“What’s your name?” He has the kind of smile that seems like it would be careful even if it wasn’t forced. Naomi remembers the giddy anxiety in his body before Cupbearer kissed him, how he pressed his whole rabbiting heart against that kiss. It makes her embarrassed for him. Though he can’t, any longer, be embarrassed for himself.

“Fiddler.”

The smile tightens. “That’s not your name.”

Naomi nods.

Ari extends his hand across the table. Naomi is still holding his lover’s warm fingers. He says, “My name is Ari.”

What is it like missing that memory? It’s so soft and so breakable, a mouse curled in some crevice of Naomi’s brain. Her own first kiss, which she traded away some time ago, probably was not that kind. What is it like for him to be missing his anger? It’s interesting, that he bet something so fundamental so early.

“You won my memory,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Can I have it back?”

Naomi would if she could, is the thing. She would like to.

“I understand that I bet it and that I lost it to you—” It would perhaps be better if Naomi called him Hound, still, because Ari is such an intimate name. She wonders if Cupbearer still knows it. “Fairly. But what could you do with it? You’re human, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t need it for anything. It’s mine, please. Is there a reason that I can’t have it back?”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

Naomi has not touched the wine in her glass, but Menagerie pours more anyway, and she is glad enough of the interruption in their eye contact, a flash of bright violet. “Second round,” he declares.

“Please,” Ari says.

Naomi shakes her head. Does he think she wants these things? His outrage and his memory playing in the theater of her skull, demanding, in that way a story does, that she involve herself. Naomi hates audience participation.

The cards are dealt. Oracle places a goblet on the table that fills with golden liquor before their eyes. Naomi hesitates a moment and then bets the familiar and Cupbearer’s fingers. The hot, damp weight of both is beginning to nauseate her.

Ari puts on the table the taste of sweet potatoes, what a specific loss. Cupbearer opts for one of his ears; he only had the one remaining. Naomi won four years of his life. What is she expected to do with those? Will her own be longer, or does she only have the privilege of her name in some undefined cosmic record, stamped on the day of his death?