A ring charred neatly in the floor about the sword, thrust in the middle of it, upright, short and straight the blade, and of the width of two fingers from those cinders up and up to the quillions heavy and plain, the hilt wrapped about in overlapping straps of white leather worn yellow with hard use, up and up to the plainly beaten round of the pommel, as heavy, and as solid. Otherwise, the room is empty. The hearth there, dark and cold, swept clean, the windows blankly dark against the dark without, and only dim lamps lit in elaborately fronded sconces. From somewhere deeper in the house, below, perhaps, a basement, a confidently off-tempo guitar, a piercing soprano, gonna put on the stereo, as loud as we can make it go, and then turn the record over, over and over again.

The first of them steps from the kitchen, a brighter room off that way, walls the color of toothpaste. His rich red hair flops from a high widow’s peak, his baggy ivory shirt open at the throat, his red check vest tightly buttoned, and his hands are warily empty. He starts at a creak above, but it’s the second of them, making her way down the stairs, tall enough she needs to stoop, white tank top and a heavy leather kilt, her fine long hair a watery green. She nods as the third of them steps from the hall beneath the stairs, shabby velvet frock coat over orange coveralls, he’s shrugging at them both, and applause smatters up from somewhere below.

The front door cracks open. The fourth of them tips in a grey-epauletted shoulder, followed by a quizzical scowl on a beefy face. The first of them nods, the third shrugs again, and the second steps off the stairs to yank the front door from his grasp, swinging it open to allow the last of them into the room, Chillicoathe, the Harper, who strides to the middle of it, his bulky sweater, his cargo shorts, his big yellow beard and his wide-eyed gaze, fixed only on that upthrust sword.

“Hey,” says the third of them, the Cinquedea Pwyll, but Chilli waves him off.

“Now or never,” says the second of them, Meg Greentooth, but the Kern Gradasso, the fourth, snaps up a hand, wsht!

“They’re finishing up down there,” says the first of them, the Stirrup Gaveston, but Chilli’s already shaking out his hands, clapping them together, pop! to reach out for that yellowed hilt.

“Do you really,” says someone, not any one of them, “want,” a small and slender man, all in black, “to do that,” there by the cold and empty hearth, delicate tulip of a cocktail coupe in his hand.

Chilli steps back from the sword as if stung, “Where,” Gradasso blusters, as Pwyll insists “I didn’t,” and Meg squeezes her enormous scale-knuckled hands into fists, opens them up again, pah! “Your pardon, Goodfellow,” says Gaveston, over the others, “we’d no intention of disrupting your revels.”

“I fear I’ve no pardon to give,” says Goodfellow, eyeing his glass, “for there’s none to be asked. This is a free house, Stirrup;” he lifts it for a sip, and then a gesture, liquor glinting in the light, “do what you will.”

Chilli’s eyes twitch, to this side, to the sword, to that. “And your will’s not to stop me?”

“I’d only suggest, Harper:” says Goodfellow, “take a moment to consider whether you’d want this role, in that tale. If so,” but Chilli’s taken hold of the hilt, and a shriek of wood, a thrum of steel, he draws the blade from the floor.

“Well,” says Goodfellow. “It’ll be nice to have the room again, for dancing.”

It’s a complicated intersection, and the truck idles there a moment, under a red stoplight. A Balanced Life Healthcare, says the sign on the wall of the building to the left. Vicente’s Pizza, over a florid red V, the sign on the corner of the building to the right. The main thoroughfare crosses before, and heads on down the hill, but here, here it’s opened out a bit, something of a plaza for the lanes of traffic limned in paint that needs some touching up. Ahead to the right the low blank wall of a convenience store, 7-Eleven, says the sign that’s bolted there, the brightest light about, and off to the left the dark bulk of an apartment building rises three storeys, four, The 20 on Hawthorne, says the unlit sign that swaddles the corner of it, Now Leasing, Units Available. Between them two more streets open up, one a dogleg off ahead, along the side of that apartment building, the other, there, cornering the convenience store, angled a diagonal rightward and down, into trees, among houses well-appointed. In the sharp slice of corner between them, the narrowed prow of an older building, painted a brown and darker brown gone almost black in the shadows, and not a window lit.

That truck idles through a full cycle of lights, green shone that way, then this, red lights this way, and that, and yellow switched on, then off, clicks of the switches audible over the muffled chug of the truck’s engine. A car passes, quick along the thoroughfare, ignoring options left and right, engine snarling as it races to beat a yellow. Red becomes green, and that’s when the truck lurches into motion, but a blaring horn, a van there to the right, hooking about the convenience store, and the truck wrenches to avoid it, brakes screeching and rear wheels humping the curb as the van accelerates away. The truck wobbles on across the angled street to mount the lozenge of sidewalk lopped before the older brown building, coming to a gentle stop by a small young freshly planted tree, engine still a-rumble.

The driver’s door pops open, and a cantering beat spills out under whirling, twirling guitars, a low voice chanting a beach for the waves of the world to crash on, you are the spilt wine, you are the spilt wine at the table of the gods, and a clap of drums. She slips from the seat, clings to the armrest on the door, and finding solid ground with her feet essays a step, but what she’s stood upon’s the curb of the low ramp from street to sidewalk, and the step she takes too heavy, too far down, and overbalancing, swung about, she topples to sit against the truck. What light there is gleams the blood that soaks the shoulder of her hoodie, blood slathered up her neck to the corner of her jaw, her cheek. There is a shining something, the voice is chanting, there is a shining something. Her head bobs with the effort of her breath, quick, quite shallow. Ellen Oh closes her eyes.

It’s quiet.

It’s quiet, and still, the music’s gone, and the engine’s chug. She opens her eyes to see a figure, bulky coat and wild white hair, stooped to squat beside her. “You’re a mess,” says Marfisa.

Ellen’s lips part, her brow creases, but Marfisa’s craning up, looking inside the cab of the truck, seat of it marred by a dark slick of blood. “Someone else will get this off the street,” she says. “You need to get yourself inside.” Lifting Ellen’s arm, ducking her white head beneath it, heedless of the bloodied hand she grips with her own. “Can you stand?”

“I,” says Ellen, gathering herself with a grimace, “I almost died.”

“You may yet,” says Marfisa, bracing herself. “Come.”

Her tattooed forest hidden now by blood, and the ruddy golden crumbs that cake her shoulder and her throat, gleaming under harsh fluorescence. She’s sat on the steps below the landing, bloodied hoodie a tangled stain on the floor, her T-shirt cut away, a sodden ruin in her lap. “You lied to me,” she says, through her teeth.

Marfisa on the steps beside her scoops more golden dust from a plastic baggie. “I did no such thing.” She presses it over the last visible edge of that ragged wound.

“You didn’t,” Ellen winces, “tell me the truth.”

“And if I had?” Marfisa smooths the dampening, darkening dust with a knuckle. “Would you have listened?” Sits back, eyeing the almost empty baggie. “This will have to do.”

“I need a shower.”

“In time. Let the owr do its work. How does it feel? Don’t touch.”

Ellen shifts her shoulder. The clumped dust, settling, fuses as she eyes it to a cleanly golden shell, gleaming without slough or crack or flake. “You aren’t human,” she says. “Are you.”

“No,” says Marfisa, getting to her feet. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

Ellen takes Marfisa’s hand to pull herself upright, working her shoulder back and up, forth and down, “That’s just weird,” she says.

“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa.

Up the steep stairs lofted from the landing, up and up to a plain brown door ajar at the top and into a brightly airy kitchen, “Can I at least get clean?” Ellen’s saying, as she tries to hold up the blood-soaked lop of her T-shirt with a bloodstained hand.

“Find her some clothing,” Marfisa says, curtly. “Did the truck get put away?”

There’s someone else, a small man in a collarless shirt of faded green, there on the three steps leading down to a dark room crowded with shadowy boxes. He sighs, with some little gravity. “The truck might be said to have been secured.”

“Is it clean,” says Marfisa. And then, “There’s clothing in the lobby. Destroy it. Clean the floor, and the steps as well.”

“It is possible, perhaps,” he says, “the lady misapprehends the particulars of a relationship with such a one as this.”

“You served the Devil,” says Marfisa, stepping away from Ellen, toward him. “Now you serve the Outlaw,” as the small man sets off with a sigh, past her, his muttering, “This one did but clean photographs for the Devil,” trailing after him, “not the scenes of crimes,” out through the door he closes behind him.

Marfisa’s pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. She scoops her white hair back, gathered a moment in a single hank, then lets it go to spring back to its cumulonimbal crest. She opens a sparsely laden cabinet, takes down a blue-lipped drinking glass. Shoves aside with the sweep of an arm the litter on the counter, dirty dishes, tangled utensils, empty takeout cartons, wadded newspaper, an unsheathed sword, a couple-three fat little paperbacks, all to make room for the stainless steel bowl she hauls up.

“Is there a shower?” says Ellen, shivering.

“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa, crossing to the sink, where she sets to filling the glass. “I’m not,” says Ellen, turning with her, but blinking, wide-eyed, “whoa,” she says, and sits, heavily, before the fridge. “Too fast.”

“Drink,” says Marfisa, squatting to offer the glass. And then, as Ellen, nodding, sips, “You struck your blow.”

“I went in through the basement deck, like you said.” She drinks off the rest in a gulp. “He was there, asleep, alone. I stabbed him,” lifting her bloodied hand to point, “here,” to the inked knob at the nape of her neck, “and,” a wincing shrug, “he was gone.”

“It wasn’t him.”

“She was there.”

“Your wizard,” says Marfisa, standing to take the bowl to the sink.

“Upchurch. She wanted me to go upstairs,” lifting her voice over the rush of the faucet. “There’s a woman, locked in a room full of moths?”

“Butterflies.”

“And she told me it wasn’t done. And then,” looking down, at the seamless red-sheened gold that plates her shoulder.

