“We’re closed,” says the man behind the counter, without looking up from his receipts.

“But sir,” says the man at the door. “It was unlocked.”

“That would be because Mel went for coffee,” says the man behind the counter, “and Mel is a,” his fingers punch punch punch the keys of an adding machine, “thoughtless,” he says, at the rattling clack of calculation, “individual. Close it on up on your way out,” punch punch punch, “come back tomorrow,” clattering rap.

“But tomorrow is too late, and what I have in mind,” stepping in from the door, his bulky oaten sweater, his dull green cargo shorts, his boots anonymous beneath dried mud and dust, “it will only take a moment of your time, or mine,” his great big beard, his unbrushed head of hair, quite yellow, even in this sparse light, “or anyone else’s. Look, let me show you,” and he lifts a hand, closing it in a fist before him about nothing at all, and it’s as if every bulb in the shop has suddenly been overwhelmed, the flare from between his fingers striking brilliance from glass cases to either side, the phones and cameras lining the mirrored shelves within, and electronic devices more occult, the knives there, some sharply silver, some resolutely matte, and other bladed shapes and tactical accoutrements, the glittering glass tumblers there and silver flasks and lurid copper cups, the sparks and sheens from watchbands silver and gold, and all their crystal dials. That brightness, embering, falls, and his fist’s now filled with the hilt of a short but serviceable sword, the pommel of it heavily golden.

“Neat trick, son,” says the man behind the counter, “but, place like this? I got nine-one-one on speed dial.” His vein-rumpled hands do not stir on the counter, the one rested on the adding machine, the other moved to cover those receipts. The Harper Chillicoathe hastens toward him, “No, no,” he’s saying, turning the sword about to present that pommel first, setting it on the glass countertop between them, “I mean to trade it.”

The man behind the counter looks over the blade, then up to Chilli, his small square spectacles secured by a slender silver chain about his neck. “For what, exactly,” he says.

Chilli looks over, past the man behind the counter, to what’s racked back there, the shadowy file of shotguns, rifles, bullpups, long guns, there above the pistols and revolvers and handguns neatly lined on a middling canted shelf.

“Ah,” says the man behind the counter, the one hand lifting from those receipts, thumb circling his fingertips, “well, cash, credit, or trade, it’s a purchase, and as a purchase I have to run you through Ficus, which, this time of night, they won’t come back till the morning. And we’ll be needing some form of state-approved identification, fingerprints to be kept on file, all that pesky nonsense.”

“I was,” says Chilli, “hoping,” and a smiling shrug, his hands still there on the countertop, not reaching for any of the pockets of his shorts, the pads of his fingertips curled away, tucked protectively against his palms. “Hope,” says the man behind the counter, and a deeply reluctant breath taken in, let out, as those small square lenses turn back to the sword on the glass between Chilli’s hands, shortly sturdy, well-made, but well-used, the several nicks and dings and scrapes along the blade of it a-gleam in this depleted light. “I,” he says, “couldn’t do better than one, one twenty for this. You got a ways to go yet, for that.”

Chilli lifts a hand, fingers rounding into another fist. “I have another sword,” he says.

Four golden cards scattered over the nubbled green cushion, Bank of Trebizond, they say, Bank of Trebizond, Good thru, Good thru. Carol Harlib, says one, and John Wharfinger another, Otto Dogstongue, and the last one there, it can just be made out, The Blue Streak.

“Fun while it lasted,” says Otto, knelt behind that couch, arms folded along the back of it, chin on his crossed wrists.

“Lasted?” says John Wharfinger, perched on an arm of it, slim black guitar case at his feet. “I just got here.”

“They, they got my name right,” says Blue, sat on the couch by the little pile. “I mean, y’know, I could only ever use it when nobody was paying any attention. Or, or self-checkout. That worked.” Flicking a card with a fingertip. “But they got it right.”

“Have to pack it all up again,” mutters John Wharfinger.

“Cheat Death,” says Carol, stood at the edge of the stage, looking out over the cavernous warehouse, and only a few of the overhead doors rolled up even halfway for the dour morning light. Here and there this subdued knot or that contemplative clump of lares and hobs, urisks, losells and phenodderee, cleaning, some of them, tinkering, others, fidgeting, quietly talking, one to another, looking up and off to nothing much at all. “Come on,” she says, turning back to them all, quietly quizzical, “Dirty on Purpose? I played it for you. We were never as lucky as we’d like,” she sing-songs, “the miracles are through,” letting that last note linger as she theatrically lifts up her face, her hands, wryly smiling, her calico sundress, her tight white T-shirt, her skinny jeans.

“Lady Waters,” says John Wharfinger. “And the Hooded One.” His red hair tangled, a darkly iridescent vest crimping his voluminously white blouse. “Bit on the nose,” says Carol, and then up pipes the Blue Streak, “Goodbye, Mr. Ed,” he says, looking to John Wharfinger, “some tasty Gabrels noise you could munch on.” His long-sleeved T-shirt says The Telegenic Dead in white letters on black.

And then ruddily bald Otto is crooning, “Anything, to feel weightless, again,” his eyes closed, his fingers lifted to help carry the words. “I liked that one. Who was that by?”

“The Handsome Family,” says Carol, mildly exasperated.

“There’s a bed for me where’er I lie,” says John Wharfinger, “and I don’t pay no rent.”

“If it’s good enough for Nelson,” warbles Otto, beaming widely, “it’s quite good enough for me!”

“This was a Pizza Hut,” sings the Blue Streak, the fingers of one hand dancing, “now it’s all covered in daisies,” pointing out the notes of the tune in the air.

“What was that, that beautiful day song?” says Otto.

“What, U2?” says John Wharfinger.

“No,” says Otto, “no, it was, elbow? Yeah. The, ah – ”

“One Day Like This,” says Blue.

“Sure about that one? says Carol.

“One day like this a year’d see me right,” sings Otto then, loud enough that out there on the floor this face turns up toward them, and that.

“Okay,” says Carol, “but if we’re doing that, we’re doing A New England. Kirsty MacColl’s, because it is objectively better.”

“Oh, hey,” says Blue, pointing to Carol, “we could do, you could do Let My People Go.”

“What,” says Otto, frowning, “from that mole thing?”

“No, no,” says Blue, as Carol’s saying “That’s let my children live,” and “no,” says Blue, “the, the, like, Diamanda Galás. You know. You,” pointing to John Wharfinger, “do something simple, stark, you know, electric piano, and you,” back to Carol, “really stretch those cords, you know?”

But Carol’s frowning, and John Wharfinger shakes his head. “Too much like what we already did,” he says. “Nicodemus.” He looks away.

“Where is her blasted nabs, anyway,” says Otto, pushing up to his feet there behind the couch, and then, as they all turn to look at him, sternly, sadly, taken aback, “what,” he says, did I miss something? Are we not supposed to talk about her? What?”

A bit of a stir out in the warehouse, someone’s come in under the main overhead door, a woman with a pink scarf about her neck and a floppy knit toque on her head, her jeans palimpsested with felt-tip graffiti, looking about, uncertain. “You never should have put that blasted Star Wars song on everybody’s phones,” John Wharfinger’s saying to Blue.

“Star Trek. And it got us that write-up, didn’t it?”

“After we split!” snaps Carol. “Fat lot of good that did.”

Someone beckons to that woman, Powys, and there’s Luchryman pointing, and others, gesturing, there, toward the great wooden tub out in the middle of it all, a dappling pool of sunlight faintly from a summer yet to come.

“No,” says Carol, “what I’m thinking,” as that woman makes her way toward the tub, “is maybe,” says Carol, “Peter Pumpkinhead. Let’s begin,” lifting a hand, but she doesn’t snap her fingers poised. The woman in the pink scarf has dipped a hand into the tub to pull it, shining, out.

“In sixteen forty-nine!” sings out John Wharfinger, and he’s up on his feet, “to Saint George’s Hill!” his voice quite loud and carrying clear, and startled, smiling, Carol’s slinks in over his, smoothing the edges, “a ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will!” The Blue Streak leaning forward on the couch helps them punch the next line, “They defied the landlords!” and the thump of Otto’s big black boot on the boards of the stage. “They defied the laws!” thump! and everyone out there has turned to look up to them. “They were the dispossessed, reclaiming what was theirs!”

A breath ratchets up and up until it breaks a shuddering gasp and eyes pop open in blinking alarm, “No, no, don’t stop, keep going, go!”

“Are you all right?”

“God, yes – ”

“I could – ”

“No, don’t – ”

“I should – ”

“Yes, yes, like that – wait – your hair!”

A hand lifted from a buttock as hips still, and bellies, the shuff of skin on silk, breasts rise and fall, and shoulders, the labor of breathing. Fingers brush a dangling lock, the roots of it a yellow dulling quickly to a sandy buff, deepening to cinnamon, to auburn, through chestnut and wenge to glossy midnight tips.

“I’m,” blue eyes blink, to green, “distracted.”

“Look like her,” the imperative no less forceful for being whispered. Those eyes clench. Braced arms shudder. Sweat patters satin as that hair’s shook out so darkly black, so artfully tangled, “no,” the whisper, “no. Look like her. Look like her.”

Lifted up, all that hair is shoveled back, and again, back and away the shadowy bulk of it melting in the candlelight to reveal the corners and curves of the skull beneath, licked by the merest fuzz of gold, and that nose, and those eyes, now icy blue.

“Like this?”

“Like her.”

“Like you,” hiking up, falling forward, “like now,” weight caught on hands planted to either side of all that yellow hair, belly over belly, breasts against breasts, thighs spread about hips that hitch and settle, rise and fall with every stroke the sigh the breath the look that’s edging toward the everything to fall.

Sometime later she sits up alone among the wraps and rugs, the pillows and bolsters, the candles guttering about. Her hair a pile of tidy black curls, looking about, “Tina?” she says. And then, “Chris?”

“Up here.”

Sat tailor-fashion there, at the foot of that wide bed so neatly made, her yellow hair severely straight to her shoulders and past, eerily lit from below by something, her phone, in her hands, in her lap.

