The dress was now a clingy emerald satin, simple and fluid. I paused in the act of undoing its ties.

“Please,” she said.

“Is it your favorite?”

“Your eyes,” she said, low. Then her voice firmed. “I want this one, and you owe me a yes.”

“Unfairly extracted from me when we were in prison.”

“As I recall, you cleverly wriggled out of two other yesses, so I think one is perfectly reasonable.”

“You would waste it on a dress?”

“On you in this dress? Worth it.”

I felt warm again. “Keep your yes. I’ll owe it to you another time. I want to wear this dress, if you like it best.” I glanced at the gold chain of her pocket watch. “There’s something else I want.”

“Name it.”

“To play you at Pantheon.”

“Bad idea.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes, of you after I beat you.”

“Is everyone from your country all talk and no action?”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said.

39

WE JOINED THE MUD TABLE in the bird’s nest, where several High Kith were already playing, some dipping fingers into tortoiseshell bowls full of glittery gray powder that they brought to their lips between rounds. “Pleasure dust,” Sid murmured in my ear. “Those players will do better than they should at first, but not for long.”

There was a pile of gold and silver on the table, but random things, too, like mother-of-pearl earrings, an open enameled box with a tiny meowing clockwork cat inside, and a little metal stoppered vial. I pulled a green comb from my hair and added it to the pile as ante. Sid tossed in a coin.

As we played, Sid was quieter than usual, eerily serene, producing winning hand after winning hand. Several players dropped out. I added more green combs to the pile and lost them. I was not playing to win, at first, but to observe when Sid bluffed and when she didn’t, which was easy enough to tell, not from any change in her demeanor, but from the simple fact that I remembered where every single card went, and who had what. Even if I didn’t know each exact card in her hand of five, because the entire deck of one hundred plus four blanks hadn’t yet been dealt, I more or less knew what Sid had when she folded, her cards facedown, showing only their gleaming black-and-gold backs.

Then, steadily, I began to win, which became easier as the deck played down. The first time it happened, Sid sweetly congratulated me. The third time, she cocked a wary brow. It was surprising to me how easy it was for people to forget what they knew, since it didn’t seem to occur to Sid that I had memorized the distribution of the deck, so intent was she on winning—and so confident, probably, with her history of dominating the game.