Chapter 5: Stay

He said he did not know, and I believed him, and the believing changed something between us that I did not notice until later. I had been reading him since the crater. Pressing against the seal, watching his body, inferring from the weather and the behavior and the silences, building my picture of him from the outside the way you build a picture of a mountain from the valley: accurate in outline, wrong in every detail, and convinced of its own completeness. He said he did not know. Three words, and they rearranged the picture, because the picture I had built did not include the possibility that he was lost in the same way I was lost. I had assumed the seal was keeping things from me. It was. But it was also keeping things from him. He did not know what he was. He did not know what he could do. He did not know whether the feathers that grew green and the man who walked east carrying his healed chest were evidence of his nature or evidence of the world's need to believe in it. He was uncertain. I had never felt uncertainty from him before. I had felt grief, anger, determination, longing, the cold satisfaction of the rider scene, the compressed homesickness that leaked through the seal every night under the stars. I had felt all of these through cracks and fissures and thin spots in the wall he kept between himself and everything else. But uncertainty was new. Uncertainty meant the wall had thinned not because it cracked but because he let it. _I did not know what to do with the difference between someone whose wall breaks and someone who opens a door in it. I had experience with breaking. I had no experience with…