“Did she post again?” Drawing a shawl to herself, blue-black and glimmering silver about her shoulders. “Chrissie, did Ettie post again?”

“What?” Looking absently up from the phone. “No, it’s Gav. We can pick up a shift whenever we want. As the Sœurs. If you can hold it together.”

“You want to dance again?” she says, her hair now severely straight, slithering yellow down her back.

“Want,” she says, “is a strong word,” looking up, her face underlit. “But we need money, and I don’t think,” a click, the phone goes dark, “we’ll have much of a career in television,” and it’s a bitter twist, but there’s something of a smile there, in the shadows.

“You should come down from there, Chris. You shouldn’t be up there.”

“What, on the bed?” Looking over, to the black shapes of clothing neatly laid out on the smooth white duvet. “She’s never coming down here.” To the white pillows neatly stacked, undimpled. “And her majesty won’t be back anytime soon. I mean, the game’s just about over, don’t you think?” Down to her, knelt there on the rugs, wrapped in that shawl. “If you need somewhere to stay,” she says.

“I have a place. I, should, have a place.” A breath, taken in, let out a sigh. “Ettie, won’t she, if she thinks I’m, replacing her? Won’t she be angry?”

“Ettie bought a one-way ticket.” Twisting about, her legs unfolding, a foot lowered to the bolsters below. “She knows how to get back. Come on,” holding out a hand, gesturing with her chin, toward the screen there, the pale frame of it, and the panels of plain linen. “Let’s go have one last spa day.”

On his wrist the golden watch, face of it crammed with three ticking dials set in an encompassing fourth, each quartered and marked by exquisitely tiny numerals, sigils, runes, each with its set of slenderly filigreed hands pointing this way, that, and set atop them all a single ornately majestic sweep hand. Fingertips roughly oblate. the nails of them cruelly cut short, pinch the innermost bezel of it, squeeze, twist, click. Every hand on the face of it falls slack, even the sweep, swinging loosely with gravity as he tilts it back and forth. He taps the crystal, brow furrowing over his frowning eyes, his sharp nose, his sharper chin. He twists the bezel back, tick-click.

Those hands immediately leap to resume their twitching, ticking, majestic sweeping, and she surges awake at his feet, sucks in a slobbering, overdue breath, “oh, Moody!” clutching his shins, “I saw her, she was real as anything, real as ever, as you,” and he yanks a foot free, “Christ, Ada, get up, you’re fucking disgusting.” Planting a boot against her shoulder, shoving her back against the louvered closet door, rattling the mirror hung from it, pasted over with stickers mostly black, some red, a few grey, printed with letters white and silver and black in shapes like electric shocks or shards of glass, or words found in the oldest Bibles, Free Men, they say, and Wewelsburg Summer, Sovereign, a blocky red capital L. “Hnánpa,” she’s muttering, “xhnánpa ála, inˀála, oh, Moody, you got no idea,” her black her dulled with grey, shining with grease.

“Pretty sure I do,” he mutters. Squatting beside her slumped there, folded in on herself all heavyset elbows and knees, beige bra-strap slipping from one wide shoulder, careworn hand curled a darker brown against the pale swell of her belly, grey-ridged slabs of her feet pinched by filthy green flip-flops, but her eyes, so wide, so liquidly wonderstruck, “Thank you,” she murmurs.

“Shut up,” he says, not unfondly. Looking to the ceiling close above. Off up that way, muffled voices, raised with an edge of stridency, “The hell?” he says.

“That damn game,” she says.

“That’s not,” he’s listening, stock still, “the game.”

A thump shakes the ceiling. He starts up, heads out, through the door, into the hall. “Moody?” she says, getting to her feet. “Moody?” One step, two, towards the door, stumbling at the sound of the first gunshot.

Loud, and flatly definite, an immensely crack however many rooms away, and then a second as irruptive, and she squeaks, then jumps at the third shot, higher, sharper, “Fuck!” she shouts, and then stuffs a fist in her mouth, cowering.

Silence, falling, spreads, seeping through the house until the scuff of her flip-flop against the carpet is unimaginably loud. She lifts her foot with elaborate care for her next step, and her next, through the doorway, into the unlit hall, the short flight of steps ahead, and daylight, however indirect. Two more gunshots in quick succession, back to those flat cracks, a third, a fourth, she crouches at the top of those stairs, the garbage piled beyond, the filth-streaked checkerboard floor, the daylit kitchen, empty.

“Moody?” she whispers.

“XO!” someone bellows, up at the front of the house. “Danny Moody! Come out and get what’s coming!”

Hunched over she scuttles into the kitchen, around toward the back door, but tumbles to a sudden flopping stop. Someone’s stood there, blocking the way to the garage, a little man with an outsized head, and seeing her, he unfurls a smile, his thin lips parting about far too many teeth. Ada Minthorn screams.

She screams, and there’s an immediate scuffle from the front of the house, heavy footsteps Dopplering toward the back the kitchen her, and the little man looks up to the awkward landing in the far corner, the man bursting onto it, baggy shorts, bulky sweater, his head a great bush of yellow, and in his hand, his hand is filled with, planted atop his hand a polished black cylinder set in a dulled silver frame that sprouts a long and slender barrel pointed this way, that, toward the hall behind, back to her, she’s looking right up into an empty black hole rimmed by a perfect round of grey that holds her, fixed, for an inscrutable moment before it jerks away. “Cearb,” he says, the name tearing itself from his heaving breath. “This isn’t,” he says, “what I asked for. This isn’t what I wanted!”

“Boon,” says the little man, lips pursed over those teeth, savoring the word’s taste. “Bane,” he says. “Bone.” A shake of that head. “It’s all in the shape of the mouth.”

“Please,” says Ada then, a squeak of a word. “Please.” Looking to the little man in the doorway to the garage, the armed man on the landing, the empty doorway back down to the basement. “Please.”

“Danny Moody hurt her grace,” says the Harper Chillicoathe. Lowering the gun to point at her again. “You all did.” His free hand, trembling, reaches across to press the heel of it against the revolver’s hammer. The click-tack as it’s cocked. “So. You all have to go.”

He pulls the trigger. The hammer springs forward as the cylinder lurches a widdershins notch. The empty click is barely audible.

Chilli blinks. Ada opens her eyes.

He cocks the gun again. Click. And again, click. “No,” he says, and “no,” he says, click, “no, he told me, he said, it wouldn’t do this, no!” Click. A sleeve of army-surplus green reaches around him, a hand clamps about the revolver to wrench it aside, twisting the fist, and Chilli hisses.

“Never dry-fire a piece of shit like this,” says Moody, the revolver now upside-down in his hand. “You’ll lock up the mechanism.”

“He said revolvers never jam!”

“It didn’t.” Moody shoves Chilli to stumble a step or two down. “You just can’t count.” He turns away, off toward the front of the house. “Moody!” shouts Chilli, starting back up after him. “Blast it, Moody!”

Ada, slowly, turns herself about in the suddenly empty kitchen, the door to the garage unblocked, the little man gone, and his teeth, the unlit stairs down to the basement, the pop and shuck of her flip-flops as she makes her way toward the steps up to the awkward landing, and the front of that little house.

The hiss of a signalless channel carried by patient speakers. An agent decked in tactical gear, frozen on an enormous television screen, an effortful rictus just discernible through a rectilinear blizzard of rainbow snow, and the cracks that radiate up the screen from a jagged hole blown through it, close by a corner. At one end of the couch a guy’s sitting, a kid, really, head tipped back at an alarming angle, both hands on the controller in the blood that puddles his lap, spilled from the hole punched through his chest. Another guy’s crumpled by the other end of the couch, “Christ,” says Moody, his knee on that guy’s chest, the heel of his hand clamped over that guy’s mouth, fingers pinching shut his nose, holding it there despite a weakly bucking struggle, knocking aside the flop of a bloodstained hand. “You can’t even make a mess properly.”

“What are you doing,” says Chilli, folding up his arms, leaning his back against the wall.

“What you couldn’t.” Moody tilts his head to one side, considering. That bloodstained hand’s fallen to the carpet, motionless there by the emptied revolver, laid to one side by a second gun, stubby black barrel set on a compact khaki grip. “This one got the teevee, huh? Trying to shoot back?” Getting to his feet, he scoops up the second gun. “Bet that scared the bejesus out of you.”

“Why are they still here,” says Chilli.

Wiping the grip and the barrel with a corner of his jacket, Moody steps over to the leather recliner, and Chad, the CO, laid back in it, brown robe sprawled about the bloody ruin of his naked chest, hands flopped over to either side hung low, one bare foot kicked out, quite still. “You know what?” says Moody. “I take it back. Six shots, four hits, center-mass, two kills, and he,” jerking a thumb back, “would’ve bled out before anybody got here. Not bad, for your first massacre.” He drops the pistol into the CO’s lap.

“What are you doing,” says Chilli, shaking that yellow head.

“Used to stage scenes like this all the time for the Gulf Clan, and the Norte boys.” Kneeling by the recliner, peering about, that body, this. “Give cops a simple story, easy to read,” getting back to his feet, “they won’t go looking for anything else.” Shoving back a ragged cuff to eye the golden watch about his wrist. “Ada!” he calls, stepping away from the recliner. “Ada, baby, time to go!”

The kid, at the far end of the sofa, his head recently shaved, the naked scalp unbearably pale, and whatever his T-shirt once said can no longer be made out. The guy crumpled at this end, the revolver there on the floor by his bloodstained hand. The CO’s head, right there, sightlessly staring up at the popcorned ceiling. Chilli, trembling, braces a hand gingerly on the back of the recliner to shuddering leaning reach, over the body, the flopped-open robe, the blood-sodden boxers, to take up that pistol, so small in his hand, two fingers curling naturally enough about the blocky brown grip, and his thumb, his index finger longer than the barrel of it, grimly flatly black.

Lurching out of the front room across the hall out onto the awkward landing, gripping the railing. Footsteps thumping up from the basement, there’s Moody, stepping into the kitchen, his broad-brimmed hat on his head, muttering to himself, “where did she,” but stopping as he looks up to see Chilli there, and what’s in his hand. “Well,” he says. “Would you look at that.”

