My familiar arrived three years late, ate the fish I had been saving for supper, and spent his first two nights asleep across my face.
On the third morning I found the basket.
He watched me put his blanket inside it. He was long-haired and white beneath, gray above, with cream behind his ears and a tail that appeared to require a separate spine. The produce seller downstairs had weighed him for me: twenty pounds, not including the stolen fish.
“In,” I said.
He stepped onto my bed.
“I am returning you.”
“Put your hands out.”
“No.”
“Then you will learn nothing.”
I had waited three years to hear a familiar say that. I put the basket down harder than necessary and held out my hands.
The cat stood on the coverlet. His front paws were enormous, the left one turned slightly outward. There was a pale green eye on either side of a pink nose. Nothing about him suggested remorse.
“Close your eyes.”
“You'll run away.”
“I am not running anywhere.”
This was true. He preferred to be carried between places less than six feet apart.
I closed my eyes. He stepped into my arms, first the broad weight of his chest, then his hindquarters. I had to draw him against me. His purr shook my breastbone. Each time it settled into a rhythm there was a small hitch, as though he were remembering something amusing.
“Know where I am,” he said.
“On me. Again.”
“More particularly.”
His left paw was on my wrist. His ribs moved against the inside of my elbow, and one hind foot braced against my stomach. The weight was familiar already. At night it had pressed the backs of my earrings into my neck and pushed my long dark hair, blue ends and all, into my mouth.
When he climbed down, my arms remained in their awkward curve.
“Open your eyes.”
He was on the windowsill across the room. Below him his shadow lay long on the floor.
“Now bring me back.”
“How?”
“Let the shadow open where you felt me. Hold it open until I step through.”
“I called you three years ago.”
“Try a shorter distance.”
I knew a pattern for making a thing go where it was wanted. I had used it to bring a needle off the floor. I shaped it between my palms, put a cat into it, and pulled.
A white shape rushed up from the shadow. I closed my hands.
For an instant there was a magnificent cat in my arms: long-tailed, green-eyed, perfect as a painted familiar in a college prospectus. Then my fingers met through its chest. It came apart into cool gray wisps.
The actual cat remained on the sill.
“You shut it,” he said.
“I had you.”
“You had a picture.”
“What was I supposed to wait for?”
“Me.”
He jumped down. I looked at my empty hands, then at the basket. At nineteen I had failed the college examination over a jug, with a brown stray watching from the examiner's sill. The examiner had passed my copy, but then I noticed that it lacked the maker's thumbmark beneath the original's handle; I tried to put it in and broke the handle off. Perhaps an animal capable of answering a question would have helped.
The cat stopped in the middle of the floor.
His shadow kept going.
It flowed toward the window in a thin black strip. The bed's shadow followed. So did mine.
I looked outside.
A piece was missing from the morning.
Above the opposite roof, a clean black wound had opened in the pale sky. A cloud passed behind it and did not come out. Along one edge shone a row of stars, hard and bright in daylight. As I watched, the last star slid sideways and vanished.
The cat's ears went flat.
He made a sound I felt in my teeth.
Somewhere far away, something answered.
“Get your boots,” he said.
I was still working a knot out of the second bootlace when a line of fire opened down the middle of my door.
The wood divided without burning. Through the narrow gap I saw a mountain under stars, then a green sea, then a man standing on a black stair. He stepped into my room. The door closed behind him.
He wore a dark coat lined with red. His mustache was streaked with gray, and there were white scars across the knuckles of both hands. Around his right wrist ran a chain whose links were little burning animals. They moved their heads as he passed.
I knew his face. Everybody knew Lord Varras's face. In the cheap woodcuts they put broken fortresses behind it.
His eyes went first to the window.
Then he saw the cat.
The chain tightened around his wrist.
“Master Thrum?”
The cat sat down on my rejected basket.
Varras bowed. It was not a court inclination. He bent so far that I could see a burn through the shoulder of his coat.
“Are you accepting apprentices again?”
I had one boot in my hand.
“He's mine,” I said.
Varras looked at me.
“My familiar. I'm returning him.”
For a moment the most feared sorcerer in the kingdom looked genuinely at a loss.
Thrum got up, stepped into the basket, and settled on the blanket.
“It has reached the upper sky,” he said.
