For those who escaped the cage and then had to learn what to do with open air.
There is a story that people in painted sky towns tell about the wide lands, and it goes like this: out there, beyond the hills and the managed certainty of properly ordered faith, there is nothing but confusion and loneliness and the grim satisfaction of people who were right about nothing. The elders tell this story with considerable feeling. It is, like most things the elders say with considerable feeling, half-true — the half being that the wide lands are indeed complicated, that freedom does not feel the way you imagined it would feel, and that the first thing a person encounters, upon stepping out from under the familiar dome into the genuine sky, is weather.
Nobody tells you the weather will be internal.
Elias had been in the wide lands long enough to have walked through seasons he hadn't expected to survive and found he had. He had been walking since before he knew what walking was for — since the night the star came through the paint — and he had covered a considerable distance in both the literal and the other sense. He had stood in observatories and asked questions about the size of the universe. He had sat beside libraries of unfinished books and asked questions about the size of knowledge. He had sat in fields and beside rivers and on the edges of hills with various people who were also asking questions, and he had found, in the asking, something that resembled purpose.
What he had not found was ground.
He sat on a hillside in the early autumn, looking at the real sky — vast and changing, the clouds building in the west with the particular purposefulness of clouds that mean business, that have an agenda and intend to keep it. He had learned to read weather in the way of someone who sleeps outdoors often enough that weather becomes personal. These clouds were saying: rain before evening. Make arrangements.
He sat in the coming rain and did not make arrangements and thought about what he was actually doing.
Here is the thing about a long season of walking. You cover enormous ground. You see things you hadn't known existed, encounter wisdom in places the elders of Edenveil would find baffling or threatening or both simultaneously, which was more or less their standard response to the world. You become, in the way of people who keep moving, very interesting at dinner. You do not become — this was what Elias was beginning to notice, with the specific discomfort of a thing noticed too late — a person with somewhere to be.
Because stopping meant inhabiting. And inhabiting meant belonging. And belonging meant — the question arrived in his chest and sat there, heavy and specific — belonging meant having a place that could notice your absence as an absence rather than a departure.
He had left the only belonging he had ever known. He had not yet found another.
The rain came. He put up his coat, found a stand of elms for shelter — their leaves had gone to gold at the edges, the particular resigned gold of trees preparing for autumn, which Edenveil's managed orchards had never quite achieved — and sat underneath them listening to rain on elm leaves, which was a sound Edenveil had not contained, and thought about the difference between escaping a place and finding one.
He had been, he admitted, very good at escaping. He was not yet sure he knew how to arrive.
He had last seen Sela three months ago, at a crossroads where four roads met without particularly agreeing on the matter. She had been sitting on a stone milestone, eating an apple and looking at a drawing she had made of the sky overhead — not the sky as it was, which was a fairly ordinary grey, but the sky as it apparently felt to her, which was a complicated dark thing with something warm and steady happening at its base.
She had found her way back to her painted sky town — or partway back; she had stopped at its boundary, she told him, and stood there for a long time and then turned around. She said this without shame or apology, in the direct way she had developed, the way of someone who has learned to be honest about her own limits as a matter of simple practicality.
"I'm not ready," she said. "I thought I was."
"That's all right," he said.
"I know it's all right." She looked at him with the particular clarity of someone who has heard reassurance too many times to need it. "I'm not asking for reassurance. I'm telling you where I am."