Teasel Sillet kept his counts on the rail. The rail ran the whole length of the Releasing Loft stairs in Crib Tower. When he went up he whispered his numbers to it, and when he came down he whispered them again, so the numbers were somewhere even when he was not. He was twelve, the youngest runner on the Lamp Service, in a striped wool scarf he had never once taken off. One foot was bare all winter, because the other boot was too tight and he would not say so.

That night was ordinary. The great lamps had gone on at the first grey, the tower doors stood open, and the moths were going out in their thousands, soft as rain on paper. Teasel’s job was to count the trays off the small cradle, number three. It turned slowly on its brass arm, and on it sat a hundred moths in their neat rows, folded wings, nine coil-holes in every back, waiting. “On the count of three,” said Nell Ashgrove, and she pulled the lever. She counted wrong. She always counted wrong. One. Two. Four.

The doors went. The sound went out over the water, and Teasel counted the tray, because that was the number of the tray. Then he counted again, because he was Teasel. He got to one hundred, stopped, started at the beginning the way he always did, and got to one hundred again. Then he went past it. “One hundred and one,” he whispered to the rail.

In the corner where the turning arm met the wood, one moth sat with its wings going. But moths do not sit. The instant a moth comes to rest it is finished: its coat dies, and then it is a paperweight, then a firelighter, then a fist of ash. So this one was not sitting. It was turning on the low warm breath off the canal, and its back was shiny where all the others were dull. “Miss Ashgrove. Miss Ashgrove, there’s one more.”

She was fifteen, with a scorched brass guard on her right thumb worn bright at the tip. “The cradle is rated a hundred.” “There’s a hundred and one.” “There’s a hundred.” She counted anyway, thumb guard scratching the brass. “The tray said a hundred, and the tray is right. Left ones happen. We render them. Go home, Teasel.” He did not go home. He rang the loom-bell. Up came Mr Tace, a factor of the Concord, in black kid gloves, the right one cut from a different and browner leather. “Who paid for that?”

“Nobody paid for it. I found a moth.” Mr Tace looked at it without touching it, the way you look at a pigeon. “It’s a hundred off that cradle,” he said. “The line will say a hundred before you came up those stairs and it will say a hundred after. Go home.” “I want to take it out.” Mr Tace laughed once, like a lid coming down. “You are twelve.” “Twelve,” Teasel agreed.

The factor looked at him a while longer. “Take it down to the Assay in the morning and let Mr Reyne tell you it is to Pattern. And take your lamp, boy, because there is nothing out there.”

Miss Ashgrove put the moth into an oiled tin with one hole punched in the lid and pressed it into his hand. “If it stops, you will know,” she said. “Nobody will tell you but you.” So Teasel went down the tower with a tin in one hand and a lamp in the other. Nobody stopped him. Out onto the Sounding Bridge, the plain iron footbridge over the canal where the water goes black. He stopped in the middle of it, because it was the bridge people stopped on, and whispered his number to the rail.

“One hundred and one came out of the cradle. Nine went over. One stayed.” The canal kept the sound a half-second longer than the air did. Then east, over the water and up the bank, into the Rows. The Rows at night were a forest with no leaves. Teasel had seen pictures of what a forest ought to be, green and down and soft everywhere, and had never once joined those two things together. The Pale Hundreds stood out of the mist in hard pale lines, bone-white bark, and nothing to hear but his boots.

He walked until the lamp began to get low, and found a house, small, with a woodshed and a rail and one lamp burning in a window that faced the Row, throwing a warm yellow circle onto the sill. And on the sill, in the circle, the moth went wild. Teasel opened the tin and the hundred and first came out and up, round and round, and went for the light the way a bee goes for a flower, and settled, and lifted, and settled. Then Teasel saw the rest of them.

On the sill, and along the edge of it, and a little way down the wall, there were moths. Grey. Stopped. Wings flat, legs curled, bodies like chalk dust. He counted to thirty, and looked again. They had not fallen off and they had not been eaten. They had flown to the light, come down onto the sill, and stopped. And stopping was the end of them. Everybody in Candleford knew that without ever being told. Teasel put his hand flat on the wood beside them. They were cold already.

Inside the window a man sat doing his evening with the lamp at his elbow. He had put it where the moths could find it, and they had found it all night, out of a sky that had held nine thousand. “One hundred and one came out of the cradle tonight,” Teasel said to the glass. “And here is what happened to them.” He counted twice, the way he did, and got the same number both times. Then he wrote it inside his wrist in pencil. The number was smaller than a hundred.

He took his lamp and went back over the bridge, stopped in the middle, and whispered it to the rail, and the canal held the sound a half-second longer than the air did.

In the morning he carried the tin down six floors to the Comparator Vault, where the walls were black with lampblack and the room was as hot as a summer kitchen. Mr Ansel Reyne was fifty-eight, with a pale crescent burn under his left jaw, and wore his collar buttoned in midsummer to hide it. He was the only man in Candleford who could say whether a moth was right or wrong.

He put the hundred and first into the machine, the size of a bread slicer, with its nine steel pins. It made a noise like a very small bird. Then he set the moth on black cloth and looked at it through a lens. “That is to Pattern,” he said. “Did it fly?” said Teasel.

Mr Reyne put the lens down. “It is still going now, so the coat in it is still alive, so it has not stopped one single time since it was wound. The coat is spun from ash and sap, and the sap is Fennim Sallowe’s. Where did you find it?” “On a windowsill in the Row. With about sixty of the others on it, dead, and the lamp on.” The old man was quiet a moment. “Yes. They go to light. They always have.” “Will somebody come and count them?” “No,” said Mr Reyne. “There is no column for it.”

And that took Teasel the rest of the day to get down into words small enough to carry. There were two numbers. The first was the number the cradle let out: a hundred, written in Ledger Hall in Bridge Nine by Orla Vessey, whose hand had not changed since she was twenty-two. That number was right, and nobody could say a word against it.

The second was the number that got as far as a tree, and nobody wrote that one down anywhere. To find it you had to go out into the cold with a lamp, at the end of a long walk, to a lit window on a Row, and count the grey stopped things on the sill yourself. The one that flew was not the one that was let out. Teasel had counted a great many things in his life. That was the first he had ever had to count twice.

He went up the Crib Tower stairs at the end of the day, because the numbers wanted to be somewhere and the rail was where he put things. “Forty flew,” he said. “Sixty-one did not.” And the rail took it, and kept it, and said nothing back at all, which was exactly what he wanted.