The hum of voices and the clink of tankards seeped up through my floor from Anker's packed common room, muffled and steady as the pulse of some large, comfortable animal. It was a sound I should have been part of. On any ordinary Felling night I would have been down there thickening the air with chords, stoking laughter, earning my room the pleasant way. Instead I sat on the edge of my narrow bed and looked at the pack I had thrown together in something under ten minutes.
It was not an impressive pack. A waterskin. A loaf of bread going dry at its edges. A blanket rolled tight as a grudge. And strapped along the side, my lute in its case. A lute knows when it is being made into luggage.
I hesitated, and I want you to know that I did hesitate. Leaving was reckless. Foolish, even, and I had a good deal of practice recognizing foolish by then, having supplied so many of my own examples. The term was barely done. My standing at the University was as good as it had ever been. Any sensible man would have stayed.
But you have to understand. I had just watched a good man die with his work unfinished. I had held the folio. I had seen the half-tied knots he was never coming back to, the margin questions that would never get their Hepten-afternoon answers. And a thought had lodged in me like a splinter, too deep to pick out and too sharp to ignore. What else remains undone?
I had seen what waiting does. Everyone has, if they look. People who spend twenty years preparing for the one journey, and arrive at last at the trailhead to find their hands have forgotten the shape of wanting it. The story they meant to live has become a stranger's tale they once heard somewhere, secondhand.
The mountains were calling me now. Now, while the calling still had my name in it. Wait a year, two years, and I would still know that I ought to answer. I would simply no longer remember why it mattered.
Some songs need singing before the gravel finds your voice.
I shouldered the pack. From below, through the floorboards, I could all but hear Anker himself, half accusing and half laughing, a smile buried in the words: Leaving already? We've a full house tonight.
I did not go down to answer the phantom question, because I could not have answered the real one. Instead I scrawled a message and pegged it to my door.
Anker,
A personal matter requires my attention.
I'll return in a few days.
My thanks, as always.
Kvothe
It would not satisfy him. Nothing short of the truth would have, and the truth was not mine to give, being not yet in my possession. But Anker was no fool, and no brooder either. He would take his irritation and put it to work, which is what thrifty men do with every scrap that comes to them. There would be fuller mugs tonight. Thicker slabs of bread. Customers would go home with heavy bellies and light purses, and by the time the last of them staggered out, his scowl would have been kneaded away entirely into the honest work of the day.
Even so, when I turned from the door, something pressed on me harder than the pack's straps. It was the ache of knowing exactly what I was walking away from. This was my home. These were my people. If I had gone downstairs and said I need to leave tonight and I cannot say why, they would have helped me pack and asked nothing, and that, of course, was precisely the weight of it. My going would cost them, in worry, in work, in the small daily labor of a missing pair of hands. And I would not be there to carry any share of it.
I stepped out into the night anyway. The cool air struck my face like a question I intended to ignore. The streets were loud with students making the most of the last free days before the Masters reconvened classes, laughter spilling out of doorways, someone singing badly and being loved for it. I threaded through all of it and out of it, over the river, leaving Imre's warmth at my back.
The mountains wouldn't wait. Or rather, and this is the truer thing, and it took me the whole road to learn it, I wouldn't. Waiting was the one thing I had never once known how to do.
I followed the road east toward Oakholt and watched the sun rise and set and rise again as the Commonwealth's soft heartland gave way to its rougher eastern reaches. My feet ached in the honest, uncomplicated way feet ache. My shoulders filed their complaints about the pack and were overruled. The lute case swung its weight against my back with every stride, an anchor I would not have traded for wings.
The road wound through farmland and scattered villages, past orchards hanging heavy with late fruit and fields where whole families moved in lines, bringing in the last of the harvest before the weather turned honest. I bought an apple off a woman selling them from a roadside basket, and I ate it walking, core and all, stem and all, as you learn to eat an apple in Tarbean and never afterward unlearn.
On the third evening I spotted a tinker's wagon ahead, its painted panels bright against the darkening road. It stood atop a low bluff at the edge of a clearing, and in that clearing, pale against the fading sky, rose a ring of standing stones.
"Ho, tinker!" I called, and waited at a respectful distance until an older man emerged from the wagon and looked me over. "I'm bound for Oakholt. Might I share your fire tonight? I can offer a song or two in trade."