Marfisa returns, careful with the weight of the bowl, “How did you escape,” she says.

“I stabbed him in the skull.”

“The skull.”

“It was what I could reach,” says Ellen. Marfisa dunks a dishtowel in the bowl, wrings it out. Ellen reaches for her wrist. “I didn’t finish it,” she says. “He’s still there.”

A drip from the dishtowel into the bowl, plink. “There is truly nothing of Grandfather left,” says Marfisa. She leans in to daub the sticky blood from Ellen’s breast, gently but firmly lifting the stiffening panel of T-shirt out of her way. Ellen tips back her head, looks up, to the dull white popcorned ceiling, “He bit me,” she says.

“Yes,” says Marfisa, scrubbing, wiping, scrubbing again.

“So, will I,” Ellen rocks a little, absently, with the force of Marfisa’s ministrations, “do I turn into something like that?”

“No.” Marfisa dunks the dishtowel, staining the water in the bowl. Wrings it out again.

“Why did you let me go there by myself?”

“You,” says Marfisa, blotting blood from there, and there, “would not be stopped.”

“I had no idea what I was in for.”

“Now, you do.” Marfisa dunks the towel again. “Now we can make a plan.”

Ellen scoots back, out from Marfisa’s clasp, hard up against the fridge, her bloodstained hand between them. “If I hadn’t made it,” she says, her affect flat, her tone unchanged. “If I’d bled out in the house. Passed out and crashed, driving back.”

Marfisa shrugs in her sheepskin coat. “It would be a different plan. What do you want from this, Ellen?”

“Vengeance,” she says, almost immediately.

“And what will you do to get it?”

Ellen blinks. Lowers her hand. Marfisa leans in, to daub and wipe once more. “I should meet your wizard, next,” she says.

“I’ve got a phone number,” says Ellen.

“Does she answer?” There’s a knock at the door, three sharp raps. “It’s open,” calls Marfisa. “I don’t know,” Ellen’s saying, “I haven’t called it yet,” but Marfisa’s sitting back, looking up and over to the unopened door, “That hod,” she mutters, “will not – ”

Three knocks, again, but slow, deliberate booms that rattle the door in its frame. Marfisa gets to her feet, frowning.

“It’s him,” says Ellen Oh. “Isn’t it.”

The door bursts open, splintering the jamb. Chilli takes a big step into the room, his boots, his shorts, his big yellow beard, the short plain sword in his hand angled to catch a flare of light the vicious chop at his head by the bat in Marfisa’s hand, “Ha!” Shifting her grip the bat twirls back around and up, a jab at his chest he thwarts with an awkward downward whack, the sound of bitten wood. He wrenches, levering the bat to spin it free of grip and blade to fly across the clattering fall to the floor, “Ho!” as he loops the point of his sword to hang in the air before her throat. “It’s steel must meet with steel,” he snarls. “Fetch my blasted sword.”

Marfisa’s focus flicks from blade-tip to countertop, the hilt there visible among the litter. “Go on!” he bellows. “Make a move. Make your move.”

“Harper!” calls someone else. The broken doorway’s crowded, Gaveston squeezing through past Pwyll into the kitchen, and Meg a-loom behind them. “There’s a gallowglas on the field,” says Gaveston, pointing to Ellen, but Chilli’s blade doesn’t waver. “There’s a gallowglas,” says Gaveston, “bleeding, on the field.”

“Changes nothing,” spits Chilli.

“It changes everything,” says Gaveston. “Put up. Step back. We’ll try again, some other day.”

“Yeah,” says Gradasso, even as Pwyll’s making shushing motions, “we ought to,” but “Shut up!” roars Chilli, fury shredded to the edge of a shriek, blade still aimed at Marfisa’s throat. “Pick,” he snaps. “Up. That. Sword.”

“No,” says Marfisa.

“Ranh!” Blade-tip leaps, settles, both his hands on the hilt held high. “Fine,” he says, and takes a step, sidelong, another, turning his way about the kitchen, his sword a spoke, Marfisa, motionless, the axle. “Fine,” he says again, his eyes still locked with hers. Reaching back for the counter with his off hand, sightlessly clumsy, fumbling about to close over the hilt. Drawing the second sword scrape against the counter, a blade in either hand now, and both of them pointed at her. “You’ve ceded the field. Take off the coat.”

“No,” says Marfisa.

“Take it off!” The blades shake in his hands. A step toward her, another, those points lowering just to touch the fleece of the coat’s wide collar, there, and there, at either end of her clavicle. “I will have my coat,” he says.

“You’ll poke two more holes in it,” says Marfisa. “Go on. Deny the Queen her Outlaw. Render me to bone.”

Gaveston swallows. Gradasso in the doorway raises, lowers an empty hand. Ellen looks from Marfisa, still, unmoving, to Chilli, settling and resettling his grips about the hilts of those two swords. Floorboards creak, as out there Meg steps back.

“I have your sword,” says Chilli.

“That?” says Marfisa, with a nod for the sword to her left, short and simply plain, his right hand clutching yellowed leather. “That I stuck in the floor of Goodfellow’s house for all to see, and anyone to take, who’d need of it.”

He pressed forward, deepening the dimples in the fleece. She takes in a quick sharp breath through her nose. “You will,” he says. “Quit, these rooms.” Takes back a step. “Get yourself to that warehouse of clods and boobs, I don’t care. Take your books, your boxes, all your trash,” another step back, toward the door, blades in either hand still high, “but you will leave that blasted, rotten coat, you hear me?” Yellow beard stirred by his panting breath. “And if you ever show that horse’s head again, anywhere south and east of the Burnside Bridge, I’ll strike it from your shoulders to set before the Queen, gallowglas or no. Are we clear?”

Marfisa’s lips suggest the slightest smile.

“Gah!” Chilli stamps, whips both swords up and back, over either shoulder, pushes out between Pwyll and Gradasso, who duck to avoid the steel. Gaveston slips after. Meg leans in to swing the door shut with a massive, green-knuckled hand.

“That was,” says Ellen.

“Yes,” says Marfisa, stooping to pick up her bat.

“I lost that mask,” says Ellen.

“We’ll get more,” says Marfisa, thumbing the freshly rough-edged nick cut deeply in the barrel of the bat. “Don’t touch,” she says.

Ellen’s hand leaps away from the gold encasing her shoulder. The edges of it have gone lacey, darkly soft, crumbling here and there to pepper her breast and upper arm with flecks. “Marfisa?” she says, looking up. “What’s a gallowglas?”

That long and oval glass-topped table, covered over with the detritus of many hasty meals, crumpled paper napkins, plastic cups stacked and toppled, crushed, glass bottles that had once held soda, beer, kombucha, an unsteadily towering stack of emptied pizza boxes, and crumbs and dregs and half-dried spills. Bruno favors it all with a rueful smile. “It’s gotten a bit out of hand,” he says. “Cachaça?” Setting a burlapped bottle on a relatively uncluttered patch, and two squatly heavy glasses beside it.

“Sweetloaf could see to this, surely?” says Luys, pulling out a chair, as Bruno uncorks the bottle, sitting himself, as Bruno pours a glass, “Would this be the first call of an industrious morning for you,” he says, offering it up, “or the last stop of a long and wearisome night?” Luys shakes his head. Bruno shrugs, sets down the glass, and pours more in the second, the liquor clear and thin, the burble of it highly pitched. “So,” he says, and sits himself across from Luys, lifting the glass in a one-handed toast. “The meeting’s yours.”

Luys nods. His chamois shirt is rumpled, brown, unbuttoned at the throat, his black cap of hair discreetly tousled. “We ought,” he says, “begin to, discuss, what each we see as possible,” a breath, “roads,” he says, “to rapprochement.”

“But Mason,” says Bruno, smiling and frowning at once, “surely, you and I are friends.”

“Between her majesty,” says Luys, with a skeptically sour tang, “and his excellency,” and Bruno nods at that, mouthing a silent ah, “But why’s it we, who ought to do this thing?” he says, and takes a sip.

“Who else is there who might?” says Luys. “The Marquess, and the Soames, being at each other’s throat.”

“The Guisarme and the Glaive are brothers yet.”

“And doubtless seek roads of their own. Should our discussion bear fruit, we’ll no doubt share with them.”

“And vicey-versey, I suppose?” says Bruno. “The fruit of the roads we might glimpse,” he mutters, and swallows off what’s left.

“Your pardon?” says Luys.

Bruno leans out over the table to uncork the bottle. “What of our lady?” he says, and pours himself some more.

“Her grace?” says Luys. “She is where she is. We must steward her demesne, as best we can, till her return.”

“We,” says Bruno.

“Yes,” says Luys.

“You and I,” says Bruno.

Luys frowns. “If you must put it bluntly,” he says, his hand closing up on the tabletop. “But we do both have our help.”

“You’ve the men,” says Bruno, pointing with his glass, “I, the matériel,” drawing it back, “to put it bluntly.” He throws back the liquor in one quick gulp. “Too blunt?” he says, to answer the quizzical turn of Luys’s mien. Sets down the glass, clack. “North,” he says, tapping to one side of it. “Northeast,” the other, fingers and thumb pressed together. “Southwest,” he says, tapping to the one side again, “Northwest,” the other. “Mason,” he says, but this time does not tap, that hand resting over the empty glass, “and Shrieve.”

“You’d set us both at odds?”

“I was not the one to call this meeting,” says Bruno.

“A meeting to discuss!” cries Luys, throwing up his hands.

“Discussion,” says Bruno, “takes two. Two points of view. Two sides, as it were. Sat across a table. As for rapprochement, well: there must needs be a gap, between the two, to be rapproched.”

“You’d have us set at odds,” says Luys, shaking his head. “With all that’s happened, with all we have to face, between the Viscount, and the Queen, you want – ”

“You’ve sat in privy council with his excellency.”

