Menagerie deals again and Naomi picks her cards up. White Queen High, she notes, a shame she means to fold this round. A potential Full Court hand is difficult to resist, both for its rarity and its grandeur. But Naomi cannot afford to get competitive, or to play through everything that piques her interest.

“Bet,” Ari says. “My four left fingers from the knuckle.” He has picked up the formula of the language, for all the good that it’s doing him.

Cupbearer wavers, a tight expression on his face that might once have been biting his lip, and flickers a gaze at Ari beside him before he folds. How many memories of his lover has he bet? Naomi wonders. Who is Ari to him now? The man who looks after him, strokes the curve of his bare head, resents him.

It’s a usual curse for Naomi, to be unable to stop herself from thinking.

Ari does not know how to play this game, and yet he came here anyway. If he is not stupid, and he is not stupid, then that’s a level of loyalty Naomi is not really capable of understanding. She could judge Cupbearer for forfeiting those memories, but isn’t Naomi the same woman who offered up her sister’s birth, her late father, cut away her loved ones so she could fill that space with more objective kinds of knowledge? More important kinds.

Cupbearer folds. He is so bare that every part of him is intimate, the aching curve of his soon-to-be-severed ear against his skull. A good thing they haven’t graduated to greater limbs yet. Naomi would not like to feel what Ari’s anger would do in her breast at Cupbearer spread over the room like chopped meat. There was no grass on Elkin Moor, no broom nor bonny whin, but’s dripping with Child Owlet’s blood and pieces of his skin.

“Call.” Naomi gestures at Ari with a short flick of her wrist. “His anger.”

Oracle bets a cage of black salamanders with real fires flickering in their bellies. Naomi tries to focus her attention there, that wonderful strangeness. She presses her fingers to the joint of her jaw, feels it pop. She’d assumed that having a bad taste in one’s mouth was not a literal expression, but her tongue has a rotten flavor.

As soon as the swap has passed and the last round of cards is dealt, Naomi folds. That will, at least, get his anger out of her. Which will help.