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finicky roses and, sniffing ash, glanced round to see the firebug standing among the tendrils. His unheralded appearance made me catch my breath; I murmured, “Where have you been?”
    He’d grown taller in his absence, but not much; his eyes were still a whiteless, syrupy black. His hair hung in grubby curls at his shoulders, long as a girl’s. His trousers were snaggle-toothed in the hem and his feet still lacked boots. There was a nasty, healing wound on his face. The arbor threw striped shadows over him; his gaze lay weightily on me. He ignored my question and said, “Have you been to the forest? Everything’s charcoal.”
    I hadn’t been among the sightseers who had trekked the hills marveling at the fire’s arid legacy — my parents sneered at such easily amused minds — but my father had led a party of important men on an official inspection of the burn, and he’d brought home char on his shoes. “You shouldn’t do things like that,” I said.
    Finnigan lifted an eyebrow. “What things?”
    “You know. It’s wrong to burn the forest.”
    Finnigan smiled wolfishly. “But I’m
allowed
to do wrong things. We agreed, remember? You swore.”
    I set my jaw; I was still on my knees. Naturally I remembered our poisonous promise, but I hadn’t expected him to take to his task so dramatically. I reminded myself he was wild and uneducated, and doubtlessly in need of a guiding hand. I said, “But the forest is your friend, isn’t it?”
    He pondered this, brushing his knuckles on the feathery petals of a rose, walking his fingers from thorn to thorn. Perhaps he’d never realized it before — that, being wild, other wild things were his allies. He looked across the yard. “When the forest burns, it grows back,” he said. “It grows back stronger than before.”
    “Houses don’t grow back,” I answered. “Cows and sheep and horses don’t grow back. All the animals that live in the forest — they don’t grow back when they burn.”
    He glanced at me. “They would die anyway.”
    “When they’re
supposed
to. When they’re old.”
    His brown face flushed. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
    “It’s wrong, though —”
    “It’s wrong, it’s wrong!” He kicked the earth, wheeled away. “Shut up, you kook! I can do what I like!”
    I shrank back into the flowers and leaves. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a kook. You know it’s wrong to hurt things that haven’t hurt you. That’s not the rules.”
    “Oh yeah?” wailed Finnigan. “What about your brother? What had
he
done to
you
?”
    My mouth snapped shut. “That’s not the same. That was an accident, I told you.”
    Finnigan watched me for a moment; his anger dropped away. He lay down on the warm earth, quiet as a pup. “I forgot the story,” he said. “Tell me again.”
    My bones are very close to my skin — there’s no buffer of fat on me. I weigh perhaps as much as a small suitcase carrying the necessities of a night. The pillows and blankets that coddle me weigh much more than I do. Yet I lie on this mattress so heavily that I ache, I feel burdened as if by padlocks — I fear that if I fell from this bed I would crash straight through the floor. Sarah shifts and adjusts me regularly, to keep the heaviness from settling; nonetheless my flesh breaks and tears. My brother Vernon had no such careful attention during the course of his short life. The places where bone has broken the skin are the places that remind me of him.
    He was born three years before me, but he was never the elder of us — how could he be, when his brain did not develop beyond the small damp cake it had been at birth? I grew up in his birdy shadow, his weak cries familiar to me from my cradle, the peculiar scent of him — his powdery skin, his soaking chin — as recognizable as the smell of smoke. He rarely left his bedroom, having scant propulsion of his own; new sights and sounds excited him, set him howling like a gibbon, a noise my mother found