Vaelira's Room

I did not need to be told whose room it was.

I came out of the scatter of glass in a place that had no glass in it at all. The walls were stone, dark and rough and unpolished, and hung with things that had clearly been hung in a temper: a torn banner, a cracked shield, a length of scarlet cloth thrown over a hook and left there. There was a bed that had not been made, and a great many boots that had not been put away, and a low fire in a hearth that had no chimney and did not seem to want one. It was cluttered. It was lived in. And it was warm. I could not feel it, but I could see the warmth in the amber cast of the walls and the way the shadows leaned toward the fire like animals.

Vaelira was sitting on the edge of the bed with her back to me.

She did not turn around. I do not think she had heard me arrive, or if she had, she had decided that it was more dignified not to have. She sat with her shoulders drawn up and her arms wrapped around herself, and her outline was rigid in a way that I recognized from the ledge above the sea. The thread between us lay across the floor in a long bright curve, the color of the inside of a coal.

For a while I stood there.

"You can shut the door," said Vaelira, without moving.

"There isn't a door."

"Then you can stop standing in the place where the door would be."

I sat down on the floor. It seemed the safest thing. From there I could see the side of her, the line of her arm, the whitened knuckles of the hand I had watched clamped around my wrist. It had not stopped trembling. I do not think she knew.

"You could have died," she said.

"Yes."

"You could have fallen forever. You'd have gone down into that white nothing and there would have been no one and nothing and no one would ever have known where you went. Do you understand that? There wouldn't have been a body. There wouldn't have been anything to be sad at."

"I understood the clauses."

"I don't care about the clauses." She turned her head, at last, and looked at me over her shoulder, and I saw that the fury had not gone out of her, but that it had changed its shape. It had folded in on itself. It had become something older and more frightened. "I don't care about your contract. I don't care what you wanted. I care that you jumped off a cliff on your own, in secret, and did not tell anyone, and if I had been one heartbeat slower..."

She stopped.

"But you weren't," I said.

"Don't." It cracked out of her like a whip. "Don't say that as if it's a point in your favor. You don't get to stand there being pleased."

I closed my mouth.

The fire ticked. She turned away again, and I watched her shoulders rise and fall, and I understood that I was not being asked to speak. I was being asked to be there. So I was there. It is the hardest thing I know how to do, and it is nearly the only thing I am good at.

After a long time, she said, in a much smaller voice:

"I laughed at you."

"It's a good joke."

"It's a terrible joke. It's the oldest joke in the castle. I have said it to every soul that ever came near this place, because it is the safest thing in the world to say. It means I heard you, and it means I'm not going to let you close, and it lets me be the first one to laugh." She drew a breath. "And you stood there. In the gallery. With your hands out. And you looked at me as though it were true."

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"It was true."

"I know it was true!"

It came out of her almost as a sob. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth, hard, as though she could shove the sound back in, and I saw her shoulders shake once, violently, and then go still.

"I saw it," said Vaelira, muffled. "Before I ever went after you. I was on the ledge, where you left me, and something went tight in my hand. And I looked down and there was this red thing, and it was orange at the edges, and it was going somewhere very fast, and I knew. I knew what it was the way you know your own name. I had been laughing at you for a season, and it was there. It had been there the whole time."

"You could see it?"

"Not until you jumped." She lowered her hand. "It seems you have to be in danger before a thing like that becomes visible. I'd like to say that's the universe being cruel. I think it's just the universe being efficient."

"That was the reward," I said slowly. "That was what I wanted. That you'd see it."

"Yes. I worked that out." Her mouth twisted. "Congratulations. It was a very expensive proof."

I looked at the thread on the floor. It was fading now, a little, the way the light fades from an ember, though it had not yet gone out. I understood that it would not stay visible to her. That whatever the mission had given me had been given for as long as the thread was taut, and no longer. But I also understood that the seeing does not un-happen. She had seen. She would always have seen. It was a fact about the world now, and the world could not take it back.

"I was going to tell you," I said. "I couldn't. I thought you'd stop me."

"I would have."

"I know."

"And you'd have hated me for it."

"I wouldn't."

"You're a very bad liar, for a plant," said Vaelira, and turned, at last, all the way around.

She came off the bed and onto the floor in a single movement, and knelt in front of me, and before I could say anything, she took my face between her two hands.

I could not feel it. I have said that so many times now that it has begun to sound like a refrain, and perhaps it is one. I could not feel her palms against my silhouette. I could not feel the heat that I knew must be in them. But I could see her hands, shaking, closed around the empty shape of my face, and I could see the thread running between us, bright and unhidden, and I could see the outline of her lean toward me, as if she meant to press her forehead against my own.

"If you ever," she said, and her voice was low and rough and not entirely steady, "if you ever do anything like that again, without telling me, I will follow you to the end of the Between, and I will drag you back by that stupid thread, and I will not be gentle about it."

"I believe you."

"Good." A pause. A long shuddering breath. "Good."

"Vaelira."

"What?"

"Thank you for coming."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else entirely.

"Shut up, Eremos," she said. "You idiot. Shut up."

And she pulled me forward, and the fire settled in the hearth, and the shadows leaned closer, and the door that was not there remained not there. The rest of that night belongs to her. It is not mine to tell. I will say only that it was quiet, and that it was warm, though I could not feel the warmth, and that for the first time in all the long eons of my rootedness, I did not have to be anything at all.

I never learned the odds.

That is the last thing I want to tell you. I have thought about it a great deal, over the long years, and I have come to a kind of peace with it. The number was written somewhere in the ledger of that mission, and I never read it, and I never will. It was forbidden to me by the nature of the thing, and I have come to believe that this was a mercy. If I had known it, it would have changed. That is the way of probabilities. That is the sorrow and the gift of them.

But I know the other number. I found it out that night, in a warm room, with a hand shaking on either side of my face, and I hold it now the way other men hold their names.

The odds that someone would be at the other end of the thread were two.

There was, I have often thought, a third who might have been counted. Far off, beyond the walls, in a stillness that was too vast to be named, something that knows everything that has been and is and will be was quietly, gently, and entirely unsurprised. I have never asked Iris whether she knew how it would end. I do not think she would tell me. And I have begun to suspect that this, too, is a kindness, and that the one thing an all-knowing thing can give to a small green fool is the chance to do something for the first time.

Probability is a strange thing.

But I have learned, in the end, what it is for.

It is for the leap.

End of chapter