People would argue—people will argue—that it is selfish of her to keep this to herself. Not to tell someone with more credentials, find some research agency to take the little snow globe of the hill from her hands and crack it open. Naomi is willing to admit that she might be selfish. Self-involved, at least; she spends more time within herself than some seem to, and has never worked well with others. It’s not as simple as that, though. This place is not built for traditional methods, for the rough edges of cooperation and bureaucracy. This is not first contact, the fair folk are well aware of humanity; if they wanted to be better known, they would be already. And they are dangerous.

The last two players enter together. They come, like Naomi did, through the hillside.

She knows one of them, though she doesn’t know his name any longer. The place where she did is a scar in her mind, smooth and pale. The place where she wrote it down in her notebook is the same. This is how she knows that he came under-the-hill with his real name, did not take Naomi’s pseudonymous caution, because he could not have bet and lost a name that wasn’t his. For her purposes, Naomi identifies him as Cupbearer, one of the cards, and it evokes, for her, the image of Ganymede in the talons of the eagle. Not inappropriate.

When Naomi first encountered this boy, he was beautiful in a romantic—it would be accurate, if ironic, to say elfin—sense. When she was green to the game, she thought he might be one of the folk. He looked how she pictured Tam Lin: long golden hair, rose-pink cheeks, that androgynous beauty common to the fay. He was missing, then, two fingers down to the knuckle on his right hand, music, and a few of his teeth. He was dressed very well.

There is still something arresting about Cupbearer’s appearance, the way the appearance of a hairless cat is arresting. His mouth and nose are blank cuts in his face and he breathes with a faint, rasping whistle. Draped over the back of Menagerie’s seat is a shawl woven of fine golden hair. Even the eyelashes. Naomi has to give him credit for the creativity of betting those. The socket of his remaining eye is gummy and pink, the pupil utterly colorless.

Cupbearer has lost other things since Naomi has known him: