The library’s swinging doors swung, and disgorged a three-foot-tall woman with a fringed garçonne skirt in striking teal and a twin-tailed wig.
It was an excellent wig; Seth wouldn’t have known if the girl whose head it was sitting atop didn’t have needle teeth and if her big obsidian eyes weren’t going two directions at once. Kari-kine didn’t grow body hair.
”Feeeeeli,” this one sang, and hopped into the al Ydris daughter’s lap with feline precision. “You’re back so early!”
“I missed you too badly.” Ofelia set her book aside and draped an arm across the kari-kine’s midsection. “Mother was taking too long. I had to butcher a village or two.”
The kari-kine giggled and swatted Ofelia’s knee. “You did not.”
“Seth, this is Atra al Mikn.” Ofelia gestured across the snug burgundy library to where Seth picked through a recessed bookcase. “Atra, Seth.”
“Hullo, Seth,” Atra sang.
He bowed—best to play it a bit careful when greeting an al anything. “Honored, milady Atra.”
Ofelia waved two more women in. “And this is Luzia, and here’s Ponytail Magda. Not to be confused with Blonde Magda.”
“Charmed,” Seth said, and had no choice but to note: “You don’t have a Ponytail.”
Ponytail Magda—a shapely shawl-draped girl seeming about Seth’s age, but who could say with the unlit—shrugged and sat criss-cross on the floor next to Ofelia’s clawfooted chair. “Blonde Magda’s not blonde anymore.”
“The rest are on the way,” skinny Luzia said, in a voice that gave Ofelia’s a run for its monotone money.
“But if I’m first here, that means I get to read first.” Atra curled up in Ofelia’s lap. “Right?”
“That, my lovely little lyricist, is only fair.” Ofelia dangled a cherry over the kari-kine girl’s head; she obediently opened her fanged maw and Ofelia dropped the cherry in.
Atra chewed gleefully; the pit crunched beneath her anglerfish jaw. “I have a new stanza. Elle is gonna despise it.”
Seth sidled to Tiago’s overstuffed easy chair, where he sat with his harness and kit spread out in his lap like a gleaming and heavily armed leather cephalopod. “The rest?”
Tiago unscrewed a jar of stringent-scented polish. “No.”
“No what?”
“No, I’m not engaging with this.” Tiago daubed a rag into the polish and applied it to his holster with vigor. “If I have to explain my sister’s harem to my mother’s boyfriend, I might climb the Psychelith and jump off.”
“They’re not my harem,” Ofelia said, one hand idly rubbing the back of Luzia’s slender neck. “They’re my salon.”
“But you sleep with them?” Seth asked.
“Only if it’s late enough after the sex,” Ofelia said. “Otherwise they go home.”
“Is this another drawing room-slash-sitting room thing where I’m too provincial to understand the distinction?”
“In a salon, you read poetry after the orgy,” Luzia said.
“And sometimes before, if it’s early enough,” Ponytail Magda added. “Oh, look. He’s scandalized.”
Seth poured bleaching vacancy over the ink of his expression and returned to the spines of the al Ydris family’s library. “No, I’m not.”
“Get used to libertinism when you’re in the Necropolis, Mr. il Gutierre,” Ofelia said. “It’s one of our city’s governing laws.”
“Nobody worries about pregnancy.” Tiago pried a bent iron eyelet from its place in his belt and thumbed a replacement in. “Everybody looks twenty-five for twenty-five years, and everyone you see on the street can sleep with you without getting their soul blown back to the wheel. Even if they’re lit, we’re close enough to the Psychelith it catches them. This is the only city in the world where an unlit can cut loose.”
Ofelia stuck out her tongue; Luzia placed a cherry onto it. “The Salon wouldn’t have to worry about pregnancy regardless,” she said, around her chewing. “The only ones with pricks are Poka and Emily. And Poka’s a muran, and Emily is finally out of the scene this year, isn’t she?”
“She downgraded the sorcerer to a fling, apparently,” Ponytail said. “She’ll be around.”
“Oh, poor Em.” Ofelia spat her cherry pit into a dainty ramekin, its porcelain stamped with a laughing skull. “I thought they were darling together.”
“The point I was making,” Tiago said, “is that it’s a perfect storm.”
“And now our lovelorn Tiago is off the market, with his lovely little ginger snap,” Ofelia said. “Well, not ginger anymore. But still snappy.”
“Ooh, Tiago.” Atra sat up in Ofelia’s lap. “Tell us.”
Tiago pointedly rolled his eyes. “Feeli’s doing that thing she does, There’s nothing to tell.” Ofelia’s bird-of-paradise lovers drooped in disappointment. Tiago sighed, and with something bordering a smile added a “Yet.”
The salon flew into eager tittering and conspiratorial congratulation.
“Tiago has been the perfect brooding boyfriend material,” Ofelia said. “She’d be crazy not to at least give you an audition. Or gay, perhaps, in which case please do point her our way.”
“The poor girl’s been ripped from her home and turned unlit and lost her family and mauled by a seraph,” Tiago said. “And now she’s stuck in the undead capital of the UTSL. She needs time to plant her feet on the ground before I can think about sweeping her off them. And to acclimate. Anyone would.”
“I didn’t,” Seth said. “But I accept not everyone can be as adaptable as yours truly.”
“You were more adoptable than adaptable,” Ofelia said.
“What’s that even mean?”
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“It means that unlike you or me or Feeli, Riccy already belonged somewhere,” Tiago said. “She had a future. She had all the expectations of a life, all the rhythms. The growing up, and growing your family, and growing old. They fall away or twist out of shape when you unlight. The milestones vanish, or stretch into the strange horizon. Things get weird.”
“Do you hear that?” Ofelia nudged Atra. “He’s calling her Riccy already.”
Tiago tossed a wadded-up grease rag at her.
A soft movement outside drew Seth’s attention; nobody else seemed to notice. Someone had been holding very still at the door, and was now departing.
“Weird is enjoyable, with the right shift in perspective.” Ponytail shrugged blithely. “Just get the girl a hobby and a king-sized feather mattress, and help her thoroughly explore them both.”
“In the books you can jump a dozen chapters ahead,” Ofelia said. “It’s made my girls and I rather impatient. Do feel free to stutter and shuffle a while before you confess your feelings. Some people go in for that.”
“I’m not stuttering,” Tiago said. “I’m being measured; I’m being mature. You and il Gutierre can follow your appetites all you like.”
“I followed your mother’s, actually,” Seth said, to peals of scandalized laughter from Ofelia’s Salon and a scoff from Tiago.
As if by Seth’s invocation came the sounds of arrival, of opening doors and heavy boots stamping stone and Annalise’s cheerful “We’re back!”
Ofelia dropped into a conspiratorial murmur. “I believe we’re finally getting Mini this evening, girls.”
Ponytail brightened. “We are?”
Luzia absently checked her nails. “She’s finally ready to snuff that garish little light of hers?”
“She is not,” Ofelia said, primly. “So you will all behave yourselves, and refrain from unclothed touch.”
Stomping up the stairs came Seth’s employer and lover, her longcoat and riding gloves slung over one treetrunk arm. “Hello, girls. How’s she cutting?”
“Hello, Mrs. al Ydris,” they chorused.
“I see a light on in the central turret.” Annalise handed her outerwear off to Miniara, who had come scurrying up behind her—now in a dress of significantly shorter length and puffier sleeves. “Is that where our Riccy ended up?”
“Might be,” Tiago said.
“Ach, might be.” Annalise strode from the room. Her voice echoed from the hallway alongside the scrape and shuffle of a closet opening. “Go be a good host. Bring the poor lass some chaye and some extra bedding.” She reappeared in the library’s horseshoe archway with a teetering pile of linen and silk. “Not everyone likes their towers bare and drafty as a saintspeaker’s cell. Can they borrow some of your necrotea, Feeli?”
“I’d actually prefer if they didn’t give it back when they were done,” Ofelia said.
Miniara fumbled with the shortened edge of her dress, seeking a serving-girl’s apron where there was none. “I can take those, Madam Verdugo.”
“Ah, don’t be troubling yourself. Otherwise Sunshine’ll just fret and polish his pistols all evening. Go have girls’ night.” Annalise cheerfully nudged Miniara further into the room, seemingly ignorant of the fact that the lissome maid was shaking like a baby doe. “I’m for a bath, a bed, and a book, I reckon. Catch, boyo.”
Tiago caught the bundle of bedclothes with his chest and face. He gathered them grimly and stood, with an indignant ruffle that reminded Seth of how he acted when he was occupying a bird.
“Good lad. And you can pour some chaye into one of the good pitchers for her.” A heavy, leather-and-apricot warmth pressed against Seth’s back. “Whenever you feel like turning in, Sethy, our room’s the door with the whacking great sword over it.”
He squeezed her big hand where it sat on his shoulder. “Be there soon.”
“Love you lots, pet.” She gave him a chaste kiss on the forehead and—out of sight of her children—a substantially less chaste squeeze on the ass. “G’night, kids,” she sang.
“Good night, Mrs. al Ydris,” the salon sang back. Annalise gave them a wink and departed.
“Good evening, Ms. il Destine,” Ofelia purred. “We’ve brewed some chaye, and there’s brandy for it if you’d like.”
“I—I’m okay.” Miniara perched gingerly on the couch, starkly upright as if in recognizance that every new fingerspan’s worth of contact between her and its velvet would glue her further into whatever sticky situation she’d signed up for. “Thank you.”
“Oh, Mini, your necklace.” One of Atra’s independent eyes tilted downward to examine the bright new bib necklace Miniara kept fidgeting with, its thin filaments like a golden spider’s web. “This is gorgeous.”
“It matches her eyes,” Ofelia said. “See?”
Atra gasped. “Oh, it does. Magda, look. Her eyes are so lovely.”
“Don’t be presumptuous, Attie.” Ponytail Magda’s fingers brushed against Miniara’s. The girls of the salon were closing ranks around her, like an oyster’s shell around a pearl. “Would you prefer Ms. il Destine, or may we call you Mini?”
Miniara’s blush was practically glowing. “Any—anything you like, mistress.”
“Ah—Mini.” Luzia shook her head. “No need for that. We can leave our mistresses at the door for now, can’t we, Feeli?”
Ofelia’s shoulders shrugged with black-cat smoothness beneath her silky black blouse. With such practiced disaffection at the center of her fawning coterie, she looked practically vampiric. “For now.”
“Il Gutierre.” Tiago’s voice snapped Seth away from this increasingly tawdry scene. The young swordsman held a copper-handled thermos of chaye and a bundle of bedclothes beneath his arm. “Would you take one of these and come with me?”
Seth eyed the steaming drink and the plush silk blankets and picked the pitcher. Its metal fastenings gave it a satisfying heft, but Tiago didn’t truly need his help; Tiago needed his company, so that he wouldn’t be alone with Riccana and those closed-off blacked-out eyes.
They moved to the end of the hall; Tiago knocked on a door planted between two hanging tapestries of black and green. “Ms. il Teremi,” he called. “Can we come in?”
Silence.
“We have blankets,” Tiago said. “We could leave them outside the door, if—”
“Come in,” came the muted invitation.
Tiago repositioned his burden to turn the brass doorknob, and Seth followed him into an airy chamber dominated by the vast circular window they’d seen on the way in. Its light shone onto a canopy bed framed with horn-beaded curtains, at the head of which Riccana huddled, staring blankly out into the Necropolitan countryside.
“Brought you some extra blankets and such.” Tiago placed them on the floor as if offering them in tribute to an antique god. “And there’s a pitcher of chaye. Have you ever had it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s good,” Tiago said, with the skittish air of a child presenting a macaroni sculpture. “It’s Necropolitan tea. Thicker and sweeter than you’re maybe used to, but… yeah. It’s good.”
“I’ll try it,” Riccana said, and Tiago lost a half-inch to the relief that sent through his spine. “I like your cows, by the way.”
Tiago chuckled. Seth peered out the window, wondering if all those fine rolling pastures had some tenants who could put the grass to use, but all he saw was Demetrius, munching mopily, and Annalise al Equis, who was hovering near him as if skittish to introduce herself.
Tiago cleared his throat and said “The inverse of the door, il Gutierre,” and he turned to see a blobby, chipped depiction of two cows, painted right onto the maple.
“Cute,” he said. “Who did it?”
“Mom’s family,” Tiago said. “A lot of them came with her on the move out of Orwiny after she’d been married, just to move things and help out. And before they went home, they painted stuff all over the house. All the walls and everything. I think this was Uncle Affy. She mentioned him over at Sheepfuck. The shitty shepherd.”
“Pretty good painter, though,” Seth said. “Really captures the blobbiness. Did he paint often?”
“Dunno,” Tiago said. “I’ve never met him. Never met any of them.”
“You brought the door with you?” Seth asked, hasty with the need to escape whatever grim familial history Tiago had implied.
“Yep. Only thing we’ve got left from my childhood home.” Tiago rapped a knuckle on the painted bovine’s gormless snout. “One cow two cow,” he said, absently, in rhythm with the knock. Tap-ta Tap-ta.
Seth smiled. “What’s that?”
“Just something she would always say when she was done reading to us,” Tiago said. “We’d refuse to let her leave until she’d knock on the door on her way out, and go one cow, two cow.”
“Little hellcats even back then, huh?”
“Ofelia was. I was a Saint.”
“Sure.”
“Eventually it became our little code. When Mom knocked on the door in the one-cow-two-cow rhythm, we knew it was her, and not him.” Tiago kept his eyes on the painted cow, until his gaze took on the dry-eye tenor of a staring contest which, of course, he lost.
“One cow two cow,” he said, quieter, and left the room.
Seth looked at Riccana, who looked back.
“He’s a good kid,” he said, apropos of awkwardness.
“He seems it,” she said.
“You holding up all right?”
“Fine.”
“It’ll, uh…” Seth wasn’t sure what he’d been running up to say. It’ll get better? “It’ll get easier.”
“I don’t…” She sat her chin between her knees. “I don’t mean to be such a wraith. I’ll be out tomorrow.”
“There’s no need for that,” he said, and even though it wasn’t his call to make he had no doubt of it.
“I am grateful,” she said. “Really, I am. Please tell them.”
“They know.”
“Him,” Riccana said. “Please tell him.”