“There’s two ways this goes down,” she says. Bared fingertips grip a hilt wrapped in dulled wire, simple, straight, and above it quillions clean straight bars, and over about it all and her gloved fist a glittering net of wiry strands that meet in thick round worked steel knots all gathered together in a cord that swoops to end at the great silvery clout of a pommel. “That’s it.”
“No,” he says, “no, it’s not.” All in black, black slacks rolled up at his shins, black turtleneck, his pink hands held out empty to either side, and his bald head pinkly shaking, no. “There’s but one way we might go out from this moment we have freely, each of us, entered into. Our terrible, freighted moment will come to its ending only when you stick me with your steel, and down I crumble, into dust. For if you will not do this,” and one of those hands is lifted, up, and even in this harsh light, bright light flares between his curling fingers. “I will let out your life,” he says, drawing down a sneering curl of cutlass from the air.
Her right foot slips back, blade of her sword dipping as she holds her free hand up between them. “That’s not,” she says, “nobody’s, done anything yet, that can’t be undone.”
“Oh, but Huntsman,” he says, a sliding shuffle-step toward her, cutlass angled up and back, above his head. “One of us will.”
Another step back, and she settles into her stance, sword up, en garde. His chest swells with a growling breath. A concussive whump shakes the entire room, everything, staggers them both, sends him to his knees, billowing dust, the lamps swaying high above, and one blows in a burst of raining sparks, filing cabinets tipping banging crashing down, the clatter of dropped blades, rising smoke, a scream
“Does it hurt?”
“What?” says Jo, a dark shape turning away from dark windows. Over on the futon a rustle, Ysabel ghostly sitting up, “Does it,” she’s saying, and then, “you’re up.” And then, “You’ve been smoking.”
Jo shrugs. On the sill by her hand a glass ashtray, a scrumble of ash, a single filterless butt. Ysabel’s feeling about, lifting blankets, tipping over to peer at the floor, and “Down at the foot,” says Jo. Ysabel leans up, hands and knees, reaches out, sits back against the pillows with something glossily white in her hands. “Time is it,” she says.
“Almost five,” says Jo. “Luys’ll be here, any minute.” Red shirt in the shadows nearly as black as her kilt.
“Of course,” says Ysabel, bunching up the stuff in her hands, pulling it over her head, a shimmering fall of chemise. “The Samani.”
“Knights gonna knight,” says Jo, and Ysabel chuckles, leans back, her head against the wall. “While Queens cannot be bothered to sleep in their own beds,” she says.
“You know I don’t mind.”
“Still,” says Ysabel. “It’s not as if we must, anymore?” Something glitters under her eye, a smudge of gold.
“Anyway,” says Jo, getting to her feet, “I was gonna go see if the coffee was ready yet–”
“Of course it is,” says Ysabel, absently picking at the smudge, peeling away a lacey scab.
Jo’s hand on the knob of the door to the room. “Right,” she says. On the wall by the door a sword, slung from a leather strap, the scabbard of it plain and black, the simple hilt wrapped in wire, swaddled in a basket of wiry strands. Above it from the same nail a painted skull-mask, teeth crudely chiseled, black mane falling almost to brush the floor. “Want a cup?”
“Bible-black,” says Ysabel, “and sweeter than sin,” but she opens her eyes. “Jo?” she says, sitting up, “you do,” and leaning on that word, she’s weighing what she might say next, but Jo with a dismissive shake of her head’s already interrupting, “You know,” she says, and she opens the door.
The unlit hall, then the kitchen, shadowy grey and blue. There’s a slender vase tucked full of cornflowers, and beside it a stainless steel carafe, a couple of travel mugs. Jo thumbs back the lid of the carafe for a sniff, a smile, “I’m sorry I ever doubted you,” she murmurs. Frowns. Cocks an ear, looks sidelong at the door to the apartment.
Opening the door Jo leaps back with a yelp as the woman lying across the threshold flops over, tan raincoat, clumsy wedge-soled sandals scraping for purchase, blond hair hung severely straight, a thready whisper, “Ysabel?” A cough.
“Chrissie?” says Jo. Hands on her shoulders, helping her sit up, lean back against the jamb. “What the hell. Are you, okay? Chrissie?”
“Chrissie,” says Ysabel, there in the mouth of the unlit hall.
“Ysabel,” says Chrissie, pushing shuff and clomp to her feet, “I didn’t mean to wake you,” and “You can’t,” says Ysabel, looking up to Chrissie towering in those heels, and “I thought you sent her home,” says Jo, as tottering Chrissie drops to one knee, raincoat lopping about a silvery cocktail dress, “I just wanted,” she’s saying, as Ysabel, arms folded, steps back, and Jo says, “You said you sent her home.”
“Chrissie,” says Ysabel. “You mustn’t.”
“She was out there all night?” says Jo.
“I’m sorry,” says Chrissie. “But I just couldn’t leave.”
“Jesus, Ysabel,” says Jo. “Did you ask her?”
“You need to go home, Chrissie,” says Ysabel, carefully, but “I don’t want to!” cries Chrissie, crumbling, and Ysabel, arms still folded, looks up to Jo. “Could you?” she says.
“Could I, what, no. Ysabel, I’m leaving. In, like, as soon as Luys gets here.”
“Of course,” says Ysabel, “he can drive you. It’s on your way.”
“The hell it is,” says Jo. “We have to be in Forest Park before the sun comes up. Ysabel, goddammit, answer me. Did you ask her.” Something’s chiming.
“I’ll play the game, I swear,” says Chrissie, thickly, looking up. Something’s chiming, getting louder. “Whatever I have to do.”
“Jo,” says Ysabel.
Jo pulls her phone from her shirt pocket, swipes at it, yanks it to her ear. “The hell can’t you learn to text like a normal person,” she snaps, then stuffs the phone away. “Luys,” she says. “He’s here.”
“Then it’s settled,” says Ysabel.
“The hell it is,” says Jo, stepping around Chrissie. “Call a cab, call her sister,” past Ysabel, down the unlit hall, “hell, wake Iona up, I don’t care.”
Chrissie’s hands on Ysabel’s hips, fingers gripping the glossy chemise pulling Ysabel close. “Please,” she says, face pressed to Ysabel’s belly. “Let me stay. For the day.” Looking up, at Ysabel, looking down. “I love you.”
And Ysabel, shaking her head, her hands on Chrissie’s hands, pulls them loose, pulls out and up, a step back as Chrissie slowly stands, hands in hands to either side. “No,” says Ysabel, leaning close, “you don’t,” against Chrissie’s lips.
“Shit,” says Jo, in the hallway behind them, and Ysabel breaks off the kiss, lets go. “Okay,” says Jo, “fine. Chrissie.” The sword slung from her shoulder, and in her other hand the mask, the mane of it twitching restlessly, looping, coiling across the floor. “Let’s get you home.”
No one looks up as he leaves. On the television screen, a man with greasy hair sews up a bloody gash in his arm.
Outside, the darkness, and low houses. He hunches under the hood of his grimy sweatshirt, heads quickly down one side of the street, avoiding cars and pickups parked along the margins of the regular, unkempt yards. Lights switch on with an audible clunk as he passes one house, chain-link fence about it hung with signs that say Posted and Beware of Dog, and sinuous bars of white wrought iron on the windows of it, and the front door. He ducks away, heads on. The lights switch off.
An overpass ahead, a close horizon brightly lit, and busses snore beneath. A driver leans against one, smoking the end of a cigarette. Past that another overpass, more slender, more dim. He crosses under, looking up, a sculpture on the other side, smooth blue stalks twining up and topped by thistled fronds of plastic about slumbering solar panels. Head down he climbs a stairway along the embankment to train tracks above.
Daylight threatens half the sky up here, off past the houses and low trees. Two hills rise, one there, spangled even now with houselights and with streetlights, the other a hole cut in the burgeoning light. He stands with his back to it all, looking over a ticket machine that’s blinking to itself, Select Passenger, it says, Select Passenger. He shrugs and sets off over the walkway across the tracks to the empty platform. No Smoking, says a sign. Fare Paid Zone, Proof of Payment Required.
The train when it arrives is only a couple of blocky cars long, squealing, groaning to a stop. Doors open on a recorded voice that says, This is a Green Line train to Portland City Center. Another look up and down the platform. In the priority seating area, you are required to move for seniors and people with disabilities, and then another voice, En el área de prioridad, and he steps onto the empty train, ceda el asiento a personas de edad avanzada, past the couple of seats right there by the doors, y personas con discapacidad, and up a couple of steps into the end of the car, grabbing a pole to swing himself into a seat, but he stops short, blinks, looks back, looks outside. Then Christian Beaumont, pushing back the hood of his grimy sweatshirt, reaches down and picks up the shoe from that orange plastic seat, a shining oxblood monk-strap shoe, a bit of dried mud clinging to the sole.
Doors are closing, says the first voice. Train departing. Please hold on.
Greenery climbing steeply either side, abrupt high wall of it coolly shadowed close on the left, lit up over across a deeply shadowed gorge to the right by the rising sun, a tunnel ahead, white numerals set in mossy stone above, 1940, briefly glimpsed before it closes over them, lamps strung down the spine of it and green daylight at the end of it yawns them out. “You maybe want to slow down?” says Jo.
“We’re late,” says Luys, leaning the car into a curve.
“We get pulled over, we’ll be even later,” says Jo. “Look, I’m sorry about the, joggers, joggers!” On the gravel shoulder by a low stone wall bouncing ponytail, light blue jacket, balding shirtless long white socks and gone, another, tighter curve, a demure bit of bridge, another tunnel. “If I might advise your grace,” says Luys, sunlight flashing, dappling, “do not apologize.” One hand on the wheel, one on the polished wood knob of the gearshift. A bit of leather tied about his wrist. Jo says, “It’s my fault we’re late. Taking her home.”
“You did as her majesty desired,” says Luys. The car bottoms out, then soars, a ripple in the road, leans into another curve. “There is no fault in that.”
“Jesus, Luys, slow down,” says Jo. The engine whines, swallows, growls as he works pedals and gearshift. She leans forward, gripping the armrest, the car’s slowing, slows further. The tock-tick-tock of the turn signal. “Your grace,” says Luys, turning the wheel, “should not apologize.”
Gravel crunches as the car noses down into a crowded little lot, a couple of dark blue SUVs, a white one, a boxy jeep atop enormous tires, the long taupe tail of a coupe de ville. Luys wheels abruptly into a space at the end, by a lone black motorcycle. Opens his door, looks over to Jo, who hasn’t unbelted herself. “Shall we?” he says. “Your grace?”
“See, but there’s the thing,” she says. “It’s gonna be a your grace kind of morning. Not so much my lady.”
Couple of signs on a wooden post, Wildwood Trail, this way and that, Audubon yonder. Jo leads the way down rough log steps, red shirt billowing unbuttoned over her blacks, black T-shirt, kilt, leggings, her red Chuck Taylors squelching muddy down the slender trail, cigarette in her hand. Luys behind her all in browns, ducking his dark head under low branches. Down they go, and down, switching back along the wall of that deep gorge, into all that green. Far below a chuckle of water, a glimpse of wooden bridge.
Someone’s standing on the bridge, thick bare legs and a cloak of fur about hips and shoulders, leaning on a massive cudgel half his height. Jo scowls, dropping her cigarette to the ground. “I’m thinking I’m maybe underdressed,” she mutters, grinding it out.
“Your grace is fine,” says Luys, and when she steps up onto the bridge he stoops to pick up the half-smoked butt. The man on the bridge lifts his ruddy bald head, wide fur-wrapped chest a-swell with a great inhalation. “Southeast!” he booms. “The Huntsman, and the Mason!” Cudgel-tip banging the planks of the bridge, once.
“Yeah,” says Jo. “Sorry we’re, uh, late.”
Luys closes his eyes, and opens them again. The man on the bridge steps aside, “Your grace,” he says, and a sweep of his arm, “is merely the last to arrive.”
Across the bridge the trail follows the bottom of the gorge, running along the bank of the creek. Up ahead Jo red and black stumps over rumples of rock and root, and Luys and the fur-cloaked man following after. “You’re to take office, then?” says Luys. “But not as Porter, surely.”
“Gordon’s with us yet,” and a shake of that ruddy head, “and as stubborn, and as selfish.” A glance spared, back at the bridge. “The Soames thought it best, though, to have someone stand where he won’t.”
“You swear to the Soames?”
“Four of us,” says the fur-wrapped man, “and three to the Marquess. And the Hound’s brought a weaselly fellow, all in blue.”
“A crowded field.”
“But none for the Hawk?”
One boot up on a hunch in the trail, Luys leans an elbow on his knee, “Her grace,” he says, “thought it best to wait.” Jo’s forging on ahead, red hair licked bright by the sun.
“How is she,” says the fur-wrapped man, “as, well,” but from away up the trail a rumor of astonishment, applause, a distant clang of steel. “They’ve started without us,” says Luys.
“They must not a heard me,” says the fur-wrapped man, “I got to warn them,” sandal slipping in the mud as he pushes to climb the hunch, but there’s the Mason’s hand, reached down, and a tight smile sits the Mason’s mouth as he hauls him up, “I look forward,” he says, “to calling you brother.”
The fur-wrapped man nods, and sets off at a run, cudgel in both hands, “Gallowglas to the field!” he bellows. “Gallowglas!” Jo stepping to one side as he barrels past. “Gallowglas approaching!”
The trail bends around a buttress of gorge-wall, turning into the rising sun, climbing up away from the creek. Ahead, the ruins of an old stone house, thick walls softened by vivid green moss and topped by stark gables at either end, shingles beams and rafters long since gone, and with them doors and frames, shutters and window-glass. A new metal railing’s been bolted along the edge of what once was a second floor, and braced against it flagpoles bearing banners brightly limp: blue, green, red, white, their emblems glimpsed in listless folds, a hound, a hare, a stark black hawk, an empty helm. Highest and largest of all a yellow banner, a glowering bee, plump stripes and slender wings. A crowd of mostly men’s pressed up against the railing, suit coats and sweaters, rain gear, dull greens, dark blues, greys and blacks and browns. Below them, where the trail pools before the ruin, the fur-wrapped man’s bent over, hand on knee to catch his breath, and a handful of figures wait, weapons in hands, watching as up climbs Jo, and the Mason at her heels. “Huntsman!” rings a cry from the railing, pink hair bobbing, slicker brightly yellow: Lymond, the King. “You’ve brought the sun!”
“Yeah, you know,” she calls up to him. “So. This is the, thing. The Samani.”
“It will be, once you’re up here, and safely off the field.”
“Oh,” says Jo, “right. That.” She heads for the steps that stagger up the side of the ruin, but one of those armed figures, a fencer in black trousers spinning bare feet slapping whip-snap of rapiers in either hand beads clacking in her hair, leaps at a man in long white robes his scimitar swung wide to knock aside her first blade but the second, “Hold!” cries someone, the King, and “Zeina!” someone else, and that second thrust’s stopped, whicked aside. Jo’s hand on the mossy stone corner, a foot on the first worn step. The man in the white robes steps back, lowering his sword. The fencer laughs. “Aw,” she cries. “I only wanted to see what would happen!”
They climb the steps, Gallowglas and Mason, up and through a stolid arch onto the second floor, open between those gables, grey stone rusty with moss and lichen, scrawled over with neon-bright graffiti. The crowd mills about, back-slaps and glad-hands, cheers and laugher as with grunts and shouts the clangor resumes below. Jo looks about, arms folded, Luys behind her, nodding, waving someone over, a boy in a brown bomber jacket, brown hair popped in a matted pompadour. “Boss!” he cries, arms flung wide. “They was starting to worry.”
“Let ’em,” says Jo, still looking about.
“How’s the banner look?” says the boy. “I think the old buzzard needs a fucking stitch-up, you ask me.”
“Did you find him,” says Jo.
“Did I fucking find him. Fuck yes I found him.”
“Not so loud, Sweetloaf,” says Luys.
“You wouldn’t a fucking sent me if you didn’t fucking think I could get it the fuck done,” he’s muttering.
“He isn’t here,” says Jo. “What did he say.”
“What he said was, he already told you. No. He said fuck no. That was him, the fuck no. Not me.”
“Your grace,” says Luys. Coming through the crowd there, yellow and pink, the King, big wide smile and a red plastic cup in either hand. “We were starting to worry!” he says, offering one to her.
“Yeah, well,” she says, and takes a sip. “It’s loaded,” she says, blinking.
“We’re not going to not have fun,” says the King. “You’d rather a mimosa?”
“Let’s just get it over with,” says Jo. And then, “Majesty.”
“You make it sound such the chore, Duchess.” Clapping a hand to her shoulder. “But come!” Steering her into the thick of it, “People to meet, flesh to press. We’ll start with the Lake Barons.”
“The who the what now?”
“Alphons,” says the King, pointing, “Alans, and, ah, Medardus, and, well. Good morning, Euric.” A grunt from the throat of a stone-faced man, slope-shouldered in a pale green coat, handing a small square envelope, blankly white, to the King. Jo nods once to that impassive face as she’s led on through the crowd. “What you have to remember,” the King’s muttering, “if you ever speak with Alans,” as he’s prying the envelope open, “he styles himself an Earl.” Peering within. “Annoys us all no end, but what will one do. Lighter?”
“What?” says Jo, lifting her cup for a sip.
“Your lighter. Or a match? You still smoke?”
She opens a silvery lighter, flicks it to life, and he touches the small square envelope to the flame, dropping it as it flares. Grinding the curling ash underfoot. “But really,” says the King, “unless you’re speaking with Alans? Baron is fine.”
