"I think I do."

He raised his eyes from the ground and regarded me calmly. "Well. I think my stories are all told, Rush, the important ones; and now that those two look-alikes have come back, you'll be going home, I suppose."

Old Blink! I had learned truthful speaking in that winter with him, and the weight and tenderness in his words made no answer possible. I only knelt by him and waited. He said nothing more, though; only watched the ant struggling through the grass like a man in the dark.

"Tell me what I should do," I said at last.

"No, no," he said, as though to himself. "No… I guess, you know, all your foolish talk about me being a saint did affect me a little. Enough so that I wanted to tell you a story you would remember, and could repeat. But it's no story, is it, only 'and then, and then, and then' endlessly… A saint, no. If I were a saint, I wouldn't tell you, now, what you should do. And since I'm not a saint, I can't."

I thought of Seven Hands, and the day we had gone to see Road. He'd said: "If you're going to go somewhere, you have to believe you can get there. Somehow, some way." I thought of Sewn Up and No Moon, living at the river house but tied to the warren by strong cords. I thought of Once a Day. No: though Belaire tugged at me, I couldn't go home again. Not yet.

"Blink," I said. "You said, about the four dead men, that if I wanted to know more, I should ask the Long League, or the angels."

"Both gone."

"Dr. Boots's List is a child of the League. And knows things the League knew."

"So they say of themselves."

"Well," I said, and took a breath. "I'll go ask them, then."

He sat silent, blinking at me as though he had just then noticed me kneeling by him, and wondered how I had got there.

"Maybe," I said, "I’m not to be a saint. Maybe not. But there are still stories to learn, and tell." I reached down with a finger and made a path through the grass for the ant, who stopped his labors, bewildered. I wondered if I would weep. I had wanted to be a saint.

"I know the way there," Blink said. "Or I knew it once."

I looked up. His brown face was creased in the beginnings of smile-wrinkles. He hadn't wanted to tell me what to do; but I had chosen as he would have chosen for me. "I wonder, though, if they'll tell you what you want to know."

"There was a girl," I said, "a Whisper cord girl, who years ago left Belaire, and went to live with them. If I could find her, she'd tell me."

"Would she?"

I didn't answer. I didn't know.

"Well," Blink said, "if you listen now, I'll tell you how to reach them. That's the first thing."

I couldn't think, at the same time, of Little Belaire, of Once a Day, and of the directions Blink would give me, so I held up my hand for a moment, palm toward Blink, as gossips do before they hear a tale, and made myself as much as I could an empty bowl; and Blink told me then how I must go from here to where the List lived; and he told it in such a way that I couldn't forget it: because in a way he was a saint, he was: my saint.

We rose, and linked arms, and walked out into the blinding meadow strewn with new flowers. The twins came to their saint, who patted them and giggled, become again the little old man they knew. We sat and talked, and his eyebrows danced up and down and his tiny hands slapped his knees. The twins supplied news from the warren, what little they knew. He listened, and yawned in the heat; finally he lay down, his feet up, on the slope. "Yes, it goes on there as always… No new thing, and if there were you wouldn't know of it… well. And then, and then, and then. Another spring, and getting hot too… Quick enough it comes and goes…" He was asleep, hands behind his head, breathing quietly in the warming south wind.

We went away quietly. I gathered my pack, but left the fine string hammock for Blink: a small enough gift.

"We'll be at the river house tonight," Budding said; and Blooming said, "Then you'll get home tomorrow."

"No," I said. "I'm not going home. But I'll go with you as far as the river. I'll find Road there."

"I thought you weren't going to be a saint," Budding said.

"I don't know about saints." We had reached the edge of the little brook. "But I decided to leave home, and I think I ought to stay left." I looked back as we went into the woods and caught a glimpse of Blink, asleep in the meadow. I wondered if I'd ever see him again.

I wonder if I ever did.

Seventh Facet

I stood next dawn at a great joint of Road, kicking apart the pink embers of the night's fire. Southward, Road fell away to woodlands gleaming in a clear morning, westward it led into lands still night. Above my head, spanning all of Road, was a great green panel supported on rustless pillars, that creaked and swayed in the rising wind. It was lettered, meaninglessly to me, except for two arrows of stained white: one pointing south, one west. I packed my little camp and went south.

In the afternoon I came into the wooded country I had seen. Road entered the forest; and the forest too entered Road. The forest stepped down steep inclines in great trees, and gracefully out onto Road in saplings and weedy trees which tore up the gray surface as spring breaks ice on a river. The liquid slide of the big trees' shade was over it, and when I waded a stream that had cut a deep wound across it, I saw that among the stones in the stream were pieces of Road. And will it all one day be washed away? I thought of Blink talking about the bits of the great angel sphere.

I was in the forest seven days without it thinning or breaking, only growing deeper and older (though not as old as Road). It was an ancient place, and nice to be in - nice to follow Road through, anyway. Night made it different; it made you think that a thousand years ago there had been no forest here; there might have been houses, or towns, and now there were only trees, huge and indifferent, the undergrowth thick and impassible except by animals. Only Road here was for man anymore; and Road would be conquered in the end. The fire I built made a great vague hole in the dark, and kept animals away, though I heard noises; and the nations of the insects made their songs all night. I slept lightly through them, waking and dozing, my dreams like waking and my waking like a dream, all filled with those ceaseless engines.

It was as though I had been taken in, by the forest, and forgotten that I had ever been elsewhere. I continued to be afraid at night, but that seemed proper; in the day I walked, turning my head side to side to see only trees. I even stopped talking to myself (which truthful speakers do all the time, alone) and just watched, as the forest watched me. I had become part of it. So much so that when between waking and sleeping in a moonless night I heard two large animals pass near me, and one come close on padded feet, I only waited, absolutely still like any small prey, alert but somehow unable to wake fully and shout or run. And they passed. And next morning I was hardly sure they had been there. I sat smoking in the morning, wondering if I should be grateful I had escaped; the forest had so far convinced me that I was the only man in the world that it was not until I heard human voices singing that I realized it was a man who had passed me in the night.

The birds talked to each other and even the sunlight seemed to make a noise as it fell unceasingly, but the human voices were another kind of noise, which sorted itself from the forest's as soon as I heard it. For a reason I remember but can't quite express, I hid when I heard it was coming closer, coming from the way I had come. From within the great ferns at Road's side I watched; and along the broad gray of Road came, not men but one, then two, then three enormous cats. I had seen cats before, shy feral faces in the woods, and one or two who lived at Belaire and caught mice and moles. These cats were not of that kind; it wasn't only that they were huge - if they had stood on their hind feet like men, they would have been nearly my height - but that their soft, padding motion was purposeful and their lamplike eyes so observant, so calmly smart. I had heard of one cat like them: the cat that came to Belaire with Olive.