I peer at her, who sits there under the trees, and then up at the cupola window. In a spell, I wander out through the house. Of all the doors I see, I pass only one that stands open. The room beyond is black, but fragrance, and the sound of breathing, comes from it. I pause to look. Teeth glint in the dark. I go on toward the front door. Bare feet pat the floor behind me. I feel two firm hands on my shoulders.

On my way back to the college, the swift-coming rain catches me, and I have to hurry along the sloughing path with my lapels turned up. The trees here are bare, it takes me a while to find one with enough leaves to offer me any shelter. I stand there shaking the rain from my hair. Already the trunks around me are soaked, glistening and brown like hard turds planted upright in the ground. I put my hand in my pocket and with a shock I feel it close on the whirring bottle. I forgot to give it to her.

*

I am drinking with Jil Punkinflake when the word comes, just within the one vast hour. Separating the glass from my lip to which it had lightly adhered makes it ring, and I pick up the envelope from the rough boards of the table. From a nest of shredded newspaper comes a small card with Makemin’s name embossed in what I know at once to be real gold near the top: my orders. We move out tomorrow. I look up at Jil Punkinflake, and in my mind I see her, walking high above me against the horizon, her arms at her sides, her veiled head lowered, rolling a little wearily with each step and her long skirts undulating lazily against red and orange sky, like waves on the sea. Orders brought me to these people that I learned to love the moment I saw them, now orders from the same source will take me from them.

We take his lantern and make our way through the wreckage to the river. I make a magic knot from cadaver hair, make a hole in the soil with my finger, put the knot in, cover it, sprinkle it with water from a rain barrel there. I bend down and speak into the ground, saying whatever comes into my head. A transparent shoot shaped like a budding oak leaf slips from the ground and brushes my lip like a mineral noodle, before it bends at a sharp angle and points in a particular direction. I take a bearing from it.