So high, too sharp, a barrage of popping strikes at an immense snare drum too loud in that close space. When the pistol stops jerking, when the silence returns, almost as immense as what it displaces, Chilli opens his eyes to see

and sees

Jo Gallowglas, Jo Maguire, Hawk’s Widow and Queen’s Favorite, Duchess of Southeast, her trousers black and baggy, her black turtleneck sleeveless, both hands clutching her breast, “what,” she says, “the,” and drops to her knees as a feather sprouts from between her fingers, long, slender, vanes of a grey so iridescent it seems to contain every possible color paling to a clean white down about the quill, and another, another, “shit,” she says, as each of them glittering sheenly shining silvery erupts from her breast to tip, slip, drift away, shed even as they emerge to float to the checkerboard floor, and Chilli, shrieking, drops

the pistol, dropped into the CO’s lap.

“What are you,” says Chilli, but then his hands leap to cover his dumbstruck mouth.

“Setting the scene,” says Moody. “Remember?” Shoving back a ragged cuff to eye the golden watch about his wrist, grinning sharply, “Hot damn, I wasn’t sure that was going to work. I’m telling you, this thing,” looking up to Chilli, down to the pistol, the mirth leaking out of him, shoulders settling, grin dissolving. “Want to try again?” he says.

Chilli pitches forward, heaves up an eruction of white-gold fluid that splashes between his clutching fingers, spattering the carpet, his boots, the leather of the recliner, the body. An arm about himself, he groans.

“I’ll get my hat,” says Moody, stepping away. “Maybe go find Ada. This ain’t the kind of place you want to stick around.”

Stepping stumbling Chilli crashes back against the wall, blotting his beard with the back of his hand. The CO, his head just visible, staring gormlessly up at the ceiling. The kid at the end of the couch, somehow staring still at the color-drenched television. He’d recently shaved off all his hair, that kid. The naked scalp so unbearably pale.

Bootheels thunder down stairs from weakly sunstruck balustrades of glass above past the yellow and grey of underlayment atop joists and beams the color of old coffee into the softly shadows of that long and slender open porch beneath, and the screams, the relentlessly raw, full-throated screams from the far end, frantic pulsing bleats shoved out between desperate yelping breaths hauled in enough to draw another ragged howl of anguish, rage, of pain and terror, harrowing despair, wordless, shapeless, formless, ceaseless, echoing over the vertiginous drop beyond, the screen of trees quite dark against a whitely grey haze of sky. Luys leaps the last few steps at the bottom to crouching lope the length of the porch, the table gleaming endlessly to one side, the wall to the other opening on a widely solid bannister, the needled trees beyond, rattling thunder become a scuffing scrape as he skids to a halt at the far end, reaches for the squalling squealing screaming tangle of blankets in the slant of sunlight there, “My lord!” from the stairs behind, the Viscount Agravante descending with only a whit more deliberation, a dash less alacrity, “my lord Mason, do not!”

A fold of blanket loosening as he seizes it, drooping from a pinkly enormous white-crowned burden, and the screams it seems had been muffled until now, as that burden tips up, that nose, those crinkled eyes, those cracked lips yawling spreading wide to make room for a piercing scream so much louder than any that had come before, and wincing, grimacing Luys yanks at the blankets, tugging them free, digging for something, a shoulder, an arm to grip, but there’s nothing, nothing but blankets and that enormous rolling shrieking head that he catches in his hands, pressing palm to cheek as that scream is swallowed by a sobbing breath, air desperately sucked into nowhere at all, and another, another, quick yelps as percussive as hiccups as Luys struggles to hold the twisting yanking slowing twitching gentling breaths that come more easily now, and the screaming’s stopped. “My lord Pinabel?” says Luys, perplexed.

Tiny eyes blink open to focus, darkly, on him. “Candy floss,” mutters the other, swiveling savagely to clamp that mouth about the heel of Luys’s hand.

Gurgling, blanching, Luys rears up, slapping the floor with his free hand, but even as those pink cheeks hollow, those tiny eyes bulge, the butt end of a polished wooden haft is pressed to the temple of that head, crumpling white hair against pink skin, pressing, “Stop,” says Agravante, shifting the butt to pinch a crimple of earlobe, press. “Let go.”

Spitting, growling, the other does, that somehow guttural snarl grinding itself into a word, words, “How, long, how long,” as Luys sits heavily back, “must I wait patiently, as you catch me out, again and again, and again! How long must I wait, to avenge my iquor that you have spilled upon the stones!”

Luys falls back, weight propped on the one hand, the other held up before a bewildered scowl, the heel of it marred, a purpled black arc that stipples the skin, seeping into the flesh. The bit of leather tied about the wrist. He opens his mouth, but can’t seem to find a word. “Hold, there, Joaquin,” calls Agravante, somewhere above, “let no one other any further down the stairs but the Anvil, call for the Anvil, let him through,” he’s stooping to busy himself with gathering up the blankets, “I was shot,” the other’s sputtering, “somebody shot me, how did a goddamn gun,” and Luys hunches over his lap, cradling that darkening, puffening hand, his bewilderment eaten away by a growing consternation, “oh,” he manages to vocalize, “I,” and “my,” as the other’s strained and fraying monologue, “goddamn bullet, goddamn hole,” dissolves in hacking coughs that culminate in an extended heaving syncopato, “oh,” the other, groaning, “oh, oh that’s not right. That’s not right at all.”

“My lords,” a new voice somewhere above, taken aback, and “Good sir Anvil,” Agravante, smoothly stood back up, “take charge of the Mason, and with Joaquin take him away through the main room and up the stairs, as discreetly as you might. I’ll see to the Count and join you, presently.”

“My lord,” says Pyrocles, concerned. Agravante murmurs reassurances, even as the swaddled other spits and snivels and moans, but Luys, Luys is focused on the feather that’s drifted across the floor to settle softly by his knee. Long, and long, a foot or more, thick quill no less substantial for being translucently pale, the sudden puff of bright white down, the neatly layered vanes an innocuous, a deceptively plain and simple grey that within its color somehow iridescently contains so very many fleeting others. A hand is on his shoulder, a suggestion he might stand, why not, he does, with some little effort. A step’s proposed, he takes it, and another, along the table, out of the sunlight, away from the babbling, and the feather, that gleaming feather, but his hand, his hand’s still there before him, in his hand.

“Careful,” says someone, Agravante, holding an axehandle, or is it a blanket, but no, he’s back there, in the sunlight with the other, it’s Pyrocles so very large and puzzled, blue jacket stretched by those broad shoulders, glint of pewter beads at the ends of his mustaches, “take his arm,” but someone’s already holding his arm, and yet a rough brown hand takes hold of his elbow, gently, but still he winces, swollen fingers curling even at that distant touch. He looks up from his hand to the man stood beside him on the stairs, squat and powerfully built, slick hair tied back with a red scarf, strap of a holster snugly crossing the front of his two-tone shirt, slight smile so gently solicitous under such dark eyes, and Luys, blinking, crumples in a faint.

A hand clamps his shoulder, crumpling the leather, “Hey!” he shouts, turning with it as he’s getting to his feet, “the fuck,” and “you fucking,” arms flapping, catching his balance, shuffle-slap of rubber on cardboard, crackle of gravel, “fuck!” and the man who’s grabbed him lets go, a step back, “You,” he’s saying, “you, what are you, who are you looking for? What did you say?” and the woman crouched on the flattened box looks away from them both, huddled in her once-white sweatshirt, mumbling something under her breath. “Who are you looking for?” says the taller man again, black jeans and a tight T-shirt that says I Fix Things in antique letters, It’s What I Do.

“Man,” snarls Sweetloaf, resettling his brown bomber jacket, “you do not just grab a guy like that, I mean, fuck!” His pompadour a-flop, the brass-rimmed goggles perched on his forehead. “I mean, shit, manners, you know? I mean, Jesus,” but at that he catches himself, blinks away, “fuck,” he’s muttering, “fuck, fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” says the taller man, “but this is important. You were saying something, you were describing someone, someone you’re looking for?”

“Ā gōng zǎi bo zhǔ xián,” chants the crouching woman then, her mumbling bubbling to the surface with an edge of hilarity, “ā gōng! Ā gōng!”

“There’s this kid,” says Sweetloaf, cautiously, still scowling. “Not too tall, not too short,” a hand, lifted to wobble right about there, “dark hair, lots of buttons on the jacket, jean jacket, young, I guess, I don’t know,” a shrug, “name’s Jack.”

The taller man seizes his shoulders, “No,” he’s not quite shouting, “no, it was somebody else, who else, who else are you looking for?” but he stops, suddenly, panting, wild eyes staring not at his hands or Sweetloaf’s face but letting go nonetheless, stepping once more back. “Ā gōng zǎi bo zhǔ xián, ā mā zǐ bo zhǔ jǐng,” sings the woman, rocking back and forth. Sweetloaf steps into the space the taller man’s ceded, “You are not doing that again. Are we absofuckinglutely clear, on that?”

“I’m sorry,” the taller man’s saying, “I’m sorry, please,” wiping his hands on the front of his shirt, “please.”

“A woman,” says Sweetloaf, warily. “Short. Lived out by the airport with all these fucking cats. Wore, like,” lifting his hands to his face, his eyes, below those propped-up goggles, “super-dark fucking glasses all the time.”

“May,” says the taller man.

“Her name’s,” Sweetloaf’s saying, “yeah, how’d you fucking know?”

“How do you know my mother?”

“Whoa,” says Sweetloaf, “whoa whoa whoa,” but the taller man isn’t reaching for him, and he lowers his hands, “I don’t, man. I never even fucking met her.”

“Èr gè xiāng!” chirp the woman, popping suddenly to her feet. “I know about the cats. I heard about the cats.”

The taller man, suddenly solicitous, “What did you hear, about my mother?”

“I need a dollar,” says the woman, “I need five dollars, twenty. Twenty dollars.”

