Chapter 5: The Search

The texts dried on their hides. The words became objects. Elde's sessions grew longer, drawing twenty, then thirty to the evening fire, and the consistency she imposed was the consistency of repetition: the same stories, in the same order, with the same emphasis, until the listeners could recite them and the reciting became a form of prayer nobody had named as such. Ryn went to the river three times that week. She told Hul about the texts. He listened. He did not go to the shelter to read them. She did not ask him to. The channel between them was narrower than the channel between him and Maretti, and it carried less volume, and the less was the point. Maretti's channel broadcast. Ryn's channel reported. Both were necessary. Neither was sufficient. I watched these things happen and I held them the way I held everything, and while I held them I was doing something I have not told you about. I was looking for the way home. I made a promise. In the settlement, at night, standing beside a being who was looking at the stars with the longing that had coordinates. I said I would help him find a way back. I meant it. I have always meant it. The meaning has not diminished across the months and the miles and the building and the naming and the texts and the kneeling and all the weight that has accumulated between his desire to leave and his ability to do so. _A promise is the most dangerous sentence a person can speak, because a promise lives in the future, and the future is the one place you cannot see. You make the promise in one world and you keep it in another, and the two worlds are never the same,…