“Lake Barons,” says Jo.
“Well,” says the King. “Anything west of the hills. Beaverton and such.”
“They have their own court?”
“What? No. No, no no. Medardus! You know our Huntsman?”
“Have not had the pleasure,” says an older man, quite tall, head canted as if stooped under some low ceiling.
“Good morning, your, ah, grace,” says Jo.
“Oh, dear me no,” says that tall man with a cheerful magnanimity, swiveling to one side, looming over the woman beside him, wearing a blue satin baseball jacket much like his. “We’re much too low for grace,” he says, as she rips a sheet from a notepad and hands it to him, and swiveling back he hands it in turn to the King. “Lovely morning for it,” he says.
“We do try,” says the King, already stepping away. Jo, hastening after, bumps into someone, thickset, softly rounding a navy jacket, and at his temples blocky hexagrams tattooed, blurred by the silver stubble of his hair. “Duke,” he says, with a nod.
“Wu Song!” she says, and then, as he lifts an empty hand, “You don’t,” she says, but his brow furrows, lips pursing under his mustaches in a frown, and her free hand leaps to take his, give it a shake. “Good to see you,” she says, and then, looking off, after the King, “I should,” she says.
“Of course,” he says.
Off through the crowd, that yellow slicker, bent over the sheet ripped from the notepad. “So,” says Jo. “Lighter?”
“No,” says the King, folding it in half, and half again, “this one’s good. For now.”
“He’s not playing, is he. Wu Song,” says Jo. “Whatever this is.”
“I told you,” says the King, leaning close. “Lake Barons. West of the hills.” Polite applause ripples about them, at some shift in the ringing clash below. “You’re certain,” says the King, “you’ve no one to propose today, for Southeast?” The crowd, milling about them both, pressing closer to the railing. “Jo,” he says.
She looks up at him, those bulging eyes, one brown, one blue. “I got nobody,” she says. “Your majesty.”
“Okay,” he says. “All right. Let’s go.”
The crowd parts, stepping back, aside, as they head up to the railing. Jo stands at the King’s left hand, there by the Marquess in a long grey gown, her one hand shelled in a polished steel gauntlet. To the King’s right, there’s the Viscount in a blue and white striped suit, and the Soames in tweedy greens, a yellow meshback cap on his head. The King lifts a hand, and stillness settles, a last few thwacks and clonks as the donnybrook below clatters to a stop. Combatants lower arms and weapons, lift shoulders, feet drawn together, favoring perhaps a leg, here or there, a wince, but “Hup!” and a punch of steel driven through skin, the fencer in black trousers crouched low, one rapier back, a counterweight, the other buried half its length in the belly of the bald man wrapped in fur. Gathering herself her ropey muscles tensing the fencer yanks her blade free, “La!” she cries, and Jo
“Enough,” says the King, looking down at Jo beside him. Her eyes closed. Her hands in fists. Her breathing shallow, quick. “Enough,” says the King again, his hand laid gently over hers, withdrawn at her flinch. “You have done as we expected, which is to say, you have done well. Let’s introduce you all, before tests and games and oaths! Soames! Tell us, who would the North put forth today?”
“Majesty!” says the Soames, leaning out over the railing, adjusting his cap, and his smile. “And such the crowd of gentles here assembled. Hoy! To join the Stevedore and the Gaffer in our service, and see to such Apportionment as we are due, we’ve drawn lots to propose, to you, these four: the Kamali!” The man in white robes, scimitar still in his jeweled gloves, bows. “The Luthier!” A bow from a man in a black leather jacket, thick chain looped about his fists. “Jackstaff!” A man in a long leather coat, a long staff in his hands. “And Bullbeggar!” The bald man, all in fur, leaning on his cudgel, one hand pressed to the hole in his belly, chuckling as claps politely smatter.
“Viscount!” says the King. “Who from Southwest?”
“But one, majesty,” says Agravante, with a sweep of his striped arm. “The Serpent!” A young man all in blue denim holds up a shining squiggle of a blade, another flutter of applause.
“For Northwest!” says the King, and again, that stillness. “We’ve no one to put forth today. Duchess?” Looking to Jo beside him. “Who from Southeast?”
“No one, your majesty,” she says. And then, in a hitch of that stillness all about, “My men,” she adds, “my, knights, are as fine a company as anyone could ask.” She drinks down what’s left in her cup.
The King nods, looking past her. “Marquess!” he says. “Who would the Northeast Marches have put forth?”
“Three candidates, your majesty,” she says. “A Dagger!” A man in a pearly grey suit, a long-bladed knife in his blue-black hand. “A Javelin!” A woman in a skirt of bronze sheaves, and a quiver rattling with short-bladed spears. “And a Mooncalfe!” The fencer throws wide her arms, swords high, crossed above her upturned face, and Jo steps back from the railing, opens her mouth, as if to say something, or shout, or
“All right!” cries the King, catching her arm. “A banner day,” he’s saying, “eight new knights!” Lifting the Viscount’s hand, and Jo’s, in his own, and the Viscount lifting the Soames’, and the Marquess raising up both her own hands gauntlet shining as cheers break out, and applause. The candidates below take their knees, duck their heads. “Now!” says the King. “I believe,” loud and clear, “before the oaths, we were promised tests and games?” Whoops at that, whistles and cheers, bottles and cups held high, but faltering there toward the back, stuttering the applause, falling away as with rustles shuffles scrapes the crowd of mostly men parts to one side or the other. Someone calls out, again, “Your majesty!” There under the stolid arch in the one gabled wall a tall man, pinkly, hatlessly bald, and no coat over his black turtleneck. “A word, if I might, slipped edgewise, before you begin to commence?”
“Devil,” says the King, still smiling. “How fares our mother.”
“Wordless, sir,” says the Devil. “Our house is free; the word I bring’s my own.”
“But weighty enough it could not wait?” The King spreads his hands. “By all means, then. Go to. Unburden yourself.”
“There is an absence, sir,” says the Devil, “its presence keenly felt.” Hands clasped behind his back be comes a little way down the ad hoc aisle dividing the whispers and murmurs that roil to either side. “And once again the perquisites of my office lash me forth, to speak those words that fret on all our lips: where is our Queen?” His pink head cocked to one side, smile widening. “Your sister, sir. Is she upset?”
The King steps away from the railing, into that ad hoc aisle. “Okay,” he says. “I can guess what my next line should be, Chazz, but you’re working off a script I haven’t read. After this? I might need prompts.” He folds his arms. “Why, no,” he says, perfunctorily. “She’s not. Whatever could you mean.”
The Devil’s smile has curdled. “To stop you, sir,” he says. “To leave the Ramp intact. To have Old Tom’s weird drawings stay, where anyone might see them, and thwart the dig of any new foundation, along Lovejoy.” Unclasping his hands, both gloved in black leather. He sets to tugging one free. “Your sister, sir, our Queen, came just last week to see your mother, and hers, and was most upset about your plans to cede the Ramp. She’d see you stopped, sir, and I?” He holds up the glove he’s taken off. “I stand with her,” he says, and lets it fall, and the slap of leather against stone when it lands in the aisle between them. “I will await your response, majesty,” says the Devil, and no one stops him as he turns to go.
A limp black duffel dragged across carpet. Dust swirls in diffident light. A pair of pants, withdrawn, a couple shirts, a black leather sheath the length of a forearm, silvery glinting, wire-wrapped handle of a long straight knife. Reverently laid aside. The pants, taken up again, and sniffed. A judicious squint. Pulled on. The louvered doors of a closet half-opened, and a mirror hung inside, the glass of it pasted over with stickers black and grey, and red, but mostly black, and letters white and silver and black in shapes like lightning bolts, like blades, like the printing in old Bibles, White Doom, they say, Hyborian Philharmonic, King-in-Ice, Four Twenty, Iron Thule. Ducking, scooting over, he finds enough of a reflection cleared to smooth his hair, brush down the front of his black T-shirt.
All in black and brown he stands on that awkward corner landing, behind a heavy bannister. Low morning light pours through the windows over the sink, the rush of water, a silhouette there, the XO, nodding, shutting off the faucet. Off back that way there’s this drawn-out, reedy groan, cut short by a meaty smack. The XO’s drying his hands on his old white T-shirt. The front of it sprinkled here and there with drips of red. “Not mine,” he says, his grin skewed by that white scar along his cheek. A querulous voice lifts up off back that way, through the half-open door, loud enough to drive home a couple of words, God’s green earth!
“Need any help?” says Moody, coming down the short staircase, careful of the ramp.
The XO shrugs. “Dad’s got it in hand,” he says. Paid us? from back there. Paid us! “I was gonna maybe get some breakfast, change my shirt. Get some sleep.”
Moody’s shaking his head. “I’m good,” he says. Peel a number off a clock, that voice, what good, any of us, another smack, another groan. “There is a thing today, about lunchtime,” says the XO. “Dad said maybe you should tag along.”
“Tag along,” says Moody.
Rip City! howls that voice from off out back.
“Anyone?” says the King, sitting in the passenger seat, looking up in the rearview mirror at the rest of them behind, Viscount and Soames in captain’s chairs, the Marquess on the bench at the back, and beside her, in the furthest corner, Jo. The Viscount’s leaning forward, elbows on knees, his white-gold locks a-dangle. “I think,” he says, “we’d best be served, perhaps,” looking up, “by viewing this within the broader context.”
“Context,” says the King. Outside an engine’s turning over, whir and rumble muffled by thick doors and tinted glass. A sleek sedan slowly backs out of the space beside them.
“Consider, majesty,” says the Viscount. “This, the first Accolade of your reign, a Samani that sees the court extended to an admirable degree, and yet: we sadly lack for candidates from every fifth. Also.” He’s holding up two fingers, a second point. “Just this past week your sister had to turn a second portion, to replace what had been stolen by a thief as yet uncaught. And now?” A third finger. “Under the strain of such an effort, our Queen’s been led astray by elements without the court to provoke such a display of defiance, as we’ve seen.” Those three fingers held up a moment more, then folded away. In the mirror up there those eyes, one brown, one blue, look from the Viscount to Jo, in the back, her head against the window. “You’d speak of weakness within our ranks,” says the King.
The Soames shifts in his seat, sucking his teeth. The Marquess with a scrape of metal lays one hand over the other. “In this context, sir,” says the Viscount, with a nod, “it’s unavoidable.”
The King looks over his shoulder, at the Viscount direct. “You’d’ve done things differently,” he says.
“Sire?” says the Viscount.
“You negotiated the dowry with the Court of Engines, did you not? That we then paid down at once, a swoop most fell?”
“That’s not,” says the Viscount, “majesty, what I mean–”
“It’s the root of our insecurity, is it not? The specter of our empty coffers, that’s led the Barons to press you to press their point to me, so forcefully?”
“Sir, I never meant–”
“It’s also, I’ve no doubt, a source of effortful strain? That’s led the extensions of this court, that you so richly laud– Marquess, Soames,” a nod to each, “to beef over who might best oversee, what is it? A cobbler’s shop?”
A cough, from the Soames. “If it’s a free house the Porter would keep,” he says, but the Marquess, leaning forward, says, “That’s not an invitation, excellency.”
“The both of you. The three of you. All of you,” says the King.
“Majesty, if I might,” says the Viscount.
“You might’ve enough, by now,” says the King. “Next time? Try,” and a fillip of his fingers, “not to twirl your mustaches so theatrically. Anybody else? Anyone? No?” He’s looking over his shoulder again, at them all, and none of them looking back. “We go on. This is not a setback; we will have everything we want. My sister– our Queen– we do know her, I should trust, more better than some banneret, so soon come back from death?”
“What,” says the Soames, “of the insult? The Devil’s, insult?”
He smiles, the King, to light up his face. “Oh,” he says. “It will be answered.”
And there, at the very back, her head against the glass, Jo closes her eyes.
The doors of that white SUV open, front and back, down at the end of the lot, and Luys stands up from leaning on the fender of a ruddy brown car. They’re climbing out, the peers, the Soames, in his tweeds, headed for the long taupe coupe de ville, the Viscount in his blue and white stripes climbing into the back of another SUV, smaller, midnight blue, and sweeping toward Luys, past him, the Marquess in her grey gown, gathering up her skirts to straddle the motorcycle there, and settling a plain steel helmet on her head. Luys still watching the white SUV, the doors of it standing open. A flash of red, there’s Jo, climbing down, backing away, turning away. Luys lifts his head, lifts a hand, not quite a wave, she’s looking down, at her feet, arms folded. That big white SUV lurches, there’s the King’s head, pinkly orange, popping up over the roof of it. He calls something to her, and she’s nodding. She isn’t looking back.
“You won’t be going home?” says Luys, as she takes hold of the handle of the passenger door. She shakes her head. In her other hand she holds a lone black leather glove. “Over the river,” she says, yanking the door open. “Clown House.”
“Of course, my lady,” he says, sitting down behind the wheel.
He scoops up the silicone chopping mat and taps chopped onions into the pan a-foam with butter, stirs them about with a wooden spoon. A couple of cracked eggs wait in a silver bowl. He pours in a plop of half-and-half, and a whisking clatter joins the sizzle and spit till he tilts the bowl over the pan, egg-and-cream smoothly poured to smother it all with a satisfied sigh. Shake and jiggle the pan to round it out.
“Yogurt would’ve been fine,” says Pyrocles, behind him.
“What, you thought this was for you?” Becker grinds pepper into the pan, sprinkles on a pinch of salt. “I mean,” he says, “I could make another, if you want this one,” as Pyrocles’ arm slips about his waist. “Yogurt,” he says, “will be–”
“Wait,” says Becker, and a shake and jerk of the pan, “hup!” The omelet lofts, flopping a twitch of the pan beneath it folding shook out slop, a browned gold circle rippling pocked with crisped onion, shushing on the flame. “Ha!” belts Becker.
“Finally,” says Pyrocles, and a kiss for Becker’s cheek. The pewter weights dangling from his mustache-tips brushing Becker’s shoulder. “Finally?” says Becker. “I’ll have you know I am six for ten, good sir, and,” another shake of the pan, settling it all, “the last four in a row.”
“It looks delicious.”
“Say the word, I’ll go seven for eleven.” Another kiss, for his mouth. Becker hoists the pan over a plate, and a shimmy lops the omelet in a perfect semicircle. “All right,” says Pyrocles, but there’s a booming knock.
Pyrocles with a sigh pads away, shirtless and barefoot in loose white trousers, to the door to the loft, a mighty thing of beams and planks and a lever that he yanks back clank a grinding screech that cuts off with a thunk. Revealed there on the landing in his blue and white striped suit the Viscount Agravante, smiling. Pyrocles dips his head, a bow. “Well, hell,” mutters Becker, shutting off the flame.
“Anvil,” says Agravante, stepping inside. “Lovely space,” he says. He stomps the white-painted floor once, a muffled thud. “And solid,” he says. Looking over to Becker in the kitchen-nook, wiping his hands on a towel, grey boxer briefs and a white T-shirt strained by his bit of a belly. “Bet you can’t hear a thing up here when he starts banging away down in the garage.”
“How went the colée, m’lord,” says Pyrocles, still by the door.
“You’d know if you’d went,” says Agravante. “It didn’t, in point of fact. Interrupted, by a challenge to our King. The candidates will swear their oaths another day, I suppose. And whatever was intended to placate our friends from over the hills?” A hand, lifted from a pocket, a one-sided shrug. “They are more skittish than before. An entire morning, worse than wasted, all before a second cup of coffee.”
“A challenge, sir?” says Pyrocles, unmoved.
“The Devil, of all has-beens,” says Agravante. “Something about the Queen, and property. Fret not: the Huntsman’s on his scent.”
“His,” says Becker, still by the stove, and then, “the Huntsman? Jo?” But Pyrocles still looks to Agravante, who still smiles, and says, “As to my purpose, here and now.”
“M’lord?” says Pyrocles.
“Your liege has need of your– presence,” says Agravante. “This very day, an hour past the noontide. A car will be sent.” A hand, slap against Pyrocles’ shoulder. “Dress to impress,” says Agravante, and then he leaves.
“Well,” says Becker, as Pyrocles leans into the lever, shoving the big door noisily shut. “That was, well. He could’ve just called.” Pyrocles is heading away down the loft, through all that light cascading down from the clerestory. “Is,” says Becker, “is Jo really going to, fight?” Pyrocles draws back a white curtain to reveal a rack hung with coveralls, white dress shirts, a couple of suits in different blues. “I mean,” says Becker, “a challenge, is that, to the King, that, that sounds serious?”
“What did I do with my white bucks?” says Pyrocles.
Becker looks down, at the omelet cooling on the plate. “How about dinner,” he says. “When do you think you’ll be back?”
“Go on,” says Jo, opening the door of the car.
“My lady,” says Luys, his hands on the wheel.
“Don’t,” she says. “Just, don’t.” One foot out on the sidewalk, looking up to the house they’re parked in front of, peeling pink siding, mud-red trim. The welter of bicycles chained together, along the edge of the yard. “Start the car. I get out, you drive away.”
“Lady, I cannot leave you.”
“What are you gonna do? If he’s here.” A rip of velcro as she loosens one of her cycling gloves, flexes her fingers. “Talk to him? About what?” Closing it up again.
“The Devil’s tongue is hammered silver, and his very breath weaves lawyer’s nets,” says Luys. “Speaking’s not what I had in mind.”
“Like hell I let you go at him, with me in the room.”
