We run for what feels like the whole night.
It's not the whole night. My head knows that. My head still counts more or less correctly, despite not having had much to count for fourteen and a half months. But my body has a different measure of time — a measure that has forgotten what *running for a long time* means, and translates every minute into several, every hour into two. My body thinks we've been running for days. My body is wrong. But I can't disagree with it without also agreeing with it.
I run badly. I know it. The priest, who still holds my arm, knows it too. Séhn, behind, knows it. Even Narien, ahead, knows it without turning around — because she sometimes slows the pace for a few seconds when she hears me gasping, and speeds up again when she senses I've recovered. She grants me micro-breaths without saying so. It's a way of moving together I didn't know — an attention without words, that compensates without humiliating.
The plain we're crossing is vast. Vaster than I would have imagined from the Well. I always thought our fortress was in the middle of something — a city, a village, inhabited territory. But no. The Well is on top of a hill in the middle of a plain that slopes down to a sparse forest, and that plain is *empty*. No road. No cultivated field. Not even a single chimney smoking on the horizon. Nothing. Just tall grass, thickets of small twisted trees, and occasionally a stone too large protruding from the ground like an ancient beast's bone.
Running, I understand why I never heard anything from the outside world from my cell. The outside world, here, didn't exist. I was locked up in a place chosen to be far from everything.
*
The forest approaches. I see it now — not a real forest, a *ruin* of a forest, as if someone had cut down half the trees long ago and let the other half grow twisted around the stumps. The trees aren't tall. Their trunks are thin. They look like plants rather than trees. And in the middle of the forest, shapes are visible — lines too straight to be natural, angles, ruins of what must have been a village once.
Narien guides us toward those ruins.
We reach the edge. The air changes. More humid. Heavier. The smell of the ground under the trees is not the smell of the plain — it's a smell of rotting leaves, moss, old wood. I breathe it in deeply without realizing it. The Guardian in my chest relaxes a little. As if she too prefers this smell.
We slow down under the trees. Narien raises her hand. She signals us to stop. She listens.
For perhaps a minute, no one moves. We hear the wind in the leaves — a sound I haven't heard for fourteen and a half months and that brings tears to my eyes without warning. I wipe them quickly, before anyone notices. The priest notices anyway. He smiles at me a little, sadly. He says nothing.
Narien resumes walking. Slower. More cautious. We now move among the trees in almost perfect silence, placing our feet carefully. I understand we have entered territory where she is wary of something. I don't ask what.
*
We see the ruins coming before we reach them.
First, a section of wall protruding from the ground — a dry stone wall, with no visible mortar, about two meters high, covered in lichen and brambles. Narien goes around it. Behind it, another section. Then the corner of an old house. Then what remains of a chimney — a column of blackened stone rising toward the sky like an accusing finger.
We reach the center of the ruins. It was a village, I realize now. Not a large one — maybe twenty houses. Arranged around a central square whose shape is still discernible due to the absence of trees. In the middle of the square, a well curb — what must have been a communal well, a real water well, not mine. The curb is broken on one side, but its circle is still visible.
Narien signals us to join her near the well.
*We stop here for a few minutes. Five. No more.*
The priest releases my arm. I almost fall — my legs are no longer used to bearing all my weight alone. I lean on the well curb. I breathe. I look at my boots — Vellan's boots. They're covered in mud. I feel sweat running down my ribs under my prisoner's shirt. I'm thirsty. I'm hungry too, but thirst is more urgent.
Séhn, beside me, has sat directly on the ground. His back is against the well curb. He closes his eyes. His breathing is rapid, but not panicked — that of a man who knows how much breath he has left before he has to move again.
I look at him for the first time properly in full light — well, in the semi-darkness under the trees, which is the best we can hope for at this hour. He's younger than I even thought at first glance in the Well corridor. *Twenty-three*, he once told me. It shows now. His skin is smooth. His dark circles are deep but not carved like an older man's. His hair is brown, fairly long, tied back with a cord. He has a tiny scar on his right temple — something that must have bled one day and left only a thin white line.
He opens his eyes. He looks at me too. He smiles faintly.
*You're checking me out?*
*I'm looking at you for the first time.*
He understands. He nods. He looks back at me — with the same attention, the same calm. He must be noting things about me he didn't know through the wall, too. I don't know what he sees. I don't know if he finds me as he imagined.
