Rosemary wore the now-familiar blue and silver-gray silk, tied into a fetching sarong-style dress which showed her arms to best effect.A slightly crumpled hat of dark blue straw completed the look.Ah, but where were the gemstones that always adorned Rosemary’s outfits?Corinthia’s gaze traveled until she found them, in a jeweled brooch on the hatband.
Stars twinkled.Frogs croaked in the Ephemeral Wetland.Lupine stems trembled.
What could Corinthia say?I see you live in the Refuge?Love what you’ve done with the place?There were ways of talking to people—procedures that could be followed—and very few of them applied in this situation.When she finally gathered her wits to speak, she said, “You look like an island princess,” and was so shocked that these were the words that had fallen out of her mouth that she actually laughed out loud at herself.
Rosemary laughed, too.“In this old thing?”
“I amsosorry,” Corinthia said, hiding her face with her hands.“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” Rosemary insisted, pulling Corinthia’s hands away from her face and holding them in her own.“Would you like to come inside?”
“Is it… is itreal?”Corinthia had a brief vision of the whole thing disappearing, and then waking up on her back porch, victim of a dream within a dream.
“Oh, it’s real.It’s just shy.”
“Your house isshy?”
“With strangers.”
“Am I a stranger?”
“Not anymore.”
One of the only things Corinthia could be quite sure of was that this simple welcome felt like a cool glass of chocolate milk, fulfilling a thirst she didn’t know she had.She had always loved to know things, but had never fully considered the pleasure ofbeingknown.
Rosemary stepped back and held the door open.
Corinthia was about to cross the threshold when a question suddenly occurred to her.“Where’d the bird go?”
Rosemary’s eyes widened.“The bird?”
“Yes, I saw it fly through the window a minute ago.”
“Oh,birds.They act like they own the place.Come in, come in.”
The question went unanswered, but Corinthia went in.
In one corner, branches framed a cozy bed that appeared to be made with fluffy lichen and flowers.Another tangle of branches resolved into a chair padded with thick, soft-looking grass.A pine stump served as a side table.The walls of the cottage, however, contained the real show-stopper: rows upon rows of books, marching along branch and vine shelves that appeared to grow organically from the walls.
Fashion Through the Ages.Emily Post’s Etiquette.The Art of Dancing.The Complete Book of Herbal Medicine.Dozens of Harlequin titles.A history of Elizabethan England.A tattered but complete Jane Austen collection.Rows of vintage cookbooks.Airport thrillers and obsolete New Age tomes and everything in between.
It was as if the contents of the free book cart had been carefully collected and shelved over the course of years.Come to think of it—Corinthia scanned the books with a well-trained eye—there was theIntroduction to Woodworkingshe herself had put on the cart!She looked at Rosemary.“You took all of them?”
“Maybe not all…”
Corinthia raised her eyebrows.
“A lot of them,” Rosemary admitted.“But I trade them in when I’m done.Otherwise I’d run out of space.”
A whole education, Corinthia thought.“How long have you lived here?”
Rosemary turned away, industriously straightening up one of the living, leaf-dappled shelves without answering the question, so Corinthia retreated to a previous topic.“Your collection is amazing,” she said.“I can’t believe you put it together entirely from the free book cart.”
“Everything butAlien Space Lesbians.That one I had to get from the library proper.”
Corinthia, who was not good at being nonchalant, went for it anyway: “Was there—uh—any particular reason you wanted that one?”
“Because I wanted to read about women in love, and you don’t get that kind of thing on the free book cart too often.”
