The second problem was the crack itself. Rowan had gone down through the crack empty-handed—or rather, empty-mouthed—and the passage had been tight in one direction. Coming up with a three-inch brass key held crosswise in his jaw was an entirely different proposition.
The key's hexagonal head was wider than the narrowest point of the crack, and the crack's widest point was at the top, but reaching the top required passing through the narrow section first. He sat at the base of the crack in the intake channel and looked up at it with the key balanced carefully in his mouth, and for the first time since he had descended, he was genuinely uncertain.
He could try to carry the key at a different angle—shaft vertical, head down—and see if the vertical dimension of the hexagonal head was small enough to clear the narrow section. He measured this with his whiskers. It was close. Uncomfortably close, but possibly close enough.
He gripped the key shaft at the very bottom, so the hexagonal head was uppermost with the shaft hanging below, and tried the lower section of the crack. The head went in. He felt the stone walls close to within a whisker's thickness of the key's flat faces, but nothing caught, and he continued upward.
Halfway up, with his shoulders past the narrow section and the key still moving, his rear paws lost their grip on the wet stone below and he scrambled—three frantic seconds of scrabbling with his hind feet against the channel wall—before his toes caught a ridge in the stone and held. He didn't drop the key. He didn't breathe for a moment either.
Then he pulled himself the remaining distance upward—the stone widening as he approached the floor level, the cold draught from above becoming warmer, the smell of grain and timber replacing the river smell—and he was through. He lay on the mill floor in the late afternoon light with the brass key clenched in his jaw and his entire body shaking with cold and the aftershock of effort.
He lay there for perhaps thirty seconds, letting the warmth of the mill floor seep into his wet fur. Then he opened his jaw and let the key rest on the stone floor in front of him. It was intact. No cracks, no damage to the ring hole, the hexagonal head clean and solid.
Now the other problem: the key was on the mill floor, and the human beings who needed it were in the mill yard, and Rowan had no method of making it known to them that he had retrieved it, short of dragging it across the stone floor in plain view, which would require him to be visible to humans in daylight—something he almost never allowed.
He sat looking at the key for a long moment. Then he heard footsteps on the mill stairs—Eli, coming up from the yard—and made a decision.
He gripped the key shaft in his teeth again, walked to the centre of the mill floor where the afternoon light from the west window fell in a broad pale stripe across the stone, and sat down with the key in plain sight, facing the stairwell door.
Eli came through the door looking at the floor, not watching where he was going, a habit he had when he was thinking hard about something unpleasant. His boot came down four inches from Rowan's nose. He stopped, looked down, and went very still.
The dormouse was sitting in the middle of the floor in broad daylight, holding a brass key in its mouth. Eli stared at him. Rowan set the key down on the stone with a quiet clink, stepped back two paces, sat up on his haunches, and looked at the boy.
For a long time neither of them moved. Then Eli crouched down, very slowly, and picked up the key. He turned it over in his fingers. The hexagonal head. The specific cut. The faint green tinge of Millcreek mineral water on the bow.
'That's the operating key,' he said very quietly, to no one in particular. He looked at the dormouse. The dormouse looked at him. Then Eli stood up, and ran.
Rowan pressed his warm belly flat against the timber beam, feeling every vibration that travelled through the ancient oak structure of the mill. The waterwheel churned steadily below, its rhythm slightly irregular where the iron wedge still pressed against the main gear flange. He calibrated each measurement with the precision that came naturally to a creature who had spent three winters listening to the exact language of this watermill's timbers.