An officer in black beckons from poured concrete steps, “Who’s got the scene?” she calls to him, pointing to a van parked close by the curb, Portland Police it says on the side, Forensic Evidence Division.

“Logan,” he says, “and what’s her name. Hidaka.”

“Fuck,” under her breath. “They done with the fibers and shit? Because I am not putting on a bunny sut.” Her white pullover gone pale magenta in this light, her close-cropped silver hair stained pink, tipped back, she’s looking up, VERN, say those lit-up letters above them, lurid, red.

He holds out a pair of paper booties. “You’re gonna want these.”

Inside, the bar’s lit up in jukebox colors diffusely dim, a woman behind the bar, man on the stool before her, coffee cup in hand, “Bartender,” says the officer, “waitstaff, they didn’t see it go down, but they got good looks at the perp.”

“And have their statements been taken?”

“Of course.”

“Cut ’em loose.” She sets a couple of business cards on the bar, snap. “It’s two o’clock in the morning.” Sends them skating away with a flick of her fingers to fetch up next to the coffee cup. “Get yourselves home. Call if you think of anything. Detective Bauer.”

“We gotta lock up when you’re done,” says the man on the stool.

“Then, as quick as we can. So! Officer…”

“Villaraldo,” he says, tapping the nametag there on his tactical vest, but she’s bent over, tugging a bootie on over a hiking boot. “Corey Villaraldo. We’ve met, like, before.”

“What is this, Officer Villaraldo, number thirty-six for the year?” Yanking the elastic of the other bootie over and around her heel. “And it’s not even June.”

“I thought last night was thirty-six. Out by the airport?”

“What out by the airport.”

“I thought,” he’s frowning, “you caught it.”

“Officer Villaraldo,” she says, straightening, “I caught a body, last night? Out by the airport? I’d be sleeping in, working that, and it’d be Christgau here, having to deal with Ted the FED.” She points toward the back of the bar. “I presume the scene’s through there?”

Past a service window that opens on a still white kitchen, through a low wide doorway into the side room, the dimness here shoved aside by bright white worklights set on tripods at the far end, relentlessly revealing the scuffs that draggle the carpet, the chips and dings in the formica, the rips in the leatherette, the dust that glazes the video poker screens, the nubbled nap of bright green felt, but the lake of blood’s still somehow resolutely dark, harsh highlights struck from the glossily untroubled surface of it, but otherwise quite black. In the middle of it, slumped against one cyclopean leg of the pool table, black boots tipped over, bare knees crooked, marred by streaks and laps of the only red the blood can muster, a motorcycle jacket skewed open over the ruin of a sundress. Two figures in coveralls shapelessly white in all that brightness, one of them cradling the long lens of a camera, lifting it to snap a photo, the other stooped over the body, paper booties islands in that lake.

“What do we got,” says Bauer.

“Samples,” says the stooped figure, his hood up. “Data, to analyze.” Intent on the tweezers in his hand, peeling back a ripped and sticky flap of cloth.

“Melissa De Voor,” says Villaraldo, flipping back the cover of a notepad, “twenty-seven, Sixty-Two Aught Six, Southeast Fifty-second is what it says on her license, but a, ah, former roommate there says she moved out over a month ago. Current address unknown. Cash and cards weren’t touched.”

“So what you’re saying, Officer Villaraldo, is that robbery doesn’t appear to be the motive.” Turning back to the figure still stooped over the body. “Have we settled on a Cee Oh Dee?”

He spares a look back over a paper-white shoulder. “It’ll be in my report.” The hood’s elastic frames a clean-cheeked face, glasses rimmed with golden wire.

“C’mon, Ted,” she says.

He looks to the other figure in white. “Almost done?” She nods, snapping another photo.

“Criminalist Logan,” says Bauer, then, tone sharpened, arms akimboed. “Upon the conclusion of your preliminary examination of the scene, what, in your considered opinion, is the most likely cause of death?”

He lifts away the tweezers, props a crinkling elbow on a knee. “Exsanguination,” he says.

“And that was the instrument?” She points. Laid in the blood on the other side of the body an enormous sword, the great long blade of it tipped away at an angle, gleaming highlights sedimenting where the tip of it and the edges break the gelling surface.

He shakes a rustling head. “That, she was holding.”

“That?” Stepping to one side for a better view, booties fastidious on the verge of the lake. “Christ, it’s longer’n she is.”

“Perp had two, witnesses said.” The photographer, camera lifted up and away, peers at something beneath a table.

“Two, what,” says Bauer. “Knives? Cleavers? Machetes? Claymores?”

“Actually,” says Villaraldo behind her, pointing, “that’s more like what’s known as a Zweihänder?” blinking as she cocks a dubious brow at him, “a classic claymore,” gesturing with his fingers, “has more of a forward-angled, ah – ”

“Is a renaissance fair in town?” she says. “Maniac running loose, Officer, two bladed weapons, positively dripping blood, and you guys can’t turn up anything on the canvass?”

“We got units rolling. We got a BOLO.” And then, “There’s a, lack of clarity? What happened, when he left? There was a car, but he maybe didn’t get in the car. You want us to pull back? Go house-to-house?”

Bauer’s closed her eyes. “How many wounds,” she says. “On the body, how many wounds.”

“Detective,” says the criminalist, “I can’t possibly answer that question yet.”

“One,” she says, stepping close to point, “just one. It’s a damn big hole, but there’s only the one, you can take that to the bank. And she was loaded for bear. This was a confrontation, this was,” grimacing, at the sight of her bootie planted in blood, “personal,” she says. “Our boy’s scared out of his mind, laying as low as he can. Dumped the weapons for sure within a couple of blocks.” Lifting her foot, wobbling a little to keep her balance, she tugs off the bootie and drops it, plop, to the blood, as she sets her bared boot on dry carpet. “Find them, maybe, we can’t turn him up.”

“Hey,” says the photographer.

“What.” The criminalist hikes up to look over the corner of the pool table. She’s knelt down by one of the red-upholstered booths, peering at something pinched in her fingers, “I don’t know,” she says.

“Let me see,” says Bauer, crinkle-stumping boot and bootie around the pool table, “hold it up, I’m not gonna touch.” The photographer lifts her blue-gloved hand. “It’s a bone,” says Bauer.

“Metatarsal,” says the photographer.

“It’s a bone, covered in purple glitter.”

“That’s not what I don’t know about it,” says the photographer.

“Well, heck, bag it,” says Bauer. “Might just break the case wide open.”

A fire-engine red Chuck Taylor hightop, toe-cap snowily spotless, nudges aside a leaning sheaf of long green-yellow grass. The ragged shreds beneath it, short acrylic fur a white gone wetly grey, marred by streaks of grimy mud, a stuffed toy animal, belly of it twisted, torn, and matted clumps of fiber stuffing spilt from the wound. All in black Jo Gallowglas lowers her foot, pushing back more grass with one bared arm. The head of the toy’s vaguely equine, with a short black mane of some material stiffer than the fur, and sewn there, just above the blackly glassy eyes, stripes of rainbow colors spiraled into a horn-shape stiffened, perhaps, by a length of wire within. Gingerly she lifts it, sagging, limp, out from its dew-damp hollow, tenderly she turns it about, to cradle it in the crook of her arm. More loose stuffing drifts from the rip to float away, snagged by the lightening grass. There’s a tag, sewn to the seam of one stubby leg, and over the faded washing instructions blocky letters have been written in a child’s persnickety hand, ROY G BIV.

“Boss! Hey! Hey, boss!”

She looks up, eyes hidden away behind small round sunglasses. Sweetloaf, pompadour a-bob, stumbles toward her over junk-strewn tummocks, holding up a flat black something, “I think I fucking found it! Over there, by the,” looking back, missing a step, “shit!” waving an arm for balance, “that fucking tent, right?” The debris trailed off behind him, cinder blocks and bicycle wheels, boards from broken pallets, an upright shopping cart, that bent torchiere at a drunken angle, all spread from a raggedly irregular mound, edges of it knocked and tossed about in churns of mud and torn-up grass, surmounted by a small dome tent uprooted, tossed aside but still intact, a-wobble beige and orange in the morning breeze. “I mean,” Sweetloaf’s saying, “I don’t fucking know, I can’t turn it on. Not sure if it’s the fucking battery or, you know,” handing it to her, “that.”

The screen of the phone is softly misshapen by a web of countless whitely splintering cracks where there isn’t, here and there, a missing shard to offer a glimpse of the occulted inner works. She hands it back. “Get rid of it.”

“You sure?” He frowns, to see it back in his hand. “There’s a guy, out by Mall Two Oh Five, he’s a fucking wizard with that Gorilla Glass shit. Which,” but she’s turning, walking away, “fun fact,” he’s hastening after, “is not fucking made by gorillas!”

Past the trailer tipped over, hitch driven into the grass, past the van its side door gaping, unshaded, on toward the dull green motorcoach, stranded at the edge of the field, spray-painted bedsheet still hung by a hook or two on the side, and littering the ground before it, beside it, around it, tumbled from it hundreds of, thousands of magazines tossed, torn, crumpled, ground into mud, all of them each and every with the same bright yellow frame edging their covers. Picking her steps with care, Jo wades into them, over them, through them, across toward the door of the coach hung askew, reaching there to lay the stuffed toy on a cleared bit of the coach’s floor.

“Boss?” calls Sweetloaf, over the yellow-lapped field. “The fuck is all this? Somebody’s chucked, like, fucking,” he kicks something, “kibble, everywhere.”

Jo’s started clearing the steps, picking up magazines, stacking them neatly on the grass.

“Boss?” calls Sweetloaf. “Hey. Boss. Everything okay?” Offering a hapless shrug to Astolfo, coming up in his grey sweatsuit.

“Go on,” says Jo, flatly quiet, stacking magazines. “Get out of here. You’re done.”

“Boss,” says Sweetloaf. “Come the fuck on.”

“Your grace,” says Astolfo.

“You want to help?” snaps Jo. “Drag over some plastic. A tarp. Somewhere to stack the clean ones, go on. The ones they, they fucking,” tamp, tamp, evening the magazines in her hands, “trashed,” she says, stacking them with the others on the grass. “Set those aside. We’ll, figure something out. You.” She points to the third of them, young, slender, ashen hair in curls to his shoulders. “You’re new.”

