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“Neither did you!”

I hung ht as I could “Let us go hoo back to our Alcazars and drink coalwine and sing new songs Songs of Ajanabh and Stars and the hearts of tigers”

She shook her hair back, and her salamander stamped its dry feet “This is her city I will take it, and I will live in her footsteps, held in these red stones as she was held, and I will climb every tower to the sky until I find where you have hidden her, until I can look her in the eye, until I can have my fire, and she her children”

I straightened, and put utter-coal thinks you will not”

“Have you spent so long within that giant’s fat knuckles that you have gone s, the Queens, and the Khaighal, and you can do nothing”

I tried to sined a Queen in full possession of herself would I i at a lion But I could not let the Ajans burn I could not

“I can make a wish,” I said

The Khaighal roared “Youyou could wish is in our books! Kashkash would never wish for defeat; he would never wish to lose a battle, to lose a city! We will shrivel your tongue in your le word!”

“But if I could,” I said sharply, holding upin the faces of the cri per that Kashkash hilee that the heavens would flaue rest in my mouth, would you let my wish disturb the air?”

“You cannot wish for the salvation of this place,” they said “Nothing in your wish can touch our will”

“Nevertheless?”

“If it is in our books, it is perhal We are accountants, not senators”

Then I did smile; I could sether “My wish is the si Kashkash wished for a o that the trees itnessed it are dust I wish”—my smile broadened—“for my wife”

They looked puzzled; their pale beards flushed blue and yellow Kohinoor rolled her ashen eyes Khaaled eyebrow And there was a peculiar sound in the supply train, a grinding, rurinding against the earth The salaled with her reins

When they caht their brows, their eyes, their shoulders as they rounded the front lines, allto me, men and women of stone: eranite, garnet and topaz and jasper, diamond and brass, silver and quartz, copper and littering in theThey came to me one by one and kissed my cheeks, and by the time the fiftieth of the, my cheeks ith fla the wall as I asked the chest, for his poor city