Both princesses immediately looked wary, exchanging glances. "Warn us of what?" Petunia asked. She studied him with those blue, blue eyes and Oliver wondered all over again what he was doing here.

Never look back, never forget.

What does it say? Does he love you madly?

And then what did you do, Lord Oliver?" Karl's eight-year-old daughter gazed up at him in awe, as though this were the best story she had ever heard.

Shaking herself, Petunia looked around. Several of her sisters had been talking to her, but she hadn't heard them. "And that answers our questions about why he gave himself up," Poppy was saying, a smile turning up one corner of her mouth as she looked at Petunia. "Now if everyone could please avoid saying his name [Oliver], so that Petunia doesn't drift off again...?

No need, no, need. Life is already too short to find it.

Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather. And it lives.