The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 15

Ringil met Eril’s eyes across the table. Their swords were up in their rooms with the cloaks and baggage. He kept his voice soft and nonchalant.

“Soldiers, eh.”

Eril made a show of lounging back in his chair. “So what do they want, lad? Is it the Watch?”

The boy shook his head, licked his lips again.

“No, my lords. They are irregulars.”

There was a pleading quality to his expression as he looked at his two customers. Not so long since the war swept through here. Hinerion’s walls had held well enough against the Scaled Folk, but the border skirmishing that followed between imperial and League forces was brutal on the inhabitants. Standard tavernkeeper’s wisdom for the whole region: Forget uniforms or nominal allegiances—if it wears a weapon and scars, it’s no safer than the next starving wild dog. Feed and water with care, walk like you’re carrying dragon eggs, and never, never get between rival packs.

“All right,” said Ringil, rising. “We’ll come out and talk to them. Nothing to worry about.”

But he had a moment—allowed himself the self-pitying luxury of it as he got up from the table—to wonder if Dakovash hadn’t taken demonic offense at his earlier insolence and set him up, whispered the plan to come to Hinerion into his head and let him believe it his own, all so that he could be caught like a rat and dragged down to the dungeons and a death by screaming inches.

He shivered.

This fucking flu.

Outside, through the candle gloom and smoky air in the main bar, he made out half a dozen bulky figures ranged about the place. The unmistakable, rigid jut of weaponry from their silhouettes, at hip and over shoulder, the instinctive space the tavern’s other clientele accorded them. One or two were idly bullying the customers and serving girls. Smacked lips and slurping sounds as the crockery-laden women tried to squeeze past, the inevitable pawing hands, stoically endured. At one table, a thickset axman leaned low over the board, getting in the diners’ faces with a mock-friendly grin and the kind of intrusive commentary that demanded either weakly smiling capitulation or offense taken and a fight.

Ringil went by and jolted him heavily with one hip, jarred the man’s leaning arms so he slipped mid-sentence on the table edge and nearly fell.

“Oi!”

It was more yelp than bellow, outrage beaten upward in pitch by surprise. But the axman came back from his stumble with a scary fighter’s grace, pivoted and grabbed Ringil by the arm, dragged him back around.

“Fuck do you thi—”

And his voice died out from under him as Ringil met his eyes.

They were close enough for the reek of the man’s breath to plaster Gil’s face like something solid, to feel that it was congealing and smearing there. Ringil said nothing, just looked at him.

It felt, for one flickering moment, as if there were black wings at his back.

The axman broke. Dropped his eyes, dropped his hand from Ringil’s arm. Turned away.

“Wanna look where you’re fucking going, man,” he muttered.

“Same might be said for you, Venj.” The voice was a good-natured rumble that Ringil recognized. “Thought you said you were a skirmish ranger in the war. Don’t they teach all-around awareness at all times, or some such shit?”

It was the shaven-headed bounty hunter from the office. He loomed up at the axman’s side, one cautionary arm out loosely across his comrade’s chest, a gesture that looked restraining and protective in about equal measures. He was taller than Ringil had realized when they talked before. He grinned with the assurance of a man used to dominating whatever room he was in.

“How you doing, Shenshenath?”

“I am. Well.”

“Klithren. From the bounty offices.”

Ringil got a firmer grip on his fake Yhelteth accent. “Yes, I remember. You have come looking for me?”

“Yeah, how about that?” The bounty hunter tugged at his mutilated ear. “See, some of us got sick of waiting for the Keep to put up its list. Going to ride out at dawn, see if we can’t flush this bandit scum out of the forest and worry about the names later. Wondered if you wanted in.”

Ringil grappled with his fever-blurred wits. “Me?”

“Yeah, well, I pride myself on being a judge of men with steel. And you’re like me, you’ve held a command. Got the rank, the experience. Man like that, be glad to have you ride with us.”

“Uh.” Ringil glanced across at Eril. The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer shrugged.

“Your pal here’s welcome along of course,” Klithren said quickly. “I didn’t know you were mobbed up. Thought you’d come in alone. Seemed like a man alone, you know. But this fella looks like he can handle himself. You’d be welcome to ride with us too, pal.”

Eril inclined his head. Ringil said nothing. Klithren looked from one to the other.

The silence stretched.

