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agreed with my nonsense.
    “Truer than perhaps you know, good Soukyan. We must wait together, just a little while, for that birth. In the meantime, you remain our guest, and no hurt will come to you.” He paused, scratching his head in a peculiarly human gesture. “Well, no, that may not be entirely true; my apologies. All the same, I would not waste time in attempting to repeat that first flight. Knowing you, however, I suspect those are wasted words, but I must leave that to your own judgment.” He bowed formally, and was gone.
    There was no lock; only the guard. When I put my head out into the corridor, after a little time, he smiled almost shyly at me, but both hands dropped to his waist, at which dangled a remarkable variety of sharp objects, long and short, and a couple of serviceable bludgeons to boot. I was touched by the implicit flattery, and reasonably certain that I could silence him well before he got any one of his toys free and pointed at me. But I looked at him and saw myself at his age: so earnestly steadfast, so proud to be trusted by my masters with such a responsibility…and I could not have laid a hand on him. Besides, there were other guards beyond. I went back into my cell and closed the door.
    And there I stayed, for days I grew too bored to bother counting. I invented ways to entertain myself, exercise and meditation—both in the economical South Island style—being the most obvious; but I also requested pen and paper, and tried my hand at poetry, which I love and memorize, and have absolutely no gift for. I am especially fond of the ballad form that my sister taught me, which is practiced in the west country, around Jara and Suyanashak. I wrote four during the time of my captivity in that place, most of them drawn from heroic legends of long ago, and all of them quite bad.
    I also meditated a good deal on what Brother Laska and the dying Hunter had meant. There were trees aplenty on the grounds— that place was squarely in the middle of an ancient wood, after all—but no individual trunk that I had ever known to have legend or reputation attached to it. Yet Laska was very nearly as old as the forest itself—or had always seemed so—and had spoken of this Tree as a thing he could guide me to. More, he had seemed eager to do just that, and most dismayed when he saw me a captive. I hoped he might come to my cell to chat with me, but he never once did.
    Master Caldrea did come, however, now and again. Often he came in company with one or another senior brother or subordinate Master: I remember in particular a thin, intense Master named Tudo who kept returning constantly to the matter of that place’ s supposed loss of power and influence, even justifying the deterioration of its environs. “We have never been easy to discover; we have always preferred to go unnoticed, to be overlooked, passed by. Yet those who seek us—like you—still find us, and we ourselves still find anyone we care to find, still learn what we choose to know. Nothing has changed, nothing at all.” But Master Caldrea’s sidelong glance and the slight twist of his mouth told me otherwise.
    Sometimes, surprisingly, he would come to bring me some delicacy or other that he thought I might enjoy. When I commented that I was eating better as a prisoner than I ever had as a novice, as though I were being fattened like a goose for Thieves’ Day, he replied that this was only to be expected. “You are important to us, Soukyan, by now you are part of our folklore. The one who got away, the one who defied the Hunters… I assure you, among our young ones at least, you are positively mythical.” He grinned at me, half-tauntingly, half with something almost like affection. “That is why I make a point of setting them to guard you, those young ones. I have a sort of theory that it would go against your conscience to harm them. So far, it has proved correct.” He patted my arm and added smugly, “Admirable.”
    “I would not