'You need to wake up, Kael. Borin needs you at the hardware shop.'
Kael kept walking. The mist opened ahead of him and closed behind, and the voices came from every direction at once, more and more of them, more and more his own.
'Elara fell ill and you didn't protect her.'
'You're not strong enough. You'll never make it against the Ash.'
'Why is Anya sacrificing herself for you? Are you worth it?'
Each one had the handwriting of a thought he had already had, at night, with the light out. The mist kept them in reserve and handed them back to him one at a time. He saw Borin's tired face above the counter, a shadow of Elara slipping away behind a door, Anya's hand trembling in midair.
'Recognize them, accept them, let them go.' Elian had said it in his usual dry way, and Kael repeated it to himself like a nursery rhyme. It worked for three voices. At the fourth the chorus tightened, the sentences piled on top of each other, and the mist turned gray around his elbows.
He clenched his teeth and raised a hand, as if to push aside a branch.
'Why don't you answer?'
A new voice, low and warm. It had Anya's tone, even her pause before the second sentence, and Kael did not think to distrust it. With that voice he had never needed to.
'One at a time. Answer each of them, Kael. Show them they have no power.'
It was a sensible idea, a repairman's idea: you take the fault, you take it apart, you find the piece that doesn't turn. He had spent years working like that, in the shop, with his hands in the iron. Lyra's advice came back to him, don't argue with them, but far away, like a noise behind a wall.
"Borin can manage," he said aloud.
Borin's voice went out. In its place, louder, Elara came back.
'And me? Do you remember what you said to me, the last night before I fell asleep?'
Kael opened his mouth and found nothing. That last night: the lamp on the bedside table, the blanket pulled up to her chin, his own voice telling her something, softly. A promise, a single one. The words, no. They were gone, and that emptiness hurt more than any reproach.
"I..." He spoke anyway, to cover it, and realized too late that he had repeated the earlier mistake. The mist froze. Every explanation was a hook: the more words he gave, the more the voice had to grab. The path disappeared under his feet. The voices were three, then six, then twelve, and he was answering all of them.
On Borin's counter lay the tools he had promised to repair. He answered. A note for a customer, forgotten. He answered. And on top of that, an unwashed plate pushed its way forward, small and stupid, and for that very reason impossible to let go: it only asked for a minute. Then another. Then another still. Every thread he pulled to free himself tightened another, and Kael felt like a spider in its own web.
His breath grew short. Beneath his sternum the Dormant Flame trembled and withdrew.
Then he stopped.
It was not a noble decision. It was the act of a man closing the hardware shop at the end of the day: one lock at a time, without looking inside. Don't answer, don't listen, don't let anything touch him. Accepting, ignoring, he thought. Two verbs, the same silence. It seemed to him the same as Elian's advice, with less effort. He closed his eyes and counted his breath, three beats, and ignored every voice with the same stubbornness with which one ignores a crack in a wall.
The voices dropped. The mist cleared, lighter. His shoulders loosened, his hands stopped clutching at the air. For the first time since he had crossed the threshold the silence was his, and Kael thought he had found the key. Something, deep in his stomach, suggested that this stillness resembled a barred door more than an open one. He ignored that too.
Then the silence changed.
A single sound rose from the mist, a slow, full melody that accused no one. The earlier voices had not vanished: they had tuned themselves together, and they spoke of possibilities. Of guilt and fear there was no trace left.
It was not an attack but a caress.
Kael opened his eyes and the mist drew back like water from a pier.
Elara stood in front of him, at the threshold of her Garden, healed. Her black hair reached her shoulders, a little untidy, the way it always was after a run. She held out her hand, her small, warm hand, and laughed. It was the laugh he remembered, the one with not a shred of regret in it. She did not ask him about that last night again.
"Come and see," she said. "They've all bloomed."
"All of them?" Kael smiled. "Even the one at the back?"
"Even that one." Elara made a face at him. "Don't play guardian of the flowers, Kael. Just come."
She took him by the fingers and pulled. Behind her the Garden stretched to the horizon, and every lotus was open, in rows, pink and white on the still water. Kael looked at it with a gratitude so simple that it almost hurt.
Then the road shifted under his feet and they were in Aris. It was an Aris made new, with sturdy roofs and windows flung open. A little boy ran up with a kite and pressed it into his hands. Borin was waiting in front of the hardware shop, arms folded, his pipe unlit between his teeth, and he was really laughing.
"You did it," he said, and clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You put everything right."
"Nobody coughs anymore!" Mara shouted from the square, waving her hat.
A crowd parted to let him through. In their faces there was only gratitude. Someone clapped. Someone spoke his name, with the title, as if he could no longer be anything else: Keeper Kael. He blushed, dropped his eyes to his shoes, and someone put an apple in his hand, still cold with dew. He bit into it. It was tart and sweet at once, like the ones Borin bought in autumn and that he used to steal from the crate.
Anya stood beside him, one hand resting on Elara's shoulder, her eyes clear, without the dull veil that had been clouding them lately. She said something long to him, one sentence after another, without hesitating and without searching for words, and smiled at the end. Her hand did not tremble. Kael could not remember ever hearing her speak like that, so easily, and for a moment he felt a pang of surprise. He did not ask himself why. Asking why took effort, and in there effort did not exist.
He was tired. He had been tired since before he began, and no one, there, asked him to explain. The Ash was not there. The Veils were not there. Relief rose to his throat and stopped.
"Your place is here," said Elara.
Beneath his sternum, the Dormant Flame was a small, warm point. Kael thought of it for a moment, like a job left half done.
Then Elara tightened her grip on his hand, and he took the first step into the Garden. The mist did not close behind him.