Girl colt, I hear from Acorn, low and pained.
And that’s all he says.
And I think about Lee and Wilf and others on the hilltop we left behind.
And we keep on riding.
(THE SKY)
“My name is Wilf,” the man says, standing alone in the fog, though I can hear hundreds behind him, hear their fears and their readiness to fight if they must–
And they must–
But something in the man’s voice–
Even as the first rows of soldiers on their battlemores line up next to me, weapons at the ready, burning and blazing and ready to fight–
The man’s voice–
It is as open as a bird’s, as a pack animal’s, as the surface of a lake–
Open and true and incapable of deceit–
And it is a channel, a channel for the voices behind him, those voices of the Clearing hidden in the fog, full of fear, full of dread–
Full of the wish that this would end–
Full of the wish for peace–
You have shown how false that wish is, I show to the man called Wilf.
But he does not answer, merely stands there, his voice open, and again the feeling, the certainty that this man is incapable of an untruth–
He opens his voice further and I see more clearly all the voices behind him, coming through him, as he disregards all their lies, takes them away and gives me–
“Ah’m only lissnen,” he says. “Ah’m only lissnen to what’s true.”
Are you listening? the Source shows, next to me.
Do not speak, I show.
But are you listening? he shows. Listening as this man is?
I do not know what you mean–
And then I hear it, hear it through the man called Wilf, his voice calm and open, speaking the voices of all his people.
As if he was their Sky.
And with that thought, I am listening to my own voice–
Listening to the Land massing behind me, streaming towards this place, at the command of the Sky–
But–
But they are also speaking. They are speaking of fear and regret. Of worry for the Clearing and for the Clearing to come from the black world above. They see the man Wilf in front of me, see his wish for peace, see his innocence–
They are not all like this, I show to the Land. They are violent creatures. They kill us, enslave us–
But here is the man called Wilf with the Clearing behind him (and an army ready, I can see it in his voice, a frightened but willing army led by a blind man) and here is the Sky with the Land behind him, willing to do what the Sky wants, willing to march forward and obliterate the Clearing from this planet, should I tell them to do so–
But they fear as well. They saw peace as the same chance that the man called Wilf saw it, as a chance, an opportunity, a way to live without constant threat–
They will do what I tell them–
Without hesitation, they will do it–
But what I tell them is not what they want–
I see it now. I see it as clearly as anything in the voice of the man called Wilf.
We are here for my revenge. Not even the Sky’s revenge, the revenge of the Return. I have made this war personal. Personal for the Return.
And I am no longer the Return.
One action is all it takes, shows the Source. The fate of this world, the fate of the Land, rests on what you do now.
I turn to him. But what do I do? I show, asking it unexpectedly, even to myself. How do I act?
You act, he shows, like the Sky.
I look back at the man called Wilf, see the Clearing behind him through his voice, feel the weight of the Land behind me in my own voice.
The voice of the Sky.
I am the Sky.
I am the Sky.
And so I act like the Sky.
{VIOLA}
We’re outrunning the fog now, but the snow keeps falling, thicker here, even through the trees. We keep the flooded river to our left in the valley below and go as fast as the horses can carry us.
The horses.
Acorn no longer responds to anything I ask him, his Noise focused only on running through the pain in his legs and his chest and I can feel how much this is costing him–
And I realize it at the same time I realize he must know it, too–
He won’t be making the journey back.
“Acorn,” I whisper between his ears. “Acorn, my friend.”
Girl colt, he says back, almost tenderly, and he thunders on, through a thinning forest that opens out onto an unexpected plateau, sandwiched under the snow clouds, a thick dusting of white already accumulated across it, and we race through a surprised herd of animals calling Here to each other in alarm, and just before we plunge back into the forest–
“There it is!” Bradley calls–
Our first, fleeting view of the ocean.
It’s so big I’m almost overwhelmed–
Eating the world all the way to the cloudy horizon, seeming bigger than the black beyond, just like Mistress Coyle said, because it hides its hugeness–
And then we’re back in the trees.
“It’s still a ways,” Bradley calls. “But we’ll make it by nightfall–”
And Acorn collapses beneath me.
(THE SKY)
There is a long silence as I lower my weapon while the whole world waits to see what I mean by it–
While I wait to see what I mean by it, too.
And again I see the Clearing through the Noise of the man called Wilf, see them rush with a feeling behind him, a feeling I know very little of–
It’s hope, the Source shows.
I know what it is, I show back.
And I feel the Land behind me, waiting as well–
And I feel the hope there, too–
And that is the decision of the Sky made. The Sky must act in the best interests of the Land. That is who the Sky is.
The Sky is the Land.
And the Sky who forgets that is no kind of Sky at all.
I open my voice to the Land and pass a message back to them, back to all those who have joined the fight, back to all those who united behind me when I called them–
And who now unite behind my decision not to attack–
Because another decision accompanies it. A decision necessary for the Sky, necessary for the safety of the Land.
I must find the man who attacked us, I show to the Source. And I must kill him. That is what is best for the Land.
The Source nods and rides his beast into the fog ahead of us, disappearing past the man called Wilf and I hear him calling out to the Clearing, telling them we will not attack. Their relief is so pure and strong that the wave of it nearly knocks me off my mount.
I look to the soldiers beside me to see if they only agree with my decision through obedience to the Sky, but they are already turning their voices back to their own lives, the lives of the Land, the lives that will now, inevitably, involve the Clearing in ways no one can foresee, ways that will first involve cleaning up the mess the Clearing made.