"We can't stay there," said Alvin, "but maybe Tenskwa-Tawa will let us pass through. Maybe them red folks'll help us with food and shelter. But my point is, I know Tenskwa-Tawa, and so I'm the one that's got to go and talk to him and see whether we can use his land as our road north. Can't send nobody else. So you folks is gonna have to follow General La Tia."

"But I don't know the way."

"Go north for a while, and then find a road that leads west to the Mizzippy," said Alvin. "Be resourceful. What white folks along the way won't tell you, black folks will."

"But what if an army comes?" said Dead Mary. "We got no fighters here, except maybe a few of the French men. We got no guns."

"That's why General La Tia has to consult with Arthur Stuart here."

"I don't got any guns," said Arthur.

"But you know what to do with any guns that are raised against us," said Alvin. "Every plantation you come to, you got to be there, Arthur, to make sure no guns get fired. At night, you got to make sure there's fog keeping bad folks from finding us. You got to follow the heartfires to make sure no one strays."

"No," said La Tia. "I can do that. I know how to do that, you can't lay so much on that boy, him."

Arthur nodded gratefully. "Watching heartfires ain't as easy for me as for you, Alvin. And making fog-that's what Calvin done, not me."

"But it's not hard," said Alvin. "I'll teach you today. And there's another thing. You're the only one speaks all the languages, Arthur. You got to make sure everybody's understanding everybody else."

"Heck, Alvin, half the time I don't even understand you."

Everybody laughed at that, but in truth they were all frightened-of the dangers on the road, but, even more, of their own inexperience. It wasn't the blind leading the blind, really. More like the clumsy leading the clumsy.

"And one more thing," said Alvin. "There's gonna be lots of complaining. That's fine, you just keep your patience, you leaders-all of you, make sure they know. Listen to everything, don't get angry. But if somebody raises a hand of violence against a leader-you can't stand for that. You understand me? Person raises a hand against a leader, he's out of the company. He's not one of us any more. Because we can't be afraid of our own people. We have to know we can trust everybody to be gentle with each other."

"How we gonna throw out this angry hitting man?" said La Tia. "Who gonna do that?"

"The general will ask some strong men to put the offender out of the camp," said Alvin. "And then Arthur will see to it he doesn't find his way back."

"What if he got family, him?"

Alvin sighed. "General La Tia, you'll always find a good reason not to punish a man. But sometimes you got to punish a man to save a dozen other men from needing punishment. And sometimes you have to have a hard heart to do what needs doing."

Arthur snorted softly.

"Arthur knows," said Alvin. "But when I'm not here, it's not my job. The decisions are yours. You make them, you make them stick, or you don't, and then you live with the consequences. Either way, you live with them."

"That why you going?" asked La Tia.

"That's right," said Alvin. "Just when things get hard, I leave."

He stared her down. When she looked away, it occurred to him that maybe that didn't happen to her very often. Giving way like that.

"When you leaving?" asked one of the colonels.

"Not till we've had our first meal," said Alvin. "Not till we're all bedded down for the night. Inland. Dry and away from these skeeters."

Margaret walked up the stairs into the attic room where she had slept as a child. It was a storeroom now. Father kept a room on the main floor for her, when she visited. She had tried to get him to rent it out like any other room in the roadhouse, but he wouldn't do it. "If other people pay to sleep in it," he said, "it ain't your room."

It was the room where Alvin had been born twenty-five years ago. Father probably didn't remember that. But every time she walked into that room on the main floor, she saw that scene. Alvin's mother lying on the bed, in desperate pain but even more desperate grief, for her firstborn son, Vigor, had been swept away by the Hatrack River scarcely an hour before.

Peggy-"Little Peggy" then, since her mother was alive, and doing the midwifery-had a job to do. She rushed to the woman lying on the bed and laid hands on her womb. She saw so many things in that moment. How the child was lying in the womb. How the mother was clamped down and couldn't open up to let the child out. Her mother had done a spell with a ring of keys then, and the womb opened, and out came the baby.

She had never seen a baby whose heartfire told such a dire story. The brightest heartfire she had ever seen-but when she cast her eyes into the paths of his future, there were none at all. No paths. No future. This child was going to die, and before he ever made a single choice.

Except... there was one thing she could do. One tiny dim pathway leading out of all the dark futures, but that one opened out into hundreds, into thousands of glorious futures. And in that one narrow gate, the one that led to everything for this child, she saw herself, Little Peggy Guester, five years old, reach out and take a caul of flesh from the baby's face. So she did it, and all the deaths fell away, and all the lives became possible.

I gave him life. In that room.

But just the once. She took the caul and saved it, and later brought it up here into the attic, to her room, and hid it in a box. And as the baby grew up into a little boy, and then a bigger boy, she used tiny pinches of the caul to access his own knack, which he was too young and inexperienced to understand.

Not that Peggy knew much better. She learned as she went. Learned to do her work of saving his life. For when she removed the caul from his face, thousands of bright futures opened up for him. But on every one of those paths, he died young. And each time she saved him from one of those deaths, another death opened up for him farther down the road.

Alvin the miller's son had an enemy.

But he also had a friend who watched over him. And gradually, as more and more paths showed him reaching adulthood, she began to see something else. A prim and austere woman, a schoolteacher, who loved him and married him and kept him safe.

There in that attic room, holding one of the last shreds of the caul in her hand, she realized that the prim, austere schoolteacher was herself.

I do love him, she thought. And I'm his wife. I have his baby inside me.

But I can't keep him safe.

In fact, I harm him as much as anyone now. I have no more of his caul. And it wouldn't matter if I did. He deeply understands his knack. He knows more about the way the whole universe works than I ever will; even when I look inside him, I can't understand what and how he sees.

So instead of watching over him, I use him. I found my own purpose in life, to fight slavery but also prevent the terrible war that I see in everyone's heartfire. I have gone everywhere and done everything, while he floundered, unsure of what he ought to do.

And why was he unsure?

Because I have never told him.

I know the great work he is supposed to do. But I can't tell him, because once he sets his foot on that road, there is no saving him. He will die, and die brutally, at the hands of men who hate him, betrayed by some that he loved. A bitter, sad death, with his great work unfinished. And without her even there beside him. In some paths he is alone; in others, he has friends with him. Some of those friends die, some live. But none can save him. In fact, it's his death that saves them.

But why? Why should he die? This is a man who could stop bullets by melting them in the air. He could simply walk through a wall and leave the room where they corner him. He could drop them all through the floor. He could blind them all, or fill them with unreasoning panic to make them run away.