Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

times.
    Ned Marriner leans back, folding his arms defensively across his chest. “I have no idea who you are, or what happened to me yesterday or today, if you heard us talking about that.”
    He nods. The mountain.
    “So what is this about ?” the boy demands. He really shouldn’t be using that tone. “You said we were an accident, had no role to play, but you followed, or waited for us.”
    He is clever, it seems. “Followed yesterday, waited just now. I took a chance you’d come back.”
    “But why?”
    The waiter is hovering. He signals for another of what each of them was drinking.
    A mild curiosity rises. He still has some of that, it seems. “You don’t feel reckless, interrogating me like this?”
    “I’m scared out of my mind, if you want the truth.”
    “But that isn’t the truth,” he says. Who did this one remind him of ? “You came back by choice, you’re demanding answers of me. And yet you know that Isculpted a column eight hundred years ago. No. You’re frightened, but not ruled by it.”
    “I probably should be,” the boy says in a small voice. “It isn’t a column, either, it’s a woman.”
    The quick, familiar anger. A sense of intrusion, violation, rude feet trampling in something private beyond words.
    He makes himself move past it. By today’s standards this one is young, can still properly be called a boy. In the past, he could have been a war leader at his age. Fit for challenging, killing. He has killed children.
    The world has changed. He has lived through the changes, at intervals. Coming and going, enmeshed in the long pattern. Sometimes he wants it over, mostly he is terrified, heart-scalded that it might end. You could grow weary beyond measure, feeling all those things at once.
    The waiter comes back: an espresso, an orange juice. The brisk, habitual motions. He waits until the man leaves.
    He says, still speaking English for privacy, “Once this awareness comes to you, it can be a kind of anchor against fear. You know what you are feeling, know a new thing is in you. The fear lies in not understanding why, but already you’re not the person you were yesterday morning.”
    He sips his espresso, puts the cup down, adds quietly, “You never will be again.”
    A cruel thing to say, perhaps; he isn’t beyond enjoying that.
    “That’s scary too.”
    “I imagine it is.”
    He remembers his own first awareness of this boy, decisions made quickly. They look at each other. The boy glances down. Few people meet his gaze for long. He finishes his coffee. “Frightened or not, you came back. You could have kept walking. You’re inside now.”
    “Then you need to tell me what I’m inside.”
    Another flaring within. “I need to do nothing. Use words more cautiously.”
    “Or what?”
    Opposing anger across the table, interestingly. He really isn’t accustomed to talking this much any more.
    “Or what?” the boy demands again. “You’ll stab me in here? Pull the knife again?”
    He shakes his head. “Or I’ll walk out.”
    Ned Marriner hesitates again, then leans forward. “No you won’t. You don’t want to leave me. You want me in this, somehow. What did we say, Kate and me, that you needed to hear?”
    Someone else had once talked to him this way. That nagging memory still there. Was it centuries ago, or a millennium? He isn’t sure; people blur after so much time, but he believes he killed that other one.
    He looks across the table and realizes that he was wrong, in fact. This impudent tone isn’t the same as that other, long-ago voice: with a degree of surprise (again) he sees that the boy is close to tears, fighting to hide it.
    He tries, unsuccessfully, to remember when he felt that way himself. Too far back. Mist-wrapped, forestshrouded.
    This defiant anger is a boy’s, in the end. Or perhaps in the beginning. Anger at helplessness, at being ignorant and young, not yet an adult and so immune (boys believed adults were immune) to the pain he is