“Who did you say you were?” The door ajar, the security chain taut, a slice of face behind, a frown, a gingery mustache.
“A friend,” says the man in the hall, pressed close. “Your daughter’s. Gloria.” His hair is long and black and wet, his shapeless jacket grey. His bare foot red and raw, jammed between door and frame.
“That’s, not,” says the voice behind the door, “her name, isn’t,” and “I know,” says the man in the hall. “It’s what she’s called.”
“Daddy?” says someone, someone else.
“She’s dead,” says the man in the hall, lifting his head, cocking it, an ear to the gap. The faintest creak, the door, a floorboard. He wears a black patch over one eye. “I killed her.”
“You need to go,” says the voice behind the door. “I’m calling the police.”
“Daddy, what is it?” says someone else.
“Suzette, get back, go to your room,” says the voice behind the door, and “Suzette,” says the man in the hall, delicately. He brushes the security chain with a fingertip. A pop, a dull red spark, the chain snaps two ends leaping apart to clink against jamb and door. He throws his shoulder against a meaty thud, a grunt, the door shivers, comes unstuck swinging into an open room, wanly yellow, a thickset man fallen back against a leather couch, bare legs kicking slippered feet for purchase beneath the sprawling skirts of a satiny white robe, “Get back,” he’s saying, pushing himself upright. Scrape of the couch against the floor.
The man from the hall, two quick long steps, leans in hand snapping about a thick throat, lifting, turning, smack of shoulders against the yellow wall. Heels kicking. A slipper, falling. He leans back away from a swatting hand the back of it freckled. The white robe’s printed with kanji in thick black strokes. “Please,” says someone else.
Still holding the thickset man against the wall Orlando turns his head. Over across the room past the couch the coffee table the low shelf neatly lined with books she’s standing, jet black hair unbound, unribboned, bangs bright pink, hands clutched one above the other about her belly in a big white T-shirt. “Put him down,” she says, her voice quite small, her eyes rimmed black and red. The T-shirt says dem toten Hasen in big purple letters. “I went,” she says, “I went home,” and her voice finds itself under that word, lifting, stumbling, “how, how did you even, how could you–”
“Home,” says Orlando, turning back to the man he’s holding against the wall. Those freckled hands trying to pry his away. Cheeks and forehead blotching red about jerking eyes. “What’s home to such as me. I break every rule.” Under the ginger mustache the mouth opens on a gurgle as one hand falls away. “Any rule,” says Orlando.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what.” He opens his hand. The thickset man drops knees buckling to collapse unstrung behind the couch. Her hand to her mouth she takes a step out toward him and another but stops, dead, when Orlando says, “They took my sword.”
She looks from her father sitting on the floor hauling in a wheezing breath to Orlando over him, both hands clasped behind his back. “The one I killed you with,” he says.
Her father coughs. Tries to clear his throat.
“It still hurts,” she says.
“She ran away,” says Orlando. “She tricked me, and she ran away, and they did not like that, not one bit. Place,” he says, “and time. They took my sword.”
“Get out,” says her father, rubbing his throat, “of my house,” and she says, quickly, coming around the shelves, the couch, “I’ll go with you, I swear. Let me get my coat.”
“But we both know,” Orlando’s saying, “I have another.”
She shouts, she lurches toward him crashing into the arm of the couch his hand’s leaping out away from her lifting as he falls to a knee coming down a short and shining arc her father grunts. Her hand on the back of the couch. His hand about a bone-white hilt wrapped in rough black cloth, the heel of his other hand on the butt of it pushing a soft wet sound, her hand slapping his shoulder, shoving, knocking him to the floor. He looks up at her, blinking blood from his eye. The long knife left upright in her father’s belly.
“It’s snowing,” says Orlando, climbing to his feet as she gropes for the narrow table against the wall, knocking a bowl away, scattering coins. “What?” she says, stepping back, a phone in her hand.
“It’s snowing,” says Orlando, turning, heading out into the hall, away. “You’re welcome, Gloria.”
In this washed-out streetlight at once too bright and pale the marmalade cat is difficult to see, fluttered by falling snow. Leather jacket creaking the man squats, “Tch-tch,” he says, holding out a hand. “Puss puss.” Pink hair bobs, dulled by that thin light. The cat hikes up on its rear legs, bumbling against the wheel of one of the bicycles parked at the edge of the yard. “Not usually so skittish,” says the man up on the cramped front porch.
“What’s he called?” says the man on the sidewalk.
“Don’t know,” says the man on the porch. Lit by tiny white lights strung along the railing he’s draped in a dark sagging jumpsuit. “Tim?” His hair slicked with sweat or gel and a thick dark line smeared under each of his eyes. The cat’s weaving away through the welter of bicycles, pausing to daintily shake snow from a paw. “Tim,” says the man on the sidewalk, pulling himself to his feet.
“You’re Ray, right?” says the man on the porch. “Pretty much missed the to-do. Been a while, hasn’t it? How’s it doing for you?”
The man on the sidewalk’s tipped his head back. “Yeah,” he says, blinking, shaking his head, looking down to thumb flakes of snow from eyes one pale, one dark. “I’m here to see the Devil,” he says.
The man on the porch lifts a cigar in a white-gloved hand. “The Devil,” he says. “I didn’t know you played guitar.” On the railing among the tangle of lights a mask, grey fur, limp rabbit’s ears, the face of it an ugly metallic skull.
“The Oxys, maybe,” says the man on the sidewalk. “The Bullbeggar? Wicht?” To one side of the porch a figure in shadow leans against peeling pink siding, a crude suit of wicker armor, snow filling the corners of its warp and weft. “Even the Frittening Boneless,” says the man on the sidewalk, “if you could,” and then he shrugs. “You aren’t dead yet.” Those eyes bulging over a snaggletoothed grin. “You’re just a clown.”
The cigar comes down, comes away, “Just?” says the man on the porch in his furry grey jumpsuit, and smoke curls around the word.
“It’s not a bad thing,” says the man on the sidewalk, a gust of snow swirling about him. Up on the front porch the dull red front door opening, swinging back into shadow. “But really, the Devil, or the–”
“There is no Devil,” says the woman stepping out on to the porch. Close-cropped gunmetal hair almost black in that light. The clown’s shrugging, “Or the what,” he says, as the man on the sidewalk says, “Helm?” His smile gone, his eyebrow climbing. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Not really,” says the clown.
“There is no Helm,” says the woman, light dappling her bare skin, sheening the polished torc about her throat.
“Was, though,” says the man on the sidewalk. “Will be again.”
“You’re, tipping toward the obscure, here,” says the clown.
“I’m back,” says the man on the sidewalk. Squeezing one eye shut, then the other, back and forth. “We’re not all in it, are we,” he says.
“Like I said, you missed the to-do,” says the clown, and “Who are you,” says the woman, “that being back,” as the clown’s saying, “but if you want to come in out of the snow,” that cigar waving airily, and the woman says, “being back means anything at all?”
“You just want to be quiet,” says the clown. “Going in.”
“Linesse, wasn’t it? Isn’t it?” Lymond steps off the sidewalk, across the yard, up toward the house. “Pledged to the Hawk, you rode with, the Dagger, the Harper, the Shrieve–”
“Dagger’s no more, neither,” says the woman. “People are sleeping it off,” says the clown.
“It’s okay,” says Lymond, one foot on the bottom step. “It’s all right. I’m back.” Snow slithers down the creases of his jacket as he reaches for the zipper at his throat and yanks it down, with a flourish. Working one shoulder free, the other, “Here,” he says, leaning forward. Holding up that jacket hung from his hand. “Take it. But know,” he says, “that when you do,” tightening a fist now about the collar of it, “you take also from this our hand, these, our Northeast Marches.”
She pulls back. The clown’s looking from the foot of the steps to the head of them and back, Lymond in his purple T-shirt in the snow up along his bare skinny arm to that black jacket heavy and still. “There’s this whole story,” says the clown, wreathed in smoke, “you got going on here, isn’t there.”
“Highness,” says Linesse.
“There is no highness,” says Lymond. The clown snorts.
“You can’t possibly,” says Linesse.
“You heard what we have said.”
“You are too generous.”
“Oh,” says Lymond. “This is no gift.”
Her hand on the jacket then. The clown pushes away from the railing, straightens, watching the jacket loft into the air as Lymond’s hand drops away, “You,” says the clown, the jacket swinging around to settle over shoulders, the arms of it wriggling, inflating with the weight of arms, “how,” says the clown, hands slipping from the sleeves to grab the bottom of the jacket, tug it closed about hips, “you weren’t,” says the clown. “How.”
Lymond’s springing up the steps. “She is within?”
“She is,” says Linesse, and the sound of a zipper.
“And with her?”
“But three remain.” She smooths the jacket’s collar over polished silver.
“So few,” says Lymond. And then, “Come Marquess! You’ve made your choice.” He sweeps a hand toward the dull red door ajar. “Lead on.”
Dark inside, and close. She takes his hand. A hall butler mounded with coats and scarves that overlap a speckled mirror, boots and shoes piled over and around its low bench. Stumble and thump the clown behind them, “Shit,” he says, wrestling the rabbit-head under an arm. To one side a wide doorway, a ruddy, high-ceilinged room, a long dining table, a woman sitting at it lit up starkly blue and white by the laptop open before her. Lying the length of the table asleep among a litter of glasses and mostly empty bottles a round little man in a leopard print bikini, his thin beard curded with white paint. A hiss, the red light and yellow throbbing about the room, past the table a man’s crouching, poking at the stone hearth, blowing, coughing. Over him a narrow figure untouched by the firelight until it turns, yellow and red like embers edging her nose, her cheek, unveiling the white streaks twined through her mad black mane. “You’re ugly,” she says, and there’s rust in her words.
“And you,” says Lymond, “are beautiful.” There in the wide doorway, Linesse behind him, and the clown. “A great many things are turned about from where they ought to be. You, hiding behind walls, sending flunkies to answer the door that I pound. You, bootlessly drunk,” his voice rising, stepping into the room, “and I am at last quite not. A great,” and then he stops, his hand resting on the table. “Many things.” The woman across from him’s shutting the laptop, changing, dimming the light in the room, pushing back her chair. Her cheerleader outfit green and yellow. “Wait,” the clown’s saying, reaching for her arm, “you gotta, Ray, he just, he pulled the most amazing trick, out on the porch, she just, out of nowhere,” and the cheerleader pats his grey-furred shoulder. “You’re an idiot, Glenn,” she murmurs, and she leaves.
Lymond says, quietly, “I don’t want to fight, Mother.”
The man by the hearth straightens, wiping his bald head with a filthy hand, the poker still in the other. His suit unbuttoned over a bare and sunken chest. Polished silver gleams about his throat. Shuffle and step the narrow figure before him with a rustle of tattered cloak a hand emerges, and pale and rough-nailed fingers brush the top of the table. The man lying the length of it stirs. The clink of glass. “What does it matter,” she says. “What you want. You will be fought.”
“I’ve already won,” says Lymond. “I am returned. I will be King. Your daughter, Queen. We will all go on. How,” and his head shakes slowly, side to side, “how is this not a happy day?”
“You are not mine,” she says.
“Yet you are as much my mother as she,” he says.
“You left,” she says.
“He left,” says Lymond. “I only went ahead, a little ways. I saw–”
“Nothing!” she cries, and a glass falls shattering to the floor.
“I saw,” says Lymond, “where we’re going. Every street a corner, every corner a tower, every tower ten thousand windows and in every window a lamp. And every lamp was lit, and every street was empty, and it was all so quiet,” he’s leaning over the table, over the man lying asleep on the table, “so quiet, you could hear the snow stop falling.”
“You saw nothing,” she says.
“If we go on,” he says.
“And you.” She lifts her nose, her chin, looks past him to Linesse behind him. “All it takes to turn your coat again’s the gift of another?”
“I was cold,” says Linesse, and Lymond lifts a hand, “Chazz,” he says. “A King needs his Devil.”
The bald man chuckles, lowers the poker in his hand to thump the tip of it against the floor. “Further be it from me than anyone else of us in this room to so thoroughly embody an aphorism, but,” and thump again of the poker-tip, “the temptation’s too delectable. For if the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifieth,” and he hefts the poker up in his hand, “great offences.”
Lymond nods at that.
Scrape of a chair and that narrow figure rustling sits, heavily. “I do not know what you thought to gain, by coming, here, but you have not,” and she coughs, bends over, wheezing, Chazz a hand on the back of the chair leaning over her. “You,” she says, bracing herself against the table, bottles shivering, “you don’t even look like your–”
“A clown,” says Lymond, and “What?” says Glenn behind him. The man on the table lifts a hand, knuckles his eye. “We have a clown, now,” says Lymond. “We have a peer. And we have already won. This house, Helm,” and he looks up, turns about. “This house.” Up in the shadows licked by firelight along the picture-molding lines of faces, of styrofoam wigstands and mannequin heads clumped in crowded lines all around the room and each of them painted, thick lines and curls and calligraphs in red and black and blue exaggerating eyes and mouths, cheeks and chins, fixed rictuses of joy and wonder and delight and here and there a glum recrimination, and no two of any of them alike. “It is subject to an agreement made with the King before us, and much like Goodfellow’s house across the river, or, or the,” frowning as the man on the table sits up abruptly, and a bottle thumps unbroken to the floor. “Where we left our mother,” says Lymond. “A free house, and open, where she might be safe. Within your demesne, Marquess, but not your purview. And when she smelled the first hint of snow in the air, she came straight here.” Crackle and pop from the hearth, and Chazz turns to it, poker at the ready. The man on the table snorts, and shivers. Her leather jacket creaking, Linesse looks from the figure at the head of the table to Lymond there at the other end. “She hopes,” says Lymond, “but cannot bring herself to ask, that I hew and cleave to that agreement.”
“Snow,” says the man sitting on the table, tugging the top of his bikini back into place. “Dammit, Ray, did you say snow?”
“Well hell,” says Glenn, “I was only telling everybody half an hour ago and nobody wanted to go out and look at it.”
“What time is it,” says the man on the table, blinking owlishly, scooting to the edge of it, clink and chime and another bottle falls, smash. “Shit.” Glenn’s stepping forward, shuffling side to side as Lymond’s turning this way, back about, “Ah,” he’s saying, “it’s Saturday, Saturday morning,” Linesse reaching past him to offer a hand to the man hopping down from the table. He’s tugging his bikini bottom up about his hips. “Very early Saturday,” says Lymond, turning about again. Down the table those pale, pale hands cover the sharp-edged face, and the white threads tangled within the thick black hair are stained red and pink by the light. “And the next day is Sunday,” he says. “A Zoobomb day. And, snow or no snow, we shall have,” and he spreads his hands, and his snaggled smile beneath beaming, bulging eyes, “the greatest, grandest, most astounding Zoobomb ever.”
The clown in the bikini’s still blinking, rapidly, scratching the back of his neck. He shrugs. “Yeah, sure,” he says. “We could do that.”
“Now,” says Lymond, and he clasps his hands together. “We have what we had come for. Marquess? Glenn? Attend me,” and he turns to leave the room.
“Sunday, the Sun’s day,” says Chazz, “the day we all might rest. But not, that day, the Solstice. The sun will not stand still for you, tomorrow.”
Lymond stops, there in the doorway. “Has it really been so long, Chazz,” and he speaks that name quite carefully, “since you have spoken to a King?”
“There is always a King, boy,” says Chazz.
“Then you must know,” says Lymond. “The Solstice is not the day the King comes back. The day the King comes back, is the Solstice.”
The snow’s falling more thickly now. In his purple T-shirt Lymond wraps his arms about himself, ducking pink hair bobbing as he heads out into it, down the steps. “Majesty,” says Linesse, at the top of them. Glenn behind her, the rabbit’s head still clamped beneath his arm.
“The cold,” says Lymond in the yard, speaking over the stuttering snow. “You feel it, now.”
She nods, shivering in her jacket, looking down, her bare legs, her bare feet. Lymond says, “And you would know what we’re about,” and her shivering stills, and she looks up, and nods once, crisply. “Yessir,” she says.
“I will always speak my mind to you Marquess,” says Lymond. “You have but to ask. One peer alone does not a quorum make.” He turns away west, speaking into the teeth of the snow. “We go to call another banner to our hosts.” Looking back to them up on the porch, and his grin is back. “It’s not far. But I’m sure we’ll find something along the way to keep us warm.”
