Chapter 20: Echoes, and What Persists After

Three weeks after the morning that was not quite a battle and not quite a negotiation and not quite a sacrifice, though it contained elements of all three, Sable dreamed about a garden.

She didn't remember it clearly on waking — only the impression of it, the particular green of things that have grown without being told to, and a sense of having moved through it without urgency. She lay still in the early morning dark of her flat above the bookshop and held the remnant of the dream the way you hold a moth that has landed on your hand, not gripping, only present, and when it faded she did not feel its going as loss. She felt it as evidence.

She had been dreaming about gardens, it turned out, before everything happened. She had simply stopped knowing that she had. There was a distinction there, she thought — something had been taken from her, but not everything. The roots were still there. Whatever he had been collecting, the Cartographer had not been collecting roots.