Four

In some deep purple chamber in the basement of this house, I sat at a table with the bandits and Sunny and Beauty and a host of painted women in loose velvet and silk, who spoke fluidly, laughed and fanned themselves, ate olives and cherries and cheese scraped on rye, little silver fishes from the tin, ribbons of peppered dried meat. The proper meal, a roasted swan that one of Beauty’s girls had placed steaming between us, was bones now. I sucked the marrow from a rib. The creaminess in my mouth tasted prayerful, like saying the bleed after a cold solstice sermon, the words that usher the longest night of the year. Syllabic revery. Unctuous and thick. I kissed my fingertips, fanned them over the table’s edge, pretended the scraps were an Idol. I would be grateful to these women so long as I lived. Nothing would pass that would harm them and they’d have abundance and golden frivolities gathered at their fingertips, forever. Praise our work, the mystery’s maintenance, and praise the Torn Child half-dead beneath us, who feigns sleep and thereby abets us. Amen.

Mors Brandegor purred in Beauty’s ear. Sunny spoke with Valor, they discussed the new fashions in Ignavia City, and it was strange to see Valor speak so crisply and sweetly, not that I knew her well enough to say whether she was otherwise usually. I saw her distressed, on her shift, after a failure. Did bandits structure their days thusly? Did they have clocks in their head like I did? Uthste stared at the open swan body. She didn’t blink, looked at the greasy spine half-lidded, her whole face slack. A noble skull showed through her translucent bruisy skin. She sat across from me. She caught my looking, looked at me. Her eyes were liquid black and long-lashed, downturned at the edges. I saw myself across them.

Uthste said, “I like your hair. Very crawly.”

That word—crawly—was not kind. Uthste didn’t seem cruel, that is, she could be cruel, but this didn’t seem like a curse from the revenant woman whose glance compelled the rich to part with their wealth. She just looked at me.

Unsure of what else to say, skin burning, I said, “Thank you, ma’am.”

A woman with glossy black ringlets draped herself across Uthste, whispered something in her ear, then leaned her cheek against Uthste’s temple, looked at me with a wide magenta smile. “No sighs! We’re crawling with crawlies around here. This right here’s a greenhouse. Don’t tell the clientele.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Mors Brandegor, who cleared her glass and flipped the cup, slammed it rim down on the table. “Who’s that I see, darkening Beauty’s doorway?”

“The crawly of the house,” said somebody behind me.

Beauty stood. She’d wrapped a thick fur stole around her, and she hugged it to herself, looked past me with such open fondness that I wondered if I ought avert my eyes. I didn’t. I turned in my chair, and I saw the woman who I’d guessed was Prumathe. She looked like Sunny, just taller, sharper, with her hair cut short and slicked back. She wore an open coat and pleated trousers. Her lip ring was yellow gold. She’d lately been crying, she had maroon splotches around her eyes, but she beamed, a little lopsided, and she rounded the table and took Beauty by the waist, swept her close, and kissed her.

I felt a plunge inside me. I pressed my hands against my thighs and took fistfuls of my trousers and squeezed. I thought uselessly about you. Kissing you wasn’t like this. It was quick, and as you reminded me, common and natural for girls enjoying one another’s company. There were no implications to be had, we weren’t—insects. We weren’t no creepy crawlies, we weren’t bugs, that is, we weren’t girls turned boyish by impulses toward buggery, my mother and all the older kids on the line were wrong about me, when I asked you about it you always told me not to worry, these things sort themselves with maturity. We’d outgrow it. It meant nothing. You weren’t a crawly. Of course, I’d seen crawlies, or women who were called such, they worked the furnace alongside my father and my uncles, but that’s a rumor anyway, and it’s unfair to say that work masculinizes you, Tullians devote ourselves to work and consequently our femininity is strong and broad sometimes, that grace ought to be extended toward Stellarine and Veltuni women too, anyway I’d never seen a woman take a woman in her arms like that. Seen a woman go slack and glow against another woman’s chest, look up at her with such perfect open sweetness. I wanted to be Prumathe. I wanted to wear her skin. I was strangling the fabric of her trousers, I was wearing her clothes I realized with a start, I thought about dead Tita on Uthste’s lap and how tenderly she’d handled her corpse and I thought, oh bleed above me, I have crawly hair!

