I nodded. I found myself smiling. It was a sad smile, but a smile. I wished somehow I could convey to him, without pride, that all my life I’d been menaced by this and that adversary, all but murdered by those I’d loved, and even almost destroyed by my own despair. I always survived. I really didn’t know what fear was, not as any permanent fixture in my heart. I just didn’t “get” fear. I didn’t “get” caution.

“All right, I’m going,” I said and I took him by his shoulders and quickly kissed his cheeks.

“I’m glad you came, more than I can tell you,” he replied. Then he turned and went back into the open door, and into the yellow light, and the door closed and the door appeared to vanish in the darkness of the wall.

I walked off through the silent snow, away from Thorne and Cyril and away from the warm yellow lights of the monastery windows. The boy was improvising those words he sang, to a concerto that never had words, and I realized in an exquisitely painful moment that he had likely spent his eternity doing such things, weaving such beauty, creating such magnificent songs, and marveled that Notker had given him this, or that he could give such things to Notker. All the world was filled with immortals who had no such purpose, no such thread to follow through the labyrinth of chance and mischance.

“Do you really not know what was bothering that spirit?” asked Amel in a low contemptuous voice. “Or are you simply pretending to be stupid in order to make me mad?”

“Well, he’s obviously afraid for me,” I said. “He fears you, he fears Rhoshamandes….”

“No, no, no,” said Amel. “Do you not know what is wrong with him, inside of him, what he’s suffering?”

“So what is it?”

“He can’t disperse the body anymore, you idiot,” he said. “He’s trapped in it. He can’t vanish on cue. He can’t disappear and reappear and dart from one place to another in the blink of an eye! He’s caught in the solid body of his own devising and refining. He’s flesh and blood now and he can’t get out of it!”

I stood there motionless watching the snow. Far away, very far away, people laughed in a village tavern. The snow thickened. The cold was nothing to me.

“You mean this?”