“Are we, uh, so, we’re walking?” says Glenn, following Linesse down the steps.
“Do you see a car?” says Lymond, away off down the sidewalk.
The Book of the Preacher, written by the son of David, King in Jerusalem, within the public domain.
Gently brushing dust from that sleeping face, fingertips dredging a crumbling pile from pillow to palm, both hands together now cupping the fitful glow, lifting to lips pursed to blow, gently, dust that lofts in great slow billows that do not fall, that coil and glitter, a thousand thousand golden stars, a galaxy of atomies that lights them both lain on the high wide bed, bodies shadowed shapes atop striped sheets drifted with more dust. “I kissed her, once,” says Ysabel. “For a cup of coffee. And tonight, she, she,” a heavy hank of curls dislodges with a shrug.
“She wanted you. She did not know what having you entailed.”
“I didn’t know,” she says, thin wisps of words. “I had no idea.” A gold-flecked hand strokes a shining, sleeping cheek, brushes spangled short black hair. Her other hand laid across the bare gold-dusted breast, fingertips against black lace still tied about the throat. “Will she wake?”
“She will wake.” Past the yawning door in the lightless hall a shuffle, a change in posture perhaps, a shift of clothing. “She will wake, when day has broken, and if she does not see you here she will wonder why her bed is full of sand. She will curse the need to sweep her floor, and wash her only linen, and she will scour herself in the bath, and at brunch with her friends when stray specks yet catch the light at her cheek or the corner of her eye she’ll make empty jokes about glitter and glue and grade-school art. And in the days and weeks to come she will find herself from time to time to’ve been staring at nothing at all, and her chest cracked open, and the heart of her cored right out, and nothing to hand but stones that might fill the hollow ache, and she will not know why. But these will pass; they will come to her fewer and fainter and further between, as time passes. But they still will come, till the end of her days.”
Bending down she presses a simple kiss to those sleeping lips, then sits up. “I should go,” she says. She pulls at sheets and blankets to free them, drape them over the body beside her, sloughing more glimmering clouds.
“You might. But where?”
Tucking blankets about shoulders she doesn’t look up, doesn’t turn around. “With you?” she says.
And a hiss of intaken breath from out in the hall, and the light all about the room quivers. “Not yet.” A sigh, and the light begins to gyre. “Not for some time yet.”
“How,” she says, but the next word’s just a shape of her mouth, and she swallows, and starts again. “I have nothing,” she says. Turning on the bed, light swimming about her. “Not a thing.” Lowering a foot to the rumpled shadows strewn along the floor, but she does not stand. “Even my clothes are someone else’s.”
“I hope the coat is warm, majesty.”
She looks up, into the darkness, arms around herself.
“It snows. Do you not hear it? An inch or more already, while you were,” and another hiss of breath then, colder, softer, “otherwise,” as she says “Fucking” sharply. “While we we were fucking. Say it. It’s a perfectly fine word, for what we were doing.”
“Majesty. This is unseemly,” but she’s turned away again, stirring the syrupy light with a dismissive hand. “So this is the great mystery?” she says, her voice rising. “This is how Queens might be quickened? Because the wonder then is that it hasn’t happened a hundred times over already.” Leaning over the body asleep beside her, hair falling a curtain before her face. “Is this woman, then, Petra B, does this make her King of Roses? And am I now her Bride?” Pushing her hair up and back over her shoulder, a gesture that sets off another glittering pavane in the air, she looks up and past it all into the darkness. “Or is it to be the cocktail waitress I kissed tonight, or the dancer? The Starling? And a fine return on the Duke’s joke that would be.” Up then and unfolding herself by the bed to stand in an awful slow collision of light, knotting sparks that flare and pop about her, here and there, and there. “Or that appalling girl who cut me, laid me open and started it all, welling up. Who’s dead now, but no matter! All hail her! All hail the King, come back.” The light’s settling, glittering in her hair, limning her shoulders, her breasts, her hand on her hip, her knee cocked, so. “Or must,” she says, “the King be a king? Is it then to be the Mooncalfe? He did sweep me so adroitly off my feet. Will he now sit the Empty Throne? Is that where this all ends?”
A creak, a floorboard, perhaps. “Your brother,” says that voice, slowly, and lugubrious.
“Wait for the King,” she’s saying, “wait for the King, wait for the King to take my hand and gallantly lead me to my wheel. My wheel; my burden, my guí and toradh; his hand. My brother? He,” but the next word stumbles, and she closes her eyes. Bites her lip. Sits back again, against the edge of the bed. “Ys, he said, Ys, there once were queens, wild queens, in the mountains, who spun whatever gold they liked from straw. If we might only learn their secret, that mystery, why, you can be Queen, Ys, and I can be your King, and you, you will never, have to take, anyone’s, hand…”
“He loves you, very much.”
“He left me.”
“Majesty - ”
“Do not call me that,” she says, quietly, and calm.
“But you are now the Queen.”
“Because of this,” she says, scooping up a handful of dust. “What do you think, a firkin? Or more?” Letting it shimmer through her fingers. “A Queen’s ransom,” she says.
“Or a city’s.”
She flings the dust then, toward the open door, but it blooms in swirls and useless puffs of light that do not reach the shadows. “You’d leave it here, like sand, for her to sweep,” she says.
“You will make more.”
The light sifting out of the dimming air. Sullen glows lick the edges of things, the blankets hillocked behind her, the crowded nightstand there, wineglass and plastic tumbler, bottles and jars of lotions and creams, an alarm clock topped by little bells, a dull pale fluted phallus, a jumble of keys on a ring. The artless tangle of her hair as her head bows. The bare slopes of her shoulders. “I broke,” she says. Arms folded in her lap, elbows cupped in her hands, feet on the gilded floor crossed one over the other. “I need a,” and then she shivers, shakes her head, fending off what might have been a laugh. “I don’t even have any cigarettes,” she says, and then, “I saw, today, what I hadn’t seen, that morning. When I ate the tongue.” Looking up now, up and up in the darkening room. “I’ve told anyone who might listen that I’d seen myself, as Queen. And Jo, at my side, and, and no King at all, that I was mindful of.” She’s closed her eyes. “But,” she says. “I was not sumptuously dressed. Jo wore, one of her T-shirts. One of those awful T-shirts. And it was, a glorious day, a blue sky, and only one great cloud, white and gold, and,” she opens her eyes. “It was shaped, it was a shape one might’ve taken for a Hind, for the banner, of the Bride. But it was just, a cloud, and her hand, I held, her hand. And all about us,” and she takes a breath, and looks down, back out into the shadowed hall. “All about us people, just people, went about their business, and took no notice.” A hand to her forehead now, her eyes. “And I hadn’t noticed, until, it hadn’t occurred to me, before. I was just, we were just.” Another breath, deep, shaky. “So small a life,” she says, “but still. And now– you’ve come, to tell me I am Queen. And she will wake. And I must go.” Both hands in her lap again, and her head hung low. “I need a cigarette.”
“I– can’t help, with that.”
“Then what use are you,” she says, and pushes herself back to her feet. Dust kicked up from the floor glimmers over the shapes of discarded clothing. She stoops, to snatch at something.
“But little enough, except at times. When I might pass on some scrap of message, or such little news, as might, for instance, be about your brother.”
“Petulance does not,” she snaps, “become,” but then she looks up, a T-shirt pale in her hands, and “you,” she says, a sliver of a word. “Lymond?”
“Even he. He has returned.”
“You let him go.”
“I never held him, child. He’s none of mine.”
“No,” she says, looking down.
“He is about the city, gathering banners to his own. He would be King.”
“I would,” she’s saying, “he would’ve found me. He would’ve come for me. I would, I would be, he, he promised.”
“Whatever I might think, he will be King. And you, his Queen. And everything you wanted, everything, despite all our misgivings. It will come to pass.”
“No,” she says, and she lifts the T-shirt up above her head, working one arm then the other up and into and through the sleeves.
“It snows, but snow will melt. We will go on.”
“No,” she says, tugging the T-shirt down about herself. A thump from out in the hall then, a step toward her, or away. “Ysabel.”
“No,” she says, and then more loudly “No” and “No” and “No.” A rustle of blankets behind her, a bedspring’s groan, a snort, a snoring sigh. She tugs her black hair from the neck of the T-shirt, and light fluffs into the air. “No,” she says, quietly, again. Letters scrawled in black ink across the front of that shirt say The Gloomadon Poppers.
“We must go on.”
“I broke,” she says. “Today. I,” and then, “for as long as I can remember,” she says, “I have held above my head this crown, and waited, patiently, until the day that I might put it on. But, today.” Kneeling in that sagging T-shirt on the glowering floor. “Today. This,” and a hitch in her breath before the next word, “terrible, day, I, I put it down. And I’m, you can’t see it. But I’m trembling, with such, such relief? It was too heavy. You must know. Far too heavy. And I can’t take it up, again.” Looking out once more through the empty doorway. “No one could.”
“Ysabel. Child.”
“I think,” she says, “I’ve changed my mind. I’d rather you showed the deference you think I’m due.”
“But you have just said you refuse it. You would not take it up again.”
“You would have us want it.”
“You can no more not be Queen, Ysabel, than not–”
“Not spin your straw to gold,” she says. She blinks, and then looks down, at her hands, lain flat upon her knees.
Another rush of breath sucked in, and when it’s let out bright dust skirls in flickering devils, a dozen candles or more, wavering, guttering, dying, stripping away what little light is left. “Why then did you flee?”
Her one hand crosses over the other and wraps about it.
“Why did you run from the Mooncalfe? If you’d stayed, let him take you with him to whatever hell he’s planned– it will all end much the same.”
“For the city, perhaps?” she says. “But not for me.”
The room is dark, now, almost as dark as the hall outside. The window in the wall past the bed’s no longer so blank, so black, a sense within of something falling, softly, gently. Or else the whole room floating, rising dizzily, up into the air. And a feathery scratching, faint against the glass.
“Then, majesty, we have returned to our impasse. And there is nothing left for me to do but hope the coat you have is warm.”
“Wait,” she says, looking up, pushing up, to her feet, a groan and a pop from out in the hall, floorboards, a footstep. She heads for the wall there by the doorway, whick and whisp of her hands on the wallpaper, the sudden thick click of a switch. Light blares whitely from naked bulbs in the fixture in the middle of the ceiling. The walls are suddenly all pink arabesques and faded bouquets, the tangled bedclothes striped dull brown and beige, the clothing on the floor still black, the window harshly glazed now with reflections, and everywhere the drifts of yellow dust. And out in the hall the floor a ruddy wood, the walls of it painted white some time ago, a man, and his pants the color of gravel, and his shirt of ash, and his face is cold and colorless in that light caught wide eyes black a mouth held open under a shapeless nose, jaw set, fixed, a word unspoken, held back with great effort.
“You look,” she says, a hand on the door frame, “so, different…”
And, he closes his eyes. His mouth. He opens his eyes and that face has softened, his shoulders in that ashen shirt pulling back, lowering as he straightens, and his hands held empty, useless, at his sides. He says, in that voice grey, and drear, “You will see me twice more yet.”
“Twice,” says Ysabel, “once, two three– if I, do this,” and the light switch clicks again, the light’s gone, snuffed in ink, “does it count,” she says in the darkness, and click again, the light, too bright, returns, beaming, “as a second time?” But the hall is empty now. There’s no one there.
She takes her hand from the switch, her face quite still, and sere.
Behind her a rustle, and a creak of bedsprings, a hoarsely sleepy voice, “I just had the strangest,” and a cough. “What time is it? Ysabel?”
Ysabel doesn’t answer, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t turn, doesn’t move.
Petra B sits up in her bed, dust sparkling in the harsh light as it falls from her shoulders. “Are you leaving?” She reaches over to the nightstand and finds a phone and thumbs its screen to life. “It’s not even almost three,” she says.
When Ysabel doesn’t say anything again, “Hey. Beautiful. Come back to bed. Stay a while?”
And then, “Ysabel?”
Lurching buttocks clenching spasms tremoring up to jerking shoulders slap and again of flesh on flesh and he barks, the heel of his hand on her hip thumbing the burning heart at the base of her spine and she groans, her hands braced against the other arm of the overstuffed chair and “greh” she says as blowing out he pushes back a single unsteady step reaching out to catch at the back of the chair, his other hand about his cock, her yellow hair heavy with sweat she pushes grimacing the cushion rolling onto her hip on the arm of the chair as he barks and “hanh” he says, a strangled yelp and pale stuff gouts across the chair-back falling to glisten on the cushion and another stream of it jetting from the darkly swollen head of his cock over the other arm of the chair to patter to the floor beyond and she’s off the chair entirely half-falling to a crouch before it looking up at him in that ruddy amber light, head back, braced, clenched, a yowl, and one last dollop, plopping.
“Leo?” she says.
Slumping, buckling, clutching the side of the chair as he sags to his knees, hauling air in, shoving it out, “Nothing,” he says. Shivering.
“Leo,” she says, wincing as she shifts herself a closer crabwise step.
“Not a thing,” he says, looking up, pulling himself grunting to his feet. “All right.” Reaching down a hand to her. She takes it shaky in her own and lets him pull her up. “Maybe it wasn’t, whatever. That’s it. It’s time.” The words a mutter he’s pushing her backwards before him around to the front of the chair. “Forget the car, they’re gonna come looking for the car. Forget the money. Don’t go back to the hall at all. I should’ve thought of that.”
“Leo,” she says, a third time.
“You can’t trust them. You can’t trust anybody.”
“Not even you?”
Pulling her into his arms tight about her, his forehead to her shoulder, “Especially not him,” he says, muffled. Then he leans back to say, “Leave the city,” and she kisses him. “Go,” he says, turning his mouth to one side away. “Plane, train, automobile, gravel barge by dead of night. Get out.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says, and lays her cheek against his chest.
“You will,” he says, stepping back from her embrace, turning to face the chair. “Give it a minute.” Leaning forward, bending over, both hands planting on the ends of the arms of the chair.
“Hey,” she says.
“Blood and milk, and jism,” he says, “and honey, and not a mark,” breathing in as he straightens slowly unrolling his spine lifting his shoulders, his head, letting go of the arms of the chair, and then turning his back to it, and facing her again. “Don’t,” she says.
He opens his eyes. Out there past the dim reflections in the great sweep of window the lights of the city spread out below, and the snow, falling. “I am King,” he says, “or I am nothing,” and he lowers himself to sit upon the chair.
And naked before him she shudders violently as he does.
“Huh,” he says.
Naked before him, shivering, arms wound about herself, fingers to her lips, she’s looking down at him naked in the chair, armrests gripped by hands unclenching, bare feet crossed at the ankles. “Is that,” she says, “is that it?”
He looks up from himself his brown locks spilling back from his face and there a slyly sidelong grin, an eyebrow cocked, “Is that it,” he says, “Your majesty.”
A gasp of a laugh from her and she looks away, a jerk of her head, fingers falling, and laughing himself he snatches her hand and pulls her, stumbling, into his lap, a tangle of knees and elbows, and he kisses her, and she squirms about settling herself, folding her legs together to stretch them out over an arm of the chair, and she takes his face in both her hands and kisses him back.
“You know,” he says.
“What,” she says.
“I am, unutterably hungry.”
“Am I not enough,” and a giggle, “for his majesty?”
“Ah, ha ha,” he says, “supping my fill of you’s what’s left me ravenous.”
“It’s, what time is it.” She sits up, pulls back. “Three? Four?”
“Or noon, or tea, or quitting, who knows?” he says. “Who cares? There’s one place in town that’s always open.”
“You want hot cakes,” she says, getting up off his lap.
“I could go for some hot cakes,” says the King.
Orange doors, wide segmented overhead doors set one after another down the white walls either side of the alley, all of them that color too luridly deep for the milky light, and a couple of them lifted opened on unlit storage units packed with boxes, furniture, the bulbous rear of a midnight-blue sedan, and the trunk lid’s up, and climbing from it a confusion of pastel taffetas, a striped sock, a plaid plimsoll delicately crushing the snow that’s drifted over the threshold. Straightening a fluff and crinkle of skirts beneath a large black hooded sweatshirt leaning over the fender to offer up a folded bundle soft and grey to Linesse, in her black leather jacket, in a folding lawn chair, legs draped in an afghan, pink and yellow, blue and green.
