The eastern regional Gathering happened in the second month of the forty-fifth year, and the eastern carrier community called it the Spring Meeting, which was the name Renn had suggested and which had been adopted without argument, because Renn had been keeping the spring's company longer than any of them and it seemed right that she should name the event the spring had called into being.Kael went. He had not been to the eastern territories before. In forty-four years of correspondence and expeditions and activated springs and activation letters and Yssel's five years of field work and Sael's book written there, he had not been. He had been the person at the east wall, receiving what came back. He had not been the person who went.He told Mira he was going. She said: "It is about time."He told Tal. Tal said: "Bring a notebook. The substrate there is different from the Greywood substrate in ways the instruments have partially documented but the qualitative record is incomplete."He t

On the third day of the Spring Meeting, Kael ran a session he had not planned to run.The programme had been built by Yssel and the eastern network coordinators and it did not include him as a presenter. He was attending as a visitor, as the person who had built the framework the meeting was held within, which was a different role from the person who ran the sessions. But on the third morning, the session that had been scheduled was a discussion of the integration stages, and the practitioner who had agreed to run it had fallen ill overnight. Yssel came to his tent before dawn."The integration session," she said."Yes," he said. "I will do it."He had not run an integration session in eight years. He had run them constantly in the early years of the Collegium, before the network had enough trained practitioners to handle the work. He had been the person who explained the protocol to the carriers who arrived at Ashenveil not knowing what they were, who sat with them through the stages

On the last day of the Spring Meeting, after the closing session and the shared meal and the conversations that happened in the particular quality of light that the last evening of a gathering had, Kael sat with Renn at the edge of the valley where you could see the western hills and the formation site's glow visible even at this distance."The first Spring Meeting," he said."The first one," Renn said. "There will be others.""Many others.""Yes." She looked at the hills. "I want to ask you something.""Ask.""The supplement," she said. "Lysse's supplement. The hollow is where we are together." She paused. "I have been thinking about this since the activation. Since I came to Ashenveil and you told me about it and I read it. I have been thinking about whether it is complete."He looked at her. "Tell me what you think.""The supplement says the hollow is where we are together. Together means the carriers. The community. The network. We are together in the hollow." She paused. "But at

Sael's second manuscript arrived at the archive in the late summer of the forty-fifth year.It arrived in a package with a letter that said: this is not the coastal book. The coastal book is still being written. This is something else that happened while I was writing the coastal book. I did not plan to write it. It wrote itself. That is the only way I can describe it.Kael opened the package at his desk.The manuscript was titled: We and the Spring. Notes on who is in the hollow together. It was sixty-two pages.He read it in one sitting and then sat with it for a long time without moving.He had written in his notebook, at the edge of the eastern valley on the last night of the Spring Meeting, the note for Sael: the we in the hollow includes the springs. The together is not only human. He had not sent this note to Sael. He had put it in his notebook and brought it home and filed it under: notes for whoever writes the next supplement.Sael had written sixty-two pages about exactly th

Veth came back to Ashenveil in the early autumn of the forty-fifth year, after two and a half years in the far eastern territories.He arrived at the archive gate on a Tuesday morning. Kael was at the east wall and saw him from a distance, the unhurried precise walk that was Veth's characteristic, the preservation kit smaller than when he had left because he had sent most of the documentation ahead through the courier network over the preceding months.Kael walked down from the wall."You are back," he said."I said I would document the eastern formation sites," Veth said. "I documented them." He paused. "I also documented eleven additional sites that were not on any list when I left.""Eleven.""The eastern geological substrates are more complex than the survey data suggested. The tidal amendment Tal and Preth developed, when applied to the eastern range substrates, identified multiple candidate sites that the original survey methodology had missed." He set his kit down at the gate.