The lamp yellowed the room, and everything in it looked soft. Susan sat on the cushioned chair near the basket of books. She’d been leafing through one while Jean used the rest as a mountain for her Barbie to scale. Kate had thought maybe Susan wasn’t listening, but now she looked up.
“Is that why we understand you, do you think?” she asked. “I’ve been wondering since we came about that. When we first got here — for a little bit — the people we talked to sounded strange, like they had a different accent. Then that all went away. Don’t you have different languages here?”
Laysia seemed happy to have a question that didn’t carry such pain in it. She shrugged. “That’s a fascination — you mean that two people speak and don’t understand each other? No, we don’t have it. Only the old speech and the new, and there’s not much difference in them. Just new ideas that need new words, or old ones, full of words for things we don’t think anymore. What’s it like where you come from? Two standing side by side can’t speak to each other?” She shook her head wonderingly. “Even your words are walls!”
“Maybe they are,” Susan said. “Where we come from, different countries have different languages, and people can’t talk to each other across them unless they’ve learned to. But here you must hear thoughts, a little, at least enough to get the sense of a thing.” She looked over at Nell. “I keep thinking this place is the same because it looks it. It isn’t!”
“No,” Nell said grimly. “It isn’t.” She turned to Laysia. “But anyway, one thing you said doesn’t fit. We only found out what we could do here when we were half crazy with fear. Being afraid didn’t stop it from happening. It made it happen!”
Some people, Kate had noticed, never really listened to questions. They were too quick with the answers. Laysia wasn’t like that. She listened, thinking, without fear that she’d lose her chance to speak. Maybe that came from being by herself so long; Kate didn’t know. So the question hung there for a while.
Finally, Laysia said, “Yes, and in that is the kernel of the unseen difference. Or perhaps I should say the half-seen, for I sense it sometimes, when I look to what it is you brought with you through that window from another place. What a strange land it must be! Here, thought brushes against us as the wind brushes skin, like the sun weighs upon the shoulders. For us, thoughts are like a song that moves us to dance before we know we’ve heard the tune. And here come you, unbent by the wind, unburnt by the sun! And yet you hear the song and sing it back from within the walls you each wear. How is that? Where we are permeable, you are solid.”
Kate wondered if it was a trick of the lamplight that reddened Nell’s face so. Laysia glanced at her, then out at the woods, where the drape of clouds erased the treetops and the sky was a blank.
“A song,” Nell said sullenly. “Susan said that once. It doesn’t seem much like a song to me.”
Again, that long silence. Then in her quiet voice, Laysia said, “The mist is very hard. You do hear, as I said, and when it comes for you, even armored as you are, you may yet fall. And then, too, the mist is worst for those it has cause to know. It uses your very self against you, twisting first mind, then body. Always, though, there is some hope. The mist can, after all, be mistaken.”
Susan’s head came up at that. “Is that how you escaped it? It made a mistake?”
Laysia nodded. “I felt the change beginning, felt the wildness at the edges of my mind. And I would have let it come, but the Guide, Kaysh, misunderstood me, and it was his thoughts that flowed there, his anger and his misunderstanding. What I heard of them stopped me.”
“What do you mean?” Nell asked her.
“I mean they were a lie. He called me beast, and one who desires the beastly. From beast we all rise, yes, but I didn’t desire any return to it. I wanted learning — that was all.”
“He called me that,” Nell told her, forgetting suddenly that she’d been angry a moment before. “An animal, he said.”
Laysia nodded. “Knowing you are no longer a beast is a great strength,” she said. “And with all his knowledge and skill and power, it’s one the Guide does not yet possess.”
In the whispering orchard, Laysia walked beneath a sky of polished copper and trees aflame. She had not known seasons to touch the orchard, and yet the wood burned red and yellow and orange, though no leaf had fallen.
Through the ruddy trees, she saw a clearing, and there a pool, tarnished silver in the yellow light. No bird sang, and no wind moved the leaves.
She was startled to see not a child, but an aged woman on her knees beside the water. The years had puckered the woman’s cheeks and hands. When she turned, her grief-stricken eyes were the color of winter.
“Gone,” she said. “All the children, gone. Even the last one.”
Fear seized Laysia and she stopped walking.
“No,” she said. “Don’t say that.”
“Should I not speak the truth here in this place?” the old woman said in her hollow voice. “The child is lost! Did I not plead for him?”
She turned to gaze into the water. The trees reflected red there.
“The pattern is laced with pain,” she said. “Why must all the threads of life unravel in agony?”
Laysia had no words to give her.
“Look,” the woman said. “The water is all blood.”
Full of dread at her talk, Laysia wanted to turn and run. But the woman was as old as Tur
