She said it the way you say a thing to a dog you have known a long time and do not want to startle. Arthur, who had been standing on the back step with his hand behind him still half on the door handle, found that he had let go of it.
???: You can come closer. I'm not going to do anything.
He walked out into the plot. He did not decide to. He went down the path of flat stones between the beans and the dark heads of the potatoes, past the water butt, with the moon on everything and his own shadow trailing behind him long and thin across the rows, and he stopped about ten feet from the fence. It seemed the right distance. Near enough to talk. Far enough to turn round. She did not come down. She sat on the top rail with her hands on either side of her, and the fence creaked under her when she shifted, and she looked down at him with her face still in shadow and the moon behind her head.
???: You stepped over the third stair.
ART: How do you know that?
???: Because I didn't hear it. And you always step over it when you come down at night. You think nobody knows. Everybody knows. Mum lies awake listening for it not creaking. She says it's the loudest thing in the house.
He did not say anything. There was nothing to say to that. It was true, every word, and he had not known the last part, and he did not know how anybody could.
???: Is the river still there? On your ceiling?
ART: Who are you?
She was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned forward, slowly, out of the shadow of her own head and into the light, and he saw her face. It was his mother's face.
Not exactly. It was younger, a good deal younger, and narrower through the jaw, and the mouth was somebody else's, but the eyes were his mother's eyes and the set of them was his mother's set, the particular look Wren Lyerm had when she was about to tell you something you were not going to like and had decided to love you through it anyway. He had seen that look across the kitchen table his whole life. He had not expected to see it on the top of his own fence at one in the morning on the face of a girl his own age.
And something else, under it. Something he could not place, that he would only place later, lying awake, when he understood it had been his own face. Not the features. The expression. The look of somebody who has walked a very long way to get somewhere and is not certain, now that they are there, that they are allowed in.
ART: You look like my mother.
???: I know. Everybody says so. It drives me mad.
ART: Who are you?
NAM: Ah-fuh.
He went cold all over. She said it exactly as the baby said it, the two broken halves of his name, the sound he had heard for the first time sixteen days ago from a very small person on a kitchen floor and four hundred times since. She said it with great care, the way you say a thing you have not said in a long time and want to get right. And then she smiled, and it was not his mother's smile at all. It was his father's.
ART: No.
NAM: Yes.
ART: That's not possible. She's on the other side of that wall. She's asleep. She can't walk. She tried to eat a flower today.
NAM: I know. I've been told about the flower my whole life. Mum tells it at every birthday. Yours and mine. She tells it so often that Dad leaves the room.
She put her hand into the front of her coat, and took out something small and flat, and held it out to him over the rail. He came the last ten feet without thinking, and took it.
It was a golden flower. It had been pressed a very long time. It was flat and dry and brown at the edges and as fragile as old paper, and the gold had gone pale in it, the colour of honey held up to the light, but it was gold still. There was a crease across one petal where something small and determined had once bitten down on it. He knew that crease. He had watched it happen about eleven hours ago.
NAM: Grandmother's recipe book. Page with the honey bread on it. She kept it for me till I was old enough not to eat it.
ART: Dad said that'd be thirty years.
NAM: Fifteen. Dad was being Dad.
He stood at the fence in the moonlight with the flower in the palm of his good hand, and looked at it, and then up at her, and then at the flower again, and the world did a thing he had felt it do only once before, in an arena, in the air, when everything had stopped. Only this time nothing stopped. Everything went on exactly as before: the owl and the still night and the fence and the plot. It was only that it had all been turned an inch to one side, and was never going to go back.
ART: How?
She told him. She sat on the fence and told him, and he stood below her with the pressed flower in his hand and listened.
NAM: Everybody's got something. You know that better than anyone. Mine came when I was six. I named it Time After Time. I came up with it myself. I'd heard the words somewhere and I liked them, and I didn't know yet what they'd turn out to mean. It lets me go back. Not anywhere. Not whenever I like. There's a rule, and it's a very strict one, and it took me nine years to understand it properly, and by then it was almost too late to use. I can only go back to a moment when somebody blessed my future. Truly blessed it. Not wished me well, or said happy birthday, or told me I'd do fine. Blessed it, and meant it, and had no idea they were doing it. And it has to be a moment I was there for, even if I can't remember it.
ART: And this is one.
NAM: This is the one. The only one I've ever had. You gave me a flower when I was ten months old because I happened to be nearest, and you told me it was a blessing on my future, and you didn't think about it for a second. And you meant it. Every word. That was enough. That was all it took. I've had that flower my whole life without knowing it was a door.
He looked down at it in his hand.
ART: Why?
NAM: Why what?
ART: Why would you come back? Of all the- if you can only do it once. Why here? Why now? What's it for?
She did not answer at once. She looked away from him, out over the plot, at the dark rise of the land going up toward the mountain, and the moon was full on her face now, and he saw that she was a good deal younger than he had thought. Fifteen, perhaps. Not more. Younger than he was. She had his mother's eyes and his father's smile and she was fifteen and had come a very long way on her own.
NAM: To save my brother.
