“I wish you hadn’t said that to him,” Mara clipped out as Beth returned to the sitting room.

Beth only smiled and bent over the table of food, piling items on a small saucer. Apple slices, cheese, a few soft crackers, tiny sandwiches with fruit spread. She poured a glass of milk from a pitcher by the tea and carried both over to the corner of the room.

“Come here, Nick,” she called, and Mara’s son hurried after her with an enthusiasm he typically held in reserve around strangers. Mara watched in numb confusion as Beth set Nick up on a plush blanket in the corner, his milk and curated plate of snacks on a footstool on one side and a wicker basket of books and wooden toys on the other.

“He’s going to spill that milk,” Mara said, annoyance growing alongside her confusion. Was everyone she met on this unhappy journey going to insist on doing things to her son without consulting her?

“Oh, yes.” Beth nodded, brows drawn together with mock gravity. “But,” she raised a finger, “he’ll drink half of it before he does, so I’d say it’s worth it.”

Mara could only shrug. “It’s your carpet.”

“Indeed,” Beth agreed cheerfully. “Now, come sit.”

Once, at the very beginning of their marriage, Davy had attempted this method during a fight. As Mara grew angrier, he grew more cheerful, more ‘reasonable.’

He’d only tried it once.

Beth, on the other hand, didn’t seem like she was employing a tactic. Mara didn’t get the sense she could browbeat the woman into engaging with her annoyance. She didn’t get the sense she could browbeat the woman into anything.

Defeated, she took a seat on the chaise as Beth set about preparing two cups of tea, accepting the one offered to her with a grudging, “Thank you.”

“Please, eat,” Beth said, leaning back in her chair, tea cradled in her lap, and gesturing to the table. “You lost quite a lot of blood. You should have seen the entryway. Looked like they slaughtered a bull in there. But enough with the pleasantries. You have questions.”

“My first question is how you came to think what we’ve exchanged so far are pleasantries.”

Beth tilted her head to the side, a slow smile spreading across her lips. “Oh, now, when you come to the Keepers, Mara, you have to expect a little eccentricity. Our powers manifest young, you know. My own dreams started when I was five years old. I made a nuisance of myself, got my family into trouble, and I’ve lived here ever since. And try as the Caretakers might to recreate normalcy for us, they’ve yet to establish a proper finishing school. We’re just one generation of isolated freaks raising another, so I have no talent for small talk. Tell me, what constitutes a pleasantry on the outside? Should I ask about the weather?”

Chastened despite the girl’s earnest, friendly tone, Mara lowered her gaze to her tea. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just…” I’m alone. My love is dead and I’m alone and afraid and I don’t know who to trust. And above and below it all, I’m aggravated by how slow the world is moving, now that I’m racing toward the finish.

“You’re hungry,” Beth stated, with a shocking paucity of prescience. “You’ll like the muffins. Have one of those first.”

Mara’s stomach twisted at the thought of food, but there was little she could do at this point but surrender to whatever script from which Beth was reading. She took a plate and set a muffin atop it. Breaking off a small piece, she set it on her tongue and waited for her nausea to flare.

But the morsel had a bite to it that tickled her sinuses and immediately calmed her stomach. She frowned at the muffin, then at her hostess. “Milkstray?”

“And a lot of butter and sugar.”

Mara took another bite. Another. Depths, she really was ravenous.

“So, your questions,” Beth prompted when the muffin was gone and Mara had set about piling food on the little plate, stomach growling obscenely.

Mara set the plate on her knees. “I’m not really sure what to ask. I’ve never been here before. I’ve never wanted this kind of guidance.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “I know that, sweetheart. But you’ve come here now.”

“I didn't come to the Hive, I was brought here. Under duress.”

“Were you brought to my chambers under duress?”

Mara popped a square of sharp yellow cheese in her mouth and chewed, thinking. Before she could answer, Beth did the work for her.

“You wanted to come. You have questions. You’re ready for answers. Ask.”

Nick sat in the corner, something red smeared across his cheek, turning the pages of a book of illustrations with fingers that stuck to the paper.

“He’s not listening,” Beth said quietly. “Ask.”

Mara met the woman’s eyes as her vision blurred.

“Is Davy—”

“Yes,” Beth said.

“You didn’t let me finish. I have to know for sure. Is he—”

“You already know.”

Mara’s heart pounded angry fists against her sternum. A scream of frustration, of despair, bubbled up in her throat.

“Let me finish,” she pleaded. “Let me finish the question.”

Beth sighed. “No, Mara. This question will carry you down a miserable path. You already know the answer. If you don’t accept it, you’ll find new ways to ask the question and new ways to hope, and reality will find new ways to dash your hope across the rocks.”