“Jo,” he says, closing his eyes. “Lady,” he says, beginning again. “I could go in first, alone, to see if he’s within.” She leans in, across her seat, against his, her hand on his shoulder. “To save you time and,” he says, but she kisses him, softly, “trouble,” says Luys. “But what if he is not here.” His voice a husk.
“Then I’ll find out where he is,” murmurs Jo, “and go to there.”
“But I must take you,” he says. “I am your right hand. I do what you need done.”
She kisses him, again. “You’re the Duke’s right hand,” she says, pushing back, “but this,” climbing out of the car, “this is on the Huntsman. And that’s all on me. So go, get out of here,” she says, a hand on the door of the car. “I’ll call you if I need you.” But then she leans down, looks in through the open door. “Actually, pop the trunk first,” she says. “I wanna grab something.”
The front door’s opened by a hugely shaggy monster in a ragged burlap cassock, great glassy yellow eyes under a single black hedge of brow, a waggling felted nose, red thick-lipped mouth with two white dagger-teeth jutting from the lower lip. “Jesus!” yelps Jo.
“You got me mistaken,” booms the monster, that lower lip yanked up and down and up again.
“Yeah, okay,” says Jo, “nice costume,” as the monster steps back, right hand jerked into an awkward welcoming sweep. “Actually, more of a puppet,” he says, not so deep, and muffled by the lip no longer moving. “Transfer’s still tricky,” he says, “between mouth and arm,” as those big furry paws pry open the lips. Within, blurred by a screen of black mesh, a wry grin. “But how else’m I gonna get to Carnegie Hall? Whoa.” Hiking up as Jo steps inside, pressing his face to the mesh for a closer look. “Killer mask.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, the skull mask in her hand, the coarse black mane of it brushing the floor. “They inside?”
Past the hall butler, its old mirror pocked and grimy, hung about with light coats and a slicker, through the wide doorway, the dim, high-ceilinged room beyond. In the shadows along the picture molding ragged lines of faces, plastic mannequin heads, styrofoam wigstands, each of them painted, expressions of wonder and delight, joy, and here and there a glare, or glum regret, calligraphed in black and red and blue and yellow, round eye-shapes and mouth-shapes and noses, cheeks harlequinned with diamonds and teardrops, and nowhere any two of them alike. A dining table’s pushed against one wall, and in the open space afforded a contraption’s being built on laid-out newspaper, gears and chains and bicycle wheels and a couple of frames, welded together, leaned up against a sawhorse. A little round man kneels before it, cargo shorts and a tatty sweater, cranking a ratchet back and forth, whir-click, whir-click. At the other end of the room a sofa, brownish pink, pulled close beside the cold dead hearth, and white heads at either end. “Hello?” says Jo. “Ma’am? Could I, speak with you? Ma’ams?”
Neither head moves. The little man’s still cranking away, whir-click.
“It’s, it’s Jo? Ma’am?”
A clatter as the little man sets the ratchet aside, spins the whirligig he’s bolted to the frame. Contemplates it. A whickering slither of mane-tips on newspaper as Jo drags the mask up to her chest, a deep breath, and then up over her head. “Jo Gallowglas,” she says, lowering it. “Huntsman,” as she fits it over her face, and the mane shivers, lifts. “Duchess of Southeast,” she says. The little man at her feet looks up, scrambles back. Shadows flit over the floor, the walls, the ceiling, bare branches tossed by a silent storm. “On the King’s business,” she says.
Down the other end of the room those two white heads turn to look at her over the back of the sofa, the one of them her long white hair left loose, unbound, and the other her long white hair bound up in glossily ruthless braids. “You have our attention.”
“The mask’s a bit much.”
“Command; do not demand.”
“I’m, sorry,” says Jo, lifting the mask from her head, and shadows flee as the mane collapses. The little man at her feet hold up an arm against the falling pattering strands. “I don’t,” says Jo, stepping toward the sofa, “I don’t know the protocol, I mean, do I kneel, or–”
“As you wish, child.”
“It’s dangerous, giving old women airs.”
The mask in her hands before her. “I’m sorry,” she says, “it’s just–”
“Don’t apologize, child.”
“I wasn’t,” says Jo, “I only–”
“Never complain,” says the one, and “Never explain,” the other.
“Right,” says Jo. “Except. I mean.” Looking from the one, to the other, wild tangles, taut braids. “You named me. You gave me this, ah,” the mask, turned about in her hands. “Office.”
“I did not give you that.”
“That, you took yourself.”
“You gave me the, you named me. Huntsman. And, I went about your business. And now, for the King. I’m about his– I’m sorry, that didn’t, that sounded–”
“Speak plainly, child. As you would to anyone.”
“Whom do you hunt.”
Jo swallows. “Chazz,” she says. The mane ripples. “The Devil. Is he here?”
They look at each other then, and it’s possibly a smile that passes between them. “What would you have of him.”
“What has he done.”
“He,” says Jo, “he claims the Queen’s against the King, and that he’s gonna stand with her. Is he here?”
This time, perhaps, a frown.
“Can you tell me where he is?” says Jo.
“It’s not without the realm of possibility.”
“Will you tell me,” says Jo.
“Do you ask.”
Looking down at the mask, those teeth, the empty eye-holes. The limp mane. “Gammers,” says Jo, looking up. “Tell me, the Huntsman of this court. Where will I find the Devil.”
“Why do you do this, child.”
“What is your reason.”
“Not the court’s.”
“Not the King’s.”
“Is it for honor?”
“For Ysabel,” says Jo, and then, as they share another look, “what,” says Jo, “what is it, what’s–”
“We were wrong about you, child.”
“You were wrong about her. I’ve said she’s trouble from the start.”
“I don’t,” says Jo, “what does that, what do you–”
“Out by the airport.”
“One of those abandoned markets, left to rot.”
“A Circuit World, or–”
“The Best Buy.”
“Its livery was blue and gold, as I recall.”
“More of a yellow.”
“He’d spend time there, days on end, when we wandered in the wilderness.”
“When I wandered.”
“I spoke in a general sense.”
“The Best Buy,” says Jo. “Out by the airport, okay. Okay. Thank you–”
“Never offer thanks, child.”
“Gratitude has no place in this.”
“What is done as you command is merely what should be.”
“What we do has no reason but our own.”
“Right,” says Jo. “Okay.” And then, “I’m not a kid.”
“Of course not, child.” They both begin to laugh.
His watch chimes softly, and he pushes back the white cuff of his shirt to look over the face of it littered with three or four ticking dials, each hashed with tiny numerals and over them all a single majestic sweep hand quivering as it holds itself still, pointing out, away toward the front of the bus, where someone’s stepping through the opened doors, holding up her phone, a woman in black leggings and a short black skirt and a baggy red shirt. In her other hand she’s holding a bundle of coarse black hair. He frowns as she swings into an empty seat down toward the front of the bus, shakes his head, looks outside. There’s no one else waiting at the bus stop there on the corner, a repurposed gas station behind it, a tall red sign on the corner, Al’s Auto Repair, it says, & Towing, Se Habla Español. “That’s, odd,” he says to himself, twisting the golden bezel of his watch. The sweep hand spins wildly about to catch up to where it should be. The bus doors close.
His watch chimes softly.
He pushes back his cuff again. Every hand, not just the sweep, trembles, pointing out as he lifts it, beside the bus, tracking the burly figure there, a big man in a black suit pounding on the doors that open with a sigh. He steps heavily onto the bus, brown hair in crimped eaves about his shoulders and an enormous brown beard, and an aloha shirt under his black suit coat. He waves a piece of paper at the driver, blundering past, past Jo Maguire looking out the window at the traffic, up to the well there by the back door to the bus, where he plants himself, one big wide-fingered black-haired hand gripping the pole right there before him where he’s sitting, twisting the bezel of his watch again, covering it with his hand.
“Well, shit,” breathes David Kerr, very much to himself.
Across the empty parking lot a looming box of a store, the façade of it a great oblong thrust above the high flat roof, and stained across the front of it where a sign once hung, and now just holes punched in sheet metal where once were struts and electrical conduits. By the blankly dark front doors a sheet of plywood’s nailed to a frame of two-by-fours, and a plastic sheet tacked to the plywood, Future Home, say faded black letters, Columbia River Campus Advanced Disaster Management Simulator. A heavy chain is looped about the handles of the doors, and a padlock, bulky with a keysafe. She brushes a finger down the keypad set in the front of it, and it falls open with a clunk. She starts back, looks around, Leans in, twisting the lock free of the chain, and it clanking falls away.
Dust within, and darkness. Light scraped by scratched door-glass falls to thinly flop against a stack of drywall, a couple of buckets that say Sheet Rock All Purpose Joint Compound. Past that, across stained concrete, a shadowed mound of gutted cardboard boxes, glinting with shucked plastic clamshells. What might be a desk lamp’s shining beyond, somewhere behind a curling row of slender columns in all that enormous darkness, and the faintly tinny chirps of music playing to itself. “Hey, hello?” calls Jo. “Chazz?”
They’re filing cabinets, those columns, a dozen or so in a wide circle about the warm glow of that lamp, tall, five drawers each and each of them painted a dull institutional green, dented, scratched, rusted along the corners and edges. Some of those drawers hang open, crammed with manila folders stuffed with sheets of onionskin and glassine all protecting photographs, glossy photos stuck up, haphazardly tucked away, and more spilled on the dusty floor about, dozens of them, hundreds, and on the desk in the middle of the cabinets, stacks of photos piled atop folders and more folders stacked atop the piles, and a high thin voice singing over stinging strings and piano, William William William Rogers put it in its place, blood and tears from old Japan, and he leans forward to shut off the little radio, dressed all in black, his pink head gleaming.
“Devil,” says Jo.
“Why,” he says, “that makes of this the storied Inferno, where it’s said I rule, and do not serve.” Pushing back his chair, an echoing scrape, and shadows swoop as he stands, hands braced on the littered desk. “Huntsman. Welcome! But we cannot have you skulking in such a dismal Abaddon.” Looking up, he cries, “Yehi-or!”
And chunk, chunk, chunk, that big dark room lights up, great bulbs hung from the ceiling in bells switched on row by row, the glow from them strengthening, brightening, blooming a blue-white glare that swallows the warmth of the lamp. Jo steps out from between a couple of cabinets, red shirt bright, blacks dusty, the mane of the mask in her hand listless. “Vayehi-or,” says the Devil, smiling, but his smile folds away as she tosses a black leather glove to slap on the desk. “Dropped that,” she says.
“Most deliberately, as well you are aware,” he says. “Right!” He claps his hands together. “Where shall we have it. Here, on the desk?” He bends down to press hands and chest against the spill of photos, twisting his head to peer up at her, still there by the cabinets. “There’ll be no stain, nor sticky mess, I assure you. Just a bit of dust, easily swept away. But no?” Pushing himself back up. “You’d rather we were out in the open,” he says, stepping around the desk, a gesture toward the cabinets, and beyond, “where there’s room to swing! Of course. I might kneel, to afford the best blow?”
“What are you doing,” says Jo.
“I yet provide whatever assistance I might,” he says, and frowns. “You do know why you’re here?”
“You went and tried to pick a fight with somebody who doesn’t have the time,” says Jo.
“Even so!” says the Devil. “Where, then, do you mean we should have it? The neck’s traditional,” his hand at his turtlenecked throat, “though a blow from you to breast or belly should suffice, or even thigh.”
“We’re not,” says Jo, “that’s, not what’s gonna happen.”
“Isn’t it?” he says, theatrically quizzical. “Then all this way you’ve come, merely to return to me my glove?” He leans over to pluck it up from the desk, limply black. “I must say I am touched, that you would take such time from what is a doubtless busy schedule to see personally to the restitution of my wardrobe. But,” he shakes it, the fingers of it jiggling, “thus am I made whole; the matter need trouble you no longer, and nor must I.” Then, when she doesn’t turn or step away, “Unless?” A broadening of his smile. “Is there, perhaps, some other task to be discharged?”
“You,” says Jo, and a sigh. “You need to apologize.”
“Apologize!” cries the Devil. “For leaving this behind?” He lets it fall, plap to the photo-strewn floor. “Or rather more, perhaps, the insult done the King, the honor of the Queen– but what are airy words that might suffice to heal such grievous harm?”
“Just, say you’re sorry,” says Jo, and a wave of the mask in her hand. “No need to make a big deal out of it.” The mane of it, lazily a-sway. “Tell me, we’re done, I’m gone, it’s all good.”
“Is it? Really? All of it?” He leans back, against the desk. “But what of it if I don’t?” His smile fades. “For there’s the rub of the green, you see: I won’t.”
“Apologize,” says Jo. “Say you’re wrong, Chazz. Because you’re wrong.”
Looking down, his pink hands clasped before him, “Mine office,” he says, “was restored to me, when off the yoke was struck from about this very neck– by none but our very King.” Looking up, to her. “We would do well, Huntsman, to address each other thus, and what we’d be about.”
“Well,” says Jo. “Okay. Devil. But I’m not going to kill you.”
“A truth, in point of fact. You must destroy me, rather. I’ve been dead; death didn’t still my tongue.”
She lifts her hand, the mask in it, fingertips glimpsed through the eye-holes, thumb curled between two crudely chiseled teeth. Then tosses it aside, the mane of it trailing a dark comet falling to hit the floor, an echoing clack, a puff of dust. “I’m not,” she says, “that’s, not gonna happen.”
Blinking, he looks up from the crumple of mane to her hand that threw it. She’s turned away, to flip idly through the folders and photos in an opened drawer. “Perhaps,” says the Devil, “his majesty was, unclear, in his remit?” And then, “This matter must be settled!” he cries. “Without my contrition, only my silence will suffice!”
“Or mine,” says Jo. She’s tugged a photo free, sepia-tinted, creased, a group of men in sweaters and padded breeches posed about the landing of some great staircase, mustaches and center-parts, a bowler hat, and the one in the center holds a football, white letters painted over its seams, PFCC. “It is supposed to be a duel, right? Trial by combat?” Peeling translucent tissue from another photo, yellowed, two women in aproned dresses on a sidewalk before a storefront, the hand-painted sign above the door that says Eat. “Not an execution. So I might lose.”
Hoarsely, hushed, the Devil says, “Unthinkable.”
“What,” says Jo, “that you might be right?” Tucking the photos back in their folders. “What are you trying to do, here,” she says, turning about. The circle of filing cabinets about them. “What the hell is all this?”
“Huntsman,” he says, “forgive me,” his voice returning, “I’ve not followed your career with the avidity that it perhaps deserves, but: I can’t possibly be your first?”
“You aren’t,” says Jo, flatly.
“Then you must know, the quarry is most dangerous when cornered in its den. Yet,” he’s headed back behind the desk, stiff black wingtips placed among the scattered photos with exaggerated care, “in you walk, daisy-fresh, cucumber-cool, you spurn my last request, demand of me my reasons, why– my garters, stars, and coronets!” He stops there, the desk between them again. “I almost begin to think you hope, against all hope, to talk me out of that which I needs must, now I’ve taken the wheel.”
“If I haven’t got a hope,” says Jo, “you might as well humor me. I mean, we can spare a few minutes?”
A single bark of a laugh from the Devil, and he turns to open a drawer in one of the cabinets behind him. “If the minutes be but few,” he says, flipping through the folders within, “I’d better show, not tell. I am often accused of verbal imprudence,” and he tugs a folder free, “of slathering a dozen over what’s best said with one,” laying it open on the desk, “but I ask you: what use parsimony, when something so simple as this is worth a thousand of them, or more?”
She reaches over to take the photo he holds out to her. Three women, all in black, walk down a meander of paving stones set in a scrap of yard, the first the youngest, black dress shortly tight, eyes hidden behind black sunglasses, long dark hair beneath a broad flat hat, the next in a black suit, flared trousers and a smartly tailored jacket, a bit of veil about the brim of her black slouch, and finally the eldest, white hair done up under a trim black pillbox, and a nondescriptly sensible black dress. Jo turns it over. On the back a worn black-letter stamp says Oregonian, and under that in red ink a date, 4/6/73. A strip of typescript peeling loose from ancient blotches of paste, a caption: L to R Duenna Perry, d.– Mrs. Richard Perry (Arabelle)– Isobella Perry / Richard Perry funeral (departing). She looks up to see him, smiling, arms folded, pink hands tucked away. “What is this,” says Jo.
“This,” says the Devil, a gesture about, “is aptly enough termed a morgue, though the singular designation is, perhaps, misleading: these were painstakingly secured from the archives of two dozen newspapers, or more–”
“Why this one.” She holds it up. “Is it that she’s, I mean, it’s a recurring thing?” She drops it to the desk between them, the folder laid open on the desk, the other photos within, three women in rich pastels about a banquette table, three women in sepia’d, antique blacks, three women, three women. “I kinda got that already.”
“One of our great mysteries,” says the Devil, “and already you kind of get it.”
“What does it have to do with you stepping to the King,” says Jo.
“The King?” says the Devil. “Huntsman– have you spoken with the Queen?”
“What,” she says, “today?”
“Since morning broke.”
“I haven’t had the, I had to go and, and, I don’t, have to,” she says. “You’re wrong. Flat-out.”
“You’ve spoken with the Gammer, though.”
“She, they, told me where to find you.”
“Of course. But tell me: have you spoken with the Bride?”
Jo’s scowling, now. “I think I’ve maybe said two words to her, since she got here–”
“I do not mean the charming lepidopterist from Detroit,” says the Devil. “I mean, and here I speak quite plainly: the Bride.” And then, as she looks away from him, down to the photos on the desk, he says, “Are you starting, now, to rather kind of get it?”
