The Cost of the Command

The storm came down on them a mile from home, in the failing light, on the one afternoon of that whole hard winter he had let himself walk out at his mother's side with nothing hidden between them but the usual thing.

It was deep winter by then, weeks past the errand to Orla's, the country shut up tight the way it shut every year — the tracks gone iron underfoot, the streams stilled to green glass at their edges, the sky low and grey and heavy for days at a stretch with a snow that did not come. Ayra had a sister's girl married out to one of the near holdings, a steading an hour's walk up the western track, and the girl had come to her own hard time with a first child, and word had come down asking for Ayra, who was steady in a birthing-room and had hands the frightened trusted; and so on a still grey afternoon with the light already thinking about going, she had wrapped herself and taken her bundle of the things such rooms want, and — because Garron was two days gone to the valley with the last of the year's cut wool, and because a woman did not walk the winter tracks alone if she could help it, and because Kael was twelve now and strong and steady and, to her, simply her son, the best company in the world — she had taken the boy along to see her there and back.

He had not liked it. He remembered that afterward, turned it over more times than was any use: that some low animal part of him, the part that had never fully slept in twelve years, had not wanted to go, had read the flat grey sky and the stilled air and the early failing of the light and set its ears back the way a beast sets its ears at weather it has no word for. He had said nothing. There had been nothing to say that a boy could say — I don't like the sky, Mother, let us not go was not a thing that would have moved her, and would only have been strange, and he had spent twelve years not being strange. So he had wrapped up warm and gone, at her side, up the western track into the shortening afternoon, carrying her bundle because his arms were the stronger, and the unease had walked with him the whole way up and he had let it, and watched the sky, and said nothing.

The birthing had gone long and gone well. That was the mercy in it, the one clean thing the day gave them and did not charge for: the sister's girl was delivered by the middle of the afternoon of a small red furious daughter, both of them living and like to keep living, and Ayra had done the steady quiet work of the room with her whole self, the way she did everything, and had come out of it wrung and glad the way she came out of the wash. And they had stayed only long enough for a warm cup and the holding of the new child — Ayra had held it and gone soft all through, and Kael had watched her go soft over another woman's newborn and felt the old strange doubled thing, the ache under the fraud, and set it down — and then they had bundled up again to start home, because the light was going and an hour's walk stood between them and the Sarn roof and Ayra would not stay the night and leave the fire cold and the house shut up with no one in it in weather like this.

They should not have started. He knew it walking out the door of the steading into the yard, knew it the way he had known it all day and could do nothing about, because the sky had changed while they were shut in the warm room bringing the child, had gone from flat grey to something lower and yellower and wrong in the northwest, a bruise-coloured weight sitting down over the hills; and the still air had begun, while they were inside, to move. The steading folk had said something — you'll want to step lively, the girl's husband had said, squinting north, there's weather in that — and had not said stay, because they had a birthing-room full and a new mother and no bed to spare and their own fear of the coming night to keep them busy, and because Ayra was a grown woman who had walked these tracks her whole life and knew her own business. So they had stepped lively. They had gone out into the yellowing afternoon with the wind rising at their backs and the first hard grains of snow beginning to tick against their hoods, and Ayra had taken his hand — she still took his hand on a rough track, and he still let her, because a boy of twelve lets his mother take his hand and because he was not fool enough to pretend he did not want it — and they had set off down the western track for home with the storm coming up behind them faster than either of them had let themselves believe it would.

It caught them, full, at the top of the long exposed shoulder of the hill where the track ran bare and high for a quarter-mile before it dropped down toward Greywick — the worst place on the whole way to be caught, the one stretch with no wall and no trees and no lee of anything, only the open hillside and the wind coming across it now with nothing to break it. The snow came down all at once, the way winter snow comes when it has been holding itself back all day: not falling but driven, flat and sidelong and thick, so that between one hundred steps and the next the whole world went out. The hills went first, and then the track ahead, and then the ground itself, the near white of the driven air and the far white of the fallen snow running together until there was no line between them and no way to tell up-slope from down but the labour in the legs. The light, which had been going, went. The cold, which had been hard, became a different thing entirely — a wind-driven killing cold that found every gap in the wrapping and reached in and took the heat out of the body faster than the body could make it, the kind of cold that had killed folk on that very shoulder before, that the village told winter stories about, that was not an absence of warmth but an active hungry taking of it.