“And you the Queen!” Luys falls back in his chair. “That’s what best fits us to this task – our vantage, jointly, is ideal, to scout what ground they hold in common, and, with our counsel, bend their ears to bend their steps to seek it.”

“We’d bend?” says Bruno. “The Queen, the Viscount, you would have us bend?”

“Away from senseless dispute? Back toward stability? Peace? Prosperity?” Luys leans forward, both hands on the cluttered table. “Every day, Shrieve. Each and every day, you take two deals, two angles, hands, and play them, to the betterment of both. This is what you do. This is your duty.”

“My duty’s to the Queen,” says Bruno, simply.

“By which you mean to say that mine is not.”

A moment passes, during which Bruno neither nods, nor shakes his head. Then with a sudden savage swing of both his arms Luys sweeps boxes, napkins, bottles and cans tumble crashing spinning clatter from tabletop to floor. Scrape as he pushes back his chair. “It’s much too early in the morning for such nonsense.”

“No, Mason. It’s far too late to play at comity.”

Luys gets to his feet. “That’s it, then?”

Bruno does not look up, or back, as Luys stalks around the foot of the table and out the trapezoidal room. He leans forward, then, to take hold of the other glass, still full, and drinks it down. “That might have been a wee bit premature,” he says, to no one in particular. Eyes the glass in his hand, twisting it back and forth. Reaches for the bottle, but pushes it away. Something rings, somewhere out behind him. “Mason?” he says, and gets to his feet.

“Shopkeep!” bellows someone away out there, and Bruno closes up his eyes.

Out in the big front room, floor of it unpainted planks lined and aisled with overflowing bins of fittings and hardware sorted by type, past the file of unhung doors leaned one against another along the wall, there’s the counter laden with Mason jars filled with keys, where the Harper Chillicoathe bangs a service bell with his fist, “Shopkeep!” he roars again, through laughter, “we’d have our wares inspected!” Pwyll and Gradasso to either side, arms folded, akimboed, Meg there in the vestibule, hands up to brace her weight against the lintel, Gaveston leaning in to nudge, to point out Bruno in the angled doorway. Chilli turns, thrusts up a hand gripped tight about the yellowed leather hilt of a short straight sword, “See what I have brought!”

“A sword,” says Bruno, still in the doorway. “All of you it took, to bring a sword?”

“With this,” Chilli shakes it, once, “I went and got this back!” Thrusting up his other hand, his own sword with its heavy golden pommel. “I beat her, Bruno. The Outlaw’s been rebuked. She’ll leave the rooms on Hawthorne and, I swear, won’t ever try to raid our portion again.”

Bruno looks down, adjusts his cuff, the link a small coin, brassy with a silver center, Good For One Fare, say letters stamped about the rim. “And it took all of you,” he says, looking up again, “to bring this thing about.”

Chilli lowers both his swords. “It’s been done,” he says. “What does it matter – ”

“Where is her grace?” says Bruno, simply.

“I,” says Chilli, “her grace, her grace is fine, I’m sure – ”

“That’s not,” says Bruno, “what I asked.” Stepping into the room, past a bin of filigreed hinges, “Where,” he says, past a bin of coppery lock plates, “at this precise moment,” up the aisle toward Chilli, “might I go,” as Gradasso steps to one side, out of the way, “to find her grace,” as Pwyll ducks into the vestibule with Meg, “the Duchess of Southeast,” as Gaveston steps back, “Widow of the Hawk, Queen’s Favorite,” as Chill, blades criss-crossed before him, glowers, “where is Jo Gallowglas,” says Bruno, “and why, under all the stars above, are you not watching over her, right now?”

It’s not a terribly thick folder she drops on the table, just a handful of freshly printed pages in a crisp blue jacket. Beside it she sets a spiral-bound stenographer’s pad and two ballpoint pens, clack, tack, and last, a short brown paper cup with the tags of a couple of teabags peeping from under its white plastic lid. Scrape as she pulls out a chrome-framed black-cushioned chair, creak as she settles her bulk in it. Her slacks a slickly brown, her half-zip pullover softly grey, her silver hair close-cropped. She opens the jacket, flips back the cover of the stenographer’s pad, takes up a pen, click-lick, click-lick, and squints at the woman across the battered table from her, younger, smaller, downright scrawny, wrists manacled to a bracket welded to the tabletop, arms bared and shoulders, shivering, dressed only in filthy jeans and a grey bralette, her hair-colored hair a matted, tangled curtain dropped before her face.

“Chilly?” says the silver-haired woman. Not even a clink of the cuffs in response.

“Okay!” Another click-lick of the pen. “This is Detective Sally Bauer, Bee Ay You Ee Are, on the Homicide Detail. Date is Friday, twenty-fifth May; time, oh-seven eighteen hours; case number,” and here she checks the first page of the file, “two seven two, four nine eight. We are currently in an interview room in the confines of the Portland Police Bureau, eleven-eleven Southwest Second, on the thirteenth floor.” Turning a page. “State your name for the record.” Looking up. That curtain of hair not even stirred by a breath.

“This strong and silent schtick won’t get you anywhere, okay? We took your prints. You’re in the system? We’ll know who you are in not too much longer. You’re not? Though, I gotta tell you, to look at you, this is not your first rodeo. Folks who, it’s their first time? Never been through this before? Tend to be a little more,” a shrug, “agitated.”

A shiver strong enough to chime the manacles.

“You want a blanket?” Turning another page. “Cup of coffee?” Lifting the lid of the paper cup to hoist and dunk the teabags. Replacing the lid. “Give me a name. That way, when your people call, they can be told where you are, what’s going on. You do have people?”

Removing the lid, setting it upside down on the table, she lifts out the teabags, squeezes them with a wince, drops them on the lid. Licks her thumb clean. “Look, the facts so far, not many of them, but, as-is, they’re not bad for you. Play straight with me, everything checks out, you don’t blow off Recog, you could be out of here by two, three o’clock in the afternoon. Not every day someone comes in with a body can say that.” Turning another page. “Before we get any further in this, were you Mirandized? Because the form is here, but quelle surprise, it’s unsigned.” A heavy sigh. “So, out of an abundance of caution. You. Have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law; you have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” Shuff as she flicks the page across the table to fetch up by the bracket. “Here,” tugging another pen from a pocket of her pullover, chucking it wobble to land with a limply flop on the page. “Gotta use one of those to sign it.”

Not a twitch from the hands on the other side of the bracket, streaked with dirt about the knuckles, the yet-green smear of a grass stain.

“I get it. Shit happens, in those camps. They aren’t safe. Big guy like that jumps you, in the dark? And maybe, we find out who he is, we find out he was off his meds, or should’ve been on some in the first place. There’s a gun. It goes off. You walk away; he doesn’t. It’s self defense, straight up. Cut and dried. So help me get it over the line. Give me something. Tell me. Is that, how it, went down?”

Sitting back, with a creak, in her chair. Folding her arms. Waiting. Watching, until, click-lack, she leans forward, drags the piece of paper back to her side of the table. Marks an X at the bottom, scrawls the date beside it. Stacks it with the other pages, taps them into a neat bundle, slips them into the jacket. “Oh seven twenty-two,” she says. “My shift ends at eight, which means about nine, nine-thirty, I should be done enough to get out of here, get a Denver omelet in me, get home and sleep for not nearly enough.” Scrape of the chair she pushes back. “So if this is all it’s gonna be?” Getting to her feet, closing the cover of the unused stenographer’s pad. “I’d just as soon be getting that whole process jump-started. So.” Tucking away her pens. “Your only chance of getting back on the street anytime today is about to walk out the door.”

“I did,” says the woman then, and Bauer starts at that, but blinking keeps any surprise off her face, “whatever it was I did.” That head lifting, tilting, matted hair falling away from her face, those thin pale lips, that nose, the mud-colored eyes. “You’re telling me what’s gonna happen because of what I did, it depends on how I talk to you, right here, right now.”

“It tells me what kind of person you are,” she says, “which, yeah, goes a long way toward figuring out what needs to happen.”

“Doesn’t sound much like justice.”

Sally snorts. “Sister, all anybody ever can do is work the problem in front of them. Justice has to sort itself out in the wash. You said, it’s mine. What were you talking about?”

Those flat eyes look away.

“It’s the only thing in Dunbar’s report that you said, to anybody. First on the scene, that’s what you said to him: it’s mine. What did you mean? What’s yours?” A moment, a blink. “The gun?”

That head lowers, hair falling strands and hanks a curtain once again. Sally looks away, a grimace of chagrin. “All right,” she says. “Fine,” she says, and heads for the door. “The interview is over.” Knocks loudly, twice. “Someone will be along to take you back down to Holding, in a bit.” Somewhere without a bolt’s undone, a knob is turned. “I’ll see you again in a couple of days, I’m sure.”

Head down, hood lowered, a grey-green mantle about his shoulders, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his running shoes once blue that take relentlessly one step after another, he makes his way down the block, across the street, down the next, past trim little bungalows in unassuming colors, and parked on the street before them bantamweight SUVs and beefy hatchbacks, many with ski racks or bicycle racks or ærodynamic carryalls fixed to their roofs. The sidewalk ahead’s blocked by thrown-together panels of chain-link to fence off a construction site, hung about with signs that say Apartments Coming September, Crutchfield Evans, Anaphenics, No Parking This Space. He steps into the narrow walkway protected from the street by Jersey barricades in orange and white, down to the corner, across the next intersection, without looking up or back.

