And yet on every path, he does none of those things. He accepts the death they bring him. And I can't bear it. How could Alvin, so full of life and joy, ever choose to embrace death when he always has it in his power to live?

She knelt in the little attic window where, as a five-year old, she had stood to watch Alvin's family ride away into the west, to the place where they built a mill that became the foundation of the town of Vigor Church. And she realized: If Alvin wishes he could die, I can't pretend that it has nothing to do with me.

A man with a wife and children doesn't want to die. Not if he loves them, and they love him. Not if he has hope for the future. If I just love him enough, I could save him. I've always known that.

Yet what have I done? I sent him to Nueva Barcelona. Knowing that if he went, he would indirectly cause the deaths of hundreds of people. Save thousands, yes, but hundreds would still be felled, and it won't help that it was my responsibility. In fact, it will hurt. Because he'll cease to trust me. He'll think I love something else more than him. That I will expend his trust in a greater cause.

But it isn't true, Alvin. I love you more than anything.

I just didn't love you the way you wanted to be loved. I loved you like that little five-year-old girl, keeping you safe. Helping turn you away from terrible futures. Giving you the freedom to make all the good choices you've made as a grown man.

And then taking away your freedom by not telling you all that I knew about the consequences of your actions. She could hear him telling her: A man isn't free if he doesn't know all that could be known about his choice.

But if I told you, Alvin, you wouldn't have done the things that had to be done. You would have tried to intervene and save everybody. And I saw those paths. It wouldn't have worked. You would have failed, and quite probably would have died right then, with your great work undone.

Instead you've turned it into something wonderful. I didn't see these paths. When you use your power you always open doors into the future that didn't exist before. So I didn't see that bridge you made across the water, I didn't see these five thousand heartfires you brought with you out of the city and into the wilderness. So it worked out well, don't you see?

Except that he'll say, "If my power opens doors to paths you didn't see, why didn't you trust me to find my own way in Barcy?"

Or maybe he won't say it. There are paths where he doesn't say that.

She reached down and laid her hands on her own belly, above the womb where her baby's heart was beating. A healthy baby, with a heartfire as bright and strong as she could have reasonably hoped for.

But nothing like Alvin's heartfire had been. An ordinary child.

Which is all she could have hoped for. An ordinary child- talented in this, having a knack with that, but all within the realms of the expected. This little boy will have no enemy pursuing him every day of his life. And instead of watching him every waking minute as I watched Alvin for so many years, I can be a natural mother to him. And to his brothers and sisters, God willing.

God and Alvin willing, that is. Because he may never come to me again. When he knows how I used him, how I deceived him, what I caused him, unknowingly, to do. How I did not trust him to make his own choices.

She sat down with her back to the window and cried softly into her apron.

And as she wept, she wondered: Did my mother weep like this, when my two older sisters died, each one just a baby? No, I know what those tears are like. Even though my first baby didn't live long enough for me to get to know him, I laid that little body in the ground and I know at least something of what she went through, laying her babies in their graves.

Nor do I weep the way my mother would have wept, if she had known about my father and his love for Mistress Modesty. I kept that secret from her because I saw the terrible consequences of her learning the truth, how it would destroy them both.

No, the way I weep now is the way my father would have wept, if he had known that his betrayal of my mother was sure to be discovered, and he could do nothing to prevent it. My sin was not adultery, to be sure. I've been faithful to Alvin that way. But it was a betrayal nonetheless, a violation of the deep trust between a man and the woman he has taken to be half his soul, and to be half of hers.

Bitter tears of anticipated shame.

And with that thought, the tears dried up. I weep for myself. It's myself I'm pitying here.

Well, I won't do it. I'll bear the consequences of what I did. And I'll try to make the best of what is left between us. And maybe this baby will heal us.

Maybe.

She hated all the maybes. For on this matter, as so many others, the fog that blocked so many of Alvin's futures from her view obscured what would happen. She could know exactly what would happen in the whole life of some shepherd she passed in her carriage, but her husband, the person whose future mattered most to her, remained so dangerously exposed and yet tantalizingly hidden.

All her hopes were in the hidden parts of his heartfire. Because the paths that were not hidden gave her no cause for hope. There'd be no happiness for her on any of those roads. Because a life without Alvin in it held no hope of joy for her.

Calvin stood on the dock and watched the riverboats pull out, one by one. Colonel Adan had done his planning well. The steamboats pulled out on schedule, and there was no danger of collision.

Unfortunately, there were also men determined to get out of this city whether they were part of the official expedition or not. So in the midst of the attempt to order the steamboats into a convoy for the passage upstream, two big rowboats swung out into the river, with six men pulling at the oars of each and another dozen or so under arms, many of them foolishly standing up and huzzahing their own bravado.

Calvin laughed aloud to see them. What fools. So eager for death, and so sure to find it.

Sooner, in fact, than Calvin himself anticipated. Though in retrospect, it seemed almost inevitable. Too much order always seemed to bore God or Fate or Providence or whoever decided such things. There was always a little chaos just to liven things up.

Sure enough, one of the rowboats, with its pilot yelling for a steamboat to get out of the way, tried to insert itself between the big riverboats. But steamboats don't stop quickly, and half-drunken rowers don't maneuver well when they try to cross the wake of a steamboat. The captain of the steamboat saw the danger, and some of the Spanish soldiers on board fired at the rowers.

That provoked the armed men in the other rowboat to stand up and fire a volley at the Spanish soldiers. Not a shot hit home, for the obvious reason that so many muskets firing in the same direction at once had such a recoil that the boat rocked over and capsized. Some of the men came up sputtering. Some came up screaming. Some didn't come up-apparently unable to remove their boots in the water or get rid of all the lead balls they carried in their ammunition pouches.

How short life is for fools, thought Calvin. They go out on the water with no thought about how to get ashore if the boat should fail them.

Meanwhile, panicked at the warning shots the Spanish had fired, and some of them thinking that a Spanish cannonball had sunk the other rowboat, the rowers on the first boat tried to change direction. Trouble was, they hadn't agreed on which direction to change to, and so the oars interfered with each other and the rowboat was swept by the current right back into the bows of the big riverboat.

The collision broke half the oars and turned some of them into spears that pierced the bodies of their erstwhile masters. Some of the men jumped into the water; those that didn't were borne under when the steamboat pushed the rowboat over.