“Before he could say anything or send me away, I asked him to first tell me one thing. He folded his arms and looked down at me, waiting for me to pose the question. He’s a tall man—you are more his size than me. For a moment I had trouble summoning my voice under the scrutiny of his hazel eyes. I finally did, of course, and asked him to tell me why General Kuno’s forces would take the corpses of our people. He stared down at me for a long time.

“Finally he told me, in a quiet voice, that he feared to imagine. I told him that I did as well and asked him to allow me to explain.

“He at last stepped aside from his doorway and allowed me in. I again told him that I needed to be blind. Anticipating what he might say and before he had a chance, I told him that I needed to be really blind, not blindfolded, in order to see what I needed to discover. I explained that I was searching for the answers to real problems, and I couldn’t use pretend methods.

“Merritt told me that if I wanted to be blind so bad, all I had to do was stab out my own eyes. I remember him pacing around his room, gesturing with his arms as he told me that he would be cursed with a lifetime of nightmares if he were to do such a dreadful thing. He said that it was a cruel request for me to make of someone.

“He grew more and more angry as he paced. He finally told me again to leave and said that if I decided to stab my eyes out for such a crazy cause I would be doing him a great favor if I made sure that he never learned of it.

“As he held my arm and led me to his door, I told him that if he cared about all the people who had been slaughtered, and all those I feared would be slaughtered, he needed to listen to me. I insisted that he wasn’t understanding what I was saying or what I was asking for.

“He finally calmed down and let go of my arm. He leaned back against a table covered in swords all neatly laid out on a red velvet cloth. He picked out one particularly stunning sword from a raised place at the center and held the wire-wound hilt tightly in both fists as he rested the sword’s point firmly on the floor. He then looked up at me and said he was listening. It was a warning that it was my last chance.

“I told him that it was not actually blindness that I sought. I was actually seeking vision.