Buttons clatter and clack as spindled fingers clamp his shoulders, push the one, pull the other, twisting him about, “whoa,” he’s saying, “whoa,” as he plants his feet to hold him fast, but the elderly man’s relentless, tugging and shoving as all over his grimy denim jacket those badges and buttons and pins so strikingly colored, distinctly sloganed, PROTECT Each OTHER, says one, and Star Grease another, ACT-UP, HE / HIM, Think Younger ’74, Queer But Tired jangle and clank until he’s turned about just so, his back to the ruddy, low-slung sedan parked athwart an otherwise empty street, “Boy,” the elderly man is saying, “I put up with far too much the last few days to have any patience left in these my bones,” the face of him weathered away to extraordinary furrows and prominences, eyes sunk deep in calderas beneath the whitely shagged escarpment of his brow, pinched mouth set in a wrinkled moraine, “so kindly do us a solid, and hold still.”

“What he said,” from the kid, sat back against the fender, scowling under a matted pompadour.

The elderly man opens the long driver-side door, squats in his shapeless linen suit to lever up the front seat, “Go on,” he’s saying as he does so, “she just wants to talk.”

“Who?” says the young man in the denim jacket, “Who?” even as the elderly man is tugging and pushing, folding him into the back seat of the car, closing up the door of it with a gentle chunk that’s nonetheless terribly loud in the silence about them, and not even a susurrant rumble or whir of traffic on the overpasses laced above.

“Jack,” she says.

Her hair a bit too ruddy to be brown, per se, pushed back to sweep her shoulders, black top turtlenecked, sleeveless, bare arms folded, those eyes the color of mud to either side of that nose, looking at him with such, such concern.

“Fuck you,” he says, looking away with a clack of buttons.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she says. “All week, ever since, Jack. Do you know what happened to May. Her son, her son’s worried sick.”

“I bet,” he snaps.

“Do you know where she ended up? Just, tell me, Jack, yes or no, and I – ”

“You mean, after the cops arrested you? Busted everything up, kicked us all out? No, Jo. No fucking clue. Been too busy, trying to put my life back together.”

“Jack,” she says, reaching out a hand, “I’m so, so sorry, about,” but before she can lay it on his knee he jerks away, “Don’t,” he spits, “don’t you dare.”

She draws back her hand. “You know I didn’t shoot anybody. You know that was bullshit.”

“What do I know!” he shouts, and she flinches. “You,” he says. “Look at you, some, what is it. Duchess. And your goons? Driving you around in this,” and “Jack,” she says, sharply, but he plows on, “this fucking car,” he snarls, and “Jack!” she barks, flatly loud in these confines, and then, as he’s catching his breath, “I had to find you,” she says. “I used what I had. Those guys?” and she looks away, with a sigh. “Who you saw, out by the airport, that’s me, Jack. That’s, who I am. Not,” a hand, laid on the back of the seat before her, “not this.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Well, which one of you’s looking for May? You with the goons? They can round up all her cats, maybe. Put all her magazines back together. Wouldn’t that be swell.”

“We’ve already,” she says, “done, what we can, with that, already. You,” leaned back, away from him, against the passenger-side door, “you’re here, but you can leave, whenever you want. But. You might want, a hot bath? Change of clothes? Something to eat, a bed, perhaps, under a roof?”

A moment, then, as he doesn’t look at her, but doesn’t reach for the handle of the door, either. And then, leaning over him, she reaches across to rap on the window-glass, and nods to Sweetloaf when he leans down to scowl through it at them both.

An apron of bare dirt slopes from a retaining wall down to a row of slender columns upholding the bridge above, a file of proscenia framing the quietly empty cross street, dimly lit, the one-lane ramps arising close by either side. A couple of old dome tents pitched right up against the wall, beneath criss-crossed stripes of whitewash palimpsesting old graffiti, before flattened cardboard laid out, an impromptu parquet floor, but everyone hooting and hollering’s gathered about the wide circle scratched in the dirt, down by the arches, where all is vaguely lit by an orange haze of sodium vapor. She’s on her hands and knees in that circle, coughing, groaning, wrapped in a puffy ski jacket of some filthy color, impossible to name, and he’s strutting shirtless about her, preening for the crowd, skinny arms spread wide, fingers beckoning for more, nodding that head under a slop of dark hair, stringily greasy, sharp nose, sharp chin, those sharply eager eyes, “Another?” he roars, and they all bellow their approval. He rears back a heavy brown boot and hurls it forward, an unsteadying kick to her belly that lifts her bodily off the dirt, and a plosive burst of breath. He drops to a squat, sharp-bent elbows braced on sharply bended knees, teeth bared, waggling his tongue. Moaning she’s pushed herself back up on hands and knees, her mismatched shoes scuffing the dirt, “Oh, no!” he cries, sharp angles unfolding to lever him upright. “You ain’t got permission to leave, Bambi!” Stalking around to plant those boots once more between her and the sketchy edge of the circle as, grimacing with a labored sob, she pulls herself down, in, curling about herself as the crowd about them jeers. “Oh, no, indeed,” he says, quiet and close, as he tugs something free from the small of his back. “Bambi Jo, you ain’t never gonna leave.” An elaborate swing of his goosefleshed arm to bring to bear a long and tapered poignard, the hilt of it wrapped in wire.

“Dread Paladin.”

Silence falls about those two words, spoken, not loudly, but with cuttingly definite purpose. She’s stood with the others, outside the circle, older than all of them, taller than most, rough hair unkemptly dark, craggy cheeks and a jut of a nose, frame of her softened by a puffy coat of her own, greasily bright, pink or orange or yellowy gold, perhaps. “That’s enough tax.”

“Oh, no,” he says, “no, jefe, we ain’t talking tax, not for what she’s done,” reaching, seizing, yanking up by that hair-colored hair a face crumpled with effort, or terror, or grief, perhaps. “Not for what she thought she was gonna do,” he says, hunching close with that knife.

“Moody.”

She steps out of the crowd, into the circle, hands still tucked in the pockets of her puffy coat. He looks up, heaving his breath, ribs broadening, yielding, sharply defined by shadows, and the awful look upon his face.

“We got no sanction,” she says, stepping closer to them both.

“Fuck that,” he spits, with a savage shake of the head in his hand, “she thinks she’s gonna leave us. Thinks a job and a room in a box is enough to get her out of here. No way,” and another shake, “we let that go. No way,” leaning close, tip of his tapered blade sinking into the puffy nylon of her jacket, “and here,” he says, the rage drained out of his voice gone cold, “right here, is where I should’ve done it. Split you open,” shifting the tip from yielding nylon to slick taut flesh, “throat to cunt, dumped you out, there and then, fuck the chief and the fucking commandant, and fuck Bambi, I’d’ve been done with her. That time would’ve been worth the doing.” Standing abruptly, letting her drop to the dirt. “Instead of letting whichever one of you,” swinging the blade in a wide circle, taking in that crowd of still and silent silhouettes, “gets beat to hell, down by the tracks,” that flash of anger once more muttering away as he looks to her, crumpled in the dirt, the face of her turned away, the back of her head a darker shadow among shadows. “At least you know what it’s like, now,” arms at his sides, his blade hung low, “doing time for for someone else’s crime. Jacked for what you didn’t fucking do. But,” and, suddenly sputtering, “damn, the, the look,” a gasping cough of a laugh, “on poor, poor Jasper, on his fucking face,” shaking his head, “bang!” doubling over with paroxysmal giggles.

“She ain’t there, Moody,” says the tall woman, and his giggles pull up short, he turns to look up to her stood there, hands still in those pockets, looking not so much at him as where he’d used to be. “She ain’t in jail, Moody,” she’s saying, but the voice that seeps from those barely moving lips is thicker, lower, softer, slurred. “You said you put her in jail, but she ain’t there.”

“Ada?” he says, incredulous, pushing himself to his feet, “but I don’t meet you yet, not yet, not till way after,” looking down, to his hands, but instead of a glinting silvery knife there’s a heavy golden watch. He shoves back the cuff of the jacket he’s wearing to stare at the dials of it, the majestic sweep hand atop them all swung slowly, inexorably widdershins until it reaches the bottom of its arc where it shivers to a halt, pointed straight at him for one long stretch of a moment, before soundlessly resuming its clockwise course.

Rattle and scratching crackling pop he scrambles crabwise up off flattened cardboard, out from under sunstruck blue tarpaulin, shouldering past Ada flapped over and back in her bone-dry purple rain shell to hunch up and clanging claw at a kiltered panel of cyclone fence. Out there in the street a low-slung ruddy car, black stripe down the side of it, an elderly man in a shapeless suit lowering himself into the front passenger seat. “Hey!” shouts Moody, but the engine’s rumbled to life, swallowing the rattle of the fence in his hands and whatever it is he hollers next. Tires squeal and the car leaps away, tail of it shuddering slewing until the velocity catches up with it straightening, accelerating, gone.

“Hold up,” says Jo, one hand lifted, a warning gesture tossed back over her shoulder, her other held to her chest, loosely curled.

“Problem?” says Jack on the top step, behind her, above her.

“No,” she says, “probably,” taking another step down, “probably not. Still,” as she makes her way down step by quick but careful step, passing from thinly daylight, muralled walls, yellowing tile, down into rough-poured concrete grotto, a darkness shaped and ranked by blocky columns thrust up to groin a ceiling lost in shadows, hiding and revealing by turns an archipelago of candlelight at the far end, about a cluttered nest of pillows bolsters rugs and wraps and Persian carpets laid upon the floor and a figure stood there, two, silhouettes uncertain in the glimmering flicker.

“Hello?” calls Jo, as she makes her way along the unlit aisle between the columns. “Excuse me, hello?”

One of them, thickset in a long white coat, looks away from the candles, peering into the darkness to see who called, but turns back to the light with a shrug. The other, shorter and more slender, doesn’t look away from whatever it is it seems they’re both awaiting.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” she calls, “I thought this was, I mean, I’m looking,” but they’ve drawn themselves upright at some signal or sign, as what they’ve been watching for appears, stepped out from behind the screen stood there, linen panels set in frames of white-washed wood, a figure tall and slim, draped in frothy white and spangled with gold, and black curls artfully tangled about her shoulders.

