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they could travel again.
    Fruit Bat was freer than some of my garden denizens, able to leave his designated area, perhaps because Abdo had unusual mental abilities of his own. He could talk to other ityasaari with his mind, for instance. Today Fruit Bat was in his grove, curled like a kitten in a nest of furry fig leaves, sound asleep. I smiled down at him, made a blanket appear, and tucked it around him. It wasn’t a real blanket, and this wasn’t really Abdo, but the symbol meant something to me. He was my favorite.
    I moved on. Loud Lad’s ravine opened up before me, and I yodeled down it. Loud Lad, blond and burly, yodeled back from below, where he seemed to be building a boat with wings. I waved; that was all the settling he ever required.
    Loud Lad was Lars, the Samsamese bagpiper who now lived with Viridius; he had appeared at midwinter just like Abdo. I had envisioned each grotesque to look like the person I’d seen in my visions. Beyond that, each avatar had developed quirks, traits I hadn’t consciously given them but that corresponded to their real-life counterparts. It was as if my mind had intuited these qualities and given an analogous trait to their avatars. Loud Lad was a noisy putterer; real-world Lars designed and built strange instruments and machines.
    I wondered whether this would hold true for the ones I hadn’t met yet, if the oddities they displayed in my garden would translate into life. The fat, bald Librarian, for example, sat in a shale quarry, squinting at fossil ferns through square spectacles and thentracing the same shape in the air with his finger. The fern lingered in the air, drawn in smoke. Glimmerghost, pale and ethereal, folded butterflies out of paper, and they fluttered in huge flocks around her garden. Bluey, her red hair standing straight up like a hedge, waded in a stream, eddies of green and purple swirling in her wake. How would these characteristics translate into real life?
    I chatted soothingly to each one, squeezed shoulders, kissed foreheads. I had never met them but felt we were old friends. They were as familiar as family.
    I reached the sundial lawn, ringed by a rose garden, where Miss Fusspots presided. She was the third and final half-dragon I’d met so far, the Ninysh ambassadress to Goredd, Dame Okra Carmine. In my garden, her double crawled on hands and knees between the roses, digging up weeds before they had a chance to sprout. In life, Dame Okra had an idiosyncratic talent for premonition.
    In life, she could also be a cranky, unpleasant person. That would be a potential hazard of gathering everyone together, I supposed. Some were surely difficult people, or had been hurt just struggling to survive. I passed the golden nest of Finch, an old man with a beaked face; he must have been stared at, scorned, threatened with harm. Would he be bitter? Would he be relieved to find a safe place at long last, a place where half-dragons could support each other and be free from fear?
    I passed several Porphyrians in a row—the dark, slender, athletic twins, Nag and Nagini, who raced each other over three sand dunes; dignified, elderly Pelican Man, who I was convinced was a philosopher or an astronomer; winged Miserere, circling in thesky. Abdo had hinted that in Porphyry, ityasaari were considered children of Chakhon, a god, and were revered. Maybe the Porphyrians wouldn’t want to come?
    Some of them might not, but I had a hunch some would. Abdo did not seem keen on the reverence, wrinkling his nose when he spoke of it, and I had firsthand knowledge that Master Smasher had not always had it easy.
    I was approaching Master Smasher’s statuary meadow now, where eighty-four marble statues jutted out of the grass like crooked teeth. Most were missing parts—arms, heads, toes. Master Smasher, tall and statuesque himself, picked through the weeds, collecting broken pieces and reassembling them. He’d made a woman out of hands and a bull entirely of ears.
    “That