For obvious reasons, I had never been much of a traveler. An invalid is confined to a narrow world, not just bodily, but mentally as well, for one rarely has the wherewithal to conjure up fantasies when all one’s living energy is focused on the bare rudiments of survival. With the sole exception of my (admittedly exceptional) adventure to the Archipelago, I had never set foot outside Evertrue. The city has some parks, and the university campus itself is a lovely site. But with senses made vulnerable by the royal gifts, I found myself conquered entirely by the beauty of the countryside, a beauty that was not merely visual, but involved every sense. There is a smell to fertile earth just after dawn, when the dew is still cool; a scent, deep and old, that every fiber in one’s body recognizes as good. The distant smell of burning firewood and fresh-cut hay and leafmold seemed to open my lungs, whispered a thousand stories of plenty and comfort.

The land itself dipped into shallow bowls and rose as it bent around hill and furrow, an undulation that delighted the eye, and all of it felted with grass ranging from olive green to rust brown. The trees showed the same variance: evergreens straight as lances furred with bright needles; oaks and birches, larches and maples, flame-crowned and smelling nutty and brittle as the wind of our passing rustled their boughs. Now and then the woods broke away to reveal the ordered squares of farms with their neat stacks of hay, or wild fields tangled through with low brush or cut with silver streams.

It was all enchanting, and more than adequate distraction from the Vessel’s pace, which remained punishing. The elves took it without complaint, unsurprisingly; I doubted an exercise this moderate would discommode elves trained to Kemses’s standards. Or perhaps there was some other reason, for it took me well into the second day to realize that I did not suffer from galls myself. I’d assumed that to be the drake’s doing; that some combination of its smooth motion and the warmth it exuded had saved me from the worst of my companions’ miseries... but observing Last’s indefatigable endurance made me wonder if our bodies were simply healing our injuries as they developed.

“Do you suffer from the ride?” I asked the genets when we’d halted at midday to dismount and stretch our legs for a few moments. One of the Pearls had vanished, presumably to make use of the shrubs, but the other three remained at my side.

“You mean does it rub us raw?” Kelu glanced at Radburn, who was tottering away to one of those handy bushes himself. “It might, if we sat on horses the way you people do. But we change position too much.”

“Our tailbones hurt,” the Pearl offered: Nine, wearing her necklace. “But it isn’t bad. We just sit crosslegged for a while, or pull our feet up.”

I had observed them to shift thus, and thought little of it. Now I wondered if I might manage to sit crosslegged on the drake’s back: I rather doubted it. I was not quite so limber, light, or perfectly balanced as the genets.

Seven had not been using the shrubs, it seemed, or at least not solely, for she returned with an ancient horseshoe, crusted with dirt. “Look, I found something,” she said, offering it to me. She frowned, puzzled. “Only I don’t know what it is. What is it, Master?”

“A horseshoe,” I said. “They keep the hooves of the horses from damage.”

“How do they stay on?” Seven asked.

“Nails,” I said. “I think.” All of the genets stared at me then and I hastened to add, “The horses don’t feel it. The shoes go through the hooves, which are like our fingernails or your claws. There’s no sensation there. They don’t feel pain.”

Seven sighed in relief, then added, “Would you like it, Master?”

What would I do with a horseshoe? And yet she was so proud of it. “I’d be pleased.”

The horseshoe went into one of the drake’s panniers, the genets went up after, and we resumed the journey. I wondered at Seven, who had first led me to the secret that would unlock the cage that had been holding us all prisoned; then she’d found the autumn flower I’d hoped to bring to Ivy as a peace offering. She seemed to have a talent for finding things—the right things—so keeping the horseshoe seemed prudent. Or was I making too much of a series of coincidences?

I knew the genets were inherently magical, bred from the deep wells of enchantment that formed an elven king, formed by spellcraft and created for the purpose of fueling greater magery. Was all that potential locked away from their own use? Or did they have some access to it, if only instinctively?

