The diversion had worked. She had escaped with the information required, which she supplied to the go-between the next morning over a market stall. “Did you get hurt?” asked the intermediary, pretending to examine potatoes as he slipped the written information into his vest.

“I’m not sure,” she replied, “it wasn’t covered in the story I told.”

For a while after that, she’d survived the worst of the injuries brought on by her espionage by escaping into stories. They served as a kind of supple armor when she was naked, a place to which her mind could retreat. Over and over again she told herself the story of the Witch and the fox babies, like singing a song in her head to give herself bravery-the same thing those filthy noisy birds had done that evening. Later, sometimes both bruised and confused, she collected herself by trying to scribble things down. Not the notes in code-that system, amazingly, had remained undiscovered. But shreds of tales.

She became involved in the work. For a short time it became her salvation. She remembered how her aunts had read the same novel over and over again, for it was the only one they had, and how in their bleak spinsterhoods they had thrilled over false adventures in an invented world.

Then she gained some distance, and lost some momentum. She began to see that her stories were an argument through incident. What had seemed arbitrary, even magical-events unfolding out of her pencil as if it were her pencil doing the thinking-she now deduced as a reductive patterning, a false simplification of the world. Narrative shapeliness was a fiction in and of itself, a lie. The pencil was lying about how much meaning the world was capable of.

Any conclusion she could ever reach was false, because the validity of any conclusion could not be proved by any creature still imprisoned in the throes of life, and therefore still ill educated about myriad cause and final effect.

So after some years, she gave up the experiment of fiction. For a while or for good, she didn’t know. When she was engaged as a helpmeet and a nurse by the elderly widower-the Ogre, she called him-only to be locked in a tower to watch from above as he died, words failed her yet again.

Now sitting just outside of the company of the Clock, her saviors, she watched her pencil trail the paper and, avoiding language, make a long arcing line, a tree trunk of sorts. She added odd hooping branches bent like geometrically accurate arches. A stylized willow, a perfect fountain of green.

Sometimes, when words began to raise welts in her skin and panic in her breast, a drawing would suffice. It came from nowhere, this pure tree on the page. Perhaps it was code of another sort, and she could not yet read it.

The sergeant-at-arms said, “Ilianora!” At the sound of her name, she had to stir; she had no choice. “The runners are back,” he continued, “we’ve worked out our route. We’re right in the crosshairs of the EC militia approaching from the west; we’ve got fifteen minutes to get out of their way. If you don’t come now, we’ll leave you here! And bye-bye, Baby Beauty!”