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.