“Of course not,” Sammy sez. “Would you—really—trust any of us?” “Oh, no,” Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else’s. But it’s still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.
