He did not blame them for their credulity. Every art but one was a game of delusions. But oh, the road to that Art was hard, and he was glad to have his list of alter egos to divert him as he made his way along it.

He even had some of the fruitier dialogue ascribed to him in these works by heart, and it pleased him to recite it aloud when there was nobody within earshot.

As now, for instance, trudging up the forested flank of this damnable mountain. A speech from a pseudo-historical tragedy called Serenissima:

"I have nothing but you, my sweet Serenissima. You are my sense, my sanity and my soul. Go from me now, and I am lost in the great dark between the stars, and cannot even perish there, for I must live until you still my heart. Still it now! I beg thee, still it now, and let my suffering cease."

He stopped in mid-declaration. There was another sound competing for his audience of trees, this far less musical. He held his breath, to hear it better. It was coming from the summit of the mountain, or thereabouts: sufficient voices to sluggest a cast of some substantial size was assembled there. No need to wonder what kind of drama was underway. The keening told all. It was a tragedy.

With his own voice now hushed, he started to climb again, the sounds more horrid the louder they became. It was only in fiction that pain made the dying poetic. In life, they sobbed and begged and ran with tears and snot. He had seen such spectacles countless times and did not relish seeing another. But he had no choice. The child might very well be up there somewhere-a child named for a goddess who brought dreams-and back in the balmy spring, in Missouri, his instincts had told him there was some significance in that naming. He'd lodged a little piece of his own dreams with the O'Connelis as a consequence, which with hindsight had probably been an error. How much of an error the next hour or so would tell.

Meanwhile, there was the mystery of the voices to vex him. was this the dying cries of pioneers, lost on the heights? He didn't think so. There were sounds amid the cacophony he had never heard from a human throat; nor indeed from any animal that lived in this corner of reality, which fact had made him sweat, despite the cold. A sweat of anticipation, that perhaps the impulsive gift he'd made to Harmon O'Connell had not after all been so unwise, and that the Irishman's daughter had led him, all unknowing, to the borders of his own promised land.

There was a crack in the sky; that was Maeve's first thought. A crack in the sky, and on the other side of it another sky, brighter than the night in which she stood. She had seen the heavens produce many marvels: lightning, whirlwinds, hail, and rainbows-but nothing like the waves Of Color, vaster than the vastest thunderhead, that rolled across that sky beyond the crack. A breeze came out to find her. It was warm and carried on its back a deep, rhythmical boom,

"That's the sea!" she Said, starting towards the crack. It was not wide, nor was it stable. It wavered in the air, as jittery as the flame of a lamp in a high wind. She didn't care about the how and why of it; she'd seen too much tonight to begin asking questions now. All she wanted to do was cross this threshold, not because she feared the consequences of what she'd done earlier, but because there was a sky and a sea she'd never seen before waiting on the other side.

"There'll be no way back," Coker warned her.

"Why not?"

"It took a great Blessedness to make this door, and when it closes again it won't be easily opened." He glanced back down towards the battlefield, and moaned at what he saw. "Lord, look at that. You go if you want to. I can't live with this." He raised his hand in front of his face and a single razor claw appeared from his middle finger, gleaming.

"What are you doing?"

He put the claw to his throat. "No!" she yelled, and grabbed his hand.

"All this dying, just because I said something I shouldn't. It's stupid."

"You don't understand the reasons," he said bitterly, though he made no further attempt to harm himself "And you do?" Maeve replied.

"Not exactly. I know there's some great argument between the families that's so bad they've been slaughtering one another for generations. This wedding was supposed to be a seal of peace between them. And the child was the proof of that."

"What's the argument?" she said. He shrugged. "Nobody knows, outside the fwnilies. And after this@' he looked at the corpse-strewn slope,

"there'll be fewer who know than ever."

"Well it's still stupid," she said again, "killing each other over an argument when there's so many things worth living for." She still had hold of his hand. As she spoke he retracted the claw. "I lost my Papa tonight," she said solemnly. "I don't want to lose you too."

"I've known Blessedm'ns less persuasive than you," Coker remarked softly. His voice was tinged with awe. "What kind of child are you?"

"Irish," Maeve replied. "Are we going then?"

She looked back towards the crack. The ground at its base was shifting, the stones and trampled snow softened in the heat of whatever power had opened this door, drawn through the threshold then pouring back again. She started towards it fearlessly but as she did so Coker laid his hand on her shoulder. "Do you understand what you're doing?" he said.

"Yes," she said, a little impatiently. She wanted to walk on that ebbing dirt. She wanted to know how it felt. But Coker hadn't done with his warnings.

"Quiddity's a dream-sea," he said, "and the countries there are swinge."

"So's America," she said.

"Stranger than America. They're born from what's in here." He tapped her temple with his finger.

"People dream countries?"

"More than countries. they dream animals and birds and cities and books and moons and stars."

"they all dream the same books and birdst' she said.

"the shapes are different," Coker replied somewhat hesitantly, "But@e souls of things are the same."

She looked at him in befuddlement. "Whatever you say," she replied.

.No, it's important you understand," he insisted. He paused for a moment, frowning as he dug for enlightenment. Then it came. "My father used to say: Every bird is one biri4 and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident. But Maeve simply shook her head, more confounded than ever. "Does this mean you're sonWhody's dream?" she said.

"No," Coker told her. "I'm the child of a trespasser!"

Here at least was something she grasped.

"Quiddity wasn't meant to be a place of flesh and blood," he went on.

"But people get through?"

"A few. Tricksters, poets, magicians. Some of them die. Some of them go crazy. And some of them fall in love with the things they find, and children come, who are part human and part not" He spread his arms and his wings. "Like me."

"I do," she said with a sly little smile. "I like you a lot."

But he was deadly serious. "I want you to know what you're doing when you step through that crack."

"I don't mind being a trespasser."

"You'll be living in a place where your people can only come in dreams, and then only @ times. The night they're born. The night they fall in love. And the night they die."

She thought of her Papa then, who'd spoken of floating in a calm sea with her Mama beside him. Had that sea been Quiddity?

"I want to go," she said, more eager than ever.

"As long as you understand," he said.

"I do," she told him. "Now, can we go?"

He nodded, and she was away in a heartbeat, stepping lightly over the shifting ground.