Before the Fireflies
I. Before the Fireflies
In Verenestra’s household, the young Benarion was an attendant. He could stand near a conversation without becoming its subject, and he found this a more agreeable position than some would have found a place of honor. He had come from the Fey-held country within Silverymoon’s wider sphere. His father was an administrator in regional affairs, working behind the scenes as the city’s power and influence reached farther into the surrounding lands. His mother was a mage of some talent. She worked alongside Naelthir Osathus in the ancient forges, where moon fire and old Eladrin craft mingled beneath Silverymoon’s Mythal. Both served a city whose growing ambitions rested on much older foundations.
Ben’s gifts were noticed early. Magic came readily to him, and his hand learned the blade almost as readily. He was sent to a school of Bladesinging under Verenestra’s authority. She remained its patron and an occasional presence; other teachers corrected his stance and made him repeat difficult passages. He sometimes mistook quickness for understanding. A movement came easily, so he assumed he knew it. Then a small error in balance betrayed him, and he had to look again. He learned from those corrections. Soon he was watching for the things he had overlooked: the shifting of weight beneath an apparently effortless turn, the relation of a spell to the breath and body that gave it form.
The habit followed him out of the school. He noticed a change of weather over familiar trees, the posture of a visiting dignitary, the slight inclination of a traveller’s hat that made one courtesy different from another. He drew these things, or wrote them down. Sometimes he painted what he had passed a hundred times and only that day seen.
People found him easy company. He listened to their stories and troubles without trying to make a place for himself in every account. He could be trusted. He asked questions, remembered answers, and seldom offered more of his own life than the conversation required. He remained unimportant by choice. Before he spoke, he usually asked himself: Who am I in contact with?
It kept him attentive to the person before him, but it also let him remain the observer rather than the observed. Verenestra noticed where that attention went. His sword and magic were developing well. His notebooks had begun to turn to something his instructors were not teaching him. He was watching the mortals.
II. Fireflies. 851 DR
Humans fascinated Ben. Their houses seemed flimsy boxes to him, built with an urgency that scarcely allowed for weather, much less antiquity. Yet they planted trees whose shade mattered to them even when they could not expect to sit beneath it. They spoke of children and grandchildren as if some part of themselves could remain in those other lives. Then they spoke of death with a familiarity that troubled him more than fear would have done. They had so little time. Why did they look beyond it so often?
Some discussed an afterlife as though the life presently in their hands were only a preparation, and not a very important one. Ben would listen, trying to understand. The person speaking had a face he could draw, a voice he could learn to recognize. The other existence had neither. He could not yet comprehend giving so much of the visible life to the invisible one.
He thought of fireflies. An individual light appeared, held the eye, and vanished before he had quite followed its course. So brief a life might pass almost without mention in the reckonings of his own people. But when he looked closely, the darkness was full of such lights. Their brevity made him attentive. He watched humans spend an evening arguing and reconcile before morning. He watched them change a plan that had seemed certain the day before. They made promises with a haste that astonished him, yet sometimes kept them through much of the little time they had. They altered tools and customs without first seeking the permission of centuries. He studied them as seriously as he studied magic. Pages filled with hands, faces, gestures, clothing. He painted the changes they made in the land and tried to understand why one change was welcomed, and another mourned. Reports and artwork went back to Verenestra. She did not tell him what she thought of his observations. He came to believe that she valued them by what she asked him to do next.
In 851 DR, Valen Gildensong was leading a company of elves and humans through Giants Dale and the dangerous northern passes toward the Elder Valley. They were refugees, traveling toward a place in which they hoped to remain. Verenestra, who counseled Valen, asked Ben to accompany his retinue as part of the escort. The work required his blade and magic. It would also bring him among the people he had been trying to understand. He accepted readily.
He began the journey as an observer walking beside his subject. Hunger made that position difficult to maintain. Cold made it ridiculous. The hand whose shape he had been drawing could pass him something he needed; its owner could be afraid beside him, or quarrel with him, or make him laugh when he had thought himself too tired for laughter. They shared watches and fires, danger and suffering. A person whose habits he had recorded one evening might stand beside him with a weapon the next. His concern for the likeness in his notebook became concern for whether the person would be there when the company gathered again.