“Ysabel?” says Jo, brought up short.

The woman in the white coat turns again to look to her, candlelight slipping to pool in the roundly concave mirror she wears on a band about her temples. The shorter man, his shirtsleeves gartered, doesn’t deign to register Jo as he steps to Ysabel’s side, lifting from about his neck a loop of tape-measure that he fussily deploys. Ysabel stands impassively, tugged this way, nudged that, as he takes the measure of a length of sleeve, the stretch of a seam, noting the results on a minuscule notepad, and all the while Ysabel’s gazing down at Jo with a vaguely imperious disappointment, and Jo closes her eyes, then opens them, a gesture far too considered to be thought of as a blink.

“Starling,” says Jo.

“Duchess,” says the Starling. “Have you come to stay?” A half-step forward as the shorter man kneels behind, twisting to reach with his tape-measure.

“I, ah,” says Jo, “what?”

“Your grace’s things are laid out on the bed, there. No one has, interfered, with any of that,” a gesture made awkward by an attempt to measure a hem.

“I, ah, I’m not,” says Jo, looking over to the high wide bed on the other side of that puddle of candlelight, “here for, ah, this,” she says, and the dark clothing laid out to one side of the pillowy white duvet. “That,” she says. “Um.”

“All’s intact and as you’d left it. We’ll just be a moment longer,” looking down to the shorter man as he tucks his pad away in the bib of his apron.

“That’s fine,” says Jo, brows pinching, “we’re just, I’m,” a gesture, toward the dressing screen, “just here to use the, ah,” looking back, over her shoulder, “I thought I told you to wait,” she says.

“Yeah,” says Jack, stood at the very verge of the light that glints and winks the buttons pinned up and down his denim jacket, he’s staring, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, one hand lifted, reaching, but not exactly, toward, but not precisely, the Starling. “You, ah,” he says, blinking, “said. There wouldn’t be, ah. Problem.”

“There isn’t?” says Jo, as the Starling’s saying “And you are?” and Jack leans back, suddenly, away, into the shadows. “It’s not,” says Jo, “nothing’s, can we just, Jack? If you could, okay?”

“A moment more,” the Starling says, turning away from them all, back toward the screen, “and we’ll be out of your grace’s hair.”

“No!” says Jo, a sharply interrupted gesture, “wait,” she says, “nobody, I’m not here to, kick anybody out, or anything, Starling, just, hang on a minute,” but the Starling’s stepped herself back behind the screen, “I, ah,” says Jo. The woman in the white coat looks down, brushes something from a sleeve. The man in the leather apron pushes himself up off his knees.

“What,” says Jack, “is going on?”

“You,” says Jo, that interrupted gesture resuming askew, yanked back at him, “are in dire need of a shower, a bath, whatever, a change of clothes,” and he closes his arms protectively about his clattering jacket, “Then what the hell are we doing here?” he says.

The Starling steps out from behind the screen, taller, wrapped in an oversized hoodie of pale pink gently overwhelmed by the cornflower seeping from those puffily broad shoulders, the hood of it lowered to lap her shoulders like a ruff of richly royal blue. Squeak of spotless white sneakers as she kneels by a black gym bag, unzipping it enough to slip a handful of filmy lace within. “I’m not, moving in, or anything,” says Jo, quickly, “so you don’t have to go anywhere, I’m not, kicking you out, Starling, you’re, you’re okay.”

“Wait,” says Jack, unnoticed, “what?”

“Rest assured that your grace in no way is putting my out,” says the Starling, hauling up the gym bag as she gets to her feet. Looking about the guttering island of light, the pillows, and the rugs. “I’d meant to leave regardless.”

“Starling,” says Jo, as she turns to leave, “wait, is there a light switch somewhere, or, like, any lights, at all, besides,” looking down, at all those burning candles.

“All else is packed away,” says the Starling, setting off.

“Yeah, but,” says Jo, “is she,” and at that, the Starling stops, there in the shadows.

“Is she okay?” says Jo.

The Starling looks back, over her shoulder. “No,” she says, and she’s gone.

“Jo,” says Jack, an unvoiced cough to catch no one’s attention but hers. And then, again, “Jo,” more urgently insistent, “Jo!” She turns to him, slowly, with a shake of her head. “Come on,” she says, stepping off the rugs.

“Where’d they go?” the same hoarsely insistent not-quite whisper. “The other two.”

“They left,” she says, looking up at the screen. And then, “Jack,” she says, and he jerks away from the shadows, peering back at her through the candlelight, “some of this shit,” she’s saying, “you don’t know the answer, just don’t ask. Trust me.” Beckoning. “Get over here.”

“What is that,” he says, without stepping onto the rugs between them.

“It’s just,” a gesture at the three tall folds of it, shallowly zig-zagged, linen panels obscure in that light, “you go behind it, they’ll clean you up, change your clothes, fix your hair, cut it, rearrange, whatever. Whatever.”

“Whatever,” he says, “I want?” Looking back, over his shoulder, into the shadows.

“Yeah,” says Jo, but then, “I mean, it’s not like you’ll have time to, to tell them what you want, or anything, they’re pretty damn fast. But just, have an idea, in your head, they’ll do whatever’s best for you, and, you know, what’s going on. You, uh, Jack?” He’s slowly turning back, staring not at her, but the screen, expressionless. “You want me to go first?” she says. “I mean,” looking to the screen herself, a sour twist of her lips, “they like to fuck with me, sometimes, but that’s because they think they can get away with it. I’ll make sure they know they can’t get away with fucking with you. Okay?”

Jack’s still staring, flatly, at the screen.

“Jack,” she says, and then, a bit more forcefully, somewhat more loudly, “Jack,” she says. “Jack.”

The hand on her knee laid so gently it doesn’t trouble the rumpled corduroy. “Sarandib,” she says, voice cracking about the name. “There were,” she says, “three princes,” her own hand, so knobby and so spare, liver spots laid loosely over knuckles, veins, lifted shakily to press two fingertips quite deliberately to her wrinkled, lowered forehead. “I can,” she says, and the man knelt before her leans close to catch her whispered words, sandals shifting scratchily on gravel, hem of his pale cardigan heedlessly brushing the dust, but not an ounce of the weight of him leaned on the hand he’s lightly laid on her knee. “I can see them,” she says, “such, brightly beautiful robes, and gowns, the turbans, and the jewelry, they were,” lowering her hand, then, to set it, quivering, atop his, “on the right-hand page,” she says, her other hand a-tremble, laid palm-up on her other knee, “and they pointed to the lovely map, on the lift,” lifting up her head, but her eyes are closed, looking away into somewhere else. “A teardrop, in the ocean,” she says, “amber, and gold, and the names, written in black ink, Sandocanda,” she says. “Bumathani. Nagadisu. Anuro,” and she takes a deep breath, “Grammi,” and a sigh. “All those houses, the corners they would turn, their flowers grew up to meet their balconies, where they would eat their breakfasts, fruit and tea, rice puddings, sweet and sticky,” her next breath taken in stepwise sips, like little sobs. “All gone,” she says. “All lost, forgotten, but all, somehow, still there, in that map, those lines, that ink,” and one more thready inhalation, “the princes,” she says. “They ripped it,” no longer a whisper, “the map,” lifting up both her hands, “the three of them, torn apart,” and her hands drop, nerveless to the mattress she’s sat upon, quilted, filthy, formerly white. “They tore it all apart,” she says, and he tips his head to better catch her words, sere ghosts of consonant shapes now, barely bound by unvoiced vowels. “The princes, tossed away, the map, crumpled, under their boots, so, so many of them, photographs, interviews, drawings, stories, maps, the maps,” her last few words so many suppositions, drawn from twitches of those lowered lips.

He lifts up his head, straightens his shoulders, pats her knee with that hand once, twice, but leaves it there, fingertips brushing the corduroy. “A terrible thing, Mother,” he says. “We are so very sorry it has happened to you.”

She looks up, blinking quickly, “Mike?” she says, those eyes of hers darting back and forth before she squeezes them shut against the light, cloudily weak though it is, “Mike?” she says, again, “that you?”

“No,” he says, and now he lifts his hand away, looks over his shoulder, a mildly impatient snap of his fingers. “But you are someone’s mother.” The woman behind him turns away from an older man, who snatches the plastic-wrapped packet of clean white underwear from her unresisting hand as she sets down an overstuffed shopping bag, Ross, it says on the side of it, in rounded purple letters, Dress For Less. She digs into it, past more packets of underwear and bundled-up socks, white and athletic grey, maroon and navy blue, each wrapped in clear unlabeled plastic crinkling to come up with something smaller, wrapped in plastic that’s anonymously grey. She slaps it into his waiting hand and he draws it to himself, slitting it open with an unzipping flick of his thumb, tipping it over to shake out the contents, a pair of black plastic sunglasses, oversized, flimsy, wraparound, that he presses into her hands, knobbled and spotted. “Oh,” she says, shakily unfolding them, lifting them into place, over those milkily tremulous eyes, “oh thank you, thank you, sir. They broke mine, when they pushed me down. Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

“Lake,” he says. “Call me Lake. And, Mother,” taking those hands of hers in his, squeezing them, gently, as his lush brown beard lifts and spreads in a smile of grim determination, “what was done to you is inexcusable. Unforgivable.” His brown eyes darkening, hardening. “And we will make them very sorry that they ever did it.”

Below, the splintered wrack can still be seen, ensconced within the shadow of the house, weathered upholstery torn and some few shreds of draggled filthy stuffing, all the lush green grass grown high all up around and through it, and here and there, even now, glass shards glint in the failing light. His one hand on the wide wood balustrade, the other folded, tucked against his breast, his loose shirt of a sunny golden yellow, silk, perhaps. He takes a breath.

“My lord the Mason,” says someone there behind him, and he turns.

The Marquess Linesse, Northeast’s Helm, all in monochrome, her gunmetal hair cut short, her black leather jacket hung open over a halter of heather grey, a plain steel helmet in one hand.

“You asked us for a conference,” she says.

“And we are pleased that you have come,” he says, stepping away from the balustrade toward the long table jutted out from under the house above but still within its shadow. He gestures toward a chair to his left, even as he sits him at the head. She hauls up to set that helmet on the table, mirroring metal on polished wood, even as she pulls out the chair to take her seat. “So,” she says. “Yourself would be the King of Roses.”