Squeak and crunch of snow, a man in a knee-length parka and a knit cap, thermos in one ungloved hand, fingers of the other threaded through the handles of mismatched clinking mugs. He offers up his mugged hand to the woman in the skirts, her face still hidden by that hood, and she takes a yellow one that says Is It Friday Yet, and then he swings to offer them to Linesse bent over, she’s unfurled that bundle, sweatpants, and now she looks up, tucks herself back under the afghan, takes a white mug printed with a drooping cartoon mustache. He sets the third on the fender, a black mug that says I’m Not Lost, I’m Locationally Challenged, and pours something richly red and steaming from the thermos into each. He lifts his, and the woman in the skirts lifts hers, and then with the slightest tic of her gunmetal head Linesse lifts hers, and then a nod, and she drinks, and they drink.
At the one end of the alley a pickup truck, and Lymond sitting on the rear bumper in his purple T-shirt, his pinkish-orange hair laid back, dark with sweat, or melted snow. Over the edge of the truck’s bed lopped a couple of shaggy rabbit ears, Glenn’s curled up back there, asleep under a tarp. A creak, a rattle, a bang and another orange door is hoisted, opened, a woman in a pale blue quilted robe shuffling from between a wall of cardboard boxes and a glass-fronted cabinet. A sludgy drone of pipes erupts, counterpointed by bass, and drums, someone’s set an old boom box on a crate, clamoring with the rattle and bang of another door thrown up, someone else stepping out, here, and there, a nod perhaps, a wave.
A short and heavy man climbs out of the cab of the truck, shapeless green coveralls and a battered tweed jacket, a blue meshback cap that says Vanport 15. “He’s here,” he calls out, and Lymond peers around the back of the truck. Trudging down another alley quiet and still, the orange doors all closed and locked, an old man in a pea coat his dark head bald and bare, bent under the weight of an olive duffel. Lymond nods, then sits back against the tailgate. “Gordon,” says the man in the meshback cap.
“Soames,” says the old man with a nod. “That this Prince?”
A brisk nod from the Soames, a jerk of his thumb. “But it’s her,” he says. “Down past Biscuit.”
The pipes and the drums and the bass climb to an end and a guitar jigs out from under it all, a clattering bodhrán, and voices in a harmony distorted by those overpowered speakers sing they’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace. A man in a worn barn coat’s doing a little dance, there’s a laugh, and a clap, and a whoop. The man in the knee-length parka’s headed back toward the truck, thermos in his hand, and back behind him there’s Linesse in her black leather jacket, her grey sweatpants, one bare foot in the snow and the other lifted to rest against her cocked knee, a tree, her back to the truck, and her mug held up in both her hands.
Gordon stops, dips his shoulder to let the duffel fall, then leaning in lowers himself first one knee then the other beside it.
“She needs shoes,” says the Soames.
“I know what she needs, Tommy Tom,” says Gordon, opening the duffel, digging among a jumble of shoes to pull out a long boot, grey wool and brown leather straps and a buckle, chiming. “Fetch the bolt cutters.”
The Soames Thomas says, “What?”
Up to the shoulder in that duffel Gordon scowls. “Every tool known to man in that truck of yours,” he says. “So reach in and fetch me out a set of bolt cutters.” And then, “You think anyone else of you is gonna do this.”
Around the back of the truck Lymond’s gotten to his feet.
Thomas opens the driver’s door, leans in, working something loose. Up in the back Glenn in his furry jumpsuit sits up as the truck rocks, rubbing at eyes slitted against the thickening light. Thomas pulls out all long dinged yellow levers and snubbed pincers brown with rust and holds them close to himself, frowning at Gordon, who’s pulled the mate of that boot from the duffel. He reaches for the cutters, and Thomas lets them go. “You’re still wearing that hat,” says Gordon, and then he heads off down the alley, past Biscuit, toward Linesse.
“Forgive him, highness,” says Thomas. He’s taken off his cap, smoothing his thick black hair. “It’s been an extraordinary time.” Biscuit’s putting the thermos in the cab of the truck. “This weather,” says Thomas, putting his cap back on, favoring Biscuit with the briefest look, the merest shake of his head. Biscuit shuts the door, leans back against the truck, blowing on his hands.
“It snowed,” says Glenn, up in the back of the truck. “It never snows.”
Down the alley in their heavy coats and coveralls, their loose black rubber boots, wrapped in blankets and one of them a sleeping bag all splotchy camouflage of pink and red and white and dirty grey, they keep their distance but still, circling about, as Linesse turns to see Gordon there beside her, and his head bowed. She lifts a hand but he stoops away, sets the cutters on the pavement, kneels, heavily, there before her, the boots in his hands, and the music’s now a ringing, chugging guitar riff, a fusillade of drumbeats, a wailing harmony, true love, true love, true love. “And here you are, nevertheless,” says Lymond then, “up with the sun, to see to the needs of your people.”
“My, people?” says Thomas. “Domestics, who can’t keep a hearth? Mechanicals without a purpose? Highness, these, they– these are no one’s people.”
“But,” says Lymond, “when our little band is once more on its way, you’ll have Biscuit open up the truck, and you’ll bring forth the last of my sister’s gift to you, and dole it out to them.”
And Gordon’s buckling a boot about Linesse’s calf.
“Give me your rabbits, Twice Thomas,” says Lymond.
“My rabbits,” says Thomas, toeing a frozen rut.
“The Hare, then,” says Lymond. “A fine emblem it’ll make, on a banner, in the sunlight.”
And Gordon’s tugging the other boot up over Linesse’s foot.
The Soames Thomas, still looking down, hands in the pockets of his jacket, says, “You can’t give us the North, highness.”
“Can’t?” says Lymond, lightly.
“You can’t,” says Thomas, “make a gift, of what we already hold.”
“A point,” says Lymond, “a fair point,” and Thomas nods, “Highness,” he says. Gordon’s leaning away as Linesse steps back from him in her new boots. He’s climbing slowly to his feet, waving away the hand she offers.
“What you don’t have,” says Lymond, “is a place at court,” and Thomas starts to say, “We’d never,” but Lymond’s speaking over him, “What you don’t have,” he says, “is a full share in the Apportionment.”
Thomas looks up at that. Over to Lymond. “There must be a Queen,” he says.
“Yes,” says Lymond. “There will.”
The cutters in one hand Gordon’s saying something with great force, holding up his free hand, throwing it to one side, and he repeats himself, redoubled, shaking the cutters at her, and when he’s said what he’s saying she reaches out and lets the mug in her hand drop. She unzips her jacket just enough to pull aside the collar and reveal there polished silver. Black Betty, Black Betty had a baby, that wailing harmony’s chanting around itself, Freddy’s dead, that’s what I said.
“It’s not for me,” says Thomas. “It can’t be for me. We won’t allow it. We’ll send who we send to court, and divvy up our share as we see fit.”
“A Count, a Duke, a Marquess,” says Lymond, watching as Gordon levers the cutters open, bites the polished silver with those snubbed brown jaws. “Why not a President, too? The office is yours to fill.”
“I was just thinking,” says Glenn, up behind them, “I mean, are the busses running today? With the snow? We should probably try to figure that–”
Flare of light and a hollow roar almost a voice and a thump of impact rattling the orange doors in their frames, sending more than one of them clattering crashing closed and closed, and the crowd turns ducking falling away, hands up, shading eyes, and Gordon bellowing staggers back, dropping the cutters smoking to the snow, as Linesse with a slow twist peels the silver torc from about her throat.
“Shit,” says Jessie, working the gas and the clutch, one hand gripping the steering wheel, one hand the gear shift, the car slewing left, juddering, whipping back and settling as speed’s picked up, engine snorting climbing down from its redline howl, snow popping under the tires rolling under the traffic light, past the palatial movie theater on the corner, Bagdad says the big sign in ornamented letters. Careful, says the unlit marquee. Twilight of the Ice Nymphs 1030. Cowards Bend the Knee. “Leo,” she says, both hands on the wheel now to steady it through a shudder. The roar of the heater swallowing her voice. “Leo. Almost home.” He’s slumped over against the passenger door, eyes closed wobbling with the car as it whines over another slick patch.
She brakes in stages approaching the snow-draped temple, those high mullioned windows up between white columns capped in green, and turns with a crunch of snow, gunning up into the little lot between the temple and the glass-walled restaurant, and noses to park at a sloppy angle under the blank brick wall. She shuts off the engine, keys clinking in the sudden thunderous silence. “Leo,” she says, and then she’s overtaken by a mighty yawn. He’s blinking, still slumped, thumbing the corners of his eyes. “Time is it,” he says.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Sun’s up,” he says. “I think?”
“Took a while to get across town,” she says, “what with the snow,” and he’s leaning over, “Hey,” he says, “that’s not what I was getting at.” His hand in her lap. “Leo,” she says. His eyes squeezed shut, his shoulder leaning heavily against her. “I feel,” he says. “Weird? All bloated and starving at once.”
“Given what you ate,” she says.
“Not talking about food.” He frowns at his hand on her thigh, fingers on bare skin between sock and jacket-hem. “You’re cold,” he says.
“I’m freezing,” she says. “I want to get inside and climb into bed and sleep for two days.”
“Only two,” he says, and then, “okay,” and lifts his hand away.
“I like it when it’s snowing,” he says, opening his door, pushing himself to his feet as she opens hers. “Not so much when it has snowed.” Leaning on his cane, limping a step or two away from the car. “What time is it?”
“Leo.” She’s looking over the top of the car at him. “You feeling okay?”
“Something hurts,” he says. “We got something wrong.” Turning about in the empty lot, lifting his cane, “Nineteen,” he says, with a sweep of his arm, “eighteen– seventeen knights, and who’s here the break of a Saturday dawn, jars and bottles in hand?”
“The snow,” she says.
“Fuck the snow.” He stomps around the front of the car. “Sixteen.”
“Sixteen.”
“You think Luys is coming back? You think any of them are coming back?”
“Your grace?”
There at the corner by the sidewalk a man in a puffy cream-colored coat, rich red hair flopping from a high widow’s peak, and in his hand a cloudy plastic bottle with a bright red lid, and Leo leaning into it cane-tip squelching in the snow swarms up to him, “You will address my majesty,” he snarls, slapping the bottle away.
“Leo!” says Jessie.
“Sir?” says the man in the cream-colored coat.
And he draws back, both hands on the head of his cane now, looking from the one to the other, biting his lip. “Let’s go inside,” he says, the words clipped, small, and when the man in the cream-colored coat steps over to reach for the bottle, “Leave it.”
Around the corner then, and up the steps, and through the double doors.
Through the double doors, and across the black-and-white tiled foyer. Up the wide white-painted stairs. She leans against, presses herself against the buzzing red bulk of a Coke machine as his hand on the faceted glass knob he leans close to the plain white door and says, “And Farquahr will be two.”
Down the dark hall, past the big room washed in thin light from those high narrow windows, through an odd little corner and into the cramped kitchen, where she stops, looks back. “Leo?” she says. By the sink a single glass turned upside down.
Through a swinging door into the airy white room, the small round table there in the middle of it, the three absurdly high-backed chairs about it, the white ridge of a sectional sofa down at the one end, the plain translucent shower curtains lining the other, and slowly a hand up before her she walks up to them, and parts them, and steps between racks of clothing, dresses, jackets, a phalanx of skirts, a platoon of jeans, clouds of lingerie. At the end of it all she sits on a low stool before a three-way mirror, in her grey chauffeur’s jacket, her yellow hair swept back under her grey chauffeur’s cap, reaching down her black-socked leg for the laces of her red shoes, those bright red Keds, but her hands fall away and up to wrap about her knees, and when she looks up, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth a twist, her cheeks shine.
Squeal and a scrape of rings as she pushes through shower curtains, clear but rippled with triangles in loud colors. She’s wearing a long white sleeveless T-shirt, and her eyes are clear, and her feet bare. There before her a queen-sized bed in a pool of soft light from the corner windows, piled high with white comforters and pillows. The man in the bed sits up on one elbow, and his smile is rueful, and he says, “I’m sorry. I had nowhere else to go.” His dark hair brushes his shoulders, and his new beard’s neatly trimmed. His chest a thicket of lush dark curls. His eyebrows cock, his smile quirks, “You did ask me to come back,” he says.
“I haven’t slept,” she says, climbing into the bed. “I have got to sleep.” Settling on her side, her back to him. Folding a pillow under her ear.
“So sleep,” he says. “I’ve kept the bed warm for you.” He leans over her, kisses her shoulder, and when she closes her eyes and doesn’t lift her face to him he leans over even more to kiss her cheek. “Kings die,” he says. “They die; it’s what they do.” Stroking her shoulder once more, then rolling over on his back. “Magicians don’t.”
Some time passes before she says, “Lake,” without opening her eyes. “I don’t have a sister.”
His hands clasped together just beneath his chin, those dark eyes gazing up at the unfinished ceiling, he sighs. “Tell me about her,” he says. “Whatever you like. Just until you fall asleep.”
“Certain ancient megaliths,” says Mr. Charlock, “were said to go down to the nearest stream for a drink, at astronomically propitious times of the year.” He’s stretched out the length of the back seat, empty sleeves of his black suit yanked tight around and beneath him, and wound about with orange electrical cord. “Their dead were buried upright, facing west.” He’s looking up, working his shoulders, his neck, trying to see out the window above him. His shoelaces have been tied together. “It is suggested,” he says, straining, “the experimenter, face himself, to the east.”
“East,” says Mr. Keightlinger, stirring from behind the wheel, leaning down to look up and out the passenger window. Outside the snow’s steeped in pale blue shadows, but light sharpens up behind the big house across the trackless street. A broad porch, there, and four front doors each set one right next to another. “Okay,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“He didn’t sing,” says Mr. Charlock. “They sing, in the snow.” Wriggling against the cords. “He didn’t beat his wings against our shields.”
“Keep still,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“Low, keep low,” says Mr. Charlock, “hell yes I did, like a worm in the,” and he frowns, shoulder rolling as he pulls against something, “snow,” wriggling again, “all those wings, and eyes.” Jacket bunching up under the orange cord and there where his white shirt’s showing his hand, twisting about. “He didn’t see us, but he wasn’t even looking. He was, he– was.”
“What,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“Sad,” says Mr. Charlock.
“Sad.”
“Sad. Still. As near a miss, as I’ll, ever want.” The car rocks as he kicks, jerks, kicks again. His hand down by his hip clawing at a loop of cord.
“Stop,” says Mr. Keightlinger, leaning even further down. “Be still.”
Out there the third of those four front doors is opening and stepping out there’s Ysabel, black moccasin boots and thin black coat, white fur trailing from the cuffs, white fur about the hood of it framing her face. Mr. Charlock kicks again, hand wrenching free enough to flop against his belly. “Stop,” says Mr. Keightlinger, crouching along the front seat. Ysabel’s turned back, facing the woman wrapped in a long heavy robe the color of wine, her black hair short, and tied about her throat a strand of fine black lace, and the air glimmers about them as she reaches out for Ysabel’s hand. Mr. Keightlinger clucks his tongue.
“What,” says Mr. Charlock, kicking, rocking the car. “What!”
Ysabel says something, lifts her hand away, and Petra leans forward abruptly to snatch a kiss at her fingertips. “Burgundy,” says Mr. Keightlinger, and a jingle of keys. “The hell does that even mean?” says Mr. Charlock. Ysabel’s taken Petra’s face in both her hands and leaned in for a long swallow of a kiss, and light blooms in the shadows about them, and a burning limb of sunlight crests the roof far above. “Around the block,” says Mr. Keightlinger, ducked below the wheel, slotting a key in the ignition. “Get some distance.”
“From what?” Flicking the fingers of his free hand, crossing them index and middle, pinkie and ring, Mr. Charlock twists it about and curls it into a white-cornered fist. Mr. Keightlinger turns the key, and nothing happens. Ysabel lets go of Petra, steps back, steps back again, and Petra B reaches after her, clutching her parting robe, saying something, pleading. “Let go,” says Mr. Keightlinger.
“Where,” says Mr. Charlock, fist still tightly curled.
“Wait and watch,” says Mr. Keightlinger, turning the key again, and again, pounding the wheel with the heel of his hand. “Let go.”
“She’s alone,” says Mr. Charlock, rocking the car with another kick. “She has no one! Grab her and be done with it!”