“So, uhm, look.” Briskly. “I figure an even split with the boys here, your man included, plus you and me take a captain’s tithe on whatever total we bring in. Sound about right?”

Ringil made an effort, brought a hand to his chin, rubbed at his stubble as if giving the offer weighty consideration. He held it for as long as he dared, head tilting dizzily with the thought of riding out at dawn in hard pursuit of himself.

“Yes,” he managed. “Yes, that. That would be acceptable. The rates. Good. And you say at dawn?”

“Yeah. Going out the Dappled Gate. You know how to get there?”

“Yes, I… the Dappled Gate. Of course.” Stop fucking mumbling, Gil. Get a grip. “On the eastern wall. Yes.”

“So you’re in?”

Ringil pulled himself somewhat together. “I will be there, yes.”

“Good.” The bounty hunter looked triumphantly around at his men. “Told you, didn’t I? The imperial knows a paying opportunity when he sees one. Here, give me your hand on it, Shenshenath.”

Ringil took the clasp, gripped the leathery swordsman’s palm in his own, forced pressure into his fingers and a smile. Klithren squeezed back, only about half as hard as a war hound’s bite.

“See, now that’s what I’m talking about.” Once more, he seemed to be addressing his companions rather than Ringil. “That old Alliance magic, just like back in the war. No stopping us now, eh?”

Some halfhearted assent from the other men. The axman glowered and didn’t join in. Klithren evidently didn’t care. He turned Ringil’s pulped hand loose and waved a dismissive arm.

“Ah, ignore them, they’re a bunch of fucking pussies. I’ve been at them over two hours not to just sit on their arses down there waiting for the city to loosen its purse strings like it’s some virgin taking off her shift. If we’d acted this way when the Scaled Folk came, there wouldn’t be a city still standing on this coast.”

“Hoy.” The axman’s glare shifted focus to Klithren. “I fucking stood with my city. I was on the walls of Trelayne when the lizards came, and I threw them back into the ocean. And I was part of the levy sent down to clean up the mess here before that, when you border rats couldn’t hold the line. So don’t come the superior fucking warrior with me.”

Klithren cocked his head. A slow, comfortable grin lit his features. The axman saw it, but it took a couple of moments for him to catch up. He was in a Hinerion tavern, after all; his comrades were—it appeared from their scowls—mostly from Hinerion. The border rats comment had not gone down well.

“Venj,” Klithren said fondly. “You are a grumpy old fuck. And if you weren’t such a dab hand with that ax of yours, I would probably have to kill you. We all know you married a border rat’s daughter, so why don’t you just get over the fact you don’t live in the capital anymore, and let’s leave Shenshenath here to get some sleep. Dawn’ll be ’round soon enough for all of us.”

It was masterfully done. The tension leaked out of the room, grins leaked in. A guffaw came from way back in the tavern gloom.

“Oh, the pain of exile,” jeered someone, none too quietly.

Muzzy from his fever, Ringil jerked a hot-eyed glance toward the voice before he realized it was not meant for him. He caught a flurry of motion at one table; much looking away or hiding of faces in goblets. Ringil detached his gaze carefully again, found himself looking instead into Venj’s mutinous face. The axman stared at him for a couple of moments, then snorted and turned to Klithren.

“Are we done here? Can we please get out of this shit-hole now?”

Klithren shrugged. “Sure. Got what we came for, didn’t we? See you in the morning, Shenshenath. Dappled Gate, right?”

Ringil nodded. “Look for me there at dawn.”

The bounty hunters left. They went in grimly assured quiet, watched fearfully and equally silently by the tavern’s clientele. They shouldered their way out through the standing customers, knocked back the main door so it clunked hard into the wall, and ducked out under the lintel, here and there a man pulling his back-slung weaponry down to stop it snagging.

Ringil and Eril watched them go.

“Got this knack for making friends, don’t you?” the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer said, deadpan.

Ringil peeled him a sour look. The door swung shut on the final broad-shouldered back, and chatter sprouted across the quiet like weeds.

“So,” said Eril. “The harbor?”

“The harbor.”

THE SKIPPER OF THE MARSH QUEEN’S FAVOR POURED THEM RUM FROM A scuffed leather flask and did his best to seem pleased. But he was not a gifted actor.

