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Z over her cheeks “Oh, I don’t bla You are so lost, too Can I help but tease you for those great hungry eyes, for all those things you said when you ca your little leaf? But ould you not eat at my table?” The Snake-Star moved forward to hold the huldra’s head in her hands

Oubliette laughed and wiped at her tears “Anyone who has read a book in her life knows not to eat the food of the dead,” she answered The toh they did not want to eht of howat his sleeve

“Why do they love you like this?” he demanded They started back, away fro the you’ll catch the just for you!”

Zmeya looked at him over Oubliette

’s bent head “I don’t know!” she hissed “Who knohy you do anything? You look at us and call us gods and sacrifice your seventh sons on altars we know nothing about! You build up toe never asked you to build, and with your other hands you slaughter us and tell us that wood is too fine for the likes of us, and rape us until our legs crack! How should I knohy so themselves at me, what can I do but catch them? Who will do it, if I do not? If I turn theht not to trouble their betters?”

“They are not your children to catch!”

“Tell theirl who cuts into her body for my sake, tell her that she is not welcome, there are already too many sisters here, we have no room for more”

The one-armed boy turned to his friend with eyes that pleaded and prostrated “Was I not brother enough?”

Oubliette glared at hiet over,” she spat “You left Taglio and Grotteschi without a word Were they not faht ht wish you had stayed, if they are closer to Ajanabh, within its gates, if Grotteschi is even now singing at shuttered s?”

Seven said nothing

“That is how often I have thought of you,” she finished

In the Garden

THE TWILIGHT WAS THIN AND WISPY OVER THE LAKE THE GIRL’S SKIN arm under her cloak, but the boy trembled

“When you finish the tales,” he said, “when your eyelids have poured out all their ink between us and the Garden is black with them, will you leave me as Oubliette left Seven? As Seven left the Gaselli and the Manticore? Will you go off into a place I cannot touch and never think of ain?” He sed hard “Or will you remember that there was once a nice boy as not afraid of you, and walked in the Garden with you, and listened to you, and did not interrupt more often than is polite? Will you sit at a table of blue crystal with parrot wings for legs with fabulouslunches of leek and rose and think to yourself: I wonder whatever happened to that boy, where he is now, if he is married, if he is fat, if he has kept the Garden well trimmed?”

He could hardly look at her; his hands shook like brown cattails