This puzzle occupied me for the remainder of the day’s journey, which was well, as none of my companions were in any way interested or able to sustain conversation. By the time we found our campsite, Ivy was not the only one suffering. All my friends, and Eyre as well, presented themselves to the priestess in hope of relief, though all with rather different attitudes; I saw in Guy and Eyre an almost scientific interest, and Radburn a wariness, and of course, Ivy and Chester more humble when they asked. But all of them shed their shoes and were given individual attention, and unsurprisingly the effects catalyzed a new debate. Eyre and Guy immediately set to dissecting the sensations and the efficacy of the spell, comparing each other’s rate of healing and depth of relief and positing hypotheses on why the differences existed. Radburn added a comment now and then, but he mostly listened with folded arms and a mulish expression, as if reluctant to admit that he’d felt anything at all.

Ivy had come to sit beside me after her receipt of the priestess’s attentions. She slipped her hand into mine and leaned on me, and this I found precious almost beyond bearing... the weight of her head on my shoulder, the smell of her, recognizable even without the violet-scented soap she’d left behind, and above all, the trust in her silences.

But Chester, whom I’d expected to join the debate—if only to mediate its excesses—did not once he and Rose were done. I’d watched him undergo the spell, able to see his back from where I sat with Ivy: the dipped head, the tense lift of the shoulders... their sag when the healing came. They spoke, quiet words I did not strain to hear, and then she left him, and for some time he didn’t move, not even to raise his head. Then he stole from the camp toward the trees, and not one of our peers noted it. I lifted my head and frowned, and this caused Ivy to look up at me.

“Something’s wrong with Chester,” I murmured to her. “Do you mind...?”

She squeezed my hand. “Go.”

I brought her fingers to my cheek, then rose and went in search.

Chester had not gone far; just deep enough into the shadows cast by the oaks to find concealment at the base of one of them, and there he was sitting all but invisible to normal sight. I picked him out quite clearly by the faint vespertine light still tinting the sky in the west, and before I saw the wet gleam on his cheeks I smelled the salt of his tears.

Quietly I crouched in front of him. The old Morgan Locke of a thousand years ago, before all I’d been through and all the changes it had wrought, would have found the sight of him in such pathos uncomfortable, and left him to compose himself in solitude. That act would have been equal parts cowardice and exhaustion: I had been suffering so much myself, and using all my strength merely to act normal, that I could not expend any power on anyone else’s behalf. I would have told myself this was courtesy, that it was only good manners to look away from someone who surely did not want his weakness witnessed.

I knew a little better now, I hoped. Our desire not to have our weaknesses witnessed was born out of our desire not to see them used against us, and out of a horror of asking for help. In such fashion, we insulated ourselves from one another, and ensured our safety, and our isolation.

The elves had shown me very clearly that isolation bred degeneracy. We were none of us meant to be alone. Not completely.

He had perhaps expected to be followed. He did not expect my hand on his knee, for he glanced at it with the bewilderment one might have expressed at the sight of a bird lighting on one’s hand. I said nothing; it was not my purpose to force him to speak before time, only to let him know that he need not suffer alone. When he did not withdraw, I resettled myself beside him in the hollow of the oak’s roots, left my hand on him, and together we watched the last of the light drain from the sky and heard the first peepings of the night insects, each of which seemed to summon a star from the firmament.

At some point, Chester rested his hand on mine. He had the hand of a scholar, and a gentleman: fine-skinned gold, but callused to sword and pen. So might my hand have been, had I been hale enough to take up the more physical arts to which our class was heir. I was very aware of its humanness: the warmth of it, and the solid weight, though Chester was a lean rather than large man.

“It’s the truth,” he said at last, his voice breaking on the first word and then steadying. “The truth has always struck me to the quick.”

“And so you became a scholar, so that you could be wounded over and over again?” I asked, which was, I thought, almost teasing. It worked, because he smiled a little.

“Something like that. But you’ll observe there isn’t much truth in scholarship, Morgan. A great deal of knowledge, yes, but they aren’t the same thing.”

“I know.” And I did, very intimately.