Valen took kindly to the young Eladrin who fought beside the refugees and afterward sat drawing them. Ben began to share what he knew of Bladesong: a form, a movement, a way to let blade and spell occupy the same moment. His education was unfinished, and he did not pretend otherwise. His companions changed what he taught them. They shortened movements, combined ideas, and discarded things that did not serve their bodies, their equipment, or the ground beneath their feet. Sometimes Ben corrected them. Sometimes he had to reconsider the correction. He made notes about that too.
By the end of the journey, the figures in his pages no longer stood for humanity. They were particular people, and he noticed their absence. With Valen’s support, he remained with a retinue among the northern communities instead of returning immediately to the Fey world. He had come to see how humans lived. Now there were people he did not wish to leave.
III. A New Song. 853–856 DR
When Valen founded the Bladesong Knights in 853 DR, Ben joined them. Verenestra had sent him with the refugees; she had not told him to enlist. The new allegiance was his choice. These people were building something he had helped protect on the road, and his skill could help keep it alive.
The order brought together older practices and the necessities of a young country. Ben’s Bladesong was one contribution among others. He taught what he knew and learned where his knowledge failed. No single moment made the Knights’ art complete. What worked on one road had to be reconsidered on another; a form learned from one teacher met a form learned elsewhere, and both were tried. Ben liked being present for this.
In the north, he supported rangers and patrols with sword and magic. Roads and settlements needed watching. Beyond the more familiar routes lay Fey boundaries that could not be understood simply by knowing where a marker stood. His upbringing and connections within Verenestra’s sphere gave him some sense of whom to approach and what an unfamiliar warning might mean. He served as a modest intermediary when one was needed. He could sometimes prevent a mistake from becoming an insult, or an insult from becoming a battle. He preferred to discover what a stranger intended before answering it with force. When protection required fighting, however, he had been trained to fight. The letters and drawings continued. He recorded the people and places he served, and the changes taking place about them. His notebooks were still those of a scholar, but increasingly the notebooks of someone with a stake in what he observed.
By 856 DR he had served for roughly three years. The northern frontier had become familiar. The great Rainmark stronghold of later centuries did not yet define his experience of that country. He knew routes, communities, duties, and the limits of what the young order could protect. Beyond those limits stood older places. Highspire was one of them. Reports of humanoid activity near the Spire brought a patrol into its approaches. Ben went to help observe and investigate. Toward dusk, the figures they had been watching began to move farther up the rising ground. The patrol followed.
IV. Highspire at Dusk. 856 DR
A shape appeared between the stones, disappeared, and appeared again farther along the slope. Ben watched the place it had left. The eye could give a body to a shadow, especially in that failing light, but a shadow did not choose a route. He followed with the others, keeping the movement in sight whenever the ground allowed it. He remembered the weight of his rapier at his side and the sound of his own breathing. Light remained on the higher stones after the hollows beneath them had grown dark.
Later, he could recover these things more readily than the pursuit itself. A voice remained, but he could not recall its words. Gaps remained where someone ought to have been beside him. He remembered deciding to go farther; he could not remember when that decision ceased to be part of an ordinary duty. By the time he entered Highspire, night had come.
The ruin bore the marks of an intention he could not read. He could recognize workmanship, the deliberateness of an angle or a passage, without knowing what those things had been made to accomplish. A doorway seemed too large for the space beyond it. Elsewhere, the depth of a shadow made him stop and reconsider the wall he had supposed it lay in. The old place did not resemble the works of the new Knights. It had belonged to a world in which other arrangements were taken for granted. Ben could see the remains of those arrangements. He did not know what remained of their power.
Then he heard a cadence in the stone. At first he took it for distant voices, some continuation of the activity he had come to investigate. He stopped and listened. The sound seemed to draw nearer without growing louder. It was as though he had been hearing something from outside a closed room and had discovered that he was already inside it. He moved toward it carefully. There was an opening. The air beyond it was still, and the dark continued farther than another chamber should have allowed. He waited at its edge, trying to place it within what he had seen of the building.
Then he crossed. He had no name for the country beyond. Mortileux was not a word that could explain the sudden loss of the ordinary night: the frontier sounds gone, the air changed, his footsteps giving him no trustworthy measure of distance. Something immense stirred in that darkness. Ben felt its attention before he understood that attention was what he felt. There was something draconic in its magnitude, something his training approached through comparisons and could not encompass. For a moment he seemed to himself no more substantial than one of the brief lives he had been studying.
