CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The answer to the most difficult questions is often a long walk.

—the Twelfth Wisdom

“ANZITAJ!” One of the juveniles caught up with her as she was walking out of lessons. Covilmon was one of the older juveniles, almost to adult status, and the one who’d been helping her the most.

“Covilmon. You knew I was going to be away a few days.” She had not yet seen Su Bei, and was eager for the reunion.

“Yes, but some of us still want lessons.”

They weren’t used to being told no or having anything closed to them. Manifest, after all, was always open. “Make a list of questions. I’ll be back in a few days.”

“Can I make the lessons?”

Anzi considered this. She’d only been conducting lessons for twenty-three days; Covilmon’s understanding of the Entire was still piecemeal. But the few things she had so far taught them—about the culture of the sways, the geography of the primacies, the history of the Entire, the idioms of Lucent—had been recorded in Manifest. The students could cross-check Covilmon, and ask questions when she returned.

“Yes, if you like.” Some students might even show up in the commons garden for Covilmon’s efforts. So far meeting in person for teaching was still considered rather novel. Anzi hoped she could sustain interest.

She was pleased with lessons. The little school had grown to a group of one hundred students. Even as small as it was, the challenge was to keep the interest of so many. Some days Venn and Sideree came to help, but their knowledge was imperfect. An arc ago Iritaj had dropped by and sat at the edge of the classroom, listening, and then drifting away looking if not pleased, at least not unhappy.

The best hope was with the juveniles. Adult Jinda ceb were not only traditionalists, but isolationists. Despite their intention to come home, they did not have much interest in matters beyond Manifest, beyond their minoral. That must change. If they were going to send out ships into the far realms, they should be grounded in the world they would represent. But beyond that, if the Jinda ceb were ever to find acceptance from the sways, they needed to understand the Entire. They should understand that although the Entire did not have a Manifest, the All was a commons nonetheless, a meeting ground of the primacies and the sways connected by the Nigh.

She was developing friendships here again. With Titus gone she needed them. Her life was assuming a calm pattern of lessons and Manifest, and that was good. A little routine, a little calm was good.

It gave her time to discover who she was.

She had learned to stop being curious about her life art. After all, Complete One Venn did not gaze at herself in mirrors. It was considered bad form to do so, and Anzi believed she knew why. Life art was a representation of what most people already knew about you. It was not the art that mattered; what mattered was what you were.

Hoisting her knapsack, she bid Covilmon good-bye and set out on the long hike to Bast.

“What took you so long?”

Su Bei looked up from his writing desk. He had aged. Thinner than she remembered him, he wore gray silks and a square cap over his hair, now completely black. His face was a mass of lines leading everywhere at once. “Master Bei, I only learned a few arcs ago that you were alive.” “Oh. Did you think I wasn’t?” He frowned in confusion, and the greeting ground to a halt.

His domicile was full of scrolls, but it was a simpler room than he’d kept at the Reach. He called down a few forma and opened a chair for her. “No doubt you’ve had a lot on your mind, what with the navitar business.” He glanced away. “That is, Geng De. That navitar.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Anzi, for what you’re…” His words trailed off.

He was finding it hard to refer to Titus. She could empathize. She turned the conversation. “Why didn’t you tell us you’d survived?”

Reluctantly, he put down his stylus. “Why?” He looked around. “It’s peaceful here. The Jinda ceb bring me my meals. No reason to go out. I’ve been getting a lot of work done. Writing work. I think you could agree that’s very important.”

She sighed. “The treatise.” His obsession with the cosmology of the Rose was so much a part of him she could not imagine him without it.

“No, not the treatise!” He frowned. “Why does everyone think I’m still working on that?” He narrowed his eyes, gazing at her critically. “You’re doing Jinda ceb art these days, I heard. That’s a project for the young. Too much change for me, I’m afraid. But I did the next best thing. The Jinda ceb gave me access to their viewing screens, not only into the Rose, but into the seven kingdoms. I spent years on it. Very productive years. I was able not only to map the present relationships of the kingdoms but also changes through time. One can dial up the times of interest, and the places. So you see, the Rose cosmology—that was just the beginning. The Jinda ceb gave me access to so much more. To the whole local cluster of kingdoms. Relationship, internal views. All written up now. Quite a while back, actually.”

