When Ellini came back to the Academy, stiff from a night spent carrying Robin and sleeping upright in a chair, it was to find the whole community in song. 

She could hear it all the way down the gravel drive, spilling out of the open doorway. It made her footsteps slow in puzzlement, but it also dragged her forwards – out of curiosity, or horrified fascination, or just a helpless love of music, no matter how badly it was sung.

She wondered if there had been some kind of an invasion – if carol singers had come unseasonably early and refused to leave – because she had never heard her girls sing like that.

But there was a very melodious backbone to the music. Beneath the sound of voices that were raucous and cracked from underuse, she could discern some very cool, capable piano playing. 

That slowed her footsteps even more. She was dragging her feet like a sullen schoolgirl by the time she reached the door and peered around it.

He always found her. Fate really was trying to tell her something. And she was afraid – so dreadfully afraid – that if she closed her eyes and listened to the music, she would disappear. The skeleton of independence she had salvaged from her stupid, shipwrecked life would be taken away, and she would be married off and settled down and no good to anyone.

But she couldn't be sullen, once she saw her girls. They were standing in the Entrance Hall with their voices raised in song, so passionate, red-cheeked and full-throated. Some of them were whirling each other round, some clapping their hands, some tapping their toes or calling out encouragement to the other dancers. It was as though the fire-mines had never existed. 

Ellini joined the edge of the crowd, smiling and silent. She would never forget herself so far as to sing, no matter how good the music was. But someone grabbed her hand and swept her up in the dance, and she came to rest, dizzy and laughing, beside the piano, where she felt its last chords trembling against her back before the music broke off. 

Elliott got to his feet. They were both too out of breath to speak, and too nervous to have thought of anything to say in any case.

It took a while for the girls to realize that the music had been whisked out from under them, but when they did, they protested just as loudly as they had been singing a moment before – although there was some teasing and whistling, because they all recognized the look on Elliott's face. 

Only Carrie had the decency to say, "Oh, leave him alone. He's been playing his fingers to the bone for you squealing harridans! Let him have a break, I'll take over."

***

He was very patient with her. He let her go upstairs to wash and change, even though he must have been worried she would climb out of the window and flee to another city. The thought did briefly cross her mind. But she was starting to believe that running away from Elliott would only bring her back to Elliott by a shorter route. The man had narrative necessity on his side. She just had to persuade him that she was not the fairytale heroine he thought she was.

They walked in the winter garden, which was at the back of the Academy, just inside the ring of gargoyles. Its shrubberies were full of winter-flowering plants – holly, heather, cyclamen, and winter aconites, looking like bulbous buttercups – anything that would relieve the greys and browns and putrid greens of an Oxfordshire winter.

Elliott had tied Ellini's black velvet choker round his wrist. He fiddled with it occasionally, when he wasn't staring at her. But he was otherwise quite composed.

"I know I said I wouldn't leave," she muttered, when they'd been walking in silence for a while. "I wanted to send you a note to explain, but I didn't want to draw Jack's attention to you. You see, he found us, and was-"

"Oh, I know," said Elliott. "It was all they could talk about for days in Northaven. The returning General and the shameless Sahiba." He gave her an apologetic smile. "And that was one of the nicer things they called you."

Ellini returned the smile, a little warily. She could see something different about him, now that she'd got over her initial terror. He was a little more at ease, a little less reverent with her. Had the girls done this? Or had it been the fact that everyone in Northaven had been calling her a shameless hussy? Perhaps it was liberating for him to realize that not everybody wanted her.

But she was different too, she was well aware of it. The satisfaction that Robin had seen in her even when he'd been half-dead from hypothermia. The pink cheeks and languid movements that came of being perfectly, physically satisfied. The feeling that had made her scars sink back into her skin. Had it worn off? Could he tell? And, if he could tell, would he be bright enough to associate it with Jack, rather than Matthi?

"I'm sorry you've had so much trouble on my account," she said, with an awkward, shrugging gesture. "Travelling up and down the country-"

"You didn't ask me to," he protested. "I think you'd be relieved if I stopped. But I wanted to help you."

Ellini squirmed, once again, in the glare of his terrible directness. "You have helped me. You saved my life, I told you that."

Elliott gave her a swift, eager smile. "Yes, tell me about that again."

"What more is there to say?"

"You don't have to say anything new. Just tell me."

She did as he asked, feeling obscurely that she was doing the same thing for him as she had done for Robin when she'd walked his fingers over the new notches in his flesh. Except Elliott was so eager. He kept interrupting her.

"I knew you were there," he said, when she was describing the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms in a broken, wobbly kind of way. "I knew someone was listening!"

"Perhaps we were both so lonely we invented each other." Ellini crossed her arms over her stomach, anxious to change the subject. That memory was still so dark for her. "You seem to have made quite an impression on the girls," she ventured.

Elliott shrugged, as if to disclaim all responsibility. "They've been without music for a long time."

"That's truer than you know. Even when you get out, it's hard to take pleasure in things, especially when you're thinking about all the girls you knew who didn't get out. I imagine that's what it's like for men after a war. There's so much guilt and so much damage that you have to re-learn everything, even how to enjoy yourself. The girls have been free for a long time, but I don't think they knew how to take pleasure in music before you arrived. It's fitting, because you performed the same service for me."

