Tick-Tick’s funeral was one of the second sort. There was some of the Elflands in it, and some American plains nomad, some ancient Roman, some traditional Japanese—the sort of result you’d expect from putting the ceremony in the charge of two people who ran a bookstore. It was held in a meadow on the southern edge of the city, under a bright blue cloudless sky and the occasional outraged diving attacks of red-winged blackbirds, like little fighter planes. A space had been cleared away in the middle for the scaffold. Its uprights were sections of young pine trunks, the scaly bark intact; the bier they supported was made of laced pine boughs. There were dried herbs and fragrant plants heaped on it, sage, artemisia, sweet woodruff, rosemary; and on that mattress lay the body, cocooned in scarlet silk and strewn with yellow summer flowers. The fire was laid and ready to light under the scaffold: apple wood, cherry, rowan, and oak. A lot of the people who came wore white, though not by any apparent prearrangement.

No, not everyone in town showed up. Not even all the people who had known Tick-Tick showed up; some of those were down with the virus, others were afraid of catching it and were staying home, and a few, I was afraid, had died as she had. But the staff of the Hard Luck had closed the place and come, as had Mingus from Taco Hell. Most of the people who worked at Snappin’ Wizard’s and Magic Freddy’s had come, as had Sunny, and Wolfboy and Sparks, of course, Ms. Wu, Milo Chevrolet, Yoshi, Camphire, Weegee, Kathy Hong and Cascade from Chrystoble Street copshop. Dancer and Val from Danceland, a contingent of the all-elven Bloods, at least as many members of the all-human Pack (after all, you couldn’t afford much anti-elf prejudice if you wanted to get your motorcycle repaired by the best mechanic in town), a lot of the Horn Dance folks, and a whole great crowd of people whose faces I did and did not recognize, whose names I did and didn’t remember, to whom she had meant something. You don’t take a head count at a funeral. Let it suffice to say that there were a lot of people there.

Some of them had brought offerings, of objects they’d made, poems they’d written, things they’d grown, or food or drink or perfume or incense. A band, composed of a fiddle player, a drummer, a guitarist, and a woman with Uilleann pipes, played while the offerings were left, on the bier or beside it, as the givers saw fit.

A few people brought things to read aloud. The last was Sparks, who raised her unassuming little voice with surprising strength to recite one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in an artless, easy way that made my throat ache.

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain

Full charactered with lasting memory.