This Is How You Lose the Time War

I have six months to fill before I can send this to you, so I am writing in pieces—parcelling out the words I wish you to have, though you’ll of course read them all at once. Or perhaps you won’t? Perhaps you’ll want to save these seeds to absorb at your leisure, perhaps even at the pace of my writing them. But why waste so much time? More dangerous to keep them on you, where they can be found. Better to read them all at once.

At any rate, this is staghorn sumac: not poisonous, delicious mixed into meats, salads, tobacco. Taste how tart it is, how tangy; grind it into a spice to sprinkle or smoke, or soak the berry heads whole and get something like lemonade.

These seeds, for you, are best eaten one at a time, rolled around your tongue and broken beneath your teeth.

Yours,

Blue

PS. I love writing in aftertaste.

PPS. I hope you noticed the difference between this sumac and the poisonous one. Only one of them is red.

• • •

My dear Sugar Maple,

We’re tapping the trees, boiling sap down for syrup and hard candy. I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.

I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No—I feel sometimes like

I ought to want to be less fierce with you. That this—whatever this is—would be better served by tenderness, by gentle kindness. Instead I write of spilling out your sap-guts with reeds. I hope you can forgive this. To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

Yours,

Blue

• • •

Dear Sailor’s Delight,

The snow’s gone and everything is warming, as if the sun were knuckling into the earth with both hands and kneading it into release. Planting time on the horizon—and I take this phrase and turn it over, smile at how Garden seeds time, makes time a planting more subtle than desert seasons, and the horizon is a promise.

I have waited until now to address your concern about shadows. I have paid careful attention. There was a time, earlier in our correspondence, when I was absolutely certain of being trailed—little things, faint, difficult to name, but you know the feeling of walking into a room where someone has recently been and left? Like that, but in reverse. Never followed, quite, but . . . trailed.

But I’ve not felt this since being embedded, which may be cause for concern. When Garden embeds an agent—as I’m sure your Commandant has noticed—they are near impossible to approach, indistinguishable from their surroundings, so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of strands that to cut us out would tear unsightly holes through which Chaos pours, Chaos no one downthread wants, not even your Oracle, who lives and breathes the stuff. Too unpredictable, too difficult to manage, the cost/benefit all askew—so you catch us on the move, in between, while we’re dancing the braid as well, touching lives only lightly. Even Garden has difficulty reaching us with the more nuanced branches of their consciousness; to be an agent out of time and approach someone embedded you’d need to practically wear their skin before the braid would allow you within fifty years or a thousand miles of their position.

You’ll ask, But how are you able to send me letters in the contents of birds’ stomachs? Think of birds as a comms channel I can open and close seasonally; fellow operatives relate their work to me at the equinoxes; Garden blooms more brightly in my belly. There’s enough traffic that it’s a simple matter to disguise incoming and outgoing correspondence, misdirect, hide in plain sight. Enemy agents, though—I’ve heard stories of what happens to those of your side who try to push through to one of our plantings. Imagine walking through a thorn hedge that grows thicker, harder, sharper the more you push into it, and you’ll have something of what it’s like—but for acres, for decades, until you’re ribboned and rent into tinsel.

All this to say, I’m not being followed; if you are, I’ll send out what feelers I can to see if it’s my people. It may well be—Garden’s clearly been interested in you since you were small. But I’ve every confidence in your ability to evade and outmaneuver anyone from my side.

Anyone who isn’t me.

If it’s your people, that’s more complicated and troubling. Be careful.

Yours,

Blue

PS. Any information you can give me about the quality of shadow—a scent, a qualifying colour of feeling, the nightmare you woke from after you thought yourself safe—will help me investigate. Though I suppose I never did learn if you dream.

Blue is braiding grasses between her fingers.

It looks like purest idleness: a long-haired woman at day’s end, painted in sunset, cross-legged near the river, weaving for pleasure. She is not making baskets or nets, not even crowns or garlands for the children running barefoot nearby.

What she does is study. What she does is play, in six dimensions, a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go, whole boards of black and white stones dancing around each other, pushed, knights turned rooks, iterations of atari carefully constructing checkmate. She lays grass over grass over grass and studies, not only the geometries of green, but the calculus of scent and heat, the thermodynamics of understory, the velocity of birdsong.