*I'm glad you're alive,* he says simply.
I don't know what to answer. I don't have the strength for a full answer. I just say:
*Me too.*
And it means both things at once — I'm also glad I'm alive, and I'm also glad you are. He understands both. He closes his eyes again, back against the well curb, and lets his head tip back to rest.
*
I look around.
Narien's men — there's only one left now — is examining the ground near an old collapsed doorway. He's looking for something. Probably tracks. Narien herself has moved a few steps away toward another section of wall. She's speaking in a low voice — so low that even a few meters away I can't hear the words. But I see her lips moving, and I see her hand placed flat against the stone.
She's speaking to the stones. Like she did in the tunnel. She's asking them something.
The priest, beside me, has noticed my gaze. He follows the direction of my eyes. He says, also in a low voice:
*She's asking the village if it remembers anything. Stones keep things. An abandoned village is full of memories, if you know how to listen.*
*You know how to listen too.*
It's not a question. The priest turns his head toward me. He looks a little surprised — not by what I said, but by the fact that I said it out loud.
*Yes, Louis.*
*Since when.*
*Since I was sixteen. A very long time ago.*
*Why did I never know?*
He looks at me for a long time. He weighs the answer before giving it. Then he says:
*Because when you're a Speaker of Stones in an Order that watches its stones all day long, you learn very quickly not to say so. Or you die.*
*The Order didn't know.*
*The Order didn't know.*
*All that time.*
*Yes. All that time.*
I understand, slowly, what that implies. The priest — my interrogator for fourteen and a half months — was, all that time, a man living a double life under the noses of those who employed him. A man who spoke to the stones of the Well in secret, who could at any moment hear through them what the other priests were saying about him, who could at any moment learn what they were planning against me.
I ask, because I have to ask:
*You heard things.*
*Many things, Louis.*
*About me.*
*Yes. About you.*
*And you didn't tell them to me.*
*Not all of them. Some. Never directly — always in questions or silences. What I told you the day I warned you about Séhn, for example. What I avoided asking you sometimes when you thought I wanted to get you to say it. I did what I could, insofar as I could.*
I nod. I don't have the anger I should have. Maybe I'll have it later. Right now, I only have fatigue. And a curiosity that's starting to return.
*What's your name.*
The priest smiles. A smile that is neither quite sad nor quite happy, the smile of a man who has just heard for the first time a question he had been expecting for a long time.
*Caïs.*
*Caïs.*
*Yes.*
I repeat the name in my head to let it settle. *Caïs.* I won't forget it. The Guardian in my chest purrs softly — she recognizes, perhaps, that this moment is important and that the name has just entered my life.
*And my mother knew you spoke to the stones?*
Caïs's smile changes — becomes softer, and more painful at the same time.
*Yes, Louis. She knew. It was one of my secrets, and it was one of hers too. We had several secrets in common.*
He doesn't specify which. He looks straight ahead, toward the wall where Narien is speaking. I understand he won't say anything more now. That I mustn't push. That it will take another night, another conversation, perhaps several, before Caïs tells me what he has to tell me.
I place my hand on his forearm. Just a second. Not a caress, not a real gesture — a touch that says *I understand, we'll talk about it again*. He nods without looking at me.
*
Narien comes back to us.
*The village doesn't remember anything useful. It was emptied sixty years ago and no one has returned. We're relatively safe for another half hour, maybe an hour. No more. I'm going to find a place where we can settle for a bit longer.*
She looks at Caïs. She looks at Séhn, who is dozing. She looks at me.
*You. Go drink. There's a spring behind that section of wall over there. The water is good — I asked the stones. Drink, wash your face if you can, come back in five minutes.*
I don't move right away. I'm no longer used to being given simple practical instructions. *Go drink.* In the Well, I was given water. I didn't have to look for it. For fourteen and a half months, I didn't look for water. It came to me.
*Louis?* says Narien.
*Yes. I'm going.*
I get up. My legs hold, barely. I go around the section of wall she pointed out to me.
*
Behind the section of wall, there is a small clearing.
The moon is directly above — it has moved while we were running, now higher in the sky, and its light falls through a hole in the canopy right onto this clearing. At the far end, between two mossy rocks, a spring emerges from the ground. The water wells up weakly, almost silently, and flows into a small natural stone basin before disappearing into the grass further on.