“Of course, for any Brother of the Bloom in need…”

He gestured vaguely, as if he hoped something in the cabin around them would sufficiently underline his loyalty to the marsh daisy pennants he flew. Following the gesture around, Ringil saw no likely candidate for the task. It was a pretty squalid space they sat in, cramped and rot-smelling, and fairly indicative of what they’d seen of the vessel as a whole so far.

“Good,” said Eril bluntly. He drained his shot glass and put it back on the table. “I’m glad to hear that. So what we’ll need from you is cabin space for the duration, somewhere as far away from prying eyes as possible. And a dawn departure.”

The skipper blinked. “Dawn?”

“Yes. You told us your cargo’s already stowed.”

“Well, yes, the cargo.” The skipper made a visible effort to regain his shipboard authority. “But I do have other passengers to consider as well.”

Eril leaned forward. “Are you trying to tell me there’s no cabin for us?”

“No, no, far from it, brother. We have four cabins disposable aboard the Queen; it would be my honor to guest you in, uh…”

“Two of them,” prompted Ringil.

The skipper swallowed. “Yes. Two. But one other cabin is nonetheless occupied by a, uh, a lady of the realm, and she does not expect to join us until late tomorrow morning.”

Eril sat back. “A lady of the realm, eh?”

He swapped a glance with Ringil. Ringil shrugged, sniffed at his shot of rum and put it carefully aside untouched.

“I’ll go,” he said.

A little later, trudging up from the harbor with a brace of the Marsh Queen’s huskier crewmen at his back for porters, he thought maybe he should have drained his cup after all, the same way Eril had. Rough as the liquor was, the shock of it in his throat and belly might have gone some way to anchoring him a little more firmly to the cobbled street underfoot and its attendant reality. Might have stopped this queasy sense of seepage. As it was, he was now dealing with the uneasy sensation that the whole nighttime substance of Hinerion could at any moment shrivel away around him, like so much poorly painted morality-play backdrop canvas tossed onto an end-of-season bonfire; and when that happened, it would leave him drifting alone in a muggy, gray-tinged void with no way back.

It’s the fever, he told himself patiently. Not like you haven’t had one before. Few more days, some sea air to clean your head out, you’ll be sharp-edged and smoking as a harbor-end whore on krin.

Krinzanz. His hand crept automatically to the pocket it was stowed in. Now, there’s an idea.

But it wasn’t really. He’d debated long and hard with himself whether or not to use some of his dwindling supply to beat out the symptoms of whatever he’d caught from the sneezing slave boy. In the end, an iron campaign frugality won out. He was down to his last thumb-sized twist of the krin, and there was no telling when he’d next be able to buy some more. Hugging the coast and allowing for favorable winds, Marsh Queen’s Favor might make harbor at Baldaran in a couple of days, but then Baldaran was an odd town, full of neatly maintained temples and pious little fucks in the magistrature. There’d been a public order ban in force on noxious substances the last time Ringil was there.

After Baldaran, it was Rajal, almost twice the distance again, and a searing, sand-and-spat-blood combat memory for every yard of shoreline once they got there. He wasn’t sure he’d be going ashore at Rajal if he could avoid it.

And after that, well…

After that…

Decision time, Gil.

The street took a bend to the right, and above cheerily lit windows the hanging sign outside the Hero’s Respite Inn came into view—some suspiciously clean-looking knight at restful ease on a carpet of lizard corpses. Lettering above his head in gilt-edged red. So it seemed the skipper was competent to chart a course, on land at least. Seven streets up, the crooked lane to the left and follow the torches until the bend with the temple on the right. The inn stands at the corner opposite. Room Eleven. Ask for the Lady Quilien of Gris.

So far, right on the money.

Ringil checked to see his husky escort were still with him—in fact they’d been dawdling so as not to get ahead of the man who’d given them coin—and realized abruptly just how slow he’d been, climbing the shallow incline of the streets up from the harbor. He nodded curtly at the men, and stood still in the street to catch his breath. The moment tilted alarmingly beneath him. His vision webbed across in gray at the edges; he felt sick and empty.

He covered for it with a measured stare across to the ornate statue-work on the temple’s façade—Hoiran’s customary tusked and fanged ferocity pared down here to something a little more urbane and close-mouthed, perhaps influenced by traffic with the south and its penchant for studiously human religious figures. But for the massively muscled shoulders and an alarming, overly well-toothed grin, the Hoiran depicted here could almost have been a Yhelteth holy man, hands raised in benediction. At his flanks, the other members of the Dark Court ranged out in bas-relief like some hard-bitten mercenary command whose services the Dark King was trying to offer you. They were equally toned-down of aspect but still possessed most of the weapons and items of iconic power accorded them in more northerly tradition. Oddly, there seemed to be a gap in their ranks on Hoiran’s left. Ringil was too jangled to focus and work out who wasn’t there.