“What do you know,” says the taller man, leaning over her, her sagging sweatshirt, her drooping hospital pants, a dingy white spotted with blue, her black hair all a-kilter. “What have you heard, about my mother?”

“I heard,” she says, “about the cats. I heard she lives, with cats. Up by the airport, but you gotta fly to San Francisco first, Ess Eff Oh. Ess Eff Oh.”

“But,” says the taller man, May’s son, “how do you know her?” as he stuffs a hand in a pocket, “have you seen her? is she here?” even as Sweetloaf’s shaking his head, “Nah, man, she doesn’t know a fucking thing, I already asked her,” reaching to slap that proffering hand, “she’s fucking scamming you,” but May’s son persists, with a sidelong look at Sweetloaf, handing the woman a folded bill she reverently takes. “A gōng,” she mutters, “a mā,” sinking back to her crouch on the cardboard.

“You shouldn’t oughtoa done that,” Sweetloaf’s saying, but May’s son stalks off, away out from under the bridges above into the sunlight. Sweetloaf hastens after, away from the woman, the cardboard, the draped and suspended blue tarps, the bedraggled, mud-rumpled tents, the catawampish stacks of rough-hewn wooden pallets, the drifts and ramparts of garbage and junk, plastic jugs and discarded clothing, shreds of cardboard and trampled paper, an abandoned cooler, a massive truck hub turned on its side, a sheet of raffled plywood set atop it, a makeshift table waiting for lunch, or a game of cards. May’s son has stepped off the narrow paved track that stretches off through grass and scrub to either side, copses of trees there and along there, and up ahead another little knot of tents and trash and taut blue tarps in the shade. “Rovers and ramblers,” says Sweetloaf, “tinkers and vagabonds, you can’t do a one a them any fucking favors,” but May’s son lifts a hand, shaking his head, “Where do you get off, asking about my mother like you are?”

“Hey, it’s okay,” says Sweetloaf, “it’s all fucking okay, all right? My, ah, my boss, your mother did her a solid, let her stay a couple a fucking weeks, you know? Fed her cats, and shit, until the fucking cops showed up and fucked everything up, and we’ve been out here just about every day since, hitting up every fucking hobo jungle and vagrant camp we can find, checking with the jefes, looking for her, and Jack, and, and,” snapping his fingers, “whatsisname, okay? Because she’s fucking worried, my boss, okay? About your mother. Okay?”

May’s son looks away, back toward those highway bridges, busy with traffic oddly silent. “They’re telling me,” he says, “the RV is abandoned. The cops. They’re telling me because it’s abandoned they have to test it for hazardous chemicals, because abandoned RVs get used as meth labs. I’m telling them this is ridiculous because this is my mother and she has never had anything to do with meth but it doesn’t matter because it’s abandoned and this is what they have to do. They’re telling me it’s probably going to cost thirty thousand dollars at a minimum. They’re telling me I have to pay for it because even though it’s abandoned my mother was living there which makes it her responsibility, which makes it mine. They’re telling me the owner of the property can sue me for the cost to have it tested and removed if I don’t.” He aims a kick at a tummock of grass. “I never should’ve gone to them for help.”

“Well,” says Sweetloaf, after a moment, “sympathies, for whatever fucking troubles, man, but I’ll tell you what I could maybe – ”

“Mike,” says May’s son. “Mike Holmdahl.” He offers a hand. Sweetloaf cocks a brow, draws back, “Yeah?” he says, “What I maybe could do, see, me and my boss? We parked up by the fucking electrical thingy-whatsit, up at a Hundred and Second, and she went east, and I went fucking west, so I can tell you that from there,” pointing up, along the length of paved trail, “to here,” pointing back, toward the overpass, “it’s no fucking dice. But. But!” spreading his hands, “the two of us, we make our way back up the Springwater, catch up with her before she fucking makes it all the way to fucking Beggars Tick, and the three of us, we compare notes, where the fuck we’ve all been, what the fuck we’ve learned, coordinate our future fucking plans,” lowering his hands, shake of his head, “to find,” he says, “your fucking mother.”

“Hey,” says Mike, May’s son, but without heat.

“Okay?” says Sweetloaf.

“Okay,” says Mike, after a moment.

“Okay.” With a jerk, Sweetloaf starts away up the paved track, looking back with a gesture, come on, let’s go.

“You know,” says Mike, as he starts up after, “Driving out here, that guy Lake was on the radio? You heard about him? Anyway, he was saying that right now, today, this whole, the Sweetwater Corridor, it’s currently – ”

“Springwater,” says Sweetloaf.

“Springwater, the Springwater, it’s the largest homeless camp in the entire country, right now. Isn’t that, amazing? All these, people?”

“And did you bring enough folding fiat for every single fucking one of them? You gotta stop doing that, man. Ain’t a fucking one a those bums worth a fucking shinplaster. You know, you want to know what the worst part of this fucking hopeless search is? It’s the fucking smell. These fucking losers can’t even be bothered to take a fucking bath.”

“Hey,” says Mike, “buddy,” with some little concern. “They can’t take baths because they don’t have houses. That’s why they’re here.”

Sweetloaf rounds on him, “I sleep,” he snarls, “on a fucking threshold, more nights than not. I never had a goddamn bed, excuse me, your fucking pardon, but I wake up every fucking morning and I take the time to look like this,” drawing his hands, an exaggerated gesture, up and down himself, dungarees, bomber jacket, pompadour, goggles, “so fuck them if they fucking can’t be bothered,” stalking away on up along the path.

She crouches over a white wooden box of a frame easily as long as she is tall, if she were to stand to her full height, but only half that in width, and the walls of it less than a foot high. Her white hair’s tied back in a ruthlessly glossy queue, her shoulders bunch and shift within a loose white tank as she wrestles with a great but flimsy sheet of pressboard, unfolding it along the scores pressed there and there down the length of it. That frame has been assembled half in the blue and white kitchen, half in the hall beyond, under the little yellow lights strung along the ceiling, and she awkwardly stretches past the jamb, leaned out over the pressboard to adjust its fit to the corners just out of reach, muttering an imprecation as she does.

“You know, you could have that done for you,” says Ysabel, stood behind her, one hand on the knob of the door to the apartment.

Marfisa lets go of the pressboard, pushing herself a-twist back out of the hallway to sit on her heels by the frame. “To have it done, majesty,” she says, “I’d need someone to do it, and he,” a desultory gesture, off that way, “is all I have.”

Ysabel follows the gesture, looking back over her shoulder down the three short steps into the room beyond, filled with bankers boxes brown and white stacked stacked three or four high in rows before the couches, around the coffee table where Inchwick’s hunched over his work, the tweezers, the mucilage, the scraps of paper and photographs, studiously paying them no mind at all.

“So,” says Ysabel, turning back to Marfisa, “what is that you’re building for yourself.”

Marfisa, a hammer in her hand, cups her other hand to catch the tiny nails she lets fall from her lips. “Bookshelves,” she says, pointing that cupped fist toward the flat packs stacked within the kitchen, five of them all of a length, BILLY, each says, in bold sans-serif on their narrow sides.

“You do love your books,” says Ysabel. “I’d no idea you had so many.”

“Abby Tinker does. And when she comes to live here, I must have these shelves ready for them.”

“These were purchased on the Chatelaine’s account?”

“With Anna’s assistance.” Opening her fist to let the tiny nails rattle down to the pressboard sheet. “She showed me how to have them delivered directly here,” pinching one up, leaning back through the doorway, “they arrived yesterday, while I was,” tap tap tap, she drives it home, securing the sheet to the frame. “Out,” she says. Tap tap tap. “The mechanism, for assembling the frame,” rapping a white wooden wall with a knuckle, “turned out to be quite clever. Almost a shame it’s now down to hammer and tacks.” Tap tap tap.

Ysabel folds her arms about herself. Her white coat soft and loose, open over a briefly golden halter, and her trousers loosely soft and white. “This must be the last thing purchased with her cards,” she says, quietly.

Marfisa stiffens at that, sits up, the hammer set aside. “You’ve come here,” she says, “your royal self, to deny me once more what you’ve freely given.”

“We,” says Ysabel, “deny, nothing. Gloria has broken with the bank, and I,” a deep breath, looking up, those artful tangles slipping from her shoulders, “came, myself, to tell you so.”

“The bank is yours,” says Marfisa, curtly. “Break with them, and unbreak the account.”

“The bank has never been ours.”

“Your majesty is Queen.”

“It’s done,” snaps Ysabel. “Out of ignorance, or,” a brief shiver, she tightens her grip about herself, “love,” she says, “it matters little enough. It’s done, and not to be undone, not even by my majesty.”

“So,” says Marfisa, folding her legs tailor-fashion, propping her hands on her knees. “There’s to be no more,” and a sidelong look at those flat packs, “things. That’s disappointing. I’m starting to think that these won’t be enough.”

“I imagine the Shrieve has plenty of shelves in his jackdaw-nest. If you were to – ”

“Why is it your majesty is here?”

Ysabel’s mien of gentle concern is troubled, then, by a hint of frown. “To make, certain, that you’d know.”

“A dozen dozen others might’ve served that certainty – why, then, should it have fallen to your majesty, to bring this news to me?” Sat there, by the half-built shelf laid prone, under those little yellow lights, her expression inscrutably patient, as Ysabel looks up, away, hands folding one about the other.

“It’s been six weeks,” she says, finally, “since I last spoke with my brother.”

“He’s gone,” says Marfisa, bluntly.

“He’s been gone before. And when he was,” still looking off, away, “I’d speak to him, when I was otherwise alone.” The soggy light out the window over the sink, weakly grey but bright enough to fill the room, to softly silhouette her, all in white and glimmering gold. “Sometimes, he would speak back. Sometimes, I’d almost see him, a shadow, in the corner of my eye, a reflection, in a windowpane, I,” she says, “the shortest night? When you and I first, kissed? I told him, after, and he laughed, and asked what had taken us so long.”

Marfisa, intent on the hammer turning about in her hands, the head of it set on the floorboards, tink.

“But since that early morning when I looked into his eyes and saw he was no longer there,” says Ysabel, “nothing. Not a word. Not a glimpse. And I cannot even bring myself to,” a weighty sigh. “He’s gone.”