Mara pushed a miniature sandwich into her mouth, the flavor of tart brambleberries exploding across her tongue as she chewed. Despite the harshness of her words, perhaps it was a gift that Beth was refusing to say it outright.

“Ask me another question. I know your mind is clouded with grief, but don’t waste this opportunity. We won’t meet again.”

“Can I trust Eli?”

“That’s vague,” Beth said, rearranging her red silk skirt as she crossed her legs. “Vague questions yield nonsense answers. Try again.”

“Is Eli…” Another miniature sandwich gave her time to think. “Will Eli keep us safe?”

“He’d sooner die than lead you into harm.”

“Is he loyal to the rebellion?”

“Yes.”

“Did he betray Davy?”

“No.”

“But I can’t trust him?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it was a vague question. There are many ways to trust a person, and there’s not one person you can trust in every way. But you can trust Eli, always, to keep your best interest foremost in his heart.”

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“But he barely knows me.”

“For now, it’s not about you. Not his loyalty to you that’s at play.”

“Who is it about, then?”

“Who do you think it’s about?”

“Davy?”

“Look at you! You should be a Keeper.”

Mara sighed. “Where is he taking us, then?”

“The Ripshaw Enclave. He’s already told you this, surely.”

“How are we getting there?”

Beth rolled her eyes again. Perhaps all the casual condescension wouldn’t grate on Mara’s nerves so much if the girl wasn’t so young. “I haven’t dreamt every moment of your life, Mara Swift. Ask Eli these logistical questions.”

“You just said I couldn’t trust him!”

“I said no such thing. You can trust him with your safety and with your precious travel itinerary.”

“How are we getting out of here?”

“The tunnel. Really, Mara, ask better questions. Big questions.”

Mara gnawed on her lip for a moment before asking, “Why are you helping us? We’re rebels. If you help us, you’re picking sides, but the Hive never picks a side.”

Perking up in her seat, Beth set her tea on the table and rubbed her hands together. “Now we’re getting to the good part,” she said with a little shimmy of excitement. “The answer is one of semantics, really. The Hive doesn’t pick sides, but that doesn’t mean we’re truly neutral.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Oh, no. Not in a cosmic sense. Neutral implies we take no interest in good and evil, which is untrue. We work for good.”

“The rebellion isn’t good?”

Beth lifted her hands and wobbled them palm-up in the air as if they were scales. “These groups that form, these regimes that rise and fall, none of them are truly good or evil. The Order was established five hundred years ago to protect its citizens from a legitimate threat. It defeated the threat but retained its strength, and with nothing outward left to fight, it turned its might inward and lost its benevolence. Your rebellion might topple the Order and free the Provinces from oppression, but in five hundred years it too will have lost its heart. The Hive doesn’t pick sides, because we recognize how quickly good can become evil.”

“So the rebellion is evil?”

Beth’s face scrunched and she wobbled her head from side to side, retrieving her tea cup and taking a long sip. “No,” she finally said, the word tipping up at the end like a question. “Not as a whole, not in our lifetime. But it will become evil.”

“So why help us, then? My question still stands, doesn’t it? We’re rebels. If you help us, you’re picking a side.”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

“But we’re rebels.”

“Yes.”

“And you refuse to side with either the Order or the rebellion.”

“Or the merchants or the paupers, the healers or the shadow casters. We refuse to side with groups, Mara. We side with people often, and we always side with what is right.”

Mara growled in frustration, drawing Nick’s attention, his little brow furrowed in concern. She forced her face into a relaxed smile and gave him a reassuring wave. Satisfied, he went back to destroying Beth’s book with his sticky fingers.

“I’m confused.”

Beth’s face crumpled a little. “I know. And I’m sorry. Truly.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could just give a straight answer.”

“You can’t?”

“I can, I suppose. There’s no written rule stopping me. But direct interference always has a way of…” she wrinkled her nose and made a motion with one hand as if she was balling up a piece of paper, “crumpling things.”

“Crumpling things,” Mara echoed, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, crumpling things. Wadding the story up into a little ball so pieces that shouldn’t touch each other do, and half the adventure is hidden from view.”

“Well,” Mara mused dryly, “that explanation wasn’t in danger of crumpling anything.”

Beth shook her head. “No, I suppose not. Imagine it like this. Say a lonely man comes to me on the cusp of defeat, no hope left to his name. And say I’ve seen his future, and I know how bright that future is, and I know exactly who will fix it. I could look him in his eyes and say, ‘The answer to your every question is the love of a single woman. You'll meet her three months and two days hence. She’ll be wearing a green skirt.’ And he’ll leave happy. It was a clear answer, right?”

Mara nodded, only partially lost. Beth went on.

