“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.”

She thrusts her head hard against my chest and drives her fists against me, shuddering and almost sobbing.

“They want me to bless them,” she says bitterly. “You have no idea how they talk about me, what it’s like to be talked about and written about and to be the object of speculation.”

I catch sight of Jil Punkinflake slipping into an alley, accompanied by Nectar. I cry out to them, and lunge without thinking from the carriage. Her hands brush my back as she tries to draw me in, but now another group of mortuary students cries, “The Cannibal Queen! The Cannibal!” and immediately converges on the carriage. With a whipsnap Orvar drives the carriage away—and now I am trying to get back to it, waving frenziedly to her, but I am only one of many doing that now.

I watch in horror as a brazen hand snatches the veil from her face—she covers her face with her hands, crying out in anguish, and recoils into the carriage. She escapes as one of the mortuary students, a woman, brandishes the veil overhead howling in triumph. Furious, I shove my way through the crowd to her, as many others are trying to get hold of the veil or tear a piece of it off for themselves. The student is as yet keeping it from them, laughing and bounding up onto any elevating thing, the base of a lamp post, a stone block, a post box. I get around behind her while she crows from atop the post box and give her a shove. She reels into the air and throws out her arms to break her fall loses her grip on the veil and before it can strike the earth I have it, and I run like a madman up the street as they pursue me.

*