“You will not find him here.”

Ysabel with a shake of her head says, “That’s not why I came.” And then, a step closer to Marfisa, away from the door, “Last week, you came to me, to tell me something, but turned and left me there, before you did. I’d not have another five weeks pass between us, without a word.”

Marfisa, still sat there upon the floor, shrugs. “Whatever I meant to say was said.”

“Marfisa,” Ysabel kneels then, reaching out, but not to take her hand, “whatever else has happened, we were friends. Before that kiss, and after, after everything – ”

“There is no after,” snarls Marfisa, suddenly forceful, suddenly bitter, and Ysabel recoils, and Marfisa, blanching to see it, lets go the clattering hammer to reach out, to seize, but not her hand, “Lady,” she says, hoarsely, “I still love you.”

Her hands, gripping Ysabel’s arms, her upper arms, crumpling that soft white coat. “I never,” says Marfisa, “stopped. Loving. You.”

Ysabel, starkly upright, lips parted, blinking, once, twice.

“When you, when we, kissed, in that room, in Goodfellow’s house, you took, my heart,” and Marfisa lets go the one arm, withdrawing her hand a fist to her breast. “Try as I might, I cannot take it back.”

Ysabel, stiffly drawn back, blinking, once again.

“When I refused your oil,” says Marfisa, “your salt, your bread, I still,” a shuddering shake, “loved you. When I, set out. To leave the city. I,” but she shakes her head, lets go her other hand, sits back, folding her arms, tucking her chin, looking down, away. “When the owr turned to ash?” she says, “and all your spells, were broken?” Ysabel leans back at that, weight braced on one propped arm. “I woke up that next morning, still, in love, with you. I,” says Marfisa, “will always,” arms still folded, head tipped low, eyes closed away, “love you, my lady. Until the last of the stars falls away from out our sight, until the end of all the days to come, I will love you.” Lifting up her head then, those fathomlessly dark eyes meeting Ysabel’s dulled green. “But I do not think,” she says, “that I will ever be able to like you.”

Tink of the hammer, taken in hand. Rattle of tacks scooped up from the pressboard. Leaning back into the hall, over the overturned frame, she sets to hammering them home, one after another, tap tap tap. Ysabel pulls herself to her feet. Takes a step back, and another. Looks about, the sink, the window, the light, the room beyond, the boxes stacked, and Inchwick, assiduous about his work. The door to the apartment, still ajar. She opens it enough to step through, and closes it, quietly, after.

The rondel of purpled toothmarks pressed into the glossily tautened heel of his hand, and jagged red lines like rays from an angry sun stitch the palm across to the meat of the thumb, the base of the fingers, the bit of leather about his wrist. His puffy hand laid gingerly on his lap of brown corduroy, by the untucked tail of his yellow chamois shirt, dimly pale in this dark room. Curtains have been drawn across a window there, daylight leaking along the edges, but otherwise unlit. Wide bed neatly made, color uncertain in the shadows. The armchair that he’s sat in, generically dark. Low mass of the dresser there, obscure against the wall. Under his boots a rug of some white stuff, too loosely soft to be any actual fur, and set on it before him a wide round porcelain basin, and a plain white saucer, and on that a slim little knife, all of a silvery piece. His other hand he runs through his neat black cap of hair, strands of it falling back into place as his fingers pass. He jumps a little as the door to the room opens just enough to admit her, whisking shut behind. Her sweeping gown, so richly dark, still manages a glimmer in the shadows, and the sudden contrast with the pale scarf wrapped about her head, framing her face, cooly composed, a hint of concern.

“Highness,” he says, struggling to his feet.

“My lord the Mason,” and she hastens toward him, “do not stand on my account,” and nodding, he sits himself again, wincing as his hand is once more laid upon his lap. Chime of the knife as she kneels before him to peer at that bite, slop of something, water, from the jostled basin, “Highness,” he says, “you’ve wet your hem.”

“Hush, my lord,” she murmurs, lightly brushing the tight-stretched skin with her fingertips. “It’s quite hot.”

“My lady.” He swallows. “Why have you come.”

“It would seem,” she says, touching the tip of his thumb, the yellow rumple of his rolled-up sleeve, the knot in the bit of leather about his wrist, “the Viscount has finally dropped the dice into his cup.” Sitting back, her hand now hesitant over the saucer, the knife.

“Highness?” he says, and then hisses as she shifts his hand, making room to set the saucer on his lap. “Hold still,” she says, and presses the point of that slim knife to the angry heel of his hand.

His teeth clench. He strangles a yelp. What oozes up and out of the heel of his hand to bulge a weighty droplet dangling to slowly, slowly fall, thick as tar, or treacle, a dollop settling melting slowly into a purple slick on the saucer.

“Oh,” she says, lowering the knife, the tip of it daintily stained. “I do not think that this will do.”

“Lady,” he groans, shifting in the chair, “I’ve, what’s left of, my portion,” digging in a pocket with his other hand, a shivering shake of his head, he’s come up with a slender glass tube, and within, a fragment, of a filament, of gold, but “Oh,” she says, “I do not think that will nearly be enough.”

He closes his hand a fist about the tube, lowering his black-capped head. “There’s more, about the house. There must be more.”

“That’s not why I am here.” She untucks the impromptu cuff of his sleeve. “Are you especially fond of this shirt?”

“Not, especially – Princess – why?”

“They’ve given us a knife,” tugging the sleeve down to blot the fresh wound, gently, but determinedly. “A dish of water,” one last press, then carefully peeling the chamois away, eyeing the smeary mess that’s left. “But nothing to serve as diapering.” A shake of her swaddled head. “Can you unbutton yourself?”

“Your pardon, highness?”

“The shirt,” she says, bending down to start picking at the knot in the laces of his boot. “It will need to come off. It will all need to come off.”

“Highness?” he says, perplexed, even as his unwounded hand begins to work the buttons free, one by fumbled one.

“Âna,” she says, widening the mouth of the boot, “Annisa,” tugging it from his foot, “hight,” she says, setting it aside. “And here, my lord the Mason, it’s your pardon I must seek.” She sets to untying the other boot. “I know your office, but not, I fear, your name.”

“Luys,” he says, his shirt unbuttoned, lopped open over his bare chest.

“Luys,” she says, removing his other boot.

“Annisa,” he says. “What happens next.”

“Well.” She sits back with a rustle of gown. “There’s medhu enough in your other hand.” Looking away, reaching up, she undoes a fold of her scarf, and another. “We’ll clean the knife,” she says. “Make the cut. Let it fall direct into the water.” Deftly gathering up the scarf as she unwinds it until she can set it aside on the rug, neatly bundled. “But after that?” Looking up at him, now, dark eyes meeting his, her face in the shadows so much larger, somehow, framed only by the smooth close underscarf, beigely grey.

“After?” he says.

“My mother,” she says, “is the Dearborn Queen, and her majesty, my sister, High Queen of all the Court of Engines, but even so,” both her hands take hold of that scarf just there, beneath her delicate chin, “what happens next’s a mystery.” Peeling it up and back and away, to let fall unbound the softly mass of her long black hair. “Shall we find out together, my good sir knight?”

“Cora,” he says, those long dark hands of his lifting from the top of her desk, “Bunch. Bee You Enn Cee Aitch.” Frowning. “I think.”

She sits forward, an elbow on the edge of her desk, “And who was she to you? Great-grandmother? Elder auntie?” Her hair a darkly afro loosely wafted with the breeze of her movement. “Go on,” she says. “Sit.”

“No,” he says, “nothing like that,” and he does, in one of the two narrow wooden chairs in that tight space, his oversized shirt of orange plaid still sharply creased from its factory folds. “I’m just curious.”

“And you are?”

“Chris,” he says. “Beaumont.” Pointing back, over his shoulder, the half-open door, illuminated by a pane of frosted glass. “You got, office hours. I just,” and he sighs.

“You’re not in any of my classes.”

The scrape of the chair abruptly loud as he pushes back, “I can go,” he says, but she lays a hand on her desk, and he doesn’t get to his feet. “Curious is fine,” she says. “I don’t mind satisfying a little curiosity. But I’m curious, myself. This doesn’t happen too often, somebody coming in off the street.”

“Duckie,” he says. “Told me you were the person to talk to.”

“Duckie,” she says. “You mean, Howard Chiles?”

Christian’s scowling, “I don’t know about that,” he says. “Duckie. Plays poker most afternoons with, with Mr. Mills, and Mr. Ford, back of, uh, George Honeycutt’s old shop.”

“Mr. Ford,” she says. “Kent Ford.”

He shrugs, somewhere in that shirt. “All I know is, Duckie says, you got a question about Black history in Oregon? Then you talk to Professor Yadira Dini, Portland State.”

A cushion sighs as she sits back, both hands on black plastic arms, a judicious nod, a small smile, briefly pleased. “The thing about Vanport,” she says, “it was the second-largest city by far in the state, but only for six years: built up from nothing in about three and a half months, in 1942; washed away in the Memorial Day flood of 1948. Maybe fifty thousand people lived there, at one point or another, over those six years, all for the war effort – Henry J. Kaiser needed labor to build cargo ships for the British, and then warships for the Americans, and all the white men were being drafted, so,” her own shrug’s more of a definite thing, the wildly patterned reds and blues of her blouse rising as her hands lift, spread rhetorically, “Vanport trebled, quadrupled the state’s Black population in the course of a year or so. What’s arguably the first racially integrated housing development in these United States, and all of it only due to an accident of capital and war, but: enough of the canned lecture.” She shifts a couple-three books on the cluttered desk to reveal a trimly silver laptop. “What all that means, is,” lifting the screen of it, “there’s seven or eight thousand people, coming and going over the course of those six years,” typing something, soft clack of keys, the hard drive chuckling to itself, “any one of whom could be your Cora Bunch. And you ought to notice, how specifically imprecise I’m being, with these numbers,” swipe at the laptop’s trackpad, click, a quick burst of typing, another. “Vanport,” she says, “might’ve had a post office, and a library, a movie theater, a shopping center, a hospital and a high school – PSU?” She taps her crowded desk. “Founded as the Vanport Extension Center. Post-war high education for returning vets. The U by the Slough.”

