A Patron Of Old Butter And Rain

The Hound is looking at me.

I know it the way you know a dog three streets away has noticed you. Everything goes quiet first. The crisps packet in my hand stops crinkling. Mira stops breathing. Faded Lamplight, my poor flickering nothing of a star, makes a sound in my head like somebody putting down a cup very carefully so as not to be heard.

[The Hound, a constellation of the hunt and the chosen quarry, has noticed you.]

[The Hound is considering a blessing.]

"A blessing," I say, out loud, because saying things out loud is the only way I have to be sure they are real. "That's good. Isn't it."

[Faded Lamplight: "no."]

[Faded Lamplight: "no no no."]

[Faded Lamplight: "his blessings always start the same way."]

[The Hound offers: [Mark of the Worthy Quarry]. The bearer becomes interesting. The bearer is found. The bearer is chased beautifully.]

Mira has not blinked. Her one shoe is half off her heel. She is looking up through the stockroom ceiling at something I cannot see and her lower lip is doing the thing children's lower lips do just before they cannot do it any more.

"Decline," I say.

[Blessings cannot be declined by the bearer. Blessings can be declined by the sponsoring star, at cost.]

[Faded Lamplight is calculating.]

[Faded Lamplight has nothing to calculate with.]

Up in the dark, my broke little star reaches into pockets that have been empty for four thousand years.

[Faded Lamplight: "i can refuse him. i can. it's just. it costs."]

[Faded Lamplight: "i'll be a bit smaller after. that's all. it's fine."]

"Don't."

[Faded Lamplight: "oh sweetheart. of course i will."]

The shop fills with a light the colour of a streetlamp at the end of its life. Just for a second. The pale coin of sun comes back into the window. The jaw shape slides off it the way a coat slides off a hook. Up at the zenith the Hound makes a sound that is not a sound, more a pressure on the ears, and then turns its red eye away with the bored patience of a thing that has all the time in the world to come back.

[Blessing refused. Refusal logged.]

[Faded Lamplight has spent: one ninth of remaining luminance.]

I look out through the broken window. I find my star. It is dimmer. Not by a lot. By the amount a candle dims when somebody opens a door in the next room. By the amount you would not notice if you were not staring at it.

I am staring at it.

"You shouldn't have done that," I say.

[Faded Lamplight: "i had to. you're mine. i haven't had a mine in four thousand years."]

.

We get out of the shop because we have to. I carry Mira on my hip the first hundred yards, because she will not put weight on the foot with the missing shoe and because she has gone very quiet, and quiet children move you faster than crying ones. The streets are wrong. Not broken-wrong, although they are also broken-wrong, cars at angles, a bus on its side like a sleeping animal. Geometry-wrong.

I turn a corner I have turned a hundred times in my life on the way to work, and the corner is longer than it should be. The pavement keeps going for thirty extra feet of itself before it remembers to meet the road. A lamp post stands at an angle that is not leaning, just at an angle, as if the ground is one degree off true and the lamp post is the only honest thing.

Above us, the Drowned King has rolled half over in his slab of sky and is now facing the city.

It starts to rain.

It is not rain. It is rain shaped. It falls in straight lines and it is wet on my face and Mira shivers in it. But when it hits the road it does not puddle. It pools upward, in slow domes, like somebody is filling the street from underneath. The domes wobble. I do not let her touch them.

[The Drowned King is considering a blessing.]

[Faded Lamplight: "oh you have got to be joking."]

[The Drowned King offers: [Lungs of the Quiet Deep]. The bearer breathes whatever is offered. The bearer is offered a great deal.]

"Refuse it," I say.

[Faded Lamplight: "i can't do another one today. i'll go out. i'll just. i'll go out, sweetheart."]

Mira's hand on my collar tightens. "He says no," she says, and I do not know which he she means. "He says no, you're his, he says no."

[Faded Lamplight: "oh. she heard me."]

I think very fast. I think about the swordsman in the yellow coat. I think about every book on my shelf at home that I am never going to see again. I think about how Borrowed Pages worked the first time, and the small paper cut it left on my hand, and the way Faded Lamplight said cost: minor as if minor were a kind of price tag.

I have read a book about a girl who could not drown.

I start telling it.

I tell it fast, because the domes of upward-rain are getting bigger and one of them is reaching for Mira's ankle. I tell the part where the girl walks into the sea up to her hair and the sea does not take her, because the sea has been told by somebody very calmly and very privately that she is not for taking. I describe the sea. I describe the colour of the girl's coat, which was not yellow, it was the wrong green of a pond in August. I describe the way she breathed once before she went under.

[Borrowed Pages: pending belief check.]

[The Drowned King is listening.]

This is the deal, then. Not with Faded Lamplight. With the thing in the slab. I tell my poor washed-up star to step back, in the back of my own head, like pushing a friend behind me at a bus stop. I look up at the Drowned King's long green sprawl, and I tell him a story about a girl his rain could not have, and I let him believe it.

The domes lie down.

The rain stops being shaped.

[Borrowed Pages: belief check passed. The Drowned King believed you.]

[Cost: ]

The text hangs. The cost field is empty. The cost field flickers.

[Cost: ]

Mira's weight on my hip becomes very light. I think she has fainted. I look down to check.

She is not there.

There is no weight on my hip. There is no warm small hand on my collar. There is a single school shoe in my left hand, the one she had been wearing, the lace still tied in a child's careful double bow.

[Cost: the listener.]

[The Drowned King thanks you for the story. The Drowned King has taken the girl who could hear the small stars, to keep.]

Above the rooftops, my faded little patron flickers hard, twice, like somebody trying not to cry in public.

[Faded Lamplight: "oh. oh no. oh i didn't know he could do that. i didn't know he could do that. sweetheart. i'm so sorry. i didn't know."]

In the slab of greenish stars in the east, one new point has lit up. Very small. Very new. Steady as a held breath.

It is the colour of a school cardigan.

It is looking at me.

The countdown in the corner of my vision, which I had forgotten about entirely, reads twenty-two minutes.

I stand in the middle of a street that is one degree off true, holding a child's shoe, and I say her name out loud so that somewhere, in the dark above the world, the smallest possible star will know that somebody down here remembers it.

"Mira."

Faded Lamplight, above me, dims another notch.