Yet there was no malice in the presence’s regard. Within it lay the sense of others once near: company so deeply familiar that it had not needed to be thought about. Their nearness had belonged to the order of things. Now that order was broken, its memory remained. Ben felt the absence before he understood that what he was being given was a remembrance. He received no names, no account of a sanctuary or the Six who had rested there together. He knew only that something vast had once been less alone.
Farther in the gloom, another impression gathered about him. It had a different weight. A will was making a vow. He could feel the terrible concentration of the choice, the refusal to let an ending be an ending. He could repeat no words, only the sensation of a promise drawing tight around the being that spoke it. This was the fading trace of Volukai taking the Kai, though Ben knew neither name. It belonged to that older will. It was not an oath being asked of him, nor the intention of the presence that had first regarded him. He tried to turn toward the opening he had entered through. His recollection ended in darkness.
V. The Long Dream
His first records were marks. He put them in the codex whenever he could, counting the intervals he thought might be days. A scholar ought to preserve even a doubtful account. If he could not say what had happened, he could at least set down where certainty ended. But he could not always tell whether he had slept. Sometimes he woke with the sense of a long journey in his legs and found no change in the place around him. Sometimes an unfamiliar place seemed to hold years of his own habitation. The marks accumulated without restoring an order to what they counted.
Weeks became years. The years loosened from their numbers. Whether he had survived the first darkness, or whether surviving was still the right word for what he did there, remained beyond him. He continued. Something continued with him. The immense presence had become bearable. Perhaps it had dwindled; perhaps he had learned to encounter it differently. It did not tell him which. No bargain, no promise of service, no hour he could later identify as the beginning of their bond.
When a memory began to fail, it sometimes answered him. He would be trying to recover a face, finding only the arrangement of lines he had put on paper, and suddenly the person would turn. There was the particular movement of the mouth before speech. There was the voice, including the small hesitation he had never thought to record. A campfire warmed his hands. Someone laughed on the far side.
He knew these things had happened. For a while, he also knew they were happening again. The presence brought other remembrances. He entered places whose use he understood while he was in them, although he had never seen them before. There was a sense of welcome, of others at ease near one another. He could feel that each had a place. He could not have drawn a plan of the whole or written a history of what had made it possible. His own memories and those of his companion sometimes occupied the same room. A refugee fire burned within the feeling of an ancient sanctuary. Human voices spoke through a peace older than the company they belonged to. He accepted the meeting until he tried to distinguish its parts.
The presence helped him reach what he was losing. He attended to what it brought, giving it the nearness of being remembered with someone else. Neither sustained the other alone. Between them, a place became where recollection could be lived. After a time, he had work to finish there. Pigment dried at the edge of a shallow dish while he considered a color. Someone moved before he had finished a drawing, and he looked up with familiar impatience, then smiled. A question put aside the evening before returned while his hands were occupied with something else.
Sometimes a painted sky would remain more clearly in his memory than the place beneath it. He could recall mixing its grey, the small amount of blue he had added, the need to leave a pale space where the light was breaking through. Around that work lay a day he could almost recover: a voice behind him, weather at a window, the pleasure of having nowhere else he must be. There were ordinary interruptions. They made the life convincing long after he had ceased asking whether it was a life. He grew older. At first the changes were slight. A movement required more care. His hands looked different resting on a page. He found he was less eager to demonstrate what he knew, though he remained quite capable of being confidently wrong. In some matters patience came. In others he had to keep learning it.
He continued to draw and paint. When he put an old study beside a new one, the difference could astonish him. The subject had altered, but so had the person looking. The younger hand had pursued every detail with an urgency that left little room for the thing itself. The older one sometimes left a patch of paper untouched. There were people in those pictures. There were years he could afterward recover only through the certainty that he had loved someone during them. There were losses, reconciliations, and stretches of happiness that had no event at their center. Work was done. Company was welcome. Evening came without his fearing what would follow it.
The life would have been easier to dismiss if it had been nothing but torment. Yet he had been happy in it, and impatient, and absorbed in work that mattered to him. He had been glad to see someone. He had stayed silent when he ought to have spoken and spoken when listening would have served better. Such memories did not have the distance of a tale told to him. They belonged to the person he had become. The presence was woven through that becoming. Sometimes it was close enough to seem a companion beside him; sometimes he scarcely noticed it. He could not remember a version of this life from which it was wholly absent.