Prumathe sat Beauty back in her chair. She tucked her into the table, bent to kiss her shoulder, then straightened, took the swan’s tray off the table. She set it aside, and in the space where the swan had been, she lay down a deck of cards, a ripe azurine, and a handful of dainty little forks. This got gasps and groans out of everybody, but I couldn’t parse why, I was trying to make my lungs work normally. Prumathe surveyed the table. Deliberately, she stabbed the azurine with each little fork, one by one, until the pinkish purplish pulp showed through the baby blue rind and all the forks jutted out at odd angles, like spokes on a wheel. She said, “Pardon my lateness. When I was told, I had to step out. Ancestors should not be made so young.” Prumathe left Beauty’s side and circled the table, bent to whisper in each woman’s ear, lingered for a quick exchange by some of the painted girls, and with Valor, whose knuckles Prumathe kissed. When she passed Sunny, she kissed the top of her head, and when she passed Mors Brandegor, they both grinned like devils, big and toothy and mean. When she reached me, I thought I’d die, and could scarcely meet her eye when she bowed her head to greet me.

“Hello, ma’am,” I breathed. I sounded reedy and horrible.

“Oh, never ma’am.” Prumathe looked at me seriously. Her brows came together, her mouth pulled sharply left. “I’m Prumathe thu Cerca, it’s a pleasure. Welcome to my home. Call me Pru. Or Scrawny, that was my mortal name. ‘Yes sir’ me if you must. Are you the lustertouched bandit baby?”

“Yessir.”

“Have you been in my closet, bandit baby?”

I couldn’t unclench my fists in my, her, trousers. I tried but I couldn’t. I couldn’t blink.

Prumathe shook her head. She stood up, put her hands on the back of my chair, and said to the room, “Round of teatime before we send the kids up. Bandit baby deals.” Then, in my ear: “Do you know how to play?”

My parents didn’t approve of cards. Gambling was fine by night, but in ill taste. My quiet must’ve been enough.

“There are five suits of eleven cards each, that’s mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and thieves, they’re numbered in the top corner. You shuffle the deck, then deal everyone five cards. You keep the excess by your right hand. What you want is a hand of matches, all the fives, all the sixes, anything like that. You’re the dealer. Top of each turn, you pull one card from the excess, and you pick a card to pass along, face down, to the girl beside you. She’ll do the same. It’ll go fast. Do you follow?”

I did. I had a good head for quick figures and moving parts. “If I get a hand of matches?”

“You take one of those forks in the fruit in the middle. You’ll be quiet about it, and subtle. You don’t want anybody to see that you did it. You put it in your lap, discreet as you can, and you keep passing cards, keeping your perfect hand intact. Once anybody sees that a fork is gone, they’ll damn their cards and dive for a fork. There’s one less fork than there are people. Somebody fails to grab one, they buy everyone a round. Or, in our case, let themselves be laughed on. That all clear?”

“Yessir.” I reached for the cards to prove it, tried to shuffle like the boys in the packing line did, in quick choppy shakes. I couldn’t quite get my hands around them right. I was afraid to bend them. I shook them lightly through themselves and dealt, felt a tug inside me, liked the repetitive motion and the attention on my hands. I put the excess in a pile beside me.

Prumathe sat to my right. A woman whose name I didn’t know sat to my left. We all picked up our cards. Father six, mother nine, mother five, daughter five, thief one. I pulled a son ten and passed the father six. It moved slow, then faster. I found a rhythm to my movements that I liked, liked how the cards felt between my thumbs and forefingers, liked the intensity of focus around me, the pretending everybody was doing like we weren’t all deadly serious. I had three fives. I tried to keep my attention between the cards in my hands and the teaspoons sparkling where my Torn Child swan had been. Pretty little doll forks. Good silver. You’d have tried to snake them and sell them to orderlies for cash.

When the cards moved fast it was like their figures danced. They wore Old Bellonan garb, wrapped and translucent, like they’d been caught in an unraveled bolt of fabric. The father was bearded, the son was shaved and shorn. The mother’s dress revealed one breast, the daughter wore her long hair loose. The thieves were all hung upside down. I had four fives.

