She thought of Father's and Angel's tests, me rules of protocol, the rituals of self-denial. Sometimes it was as Will said. Sometimes she chose freely. But other times, no. Other times she was not free at all, and chafed at the bonds of slavery.

"Did he ever take away your breath?" she asked.

"I went into battle one day. My master was the captain general, and his banner drew the enemy to us. I stood between them and him, as I had always done. Only this day, Unwyrm called to me. He put terrible fear in me, but I stood my ground. He made me so thirsty and hungry that my head ached and my mouth went dry, but I stood my ground. He made the need of my bladder and bowel so great that my body released all that it held, but I paid no attention and stood my ground. And then, as the enemy reached me, he made me feel as if I were suffocating. The need to breathe is the one irresistible need, and I knew that I would not find ease from that agony until I left the field of battle and began my trek Cranningward."

"What did you do?"

"What you would have done. I made sure I really was breathing, and then went ahead and did what I wanted, regardless of the pain. I killed forty-nine men that day- the flagbearer kept count of it-and my master offered me my freedom."

"Did you take it?"

"How could he offer me what I already had? I was free. As you are free. If you had not secretly doubted that you wanted to love me, you would have had me here on this deck."

"And would you have given yourself to me?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Because I am Heptarch?"

"Not because you are Heptarch, but because you are Heptarch."

"I'm not as strong as you think."

"On the contrary. You're stronger than you know."

She turned the conversation; she did not believe him, and wanted to, and feared that if she listened any longer he would lead her to overconfidence. "You're one of the Wise? What secrets do you know, which Heffiji could put in her house?"

"She asked me her question, and I gave her my answer," said Will.

From his tone, she knew not to ask directly what the question or the answer might have been. Instead, she asked her own question. "What did you learn, as a slave?"

"That no one can ever be a slave to another man."

"That is a lie."

"Then I learned a lie."

"But you believe it."

Will nodded.

"There are people who do things for fear of the lash.

There are people who do things for fear they will lose their families or their lives. There are people bought and sold. Are they not slaves?"

"They are slaves to their passion. Their fear rules them. What power do you have over me if I am not afraid of your lash? Am I your slave, if I am not afraid to lose my family? I obey you, faithfully, completely, because I choose to; am I your slave? And when you come to hate me for my freedom, which is greater than yours, and you command me to do what I will not do, then I stand before you in disobedience. Punish me, then; I choose to be punished. And if the punishment is more than I am willing to accept, then I will use such force as is necessary to stop the punishment, and no more. But never, for a moment, have I done anything but what I choose to do."

"Then no one is as strong as you."

"Not so. I've given my obedience to God, and use my best judgment to carry out his purpose, when I have some understanding of it. But those who have chosen to give their obedience to their passion, or to their memory, they freely choose to obey. The glutton freely overfills his belly, the pederast feeds on innocence, and the fearful man obeys his fear-freely."

"You make it sound as if our desires were separate from ourselves."

"They are. And if you don't know that, then you might well become Unwyrm's slave after all."

"I know something of the doctrine of the Vigilants."

"I am not talking about a school of doctrine. I'm talking about the answer I gave Heffiji. The reason Unwyrm calls to me."

Now she could ask him outright. "What question did Heffiji ask?"

"She asked me whether dwelfs have a soul."

"Then it is theology."

"What she really was asking-and it's a question you'd better answer before you face Unwyrm-she was asking what part of her was herself."

Patience studied Will's placid face. How could he have known the question that so haunted her? "My father taught me to listen to everything and believe nothing."

"The dead do that much," said Will.

"The dead don't listen."

"If you believe nothing, then you are listening exactly as much as the dead."

"I'm not dead," Patience whispered.

Will smiled. "I know," he said. He reached out as if to touch her cheek; she recoiled from him and shook her head. So he sat back, making no effort to conceal his disappointment, and began to teach. "Each part of the triune soul has its desires. The passion has the desires of pleasure and survival and the avoidance of pain. Those who are slaves to passion are the ones we see as hedonists or cowards or addicts or drunks, the ones we pity or despise. And these slaves think that their passion is themselves. I want this drink. I want to breathe. Their identity is in their needs. And to control them is easy.

You simply control their pleasure or their pain."

She smiled. "I learned this in the cradle. People who are that easy to control, though, aren't worth controlling."

"So," he said. "They're the weakest. Are you one of them?"

"When he calls me, I can hardly think of anything else but the need for him. Even when I remember what he looks like, from the gebling memories within me, even when I should loathe him, he makes me want him, want his children."

"You came through Tinker's Wood when he didn't want you to."

"If he had really wanted to stop me, he could have."

"I say he couldn't. Because you long ago separated yourself from your body's desires."

She remembered the cold breeze from the unglazed window of her room. She nodded.

"So." He did not teach as Father did; there was no sense of triumph when she bent before his argument. He merely went on. "The second part of the triune soul, the memory-it's more difficult. It has another kind of desire, one that is born in us as surely as the need to breathe, but because it is never satisfied, we don't know that it exists. For a moment, between breaths, we don't need to breathe, so we recognize the need to breathe when it returns."

"But this one is never gone, so we never notice it."

"Yes. Yes, you see-our memory can't hold everything.

Can't hold every vision we see, every sequence of events that happened to us, everything we read, everything we hear about. It's too much. If we actually had to do that, we'd be insane before we left our infancy. So we choose. The things that are important. We remember only what matters. And we remember it in certain orders, in patterns that mean things together. In daytime, the sun is up; and all daytime becomes one day, and all nighttime becomes one night-we don't have to remember every day to remember the idea of day. But we -don't just remember this-we remember the why. It is daytime because the sun is up. Or the sun is up because it is daytime. You see? We don't remember randomly. Everything is connected by threads of cause."

"I'm not one of the Wise," said Patience. "Maybe the Wise understand the cause of everything, but I don't."

"But that's just it, that's just where the hunger comes.

Every shred of experience that we remember comes as a story-a series of events that are connected by the pushes and pulls of cause. And we believe this story, of how everything is causally connected, without questioning it.

I did this because. I did this in order to. And this is the world we live in, this pattern of events that cause each other. It becomes the framework by which we remember everything. But some things come along that don't fit."