Ysabel’s coming down the steps. Still reaching out her face crumpling Petra sinks to her knees, and light falls from her hand as it closes on nothing. Ysabel careful of her booted feet in the stiff snow, looking up to see the low-slung orange car parked across the trackless street, snow falling from its faded black ragtop as it rocks from side to side.
“We coulda had her last night!” says Mr. Charlock, and Mr. Keightlinger’s muttering “Bind, bind and stop.” Mr. Charlock’s rolled over on one side, his other hand squirming there at the small of his back, fighting free of his rucked-up jacket, fingers jabbing, rigid, a sizzle, a long slash ripping through the vinyl seat-back, and old yellow foam rubber popping from the slit. “We coulda been back in Schenectady by now!”
“Never been,” says Mr. Keightlinger, leaning over the front seat, raising a hand.
“It’s a figure of speech!” shrieks Mr. Charlock, and someone’s tapping on the window, and they freeze.
“Well?” says Mr. Charlock, after a moment.
Mr. Keightlinger ducks back down, peers up through the window. Ysabel’s squinting through the scratched and dirty light-struck glass.
“Go on,” says Mr. Charlock, relaxing his fist, stretching out his fingers.
Mr. Keightlinger leans across to roll down the passenger-side window a couple of inches. “Do you have any cigarettes?” says Ysabel through the gap. “I could really use a smoke, and I don’t, I don’t have any,” and she shrugs. Mr. Keightlinger shakes his head. “No,” he says.
“Okay,” she says, looking away, blinking at the light. “You’ve been following me.”
And a single loud flat bark of a laugh from Mr. Charlock.
“All this time,” says Ysabel, looking back into the car, at Mr. Charlock sprawled across the back seat. “The two of you. All this time.”
Mr. Keightlinger doesn’t say anything. “She’s got us, dead to rights,” says Mr. Charlock.
“And that was you, last night,” says Ysabel. “And on his machine. Place and time. The club. He was going to sell me to you.”
Mr. Keightlinger doesn’t say anything. “Give, more like,” says Mr. Charlock.
From behind her across the street a plaintive cry, “Ysabel!”
“Show me,” she says, and she opens the passenger door. Mr. Keightlinger presses himself back against the driver’s door, “Wait,” he says, as she climbs into the car. “Show me what would’ve happened,” she says, “if he had. If I hadn’t.”
“Observe!” cackles Mr. Charlock. “Wait and watch her climb right in!”
“Ysabel!” wails Petra B.
She pulls the car door shut, and glitter settles on the seat about her. “Go,” she says. “Before that woman wakes the whole neighborhood.”
“Do not engage,” says Mr. Charlock. Mr. Keightlinger turns the key. The engine rumbles to life. And the Queen leans over, punches a button, twists a knob, and the heater roars to life. She holds her hands over the vent in the dash. “Come on,” she says. “Show me what I’m for.”
“Just watch,” Mr. Charlock’s chanting, as Mr. Keightlinger puts the car in gear, “Just watch, just you watch–”
“Mammoth No Arms,” written by Rare Air, copyright holder unknown. “Buckingham Palace; Dunford’s Fancy,” written by A.A. Milne, arranged by the Flash Girls, copyright holder unknown. “True Love, Pt. #2,” written by John Doe and Exene Cervenka, copyright holder unknown.
Clank and up he sits, owlish, fuddled. Puts out a hand bang against the side of the tub and clatter the ducting clamped about his forearm, the pot lid cupping his shoulder, wound about with grubby grey tape. The colander rakishly precarious on his head tilts over the bridge of his nose and his running shoes squeak on the enamel and the ducting and stove pipe crimping his filthy jeans a kitchen cabinet spilling into a sink. Scrape and thump. One hand bare finds the edge of the tub and grips it, the other a club in a thick hockey glove bats the colander, knocking it back, there’s his dark unfocused eyes, his unwashed hair that lankly shines, the stubble blotching his chin.
Leaning over the toilet rush and splatter of piss that bulky gloved hand braced against the wall. Scrape and jangle. Red plastic cups lined up along the back of the toilet and a couple of cans that say Wild Turkey Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey and Cola, Real Kentucky. Pushing back wavering from the wall both hands gloved and bare pawing at the fly of his jeans “Shit” he says and hisses and then frustrated shakes the glove loose, flings it thump to the floor and catches himself from falling. Buttons himself up.
“Fucking hell,” says Frankie Reichart.
Clamor and clunk down a flight of stairs too many at a time, wrenching himself to a stop before the bottom, leaning out over the railing, the dark hall below, to one side a wide doorway, high-ceilinged room, a ruddy flicker struggling with daylight muted by drawn shades. At the foot of the steps is sprawled a woman in a green and yellow cheerleader outfit, dozing with a laptop on her chest. She doesn’t stir as he gingerly steps over.
In that room past the long dining table littered with dirty glasses and mostly empty bottles a fireplace, and crouching before it a bald man all sharp corners draped in a charcoal-stripe suit. He doesn’t look up as Frankie crashes to a halt. Keeps poking the dying fire as Frankie says “Hey,” and “Hey” and “Where is everybody.” Clanking further into the room, and all those painted faces up along the picture-molding, just beneath the ceiling, looking out upon each other. “The party’s over? You got me all dolled up like this, marched me half across town, now what.”
“She’s left us here, arreared, to join herself to the Changeling’s court,” says the bald man by the fire. “Yourself is free to go, or not.” On the pale hearth by his knee in a splash of char a tarnished snake of silvery metal, not much longer than two hands laid one after another.
“What happened,” says Frankie, “what happened to your–”
“Stay, or go,” says the bald man, “as you’d prefer.” Levering up a log with the poker, he blows into the gap he’s made, and sullen flames lick out from underneath. “You’ll find it makes no difference.”
A hand up against the brilliance of the white outside, the seamless snow, the faintest blue tingeing the cloudless sky. “Christ,” says Frankie Reichart, looking back through the door stood open on the darkness of that house. A gassy snort, a climbing whine of a rumble dropping suddenly to climb again and the clinking of chains, a bus bulling its way down the street, and wet black ruts in its wake. A peal of laughter from somewhere, a block away, or two, and water ticking, dripping, a plop and splash from the eaves. “Well, hell,” he says, and yanks the colander from his head, whips it skimming out into the yard. “It’ll all be gone by two, anyway.” Banging a stumble down the steps from the porch, and way up above, the ghost of a crescent moon, looking back toward the rising sun.
There’s a tree now, towering above the snow-swept plaza, the green of it overwhelmed by lights hung all upon it, by blues almost white, reds almost pink and orange, by greens almost yellow and blue, a rift of light opened in the unearthly blue climbing all the way up to a pale slice of moon, and if that spread of sky above is all of it brighter than the tree, soaking up the coming day in pearly yellows and whites shining even now behind the unlit bulk of the courthouse, it’s still dark on the plaza, the snow blued by the shadows of the buildings all about, the darkened signs of banks and restaurants and jewelers, and the lights of that tree are enough to tamp down those shadows beneath it, and play fitfully over the man stood there, tall and broad in a shortwaisted jacket, his hair a dark black cap, looking over the base of the tree, wrapped in a hinged red box, printed with snowflakes. Welcome to Portland’s Living Room, it says. Be Merry. “Mason!” cries someone, somewhere up behind him, and he turns.
She’s coming down the great sweep of steps that walls that end of the plaza, careful of the drifts and pockets of snow, wrapped in a sheepskin jacket, and a knapsack on her back, her hair loose and wild about her head a creamy glow against the darkness behind her. “I had not thought to meet you here, again,” she says. In one hand a baseball bat.
“I hadn’t thought to see you again at all,” he says. His hands in the pockets of his jacket.
At the bottom of the steps now, she’s walking up the slight slope toward the tree, the bat loosely idle at her side. “I beat you, the last time.”
“A near-enough thing,” he says.
She’s there beside him now, under the tree, a step or two more than a sword’s length between them. Without shifting his feet, without moving his hands he looks up, along the trunk looming over them. “You can see,” he says, “where they’ve bolted on extra greenery. To fill out the bottom of it.”
“Yes,” she says, without looking up, or away from him at all.
“My lord,” he says then, “the Duke– he asked me to wear the mask.”
“And you’d do anything, if asked?”
“I’m but a knight, lady.”
“Then it was but the form, of a question,” she says, and he inclines his head, lifts a shoulder, something of a shrug. “She has it now,” he says. “The Gallowglas.”
“A proper Huntsman, once again,” says Marfisa. “So set her on my heels! I’ll make a proper sport of it, I swear.”
The frown that steals over his face is hesitant, even tender. “The Queen,” he says.
“The Queen,” she snaps.
“Has set her,” he says, “to hunt the Mooncalfe.”
She looks down, then, and the tip of the bat in her hand thumps the brick at her feet. “Well,” she says.
“Coming down from the hills,” he says, “I’d thought to see fires, pillars of smoke, that I’d hear trumpets. The Queen, unhoused, and the Duke, the Count, the Prince now, vying for the Throne, the Bride taken, and the Shootist and our Gammer cut down,” his eyes on his boots as he says this, his black hair shot with red and green and blue from the lights above. “But it’s all so, so quiet.” Sighing. He looks up to see her frozen there, breathless, eyes wide, mouth set, so still she almost trembles. “I,” he says, “you, I thought you must’ve known–”
“Which,” she says, the word a crack.
“Which, what–”
“Which of them has taken her,” she says, “the Duke,” she says, “the, the Prince?” Turning away from him. “My brother,” looking back over her shoulder, up the sweep of steps. “Who has, it seems, neglected,” she says, “to mention, some, aspects–”
“None of them, lady,” says the Mason. “The Mooncalfe.”
The bat thumps the brick again. “Orlando,” she says. Then, “And a telephone salesgirl’s sent to bring her back.”
“My lord, the Duke,” he says. “Told me, go, do, what must be done. But I don’t– I came here, because I don’t know where to find her, or how to go about it, and I must confess, Axe, that when I saw you coming down those,” and then he says, “oh. I must apologize, for that.”
“Don’t,” she says.
And when she does not go on, he says, carefully, “When I saw you coming down those steps, I thought, at last, someone else, to help.” He’s holding out a hand to her, and a bit of leather tied about his wrist. “Together, we can–”
“My lady broke with me,” she says.
“But she is still your lady,” he says.
The sound she makes is not a laugh. “I broke with the court, I left my sword,” she says. “The Gallowglas, if we find her, might harry me to the ends, of the,” and she shakes her head. “I went,” she says, “to the bus station, a week after I came back to myself. I went and I bought a ticket to some, other place, with a candy wrapper, and I actually got my foot on the steps of a bus, I stood there, about to pull myself aboard…”
“But,” he says, his hand held out to her, “she is still your lady.”
Just two blocks away or so a man stands outside the entrance to a tiny shop, little more than a booth behind a window plastered with advertisements for Repair and Unlocking and Prepaid Minutes and Handmade Wooden Cases for Your Phone, All Sizes. His long dark coat unbuttoned over a blue silk shirt open at the throat, his shoes severe and black and highly polished, and in one hand a heavy ring of keys. His cheeks red-blotched, his puffed eyes ringed with purple. He isn’t looking at the keys, or the notice taped to the door, a single sheet of paper different from the advertisements about and under it. He isn’t looking at the thick yellow chain wrapped around the handle, held by a great padlock, wrapped in a red seal. A slice of snow, drifted up in the corner of the step before the door, an unblemished lune of blue. Off to his left the street dips between high buildings toward a burning edge of dawn away beyond the river. To his right the street climbs toward a skelter of trees, a church spire, the hills, steeply black on black. A gust of wind lifts his thin and colorless hair in a single shellacked wing, holding it even as the sound of it fades, and in the silence he looks up.
Not an arm’s length away a tall man, thin, his long straight black hair settling as the gust dies. His jacket grey and shapeless, his long skirt a dark and nameless blue, his feet bare in the snow. The man in the coat starts, scrape of shoe, jangle of keys. “Tut,” says Orlando. Something dark’s been splattered along the sleeves of his jacket, something dark, and brown, and up his neck, and the side of his face. He leans in abruptly smiling now, a wide-eyed reckless smile as he brings his hands together up above his head, the man in the coat stumbling back, and with a jerk Orlando lunges after him, bringing those hands down, “Gah!” bursts the man in the coat as those hands stop pressed together touching his chest the dark hair curling there where is blue silk shirt opens. Orlando steps back, throws his arms up, “La!” he cries.
The man in the coat falls against the door frame floundering arm clunking the chain keys falling to splash in the snow. Orlando twirling away, arms spread, skirt flaring, smiling, smiling. The man in the coat coughs, hawks, leans over to spit. Straightens his coat, his shirt, his shoulder brushing the notice taped to the door. He hikes up his trousers to kneel and scoop up the keys, then steps out into the empty street, heedless of his shining shoes in the snow, turning about, looking up the street, looking down. At the heavy ring of keys in his hand.
A deep breath stretches his broad chest, lifts his shoulders, is blown out in a sudden deflating sigh. He drops the hand holding the keys and twists to one side, then spins back all the way around and swings that arm out and up and letting go, and the chiming keys arc up and away down the street, the spark of them lost in all this morning light.
The blade swung slowly parries up, to the left, low, to the right, and then a long low lunge, a stately thrust, a gleam slipping down the edge of it to splinter in the glittering guard about the hilt. Her free hand dropped back in a fist pulling herself back up, and tucks up close against her chest again.
“No,” he says.
Jo all in black shakes out her arms, works her head back and forth. Takes up her stance again, blade upright before her again, and again the parries, the lunge, the thrust.
“I can hear you thinking,” he says.
“I’m not,” she says, pulling back, “trying,” and the parries to all four quarters again, “for fast–”
“I don’t mean speed,” Roland says, “it’s,” his hands in fingerless bicycle gloves reach up, grasping, closing into fists about nothing. He claps them together, pushes himself up from the base of the engine hulking quietly idle, the housing of it painted an industrial pea-soup green, the great nest of gears racked vertically behind, waist-high and higher, glistening with grease. “The flow,” he says. The sword he’s holding is long, and straight, with a heavy golden pommel bright in the shadows. He plants himself before her in the narrow aisle, right foot forward, off-hand loosely curled against the small of his back, and he’s already moving, swipe and step and cut and back and down into a lunge, his off-hand swinging down and back, extending, pulling him up again, the sword returning, “Just so,” he says. “Again?” Falling forward into a lunge, pulling back, the sword licking at this parry, that. “You see?”
“Ever been stabbed through the gut?” says Jo.
Pulling his foot back, lowering his sword. “That’s how Orlando took you.”
“Yeah,” she says. The tip of her blade looping a figure eight there by her boot. “He came at me, swinging this hellacious cut at my head, and I,” she hoists the hilt, torquing up, around, “blocked it,” the blade above her upturned face, “but I had to turn?” A twist of her waist. “And when his cut slid off he just somehow stopped,” a boot-stamp as her sword continues the twist, blade-tip arcing over and down and back, her off-hand cupping the hilt of it, pushing. “And that was it.”
Roland nods. “His Fool’s Mate.”
“It has a name,” she says.
“He defeated me with that move, once,” Roland’s saying. “The Guerdon, too, Linesse, the Wulver, that I know of. He tried it on Marfisa; she stepped to the side,” his white shoes hop, “and,” miming a low quick cut, “hamstrung him as he passed. He limped for three days, after.”
She’s smiling as she kneels, taking up her discarded scabbard. “So at least once,” she says, fitting blade-tip to mouth, sliding it home.
“Three times, that particular wound.” He picks up the butter-colored coat from the concrete floor and holds out the weight of it dangling from his hand. “You’re the only fighter ever to defeat me without landing a blow.” His lips purse, his eyebrows rise, a judicious smile. “Which you’ve done twice.”
“You gave up,” she says, putting on the coat, passing her sword from the one hand to the other.
“I never did.”
“You gave up!” she says. “I found you sleeping in the damn snow.” Laying her sword at the base of the engine, there by the blue and white headphones atop a portable CD player, by the crudely painted skull-mask with its long black mane. “And don’t think I don’t know why you hauled us up into this bridge, over the damn river.” He turns away at that, looking down the length of the great axle shining in the chill grey light, the light seeping from the end of the room there, the curling stairwell caged behind chicken-wire. “Burnside,” says Jo. “The middle of it all, nowhere, no North, no South, no East or West, and not a fucking thumb to be seen.”