The rapier remained as well. He had modestly enchanted it when he carried it into Highspire, a good weapon for a young Bladesinger. Over its long life, it was used and kept, cared for, and worked upon. Further enchantment entered its making. He would retain moments of that work without being able to recover the whole: the familiarity of the metal in his hands, the blade as it had been, the blade afterward. The change did not come to him as a single marvel. It gathered a history.
As his own years grew long, he thought more and more about what would become of it after his death. The rapier had ceased to be merely the weapon he expected to carry on his next duty. He had kept it through too much of his life for that. Someone should receive it. By then, he often thought of the lost son. The name was Benarion. The absence did not fit the life he could recount. He could not follow it backward to a clear beginning. Yet it returned with the certainty of love: someone younger was missing, someone he cared for, and he could not set it aside because it was too hard to explain.
In still moments, he felt darkness around that younger one. It did not seem quite the darkness of death. There was something waiting within it. Ben found himself making provision for the son. He considered what might be useful to a young man, what should be preserved, what might survive until it was needed. The thought could enter a contented day without making it sorrowful. At other times the absence was so sharp that he had to stop what he was doing and wait for it to ease. He made the rapier a memorial. But he could not think of the memorial as something finished, with no one left to receive it. It required an heir.
Years of care went into that contradiction. He returned to the weapon, held it, remembered why he was keeping it. It lay across his aging hands with a familiarity that went beyond his ability to account for. Only very late did he understand. The young man in the darkness was himself. Beyond the life he was living, Benarion still lay in Mortileux, the young Eladrin who had crossed the threshold and had not yet awakened. He had been reaching toward his own sleeping life. The dream had recognized it before the old man could, giving him the absence and the love before it gave him understanding.
Knowing this did not wake him. It did not tell him how the two lives touched, or how a thing kept here might find its way into the hands of someone lying elsewhere. He understood the relationship more clearly than the world in which it had become possible. He remembered the young Knight’s eagerness. He remembered the privacy, the pleasure of being useful, the belief that a sufficiently careful observer could come to understand almost anything. He could regard those things tenderly now. He no longer needed to correct the boy before he could care for him. There was still somewhere for that young man to go. Ben left him the sword.
It was an ancestral weapon now, though the lineage by which it passed could not be traced to fathers and sons. The hand that had first carried it would receive what the old hand had kept. The memorial was also an inheritance. He could not explain how it would be delivered; he knew who it was intended for. By the reckoning of that life, he was about two thousand years old when it ended. He was content. Questions remained, and so did the people he had lost. Yet the years behind him had held work and affection, and the things left unfinished no longer required him to stand watch over them. The presence was near. He rested without trying to discover what the next moment ought to contain. His hands relaxed. He thought of the young man in the dark and of what he had left for him. Then his last breath passed.
VI. War Cries
A hundred voices answered another hundred. Ben drew breath and opened his eyes. The chanting pressed against him from every side, fierce cries of war and power driven higher by a voice above them all. He raised a hand toward his face. The movement was too quick. He looked at the fingers and waited for them to become the fingers he remembered. They did not.
His body was young. His chest filled easily with air. A heartbeat ago he had reached the end of a long life and had been ready for it. Now his heart was beating violently, and there was an army outside. For a little while the two certainties left no room for thought. Then training returned in a form small enough to use: stay still; listen; find the danger before it finds you. When he moved, something tore at his shoulder.
The cloth beneath his armor had stiffened and weakened. Fittings and fabric gave way under his touch. He caught at his cloak, and part of it came off in his hand. The rest slid from his shoulders into a heap of rotten threads and dust. He watched the dust settle. He had worn that cloak into Highspire at dusk. He had also lived so long without thinking of it that its return to his attention seemed impossible. His codex lay nearby. The binding scarcely held the leaves together. Their edges were dark and softened, breaking away beneath the lightest handling. He opened it a little, enough to recognize a drawing and the writing beside it.
His own work. The young hand, with its haste and its confidence that there would be time to put everything in order. The rapier lay within reach, its edge bright. He took it up. He knew the balance, but the knowledge did not end with the young Knight who had carried it into the ruin. He remembered keeping this blade through the long years. He remembered considering what the lost son would need. He had left it. He was the one who received it. The sword remained in his hands while he tried to make one truth displace the other. Neither yielded. The metal was cool and solid, bright among the ruined possessions, carrying a history the rest of the room could not explain. The cries outside forced him to attend to something else.
