Oh, why was this so hard? Alice wondered desperately. Why couldn’t she ever tell Peter what she thought? Always they had been bodies hurtling just out of one another’s orbit, when all it would have ever taken was an honest word. But that was precisely what magicians lacked; there were no honest words, only puns and illusions and constructions of reality so convoluted that you couldn’t keep track anymore of what was real and what wasn’t. Everyone was always trying so hard to pretend they were somebody else.