I approach. I crouch at the edge of the basin. I look at the water.
I had forgotten it.
I mean — I knew water existed, of course. I was given it every day. But the water from the Well was lukewarm, cloudy, with an aftertaste of iron. The water that was *mine* had not been real spring water for fourteen and a half months. And now, twenty centimeters from my face, there is water coming out of the ground that is absolutely clear, so clear that I can see every little pebble at the bottom, every blade of grass swaying, every tiny bubble that rises from time to time to burst at the surface.
I reach out my hands. I plunge them into the water.
And I *feel nothing*.
Not nothing-nothing. I feel the volume. I feel the pressure of the water against my palms. I feel the slippery texture, I feel the resistance when I move my fingers. But the *coolness* — the coolness this water should have, the coolness of a spring emerging from the ground in the middle of a cool night — I don't feel it.
It's gone. Like it was since the mug. It won't come back.
I close my eyes. I keep my hands in the water. I *search* for the coolness with all my concentration. Nothing. The water could be at any temperature in the *not warm* range, I wouldn't be able to tell. It's water. It's wet. It slips. But it's not cool.
I open my eyes again. I cup some water in my joined palms. I drink.
The taste. The taste, on the other hand, is there. Not the sweetness — the sweetness is also gone, has been for a long time. But tastes remain. A taste of stone, very pure. A taste of real spring water, which has almost no taste, but whose absence of taste is itself a taste — the recognition that I'm drinking something that hasn't been locked in a pitcher, that hasn't slept in a container, that was in the earth a few seconds ago and is now in my mouth.
I drink again. I drink too much, I know, but I can't stop. My stomach fills. My lips dip into the basin. Water runs down my chin, my neck, my shirt. I don't care. I drink as if I've crossed a desert. I'm not crossing a desert. I'm only crossing my own past captivity, and the water from this spring is the first *real* thing I drink in my new life outside.
*
When I finally stop drinking, I realize I'm laughing.
Not a loud laugh. A small laugh, to myself, silent. The laugh of a fool who just drank too much water from a spring.
I put my hands in the water again — this time just to look at them. I move my fingers. The water swirls around them in small spirals. I make a stronger movement — I splash. Water sprays onto my arms, my face. I laugh harder, and I put my hands back in, and I stir the water like a child. I take a full handful and throw it into the air. The drops fall back into the basin with a sound of tiny hail.
I realize I'm doing something I haven't done since I don't even know when. I'm *playing*. I'm playing with water like I would have played as a child in the courtyard of the Vermillion estate, with Maela, when we were eight and five and our mother watched us from the window, smiling.
I stop. Suddenly. Because the memory of Maela arrived, and with it came the awareness that Maela is dead, and with her came all the things I've forgotten and all the things I will forget again.
I stay crouched at the edge of the basin, hands in the water, and I cry softly. Not long. A minute maybe. It's strange — I cry and smile at the same time. I cry because Maela is no longer there to play with me in the water. I smile because I played in the water for the first time in fourteen and a half months and it felt *good*.
I realize, crying and smiling, something I wouldn't have phrased like that before. *I'm glad to be alive.*
It's a simple sentence. It seems like nothing. But for fourteen and a half months, I didn't think it once. I stayed alive out of habit, out of inertia, out of refusal to let the others win. Not out of *desire*.
Now, in this clearing, with my hands in the water of a spring I no longer feel as cool but still feel as real, with a moon falling through a hole in the leaves, with people who pulled me out of a tunnel and are waiting for me twenty paces away behind a section of wall — now, I *desire*. To stay alive. To see what comes next. To drink this water again tomorrow. To see days, nights, things.
The Guardian in my chest purrs softly. She feels it too. She's pleased with this desire. She may have been waiting for it for fourteen and a half months.
*
I stand up. I splash one last handful of water on my face, so Narien won't see too clearly that I've been crying. I rejoin the group behind the section of wall.
No one asks why I took more than five minutes. Narien looks up at me, scans me with a quick glance, sees that I'm doing better than before, and nods.
*We're leaving. The place I want us to settle is a twenty-minute walk away.*
She stands up. Her last man stands up too. Caïs looks at me gently — he has probably guessed what happened at the spring. Séhn opens his eyes, stretches, stands up in turn.
