You see, this pitiful anatomy of mine, wounded beyond all hope of repair, was quickening. It was uncanny. I was in the presence of this woman, my father's wife, very rarely, but I knew from past experience the effect of this visit would last for days. Even if she were to leave the room now I would feel spasms in my lower limbs for a week or more, though the muscles of my legs were atrophied. And my cock, which had been just a piss-pipe for far too long, would stand up like an adolescent's and demand milking twice an hour. Lord, I thought, was it any wonder she'd been worshiped? She could probably raise the dead if it pleased her to do so.

"Come away. Tansy," she said to the porcupine.

Tansy ignored the instruction, which I will admit pleased me. Even she might be disobeyed.

"I don't mind it," I said.

"Just be careful. The spines-"

"I know." I still had the scars where one of her quill-pigs, as she preferred to call them, had taken against me. And I think it had distressed Cesaria to see me bleed. I remember the look on her face quite dearly: her eyes like liquid night in that obsidian head of hers; her sympathy terrifying to me, because I suppose I feared her touch, her healing. Feared it would transform me, make me her devotee forever. So we'd stood, neither one of us moving, both distressed by something essential to the other (her power, my blood) while the quill-pig had sat on the floor between us and scratched its fleas.

"This book…" she said.

"Marietta told you about it?" I said.

"I don't need telling, Maddox."

"No. Of course not."

What she said next astonished me. But then of course she would never be who she is-she could not trail the legends she trails-if she were not a constant astonishment.

"You must write it fearlessly," she said. "Write out of your head and out of your heart and never care about the consequences."