“I know.” Varras opened his hand. Three of the little animals on the chain had gone dark. “I drove it off the western roads. It learned to feed between them.”
“How long?”
“Since the winter you died.”
I lowered the boot.
Thrum's tail moved once.
“You were dead?”
“Eighth life.”
I looked from him to Varras. The sorcerer was looking at the cat as though he were both someone he had missed and someone he had never seen before.
“He was brown,” Varras said softly. “Small enough to sit inside my coat.”
“Ninth,” I said.
Thrum flicked an ear.
“That's why you were late?”
“Milk. Mice. Remembering my name. It takes time to grow.”
A cold wind came through my window. Outside, someone shouted. The cloud was still vanishing into the black gap, steadily, like cloth being drawn through a ring.
Varras flexed his wrist. Far above the roofs, a line of silver fire drew taut.
“Can you hold it?” Thrum asked.
“If I can get the Hart around its throat.”
“Then do that.”
“And afterward?”
“We go inside.”
Varras's expression changed. I thought it might be relief, until I saw him swallow.
“Of course,” he said.
The chain uncoiled.
It passed through the window and kept passing. Link after burning link slipped over the sill, though there had never been enough chain around his wrist to reach the door.
Thrum jumped onto the bed.
“Pick me up.”
“Inside what?” I asked.
The wound in the sky opened a little wider. For the first time I could see teeth.
Varras walked up the outside of the house.
He did not climb. He stepped from my sill onto empty air, turned his foot, and put it against the wall. His coat hung sideways. He looked back at me.
“Keep your hands on your master.”
Thrum was heavy against my chest.
“I have no intention of dropping him.”
“Not what I meant.”
The cat put one paw on my shoulder and looked over it. My shadow rose from the floor, climbed the wall, and spread itself across the open window.
Through it I saw a narrow road under an unfamiliar night.
“Step,” Thrum said.
I stepped.
My boots struck something hard. I was standing above the roofs on a strip of darkness no wider than a footpath. On either side, the town fell away into daylight. Ahead, the road curved upward into the wound.
The air smelled of cold iron.
I tried not to look down. This proved difficult because looking straight ahead meant looking at the thing eating the sky.
It had no eyes. Its head was a black wedge, smooth as wet stone, and its mouth opened along half the horizon. Inside were stars. Not reflected stars: some went out as its jaws worked, and others flared through the thin skin beneath its throat.
I could hear them. A high, continuous singing came through the dark, with gaps where voices stopped.
Varras stood on the point of the college tower.
He raised both hands.
The daylight above him broke into twelve bright pieces.
They turned, and I understood that they were antlers.
A creature unfolded from the heavens, its shoulders towering above the eastern hills. Stars burned beneath its translucent skin. Its great chest expanded, and wind flattened every tree in the court below us.
The Hart lowered its head.
Varras threw his chain.
It passed between the antlers, looped around the devourer's throat, and pulled tight.
The sky struck back.
I fell to my knees. Thrum's claws caught in my coat. The road bent under me like a branch.
The devourer rolled. Its mouth swept across the morning. An entire ridge of cloud disappeared, leaving a hard blue edge behind it.
Varras did not let go.
His boots cut grooves in the tower stone. He drew one hand toward his chest, slowly, as though dragging a loaded cart by a single rope. The living Hart braced its front legs across the sky. I saw the muscles move beneath its stars.
Another link went dark.
“Master,” Varras said.
It was not loud, but I heard it.
Thrum sprang from my arms.
He landed on the road in front of me, crouched, and put his teeth into the dark beneath his feet.
For a moment he looked absurd: a fat cat trying to bite his own shadow.
Then he pulled.
The road split.
Through the opening came a light so fierce that I covered my face. In it I saw a sea standing on its edge, a ringed moon caught in black reeds, and something long and golden beating against a membrane.
The cat dragged the opening wider with both front paws.
“Inside,” he said.
I crawled after him.
We came down on a ledge that ran along the inside of the creature's throat.
Beneath it hung the sea I had glimpsed. Waves rose and broke downward into a depth full of blue fire. Above us, the ringed moon turned slowly among black strands thicker than trees. Light from it moved across my brown hands.
Thrum shook himself.
“Stay where things resist you.”
“What?”
He pushed his head against my shin.
“That is me. That is you. Something happened between us. Remember.”
Ahead, the ledge broadened into a staircase.