In the dim guttering of the street torches, he thought the figure of Dakovash tipped its head a fraction and winked at him.

Did not.

He leveled his breathing, snapped a glance over his shoulder, and caught his escort watching him curiously. They averted their gazes as soon as he looked around, found something apparently fascinating instead about the brightly lit windows of the Hero’s Respite. From the interior of the inn, a suddenly audible wash of laughter. It sounded harmless enough. Ringil looked from one man to the other, cleared his throat, and turned his back on the darkened temple.

“Let’s get on with this,” he muttered sourly. “Shall we?”

He stalked up to the door of the inn and thumped it open. Stood on the threshold. A startling waft of chatter and the tangled aromas of roasting meat and coffee washed out to meet him. Warm yellow light escaped through his legs like a cat, spilled out onto the cobbled street behind. Ringil stood and peered inside like some visitor from another, chillier world.

Under bright lamps and hanging candelabras, a crowd of rosy-cheeked, well-dressed diners sat at cloth-covered tables, eating with the leisurely self-assurance of men and women who had never gone hungry. Staff in cheery scarlet livery waited on the tables, and more somberly uniformed hired muscle stood around near the bar, riot batons looped casually on their belts. The floor was freshened with sawdust, not straw, and stringed music, for Hoiran’s sake, lilted from a screened dais at the far end of the room.

Ringil saw faces glance up unhurriedly from their platters as he came in, register his arrival, and then go back to dining with as little concern. Small smiles and shrugs, a disinterested comment back and forth. If the sword on his back was noticed, it excited none of the anxiety Ringil had seen in the other tavern when Klithren and his men came calling. In fact, at one table a satin-clad young woman turned and eyed him with open and rather predatory interest, before her friends’ chorus of shocked mirth and expostulation brought her back around to face her food.

Ringil let a thin smile flicker across his face in response. He crossed to the bar.

“I’m looking for the Lady Quilien of Gris? I understand she’s lodged here.”

The bartender wiped a cloth across the bar-top. He surveyed Ringil and his companions, shot a sidelong glance at the closest of the hired muscle. He sucked at his teeth. “Is she expecting you?”

“No. But if she still plans to take passage on the Marsh Queen’s Favor tomorrow morning, she’ll need to see me.” Ringil nodded upward to the stairs and landing over the bar. “Room Eleven, isn’t it?”

The bartender put down his cloth.

“Wait here,” he said. He moved down the bar and leaned over to mutter in the ear of one of the uniformed men. The man looked at Ringil, clearly wasn’t much impressed by what he saw, but shrugged and pushed off the bar, then made his way to the stairs and up. His footfalls clomped overhead on the landing gallery, then faded. Ringil waited and watched the diners. The bold woman in satin sent him a couple more arch glances and whispered to her friends. He looked about idly for some male attention in the same vein, but could not find it.

“Get you something while you’re waiting?”

Ringil was about to say no, then recalled his abandoned glass aboard the Marsh Queen’s Favor and the ensuing regret through the climbing streets, the tilting gray vagueness that would not leave him alone. The sense that he was not anchored enough in things outside his own feverish head.

Yeah, like getting drunk is going to help that.

Fuck it. Battlefield tonic, right? He remembered Flaradnam after the battle at Rajal Beach. Iron hip flask raised, seamed black face grim and gashed with something you couldn’t really call a smile. Kill or cure, Gil.

“Rum,” he said, and indicated his porters. “For them, too.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow at that, but he set up the glasses and poured accordingly. Ringil tossed a couple of coins onto the bar-top, glanced up at the sound of clomping footfalls on the landing overhead. The uniformed muscle, coming back downstairs with a bemused expression on his beefy face.

“You can go right up.” He apparently couldn’t believe it.

Ringil grunted as if he expected no less. He knocked back his rum—this one wasn’t bad—and upended the empty glass on the bar.

“Stay here,” he told his escort.

