“The valley’s that way,” she said. She frowned, shook her head, and went inside.
Laysia had again set out bread and cheese on the table, and Nell took the seat she offered.
“They told me about you,” she said. “The old man. He thought you sent me.”
One dark strand of hair had fallen from Laysia’s braid, and she was in the process of tucking it back when Nell spoke. She let it drop again.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a rough voice. “It’s on my account they’ve done this.” She shook her head, and another loose strand fell. The sun was in the western half of the sky now, and the front room sat in shadow, the windows full of cool light. Impatiently, Laysia brushed the loose hair from her face.
“Children, exiled! Was it for asking too many questions? For wandering in the wrong garden? What could you have done, after all?”
Nell looked a little affronted at that, but she said nothing right away. She hadn’t finished studying Laysia, and when Kate opened her mouth to speak, Nell shook her head briefly. She looked over at the cheese on the table and said suddenly, “Where did the cheese come from? I didn’t see any animals in the yard.”
Kate thought that a strange thing to say, especially in the accusing tone Nell used. Laysia raised an eyebrow at the question, and Kate flushed.
“She really likes cheese,” she said.
Nell frowned at her and said to Laysia, “Where did it come from? There’s nothing for miles here.”
Again Laysia didn’t answer, and Kate couldn’t understand the guarded look that had come into her face. Maybe it was Nell’s rudeness, she thought. Trying to smooth it over, she said to Nell, “Maybe she has a refrigerator, you know, under the rug, like at Liyla’s house. Maybe she got it from someone.”
Neither of these answers would serve, it seemed. Nell shook her head again, never taking her eyes from the woman. And Laysia dropped her gaze to the table. After a while, she said, ruefully, “I can see why you frightened them, down there.”
Nell didn’t say anything. She waited. Her bangs had grown down into her eyes in the time they’d been through the window, and she glared through them, unappeased.
Dismayed, Kate watched the two of them stare at each other. Nell was not as old as Susan, and yet she seemed suddenly very old, as if coming up the mountain had let her jump across the bridge that made her an equal to Laysia, or any of the others. She was full of the secret understanding adults always had, and she sat there, unafraid despite the brutal trip through the mist, challenging the woman. And Laysia, to Kate’s surprise, neither brushed the question off nor turned away. Instead, she said, a little tentatively, “There are some things maybe you would not understand.”
Nell’s eyebrows came up, and Kate suddenly felt sorry for the woman, saying all the wrong things. She watched the two of them a second, each holding her secrets close in that funny, opaque game adults played, saying things by halves, making you guess and give your ignorance away.
After another second, Nell sniffed and looked sideways at Kate.
“She thinks we can’t make peaches,” she said.
Kate decided not to remind her that neither she nor Nell had, in fact, made peaches. And anyway, Nell was looking at her hand in the fierce way Max had looked at the ground when he made food for them in the woods. A little buzz tickled the air, and then, in Nell’s cupped hand, a fine blur. A second later, one of the flowers, a pink open-palm, lay there.
Nell looked up at them, that challenging, half-angry expression bending into a grin.
“Better than cheese,” she said.
Dreams and fragments of dreams
Are we,
A musing thought
In the mind of the maker of patterns,
Soft skinned, moldable as unglazed clay.
Such is the world
And such are we,
Yet we carry the shaper’s tools,
Gouge and blade and wire in hand,
And thus unfinished,
Ever firming our own lines and edges,
We may yet reach out to remake
The very surface of the world.
— Vision of the Walking Sage, First Age of Sage Kings, Ganbihar
A child had opened her hand and made a flower. A child!
How could it be? “Such is the world,” the Walking Sage had written, “and such are we”: “soft skinned. . . . ever firming our own lines and edges.”
Years ago, Tur Nurayim had quoted the passage to bolster Laysia’s patience. She had been a young student then, chafing with the work of learning. How tedious the tasks he set her, the endless fixing on a stone or a flower or a mound of sand. And for two hours’ strain, she earned nothing more than the sand swirling in its bowl!
“Is it a simple thing for us to remake the surface of the world?” he had chided her. “Much of a man’s mind is busy holding his own self firm, though he may not know it. In this dark age of ours, we’ve learned even that might be lost, without some effort. So to do more, he must spend years sharpening his mind like the sculptor’s blade. Only then can he turn outward.”
Hearing this with impatience, she had wondered aloud why man — jewel of the pattern and graced with the gift of shaping — couldn’t simply be born hard boned and unchangeable. Why such a flimsy-edged thing? Why not stiff shelled and invulnerable?
A wistful look had come into Tur Nurayim’s face when she said it, and he’d told her that, indeed, some spoke of other places, worlds like tapestries hung in the great hall of the pattern maker — a thousand of them, more.
“Among these, they say, there are iron-hard lands full of people edged in steel, impervious to change.”
He sighed. “But not in this one. Here we are of the soft-skinned variety.