“Say, rather, that her majesty Annisa’s now our Queen.”

“You quickened her.”

He unfolds his hand, holds it up, and there, about, across the heel of it, that purpled rondel of toothmarks. “She turned owr enough to heal this hand, that would otherwise have done for me.” Closing it up again. “Not so much as yet, perhaps, but more will come, with time.”

“And while we wait?”

He looks down to the polished wood between them, that gathers up and banks away the falling light. “We have,” he says, “secured, what remains, of the court’s existing stores.”

The corner of her mouth downturning just, even as her brow so slightly angles up. “How much,” she says.

“More than enough,” he says, “to fill a puncheon, but not so much as might fill a pipe.”

“So,” she says. “Plenty.”

“The stores of the court are once more under controlment, that,” laying his unclosed hand definitively on the table, “is the import, of what’s been done.”

She looks away with a shake of her head.

“Linesse,” he says, leaning forward. “In the wake of her mother’s infirmity, her brother’s loss, to have left those stores, our treasure, out in the open, where anyone might,” but “I know,” she says, “what I know, Luys, is I’ve four knights sworn, not even a handful, who must glean the medhu from the Northeast Marches,” and both her hands are laid as flat as his upon the tabletop, “and yet, from the moment her majesty offered up the owr to any and all, not a moment has passed that one of those four has not been keeping watch, from the great hall of her palace, or the streets about it, ready to step in at the slightest provocation, and not once, Luys, in all this turbulent month of May, not a once has any of them had to. But I must admit,” drawing back her hands with a faint squeak, “not a one of us thought to keep that bounty safe from theft by stealing it.”

His expression flattens, and his voice, “We cannot steal,” he says, “what’s ours.”

“Chop logic,” she says. “There was but one exception, to her majesty’s largesse. No sworn Hound might partake. Yet Udom, yesterday, saw those bullies as they crept into the palace with their sacks, and every man Jack of them dressed in blue.”

“They came not as bullies, nor as Hounds, but knights, in service to their Queen.”

“At the order of the Viscount.”

“As directed by their King,” he snaps, and then, a breath, a gesture, “Linesse,” he says. “You and I, Mason and Helm, did serve his grace the Duke for many years, together. We’re practiced, in forestalling the, exuberance, of others, long before it curdles to unfortunate excess. The Spadone’s shenanigans, or the Cater, and the Harper. Sidney Dagger.”

“Lymond,” she says, with a warning lilt, but he holds up a hand, his left hand, his mottled, bitten hand, “What she did,” he says, “with what is all of ours,” and then, finger by finger, counting off, “is just. Like. That: exuberant. But,” laying his hand back down, “doomed. In need of,” sitting back, in his chair, the light fading about him, “curbing,” he says. “You must see that. Beset on all sides by outlaws and warlords, and she would prosecute this vendetta, against a dozen of her knights, a fifth of her court, turn your coats, or be turned away, and for what?” A shake of his head. “But a dozen burlap sacks proved her a fool.”

“You proved nothing of her majesty,” she says, “but that she is correct to scorn the Hound.”

“There’s the crux!” he says. “We can no more be merely Hounds, or Hawks, we can’t only serve the Helm, or the Hive. We must, all of us, every one, be for the Rose.”

“And that would be yourself.”

“That would be her majesty, Annisa Baydoun, our Queen of Roses.”

“But you,” she says, “would be King.”

“I am,” he says.

She draws her helmet to her with a scrape. “John Perry ruled five years,” she says. “Lymond for five months. We’ll see you last five days.”

“Marquess,” he says, in such a tone that she holds that helmet still at the table’s edge. “In a moment, upstairs, the firstly portioning of what’s been taken back will be laid out, securely. Prudently. Orderly. One for Northwest, of course, and Southwest. Southeast. North. And, one for Northeast, also.” Pushing back his chair, he gets to his feet, the shadows now so long the light can’t brush his sleek black cap of hair. “Take a moment,” he steps around, across the table from her, “think, for a moment, and then come back upstairs. Take what’s parceled out for you, for your fifth, give back, to your people, what they have freely given.”

Away down the long length of that table, fingertips trailing from chair-back to chair-back, down and down to the end of it and the high and narrow flight of steps beyond, and up and up he goes, without once looking back.

At the top he comes around the balustrade of glass into that wide room, where a folding table’s been set up, and there atop it five neat parcels bundled in wraps of iridescent pink, of burnt orange, dull gold, of a leafy green, and a cooly silvery grey. Stood beside it a woman uncomfortably strapped in raddled yellow and bared skin, her close-cropped hair a virulent chartreuse, expression forbiddingly grim, and some few more already about that otherwise empty space beneath the great and curving wall of glass, the Soames in his jacket of kelly tweed, turning and folding up a yellow meshback cap in his hands, the Anvil Pyrocles in slatey seersucker, his widely knotted tie of royal blue, and there beside him Becker, in a vested suit of darkest navy and a crisp white shirt, what’s left of his hair slicked back, still, he reaches to discreetly tuck an errant sprig behind his ear, “Why,” he murmurs, “why not, the lawyer? From the bank?”

Pyrocles leans close, speaks quietly, but clear, “He will also sit the council, but as an advisor in matters fiscal, as befits his expertise. I am to represent the fifth, and see to our portion. Administrative matters, little more. Much as, ah, yes,” as through the doorway steps a thin man, entirely bald, his suit of bone over a brown silk shirt, “Calidore, the Flammard, will sit across the river from us, and Bodenay,” a taller man in a slimly outmoded suit of popping daffodil, “the Gladius, will do for the,” but Pyrocles, still looking toward the doorway, frowns, “Hive,” he says. A third man’s come into the room, squatly powerful in a satiny black kimono jacket over a two-tone shirt of orange and magenta, his long black hair held at bay by a pink bandana, his faintly puzzled amusement brightening as he catches sight of Pyrocles. He makes his way toward them with a quick salute of a wave, “Sir Anvil!” he calls, “how good it is to see you.”

“Good Sir Shootist!” says Pyrocles, with much the same bonhomie, “if I might be so bold.”

“Ah, in but an hour’s time, if that,” says Joaquin, “you might say so in earnest, and not so bold a jest.”

“You’re to be knighted?” says Pyrocles, beaming.

“It seems his majesty’s determined a coronation does for a Samani, and he’d have new knights, for every fifth,” and an inward deprecation twists his grin. “From provisional, to formal, at a touch. And might I say,” shifting his attention from the one, to the other, “how splendid it is to see you here as well, Arnold,” and that deprecation turns itself about within his lips. “Think you his majesty would name himself a Huntsman?”

“Wait, but,” says Becker, alarm lighting on his brow, “you mean, I mean, like Jo?” but Pyrocles with a heavy step closer sets a firm hand on Becker’s shoulder, “No,” he says. “He’s said nothing to that point.”

“To you, perhaps,” says Joaquin.

“He’d’ve asked,” says Pyrocles, and Becker, blinking, looks from the one to the other, and neither looking to him.

“As you say,” says Joaquin, turning with the rest of them toward the doorway to that wide room and the the woman stood there, gowned in purpled midnight, and a neatly figured scarf of blue and white to bundle up her hair, looking over the crowd of them all bowing their heads to her. Behind her in the shadowed hall the Viscount Agravante’s white locks head and shoulders above her, and his blankly satisfied expression, looked out over them all as they lift in unison their solemn heads to see their Queen, all of them but the King himself, stood by that table, looking not to her and not to the court scattered about that wide room, not down, to the bricks on the table before him, each in its colored wrap, but back, over his shoulder, to the glass balustrade about the stairwell down, and there, on the top step, Linesse all in monochrome, plain steel helmet under one arm, one black boot lifted to the clean-swept floor of that wide room, looking not to her majesty, nor his, not to the rest of them all, but to those bricks neatly wrapped, cool green, dull gold, dim orange, and pink, and the grey, rendered by some trick of the light as a mirror, shining.

Evening light still strong enough to harshly slant through crooked blinds beneath the warmly unobscured glow of a great half-circle of glass above, radially mullioned, orangely bright. The office so lit is small and lined with towering bookshelves about an overlarge overstuffed desk, and each and every shelf and otherwise available surface is filled covered crammed piled high with books set upright, side by side, or shoved sidelong above them, here and there laid open face-down atop this precarious stack or that more promiscuous mound, a couple-few more across the top of the desk, and one on the pile on the leather cushion of the only chair, all left splayed open, pages curling, pressed flat with other books, words exposed to the slanting light and all those other spines, gleaming leather or leatherette beside wrinkled bowed and crackling paperbacks, jackets shining wrapped in plastic or dustily matte, crumpled, creased, a few smoothly unblemished, and all those downcast names, printed in gold or silver or white or black or some contrasting color, Stewart Holbrook, Mark Fisher, John Michell, Ioan Culianu, Nik Cohn, Alan Moore, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline, A. Bartlett Giamatti, E. Kimbark MacColl, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Reza Negarestani, Christopher Chitty, Julian Jaynes, Avram Davidson, Alfred Hutton, FSA, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, a Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs, an Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, an enormous two-volume Oxford English Dictionary, a Dictionary of Imaginary Places, one whole shelf consumed by the 1997 edition of the Oregon Revised Statutes, bound in pebbled black, along with a handful of brick-red volumes from 2007, the slick grey width of Title 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations there by an imposing bulk of leather worn to blackening crumbling flakes and faded golden lettering that says Deady & Lane’s, over and about the buckled ridges of it, General Laws of Oregon. A rattle, a click, someone’s trying the door of the office, an afterthought tucked between a couple of bookcases.