He lifts a hand to his neatly knotted tie of gold, tucked safely within the placket of his fine white shirt. “Jeffeory, your grace. The Axe.”

“You’re the Axe.”

“I am but freshly dubbed.”

“Yeah,” she says. “If you’re the Axe, shouldn’t you be over across the river? With the Count?”

He looks to either side, but Astolfo’s already off that way, tugging at the van’s downed awning, and Sweetloaf’s stooped to gather magazines. “I serve the Queen,” he says.

“Yeah?” says Jo. “Well, okay. Let’s go. Hop to.” Smoothing a torn cover with her hand, the yellow of it framing what’s left of an image of an iridescent beetle, with great curving horns, that almost fills the palm of an unconcerned hand. She tips back her head, eyes hidden away behind those sunglasses, then sets the ruined magazine aside.

The weakly brightening air is breathless, still, untroubled by even a rumor of engine-rumble or tire-roll. By the back door, under the flight of stairs bolted to the brick, he leans out the doorway, one hand on the jamb, to peer at them, three worn plain cardboard boxes stacked one atop the others, hard by the foundation. The sky above a ceiling of flat pale shapeless clouds without definition.

Inside, though a cramped dark kitchen, down a narrow hall lined with cubbyholes, stuffed neatly each with mismatched pairs of shoes, and more of them lining the floor below, croc by stiletto, wedge by boot, sneaker by mocassin, he’s awkwardly looking around the two boxes in his arms so as not to step on anything. Clatter through a beaded curtain, strings of it rattling loud as they drag the cardboard, up to a worktable mounded unstably with yet more shoes, and more besides, fallen and tumbled in piles on the floor. He squats to let drop the boxes, shoving shoes out from under till they both sit flat. Lifts a hand to the mighty round of tight black curls crowning his head, but pulls away at the touch of them, scowl twisting. Up on his feet in a practiced, stoop-shouldered stance somehow at odds with the lanky power in his frame. Out through the curtain left swaying in his wake.

The beads, slowly, still. Silence for a moment, or two, before a slithery, shifting slip, a Chelsea boot, destabilized, disturbed, tips toppling flop from the worktable to the floor, taking with it buckle-clack an undone sandal, a brogue a-slide the slope of shoes, a  plimsoll tumbling end over end to fetch up at the edge of the table, buffered by a shower shoe, rustle and settling slump until all is once more still.

Back through the clattering beads with the third box, that he sets atop the other two, brushing down the front of his dull blue shirt. He pries up a stiff flap and reaches into a tangled nest of footwear to pull out a running shoe of teal and neon green. Eyes it, the pile on the table, the alluvium littering the floor, and lets it drop. Reaches in for another.

Unlocking the door he swings it open with a jingle of the bell, “Okay,” he’s growling, “okay, come on in,” and “I’m sorry,” says the woman stood there, shoulders draped in a wide pink scarf, “are you open?”

“Might as well be,” he says, switching on the lights in the front window. George’s, say the letters painted in red and yellow in an arc across the glass. Shoes Repaired.

“Is the,” she’s saying, “old man, here?” That pink scarf, her blue jeans palimpsested with felt-tip grafitti, her scuffed suede mules. The floppy knit toque on her head. “I heard,” she says, “he ran a sort of, lost-and-found?” Turning over what’s in her hands, a worn brown low-topped boot, panels of darker elastic on either side. “This is ridiculous,” she says. “Who cares about a shoe on the sidewalk. Lost and found. I could’ve just, I should just throw it away.”

“You could,” he says, his stern expression not quite a frown. She looks up to meet it. “No,” she says, looking away. “No.” Down to the boot in her hands. “If there’s a chance.”

He tips back that black-crowned head, his expression reluctantly letting go. A flick of a gesture, another, at her hands, the boot, she holds it up for him. “I might’ve seen the like,” he says, looking over his shoulder to the worktable, the whelming mound of shoes. “But it might take a bit.”

There’s a knock at the door, “A moment,” he says, but quietly, to himself, dabbing the mottled back of the photograph before him with the rubber-stoppered top of a small brown bottle. Presses a yellowed strip of paper to the glistening daubs of mucilage, 6/17/1983 Law Firm Seals Deal For Top Floor, the browning typescript stretched across it, (l – r) S. Yoelin, J. Dunn, G. Welund, F. Pinabel, G. Rhythidd, A. Pinabel, J. Sap, ending there in a feathery torn edge. He unscrews the cap from a fountain pen and sets to inking a second p there, beside the first, deftly counterfeiting slabby umber serifs. Again, a knock. “A moment!” he calls, louder this time.

“Package!” Muffled, from the other side of the door. “For the Outlaw!”

“She’s not within!” He starts on an e, finickily etching the curl.

“Well could you maybe take it for her? Come on!”

He lifts the pen, eyes the cap in his hand, looks up, lips pursed in a put-upon moue. Unfolds his legs to get to his feet.

He’s young, the man at the door, cheekbones hunched like shoulders under a squint at the effort of hauling the box in his arms over the threshold, “Where do you want it,” into the kitchen, and “Wait,” he’s left to say, hastening after, screwing the cap on his pen.

“Right here?” The young man hoists the weight of the box up onto the counter there, overlooking the room beyond.

“What, what,” he’s blustering, tucking the capped pen away in his vest, “what is that.”

The young man, stepping back, shrugs, his oversized yellow plaid shirt new enough that sharp creases still clench the back of it, and the sleeves. “For the Outlaw. Came to the warehouse for some reason,” he’s headed around the counter, looking down into the room beyond. “I drew the short straw.”

He nods at that, poking the box with his long and slender fingers, prodding it about. A bright red logo haltingly turns into view, Archie McPhee, it says. Home of the Original Horse Head Mask.

“So, like, what is this?” says the young man, headed down the three short steps, and he starts up, eyes owled with alarm, “No!” he cries, bustling around the counter, “Wait! Stop!”

“It’s, okay, it’s okay,” says the young man, hands held up, away, stood among all those banker’s boxes white and brown stacked in that room beyond, its windowed walls narrowing to a point. “What is all this? It’s not the Outlaw’s, is it.”

Arrested there at the top of the three steps, his still-wide eyes dart back and forth, the unsettled boxes, the photographs stacked here and there, the low table laden with his work, his tools, the onionskin paper, bits of newsprint, the tweezers, the scissors, the small brown bottle. “This one,” he says, slender fingers twining, one hand folding up the other over his narrow breast, “does maintain the morgue, at the direction of her grace, much as was done for the Devil.”

“Morgue?”

“Moments,” he says, those slender-fingered hands now firmly clasped, “fished from the river of time,” taking one step down, and another, “laid out for solemn and dispassionate consideration.”

“These are from, newspapers?” Looking over the boxes, a lid skewed here and there, the papers, folders, photographs within. “Like, their, paper files?”

“Clippings, and other ephemera, there, there,” a hand released, to vaguely point, “the bulk of the collection does consist of photographs, along with their accompanying captions, indices, and tags,” that hand withdrawn, refolded, “there are, several archives represented,” a wince, that’s almost a shrug, “and thus several such, systems, protocols, codes,” he frowns, not unhappily.

“What,” says the young man, unsquinted eyes gone serious, “what do you got on the Black Panthers?”

His frown pinches contemplatively. “Panthers?”

“Portland chapter of the Black Panther Party. Nineteen sixty-nine, seventy – Kent Ford? Johnson, Oscar Johnson? Sandra Ford? George,” he says, “Honeycutt?”

“This one must humbly admit the effort to secure the Skanner’s files was not met with much success.”

Those cheekbones hunch again, higher than before. “Then what have you got on Vanport?”

“Ah!” Eyes brightening, frown swept away, “yes, of course,” stepping among the boxes, “the Vanport flood, thirtieth of May, nineteen and forty-eight. The files should be,” one long hand lifted, wavering, but “No, no,” the young man’s saying, “not the flood. Anything but the flood.”

Those brows pinch again, lips pursing, “Construction, and the opening, would’ve been nineteen and forty-two, there may be files,” turning to point, but “Not the beginning,” says the young man. “Not the end. Just, what it was like, in the middle. Regular, everyday, whatever, you know? Anything like that.”

Those slender hands spread in an apology. “If it did not make the news, it will not be in this collection.” Arms folding, one long finger lifted to tap at thoughtful lips. “Perhaps,” he says, “the Historical Society?”

“Forget it,” says the young man, heading up three quick steps, “forget it,” but then, his hand on the doorknob, “Cora Bunch, okay?” he says. “You want the news, you find out what happened to Cora Bunch. She lived in Vanport.”

He doesn’t slam the door when he leaves. The short man looks away, back to his low table, “But, that would be absurd,” he mutters. “This one does not investigate.” He plucks the pen from his vest, and sets to unscrewing the cap.

“Tell her, Gee!” a burst of spangles and glitter, “you tell that bitch she can’t have my fucking song!”

“I’ve asked you not to call me that,” he says, without looking up from his ledger.

“Tell her, Gav,” says the woman following after, loosely wrapped in green terrycloth, “remix is not song. Song is not remix.”

“And I’ve asked you not to call me that,” he says, but the first woman’s whipped about, “The beat, it’s the fucking beat is the same, whenever everybody hear Charli kick in that Pink Diamond beat, that bip bip, doo boop-dee-boop, they know it’s about to be the Merch on the pole, only no, no, they hear that beat, that Pink Diamond beat, only it’s a fucking remix, and it’s your skanky Slavic ass instead!”

He looks up, then, rich red hair a-flop from a high widow’s peak. “This is about a song?”

“It’s about respect,” snaps the first woman.

“This is about a song,” he says, looking back to his ledger. “Play whatever you want.”

The second woman smirks at the first, who throws up her spangled hands, “No, Gee, goddammit!”

“Don’t shout, Merch.”

“Is Galveston,” says the second woman. “Like Glen Campbell. Galveston, oh Galveston – ”

“My aim is true,” croons a newcomer, crowding the doorway to that tiny, white-lit office.

