Elowen returned when the fire had decided to be only embers.
Without a tray this time — with empty hands and the side door left slightly ajar behind her, with the posture of someone who had finished what there was to finish and who had arrived at the point of the day where what remained was choice and not obligation, and who had made the choice without taking long about it. The white-haired woman had left with the other woman upstairs, their conversation low and continuous and of the kind that emits no invitation, and Mara had remained with the fire and the untouched tray and the documents on the table which she had looked at without touching because there was the clear sense — the kind that requires no argument to be taken seriously — that touching them would be the sort of error that need not be made on the first night.
The young woman stood at the entrance.
She looked at Mara. She looked at the bread Mara had not touched. She looked at the empty cup. She did something with this sequence of information that produced an expression close to satisfaction — not with Mara, not with anything specific, but with the logic of things functioning as the logic of things functioned, with the fact that what had been brought to be drunk had been drunk.
"The bread is good," she said. With the tone of someone not recommending but transmitting — a fact she considered relevant and which Mara had clearly not taken advantage of, and the absence of advantage was information the world ought to have and which she was supplying.
"I wasn't hungry."
"Ye would be." Said with the particular certainty of someone who does not predict but states, who already knows the result before the process has finished because the process is simple enough to be known in advance and she had known enough of such processes to have confidence in this ability. She entered with the direct step of someone who had decided the entering had already happened and that the rest was natural continuation. She went to the fireplace. She sat on the floor — not in one of the available chairs, on the floor, with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, with the ease of someone who had arrived at the right place and considered the matter of position closed.
Mara looked at her a moment.
There was something in the girl — and she was a girl, not by physical measure but by the way of existing in the world, with the lightness of someone who had not yet accumulated sufficient weight to walk differently, with the specific absence of the weight that life deposits when it deposits in quantity — that was not what she had expected to find here. There was no strangeness in her towards Mara. There was the ease of someone who had been born into this world and who found it entirely sufficient, who had never looked at its edges with the suspicion that there was more beyond them.
And there was, beneath this, something that was the exact opposite of the smallness the first impression had suggested.
"What's your name?"
"Elowen." Without ceremony, without the pause of someone deciding whether to answer, with the simplicity of someone supplying requested information because requested information is information that ought to be supplied. "And thou art Mara Solé of Varra who came from another time with the old man's wand." There was no question in this — there was the enunciation of a compilation she was organising aloud to verify whether the pieces were where she had thought they were.
"You heard."
"I always hear." She turned slightly towards the fire with the expression of someone making a concession that was not quite a concession because it had ceased to be a concession a long while ago and had become simply a fact. "It is not discourtesy. The walls of this house are thin where it matters and thick where it does not, and I learnt early which is which."
The fire crackled with the intimacy of something that had been in that room long enough to have opinions about the conversations.
There was, Mara noticed, something in the way Elowen spoke that was different from the white-haired woman and different from the other woman — there was the same archaic register, the same thee and thou and wouldst, but where in the others there was the weight of vocabulary accumulated over a span of time the language had absorbed like sediment, in Elowen there was the lightness of someone who had learnt the language of the environment without the environment having yet managed to deposit all the weight alongside it. Like a song learnt without yet knowing what the words mean — correct in form, still light within.
"Don't you find it strange?" said Mara. "That I came from another time?"
Elowen considered with the seriousness of someone for whom consideration was a process that deserved its stages. "Strange is a large word for a small thing. Thou camest. Things come. The lady receives what comes." A pause. "What is strange is that the relic held and no one expected it."
"Nor did I."
"That." Elowen turned her gaze to Mara with the quality of attention she had noticed before — absorbing, filing, arriving at conclusions with the silent speed of something that works without announcing that it is working. "The lady says relics hold those who know what they do. But thou didst not know." A small and precise pause. "So either the relic erred — which relics do not do — or there is another reason that has not yet been said."
"What might it be?"
Elowen was silent with the silence of someone processing, not the silence of someone hesitating, which are two forms of silence that resemble each other from the outside and are entirely different within.
"I don't know," she said finally. "But I think about it." A pause. "I think about many things."
The fire between them had the patience of things that are not in a hurry.
"Such as?"
Elowen looked at the flames with the expression of someone arriving at a territory that was preferred — visited with pleasure and not obligation, always there and always containing more than was there on the last visit. "I think about memories," she said. "How they are made. How they last. How some remain even when thou wouldst not have them and others go even when thou wouldst keep them." A pause. "The lady says that memories are the material of the world. That the portal thou crossedst is made of them." The eyes returned to Mara. "I think about whether it is possible to shape them. Not to remember — to shape. To make of a memory something different from what it is. To change what remained as though what remained were not fixed."
There was in the way she said this — not as a dream, not as reverie, but as a working hypothesis thought about long enough to have ceased to be vague and begun to have structure, which had passed from wanting to working-towards — the quality of someone whose vision was small on the map and large at the point where the eye rested, who did not know the world but knew, with considerable depth, the thing she had chosen to know.
Mara was silent.
She thought about the portal. About the world remade from grey to colour, about the red that had arrived at the edges with the quality of something that had been waiting for the beauty to finish before advancing. She thought that she had entered a memory, that the memory was the test, that the test had not ended.
She thought about the cathedral that was still there.
"The cathedral," said Mara. Not entirely to Elowen — to the thought that was taking shape, to the next steps that did not yet have contours but were beginning to have direction.
"It always has been," said Elowen, with the naturalness of someone confirming the position of a mountain.
"The ritual is still happening."
"It always has happened." A pause. Elowen turned her face slightly. "Since before my mother. Since before my mother's mother." She stopped — with the hesitation of someone arriving at the limit of what they know with certainty and not wishing to cross it without noticing they had. "Since long before."
"Who is she? The saint."
The silence that followed was different from those before — it had the quality of something that had been kept carefully and was being accessed with corresponding care.
"The lady knows," said Elowen at last. "The lady knows things about the saint that she does not tell me." A pause that was not resentment but the observation of someone who had arrived at this conclusion at some point in the past and who had decided, rather than lamenting the absence, to work with the fragments that came through the thin walls where it mattered. "But what I hear is that the saint was not always what she is. And that what she is now began with something that was done to her." The eyes met Mara's with the quality of someone delivering the first piece of something they know to be much larger and who wants the receiver to know it is only the first. "Not with something she chose."
The fire diminished.
"Elowen."
"Hm."
"The documents on the table." Mara looked at the papers she had been avoiding. "You've read them."
The young woman was silent with the silence of something being weighed — not the truth, which was evident, but the decision to say it, which was different.
"I always hear," she said. "And I read when I can." A pause with the texture of something kept long enough to have its own form and which was now being released with the care that proper forms require. "The village was prosperous. There was a woman. There were the gods." She stopped. "And then there was blood and then there was the saint and then there was what there is now." The eyes met Mara's with the seriousness of someone who knows they are delivering a beginning and not a middle and not an end. "But what is in the documents and what the lady says when she speaks to herself are different things. And that difference—" a small and precise pause, "—is the part I do not understand. And which seems to me to be the part that matters."
Mara looked at the documents.
She looked at Elowen sitting on the floor of the manor with her legs crossed and eyes that held the attention of someone who saw more than necessary, who had said more in ten minutes than the mistress of the manor had said all evening, and who had said it with the honesty of someone who had not yet learnt that certain truths cost more than they are worth — or who had learnt and had arrived, with the specific consistency of someone with a small but firm vision, at the conclusion that she did not believe this.
There was a difference between the two possibilities.
Mara did not yet know which was the true one.
But there was something in the girl with the small world and the large eyes that said that when she knew, it would matter.