“Real truth, the sort that wisdom gathers... that is a rarity, and when it comes, it’s like...” He looked toward the narrow break in the trees through which we’d been watching the night deepen. “Like the first warmth after winter, that makes a single drop of ice melt from the thinnest twig of a branch. Its poignancy pierces, and one senses its power behind it, though that power is not expressed in that moment.” He brushed at his eyes with his free hand. “Truth exists through time. We recognize it in that moment it comes, but it extends forwards and backwards from that point, and that is how long it takes for us to truly understand it.”

“You have seen one of these truths,” I said, quiet.

He lifted his chin, eyes closed. “The highest priestess in all Troth can do magic, Morgan. Magic. And she touched me, and it was real, and all the stories that have been part of my life, all of my life... they really were true. And they were true not just for the fortunate and beautiful, but for all of us.” He looked at me then, lashes still spangled with tears. “We can do magic.”

What could I say to that? Here was a man of faith who had seen all his prayers answered in his lifetime, the fulfillment of his religion. He did not have Ivy’s easy acceptance of such things, for like me she’d been born with constraints against which she could not fight in our society and win. Confronted with the impossible made real, she could let it into her heart with less trouble than someone like Chester, who had been able to have anything, and so those things he couldn’t had seemed tautologically unattainable. Did I need any greater illustration of how deeply the Church’s revelations would affect the most sensitive of its believers, I had it now.

I cupped his face and dipped it, and kissed his brow, because for some things words were an obfuscation. His skin was warm beneath my lips, and in that moment some part of him became kin. Maybe he knew it, because he accepted the attention, eyes closing and shoulders growing loose.

“You have changed,” is what he said at last, when the moment passed.

“Unavoidably. Much of what I was before was a creation of my illness,” I said. “I arranged my life around the need to seem normal, and fought with exhaustion and sickness to be as personable as possible, and that not as much as I might have been without it. Now... now I suppose I’m free to find out who I might be without the constant pain.”

“Will you be so much different? We would miss you, you know.”

“Miss me! Where do you suppose I’ll go?” I snorted. “Abandon my friends of long-standing? For what?”

“For an elven kingdom?” Chester smiled lopsidedly. “I would think that would require your attention.”

“The elven kingdom was not originally sited on the Archipelago,” I said, realizing it even as I said it. “That is the place of their exile, not their home. We used to live together, humans and elves, if the histories Eyre showed me were right.”

“I wonder if the elves will still want to live among us once we are no longer their weaker younger siblings,” Chester murmured.

“So weak you bound them in magical chains and forced them south, completely off the continent,” I observed.

“With the help of demons, though. What will they feel now that we have the blessings of angels?”

He said it with such wonder that I couldn’t begrudge him the line of questioning. “I hope,” I said, “they’ll feel joy at the reunion.” He glanced at me sharply, with such an incisive expression, that I sighed and finished, “What I suspect is that it will be as unsightly a mess as any as everyone attempts to untangle their resentments, angers, and fears.”

Chester laughed. “If you’re involved, perhaps we’ll manage. Someone who is neither human nor elven entirely.”

“And completely unsuited to the mediation of personalities.” I managed a rueful smile. “I would much rather have a book in hand.”

“Well we know it. You are not so different after all.” He touched my shoulder, a hesitant brush, but I caught his hand in both of mine and squeezed it before letting it fall.

“Better enough to return?”

“Yes. And thank you, Locke.”

Having once again become my surname, I was assured of his temper. I left him to compose himself in superficial ways, to wipe his eyes and straighten his clothes.

On my return, I found Ivy had set her pallet near mine and was already in it. My arrival caused her to lift her head with a quizzical expression. I murmured, “He’s fine,” and she nodded and resumed her repose. The genets were a little less easily accommodated, but I managed to find a comfortable hole in the middle of them to lay my body down. One of the Pearls draped herself over me, like a blanket, and I resigned myself to being smothered in fur for the rest of their natural lives.

Once they started purring, it didn’t seem that terrible a durance.