Another rattle, a clink, the door swings, hesitantly, open. She steps through, the sheen of her pearly jacket brightening in that light, rendering the color of it difficult to ascertain. Hands held up and out, away from the stacks and piles as she steps once, twice toward the desk, around to the side of it. One hand holds a little sprig of greenery capped with a couple of clusters of bright yellow flowers, tiny petals of them loosening, drooping about her fingers curled. Looking about, left, right, up, around, the shelves, the books, the desk, the window, the light, the dust. Shifting a couple of books on the desk, she unearths a burnished laptop wide and flat and heavy enough it’s with some little effort that she levers up the screen of it. Considers it a moment, pursing her precisely painted lips. Brushes the keys of it with that sprig. The screen flickers to life, filled with a photo of a lighthouse stubbily upthrust from a rocky promontory, icons winking into place along the bottom, including one outlined as a battery-shape colored with a sliver of red, 7%, say the characters beside it. She brushes the keys once more with the sprig, and again, as applications spring to life, windows stuttering open one after another, password challenges answered even as they appear. Mindful of her nails, she swipes and clicks the trackpad, presses keys, browses a queue of unread messages, subjects modulating from angry apprehension where are you answer your phone’s dead where through less heated concerns about that proposal what are you how about a drink into a flurry of dated congratulations on a fight hard fought and a campaign won and a handful of genial what’s nexts as she scrolls down and back in time. Swipe, click, now the screen displays the ordering information for a pack of tarot cards, inscribed by Giani Siri, buyer pays shipping. A shake of her head, swipe, click. Inscrutable numbers tightly columned in a spreadsheet. Clack-click, swipe. She frowns.

Setting aside the sprig she reaches past the laptop into a gap between stacks of books to fish out a micro-cassette recorder, slim and silvery, the dotted grille of the speaker, the plastic window scored and cracked, obscuring the tape within. She strokes the buttons along the side, markings worn away to illegibility, then punches one. The tape whirls rewinding itself to jerk to a stop, button popping back up. Finger shifting, she punches another.

“Yeah, so,” says David Kerr, “item one, get Avery off my back regarding the whole onsite meeting bullshit situation, Item two,” click, whirr of the tape fast-forwarding, clack, “thing with the situation is, I’m fairly certain he knows exactly what he’s walking into, and,” click, whirr, clack, “sparkle like burnished bronze, the likeness of lightning, and draped,” click. She sets the recorder down on top of the book before her, there on the corner of the desk, The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, it says.

Whirr. Clack.

“What he’s walking into,” says David Kerr, “and that more than anything else, I mean, thinking about it, he couldn’t possibly, not and be so,” sucking his teeth, “certain. It would really be helpful to have some idea what his handlers have been telling him. So,” unseen, he shifts himself, rustle of clothing, clack of the recorder’s housing against the mike, “Frances Upchurch, though that is not your name. What did you hop our boy up on.” Her hand hovers over the recorder, a finger over the buttons, but she’s looked up, away from it, at all the books on all the shelves about. “I’ve done my homework, Dr. Uniform,” he says, a bit louder. “So if you’re hearing this,” and she turns sharply back to the recorder, “it’s because I haven’t made it back, and if I haven’t made it back, well, I probably won’t. So. Here’s hoping you’re just, really alacritously fast, at doing what it is you do, poking about, snooping, whatnot.” Squeak of the take-up spindle, hiss of tape, her finger poised over the buttons. “Maybe our boy Phil doesn’t really know what’s slouching toward him up in that house on the hill, but you know I know you do. They all have four faces, and I bet you’ve seen each of them. Every one has four wings, their feet are straight, and the soles of them like calves’ feet, and they sparkle like burnished bronze, the likeness of lightning, and draped in garments white as snow, two four six many of them, crowding the room, and their names, all their names, the names of them all begin with,” click.

“There’s only the one,” says Frances Upchurch. Punching another button, and the drawer of the recorder pops open. She plucks out the cassette, small, clear plastic smoked with grey, unlabeled, unmarked. Tosses it, once, high in the orange light to catch it and tuck it away in a pocket of her jacket.

Night’s fallen. Nestled between three emptily narrow streets a little lot, filled with stilled and silent cars, the colors of them uncertain in the streetlight brightly thin from lanterns set on poles among the bordering trees. New Seasons Market, says the discreetly spotlit sign above a grass-grown awning. High broad windows filled with light offer glimpses of well-stocked shelves and no one at all to make their way between or about them or to go in or out through unmoving glass doors.

“Can y’all hear me?” she yells.

Jaggedly abrupt in all this cloistered stillness, her lurching searching steps, her wildly lashing arms, each ended in skillful grips about the hilts of whip-thin rapiers, “Can you,” and she leans into the roar, drawing it out, jaw rictused, tendons distended, “hear! me!” Swung about, her bare feet slapping pavement with every swiveling, loping step, clacking the vivid layers of beads that lap her shoulders and her breast. “Bad moon rising, how I’m signified! Blades too quick, how I’m dignified! Draw down on me, that’s suicide!” Throws up her hands, those rapiers shining, “Rabbits!” and a loudly flat clack as she whacks them together, “Can you!” Clack. “Hear!” Whick. “Me!” Stalking back down the short lines of cars to either side, toward the trees thinly screening the far end of the lot, “Y’all rabbits, y’all rabbits,” she chants to the beat of her feet, “union strong, always wrong, hiding back behind that label all day long,” spun about, those swords spread wide to take in the whole space, “mechanicals please, looking to seize and you come upon these?” crossing the blades high above her, “you drop to your knees! Take a page from Brer Possum, learn how to play dead, bow your head, droop them ears when you hide up under your bed, you heard what I said, here come the Child of the Moon that you dread, you’ll be mystified as you’re nullified when you testify so to certify how my expertise with my snickersnees leads over and all to my victories!” Leaning into it again, “Hasenpfeffer!” she bellows. “Incorporate!”

But already the pop of mockingly languid applause, there, and there, she straightens, shaking her beaded twists away from her wolfish grin, pointing with the one rapier to the man stepped out from behind an anonymously pale panel truck, lifting the other toward the man leaned against the trunk of that sports car, jerking away to cover the men stepping onto the lot through the thin scrim of trees, and each of the three of them with empty, clapping hands.

“She hasn’t heard,” says one of them.

“Nobody told her?” says another.

“She ain’t been told, Boggs,” says the third.

“Who’s first,” she says, blades still up and out, pointing together now, to the third of them, the first, the second. “We’re all on the same side now,” he says, pushing up off the trunk, wrapped in a dark pea coat, a fisherman’s cap pulled low.

“Your Marquess took her portion,” says the third man, his long coat of dark leather.

“It all begins a strenuous return to normalcy,” says the first, his robes of white, and jewels glinting, green, blue, brilliant, all on the backs of his hands.

“So there’s no need to fight, tonight.”

“Or evermore.”

“Then let’s play!” she roars, whacking her rapiers against each other again. “Come on! Right now, all at once, y’all snuffling dizzy-eared lop-wits!” but they’re turning away, slipping away, one by one back between those cars, into the trees, gone. “Rabbits!” she yells, there in the middle of the lot. “Y’all rabbits!” But a bleep behind her, the whoosh of sliding glass, a burst of music, slippery, jangled, timeless, and she whirls about to the shock of the woman stepping out, freighted canvas bag slung from one hand, sleeveless dress and a puff-ball of curls, taken aback to see the Mooncalfe, barefoot and shirtless, blades in her hands, blocking the way, and all falls still once more, quite suddenly.

“Rah!” shouts Zeina, throwing up her empty hands, leaping away to the bumper of one car, roof of another, crumpling pop the hood of a third and off through the trees, over the sidewalk, before a honking squealing truck and away, leaving that woman stood there as the door slide shut behind her with her groceries, blinking.

Notice, says the bright orange flyer, Illegal Campsite, attached to the smaller door with careless strips of tape, It is the policy of the City of Portland to provide notice, and here a corner of the flyer’s curled, obscuring the text, shelters erected at illegal campsites, it continues, This campsite will be cleared, and then, twenty-four (24) hours after and seven (7) days of: and, handwritten there, the date, 6/1. Notificación, it continues, beneath, Campamento Illegal. He brushes it with considering fingers before ducking away beneath the much larger overhead door half-lifted beside it.

The vastly cavernous hall is empty, dim, stalls marching away to either side and no one in them, about them, around, though here and there the signs of activity interrupted, boxes left open, frames stacked and canvases half-draped with quilts and wraps of felt and bubbled plastic, a cookstove dismantled, the scaffolding at the far end abandoned, dusty polyethelene sheeting hung from this pole, or that, obscuring an unfinished mural, a great sharp fang of a mountain lit up unearthly, pink and green, orange and magenta limning an appalling massive blue loomed over a suggestion of a thickly darkly deeply haunted forest, but overwhelming all that empty, quiet hall are neatly stacks of yellow two-by-fours, chest-high, depending, there in the aisle between those stalls, and spiky rolls of chicken wire leaned up against them, tipped before them, there among the twine-wrapped packages of newsprint one atop another, some tumbled from this height, or that, rolled or pushed or kicked almost to the verge of those pallets there, laid out beneath an enormous wooden tub, knee-high, unlit, empty.

His steps clack slowly, measured, as he makes his way from that half-opened overhead door toward the tub, until his footstep doesn’t clack, but rustles. Looking down to his cracked brown wingtip set upon a crumpled corner torn from some much larger page. He lifts his shoe away to see the ghost of an intricate framework, a figure sat, resplendent, and in the lap of it a tumble of households and of towers, all sketched in charcoal long since smudged, smeared, worn away to ashen smoke.

The clack resumes, measuredly stepping toward that tub, around it, to find her there, sat on the pallet, clocked black socks up over her knees and big black boots, brief red skirt and a soft black sweater, puffily oversized. Her hair’s been tucked away beneath a stocking cap of black, and her scowl lightens somewhat to see him. “Bruno,” she says.

“My lady. Did we lose a bet?”

Her scowl tightens, she tugs at the hem of her skirt, pressing it into her lap, but says nothing as he hitches up his trousers to lower himself beside her, braced against the wooden staves of the tub. “I take it you have found them?”

“One of them,” she says, tilting her knees away. “He’s off getting us coffee. Thinks he’s being galant,” she says, archly stressed. He stares at her lips, the same brightly artificial red as her skirt, and she shakes her head away, annoyed. A lock of hair escapes the confines of her cap, a fakely glossy platinum slither there behind her ear, and his brow quirks, “What,” he says, “did you do – ”

“He thinks it’s cute,” she says, tersely tucking it away. “How bad has it got, that there isn’t any coffee?”