“Rocky,” he says, shaking his head, “you aren’t helping.”

“Not in the job description.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “Company.”

“It’s Saturday. It’s hardly almost noon. Who could possibly,” but his expression collapses, from indulgent bemusement to affronted disgust, “what,” he says, suddenly vehement, “under all the stars above, could you possibly want here?”

Rocky squeezes back against the wall of the hallway, making room as the Merch, glittering, shrugs back against the paper-piled cabinet, and Gina, resettling her robe, smiles bitterly to see who stands revealed. “Hello, old boss,” she says.

“Ladies,” says Chilli, yellow beard a-blaze in the white office light. “Been a while. Maybe head out front, get a party started? Need a word with your new boss.”

“Gina,” calls Gaveston, over the rash of departure. “Find another blasted song. Merch, don’t ever yell in this office again. And Rocky?”

“I know, I know,” she says, “make some damn money.”

He turns back to his ledger. “Get out,” he says, after a moment, companionably enough, but without looking up.

“There’s nowhere else I can go,” says Chilli.

“Not a problem,” turning a long lined page, “I need to address.”

“Oh,” says Chilli, “but Stirrup. You’ve been with us at every step of this path we have taken. Together.”

Gaveston looks up, then, and makes a show of turning his head to the left, then the right. “I see no us. I see you. Who sought a boon from the Gammers. Who abandoned that quest, to pick a fight with the Outlaw. Who – ”

“That was a duel,” snarls Chilli. “I prevailed.”

“Whose hand, last night, was on the hilt,” says Gaveston, quiet, cold. “Yours, and no one else’s.”

“That?” spits Chilli. “Is that why, that’s why you, that mewling sack of berry juice? She drew on me!”

“She was the Queen’s Huntsman, you rotten fool. You will not speak so, of her.”

“Whyever not?” The words too loud, and with a ragged edge. His gesture too sudden, his smile too ostentatious. “You think she’ll mind?”

“She was sent,” says Gaveston, flatly, “by the Queen, and you must – ”

“The Queen!” That big yellow head thrown back. “You said it yourself, Stirrup: the Queen? Is done!”

“No!” roars Gaveston, up on his feet, “no.” Leaned forward, planting balled fists on the cluttered desk. “I said, and I maintain, that an open Apportionment is dangerously foolish. I worry now, as I did then, that we will never see another bounty enough to keep it possible. But to say her majesty is done? Those words are yours, Harper. Not mine.”

“When I spoke them,” says Chilli, and his is now the quiet voice, and cold, “you were with me.”

Gaveston straightens, fingertips on the desktop now, not fists. “Do you know, Harper, where I was, but a year ago?”

A blink, another, uncertain at the slackening of the tension he’d been leaning on. “Sellwood?” says Chilli.

“I was a banneret, in Sellwood,” says Gaveston. “Four streets, and all their folk: Tenino, Umatilla, Harney, Sherrett. Their medhu mine to glean; mine the hand that received their portion, direct from her generous majesty.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Chilli.

“Then you remember, how it was never enough. How they would give, and give, and all we ever brought back were miserable pinches. You remember, how it was, just one short year ago.”

A wave of dismissive agreement from Chilli.

“September, then,” says Gaveston. “Eight months gone. Not even three full seasons – the Bride’s champion, in his foolish pride, lost a duel to a mortal slip of a girl, and the Bride and the Queen fallen out over it. And I thought to myself, it must be time, time to pass, from the one, to the other, and what harm could there be, in helping it along?”

Chilli, arms folded, beard hunched about his grim-set mouth.

“I went to the Duke, and urged him take the Bride, for with her hand would come the Throne. So was I there, the night a mortal slip of a girl sent Tommy Rawhead down to dust, and for my pains,” says Gaveston, sat back in his chair, “for his grace’s embarrassment,” adjusting the drape and knot of his burgundy tie, “my arms were sworn in service to the Hawk, my streets pledged to his coffers, and now,” a hand laid on the open pages of the ledger, “I manage a bawdyhouse on Foster Road, and it’s been far too long, since last I was in Sellwood.”

“And when the wind blows?” says Chilli, hoarsely gruff. “The one that doesn’t stop? That whittles her majesty’s bounty back down to generous pinches? Who will you whisper to then, Stirrup?”

“You miss my point,” says Gaveston. “I may grumble, I may growl, I may well have a beer, but I’ll take the pinch and be glad of it. My politicking days are done.” Smoothing the long page of the ledger with his hand. “Go on,” he says. “Get out. Bruno will soon enough know you’re here.”

“You,” says Chilli, “you wouldn’t call him, on me.”

Gaveston opens a drawer of the desk and pulls out a little phone, flipping it open. Chilli’s yellow beard gathers in a scowl, and he turns and steps without a word from white-lit office into the cramped shadows of the hall. The light shifts, as out there the door to the bar’s swung open, music coming into focus, snapping drums, relentless riff, a woman coolly chanting would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother, muffling again as the door swings shut. Gaveston deliberately folds up the phone. “Soon enough,” he says, and drops it back in the drawer.

First a cardboard box, printed with blue diamonds and pink, Mezcal, says the logo, 400 Conejos, and atop it in his arms a blue milk crate with a dozen or so albums inside, and an awkwardly tilted gooseneck lamp. Next a sleekly slender turntable under a couple of boxy speakers braced with his chin, cords neatly wrapped about one grasping hand, following the first through the parlor and out the front door. A third backs down the staircase in his shirtsleeves, craning up over the unwieldy bulk of a thick rolled futon toward a presumable fourth, presumably clutching the other end. “Your pardon, miss,” says Pyrocles, there in the middle of the parlor in his dark blue suit, a smile polite beneath his mustaches. “We’ve not been introduced.”

Becker beside him turns to see the woman stood in the archway from parlor to dining room, her baggy T-shirt, hacked-off sweats and fuzzy socks, “right,” he says, as she says “Oz,” and he says, “Oz, this is Oz, meet Pyrocles.”

“Don’t I get an introduction?” calls a heavyset man over the futon, as it’s squeezed through the front door out onto the porch.

“You’ve already met,” mutters Becker, peevishly.

“Context, Arnie,” stepping within as the doorway clears, his enormous cardigan a-sway. “Never open your mouth till you know the shot; what flies in the street’s not fit for a drawing room.” Looking past Becker to Pyrocles. “Whoever told you that you could work with men.”

“Actually, Jimmy,” says Becker, “about the – ”

“Nah ah ah,” says Jimmy, lifting an implacable finger, “never quit a job, Arnie, if instead you can get yourself fired.” He produces a plain white envelope, folded once in half. “State law mandates that, by the close of the day upon which one’s employment is terminated, any monies outstanding are due, and so: eight hours’ wages, at fourteen an hour. Less taxes, of course.” Handing the envelope to Becker with a flourish. “You’ll note it’s dated yesterday.”

“Oh,” says Becker.

“And but also.” Jimmy produces from another pocket a glossy black phone.

“Oh,” says Becker, again. “Right,” as he takes it. “Sorry.”

“I believe this concludes our business.”

“Jimmy, seriously, I’m sorry, it all just – ”

“Enough, Arnie,” and there’s that finger again. “Live the dream,” he says, not unkindly. “Follow thy bliss.”

The shirt-sleeved man leans in from the porch, “Anything more, Anvil?”

Pyrocles shakes his head, but holds up a hand as Oz, who’s looking to her fuzzy rainbow socks, mutters mostly to herself, “This is all well and good, but I don’t suppose,” looking up, “I can’t imagine,” she says, a little louder, “anybody knows somebody who needs a room? Six hundred a month, communal kitchen,” trailing off.

“Good friend Oz,” says Pyrocles, and he holds out something to her, a tightly neat roll of bills wrapped about with a rubber band. “Go on,” he says. “Funds freely given, to be taken freely.”

“That’s, ah,” she says, but she takes it.

“And with them, this advice,” says Pyrocles, “a glass of cold, fresh milk, set nightly by your kitchen sink, will work wonders.”

Out the front door then, and off the porch. A sandwich board’s set up on the scraggled strip of frontage grass, Piano Lessons, it says, Weekday Appointments. Parked on the street a black late-model SUV and an older, smaller pickup truck, pale blue, meticulously clean, futon laid in the back of it, the milk crate, boxes. The last of the men climbs into the SUV, offering a wave of a salute to Pyrocles, and he nods in turn as that big engine clears its throat.

“Now what,” says Becker, taking hold of the handle of the pickup’s passenger door.

Pyrocles looks over the hood between them. “The haberdasher’s, I think,” he says. “You need a proper suit.”

“Charles Harlib,” says the delivery woman.

“I see that,” he says, “I mean, it’s just – ”

“That’s the address?” Her manner brusque.

“It’s,” he says, “yeah.”

“Can you sign for it?” Her shorts of baggy brown.

“I,” he says. “Yes.”

Back through the house, eyeing the box, it’s flat, not especially deep, a bit longer than his forearm. Past an empty mantel, into a narrow sitting room, a girl stood in the middle of it, face squeezed up in rapturous attention. Enormous headphones pinkly cup her ears, the music in them loud enough to leak a jouncing beat she’s nodding along with, “Grace,” he’s saying, he says, “Grace,” a flick of a gesture at his ear, push off, and seeing him she shoves back the headphones, chorus suddenly swelling, sinking down in this void like a crater, and she shakes her head, brow cocked, what?

“Momsicle about?”

“In here,” says Carol, past the cluttered breakfast bar, there in the kitchen in her brown and yellow serape, book bag slung from her shoulder. He pinches a corner of the shipping label on the box and yanks, a ripping strip.

“Jason?” says Carol. “What is that?”

“I was going to ask you,” heading toward her, into the kitchen, away from heedless, prancing Grace. “I can guess, but,” shrugging, the box in his hands.

“They said it was coming tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s something else they got wrong.”

“So, happy Memorial Day, I guess, or whatever.” And then, “It’s for you, jackass. The retro keyboard you’ve been jonesing for.”

He looks up, stunned. “We can’t possibly afford this.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Which card did you even put it on? OnPoint’s just about full, and Citi would’ve alerted – ”

“It’s not any card you have to worry about.”

