the shepherds. Eventually he discovered the horses. They drew him back day after day. The head stableman let him get close to them. When, eventually, he let Darid touch them, Darid felt it again: that same joy he’d felt on the night of the baby. He didn’t know the word serenity, but he knew serenity itself. He found that he could reach for it when he needed it; he found that it never entirely left him.
* * *
Darid finally stopped speaking. Judah felt fevered and sick. Weak, somehow, all the strong and hard inside her dissolved by the story. The pasture looked different. Darid looked different. The House spreading out in the distance looked different. The Wall looked the same.
“When word got around that Lady Clorin had adopted a little girl, I knew it was you. I always listened when people spoke of you, no matter what they said. When you came, that day we were weaning the colts, I was glad to see you. But I wasn’t surprised. Not that I ever expected this.” He gestured at her, at himself, at their proximity. Somewhere she heard a night bird chirping out its incessant, repetitive song: I am here, I am here. “I’ve never been the wander-and-wonder type. I have a job and I do the job and I’m good at the job. But everything about you makes me feel like—always, even that night, when you were just a tiny baby in a towel—like there’s something I’ve forgotten. Something as basic as my own name, something I should know and don’t. Like one of those dreams where you can’t find your own house, when you walk and walk and walk down the street and it’s not where it should be.” He shook his head. “I’m not making sense. None of it makes sense.”
No. It didn’t make sense. “I suppose I should thank you.” Her voice sounded flat and lifeless.
Puzzled, Darid said, “Why?”
For finding someone to cut her free of her dying mother. For carrying that mother’s bones to the midden yard when they were picked clean. The two thoughts existed on top of each other, like layers of silk over the world. He had held her when she was a baby. He had seen her mother. He had seen her born.
Instead, she stood up, a little unsteadily. Her legs didn’t seem entirely connected to her body. “I have to go.”
“Should I not have told you?” The wondrous look was gone now. He looked sad. “I just wanted—It was amazing, don’t you see? That I was there, and the midwife—just at the right time—and the courtyard is never deserted, there’s always someone around—”
“Yes,” she said, hearing the chill in her voice. “I’m a miracle, aren’t I?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But being there that night was the best thing I’ve ever done. It was the best thing I imagine I’ll ever do. It led to you, being here. And so I know I can do good things. I know the good things I do make a difference. Maybe that’s just the world. But—it’s a better world than it could be. Isn’t it?”
“I have to go,” she said again.
Outside she stumbled up the path that led from the pasture to the House. By the time she reached the stables, she felt like she might be walking instead of stumbling. She had been cut free of her dying mother. The hounds ate her mother alive and the kennel boys threw her bones in the midden yard. The boy who threw them (the boy who had saved both of them, the boy who had no choice, the boy who sold his choices long ago) became the man who kissed Judah. Who chose to kiss Judah. Who would choose to, still.
She’d had a mother.
She found herself at the kennel. It was inevitable. There was nowhere else she could have gone but here, to stand on this patch of dust, a few feet from the gate. Was this the spot? Ten-year-old Darid, dragging her mother’s body (her mother’s body, she’d had a mother, her mother was dead, Elban had ordered her killed)—had he made it this far? If she dug down far enough, would she find traces of the blood he’d kicked dirt over?
Her mother’s blood. Her mother had stood here, died here.
She’d had a mother.
Then, another thought: this is where she’d been born. All those years of staring off at the lights of the city, and it was here. There was no family