Draconians filled the camps beyond his hiding place. They gathered about an ancient black monolith, and upon it stood the figure whose bellowing voice raised their answering cries. Ben could not understand the language. He understood the ordering of a host, and what it meant when many separate bodies waited upon one will. He called inwardly for his companion. For a time there was little answer. Its quiet frightened him. Through all the years of the other life he had rarely needed to ask whether he was alone. Here he had awakened young among enemies, and the one being who might have shared his bewilderment had fallen almost silent. He waited, listened, and began the work he knew.
During the days that followed, he observed the camps from concealment. He watched who could interrupt whom, where orders traveled, which gatherings dissolved and which became companies ready to move. He kept what he had seen apart from what he merely suspected. His mind could lose its way in a memory, but a task with a beginning and an end helped him find the present camp again. Sometimes, when he was very still, the Vestige whispered.
A phrase might suggest command or rivalry. A gesture became comprehensible without the words accompanying it. Fragments of meaning met what he could observe, although he could not always recover them when he tried to repeat them to himself. The name Severin became attached to the figure on the monolith. Ben came to understand his importance, and something of the hierarchy beneath him. He did not learn the language. He learned enough to recognize that the preparations were nearing their purpose. For roughly a week he watched. An interval of waiting could still become another room, another age, the expectation of an old body. Then footsteps passed close enough to hear, and he was in Mortileux again. People beyond this place needed his report. He held to that when he could hold to little else.
VII. Dusk Again. 1510 DR
On the far side of the boundary, Yultha fell, and the protection she had held failed with her. Ben did not witness her death. In Mortileux, he heard thunder move through the old place and felt the air and stone answer together. The camps broke into motion. Orders passed through the waiting ranks. The gates opened. Pale light lay beyond them. It was scarcely more than the light left in an autumn sky, yet his eyes watered at the sight of it. The Draconians went toward it in their hundreds. Ben watched the movement, measuring what he knew of the host against the chance before him. He waited for a space he could use, then moved.
The passage had not opened for his sake. It was carrying war into the country he served. He could neither stop the host from where he stood nor remain behind and warn anyone. His opportunity lay within the same catastrophe. He took it. Noise and movement crowded the crossing. For an instant he could not tell whether he was leaving Mortileux or remembering his first step into it. He held the rapier close and continued toward the light. Cold air touched his face. He was atop Highspire. Above him lay an open sky, and the cool wind of an autumn dusk moved through the remains of his clothing. He stopped long enough to look up. Even the paleness hurt his eyes.
The invasion was still unfolding about him. He could not stay there. He turned toward the country beyond the Spire, seeking a way to reach his people. He had followed the patrol into dusk in 856 DR. He had returned to dusk in 1510. Six hundred and fifty-four years lay between the evenings. Ben had not yet learned what they had taken.
VIII. After the Return
Ben tried first to give a report: the camps in Mortileux, Severin upon the monolith, the ordering of the host. He separated what he had observed from the less certain impressions the Vestige had given him. The people questioning him had good reasons to listen. They also had reasons to doubt the man who had come from the direction of the invasion in the remains of ancient armor, carrying a disintegrating book and an immaculate sword. They asked his name and his service. He gave both. Benarion Naïlo, Bladesong Knight. He had joined when Valen founded the order. The questions began again.
He supposed he had explained himself badly. Setting aside the long life and its impossible inheritance, he began with the retinue and the patrol. These ordinary things seemed to trouble his listeners almost as much. They kept him under watch while they examined his account. Ben understood caution in a place under attack, but understanding did little to ease his bewilderment. He had come to return to duty and was being asked to prove that he had ever held it. Rainmark made that bewilderment larger.
The northern country now held a stronghold: walls and dwellings, stores and refuges, a school of arms. Things had been added, repaired, made customary. He could not connect those generations of labor with the frontier he had left behind. There were Bladesong Knights everywhere. They belonged to an institution old enough that its beginning required no daily thought. Customs Ben remembered taking shape were settled practice. Other things had changed until he recognized only the beginning of a movement, or the purpose of a form whose details were new to him.
He watched a familiar turn of the blade end in an unfamiliar way. The question came readily: who had taught that variation? Then he began to understand how many teachers might stand between the answer and his own life. They told him the year. He asked again, and received the same number. He could subtract. The answer was not beyond his ability. But knowing the sum did not make Valen’s voice remote, or place his human companions where the number said they must be. The patrol could seem nearer than that morning. His youth could seem distant beyond the quiet centuries of the life in which he had grown old.