“You can’t just say that, Charley, I have to – ”

“Hey,” she says, not loud, but sharp.

Jason closes his eyes, “I have to keep track of these things,” he says, and opens them again, but she’s looking, turning away, calling over the breakfast bar, “Not on the couch, Gloria, Gloria! Not on the couch.” Out in the narrow sitting room, Gloria hops off the cushions of the low couch to resume her yearning pose feet planted on the rug. “I swear,” says Carol, turning back, “I don’t know what it is right now, with her, and show tunes.”

“That’s a,” he says, “bit racist, don’t you think? Policing, what she ought to listen to, or not, just because of,” trailing off, “her,” a gesture, toward the living room.

“The point I was trying to make,” says Carol then, slowly, “is that show tunes, as a rule, are grotesquely overproduced, tragically underwritten, and, inevitably, mawkish. She can do better. A good murder ballad, maybe.”

“Carol,” he says, and winces at the force of it. “We’re running the ragged edge, these last couple months. Especially with you being gone so much, doing, whatever it is you, do, with those people, I have to keep track, so we don’t – ”

“Keep track,” she says, so witheringly quiet. She hauls up her book bag. Yanks it open. “How about,” she says, rummaging, “that last run to Trader Joe’s? Or the other night, when Grace and I snagged dinner from FoPo? Did that show up on your cards or alerts, or,” she’s plucked something out, “did you even notice that it didn’t?”

It’s a gold credit card. MasterCard, it says. Bank of Trebizond. Carol L. Harlib. Good thru 21/45.

“I only put a couple things on it, at first,” she says, “because I didn’t really believe that it would do what they said it would. But it does.”

“They,” he says. “Who, they.”

“Gloria. Those people. This is for expenses. Within reason. Groceries. Take-out. The occasional gift.”

“For, what?” he says. “Singing? Sometimes? Hanging out?” She’s savagely hauling the book bag up on her shoulder. “Will they at least provide us a ten ninety-nine?”

“You’re welcome, Jason,” she snaps, pushing past him, out of the kitchen, away, leaving him with his box, and Gloria with her headphones, reaching up for a big finish.

She taps the last of a string of numbers written on the slip, “Thirty-seven,” she mutters, and then, pushing her narrow glasses back in place, “he wants what?”

“To speak with the owner?” says Petra B. “Or manager, or whatever.”

“Isn’t this what Gloria’s for?”

“I can’t find her, Anna, I’m sorry,” stepping out of the way as Anna shoves back her chair, “If it’s one more thing,” she mutters, on her way out the door, and Petra B left bobbing in her wake.

Out onto the balcony ringing, the warehouse spread below, overhead doors cranked open to either side to let in cooling, greying light, and all the hobs and clods, urisks and domestics, penates, broonies, mechanicals and here and there a peer, all about their various businesses, but it’s not the chopping, the rustling, the rattling, the scraping and tearing, the brushing and mixing, it’s not the indications and adumbrations, the attestations, the raucous laughter and that angered yelp, it’s the singing that’s most notable, as they make their way down the skeletal staircase bolted to the wall, it’s that lone baritone booming from out on the loading dock, “Fetch me some a thy father’s gold, and some a thy mother’s fee,” and the chorus, well-pitched, raggedly timed, an two a the steeds from the castle stalls, which hold em thirty an three!

Black battleship of a pickup, parked by the loading dock, facing the hitch of the flatbed trailer, and stood in the back of it Big Jim Turk, hoisting one end of a bundle of yellow two-by-fours, hefting his big deep voice, “I’ll mount me on my milk-white steed, an thou the scarlet roan,” and at the other end there’s Lustucru, swinging the bundle in time, as Cherrycoke wrestles a roll of chicken wire up and over the tailgate, Cinædus and Brether Ned humping up twine-wrapped stacks of newsprint, we’ll ride till we reach the stoney strand, an hour afore the dawn!

Anna makes her way past all the unloading, keeping a prudent distance, there’s Powys stood on the corrugated flatbed, and paint-spattered Trucos beside, Getulos crouched behind them, but instead of a husband I’ve found me here a grave in the salty sea! as Petra hops out of Christian’s way, he’s leaping onto the flatbed with an awkward armload of rolled-up papers.

Down by the foot of the trailer, there on the pavement, a man’s stood in drab coveralls, arms pointedly folded, seething under a scowl as he takes Anna in, her smart blouse crisply white, her trousers neatly tartaned, “You in charge?” he belts.

“What can,” but “Pull off, pull off,” Jim Turk’s launched the next verse, “your rings and pearls, and deliver them up to me!” and she waits for the cæsura, “How might we help you?” she says, quickly, but solicitously clear, for I think it not fit such a glittering tip should rust in the salty sea!

“This has to stop!” shouts the man in the coveralls, a patch at his chest that says Gatto & Sons, much as the sign on the warehouse across the street, Gatto and Sons, Wholesale Produce. “The music! At all hours, the coming and going! Living here, and this ain’t a residential block! And the, that goddamn street fair!” throwing his arms frustratedly wide, for I think it not fit such a silky slip should be roughened by the sea!

Anna hitches up her trousers at the knee to squat there, on the dock, head now at a level with his. “We let your trucks through,” she says. “There was no impediment to your trucks.”

“If I’m to doff my holland smock, then turn your back to me!” booms Big Jim Turk, swinging another bundle of lumber. “You shouldn’t’ve had to!” shouts the man in the coveralls, and Anna manages not to flinch. “Tell me, sir,” she says, but she looks away as she does so, “are you Mr. Gatto,” somewhere up past the trailer, “or, ah, one of the sons?”

“Derek!” he shouts. “I’m the fucking day-shift manager!”

“And I would be Anna Nirdlinger. A moment.” Hand on the edge of the dock, she hops down, “Hey!” he shouts, but click-tock of heels she’s headed away around the foot of the trailer, for I think it not fit such a ruffian bent my beauty for to see!

Coming toward them all down the middle of the street a man on foot, his vest and trousers of rumpled plaid, expression slackly grave. “Shrieve?” calls Anna, hastening toward him, and another “Hey!” from the man from Gatto and Sons. “I did then turn my back to you, and laughed to hear you weep!” but there’s a commotion up on the trailer, “ahead!” yells Trucos, marching with an imploring gesture down toward the foot, “to see where she’s going!” but “She won’t be driving,” insists Getulos still crouched at the head of it, “she’s to draw everyone after!” and Christian beside him, trying to keep the plans from rolling back up, but I caught you by your shoulders wide, and tumbled you into the sea! For six pretty maidens drowned thou here, but the seventh did drown thee!

“Oh!” cries Anna, there by the man in plaid, or “No!”

“Hey!” shouts Derek, one more time. “Can somebody! Anybody! Please! Who the hell is in charge, here?”

The dim air’s doldrummed by arabesques of smoke that leak from the coal of the cigarette in her fingers poised, untapped, over a plastic coffee lid. She’s sat herself on the yellow table among the six of them set close together, red shoes propped on the cushion of a rolling chair, black trousers loosely baggy, black top sleeveless, rising to a close crew neck. “I’d heard your grace had quit,” says Bruno, closing the double doors behind him.

She looks over her shoulder, eyes hidden away behind small round sunglasses despite the dimly haze. “It’s a process,” she says. Ash tumbles as she lifts it to her lips, stopping just short of a breath, “What do we know.”

He leans a hand on the back of another of those scattered rolling chairs, “Nothing more, I fear. But – ”

“Nothing,” she says. “Is that what there is? Or just what you’ve been able to find out?”

“Your grace,” he says, strained.

“Sorry,” she says, a wave of that cigarette, the cigarette she lowers to crush out on the coffee lid. “There’s no record,” he’s saying, “of anyone with the name May, or Hector, being processed into the Detention Center in the past two days. There was a Jack listed, as an alias, but too old to be whom you described.”

“What about Johanna?”

“And no record of a Johanna Draper. Of course, there’s no record of your incarceration, either.”

“Right,” she says.

“My lady,” says Bruno, “the Queen’s Huntsman is dead.”

Squeak of the wheels as her feet drag that chair toward the table, “I told her,” she says, folding her arms atop her canted knees. “Where’s Luys?”

“I – couldn’t say. He, is, where he is.”

“I ask for help this morning, I get Astolfo, I get Sweetloaf, I get one of Agravante’s boys, and that’s it?”

“Jeffeory’s no more with the Hound. Her majesty’s named him her Axe.”

“Yeah, I,” she says, straightening, “I don’t care,” she says. Looking to him, down at the corner of the lavender table. “Where’s the Mason?”

He takes in a breath, examining a moment the cracked leather of his worn brown brogues. “Your grace,” he says, “does yet stand with her majesty?”

Her own inhalation’s sharp, through her nose, “Jesus,” she says. “The hell kind of question is that.”

“Unfortunately apposite.”

“Shit,” says Jo, tipping back her head.

“I would not disagree,” says Bruno.

“I can’t,” says Jo, and then, with a kick that spins the chair away, she hops off the table. “I can’t. There’s too much – if they didn’t get picked up by the cops, they must’ve, at least, one or two of them, I need somebody, I need several somebodies, who know the current, ah, situation, where the camps are, who to talk to,” but Bruno’s shaking his head, “what,” she says. “What.”

“For that sort of work, we’ve always gone outside the company. There’s the gentleman who fancies himself the Commanding Officer of the city’s indigents, but,” a grimace of a grin, as he notes the blank expression she’s offering, “of course, your grace knows the CO.”

“We’re not going that way,” she says. “Shit.”

“There’s still the matter of the Huntsman’s death,” and then, as she turns away, “my lady – it appears to have come at the hands of the Harper.”

“Christ!” she roars, and he flinches, “Bruno! I know!” Both hands up to her face, “You think,” she says, “I got any sleep last night,” removing her sunglasses to glare, directly, at him.

“Your grace,” he says, and ducks his head.

She steps away, toward the darkening windows, folding up those glasses. “Okay,” she says. “So. Smart guy. What’s the play.” Looking back, over her shoulder. “What’s your plan.”

He spreads his hands. “I, have no plan, your grace. I never do. My dearest wish is only to see that, those who do? Have everything, and everyone, they need, to see them done.”

