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She stood above her daughter’s crib It was a beautiful room, with a fire in the lass table The crib was cedar, and the blankets were pure and white as a dove’s belly The little girl had a shock of dark hair and her red fingers were curled into fists, her tiny brow furrowed as she dreaht of the Stars could streaht of the Moon, the dark of the Sky Dappled silver light fell onto the child’s face

“Sorrow,” she whispered “My Sorrow, my love”

Tears welled up in her eyes, tears of light, of Snake-light and Star-light Z into the corners She had not known such light in her skin since before the Boar-King had taken her It filled up her throat so she could not breathe She had forgotten what it felt like to be so bright She knelt by the crib, her jagged, shorn hair dripping light like blood, and shter She wanted to stay, after all She wanted to put a veil over her hair and take this child downstairs into the spinning world of the court, and watch her grow up She wanted to make sure that the Moon and the Stars were always on her She wanted to hold her child to her as she had done on the lonely island, and feel her livingat her breast

Slowly, Zer, and with infinite care, caressed her daughter’s eyelids, the first and last touch of the Star and her daughter in the lakeless world

The skin beneath her finger curled black and steaan to cry A nurse ca in, and Zrined

Once, there was a ferry on a lonely gray lake on a lonely gray shore It creaked in the storms and the wind, and its tether stretched A man with a hunch on his back poled it back and forth, clothed all in rags He sao the shore toward hi She came to the ferry and looked up at him stonily

“I only wanted to touch her, with living hands,child Just once”

“Was it enough?” the ferryman asked

Z

“Yes,” she said finally, and stepped onto the ferry once more

Out of the Garden

“WHAT SHE LEFT ON YOUR EYELIDS, SORROW, MY DOVE, MY DARLING, oose,” said the old wo back and back and back It was your story, the story of your birth, your life, swinging forward and backward like a holy censer, the tendrils of its s out and around and into each other like the coils of a snake, pursuing all those strange and varied folk with a Star’s tenacity They are the tales of everyone who reached into silver shadows and pulled you into the world: your mother, as a murdered Star; your father, a lonely creature who loved a raft that became a tree and a tree that became a red ship; a tea leaf that found its way out of the world and quickened a dead woirl who carried it there; the boy who paid your fare across the water, the women who pushed your mother back from death, the Basilisk three women mutilated to speak once more before they di

ed, the bear as turned back, and the fla beneath your mother’s hand, who drifted into the world before you” The crone s with tears “And perhaps not least the wooose, who took a child away fropie’s trick, atched over you, and gave you a knife to keep you froer and safe, her own knife, the one she used to kill a Wizard when she was very, very young Your name is Sorrow, my little bird, my dear-as-diamonds, and you have been loved all your days”

The girl could not breathe She coughed, and wept, and cruirl into her arms She stroked her hair She whispered to her and dried her tears The boy watched, histheolden fish that would not stay

Out of the wood a young girl came She was very beautiful, and she wore a wispy red dress that seeht side ran stark tattoos: a dancing black fla Djinn, and a sirl walked slowly to Sorroho untangled herself froirl’s eyelids softly, and looked into the white-hushed Garden