If he's a ghost, then what is she?

        Caneo says nothing, of course. If he catches the dance of flame at the edges of his vision, he dismisses it as so much powerful memory. If he recognizes the pattern of her footfalls, he credits his imagination. How well did he know the Firedancer, after all? The way priests know the stars? She had gone. She had gone, and if he had looked, he had not found her. It wasn't lack of trying. It wasn't carelessness.

        He pretends it was.

        He gives her an ear, turned carefully toward the noise of an approaching body. Then, because he cannot suffer the presence of anyone without looking, Caneo recoils from the edge of the pond. He forgets the bloody glint of the waters below. His haunches coil as he balances back. His head swings slowly around. And the serpent coils back into his forelock, her tongue flickering out suspiciously. Of course, between them secrets don't exist; she knows the anomaly in his pulse as surely as she knows the sudden flash of recognition in his brain.

        Tandavi.

        Would he run, if he were still a boy? Caneo cannot bring himself to run, today. He turns to marble, his narrow body somehow more ethereal than ever, hewn to the narrowest of edges by maturity. In contrast, the Firedancer looks the same. And her voice is the same — the sound of smoke at midnight. If it feels the way he wanted the Dragon's Throat to feel, what does that mean?

        Caneo's face narrows to match the rest of him, now a frown, as if the light hurts his eyes. He doesn't care for gods; he wants to ask, Then what made it divine? but the question coils silently around in his head. All the while, she isn't looking at him. She's far away even if she's only at another edge of the pond. And if he approaches, will she run again? And if he was happy with her, what is he when they live apart? He had nearly reached the point of forgetting. He is already becoming someone else.

        A breath. When the Firedancer does look at him, his heart jumps again and the snake's head jerks between his ears. She's stiff enough to strike, her narrow coils all wound up around his horn, his ears, his forelock. And Caneo is struck by how much time has passed since the Thistle Meadow - how much has occurred. Tandavi never knew the snake. The snake knew her only as memory, as something scattered at the edges of his vision when he visited that place, when he paced through the desert, when he traveled north in search of other friends only to wound them. He feels strange, almost as if his mind is slipping out of his body; as if he perceives the scene from far away.

        "Tandavi." His voice is quiet. If his expression softens at the sound of the kitsune's voice, if he leans forward into the noise of her laughter, he ought to be forgiven. He had tricked himself, once, into believing he was a whole creature around her. Now, the smile he wears is strained. "Have you been having fun somewhere without me?""