"Once a Day," I said, at the edge of the pool, my hands on its wet rocks as hers were. Her eyes never left mine, and she made again the smile I had seen from above, but now, close to her, I could hear her quick exhalation as she made it; and when the cat beside her made it too, I saw that it was a cat's smile, a smile to bare teeth and to hiss.

I could think of nothing to say that she would hear. The cat had made himself clear, and she had made herself as the cat. I tore off the pants and shirt I wore and stepped down into the icy water. She watched me, unmoving; in two long strokes I reached and touched the rocks where she sat. When I grasped the rocks near her feet, and began to say a word about cold water, she rose and stepped back, as though afraid I would touch her. The cat, when I drew my numb body out and water streamed from me, turned and loped away silently. And then she, deserted and pursued, without a word turned on her toes and ran from me.

I called after her, and almost followed, but felt suddenly that that would be the worst thing I could do. I sat where she had sat and watched her wet footprints on the stone dry up and disappear. I listened: the woods had stopped making noise at her passage; she hadn't run far. There was nothing I could do but talk.

I don't remember now what I said, but I said my name, and said it again; I told her how far I had come, and how amazed I was that she had passed me in the night; "come more miles than I thought I could hold," I said, "and I don't have any other gift for you than that, but as many more as you want…" I said that I thought of her often, thought of her in the spring, had thought of her this spring after a winter in a tree and the thought had made me weep; but, but, I said, I haven't chased you, haven't followed you, no, by the Money you gave me I said I wouldn't and I didn't, only there were stories I wanted to hear, secrets I learned, from a saint, Once a Day, from a saint I lived with, that I wanted to hear more about; it's your own fault, I said, for setting me on a path I've walked ever since, and you might at least say my name to me now so that I know you are the girl I remember, because…

She stood before me. She had put on a coat of softest black covered with stars, black as her hair. "Rush that Speaks," she said, looking deeply into me, but like a sleepwalker, seeing something else. "How did you think about me when I wasn't there?"

She spoke truthfully, I thought, I hoped, but her speech was masked, masked with a blank face like a cat's or like the blank secret faces of the ones who had found me in the woods. "You never thought of me?"

The cat came from the woods, warily, and passed us. "Brom," she said, not as though to call to it but only to say its name. It glanced once at us as it passed, and started up a path toward the camp. She watched it for a moment, and then followed. She glanced back at me, her arms crossed, and said, "Come on, then," and all the years between now and the first day I had seen her folded up for a moment and went away, because it was just that way she had said it to me when I had followed her to Painted Red's room when we were seven, as though I needed her protection, and she must, reluctantly, give it.

She didn't ask how I came to be here, so I told her.

"Are you a prisoner?" she said.

"I think so," I said.

"All right," she said.

Something more than years had happened to Once a Day, more than a mask put over her speech. The girl who had kissed me for showing her a family of foxes, and lain down with me as Olive had with Little St. Roy, was gone, gone entirely. And I didn't care at all, at all, so long as I could follow this girl I had found, this black-robed starred girl, forever.

Eighth Facet

At evening I sat alert among them, though they were easeful, resting their backs against the walls of their camp in the gathering dusk. For what they were discussing, they didn't seem fierce enough.

"We could tie him to a tree," said one of them, moving his hands in a circle as though tying me up, "and then hit him with sticks till he's dead."

"Yes?" said the older one, the one with gray in his beard. "And what if he doesn't hold still while all this tying and hitting is going on?"

"I wouldn't," I said.

"We'd hold him," the first said. "Use your head."

Once a Day sat apart from me, with Brom, looking from face to face as the others spoke, not concerned in it, it seemed. I would never be able to run from them in their forest.

"If we had a knife," said another, yawning, "we could cut his tongue out. He wouldn't be able to talk then."

"Are you going to be the one to cut it out?" Once a Day said, and when he didn't answer, she shook her head in some contempt.

"We don't have a knife, anyway," he said, not much cast down.

They were afraid, you see, that I'd go back and tell everyone where their camp was, and that they would be invaded or stolen from; there were thieves still; they had no reason to trust me. They just didn't know what to do.

"If we were nice to him," Once a Day said. "And gave him things."

"Yes, yes," said a voice, someone lost now in darkness, "and one day he's dark, and then what does any kindness mean?"

"He's not like that," she said in a little voice. And no more was said for a long time. I jumped when someone near the door got up suddenly; it was the old doorkeeper, who went inside and came out a moment later pushing before him a white ball of light, cold and bright, which when he released it floated like a milkweed seed and shone softly over the men and women seated there. My mind was set on my fate, but when he released the Light and it floated, I thought of Olive and the full moon; I looked at Brom, and the other cats there, who regarded me with the same frank candor that was in the faces of those discussing hitting me till I died. And in Little St. Roy's ear Olive whispered her terrible secrets.

"I have an idea," I said, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice. "Suppose I didn't leave." They all looked at me with the same graceful indulgence they granted one another. "Suppose I just stayed on with you and never went back. I could help out; I could carry things. Then I'd grow old, and die naturally, and the secret would be safe." They were silent, not thoughtful particularly; it was as though they hadn't heard. "I'm strong, and I know a lot. I know stories. I don't want to leave."

They looked at me, and at the Light that moved slightly when the breeze pushed it. Finally one young man leaned forward. "I know a story," he said. And he told it.

So I spent that evening between Brom and Once a Day, not sleeping, though they were asleep in a moment. Nothing further had been said about hitting me or cutting me; nothing further at all had been said, except the story, which I smiled at with the rest, though I hadn't understood any of it.

And not long after I had at last fallen asleep, before dawn, she woke me. "The cats are walking," she said, her face dim and strange; I forgot, for a moment, who she was. I stumbled up, shivering, and smoked a little with her, and drank something hot she gave me in a cup; it tasted of dried flowers. Whatever it was, it stopped the shivers, that and a long cape of black she gave me, giggling when she saw me dressed in it. The others were laughing too, to see me in this disguise. In the long night while my fear passed, I learned something: that the truthful speakers have little need to be brave, because they always know where others stand. It had been only that these people couldn't speak that way that had made me afraid of them when, in fact, they would do no harm to me. I had been afraid of men for the first time in my life, and I saw that it would happen often from now on - fear, confusion, uncertainty - and I would just have to be brave. Odd to find it out, old as I was, for the first time. And to think of the warren, where old people died peacefully, never having learned it.