"They came," she said, "but not for that. I thought it was, which is why… I’m sorry about your door. I was trying to get rid of them. They said they’d leave when they had what was taken from them. But that wasn’t what they wanted. It was they who… Fennec…"

Doul nodded.

"He’s alive," Bellis whispered, wondering whether that was still true.

Doul’s eyes flashed wide for a moment.

Bellis waited. She wondered with tired nervousness what he would do. There were many things he could punish her for. She had lost Armada the grindylow figurine, for nothing at all. Needlessly. Or was there a trace of the old closeness in him?

But there seemed nothing but a flatness, a resignation in his manner, and Bellis was not surprised when finally he nodded and turned from her, walked back across the deck. She felt deflated, watching him. What do the Lovers think of that? she wondered. She could not imagine the Lovers giving up the magus fin without some rage. Don’t they care?

Do they even know?she thought suddenly. And if they know it’s gone, do they know it was me?

That night, Tanner Sack came to her door. She was astonished.

He stood on her doorstep, staring at her with eyes so bloodshot, in skin so grey, he looked like a junkie. He stared at her with dislike for several silent seconds, then pushed a sheaf of papers at her.

"Take these," he said. They were used and reused scraps on which she recognized Shekel’s enthusiastic script. Lists of words he had found, that he had seen and wanted to remember, to cross-reference, to look for in the storybooks he pillaged.

"You taught the boy to read," Tanner said, "and he loved that." He kept his eyes on hers and his face expressionless. "You might want to keep some of these, to remember him by."

Bellis was shocked and embarrassed. She was not constructed that way. It was absolutely against her instincts to accumulate mawkish, morbid remembrances of the dead. Not even when her mother or father had died, and certainly not at the death of this child she had barely known, no matter how she felt his loss.

She almost refused the papers. She almost framed some cant about not deserving them- as if one could deserve these ragged scraps!-but two things stopped her.

One was guilt. Don’t run from it, you coward, she thought. She would not allow herself to escape it. Her personal taste in death, she told herself, was not the issue-how convenient it would be for that to let her reject these evidences. And besides her guilt was her respect for Tanner Sack.