“What's more,” her twin added sharply, “if you expect us to freeze off our toes and tits, to please an audience of smelly old bearskins, you've got your head on upside-down.”

“Don't worry, Seddy,” the Ilthmarix said, patting his flushed cheek and its sparse white hairs, “I always give my best performance when I'll all gooey. We'll have them chasing us up the walls, where we'll pop from their grabs like so many slippery melon seeds.”

“Chasing—?” Essedinex gripped the Ilthmarix by her slim shoulder. “You'll provoke no orgies tonight, do you hear me? Teasing pays. Orgies don't. The point is to—”

“We know just how far to tease, daddy-pooh,” one of the Mingol girls put in.

“We know how to control them,” her sister continued.

“And if we don't, Vlana always does,” the Ilthmarix finished.

As the almost imperceptible shadows lengthened and the mist-wreathed air grew dark, the omnipresent crystals seemed to be growing even a little more swiftly. The palaver at the trading tents, which the thick snowy tongue of the forest shut off from the home tents, grew softer-voiced, then ceased. The unending low chant from the Women's Tent became more noticeable, and also higher pitched. An evening breeze came from the north, making all the crystals tinkle. The chanting grew gruffer and the breeze and the tinkling ceased, as if on command. The mist came wreathing back from east and west, and the crystals were growing again. The women's chanting faded to a murmur. All of Cold Corner grew tautly and expectantly silent with the approach of night.

Day ran away over the ice-fanged western horizon, as if she were afraid of the dark.

In the narrow space between the actors’ tents and Godshall there was movement, a glimmer, a bright spark that sputtered for nine, ten, eleven heartbeats, then a flash, a flaring, and there rose up — slowly at first, then swifter and swifter — a comet with a brushy tail of orange fire that dribbled sparks. High above the pines, almost on the edge of heaven — twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three — the comet's tail faded and it burst with a thunderclap into nine white stars.