“Please keep me well,” she prayed. “Father-Spirit, keep me as the Singer left me.” She felt her little legs to be quite sure they had not withered in the night. “Now that he is gone, please, Father-Spirit,” she pled into the darkness, “must I become an invalid again?”

In every shadow of the night she saw the lurking image of the World Hater. She remembered how he leered at her and smirked to see her in the roadside dust. “Oh, Father, it is better that I had not received the gift of motion than to have gained and lost it. I never can go back again to crawling in the streets,” she sobbed. “Please do not make me crawl again and beg. Oh, Father, please …”

The first faint coloring of dawn found her lying in fatigue, still begging for her legs which had not suffered any loss for all her worry. But her agony and doubt had caused her view of things to grow narrow in the night. Even the first pale light of day did not reveal the world that really was.

She felt someone beside her on the simple mat that was her bed.

“You worried about your legs for nothing,” said a voice.

She sat upright in her fear. In but a moment she was on her feet and seemed about to run. Then she looked at him more fully. Her heart was pumping. “Can it be?” And she concluded in her madness, “It is!” She threw herself into the Singer’s arms with such a strong embrace it all but knocked him over. “You’re alive—alive.” She closed her eyes and opened them to be sure that blinking would not erase her joy. “Oh, Singer—I was so afraid. I thought my legs would be as …”

“Yours are better far than mine this morning,” he said.

His hands and feet were barely recognizable. She who had cried for her own legs was overcome by real concern for his.

“You healed mine!” she said. “Heal your own. Please, Singer, make them well.”

“They are well. There is no pain now.”

“But they are scarred and wounded. How can they be well?”

“Earthmaker leaves the scars, for they preserve the memory of pain. He will leave my hands this way so men will not forget what it can cost to be a singer in a theater of hate.”

“But the word … the word they wrote upon your face is gone.”

The Singer reached up to his forehead where the searing iron had left the accusation of the council. The word was gone indeed.

“It is,” he said, “because Earthmaker cannot bear a lie. He could not let me wear the word for He is Truth. He knows no contradiction in himself. So learn this, my little friend, no man may burn a label into flesh and make it stay when heaven disagrees.”

“But did the Father-Spirit agree with all the other things they did to your hands and feet?”