Beloved Zann,

I woke slowly, midmorning, with sun on my face. Ellewen sat next to me, looking very much like he belonged among the trees and branches that surrounded us. “You slept well,” he said.

I had. It was the most peaceful sleep I could remember. I closed my eyes again and nodded.

“I wish you could see yourself as I see you,” he said.

“Nnn?”

“Nn,” he agreed, and tickled my chin with a blade of grass. “We of the green have more senses than your people do. I know things about you that you yourself don’t know.”

I rubbed my face and sat up. “I know you do.”

Ellewen smiled. “I mean, I can see things of you that you don’t have words for, that if I explained them you wouldn’t understand. Your people are fascinating, unknowable because you cannot know yourselves, and indomitable in spite of it. There’s a nobility in that, that most of my people don’t appreciate. Too many of us think that your folk can’t truly be people, persons, any more than butterflies or chipmunks can. But I think that it makes you persons more, because it is so difficult for you.” He shrugged, a flutter of his slim shoulders. “It’s easy to be a person for the greenkind. I think we often take it for granted.”

“Is this about Lord Clear?”

“It is about you, Ybel. The stripes of sound and the textures of scent that your waerd has flavoured you with. The wonderful past you are fleeing and the terrible future you are pursuing so avidly. And the virtue that you believe in less and less as you cling to it more and more. I don’t believe I can speak with authority about the best of humanity. But you are my favourite.”

I didn’t say anything, and he kissed my tears away, and I kissed him back, and we ended up not choosing a crossroads that day.

Love,

Ybel