In Pyrah, I had discovered something about myself. Something pure that I hadn’t anticipated, and now Kenn was forcing me to defend time spent with her.
As I approached the brink, I thought of flaying Kenn’s heart and telling him everything. But then my rage and anger departed. Instead of Kenn’s sneering petulance that I was currently facing, my mind wandered to the nights that Pyrah and I shared. The sort of nights that Shriekback spoke of on the liner notes for Big Night Music: “nights—fragrant with blossom, incandescent with moonlight and dreams, possessed by a cool beauty which evaporates with the dew.” Except that the beauty of these nights didn’t evaporate with the dew—it flourished into a new day. The dew nurtured my parched yearning and renewed my sense of the world, a world in whi
