“I know.” Leeba settled herself more snugly into his shoulder. “Are you going to pull Garland’s tooth now?”

“Karis fixed it already.”

Leeba sighed with exasperation. “She’s always fixingthings!”

“She’s the Lost G’deon?” Garland said. His voice came out of his throat harsh and strange, as though he had swallowed a glass of spirits too fast.

J’han said gently, “Doesn’t she seem lost to you?”

Garland sat down. The twig chair uttered a squeak as though it were surprised.

“She doesn’t seem like a G’deon to you,” said J’han.

Leeba was neither talking nor wiggling, which meant she was about to fall asleep. She gazed at Garland curiously, though, as if she wanted to know what he thought.

Garland said, “She’s always fixing things.”

Leeba grinned at him.

Garland added, “The Sainnites thought the G’deon was a war leader. A man of fearsome power.”

J’han said, “Medric, our seer, has concluded that every G’deon has been well and truly terrified of his or her own power. I don’t guess that’s the kind of fearsome power you mean, though.”

“I never thought of it that way.” Garland swallowed, feeling the room, the world, shift around him like a house rebuilding itself into a completely different shape. “What can she do?”

“It’s hard to know, until she actually does it. I’ve seen her do some amazing things. She puts things together, basically–but she could just as easily be taking them apart. And she knows it.”

“But she doesn’t?”

“Fortunately,” J’han said, kissing his sleepy daughter’s head, “Karis is disinclined to destruction.”

It’s a strange and unpleasant sensation to know my life is almost over. For forty of my sixty years, I have been thinking as a farmer does, not just of the next crop, but five, ten growing seasons into the future, always asking myself, If I do this now, what will be the result then? But now, when I think that way, my thinking collapses. I will not be there to repair any errors I might make now. And it makes me afraid to think at all, afraid to take any action at all. Can I tell you this, a secret I try to keep even from Dinal (though, really, it is hopeless)? Can I write to you as though you were my friend? Or are you so angry with me that to tell you my secrets will only seem an insult, a presumption, like a drunk in a tavern who whispers to you exactly how he pleasures his lover?

Despite herself, Karis uttered a laugh.

Well, really, what choice have you? You can close this book and walk away, but you will eventually read it. No… I am guessing.I have no way to know you. I assume you will be like all earth bloods, but how can I be certain? Perhaps your disastrous childhood in Lalali (you see, I do know something about you) will leave you bent, lightning‑struck, irreparable. Perhaps it is a bitter, foolish, short‑sighted woman who reads these words. Perhaps I have vested the power of Shaftal in a broken container.

Here Karis did shut the book sharply, and stared into the cold fireplace, breathing hard. Faint voices murmured in the kitchen. Rain sighed, and then pounded on tightly latched shutters. The repaired roof held. Karis opened the book again.

But I do not think so. You see, I am afraid, and yet I am not. It is too late for me to save you. You will have to save yourself. But I know, or I believe, that it’s better that way. By the day you read this book, you will be healed. You will no longer rage at me for doing to you what I am going to do. And you will have found a companion, a fire blood, who in turn will find this book for you, wherever Dinal hides it, just as she would find it for me, had it been hidden for me by a G’deon of the past. Some things, I believe, will not change. And so I believe in you, as Rakel G’deon believed in me, when he threw that great weight of power into me. Like stones, it was. And then I awoke from my faint to find him dead. Though everything and everyone may seem to fail you, Shaftal will not, and you will be made strong.

So. I will write to you, to a G’deon whose name I cannot know, whose present pain and power suddenly evidenced itself to me mere days ago. I write to you on the day that the healers informed me that the strange weakness I feel from time to time is a herald of my death. I will live a half year, they say, maybe a bit longer, since we G’deons can be so tenacious. (Really, we are famous for it. But perhaps, in your time, such things will have been forgotten.) I write to you, for you and I will never speak because, in order to protect you, I must leave you in that midden heap where you were born. I write to you and I am not certain why. Because I pity you? Because my many, many guilts have grown impossible to live with any longer? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s that I love you, though you don’t even exist yet, though you are just an idea. I love you, and from your distant difficult future, I can almost feel you looking backwards to comfort me. “Harold” you say to me,“I am Shaftal! All will be well! ”And that’s the truth that rises up in me that I want to say back to you. All will be well. I am an old man facing his death, writing a letter to a stranger. I have no reason to lie to you. I tell you what I know even as I doubt it: All will be well.

Karis raised her eyes from the book and wiped her face carefully. When the tears did not stop, she lay back her head and sat quietly, simply waiting. Tears fell as though from someone else’s eyes. She kept wiping them, as though she feared that they would fall onto the book and blur the ink. In time, they stopped.

Dinal has just come in. She was away, tending to Paladin business, and I had not sent for her, because I have never had to send for her before. She said, “What are you thinking, to write in the dark? Your eyes will fall out of your head” I had not even noticed that the sun had set. She lit a lamp for me, andI saw by its light that she knew. No doubt she has already talked to the healers. I never have to tell her anything important. Always, she already knows. I say things to her anyway, because it lifts the weight.“I am dying” I said to her. “I’m writing a letter”

She said, “Well, it must be an important letter.”

And then we held onto each other for a while. The wood feeds the fire. The fire transforms the wood. That is our love. But you know this, don’t you?

Karis said out loud, “I can’t endure this!” She closed the book, stood up, and paced the empty room, which Garland had scrubbed clean. The candle, which she had stuck onto a projecting stone of the wall, fluttered with her passing. Her heavy, hobnailed boots scraped the floor. The book lay on the chair seat. She looked at it from across the room. Her eyes were red, her face stark. She said to it, as though replying to its long dead author, “Did you ever knowingly send Dinal to her death? Do you know what that’s like?” And then she stopped, as though she had heard the answer to her question and it was not the answer she expected. Her angry shoulders slumped. She returned reluctantly to her chair.

Now Dinal has gone, to tell our children. Half our life together she has spent on horseback, running my errands, while I usually remain in or near the House of Lilterwess. Half the year I am in the gardens, weeding the carrots and cutting great armloads of flowers to decorate thedining room tables.Young people coming to the House of Lilterwess for the first time to be novices in one or another order, bump into me in the hallway and don’t even excuse themselves. They are too preoccupied with hoping for a glimpse of the G’deon. There I am, in my work clothes, with my hair untrimmed and dirt under my fingernails, carrying a big basket of cabbages to the kitchen. This is why we don’t trust children’s judgment! When adults look down their noses at me, those are the people that don’t rise in their Orders. Not because I am affronted, but because they still have the judgment of children, and need to grow up before they are given more power. Alas, there are too many such people here lately, besotted with their own self‑importance, strutting about in their fur cloaks and whispering with Mabin about war. Where have they all come from?