Anzi listened to this recitation in surprise. Su Bei had found a scholar’s heaven—and he had been in the correspondency world, just like her. He had probably not missed his old friends at all.

“These days,” he went on, “I don’t have the old fire for research. I’m slowing down. What I’m working on now”—he looked around his hut—“is a less scholarly work. Decidedly less scientific. I hope you’ll approve.”

“Why would I not?”

He fingered his pen. “Well. It has to do with you.”

“Me?”

“Somewhat.”

“What are you writing, Master Bei?”

He cleared his throat. “Actually, it’s the story of Titus Quinn. Titus in the Entire. It’s taken me four books, but by the bright, I’m done. Or nearly. I took many liberties, of course, filling in people’s thoughts and motivations, for example.”

Anzi stared at him. “A biography?”

“With flourishes.” He waved at the finished scrolls. “The provisional title was Annals of a Former Prince. But I think I like something simpler. The Entire and the Rose might suit. What do you think?”

“But how can you know all that happened? You weren’t here....” Then she realized he had already told her how.

“Well, Anzi, I was counting on you to fill me in a bit. I’m almost done now, except for perhaps an epilogue. I’d like to know, for example, what happened at the end to Titus.”

Anzi’s gaze fell to the floor. “We don’t know. He left.”

Bei’s eyebrows went up. “The Rose?”

She tried to answer. Could not. For one thing, she didn’t know.

“Oh, and another thing,” Bei went on. “What happened to Johanna? You will let me know when you find out?”

Anzi stood up and went to shelves along his wall. She trailed her hand over the scrolls. “How did you know…the more personal details?”

He glanced away. “One takes a few liberties. Then, too, I had Titus’s daughter’s book of pinpricks. Old Venn gave it to me, apparently a gift from the girl. So I had quite a bit from her perspective. She’s in charge now? Remarkable. In any case, if one isn’t sure of how it went, and one can’t dial it up on the screen, one is inclined to just go by what one knows of people.” He shook his head, “It isn’t proper scholarship. It ends up being, of course, a story. Would you like to read it sometime?”

She nodded.

“Then I shall have to finish it, won’t I?”

It took her a few moments to figure out that he wanted to get back to it.

Before she left, he put a restraining hand on her arm. “I’m very glad to see you, Anzi. Once I heard you were safe, a great burden lifted. For the rest…” He waved at the thin air. “I always knew Titus would work things out. He was clever that way.”

He bent over his scroll, murmuring, “Tell him that if you ever see him again.”

She stood under the ebbing sky, trying to decide whether to spend the night in Bast or make her way to Tir, Venn’s village. She had been strangely moved by Bei’s efforts to write Titus’s story. There were times in the last twenty-three days when she’d had the sense that everything that had happened was not quite real, that it was all slipping past her, out of memory, out of her grasp—that it in fact was becoming a more brilliant sphere of her life, one that would shadow and dwarf anything that she would ever experience again.

Thinking of Su Bei’s story made her smile.

It was with that smile on her lips that she turned and saw Titus standing on the edge of the commons garden.

He wore a simple padded jacket and trousers tucked into boots. With his hair pulled back into a clip, he looked a little thin. He came toward her, since her feet were glued to the ground.

“They said you were here.” He looked up at Bei’s hut. “How is he?”

“The same as ever,” she managed to say.

They looked at each other for a long moment. He broke the silence. “Perhaps we could walk.” He tilted his head at the commons garden.

She got her feet under way.

Once they had entered the garden, they walked in silence for a time. He seemed to be having a hard time making a beginning. It was enough that he was here; it was everything. She bit back tears.

He said, very low, “I asked the Jinda ceb to let me stay. In the minoral. If you agree.”