He sighs, and shifts himself to sit his back against the tub. “It was bad, when the Chatelaine’s credit was revoked. They finally took her new truck yesterday, and the trailer, and now,” he sighs, “it appears there may be trouble with our tenancy. But. What was done, here, on Wednesday?” Looking up, to the faintly buzzing fluorescents racked so far above. “A whole new word is needed, for what did happen then.”

She hikes up to look over the rim of the tub, the floor of it swept almost utterly clean, a half-dozen, maybe, no more than a dozen crumbs of gold left to sparkle in the rough whorls of the grain. “They really polished it off,” she says.

“No one was here,” he says.

“Well, but, who’s left?” she says, sitting back down. “Sweetloaf, whatsisname, Cullock? Astolfo, maybe? You?”

“Anyone,” he says, with a wave toward the detritus of all those half-finished tasks before them, “but specifically,” turning with a stern look for her, and “Oh, sure, Bruno,” she says, with a bitterly mocking lilt. “All of us all lined up against the lot of them, just a big old knock-down drag-out donny-fuckin-brook right here in the middle of the,” her hand, reaching in the air before them, “the, this, palace,” she says, “and a gallowglas smack in the middle of it all, that’s, that’s,” shaking her head, looking away.

“The right word, at the right time, from the right person, and enough stood up behind you?” leaning forward, to catch her eye. “Rebellion’s a fickle, fragile thing, your grace, a kettle easily knocked from the flame, before it comes to boil. They would have folded.”

“Rebellion?” she says, incredulous. “They’re the ones with everything sewn up, the whole fucking court, lock, stock, and the goddamn barrel. They’re the fucking empire, Bruno.”

“They may well have the barrel, but they will never fill it. Has your grace spoken with her majesty.”

“What, today? I just woke up, Bruno. I have not had my coffee, yet.”

“My liege,” he says, with some concern, “do you happen, even, to know, where her majesty is, of the moment?”

She looks to him, brow quirked, considering. “Anna,” she says, then, “said, last night, said that she’d said she meant to, to be with,” a breath, “the, ah, the strippers, exotic dancers, those, the, I, I didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Interrupt,” she says, “anything.”

“Her majesty,” says Bruno, “did quit this palace yestereve, for the apartment of her sometime dalliance, Christina Halliwell, who has worked as an exotic dancer, and also as an actor, singer, and model, under the names Christienne Limoges and Tina Triplette. Number Seventeen, Twelve Forty-five, Southeast Forty-ninth; rooms shared with her sister and partner, Stephanie Halliwell, currently in Los Angeles. Her majesty did spend the night, but slept alone, on a couch. I’m told there’s plans for brunch at Surabaya in a bit.”

“The couch,” says Jo. “You’re well-informed.”

“Your grace must be, when it comes to her majesty.”

“You’re saying they, they’d actually, are you saying she’s, in danger?”

“Her majesty is always in danger. Put away your delicacy: your grace must always be in the middle of it, now, or at the very uttermost least, know where that middle, and her majesty, might be found.”

“Dammit, Bruno – ”

“Blast it, Duchess,” and she flinches, though he has not raised his voice, “you,” he says, that syllable quieting punching the air between them, “are Southeast. You are the Widow, of my lord the Duke. Favorite of the Queen. You are the Hawk, my lady. Your grace has authority, which is power, but also a terrible duty. You are the last of her majesty’s court, and your grace must – my lady!”

She’s lurched herself to her feet, stalking away around the tub to fetch up suddenly before Jack, stood there just out of sight, his denim jacket of a softer, brighter blue, verbosely spangled with badges, and beneath his nose, above his lip, a neatly penciled mustache. He holds a couple of tall white paper cups striped yellow and red and blue down the sides and a plain white paper bag, and as the Shrieve Bruno cries “Duchess!” Jo seizes Jack by an elbow and yanks him stumbling after, back away from the unlit stage the overhead door the tub and Bruno, reaching after her, “Jo Gallowglas!” as she drags burdened Jack with her past lumber and paper, chicken wire and stalls, dismantled stove and scaffolding, into the archway under the mural and through the tunnel and all the while “Wait” he’s saying, and “Jo, stop” and “I’m gonna drop, Jo! Wait!” as they spill out onto the yellowing tiles of the vaguely daylit foyer, “The hell?”

“I just,” letting go, turning about, resettling the cap on her head, “wanted some, peace, and quiet, for,” looking to his cups, the bag, “what did you get?”

“Uh,” he says, “ah, lemon, lemon poppyseed, and, and chocolate chip. Muffin-tops, I mean. And, uh, they had,” lifting one of the cups, “protein lattes? Which, I figured – ”

“Come on,” she says, grabbing his elbow again, yanking him after, toward the dark stairs down as, down the flight from above, one two many sets of footsteps clack-tocking, thumping, “have to,” someone’s saying, Gloria Monday, “no, we have to, get it all in, every last scrap off the dock,” coming down into the foyer, followed closely by Jim Turk, and then Getulos, Trucos, and more besides, “the paper especially,” says Gloria, across those little hexagonal tiles and into the tunnel, her jet-black hair and her great brown T-shirt that says Sheriff of Hong Kong in lurid red across the front, “some of it’s already got rained on,” she says, “and more’s on the way, so we need to figure out,” turning about before the archway, shuffle-scuff of her dingy shower slippers, “who,” she says, thrusting a finger at Big Jim brought up short, “is gonna,” she says, but beneath that bushy mustache of his, the black of it hatched with white, his satisfied smile spreads wide, and without a word but a simple wave of his hand he steps past her, out from under, into the great high hall, his loose white shirt wide open at the throat, his corduroy kilt a-sway, “we have to,” she says, turning after him, “what the,” stepping after him, “happened,” she says, taking in the lumber, the wire, the bundles of newsprint, “you,” she says, hastening after him, “you already,” catching him by a sleeve, “you already did it,” hauling him about even as she launches a shove at his shoulder, “you let me just, natter on, like that, and the whole time, we, you, you!” Another shove of a punch. “You let me pontificate, like a goddamn asshole,” crashing her whole self into him, wrapping him in an enormous hug, “you big fucking jerk,” she says, muffled against his chest.

“Sure, and of late, sweetling,” he says, and a kiss for the top of her head, “you’ve a lot on your mind.”

“Jesus,” she says, pushing away from him, his big hand gentle on her shoulder, “the fuck is that?” pointing, past the lumber, the empty tub, to the space before the opened overhead door, where a man in a pale work shirt is stooping to set down a couple of heavy cardboard boxes he’s been carrying by the handles upfolded from the tops of them, his bent head topped by a mighty round of tight black curls. Straightening, shoulders hunched despite his powerful frame, he looks about to spy a folding table, leaned up against the wall there, and crosses over, pulls it away, unlimbers the one set of legs with a resonant clank, kicks the other set down, clank, and easily lifts the table to spin it about and set it lightly down. Heads back to, with some little effort, take up the burden of those boxes and shuffle them over to, one after the other, haul them up and set them on the table. “You!” he calls, pointing to Teacup Tall, stood there by Jim Turk, and tosses something a-jangle that juggling dandling Teacup happens to catch, a ring of keys. “Two more in the sedan outside, in the trunk. And the cups, bring ’em. Help!” he barks at Charlichhold, with a sweep of his now-empty hand. “Go on! Do not scratch the finish, you hear me?” A woman’s ducking in beneath that half-opened door, her stodgily utilitarian dress of taupe and umber, and an apron not quite so white as once perhaps it had been, and two wide milkily translucent plastic bins stacked one atop another in her arms, and she’s careful not to tip or shift them as she straightens and makes a beeline for the table, where he’s crouched, poking a perforated notch at the base of one of those boxes with a darkly thickly finger, digging into it, hissing, he wrestles out a plastic spigot, shaking his hand away.

“Everything is okey-doke?” she says, setting the bins down one by the other, popping the lids off them to reveal ranks and rows of donuts glistening, gleaming, dusted with sugar, white and yellow-gold and densely chocolate and burgundy blue.

“Turns out, hot coffee’s hot,” he says, moving on to punch in the notch at the base of the second box. There’s Teacup and Charlichhold with two more, and long ungainly plastic sleeves of paper cups, and up comes Dick-a-Tuesday to take a sleeve in his hands and gnaw a hole in the plastic wrap, tipping out and stacking up the cups as the stoop-shouldered man in the pale shirt pushes himself to his feet, a hand to the back of his black-curled head, “You saw the napkins? Cup jackets? Creamer, sugar? Go on, go on, go get ’em,” shooing them with both his hands, turning about, taking in the smattering of others slowly approaching, from this stall or that, the arch at the end of the hall, the balcony above, “and tell everybody it’s coffee!” he booms. Brushing down the front of his shirt. “Better than the alternative,” he mutters, to himself.

“That’s Gordon?” says Gloria, still stood there by the lumber.

“You know Gordon,” says Big Jim behind her, hands on her shoulders, watching as Gordon starts filling cups from one of the boxes, handing them around, and Teacup Tall is scowling at Getulos’s paint-flecked fingers hovered contemplatively over the donuts, as Danarey and Herwydh, Hob and the lucent Himmelbord, Nicky Nack and Cragflower, Cherrycoke, the Flynn and flat Peg Powelr, Joli with her rainbow braids and Tumble Tom, gigantic head thrown back, laughing fit to fill the hall, and Val demurely ducking, her greasy unwashed hair hung well down past her shoulders, Sproat, the Buggane, and Petra B in black, tugging a stray bit of tape from the heel of her hand. “Shall we, sweet?” says Big Jim, leaning around her.

“What?” she says, shaking her head. “Sure, yeah,” stepping away from him, out from under his hands, looking from table, coffee, crowd, back to the lumber and the supplies, laid out there in the aisle. “We, we don’t need a truck,” she’s saying. “We don’t need a truck! Trucos!” she calls, beckoning. “C’mere! I wanna run something by you guys.”

And then, afterwards, her smile spreads in fits and starts almost in spite of itself, and, blinking, the breath she’s catching turns to puffs of laughter. She rolls onto her side on the white expanse of softly deflating comforter, pressing her thighs together as his hand slips from between them.

“God,” he says, knelt beside her, still in his fresh white T-shirt, those newly stiffly selvedge jeans, his curls a-glimmer in the candlelight, and that neatly penciled mustache, “you are so fucking beautiful,” he says.

