That evening, she sat in Abasio’s wagon, telling him of all this, his arm around her as it often was, his cheek against hers. She said the word “love,” and his arm tightened. She turned toward him and met his lips. She thought dazedly that it was her first kiss; Oldwife Gancer had told her about first kisses, waxing romantic for such a practical person. It wasn’t a surprise, was a surprise, was a fantastic, wonderful surprise—especially that she did not have to decide anything at all. What happened after the kiss was a silent clap of thunder, something that should have shaken the sky so that everyone heard it, though later it seemed no one had either heard it or seen the lightning that preceded it, the luminous, effulgent air that seemed to burn without heat, the fiery air that held them at the center of a great crowd. She had felt them, the people, felt their eyes, calm and studious and concerned, and yet they two had been quiet and private as though they had hidden themselves in the depths of a forest while it all happened, and after a while, happened again. They did not even speak of it. They did not need to speak of it. They knew what had occurred and how it had been witnessed; they were sure of that, though not sure why. The whole thing was simply too much for a why.
“Do I need to tell anyone?” she whispered. They were lying on his bed, covered by a feather quilt.
He was lying dazed beside her, conscious of the immensity that had come to surround them from some strange, evanescent, utterly unidentifiable source. He summoned consciousness with some difficulty and made a slightly shrugging motion with the shoulder her head was lying on. “Do you feel you should tell someone?”
“No,” she said. Though she might tell Precious Wind. Sometime. If it mattered. If, for example, she found herself—pregnant. Well and well, so, if she were, they would decide what to do on their way to Tingawa. She had sworn to get there; this would not interfere.
Later that evening she returned the librarian’s book. “Did you find what you needed?” he asked her, aware of her eyes for the first time. They had a depth to them he could not quite—“perceive” wasn’t the right word. What was the right word for something one knew was there that one could not sense in any normal way? All he could do was repeat himself: “Did you find what you needed?”
“I’m sure I did, Elder Wordswell. I’m sure when I find out what it was, the answer will be there.”
“You’ve copied the book?” he asked, astonished.
“Oh, the book. Yes. Someone is remembering it for me,” she said, astounding him yet further.
Virtually overnight, the drifts melted down; Abasio took Blue out onto the fields south of the abbey and rode him a bit, asking him please to fancy it up so they wouldn’t look like idiots. Blue said fancying it up would make them look more like idiots, but he did it anyhow. Blue had met fancy horses; he knew what horses could be trained to do. If the man wanted prancing, very well, prancing he would get, and dancing with this foot, then that foot, so that any observer would get a very false idea about what kind of horse Abasio was riding. Such horses had been trained out of having any minds of their own. Blue had no time for such horses, though he had plenty of time to notice that during their riding sessions no men in armor went into the anytime dining room.
“When are you going to dye the horses?” Xulai asked that evening.
“You don’t have school tomorrow or the next morning, right?”
“It’s a holiday they have here, a kind of feast day.”
“Both mornings I’ll go out where I’ve been exercising Blue, you’ll come along on Flaxen, and I’ll pretend to be giving you some pointers on riding. That’s to get people used to your being out there. The second night, I’ll hitch up Blue and drive the wagon away south. I’ve found a place to hide the wagon where it’ll be safe, an old half-fallen-in building, maybe a cabin or barn, in a small hidden canyon with a little stream in it. The wagon will fit inside. I’ve already cut some trees to hide it. I’ll change Blue’s appearance that night and pack the things we’ll need for the trip. I rode on south the day before the storm; there’s a farmer southerly a few miles who had a mule for sale. I bought it and told him I’d pick it up in a few days.
“The morning after I go, you take Flaxen out to the field, just as we’ll have been doing. There’s a corner of the field where you can’t be seen from the parapets. You’ll move in
