Ysabel. Guy Gavriel Kay

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      “I had gone. I don’t even know why I checked inside. I was halfway across the market square.”

      He considers that. “Then you are stronger than you knew.”

      “I don’t know anything,” the boy says again. His voice is lower now, intense. There was someone like this, long ago. A vague sense tugs at him. But there are too many years between. He has been here so many times.

      Ned Marriner leans back, folding his arms defensively across his chest. “I have no idea who you are, or what happened to me yesterday or today, if you heard us talking about that.”

      He nods. The mountain.

      “So what is this about?” the boy demands. He really shouldn’t be using that tone. “You said we were an accident, had no role to play, but you followed, or waited for us.”

      He is clever, it seems. “Followed yesterday, waited just now. I took a chance you’d come back.”

      “But why?”

      The waiter is hovering. He signals for another of what each of them was drinking.

      A mild curiosity rises. He still has some of that, it seems. “You don’t feel reckless, interrogating me like this?”

      “I’m scared out of my mind, if you want the truth.”

      “But that isn’t the truth,” he says. Who did this one remind him of? “You came back by choice, you’re demanding answers of me. And yet you know that I sculpted a column eight hundred years ago. No. You’re frightened, but not ruled by it.”

      “I probably should be,” the boy says in a small voice. “It isn’t a column, either, it’s a woman.”

      The quick, familiar anger. A sense of intrusion, violation, rude feet trampling in something private beyond words.

      He makes himself move past it. By today’s standards this one is young, can still properly be called a boy. In the past, he could have been a war leader at his age. Fit for challenging, killing. He has killed children.

      The world has changed. He has lived through the changes, at intervals. Coming and going, enmeshed in the long pattern. Sometimes he wants it over, mostly he is terrified, heart-scalded that it might end. You could grow weary beyond measure, feeling all those things at once.

      The waiter comes back: an espresso, an orange juice. The brisk, habitual motions. He waits until the man leaves.

      He says, still speaking English for privacy, “Once this awareness comes to you, it can be a kind of anchor against fear. You know what you are feeling, know a new thing is in you. The fear lies in not understanding why, but already you’re not the person you were yesterday morning.”

      He sips his espresso, puts the cup down, adds quietly, “You never will be again.”

      A cruel thing to say, perhaps; he isn’t beyond enjoying that.

      “That’s scary too.”

      “I imagine it is.”

      He remembers his own first awareness of this boy, decisions made quickly. They look at each other. The boy glances down. Few people meet his gaze for long. He finishes his coffee. “Frightened or not, you came back. You could have kept walking. You’re inside now.”

      “Then you need to tell me what I’m inside.”

      Another flaring within. “I need to do nothing. Use words more cautiously.”

      “Or what?”

      Opposing anger across the table, interestingly. He really isn’t accustomed to talking this much any more.

      “Or what?” the boy demands again. “You’ll stab me in here? Pull the knife again?”

      He shakes his head. “Or I’ll walk out.”

      Ned Marriner hesitates again, then leans forward. “No you won’t. You don’t want to leave me. You want me in this, somehow. What did we say, Kate and me, that you needed to hear?”

      Someone else had once talked to him this way. That nagging memory still there. Was it centuries ago, or a millennium? He isn’t sure; people blur after so much time, but he believes he killed that other one.

      He looks across the table and realizes that he was wrong, in fact. This impudent tone isn’t the same as that other, long-ago voice: with a degree of surprise (again) he sees that the boy is close to tears, fighting to hide it.

      He tries, unsuccessfully, to remember when he felt that way himself. Too far back. Mist-wrapped, forest-shrouded.

      This defiant anger is a boy’s, in the end. Or perhaps in the beginning. Anger at helplessness, at being ignorant and young, not yet an adult and so immune (boys believed adults were immune) to the pain he is feeling.

      Had he been a different man he might have addressed some of this. Ned Marriner has, after all, come to the edges of the tale, and he might even be an instrument.

      But that is all he can be. You didn’t confide in tools or comfort them. You made use of what lay to hand. He stands up, drops a few coins on the table. The boy lifts his head to look at him.

      “I don’t know if you said anything I need. It is too long to tell, and I’m disinclined to do so. You are better off not knowing, though it may not seem that way to you. You will have to forgive me—or not, as you like.”

      Then he adds (perhaps a mistake, it occurs to him, even as he speaks), “I wouldn’t go up to Entremont on the eve of Beltaine, though.”

      The youthful gaze is sharp, suddenly.

      “That was it, wasn’t it?” Ned Marriner says. He doesn’t look any more as if he might cry. “What Kate said? About that place?”

      The man doesn’t respond. He really isn’t accustomed to answering questions. Never has been, if truth were told, even from when he entered the tale himself a little west of here, having come across the sea.

      Everyone here has come from somewhere else.

      He’d said that to her, once. He remembers her reply. He remembers everything she has ever said to him, it sometimes feels.

      He walks to the café door and out into the late-April afternoon.

      The dogs have been waiting, scuffling around the market nearby. They attack as soon as he reaches the street.

      Ned heard a woman scream. There were shouts and—unbelievably—the snarling of animals in the middle of the city.

      At the two tables outside people were scrambling to their feet, backing desperately away from something. Ned leaped up. He wasn’t really thinking. Thought took too long, sometimes. He ran towards the door. On the way, he grabbed one of the café chairs.

      It may have saved his life.

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