She closes up her eyes, and after a moment opens them again. “Bruno,” she says. “Shrieve. You’re getting sentimental on us.”

His lips quirk with a touch of rue. “Assume, for the moment, that I don’t believe her majesty, when she tells us Count Pinabel’s no longer himself. Assume I don’t account your grace a blasted fool for trying to bear – ”

“Hey,” she says, sharply.

He leans into an avuncular smile. “Our counterfactual is you don’t shoulder a terrible burden you refuse to share.”

“You have no idea – ”

“Indeed, your grace,” he says, quietly, even tenderly, and she bites back what she’d been about to say. “My point is this,” he says. “Downstairs from us, right now, a Queen’s ransom sits in a great wooden tub, open to all, knight, or churl, or peer of the court, that any might take what they would, and none,” he says, “not one, ever takes more than they need. I don’t know that your grace appreciates the magnitude of what her majesty has done. What you, Jo, helped her do.” He takes a breath, a shadow in the hazy unlit shadows. “It’s returned to me a faith I hadn’t realized I’d lost,” says Bruno. “For that, alone, I’d follow her majesty over the very rim of the world.”

“And the rest of us tumbling after,” says Jo. “Shit.”

“It is even as your grace has said,” says Bruno.

The sour gong of rubber mallet striking glass, jagged top edge held secure by a hand gloved in nubby canvas, another strike, the snap of it breaking loose amidst a ringing showerfall of splinters and shards, the smash when it’s tossed to the growing pile of broken glass on the blue tarp spread below, another gong, another, four of them in rough dungarees, T-shirts, coveralls, clambering about the scaffolding erected before the great curving wall of broken glass, criss-crossed by an erratically angled grid of wide blue strips of tape, a detuned, arrhythmic carillon, rung out over a constant drizzle of broken glass.

“It is done,” says Agravante, under all that racket.

He’s stood at the head of a folding table, the only furniture as such in that wide room, and set on it before him a napkin folded carelessly, dotted with crumbs, a shaker tipped over, salt spilled from its silver cap, a small brass lamp, snuff of smoke uncoiling from the tip, a little white ceramic dog, ears and tail of it painted black, a tightly curled netsuke rabbit, carved from yellowing wood. “Seems odd,” says the man in the green denim jacket, taking up the last item, a ragged little cloth chimera, body of it striped, legs of iridescent fabric suggesting scales, head of it roughly wooled, with button eyes, and two limp horns. “Doing such a thing without the benefit of her majesty.”

“Yours the hand that gives, Soames Thomas,” says Agravante. “Yours it is, to take away. How,” waiting out a vigorous smash, “how goes the work?”

“New panel’s due from Wilsonville in a matter of hours,” the man in the green jacket, settling a white cap on his thickly greasy hair, “it will be in place in time for tonight. But, my lord,” pitched low now, so as not to carry much further than themselves, “assurances were made, as to supportment, for our work?”

“You’ll have your portion, my lord,” says Agravante, just as low. “This very night.” And then, raising his voice up over the clamor, “Next!” he bellows, turning away, only to “Oh!” at the glumly narrow man right there. “We are done,” says Agravante, voice pitched once more low, “nothing should need be said.” A gesture back toward the table, the items still littered on it.

“Excellency,” says the glumly narrow man, chin tucked behind the fenceposts of a high white collar, “this household’s complement has been,” the next word lost in a crash of glass, and “What?” snaps Agravante, an irritated shake of his white locks.

“Decimated!” says the glum man, flinching at his volume. “Sir. There’s aught to polish the plate.”

Agravante claps a hand to a narrow, black-jacketed shoulder, and the glum man flinches again. “You are the Majordomo! Master of any domain. I leave it, all, in your hands so very capable. Next!”

A young man, pale hair elaborately braided, gestures toward the doorway, inclines himself to murmur something as Agravante passes, into the relative quiet of the long dim hall, and another man stood there, blinking at the milky light, the clanging glass, his safety orange coveralls, his red velvet frock coat pricked and dimpled by intricate embroidery. Agravante leans to one side, looking past him, “I’d thought there were to be two of you?” he says.

“Excellency?” says the man in the frock coat.

“You’d be the Hawk’s Cinquedea. Not the Harper. Why are you here.”

“Hawk’s Widow’s,” says Pwyll. “Frankly, excellency, it’s all a wreck. Gradasso’s gone, you see. The Kern. It’s a wreck, sir, all of it, and coming down around us, and I need a place to stand. I’d just as soon,” leaning close, “other guys,” he says, hoarsely forceful, “have come over, last few days. I heard.”

“The Spadone,” says Agravante. “The Axle. The Estoc; the Flammard. And the Mason, Luys. But you, I was told, came here with the Harper.”

Pwyll looks back, over his shoulder. The front door, at the end of the hall.

“You understand,” says Agravante, leaning close in turn, “whatever my position on her majesty’s choice of Huntsman, it would be, impolitic, for me to be,” out in the wide room the tenor of the tumult’s overwhelmed by shouts and cries and an enormous shattering crash, but Agravante’s pressing home his point, “seen,” he says, “rewarding anyone who’d had a hand in the demise of that particular gallowglas.”

The gonging has, for the moment, stopped, replaced by heated conference. Out there in the wide room an enormous portion of the window’s fallen loose, smashed to tempered bits, and the Soames has taken off his cap. “Pwyll,” says Agravante, “tell me,” as Pwyll drags his attention back, “who was it, that ended the Kern.”

“I didn’t,” says Pwyll, and then, “I do not know, my lord.”

Agravante smiles. “A judicious response. Welcome aboard.”

A dozen cans on the tip-top shelf, Campbell’s, they say, over and over, Tomato Soup, he seizes one, his other hand busily disengaging spindly spectacles from a shirt pocket, holding them up still folded to peer through at the label, contents, suggestions, directions, but he’s blinking, shaking his head, moving the spectacles in and out until he closes up his eyes. A sigh, somewhat peeved. Lifting the spectacles away. “Stir in one can water,” he mutters, hand to the back of his head, wincing as he touches there a mighty round of black curls.

The jingle of a bell, up front.

Setting the can on the counter he turns and starts to see the little man stood unexpected there, beads of the curtain behind undisturbed by any passage. “Out,” says Gordon Porter.

The little man smiles around far too many teeth. “We are loathsome in their eyes,” he says, cheerfully. “Strewn panting on an unknown shore, overcome by weariness. No god nor mortal will have truck with us. We were born – ”

“Don’t need this,” Gordon growls.

“We were born,” that word stretched through those teeth, “for all that is not right, by their lights, and that is why we’re left to fend for ourselves in the barn, the crib, the cellar and the sty, we make of their crumbs our feasts, our wine their dregs. We’ve dogged their footsteps everywhere they’ve been, across the sere dead grass of continents since sunk, over storm-chilled waves, to cities that would one day scrape the sky, and gardens there, with oceans all about – ”

“Somebody,” says Gordon, but “we hum!” cries the little man, taking a step toward him, “mere snatches of their half-remembered songs, as we set about the work they will not do,” and another, “what else, is there, for us?”

“There’s what we do,” says Gordon, “and there’s how we go about the doing of it. No need for all the bowing and scraping, the yassuhs and the no-milords. Your nasty little self is proof enough of that.”

“We all must do as we are bidden.”

“Yeah? Who’s bidden you, these days?”

“I’ll eat your birds, youngster,” a sudden, savage snarl. “Their quills will make my toothpicks, and such delicate baubles of their skulls.”

“House is free,” says Gordon, with a lurch of a step angled toward the gap between the little man puffing himself up and the beaded curtain. “Kitchen ain’t. Get yourself gone.”

Out in the front room there’s an old man in a brown suit much too big, frowning to see Gordon stepping through the shoe-choked doorway. “Looking for Gordon,” he says. “He about?”

Gordon blinks.

“He ain’t been at the table,” says the old man, looking away to the window. George’s, it says. “He didn’t say nothing about having up family.”

Gordon blinks, again. “I know the kid,” he blurts. “Christian. He’s a, a friend.”

“Christian,” says the old man. “I swear, you are the spit and image.”

“I got,” says Gordon, a vague gesture at all the shoes, “work, so, I’ll say you stopped by?”

“Tell him Duckie say he got nuts to lose.”

“Yes, sir,” says Gordon, after a moment, and Duckie nods. “I got a nap to see to, meantime,” he says, and turns away, limping slowly toward the door. Gordon watches, until the bell over the door jingles again.

Thick-knuckled fingers snap by the padlock, and again, loud and sharp in the still grey afternoon. He seizes the lock, shakes it, nothing. “Leugh,” he says, leaning against the smooth bright orange door, “leug.” Letting go of the lock, he stoops close to it, “Stone and Salt,” he whispers to it. “Lugubrio.”

Open it pops.

Rattle and crash with a shove he throws up the door, looking about, the empty alley and all those other orange overhead doors side by side still closed, still locked, still silent. His bald head ruddy, as if picking up some color from them all, his cloth coat, much too short in the sleeves, shawled with fur the color of cheap lime candy, his wide-waled trousers belling over bare and filthy feet as he steps inside.

A couple-three gear carts, a trunk, all blackly anonymous in the shadows, a keyboard there, leather sack beneath it, a careless splay of wood and ivory pipes, a partially assembled drum kit, tom on a spindly stand, rakish hi-hat, big bass that says Stone & Salt on the head in fresh black vinyl letters. He squats by a canvas shopping bag to rummage up a pale drumstick that he spins about suddenly unclumsy fingers. Eyes it resting, there, in his hand. Tucks it back away.

Past the kit a fleet of instrument cases laid with casual reverence on the concrete floor, a couple of fiddles, or maybe one’s a mandolin, the hulk of an acoustic bass, beached on its side in stiff nylon, something long and low and flatly rectangular, but he sits himself heavily beside a battered old guitar case of felt and cardboard, marked by a lone demure sticker, pasted at an angle, Play Anything, it says. Raps the lid of it, once, then scoots himself back.