Christian draw back in his narrow chair, that scowl of his turning, cheekbones hunching quizzically.

“What I’m getting at,” she lifts a hand at once inviting, forestalling, placatory, “Vanport might’ve been the second-largest city in Oregon, but it was never incorporated. It never had the chance to develop the means of seeing, and counting, and remembering, that cities need in order to build up archives.” Her attention returned to the laptop, type, swipe, twiddle, click.

“So that’s it?” says Christian. “Nothing we can do? Nothing to look up?”

“Not,” she says, “nothing,” clack, tap, “necessarily.” Pointing to something, there on her screen. “March of 1947, the telephone exchanges were rearranged to give Vanport a switchboard of their own. Used to be they had a hotchpotch of exchanges, ah, Trinity, Tuxedo, University, Webster, but they all became Tyler. So: they printed a directory.” She moves some of the clutter out of the way, a couple-few file folders, a stack of books, making room to turn the laptop about to face him, “and there you go,” peering around to tap, there, a blotchily printed column of tight-packed names from some old sheet of typescript, he leans forward, cheekbones hunched in concentration, Bunch, A., TYler 4-5642, Bunch, Jos., TYler 4-0181, Burdell, Geo., TYler 2-1712. “That’s it?” he says, looking up.

“That’s,” she says, turning the laptop back around, “two possibilities. Which is two more than you had,” tap, tap, click, “when you came in. That ain’t nothing.”

“Yeah, but,” his scowl shifting from concentration to annoyance, “what do I do with that, I don’t,” shaking his head.

“I can only get you so far,” she says. “Talk to your elders. Talk to Duckie. See what they can make of those names.”

“Duckie wasn’t ever in Vanport.”

“True,” she says. “But I’m sure he knows folks who were.”

“How many died in,” he says, in a rush, and then, a breath, “the flood?”

“The official count,” she says, “is fifteen. And I can tell you the name Cora Bunch isn’t on that list. But that’s the official count. There’s no way to know for sure how many, or who, but there’s more. That flood came on awful fast.”

“Yeah,” says Christian. “I know.”

Up past the jumble of bicycles, parked along the edge of the overgrown yard, a cyclopean ziggurat of poured concrete steps leads up to a comically cramped front porch framed in peeling pink siding. An enormous figure takes up most of one corner of it, a crude suit of wicker armor, the warp and weft darkened in streaks and patches by old rain. He looks up at it, one foot on the concrete steps, stooped in a barn jacket made for a much wider man, and he shakes his head, crowned as it is by a mighty round of black curls.

“Will you knock?” she says, stood behind him, draped in a rough grey himation over an ivory chiton, her left arm sleeved in sleekly shimmering mail.

“You should get back,” he says. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your rehearsal.”

“It’s fine,” she says. Her face painted, the shapes of her lips and eyes theatrically elaborate on a whitely powdered ground. “Matty will appreciate some time to fix her Jupiter lights.” A nod, toward the front door the color of liver. “Well?”

It’s opened by a round little man in a cocktail dress, “Yeah?” he snarls, but as he peers up at them his ruddied scowl softens in vague disappointment. “Oh,” he says.

A brownish sofa at an angle before an unlit hearth in that dim, high-ceilinged room. Two women dressed in black are sat upon it, leaned back against either arm, outstretched legs entwined beneath a garish god’s eye afghan, the one of them her white hair tightly knotted in glossily ruthless braids, the other her white hair unbound, a-float in wisps about her head and shoulders. “Do we mistake our eyes?”

“Has Aphrodite stepped down from Olympus?”

“Look more closely, it’s but the landlady.”

“Fickle fashion does but wax nostalgic.”

“To what do we owe.”

“I would not,” says Linesse, lifting her bared hand, “lay claim to aught of yours today, no more than but an ounce of your attentions. It’s Gordon,” stepping aside, that hand swooping, a gesture, “who’d have a word with you,” but he looks away from both of them, and her as well, away down the length of a table littered with folded newspapers and stacks of magazines, “I should,” he says, “go,” taking a step away, and another, another, until, “George Honeycutt,” calls the one of them, there on the soda.

“Porter Foresworn,” the other.

He halts, a hand on the dusty tabletop. “Gordon,” he says, looking back over his shoulder. “The kids call me Gordon.”

“Called, they did.”

“And kids.”

“So long ago.”

“And we, you see, are not.”

“What would you have of us, Porter?”

“I,” he says, turning slowly, reluctantly, but about, “am not myself.”

“Why, and who else would you be?”

He straightens, “This,” he booms, and Linesse at the other end of the table starts at the force of his voice, “is not me,” his hands up about his exuberantly dark hair, his glaring, unlined face, his shoulders broad, up and back, his chest swelling with a great breath taken in, but deflating, sagging, slumping as he lets it out, shoulders stooped once more, chin drooping, hands lowered. “I was born,” he says, “in nineteen and forty-four. I can’t be looking like this. They don’t know me.”

“But they never did.”

“They knew George Honeycutt.”

“Son and namesake of George Honeycutt.”

“Nephew to Eddie Unthank.”

“Good friend of Kent Ford, and Oscar Johnson.”

“The children called him Gordon.”

“When he served them breakfast.”

Gordon, scoffing, looks away, but one of them lifts up a spindly finger, “George Honeycutt, who, in nineteen, was it, seventy-one?”

“It was.”

“At the corner of Vancouver and,” snap, snap.

“Was it Beech?”

“North Vancouver, anyway.”

“Three witnesses saw him – ”

“A third was never confirmed.”

“ – get manhandled into the back of a prowler.”

“By two uniformed Portland police officers.”

“But, to this day.”

“The Portland Police Bureau insists.”

“To this day!”

“No car was patrolling that neighborhood.”

“Not at that time.”

“He was never seen again, George Honeycutt.”

“But the protests?”

“Were spectacular.”

Not a clock ticks, not a board creaks, not a drop drips, not the faintest breath of a breeze, not until Linesse says, “Gordon?”

“Who you mourn never was,” says the one of them.

“I was,” he insists.

“You were,” says the other, “a young man.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six, he’s a Sagittarius.”

“And we will always have been who we are.”

“But I was,” he says, his words crumbling, hoarsely, “old, with them, for a time,” and then, barely vocalized at all, “why.”

“A mystery?”

“A gift.”

“A precious gift.”

“Too precious?”

“What is it you tell your hopeful charges?”

“As you usher them through the door?”

“I,” says Gordon, frowning, but the one of them calls out, “Heed thy own advice!”

“Heal thyself, Porter.”

“Howsomever foresworn.”

“I give no drop,” he says, fiercely quiet. “I take no pinch. That, would be how.”

“That would be how you serve your Queen?”

“That would be how you serve this Court?”

“Sacramento!” he shouts, and slaps the flat of his hand on the table, and Linesse jumps. The one of them there on the couch lifts her nose, and the other lowers her chin. “The Court of Camellias fell. Two months ago. The Queen deposed, without a Bride. The King, fled. Knights, torn to pieces in the street. This city,” he snarls, stomping toward them, one, two, three, “is on the verge of following after, am I wrong,” and he slaps the table again, and Linesse flinches. “Tell me I am wrong.”

The one of them lifts up her head judiciously. The other looks down, lips pointedly moued.

“Tell me how you would have me best serve my hopeful charges,” says Gordon, quietly, his hand a fist, knuckles down on the tabletop.

“There’s the work, to be done,” says the one of them, then.

“There’s always the work,” the other.

“The shoes.”

“The shoes.”

“They never.”

“Never.”

“Stop.”

Silently and with infinite care he slips between jamb and door opened just enough to admit him, shutting it after with such delicate precision, and the faintest click of the latch.

The room’s unlit but for daylight weakly seeping from the edges of heavy curtains drawn, not enough to clearly determine the color of the duvet and pillows neatly spread, just enough to make out the mass of a dresser against the wall, to render the figure, sprawled insensate, palely naked, in what must be some sort of armchair, black-capped head tipped back, one arm flung aside, the other folded tucked against his flank, and the darkly swollen mass at the end of it cradled on his breast. One soundless step after another to the foot of the bed reveals a second figure crumpled on an oblong rug of singed fake fur, delineated by thickly regular strokes of long dark hair laid in drooping hanks about and over the slimly round of a shoulder, the slope of a waist, the swell of a hip. Between the two of them, by a bare foot, a hand closed about a little silver knife, there’s a wide round soot-smudged basin, half-filled with greasy smoking water, and hung within it a cloud of darkening yellowish grey unskeined in sluggish threads and tatters, and he sucks his teeth to see it.

Hiking up his sharp-creased trousers he kneels by that tableau, pale hair in dreadlocks swaying in the shadows. He plucks forth a pocket square, ivory edged with a pink insistent even in this darkness, and shakes it out to twist and wad it up again, and dips it in the basin, dredging up that slimy cloud as best he can, dunk and swipe to lift it, dripping, from the water. He stuffs the whole mess under the bed, distastefully flicking his fingers, wiping them back to front on an unscorched stretch of rug.

The man in the chair, unmoving. The woman, still, fœtally curled, not even the hint of breath.

An energetic plinking as he digs in the pocket of his jacket to produce a couple of slender glass tubes, each capped with dark blue wax, and within them threads of golden warmth, shining enough to ruddy up his hand. He sets one on the fur, and snaps off the top of the other with a quick clean clink of sundered glass. Tipping it over the basin he taps out golden dust, some falling to spark and pop and blacken on the greyly greasy surface of what water’s left, but mostly drifting in clumps and streaks of gleaming gold on the sooty porcelain rim. The tube, emptied, he whips beneath the bed as well.

The second tube.

