If there had been any strangers close by, they would surely have given him a wide berth.

But there was no one, only his horse, which was grazing untethered nearby, apparently as oblivious to the cold and rain as its master.

He was standing at the foot of one particular grave - the newest, though a winter's frost and wind had ob-scoured the freshness of its turned soil and given it a look little different from the others around it. Except that the gray headstone still looked very new.

The man's eyes were fixed on the second to last line of the inscription - "Aged Sixteen Years." And then beneath it, "Rest in Peace." "He has found the man he was looking for, Jon," he said softly to the headstone. "And the odd thing is that you would have been delighted, would you not? You would have been happy and excited. You would have demanded to meet him, to befriend him, to love him. But no one thought to look for him until after you were dead." The headstone offered no reply, and the corners of the man's mouth lifted in an expression that was more grimace than smile. "You loved indiscriminately," he said. "You even loved me. /Especially /me." He looked broodingly at the slight mound of earth beneath the headstone and thought of his brother buried six feet under it.

They had celebrated Jon's sixteenth birthday, the two of them, with all his favorite foods, including custard tarts and fruitcake, and with his favorite card games and a vigorous game of hide-and-seek that had continued for two whole hours until Jon had been exhausted and helpless with laughter - a fact that had made him ridiculously easy to find when it was his turn to hide. An hour later he had beamed up happily from beneath the covers of his bed before his brother blew out the candle and withdrew to his own room. "Thank you for a lovely birthday party, Con," he had said in his newly deep voice, whose words and expression sounded incongruously childish.