Elliott's face brightened. He looked as though he'd had his whole life justified – which was a bit silly, because he had played at La Scala, the Opera Garnier, and the Royal Albert Hall, to rapturous applause. Just making such beautiful music ought to have been enough to justify his life, and he was grinning at the news that he'd taught a handful of damaged women to enjoy music again.

She had naturally been too terrified of hurting him to evaluate him as a person, but she thought she liked him now. Which, of course, made her even more terrified of hurting him.

"You're different with them, I think," she said. "Or perhaps you're just different altogether. More at ease..."

"Oh," said Elliott, the smile fading. "Yes, I... Well, you know what I've come to realize, travelling up and down the country, playing music-halls and penny-gaffs? It's not company I dislike, but polite company – which you would hate too if you were an American in England, and everyone called your accent 'delightfully earthy' and your manners 'delightfully rustic', and used everything you said to justify their notion of your country as a boorish outpost on the edge of civilization."

"You should try being half-Indian," said Ellini. "Half-Indian and half-Irish, if you can credit it – two nations that the English have tried so condescendingly to civilize. And yet, the funny thing is, I feel English. Perhaps that's part of my masochism. When the English are arrogant and insensitive – and when are they not? – I wince and hope nobody will think the worse of us."

"I could never think the worse of you."

Ellini sought desperately for a way of diverting that fierce blue gaze from her face. She wouldn't even have minded if it was fixed on her bodice. But he distracted himself without her help. He cleared his throat and said, "Now that you know that, will you go on confiding in me? Will you tell me everything that's happened to you since we last met?"

Ellini's smile froze. She couldn't think of anything that had happened to her except Jack, and the thought of sharing that madness – that wonderful madness – with someone else, especially someone who might be jealous...

"You said it would be a relief to tell someone everything," Elliott insisted.

"Yes. Um-"

But other things had happened to her, hadn't they? She had met the mother of the demon race, she had seen jars of male genitals preserved in formaldehyde. And, as far as Elliott knew, those things had been just as memorable.

So she told him about coming back to Oxford, about getting snowed-in at the Faculty and having to spend the night, about walking with Jack on the rooftops, and seeing him wobble, and realizing how much pain she had caused him by letting him think she was dead.

Here, she skipped forwards to the Academy the next morning – meeting Elsie, hearing about the transformation of her demonic symptom, rescuing Robin from the ice-house. But she didn't know how much he really heard. He seemed to be stuck in that suggestive gap in her narrative. Perhaps it explained something he'd already noticed about her.

It was probably best that he knew. She would have told him explicitly, she just didn't want to hurt him. Or answer any questions about it. 

He was silent for some moments when she reached the end of her tale, as if weighing things up.

"So you've forgiven him, then?"

"Yes and no," said Ellini, without looking at him. "You don't understand what it did to him to think I was dead."

"Does he understand what it did to you, to be stabbed in the chest?"

Ellini gave a helpless smile. "Neither of us can make it right – that's why I said yes and no."

Elliott stopped abruptly and turned to her. "Don't marry him."

"Marry him?" said Ellini, laughing in alarm. "I couldn't-"

"Marry me instead."

She stopped laughing. "Please don't say that."

"Why not?"

Ellini stared at him, half-amazed and half-exhausted. "But you know," she protested. "I've told you everything about myself! You know what my life's been like – you know why I can't-"

"But you're free now," he said, seizing her hand. Ellini stared at it in horror, but didn't tear herself away. "Your girls are safe, your demonic symptom has been turned into something harmless. You don't have to worry that I'd be killed by a rival in a jealous rage, or that Franconia would tear itself apart fighting over you. You could start again."

"Start again?" she echoed, bewildered.

"Certainly. What's to keep you here?"

"But Myrrha-"

"You've done enough. You've taken away her supporters."

"She'll get new ones," said Ellini, shaking her head. "Somebody has to-"

"But why does it have to be you?"

Ellini tried to get a hold of herself. "You don't understand," she said, very gently extracting her hand from his. "These things happened to me, they shaped me, and I'm not going to run away from them anymore. I'm sure you think I'm holding onto the past just to torment myself – I'd have the greatest sympathy with you if you did. But please accept my assurances that I'm not doing that this time. I don't know any clearer way to explain it, so I'll just reiterate what I said before. These things happened to me – they shaped me – and I'm not going to run away from them anymore."

"But you don't belong with people like Jack Cade and Robin Crake! They're murderers-"

"I don't belong with anyone but myself," said Ellini. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. Belonging starts from within. If I run from myself, I'll be an exile everywhere. Dear Mr Blake-"

"Elliott!"

"Elliott. I can't marry anyone. Really. New Hampshire isn't the answer for me; a man isn't the answer for me – and no, not a woman either," she added, catching his eye, and blushing to the roots of her hair. Perhaps she shouldn't have told him everything. "I need to work. I need to feel useful. I need to face what's happened to me. Of course you don't trust me to look after my best interests – who would, after what I've done to myself? But, whether you trust me or not, I have to do this."