The women before Zhinsinura, some of them, had listened intently, chins in hands; others had been preoccupied with hushing children, or nudging cats away, or changing their places for better ones. The children played at distracting each other, as children do when serious things are said. For it was an old, old story, after all, and heard hundreds of times; this was only the day in April when the List chose to tell it all together. I had listened perhaps more intently than any of them.

Mother Tom in her garden raised her hand, waved, lowered her hand.

"We who are the League's child," said Zhinsinura, "and who remember Mother Tom - we who feel those ancient women still to be here, here, where they guarded and dispensed the food that once burdened the thousand shelves long since gone; where they made medicines to save lives now long over; to where they returned from their journeys with stories and angels' things which remain here still; where their plans were laid, and where the old agreements were come to which made the world the way it is today; and where in the end that struggle was resigned - we don't forget, though we regret nothing, as no one in old age regrets the death of a parent long ago.

"If you were to tell a story of the days in which the League grew to be the Long League of famous memory, you would say that a cat is curious when it's not comfortable. That their curiosity found the secrets of medicine's daughters and all the angels' medicines, we are grateful. That it uncovered the four dead men, most horrid of all the angels' secrets, and destroyed them, we shudder at: and praise their courage. That it learned Dr. Boots and so came to know dark and light as we do, well, what is there to say? But the League as it was is gone; the curiosity is satisfied; the struggle over. Dark or light, the world is lighter than it was."

She shook her head, smiling, and brushed shell crumbs from her lap. "Yet think of it," she said, smiling wider and looking out over them, who caught her smile, "only think of it long enough to feel how odd it is, children, how odd in the end, far, far more odd than either happy or sad. May comes now, and that communion: the oddest of all. I want no one's secret: only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!"

On the faces around me, as Zhinsinura asked, it seemed to dawn on them: the one thing I had known and they had not, seemingly. There was even a ripple of laughter that rose here and caught there, grew deep among the men and died away as our evening song did. Their laughter at the oddness of it was the first time they had seemed like ordinary people - I mean like truthful speakers - since I had come there.

In their laughter, it seemed, that day came to an end. The rain would go on till night, or through the night; in the silver glimmer of it the afternoon was already dark. Zhinsinura still sat, with Mother Tom before her, and broke nuts to eat, while the rest of us stretched and moved, walked and talked again.

I made my way to where Once a Day sat before the box inside which Mother Tom stood waving. It had grown dimmer in that garden, and Mother Tom's eternal wave moved more slowly. Because Once a Day still watched it, I watched it.

"What did she mean," I asked, "when she said 'May comes, and that communion'?"

"She meant our letters from Dr. Boots," Once a Day said, her eyes not leaving the box.

There was a flowering tree in the garden, and now, close to it, I could see that there was a tiny cat curled up at her big feet. Mother Tom's hand rose, and a petal began to drift from the tree. Her hand rose high and waved; the petal reached the ground; Mother Tom smiled, and the cat at her feet closed its eyes peacefully. Mother Tom lowered her hand; her smile faded as her hand came to rest against her side. Then the whole garden seemed to give a minute shake. Mother Tom's face became set and grim and apprehensive, the cat's eyes were suddenly open and alert. Her hand rose, in the same way; her face lightened to a smile, the cat's eyes began to close - and another petal fell from the tree, exactly then.

When she was dark, they said, she was very, very dark, and when she was light she was lighter than air.

She waved, and waved again. Each time, her face would be dark and apprehensive, then lighten to a smile; each time as she smiled the cat would close its eyes. And each time another petal would drift in rocking lightness to the ground.

"If we watch long enough," I said, "there will be no more petals. The tree will fruit."

"No," said Once a Day. "No, it won't."

There was a puzzle that St. Gene made: he took a strip of paper, and half-twisted it, and sealed it in a loop. Now, he said, trace the outside of the loop with your finger. But don't trace the inside. But the beginning of the inside always came before the end of the outside; the loop always began again before it came to an end.

"That's a riddle," I said. "You promised me, last month, you wouldn't set me riddles any more."

"I don't remember riddles," she said.

Mother Tom waved. The cat slept. The petal fell. With a sudden suffocating sense of having discovered myself to be in a small, closed place forever and ever, I understood: all the petals that fell were one petal. Mother Tom's wave was one wave. Winter never comes.

Fifth Facet

"When do you go?" I asked her.

May had rebuilt our shade house on the hill; the grass we had beaten down there had sprung up golden-green again.

"Soon," she said. "They'll come to tell me."

They had been going away, one by one, down toward the river, and returning, naked many of them, from Dr. Boots, the old looking like children and the young ancient. The letter was got by each, and their secrets grew strong and sure, and intersected me everywhere. I turned to them, one by one, to the friends I had made, and found they had disappeared, though they looked at me still; and the greeting died on my lips. Even the youngest children, though left out as I was, seemed more still, and played games I didn't know with cats who seemed restless and watchful. And though it was the List that had become-become disembodied, in a way, yet it seemed that it was I who was not there, who was only a flicker of memory and misunderstanding amid the solid weight of their magic.

"What if," I said to her, "what if you didn't go, this year?"

"What do you mean?" she said, not as though she truly wanted to know, but as though I had said something without any meaning at all, which hardly interested her. A thick wave of despair came over me. She could never, even Whisper cord as she was, have asked me that question in Little Belaire: what do you mean?

"I mean what I say," I said softly. "I really mean what I say."

She looked at me, the blue of her eyes as blank and opaque as the sky behind us. She looked away, at the hoppers that hopped in the damp grass; at Brom, who chased them, daintily for one so huge. She couldn't hear. I would have to say it all in words.

"I don't want you to go and get this letter," I said.

Through the year I had lived with her, she had come slowly to be someone I knew; not the girl I had once known, but, month by month, someone I knew. I hadn't asked for what wasn't given me; yet she had given me herself. And I knew that when she got her letter she would be abstracted from me again as surely as if she fled from here to Little Moon. "Listen to me now," I said, and took her thin wrist. "We could go away. You said they wouldn't care, and surely now of any time they would care least. We could go tonight."