I glanced over my hand. Mors Brandegor and Uthste and Valor had all adopted the same expressions they’d worn on the train, the wolf smile and frightful cool and misery. Beauty moved languidly, I suspected she wasn’t too pressed, but many of her friends, or coworkers maybe, seemed dire. I eyed Sunny, who I suppose was properly Sunny zel Cerca, assuming she and Prumathe shared a mother and there weren’t other siblings in the mix, and noticed that she was hardly looking at her hand. She took her new card, wove it between her existing cards, and passed it along without so much as frowning at it.

I looked at the milky white forks in the glossy purple pulp. The pith showed like bone. I counted us, and counted them, and reached for the middle of the table.

Prumathe shot her hand beside mine, and as I closed my hand around a fork in the fruit I looked to my right to tell her something quick and gracious, but the table squealed and shoved sideways and I fell under somebody’s body, somebody laughing, because everyone had climbed onto the table and scrambled for forks, crawled over each other, wrestled and squirmed and laughed and wheezed. Dresses slithered over dresses, the fabrics gleamed over each other, elbows shot and hairpins clinked against porcelain plaits and high-heeled slippers swam through the air. The fruit was a smashed-up mess. It smelled tart and soursweet as ichorite. I felt a flutter in my chest and thought I might shout, it was too much pressing in on me, I slipped under the table and shivered with my fork in my fist.

Sunny crouched under the table. She smiled serenely with her sharp little cat teeth. She reached out a hand, showed me her fork, and unsure of what else I should do, I took it with mine. Our forks clattered together. She wrinkled her nose but gave me a tug, pulled me out from under the table and snuck me out of the room, where Beauty and Valor were strangling each other with the stole. Sunny took me down a hall and up the stairs. We went higher and higher, up the eerie red stairs to her bedroom, and she shut the door behind us and the quiet poured over me.

I panted and sat on her floor.

Sunny took the forks out of my hand. She put them on her bedside table, fetched the frilly quilt off her bed and Velma and the rag rabbit, and she flounced on the floor beside me, threw the quilt over our heads, bathed the four of us in darkness. We breathed with our knees pressed together. She skittered her hands over my shins, looking for something, so I gave her my hands and she squeezed them.

“Marney,” she breathed, “I cheated.”

My tongue was clumsy. “What?”

“I didn’t have a perfect hand, I was just impatient for the fun part,” she said. I could hear her smiling. It fluttered at the edges of her voice. “Did you see Brandy? I thought she’d kill Uthste! The way she had her pinned!”

I felt dizzy. I smiled at nothing, marveled over my heartrate. All that chaos over a little trick. I liked Sunny, I realized. With a sudden boldness I took the hands I held, and I brought them to my lips, ghosted a kiss over her knuckles. “Seems in the spirit of the game,” I said, then dropped her hands, suddenly petrified.

She pushed me. I opened my mouth to apologize, but then she pushed me again, hard enough to knock me flat. She lay down beside me and tucked into my side, pressed her nose against my cheek. She said, “When you join the Choir down in the Fingerbluffs, they’re going to give you a lurcher, and you must ride back up here and spend time with me sometimes. Not too often, or I’ll get sick of you, but sometimes, so that I can upkeep your haircut and show you what I’ve picked out at the market. You’ve got to swear!”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I swear.”

I woke alone in Sunny’s bed. Sunny’s side was neatly made up, her toys arranged on the big squashy pillow, and I saw the clothes she’d picked yesterday folded at the foot of the bed. Fresh stockings, kind of her. It was well past dawn, I felt a stab of guilt about missing the bleed, but it seemed an unproductive feeling, one I could take to a reverend in the Fingerbluffs, assuming there were Tull Shrines there. I knew the Fingerbluffs barony only by name, had no real idea what it was like. It was on the coast, I thought. Nearer to Tasmudan than Royston.

I climbed out of bed. I smoothed the quilt, tried to make my side as neat as hers. I wore one of her nightgowns, it was ruffled and dripping with little bows, and I folded it after I pulled it over my shoulders, replaced the laid-out clothes with it. I pulled up my suspenders and buttoned my shirt most of the way. I didn’t like the tightness on my throat. I put on my boots, my bloody filthy boots, and Tita’s jacket. I tucked my knife in my waistband. I left her room. I closed the door carefully, imagined somehow that the frame would bruise if I shut it wrong.

Mors Brandegor smoked in the stairwell. She stood in the landing in a long slip dress, like one of the dresses the women here wore, with her hair down her back. She faced away from me. She flicked ash in a sconce. “I can hear you breathing,” she said. “Come down and join me.”

I touched the wallpaper as I descended. The pattern was felted. The texture twinged. I stopped a step above her and tensed.

“Beauty loves a story. She told one about you. Later last night, she recounted to us that the workers at that big ichorite foundry keep having magic children. That the magic children are sick and insane, that those factory fumes their mothers sucked all through their gestations produced a certain sensitivity to the stuff. Lustertouched children. Beauty says Industry’s burned good money hushing the press. Wouldn’t want rumors about freak babies sullying the reputation he’s building for the empire of his brand.” She took a drag. “Beauty says, and Prumathe agrees, that last week’s massacre wasn’t a riot, nor a standard union bid, but a plea for Industry to ease their children’s suffering. He cut them down to protect his profits and cull insubordinates, and to snuff noise about the lustertouched before a public discourse spread. Beauty says you’re one such child. She says the stray I’ve collected survived one of the worst strikebreaking slaughters on record, and that she is, that is you are, magic. Squares with what I’ve seen. You agreed last night when she asked you, but Beauty’s an easy woman to offer a yes to. Tell me, now. Are you lustertouched?”

I pressed harder on the wall. I didn’t run up the stairs but I entertained the thought. “Yes ma’am, I am lustertouched,” I said. “I wouldn’t call that magic.”

“Magic is abundant where I’m from. Luck. Weather. Drugs. Grief. Magic’s crammed in the walls and stitched into skirts. It’s in the blood. It’s dull to me, the Ignavian insistence that knowing better changes things. A nation obsessed with religion but shy about superstition is impotent and sour. If Yann Industry Chauncey gets his hands on the free Drustlands, slaps factories beside our Halls, our lustertouched babies will be magic. We’ll invent some sprite to inhabit you and hide pendants and heather in your cribs to trap it.”

“How do the Drustish tend to their dead?”

Mors Brandegor turned her head. The gloss daubed on her eyelids caught the candlelight. She said, “Do you see death’s hand on me?”

“No ma’am,” I said, “I meant no disrespect. My friend Gwyar is dead.”

“Gwyar,” Mors Brandegor repeated. She rolled your name off the back of her tongue with an ease I couldn’t, a slickness. “Last week?”

I nodded. I couldn’t feel my hands. You were dead. How dare you.

“What was Gwyar’s Hall?” She searched me. “Mine was Mors. I belong to Mors Hall, if such a thing still exists. That’s why it’s formal to call me Mors before my name.”

“She’s Flox Drustish,” I said. You told me tales about the Drustlands, but not about your family, never nothing about a Hall.

“Flox Hall.” She put her cigar in her teeth, showed me her palm. She traced a line with her long nail, stopped at the meat under her little finger. “Is here. Northeast, past the badlands, in the mires. The Flip River cuts by it. Floods it sometimes. It’s a hard Hall. No feuds, at least when I left. They cleared all they provoked. Your dead friend, was she here with family?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t like you called that. Hearing you called dead abraded me. I resented you for being it. “She lives in Crellin Sanatorium. She’s sick. She works with me to pay for her bed there.”

“Blodfagra.” She closed her hand in a fist. “Don’t worry over how Flox Hall would’ve tended the corpse of your girl.”

“I need to do right by her,” I said too fast. I averted my eyes. “I don’t mean to intrude.”

“I’ll get you good with a gun.” Mors Brandegor, just Brandegor, grinned at me. “You should go on down. Uthste and Valor are ready to leave. They’ll be gone soon. The Fingerbluffs are calling.”

“Won’t you come?” I wanted her to come. The lurch in my belly was childish, stupid, but absolute. I didn’t want her to be far from me. It made me worry.

“I’m the Choir’s girl. I’ll be back. I’ve got some favors to pay with Beauty and Prumathe, and I’ll stay until they’re attended. Shouldn’t be long.”

“How long?”

“Don’t start, Miss Marney. Don’t count on your fingers and jinx me. I could be dead by dinner, or I could be back in four days’ time, or two months’. You’ll see me when I come. Understand me?”

I wanted to bite my hand. I felt a jolt of sizzling energy, like I’d had too many sweets and made myself sick. My skin buzzed. I set my jaw and nodded, eyes down, fixed on the hem of her silk dress. There were tattoos on her arms, on the proud expanse of her chest. MORS BRANDEGOR upside down beneath her collarbones. She looked like a tapestry. She was beautiful. “Yes ma’am.”

“Scamper off,” she said, an order.

I passed her on the stairs and panted on the landing. I pushed the manticore aside. The beautiful room was empty of people, brimming with treasures that I tried not to drool over. I wanted to hold onto my fear. I slapped my chest, beat over my heart, and breathed on a work song rhythm. Lungs empty on hammer strikes. My fear grew, it bubbled up my throat and pushed the backs of my eyes. I shook all over. I walked through the beautiful room and its beautiful things and pushed open the big red door, stepped out into a grayish chilly day.

Valor and Uthste leaned their backs against the wall. Uthste glanced my way when I emerged, gave me a curt nod. She and Valor smoked cigarettes with blue paper, like the ones the shipping boys Edna sulked around used to smoke. Stellarine boys. One of those boys had been her boy, maybe. I didn’t know who’d made her pregnant. She never said. In my memory they all looked the same. I saw the straps on their shoulders and the skin of their necks. Pearls in their ears, cheaper and more stylish than full prayer strings. Mother had been furious. Collective bargaining ain’t good Tullian orthopraxy neither, Edna would say. Organizing is a feat of secular reverendship. Hate my folly, go on and hate all of it. I am laid low in wickedness and will speak no more. Surrender the movement for your pride. So bold! Had mother hit her? My memory fuzzed. Uthste said, “With us?”

I nodded. I thought about asking after Sunny but thought better of it. I ran my hands through my shorn hair. The curls sprang between my knuckles. I wondered if I’d recognize myself.

Valor dashed her cigarette on the wall. Sparks fell and disappeared. She took up her lurcher, climbed across it, squeezed it to life. She looked at me.

Uthste took another drag. She jerked her chin at Valor. I was scared of Valor, slightly. I’d been hoping for Uthste. Still, I don’t deny hospitality. I walked away from Beauty’s house and climbed on the back of Valor’s lurcher, held her waist. She breathed against the crooks of my arms and I squeezed my eyes shut. I heard Uthste’s lurcher scrape the gravel. Then Valor kicked off, and we were gone.

For hours we chased the pines. The pines opened into cities; we blazed through them. Places I’d never seen before melted into the air. Colors rushed over my head. The day warmed as it passed. I sweat under my jacket. The pines bled into maize and rye fields, I watched farmers with their skirts tied at their hips reap with long white sickles. There were mills and plants but they got scarcer the closer we came to the coast. Under-industrialized, I think it’d be figured. Yet-to-be-paved. I wasn’t sure where one barony became the next. Edna said the work would come this way once the provincial barons bent to the new economy’s glow. She said this with an ambivalence that could’ve been approval as easily as it could’ve been loathing. Edna called me crawly with that tone sometimes. Crawly little pest. The back of Valor’s dress was done up from her tail to her nape in little covered buttons, and I rubbed my cheek against them.

We stopped by the Flip River. Fast water, murky green cut with silver bubbles, heavy with algae and eels. There was a narrow dock with a ferry, and as Uthste dismounted to speak with the ferryman, Valor and I went to a vendor stall beside. She bought hot fried okra and buttered bread with azurine marmalade, gave the paper parcels to me to carry. She walked her lurcher onto the ferry, where Uthste waited, sitting beside her machine with her head in her hands.

I sat beside her and opened the parcels. I liked the battered smell. Valor’s lurcher cast a weird shadow over us. She joined us on the ferry floor, and the three of us ate. The ferryman took us from the shore. The sway and bob of water underneath me made my ribs feel tight. Hadn’t ever occurred that boats aren’t still on the inside. I wasn’t too sure about that. Without much effort I managed to ignore the unease, hunger was a greater power. I licked my fingers. I watched the sunlight glance off the broken water. We passed a grand riverboat with musicians and dancing, and I watched a woman spin backwards with her skirts in her hands. The bright sharp ichorite taste of the azurine marmalade clung to my hard palate. I watched the clouds churn above us. It’d be the bleed soon.

“Thank you,” I said.

Valor pulled a compact from her bodice. She checked her rouge. “The Choir cares for its own.”

Uthste rubbed the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to share the truth with you. Once you have it, you’ll be bound to it, on pain of death. Do I make the stakes clear, Marney?”

“Yes’m,” I said. I folded my hands in my lap. “On pain of death.”

Uthste said, “All outlaws aren’t in the Choir. The Choir’s got a code of ethics, and our grace extends to all those, but only those, who uphold it. Fifteen years ago, Baron Fingerbluffs, that’s Horace Veracity Loveday, got got by his servants. Those servants are insurgent Hereafterist partisans. The partisans reached out to the Choir, and to the pirates who’ve long gathered in the Fingerbluffs, and offered community.” She spread her hands, then clasped them. “The Fingerbluffs are the Choir’s home, Loveday Mansion our open hostel. A third of our spoils, that’s a third minimum, belongs to the Fingerbluffs and her children. We don’t hold property there, we live together in shared trust, and we are rich, and unalone, and beautiful. Everyone in the Fingerbluffs is wealthy. The poorest man’s a king. Everyone in the Fingerbluffs vows to keep the charade that Baron Loveday still lives. We take turns writing letters for him, making excuses for him not to attend the baron’s senate, and the villagers protect knowledge of us, stave off our certain annihilation at the hands of the law. Cooperation and collaboration are sacred. Without each other, we’d be damned.”

I’ve never known nobody rich. Beauty’s house was the finest thing I’d ever seen, plusher and more luxurious than the Tull Shrine had been, and the grand tone Uthste took made me shiver. “What’s the code?”

“Do right.” Valor snapped her compact shut.

Do right seemed frightful vague for a code of ethics. I looked between them and the shifting water. “Do right on pain of death?”

“Mhm.” Uthste turned her collar up against the wind. “Do you swear to do right?”

I chewed on the fact that stealing was plainly and obviously wrong, as was frightening people and threatening people and killing them and so on. We’d taken a hard turn from right. I stretched my legs out in front of me and looked at the week-old violence on my boots. Dried down like this, it looked like peat in my laces. “I can swear to try.”

Valor smiled. I had no idea how old she was. “Right’s a star by which to navigate. You’ll have to make hard choices in this work, you’ll worry about them when they arise. Worry now about composure. Be smart about yourself. Conduct yourself with dignity. Don’t be cruel for the sake of it. Be generous. Don’t leech from the Fingerbluffs or act against her people or we’ll beat you bloodless and kick you off a cliff.” She lifted her chin like she was scenting the air. “Almost across.”

We stood. The ferryman sang to himself. A tattoo’s frayed edge peeked under his sleeve. I watched the ripples change as the vessel slowed. The grass on the other side was thicker and bluish in this light. It looked like fur. Valor put her hands on my waist and hoisted me on her lurcher, my lungs quit and my head fizzled, and she arranged herself behind me. She was enormously strong, despite not looking it. Solid, dense. She radiated heat. She reached around me, closed her fists around the sloped horn handles. She squeezed a lever there, and the engine purred below us. She moved her hand. I put mine there, tried. The vibrations shook the bones in my fist. I looked over my shoulder at her, and she jutted her chin forward, pointed toward the road that adjoined the dock now ahead of us. “Go,” she said. “If you crash us you’ll carry me the rest of the way.”

Uthste snorted, then clipped past us.

Valor held her hand over mine, not touching me. She shifted her wrist. I followed her motion like she puppeteered me, and the lurcher lurched, and we flew forward. The sky flew fast around my face. I didn’t say the sunset bleed, but I felt it, held that kneeling feeling in my chest while road unfurled ahead of us, suddenly existing where only hills had been. I imagined it frothing my blood up. Valor was driving properly, when we teetered she put a hand on my arm and pressed the pads of her fingers down, and the tendons under my skin obeyed her will in ways my head didn’t. I moved how she showed me. When I turned too subtly, she leaned and I followed her weight. It felt good. I hardly thought. My curls flew around. They were curls now. They whipped and whispered against my neck.

There wasn’t a town for a long time. No settlements aside from the stray hut and goat herds. Big twists of horns capped with little bells. The whole scene got bluer, then bluer still. Azurine clouds that melted into azurine fields, then azurine orchards, acres upon acres of gnarled trees with leather bark and spined feathery leaves and heavy drooping fistfuls of glistening fruit. The soursweet fragrance was sticky on the breeze. I prickled all over. My gums swelled puffy soft around my teeth. Uthste stood up on the lurcher’s stirrups, plucked one from a branch as she rushed past it. The whole tree shivered in recoil. Dewdrops bounced from it. I didn’t dare take my hands off Valor’s lurcher, but I let myself steal my eyes from the road and gaze at the abundance suddenly everywhere. The fruit hardly looked real. They looked like smudges that come after one rubs one’s eyes too hard. The rinds illusorily luminous. Nothing was so powder blue, besides some flowers maybe, and fabric nobody I knew could afford. I tried to wonder if there was a Tull Shrine around and an attendant community, we’re an agricultural people, or were once, but I couldn’t imagine past the aliveness everywhere. It smelled so bright. Breathing was sweet and hurt slightly.

I wanted to show you. It did not feel like you were dead. I wanted to pick an azurine and split it with you. I wanted to peel the rind with my thumb and watch my thumb turn red with you. You’d pinch the tip and say, does that hurt? How about now? You love the stingy favors, don’t you?

And I’d say nothing in particular and do it again. That’s the ritual. I missed you.

The orchard went on a long time. Then there were lights through it.

Valor reached a hand into the advancing shadows as though someone would take it. The lights flashed at the ends of her fingertips, glowed through her nails in slivers of mean dark pink. The Fingerbluffs waited there. Gulls flew above them. Behind them was nothing, a drop over the sea. I’d never heard the sea before. The rushing was so loud. Salt cut the azurine smell and my heart inverted and I wanted to tear my hands off the lurcher and slide them under my shirt and touch my belly and my breastbone. I throbbed there.

Into the Fingerbluffs we rode, the gorgeous, heaving Fingerbluffs, whose dingy narrow mews peeled out from the brick streets and held children who played there in the darkness, chasing each other and shouting, twisting, braids floating behind them in deference to their speed, not working, not governed, unafraid. The buildings slumped against each other, hipped rooves embracing, shrouding those pink lights that seeped through the red papered windows onto the pavement like a hand cupped around a lighter in a breeze. People danced inside. Naked tattooed arms tangled, foreheads rested on shoulders, hands cupped the napes of marked necks.

We rode past looming skinny temples and triple gallery shotguns with deep shady overhangs painted bottle green, fountains, freestanding archways strung up with beads, gaslit stalls with blinkering festival games. Knives juggled and swallowed and hurled through azurines balanced on the outstretched hands of smokers who lounged along broken knuckled Bellonan column hunks, lichened over like boulders, who gestured with long pipes and fanned themselves, shouted when the knives knocked the balanced fruit down and yawned laughter that swirled and swelled with brass music and low chatter and more laughter, deeper sourceless ceaseless laughter whose component voices were indistinct and crested and ebbed like the sea does. The crowd churned. People hailed Valor and Uthste by name from balconies above us. They tossed down fistfuls of petals. We rolled through the molten golden languid city, and strangers waved to me, and I shook the little white petals from my hair. We rode to the mansion at the cliff’s edge. Its silhouette was enormous and darker than the surrounding sky.

“We all live here together,” Valor said. “This is home, Marney.”

I slumped backwards against her chest and she took the handles. I watched the mansion envelope the sky. Its corners covered both moons. Its big roof was the whole heaven. Forgive me that another place could so quickly become my home. Forgive me for loving twice. I’ll do it again. I’ll fall in love again. It doesn’t diminish you. It was for you, in its way. We fell in love together, the shard of you in my brain and me. We devoted ourselves to the Choir and chose to continue living.