“I was, waiting,” says Roland.
“For what?” she says. He’s turned abruptly, he’s walking away, down toward the end of the room. “The King,” he calls back.
“The King,” she says, starting after him. “You were gonna, what, sleep? In the snow? Till he came back?”
His hand on the latch of the cage. “Yes,” he says, and he opens it, and steps through.
“There’s a,” says Jo, reaching the cage as he starts up the tightly spiraled stairs, “there’s a Queen?” His feet clanging up and around and out of sight. “There’s a Queen!” She starts up after him, around and up, up into thin grey daylight, a cramped hexagon of a room, high-ceilinged, the stairs turning on to the next floor up. Narrow sash windows in each wood-paneled wall look out on an emptiness of grey cloud. Roland leans against a sill, and past him and down, through that gelid haze, a suggestion of weight, of lines, edges, a railing, the paved deck. “Beneath our feet,” he says, “there is a forest. Nearly four hundred trees sunk in the cold mud, bearing up the weight of this end of the bridge.” He looks back to her, over his shoulder. “Stripped of leaves,” he says. “Shorn of branches. She may have granted you an office, Gallowglas, and charged you with a duty, but she is no more the Queen, nor has been, for many months.”
“I don’t mean her,” says Jo. He’s looking out into the fog again. “Roland, that girl was dead.”
“You’re mistaken,” he says, quietly.
“She brought her back to life!”
“She is not the Queen.”
“There was owr,” says Jo. “Everywhere.”
“We broke her!” he roars. And then, a knuckle knocking the sill, flatly, “I broke her.”
“No,” she says, letting go of the curled rail, stepping off the staircase. “We didn’t. Roland. Roland, what does the Queen do.”
“She,” he says, “she is the Queen.”
“She makes owr.”
“That’s, that’s not–”
“She turns the, the stuff, into owr. The Queen, the, her, her mother, Ysabel’s mother. She does everything else, everything but that, and you–”
“Jo, you don’t–”
“– she can’t turn the owr, and you say she’s no longer Queen–”
“There is no King!” he cries. “The King did not come back! And without a King, to take her hand, she cannot turn the owr.”
“That burger joint,” she says. “It’s not five blocks from here. You can go scoop it off the floor.”
He’s shaking his head. “You tried,” he says. “No one can deny. You’ve done,” he says, “everything that could have been done, but.” A gesture, toward the window. “It’s too late. It’s over.” That gesture folding, into a fist. “No King, no Queen, the Gammer cut down, by the Mooncalfe, who’s stolen the Bride, and this snow, and,” the fist opening, “the city,” his fingers spread wide there by his face, “melting away… Gallowglas,” he says, looking over to her. She’s digging through the pockets of her coat. “Jo,” he says, tenderly.
“Too late,” she’s muttering, pulling out her black glass phone, thumbing it to life.
“It’s not something you should expect to understand,” he says.
“Half past eleven,” she says.
“What?” he says. He steps away from the window. She’s holding up her phone. “It’s eleven thirty,” she says. On the screen of it a photo, Jo and Ysabel cheek to cheek, Ysabel, her hand to the upturned collar of her coat, looking sidelong at Jo smiling widely and directly at the camera, the blur of her arm at the bottom of the shot. At the top of the screen the clock says Half Eleven. Seventh Groosalugg. “We don’t know what time it is, out there,” says Jo. “We don’t have any idea what’s going on right now. So don’t–” She stares a moment, not at him, not past him, then turns the phone back to herself. Pokes and swipes at the screen.
“Don’t?” he says. “Gallowglas?”
“The wrong one first,” she says. She’s scrolling through the call log.
“Yes,” says Roland. “That, burger joint. When you followed the Duke’s counsel, instead of your own, and went to the wrong–”
“That’s the wrong wrong one,” she says, standing, tucking the phone away. “I know what she meant,” she says. “I figured it out.” She’s started down the steps. “The wrong one, first.” Stopping, looking back. Coming back up, a step or two. “I don’t know how yet,” she says, “or why, but. We can get a direct answer, we can find her, he, how would he, I,” she shakes her head, quickly. “Roland,” she says. “We haven’t done everything, not nearly, not yet. And we, I– she, she needs your help, Roland.” Holding out her hand. “Please.” A sudden twist of a smile. “I mean, even if I’m wrong. He might have, I don’t know. Breakfast?”
The desk is broad, the pale leather top of it empty but for a silver pen, an ivory-handled knife, a banker’s lamp with a white glass shade. Behind the desk a glass cabinet of shelves crowded with dolls and figurines, a swordswoman in scraps of chainmail and elaborate boots, a cowgirl guns cocked sitting her chapped legs spread on a bag of money, a slender schoolgirl in a tight orange jacket and long dark stockings, tossing an arch salute. A man bellows, full of pain, edged with fear, the sound of it dulled by a wall or two. Her hand tentative, Ysabel reaches in, careful of the ball-jointed woman leaning on a plinth, panels on her naked arms, her thighs, her belly and breast popped open, pulled aside to reveal intricate circuitry, pipework, armatures. She plucks up a girl in a furry pink bodysuit, furry pink booties on her feet and a hood with rabbit ears pink and furry, and above her head an enormous rainbow-swirled lollipop held like an umbrella, or a balloon.
“Do you like them?” says the man in the white suit. His vest is white, his tie a white of alternating stripes, glossy and matte, woven in a complex knot between the spread collar of his spotless white shirt. His white hair thick, unruly, his face beneath it unlined, and quite young.
“One notices a theme,” she says.
His head inclines. “If there’s anything you find you require.” His eyes are almost grey. A room or two away, someone yells, a stammering, bubbling sound that isn’t quite a word.
Ysabel lays a hand on the desk, dimpling the leather. Her hair in clumps and tangles about her face, thicketing her shoulders. The sleeves and neck of her oversized T-shirt sagging, loose. “Some answers,” she says. Letters scrawled in black ink across the front of her shirt say The Gloomadon Poppers. Glitter hints along her cheek, her throat, has spangled the fine hair on her arm.
“To any questions in particular?” he says.
“I,” she says. “I could use a cigarette.”
“Of course.” He reaches over a corner of the desk to open a drawer. Pulls out a clear cellophane packet of unmarked cigarettes and a clean glass dish and a mirror-bright lighter, and then busies himself with freeing a smoke and holding it up for her to take, opening the lighter, striking a flame. “Strong,” she says, blinking, after her first drag.
“A custom blend,” he says, putting the lighter and the packet away. “Burley, and a Macedonian leaf. Not to everyone’s liking. Please, sit. You must be exhausted.”
She reaches back to find an arm of the chair behind her, dark wood framing glossy tufted leather, and she lowers herself, carefully, into it. In that white suit he’s kneeling before her, and his fingers smooth and slender, the nails cut close and neatly shaped, pick at the knots in the laces of her moccasin boots. “The office has a shower,” he’s saying, “and a cot, if you would nap. Fresh clothing will be fetched, but later, later.” Laying the empty boots one atop the other, his hands, the pale backs of them rumpled with blue veins, wrap themselves about her bare feet worn, creased, reddened and stained from those black boots. “Coffee?” he says as he strokes them, holds them, warms them. “Tea? A pastry, or an omelet?” Brushing with a fingertip the silvery gold-tinged ring about a toe. “Liquor, cocaine, hashish?”
Ysabel lets out a smoke-wreathed laugh, and leans forward to tip ash into the glass dish. Sitting back she lifts a foot from his hands, swinging it out and up, hiking up her knee to hook it over the arm of the chair. Leaning on the other arm she tips her matted hair out of her face. “What would you have of me,” she says.
“Oh my lady Bride,” he says, and he lets go her other foot. “What I would’ve had of you, had you not,” and then, sighing, he stands. “Had things gone according to plan.” Stepping back. “The King was to have,” and his eyebrows lift, “returned, in three weeks’ time. The turning of the year, when the sun is passed from archer to goat, and the wheel turns from sun to Saturn, and up comes a man, dancing, his body all over hair like a boar’s, and his teeth like roof-beams; he holds a cattle-goad, and catches fish.” He half-sits on the corner of the desk. “And at that moment, with you quickened, but not yet realized, I’d’ve stepped in and bound you about in such a ceremony,” spreading his hands, a shrug. “A ring, a dress as white as snow, and flowers, mountains of flowers, in this dead of winter. Pale roses,” he says, “pinks and yellows, and white, of course.”
She leans forward, to tip more ash into the dish. “White roses,” he says, “and then four walls, and a daily routine, a career, if you’d needed one. Real estate, perhaps. You could have been kept on the cusp for years. Decades.” He brushes nothing from his knee, then stands, steps around to the other side of the desk. “But it seems,” he’s saying, “the rules are less stringent than I’d been led to believe. They always are, of course;” he stands there, his back to her, arms folded before him, “the question’s always whether the other players are also aware of this fact.” He looks down, not quite back at her. “I blame myself, you must understand. I miscalculated. There’s no other word for it.”
“The wedding’s off,” says Ysabel, her voice a flatly cautious thing.
“Oh, there’ll be a small ceremony. A few close friends. Business associates. Tonight, of course; it’s Saturn’s day, after all.” Turning, smiling. “Short notice, but they’ll take my calls. For this, they’ll rush to pick up the phone. We’ll settle on some mutually agreeable location, a well-appointed room, we’ll say a few words, then lay you out upon the table, take up our forks, and eat the very essence out of you.” He picks up the ivory-handled knife from the desk, bounces it once, in his hand, “So,” he says, slipping it into a pocket. “Fresh clothing, soon, new shoes, and in the meanwhile, if there’s anything you need– Mr. Charlock and Mr. Keightlinger should be done, by now. Let them know.”
He opens the door, stops there, a hand on the knob. “I take the fact you haven’t asked me what I’m to be called as a sign that, you understand– this is strictly business. Nothing personal to it, at all.”
He closes the door. The sound of the lock, turning. It’s some time before she leans forward to snub out the half-smoked cigarette, and then sits back, in that chair, behind that desk.
Sunlight bright and clear pours through snow-dusted branches, through leaded glass, through venetian blinds lowered but louvered open, striking sharply from the silvery coffee pot, the spoons, the fork laid on a pristine white plate, the untouched glass of tomato juice, the upright console of the telephone, silver and black. Black cords plugged here and there wound together into a single hank that dangles over to the bulky headset clamped about his ears, over the unruly dreadlocks, a dully fuzzed white touched with gold. “I’ve no doubt of it, Welund,” he says. Somewhere in the room a toy piano’s tinkling a line of a fugue beneath a sticky chorus of saxophones. “But do recall,” he says, “this career as coinsmith and debt-minter’s but a hobby? You serve the court as lawright, first and foremost. Forge me a thing of clauses and parentheticals that I might use to cut away this ludicrous guarantee.” His crisp shirt salmon-colored, with collar and cuffs of smooth pale blue. His fitted boxers blue printed with a pattern of little dogs and fishes. “Nevertheless,” he says. Sipping black coffee from a thin bone china cup, careful of the microphone. His other hand he’s pointing to the map pinned up over the sideboard, touching an intersection in Northeast, sliding west and north, up and along the horn of the city above the river, stopping just short of St. Johns. “I understand that,” he says, “I do.” The slender man standing next to him wears a blue suit tight over broad shoulders, and his pink tie’s so pale it’s almost white, and he reaches past Agravante, over the river, to tap another intersection, in Northwest, near a little blob of color that says Civic Stadium, not more than a block from the long clear line of Burnside.
“Our situation,” says Agravante, leaning over the table then, the platter of scrambled eggs, the dish of salsa picada, the tortilla warmer, “is, to use your word, fluid. Liquidity is called for.” He lifts a thin tube from a rack of them, each capped with cork and sealed with dark blue wax, each sparkling with threads of golden dust. He hands it to the man in the tight blue suit, who nods, then leaves, stepping past another man, younger, his pale hair elaborately braided, his sweater a pattern of jagged, angular blues. “Hold a moment, Welund,” says Agravante, tilting the microphone away from his mouth. “Well?”
“Returned to his temple with the last of the snow,” says the man in the sweater. “Since dawn. Hasn’t left.”
“But where was he between here and there?” says Agravante, quietly.
“We don’t yet know.”
After a moment Agravante tilts the microphone back. “Welund?” he says. “I need to– I must go.
“Yes, they’ve been sent. All three. If there’s a response–
“If there’s a response.
“And a good morning to you.” He presses a button on the phone, then opens a green binder there by the rack of glass tubes, and the fiendish little basket-box, carved from a single chunk of dark red wood. He takes up a pen. “Forget the Duke,” he says, scribbling an amount on a check, signing it with a broad flourish. Folding the check precisely along its perforations and ripping it neatly loose. “This to the American bank,” he says, “not the Trapezuntine. Exchange it for fiat money.”
“But the snow,” says the man in the sweater, taking the check.
“Find one that is open,” says Agravante. He plucks up another tube from the rack. “Then take the valuta to a store, and purchase bicycles.”
“Bicycles,” says the young man.
“As many as that will buy. At least a dozen. You’ll need the truck.”
The man in the sweater takes the tube, and nods, and leaves. Agravante turns back to the phone, punching in a number. “Tell me you’ve found her,” he says, into the microphone, and then, looking toward the door, frowning, he bellows, “Where are my trousers?”
The crash of a gong as he opens the door. He holds it open so she might push past him, knapsack slung from her shoulder, bat in her hand, into a foyer stacked with boxes. To the left a pinched doorway, more boxes and stuffed garbage bags piled up to either side. He follows her into a showroom lit by what daylight makes it through the dusty windows lining the one wall. More boxes yet line the other, and more garbage bags, and a rolled rug set on one end and a plump sofa piled with coats and other clothes, a stool leaned against it, a table upended, and laid against them a stack of paintings, the foremost a sheet of black velvet in a baroque frame, pricked with unlit stars, smeared with spaceships in a blur of battle. And the floor before them empty but for scraps of paper, a blue silk rose, a scatter of tickets, all of them red and not one torn in half, the remains of an orange clay bowl smashed there, under the window.
“This doesn’t,” says Marfisa, turning about in her sheepskin jacket, and “I know,” says the Mason, rubbing the back of his neck. “It looks like,” she says, and “I know,” he says. She strides to the front corner, pulls from the window a sign, holding it up. Orange letters on black say For Rent. “So where’s Miss Cheney?” she says, putting it back.
“Your questions,” says a sour croak of a voice, “I don’t have to answer.” She’s there, by the counter at the back of the showroom, a fleecy pullover the color of plaster dust, her yellow hair held back by a black band, and cradled in her arms a little rabbit.
“Why?” says the Mason.
“She broke her bond,” says Miss Cheney. “To city, brother, court and Queen. Your questions?” She’s nodding. “That was your first.”
The Mason opens his mouth, looks away, snapping it shut. “You’re breaking your bond,” says Marfisa, and a gesture toward the boxes, the bags, the furniture stacked. “Where do you mean to go?”
“I’m breaking nothing,” says Miss Cheney. “I’ll still take the questions of those who care to find me. Case in point.”
“Jo was here,” says the Mason. “You gave her answers.”
“Can’t answer what isn’t asked,” says Miss Cheney.
“What did you,” says the Mason, and “Luys,” says Marfisa, and he holds up a hand, “when you spoke to her,” he says, “to Jo, what did you see?”
“I didn’t see anything,” says Miss Cheney. “That was your second.”
“That’s not what he meant!” snaps Marfisa.
“You think I want to leave?” cries Miss Cheney, squeezing the rabbit rigid to her chest. “Is that it? I love this city. You dolts.” Turning away, letting the rabbit scrabble from her arms to the countertop.
“Then help us,” says the Mason. “Please.”
“We all want the same thing,” says Marfisa.
“Do we,” says Miss Cheney.
“What did you,” says the Mason, and “Luys,” says Marfisa, quickly, “think. Carefully. Ask her– ask where we must go, to find Ysabel. Today! To find her today.”
“What did you learn–”
“Luys!”
“– from answering the Huntsman’s questions that has frightened you so?”
And Marfisa closes her eyes.
“The Mooncalfe,” says Miss Cheney, stepping away from the counter, “has taken the Queen, and means to sell her to the highest bidder he can find.” Her hand out, brushing the wall of boxes with her fingers.