“Well,” says Jo, “that’s, that,” and a rip of velcro, one hand worrying at the cycling glove about the other, “that’s not, what you said this morning, which, that she wants to stop the King. She doesn’t. That’s what you’ve got to walk back.”
“Then prove it!” He pounds the desk. “With your blade! Upon this body! Let there be no doubt!”
“Not gonna happen,” says Jo.
“Hunts end in death, Huntsman! Or do you think to set aside your duties as lightly as you do your badge?”
“Apologize,” says Jo.
“No!” roars the Devil.
A deep breath, and she shakes her head. “Okay,” says Jo, “all right, then I guess we’re at an impasse,” and the Devil leaps.
He leaps, pushing up over the desk in a tidy tumble, hanging there an instant impossibly arms spread wide and legs drawn up, and then his shoulder dips a dancer’s roll to sweep a shining black shoe round and out a kick that doesn’t landing crouched hands slap the floor for balance head a-tilt, ducked aside, drawn back from the tip of the blade she’s pointing at his throat.
“There it is,” he says. And then, a careful swallow, “Such clarity, pressed into the moment by the enormity of what’s to come.”
She lifts her sword away, long, straight, harsh light chasing down the edges of it, swirling the basket that guards her fingers lightly gripped about the wire-wrapped hilt. “You startled me,” she says. “That’s all.”
“That’s all?” he says, drawing back as he stands. “That’s all? You pulled steel from the very air. What might you produce if you were, let’s say, alarmed?”
Jo closes her eyes, her sword leaned up and back against a shoulder. “All right,” she says, and opens them. “Thank you,” she says, “Devil, for your apology. The King will be pleased.” And with a shrug she turns and walks away, out between a couple of cabinets. The Devil stands quite still a moment, then, with a shiver, starts forward, “Huntsman!” he cries, heading after.
She’s marching away across the enormous, empty, bright-lit room. “Huntsman!” he cries again. “You cannot do this!”
“Watch me!” she calls back.
“It is a lie!”
“So?” She stops, turns back, “Whatever it is you’re trying to prove, Chazz, nobody gives a damn!” Dropping her arms, her sword held loosely at her side. “Everybody’s, embarrassed– they’re gonna jump all over the slightest chance to get back to business as usual. And one way, or another, I’m gonna give ’em one.” Jabbing a finger at him, across the emptiness. “That is my fucking duty,” she says.
He rushes at her, but stops as she steps back, free hand held up. “I will call you out,” he snarls. “Before court and Queen I will name you a liar. As you love her– as you love her, Huntsman! Think! How it will crush her, to see you as you are!”
And she tips back her head, a shudder of laughter boiling up to a whoop. “You!” she cries. “You don’t know a goddamn thing! About me, about her, about any of this! Not a goddamn thing!” Walking away, turning about again, pointing her sword back at him, “Just say you’re fucking sorry. We’re done.”
“As you love her,” he says, and his brow knits, his eyes blaze, “half so much as I do, strike. Me. Down!”
“No!” she bellows back. Lowering her sword. “You apologize,” she says, “or I go out there,” sword swung back, pointing to those bright front doors, “and tell them all you did. There’s two ways this goes down– that’s it.”
“Paris 1919,” written by John Cale, copyright holder unknown.
“Put that away,” says the XO.
“She has a name, you know,” says Moody, elbows on the table, delicately fingering the pommel of the poignard balanced on its blade-tip before him, turning it slowly about, the long and tapered edge of it gleaming, and the wire wrapped about its handle.
“You named your knife,” says the XO. He’s in the doorway there, looking out from the dim little cabin onto a porched bit of yellowing deck, the placid river just beyond, greyly green. His anorak dappled in chocolate-chip camouflage, the furred hood of it laid back, a ruff about his shoulders.
“Boat has a name,” says Moody.
“It’s a boat,” says the XO. “They’re coming. Put it away.”
“Lucinda,” says Moody, twirling the knife about again. “Why are we on a boat, anyway.” His black T-shirt plain, his worn jacket of army-surplus green.
“I’m not gonna ask you again, dammit,” says the XO.
“A few manners go a long way,” says Moody, tilting the knife back and forth, the tip of it dimpling the table’s dark veneer. Footfalls clomp the dock without. The XO says, “Moody, please. Put Lucinda or whatever the hell away. There’s that old saying, about knives, and gunfights?” A tinny electric bell ding-dongs, and “Come on in,” the XO calls out, without taking his eyes off Moody. Moody slips the blade back in its sheath. The XO nods, turning away to greet the first man stepping onto the deck, tall and broad, straining the shoulders of a shiny blue suit. Long mustaches droop about his mouth, the tips of them weighted with a couple of heavy grey beads. He nods once, stepping aside as the second man enters, shorter and more slender, Agravante in his blue and white striped suit. “You must be the Executive Officer,” he says, with a quick squeeze for the XO’s proffered hand.
“Yessir,” says the XO. “Chad.”
“And I am the Viscount Pinabel. This, the Anvil;” a nod to Pyrocles beside him, “you will take instruction from him, when I’ve instructions to give,” and Pyrocles’ mouth tightens at that, a pinch of a frown.
“I,” says Moody, “am the Dread Paladin.”
They turn to look at him, sitting there, at the table. The XO clears his throat. “One of our jefes, sir,” he says.
“Ah,” says Agravante. “Well. The Anvil, here. Rest assured: when he speaks, it is with my voice.”
“All due respect, sir,” says the XO, “but it’s your money we’d be listening to, mostly.” He gestures toward the table, and his tight white scar lopsides his welcoming smile. “Something to drink?”
“We’re familiar with the broad outlines of your arrangement with the Duke,” says Agravante, who doesn’t move to take a seat. “We see no need to alter the particulars.”
“Well, see,” says the XO, “that arrangement with the Duke, we hadn’t altered in quite some time. Being an established relationship.” He folds his arms, leans back, half-sitting on the table, and Moody behind him. “Market being what it is, we’d want to talk about upping the retainer.”
“And we’d propose something of a trial run, as it were, before commitment,” says Agravante.
“Well, without a retainer, prices do go up a bit.”
“As you require,” says Agravante, a dismissive wave of his hand, but Moody’s leaning forward, “Hang on,” he says. “Viscount, that’s like a Vice President, right? And used to be we worked for a Duke?” Looking up to the XO. “What are we, getting demoted?”
White-gold dreads brushing his shoulders, blue eyes weirdly pale in the dimness, “It really is quite simple, Paladin,” says Agravante. “The Duke’s now gone, and the Duchess too wrapped up in court intrigues to find your services to be of any use.”
“I dunno,” says Moody, as the XO mutters something tersely pungent. “A Duchess,” says Moody. “Sounds like more fun.”
“Jo Gallowglas is many things,” says Agravante, “but I’d hardly call her fun,” as he turns back to the XO, but there’s a pop of a laugh from Moody. “Danny,” says the XO, a warning in his tone, but “Jo?” says Moody. “That’s the Duchess? Jo?” And then, when no one answers, “A girl named Jo. Isn’t that funny?”
“Maybe now’s not the time,” says the XO.
“I used to once know a girl named Jo,” says Moody. “Jo Maguire.” Looking past Agravante to Pyrocles, whose mouth’s set between those drooping mustaches. “Wouldn’t that be funny,” says Moody.
“I believe,” says Agravante, “that is the name inscribed on the cards she carries in her purse,” and Moody laughs again, leans back, looks up to the XO. “I get it, now, why your old man wanted me along.”
“You mean to tell us that you know the Duchess of Southeast?” says Agravante.
“Oh,” says Moody, grinning, “me and Jo, we go way back.”
“Hold still,” says someone, the clatter of dropped blades, rising smoke, a scream, get her down, she’s on her knees, her belly, cheek pressed to polished concrete streaked white with dust, mud, the door flare brightly shadow bulked is walking across the ceiling toward her, where she’s lying, on the falling massive bell-shaped lamp up from the floor behind him crashing fountain sparks that drift quite lazily back up and up she makes me dizzy turn about, flip over, this is she’s the one the gunshot, yes, does she could she I don’t know, black shoes trousers squatting, blue and white and yellow flowers, idiot, reaching for her sword-hilt, get herself killed, hold her, roll her on her back and black smoke whirls before her eyes, about her wrists and arm, her shins and shifting lifts her yanking over and she kicks, she can hear us, black smoke whips about her ankle, hear us she can see us, as he’s leaning over, black smoke trails and tatters of it swirl about the crimpled eaves of hair untouched left still and calm in the ruffling fluttering shut up hold her is it yes it’s open up, make sure, make sure, those thick-fingered hands push her chin to one side grip the placket of her red red shirt and once more there’s a scream, she’s screaming, and as he yanks a button popping free he says, Mr. Keightlinger, his mouth full of black smoke, “Hold still.”
Dull whump, and he shivers, but when dirty smoke billows from the front doors, the roof, he steps out of the grass, into the empty lot, his eyes on the heavy gold watch about his wrist. Every hand on the face of it pointing quivering at that big box of a store.
“Shit,” says David Kerr.
Breaking into a jog, a lope, a flat-out run for those doors hung slackly open in that great oblong thrust above the high flat roof, and behind it, the towering pillar of smoke. Wading over the threshold through that smoke, slapping at tatters of yellow-white flame that lick at his sleeve and trouser-leg, toss his unruly hair, he yelps, ducking, stumbling out into the enormous open empty room, sparks everywhere and the sizzle and popping bangs of dying lamps. A scrap of paper flies past, another, more, he grabs one out of the air, a photograph stiffly glossy, two men in a canoe before a grand stone arch. More photographs, and more, tumbling, skirling, scraping the floor, here and there burning, flaring, wild shadowy flocks of them lofted, sculpting the gusts and blasts of a raging windstorm and there, in the eye of it, over toppled cabinets and the fallen bell of a lamp, hangs a man all in black his feet churning the air, reaching, grasping, wailing, yanking himself about with the effort of clutching the photos that whirl just out of reach.
“Hold still,” says someone loud enough to carry over the wind. A zipping rip of cloth. A big man kneeling darkly crouched over something, red shoes kicked out a-sprawl to one side of him, the gleam of a blade. “Well, do something,” that loud voice again, and Kerr, reaching for the bezel of his watch, finds his feet no longer on the floor, turned about his hands whipped back a grunt and slap, photos against his chest, photos clinging to his arms, the side of his face, a yelp from the Devil over across that room. More photos flutter snap to press against him trembling, he’s lurching himself around in the howling wind. Mr. Keightlinger below spreads that undone red shirt, that ripped black T-shirt, Jo’s eyes wide mouth working a word unheard, and those spatulate fingers press and twist her skin. Kerr hung above a lapped and bristling mass of photographs plastered to his torso, more photos slithering his arms one bending lifted close a hand to grab to peel to rip away the photos crumpling themselves into his mouth, a desperate gulp of air, a single shout, “Lu!” or maybe liu, or leu, it echoes, a distorted clang, and Mr. Keightlinger looks up, startled, as the wind
Kerr’s feet hit the floor, he stumbles to his knees, an elbow, clang and crash the Devil falling from the air, the rustle flutter patterfall of hundreds, of thousands of glossy photographs dropped all at once. Scrape and squeak of shoe on concrete Mr. Keightlinger standing, looking about that enormous, empty, silent room. “Where!” he cries, a forlorn yelp, and then, “Come back!” a ragged shout. Kerr pushes himself to his hands and knees and “You!” roars Mr. Keightlinger, rounding on him a kick to his belly over and tumble, grunt. Hauling him up, handfuls of beige fleece, “I’ll,” says Kerr, but an arm swings back for a punch to his gut, “What did you,” Mr. Keightlinger’s howling. Kerr says, “I’ll speak another,” and then the next punch lands. Kerr grunts, coughs. “You couldn’t,” Mr. Keightlinger’s saying, arm cocked.
“Sure I would,” says Kerr, grin crooked.
“Hey. Fucko,” says Jo Maguire.
Mr. Keightlinger drops Kerr, backs away. Jo’s marching toward them, rent shirts hung open, sword in hand. “Come back,” says Mr. Keightlinger once more, to none of them in particular. “Please.”
“What the hell,” says Jo. Over behind her a scrape of metal pop and clatter, the Devil, rolling over.
“You have it,” says Mr. Keightlinger. “You’re the one that has it.”
“That’s not all I have,” says Jo, lifting up her free hand.
Something rustles in the drifts of photographs, and Kerr looks back and forth, from her to him, to her again, but there, by the toppled cabinets, the skull mask lifts itself, the mane of it drawing itself together as it leaps across all that empty room, a thunderbolt to her hand.
“My morgue!” the Devil’s roaring, kicking over a tumult of wrenched and broken cabinets.
“You,” says Mr. Keightlinger, to Jo as she fits the mask over her head, as the mane climbs up and up, a great black banner flying. “Stay alive,” says Mr. Keightlinger, backing away. “And you,” he points to Kerr, who lifts a useless hand. “I won’t forget,” says Mr. Keightlinger, turning, loping away, off toward the broken doors.
“Your heart!” cries the Devil, staggering, slipping on photographs, stooping to snatch up his cutlass, “in my hand!” as he levels the blade at Mr. Keightlinger’s retreating back. “Now!” And slashing the air with it leaps over the photos after him at a run.
And Kerr, Kerr’s fallen, scrambling back, Kerr’s staring jaw dropped at Jo Maguire, Jo Gallowglas, Jo the Huntsman of the Court of Roses, under that swelling thunderhead that roils the bells of the remaining lamps, swallowing the light, lifting, pointing her flashing blade, “Devil,” she says, and the word booms. And as the Devil stops, looks back, eyes widening, she says, “We ain’t done.”
And he smiles. “Of course,” he says. “The knave will keep.” A jaunty salute of his cutlass, and he sets off, charging back across the room toward her.
That mane hangs in the air above them, lazily coiling about as she ducks, sidesteps his first wild chop, his second, clang and scrape she catches the third, steel screeching as she pushes, he shoves, she stumbles blade whipped wide as both hands gripped his next cut slashes her shoulder to hip she’s falling, heavily, a gasp, and all that mass of mane drops from the air. The Devil steps back, panting, blinking. Swallowing as he takes in the basket of wiry strands a-bob in the air before him, at the end of the blade jammed through his chest. It sinks with him as he falls to his knees, reaching. The blade wobbles, shifts, drops suddenly in a spatter of something wet and black to the floor, by an angled jawbone bristling with golden teeth. The mask falls from Jo’s face with a horrid echoing clack.
Blood wells from the long clean slash across her breast and belly, dark slicks of it already swamping the photographs crumpled beneath her. Kerr kneels over her, looking about, hands hovering uncertainly over throat and wrist, she jerks, a bubbling splat of a cough, and he yelps. Wisping up from her chest the barest tendril, too faint to have any color at all. “Oh, shit,” says David Kerr. “That’s it. That’s what he meant.”
Jo drags up her sodden hand, presses the heel of it a squelch to her breast, tamping it back down.
“I can’t,” says Kerr, “I’m sorry, there’s no way I can call an ambulance. They’re not equipped. I should be running for the fucking hills,” but her head’s rolling back and forth, no, no, as her other hand wrestles something up, her phone, lighting up under a film of red. Holding it up to him. “Luys,” she just manages to say. “The Mason. Call,” her voice catches, “Luys.”
And now the blue is almost gone from the sky, a lemony pale above that shades down through lime and lavender to oranges, to wild magentas that cling to the bottoms of a shadowed flotilla of clouds, down and down to the molten gold still burgeoning over beyond the roofs and towers, the far-off hills, and off behind it pinkly greens through purples unearthly, stately, down into a rumor of the darkness that’s to come. He slips around the corner of the low white warehouse as across the way a streetlight flickers to life. The empty street, the bare sidewalk, the warehouse wall painted over the length of it with a sprawling mural, figures and scenes that lap one over into another, masks and blocks, flames, a gnarled and squamous root-shape crowned with a forest, all the rich colors of it leached away in the deepening dim. Another wall over across the street, grey and blank but for a simple sign, Multnomah County Department of Community Corrections, it says, Probate and Parole. He hunches under the hood of his grimy sweatshirt, hands wrapped around whatever it is he’s carrying, and heads quickly down the open stretch of sidewalk, toward the row houses at the end, the cluster of recycling bins, but even before he’s halfway along there’s an engine-chug, a pickup truck turning the corner ahead, and he stops in the glare of its round headlights. It’s an old truck, an aqua blue weirdly luminous in the gloom, fenders scabbed with rust. “Hey,” says somebody, the driver, through the window rolling down, “hey,” as the truck stops there beside him. “Christian? The hell you doing over here? You know my word only goes so far.”
“You hold my money,” says Christian, tipping back his head, looking out from under his hood. “Not my feet.”
“I hold your money,” says the XO, companionably enough, “and you know if you need anything, all you have to do is ask. Just like I know if I ask you for something, you’ll bring what you got to the table.” There’s a shadow just past him, someone else in the cab. “Now get over here,” he says. “We been looking for you all afternoon.”
“Who’s we,” says Christian. “Who you got in there with you.”
A chuckle from whoever it is, the shadow in the passenger seat. “Oh,” it says, “oh that’s Shizzt, all right,” and Christian closes his eyes with a shiver. The passenger door opens with a scrape. Christian hurriedly takes the shoe he’s holding, wrapped in his hands, the oxblood black in the darkness and the buckle of it gleaming, and stuffs it into the pocket in the front of his sweatshirt, and his hands in after. Moody steps around the front of the truck, lit up suddenly by the headlights, “Shizzt the Drow,” he says, his hands spread wide, welcoming. “How the hell are you.”
“We ain’t got nothing to say to each other,” says Christian, looking down, hunching over the bulge of the shoe in the pocket of his shirt.
“Now don’t be like that, man,” says Moody. “You know I didn’t do half a what they said I did. That’s why I’m out so early. Good behavior, and all kind and manner of false pretenses and shit.” A step closer, and Christian lifts his head up, glaring out from under his hood. “Now you,” says Moody, a hand up against the light, “you ain’t changed a bit. But Bambi Jo?” And there’s that chuckle again. “You seen her, lately? God damn.” Another step closer, and there he is, right there by Christian, one foot up on the curb. “Tell me,” says Moody. “How the hell you think she’s doing, these days?”
Ysabel, a silhouette in the doorway, and behind her the hall, stellated by those strands of little yellow lights. “Jo?” she says. “Are you awake?”
From the mounded white comforter, blued in the darkness, a sigh resolves itself into a word: “Yes.”
“I wish you had come,” says Ysabel, stepping down as she kicks off her shoes, clump-thump. “The piano, in this one song,” and she twirls about, white coat slipping from her shoulders, flump to the floor. Careless drips of golden glitter spangle her bared arms, her thigh, down about her knees. “It was magnificent,” she says, sitting at the foot of the futon.
“There’s the, Samani? In the morning? Knighting of knights? Luys is gonna be here in, stupid early,” grabbing her phone from the clutter on the table by the futon, ghostly flash of her face in the light of the screen. “Three hours,” she says, putting it back.
“You might’ve brought him with you. Made a night of it.”
“Some of us need our sleep, your majesty?”
“Sleep, your grace, is highly overrated.” Ysabel undoes a knot at the back of her neck, and peels the lacey overlay of her brief dress from the glossy chemise beneath. “As well you know,” she says, dropping the overlay to the floor. “Do you still mean to propose your friend for office?”
“Ah, he said no, and took off, but,” and Jo rolls over, under the comforter. “I got Sweetloaf out looking for him, just in case.”
“Sweetloaf?”
Darkness shifts as Jo sits up a little, “Yes,” she says, “Sweetloaf,” and then, falling back, a shadow on the pillows, “the hell do you care, you’re not even going.”
“I do care,” says Ysabel, leaning back against the wall, closing her eyes.
After a minute or two, another sigh from under that comforter, “Christ, if you’re staying, get under the damn covers. Make me nervous, just sitting there like, what are you, Ysabel?” Jo sits up again, switches on the anglepoise lamp on the table by the futon. There at the foot of it Ysabel’s squirming out of her chemise. “I’m not sleeping in this,” she says, dropping it on the comforter. “Besides,” a brow cocked at Jo’s bare shoulder, her breast, “when in Rome.”
“And of course, you went commando,” says Jo, as Ysabel crawls up the futon. “And you reek, of cigarettes, of booze, of, of pussy–”
“Jo!”
“You do!”
Ysabel leans close, to nuzzle Jo’s cheek, “Intoxicating, isn’t it,” she murmurs. Stroking that red hair spread out in the lamplight. “Don’t,” says Jo, gone suddenly still.
Ysabel lets go, sits up, “Jo,” she says, “I would never,” and “I know,” says Jo. “I know.” Looking up to Ysabel, those short black curls touched here and there with white. “What,” says Jo. “Ysabel. What is it.”
“I,” says Ysabel, looking away.
“Is it Chrissie? Did you leave her in your room again, or–”
“I sent her home,” says Ysabel, “but, I, I,” the dim glow of the hallway out there, past the half-closed door. “Does it hurt?” she says, turning back to Jo.
“Does, what– hurt?”
“Your,” and Ysabel waves a hand, vaguely, over Jo, “condition. Does it hurt?”
Jo says, “That’s what this is about?”
“Well, I, I worry, I do.” Her hand laid gently over Jo’s heart. “I do care.”
“So you can’t bear to let me sleep.”
“You owe us, Southeast,” stern words belied by a gentle smile. “You told your Mason, before you told your Queen.”
“Well, I, yeah,” says Jo, “he is my, ah, my, my–”
“Your lover.”
“– I was gonna, more like say, lieutenant?” The sour twist of her mouth. “What’s that Mafia word. Consigglesomething. Consorleoni?”
Ysabel, pressing softly with her hand, says again, “Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes?” says Jo, looking down at Ysabel’s fingers. “Mostly, it’s just, like, a chill. But I can forget it’s even ow, okay, yes, you do that,” laugh and tussle, rustle of bedclothes, a shimmer of falling gold knocked loose from Ysabel’s skin, “that’s not it, you can stop! Now!” the last words spiking, slap and shove and tumble, and Ysabel gasps, “What,” says Jo, hands lifting away as Ysabel sits back, “I saw it,” she says, “I think.”
“Yeah?”
“A glimmer.”
“Like soap.”
“A rainbow.”
“But you look at it.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Sometimes,” says Jo, reaching out, “it’s easier to see,” switching off the lamp, “in the dark.”
“I don’t,” says Ysabel, black hair lost in the shadows, her hand a shadow on the pale, blue-tinged ground of Jo’s chest. “It’s gone,” she says.
“Quicksmoke,” says Jo, her hand covering Ysabel’s.
“The whirlwind, in a bottle.”
“Christ,” says Jo. “Don’t remind me.”
“The fire enfolded, from before the world was the world.”
“Echoes,” says Jo. “Your father called them–”
“I have no father.”
“Okay, uh, John, John said–”
“The King Before.”
“The King,” says Jo, “Before. Yes. Called them echoes.” Her hand, clasping Ysabel’s. Fingers twining. “I am,” she says, “so fucking sorry.”
“What on earth for,” says Ysabel, with wonderment.
“That he went after you,” says Jo. “The magician. I– you, you shouldn’t’ve had to– if I’d told you, but,” as Ysabel stretching out lays herself down, her head on Jo’s shoulder, “I should’ve told you. I should’ve. Before he– but I didn’t–”
“Jo.”
“– I had no idea he was even still here–”
“Jo, it’s only logic, that he’d come to look for it first in me,” and “I know,” says Jo, “but if I’d, I,” her arm coming up about Ysabel, “I’m so sorry,” and Ysabel’s saying, “he hurt no one, he barely even spoke: mostly bluster. It’s all right. It’s all right. I was more concerned,” a little laugh, “with what my mothers meant to do.” Her hand, squeezing Jo’s. “I am all right,” she says. “But you should know. He’ll come for you, next.”
“Yeah,” says Jo, looking away. The shadowed walls, the windows streaked with streetlight.
“All this time,” says Ysabel, “you’ve carried it,” her thumb, lightly stroking, there between Jo’s breasts. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
And Jo says, “I was scared.”
“Oh,” says Ysabel, pushing up, “oh, Gallowglas,” leaning over, a hand to that red hair, black in the blackness. “How could you ever be frightened of me.”
“Not of,” says Jo. Looking up, past Ysabel’s shadow. “For.” The dim ceiling above. “You were,” she says, “gone.”
“I fell,” says Ysabel.
“It, this, stuff. This smoke. It eats things, out of the world. People.”
“I fell, into myself.”
“You were gone.”
“I fell, but you came for me.”
“Before that,” says Jo. “Before that. Before your, the King, before he found me, you were– nobody, they all, didn’t know you. Luys. Marfisa. The, Mooncalfe, and, and Leo, nobody–”
“Jo.”
“Sweetloaf! Nobody, no one,” pulling her hand free, sitting up, away from Ysabel, “you were gone.”
“Jo,” says Ysabel.
“This, stuff,” says Jo, and her wavering hand closes in a fist, presses knuckles sharply to her sternum. “Lenses, he said. And mirrors. Breath. That’s what holds it, he said. But it also,” that fist, twisting, and she winces, “makes a shell, for itself? From what it takes. It makes a shell, and plants itself,” her eyes, her face crumpling, shoulders hunching, knuckles digging and she groans, “it’s sleeping, here, in my heart, and I don’t know what will happen when it wakes,” shuddering, “up,” and a hiss of breath, but Ysabel’s grabbed her arm, pulled that fist away, pulled Jo close her arms about her, “But I’m here,” she’s saying, “I’m here, Jo, I’m here,” kissing her, her forehead, a hiccuped sob. “I’m here,” she whispers. “Jo. Know this.” One hand slipped between them, laid against Jo’s breast. “I am,” says Ysabel, “so much bigger than that.”
Jo pulls her close, arms tight about her, crushing Ysabel’s hand between them, “It’s just,” she says, eyes squeezed shut, “I, I love you,” a breath, in Ysabel’s ear.
And Ysabel’s arms about Jo, and her mouth turns to find Jo’s mouth, and a kiss, and another kiss, another, and just the barest motion of her lips against Jo’s lips: “Thank you.”
“Rude Love,” written by f(x), copyright holder unknown.
The room is blue, and dark, and very quiet. At the foot of the pallet mounded with white pillows under the angled ceilings he’s sitting, and dark hair eaves his shoulders, a great beard brushes his chest, his back and upper arms are hatched with more hair curling with the curves of sagging muscle, down to his thick round waist. His legs are folded tailor-fashion, bare feet tucked under bare thighs, hands held loosely open on his knees, his cock a-jut, tip of it darkly swollen, glistening, there before his thick-furred paunch. Mustache wide in a simple smile beneath eyes simply, gently closed, there between his beard, his hair, serenely still, so very quiet.
Explosions rip the television screen, chatter of gunfire, Angels comin thick an fast Sarge, and the guy on the beanbag leans back and forth, thumbs and fingers frantically working the controller in his lap. The view on the screen wheels, jerks, dials and meters in the corners whirling, flashing, galloping along in a tight-packed herd of wildly colored centaurs, garish pastel zebra stripes, neon leopard spots, Appaloosa rainbows, all wrapped in khaki saddlebags, human torsos draped in bandoliers, big guns in their outsized hands, Get to cover! Under the cable! Your six, your six! and another explosion. “Shit!” he yelps, tap-tapping, laughing, “Shit!” Over across the room a woman’s headed toward a grand dark staircase, and the other man in the room looks away from the screen, starts after her, “Ellen,” he says, dodging around a dark wood column, “hey, Ellen, wait up.” She stops, a couple steps up, looks down at him. “How long, exactly,” he says, “is he gonna be staying here,” and he points, up the stairs, past her. She shrugs. More explosions, more gunfire, the guy on the beanbag whoops. “Long as he needs,” she says. Her black hair spiky short, the inky lace of tattoos edging the collar of her running shirt.
“It’s just,” he says, at the foot of the stairs, tall and heavyset, cardigan blue. “The occasional overnight guest is one thing, but–”
“My room, my friend, my business,” she says. “You won’t even know he’s there, Dan, unless you go out of your way.” The loudest explosion yet, and “Shit!” yells the guy on the beanbag. The television’s gone red. She’s turning to climb the stairs. “Ellen!” says the man in the blue cardigan, starting up, “Ellen, he was, what the hell was he doing, wearing my shirt?”
She looks down at him again, and maybe shrugs. “Looks better on him,” she says, and up she goes, up another flight, up under the very peak of the house. At the end of a cramped hall a door, cut at an angle the top to fit the slope of the roof.
The door to that blue room opens, and she steps in, a shadow dressed in black, flashes of silver piping, “Phil?” she says. “You’re, ah, oh.” Stretching out a foot to prod the black huddle of a discarded suit, there on the floor by the door. Splash of yellow within, and blue and white, a rumpled aloha shirt. “Hungry?” she says. “I was gonna go for phở.” Still in the doorway, hand on the jamb. “Did you want some?” Creak of a floorboard as she steps back, out into the hall. “I’ll bring some back,” she says. “You’re welcome to half the bed, if you need it.” The door swings shut. The latch clicks, quietly.
Rattle of glass, yellow bin in his hands, blue letters along the side say Portland Recycles! Clang and clink he sets it down, chock full of bottles, brown glass and green, clear, four or five of them wine bottles long and slender, the rest soda bottles, beer. Squatting he pulls out a wide-mouthed jar, the label mostly torn away, and holds it up in the light. “Fuck,” he says, setting it down. Smacks it, topples it, sends it rolling a hollow rumble away down the linoleum clunk against the wall. “Fuck,” he says, again, rattle and clink, and “shit,” and then “damn.”
Over by the floor-length curtains a brown and green sleeping bag, someone in it, rolling over, a voice, sleep-muzzled, “What.”
“Bits,” he says, “of pickle,” waving a hand, and dark hair swings about the shoulders of his warm-up jacket, blue and grey.
“So rinse it?” The sleeping bag hunches and flops open, whoever’s in it sitting up, a woman, wrapped in a puffy pink and orange parka. “Why should I,” he’s saying, “why couldn’t they,” and he shoves the bin, a chiming crash. “We’ll just have to get some. Bread-and-butter pickles. Trader Joe’s.”
“You want to,” she says, and she’s pinching the bridge of her nose, “you want to buy a new jar of pickles, and, what, eat them all, or throw them out, and the rinse the jar, because you don’t want to rinse the jar?”
“The label on that one,” he says, and then “dammit! It’s the perfect size.” Stomping the length of the room to snatch up the jar, and then through the door. Clomp and clatter, a squawking wrench, the rush of water.
She sighs, crawls out of the sleeping bag, long yellow hair a-dangle from the parka’s fur-lined hood. She slips on a couple of red canvas shoes and heads off carefully through the garbage strewn across the floor, more bottles, empty, all sizes and colors, glass and plastic, quart-sized cartons and half-gallon cartons and little pints and half-pints, cereal boxes and pasta boxes stacked and wrapped together with blue masking tape and black friction tape, towering masts of emptied rolls of plastic wrap and toilet paper, paper towels, plastic tubs tall and squatly broad, whole ranks of them that say Nancy’s in letters of various hues, all laid out in a relatively tidy grid, narrow paths between and through them all where she places her feet, aglets of her undone laces clacking against the floor, until she reaches a wide cleared curl of an aisle of sorts, edges marked with long strips of more blue tape.
He’s at the sink, fiercely scrubbing the jar, “Basic civic duty,” he’s saying, “think of other people, come on.” Slamming the jar on the counter by a dozen or more empty jars and bottles, scrubbed clean, gleaming. Yanking the faucet to shut off the water. “Luke,” she’s saying, “Luke,” and he looks up to see her there, hands stuffed in the pockets of her parka. “The hell you wearing that for,” he says, scooping wet shreds of label from the sink.
“It’s freezing,” she says.
“You know why it’s cold,” he says, dropping the mess plop in a swollen garbage bag that yawns there on the floor.
“So I’m wearing this.”
“You look ridiculous.” He shakes the slop off his hand.
“There’s still a smell,” she says. He’s headed past her, out of the kitchen. “Luke,” she says, following, “Luke. We’re gonna need–”
“Don’t,” he says, kneeling by an untidy patch of garbage.
“We’re gonna need money,” she says. “Rent. The fifth. It’s next week.”
“We’re always,” says Luke, “gonna need,” plucking up a cereal box, “so get a job,” he says, grabbing another, a clownishly colored bird on the front of it.
“I had a job,” she says.
“Jessie,” he says, “don’t, just,” and he looks up, a shrug. “Your sister’s gonna be here soon. Right? So maybe she’ll have something for you. For us.”
“My,” says Jessie, frowning. “Luke, now is not the–”
“Don’t,” he says, leaning over to place one of the boxes right next to a yellow plastic jug.
Gæa, Titanides, Angels, etc. created by John Varley. Trader Joe’s® is a registered trademark of Trader Joe’s® Co. Nancy's™ is a trademark of Springfield Creamery, Inc.
“The first order of business,” says the man at the head of the table, “in any face time we take with potential occupancy partners, we need to assess how the anticipated anchor’s gonna impact their appraisal and availability approach.” It’s a long table, a slab of wood the color of pale flesh, polished to a striking gleam that’s broken here and there by a phone or a computer tablet laid before this person or that, until down at the very other end of it, a couple of comb-bound reports bristling with post-it flags, a spill of colorful diagrams, a worn redweld holding a couple of file folders upright, a small black notebook splayed open, the wispy scratch of a fountain pen, APPRAISAL written in ruddy black ink, AVAILABILITY, then three sharp underscores. “It’s not,” the man at the head of the table is saying, “that we anticipate an antagonism toward the anchor, on the part of any potential partners?” His flat grey suit’s a touch too big, the collar of his soft blue shirt’s undone, his sparse beard neatly trimmed. “But by anticipating,” he says, “their respective stances vis-à-vis their individualized brand engagement profiles which, let me assure you, we will be reviewing in a thorough manner before we, we take up any,” he’s trailing off, “tête-à-têtes,” blinking quizzically. The room about them’s walled in cool sheets of green-tinged glass on all four sides and more beyond refracting, reflecting, shimmering desk lamps and fluorescents, computer screens, heads popping up over cubicle walls, turning, following the figure swimming up through them, one glass door after another opening before her, “I,” says the man at the head of the table, “excuse me,” as the final glass door swings open, she’s sweeping into the room, Ysabel in her long white coat. “I tried to tell her,” someone’s saying, a receptionist maybe, bobbing in her wake, and “Do you mind,” says an older man, halfway down the table, a hand on his phone on the wood, but she’s glaring at the very other end of the table. “How dare you,” she says.
“Sorry, folks,” says Lymond, screwing the cap onto his fountain pen. “Think we might have the room a minute?”
“I, um,” says the man at the head of the table, “we just got started?”