He took his time about answering, reading me as tinkers read everyone. Clothes, boots, pack, and, longest of all, the lute case on my back. Something in his weathered face eased at the sight of it.
"You play, do you?"
"A little."
"Good." He nodded toward an ax leaning against the wagon's wheel. "Make yourself useful with the firewood first. Can't have songs without supper."
That is a tinker for you. Even hospitality comes as a trade, and the trade is always fair, and somehow you always come out feeling you got the better half.
I split wood while the light died, and he told me his name was Terrence, and that he had worked the circuit between Imre and Oakholt and the small towns between for better than thirty years. And he always, always, he said, in the tone men reserve for the two or three rules they have never once broken, made his night camps at greystones.
"Old roads," he said, when I asked. "Old stones. My father taught me to respect them, and in thirty years I've had no cause to regret it."
I could have told him my father had taught me the same. That I had slept in the lee of a hundred such stones before I was ten, that the Edema Ruh know the old ways better than anyone now walking. But the word Ruh opens certain doors and bars certain others, and you cannot always tell which until the hinge moves. I held my tongue and stacked his wood, and if he noticed how naturally I settled into a greystone camp, he was polite enough, or wise enough, to let it be.
After supper I played for him. Road songs first, traveling tunes, the small unbreakable coin of my trade. And then, as a jest, because he was a tinker, and there is one song every tinker on four roads has endured a thousand times, I struck up "Tinker Tanner."
Terrence threw back his head and laughed like a man twenty years younger.
"That's the one nobody ever dares play for me," he said, wiping his eye, and disappeared into his wagon, and came back out with a bottle of spiced whisky. "Here's to old songs and old roads."
We traded verses by the fire deep into the night, each verse more disgraceful than the last, as the rules of that game require. I contributed several from the University's collection, he countered with variants I had never heard, thirty years of road-gathered filth of truly professional quality. By the time the bottle gave out we had exhausted every rude rhyme either of us knew, and invented several new ones that I can only hope died there on that bluff. I'll spare you the worst of them. Not out of delicacy. Some compositions simply cannot survive transplanting; they live only in firelight, at the bottom of a shared bottle, between two people who will likely never meet again. That is part of what makes them good.
Even with the world turning gently under the whisky, I should have slept like a stone that night. Tehlu knows I was tired enough. But something kept me surfacing, some small itch at the edge of my mind, like a name you cannot recall but cannot stop reaching for.
It was well past midnight when I finally understood what it was.
I opened my eyes. The fire had burned down to embers, a dim red breathing that gave just enough light to suggest the shapes of things. I lay still in my blanket for a long lazy moment, weighing whether my bladder's petition was worth the cold, which is as far as my thoughts had gotten when they stopped.
Beside the nearest greystone, at the very edge of the ember-light, someone was standing.
They were tall. Tall in a way that my eye kept trying to correct and couldn't, like a doorframe that looks wrong in a dream. A lean, angular frame, and it moved, shifted its weight, just slightly, with a strange, deliberate delicacy, a grace that stood next door to dancing. But the legs were too thin. Or bent at some height where legs do not bend. Or the shadows below its knees clung strangely, pooling where firelight should have fallen. My eye offered me these explanations one after another, and took each of them back.
I blinked, and its face was toward me.
I did not see the face turn. Between the closing of my eye and the opening, the fact of its attention simply arrived, like frost on a window. And even across that distance, even in light too dim to read my own hand by, I felt the weight of being looked at. Not seen. Looked at. Like a cat at a bird through glass, without hunger exactly, without haste at all, with the whole patience of a thing that owns the time it stands in.
I opened my mouth to call out. A challenge, a greeting, anything with edges to it.
Nothing came. Not caught in my throat, you understand. There was no throat to catch in. No lips, no tongue, no words, no mouth. Where the machinery of speaking should have been I found a smooth, sealed nothing, and the discovery went through me like ice water. In a moment of pure animal panic I clawed at my own face.
And gasped.
Air. Lips. My own breath ragged in my own mouth, which was there, which had always been there, as though it had never left. My heart was slamming at my ribs like a fist at a locked door. I was half out of my blanket, one hand still pressed to my jaw.
The greystones stood pale and empty in the darkness. The camp was silent. Nothing moved anywhere but the embers, and Terrence's wagon dark and peaceful, and the old stones holding up the sky as they had for a thousand years.
