It was Hamo, in the end, who asked the question directly, on an ordinary evening in the scriptorium that had become, over the years, the place where the two of them seemed to have their most honest conversations without either quite planning to.
"You have been different since Oakhaven," he said, setting aside his flow calculations with the same unhurried deliberateness he brought to everything. "Not troubled in the way a man is troubled by a hard negotiation, or a difficult harvest. Something quieter than that. I have watched you three years now, Thomas, closely enough to notice when a thing has changed in you that you haven't chosen to explain."
Thomas considered denying it, the old reflex to keep his fear contained to the smallest possible circle, and found, looking at the monk's steady, patient face, that he didn't have the will left to manage the denial convincingly.
"There's a number," he said finally. "Something that measures — I don't fully understand what it measures, if I'm honest. My connection to the place I came from, maybe. Or something more literal than that — my time, perhaps, in whatever strange currency the anomaly that brought me here still charges against it. It's been falling since before the charter. It's fallen faster since Oakhaven. I don't know what happens when it reaches zero, only that I don't believe it stops falling before it does."
Hamo was quiet a long moment, absorbing that with the same careful attention he gave any genuinely difficult problem, technical or otherwise. "You believe you are dying."
"I believe I'm running out of something. I don't know if dying is the right word for it. I don't know if there's a right word for it in any language either of us actually speaks."
"I understand that particular uncertainty rather better than you might expect, Thomas, though the shape of my own was considerably smaller than yours." Hamo folded his hands, and for a moment the old scripture-cadence crept back into his voice, though it carried none of its former certainty, only a kind of hard-won steadiness. "I once believed my life had an architecture — sin and grace, obedience and reward, a shape I could trust even when I couldn't see the whole of it. I lost that architecture on a hillside three years ago, and I have spent every day since building something smaller and more honest in its place, one careful observation at a time, because the alternative was to live with no shape at all, and I found I could not bear that."
"What did you build instead?"
"Usefulness. Presence. The plain, unglamorous fact of showing up for the people around me, day after day, whether or not I understood the larger question of why any of us are here at all." Hamo met his eyes steadily. "I do not know what happens to you when your number reaches its end, Thomas, any more than I know what happens to any of us when our own ends finally arrive, in whatever ordinary or extraordinary manner they choose to arrive in. I know only that a man who spends his remaining time in dread of the ending has less time, not more, for the living that's still available to him. I watched you learn to build a town instead of hoarding a secret. I would ask you now to learn the same lesson on a smaller scale — build the days you still have, rather than simply mourning the ones you fear are coming to take them."
Thomas sat with that a long while, the candle between them burning low, and found, when he finally spoke again, that some part of the fear had loosened its grip, if only slightly.
"You've gotten wise in your old age, Brother Hamo."
"I have gotten considerably more honest, which I have found, to my own surprise, amounts to nearly the same thing." A faint, dry note crept into his voice — the closest thing to a joke Hamo ever permitted himself. "Now go home to your wife, Thomas. I suspect she has spent this same evening worrying about you in her own quiet way, and I do not believe either of you is well served by grieving separately what you might instead learn to carry together."