The more I reflect on it, Sybel had it right: I was, considering the condition of my foot, lucky. My status as Old Relic counterbalanced the crippling whorls of my wooden toes and the grain of my soles. I could diverge from the script to tell stories about the places we visited with a knack for detail and intrigue and personal panache that few other guides could match. I truly had been there when that happened, or this, or this. To pay for my past crimes against public decency, against modesty, I would even sometimes have to guide people to the site of my poor gutted gallery, there to recite a history of it and the fabled New Art. (Do you really believe that Sirin didn’t experience a shiver of perverse satisfaction from forcing you to go back there? I’m sure he did; how could he not?)

I didn’t mind the job too much in those early years, if I’m to be truthful, especially when I didn’t have to do the “Haunted Ambergris” tour, and before I had to stand outside Mary’s home like a fool. At least part of the time a horse and buggy would be employed so I didn’t have to drag my leg around. And business gradually became more robust: the cessation of hostilities soon brought a new wave of the curious—not curious enough to venture over for the Festival, but curious enough to explore during the daylight of other seasons.

Besides, I often contrived to arrive at the Blythe Academy right before lunch, so I could allow those bright-eyed travelers from Morrow or Stockton or Nicea to wander as they would, within reason, while I sat down for a sandwich with Bonmot. At a stone bench. Under the fabled but now considerably more wizened willow trees.

“Tough crowd today?” Bonmot would almost always say, making me smile.

“I’m not a comedian or a juggler, Bonmot. I don’t have to entertain. I just have to lead them around to interesting places.”

“You are such a kind tour guide,” Bonmot would say, trying not to laugh. “To teach them the responsibility of finding their own entertainment.”

“Why not? That’s what I have to do.”

I wish I could say my lunches with Bonmot felt the same as before, but they did not. Yes, a similar sense of contentment, of ease, lingered over those conversations, but it became a more fleeting thing; it did not last as long or affect me as powerfully. Our discussions had limits; we had acquired scars. Bonmot never discussed Duncan, and I, not wishing to give up even the faded pleasure of those lunches, never pressed the point.

If the situation had changed, so had Bonmot. The war had changed him.

“You’re hesitant sometimes now,” I said to him once, during an uncomfortable silence. “You halt on the verge of saying things.”