And besides, courage or not, the Ghost of the Railway had just been exposed as a fraud. No one would ever believe the old wizard again.
Rion Daaveh looked at Krisia, at Copper, at the engine twinkling with ice and glass fragments, not comprehending the presence of any of them. "Yes," he said finally, "Yes, I must do that. Come here, niece."
Krisia went to him, not even glancing back at Copper. Rion Daaveh knelt to hug the girl, and then said, in a voice thick with what sounded very much like disappointment, "It was only magic, then … only a spell after all."
Copper had no idea who the old man was asking, if indeed any of them; and no one at all answered.
Rion Daaveh and Krisia went away. There were some other people by the entrances to the station, but they drifted away into the night. The railway was not finished yet. They would have to find some other way to reach their goal.
Copper sat down on the edge of the platform. He pulled a gold coin from his pocket, tossed it. It landed tails-up. Like iron out of the lodestone's draw, the luck was gone from it. Copper leaned back against the engine, tipped his head way back until it rested on the cabin floor, and looked up through the hole in the glass overhead at the white moon.
He could no longer hear the cabin clock ticking, and the engine's firebox was cold and dead. One could be wound back up, though, and the other scraped and stoked, so it scarcely mattered. Copper continued to look up at the moon, and wondered how many years he would be dead and gone and forgotten when first a human foot trampled her face.
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