Jessamy stood just outside the door for a few minutes, out of sight but listening, with her arms full of the blankets she had insisted on taking from Sorcha before the maid had gone into the parlor to pretend to check the fire. Then she turned on her heel, dumped the blankets unceremoniously on a chair in the hall, and followed the scent of spicy-sweet cigar smoke into the public bar. Tesserian, Amalgam, Masseter, and Sangwin sat around a table against the far wall. This room was drafty by intention, so that the breezes off the Skidwrack could help waft away the smoke that accumulated there. But even as the panes rattled, at a table by the window overlooking the road the more modest house the gambler had built the day before was, improbably, still standing.
Jessamy pulled up a chair to join the four men. Masseter put away something small and glittering that he had been worrying against the scars in his palm, tucking it into his watch pocket. Then he took the box of little cigars from inside his vest, opened it, and held one up in an offering. Jessamy nodded and waited while the peddler notched the end with his knife. Tesserian lit a match for her, and the five of them sat smoking in silence for a few minutes. Then the gambler reached out again and took the cigar nimbly from Jessamy’s gloved fingers as she crumpled, dropping her head into her hands on the tabletop, and began quietly to sob.
Her companions passed a silent conversation around between them. Amalgam, sitting to her left, put a hand tentatively on her shoulder. “I apologize.”
Jessamy shook her head, hiccuped, and managed, “Not your fault.”
She composed herself, and Tesserian passed her cigar back. “May I ask what instrument you played?” Masseter asked, rubbing the scar in his palm with the thumb of his other hand.
“I can play them all,” Jessamy said simply.
“Jack of all trades, master of none?” Sangwin guessed.
She looked at him for a moment. “Master of all of them, too, Mr. Sangwin. But it takes more than mastery. More than gifts.” She drew on the cigar, exhaled. “I don’t know what it takes, but on that night at least, the night when it mattered, I didn’t have it.”
Masseter tapped the ash from the smoldering end of his own cigar. His eyes rested on Jessamy’s bloodstained pink gloves. “Do you know how long?”
“How long I have?” She lifted the hand that held the cigar and looked at the rust-colored marks on her palm. “No.”
“If it were your last night . . .” Sangwin began thoughtfully.
“I begin every day with a similar thought,” Jessamy interrupted coldly. “Respectfully, Mr. Sangwin, but forgive me if just once I waste an hour like everyone else.”
The printmaker nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Thank you.” She took another pull on her cigar, then pushed herself to standing. “And thank you for this, Mr. Masseter,” she added, setting the half-smoked cigar in the ashtray at the center of the table. “Good night, gentlemen.”
“Pleasure,” Masseter said as she left the room.
“I don’t imagine she’ll tell us,” Tesserian said quietly as the cigar smoke swirled in Jessamy Butcher’s wake, “but I’d wager it’s a hell of a tale.” Phineas Amalgam gave a mirthless chuckle. Tesserian shot him a glare. “Pun not intended.”
Sangwin cleared his throat. “Speaking of tales . . . Masseter—”
The peddler waved his cigar. “Don’t give it a second thought.”
“Good of you.” Sangwin frowned. “Thing is,” he went on, troubled, “I really don’t recall mentioning that tale to the young lady, Petra. I can’t imagine I would have been so . . . so tactless.”
Amalgam tapped ash into the dish. “Odd, isn’t it?”
Masseter said nothing. He blew a series of smoke rings and watched them stretch, distort, and dissipate, looking for patterns.
Jessamy grabbed one of the blankets from where she’d abandoned them on the chair and fled up the stairs. She passed Petra coming down from her room, where from the window she had been watching the two figures under the iron arch in the road and wondering who would return and who would not. Wordlessly, without slowing their steps at all, each woman reached out and grasped the other’s hand, a quick exchange of pressure. Each stood just a hair taller as she moved on.
When at last both Sullivan and Captain Frost climbed the stairs to the porch, Petra opened the door. She handed the larger of the blankets to the captain with one hand and reached up to take off his tarpaulin hat with the other. “The stories are finished for the night, I think,” she said, hanging the hat on a peg by the door to dry. “But I saw Phin and the travelers in the bar, and Masseter always seems to have a spare in that cigar box of his. I turned your glass at a quarter to ten, Captain. You have time.”
“Thank you,” Frost said. He wrapped the blanket about his shoulders. “I’ll just see my way to some dry clothes first.” He stomped down the hall and up the stairs, leaving Petra and the sopping Sullivan facing each other.
“You’re a bit of a puppeteer, aren’t you?” he observed.
She looked over her shoulder, toward the sounds of laughing from the dancers in the parlor and the scent of smoke from the men in the bar. “When circumstances require.”
“And have you accomplished whatever it is you were after?”
“Not yet.” But the words weren’t meant for him, and she spoke so quietly that Sullivan almost didn’t catch them.
Then Petra turned back toward him and hung the blanket she held on the peg beside the captain’s hat. She reached up, and Sullivan tilted his face down nearer to hers. Neither of them blinked, or breathed, or looked away as she ran her fingers through the hair still streaming water down his neck, gathering
