She thought more than once to talk it out with Pan because she had always talked out everything with him. But she chose against doing so here because it would only remind him of the fact that he was the cause. Better that she suffer quietly and not make him share in her pain. In any case, he could never know the extent and nature of that pain, because it hadn’t happened to him.

So they talked of other things.

“There are still a good many old-world weapons out there,” she told him at one point. “Deladion Inch had some of them, all in good working order, all deadly. He had vehicles that ran on solar power and explosives that were no bigger than my hand but could destroy whole buildings. If he had them, others will have them, too.”

“But not so many maybe.” Pan was peering off into the forest, always paying attention to his surroundings. “Besides, they weren’t enough to save him, were they?”

“They might have been, if he hadn’t chosen to rescue me.”

Pan nodded. “For which I will always be grateful. It says something about him that he decided to come at all. He didn’t know you, didn’t have any reason to make rescuing you his business. He did it for Sider.”

“Oh, I think he did it for himself, too.” She gave him a quick smile as he looked over. “No, it’s true. He liked challenging himself. I think that’s what made life worth something to him.”

He nodded and looked away. She wondered if the look of her eyes troubled him. He didn’t seem to want to focus on them. Maybe he found her ugly or a little less human now. She didn’t like to think that he would be this way, but she would understand if he were. She didn’t like it any better than he did. She didn’t want to look at herself anymore, either.

“I want you to know…” He stopped midsentence, shook his head, and kept walking. For a minute, he didn’t say anything more. Then he looked at her anew, and said, “I just want to say again how sorry I am that this happened.”

She gave him a fresh smile. “I know. But I like hearing you say it. It makes it all a little easier.”

“Do you think that what he did—the King of the Silver River—that it sharpened your instincts?”

She thought about it. In the time since she had returned from wherever the Faerie creature had taken her and resumed her trek home, she had been given ample opportunity to discover if she had been helped or not. It seemed to her that her instincts were fully restored. More than once, they had warned her of dangers she could not see, of creatures in hiding, sometimes directly in her path. When she changed course, the feelings would diminish.