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“There isn’t a good enough trick played by the best of all tricksters to il doesn’t vanish because one’s toes are frozen blue”

“Why are you holding vigil?”

“Do you see those seven stars there?” he asked I did, of course—there was little enough to look at but those glittering specks “You ht not” He coughed and rubbed at his four teers “I cao of h I should be dead I came up here to see if the seven stars in the sky were o I hardly remember what they looked like, safe home and no worse for death If they were, if they were safe as rabbits in a hutch, then I wouldn’t be afraid, then I could let go of my head and drift up This is the roof of the world, and you can alo”

He looked atto frost over, and I think if he could have he would have taken theined he wanted me to, I reached up on ers pressed into the black and oh, it felt like flesh! It felt like skin and a soft, glistening leg or belly behind the skin, and a diaht be, but it arertips, so warm And when I touched it I saw the seven stars as helike stars at all, but just seven troughs dug in the sky, pale as sea-bleached bones

“They’re graves,” he whispered, “nothing but graves, and their light is nothing but a headstone, and they are not there, not there at all, the sky is a tomb and I cannot die, because I ao if not here? I am so afraid, and so alone, and all I have ever loved is a pathetic broken raft, and it is all that has ever loved me”

Itto eeping then, great hot tears from each of his four eyes, and they froze on his cheeks

as they fell

I crouched on e, misshapen head into my hands I stroked his brittle, snow-crusted hair and pressed ; I crooned like a bird, or how I thought a bird would sound, and I held hiet him down, but I supposed that I did, in the end, kno to steal him from himself

I wrapped an to pry his hands froasped “I can’t!”

“It’s all right,” I said, and I said it over and over “It’s all right You’re hurting your Sekka, who loves you like a raft, and would rather see you snug under the forest loa sorry for yourself It’s all right, I’m here, and I know you’re too afraid to do it, but I’ll help you”

His lips were dry against my arms as I pulled at his hands “But couldn’t I stay like this, forever, in the freeze?” His doubled voice was plaintive as a child asking for a sweet and afor a sweetheart—but he answered himself “No, I a myself to myself”

“I know a good trick, Itto,” I whispered, “a very good trick”

He turned his head so that one of his faces could see htly, on each face and his lips under mine were cracked and torn as old paper It was my first kiss, and my second, and they tasted of snow

He went slack, and let me pull his hands from his head I folded them in his lap He stayed whole for a moment, and then his head opened into two halves, like an iris opening in the sunlight Black fluid poured out of hily, over my hands and my robe, lumpish, dead stuff which had no scent at all His body slumped forward onto me, and finally, after I had been soaked in his blood which was not exactly blood, two tiny silver drops of light squeezed out fro onto ers over them

Sekka turned her head ahen she saw , low cry, that strange loon-cry that h she sang her funeral dirge to every passing cloud for all the days and nights it took to descend from the tiled roof of the world, there was a kind of happiness in it, a relief, sweet and soft in the lowest notes of her song