The Crystal City Page 0,64

girl, keeping you safe. Helping turn you away from terrible futures. Giving you the freedom to make all the good choices you've made as a grown man.

And then taking away your freedom by not telling you all that I knew about the consequences of your actions. She could hear him telling her: A man isn't free if he doesn't know all that could be known about his choice.

But if I told you, Alvin, you wouldn't have done the things that had to be done. You would have tried to intervene and save everybody. And I saw those paths. It wouldn't have worked. You would have failed, and quite probably would have died right then, with your great work undone.

Instead you've turned it into something wonderful. I didn't see these paths. When you use your power you always open doors into the future that didn't exist before. So I didn't see that bridge you made across the water, I didn't see these five thousand heartfires you brought with you out of the city and into the wilderness. So it worked out well, don't you see?

Except that he'll say, "If my power opens doors to paths you didn't see, why didn't you trust me to find my own way in Barcy?"

Or maybe he won't say it. There are paths where he doesn't say that.

She reached down and laid her hands on her own belly, above the womb where her baby's heart was beating. A healthy baby, with a heartfire as bright and strong as she could have reasonably hoped for.

But nothing like Alvin's heartfire had been. An ordinary child.

Which is all she could have hoped for. An ordinary child- talented in this, having a knack with that, but all within the realms of the expected. This little boy will have no enemy pursuing him every day of his life. And instead of watching him every waking minute as I watched Alvin for so many years, I can be a natural mother to him. And to his brothers and sisters, God willing.

God and Alvin willing, that is. Because he may never come to me again. When he knows how I used him, how I deceived him, what I caused him, unknowingly, to do. How I did not trust him to make his own choices.

She sat down with her back to the window and cried softly into her apron.

And as she wept, she wondered: Did my mother weep like this, when my two older sisters died, each one just a baby? No, I know what those tears are like. Even though my first baby didn't live long enough for me to get to know him, I laid that little body in the ground and I know at least something of what she went through, laying her babies in their graves.

Nor do I weep the way my mother would have wept, if she had known about my father and his love for Mistress Modesty. I kept that secret from her because I saw the terrible consequences of her learning the truth, how it would destroy them both.

No, the way I weep now is the way my father would have wept, if he had known that his betrayal of my mother was sure to be discovered, and he could do nothing to prevent it. My sin was not adultery, to be sure. I've been faithful to Alvin that way. But it was a betrayal nonetheless, a violation of the deep trust between a man and the woman he has taken to be half his soul, and to be half of hers.

Bitter tears of anticipated shame.

And with that thought, the tears dried up. I weep for myself. It's myself I'm pitying here.

Well, I won't do it. I'll bear the consequences of what I did. And I'll try to make the best of what is left between us. And maybe this baby will heal us.

Maybe.

She hated all the maybes. For on this matter, as so many others, the fog that blocked so many of Alvin's futures from her view obscured what would happen. She could know exactly what would happen in the whole life of some shepherd she passed in her carriage, but her husband, the person whose future mattered most to her, remained so dangerously exposed and yet tantalizingly hidden.

All her hopes were in the hidden parts of his heartfire. Because the paths that were not hidden gave her no cause for hope. There'd be no happiness for her on any of those roads. Because a life