How does your heart cope with needing an answer it’ll never get?

  I left the outer cloak with the kit bag in the roots of the stately yew tree on the Glade’s island. It erupted from the earth like a magnificent wooden geyser, almost like it was inviting me to climb. And frankly, who was I to decline a tree? Its low canopy splayed broad and I settled into the upper branches, finally in the place where no one in this world would disturb me. Felt like I was the only one who’d been here in years.

  The crumbled ruins down below extended out from the spring pool in every direction. Something to do with monks – was that what Miss Belladonna had said? Provided anything she uttered could be trusted at all. Someone had built these, whoever they were. Someone long ago. Clearly for reasons, but reasons I’d never know. And maybe that didn’t matter too much. Maybe nothing mattered that much if you could convince yourself it didn’t, but some things the heart simply would not let go of. How does it cope clinging onto something that’s never coming back?

  That’s why everyone was wrong: I wasn’t strong or clever or anything. I’d been too weak to ask my closest friend a question. Too dumb to realise chances didn’t last forever. Too naive and believing we’d one day have that perfect world. Too wounded to risk another failure. Too messed up to aim for anything less.

  Now it was gone. Gone. All gone. What was left without it? What was I without it? The Institute didn’t want me. Dreadfall didn’t either. Baronbridge had become a poisoned cauldron. Still the war front beckoned as ever. My fate, due and waiting. Growing up in Dreadfall, you’d always known. Perhaps it was time. Perhaps life was easier when you stopped kicking and let the river take you. I’d read a book once about an invisible rope tied to you, stretching off to the distance, always leading where your life would go. No wonder it felt like tying yourself in knots trying to pull yourself any other way.

  That book was long since burned, taken in one of the tinder scavenges many deepfrosts ago. Ironic how that book’s rope led it to someone’s hearth, but then most things in Dreadfall ended in flames. My drawings. Those books we still had here and there. The house of a neighbour you’d quarrelled one too many times with. That neighbour too, if they weren’t so lucky. Such was our way. Honour above honours. Fight for your own interests. Grab what you need. Burn what you have to.

  I think I fell in and out of sleep for a while, cradled in the branches, catching up on what I couldn’t get these past few months. I had nowhere better to be. No plan. Nothing. No home. No safe place. I didn’t trust anything, least of all myself. Dreams flitted sparsely between the leaves and the branches: faces I knew and some I didn’t, voices I knew and some I wished I didn’t. When there was nothing you could do, the simple answer was to do nothing. So that’s what I did.

  *

  In the kitchen, Omen scrubbed mud from his boots, a vibrant hamper of vegetables beside him still fresh from the garden. I took a boot from him and helped, and Miles came through the door and dropped a preliminary roll of sketches on the table, setting his paints and some coins down next to them. It wasn’t a big cottage so there wasn't much other place it could go. I asked who’d sat for him today, and he said the noble lady in the hunting lodge on the way to the city; he’d need at least another two days, but she was happy with the progress so far. Miles made a show of promising he’d try again to cut the habit of pinching coins from his higher-ups as well. And with Omen cleaned up, I sorted some cooking, and we chatted for a while, and it was… nice. More than nice. Everything we wanted was here, no tension of expectations nor need of anything more. A good, simple life, safe and warm and secure and far away from all the problems we’d survived growing up. From here, we’d all go our own ways one day, but for now, it was… more than nice. Perfect. We talked more, and when the food was ready I set it out and we ate together. Omen asked if this was what I wanted, and I said I didn’t mind what food he brought. Any was good by me. “No,” he said: “Is this what you wanted, or are you running from what you don’t want?”

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  I woke like I’d been slapped awake and the world around was dark. Deeply dark, but not like the kind in a house when you’re a growing kid and you don’t know what those jagged noises are downstairs one or two nights a week. Dark like rich, healthy soil full of nutrients and promise. The kind of dark you can grow from.

  From below me rippled a glow, and I reoriented in the branches. I’d never been out this far at night, and I’d never seen how the mushrooms and toadstools glowed so brightly. I’d never seen the world so beautiful. Everywhere across the little island, easily half a hundred of them and none the same. Large or small, tall or squat, wide or narrow, purple or green or yellow or blue. All glowing, all shining. All different. All beautiful. Nothing at all like that patch of foxgloves down the path. And sure, I’d been fascinated by that, but every bloom down there was essentially the same. I couldn’t live with that. Looking only upon those endless identical flowers, I’d grow bored of them within the day, sick of them by the weekend, and I’d chop a frenzied scythe through every last stem before the month was out. I saw it now, and I think I understood her – not like before, in the sense of connecting with who she was, but really understood her. What she was, and how she’d become it. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was only a start, but I couldn’t let myself fall the same way.

  Because below me, the world glowed, and for a moment I glowed with it. Every odd, wonky, crooked, oversized, undersized glimmer of light down there was beautiful. Lost in the endless comfort and ease of their spectacle. Those foxgloves made me want to be better, impossibly so, and yet if these mushrooms didn’t need to pretend to be better to be just as they ought to be, why should anything else? Why wasn’t it enough to exist as was natural, and be beautiful in that way? Be what we can, do what we can. Because Omen glowed too. Even a little wonky, a bit broken, he still glowed. Why couldn’t he see the beauty in that light?

  So my heart would never have that answer from him it needed, and I’d never know what I needed to know. Not knowing was the worst thing. At least once you were told, you could start figuring out how to handle what you now knew. Nothing I could do about it, and maybe one day I’d learn to live with that. But there was still one thing I could do. One thing that ought to be done. I couldn’t choose to be smart, or to be strong – that was true. But if I had one choice left, one breath left inside me, I could still choose to be kind. Someone I care for told me that. So once I’d slept, that’s what I would do, because not knowing was the worst thing. I’d put it right. Even if it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.