“What form would such a friendship take?” asked Ced. “I had a friend once who provided me a home and food, and let me make my own mistakes, and figure things out for myself.”

“I’m the kind of friend who would like to prevent your mistakes from killing people—either directly in the storms you raise, or afterward, when their ruined crops lead to famine and death this winter.”

Ced reached out and took the man’s hand and gripped it. “That’s what I want, too, with all my heart.”

“You seem to mean it,” said the Gate Thief. He looked relieved.

“I do,” Ced answered. “I’m not a violent man. I don’t like breaking things. But when the wind starts…”

“It takes on a will of its own,” said the Gate Thief. “It grows and grows, stronger and tighter, whirling and dancing. Do I have it right?”

“Yes!” cried Ced.

“And the ecstasy you feel—it’s overpowering. You want to scream with joy. Do I have that right as well?”

Ced nodded, ashamed now, because the Gate Thief had caught out the secret Ced had been keeping even from himself. “It’s a drug. It’s heroin and coke and ecstasy and methamphetamine all at once—it’s way more powerful than pot, which is the only drug I ever actually tried. Once it starts, I don’t even want it to stop. Even though I know the terrible things that are happening, I can feel the tearing and breaking at the edges of the wind, but I can’t stop.”

“Meaning that you choose not to stop,” said the Gate Thief.

That, too, was true, and Ced felt the shame and guilt burst within him, and in front of this powerful stranger he broke down and cried. “You should have killed me in my sleep,” he said. “I have so much blood on my hands. Not soldiers’ blood from a war—the blood of children who died in the collapse of roofs or were swept away from their parents in the wind and dashed into trees or rocks or plunged into ravines. The blood of the parents who died reaching for them, or later, searching for their little bodies. I should be dead—I owe a hundred deaths already.”

“Twenty deaths, in fact,” said the Gate Thief. “Your shame makes you exaggerate.”

“Twenty,” Ced repeated, and he wept again.

The Gate Thief’s hand was on his shoulder. “I take it that you tried to stop.”

“The voices of the wind won’t leave me alone. How do I make them still, so I can think?”