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The bells ring every fifteen minutes. The sound squeezes into her castle room, through the bars, and spreads out again like a unit of light scattering through the two slits to the consternation of physicists. Of course, she could not have known that the interval was fifteen minutes if she did not have a tiny, silent clock of her own. And isn't that the odd thing, to imagine those bells as the arbiters of time, as they were, centuries ago (and would anyone have known it was centuries without some mechanical calendar?). She thinks of monks rising and praying, rising and praying, at all hours in the old sense: matins, vespers, all those hours. When there was no other time but this.

Somewhere behind this all, she thinks she hears a distant, low, mournful note like a foghorn. It is dark, her eyes are shut, and she cannot at all determine its interval or even if she is only imagining it.

But soon it is time to go.