And Ayra fell.

He never saw it, in the white; he only felt her hand wrench out of his and heard the short surprised cry, half lost in the wind, and turned and groped back three steps and found her down on the iron ground, on her side, with her ankle turned under her where a stone hidden by the new snow had rolled beneath her foot. He got her up. She could stand — she got up gamely enough, leaning on him, saying it was nothing, saying she'd only twisted it, saying they must go on, they were close, they must go on — but she could not walk on it, not really, not more than a hobbling step at a time with her arm across his shoulders and her weight coming down on him at every stride, and a hobbling step at a time was not going to carry them the half-mile of open killing shoulder and the mile beyond it down to home through a dark that was already total and a cold that was already reaching past their wrappings into the deep of them. He felt her strength going as they tried it — felt the shivering come up in her, hard and then harder, the deep uncontrollable shudder of a body losing the fight, and then, worse, felt it begin to ease, the shivering slackening not because she was warming but because the cold was winning and the body was giving up the effort — and he knew, with the flat cold clarity that had never once left him even here, even now, that if he kept her walking into this she would be dead before they reached the drop, and that if he stopped she would be dead where she sat, and that the only warm thing in the whole white roaring dark was the thing he had spent twelve years hiding, standing asleep in the buried floor of him, waiting to be reached for.

There was nothing to weigh. He noticed that, distantly, even as he moved — that the choice he had built his whole second life around, the choice to stay hidden whatever it cost, the discipline he had held through the pole and the fold-yard and his father's ledger and twelve years of the daily arithmetic of how-much-to-be, simply was not there when he reached for it. It had a price, showing this. It might have the largest price of all; he did not know who might see, did not know what the morning would make of a fire on the shoulder where no fire could be, did not know what it would do to the careful invisible life he had spent a decade building. And none of that weighed anything at all against the slackening of the shivering in the body pressed to his side, because the body pressed to his side was Ayra, and he understood, in the one clear instant it took to stop weighing, that there had never been a version of this where he let her die to keep his secret — that the secret had always been worth exactly everything except this, and that he was finding it out only now, on a killing hillside, the way a man finds out what he truly holds only when the wind is taking everything else.

He got her off the shoulder. That was the first thing, and it took the last of what her legs could give and most of what his could: he hauled her half-upright and took nearly her whole weight and moved them not down the track, which ran on exposed, but off it, crosswise and down into the fall of the land where he could feel the wind lessen by degrees, groping blind through the white until his shin cracked against stone and he found what the hillside had left them — a broken drystone sheepfold, an old one, three walls of it still standing waist-high and the fourth tumbled, a corner where two courses met and held off the worst of the driven snow. He got her down into the corner of it, into the lee, out of the direct killing push of the wind, and it was not warmth but it was less cold, and less cold was the whole of what the world was offering and he took it. Then he knelt over her in the near-total dark, and he pulled off his mittens with his teeth, and he laid his bare hands on his mother — one against the cold skin of her cheek and one flat over her heart through the wrappings — and he reached down into the buried floor of himself, past the mask and the ledger and the twelve years, down to where the heat lived, and he called it up not as a flame this time but as heat, plain heat, and poured it into her through his hands.

It was nothing like the store-room. The store-room flame had been a delicate thing, a candle's-worth held cupped and careful for the count of a few breaths; this was a wall he threw himself against and kept throwing. He had never tried to move so much of it, or to move it into another living body, or to hold it going past the point where his wind gave out — and he found that he could, that the thing in him was larger than his careful private practice had ever let him learn, that under a need this size it woke and came up out of him in a way it never had behind a closed door with nothing at stake. Heat went out of his hands into her cheek and her chest, real heat, the deep banked live warmth of a stone off the hearth, and he felt her body take it — felt the killing slackness in her fight and firm, felt the shivering come back, which he understood was good, which was the body finding the strength to try again — and he poured it and poured it, kneeling over her in the corner of the ruined fold with the snow driving grey past the broken wall, until the worst of the cold's winning was turned back and she was, for the moment, not dying.

But he could not kneel there with his hands on her all night, and the night, he knew, would be all of the night; the storm had the sound of a thing that had settled in to blow itself out over long hours, and no one would come up the western track into this before light, if then. He could not be her fire for eight hours. He would empty long before that. He needed a fire that would keep — a real one, that would hold the corner of the fold warm and hold her alive while he spent himself in smaller measures feeding it, and that would still be there, ordinary and burning, when the light came and the world could see.

