VIt flowed through his fingertips somehow; even he didn’t understand it. He understood the thing as he understood his rifle and his pistol, as he had understood Sheila’s lithe body and small shoulders. He understood its strings and its frets, its tuning knobs, its symmetry, and he knew just how to hold it, with its waist on his right leg and its back against his stomach and chest, its neck horizontal to the earth. He played it as Ank lay in the tall grass beyond the porch: picking and strumming, pausing occasionally to tune its strings, as the wild blades of grass blew all around and the thin wood of the guitar and porch creaked. For they were home; they had made it—Tanelorn was real, as they had known it would be.
So, too, was she there, in the cabin’s kitchen, preparing dinner not out o
