“I’m walking a labyrinth right now, aren’t I? That’s the way the undying get humans to travel through time. Maybe if I spin one myself, I can go where I want.”

He kept careful control of his expression as he tried to assess whether she had returned to full rationality or whether she was still dazed by the memory of pain and drugs. “If you want to leave the labyrinth, all you have to do is tell Patience your decision.”

Miranda scuttled down from his knee, across his lap, and onto the back of his hand, her legs busy with nervousness. “My decision—”

“Yes. If this is too much, you don’t have to do it. You can stop. Say you want it to stop. She can’t force you to do what she wants. She won’t.” He stopped himself before he began to sound pathetic in his pleading.

“No,” Miranda agreed. “But she did seem to think this was the only way to be fair, to show me why I should help her without my having to trust her word.”

He grimaced. “That’s Patience for you. She loves the idea of free will.”

Miranda fell silent again. The Trickster watched her, his hand flexing slightly under her.

“I can’t show you how to make a labyrinth,” he said at last. “You’re too human for that. But I can show you how to weave a fence to hold back the pain.”

She looked up, all gem-bright eyes and eagerly twitching limbs. “Show me. Show me now.”

Weaving was like labyrinth-walking in some ways. It took the mind to a place of narrow focus, shutting out the distractions that pulled the consciousness every which way. He took as long as was needed for her to learn the movements of body and mind to craft a cocoon as strong as a hospital narcotic. He also remarked that she would need to practice when she returned in order to convert the spider leg movements to human finger movements.

“But it’s all in the mind, really,” he reassured her.

He continued to talk, distracting her, avoiding difficult topics and choosing to act as if their only concern was weaving and weaving well. Her return to the hospital was swift, like a sleight of hand, a very smooth and professional transition between worlds as if he too had improved his concentration after the weaving exercise. He put her on the linen-swaddled heap in the bed, his cupped hand restricting her vision, and sensed her consciousness trickle back where it belonged, running along tributary nerves already blissfully numbed by a fresh dose of painkillers.

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

He hesitated. This was, after all, her journey and not his. “Eventually. I can’t be sure when. Would you like me to bring you a shadow again?”