He heard it before he saw it; the sound of wings, fluttering somewhere overhead. He resisted the urge to look up; he was on duty, and had to keep an eye on the room full of mages. He automatically scanned the room, checking where everyone was; the group of older mages standing in a circle and talking quietly at the far end of the room, the tall thin mage in the nearest corner of the room with the cluster of young apprentices – none of them more than waist-high to Ewan – describing the arcane workings of the book cataloguing system to them, his voice a steady monotonous drone. Older apprentices and a handful of younger harrowed mages sat along a long table, quietly studying, occasionally rising to re-shelve a book or consult the catalogue to find where the next volume they needed might be found.

The sound of wings, again, and a small dark form swooped down into his line of sight, gliding for a moment, wings outspread, before flitting up to perch on the top of a nearby bookshelf. It paused there, grooming its wing, its back and wings the same bright blue colour that the apprentices wore, with a white underside and a flash of red-brown on its face and throat. A barn swallow. And for a moment, he wasn't standing motionless in a corner of a large shelf-lined room of a vast tower built of cold stone, but was remembering being a child, watching the swallows flitting in and out of the barn, from their nests tucked high up in the rafters, chasing after insects, and the voice of his mother, calling him to come in for supper.

He drew a deep breath, and the scent of old books and cold stone drove away the remembered scent of sun-warmed hay and dusty barnyard and his mother's baking. For a moment he felt cold and alone, here in the dimly lit stone tower, locked away from the warmth of the sun, the fresh outside breezes.

The swallow suddenly took flight again, circling the library once, its little trills and witt-witt sounds seeming astonishingly loud within the room. The teacher's droning voice stopped, and faces all over the library lifted to watch the circling bird.

"What is that?" one of the children asked, staring at it in wide-mouthed astonishment, tossing his head to flip lank black hair out of pale grey eyes.

"Don't you know anything?" one of the older apprentices slouched at the table nearby answered, a sneer in his voice. A known trouble-maker, that one. He pushed his own long red-blonde hair back from his face. "It's a bird. A swallow."

"I've never seen a bird before," the younger child answered softly, almost apologetically, his eyes never leaving the bird as it flitted around the room, from shelf-top to shelf-top. "Where'd it come from?"

"Outside," the blond answered shortly. "Through a broken window pane probably. Watch, it's trying to find its way out again..."

Even Ewan raised his head for a moment, watching the swallow's flight as it circled up to the top of the room, so far overhead. Abruptly its path swerved, and it flew directly toward the centre window. Ewan held his breath, worried for a moment, and felt his heart lift as the bird dipped, turned, twisted, and slipped out some opening too small to see from this far below, its feathers gleaming bright blue for a moment as it slid back out of the dim interior of the tower into the sunlight outside, and disappeared.

"It escaped," the older boy said, enviously.

Ewan cleared his throat. "Quiet in the library," he reminded them. The library's normal sounds slowly returned, the teacher resuming his talk, the students turning back to their studies, the older mages to their conversation.

Ewan looked at the small black-haired boy, his eyes still glued to the window far overhead, mouth still open in astonishment. And for a moment, he almost felt pity, for the boy who hadn't even known what a bird was.