Just before dawn, the fish-keep rose from his bed. Stretching his old bones, he stepped out of his hut. The sun had not yet crept over the palace walls; everything was washed in deep purple light.

He walked around the pond. He liked this time of day best—before the king rose to poke at the pond (usually), before the city noises began to bounce around the small garden walls, before the guards began their patrols. In these hours of quiet, the fish would sometimes leap from their pool—pink and green and gold flashes—and, if he closed his eyes and listened to the splash in the stillness, he sometimes could feel as he did when, so much younger, he sat on the wide green riverbank with hook and line in the water. The sun would be sparkling off the ripples, but he would just be sitting, patiently waiting, feeling the air moving across him as it moved across the water and the trees.

This morning, the fish were splashing more than usual. He watched one, then another, then another leap from the dim pool and return; he watched the watery rings spread where they reentered.

Ah! He nearly stepped on something. He bent down. What was it?

A tiny frog, pale and slight and squatting. No bigger than his thumb. It made a quiet tthhhrrrp.

Cupping his hand around the damp creature, he picked it up and held it close to his eyes.

“Strange little thing,” he said to it. “How did you arrive here? There’re no frogs in the king’s pond.”

Though the pale throat fluttered in alarm, its eyes were as placid as cream.

“Oh, I doubt you’ll do much harm,” the fish-keep said. “I suppose you might stay.” Gently, he placed the creature back on the damp rocks. “You’re so small, after all.”

Stunned by its trip in the great hand, the little frog sat on the stones, its sides puffing with fear. When after a moment it realized it was free, it leapt—arms and legs and toes splayed desperately wide—into the pond.

The fish-keep watched the small creature disappear through the reeds into the deep shadows of the water. “There you are,” he said. “You’ll be all right now.”

LX

SHE SPEAKS! SHE SPEAKS!

When the door finally opened, Alba was not really there. Only a body—tiny, swimming in the folds of a tunic that had once been kept so carefully clean—lay limp and cold on the floor.

“Oh!” said the person who had opened the door.

“Oh!” cried another behind.

“What is that?” exclaimed a third.

There was a commotion.

She wasn’t gone. Not completely. She hadn’t entirely slipped into darkness. But it took her a long while to find her way out.

For a time, shadows of sounds splashed around her. Bumpings. Murmurings. Exclamations. Outcries. They lapped senselessly around her shape in the dark.

She felt her body being tended to—cups raised to her lips, cool cloths brought to her skin, small patterings all about her. Fingers, ankles, knees—she became aware, slowly, of her own form. She tasted the coldness and sweetness of water.