She hadn’t realized she had not quite been breathing. She pulled in a life-giving breath. And then another. “I agree.”

She remembered—painfully remembered—everything she had said to him on board Ghoris’s ship. If he felt uncertain of his reception, it was because she had been uncertain. All that vanished. She felt a delirious happiness, a vast and physically weakening sense of relief.

Titus said, “I thought I could help you with lessons.” A quick glance at her. “If you want help.”

“There’s a lot of work.” She turned shyly to him. “I need a lot of help.”

He swallowed. Tried to say something. Failed.

They passed several Jinda ceb who frankly stared at them. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew who he was. As they walked, Titus unconsciously rubbed his arm.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“I had a mole removed. It’s nothing.” He stopped in the middle of the path, turning to her with a sudden intensity. “Anzi, I’m still working on all this.” A Jinda ceb walked by, having to move around them. Titus seemed oblivious of being in the middle of the path.

“I wake up at night, seeing things, or remembering them. And I don’t always seem to know what I’m thinking. What to say.” He took her by the arms, gently but deliberately. “Anzi. It won’t be easy for you.”

Well, she had not had easy from the moment she’d met him.

He went on. “Iritaj says I can learn to accept it—all that I am. In time.”

“Iritaj is teaching you?”

“I’m not sure we’ll get on.”

Anzi said, heart still racing from the turn of events, “He improves with time.”

As they continued through the commons, Titus said, “I thought Iritaj…someone like him…I thought he’d keep me honest.”

She said with all her heart, “You always were honest.”

He took her by the hand, off the path, finding a shaded place anchored by a very thick biot. Taking her by the shoulders, he leaned her against the trunk of the biot. “I want to find you again, Anzi. I want you to find me.”

She whispered, “I want that too.”

He nodded, as though that settled things. And perhaps it did.

He was still pressing her against the tree. She put her hand on his face and said, “Hold me, Titus.”

He put his arms around her, embracing her very tightly. As always, he stirred her. At last she drew back, letting out some of the anxiety that had been massing in her over the long days of his absence. “I thought that you might have gone home.”

“This is home.”

“I can’t go to the Ascendancy ever again,” he continued. “I hope you won’t miss it.”

It was a mark of how new they were to each other that she didn’t know whether this remark was serious or not. The draw of ultimate power still haunted him. But not for his own aggrandizement—she would never believe that was true—but because it would have allowed him to keep the Rose safe, and also the Entire. To prevent and protect. She would always believe that. But it still led to the same future: the worlds at peace; Titus corrupt. If staying away from the Ascendancy made that nightmare less real, she was happy to never go there again.

Titus said, “Sydney gave me permission to stay. In the Entire. Zhiya will help her. And Suzong and Ci Dehai. She’ll have good councilors.”

He was looking into the shadows of the commons, past her shoulder.

A squeeze to his hand brought his gaze back to her. “Drifting,” he said, and shrugged. Then: “Anzi, if your lessons are ever done—”

“Our lessons.”

“If we’re ever done, Sydney might…ask us for help.”

“Not the Ascendancy.”

“Sydney,” he mused. “I think I’m the only one that can call her that.”

“But you don’t mean go to the Ascendancy.”

Again that look into the shadows. “No. But when the Jinda ceb contact the other places, the other realms beyond the seven—when their ships are ready, we might go along.”

Anzi’s head was beginning to hurt. She really could not think beyond lessons. Beyond having her husband back.

He went on. “I suspect I wouldn’t be much good at negotiation, but you would. I might be useful as a pilot.”

“If you want to do that, Titus, you must.”

“Right now, I’m done with journeys. And I wouldn’t go without you. Ever again.”

He led her out of the grove. On the path, he took her hand in his strong left hand, the one that wasn’t damaged from the gauntlet the Tarig had put him through before they lost the realm.

Walking along the path once again, they approached a group of Jinda ceb who looked up from working on a biot art form. Gossip flew into Manifest.

Mind your own business, Anzi said gently.

The chatter evaporated. And though it was late in the ebb, she and Titus started the long walk down the minoral.