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+{"text":" \nHow to Choose  \na Partner\n\nSusan Quilliam\n\nMACMILLAN\n_For Michael and Silvano. I could not wish for better friends._\n\n#### Contents\n\n1. Understanding\n\n2. Being Ready\n\n3. Looking Back\n\n4. Not Choosing\n\n5. Focussing\n\n6. Connecting\n\n7. Being in Love\n\n8. Knowing\n\nBibliography\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nPicture Acknowledgements\n\n#### 1. Understanding\n_When you make a choice, you change the future._\n\n(DEEPAK CHOPRA)\n\nChoosing a romantic partner is one of contemporary life's biggest adventures. Embark on the quest and we may meet fascinating people as well as some who make us crazy; we may rise to emotional heights as well as sinking into fury, fear and depression; we may lose direction completely before at last we find our way to love.\n\nThe real challenge is that we grow. Partner choice is a self-development journey, driving us to learn more about ourselves, about other people, about life and the way we want to live it. Take all that on board and we start to realize just how big an adventure choosing a partner is.\n\nWhat we may not realize is just how much bigger and more difficult that adventure is now more than ever before in history. For up to now, humankind has been sensible about partner choice. Of course lust and romance have had much to do with it \u2013 especially around affairs, liaisons or simple flings. But for serious lifetime pairing, people have historically leaned away from the romantic and towards the pragmatic. The rich have typically chosen a partner for honour, for fortune, for political expediency and to preserve the hereditary line. The less rich \u2013 with less to protect \u2013 have had more leeway to let hearts rule heads, but have still needed to guarantee financial security, secure practical support and bear children to provide for later years.\n\n_The Arnolfini Portrait_ by Jan van Eyck, a celebration of uber-traditional marriage with one main aim \u2013 an heir.\n\nEven in the glorious Age of Chivalry, when a knight's love for his lady was a key life aim, no one ever suggested that romance should lead to commitment; in the Court of King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere's real crime was not so much in adoring each other as in trying to make their adoration the basis for a 24\/7 relationship. As historian Stephanie Coontz points out in _Marriage, a History_ , while people have always enjoyed a love story, up until very recently 'our ancestors didn't live in one'.\n\nAn emotional revolution\n\nFast forward to the twentieth century and romance became an imperative. Claire Langhamer, in her book _The English in Love_ , explains that this emotional revolution had been simmering for a while, but was fully triggered into being by many and varied social changes \u2013 though who knows which of these was cause and which effect. The introduction of the contraceptive Pill making partnerships less focussed on procreation and more on emotional connection? Women becoming more educated, more highly paid and therefore more able to exit loveless marriages? The slaughter of two World Wars encouraging us to seize the day and prioritize short-term intensity over long-term commitment? The rise of social liberalization, mass education, global communication? The fall in religious belief, the rise of individual entitlement, the passing of divorce laws?\n\nWhatever the reasons, somewhere around the mid years of the last century, partnership became universally and inextricably linked with love. And that has tossed all the jigsaw-puzzle pieces into the air. For the first time, passion \u2013 sexual and emotional \u2013 has become the primary benchmark for relationship success. Think of the famous opening line of Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ : 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' Then compare that with the 1949 pronouncement by Rev. Herbert Gray, chair of the National Marriage Guidance Council, that 'the only sufficient reason for marrying is that you . . . love somebody . . .' Where matrimonial ads in the mid-1900s \u2013 when my own mother was making her partnership decisions \u2013 marketed prospective mates on their cleanliness, honesty and weekly wage, our contemporary equivalent, online dating sites, now trumpet the glories of 'Chemistry', 'Encounters' and being 'Soulmates'.\n\nReality hits\n\nAll of which sounds enticing. But the reality's more problematic. For we now approach partner choice with bigger expectations, deeper confusion and heavier pressure than ever before. Blending love into the relationship mix may have promised fulfilment but it's created huge challenges.\n\nThe first issue is that we need to make more choices more often. Centre-staging love means we're likely to want to walk away from a relationship if the romance dies, while less insistence on marriage plus more liberal divorce laws means we can do so far more easily. The result is that we now have not just one window of partner choice at biological maturity \u2013 with an additional window if a spouse dies \u2013 but on average five windows through a lifetime. We may choose in our teens for first love, in our twenties for first commitment, in our thirties for parenting partnership, in our forties for post-divorce companionship, with a final choice for relationship support to take us through to death. All that plus any additional liaisons.\n\nNow set this increased need against decreased opportunity. We meet fewer partners because we are more globally mobile; as never before we move house, change jobs, relocate to new countries. We have less chance to create partnerships because we work long hours \u2013 then travel home, in different directions, to socially isolated conurbations. Plus, we're less resourced to find and choose a partner because we're less supported; we take the practical and emotional burden on our individual shoulders far more than when we only had to decide between marrying the boy\/girl next door or the one further up the street. The final outcome of this blend of more demand and less supply? Meeting a mate has rarely been so challenging.\n\nHappy endings?\n\nAnd rarely so important. As never before, loving coupledom is now regarded as the key task of the human lifetime, and even more vital because we live in a fractured and isolated society. Cue that wise verse in Genesis where God says 'it is not good for man to be alone'.\n\nWhich leads us to another problem. For now, religion has less and less place in loving relationships, just as it has in the human psyche, to the point where not only is God absent from partnership but partnership has become more significant than God. Philosopher Simon May, in his book _Love: A History_ , explains that where once we sought meaning in the divine, now that we can no longer find such meaning, we seek it elsewhere. Partnership is the source which is now expected to deliver all the hope and happiness that we originally expected to get from the deity.\n\nWhen you think about choosing a partner, do you envision a quest, a crusade, a battle, a treasure hunt . . . or a stroll in the park?\n\nNow, when we commit to someone, we're seeking a God-substitute \u2013 which means they have to be perfect. Then we have to become perfect God-substitutes for them, offering unconditional, everlasting and utterly selfless love. Coupledom has become not only a matter of practical support, continuing the line or personal fulfilment; it's now the route by which we gain sanctity and everlasting redemption.\n\nSurely that's impossible? Well, of course it is. Even in theory we can't reach the ideal expressed by philosopher Friedrich Schlegel: 'through love, humanity returns to its original state of divinity'. And in practice we have regular proof of how implausible that aim is. Proof in our own imperfect relationships, proof in the daily media coverage of failed celebrity partnerships, proof in the divorce figures that over recent years have reached 70 per cent in some European countries \u2013 and that doesn't include the endings of unmarried, therefore undocumented, relationships.\n\nIs it any wonder we panic about commitment? Traditional 'one time' selection limited our freedom, but once paired off we had the possibility of lifelong security, and a near-guarantee that if we stayed the course, society would call it a win. Now we fear that if we choose wrong, we will end up not only alone but condemned \u2013 even damned \u2013 for our failure to make love work.\n\nIf we ask older relatives what partner choice was like for their generation, and what contentment, as well as what constraints, they felt, we may be in for a surprise. Our ancestors may not have lived in a love story, but with lower expectations \u2013 both their own and their partner's \u2013 they may well have had more happy endings than we do.\n\nNew benefits\n\nAll that said, I'm hugely grateful to be living and loving today. For new order brings new benefits. Our partnerships are now our own, rather than those imposed on us by family or proscribed by community. More dating 'windows' throughout life means more go-rounds to discover which relationship decisions help us thrive. More arenas from which to choose mean more ways to find partnership outside traditional boundaries \u2013 across culture, belief, class and age range. More freedom to walk away if we pick wrongly means not being trapped for life in an unfulfilling half-death.\n\nAnd the current challenges are gradually finding solutions. Increased need and decreased opportunity are being met by a battery of ways to meet potential partners. My mother and her generation didn't imagine using dating agencies or matchmakers, but nowadays they often represent the elite level of the partner-choice range. My grandmother and her generation had never heard of the now ubiquitous speed dating \u2013 though I suspect she would have found it all great fun.\n\nThen there's new technology. In the past two decades the internet has extended choice from the few in one's 'village' to millions worldwide; has given us a plethora of extra ways to reach out to partners through websites, apps and social media; has transformed the courtship process \u2013 albeit with the downsides that any newly born innovation brings. The landscape of relationship decision-making has changed for ever; where in the early 1990s, 1 per cent of couples met through technology, now an estimated 33 per cent do and there are claims that by 2040 this number will reach an astonishing 70 per cent.\n\nThis enormous social shift is being supported by the development of new knowledge, new insights, new resources. My mother \u2013 who was a school teacher as well as an incredibly wise woman \u2013 often bemoaned the fact that 'how to love' was not on any classroom timetable; her wish is now reality, with the growing crop of relationship courses, workshops, coaching and counselling that has sprung up to meet the need. Love may never in history have been so challenging, but perhaps never before have we been so resourced to meet that challenge.\n\nStarting the adventure\n\nWhich leads us neatly to this book. I come to write it not only through my experiences as a teacher, coach and writer on relationship issues \u2013 as well, of course, as what I've learned through my own partnership decisions \u2013 but in particular through my association with the School of Life. Over the years I've worked with them, we've become more and more aware of a huge iceberg of concern around relationship choice, a concern that reaches across all genders, ages and nationalities.\n\n_How to Choose a Partner_ is a guide to finding the right partner for you \u2013 though be warned, it's not a map, not a tip-list, not an action manual. Instead, it is a series of reflections drawing on psychology, philosophy, culture and ordinary human experience. The book's wisdom is the wisdom not only of the many professionals who have considered the decisions that we make about love, but also of the class participants I have taught and the coaching clients I have worked with.\n\nThe aim is to inform, enhance and support your own thoughts, feelings and insights. Each chapter offers a different perspective on the issues, encouraging you to look not only at where you are now, but also at how your past has informed your present, how your criteria for a relationship can be clarified and refined, and how to explore whether you and a particular partner could be right for each other. In particular, the exercises and tasks that are scattered through the book invite you to consider the route you are taking on your journey and, if necessary, adjust it \u2013 to find, recognize and commit to a relationship in which you will thrive.\n\nHere is the first task, an initial question for you to consider. How do you fit into this contemporary relationship landscape? Where do you stand as regards the 'new deal' of partner choice? Do you see it as an exciting challenge or a hopeless task, a complex puzzle or a terrifying trial? You might want to complete the following sentence. 'When I think about choosing a partner, I feel\/realize\/wonder . . .' This simple exercise will tell you a great deal about your hopes, your fears, your attitudes, your feelings.\n\nAs you read on, a final optimistic thought. You are not alone. There are literally many millions of people out there who, like you, are looking for a deep connection. Like you, they have previously made the best decisions they could, given their circumstances and resources. Like you, they have sometimes suffered regrets and disappointment but are now once again wanting to love and to be loved. There are many options out there when you are ready.\n\nAnd, as the quotation at the head of this chapter suggests, by exploring these options you create a whole new set of possibilities for yourself. By taking on the adventure of choosing a partner, you have the opportunity of changing your future for ever. Starting now.\n\n#### 2. Being Ready\n_All things are ready if our mind be so._\n\n(WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, _H ENRY V_, ACT IV, SCENE III)\n\nIt's very tempting to rush into love. It's very tempting to think we're ready to love because we want to \u2013 and there's nothing wrong with that wanting. But readiness to even look for a partner, let alone choose one, can be more complicated than it seems. Which is why this second chapter is something of an amber traffic light.\n\nThe first amber question to ask is this. Is now the right time to be seeking a committed relationship? There are many life situations, temporary transitions and extended periods where being single is essential. Perhaps our focus currently needs to flow inwards to ourselves because our energy needs to flow outwards \u2013 maybe to a demanding job, a sick parent (or child), a sudden life crisis. If so, though we may want the support of a relationship because we threaten to collapse without it, choosing a partner may actually be the last thing in the world we should be attempting. And not just because partnership's arguably the second hardest challenge of a lifetime \u2013 the first is parenting, if you're wondering \u2013 so it shouldn't be undertaken while vulnerable. But also because, vulnerable, we may choose a mate simply as a crutch; crisis over, life healed, that crutch may be superfluous. Unfair to both parties.\n\nThere are also many life phases when being single is enough \u2013 not because we are running on empty but because we are fulfilled. It can be a hugely enlightening exercise to list the people close to you then list the things they give to you, the things that enhance your life. Company, conversation, common history \u2013 or that simplest of support, a hug. Do this exercise and it may gradually dawn on you that most if not all of your needs are being met at the moment. If so, you may opt to put partner choice on hold \u2013 or choose a mate who fills the current gap even if they don't offer the traditional 24\/7 comprehensive companionship.\n\nStaying on amber\n\nThe next amber question is even more challenging. Is it ever the right time to be choosing a partner? It's said that the best thing in life is to be happily partnered and the next best thing is to be happily single \u2013 but for some people the hierarchy's reversed. Some of us are entirely whole without additions, flourish better without distractions, are simply happier alone.\n\nIf you suspect you're more contented when single, consider \u2013 and not just as a passing thought \u2013 whether partnership may not be what you are meant to do with your life. The ideal of singledom is highly valued in many spiritual traditions less because of puritanism than because it frees us to follow our real vocation. The composer Robert Schumann, when he achieved his initial musical success, is said to have compared it to his forthcoming marriage in these words: 'I doubt if being a bridegroom will be in the same class with these first joys of being a composer . . . I now . . . marry the wide world.' If you are seeking a relationship only because it is what 'everyone' does, try on for size the possibility that you are not everyone. You are special and the best way for you to thrive may be to 'marry the wide world'.\n\nPlanning\n\nFor the rest of us there are still the practicalities to consider. Do we actually have room in our lives right now to hold down a committed relationship? The reality is that online dating, for example, will likely take up an hour each night \u2013 the equivalent of a working day each week for anything up to a year.\n\nAnd once the search is over, life will be even more overextended. For love may be wonderful, but it demands time, space, energy and a willingness to accommodate. And while statistically our formal working hours at the start of the twenty-first century are apparently almost half those we endured at the start of the nineteenth, the additional claims on that time, space and energy \u2013 by family, friends, hobbies, housework, travelling, childcare, texts, email, Twitter, Facebook and the miscellaneous demands of living \u2013 are arguably double what they were a hundred years ago.\n\nThe extra sting in the tale is that the more successful we've been in life up to now, the more we've developed our career, expanded our social life and gained a rewarding lifestyle, the less room we have for partnership. The more established we are in our world, the less flexibility we have for allowing a partner into that world. To love, we may have to sacrifice at least some of the rest of our lives. (For moving stories from people who feel they've not sacrificed as they should have done, see the website www.notimeforlove.com, which describes itself as a project to acknowledge that 'in a reality where time is finite, prioritizing love, in any form, can be challenging'.)\n\nStop? Go? Wait? Hesitate? Panic and stay pinned to the pavement?\n\nTry this exercise. Map out your typical week \u2013 morning, afternoon, evening. Indicate which of those twenty-one time segments are currently full to the brim, then judge how many segments you would \u2013 or could \u2013 happily drain in order to make room for a relationship. Then ask what having a relationship might drain from the rest of your life and what the rest of your life might drain from a relationship. Is the bargain worth it? This is not, you understand, to dissuade you from the journey, but to make the advance planning more realistic.\n\nFacing fears\n\nWhich brings us to the question of emotional readiness. Here, the elephant in the room is typically the emotion of fear \u2013 particularly because choosing a partner also involves the intimidating challenge of being chosen.\n\nWhen I ask the men and women in my dating classes to think of one word to describe how they feel about partner choice, what is mentioned more than anything else is some variation on the fear concept; unease, wariness, anxiety, terror. As well as fear of making the wrong choice, we suffer fear of being rejected \u2013 'I'm too fat, too shy'; fear of being left on the shelf \u2013 'I'm too old, too boring'; and fear of being shamed by being left on the shelf, particularly when our peers all seem to have clambered down from said shelf and are now happily mated. Though on that last point, be aware that one never knows what goes on behind closed doors. Not to encourage _Schadenfreude_ , but many of the couples who seem most happy now will be the ones sobbing on your shoulder when they hit their first divorce in a few years' time.\n\nThere's also huge fear of admitting the fear. We don't want to confess \u2013 in this age of self-possession \u2013 that we're struggling, that we're not completely fine about the whole partner-choice business. _Bridget Jones's Diary_ made us laugh at Bridget's dating struggles not only because her errors redeemed ours but also because her fight for control over life and love made us more able to break the silence and admit our own struggle to ourselves and to others. And Bridget's final triumphant union with Mark Darcy, when it came, reassured us that there could be a good result even for those of us most petrified.\n\nSince Bridget, many books \u2013 both fiction and self-help \u2013 have urged a 'fake it till you make it' attitude to fear. But there is another way. More recently, and to my mind more usefully, we've started to embrace the suggestion that vulnerability may be better than bravado. Writer Bren\u00e8 Brown, in her book _Daring Greatly_ , brings the fear story up to date when she talks about the huge courage it takes to even consider entering a relationship, let alone doing so \u2013 but how the act of revealing the fear behind that courage is a key first step on the road to successful partnership. This is vulnerability. This is 'daring greatly'.\n\nMany of us already do just this. When my class participants confess their lack of self-confidence, I often look round the room awed by what these men and women are bringing to the field. Intelligence, personality, talent \u2013 but, above all, the courage and willingness, often despite earlier heartbreak, to dare greatly once again. Because of that, surely success is certain. As the Chinese proverb says, 'Pearls don't lie on the seashore. If you want one, you have to dive for it.' And we do.\n\nAvailable or not?\n\nBeing ready for love also depends not only on being emotionally open but also emotionally available. The crucial instance of this is that, however long it is since our last relationship, if we still grieve that story, if we secretly hope to open up its pages again, we can't move on to our life's next volume. Yes, it's common to believe that a new romantic connection will begin a new chapter. Scan the tabloid headlines and we find numerous triumphal reports of newly loved-up celebrities who underwent break-ups just a few weeks ago. Scan the online dating sites and we similarly discover the many profiles saying 'We separated last week so now I'm keen to find love again'.\n\nBut the assumption's unsound. Yes, humans are wired to bond \u2013 but when a bond breaks, humans are doubly wired to suffer and that makes us unfit to bond again for a while. Helen Fisher, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, MRI-scanned fifteen newly single students and found their brains shimmering with a pain akin to that of going cold turkey from drug addiction. So it's not surprising that post-break-up is rarely the moment when we are emotionally available to connect with another. Problem is, that's precisely the moment in which we may be driven to connect in order to dull the pain \u2013 but then, once the injury is healed, find ourselves looking at our newly acquired partner and wondering what on earth we just did.\n\nSo how long does it take after losing a love to be truly and wisely available again? There are no schedules here. For recovery after a break-up, the litmus test is whether we can yet think about our former partner kindly \u2013 or if not, then at least not with hate but with love's true opposite, indifference. The delightful blog quantifiedbreakup.tumblr.com \u2013 by a blogger herself in 'relationship recovery' \u2013 lists several calculations for this, from 'at least two years' through 'half the length of the relationship' to 'one week for every month you were together'.\n\nWhen it comes to a variation on the theme of losing a partner \u2013 bereavement \u2013 the schedule may be more protracted; Jeanette Winterson's downbeat but arguably accurate appraisal in her book _Written on the Body_ , in which her heroine tries to come to terms with her lover's leukaemia, is 'To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever.' Whatever the situation, the only definitive truth is that being ready for the next relationship will always take just as long as it takes.\n\nBeing grown-up\n\nThe final, tough-love question about readiness is this. Are we yet 'grown-up enough' to pick a partner? Mischievously, that very wording is a test; if we're willing to even consider the question, we're probably on the way to ready, for success in partner choice often lies in the ability to question ourselves with mature and undefended honesty.\n\nOn this point, we turn to philosopher and social psychologist Erich Fromm, whose master work, _The Art of Loving_ , is arguably the seminal statement of our contemporary view of what love can and should be. Fromm outlines in detail what he sees as the supremely 'grown-up' task of partnering another human being. In his view, mature partner choice needs the self-belief that we are worth loving, the self-insight to know what we need and the self-control to let go of our needs where necessary. Plus, the ability to teach a partner how to love us, the humility to learn from a partner how to love them and the insight to know that love doesn't just consist of partnership but constitutes, in Fromm's words, the 'only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence'. At which point, most of us will run screaming from the room, thinking that for this weight of responsibility we're not only unprepared right now but will always remain so.\n\nLet's not panic. If we can realize that the 'art' Fromm speaks of is not one we're born with but one which, like any art, we learn, then the challenge becomes more manageable. Love is surely not a single act but an ongoing course of lessons. Which means that at this point, as we choose a partner, all we really need to ask ourselves is whether we're ready to fill in the enrolment form.\n\nOf course, it isn't only we who need to be ready for love, but also the partner we choose. So it's more than a good idea to also do due diligence on a potential partner's readiness. We're not talking here about the relentless first-date quizzing that makes the person on the other side of the restaurant table reach for the bill after the first course, but a compassionate awareness of whether the person we are beginning to care for is truly free. Do they have time and room in their life for love? Are they over their past relationship or actually still yearning? Are they reaching out to us through genuine attraction or to fill a life gap?\n\nIf the answer to any of these questions is 'unclear', we may be wiser to step back and allow them the time and space they need. And allow ourselves to find a partner more ready to be chosen.\n\n#### 3. Looking Back\n_Study the past if you would define the future._\n\n(CONFUCIUS)\n\nWhen we actively search for a long-term partner, most of us tend to think ahead. We map out goals. We create aims. And the more serious a partnership we want, the further ahead we tend to think \u2013 not just to meeting a new date, but to moving in, to getting wed, to which gender our first child will be. There's wisdom in that. To choose well we have to gauge what the long-term will deliver.\n\nBut there's wisdom too \u2013 as Confucius says \u2013 in first putting attention back to the past. How has it made us who we are? What does that mean for who we choose? It's not only that our past partnerships have been preparation for this moment, giving us both ability and vulnerability around loving. It's also that every event in our past \u2013 from the moment we were born, let alone from the moment we began to date \u2013 has taught us messages about partnership and partnership choice. Whom we choose may be our decision alone, but why we choose will be influenced by a whole lifetime's cast of characters and scenes.\n\nYour influences\n\nIt's an interesting exercise to look back at our personal cast-list and our personal life-plot. Was it our mother, father or neither who taught us, by what they said or what they did, which kind of relationship we should aim for and which we should avoid? Was it our siblings, our friends, our teachers or our culture that told us we should choose a partner for their intelligence, their earning power, their beauty or their biddability? Was it being brought up in a conflict-ridden family or being a member of the debating society that has made us believe so completely that perfect partners either never argue or that, conversely, they regularly do? Is it our parents' ruby wedding anniversary or our own recent relationship break-up that leaves us convinced either that love lasts for ever or that it is utterly impossible? And what role do Jane Eyre, James Bond, _Fifty Shades of Grey_ or _The Selfish Gene_ have in all this?\n\nSo review. Who have been your biggest influencers on how best to choose a partner? What has most shaped your thoughts and feelings about the kind of person who will be the best mate for you?\n\n\u2022 Parents, siblings, extended family\n\n\u2022 Religious or cultural leaders, teachers\n\n\u2022 Your peer group and their partners\n\n\u2022 Your past loves, requited or unrequited\n\n\u2022 The media, be that news, books, films, the internet, television\n\n\u2022 Traumatic events in your own life or the lives of those close to you\n\n\u2022 Positive, affirming events in your own life or the lives of those close to you\n\nNow take this further. Consider what messages all of these have passed on to you. What definitions, expectations and presuppositions have you learned about the kind of relationship you should want, and so what kind of partner to pick? It may help to complete the following sentence: 'I learnt from ____ that the best relationship is ____ and so I should choose a partner who ____', and to complete that sentence at least ten times to get a range of differing messages. Then, see if there are any patterns, any surprises, any wake-up calls. Most crucially, how have these life lessons affected the partner choices you've made up to now?\n\nLove maps\n\nFor more insight let's turn to sexologist John Money, who calls these lessons 'love maps' \u2013 templates of how we see ideal partnership and how we see our ideal partner. Money suggests that we gain love maps instinctively and early \u2013 often between the ages of about five and eight \u2013 as if we're picking up an accent in our native language. So we don't question, perhaps hardly even notice, the internal image we're building of relationships, the specifications we're drawing up about the kind of partner we want \u2013 often down to race, height, build and manner. When we find someone fitting that map, we're compelled. Yes, we may know on a logical level that an alternative mate may be just as good for us; but somehow this person just feels right.\n\nNavigating one's way through the highways and byways of the heart can take concentration, courage and an accurate road map.\n\nVery often, the person feels right because they remind us of someone who felt right earlier in life or because we believe that with them we can reclaim the 'right' life events. One way of describing this would be 'transference'; we 'transfer' affection from someone who was important to us in the past to someone important to us now \u2013 or to someone we want to be important to us in the future. A tone of voice, a sideways glance, a certain strength, a certain gentleness \u2013 all of a sudden, typically without knowing why, we feel we're safe. No matter that we don't know this person and they don't know us; we feel inevitably drawn in.\n\nIt makes absolute sense to gravitate to the people most like the ones who have made us happy in life, and much of the time that's a wonderful strategy. But get expectations confused, and it can go wrong. We can end up assuming a prospective partner will deliver the same kind of wonderful experiences that our parents (or our best school friend, or our very first 'crush') gave us. But partners don't necessarily deliver, because they're not that person and this isn't the past \u2013 realizing this and accepting it is a key lesson of partner choice. Professor Sue Johnson tells how when she met her husband almost the first words he said to her were, 'I am not going to live up to your expectations'. In the face of such insight how could she do anything other than marry the man?\n\nThink back to when you were very young \u2013 say just starting school. Now identify three figures \u2013 perhaps parents, teachers, siblings \u2013 or events \u2013 successes, wins, triumphs \u2013 that at that period in your life made you feel deeply valid and loved. You'll not only consciously look for a partner who holds out the promise of replicating those feelings but also be unconsciously drawn to any potential partner who holds out that promise. Good idea, with just one caveat. You may also be drawn to any partner you _believe_ can deliver, even if they can't. So try before you buy.\n\nBad experiences\n\nThere's an added twist and it's this. Sometimes we get drawn to partners not because they could give us something wonderful but because they could give us something terrible \u2013 in the hope that they may also give us the chance to overcome that terror. So we may choose someone who reminds us how withdrawn our father was or how dominating our mother was, someone who creates demanding situations that remind us of exam failure in school or the time we got made redundant from work. We find all this painful but familiar, troubling but known; we aim, this time, to resolve, to cope, to survive.\n\nAnd it often comes good. Often, we get to turn things round, to cope with challenges in later life in a way we didn't in earlier life because we are now older and wiser. And the fact that we cope not only gives us victory here and now, but helps to resolve the previous sense of failure. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote that 'people use each other as a healing for their pain' \u2013 but in this case we are actively choosing each other for the pain, in hopes of getting the healing as part of the package.\n\nAgain, think back to your early life. Which people or events made you feel unloved or taught you hard lessons about what it means to relate to others? Do these memories link to your adult partners and the experiences you have had with them? What does that tell you about your partner-search strategies?\n\nThere is also, of course, the impact of life events so traumatic that they create a deep vulnerability in us, so we end wary, grief-stricken, furious or in some way simply too wounded to make good partnership decisions. We may be confused about what love means, unable to recognize it when it happens, unresourced to take it when offered or give it when needed. The obvious \u2013 and publicized \u2013 traumas are bullying, abuse and violence, but other seemingly less serious occurrences can wound us too. If our world rocks on its axis \u2013 perhaps from a house move, a hospital stay, an absent parent \u2013 we can end up thinking love will let us down. If as a child the only way we got any attention was when we were punished for bad behaviour, we may end up prone to tantrums in our relationships. The shock has not only broken our spirit, but dented our capacity to make good partner decisions.\n\nMoving on\n\nAll the above works both ways. For our partners too the 'past is prologue', as Shakespeare wrote, and what happened in a partner's life before the scenes they write with us affects not only who they are but also who they are _when with u_ s. Partners steer their course by their own love maps, make their own transferences, have their own stream of negative or traumatic characters and episodes from their own lives. So they may choose us because our ways of being wonderful remind them of wonderful people and events in their past, or because our ways of being difficult remind them of difficult people and events in their past. They too may need to align their expectations, to work through the difference between their hallucination and the reality that is us \u2013 and to cope when we deliver the pain that they unconsciously wanted to resolve through being with us. If a partner seems to be reacting in a way that says more about their history than about the present reality of our relationship, it's worthwhile paying close attention.\n\nIt is not all bad news. Though it's tempting to believe that everything that comes to us from the past is detrimental, it's not so. Normal, kind, human love from those around us \u2013 whether given in childhood or in adulthood \u2013 not only provides us with solid ground for loving but goes a long way to redress any harm that comes our way. And while single intense experiences of betrayal can wound us, similar experiences of happiness, acceptance, success and security can emotionally vaccinate us against mistakes. For most of us, past bad experiences are not a car crash on the relationship road, but simply a bump on the way.\n\nPlus, we don't have to bring the past with us into the present. We can keep the bits that seem more helpful and most healthy; the others we can throw overboard. To which end, you may want to look back at all the lessons you've ever learned about love. Which messages are horribly outdated and need to be junked? Which are irrelevant to you now you're a grown-up? Which messages are so idealistic or perfectionist that no one has the slightest chance of matching up to them, and by continuing to try to match up, you are simply feeding your guilt monkey? Which were taught to you by people whose experience is not yours, whose word you no longer believe, or whose life you have no intention of living? Which lessons did you learn through events that were so painful that you need to cull them from your memory bank?\n\nWe can cull. With new awareness we can unbelieve our past beliefs, let them go and take on board a new and more helpful set. And if we can't do that alone, it's entirely possible \u2013 and utterly wise \u2013 to get help; there is a wealth of knowledge and guidance to help us overcome relationship issues. So if you suspect that some events or people have left you vulnerable to wrong choices or misguided decisions, let me encourage \u2013 even beg \u2013 you to see a professional. We can't change the life we've lived, but we can rethink it, understand it differently and so resolve the pain.\n\nConfucius said that the past needs to be studied in order for us to define the future. Once studied, though, we may want to complete the lesson and move on.\n\n#### 4. Not Choosing\n_I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter._\n\n(ATTRIBUTED TO SAMUEL JOHNSON, BOSWELL, _T HE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON_)\n\nIf you agree with Samuel Johnson, you're in a minority. Most people deeply believe that the best life outcomes are created by active and informed decisions. More, that if we ourselves don't make those decisions, we give up the chance of those best outcomes; we surrender control, cede responsibility and in so doing resign ourselves to compromise \u2013 as well as tacitly admitting that we're not up to the task of managing our own lives.\n\nBut let me argue the opposite. Maybe Johnson is right, and letting go of choice is a good idea. It's not just that love is one of the few areas in modern society where we may still cling to romantic notions of fate determining our future. But also, by handing over control to others, we might avoid repeating past mistakes or making new and future ones. When dealing with 'winged Cupid painted blind', as Shakespeare put it, taking our own blind prejudices out of the equation may be no bad thing.\n\nHeads or tails?\n\nOpt to step back from active decision-making, and the first possibility open to us is to toss a coin. When it comes to deciding a lifelong commitment, doing that literally may not seem wise, though devotees of the I Ching might disagree. A friend of mine did once use the system to decide whether to marry her boyfriend; the coins said 'no', which in hindsight proved to be excellent advice. And in Luke Rhinehart's _The Dice Man_ \u2013 as its title suggests, a novel about a man who makes all choices thus guided \u2013 several partner-decisions are made that way. The result is whole-scale erotic abandonment under the absolving aphorism 'Who am I to question the dice?'\n\nLet's consider next the American psychologist Barry Schwartz, whose work focusses on the reasoning behind choice. His argument is that randomness is a 'good enough' option. Once certain standards are met \u2013 we like each other well enough, we have similar life goals, we've checked issues such as substance abuse and criminal record \u2013 there are really no good reasons to discriminate between one suitor and the next. Chance, Schwartz suggests, might well be the 'most efficient' but also the 'fairest . . . most honest' option.\n\nInteresting ideas, though most of us are wary of making key life decisions with so little information. Which is why I don't advise either coin-tossing, dice-throwing or absolute randomness. But I do suggest that to circumvent our biases and introduce a little serendipity, daters should, online, approach one random person in every twenty profiles they access, and offline be open to the occasional blind date, opportunity dinner from a colleague or fortuitous encounter at the supermarket checkout. Randomness certainly can open a different, less blinkered and therefore sometimes better door.\n\nDestiny vs growth\n\nThe issue of fortuitous encounters brings us to an interesting double standard here. We may recoil in horror at the thought of haphazard chance determining our future life partner, but label that chance 'destiny' and we're entranced by the prospect. On the one hand we feel the need to be in control of our romantic choices; on the other hand the thought of losing control can be hugely seductive.\n\nEnter Professor 'Chip' Knee of the University of Houston, and his work on 'destiny love', his term for the conviction held by some couples that kismet rather than coincidence brought them together. Believe this, and we are likely to feel strongly and instantly attracted to a partner, the relationship is likely to be passionate and intense, and a magical certainty of success is likely to hover over the whole enterprise. As a perfect example, see that scene in the film _Sleepless in Seattle_ where Sam Baldwin describes meeting his first wife, speaks so movingly of taking her hand to help her out of a car, and \u2013 just with that initial touch \u2013 realizes 'we were supposed to be together . . . and I knew it.'\n\nSam Baldwin was lucky \u2013 thanks to a good scriptwriter creating the traditional rom-com happy ending \u2013 his ensuing marriage worked well. But the 'destiny' assumption may not survive the cold light of real-life daily commitment, because it comes with certain built-in structural defects. The problem is, if fate has generously provided us with a predestined partner, there may seem no need for effort to make the relationship work \u2013 and if effort is needed then that particular romance is clearly not as predestined as we thought it was and probably needs to end forthwith. Professor Knee's work suggests that those who believe in destiny love are likely to react badly when things go wrong, likely to exit relationships lightly, likely to move on quickly \u2013 to their next destiny.\n\nCompare and contrast couples convinced of what Knee calls 'growth love', who see partnerships as developing slowly over time, with any glitches along the way meaning nothing sinister, but simply indicating a need for more effort. Growth love couples tend to get involved more gradually, have lower expectations, but are more capable of the long haul. It is certainly worth remembering that while belief in fate-determined love \u2013 whether on our side or on a partner's \u2013 might add a breathless magic to romance, belief in growth-based love might mean the difference between a ruby wedding anniversary and being left at the altar.\n\nArranged\n\nLetting destiny decide partner choice may seem like giving away control, but at least destiny (or fate or God or Providence) is all-seeing, all-knowing and infallible. Letting other, all-too-human beings decide partner choice seems a far worse bet, for ordinary folk are all too capable of confusion, ignorance, error and their own personal prejudices. Which is why, while accepting support on partner choice from friends and family may be helpful, it's usually better to block one's ears and step away. 'You should' and 'you must', even when voiced by onlookers with the best of intentions, should not govern partner decisions.\n\nWhat does have a place, and a long history of some success \u2013 it's even mentioned in the Bible \u2013 is allowing others to 'arrange' possibilities which we can veto, or from which we make our own pick. Don't forget that until very recently, especially if a partnership was the way to cement political alliance or unite feuding families, it made perfect sense for elders rather than the happy couple to make the courtship decisions. In Britain, for example, it is only the last two generations of the monarchy that have had any kind of genuine personal freedom over marriage choice. (When certain of those love marriages failed, there was in some quarters a general feeling of 'Well, what did they expect?')\n\nIf done well, 'arranged' can triumph, delivering the objectivity of chance, the reassurance of destiny, the pragmatism of growth. Like chance, an externally determined partnership can avoid personal bias or the temptation to let lust dictate terms. Like destiny, it can remove the burden of choice, allowing us to relax rather than agonize about our own responsibility. Like growth-love, 'arranged' can mean we don't demand instant compatibility, or call foul if things don't prove perfect always and for ever.\n\nBut there does need to be a high level of competence here. Matchmakers \u2013 whether they be friends, family, the Jewish _Shadchanim_ or the upmarket urban introduction service \u2013 need to know us at least as well as we know ourselves, need to know our partners well enough to judge the fit, and need to have a deep understanding of how relationships play out. The problem is that this level of wisdom is unusual in today's society. Few people witness others profoundly and consistently enough to judge what is needed in a mate. Few relationships are sufficiently exposed to public gaze to deliver a real understanding of partnership dynamics. Which is why, though popular, modern matchmaking services can be infamous for high prices but low results. That said, in the right context and if the arranger is insightful and practised, 'arranged' can work well.\n\nLet us be grateful we don't live in 1917. Herbert Rawlinson and Alice Lake in the one-hundred-year-old black-and-white film _Come Through_.\n\nA quick note on the extreme of 'arranged', those serried ranks of mass marriages where hundreds of couples meet for the first time on their wedding day, their partner choice made entirely by religious leaders. For most of us, this is somewhere between incomprehensible and appalling; how on earth does it ever work? The answer is that spouses' contentment with the arrangement is constructed on their deep belief that they have the blessing of the deity; that their culture, community, family and religion will support them; and that love grows over time rather than instantly strikes. Despite individual horror stories, that's a pretty big resource to bring to the table.\n\nOnline choice\n\nDoes online dating take control out of our hands? At first glance, no; we seem to have a multitude of options. But look more closely and we see that what we get is pre-sorted. Most sites cherry-pick attractive users and profile them on the home page to catch incomers' attention. Many sites also highlight profiles of particularly popular users and present them as a separate and therefore more noticeable subcategory. We're getting a choice, but only after the site filters have done their secret work.\n\nAnd then there are the algorithms. It was way back in 1959 that a group of Stanford University maths students working on a final class project programmed their IBM 650 computer to pair up forty-nine men and forty-nine women according to their answers to a questionnaire; the result was one marriage and a deserved A-grade for the dissertation. More than half a century on, and that early study has led to a billion-dollar industry; almost every online dating site has a visible 'questionnaire' and they all have hidden algorithms to guide us firmly towards matches of our age, location and gender of preference. Choice is, if not taken out of our hands, at least slightly compromised.\n\nThere's also another problem: dating sites only do the top level of the job. Yes, most sites match those who, on tick-box criteria, are similar, which replicates the surface-level criteria that attracts us to a mate; some sites then aim for more, with personality questionnaires or hormone-based matching systems. But while these matching systems maintain that the criteria for compatibility are well-established and that it's therefore possible to predict relationship success, in fact 'neither of these assumptions is true'. (I quote here from a recent research review of studies of online love-search by Professor Eli Finkel of Northwestern University, Illinois.) By allowing sites to try to match us, we are not only limiting our own options, not only failing to take into account the deeper compatibility factor, but also entrusting our fate to completely unproven systems.\n\nTrusting chance\n\nI'm not suggesting that abandoning choice altogether is either a good or a bad idea. But it is a possibility. What you may find useful is to think about what degree of abandonment you've used in the past without even realizing it. Have you ever started chatting to someone near you at the theatre, during a party, on a train \u2013 then spent a delightful half-hour even though that didn't lead to romance? Probably. Have you ever met a partner by chance, circumstance or sheer happy coincidence? Again, probably. Have any of your intimate relationships been 100 per cent predetermined and predicted? Probably not. Start to gauge the extent to which you're comfortable with serendipity and you may feel more inclined to accept it as another tool in your decision-making kit.\n\nCoin-tossing, random chance and a belief in fate are all quite risky. But handing over some of the burden to others is certainly worth considering \u2013 so perhaps let online dating sites screen the undesirables or let matchmaking services do the legwork. Allowing ourselves to widen our initial love-search beyond our personal preference is also useful \u2013 so perhaps make a deliberate effort to contact (or start talking to, or agree a date with) someone who on the surface doesn't seem like a possible. Gathering emotional support is vital to get us through the process \u2013 so perhaps actively enrol trusted friends and turn to them for guidance, consolation and celebration.\n\nAbove all, when it comes to choice, be prepared to occasionally take a risk, accept uncertainty, let go of control. As ex US president Jimmy Carter once said, 'Go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.'\n\nFrom time to time, they both wondered what the next forty years of marriage would bring.\n\n#### 5. Focussing\n_Focus is about saying No._\n\n(STEVE JOBS)\n\nSurely the more options we have, the more chance we have for love. Especially if we blame previous romantic disappointments on a lack of alternatives, then richness and variety of choice seem the obvious keys to success. Which is why the first question we may be asking about our love-search is how to find 'more' possibilities.\n\nThis is a great question if we're short on options, if our circle of single contacts has dwindled to nil; if we live in a town \u2013 or country \u2013 where we know no one; if we're not meeting any potential partners either at work or at play. It's an especially useful enquiry if we are in a majority gender for our life-stage: research suggests that men in their twenties have only half as many partner possibilities as women do, but that in the forties the balance begins to reverse. If we can't find a partner in these situations, the main problem is certainly the numbers. We're a seller in a buyers' market and the solution is to find more buyers.\n\nThe way forward is to steer clear of babbling brooks, avoid stagnant pools and find slow rivers. Stripped of the metaphors, what I mean is this: stay away from gatherings with no chance of 'get-to-know-you' conversations, or where meeting up again is unlikely. Don't get trapped in a social life where you see the same people over and over again. Instead, put your energy into groups which offer a steady and regular through-flow of different individuals, in situations where there's opportunity to mingle, meet, chat and bond. That's a slow river, and so long as it contains people with a similar background, outlook, values \u2013 it will deliver partner possibilities. Just as importantly, it will also deliver a fulfilled and fascinating existence as a base camp from which to embark on the partnership climb.\n\nFinding a slow river\n\nHow many slow rivers do you have in your life? If the answer is not many, and getting 'more' is your issue, pause now and brainstorm what your rivers could be; include as many ideas as possible, without censoring even the maddest thoughts. Start a new hobby? Go to a partnered dance class? Attend dating events? Organize your own dating events? Put a call out on Facebook? Put a call out on your local radio station \u2013 it worked for Sam Baldwin, aforementioned hero of _Sleepless in Seattle_. Take off on a three-country tour \u2013 it worked for Elizabeth Gilbert, author of _Eat, Pray, Love_.\n\nPlus \u2013 if it feels comfortable \u2013 sign up to a dating website. Whether we like it or not, online is without question the most accessible slow river currently available \u2013 one in which the whole agenda is to bond and the entire process ensures a regular through-flow. To enhance the expansion project, join a variety of sites \u2013 some paid, some free, some new, some established. Once on, be open-minded about possibilities, proactive rather than reactive and as flexible as possible about non-essential parameters. (Though not foolishly flexible. Tick the '200 miles away' location box on websites and you'll very soon face the reality of long-distance relationships and find yourself switching the location specification to 'same town'.)\n\nStagnant pools. It's worryingly easy to create a life so pleasant, established and secure that it delivers absolutely zero chance of meeting any suitable partner.\n\nMore or less?\n\nHaving noted the above strategies, and taken the first steps towards action, forget the advantages of 'more' and embrace the benefits of 'less'. And not only because quantity is less crucial than quality in partner choice, but also because the human brain treads a fine line between having a wide range of options and having too many for sanity.\n\nIn a famous experiment by Professor Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University, customers at a grocery store decided what jam to buy; of those who had a choice of twenty-four jams, only 3 per cent ended up purchasing, while of those who had a choice of six jams a full 30 per cent bought. Given we likely don't use the same criteria to pick a partner as to pick a preserve, let's also mention a less-famous but more relevant survey which gave parallel results. Prospective partners who looked at either four or twenty-four online profiles made more picks than those who looked at sixty-four. Significantly, the participants who were presented with only four options took time to consider everyone, while those who were presented with twenty-four or sixty-four options made only cursory decisions.\n\nThe point here is that too many options plunges us into what's called 'shopping mentality'. With a profusion of possibilities, we suffer mental overload. We get confused. Then we get anxious about getting confused. And then, to combat the increasing emotional paralysis resulting from that confusion, we try to simplify. Which in turn leads to our over-considering irrelevant criteria, rejecting without real consideration, and craving the 'next good thing' rather than focussing on the current one. (This last is part of the reason why the constant forward momentum of the left\/right swipe on some dating apps is so addictive.) Finally, when it comes to online dating in particular, even if we think we've found The One, we may still suffer buyer's remorse because the wealth of choice available suggests there's someone even better out there for us. If you've ever been enthusiastically emailed for days then suddenly dropped, you were probably the victim not of someone's rejection but of their shopping mentality.\n\nIf only choosing a partner were as simple as walking into a supermarket. On the other hand . . .\n\nWhat all this means is that any website which trumpets \u2013 as one of the global players did very recently \u2013 an astounding 197 million members might seem like a magnificent opportunity, but may well prove a disaster in disguise. Our real challenge, offline as well as on, is not how to expand possibilities but how to limit them, how to reach an equilibrium where we think clearly enough to make good judgement calls.\n\nElimination\n\nThe solution here is, not coincidentally, to take the route that nature intended. Intelligent elimination \u2013 the kind of shedding that Steve Jobs refers to in the quote at the head of this chapter \u2013 is the way evolution means us to mate. Walk into a room full of a hundred possibles \u2013 or log on to a website of a million \u2013 and we're doing just as our ancestors did thousands of years ago from the vantage point of their caves, unconsciously excluding those who don't meet our basic criteria (right gender, right age, right tribe). Elimination may sound cruel, but it's the way our instincts are meant to operate in the initial going \u2013 not saying 'yes' to one but 'no' to many, not making a single positive choice but first applying wholesale negative screening.