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“Yoi-as-born-in-the-evening,” she said, after we had been walking in the fields for a tih the central rooain into the world, “do you suppose that when our water spills out, and afterwards fills up again like a basin eht, we are the same Kappa, the same dear turtle that ere before?”

“I do not know, Yazo-as-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter,” I stammered “I have never considered it”

“I have spilled out my water once a month since I entered the cucu out over the ater and drifting milkweed-mayflies

“What?” I cried, aghast “Why would you do such a thing to yourself? It’s terrible, obscene!”

“Perhaps I a myself a lesson,” was her only answer, and alked in a stubborn silence which would not give us up I looked again at the holes in her webbing and her frazzled hair, her peculiar skin I sahy the other Kappa did not like Yazo—she was ragged and strange and possibly mad But still, I did as she said

And what she said was that ere bound for the Kingdom of Glass Rain, a far-off prairie land whose folk had discovered a novel way of ferreting out the answers to things In need of answers, we turned our shells to the grasslands, and I thanked the Stars each night that the journey was not so long as a month, so that I would not have to witness Yazo’s scarification

The Kingdorasses, which blew over the flats like waves rolling in with high tide They were green and gold and their stalks were silvery gray, and the waves were very beautiful All ringing the dell were red rocks and squat, flat-topped hillocks, streaked in pale swathes of yellow stone It was cold; the sky was high and brittle, and the long roofs of the capital, tiled like, well, like a turtle’s shell, glinted clear and sharp in the distance

We were received, in a ate of the local academy, which was a thick, dusty cedar door carved in a co lizards I say “in a ” because ere not at first sure that anyone at all was there, just inside the shadowy threshold, which ss and old cedar, polished by a hundred hands

“Please,” a voice said, s at the kitchen“Who is this ishes to enter the breeding house?”

But there was no one standing where the voice see hall filled with hushed voices and the sounds of clacking claws on glass

“I a, and this is Yazo-as-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, of the Greater Kappa, who have coht it should go, but the voice sounded again, farther off to ht

“I am sorry, I know you cannot seeMy name is Ostraya, and I am the Princess of Glass, and I keep this house If you have questions, I am she ill breed the lizard ill have your answer”

We were soine “But where are you? Why can we hear you and yet see nothing?”

The voice laughed a little, as if at a very old and no longer particularly funny joke I felt a weight fall on lass

“The Glass Rain took me…”