So Foulk looked for the obscure pattern he could sense but not see, and he yearned for Jacinda, and those two things held back the madness of the rest of the things he could not ignore, and time passed. The pattern still eluded him, but the search for it accomplished what Foulk had hoped: it drove the others into the scenery. Little by little, he forgot what it was like to see them all, hear them all, sense them all. They became a blur, a rushing in the background, like the landscape seen from a carriage or a train when your eye is focused somewhere other than on the window and what flashes by outside it. But it was still all there, ready to pop back into focus at any time.
One afternoon when he was almost sixteen, Foulk took a walk, looking for his pattern. He walked straight out of town on one of those old, old roads that crisscrossed the country. He ignored the infinitely repeating spirals and ratios in every flower head and he forced himself not to try to predict the movements of the flocking starlings or get lost in the wave action of wind across the wheat in the fields. Instead he looked for examples of the elusive system, and he let the road carry him deep into the countryside.
It had rained earlier that afternoon, but the sky had cleared, and now as the sun began to set with red and gold clarity, it reflected off the puddles that still lay in depressions in the rutted old roadway. He tried to ignore these, too; seeing the perfect mirroring of the world above in the road below at those uneven intervals was like sitting under a leaky roof that dropped single drips onto his forehead without predictable frequency. It was both system and nonsystem, and it hurt.
But then, because of course he couldn’t totally ignore the puddles if he wanted to keep his feet dry, he saw something that made him stop: a puddle that reflected something it shouldn’t have.
Reflections are predictable, mostly. They can be calculated. But mirrors, even the most ordinary of them, are uncanny. They all have a glaze of what Foulk would soon come to call the quality of ferly. Any surface that can become a mirror has the potential for bewitchment.
This puddle showed him a fingerpost, with two hand-shaped signs offset from each other by ninety degrees.
Foulk looked up and around himself, but of course, if he’d been walking toward a huge road sign, he’d have known it. There wasn’t a sign. There wasn’t even a crossroads. There was just this one very old, very rutted road, which he’d been following now for a good four miles without a single turning, and there were no intersections visible ahead, either.
But when he looked back down at his feet, Foulk found the crossroads still there in the puddle, plain as day. Or not, actually, because the sky over the reflected fingerpost was not the bright clear sunset of Foulk’s own sky, but a deeply twilit one instead: dark enough that even when he crouched for a closer look, Foulk couldn’t read the words on either of the finger-shaped signs. But he could see himself. There was a Foulk in the reflection, perfectly mirroring the boy’s surprise as he looked out of the puddle.
“You can see it,” said a voice, and another face appeared in the puddle.
It was . . . well, it was Morvengarde, and it’s impossible to describe the man until he’s standing before you. But there he was. He was there in the reflection, and he was there still when Foulk turned away from the water on the ground and looked back at the real sky, looming over the boy and blocking out what was left of the sun.
It may surprise you, since Morvengarde and the company he founded are so much a part of Nagspeake history, to know that he has a place in the world beyond this city. But his shadow is long and his reach is broad—even so far as to lonely country roads in the middle of nowhere.
And when he appeared to Foulk on that lonely road, he was so instantly, obviously a part of the obscure system Foulk sought, and Foulk was so desperately relieved to have not one but two terms in the pattern—the reflection that did not reflect the world around it, and the stranger himself—that the boy almost completely failed to notice how terrifying the man was. At first, anyway.
“Yes,” Foulk said, getting to his feet. “I see it. But where is it?”
“That particular crossing?” the man nodded down at the fingerpost. “Everywhere. Everywhere you are, anyhow. It’s the crossroads you carry with you.”
“I carry a crossroads even when I’m not at one?” Foulk asked, looking back down at the reflection.
“Oh, you’re at one,” the man said with a smile. Then he held out a hand. “My name is Morvengarde.”
Foulk introduced himself, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the puddle. “Why can I see it? Can everyone see their crossroads?”
“Certainly not,” Morvengarde said, chuckling. “Most people would go mad if they had to be reminded constantly that their choices have consequences. You can see it because—and correct me if I err—you often see things others cannot. And what you cannot see,” he added meaningfully, “you sense.”
“The obscure system,” Foulk said eagerly. “It’s real, isn’t it? This is part of it. You’re part of it. Tell me what it is! Please. I’ve been looking for so long.”
“It doesn’t have a single name,” Morvengarde said. “Different people have different names for it. The one I hear most is