“Shut up,” she says, half-muffled, but she doesn’t flinch at the hand he lays on her bare hip. Still in that copious black sweater rucked and tangled, those black socks stretched well up over her knees, but the cap is gone, and tousled on the pillows her short hair glossily bleached to a fakely translucent platinum, stripped of all lingering colors as if to leave room for any possible color to somehow come rushing in.

“You are,” he says, that hand of his slid up, along her hip, her flank.

“You’re just saying that,” she says, “because I’m here. Available.”

“I’m saying it because you’re beautiful,” he says, that hand of his tugging at the hem of her sweater, lifting it. “Go on,” he says. “Take this off. Go on.”

“Stop,” she says. “Jack. Stop it. Stop,” jerking away, she claws back a corner of the comforter to slip under it, “I’m chilly. Anyway, it’s your turn. Shimmy out of them jeans, already,” but he’s looking away, shifted to sit on his haunch. “I know you like being galant and shit, but it’s supposed to be, like, a reciprocal act, you know? Sex? Couple-few more goes, I’m gonna start feeling guilty. You keep picking at that, it’ll never heal.”

He yanks his hand from his upper lip, the mustache thinly dark and sparse, “It was supposed to be bigger,” he grumbles.

“They can only work with what you’ve got,” she says, elbows leaning on her knees tented under that comforter.

“That’s not,” he says, “not what we saw. Yesterday.”

“What, who, the Starling? Trust me, Jack, that was, mostly? Her.”

“Yeah?” he says, sitting up, seizing handfuls comforter, tugging, “and what about,” he says, yanking it free of her grasp, “you,” he says, pulling away dim white to reveal the featureless black, that sweater pulled down over her bare lap, the clocking of those long socks lost in the shadows.

“You thought this was cute,” she says.

“You don’t?” He looks back, over his shoulder, past the nimbus of candlelight from the floor there to the pale linen screen just visible, “so go put on something else,” he’s saying, but she sighs, leans forward, hooking her thumbs in the top of one of those socks, pushing it, down her thigh, around her knee, down and down, “I don’t care,” she mutters, working it over her ankle and off, wiggling her freed toes.

“All right,” he says, as she’s wadding up the sock to toss it away, into the shadows on the unlit side of the bed. “What’s next.”

“With what,” she says, hooking her thumbs in the top of the other sock.

“For us! What are we gonna do next.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Draper,” she says. “You tell me.”

He blinks, his expression falling away. “That’s, not my name,” he says.

Her hands stop, that sock down over her knee, bunched about her shin. “Okay,” she says, without looking up.

“That’s, that’s not me. That’s not my name.”

“Okay,” she says. “Jack. Just Jack. I didn’t, mean anything by it.”

“Yes you did,” he says.

She looks up, then, to meet his eyes as fiercely stern as hers, that mustache arched over an incipient snarl, the corner of her own mouth so absolutely motionless before, with a breath, relaxing. “Okay,” she says. “Jack. What is it you think we ought to be doing.”

“You,” he says, “yesterday you was the one all fired up to go find May, and hell, I don’t know, maybe Hector, but instead we’ve done,” he shrugs, “fuck-all. Just, holed up down here, a day, a day and a half, I mean, do you even have any idea what time it is?” but “I’m,” she says, “tired, Jack. I’m just,” working the sock the rest of the way off, “so. Fucking. Tired.” Tossing it away.

“So, what,” he says, “is that it? You’re just, gonna give up?”

“I,” says Jo, lifting the corner of the comforter to crawl back under it, “am going to lie down and maybe sleep for a bit, I don’t know. I might get hungry enough I’ll, actually, maybe, go look for some way to scrounge something to eat, and that,” lying back against the pillows, “is pretty much all I got.”

“You wanted my pants off a minute ago,” he says.

“Moment’s passed.”

“You’ve got,” he says, “people, who would,” a breath, an irruption of animation, “you have money,” he says, sat up, “cars, people, you’ve got,” an arm flung up, pointing above, “all this,” but she’s rolling over, up on an elbow, “Jack,” she says, and then “Jack,” and, shaking his head, that hand drops back to his lap. “Precisely none of any of that is mine,” she says.

“But – ”

“You have no fucking idea what I, I’ve,” she closes up her eyes, a fortifying breath, “I wanted to find you, and fix things. Put them right. But,” lying back on the pillows, “I can’t. Roy’s dead, Jack.” One arm curling protectively over herself, shapelessly black atop white. “Roy’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“You’re,” he says, looking down at his hands, one beside the other in his lap. “Sorry,” he says, and then, “what about May, what about, getting her back to her, to what’s hers. Her cats. Those damn National Geographics.”

“She has people.”

“She, she has, what?”

“She has people, her son, whatsisname. Mike.”

“He lives in Wilsonville! He drives a goddamn stormtrooper pickup truck! The fuck does he know about jungles.”

“She knows his phone number, Jack. Yours?” Opening, blinking, her eyes. “I bet she doesn’t. And me,” closing them up again, “I don’t even have one, anymore.”

“You, you’re,” sputters Jack, “so, that’s, that’s it. You’re giving up.”

“Looks like.”

“Well, I’m not,” he snaps. “I’m gonna go out there, I’m gonna find her, and I’m gonna make sure everything, I mean everything, is back the way it was. With or without you.”

“Okay,” says Jo, her eyes still closed. “I mean, you know how to catch a bus.”

And now the sun is setting once again, to hurl against a towering wall of clouds such brilliant washes of a wildly nameless color that deepens as it rounds, and fades, to merest orange, and red, and ruddy gold, and greening, there, along that edge, and blueing into greys, receding across and beyond the river, sailing away into oncoming night. The city below lit up as well in painful gleamings struck by those last few lances from glass and steel and even here and there the clean white stone of this climbing tower, the interlaced yellow timbering of that construction site, it’s all too bright to look upon for long. The trees that crowd the slope to seat and frame the view provide a darkly cool relief about the city far below so crisp it almost seems too close against those cyclopean clouds, so close and small enough to reach out, from here, among those trees, against a stone wall risen up abruptly on this side of the street, but even as those towers so bright so close so small she might reach out with her hand to cup them, lift them in the palm of her hand, all that brightness swelling up from darkening streets to climb those delicate planes and edges of stone and glass and steel, it all takes on a fiery rose, a blush that falters, fades, sinking away before it might escape the falling fulness of night.

She steps off the sidewalk into the street, two lanes of dimming tarmacadam, the high stone wall behind her, the gap in the trees ahead. Not even a crumble of sidewalk on that other side, not yet, just a verge of grass where she twists a quarter turn and sets to striding, one definite foot before the other along the edge there, of yellowing grass against pavement, matte black soft-soled shoes, bare shins and knees up to loose black shorts, grey jacket zipped up to her sternum, where ink climbs in spikily knotty thickets up from under along the lines and cords of her throat, up and under to the point of her jaw. Slowly, languidly lifting her arms to either side, as if walking a tightrope, as if reaching for the stone wall to her left, out over the dropping grass and treetops to her right. One of those hands holds an awkward rubbery bundle, oxblood edged with black, the other a slender boning knife, the single edge of it curling to a needly point.

Ahead, the grass slope gentles, the verge widens, enough for a sidewalk to start itself and even more for the side yard of a low house built out on stilts over the drop. She stops short of that first step onto concrete, lowering her laden hands. Eyes the next house along, and the next. Each of them from the street seems nondescript, and all much like the others, but she fixes on that one, there, fourth along, a meander of paving stones set in the scrap of yard leading to a yellow front door, the shallow curl of a driveway leading to a white garage shut tight.

Ellen Oh shakes out the bundle in the one hand and, careful of the knife, tugs it on over her head, a goggle-eyed horse’s head with a stiff black mane. “Take two,” she says. But it’s another long moment before steps onto that sidewalk.

A dozen or so clear and empty capsules piled on the island countertop, translucently soft, yielding under his fingertips as he plucks one up, pinches it apart, tucks the one end upright, there, in a small hole drilled in the slender plank before him, and the other end laid beside it. Another plucked, pinched, tucked and laid, and another, again, six holes neatly and evenly drilled in that end of the plank, six capsules so prepared. He takes up in one hand a little silver funnel, carefully fitting the slender stem of it into the first cap-end held upright in the plank, and in his other hand a tiny scoop at the end of a longly delicate handle. He dips the scoop into a spill of golden dust tipped out on a square of paper, there by an empty glass tube, lifting up a pinch of a portion of it, glimmering in the harsh light shining down from above. Leaning close to eye the amount, pewter weights a-dangle at the ends of his long grey mustaches, he taps the delicate handle with a precisely trembling fingertip, and again, knocking just enough of a puff back carefully onto the paper and then, with a sure swift shift and twist, deposits the payload into the mouth of the funnel, then strikes the rim of it once, a silvery clink, dislodging any lingering trickles of brightness. “We must be parsimonious,” he says, setting aside funnel and scoop to squeeze the two ends of the cap back together, “at least until our new Queen finds her footing. But our lot’s enough,” taking up funnel and scoop to set to filling the next, “more than enough, for a dozen pills, twelve days, and some,” tap, twist, clink, “left over.” Looking up from his work. Lifting up to perch on his forehead a pair of glasses, the half-moon lenses set in wire rims. “More than enough,” he says.

Out past the otherwise pristinely empty island, beyond that belvedere of focused light, the darkly glossy kitchen floor ends in a featureless surf of pale shag stretched untroubled by table or sofa or armchair to a sweeping upright wall of glass that looks out over the bright night beyond, and just before that glass untroubled by any reflection he’s sat tailor-fashion, bare feet tucked beneath bare knees, bare shoulders rounded, slumped, hands laid limply in his bare lap, and Pyrocles smiles to see him. “Becker,” he says, gently, lowering his glasses, taking up funnel and scoop once more. “When you’re ready, I’ve a dose prepared.”

A moment more, and then, with a sigh, Becker sets himself in motion, leaning forward as he hikes his haunches, arms spreading as they lift, legs unfolding as his head works back and forth, the wince of a crick. “Did you,” he says, turning, frowning, nakedly unconcerned, “what did you,” he says, looking across that wide and empty space to Pyrocles, iron-bright beneath the kitchen lamp, busy about his work, “what do you,” he says, setting out across the shag, “think, of Joaquin?”

