“I am a spirit, but all spirits are part of me. And gods.”

The captain rolls his eyes, grins at Silichieh.

“You’re not time?” I ask.

“I grow with time, and time often strengthens me.”

“Are you beauty?”

“I think I’m beautiful, but that’s not my name.”

“Virtue?”

“... That is not my name.” Very grand the way he refuses the contraction there.

“Honor?”

“All wise people do me honor. But I’m not wisdom, either—and you’re just running down a list, so stop now.”

“I give up.”

“My name is fear.”

*

Rattle of our gear against the quiet; Thrushchurl’s anthem, and unsmelly smell of the fog, not a trace of salt air in it, and suppressed under it is the smell of cakey black earth. The swaying shapes of marching soldiers, blue shadows against a low ceiling of fog and the dark crescent of the hillside above me. The captain, speaking in a clear ringing but not loud voice, is describing his great patriotic epic to me. Sounds awful.

“A complex book,” he says, “a sorcerer’s-apprentice book. A book of loneliness,” he adds with a wistful note. “It’s about a young man who is sent far away to a sanitarium in the mountains; he must learn there how to cure the plague that is destroying the people back in his home.”

He lapses into his original language, addressing himself to Silichieh, and then runs out of words. None of us has much attention to spare. We are less and less able to combat our awe in this still country. Even the loonies are. Thrushchurl’s singing has retreated under his breath.

Our muffled noise. An extensive white swatch of dim scales on the slopes ahead, looking like splashes of spilled milk. Presently we draw near, and the patches of white come down to the brink of the path. Even close up, the white is confused by the cloud of fog we’re engulfed in, so I have to step to the edge and stoop. Suddenly I can see clearly—tiny, incredibly regular flowers, growing low to the ground, each with six diamond-shaped petals. They aren’t white, finally, but a colorless, mother-of-pearl silver, like polished chips of fog. The petals are inflexibly hard, and when I reach to pick one, the thin stem bends stiffly in my fingers like wire, and won’t break.

“What’s that?” Jil Punkinflake knocks my back and points up the slope at something dark tumbling in among the flowers. I peer through the fog, and I can see a little almond-shaped head up there, and a few others besides.

“Those are hares,” I say.

“I’ve never seen one,” he says.

I wonder if, and if so how, they eat these mineral flowers.

“Look there!” and no sooner has he said this and pointed than Jil Punkinflake darts from the path, following the rocky bed of a shallow brook. Thrushchurl follows him avidly on his long legs. I hadn’t seen the brook at all, and now I can hardly believe it’s there. It flows without making a noise.