The Cakes opened the door to Mosca’s knock. She was wearing a knitted nightcap, and her red ringlets hung to her shoulder. She had been looking pinker and happier since the midnight marriage, Mosca noticed.

“Come in! Are you hungry?” The Cakes seemed pleased and surprised at her nocturnal visitor, although her smile crumpled a little as Mosca pushed through the open door, dropped to a squat, and tucked her knees to her chin. “What is it?”

Mosca buried her nose between her knees, and stared up at the other girl with big, black, helpless, hostile eyes.

“Mosca . . . what is it?” The Cakes’s face started to take on that drooping, beaky look it always had when she was about to cry. “You’re scaring me. Has someone hurt you?”

Mosca shook her head.

“Is it a bad dream? I know how it can be with dreams. You can stay here for a bit if you like.” The Cakes went back to her bed and sat down on it, sensible and big-sisterish. She pulled off her nightcap, and combed her fingers through the ringlet-wrangle on her head. “There’s some pieces of cake there on the dish, if you’re hungry; they’re a bit stale but still good enough. A couple we had earlier went straight to bed without eating a thing—the bride was so far in her altitudes she couldn’t hardly stand.”

The Cakes floated before Mosca’s eyes in her halo of candlelight. It seemed to Mosca that she was looking up at the other girl from the bottom of a well so dark that she could not see her own hands, and that the Cakes’s world was a tiny, bright bubble drifting almost beyond reach. Mosca wanted to reach out to that world, but it seemed to her that if she did she might burst it, and then she would be left alone in an infinite blackness.

“Was it a dream?” The Cakes wrinkled her nose as a stray hair tickled it.

“Yes,” said Mosca huskily. “It was just a dream.”

N Is for Not Proven

N
IS FOR NOT PROVEN

Just a bad dream . . .

Mosca lay in her trundle bed, wondering why it was so dark and why she could hear water clicking against the wood like a great tongue. Her questioning fingers discovered that the bed had a lid, locked shut, half a foot above her face. The air was becoming warm and unbreathable. She beat against the lid until the lock splintered.

The lid swung back, and the white face of the moon stared down at Mosca through the lace curtain of the mist. She sat up, and found that she was sitting in the oaken clothes chest, which was floating past the pillar of Goodman Sussuratch.