Most beloved Zann,

Ellewen and I walked down a long country road, side-by-side. We hadn’t seen much other traffic, wagons or riders or trudgers. I had lost track of time. How many times had we stopped to eat or sleep or make love? How many nights had there been, or afternoons when the mist stood away from us? I couldn’t tell. I thought Ellewen seemed gloomy, though.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

He smiled, but it didn’t reassure me. I thought he seemed more resigned than content.

“You can tell me, you know. Maybe I can help.”

“We’re here,” he said, and stopped.

I looked around. There was a lane stretching away from our road to the left, but only scrubby woods to the right. “No, we’re not.”

“We are,” Ellewen said, peering down the lane. “This is the crossroads in your drawing.”

I tried to remember what I had drawn. It didn’t seem like this at all.

“Stand over there,” Ellewen advised, “and don’t worry about the fourth road.”

I crossed the lane and turned back to regard the scene. I tried to fit what I saw into my memory of my drawing. If this road was the one that I drew up-to-down, and the lane branched off this way, yes, there was the tree with the overhanging branch, and there was a rotted post where I had put a sign… I had drawn that rut… “It is the same!” I said. Had I been here before? Or someone else in my family?

“Yes.”

“But what about the fourth road?”

“Look again.”

I looked again at the tangle of bushes, to see if there was anything there that looked like a road. There wasn’t. It was just scrub. And then a slight breeze fluttered through, and I saw it. The leaves and twigs of the trees and bushes, in their motion they described the lines of a road matching the one in my mind, one that led out of this world into another world that we knew.

“Can we go?” I said, stepping toward it. I knew I could walk that road.

Ellewen didn’t move.

“Ellewen?”

He started to say something, stopped, tried again, stopped again. Obviously he didn’t want to. But why?

“Ellewen, Wande and Jhus may be in there. You don’t have to go, but I do, and I will.”

He sighed, and followed me. “It isn’t that I don’t want to go,” he said.

I took his hand, closed my eyes, and stepped onto the fourth road of the crossroads. I could feel the leaves under my feet, and we entered the laur.

Love,

Ybel