At the top of it was my room.
The door stood open. My bed was made. A small, elegant white cat sat on the windowsill, and there was a letter on the coverlet with the college seal in blue wax.
I stopped so abruptly that Thrum's tail struck my leg.
The little cat turned. It had clear green eyes and an expression of tender intelligence.
“That's not you,” I said.
“Test it.”
I reached through the doorway.
My hand met a flat, cool surface. The room remained perfect behind it. The cat moved its head again, exactly as before.
I pressed harder. Nothing pressed back. The image of the letter had no thickness.
“It makes places where you want to go,” Thrum said. “Then it swallows what steps toward them.”
The stair folded shut.
A row of small teeth closed where the doorway had been.
I pulled my hand back. Thrum hooked one claw into my trouser leg and led me on.
We walked beneath the inverted sea. I could see ships in it, their sails hanging motionless in the wrong direction. Behind the moon were other lights: a red sun no larger than a house, a great turning wheel of birds, a city whose towers were bells.
“Are those real?”
“Some.”
“How can you tell?”
“I have been there.”
He sprang onto a narrow ridge and waited while I climbed after him.
“Did you used to be a man?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
He looked back at me.
“No.”
I put a hand against the wall. It was warm and slightly yielding. Far beyond it, Varras's chain made a sound like a thousand doors being dragged open.
“But you're a sorcerer.”
“Yes.”
“Who taught you?”
“Several people. A fox. Something under a mountain whose name I cannot pronounce in this mouth. I paid attention.”
He set off before I could ask about the other mouths.
The ledge trembled.
Through a long opening in the wall I saw Varras outside. He was no longer on the tower. He stood between two points of the Hart's antlers, one foot on each, with the chain wrapped round both arms. The creature's throat had begun to slide through the binding.
Varras pulled the antlers toward one another.
The Hart bellowed.
Stars spilled from its open mouth, struck the chain, and became new links. They ran down the binding in a blaze, tightening it around the black flesh.
The pressure lifted me off my feet.
Thrum caught my sleeve in his teeth. For a moment I hung over the inverted sea with a twenty-pound cat holding me by my coat.
I found the ledge with one boot, then the other.
Outside, Varras lowered his head between his shoulders and took another turn of chain.
Blood ran from one palm. He did not look at it.
“He can't hold that forever,” I said.
“No.”
Thrum moved faster.
“What was it before?”
“A thing under roots. I hunted it in my fourth life. In my eighth it found a tear in the night and swallowed its way through.”
“You stopped it?”
“I bound the tear shut.”
“Then you died.”
“Yes.”
Below us, something enormous moved beneath the sea. Its passage drew whole islands across the underside of the waves.
“I didn't do that to you,” Thrum said.
“What?”
“The three years. They were not a lesson.”
I had not thought he was capable of hearing something I had not said.
“I know.”
“I had to learn where my feet were again.”
He jumped a gap in the ledge. I put one hand down to follow, and the stone beneath my fingers vanished.
The passage lurched.
Thrum landed on the far side. Between us there was now thirty feet of open dark. The inverted sea was falling through it in slow, bright pieces.
I backed against the wall.
“Don't try the jump,” he said.
“I wasn't.”
“Good. Bring me back.”
I stared at him.
The sea gave a deep cracking sound below us.
“Now?”
“Now.”
I held out my arms. They were shaking.
“Not a picture,” he said.
I remembered his weight against me. The left paw on my wrist. The uneven purr. I let my shadow open across the inside of my forearms.
It felt like letting go of something I had been clenching all my life.
At the far side, Thrum's shadow lengthened toward mine.
I felt fur.
I nearly closed my hands.
“Hold,” he said.
There was no weight in the fur. It was only the shape I had supplied.
I made myself open my fingers again.
“Where are you offering to put me?”
“Here.”
“Then make room.”
I lowered one forearm, the way I had learned to do at night when he insisted on fitting between my cheek and my shoulder.
Something pressed against the new space.
A paw hooked my sleeve. I felt his chest turn, much heavier than the smooth, comforting picture had been. His purr began against my wrist, stopped while he made an adjustment, then returned with its familiar hitch.
The shadow opened.
Thrum came through it all at once.
My knees hit the ledge. I held him against me, his hind feet digging into my stomach. Behind him, the far side of the passage broke away and fell into the sea.
