Calli?  Astar?  Together or alone they might see me as a threat to their authority, but they too stood to lose much more than they could possibly gain.  Erin?  Jess?  Somebody else who somehow felt confident of producing a Leapyearian next year, and wanted me out of the way, or at least compromised, beforehand?

None of these possibilities seemed to make much sense.

As for how it had been done, getting the vial itself would have been easy; it normally resided in the unlocked box on the altar in the meeting hall, which itself was always open.  Getting it into my kit-bag would hardly have been more difficult; I recalled packing the bag in my room and leaving it there while I met with my Grandfather, Allan and Erin again.  Later I went across the courtyard to brother Indra's workshop to see how the inner-tube boat was progressing, and then returned to my room to fetch the bag and leave it outside the meeting hall in the mansion house while we all convened again to pray and sing.

Anybody could have slipped up to my room, or dropped the vial into my bag while it was outside the meeting room; there was no lock on my room door - I don't think there is a functioning lock anywhere in the farmhouse - and we are anyway simply unused to guarding property or caring much about chattels; there is no culture of watchfulness or wariness in our Order that would raise suspicions in the first place.

The last opportunity somebody would have had to put the vial in my bag would have been that morning, as I was getting into the inner-tube boat; who had carried my bag from the farm?  How many people had handled it before it was delivered into my hands?

I recalled that I'd found the zhlonjiz vial at the bottom of my kit-bag, implying that it had been hidden by somebody with plenty of time to place it there rather than having been simply dropped into my bag, but the jar had been tiny and - jiggled and bounced around as I'd walked from the coast into Edinburgh - it would have had plenty of time to work its way down from the top to the bottom of the kit-bag.  I'd opened the bag twice after I'd packed it in my room, I thought, for food and for the vial of river mud, so maybe I would have seen the little vial sitting on top of the other things packed in there, but - again due to its size - maybe not.

I was a very poor investigator, I thought.  I had failed to confront Morag and now I was failing to work out when, how and why somebody had made it look as if I was a common thief.

I shook my head at my own dreadful incompetence, and rose with creaking trousers if not joints to dust myself down, bid farewell to the river and return to whatever it was I had to face at the Community.

I returned to the mansion house at about six; in the office, Allan said that Salvador had eaten early and was having a nap; he'd call me if and when Grandfather wanted to see me.  I went to the farmhouse for the evening meal, eaten in the kitchen with various Brothers and Sisters in an unusual and strained atmosphere which was only relieved by the children being barely less boisterous and loud than normal.  Sister Calli, who was supervising the kitchen that evening, did not speak to me, and made a point of not serving me my food.  Astar was kinder if still as quiet as ever, just coming up to me and standing by me, patting me on the shoulder.  A few of the younger ones tried to ask me questions but were hushed by Calli or Calum.

I went back over to the mansion house.  I told Sister Erin I would be in the library, and sat in there trying to read passages from the previous edition of the Orthography in a restless, unsettled manner until I gave up and just sat, looking round those thousands of books and wondering how many I had read and how many more I still had to read.

I picked up The Prince and read a few of my favourite passages, then I returned to Erin and said I'd be in the meeting room - the mansion house's old ballroom, where the organ was.

I sat there at the old organ, playing it silently save for the click and clack of my fingers on the keys and my feet on the pedals, pulling out stops and sweeping my hands over the keyboard, caressing it and pummelling it, humming and hissing to myself on occasion, but mostly just hearing the music in my head, its flowing, pulsing power and body-shaking reverberations existing only between my ears.  I played until my fingers hurt, and then Sister Jess came to fetch me.

Jess left me in the sitting room of Grandfather's quarters while she checked he was quite ready to see me.  She reappeared from the bedroom, closing the door on the dark space behind. 'He's having another bath,' she said, sounding exasperated. 'He's in a funny mood today.  Do you mind waiting?'

'No,' I said.

Jess smiled. 'He said to break out the drinks; shall we?'

'Why not?' I said, smiling.

Sister Jess opened the drinks cabinet; I declined a whisky, having not long since got rid of my hang-over from the previous night, and settled for a glass of wine.  Sister Jess chose the whisky, well watered.

We settled down on a couple of seat-boarded but otherwise quite plumply luxurious couches and talked for a while.  Sister Jess is a doctor; she is slim and has long black hair she wears in a single long plait.  She is about forty and has been with us for nearly fourteen years.  Her daughter Helen is thirteen and Salvador may or may not be the child's father.

I have always got on fairly well with Jess, though I sometimes wonder to what extent she feels that I usurp some of her powers with my ability to Heal.

I told her of my trip down south; she said that at the time she'd thought I was mad to travel to Edinburgh by inner-tube, but congratulated me on getting there.  She took a dimmer view of interfering with train signalling systems, but let it pass.  There was no embargo I had been told of regarding the things I had found out in England, so, while I did swear her to secrecy until we both knew how widely Salvador wanted such facts to be disseminated, I felt free to tell her about Morag's alter ego, Fusillada.  She blinked rapidly at that point, and almost choked on her whisky.

'You saw one of these videos?' she asked.

'By sheer luck, yes.'

She glanced at the closed door to Salvador's bedroom. 'Hmm; I wonder what he feels about that?'

'I take it Allan's told him all this?'

She leaned over towards me, with another glance at the door. 'I think he overheard quite a bit from outside the office door,' she said quietly.

'Oh,' I said.

'Let's have another drink,' she said. 'About time the lamps were lit, too.'

We lit the lamps and recharged our glasses.

'How is Salvador?' I asked her. 'Has he been keeping all right?'

She laughed quietly. 'Strong as an ox,' she said. 'He's fine.  Been tiring himself out a bit recently and drinking too much whisky, but I think that's just all this revising he's doing.'

'Oh,' I said. 'He's managing all right with that himself?'

'Allan's been helping him; him and Erin, sometimes.'

'Oh.  Well, that's good.'

'It's keeping him busy,' she said, glancing at the door again. 'I think he's getting impatient for the Festival.'

'I suppose everybody is, a bit.'

'Some with better reason than him,' she said quietly, leaning forward and with a conspiratorial grin.  I did my best to reciprocate the expression. 'But, anyway,' she said, sitting back, 'what happened after you were arrested?' She held her hand up over her mouth, giggling.

I regaled her with the rest of my story, settling into the swing of its telling with, by now, practised ease.  Grandma Yolanda was about to make her appearance - and Jess was still laughing at the thought of me being arrested and being televised in the process - when we realised our glasses were empty again.  Jess listened quietly at the bedroom door, then tiptoed away with her finger to her lips and whispered, 'Singing.  Still in the bath,' as she made her way to the drinks cabinet.