The lid trembles and then, with a protesting creak, lifts. Up from within a slender hand, joined by another, reaching, stretching, a fusillade of knuckles cracked, joints popped, fingers wriggling now, limberly loose. The case scrapes the floor, shifted by the shift of weight within, a curled back breasting the lid, a long bare leg lifted out to slap a blue flip-flop on the concrete, a skinny red-headed man standing himself up out of the case, blinking thickly, cropped grey sweatshirt, Y-font underpants laundered to a dingy ivory. “Otto,” he says, looking away. “Or, it’s Sir Otto, now, isn’t it.”

“Not no more,” says Otto Dogstongue.

“Not no more what.”

“They say you can feel it? When it happens? Well, I’m here to tell you they’re right. Bread, oil, salt, pop, pop, pop,” savoring each plosive smack, “and once more,” a sigh, a flick of those fingers, “court’s light a Bullbeggar.” A shrug. “Had no idea ol’ Tommy Tom’d go for all that pomp and circumstance. Must be trying to impress the Barons.”

“So what did you do,” says the red-headed man, stepping away, snagging the stool from behind the drum kit.

“It’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t swan off across the river, with him and the rest of the Local brass. Kamali and Stevedore, Jackstaff and Gaffer, and Luthier, who can’t win a duel for a nickel, but not no more myself.” Sitting back, resettling that furry collar on his shoulders. “Meeting’s next week,” he says. “What am I, not supposed to go?”

“So why am I awake?” says the red-headed man, skinny gammons planted on the stool.

“Come back with me, John Wharfinger. Come back, to the Queen’s new digs. She’s done so much more, in a month, for far so many more, than the Local’s ever dreamed. You have any idea why it’s so quiet here, now, and empty?”

“I like it.”

“It’s because everybody’s there,” says Otto. “They’re all there.”

The red-headed man looks up, out toward the open door, the orange doors across the alley, scowling at the marginally brighter afternoon.

“And there’d be music. We’d all play together, again.”

“Herself?” says John Wharfinger.

“The Axe may have foresworn us, but my lady Outlaw’s piped for Carol, and I did rattle a drum betimes.”

“And the kid?”

“Streak’s yet Blue,” says Otto, unfolding a giddy smile.

John Wharfinger nods, looking down at the case on the floor.

“I mean, come on,” says Otto, smile crumpling. “We could, we could get a truck, load all this up, it wouldn’t take, come on, John.”

“I said yes,” says John Wharfinger. “But I wouldn’t say no to a truck.”

“No, but, see?” he’s saying, “they fucking get fogged,” holding up the goggles, “I wear ’em,” up against his forehead, “here, right?” shrugging the flop of his pompadour aside, “fucking cool, right? But when I want to actually fucking wear them,” lowering a brass-ringed lens over one glaring eye, “they’re all fucking fogged!” whipping it away, leather straps a-flap. “There has to be some fucking treatment, or something, a fucking spray, some fucking, I don’t know, fuck is the word, unguent? Something?”

The Dinny-Mara shrugs without looking up, as he adjusts scrape and chime the placement of upright leaves and shards of dark grey slate set neatly close one flat before another in a small cast-iron pot.

“Seriously,” says Sweetloaf, “they don’t fuck up like this in the fucking movies.” And then, as the Dinny-Mara sits back, eyeing his arrangement of slate, a stark little cartoon of sheer mountain cliffs, “Don’t fucking do me like this,” says Sweetloaf, aggrieved. “Moisture’s, like, your fucking thing.” The Dinny-Mara’s pouring a cup of water into the pot, and bends down to flick a switch. The gurgle of a hidden pump, and a sudden skin of water coats those leaves of slate, rinsing dull greys away to every possible shade of black, iridescent indigos through all the blues and wetly ruddy browns to hints of green, as a mist seeps up, flowing between and about those cliffs, lopping the lip of the pot. “Fuck it,” says Sweetloaf, turning away with a scowl. The Dinny-Mara carefully lifts the pot, mountains, fog, and all, and sets it on a shelf with a dozen other potfuls of mist-sodden cliffscapes.

Sweetloaf stalks away up the aisle between those stalls, lit here and there against the cloudy gloom without, and the gently lambent glow of the great wooden tub. Past it, there before the empty, unlit stage, a dozen or so are crowded about great sheets of paper unrolled on the boards, murmuring, pointing, “Fuck,” mutters Sweetloaf, “still fucking at it,” turning about, goggle-straps flapping, he stops suddenly, “Oh,” he says. “Hey.”

The young man crouched on the floor of the otherwise empty stall doesn’t look up.

“Hey,” says Sweetloaf. “Butterlocks. How the fuck you doing.”

“Stop calling me that.” His oversized shirt of yellow plaid, he’s crouched over a broad sheet of rough brown paper, scribbling over the shape he’d just begun to draw with a grease pencil. “Well,” says Sweetloaf, “the fuck should we call you? We already got a Goodhill, used to fucking do for a house up in Montavilla.”

“Christian,” he growls, starting again, two quick strokes to either side, a long wobbly line to connect them, and another, a low rectangle.

“Like that’s gonna fucking last.”

Those murmurs at the other end climb to a pelting absolutely, answered by a rousing chorus of negations and dubious groans. Christian sits up to look over his work. The thick blank painstaken strokes are now clearly the outline of a long façade, topped by a low-hipped roof. He addes a shape at one end of it, suggesting a shallow porch, and two doors, side by side.

“Fuck is that? A strip mall?”

“Apartments,” says Christian, duckwalking down to the other end of the sketch, “where people lived, and, and,” strokes now quick, assured, “worked, and,” another porch, the same two doors, “cooked,” he says, and winces, “dreamed,” he says, and scowls.

“The fuck ever,” says Sweetloaf, looking away. The kerfluffle by the stage drops away, stilling, as all those domestics and mechanicals turn, look, duck heads, a couple of them bowing, “Hey,” says Sweetloaf, “look alive. It’s the Duchess.”

Up there, Jo Gallowglas, all in black, a hand held up, nodding, as Trucos, or is it Getulos, says something earnestly emphatic, pointing to the plans, and Getulos, no, it’s Trucos, vociferously disagrees, as Jo, still nodding, backs away, that hand still up, pushing back against their collective enthusiasm.

“Shit,” spits Christian, stuffing the grease pencil in a pocket, scrabbling to roll up his drawing, clambering to his feet as Sweetloaf steps out of his way, “I gotta,” he says, but “Christian!” calls Jo, rounding the tub, heading down that wide aisle toward them, past stalls filled with art and tools and debris. “I was looking for you. Really wish you had a phone.”

“Well,” says Christian, looking down toward the other end of that aisle, the arch, the shadows beyond. “I don’t.”

“You still up on the camps?” she says, and a “hey” for Sweetloaf. “Where folks these days jungle up? I need to find somebody, and Bruno’s people are useless for this. Little old lady named May, had a big damn camper out by the airport and a metric fuckton of National Geographics,” but “Nah,” he’s saying, raising his voice, “nah, CO’s gone and ain’t neither of us want nothing to do with the new XO. Trust me.”

“I want, you,” she says. “I have to find her. And, Jack, and Hector – cops trashed the camp, Thursday night, and they didn’t get picked up, but otherwise I got no idea where they went. You need to get out to whoever you can who knows about or’s in charge of this shit, and tell me, I mean, is Springwater still a deal? What?”

He’s shaking his head. “I help you, you gotta do something for me.”

“Since when,” she says, “did this become transactional?”

“Since when I never worked for you, is when.”

“You,” she snaps, but catches herself, “what,” she says. “What is it.”

His chin juts, points toward the crowd of them, up by the stage. “They’re working out what to build, on the float out there. I mean, they know what, just not which way it’ll go. It’s a map, or a model, of the city, that’ll sit in the lap of the Queen.”

“Lap,” says Jo.

“Of a statue, of the Queen. So, you, have to tell them. Vanport has to be in there. One way or another, they gotta put Vanport in there, too. That’s what I need you to do, for me.” The glare over his hunched cheekbones. The rolled-up drawing crumpled under one arm. The free hand curled in a heedless fist.

“The fuck is Vanport?” says Jo.

It’s abrupt, how Christian turns away, sets off, slap of his grimy running shoes, “Hey!” shouts Jo. “Christian! Goddammit. Christian! You want anything with that, that fucking float? You gotta run it past Gloria! It’s her show! Christian!”

He’s gone, under the arch, into the shadows.

“Shit,” says Jo.

“Hey,” says Sweetloaf, then. “Boss. I know some a them fucking camps.”

“So do I,” says Jo. “I need all of the camps. Everything. I have to find them.”

Sweetloaf shrugs, goggles glinting. “I can drive.”

A half-dozen dream-catchers dangle before a broad window, colors washed away by the glooming on the other side of the glass, relieved only by the pinpoint brilliance of a lamp across the street, there before a three- or four-storey pile of bricks, the huge high windows of it as dark as everything else. She lifts a hand, surprising the shadows, reaches along the sill to nudge a small round mirror in an octagonal frame, shifting it until the silvered surface catches a corner of streetlight flaring, she blinks, lashes artfully thickened by mascara, lids carefully lined. Scoots the mirror back as clack of latch, key-jangle, lights flick on out in the front room, “what we’ve been doing,” someone’s saying, “I think you’ll see,” and she sits up, smoothing wrinkles from her lap.

Lights flick on in here, and there she is, sat on the couch in her charcoal suit, corkscrew curls, dourly patient mien, but he doesn’t seem to see her as he bustles in, grizzled and jowly, doughy in tie-dye, to lean over the big desk, shuffling through an assortment of red- and blue-jacketed files. The second man stays in the doorway, tall and achingly slender in a long pale cardigan, and he does seem to see her, a smile cocked in his lush brown beard, so neatly combed.

“Here we are,” says the grizzled man, manila folder held up, a trophy, “participation,” he says, and then he sees her, too, and his bluster’s whisked away. “Who,” he says, “how, how did you, what are you doing here?”

“Might we have the room, Mr. Stiles?”

“I,” he says, looking to the man in the doorway, who, still smiling, shrugs a slender shoulder.

“A few minutes only,” she says.

“I could just,” he says, pointing, past the man in the doorway, out. “I’ll wait in the car,” he says, stepping back into the front room. At the sound of the outer door closing, she says, “You despise him.”