\n\nIn a society more complex than the Neolithic, some screening's done before we even begin. Dive into any 'slow river' where we feel at home \u2013 a study group, a sports association, a dance course \u2013 and it's likely the event organizers have already aimed their publicity to eliminate people not in the tribe; we then informally cut the field by choosing to attend only certain events and then to mix only with certain people in the room.\n\nOnline, the system's parallel. From the start, some elimination's already done for us because we enter a world where those not looking for love have already self-excluded; many sites also helpfully (though covertly) screen out those with relationship-threatening issues such as drug abuse or long-term mental illness. We further narrow the range ourselves by signing up to sites that target our tribe even more specifically; there are now dedicated destinations for specific age groups, individual cities and almost any special interest you can name, along with some you can't even imagine.\n\nOnce signed up, the site tick-boxes create further focussing on surface compatibilities such as smoking (or not), drinking (or not), whether we follow sport or how passionately we love Chinese food. The algorithmic 'matching quizzes', if well done, then disqualify on deeper issues \u2013 though of course they can't predict face-to-face chemistry, and, as mentioned earlier, there's little correlation with long-term compatibility. Happily, the recent introduction of categories for 'serious', 'fling' or 'affair' now also achieves the elimination of those wanting a relationship of a kind we're not seeking, which is a huge relief for all those online daters single and looking for marriage who \u2013 up to a few years ago \u2013 kept bumping into those married and looking for a fling.\n\nThe funnel of love\n\nAll this pre-sorting is helpful. But the bottom line is that, however small the partner pool we fish in, there'll come a time when we need to do our own, more individual eliminations, partner by partner. My favourite metaphor here is one offered by the late Israeli psychologist Ayala Malach Pines. She imagined a kind of 'funnel of love' \u2013 her pun, not mine \u2013 into which we pour everyone we meet. But just as a funnel gets narrower as it deepens, and lets fewer and fewer elements through, so our criteria naturally get more and more focussed as we eliminate potential partners, until we eventually accept only the ones who really suit. (The criteria we use to create and operate our funnel form the substance of the following chapters of this book.)\n\nWhat often stops us from using the love funnel effectively is a kind of fear of focussing: a nervousness about elimination, a wariness of being choosy, a belief that we shouldn't \u2013 for which read 'aren't entitled to' \u2013 dismiss partners who mismatch, or partnership options which don't appeal. 'I need to spread the net wide or I won't find anyone'. . . 'If I set the bar too high no one will want me'. . . 'I can't say no to her\/him, they'll feel so rejected'. This panic is totally understandable if we've had \u2013 as we all have \u2013 past heartbreak. But it's nevertheless misguided; we do need to focus on what we want rather than going with the flow. I'm not a believer in 'The One', but unless we start saying no to those who aren't right for us, we won't get anywhere near those who are.\n\nIf you suspect that fear of focussing is holding you back, then try this. Imagine yourself sitting somewhere you feel most comfortable, and knowing that your 'right for you' partner is nearby. You're happy because he or she is there, you know that they care for you and you for them and you allow yourself to want them and to want the relationship you have with them. (If you're tempted into caveats or qualifications of the 'nobody loves me' or 'that'll never happen' kind, set these aside for the moment.) Now imagine your partner arrives. Imagine seeing them, hearing their voice as they speak to you, feeling their touch as they reach out for you. Allow yourself to experience their attention fully and know that you deserve that attention.\n\nThe point of this exercise is not to imagine what a future partner might actually be like. It's to have a mental experience of wanting that partner, feeling entitled to want them and being wanted in return. As explained at the very start of this book, partner choice is a quest, and as with all quests it's good to have a bit of feisty courage \u2013 courage to believe in yourself, courage to believe there are partners out there you can choose, courage to believe that there are partners out there who will choose you. Given that belief, you'll find it much easier to keep setting aside those you don't want and keep heading towards those you do.\n\nSpecifying\n\nSo how do we begin? How do we create our personal love funnel? The answer is to get more specific. Specificity clears the mind, orders the thinking, makes us feel in control, helps us understand what we're doing. We are right to believe that specifying will help us towards a result, even in an area as unpredictable as partner choice.\n\nThe historical wheel has come full circle here. When marriage decisions were made on measurable criteria \u2013 age, status, earnings, childbearing potential \u2013 specifying was the way to narrow the field. But when romance left its place in the wings and took centre stage, we sniffed at being too precise, because we wanted to let our emotions rule \u2013 if we loved each other, surely the details were irrelevant. Now things are coming back into balance. Much of the current coverage of partner choice presents its lessons in the form of specified lists \u2013 as seen on every online dating site, in many relationship-advice articles, and via the relationships section on Amazon. The current crop of urban tales featuring heroes\/heroines who found their princess\/prince through detailed specification inspire us not only because we too want to magically conjure up our own fairy-tale partners, but also because we recognize that specifying is necessary to the process.\n\nOf course we shouldn't over-specify. It's not only that, life being what it is, we can't have everything we want. It's also that many of the details of what we want will be irrelevant to our goal of a good relationship. It may matter hugely that a partner shares our love of animals, but if they do love animals \u2013 or if we fall for them regardless \u2013 it likely won't matter at all that they have blue eyes rather than brown. Proof of this is courtesy of another study by Professor Eli Finkel, in which he asked speed daters their partner criteria just before the event; said daters then completely ignored their own benchmarks when they started mingling only minutes later. However convinced we are that we need a partner who's extravert\/introvert, dark\/blonde, big\/small, if we find the right person, size won't matter.\n\nEven so, once our partner pool is big enough, specifying is the perfect starting point. It keeps us on logical track. It boundaries the challenge and keeps it doable. It engages our minds for a task which can otherwise all too easily become over-influenced by our hearts and other more lustful parts of our anatomy. Perhaps unexpectedly, specifying also opens the door to deeper realizations. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, whose bestselling book _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ recently alerted us to the subtleties of decision-making \u2013 or in other words, choice \u2013 points out that specifying doesn't just call on logic but also on a more instinctive awareness. He believes that we 'improve . . . intuition by making a list then sleeping on it.' When we create a partner specification, we will often mysteriously find ourselves exploring much wider issues, not just about surface criteria but also about what we need from a partner on a deeper level, and how to instinctively recognize that when it arrives.\n\nYour wish-list\n\nSpecifying is the perfect starting point \u2013 and the right first step. Our assumption, offline as well as on, is that we should start with what we ourselves are 'selling' and only then consider what we want to 'buy' from a partner. But that's not only the wrong metaphor \u2013 partnership is not about trading but about relating \u2013 it's also the wrong way round. To attract someone, we first need to know what kind of someone to attract. We can't set the GPS effectively until we know the destination.\n\nIf you've already made a wish-list of the specifics you want in a partner, take this opportunity to revisit it. If you haven't already made a list, here's your opportunity. Write down all the elements which for you headline your ideal mate. Gender, age, appearance, cultural background, religious belief, lifestyle, career, earnings, leisure patterns, hobbies, interests, location \u2013 if you run out of categories, most online dating sites include an extensive tick-box list. Avoid vague, avoid abstract \u2013 the idea is to get a detailed, defined, quantifiable starter guide. Then prioritize in order of importance; as I've said, you can't have everything, so your top five at least need to be the things you couldn't live without.\n\nDeal-breakers\n\nNext, list the things you couldn't live _with_ , your deal-breakers. This part of the process aims to make sure we don't find ourselves involved with (worse, married to) someone utterly unsuitable; it's the bottom line which helps us less to find The One \u2013 for there are many Ones \u2013 as to make sure that The Totally Wrong One doesn't slip under our guard because they are tempting. Here are four classic deal-breakers, and that's about the number to aim for \u2013 more, and you're probably drawing the net too tight.\n\n\u2022 Different and uncomplimentary sexual leanings \u2013 such as a potential partner's being gay whereas you need straight, or vice versa\n\n\u2022 Mismatched relationship aims \u2013 such as their wanting marriage where you want casual, or vice versa\n\n\u2022 A conflict in deep values \u2013 such as their being highly religious whereas you are allergic to anything remotely spiritual\n\n\u2022 Incompatibility of interests \u2013 not a gap in enthusiasm, which can often be bridged by encouragement, but a serious mismatch, such as their being a passionate sailor whereas you are aquaphobic\n\nIt's tempting not to consider deal-breakers. But we should be clear about what we don't want, especially the elements we are uneasy about not wanting, as they're the ones we may most unwisely give ground on. If we truly couldn't live with someone who has a dangerous job, for example, it's fairer to everyone to be aware of that, rather than denying, compromising, then wobbling.\n\nA 'normal, happy day'\n\nWish-list made, deal-breakers noted, we next need to specify in a slightly different way. Rather than defining a partner, envision a partnership. What if you woke up one weekday morning five years in the future, having made the perfect choice. Imagine the rest of the day \u2013 not special, not peak experience, just normal, solid and satisfying. What might be your plan for this 'normal, happy day'? In what location would you see yourself? What would you do? How would you spend time \u2013 with your partner? By yourself? Who else might be there? What sort of lifestyle would you have? How would you feel? Above all, what would be especially rewarding about the relationship you'd created?\n\nThis exercise gives new perspective by drawing two crucial distinctions \u2013 between dream and actuality and between partner and partnership. Envisioning what we're after not as fantasy but as reality strips away many of the inessentials \u2013 things we may hanker after but are irrelevant to our happiness; we may find ourselves altering our wish-lists as a result. Plus the exercise broadens awareness out again, from the partner we might choose to the everyday life we would have with that partner. (This everyday life is, of course, the whole aim of choosing a partner in the first place: I did at one point wonder whether this book should have been called 'How to Choose a Partnership'.) Enhancing detail in this way leaves in place the core needs, but allows us to form a resonant and motivating picture of what we want our future to hold.\n\nWelcoming invitation\n\nHow to use these specifications? When doing distance dating, the wish-list and the deal-breakers inform the tick-boxes, while the 'normal, happy day' exercise will give you the material to write the free-text elements of profile and partner specification. There's an added bonus here. Research suggests that, online, it's more compelling \u2013 for which read attractive \u2013 to structure your profile not as a 'dating CV' (age, interests, holiday plans) but as a welcoming invitation to join you in a relationship; the 'normal, happy day' exercise provides all the essential raw material for such an invitation.\n\nIf you're motivated to put in the work, you could also use the material you've gathered to design and apply your own customized matching algorithm. This is precisely what was done by PhD student Chris McKinlay, who apparently had something of a eureka moment when he realized that, rather than relying entirely on personal charisma, he could use his talent as a mathematician to develop a personal formula for a perfect partner. He did so, found love and wrote the bestselling book to prove it. Details of _Optimal Cupid_ \u2013 and of _Data, a Love Story_ , from female counterpart Amy Webb \u2013 are in the bibliography.\n\nIf partner choice is face-to-face \u2013 speed dating, blind dating, meeting with an online suitor or simple right-place-right-time serendipity \u2013 the wish-list, deal-breakers and 'normal, happy day' specifications are vital touchstones. With these kept firmly in mind, we can begin to tally vision with reality, our desires with flesh and blood, and start asking ourselves the crucial questions: Does this person fit our theoretical specification and, if not, does that matter? We may well feel it doesn't, if in other ways there is a fit. Does this person contravene any of our deal-breakers, and if so, is that contravention writ in stone? It may well be resolvable with some negotiation. Finally, but most importantly, could this person help us create the daily life that we want for ever? If there's a real possibility they can, that's the best basis for continuing.\n\n#### 6. Connecting\n_Only connect._\n\n(E. M. FORSTER, _H OWARD'S END_)\n\nIt's surely clear that good relationship decisions are based on knowing far more about a partner than whether they simply tick the headline demands of our wish-list. To return to the 'love funnel' metaphor, the more we filter down our options to fewer possible partners, the more we need to aim for a broader and more extensive understanding of each one.\n\nFor there's an addendum to the earlier-mentioned jam experiment. Repeats of the research suggest that the 'shopping mentality' problem is not only down to too much choice but to too little information. Increase our knowledge about each jam (that is, each partner) and choice becomes not only easier but also more accurate, more emotionally intelligent, more successful. So, as we recognize which partners may be right for us, we need to view them from different perspectives, to witness them in different situations, to learn about them and allow them to learn about us \u2013 in short, to connect. The slow-river approach again, but this time trawling the deeper waters.\n\nLet's start with the simple fact of meeting. Once upon a time, we knew we were smitten because our eyes met across a crowded room (or at the village well, or as we were tilling the fields). The natural, biologically driven ritual of partner choice is founded on real-life contact.\n\nYes, some historical courtships were pursued at a distance. Europe in the Middle Ages was awash with ambassadors journeying from royal court to royal court while bearing portraits of beautiful princesses in the hope of arranging advantageous marriages. But without meeting, such long-distance strategies often went horribly wrong: King Henry VIII of England failed to even consummate his marriage to fourth wife Anne of Cleves because when she arrived for the wedding, he realized that 'she is nothing as fair as she hath been reported'.\n\nTo really connect with \u2013 and make a decision on \u2013 a partner, we need to see, to hear, to literally feel them. It was anthropologist David Givens who in 1978 mapped out for us the instinctive process of natural attraction. We glimpse a potential partner from afar, then engage by eye contact, then by talking, then touch, eventually getting close enough to smell, taste and, if the stars align, be sexual. At each stage we parallel our conscious appraisal by unconsciously rating the other's physical appearance, the way they move and speak, their hormonal invitations. At this early stage, closer and closer contact filters partners, not only because of what they say and do, but also because of the way they say it and do it. (Those who make the cut are likely not only to attract us but to be attracted to us; if face-to-face connection leads to a 'yes', it's likely to become a virtuous, circular reinforcing 'yes'.)\n\nTwenty-three days\n\nActually, we know all this. We intuitively trust face-to-face contact because we realize it gives us essential knowledge on which to base judgement. We are reluctant to develop a relationship before meeting someone, because we know that without face-to-face contact we can't make a full assessment. Which is why when it comes to the distance dating of new technology we may be fascinated but we're also wary; traditional partner choice follows a 'meet\u2013look\u2013talk\u2013touch' model, while new technology follows the new pattern of 'view\u2013read\u2013write\u2013talk\u2013meet\u2013touch', which leaves the really important bit to almost the very end.\n\nQuestion: How can that work? Answer: It often doesn't. We may find that, after crashing the internet with reciprocally enthusiastic emails for several weeks, when we finally get close to our online crush it's loathing at first sight. Moreover, studies suggest that disappointment when face-to-face rises in direct proportion to how long we've been in other sorts of contact before meeting. In other words, whether our expectations are met depends almost entirely on how long we've been stacking up those expectations. The key number here, according to a recent study at the University of South Florida, is twenty-three days of email; after that, a suitor would have to be a deity-come-to-earth in order to measure up face-to-face.\n\nIt's no coincidence that the site- and app-developers, having made their mark promoting a form of dating that was literally at a distance, are currently putting huge effort and budget into trying to reduce that distance and replicate the natural first step of crowded-room eye-catching. The current direction is not just for increased accessibility through profile pictures, audio and video, but for meet-ups, social evenings, dance classes and singles holidays, as well as apps that reveal which of those sitting in the same coffee bar are looking for love tonight. The litmus test will always be the 'close enough to smell' connection.\n\nDistance benefits\n\nThat said, we're wrong to be wholly wary of distance in a dating medium. For when it comes to thoughts and feelings, being apart can actually be more trustworthy and more revelatory. A study from Cornell University suggests we're more likely to tell the truth in an email than in a voice conversation, because we know our words are literally down in black and white and can be checked. We're also more likely to open up about significant thoughts and feelings online than face-to-face, because being less close to a prospective partner lowers the fear of rejection and leaves us more able to be authentic. The adrenalin rush that comes with the ping of 'you've got mail' stems not just from the potential of a new relationship but from the fact that the mail in question may contain deep emotional revelations \u2013 and the fact that we can respond in kind.\n\nSo here's how to drive distance dating to best effect. Benefit from the larger numbers to spot possible candidates, but rather than staying with 'winks' or 'likes', move to email as quickly as possible. Then, at that email level, without getting over-demanding, dive below surface chat; ask serious questions, give serious answers, open up and let partners do the same. The deeper revelations will help gauge the deeper compatibility; if it's there, move on to phoning and meeting \u2013 the gold standard of real life.\n\nProximity and chemistry\n\nFor contact makes everything tangible, not only physically but also emotionally. It adds in all the wonderful elements which circumvent our logical brain \u2013 there's a reason why Eros is shown with an arrow of love which pierces straight to the heart. It's almost a clich\u00e9, that total fixation of gaze and suspension of logical thought. Think Maria and Tony in _West Side Story_ , stepping across the dance floor to touch each other. Think Marius and Cosette in _Les Mis\u00e9rables_ , stopping in their tracks at the Luxembourg Gardens as their eyes meet for the first time.\n\nThis isn't, contrary to what we might think, only about desire. It's also that simple proximity matters hugely and biases hugely. Once there's a basic attraction, the more time we spend close to someone, the more they will seem appealing, lovable, simply better. And the longer, more frequently, more regularly we spend time with them, the deeper the impact. A 1930s study of 5,000 American couples showed that 45 per cent of them had got together when living within a few blocks of each other, which \u2013 while not as surprising in the 1930s as it would be nowadays \u2013 is still remarkable.\n\nA word here about 'chemistry', a factor so prized and persuasive that an entire online dating site is named after it. We've surely all experienced the sort of heartfelt mutual liking which leaves us feeling good about ourselves as well as about the other person. But it's difficult to pin down \u2013 and research hasn't shown \u2013 what exactly chemistry is, let alone what causes it. Basic biological urge? Complex psychological fit? And should we factor it into our choice strategy? Without chemistry most of us would hesitate to take things further with a partner, and many commentators feel its absence is a deal-breaker; the founder of eHarmony, Neil Clark Warren, states uncompromisingly that unless you feel the urge to kiss a prospective partner by the third date 'you're probably never going to feel it'. But other dating experts join with many traditional cultures in judging chemistry as no predictor of partnership success; perhaps the only thing that chemistry guarantees is chemistry. If so, then maybe instead of demanding it as a prerequisite for a relationship, we ought to be seeing it as a distracting delusion.\n\n_West Side Story_. Love at first sight with score by Leonard Bernstein, words by Stephen Sondheim and choreography by Jerome Robbins.\n\nDecision-making strategies\n\nWhich is why \u2013 unromantic though it may seem \u2013 it's good to add in some more measurable, more strategic, less instinctive criteria for judging. It's a wise exercise, as first meeting evolves into regular contact, to ask yourself what evidence you use as you form your opinion. (It may help to consider here how you judge not only partners, but anyone close \u2013 friends, colleagues, even family.)\n\nDo you reach conclusions about a person because of . . .\n\n. . . how they look?\n\n. . . what they say?\n\n. . . what they actually do in practice as opposed to what they say?\n\n. . . what their general reputation is?\n\n. . . what the important people in your life think about them?\n\n. . . how you feel emotionally when you are with them?\n\n. . . how you feel emotionally when they are not there but you are thinking about them?\n\n. . . your sexual contact, if any?\n\n. . . what their friends and family are like?\n\n. . . how they interact with their friends, family, colleagues?\n\n. . . how they interact with your friends, family, colleagues?\n\n. . . their previous life in general?\n\n. . . their relationship track-record in particular?\n\n. . . what your gut reaction tells you?\n\nTry dividing the elements into those you would always check, and those you'd never bother with because they seem unlinked, irrelevant, impossible to judge. Next, put the list in chronological order, according to those checks you pay attention to first, those you usually leave for later, and those you never attend to. Are there any surprises there?\n\nThen think back. How has this decision-making strategy of yours actually played out? If less than perfectly, how could you improve? Perhaps you could prioritize the elements that until now you've left until later. Perhaps you could place less reliance on some kinds of evidence and more on others. Perhaps you need to extend, to use a wider range of checks and balances so your decision-making's more effective.\n\nAn interesting thought about initial moments: one of my early psychology tutors suggested that the first experience we have of a partner provides a snapshot of our entire future relationship, sets the scene, writes the script for later plot development. So, if in their initial meeting Mary finds herself listening to Tom hammer on about his ex, she could find that Tom's past dominates their future relationship. If in their initial meeting Tom and Mary find themselves agreeing easily about where to go to eat, they're likely to have a cooperative time ahead.\n\nSo have there been any first meetings that, in hindsight, should have told you to turn and flee? Have there been any first meetings that, in hindsight, you should have taken as the starting point for something important? No regrets \u2013 the past is over \u2013 but maybe such meetings can be a touchstone as you go forward.\n\nThree elements\n\nIf face-to-face compatibility's confirmed and what we want is a simple liaison, we need demand very little more than passion and opportunity. If we are seeking something deeper, the criteria are more complex; below the intensity and the delight, there's a need for a deeper compatibility. As Joanne Woodward apparently said of her five-decade marriage to Paul Newman, 'Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades. But to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day . . . that's a real treat.' So, can we get \u2013 can we give \u2013 that kind of treat, whether through laughter or otherwise, with our partner?\n\nIf we can, we're likely looking at connection across three elements: values, life goals and personality traits:\n\n\u2022 _Values:_ what makes our existence most worthwhile: safety, excitement, social recognition, happiness, self-respect, status.\n\n\u2022 _Life goals:_ the achievements we crave during a lifetime: career success, financial security, travel, adventure, marriage, children.\n\n\u2022 _Personality:_ a combination of character and temperament: honesty, mental acuity, kindness, generosity, bravery, commitment to hard work.\n\nThere's a numbers problem here. I've just enumerated a longish list of examples to cover all three elements, but I could have devoted an entire chapter (or indeed a whole book) to each. For, while a full tally of a partner's hobbies is typically achievable on the fingers of one hand, the possible subcategories of these three deeper levels might number more than the hairs on one's head. Far too many elements to keep count of, let alone keep in mind as a benchmark for partner choice. Better to explore these issues more broadly to reveal what's really important.\n\nThree questions\n\nThe next exercise lets you attempt this broader exploration. It has as its starting point a somewhat morbid topic, but it's useful to help you reflect. Imagine you are on your deathbed. You are looking back on a good life. You've experienced what you were meant to experience, done what you were meant to do, are ending as you are meant to end. Now ask yourself these questions:\n\nHe wondered how long it would take his partner to join him at the summit, given that they'd set off in different directions to begin with.\n\n1. What three values made your life most worthwhile? (Think benefits such as safety, happiness, etc.)\n\n2. Which three goals have you achieved in your life that you are most satisfied with and proud of? (Think aims such as career success, adventure, etc.)\n\n3. What three personality traits do you most want other people to praise you for when you have gone? (Think descriptors such as honesty, generosity, etc.)\n\nAnswer these three questions, get your nine answers, and you'll have a top-line list of what is deeply important in your life and thus what needs to be deeply important to your partner in his or her life. If one of your key values is status, you'll want a partner to rate that too. If your dream is to parent an entire football team of offspring, your ideal partner will be one who shares that goal \u2013 forgive the pun. If it matters to you to work hard, you'll need a partner willing to pull all-nighters alongside you, or at the least give you a genuinely appreciative hug when you finally come to bed at 6 a.m.\n\nProofs of love\n\nNine words are a great start, a good snapshot. Problem is, almost always we'll choose words that \u2013 while meaningful \u2013 are also abstract, indefinite, lacking detail. Example: almost everyone who does this exercise mentions the word 'love'. But what particular flavour of love is that \u2013 and what if it's not to a prospective partner's taste? What if our idea of 'love' consists of huge amounts of free time apart, and theirs is 24\/7 gazing into each other's eyes? What if we agree with St Paul that 'love is patient, love is kind', while our partner is more of the Woody Allen school of thought that says 'love is suffering'.\n\nFanfares please for counsellor Gary Chapman's bestselling book _The Five Love Languages_ , which makes just this point. He suggests we each have our own vocabulary of ways we feel cared for, as does our beloved \u2013 but discrepancy between our respective visions creates relationship booby traps. Chapman's list of five languages is as follows: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, physical touch \u2013 though there are surely more one could creatively add to the list. And it's pretty clear where the traps might lie. If our partner's top love-language is gifts and ours is words of affirmation, then however many delightful presents they bring home, we'll still feel unappreciated if they don't say those three little words. If our top criterion is quality time spent together, while our partner defines love as acts of service, then however many romantic weekends we surprise them with, they won't be satisfied if we don't occasionally take the rubbish out.\n\nWhat are your proofs of love? Define them as concretely as you can. Then list just as concretely the 'proofs' of all your deathbed answers. What do you mean by 'safety' \u2013 is that financial, practical or emotional? What are you thinking of when you talk about 'career success' \u2013 promotion, work satisfaction or appreciation from your team? What do you have in mind when you talk of 'generosity' \u2013 is that giving of your time, your money, your energy? Think through these deeper meanings so that, when the time's right, you can explain them to a partner and teach them how to be good for you.\n\nSameness\n\nIt's clear that we need a partner to accept, appreciate and approve of these elements of us. But do we need them to copy, to match exactly, to be a 'bird of a feather' that 'flock[s] together'? Here we call on the insights of psychiatrist Hellmuth Kaiser, who in the 1940s, while watching identical twins ice-skate in perfect harmony, suddenly realized that the audience's rapt fascination was due more to the synchronicity of the siblings than to their technical skill. We human beings like sameness. It makes us feel secure; babies even a few minutes old gurgle with glee when adults mirror their movements. It makes us feel validated; imitation is flattering, so strengthens our good feeling about ourselves.\n\nThis good feeling's reciprocal, a virtuous circle; if we worship a partner because we're alike, they'll probably worship us back. Which is why most dating systems, from online to matchmaking, pair clients based on likeness. And certainly when it comes to values and life goals, this approach is quite correct. Pair with someone who's taking the same track in life and we'll be content; if we're on opposite tracks we'll either move apart at speed, or play tug-of-war. Love, as Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry famously wrote, consists 'not in two people looking at each other, but two people looking outwards in the same direction'.\n\nWith personality it's slightly more complicated, the research is more contradictory and it's possible opposites really do attract. Yes, same-personality partners may make good buddies. But there may not be enough spark for interest, let alone romance, not enough complementarity for day-to-day teamwork, let alone home-building, child-rearing and balancing all the spinning plates of a practical life together. As an example, in _Little Women_ , Louisa May Alcott's novel about girls growing up in Civil War America, Jo March makes a fast friend of Laurie, the boy next door. Their bond is close and strong, but when Laurie falls in love with Jo, she is sensible enough to realize that their similarly masculine attitudes and hot-tempered personalities mean they could never make a good match. Instead, she moves to New York and there meets academic Friedrich Bhaer, whose tender character complements rather than copies her own; under his guidance she fulfils her potential, while Laurie ends up equally happily married to more feminine, less tempestuous Amy March. The lesson Alcott offers us \u2013 and one which relationship-advice books have repeated down the ages \u2013 is that we should choose a mate with similar values and goals, but with a different personality.\n\nThat said, recent research from the University of Columbia suggests it's more complex than that. Apparently a better answer is to ask a further question: What do individuals want? Those of us who feel good around similarity will thrive with a partner as like us as possible. Those of us energized around difference will thrive with a dissimilar mate. It's not the dynamic itself \u2013 all variations can theoretically work \u2013 it's our comfort level that dictates success.\n\nWhat about the 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' issue? We might wonder whether, if similarity is so very important, but X and Y chromosomes are so irreversibly unlike, all different-gender relationships are going to be fraught. Here's the reassurance: men and women are actually very similar. Some psychologists even suggest there are only two built-in gender differences \u2013 verbal skill and aggression \u2013 while anything else is down to nurture not nature and therefore adaptable. So if a relationship ends unhappily we shouldn't blame the gender difference, or point accusingly at 'men' or 'women'. And if a relationship seems well advised, we shouldn't worry that it's all doomed just because our beloved is of a particular gender. To put it another way: 'Men are from earth, women are from earth. Deal with it.' (The original of that quote is claimed by at least a dozen people, but it was far too apposite to omit from this book just because its author can't be identified!)\n\nDisrobing\n\nValues, life goals, personality. Given honest conversation, we can probably guestimate these three elements in the first few meetings with a potential partner and \u2013 as we should \u2013 bail out if there are reasons for doubt . . .\n\nBut real proof at this level takes a while, and it's as important to talk as it is to listen. Revealing what matters to us, doing the things that fascinate us, exploring the past and planning the future together will over time remove more and more individual 'veils', and, along with that disrobing, our judgement of each other will become more and more accurate. Studies suggest that goals will become obvious first, values next, with personality revealed last of all. To slightly hasten the process, you might try raising the 'deathbed questions' as a topic for mutual discussion; crassly posed, they may bring the conversation to a shuddering halt, but used at a stage where both partners are sufficiently at ease to go deeper, they're exceedingly good for highlighting compatibilities.\n\n'Commitment is an act, not a word.' \u2013 Jean-Paul Sartre\n\nEmbroidery\n\nSpeaking of veils, is it wise to 'embroider' them in the early going, perhaps omitting certain details and subtly altering others for effect? How should we present ourselves in order to attract a mate? Answer: don't 'present', simply be. Of course it's tempting to massage the headline figures \u2013 online, apparently women often lower their age and weight, while men increase their height and salary. And of course it's courteous not to be so 'open and honest' that we spend the first few dates revealing intimate details of our most recent relationship-breakdown or the exact figures of our current financial crisis. But if we're not at least factually truthful to begin with, and if we're not emotionally truthful very soon after, we're in grave danger of ending up with a partner who wants what we say we are, not what we actually are.\n\nWhich is why I'm no fan of dating systems such as _The Rules_ , which advise a 'play hard-to-get' approach to partner choice. I have to admit to feeling faintly nauseated by a book which, as early as line nineteen of its introduction, promises a way of acting around a guy so he becomes 'obsessed with you and wants to commit' \u2013 surely patronizing to both genders. But my objections are not only ideological but also pragmatic \u2013 any suitor, male or female, who is only enthralled by the thrill of the 'hard-to-get' chase will likely lose interest once the hunt is over. Although being authentic may feel scary, the more authentic we can be \u2013 about what we believe, what we want, who we are \u2013 the more chance we'll have of eventually meeting a suitable prince or princess, even if that also means that en route we drive off a lot of incompatible frogs.\n\nWhat if, conversely, we wonder if a partner is being inauthentic? This isn't so much about whether they are lying \u2013 if we suspect they are, we're almost certainly right. But what if nerves are holding them back, or lack of self-confidence is making them hide true thoughts and feelings. Usually only time, trust and the opportunity for in-depth conversation will tell. But \u2013 though it isn't under our control and shouldn't be magicked up to order \u2013 an external drama or crisis will often make it clear, snapping us out of early courtship timidity, giving us a reason to step out and show who we really are, for bad or for good.\n\nI am remembering one client whose turning point for leaving a boyfriend was when she was involved in an accident and he suggested she call a cab to take her to A & E as he was 'too tired' to drive her there. More hopefully for one's faith in human nature, I'm remembering another client who suffered a burglary; her partner's absolute support, practical action and complete understanding of how traumatized she was sent her rightly over the edge into commitment. It was sad about the burglary, but for the relationship, it was a result.\n\nSoothe then solve\n\nThe two stories above, highlighting two very different responses to the emotional needs of a partner, bring us neatly to another kind of connection. And if you're reading this book in the hope of a single 'top tip', here it comes. Without this element in a relationship, all the compatibility in the world won't keep us afloat; with it, all the alarms, excursions, dramas and crises won't sink us. Professor Sue Johnson, on whose work this section of the book is based, even hints that every other single factor involved in partner choice may be irrelevant. Get this right and you're sorted.\n\nI'm talking about emotional responsiveness \u2013 a partner's ability to pay loving attention to our emotional needs, and our ability to pay attention to theirs. Note the reciprocity. As well as needing to choose a partner who values our feelings, we need to choose a partner who motivates us to value theirs. However wonderful a suitor, if they don't inspire us to respond, they're the wrong choice.\n\nWe all have emotional needs. Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs \u2013 that triangle at whose base sit the human physical requirements for air, water, food, clothing, shelter and safety \u2013 has on its higher storeys the need for belonging, acceptance, security, respect, love. We generate much of this inside ourselves as we mature, but the meaning of John Donne's cry that 'no man is an island' is that none of us can do the job alone. Knowing our partner will respond when we need them, knowing we'll respond when they need us, is at the heart of the love bond.\n\nSo what is this responsiveness? Here's a definition which you may find useful:\n\n1. Being able to notice, pay attention to, reflect on, soothe and express our own emotions.\n\n2. Being able to notice, pay attention to, reflect on, soothe and respond to a partner's emotions.\n\n3. Being able to reflect on and discuss the interaction between 1 and 2.\n\n4. Being able to do all the above even when a partner can't, won't or doesn't want to.\n\nNotice what's missing: any mention of solutions. Solutions may be vital, but a partner's unlikely to even hear them, let alone do anything with them, until emotions are being honoured. So first soothe. Only then, solve.\n\nAt home by the fire\n\nLet's look at this another way, not as a list but a story. One of my favourite books is Thomas Hardy's _Far from the Madding Crowd_ \u2013 where headstrong Bathsheba Everdene turns down a proposal from good-hearted employee Gabriel Oak. Instead she marries dashing Sergeant Troy and, when he abandons her, accepts the courtship of reserved neighbour William Boldwood. Just to be clear, while there's tragedy, there are no absolute villains in this story. In their own way, everyone does their best.\n\nBut only one man \u2013 Oak \u2013 is worthy of Bathsheba. That's not just because he supports her practically through his work on the farm, but also because he is the only one who can stand firm emotionally. Sergeant Troy's passion seduces Bathsheba but his feelings are unreliable, while Boldwood is emotionally crippled. Only Oak is capable of empathic generosity; in Hardy's words, 'the [things] which affected Gabriel's personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes'. If you've read the novel, you'll know the ending. If not, then take a clue from Gabriel's proposal to Bathsheba \u2013 which at first she rejects as uninspiring, but later learns to treasure: 'at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be \u2013 and whenever I look up, there will be you.'\n\nEmotional engagement\n\nWhich makes it all sound very simple. But this kind of maturity is a big ask. It means, as Gabriel Oak knows, being there for a partner over time and under all circumstances. It means staying calm even when sad, angry or anxious. It means staying engaged even when our partner is sad, angry or anxious and we are sorely tempted to tell them to get a grip. It means staying rock-solid even when our partner is firing negative emotions, with us as the target \u2013 as they will do from time to time in even in the most loving relationship. Easy? Not at all.\n\nSo are we warranted in making emotional responsiveness a benchmark for partner choice? So long as we give back, surely it's entirely reasonable to expect a potential partner to deliver emotional support, entirely justifiable to walk away if they can't or won't. Science is on my side in this. A landmark fourteen-year study by Professor Ted Huston of the University of Texas at Austin suggests that where partners aren't emotionally concerned about each other during courtship, then even if they decide to wed they'll probably part in the end. If couples are consistently kind, warm, sympathetic and empathic from the start, they're hugely more likely to stay the course. We not only can, but should, make emotional responsiveness a relationship deal-breaker.\n\nAdam realized at once that this relationship was going to be emotionally demanding.\n\nYou may at this point be wondering about the widespread belief that such demands could never be made of those with the Y chromosome. So can men respond emotionally? The answer is absolutely yes. Any male wariness of emotion is not because men feel it less \u2013 physiologically they actually experience it more strongly, more painfully, hence the wariness. Men's main handicap is conditioning; little boys are told not to cry, big boys are told to 'be a man', but what they're rarely told is how to manage their emotions. But another study from the University of Texas suggests that when told empathy is attractive and that emotional responsiveness makes for good relationships, men are totally capable of stepping up. I know this first-hand. I have had as clients many men who fully take on board this particular relationship challenge, reach out to their partners and respond to their partners reaching out to them. These men are certainly brave \u2013 but they're not unique. There are lots of them out there.\n\nProofs of responsiveness\n\nEarlier in this chapter, we needed to get very specific about values, goals and personality \u2013 thinking through what our definitions were, deciding what 'proof' there might be that we can deliver what a partner might need and vice versa. In the same way, it's good to get specific about emotional responsiveness \u2013 what we mean by it, how we would know it if we saw it \u2013 or we again risk a relationship minefield where what one partner wants is not what the other can give.\n\nHow to unearth your definition? One good way is to think of the last time you actively felt emotionally supported; what did people say and do (or not say and do) to bring you back into balance? As contrast, when did you last feel unsupported; what went on that left you disappointed and discouraged? What were the differences between those times that made such a difference in how you felt?\n\nCan we tell if a potential partner is capable of responding? It's unwise to even try to judge this in the early going, when heavy-duty emotional interaction is rarely appropriate, let alone needed. That said, the following are excellent signs, their absence worrying: if a suitor listens with concentration when we are speaking, reveals emotional awareness when they are speaking, and \u2013 a sneaky one, this \u2013 shows empathy to those in the vicinity, even though these people are clearly not the object of courtship attention. One of my friends married a woman who on their first date behaved well to a waiter when he accidentally spilled soup in her lap. Another friend instantly dumped a beau who was rude to a nervous server. On both occasions my verdict was: good choice.\n\nSerious tests of this dimension will likely come when strong and uncomfortable emotions first bite \u2013 on occasions that might be as huge as a bereavement or as small as a hellish commute from work. A partner may be able to listen, comfort, sympathize and soothe \u2013 and we may accept that from them, or not. We may be able to listen, comfort, sympathize and soothe \u2013 and a partner may let us in, or not. We need to pay close attention, for it's here that both sides will show their true colours. And it's here we will find the answers to the two questions which Sue Johnson claims are most crucial to relationship success: 'Can I be there for you? Can you be there for me?'\n\nPaul and Linda\n\nWhat if the answer to the first question \u2013 can I be there for you? \u2013 is actually 'no'? If we don't feel inspired to deliver emotionally to a partner, we need to ask ourselves why and then listen carefully to whatever reasons our minds and hearts give back. 'Because I'm just not motivated enough with this person' is extremely useful information, even though it probably signals an ending.\n\nThe answer to the second question \u2013 can you be there for me? \u2013 may be unclear. We may sense a partner's willingness but the way they respond to our 'bids' for care may not be quite what we need \u2013 a loss of attention, a turn away, an unresponsive comment. Is this just cause for dismissal? If all other signs are good it's surely unfair to call a halt without giving a partner at least a chance to step up. So perhaps we ask, clearly and without criticism, for the response we need when we're emotional? Listening or cuddling. Asking questions or staying silent. Looking on the bright side or joining in the pessimism. Giving time alone or being willing to stay for a while. While we're on the subject, we might even turn the conversation to asking what response a partner might need from us when they are distressed. Just so we know.\n\nThis depth of conversation may not be possible at once. And those few preceding paragraphs may seem more like advice on how to relate to a partner than advice on how to choose one. But a huge element of successful decision-making is finding out whether each partner is both able and motivated to actually learn what the other person needs and what the relationship may demand. If either of us can't or won't learn then, harsh as it may sound, there is no future. If we're prepared to study, the future is shining bright.\n\nApparently when Paul McCartney and his first wife, Linda, married, they made a private vow: 'I will never put you down'. To my mind, this didn't only mean that they would never insult or disparage each other. It didn't only mean that they would never betray or abandon each other. It meant that they would never stop being aware of each other's feelings, never stop giving attention to each other's needs, never fail to open up to each other, never fail to reply. Emotional responsiveness at its best.\n\nFour tendencies\n\nWe come now to perhaps the most intricate of all issues by which we may assess relationship potential \u2013 how we relate, not just when one of us has an emotional need but when the connection between us threatens to fray.\n\nBecause all of us will inevitably, at some point in our relationship, feel insecure, even unloved. Where we differ is what we do with that. At the heart of understanding what we need in a partner is understanding just how we differ, and how that plays out.\n\nFor which insight, we thank psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth and their work on child development (which, for easier consumption, I've here simplified). Bowlby began, in the mid years of the twentieth century, with a simple but innovative idea: that for humans, life is insecure. This starts early. We lose trust when we are propelled at birth into a world that is totally unlike the safe and comforting womb we just left. We lose more trust when, however devoted our carers, they're sometimes too distracted, busy or stressed to give us the attention we need. Yes, we survive, and largely we survive well. But underneath it all we're still mistrustful, fearing that we won't be loved and if we are that love will disappear \u2013 when such insecurity hits, we fall back on our own individual coping mechanisms, 'attachment' tendencies, as Bowlby called them.\n\nMary Ainsworth built on this theory with an in-depth study of seventy-six toddlers and their mothers, exploring more fully what these coping mechanisms might be. Mum and baby were shown into a room full of toys and with a research assistant on hand. Once toddler was happily playing, Mum left the room three times for three-minute intervals \u2013 during the last time the research assistant also left. Some little ones cried at first, then calmed, seeming 'secure' that Mum would come back. Some became 'anxious', and when Mum returned, clung on in case she went away again. Yet others protested by cutting off, ignoring Mum on her return, punishing her for her absence; Ainsworth called this 'avoidant' behaviour. Others got angry with Mum for leaving; I'm naming this tendency 'attacking'. Four toddler reactions, four emotional strategies, four tendencies to behave a particular way when feeling insecure, unloved and wary that love might never return.\n\nAs adults . . .\n\nA few decades on from Bowlby and Ainsworth's work and we see a growing realization that these tendencies don't just fade as a child grows up. As adults, we're certainly more secure because we're more in control of our world, but we also repeatedly learn \u2013 often through the route of heartbreak \u2013 that we can't always trust that world to deliver. And we still harbour those four attachment tendencies, sometimes majoring in one, mostly doing mix-and-match to differing degrees. When we are 'secure', trusting in ourselves and others, we handle love situations with calmness and confidence \u2013 even if in the end a relationship dies. When 'anxious' we are worried by love, unsure of our competence and needing reassurance. As 'avoidant', we fight shy of emotional engagement, pull away if commitment looms. 'Attacking', we feel an inner frustration, perhaps creating conflict in order to connect.\n\nIf any of this sounds familiar, you're right. We all have all these tendencies in different proportions. We may not manifest the more challenging ones except when we feel insecure or feel a relationship connection weakening \u2013 but they're there in all of us. For that, no blame, no shame; attachment tendencies are the human condition.\n\nWhich of course is why so many characters in literature and film display them (aside, of course, from the 'secure' tendency, which is so mature and wise that it has zero dramatic potential). The other tendencies, however, provide endless raw material for compulsive characters and angst-driven plot. For 'anxious', see Bridget Jones's romantic insecurity and her readiness to cling again and again to Daniel Cleaver even when he behaves badly (though thankfully, in the end, she sees the light and walks away). As an example of 'avoidant', we might turn to the butler Stevens who, in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel _The Remains of the Day_ , is so wary of the relationship that might develop if he showed his true feelings for housekeeper Miss Kenton that he fails to admit his love over a period of several decades. For 'attacking', we need look no further than Heathcliff and Catherine in Emily Bront\u00eb's novel _Wuthering Heights_ ; while they think of themselves as one \u2013 'Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same' \u2013 they are nevertheless endlessly intense with each other and Heathcliff in particular can often only express his love for Catherine through absolute rage.\n\nThese tendencies have had an undeserved bad press. As is clear from the last paragraph, particularly when they're presented in art rather than real life, they're often seen as being all downside, fault and weakness. 'Secure' is, rightly, viewed as the poster child for happy and mature relationships. But the other tendencies have their upsides too. Being anxious may mean we're motivated to ride out a partnership storm, stay loyal, stay committed. Being avoidant may mean a certain emotional independence, the ability to give partners space. An attacking tendency can mean being comfortable with dissension, or being able to summon huge intensity and passion.\n\nSo, to what extent do you stay calm and serene, trusting in life and love to give you what you need? How far do you stay loyal \u2013 even though you also sometimes cling? How far do you maintain your emotional independence \u2013 albeit you may get accused of not caring? How far do you engage energetically \u2013 granted that you occasionally pick fights? How do you respond when you feel love sliding away from you? What, in short, are you going to bring to the partnership table when you feel less than fully connected?\n\nPartner tendencies\n\nAnd what will a partner bring to the table? Discovering that is never going to be as simple as gauging height and weight, values and life goals, or a capacity for emotional responsiveness. Crucially, attachment tendencies may not kick in at the start of a relationship because at that point we likely feel perfectly loved and perfectly secure. So how can we make at least a top-level guess on a beloved's tendencies in time to make a reasoned decision?\n\nHere's a useful diagnostic. Sex. Sex is one of the arenas where a person is most themselves, and reveals that self most early and openly in a relationship. It is Sue Johnson who here again offers guidance. She suggests that sex which involves a healthy balance between physical pleasure and emotional bonding might be called 'synchrony sex' and reflects a secure tendency. Sex used largely for comfort and as a way to calm doubts or conflicts, which Johnson terms 'solace sex', suggests a tendency to be anxious. Sex that is self-focussed, performance-oriented, with little emotional openness, could be labelled 'sealed off' sex; it signals avoidant tendencies. I would add that energetic, forceful, 'fight it all out' passion is what one might call 'squabble sex' and might reflect an attacking tendency.\n\nAgain, these are tendencies, not types. All of us make love in all the above styles \u2013 with emotion, for reassurance, as self-gratification, to let out frustration \u2013 in fact my guess is that if you mixed all four together what you'd get would be sex labelled 'normal'. But a noticeable preponderance of one type or the other can act as a Rorschach test, revealing who a potential partner is and what a potential partnership with them might be like.\n\nTom and Jerry\n\nWhat do attachment tendencies suggest for partner choice? Similarity can work. When both of us are anxious or attacking we'll understand each other and thrive on our mutual need for security or strong engagement. When we're both avoidant \u2013 that is, if we ever manage to get together in the first place \u2013 we may feel constant gratitude for the reciprocal freedom.\n\nDissimilarity can play well too. If we compensate for each other, some anxious dependency may strengthen the bond; a small amount of avoidant independence may stabilize interactions; a little attacking engagement may mean issues get put on the table and dealt with in healthy short order. (A good exercise, at this point, is not only to remember your own past relationships but also look at the ones you see around you, as acted out by friends, family or colleagues. Playing 'spot the attachment tendency' is not only good practice for understanding partners-to-be but also good fun.)\n\nBut do be wary of extremes. If we meet a partner who pushes for commitment on the first date, one who's never had any relationships longer than a few weeks, or one who picks a fight within minutes of meeting, beware. We are facing respectively an off-the-scale anxious, off-the-scale avoidant and off-the-scale attacking personality. Unless we're totally convinced we can handle it, we shouldn't even try.\n\nThe more subtle, and often less easily spottable, combination from hell is when partners of different tendencies date but can't accommodate. Initial attraction may be strong \u2013 contrast makes for interest \u2013 and when we're safely in love there may be no trigger for attachment wobbles. But fast forward a little: inject any kind of stress or insecurity and the dynamic will make both sides crazy. Anxious plus avoidant means one of us clings, the other pulls away. Avoidant plus attacking means one of us runs, the other pushes to engage. Attacking plus anxious means one fights, the other fears. The result can be a Tom and Jerry cartoon-type chase, with A emotionally pursuing B round the room of the relationship. If you've ten years of commitment behind you by the time this sort of thing creeps in, it's absolutely worth taking time, energy and counselling to resolve it. But if it's happening a mere ten days or weeks into a new relationship, run for your life.\n\nThe ideal\n\nThe ideal here \u2013 and it is an ideal \u2013 is that mostly we are secure with each other and that at least one of us is secure most of the time. Yes, there'll be bouts of wobble \u2013 but in terms of choosing a partner, what to look for is someone largely honest and direct, who communicates clearly and is not into game-playing. Someone who is aware of emotion, not afraid of intimacy and is open to the possibility of commitment. In other words, human, but largely sorted.\n\nBut there's a problem. What I've just described can easily be experienced not as ideal but as boring. Remove the emotional roller-coaster tendencies of anxiety, avoidance and attack, and what's left can feel all too calm. It's easy to get confused and think that because someone isn't any kind of a problem, they are no kind of a partner. I have had clients who in the same breath as describing their relationship as 'the most secure I've had', express doubts that it is 'the real thing'; clients who, while reporting contentment, worry that what they're experiencing is too effortless to be true love.\n\nIn fact, secure is good, contented is something to be glad about, and the occasional tempest is exhilarating but constant storms are exhausting. If in the past we have experienced a feeling of secure contentment with a partner but didn't choose them, that was our loss. And if in the future we experience that kind of security in a relationship, then \u2013 assuming all other boxes are ticked \u2013 we should offer up heartfelt thanks and hang on for dear life.\n\n#### 7. Being in Love\n_Anthony Carthew: 'And [you are], I suppose, in love?'_\n\n_Lady Diana Spencer: 'Of course!'_\n\n_Charles, Prince of Wales: 'Whatever \"in love\" means.'_\n\n(ITN INTERVIEW ON THE ENGAGEMENT OF CHARLES AND DIANA, 1981)\n\nI am a huge believer not only in the possibility but also the wisdom of falling in love. It's a magical, sparkly feeling. The world seems bright and shiny, the future seems glorious, everything seems possible. Yes, being in love can sometimes be hard \u2013 as the classic French ballad has it, 'the pleasure of love lasts a moment, the pain of love lasts a lifetime.' But the excitement, the arousal and the adoration are surely irresistible. Everyone should be love-struck at least once in their life.\n\nTwo examples. In Charles Dickens's novel, the eponymous David Copperfield first meets Dora Spenlow when he visits her father's house. 'All was over . . . I was gone, headlong.' There follows a delightful description of the ecstasy that comes with having 'fulfilled my destiny . . . in an abyss of love.'\n\nAnd in case we think that fiction always exaggerates reality, let us also recall footballer David Beckham's equal wonderment at first seeing Victoria on a Spice Girls video: 'I thought \"she is . . . perfection\".' Their later face-to-face meeting, at a charity football match, happily led to David's infatuation being fully returned and an almost instant relationship, engagement and marriage.\n\nFixation\n\nBut what does being 'in love' have to do with effective relationship choice? In some ways, not a lot. In evolutionary terms, this rush of wonderful emotion was originally designed not to help us choose a compatible match, but to help us stand by a partner with whom we were making babies. Lust was there to get us rolling in the hay, being 'in love' was there to make us willing to push the pram alongside the one we'd originally sneaked off to the barn with. The 'in love' flurry of the hormones known as 'monoamines' exists to focus us on partnership through those early years when offspring need us to stay close, to the exclusion of all else. So much so that research at the University of Pisa has found key similarities between the monoamine levels of new partners and those who suffer obsessive\u2013compulsive disorder. When we fall for someone we become literally fixated on them \u2013 as David Copperfield describes it, 'a captive and a slave'.\n\nThere's a less evolutionary, more psychological and \u2013 in this age of family planning \u2013 less offspring-focussed set of reasons why 'in love' is so compelling. It's that when we fall in love, we're following an emotional dream of being the centre of the world. While very small, unless our childhood was damaged, those around us did their best to keep us absolutely safe, warm, cared for, loved. We leave that behind as we grow to adulthood, but we'll always be looking for it again, always be wanting to recreate the security and the validation that was ours in the early years. 'In love' holds out the promise that our beloved will make us the centre of their world, and for ever. No wonder it's an obsessive compulsion.\n\nWe build on that compulsion. When in love, we're likely to spend huge amounts of time together \u2013 proximity, you may remember, strengthens attraction. We stay close, connecting through sex but also through matched body language, emotional revelation and deep eye contact. The effectiveness of those last two elements was fascinatingly demonstrated by psychologist Arthur Aron, who got previously unintroduced subjects falling head over heels with each other simply by having them ask each other a series of thirty-six self-disclosure questions, then gazing into one another's eyes for a mere four minutes. This approach was later used in an experiment to raise the 'take-up factor' for speed daters \u2013 and indeed those daters who asked more personal questions and gave more revealing answers got more picks from the evening.\n\nThe wrong roller coaster?\n\nThe problem is that thereafter we may get stuck. For though I hate to be the bearer of bad news, none of that wonderful falling-in-love experience is guaranteed to produce long-term compatibility. Literature is riddled with stories of how initial adoration translates badly into ordinary everyday life: Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky; Madame Bovary and Rodolphe Boulanger; even Romeo and Juliet, if we believe Shakespeare's hints that had they actually set up house together in Mantua, the result would have been something of a car crash.\n\nIt's best to choose a roller-coaster ride that brings you back down to earth both safely and without nausea.\n\nGiving more cause for concern \u2013 for literature does dramatize for the sake of a good yarn \u2013 there's little scientific research showing a link between short-term attraction and long-term compatibility; Arthur Aron himself points out that while the closeness produced in his studies is similar to romantic passion, 'it seems unlikely that the procedure produces . . . commitment.' 'In love' might turn into a loss-leader for something deeper, but there's no absolute correlation between the two.\n\nThere is, however, correlation between 'in love' and anxiety. Here's another Arthur Aron experiment, this one involving eighty-five male subjects and a wobbly footbridge. Result: the men were significantly more likely to be charmed by a female researcher if they'd previously been scared out of their wits crossing the deep canyon at Capilano, Vancouver. (In case you're suspecting gender bias here, the experiment was replicated some years later with women as subjects and male researchers; it produced the same outcome.) What both groups experienced was a dynamic that's classic in the early stages of a relationship; our whole body is in a peak state of nervous tension, not only from wanting our beloved but also as a result of not knowing whether our beloved will want us. This arousal then provides the motivation to do exactly what we are genetically programmed to do, cling on to each other. Even the most delightful bonding involves some level of anxiety, and, in turn, anxiety often leads to bonding.\n\nYou can probably see where I'm going with this. We can easily confuse the strong emotion of the 'in love' kind with the strong emotion of more unhappy kinds. We may even find ourselves likely to bond in _any_ uncertain situation, with any uncertain partner \u2013 one who is emotionally unreliable ('I'll phone you' syndrome), one who is seriously uninterested ('s\/he's just not into you' syndrome), one who is terminally unavailable ('it's complicated' syndrome). In fact, when we keep choosing unsatisfying partners, that might be not despite the fact but _because_ of the fact that they are unsatisfying. If you recognize yourself in this scenario, don't self-blame; there's a very small distinction between an emotional roller coaster that makes us squeal with delight and one that makes us shriek with horror, and most of us at some time choose the wrong ride.\n\nThe earthquake of love\n\nThere's something else we need to remember about 'in love'. It's date-stamped. That original flurry of addicted monoamines will in the end give way to a lower-key flow of the 'cuddle hormone' oxytocin, designed to give us a more secure connection and get us not just pushing the pram but setting up house and home until the kids have grown and flown. There's a natural switch from high arousal to low-key stability, from excitement to steadiness, from absolute adoration to loving respect: as Louis de Berni\u00e8res writes in his novel _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_ , 'a temporary madness . . . an earthquake . . . then it subsides.'\n\nGiven this non-correlation between 'in love' and compatibility, it's therefore wise to avoid making choices from the earthquake zone, wise to wait until the earth has stopped moving before we pitch permanent camp. As de Berni\u00e8res suggests, at that point there is a decision to be made about whether we are so compatible, so committed that even without 'in love' we want to stay together. This stage beyond 'in love' may not feel as intensely exciting, but it's what makes a relationship stay the course. 'Love itself,' says de Berni\u00e8res, 'is what is left over, when being in love has burned away.' If we want a partner for the long term, we need to discover what is 'left over'.\n\nHere's an exercise to help in the discovery. Pick three friends you've known for a while and are emotionally at ease with. Now think of what makes them your friends; think of what you get from them that has maintained your connection over time. Fix in your mind that feeling of being comfortable with them, relaxed in their company, authentically yourself, simply content. And there's your point of reference, the touchstone to use when you fall in love. If you feel with a partner that same sense of comfort, relaxation, contentment \u2013 and if you sense that feeling could endure \u2013 then you are on safe ground.\n\nGood navigation\n\nWhich unfortunately doesn't mean that the ground will stay safe for ever. Yes, we're always told that when we love we will not only live 'happily' but will do so 'ever after'. We're assured that, apart from when it's absent, denied or ended, 'love is a many-splendoured thing', 'love lifts us up where we belong', 'all you need is love'. And so we tend to set our compass for partner choice by the pole star of joy . . .\n\nOften, that's good navigation. If we choose a partner who complements us, who completes our jigsaw and adds their skills and strengths to the ones we lack, we'll live a more effective but also a more contented life. In Jane Austen's _Pride and Prejudice_ , Elizabeth Bennet, having spent most of the novel thinking that Darcy is 'the last man on earth' she would marry, realizes at last \u2013 and possibly too late \u2013 just how complementary they are and how happy their relationship could be. 'It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance.' (If you've never read the book, be reassured: they get together in the end.)\n\nSimilarly, if we choose a partner who supports us, who by their attention and responsiveness heals our emotional wounds and makes us whole, we'll live a more fulfilled but also a more joyful life. Here is another Elizabeth, this time Elizabeth Barrett, writing to fellow poet Robert Browning after he has expressed his love for her: 'To receive such a proof of attachment from you not only overpowers every present evil, but seems to me a full and abundant amends for the merely personal sufferings of my whole life. [My tears] went away in the moisture of new, happy tears. Henceforward I am yours.' (If you don't know the history, they married; he then helped her to not only bear lifelong illness and a family estrangement, but also fulfil her promise as a writer.)\n\nPeople-growing\n\nBut despite these examples, love doesn't make us happy all the time and every time. Maybe an adorable partner has a less-than-lovable phase, an easy relationship starts to feel like hard work, a future that was glorious slowly becomes ordinary or even disagreeable. In Dickens's novel, David Copperfield finds it hard to come to terms with Dora's naivety and impracticality, while David Beckham's marriage has reportedly not been without its ups and downs. Faced with dissatisfaction, it's not surprising that we start to question our judgement. Does our unhappiness mean we chose the wrong partner? And what does it mean about how we made our decision and whether we should renege?\n\nHere's the thing. A relationship is what psychologist David Schnarch, in his book _Passionate Marriage_ , calls a 'people-growing process'. It invites us to flourish by learning to overcome not just the problems of everyday life, but the specific problems that our partner and our partnership present. It invites us to step up to the challenge of becoming more tolerant, more patient, more loving than we were before, in order to cope with the one we love. (If this seems unfair, be reassured. It cuts both ways; a partner has to step up in order to cope with us.)\n\nThis challenge of people-growing is never going to be a constantly happy one. It can't be. Poet David Whyte, in his work _The Three Marriages_ , offers the metaphor of buying two houses in order to join them together \u2013 but instead of being able to simply knock down the walls, we have to demolish both houses completely so we can rebuild, and 'from the razed foundations of our former individual [selves] make a new home'. Schnarch picks up on this metaphor but with an extra emotional challenge: that in order to do this we must become more loving not only to our partner, but to ourselves as well. We must be strong, self-contained, 'secure', comfortable in our own skin \u2013 for we need to feel 'at home' in ourselves in order to have 'a good place to invite a spouse to visit'.\n\nStanding in love\n\nBoth Whyte and Schnarch say the same \u2013 that this process is universal, that it is a good thing, that we need to welcome it as a way of maturing and developing, that long-term it will lead to happiness because it will help us thrive. Similarly, Erich Fromm, whom we met earlier in this book, says that falling in love is inevitably followed by a period of needing to 'stand' in love, if our relationship is to survive. Happiness will not necessarily be what marks progress; sometimes there will be pain.\n\nA common response to all this is to swallow hard as one tries to come to terms with the shock revelation that even the most successful 'love, sweet love' doesn't always feel so sweet. But there often follows a sigh of relief that relationship problems don't imply that the partners are wrong for each other or that they necessarily need to separate. For even if we make the most perfect partner-pick in the world, we will at some point meet challenges. We will always be required to master the essential human balancing act of trying to answer our own needs while meeting those of our beloved, of loving ourselves while loving another, and of growing through that process.\n\nSo the key aim in finding the right partner should not be to try to avoid that balancing act \u2013 it's inevitable \u2013 but to find someone for whose sake we'll attempt the act because we love them so much, someone who loves us so much that they'll make the attempt for our sake. The question for both sides becomes how to choose a partner who is so compelling that we're willing to demolish our own house in order to rebuild a more beautiful mutual home.\n\nDiamond-polishing\n\nThe good news is that we likely know how to choose correctly even when we're not doing so deliberately. For humans are drawn towards those who help them grow; the message from Whyte, Schnarch and Fromm is that partner choice is the way we actively, though often unconsciously, choose to mature. Schnarch even likens it to the meeting of two flawless but rough diamonds that rub away every part of themselves that doesn't fit in order to stay joined together. The end result is not only a loving relationship, but two sparkling jewels.\n\nSo, for example, we may be drawn to someone who needs something from us that we find it hugely difficult to deliver: attention even when they are angry, energy even when we are drained, emotional control in the face of difficult circumstances. Over time, because we care, we learn to step up and meet these challenges \u2013 and in this way develop a part of ourselves we would otherwise never have developed.\n\nOr, we may pair with someone who \u2013 once the rose-coloured glasses are off \u2013 manifests some vulnerability or fault that we dislike, or even deny, in ourselves. Because love means we are motivated to understand and accept that partner, we learn to accept and understand our own vulnerabilities \u2013 and so we thrive.\n\nMore unexpectedly, perhaps \u2013 for more explanation of this, reread Chapter 3 \u2013 we may find someone whose personality reflects that of someone from our early past with whom we've had a complicated relationship. That reflection may make our current relationship complicated \u2013 but given that we are now older and more mature, we may learn to relate to our partner in a way we never could to the original. We may grow up sufficiently to create a happy ending this time round.\n\nTake some time to think back to past relationships with partners (or friends, or family) where things were challenging but left you changed for the better, even in small ways. You've almost certainly, in those relationships, chosen to be with people who helped you with the diamond-polishing. So what did those relationships give you? What benefits have you gained? And what can you learn that will help you begin \u2013 and maintain \u2013 your future partnership?\n\nThe right order\n\nHow can we tell whether a partner will help us mature in these ways and whether we can help them in return? There's no formula, no guaranteed way of discovering if someone constitutes our growth opportunity \u2013 and as with attachment tendencies, real evidence may only be possible when the relationship's well beyond the point of first choosing.\n\nBut in the earlier going, certain signs are encouraging: feeling ourselves becoming more emotionally truthful, and seeing our partner becoming equally more authentic; feeling encouraged by them to reach our potential, and being able to encourage them to do the same; finding ourselves both learning and teaching, like Elizabeth Bennet; or finding ourselves emotionally healing and professionally achieving, like Elizabeth Barrett. In her novel _Beloved_ , the author Toni Morrison describes this kind of personal development as if the person in question were a jumble of jigsaw pieces, taken up by a partner, rearranged and returned 'in all the right order'. If we have chosen well, both partners may find their 'pieces' falling into place.\n\nThe sparkle\n\nThe lesson of this chapter is not that we should choose a partner with whom things are tough from the very beginning \u2013 if that's what's going on, it's not the right relationship. The lesson is that the best love is a three-part process, with the initial delights driving us on to ride out the medium-term challenges for the sake of long-term rewards. To complete the stories with which we began this chapter, David and Victoria Beckham are near to celebrating two decades together, while David Copperfield learned to accept his wife's failings and so allowed his marriage to gain stability, even if it was cut short by Dora's death.\n\nEnough, then, of any alarm bells. My original statement of belief in love still stands, and more. Because, firstly, whether or not a relationship lasts, being love-struck may be worth it just for the experience. And, secondly, if the relationship does last, love-struck is a wonderful place to start. The very fact we are so drawn to someone else \u2013 the lure of the obsession \u2013 is a huge motivator to stay loyal if things become challenging. The fact that we want so much from a partner means we're driven to deliver in return. The fact that 'falling in love' means we bond, connect, open up, reveal and respond to each other emotionally creates the foundation for 'standing in love' further down the line. If what's left after the earthquake subsides is a solid core of commitment, then we have the best of both worlds.\n\nSo let's embrace the romance, let's enjoy the passion. In short, bring on the sparkle.\n\n#### 8. Knowing\n_Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others._\n\n(JANE AUSTEN, _S ENSE AND SENSIBILITY_)\n\nThe question we're most likely to ask ourselves when we begin to date is 'How will I know?' What this really implies is two questions, 'how' and 'when': 'How and when will I know enough to choose this person, or to not choose them, or to decide that the moment of choice is past?' Let me say from the start that there's no answer here, nor are there guarantees that one ever will know. All we can do is explore the possibilities.\n\nInstant reaction\n\nPossibility number one is that the answer to 'how will I know?' is 'sheer gut reaction' and the answer to 'when will I know?' is 'instantly'. Eyes meet across a crowded room and the deal is sealed; as examples, see two separate if very different American presidents. In his memoirs, Bill Clinton reports that when his wife Hillary first spoke to him, he was so overwhelmed that he forgot his own name. Lyndon B. Johnson apparently asked 'Lady Bird', as his wife was known, for a date within minutes of meeting, and proposed at the end of that first date; they were still happily wed when he died almost forty years later.\n\nOf course, an instant and instinctive decision about partner suitability is often a vote against \u2013 the elimination principle at work. Which is why, if all other boxes are ticked, it's often wise to follow up even the most disastrous first meeting with a replay. That allows us to gather more, and more accurate, evidence \u2013 as well as reducing self-consciousness on both sides, allowing prospective partners to shine. This advice was passed on to me by a colleague who judged her blind date to be socially incompetent but gave him the benefit of a second hearing. She soon discovered he was simply overawed by her, a trait which soon transformed itself into socially competent adoration on both sides.\n\nThen there's the opposite danger. Over-speedy decisions can lead to being totally swept off one's feet by beauty and charm, only to realize that one's given house-room to a monster. That said, as I've confessed, I'm no enemy of a little carefully managed infatuation. And the danger's often resolved by the inevitable removal of rose-coloured glasses \u2013 inevitable because such instant passion is likely to implode at the first sniff of a problem; as Shakespeare put it, 'These violent delights have violent ends \/ . . . like fire and powder \/ Which as they kiss, consume.' But if instant enchantment makes us want to instantly commit in some comparatively irreversible way (mortgage, marriage, motherhood) then it's best to apply the necessary brakes.\n\nTaking time\n\nBill Clinton may have been so overwhelmed by Hillary that his brain stopped working, but the 'how' of knowing is normally more thoughtful. And it's usual to take longer than Lyndon Johnson's few minutes to decide that we have found our life partner; radioactivity pioneer Marie Curie, for instance, turned down husband Pierre's proposals a full seven times before she was convinced. Taking at least some time, space and consideration typically works best because it helps us to discover more about a partner, allows them to discover more about us. Where possible, dig deeper, search wider, allow both logic and emotion, head and heart to synchronize. As the Russian proverb runs, 'Trust, but verify'.\n\nWhich is why communities have traditionally built in delay: long engagements, no sex before marriage, betrothal for a year and a day before the wedding proper, all so we can verify the information and draw a considered conclusion. Our contemporary speedy courtship rituals \u2013 sleeping together without vows, moving in together without documentation \u2013 are only acceptable because we're now not bound together for life if love turns to hate. Ironically, the most modern method, online dating, has reintroduced some of that traditional delay, with users going through a sometimes lengthy and in-depth process of 'getting to know you' while they continue to 'get to know' several others online until they commit.\n\nBut it's also best not to be too slow and too considered, for there are dangers in hesitation; we may lose not only momentum but also faith. Especially in the key transition stages \u2013 having sex, becoming monogamous, moving in \u2013 if the moment passes, so too may the belief that it was a good idea. If you're worried about a timetable be reassured that, as the Jane Austen quotation at the beginning of this chapter shows, there is no ideal. That said, as very rough guidelines, two months of regular dating is long enough to know whether both sides want to declare themselves partners, two years long enough to know whether lifetime commitment is possible. Pass those breakpoints and it's justifiable to question the length of the journey.\n\nHow do you know?\n\nSo take stock. What is your journey to knowing? Do you rush into connection, physical or emotional, with spontaneous eagerness, enthusiasm and a marked inability either to doubt or to tolerate delayed gratification? Or do you progress so slowly and serenely in affairs of the heart that onlookers \u2013 or even the objects of your affection themselves \u2013 believe you're ambivalent? In other words, do you typically push for commitment because you're so quickly convinced that you've found perfection, or delay it because you're waiting for perfection to prove itself?\n\nThere is an argument here for acting against usual tendencies. Previous speedy commitment may have led to some lack of judgement, previous tardy commitment may have meant losing love. And, as the old saying goes, 'If you always do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.' So if we normally rush in, then, without playing 'treat 'em mean and keep 'em keen', we could maybe try holding back on that first kiss, that first sexual encounter, that first meeting with parents, until we know precisely what we're dealing with. Conversely, if we typically tend to hesitate, then, without playing 'wear your heart on your sleeve', we could maybe 'lean in' to suggesting that date, supplying that extra front-door key, declaring those intentions \u2013 even before it feels completely comfortable. Altering approach is, as always, a challenge. But perhaps if you do what you've never done, you might get what you've never before got.\n\nOne of the nicest, as well as one of the most effective, ways to make a partnership decision \u2013 which involves taking time to explore but doesn't drag things out \u2013 was suggested by my colleague Dr Charley Ferrer. Its approach is based not so much on information-gathering or timing as on attitude. For ninety days, Dr Ferrer advises, we should commit completely. We shouldn't hold back for fear of being taken for granted, shouldn't cling on for fear of being rejected. Instead, for a full three months, we should offer full engagement in giving and taking, full emotional responsiveness, full trust that the partnership will continue. In other words, we should behave as if we already 'know' and have already chosen. If after that time we have no hesitations, then we know enough to say a completely wholehearted 'yes'. If at the end of the ninety days we are still hesitating, we have gained more than enough knowledge to justify a 'no'.\n\nSaying no\n\nIn some cases that 'no' is obvious. Deceit. Infidelity. Drug dependency. Abuse. Violence. All these bad behaviours are perfectly good reasons to flee, even after making an initial choice.\n\nThere can also be good reason to flee when there's no bad behaviour at all. There are numerous partner combinations that don't augur well: deal-breakers in our preferences; differing values, goals, personalities; questions about one's enjoyment of a partner's company; a not-quite-good-enough sex life; an annoying level of conflict (even if it is generally bearable). As Ross from the TV comedy _Friends_ commented when asked why he and lesbian Carol weren't together: 'This is not a mix-and-match situation', and we shouldn't attempt to make round holes accommodate square pegs. (We equally, of course, shouldn't simply walk away in an attempt to force the pegs into the holes; break-up rarely works as a way to compel commitment in ourselves or others, and even if we reconcile, such abandonment will always strain the partnership, sometimes irreversibly.)\n\nSometimes too, the answer is neither to go nor to stay but to try the third alternative. Change. If the benefits of partnership are obvious, we could \u2013 kindly, supportively, specifically \u2013 ask for the adjustments we want. Our partner might then answer \u2013 willingly, readily, enthusiastically \u2013 that they're happy to oblige. Or vice versa. If that's the conversation, there's good reason to stay.\n\nThe bad news is that, without that conversation, there's every reason to go. Professor Ted Huston's fourteen-year couple study, mentioned earlier in this book, found that when women in the courting phase of a relationship predict future problems, their predictions usually come true. So if we decide to stay with someone in the hope they'll improve in time, we're not really committing to the person they are now but to a future ideal that's highly improbable. As Albert Einstein \u2013 who was something of a philosopher as well as a theoretical physicist \u2013 famously commented, 'Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.'\n\nIf having done due diligence we still feel a quiver of doubt, we could stay one more day to make absolutely sure. But if what we feel at the thought of staying is a flinch, a nausea, an exhaustion, that's our unconscious screaming 'go'. In which case, let me offer you an absolving 'get out of jail free' card. It is fine to turn someone down. In fact, it's actually best to turn them down if you have come to the conclusion that they aren't for you. Because by walking away you're not just freeing yourself to find someone you can love. You are also freeing your no-longer-potential partner to find someone who can love them. Don't feel guilty. If we know our heart is not in a relationship we do right by everyone if we leave.\n\nNot being chosen\n\nSometimes, though, the situation's more complex. Our heart is in, fully in. But our feelings aren't returned \u2013 or perhaps worse, not returned right now but with a hint that they might be at some future time. Then things become hugely more difficult \u2013 though this is also a timeless theme in our history and culture. The poet Dante's love for Beatrice. The Hunchback of Notre Dame's longing for Esmerelda. Mark in _Love Actually_ standing before his ideal (but already happily married) partner with a poster reading 'my wasted heart will always love you'. These tales touch us \u2013 and not only because we prefer a good ending to our love stories but also because they trigger a human terror that began when we were born: that we will not get everything we want in life.\n\n_Dante and Beatrice._ Sometimes, there's nothing more comfortable than focussing our choice on a prospect who, because we will never have them, will never disappoint us or be disappointed by us.\n\nHowever unfulfilled a relationship \u2013 Dante loved Beatrice for life, but only met her twice \u2013 not being chosen is a blow. If, or when, it happens to us, we shouldn't underestimate the impact; studies have equated this loss to an actual physical attack, a trauma, a bereavement. Then we need to cling to the fact that \u2013 given some weeping and wailing, but also given time, human support and a sense of perspective \u2013 we will likely move through the suffering.\n\nBut if we don't move through rejection, we can land in deep trouble. For sometimes the label 'non-available' spurs us to even more commitment; surely if we can be different, woo more successfully, offer more resources, deliver more favours or simply try harder, we will get what we want.\n\nHere the cautionary tale from literature is the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's millionaire hero who invests everything he has in trying to rekindle the love of Daisy Buchanan's 'beautiful little fool'. He takes a luxurious mansion directly across the bay from her marital home, spends endless nights staring over at the green light at the end of her dock, throws hugely extravagant parties to tempt her to come to him.\n\nIt's clear from the start that there will be no happy ending here; Daisy's self-absorption makes it almost inevitable that, while she does restart her affair with Gatsby, she will in the end abandon him. But Gatsby himself creates his own tragedy by sacrificing all to win the love of someone who cannot truly love him, squandering his fortune in relentless decadence, abandoning his values and in the end losing his life to protect Daisy. The whole story is shot through with the pointlessness of clinging on in hope.\n\nIf our love story ever approaches that of Gatsby, the answer is not to twist our hearts and our souls out of shape as he did, but conversely to be even more authentic than usual. If after a while we are still not loved, then however much we mourn, it's been a lucky escape. In the same way as it's best to free up a partner we don't want, it is also best to be freed from a partner who doesn't want us. We deserve more than that.\n\nBeing chosen\n\nWhat if, instead, we are adored without adoring in return? If our immediate reaction to being picked is obvious repulsion, that's fairly straightforward; there likely follows a few embarrassing conversations, a little self-reproach and the occasional need to repel the boarder in question.\n\nMore difficult is when our reaction is not repulsion but temptation. For being the object of desire can be highly seductive. If we suffer the normal human tendency to self-negation, it may feel very good indeed when someone else puts us at the centre of their universe, giving us a control over them that's even more seductive because we aren't in any danger of ceding any control to them. (Plus, if we are feeling pessimistic because previous partner choices have misfired, such a person may be even more attractive because we believe they are our only remaining option.)\n\nGiven all this, being pursued can make us blind to danger signals. We may ignore huge signs of incompatibility, consign huge doubts to the file marked 'ignore'. And, particularly if our would-be partner stays the course, we may stay with them despite misgivings; there is something deeply romantic about Being Won Despite All Challenges. 'She wanted me even though she was married. . .'; 'I wasn't interested but he was so keen. . .'; 'I was convinced by her conviction that I was the one for her . . .' It was Wallis Simpson who \u2013 feeling bound to marry the abdicated Edward VIII long after she had tired of him \u2013 commented: 'You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.'\n\nBalance, imbalance\n\nAgain, pause and take stock. Do you recognize in yourself a habit of staying in a relationship well beyond the point you should be leaving? Of leaving when you should be giving it another chance? Are you consistently drawn to those who don't pick you? To those who are married \u2013 whether to spouse or to job? To those who care, but only at certain times, only in certain situations and only when you offer attention, support or no-strings sex?\n\nOr do you find yourself in relationships with partners who do choose you but who you know, heart of hearts, will make you deeply unhappy? Do you find yourself persuaded by intensity (or by flattery, or by genuine if one-sided love), to the point of ignoring your own doubts and ending in uneasy partnership? In all these situations, it may be time to change.\n\nAll that said, don't panic if there's some imbalance in a relationship, particularly at the start. Every relationship suffers disequilibrium. Even for just a few moments, one person wonders while the other is certain; one person doubts while the other has faith. So long as the dynamic eventually settles into an equal match, that's fine. More, if what we experience at the start of a promising relationship is a certain deliberation on either side, this may well be good news. The resulting choice, if it comes, is likely to be more considered \u2013 and therefore more dependable.\n\nChoosing\n\nThe first chapter of this book painted partner choice as a journey \u2013 and the promise that description offers is that there is a conclusion to the trip. It's a promise that will almost certainly come true. We may have encountered detours or cul-de-sacs along the way, but the vast majority of us will reach our destination. We will let go of alternative possibilities and begin to focus more and more surely on one. We will come to a point where we believe that we can love, and that we can be loved in return.\n\nAnd there we are, decision made. We echo the moving words of poet Edwin Muir: 'yours, my love, is the right human face'. We know. We have committed. We are set for the happiest of endings.\n\nExcept, except . . . of course this isn't the end. Commitment is only the beginning, the first choice. There will be other decisions to come and it's wise to remember they are out there waiting for us.\n\nMoving in together. Getting engaged. Marrying. Having children. Raising those children and then staying together to the end of life. The thing about these later transitions is that by the time we make them, we're in a different place from before. As Somerset Maugham pointed out, we are not the same as we were even a year ago, and 'nor are those we love'.\n\nThrough the course of our relationship, we will likely several times come slap up against what can only be described as the Wall of Life \u2013 trials of illness, accident, job change, ageing, bereavement. Through these, and with the passing of time, we will learn more about our partner and they will learn more about us. And this may shift the goalposts. Soberingly, the second half of the Somerset Maugham quotation reminds us that it is only good fortune if 'we, changing, continue to love a changed person'.\n\nWhether or not we have such good fortune, much of what this book suggests is always relevant. In the context not of a hoped-for or recent connection but an existing and lengthy commitment, it is still useful to specify what we want from our partnership; to reassess the fit with our partner's values, goals and personality; to face fully whether we can still emotionally respond to each other. And sometimes that raises questions. If our partner promised us a rose garden but over the years has delivered only armfuls of brutally stinging nettles, it's understandable if we dump the greenery in the waste bin and head for the door.\n\nNettles aside, the most important factor in making future partnership decisions \u2013 just as for the initial choice to partner with that person \u2013 is not whether we are currently ecstatic but whether we are currently growing, whether we trust that we will grow in the future, and whether we believe our partner is growing too. If we are in a relationship that pushes us to mature, we may not be 100 per cent joyful, 24\/7 \u2013 ask any caterpillar in the process of becoming a butterfly. Yet if we are still evolving, that will make it worthwhile to keep loyal.\n\nLet me end with a tribute to continuing loyalty. In his novel _Love in the Time of Cholera_ , Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez describes the experience of the multitude of ordinary couples who stay the course even though it proves hard. He pays tribute to the immense courage and willingness of those who have chosen again, beyond the first romantic decision, who have overcome the challenges of 'daily incomprehension', 'instantaneous hatred' and 'reciprocal nastiness' that characterize most relationships, and he celebrates that it is fully possible to come through and to triumph, to reach the point where partners 'love each other best'.\n\nThat's the hope. That if both of us keep evolving, keep learning, keep growing, then at some point in the future, we will be able to create a wonderful partnership, to relate to each other as never before, to love each other 'best'. And then we will know for absolute certain that we have made the right choice.\n\n#### Bibliography\n\n_Books_\n\nLouisa May Alcott, _Little Women_ , Vintage Children's Classics, 2012 edn\n\nJane Austen, _Pride and Prejudice_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1992 edn\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Sense and Sensibility_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1992 edn\n\nLouis de Berni\u00e8res, _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_ , Vintage, 1998\n\nEmily Bront\u00eb, _Wuthering Heights_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1992 edn\n\nBren\u00e9 Brown, _Daring Greatly_ , Avery Publishing Group, 2015\n\nGary Chapman, _The Five Love Languages_ , Moody Press, 2015\n\nStephanie Coontz, _Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage_ , Penguin USA, 2006\n\nHelen Fielding, _Bridget Jones's Diary_ , Picador, 2001\n\nF. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Great Gatsby_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1992 edn\n\nGustave Flaubert, _Madame Bovary_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1993 edn\n\nErich Fromm, _The Art of Loving_ , Thorsons, 2010\n\nElizabeth Gilbert, _Eat, Pray, Love_ , Bloomsbury, 2007\n\nDr Sue Johnson, _Hold Me Tight_ , Piatkus, 2011\n\n\u2014\u2014, _Love Sense_ , Little, Brown, 2013\n\nDaniel Kahneman, _Thinking Fast and Slow_ , Penguin, 2012\n\nClaire Langhamer, _The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution_ , OUP, 2013\n\nGabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, _Love in the Time of Cholera_ , Vintage, 2007\n\nSimon May, _Love: A History_ , Yale University Press, 2012\n\nChris McKinlay, _Optimal Cupid: Mastering the Hidden Logic of OkCupid_ , CreateSpace, 2014\n\nToni Morrison, _Beloved_ , Vintage Classics, 2007 edn\n\nDavid Schnarch, _Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships_ , W. W. Norton, 2009\n\nWilliam Shakespeare, _Romeo and Juliet_ , Wordsworth Classics, 2000 edn\n\nLeo Tolstoy, _Anna Karenina_ , Wordsworth Classics, 1995 edn\n\nAmy Webb, _Data, a Love Story_ , Plume, 2014\n\nDavid Whyte, _The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship_ , Riverhead Books, 2010\n\nJeanette Winterson, _Written on the Body_ , Vintage, 1993\n\n_Websites and other resources_\n\nwww.notimeforlove.com\n\nEli J. Finkel et al., 'Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science', available at www.psychologicalscience.org\n\nwww.quantifiedbreakup.tumblr.com\n\nThe School of Life, 100 Questions: Love Edition (100 question cards with box \u2013 a toolkit for relationships)\n\nThe School of Life offers coaching and therapy for relationship enhancement: www.theschooloflife.com\/london\/shop\/therapy\/life-coaching\n\nIn Britain you can also find counsellors through the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists: www.cosrt.org.uk, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy: www.itsgoodtotalk.org.uk and Relate: www.relate.org.uk.\n\n#### Acknowledgements\n\nMy thanks go to everyone who has made this book possible, especially my agent Barbara Levy and all the staff at the School of Life and at Pan Macmillan, especially Morgwn Rimel, Cindy Chan, Robin Harvie, Zennor Compton, Laura Carr, Marcia Mihotich and Jonathan Baker, all of whom have been endlessly helpful. Above all, my thanks go to Caroline Brimmer, who originally invited me to help her develop the 'How to Choose a Partner' course at the School of Life, and whose talent, insight and support have been an inspiration; without Caroline, this book would not have happened.\n\n#### Picture Acknowledgements\n\nThe author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the images used in this book:\n\npagelink _The Arnolfini Portrait \u00a9_ Thaliastock \/ Mary Evans\n\npagelink _Sir Galahad \u2013 the Quest of the Holy Grail_ , 1870 (oil on canvas), Hughes, Arthur (1832\u20131915) \u00a9 Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool \/ Bridgeman Images\n\npagelink Traffic Sign With Heart Shape \u00a9 Richard Newstead \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink Human Heart Map \u00a9 Kate Hiscock \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink Come Through \u00a9 Everett Collection \/ REX Shutterstock\n\npagelink Watching the Roulette Wheel, Hollywood, California, 1930 (b\/w photo) \u00a9Underwood Archives \/ UIG \/ Bridgeman Images\n\npagelink Scene at Reelfoot Lake \u00a9 Andreas Feininger \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink Jam and Marmalade aisle, Woolworths store, 1956 (b\/w photo), English Photographer, (20th century) \u00a9 Private Collection \/ Bridgeman Images\n\npagelink _West Side Story_ Photo \u00a9 Michael Ochs Archive \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink A Man Hiking \u00a9 Lambert \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink Kissing Couple 1968 \u00a9Mary Evans Picture Library \/ Shirley Baker\n\npagelink _The Creation of Adam \u00a9_ Massimo Pizzotti \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink Corkscrew \u00a9 Keystone France \/ Getty Images\n\npagelink _Dante and Beatrice_ , 1883 (oil on canvas), Holiday, Henry (1839\u20131927) \u00a9 Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool \/ Bridgeman Images\n\n#### **TOOLS FOR THINKING**\n\nA RANGE OF THOUGHTFUL STATIONERY, GAMES & GIFTS FROM THE SCHOOL OF LIFE\n\nGood thinking requires good tools. To complement our classes, books and therapies, THE SCHOOL OF LIFE now offers a range of stationery, games and gifts that are both highly useful and stimulating for the eye and mind.\n\nTHESCHOOLOFLIFE.COM\n\nIf you enjoyed this book, we'd encourage you to check out other titles in the series:\n\nHOW TO MAKE A HOME | EDWARD HOLLIS\n\n---|---\n\nHOW TO LIVE IN THE CITY | HUGO MACDONALD\n\nHOW TO CHOOSE A PARTNER | SUSAN QUILLIAM\n\nHOW TO THINK LIKE AN ENTREPRENEUR | PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON\n\nHOW TO BE A LEADER | MARTIN BJERGEGAARD & COSMINA POPA\n\nHOW TO BE BORED | EVA HOFFMAN\n\nAlso Available:\n\nHOW TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY | CHRISTOPHER HAMILTON\n\n---|---\n\nHOW TO AGE | ANNE KARPF\n\nHOW TO DEVELOP EMOTIONAL HEALTH | OLIVER JAMES\n\nHOW TO CONNECT WITH NATURE | TRISTAN GOOLEY\n\nHOW TO THINK ABOUT EXERCISE | DAMON YOUNG\n\nHOW TO BE ALONE | SARA MAITLAND\n\nHOW TO FIND FULFILLING WORK | ROMAN KRZNARIC\n\nHOW TO STAY SANE | PHILIPPA PERRY\n\nHOW TO WORRY LESS ABOUT MONEY | JOHN ARMSTRONG\n\nHOW TO THINK MORE ABOUT SEX | ALAIN DE BOTTON\n\nHOW TO THRIVE IN THE DIGITAL AGE | TOM CHATFIELD\n\nHOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD | JOHN-PAUL FLINTOFF\n\nIf you'd like to explore more good ideas from everyday life, THE SCHOOL OF LIFE runs a regular programme of classes, workshops, and special events in London and other cities around the world.\n\nTHESCHOOLOFLIFE.COM\nSUSAN QUILLIAM is a relationship psychologist, coach, advice columnist and Faculty member of the School of Life. She is the author of twenty-two books published in thirty-three countries and twenty-four languages. She is a regular media expert on the subject of sex and relationships.\n\nTHE SCHOOL OF LIFE is dedicated to exploring life's big questions: _How do we find fulfilling work? Can we ever understand our past? Why are relationships so hard to master? If we could change the world, should we?_ Based in London, with campuses around the globe, The School of Life offers classes, therapies, books and other tools to help you create a more satisfying life. We don't have all the answers but we will direct you towards a variety of ideas from the humanities \u2013 from philosophy to literature, psychology to the visual arts \u2013 guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console.\n\nwww.theschooloflife.com\n_By the same author:_\n\nThe New Joy of Sex (co-written with Dr Alex Comfort)\n\nStop Arguing, Start Talking\n\nThe Relate Guide to Staying Together\n\nFirst published 2016 by Macmillan\n\nThis electronic edition published 2016 by Macmillan  \nan imprint of Pan Macmillan  \n20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR  \nAssociated companies throughout the world  \nwww.panmacmillan.com\n\nISBN 978-1-4472-9330-9\n\nCopyright \u00a9 The School of Life 2016\n\nThe right of Susan Quilliam to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.\n\nThe picture acknowledgements here constitute an extension of this copyright page.\n\nPan Macmillan does not have any control over, or any responsibility for, any author or third party websites referred to in or on this book.\n\nYou may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. 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+{"text":"QUESTION***\n\n\nE-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team\n(http:\/\/www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by\nInternet Archive\/Canadian Libraries\n(http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/toronto)\n\n\n\nNote: Images of the original pages are available through\n      Internet Archive\/Canadian Libraries. See\n      http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/shelleyandthema00todhuoft\n\n\n\n\n\nSHELLEY AND MARRIAGE.\n\nOf this Book Twenty-Five Copies only have been printed.\n\n\nSHELLEY AND THE MARRIAGE QUESTION.\n\nby\n\nJOHN TODHUNTER, M.D.,\n\nAuthor of _Notes on \"The Triumph of Life,\" A Study of Shelley, etc._\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLondon:\nPrinted for Private Circulation Only.\n1889.\n\n\n\n\nSHELLEY AND THE MARRIAGE QUESTION.\n\n\nNow that marriage, like most other time-honoured institutions, has come\nto stand, a thing accused, at the bar of public opinion, it may be\ninteresting to see what Shelley has to say about it. The marriage\nproblem is a complex one, involving many questions not very easy to\nanswer offhand or even after much consideration. What is marriage? Of\ndivine or human institution? For what ends was it instituted? How far\ndoes it attain these ends? And a dozen others involved in these.\n\nThe very idea of marriage implies some kind of bond imposed by society\nupon the sexual relations of its members, male and female; some kind of\nrestriction upon the absolute promiscuity and absolute instability of\nthese relations--such restriction taking the form of a contract between\nindividuals, endorsed by society, and enforced with more or less\nstringency by public opinion. Its object at first was probably simply to\nensure to each male member of the tribe the quiet enjoyment of his wife\nor wives, and the free exploitation of the children she or they\nproduced. The patriarchal tyranny was established, and through the\nsanction of primitive religion and law became a divine institution.\nThen, as civilization progressed, the wife and children became less and\nless the mere slaves, more and more the respected subjects, of the\npatriarch. The paternal instinct (like the maternal) became developed,\nand family affection came into existence. At present the whirligig of\ntime is bringing its revenges. The patriarchal tyranny begins to\ntotter; parents are often more the slaves than the masters of their\nchildren. And even wives begin to rebel against wifedom, and threaten to\nrevolutionize marriage in their own interest. Woman, like everybody\nelse, is beginning to strike for higher wages. There are more than the\nfirst mutterings of that revolution in the Golden City of Divine\ninstitutions prophesied of by Shelley in _Laon and Cythna_. There are a\ngood many Cythnas ready to rush about on their black Tartarian hobbies,\nof whom Mrs. Mona Caird is the one who has recently made most noise.\n\nThere is a little design of Blake's in _The Gates of Paradise_, which\nrepresents a man standing on the earth who leans a ladder against the\nmoon and prepares to mount; the motto underneath being: \"I want! I\nwant!\" This is a type of our own age. Never was such an age of\ndiscontent, never such a Babel of voices crying: \"I want! I want!\" We\nhave become very conscious of our pain, and are not ashamed to cry out\nand proclaim it on the house-tops in these hysterical times--simply\nbecause the ancient sanctions and anodynes have lost their sanctity and\ncomfort for us. The very \"priests in black gowns\" who used to \"walk\ntheir rounds and bind with briers our joys and desires,\" have been\nthemselves corrupted with a longing for a little present happiness, and\nthat Old Woman in the shoe, Mrs. Grundy herself, instead of whipping us\nall round and putting us to bed in the old summary fashion, when we\nventure to complain that the shoe pinches here and there, has herself\nbecome lachrymose. We cry out because, having neither the old\nrepressions nor the old opiates to restrain us, there is no valid reason\nwhy we should hold our tongues. By crying loud enough and long enough we\nmay get some help. We may even find some good-natured person to stop\ncrying himself and help us; and then for very shame we may go and do\nlikewise. In this lies the age's hope. It is really in its best aspect\nan unselfish age, an age in which sympathy and justice are vital forces,\nin which the miseries of others are felt as our own. There are thousands\nnow who feel themselves \"as nerves o'er which do creep the else unfelt\noppressions of the earth.\" We are not wise enough yet to conceive and\norganize those vital adjustments between conflicting wants, interests,\nand principles, which shall be of deeper efficiency than mere\nsuperficial compromises; but this wisdom will come in due time, if we do\nnot rush into anarchy through that licentious impatience which is the\ncurse of revolutionary periods.\n\nNow, of all the bitter cries ringing in the air at the present time,\nabout the bitterest and most persistent is that not merely of women, but\nof woman with a capital W. It is the most appalling note of change that\ncan pierce the ear of self-satisfied Conservatism. The patient Griselda\nhas begun to protest against the tyranny of her lord and master. Love's\nmartyr has at last begun to think that her martyrdom must have its\nlimits. It is as if the Lamb, whose function we thought was to be dumb\nbefore its shearers and even sacrificers, had found a voice of\nprotestation. It is a portent. And even men are constrained to listen to\nthe cry; for it sounds like the birth-cry of regenerated Love. Not now\n\"Love self-slain in some sweet shameful way,\" but Love the winged angel\nwho shall finally cast out Lust, the adversary. But many things must\ncome to pass before this triumph of love can be brought about; and in\nmany respects the horoscope looks unpropitious enough. The first effect\nof the birth, or coming to the surface of a higher ideal, gradually\nevolved by the progress of society, is apparently to make confusion\nworse confounded. Not peace but a sword is the first gift of the Prince\nof Peace. Liberty comes masked like Tyranny, and cries \"Fraternity or\ndeath!\" Love goes wantonly about with the Maenads of licentiousness at\nhis heels. But the divine Logos, incarnate as the Son of man, always\ncomes not to destroy but to fulfil.\n\nJust now that highly moral being, Man in the masculine gender, is much\nshocked at the strangely immoral conduct of his feminine counterpart. In\nthe first place, she has dared to look at the realities of things with\nher own eyes, not through the rose-coloured spectacles with which he has\nbeen at pains to provide her; and not only that, but to peep behind the\nsacred veil which man has modestly cast over many ugly things. Secondly,\nshe has begun to talk openly about these ugly things, and to call them\nby non-euphemistic, ugly names, in a manner quite unprecedented.\nThirdly, she has dared to attempt her own solution of things insoluble,\nher own achievement of things impossible. And fourthly, she has dared to\nformulate a demand for liberty, equality, fraternity on her own\naccount--a demand which every day comes more and more within the sphere\nof practical politics. Here are pure women making common cause with\nprostitutes, married women crying out against the holy institution of\nmatrimony, mothers rebelling against the tyranny of the beatific\nbaby--nay, absolutely on strike against child-bearing, or at least\ndemanding limited liability as regards that important function. Finally,\nhere is Woman, whether as virgin, wife, or widow, demanding independence\nas to property and a fair share of the world's goods in return for a\nfair share of the general work of the world outside of her special\nwomanly functions. \"D----n it, sir, I say that women are unsexing\nthemselves--unsexing themselves, by Jove!\" as Major Pendennis might\nexclaim. And the worst of it is that there are so many men, traitors to\ntheir sex, who are casting in their lot with women in this terrible\nWomen's Rights movement--\"unsexing themselves,\" too, no doubt--so that\nwe shall all soon become either a-sexual or hermaphrodite beings! And\nhere let us leave for a moment the more or less limited and prosaic\nCythnas of the day, the terrible women who ride about upon Tartarian\nhobby-horses in novels and magazine articles, who spout on platforms and\npractise medicine and other dreadful trades--the scientific Mrs.\nSomervilles, and medical Mrs. Garrett Andersons, and pious Mrs.\nJosephine Butlers, and impious Mrs. Mona Cairds, and get back to Shelley\nhimself, the poet of this shocking social aberration.\n\nShelley, as Mr. Cordy Jeafferson has taken great pains to demonstrate,\nwas an exceedingly immoral young man. He outraged the conventional\nmorality of his day by his actions as well as in his writings in the\nmost shameless manner; but this shamelessness was due to his intense\nconviction that he thus outraged _conventional_ in the interests of\n_ideal_ morality. His life and writings are so full of the paradoxical\ncharacter which I have ascribed to the social agitation of the present\nday, and some of his utterances are so prophetic of it, that we may\nfairly regard him as its precursor.\n\nShelley, as we know, started rather as an anarchist than as a mere\nreformer. His ideas were cataclysmal rather than evolutional. But he was\nan optimistic not a pessimistic anarchist, and he endeavoured to destroy\nin order to rebuild with all possible expedition. The kingdom of heaven\nwas, for him, at the very doors, ready to take shape as soon as man\nwilled it; and man _would_ will it as soon as the mind-forged fetters of\nhis mind were loosed. Accordingly he endeavoured to loose them. He\ndethroned God that the Spirit of Nature might be enthroned; and then he\nproceeded to abolish marriage that free love might regenerate mankind.\nHe believed in regeneration by incantation--a few words murmured in\nmen's ears would make them as obedient to the ideas those sacred words\nrepresented as spirits to the spells of a magician. Abolish marriage\n(and what could be easier?), and love, being set free, prostitution\nwould cease. We may pass by such puerilities of inexperienced idealism,\nto be found by the score in _Queen Mab_, and pass on to Shelley's more\nmature utterances, always remembering that he died, as the _Triumph of\nLife_ shows, in the very process of maturation. His whole history is\nthat of an idealist, who first seeks his ideal in the actual, and not\nfinding it endeavours to bring the actual into harmony with his ideal.\nHis imagination hacks at the rude block of the world with the divine\nfury of a Pygmalion; thinking at first that he has but to remove the\ndull superfluous husks of custom to find the living idea in the centre;\nbut gradually perceiving it was but created an inanimate image, which\ncan only come to life by the invocation of Venus Urania. All the\nweaknesses, faults, and follies of his life and his writings, as well as\nthat \"power in weakness veiled\" which he felt himself to be, come from\nthis. He is driven to reform society by attacking the conventional\nmorality of marriage, because he is first a transcendental lover; just\nas Mr. William Morris is driven into socialism, because he is first a\nvery practical decorative artist. To speak irreverently, both men want\nelbow-room for their fads. But Shelley's fad is of even more importance\nto us than Morris's. It is better to have a beautiful love, than to have\na beautiful house to put him in. Shelley is, above all things, the poet\nof modern love. Dante's love, fantastic and supersensuous, was not\nmodern love. We do not want angels, either in heaven or in the house, to\ncondescend to our depravity and lead us upward. We do not want the\ndivine school-mistress to bring us to something not ourselves which may\nor may not make for righteousness, but the divine mistress, passionate\nas well as pure, to bring us to our best selves, and live with us in\nperfect union. Shakespeare showed us glimpses of this love defeated by\ncircumstances in _Romeo and Juliet_, triumphant over circumstances in\nPosthumus and Imogen; but Shelley has had a fuller vision of it. Since\nShakespeare's time both manhood and womanhood, and especially womanhood,\nhave by pressure of circumstances become more self-conscious, and the\nconditions of their union through love more complex.\n\nAnd what is this modern ideal of love, of which Shelley is the exponent?\nWhat is this strange affection, love, whether ancient or modern? It is\nthat most paradoxical of passions, that compound of selfishness and\nself-renunciation, that forlorn desire which strives to reconcile all\nthings, and found an eternal home on the shifting sands of time, of\nwhich we all know something. Blake has expressed this paradoxical\ncharacter of love once for all in his little poem \"The Clod and the\nPebble.\"\n\n  \"Love seeketh not itself to please,\n    Nor for itself hath any care,\n  But for another gives its ease,\n    And builds a heaven in hell's despair.\n\n  Love seeketh only self to please,\n    To bind another to its delight,\n  Joys in another's loss of ease,\n    And builds a hell in heaven's despite.\"\n\nWe may call these the masculine and feminine elements in love; though of\ncourse both exist in all love, whether of man to woman or woman to man.\nBoth sexes give more than they receive, and receive more than they\ngive. In all love, from the first step beyond mere physical appetite, to\nthe most transcendental Platonism, there are these two antagonistic\nelements. If the merely self-indulgent element prevails, we tend in\nthe direction of lust, one of the most cruel diseases that plague\nhumanity, which Milton rightly places \"hard by hate.\" If the merely\nself-renouncing, we tend in the direction of monastic chastity, which\nthough not so distinctly an evil thing, may become cruel and inhuman,\nand a bar to human progress. Asceticism is not, like lust, a disease,\nphysical and spiritual, but it may lead to disease, spiritual if not\nphysical. There is an asceticism, the Greek [Greek: aschesis], a\ntraining of the lower faculties to act in subordination to the higher,\nwhich is the strait gate by which we enter upon the arduous ascent\ntoward noble passion and noble action. There is another asceticism which\nif not truly Christian, came in the wake of Christianity, which, denying\nthe rights of the body, was less a training than a mortification. Both\nunrestrained sensuality and monastic chastity, in their injustice to the\nbody outrage the sexual principle, the former by regarding it as a toy\nto be polluted by base pleasure, the latter by regarding it as a thing\nunclean in itself to be cast out and killed, or at best tolerated and\ncleansed by the Church's holy water. To the present day the average\nman's, or at least the average Englishman's great temptation is to sin\nagainst love, through dull unimaginative lust, the average\nEnglishwoman's through dull unimaginative chastity. Men live too much in\nthe sensuous, and women in the supersensuous, to meet fairly. Love, the\nreconciler, himself is too weak fully to reconcile them and to bring\nthem together in that perfect ecstasy, body to body, spirit to spirit,\nsoul to soul, that \"unreserve of mingled being,\" which Shelley, giving a\nvoice to the desire of all ages, but especially to modern desire, sighed\nfor. To understand Shelley's protest against marriage, we must\nunderstand his ideal of love--the unconstrained rush together of two\npersonalities of opposite sexes, in whom the body is but the vehicle of\nthe spirit. This love is not born merely of the flickering fire of the\nsenses. It is a divine flame, kindled alike in body, soul, and spirit,\nand fusing them into unity. Of course, if this love is to be the great\nend of life, marriage is somewhat of an impertinence. While the divine\nfire burns, what need of artificial ties to keep the two lovers\ntogether? If it goes out why should they be kept together? To which the\nprosaic moralist replies: \"Your ideal of love is very beautiful, no\ndoubt. Get as much as you can of this divine flame into your Hymen's\ntorch; and after all, every young couple start with some such high-flown\nnotions in their heads; but I must have some guarantee that your wife\nand children are not left as burdens upon the parish, when you begin to\nfeel the pinch of real life, and the glamour of your imagination fades\nfrom your 'divine mistress.' Marriage was not ordained to be the\nparadise of ideal love, but for the sober discipline of the affections\nof men and women, and above all for the production and rearing up of\ngood citizens of the commonwealth. To judge by your own writings, Mr.\nShelley, you seem to have been running after a will-o'-the-wisp all your\nlife in this ideal love. And if _you_ did not catch it, is it likely\nthat Tom, Dick, and Harry will? In any case the pursuit of it seems just\nas likely to make inconstant lovers as that sensuality you affect to\nlook down upon. You always had the word 'for ever' on your tongue; but\nhow long did your for evers last? No, no, my dear sir, the good of\nsociety demands fidelity to incurred responsibilities, and we find by\npractical experience that both men and women, but especially men, are\ninclined to shirk the responsibilities which indulgence of the sexual\npassion brings in its train. Hence the marriage contract. It does not\nconcern itself primarily with either love or lovers, but it helps to\nkeep husbands and wives together, and women and children maintained\ndecently without coming upon the rates. And, mind you, it does not by\nany means leave love out in the cold. It may not rise to your\ntranscendental ecstasy; but it is love all the same, good honest\ndomestic affection, when your young couples get well broken to harness.\nDid you not say yourself that one might as well go to a gin-shop for a\nleg of mutton as to you for anything human? Well, give me the wholesome\nleg of mutton--none of your gin for me. Egad, sir, when I see some\nhonest couple going to church of a Sunday morning, with half-a-dozen\npretty children about them, I call that a poem--ay, and a better poem,\nMr. Shelley, than all the fantastic Epipsychidions you ever put upon\npaper. Hang it all, sir, let a man make love to his own wife, and stick\nto her when he has got her. I'm a plain man, sir, but I hope a moral\nman, and them's my sentiments.\" To all which, let Shelley reply as best\nhe may. The fact is that he has given no satisfactory reply, simply\nbecause it was only just before his death that he realised the\ncomplexity of the problem of life. He did, however, see clearly that the\nbringing of men and women into more complete harmony, by raising the\nideal of love, was the most important step towards that renewal of the\nworld, that living of the most perfect life attainable by man, for which\nhe sighed and after which he strove; and he saw clearly that our\nsolution of the marriage problem was imperfect, not merely in practice,\nbut to some extent in theory. As regards the subjection of women, he\nseems to have considered this wholly an artificial product of religious\ndogma, and not, as it is, the natural result of an imperfect\ncivilization. Man protects woman because, on the whole, she adds to his\ncomfort. Protection implies subjection, and subjection to a tyrant is\nslavery; and man, if not altogether a tyrant in these later times, has\nalways the temptation to become one, and the tyrannical traditions of\nbygone times have a strong tendency to persist. Laws and even customs\nlag far behind the highest public opinion of the day.\n\nNow, men being in possession of the capital of the world, the material\nmeans of life, women stand to them in the position of what the\nsocialists call wage-slaves. They must do what their employers require\nof them on pain of starvation, and there is no true freedom of contract.\nAnd so far men have almost without exception required of them\nconcubinage or menial service, or a mixture of both. English marriage,\nwhile recognizing the existing fact of the subjection of women, has done\nsomething to raise their status, chiefly by making the bond between the\ncontracting parties theoretically, and to a great extent practically,\none of love and mutual service. It has indeed been much more than\nShelley seems to have realized, the _nidus_ of a love pure and\nwholesome, if not very passionate. Theoretically strictly monogamic, it\nhas been so practically to a very respectable extent. It has put a\nperceptible curb upon the strong polygamous instinct of men, and it has\nfostered the monogamous habit in women enormously. English women are for\nthe most part faithful wives. Even transitory prostitution does not kill\nthe monogamous propensity in them. They settle down into marriage, or\nlive faithfully with one man, if they get the chance.\n\nStill, Englishwomen are not satisfied with marriage as it exists. Let us\nhear Mrs. Mona Caird on the subject. She is much more prosaic than\nShelley; she looks at the subject, chiefly from the standpoint of\npractical comfort. She sees that from this standpoint, from various\nreasons, which may be summed up in the phrase \"incompatibility of\ntemper,\" marriage does not induce even that amount of mutual toleration,\nnot to say happiness, without which it is impossible for man and wife to\nlive decently together. She therefore asks, What good purpose is served\nby keeping two people together who are evidently unfit to live together?\nWhy indeed? if, as Mrs. Caird says, \"The matter is one in which any\ninterposition, whether of law or society, is an impertinence.\" But,\nunfortunately, law and society are the most impertinent things in the\nworld, always binding with briers our joys and desires, and poking their\nugly noses into our private affairs in the interests of the British\nratepayer. We shall never be happy until we have got rid of them--if\neven then, and it is quite impossible to get rid of them for some time\nto come. Now the British ratepayer cares nothing about women and\nchildren, except in so far as there is a danger of their coming upon the\nrates. And he is a little scared about giving greater liberty of\ndivorce, \"saving for the cause of adultery,\" as he piously ejaculates.\nHe does not like stray women and children going about the world. But\nafter all, adultery is only a particular, perhaps even a minor, case of\nincompatibility. Marriage was made for man, and not man for marriage,\nand although marriage may work well in nine cases out of ten, the tenth\ncase must be considered, and relief given if possible. The individual is\nright to demand relief, and the mode of giving relief is a question for\nthe legislator. Greater facility of divorce must come, and will come,\nnow that both men and women demand it.\n\nMrs. Caird's demand for greater laxity of the marriage bond _ab initio_,\nthe nature of the contract being left to the contracting parties, like a\nmarriage settlement, is quite outside the sphere of practical politics,\nas she is herself quite aware. If men were but educated up to the\nShelleyan ideal, then we might try all sorts of delightful experiments\nin marriage, and gradually arrive at absolute freedom of contract, which\nwould _not_ mean that absolutely unsentimental hygienic promiscuity\nwhich is the ideal of the highly advanced physiologist. But men are not\nyet harmonious creatures, like Wordsworth's cloud, which \"moveth\naltogether if it move at all.\" They are torn by their lusts which war in\ntheir members. Hence these bonds. Lust, lust, lust: this is the most\nconcentrated form of selfishness--the undying worm at the root of the\nTree of Life. This is the tyrant that women have at last begun to\nrecognize as their deadly adversary and to fight against. Shelley, a\nbetter physician than Goethe, laid his finger on this plague-spot, and\ntold the age plainly: \"Thou ailest here.\" But he did not see that\ninstead of saying, \"Abolish marriage and prostitution will cease,\" he\nought to have said, \"Abolish prostitution and marriage will\ncease\"--marriage without love being only a particular form of\nprostitution. He did not see that the abolition of marriage would no\nmore get rid of lust than the abolition of private property would get\nrid of selfishness. We have already, in monogamic marriage, struggled\npainfully upward to the level of the higher animals; let us not imperil\nthis progress rashly.\n\nThe Cythnas of the present day have felt their burthens more directly\nthan Shelley did. Hence their demand for economic independence, that\nthey may not be forced into marriage or prostitution by the various\ndegrees of starvation. Their demand is a just one, and must be satisfied\nsomehow, even if we have to put a bonus upon womanhood and pay women,\nnot merely fair wages for their work of all kinds, but a tribute to them\nas women, as potential mothers, which shall fairly handicap the sexes\nin the struggle for existence, and put men more on their good behaviour.\n\nShelley, the mystic, who looked for a miraculous change in nature\ncoincident with a miraculous change in man, seems to have seen, almost\nas little as the average socialist of the present day, who believes in\nthe spiritual efficacy of a purely material revolution, that the ideals\nand interests of the two sexes are widely apart, more so now than ever\nbefore probably. He, like the socialist, in his impatience to arrive at\na practical solution of the life-problem, did not take the trouble to\nunderstand the true bearing of the doctrine of Malthus. He did not see\nthat whether Malthus's figures be right or wrong, it is a fact that the\npopulation of any given district (be it an English barony, or the world\nitself) tends to increase up to the limits of its food-supply, taking\nthe word _food_ in its very widest sense to signify all the means of\nwell-being; and that this tendency is a fundamental element in all\nsocial problems, just as friction is in all mechanical problems. He did\nnot see that, other things being the same, a higher standard of comfort,\nwhile, finally tending to diminish the rate of increase of population,\nfirst increases its pressure. He did not contemplate that strike against\nchild-bearing on the part of women, which is induced, not merely by the\ndesire for personal comfort, but is largely due to the vague influence\nof those new ideals of which he was himself the prophet. He, like the\nsocialist, thought that we might go on increasing and multiplying _ad\nlibitum_, till we reached the ultimate limit of standing-room on the\nearth, and of miraculous chemical food out of the air, and began, as\nastral bodies, to emigrate to Mars. Women know better than this; and\nfeel the pinch of population, when what they just now consider their\nhigher life is hampered by children. The woman who has one child more\nthan she wants is an over-populated woman; and the advanced woman of the\npresent day, having her own higher culture, and the culture of humanity,\non the brain, possibly with a high ideal of the duties of maternity, and\nfrequently a sickly and weary creature, morbid in body and mind, is very\neasily over-populated. Hence much social discomfort. Shelley does not\nseem to have contemplated this, nor seen that the good-natured\nacceptance of the feminine ideal by man might lead him, like poor St.\nPeter in his old age, \"whither he would not.\" How all this is going to\nend I confess I don't know. I trust in more delicate adjustments, a\nhigher and more wholesome life all round; but the ascent of man is\nalways a painful process. Meanwhile it is quite time for this bald,\ndisjointed chat of mine to come to an end.\n\n\n\n\n  _London:\n  Printed by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, Bread Street Hill.\n  September, 1889._\n\n\n\n\n      *      *      *      *      *      *\n\n\n\n\nTranscriber's note:\n\nText in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).\n\nThe original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these\nletters have been replaced with transliterations.\n\nThe misprint \"tempation\" has been corrected to \"temptation\" (page 15).\n\n\n\n***","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nMore Praise for the _Best Food Writing_ Series\n\n\"This is a book worth devouring.\"\u2014 _Sacramento Bee_\n\n\"The cream of the crop of food writing compilations.\" _\u2014Milwaukee Journal Sentinel_\n\n\"An exceptional collection worth revisiting, this will be a surefire hit with epicureans and cooks.\"\u2014 _Publishers Weekly,_ starred review\n\n\"If you're looking to find new authors and voices about food, there's an abundance to chew on here.\"\u2014 _Tampa Tribune_\n\n\"Fascinating to read now, this book will also be interesting to pick up a year from now, or ten years from now.\"\u2014Popmatters.com\n\n\"Some of these stories can make you burn with a need to taste what they're writing about.\"\u2014 _Los Angeles Times_\n\n\"The book captures the gastronomic zeitgeist in a broad range of essays.\"\u2014 _San Jose Mercury News_\n\n\"The next best thing to eating there is.\"\u2014 _New York Metro_\n\n\"Stories for connoisseurs, celebrations of the specialized, the odd, or simply the excellent.\"\u2014 _Entertainment Weekly_\n\n\"Spans the globe and palate.\"\u2014 _Houston Chronicle_\n\n\"The perfect gift for the literate food lover.\" _\u2014Pittsburgh Post-Gazette_\n\n\"With this typically delectable and eclectic collection of culinary prose, editor Holly Hughes proves her point made in the intro that the death of 68-year-old _Gourmet_ magazine a year ago didn't lead to the demise of quality food journalism . . . There's a mess of vital, provocative, funny and tender stuff . . . in these pages.\" _\u2014USA Today_\n\nALSO EDITED BY HOLLY HUGHES\n\n_Best Food Writing 2011_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2010_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2009_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2008_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2007_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2006_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2005_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2004_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2003_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2002_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2001_\n\n_Best Food Writing 2000_\n\nALSO BY HOLLY HUGHES\n\n_Frommer's 500 Places for Food and Wine Lovers_\n\n_Frommer's 500 Places to See Before They Disappear_\n\n_Frommer's 500 Places to Take the Kids  \nBefore They Grow Up_\n\n_Edited by_\n\nHOLLY HUGHES\n\nA Member of the  \nPerseus Books Group\nMany of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Da Capo Press was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by Holly Hughes\n\nPages 380\u2013384 constitute an extension of the copyright page.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Third Floor, Boston, MA 02210.\n\nSet in 11 point Bembo by the Perseus Books Group\n\nCataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.\n\nFirst Da Capo Press edition 2012\n\nISBN 978-0-7382-1619-5\n\nPublished by Da Capo Press\n\nA Member of the Perseus Books Group\n\nwww.dacapopress.com\n\nDa Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 255-1514, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\n#### CONTENTS\n\nIntroduction\n\nBy Holly Hughes\n\nFOOD FIGHTS\n\n**On Killing,** From HunterAnglerGardenerCook.com\n\nBy Hank Shaw\n\n**The Gumbo Chronicles,** From _Outside_\n\nBy Rowan Jacobsen\n\n**Serving Up Sustainability,** From _Edible Boston_\n\nBy Erin Byers Murray\n\n[**Kids Battle the Lure of Junk Food,**  \nFrom _Pacific Northwest Magazine_](chapter04.html#ch4)\n\nBy Maureen O'Hagan\n\n**Pastoral Romance,** From _Lapham's Quarterly_\n\nBy Brent Cunningham\n\nFARM TO TABLE\n\n**Sweet Spot,** From _Alimentum_\n\nBy Paul Graham\n\n[**Snowville Creamery Has a Modest Goal: Save the World,**  \nFrom _Edible Columbus_](chapter07.html#ch7)\n\nBy Eric LeMay\n\n**Matters of Taste,** From _Tomatoland_\n\nBy Barry Estabrook\n\n**Olives and Lives,** From _Extra Virginity_\n\nBy Tom Mueller\n\n**This Little Piggy Went to Market,** From _Memoir Journal_\n\nBy Laura R. Zandstra\n\nHOME COOKING\n\n**How to Live Well,** From _An Everlasting Meal_\n\nBy Tamar Adler\n\n**Still Life with Mayonnaise,** From _At the Kitchen Table_\n\nBy Greg Atkinson\n\n**The Fried Chicken Evangelist,** From Leite's Culinaria\n\nBy Lorraine Eaton\n\n**Lasagna Bolognese,** From SmittenKitchen.com\n\nBy Deb Perelman\n\n**The Forager at Rest,** From _Bon Appetit_\n\nBy Christine Muhlke\n\n**Better Cooking Through Technology,** From _Technology Review_\n\nBy Corby Kummer\n\nFOODWAYS\n\n**The Pastrami Dilemma,** From Chow.com\n\nBy John Birdsall\n\n**Passover Goes Gourmet,** From _Sunset_\n\nBy Rachel Levin\n\n**The 2011 Dyke March Wiener Taste Test,** From _The Stranger_\n\nBy Bethany Jean Clement\n\n**The Missing Link,** From _The Times-Picayune_\n\nBy Brett Anderson\n\n**Foraging and Fishing Through the Big Bend,** From _Desert Terroir_\n\nBy Gary Paul Nabhan\n\n**Italian America,** From _Saveur_\n\nBy John Mariani\n\n**What Makes Sushi Great?,** From GiltTaste.com\n\nBy Francis Lam\n\n**Food for Thought,** From the _New York Times_\n\nBy Jeff Gordinier\n\nDUDE FOOD\n\n[**Learning to Barbecue Helped Make Me a Man,**  \nFrom _Food & Wine_](chapter25.html#ch25)\n\nBy Joel Stein\n\n**Memphis in May: Pork-a-Looza,** From _Garden & Gun_\n\nBy Wright Thompson\n\n**Truffle in Paradise,** From _Gastronomica_\n\nBy John Gutekanst\n\n**A Slice of Family History,** From _Food & Wine_\n\nBy Daniel Duane\n\n**Barbecue Road Trip: The Smoke Road,** From _Garden & Gun_\n\nBy John T. Edge\n\nTHE FAMILY TABLE\n\n**The Food-Critic Father,** From _The Washingtonian_\n\nBy Todd Kliman\n\n[**The Legacy That Wasn't: Wonton Soup,**  \nFrom _A Spoonful of Promises_](chapter31.html#ch31)\n\nBy T. Susan Chang\n\n**Curious Cookies,** From _Edible Vancouver_\n\nBy Eagranie Yuh\n\n**Chicken Brick,** From _Fire & Knives_\n\nBy Henrietta Clancy\n\n**Angry Breakfast Eggs,** From Poor Man's Feast.com\n\nBy Elissa Altman\n\n**Sweet Southern Dream,** From _Saveur_\n\nBy Ben Mims\n\nSOMEONE'S IN THE KITCHEN\n\n**The King of Pop-Up,** From GQ\n\nBy Brett Martin\n\n**Hot Plate,** From _Minnesota Monthly_\n\nBy Rachel Hutton\n\n**Austria's Culinary Ambassador,** From _Edible Manhattan_\n\nBy St. John Frizell\n\n**Remembering Savoy,** From _Edible Manhattan_\n\nBy Rachel Wharton\n\n**Appetite for Perfection** , From _Los Angeles Magazine_\n\nBy Ed Leibowitz\n\n**Supper Clubs in Denver,** From the _Denver Post_\n\nBy John Broening\n\n**Why Chefs Sell Out,** From Chow.com\n\nBy Richie Nakano\n\n**A Chef's Painful Road to Rehab,** From the _Chicago Tribune_\n\nBy Kevin Pang\n\n**Bitter Start to a Life of Sweets,** From _Sacramento Bee_\n\nBy Chris Macias\n\nPERSONAL TASTES\n\n**Kitchen Confessional: Burnin' Down Da House** , From Leites Culinaria\n\nBy David Leite\n\n**Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?,** From _Texas Monthly_\n\nBy John Spong\n\n[**A Proposal for Feeding the Fat and Anxious,**  \nFrom _Gastronomica_](chapter47.html#ch47)\n\nBy Josh Ozersky\n\n**The Bone Gatherer,** From _Saveur_\n\nBy Mei Chin\n\n**They Don't Have Tacos in the Suck,** From _Houston Press_\n\nBy Katharine Shilcutt\n\n**I Won't Have the Stomach for This,** From the _New York Times_\n\nBy Anna Stoessinger\n\nRecipe Index\n\nPermissions Acknowledgments\n\nAbout the Editor\n\n#### INTRODUCTION\n\n#### By Holly Hughes\n\nI'm easily mesmerized when it comes to food shopping\u2014inhaling the yeasty scent of the bakery, gently plucking ripe items from the produce bins, shivering in the frosty air of the freezer section. But lately it seems that all I do in the grocery aisle is pore over package labels. Yes, I'm following Michael Pollan's sage advice in _Food Rules_ (no food products with more than five ingredients, no ingredients you can't pronounce, nothing your great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized\u2014you know the drill). But I have two other compelling reasons to vet the foods I feed my family.\n\nOur kitchen now must be totally nut-free, after my college-age son went into anaphylactic shock from a dinner of Thai shrimp and cashews. A game-changer? Absolutely. So now I scrutinize the fine print on every package of food that enters our home. Even when the ingredient list doesn't include nuts, there's the dreaded caveat: _manufactured in a facility that also processes tree nuts._ Maybe it's a slim chance of cross-contamination, but I can't take that risk\u2014put the Le Petit Ecolier cookies back on the shelf and choose Choco Leibnitz instead.\n\nWe'd just gotten used to that New Normal when my younger daughter threw another wrench in the works: She's decided to go vegan three days a week, filling our refrigerator with tubs of tempeh, seitan, and Tofurkey. Usually I'm wary of any dietary regimen that's so exclusionary, but I'm going along with this one, because A) this too shall pass, and B) until it passes, she's been inspired to try all sorts of healthy foods she wouldn't touch before. It's actually expanding her culinary horizons instead of narrowing them, and I'm all in favor of that. But now I have to apply a second filter when I read food labels. And lo and behold, what's the main source of protein in many vegan products? You guessed it, nuts. So my kitchen has become a bit of a battleground.\n\nSound familiar? When it comes to food, our entire society seems to be a battleground these days. Americans were once known as a nation of slapdash, thoughtless eaters; now it almost seems we think about nothing else. On the one hand, we obsess over food as entertainment, fetishizing \"decadent\" desserts and all-you-can-eat buffets and trophy high-end dining. On the other, we relentlessly worry about nutrition, health, and the environmental impact of what we eat. People feel so invested in their dietary choices that the age-old concept of sharing a common meal\u2014breaking bread together, even if it's gluten-free\u2014gets short shrift. It's almost impossible to throw a dinner party these days without negotiating a minefield of various guests' food demands.\n\nEnter food writers, who every year become more and more indispensable as guides to this shifting gastronomic landscape. Since editing the first edition of _Best Food Writing_ in the year 2000, I've witnessed an explosion in the number of magazines, websites, newsletters, and TV shows devoted to food; the shelves of my local culinary bookshop (New York City's esteemed Kitchen Arts & Letters) are crammed with expensively produced cookbooks, best-selling culinary memoirs, and scholarly works on all aspects of food. It's been a thrilling metamorphosis to observe firsthand.\n\nIn those years, I've watched food stories move from the \"women's pages\" of newspapers onto the front pages and op-ed pages. Check out the issue-oriented pieces in the opening section, Food Fights\u2014stories like Rowan Jacobsen's venture into post-oil-spill Louisiana fishing waters (page 7), Brent Cunningham's questioning of farm-to-table as a cure-all for America's food supply (page 36), and Hank Shaw's defense of hunting (page 2). And here's another sign of the times: Many of this year's writers earned their stars as bloggers (Elissa Altman of PoorMansFeast, page 246; Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman, page 103; Katharine Shilcutt of EatingOurWords and SheEats, page 364), a source of food writing that was barely on anyone's radar thirteen years ago.\n\nIn a food-obsessed culture, trend-spotting is always risky. Nevertheless, when you spend months combing through bookstores and magazines and websites, as I do, every year certain themes pop out. I think of 2012 as the Year of the Three F's: fermentation, foraging, and fennel. What inspired the fermentation craze is anybody's guess, but it's a fair bet that foraging rose to the forefront thanks to Rene Redzepi's Copenhagen restaurant Noma (see Christine Muhlke's profile on page 111). The fennel? It may just be me, but ever since reading Tamar Adler's _How to Live Well_ (page 82), I've noticed roast fennel and shaved raw fennel on menus everywhere.\n\n2012 also produced a bumper crop of pieces concerned with cooking as a Guy Thing. Hence our whole new section on Dude Food, congregating a tailgate party's worth of male food writers, no less than two of whom\u2014Joel Stein (page 180) and Daniel Duane (page 204)\u2014have recently written entire books on the subject of Manliness.\n\nAlways looking for new frontiers, Americans have recently developed an avid curiosity about diverse food cultures. Our Foodways section examines a wide spectrum of those, from sushi (Francis Lam, page 169) to Passover seders (Rachel Levin, page 133) to red-sauce Italian-American (John Mariani, page 162). And because chefs are the new rock stars, Someone's in the Kitchen profiles all sorts of chefs\u2014from Kevin Pang's cautionary tale of a chef on the skids (page 320) to Chris Macias' inspiring profile of one redeemed (page 327).\n\nSome pieces in this year's _Best Food Writing_ feature the very newest developments, such as pop-up restaurants (Richie Nakano, page 317, and Brett Martin, page 258) and the high-tech wonders of _Modernist Cuisine_ (Corby Kummer's review, page 117). But the Old always has a place alongside the New: witness Paul Graham's lyrical essay on syrup making (page 48), Jeff Gordinier's look at eating as an act of meditation (page 173), or Mei Chin's musings on broth and bones (page 359).\n\nSpeaking of balancing the Old with the New, this year's book features a number of writers who have graced these pages often: Deans of the food writing world such as Southern food champion John T. Edge (page 208), political watchdog Barry Estabrook (page 62), locavore crusader Gary Paul Nabhan (page 149), the always witty David Leite (page 336), philosopher of home cooking Greg Atkinson (page 92), and the man whose food writing helped save New Orleans, Brett Anderson (page 140). But the robust state of food writing ensures that there are always new personalities bursting onto the scene\u2014writers such as Vancouver chocolatier Eagranie Yuh (page 237), San Francisco's John Birdsall (page 128), New England's T. Susan Chang (page 230), Londoner Henrietta Clancy (page 241), and transplanted Southerner and sweetaholic Ben Mims (page 250).\n\nSo while fretting over package labels has become a necessity for me, I gratefully turn to food writing to remind me that food should also be a pleasure. Instead of limiting their options, I've found ways to help my kids expand their food choices\u2014teaching my son to make a stir-fry that's better than risky takeout, surprising my daughter with a savory lentil salad full of diced raw veggies. Here's hoping that this year's _Best Food Writing_ will help you too navigate the gastronomic landscape with zest and an open mind. The food scene doesn't have to be a battleground, after all\u2014there's room enough for all of us at the table.\n\n## Food Fights\n\n### ON KILLING\n\n### By Hank Shaw\n\n### From _HunterAnglerGardenerCook.com_\n\n### Foraging and fishing have gained hipster cachet recently, but hunters still are often shunned by politically correct foodies. Hank Shaw\u2014former line cook and commercial fisherman, and author of _Hunt, Gather, Cook\u2014_ demands equal respect for those food lovers who slay their meat.\n\nI have been dealing a lot of death lately. I've hunted five of the past eight days and have killed birds on each trip. My larder is filling, and Holly and I are eating well. Lots of duck, some pheasant and even a little of the venison I have left over from the 2010 season. That is the good side of all this, the side of hunting that most people can embrace. I hunt for a lot of reasons, but for me the endgame is always the table.\n\nIt is the journey to that table that can sometimes give people pause. What I do to put meat in my freezer is alien to most, anathema to some. In the past seven years, I can count on one hand the times I've had to buy meat for the home. This fact alone makes me an outlier, an anomaly. And that I am unashamed\u2014proud, really\u2014of this seems to cause a lot of folks I meet to look at me funny: I am a killer in their midst.\n\nNot too long ago, I was at a book signing event for _Hunt, Gather, Cook_ when a young woman approached me. She was very excited about foraging, and she had loved that section of my book. Then her face darkened. She told me she'd also read my section on hunting. \"How can you enjoy killing so much? I just don't understand it. You seem like such a nice person, too.\" It took a few minutes for me to explain myself to her, and I am grateful that she listened. She left, I think, with a different opinion.\n\nA few weeks later, I was at the University of Oregon talking about wild food to some students. When I mentioned hunting, I could feel the temperature in the room drop. It occurred to me that no one there was a hunter, nor were they close to any hunters. I called for a show of hands. One guy raised his. I asked him briefly about his hunting experience, and it was obvious that it had been traumatic for the poor kid. I let the topic slide and moved on to mushrooms.\n\nWhen I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I spoke with more than 100 diners during my book dinner at Craigie on Main. Only four were hunters, although a few more wanted to start. Over the course of the night, I fielded weird question after weird question from diner after diner. _Have I ever shot someone? Did I actually eat what I shot? Wasn't I afraid of diseases?_ It was a stark show of ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you, just an utter lack of knowledge of what hunting is all about.\n\nTo be sure, these encounters were in college towns among a certain set of people. I had some book events, notably those in Montana, Pittsburgh and Austin, where most everyone who attended either hunted or was at least familiar with it. And in most places I could be assured of a healthy smattering of fellow hook-and-bullet types or farmers, who are equally familiar with the death of animals.\n\nBut the fact remains: Most people reading this have never killed anything larger than an insect, and among those who have it's usually been a fish, or an accident\u2014like running over someone's dog. Most people have no idea what it's like to take the life of another creature, let alone why someone would actively seek to do so. Let me try to explain to you the way I did to my young foraging friend on book tour. Let me tell you what it means to kill, at least for me.\n\nTo deal death is to experience your world exploding. It is an avalanche of emotion and thought and action.\n\nArmed with a shotgun, it is often done without thought, on instinct alone. A flushing grouse gives you no more than a few seconds to pull the trigger before it disappears into the alders. A rabbit can leap back into the brambles in even less time. Unless you are perfect in that split second, the animal wins. And being human, we are far from perfect. Even with ducks, where you often have plenty of time to prepare for the shot, their speed and agility are more than adequate defenses. We hunters fail more than we succeed.\n\nThis is why we will often whoop it up when we finally bring a bird down: We are not being callous, rejoicing in the animal's death. It is a hard-wired reaction to succeeding at something you have been working for days, months, even years to achieve. In some corner of your brain, it means you will eat today. This reaction can look repulsive from the outside.\n\nShould you arm yourself with a rifle, you then must wrestle your conscious mind. Buck fever is real. A huge set of antlers will hypnotize the best of us, man and woman alike. Even if the animal lacks antlers, as mine often do, you have to contend with The Twin Voices: On one shoulder sits a voice shouting, _Shoot! Shoot! You might not get another chance!_ On the other shoulder sits another voice, grave and calm: _Be careful. You must not put that bullet in a place where the animal will suffer. Better to pass a shot than wound an animal._ A wise hunter does not kill lightly.\n\nIn that moment when the game shows itself and you ready yourself to shoot, all that matters is that you do your job correctly. And that job is to kill cleanly and quickly. The animal deserves it; we would want no less were the tables turned. And make no mistake: A great many hunters, myself included, do this mental table-turning with some frequency. Seeing animals die so often makes us think of our own death, and I can assure you most of us would rather die with a well-placed shot than wither in a hospital.\n\nWe also know all too well that we are fallible creatures. When we fail to kill cleanly, when we wound the animals we seek, it is our duty to end their suffering ourselves. If there is a moment in this whole process that breaks my heart, it is this one. Everything wants to live, and will try anything it can to escape you. We see ourselves in this struggle, feel tremendous empathy for the struggling bird, the fleeing deer. It is a soul-searing moment where part of you marvels at the animal's drive to live\u2014 _to escape!_ \u2014at the same time the rest of you is consumed with capturing it as fast as possible so you can end this miserable business. This internal conflict is, to me, what being human is all about. A coyote or a hawk has no remorse. We do.\n\nI am not ashamed to tell you that I have shed a tear more than once when I've had to deliver the coup de grace to a duck. I'm not sure what it is about ducks, but they affect me more than other animals. I always apologize to it, knowing full well that this is a weak gesture designed mostly to help me feel better. But it does help me feel better. At least a little. So I keep doing it.\n\nAs the moment of killing fades, death rides home with you in the back of the truck. Once home, you must transmogrify the animal you killed into meat. The transformation is a mystical one, and every time I \"dress\" game\u2014such a pleasant euphemism, that\u2014I marvel at how fast my mind toggles from hunter to butcher to cook.\n\nIt is a necessary process, and one that is vital to why I have chosen this life, why I am a hunter.\n\nI look down at my keyboard and see death under my fingernails. I smell the fat and gore and meat of dead ducks upon me; it's been a good week of hunting. And because I **eat everything on a duck but the quack,** I have become intimate with the insides of waterfowl. Over the years, I've gutted and taken apart so many animals that I know the roadmap blindfolded. And that road leads to meals long remembered. I reach into a deer's guts without thought: I want those kidneys, and that liver. I turn my arm upwards and wrap my fingers around its stopped heart, slick and firm. It will become **heart cutlets,** or **jaeger schnitzel.**\n\nOnce plucked and gutted, I can take apart a duck in 90 seconds. Maybe less. My fingers intuitively know which way and how hard to pluck each feather from a pheasant's carcass. I know just where to put my boning knife, sharp as lightning, to slice the tendons that hold a hog's tongue into its head. I use the same knife to caress its hind legs, separating the natural muscle groups apart along each seam. Some will become roasts, others salami. Animal becomes food. The pop of a goose's thigh bone disjointing from its body no longer sickens me; all it means is that I need to slip my knife under that bone and around the coveted \"oyster,\" the best bite on any bird.\n\nWasting meat is the sin I cannot forgive. When I kill an animal, its death is on my hands, and those animals to whom I've had to deliver the coup de grace are especially close to me. There is a bond between us that requires that I do my part to ensure they did not die for nothing. This is why I spend so much time creating recipes for every part of the animal. Nature wastes nothing, and neither should I. It pains me to know that some hunters do not share this feeling, that they care only for backstraps or breasts\u2014and while I know that coyotes and buzzards will eat what we do not, I do not hunt to feed those creatures.\n\nYou might ask me that with all this, why bother eating meat at all? Why deal with all the moral and emotional implications? In the face of such constant death, is it not better to be a vegetarian?\n\nFor me, no. It is a cold fact that no matter what your dietary choice, animals die so you can eat. Just because you choose not to eat the flesh of animals does not mean that their homes did not fall to the plow to become acres of vegetables and soybeans, wheat and corn. Habitat, more than anything, determines the health of a species. The passenger pigeon may have been snuffed out by hunting, but it was the massive destruction of virgin forest\u2014forest cleared to grow crops\u2014that brought the pigeon to the brink. I have nothing against vegetarians, and the vast majority I've met understand what I do and respect it. But to those few who do not, I say this: We all have blood on our hands, only I can see mine.\n\nIt all boils down to intimacy. Hunting has created an uncommon closeness between the animals I pursue, the meat I eat, and my own sense of self. There is a terrible seriousness to it all that underlies the thrill of the chase, the camaraderie of being with my fellow hunters and the deep sense of calm I feel when alone in the wild. I welcome this weight: It fuels my desire to make something magical with the mortal remains of the game I manage to bring home. It is a feeling every hunter who's ever stared into the freezer at that special strip of backstrap, or hard-won bird or beast understands.\n\nMeat should be special. It has been for most of human existence. And no modern human understands this more than a hunter. I am at peace with killing my own meat because for me, every duck breast, every boar tongue, every deer heart is a story, not of conquest, but of communion.\n\n### THE GUMBO CHRONICLES\n\n### By Rowan Jacobsen\n\n### From _Outside_\n\n### How successful was BP's much-touted cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico after 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Food writer\/environmentalist Rowan Jacobsen (author of American _Terroir_ ) sailed out with Louisiana crabbers, oystermen, and shrimpers to fish for the real truth.\n\nIn the predawn steam of a Louisiana night, I stood in a yard surrounded by catfish heads. The headlights of dualies towing fiberglass crabbing boats swept into the yard and illuminated wooden pallets stacked six feet high, holding tens of thousands of fish heads: eyes, whiskers, stringy stuff coming out the back. Men in baseball caps stepped out of the trucks, loaded pallets into their boats, and pulled away.\n\nIt was 4:30 A.M., and I was in the yard of Vincent Comardelle, 67, who supplies bait to the crabbers in Larose, a small Cajun town abutting Bayou Lafourche (pronounced la _-foosh_ ), a 109-mile, shellfish-heavy waterway that peels off from the Mississippi River above New Orleans and winds through the marshes of southern Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico. I was waiting to meet Ryan Comardelle, Vincent's son and one of the top crabbers in the area, who had promised to take me out on the marshes. Finally, a white pickup pulled up. Ryan stepped out and peered at me. He was wearing a tight red T-shirt over a massive chest and Popeye biceps. Buzz cut, goatee, merciless blue eyes.\n\n\"You bring any food?\" he asked. I hadn't. He shot me an unimpressed look. \"We gonna be out there all day,\" he said. \"I don't like to share my food.\"\n\nVincent shambled into the house\u2014he has a limp from an old boating accident that ended with an outboard propeller buried in his back\u2014and returned with a package of peanut butter crackers. We launched Ryan's boat from a nearby dock and motored through a series of shallow, brackish marshes\u2014crab heaven\u2014until we reached Little Lake, which is no longer little, thanks to erosion and land subsidence. Southern Louisiana is sinking, and every year the salty Gulf of Mexico covers more of it, killing the grasses and trees that hold the land together. This is a problem for native shellfish, which rely on a delicate, finely tuned balance of fresh inland water and salty tidal flow.\n\nA full moon hung in the west, silhouetting the rocket-ship spires of gas rigs and the bones of dead oak trees, killed by encroaching water. Ryan, who has crabbed for most of his 40 years, steered while his friend Reggie, an athletic guy sporting a Bud Light cap and a bewildered expression, handled the traps. Reggie was a little off, which Ryan kept pointing out.\n\n\"He ain't exactly stupid,\" Ryan said. \"He just got no sense.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah?\" Reggie said.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nReggie tried to think of a comeback, failed, and went back to the traps. We could just make out ghostly foam floats bobbing on the water. Attached to the side of Ryan's boat was a metal rake, its teeth combing the surface and snatching the line dangling beneath each passing float. When the rake hooked a float, a wire trap came up, dragging near the back of the boat. Reggie opened each trap, shook the captured crabs into a plastic crate, and removed the rotting catfish heads, tossing them overboard. Then he added two new heads and dropped the trap back into the water. For eight hours this is what we did. The boat never stopped. Reggie never stopped. The crabs piled up: olive shells, turquoise legs, orange claws reaching for Reggie when he got close. Every time they pinched him, he'd yelp, \"Oh mercy!\"\n\nMost traps held just two or three crabs and the occasional flounder. \"I used to run 400 cages,\" Ryan said. \"Now I'm running 700 and making less money.\"\n\n\"Bad season?\" I asked.\n\nRyan glared. \"Today might be my worst day ever,\" he said. \"Normally I fill 20 pans. Last time I filled 13. I'm hoping to catch half that today. That don't even cover my expenses.\"\n\nRyan was going to give up for the year if things didn't change in a week or two, and he wasn't alone. When I was in Bayou Lafourche, in September 2011, many crabbers didn't even bother to go out. Apparently, they hadn't got the memo that everything in the Gulf was fine. A year and a half after BP's April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, virtually the entire fishery was open for business, and federal and state officials were happily trumpeting the health of the Gulf's marine life. Ryan had nothing but contempt for those officials.\n\n\"Dey tellin' everybody everything's OK,\" he said, in the region's ubiquitous Cajun accent, which features a lot of _dis_ and _dat._ \"And it's not. The crabs are not getting fat. A lot of dem are dying right when dey shed. The biologists say everything's normal. Well, shit. We out here on the water almost every day of our lives. We know what changes from one day to the next. Where the little crabs? Before BP hit, they'd be all over this boat. Where dey at? We screwed.\"\n\nRyan was much happier talking about arm wrestling. He was ranked number one in Louisiana for his weight division. \"No guy around here can put my arm down. You want to see why?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I said.\n\nRyan grabbed the next float from the rake and curled it tightly against his chest as the boat churned along. The cage dragged in the water, half-submerged and spraying a wake. \"That's how I won my biggest match!\" Ryan said, veins popping. \"Other guys use weights. I just come out here and work. Wanna try?\"\n\nI did. The cage jerked me to the back of the boat, and mercifully, the float ripped out of my hand before I was dragged overboard. Ryan smiled and went back to crabbing. We struggled to fill six crates. I counted time in catfish heads. Around noon, I broke out the crackers.\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill, many observers\u2014myself included\u2014anticipated an unthinkable disaster: the death of the Gulf Coast fishery and the final ruination of the Gulf's beleaguered estuary system. Nearly 206 million gallons of oil leaked from the Macondo well. More than 88,000 square miles of fishing grounds\u201437 percent of all federal Gulf of Mexico waters\u2014were closed, along with most affected Louisiana waters, including Bayou Lafourche. Oil filled the estuaries and worked its way into the bayou marshes. Destruction appeared imminent.\n\nAnd then the oil just seemed to fade like disappearing ink. This happened, we were told, thanks to naturally occurring hydrocarbon-eating bacteria, aided by beneficial ocean currents at the site of the leaking well. By October 2010, most Louisiana state fisheries were reopened, including Bayou Lafourche. Since then thousands of seafood samples have been tested for the carcinogens found in hydrocarbons and deemed safe. On April 12, 2011, with the one-year anniversary of the spill approaching, Eric Schwaab, assistant administrator for fisheries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), proudly declared that \"not one piece of tainted seafood has entered the market.\" Meanwhile, BP has mitigated the damage to its image with a $20 billion fund to pay the claims of affected businesses, plus a slick TV ad campaign to lure tourists to the region. In January, _The New York Times_ ran an editorial lauding the recovery effort as a shining example for future industrial cleanups. These days the consensus from state and local governments, BP, and pundits alike is that everything is pretty much fine. We dodged a bullet, they tell us.\n\nAll of which seemed incredible to me. I reported from the Gulf during the spill, and I watched the Vessels of Opportunity (local boats hired by BP to lay boom and corral oil) and saw how ineffective they were. I worried about what polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons\u2014the mutagens and carcinogens found in crude oil\u2014might do to the generation of shrimp and crab larvae that were getting soaked in gunk. I wondered about the effects of the 1.8 million gallons of chemical dispersants that BP sprayed to prevent the oil from accumulating on the ocean's surface. And I thought about the scientists who said it would take years before we could comprehend the effect of the spill, much less make grand diagnoses about the Gulf's health.\n\nThese were guys I quoted in my 2010 book on the spill, _Shadows on the Gulf,_ among them Florida State University oceanographer Ian MacDonald, who said, \"I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life.\" And University of South Florida oceanographer John Paul, who said, \"The impact on commercially important larvae that are bathed in this stuff is hard to say. We might see grouper with tumors three years from now.\"\n\nI wanted to believe in the recovery\u2014who doesn't like miracles?\u2014but the spin was hard to cut through. So I decided to do some personal recon to see if the facts on the ground jibed with the reports being fed to the public. In my mind, there was no better way to assess the Gulf's health than by traveling around and sourcing one of my favorite meals\u2014seafood gumbo\u2014in the heart of bayou country.\n\nI've written a lot about food traditions, and I've always had a thing for gumbo, a delicious stew that came about after a bunch of poor people from elsewhere were stuck in a marginal environment, handed a cooking pot, and told to fend for themselves. The poor people were Acadians, French Catholic farmers who got booted out of Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, arrived in Louisiana, looked around at the soupy, unpromising environment, and thought, How do you make dinner out of this? Not only did they succeed, but they designed a culinary miracle, a spontaneous dish born of the holy trinity of crab, shrimp, and oyster that's as American as anything we've got.\n\nIt's no exaggeration to say that Bayou Lafourche has traditionally been the finest place in the world to find ingredients for gumbo. Route 1, which hugs Lafourche, is often called \"the longest Main Street in the world\" because of the way one linear town eases into the next. There are few significant side streets; the only solid land is the two parallel strips of high ground built up on either side of the bayou by millennia of flood sediment. As soon as you get away from that, you sink into the marshes. Those marshes are some of the most fabled crab, shrimp, and oyster grounds on the planet. And they were directly in the crosshairs of the spill. The way I figured it, if I could still make an all-Lafourche gumbo, then America's seafood soul was intact. So I bought a plane ticket and called my buddy Jim.\n\nJim Gossen is the CEO of Louisiana Foods Global Seafood Service, a major Gulf Coast supplier. We first met a few years ago, at the International Boston Seafood Show, and bonded over our enthusiasm for all things oyster. Gossen, who is 64, grew up in bayou country and has been buying from its fishermen since the 1970s. Not incidentally, he has a beach house on Grand Isle, a long barrier island that sits where Bayou Lafourche meets the Gulf of Mexico. When I told him about my plan to toast the non-death of the Gulf with gumbo, he offered to guide me to local fishermen and host the celebratory cook-off. \"I just need to cancel a week's worth of appointments,\" he said.\n\nGossen, who has slicked-back, thinning hair and a gourmand's earthmover-size spare tire, picked me up from the airport in his white SUV on a warm September afternoon, air conditioning blasting. We rolled down Route 1, past moored shrimp boats and ramshackle stores advertising bait and boudin, a Cajun sausage. Our destination was the house of Wilbert Collins, a legendary septuagenarian oysterman. \"There's something about oysters,\" Gossen said. \"I always loved them. My dad loved them. My grandfather loved them. We'd buy sacks in the wintertime and sit in the backyard and shuck.\"\n\nLouisiana oysters tend to grow faster than other kinds, thanks to the warm waters of the lower Mississippi River and an extraordinary abundance of phytoplankton. Collins's specimens were particularly fat. I'd eaten them with Gossen before. They were too large to fit in any human mouth, which stymied me until I watched Gossen take the edge of one in his lips and slurp it like a massive linguine.\n\nAt one time, 16 family-run oyster businesses plied the waters of Lafourche Parish. Gossen used to send a tractor-trailer down Bayou Lafourche and load the entire thing with oysters. But Lafourche's marshes have been under assault for years, long before oil started fouling its beaches. Those marshes, along with the rest of the lower Mississippi, constitute the fastest-disappearing landmass on earth. There are two reasons for this: the leveeing of the Mississippi River by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the digging of canals through the marshes by the oil-and-gas industry in search of new reserves. The levees prevented natural flooding, which over time had deposited enough sediment in the marshes to compensate for natural subsidence. The new canals allowed pure saltwater to intrude inland and kill the marsh grass that held the mud in place. The result: sinking, disintegrating land as the Gulf of Mexico chewed its way farther north every year.\n\nOysters do best in brackish water. Fresh water kills them outright, and while they can grow just fine in salt water, the ocean brings with it numerous critters that relish young oysters, especially snails and drumfish. As the salt water has encroached, many traditional oyster reefs have succumbed to predation and hurricanes. By the early nineties, the reefs near Bayou Lafourche had declined so much that Gossen stopped sending the truck. By the time Deepwater Horizon blew, only the Collins Oyster Company was still in operation. When we arrived, we discovered that it, too, had gone under.\n\n\"Collins Oyster Co. Out of Business After 90 Yrs.,\" read the sign in the yard, \"Because of BP's Oil & Governor Jindals Fresh Water.\" In May 2010, as the oil crept closer to the Louisiana wetlands, Governor Bobby Jindal and local officials tried to push it back by fully opening seven of Louisiana's floodgates on the Mississippi for the first time in history. River water poured through the brackish marshes, turning them fresh. After being threatened for years by overly salty water, most of the reefs in the Barataria and Lake Pontchartrain basins\u2014some of the state's richest oyster grounds\u2014were decimated.\n\nGossen and I stared at Collins's boat, dry-docked beside the bayou. \"Whenever I drove down to my beach house,\" Gossen said, \"I used to stop at Wilbert's and say, 'Please pick me out some good ones! A couple of sacks\u2014make sure they're real nice.'\" He shook his head. \"I don't want to see this die.\"\n\nLouisiana harvested some seven million pounds of oysters in 2010, down from 15 million the year before. Crabs aren't faring much better. The state's crabbers pulled in 53 million pounds of crustaceans in 2009 and 31 million in 2010, when some areas were closed because of the spill. With the fishery reopened in 2011, everyone expected a rebound, but that didn't happen. In the normally plentiful month of May, crab landings for the region that includes Bayou Lafourche were 460,068 pounds, down from 953,503 in May 2010 and 1,471,987 in May 2009. There were so many reports of crabs dying with mysterious infections that the state launched an investigation. Normally, when landings plummet, prices rise, but not when consumers suspect your product is contaminated. Prices had plunged from $1.42 per pound in 2009 to between 35 and 55 cents at the time of my visit.\n\nGossen and I continued down to Grand Isle. As we drove, he told me about another program he'd started at Louisiana Foods, to buy and promote forgotten fish like drum, almaco jack, and wild catfish. \"The goal is to cultivate new fishermen,\" Gossen said. \"As I get older, I've seen less and less fishermen. We losin' 'em, one by one. If there's no way for a young guy to get into it and make a living, he's going to go into gas or oil.\"\n\nLuckily, we had a Plan B: farmed oysters. Last year, Gossen teamed up with an oysterman named Jules Melancon and a professor from Louisiana State University, John \"Soup\" Supan, to build a nursery on Grand Isle. They wanted to grow oysters in wire cages, as is done in most of the world. This had never been attempted in Louisiana, thanks to the abundance of wild reefs. But after watching saltwater-loving predators deplete Bayou Lafourche for years, Gossen decided that farming was Louisiana's future.\n\nIn June 2011, Soup seeded the waters of Barataria Bay, which borders Grand Isle, with 100 million oyster larvae and supplied 250,000 baby oysters the size of match heads to the Gossen and Melancon's project. The idea was to grow the oysters on land, in barrels of water, until they were large enough to be transferred to the bay, where they would live in submerged cages that would protect them from predators. Melancon, a fourth-generation oysterman with underwater leases in Barataria Bay, provided the real estate, the boat, and the labor. Gossen provided the startup cash. The oysters weren't very big yet, according to Gossen, but I just wanted enough to fill out our gumbo.\n\nWhen we pulled up to the docks at Grand Isle, Melancon, 54, was scrubbing algae from plastic barrels filled with seawater and oysters the size of fingernails. He has huge shoulders and hands that seem to be made of petrified wood, the result of spending his teenage summers hauling 100-pound sacks of oysters from his grandfather's 400 acres of reefs, which were located in a marsh a couple of miles from where we stood. Now those reefs were entirely under saltwater, thanks to erosion, and surrounded by predators. The only option was cages.\n\nMelancon had no oysters for us. He took us out to his leases in his 23-foot flat-bottomed boat to show us why. For an hour we motored gently through the calm, flat water, passing flocks of ibises and pelicans, until we moored the boat and Melancon winched up a cage. It surfaced dripping black slime. The oysters were coated in shiny goop. Melancon plunged his tongs into the water and pulled up a jiggling mound of black pudding.\n\n\"What the hell is that?\" I asked.\n\nMelancon scooped some up with his hand. It held like shaving cream. \"I think it's oil,\" he said. \"Look how it stains your hand. Dat's carbon.\" Grand Isle is the sandiest spot in Louisiana. Its reefs are normally a pleasing jumble of shell and grit. But when Melancon checked this one on August 26, two weeks before I arrived, it was buried under a foot of black gunk. \"Dis land was clean,\" he said. \"Just shells and sand. Not all dis fuckin' bullshit.\"\n\nUpon discovering the gunk, Melancon called the mayor of Grand Isle. The next day, the Coast Guard and a state fisheries employee turned up to collect samples, which they delivered to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility\u2014the organization run by \"claims czar\" Kenneth Feinberg that adjudicates damage payments for BP. At the time, Feinberg had distributed about $5 billion of BP's $20 billion fund to 200,000 victims of the spill, who were granted payments of twice their documented 2010 losses in exchange for waiving the right to future compensation. (The exception was oystermen, who were granted up to four times their 2010 losses.) But an estimated 100,000 claimants have refused to settle, instead filing a monstrous class action. Now BP is arguing that future payments should be curtailed, since the Gulf's tourism and fishing industries have rebounded.\n\nSince the samples were submitted, Melancon had heard nothing. Now we scooped more samples into ziplock bags to send to an independent researcher at the University of Georgia.\n\nAccording to some scientists, the presence of oil near shore is a distinct possibility, though tracing it to Deepwater Horizon could be tough. \"It would not necessarily be surprising that there is some residual oil in these wetlands,\" said Don Boesch, professor of marine science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences, who served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010. \"However, that area is one of intense development by oil-and-gas companies. After a year and a half, the natural process would change the chemical composition of the oil from Deepwater Horizon. It becomes more difficult over time to identify oil with a specific well.\"\n\nSuch statements are of little comfort to Melancon. He dropped the mess over the side and motored back in. We drove the samples up Route 1, looking for a place to FedEx them. As we rode, Melancon told me how, after the spill, he had worked for BP skippering a Vessel of Opportunity, hauling boom on his boat. He was paid $3,300 a day. By my calculations, he earned half a million dollars, an amount that takes some of the sting out of losing your life's work. Many other \"spillionaires\" on Grand Isle saw similar paydays. The island is crawling with antique roadsters. But a lot of the spillionaires, like fishermen everywhere, have only a passing familiarity with the Internal Revenue Service. They had no idea a tax bill was coming and saved no money for it.\n\nMelancon, on the other hand, bought nothing. As a well-known boat operator with a 500-ton hauling license and no oysters to harvest, he was in high demand. As we drove, he took a call from a guy who offered him a job in Texas working as a barge captain for a chemical company. One hundred and thirty grand per year, plus benefits.\n\n\"Can't do it right now,\" Melancon said. \"I'm tied up with Jim on dis seed business.\"\n\nHe hung up, and then his phone rang again. It was a state official with the test results. \"Uh-huh,\" he said. \"But it's carbon. Smear it on your finger. You can tell. It's contamination.\" He hung up. \"Dey say it ain't oil,\" he told us. \"Dey say it's sludge. What's dat mean?\"\n\n\"Could mean a lot of things,\" I said. \"Maybe it's stuff that washed down the Mississippi.\"\n\n\"Never did before.\" Melancon Googled \"sludge\" on his phone. \"Semisolid material left from industrial wastewater,\" he read aloud.\n\n\"Maybe somebody opened up their holding tank over your reef,\" Gossen offered.\n\n\"I'm worried about my gumbo,\" I said.\n\n\"There's a place up here called Bob's Seafood,\" Melancon said. \"Maybe he's got oysters.\" He kept poking at his phone, eyebrows knit. \"Sludge. Sounds like contamination to me.\"\n\nBob's shop looked pretty barren: the stainless steel oyster-shucking station was gleaming and clean, and a nearby walk-in fridge was just about empty. \"Got any oysters?\" Melancon asked.\n\n\"I got one half-gallon tub from Chauvin,\" Bob said. Chauvin had dodged both the oil and the fresh water. \"Why?\"\n\n\"We gonna make gumbo,\" Melancon said.\n\nBob marveled at Melancon. \"Oysterman wants to buy oysters?\"\n\nIt was looking like our gumbo might be skimpy on crabs and oysters, so we decided to go heavy on the shrimp. Grand Isle, after all, is America's unofficial shrimp capital, complete with its own shrimp king. Actually, _don_ might be a better word.\n\nDean Blanchard, 53, is the only guy I know who's done time in prison for illegally transporting red snapper across state lines. He once drove to New York City's Fulton Fish Market in a Corvette and threatened a deadbeat seafood buyer with an Uzi. He fits in well on Grand Isle, a place that's proud of its pirate heritage, which dates to 1810, when the buccaneer Jean Lafitte set up camp nearby, smuggling slaves and rum into New Orleans by poling them up Bayou Lafourche.\n\nBlanchard is the top shrimp broker in the country, single-handedly responsible for 7 percent of the shrimp bought and sold in the U.S. At least he was. Since the oil spill, Grand Isle shrimp have been few and far between. Chances are you haven't noticed. While the Gulf Coast is still America's top shellfish producer, 90 percent of the shrimp you see in stores is imported from Asian farms. Louisiana shrimpers can't compete; three-quarters of them have disappeared in the past 25 years, a result primarily of competition from the East. When the last Gulf fisherman hangs up his hip waders, Red Lobster will not be fazed. Blanchard is not only the biggest shrimp buyer in Grand Isle; he's the last.\n\nWhen Gossen and I pulled up to Blanchard's house\u2014a newly renovated, _Sopranos-esque_ affair on an island of beach camps, built with internal steel beams to withstand hurricanes\u2014there were four men, one on a forklift, polishing his massive motor home, which he had just driven to and from the Saints-Packers game in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Next to it was a Hummer with decorative Saints plates. Dean was inside watching football in his recliner, wearing shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt.\n\n\"How are your shrimp?\" I asked.\n\n\"I wouldn't eat dat shit,\" he said, rubbing his spiky gray hair.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Dat water's poison. Every day, dey haulin' dead porpoises in front of my place. Wildlife says dey was dying before the oil spill. I say, Yeah? I musta been sleepin'. Cause I ain't never seen y'all haul one in front of my place before. Now I see y'all haul a hundred of these motherfuckers!\"\n\nIt should be noted that Dean is one of the claimants in the class action angling for a massive settlement with BP. He therefore may not be the most objective source. But his story more or less checks out. NOAA reported some 80 abnormal dolphin deaths between January and April 2010. Since the spill, more than 450 dead dolphins have washed up on Gulf Coast beaches. Many were newborns or stillborns, leading some biologists to hypothesize that ingested oil had contributed to a wave of miscarriages. NOAA has declared the situation an \"unusual mortality event.\"\n\nIf none of the seafood tested by NOAA showed oil contamination, how could the Gulf's marine life be so affected? A recent paper by LSU biologist Andrew Whitehead provides a clue. Whitehead examined Gulf killifish\u2014minnows that live in the marshes and are an important food source for many species\u2014before, during, and after the oil hit. He found that even tiny amounts of oil caused genetic abnormalities and tissue damage in the fish, enough to impair their reproductive abilities. And you wouldn't have known this simply by testing them for contamination.\n\n\"Though the fish may be safe to eat,\" Whitehead said, summarizing the report, \"that doesn't mean they are capable of reproducing normally.\" This problem may extend to other marine life. And many fishermen blame low yields on BP's dispersants, though the scientific jury is still out.\n\n\"The dispersant is biodegradable,\" said Ralph Portier, professor of environmental science and oceanography at LSU. \"The oil is biodegradable. So we're not worried about their presence over a long period. The real issue is whether the mixture of dispersant and oil made it to the marsh and had a catastrophic effect on key organisms. There are literally hundreds of scientists working on these problems, but right now there are too many variables and not enough data.\"\n\nPerched on his dock at the very edge of the Gulf, Blanchard has a unique vantage point to speculate on such things. And what he wanted to tell me was that the white shrimp season was a bust. \"White shrimp are born on the beach,\" he said. \"Dey ain't got a chance to go nowhere. Dey layin' in polluted fuckin' water. Dey dead! Unless dey like Jesus and can raise from the dead, dey ain't comin' back. Usually, I buy about 250,000 pounds opening day. This year I didn't buy one. First time in my life.\"\n\nAgain, Blanchard's not lying. According to Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, the white shrimp haul was down 80 percent across Louisiana in 2011. On November 30, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the poor season, Feinberg, the claims czar, announced that commercial crab and shrimp harvesters would be entitled to four times their documented 2010 losses, instead of two times, in exchange for waiving their right to sue. This was good news for the 1,000 or so shrimpers and crabbers still holding out but an affront to the 4,000 who had already accepted a settlement and were told that there would be no retroactive payments.\n\nI asked Blanchard whom he blamed for the disaster. \"The French media came and asked me whose fault it was. I told 'em Napoleon. He should've killed all the British at Waterloo. The German media came. I told 'em Hitler. He should've bombed 'em with the fuckin' Luftwaffe. The American media came. I told 'em it was George Washington's fuckin' fault. We been fightin' the British on this island since 1673.\"\n\nWe decided not to buy our shrimp from Blanchard. Instead, we bought it back up the bayou, in areas less affected by oil, from an old guy on a boat called the _Tootsie._ I paid for five pounds, and he shoveled about 20 into our cooler. As he handed it over, he said, \"Hey, lemme show you dis shit we found on the west side of the bayou.\" From the cabin of his boat he produced a tar ball and a big chunk of hard, black crude. \"Never seen nothin' like this in my life,\" he said.\n\nOn the way back to Grand Isle, we tuned in the local talk-radio station. A caller had hijacked the show and was on a full-blown BP rant. \"I blame Napoleon!\" he yelled.\n\nMaking gumbo is a social affair. That's the point. People gather, work side by side, drink beer, celebrate the bounty of the sea. Against all odds, that's what we did. Word spread around Grand Isle: gumbo at Jim's house. Melancon showed up with his wife, Melanie. Vincent and Ryan Comardelle didn't make it, but a guy who ran the port commission did, having heard the news. So did \"Soup\" Supan from LSU. He stared in mute horror at the photos we'd taken of Melancon's reef. \"Jules,\" he said, \"get those cages out of there.\"\n\nGossen boiled the shrimp to make a stock. I peeled off the tails. Gossen made the roux\u2014flour and oil simmered and stirred until it turns mahogany brown. Then he threw in onions, celery, and bell peppers. _Gumbo_ is an African word for okra, a mucilaginous vegetable that came over with the slave trade. Around New Orleans, okra is the standard thickener for gumbo. But down in bayou country, where there were no plantations, the gumbo has always been thin, heavy on the seafood.\n\nMelanie pulled a box of live crabs from the fridge. The chill had slowed them considerably. \"We down here at the end of the world,\" said Melanie, who has lived on Grand Isle all of her 50 years. \"Nobody knows what goes on here.\" Then she ripped a live crab in half. I'd never seen a woman do that before. Every now and then, a crab would warm up enough to sink a claw into her, eliciting a giggle. \"Oooh, he ticklin' me!\" she'd say. \"Stop dat, now.\" Then, with a twist, she'd pop his top shell off, pull out his lungs, snap off his mouth, wrap a meaty hand around each half of his body, and snap it in two. That put an end to the tickling.\n\nThe crabs went into the pot, guts and all. Once the crabs and veggies were cooked, we threw in the shrimp and oysters and turned off the heat. I'd never made a gumbo with live crabs and shrimp right off the boat. It was sweet as all get-out. I dipped my spoon in and fished up some shrimp and oysters. A crab claw protruded from my bowl.\n\n\"Nice job, Jim,\" I said, raising my beer.\n\nHis eyes got big. \"I just want to see it come back!\" he said.\n\nMe, too. But I wonder. Complex systems do complicated things. The night after Hurricane Katrina passed through southern Louisiana, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. We dodged a bullet, they said. And then the river came pouring through the levees. Since the spill cleanup ended, the government, the media, and the oil industry have been only too happy to announce that we got lucky. Wait and see, though. You can still hustle up a meal from the marshes of Bayou Lafourche. But a way of life is ending along the lengths of the longest Main Street in the world.\n\n### SERVING UP SUSTAINABILITY\n\n### By Erin Byers Murray\n\n### From _Edible Boston_\n\n### Cold New England waters offer very different seafood harvests, as no one knows better than Erin Byers Murray, author of _Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm._ So how do Boston chefs and restaurateurs define sensitive issues of seafood \"sustainability\"?\n\n\"Is this sustainable?\" Restaurant chefs are faced with the question regularly, especially when it comes to seafood. But as most of them are learning, there is no easy answer.\n\nDepending on what's on the plate (salmon, sea bass, tuna or lobster), the answer might be yes\u2014with the justification that it's caught or farmed in a way that maintains healthy fish stocks; that it keeps the ocean floor intact; and that harvesting it results in limited bycatch. All three, if true, would be valid answers, at least on the surface. But look deeper into any single species and the chef might be falling into murky territory.\n\nTake Atlantic bluefin tuna, for example. Right now, this local species is one to \"avoid\" according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch list. This list uses what the aquarium calls \"science-based, peer-reviewed and ecosystem-based criteria\" and many restaurant chefs rely on it, or others like it, to determine what to put on their menus. Bluefin has been on the list for several years, and in November 2010 the Center for Biological Diversity, a group that campaigns to protect endangered species, initiated a \"bluefin boycott,\" asking chefs to pledge to avoid serving the species and diners to pledge to avoid restaurants that serve it.\n\nBut if a chef were to talk to a small day boat fisherman working out of Plymouth or New Bedford last summer, he might reconsider the boycott. Fishermen working in and around those waters found the tuna to be considerably abundant, so much so that guys were hitting their season quota in just three or four days.\n\nBuyers were heeding the watch lists and avoiding bluefin altogether so the fishermen found that the wholesale demand had dried up. Yet the tuna fishery in Massachusetts is closely regulated so while landing a tuna might not have been considered morally correct, it was (and is) still very much legal. In light of the boycott and a dying market, would a fisherman throw the tuna back? Why, when landing a large one might bring him a large profit\u2014a profit that would help his business, feed his family and put money into the local economy?\n\nLooking at it that way, the chef's choice is easy: he's buying tuna from a local fisherman who caught the product legally and within regulations and in turn, he's showcasing a quality fish on his menu, which he likely got for a great deal because the market has pushed prices down. He realizes that he can turn a nice profit on the plate with that bluefin tuna\u2014and what's more, despite the boycott, people are going to order and eat it. So what if he's going against a watch list and an industry ban: Can the chef afford not to put that bluefin on the menu?\n\nThe answer is probably no. Restaurants all over Boston, no matter the size, shape or concept of the restaurant, will tell you that they have, in fact, put bluefin and other species like it on their menu\u2014and that customers continue to order it.\n\nIt is, undoubtedly, a complex web of issues that chefs struggle with every day. And because there are as many types of restaurants as there are fish in the sea, each chef will handle the situation differently. In the end, each chef needs to create his or her own definition of sustainability. Is it about the restaurant's bottom line? Is it about the fisherman's livelihood and buying local? Or, is it maintaining the population of a species?\n\nIt's about all of the above, and more.\n\nThe good news is that in Boston, many chefs weigh their buying decisions carefully. They study watch lists, they discuss options with their distributor, they ask questions of local fishermen. Sometimes, they make compromises. Other times, they draw a hard line and refuse to cross it. Either way, putting sustainable seafood options on their menu is a job that chefs have started taking very, very seriously.\n\n##### **Defining Priorities**\n\nChef Michael Leviton, who owns Lumiere in Newton as well as the newly opened Area Four in Cambridge, is well known for focusing on sustainable practices across his menu. (This spring, he was named the director of the board of overseers at Chefs Collaborative, a nonprofit dedicated to sustainability education.) When it comes to seafood, he defines sustainability through three different domains: environmental (a species that is caught or farmed using low-impact methods but also doesn't have to travel thousands of miles); economic (micro in terms of \"can he afford that fish?\" and \"can he put it on the plate for an amount his customers will pay?\"; macro in terms of the economics of our state and regional fishing industry); and social diversity (maintaining a 400-year-old industry). He also adheres to a strictly local policy by only using seafood from waters between the Chesapeake Bay and northern Canada and prides himself on knowing the name of every boat his fish comes off of, which he gets directly from purveyors.\n\n\"I drew the line at a certain point,\" Leviton says about his seafood choices. He long ago cut salmon from his menu altogether due to the environmental impact of shipping fish from thousands of miles away. \"So as long as there are other alternatives that are equally good I don't think it's an issue,\" he says. \"The first rule of running a sustainable restaurant is to keep your doors open. I am no good to the sustainable agenda if I don't have my pulpit,\" he adds.\n\nLeviton's practices might seem extreme but they resonate with other like-minded chefs. Steve Johnson, chef-owner of Rendezvous in Central Square, maintains a similar philosophy: Sourcing locally actually helps narrow his seafood buying decisions.\n\n\"It's made it easier for me to develop a very focused approach, which is that almost all of the species we serve are north Atlantic,\" he says. His priorities start with healthy fish stocks, so migratory species that are carefully regulated such as striped bass and blue fish, are served in season while a species like squid, caught off of Point Judith, Rhode Island, are on the menu year-round.\n\nBut Johnson admits that certain factors have to fall to the bottom of the hierarchy. Catch methods, for example, are less of a concern for him. While he's aware that squid and scallops caught with nets may have an impact on the ocean floor, he justifies purchasing them, saying, \"I have to believe that someone is working to improve the technologies so that we can have fewer issues environmentally.\"\n\nIn general, small restaurants that can update their menus frequently seem to have an easier time with local options. Fish Market, a tiny sushi restaurant in Allston, forgoes exotic species from Japan in order to utilize local species. Chef and co-owner Kin Chan says about 70% to 80% of his menu is locally sourced. \"There are plenty of options here: mackerel, sea bass, fluke, sea urchin,\" he says. \"I'd rather get it here than something that's been on a ship from Japan for two weeks. It's very important to me.\"\n\nOn the other end of the spectrum, larger seafood restaurants like Summer Shack have as many as five locations and serve several hundred diners a day.\n\nSummer Shack owner Jasper White says their seafood orders are tremendous. But White, who advocates strongly for the Boston harbor advocacy group Save the Harbor\/Save the Bay still puts sustainability at the top of his priority list\u2014and in his eyes, sustainability does not come down to watch lists. \"I question everyone. I question the integrity of some of those groups. I don't think they have much concern for the humans involved,\" he says. After opening his first Summer Shack in Cambridge, he became so frustrated with the regular seafood supply chain that he launched his own wholesale company. Run by former commercial fisherman Max Harvey, Summer Shack's wholesale arm supplies all of White's restaurants along with a few other select accounts. Because of Harvey's fishing background, he chooses to get information directly from the men and women who are out on the water every day. From his vantage point, he says he's seeing good change: \"There's been a lot of work done to rebuild certain stocks.\"\n\n##### **Gathering Information**\n\nDetermining where to look for trustworthy information takes practice, most chefs say. While some use watch lists as a guide, others dig deeper. Leviton speaks to his distributors\u2014Kim Marden of Captain Marden's Seafood in Wellesley and Ingrid Bengis, a seafood purveyor out of Stonington, Maine\u2014almost daily to learn what's coming off the boats. Others go directly to the fishermen themselves.\n\n\"I get as much of my information as I can from the people who are harvesting, growing and catching the fish,\" says chef Jeremy Sewall, a partner in Kenmore Square's Island Creek Oyster Bar who not only works closely with oyster farmer Skip Bennett of Island Creek Oysters but also with his own cousin, Mark Sewall, a lobsterman up in Maine. Those direct relationships have given him connections to other commercial fishermen who are helping him grasp what should or should not go onto his menu. So not only is he getting information directly from the source, he's also asking questions of his purveyors and others in the industry in order to get a well-rounded look at what is happening on the water. In some cases, he finds that he's the one educating his purveyors\u2014a role that more and more chefs find themselves in these days.\n\nAll of that information gathering gives Sewall the unique advantage of being able to read the market daily. \"You're seeing different species become more popular out of necessity rather than creativity,\" he says. he brings up the examples of fluke and sea trout, which are both delicious fish that have been scattered on menus for a long time but have recently become more popular now that some mainstream species (Atlantic halibut, cod) are showing up on watch lists. \"One fish is taking the pressure off another, which means fishermen have had to go to alternative species to fill the void of things they just can't offer like they used to,\" says Sewall.\n\nIn Gloucester, restaurant owner Mark McDonough is located close enough to the docks so that he can literally have conversations with fishermen every day. And he does. his restaurant Latitude 43 buys directly from the smaller, family-run day boats that come in and out of Gloucester harbor because, he says, \"we believe that if we buy local, we're safe.\"\n\nChris Parsons, the chef-owner of Parsons Table in Winchester chooses to take it even one step further: he discusses many of his seafood buying decisions with two marine biologist friends from Rhode Island. \"They opened my eyes to the larger story,\" Parsons says, explaining that they've given him in-depth background information on what goes into salmon farming. That knowledge has helped him shape a plan for buying from farms that use low-impact methods. \"I'm not an expert,\" he admits. \"I could read some articles online and base my decisions on a little bit of research but that won't give me the full picture. Working with these guys really helps me cut to the chase.\"\n\n##### **Factoring Cost**\n\nMaking responsible choices is just part of the equation. Most chefs will admit that ultimately what they serve comes down to price. \"There will always be critics that say farm-raised salmon is bad. And yes, I think wild king salmon is the top of the line in terms of a well-managed species but it is ungodly expensive,\" says Jeremy Sewall. \"It's hard to put a piece of fish on the menu at $44 per plate. Your guests aren't going to feel like they can come in every day and order it.\" Instead, he says, the farmed salmon he uses, farmed salmon from the Faroe Islands, \"has a minimal impact on the environment and they're pretty responsibly raised.\" And he only charges $26 for it.\n\nFor other chefs and restaurants, dollars and cents equal out to more than just the final tab. Karen Masterson, a co-owner of Nourish restaurant in Lexington, considers the cost to the fishermen themselves. This spring, she started working with Cape Ann Fresh Catch (CAFC), a community-supported fishery, on a pilot program that incorporates restaurants into the community-supported model; Cape Ann now delivers weekly shipments of fish directly from Gloucester day boats to her restaurant kitchen. (CAFC is looking to launch the program at other restaurants, including Dog Caf\u00e9 in Gloucester, this summer.) The setup is risky in that Masterson never knows what she might get (whole yellow-tail flounder one week, cod filets the next). But once she receives the shipment, her kitchen staff comes up with specials and that's what she serves through the weekend.\n\nWhile it is undoubtedly more expensive than working with a traditional wholesaler, she's chosen this route because CAFC provides a direct conduit to the fishermen. So instead of spending money with a third party week after week, she's paying slightly more to receive fish directly from the boat\u2014and her dollars are going right back to the fishermen. \"It's a truer cost of our food. From my perspective, that's a more just purchase,\" she says.\n\n##### **The Hook**\n\nEven while chefs struggle with making sustainable decisions, they do it knowing their efforts are part of a larger movement. For Steve Johnson, that means keeping his dollars in the local economy. \"People in our own community, in Gloucester, are suffering. In this small way, I know I can keep my money here,\" he says.\n\nMichael Leviton sees a larger impact. \"Part of doing what I do is the hope that there is this eventual trickle-down in sustainability,\" says Leviton. \"That it just becomes the way we do things so that everyone can afford it.\"\n\n### KIDS BATTLE THE LURE OF JUNK FOOD\n\n### By Maureen O'Hagan\n\n### From _Pacific Northwest Magazine_\n\n### Battling America's childhood obesity \"epidemic\" takes more than preachifying, as _Seattle Times_ reporter Maureen O'Hagan examines in this award-winning three-part feature story. This first installment profiles a pair of obese teens and the daily minefield of temptations they navigate.\n\nNathan Stoltzfus has a problem.\n\nIt starts first thing in the morning, when he catches five or 10 minutes of TV just before heading out the door to Northshore Junior High. \"There's these commercials for Cookie Crisp cereal or Pop-Tarts,\" he says. \"They show some really happy kid eating them.\"\n\nOver at school, he makes his way to homeroom as the smell of French toast drifts from the cafeteria.\n\nAt lunchtime, he sees a sign over the ice cream and cookies. It says, \"Treat yourself today.\" He tries to focus on his veggie-filled sandwich. But invariably, one of his buddies will jump up for another run through the lunch line. \"Who wants to come with me to get some cookies?\" the kid'll ask.\n\nTo Nathan, this innocent question is a trap. As the heaviest kid at the table, he tells himself, keep your eyes on the veggies. But he also wants to fit in. \"It's very tempting,\" Nathan says. \"You feel like you almost have to do it in order to be friends.\"\n\nNow, Nathan's just 14, but he's no slouch. He's articulate, creative, has a good group of friends and seems to take time to think about what he's doing. He's dedicated, too, singing for years with the Northwest Boychoir.\n\nHe's also been overweight for most of his life. To him, it feels like a curse.\n\nAnd the pressure never subsides. There's the school's annual pie day to celebrate \"pi\"; there's the group Slurpee runs after school; the torment of his skinny brother devouring Oreos; the weekend trips to the mall. \"A couple weeks ago, there was like 16 of us. One of the guys said, 'Oh my gosh you have to try this ice cream,'\" he recalls.\n\nWhat's a kid to do?\n\nRight now, leaders here are trying hard to help. In the past decade, local agencies have been awarded at least $53 million in grants and other funding to combat obesity\u2014most of it in the past year. They've enlisted hundreds of partners in this effort, and they're using some of the most newfangled approaches.\n\nWithin the next year, for example, they'll have spent at least $1.8 million getting healthy produce into corner stores. In the next two years, another $276,000 will be spent on building school gardens. Money will go to rejigger P.E. curriculums, train cafeteria workers and try to get kids to walk to school.\n\nStill, all this effort will miss one of the biggest battlegrounds of all: what's going on inside Nathan's head.\n\n\"Treat yourself today,\" the sign in the cafeteria commands. Just say no, Nathan tries to tell himself. Let's call this the Temptation Complication.\n\nIt's a problem for Nathan. It's a problem for tens of thousands of overweight kids in Washington. And it's a problem for all of us.\n\nIt'll take a lot more than school gardens to dig our way out of this one.\n\nPeople who work on childhood obesity often talk about how different the world was a generation ago. When she was a kid, University of Washington researcher Donna Johnson told me, soda was a special treat. Now, sugar-sweetened beverages are just a few quarters away, in the school vending machine. In surveys of Washington adolescents, about 40 percent said they drank at least one soda yesterday.\n\nWhen he was a kid, former FDA Commissioner David Kessler says, there weren't coffee shops on every corner selling super-duper, fat-and-sugar, grande frappa-yummies. There wasn't the cacophony of chips and cookies at every gas station.\n\nWhen I was a kid, I recall, we ate pretty much what our parents ate. Now, vast product lines are designed just for youngsters: the Go-Gurts and Lunchables and drink pouches. Experts say more new food products are introduced each year for kids than for adults. And guess what: Studies show kid food has more sugar than the adult version.\n\nAnd don't even get me started on the \"fruit leathers\" and \"fruit snacks\" with nary a drop of juice. \"When I was a kid,\" snickers Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, \"they were called jelly beans.\"\n\nThis special kid food is sold on special TV stations created just for kids by special advertising execs who study youth culture as if they were researching a doctoral thesis.\n\nMeanwhile, kids are noshing practically nonstop. \"Your product doesn't have to be for a meal anymore,\" says Laurie Demeritt, president of the Bellevue market-research firm the Hartman Group. \"Now there are 10 different 'eating occasions' throughout the day.\"\n\nWhat we have here is a supply problem. Food is everywhere. That means temptation is everywhere. If Nathan makes healthy choices half the time, it's probably not enough.\n\nBut the Temptation Complication has another layer, one that's older than Go-Gurt and Nickelodeon and Mountain Dew. It has to do with biology.\n\nPatsy Treece says her daughter, Hannah, has a \"face that radiates kindness.\" She's right. Her eyes are a beautiful brown; her smile shines. At age 13,Treece says, Hannah's the kind of kid who'll stop to help if someone gets hurt on the playground.\n\nShe also has an appetite that won't quit.\n\nAt dinner, she'll ask for seconds, even thirds. \"I'm really, really hungry,\" she explains.\n\nWell, maybe not hungry exactly.\n\n\"It's just that if I see something good,\" she sighs, \"I automatically pick it up and eat it.\" Like a lot of us, she gets pleasure from food. But afterward, she also feels pain.\n\nHannah's twin brother is slim and athletic, but her mom is also overweight. Treece has tried different diets with Hannah. She's tried sports. Delay. Portion control, using 100-calorie snack packs. \"She'll have a couple of them,\" Treece says.\n\nDon't even mention Flamin' Hot Cheetos. \"She would kill somebody to get a package of those,\" Treece says. \"It's almost like a compulsion.\" No kidding. Remember the old ad campaign, \"Betcha can't eat just one\"? That was Lay's Potato Chips. The same company makes Hannah's Cheetos.\n\nSome people simply _can't_ stop. There's science to prove it, says former FDA Commissioner Kessler.\n\nHere's a guy who fought Big Tobacco. He's a doctor; he knows what's healthful. Yet until recently, he could come undone over a chocolate-chip cookie. \"I have suits in every size,\" he says ruefully.\n\nOur desire to eat doesn't originate in the stomach, really. We're wired to crave salt, sugar and fat, Kessler says. You see it in laboratory rats, too. They'll brave the possibility of electric shocks to keep eating their junk food. Even _bacteria_ swim to sugar.\n\nThere's more.\n\n\"We used to think people were lazy or it was a question of willpower,\" Kessler explains. \"I can now show you the (brain) scans. The vast majority of people who have a hard time controlling their eating have excessive activation of the brain's emotional core.\"\n\nWhen you eat things like cookies or Cheetos you get an immediate reward. You feel good. Your brain actually changes when you eat that stuff, Kessler explains. The neurocircuitry gets rewired. Stumble across a \"food cue\"\u2014maybe an ad for cereal, or the smell of French toast\u2014and suddenly, your brain lights up. Your thoughts slip into those newly laid tracks and can't get off, like the way your skis follow along in a cross-country trail. Your brain, Kessler says, gets \"hijacked.\" And the new pathway is reinforced further. Scientists say it's not exactly that we're addicted to food, but it sure is an awful lot like that.\n\nProblem is, these food cues are everywhere. \"We're living in a food carnival,\" Kessler says.\n\nSo we're not just fighting temptation like Nathan. We're battling our very biology, that automatic response that makes Kessler crumble at the thought of cookies and Hannah unshakable in the face of orangey-red salt.\n\nLet's call this the Cheeto Compulsion. Betcha can't eat just one.\n\nHilary Bromberg, strategy director at the Seattle brand\/communications firm Egg, says they sometimes put clients through a little exercise: _Talk about your food history._ \"They enter almost a trance state,\" she says. \"They say, my grandmother made me this, or my mother made me this. There's this visceral attachment.\"\n\nEating, in other words, isn't some sort of clinical calculation of calories. Most people aren't thinking, _Gee, I better have carrots instead of cake because I didn't get my five servings of vegetables today._ \"Food is a source of sensual pleasure,\" Bromberg explains. \"The emotions around food are profound.\" She's saying this as a marketing maven. She's also saying this as someone who studied cognitive neuroscience at Harvard and MIT.\n\nNathan's mother, Susan Stoltzfus, knows this, too. \"Food has been that comfort or that source of consolation or that sense of belonging,\" she says. It's immediate, too\u2014unlike losing weight, which requires forgoing that sense of pleasure over and over and over. \"How do you live for that delayed gratification?\" she wonders.\n\nNathan and Hannah might not explain it the same way. But they understand. Food is pleasure. Food is family, culture and tradition. Food is love.\n\nLet's call this the Comfort Connection. And I'm willing to bet it's within arm's reach right now.\n\nMarlene Schwartz, a clinical psychologist at Yale University, suggested a little experiment. Ask a roomful of people, _Who thinks junk-food marketing works?_ All the hands will go up.\n\nAsk, _does it work on you?_ The hands will vanish.\n\n\"I think people decide, once it's in their pantry, it's no longer junk food,\" she says. Talk about getting inside your head. These marketing guys can put an idea in there and you don't even know it.\n\nAnd it's growing even more sophisticated. Food producers have long hired experts to survey thousands of consumers at once. But in the past decade or so, the behind-the-scenes work has become even more stunning in its scope and highly particular in its findings. Some of the topics food marketers have studied recently: mother\/daughter baking rituals; parents' stress level on car trips; the habits of kids at sporting events; how preschoolers are using their parents' smartphones; the traits of parents who are strict versus parents who are more permissive\u2014and what it all means for their kids' eating habits. There's an entirely new genre of marketing and advertising firms, in fact, that focus on youth culture.\n\nMeanwhile, in the past decade or two, says Demeritt of the Bellevue market-research firm, food-marketing companies also started going directly into people's homes. Shopping with them. Asking detailed personal questions. It's called ethnographic research, and it's being done in many cases by social anthropologists. Hordes of psychologists have been enlisted, as well, to better get inside consumers' heads.\n\nThe result is that marketers know exactly how families eat, what they eat and why. They know what makes them keep coming back, even when they know it's probably less nutritious.\n\nTake Go-Gurt, for instance. It's one of the most successful kid foods ever. Moms are doling it out for breakfast, yet it's got more sugar per ounce than Coke. Yoplait sells $129 million worth of this stuff a year. Unnatural-hued goo in a squeezable tube!\n\nHow did Go-Gurt come to be? Really good research. In phone interviews, typical consumers would say breakfast was a sit-down, family affair. But when General Mills hired an anthropologist to spend time with ordinary families, she discovered they were actually eating on the go. A niche was identified: Families could use something portable. And squeezable yogurt was born.\n\nIt appeals to a kid's taste buds for sure. But the makers of Go-Gurt aren't selling that, per se. They're selling fun, coolness. Remember Kessler and the way food activates the emotional core? Bingo.\n\nThe opportunities to hit that emotional core are greater than ever. Advertisers can reach kids on their own cable channels. They can reach them on the Internet\u2014for a lot less money. At the same time, they'll learn even more about them. Marketers know the search terms consumers enter, the information they put on social-networking sites, the pages they view and countless other metrics. Companies are prohibited from collecting personal data on users less than 13 without parental permission, but a _Wall Street Journal_ investigation found even youngsters' online activities were being tracked, and in some cases offered for sale to advertisers. \"Youth in 2010 will be the first generation in the post-digital economy the retailer will know by name,\" one marketing report said last year.\n\nCheck it out. There are Go-Gurt pages on Facebook. Go-Gurt videos on YouTube. There's even a Go-Gurt game. Betcha can't quit at one.\n\nLast December, Demeritt's firm conducted a nationally representative survey about weight issues. Forty-two percent of people said childhood obesity is a big problem. But among the same people, only 3 percent agreed it was a problem in _their_ family. \"It shows you why people don't really do anything about weight,\" she says.\n\nOther studies have found that most people aren't driven by a desire to be healthy. Instead, they judge their own weight in relation to their peers. If your peers are heavy, there's less motivation to reduce. As it turns out, we have a lot of heavy peers.\n\nAnd look what we're up against: the Temptation Complication, the Cheeto Compulsion, the Comfort Connection.\n\nThen there's the sheer firepower of food producers. \"I remember a honcho at the CDC looked at me and said, 'They're way smarter than we are, and they have more money,'\" the UW's Johnson recalls. She spends a lot of time nowadays thinking about the food environment, how it's easier to get Cheetos than it is to get an apple. But even if apples were everywhere, I ask her, would Nathan choose them? Would Hannah forgo her Cheetos? That's a tough one, she says.\n\n\"Most of us,\" she says sadly, \"are going to choose fat and salt and sugar over foods that don't have those things in them.\" It's biology. It's culture.\n\nThen she thinks, what if apples were made to seem more appealing? \"It's not like Madison Avenue is inherently evil, right?\" she muses. \"If we could harness that . . . oh, man . . . Think of the potential of what they could sell.\"\n\n### PASTORAL ROMANCE\n\n### By Brent Cunningham\n\n### From _Lapham's Quarterly_\n\n### Is back-to-the-land agrarianism the answer to American food reform, or just another salvo in the culture wars? Political journalist Brent Cunningham, who is deputy editor of the _Columbia Journalism Review,_ offers some healthy skepticism, based on grassroots research in a struggling Rust Belt city.\n\nBetty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.\n\nPhoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo's thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour's drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.\n\nRecently, over lunch in Betty Jo's cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter's notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: \"Leave it. There's nothing romantic about it.\"\n\nLeave it? But isn't Green Acres the place to be? Listening to the conversation about food reform that has unspooled in this country over the last decade, it's hard to avoid the idea that in terms of food production and consumption, we once had it right\u2014before industrialization and then globalization sullied our Eden. Nostalgia glistens on that conversation like dew on an heirloom tomato: the belief that in a not-so-distant past, families routinely sat down to happy meals whipped up from scratch by mom or grandma. That in the 1950s, housewives had to be tricked by Madison Avenue marketers into abandoning beloved family recipes in favor of new Betty Crocker cake mixes. That the family farm was at the center of an ennobling way of life.\n\nEvidence of the nostalgia abounds. There is an endless series of books by urban food revolutionaries who flee the professional world for the simple pleasures of rural life, if only for a year or so: _Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land; Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg; The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir._ A new crop sprouts each year. There's Michael Pollan's admonition, in his best-selling book _Food Rules,_ to not \"eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.\" And then there are countless articles about the young and educated putting off grad school to become organic farmers. A March 5 piece in the _New York Times_ is typical. Under the headline, \"In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges,\" it delivers a predictable blend: twenty-somethings who quit engineering jobs to farm in Corvallis, Oregon\u2014microbrews, Subarus, multiple piercings, indie rock, yoga. This back-to-the-landism is of a piece with the nineteenth-century, do-it-yourself fever that has swept certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, complete with handlebar mustaches, jodhpur boots, classic cocktails, soda shops, and restaurants with wagon wheels on the walls.\n\nThe surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. PepsiCo now has throwback cans for Pepsi (the red-white-and-blue one Cindy Crawford famously guzzled in the 1990s) and Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they've replaced \"bad\" high-fructose corn syrup with \"good\" cane sugar. Frito-Lay is resurrecting a Doritos chip from the 1980s (taco-flavored, a sombrero on the package).When nostalgia is co-opted by corporate America and sold back to us, as it invariably is, the backlash can't be far behind. Consider this the opening salvo.\n\nIt's unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that \"Food used to be better\" so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn't. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn't very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.\n\nI came to Huntington last November with my wife, the food writer Jane Black, to research a book about the effort to build a healthier food culture there. This is where celebrity chef Jamie Oliver last year debuted his reality television show, _Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution,_ after the Huntington metro area was labeled the nation's most unhealthy community by a 2008 Centers for Disease Control study. It is a place that has suffered the familiar litany of postindustrial woes: a decimated manufacturing base, a shrinking population, a drug problem. It is also precisely the kind of place where the food-reform movement must take hold if it is to deliver on its promise of large-scale and enduring change.\n\nHow would the messages and assumptions that have powered the movement in the elite enclaves where it took root over the last decade\u2014like Brooklyn, where we live, Berkeley, Washington, DC, etc.\u2014play in communities like Huntington? Places where most people don't consider Applebee's and Wal-Mart to be the enemy. Where the familiar and the consistent are valued over the new and the exotic, especially when it comes to what's for dinner. Where a significant portion of the population lives in poverty or perilously close to it.\n\nJane and I suspected that the environmental, social justice, it-just-tastes-better case for eating seasonally and sustainably that our foodie friends consider self-evident would be met with skepticism\u2014or shrugs\u2014by people who have more pressing concerns than the plight of tomato pickers in Florida or the fact that cows are meant to eat grass, not corn. Nostalgia, though, did not immediately register with us as part of the movement's message problem. Perhaps because we live in the same world as the people who write those My-Year-Doing-X books, foodie nostalgia only seemed an innocuous, if annoying, bit of yuppie indulgence.\n\nBut in Huntington we kept meeting people like Betty Jo. Alma Keeney, for instance, who also grew up on a farm, is baffled by her daughter-in-law Shelly's decision to launch a goat-cheese business. Shelly runs the fledgling Yellow Goat Farm with her friend, Dominique Wong, and together they tend their Nubian and Alpine dairy goats on a small plot in Proctorville, Ohio, just across the river from Huntington. The eighty-seven-year-old Alma, Shelly told us, prefers individually wrapped American slices of cheese, not \"farm food,\" which brings back memories of hard times. Jane and I started thinking about the uncritical, even simplistic way that our agricultural past\u2014and our kitchen-table past\u2014are referenced in American society generally, and in the conversation about food reform specifically.\n\nThe farmer is among the most enduring figures in the American pantheon. \"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,\" wrote Thomas Jefferson in _Notes on the State of Virginia,_ his classic work on the promise of the American experiment. The agrarian ideal\u2014a belief that the family farm is the soul of the nation, a pure embodiment of our democracy\u2014is a recurring theme in the national narrative. In 1782, J. Hector St. John de Cr\u00e8vecoeur, in his _Letters from an American Farmer,_ celebrated the notion of independence and self-sufficiency that is central to the story: \"Where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us?\"\n\nThe exalted status of the farmer has influenced political strategy and policy decisions throughout our history: in New Deal legislation that sought to place the family farm, which struggled mightily during the Depression, on par with other industries primarily through price supports; in an amendment to the Selective Service Act of 1940, which granted deferments to young men who were \"necessary to and regularly engaged in an agricultural occupation\"; in the creation of the U.S. food-assistance program in 1954, which pitted the stalwart American farmer against the menace of Soviet collectivized agriculture. And it surely informs the nostalgia that shrouds today's food-reform movement. One can essentially trace a through line from Thomas Jefferson's romantic image of the farmer to a recent defense of rural America in the _Washington Post_ by Tom Vilsack, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture: \"There's a value system there. Service is important for rural folks. Country is important, patriotism is important.\"\n\nToday most of us are so removed from the agricultural life, and so ignorant about its realities that this wholesome and nostalgic lens is the only one we know. Research by the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank employed by nonprofits to strategically reframe public conversation about social issues, found that for Americans, \"Rural Utopia\" is the dominant image of life beyond the cities and suburbs: a countryside \"filled with poor but noble, tough and hardworking people living healthier and fundamentally better lives than the rest of us.\" This despite the fact that the reality in rural America today is one of decline: unemployment, rising divorce rates, a scramble to get out. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, farming is the nation's fourth-most-dangerous job.\n\nStill, nostalgia has been a useful tool for the food-reform movement. It has provided a blueprint for how to think about and act on the daunting environmental, moral, and health problems associated with our industrial food-system for people who have the resources\u2014financial, social, and educational\u2014that allow them to participate in the movement if they so choose, and that predispose them to be sympathetic to the cause in the first place. Whether they started raising chickens in their backyards or simply became better informed about how their food is produced, this idea that we've lost our way has helped make food _important,_ and in ways that go beyond simple sustenance.\n\nMost of these food revolutionaries won't become actual farmers, and most of those who do\u2014including those microbrew-swilling kids in Corvallis\u2014won't make a career of it. But the movement has, I suspect, permanently changed their attitudes toward food, and this alone is already forcing modest systemic change. Since 1994 the number of farmers' markets in the U.S. has risen from 1,700 to more than 6,000. And between 2000 and 2009, organic-food sales grew from $6 billion to nearly $25 billion\u2014still less than 4 percent of total U.S. food sales, but it's a start. Twenty years from now, most of these young \"farmers\" will have rejoined the professional ranks. Like their middle-class forefathers who tuned in, turned on, and dropped out in the 1960s, the appeal of financial security and a climate-controlled office will, in most cases, win out. That said, they probably won't be regulars at McDonald's, and they'll instill these values in their own kids.\n\nNevertheless, a \"bourgeois nostalgia\" pervades the food-reform movement, as Amy Trubek, an anthropologist at the University of Vermont who studies food and culture, points out. This is a perception of our food history that is the luxury of people who have little or no experience with farming, or more generally with manual labor. A perception that appeals to those who have never had to cook from scratch, let alone milk cows, kill chickens, and bake bread, just to get food on the table every day. A perception of people for whom it makes perfect sense to redefine their _leisure_ time to include things like making _guanciale_ or Meyer-lemon marmalade. As such, it may not resonate with great swaths of the public who don't fit this demographic profile, and it is a perception that ignores some crucial truths about our food history.\n\nThe reality of America's food past is far more complicated, and troubling, than is suggested by the romantic image at the heart of our foodie nostalgia. In _Revolution at the Table_ and its sequel, _Paradox of Plenty,_ the historian Harvey Levenstein provides a more sober, and ultimately more useful, accounting of that past. Levenstein shows how, starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth, food preparation steadily migrated outside the home. The reason is simple: if you have no choice but to plan and prepare multiple meals every day, cooking not only isn't cool, it's tedious and damned hard work.\n\nJane and I experienced this firsthand in West Virginia. We both are skilled and enthusiastic cooks, and as part of the reporting for the book, we wanted to see how well, and local, we could eat, and for how much money, preparing three meals a day. But we also understood that we were the kind of people for whom cooking is a hobby. Outside our door in Brooklyn, there is a cornucopia of options for the nights when we are busy or not in the mood to cook. In Huntington, though, most of those options are missing. Three months in we began to notice, with dismay, that as soon as one meal was finished, we had to start thinking about the next. Four months in, the joy of cooking was replaced by a growing irritation, a longing to amble down the block for _banh mi_ or a bowl of ramen. By mid-March, Jane wrote in her journal, \"Officially sick of cooking.\"\n\nBetween 1880 and 1930, the fruits of industrialization\u2014canning, bottling, the growth of food manufacturers and restaurants\u2014enabled the outsourcing of food preparation that Levenstein describes. Improved transportation\u2014first the railroad and then the automobile\u2014and food-preservation processes\u2014refrigerated rail cars, for instance\u2014brought an end to seasonal and regional restrictions on what we ate. Soon, people in Kentucky had the same food choices as those in New York or California.\n\nThe standardization of the American diet, so bemoaned by people like me, is what many\u2014maybe even most\u2014people want at mealtime. It is reassuring to have what everyone else has. The desire to have the same Big Mac in Syracuse as in San Diego is a big part of why fast-food outlets became America's default dining-out option, and why suggesting that as a nation we return to a more seasonal and regional way of eating will be a tough sell.\n\nThe family farm itself was not immune to these developments. By the 1920s and '30s, the gap between city and farm diets had begun to collapse, as processed foods became high-status items in rural areas. Poor Appalachian farmers began to prefer canned hams to country hams; farm women who could afford store-bought canned vegetables and other processed food embraced this new convenience without a second thought that they were abandoning a purer, nobler way of life.\n\nThere's a reason that less than 2 percent of people in this country are engaged in farming today, and it isn't simply that they've been driven off the land by Cargill and ADM. Just like Betty Jo Patton, many of them wanted things to be easier. This revolution at the table\u2014the one that produced the food culture that today's revolutionaries are trying to counter\u2014was considered a tremendous leap forward. It was modern. It gave people time for things other than keeping the family fed.\n\nThere is an even more fundamental concern about our nostalgia: America's food system has always depended on the exploitation of someone, whether it was indentured servants, slaves, tenant farmers, braceros, and other guest workers, or, now, immigrants. In his ode to the American farmer, Cr\u00e9vecoeur made it clear that he had a little help on his farm. \"My Negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy,\" he wrote. This is an aspect of our agricultural heritage that rarely gets mentioned in the mainstream conversation about food-system reform, and it raises thorny questions about who actually grows, harvests, processes, and prepares the food in a capitalist society. We have no history of a food system that does not depend on oppression of some sort, and it seems unlikely that we will be able to create a future system that avoids this fate. The leaders of the food revolution have, in recent years, begun to speak out on the matter of farmworker rights. But few acknowledge\u2014at least in the public debate\u2014that if a central goal of the movement is a more equitable food system, then the notion that we once had it right is deeply problematic.\n\nExploitation is as true in the kitchen as in the field. Women have always borne the burden of transforming the raw to the cooked in the American home. Interestingly, it was a confluence of these two inconvenient truths about our food past\u2014its reliance on women and exploited labor\u2014that helped set the stage for our national embrace of fast food.\n\nDuring the Gilded Age following the end of the Civil War, and continuing into the early twentieth century, America's rapidly expanding ranks of wealthy industrialists used extravagant dinner parties, featuring French haute cuisine, as a way to showcase their status. Hosts and hostesses sought to outdo one another: chefs were imported from France; eight courses were standard, as were menu cards, elaborate centerpieces, and a labor-intensive style of service known as _\u00c3 la Russe,_ which involved a butler carving and arranging the food on plates at a sideboard, which were then delivered to guests by servants. (The traditional style had been to fill the table with platters and bowls and let the guests serve themselves.)\n\nThe fetish for French cuisine, and all the attendant showmanship, quickly trickled down, and the nation's middle-class, which also was expanding, sought pecuniary emulation of this conspicuous consumption. Competitive dinner parties became a fixture of middle-class social life. And it wasn't just at dinner; there were also multicourse luncheons and high teas to pull together. The problem, though, was that middle-class households couldn't afford the number and quality of servants necessary for this kind of entertaining. This \"servant problem,\" as Levenstein calls it, became something of an obsession for American housewives, who saw it as the main obstacle to fulfilling society's expectations of them.\n\nTheir plight led to various time-saving experiments, including cooperative kitchens\u2014in which meals for multiple families were prepared for pickup in a central location\u2014and the first home-meal delivery services. The former failed because they were regarded as a violation of the \"ideal of American family life,\" a critique that had more than a whiff of antisocialist sentiment. The latter, it turns out, was simply an idea ahead of its time. These delivery services conformed to what was then considered the standard for a \"proper meal\": three courses and a menu that changed daily. As such, they were too expensive to be sustainable. The inability to solve the middle-class servant problem led, eventually, to a new conception in American society of what constituted a proper meal: simpler, cheaper, and of course, faster. We know how that story turned out.\n\nBy misrepresenting\u2014or misunderstanding\u2014our food history, we make a realistic conversation about what to change and how to change it more difficult than it already is. America will not revert to a nation of family farms. Convenience will always be important. Seasonal and regional limitations on what we eat can only go so far. If Americans want to cook like their grandmothers, fine, but the fact is our grandmothers, by and large, made only a handful of meals, they made them over and over again, and they used plenty of shortcuts, courtesy of the industrial age. My grandmother's cornbread, which still remains the gold standard for cornbread in my family twenty years after her death, began with a Martha White mix.\n\nNostalgia is part of a larger message problem that food revolutionaries face as they attempt to broaden the appeal of their cause. For example, when Wal-Mart announced earlier this year that it would, over the next five years, reduce the amount of sodium by 25 percent and added sugars by 10 percent in its house brands, and pressure other food manufacturers whose products it carries to follow suit, the overwhelming response from within the food-reform community was, \"That's not good enough.\"\n\nIn Huntington, and in communities across the country, Wal-Mart is where a lot of people get their food. They like the way the food there tastes. If that food has less sugar and salt\u2014incrementally less so that they will still like the way it tastes\u2014that is an important, and realistic, step toward a healthier food culture. Wal-Mart has many bad policies, but it's shortsighted to write off every initiative just because it comes from Wal-Mart. New ideas about food need to conform to people's social and economic aspirations, and those aspirations are going to be different in 2011 than they were in 1900, and they will be different, too, in Huntington, West Virginia, than in Brooklyn, New York. Achieving fundamental and lasting change in our food system will require the efforts of those yuppie farmers in Oregon who can afford to step outside the mainstream food culture and, as they say, vote with their forks. It will also require the more hard-won, incremental reforms at the big food processors and sellers, like Wal-Mart, that feed the great mass of people who either can't or won't vote with their forks.\n\nSomewhere in the middle of these two efforts, hopefully, we can eventually arrive at a food system that makes sense for the twenty-first century. But the process of figuring out what that will look like needs to begin with a full and honest accounting of where we've been, and what's possible given where we are.\n\n## Farm to Table\n\n### SWEET SPOT\n\n### By Paul Graham\n\n### From _Alimentum_\n\n### When novelist and English professor Paul Graham drove a tap into the one maple in his yard, he bottled more than syrup\u2014he captured in words the poetry of coaxing golden elixir from a tree. His debut short story collection _Crazy Season_ was released in summer 2012.\n\n##### **1. Reveille**\n\nThe other day, I turned a corner while walking my dog in town and suddenly, finally, knew the _bon mot_ for the taste of the late-winter air in northern New York. It tasted _tarnished._ I'd been worrying the language for weeks, and then there the word appeared, dull on my tongue, a little bitter. The light, the wind, the dampness: these all tasted faintly oxidized, like a dented old bugle my grandfather had played with when he was a child and one year presented to my brother. The bugle slept in a closet until someone impulsively decided to hold the bell to the other's face while he lay soundly sleeping, tongue the brassy mouthpiece, tasting metal and neglect, and explode one flatulent, croaking note. In March I seem to hear that sound constantly\u2014spring's pathetic reveille\u2014as the days lengthen but bring no other relief. The snowy silence no longer feels refreshing, as it did early in December, when the flakes fell big and clung to the pine-boughs. Forget my stores of books and firewood, forget my full freezer, my loving wife and good dog. By now the sky has reabsorbed the sand and rock salt grit, the frozen dogshit and trash in the jagged plow-furrows, seemingly with the intention of flinging them back in my face.\n\nI'm waiting for 40\u201320. Forties during the day, twenties at night. Not a big deal most places, but here, it's better news than the arrival of the first robin. Robins can lie to you like any other courier. You also can't eat them, or at least _I_ haven't.\n\nWhen I finally see those numbers on the nightly news around the first week of March, I look at my wife and ask, Is this guy to be trusted? How many forecasts has he blown recently?\n\nThe urge to cheat, to set the taps early, is strong. It's not bad for the tree, only your pride; you'll be the one sad fool in the county with galvanized buckets hanging from his tree while the snow swirls like sand.\n\nI choose a weekend day to tap, so I can boil the first catch of sap that very evening. Even if the yield is only a few tablespoons, like holy water, the first run is powerful stuff. The syrup speaks of hope, and of promises kept, in the way of all seasonal foods: apples, tomatoes, berries, venison. Early in the morning I walk outside with the Makita. I bought it years ago for home improvements, knowing even then I'm not that type. I use it once a year, on average, to drill \u00be\" holes in a sugar maple. I can hear my furniture-maker grandfather smacking his forehead with his palm somewhere on the other side of the grave.\n\nWe have only the one tree, a haphazardly trimmed 60-footer that turns orange in October. I'd never have thought to tap it if our old neighbor, a poet who worked in an Adirondack sugarbush with several hundred trees, hadn't tapped _his_ one tree. One, it turns out, can be more than enough and not nearly enough at the same time. I've tried to picture the yield from 1500 taps and can only get as far as a fleet of tanker trucks and an acre of fire.\n\nThe holes go waist-high on the western side, which receives more sun and delivers more sap. I sink two taps with a rubber mallet. I reserve a third in case one dries up. Immediately the juice starts running, dribbles to the metal lip, and trembles in the sunlight before falling into the bucket with a flat _plunk._ It seems impossible that I'll empty these buckets twenty, thirty times, but I will.\n\nThe sap, when I lift a drop to my lips, tastes of the purest, cleanest water.\n\n##### **2. First Haul**\n\nThe first day is always a good run, the tree primed like a well-oiled pump, and when I walk outside at four o'clock, I can't believe my eyes: the buckets are half full. If I don't get started on a boil now, I'll be up all night. I pour the two buckets into one and pour that into a heavy stockpot on the strongest burner. Fire it up. Walk away.\n\nIn thirty minutes, the sap will boil. A layer of scum needs to be skimmed off the top.\n\nIn three hours, the sap reduces by half. The kitchen smells honeyed. The brew in the pot is the color of light beer.\n\nIn four hours, it needs to be transferred to a wider, shallower pot, filtered again, and re-boiled.\n\nIn five hours, the kitchen smells of vanilla. There may be almonds, honey, butter, or hazelnuts, too, depending upon the year. There's surprisingly little \"maple\" flavor. The poet-friend accurately compared maple syrup made from one tree to single-malt Scotch.\n\nThen the syrup begins to foam in the pot with a tidal fizzing. I must watch it carefully now, observe how it coats a spoon. There are instruments, hydrometers and thermometers, but I don't do precision. This explains why, although I'm a good cook, I'm a miserable baker\u2014I can't be bothered, even though I know better.\n\nHow close to disaster do I want to ride? The longer the boil, the more intense the flavors, but if I push too far, the syrup will harden when it cools. I'll have to chip the crystals out of the jar with a fork and suck on the shards.\n\nIt's late. The dog chases footballs in his sleep, his nails clicking on the floor. My wife's knitting needles tap. I'm tired, so I kill the burner and pour the syrup into a clean ramekin. There's no need to sterilize a jar. This stuff won't make it to morning.\n\n##### **_Recipe for First-Boil Syrup_**\n\nIngredients:\n\nAs much maple syrup as you just made\n\nA spoon\n\nA ramekin or small bowl\n\nA partner, if you're the generous type, in which case you'll need two spoons and ramekins\n\nIn the steamed-over windows and soft light, pour the limpid syrup into the ramekin and eat it still warm. Close your eyes. Marvel at the power of nature, wonder at the Indians who were first bored or desperate or clever enough to boil down tree-water for a whole day _just to see what happened._ Who the hell _does_ that? You're in their debt. Taste honey, vanilla, floral notes. Feel the back of your throat burn with the sweetness of winter's end.\n\nGo ahead, make yourself sick. Pancakes? Overrated and too much trouble.\n\nIf you have an embarrassment of riches, pour the warm syrup over vanilla ice cream. But just how much syrup would that _be,_ though?\n\nAnd look\u2014it's already gone.\n\n##### **3. Doubters**\n\nEven up here, in the heart of the country, they exist. Like this one: sixty-something, windbreaker, her pant cuffs stained by puddle-splash. Dogless. I've never seen this snow troll before, and I wonder what thawed snowbank she's crawled out of. She looks at me kind of walleyed as I'm at the end of my driveway collecting sap one week into the season.\n\n\"You're not boiling that _inside your house,_ are you?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It'll take your wallpaper right off. It'll turn your walls yellow.\"\n\nWe've been home-making maple syrup for three years now, and we have had zero wall-issues. But we don't have wallpaper. After stripping nearly all that came with our house, we have unflattering things to say about people who do have wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman nailed it. I once called the stuff The Official Decorating Choice of Hell. After fifty-some boils, my kitchen walls are still white. True, the exhaust fan over the stove burned up in the middle of last season, but that could have been anything\u2014a faulty part, spiders in the wiring, or, most likely my aggressiveness in general as a cook. I love heat. _Sear_ is one of my favorite verbs, _smoke point_ one of my favorite temperatures. I revel in culinary accelerants: brandy, amaretto, oil, chili paste. There is often fire\u2014intentionally. The hiss of deglazing makes me hoot. I've been meaning to replace that exhaust hood, but electrical wiring is not my forte, and what are windows for? It's 44 degrees already, after all.\n\nI pity this woman and all of her kind. She appears unaware that nothing great ever gets made the easy way.\n\n##### **4. Regarding the Holes in the Tree**\n\nThey cannot be plugged up. Not with old wine corks, not with DAP, not with cement, rubber or real. Once I've drilled them, the sap won't stop flowing for a month. I won't stop boiling until the yield is so low that it's no longer worth the trouble. Unless I'm using all of those hours while the stove steams to build a time machine that will enable me to go back two weeks _and not pick up that drill,_ I'm in it for the duration.\n\nI know this in theory, but on days when I have other things to do, because I'm running a typical household, not a sugarbush, it will seem as if that maple tree is cranking out liquid just to spite me. On a good day the buckets fill several times, and I pour them into a 5 gallon water cooler barrel. One barrel is about eight hours' boiling with all the burners running, meaning that night dinner will be Thai takeout, or Mexican, or cheese and fruit, but never out at a restaurant, because only a fool would walk away from a kitchen with that much fire pouring out of it. I'd like to expedite the process, but that seems begging for trouble.\n\nJust yesterday I heard about someone on the other side of town who burned his garage down while trying to do a boil in\u2014of all things\u2014a turkey fryer. He had too much sap and he needed to raise the temperature _fast,_ apparently.\n\nThese are my people. Sort of.\n\n##### **5. A Steep and Slippery Slope**\n\nMeaning both downward and upward. Downward in the sense that after only _one_ season, let alone several, you can never go back. Log Cabin, Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth, anything that comes in a plastic jar or, Godhelpus, a tiny rectangular pack from Kraft with a peel-away top\u2014it's criminal. I'll pay extra for a vial of the real stuff if I have to, though in northern New York we have syrup like the Gulf has shrimp, so it often comes for free. A year we lived in western Pennsylvania stands out as one of the darkest in my life for many reasons, not the least of which is the crap they expected you to dump on your pancakes.\n\nAnd upward, in the sense that someone always seems to have a better setup. Like a friend who taps his maples _and_ his black walnut tree. One year I finally got my hands on a jar of his black walnut syrup, trading it, I'm sad to say, for some amateurish bottles of homebrewed beer I'd made. Not even the guilt of sticking it to him could keep my brain from lighting up in neon\u2014black walnut syrup is earthy, sweet, nutty-green, with the texture of molasses. I took a walk through our tiny village lot after pouring the syrup on oatcakes as he'd recommended, hoping to find that I'd mistaken a walnut tree for a scrub pine. Thwarted, I surveyed the treeline for anything else that could be tapped. _What about that tree over there? Or that one? Arborvitae sap? Yellow birch? Why not?_ People have gotten themselves killed this way, I'm certain.\n\n##### **6. Potential**\n\nMarch is the time of the year for maple festivals, where you can watch what the big boys do and sample all sorts of maple products. We've never been. We have our own maple festival nonstop for several weeks, and we seem to invent a new product every day. Of course there are the usual suspects: pancakes, waffles, French toast, regular toast with a small beaded drizzle in the butter; but we also pour the syrup over ice cream, into ice cream, and can make sorbets and gelatos; use it in place of sugar in breads, cakes, and cookies; in homemade barbeque sauce, salad dressing, and mayonnaise; as a background to sauteed Thai chiles, pad Thai, and other stir fries; with fruit, yogurt, Kefir; alone, out of the jar, like a shot of whiskey on a rough day; shot _with_ whiskey, like a sweet boiler-maker, on a rougher day; as a glaze for chicken, salmon, pork, and shrimp; over oatmeal, with cinnamon and nutmeg; in a pan sauce, like Madeira; in place of honey with strong cheeses. The limits are your own apprehensions and the amount you're willing to risk wasting should the flavors fall into dissonance. The only way I _haven't_ had it is as the Canadians do, dumped into a pile of clean snow on a cutting board outdoors and stirred up with a stick, then eaten, communally, with a spoon.\n\n##### **7. Gifts**\n\nWhether any recipient of DIY maple syrup knows it or not, the value of the gift is always high, might be called equal in dollars to the yield in ounces squared (at least), where yield is the product of a completely idiosyncratic and therefore unpredictable product of temperature, time, and sugar level. I don't know a damn thing about higher mathematics, but it seems chaos theory might be useful here.\n\nWhat I do know is that most maple producers say 40 gallons of sap yields an average of 1 gallon of Grade-A syrup. Our numbers may be higher early on, lower a little later. We'll put up 1 gallon or so a year, spread across an oddball collection of jam, jelly, sauce, mason, and other jars. Some jars, the best, we'll mark with smiley faces, a special cache.\n\nI give jars away reluctantly, and only after attempting to verify that Aunt Jemima is nowhere on the recipient's premises, the apparition of her broad-shouldered, placating form in a kitchen cabinet being, like wallpaper, deeply revealing in a number of ways.\n\n##### **8. Anxiety and Its Cure**\n\nYou begin anticipating the temperature and then move to obsessing _over_ the temperature. The end can come quickly, and not always predictably. One week the temperatures hold steady in the 40s during the day, maybe toeing 50 as if considering the idea, and then one afternoon the wind shifts and the mercury shoots into the 60s. You can recover from only one 60 degree day, but not three or four. It doesn't matter if the temperatures drop again; the syrup will be thinner, the taste not as complex, suitable for baking, perhaps, but barely. In a good year there are two or three weeks in the forties and you can see the warm-up coming. I hate to curse the spring, but I'm never ready to let go unless the season has been so good that the tree has bullied me to exhaustion. I always want just one more jar socked away for August, when the blueberries are as deep as the January snows, and for January mornings, when the snows themselves are deep and we self-medicate with elaborate breakfasts of French toast and local bacon.\n\nBut the season _does_ end, of course. It must. The arrival of the bees in April tells you all you need to know. One day they just appear around the buckets, a little drunk on the sunlight, circling wildly, too drowsy to sting. The rest of the run is theirs. If you keep collecting and boiling, you're only the fox from Aesop. I grab the pliers and pull out the taps, dropping them into the bucket with a bittersweet, metallic clank. The sap begins weeping down the trunk of the tree, staining the sidewalk.\n\nInside, I count the final take, squirreling away jars in various cabinets and corners of the kitchen and pantry so we can forget and rediscover them one night in November. The next season seems a long way off, but now, standing in the sunlight, it's easy to idealize the winter that must come first. Spring will atone for ending the boils with wild leeks and mushrooms in May. Not too long after, there will be garlic and strawberries. Then tomatoes, and watermelons, and winter squash. You can play your favorites, and we do, but the truth is that it's never too far to the next good thing.\n\n### SNOWVILLE CREAMERY HAS A MODEST GOAL: SAVE THE WORLD\n\n### By Eric LeMay\n\n### From _Edible Columbus_\n\n### Poet, essayist, writing teacher, webmaster Eric LeMay\u2014author of _Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese\u2014_ pursues his longtime obsession with dairy products from his home in Athens, Ohio.\n\nPouring milk from Snowville Creamery feels blissful. When you pick up the carton, you're greeted by a lovely dairymaid who seems to embody the countryside, with its green pastures and rustic fences. She wears a white fluffy bonnet and wholesome dress. At her bosom, she cradles a pitcher, as though she were Mother Earth pouring out the milk of human kindness. Behind her, the sun rises, encircling her with its hopeful glow.\n\nThis is milk made mythic, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to meet Warren Taylor, owner of Snowville Creamery. The other is the milk itself, which is thick and frothy and delicious. The first time I tried it, I drank a quarter of a gallon, glass after glass. I thought it was a milkshake.\n\nHow, I wondered, did a small diary nooked in the hills of Southeast Ohio produce milk this good? Who was this man behind the maid?\n\nNow, having spent some time with Warren, I see that maid differently: She's wearing a red bandana around her forehead and raising a revolutionary fist in the air. She's marching down Independence Avenue, passing out leaflets on the dangers of genetically modified foods and hydraulic fracturing. And she's smiling, because she's looking forward to a fight. She's going to take on huge corporations who want to strip our food of its nutrients and flavor. She supports our local businesses serving our local communities. She wants our kids drinking healthy milk from healthy cows raised on a healthy soil.\n\n\"Love your food,\" she cries. \"Love each other.\"\n\nShe wants us to join a revolution.\n\n\"This isn't about _this_ ,\" says Warren.\n\nWe're outside, standing on the slope of a hill, looking up at what's essentially a pole barn. It's the milk plant that Warren designed from the ground up, and he's telling me how it takes advantage of gravity: Every time Snowville processes and packages milk, they have to flush the plant's metal pipes with hot water and cleaner. This happens multiple times and generates waste. Thanks to the hill, however, this waste funnels down into a huge tank on the plant's lower level. But then what? You've still got to deal with hundreds of gallons of cleaner-filled wastewater. Turns out that Warren uses cleaners that are different from those used in most dairies. His contain nitrogen and potassium hydroxide.\n\n\"And you know what those are, don't you?\" he asks.\n\nI don't. I don't know 1% of what Warren knows about dairy. Luckily, Warren gets a kick out of teaching it. He has a catchy \"Isn't this so cool?\" vibe about him, even when he's describing chemical cleaners.\n\n\"Fertilizer!\" he booms, nodding toward a nearby field where cows graze. In the distance, an unassuming sprinkler spritzes the grass.\n\nGradually, I get it: That's the wastewater. \"Instead of contaminating the water supply,\" says Warren, already moving on, \"we're nourishing the soil.\"\n\nI'm hustling after him, trying to keep up, as I fit this latest information into my growing picture of the plant. So far I've learned about\n\n\u2022The genetic makeup of the 260 cows that provide Snowville with their milk. They're Jersey, Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Milking Shorthorn, Friesian and Holstein, all intermixed by years of cross-breeding. They're heartier and give healthier milk than the huge Holsteins that are confined on most dairy farms.\n\n\u2022The grazing practices used to feed the herd, which rotate through many different pastures rather than remaining confined to one, so that the cows can rebuild the topsoil instead of depleting it.\n\n\u2022The minimal amount of processing Snowville does to its milk, which leaves the milk's nutrients and flavor intact rather than pasteurizing and homogenizing them out of existence.\n\n\u2022The eco-friendly and taste-preserving cartons in which Snowville packages its milk. And the delivery schedule\u2014from cow to store in less than 48 hours\u2014that keeps its milk so fresh.\n\nAnd that's just what I've managed to scribble down, because Warren is now detailing the spatial layout of the plant. Its core, where the raw milk goes from storage tanks to finished cartons, takes up only 600 square feet, which saves space, energy and money.\n\n\"So what _is_ this about?\" I finally get to ask. I can't imagine putting so much care into creating a milk plant that isn't about milk.\n\n\"This,\" says Warren, \"is about building a canoe. This is about where you go with it and what you do with it.\"\n\nA canoe seems a bizarre metaphor for a milk plant, but I press on. \"What do you want to do with it?\"\n\nWarren doesn't hesitate: \"Save the world.\"\n\nSave the world? With milk? The idea sounds absurd, the sort of thing proclaimed by a zealot or a madman. That absurdity isn't lost on Warren.\n\n\"I'm hoping to be the Che Guevara of dairy,\" he says.\n\nAnd sure enough, on the flipside of his business card, hiding behind that milkmaid, is a smiling Che. There's also a quote: \"The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.\" Che isn't Warren's only guiding spirit; you can add John the Baptist and Neal Cassady.\n\n\"And what about that milkmaid?\" I ask.\n\n\"That's not me,\" says Warren, throwing a friendly, quit-messing-with-me elbow into my chest. \"I'm the Hunter S. Thompson of dairy.\"\n\nWarren grins when he says stuff like this\u2014it's not every dairyman who compares himself to a Marxist revolutionary, a religious prophet, a psychedelic muse and an antiauthoritarian wild man\u2014but his eyes have an edgy gleam. He's not joking. He's got the messianic, near-manic glow of a visionary, because he has a vision: This small milk plant in Pomeroy, Ohio, is going to spark an international movement of social justice.\n\nBut how? That's a fair question. And when you ask it, you see that Warren also possesses the keen intelligence of an engineer. He can make his case coolly and methodically, even when it comes to saving the world:\n\nFirst, take a food as essential to human existence as milk. Then build a dairy plant that provides this food for people in a safe, natural and healthy state. Run that plant in an environmentally sustainable manner. Then integrate that food and that plant into the local community and economy, so that it provides both good jobs and good nourishment for the people it serves. Then make that plant a model, make its design freely available to anyone who wants it, and mentor those who want to emulate it, so that milk plants like Snowville pop up around the country and around the world.\n\nAnd don't stop with dairy. Let the principles that guide Snowville\u2014sustainability, community, harmony and love\u2014catch on and spread. Let them inform how we grow all of our food, how we run all of our businesses. And show people that this is really possible, right now, by starting with one small milk plant in Pomeroy, Ohio. Save the world.\n\nIf that sounds like unattainable vision, so be it. Warren pursues it tirelessly. He regularly works 100-hour weeks at the plant, and when he's not dealing with broken delivery trucks or carton fillers, he's speaking at universities, community centers and city council meetings about the need for sustainability and the dangers of hydraulic fracturing. He's traveled to Italy to represent Ohio as part of the worldwide Slow Food Movement. He's testified at USDA hearings on behalf of small dairies against regulations that unfairly favor mass producers. He's started initiatives for feeding livestock with grain that isn't genetically modified and worked for more honest and clear labeling of dairy products. He's helping to create a food distribution center in Columbus, so he and other producers can pool their resources. In essence, he's working to develop an infrastructure for delivering local food to local people.\n\nAnd yet, amidst all this, he can't resist riffing on the best way to eat an ice cream sandwich, or the mindset of a martial artist (\"You've got to expect to get hit\"), or how to domesticate a wolf.\n\n\"I wouldn't want to control Warren,\" says Victoria Taylor, Warren's wife and partner. Victoria is the plant's co-owner and general manager and she's equally savvy about Snowville's larger vision. She'll quietly turn from giving a group of employees shipping instructions to telling you about the omega acids in milk or the effect of herd grazing on the North American landscape. She struck me as the still point of Snowville's spinning world. After 25 years of marriage, she's come to a conclusion: \"You adapt to Warren.\"\n\nSure enough, once you hear about Warren's family history, you understand that he couldn't be anyone or anyway else. Warren's brother is the president of Daisy Brand, the largest sour cream producer in the world, and his father, a renowned dairy taster, worked in the dairy industry for 35 years. Warren got his dairy tech degree from Ohio State University in 1974 and three years later he was working for Safeway, the largest milk processor in the country. He spent three decades as a dairy engineer and consultant for plants that processed up to 300,000 gallons of milk a day. (Snowville, by contrast, processes 60,000 gallons a month.) He knows every facet of the industry.\n\n\"Cut me and I bleed white,\" he'll say, and you get the sense that dairy and destiny fuse in Warren, that his family made him into who he is.\n\nThat's true, but not how you'd think. For me, what most revealed the man behind the milk wasn't when I heard about Warren's father the dairyman, but Warren's father the Navy pilot. During the Second World War, he led the Medical Evacuation Squadron in the Pacific. Warren told me about one of his father's rescue missions to evacuate sailors who had survived the sinking of the USS _Indianapolis._ The ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine after delivering the atomic bombs to an air base on Tinian island. Of the ship's 1,196 crewmen, only 316 survived. On the way to pick them up, Warren's father and the pilots of the six other planes who were flying alongside him learned they were heading into a typhoon. Four of the six turned back, but not his father. And he made it.\n\n\"I realize now, my father didn't expect to live,\" says Warren, his voice going quiet, \"but he didn't turn back.\" He pauses and takes a deep breath. Then, like a bull readying for the charge, he digs at the ground with his foot. \"That's what I told the USDA the last time I was in Washington: I'm not turning back.\"\n\n### MATTERS OF TASTE\n\n### By Barry Estabrook\n\n### From _Tomatoland_\n\n### In _Tomatoland,_ Barry Estabrook exposes how agribusinesses compromise the environment, exploit migrant workers, and obliterate the taste of Florida tomatoes. Estabrook's investigative food journalism has appeared in _Gourmet, The Atlantic, Gastronomica,_ and on his blog politicsoftheplate.com.\n\nIn early 2010, I enjoyed a supermarket experience that I'd never had before. I bought a pretty, stridently red winter tomato that actually tasted like something. It was by no means a great tomato, harboring only hints of the flavor wattage of a vine-ripened August tomato, but it was nonetheless unmistakably a tomato, in taste as well as appearance. As is de rigueur with so-called premium produce nowadays, my purchase, which weighed three-quarters of a pound and cost $3.47, versus 80 cents a pound for its nearby commodity cousins, bore a little sticker with the trademarked name Tasti-Lee. A few days later, I returned to the same store hoping to replenish my tomato larder, but the Tasti-Lees had all been sold. And I was left to ask, what made this tomato so different? How come I had never heard of it? Why don't all supermarket tomatoes taste like it did? And where could I get more?\n\nWith those questions on my mind, I drove to the University of Florida's Gulf Coast Research and Education Center, a curvilinear structure faced with pinkish bricks that rises like a space station from the endless fields of strawberries and tomatoes a half hour's drive southeast of Tampa. There, in an office crammed with all manner of tomato kitsch\u2014coffee mugs, antique labels for packing boxes, framed vintage magazine advertisements for Campbell's Tomato Soup, tomato piggy banks, tomato salt and pepper shakers, and teetering stacks of\u2014who knew\u2014 _The Tomato_ magazine\u2014I met John Warner Scott, a professor of horticultural sciences. Scott, who is known far and wide in the tomato business as \"Jay,\" is one of the most prolific breeders of new tomatoes in the state. Over his three-decade career at the university, he has developed more than thirty varieties, although he doesn't keep track. \"I haven't gone back and counted in a while,\" he told me. Unlike seedsmen who rely on molecular biology, DNA sequencing, and in the case of some crops, genetic modification, Scott is the last of a dying line of old-fashioned plant breeders. His tools are the same ones the great nineteenth-century tomato grower Alexander Livingston used to develop the Paragon: a keen eye, a disciplined palate, and superhuman reserves of patience. Each year, Scott grows several hundred different varieties of tomatoes, called \"parent lines,\" in test plots surrounding the Gulf Coast center. His goal is to find plants with complementary traits\u2014one may have disease resistance but low yields, another high yields but weak immunity\u2014and crossbreed them hoping that some of the offspring will carry the best traits of both parents. Toiling in the hot sun, Scott pulled a floppy sun hat over his close-cropped graying hair and plodded through the rows, notebook in hand, carefully examining each plant and ticking off a mental checklist: How many fruits has it set? Are they big? Do they have cracks? Are their bottoms smooth and rounded, or do they still have scar tissue where the blossoms fell off? What's the color like? \"With some of them, you can just look at the plant and just throw it out,\" he said.\n\nIf a plant passed visual muster, Scott took out his pocket knife and, still standing in the field, lopped off a slice and tasted it. \"Plant breeding is a matter of seeing what's good,\" he said. \"But you can't make any decisions based on one season. You have to grow a variety a lot of times in a lot of environments to see if it's really good.\"\n\nTasti-Lee is not perfect. Its fruits are smaller than commercial growers like. But it is as close as Scott has ever come to finding Tomatoland's Holy Grail\u2014a fruit thick-skinned enough to shrug off the insults of modern agribusiness, but still tender at heart and tasting like a tomato should. . . .\n\nDeveloping a better tomato can take years, and even then, there is no guarantee that it will be picked up by professional growers and have a shot at commercial acceptance. Florida's multimillion-dollar tomato industry is littered with once promising but now forgotten varieties. But in early 2010, after more than a decade of painstaking growing, breeding, and crossbreeding, Tasti-Lee left the rarified confines of academic test plots and rigorously monitored consumer-tasting panels to try to make its way in the competitive hurly-burly of the produce section. If Tasti-Lee lives up to its early promise, Scott will achieve a plant breeder's version of immortality. The rest of us finally will be able to head to the local supermarket any day of the year and bring home a half-decent-tasting tomato.\n\nBut it won't be an inexpensive tomato. Scott developed the Tasti-Lee to provide farmers in his state with a crop that can be planted outside to compete with hydroponic, greenhouse-grown tomatoes, the latest competitive threat to the Florida fresh tomato industry. Beginning from almost nothing in the early 1990s, greenhouse tomatoes expanded from a tiny niche-market novelty mostly imported from Europe to a mainstream produce item. They are now in every supermarket and account for about 10 percent of fresh tomato sales. Although Florida's field-grown slicing tomatoes remain as popular as ever in the food-service industry, sales have declined sharply in supermarkets. With Tasti-Lee, Scott hopes to give growers a baseball-size tomato that packs the same flavor as the popular ping pong ball\u2013size salad tomatoes produced in greenhouses and often sold in clusters on the vine. \"It seems to me that it would be a win-win situation,\" said Scott. \"Consumers tend to be spoiled. They go into the grocery store and they expect to see fresh tomatoes any time of year, even if they grumble about the quality. I want people to buy Tasti-Lees because they like them, not just because they are the only tomatoes there.\"\n\nLike many plant varieties, Tasti-Lee owes its existence to a combination of serendipity and the time-sharpened instincts of a great plant breeder. In Florida, the summer of 1998 was a terrible season for anyone trying to grow a tasty tomato. For some unknown reason\u2014too wet, too cloudy, too hot\u2014Scott's tomato field tests failed to produce fruits with any sweetness. Even tried-and-true varieties that had been sweet during previous years tasted dull. But one morning after tasting fifty varieties, each more bland than the other, Scott spotted a nice-looking tomato called Florida 7907. He picked a fruit, cut off a wedge, and popped it into his mouth. \"Aha!\" he said.\n\nIt was sweet, but Florida had one big flaw that made the variety a nonstarter for commercial production: It was too spherical. Florida growers like their fruits to have defined shoulders and slightly flattened bottoms. And that's only one item on a list of must-haves. Because producers are paid strictly by the pound, plants first and foremost must produce high yields of large, uniform fruit. They have to be able to resist diseases and tolerate extremes of heat and cold. And their tomatoes need to have a long shelf life. Taste enters the equation, if it enters at all, only after all those conditions are met. \"Sometimes I wonder why we even bother with flavor,\" said Scott. \"There is no easy way to breed for taste. It's not like there's one genetic marker that tomatoes must have to taste good,\" he said.\n\nThe structure of a tomato also makes breeding for both taste and toughness a difficult balancing act. The grocery part of a tomato, called locular jelly, has most of the all-important acidity. The pericarp tissue, the walls of a tomato, give it strength and some sweetness, but no acidity. The harder a tomato is, the more bland it is likely to taste. Even if you have a perfect balance of sugars and acids, there are still many obstacles in getting decent-tasting tomatoes from field to consumers' kitchens. Most Florida tomatoes are picked at the so-called mature green stage. Under ideal circumstances, a mature green tomato, reddened by being exposed to ethylene gas, will ripen and develop a measure of taste\u2014not great taste, but something. The problem is that short of cutting one open, there is no definite way to tell a mature green tomato from one that is simply green. Inevitably, some immature tomatoes get picked and they will never develop flavor, although the ethylene will give them the appearance of ripeness. Finally, even if all else goes according to plan, a tomato can lose its taste if exposed to cold temperatures at any time between harvest and being eaten, after which point it can never recover it. Crop specialists even have a scientific term for this process: \"chilling injury.\" Whether it happens in a truck, warehouse, produce section, or home refrigerator, a tomato that is held at temperatures lower than 50 degrees soon becomes a tasteless tomato. For reasons unknown, chilling reduces the fragrant volatile chemicals that are all-important in giving the fruit its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, keeping tomatoes cool extends their shelf life, too, so the temptation to refrigerate dogs tomatoes every step of their journey to the table. Years of efforts by a plant breeder can be destroyed by a few days in a refrigerator.\n\nScott was also developing a line of what he calls \"ultrafirm\" tomatoes during the same season he happened on the sweet-flavored 7907. Among those he was developing was a tomato called Florida 8059. It was hard and had the right shape. Sensing a match made in heaven, Scott crossbred the sweet but too-spherical 7907 with the firmer 8059, and in the fall of 2002 the first of what was then referred to as Florida 8153 ripened. Scott thought the new hybrid carried the best traits of both parents. At trials conducted by the university, consumers on test panels agreed. Time after time, 8153 beat out other tomatoes. Subsequent chemical analyses showed that the fruit had a desirable balance of sugars, acids, and volatiles. It also had a surprise bonus: Both of its parents possessed what plant breeders call the \"crimson\" gene, which was originally revealed when the pioneering tomato geneticist Charlie Rick crossed a wild _L. chilense_ (a relative of the domestic tomato) with a commonly grown variety. The crimson gene gives 8153 a striking fire-engine red color and an extraordinarily high level of lycopene, a sought-after antioxidant. \"It sounds like magic, doesn't it?\" said Scott. \"It really is, in a way.\"\n\nFlorida 8153 had everything going for it, except for a catchy, appetizing name. Scott christened and trademarked his new baby Tasti-Lee, Lee being the first name of his mother-in-law, a tomato lover who had encouraged and supported his research through the years. \"You hear lots of stories about bad mothers-in-law, I had a great mother-in-law,\" Scott said, a flash of emotion overcoming his usual deadpan. \"She had tasted what was then still just called Florida 8153. She really liked it and encouraged me. Sadly, she fell terminally ill. I went to visit her in the hospital. She was in a coma at that point, but I took in a tomato anyway and showed it to her and told her that I was going to name it after her. I like to think she heard me.\"\n\nFour seed companies lined up to bid for rights from the university to produce and distribute Tasti-Lee seeds. The winner was Bejo Seeds, Inc. A large, family-owned, Dutch firm with offices around the world, Bejo's specialties are cabbage, carrots, and other cool-weather crops. \"We felt that marketing would be a key to Tasti-Lee's success,\" said Scott. \"It seemed like Bejo would be hungry to get into the tomato market and that they would push Tasti-Lee pretty hard.\"\n\nThe job of giving Tasti-Lee that push fell to Greg Styers, Bejo's sales and product development manager for the southeastern United States, who has been known to board airplanes lugging twenty-five-pound boxes of tomatoes as carry-on baggage. \"We had a vision to start with a grassroots movement,\" said Styers. \"We were going to start with roadside growers and chefs. People who were interested in good flavor and good quality. Then we were going to work our way up.\" It didn't turn out as planned. Styers, who was looking for a grower who shared his vision that Tasti-Lee was \"born to be a premium tomato,\" approached Whitworth Farms, which grows vegetables on seven hundred acres near Boca Raton, making it a small player in the Florida tomato business. \"Whitworth was big enough to deal with some large retailers, but small enough that they were willing to take a chance on Tasti-Lee. It was a perfect fit for us,\" said Styers.\n\nOne of Whitworth's customers was Whole Foods Market. Glenn Whitworth, who owns the farm along with his sister and two brothers, approached one of the company's produce buyers. Weeks went by before the buyer would even schedule a meeting with Styers and Whitworth. When they did finally get some time, Styers stopped by a Whole Foods store beforehand and bought one of every tomato on display and added a Tasti-Lee to the mix. On the basis of that impromptu conference room taste test, the buyer agreed to test-market Tasti-Lee. In February 2010,Tasti-Lees began appearing in sixteen Whole Foods stores in Florida. By late March, reorders were coming in faster than Whitworth could grow Tasti-Lees. Later that spring, Whole Foods stores as far north as Washington, DC, began to carry Tasti-Lees, and by the end of the year, other retailers and even a few restaurant chains were expressing interest. \"I think the stars really lined up for Jay when he developed this variety. It truly is remarkable,\" Styers said.\n\nScott, who drawls his carefully chosen words with little inflection and almost no emotion, didn't go that far. \"I stand behind it,\" he said. \"For a full-size tomato, it's better in my opinion than what's out there. Hopefully, it goes.\" If it doesn't, Scott has plenty to keep him busy. He's currently developing heat-tolerant tomatoes, tomatoes with resistance to the virulent leaf-curl virus, and tomatoes that can be grown on the ground and theoretically harvested by machine. And he hasn't given up on flavor. \"In some work we've done, there is this fruity-floral note that adds pique to the sweetness,\" he said. \"We've crossed a big, crimson tomato with that trait into one of Tasti-Lee's parents. The result might have even better flavor.\"\n\n### OLIVES AND LIVES\n\n### By Tom Mueller\n\n### From _Extra Virginity_\n\n### Living in Liguria in an ancient stone farmhouse surrounded by olive groves, writer Tom Mueller found ready inspiration for this groundbreaking book about the international olive oil trade\u2014its frauds, its failures, and the artisanal producers striving to restore honor to the label \"extra virgin.\"\n\nFor the De Carlo family olives mean home, not only because their family tree has intertwined with their groves and with oil-making for the last four centuries, but literally as well; their house is perched atop their mill like the keep of a castle. The impression of defensiveness at casa De Carlo is accentuated by the imposing security wall which rings the property, as well as the surveillance cameras which film everyone who approaches the main gate and project them on screens inside the house. Local producers are periodically held up by armed oil bandits, who drive tanker trucks with high-pressure pumps to siphon oil out of storage silos. \"After a certain hour we don't open the gates,\" Saverio said as we returned to the house for lunch, after touring the De Carlo groves. Francesco and Marina were waiting for us beside a large olive-wood fire, Francesco resting his head in his sister's lap as they ate pickled _cima di Mola_ olives from a small porcelain bowl and tossed the pits onto the coals. (Olive pits are an excellent fuel, and oil-makers often sell their olive pomace\u2014the solid residue from oil extraction, consisting mostly of crushed pits\u2014to electric companies and other industries, to be burned in furnaces.)\n\nGrazia knelt on the hearth beside them, and set several pounds of suckling lamb on a grill over the coals to cook. While the meat sizzled and popped and we watched the little eruptions of flame from each drip of fat, she told a true story of poisoning, blindness, and death, and said she half wished it would happen again.\n\nIn March 1986, she said, hospitals in northwest Italy began to admit dozens of people suffering from acute nausea, lack of coordination, fainting spells, and blurred vision. Twenty-six died, and twenty more went blind. Investigators eventually discovered that each victim had recently drunk a local white wine; several producers, they found, had been raising the alcohol levels of their wines by cutting them with methanol, a highly toxic substance also called wood alcohol. The scandal, and the resulting government crackdown, devastated the Italian wine industry. Consumption plummeted, and hundreds of producers, most of them honest, went bankrupt. Ultimately, however, the crisis radically improved Italian wine-making and forced a generalized shift from quantity to quality.\n\n\"Before the methanol scandal, people around here didn't make wine like this,\" Grazia said, pouring glasses of Rivera Il Falcone 2004, a garnet-red wine made from a local grape varietal, _nero di Troia,_ by a producer at Castel del Monte, a nearby medieval castle. \"And even if they had, nobody would have bought it. Most people just bought their wine in big jugs without labels. You'd see them on tables in restaurants, where they'd been sitting open for days. Most people wouldn't dream of buying a bottle of wine with a label on it.\"\n\nAfter the methanol crisis, consumers grew more particular, and the producers who survived the market consolidation learned to use techniques and technology pioneers by French enologists. \"After the scandal, producers started creating brand names they were proud of and wanted to defend. Only after methanol did people start thinking about what they were buying and drinking, and become willing to pay for the good stuff. And only after methanol did the government get really serious about checking quality, and making sure that the bottle contained just what the label said.\" During the 1990s, dozens of premier Italian wines emerged, and wine became a major export product (wine recently topped $1 billion in annual sales in Italy).\n\nGrazia brought the wine to her lips, then stopped and put it down without tasting it. \"In olive oil, we're where the wine-makers were before methanol,\" she said. \"We're stuck in the dark ages.\" She shook her head disconsolately. \"It would be awful to see my children's livelihood damaged, even destroyed. And I'd certainly never want to see anyone hurt. But sometimes I wish there could be a methanol scandal in olive oil, which would obliterate this corrupt industry completely, and rebuild it in a healthy way. It's been Babylon around here for far too long.\"\n\nOur lunch began with a succession of seasonal vegetables, mostly from the De Carlos' own garden: _lampascioni,_ a small wild hyacinth bulb marinated in oil and vinegar; meaty, densely flavored cherry tomatoes; _puntarelle,_ the tender tips of a local chicory; and flat little artichokes as big around as a pound coin or a quarter, lightly fried. _\"Pugliesi_ eat an incredible amount of vegetables\u2014we're like goats,\" said Francesco, a rangy twenty-four-year-old with a crew cut and large, dark, serious eyes that watch you unblinkingly, though their intensity is softened by a faint, unsarcastic smile that never leaves his lips. He holds a degree in food quality and a diploma in olive oil tasting from the University of Naples and recently launched a De Carlo line of vegetables in extra virgin olive oil: mushrooms, artichokes, peppers, and other produce grown on their lands, as well as green table olives of the _picholine_ and _cima di Mola_ cultivars. \"I introduced them to broaden our product offering so that our facilities would remain active throughout the year,\" he explained. \"But given the sorry state of oil prices nowadays, they're a much higher-margin business and help us stay profitable.\" His modern financial jargon was so different from his father's homespun way of talking about the oil business that I instinctively asked if he and Saverio worked well together.\n\nFrancesco didn't miss a beat. \"No. We argue every day,\" he said. \"Every single day!\" And when the laughter, a shade nervous, subsided, he added, with a quick, testing look at Saverio: \"Disagreeing, sharing different opinions, deciding together the best way forward\u2014that's the best way to collaborate, no?\"\n\nFor all his university training, Francesco clearly shares his father's visceral enthusiasm for olive oil. His earliest memories also concern the family mill\u2014such as the time, as a three-year-old, when he fell asleep in a little nest between sacks of olives, and slept through the increasingly despairing cries of his family as they searched for him amid the whirring blades and grinding wheels.\n\n\"If you'd come a couple of weeks earlier, or later, you'd be eating a completely different meal,\" Francesco said, looping a green ribbon of Arcamone oil over a big bowl of a half-dozen different wild-looking greens, most of which I'd never seen before, and whose names he knew only in the local dialect, not in Italian: _cuolacidd, spunz\u00e1l, sev\u00f3n, cicuredd._ \"We _pugliesi_ are demanding about these things,\" he continued as he stirred the glistening leaves. \"We try to eat only vegetables and fruits that are in season. Many Italians are the same. They prefer fresh things from local gardens to the brown, tired-looking produce in supermarkets, even when local crops cost more. So why don't they buy their oil the same way? Olives are a seasonal fruit, and olive oil is a fresh-pressed fruit juice\u2014it's best shortly after it's made, and goes downhill from there. Why on earth do people buy expensive vegetables like these, and dress them with the cheapest oil they can find?\"\n\nDe Carlo oil flowed for the rest of the meal, gushing over the _burrata,_ a rich curdy cousin of mozzarella, and pooling in the little cups of the _orecchiette_ pasta with _boragine,_ a wild herb. At first I thought the De Carlos were showing off for me, but I soon saw that they used olive oil this way every day, choosing from the four different oils on the table the one that best fit each dish they were dressing. Saverio sloshed so much Tenuta Torre di Mossa, the family's pepperiest oil, over his grilled lamb that the others giggled and pointed. He bobbed his head and smiled happily, the first smile I'd seen from him. \"I've spent my whole life making oil, but I can never eat enough of it. What other job gives you this?\"\n\nHe handed me the oil, and I poured some over my lamb. As if it had catalyzed subtle chemical reactions in the meat, I tasted dense new flavors which I hadn't noticed in my previous, unoiled bites: the rosemary and _santoregia_ Grazia had used to season it, the browned fat, the light charring from the olive-wood grill\u2014each flavor had a new depth and intensity. The meat even felt different, more supple and juicy. This oil wasn't just a condiment, but had entered into the dish.\n\nWhen I observed this, Francesco snorted. \"Try telling that to a chef!\" He explained that he'd recently given an oil-tasting course in Naples to twenty head chefs of prominent restaurants, most of whom had shown the most abject ignorance about olive oil. \"Each of these guys ran a top-flight restaurant, right? Some had Michelin stars. They had highly developed palates for wine and for foods of all kinds. But every last one of them was using a refined olive oil or a cut-rate extra virgin in their kitchens, and even on their tables. They'd been using bad oils so long that they didn't even know what a good oil tasted like.\"\n\nGrazia, who had been silent for some time, spoke with sudden force. \"Then we've got to teach them. The road we've got to follow is _la cultura_ ; educating people about good oil is the only way out of this crisis. Because once someone tries a real extra virgin\u2014an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds\u2014they'll never go back to the fake kind. It's distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you've ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally _rotten._ But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.\"\n\nShe stood and went into the kitchen to get dessert, leaving a sudden silence in the room. Everyone seemed to be thinking about what she'd said, and what she'd omitted: that if the economics of oil-making don't change soon, no one will be left to make real extra virgin oil. Not even the De Carlos.\n\n### THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET\n\n### By Laura R. Zandstra\n\n### From _Memoir Journal_\n\n### Before she became a creative nonfiction writer and oral historian, teenaged Laura Zandstra helped her Indiana farming family sell produce at a weekly farmer's market in Chicago. With impressionistic strokes, she evokes the market day experience as seen from behind the scales and cash register.\n\nChicago at four a.m. smells like two hundred years of dirt and one hundred years of oil and gasoline spilled on pavement and then congealed in the dew before daylight. About that time on Saturday mornings, our 1979 Mercedes truck pulled into the high school parking lot at 29th and King Drive, thirty miles from our Indiana fields, and eight of us would tumble out into the darkness, throw open the rear roll-up door, and set to work unloading our wares.\n\nThe cabbages were in fifty pound boxes that, try as I might, I could not heave off the back of the truck by myself. The beans were in square wooden crates, the green onions in fancy waxed cartons with pictures on them. We bought the green onions from our neighbors, the DeJong brothers. They sold us radishes, too, because we didn't quite have the space or the dirt or the patience to grow them ourselves, as prone to pests and in need of constant looking after as radishes are. The tomatoes, however, were ours, and kept in cardboard that cushioned their soft red flesh. The spinach was ours, too, packed into bushel baskets with lids held in place by wooden slats secured under metal handles.\n\nThe beets, the carrots, the turnips, the corn: load by load, we paced the lot from the rear of the truck to unmarked spots on the pavement, arranging these boxes and bushels on the blacktop where their contents would be displayed once the sun was up and the community emerged. While we worked, a handful of people would stray past, illuminated beneath the streetlights the last ones to sleep and the first ones to wake. They'd wish us good morning, or stop to tilt their heads and watch our efforts.\n\nBrother Al was one of this handful. He always appeared long before darkness had melted from the sky, with hair that looked like an old Brillo pad and gray coveralls that smelled like sweat and dust.\n\n\"You got any butta' beans, Baby?\" he'd ask me.\n\nI'd shrug. \"I don't know yet.\"\n\n\"You don't know yet?\" he'd tease with a grin and a gentle elbow jab.\n\n\"It's too early,\" I'd tell him with a scowl.\n\n\"Too early for what? How old a' you?\"\n\n\"Eleven.\"\n\n\"You just a baby.\"\n\n\"The truck isn't all the way unloaded yet,\" I'd say, mad. \"So it's too early for me to know if there are any lima beans today.\" Then defiantly under my breath: \"I'm not a baby.\"\n\nOur vegetable stand was the most primitive at the South Side farmer's market. My father and his brother had purchased canopies from a man with a fancy welder who lived a few towns over. The man had cut one-inch metal pipe into long pieces that served as beams and short pieces that served as rafters. These made sturdy rectangular frames once fitted into welded steel corners that looked like hollow-limbed spiders. We'd bungee gray tarps over two such frames and then erect them, three medium-length pipe legs on each long side of a rectangle.\n\nBeneath the tarps we balanced old doors on tall, conical bushel baskets that arrived from southern states packed tight with pole beans and purple hull peas. The doors had come from deep in the junk stocks of our farm where they'd congregated for years, gathered two and three at a time from dumps and construction sites and neighbors who were remodeling. There is room on a farm for all manner of almost-garbage\u2014car carcasses and plywood scraps and retired traffic signs\u2014and always the sense that one day, hoarded odds and ends will fall precisely into place in the puzzling mill of farm projects.\n\nThe doors and baskets had found just such fruition, and once they were lined up in long skinny rows, we piled them with produce picked from our fields in the days before. Yellow squash next to zucchini, leaf lettuce next to green peppers, pickles next to tall stalks of dill. The melons arrived on their own flatbed truck and were too heavy to arrange on our rickety doors, so we'd line up from truck to table front, tossing Millionaires and Sangrias, Saticoys, muskmelons, and honeydew one man to the next, arranging them on the pavement until handsome foothills of fruit girded the walkway beneath our gray tarps.\n\nTo the left and around the corner from us in the line-up of vendors was Lyon's Orchards, whose apple cider is still the best I've ever had. Tom Lyon\u2014a dashing football player of a farmer's son with wavy black hair slicked back from his forehead\u2014enjoyed harassing me as much as Brother Al did. He'd throw rotten fruit at me from time to time just to watch me get mad, which I always did in spite of myself.\n\nDon the flower guy was to our right. His sandy blonde hair stuck out in wings beneath his green seed company cap and hung in a thick mustache under his nose. He chain-smoked from open to close, a cigarette dangling between his lips while he handed out change or put bouquet stems in plastic bags so as not to drip mud and water onto paying customers. He gave me leftover bunches of baby's breath at the end of the day.\n\n\"Here comes trouble,\" he'd always say when he saw me approaching.\n\nAt the far end of the parking lot, across a wide expanse of gravel and cracked pavement, were two vegetable growers\u2014our competition. They tried to outsell us by offering cheap produce bought in bulk from California, or so the farmer rumor went. I squinted my eyes in their general direction whenever I had a moment to spare and assumed that they squinted back.\n\nIt was my job to scout out the nature of these competitors to make sure we were on level playing fields. After setup, I'd nose around their fancy, store bought display tables and bright blue tents, memorizing the price per pound of everything I could, and then present the information, along with note of any dubious products, like red peppers in June, to Uncle Butch, my boss. He'd sigh and heave a bit, then say, \"Good work, Laura. We couldn't do this without you,\" and send me off to sell melons.\n\nMelon prices were always set on dollars and quarters, so one could conduct sales and dig change from the green money-apron pockets without the need for plastic bags or proper scales or speed in simple math.\n\n\"Muskmelons are two for a dollar,\" I'd tell those who stopped to sniff at the alligator skin of the fruit.\n\n\"Mush melons?\" people would snarl in disgust.\n\n\"No, muskmelons. They're just like cantaloupe.\"\n\n\"Got any half-price melons?\"\n\n\"Not yet, Brother Al. Come back later and I'll have some set aside for you.\"\n\n\"Come back later?\" he'd chuckle. \"You just a baby, but I'll see if I can't come back after lunch, get me some melons and butta' beans. What about okra? You got any okra today?\"\n\n\"I think I saw some halfway down the table,\" I'd say and point timidly, knowing that if I was wrong, further harassment would ensue.\n\nBrother Al would snort with a smile and pat my shoulder before ambling off into the crowds.\n\nBy the time I turned twelve, I had graduated from melons up to the greens table. I was shocked to learn of its existence. Unbeknownst to me, somewhere hidden deep in its flat acres, our farm produced endless bushel baskets of turnip greens, curly mustard greens, slick mustard greens, collards, and kale. Unlike the rest of the vegetables at our stand, these items had never made an appearance at our dinner table. I'd never even heard of them, and yet they were significant enough to require a sizable display and separate staffing. Fortunately, my lack of knowledge mattered little. The greens went like hot-cakes no matter who was selling them.\n\n\"Now,\" my uncle instructed, joining me briefly on my first day behind the greens table where two bushels of each variety were pushed up against each other in haphazard showcase, \"when one basket is almost empty, you dump the last few handfuls into the other bushel of the same kind and then put a new one up on the table. Got it? I'll come and check on you in a while.\"\n\nWithin moments of him leaving my side, women crowded in to claim five pounds or five bushels, stuffing handfuls of leaves into plastic bags that we bought at discount because they'd been misprinted. \"Tank you!\" smeared in red, four times across white bags engorged with produce. \"Fred's Discont Grocer,\" \"Mike's Meaatts Welcomes You!\"\n\nThe misprints didn't matter either. The women jabbered together and rolled deep laughter over their purchases as they planned for good food and family. Then, while still scrutinizing the spread as if they might have missed a perfect handful of leaves in a bushel basket not yet considered, they'd absent-mindedly hand me their bags to be weighed.\n\n\"Baby, how much I got there?\"\n\nI'd place the bag on top of the scale and then drag my finger right across the price table, which calculated from fifteen cents a pound all the way up to a dollar twenty-five.\n\n\"Four pounds at fifty cents a pound . . .\" I'd figure to myself. \"Two dollars.\"\n\n\"What d'you say, Baby?\"\n\nWe had to pay for our scales to be reckoned and licensed. A man in a nice button-up shirt would come with a briefcase full of weights on the first day of market each summer and examine the front and back panel of the display windows as he gingerly placed two pounds, five pounds, ten pounds in the pan on top. Without fail, he'd renew our machines with an official sticker slapped onto the front. He'd smile, shake hands with us and take our money, gone within moments of appearing, yet the event always caused a nervous stir in my Uncle Butch, which infected me even though I knew that we would never deliberately cheat anyone. My family was raised in the tradition of John Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism; vigorous moral standards were part and parcel to the ins and outs of days. Short-changing people on their vegetable purchases was almost as bad as rejecting the church, and this religious intentionalism was only enhanced by an existence that hinged on the wiles of the earth.\n\nThe Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I knew. There were floods and droughts and there were perfect warm springs and fields made rich from the old swamps of Lake Michigan. There were years with too many locusts, with lightning storms and early frosts that burnt whole fields of tomatoes, but there was always enough food to keep our family far from hunger, so we were in a position to do the giving and not the taking away.\n\nThe scales, though, were prized and pricey possessions to be handled with extreme care. Drop them once and they were ruined, rejected by the man in the button-up shirt, thrown irrevocably out of whack, the glass cracked, the mechanics jarred so that no more than half a pound could be correctly ascertained. Sometimes Uncle Butch would shove a screwdriver into the metal guts of an ailing machine, but the prognosis for such a procedure was generally grim. I was therefore not to pick up the scales when they were loaded on and off the truck, my arms too flimsy to be trusted with the weight and investment of the things.\n\nI was allowed only to take bags from customers, place them on top of the scale, figure the weight, and then state the price. \"Four pounds. Two dollars.\"\n\n\"Four pounds? Gimme 'notha bag. I need more than that. Got the pastor's family comin' over for dinner tomorrow after church! Phew! Pastor loves those curly mustids. You ever try those?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, why not? Here, try one. Take a bite.\"\n\nI shrugged slightly at the challenge, the picture of nonchalance, then reached into a bushel basket, grabbed hold of a leaf and wiped it off on my money-apron.\n\n\"Little dirt won't hurt you none,\" the woman said, watching with a mischievous grin on her big, brown lips.\n\nI nodded and bit down, grinding the green between my molars for a moment with disinterest, but when the taste spread over my tongue I didn't try to hide my shock and disgust. The woman broke into giggles and those at her elbows looked up to see what was going on.\n\n\"Curly mustid,\" she said by way of explanation as she nodded at me, and then everyone was chuckling.\n\n\"Got a little bite, don't it?\" another one said with a knowing flop of her wrist.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said, examining the curly mustard as if to gain a better understanding.\n\nI never imagined that a frilly leaf colored such a happy shade of green could have so much heat and pepper coursing through its veins. This was almost as mean as feeding jalape\u00f1os to my younger cousins, but the ladies loved me for my innocence. I was the scrawny farm girl with glasses and freckles and a limp brownish ponytail straggling over ratty work clothes, selling greens, easily coerced into taking big bites of fire leaf. They came back every weekend for years, knowing me as I finished junior high and started high school, knowing me as the girl who sold the mustids and took the food stamps.\n\n\"How you doin', Baby?\" they'd say every week. \"Mm-mm-mm, look at these greens! I need six pounds. You got any butta' beans today?\"\n\nThe markets stretched out across the summer, starting in mid-June when the asparagus and rhubarb and peas were just in, and ending with the last days of October. As the months passed, more and more doors were balanced on bushel baskets and covered with the burgeoning harvest until the frosts set in and the fields went brown. By then, days were so cold that I would wear four pairs of pants to work, making myself sick with all that elastic squeezing at my middle, and five layers of warmth on top so my movements were slow and padded. I despised the taste of coffee, acidic and bitter, but I started drinking it to warm my insides and keep my fingers from freezing on those mornings at the greens table, when I scooped up the leaves myself so the ladies didn't have to get their hands out of their gloves and make them wet and dirty and cold.\n\n## Home Cooking\n\n### HOW TO LIVE WELL\n\n### By Tamar Adler\n\n### From _An Everlasting Meal_\n\n### Tamar Adler's quirky culinary education has included working under such talented writer-chefs as Gabrielle Hamilton, Dan Barber, and Alice Waters. In _How to Live Well,_ Adler shares recipes, kitchen tips, and a compelling philosophy of cooking as an approach to life.\n\n### _Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio._  \nWe were better off when things were worse.  \n\u2014FIFTEENTH-CENTURY TUSCAN SAYING\n\nBeans have always been associated if not with poverty, with the sweating classes. Fava beans, whose slightly bitter flavor is so refreshing it's common to see them being peeled and eaten raw, were called, in ancient Rome, _faba,_ a play on words with _faber,_ the Latin word for \"worker.\" The Roman physician Galen said of beans: \"Legumes are those grains of Demeter that are not used to make bread.\" He then chose them over less wholesome wheat loaves as the staple of Roman gladiators' diets.\n\nMost of us regard beans with suspicion, as we do stale bread and cooking in water. Prejudices are always best dispatched, but not always unfounded. When food is boiled badly, it's fair to turn away from it, and if stale bread isn't cooked with, or toasted, but served dry and harsh, it's awful.\n\nBeyond the indelible stain the poor little things will never shake, the distaste we feel for beans is not unfounded either. Our beans are rarely as good as they can be. They're usually so bad, in fact, that basing an opinion of their merit on prior experience is very much like deciding you don't like Bach after having heard the Goldberg Variations played on kazoo.\n\nI suggest you set your doubt aside, fill a pot with cold water and two cups of dried beans, put it on your counter, and leave it there overnight. You will be on your way toward making beans that taste like that that have fed laborers and fighters for centuries.\n\nYou will also have plowed effortlessly through the hurdle of \"soaking beans,\" a hurdle whose existence and gnarliness is a pure invention of food writers' proclivities for making cooking seem difficult.\n\nThe way to keep bean soaking from getting in the way of your cooking beans is to detach the process from today's hunger and expectations and pour dried beans into a pot and cover them with cold water whenever you think of it. Their needing to stay where they are until being cooked tomorrow won't be a problem, and you'll have soaked your beans.\n\nA lot of bean recipes advise soaking in the refrigerator: beans are vegetables, and warmed too gently in water may think they're being asked to sprout. I soak mine wherever there's room in the kitchen, and they keep their vegetal ambitions well in check for a day.\n\nOnce the sun has set and risen, drain the beans through a colander and cover them by two inches with fresh, cold water. What gets flushed out of the beans on their overnight wallow is what inspires musicality in eaters. Feed their soaking water to your plants, who will digest it more quietly, if you like.\n\nIf you didn't put two cups of beans in a pot of cold water last night, get on the bandwagon today by putting them in a pot, covering them with five inches of water, bringing it to a boil, turning off the heat, and leaving them sitting in hot water, covered, for an hour. Then drain them and cover them with new water. This has the same effect as overnight soaking and is a good alternative.\n\nThe cooks who make the best beans are the ones who hold simplicity in high esteem. Romans and Tuscans value spare eating and living. Both of their legislative histories are peppered with sumptuary laws limiting the length and content of meals, passed whenever their citizens' affection for simple living got flabby.\n\nTuscans, though, make the best beans. They are known in Italy as _mangiafagioli,_ or \"bean eaters.\" Tuscans believe that frugality is next to godliness and give the humblest ingredients their finest treatment. Tuscan cooks are extravagant with good olive oil, pressed from dark trees, and with vegetable scraps and Parmesan rinds, which, along with salt and more of that fine oil, make transcendent pots of beans.\n\nThose odds and ends are as crucial to pots of beans as fresh water. Your pot will benefit from a piece of carrot, whatever is left of a stalk of celery, half an onion or its skin, a clove of garlic, fibrous leek tops. If you must decide what to save for your chicken pot and what for stock and what for beans, save your fennel scraps with pots of beans in mind. I make notes to myself after meals, and there are enough torn pieces of paper attesting that \"The best bean broth has fennel in it!\" for it to have become axiomatic.\n\nYour pot also wants parsley stems, whole sprigs of thyme, and a bay leaf. It can all be tied into a neat bundle in cheesecloth or with kitchen twine, or it can be left bobbing around, as everything in my bean pot always is.\n\nBeans need salt. There is a myth that adding salt to beans keeps them crunchy and unlovable. Not cooking beans for long enough keeps them crunchy, and undersalting them is a leading culprit in their being unlovable. They also need an immoderate, Tuscan amount of olive oil. This is different from adding oil to a boiling pot of water for pasta. Pasta doesn't cook in its water long enough to benefit from the oil, and you use only a small amount of pasta's cooking water to help sauce and noodle get acquainted.\n\nThe liquid in a bean pot becomes broth as beans cook in it just as the water in which you boil a piece of meat does. No ounce of the water that goes into a bean pot should be discarded. Tuscan food is based as much on the broth made by the beans on which Tuscans lavish their affection as on the beans themselves. Harold McGee, who writes about the chemistry of food simply, writes that beans make their own sauce. He is right. Their sauce must be well made and it must be kept.\n\nCooking beans is like boiling a chicken or boiling an egg: only their water boils, and only for a brief second. The rest of their cooking is slow and steady. Light the burner under your beans, and as soon as the pot has come to a boil, turn the heat down to just below a simmer. Gray scum will rise to the top of the pot and gather around the edges. Skim it off and discard it.\n\nThe best instruction I've read for how long to cook beans comes from a collection of recipes called _The Best in American Cooking,_ by Clementine Paddleford. The book instructs to simmer \"until beans have gorged themselves with fat and water and swelled like the fat boy in his prime.\" The description is so perfectly illustrative I don't think anyone should write another word on the subject. I don't know who the fat boy is, but I feel I understand his prime perfectly, and it is what I want for my bean.\n\nAs they cook, beans should look like they're bathing. Their tops should stay under the surface of the liquid, or they will get cracked and leathery, and they shouldn't ever be in so much water that they're swimming. Taste their broth as they cook to make sure it is well seasoned. It should taste not like the pleasant seawater of the pasta pot, but like a sauce or soup.\n\nThe second good piece of advice from the same book is in one of its recipes for black beans: \"Soak beans overnight; drain. Put in pot, cover with water. Add onion, celery, carrot, parsley, salt, and pepper. Simmer until bean skins burst when blown upon, about three hours.\" This is the only recipe I've ever read that takes the doneness of beans as seriously as it should be taken: a cooked bean is so tender that the mere flutter of your breath should disturb its skin right off.\n\nBeans are done when they are velvety to their absolute middles. You should feel, as soon as you taste one, as though you want to eat another. The whole pot is only ready when five beans meet that description. If one doesn't, let the beans keep cooking. (My \"five bean\" method is good, but ever since reading Mrs. Paddleford's book, I feel like a brute when I practice it, and am quite intent, moving forward, on whistling the skin off a bean.)\n\nCool and store your beans in their broth. The exchange of goodness between bean and broth will continue as long as the two are left together, and the broth helps the beans stay tender through chilling, freezing, and warming up again.\n\nThose are instructions for cooking all beans. The only exception to these instructions is lentils. On the timescale of beans, lentils are instant. They do not need to be soaked and take only a half hour to cook. It is smart to keep cans of cooked beans around, but there is no reason to buy precooked lentils. Cooking them from dried does not take any more planning than putting a pot of water on the stove, lighting a burner, and opening a plastic bag.\n\nOther than how good they are when they're cooked well, and how many good meals you can get out of them, beans are economical because they're a cheap habit. I keep an assortment of different beans stored separately in little glass jars. I have jars of little green French flageolets, marsh-brown cranberry beans, inky black beans, turtle beans, speckled Jacob's cattle beans, and plain burnt umber kidneys.\n\nPots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It's the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days' sitting, gorged and swelled, like happy fat boy. Any longer and you should freeze them, but they'll thaw ungrudgingly when you want them back.\n\nA bean pot has a lot of meals in it, and you've already done much of the cooking you need to for many. A bowl _of pasta e fagioli_ is a pot of boiling water away. Bring a few cups of beans and broth to a simmer in a deep pan or pot along with the rind from a piece of Parmesan. Smash the beans with a spoon as they warm. Cook a short pasta like ditalini or orecchiette until it is still quite firm. When the pasta is nearly done, remove the cheese rind from the beans and scoop the pasta into the bean pot to finish cooking. Serve drizzled with olive oil, and top with freshly cracked black pepper and freshly grated Parmesan.\n\nSimple and delicious beans and rice also only requires that you boil a pot of water and add rice. Warm your beans in their broth until they're very hot, make rice, and ladle the beans on top. Or, if it's spring, cook halved little white turnips with their long greens still attached, or English or snap peas in butter and bean broth or water, and cut little wedges of artichokes and cook them in olive oil and butter. When everything is tender, combine it in one big pan, add beans, a lot of broth, and a big handful of whatever soft herbs you have\u2014chervil, chives, mint, fennel fronds, celery leaves\u2014and ladle the bright, springy stew over rice. If you don't want to make rice, add a little extra butter and herbs to the vegetables and beans and serve it over toast.\n\nA deeply comforting supper for one or two is beans and egg. Warm cooked beans in a little pan. Add saut\u00e9ed kale, or roasted squash, or a little bit of roasted tomato, or add nothing at all. Crack an egg or two onto the beans, cover the pan, and cook. If you have stale bread, put a toasted piece, rubbed with garlic, in each bowl. Spoon the beans and egg over the toast, salt each egg, grind it with fresh black pepper, drizzle the beans and egg copiously with olive oil, grate them thickly with Parmesan, and dine like a Roman plebeian, or a Tuscan pauper, prince, or pope.\n\nCassoulet is a bean dish from southern France, where austerity is not considered next to godliness. If you can tell such things from what people eat, for Toulousians, pork, goose, and duck, all slow-cooked in fat, occupy that station.\n\nTraditional cassoulet contains all three, plus copious quantities of fat, pork skin, and a great quantity of beans. If they were lingering, any vestigial associations between bean meals and deprivation should be erased by the very existence of cassoulet. To make an authentic one, follow any of a million good recipes. They're involved but worth the trouble.\n\nOr make a simpler, utterly satisfying version by cooking a mixture of finely chopped onion, carrot, and celery, called mirepoix, in olive oil, browning a small, garlicky fresh sausage per person, spooning beans and mirepoix into a baking dish big enough to fit them happily, and nestling the sausages among the beans. Add bean broth to come up just halfway and put it in a 300-degree oven.\n\nIt takes about one hour for the sausages to cook through at low heat, which gives them time to get tender and for the beans to sip up some of their juices. Take the dish out when it's bubbly and the sausages are cooked, scatter the top heavily with toasted breadcrumbs, then put it under the broiler for a few minutes, until the top is crisp and brown.\n\nThere are similar dishes, made of mostly beans with some meat, in every bean-eating cuisine in the world. They range from franks and beans to black-eyed peas and ham, from chili to the majestic Brazilian _feijoada. The_ principle of all is the same and the principle is good.\n\nIf there's already meat on the table, or you can go without, skip the sausages and ladle beans an inch or two deep in a small ceramic roasting pan and turn them into a rustic, herby French bean gratin. Cook mirepoix as above and mix it into the beans. Bake the gratin in the oven until it begins to bubble. Mix a big handful of any combination of chopped parsley, rosemary, and safe into toasted breadcrumbs, top the gratin thickly, and let it cook until the top is quite brown.\n\nThe world of bean soups is populous. Its population is for the most part exemplary. If you'd like to make the most straightforward one, put more broth than beans in a pot and heat it up. For the second most straightforward one, pur\u00e9e the mixture with a little olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.\n\nMinestrone is much more than a bean soup; it is the complete expression of the bean's generosity, its raison d'\u00eatre. Minestrone underlines all sensible cooking practices. Like the other great Tuscan soup, _ribollita,_ minestrone is a beacon. If you have the ingredients to make either one of those soups, two of which are beans and their broth, it means you're cooking steadily, buying good ingredients, and saving the parts of them you don't cook immediately to cook later.\n\nMinestrone is a precisely seasonal soup: it should reflect the season inside and outside your kitchen at all times. The beans you have cooked will always be at its center, but the rest will change throughout the year. In the winter, it will be chock-full of beans and pasta and thick enough to stand a spoon in. In spring, you will leave out the dark greens and include English peas and new onions; in summer, include the first slim green beans and basil, and little zucchini and ripe tomatoes, cut into cubes.\n\nMinestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear or that number plus one.\n\n##### **_Minestrone_**\n\n1 cup diced onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel\n\n3 cloves garlic, sliced\n\n\u00bd cup olive oil\n\na small pinch of chile flakes\n\nthe end of a piece of cured meat or hard salami, diced\n\n1 cup any combination parsley, rhyme, marjoram, basil leaves\n\n2 to 3 cups roughly chopped any combination kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens, dandelion greens, broccoli raab, escarole, cabbage (cooked or raw), any stems and leaves, ribs, and cores, cooked or raw\n\n\u00bd cup whole tomatoes, well chopped, or drained canned tomatoes\n\noptional: \u00bd to 1 cup chopped root vegetables (if they are there and need to be cooked, or cooked and need to be eaten)\n\n6 cups cooked beans\n\na Parmesan rind\n\n8 cups any combination bean broth, stock, and liquid from cans of tomatoes\n\n1 cup small pasta such as orecchiette, little tubes, or small penne\n\npesto, olive tapenade, fresh ricotta, or parsley for garnish\n\nCook the onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel, and garlic in the olive oil until tender in a big pot. Add the chile flakes and any cured meat. Stir to combine. Add the herbs, greens, tomatoes, root vegetables, beans, and cheese rind, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot. Add liquid to cover. Simmer for 45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone. Just before you eat the soup, cook the pasta in a pot of salted, boiling water, only enough for the soup you're planning to eat that week, and add it to the week's soup. If you freeze minestrone, cook new pasta whenever you eat the minestrone you've frozen.\n\nGarnish with pesto or olive tapenade, or a big dollop of fresh ricotta, or simply parsley.\n\nI once lived with a Tuscan in a house in San Francisco. I would cook a pot of beans weekly, and our bean meals followed a regular pattern. The cooked beans would sit in their broth for a half hour, contenting themselves with their last swallows of olive oil and herbs. When my Tuscan decided their time was up, he would stand ceremoniously, clear his throat, slice bread, open wine, and put olive oil on the table.\n\nThen we would eat just beans and bread, and we would drink wine. I would do it all happily, he intently, glowing with genetically imprinted joy at his great fortune to be sitting there, eating beans, beans, beans.\n\nThere are a good number of bean-loving Americans who agree that cooked beans need no further fussing, and eat beans, on their own, as whole meals, as Tuscans do. In New Mexico, big pots of beans are cooked studded with pork and served for dinner. They're called _borrachos_ and eaten plain and hot with an accompanying stack of warm corn tortillas and beer. In Texas, the same beans, cooked the same way, are _called frijoles_ and are eaten plain and hot with plenty of corn tortillas and beer. In the South, you can still get bowls of black-eyed peas or crowder peas accompanied by chopped scallions and watermelon pickles and pepper vinegar to eat with sliced white bread and beer.\n\nTuscans may treat dried beans with reverence, but it is a fresh bean they worship. When you know the taste of a fresh bean, you taste in dried ones the invisible mark all true loves bear: a memory of what it was we first fell in love with. Fall in love with a fresh bean, and you will stay in love with a dried one.\n\nFresh beans are in season in the summer, and come in as many shapes and colors as you can imagine. To shell fresh beans, practice a technique a friend calls \"the twist and tickle\": twist a bean's ends, one in each direction, and then, once its seam opens, tickle its beans into a bowl. This won't work for fava beans. Their pods' insides are sticky, and if you tickle them, they tickle back.\n\nI usually use up my bean broth in minestrone or a bowl of pasta, or warm it up and make some odd, delicious thing of stale bread and whatever else is around, and probably cook an egg on it in the end. But I've been served plain bean broth twice, and been inspired to serve it myself several times.\n\nThe first time it was served to me was at a convent in Oaxaca, Mexico. The broth was the first course of a meal so pure and simple, the air seemed to thin as we ate. The soup was smooth and golden and tasted of grass. After it there were five tiny, glossy meatballs, on a pool of serene, dark amber tomato sauce. It was a simple meal, and it was calming.\n\nThe second time was in a weathered dining room in Turin, Italy. The broth was ladled out of a ceramic jug in which beans had cooked in the fireplace. The beans themselves were served separately with torn kerchiefs of fresh pasta, but the beanless soup was hot and each spoonful told the story of the beans' slow bubbling amid herbs and garlic.\n\nIf you decide to serve bean broth, I have only the advice of a guest to whom I served it once. He thanked me for the meal after saying good evening, and suggested that the next time I might serve it hot. If you serve bean broth as a soup, do remember what I forgot and was too proud to rectify during dinner. If you are ladling it from anywhere other than an earthenware jug in a fireplace, the broth will have cooled as it sat and needs to be ladled into its own pot and heated up again before being served.\n\nThe writer Waverley Root did a thorough survey of Italian food, top to bottom, in his book _The Food of Italy._ He was deeply enamored of the noble Tuscan and insisted that the Tuscan obsession with frugality was nothing but \"finesse.\"\n\nI cannot associate the word _finesse_ with bean cookery. It doesn't take finesse, but dried beans, good olive oil, a big pot, and time to do it well, and it takes only common sense to appreciate.\n\nBut there is great dignity in allowing oneself to keep clear about what is good, and it is what I think of when I hear the term \"good taste.\"Whether things were ever simpler than they are now, or better if they were, we can't know. We do know that people have always found ways to eat and live well, whether on boiling water or bread or beans, and that some of our best eating hasn't been our most foreign or expensive or elaborate, but quite plain and quite familiar. And knowing that is probably the best way to cook, and certainly the best way to live.\n\n### STILL LIFE WITH MAYONNAISE\n\n### By Greg Atkinson\n\n### From _At the Kitchen Table_\n\n### Though chef-writer Greg Atkinson earned his stars in high-end restaurant kitchens, both in Europe and in the Seattle area, his meditative essays on food and cooking are less about dazzling technique than about the quiet, honest rhythms of home cooking.\n\n### \"When she picked up her lunch the bag felt very light. She reached inside and there was only crumpled paper. They had taken her tomato sandwich.\"\n\n\u2014LOUISE FITZHUGH, FROM _Harriet the Spy_\n\nSince I am both a chef and a writer, I am sometimes compelled to contemplate what cooking and writing have in common. What draws me to both pursuits is the simple joy I find in making something, and I have often said that baking a cake or writing a story satisfies the same impulse. I believe that this creative impulse is a basic human need. We all like to make things. And since I am not particularly good with power tools, I don't make houses.\n\nBut among creative outlets, cooking and writing are unique in that both endeavors produce something that ultimately becomes a part of whoever partakes in them. If I cook a meal and someone eats it, and if everything proceeds as it should, then something in that food will become a part of that person. If I read something and internalize that dialogue, then the words on the page will be incorporated into my own thoughts. Ideas expressed on the page will be reformulated in my mind into thoughts of my own.\n\nIf I write a recipe and you make it, then we are sharing both the words and the dish that results from them. Of course, you'll change the recipe. Of course, you'll hear the words differently in your head than I would in mine, but a connection is made nevertheless, and that connection is what writing recipes is all about.\n\nWhen she was compiling the recipes that would eventually become _Mastering the Art of French Cooking,_ Julia Child was living in France with her husband, Paul, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency that would eventually become the CIA. So it's not surprising that she maintained strict security about her recipes.\n\n\"Perhaps it was my old OSS training kicking in, or just my natural protectiveness,\" wrote Julia in her memoir, _My Life in France._ \"But,\" she wrote in a letter to her sister, \"the form we think is new, and certainly some of our explanations, such as that on our beloved mayonnaise, are personal discoveries.\" And so she sandwiched each recipe between pink sheets of paper on which she wrote \"Confidential . . . to be kept under lock and key and never mentioned.\"\n\nSince I learned to make mayonnaise at a very early age, I never thought of the technique as particularly secret. My mother and her seven siblings all learned it from their mother, and they in turn taught it to any members of my generation willing to learn. In our family, dishes like potato salad and Waldorf salad just had to be made with homemade mayonnaise. But some people feel just as strongly about certain brands of store-bought mayonnaise.\n\nThe novelist Tom Robbins is quite devoted to Best Foods\u2013brand mayonnaise. \"A lot of people in my hometown are loyal to Duke's,\" he says, \"but I like Best Foods, which is the same thing as Hellmann's in the South.\" Robbins hails from Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and Duke's is made in Greenville, South Carolina. Hellmann's, which originated in New York City, was purchased by California-based Best Foods in 1932, and the two brands utilize the same formula and market it in similar packaging on their respective coasts.\n\nIn his 2003 novel, _Villa Incognito,_ Robbins waxes poetic about mayonnaise. \"Yellow as summer sunlight,\" he writes, \"soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again.\" The rave prompted many of his fans to start sending Robbins samples of their favorite brands of mayonnaise.\n\n\"There are some surprisingly good Mexican brands,\" says Robbins, \"and the Japanese make extraordinary mayonnaise. I think I have about twenty-three brands in my refrigerator right now.\"\n\nWhen Tom's wife, Alexa, invited my wife, Betsy, and me up to their place in La Conner for a private mayonnaise tasting, we hit the road with a few jars and bottles of our favorite brands. I also had, secreted away in a canvas shopping bag, a wire whisk, a deep mixing bowl, a fresh egg, a bottle of organic canola oil, some white balsamic vinegar, and a bottle of good Dijon mustard. It occurred to me that Tom and Alexa might like to learn how to make their own mayonnaise, and I wanted to see how the homemade stuff stood up in a taste test with the commercial brands, especially Robbins' beloved Best Foods.\n\nBut our evaluation of mayonnaises at Chez Robbins involved more than just the condiment itself. Mayonnaise is just one of the essential components of Robbins' favorite food, the tomato sandwich, a culinary delight he celebrated in his book of essays, _Wild Ducks Flying Backward._ In addition to various musings and critiques, the collection of stories and poems includes a piece called \"Till Lunch Do Us Part,\" in which Robbins answers the age-old question, \"What would you have for your last meal?\" with an eloquent treatise on the tomato sandwich and its essential components, soft white bread and Best Foods mayonnaise. \"But the mayonnaise would have to be the right mayo,\" Robbins reminds us. \"The bread would have to be the correct bread. I don't want to leave the world on an inferior tomato sandwich.\"\n\nSo along with the various jars, tubes, and squeeze bottles of mayonnaise set out for our consideration, Alexa had acquired a soft and wonderful commercial white bread and several perfectly ripe red tomatoes. Then I pulled out my bag of tricks and went to work. But when I set about making a batch of homemade mayonnaise so that we could compare it to the store-bought stuff, Robbins did not appear to be interested. In fact, he seemed to deliberately avoid getting too close.\n\n\"I was occasionally watching you out of the corner of my eye,\" said Robbins later, \"because I did find it interesting. But I didn't want to see exactly how it's made because I kind of like the idea of it being a mystery. I have been eating mayo for sixty years, and until ten years ago, I didn't even know what the ingredients are. I preferred to think of it as some kind of substance dug out of an underground cave in the French Alps.\n\n\"Socrates said, 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' but Oedipus Rex and I are not so sure. I like the mystery. I think Oedipus might have had a long and happy marriage with his mother if he hadn't found out the truth.\n\n\"I had a 1969 Mercury Montego, and in two hundred thousand miles, the head was never off the engine. I attribute that to the fact that I never once looked under the hood. I thought there was a ball of mystic light that kept the motor running.\n\n\"Beneath that silliness is a propensity for mystery. Every great work of art, whether it's a painting or a film, has an element of mystery. Mayonnaise is not a work of art, but it is the food of the gods; it is ambrosia.\n\n\"I have been quoted as saying that I don't know how to write a novel,\" he said, \"and that was construed as a confession of incompetence. But that's not what I was saying. I'm saying I don't have a formula; I don't have a recipe for a novel.\" Rather, for Robbins, the creative process is something of a mystery. \"I used to cook quite a bit, too,\" he said. \"But I didn't use recipes. When I cooked, I cooked from vibration.\"\n\nI like the idea of this well enough, and even though I write recipes for a living, I almost always cook without them, feeling my way from one step to the next. First this happens, then that happens. While the onions soften, I'm cutting the celery, and on a back burner, the rice is simmering away. But eventually, my left brain kicks in and I start to codify things because I want to share them. How much olive oil did I swirl into the pan? Was that a medium onion or a large one? Was it chopped or sliced? I like the geometric proof-like formula of a recipe, and I feel that if the precision of writing it down doesn't get in the way of the thing, it can be like an incantation, a magic formula for transforming a bunch of ingredients into something completely unlike its component parts. Mayonnaise is, after all, nothing like eggs and oil.\n\nMaking a recipe is not unlike making a sandwich. There is a formula, and when it is followed, real transformation occurs. That is magical.\n\n##### **_Homemade Mayonnaise_**\n\n_Homemade mayonnaise is not only easy to make, it's also an exercise in practical magic. The end result is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Many recipes, including some of mine, call for a food processor. But for a small batch of the stuff, especially someone's first batch, hand whisking is better. It helps to have a second pair of hands; one person handles the whisk and the bowl while the other person slowly dribbles in the oil. If white balsamic vinegar is not available, use white wine vinegar with a teaspoon of sugar._\n\n_Makes about 2 cups_\n\n1 egg\n\n1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar\n\n1 tablespoon Dijon mustard\n\n\u00be teaspoon fine sea salt\n\n1\u00bd cups canola oil, preferably organic\n\nWhisk the egg in a medium mixing bowl with the vinegar, mustard, and salt until the mixture is very smooth, almost fluffy. Whisk for at least 1 full minute before adding any oil in order to set a good foundation.\n\nWhisk in a few drops of oil. Then, whisking all the while, build to a very slow but steady stream until all the oil is incorporated. As the sauce comes together to make a stable emulsion, the last of the oil can be added somewhat more steadily than the first few tentative dribbles.\n\n### THE FRIED CHICKEN EVANGELIST\n\n### By Lorraine Eaton\n\n### From Leite's Culinaria\n\n### Covering the local food scene for southeast Virginia's _The Virginian-Pilot_ newspaper, columnist-blogger Lorraine Eaton delights in the characters and culture of Southern cooking\u2014like Mississippi-born fried-chicken master Sydney Meers.\n\nI was raised in the South in a home that never knew a grease-splattered stove.\n\nMy parents were displaced New Yorkers. So despite my growing up in a region where everything is fried\u2014tomatoes, bologna, okra, pies, and, at the State Fair of Virginia, even Pepsi\u2014I never learned the fine art of frying\u2014especially how to make fried chicken.\n\nOver the years, this bothered me some, sort of like a loose pot handle that was in need of fixing yet easily ignored. Now, though, my job title is Staff Epicure for Virginia's largest newspaper. Readers look to me for advice on how to dry-age steaks, open oysters, roast goose. What would they think if they knew of my fear of frying?\n\nWhen I reached the half-century mark\u2014an occasion for celebration as much as assessment\u2014I figured the time had come to correct this culinary shortcoming. I set my sights on how to make Southern fried chicken and sought professional help from Sydney Meers, a Mississippi native who owns Stove, a quaint and quirky restaurant in Portsmouth, the Virginia town where I was raised. Every neo-Southern meal at this 32-seater comes with a side of Syd, who intermittently cooks behind the tiled half-wall of his open kitchen and repairs to the dining room to sip whiskey, neat, alongside dinner guests.\n\nSyd grew up in Senatobia, Mississippi. He spent many a day hanging out in the restaurant kitchen run by his Grandma Winnie Lee Johnson. There were also many mornings spent tending her half-acre garden, pulling weeds, and tamping down leaves between rows, until she'd say, \"Let's go make some lunch.\" Then they'd cook. She shared all that she knew\u2014all manner of pies, pork, and fried chicken\u2014and encouraged Syd to do the same. \"It's part of your heritage,\" she'd say. \"You have to pass it on.\"\n\nThat notion is now a part of him. Syd is an evangelical cook, spreading the gospel of Southern fare by way of his menu and occasional cooking classes. \"To say something is a secret recipe is bullshit,\" he once told me.\n\nSo when I called, Syd graciously agreed to bring me into the fold of folks who fry\u2014with Grandmother Winnie Lee's recipe, no less.\n\nTwo days later, Syd hands me an apron. We're standing in front of an eight-burner gas stove in his speck of a kitchen, a honey-colored chopping block before us and pots and pans dangling above us. Metal shelving units that are stacked to the ceiling practically spill their ingredients and equipment, they're so crammed. Classical music plays from a radio that's hidden somewhere, maybe on one of those shelves.\n\nSyd inspects the organic, free-range bird that I proffer for my lesson in fried chicken.\n\n\"Now, you've done real good, Low-raine,\" Syd says in a voice seasoned with the South. \"This is beautiful.\"\n\nOrganic is fine and dandy, he explains, but that alone doesn't deem the bird worthy. It has to also be free-range and raised without hormones, just like the ones that ran around his grandmother's backyard when he was young, eating bugs and grasses, before Winnie Lee wrung their necks.\n\nSyd makes a cut between the leg and wing with a flick of his knife. He notes that the drumette is slender, not bulging. Proof of the absence of hormones. I may not know how to fry, but I do know how to cut up a chicken. So when Syd flattens the breasts of the bird against the cutting board with his hand, I'm surprised to see that instead of slicing out the backbone, he leaves it attached to one breast.\n\n\"Sometimes grandmother would fry it up separate,\" he says. \"Now most people just cut it out, but that's the choicest piece. The bone holds so much flavor.\" Huh? The things you learn.\n\nSyd has already prepared the brine, a critical element, he says, that imparts flavor and extracts bacteria and toxins. It sits in a stockpot beside us, a simple solution of salty water with a sprinkling of crushed bay leaves and fresh rosemary sprigs from his garden.\n\nI submerge the raw meat in the brine. Syd sets his spattered red kitchen timer for 30 minutes. We slide into his tiny eight-seat bar which he calls The Cougar Lounge. Staring down at us from the wall are mounted game\u2014buffalo, wildebeest, and antelope\u2014that came to him by way of a friend of a friend with an IRS problem of which Syd will say no more. He opens a split of champagne and pours us each a glass.\n\nSyd opened his first restaurant, The Calico Cat, in Senatobia. After leaving Mississippi, he joined the Air Force and attended culinary school on the GI bill. He's owned several popular restaurants in the Tidewater region along Virginia's southern coast. His \"Cowboy Syd's Sextuple Truffle Tart with Bittersweet Chocolate Whiskey Cream and Sensuously Sensational Chocolate Espresso Ice Cream\" is included in the James Beard award-winning cookbook \"Death by Chocolate.\"\n\nHeady stuff. But sitting in the bar, waiting for the bird to brine, Syd says it all goes back to his grandmother.\n\nAs a child, he sat atop sacks of flour in her restaurant watching the line cooks while his mother waited tables. He takes a picture from the wall and hands it to me. It's a faded snapshot, circa 1955, of the diner-ish place. The sign out front says \"Johnson Cafe\u2014Bar B Q Steaks.\" A second sign, emblazoned with \"air-conditioned,\" hangs over the door, a beacon to the hot and weary. A man-sized ice cream cone stands at the entrance.\n\n\"Winnie Lee,\" says Syd, looking at the picture. \"What a girl she was.\"\n\nThe timer dings.\n\nBack in the kitchen, Syd removes a hotel pan from a shelf and dumps three cups of flour and one cup of cornmeal into it. This is the start of his grandmother's dredge. Syd uses his hands to mix it up, cautioning me to rely on all-purpose flour because cake flour will absorb too much moisture and turn to clumps. His grandmother sifted her flour, but because most come pre-sifted these days there's no need to do so unless it's humid. It's always humid down South.\n\n\"We like cornmeal,\" he adds, \"because of the crunch factor and because it helps hold the flour on the skin.\" He says the slightly coarse texture of stone-ground works best.\n\n\"Here's the way you've got to do the salt,\" Syd says. He sprinkles four pinches into flour and cornmeal and offers me a taste. The salt registers in specks on my tongue.\n\n\"Not enough?\" I venture a guess.\n\nSyd agrees. He adds two more pinches and mixes it in. I take another taste. A more uniform salt sensation spreads across my palate.\n\n\"Just right,\" Syd says.\n\nThe pepper that Syd sprinkles into the pan was gleaned from the bottom of the pepper grinders in the dining room. Shrewd restaurateurs don't waste a thing. I place a smidgen of the dredge on my tongue. There's just a whisper of heat. I'm surprised that Syd says the seasoning is correct given that it's much less pronounced than the salt. I voice my concern.\n\n\"Girl, that's because pepper holds up better during cooking than the salt,\" he says. \"The salt will dissolve.\"\n\nOh.\n\nIt's time. I remove the chicken from the brine, flicking off any herbs that stick to the skin. I catch the faint aroma of rosemary and bay as I roll a drumstick in the dredge.\n\n\"No, stop doin' that,\" Syd says, taking over. He covers the meat with handfuls of flour, flipping and flouring and flipping and flouring the drumstick until it's completely coated. \"Handle the flour, not the bird.\"\n\nI can't recall what kind of oil I used during my past frying foibles, but I know it wasn't what Syd pulls out of the fridge: a clear plastic tub containing lard that's slightly off-white and as smooth as buttercream icing. At the bottom of the tub is a glistening brown gel\u00e9e\u2014drippings from braised pork bellies, a staple on Syd's dinner menu.\n\nIn this kitchen, the contents of that tub are considered gold, all but guaranteeing chicken in the same league as Winnie Lee's. Settle for nothing less, Syd says. If you don't have lard, fry up about five pounds of bacon and use the drippings. If all you have is Crisco, don't fry chicken.\n\nAnother nonnegotiable item: Syd's decades-old cast-iron skillet. Black as a cat, the pan has been wiped clean but never washed, same as Winnie Lee's. She figured the difference was her skillet, which held all the seasonings of every food she ever cooked in it. No secret. Just the soul of the pan.\n\nSyd ignites a gas burner and adjusts the flame to medium-high. The lard melts into a pool about 1\/2 inch deep. When it begins to bubble, the pitch becomes more a gurgle than a sizzle.\n\n\"They now have fancy thermometers, but this is the way you fry chicken,\" Syd says, noting the sound. \"You've got to listen.\"\n\nThe throaty gurgle signals that the lard is hot enough to fry. Using tongs, we quickly nestle the chicken in the skillet, skin side up, careful to handle only the ends of the bones so we don't mar the coating or inadvertently squeeze out any moisture. The gurgling continues. Soon the meat is rimmed with a frenzy of fine bubbles, which Syd attributes to moisture from the bird. Only when these tiny globules create a goldenrod outline around each piece is it time to turn the chicken.\n\nWe take turns carefully turning the fried chicken with tongs. Grease spits and snipes at us, but Syd nixes my plea to use a spatter screen, saying it would trap moisture in the pan and turn the chicken soggy. When the pieces turn a shimmering golden brown, we tong them from the pan and set them on paper towels to rest for a spell. It's by sight, not sound, that you know when fried chicken is done.\n\nA few long minutes later we sit in the empty bar, white linen napkins in hand, the gorgeous platter of browned chicken before us.\n\nI bite into a thigh, piercing the perfectly crisped skin. It's juicy but not greasy. I detect a hint of herb from the brine. Syd selects a breast\u2014the one with the backbone attached\u2014and proclaims it just like Winnie Lee's. After we finish, he packs up the remaining thigh and breast for me and offers one last morsel of wisdom.\n\n\"You can do this, girl,\" he says. \"The more you fail, the better you get. That's the fun of cooking.\"\n\nI ask if he ever failed at channeling his grandmother's cooking. He raises an eyebrow. \"Everything I've tried, I got it right the first time right on the spot,\" he says, without hesitation. \"I think it might be a gene.