“And we’ll get right back into it,” says Lymond. “I’m really looking forward to hearing more about this brand engagement. Now,” pushing back his chair, “if you don’t mind,” but already they’re filing out, shirts and blouses of dull green, milky blue, an intrepid puce, awkwardly around past Ysabel all in white. “Um,” says the man who’d been at the head of the table, in his flat grey suit.
“Thanks,” says Lymond, cheerfully. The green glass door swings shut. “How dare I?” he says, to Ysabel. “I’m the King. A certain latitude’s expected.”
“You could’ve gotten her killed,” says Ysabel.
“They’re watching, you know,” he says, tucking a report into the redweld. “Go on. Lean over the table. Slap me. That should be enough to undo all his sacrifice secured.”
She blinks at that, draws back. “Sacrifice,” she says.
“He thought of it as such,” says Lymond, stacking up those diagrams, tapping their edges against the wood. “Now. Slap me, or turn about, and go home.”
“Not until you explain yourself, brother.”
“Oh, Ys,” he says. “If you would play at this table,” he’s tucking the diagrams into a file folder, “you must pay attention.” A wince, as he sets the folder aside. “We find ourselves upon a crux: the duel between the Devil and the Huntsman redounded to our favor, yet the wound’s but freshly healed. Any sudden shift might tear it right back open.” His hands, folded together before him, a thumb pressed tight against a knuckle. “Is that what you would have?”
“I’ve seen the wound,” she says. “He nearly cut her through. The owr does what it can,” and she looks up from the tabletop to meet his eyes, one brown, one blue, both cold. “She sleeps. She’s been asleep since the Mason brought her home.” Leaning down now, both hands planted on the glossy wood. “I’m doing you a courtesy, by answering a question I assume you would eventually have asked?”
A bitter something of a smile. “How is Jo,” he says, “how Jo is, I know how is our Gallowglas: loyal, and effective. I trusted her to do what needed doing, and she went and got it done. Now,” over her sharp intake of breath, “I ask, once more. You know what is at stake. Do you mean to stand against any particular point of our plan?” Leaning in close. “Slap me,” he says. “Or go home.”
She steps back, she turns away. Before she can open the green glass door he says, “Take care, sister, where and when you might vent any further displeasures?” Looking down, at his folded hands. “Our tantrums are expensive.”
“You’ve no idea,” she says, “what could’ve spilled from her heart, had his stroke been a whit more true.”
She opens the door. He shifts his thumb. The thin line of a neat straight cut along the edge of his forefinger, sewn with tiny beads of dark red blood. He lifts it to his lips. “Um,” says someone, the man in the flat grey suit a touch too big, peering into the room. “Everything good?”
“Paper cut,” says Lymond, waving him in. “C’mon, let’s go. Take it from the top.”
Well and I don’t know, dim voices floating up through floorboards loosely laid across the joists, not what we discussed, poets and junkies, epic, like some, there’s a mirror, there’s no one in the mirror, there’s a crack in the glass of it jagged, chased and dappled, splotched with gold, a spangled haze, such a history, working together, that didn’t work, a drip-drip trickle from the faucet, puddles on gold-streaked marble about the sink, but there, it’s gonna be epic, dust gone dark to grey, to black, a lump of it mucked up under the mirror, with the shreds of a burst plastic baggie, this, or this, or this. There’s music, too, loud but languid, strummed guitars, a melodeon, but she’s sitting up in the dark, her head in her hands, and there is no mirror, no light, no sinks or water, no marble countertop, but there is the dust, spangled, glimmering in the milky cloud of her hair, and still the music.
“Well if we have to have a name,” says Gloria Monday.
“It’s something to put on a poster,” says the woman sitting on the nubbled pea-green couch, one hand braced on the curled handle of an orthopædic cane, a big brown scaley purse in her lap.
“Well if that’s all we want,” says Gloria, wrestling to one side a great stretched canvas, a twirling figure calligraphed in slashes of black, to reveal another propped behind it, the next wild scribble of dance. She steps back, behind a tiny silver camera atop a stolid tripod, stoops to peer through it. “We could call it the Lawn,” she says, snapping a picture. Straightening, she looks back and forth, from the painting, to the image of it, now on the enormous white-framed monitor behind her there on the worktable.
“As in get off the?” says the woman standing off to one side, her long black coat done up with brightly silver buttons, and a little grey snap-brim hat on her head.
“That’s not what we discussed,” says Anna in her houndstooth trousers, narrow black-rimmed glasses glaring in the light.
“The house,” says Gloria, taking hold of the canvas. “Run-down and falling apart and poets and junkies and twenty bedrooms to one bathroom and full of,” lifting, “epic,” hoisting it aside, “legend, and, and art,” to reveal the next. “The Lawn,” says Gloria Monday. Her feet are bare, laddered tights printed with overlapping gears, her vast white T-shirt says Robot Fightin’ Boots.
“I liked Weatherall’s,” says Anna. “If we’re going to change it.”
“Yeah, well,” says Gloria, stooping behind the camera again.
“Sounds like some Harry Potter shit,” says the woman in the long black coat.
“Jilting of,” says Gloria, snapping another picture. “Granny Weatherall? Been a while, since you been in high school?” The woman on the couch snorts up a laugh, sits up, hefting her cane. “How about,” she says, pointing the wide rubber foot of it out, toward the cavernous space beyond, “this building,” the boxes, equipment, the bulks of whatever it is under tarps shoved off to either side, stacked in the stalls that one by one march down the long high walls, “the history,” soaked in soft grey light depending from up under the rafters, the windows there scrubbed clean of filth, scraped clear of paint, “a name should honor that.”
“It was a warehouse for vegetables,” says Gloria.
“A farmers’ market,” says the woman on the couch, “built by Italian immigrants, working together. Cooperatively.”
“Snot Market,” says Gloria, “Grime Market, that didn’t work,” grabbing the next canvas, “Pus Market has a certain punch,” hauling it aside, “but Anna didn’t like any of those, and anyway it’s antique punk bullshit. Effluvial Plane I kinda liked, but that’s too, much, y’know?”
“How old are you?” says the woman all in black.
“Fuck you,” says Gloria. “That’s how old I am.”
“Gloria,” says Anna.
“No, fuck this,” snarls Gloria. “We got the space. We’re doing the thing. It’s gonna be epic. And you can either get on board, get your, people, involved,” the woman on the couch, clutching her purse, “you can write about it like you know what’s gonna happen,” the woman all in black, hands in her pockets, smirking, “or you can scramble to catch up after, like everyone else.”
“Ms. Thorpe, we must apologize,” says Anna, after a moment, but “No, no,” says the woman all in black, “tempers run hot and you let them out and that’s fine, and then you stop and you take a deep breath and you think. Maybe you do this, or maybe tomorrow you’re kicked out for squatting. You don’t–”
“Hey, Anna!” says Gloria. “What’s the owner got to say, about us being here?”
“There are no objections,” says Anna, but Thorpe looks away, rolling her eyes. “I did my homework,” she says, lifting her little grey hat, “or I wouldn’t be here at all,” scratching her head, her dark hair short, swept back. “You’re Suzette Wilson, you’re Tom Wilson’s daughter, and I’m sorry for your loss, but the title to this pile is hardly as clear-cut as,” but Gloria’s saying, “This, this is my place,” as Thorpe says “that’s before we even get into the questions of insurance, and zoning, and inspections,” but Gloria’s shouting “S1! Last Thursday! The Teahouse! You think they waited around for fucking paperwork?”
Anna and the woman on the couch, watching them both, Gloria seething, Thorpe settling her hat on her head, “Well,” she’s saying, tucking her hands in the pockets of her coat, “S1 is street-legal now, yeah, and the Teahouse? That was in Sellwood? Long gone. And you have any idea how much the merchants on Alberta pay the city for extra cops?” A shrug, and that smirk warms to something more sympathetic. “You want to beg forgiveness instead of ask permission and I can respect that, but there’s this delicate balance. You gotta be big enough to get noticed, but you can’t be so big you get noticed, you know?” Looking out, over the cavernous space below. “And all this you want to do in a week.” Turning back, hands spread in a hapless shrug, a burble of sound, “I like you,” she says, “I do, I like the idea,” looking up. It sounds like someone’s singing up there.
Up there, up at the edge of the planks laid across the joists, up by the brief ladder bolted to the wall a couple of long bare legs kicked over and orange underpants, ee, ee-oh nor, the keening voice a grunt, doo da-da dee, doo da-da dee, down the ladder to the walkway up there, a wild mad cloud of white-gold hair, “and quickly was received, enthusiastically,” and Thorpe looks down, over at the paintings leaned, at the image on the enormous monitor. “Some say that it had more to do with her,” the singer’s making her way, hand on the railing, “improper sense of dress, than her talent, or her diligence,” opening a door up there, painted with letters that possibly once said Ranchers, or Gardeners, and closing it muffles her song. “I’m sorry,” says Anna, drawing back their attention. “It seems Marfisa forgot we were meeting this morning.”
“I’ve seen,” says Thorpe, “I’ve heard her, before.”
“Salt and Straw,” says the woman on the couch, but then, lifting a finger, “no, that’s the ice cream.”
“She kinda came with the place,” says Gloria. Up there a crash of water, flushing, that door opens, Marfisa’s stepping out, “Cartier Bresson!” she shouts. “Max Ernst, Paul Eluard, George Bataille,” as she’s making her way back along the wall above them. “Their misogyny really irritated her, but she wasn’t, she,” stopping, standing there, wavering a little, looking down at them. Absently scratching just beneath a breast, and sunlight flashing from the gold dust spangling her skin.
“I heard you play once,” says Thorpe, abruptly.
Her wide smile spreading, Marfisa tips back her white-gold head, “Lee, ee-oh nor!” she sings, reaching for the ladder. “Lee, ee-oh nor!” Climbing back up toward the makeshift floor above.
“Stone and Salt!” says the woman on the couch. “That was it.”
Ding the microwave, she opens the door of it, reaches in with a hot pad for a steaming pink mug that says Sophia & Dorothy & Blanche & Rose. In she dunks a purple octopus infuser, dandling its delicate chain a moment. Color blooms.
Out of the kitchen, across the living room, dark wood paneling, grey-green shag, shuff and snap of her slippers into a nook of a hall, too brightly lit. She nudges open a door left ajar, into a small dark room lit only by sunlight staining the edges of heavy curtains drawn, and almost entirely filled by a great wide bed. “I’ve brought tea,” she says, setting the mug on the nightstand in the corner. “Hey.” Sitting on the edge of the bed. “I called Reg,” she says, reaching along the margin of the thick dark comforter, and a gentle stroke for the blond head there, turned away. “Told him we’d need another week. He wasn’t happy, but hey. Fuck him.” Tucking a lock of her own hair, as blond, as straight, behind her ear. “Chrissie,” she says. “Chér.”
“I don’t want any tea.”
“Yeah, well,” says Ettie, and she gets to her feet with a sigh. “This would be why I stick with men. They can’t break your heart.”
The door swings open, for a moment all’s revealed, scarred floor and drifts of grit against the bar, peeling dimpled paint along the front of it and its cracked vinyl bumper, dust furring the bottles along the top shelf, the washed-out flyspecked neon lights, the bartender, spiky hair flared palely to a golden brown, hand up against the raw daylight, skinny arm festooned with shadowy tattoos, “Jacks?” says Jessie, blinking, but the light’s swallowed away as the door swings shut, and dimness closes about the warm neon, the sparkle of glass, the rattle of drums and a couple of jangled chords, bubbling bass, “Jackie?” says the bartender, his hair gone black. “Ah, naw. She ain’t here.”
“Oh,” says Jessie, in her puffy pink parka. “Sorry. I thought,” and she shakes her head, Americans were thus denied, someone’s singing, with the guitar and the drums, all right to travel to the other side. “She usually works mornings,” says Jessie. “Any idea when she’s in next?”
“No, see,” says the bartender, “I mean, she’s not here? Anymore?” Folding those skinny arms, leaning his elbows on the bar. “And we can’t be giving out people’s schedules, come on. Basic security.”
“I’m a friend,” says Jessie, and then, “I used to dance here? About a year, year and a half ago. Went by Rain?”
“If you’re a friend,” says the bartender, “I mean, she left, what, right after the holidays? Two, three months ago? So, I mean,” and he spreads his hands. “Want something to drink?”
“Where’d she go?” says Jessie.
“I don’t know, Eugene or something? But even if I did I couldn’t tell you, because, security, you know. Coffee? Anything?”
Betcha my life, there’d be no violence there, and she opens her mouth to speak but everything lights up again, washed out, as the door swings open, two women, raincoat, trench coat, gym bag and backpack, nodding to the bartender who waves hello as they head through empty tables past the empty little stage, toward the nondescript door back there. “How about Chilli,” says Jessie. “He back there?”
“He, naw, Chilli, we’re,” the bartender jumps as she walks away, “we’re under new management,” he calls after her, “so,” but there’s confusion by that nondescript door as it opens, those women stepping through around and past a man who’s stepping out, brown leather vest and rich red hair flopping from a widow’s peak, “I need you to,” the bartender’s saying. Jessie waves him off. “It’s Gaveston,” she says. “I know Gav.”
But Gaveston’s holding the door for someone else, a tall woman in a white track suit, short hair greenly yellow, and Jessie stops short, in the midst of the empty tables. “Chariot?” she says. The tall woman’s saying something to Gaveston, as she heads off past the little stage. “Iona?” says Jessie, and the tall woman looks over to see her there in pink. “Oh,” she says, stopped short. “Rain.”
“Is she here?” says Jessie. “The,” a cough, “the Princess? Uh, Queen? Ysabel?”
Iona’s shaking her head, “I’m merely here on her behalf,” she says, stepping away, but “Iona,” says Jessie, “Chariot, tell her, please,” and Iona stops, looks back. “Yes?” she says.
Jessie looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “Don’t tell her anything. Not even, that you saw me.”
“As you wish,” says Iona. Jessie’s still looking away, there among the empty tables. I’d want the giddy-up, the guitar jangles, I’d want to live it up, I’d want the pick-me-up, and the nondescript door back there’s now shut. The bartender isn’t behind the bar that flares, scoured once more by daylight as Iona opens the door outside. She steps through, the door swings shut, the darkness returns.
Nox Sea Raid say the letters punched in light across the screen. Choose Your Squad swooshes in below. A husky contralto says Set em up Sarge over the speakers, and the guy on the beanbag thumbs and clicks the controller in his lap, wheeling the view on the screen about a motley crew of centaurs, each stepping up to present arms as the focus settles fleetingly on them, uttering a catch-phrase, Rock an roll, rack em and pack em, they will fear my song, buzzbombs why’s it have to be buzzbombs, reportin for beauty! rock an rack em rock an pack em why’s it have to fear my rock an roll an reportin! “This is gonna suck,” says the guy on the beanbag, “I need more’n one tank for this.” Wrinkles about his eyes and gingery stubble along his jaw. “Whaddaya think,” he says, looking away from the screen, “would a Mixolydian,” but there’s nobody beside him, there’s a man headed away, over toward the grand dark staircase, dodging around a dark wood column, his sweater bulky, red, he’s looking up to the woman stopped there on the stairs, black trousers, a bowtie unclipped about her winged collar. “Long as he needs,” she’s saying, and “Oh,” says the guy on the beanbag, turning back to the screen, “Ellen’s home.” Clicking through the figures on the screen, rock an roll, reportin for beauty, they will fear, “The hell was he doing, wearing my shirt?” and the guy on the beanbag looks up again at that, the man in the red sweater a step or two up the stairs, and Ellen above him, maybe a shrug, “It looks better on him,” she’s saying, turning away. Why’s it have to be, says the centaur on the screen. Rack em!
Post-it® Brand is a trademark of 3M. “Leonor,” written by Katell Keineg, copyright holder unknown. The Original Girls Mug is available from the Diesel Sweeties store. “Dancin’ at the Bains Douche,” written by August Darnell, copyright holder unknown.
“Quite distressing,” says the older man, there in the wingback chair. “Though one does not wish to play the churl. A certain degree of disarray must certainly be allowed, given the shocks– the challenge, the duel–”
“Allowed?” says Agravante, there by the yellow stone fireplace, an elbow up on the mantel, and the older man takes a sip of milky tea from a thin bone china cup. “How is the King’s champion, by the way?” he says.
“Death’s door,” says Agravante. There on the mantel by his elbow a fiendish little basket-box, carved from a chunk of dark red wood. “Shame,” says the older man, shaking his head, stiff grey curls swept back, and the collar of his shirt undone, a blue scarf knotted tidily about his throat. “Though it is distasteful, how they might linger, on that threshold? Neither here, nor there,” and another sip of tea.
“What is it that distresses you, Medardus,” says Agravante. White-gold locks tied neatly black, his grey suit shot with blue.
“It’s a delicate question I’d have answered, Pinabel,” says the older man, setting the cup in the saucer on his lap, clink. “Does the King yet mean to pursue his bold vision?”
Agravante’s brow pinches. “Of course,” he says. “Insofar as I know.”
Medardus smiles. “Delicately put,” he says. “It’s been two days.”
“These things take time.”
“Two days,” says Medardus, “since he took from me mine offer,” knobbled fingers closing in a fist, drawn up by his yet-mild smile. “And not a word said since.”
“There’s much to be considered,” says Agravante. “Four of you do vie for her hand.”
“Please, Pinabel,” says Medardus, dropping his hand, and a clatter of cup and saucer. “It’s an indulgence to pretend the choice isn’t manifestly clear– that mine is not the best offering.”
“The best, perhaps,” says Agravante. “But sufficient?” A slatey shoulder shrugs.