Past the construction, more estate cars and bungalows, but also minivans and older sedans, and here and there houses more recently built, flatter, the windows of them duller, yards meaner, and what trees they have are yet too small to settle down behind. Music wafts his way, echoing chime of piano chords over a crisply languid beat. Up ahead, across the street, a half-dozen or so young men, boys, talking and laughing, shoving, mac ’n’ cheese an a snotty nose, Motel 6, lame trappin an some shoddy hoes, somebody blows a cloud of smoke, somebody twirls away, dropping in a complicated tuck and stretch to a clap and a slap and an ah-ha, oh yeah. His shoulders hunch even higher to carry him on past, deliberately refusing to wince as the laughter redoubles, rising, joining, becoming a ragged revving chorus on the beat, unh-huh, unh-huh, ha-ha! and very much without looking like he’s looking up or around he eyes the street behind him. A delivery tricycle’s trundling up, big yellow box over the back two wheels behind the saddle, This trike eats hunger for breakfast, says the slogan on the side of it, Ask our rider about B-shares, the cyclist pedaling furiously, bright green helmet and a blue rainshell, “Go on!” one of the young men shouts, and “Fuck yeah, motorvate!” another, and “I think I can I think I can” over a couple of chorused chugga-chuggas that all dissolves in general hilarity. The cyclist’s left hand lifts, bent at an angle, and the trike wheels into a right turn.

Head down, he keeps on.

A block or so later he darts across the street to the corner, the cross street here narrow, a low rise closely lined with smaller houses, cars and trucks parked heel-by-nose down either side. He heads down the slender single lane that’s left between them, past here and there a tell-tale yellow envelope of a parking ticket tucked under the wipers, and pasted on a windshield there a faded green label, Tow Warning, it says, PBOT. One door, two doors, three doors down, and he comes to a stop, there in the middle of the street, his narrow cheekbones hunched much like his shoulders.

The house is small, pale green, the front of it mostly a shallow gable swooping to shelter a front door the color of cinnamon, and pushing up from the little porch before it to waddle down those concrete steps a portly brindle pit bull.

He squeezes sidelong between bumpers, around the blue garbage bin on the curb to kneel there, on the sidewalk, at the edge of the yard. “Goose?” he says, putting out his hand, and the dog’s tail wags hard enough to unbalance its mincingly hastening. “How’d you get to be so old?” The dog leans into his proffered hand, tongue-lollingly beaming at the scritches.

“You know him?”

He takes a moment, and a breath, before looking up. “He’s just a good dog.”

She’s small, the woman on the porch, small enough her upswept bun of honey-silver hair seems too ponderous for the rest of her, draped in a shapeless purple sweater. “About the only person,” she says, “Gustav ever tolerated that from,” scratching her chin, “was my boy.” Folding up her arms.

His scritching’s shifted to stroking, a couple of pats. “That so.”

“Christian,” she says. And then, “Beaumont. My son, though you wouldn’t think it to look at him. Such a beautiful boy. You know him?”

A careful shrug, without exactly nodding, or shaking his head. “Did, ah,” he says, eyes on the dog gazing blissfully up at him, “did something happen?”

“He was always running off,” she says. “But he always came back. A wild boy, but not that wild. A few days, a week, at most.” He’s stopped stroking, but Gustav’s tail still wags. “Been gone all winter, though. Eight months, now, this time. He sure has taken a shine to you.”

He looks up again, blinking once, twice, to meet those pale grey eyes like water, like ice, faintly stern, vaguely suspicious. “I’m sure,” he says, and swallows, and starts again, “I’m sure, wherever he is, your son, he’s, he’s doing fine, just fine.”

“That so,” she says. “Well. I think, now, maybe, you best be about your business.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, getting to his feet. The pit bull gathers himself for a single baritone bark. “Gustav!” she chides.

“It’s okay, Goose,” he says. “You stay. You be a good boy.”

She comes down a step or two, eyeing him as he heads past the garbage bin, away on down the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Gustav still there at the edge of the yard, tail flagging, musters up one more bark. “Gustav,” she calls, still watching. “Get on back here.”

He sits up of a sudden, in that big round bed in the middle of the room, legs tangled in linens crisply striped with indigo. Leans forward, head in his hands, hands the heels of them rub at his eyes, shift as he sits up, slide down his cheeks, the faint rasp of yesterday’s stubble, lifting to push back what’s left of his hair.

He swings down his feet from the edge of the bed, bare feet that nestle in white shag carpet. Elbows on knees, bare knees, his head hung low. Up and standing then, all at once, stepping away from the bed toward the sweeping wall of glass. The sun is somewhere behind this room, blazing with daylight the city below, houses and low buildings across the bright river, traffic busy lined and crossed in a grid half-swallowed by green unruly overgrowth, and along this bank the towers of downtown deceptively sharp, brittle façades that shuffle themselves until it’s difficult to pick out the shape entire of this brick ziggurat, that slit-windowed tower, and so many panes of cool rain-colored glass, and only the one lone tower of pinkly amber granite behind them all defiantly itself, windows of it struck to copper by the light.

Turning away.

The bed, in the middle of the room, striped sheets rucked and crumpled there, and the pillows where his head had lain, more pillows stacked beside them neatly, and the crease and drape of the sheets there undisturbed. Two small nightstands, one to either side, the tops of them both bare, and an empty stretch of thick white carpet, and the wall behind, a palely neutral blue that’s almost white, the door there, left ajar, the shadowed hall beyond.

That hall jogs round a corner past a couple of closed doors to open out into an empty kitchen, unlit, dim haven from the dazzle of more white shag beyond, another wall of glass too bright. He leans a hand against the bare kitchen island and watches the big man move through all that daylight, stepping into a long low lunge of a stretch, twisting his torso the one way, the other, as he lifts both his arms out and up to the height of those thickset shoulders, muscles rolling and sliding along his broad bare back as he quite slowly supinates the one hand, pronates the other, looking away off to that side, and then just as slowly turns them about as his head twists to look the other way. Lowering his hands, then, straightening to his considerable height, iron-colored hair close-cropped, mustaches lush and long, gathered to either side of his close-lipped mouth by rough-hewn beads of pewter, and only a pair of snug white briefs about his hips. They share a look for one long wordless moment, and then those mustaches spread in a simple, guileless smile. “You remember,” says the big man.

“I remember last night,” he says, “astonishing enough. I remember,” trailing off. He doesn’t pull his hand away when it’s taken gently in that larger, rougher hand. “I don’t know what happened to my clothes,” he says.

“Ah,” he says, still smiling. “They’re being found, retrieved, and seen to.”

“Found,” he says, looking away. “Is there any coffee?”

“There can be,” he says, “and we have the makings of simple omelets, if you’d like,” but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t pull away. They stand there, hands clasped, on either side of the corner of the island.

“I remember last night, and the carnival,” he says, “and I remember you swore. You swore you’d keep me safe.”

“And here you are,” he says, “and you are safe.”

“I remember forgetting you,” he says, looking up again, looking back to him again, until he looks down, away, those weighted mustaches swaying. “I remember,” he says, “how much I forgot,” blinking rapidly as he looks back up to him, but he doesn’t pull his hand away, he squeezes instead, and closes his eyes, and tips down his head. Lets him turn that hand over, lets a thickly grey-furred thumb stroke the back of it gently, once, twice.

“Well,” he says then, thickly. “I’ll have to make certain that never happens again.” And he lifts that hand, to press a kiss to the back of it. To squeeze it with his own, another kiss parting his lips about the knuckles, a step to the side as he steps to the side, the corner no longer between them, pressing close, arms folded hands clasped between them as their lips meet in a kiss.

“Mine is the hand!” a howl from somewhere above. He looks away from the wide room ahead, back to the closed front door, the kitchen lemon-bright to one side, stairwell to the other, winding its way up. “Mine, the hand that writes upon the wall the name of God!” He swallows. Adjusts the knot in his tie of burgundy blue.

“Six are the wings unfolded from my face, and six times do they beat, and from them do I draw my quill! My ink!” That voice pummels the close walls as he climbs. “My ink the very dregs from your cups, and with it do I tally your numbers, many and all. Seven! Seven the wings that beat about my breast, but numberless the eyes within, and from them will I bring the scales that I must use to weigh you all, and find what you are wanting!”

He stops there, a handful of steps from the top, head down.

“Mine the mouth, to sheathe the burning blade! I am the one to draw it forth, when comes the time, and times, and the dividing of time!”

He resumes his climb, around and up into a ravaged hall, the carpet raked and tattered, crumpled walls smeared and splotted with ruddy brown. Two long ungainly feathered arms too skinny for the swollen hands at the ends of them, fleshy anchors twitching uselessly amongst fallen feathers and gypsum dust, and sat atop, a white-crowned pink-cheeked head, “My teeth, of iron! My nails of brass! I will devour, and break into pieces, and stamp the residue with my feet!” Spittle flecks those lips with foam, and spittle and tears shine the cheeks beneath wetly blazing eyes. “I will kill you all with death!” And jutting from the temple, he blinks to see it, the short plain handle of a knife, pale wood and two dull rivets smeared with blood, or something like it. “Minister to me! A thousand thousands, ten thousand times ten thousand stand!”

“Did you bring it?” says the Viscount Agravante, knelt at the other’s side, stripped to his shirtsleeves. “Rhythidd?”

“What?” he says, and “yes, of course,” lifting a heavy sack of blue velvet from a pocket. “Eagles and vultures,” the other’s muttering, “ravens and kites, and dogs. And owls.”

“Go on, then,” says Agravante.

“Yes,” he says, “of course, I should,” fastidiously hitching his trousers at the knee to kneel there, by the other. He tugs the sack open, and a horrid squeal wrenches from that jerking throat, “No! No! You cannot, will not, must not, no!” Rhythidd rears back from a skinny outthrust elbow rattling with pinions. Agravante leans his weight on fragile shoulders heaving, struggling to lift those uselessly enormous hands, “The blade, the pain, it’s cold but clear, that clarity is all, but gold? Dehab?” struggling, those wet eyes widen as Rhythidd tips out a palmful of brilliant dust, “That honey’s too, too warm, voluptuously sweet, do not, do not, you must not!” struggling uselessly.

