… When she first as a child stood in snow, laughing…

… The night her mother died and she took the Fireflower, and her sense of what should be would not let her weep…

… Her eye, knowing…

… Her lips, warm and forgiving after that terrible fight…

The associations went on and on, unstoppable, and Barrick Eddon was terrified by how little he could do beyond holding onto those parts of himself he could still recognize.

I was a fool to agree to this, he thought. It is like the story of the greedy merchant-I will get everything I wanted, but it will fill me until I swell like a toad and then burst like a bubble.

Saqri suddenly stopped and turned toward him-a graceful transition from motion to absolute stillness. She used words to speak out loud but he heard them in his thoughts as well, where the meanings were subtly different. "I have thought all the day and I still do not know whether to embrace you or destroy you, manchild," Saqri told him. "I cannot understand what my beloved great-aunt thought she was doing." A tiny shift of the mouth betokened a scowl. "I stopped wondering at my late husband's actions long ago."

Her thoughts came with a sting even sharper than the wind off the booming black sea. "It isn't…" He fought to keep his concentration through the flurry of foreign recollections and impulses. "It doesn't matter anyway. What she wanted. She sent me and… and then your husband gave me the Fireflower."

She looked at him with an expression that did not quite reach compassion. "Is it painful, then, child?"

"Yes." It was hard to think. "No, not painful. But it… I think it is too much for me. That soon it will… drown me…"

She took a few steps toward him, her head tilted a little to one side as if she listened. "I cannot feel you the way I could always feel him-but nevertheless, you are there. How strange! You are truly shih-shen'aq." It was a thought that did not become a word in his language, but still blew toward him with its meaning trailing-flowered, enbloomed, blossomhearted: it meant to blaze with the inner complexity and responsibility of the Fireflower.