So he built one out of nothing, in a wet frozen dark, which was a far harder working than any he had ever done, and it took him the rest of the night, and it cost him more than he knew he had.

There was old fuel in the fold, as there is in every old fold — a fallen hurdle-rail half-buried, a mat of dead frozen bracken and gorse blown into the lee corner over years, a scatter of sheep-dung dried and frozen hard. All of it wet. All of it iron with frost, the kind of fuel that will not take a flame in the best of conditions, that a man with dry tinder and a good flint and steady warm hands could kneel over for an hour on a fine day and never coax alight. He had no flint and no tinder and hands going numb, and he had the thing in the buried floor of him, and he used it — reached down and drew the heat up and put it not into his mother now but into the sodden bracken under his cupped hands, held it there and poured, drying the frozen wet out of the stuff by main force, driving the heat into it until the water hissed out of it in a thin steam and the bracken went from wet-black to brown to the first curl of scorch, and then, past that, the white-gold flame he knew standing up small in the cup of his hands and biting, at last, into fuel that would carry it.

Ayra saw that. He knew it even in the moment — felt her, half-conscious in the corner of the fold at his back, come up toward the surface at the sudden bloom of light in the dark, and turn her head, and see. He could not help it and could not stop and did not try; he had made his choice on the shoulder and he did not un-make it now to spare her the seeing. He heard her make a small sound, wordless, the sound of a mind too cold and too spent to make sense of a thing it should not be seeing — a fire blooming up out of her son's bare hands in a wet frozen dark, out of nothing, where no fire in the world should catch — and then the flame took the hurdle-rail, and caught, and became at last an ordinary fire, a real fire of burning wood throwing real light and real heat up the broken walls of the fold, and whatever she had seen was folded over by the plain fact of a fire burning, the way the errand had folded back over the hour at Orla's, the way the world always closed back over the strange thing and left you doubting you had seen it.

He kept it alive till dawn. That was the labour, and it was the hardest labour of his two lives, because the wet frozen fuel did not want to burn and kept trying to die, and every time it guttered toward going out he had to reach down and pour more of himself into it, dry the next wet branch by force, drive the heat back into the failing coals — hour on hour, in the driving dark, feeding a fire he was making as much out of his own body as out of the poor wet wood. And somewhere in the deep of the night he began to understand the price, because it came for him at last, the price he had looked for in the store-room five years ago and never found written on his unmarked palms. It was this. The heat he poured out came from somewhere, and the somewhere was him, and by the small hours he was pouring out more than he had, and he began to go cold — cold from the inside, the fire-maker freezing beside his own fire, the deep spent chill of a thing emptied past its bottom. His hands shook so he could barely feed the flames. A slow grinding ache set into him behind the eyes and down the long bones. And near the grey end of the night, tending the fire with the last of what he had while his mother slept the deep exhausted sleep of the rescued in the warm corner of the fold, he felt the warm salt run over his lip and put his shaking hand up and found his nose was bleeding into the firelight, dark drops falling and hissing on the hot stones, the body he had spent so far past its measure beginning, quietly, to come apart at the seams — and he understood, kneeling there grey and shaking and bleeding beside the fire he had made out of himself to keep his mother living, that everything in this world came in the one closed fist, and that the fist had opened at last on what the flame cost, and that it cost him, poured out of the deep of the body a coin at a time, and that a man who spent it without counting would one day find he had spent his way clean to the bottom and had nothing left to pour.

They came for them at first light, when the wind had dropped to nothing and the snow had stopped and the world lay new and blue-white and terribly still under a hard clear dawn. Two of them — the Renn man and the elder Hald — up from Greywick along the western track with a hurdle for a litter and their faces set for the worst, because the whole village had known Ayra went up to the steading and had watched the storm come down and had counted, through the long night, the hours she had not come home. They found the smoke first, a thin grey thread standing up off the shoulder in the still morning, and came to it, and found the broken fold and the dying fire and Ayra alive and sleeping in the warm corner of it with her turned ankle swollen fat in her boot — and the boy beside the fire, grey to the lips and shaking, with dried blood black on his mouth and his chin, kneeling over the last of the coals as though he had knelt there a very long time and forgotten how to do anything else.