Six filled capsules glimmer on the island, discretely separate from the larger pile of empties, and Pyrocles doesn’t look up from his hands as they set to preparing another six, pluck, pinch, tuck, “What do I think of him?” he says, mildly puzzled.

“He’s a, he’s new,” says Becker, the color of him warming as he approaches the light. “I mean, Sacramento. You’ve, none of you has ever, worked with him. Before.” Blinking against the brightness. “So. What do you think?”

“He is,” says Pyrocles, intent on scoop and funnel, “a doughty knight.”

“Doughty,” says Becker. “That’s, that’s a word. Yeah.” Shadows deepen, sharpen to underline wrinkles and sags, defining the shift of tendon and muscle as he lifts a hand to brush back what’s left of his hair. “Did you, ah,” he says, “I mean, when we, um,” gesturing fruitlessly, “you know, did you,” as “Yes,” says Pyrocles, looking up. Lifting his glasses back up onto his forehead. “As did you.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s, I know, that’s not what I, that’s, I just, I mean,” and Pyrocles, smiling, says, “Pleasures of the flesh, and treasures of the heart, lie in very different realms, love. So long as we keep that borderline in mind,” laying his hand, palm up, on the island countertop, “we’ll be fine,” as Becker clasps it, “That’s you,” he says.

“I rather think,” says Pyrocles, “our Shootist’s attentions, pleasure and treasure, are currently occupied elsewhere.”

“No, I mean, you’re ringing.”

“Am I?” says Pyrocles, frowning.

“Your phone, it’s the buzzing, on silent, it’s, mine,” Becker points, “mine’s in the bedroom, charging, and anyway,” looking down, “no pockets, so,” as Pyrocles, leaning back on his stool, pats about himself, “I will never,” he mutters, lifting out a glossy white plaque, the screen of it lit up, Incoming Call, it says, Viscount, the buzz of it strident in the open air, “understand,” he says, poking a green icon, “hello?” he says, lifting it to his ear. “Yes. The Anvil, yes.”

He frowns. “I see,” he says, and then, “of course,” and sets the phone down on the countertop.

Becker tilts his head to take in the expression Pyrocles turns away from him. “Is,” he says, “is everything,” but Pyrocles takes off his glasses, setting them clink by the phone, pinching the corners of his eyes. “Something’s happened,” he says.

Abruptly up in the darkness, a gasp, a retching groan of a cough. Throws back a drift of comforter, lunging for the edge of the sliding to heavily thump that high wide bed and slippery flap a pillow tumbles those oversized bolsters littering Persian rugs spread each over another on the concrete floor, “shit,” she gets herself on hands and knees but tangled still in kicking loose, “shit,” again as a flame blooms, a candle, lit, another, and another, off on the verges of this upholstered confusion, “cut it out,” she snarls, “stop it,” as yet another flares to life, “go away, leave me alone, I told you, just, go,” she snaps, “I don’t,” the slither, of long black strands of hair dragged with the motion of her head across marbled brown marmoleum, “need, anything,” she says, the patterfall of more long strands falling from about her shoulders, from where they had been pooled in the small of her back, as she sits up, back, on her heels. The sway of all that black hair, squirming about her arms, coiling up to lap her knees, lofting suddenly as if in some unfelt gust to shimmying float, all that long black mane a crown a cloud a tree above her, and slowly, so slowly, she lifts her hands to her face, to the mask over her face, shaped like a skull, her eyes behind the empty staring eyeholes of it, the crude teeth hung from the upper only jaw limned with thick black ink. “No,” she says, with some little force behind the word. “No.”

“Huntsman,” says whoever it is who’s stood behind her. She turns about, getting up on one bare foot, still crouched, her movement troubling the upward cascade of that mane, a sinisterly languid ripple to shadow the ceiling above.

“I wish,” says the man stood there across the crepuscular lobby, “I could say,” his brownly baggy boilersuit unzipped enough to reveal a lushly knotted necktie of paisleys in orange and gold and pink, “I were surprised,” the tone of that word left hanging, as if another clause might be forthcoming, but he stands there, the marbled stretch of earthen brown between them, hints within of numerous incongruous shades suggested by the light of a dimmed chandelier above, he’s stood there, waiting, and his strenuously flattened affect of disdain barely papers over an expression that trembles with an urge to slink away.

“This isn’t,” says Jo, lowering one hand from her mask to clutch, a fist, at her breast. The other lifting, tipping back that mask, the mane of it still a billowing tower above. “This isn’t how it went down.”

Puzzlement troubles his mien. “I don’t understand,” he says.

“This already happened,” says Jo, pushing herself up, onto her feet, her bare legs, her shapeless black sweater, that mask sitting atop her fakely colorless hair. “You’re Cotlap, the Lovejoy Earl. Tight with the Soames. Started running your mouth about how the King was a pretender and the Queen a bona roba, which, I had to look that up. You,” and a deep breath taken in, held, as the mane shivers above her, and then, let out. “You were number ten,” she says.

“I don’t,” he says, “understand – ”

“You don’t have to,” she snaps, a stomp of a step and another over that floor, yanking the mane in her wake as more and more of it loops in tendrils up and out, and up, “this already happened,” she snaps, as the chandelier above jangles, loose crystals shoved about by seeking darkness, and the light begins to fade. “You were the tenth. Early March, the eighth,” she says, “a Thursday,” and lifts the mask away entirely. That thunderhead of darkness collapses, the terrible weight of the mane slapping the marmoleum, whipping her sweatered shoulders, her arms, slipping away down her back.

“Today,” he says, hesitantly, as darkness restlessly settles.

“Three months ago!” she bellows. “Not even!” Letting the mask drop from her hand. “I,” she says, “I’m not, dreaming,” she winces, her other hand tightening at her breast. “So this, you, you aren’t you. This, I’ve, been here before. This has happened before. You, you’re Daniel fucking Moody, and I am fucking sick of this.”

“I,” he says, “who? I,” thumping his sternum once with his knuckles, “am the Cotlap Grady, Earl of Lovejoy, I take my portion from the Guisarme’s hand direct, and see to the needs of a dozen and one in this building,” those knuckles lifting, fingers spreading, a gesture to take in the lobby, the night-blanked glass doors there, the two gold-flecked elevator doors behind them, “that his majesty would would see demolished, and that, dear Huntsman, not the truths I’ve spoken through my running mouth, but this nagging impediment, that would be why you are here.”

“Christ,” she says, that fist still clenched, “it was boring the first time. We are not going through this again, Moody. You’re not him, I’m not here, and, and, oh, oh God,” doubling over as her knee buckles, refusing her weight, slumping sidelong wretching for breath, and, for one fleeting instant, as he stands there, watching her struggle, a spark flares in his eyes, and his chapped lips quirk in the briefest, but clearest, most savage little smile. She’s wrestling her arms up under the hem of that sweater, heedless of her exposure, grappling, grasping at something, quivering with the effort, and some growling climbing groan claws out of her mouth with a sudden ripping yank her hands beneath the sweater churn their way out, her fingers unfolding as she stares, appalled, aghast, astonished, at a feather so very long and slender as it is, the vanes of it a grey so iridescent it might contain all other possible colors paling to a clean and simple white about the quill, “shit,” she says, as glittering sheenly shining silvery dropping from the palm of her hand to the darkness draping the marmoleum below, “what,” she spits, “I, what?”

“Do me this honor,” he says, that trembling slinking urge returned but ducked again behind his flat attempt at chilly disdain looked up, and out, to where she had been standing but a moment before, and not to herself there crouched on the lobby floor, over the black locks of that fallen mane, the feather in her hands. “Draw your blade and show it me before you strike,” he says, to where she’d been, not where she is. “Do this, for me. I will not take it amiss. I do still hold it true,” bracing himself, “as anyone must, that our King Lymond Perry’s a bastard illegitimate, spawned of the Gammer’s gallowglas lover, Handless Vincent Erne,” a shuddering breath at the effort of having said that, let halfway out, for the effort of what’s to come, “and I will tell you,” he says, as she laboriously pulls herself unseen to her feet, “you, and anyone who’d listen, that his sister Ysabel’s a lust-drunk strumpet no more now fit to be Queen than a cat! But I would never,” and he swallows, “I would never raise a hand to any Huntsman of the court. And I will never shift my people nor my feet from off these floors. So.” Still not looking to her stood wavering there at all, he tightens the knot of his necktie, adjusts its drape. “Show me your blade, then cleave me to the bone. For I,” and he sighs, heavily, “am so, so very tired,” but “Grady,” she’s saying, with some effort, “Grady. Earl.” Snapping her fingers before his gaze, and he blinking looks from where she’d been, to where she is, half-slumped before him, sweater hiked, askew over her other hand, clutched at her heaving breast within. “I’m, sorry,” she says. He steps back.

“I’m sorry,” she says, again, and takes in a breath that lifts up, steadies, “I thought, you were someone else.” Dragging her hand out from under, tugging the hem of the sweater discreetly down about her hips. “I’m sorry,” she says, “that I did, what I did. You said some shit, you said that shit, and it, but, that’s not a reason. If I had to do it over again I wouldn’t, but that doesn’t, excuse, any of it. All I can do is tell you I’m sorry but that doesn’t, I don’t, I’ve got no idea, how much of you this,” the heel of her hand, thumping her chest, “this fucking thing,” and again, eyes squeezing shut in a wince, “I don’t,” she says, “know, what kind of, ghost, but you,” she says, looking up to him again, “are here. And I,” she says, but, trailing off, “am, sorry..?”

He’s smiling.

He’s grinning, lips spread, teeth bared, corners of that mouth dragged back and back to crumple his cheeks in a horrific rictus of surprised delight, an upwelling of malevolent joy that erupts in a snapped-off bark of laughter, “You,” he says, his head shook slowly, one side to the other, “still,” he says, “don’t get it.”

She screams, a ragged burst of wordless rage as she lurches backwards, making room to find her footing on slipping hanks of mane, that one fist white-knuckled over her breast but her other even as she lets out another scream, as rough, as loudly raging, but longer, thinning, drawn out as that other hand curls in the air between them, fingers closing about a brightly aching white-hot flare that dimming subsides to reveal the hilt in her hand, three fingers gripping the glossy black tape wound about it, index finger against the stubby wodge of a barrel angled down, to one side, top of it slickly blued above the pebbled black of the frame, and the letters Kel-Tec stamped there, where her thumb is curled.

