Ari still likes to be with him, which is probably pathetic. His nameless, lipless, eyeless— He has told his sister that his boyfriend, whose name he couldn’t tell her anymore (does she remember? could he ask her?) is very sick. He doesn’t know if she believes him, hopes she doesn’t think he’s so indecent a person that he’d lie about that just because he’d been broken up with. Though he is lying about it, assigning the suffering of disease to a man who elected his condition.

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.