“When?” I gasped.
“When I am here.”
He pressed his forehead under my chin.
I felt him settle, completely. Then I let the opening close.
For a moment I could do nothing but sit with my face in his fur.
“I did it.”
“Yes.”
“I actually—”
The wall burst open beside us.
A section of chain thicker than a road drove through the dark. Its links were blazing stags, each one running inside the next. Between them I saw Varras's raised hands and the devourer's jaw lifting against the sky.
Thrum climbed onto my shoulder.
“Be pleased while moving.”
I got up.
Beyond the broken wall the creature opened into a country of captured heavens.
There was no floor. Roads ran between pieces of night: a curve of white desert, the underside of a forest, steps cut into the rim of a pale sun. Each island of matter carried its own wind. The air was full of bells and wings and voices I could not understand.
Far overhead, the blue morning of my own town showed through a narrow slit.
Varras's chain crossed it.
He was holding the creature's jaws apart.
Thrum sprang from my shoulder onto a strand of dark stretched toward the center.
“What do we do?”
“We put back what it ate.”
“You know all of it?”
“No. Enough to find the way out.”
He looked up.
The star I had seen vanish above the roofs hung in front of us. It was a small golden beast, tightly curled, with six legs folded against a body like molten glass. Its light pulsed between my fingers when I raised a hand against it.
A black membrane held it in place.
Thrum touched the membrane with his nose.
“This one. I slept beside her fire in my second life.”
The golden creature opened an eye.
Thrum put his front paws against the dark.
Lines of white appeared beneath them.
They spread.
I watched a sky begin to assemble itself where his claws rested. First a curve of cloud, then a blue so deep that looking into it hurt. The membrane stretched across it, resisting.
The cat bared his teeth.
The golden beast uncurled.
A foreleg came through the membrane, then a long bright head. Warmth struck my face. Its body followed, unfolding to a size that made the night road sway beneath us.
It leaped.
For three strides it ran across the air. Then it passed through the slit above us and became a point of gold in the morning.
The wound in the sky grew smaller.
Thrum's back rose and fell.
I could smell singed fur.
“Only what you knew,” I said.
“Only what I knew.”
He stepped forward.
The roads around us began to turn.
Beneath their broken edges I glimpsed older roads, thinner and stranger, laid beneath the stolen ones. Thrum walked among them with his tail high. Each time his paw came down, a dark seam opened, and something trapped behind it began to move.
The wheel of birds broke free.
Their wings struck together like hammered shields. They poured through the slit in a torrent of white, dragging a long stream of daylight behind them.
The road beneath us caught in their wake and swung sideways toward a deep crease in the dark.
The devourer screamed.
The sound went through my bones. I fell onto my hands, and my shadow nearly tore away from my wrists.
Thrum turned back.
“Here.”
He stood at the edge of the crease. No light reached its bottom.
“I have to go down.”
“Then I'll—”
“No. Keep the return outside the jaws. Don't follow me in.”
I looked into the crease. Along its walls were thousands of pale curves. Jaws, I realized. The creature had folded its first wound around everything it swallowed.
“I knew it before that opened,” Thrum said. “I can close it. But the things inside must come out first. Then Varras must bind the seam to the Hart. My binding died with me.”
His whiskers were shining.
“If the fold shuts behind me, I cannot make an outside from within it. Varras has no free hand. You hold the return.”
I held out my arms.
He stepped into them again. His fur was hot. Beneath it his breathing was fast, but the weight was the same weight that had woken me in the dark.
I pressed my cheek against the back of his head.
He allowed this for a moment.
Then he wriggled until I let him down.
“Why me?” I asked.
“Because you noticed the thumbmark.”
I stared at him.
“The examination. You had already passed. Then you took your work apart because something particular was missing.”
“The handle broke.”
“Yes. I thought you needed teaching.”
“There was a brown cat on the sill.”
“Yes.”
He put one paw into the dark.
“I didn't choose you for this,” he said. “We are here now.”
Then he went down into the fold.
At first I could follow him.
His white back moved between the pale curves. Each time he passed beneath one, a line of light spread behind him. The folded jaws shuddered.
Then the darkness filled with cats.
A brown cat crouched on a ledge below me. A thin black one stood on a moonlit stair. Farther down was a red cat with a torn ear, and beyond it a gray one scarcely larger than a kitten. They looked up together.
