One goose waits on the shore, for her.
She kneels.
It lays its head on her shoulder.
Then it leaves, and two feathers remain.
Red clutches them to her for a long time before she reads.
Later, farther south, a great horned owl takes the goose, and the seeker, weeping, eats its heart.
When Red enters the clearing, only footprints and the cored goose remain.
* * *
My dear Miskowaanzhe,
I write to you in the dark before dawn, slowly, longhand, chalk on slate—later I will translate these words into feathers. There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us. Have you ever watched this kind of sunset? The colours don’t blend: the redder the sky the bluer the water, as we tilt away from the sun.
I’m embedded, now, in a strand beloved of Garden—one of the ones where this continent wasn’t critically overrun by settlers with philosophies and modes of production inimical to our Shift—on a research mission, tugging at and wicking fibres for easier braiding into other strands. Always a balancing act, of course, to give without losing, to support without weakening. Everything a weaving.
I’ve been placed here to convalesce, I think. Garden doesn’t always spell these things out but does know my fondness for hummingbirds and migrating geese. I’m grateful. It is good to write with leisure. I hope, while here, to stretch my letters out, if only because they will have to find you at a lived pace—it will be a long while before I walk the braid again.
I’m married and will soon wake my husband with rose-hip tea and breakfast before sending him out to train. He’s a good man, a runner and a scout, and the days are getting cooler, so there are a great many messages and supplies to send and share before the storytelling season sets in and blankets us indoors.
It is such luxury to dwell in these details—to share them with you. I want, Red—I want to give you things.
Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too—I think you might like sumac.
I find myself naming red things that aren’t sweet.
Your letter—your last letter. Be certain that I won’t drop it where any of your fellows can read it. It’s mine. I am careful with what belongs to me.
Few things do, you know—belong to me. In Garden we belong to one another in a way that obliterates the term. We sink and swell and bud and bloom together; we infuse Garden; Garden spreads through us. But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.
It amuses me to think of liking your Commandant. What a strange Strand that would be.
I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel—to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small. I don’t want to do that. I suppose in some ways I’m more Garden’s child than she knows. Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning—poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What’s supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor. If I could touch you, put my finger to your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does—perhaps then. But I would never.
So this letter instead.
I ramble, it seems, when writing to the darkness by hand. How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give you: this first, for me.
Yours,
Blue
PS. Should this find you near a library, I recommend Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison. It’s the same in all strands in which it exists. It might be a comfort to you on the move—I can tell you’re moving a lot right now.
PPS. Thank you. For the letter.
* * *
Blue walks in the hush-light before dawn and looks for a sign.
Her work here is slow but never boring; one of Blue’s virtues as an operative is the thoroughness she brings to every life. Her husband will be important to the daughter of a rival’s friend, and the conversations Blue has with him, the gifts she makes him, the dreams towards which she rocks him in their bed will spiral tendrils of possibility from this strand into others, send tremors to shift and shake the future’s boughs in Garden’s direction.
It is a gift from Garden that her role here requires such thorough, deliberate in-dwelling; that to wander in the woods and think of birds and trees and colours is expected of her, is mission critical. Blue loves cities—their anonymity, their smells and sounds—but she loves forests, too, places other people call quiet that are anything but. Blue listens to jays, woodpeckers, grackles, laughs at hummingbirds jousting on the wing. She holds out her hands for nuthatches and chickadees, black-and-white warblers, and they flit to her, make branches of her fingers. She strokes sapsuckers’ crests without naming the colour, makes a needle and a thread of the thrill she feels in touching it, then stitches it into the joy Garden expects her to feel in the woods.