He remembered little of the coming-down after that, and was glad of it, because it meant he could stop. They wrapped Ayra and carried her on the hurdle and half-carried him, and someone kept saying the boy had kept the fire, the boy had got a fire going up there in that, the boy had saved her, in a tone of plain wondering praise that he was too far gone to manage or deflect; and he let it wash over him and gave it nothing, because he had nothing left to give it, and because a boy grey and shaking and half-dead of cold is not expected to make clever conversation about how he lit a fire. He came back to himself in his own bed in the warm house with the light of full day in the window and Ayra safe across the room and a fever coming up in him hard — the body collecting, all at once, the whole bill for the night, the cost of the flame come due in his own flesh at last. He was ill for the better part of a week. That was the price paid where the village could see it, and it was a mercy, because a boy laid low by a night in a storm was the most ordinary thing in the world, and no one looked past it, and it bought him days of not having to hold his face together while he found out what Ayra would make of what she had seen.

She made of it, at first, nothing — she was ill herself, and the ankle kept her abed, and the joy of both of them living swallowed everything else for a while, and the house filled up with the neighbor women and their broths and their tellings-over of the story, which had already begun, in the way of village stories, to smooth itself into a shape that left no room for anything strange: Ayra had fallen, the boy had got them off the shoulder and lit a fire and kept her from the cold, brave clever lad, and God be thanked for both of them. He lay in his fever and heard it settle into that shape through the wall, and did nothing to shape it, because it was shaping itself exactly the way he needed, and the surest way to make a story go strange is to be seen minding how it goes.

But Ayra had been there. That was the thing the village telling could not touch, and he knew it, and he waited for it the way he waited for everything, because he knew his mother and knew she was not a woman who let a thing she had seen with her own eyes lie unexamined forever, however glad she was to be alive.

It came near the end of the week, in the quiet of an afternoon when the neighbor women had gone and Garron was back but out at the byre and the two of them were alone in the house, he mending in his bed and she in her chair by the fire with her bad foot up, and the low winter light coming grey through the window. She had been quiet a while. Then she said, not looking at him, looking into the fire, in a careful voice he had not heard her use before:

"Kael. Up in the fold. When you got the fire going." A pause, the length of a woman deciding whether to walk through a door. "How did you light it?"

He had known it was coming and he had the answer built, laid down cold across the fever-days the way he laid everything down, every joint of it fitted and sanded so it would bear weight. "Had my flint," he said, sleepy, easy, a tired boy in a warm bed with no idea he was being asked anything that mattered. "In my coat. And a bit of char-rag, from lighting the wash-fires for you. There was old wood in the fold, under the snow — a hurdle-rail, dry in the middle where the wet hadn't got. Took me an age. My hands were that cold I dropped the flint I don't know how many times." He let a small tired pride come into it, the exact amount a boy would feel and show. "Da taught me. Striking a fire. You have to get down to the dry heart of the wood."

It was good. He knew it was good — every piece of it was a thing a listener could check and find true, the flint he did carry, the char from the wash-fires she had watched him lay a hundred times, Garron who had in fact shown him fire-striking among the other hard skills, the dry heart-wood that any hill-child knew to look for. It was the work of a craftsman, that lie, built to hold under exactly the pressure it was now under, and he lay in his bed and delivered it in a sleepy child's voice and watched his mother, across the grey afternoon, decide what to do with it.

And he watched her choose to believe it.

That was the thing he had not braced for, for all his bracing — not the asking, which he had built for, but the watching her choose, the slow visible turning of it in her face by the fire. She had seen something in that fold. He knew she had; he had felt her come up and turn her head at the bloom of it. Some part of her, the low animal part that reads the world before the mind can argue with it, had seen fire come out of her son's bare hands in a wet dark, and had carried the seeing home through the fever and the joy and the week, and had brought it out now, quiet and careful, to be looked at. And he watched her hold it up against the sleepy sensible boy in the bed and his flint and his char-rag and his dry heart-wood — and he watched her want the boy and the flint to be the truth, want it with her whole self, because the other thing, the thing she had half-seen, had no place to live in the world she knew and loved and had built her whole life inside of; and he watched the wanting win. He watched his mother, who was not a fool, who was steady and clear-eyed and strong, look at the plain answer her son gave her and take it, because it let her keep him, because a boy with a flint was her son and a boy with fire in his hands was a stranger, and she would sooner have the son. The half-seen thing went back down under. Her face eased. She let out a breath she must have carried a week, and the careful voice went warm again, and she said, "Da did teach you well," and something in it that had stood up wary lay back down, and she smiled at him, tired and fond and relieved, and told him to sleep, and turned back to the fire.

