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they were asking. They wanted him to betray his friends.
    "I cannot," he said.
    "Then, Thomas, you do not yet know the darkness."
    He sat down without being asked. The ceiling cover was restored, and the darkness returned.

Chapter Four
    Emptiness
    Orah worked the loom, trying to focus on her handiwork. Shift and weave. Shift and weave. She marveled how her fingers passed the shuttle back and forth while her feet worked the treadle, weaving the weft through the warp, without engaging her mind.
    While most people in Little Pond were farmers, her family had been weavers for generations. Like everyone else, they kept a vegetable garden and cultivated flowers to adorn their cottage. They raised a few animals for milk and eggs. But the bulk of their time was spent at the loom.
    Local farmers delivered wool or flax to Great Pond, where a community of spinners turned the fibers into spools of yarn. These were sent to families like Orah's, masters of the weaving craft. The weavers kept some cloth for their own needs and distributed the rest to the farmers and spinners, receiving food and yarn in return. Everyone had enough to eat and wear, a balance so sensible Orah couldn't imagine how it would be otherwise.
    Her mother had taught her the craft when she was eight, and since then, she'd been taking her turn at the loom. It had become as natural to her as walking. But now, she wished it took more concentration without leaving her free to think of other things.
    Orah needed no calendar to know festival was near. She could track it by the shadow on the sundial in her family's garden. It was a beautiful piece, with a face of white granite, inlaid black numbers, and a bronze shadow maker. The dial had been carved by her grandfather as a present for her tenth birthday. Her grandmother had died that spring. Making the sundial had been his way to take his mind off his sorrow and force himself to look forward to the granddaughter he doted on.
    It took half a year to finish. First, he traveled two hours to the base of the mountains, then climbed to where the vegetation thinned and the granite began. He needed several trips to locate rock pure enough for the face, weeks to carve it out, and nearly as long to drag it back. He went whenever he could spare time. Overall, he spent the entire summer just to find the materials and bring them home.
    Every night that fall, he'd work on the sundial by candlelight. Orah would stay awake, listening to her grandfather chipping and rubbing at the hard rock until her mother insisted he go to sleep. Finally, in November, he went to Great Pond and had the blacksmith make a bronze shadow maker. When all was ready, he took Orah to a flat spot in the garden and sited the shadow maker to point true north.
    For the weeks leading up to festival and a number of days thereafter, until her birthday, Orah watched as sunset grew earlier and then later, and the shadow longer and then shorter. Her grandfather would supervise while she recorded her findings in a log. For the past six autumns, she'd continued the tradition, writing down the date and position of the shadow, learning to predict the seasons.
    Keeping the log had been harder this year. Her grandfather had died in late winter, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, unable to hold on for her coming of age. As she wrote each entry, she thought of him and wanted to continue for his sake.
    Then Thomas was taken. Despite her best efforts, she could find little about what was happening. No one dared predict the date of his return. She drew a double line in the log the day Thomas left, and now each additional entry emphasized how long he'd been gone. She wanted to toss the log away. Such a trivial tradition in light of her concern. But she kept on to honor her grandfather.
    For the first time, the three friends were separated. When she and Nathaniel were together, they felt the emptiness, but when they were apart, it was worse. So each evening after dinner, despite the