I sit by the wayside and watch the high, emaciated clouds drift. The days are shorter and shorter, and the sky is already becoming funereally ornate with another sunset. No lights come out, anywhere. The city and the landscape sing to themselves, and from the cave of the saint far above something reflective turns and flashes occasionally. If I wait long enough, I will calmly disappear too. Death is what I feel.

Has the camp disappeared? Somehow it’s more difficult to find my way there in the empty streets. Numbed branches tap with vacant insistence on the glass of a caved-in store. Hooves beat sharply behind me coming fast and I am seized up bodily by the shoulders—she lifts me with her fingertips as though I were a paper doll and flips me into the carriage, into her arms. She kisses me through the veil, her ardent mouth now soft now hard through the crepe. Her fingers sharp as daggers rake me up and down; I will sigh with bliss when they cut me open and plunge deep into me, greedily seizing and fondling my organs, won’t I?

—Now she crumples against the cushions. I see the soft open outline of her lips, where the veil clings to them. They speak.

“Don’t go __________ ...” she says quietly, calling me by her husband’s name. “Let me hide you.”

I look at her, whose first name I don’t even know, and I love her. I want to worship her. But when she speaks with her lips glued to her veil, calling me by the name of the husband whose body she devoured, I shrink. I think of soldiers on the road, and I think of hiding in her house, watching helplessly from the windows as the Edeks pass again and again in the street, closing in, loitering longer and more intently each time they return.

“I was seen by an Edek.”

“I can hide you ... from them ...” she’s falling asleep, cooing and smiling.

A light flickers by me and I seem to see the Girl climbing hastily into the carriage, but it may be I am confused again.

Orvar coughs up on the box. Are we alone again? Have we been? She sits bolt upright and she turns this way and that from the waist, her hands in the air.

“There’s a festival tonight! We should stay out of the streets.”

She lunges forward to rap on the hatch, but I take her in my arms. I feel the delectable firmness of her flesh under my grip, and her fragrance, and it’s as though I’d only just learned to love her.

“What are you worried about? They won’t hurt you—and I want to see if I can find Jil Punkinflake.”

“No—they want me.” Her eyes are alarmed, I can see them grow wide. “They want to put me up in a sedan chair and parade me up and down like a pagan idol. They want me to stand there in the midst of them high on a dais, head to foot wearing only my veil and the garlands of flowers they grow for me.”