“Lucinda!” he crows, and throws up his hands. “You done growed up!”

Those hands flop forward, his chest punched back, the crack of the gunshot too much for the lobby followed quickly by another that powders the side of his rocked-back head, the whole of him collapsing withered to mane-strewn marmoleum and one step, two, she’s stood over arm stretched down at what’s leaving of him, pistol banging once more and again, too enormous to echo. The silence, stunned, returns to find an oiled spring-wound click of a mechanism, and another, another, the pistol in her hand not leaping but still reflexively kicking, braced for something that doesn’t happen, over and over again. She groans, click, a choked-off sob, click, rising click by click to a shriek, click, until her arm jerks upright, cocked and poised to throw the pistol.

She doesn’t throw the pistol.

The rug before her, beneath her feet a threadbare Persian, tangled knots of pomegranate and gold laid over damp concrete, and fitful candlelight picks out a single smoking scorch-edged hole, no bigger than a fingertip.

The pistol still in her upraised hand.

She lowers it, slowly, her other hand taking hold of the hem of the sweater. Yanking it suddenly up, under her chin, baring belly, breast, the slender white scar that climbs to end there as a nodule set in a pucker of blotchily ruddied flesh. She holds the pistol out away from herself, turns it about, brings it close to press the mouth of it right up against the darkly glassy surface of the thing, clink. She closes her eyes.

Click.

A splash, at her feet. The gun’s been dropped. Her emptied hands at her sides. Somewhere, in the distance, the sound of falling water.

The sound of water, falling, in the distance, not the constancy of rainfall, not the singular trickle of a faucet or the focused plash of a fountain, but many differing streams and sources, here and there and there, the varying rhythms falling in and out of phase with each other, and their echoes, and now and then a sudden sputtering gout or exuberant overflow. Jo opens her eyes.

The light’s brighter, whitely sifted from fluorescents bolted to green concrete beams along with oh so many pipes, black lengths of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene criss-crossing clean white polyvinyl chloride interspersed with much more slender tubes of gleam-nicked steel, and all of them every one leaking from joints and elbows, caps and seams, water falling from all that plumbing to spang and thump and plack and tock the roofs and hoods, the windshield glass of cars that have been parked in spottily ordered rows on a concrete floor awash with troubled dimpled spattered water, with water stretched in placid sheets, with rippled runnels gurgling down choked and sucking drains, water lapping over her bare feet, over the gleaming pistol dropped to the concrete before her, submerged.

“Ahuh,” she says, she sobs, slosh-stepping back, “ah, aheh,” arms wrapped about her oversized sweater, “Ys,” she’s saying, “Ysabel!” slap and spatter, “Ysabel!” turning about and around again, stilling, stalling, water-slash stop. He’s stood there, at the far end in the moonlight slanting through the open garage door, not as bright as the fluorescents but limning him with a pearly sheen, for all that everything about him’s grey, his trousers a roughly woven shade of ash, his loosely rumpled shirt the speckled hue of gravel, his lugubrious expression the color of cold oatmeal.

“John,” she says, pitched to carry over the drip and tinkle.

“Joliet,” he says, reverberantly. “You’ve changed your hair.”

“What is this,” she says, headed toward him. “Is it all melting?”

He looks, up, about, “No,” he says, a considering shake of his head, “no. This, this is just, shoddy construction.”

“Where are we?”

He shrugs expressively. “I, am here. You? Are, where you were.”

She pulls up short, a couple-three car trunks between them, water slopping her ankles, her shivering grip about herself tightening. “This, isn’t the warehouse,” she says. “I didn’t, unless this is, more, Moody bullshit,” and at that, he moves to close the distance between them, slurp and plop about his grey shoes wetly blackening, “Do not,” he says, “be so quick with that name, here and now. This is, perhaps,” a sweep of an arm, taking in the garage about them, “what might have become of that warehouse, had it burned to the ground some years ago. If your Chatelaine’s father had not completed his purchase, or made a better go, of the deal he’d had in mind.”

“If he hadn’t been cut down by Orlando,” she says.

“You’re shivering cold. Let’s get you in, out of this,” looking up, about, “rain,” he says. Looking back, over his shoulder, the open door, the moonlight. “There must be a shop close by with something suitable. Once more, it seems,” turning back to her, with something like a smile, “I’m called upon to see you outfitted.”

“Well,” she says, “if you’d maybe call first.” Shivering enough now to chatter her teeth. Her one hand still closed, over the top of her breast. “Give a girl some notice.”

A small bird, perched on the roof-rack of a low-slung, slope-hooded car, looking here there there, sharp black eye, wicked beak, head of it a pale grey cape shading to white at the throat, the body a canary yellow almost green in this uncertain light, there, then gone, a furor of wings darted over the sidewalk between steel and glass and a row of young trees freshly planted, all of a scrawny size, and those wings settle, and hold, a swoop of a glide over a yawning garage entrance, PARKING, say the steel-rimmed letters above it, past that turning climbing over clambering steps and concrete bleachers that lead up to a narrow alley and a couple-few more of those young trees lost in the steepening shadows of a falling night, or a breaking day. Wings flutter to dip sharply, rear up, alight, of a sudden, atop a demure blue sandwich board, Goat Blocks, it says, Leasing Office, and an arrow pointing. Looking there, there, up, over, a storefront tucked away here in this narrow crook of an alley, Alouyiscious, maybe, says the swirlingly calligraphed sign over the open door. Clearance Sale, says the hastily lettered cardboard sign in the window. Everything Must Go.

A look, away, again, and instantly the bird’s not there, a rattle of wings, whip of air through that opened doorway into the unlit shop to find the edge of a rough grey hand and stop as if it had always been folded, tiny, there, up, out, there. “No, no, an actual, like, flower,” Jo’s saying, “grown up out of the, this, this thing, like it was a seed,” from somewhere unseen, that curtained alcove, maybe, “looped, like, around my neck? This big fucking thing, always in the way, it was, like, a poppy? But, like. Pink.”

Grey John lifts his hand, mindful of the bird’s wariness, up and up until it’s there by his listening ear.

“Anyway. She said, the, the wizard, Upchurch, said, it’s not a seed. That there wouldn’t be a flower. I mean, there was, but, that was, like, a dream? And I mean, just now, in what Moody, him, he, tried to, fuck me up with, I, it was, a feather, John, that came out of it. I mean, is it an egg? Is that what it is?”

The bird leaps away as that curtain’s yanked open with a scrape of rings, and Jo steps out in a dull red running jacket, zipping it up to her chin. “What happens when it hatches?” she says.

He turns his grey head back from the palely open doorway to her in those uncertain shadows, red and black and white by other clothing racked in mistily pastel gradients. “Quicksmoke,” he says, “does not hatch. It makes a shell, of scales, for itself, of what it takes from the world, that it might securely slumber, till it might safely wake.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, “I think it’s getting restless,” sitting herself on the low rim of steps about the little open foyer. In her hand a pair of long thick woolen booties, heavy socks with papery leather soles, that she sets to pulling on. “No shoes?” he says, frowning.

“I’m not wearing any of those,” she says, pointing back to a low table decorously littered with slenderly spike-heeled pumps and insubstantial sandals. “I swear, everything in here’s either lululemon knock-offs or, I don’t know. Trophy wife goes to the bank. I think I know why they’re going out of business. Okay,” sitting back, hands braced on the floor behind her, “where am I going.”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“John,” she says, sitting up. The face of him looking back, stonily impassive. “Then,” she says, “how do I get back.”

“You never left,” he says, and steps toward the open door.

“I never,” she says, and then, “I need to, John! I need to, you said. All this,” a sweep of her arm, taking it all in, shop and clothing, shoes, the doorway, the alley beyond, but somehow also steel and glass, and brick, and pipes, and falling water, “it’s what it could’ve, should have been. I need to get back to what it was, is, to what it is. How. How do I get back, to, to,” and as she trails away, he half-turns, on the threshold, looking back to her. “How have you ever made it back?” he says.

She blinks. “Jesus, John,” she whispers.

“It is given to you to see me but once more,” he says. “It is my fondest hope,” turning away, but not before that grey face is lighted by a smile, “that when that time does come, I shall see you, both, together.”

And out he steps, into the alley. Up she springs and out, after him, into the burgeoning sunlight, “John!” she calls, but stumbles headlong reaching managing barely not to fall over a tummock twisting turned about upright again her footing not on brick or concrete but on grass, lushly rumpled grass, a great long vacant block of it tilted from the far high end yonder down and down, past a somnolent backhoe drooped there, struck by the rising sun, past the parking lot over across that street, Zipcars Live Here, say green signs hung from the cyclone fence, past the low olive warehouse across the street to the other side, Gatto and Sons, it says, over the bay doors, Wholesale Produce, down and gentling down past where she’s stood to the low end of the block below, the hulking workshop across the short street there, Creative Woodworking NW, says the sign over the door. Down there, a corner of the lot’s been cordoned off, a low and temporary fence of wooden stakes upholding sheets of startling orange plastic netting about a close-cropped patch of grass. A couple haphazard structures within, makeshift sheds, waist-high at most, bridged by a wide bowed plank, and an erratic causeway of tree-trunk segments set on end about them.

Jo makes her way toward it all, carefully through the grass in those heavy woolen booties. Movement within one of those sheds, crunch of straw, a sleepy bleat. She could easily step over that low orange fence, but sits herself before it in the grass, and, as the light grows and warms, watches the goats, a couple of billies, a half-dozen nannies, three little kids all stepping from their hutches, chewing their breakfasts, greeting the day, one after another leaping onto those tree-trunks, and the clattering clack of their hooves.

Her eyes close.

The arc of the rising sun clears the treetops off to the left there.

She doesn’t look up or around at the soft footstep behind her, the wisp of gauze over grass. She doesn’t open her eyes to look to the hand, laid gently on her shoulder. Her mouth sets, holding something back. She lifts her own hand, to reach for those fingers there, unseen, and take them with her own, and squeeze.