“Go on,” says Agravante, stark.

“The flakes of my flesh are joined together, shut up as with a close seal,” the other, trembling with the effort of trying to lift that round little body those long frail arms against Agravante’s weight, “my very, nostrils, seething smoke,” twisting with a grimace from Rhythidd’s shining hand, “and my eyes,” a grunt, as Agravante shifts to free up a hand to grip that chin, those cheeks, to yank that head, turning the hilt back down beneath the gold, “the eyelids of morning,” a mutter squelched by pinch-squeezed lips. Rhythidd tips his hand to trickle a shining thread that spilling loops about the hilt, the black and sticky crust, hissing to fill the wound. “Sorrow!” a yelp, and one last straining push from those wrong-braced slender arms, “withers to joy at my feet!” as the last of the gold falls from Rhythidd’s palm.

“The blade,” says Agravante.

“My lord?” says Rhythidd.

With a snarl for Rhythidd’s consternated frown, Agravante plants a knee in the other’s belly, seizes the jutting hilt, though there’s no struggle now, no strain, just a drawn-out sigh as he draws it forth. Agravante sits back in a crackling flump of feathers, dropping that little knife. “More,” he says.

“My lord,” says Rhythidd, hoisting the sack. “There is no more.”

“It’s gone? All of it, gone?”

“Unless you wish to claw back what’s been portioned.”

“Even your Champoeg vault?”

“My lord,” says Rhythidd, “we must maintain reserves, in case of an, emergency,” starting, as with a plosive gasp Agravante giggles, a shivering mirthless whining laugh he stops up with the back of his hand.

“Actually,” the other says, “I’m already feeling much better.” Those hands, drawn back, no longer quite so large, as feathers drop from pimpled, thickening arms. “More myself.”

“There,” says Rhythidd, slumped against the crumbling wall, loose feathers lofted about the hand he lifts to his forehead. “Now, we might have this,” an airy gesture, at the wreckage all about, “dealt with.”

“Feel free,” says Agravante, tipping back his head, his long white dreads in sagging disarray.

“My lord,” says Rhythidd, consternation curdling. “I’ve no one here to see to it.”

“You came alone?”

“I even drove myself,” says Rhythidd. “On this, you were quite clear, and firm.”

“Then we are as you see us. Mix up the plaster and find us a trowel.”

“There’s no one here, but us? What of the Princess?”

Agravante looks away, down the hall, the door at the end there, padlock shut upon its hasp. “Safe, for the nonce. You’d have her take up a broom?”

“Excellency,” says Rhythidd, taken aback.

“His grace,” says Agravante, “got greedy.”

“The hell I did,” snarls the other, sitting up with a grimace. “Horse-headed asshole was the one did this, only it wasn’t your bitch of a sister.” Pointing an arm foreshortened to smears of blood dried dark, dragged down cracked and broken plaster. “That? Ain’t mine. Though it would’ve been. Should have been.” That arm joining the other wrapping both to cradle a belly pinkly wrinkled. “I had her in my mouth. Salt, and iron. And the heat,” that last word folded in a drawn-out groan.

“I should, perhaps,” says Rhythidd, but, “A moment,” says Agravante, a hand up in forbearance over the clenched and rocking figure of the other, who coughs, a laugh, “I’m more, myself, yes, but,” those small eyes squeezing shut, “not entirely. Candy floss.” Nostrils flare. Those eyes pop open. “Better’n nothing.”

“I must see to her highness.” Agravante stands, brushing feathers from his trousers.

Those eyes, that regard, woozily unfocused, turns to take in Rhythidd, who shifts his feet, but does not get to them, who lifts a hand, but does not sit up. He skews his necktie in a brusque attempt to straighten it. “I should,” he says, but doesn’t, his expression, clarifying, scums over with a greasy sheen of horror as the other, featherless, slumps forward, pushes up, on hands and knees. That white hair has resumed its wild corona, matted only a bit there by the ear, where what gold’s left drifts dustily to gleam a burgeoning shoulder. “My lord,” says Rhythidd, trying again. “This is not your grandfather.”

“This is necessary,” says Agravante, halfway down the hall.

“What of,” says Rhythidd, flinching as the other’s hand crumples the shoulder of his jacket, clinging, “my brother’s portion? How can you,” as the other seizes his tie, “what will you, what will you!” as a grey-pink tongue slips out to wet those pale pink lips. “Without me,” says Rhythidd. “He won’t give it to you without me!”

“We’ll make do,” says Agravante, reaching for the padlock. “At the moment, it’s come down to you, or me. My position’s,” looking back, “understandable.”

“Please,” says Rhythidd, the word stretched to a whisper.

The other chuckles, once. Feet kick, a briefly tumult in the feathers, and then the dull tock of a bit of bone, dropped to the carpet.

Ding the microwave, she opens the door of it, reaches in with a hot pad for a steaming yellow mug that says Ray of Fucking Sunshine. In she dunks a bright red seahorse infuser, dandling its delicate chain a moment. Color seeps.

Out of the kitchen, across the living room, dark wood paneling, grey-green shag, shuff of her bare feet into a shadowy nook of a hall. Nudging open a door into a small room filled with watery cloudy light from a sliding glass door, framed to either side by heavy curtains drawn. Around the foot of the great wide bed, messily unmade, to stand there by the glass, satiny tap pants in an antique beige and a scarf about her shoulders like a shawl. Sips her tea. Her hair’s been shorn to a yellow fuzzing the curve of her skull.

Lopped open on the bed a bright blue rolling duffel, and stuffed within it, spilling out of it over the rumpled duvet, scraps and shreds of satin, silks, clouds of tulle and filmy lace, diaphanous rayons, workaday nylon and lycra in competitive colors, here and there white cotton knit. Setting her tea aside she turns to it, shoving this bit in, tossing that out, whirl of dangling straps, clatter of fasteners striking the wall. Leaping up onto the bed to step across it, angry squonk of springs, she drops to the narrow space on the other side. Shelves there, opposite the glass, haphazardly piled with more clothing, and she seizes handfuls of leggings, T-shirts, stuffing them heedlessly into the duffel, snags a translucent tub filled with balled-up socks, dumps them in after.

Outside, a bug-eyed little hatchback, bright red with racing stripes, swings into the space before the glass. She opens the passenger door, climbs out, transparent raincoat over a neon bandeau, baggily shredded jeans. Under the glassy hood, her yellow hair’s cut short in back to swoop in lengthening, asymmetric sheaves about her face. She watches, for a moment, the room through the glass, before stepping up to rap it, smartly, with a knuckle.

She looks up from the duffel to see her there, without. Sets off around the bed, not over it, stooping before the glass door to pry something up, a sawn-off broomstick from the bottom rail, then straightening yanks on the unmoving handle, and again, rolling her eyes as on the other side of the glass she’s pointing to the latch that, clutching the scarf about her shoulders, she’s already undoing. The door slides open with an effortful squeal.

“May I come in?” she says.

“You still live here,” she says, turning away.

“I, ah,” she says, stepping within. “You cut your hair.”

“Got tired of not remembering how long it was, on any given day.” She shoves another handful of stuff in the duffel.

“We hadn’t seen you, at the warehouse. Not since – ”

“I haven’t been to the warehouse. I got this done,” a hand, lifted to her yellow fuzz, “at Rudy’s, on Division. Paid Bethany seventeen dollars, plus a five-dollar tip. And you don’t even know their names.”

She draws back. “What?”

“When you went behind the screen, for the, coat, your hair, the, the jeans, what is that, cybergrunge? Did you ask for that, like, specifically? Or was it more of a dealer’s choice?”

She looks down, transparent coat a-crinkle. “Aigulha,” she says. “And Costurere. Of course I know their names.”

“Well,” she says. “You did fuck them.”

“Is, is that what this is about?” Shaking her head. “That can’t be what this is about.”

“We swore,” she says, that word shored up with something like cold steel, “we were never going to do,” a breath, “that,” she says, “again.”

And at that, some uncertainty slips from the set of her shoulders. “It takes two to tango,” she says, without smiling, and yet.

“But only one to wallflower.” And then, before she can respond, “I push too far, you pull back, that’s the balance, that’s how we,” turning suddenly away, resettling the scarf about her shoulders. “Did you come here to get something, or,” wadding up a scrap of lace, stuffing it in the duffel.

“I told you,” she says, gently. “It’s been a couple of days. You haven’t answered your phone.”

“I need to charge it,” she snaps.

“Where are you going?” she says then, small and quiet.

She shakes out what she’s holding, spandex tights the color of lemon sherbet, rolls them tightly to lay them atop the pile in the duffel. “LA,” she says. “Reg knows somebody who knows somebody in Westwood, up in the hills. It’s a landmark, of Brutalist architecture, he says. Anyway. Cameron’s shooting there, next week.”

“Prescott?”

“Dameshek.”

“Wow. Just you?”

A shrug. “Three or four other girls. You know how it goes.” She plucks out something, ivory satin edged with lace, and lets the scarf slip from her shoulders. “Flight’s at four. It’s only sixty bucks.” Lifts it over her head to slip it on, a camisole.

“That’s a one-way price,” she says, once more small, and quiet. And then, shaking her head, “We’re shooting next week, too. We got the show.”

“Ah,” she says, looking through the glass to the car without. The driver’s still behind the wheel, anonymously hooded, a silhouette through the rain-spangled windscreen. “Turned out twins were enough, huh?”

“I’m sure he could make it work, if – ”

“What about our show, Chris?”

“It could,” she says, “still be three.”

“Strippers,” she says. “At an Exhibition. Remember? All our plans? What it was we were gonna do to take the world by the balls?”

“Pictures,” she says, “at an Ecdysis.”

“Who cares! Huh? Is it ever gonna happen, now? Ever?”

