The cloth stayed behind at the crossroads. We walked for three more days, and I thought about it less than I expected, because the road was giving me other things to think about. Maretti had begun to teach. I do not mean he stood before the group and delivered lessons. I mean that when the young man asked him a question about Hul, Maretti answered it. And when the resolute woman asked a different question, Maretti answered that too. And the answers were warm and certain and they were not Hul's answers, because Hul had not been asked and would not have answered if he had been, and each answer added another layer to the version of Hul that traveled alongside the actual Hul without being him. I had watched this process before. In the wars, commanders became legends while they were still alive, and the legends walked beside them like shadows that moved independently, and the commanders could not correct the shadows because the shadows served the army better than the truth did. A legend does not tire. A legend does not doubt. A legend does not sit against a wall and fail to heal a child. I have learned, across a very long existence, that the first thing to separate from a living being is its image. The being walks. The image flies. And the image arrives everywhere first. I did not yet know what Hul's image looked like when it arrived without him. The village was larger than the settlement. Not a city. Not a town. But a place with a name, though Birdie did not learn the name until later. A place with a market, a forge, an inn of sorts, and the particular density of human activity that comes from being located where two roads…