Tom

A boy of about ten who climbs a cliff to give Astra a drawing of a fight he did not see.

What he is

Small, in a coat that is too big for him, with a satchel that lists to the left under the weight of what is inside it. He has old ink on his left hand from something unrelated, "the kind that had survived several washes without quite disappearing" (ch. 199).

Illia knows him by name and ruffles his hair, so he was around before he found the cliff. The argument they have is about whether there is paint on the rocks.

ILA: There is not paint on the rocks. TOM: There's a little bit of paint on the rocks. ILA: That's from last Tuesday and it was an accident and I painted over it. TOM: You painted over it with more paint. (ch. 199)

What he carries

A pencil drawing of Astra fighting. He was not there. He made it out of what people said afterwards.

It showed a figure she recognized as herself, the hair, the hands raised, the light coming from the palms in long radiating lines, facing something large and dark that loomed at the paper's edge. (ch. 199)

He offers it with shaking hands and says "You can keep it. If you want. I have others."

Why he matters

He is the mechanism of Astra's recovery, and he does it by accident.

Astra had been thinking around the fight for weeks. Tom's drawing makes her look at it directly, and looking at it directly is what returns her light (ch. 200). His question is the one that names the whole volume:

TOM: Why are you crying? AST: Because someone remembered. (ch. 199)

Then he hugs her, "as far as they would go, which was not very far because he was ten and she was not, but the intention was complete", and afterwards checks her over "with the serious evaluating expression of someone assessing structural damage" (ch. 200).

Not the Tom of Act 11

Act 11 has a TOM in Arthur's childhood, four hundred and seventeen years later (ch. 238). They cannot be the same person without something the text has not offered. The name is recorded here as shared, not as connected.