The warmth lasted three days. I do not mean the weather, though the weather held too. I mean the quality between us. The opened door, the thinned seal, the agreement to see what came next together. For three days I walked beside him and the silence was the silence of the fire's last night: inhabited, warm, shared. He spoke to me more in those three days than he had spoken in all the weeks before. Not much. Not revelations. Small things. A comment about the way the light struck the grass in the mornings. A question about the wars that I answered carefully, giving him the weather of the memory without the details he had not earned yet. Once, something that might have been a joke, though his delivery was so flat I could not be certain. For three days, the door was open. Then the group grew, and the door began to close, and I understood, too late, that the closing was not his choice. It was the cost of the growing. A being who is becoming the center of something cannot also be the person who sits by a fire and asks a woman made of wind about her wars. The center demands a different posture. The center requires the seal. I should have known this. I have watched powerful beings lose themselves to the demands of their positions for longer than most institutions have existed. The loss is never dramatic. It is gradual, like the cooling of a stone after the fire goes out. You do not notice the temperature changing until you reach for the warmth and find it gone. The group was fourteen now. Five more had joined in the three days since the warm night. A family of three from a hamlet they had…