that, a sarcastic, vindictive laugh. Well, perhaps he was laughable. The fish was not seven inches long, hardly breakfast. So? Well? "If I had to live on fish," he said, "I'd grow a beak."
"You shouldn't speak," said the kingfisher, "until you're spoken to. There are manners, you know."
"Sorry."
"First I speak," said the kingfisher, "and you wonder who it is that's spoken to you. Then you realize it's me; then you look at your thumb and your fish, and see that it was the fish's blood you tasted, that allowed you to understand the voices of creatures; then we converse."
"I didn't mean . . ."
"We'll assume it was done that way." The kingfisher spoke in the choleric, impatient tone August would have expected from his upshot head-feathers, his thick neck, his fierce, annoyed eyes and beak: a kingfisher's voice. Halcyon bird indeed!
"Now you address me," the kingfisher said. "'O Bird!' you say, and make your request."
"O Bird!" August said, opening his hands imploringly, "Tell me this: Is it okay if we have a gas station in Meadowbrook, and sell Ford cars?"
"Certainly."
"What?"
"Certainly!"
It was so inconvenient speaking in this way to a bird, a kingfisher seated on a branch in a dead tree at no more conversational a distance than any kingfisher ever was, that August imagined the bird as seated beside him on the bank, a sort of kingfisher-like person, of a more conversable size, with his legs crossed, as August's were. This worked well. He doubted that this kingfisher was a kingfisher at all anyway.
"Now," said the kingfisher, still bird enough to be unable to look at August with more than one eye at a time, and that one bright and smart and pitiless, "was that all?"
"I . . . think so. I—"
"Yes?"
"Well, I thought there might be some objection. The noise. The smell."
"None."
"Oh."
"On the other hand," said the kingfisher—a laugh, a raucous laugh, seemed always just beneath his words—"since you're here, and I'm here, you might ask for something else altogether."
"What?"
"Oh, anything. What you most want."
He had thought—right up until he had voiced his absurd request—that he was doing just that: but, with a terrible rush of heat that took his breath away, he knew that he hadn't, and that he could. He blushed fiercely. "Well," he said, stammering, "over in Meadowbrook, there's, there's a farmer, a certain farmer, and he has a daughter . . ."
"Yes yes yes," said the kingfisher impatiently, as though he knew well enough what August wanted, and didn't want to be bothered with having it spelled out circumstantially. "But let's discuss payment first, reward after."
"Payment?"
The kingfisher cocked his head in short, furious changes of attitude, sometimes eyeing August, sometimes the stream or the sky, as though he were trying to think of some really cutting remark in which to couch his annoyance. "Payment," he said. "Payment, payment. It's nothing to do with you. Let's call it a favor, if you prefer. The return of certain property that—don't get me wrong— I'm sure fell into your hands inadvertently. I mean—" for the briefest moment, and for the first time, the kingfisher showed something like hesitation, or trepidation "—I mean a deck of cards, playing cards. Old ones. Which you possess."
"Violet's?" said August.
"Those ones."
"I'll ask her."
"No, no. She thinks, you see, the cards are hers. So. She mustn't know."
"You mean steal them?"
The kingfisher was silent. For a moment he disappeared altogether, although that may only have been August's attention wandering from the effort of imagining him, to the enormity that he had been commanded to perform.
When he appeared again, the kingfisher seemed somewhat subdued. "Have you given any further thought to your reward?" he said, almost soothingly.
In fact he had. Even as he had grasped the fact that he could in some sense ask Amy of them (without even trying to imagine how they could make good on such a promise) he had ceased to desire her quite so intensely—small presage of what would happen when he did possess her, or anyone. But what one could he choose then? Was it possible he could ask for—"All of them," he said in a small voice.
"All?"
"Any one I want." If sudden horrid strength of desire hadn't whelmed him, shame would never have allowed him to say it. "Power over them."
"You have it." The kingfisher cleared his throat, looking away, and combed his beard with a black claw, as though glad this unclean bargaining was done.' "There is a certain pool up in the woods above the lake. A