Upstairs, the landing gallery cornered right, into a narrow passageway with doors on either side and small candelabras in the ceiling every ten feet or so. The receding dimensions of the passage seemed to sway very slightly in the guttering light the candles gave, as if the inn were a ship that had already put to sea. Ringil resisted the temptation to put bracing hands against the walls as he walked.

The door to Room Eleven was ajar.

He stopped dead when he saw it. Something black and whisper-edged ghosting up through the layers of flu and alcohol, right hand flexing at his side, left reaching across to loosen the sleeve he kept the dragon knife in. The corridor was far too narrow for the Ravensfriend to be useful—any fighting done here would be close and sweat-palm desperate.

Just what you need right now.

Ringil eased closer to the far wall to get an angle of vision on the cracked door. Silence battened down in the corridor, stuffed itself into his ears like black water. He watched with fatalistic calm as the gap between door and jamb thickened, as the door hinged slowly and soundlessly back on itself and opened the room beyond to view.

A dog stood in the gap, looking steadily up at him. Pricked ears and slanted amber eyes in the gloom. Long gray muzzle, and a ruff at its throat as thick and glossy as one of his mother’s winter mufflers.

Dog? That’s a fucking wolf, Gil.

Ringil stared back into the amber eyes. Had he been less fuddled with fever, he might have reached for the ikinri ’ska, the words and gestures he’d used against the dogs at the river, the marsh dweller lore learned from—

—Hjel, leapt into his head, tight-limbed, hot-eyed young scavenger prince in rags, who seems, despite evasive conversational maneuvers to the contrary, to somehow already know you as he tilts wine from a leather skin, catches your eye in that way you recognize, invites you to stay and admits yes, he’s heard of Trel-a-lahayne all right, his forebears were its rulers, but it’s a dead legend now, man, fallen to an unknown evil out of the south a thousand years ago—and then he leads you to tumbled white ruins on the marsh to prove his point—

The Gray Places were full of that shit, full of the wreckage of what you thought you knew about the world, full of people and places that could or should not be, and aching absences where what you expected was suddenly not. But with time you learned, you handled the ache, you let the current carry you, and you took what it offered you along the way; you lay down, for example, beneath damp marsh dweller canvas like some childhood fantasy of escape, lay down with hot-eyed scavenger princes who smelled faintly of wet earth and wood smoke, and owned all manner of useful tricks of sorcery with plants and animals.

And when you woke, some uncounted series of days and nights later, and your companion was gone with his tent and wagon and the rest of his grubby clan, and the Gray Places as often had faded with them, burned back to the hard-varnished texture of whatever portion of the real world you’d washed up in with your dreams—then, still, the scents of your fucking lingered on your flesh, and the ikinri ’ska, in your own reality no more than myth and marsh dweller superstition, was harsh in your head, and real as a blade…

The wolf, or dog, perhaps bored with all this, twitched an ear at him and turned its long gray head away. It yawned, exposing slick white fangs as if for inspection, closed up its muzzle again with a hollow snap, and walked away from him, back into the room. Ringil, beginning to suspect that the rum had been a bad idea after all, went after the animal, one wary step at a time.

At the back of the room was a section for washing and dressing, screened off by an opened iron concertina frame hung with thick muslin curtains. The dog crossed to the leading edge of the screen, peered in, and then seemed to leap up onto some high platform behind the drapes. A poorly defined shadow moved across the muslin, and a woman’s voice drifted languidly out to him.

“You wished to see me?”

Ringil cleared his throat. “I’ve come from the Marsh Queen’s Favor. Our departure has been brought forward.”

“Really?” A sudden edge on the urbane tones now. “And there I was, given to understand we need not depart until I chose to present myself aboard tomorrow morning. Your captain is a fickle man when his purse is filled.”

“He is not my captain.”

“But fickle nonetheless.”

“Possibly so, my lady. I really wouldn’t know.” Some ghost of court-bred manners past struggling to assert itself as he spoke. It was a part of himself he took out from time to time, like some age-worn keepsake of youth, and was always surprised to find how much he missed it. “But though it grieve me to carry the message, I am very much afraid that your ladyship will need to present herself aboard before dawn, or the ship will sail without you. I have brought men to ease the transport of your effects.”

A slight pause.

“Well. They send me a knight errant. And I have, I suppose, been less than courtly with you.”

Motion across the muslin again. The Lady Quilien of Gris stepped out from behind the screen and paced toward him, toweling riotous dark hair dry with one hand as she came. Apart from the scarlet flannel towel she was using, she was completely naked. She offered her free hand in a—

Naked?

