“Very well,” Dice said. “Let’s try a different kind of cure.” Dice left the room, probably to fetch a remedy from Pear’s cabinet.

I looked at Dice’s rose-colored love seat, the tatty lace in his windows, the row of bones—phalanges or spine bones—on his bookshelf. I walked over to his bed and touched his sheets. I bent to sniff his pillow, that wild pine scent. I ran my hand over his nightstand, its worn paint like suede. I held my breath and opened the little drawer. Inside were four bars of yellow soap. Isaac’s soap. Fake-world soap. The sight of it broke my heart. I shut the drawer. We had everything we needed here, I knew. Yet I’d fallen for it: I loved the way he smelled.

“Harmony,” Dice said. He’d snuck in behind me, on his moccasins. I had no idea whether he’d seen me opening his nightstand. As though to draw our attention away, the owl extended his unbroken wing like a paper fan. Dice sighed. “I can’t fix him if you won’t tell me what’s wrong,” Dice said.

“What’s wrong?” I said. My heart was beating hard enough for him to hear it.

“Yes,” Dice said.

I felt sick. “What’s with the soap?” I said. “Isn’t that against the rules?” I wondered if I’d caught him in a lie. I hated the idea of catching him at something. He was supposed to be better than all of us.

I opened the nightstand drawer again.

“Oh,” he said. He picked up a bar and weighed it in his hand, turned it back and forth. He wasn’t embarrassed or angry and I felt off balance.

He handed me the bar. “I like the way it smells,” he said, simply.

He turned back to the owl. He trickled some plant essence from the dropper of a dark brown bottle on the owl’s wing. He murmured, in his beautiful tenor singing voice. “I think he’s better now,” he said.

He held out his forearm and the owl stepped one claw, then the other, onto it. The owl tucked his crooked wing against his body. If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.

“Point out the window,” Dice said.

I pointed.

In a surge of air, the owl winged straight out.

Then I didn’t mind the soap or the rule-breaking, the crushed ice cream, the trouble about Cassie. Dice performed miracles, Queen had said, and now I’d seen it was true. Dice was above our rules.

* * *

Queen didn’t come to dinner that night. July dinner: snap beans, garlic toast, honeysuckle-flower ice cream.