I am a king's daughter, And if I cared to care, The moon that has no mistress Would flutter in my hair. No one dares to cherish What I choose to crave. Never have I hungered, For that I did not have I am a kings daughter, And I grow old within The prison of my person, The shackles of my skin. And I would run away And beg from door to door, Just to see your shadow Once, and never more.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

Love was generous precisely because it could never be immortal.

The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.

Beyond the town, darker than dark, King Haggard's castle teetered like a lunatic on stilts.

No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.