She’d done it with such aplomb, such utter lack of care or self-consciousness, that it took him those first few paces and the outstretched hand before he realized the fact. He supposed that a man with more conventional appetites might have spotted it faster—youthful breasts, belly, thighs, all on open display—but even there, he wondered how many such men would be prepared for the complete lack of acknowledgment this creature offered for her state of undress. Ringil had known his share of successful sluts, numerous of them among the nobility, and there were quite a few he remembered who’d have no problem pulling a trick like this if it were for the right visitor to their rooms. But in all of those women, at the heart of all their artifice and display, there was always the arch stare, the tilted head, the intimate signal that this was a game of stakes. They deployed their bodies and their availability exactly the way you’d deploy a regiment across a battlefield, with every bit as much ceremony and command.

This woman was not deploying herself.

The Lady Quilien of Gris wore her pale and shapely body as if it were some cheap garment she’d borrowed from a friend and just that moment thrown on.

“You wished to see me,” she said simply. “Now you do.”

“I, uh…” Ringil took the offered hand and pressed it to his lips, something mechanical to do while he got his head together. The Lady Quilien of Gris was clearly insane. “Thank you, my lady. But might I suggest that you are not as, uhm, open, when my porters come to collect your luggage.”

“Oh, I won’t need them.” Quilien took back her hand, brought it to her face. It seemed, for a moment, she was about to sniff or lick at her knuckles, but then she suddenly remembered herself and dropped her arm to her side instead. “I travel very light, you see.”

She was still holding the red flannel towel to her head in her other hand, as if to stanch the flow of blood from some recently acquired scalp wound. She smiled brilliantly at him from under the cloth and the damp mass of her hair, but there was something vacant in the way she did it, as if smiling were something she’d only recently learned to do. She tipped her head, but it was a jerky, inelegant motion, and he heard her neck click as she did it. In the uncertain light, he had the sudden sensation that the color of towel might indeed be blood-soak, and the off-key gestures the sign of a brain damaged by some brutal blow to the skull. The wide, empty smile stayed and stayed. Saliva gleamed on the points of the teeth. Her eyes seemed to stare through him at something else.

Ringil felt a brief quiver of something, made it for pity, and fell back on his original verdict—here was some touched-in-the-head scion of a rural House too embarrassed to keep her at home or consign her to one of the newfangled asylums pioneered in Parashal since the war. A House wealthy enough to pay instead for an endless round of pilgrimages to shrines of reputed healing somewhere far from Gris.

Wherever that was.

“Are you quite sure that—”

“You are very kind, nameless knight. But I assure you that anything I need for travel will be in my cabin when I arrive.”

So perhaps she had porters of her own. Or imagined she had. Or—

Whatever. Feeling increasingly like a man in the wrong place, Ringil contented himself with a courteous nod.

“At dawn,” he reminded her.

“Yes. At dawn.” Almost absently—her interest in him seemed to have abruptly waned. She was looking past his shoulder and slightly downward. “And now, since I see there are men waiting for you, perhaps you should go to them. It was nice meeting you.”

Her arm was out again, hand held up, but oddly, as if it were something she thought might belong to him rather than her. When he took the hand and raised it to his lips, she looked at him with blank surprise, as if she’d had no idea her limb had moved from her side.

Ringil fixed on a courtier’s smile, let go of the arm, and made a bow. Got himself hurriedly back out of the room and into the passageway. Surprised to find the breath tight in his throat.

It wasn’t that madness bothered him much anymore—Hoiran knew he’d seen enough of it during the war to become accustomed.

And in the Gray Places, it was practically the key to survival.

But somewhere, elsewhere, in whichever rural backwater shit-hole it counted itself lord over, Quilien of Gris’s family ate and drank and slept without her under their roof, knowing she was tipped out into the world and groping about with her scrambled sense of self to make whatever poor tapestry of day-to-day living she could. They knew that, and they had let it happen, and they lived with it daily in complicit, well-heeled tranquility. Perhaps they spoke of her sometimes, in strained and distracted tones, their oceanic complacency driven back every so often by storms to reveal the reefs of memory and care. Or perhaps, on some patriarch’s orders, they did not name her at all except in whispers.

In any case, they had abandoned her; had counted it their best strategy.

At least she’s got the dog.

Funny, he’d forgotten all about the dog.