For an instant she saw onto the place she actually stood: the pinnacle of rock beneath her feet, the vast bowl of land to the east, and the rose-painted hills to the west. She took another step and saw a dusty hilltop rimmed by boulders, the setting sun visible as a red smear. She faltered, chest tight as she sucked in air for courage.

When she had looked onto this place before, Lord Radas had spoken to her. Hastily, she moved on. She smelled the rotting damp of marshland but could see only the suggestion of a flat landscape against the swallowing night. As she moved through the path, she must smell and hear what lay beyond each turn because the sun had set and she was walking in layers of night, some too dark to penetrate and others still limned with the last measure of day as though she were leaping from east to west, north to south, and back again, randomly.

Not randomly. The pattern repeated. And if it repeated, she could learn it.

She took another step. Air iced her lungs. Her face and hands smarted in a bone-freezing chill. A tincture of juniper touched her nostrils. She halted, startled by the brush of that perfume, remembering Joss and how he had washed with cakes of juniper-scented soap sent twice yearly by his mother. Joss, her lover. The man she loved, even if she had never quite told him so.

Twilight is a bridge between day and night. On its span, the wind blows both into the whispering past and the silent future, and you partake of them both because you are in transition from one state to the next, a condition that recurs with every passage between night and day and night. Indeed, this condition occurs many times in the entirety of a life, which is lived out as a series of such transitions, bridges between what has gone before and what will come next.

Twilight is a presence, hard to know in its impermanence.

Twilight speaks to her in a soft foreign lisp, with a good-natured voice half amused and half cynical.

“Hu! There you are. They’ve been looking for you for a good long while now, since long before I came to them. They’re getting irritated. If I were you, I would submit now. That’s better than what will happen if you can’t keep hiding from them. On the other hand, I don’t mind seeing them wring their hands and stamp their feet a bit longer.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a ghost.”

“A ghost! You don’t sound like a ghost.”

“What do ghosts sound like?”

“Aui! I suppose they sound like we do, I mean, that they talk no differently as ghosts than they do when living.”

“So are you saying I can’t be a ghost? Or I can be a ghost?”

“You’re a flirt,” she said with a laugh, because she liked his lazy, good-natured, and sexy baritone even if she could not trust him.