He could find no place to stand from which all of it lay in the proper direction. Gradually his knowledge, his possessions, and the peculiarities of his condition made the simpler explanations harder to sustain. Suspicion gave way unevenly to the possibility that something extraordinary had happened. It was enough to allow a different kind of care. Eventually he was taken to Silverymoon. There, they gave him quiet, an examination, and help in attempting an account of his experience. His days could be arranged around something other than alarm. People brought him histories of the interval he had missed.
Some days he could read them. On others, a single name required him to close the book. Valen Gildensong was dead. Ben remembered wanting to show him a drawing. He remembered the living man taking an interest in it. There were other deeds in the history, consequences and endings of which Ben had known nothing. They did not make his memory false. They made it one small part of a life that had continued beyond his sight. The page could tell him when that life ended. It could not give him another evening in which to speak to its owner. His human companions, too, had lived their remaining years within the great absence. Some might have been remembered; some might have left little that could now be found. He wanted to know whether they had been happy, what they had made, which of the things they had discussed beside the fire had come to anything.
He had missed their living as completely as their deaths. Once he had wondered how they could spend so much of their short existence thinking about another life. Now he caught himself listening for the voices of people whose whole remaining future had already passed. He had learned something about their difficulty without finding an answer. He began to draw again. At first it required less of him than a conversation. A hand resting before him was there to be looked at. The light on a face belonged to the hour in which it fell. He could attend to these things without deciding which of his lives had taught him to see them.
He began making notes as well. Many were plain accounts of the present day: where he was, whom he had spoken to, what had happened that morning. He tried to give the day an order the older memories could not take from it. They sometimes took it nonetheless. A remembered room could interrupt the room about him. He might reach for something that belonged to the long life, or begin an answer whose listener was not there. On waking, he still sometimes expected the caution of an old body and was startled by the strength with which he sat up. He remained amiable. People still found him willing to listen. His privacy endured too, though now it was not always a preference. There were things he could not say without losing the thread of what he was trying to explain. The Vestige had become talkative.
Its quiet in the first days after awakening had passed, but speech had not brought the clarity Ben wanted. He asked about a place and felt as if he had once been welcomed there. He asked about danger and was answered with a grief whose object he could not identify. It could speak at length while leaving the smallest practical question unanswered. He grew impatient with it. Sometimes he had to put down what he was doing and wait until he could listen without trying to force its meaning into his own words. There was no other being to whom he could speak of the life in which he had grown old. The presence had been there. Whatever it was, whatever relation its old remembrances bore to the world outside them, they had sustained one another. He did not simply want it gone. He wanted to understand it, and he wanted to know whether it was well.
The rapier stayed near him through those days. He could not tell what further power might awaken in it, or account for all the workings that had already changed it. The weapon itself was plain enough beneath his hands. It had acquired a history within a life other people might have been tempted to call unreal. Ben could remember leaving it for the lost son with a tenderness that unsettled him. Now he was required to receive that tenderness. In youth he had known how to be useful to other people, and how to keep himself from becoming the subject of too much concern. He had not learned what to do with a gift the old man had left him. Sometimes he could only hold it, remembering.
As his attention steadied, he began asking more often for news from the north. Highspire still called to him. He could not tell whether the pull came from the place, the Vestige, or the unfinished portion of his own story. Its strength did not make him trust it. He had lived too long among things he could feel but could not explain. There were reasons to return that did not depend upon obeying the call. He had watched the Draconian host assemble. He had heard Severin raise it to fury. People were in danger because of the passage through which he himself had escaped. He could not let the uncertainty of his own life be a reason to withhold the help he could give.
The order he had joined remained, though he would have to discover what his allegiance meant among its present members. The people it protected were not substitutes for those he had lost. They had their own work, quarrels, affections, and things they hoped to accomplish. Some had begun telling him about them. He found himself asking how the work had gone. He remembered what someone had been worried about and wanted to know whether it had been resolved. A person’s absence from the usual company had begun to matter to him again. He was not recovered when he began preparing for the journey north. The two lives still overlapped, and the Vestige still answered in meanings that would not become explanations. Some mornings, his own hands looked unfamiliar to him.
But there was also a day to attend to, and people in it. He sorted the pages he would carry. Among the remembered faces were drawings of people he had met since his return. Their likenesses were no more complete than the older ones. He still had things he had not yet thought to ask them. He put those pages with his other work and made ready to take them north.
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