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It happens this way. Small things, accidents of timing and congruence: and then all that flows in our lives from such moments owes its unfolding course, for good or ill, to them. We walk (or stumble) along paths laid down by events of which we remain forever ignorant. The road someone else never took, or travelled too late, or soon, means an encounter, a piece of information, a memorable night, or death, or life.
He saw gentle, rolling country, rich land. The sort of soil that made a soft, easy people. Not like Vinmark, where cliffs crashed jaggedly down in places where the sea gouged the land like a blade. Where rock-strewn slopes and icebound winters made farming a wounding aspiration on farms never large enough. Where younger sons took to the sea roads with helm and blade, or starved.
What she saw in him, that moment, in the last fading of the summer daylight, and remembered ever after, was fear, and defeat. It could be read, the way some clerics read words in books.
Ceinion went after him. No one else would do it, and the cleric was aware of terrors clinging to what remained of this day, building within himself. He felt trammelled, as in a fisherman’s net of sorrows.
“Forgetting is part of our lives, my lord. Sometimes it is a blessing, or we could never move beyond loss.”
Standing still was very nearly intolerable, it could shatter the heart.
He rubbed a hand through his beard, drew it across his eyes, felt time grip him again, carrying them, small boats on a too-wide sea.
As far as Kendra was concerned, defiance needed to get you somewhere, or it was just . . . being noisy.
Some things at least still seemed clear enough, and needful: in the nighttime you prayed for light.
Some things were not for the light. Jad ruled the heavens and earth and all the seas, but the Cyngael lived at the edge of the world where the sun went down. They had always needed access to knowledge that went beneath, not to be spoken.
The past, what we have done or not done, slips and flows, like a stream to a carved-out channel, into the things we do years after. It is never safe, or wise, to say that anything is over.
Actions ripple, in so many ways, and for so long.
A silence. Late afternoon, late summer. Late in life, really, for both of the men speaking now.
The Cyngael, it was said, were never far from sadness. Rain and mist, dark valleys, music in their voices.
He had no idea how much time had passed or if, indeed, it had.
Some paths, some doorways, some people were not to be yours, though the slightest difference in the rippling of time might have made them so.
Joy. The other taste in sorrow’s cup.