As they wound their way through the maze, the guard cleared his throat. “Are you really the oracle-apprentice?” he asked. “I mean, it doesn’t matter overmuch—if the king wants you below, here is where you have to be. But for myself, I want to know whether it is the oracle-apprentice I’m leading.”

“I am.”

The guard hemmed again, a few times, trying to find his way to something he wanted to say. “Do you know my fate, then?” he finally burst out.

“I’m not in my chamber.”

“But you must know.” He spoke almost pleadingly.

Alba, looking up at the tall figure, wondered at the half-moons hanging beneath his eyes. Deep, nearly blue, they seemed dug out by sleepless nights upon sleepless nights, by turnings of grief and regret.

“What did you do?” she asked almost unthinkingly.

Back stiffening, the guard turned away. “My duty,” he said sharply. The hand encircling her arm tightened. He pushed her down another sloping corridor.

“There’s no good can come from any of it, is there?” he murmured, his eyes casting up and down the long hall. “Even if you’re the apprentice…” He shook his head. “I don’t see how you stop all this.…”

Coming to the end of a corridor, the guard unlocked the very last door and waited for her to enter.

“You,” she said, suddenly realizing. “It’s you. You’re the guard that abandoned the babes.”

Hand on the door, the guard started. “You are mistaken,” he said slowly.

Alba shook her head. “No. I see it. You—your regret. On your face—it may as well be written in ink: I abandoned the babes. The twins,” she said carefully, stressing the last word.

Shaking his head, frowning, the guard backed away. “I have no regret for duty done,” he said as he pushed the door closed.

“But you do!” Alba called through the closing gap. “That’s the fate you want to know about—you want to know if your future will forever be shaped by this terrible thing you have done!”

The door slammed shut.

“Duty is not destiny!” Alba called. “Duty is not destiny!”

Only the key turning in the lock answered.

XXXVIII

NOTHING-FULL

Winter came, and spring and summer, and the year spun all around again with pale fields and frost and softening earth, but a part of Mop never returned.

In time, he relearned to walk, limpingly, to the nearest meadow, and on days when the sheep grazed close to home, he would sometimes, for an hour or two, tend them as he had done before. Though he waved at Rae to run and play—to seek out mouse holes and bird nests and papery cocoons as she used to do—she would not leave his side. She was sitting with him now, leaning against a gray-barked beech in late afternoon, watching the flock. They were quiet as they sat together, the only sound the sheep tearing up mouthfuls of the tender spring greens.

After a time, Mop gestured to the hills. “Milk buckets and across the way and nevertheless under there because of course it should be beyond this but in any case,” he said with half of his mouth.