How can he do this? If you were mine, I would fight to keep you. I would die, before I let you go.

More like some small, fierce bird of prey, something with a sharp bite. An owl perhaps, that speaks only when the rest of the world sleeps. Jenny will do well enough.

Come, dear heart. Lean on me and let us walk this path together.

With respect," said Red, and his voice had gone so quiet people hushed each other to hear him, "my tale is yet unfinished; you should hear me out. And it is her answer I have come to hear, not yours.

I thought of betrayal and how it came so easily - in a word, a glance, a gesture.

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.

A dream is the key that unlocks the mysteries of the waking world.