The three sons of the ferry lived at Thornwater, and the water of life lay in the far hills, and the King's daughter at Horncastle had a fever for two years and could not get down to the river. The King had posted a notice. The water of life was a public trust. It could be taken by anyone, free, once a year, on Thursdays, for the asking, provided the asking was done in writing. Nobody had ever done it in writing, because nobody had ever known. Keel said they would go on the Tuesday and be back for the harvest.

Barley said they would go on the Monday and be back before the frost. Dull said nothing, because nobody counts on the youngest when the eldest two are talking.

Dull's part was the hardest, and he had taken it before anybody asked, so nobody noticed. Keel would not lock his two brothers in the tower and keep the key. Barley would not drink the free wine at the toll-house, though the keeper set out a jug for him with his own hands, and that was the last the west road had of them. At the intake of the water there was a stag, and the road to the intake went through him, and the old way through was to kill him and carry the antlers as a token. Dull would not do that either, and he did not say so, and so the three of them walked up the west road together and did not speak again for a week.

The Registry of the Waters stood in a walled yard with a gravel forecourt, a bench, and a door with a slot in it, and the door was locked in the ordinary way, by a key, in an ordinary lock, with a keyhole above the slot for looking through. There was a board beside it. Papers in on Mondays, at the hour, by the slot. Out on Thursdays, at the hour, from the door. Two witnesses required. Bring nothing you have taken by force. Do not knock.

Keel tried the door. Barley tried the door. Dull read the board, which took a very short time, and then sat down on the bench. "Do not knock," said Dull. "It says do not knock." The door opened on Thursday morning by itself, for a man who was there on Thursday morning, and it opened onto a long room, and a long room full of clerks, and a counter with a groove cut in it the shape of a raindrop, and absolutely no rope, no lion, no steps, and no voice saying a riddle. A clerk took Dull's paper and read it twice.

"You are asking for the water of life, for Mistress Elfrida of Horncastle, who is a child of this kingdom, and the request is in your own hand. Your two witnesses are outside. Sign here, please. You may sit down; it is a Tuesday for us as well as for you." Then the clerk said the thing that made Dull understand the whole three days.

"We have had a man here on Sunday twice this season, both times to take the water out of the intake himself, and both times he took it by killing the animal that stands there, which is the easiest way to the channel and the only way not permitted. And we had a man on Wednesday who said in front of us that he had never hurt the stag, and the reason we could put his name in the book is that we could look at him and there was nothing on him." He turned the paper round.

"A claim cannot be taken from a person who has done a thing to get it. It can only be taken from a person who has not. Write your witnesses' names and come back on the Thursday with a vessel we seal."

Keel got in on Monday and out on Thursday with a very bad paper. He had spent Wednesday shutting his two brothers in a tower and being talked out of it, and then walked six miles to find somebody who would stand in front of a clerk and say they had seen him do nothing wrong.

The only man who would say it was a ferryman, and the ferryman said that a man who lets his own brothers stand in a cold tower in a bad week is a man he has seen and will speak to again, and that was the whole of his testimony, and it was not enough. He got water in the end, in a stoppered jar with a strip of lead and a wax, the wax the County's and the strip numbered, and it was not stolen at all, and the water was still warm on the day he got home, which is what warm water does.

Barley's jar was not a jar. It was one of the courtyard jars, the wax was the Registry's, and the name on the strip was the name of the man who had filled it, and he had an interest in what the girl was owed. The Registry's rule on that is written down and has been since the year the Registry was founded, and Barley's claim was a technically excellent piece of work by a man who had not read the small print in the yard.

So Thornwater's two elder sons came home in September, one of them two days ahead of the other, with a jar of water that was still warm, and they were very glad with themselves.

Dull came home on the last Thursday of the month, and the jar was empty, and everybody in the house had decided that the youngest had stolen it and hidden it, and his two brothers were extremely pleased about this, and said so, at some length, over supper. Dull said, "No," and set a folded paper on the table, and then he went out to the yard and did not argue, because the truth had come home before him, and it is the other half of a journey.

Then a rider came from Horncastle. Not an angry rider: a Registry rider, in a blue coat, with a satchel, who wanted the record, and read it out loud in the kitchen to four people and a dog. That is how the two brothers learned what they had done, and specifically that the Registry keeps an address for every claim it fills, and a claim filled is a claim on the house, and a house with a claim against it must account.

Elfrida was better. She had been on her feet a year the year before, and the water had not done it. The physician said so and gave his reasons, and Elfrida's mother repeated them in the doorway like a woman singing. Elfrida was thirteen, and she came out to the yard that evening and walked by herself, as far as the gate and back, holding on to nothing, and her brother had to stand there and be a brother.

The brothers' names are in the Registry's book, under the season's account, and it is not a page and a half of blame. It is a page and a half of dates: a bond of six shillings a week from the winter toll, secured on the bridge, held two years, for wages. The clerk of that page is a young man from the capital who took the job because nobody else would and has not lost a night's sleep over it in his life, because the page says what it says and the page has a rule attached to it.

Dull took the winter contract on the Registry road. Sixteen miles of gravel, two culverts, and a mile of verge that has to be cut twice a year whether it wants it or not, which is the job his brothers thought was beneath them, and which is in his own opinion the best work he has ever done.

The stag is still on the intake, and the Registry feeds it from a store in the wall on a rule made in writing and never varied, and it has had nine calves that anybody knows of, and the two eldest come down to the gate at the same hour. Boys of Thornwater who walk that road on a Sunday will tell you that if you go quietly on the far side of the yard you can see them through the slot in the door.

And in the Registry there is one chair that is not a clerk's chair, and it is by the window, and the man in it is a ferryman's youngest son, and on Thursdays he is the one who goes to the door and opens it, and hands out the sealed vessels to whoever is standing there, and asks them what it is for, and writes down what they say, and then says it back to them to be sure.