“My brother. He’d become a great favorite of the council by then. A rising scholar, a great mind, a champion of the ancients and an upholder of the pattern. That’s a great thing for a young man. For anyone, really. And he did protect them. He was still good at hearing things, even then. Still good at spying things out. It was he that saw me go to the garden that day. And it was he who told them I was there. My brother — Lan.”
The arguments of sages could be heated, but they had never been hateful, until the end. Laysia had told herself often enough that she had been blind not to see what lay ahead, but then Tur Nurayim himself had been blind to it. He had seen things always in the pretty terms of debate — are we this or are we that? What road is best, what manner of thought? He did not understand until the end the dangerous nature of threats.
“Many have called the sanctuary the last flame,” he told her once, so near the end that it seemed foolish now to have talked in calm voices amid the waving corn and wheat on a late-summer afternoon. “But is it the bit of warmth kindled in the window of the farmhouse so the traveler might see, and take of it for his own lamp and campfire, on his way? Or is it the devouring fire that burns the infected seed from the ground so the farmer might plant his own there? Or if it be like water, as others say, does it quench thirst or wash the mountain away in a great deluge? Some choose the gentler way, the warming lamp, the small cup of water. For others, there is only the devouring flame and the punishing wave.”
So he spoke, even then, not of Kaysh and himself, but of some and of others. There were no enemies in Tur Nurayim’s calculations. No calculation at all. Only the sometimes contentious debates of sages.
Tur Kaysh favored a harsher calculus. He had been a watcher in the city when the present Genius rose, a terrifying figure so ambitious and magnetic that he pushed his own father aside. The new Genius roused the city with promises of the change gone, of a coming era of power and glory. Witness to his ascent, the young Kaysh had returned with thoughts of a different future. Laysia remembered him in his later years, as he gained his seat on the council and rose. He had been charming, powerful, the kind of man that made other men fall in love with him. Lan had worshipped him from the start. She recalled her brother’s talk of the man’s brilliance, his depth, his wisdom, his warmth. “We need a leader,” he had said. “Tur Kaysh says the end of times approaches, and leaderless, debating intricacies, the council dallies. He would lead them! He should!”
The early scholars had written approvingly of the thousand faces of truth, truth like a diamond, facet upon facet full of light. Tur Kaysh spoke of truth as the tip of an arrow, a single sharp point ready to pierce and destroy the evil that had overtaken the world.
Soon all the young watchers spoke as he did, and their elders followed, until at last the sages of the council turned their backs on the thousand faces in favor of the one. They grew impatient with quiet, impatient with gentleness, impatient with patience itself. Unlike Tur Nurayim, Tur Kaysh had no trouble speaking of enemies, and finding them. And the first of his enemies was Tur Nurayim himself, the kind old man who spoke quietly, who voiced doubts and urged a different view. For Kaysh, nothing but the devouring fire, the punishing wave, would do. And soon the council bowed to him and swept the gentle sage from their table, turning his chair to the wall.
Until they did it, Tur Nurayim, for all his farsight, had not seen what could come. Not to him, not to her, and not, as the fire burned and the wave rose, even to children.
Nell woke that afternoon with a howl and her hands around her head, but it was only fear of the mist that made her cry out, not any real change. Kate tugged her arms down and whispered to her, and when she opened her eyes, miraculously it was Nell there, not something strange and fearsome on the soft pillows in the back bedroom. The light slanted through the window now and made the dust dance in its path. Nell turned her face to it, then sat up and looked out. Over the wood, the blackbirds swooped like daredevils in the windy sky.
“Where are we?”
Kate told her. As she did, she watched Nell grow sharp-eyed and alert again. She looked past Kate, trying to see into the big room.
“Where’s Susan? Is everybody here?”
Kate didn’t know how to explain that, so she said only, “She’s getting Max. Then she’ll come.”
Nell’s brow wrinkled. She seemed about to ask something else, when Laysia returned from a trip to the garden. She came straight to the door to welcome Nell and to tell her that she looked hungry, which she didn’t, Kate thought. She looked full to bursting with questions, but Nell didn’t ask them right away. She only thanked the woman and followed her out to the table.
“Jean?” she asked, looking over at Kate.
“She’s with Susan.”
Laysia took up the chipped pitcher and went to fill it. Nell watched her go.
“She’s the one who helped us?”
Kate nodded. “The exile, they call her.”
At the word, Nell turned her head sharply. “The exile,” she said slowly. “I’ve heard of her.”
After that, Nell moved around the room with interest, examining the books and peering out the window. She stepped outside and
