Have to get a clean shirt, Susannah reminded her unwelcome guest.

Mia, daughter of none, made no reply. She clearly cared bupkes for shirts, clean or dirty. Mia was looking at the telephone. For the time being, with her labor on hold, the phone was all she cared about.

Now we palaver, Susannah said. You promised, and it’s a promise you’re going to keep. But not in that banquet room. She shuddered. Somewhere outside, hear me I beg. I want fresh air. That banqueting hall smelled of death.

Mia didn’t argue. Susannah got a vague sense of the other woman riffling through various files of memory—examining, rejecting, examining, rejecting—and at last finding something that would serve.

How do we go there? Mia asked indifferently.

The black woman who was now two women (again) sat on one of the beds and folded her hands in her lap. Like on a sled, the woman’s Susannah part said. I’ll push, you steer. And remember, Susannah-Mio, if you want my cooperation, you give me some straight answers.

I will, the other replied. Just don’t expect to like them. Or even understand them.

What do you—

Never mind! Gods, I never met anyone who could ask so many questions! Time is short! When the telephone rings, our palaver ends! So if you’d palaver at all—

Susannah didn’t bother giving her a chance to finish. She closed her eyes and let herself fall back. No bed stopped that fall; she went right through it. She was falling for real, falling through space. She could hear the jangle of the todash chimes, dim and far.

Here I go again, she thought. And: Eddie, I love you.

STAVE: Commala-gin-jive
Ain’t it grand to be alive?
To look out on Discordia
When the Demon Moon arrives.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-five!
Even when the shadows rise!
To see the world and walk the world
Makes ya glad to be alive.

6TH STANZA
THE CASTLE ALLURE

ONE

All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond’s Beauty Bar, her mother’s soap and her mother’s borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought: It’s the Spring Hop! I’m going with Nathan Freeman!

Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond’s soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one’s calf and knee.

She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.