“But three months and two days later he’ll see that woman and he’ll know, and it never is the one you think, is it? Maybe he’ll be disappointed, maybe she’ll say something rude to him, maybe she’s not even available at the time. He’ll drive himself mad, trying to make himself love her or make her love him. Or he’ll avoid her, be cruel to her, railing against what he knows. He’ll ruin the story for both of them, because I gave him the ending. I skipped to the conclusion and robbed him of all the story in between, and it’s in those lines that the two fall in love.”

“So you can change the future, just by telling a person about it?”

Beth nodded. “Fate is durable, but it isn’t immutable. If I told that man the ending to his story, the page would crumple and find its way into the bin. And that’s not a good thing. The story was written by powers much wiser than us. It’s my duty, as a Keeper of Truth, to protect it. Not to scribble all over the pages, let alone crumple them up and throw them away.”

“Then what do you say to him instead?”

Beth shrugged. “I tell him not to give up hope. And I tell him when the road forks, the journey's best end is down the road from which she's calling him.”

“Without even telling him who she is?”

“Yes.”

“Does that answer annoy him?”

“Of course it does. But he’ll get over it, and so will you.”

Mara stared down into her teacup, wondering how things would have changed if she’d known from the beginning how much she’d come to love Davy. The marriage had been an imposition. She’d hated him for the first three months. They’d fought constantly. Learned each other’s quirks by treading all over them with clumsy, careless feet. And then they’d started making up after those fights. They’d learned each other’s bodies. Learned the softness of surrender. She had to admit, she would hate to have been robbed of those months of bittersweet falling, of the blissful transition from resentment into affection into love.

“Do you have any more questions?” Beth’s quiet, knowing voice drew Mara from her reverie.

She had so many questions. Would they make it safely to the enclave? Would Nick lead a long and happy life? Would she ever learn to breathe around this weight inside her chest? Would the rebellion succeed, or would it fail?

But would any answer to any question make her feel anything less than distraught and alone?

She cleared her throat. “So that you can give me more non-answers? No, I think I’m done.”

“For what it’s worth, the answers always make sense when they need to.”

“It’s worth very little to me right now, Sister Beth.”

Beth laughed, and Mara found herself relaxing into the chaise, and they passed most of their remaining time together in idle conversation. She learned that Beth had been born to rebel parents, and that her mother still came and visited her once a year. That her father had died of a fever just a year after she’d come to the Hive.

She learned that the Keepers never dreamt their own fates, and that fate itself was less a path and more a tangled pile of countless different lengths of yearn. That some outcomes were more likely than others but none were certain and the right inducement could transfer a soul from one stretch of fate to another.

When Nick spilled his glass of milk, they cleaned the mess together and then Beth sat with him on the carpet, silk skirts splayed across the ground around her, and played with him while Mara dozed to the sound of her son’s happy giggling.

Mara didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until a knock sounded at the door. She jerked upright, rubbing her achy eyes, as Beth leaped to her feet and hurried to the door.

“A whole new man,” she exclaimed as she swung the door open, taking Eli by the sleeve and drawing him into the kitchenette. “Amazing what a little tonic and warm water can do, isn’t it?”

He did look better, Mara realized, but only a split second after realizing how truly ragged he’d looked before.

“If you needed a tonic, you should have asked,” she said bluntly, nudging at her pack with a toe. “I brought some with me.”

His expression never shifted from neutral, but he lifted a hand and squeezed the back of his neck in obvious discomfort. “We’re leaving this evening after dinner,” he said, choosing to ignore her bitter peace offering. Perhaps wisely. She couldn’t imagine a response that would make her care for him more or miss Davy less. “I can take you back to the room to rest.”

Mara looked instinctively to Beth, but the girl had no wisdom to offer her, however vague. She stood against the wall, watching Eli with soft eyes and a sweet smile. Fondness poured off her waves, warm as firelight. Such a stark contrast to Mara’s own bitter distaste.

His body tensed minutely, as if fighting a shiver. As if he’d felt the pulse of Mara’s cold, reluctant tolerance.

She had never met an innate magic user who bothered to learn sensing, but she supposed it wouldn’t be the most shocking thing about him. She’d have to keep a tighter lid on her emotions where he was concerned.

“Sure,” she said, wondering how she’d get any rest with Nick so clearly recovered from his coma-like slumber. He’d be crawling the walls like a spider.

Eli retrieved her pack before she could grab it, and Beth saw them out into the hallway, sending Nick away with his choice of the wooden horses from the basket of toys. Before Mara could decide how to thank the girl for the nonsense advice she’d given, Beth had reached up and framed her face in small hands like she was a grandmother studying a precious grandchild. “Be good, Mara Swift,” she said with a gentle smile. “Trust your instincts. Trust your heart. Let the story unfold. You’ll be happy again before it ends.”