against the walls of the castillo in Yepes and flowed onto the plain of Extremadura in a scene of great beauty because the lake, in covering the landscape, also changed its configuration. Was it that the black waters offered one’s gaze a form so simple they created wonder, or was it that one sensed the world was less full in its plain liquid nature? Or was it that the waters told a story without a Church, a fable to greet the wishes of every heart?
The battle was coming to an end.
“We have to go, and we don’t know whether murder or poetry will carry the day,” said Luis.
“What began with one murder ends with another,” said Miguel.
“What came about through treason engenders treason,” added Luis.
“Something’s not right,” Clara murmured again.
“Something’s not right,” said Solon.
Sandro Centi stood up.
As shared by Tagore, the scene at Yepes was changing.
The lake was burning.
Tall, raging flames rose above the water and as they spread, roaring, the world was filling up—yes, the world was becoming fuller and denser, until all these crowded panoramas became suffocating, with their cities, houses, factories, and throngs of people moving indifferently through their surroundings.
Luis and Miguel vanished. Sandro staggered.
He collapsed on the floor of the pavilion.
They ran over to him, and Maria and Clara, kneeling by him, took his hands.
He was burning with fever.
“He’s dying,” said Clara.
Gustavo, Solon, and Tagore had leapt up and were peering out at the world—casting all the power of their great minds into the struggle as they searched through the universe with the force of the tea, going over every acre and every pathway, trying to find the seed of betrayal, every breach of strength and every tremor in the dream.
It is the visionary who dies, in the first exchange of gunfire, and when he falls in the snow, and knows he is dying, he recalls the hunts of his childhood, when his grandfather taught him to respect the deer.
Who told me that? thought Petrus.
Then he remembered.
“It was the writer,” he said.
He knelt down next to the painter.
“Give him snow,” he said, to Maria.
She looked at him, not understanding.
“He is dying,” said Petrus. “Give him the comfort of snow.”
“He cannot die,” she said.
Sandro opened his eyes.
“My little one, for ten years you have been there, whenever I’ve been reborn and whenever I have died,” he whispered. “How many more times will this happen?”
With an effort, he added:
“I have lived only for this peace.”
It began to snow in the Pavilion of the Mists, and there came a breath of air, which filled their thoughts with the image of a deer at the edge of a snowy forest, then of a cascade of transparent plums in a summer orchard.
The air stopped moving.
“He is dead,” said Father François.
The snow was falling gently.
Minute gilded cracks slithered like lizards across the new bridge.
“We’ve been blind,” said Tagore, “the enemy has been playing us from the beginning.”
“History is not written with desire, but with the weapons of despair,” said Petrus. “The gray tea is deadly.”
Must one be clear-sighted or blind to thwart the machinations of destiny? Of them all, Petrus was the one who foresaw how that which touches our hearts is always that which we come to understand last—alas, at first we see only the inessential, and our hope is always caught up in its net, and we pass by the garden of our soul without seeing it. The gray tea was deadly. By agreeing to let it rule their vision, Katsura and Nanzen had sealed their own ruin. Had Aelius activated its toxicity only toward the end, or had he made use of it right from the start? It was too late to go solving riddles. The enemy preferred its own destruction over a victory of the alliance. All those who had drunk the tea would die there today, enemies and allies alike, in a final tragedy.
Some are born to assume responsibility for other creatures. That is our realm, and our mandate, the ministry that gives life to the powers of death, to their territory and legacy. This eternity and this responsibility are henceforth incumbent upon you, because you have drunk today from the thousand-year-old tea.
“Who said that?” wondered Petrus.
Then he understood.
Those who had drunk the thousand-year-old tea would survive the poison, because they would be traveling forever in the company of their dead. Since the boatman from the Southern Marches had presented the three elves with the tea upon their arrival from the Deep Woods, Petrus, Paulus, and