The owl said something, far off. Nobody answered it.
ART: Save me from what?
NAM: I can't tell you.
ART: Nami.
NAM: I can't. I'm not being mysterious. I promise I'm not. I've thought about this for most of my life. I've thought about every single thing I could say to you on this fence. And every one of them is the same problem. If I tell you what happens, you'll do something about it. You're you. You always do something about it. And then the you who does something about it isn't the same you who gets there in the end, and I don't know what that you does, and neither do you, and I might make it worse. I might make it so much worse.
ART: Then what can you tell me?
She looked back at him. The fence creaked.
NAM: That there's a last fight. You know that. You've known it since you were seven and stood up in Master Hobbes's class and said it to everybody. There is one. And where I come from, it comes late. Years later. Everybody's tired by then. You're tired. And you lose.
He did not say anything.
NAM: You don't lose because you're not strong enough. You were. You were stronger than anybody. You lose because, near the end, before it even started, you stopped thinking you'd win. I watched you stop. I was there. I was fourteen and I watched my brother stop hoping, a little at a time, over two years, the way the fire in the kitchen goes down at night, and I didn't know how to give it back to you, because I was fourteen, and you were you, and nobody had ever had to give you anything.
She held out her hand.
NAM: So I came to give it back.
He did not understand at first. He stood there with the pressed flower in his palm, the old one, fifteen years old and brown at the edges, and looked at her hand held out empty over the rail. Then he understood. He held up the flower, and she did not take it. She closed his fingers over it instead, the way Elsie had closed his fingers over the whistle that morning, and held his fist shut in both her hands.
NAM: That's a blessing on your future, that is. A book said so. You're meant to keep it.
They were his own words. Exactly his own words, from eleven hours ago, to a baby on a kitchen floor. She had been told them so often at so many birthdays that she knew them better than he did.
ART: That's it? That's all?
NAM: That's all. That's everything. I don't know if it's enough. I don't know if anything I do here changes anything at all. I've only got the one door, and I've just used it, and I gave you a flower. Do you know how stupid that sounds, said out loud?
ART: A bit.
NAM: It's very stupid. It's the stupidest plan anybody has ever had. But you'd have done exactly the same, and you know it.
He thought about it. He would have. He knew he would have, and that she knew it, and that this was why she had come.
She let go of his hand. She sat back on the rail and looked at him for a long moment, the whole of him, from his bare feet on the cold path to his hair sticking up on one side, as though she were fixing it somewhere she could find it again.
ART: Where will you go?
NAM: Back.
ART: To what? If it works, if I- if things are different, then where you come from isn't-
NAM: Arthur.
She said it the way she had said it from the dark, the first time, as though it had been said a great many times before and would be said a great many times again.
NAM: Don't. Please. I've thought about that part too. I'm going back to something. I don't know what. Neither do you. That's all right. That's the point of it, I think.
ART: Will I see you again? Like this?
NAM: You'll see me tomorrow morning. I'll be on the kitchen floor trying to eat your boots. Be nice to me. I'm going to be extremely annoying for about fifteen years. Just know, I love you lots.
She smiled, his father's smile, and he opened his mouth to say something back, he never afterward knew what. The fence creaked, once. There was nobody on it.
He stood in the plot for a long time. The moon went on being nearly full. The owl went on not being answered. The plot lay silver and empty to the fence and past it, and there was nothing on the top rail but moonlight and the grain of the old wood he had helped his father sink when he was eleven. He opened his hand.
The flower was still there. Pressed, and brown at the edges, and pale gold, with a small crease across one petal where somebody had once tried to eat it.
He looked at it for a while. Then he thought, with the part of him that had grown up in a village where you were not allowed to make a fuss about anything, that it was a lot of weight to put on a flower. A lot of weight. A line in a library book, in the middle of a chapter about wedding customs in Corvane, and a field nobody had ever written down, and a baby who tried to eat things. Golden flowers stand for hope. Did they, though. Did they really. He thought about Yseult saying you could use a great deal, that was the consensus, and about Gregor complaining all the way down the lane about the one in his buttonhole, and about himself crouching on the kitchen floor saying a book said so, and he laughed. He did it quietly, on his own in the moonlight, a short breath through the nose. It was absurd. The whole thing was absurd.
Then he stopped laughing.
He stood in the plot with the flower in his hand and thought about a girl of fifteen with his mother's eyes, watching her brother stop hoping a little at a time, like a fire going down in a kitchen at night, and not knowing how to give it back. He thought about her finding out, at fifteen, that she had one door and one only, and walking through it, on her own, with nothing in her hands but this.
He closed his fingers round it. Carefully. It was very old. He went back up the path between the beans and in through the back door, and shut it behind him, and stood in the dark kitchen by the banked hearth with the flower in his fist for a long moment. Then he went up the stairs. He did not step over the third one. He put his whole weight on it, on purpose, and it creaked, long and loud in the sleeping house, the sound that had meant, when he was very small, that somebody was coming up to check on him.
Behind his parents' door, which was open a crack, he heard his mother turn over, and settle, and sleep.