Her tattooed forest hidden now by blood, and the ruddy golden crumbs that cake her shoulder and her throat, gleaming under harsh fluorescence. She’s sat on the steps below the landing, bloodied hoodie a tangled stain on the floor, her T-shirt cut away, a sodden ruin in her lap. “You lied to me,” she says, through her teeth.

Marfisa on the steps beside her scoops more golden dust from a plastic baggie. “I did no such thing.” She presses it over the last visible edge of that ragged wound.

“You didn’t,” Ellen winces, “tell me the truth.”

“And if I had?” Marfisa smooths the dampening, darkening dust with a knuckle. “Would you have listened?” Sits back, eyeing the almost empty baggie. “This will have to do.”

“I need a shower.”

“In time. Let the owr do its work. How does it feel? Don’t touch.”

Ellen shifts her shoulder. The clumped dust, settling, fuses as she eyes it to a cleanly golden shell, gleaming without slough or crack or flake. “You aren’t human,” she says. “Are you.”

“No,” says Marfisa, getting to her feet. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

Ellen takes Marfisa’s hand to pull herself upright, working her shoulder back and up, forth and down, “That’s just weird,” she says.

“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa.

Up the steep stairs lofted from the landing, up and up to a plain brown door ajar at the top and into a brightly airy kitchen, “Can I at least get clean?” Ellen’s saying, as she tries to hold up the blood-soaked lop of her T-shirt with a bloodstained hand.

“Find her some clothing,” Marfisa says, curtly. “Did the truck get put away?”

There’s someone else, a small man in a collarless shirt of faded green, there on the three steps leading down to a dark room crowded with shadowy boxes. He sighs, with some little gravity. “The truck might be said to have been secured.”

“Is it clean,” says Marfisa. And then, “There’s clothing in the lobby. Destroy it. Clean the floor, and the steps as well.”

“It is possible, perhaps,” he says, “the lady misapprehends the particulars of a relationship with such a one as this.”

“You served the Devil,” says Marfisa, stepping away from Ellen, toward him. “Now you serve the Outlaw,” as the small man sets off with a sigh, past her, his muttering, “This one did but clean photographs for the Devil,” trailing after him, “not the scenes of crimes,” out through the door he closes behind him.

Marfisa’s pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. She scoops her white hair back, gathered a moment in a single hank, then lets it go to spring back to its cumulonimbal crest. She opens a sparsely laden cabinet, takes down a blue-lipped drinking glass. Shoves aside with the sweep of an arm the litter on the counter, dirty dishes, tangled utensils, empty takeout cartons, wadded newspaper, an unsheathed sword, a couple-three fat little paperbacks, all to make room for the stainless steel bowl she hauls up.

“Is there a shower?” says Ellen, shivering.

“Don’t touch,” says Marfisa, crossing to the sink, where she sets to filling the glass. “I’m not,” says Ellen, turning with her, but blinking, wide-eyed, “whoa,” she says, and sits, heavily, before the fridge. “Too fast.”

“Drink,” says Marfisa, squatting to offer the glass. And then, as Ellen, nodding, sips, “You struck your blow.”

“I went in through the basement deck, like you said.” She drinks off the rest in a gulp. “He was there, asleep, alone. I stabbed him,” lifting her bloodied hand to point, “here,” to the inked knob at the nape of her neck, “and,” a wincing shrug, “he was gone.”

“It wasn’t him.”

“She was there.”

“Your wizard,” says Marfisa, standing to take the bowl to the sink.

“Upchurch. She wanted me to go upstairs,” lifting her voice over the rush of the faucet. “There’s a woman, locked in a room full of moths?”

“Butterflies.”

“And she told me it wasn’t done. And then,” looking down, at the seamless red-sheened gold that plates her shoulder.

Marfisa returns, careful with the weight of the bowl, “How did you escape,” she says.

“I stabbed him in the skull.”

“The skull.”

“It was what I could reach,” says Ellen. Marfisa dunks a dishtowel in the bowl, wrings it out. Ellen reaches for her wrist. “I didn’t finish it,” she says. “He’s still there.”

A drip from the dishtowel into the bowl, plink. “There is truly nothing of Grandfather left,” says Marfisa. She leans in to daub the sticky blood from Ellen’s breast, gently but firmly lifting the stiffening panel of T-shirt out of her way. Ellen tips back her head, looks up, to the dull white popcorned ceiling, “He bit me,” she says.

