Like clinging vines, ornately fenced walkways marked the levels, and Nell could see figures moving along them. Across the open space above, narrow bridges met like the spokes of a wheel, converging on twisting staircases.
She had the urge to shout, just to hear the echo of her voice in this huge place.
Mistress Meva beamed at them. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
Susan nodded. “How many books do you have here? Where did they all come from?”
The woman raised a hand, indicating the shelves.
“Would you believe me if I told you this is only a fraction of what once was? These are the books saved from the study halls of Ganbihar, before the destruction.”
“Destruction?” Nell asked her. “Are you talking about the change?”
She nodded. “You’re a clever one! I’m going to have to tell Mistress Leeta to put you in the front seat in history.”
Nell wanted to ask more, but the Shepherdess was already walking again. “The library’s open at all hours,” she was saying in answer to a question of Susan’s. “You’re free to come here day or night.”
Susan looked like someone had just handed her a million dollars. And a pony.
“Do you see that?” she said to Nell as they followed the Shepherdess past oak tables piled with books. “There are at least six stories of books here! Maybe seven!”
The Shepherdess led them from the library to a hall on the third floor and into a large room with four beds, a wardrobe, and a desk. Unlit lanterns hung in brackets on the walls. Above the desk, a scene of a man emerging from a pool, glowing with light, had been rendered in fine needlework, with threads of gold and yellow and orange woven atop the green of a wood and the blue of the water. On the other side of the room, a wide window looked out on the valley. Nell went to it and peered up past the orchards and fields to see if she could make out the mist. She couldn’t. In the distance, the tops of the trees on the edge of the wood stood etched into the skyline, deep greens and browns catching the sunlight as it inched westward.
Clothes had been laid out for them, clean light-colored dresses of the same long style the Shepherdess wore. To Nell’s relief, there was a bathroom across the hall, complete with running water and something that looked wonderfully like a toilet.
“Now, that’s civilization,” she said, thinking of Max. She sighed. She’d have to tell him later.
When they’d washed and changed, the Shepherdess returned to tell them how wonderful they’d find their education. Nell was in too good a mood from finally being clean to resent her tone. Then the woman ruined it with her first question.
“Can you read, too?” she asked Nell.
Susan looked up at that, and she and Nell exchanged a glance.
“We all can,” Susan said hastily.
Mistress Meva’s eyebrows shot up. “Really! Even the little ones? How unusual!”
She clearly didn’t believe them, though, until she’d had them each read something. The woman reached a new peak of excitement when she found that Jean could read a sentence.
“Now, don’t show off too much,” she grinned, when she’d summoned a younger woman to take Kate and Jean to join the primary classes.
“You two will be in the upper levels,” she told Susan and Nell. “Expect to work hard. Even if you’ve been to school in the city, which it appears you have, you’ll find things quite different here. We expect you to learn to use your mind. You’ll need every bit of effort you can muster to keep the change at bay, especially in these first days.”
Nell felt her spirits lift. She saw that Susan, too, seemed happier. They both knew what that meant. Max isn’t the only one who’s going to learn something here, Nell told herself with satisfaction. The Shepherdess isn’t half bad, even if she does smile too much.
Anticipation shivered in her stomach. Susan had made the wind blow, and Max had made peaches. Now it would be her turn. She intended to be good at it.
Four gates to the valley, four ways home.
It was an old saying. Wanderers and wise men, seekers and the bereft, carried the phrase with them, passing it, one to the next, as a cherished, free-given gift. And so for a century those who broke away, the unwanted or the far-seeing, were led to one of the gates or another, to find in the valley welcome, and shelter.
To these gates the exile returned now, to the clearings that overlooked the valley, to the place where the mist simmered, cold, beneath the heat of the day.
The first three, rarely traveled by any but watchers in these late years, lay undisturbed, the mist beneath them a dull, leaden cloud.
In the last, the grass was pressed to earth, and the mist rolled beneath the rise, angry. The exile searched the ground, counting signs: the broken stem of a wildflower, a trampled path, a second, a third. A curled hair, caught in a patch of onion grass and waving like a thin flag. More than one traveler had been here; more than two.
The mist crept toward the clearing, and the noise of it rose, a static, crackling sound of warning and hunger, of rage. Still the exile searched. Who had come? Who had waited upon this hill?
The cloud seeped upward, muttering and reaching, when at last the exile found a single clear footprint engraved in a bald circle of dirt, in a spot where the clearing began to slide toward the valley below. The perfect outline of a small shoe with a strange, lined sole. Too small, this, for a man or even a woman.
It was the print of a child.
Nell had once been told, by a teacher whom she had undoubtedly annoyed, that her impatience