Tink as he breaks off the top of it. Sits up there by the armchair, leaning over, careful of those canted ash-splashed knees, the bare thighs slackly muscled, hatched with thick black hair. Focused intently on that shape that had once been a hand, fingers lost in the purpled bloat, a glint of quick-bitten nail capsized in the swell of it, the ghost of a knuckle knurling the darkly taut skin. The bit of leather tied about the wrist. The arm then, drained pale, held close against that chiseled flank. He tips the second tube up over his palm and taps out the golden dust into a tidy little pile. The woman, still curled, unmoving, behind him now. The basin gently steaming by his knee, the little silver knife, the saucer, daubed with a wine-dark paste. He frowns.

He slaps his laden hand down on that shape.

Shuddering jolt the man in the chair surges struggling wrestles to yowling shrieking hissing smoke, but Agravante will not be dislodged, holding tight as yanked and wrenched he’s chucked from side to side, knee-thump and kick-chime and slop a hissing gasp, but keening up from Luys’s throat such a lost and hopeless howl that gathers strength, volume, a vector, weight, well on its way to becoming a vowel, perhaps a syllable that might’ve opened into a word, but roughly raggeding as he thrashes in the chair, hoarsening, raveling, shredding, crumbling into a lowering hacking cough of a sigh as his body relaxes, slumping beneath Agravante yet between his knees, hunched over until a gasp, that broad bare chest beneath him rising, falling, a breath taken in, let out, another, and another, and.

Hanks of long hair shifting slip from her shoulder as hips, rolling, lift above pivoting knees, her hands still pressed to the scorched and sodden fur, and her face, “My lord,” she says, the words half-swallowed, pushing up her head, “my lord,” she says, again, and something somewhere’s dripping. “You mustn’t, my lord. I have failed you all.” Wavering, unsteady, she looks up to his arched back jacketed in midnight, bent over Luys’s lap. “I must,” she says, wincing as she sits herself back on her settling heels. “Gather myself,” she says, head hung low, hands lifting to the hair spilled long and loosely damp about her. “I must wash.”

“Your majesty did not fail,” says Agravante.

“I could not,” she says, combing those dark wet tresses with her fingers, “turn,” she says, “the owr, it all, it all,” tugging, snarled in a knot, a hiss, “it all,” she says, “went off,” her hands suddenly ceasing. Caught on the back of her hand a glimmering crumb of gold, and more, a-sparkle along the verges of the rug, flashing from this half-molten strand of fur, or that, somehow, incredibly, gilding the rim of the tumbled basin.

“It was never all,” says Agravante, “or nothing at all.” Dark shoulders gather themselves, bracing, “Our fortunes only ever turn on just so much: enough.” Pushing himself up, and back, silhouetted by a sudden flare of gold, gold that brightly lights Luys’s chest and shoulders, limning even as it fades the edges of his cheeks, his chin, glimmering the dark cap of his hair, falling into the black pools of his wide eyes staring aghast at the arm he’s lifted in Agravante’s wake, the bit of leather tied about his wrist and the hand, there, five fingers unfolding, turned this way about and that, ruddily mottled, a bit darker, perhaps, than the rest of him, but otherwise hale and whole.

“Enough,” says Agravante, again, and a burbling cough. His arms fold about himself, that midnight jacket pouching open, his white shirt, his pinkly lustrous tie still smoldering, spotted with a last few golden embers dying even now, and his drooping white locks singed. “Enough, to heal a hand. Enough to quicken a queen. Enough,” a deep breath, “to save our court.” Shrugs to resettle his jacket, hands still tucked away. “I’ll leave your majesties to compose yourselves.” Turning, stepping away. He winces as he reaches in the shadows for the doorknob, but stops before stepping through. Looks back. “Unless you’d have me send someone to assist?”

Luys, sat up with no little effort, stares in horror not at his hand, but Agravante, “My lord,” he manages to say. “You can’t possibly, my lord. You can’t!”

“But, your majesty,” says Agravante, stepping out, into the hall. “I didn’t.”

Over, through, down, and switch, then up around and through again, and switch, around and through once more, fingertips patting the knot to shift, adjust, but “No,” says Agravante, “no, no, stop,” slapping those fingers away, “it’s lopsided. Stop.”

“My lord,” says the Majordomo, glumly, “allow me to, if you would,” lifting his hands away even as he reaches again for the tie, glossy blue and red and buttery yellow to pick out paramecial paisleys, crumpled by the half-done knot, “I said stop!” snaps Agravante, slapping again, wincing as he strikes the Majordomo’s hand. “Go on,” he mutters. “See to the court.” Tugging to loosen the knot, fingers clumsy in gloves the color of fawn, sawing the tie back and forth until he can hurl it away. “My lord!” cries the Majordomo, reaching for him even as he rears away, but “Enough!” snarls Agravante. “Go on, about your business.”

“Your tie, my lord – ”

“I’ll do without!” Tugging the gloves, one hand, the other, resettling the fit of them, eyes closing definitively as he presses the one thumb against the other palm. “I’ll do without,” he says, again, and opens up his eyes, and with those newly stiff, tight-wrapped fingers, undoes the top button of his shirt.

Clunk of a key, turned in a lock, the body of it dropping enough to free the shank, twist and she lifts it from the hasp, her other hand turning the knob to open the door, “Your majesty,” she says, stepping to one side.

“I,” says Annisa, but then, words fail. She doesn’t take the proffered step through the doorway, into the room, the gauzy wall beyond, the scraps of shadow fluttering against it, in the lamplight. “We,” she says, still stood there in the hall, loosely wrapped in a rough green robe, and only an underscarf of beigely grey to bundle up her hair.

Set on a stool before the wall of gauze an overweening bouquet of roses, the buds and blossoms so very round and full and richly winey red and purple against the paler green of their foliage, so droopingly heavy they threaten to topple in any available direction, a-tremble with possible catastrophe.

“Majesty,” says Florimell, the Laguiole, in her jacket of salmon pink, “will you require assistance, with your ablutions, and preparations?”

“We,” says Annisa, and a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. “We would have that,” a gesture, toward the exuberant bouquet, “removed. The odor, in such a profusion, cloys.”

“Of course, majesty.” Florimell’s looking down to her suede magenta booties, pressed together side-by-side, pink-painted nails just visible through the cut-outs at the toes.

“We would have my clothing, our clothing, our personal effects, brought to the bedroom where I was,” another breath, and a shake of that tight-wrapped head. “Where we were, this morning. My subjects, and equipment,” looking past the roses to those palpitating shadows, “will remain; this is to become my laboratory.” Looking to Florimell then, waiting, patiently, until Florimell looks up, those softly light brown eyes. “We would speak with the Majordomo at his earliest convenience.”

“Of course, your majesty,” says the Laguiole.

Into the lemon-yellow kitchen, those high white cabinets, his chamois shirt more of a goldenrod, really, in all this brightness, the crash of running water, there, at the sink beneath sunlit curtains, a tall broad man in buff coveralls looks over his shoulder and smiles. Shuts off the faucet, turns about, drying his hands on a dishcloth, “Sir Mason,” he says. “How good to see you.”

“Don’t,” says Luys, quiet and quick, unsteadily lurching the lemony length of floor to fetch up there at the end, and the tall man stood between him and the sink, “don’t,” he says, “presume, to such familiarity,” and a brusque gesture, “Scuppernong,” he says, “your pardon, but I’ve need, of the sink.” And then, “It’s, good, to see you, too,” he mutters, as Scuppernong steps aside.

He catches water in cupped hands, splash to his face, and again, and he takes the dishtowel Scuppernong offers, blotting his brow, his cheeks, wiping his hands. “I had heard,” he says, “there were few enough to see to the house, these days.” Still wiping his hands, the front of his shirt wetly dappled.

“Oh,” says Scuppernong, “I work the grounds, mostly. He never sees me. I do hear him, of a morning,” reaching to take the cloth from Luys, “chattering to himself on the porch,” and Luys is left with the one of his hands cradling the other, darker, mottled, the palm angrily ruddied, and there the ghostly rondel of faintly darker toothmarks, the memory marked of a bite almost taken. “What is he,” says Luys, a merest whisper Scuppernong leans close to catch.

“My lord,” he says, drawn back. “He is the Grandfather Count.”

But Luys is shaking his head, no, he says, a soundless puff of a word. Scuppernong’s genial puzzlement crumples to a frown, “My lord,” he says, but Luys is turning the one red hand over and back again, squeezing the mottle of it with his thumb, his fingertips, and the bit of leather swings about his wrist, “my lord,” says Scuppernong again, reaching hesitantly, to take both hands in his, to stop them, soothe them, press them close between his own.

“You will show the deference his majesty is due,” says Agravante, calmly stern there in the doorway, his midnight suit, his white shirt open at the throat, hands clasped behind his back. Scuppernong looks from him there back to Luys, something dawning in his expression, a whelming horror to slack his lips, smooth his brow, dull his blinking eyes, his hands leap apart, releasing Luys, and with an awkward rustle, a thump of cabinet doors, he sinks to one knee before the King, bowing that tow head, and Luys all the while yet shaking his head, no, he’s mouthing, no, no.

Striding the length of the kitchen footsteps heavy a hand swept out to clasp a buff-shrouded shoulder, “Up,” says Agravante imperiously, “and be about your work,” that hand gloved in pale fawn, lifted away as Scuppernong gets to his feet, but Luys catches him, his own hands on those shoulders, and Scuppernong stiffens, uncertain where to look. Luys hikes up off his heels, leans close, to press a kiss to Scuppernong’s forehead, nosing aside those towy curls.

“Go,” says his majesty.

Scuppernong steps away, back down the lemony length of the kitchen. Luys looks to his hands, there on the counter. Takes up the dishcloth to wipe them again, and over again. Agravante looks him up and down, brushes the chamois shirtfront with the backs of his gloved fingers. “We should change this.”

“No,” says Luys.

“Your majesty,” says Agravante, but then, at the look he is given, stops.

“Do you know,” says Luys, sternly, quietly cold, “what you have done,” but also shakily, and hoarse.

“What has happened,” says Agravante, “happened, because it had to. We cannot be without a Queen. A Queen must have a King, to quicken her. It’s as simple as that, your majesty.” He moves to step away, but Luys catches him by the elbow, “When the time comes, for her to turn more than a pinch of owr,” dragging him close, “what will happen then?”

