The King in Red kept still as she approached. She gave his chair wide berth, rounding to the side. His ribs jutted from the chair like tree trunks a fire had stripped of bark and left to die.

One skeletal hand held a round glass three-quarters full (or one-quarter empty) of a weapons-grade pink cocktail shaded by four paper umbrellas and sporting a spear of tiny melon cubes interspaced with jadeite giraffes. Ice shifted in the glass.

He wore sunglasses, which made no sense. Golden tabs affixed the glasses to the holes where his ears would have been.

She stood, hands clasped behind her, watching and waiting. There were greater powers than the King in Red. It was just hard to think of any at this precise moment.

He raised the glass to where his lips once were, and drank. She watched the liquid disappear.

“Your Majesty,” she began, to be on the safe side.

“I know who you are, Ms. Abernathy. I know why you’ve come.”

His voice was almost human. The difference mattered.

“That will save time, Your Majesty.”

“Drop the Majesty. I have enough. I told Elayne I’d see you, and I have. You can go now.”

“I want to present my argument.”

“It’s good to want things.” He drank again, and again the fluid disappeared—reduced to chaos, all useful properties stripped to feed the Craftwork that kept the King in Red whatever he was. “Alive” was the wrong word. “I want to hear from an old friend once in a while for some reason other than business. You want me to hand you a fortune for no reason. Your stone companion wants to murder me, though he’s displaying admirable self-control.”

“Would you like me to stop?” Shale asked. Jewel facets glinted beneath his imitation human eyes.

“Try me.” The skeleton sounded bored. “Get this over with. I’ve killed so many of you before, in very many ways.” His voice went singsong for that last bit, then lost all humor. “I tore your goddess open and ripped her heart and lungs from the ruin of her chest. Break yourself on me, if you like. You’re not the hundredth or even the thousandth to try. And when I’m done with you, I’ll go back to my drink.”

He took another sip. Translucent giraffes danced with sun.

“Shale!”

There was no Craft in Tara’s cry, but Shale stopped anyway, halfway to the King in Red. He’d begun to change. His skin was veined with gray and hatched with gleaming gaps, his back a wreckage of wings. The human seeming reasserted itself; the jaw cracked to fit shrinking teeth together. He knelt, gasping, on the sand. His shirt hung tattered from his shoulders. Scars crossed his back where the wounds had been.