“Yes,” says Marfisa, scrubbing, wiping, scrubbing again.

“So, will I,” Ellen rocks a little, absently, with the force of Marfisa’s ministrations, “do I turn into something like that?”

“No.” Marfisa dunks the dishtowel, staining the water in the bowl. Wrings it out again.

“Why did you let me go there by myself?”

“You,” says Marfisa, blotting blood from there, and there, “would not be stopped.”

“I had no idea what I was in for.”

“Now, you do.” Marfisa dunks the towel again. “Now we can make a plan.”

Ellen scoots back, out from Marfisa’s clasp, hard up against the fridge, her bloodstained hand between them. “If I hadn’t made it,” she says, her affect flat, her tone unchanged. “If I’d bled out in the house. Passed out and crashed, driving back.”

Marfisa shrugs in her sheepskin coat. “It would be a different plan. What do you want from this, Ellen?”

“Vengeance,” she says, almost immediately.

“And what will you do to get it?”

Ellen blinks. Lowers her hand. Marfisa leans in, to daub and wipe once more. “I should meet your wizard, next,” she says.

“I’ve got a phone number,” says Ellen.

“Does she answer?” There’s a knock at the door, three sharp raps. “It’s open,” calls Marfisa. “I don’t know,” Ellen’s saying, “I haven’t called it yet,” but Marfisa’s sitting back, looking up and over to the unopened door, “That hod,” she mutters, “will not – ”

Three knocks, again, but slow, deliberate booms that rattle the door in its frame. Marfisa gets to her feet, frowning.

“It’s him,” says Ellen Oh. “Isn’t it.”

The door bursts open, splintering the jamb. Chilli takes a big step into the room, his boots, his shorts, his big yellow beard, the short plain sword in his hand angled to catch a flare of light the vicious chop at his head by the bat in Marfisa’s hand, “Ha!” Shifting her grip the bat twirls back around and up, a jab at his chest he thwarts with an awkward downward whack, the sound of bitten wood. He wrenches, levering the bat to spin it free of grip and blade to fly across the clattering fall to the floor, “Ho!” as he loops the point of his sword to hang in the air before her throat. “It’s steel must meet with steel,” he snarls. “Fetch my blasted sword.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Marfisa’s focus flicks from blade-tip to countertop, the hilt there visible among the litter. “Go on!” he bellows. “Make a move. Make your move.”

“Harper!” calls someone else. The broken doorway’s crowded, Gaveston squeezing through past Pwyll into the kitchen, and Meg a-loom behind them. “There’s a gallowglas on the field,” says Gaveston, pointing to Ellen, but Chilli’s blade doesn’t waver. “There’s a gallowglas,” says Gaveston, “bleeding, on the field.”

“Changes nothing,” spits Chilli.

“It changes everything,” says Gaveston. “Put up. Step back. We’ll try again, some other day.”

“Yeah,” says Gradasso, even as Pwyll’s making shushing motions, “we ought to,” but “Shut up!” roars Chilli, fury shredded to the edge of a shriek, blade still aimed at Marfisa’s throat. “Pick,” he snaps. “Up. That. Sword.”

“No,” says Marfisa.

“Ranh!” Blade-tip leaps, settles, both his hands on the hilt held high. “Fine,” he says, and takes a step, sidelong, another, turning his way about the kitchen, his sword a spoke, Marfisa, motionless, the axle. “Fine,” he says again, his eyes still locked with hers. Reaching back for the counter with his off hand, sightlessly clumsy, fumbling about to close over the hilt. Drawing the second sword scrape against the counter, a blade in either hand now, and both of them pointed at her. “You’ve ceded the field. Take off the coat.”

“No,” says Marfisa.

“Take it off!” The blades shake in his hands. A step toward her, another, those points lowering just to touch the fleece of the coat’s wide collar, there, and there, at either end of her clavicle. “I will have my coat,” he says.

“You’ll poke two more holes in it,” says Marfisa. “Go on. Deny the Queen her Outlaw. Render me to bone.”

Gaveston swallows. Gradasso in the doorway raises, lowers an empty hand. Ellen looks from Marfisa, still, unmoving, to Chilli, settling and resettling his grips about the hilts of those two swords. Floorboards creak, as out there Meg steps back.

“I have your sword,” says Chilli.

