Dear God, Nancy thought, what did he learn out there?

The creature hovered. She saw one wing come down. Its membrane of light moved across Travis— or through him—like a caress. The gesture was at once so tender and so entirely alien that Nancy felt a tingling at her neck. Then the creature moved away, rose up or diminished; she could not say which.

She went to Travis. With an expression of slow wonder he peeled away the bandage Nancy had made for him.

The wound was closed; there was only the hint of a scar.

“They know us,” he told her, hoarse with awe. “They know us yet.”

And then they were alone. The creature that was Anna and Bone moved away across the meadow in an impossible motion that made her blink and avert her eyes. Gone, she thought, vanished into the lanes and pathless alleys between the worlds… and for a moment she was stricken with an inexpressible longing. Her memory of the Jeweled World was strong in her and she thought, I want to follow, follow… but Bone and Anna were gone where there was no following, vanished along some invisible axis. There was only the prairie—prairie grass, buck-brush, dry foxtail and lupine running in swells to a distant shore of sky,- summer and winter, spring and fall contained in it (somehow) all at once—and Nancy thought: why, I guess it is enough. It is enough.

She moved with trepidation into the dark hollow of the vacant shack. It seemed now as if she had lived much of her life in this confined space—made alien, curiously, by Anna’s absence. The door had fallen away when Greg Morrow kicked it. Fingers of sunlight probed into all the secret places. The mattress was tawdry and stained, Anna’s old clothes in a heap on it, and Bone’s there, too, his old blue pea coat— bloodstained—discarded in a corner.

She folded the dress neatly and put it aside. It was a small gesture but soothing. The blue pea coat was heavy with blood but deserved, she thought, the same act of respect. But when she lifted it in her hand a bundle dropped from one of its pockets.

Nancy, curious, reached for it.

The freight car they rode out of Haute Montagne was crowded, and Nancy was dismayed by the people who filled it. These were not just hoboes like the men she had seen under the railway trestle but whole families, men and women and children, migrating westward with winter and poverty hard behind them. Outcasts, she thought, exiles, and how easily we might have joined them, become indistinguishable from them. … In truth, she thought, we are not much better off, despite the money that had fallen from Bone’s pea coat (enough to buy food, pay a little rent)—but, too, she thought, in some way we are different. It was written in Travis’s face.

The granaries and the water tower fell away behind them. A cold wind came through the slats in the freight car and made her press into Travis’s shoulder. He held her with a gentleness she had not sensed in him before. She looked at his face and he was frowning into the gray distance, worried, she guessed, about where they were going and what they would do there; but there was a second quality in him that was unfamiliar, utterly new. He sensed her attention and smiled at her. And it was the smile, Nancy thought wonderingly, of a man who has just forgiven someone, or who has been, himself, forgiven.

There were no funeral services held in Haute Montagne in the month of November. No one would say (though some suspected) that Creath Burack was dead. Liza lit a candle in the parlor window each night all that cold month in the hope that her husband might find his way home. But he did not, and come the first snow Liza laid away the candlestick in a bureau drawer, secure between a lavender sachet and a neatly folded linen tablecloth. For him, as for her, there was no returning.