“What has to happen,” says Agravante, looking down at the clutching hand, mottled so angrily, “will happen, but it will not be for some time. In a moment, after I make a call,” shrugging himself free from Luys’s grasp, “we will step out to address the court, and your majesty will rally the knights. We have a city’s ransom to secure, and a foolish wrong to right.” Again, those fawn-gloved fingers brush yellow chamois. “You really ought to change this shirt.”

A look of such keen uncertainty, such anguished delicacy, as her breath catches, a happy sob, a nod, her face tipping up, black curls spilling down her back.

He closes up the phone in his hand, scowl losing itself in the shadows as the light of the screen is folded away.

She’s overwhelmed, again, eyes widening in greenly consternation as her head jerks upright, mouth oohing as her white jacket slips from her shoulders as she lowers a hand, her hands, golden halter draped over her rising breast and falling with a breath, fingers stroking severely yellow hair, the head of the woman knelt before her, the head of the woman knelt behind, the same pale naked swoops of torsos that bookend her, pale hands clutching olive thighs, bare hips, white trousers loosely pooled about her ankles, there on the lapping rugs.

Light blooms unnoticed beside him, flaring from his hand, lasting barely long enough to glimpse once more that scowl, yes, framed by ashen curls, his necktie neatly knotted, the smoothly gleaming wooden haft his descending fingers curl about, the tooling that filigrees the butt and cheek of the axe-head at the top before slipping entirely back to darkness.

Pale shoulders rolling those yellow heads swiveling twisting pressing mouths to work, to lick, kissing sucking nipping and licking again together until the one behind lifts up, sits back, removing her lips to make way for her fingers, and between the two of them she throws out a hand for balance.

He steps from behind the column, toward the three of them, the spread of rugs and pillows, the brightly burning candles, the haft of that axe in both his hands the head of it dropped down swung back and then up, behind and above his shoulders. The one knelt behind her sees him coming and starting back her hand slipped free a swallowed yelp of shock at the swinging glint of that axe through the air and between them ungainly she looks up in time to lurch forward falling managing just to duck the uselessly murderous blow and tumble a-sprawling to fall to one side on the pillows.

The one yellow-headed woman getting her bare feet under herself as the other pushes herself upright to blinking wipe her mouth with the back of her forearm but starting to see that axe held high, his one hand choked up hard by the head of it, reaching with his other hand to shove her aside, stumble to crash into her twin. “False Queen,” he snarls, stepping a polished black brogue onto the rugs.

“Jeffeory,” says Ysabel, rolled over on her back, still trying to kick her feet free of her trousers, “put that – ”

“You,” he says, falling on her, his suited knee driving into her belly, “are deposed,” the words too calm, too cold, too steady, as he hauls the axe around, the edge of it over her throat, his grip tightening. “Your gallowglas whores will,” but that last word snags on something, a puzzlement pinching his brow. He falls away to reveal the Starling crouched behind him, the wide flat blade of an ornate punch dagger protruding from her fist, yellow hair severely straight still swaying from the force of her blow, blinking, sternly worried, but blinking, those eyes of hers changing from blue to brightly green, to icy blue again, to the more earthly color of mud.

“What,” says Ysabel, staring at the bit of bone, a patella, landed on her belly, spangled with a chilly silvery glitter, but that’s when Chrissie, sitting up, finds her breath, and starts to scream.

“Hello?” he’s calling, peevishly loud. “Anybody? I’m looking for a, is there, anybody?” Turning about, tall but stooped, plain grey sweats, his dwindling hair clipped close. “Hello?” Up on the unlit stage behind him, to one side of the nubbled green couch, a battered acoustic guitar upright on a stand, the frayed ends of the strings of it, unsprung from the tuning pegs, glinting in the shadows, and the whitely striated shellac yet glossy enough to catch and hold a trace of glow, the afternoon daylight sloping through the windows above, perhaps, and the opened stalls, or maybe the gentle golden light that shimmers just over the rim of that wooden tub, out in the middle of it all. A half-dozen or so, scattered desultorily about, a lar and a lutin, a kobold, a clod, a couple of broonies, a slouching hob, murmur or sip or tinker or pack this or that away, but each of them all of them studiously avoiding any notice at all of his agitation, his frustration, “Anybody?” he calls, headed back toward the one great overhead door, but veering from the threshold toward the foot of that skeletal staircase, bolted to the wall there, under the painted letter-shapes of some long-faded sign.

He’s only halfway clanging up those steps when the door at the top of them bursts open and she steps out, willowy tall and determined, loose white blouse and brief knit shorts of an incongruous check, russet hair framing a pair of narrow black-rimmed glasses. He draws himself up as she ringingly hurries down, “Excuse me,” he says, and louder, “excuse me,” but she’s focused on the bottom of the stairs, angling to slip past, and he reaches to impede her, “excuse me,” he says, “I need to find Marfisa.”

Stopped there she looks up, from his arm to his face bent over her, abashedly stern, “And who are you?” she says.

“Eddie,” he says. “Auchincloss. I’m, is she,” looking away from the darkly irked eyes behind those narrow lenses, out over the warehouse below, “this is,” wonder creeping, distractedly, into his words, “all this, it’s her place, right? Y’all’ve been busy.”

“Marfisa isn’t here,” she says, stepping down and past, but, his attention yanked back, he reaches to catch her arm, “It’s important,” he snaps. “She doesn’t even have a phone, as far as I can tell, I’m sorry,” letting go, “but I really need to find her.”

“Twentieth and Hawthorne, sometimes,” she says. “The older building, dark brown. Number three one two.” Down below, someone’s ducking in under the overhead door, thinning blond curls and a turquoise summer suit, and she’s turning away again, but Eddie hustles a couple steps down after her, “If you,” he’s saying, “if you see her, before I can find her, can you, could you give her a message?”

She doesn’t nod, looking back up at him, but she doesn’t shake her head, either. Down below the man in the summer suit’s looking back outside, lifting a beckoning hand.

“Tell her,” says Eddie, “tell Marfisa, that Abby Tinker is,” but then he stops, and takes a breath. “Tell her it’s about Abby. And that I need to see her as soon as possible.”

“I will,” she says, but another half-dozen or so men in suits of navy and periwinkle, Prussian, steel and azure and sky, all march in to join the man in turquoise, and after but a moment’s conference fan out to ring the tub. “God damn it,” she mutters, and leans out over the railing to spit. They’re unfolding burlap sacks from their jackets, shaking them open, lofting them over the walls of the tub, some with more reluctance, perhaps, or less alacrity, than others, to settle, limply empty, atop the golden dust within, and the light about them dims, the warmth of it falters.

“Only what you need,” calls a domestic, hesitantly, out from one of the stalls, but “Not a Hound!” cries another, and “Not a Hound!” the chant’s taken up, “Not a Hound!” and she’s clanging away down the skeletal staircase, “Stop!” she calls, but “Begin!” booms the man in the Prussian blue suit, and they all, some with more enthusiasm, perhaps, and less trepidation, than others, set to scooping handfuls of spilling golden dust into those burlap sacks.

“Stop!” she cries again, hurling herself toward them as the chants collapse in peals of alarm, seizing a dark blue shoulder even as someone shoves her aside, silence falling as she hits concrete beneath a trident braced against a turquoise hip, the middled prong of it dimpling her blouse. “Keep on,” says the knight in Prussian blue, though the slither and shuff of shoveled dust never stopped, and he steps to the side of the knight in turquoise, holding that trident, and squats beside her, “Now,” he says. “Who is it you think you are, to interfere so with knights of the court, about royal business?”

“Some of you!” she calls, then, “go! Find Big Jim! Call for the Shrieve! Gloria! Send word to the Helm! Some,” faltering, as the knight in turquoise leans on the trident, but the knight in Prussian lifts a hand, “No, no,” he smiling says, “let them go. We’ll need strong backs to load these on the truck.”

The trident’s lifted away, turned about thump to set the butt of it on concrete, and sitting up on her elbows, she reaches to resettle her spectacles, and suddenly alarm, “Petra!” she cries, surging to her feet. “Stay there! Do not set foot on the floor!”

Halfway up those skeletal stairs, Eddie turns to see a few steps above a woman caught in the act of coming down, black hair in angled swoops to her chin, a bit of black lace ringing her throat.

“Oh, do come down, little gallowglas!” taunts the knight in turquoise, hoisting his trident. About the tub, another knight his shoulders straining a navy blue jacket, stops his scooping, bag gaped darkly in one hand, gold light warming the side of his face, sparking the rough weights that tremble at the ends of his mustaches a moment before redoubling his shoveling with frustrated anger. The bottom of the tub can be seen in growing patches, all about the rim, and they’re having to lean well out over the pile now, to scoop up dust enough. “You’d be the Glaive’s secretary, wouldn’t you,” says the knight in Prussian blue, leaned patronizingly over her. “I am,” she snaps, stepping back, “Anna Nirdlinger, I keep the books, for her majesty, and you, Guerdon,” she sneers, “would be trying to take what isn’t yours!”

“Not ours?” turning to sweep an arm toward the tub, the knights busy about it, “this is the very heart and treasure of the court,” he’s saying, “to be held close, and tight, and safe, portioned out to peers and knights, not piled up in the marketplace!” even as the first of the filled sacks’ hefted heavily out. “And we!” he shouts, eyes wildly wide, “are! the court! We are about the Queen’s business! We are bidden by the King!”

“You,” says Anna, as horror crawls into her voice, her eyes, “he’s,” she says, “you,” and her head begins to shake, from side, to side. “It’s ours!” someone pipes up, and “Ours!” the call taken up, “It comes, it comes from us!” from someone else, and “It comes to us! It comes to us!” and “From us! To us!” the building chant, and “Ours! Ours!”

“In good time!” booms the Guerdon, the Trident beside him, weapon ready, as another sack’s hauled out of the tub. “And in such manner as is prudent, and in such amounts as are provident. The owr,” raising his voice over the mutterings and murmurings, the yelps, the shouts, “the owr is once more safe and secure! The owr is in her majesty’s hands!”