“That?” says Marfisa, with a nod for the sword to her left, short and simply plain, his right hand clutching yellowed leather. “That I stuck in the floor of Goodfellow’s house for all to see, and anyone to take, who’d need of it.”

He pressed forward, deepening the dimples in the fleece. She takes in a quick sharp breath through her nose. “You will,” he says. “Quit, these rooms.” Takes back a step. “Get yourself to that warehouse of clods and boobs, I don’t care. Take your books, your boxes, all your trash,” another step back, toward the door, blades in either hand still high, “but you will leave that blasted, rotten coat, you hear me?” Yellow beard stirred by his panting breath. “And if you ever show that horse’s head again, anywhere south and east of the Burnside Bridge, I’ll strike it from your shoulders to set before the Queen, gallowglas or no. Are we clear?”

Marfisa’s lips suggest the slightest smile.

“Gah!” Chilli stamps, whips both swords up and back, over either shoulder, pushes out between Pwyll and Gradasso, who duck to avoid the steel. Gaveston slips after. Meg leans in to swing the door shut with a massive, green-knuckled hand.

“That was,” says Ellen.

“Yes,” says Marfisa, stooping to pick up her bat.

“I lost that mask,” says Ellen.

“We’ll get more,” says Marfisa, thumbing the freshly rough-edged nick cut deeply in the barrel of the bat. “Don’t touch,” she says.

Ellen’s hand leaps away from the gold encasing her shoulder. The edges of it have gone lacey, darkly soft, crumbling here and there to pepper her breast and upper arm with flecks. “Marfisa?” she says, looking up. “What’s a gallowglas?”

•

That long and oval glass-topped table, covered over with the detritus of many hasty meals, crumpled paper napkins, plastic cups stacked and toppled, crushed, glass bottles that had once held soda, beer, kombucha, an unsteadily towering stack of emptied pizza boxes, and crumbs and dregs and half-dried spills. Bruno favors it all with a rueful smile. “It’s gotten a bit out of hand,” he says. “Cachaça?” Setting a burlapped bottle on a relatively uncluttered patch, and two squatly heavy glasses beside it.

“Sweetloaf could see to this, surely?” says Luys, pulling out a chair, as Bruno uncorks the bottle, sitting himself, as Bruno pours a glass, “Would this be the first call of an industrious morning for you,” he says, offering it up, “or the last stop of a long and wearisome night?” Luys shakes his head. Bruno shrugs, sets down the glass, and pours more in the second, the liquor clear and thin, the burble of it highly pitched. “So,” he says, and sits himself across from Luys, lifting the glass in a one-handed toast. “The meeting’s yours.”

Luys nods. His chamois shirt is rumpled, brown, unbuttoned at the throat, his black cap of hair discreetly tousled. “We ought,” he says, “begin to, discuss, what each we see as possible,” a breath, “roads,” he says, “to rapprochement.”

“But Mason,” says Bruno, smiling and frowning at once, “surely, you and I are friends.”

“Between her majesty,” says Luys, with a skeptically sour tang, “and his excellency,” and Bruno nods at that, mouthing a silent ah, “But why’s it we, who ought to do this thing?” he says, and takes a sip.

“Who else is there who might?” says Luys. “The Marquess, and the Soames, being at each other’s throat.”

“The Guisarme and the Glaive are brothers yet.”

“And doubtless seek roads of their own. Should our discussion bear fruit, we’ll no doubt share with them.”

“And vicey-versey, I suppose?” says Bruno. “The fruit of the roads we might glimpse,” he mutters, and swallows off what’s left.

“Your pardon?” says Luys.

Bruno leans out over the table to uncork the bottle. “What of our lady?” he says, and pours himself some more.

“Her grace?” says Luys. “She is where she is. We must steward her demesne, as best we can, till her return.”

“We,” says Bruno.

“Yes,” says Luys.

“You and I,” says Bruno.

Luys frowns. “If you must put it bluntly,” he says, his hand closing up on the tabletop. “But we do both have our help.”

“You’ve the men,” says Bruno, pointing with his glass, “I, the matériel,” drawing it back, “to put it bluntly.” He throws back the liquor in one quick gulp. “Too blunt?” he says, to answer the quizzical turn of Luys’s mien. Sets down the glass, clack. “North,” he says, tapping to one side of it. “Northeast,” the other, fingers and thumb pressed together. “Southwest,” he says, tapping to the one side again, “Northwest,” the other. “Mason,” he says, but this time does not tap, that hand resting over the empty glass, “and Shrieve.”

