The memory echoed in Laysia’s head now as she stared at a child — a child! — whom the mist had battered and could not take.
What were these children of dreams? From what tapestry had they emerged?
“Why did they send you through the mist?” she asked the girl.
“For going to the center,” Nell answered promptly. “For breaking their stupid lock and their stupider rules.”
Another thought came to Laysia. The child had said “we.” We make peaches. She turned to the small one, the quiet cloudy-haired child whose face she had known in dreams.
“And can you, too, do this?”
The little one shook her head. “I don’t think so. Only Susan and Max.”
Her sister frowned at that. “You could learn. It’s not that hard. You and Jean both.”
Laysia sat and counted names. The small one, Kate. Her round-faced sister with the soft profile of a child and the sharp eyes of an adult, Nell. And these others: Susan, Max, Jean. Five. Five glazed and firm edged, unbending, unchanged and unchangeable. Five who walked in dreams.
“Tell me how you came here,” she said.
But there was most certainly steel in this one. Nell refused.
“You’d think we were crazy,” she said. She sat still and wary, watchful with those sharp eyes. But Kate patted her hand and leaned over to whisper in her ear, motioning Laysia’s way.
Nell frowned and shook her head and at last gave in.
“It was wintertime,” she said. “And the five of us were home from school. We weren’t doing anything special. Then our window — we have a big window in that room — it changed. I don’t know how, but it opened. And we came here.”
At the word “window,” Laysia froze. She thought again of worlds like tapestries in a great hall, of colors and designs and threads woven in patterns that had never been seen or imagined.
Nell glared at her across the table, defiant. “We’re not crazy,” she said. “Kate will tell you the same thing. We all would. It happened.”
Shakily, Laysia stood and took from her shelf the worn copy of The Age of Anam Tur Nurayim had set there so long ago. She opened it to the most familiar of all the orchard visions.
Out of the longest night,
Into the age of wolves,
The five
Will come.
Strangers
Bringing hope of light.
Watch for them
When the time ripens
And the danger grows.
Wait then
For the opening
Of the window.
Nell whitened when she saw it.
“The age of wolves,” she said. “That’s now.”
“Who wrote it?” asked Kate.
Laysia thought of the arguments of sages. Anam himself wrote it, though he was not named. Another, a disciple, a follower. Neither. It was the product of a different, earlier time; it came from the very dawn of life and passed from the first on. Which answer would she give to these, who were themselves an answer? Who and what the five would be had been debated for centuries. And the window? On that there had been unusual agreement — it meant not a window at all but a moment, an opportune time.
And now here stood two of the five, telling tales of windows, come into the age of wolves. So she said only, “An ancient. We don’t know who.”
“But they knew about the window!”
The small one, Kate, plucked worriedly at her dress, and Laysia reminded herself that after all, this was still a child, uncertain as children were uncertain, afraid as children were afraid.
“How are we supposed to fix things?” the girl asked. “We don’t know anything about bringing light!”
“Perhaps you know more than you think,” she said, not knowing another answer. “I would never have dreamed a child could resist the mist — or another save her from it.”
Nell looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Wasn’t it you who saved me?”
“Hardly. It was this little one here.”
She watched surprise flower on Nell’s small, soft, shrewd face. Kate colored.
“I think Susan helped me,” she muttered.
“No,” Laysia said. “There was no one else on the mountain. I would know.”
Nell turned those keen eyes her way, and Laysia saw them flare with sudden pain. The girl knew the sound of the mist, too, now. Hard-shelled though she was, she could hear its acid whispering. Laysia watched her struggle to push it away.
“So these five,” Nell said at last. “What are they supposed to do?”
Laysia didn’t seem to know, and that worried Kate. She didn’t like expectations, and suddenly the woman seemed loaded with them. She had looked into her big book, face etched with disbelief and fear and surprise, and the words were like a shovelful of promises poured into a basket, heavy, heavy, and waiting to be carried. But Kate didn’t know how to carry them.
“How can people see what’s going to happen before it happens?” she asked, trying to find a way out of it. More, she wanted to know where the part about going home was in that big, knowing book. She wanted to read about windows opening to let you out as well as in.
“And this was written before the change?” Nell asked. She seemed unafraid of the book and its demands. Surprised, yes, but not terrified. Nell was never terrified, Kate thought with a mixture of relief and resentment that she couldn’t have sorted out even if she had had the time to mark it.
Laysia explained that people often foretold things like that and wrote them down. Or at least they used to. In the old days, they’d known the change was coming. So when it came, they had hope — they waited.
“Well, what did they think they were waiting for?” Nell asked.
Laysia shrugged. The long, still light of afternoon fired the windows to her back and side, and it was not cool and white anymore, but buttery, a warm glaze that slipped through the glass at the edges. All the little cups and plates and the bindings of the books with their worn
