I see the priest pick up Lizzie. He laughs as she bats ineffectually at his big hands holding her. Mattie’s watching it all with this small, awful smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“Well, toodle-oo,” she says.

“Don’t you stray too far,” Del tells her.

She doesn’t answer. She just walks away. He doesn’t turn to see her go. He’s too busy reaching down for me.

Big Dan

Big Dan knew he shouldn’t have let his nephew go off with that pluiking green-bree. He didn’t doubt that Rabedy would handle the blind man—not after he’d given his nephew Odawa’s true name. No, that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem stood beside him, smelling like she hadn’t washed yet this week, although that wasn’t stopping her from leaning in close to speak in his ear with a hoarse whisper.

“Is this what you have in mind for my boy?”

Gretha Collins was unattractive even for a bogan—a squat barrel of a woman with a nose like a ski slope, wide-set eyes, and lips so thin they might as well have been nonexistent. Her hair was always greasy, hanging down her back in long untidy braids, and she dressed like a ragpicker who was too fond of her own wares.

She was also Big Dan’s sister, Rabedy’s mother.

They were attending the funeral for Gathen Redshanks in an empty lot, deep in the Tombs, with abandoned buildings rising up all around them. It had proved to be a far more sizable gathering than Big Dan had expected. All the Redshanks were in attendance, which was only to be expected, but at least two-thirds of the other local bogan clans had gathered as well, including a sizable showing of Flynns and Burtons, both of whom had been feuding with the Redshanks for about as long as anyone could remember.

But it had been a long time since a bogan had fallen in battle. At least that was the story Big Dan had told. How they’d been attacked by a pack of canids in the otherworld, how Gathen had fallen in that struggle, but not before he’d driven the canids off through the sheer ferocity of his own assault.

Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea—not if the ugly murmurs and whispers he’d been hearing among the crowd were any indication. All they’d need was for a gang of pluiking Redshanks and their kin to go looking for revenge against the green-brees. That would bring the whole business right to Tatiana’s attention, and then there’d really be hell to pay.

But at the moment Big Dan’s main concern was Gretha, worrying over the son she only paid attention to at times like this, when it gave her a chance to rag on Big Dan.