Because, just as he’d sensed with his glimpses of the Roaming World so long ago, Foulk began to see that there were brief points in time when the patterns and systems shifted. Loops could be broken. Whole new possibilities opened up. In those moments, great and even impossible things could be done—if you didn’t miss the moment. For the most part, those junctures were impossible to anticipate; they were the confluence of so many factors that even Foulk’s brain couldn’t hold and calculate them all, and some came and went in less time than it took a heart to shudder. But Foulk could see how to do it. And with the aid of Morvengarde’s device, he learned to calculate, anticipate, and use those moments.
As for Jacinda . . . it seems strange to say it, perhaps especially when talking of a man who was rapidly becoming something like an artificier of time and space, but . . . Foulk never looked back. At first it was that he couldn’t bear to learn what he knew he would find, because it was impossible not to understand what happened when Morvengarde made a deal. Foulk learned that the Great Merchant never risked losing a relic. Yes, the terms of the deals he made were always that he would collect the relics after death. But no reliquary who made a deal with Morvengarde ever lived long after that.
Jacinda had surely been dead for a long time.
As the years went by, Foulk found another reason not to look back, or reminisce, or ask any untoward questions. He didn’t want anyone to think he cared. And while he feigned carelessness, Foulk began to plan. Someday, he decided, someday he would go back for Jacinda. He would take his still-broadening skills and Morvengarde’s mechanism, and he would reset her life, and save her from himself.
But he couldn’t hurry. This was the kind of thing he’d have only one shot at, and there was every chance that, even if he succeeded, it would be the death of him. He had no idea what Deacon and Morvengarde had done with Jacinda’s relics, but if he managed to save her, whatever parts of her they’d deemed valuable would vanish, and the merchants would be furious at the loss. He couldn’t fail, and his likelihood of success went to zero if Deacon and Morvengarde doubted his loyalty for even a second. He planned, and he told himself he was waiting for the moment: that one juncture that was the singular true conjunction of time and opportunity for the saving of the girl he had loved when he was a boy.
And in the meantime, he did terrible things.
He did whatever they asked. He told himself this was to avoid any doubt they might’ve otherwise had, and he told himself when he went back to rescue Jacinda, it would all be undone. He told himself it would be as if all the dreadful things he had done had never happened at all—even though by then he knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Time isn’t like a strand you can tease out of a muffler or a knot and, simply by pulling on it, undo the whole. Foulk knew that. But he was also becoming incredibly good at time reckoning, and he told himself he’d find a way to undo Jacinda’s death in a manner that would also undo all the rest of his crimes.
He told himself many, many lies.
All the while, the years spiraled around him. The War Between the States began. Foulk worked as a sutler, following armies and selling to soldiers, still seeking worden and ferly amid the hellscape of the Civil War in his own era, and in times and places beyond that. Battle had its particular set of systems, and so did time, but he saw all the patterns, quotidian and uncanny. He carried on.
It is . . . difficult to break from any orbit. He tried not to think of Jacinda, but when he did, Foulk thought of her garden and the meteorites that had broken free of all sorts of forces—more than he understood at the time—to land improbably in what would become her dahlia beds. He himself was feeling more and more like a satellite, flung in loops that changed in subtle ways even while bringing him back over and over again to basically the same place. He put off returning to Jacinda in her garden. There was always a reason, though never a good one.
There are some systems, some patterns, you can access only if you’re willing to give something up. To really understand the deeper realities they reveal, some systems force you to make sacrifices. There is a property of multiplication, for instance, that states that three times four gives you the same result as four times three. But there is a kind of mathematics that’s done with four-dimensional numbers called quaternions. It is the mathematics of rotation in three-dimensional space: the mathematics of orbits, in fact. If you want to do these kinds of calculations, you must first accept that A times B no longer equals B times A. And then there are eight-dimensional numbers called octonions, which require you to give up other fundamental mathematical properties. There are . . . well, truths that have to be tossed aside to understand these strange mathematics, which are also true.
It’s not easy to let go of things you have always known to be true. But imagine finding that the patterns and facts you’ve held contain the evidence of a whole new reality you never suspected was there. And imagine that, to even begin to understand it, you have to question some things you’ve always believed. Bit by bit, you cast away little truths. A times B equals B times A. Or, I am not the sort of person who would willingly allow another person to die. Little by little, you give up everything you think you understand about the world. Oh, those certainties