He had won. He made himself notice that, because it was true and because he had earned it: the lie had held, the one glimpse the world had ever handed her had been folded back under, the danger was past. He had done a hard thing well, and the doing of hard things well was the one clean pride he had left himself in either life. And it was ashes in him, lying there watching her turn back to the fire believing him — ashes in a way none of the ten thousand smaller lies had ever been, because all the others had been told to people who did not love him or did not know they should, to a village managing its fear and a father keeping a ledger, and this one he had told to the one person in two worlds who loved him without stint or reserve, and he had used that love against her. He had built the lie out of her love — out of her wanting to keep her son, out of her trust in the boy she had raised — had reached into the deepest warmest true thing she had and turned it into the very hinge the lie swung on. She loved him. She had always loved a boy who was not there, a mask with a child's name, and he had lived twelve years with the ache of that and thought he had taken its measure. He had not. This was the bottom of it, and he found it only now: that her love, the realest thing in his second life, was also the surest tool he had for deceiving her, and that he had just used it so, cleanly and well, and that she had never been safer or further from him than in the moment she smiled at the fire and believed her clever son.

Something closed in him then, quietly, the way a door eases shut in a still house — not slammed, not broken, only shut, and latched, and he heard the latch drop the way he had heard Orla's drop behind him in her doorway, and knew that a thing was over that would not open again. Whatever he had still half-hoped for with Ayra — some far-off day when the mask might come down, when she might know him and love him anyway, the child's wish he had never quite killed in twelve years of being loved for a stranger — he laid it down now, in the grey afternoon, watching her believe him. It was not going to happen. It could not; he had just proved to himself that it could not, that the love and the lie were built of the same stuff and he would always, when it came to it, choose to keep her by deceiving her rather than lose her by being known. He would carry her the rest of the way as he had carried the faceless one behind the wall — held close, and loved, and lied to, and never, ever let all the way in. That was the cost the fold had charged him that the fever had not: not paid out of the body a coin at a time, but taken all at once, in a warm room, in a smile — the last of his hope that the person who loved him most might one day be allowed to love the real thing.

It came for him that night, and it was not the flame's price and not Ayra's, but the oldest debt of all, the one he had owed since before he had a body, come round at last to be remembered.

He was mending by then, the fever broken, and he lay in the little back room in the dark with the house asleep around him, tired in the deep bone way that follows a fever, turning the day's grey reckoning over and finding no bottom to it. And sleep came, and took him down the way it always took him, the body first; and somewhere below the floor of sleep, in the place he had learned to fear and to wait for, the dark began to change.

He knew it at once. He had felt it twice now — once at seven, in the deep of that winter, the pressure and the pointing; and once, long before, thrown out of the first dark into this life on three shut words. He knew the thickening of the emptiness, the sense of the void around him ceasing to be void and becoming, again, the inside of something vast and old and paying attention. The presence. It had come back. And it had not come this time to aim him. There was no pointing in it, no this way, no finger laid against a landmarkless dark. It came as weight — only weight, but more of it than he had ever felt, a great slow settling pressure that bore down on him out of the filled dark not to turn him but simply to press, to make itself felt, to remind him that it was there and had always been there and that he lay, and had always lain, beneath it. And under the weight, wordless as everything it did was wordless, there was a quality he had no name for and would spend years finding one for, and the nearest he could come to it, lying pinned beneath it in the dark, was that it felt like being called to account — like the moment a creditor you had half-forgotten steps out of a doorway into your path and says nothing at all, and needs to say nothing, because his standing there is the whole of the message: I have not forgotten. You owe. Remember what for.

