In Green's Jungles by Gene Wolfe

were not his only child, and if he did not love you as he does. Believe me, Mora, you are wrong."
    "He wants you to stay with us."
    "I know. He pressed me to last night."
    "Why didn't you?"
    "Because I wasn't sure I would be welcome."
    "Grandmother thinks you're wonderful! Probably you didn't see it, but she kept telling Papa to make you stay, the way she looked at him and the things she said."
    "I did see it, Mora. And hear it, too. It wasn't your grandmother's welcome that concerned me."
    She was baffled. "Papa's going to write you a letter. He said so."
    "I would prefer one from you."
    The solemn nod again. "When I get back home."
    "Fava will try to dissuade you, I feel sure."
    "I won't tell her." She fell silent, then burst out, "They'll burn her if they find out."
    I tried to make my voice noncommittal. "In that case, she is foolish to remain."
    "Are you going to tell Papa? He'll burn her himself. He hates them."
    "Most people do. I may tell him, or I may not. Certainly I won't unless I find it necessary."
    "Don't you hate them, too?" Beneath their heavy, dark brows her eyes were puzzled.
    "No," I said. "Mora, I have been to Green, and I have come back. I know that's hard for you to credit, but it is the truth. I have."
    Trying to be helpful, Oreb added, "Good Silk!"
    She ignored him. "They say the inhumi kill everybody that goes there."
    "I know they do. They're wrong. Haven't you asked her about it?"
    Mora's voice fell to a whisper. "We don't talk about that."
    "You don't talk about her real nature?"
    Mora shook her head, unwilling to meet my eyes.
    "How is it that you know?"
    "I guessed."
    "Have you ever seen her when she wasn't-Fava?"
    Mora's "No" was whispered, too. Much louder: "I don't want to."
    "I don't blame you. Mora, there was an inhumu who was a son to me. Can you believe that?"
    "No," she repeated.
    "That, too, is the truth. For a long while you did not so much as suspect what Fava was, and for still longer you must have been unsure. It wasn't like that for me. I was in real and imminent danger of death, and he helped me and let me see him as he was. I was so badly frightened that it did not seem strange to me."
    "I was in trouble, too."
    "I know you were, and that's one reason I don't want Fava burned. One of many."
    "It's hard for me to think of you being afraid of anything. Were you really?"
    I cast my mind back to the pit; it seemed very long ago. "I was resigned to death by then, I believe. I had lost hope, or almost lost it, yet I was very frightened."
    "You said I had to make her go away."
    I nodded.
    "But this one helped you."
    I nodded again. "Then and afterward. He stayed with me, you see. With us. Others saw him as a boy about your age, Mora. I saw the inhumu. That was a part of our agreement-that he would not deceive me as he deceived others. When my real son and I went aboard the lander that would carry us to Green, he boarded it too. I hated him then, just as I had come to hate him while we were on my sloop. Brave men taunt the things they fear, Mora, and he did too."
    "She's not afraid of me."
    "She should be. You said that if you told your father, he would have her burned alive."
    "He'd burn her himself, only she knows I won't. How did you find out?"
    "From the story she told, first of all. There was an undercurrent in it, a stream of things left unsaid. Your father sensed it just as I did, though he may not have been conscious of it. He was puzzled because the little boy in the story did not go back to his family, remember?"
    Mora nodded.
    "We were supposed to believe he was afraid that the mother who had set out to kill him in her desperation would try to kill him again. That didn't ring true, and your father rejected it out of hand, as I did. A boy too young to know his own name could have had only the vaguest notion of his mother's intention, and would have forgotten the entire incident in a day or two. Then Fava suggested that he got away from the Vanished People, who periodically