X. On the Question of Trust

I have been asked, more than once, whether Sabine can be trusted. The question is understandable. The investigators themselves suspected her of ill motives before they understood the nature of her bargain with Agatha. She deals with fey. She trades in drops of time. She speaks in riddles that may or may not be prophecy.

Even Geist der Feen, who senses malice the way a hunting dog senses prey, observed that he had never detected any from her: “There’s an erratic nature to her thoughts, a bewildering randomness that confounds, but it lacks any true ill intent.”

I believe Sabine is trustworthy in the way that a compass is trustworthy: it always points in a direction, and that direction is always true, but the reading shifts depending on where you stand and whether the landscape contains iron.

She cannot lie, I think, because lying requires a settled relationship with truth, and she experiences too many truths simultaneously to privilege one over another. What she can do, and does do, is omit. She tells you what she believes you need to know in the moment she believes you need to know it, and she determines both the content and the timing through a process that is opaque to everyone, possibly including herself.

Is this the same as trust? I am not certain. But I will say this: when the Consortium collapsed, when every other certainty was stripped away, when Ritalsin’s betrayal revealed that the foundations we had built upon were hollow, Sabine was the one who held steady.

Or rather, she was the one who had always been holding steady, and the rest of us simply caught up to where she had been standing all along.

Whether that constitutes reliability or merely a different kind of inevitability is a question I leave to the reader. I will note only that the Foundation she built is the best organization we have for what is coming, and that the woman who built it has been preparing for what is coming since before most of us knew there was anything to prepare for.

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“Well, well… so many threads, so little time to weave them all together. Or perhaps too much time? It’s all quite fascinating, really. Isn’t it?”

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