He cocks his head. “Maybe you and Mira are more different than I thought. Because she wouldn’t accept that. She said it was my responsibility to make things right—that the whole world was my responsibility, not just some small corner of it—and so long as I made no effort to do so, then we could no longer be friends.”

I almost hear that conversation. Mira was nothing if not stubborn. But I also knew her as especially reasonable. How could she not have seen things from Raven’s point of view?

I ask him as much.

He shrugs. “We all have blind spots. When it came to me, hers was that she’d decided I was supposed to mend whatever was broken, however it needed to be done. It seemed so simple and straightforward to her, such a fair and honourable solution, that my disagreeing with her could only be construed as a deliberate avoidance of my perceived responsibilities.”

I think about how active he’s been these past few days and compare it to the stories told of him, of how he distances himself from the world. How there are times when he completely withdraws from the world, sometimes for years at a time.

“I can see her side of the argument, too,” I tell him. “Isn’t it a part of the Grace’s teachings that each of us has a responsibility to leave the world at least a little better than it was before we got here?”

Raven nods. “But Mira wanted me to put the world back into the pot and pull it out again, fresh and sweet once more—the way it was in the long ago. But you know, Cody tried that and all he succeeded in doing was almost destroying the world and the pot I brought it out of.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Raven shrugs. “So you can see why I might be reluctant to attempt the global changes Mira insisted I make. I didn’t want her out of my life, but she gave me no choice. I thought we would reconcile, eventually. But then Odawa killed her, and I was left knowing that we never would.”

“You never went after him?”

“Oh, I did,” Raven says. “But he’s a wily one. I could never track him down, no matter how many of our kin I sent hunting him.”

“I gave up hunting him,” I say.

“Because of your guilt.”

I nod. Mira wouldn’t have died, no one else would have died, if I hadn’t blinded Odawa in the first place. Saying I thought he was dead at the time—truthful though that was—was still no excuse. I’d still done the deed that set everything else in motion.