Bone Dance

I was irritated. It was another change, another upset to my delicately balanced routine. I found myself suddenly too grouchy to converse. I would have dropped into my chair, but Theo was in it.

“Here,” Sher said. She’d dragged two low-backed chairs to the other end of the tea table. That was irritating, too: the second-guessing, the attention, the proximity.

“Thank you,” I said, and sat down. She gave me a sideways glance, filled the last clean cup for Theo, and sat, too. Then China Black returned with a cup for her.

“I bet everybody’s told everybody everything,” Sherrea said. “But would you mind telling it all to me, anyway?”

“Starting from the Underbridge,” Theo added across his tea. I didn’t feel like talking, but they were looking at me. Well, I was the one they knew, not Frances or Mick. Chango — or whoever — it seemed strange that they didn’t all know each other. I knew them, and until a few days ago, I would have described myself as knowing no one and happy about it.

I started from the Underbridge and didn’t get far. As I came up on the image of Mick in the archives, I realized I was in trouble; I should have started earlier and explained Mick. But I couldn’t explain Mick, because that would mean telling about his dead body, and revealing that he was a Horseman, which wasn’t mine to tell. And then there were the archives. I dragged to a hand-waving stop.

“They’re Horsemen,” Sherrea said briskly, nodding. “I knew that. Which one was riding the redheaded woman?”

I stared at her.

“It was the only thing that explained what happened. What did you think, that she was having a religious conversion?”

I gave up on chronology and explained Frances’s vendetta against Tom Worecski and our interception by China Black and Mr. Lyle.

“How did you sandbag Mick?” Frances asked. “It’s a bit of a trick to get one of us unconscious before we think to jump horses.”

Mr. Lyle nodded. “You have to be very slow, or very fast. In this case, it was speed. And one can’t suspect every large, friendly dog one sees.”

Mick half gri

“I’ll remember that. Too bad it wouldn’t work on Tom; he hates dogs.”

Sherrea folded her knees up under her chin and wedged her feet on the chair. “So you want to find a guy who could be anywhere and look like anybody, who might not even be in the City. Why not give us a hard one?”

Frances turned her hands palm up. “It was the best I could do at short notice.”

“Ti-so, this has nothing to do with us,” China Black said urgently.

Sher looked up at her. “How can you be sure? It has something to do with Sparrow.”

China Black’s gaze went from Sherrea to me, and narrowed. She tapped a finger against her lower lip. She looked as if she were pla

Sherrea began to push empty dishes and the samovar to the far half of the tea table. Mr. Lyle caught the muffin bowl as it was about to heel off the edge, and stacked it and anything else in danger on the tea tray. Then Sher pulled a wad of electric-blue silk out of her sash. It fell open when she put it on the table, in a way I recognized. I wondered if anyone else there knew it was a new cloth, and knew why.

Given my last reading from Sher, I wanted to volunteer to take the dishes to the kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where it was. I lifted my eyes from the cards to the rest of the audience. China Black was haughty and nervous; Mr. Lyle was calm, as if this was the logical progression of the conversation. Theo was leaning forward and peering. “Groovy cards,” he said. “Where they from?” Mick was looking, and looking blank. But Frances was sitting straight-backed on the edge of the couch, her face frozen.

“Could we forgo this, do you think?” she asked. “It’s silly.”

Sherrea raised her eyes to Frances as she shuffled. I watched her small-boned, purple-nailed hands working over the cards, fllllllllt, fllllllllt, as she said, “This won’t take long. And we promise not to tell anybody you did something silly.” Thump — she set the deck on the silk and cut it into three piles. Then she snapped the top card off each pile and onto the table, face up.

“Oh,” she said, and stopped. Her head lifted again, and this time her eyes went to Theo. “Well, that was easy.”

Theo leaned even more. “What did — oh,” he breathed.

The Tower, the Ace of Pentacles, and the Emperor. I looked at Sherrea.

“For the question-and-three-cards, you want to be pretty literal-minded,” she explained. “Which means he’s in a tall building, the one associated with the most money and power; and either the building is owned by, or he’s in the company of, or he is, the bossman of the temporal reality.”

“Or all of those,” I said, staring at the three cards. “You mean, he’s in Ego? With Albrecht?”

She turned again to Theo, so I did, too. He looked like old ivory. “He is,” said Theo, barely audible. His glasses reflected afternoon sun; I couldn’t see his eyes. “Oh, shit. He sure is.”

Frances’s icy posture was melted. It had been replaced with the hunting-animal intensity I’d seen before, and that was turned on Theo. She hadn’t spoken, but she was waiting.

“What?” I said. “How do you know?”

“My dad’s goddamn advisory officer. I know those two freaks who were after you at the Underbridge — they’re goons of his. Oh, shit, shit, it makes too much sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. What does this have to do with Albrecht?” But as I said it, I knew.

“That’s my dad,” Theo replied.

China Black sat down suddenly. “Ah,” she said with a look at Sher. “This would seem to be our business, after all.”

The assembled multitudes were in the parlor, listening to Frances plan her murder, no doubt. I wasn’t with them. I’d found, after a few more minutes, that I needed a walk in the garden.

The front door didn’t object to the idea, and the path didn’t lead me back to the porch as I’d half expected. It was a brick path at first; then it became a trail of slate flags in a stream of silvery creeping plants. In the shade of a cluster of trees, I found an ornamental pond with a boulder beside it for sitting. So I sat.

I hadn’t been there long before Sherrea said behind me, “I know just how you feel. Hey, you’ve been doing this to us for years.”

I decided I wasn’t up to a heated response. I’d try Frances as a role model. Chilly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, fuck that,” she said, and sat down with a bump on the grassy bank. “You’re pissed as hell that you’ve known Theo for years and he never told you who he was. And that you’ve known me for about as long, and I didn’t tell you I was an accredited kick-ass bruja. In fact, you’ve had your nose rubbed in it that life has been going on outside your skin and nobody was filling you in on the details, and it bothers you a lot.”

At the side of my boulder, almost hidden in a tuft of tall grass, was a thin-stemmed little plant with a cluster of deep pink flowers. The color was so vivid it seemed to vibrate. I pulled it. It had no fragrance. There were short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. I began to strip them off, starting at the bottom.

“So now you know how all your friends feel,” Sher continued.

“Not quite,” I said. “You haven’t had any sudden revelations about me.”

She glared at me. “I’ve had plenty about you. Half of ’em I found out by accident and the other half by putting things together, and every time I found the kind of thing friends tell each other, it made me feel like shit. Because you hadn’t.” Sher dug a stone out of the grass and lobbed it into the pond; I watched the rings of water pulse out toward us as she talked. “If you’d wanted to know anything about me, or Theo, you could have just asked. But then we might have asked you something, and whenever we did, you’d slither out of it until it was pretty clear that you wanted us to keep our distance. Now you’re mad because we did. Were we supposed to keep giving our little secrets to you and never get anything back?”