“Today,” he said, “I finished the last page of this record. It’s time to begin another. Each set of bindings holds one year. They go back a long way. Every oak they planted, every barn they built, the breeding lines of sheep and cattle. The battles they waged; the fires and floods they braved. The story of the valley. It was all I ever wanted, to carry out the work they had begun; for my beasts to thrive, for my crops to grow healthy and my people to be safe and content. That, I believed, was what I was born for.”

There was a pause. I glanced at him sideways. His profile was very stern. But? my hands signaled.

“But—since Simon went away, since—since I found you, and brought you to Harrowfield, it’s as if I have been walking through shadows, and dicing with ghosts. As if I have lost my way. Or—or as if the way I always believed to be mine is changing before my feet. Always, before, it seemed enough, for my life to follow this path, as my father’s did and his father’s before him. But I have stepped out of the pattern, and there is no going back. I am not afraid, not for myself; but I am uneasy, for the real and the unreal draw ever closer together, tangling and twining so that I cannot tell them apart. I hear two versions of the same story, and do not know the truth from the falsehood. Here I am telling tales, and half believing them. For I think sometimes that you, too, will go back one day, hear the call of the sea and slide away under the water as Toby’s mermaid did. Or maybe one night, as I watch outside your window, I will see an owl fly out and vanish into the forest; and when I look for you, all that will be left is one small feather on your pillow.”

My hands were unable to speak for me. Since that night, when I had tried to comfort him and had made him so angry, I had given up hope of his ever speaking to me like this again. Had believed the shutters closed forever. Why had he chosen, now, to reveal so much of himself? I needed words. I could have told him, it is the spell. The enchantment they laid on you, to keep me safe. To accomplish the task. Now, the task is nearly finished, and my brothers will find me, and then your doom too will be lifted. You can go back to your valley, and the ordered pattern of your life, and I—I will go home.

“You’re not saying much,” said Red. I made no effort to respond. I thought, whatever I try to say, or do, it will be wrong, and the mask will come down again. Perhaps if I sit here very still, I can hold this moment, with the sky and the sea and the day’s warmth, with my brother’s voice in my head and Red sitting by me and talking as if—as if—