I may be in the right where. But this is not the right when.
Summoning courage, he knocked on the door and met a stone-faced couple who visibly muscled aside their suspicions to offer the strangely dressed newcomer kindness.
They had biscuits.
They had coffee.
They had news of the year.
1894.
He did not vomit when they told him, but it was a close thing.
The Crow King’s words came to him.
Forward in your future, but backward in a twin of this world’s past…
What had Valentina told him about the man who traveled back six minutes? No paradoxes. No changing the future. No meeting yourself. A pocket timeline.
He tried to focus on gratitude. He was back in the world. Perhaps it was too much to expect precision on a return trip from outside reality.
I did pretty well, give or take a hundred years.
Seated at the millers’ table, weathering incredulous looks, Green chewed his food mechanically and tried to keep his emotions from his face. Against all odds, he had managed to survive. He had gained a home and lost it. He was more absolutely alone than ever before. Even without the universe’s rejection of paradox, he knew nobody in the nineteenth century.
Nobody?
When breakfast was had and talk turned to harnessing the horses and driving the exhausted stranger to Hickory, Green was biting back on a flood of questions, but one slipped through his teeth.
“Do you know anyone by the name of Valentina Blackwood?”
In the autumn of thepresent, a year after Green went through the Hole in Nothing, a mile beneath the forest, Catskill smelled a shift in the world. It was an air thing. A tree matter. A ripple from far, far above.
May it wait until the spring?
He posed the question to the mountain.
The responding silence saidno.
He licked at nothing in frustration.
An under-saint was on the move, assembling itself, roaming near the borders of the lower webworks. It was flirting with the idea of entering Catskill’s territory to hunt for warm blood. He could feel the compressed sediment of the creature’s mind growing a fault line, building up tension. A quake was imminent.
Perhaps it was not a proper wish, but he wanted it to come. He was grateful for the wholesomeness of the task. His duty was clear. It was deliciously straightforward.
The surface call bit his snout, the idea of leaving his cat and mousegame with the giant blasphemy, climbing back up to the bedrock, the sandstone, the aquifers that smelled of air and seas, the too-soft clay and soil.
The year had been odd.
Last autumn gripped his thoughts with unusual ferocity, constantly drawing his mind away from thenow,which was the seat of his power.
The outsider. The glass fawn. The not-man Green. Sudden kin. Here and gone like bloodroot in April.
It was a unique victory and a unique defeat.
And somehow, impossibly distant, he could still feel his lost packmate. The feeling came and went. Each time, he reached for the sensation, offering a piece of himself, but couldn’t quite hold it steady. In a way, the uncertainty of it was more galling than an outright loss.
Far above, autumn had returned to the mountains. He had hoped to stay down deep for the whole season. Let the surface have its seasons. He did not need them.