“The King would demand more?”
“How can I answer that,” says Agravante, “when I know nothing of what you’ve promised, or he might require.”
“Nothing,” says Medardus, still smiling. “Such a delicate word.” Setting cup and saucer on the low table between them. “I would hope,” he says, “it could always be said that the Hound has done well by Medardus,” and he knots those knobby fingers in his lap. “Much as it can be said, to a surety, that Medardus has done well by the Hound.”
Rather carefully, Agravante does not smile at that, or nod, his shoulders do not move, nor does his arm, there by the basket-box. “Of course,” he says.
“But it’s also said,” says Medardus, “that a fear grips your court: that the line is not unbroken. That the Queen, despite her, prodigious recovery, has no Bride of her own. That your King’s hand, howsomever reluctantly, is forced. That he means,” and here Medardus leans forward, elbows on knees, “to take the Princess for himself, and that is why our offers go unanswered.” Sitting back, a dismissive fillip of his fingers. “Or so it’s said.”
“By some,” says Agravante.
“Indeed,” says Medardus.
“But not to me,” says Agravante.
“Ah.” Medardus pushes himself to his feet. “Tell me,” he says, as Agravante leads him out of the little drawing room, “how fares the Count?”
“Grandfather?” says Agravante, pushing open the sliding wood-paneled door. “He sleeps.” Beyond, a narrow hall, in the shadow of a long straight staircase.
“Oh,” he says. “It’s you.” A glass of wine in his hand, something dark. “She isn’t here.”
“She will be, soon enough,” says Marfisa, muddy boot up on the side porch step. “Jason, can I just, wait inside?” The collar of her sheepskin coat turned up, loose white hair stirred by a gust. He steps back, the door held open, his lips a sour purse between his mustache and his dull red beard.
Up the steps into a mud room, painted blue, forgotten coats and a tangle of umbrellas, a scooter, a chalkboard palimpsested with to-dos and shopping lists, “Ah ah,” he’s saying, pointing, thick-lensed glasses blanked out by the ceiling light, and she scrubs her boots against a mat before stepping up into a kitchen to the left there, ruddy stove and a steaming pot of something, stainless steel refrigerator hung about with coupons and note cards, a calendar, a math test festooned with red checks and gold stars, past a breakfast bar sloppily piled with newspapers and a box of soda cans, into a narrow sitting room, a low brown couch, a girl tucked at one end of it, under a red and yellow blanket, and pink headphones startling against her dark hair, watching something on the tablet on her lap. “Grace,” says Jason, still in the kitchen, but she’s already snatching off the headphones, a burst of chirpy music, as Marfisa steps about the low coffee table. “Hey, Mar,” says the girl on the couch, and “Grace,” says Jason again, “upstairs,” as Marfisa sits herself at the other end. Something bulky’s tucked in her coat, she leans over the table, pulling it out, a flat paper sack that spills out a sheaf of handbills, goldenrod pages splashed with black lines, a dancer rendered in calligraphy, and each marked by the green dot of an eye. “Oh, hey,” says the girl, springing from under the blanket, all elbows and knees and clattering headphones, “is that,” says Jason says “Grace!” again, but she’s already scooped up a handbill, turning it over and back again, nothing else to it but little pull-tabs at the bottom, each printed with an elaborately arabesqued question mark. “You’re putting these up?”
Marfisa shrugs. “You’ve seen them?”
“Yesterday, at Mississippi Pizza?” says Grace. “Did you hang ’em there?” Marfisa shrugs again. “The Mercury just had a thing about these things, like how nobody knows what they are, or who’s, it’s, it’s you! You’re doing it! Is it like, are you putting the band back together?”
“Grace,” says Jason.
“What,” snaps Grace, rolling her eyes away.
“Upstairs,” he says, “now. Flashcards till dinner.”
“Jason,” she says, but she’s kicking off the couch, scooping up the tablet, stomping around the table when back that way there’s a clatter and a squeak of hinges from that side porch, “I’m home!” cries someone, and “Carol!” cries Grace, turning on a dime, scampering off past Jason, through the kitchen, “Guess who’s here!”
Marfisa leans forward, slipping the handbills back in the sack, not looking up at Jason looking down at her.
And there’s Carol, by the breakfast bar, setting a brown leather book bag on the carpet. Draped in a brown and yellow striped serape, her dark hair neatly short. “Mar,” she says. “How are you.”
“Well as I might,” says Marfisa, looking up, pushing back a wave of white-gold hair. “What would you say to a chance to sing again, together?”
A hallway narrow, dim, dark doors to either side, silvery numerals set in the walls by each, slender 1s, a wiry 7, great round-bellied 6es, an 8, a 9. Iona in her yellow track suit leads the way around a corner, stops before the door at the end of the hall. 620, the numerals beside it. She plucks a white card from a pocket, holds it up before slipping it into the slot above the knob. “I miss keys,” she says, as the lock chunks, a green light flicking on. “These may be better, but not in any way that matters.” She opens the door. “Go on,” she says.
Within brown walls and gold, bathed in daylight hazed by yellow curtains drawn over corner windows. A comfortable yellow chair, a reading table and a lamp, unlit. A wide bed draped in blue and brown and at the foot of it, sat tailor-fashion, Ysabel, in a white chemise, and soft white leg-warmers thickly rumpled. “Starling,” she says, with a smile.
“My Queen,” says the Starling, a shadow there by yellow Iona, black jeans, black sweatshirt, the hood of it up. “This is not our usual Thursday,” she says, in not much more than a whisper.
“This isn’t a Thursday,” says Ysabel, nodding to Iona, who steps out, closing the door behind her. “This is a whole weekend, if you’d like.”
“But I must dance, ma’am,” says the Starling. “Today and tonight, at the club, and Saturday–”
“It has been cleared, with your, manager,” says Ysabel. “You’re free, till Monday.”
“Free to be here, with you,” says the Starling. And then, “If it’s just to be the two of us?” Her words worn thin.
“If you’d like,” says Ysabel. “Or, step back through that door. The Chariot will happily take you anywhere in the city you may wish to go.”
The Starling reaches for the strap of the black gym bag slung from her shoulder. “I don’t mind,” she says, “being with you. I’ll just go change,” but “No,” says Ysabel, quickly, “Starling, no. Put that down. Sit with me.”
“My Queen,” says the Starling. “I am not who I am, when I’m with you.”
“Please,” says Ysabel. “Sit.”
The gym bag slumps to the speckled brown carpet. Stepping over, the Starling stands a moment before the foot of that bed, and Ysabel sat there, smiling up, but then she turns, the Starling, and finds the yellow chair behind her, and sits, a darkness in that weak light.
“I’m glad you came,” says Ysabel.
“My Queen desired it,” says the Starling.
“I thought,” says Ysabel, looking away. “I’d thought today that I might dance for you. I have danced, you know. At a party. She said I was quite good.”
“Of course,” says the Starling.
“I settled on an outfit,” says Ysabel, looking down at herself, “nothing too elaborate,” and “Good,” says the Starling, “but,” says Ysabel, “I’ve been flummoxed by my lips. What should the color be?” A hand, lifted to her mouth, her hair, “White?” she says. “To go with the ensemble? Or would that be too much? Would a simple red be enough?”
“No one pays attention to the lipstick,” says the Starling.
“You do,” says Ysabel, quickly, even sharply, and then, “You take such care, with yours.”
That hood shifts, down, to one side, dim light passing over her chin, the tip of her nose. “White’s better for the stage,” she says. “Too bold for such close quarters.”
“A simple red it is.”
“Your majesty is sad,” says the Starling, then. “Why should that be?”
“I,” says Ysabel, shoulders lifting, and her chin, a retort swelling but then suddenly pricked, deflating, and she looks away. “Affairs of the city,” she says.
“Not the heart, then?” says the Starling. “Nor the hips?”
Ysabel untucks herself, a bare foot lowered to the carpet, and her hands on the edge of the bed. “Tell me,” she says. “Do you know the smell, of blood?”
That shadow sits up. “I do, ma’am,” says the Starling.
“She sleeps,” Ysabel’s saying. “Peacefully. Her wound is poulticed with a fief’s portion. The bleeding’s long since stopped, but,” and she takes in a deep breath, shivering at the top of it, a sigh, “wherever I go in those rooms I still can smell it, that– tang, like an armor hot from the sun, and I,” but the Starling’s standing, stepping over, she kneels at the foot of the bed, reaches for a hand that Ysabel lifts away, “here I am,” she says, “holed up in a hotel across town.”
The Starling sits back on her heels. “Would you rather go to her?” but Ysabel’s shaking her head, “The Mason,” she says, “watches over her. She wants for nothing. I am,” but then she stops, and the Starling catches her hand, draws it down, covers it with her own. Ysabel says, “My brother once told me,” but then she stops again, blinking rapidly, looking down at the Starling looking up from under her black hood. “He was once a little boy,” says Ysabel. “Did you know that?”
“The King,” says the Starling, “yes, ma’am, of course. I remember those days.”
“Not even a Prince, just an infant, he came to me, in the little garden, and took my hand, and asked me, sister, why are you crying?” Turning her hand in the Starling’s hand, taking hold of it, squeezing. “And I said, because I do not wish to wed. But I am the Bride, I said, and one day a King will come, and I must take his hand. Whether I will or no, I must, but he,” looking away, “he swore to me, then and there, most earnestly, that he would one day be the King, that I might never need take anyone’s hand.”
The Starling says, “And he did just that.”
“My brother,” says Ysabel, “the King, this,” and her eyes close, the lashes of them shining, “city,” she says, and her mouth closes about another, unsaid word, she swallows, and a lick at her lips. “Jo,” she says.
“My Queen,” says the Starling. “I will go, and change, and dance for you, to take your mind,” but “No,” says Ysabel, leaning forward, her hands on the Starling’s shoulders, “do not change, do not dress, do not perform,” lifting a hand, right to the very hem of that hood, but then pulled back, withdrawn. “I would see you just as you are,” she says, her hands once more in her lap.
“But, my lady,” says the Starling, and she reaches up to draw back that hood. “I am always as I am.” Black hair uncurled, slicked back, clipped down to stubble along her temples, about those ears. Her cheeks, the line of that jaw. The nose. Those eyes, only a hazeled hint of green. Thin lips unpainted, upturned, parting as Ysabel leans close to say, “And you are with me,” and then a feathery kiss, tugging at the Starling’s hands, lifting, the Starling who stands up before her, and her hands fall to the Starling’s hips, rough black denim, the belt loops, her thumb, the wide leather belt, looking up, those green eyes. She yanks at the bulky black sweatshirt, “Get this off,” she says, and the Starling lifts it up and off and tosses it aside. Bare now from the waist up, and the torso of her lean and long, and her long arms sinewy lowering, curling, Ysabel’s darkly hands caught up against the smooth pale chest of her by those wide white hands, and the backs of them snarled with thick blue veins.
“Now would you have me go and change?” murmurs the Starling.
“But you are beautiful,” says Ysabel, slipping her hands free, reaching for the tongue of the belt. The buckle jangles. “Majesty,” says the Starling, “I am many things, but,” and a gasp, at the kiss pressed there below her shadowed navel, as those black jeans loosen, lop, as Ysabel’s fingers dip within to uncurl a palely slender cock, and a stroke for the lengthening lift of it, “oh,” says the Starling, “my Queen, you needn’t,” as her hand cups Ysabel’s face.
“But do you want me to,” says Ysabel, and the Starling, shivering, nods. “The principles, I should think,” says Ysabel, “are essentially the same?” And a lick of a kiss for the tip of it, there on her palm.
Pinned to the pole a mulching bark of posters, flyers, handbills, postcards, lapped and shingled one over another, rain-dimpled, sun-faded, twisted, torn, defaced, Thrash or Die, April Showers Burlesque, Snap! at the Holocene, Anodyne Presents, Missing Dog, Laughing Horse, Drum Circle Saturday Rain or Shine, Cinco de Mayo on the Waterfront, big black letters on an enormous sheet, Grupo Samurjay, Grupo Maravilla, Los Supremos de Los Hermanos Flores, Woodburn Rocks. As the bus pulls away she’s pushing back her black hair looking up toward the top of that slithery bristling treeline, there where handfuls of old notices have been ripped away leaving crowded dozens of denuded staples, glinting, by a metal sign that says No Parking This Block, a relatively fresh sheet of goldenrod paper, mad black scribbles limning a dancer, a single eye of bright green ink. She reaches up, to the pull-tabs fluttering the bottom of it, each printed with only an elaborately arabesqued question mark. Her other hand holds fast a black leather knapsack slung from the shoulder of her slick black jacket. Her glasses with thick black frames. With a sudden yank she rips the handbill down.
A broad porch with four front doors set one right next to another, and she unlocks, slips through the third of them, and up an immediate steep staircase, narrow between dark walls, unlit, that yellow page bright in her hand. Around the wall at the top of the stairs through an open room a couch the floor before it piled with cardboard boxes into a long hall once painted white, some time ago, lit by daylight seeping in from somewhere else. At the end of it a dark room, curtains drawn, and she closes the door behind her, a shadow in the shadows. Flump of the knapsack, dropped to the floor, creaking footstep, the thick click of a switch. Light blares from naked bulbs in the fixture in the middle of the ceiling, pink springs from the walls all whorled curlicues and faded bouquets, the bed there, skewed bedclothes striped dull brown and beige, and on the floor at the foot of it a great conical pile knee-high or more of gleaming golden dust.
She steps around it, jacket half-unzipped. A ridge of the pile has settled, slumped, dust trailed over the floor away from it, and the goldenrod poster drops, crumpled, from the hand she’s lifting to her throat, to the bit of black lace tied there. Steps back, around the bed. She grabs a little hand broom from the nightstand. Kneels down by the pile. Begins to sweep up the goldstuff, careful with each thread and grain.
Eyelids a-twitch, lips parting just to say not even a whisper, maybe a number, counting, nine or ten, eleven, those lids blink open over mud-colored eyes that swivel, narrow, try to focus, a gleaming edge there, mirror-bright, shifting as she blinks the length of it flat and smooth and slender, somehow deep within it coiling whorls of light and dark chased up and down a shallow groove that cleanly stretches up and up to a glittering net there on the pillow, wiry strands that knot a cage about a simple hilt she jerks away, kicks back sitting up, “Shit,” she says, as the sword’s tangled in the sheets, teetering at the edge of the futon. She’s bent over, thin white T-shirt, wine-red hair, rubbing her shin, a thin dark line of blood beading down by her ankle, “Shit,” she says, again. Snatching the hilt she whips the blade free from the sheets, “this fucking,” but it turns in her hand, a wrench and away it flies across the room to crack and a wibble it’s stabbed the white wall there by the plain black scabbard, hung from a nail, and the painted skull-mask also, the mane of it stirred by that thrust. Jo blinks. “Okay,” she says, to herself.
Without, the hallway’s dark, the little lights strung along the ceiling unlit. The kitchen beyond is empty, only glancing daylight and shadows. Jo leans over to knock at the door across the hall, “Ysabel?” she says, turning the knob. The room within all yellow and white, gauzy curtains, big bed neatly made, the armoire shut, and nothing draped over the dressing screen in the corner. “Ysabel?” says Jo again, but something, she looks down. Something lightly, barely there, faintly wisps, like down, like ash, falling from, brushing her foot, past her knee, caught there in the hem of her T-shirt, falling from, she lifts it, peering down at her belly beneath, and the line that climbs it packed with an ashen crust and a last few spangles of gold and, she touches it crumbling, flaking away, the pink skin taut beneath.
Back against the jamb. Dropping the hem of the shirt her hand to her breast, and quick wincing shallow breaths. Lurching up across and over to the dresser, a bouquet of heavy-headed peonies pink and yellow, she grabs a small brass box and pries it open, frees a cigarette, and a ragged book of matches.
The hall, the back room, dark, the back door and out, outside, out in the grass, under the sky, sunlight and blue sky, and glowering clouds behind, white and blue and grey and blue and greenly black, swollen with the coming rain. Fitting the cigarette to her lips but even as she opens the matchbook she’s falling to her knees in the lushly green, soft grass out to the parapets to either side, and she coughs up a sob, another, doubled over on her shaking shuddering self, her hand a fist to her chest.
The cigarette falls white to the grass before her. Feathers of grey-white ash caught about it, and sparks of gold.
A call behind her, muffled by walls and doors. Sitting up she catches, holds her breath. Swallows. A slam back there, distant, bump of a footfall, she wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and leans forward getting her feet under herself but the back door bangs open boot-thump someone shouting and she springs up turns her arm flung out the sword
The sword in her hand–
Her hand, her arm extended shoulder dropped her torso sidelong and her front foot planted, off leg leaned back straight and true, off hand slung back to balance the thrust that’s ended sword-tip snagged in a corner of his unzipped shortwaisted jacket yanked up one side he’s twisted, turned away from it, both arms flung up and alarm gently folding his face.
“Oh God,” says Jo, dropping the blade, the ring of it soft on the grass.
“You’re awake,” says Luys, lowering his arms. Brushing the front of his soft brown jacket, his finger finding the hole punched there. “Your coat,” says Jo, “I’m so, sorry,” but “No sin espinas,” he’s saying, almost to himself, holding out a hand, “You are awake,” he says, but she rushes past that hand to crash into him tumbling her arms about him there on the rooftop under the clouds, she’s kissing his throat and then as he lowers his head she looks up to kiss his mouth, his mouth.
Eyelids twitching over mud-colored eyes that widen, startled, but then she smiles, stretching under the comforter, lifting her bare arms up and out and sighing deeply, turning on her side. There’s Ysabel sitting on the floor by the futon, chin on her folded hands. “You’re awake,” she whispers.
“Yup,” says Jo, reaching out to stroke her cheek, leaning in for a kiss.
“He isn’t,” mutters Ysabel, against her lips.
Jo rolls back. There on the other pillow a cap of black hair turned away, a broad brown back, hillocks and bunches of muscle soft and still. “Poor tuckered boy,” she says.
“This must be the first he’s slept since you were struck.”
“He stepped out, just for a minute, and that’s when I woke up. He was, so apologetic,” her hand laid gently on that great shoulder.
“Come,” says Ysabel, getting to her feet, and Jo rolls back, looks up to her standing over the futon, a bulky fisherman’s sweater over a loose white gown, a hand held out. “I’m,” says Jo, the comforter clutched to her chest, “I need to,” and Ysabel steps back, “If you must,” she says, headed for the door. “But come.”
Jo sits up. Drops the comforter. Luys doesn’t stir. She’s looking down, at the clean pink line drawn down her skin, and her fist pressed over her heart.
Up the thin white T-shirt from the floor and over her head she’s standing, the light about uncertain, shrouded in the doubting rain outside. On the wall there by the door the painted skull-mask and its mane hung motionless, and slung from its leather strap the plain black scabbard, and snug within, her sword.
“Ysabel?” she says, hand on the knob of the door across the hall, under the little yellow lights, but a wrenching screech from the bathroom, the crash of water, the light bright within. Jo lets go of the knob.
Ysabel’s already doffed her sweater. “Go on,” she says, over the rushing water, wrestling with the gown she’s tugging up over her head, letting it drop, and only a bit of mushroom-colored silk and ivory lace about her hips. “You,” says Jo. “You want to. Turn, some owr.” Sitting with some care on the edge of the tub, her hand, hovering uncertainly before her breast. “Look, if this is about replacing what you had to, I mean, for me, there’s still, the surplus? From a couple weeks ago?” Ysabel’s stepped away, toward the sink, the jagged oblong of mirror set in the wall above it. “Unless– Christ, Ysabel, how much did it take to sew me up?”
Ysabel’s picked something up, a small blue balloon tied off at one end, swollen with liquid weight. She slops it into Jo’s hand, and “This,” says Jo, poking it with a finger, “this is a condom.”
“I’ve been,” says Ysabel, “with the Starling.”
“Oh,” says Jo.
“We must do right by her.”
“Okay,” says Jo, the condom in her hand. “But–”
“With all that we’ve been able to do, with the turning, with surpassing our mother and restoring the, the city,” and she sighs. “We,” she says, quietly, under the churn of falling water, “I, wronged Chrissie. I would not do that, to the Starling.”
“Okay,” says Jo.
“I would give this back to her as gold, and set her free.”
“But,” says Jo, “I mean, right now. You want to do this.”
“Are you up for it?” says Ysabel. “Are you still in pain?”
Jo leans back, over the steaming tub, twisting the faucets squeak and groan. “Eh,” she says, as the flow of water gurgles to a stop. “Mostly tired. Shaky, weak-as-a-kitten tired. Which, I mean, I just woke up, you know?” One last twist of the faucet.
“You were strong enough to bear the Mason’s weight,” says Ysabel, in the silence.
Jo sits up. “The fuck is that supposed to mean,” she says.
“Show me,” says Ysabel. “Your wound.” Stepping close, taking Jo’s hands in her own, and that small blue egg clutched between them. “Show me how it healed.”
Jo steps back, lifts up the hem of her T-shirt, and Ysabel kneels then on the white tile before her, and strokes that faintly puckered seam, stitched up from crease of thigh and up across the belly. “Your skin,” she says. “It remembers.”
“This time,” says Jo, letting the shirt fall, but Ysabel catches it, lifts it up again, “don’t,” says Jo, but “Show me,” says Ysabel, and “I did,” says Jo, stepping back, away, but Ysabel stands, tugs, “the rest of it,” she’s saying, “what did it do,” and Jo catches Ysabel’s hand, “hey” and “stop” and “don’t” as she yanks and twists, “I must see it!” cries Ysabel, “What is over your heart!” and that little blue balloon squirts free to arc to fall to burst there on the floor.
“Shit,” says Jo.
The deflated condom, darker now, the knot skewed by a rent, the milkily viscous splotch frothed desultorily with bubbles popping as it spills lazily into the grout between tiny hexagonal tiles.
“Shit,” says Jo, again. “I’m, I’m sorry.” Stepping back. “Can you, I mean, but you can just, get more. Right?” One small step, a shift of weight, back in. “Right?”
“Gallowglas,” says Ysabel, quietly, still looking down at the mess. “Leave us.”
“Gah,” she says, shutting the big front door on a dripping susurrus, shaking herself from her sodden coat. “Wasn’t it, like, seventy-five yesterday, or something?” Unwinding a gauzy stretch of scarf. There in the open collar of her white shit a thicket of black ink, leaves and branches, a songbird’s beak.
“Hey,” says the big man coming up to her, there by the grand dark staircase, “we need to talk.” An explosion rattles the windows, and “Aw, crap,” she says, “is he playing that again?” Leaning past him, “Hey!” she yells, at the guy on the beanbag before the garish television screen. “Turn that down!”
“Ellen,” says the big man before her, shawl-collared sweater over a T-shirt that says Dave’s Dog Dave. “It’s about,” and he points up, at the ceiling, “him.”
“Yeah?” The receding rat-a-tat of gunfire.
“How long, exactly, will he be staying?”
She shrugs. “Long as he needs, Dan.”
“I don’t mean to tell you your business–”
“So don’t,” she says, stepping up onto the stairs, but he moves in close, “None of the rest of us know him,” he says. Another dulled whump of explosion. “My friend,” says Ellen, “my room, my,” she frowns, looks away, “business,” she says, taking another step up.
“Ellen!” says Dan, starting up behind her. “Ellen, what the hell was he doing, wearing my shirt?”
She’s still frowning, looking down, at her feet on the stairs, at him below. “You know what he was doing, Dan,” she says, and up she goes.
A single glass vase, a singular stalk of artificial pussy willow, and bolted to the wall above a wooden sign, scrolled edges and gilt letters that say Rooms 201– 209, Rooms 221– 232, and frilly arrows pointing left and right. She scoops her phone out of her pink and orange parka, flips it open, thumbs to a text message that says only 213. Snaps it shut, heads off to the left, pink and orange and white yoga pants, red canvas Keds, her yellow hair loose about her shoulders.
Cream doors to either side down dull beige walls. She stops by the one that gilded says 213. Tips her head back and forth, shakes out her hands. Unzips her parka, and underneath a white sports bra, her midriff bare. She knocks.
The man who opens the door’s a tangle of blond hair and a big blond beard, and his white blouse half undone. “Not here,” he says, and then, relaxing, “Oh?” he says.
“Harper,” says Jessie, her smile tight, her lips shellacked a glossy pink, her eyeshadow pink and a glittery silver frost.
“Rain,” says the Harper. “Been a while.”
“I went, last week, down to the club,” she says, and “New management,” he says, with a weary shake of his head. “I know!” says Jessie. “The Stirrup. Can you believe it?”
He steps back, opening the door. “Wouldn’t give you a slot, would he.”
“He told me where to find you,” says Jessie, stepping in.
“You smell like a lollipop,” says the Harper.
“Like it?” Past a bathroom and a closet the room opens up under bright ceiling lights, a low dresser, an exorbitant television set, a couple of queen-sized beds, one mounded with stacks of white boxes, and on each of them a photo of what’s presumably inside, keyboards, music players, remotes, phones, and the other bed a rumpled mess of blankets and pillows piled, a plate of crumbs, an empty soda bottle clinked beside. The Harper in that white blouse and his bright green boxer briefs, his bare legs blondly furred. “Did I wake you?” says Jessie.
“You, who worked your way up under a Duke, a Queen,” he says. “Must you now go trawling for humble knights?”
“Chilli,” she says, “can we just do this?”
“Do what, my– ah, forgive me.” He combs his fingers through his beard. “Away from court as I am, I’ve no idea of the current fashion in addressing former concubines.”
“Rain,” sighs Jessie, “is fine.” Her hands in the pockets of her parka.
“Then, my rainy Rain,” says the Harper, “a hundred other clubs await, and none of ’em run by me; go! Dance!” and a magnanimous sweep of his hand toward the door. “You have my blessing.”
“But I need the money, now, is the thing.”
“Now?” A scuff of laughter. “I’m not a bank.”
“Why not?” A deep breath, pink-shaded eyes a-squint, “You forget, Chilli. I’ve seen the dukedom’s books. I know what you bring in, running girls.”
He folds his arms. “You want me taking care of you.”
“I want you to give me two thousand dollars,” says Jessie, and he guffaws. “Tonight,” she says. “And then, this weekend, I work for you. Whatever I make, it’s yours. Send someone with me,” she says, as he rolls his eyes, “if the word of the Hawk’s widow isn’t enough. Come on, Chilli. If you have half an idea what you’re doing, it’s,” and her pocketed hands open up the parka, “a sure thing,” in a shrug of a display. “What do you think?”
He steps over to that enormous television, and the dresser beneath. Kneeling, his hands on the knobs of the bottommost drawer, “I think I got it covered,” he says, and with a grunt he pulls it out.
Within a cloud of taffeta fluffed about a length of smoothly gleam like polished wood, and when it rustling moves Jessie gasps, there’s an ankle, a foot, a thigh and hip, a figure jackknifed forehead to knee lifting up and up a leg unfolding elbow wrist a hand stretched up and out and Jessie’s stepping back, a groan, a pop of wood, silver glitters, pushing rolling turning standing up, a woman in a cocktail dress of mirrored sequins, smiling woozily, blond hair in squiggled curls. “It’s time?” she says, a breathy squeak.
“A couple hours yet, sweetling,” says the Harper, still sat on the floor, holding up a pair of silver slingbacks. “I thought you might like a walk about the lobby, or the lot?” She’s leaning back, lifting a foot, slipping on a shoe. “See what you turn up on your own.” He holds up a white keycard. “Use the room next door.”
“Nifty!” she says, turning to go, a couple inches taller now, and a strut in her step. “Hello,” she says, smiling brilliantly at Jessie.
“No more than an hour,” calls the Harper after her. And then, “So,” he says, still sitting on the floor, to Jessie, still staring. “Two thousand dollars, or,” a nod at the door, swinging shut, “just the wear and tear. Which do you think?” The drawer, still open beside him, fluffs of taffeta drifting about the depression left crushed in that nest. The drawer above it, closed, the same width, the same height. “Well,” she says. “You could,” and she shudders, looking about, the bed mounded with boxes, the other bed messily rumpled, the Harper on the carpet in his bright green briefs. “Leo,” she says, and a scowl creeps over his face, “Leo,” she says again, “tolerated your pimping, but this–”
“The Duke is gone,” snaps the Harper, “and desperate times call for measures desperate. If they will not let me fight for my honor,” and a hand on the carpet now, and he’s leaning on that hand, “I’ll buy it back, instead.”
“Buy it?” she says. “Even Bruno would, would balk at this. What were you thinking, what, that Jo, would have anything to do with this? With you, after she heard about this?”
He lifts that hand from the carpet, a fist now about the stubby golden hilt of the sword he swings around and up as he pulls himself to his feet. “And how would her grace come to hear about it?”
“What,” she says, “what’re you,” as he steps close, as she steps back, brought up thump against the door, “kill me?”
“A step, a shift of weight,” he says, the scalloped tip of his sword slipped between the pink and orange placket of her parka, there to crease the gore of her bra. “I won’t just,” she says, looking right into his pale blue eyes looking right back at her. “There’ll be blood,” she says.
He rocks back, sword-tip slipping free. “A tragedy’s been writ, and played out many times, that ends with a woman’s body in a dumpster. And here’s you, dressed for the part! The police might not even bother to file a report.”
“Oh, Chilli,” she says. “Chilli, you damned fool. It’s not the police.” Shaking her head as he pulls back another step, and his sword with him. “It’s Ysabel,” she says. “The Queen. Falling on you, to avenge, her love.” But her voice quavers as she says it, and the corners of her eyes do shine.
The demure brown of the door melts into the brickwork about it as he closes it, and locks it with a key on a lanyard about his neck. Works his head back and forth, shakes out his arms, couple-few jogging steps in place there on the sidewalk. Turning about to set off he yelps, leaps back, “Excuse me,” says Marfisa, stood not an arm’s length away, hands in the pockets of her sheepskin coat.
“You always,” he says, hand to his chest, deep breaths, “sneak up, like that?” Taller than he seems at first, his dwindling hair clipped close.
“I wanted to let you know,” she says. “Tomorrow night, we’re hosting a,” and then she stops, frowning, as away off a block or so a clattering crash, “a, ah,” she says, “a sort of, gallery opening,” and he shakes his head at that. “You make any noise,” he says, “we call the cops.” There’s another rumble and crash. “The hell?” he says, looking away toward the corner.
“There’ll be,” she says, looking off away too, at the echoes, “live music,” but he’s waving a hand, “If there’s any kind of a disturbance,” he says, “I don’t care if you own the block, we’re calling the cops. Okay? Thanks for the warning and all, but–”
“This isn’t,” she says, sharply, and then a shake of her white-gold head. “I’m here to invite you,” she says.
“Invite?”
“Both,” she’s saying, but a rapid thumping’s started up, around that corner. “Excuse me,” says Marfisa, turning, striding away, and “Both?” he says, frowning, but she leaps at a yelp from faintly off that way, around the corner, down the slope along the looming blue-grey bulk of the warehouse, that thumping getting louder, a roll of cyclone fencing leaned up against the wall there, and an old worn sign tipped on its side that says Wilson Properties, and someone’s screaming. Marfisa kicks off the bundle of uprooted fenceposts ringing under her bootheel up to crouch on a shallow threshold jutted beneath the door cut into the wall there, three or four feet up, and her fist a clang of a knock, and still the banging, the screams, the roaring rush, like wings. Gripping either jamb, leaning back knee cocked and up the sole of her boot, boom, another, pop the door. She shoulders her way in.
Dust and litter and pieces of paper, a tarpaulin skirling, madly rips of wind through all that cavernous space, she throws up a hand, “Hey!” she hollers, “Anna?” and over by the green couch another shriek. She bulls her way through the flapping hurricane, “Gloria!” An answering “Mar!” from there in the corner.
“What happened!” she cries, stooping beside them, huddled under a stretched canvas borne up on Gloria’s broad back.
“She didn’t get the milk!” wails Anna, head on the floor, hands over her head.
“The fuck with the milk!” roars Gloria, and they’re pelted with handfuls of nuts and bolts. Marfisa ducks as her bright white hair flies up, a turbulent cloud that skeins itself into knotted hanks and “Damn you!” she bellows, “You dare!” At that the litter all about them drops, and a thunderous silence. Marfisa stands there, panting, as Gloria heaves the canvas up and over, helps Anna to her feet. “Hempen!” cries a voice out there, and “Hampen!” another, over that way, and “Hempen! Hampen!” again, and again, Gloria peering wildly about, that first voice crying “Neither!” over the boxes tumbled, tarps askew, “Neither no more!” and “No more tread!” and “No more stampen!” echoing about, and “What the hell?” says Gloria.
“Shut up,” says Marfisa.
“Hempen!” this voice, and “Neither no more!” that, and “No more tread nor stampen!”
“Where did they,” says Gloria, and “Shut up,” says Marfisa, and “Hempen!” cry the voices now in unison. “Hampen! Neither no more tread nor stampen!”
“Shut up!” roars Marfisa. “Now!” Grabbing the handrail of the skeletal staircase, those voices a cacophony again, “Outlaw!” and “Bandit!” and “Exile!” echoing as she climbs, steps clanging, “Enough!” she hollers, up there on the walkway, a hand on a rung of the brief ladder bolted to the wall. “I will show you the law!” she calls down. “I will show you who’s without it!” She starts climbing, up toward the makeshift floor of planks above.
“We are so fucked,” Gloria’s muttering, “we are so fucked, we are so fucked,” and “Would you please stop,” snaps Anna.
“Hilda’s here in an hour, in an hour to load in,” says Gloria, kicking at the trash. “How the fuck are we gonna, how the fuck, how–”
“Perhaps,” says Anna, still looking up, “next time, you will remember the milk.”
“The hell with the milk,” says Gloria, and the light changes.
The light changes, softly golden falling now to warm away the shadows, gloss Gloria’s black hair, to ruddy Anna’s mousey brown and glint her glasses. Down there, out in that cavernous space, things move and shift as people stand, three four five of them stepping out, looking up, lit by a seeping summer twilight. Up on the walkway there’s Marfisa, holding up a shallow wooden box, and the lid of it open, and the low bright sun within. “Here!” Her free hand scoops up sunlight, flings it out, clouds of buttery sparks that arc, that fall, an afternoon in fireworks. “Take it up!” The box snaps shut, light shifting as the brightness starts to melting settle. “Clean up your mess with it,” she says, setting the box at her feet, “tread it, and stamp it,” as she stands back up, a wooden bat now in her hand, “and what is left, is yours!” Clang the bat against the railing, as toppled boxes rustle upright, as tarpaulins loft into place, as those scraps of paper and canvas sullenly sweep themselves away, as Gloria’s turning about, eyes wide, as Anna turns away, her hand to her mouth. Light congeals to wisps of glistening fog, streaming, swirling, and one more clang of the bat against the railing. “There is more,” cries Marfisa, “where that came from!”
