wood," Susan says. "Oh God, we hunted the stag in the forest and I remember it – it was such a fresh morning – We ran for our lives in the woods, too, but that was in winter. The trees were silent then."

"Yes." Kay's voice has dropped, it's almost inaudible, but everything echoes to Susan right now. "I almost died in winter. I was trapped underground, and I was small – and we went out on a boat leaping like a salmon – I've never been so scared in my life, but I felt so –"

"Alive." Susan almost thinks she can feel the word, in the puff of breath she can see before her, crystallizing in the air. "Afraid but alive. Afraid and alive."

"Yes." They've slowed down, now, no longer dancing down the street. It occurs to Susan, distantly, that her face is wet, and they're coming near to Kay's car.

"How did we forget?" she whispers.

Kay stops still by the car. "We grew older," he says – not resigned, not condescending, but sounding almost heartbroken. "And it was wartime. I think I forgot fear could be good. I forgot anything good could come out of the winter."

"And you forgot to – to trust," Susan says. "That's the thing, isn't it. Not trusting yourself."

"Yes. Yes." He opens the car door. "What was your thing?"

"Yours was fear," Susan says, softly, "and mine was – I let it slip, for a while, when I wanted friends and let anything my friends didn't like about me fall away, a little – and then the train crash happened, and I buried it. I had to bury it. And then I couldn't feel it any more, the fear, or the gladness, because if I felt those I had to feel the grief too."

She gets in, then, and Kay starts driving. They don't say anything for a while.

"Where to?" Kay asks at last. "Seekings, or your house?"

Susan doesn't even have to think. "Oh, Seekings, Catherine won't be back from visiting her sister-in-law until tomorrow afternoon anyway."

When they get there, Kay brings out the mulled wine and the mince pies, and they curl up on a sofa together, and swap winter stories in the dim glow of the lamps and the fire. Kay tells her about Romans and hills filled with catacombs and the sign of the longwise cross on a ring. Susan tells him about beavers, and crocuses on the last day of winter. He says he's never met a beaver – yet. Susan tells him about Bacchus and the Maenads and he laughs at how those can appear in two worlds at once.

What a strange secret we're sharing, Susan thinks: what a strange, warm secret. Are they the only ones this has ever happened to? Or are there others out there, lost and far from their childhoods, hollow and echoing where there used to be something more? Are there others who know this, without knowing how they know it?

She throws a bit of pastry at Kay and leans her head on his shoulder, and feels properly warm for the first time in years.

A/N: I have so many notes.

- Tatchester Cathedral, to me, looks a bit like various cathedrals - St Albans and Ely and Lincoln - but the cloisters come straight from Lacock Abbey.

- The Chinese poetry I quote is "Song of Liang-chou" by Wang Han, and the translation is J. P. Seaton's from the Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry, which Susan definitely would not have had.

- "Under the trees it was a marvellous thing/ to see the deer running" is from a poem by Peter Levi called "In midwinter a wood was", and whether it existed at the time Susan is reading it depends on when you want to set this.

- Spot the cheeky Masefield quote, anyone?

- Expect the section with the englynion to be padded out with more quotes once I can get my hands on Jenny Rowlands' "Early Welsh Saga Poetry", I plan to add a quote from "Llym awel". The translation of "Claf Abercuawg" is my own.

- I did not anticipate the difficulty of having two Susans.

- In case it's unclear, the service Susan goes to at the end is the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, on Christmas Eve.

- The setting of "A spotless rose" is the Howells one, which I have sung so much these past few weeks that I almost got sick of it, until Tenebrae saved the day.

- I can't believe I started this fic on 1 December 2014.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading!