Two men with the knack of making ponds and puddles and, yes, streams and rivers freeze over in winter. Alvin had mentioned that there were such men, one Irish, one from the South. He had spoken as if she already knew who they were, but how would she? If those were their knacks, there hadn’t been much call for freezing rivers during the summer and fall, so they hadn’t made much use of those knacks.

  It was Calvin at the door. He did not seem to want to come in, so he wasn’t here to mooch a free breakfast.

  Get your resentment of Alvin’s nasty little brother under control. For all you know, Margaret, he’s doing his petty, malicious best to be a good brother to Alvin.

  But lately, the last few days, really, Calvin seemed to be making an effort. So maybe Alvin had been right to trust him with a few responsibilities. Though perhaps it was telling that his main responsibility was to Unmake the crystal part of the Crystal City.

  “Miz Margaret,” he said, and his humility and meekness were quite believable, along with a shy kind of pride. “I’ve made sure that the water will all flow south, into the boggy land where nobody lives. So the last part, the main tower, I thought I’d bring it all down at once.”

  Margaret waited for him to tell her why he got her out of bed to hear this news.

  He wants me to watch his triumphant moment. Doesn’t he realize how much those crystal blocks meant to Alvin and me? How devastating their destruction will be?

  “Can we see it from here? Because I don’t want to dress to go out in public this early in the morning.”

  “If you can see the tower from here,” said Calvin, “you can see its fall.”

  “Well then, Calvin, let me see you fulfill the charge your brother left with you.”

  He looked a bit crestfallen, and she realized—he wanted me to watch with him as equals, each of us doing our part. Instead, I reminded him that he was only obeying Alvin, and I would be watching his work, not their work together. I diminished him.

  No I didn’t. I treated him exactly as his stature in this community deserved. I am respecting his power.

  At least he didn’t try to make it a huge public ceremony, though he had hinted a couple of times, should they tell people it was going to happen? And she had refused to make it a grand spectacle for the whole city.

  She stepped out onto the porch. The two of them rested their hands on the railing, and Calvin leaned a bit against the post holding up the porch roof.

  The Crystal tower at that moment caught the first sunlight coming over the horizon. No part of the disk of the sun was visible from the porch, but its light reflected and dazzled at the top of the Crystal tower.

  The place of free and open visions for all comers would come down. She thought of the place in—Exodus? Or one of the later books?—when Moses said, “I wish all my people were prophets.” That’s what Alvin had built out of his own blood and the water of the river. Now coming down.

  “You don’t have to be touching one of the blocks?” asked Margaret.

  “I’ve learned a lot in the last day. I can sense Alvin’s blood in the crystals, because his blood there is still alive. No heartfire—that would still be in his own heart!—but fire nonetheless. Alvin’s blood burns and shimmers wherever it is.”

  “I thought I was the only one who saw that,” said Margaret.

  “But I had to detect it, call to it, bring it out of the crystal.”

  “And put it where?” asked Margaret.

  “Nowhere,” said Calvin. “I will simply hold it, to return to him when he comes back from Carthage. And if he…”

  “And if he never comes back,” said Margaret.

  “Then it will be a kind of—what, a reservoir? A bank? A garden of light inside me, and perhaps I can draw power from it, as long as I use it in a way that he would have approved of.”

  “You’ve thought of many good things,” said Margaret, holding back her grief and, yes, rage that such things could be said so calmly by Alvin’s disloyal brother.

  Beaming, but trying to conceal his pride, Calvin reached out a hand toward the tower.

  The top row of crystal blocks wavered, shimmering, but then disappeared. Margaret imagined that the water they contained was now spilling to the ground around the tower.

  “There’s less water in each block than you might think,” said Calvin. “Otherwise, it couldn’t be carried. Certainly not by one person! So it won’t be quite the deluge that Arthur and I feared.”

  “Arthur and I.” That was Alvin’s phrase to say, because he and Arthur had been bound up in each other’s souls in a way that was much closer and more permanent than brotherhood. It irritated her for Calvin to think of himself and Arthur Stuart as having some kind of bond.

  But they had a kind of bond.

  Don’t be angry at Calvin for having the nature of a thoughtless young man.

  The second level of blocks shimmered and disappeared, but this time the layer under it was already shimmering. It wasn’t immediate, but it was quick, the movement, the melting that progressed down the tower.

  Until the tower was no longer visible above the rooflines across the street.

  “It’s not finished yet, is it,” said Margaret.

  “About halfway. But it’s the same all the way down—you’ve seen all there is to see,” said Calvin.

  The visions in the blocks were gone, so she had seen all there would ever be to see in these seeing stones. All that so-called “crystal balls” showed was a distorted upside-down reflection of all the light sources playing across the orb. Charlatans could pretend to see profound things in the ball, but those things were not there. In Alvin’s crystal blocks, there were real visions, of the true, the possible, the probable, the unchangeable.

  But gone. Everyone who wanted to had seen all that there was to see in Crystal City.

  * * *

  Alvin half expected to be wakened by marauders in the morning—or in the small dark hours before morning. But nothing happened. A few heartfires of sentinels watching, no doubt, to make sure Alvin and his fellow “witches” didn’t get away in the night.

  He was tempted to walk out of the jail, as he so easily could, lock or no lock, and wander among the sentinels, asking them how their vigil was going. Seen anything? “I don’t think they dare stage any kind of jailbreak today,” the sentinels would say—not realizing that the person they were talking to was Alvin Maker himself, proving that no jail could hold him.

  But he had proven that many times before. Why should he vainly flaunt his powers? He had done nothing to earn them—they had always been there waiting for him to learn how to use them. Possibly he was so knackled because he was seventh son of a seventh son, a mundane cause for all the complication in his life.

  Why should I take pride in what came to me without effort or merit on my part? Like pressing my own pants without touching them—it was a trivial way to use the powers he had been given. And yet they needed pressing and cleaning and he could do it. So why shouldn’t he?

  The light in the window let him know that day had broken. His inner clock told him that the days were indeed shortening.

  “Is this Wednesday or Thursday?” asked Marty Laws softly. Alvin opened his eyes enough to see that Marty was standing at the window. He wanted to warn him to come away, he was too easy a target there. But there were no assassins waiting. Maybe the people here would wait for judicial process.

  Alvin cast off his covers and sat up on his bed. I have a better one than this at home, he thought. Why am I not there?

  “Measure went to get breakfast,” said Marty. “And John Binder went with him, in case it was awkward to carry.”

  “And you stayed here to—what, watch over me?” Alvin made his way to the cuspidor and used it, as agreed. He wondered what its capacity was, compared to the bladders of four grown men.

  “I stayed here out of sheer laziness,” said Marty Laws. “I’m a lawyer, not an errand boy.”

  “There’s much to be said for the profession of errand-running,” said Alvin.

  “So you can be the patron saint of deliverymen,” said Marty. “And I will be the patron saint of nap-takers and sleepers-in.”

  Alvin tried to remember all the words of the new song John Binder had sung the night before. A poor wayfaring man of grief hath often … what? Something … on my way, and begged so humbly for my aid. Sued so humbly for relief.

  “Can you remind me of the words of the song John Binder sang for me last night?”

  “I like to think I’m a singer,” said Marty Laws, “but that was a new one to me, and it’s got a few stanzas, and I didn’t get all the words.”

  Alvin repeated the words that he remembered from the opening.

  “Well, that’s a lot better than I could do,” said Marty. “And you don’t have a bad singing voice yourself.”

  “As Margaret says, my singing is always on some pitch, but it’s hard to guess in advance what pitch it’s going to be.”

  “I believe the Latin word for that is ‘pshaw.’ Or is it ‘piffle’?” Marty laughed. “You have a right good voice, always on pitch as well as any man who isn’t paid to sing.”

  “I fear that people would pay most generously for the privilege of not hearing me sing.”

  John and Measure returned then, carrying bags with clinking plates inside. Clinking tin plates. No nice chinaware for them today.

  A guard, this time in the uniform of the Carthage Grays militia regiment—one of six regiments in town—unlocked and then relocked the door. “Trying to keep you safe,” he said as he closed the door. And Alvin saw in his heartfire that he was sincere—he knew his duty and he would do it.

  “The governor sent orders commissioning the Grays to guard the jail and keep anybody from attacking the prison,” said John Binder.

  “It’s nice that we’ll know who it is that betrayed us,” said Measure.

  Alvin looked quizzically at his brother. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “I have always known many things that you don’t know,” said Measure.

  “No bickering, children,” said John Binder. “The plates aren’t much, but the food is hearty and while it won’t measure up to yesterday’s breakfast, it’s enough to keep the meat from falling off our bones.”

  They ate, and talked about various nothings as the whim struck them, though not for a moment did any of them forget the danger they were in.

  “Relax,” said Measure. “Nobody’s going to do anything this morning.”

  “And you know this because…” said Marty Laws.

  “Any assassins were being whipped into a frenzy of blood lust last night,” said Measure. “They know today is their chance, that somebody might move us somewhere else, or some other militia might be assigned this duty, or maybe they’re afraid that an entire Crystal City militia is marching here, armed with knacks and guns to raze Carthage to the ground.”

  “I hope our militia is staying safely invisible in Crystal City,” said Alvin.

  “I imagine they’re patrolling, not in uniform, to withstand or repel any marauders,” said Measure.

  “Because that’s what you ordered them to do,” said Alvin.

  “I have no authority in the city,” said Measure.

  “The great secret is that nobody has authority,” said Alvin. “Or everybody does. It was something we made together.”

  “You made the crystal blocks, Al,” said Measure.

  “Calvin made some, too,” said Alvin.

  “His showed nothing sensible. Not the same as yours. Not at all.”

  “Well, I imagine that by now, Calvin has mastered the secret of breaking the blocks open and releasing their water,” said Alvin. “Maybe there’s no crystal left in Crystal City.”

  “It’ll be sad to get there and not see the tower,” said Marty Laws.

  Alvin said nothing. The towers were among the least of the things he would not see again in Crystal City. Because now more men were arriving in the environs of Carthage Jail, and these were men whose heartfires were burning with desires that did not bode well for Alvin.

  “So the would-be killers,” said Measure, “had to get all het up and likkered up last night. They would have been so drunk that some of them slept out in the open, and this morning nobody felt like early rising.”

  “A few,” said Alvin.

  “Including, probably, a few who never went to bed last night,” said Measure.

  “So they won’t come at us today?” asked Marty Laws.

  “They won’t come at us this morning,” said Measure. “They won’t do it in daylight, anyway. They need to have the disguise of darkness, because not everybody in Carthage is in favor of cold-blooded killings of men who haven’t been convicted of anything, and who are officially under the protection of the governor.”

  “I bet the governor is in on the plot,” said Marty.

  “Do we even know there is a plot?” asked John Binder.

  “Yes,” said Alvin. “There are a few heartfires out there who were there for the harangues last night. A certain Reverend Philadelphia Thrower was at his oratorical best, and Cavil Planter, always a faithful servant of the Unmaker, and half a dozen others who had their own reasons for being terrified of the knackles.”

  “Witches,” said Marty Laws.

  “Murderous sons of Satan,” said John Binder.

  “And Alvin as the chief among the devils of Pandemonium,” said Measure. “That’s what Mother always said, when we were growing up.”

  “About Wastenot and Wantnot,” corrected Alvin. “I was too busy studying to be the perfect son that I didn’t have time for mischief. And they never invited me to take part.”

  After breakfast, Alvin wrote a letter to Margaret, which began normally—his ideas about things they ought to do, changes they ought to make. But soon he was writing about the children—the one they had, the two that were coming, even the one they had lost. Tears bleared his vision once he was writing about the little ones, so his letter went slowly. And he wondered: How will this ever be delivered? Who will be respectful of my last letter to my wife?

  Not necessarily the last, thought Alvin. I don’t know that. I know what they intend, but intending isn’t accomplishing. He still had his knacks, and maybe he could save them all. He figured that when they came to drag him out and kill him, he’d make sure the others let them do it. Then, when he had a chance to assess his would-be killers, he could set to work. Not harming any of them, but disarming and disabling them. Arms out of joint, splitting headaches, stumblings and fallings—he knew how to do these things without causing lasting harm. He’d make it clear that they could not harm him. When would they give up, once that had been demonstrated?

  Then he heard his own voice in his memory, when he told somebody—who?—somebody, anyway, “You know that I can be killed, don’t you?”

  Why had he said that? Because people had too much confidence that he was in no danger.

  So what did he mean when he said that?

  There’s a limit to how many musket balls I can deflect at once. How many weapons I can destroy at once. How many men I can even detect at the same time. If they all shoot at once, and a bullet hits me, I can heal it—but if six more strike me while I’m doing that, then what? Can I heal them all?

  I have to act as soon as they start leading me away from the others, before I can be shot by so many guns at once. That will give me time—

  “Oh,” said Marty. “I suppose I shouldn’t have accepted it, but it’s not as if Mike Fink tolerates arguments from lawyers.” He pulled a single-shot pistol out of his pocket. “It’s loaded and wadded. I figure if Mike Fink was carrying it, then it would be lethal.”

  “Can’t shoot a pistol from the window and hope to hit anything,” said Measure.

  “I don’t expect to fire it at all,” said Marty. “Mike Fink told me to take it, not use it. I’ve never fired a pistol in my life. Never been hunting. Don’t own a firearm of my own. So you don’t have to persuade me how useless this weapon would be in my hands.” Whereupon he handed the pistol, butt-first, to John Binder.

  Binder held it, examining it like some incompetent student’s examination paper.

  “John, I know you’ve gone hunting and brought home your meat,” said Measure.

  “I’m just trying to figure how I can make use of two pistols,” said John Binder.

  Alvin, who had been lying back on his bed, his letter temporarily abandoned, now sat up. “Two?”

  “Seems like Mike Fink figured that if he couldn’t be here himself, he could leave us with some means of self-defense.” John Binder pulled a six-shooter revolver out from under the thin mattress of his cot. He spun the chamber. “Fully loaded, of course.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t pre-aim them for us,” said Marty.

  Measure looked at Alvin, raised his eyebrows.

  “No, I’m not surprised, I’m not mad,” said Alvin. “I’ve got nothing against self-defense, though I don’t know under what circumstances these would be useful compared with muskets and rifles.”

  “I don’t expect they’ll bring artillery,” said Measure, “because they won’t want to have to pay taxes to rebuild the jail.”

  The others chuckled.

  “So, drunk, murderous, and cheap,” said Alvin. “That’s about right.”

  “Can you shoot that thing?” Measure asked John Binder.

  “I don’t think this is a good time for me to try to practice with it. Especially since if I use these as practice bullets, there won’t be any more to replace them.”

  John Binder handed the single-shot revolver back to Marty, but before Marty could get a grip on it, Alvin got the pistol in his hand and studied it. “This should be pretty accurate. The barrel is straight and true, the charge is strong, and the ball will do some damage at close range.” He handed the single-shot to Measure.