With a Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony

husband's unresponsive lips, and wet his face with her tears, and turned away. "May you have joy in Heaven, my bonnie boy," she whispered. "May I join you there-when my business here is done."
     
    She went to Cousin Pacian's parents' farm, where Junior had been boarded for several days. Junior saw her- and burst into tears. She picked him up, in tears again herself, and held him close.
     
    "But he was doing so well!" Pacian protested. "He was having a good time here, honest!"
     
    "Of course he was," Niobe agreed. "It's just that once he saw me, he realized how he missed me. It's a natural reaction." But what, she wondered bleakly, would be his reaction to the permanent loss of his father?
     
    Indeed, once reassured. Junior returned to his play with Pace, and it was obvious that the two liked each other, the baby and the boy, though about twelve years separated them. It was more than kinship. "You are a truly wonderful family," she told them as she departed with Junior. "1 can never thank you enough."
     
    "Bring him back to visit soon," Pace said, hiding a tear of his own.
     
    Niobe nullified the anti-lac spell and nursed Junior- but he quickly turned colicky and screamed in pain, and she realized that her grief for Cedric was in her blood and in her milk, poisoning her baby. She had to restore the spell and prepare a formula and return him to the bottle. She felt guilty doing it and less a mother, but perhaps it was for the best. Certainly she had no right to inflict her pain on him.
     
    And I-will cry-she sang to herself. I'll cry when the wetlands are dry. It had new meaning now; it was as if her own drying-up was an echo of the suffering of the forest wetlands when man interfered.
     
    She attended Cedric's wake, and Niobe smiled dutifully, but she had no taste for festivity. The ghost did hover near the corpse, reluctant to depart before the burial, despite the burning candle and ritual eating of bread. No one could make it depart until Niobe herself faced it and tearfully demanded an accounting. Then the ghost floated to her, touched her wet cheeks, shook its head, kissed her with the touch of gossamer but also of music, and faded away. It seemed to be a message of reassurance, ironic in this circumstance.
     
    Now it was over, and her life loomed bleak before her. Come live with me and be my love, she sang to herself, trying to remember the feeling of being with Cedric, but she could not. She knew, too well, that he was gone.
     
    She set about fulfilling as much of Cedric's ambition as she could. She talked again with the Prof to see whether it was feasible to develop a spell to enable the deer to shoot back, but he said that such magic was beyond his ability. "The magician who accomplishes that will be a master," he said.
     
    Cedric's death did accomplish something useful: the suspicion that the developer had done the deed turned out to be unfounded, but local sentiment was now so solidly against the project that all such plans were canceled. Perhaps Cedric had known that this would be a side effect of his sacrifice.
     
    There was a death settlement on Cedric which left her economically comfortable for the time being, but she also returned to her weaving, producing fine tapestries for sale. She kept herself'busy-but though she had lived mostly alone for two years while Cedric was in college, this wasn't the same. That had been temporary; this was permanent. Now she knew he wasn't coming home, and that hurt constantly. It was a tunnel with no light at the end.
     
    Increasingly she thought about her trip to Purgatory. She had met five Incarnations-entities she had hardly believed in before. She had seen some of their powers and realized that there had to be more that she had not seen. They had pleaded inability to do what she asked-but they had enormous abilities nevertheless. What did they do when they weren't talking with visiting mortals?
     
    She had no life here on Earth, really. Even Junior would be