pancakes, the indefinable sweetness of a place a clean, beautiful woman has just been breathing. He filled his lungs several times. Even the faint mildew of the laundry pile had retreated, replaced by fresh air.
He finally piled all the dishes in the sink. The coffee was still hot, so he poured himself another cup. He settled on the couch, right next to a mound of dirty laundry, and stared at the blank glass face of the television set as if it would tell him something.
A CERTAIN SATISFACTION
14
Thin sunshine could not warm a sharp breeze redolent of exhaust and rotting wood. It skipped across St. Martin’s Avenue, lingered at a stone wall, and licked at a shadow darting up the moss-stained wall-face in a lizard-flicker. Once it reached the shelter of branches overhead, the shadow thickened, and Puck Goodfellow braced himself on an oak tree’s huge, brittle arm. The wall itself was wide enough that he could walk along it, ignoring the sharp, unpleasant nipping sensation stabbing his quick feet.
On the other side, cool greenness beckoned, but he did not leap down. Willows trailed their spiny fingers, the grass soaked with mineral-smelling water and other substances, bright spots of plastic gewgaws or—more rarely—actual blossoms, dying but held fast in cones, and the stones. Some upright, some a-tumble, some set flat in the earth, they hadn’t changed since the last time he had occasion to prance along this confounded heap of stone.
Although green, this park gave him no pleasure, because of the gray bulk rising in the distance. Atop its highest spire, the hated symbol of singularly joyless invaders spread its bony arms, worked over and over again into the colorful windows and repeated on some of the stones.
The sideways realms were wide and varied, between the place of mortals and the Second Veil’s shimmering, deadly barrier. In another few years, Summer’s Gates would move, according to its whims, and another city would hold its garlanded mouth. Unwinter had entrances everywhere, and the free counties overlapped anywhere they could, but Summer… well, perhaps it craved mortals to contrast itself with.
Or perhaps she did.
It was mere chance that the Gates lingered here. Although, of course, the Goodfellow liked to think chance favored him, as he was in a certain way her eldest. They called him the Fatherless, when they thought he could not hear.
It pleased him to think most believed it.
He squinted, spotting a fir’s dark drooping, and danced into its shadow just as she appeared, her russet head down and her skirt fluttering, tugging at her knees while the breeze fingered her bare arms and teased her curls.
A Half would feel none of the stabbing from such cursed ground.
The fir’s shadow was a balm. He climbed and leapt, the tree sleepily waking enough to breathe fragrance over him. He settled comfortably where he could see a particular stone, next to a notch made in the trunk’s thick bark by his little knife. Marking a tree did not make it heartsblood, of course, but there was still a certain satisfaction in knowing even here, at the edge of a cursed churchyard, he could in time spread his influence down through living sap and spreading roots.
She brought no flowers, her hands bare and empty as she trudged up a slight rise, stepping off the narrow strip of cracked paving. Her heels did not sink in the wet loam, but she stepped delicate as a doe, unwillingly, until she reached a stone no different from the rest—the very one Puck could see through a convenient parting in the fir’s green robe.
He knew the name that would be chipped on the stone. Sometimes he fancied this was the Ragged’s idea, to lay such bones in hatefully consecrated soil to keep them from… disturbance. They would not be half so pretty now as they once were when a mayfly mortal’s brief blossoming had enchanted the eye and hand.
Puck settled himself more comfortably. His feet had stopped stinging. Clasping the branch with both palms, his knees wide-splayed, he smiled his sharp white smile and wondered if the Ragged would, as she sometimes did, weep at her mother’s grave.
This time she did not, and she did not linger overlong. She did whisper something the breeze almost failed to carry to Puck’s waiting ear, but he pursed his lips and blew a little. The air itself was happy to carry tales, for a sidhe such as himself.
“Mama, I’m sorry.”
Puck’s grin widened, his green eyes twinkled, but he waited until the