“She’s done it!”
Kate wondered why it didn’t make her happier.
Master, at what age does a man attain wisdom?
So the young student asked.
Some say when he comes to manhood, for then flows his strength.
Some say with the taking of a wife, for he is then complete.
Some say after ten years of study, for only then does he begin to understand.
Some say more, and some say never.
For wisdom is a ladder of a thousand rungs, and what man can climb them all?
And the first rung of that climb? the young man asked.
Play, said the sage. For without it, there is nothing.
— “The Ladder of Wisdom,” Tur Rime, Second Golden Age, Ganbihar
There was little time for play. Only the smallest of them sat in the clearing with her strange doll and dreamed as children should dream. The others bent to the task, and Laysia led them like the ox too early in harness.
To make up for it, at night she told them stories. The tale of Tur Doli, first of the sage kings, who climbed the peak and conquered the mountain city with a riddle. The little one’s favorite was the tale of Tur Gafen, who crossed the ocean to Elsare and learned that with a playful mind, he could banish walls and move the sea as easily as a single drop of water.
“See?” Jean told Nell, who had that day scolded her for her games in the clearing. “Even the old men play.”
Laysia thought of Tur Nurayim, grown old but ever loving his riddles and games. His board of shells and boxes still sat on the shelf in the cottage, long abandoned, for it was meant for two. He was one who loved little tricks and cleverness, and lessons full of play. He had made the first rung of wisdom into a kind of song he would sing to her, teasingly, when she was too impatient with her lessons.
“You want the flower without its seed,” he had said. “Can such a thing be?”
For the seed was the child-sight, seeing the possible without building the wall of impossible to stop it.
“To the greatest mind, the wave is but a water drop, and so is the sea. In dreams, there is no great and small, no time, no walls at all. This is the lesson of the orchard.”
Such was his song.
He had many of them. Songs of play and teaching, songs of power and of healing. He sang them so often to her that she found herself humming them, sometimes, in sleep.
She had cause to think of his songs often in these last years, after she had become an exile. The old man, Kaysh, was ever certain of his impossibilities. And so, as a poor substitute for their time on the first rung, she sang the children Tur Nurayim’s song, a water drop to a wave, the first rung also the last.
And the next day, on the cliff’s face, the littlest one, Jean, sprayed them with water drawn from the sea. In her play, she had called a wave.
Laysia told them often that they were doing well, but there was an unhappiness in her voice, behind the praise, and Kate thought it must be that she was disappointed, maybe not in Susan and Nell, but in her and Jean, who were smaller than she had expected. How could the five include them? They were little, and not good enough.
Jean was not interested in trying harder. Each day when Max failed to come, she grew more silent. And though she perked up a little when they sat by the ocean, at night when they walked back to the cottage, she shrank down into a flat line like a cake pulled too soon from the oven.
Sometimes she’d invite Kate to go out back with her to read over Max’s letters, but though these pleased Jean, who in a brief flurry of hope would always find some new proof that Max was coming tomorrow, or even an hour from now, they made Kate feel smaller than ever. So when Jean had finished reading and gone in to eat or play, Kate would creep out to the line of trees past the garden and practice the day’s lesson again, hoping for a head start on the morning.
But she was very tired, and so mostly what she did was sit and listen to the woods. One night, she sat as the dark gathered, trying not to hear the hissing of the mist, trying to shake the leaden press of it from her bones. Somewhere in the distance, a fox yipped, and instead of being afraid, she found that the noise comforted her. So many things lived out here that didn’t care about the mist, or the valley, or any of it. She liked thinking about that.
She listened and found that the forest was full of comforting sounds, busy with its own concerns. A lonely night bird screeched, and the wind hushed it. Crickets ran files across the bars of their legs.
Fireflies sparked and caught in the trees with a sound like small puckering kisses.
Something jumpy thrilled a little nearby, then waited. What was it? A rabbit, she thought, getting a sudden sense of a quivering, glass-eyed presence, What was it listening for? she wondered. A second later, she knew. A sleepy, half-interested bear, not too far off. How had she known that? She couldn’t tell, but its presence tickled at her, something like a whisper, half caught. She sat very still. What else was here?
A squirrel, busily dismantling a nut. Hungry, hungry, hungry. The rabbit, tensed. And then — something complicated and sad. She turned to see Laysia coming to find her. The woman stood at the edge of the garden, peering into the wood, looking for her in the gathering dark.
“Kate?”
“I’m here.”
“Don’t you want to eat with the others?”
“Not really.”
Laysia sat down, scattering the fireflies. The squirrel, full of caution, stopped working at