We set off again. This time, I walk better. Not because my legs are stronger — they aren't. Because I *want to*. Because my legs pull harder when there's a desire behind them.
*
We cross the ruins in reverse and leave the village through an opening where a gate once stood. Behind it, a path that goes deeper into the sparse forest. Narien guides us along this path.
I walk between Caïs and Séhn. Caïs has taken my left arm out of habit, but less tightly than before — he sees that I'm staying upright better. Séhn, on my right, looks around like someone who hasn't been out for a long time either. I realize, watching him discreetly, that Séhn also hasn't seen the outside world for months. He too was in the Well for thirteen months. He too is rediscovering it. I hadn't thought of that.
I ask, in a low voice:
*Did you see the sky?*
It takes him a moment to understand my question. Then he nods.
*When we came out of the trapdoor. Yes. I saw it.*
*What did you think.*
He thinks. He looks ahead, toward Narien's silhouette in front.
*I thought that my sister had seen it too, in her time. And that it consoled me that the same thing she had seen, I could see now.*
I say nothing. I could have said many things. But what he just told me deserves to be left alone for a few seconds, before moving on.
I press his elbow against mine, gently. He presses mine back. We keep walking.
*
At the end of the twenty minutes Narien had announced, we arrive at a hollow in the forest — a basin below a fold in the terrain, where rocks form a natural half-shelter, with a stone hearth already built in the middle and traces of old fires. Someone has stopped here before us. Probably often.
Narien says:
*Here. We can stay for a few hours. We're protected from the west winds and we can't be seen from the plain. Sit down. Rest. No fire — smoke would betray us.*
We sit down in the hollow. I lean back against a rock. The priest — *Caïs*, I have to think *Caïs* now — sits down next to me. Séhn finds a spot near another rock, to my right. Narien's man remains standing, at the edge of the hollow, as a sentinel.
Narien, for her part, takes a small package wrapped in cloth from her travel bag and unfolds it on a flat stone. Hard bread, dry cheese, a few apples. Travel food. She cuts it with a pocketknife and distributes the portions.
I take mine. I eat it slowly. I discover, piece by piece, that fresh bread doesn't taste like stale bread, that cheese has a texture I had forgotten, that the apple — the apple — the apple *crunches* between my teeth in a way I can't describe because there are no words to describe the sound of the first fruit you've eaten in fourteen and a half months.
I chew for a long time. I can't swallow right away. The others look at me without looking at me. Séhn smiles, imperceptibly. Caïs quietly hands me his own apple.
*Take this one too. I'm not hungry.*
I take it. I bite into it. I chew again.
I say nothing. There's nothing to say.
*
Above us, very far away now, in a direction no longer even visible because the trees block the sky of the forest — above us, the glow must be touching the Well at this very moment.
I feel it more than I see it. The Guardian in my chest feels it too. She's no longer relaxed. She has resumed her listening posture.
Narien looks up, as if she too can feel the contact. She says, in a low voice, almost to herself:
*She has landed. She knows now that we're no longer in the Well. She's going to search.*
She looks at us one after another.
*We eat. We rest for an hour. And then we leave again. We have a way to go. A long way.*
No one asks where. No one asks how long. No one has the strength, right now, to want to understand what comes next. We eat. We rest. The Guardian listens. The forest breathes around us, with its small sounds of nocturnal animals regaining confidence, with the wind passing through the leaves, with somewhere very far away the barely audible rumbling of something that has just set foot on an empty fortress and is wondering, in its language of stars, where the boy it came to find has gone.
It will search. It may find. Perhaps not now. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps in a month.
I close my eyes. Caïs's apple is finished. I still have a small piece of its skin in my mouth that refuses to dissolve. I keep it there, like a candy.
I almost fall asleep, leaning against the rock. I vaguely hear Narien and her last man speaking in low voices about the rest of the route. I hear Séhn breathing beside me, slowly. I feel Caïs's presence on my left.
Just before I drift off, I think: *I didn't know the world had so many tastes.*
And I think, right after: *I must remember them. All of them. Before the Guardian takes them too.*
The Guardian in my chest purrs softly. As if to tell me: *that one, I'll leave it for you.*
I fall asleep.