I read the letters slowly. I read and reread them the entire way to the capital: four days by train. It was right that I had come back. They worried. They were concerned. They reminded me that I was not so adrift as I’d thought, that I had roots, and that I did indeed have obligations. I was someone’s son, which is not always an easy thing to be. All of us exist in a web of other people, tethered to them and pulled by them this way and that. Mine was a life that mattered, at least to some people, and perhaps shouldn’t be thrown away so carelessly. Mine was a life not entirely my own. The letters were not actually addressed to me but were in fact correspondence with Dirva. I only saw their responses, but I could catch glimpses of the things he’d told them in the letters. The training had ended, but he was my mentor still. In many cases the end of training is little but a formality, and such was the case with me and Dirva. In the letters, he took responsibility for my detainment. He made promises to get me back, and he wrote them as soon as he’d figured out a way to make good on those promises. The tone of the first letters from my parents to Dirva were livid. That is not so surprising, given that I followed him across borders without informing them of my departure, and given that I’d managed to get myself trapped in Qin clutches in my failed attempt at reentry. But as the letters went on, the tone softened. Respect tempered the anger, and gratitude finally eclipsed it. I was lucky to have him, my mother wrote, and she only hoped I was bright enough to learn from Dirva his clear-headedness in times of trouble and his impressive sense of loyalty. My mother had phrased it exactly that way: “impressive sense of loyalty.”