The white cat kept walking.
I fixed my eyes on him.
Something struck the creature from outside. Through the slit overhead I saw the Hart's antlers drive beneath the lower jaw. Varras stood between them with both arms spread, holding the jaws apart as the devourer tried to swallow the constellation.
Its teeth came down around one antler.
A star burst.
Varras pulled his right hand free of the chain.
I thought he had lost it. Then he reached into the wound in the Hart's crown and closed his fist around the escaping light. He dragged it into a new point of the antler, white fire running between his fingers.
The constellation lifted its head.
The devourer's jaw rose with it.
Down in the fold, Thrum became a small, brilliant outline.
I felt him in my arms.
Relief came so violently that I almost sobbed.
His fur lay against my wrists. His chest was heavy. The purr had its little hitch. I drew him toward me, already imagining how I would get back to the road.
Then I saw the white cat below.
He had not turned.
The weight in my arms settled, perfectly, into the position in which I had last held him.
I remembered the cat in the college prospectus.
My fingers began to close. The ledge shook under me. Somewhere below, an island of captured night broke free and rose like a sail.
I wanted the cat in my arms to be him.
I lowered my left elbow.
The weight did not change.
The purr went on exactly as before.
At night Thrum had always objected to that movement. It took away the shelf on which he laid his chest. He would brace his left paw, twist his back, and shove his hindquarters into the space I had made. I knew because he had done it six times while I was trying to breathe.
The thing in my arms only purred.
I opened my hands.
For a moment I was holding nothing, and I had never been so frightened.
Below me, the white outline vanished.
The other cats watched.
The ledge cracked beneath me.
A narrow path ran along the outer rim of the fold. I took it, keeping my forearms curved around the open return. Wind came up through the break and pulled at my hair. The blue ends struck my lips.
“Thrum.”
My voice came back from everywhere.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
I did not call again.
The path ahead rose into a smooth white floor. At its far end my room stood open once more. I could see my bed, the blanket, the safe, familiar basket.
I kept my weight on the black edge and tested the white surface with the toe of one boot.
There was no resistance.
I drew my foot back.
A weight tugged at the opening across my arms.
Not settled in my hands. Far away, dragging downward.
I moved toward it.
The black edge led out over the center of the fold. Beneath it I could see the pale jaws closing. There was no white cat now. The light between them was widening into a dawn.
Thrum was still casting.
I held my arms out over the closing jaws.
The answering weight struck my wrists and slipped.
I almost pulled.
Instead I moved my right arm, giving the space a different shape. I remembered the way his hind feet searched for purchase against my stomach. The weight rolled, clumsy and annoyed. One claw caught the seam of my sleeve.
That was new.
I held.
The edge beneath me broke.
I fell.
The shadow stayed open across my arms. The jaws rushed up beneath my boots.
Something drove its forehead against my wrist.
Then a chest pressed through, the left paw found my sleeve, and twenty pounds of living cat hit me hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs.
He was hot. His purr had stopped. His ribs moved against me in quick, rough breaths.
I did not close my hands.
He twisted, planted a hind foot against my belly, and settled the whole of his weight into the crook of my arm.
Here.
The white jaws were still below my boots when I let the return shut.
“Got you,” I said, though I could scarcely hear myself.
Thrum looked up.
Between his teeth was a thin blue line.
“Hold,” he said around it.
The line widened.
I was falling with the cat against my chest, and the edge of a morning was opening from his mouth.
Wind struck us from below.
It smelled of grass, salt, hot stone, rain on dust. I saw the first road he had torn open beneath my room, then older roads beneath it, unrolling from the fold like roots drawn out of earth.
One came up beneath my boots.
I landed on it and staggered. Thrum sprang from my arms onto the dark in front of me, still holding the blue edge in his teeth.
He pulled.
The first wound opened all the way.
The stolen heavens began to come out.
The ringed moon rolled free of its black reeds. Its rings swept through the chamber, a vast bright plane passing so close that I saw boulders turning in the light. They were mountains, I realized, and the dust around them was made of mountains too.
The moon passed through the creature's mouth.
Behind it came the sea.
It rose whole, carrying its ships, its islands, its deep slow shadows. Water swept upward beside our narrow road. I saw the hull of a ship pass a few feet from my head, its green copper plates shining. Faces stared from its rail.