Staring then, glaring, each at the other, the one of them heaving angry breaths, the other preternaturally still. “What about the Queen?” she says.

“Oh,” she sneers, “I think you got that covered.” But then, blinking rapidly, she turns away, a shake of her head, hands casting about to settle on the duffel, close up the flap, zip it shut. “And anyway,” she says. “I can’t blow off Cameron Dameshek.”

“You told him about the hair?”

“He knows about the hair. He likes the hair. You should maybe try it, next time you’re in for a glow-up.” Hauling the duffel off the bed, setting it upright on the floor.

“Stef,” she says, her hand on the handle of the glass door. Looking up, across the bed, to her. “I love you,” she says.

“Sure,” she says. “Like that’s got fuck-all to do with anything.”

His one shoe propped on the pallet, nylon that might’ve been blue, and silver stripes long since gone lustreless, hands stuffed in the pockets of his oversized hoodie, greyly green, or maybe a greenish grey, he’s looking out over the great wide knee-high tub, bound about by riveted iron, wide enough his skinny arms stretched wide could never reach across it. Over on the other side, sharp Jenny Rye steps up, her dutiful scowl underlit by gold to shift and soften into something no less stern, but gone’s all trace of pettiness, or of resentiment. She favors him with a nod of recognition that startled he returns, and then she leans out to scrape a teacup through all that golden dust, draws it up to wave beneath her nose, careful of her chin, savoring something about it before she tucks it teacup and all away in a pocket of her coveralls. Up steps Brether Ned, ponderously kneeling to dip in a hand, pinching up a goodly amount between spatulate fingers and thumb that he drizzles into an opened handkerchief, and paint-spattered Getulos, dunking a stripped tin can, and Trucos behind him, holding out both hands for what Getulos lets spill.

He shifts his shoe from off the pallet to squat, lean over, reach within but not to touch, the back of his closed fist no more than an inch above that warmly golden light. Unfolding his fingers, haze-edged silhouettes almost lost in the brilliance. Cheekbones hunching, he squints at the inside of the wall of the tub. Splays his hand along the oaken staves bound tightly, uncaulked, one against another. Difficult to make out in the effulgence, but a glimmer grits the gloss of the wood, up from the tip of his little finger, there, just above the burning surface, up and up to about the end of his thumb, a bit yet below the lip of it. He drags a fingertip up against the wood, gets to his feet as he eyes it judiciously, the pale pad glittering, granules of gold trapped in the whorls of the print. Turning away from the tub he nearly crashes clank and chime into a short woman peering thickly at him, leather jacket and something, a great big sword leaned up against her shoulder, “Hey,” she says, “buddy, you okay?” He waves her off with his other hand, ducking his shoulders to swerve away, the one hand still held up to his nose, his mouth, his lips, that glimmering finger brushing his

“oh,” says Christian Beaumont, turning to look back at that wide and shining tub, out in the middle of it all.

“Okay, everybody!” calls the woman with the great big sword. “Gather round! It’s here, folks, it’s here! Go on, open those up,” one hand balancing the weight of the scabbard, pointing with the other to the stalls along the wall, the overhead doors in each of them, some of them already open, some rattling up as she’s calling, and hands hasten to open up the rest, “let’s go, everybody, here she comes, it’s here!”

Down from the walkway above the empty, unlit stage, Gloria Monday’s making her way down the skeletal stairs, baggy sweatshirt and knee-length purple tights, her bangs dyed freshly pink. She stoops under the rising big overhead door there, and everybody follows, out through the stalls and doors to the loading dock outside.

A battleship of a pickup’s parked on the street, snugged right up next to the dock, black paint gleaming, dealer’s sticker still pasted in a window. Hiked up over the tailgate a gooseneck hitch hooked to a long and empty flatbed trailer, clad in corrugated steel. Gloria nimbly leaps from dock to trailer, clang of the impact, “Okay!” she shouts. “All right.” Lifting her arms to address them all, a benediction, an adjuration, a conductor’s imperation, or a conjurer’s. “This?” she says, “all of you, here, now?” and those upraised hands close in fists of acclamation, “this is not what I had in mind!” Those hands clap together, pop! “But that’s okay! That’s okay. This is not what I made, not at all. It’s what we all have made, together,” quick shake of her head, spreading her hands, allegro, vivace, she bulls her way through, “the, art, the food, the, the home! That we have made. The community! That we have all, together. It’s, a wonderful thing! A wondrous thing.” Lowering her hands, clenched again in fists, ritenuto. “And it should be celebrated. It should be seen! And this?” stepping back, to one side, “this is how,” a sweeping gesture, mostrare, for the shining flatbed stretched beneath her feet, “this is how we make that happen!”

Some of them already coming down off the loading dock, the stairs there, and there, the ramp at the end, or just dropping down to the street, running their hands over shining corrugations, inspecting the hitch, the grimly oversized grille of the truck, and Big Jim leaning an elbow out the window of it, grinning under his thick mustache. “One week from today, from tonight!” Gloria’s saying, “Downtown! The Rose Festival’s gonna crescendo with the Starlight Parade! And this?” Clangingly stomping the flatbed. “This is gonna be our float! We are gonna ride this,” another stomp, “into the parade! Into legend! So! Start thinking up what we might wanna do, here. What are we gonna build? What’s it gonna be? It could be, anything. Anything. Sky’s the limit. Whatever you need to make it happen, lumber, lights, giant buckets of papier-mâché, I don’t know, truckloads of flowers, tell me! And I will make! It! Happen!” Fists waved over her head, but faltering, lowering herky-jerkily, frowning at the lack of applause, the dearth of enthusiasm, the wholesale shift of attention from her, and the truck, and the trailer, to something, someone stepping out from under the big overhead door, dressed in loosely flowing whites, black curls undone, the Queen, making her way implacably through the crowd as it bustles to part before her, with curtsies, and with bows, heads ducked, hands folded, with fingers lifted to murmuring lips, with eyes that shine. She holds a hand up warily, as if to indicate her intended path, the palm of it and the fingers slathered with gold, and her gold-dipped feet are bare. She passes without comment or acknowledgement, down to the ramp at the end of the dock, white robe lofting behind her as she strides off down the street, each step a golden print to mark the dull black tarmacadam, and all the crowd left awestruck as she goes.

“What the hell was that,” says Gloria Monday.

“You know,” she says, “you know, where it comes from. You know. You know. I had the papers. I had them. The, the, the, injections, the vaccinations, they don’t, they don’t inoculate, they don’t, no, no! They don’t, they don’t put anything in, they don’t they don’t, they, sugar water. That’s all. Sugar. Water. I had the papers. No,” pushing back her hair, shoving back, down, stiffly crackle of too much old product, “no, what they do, what they do, they’re taking out. They’re taking it out. They’re taking out,” leaning close, “the blood.”

Jo clutches a rough green blanket close about her shoulders, shifts away on the bright steel bench. Leans back against the slick-tiled wall. Closes her eyes again.

“I had the papers. I had the papers. They took my papers, they took, they took them. The papers proved it. The papers proved it, in a court of law. A court of law. They take the blood, they use the needles, they use needles to take the blood because they’re scary, because needles are scary, they scare you to get the fight or flight, fight, or flight, to juice the blood, juice the blood with adrenaline, excite the adrenergic receptors, the papers, they took my papers, they took my papers and my laces.” Shuffle-flop of undone shoe about a restless foot. “Fight or flight. Fight or flight. It burns adrenaline, it burns the adrenaline, tightening muscles, dilating pupils, juicing the blood, isozymes and transferases, it was in the papers. They took my papers. To burn the adrenaline. Burn it right up. Ox-i-dize it. Carbon. Hydrogen. Nitrogen. Oxygen, whoosh to juice the blood, they take it, they take it, they inject the sugar water, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen tangled, aitch-two-oh, they inject it so they can outject, eject, take the blood, burning blood, adrenochrome, adrenochrome.”

Jo opens her eyes. The woman at the other end of the bench sags forward, elbows on knees, ragged hem of torn-off jeans, grease-stained yellow blouse, light brown hair like straw. “Adrenochrome,” she says, once more, her hands a-dangle below her lowered face. Across the room, past the empty steel bench stretched down the middle of it, the third steel bench against the opposite wall, three women side-by-side, puffy vest, vinyl skirt, cartoonish orange hair, baggy trousers, hiss and snap of a bubble of gum, slow whining whisper of a welling snore.

“It’s pink,” says the woman beside her, and the gum-chewer rolls her eyes. “It’s pink, when it’s first extracted, it’s pink, but if you burn it, if you burn it, I had pictures, in my papers, they took my papers, but it’s pink until you burn it, when you burn it, it turns brown, and then it’s black, a sheet of black, but not like ash, it shines, ash doesn’t shine, you burn it black until it shines, sticky and black and spread out on trays to shine and when you hit it,” smack! of her fist against her palm, and the snoring woman starts awake. “When you hit it,” she swings her fist again, stopping short of her palm, wavering there, relaxing, opening, “it shatters,” she says. “And you hit it, and you hit it,” clap, clap, “and you grind it, to a powder, when you do, it turns to silver, silver powder, piles and piles of silver powder. That’s why they do it, for the powder. Juice the blood for silver, that’s how lizards live forever. I had papers. I had the papers, in my folders, but they took them. They took my papers, and my pictures, and my laces, took my belt, they took the blood! Fight or flight to juice the blood, burn the juice for silver powder, I had the papers, you know I had the papers, it’s all in my papers, that’s the proof.” Rocking on the bench, one hand reached across to clutch, to knead her shoulder, “You know,” she’s saying. “You know where it comes from. I had the papers. It’s all in there. That’s why they took it. Fight or flight, the needles, juice the blood. Crush it into silver, sugar water. Sugar.” Her rocking slows. She takes a deep and gentling breath. “You know,” she says, and closes her eyes.

