The damp air is chilling me. I regret tearing open my tunic. I start rooting the buttons out of the mud, and sewing them back on as best I can. I work for a long time, and the air grows darker between my eyes and the buttons.

Dusk comes down.

I look to see just what a bad job I’m doing, thread jabbed in and out of the cloth everywhere. Buttons and tunic slip from my nerveless fingers and my hands fly up to my face.

“Saskia!” I scream through my hands.

Weak I droop over onto my side—I imagine the victorious stories rolling out like crawling smoke from the cemetery, the city, the capitals of both sides, and rolling us, the ones who lived and died the story right off the page like we never existed for ourselves, we were just characters. I look up and see nothing around me, no people anywhere—not even me.

“Saskia!”

Does my voice even make a sound?

I’m calling her name to the distant woods, the gathering dark, the empty fog—

“Come back! You were right!”

*

The cemetery is nearby, but the landscape is monotonous trees and clay land, trees again and clay land again. I never see my footprints ahead of me so I can’t be going in circles. Even in the open spaces I can’t see above the trees, or through the mist. I can sense the mountains without seeing them, and I keep them in to my left.

I’m not alone—the woods and open places are filled with people, going up and down on all sides. Nardac is here, the Captain, Silichieh, Jil Punkinflake, Thrushchurl, the Lieutenant, Makemin. They’re all too preoccupied with what they’re doing, with their own thoughts, to talk to me, but they look happy and well, only very busy. I can’t get close to them—whenever I draw near, they have somewhere else to go, and withdraw faster than I can follow, always with the air of people who have some private matter to attend to; but they always show me, never with words, but by means of very slight gestures that a less astute observer might not notice, that they are aware of me and entreat my indulgence a little while longer.

Soon they will have time for me, I’m sure.

*

“Cemetery can’t be far a happy thought.”

Happy thought. Happy thought.

No thinking, no thought at all.

“I will go on long enough find my way there.”

The cemetery? Or the coast, what name is used to mean what isn’t the interior? Another clearing.

“I’ll get out.”

—“Then?

“Happy then?

“Then what?

“Happy?

“How?”

—“Then I’ll be out of this.”

—“War is everywhere.

“Out there too.”

—“I’ll be out of this.”

—“This won’t get out of you.

“Happy?”

—“Better.”

—“Happy? Or just not afraid, not tired?”

—“That’s a cynical definition of happiness.”