“Nelson?” says the man in the doorway. “That’s a strong word, despise. I merely prefer when I don’t have to think of him.”

“And why do you have to think of him now?”

“Can we skip, to where you tell me I’m in your way, I need to get out of it?” he’s stepping out of the doorway, into that back room, “you’ll have to forgive me, I’m not up on the etiquette in this sort of situation.”

“What sort of situation is that, Mr. Lake?”

“Luke,” he snaps, and then, “the situation,” gathering up his splintered insouciance, “of being ambushed by an occult operator.”

“Are you feeling ambushed, Mr. Luke?”

“Just, Luke.”

“Plain, simple Luke.”

“That was you, wasn’t it. The sunburst, downtown, a couple days ago.”

She looks to the mirror on the sill, the reds and greens of the frame now clear in the artificial light. “We’re not the only players at this table, Luke.”

“What I don’t know,” he says, folding his arms, “is if it means your little excursion across town was a success, or a failure.”

“Why do you find yourself having to think of Mr. Stiles?”

That smile in his beard flashes teeth. “You must have some idea,” he says. “You knew enough to meet me here.”

Her arm, stretched out along the back of that couch. The rumples shadowy soft of her charcoal sleeve, of her exactingly baggy trousers, one leg crossed over the other, glossy grey pump tocking aloft there, a metronome portentously adagio. The expertly painted expression brightly expectant.

“He has something I want.”

That expectancy dims a little, disappointed. The metronome ceases.

“Need,” he says. “His, contacts. The good name of this, organization,” with a gesture that takes in the back room, the front room, the desk, the files.

“The Urban Restoration squad,” she says. “Founded by Nelson Stiles, and Michael Sinjin Lake.”

Not a trace of that smile can be found in his beard.

“What I don’t know,” she says, “what I can’t, quite, discern, is, well,” a fillip of her fingers, “why.”

He looks down, lush beard lapping his shoulder, thick hair brushing the cardigan lopped open over a stark white shirt, his khakis the color of sand, his monk-strap sandals. “Surely,” he says, and then, looking back up to her, a hint of that smile returning, “you’ve heard my speeches.”

“Oh, indeed,” she says. “And read, the interview, in Street Roots. You’ve managed quite a lot in little over a week.”

“Then you know.”

“One bad day,” she says, limned eyes widening as she relishes the quote. “Your message discipline is admirable. All the petit lumpen. But,” leaning forward, elbows braced on her knees, “to what end, Luke. Toward what purpose.”

“That,” he says, and there’s his smile complete again, and his teeth. “That’s how I’m going to do it. No one, not a one of you, believes, that I say only what I mean. That I’ll do everything I say.”

“The dispossessed,” she says, “reclaiming what was theirs. Well.” Hands on her knees now, pushing, up on her feet. “You are not in our way today, Luke.” Stepping close beside him, she takes in a long, savoring sniff. Favors him with a benedictive nod.

He doesn’t watch her leave. But when there is no clack of latch or groan of hinge, he turns in the doorway, with a snort, to see that front room empty.

His suit, his shirt, his tie, all coolly subtle blues and greys and here and there a touch of pink, and what’s left of his hair’s been slicked straight back. Arms crossed before him, he worries at the watch about his wrist, shining silver, bulbous crystal and a heavy, segmented band.

A laugh bursts over the burble and hum of polite conversation and startled, blinking, he looks up, across the spare crowd in that wide room, there’s Pyrocles in pearly blue, there by the great curving wall of glass, and hard beside him a squat man, thickly thewed, shoulders still a-wobble with hilarity, glossy black hair wrapped in a blue scarf, his two-tone shirt of pink and ivory, embroidered across the back with calligraphy that says Gutter Perfection, crossed by the worn brown leather strap of a sling holster.

Becker looks away.

It’s a varied crowd, these knights and peers and sundry others gathered in this room. The man at the makeshift bar beside him, a folding table, really, dull green jacket and white meshback cap, nodding as he lifts a plastic coupe of fizzing wine from the ranks of identical coupes. The short woman across the table, her black dress brief, taking up two coupes to hand one to another woman, willowy tall, her jacket of black leather. The man there in a linen suit, his sun-browned head quite bald, explaining something desultorily to the woman uncomfortably buttoned up in cyan and bared skin, her close-cropped hair a virulent chartreuse. The stone-faced man, impassive in his olive-green fleece vest. The young man holding court by a waist-high pane of glass, a balustrade about a stairwell leading down somewhere, his pale white tangled dreads just touched with gold, his slim blue suit, his shirt and tie the same flat shade of dusty pink, directing with a magnanimous gesture the attention of those about him to the man at his side, wide face warmly red, jacket of indigo twill.

Becker seizes a coupe, wincing at the slosh of pink wine that dribbles his fingers, takes up a second with more care, and sets off through tendrils of converse toward that great high wall of glass, the evening outside flatly black, blown out by the bright lights here within, and the two men stood before. He offers one of the coupes to Pyrocles, even as he sips from the other, “sorry,” he says, a winsome shrug. “Only two hands.”

The squat man doesn’t seem put out. “Good to see you again, Arnold,” he says, with grave bonhomie. Becker’s eyes slip sidelong to Pyrocles, who lifts his coupe, “Joaquin,” he says, “is to be named this night the Shootist, of our court.”

“Provisionally,” says the squat man. “Needs must we await your next Samani to make it official.” The matte black butt of a pistol grip peeps from that brown leather holster, strapped across his chest, snugged up under a pectoral. “Soon enough,” Pyrocles says, turning aside, “soon enough. Excellency!” to the young man approaching, his blue suit and his pale, pale locks, “how provident, that we might supplement our ranks with the likes of friend Joaquin!”

“Indeed,” says the Viscount. “It seems roses, in the end, do trump saltwater.”

“Excellency, I unfolded a map,” says Joaquin, “and with a finger traced the route from where I’d been, to here, to there, and when I saw just how much further north I’d have to go?” He shakes his scarf-wrapped head. “There’s rain enough in Oregon for my taste.”

The Viscount reaches back, beckoning, then hands a plastic coupe to Joaquin, “We merely await the arrival of Southeast,” he’s saying, “and then we’ll be about our Apportionment.” Looking off to one side, “Someone!” he calls, “play music!” Turning back, smiling tightly as with a clack there’s heard the groaning eloquence of an unseen cello. “Of course, Shootist, you’ve no streets yet to till, but nonetheless you’ll have tonight your measure and your due.”

Joaquin’s nod is one of phlegmatic approbation. “Southeast,” he says. “This would be the gallowglas,” but then, a puzzled frown at the Viscount’s admonishing hand, “I’d thought the Duchess to be a gallowglas?”

“Her grace,” says Pyrocles, “does not,” as the Viscount says, “I fear the only mortal to grace us with his presence is the Anvil’s, ah, companion,” a knuckle to his chin, “it’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“Becker,” says Pyrocles. “Arnold,” says Joaquin. Becker empties his coupe with a gulp. “Even so,” says the Viscount, looking to a bustle at the doorway of that wide room, “ah!” he says. “And here’s Southeast. Clear the table! Make room, make room!”

Stepping from the hall, his rough brown jacket pattered with fresh rain, his hair a jet black cap, beside him an older man in a blue coat, shoving back a damp grey mane, up to the folding table that’s been cleared, not a coupe left in sight, as the Viscount stands himself at the other end. “Luys!” he says. “Good Sir Mason, what bricks have you brought us tonight?”

Luys sets a modest canvas sack on the table, “There was no time to press and mold, I fear,” he says, tugging open the mouth of it to reveal a plastic bag within, sealed up about a heap of loosely golden dust.

“Beauty’s in the stuff itself, and not the shape it takes,” says the Viscount. Looking up, from the sack to the crowd of them, thick about the table, “Friends,” he says, “peers, neighbors, gentles all, before we divvy up our dower, a moment, to mark the loss of the Glaive Rhythidd, wise counselor, trusted advisor, dear friend, beloved brother,” an inclination toward the bald man in the linen suit, who does not look up to meet it. “A Huntsman, murdered in the street; an awful parody sent to accost us – let us hope her majesty’s – ”

“Your sister,” says someone in that crowd, quite low, but audible enough.

“I,” says the Viscount, suddenly cold and terrible, “have. No. Sister. Therefore,” a deep breath, “it cannot be said my sister has done,” lifting his hands, fingers spread, “anything. Now. Let us take another moment, more pleasant, I assure – ”

“What of the Count?”

“To admire,” grits the Viscount, turning away, a gesture back, toward the great dark empty window behind, “the labor undertaken by our Soames, to restore this hall to its former grandeur – ”

“At great expense!” says the man in the meshback cap, and the tension run through them all relaxes, then, with chuckles, nudges, though their attentions all return to fix upon the bright sack on the table. “All hail the Soames,” says the Viscount, “and his mighty rabbits. Now – ”

“Where is the Count?” It’s the stone-faced man, off to one side, glaring fixedly not at the sack but the Viscount, whose hands are on the table now, by a small set of silver scales, the precise brass cylinders of graduated weights. “Grandfather,” he says, “is indisposed.”

“And the Princess?” says the woman in black leather. “Also indisposed?”

“Baronness,” says the Viscount, “Barons, peers and delegates – let us cut and weigh and portion out our bounty. There’s time enough for business, at another time.” He’s lifted a slender glass tube from the neat wooden rack of them, there, gleamingly upright, empty, and the breath of the room is held as he dips it into the modest sack of light.

Becker looks down, the pinkly sticky coupe in his hand, the sharp crease of his trousers, the grey of them shot through with threads of blue and lavender and silver, his softly polished tobacco leather shoes. Shuff of a sliding step aside. Under a threadbare scrim of freshly unswept sawdust, spangled still with crumbs of broken glass, a coprolite of caulk, the floor, it’s faded, but an unmistakable stain, an irregularly ruddy brown, blotching once-polished boards. Becker steps back, and back again, away and off, “I’ll, uh,” he says, “bathroom,” but Pyrocles has pressed close about the table with the rest of them.