Jo opens hers, essays a sidelong look. The woman, still holding her shoulder with a slackening hand, crisp-haired head tipped back against white tiles, asleep. Shifting, working her head back and forth, Jo stretches out her legs, up her arms, lunging to catch the blanket as it slips. Looking about. She frowns.

The three women across the room, the one in the puffy ski vest, her head’s tipped forward chin on chest, the one in the middle, knees jackknifed, hiking that vinyl skirt, she’s sagged to one side, pillowed on the shoulder of the third, her head tipped back, cartoon orange bouffant crushed against the tiles, the snuffle of a snore resumed. She’s asleep. They’re all asleep.

Jo gets to her feet, paper slippers crinkling. Out into the space between benches, past the toilet and the sink there, dulled hunks of stainless steel obscenely sprouted from the wall, up to the thick round bars of the door of the cell. Taking hold she presses close, looks out into the hall, blank cinderblocks of a white that seems at once dingy and freshly painted, speckled linoleum scuffed and scarred, to the left, the right, she starts. Somebody’s slumped on the floor there, a woman in a uniform of clashing greens, legs splayed out at an awkward angle like the truncheon from her duty belt, eyes shut, unconscious, asleep, maybe asleep.

The bars thrum under her hands with a weighty thunk, she lets go, steps back, a clack, somewhere a clank. Tentatively, she pushes the bars. They slide to one side easily with a well-greased hiss.

After a moment, she shuffles out into the hall.

Past the sleeping deputy, under a bank of fluorescents that snaps off, stutters back to life. Some alarm, buzzing ahead, cuts off with a tinny ding, she stops a moment, listening. Steps out of the rustling paper slippers, leaves them behind.

Around a corner, past an alcove, another green-clad deputy collapsed over a boxy camera-printer before a lit wall hashed with height marks, five foot, five foot six, six foot. Out in the empty utilitarian lobby, glass doors reflect harsh light against the dimness of what looks to be a parking garage beyond. In the middle of the floor a police officer’s sprawled atop a big round-shouldered man in a sleeveless hoodie, arms cruelly bound by whitely stretched zip-ties, the sluff and wheeze of sleeping breath, bubbling catch of a snore, the scribble-scratch of nib on paper. Someone’s writing something.

Across from the doors a counter takes up most of the wall, topped by panes of glass a handspan thick. Behind it, a woman in a charcoal suit, her hair all tiny corkscrew curls of brown and gold hung loose about her face, “A moment,” she says, without looking up from her calligraphy.

Those two, asleep, the cop in his blacks and tactical vest lifted slowly, lowered, by the gently inexorable lungs of the man beneath. Her bare feet filthy on the scrubbed linoleum, nail of one big toe a dead grey curl. She starts as the buzzing alarm kicks off again, an elevator door trying to close itself beside her, track blocked by someone’s heedless, green-sleeved arm, an ugly black watch about the wrist.

The woman behind the counter tucks away a thick-barreled pen of ruby tortoiseshell, lifts up her sheet of paper, eyeing the loops and whorls inked over it. “A moment more,” she says, over the relentless buzz. Turning she reaches over the deputy asleep beside her to lift the lid of something, a copier, a scanner, she’s laying the paper on the glass.

“You did this?” calls Jo.

The woman, bent over, eyes a monitor over the deputy’s shoulder. “You’ll have to be more specific,” she says, loudly dull through the glass. Clack of keys, a sideways sliding flare of light.

“Okay,” says Jo. “Who are you? What have you done? What the, shit,” as the buzzing shuts off again with a ding, the elevator door sighing back open in silence. “What the hell is going on?”

“Mrs. Upchurch,” says the woman, looking up from the monitor with a pinched smile that doesn’t reach her carefully painted eyes. “You’re being extracted.”

“Is that so.”

“Had I not been called away last night,” another key-clack, she does something with the mouse, “things would not have gotten so out of hand.”

“So,” says Jo, “you, sent that other guy, instead?”

“Mr. Loudermilk,” she’s lifting the lid of the scanner, “was there on other business entirely, and not at all prepared for what he found.” Lifting the paper from the glass, she folds it once, and then again, impressing the creases with quick sure swipes. “The situation’s more fluid than it seems.”

“But you, ah,” Jo swallows, “you’re good. You got this.”

Another fold. “They’ll wake up, soon enough. They’ll be vaguely embarrassed, and unable to keep in mind the matter of a woman, brought in for questioning in last night’s shooting,” swipe, “and,” she says, “if they do think to look in their files for any such reports?” She lifts her hands, empty of any paper at all.

“Neat trick,” says Jo. “Maybe next, you can pull a pair of shoes out of a hat? Or a,” whirring, the elevator door’s sliding shut again, fetching up against that prostrate wrist, and there’s the frustrated alarm again, “shirt,” says Jo, over the buzz, “hang on, let me just,” heading for the elevator, but “Wait!” says Mrs. Upchurch, hastening down to the end of the counter, “you cannot disturb – ”

Jo, stooped over the deputy’s arm, looks over, back, her eyes meeting Mrs. Upchurch’s for one charged instant.

“Don’t,” says Mrs. Upchurch.

Jo slips through the gap, into the elevator, dragging the arm in after. The buzz cuts off as the door slides shut on Mrs. Upchurch’s lunging scowl. Jo’s pressing every button she can on the panel, but only the one that says L lights up. She stabs it again and again with her finger. The elevator starts up.

Sudden squawk of an electric guitar, she jumps, sinister noodling that overdubs an echoing cascade, she rears back against the elevator wall as the drums kick in and the rest of the band revs up before it cuts off to start all over again, the snarling guitar by itself, a ringtone, the phone, there, in the deputy’s other hand. She resettles the blanket about her shoulders. The elevator haltingly stops, with a ding, the door sliding open, and as it does Mrs. Upchurch reaches in to seize the blanket below her chin and haul her stumbling into an unlit lobby, and swung about by the force of it Jo wriggles free of the blanket bare feet slap the carpet crouching, arms a-ready, closed doors down the hall behind her, to the side, but daylight vaguely shining from the hall away down there, and Mrs. Upchurch stood before it. “Listen,” says Jo, “lady, I – ”

“Joliet Kendal Maguire, you will listen to me,” hisses Mrs. Upchurch. “I know,” she says. “I know when you finally made up your mind. I know why you left. I know how it was you managed to come back. I even know where you learned to ride a horse, and who the father would have been. But most of all, girl, I know what’s embedded in your heart. You cannot surprise me, and you will not thwart me. Are we clear?”

Jo, still crouched, takes a breath. “Okay,” she says. “Sure. Except the whole what the fuck you want to do with me bit.” One of her arms drawn back, her hand closed over her breast.

Straightening and softening at once, Mrs. Upchurch offers the blanket, “It’s not you,” she says. “It’s that.”

Jo lifts her hand away, “This?” she says. The pucker in her skin just visible over the hem of the bralette. “You can have it. Please, take it, I insist,” but Mrs. Upchurch, still holding out the blanket, shakes her head. “It’s not that simple,” she says.

“Why would it be,” says Jo, and takes the blanket.

“The qlifot’s embedded, in you. Until it’s done, there’s nothing to be done.”

“Qliphoth?” says Jo, trying the taste of it, “huh. We’ve been calling it quicksmoke.” Looking down, as she drapes the blanket about her shoulders, “I mean, it’s not either, at the moment, but trust me.” And then, “You’re a wizard, right?” and when Mrs. Upchurch, frowning, opens her mouth to demur, “I mean,” says Jo, “you know shit. So. What happens, to the seed, when the flower sprouts?”

“You,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “are not a seed, that,” and then, composing herself, “there are points,” she says, “where similes fail. That’s not a seed. There is no seed. And what comes, when it comes, will not be a flower.”

“Whatever it is,” says Jo, “it’s something you want, isn’t it. Something powerful.”

“It’s necessary,” says Mrs. Upchurch.

“Yeah,” says Jo, looking away. “I bet you say that to all the girls.” Across the lobby from the elevator bank a display cabinet, and pinned within, curled and fading drawings in crayon and marker of police cars and police boats and helicopters, cops in black uniforms, and blue, guns in their hands, robbers with striped shirts and domino masks, and great big sacks of loot, Our Neighbors, say letters cut from construction paper, The Police. A notice in the corner says Mr. Chheda’s Third Grade Class, Beverly Cleary Elementary. Light catches and drags across the dusty glass of it, shifting, brightening. Jo frowns. “We should go,” Mrs. Upchurch is saying, “they’ll be waking soon.”

“Was there anything else?” says Jo.

“What?”

“Was there anything,” starts Jo, sharply, and then, “did they grab any of my stuff? My phone, the, the gun? Or Jack, did they pick up Jack, too? Or May? Was there anything else?”

“There’s nothing left,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “that’ll lead them back to you.” The light behind her welling.

“That’s not what I’m – ”

“We don’t have time for this. We have to go. We should’ve gone already. What is that.”

That light, warming, swelling, reaches the lobby, flooding in to brighten everything, gleam trim and blaze the elevator doors, dazzle the glass, lap the walls and wash over them both as they turn to see the source of it, marching up the hall toward them.

“Did you know?” says Mrs. Upchurch, a hand lifted to shield her eyes, but her words can’t be made out over the brilliance. She tries again, shouting, “Did you know!” but the terror in Jo’s face, and the awe.

“The moon, under her feet,” says Mrs. Upchurch, unheard in all that light. “About her head, a dozen stars, a crown.”

The Queen enters the lobby, each of her steps a crack of dawn, and daylight flares from the sweep of her hands as she lifts them, shines from her blackly lustrous curls, burns from her terrible green gaze. “Jo,” she says, and it’s all so bright. Jo’s closed up her eyes.

Mrs. Upchurch flinches as it all turns to regard her. “You have brought her forth already,” says her majesty, her words at once quite close and much too far away. “That will go well for you. Release her to us now.”