I stayed as I was for a long while, watching the space where the figure had stood, waiting for the dark beside the stone to curdle back into that tall, wrong shape. It did not. Finally I threw off my blanket and walked the whole edge of the camp, because I needed to move, needed to feel my body answer me. The grass at the foot of the greystone was unbent. No print, no mark, no bruised blade of it.
I did not sleep again that night. I sat feeding twigs to the embers and holding my mind very carefully in both hands. In the morning, as Terrence hitched his horse, I asked, lightly, in the voice you use for asking nothing much, whether he had seen anyone near the stones in the night.
He gave me an odd, sidelong look, and shook his head.
"Just us," he said. "Just us and the road."
We traveled together one more day and parted at Oakholt, Terrence turning south to the outlying farms with a lifted hand and a last unrepeatable verse, while I turned east, to where the mountains stood up against the sky in earnest.
The Six Sisters, the maps call them. From Oakholt you can see four of the six, grey-shouldered, white-headed, their peaks lost in cloud more days than found. I stood in the street looking at them longer than a sensible man would, and then I went and found an outfitter's shop and spent a long hour turning my thin purse into supplies. Dried meat. Hard cheese. Trail bread fit to survive a siege, or cause one. A small pot. A proper flint and steel, because a sympathist who cannot make fire without his tricks has not planned for the day his tricks run out.
On my way to the counter I passed a shelf of journals and folios, and on a whim I could not have justified to anyone, I picked one up. Small. Plain leather. Pages unlined. I could not have said why I wanted it. Perhaps I thought I might want to remember what I found up there. Perhaps I simply liked the weight of it in my hand. Both reasons are true, which usually means neither is the real one.
I took a cheap room, spread my provisions across the bed to take stock, and ate Anker's stale loaf that night rather than carry it further, a small funeral for the last of home.
Before I slept, I opened the journal, and dipped my pen, and made the first entry:
Tomorrow, I climb.
The Six Sisters rise to the east. Their peaks are lost in the clouds.
That night I dreamed of drowning. My face was gone, sealed beneath smooth sticky flesh where my mouth had been, and I clawed and tore at it until my fingers were slick, and found no seam, no breath, no way to scream. I woke with the blankets strangled around me and the grey light coming up, and I will tell you honestly. I chose to call it a whisky dream, knowing better.
Day One.
The foothills rolled out gently under my boots, all autumn grass and easy grades, and I went up through them without breaking stride. The pack rode high and tight. The air had the green smell of living things drying sweetly toward winter. By evening I had put perhaps fifteen miles behind me, which was better than I had any right to expect, and exactly the sort of early success that mountains extend to fools before they collect.
I made camp in a hollow between two weathered stones, out of the wind that had begun to speak in whispers up the slopes. I ate dried meat and hard cheese, drank from the skin, and watched the stars come out one at a time over the black shoulders of the Sisters, naming the ones I knew and greeting the ones I didn't.
And I wrote. That was the surprise of those first days. The journal grew longer as the light did shorter. I had bought it on a whim and expected to fill three pages with weather. But there is something about being alone with nothing but stone and sky that loosens things you did not know were tight.
I thought of Anker polishing his bar that very hour, the common room's laughter rising around him. I thought of Wil and Sim bent over books, or holding down our corner table at the Eolian with Mola dissecting somebody's bad play at cards and Fela laughing at the autopsy. My people. My home, whatever I had told myself as I slipped out of it.
They would know by now that I was gone. Sim would worry, worse for the note's cheerfulness, not better; he had learned to read my cheerfulness for what it was, the green sky before weather. Wil would shake his head and mutter something in Siaru with the word for fool in it, and check the eastern road out of habit each morning. Fela might understand, or come nearest to it. Mola would observe, correctly, that worrying would not change the outcome, and would say so, and would worry.
I had not told them. Not properly. I had left a note for my innkeeper and vanished like a thief with the candlesticks. Out there under the wheeling stars, with no audience to perform composure for, I finally let myself feel the small sharp sting of what that was.
It was easier to leave than to explain. That much I knew about myself, and had known for years. It was easier to vanish than to stand in front of people who loved me and say that the place I loved most in the world had begun to feel too small, and that I did not know why, and that the not-knowing was the thing I was really running from.
So I had run. As I always ran. The only difference, that time, was that I wrote it down.
