Farrell flexed his arm cautiously and reached a second time to touch his lute. “Not much. I suppose she’d just have to go on being a queen. There’s a shortage of queens these days, trolls or any other kind. People are complaining about it.”

She laughed so that he could hear it then, the slow, disheveled laugh of a human woman in the morning; and suddenly they were only themselves at the table, and nothing in the kitchen but sunlight and a dog and the smell of cinnamon coffee. “Play for me,” she said, and he played a little, sitting there: some Dowland, some Rosseter. Then she wanted to know about his wanderings, and they talked quietly of freighters and fishing boats, markets and carnivals, languages and police. He had lived in more places than Sia, but never as long; he had been to Syros, the island of her birth, that she had not seen since girlhood. She said, “You were Ben’s legend for a long time, you know. You acted things out for him.”

“Oh, everybody has one of those,” he answered. “People’s dreams dovetail like that. My own legend was running around Malaysia on a bicycle, the last I heard of her.”

The mischief flared again in Sia’s eyes. “But what a strange sort of Odysseus you are,” she said. “You keep having the same adventure over and over.” Farrell blinked at her uneasily. Sia said, “I have read your letters to Ben. Wherever you wake up and find yourself, you take some stupid job, you make a few very colorful acquaintances, you play your music, and sometimes, for one letter, there is a woman. And then you wake up somewhere else, and it all begins again. Do you like such a life?”

In time he learned almost to take it for granted, that moment in a conversation with Sia when the ground under his feet was gently gone, like a missed stair or curbstone, and he invariably lurched off-balance, as violently as when he twitched out of a falling dream. But just then he felt himself blushing, saying with hot flatness, “I do what I do. It suits me.”