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There’s a scar on her shoulder in every shape now, a puckered tracery of trauma. Wolves shy from her, love her from a distance.
Because she is expected to amble in this way, it’s relatively easy to disguise her searching; because she has been turning the last season’s leaves, picking up crow skulls, the shed and drying velvet of antlers, foxes’ teeth, it is not at all noteworthy that she goes still as prey in the presence of a great grey owl, its wizard face inclined to her, the sheen of its feathers ruffling a colour like the retreating night.
It stands, serene and dignified, in the hollow of an oak and looks at her.
Then it horks up a sizeable pellet, ruffles itself, and flies away.
Blue laughs—sudden, sharp—and stoops to pocket the pellet. She turns it over in the fingers of one hand without looking at it, just another curio for her collection. She does not take her hand off it until she is back home; she waits until sunset, when she can be looking at the scarletting sky as she cuts carefully into the pellet and finds something there to read.
Years later, a seeker scours the area just shy of the speed of sound, blurs in and out of sight, and carries tiny fragments of bone back into the braid.
* * *
Dearest Lapis,
Yes! I’ve been moving. They have us—well, me, really—all over these days, upthread and down, new assignments gathering by the minute. Your side’s tricks and traps took their toll, so our missions multiply to make up the difference. But enough of the war. Enough to say: I write at haste.
I was about to ask you to forgive my brevity. As I went to write that, though, I saw you shaking your head. You were right, back when—I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.
Thank you for your letter, more than I can say. It found me in a moment of hunger.
Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.
My memories of you spread through millennia, and each highlights you in motion. This picture of you at home, with husband, with rose-hip tea, with sunset and river, swells my heart. A stippling of sea skin indicates the whale beneath—or dots of star shape a bear light-years big—so I trace your life now, from these hints. I imagine you waking, sleeping, watching geese, working hard outside, with arms and back and legs and period technology. I will find some sumac when next I’m where it grows. I confess I’m only familiar with the poison variety, which I don’t think you mean.
Perhaps someday they’ll assign us side by side, in some small village far upthread, deep cover, each watching each, and we can make t
ea together, trade books, report home sanitized accounts of each other’s doings. I think I’d still write letters, even then.
Read the Mitchison. Loved it. (Though that seems too quick a summary—I get what you mean about words, now.) It hit me. Especially the dragons and Odin and the ending. I had a harder time with the Constantinople section—I may be missing some context there, though I can see what place it holds in the book, and the trickery reminds me of pieces of Don Quixote. But the final revelation—about the kings and the dragons—yes. Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them.
Garden seems to like roots, and this book roots in rootlessness. Are you a tumbleweed, then? A dandelion seed?
You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain,
Yours,
Red
PS. Owls are fascinating creatures, but it’s harder than I’d thought to convince them to take food. Maybe this one didn’t trust me.
PPS. I don’t mean to unnerve you, but—are you seeing shadows? I may have picked one up. No proof yet, and I may well be paranoid, but paranoia doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Commandant hasn’t let on she suspects anything, at least not yet. Take care.
PPPS. Really. That book. In a moment of daring I commended it to the attention of a few major critics in Strand 623; hard to generate momentum, but you never know—new strands rise all the time. Send me more.
* * *
Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.
She climbs upthread, taking solace in the past.
Red rarely seeks company with others of her kind. They are oddballs all—decanted after being found, at some point in their development, deviant. Or, the most deviant of all, those who decanted themselves. They are not at peace and play in the celestial rose. They carve their bodies off, they introduce asymmetry.
They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.
But she seeks company now, in one of the places she can always find it.