Day Two.
The gentle foothills stopped being gentle somewhere before noon and stopped being foothills soon after. Grass gave way to scrub, scrub to bare grey rock stitched with tough little plants that gripped the cracks like sailors in a storm. The pack's straps found the exact grooves they had worn the day before and bit down. My calves burned. My lowland lungs, fat and complacent from two years of Imre air, began to labor like bellows at a forge.
By midday I had made perhaps five miles, and I wanted nothing in the created world so much as to sit down and never perform the act of standing again.
But I kept walking, because there was nothing else up there to do, and that, I would come to understand, is most of what a mountain is for. One foot. Then the other. The rhythm of it became a kind of meditation, a drumbeat with no drummer, and I lost myself inside it for whole hours at a stretch. Step, step, step, breathe. The world narrowed to the next stone, the next ridge, the next thin mouthful of air.
I had thought myself strong. I want you to understand the flavor of my error. I had survived Tarbean's winters with no coat and no floor. I had endured the Medica's disciplines and the lash and hunger of the sort that rewrites what food means to you forever. I thought strength was a thing you could store up, and mine well stocked.
But all of that had been endurance, and endurance is a wall you crouch behind. This was different. This was not a thing to be endured but a thing to be walked through, step upon step upon step, with no far side promised and none visible.
The mountains did not care that I was clever. They did not care about my quick tongue, my talent pipes, the tricks I could do with sympathy or six strings or a crowded room. Every audience I had ever won meant nothing to them. They cared for exactly one thing, and they told me what it was with every mile of themselves. That I keep climbing.
There was a strange rest in that, under the ache. I had spent my whole life being watched. The mountains were the first audience that could not be played to.
Day Three.
On the third day, the mountains began to speak.
Not in words. In the long howl of wind funneled through narrow passes, rising and falling like a grief too old to remember its own cause. In the crack of ice under my boots, sudden as a snapped string. And in the silences between. Because up there, silence is not one thing but many, and when the wind dropped, a quiet would come down over the rock so total that my own breath sounded like company.
I made camp early, in a shallow cave scarcely deep enough to deserve the word, and my hands shook as I unrolled the blanket. Not the other shaking, the one this story is still walking toward. The honest kind, the body's plain report of too much asked and too little left. I had eaten well enough from my supplies. It made no difference. My exhaustion had outrun anything a supper could repay.
Tomorrow, I told the journal, I would have to decide. Climb on, or turn back.
But that night there was only the cave, and the cold, and my own thoughts, which had been waiting all day at the edge of the drumbeat for exactly this stillness.
Herma.
The name rose unbidden, and with it everything I had packed away beneath the miles. His hands trembling over the Yllish cords. His voice going thin across a season while I sat two feet away, taking notes. The last time I had seen him alive, bent over the Scriptorium table, waving away my half-asked question with that gentle deflecting humor of his: some knots slip; the world keeps spinning. And I had let him. That was the splinter under everything. I had let him. Some part of me had seen. Some part of me had catalogued the small betrayals of a failing body, and filed them, and chosen the file marked later. Looking squarely would have meant admitting that I loved the man, and that his death would be a wound. And I had grown so skilled at armoring myself against wounds that I had armored myself against the seeing, too. That is the trade nobody warns you of. You cannot callus your heart selectively.
And then, because the night was long, and the cold was honest, and there was no one to perform for, I thought of Denna.
I loved her. That much was simple, and had been simple for years, the one simple thing in the whole tangled business. But what I had done with that love was anything but. I had pursued her across half the civilized world and let her slip away a hundred times without a word. I had watched her on the arms of other men and manufactured indifference by the cartload. I had made her into a mystery to be solved, a song to be finished, a fire to warm my story by. And in all that making, I had managed to miss the plain truth of her, which was that she was not a puzzle, nor a prize, nor a verse wanting its rhyme. She was Denna. She was a person, tired and clever and hunted by something she never named, and I had never once let person be enough.
What had I ever actually given her? I counted it out under the cold stars, and the counting did not take long. A few hours of talk, here and there, when our roads happened to cross. Half a song, never finished. The dubious honor of my obsession, which I had always dressed as devotion, and which she had always seen through, and which she had, this was the worst of it, been kind about.
The wind howled past the cave mouth, going somewhere, as wind always is.
For once, I did not try to answer it.