Then the sea spread across an opening in the sky and was gone.
Thrum braced all four feet.
The blue edge ran between his teeth and out through his whiskers. Each whisker held a different light. Some were colors I could not look at directly.
I could feel the road buckling under his paws.
He was not making the things that escaped. They came out as themselves, moving toward the openings he was restoring. Birds found their own winds. The bell-towered city turned until its foundations lay beneath it again, then passed above us.
Thrum's head shook.
He took another grip.
The dark around the fold drew inward.
The pale jaws became smaller, fewer. Light poured between them. At the center I saw something moving that was not black at all: a narrow, translucent creature with a red seam along its belly.
Thrum lowered his nose.
Along the seam, two edges met.
The devourer convulsed.
The road tilted nearly upright. I dropped to my knees and caught the dark between my hands. Thrum dug his claws into it. Below us, the red seam closed another inch.
He remembered the creature before the wound.
I could see that memory becoming flesh.
The terrible mouth outside began to shrink. Its black skin folded back around a body no longer large enough to hold a single star.
The last of the stolen light rushed past us.
Then Thrum let go of the blue edge.
It snapped upward, spread, and became the morning sky.
We were outside.
The road ran beneath us into open air. Far below were the town, the college tower, and the narrow window of my room.
Above us, the devourer twisted inside the Hart's antlers.
It was still the size of a house. Its body had become almost transparent. Through it I could see the red seam trying to open again.
Varras saw it too.
He came down the antler toward us, each step leaving a print of fire. His coat was gone. His right sleeve hung in black strips, and the chain had cut into both wrists.
“Clear of the belly,” he said.
Thrum turned.
He looked at the open space between our road and the Hart's shoulder.
“Can you step?” I asked.
“No.”
I picked him up.
His weight was simply weight now. I held him with one arm and reached out with the other. The road was unraveling beneath my boots.
The Hart lowered its head.
One point of an antler came beneath my hand.
I stepped onto it.
Varras passed me going the other way.
The chain followed him, all its burning animals running toward the place where his hands were joined. He wrapped it round the devourer once, twice, then caught both turns in his fists.
Varras braced one foot against its belly and hauled the chain tight.
The chain sank into the closing edges.
The seam shone through his body. I could see the lines of his ribs, his heart beating among them, and beyond him the living stars of the Hart.
He spoke a word that made every hair on my arms stand up.
The constellation lowered its mouth to his hands.
Its breath went into the binding.
The devourer's body arched.
The black fold opened a finger's width.
Then the links drew tight.
I heard a sound like a lock being turned deep beneath the world.
The fold was gone.
Where it had been, a line of small stars lay sealed beneath the creature's skin. Its mouth opened and shut. There was only a mouth inside it.
Varras took his hands away.
The Hart lifted the creature between its antlers, turned its enormous head toward the east, and began to run.
We went with it.
The town fell away below us. The restored sky opened ahead, deeper than any sky I had looked at from the ground. Roads curved between its lights. Some were narrow as threads; others were broad enough for the walking cities I could see far beyond them.
The Hart leaped.
For an instant we passed a shore of black sand under three low moons. Something with wings like folded mountain ranges slept beside the water. Beyond it stood a door made of running fire.
I could not speak.
Varras sat down against the base of an antler.
“The wound is bound to the Hart now,” he said to Thrum. “Not to either of us.”
The cat's eyes were almost closed.
“Good.”
“It will keep it beyond the feeding roads.”
“Good.”
I sat against the antler and tipped my head back. The running sky opened above me.
I looked down at him. A little patch of fur beside his nose was singed. His left front paw still turned outward against my arm.
“You should have told me,” I said.
“What?”
“Any of this.”
“I was beginning.”
Varras laughed. It hurt him; I could hear it. He laughed anyway.
Thrum opened one eye.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we will work on keeping your endpoint steady.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You fell.”
“I brought you back.”
“Yes.”
The Hart ran on. Beneath us the black shore dwindled to a silver curve, and another road opened beyond it. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I wanted to know where it went with an appetite so fierce it frightened me.
“Can we go there?” I asked.
Thrum looked.
“Not today.”
I held him closer. He let me, for once.
For several breaths I had the whole restored heaven in front of me.
Then he climbed onto my shoulder, settled across my face, and began to purr.