You used it. That was the shape the weight pressed into him, not in words but in pure mute meaning, plainer and heavier than the pointing had ever been. You used what I sent you back carrying. For twelve years it had slept in you and I let it sleep; you reached for it in secret behind your little doors and I said nothing; and last night you spent it, poured it out, wide open on a hillside where the world could see — and I felt you spend it, the way a man feels a coin go out of his own purse though another hand does the spending, because it is mine, because it was always mine, because I sent it with you for a purpose and you have begun, at last, to draw on the account. And now you will remember whose it is. Now you will remember that it was given, and that a thing given in this world is never given free, and that the day is coming — not yet, but coming, and nearer now than it was — when I will show you the purpose, and call the whole of the debt, and you will pay it.

He lay beneath it and did not fight it, because you did not fight the tide, and he took its measure the way he took the measure of everything, cold and clear even here, even pinned. And when he had its measure — when he understood that it had come not to command and not to guide but only to remind, to lay the weight of the owing back over him now that he had begun to draw on the loan — the old thing rose in him to meet it, the small hard splinter that had gone in during the first dark and never once come out, and he set it, wordless, against the wordless weight. He had never agreed. That was the whole of what he had to answer with and he answered with it, not in defiance, which the thing would not have felt, but as plain fact, the one fact that was his: no one had asked him. Not in the void, when it took him and threw him into a body and a name he had not chosen. Not at seven, when it aimed him. Not last night, when the need had reached into him and drawn the power up whether he willed it or no. It had given him the life and the tool and now it pressed the debt down over him — and at no point in any of it, across twelve years and a death and a void, had it once turned the whole weight of itself into a question and let him answer. He owed, the weight said. Perhaps he did. But a debt you never agreed to was not the same as a debt you took up, whatever the creditor believed, and the difference was the one thing in all of this that was still his, and he held it — a small cold stone he would not set down and would not, whatever came, whatever the weight pressed into him, whatever it one day showed him, let it mistake for the thing it wanted.

The weight held a long moment more. Then it lifted — not withdrawn the way the pointing had withdrawn, tide going out, but simply eased, the pressure coming up off him by degrees, leaving him lying spent in an ordinary dark with his heart going hard and the taste of the fever still in his mouth and his hands, when he lifted them, ordinary and cold. It had said its one thing. It had not needed twelve years to say it and had taken twelve years anyway, patient past any patience he could match, so like his own that the likeness turned him cold: it too knew how to wait, how to say the least a thing required and let the silence do the rest, how to lay one course and then another and let the years raise the wall. He understood, lying there, that he had been reading the presence wrong for twelve years the way he had read Orla wrong for two — filling its silence with the largest thing that would fit, calling it vast and old and terrible — and that it was all of those, yes, but that it was also, simply, a creditor with a long memory and a longer patience, and that the debt was real, and that it was coming, and that no amount of holding his one small stone would make it not come.

He did not sleep again that night. He lay and watched the dark thin toward another hard bright morning, and he did his sums — the fold, the fire, the price in his own blood, the lie, the door shut on Ayra, and now the weight come round to remind him what the whole of it was borrowed against — and he found that they came to a number he did not like and could not argue with. He had spent the year learning he was not alone: Orla had seen him, and there had been one before him, and the world had cracked open its long solitude by a hopeful inch. And in the same season the thing behind the world had reached down and pressed the owing back over him and reminded him that whatever else he was, whatever small human warmth he might yet scrape together at the end of a lane, he was bound — had been bound since before his first breath in this life — to a purpose not yet named and a debt not yet called, and that the binding did not care in the least whether he had ever agreed to it.

He got up in the morning. The fever was gone; the house wanted its work; Ayra, mending, called him to help her to her chair, and he went, and helped her, and let her lean her weight on him and pat his cheek and call him her good clever boy who had kept her alive on the hill, and he smiled the boy's smile and said the boy's small words and closed the door of himself over all of it — the flame and its cost, the lie and its cost, the weight and its owing, the one small stone he would not set down. He had been given a life he never asked for, and then the means to keep the people in it alive, and then, in the same breath, the bill for both. It seemed the world would not let him hold a warm thing without pressing a cold one into the other hand. He was beginning to understand that it never would. He set his mother in her chair by the fire, and built the fire up for her with a boy's ordinary flint and a boy's ordinary care, and did not once, doing it, reach for the other thing — and went out into the cold bright morning to see what the day would ask of him, carrying the whole account closed and quiet behind his face, and owing, now, in two directions at once: to the woman who loved a stranger, and to the thing in the dark that had never asked.