“Margot didn’t do nothing. No blood on his hands, nor under his nails, neither. When he came round, though, I heard rapture in his voice. Like I hadn’t since the war, you understand? Like he’d found something he never knew was lost. He thanked me. I took him back, cleaned him up with cheap rum, and he didn’t flinch when I poured it on his cuts. The Penitents came by to see if he could name his attackers, and he said no. So they left, and he left, and I thought that was the end.”

“But he came back.”

“He did. The next week, at the reading, he spoke thunder words with a hurricane voice. When he was done they screamed for more. Eve dragged him into the light. He had other poems he hadn’t finished yet; he said them, and the crowd roared. The next week we gave him his own gig, and he killed again. Two weeks later, folk came in raincloud masses.”

“And I missed all this.”

“That’s what you get working so hard, as if that’d save you from what soured twixt you and Claude.” He wound his broken fingers together, then unwound them as if scattering water drops on the table.

“Thanks for the editorial,” she said. “I saw Margot a few weeks back. He was good. I wouldn’t say genius.”

“I’m talking then, and you’re talking now. He’s had a bad run the last couple months. A curse broken. The voice took him up, and he wrote in its grip for two seasons, and it set him down as fast. Hurts, but hell, six months is more than most folks get out of love. I’ve known men who chased the line for decades after one night’s grasp of what Edmond Margot held for half a year. He doesn’t need your pity.”

Six months. Kai frowned. “This started, what, eight months back?”

“I can count. And I can feel the seasons change.” He opened his mouth wide, baring yellowed teeth. The point of his left incisor was missing, snapped off, casualty of some God Wars fight. “Eight months it was.”

“Where does he live?”

“Why do you care?” He drank his coffee again in one long gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and sighed, heavy and wet and sated.

“I want to talk to Mister Margot,” she said, “about faith.”

Chapter 28

28

The poet’s street looked no nicer by morning. Same stupid row houses, same slumping newsstand on the corner, same pox of printed tulips on every window’s curtains.