No letters had ever come, and as far as they knew their own letters had never reached
him. When he first was taken, Father and Mother sat at the table and keyed in long letters
to him every few days. Soon, tnough, it was once a week, and when no answers came,
once a month. Now it had been two years since he went, and there were no letters, none
at all, and no remembrance on his birhday. He is dead, she thought bitterly, because we
have forgotten him.
But Valentine had not forgotten him. She did not let her parents know, and above all
never hinted to Peter how often she thought about Ender, how often she wrote him letters
that she knew he would not answer. And when Mother and Father announced to them that
they were leaving the city to move to North Carolina, of all places, Valentine knew that
they never expected to see Ender again. They were leaving the only place where he knew
to find them. How would Ender find them here, among these trees, under this changeable
and heavy sky? He had lived deep in corridors all his life, and if he was still in the Battle
School, there was less of nature there. What would he make of this?
Valentine knew why they had moved here. It was for Peter, so that living among trees
and small animals, so that nature in as raw a form as Mother and Father could conceive of
it, might have a softening influence on their strange and frightening son. And, in a way, it
had. Peter took to it right away. Long walks out in the open, cutting through woods and
out into the open country-- going sometimes for a whole day, with only a sandwich or
two sharing space with his desk in the pack on his back, with only a small pocket knife in
his pocket.
But Valentine knew. She had seen a squirrel half-skinned, spiked by its little hands and
feet with twigs pushed into the dirt. She pictured Peter trapping it, staking it, then
carefully parting and peeling back the skin without breaking into the abdomen, watching
the muscles twist and ripple. How long had it taken the squirrel to die? And all the while
Peter had sat nearby, leaning against the tree where perhaps the squirrel had nested,
playing with his desk while the squirrel's life seeped away.
At first she was horrified, and nearly threw up at dinner, watching how Peter ate so
vigorously, talked so cheerfully. But later she thought about it and realized that perhaps,
for Peter, it was a kind of magic, like her little fires; a sacrifice that somehow stilled the
dark gods that hunted for his soul. Better to torture squirrels than other children. Peter has
always been a husbandman of pain, planting it, nurturing it, devouring it greedily when it
was ripe; better he should take it in these small, sharp doses than with dull cruelty to
chldren in the school.
"A model student," said his teachers. "I wish we had a hundred others in the school just
like him. Studies all the tlme, turns in all his work on time. He loves to learn."
But Valentine knew it was a fraud. Peter loved to learn, all right, but the teachers hadn't
taught him anything, ever. He did his learning through his desk at home, tapping into
libraries ano databases, studying and thinking and, above all, talking to Valentine. Yet at