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wall of the hospice, his well-worn coat buttoned to the top. He looked like every field hand I’d ever seen. He didn’t speak again for a long while, pulling a time or two on a tobacco stem, the end flaring in the dark.
    Then he stood up and came close so that I could see his expression. Or rather the lack of expression. Empty, by those silent gods. His face was just plain empty. In philosophical terms, I’d say diffident. Lacking animus.
    But that was my nerves trying to gain control of my fear, which had begun to gallop along irrationally. The Grove didn’t have real enemies. Debates, sure. Spirited disagreements. But never hate. Never . . . apathy.
    “Did you enjoy those few moments of clarity with your wife?” he asked.
    A chill shivered through me.
    I stared, unmoving.
    “You’re welcome,” the man added.
    My dying gods. Velle. Had to be. The Velle knew how to render the Will, cause things to move, change . . . stir. And they lived inside the Bourne, where Anna had been taken . . .
    “You plan to take her back,” I surmised, trying to sound defiant.
    “Do you honestly think a single woman is that important to us?” The man took a long pull on his tobacco stem, savoring the smoke as it rolled from his lips and nose in slow streams.
    “She must be,” I replied. “Why else make a trip to Aubade Grove to give her a moment’s clarity.”
    The man turned and began to stroll, clearly expecting me to join him. I didn’t follow. Several strides down the small street he stopped. Never looked back. Waiting.
    After several long moments of indecision, my skin began to prickle. A chill. But not of cold. Not temperature cold. This chill moved inside me. I shuddered as it touched my bones, as it caressed memories I’d successfully forgotten—about being an albino child, about how I’d rescued Anna. I felt like a cello string being played on a bitter midwinter morning, moments from snapping and ending that deep, dry note.
    I dropped to my knees, staring up at the back of the Velle, who hadn’t moved, save his head, which cocked back as if to some expectant pleasure.
    That’s when I felt the chill deepen. And in my mind images flared. Dark hovels rank with the sweat of childbirth labor. Long brackish ponds walked in by stooped figures harvesting mud-roots. Fields of short graves.
    I agonized with the brutal suggestion of the images. My body and soul resonated in the night with the Velle, as if we’d become connected somehow. And just as my own dark secrets began to surface, the note ended. I crumpled to the stones, exhausted, defiled in a way one feels who’s been caged and put on display as a low one . Something to be gawked at. Ridiculed. I knew those feelings. Oh, I knew them.
    When enough of my strength returned, I stood and limped to the Velle’s side. If I hadn’t broken or cracked a bone in my left leg it sure felt like I had. But I shuffled alongside him as he started to stroll.
    The man turned his indifferent eyes on me. “What do your stories say about the races in the Bourne?”
    His question needed no answer. We both knew what the stories said. Whatever lived in the Bourne had been herded there, placed by gods who’d abandoned us all. And those races were kept in the Bourne by a barrier of some kind. A veil, the stories said. Raised by the gods to keep these Quiet races at bay. Keep them from coming into the Eastlands to test men. Test them with war. With death. With suffering.
    He was merely reminding me of all this before coming to his purpose.
    “There’s an argument about to begin in your College of Philosophy,” he said. “Not a Succession of Arguments,” he clarified. “This won’t involve your colleges of astronomy or mathematics or physics. Or even cosmology.”
    I looked up at the five great towers of the Grove, their observation domes looming hundreds of strides above. They formed an immense pentacle at the center of the city. Each college had its own tower. Libraries and research