Day Four.
I filled my waterskin at a stream come straight down off the snowfields, water so cold it made the bones of my hands ache to the wrist, and climbed on, and somewhere in the morning I breached the treeline.
There is a border up there as real as any kingdom's. Below it, the world still bothers with life. Trees, scrub, moss, birds with opinions. Above it, the mountain drops all pretense. Bare rock, old ice, a sky of hammered grey. Nothing grows. Nothing moves but weather. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing to hide from except the fact of yourself, which turns out, at altitude, to be considerable.
I thought of Simmon that day.
Dear, earnest Sim, who had wept openly when they gave me my talent pipes. Wept, in public, and never once thought to be ashamed, because it would not have occurred to him that joy for a friend was a thing requiring concealment. Sim, who pushed food across tavern tables when he judged I wasn't eating, casually, mid-sentence, as though the plate had drifted. Who stayed up three nights running to drag me through examinations I had been too proud to prepare for, and let me pretend afterward that I had never needed dragging.
And how had I repaid that? I had accepted his friendship as my due. I had kept my whole true self locked behind a performer's smile and let him believe the smile was the man. I told myself the concealment was protection, his and mine, when really it was just the oldest habit I owned. Sim deserved a friend who would sit with him in his hurts as he sat with everyone in theirs. Who would hear his poetry without one eyebrow's worth of judgment. Who would let him see the ugly broken cellar-rooms of me and trust him, Sim, of all people, the single safest pair of hands I knew, not to flinch.
And Wil. Steady, dry, unfoolable Wil, who saw through my performances with those dark Cealdish eyes and stayed anyway, which is its own kind of love and I knew it even then. I had never asked him about Ralien. Not once. Never asked about his family, his people, what he wanted after the University, what he had left behind to come to it. He was simply there, reliable as stone underfoot, and I had walked on him accordingly, and stone, I was learning that very day, deserves better from the people it holds up.
The mountains did not care about my regrets either. They simply went on rising. But I noticed they had gotten easier to carry, the regrets, since I had started taking them out and looking at them. Most heavy things are like that. It is the packing and unpacking that wears you out, never the weight.
Day Five.
By the fifth day I was too tired to think in words, which I would recommend to anyone who thinks as much as I do. My legs moved on their own. Snow lay drifted in the lee of the rocks in long white commas. The wind had become a constant tugging whisper at my hood, my straps, my sleeves, a pickpocket with nothing left to steal.
It was only mid-morning when the sky went the color of wet slate, and it started to hail.
As for the hail? Well. Hail is hail.
Day Six.
I came back to myself in a stand of pines below the treeline, huddled against a trunk with my shaed wrapped tight around me and no clear memory of choosing the tree. Every separate muscle had filed its grievance. My ribs throbbed where something, a stone, a root, the mountain's elbow, had caught me on the way down. There was a crusted gash along my forearm that I could not account for at all, which is the mountain's way of signing its work.
Running down had cost me half a day's climbing. Likely more.
I sat under that pine for a long time, taking stock, and the stock came to this. I had tried to master the mountain, and the mountain had answered, briefly and in full.
But when I finally stood, and turned, and started back up, and I could not then have told you why I started back up, except that going home hollow was the one weight I refused to carry, everything had changed.
The wind met me differently. It still shoved at my cloak and needled my cheeks. But the malice had gone out of it, or rather, no. The malice had never been in it. What had gone was my insistence on hearing malice, on making the mountain my opponent so the climb could be a duel. A duel at least is a performance, and I did not know how to do anything that wasn't. What was left, once I stopped fighting, was something almost like curiosity. The wind circled me as I climbed. It tugged, and let go, and came back, like a half-wild dog nosing at a stranger who has stopped pretending to chase it.
I did not try to call it. That is the whole of what I did, and it took me six days and a hailstorm to learn. I did not call, or command, or coax, or want at it in any of my thousand practiced ways. I simply walked, and let the wind walk with me.
By late afternoon I had regained the treeline and passed it, and come out onto a rocky ledge that hung above the whole visible world. Below, the land fell away in great sweeping folds. Forest, field, the far glint of rivers laid across the country like dropped thread. Above, the peaks went on without me, vanishing into slow, stately clouds. I sat down on the stone with my legs over all that emptiness.
