It’s easy enough, now that she’s been playing for a while, to cycle previous games’ prizes back into the pot. Tonight: the knife, Cupbearer’s dancing, other minor sacrifices. However, she considers it wise to lose something of her own on occasion, not to seem competent enough to game the system, though she wonders if she might be, given the chance. Of her own things, Naomi has lost: her left pinkie finger, the memories of her first kiss and of her sister’s birth. The color red, a ring her father left her, and the taste of blackberries with cream.

The game advantages new players. It’s possible to bet small things until you run out of small things. Naomi does miss blackberries.

“Bets.”

They begin with the woman on Magpie’s right, whom Naomi calls Oracle. Her hands whir softly as she lifts a previously unseen cat from beneath the table, its body limp as a fur coat in her hands. “Bet. My familiar.” The cat, when she sets it down, arches its white back without hissing, and blinks in a strangely lifeless way, like one of those dolls with weighted eyelids.

The system here is imprecise, the value of a bet determined partially by how interesting the item is to the others at the table but also by what it means to the player to lose it. The most material things, the most replaceable, always fall early.

Naomi puts her knife down. “Call. Enchanted blade.”

Cupbearer is squinting at his cards single-eyed. Probably, he is having trouble seeing. He motions, with his free hand, to his jacket.

Magpie considers him. The material of her face looks like something other than skin. The gold edges of her cards brush her beak. “Child, you undersell me.”

Without hesitation, Cupbearer lays his cards facedown on the table and holds up his pinkie and ring fingers.

“Two fingers and the coat?” asks Menagerie.

Cupbearer nods.

The boy next to him presses a sound through his teeth. Naomi will need a name for him. Hound, perhaps, for those wide, pleading eyes. When it’s his turn, he chews his bottom lip. “What can I—” he begins, and then swallows, puts his shoulders back. Naomi has always been unsettled by people who overflow like this, pour feeling uselessly from their faces and bodies. Here there’s no quarter for that kind of human untidiness. “Call. What’s living in my garden.”

He is testing the betting system. Naomi remembers that, though she was more deliberate, wiser.

There is a folktale called “The Girl Without Hands” that frightened Naomi very much as a child. The story is about a man to whom the devil offered a great deal of wealth in exchange for whatever was behind his barn, where nothing but an old apple tree grew. He agreed, not knowing that his daughter was picking apples. Naomi would hope that whoever speaks so vaguely with the folk knows who walks in their garden.