“What about you?” she asked Nell.
“Riddles,” Nell said promptly.
“Riddles?” the Master Watcher cut in. “How are riddles anybody’s home?”
Nell grinned at him, which, Susan noted, must have been a first. Maybe that was a good sign.
“We like them. We tell riddles at dinner sometimes.”
“And jokes,” Max added. “Sometimes even funny ones.”
“Kate sings at night — loudly,” Nell said, grimacing at her little sister.
Susan felt as she sometimes did when she walked into the back door of a house after she’d only ever come in through the front — disoriented by the new angle. Things did look different that way.
The Master Watcher was looking at Laysia with an expression that told Susan he was not used to lots of people talking at once, especially if those people were under the age of thirty.
“What do riddles and songs have to do with opening windows?” he asked her.
Laysia patted his shoulder, and the familiar act seemed to startle him and then loosen him up a little. He smiled faintly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But perhaps a world full of walls is made of such things. Perhaps ours is, too.”
And Susan thought: Riddles and songs and jokes at the table — all of that had plenty to do with windows.
She laughed to herself. She had thought that another world was a thing like a chair, or a peach, or water, or fire. But she’d had it wrong. It wasn’t one thing at all, but a thousand of them. What did home look like, after all? A satiny dip in the couch, where she could read and catch a glimpse of the sky. Kate humming without knowing it. Jean giving her Barbie a bad haircut. Nell telling riddles at the table, and Max reciting letters to Jean.
Not all the books of mystery, not anything in the sanctuary, or any one of the scholars, could open the window. She knew that now. How could they? Maybe they could see a house on the other side, but they could never see home.
“What does that mean, a world full of walls?” Kate whispered to her. “Does that mean we can’t ever get back there?”
“I don’t think so,” Susan told her. “Even walls can be opened. You can make a door, after all. Or a window.”
Susan marveled that she could pull fire from the air and make water flow from nothing, but she had not been able to see this simple fact until now.
They gathered outside, in the garden, cool and smelling of fallen leaves. The sun had long set, and a pearl of a moon glossed the air. Laysia and her brother stood behind them, watching.
This time, Susan didn’t think of windows. She thought of her parents’ faces, her room, the book she had left open, even Mrs. Grady, waving, as she sometimes did, from her kitchen.
It occurred to her suddenly that if she could see that, then maybe, like the people who visited the dream orchard that Laysia had spoken of, she could step outside time, too — or into it. Maybe the moment they had left waited there for them, like a bubble caught in glass.
“Think about home as we left it,” she told the others. “Think about that winter night.”
The air crackled a little and buzzed. In the darkness, the moonlight seemed to smoke and wrinkle, then fracture. A stuttering, broken image shook a second in the glimmering space and resolved. The window. And on the other side, a familiar maroon couch, a book, a wall full of pictures.
Laysia had dreamed of the orchard, and walked there in a wood outside time, but that could not compare to this moment, when she stood at the heart of the world and watched the moonlight cleave the night to reveal a land beyond.
Tur Nurayim had spoken of a thousand worlds, tapestries in a great hall. It had been a half-meant tale, a flight the mind must take to understand what cannot be.
And yet it was.
Beside her, Lan gasped. She looked to him, and saw at last the joy that had been so long absent. Together, they peered at the place beyond the glass, that world of walls and hard edges. It was softer than she would have guessed — a room like others, with its cushions and its portraits and its mess of scholar’s papers. Like the children, she thought, its differences were not at first easily perceived.
Susan reached out to the glass, and this, too, was unexpectedly soft.
“Come on!” the little one said, pulling at her sister’s hand. “Before it goes away!”
But the older one hesitated a moment.
“Will we see you again?”
How could she answer? They were children of dreams. They had come to her first outside of time. This gulf seemed greater still.
She would have liked to give the child the gift of ancient words, some bit of wisdom passed on. But she could not think of any just then. So she gave her the only truth she knew — her own.
“Always and often,” she said. “In dreams.”
Susan felt herself sink into the warmth of the window, its glass pliable as honey. She could still smell the fading greenery of the fall garden, the rich half-sweet aroma of turning leaves, when the honeyed glass dissolved and she found herself stepping down into her own house, her own well-remembered thinking spot.
The scent of paper, wood, and the worn maroon couch replaced the scent of the garden, and she sucked in the first breath of home.
“It’s the same!” Nell marveled. “All the same!”
Max touched the sofa, the notebook on the table. “It’s like we never left. Like we weren’t away a second!” He looked at Susan. “Do you think we can do any of it here? Is it all gone now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I feel different. Don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Me, too,” Kate said. “Better, because we’re home.”
Better, Susan thought. But not the same.
From the hall came the