“Of course,” says Mrs. Upchurch, quickly, flatly, small, and that’s when Jo with a startling yelp begins to laugh, or sob, it’s hard to say.

This tub’s of beaten copper, not of wood, set in the midst of the trim green lawn stretched flatly out to parapets of brick. Panels of palest gauzy blue shiver in an intermittent breeze, screening the tub from the backsides of the buildings at the high end of the block. Above, shreds and scuds of darkening clouds slink from the setting sun, and those last bright beams of daylight strike window-glass and metalled trim, shine slantwise over graveled roof and silhouetted copse, softening as they fall to wash the edges and details away, dissolving all that distance to a deepening haze outshone already by storefront and streetlit intersection, artificial colors sharper, more precise, though small, and thin, to be so sharp. Jo’s sat at the one end, shoulders lapped by faintly steaming water, head hung low. Knelt behind her on the grass Queen Ysabel in a rough white robe, leaned over the beaten rim of the tub to rub and knead Jo’s wet-dark hair with sopping clouds of suds. Jo flinches, and she halts, her hands become cradles, “Did they hurt you?”

“They, ah,” says Jo, turning away, “they weren’t that careful, putting me in the car.”

Her hands now combs, to sluice away the suds. “My poor Gallowglas.”

“Are we done?” Slop of water restless against copper.

“Rinse,” says Ysabel, lifting away her hands to blot them, front and back, on the nubbled lapels of her robe. Jo dunks her head, then pushes out into the middle of the bath, her wake a soapy iridescence. Ysabel looks back, over her shoulder, “It seems it’s time,” she says, to no one in particular, “for refreshment, and illumination.” Parting those lapels to draw aside, let slip, down her arms and off. She lifts a bare leg over the rim, slowly to settle herself with a beatific wince, the water displaced rolled silkily across to lick the edges, lift Jo’s hair, brush her ducked chin as she looks away. The sun gone down, away behind the hills, the city turned toward night below. “Quite the spread,” she says. “Those from the old place?” She’s pointing, down the lawn yet glimmering to the angled shadow-shapes of a couple of empty Adirondack chairs.

“You know, I think they are?” says Ysabel. “Gloria hasn’t bought anything like that.” Leaning back to soak her curls, sighing extravagantly. “We can have them taken back, if you’d prefer.”

“What?” says Jo. “No, I don’t,” something, a flicker, she turns back to see the surface of the bath now littered with floating candles, a dozen or so, and Ysabel, smiling in their lambent glow. A small tray’s been set beside her, on a stand, and on it a bottle in a silver pail, two slender fluted glasses. “What’s that?” says Jo.

“Vodka,” says Ysabel, plucking the stopper from the bottle, “infused with tarragon,” pouring a gelidly viscous trickle, “and kept on ice,” into one glass, then the other, “all day.”

“So,” says Jo, eyeing the liquor palely green that half-fills the glass she’s offered. “That’s a thing.”

“Don’t sip,” says Ysabel. “Not yet. We must have a toast.” A small brass box has been placed on the tray where the glasses had stood, and she flicks it open with a fingertip, prising out two slim brown cigarettes. Leaning forward, she tops one toward Jo, who shakes her head. “For the toast,” says Ysabel. “A sip of liquor, through a mouthful of smoke. The spice,” waggling the proffered cigarette, “complements the herb,” lifting her own fluted glass.

“Clove?”

“Of course.”

“I’m trying to quit.”

“I know. But one, just one, won’t hurt. I am the Queen; I do so decree it.”

“Is that how it works.” Jo takes the cigarette, and lights it, following Ysabel’s lead, by bending over one of the floating candle-flames. A long and crackling drag. “My God,” she says, sunk back in water, cigarette and glass held high.

“We toast,” says Ysabel, enbowed in curling smoke and steam, “then inhale, then sip.”

“Complicated,” says Jo, sitting up, inclining her glass toward Ysabel’s. “To what?”

“To your return.” Clink of glass on glass, but Ysabel pauses, frowning, in the act of lifting her cigarette.

“I, ah,” says Jo, her glass unmoved, her cigarette aside.

“You’re back, and you’ve come back. What else could there be?”

The two of them, there, in that tub, flickeringly lit from below as night settles about them, Ysabel sat up, leaned forward, Jo almost submerged, and only her head and laden hands to break the surface.

“I haven’t,” says Ysabel, then, “asked. Anyone. Not since you told me you did not, again.”

“So, what,” says Jo, “you’re coming up on your thirty-day sobriety chip?” and then, almost immediately, “I’m sorry,” she says, looking away, the steam.

“It’s only been three weeks,” says Ysabel, quietly.

“Shit,” says Jo.

“Since we restored the owr.”

“Cinco de Mayo, yeah.”

“I’ve asked no one but you, that once, since then.”

“What,” says Jo, “what is that, what does that even mean.”

“They’re free,” says Ysabel. “All of them. Freed of the burden of the answer they’d given. And some of them, many, did leave. Go on to live their lives elsewhere, and they’re happy, I suppose, but those who stayed? Anna, my mother’s amanuensis, and Petra B from the coffee shop, with her camera? The Starling, and Chrissie, and her sister? Melissa, and Gloria our Chatelaine, who’s somehow made this house into a splendid palace, for a queen,” she takes a gliding slowly closer lowering step, glass and cigarette both high in one hand, her other reaching, her fingertips to brush Jo’s cheek. “There is room here, in this house, for you.”

Jo, eyes closed, takes in a breath. “I have to go back,” she says.

“What?”

Hiss of cigarette dropped in vodka, “I don’t know,” Jo’s saying, turning away, “if they’re okay, I don’t know if they got picked up, too,” gripping the rim of the tub, “if May or Hector,” glass held high as over she throws a dripping leg, “fuck, Jack, he could’ve been in the next cell over, I never would’ve known,” looking to set it down on the tray, but the pail’s gone, and the brass box, and in their place a stack of neatly folded towels. “I gotta go back,” she says, and lets her glass drop to the lawn.

“You’ve got to do no such thing,” says Ysabel.

“You weren’t there.” Jo seizes a towel, shaking it out. “You didn’t see what they did, the cops, when they showed up in force.” Wrapping it about herself. “Yanking people around, smashing shit up, like they were pissed,” tucking it close, above her breast, “they had to be there at all, and they were gonna take it out, on whatever they could reach.”

“There is nothing you can do tonight,” says Ysabel, “that you cannot do as well, or better, tomorrow.”

“Is that how it is,” says Jo. “Your majesty.”

Something, some tension, slips, or shifts, in Ysabel’s expression, “Don’t,” she says. “Not between us, Jo,” and a swallow. “Please,” she says. “Do not.”

“What else, am I supposed to say? You’re the, the Queen. I’m just, a lowly Duchess, or whatever. You conjured up a hot tub, on a lawn, on the roof of your fucking palace. You,” she says, catching her breath, “you were, lit up, like the goddamn sun, Ysabel. How do you even do that.”

“I was furious,” says Ysabel. “When your Shrieve told me what the Harper had done.” Turning to her cigarette. “I should’ve assembled the knights,” she says, and lets out a cloud of smoke.

“I doubt it would’ve gone any better,” says Jo, “you’d rolled up with an army.”

“Well.” Ysabel sits up in the water, drinks off her vodka in a swallow. “It’s not an army, or a sun, we’ve sent to chastise Chillicoathe.”

“What?” says Jo, her hand closed over the knot tucked in her towel. “Why?”

“He betrayed your grace. Sold you, his leige, for a moment’s advantage in a silly feud. He’ll have to face our Huntsman.”

A blink, looking away. Looking back. “Who?”

“Melissa Gallowglas. Don’t be jealous, Jo. We are the Queen. We must have a Huntsman.”

“Ysabel,” says Jo. “My God. What have you done.”

Over the door, red neon letters, VERN, they brightly say, the T and the A before them hung lightlessly from the crumpled frame. A boxy car pulls up beneath, the color uncertain in this light, dark green, perhaps, or purple. The back door on the sidewalk side pops open, letting out a bluesy riff, a chanting voice, got a good thing going, God damn, gotta give it to you, girl, you got game. Somebody’s climbing out, but even as bootheels hit the curb she’s rolling over, reaching back, jingle of buckles as she hauls out a bundle long and heavily awkward, “Careful!” calls the driver, over the music. “Heck is that, anyway, is that a sword?”

“Yeah,” she says, rough with effort, “a goddamn,” yank, “sword,” stepping back, swung around to clang the tip of it planted on pavement, scabbard rising wooden frame and iron fittings, thickly felted wool, handle of it long and straight above the wide strong quillions, topped by a gleaming faceted pommel. “Gonna take it in there, put the fear of God in some asshole, because that is apparently what I do, these days.”

“You?” says the driver, leaned back, peering up. “With that?”

Leaned there, hands on the quillions, motorcycle jacket over her sundress of pink and spangled marigolds, she lets out a bark of a laugh. “As if. This?” hefting, dropping, clang and chime, “it’s a prop, for a music video. Band’s inside.”

“Hey!” he says, leaning even further back as she’s about to close the door. “You can leave a tip in the app, whenever you want.”

“Sure thing,” she says, shutting the door. Watches the car pull away. Gripping the hilt with a grimace she yanks, lifts, the long and leather-wrapped ricasso tugged free of the quilted throat, and then, there, an inch, another, of the bare steel blade, sharply gleaming in the mean red light. She drives it home with a grunt. Hauls the scabbard up to brace the weight of it against her shoulder, tipped back the hilt and quillions, weight of it balanced by her hand laid lightly. The door there, under the light, a sign by the narrow window of it, NO MINORS, it says, Permitted Anywhere On This Premises. “Well,” she says, “here we go,” and makes her way up the poured concrete steps to take hold of the handle of it.