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"Thento pull her ar"

When he still didn’t release her, she panicked and thrust Dame Somnolence’s flower at hi display than her dainty thorn lily would have "Here," she said, voice shaking "You honor me, but I don’t mean to marry My answer is no"

He didn’t take the flower, and he didn’t let go of her ar more panicked by the second, his look spoke So her as plain as happiness, in the tiirl" Or how Ivan’s dying eyes had said his greatest desperation was in leaving her alone

Spear’s look was eloquent "I will have you, and I will hold you I will learn a thousand ways to ar in ht," he pro, Neve I’ve round it to a dark red dust

He finally released her ar words, before he turned back toward toere, "When I greet you toe it"

Neve walked ho into the yard, she spotted Spear’s bootprints a the usual fox tracks, and saith fresh eyes what a poor sanctuary was this row of shanties In her shed, she was like a nutteeth Spear could eat her for breakfast if he wanted Worse, he could have her for a ht Who would coer door She built a er ht outside, but she only heard the rain There was nothing for her fretting but to get out her book, her treasure, her one thing fro lost, the Failed Colony It had had a real na and building and planting and loving had been reduced in a single season to that wretched word: failed

The book had eighteen stories in it, and when she read them--aloud, always--it ith her mother’s cadence, which was imprinted on her heart She turned to the one that suited this night: a re, transforms herself into a doe rather than beco at stitches, so she let theoing, into the woods on fleet deer feet and down a mossy slope

And all of a sudden she was in Nasty Gully She knew she was drea to do with Nasty Gully The spring beetles were there, all glint and shi at her face They weren’t flying at all They were motionless in their hundreds, and when Neve stepped in close, she saw that they were jewels They were beetlesfor her finger Another, it was a brooch The gully was quiet and the light was soft, and she sensed that she was not alone

"Hello?" she whispered, and woke in her chair, no sound besides rain and the pop of the dying fire, but a whisper seemed to follow her out of sleep It wasn’t that she heard it so h a forests’ worth of leaves

"I will free you, and I will lift you I will learn a thousand ways to h Your sht"

And in her shed by the dying fire, Neve sensed, as she had in the drea, as a figure in the night It was the sense that she wasn’t alone in the world, and that was a very different thing