“She asked who our mother was. Why’d she care?”
A gleefully gloating expression fled across the older man’s face. “No reason. Just trying to confuse you. Get on in here. I’m sick of towns. Time to go.”
The boys climbed in, and Ashes took up the reins, starting the horses up the hill, along the road that led past the mansions into the wild, the same way Marool had gone when she investigated her parents’ deaths in the badlands.
“Where we going now?” asked Dyre, yawning.
“Off into the wild to meet your cousins, boy. Our kindred. The first settlers of this world. The Wilderneers.”
Ornery moved off down the tunnel, sped both by curiosity and by Questioner’s urgency. Mouche moved with more eagerness, though Questioner noted that both Mouche and Ornery seemed somewhat reluctant to look where they were going. Like guilty children handing around a dirty picture, they peeked at the darkness ahead, and pretended not to and peeked again. So long as they were all headed in one direction, it made little difference, though Questioner could imagine circumstances in which this preoccupation and inattention could be dangerous.
“Mouche,” murmured Questioner, placing her heavy hand firmly on one of his shoulders, “stop trembling.”
Instead of steadying, he quivered like an excited horse.
“Whoa,” Questioner said. “Stop. Take a deep breath; stop.”
She turned Mouche toward her, staring into his dazed eyes. “What is this business of not looking where you’re going?” She snapped her fingers in his face and shook him lightly. “What?”
Ornery had turned and came back to them. “It’s hard for us, Ma’am. They do not exist, Ma’am. So we are taught. We are not allowed to see or hear them. I can see them or not, depending, though I am still surprised at myself, but Mouche seems to be having trouble looking at them.”
“You cannot see them?” Questioner turned her searching gaze on the sailor. “What do you mean you cannot see them?”
“I mean … I can sort of not. Not look. I mean, I … know they’re there, but I don’t. They wear brown robes that cover them all up, and we’re not allowed to look. Not once we’re six or seven years old.”
“Why?”
“Because … well … they don’t exist.”
“They what?”
Ornery cried petulantly, “They don’t exist! There weren’t supposed to be other creatures here. And they weren’t here when our people came, which means they probably came from somewhere else. But even if they didn’t, it wasn’t playing fair to hide all that time … “
“So, what’s the matter with your friend, here?”
Mouche’s life of sin had caught up with him all too swiftly. He quivered with mixed joy and shame, muttering, “I’ve been watching them. I’ve been watching them at House Genevois. I’ve been … I’ve been … “ His sins had been settled, dependable. He had made a detente with his sins, taking his inspiration from his sins, but now he was in actual pursuit of the ideal, and he could not say what he had been. “ … maybe wicked,” he concluded, head hanging.
Questioner mused over this for a moment, shaking her massive head as an indication of the astonishment she did not feel but knew was suitable to the occasion. “Young ones, listen to me. During this present time we are in, this now, Timmys do indeed exist. During the near future, it will not be forbidden to look at them. During the near future, everything you learned … when? When you were mere schoolchildren? Well, whatever you learned then was wrong. For the near future. Can you absorb that? When we catch up to them, or when they return to us, you will see them for they will be there, right? All this pretense has to end. Ending it is one of the reasons I am here!”
“Ahh … if you say so, Ma’am.”
“I do say so. And I am smarter than your teacher, so what I say, goes. You understand?”
Both of them nodded, Ornery obediently, Mouche equivocally. Ornery didn’t care one way or the other, but Mouche had set certain limits on his dreams and delights. He didn’t particularly want them to be sullied by reality. He wanted to have without the burden of having, to imagine without being imagined in return, and most, to be inspired without questioning his inspiration. Now, having heard Flowing Green’s voice so near, he alternately rejoiced and suffered. She had come to get him, him, personally. Why? What did she think of him? What did she see when she looked at him? Did she look at him? What would she think of his face now? Or did that even matter? Would she hate him?