Miranda left the town house with slow steps, deep in her own thoughts. She absently declined the housekeeper’s help and immediately embarrassed herself by stumbling on the threshold. Gripping the doorframe with her free hand, she righted herself before the housekeeper had time to become solicitous, and gave her a firm farewell. Once the door closed, she walked a few steps away from the eye of the nearest window and its twitching, curtained lid and sat down on a tree-shaded bench with a grateful sigh, resting her forehead on the smooth handle of her cane.

After a little while she raised her head and saw him standing on the sidewalk across the road, distinctive in his country clothes of pale cotton and his sandaled feet. Immediately she smiled. She had been wondering for a long time how and when she would meet Chance as human, and although a shaded avenue in one of the City’s better districts was a far more mundane location than her imagination had dreamed, there was still a kind of magic to how he stood there, looking out of place and at home all at once.

He crossed the street and came toward her. The leaves overhead shifted in the breeze and dappled his skin with shadow and sun . . . but then she blinked and saw instead indigo chasing ivory with an excitement and nervousness that contrasted with the calmness of his features. By the time he sat beside her, resting his hands neatly over the curves of his knees, he had regained control and was uniformly pale of skin, squinting as a patch of sunlight touched his eyes, entirely human.

She skipped greeting and courtesy. “I thought I would have an advantage over you, meeting you in my world and time, but it seems that you know me still.”

He turned to her and smiled, his face familiar and yet new in its unexpected youthfulness. “Time and space are never strange for us, and you are one of us now. Let us say . . . we have always known each other.”

She raised her right hand slightly, keeping it sheltered from broader view between their bodies. With a slight exhale like a faint sigh of relief, she stretched her fingers and strummed the empty air. A faint smoke of coiling umber trickled from her fingertips and played shyly in the space between them. Chance watched with a proud, polite smile.

“That’s it,” Miranda said. “That’s all. I thought there would be more. What can I do with this? What am I meant to do?”

He took a moment to be silent, respectful of her query and her confusion, before replying, “Perhaps you are not meant to do anything. Perhaps your only task is to be.”

She said nothing, but her gaze swept in an arc that encompassed the tyranny of the cane and the dancing freedom of her spirit’s essence.