The Mason smiles, relieved. “Then somehow, this once, you are wrong, Miss Cheney. The Queen is safe at Goodfellow’s; her son, the Prince, is returned, and took her there himself. The Duke–”
“She doesn’t mean Duenna,” says Marfisa.
“But,” says the Mason, “the Queen,” and then, a hand to his mouth, “oh.”
Miss Cheney says, “Even if I might answer a fourth question, or a fifth, about where or who or when,” the sound of her fingertips sweeping down cardboard, “don’t think for a moment I could. The geis only goes so far.”
“Melanchlœnidon,” says the Mason.
“There can’t,” says Marfisa, “there can’t be that many wizards in the city. We could–”
The gong sounds, and as they all look to the pinched doorway framed in stacks of boxes and bags “Hail me!” cries a voice. “Hail and blast me, in a breath.” From the foyer steps a figure in a shapeless grey jacket, a long dark skirt, and his black hair long and straight, and his feet bare. “I went back to her,” says Orlando, the Mooncalfe, “I let her stay, she stayed, and I killed her,” marching the length of the showroom, “I killed her, and she would not die.” Past the Mason, past Marfisa staring. “I slew her father, and the snows came, just as you said, so tell me,” the Mason lunging after him, “where do I,” the Mason grabbing his arm, his shoulder, hauling back, to the side, the Mooncalfe stumbling swung into the wall of windows shivering crash.
“Hold!” cries the Mooncalfe, arms up before his face, the Mason pulling a flare of light in that dim room his sword back for a thrust and Marfisa grabbing his elbow, “Luys!” she shouts. He holds. She doesn’t let go. “He knows,” she says.
“By my troth,” says the Mooncalfe, “I do not.”
“You all want the same thing,” says Miss Cheney, and then, stalking back to the counter, “One blow lands and I’ll find a goddamn King to exile the lot.”
“Where is the Bride,” says Marfisa, her hand still in the crook of the Mason’s arm still cocked, the tip of his blade aimed squarely for the Mooncalfe’s throat, that’s bulging in a swallow. “I let her go,” he says, the one eye blinking.
“Just like that,” says Marfisa.
“You said you killed her,” says the Mason, his voice gone rough.
“Gloria,” says the Mooncalfe. Shaking his head. “Suzette. Don’t worry. She’s fine.” He reaches out to push the Mason’s blade aside. “If I might be about my business,” he says.
“You,” says Miss Cheney, comforting her rabbit, “you have questions.”
“Oh, I do,” says the Mooncalfe. Marfisa’s let go of the Mason’s arm. “Orlando,” she says. The Mason’s lowering his sword. “Will I ever see my blades again?” says the Mooncalfe.
“No,” says Miss Cheney.
“Barely a knight,” murmurs the Mooncalfe. “Down to my spurs.”
“Orlando,” says Marfisa. “Please. Ask about the Bride. The, the Queen.”
His bare feet whisk him aimlessle out into the middle of the room. “Will I,” he says, then, “no– I’ll raise the stakes. Will anyone in this room ever kneel before another King?”
“Not a one,” says Miss Cheney.
The Mooncalfe lifts up his smiling face, and the Mason looks down at his empty hands. “Orlando,” says Marfisa, once more. “Ysabel. Please. You let her go, you left her, alone? Your third. Please. Ask– I beg you. Ask where we must go to find her. To help her.”
“Help,” says the Mooncalfe. “The Princess. Surely,” turning his back to her, “surely she might help herself. My third!” Sweeping away from them down to Miss Cheney, the little rabbit in her arms. “I’ve closed the door on the King, all Kings. I’ve cut the last rose from its cane and left its petals in the snow. I will not be forgotten. So. Answer me,” and he closes his eyes, “where must I go to meet my particular end?”
And Miss Cheney, the rabbit clutched rigid to her chest, opens her mouth to speak.
A mechanical cursive, the letters slender, spells out Crown Imperial between two simple windows above and below in the buff-colored wall. The window above festooned with Christmas lights blinking red and red and green. The building’s a long and shallow U-shape enclosing a parking lot rutted and marred by sludgy dikes of melting snow, and in the shrinking shadow of the stubby eastern wing a litter of snowmen no higher than a knee, or a shin, some with the twigs that were their arms already fallen to the ground, one with a top hat askew on its slumping head-shape, and water dripping everywhere, from eaves and steps and sills. In the middle of the lot stands Jo her hand up against the brightening sunlight, peering at the numbers next to doors shadowed by walkways and awnings. “Over there,” says Roland, pointing across and up. “Okay,” says Jo. Sword slung from her shoulder, mask in her hand, she sets off across the lot boots crunching and splashing to mount the sidewalk and then one of the long lines of stairs. Roland follows, his steps long swoops from one island and bank of snow to another, careful of the meltwater.
Jo presses a yellowing plastic doorbell taped to the frame under black metal numbers, 1917, and when Roland catches up to her she presses it again. Clack of the handle under her thumb, croaking wrench of the hinge as she opens the screen door, props it with a boot, leans in to rap on the front door, and there’s footsteps on the other side, rattle and thunk of locks. The mane of the mask in her hand shivers and ripples. The front door opens. Becker’s wrapped in a maroon robe, over pyjamas in a Stewart Dress tartan. “Jo?” he says.
“I, ah, tried the bell,” she says.
“It doesn’t, yeah, I’ve been meaning to replace that,” he says.
“I tried to call,” she says. “Before we, headed over here.”
“We, well, I guess I was busy,” says Becker. Taking in the sword she’s carrying, and the quivering mask. “Am.”
“Can we, oh, this is, Roland,” nodding over at Roland beside her. “Hi,” says Becker, without stepping back, without opening the door any further. “Can we come in?” says Jo. “It’s important. About Ysabel. You, remember Ysabel. Right?”
“Of course I remember Ysabel,” says Becker.
“Okay,” says Jo. “It’s hard, sometimes. Knowing what you remember.”
“I remember Ysabel.”
“But you remember forgetting, right?” she says, and he shifts at that, a short step back, a quick look back over his shoulder. “You remember the party? Thursday? Thanksgiving?”
“The old accustomed feast,” he says, and then, “I think, it’s not a good time, really, so, if you could,” and Roland’s putting a bicycle-gloved hand on Jo’s shoulder, there by the hilt of her sword, “Jo,” he says, as Becker’s saying “I’d really appreciate” and then she says “Pyrocles,” and they all stop.
“Pyrocles,” she says again.
And Becker asks, “What does that have to do with Ysabel?”
“Can we come in?” says Jo.
He steps back, and opens the door wide.
The living room inside is coolly dim, blue carpet, white walls blued in the light that drifts through gauzy curtains drawn. A piano ringing softly from little speakers on a low shelf, and if they ask if I’ve seen Casablanca, someone’s singing, I’ll answer a resounding no. “Ysabel’s missing,” says Jo, “and, we’re looking for her. And I got this clue, this, which,” and she stops, hand to her head, and takes in a deep breath, “it was, I went to the wrong one first. And I thought meant I listened to the Duke when I shouldn’t have, because I went where he said to go first, but that doesn’t make any sense because then I went where I would’ve gone first if he hadn’t which was Guthrie’s, to talk to his girlfriend, who couldn’t have helped me even if I had gone there first because she can’t see this stuff anyway, and you have no idea what it is I’m talking about.” The mane of the mask in her hand lashes out, the ends of it pattering against the low glass-topped coffee table there by her knee. “It’s been the two of you, all this time, is the thing,” Jo’s saying, “even before all this, before you got promoted, but then, that night, it was both of you who went with us, me and Ysabel, to Goodfellow’s house, and then the boar hunt, and the church, and when the Duke said to ask whoever I wanted to his, to that feast, I called you, I called both of you, just the two of you.” She looks at Becker then, his robe gone darkly purple in the dim room. “But it was Guthrie’s I went to first, last night, and that was the wrong one. I should’ve come here.”
“I don’t,” says Becker, eyes wide, mouth pinched.
“It could be anything,” says Jo. “Something you saw, something you remember. Something you’re about to say.” He doesn’t say anything. She’s looking about. “Something in this room.” On the glass tabletop, a phone, two coffee cups, a white paper bag, the bottom of it translucent with grease. “The least little thing. Could be enough to, to get us to. The next step.” Becker blinks, looks down, away. “To finding her,” says Jo. “Ysabel.”
“I,” says Becker, and his jaw trembles. Roland a dark shape in the open doorway, sunlight behind him, and the drip and trickle of melting snow. “Jo,” he says.
“Wait,” she says, a crack running through the word.
Becker lets out the breath he’s holding, blinks quickly, eyes shining, and asks, “What’s Pyrocles?”
“I think I can help,” says someone else, and they look up, look around, turn. He’s there in the passageway leading further back into the apartment, tall, grey dress slacks and a blue and white striped shirt half-open over his blackly furred chest, his hair an untidy mop of black curls. “Sorry,” he says. “I overheard a little of that. Well. Most of it.”
“Help,” says Jo, and “David?” says Becker, his voice gone far away.
“That call, I had to take?” says the tall man to Becker. “The day job. Well. The twenty-hour hour a seven-day job.” He sucks his teeth. “I don’t know where the Bride is,” he says, to Jo, “but,” and he holds up the phone in his hand, a platter of black glass in a white frame. “I’m pretty sure I know where she will be. Tonight.”
“Bride?” says Becker.
“She’s the Queen, now,” says Jo.
“Even so,” says David Kerr.
“Grandpa’s Hands,” written by Blue Cranes, ©2010. “Halley’s Comet,” written by Chuck Coleman, copyright holder unknown.
A suit of worsted wool, grey sheened through with threads of black, and a crisp white shirt, there by the front door. He’s looking at the watch on his wrist, a heavy silver nest of gears and dials, the numbers and hashes picked out in something that gleams like mother-of-pearl. His sun-browned head’s quite bald, his cheeks dusted with white stubble. Out in the middle of the big front room a sword upright, the hilt of it wrapped in leather yellowed with long handling, and the floor where it’s been thrust is singed in a neat black circle. The window’s empty, the fireplace dark and cold, swept clean. From somewhere further, deeper in the house, a tumble of plucks and picks, flurried strums, mandolin, banjo, a guitar or two. He’s looking at his watch again.
A door swings open over across the room, a glimpse of kitchen beyond as Lymond steps through, wide eyes and maybe a grin, plain white T-shirt and bone-colored chinos and his shock of pinkish orange hair, wiping his hands on a floury towel. “Good afternoon, my lord,” says the man in the suit, but Lymond says sharply, “Welund,” and his maybe grin is gone. “We must find a way to live together, or we won’t.”
The man in the suit purses his lips. “If it regards your mother’s house,” he says, “once the question of succession’s settled, we might discuss what must–”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” says Lymond.
“It is possible, perhaps,” says Welund, weighing each word, “your highness does not realize the monies needed to keep such a house–”
“I’ve seen the house,” says Lymond. “What’s required’s some brooms and buckets, lumber, some plaster, some paint, knowledge and time, and hands. Money’s but one way this stuff is put to work.”
“And the owr you’ll need?” Welund spreads his hands, inclines his head. “Everything I’ve done was for the good of the city, and the court, without a King for so long– and now, with every conceivable respect to you, to your mother, your– sister, but. The line is broken. I saw it myself. We have no Queen.”
“You’re wrong, Welund, and everything you’ve done, was wrong.” Lymond drapes the towel over his shoulder. “There’s always a King, and always, always a Queen. You must have faith.”
“Faith does not fill coffers,” says Welund.
“How useful, that excuse,” says Lymond. “What we wouldn’t do to fill those blasted coffers.” Turning toward the empty fireplace, there by the sword in the floor. “And if the coffers prove inconveniently full, well. All that must be done is tip one over yourself, to call upon its power.” That music’s stopped. There might have been a patter of applause. Welund’s frowning, there by the door, “I don’t,” he says, “take my lord’s meaning…”
“This peace, Goodfellow treasures;” says Lymond, careful of the charred floor about the sword, “I’ve nothing but the utmost respect. And this sword! You know the story? How Marfisa struck it here, a single blow, threw everything away– the court, the Queen, her love,” and his hand closes lightly about the hilt of it. “Merely to keep my sister safe from any hint of insult.” Looking up, to Welund there by the door. “But that’s not it, either.” His grip shifts, tightens. Feet braced. “But one thing stays my hand, Welund. From ripping this sword from the floor and striking your head from your shoulders. And that’s that I do not know, to a certainty, that you were the one to unleash the Mooncalfe.”
“Highness,” says Welund, as he tries to settle on an expression, “I can assure you, I would never,” and he catches his hand from reaching for the door. “The Mooncalfe, my lord!” That hand lifted to his shoulder, his chest, pressed flat. “He is as he does!”
And Lymond says, “It’s interesting, Guisarme, to me, that you haven’t drawn a weapon.”
The hand on his chest now a fist, Welund, “Nor you yours.”
Lymond says, “My hand is stayed,” and he lets go the hilt. “Would you like some bread?” And there under his bulging eyes a flash of teeth, his grin.
“Bread,” says Welund.
“Baguettes,” says Lymond. “For tomorrow? I thought, a light repast, crostini or bruschetta. Maybe just some olive oil, and good sea salt.”
“My lord is baking bread.”
“Well.” Lymond’s grin slips wryly sideways. “Mostly I’m staying out of the way. They say,” he holds up his hands, “I don’t have a feel for the kneading. I will see you there?”
“Of course, my lord,” says Welund, and now his hand’s on the knob.
“Good,” says Lymond. “Good.”
Wrapped in glass, in steam, in streaming water, lilting slightly, side to side, one hand held up and out, and the crusts and streaks that glitter her arms, her breast, her belly, that filigree her thighs and knees are crumbling, darkening, melting away, and the water splashing about her feet’s a cloudy grey, larded with ropes of black. She leans back to let the shower soak her hair, that one hand still held up out of the water, a hand still spangled with gold that warmly gleams in the wet white light, burnished, dazzling, a shape of light too bright to look at as flashes pop and spark in her hair, yellow and gold and orange, pink and white along her skin, stars that shining burn and one by one flicker and dim and die. She’s turning under the water, holding that hand under it, and the last of it washes away, the water running grey and gritted black along her arm.
A thick white robe about her, her hair done up in a towel. Behind her the door closes, and the sound of the lock, turning. Clothing’s draped over the desk, drifts of white that shine under the stark light of that white-shaded banker’s lamp, lawn and lace and satin, taffeta, a cloudy hillock of crinoline, and there on the floor a line of shoes, slender foot-shapes balanced tip-toe on delicate heels of various heights, thin sandal-straps of white and silver and grey lolling emptily. She nudges them aside with a foot, reaches into the pile on the desk with a clink of hangers, a crinkle of paper and plastic wrap slitherly settling as she tugs something free, white fur ivoried as she pulls it from the circle of light, a long coat of it, the skirts lopping softly from desk to floor, the lining of it a chilly grey.
The light from the desk lamp’s washed away when she yanks open the heavy curtains. The fogged glass filled a richly blue that shades through white to yellow and red and an orange, and only a simple latch at the top of the sash. She turns it with a solid thunk, and presses up against the frame, and with a shudder the window lifts, a suck of air in the gap and she hisses, then hoists it up with a rattle in the frame, counterweight scraping inside the wall. Ducking her head she leans out, seven storeys up or eight, the street below gleaming wetly in the shadows, and beads of snow strung along the gutters. The face of the building off to the left of yellow brick glowing and glass ablaze in the sunset torching the hills off to the right, the block ahead across the street a parking lot nearly filled, and lining the sidewalks on all four sides of it carts and kiosks, placards, sandwich boards, the steam of cookpots and griddles, the smoke of grills, and lights strung in the bare branches of the trees here and there, and knots of people bundled in coats and hats, scarves, stocking caps, at the corner, before this stand or that, and laughter, and a cry, someone calling someone else’s name. She opens her mouth, as if to say something, to call out, but only the tattered wisp of her breath, a sigh. She leans her elbows on the sill, her face flushed in the light, shadows staining the robe. “Any more than the sun is the sun,” she says to herself. She shivers, and the shiver becomes a shudder. She pulls herself back inside.
