“What would I do without you, Tally?” I said.

“You’d probably still be bundled up with that magician, a knife to your throat,” she said.

“Good point,” I said.

We made our way up the stairs, peeking in each open door, a Parsnit duel happening behind every one. It was hard not to stop and watch.

In one room was an old woman, wrinkled and hunched and stuffed-looking, like a fluffy toy grandma. She sat there with her eyes closed mostly. She didn’t even need to look at the cards. She just brushed her fingers over the backs of them and smiled, turning the card she wanted. On a stool next to her sat a girl about my age. She was tiny and pale and blond and could have been the old lady stumbled back in time, so identical they were. She was so short her feet didn’t touch the ground, they just kicked and dangled like a restless toddler’s. It looked like they were playing as a team, something I’d never seen happen before in a Parsnit duel. But Parsnit could be tricky like that, I guessed, and if it was okay with Baudelaire Quatro, then it was okay with me.

Their opponent was some sweaty-looking fella with bushy hair and a twitch to his lip. He looked like he’d been awake for three days straight, like he could use a shower or two as well. The sitting witch was a bald man with sharp eyebrows whose fingers never quit moving. It was like he was conducting some invisible magic orchestra, like he conjured every whirring syllable into the lantern-bright air. His eyes were dull and stone gray and I felt cold in his presence, like he had lived a long time and seen too much and my soul would shiver at the telling of it all.

The old lady smiled and flipped another card. The Old Crumbly Castle, that’s the card she turned. Now it was time for the old lady to Orate. The girl next to her went stiff and rigid, her eyes gone a pupil-less glassy white. Her arms hung limp down at her sides, and as the old lady’s lips began to move, the girl’s did too. It was like a ventriloquist dummy, you ever seen one of those? The old lady’s words belted out through the sticky-sweet girl voice, a long weird tale of being a fair maiden trapped in a rotting old castle with no doors and no windows and no way out. Just a window she could peek out from and watch the world change.

“And the maiden was a hostage,” the doll girl said sweetly. “A hostage to her body, which was small and frail, and a hostage to her land. The only window in the castle was in her mind, and that window was great and wide and through it she could see everything.”

I realized she was talking about herself, the old lady was, about having a bright springtime soul latched to a rusty old barge of a body. Or maybe she was talking about her granddaughter, or whoever the girl was, forced always to be a durn bullhorn for a frail old whispering woman. Or else she meant something else altogether, some big question floating over all our heads, like what’s a soul and what’s a spirit, and what makes the candle snuff out behind our eyes when we die? She could have been saying any of those things, or all of those things, or even none of them. That was her power, this old lady Orator and her flesh-and-blood dummy.