Is that unfair? Gambling can be an addiction. Ari does not know where the lines of his anger are supposed to lie. He should be sorry, anyway, for draping someone else’s pain over his own like a couch cover. His sister has found and mailed him some of the books and pamphlets that are given to caretakers. She’s sweet like that.

Sometimes Ari sings for [ ], quietly. He has not sold his hearing yet, and Ari does not know if he can still enjoy things like this, but once he very much liked Ari’s singing.

“Comfort for the comfortless, and honey for the bee. Comfort for the comfortless, but there’s none but you for me.”

Naomi tries not to be too given to pity.

Here are the ribs, being slid across the table. Three ribs, music, a healing spell she wouldn’t know how to use, a memory, a surname, four fingers, and anger she didn’t want back. Technical ownership over Cupbearer, though she still doesn’t know his name. Her own name and the vial of blood and her fingers, safely kept, and passage out. And a favor. And her notebook.

And she can never return. Not now that it is all out in the open, her research butchered on the table, and the folk may seek novel ways of toying with her. Three years of study, and she still can’t predict them with any certainty.

Three years of study, and this and many more things she will probably never learn.

“Fiddler fair,” Magpie calls her, “what is your heart’s desire?”

Naomi won Midsummer Switch with a Full Court hand. She could have anything now. She could demand that Magpie tell her everything she’s wanted to know. She could make them let her come back, and give her a little chair at the side of the room, and let her take notes. At the end, Naomi could go down among unhuman things, and wrap them around herself, and come to understand them.

At the end, Naomi feels wrung out, hollow like her blood has abandoned her veins.

She points to Cupbearer, his empty, ugly face, his closed, single eye. She does not know what a person’s life expectancy is with three ribs neatly removed, but he is still breathing. “Give everything back to him,” she says. Her voice is clear, authoritative, and someone else’s. Speaking into this hot aorta of the earth, at the end of the things Naomi can know. “Everything he lost. Give it back.”

It’s an entirely uneventful restoration. It feels as if there ought, at least, to be some flash and sparkle, something she could write down. Instead, there is just the fair face, and the pale hair, the gray glass eyes, and the long lashes. There is his open mouth, full of teeth. He stretches and rolls back both shoulders. At least he has the courtesy to tremble, as one before the grace of God. That saved a wretch like me.