The thick white robe in a heap on the floor below the window. The white fur draped over the pale leather top of the desk, and the rest of all that clothing pushed to the edge of it, and over, and “Each of each,” she’s singing to herself, a whisper, if that. “Exactly where.” Sitting on the fur, hands on her knees, head hung low, damp hair a pendulum, drifting. Hands on her thighs now, goosefleshed. The window before her’s still opened wide. She lifts her head, her shoulders, eyes closed, her lips moving around a word, words she doesn’t voice. Lifting a foot to plant a heel on the fur, a hand on her upraised knee, the other between her thighs, thumbing the sprigs of black hair there, her other hand to her mouth now, her lips, her teeth against her lip, her breath quick in and out through her nostrils now and her lips parting, her finger drawn between them wetted, slicked with spit. Lowering her hand her jaw set, shoulders set, rocking now back and forth to the beat of her heart, the squeeze of her lungs, a hiss, a grunt, rocking and a slap of flesh, her mouth in what might be a snarl, a sneer, her eyes opening on that window full of deepening sky.
The window, open, dark, the lamp at an angle, the bare desk. The piles of clothing fallen softly over the tumbled line of shoes. A tongue of white fur there, crumpled to the floor, over around behind the desk she’s kneeling on it, slumped to one side elbow on her knee, fur clenched in one hand, dangled hair brushing the broken glass about her. The cabinet’s sagging broken against the wall. A scatter of dolls, figurines splayed, a woman with a cabled mechanical leg red-lensed goggles and a sledgehammer balanced on her shoulders, a schoolgirl arm akimbo on her kilted hip and black boots and a patch over one eye, a swordswoman fixed mid-lunge in fiercely tangled ribbons and her own long yellow hair, a cowgirl guns cocked chapped legs spread as if to sit on something that isn’t there. A shiver tremors down the length of her, ending as an absent tic of her foot. The girl in her hand wears a cat-eared helmet and a silver maillot and her long-socked leg’s kicked high as if to climb onto something. She sets it down precariously next to a blocky toy scooter and picks up another, a schoolgirl weirdly slender in a tight orange jacket and a flippy little skirt, and dark stockings stretched along elongated thighs, tossing off an arch salute. A thump at the door, the lock rattling, turning. She tips the doll over, fingering a long brown plastic ponytail. The door bangs open, “The hell,” says someone, and then “Shit!” and a bustle into the room, it’s the little guy in the black suit, feet catching in the clothing strewn and a crash into the desk, “Shit” again, and he’s reaching for the open window when he sees her there, and stops dead. “What happened,” he says. The tuft of hair between his brown and the top of his skull uncurled, standing up and out. “It’s freezing in here.” He shuts the window. She rolls onto her back, a clink and crunch of glass. “That was stupid,” he says, rubbing his forehead.
“It’s not as if I could fly away,” she says.
“You can, you could fall,” he says. The doll in her hand. Her hand on her belly. Her wet hand, the edge of it gashed shining yellow and white, and her forearm webbed to the elbow in glistening trickles. “You need a bandage,” he says.
“I won’t run dry,” she says. “Besides. It’s not what he wants. This?” Sitting up, holding up her hand. “This he could get from any of us.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts,” she says. “But it’s the last time it ever will. Let me enjoy it.”
The doll, dropped to the fur. “Do you,” he says, and then, “I,” and then, “We’re leaving soon. You, you’ll need to put something on.”
“Why?” She rolls over onto her knees. “Why put something on,” pushing herself to her feet, “only to take it all off again shortly thereafter?”
“It’s– cold?” he says.
She takes up the fur and shakes it out, a tumble of dolls, a clatter of shards. “I’ll wear this,” she says, slipping an arm into a sleeve, settling it about her shoulders, the skirts of it twirling about her calves. Opening it, holding it open, the grey silk shining behind her. “What do you think?”
“You really,” he says, “made a mess of things.”
“I didn’t like the way they looked,” she says.
He squats, he reaches out for the weirdly slender doll, her orange jacket, her arch salute. “It’s kind of a weird thing to ask,” he says, sitting back, without touching it. “But can I ask you a question?” In his other hand something wadded, a bit of fabric, blue and white.
“If I can ask one first,” she says.
He laughs. “You know,” he says, “I know how that works.”
“Do you,” she says. Hands on her bare hips. “Well?” she says.
“Mr. Charlock,” says the big guy in the doorway.
“I might,” he says. “I might just.”
“Mr. Charlock.” Black suit, bush of a beard the color of polished mahogany. In his hands a stainless steel thermos. “The car. It’s time.”
“Yeah,” says Mr. Charlock, stuffing the wadded cloth back in a pocket. “Okay.” Reaching out to her. “I might’ve let you,” he says. She’s shaking her head. “I wouldn’t,” she says. She takes his hand. “I gave my word. I told you. I’ve given up.”
“Right,” says Mr. Keightlinger, in the doorway. “Check.”
“Uh,” says Mr. Charlock, as they step around the desk. “You might want some shoes.”
“No,” says Ysabel.
The walls tiled with old album jackets, duotones in yellows and reds of elaborately coiffed women sitting at pianos, smiling men snapping fingers, whole bands at feverish work on darkly crowded stages. Out in the middle of the room a big round table covered in green felt, and little stacks and piles of nuts and washers here and there about the edge of it, and by each pile two cards face down, and the rest of the deck there by a plastic tub that says Aunt Ruby’s Peanuts in faded letters. Out in the middle of the table more washers grey and dull red and hex nuts, square nuts, wing nuts all in a heap by four cards in a line face up, the six and jack of diamonds, the five of clubs, the ace of spades. “The hell you been boy,” says the old man in a rumpled blue suit much too big for him, sitting up in the recliner there laid almost flat. His face blotched with pale pink.
“Out,” says Frankie. “Dragged all the way across town, suited up to march back, and then I fell asleep in a tub in a house full of clowns.” He’s standing in the doorway there to the side of the closed garage door. “And then I had to fucking walk back.” The old man yawps at that. “Sorry,” says Frankie. “I couldn’t find a, a bus, because it snowed. And I swear, sorry, I was halfway here, before I even thought to take the kit off? I mean it’s basically garbage, right? All those fucking stovepipes and shit.” Picking at the shreds of duct tape still glued to the shoulder of his jacket. “Sorry. Where is everybody? Where’s Gordon?”
The old man’s lying back down in the recliner. “Company,” he croaks, waving a careless hand.
Across the alley steeped in evening light, the crunch of dead grass and ice, the squonk of the single hinge, the gate hung drunkenly. Up the tuffeted lot high fences to either side of the old brick building there, and there at the back door Frankie stops. A muffled chug of drums, a piano rattling up to a ringing hymn of an anthem, voices raised a shout and an impact that shakes the wall, the door in its frame, the knob in his hand, a smash of falling crockery. He throws open the door. A kitchen, scarred linoleum and darkly looming cabinets, a scuffle, the mouth of a pitcher underfoot edged in jagged shards and a grunt, one man bare muscled arms pushing an older man back, “Gordon!” yells Frankie, leaping into the fist at the end of one of those muscled arms swung to catch him knock him gasping to the floor. A heavy knife in the other first, forearm against the chest of the older man grunting, another scuffle there by the yellow stove, “Frankie,” calls the older man over one of those pale broad shoulders, reaching, and “Chill and still, everybody,” says the big man in the tank top, turning the knife by Gordon’s cheek. “Limpid.” His cheeks dark with stubble, his hair slicked back.
“You let him alone,” says Gordon. The radio on the shelf above his head’s gone quiet, piano contemplative, the drums dropped away. Frankie’s sitting up. A hand’s offered, and he takes it, pulls himself up, careful of the small formica table, and the fourth man in the room, short and wide and bald. “Dogstongue?” says Frankie, looking from him to the man in the tank top and back again. The hand he took’s about his wrist, and doesn’t let go when he tugs.
“Hey, Swift,” says the bald man.
“Due time,” says the man in the tank top, and then, “Cobbler?”
“I give no drop,” says Gordon, leaning away from that careless knife. “I take no pinch. Everyone knows this.”
“Everyone’s upended,” says Swift. “He’s come back, the King. We’re passing the hat. The Hare’s to be a banner now, and Tommy Tom will not go empty-handed to take it up.”
“And domestics?” says Gordon. “Will you take your knife to knock at every cupboard door?”
Swift pushes close, the stove behind them scraping the floor, “The hell,” says Frankie, yanking, as Dogstongue grabs his other hand and says, “Swift.”
“Nothing’s changed,” says Gordon, “not anything real. Nothing at all. You want more than spit from me, you best get ready to cut.”
“Domestics,” says Swift, “clods and hobs,” and stepping back turning the knife in his hand arcing up, “Swift!” cries Dogstongue one more time as Frankie tries to pull away again, as the knife comes down a thunk and Frankie jerks, looking down at the hand on the hilt of the knife in his chest. “Let ’em give,” says Swift, “if they would get!” Muscles bulge, he twists and rips the knife free. The blade of it dark with blood. “I,” says Swift, face falling.
“He’s not,” says Dogstongue, struggling with a sinking Frankie knees buckling jacket lapping open over his yellow shirt welling blood.
“I didn’t,” says Swift. “I thought.”
“He’s mortal,” says Dogstongue, letting Frankie slump. “Was.”
“I had no,” says Swift, waxy pale beneath his stubble. “Idea,” he says to Gordon. Beads rattle. The piano’s found its footing again, banging up a fanfare over the bubbling bass. Dogstongue’s gone. Gordon shaking steps away from the stove and Swift leaps back, over Frankie’s legs, catching himself on the doorframe, ducking through the beaded curtain pattering, away. Gordon kneels, reaching for Frankie’s face, his open eyes. The DJ’s saying something about the weather.
“Perpetuum Mobile,” written by Simon Jeffes, copyright holder unknown. “The World and I” written by Laura (Riding) Jackson, ©1938. “Gangsterism Over 10 Years,” written by Jason Moran, copyright holder unknown.
Sky Bridge, Theatre, Accessible Route, white letters on a blue sign hung in a counterbalanced assemblage of white poles leaning away from each other on the brick-paved corner. He’s wearing a trench coat over a black suit, bow tie crooked beneath his chin, dark curls shellacked, he’s looking along Second and then up and down Salmon, then at the watch on his wrist, heavy and gold. Behind him a couple of escalators rise to the glass-walled lobby that ceils this little plaza, this bit of garden, and over there on a plinth a great homolosine map of the world unfolded, stylized continents shaped in chrome, and the letters beneath it say World Trade Center. Enormous snowflakes of yellow-white lights dangle among the white poles and columns that brace and frame the glass above. He steps away down the sidewalk, past signs in dark windows that say Washington Federal, Invested Here, Right-size your Loan, and a green sigil of a long-tressed woman, crowned with a single star. A block away across the street a couple of figures, pale coat, green jacket and a flash of silver. He lifts a hand to beckon, once. Absently shaking his head.
Jo leads the way as they come over, in one hand her sword in its scabbard, in the other the mask, the mane undulating gently behind her. Roland’s gloved hands are empty, his head bare, his blue and white headphones down about his neck. “You’re cutting it close,” says Kerr, shooting his cuff to show his watch. “Less than an hour left. There’s already some caterers or something setting up.”
“Okay,” says Jo, looking past him along Second, the other corner there, the snowflake lights, then over down Taylor. Her breath a ragged banner. “Where do we go? Where they coming in?”
Kerr says, “You’re probably going to want people watching all three blocks–” but Jo says, “Where’s the theater? The, auditorium or wherever, that this is going down?”
“Building Two,” say Kerr, pointing down Salmon. Roland nods. “Okay,” says Jo. “There’s a front door?”
“You go up over the skybridge, the escalators back there,” and Jo’s saying, “A back door? Any other way in?”
“I,” says Kerr, “don’t know, there’s a parking garage? A couple of elevators, some staircases–”
“Shit,” says Jo.
Roland says, “You are the Huntsman; I’ll be your mastiff and lymner, at once.” He points down toward the escalators. “Station yourself at the front doors. I’ll circle the blocks on the street, and sound the rechance when I spy them.”
“The phone, you mean,” says Jo.
“On the phone,” says Roland.
“Hey,” says Kerr.
“Okay,” says Jo, “I don’t like it, but okay.” And as Kerr says, “Can I just,” she heads off, toward the escalators, and Roland nods once, crisply, and jogs away across Salmon, ahead of a trundling white van. “Hello?” says Kerr. “Still talking, here?” Eyes rolling, he sets off after Jo. Off a couple of blocks away somebody whoops, ah-yi-hee, Shawnee! “Hey,” calls Kerr, “hey!” Jo stops there at the foot of the narrow escalators tocking quietly, regularly up and down. “You have any idea,” says Kerr, “how far out on a limb I am for you?”
“Sure, thanks,” says Jo, turning back toward the escalators, “but that’s hardly my” and “Dammit!” he snaps, lunging for her arm. “You half-ass this thing and you’ll get yourself killed, or worse. And your Queen.”
“Let go of me,” says Jo.
About and behind them white columns depend aslant from the glass canopy above to meet butt ends braced against each other atop stubby concrete pedestals. The snowflake lights among those boles hang still in the still air. “You think you know something,” says Kerr, letting go. “You heard something, something the witch told you that makes you think you’re going to win, no matter what. That’s what this is.”
“What?” says Jo, her sword in its scabbard held between them.
“That’s not how it works,” he says, and she’s saying “What are you” as he says, “Prophecy! That’s not,” and both hands up to his forehead pressing his hair back. “The first duty of prophecy is to be true, no matter what. Ibis redibis nunquam in bello morieris, okay? So whatever you think you heard, it’s not–”
“What I heard,” says Jo, “is what you said. You got the call from the guy who said to tell the mayor he’s got the Perry girl and it’s time to do what he said. Here. Tonight. Which means Ysabel’s gonna be here. In about an hour.” The mask dangling from her other hand, the mane of it straining back, past her, toward the rising steps. “That’s what I think I know,” she says. “That’s what this is about. Did I hear wrong? Misinterpret?”
He’s looking at his shoes, narrow and gleaming black. “I don’t,” he says, “it’s not the mayor.” Looking up. “I work for a commissioner–”
“Whatever,” says Jo, turning away, stepping onto the escalator, a scuffle as he leaps after her, grabbing for her again, her coat, “Dammit,” he’s saying, “that guy,” and a squeak of metal on leather, Jo’s drawing her sword, he’s stumbling back staggering down and away from the blade swiveling tip toward him, “he’s a sorcerer, that guy,” says Kerr, hands up, backing unsteadily down the rising steps, turning to hop off as Jo steps down behind, her sword-tip following him as he backs away, the mask dangling from her sword hand, the mane starkly black against her pale coat as it winds lashing about her arm. “You can’t just–”
“You’re a sorcerer, too,” says Jo.
“More of a,” says Kerr, “a tregetour, really–”
“So do some magic,” she says, stepping lightly off the escalator, elbow crooked up, blade level, mask staring. “Stop me. Change my mind.”
“That’s not,” he says, looking down. Shoulders hunched. “That isn’t how it works.”
“Okay then,” she says, and sheathes her sword. The mane relaxing, falling about the mask a-dangle as she steps back onto the escalator.
“You’re gonna Butch and Sundance this,” he says. “And you’ll die. She’ll die. And he gets exactly what he wants!” She doesn’t look back. “For fuck’s sake,” he says, “call Southeast! You’re tight, you only have to ask and there’d be a dozen knights–”
“We broke up,” she says, rising away.
The hand he’s reaching after her curls in a fist, bobs there a moment, slams into the crawling handrail of the escalator. Turning away, shaking out his hand, he digs up the headset for a cellphone and clips it to his ear. “Hey,” he says, walking away. “It’s me. This thing tonight. I’m waving you off.” Waiting at the corner as an SUV stretched to limousine length wallows by. “I got one of those bad feeling you pay me for,” he says.
At the top of the escalator a blue sign hangs from one of the white beams there beneath the glass canopy. The numeral one’s to the left, numerals two and three further on ahead, and a glyph of figures seated at a conference table, and two simple masks side by side, one smiling, one weeping. On ahead the airy lobby narrows to a bridge, glass walls tipped to lean against each other above, braced by angled files of white poles, lit by streetlight from below.
On the other side another sign, the numeral two to the left now, and three to the right, over another bridge. The lobby here’s a low but open space, glass-walled, glass doors to the left, the room beyond but dimly lit, low steps, a baleful sign that says Exit, a dark conference room behind a floor-to-ceiling pane of glass. Movement in there, a shift of shadows lost in a welter of reflections and shadows. Jo walks on by, her pale coat, her sword in one hand, the mask in the other, and her wine-dark hair. Across the open lobby folding chairs grey and brown and tables unfolded, one of them strewn with the remains of a paper cornucopia, plastic vegetables, fake flowers, and then the leaning glass wall, more white poles criss-crossed and braced, the plaza below and the trees here and there strung with tiny white lights, the street and the river beyond. The mask in her hand is still, the mane hanging limply, rustling as she turns it over. The empty shadowed holes where eyes should be. The tooth-shapes crudely chiseled, lined with thick black ink.
She leans the sword in its scabbard against the railing.
The mane shivers, stiffening as she settles the mask on her head, then relaxes to float weirdly behind her, undulating as she turns, looking about the glass-walled lobby, then back out over the plaza, the street, the river. “Your banner, over the city,” she murmurs, under those mask-teeth. “Me, by your side.”
“Excuse me,” says someone. The mane jumps. She turns with a jerk, reaches up to tilt the mask back, clearing her eyes. The man there under the blue sign’s short and thick, his black tuxedo blocky, his necktie plain and bottle green, tied in a wide Windsor knot, the boutonière in his lapel a tiny yellow rose. “There going to be a floor show?” he says. The scruff of grey about his chin too carefully trimmed to be forgotten stubble.
“I, ah,” says Jo, and then, “you’re, are you the mayor?”
A curt laugh. “No,” he says.
“They’ll,” she points toward the glass doors, “let you in, I’m sure–”
“I know,” he says. He nods at her hands. “No smoking up here.”
She looks down at the crumpled orange pack she’s holding, the lone cigarette within. “Yeah,” she says. Her phone’s ringing. “I know.” She turns away, hauls the mask off, the phone up and out, “Hey,” she says.
“They’re coming,” says Roland. “On foot, down the street. Three men and the Bride, and they’re going to come up the escalator.”
She tucks the phone away. The man’s gone. Nothing’s moving in the dimness past the glass doors. She lifts the mask, sets it back on her head. Takes up the sword in its scabbard and strides across the lobby to the mouth of the skybridge.
Movement, down there at the other end. A white hat clears the floor, rising with the escalator, white shoulders, a long white coat over a white suit, white shirt, white tie. Behind him rising as he steps off a little guy, black suit and a skinny black tie, and in his hands a stainless steel thermos. His hair thinned to a single curl between his brow and the top of his skull, an owl’s feather dangling from one side of the classic black sunglasses he’s wearing, and looming behind them both now a big guy, black suit and a skinny black tie swallowed by his bush of a beard, and the one lens of his classic black sunglasses swarming with spidery letters written in white ink. And leaning against him in a white fur coat, her head against his chest, stumbling as they step off the escalator, “Home, and safe, and sound,” says Jo to herself, and she sets foot on the bridge.
Striding toward her Mr. Leir doffs his hat, his face quite young beneath that unruly white hair. “And who might you be,” he calls.
“I am the Queen’s Huntsman,” says Jo, planting her feet, and Ysabel looks up as Jo draws her sword, letting the scabbard fall to the speckled grey industrial carpeting. “You need to let her go,” pointing her sword at Mr. Leir, “and walk away,” and Ysabel straightens, pushes a little away from Mr. Keightlinger, his arm still about her. Mr. Leir laughs and waves his hat at Mr. Charlock. “Look, behold,” he says, “a whirlwind in a bottle, a great cloud and a fire infolded from before the world was the world. Cold and empty and utterly inimical. If loosed it will swallow whatever it touches until it’s sated, and eat up even the hole you leave when you’re gone.”
“Let her go,” says Jo again.
“Jo,” says Ysabel, ducking out from under Mr. Keightlinger’s arm.
“Drop your sword,” says Mr. Leir, “or he anoints your Queen, and pours what’s left down your throat.” Mr. Charlock, holding the mirror-bright thermos up, starts to unscrew the cap of it. The tip of Jo’s sword wavers, shifting from Mr. Leir to Mr. Charlock and back again. “I’d rather do it myself,” says Mr. Leir, “but eaten by us or this she will be done away with.” He puts his hat back on his head, caressing the pinch, the curl of the brim. “You’ve lost, Jo Gallowglas,” he says. “Drop your sword, walk away,” and the rattle and clunk of Jo’s sword hitting the carpet, and Mr. Leir nods. “Save yourself,” he says, and then his head rocks back.
His head rocks back, his hat flies off, his arms flop up, unstrung. The dull pop an echoless crack enormous, the flash too quick, an afterthought. The smoke rising from the mouth of the flat black pistol in Jo’s hand as it shifts to point to Mr. Charlock, the feathers bristling brown and black and white about his eyes, his mouth ajar in a wordless howl as torn pages gush into the air from the white coat flapping open beside him, fluttering, falling to the bridge in drifts about an empty pair of white and ivory brogues and with a flump behind them a glossy white wig, the acrylic hairs yellowed with old sweat.
Mr. Keightlinger stock still, Ysabel leaping forward through the falling pages, Mr. Charlock roaring lunging after her catching her arm hauling her up short between him and the gun. She swings a white-furred arm, thunk, “I will eat you,” he’s screaming, “grind your bones to salt,” and the pistol in Jo’s hand sweeps away from Ysabel struggling, wavers, fixes on Mr. Keightlinger holding his sunglasses up between his wide-open eyes and Mr. Charlock, whose face is wreathed in feathers. He’s locked a hand on Ysabel’s arm, the thermos loose cap rattling in the other. “This can still,” he says, as if two or three voices are fighting for the words in his mouth, and then he roars. Ysabel hits him again pulling away, and feathers rustle as he looks down, frowning, at the blade-tip that’s ripped a hole in his white shirt, knocking his tie aside. A good two inches poking out of his chest, just to the left of center.
A twist, and a jerk, and Roland pulls his blade from Mr. Charlock’s body.
“Jo,” says Ysabel. The pistol in Jo’s hand is following Mr. Charlock’s body as it slumps to the carpet. “Gallowglas,” says Ysabel, there before her, reaching up to take the mask in her hands, the mane of it slumping as she lifts it from Jo’s head. Jo lowers the pistol, blinking. “Kilo,” says Mr. Charlock, a cough of those awful voices. On his hands and knees on the torn pages, feathers falling. “Kay,” he says, and his arms buckle, and he falls to his side. Roland’s swiveled his sword to point at Mr. Keightlinger quickly walking away, stuffing his sunglasses in the pocket of his jacket.
“Ysabel,” says Jo, and the mask drops to the bridge, and Ysabel’s arms around her white fur about her pulled close together, shivering.
Lights flickering on behind the glass doors, the jingle and clink of keys against glass, “Princess,” says Roland, and then, “Majesty. Huntsman. We must go.”
The top of the thermos, unscrewed, falls without a sound to the roughly speckled carpet. The stuff that seeps out hissing in wisps of white smoke crawling, curling, hard to make out in this light, roiling up suddenly, surging a gout of it sloshing into the rippling thickening air uncoiling reaching for Roland as he turns, frow
ickening rippling air as it whitens, flashes. Ysabel looking up, Jo stepping back, “The hell,” she says.
On the other side of it Mr. Charlock crowned in feathers looks down at the uncapped silver thermos in his hand. “I didn’t mean to,” he says, turning away, “Keightlinger!” he calls. “Kay!”
“What is that,” says Jo.
“Old,” says Ysabel. “We must go.”
That stuff swells and lops and spills more smoke into the air and “Dammit, Phil!” yells Mr. Charlock, and when he tries to step back he falls, his leg is caught, his foot already gone and he screa
ivering glass falls in sheets the cracking of it loud as gunshots shattering below that fills the street a wave of crashing sound pops sparks and flying lights that flicker and go out as Jo sits up Ysabel in white fur sprawled and coughing. “We’ve got to go,” says Jo over the din, gathering herself.
“What is that,” says Ysabel, taking Jo’s hand, pulling herself up.
“Run?” says Jo. The boiling shape of smoke, yellowing, reddening, filling the space from carpet to glass to where the glass had been. Hand in hand they’re stumbling running Ysabel looking to the closed glass doors across the lobby Jo pointing leaning toward the door ajar there, a glimpse of stairwell, a booming crash the floor thrumming wobbling knocking them Ysabel down to her knees and Jo tipping forward brought up short, falling back, rolling over the red smoke and black there filling swallowing the lobby and “Jo!” cries Ysabel white fur billowing hand wrenched away from hand and scrabbling to her feet pushing kicking lunging into the smoke screaming reaching for the last glimmering flickering scrap of white and her hand closing about, the lobby, dark, turning about in the, the glass walls leaned against each, and the white poles, the skybridge, and the, the columns, the streetlight from below, the stretch of speckled grey industrial carpet, the glass doors closed, the red glare of the Exit sign, the clear air quiet and still, the, the, the, she, and she, she stops.
A ways down the skybridge her sword, in its scabbard. There before her the skull-mask, the mane spread about in limp coils. In the hand she lifts with a jerk a pistol, the dull black barrel, the grip of it wound about with glossy black tape. She drops it in a pocket of her pale leather coat. Her other hand pressed to her chest rising and falling with her quickening, shallowing breath, her mouth, opening–
“Ysabel?” says Jo Maguire.
Laughter, a whoop of delight as they come across the darkly silent intersection, black parka, big green coat, hoodie over a nightgown leaping boots to clomp the last bit of snow in the gutter. On the wedge of sidewalk there across from the pizza place a mound of bicycles, tires fat and white, and skinny buff, ape-hanger bars over a comically tiny front wheel, banana seats glittering silver and gold, stumpy kid’s bikes in medicinal pinks and blues. Wound about and through a thick chain and also lengths of yellow plastic tape printed with bold black letters, CRIME SCENE– DO NOT CROSS. Hung on the front of the pile by chain and tape a door ripped from a car, white with letters that say ND POLICE and a rose stenciled near the bottom. The woman in the nightgown bangs a tattoo on the door, whooping again, as the man in the parka finds a padlock on the chain and fits a key to it. The man in the green coat leans over to catch a loosening hank of chain. The woman in the nightgown takes the weight of the car door, helping it down the pile clatter and scrape.
Backing out of the cabinet under the sink he’s hunched over rubbing the small of his back, grumble and whoof, settling on his knees on the lemon-yellow floor. He pulls from the cabinet a yellow tin that says Clabber Girl, and a white tin that says Guardsman Professional Strength, and a handful of rags. Reaching deep inside, thump and rattle, he pulls out a little red handheld vacuum cleaner, and then pulls himself to his feet, yawning, scratching himself under his loose blue shirt. He reaches a knobby bare foot into the cabinet to drag out a pair of salt-stained espadrilles, working in one foot, then the other, and taking up tins and vacuum and rags in his wide hands he shuffles out of the dark kitchen, down a long unlit hall creak and pop into a big room empty but for an overstuffed armchair, and a low table beside it and through a wall of glass the lights of the city beyond, below. He sets his stuff down and with a muttered growl reaches up to yank a pull chain and a low bulb flares above, banishing the city. Leaning down he takes up the yellow tin and tut-tutting, shaking his head, he sprinkles cornstarch over the stains that blot the cushions of the chair.
Eight people in the train car, all clustered there in the open space near the doors, each of them with a bicycle, hung from the racks, upended on back wheels, a sturdy mountain bike and a low dun brown recumbent, a couple of battered minibikes their frames gleaming under chipped and scored paint, a delicate ten-speed with drop handlebars. The clack and chunk of wheels on rails as the walls of a tunnel rise up and over them, and they pick up speed, and the woman with the recumbent bike opens her mouth to let out a low rumbling note. The man with one of the minibikes laughs and joins her, and the man with the luridly purple wheelie bike, the note becoming a syllable, the syllable a word, “Uncorrected personality traits,” they’re singing, a ragged, jagged harmony, “that seem whimsical in a child,” and another joining in, and another, “may prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult,” as the walls of the tunnel rush past.
Parked at an angle in the shallow curl of driveway a white panel van, the tail of it tucked under the open garage door, and light spilling out onto the shadowed scrap of yard. She opens the rear doors, then tugs her black vest down and back into place before with a scrape startling loud pulling a tray from the rack, lifting a corner of the towel draped over it to check the loaves, flat slipper-shapes darkly crusted. Careful in both hands she carries it up a short flight of steps into the kitchen, brightly lit, the lemon-yellow floor, the gleaming white cabinets. “One more of these,” she says, wrestling it up onto the countertop, “and the butter into the fridge,” and the man in the black vest and the bow tie just like hers nods and hands her a paper coffee cup. “Thank you,” she says, and she turns to fill it from a great silver urn as he heads out the door to the garage.
“Here he comes!” someone cries, and the cheers go up across the parking lot, knots of people with their bicycles, and clustered around this pickup truck, that unmarked van. Men in suits of sky and Carolina, periwinkle, denim and Oxford, midnight, navy, all about the tailgate of a dark blue SUV, reach up for the bicycles being handed down, all of them pink with the same swooping frames, and dotted with the same appliquéd flowers, yellow and white. Down there, past the closed dark gates, the cabin that says Oregon Zoo in letters up on the gable, up the arc of sidewalk along the lot a lone man in a long dark coat, his head bare, and his hair a pinkish orange pompadour. The sky above a pearly grey, and all the colors lurking within.
Flights of bicycles kick off skirling toward him, he waves, he nods, stepping into the lot and across it toward the crowd, toward the woman there in the black leather jacket and the long silvery dress of sequins, like mail, toward the man beside her in green coveralls that say Thomas Thomas over his left breast in neat black embroidery. “Marquess,” says Lymond, and “Soames,” shaking their hands, turning to find the Viscount there in a suit of Prussian blue, pale dreadlocks tied back neatly, and a pink bicycle up on his shoulder. “You must not think of me as a rival,” he says to Lymond, and offers up his hand. “I’m only sorry you’ve been pushed to this extremity, and without a Queen.” Lymond, slowly, takes his hand, and shakes it. “The Duke’s sent no ambassadour?” says Agravante.
“No,” says Lymond.
“If only your mother had ever managed a Bride,” says Agravante. “To wed to him, and heal this rift. It’d be him to take this terrible risk today, instead of you.”
Lymond turns away, lifting his hands, to face the crowd. “Thank you!” he calls to them, and they all fall silent, mechanicals and bikers, knights and clowns. “Thank you. For coming on such short notice, and so early in the morning. It’s not far, and there’s a little something at the end of it, tea, and coffee, and fresh-baked bread.” And he turns abruptly and starts away, up the switchbacking length of road out of the lot, up the wooded slope still dusted with snow, soaking up the chilly early light.
“The Viscount’s rude,” says the Soames Thomas, marching close beside Lymond down the quiet winding street, “but he’s right.” The bicycles winding behind them, and the trundling pickup and its hangers-on.
“You’d rather a Duke, not a Prince, for King,” says Lymond.
“I’d rather a Queen,” says the Soames. “I was promised a Queen.”
“You expect wonder hard on the heels of miracle,” says Lymond. “I am the only Perry, and the last of them. Let’s first see if that’s enough.”
Heading to the edge of the street, across the sidewalk and the scrap of dying grass, up to the yellow front door, followed by the Marquess and the Soames and the Viscount, and clatter and clank and ticking spinning as bicycles tumble to stops behind them. Lymond pulls a padded envelope from inside his coat, and from the envelope he pulls a gold credit card. Letting the envelope fall he works the card into the gap between door and frame, slipping it down, jimmying it as he leans against the door. The Soames frowns at the Marquess, and the Viscount smiles behind his fingers. A click, a clunk, and Lymond opens the door. “My house,” he calls out to them, “is yours,” and he steps inside, and down the long hall, followed by the thunder of dozens of footsteps out into the big room, empty but for the overstuffed armchair and the low table beside it, and that great window, and the shapes of the city uncertain in the shining haze, and beyond the mountain a pale shadow of blue and rose against the first rays of the rising sun.
“Well,” says Lymond, as the footsteps settle, and the rustle of coats, scarves and gloves, blue suits and green coveralls. All of that motley crowd under the window, uncertain whether to look at out the view, or at Lymond there, his back to them, his hands on the arms of the chair. “Let’s see,” he says, and turning, sits him down.
“Uncorrected Personality Traits,” written by Robyn Hitchock, ©1984.