I thought of Fela then, to my own surprise. She had looked at me with real interest once, after the fire in the Fishery, after I carried her out of it. I had seen it plainly, felt it in how she lingered. And I had done precisely nothing, being too thoroughly occupied with a woman who was mostly a shape I'd made of smoke and wanting. Sim saw her instead. Sim, who did nothing by halves and hid nothing he felt. And I was glad of it, truly, cleanly glad, which was a relief to discover. But sitting on the roof of the world, I let myself wonder, just once, how many other moments had gone by me unlived while I was busy chasing the next bright thing over the next hill. It is not a comfortable count. I recommend a very high ledge for the making of it.
Then I stopped counting. I stopped doing anything. I sat, and breathed, and let myself simply be. No audience, no performance, no next clever move. And I tell you it felt like setting down a pack I had been carrying so long I had stopped feeling it as weight.
The wind came then. Fierce, sudden, battering at my chest and legs, whipping my hair into my eyes, and I did not brace against it. I let it push. I let it test my balance and take its honest measure of me, and I breathed in its own rhythm, long and rough. Somewhere in that breathing, the fight I had brought up the mountain finished going out of me entirely.
And then, between one gust and the next, it stopped.
The silence was so complete it rang. My heart slammed once, hard, as it does when a room full of noise goes quiet at your entrance. Because the wind had not gone. I could feel it everywhere, all around, coiled close and waiting, a held breath the size of the sky.
For the first time in my life, I did not reach for it. I did not grab, or call, or need. I listened.
And beneath the wind, beneath the sound of it, beneath even the moving of it, there was something else. I will not call it a name, because it was not one, or not yet, or not only. It was more like the recognition that comes just before a name, the knowing you have in the dark, of a step's owner by the rhythm of the step. It was the understanding, arriving whole, that names are not the only way to know a thing. That before the word there is the listening, and the listening is older, and the wind minds the difference.
The wind knew me. That is as plainly as I can put it. It had watched me stagger up its mountain and break on the hail and come back up anyway. It had ridden my hood through six days of grief and inventory. It had heard everything I had finally stopped performing long enough to think. And now, at the last, it was willing to allow that I had come, not as a conqueror, not as an arcanist with a word in his mouth like a bit and bridle, but as something nearer to a friend.
The sky exhaled. The gale wheeled up and away over the ridge like a flight of starlings.
And a single wisp of it stayed.
It lingered by me, a small current with no business existing, a thread of moving air in the great new stillness. It circled my hand. It nuzzled at my knuckles, slipped between my fingers, wound and unwound there, asking, as clearly as anything has ever asked me anything, whether it might stay.
I moved very slowly. A wild thing had decided to trust me, and the world hung on my not being sudden. With my other hand I plucked its trailing edge, gently, between finger and thumb. It did not startle. It did not squirm. And so I tied it. A musician's knot, the one my father taught me before I could read, for securing a string you cannot afford to lose. Thumb pressed down. A twist. A pull.
Then the ledge was only a ledge, and the sky was only the sky, wheeling vast and blue above me, and the world lay spread out below exactly as before.
Nothing looked different. Everything was.
Day Seven.
I came down the mountain with steps that were lighter, though no less careful. Mountains forgive descent even less than pride.
They had taken things from me, those seven days, and I made the inventory going down. The arrogance, or a season's worth of it. The certainty that anything could be mastered if I were only clever enough, which had been load-bearing in me since I was eleven, and whose removal I could still feel. And they had given things too, as all hard trades do. A quietness. A willingness, small, new, unpracticed, to wait. The knowledge, bought with hail, that some things cannot be forced. Only invited.
I thought of my friends the whole way down through the golden foothills, and for once the thoughts had no sting in them. I could not unmake what I had been. The leavings, the maskings, the years of taking steadfastness as my due. Those pages stood written. But a man is not only his past pages. I could choose, from this footstep forward, what got written next.
The foothills unrolled before me, warm in the late light. Somewhere beyond them lay Oakholt, and the long road back, and Imre, and Anker's, and the University with all its doors, the whole complicated, messy, beautiful work of being alive among people who insisted on loving me.
I carried nothing back down that I had not carried up. A pack, a lute, a journal fatter by a mountain.
Nothing, except a small, thrilling certainty, riding in my chest where the old arrogance had been, lighter than what it replaced and stronger:
When I truly called, the wind would come.