“You’d set us both at odds?”

“I was not the one to call this meeting,” says Bruno.

“A meeting to discuss!” cries Luys, throwing up his hands.

“Discussion,” says Bruno, “takes two. Two points of view. Two sides, as it were. Sat across a table. As for rapprochement, well: there must needs be a gap, between the two, to be rapproched.”

“You’d have us set at odds,” says Luys, shaking his head. “With all that’s happened, with all we have to face, between the Viscount, and the Queen, you want – ”

“You’ve sat in privy council with his excellency.”

“And you the Queen!” Luys falls back in his chair. “That’s what best fits us to this task – our vantage, jointly, is ideal, to scout what ground they hold in common, and, with our counsel, bend their ears to bend their steps to seek it.”

“We’d bend?” says Bruno. “The Queen, the Viscount, you would have us bend?”

“Away from senseless dispute? Back toward stability? Peace? Prosperity?” Luys leans forward, both hands on the cluttered table. “Every day, Shrieve. Each and every day, you take two deals, two angles, hands, and play them, to the betterment of both. This is what you do. This is your duty.”

“My duty’s to the Queen,” says Bruno, simply.

“By which you mean to say that mine is not.”

A moment passes, during which Bruno neither nods, nor shakes his head. Then with a sudden savage swing of both his arms Luys sweeps boxes, napkins, bottles and cans tumble crashing spinning clatter from tabletop to floor. Scrape as he pushes back his chair. “It’s much too early in the morning for such nonsense.”

“No, Mason. It’s far too late to play at comity.”

Luys gets to his feet. “That’s it, then?”

Bruno does not look up, or back, as Luys stalks around the foot of the table and out the trapezoidal room. He leans forward, then, to take hold of the other glass, still full, and drinks it down. “That might have been a wee bit premature,” he says, to no one in particular. Eyes the glass in his hand, twisting it back and forth. Reaches for the bottle, but pushes it away. Something rings, somewhere out behind him. “Mason?” he says, and gets to his feet.

“Shopkeep!” bellows someone away out there, and Bruno closes up his eyes.

Out in the big front room, floor of it unpainted planks lined and aisled with overflowing bins of fittings and hardware sorted by type, past the file of unhung doors leaned one against another along the wall, there’s the counter laden with Mason jars filled with keys, where the Harper Chillicoathe bangs a service bell with his fist, “Shopkeep!” he roars again, through laughter, “we’d have our wares inspected!” Pwyll and Gradasso to either side, arms folded, akimboed, Meg there in the vestibule, hands up to brace her weight against the lintel, Gaveston leaning in to nudge, to point out Bruno in the angled doorway. Chilli turns, thrusts up a hand gripped tight about the yellowed leather hilt of a short straight sword, “See what I have brought!”

“A sword,” says Bruno, still in the doorway. “All of you it took, to bring a sword?”

“With this,” Chilli shakes it, once, “I went and got this back!” Thrusting up his other hand, his own sword with its heavy golden pommel. “I beat her, Bruno. The Outlaw’s been rebuked. She’ll leave the rooms on Hawthorne and, I swear, won’t ever try to raid our portion again.”

Bruno looks down, adjusts his cuff, the link a small coin, brassy with a silver center, Good For One Fare, say letters stamped about the rim. “And it took all of you,” he says, looking up again, “to bring this thing about.”

Chilli lowers both his swords. “It’s been done,” he says. “What does it matter – ”

“Where is her grace?” says Bruno, simply.

“I,” says Chilli, “her grace, her grace is fine, I’m sure – ”

“That’s not,” says Bruno, “what I asked.” Stepping into the room, past a bin of filigreed hinges, “Where,” he says, past a bin of coppery lock plates, “at this precise moment,” up the aisle toward Chilli, “might I go,” as Gradasso steps to one side, out of the way, “to find her grace,” as Pwyll ducks into the vestibule with Meg, “the Duchess of Southeast,” as Gaveston steps back, “Widow of the Hawk, Queen’s Favorite,” as Chill, blades criss-crossed before him, glowers, “where is Jo Gallowglas,” says Bruno, “and why, under all the stars above, are you not watching over her, right now?”