same as she to allow yourself what you wish for.”
Schmendrick stubbornly kept his back to her. “Wishing will not make it so. Believe me, I would know.”
Mourra heard her mother’s breath catch briefly once more before she spoke again. “So would I.”
The magician finally turned. He said nothing for the longest while, his face shadowed, his shoulders pale with the moon. “I expect to go on being a fool. I feel you should know this.”
“You’re alive. It’s much the same thing.”
“No more searching for the perfect branch, you think? Mind, I can’t promise.” He walked slowly toward her as he spoke.
“Oh, you’ll do as you must. People do.”
“But you will hope.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes.”
“So, then.” He leaned down, holding his open hands to either side of her own, where they rested in her lap. “Another gift. Palms out, please.”
From the window Mourra saw her mother raise her hands slowly, almost shyly. She wished she could see her face.
The magician laid his own palms gently against Sairey’s, his large, smooth hands completely hiding her small rough ones from view. He stood still for a very long time, murmuring, his head bowed and his hat near tumbling off, before he finally stepped back and said, simply, “There.”
Sairey spread her fingers. “I don’t see anything.”
“No, neither do I. But I don’t think I’m supposed to.” His tone, which might have been expected to be sad or frustrated once more, was in fact curiously pleased. “You might ask Findros in the morning, or Mourra.”
“You are a very strange man…and always welcome. Farewell, friend. Come to us again.”
To Mourra, eyes closing, chin now on her window ledge, it seemed that she heard the magician’s faint answer, “I will,” though later she thought that she might have dreamed that part. He never once looked back; her last glimpse of him was of a silly hat bobbing with determined jauntiness against the rising moon. As young as she was, and no matter what adults told her, she had never convinced herself to see more than a profile of some sort on the moon: now it seemed that she could make out almost the entire figure of a man leaning forward over something that might have been a fishing line. And behind him, over his shoulder…
Sairey looked after the magician for a long time, before she finally patted the arm of the old chair. “Well, you were always
But Mourra missed the last words, and only noticed the new flower lying next to hers on the window ledge — white as the stars, except for its wine-red center — when the sun turned her pillow golden, and she awoke.