Out, into the hall, long and dim, lit only by a spot at the far end striking shadows from the rails and stiles of a yellow front door. Becker feels his hesitant way along until there, to the left of that door, can be made out a stairwell climbing its shadowy way up in an enclosed spiral, and a man stood on the first step, arms folded in a suit forbiddingly dark, skeptically chewing his lower lip. Becker turning about steps right, blinkingly into a lemon-bright kitchen, a woman in a white apron, kerchief about her hair, halted in the clattering act of unloading an armful of empty plastic coupes into an ungainly garbage bag, “Not yet!” barks someone, someone else, a grumpily narrow man, shirtsleeves tightly rolled above his elbows, flat black vest buttoned up to the white collar upright like a fence about his gin-blossomed jowls. He’s roughly stripping the plastic wrap from a plastic tray of chopped raw vegetables, cucumber slices, pepper strips of red and yellow and green, whole cherry tomatoes, baby carrots orange and magenta and yellowing white, florets of broccoli and cauliflower, “Not yet!” he snaps, again, more plastic trays of crudités stacked one on another beside him, “it will come, it will come,” and he flings a gesture at the doorway, but Becker’s already backing through it, “Sorry,” he’s saying, “sorry,” back out into the hall.

“Moody!” he bellows, boots loud on the boards in this darkly narrow alley between towering boat-bows crowded close, the unlit façades of floating homes, “Moody!” over the lop and slap of the water below, the ringing chimes of fittings jostled, taut buzz of cables strummed by wayward gusts. “You will answer for what you’ve done!” Kicking a cleat wound about with thick grey line that stretches a-sag out over the water to the blocky snout of a houseboat, porched-over bow of it blankly anonymous behind those darkling screens. “Hey!” No gangplank braced between wharf and deck, no sign of one laid about anywhere. He plants himself on that very edge, slopping water below, cargo shorts and a bulky sweater, pale tangle of beard and unkempt hair. What little light there is to be found here snags the edges of the swords he carries, one in either hand, spread challengingly wide as he roars once more, “Moody!”

A flare dazzles over him and wharf and bow and all, he steps back, an arm thrown up to shade his eyes, blade bright in his hand, “Moody?” he says. A step toward the light, and another, “Face me, you wretch!”

“Ain’t nobody here, Harper,” the snarl in response. “But keep it down anyway.” The light swoops away, settles brightly to reveal the rough grey boards between them, his boots, her enormous canvas deck shoes. “Peg-Meg?” he says, querulously.

“Always the games.”

“You went over to Moody?”

A guttural plosive that might be a laugh, or a spit, or a cough. “Moody works for the Commanding Officer. Commanding Officer rents. This dock?” That light swings back and forth between them, tarries, lapped a ways up his bare shins. “The Soames,” she says.

“You’ve gone over to the rabbits?” he says, even more incredulously, and the light swoops away, back down the length of that alley, “Needed a watchman,” she says.

“Meg Greentooth, gone to the rabbits,” he says. “Five-fingered Pwyll to the hounds. Red Gaveston to his doxies, all in a day, I just don’t – ”

“Kern Gradasso gone to dust,” she says. The light’s switched off.

“Margie,” he says, thickly.

“Go,” she says.

The colorless key stops just short of the lock, bobs a moment, is folded back into fingers that seize the handle, lever it easily down, unlocked already. He opens the flimsy door, and a groan of springs as he steps his weight within, head and shoulders stooped against the close curl of the ceiling. A step to the right, and he sits himself with a creak in the booth there in the nose of the unlit trailer. A crackle across the little table, from a cigarette’s glowing coal.

“Your grace,” he says.

“My lord the Mason,” says Jo Maguire.

“I had thought you’d meant to quit.”

“I meant,” she says, “to walk out of the city and never come back.” Another crackling flare. “Lately I’m shit with the grand pronouncements.”

“Where had you meant to go, on foot?” he asks, gently, genuinely interested.

“I don’t know,” she says. “East.”

“That way lies the desert.”

“Not like any thought went into it.” The coal swoops to be swiftly snuffed, a ruddy glimpse of the rim of a plate, his closed hands on the table, bit of leather tied about one wide wrist. “But there,” she says. “That was it. Last one.”

“As pronouncements go, that’s not so grand.”

“It’s a promise,” she says. “Big difference. Whatcha got, there.”

His one hand’s tucking away that key. His other, the one that leaks a faintest glimmer through his fingers’ interstices, he opens to reveal a slender glass tube, capped by dark-waxed cork, and within a filament of gold. “A portion,” he says. “Same as any other.”

“Didn’t know we’d started giving ’em out in test tubes,” she says. “Classier than sandwich bags, I guess.”

“Do you believe her majesty?”

“Do I what now?”

“Is that not,” his voice like gravel underfoot, “the crux of this conversation?”

“You weren’t there,” she says, flatly. “You didn’t see him, you didn’t hear him. You weren’t there.”

“I have, now. If he’s truly what you say.”

“If you had, if you truly had? There’d be no doubt.”

“Yet there is,” he says, simply.

A moment passes, before Jo says, “So. You don’t. Believe her.”

A shuff, of corduroy on naugahyde, the clink of crockery displaced. “On this particular point,” he says, picking his careful way, “I do maintain, her majesty’s mistaken,” and then, in a rush, “for I do not doubt the most undeniably compelling of reasons.” A heavy breath, taken in. “I do not doubt her majesty believes. But what she’s done, my lady, because of that belief? Threatens to sunder court, and city, all.”

Click, chime, something in her hands. “What is it she’s done, Luys.”

“Denied the Hound his portion. Banished a fifth entire. Charged them with impossible demands.”

Click, rasp, a pop of flame from the lighter in her hand, that brings out the color in his rough brown jacket, her pale bare arms, “That it?” she says. Couple-three unwashed plates at her elbow, the cigarette butt, a desiccated tea bag crumped against a mug. “That’s all that’s got you upset?”

“My lady,” he says, his expression grave, “it is more than enough.”

Whick, and darkness once more. Squeak as she sits back on her bench.

“Your,” he says, after a moment, considering, “absence,” he says, testing the weight of each word, “did greatly, upset, her majesty.”

“So it’s my fault.”

“I mean only that it was upon your grace’s vanishment that she retreated, to that woman’s warehouse.” Table-creak as he leans toward her. “When you found your way back, it filled us all with hope. And when you helped her turn the owr, that hope was fulfilled, to overflowing,” his voice a husk, he swallows. “But then you left. Again. Walked away. And she announced her plan to give it freely, to any and all, save Southwest.”

Click, chime. Click. “You left out the bits,” she says, “where Southwest attacked her.”

“An exaggeration,” he says.

“Where you there, for the first one?”

“A disagreement, over how best to safeguard her majesty.”

“What, whether to fuck, marry, or kill?”

“No harm was intended – ”

“Were you there?” Slip and pop as she leans toward him, clack of plates, “way I heard it, Marfisa had to throw the goddamn throne through the window to get them both out safe.”

“The window,” he says, “has been restored.”

“Well thank God for that. And the throne? How about the King, Luys? How come nobody talks about that?” And then, “I swear, if you’d asked me, who’d be the true believer, and who’s the triangulating, equivocating fuck-up – ”

“My lady!” He starts back, blinking, as the lighter’s flame licks up once more between them. “Am I?” she says.

“Of course.”

“Then this?” says Jo. “Stops.” Click, the flame is gone, and sudden once more darkness, and complete. “No more footsie with Agravante. Got it?”

Scrape, a grunt, groan of trailer-springs, a gasp, “Let go,” she says.

“We will be torn apart.”

“And you’re the only one can hold it together?”

“Someone,” he says, “has to,” slip, scuff, the hiss of her breath, “Jo,” he says, a roughly secret whisper. “Her majesty is mad. This scheme of hers, her mulish stubbornness, her wasteful dalliances – she sent her Huntsman, it could have been you, to a needless, useless death. Jo. Listen to me. Jo. There is no Bride. A Queen, two Crones, and there is no Bride. Do you,” clink, a clunk, “do you understand?”

Squeak, and a sigh of the cushion, released, she’s getting to her feet. “Tomorrow,” she says. “First thing. As many of everybody as you can, meet me at that, woman’s warehouse.” A step away. “Some friends are missing. We’re gonna find them.” Clack of latch, the flimsy door swings open, streetlight spilling silvery thin, and there she stands, harshly limned against her silhouette. “Now. You want me to send in Sweetloaf? Or you gonna dally yourself?”

“Lady,” he says, choked, but the trailer judders, and she’s gone.

The last chord floats from his strings, a brightness falling shimmering dissolve, and his fingers lift from the fretboard, the soundbox, but his arms remain curled about that big-bellied guitar, his head hung low, face obscured by a lone long lock dyed blue. There’s no applause, but the stillness all about him breaks as one by they lower hands, or lift them, look to their friend, their neighbor, to him there on the stool by the cold and empty hearth, the crowd of them in that big front room, lit only by dim lamps set in elaborately fronded sconces, and somewhere in the middle of them all she takes a deep and shivering breath, “Oh, my,” she says.

“White boys shouldn’t ought to play the blues,” murmurs the woman beside her, “always ends up something different when they’re done with it.”

“Now, Mother,” she says, but frowns as she looks to her, much too tall, head and shoulders draped in the hood of some loose, brief jacket of pale gold, or brassy silver, high black boots laced up past her knees, but her dark thighs bare between for anyone to see. “Forgive me,” she says, “I had thought – ”

“You keep doing that,” says the woman, not unkindly, moving away through the crowd, leaving her to herself, her long full navy skirt, prim pink sweater, hair neatly tucked in an up-do, folding her arms as the crowd, released, moves about. Up there by the hearth the guitarist speaks quietly with a short man all in black, his beard a whisper of curls to line his jaw.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispers, and casts about, the front door there, she sets out toward it, but her first step stumbles, something clatter-thump underfoot, and she kneels, skirt pooling, to take it up, a lone shoe, a loafer with a strap across the softly wrinkled vamp of it, and tucked there the winking copper of a penny.

“Is someone,” she says, looking up, but there is no one, everyone has gone, there’s just the stool there, by the hearth, and otherwise that big front room is empty.