"Hi, Val.” He took her arm, and felt leaned upon for real.

"So they went and did it,” said Val.

"Yep."

"Tied the knot."

Pierce nodded in solemn agreement, though it seemed to him not so much a knot tied as one untied, a great Celtic knot, one of those mazy ones that though apparently undisentanglable are seen at last to be made out of simple symmetries, a tug at one end would return it to its primal state as an undifferentiated thread or string or braided belt with both a beginning and an end, though both had been hidden in the design.

They were the first at the long table whereon open bottles were displayed, and stacks of plastic wineglasses, which Pierce from a distance had taken as real, as they had been at Boney's memorial, held here too.

"Who will be next,” she said, as though pondering an awful force that was mowing down the innocent or the fated. She hadn't ever; neither had he; she never would, he (she knew, from his ambiguous natal chart, still in her files) either would at last, or never would. Barren, anyway, that much was for sure. “Was that Barney Corvino's daughter I saw you come with?"

"Yes, it was."

"Sad story,” she said.

They looked together back to the lawn, where Rosie and Spofford were making slow progress through their well-wishers, taking the hands of elders, laughing and embracing friends they perhaps had not earlier noticed among the guests, too busy with their ritual and one another.

"You know,” Pierce said, lifting a glass. “This is a beautiful place we live in."

"Yes, it is.” They both looked to the shade of the tall oaks and maples, and to the pale hills beyond. “The Land of Heart's Desire."

"Of course no place is that,” Pierce said. “Not really. But still."

"Actually,” Val said, “it really was. Once. But of course that was before you got here.” She shouldered him gently, to show she was kidding. Pierce left her to refill and meet her neighbors (and clients, as some of them were) and made his way to where the well-wishers clustered around the wedded pair, waiting their turn. He stood by an elderly man, in a straw fedora and seersucker suit, whom he felt he had seen somewhere, and in this connection, too—maybe only because he reminded him strongly of Boney Rasmussen. He was talking to the Blackbury Jambs librarian, today without her glasses.

"Yes,” the gent was saying. “The fierce vexations of a dream."

"Yes,” said the woman. “And in the end—what does Robin say? ‘Jack shall have Jill, and naught shall go ill.’”

"So he says,” replied the elder. “So all the confusions of the night are straightened out. But—as I always pointed out to my students—there's an interesting exception."

A teacher, Pierce thought: and an unexpected envy arose within him. How much fun that had been: to tell people what they didn't know, things that weren't even maybe so important, but that caused that sudden light to arise in their eyes, effulgence of an inward connection just then made. A small sound made too, sometimes, a sort of call or coo that was made on no other occasion. Meaning.

"What exception?” the librarian asked.

"Well, you'll remember that Robin anoints the eyes of Lysander and Demetrius, who both love Hermia, and Cupid's flower causes the both of them to love Helena instead."

"Yes."

"And when Oberon is setting things to rights, he anoints Lysander's eyes with the new herb, and wipes away the effect of the love drug. So that when he wakes, he loves his Hermia again."

"Yes."

"But Robin doesn't anoint Demetrius. When he wakes, he still loves Helena, not Hermia as he did before. For him the spell's not broken. And since this makes up two couples, the fairies leave it that way. So Demetrius went to sleep, was put under a love spell, and never wakes up."

"Well, good. It should happen to us all."

They both laughed loudly, heads nodding together, as though they'd pulled the trick themselves. It was their turn then, and Pierce was surprised to see tears in Rosie's eyes as she took the old man's gnarled claw and listened to the words he spoke for her alone.

Pierce approached them next. He too was embraced with sudden gratitude, and tears appeared in her wide eyes for him too; Rosie seemed like a shipwreck survivor come to shore, glad for every human touch. Spofford more manly, each of them pounding the other's back as though to eject a bone from the throat. Pierce thought he smelled in Spofford's beard or collar a sweet herbal smoke.

He was the last in their receiving line, and they took him by each arm and drew him to sit with them at a long table beneath the oaks. They talked there of many things. Pierce felt the sun on his back, and thought he should not have worn black, all he had, though, in suitings. At a silence he asked, his heart contracting in his breast, if Rosie had heard from Mike, and what, and how he.

"Gone,” she said. “Still gone.” For a month or more as winter went on he hadn't called or come for his turn with Sam; neither he nor anyone speaking for him had appeared at the new custody hearings that Allan Butterman had arranged at last, his claims therefore evaporating as her own had done that day when she had sat for an hour in the wrong room in the Cascadia courthouse, and Sam had been taken from her. He was gone from the county, it appeared, gone from this area, gone entirely.

"I got a call then from Indiana or Iowa or I forget where,” she said. “He wanted to tell me he was there, and that he was still here, I mean that he was still, you know. But then nothing more since then. I don't think anything's changed."

Pierce nodded. It seemed not to trouble her to be asked, in fact she put a hand on his black sleeve, as though she knew that it was harder for him to ask than for her to answer, and why. He thought—he had not thought of it since the midwinter, it had come at a time when so much else had thereupon tumbled over on him—how he had on a dark morning given to Rose Ryder two hundred of Fellowes Kraft's dollars, his share of money found in Kraft's house, in a book, where else; two hundred dollars of getaway money, to replace the money she'd paid to the Powerhouse to train her in their theurgies. What if she still had it, what if a time came when. Those bills were oddly large, he remembered, dating from some earlier currency era, and maybe could no longer be spent. Pierce felt the inescapability of all that he and she and all of us everywhere had done, still going on somehow. Inescapable and unreleasable things, altered though at every iteration, past and present like a boy and his mother holding hands and swinging in wide circles, first one standing his ground and impelling the other around and then the other impelling the first, and at the same time both moving forward, across the lawn, across into the future, neither able to go without bringing the other. If that's what he'd meant or known about the way the world goes, then maybe Roo wouldn't have said it was obvious, that everybody knew. Or it was the most obvious thing of all.

He saw Roo now turn back toward him. She lifted her hand from far off. All three of them returned her slight salute.

"How's that Rabbit working out for you?” Spofford said to him. He seemed fully, almost insolently at ease in his atemporal finery, as though he had been married countless times, as though he'd done nothing else ever.

"Good. It's good."

"Nice little vehicle.” He had that smile Pierce knew, as though he was playing a not really unkind but unsettling joke, as though he knew something to Pierce's credit that Pierce didn't know.

"Yes."

"Good winter car. Sturdy. Front wheel drive."