She steps off the sidewalk into the street, two lanes of dimming tarmacadam, the high stone wall behind her, the gap in the trees ahead. Not even a crumble of sidewalk on that other side, not yet, just a verge of grass where she twists a quarter turn and sets to striding, one definite foot before the other along the edge there, of yellowing grass against pavement, matte black soft-soled shoes, bare shins and knees up to loose black shorts, grey jacket zipped up to her sternum, where ink climbs in spikily knotty thickets up from under along the lines and cords of her throat, up and under to the point of her jaw. Slowly, languidly lifting her arms to either side, as if walking a tightrope, as if reaching for the stone wall to her left, out over the dropping grass and treetops to her right. One of those hands holds an awkward rubbery bundle, oxblood edged with black, the other a slender boning knife, the single edge of it curling to a needly point.

Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.

The vastly cavernous hall is empty, dim, stalls marching away to either side and no one in them, about them, around, though here and there the signs of activity interrupted, boxes left open, frames stacked and canvases half-draped with quilts and wraps of felt and bubbled plastic, a cookstove dismantled, the scaffolding at the far end abandoned, dusty polyethelene sheeting hung from this pole, or that, obscuring an unfinished mural, a great sharp fang of a mountain lit up unearthly, pink and green, orange and magenta limning an appalling massive blue loomed over a suggestion of a thickly darkly deeply haunted forest, but overwhelming all that empty, quiet hall are neatly stacks of yellow two-by-fours, chest-high, depending, there in the aisle between those stalls, and spiky rolls of chicken wire leaned up against them, tipped before them, there among the twine-wrapped packages of newsprint one atop another, some tumbled from this height, or that, rolled or pushed or kicked almost to the verge of those pallets there, laid out beneath an enormous wooden tub, knee-high, unlit, empty.

His steps clack slowly, measured, as he makes his way from that half-opened overhead door toward the tub, until a footstep doesn’t clack, but rustles. Looking down, to his cracked brown wingtip set upon a crumpled corner torn from some much larger page. He lifts his shoe away to see the ghost of an intricate framework, a figure sat, resplendent, and in the lap of it a tumble of households and of towers, all sketched in charcoal long since smudged, smeared, worn away to ashen smoke.

“My lord the Mason,” says someone there behind him, and he turns.

The Marquess Linesse, Northeast’s Helm, all in monochrome, her gunmetal hair cut short, her black leather jacket hung open over a halter of heather grey, a plain steel helmet in one hand.

“You asked us for a conference,” she says.

“And we are pleased that you have come,” he says, stepping away from the balustrade toward the long table jutted out from under the house above, but still within its shadow. He gestures toward a chair to his left, even as he sits him at the head. She hauls up to set that helmet on the table, mirroring metal on polished wood, even as she pulls out the chair to take her seat. “So,” she says. “Yourself would be the King of Roses.”

“Say, rather, that her majesty Annisa’s now our Queen.”

“You quickened her.”

He unfolds his hand, holds it up, and there, about, across the heel of it, that purpled rondel of toothmarks. “She turned owr enough to heal this hand, that would otherwise have done for me.” Closing it up again. “Not so much as yet, perhaps, but more will come, with time.”

“And while we wait?”

He looks down to the polished wood between them, that gathers up and banks away the falling light. “We have,” he says, “secured, what remains, of the court’s existing stores.”

The corner of her mouth downturning just, even as her brow so slightly angles up. “How much,” she says.

“Dread Paladin.”

Silence falls about those two words, spoken, not loudly, but with cuttingly definite purpose.