her cold nose into the crook of his neck to warm it, moaning like a dove, as his hands took hold of her panties' elastic.
At Edgewood, Sophie laid one card on another, knight of wands on queen of cups.
Later Sylvie said: "Do you have thoughts?"
"Hm?" said Auberon. His nakedness draped in his overcoat, he was building a fire.
"Thoughts," Sylvie said. "Then. I mean during then. I have lots, almost like a story."
He saw what she meant, and laughed. "Oh, thoughts," he said. "Then. Sure. Crazy thoughts." He built the fire hurriedly, heedlessly throwing in most of the wood left in the woodbox. He wanted it hot in the Folding Bedroom, hot enough to draw Sylvie out from the blankets she sheltered beneath. He wanted to see her.
"Like now," she said. "This time. I was wandering."
"Yes," he said, for he had been too.
"Children," she said. "Babies, or baby animals. Dozens, all sizes and colors."
"Yes," he said. He'd seen them too, "Lilac," he said.
"Who?"
He blushed, and stabbed the fire with a golf club that was kept there for that purpose. "A friend," he said. "A little girl. An imaginary friend."
Sylvie said nothing, only wandered in thought, still not quite returned. Then, "Who again?" she said.
Auberon explained.
At Edgewood, Sophie turned down a trump, the Knot. She was looking, not having chosen to look but once again looking, for a lost child of George Mouse's and her fate, but couldn't find them. Instead she found, and the more she looked the more she went on finding, another girl, and not lost; not lost now, but searching. Past her the kings and queens marched, rank on rank, speaking each his message: I am Hope, I am Regret, I am Idleness, I am Unlooked-for Love. Armed and mounted, solemn and minatory, they went on progress through the dark wood of the trumps; but apart from them, unseen by them, glimpsed only by Sophie, moving brightly amid dark dangers, a princess none of them knew. But where was Lilac? She turned down the next card: it was the Banquet.
"So whatever happened to her?" Sylvie asked. The fire was hot, and the room warming.
"Just what I told you," Auberon said, parting the skirts of his coat to warm his buttocks. "I never saw her again after that day, at the picnic . . ."
"Not her," Sylvie said. "Not the made-up one. The real one. The baby."
"Oh." He seemed to have been propelled forward several centuries since his arrival in the City; trying to remember Edgewood at all now was an effort, but to search in childhood was to dig up Troy. "You know, I don't really know. I mean I don't think I was ever told the whole story."
"Well, what happened, though." She moved luxuriously within the sheets, warming too. "I mean did she die?"
"I don't think so," Auberon said, shocked at this notion. For a moment he saw the whole story through Sylvie's eyes, and it seemed grotesque. How could his family have lost a baby? Or if it hadn't been lost, if the explanation were simple (adoption, death even) then how could it be that he didn't know it? In Sylvie's family history there were several lost babies, in Homes or fostered; all were minutely remembered, all mourned. If he had been capable just then of any emotion other than that directed toward Sylvie and his plans for her in the next moments, he would have felt anger at his ignorance. Well, it didn't matter. "It doesn't matter," he said, glad to know it didn't. "I give up on it all."
She yawned hugely, and tried to speak at the same time, and laughed. "I said so you're not going back?"
"No."
"Even after you find your fortune?"
He didn't say I've found it, though it was true; he'd known it since they'd become lovers. Become lovers: like a wizardry, like frogs become princes.
"You don't want me to go back?" he said, doffing the overcoat and climbing on the bed.
"I'd follow you," she said. "I would."
"Warm?" he said, drawing down the quilt that covered her.
"Hey," she said. "Ay, que grande."
"Warm," he said, and took the neck and shoulders he had revealed by turns between his lips, sucking and munching like a cannibal. Flesh. But all alive, all alive. "I'm melting," she said. He entwined her in him as though his long body could swallow hers, a morsel but endless. He bent to her nakedness, a banquet. "In fact I'm cooking," she said, and she was, her warmth and comfort deep