“I understand very little, father. I may have thought I did, but I was wrong. Who understands why the Five send us storms, or heat or cold, or famines? They must have their reasons, but how can we presume to say what they are? So it is with the Queen. She’s like a force of the universe. It’s impossible to understand Her. I know a little of what the Nest is like, its shape and smell and how life is lived there. But that’s mere knowledge. Knowledge isn’t understanding. I’ve started to see that no one who is of the People can even begin to understand the Queen. Except — just possibly — someone one who has been in the Nest.”

“But you have been in the Nest.”

“Just a minor one. The truths I learned there were minor truths. The Queen of Queens who dwells in the far north is the only source of the real revelations. I thought they were going to take me to Her when I was older; but instead they let me go and brought me back here to Dawinno.”

Hresh blinked in bewilderment. “They let you go? You told us that you escaped!”

“No, father. I didn’t escape.”

“Didn’t — escape—”

“Of course not. They released me, as they did that Beng in that chronicle of yours. Why would I have wanted to leave a place where I was completely happy for the first time in my life?”

The words struck him like blows. But Nialli Apuilana went serenely on.

“I had to leave. I never would have gone of my own will. Whether the Nest is a place of good or evil, one thing is true of it: while you’re in it you feel utterly secure. You know that you live in a place where uncertainty and pain are unknown. I surrendered myself completely to it, and gladly, as who wouldn’t? But they came for me one morning and said I had stayed with them as long as was necessary, and led me outside, and took me on vermilion-back to the edge of the city, and turned me loose.”

“You told us you had escaped from them,” Hresh said numbly.

“No. You and mother decided I had escaped from them, I suppose because you weren’t able to imagine that anyone could possibly prefer to remain in the Nest instead of coming home to Dawinno. And I didn’t contradict you. I didn’t say anything at all. You assumed I had escaped from the clutches of the evil bug-monsters, as any sensible person would have wanted to do, and I let you think so, because I knew you needed to believe that, and I was afraid you’d say I had lost my mind if I told you anything approaching the truth. How could I tell you the truth? If everyone in the city thinks the hjjks are dreadful marauding demons, and always has thought so, and I stand up and say that they aren’t, that I found love and truth among them, will I be believed? Or will I simply be met with pity and scorn?”

“Yes. Yes, I see that,” said Hresh. His shock and dismay were slowly beginning to lift. She waited in silence. At last he said, very softly, “I understand, Nialli. You had to lie to us. I see that now. I see a great many things now.” He put the ancient Beng scroll away, closed the casket of the chronicles, let his hands rest on the lid. “If I had known then what I know now, it might have been different.”

“What do you mean?”

“About the hjjks. About the Nest.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I have an idea of what the Nest is like, now. The great living machine that it is. The perfection of its pattern, the way it all rotates around the tremendous directing intelligence that is the Queen, who is Herself the embodiment of the guiding force of the universe—”

It was Nialli Apuilana’s turn to look amazed. “You sound almost like someone who’s been to the Nest!”

“I have,” Hresh said. “That’s the other thing I had to tell you.”

Her eyes went bright with shock and incredulity. “What? To the Nest? You?” She recoiled and stood up, bracing herself with both her hands against the edge of the table, staring at him open-mouthed. “Father, what are you telling me? Is this some kind of joke? These aren’t joking matters.”

Taking her hand in his again, he said, “I’ve seen the small Nests, like the one where you were taken. And then I approached the great one, and the great Queen within it. But I turned back before I reached it.”

“When? How?”

He smiled gently. “Not in the actual flesh, Nialli. I wasn’t really there. It was with the Barak Dayir, only.”

“Then you were there, you were!” she exclaimed, clutching his arm in her excitement. “The Barak Dayir shows you true visions, father. You told me so yourself. You’ve seen into the Nest! And so you must know Nest-truth. You understand!”

“Do I? I think I’m very far from understanding anything.”

“That isn’t so.”

He shook his head. “Perhaps I understand a little. But only a little, I think. Only the beginning of the beginning. What I had was simply a fleeting vision, Nialli. It lasted just a moment.”

“Even a moment would be enough. I tell you, father, there’s no way you can touch the Nest without experiencing Nest-truth. And therefore knowing Nest-bond, Egg-plan, all of it.”

He searched his mind. “I don’t know what those words mean. Not really.”

“They’re the things you spoke of a moment ago. When you talked of the Nest as a great living machine, and spoke of the perfection of its pattern.”

“Tell me. Tell me.”

Her expression changed. She seemed to disappear deep within herself. “Nest-bond,” she said, in an odd high-pitched way, as though reciting a lesson, “is the awareness of the relationship of each thing in the universe to everything else. We are all parts of the Nest, even those of us who have never experienced it, even those of us who look upon the hjjks as dread monsters. For everything is united in a single great pattern, which is the endless unstoppable force of life. The hjjks are the vehicle through which this force is manifested in our times; and the Queen is its guiding spirit on our world. That is Nest-truth. And Egg-plan is the energy that She expresses as She brings forth the unceasing torrent of renewal. Queen-light is the glow of Her warmth; Queen-love is the sign of Her great care for us all.”

Hresh stared, thunderstruck by the girl’s strange burst of eloquence. The words had come pouring out of her almost uncontrollably, almost as if someone or something else were speaking through her. Her face was aglow, her eyes were shining with absolute and unshakable conviction. She suddenly seemed swept up into some rapture of visionary zeal. She was aflame with it.

Then the flame flickered and went out, and she was only Nialli Apuilana again, the troubled, uneasy Nialli Apuilana of a moment before.

She sat stunned and depleted before him.

She is such a mystery, he thought.

And these other mysteries, those of the Nest — they were great and complex, and he knew that merely hearing of them like this could never give him a true grasp of them. He wished now that he had lingered longer when he had made his Barak Dayir voyage into the country of the hjjks. He began to see that he must before much longer make that voyage again, and experience the Nest far more deeply than he had allowed himself to do that other time. He must learn what Nialli Apuilana had learned, and he must learn it at first hand. Even if the learning of it cost him his life.

He felt very weary. And she looked exhausted. Hresh realized that they had carried this meeting as far as it could go this day.

But Nialli Apuilana apparently wasn’t quite ready to end it.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you say? Do you understand Nest-bond now? Egg-plan? Queen-love?”

“You look so tired, Nialli.” He touched her cheek. “You ought to get some rest.”

“I will. But first tell me that you understood what I was saying, father. And I didn’t really need to say it, isn’t that true? You already knew all that, didn’t you? You must have seen it when you looked into the Nest with your Wonderstone.”