\"\n\n### LASAGNA BOLOGNESE\n\n### By Deb Perelman\n\n### From Smitten Kitchen.com\n\n### The runaway success of Deb Perelman's chatty blog Smitten Kitchen\u2014featuring detailed photos of her cooking adventures in a tiny New York City apartment\u2014won her every food blogger's dream: a book contract. _The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook_ is due out in October _2012._\n\nThis, this is my culinary Mount Everest. This twenty-layer striation of noodles, ragu, b\u00e9chamel and cheese, repeated four times and then some, took me more than five years to conquer. To be honest, six years ago I didn't know what it was. Sure, I had heard of lasagna but I wasn't terribly fond of it because I don't much care for the texture of ricotta once it has baked. (Ricotta, I'd argue, is best rich, fresh and cold on toast.) But I was galloping through a post on an Italian food blog and I stumbled upon a parenthesised side-thought that stopped me dead in my tracks. It said something along the lines of \"I don't know whose idea it was to put ricotta in lasagna but . . . shudder.\" And I thought, but wait! _What's supposed to go in lasagna?_ But there was no answer, so I set out to find one.\n\nLasagna alla Bolognese is an epic dish. Oh sure, it looks like an ordinary broiled mass of cheese, pasta and meaty tomato sauce but it's so much more. To make it as I dreamed from that day forward I wanted to, everything gets a lot of love and time. The ragu is cooked for hours. The b\u00e9chamel (ahem, _besciamella_ ), although the simplest of the five \"Mother Sauces,\" is still a set of ingredients that must be cooked separately, and in a prescribed order. The pasta doesn't have to be fresh, but I figured if I was going to do this, I was going to really, really do this, and I wanted fresh, delicious sheets of pasta to support the other cast members I'd so lovingly craft. And the cheese? There's just one, Parmesan, and it doesn't overwhelm.\n\nSo why did it take the better part of six years to conquer? First, I had to find the ragu of my dreams. I realize that most people have a bolognese they like\u2014maybe it has milk or a mix of meats, not just beef (mine doesn't), maybe it goes easy on the wine (mine doesn't), maybe it can't be cooked for less than six hours (mine can) and maybe it just has a slip of tomatoes inside (mine doesn't). I sometimes think that there are as many interpretations of bolognese as there are people who make it; it's totally cool to use your favorite. But if you're still bolognese-hunting, oh, I do love Anne Burrell's above all else. You could forgo the pasta, the white sauce and the cheese and enjoy it straight from a bowl. But today, we won't.\n\nEven once I found my ragu nirvana, it took a couple rounds to get the lasagna right. The first time I made the noodles, I rolled them too thin and put them on towels, where they proceeded to stick. Miserably. The dish was intended for a 2 p.m. lunch in New Jersey; at 3, Alex was running to a bodega in Manhattan to buy a box of dried pasta. On the plus side, we're still talking to each other. On the minus, we had \"lunch\" at almost 8 that night. I had a few other mishaps; recipes I found seemed out of balance or evasive in directions. One b\u00e9chamel was too thin. And I kept ending up with too much ragu, too little white sauce, too many noodles, not enough directions, too little time. It was not until this week that I finally got the recipe exactly as I'd always dreamed of it, with I hope a level of detail that will make it replicable for anyone at home. Even if you, like me, got to the final inning and realized you were out of cheese, requiring a run to the bodega to pick up _I don't want to even talk about it_ variety of so-called Parmesan. Yes, even for people like me.\n\nNow here's the part where I know you're not going to believe me, but I implore you to consider it: This lasagna, it feels light, almost ethereal, or as close as a decidedly hearty dish can. Maybe it's the absence of ricotta and mozzarella, or the thinness of the homemade noodles but something about it feels utterly decadent, mind-bogglingly delicious, completely warming but not . . . gutting. It needn't immediately lead to a nap on the sofa. It's a miracle. A miracle in twenty parts. Let's get started.\n\n##### **_Lasagna Bolognese_**\n\nRagu adapted from Anne Burrell, everything else from trial and error.\n\nServes 12 (in hearty portions) to 15 (in generous 3-inch squares). You will have double the bolognese sauce that you need because I cannot in good conscience let you spend several hours simmering a sauce that will only yield 4-ish cups of sauce. Trust me, you'll want extra.\n\nThis is a beast of a dish, and worth every second you put into it. I recommend making the meat sauce a day or longer before you need it; then, do everything else on the second day. My advice is to give yourself way more time than you could possibly need on the second day, so that you can make the dish from a place of leisure and love, and not one that is frenzied and not particularly fun. You'll be glad you did. This is a perfect project for a lazy winter weekend, something two people could then eat dreamily all week.\n\nA note on authenticity: This is the kind of dish that gets, ahem, passionate cooks out in droves. I've been told that you cannot call it bolognese if you simmer it for less than __ hours or that it can\/can't have tomato\/milk\/wine\/only beef in it. Others will pfft over the lack of color on the crust (I had a word with my dinky oven about it). I absolutely love this about cooking\u2014the way we care so deeply about the way our food is made, and how much I'm lucky enough to learn about the different ways people approach the same dish. But, my other favorite part about cooking is that it's just you in the kitchen and you can make your food the way you alone like it. Feel free to tweak this to your taste by replacing portions of the beef with other meats, using less tomato paste or wine if desired or replacing some wine with milk.\n\n**Bolognese sauce**\n\n1 medium onion, coarsely chopped (1-inch pieces are fine)\n\n1 large or 2 slim carrots, coarsely chopped\n\n2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped\n\n3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped\n\n2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil\n\nKosher salt\n\nFreshly ground black pepper\n\n2 pounds ground chuck, brisket or round or combination\n\n1 \u00bc cups tomato paste (from 2 6-ounce cans)\n\n2 cups red wine, preferably hearty but really, anything you like to drink\n\nWater as needed\n\n2 bay leaves\n\nA few sprigs thyme, tied in a bundle\n\n**Pasta**\n\n1 \u00bd cups all-purpose flour\n\n2 large eggs\n\n\u00bd teaspoon table salt\n\n1 to 2 tablespoons water, if needed\n\n**B\u00e9chamel sauce**\n\n\u00bd cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter\n\n\u00bd cup all-purpose flour\n\n4 cups whole milk\n\n1 teaspoon table salt\n\n1 clove minced garlic\n\nFreshly grated nutmeg, to taste\n\nFreshly ground black pepper\n\n_To assemble_\n\n1 \u2154 cups grated Parmesan cheese\n\n_Day 1: Make the bolognese sauce:_ In a food processor, pulse onion, carrots, celery, and garlic until finely chopped. Heat a moderatesized Dutch oven (4 to 5 quarts) over medium-high heat. Once hot, coat the bottom of the pan with two to three tablespoons of oil. Once it is hot, add the chopped vegetables and season them generously with salt and pepper. Cook the vegetables until they are evenly brown, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes.\n\nI'm going to insert my favorite Burrell-ism here: Brown food tastes good! Don't skimp on the cooking times as this creates the big flavors that will carry right through to your plated lasagna. And now I'm going to insert my own-ism: Don't worry about sticking bits of food or uneven pieces or anything. It's all going to work out in the end.\n\nAdd the ground beef and season again with salt and pepper. Brown the beef well and again, don't rush this step. Cook for another 15 minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Add the red wine, using it to scrape up any stuck bits in the pan. Cook the wine until it has reduced by half, about 5 more minutes. Add water to the pan until the water is about 1 inch above the meat. Toss in the bay leaves and the bundle of thyme and stir to combine everything, bringing it to a low simmer.\n\n_Here's how the next 3 to 4 hours will go:_ You'll keep a pitcher of water near the stove. You'll stir the sauce from time to time. As the water in the sauce cooks off, you'll want to add more but you don't want to add more than 1 to 2 cups at a time or you'll have boiled meat sauce (bleh) rather than something thick and robust with flavor. Taste it from time to time and add more seasoning if needed. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours.\n\nYou'll have about 8 to 8\u00bd cups of sauce but will only need 4 for the lasagna. Discard the thyme and bay leaves and put half in the fridge for lasagna assembly tomorrow and the other half in the freezer for up to a couple months. Ours was still as good as day one after 6 weeks.\n\n_Day 2: Make your pasta:_ Combine all of the pasta ingredients in a food processor. Run the machine until the mixture begins to form a ball. You're looking for a dough that is firm but not sticky. If needed, add water a drop at a time until it comes together. Place ball of dough on a lightly floured surface and invert a bowl over it. Let it rest for an hour. (You'll have about 10 ounces or a little less than   pound of fresh pasta dough.)\n\nGet your work area ready; I like to line a large tray with waxed paper. Dust the waxed paper with flour. Keep more waxed paper and flour nearby.\n\nWorking with a quarter of the dough at a time, run it through your pasta roller on the widest setting (usually \"0\"), then repeat this process with the roller set increasingly smaller (1, 2, 3) until the pasta is very thin. My Atlas machine goes to 9, but I almost always stop at 8 because this setting makes for thin, delicate pasta that's not so fragile that I'm pulling my hair out with frustration trying to move it around.\n\nIf you find your dough sticking, lightly flour it. If it gets too big to handle, cut it in half. If the piece gets too wide for the machine or becomes annoyingly irregularly shaped, I re-\"fold\" the dough by folding the sides of the dough into the middle, like an envelope, and press it flat. Then, run the piece back through the machine with the open sides up and down on the widest setting again (0) working your way thinner. This allows the machine to \"press\" any trapped air out.\n\nLay your pasta on the floured waxed paper in a single layer, trying to keep the pieces from touching. Flour the tops of them and place another sheet of floured wax paper on top. Repeat this process with the remaining dough and as many layers of pasta as you need.\n\n_Next, cook your pasta:_ Cut your pasta lengths into square-ish shapes. The fun thing about making fresh pasta for lasagna is that the shape doesn't much matter; you're going to tile together whatever you have and nobody will care if it took 9 or 16 bits to patch the layer together. Bring a large pot of water to boil. Have ready a skimmer, a large bowl of ice water and a large tray or platter that you've drizzled or spritzed with oil. Boil several squares of noodle at a time for 1 to 2 minutes each (1 minute if you, indeed, went to the thinnest setting on your machine; 2 if you, like me, stopped one shy of thinnest). Scoop them out with your skimmer, swish them in the ice water and lay them out (still wet is fine) on the oiled platter. Repeat with remaining pasta. It's okay to have your noodles touch; they shouldn't stick together in the short period of time until you begin assembling but if you're nervous, you can drizzle or spritz each layer very lightly with more oil.\n\n_Make your b\u00e9chamel:_ Melt your butter in the bottom of a medium-to-large saucepan over medium heat. Once melted, add your flour and stir it into the butter until smooth. Cook the mixture together for a minute, stirring constantly. Pour in a small drizzle of your milk*, whisking constantly into the butter-flour mixture until smooth. Continue to drizzle a very small amount at a time, whisking constantly. Once you've added a little over half of your milk, you'll find that you have more of a thick sauce or batter, and you can start adding the milk in larger splashes, being sure to keep mixing. Once all of the milk is added, add the salt, garlic, nutmeg (if using) and few grinds of black pepper, and bring the mixture to a lower simmer and cook it, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.\n\n_At last, you may assemble your dish:_ Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a 9\u00d713-inch or equivalent rectangular baking dish, spread a generous \u00bc cup of the b\u00e9chamel. I mostly use this to keep the noodles from sticking. Add your first layer of cooked noodles, patching and slightly overlapping them however is needed to form a single layer. Ladle 1 cup bolognese sauce over the noodles, spreading it evenly. Drizzle \u00bd cup b\u00e9chamel over the bolognese; don't worry about getting it perfectly smooth or even. Sprinkle the layer with \u2153 cup parmesan cheese. Repeat this process\u2014pasta + 1 cup bolognese + \u00bd cup b\u00e9chamel + \u2153 cup parmesan\u2014three more times, then add one more layer of pasta. You'll use 5 layers of pasta total.\n\nThere are two ways to finish the dish. You can simply sprinkle the top layer of pasta with your remaining parmesan before baking. This makes the crunchiest lid. I like a semi-crunchy lid and first spread 1\/4 cup b\u00e9chamel over the top layer of pasta before sprinkling it with the remaining cheese. It still gets crunchy\u2014and has corners that are worth fighting over\u2014but never unpleasantly so.\n\nBake your lasagna for 30 to 45 minutes, until bubbly all over and browned on top. You should do absolutely nothing but put your feet up and drink a glass of wine while you do; you've earned it. When it comes out of the oven, I like to let it rest for 10 minutes before serving it.\n\n_Do ahead:_ Lasagna can be prepared right up until the baking point a day in advance, and kept wrapped in plastic in the fridge. Theoretically, you could also freeze it at this point but I haven't tried this. I'll update this to say \"go for it\" if many people respond in the comments that they've done so successfully. Lasagna will also reheat well for up to three days, possibly longer but in my apartment, we've never had the chance to find out.\n\n* Yes, cold is fine. I divert from the proper b\u00e9chamel method here as I've found that as long as you add your milk slowly, you do not need to heat it separately first. Hooray for fewer steps and pots!\n\n### THE FORAGER AT REST\n\n### By Christine Muhlke\n\n### From _Bon Appetit_\n\n### Two of the world's hottest chefs\u2014Noma's Rene Redzepi and Momofuku's David Chang\u2014meet for Sunday lunch, and who's lucky enough to cover it? _Bon Appetit_ executive editor Christine Muhlke, who co-authored _On the Line_ with another star chef, Le Bernardin's Eric Ripert.\n\nIt's Sunday morning, and Rene Redzepi is gliding around the kitchen in his socks while obscure Aboriginal music drifts through his bright, cavernous, just-moved-into Copenhagen apartment. His wife, Nadine, smiles and hands the couple's 13-week-old daughter to her mother so she can make everyone a second cappuccino. New York chef David Chang, whose photo hangs in the kitchen next to family portraits, is in town and has called to say he'll be by in an hour. It's the type of scene\u2014kind, calm, lovely people in a spare yet creatively furnished space\u2014that makes you wonder why we don't all live in Scandinavia.\n\nAs the chef at Copenhagen's esteemed Noma, Redzepi has inspired cooks around the world to find their ingredients as close to home as possible. So what does that mean when the man behind what many consider the world's best restaurant\u2014a place where fried reindeer moss and coastal flowers have appeared on the menu\u2014is actually cooking at home?\n\nToday's menu is, of course, seasonal and local. But it's also quick. Nothing takes more than 90 minutes to cook. Reindeer-horn-handled knife at the ready, Redzepi takes a parsley plant off the windowsill and cuts off a handful, leaving the stems. \"There's so much flavor in the stems!\" says the man who has made foraging the ultimate in locavorism. \"In the winter we saute them\u2014incredible.\" Next, he slices small biodynamic fennel bulbs so that the open V's resemble the slender mussels that were gathered in a fjord: \"I'm imagining that if a mussel slides out of its shell, maybe it will slide in here.\" So this is how his restaurant dishes come to mimic nature\u2014a gnarled breadstick mistaken for a twig, a snail replacing a nasturtium stamen.\n\nRedzepi's talent for reconnecting natural flavors runs through the rest of the dish: The mussels will be steamed open in gooseberry juice, pressed from the sour berries that grow wild in Scandinavia. \"Berries are so underestimated in savory cooking,\" he says. \"They're so versatile, and they're not all sweet\u2014you just associate them with pies.\" White wine balances the acidity. \"People cook savory dishes with wine, and that's fruit juice, so what's so strange about this?\"\n\nMussel prep finished, he starts work on the appetizer, a toast inspired by the _bo ssam_ (pork shoulder served with a dozen raw oysters) served at Chang's Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York's East Village. Wild chanterelles are sauteed over high heat on the induction cooktop (below which is a clever ventilated IKEA drawer that keeps butter and other ingredients cool and close at hand; cue Scandi lifestyle envy). The mushrooms get a few tablespoons of cream, some minced shallots, parsley, and roughly chopped oysters. After several brisk shakes of the pan, the rich mixture is spooned onto sourdough toast that has practically been caramelized in butter. Translucent sheets of paper-thin Speck fat are laid atop a layer of sliced raw chanterelles just as Chang arrives.\n\nThe Momofuku chef loves the expansive, earth-forest-sea flavors of the toast, even though it's not yet breakfast time in New York, where he was just 36 hours prior. The toasts are even better with the spicy Noma beer brewed from birch sap by Skovlyst. Then the mussels are cooked for five minutes and served in mismatched bowls made by Noma's ceramist. \"Samples,\" explains Nadine.\n\nFor the entree, there's a pot roast. But this one is celery root, not beef. At Noma, Redzepi has been treating vegetables like meat: braising them, basting them, flavoring them with lots of herbs and butter (preferably that made from sweet, rich goat's milk). He'll even throw in a handful of coffee beans from the excellent local roaster Coffee Collective to see what happens. Earthy celery root takes extremely well to the treatment, browned and tender with herbal undertones. A quick sauce of warm buttermilk and olive oil\u2014\"basically a vinaigrette\"\u2014adds a complex tanginess. Garnished with black olives heated through in the herb butter, it's deeply, shockingly satisfying.\n\n\"This is a very good example of how we eat at home,\" Redzepi says: \"It's vegetable based, there's a little twist to it, and it's very, very simple.\"\n\nSeated at the sprawling dining table is an easy crowd. There's Alessandro Porcelli, himself an important tastemaker in the international food scene. He's a co-founder of the Cook It Raw chefs' adventure series, as well as closely involved in the inaugural MAD Foodcamp symposium, which is what has brought Chang to town. Noma sous-chef Trevor Moran, an Irishman with the most fantastic hair, is tucking into his day off. Nadine's mother holds a very sleepy infant, while toddler Arwen works on her princess drawing. And then there is the serene young Nadine, a reservationist at Noma, where the 12 tables are booked three months ahead. If people knew how beautiful she is, an Ingres portrait come to life with a smile as quietly sure, they wouldn't be upset when she tells them that the dining room is full. Possibly forever.\n\nMaybe Nadine could send them some of her walnut cake to alleviate the sting. It's made with over a pound of nuts and a half pound of butter. \"This is one of the best desserts I've had,\" Moran says a little sheepishly as he glances at his boss. But Redzepi isn't slighted; the British food critic Jay Rayner is coming over for dinner tomorrow, and Redzepi asks Nadine to please make another one. Everyone nods imploringly.\n\nAfter coffee, Redzepi buckles Arwen into the front carriage of his dad bike and everyone walks alongside them to the King's Gardens. \"This is where the king used to grow his vegetables. You can still get food here!\" he says. While locals laze in the late-afternoon sun or play petanque, he heads straight for the trees. In the middle of the city\u2014just blocks from his home\u2014is a mulberry tree jeweled with untouched fruit. A few dish ideas are batted around by the chefs as they stare up into the leaves. \"I know where we can find walnuts, too,\" Redzepi says and bikes ahead. Soon he and Chang are cracking open the green orbs and picking at the jellied flesh, running it between their fingers. \"Trevor,\" he says decisively, \"it's time for walnuts.\" Noma might be closed Sundays, but a true forager knows no bounds.\n\n##### **_Pot-Roasted Celery Root with Olives and Buttermilk_**\n\n_In this surprising main course, Redzepi pot-roasts whole celery roots. Be sure to use small celery roots; larger ones will not cook evenly. The chef also cooks small heads of cauliflower in this way._\n\n_6 servings_\n\n**Ingredients**\n\n3 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil plus more for drizzling\n\n6 small celery roots (celeriac; each about 4 oz.), unpeeled, trimmed with some stem still attached\n\n\u00bd cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1\" cubes\n\nKosher salt\n\n12 sprigs thyme\n\n6 sprigs rosemary\n\n6 sprigs sage\n\n1 tablespoon coffee beans (optional)\n\n1 cup buttermilk\n\n\u00bd lemon\n\n\u00bc cup oil-cured black olives, pitted, quartered lengthwise\n\n**Preparation**\n\nHeat 3 Tbsp. oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat. Add celery roots and cook, turning frequently, until golden, 8\u201310 minutes. Add butter and a large pinch of salt. When butter begins to foam, reduce heat to medium-low. Add herb sprigs, coffee beans, if using, and 1 1\/2 cups water. Cover and gently cook, adding more water by tablespoonfuls if pan is dry, until celery roots are very tender, about 1 hour.\n\nRemove herbs and coffee beans (if using) from pot and discard. Baste celery roots with buttery juices in pot. Remove from heat. Transfer celery roots to a cutting board, slice in half through stems, and place 2 halves on each plate.\n\nMeanwhile, very gently warm buttermilk in a small saucepan over low heat (it will break if warmed too much). Squeeze in a few drops of lemon juice and add remaining 2 tsp. oil and a pinch of salt to make a loose sauce. Spoon sauce around celery roots on plates. Garnish with olives, drizzle with oil, and squeeze a few more drops of lemon juice over each.\n\n##### **_Walnut Cake_**\n\n_Nadine Levy Redzepi created this incredibly rich, moist cake. \"Fat with fat\u2014what could be better?\" asks her husband. Serve it for dessert or with coffee or tea for breakfast._\n\n_18\u201324 servings_\n\n**Ingredients**\n\n1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pan\n\n6 tablespoons raw sugar, divided\n\n7 cups walnut halves\n\n\u00be cup all-purpose flour\n\n1 \u00bd cups almond flour or almond meal\n\n\u00be cup granulated sugar\n\n6 large eggs\n\n\u00be cup heavy cream\n\n\u00bd cup plain whole-milk yogurt\n\n1 teaspoon kosher salt\n\n1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise\n\nWhipped cream\n\n**Ingredient Info**\n\nAlmond flour is available at some supermarkets and at natural foods stores and specialty markets.\n\n**Preparation**\n\nPreheat oven to 350\u00b0. Butter a 13x9x2\" metal or glass baking dish; sprinkle bottom evenly with 3 Tbsp. raw sugar. Set aside.\n\nPulse walnuts in a food processor until coarsely chopped. Set 2 cups aside. Add all-purpose flour to processor and pulse until walnuts are very finely ground, 1\u20132 minutes. Add almond flour; pulse to blend. Set aside.\n\nUsing an electric mixer, beat 1 cup butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy, 2\u20133 minutes. Add eggs, cream, yogurt, and salt. Scrape in seeds from vanilla bean (reserve bean for another use). Beat until well combined, 1\u20132 minutes. Add ground-walnut mixture and beat just to blend. Gently fold in chopped walnuts, being careful not to over-mix. Pour batter into prepared dish; smooth top. Sprinkle with remaining 3 Tbsp. raw sugar.\n\nBake until cooked through and a tester inserted into center comes out clean, 50\u201355 minutes. Let cool in pan on a wire rack. Serve with whipped cream. **DO AHEAD:** _Can be made 3 days ahead. Cover and chill. Cake is best served cold._\n\n### BETTER COOKING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY\n\n### By Corby Kummer\n\n### From _Technology Review_\n\n###\n\n### Poised at the apex where gourmet cooking meets high-tech technique, Nathan Myhrvold dazzled the food world with his 2011 multi-volume _Modernist Cuisine._ Corby Kummer, longtime senior editor for _The Atlantic,_ reviewed and interviewed Myhrvold for a tech-savvy audience.\n\nTo see _Modernist Cuisine_ is to covet it. Which is why, one day in May, the team that spent six years creating the oversized, over-everything five-volume work came from Bellevue, Washington, to New York City to demonstrate the wondrous object. And it is why a group of chefs, writers, and TV personalities (so stellar that one guest remarked, \"The only other event that could bring these people together is a funeral\") gathered one morning at Jean-Georges, the flagship restaurant of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, at the invitation of Tim and Nina Zagat. They were there to meet Nathan Myhrvold, the mastermind and financier of a book so expensive to create that he refuses to say how much he spent (other than to say it was more than $1 million but less than $10 million). They wanted to try the pastrami cooked sous-vide for 72 hours, the \"tater tots\" dunked in liquid nitrogen before being fried, the fruit juices spun in a centrifuge, the mushroom omelet striped with powdered-mushroom batter so that it looked like a piece of upholstery, with a perfectly spherical, magically just-cooked egg yolk right in the middle. But they really wanted to see the book.\n\nAnd it _is_ a wondrous object. _Modernist Cuisine's_ five volumes comprise 1,522 recipes and 1,150,000 words of text on 2,438 pages, almost every one of them illustrated with color photography and charts, with dozens of gee-whiz, never-before-seen photographs of beautiful free-form color swirls that could be textile designs but turn out to be life-threatening pathogens; or sculptural objects that could be outdoor art installations but are mussels suspended in clear gelatin; or stunning anatomies of a painstakingly shelled lobster or flayed monkfish or whole chicken; or spectacular cross-section cutaways of pieces of equipment you never thought would or should be sawed in half, like ovens, woks full of hot oil, and kettle grills with white-hot smoldering coals. It weighs 40 pounds, four of them just ink. When Wayt Gibbs, the book's editor in chief, met me later that week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Toscanini's, an ice-cream parlor and intellectual salon heavy with MIT students and faculty, he painstakingly unwrapped the gigantic carton he had lugged on a portable dolly from Bellevue to New York and then to Boston. The caf\u00e9-goers grew silent and stared at the huge white volumes in their clear Lucite case, one of them later wrote me, as if they were the monolith in _2001._\n\nThe long-awaited publication of _Modernist Cuisine,_ in March, was the most significant event in the food world since . . . well, there might not be a precedent. The 6,000 copies that Myhrvold printed privately\u2014against more conservative advice from what he describes as \"cooler heads\" in book publishing\u2014immediately sold out at the introductory price of $465. \"We sold 9,000 of those 6,000 copies,\" Myhrvold says with satisfaction. He quickly ordered 25,000 more copies to be printed.\n\nTo research the book, Myhrvold built a 4,000-square-foot laboratory\u2013kitchen\u2013photo studio in an 18,000-square-foot former motorcycle showroom in Bellevue, where an ever-expanding team of cooks experimented with machinery usually restricted to doctor's offices, hospitals, and commercial food processing, using powders and essences and chemicals similarly typical of the food industry.\n\nSuch experimentation had been going on for years, of course, most famously starting in the early 1990s at Ferran Adri\u00e0's El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain, and in the mid-1990s at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck in Berkshire, England\u2014the two main inspirations for Myhrvold and his team, whose lead members trained with Blumenthal. In this country, it was hard for ambitious young chefs to visit a similar nucleus of cooking research unless they could get into Grant Achatz's Alinea, in Chicago ( _see \"The Alchemist,\" January\/February 200_ 7). Or unless they were among the favored few to be invited to one of the 30-course tasting dinners in the Bellevue lab, which were reserved mostly for cooks and industry leaders who had lent expertise or machines to the team, and for reporters like me who wanted a look at just what went into the three years of decision making, recipe testing, writing, and editing that preceded publication.\n\nMyhrvold himself is an object of intense interest. The former chief technology officer of Microsoft and the founder of the patent investment company Intellectual Ventures, he is a genius and billionaire who still indulges his boyish enthusiasms, which include photography and dinosaurs but revolve mostly around cooking. The interest began at age nine, when he nearly set his mother's kitchen on fire in a plan to flamb\u00e9 everything for a Thanksgiving dinner. Myhrvold is a charming, even twinkling, spokesman for his mad invention processes\u2014quite unlike, say, Ferran Adri\u00e0, whose trademark is a messianic intensity and utter imperviousness to anyone not as focused as he on the windstorm of creativity ever blowing round his brain. Myhrvold's voice is strong enough to come through in many sections of the book, though they're unsigned: a droll account in the third volume of traveling to Greenland and eating rotten shark, which \"doesn't taste like chicken,\" is probably his. So is much of an excellent chapter in the fourth volume on coffee, in which he goes in search of what baristas call the \"God shot\" and in the process learns and shares a terrific amount of information on roasting, grinding, foaming milk, and pulling espresso shots.\n\n##### **Justifiable Cost**\n\nI managed to get my hands on the copy Gibbs unpacked at Toscanini's. Opening any volume brings you right to cutting-edge tech techniques that produce food unlike anything anyone has ever tasted outside El Bulli or the Fat Duck or Alinea.\n\nBut the high-tech toys and futuristic food are not why I think you should put yourself on the wait list and spend the $478 the book now costs (unless you want to spend the $800 and up being asked for \"used\" copies). Although some of the futuristic food is fabulous, as I learned from the 30 courses I got to try at the lab, the reason to pony up the going rate is that _Modernist Cuisine_ is an incomparable introduction to many of the basic techniques of food and cooking. Within its five volumes (six, actually, including a spiral-bound book of recipes for the professional kitchen) are several long chapters that are as comprehensive and readable and valuable as any books I've seen on subjects essential for anyone interested in food.\n\nThe first volume alone contains a long, definitive introduction to food pathogens and food safety, a subject cooks ignore at their peril. The other volumes give basic information on science, ingredients, and techniques common to all cooking, not only \"modernist\" cuisine. And, of course, the book is a guide to the avant-garde\u2014one far more comprehensive and usable than anything else yet written. As for the food, there are those 1,522 recipes, and if you can lay out a fairly substantial sum and clear enough counter space to start trying them\u2014well, more on that later.\n\nI didn't read all 1,150,000 words\u2014no one other than Gibbs has claimed to, he told me when I spent a few days in the Bellevue kitchen. (He also admits to having tried only a few recipes, because he's not a cook.) But I'll claim a good 750,000. Watching the media appearances of the buoyant and unfailingly enthusiastic Myhrvold; visiting the book's website for cool videos of machines and pots being sawed in half or a kernel of popcorn dancing across a black screen until it explodes and soars up and off like a rocket; even eating 30 courses in Bellevue\u2014none of it prepares you for the experience of reading _Modernist Cuisine._\n\nEverything about the book has been designed to keep a reader going, with bits of information in the margins and pages-long interruptions for techniques, cooking charts, and \"parametric\" and \"example\" recipes. Some sidebars go on for a few pages; they're printed in white type against black, as are most of the charts, so that the flow of text, though unusually complex, becomes intuitive. As in a magazine or textbook, captions provide complementary information and pr\u00e9cis that make you feel you've got the gist of the main text.\n\nThe similarity to magazines and textbooks is not accidental. Myhrvold and Chris Young, a scientist and former Fat Duck chef who is listed as an author along with Maxime Bilet, another Fat Duck alumnus and the head chef of the Bellevue kitchen, were influenced by the illustrated Time-Life series of cookbooks from the late 1970s\u2014books, like this one, assembled by veterans of the magazine and book worlds who knew how to unite text and photographs for maximal informative value. Gibbs, who's been a writer and editor at _Scientific American_ and has extensive experience creating illustrated features, served as producer for a total of 44 writers, photographers, designers, researchers, and editors whose combined efforts bring life and interest to every page.\n\nMyhrvold has been derided for producing a book, that most old-fashioned of objects, rather than a $5 app. His stock reply: a \"really good\" electronic version, with interactive features to scale recipes, animations for key techniques, and video clips, would be a project \"bigger than the one to do this book.\" A book is still the best way to publish so much information, and the spiral-bound supplement, unlike an iPad, is waterproof. And with a few exceptions (including much of the fourth volume, which is devoted chiefly to thickeners, gels, emulsions, and foams\u2014the trickiest in the new chef's bag of tricks), my interest never flagged.\n\n##### **Cool Tools**\n\nThe book I'd make required reading for any cooking student is Volume 2, on techniques and equipment, which gives as good a description as I've seen of basic processes like baking and frying. This is also the volume that lists the toys in the toy box. Number one on the list is a sous-vide water bath\u2014a tool that is ubiquitous in the recipes, particularly for meat. The bulk of the volume, unsurprisingly given the project's origins as an eGullet chat forum Myhrvold opened about sous-vide, is devoted to this cookery technique, which Myhrvold and many other cooks value for its precise control and predictability. Thanks to the enthusiasm of chefs like Achatz, Thomas Keller (who wrote a book on the method), and Philip Preston, of PolyScience, a manufacturer of controlled-temperature equipment who worked closely with Achatz and Myhrvold, the water bath has gone from science-lab \"immersion circulator\" to almost-affordable kitchen tool.\n\nI don't have the patience for sous-vide, and I find that it produces too soft a texture in meat and fish. The piece of equipment I'd like to buy is a combination dry-and steam-heat \"combi\" oven, which so far hasn't found a manufacturer like Preston willing to work on one for the Williams-Sonoma crowd. There are tiny ones for $2,000, but they hold almost nothing; models not much bigger than a big microwave easily cost $12,000, and the authors say you need a couple of those. Still, the fact that the ovens thaw, steam, poach, and roast makes them as appealing to me as the microwave\u2014which, hearteningly, the authors endorse for cooking vegetables, frying tender herbs, and turning vegetable juices into \"perfect powders.\"\n\nThe authors do list cool tools that are within the reach of many home cooks, like digital scales and thermometers; the carbonator, for foam; a Toddy cold-brewing coffee kit, for deriving extracts of many flavorings besides coffee; and my favorite all-purpose tool, a pressure cooker, something I use nearly every night. The reason that stocks made in pressure cookers are perfectly clear, they point out, is that the water inside never boils, and the motion of boiling is what emulsifies oil and creates scum in normal stocks. They give everyday tips for ways to use the device, including making risotto (a longtime guilty secret of time-pressed Italian cooks, who will reveal it only after receiving compliments on how good their risotto is) and adding calcium chloride to the water for beans to let them soften without splitting their skins.\n\nThe tool many professional chefs may decide they need is a centrifuge, which costs $10,000 to $30,000 and can take up as much room as a washing machine. Myhrvold's team used a centrifuge to clarify juices from citrus and from sous-vide bananas, which became translucent and serum-like. Thomas Keller, chef of the French Laundry in Yountville, California, decided he needed a centrifuge after he saw the Bellevue lab use one to separate the fatty solids from peas to make \"pea butter,\" spreadably thick and perfectly smooth.\n\nAnd some chefs might sign on to the tank of liquid nitrogen that the team says is second in utility only to the sous-vide water bath. Dunking a food in liquid nitro before you fry it\u2014\"cryofrying,\" the lab calls it\u2014makes the outside of, say, cubed pork or sous-vide chicken or \"tater tots\" hot and crisp while the interior turns out just warm and not overcooked. It also makes soft foods manageable to slice thin or to grind. Cubes of beef can be put into meat grinders, drawn out in parallel, extruded strands, and carefully rolled into plastic-wrapped cylinders. After being submerged in liquid nitro, they're cut into patties and deep-fried for hamburgers that, as Jean-Georges Vongerichten reported with wonder, are juicy and crumbly without being fatty or tough. But the grownup boy magicians on the _Modernist_ team use the cooling agent, they admit, \"for just about every food,\" because it's \"just plain fun\"\u2014for instance, to \"cryoshatter\" olive oil for a garnish.\n\n##### **Possibilities**\n\nVolume 3, on animals and plants, is both an anatomy class and a guide to how proteins and fibrous plants react to heat. The section on meat includes wonderful color diagrams of muscle fibers and collagen that do more than anything else I've ever seen to explain the structure of meat and make it clear why different cuts cook differently. The section on vegetables is a good bit shorter, perhaps reflecting the cooks' degree of interest. (They seem to have been intensely interested in the heat scale of peppers, though!)\n\nVolume 4, on ingredients and preparations, spends the most time on thickeners, this being \"truly the best age ever in which to thicken a liquid.\" I was glad to learn about viscosity and fluid gels, and to discover that alginate, a hydrocolloid extracted from brown seaweed, is the key to the \"spherification\" that Adri\u00e0 has made almost as popular and widespread as foams. But for anyone who doesn't plan to buy Ultra-Sperse 3 or Ultra-Tex, or N-Zorbit M or even xanthan gum\u2014all of which are turning up in modernist-inspired kitchens, and all of which appear in dozens and dozens of recipes in the book\u2014this will make the least absorbing reading.\n\nI'd argue that the plated-dish recipes in Volume 5 will date the book faster than any other part. They're included to demonstrate the possibilities of all the techniques and ingredients we've learned about in other volumes, and to conclude the argument started in Volume 1 that all history builds to their inevitability. So classic recipes are updated and adapted, using a panoply of time-consuming steps few home cooks would attempt. Blanquette de veau, the classic veal stew, is liquefied to a warm cream called \"veal nog\" that requires a rotor-stator homogenizer and a centrifuge. Boeuf en gel\u00e9e, the gel hot rather than cold, demands a homemade oxtail stock, xanthan gum, and low-acyl gellan.\n\nSome cooks might attempt all this\u2014perhaps ambitious professionals who haven't been able to apprentice in any of the new-wave kitchens, perhaps semi-obsessed hobbyists. But I'm not one of them, and the 30 courses at Bellevue, every one of which I tried and took notes on, didn't make me a convert. Some of the flavors and textures were revelatory: a clear, strong \"beef tea\" that came from a sous-vide bag; cocoa pasta, something impossible without \"vital gluten\" (cocoa powder has no gluten of its own), with pur\u00e9ed, cured sea urchin cooked sous-vide. But much of it still seems mere trickery: freeze-dried corn kernels and powders of brown butter and lime and ash in a version of the Mexican street food corn elote, the powdered fat unpleasantly greasy on the tongue; a cream of mushroom and bacon soup infused with dark miso and gelled into a too-intense foam; smoked butter made in a rotor-stator homogenizer that overwhelmed a delicate piece of fresh-caught, unfortunately brined albino salmon (cooked sous-vide, of course).\n\nBut these are matters of personal taste, and the night I visited Bellevue I was fascinated every moment. As I did at the Jean-Georges breakfast, I came away convinced that these techniques and ingredients will be essential for cooks of the future. It's too early to know how they'll be adapted, and which will be most frequently used, but my feeling when sampling the 30 courses was that as prices for homogenizers and centrifuges come down, thickening agents become easy to find, and even liquid nitrogen becomes commonplace in professional and then home kitchens, we'll make our own ketchup and many other staples, and come to cook dishes as basic as fried chicken and hamburgers in completely different ways.\n\nEvery big-name chef, however rooted in classic techniques, is already interested. A couple of hours after the Zagat breakfast, Vongerichten persuaded me to stay for lunch, to eat the tasting menu he was giving the chef Daniel Boulud as a birthday gift. He didn't send us 30 courses, but the number approached 20, and the flavors were a kind of musical composition that varied in volume and intensity but never in virtuosity. Almost none of them used any of the new techniques described in _Modernist Cuisine_ ; almost all of them strove to find innovative but nonrevolutionary ways to extract the maximum flavor and fragrance from the herbs, fish, and meat Vongerichten had in the kitchen.\n\nBut Vongerichten told me he's getting ready to be a not-quiteearly adopter, even though \"I tried meat glue, and I just don't understand\u2014why do I need meat glue?\" As we discussed the book after lunch\u2014he had paged through it in the morning like a child with his first train set\u2014he had a look in his eyes that was both wistful and determined. \"I've got to make burgers that crumbly,\" he said. Another tank of liquid nitro sold.\n\n## Foodways\n\n### THE PASTRAMI DILEMMA\n\n### By John Birdsall\n\n### From Chow.com\n\n### Chow senior editor John Birdsall\u2014a former chef who segued into food writing for the Bay Area's SF Weekly and _East Bay Express\u2014_ traces the fortunes of this Jewish deli staple, finally getting its long-overdue artisanal revival. Reuben sandwiches will never taste the same.\n\nThe joke goes: A gorilla walks into Sol's delicatessen and orders a pastrami sandwich.\n\n\"That'll be $15,\" says Sol, handing the gorilla a sandwich. \"I gotta say, I never expected to see a gorilla in my deli.\"\n\n\"At $15 for a pastrami sandwich,\" snaps the gorilla, \"you never will again.\"\n\nOnce, pastrami was cheap. It came from Jews on New York's Lower East Side in the 19th century, when beef was abundant. They adapted it from Romanian _pastram  ,_ originally made from salted and pressed geese and ducks. And since then, it's been viewed as a well-loved but lowbrow American original, like the hot dog or the hoagie. You could say it's the soul of the American deli.\n\nBut even while chefs in other parts of the restaurant industry are making their own charcuterie, pastrami has, until recently, been stuck in the deli case of the 1950s: industrialized and mass-produced.\n\nYou know all those discussions about who has the best, Stage or Katz's, Langer's or Canter's? Forget about it. Three factories make nearly all of that famous deli pastrami and distribute it around the country.\n\nThe owners of these three pastrami factories, kind of like dons in a benign pastrami mafia, each control their own turf. In Brooklyn, for example, there's Eddie Weinberg, who supplied the old 2nd Ave Deli. In Detroit, it's Sy Ginsberg, who does _Zingerman's._ Lou Sandoval of Burbank, California, supplies _Langer's._\n\nBut finally, there's a pastrami revival going on: Artisans all over the country are starting to make pastrami the old-fashioned way. From Portland to Brooklyn to San Francisco, young chefs are opening traditional Jewish delis and bringing back the nearly extinct tradition of hand-cured, hand-smoked pastrami. But it turns out the old way is a lot harder than you'd think.\n\n##### **Hot Beef Injection**\n\nPicture your favorite Jewish deli: You probably have visions of a guy in a white apron slicing spicy, steaming brisket into a gorgeous tower. The truth is, that guy didn't make that brisket. Almost all pastrami in this country is made more like a Honda on an assembly line than like a craft project.\n\nFirst, the meat goes into an injection machine, where it's shot up with a salty solution. Then it gets a quick brine, is coated in spices, and gets smoke flavor\u2014either briefly, over actual smoldering wood chips, or more likely on a grill like at a backyard barbecue, where the \"smoke\" comes from fatty juices flaring up against hot metal. Or even in a chamber of aerosolized liquid smoke. The whole process is over in a matter of hours, after which the meat is vacuum-sealed in plastic so it can sit in a cooler for weeks before it's dumped in some deli's steamer to cook for a few hours.\n\nAnd probably not surprisingly, the factory dons are vague about where they get the meat for their clients' famous pastrami. We can guess it's not grass-fed.\n\nThe truth about pastrami isn't exactly a secret. David Sax's book _Save the Deli,_ published in 2009, revealed the state of industrialization of high-end deli meats. And it's not that pastrami's an unpalatable product. A pastrami sandwich from one of America's storied delis can be great. (LA food critic Jonathan Gold, for instance, thinks _Langer's_ makes the best pastrami sandwich in the country.)\n\nBut handmade everything is the new ethos among a certain breed of chef. And those opening up nouveau Jewish delis think they can do better. As it turns out, though, making pastrami is a lot more challenging than making rugelach and whitefish salad.\n\n##### **Navel Gazing**\n\nProblem number one: To make old-timey pastrami, the way the original preindustrial New Yorkers did it, you have to use the navel: a fatty belly cut akin to bacon on a hog. It's got thick streaks of fat that ensure the meat stays moist.\n\nAt Saul's, a New York\u2013style Jewish deli in Berkeley, California, co-owner Peter Levitt learned it's nearly impossible to use navel without going broke. Levitt, a former Chez Panisse chef, makes some essential deli products in-house: sodas, pickles, kreplach. But when it came to pastrami, the traditional ingredients were out of reach. The navel used to be a cheap cut of meat. Nowadays it's expensive, thanks to demand from Asia. (In China and South Korea, the navel is prized.) Adding to his problems was Levitt's desire to find _sustainably raised_ navel\u2014after all, Michael Pollan is a regular at Saul's.\n\nFor a few weeks, while he was trying to locate the right navel, Levitt took pastrami off the menu. A Jewish deli without pastrami? You can imagine how well that went over. For nearly two weeks, servers wore buttons on their aprons reading \"Pastrami Under Construction.\" Some customers were pissed, and Levitt continues to get calls from people asking, with trepidation, if pastrami is still \"not on the menu.\"\n\nWhen Levitt was finally able to source sustainable navel, it was cost-prohibitive because the meat is so fatty that the usable portion from one slab of navel is very small. There's a reason why most pastrami these days is made from brisket, with a tendency toward dryness. And now Saul's is too.\n\n##### **Mystery Meat**\n\nProblem number two: If nobody's making \"real\" pastrami anymore, how are you supposed to know what it's supposed to taste like? Sort of a funny question, but that was a real conundrum for Leo Beckerman and Evan Bloom. In late 2010 when the two former college buddies started Wise Sons, a pop-up Jewish deli in San Francisco, they knew they wanted to make their own pastrami, but they had no models to follow. Nobody they knew was making honest-to-God nonfactory pastrami, so they had no one to learn from. They had to turn to the Canadians for help.\n\nMile End Deli in Brooklyn, opened by Canadians Noah Bernamoff and his wife, Rae Cohen, in 2009, makes its own Montreal smoked beef. (Canada never lost its tradition of delis smoking and curing their own beef the way America did.) Mile End's product was as close to traditional pastrami as Beckerman and Bloom could find. The most noticeable thing about it was the intense smokiness that most American pastrami has lost.\n\nUsing the Bernamoffs as their guide, Beckerman and Bloom began to experiment. After trial and error, they developed an authentic-tasting recipe. First the meat (they experimented with navel but soon abandoned it for brisket) gets \"wet cured\" in brine and pickling spices for a week. Then it sits another couple of days on a rack, coated in powdered spices, until it dries out and develops a crust (the technical term is _pellicle_ ). Then it smokes for six to ten hours over hickory chunks.\n\nAt the end, they get meat that's both smokier and more beefy-tasting than factory pastrami, that's chewier, and that has an almost creamy texture from fat marbling. After nearly two weeks of work, it better be good.\n\n##### **Is It Worth It?**\n\nOf course, not every old-fashioned process works in the modern world. Ever tried making your own salt by evaporating seawater, or not washing your hair like the Native Americans did? At Portland, Oregon, deli Kenny & Zuke's there's been some backsliding on the road to authenticity. One of the earliest pastrami revivalists, co-owner Ken Gordon started making his own while still a chef in a Portland bistro, six years ago. He used the navel. But at Kenny & Zuke's, he found the original recipe to be off-putting for many Portlanders.\n\n\"It was too fatty,\" he says. \"My grandparents came over from Russia and Warsaw and ate serious chunks of fat and died in their 60s. These days customers want it lean.\"\n\nSo the deli switched to what people are used to: brisket.\n\nNow Kenny & Zuke's pastrami has a cult following. (One reviewer described their sandwich as capable of bringing a woman to orgasm.)\n\nAnd yet a week's worth of curing is a long time. Imagine you're burning through, say, 2,000 pounds of pastrami a week. How are you going to keep up? And where are you going to find the walk-in space? Such were the problems for Kenny & Zuke's. Add to that the fact that Gordon has designs on Whole Foods\u2014he hopes eventually to get FDA approval to package his pastrami to sell to retailers.\n\nAnd so, there have been some tweaks to Kenny & Zuke's traditional-ness. To shave a few days off the curing process, the meat no longer goes through the long brining. Instead, it's injected, just like the factories do it.\n\nBerkeley's Levitt has started injecting, too. He _was_ a pastrami purist, but these days he says he doesn't think the old-timey wet brine makes any difference to the taste of the meat.\n\nAnd a week after opening their brick-and-mortar delicatessen, Wise Sons' Evan Bloom is already thinking about how he can speed up the curing process.\n\nThe revivalists' pastrami still tastes great, though. It still sells like crazy. And it's still handmade. After all, Gordon's and Levitt's employees are the ones holding the syringe. For now.\n\nSomebody tell the gorilla that he can come back for a pastrami sandwich.\n\n### PASSOVER GOES GOURMET\n\n### By Rachel Levin\n\n### From _Sunset_\n\n### Once you've conquered pastrami making, why not throw a hipster Seder for the Bay Area? Freelance travel and food writer Rachel Levin laid to rest ghosts of Passovers past at this pop-up event in a San Francisco warehouse.\n\nWhy was this night different from all other nights? For starters, there was a bar. And not a bottle of sticky-sweet Manischewitz behind it. People at this Passover Seder were drinking. _Good_ wine. _Before_ the first of the traditional four glasses was poured.\n\nSecond, people were dressed in jeans. My mother never let me wear even my very best Jordache to any Jewish holiday. Skirts only, and tights that would sag around my ankles. Now, three decades later, I swapped a pair of faded cords for a stylish purple number and heels. I hadn't felt this overdressed since I wore a bathing suit to the Big Sur hot springs.\n\nThird, this wasn't my grandparents' house in a manicured Boston suburb, but a mod cafe in a former warehouse in San Francisco. My aunts and crazy cousins were clear across the country. There were no conversations-cum-arguments about what route everyone took to get there. Or kids' tables topped with Dixie cups of Welch's white grape juice.\n\nAbove all, apart from my Caribbean-born gentile friend George\u2014whom I'd dragged here while my Jewish husband was, uh, at a Black Crowes concert\u2014this was a Seder of strangers. All different backgrounds. Fifty folks here _voluntarily,_ not because their parents forced them.\n\nThe big draw? The food. Cooked, not by Grandma Hannah, but by Leo Beckerman and Evan Bloom, whose Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen pop-up here had an instant cult following. Lines snaked down sidewalks for their hand-sliced artisanal spin on pastrami. The demand for good deli\u2014in a city long lacking it\u2014grew so strong that the duo recently opened a real-deal restaurant. Last April, their first-ever public Passover Seder sold out within minutes by word of mouth.\n\nImagine, the promise of gefilte fish _that_ good.\n\n##### **Strangers become friends**\n\nCandles were lit. Communal tables were set. Sparely. No lacy white tablecloths or Blue Danube china. Playing silently on a screen was the '50s classic film _The Ten Commandments._ I mean, Charlton Heston's low-tech parting of the Red Sea is the kind of Seder entertainment I could've used as a kid.\n\nI loved my grandpa Orrin, I really did. He was a kind, lanky doctor in a knit tie and corduroy blazer. But his Seders were by-the-book snooze.\n\nHere was fresh-faced 28-year-old Leo! With waist-length dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail, he had a cool, confident command over the room that would no doubt make his own grandfather proud. After the blessing over the wine, servers presented plates of matzo. It was blistered, cracker-thin, imperfectly shaped. And _not_ from a box, but made by Bay Area local Blake Joffe of Beauty's Bagel Shop\u2014with more than just the requisite flour and water. If all it takes is a little sea salt and olive oil to enhance matzo's typically dry-mouth taste, then I vote for a minor overhaul of tradition.\n\nStill, this was a legit Seder. Everyone had a photocopy of a Haggadah, the book of prayers, songs, and biblical tales that recount the Israelites' exodus from Egypt and freedom from slavery.\n\nIt's a good story. But as a kid, taking turns around the table reading The. Entire. Freaking. Thing meant we didn't eat for _hours._ I'd steal sprigs of parsley from the tabletop (long after we'd dipped it in the ritual salt water)\u2014and sit, starving and bored as hell. Grandma's dense-as-rocks matzo balls and gray, leather-tough brisket weren't any prize. But by the time dinner was actually served, I would've eaten the jar of Heinz Chili Sauce she'd \"seasoned\" it with.\n\n\"Tonight, we're going to move through the Passover story pretty quickly,\" announced Leo. \"We've got eating to do!\"Amen to that.\n\nAnd so it began: the explanation of the Seder plate, the Four Questions (typically, the youngest person at the table is charged with tone-deaf singing this integral part of the evening, but on this night, the lone tween was too shy; instead we were treated to a woman who actually had a beautiful voice), and the Ten Plagues, detailing Old World woes. By the festive song _\"Dayenu\"_ (\"Enough\"), we'd lost count of glasses of wine and were all one big, happy family\u2014singing, clapping, exchanging smiles. George turned to me and exclaimed: \"I love this! I'm with my people!\"\n\nBefore we knew it, dinner was served, family-style: pickled heirloom carrots and Bull's Blood beets. \"Mock liver\"\u2014a mash of organic peas and Blue Lake beans. The prettiest, most perfectly pungent, handgrated fluorescent-fuchsia horseradish I've ever had. (Note to Wise Sons: Jar that stuff!) The soup was a clean, flavorful broth buoying matzo balls as God intended them to be: feather-light and fluffy. The gefilte fish was a custom-grind of carp and whitefish in a fennel-thyme fumet\u2014a far cry from the congealed stuff in jars you see every season at the supermarket. And the brisket: not gray! Not tough! Just fork-tender shreds of peppery sweet meat.\n\nThree hours later, when we were down to the last sips of madeira, matched with a creamy, rich chocolate pot de cr\u00e8me (single-handedly bringing Passover desserts back from the dead), there was laughter; career-advice-giving; gossip about embarrassing wedding toasts and bad breakups involving people we didn't know. No barking between relatives or help-clear-the-table mandates from Mom. But hugs good-bye. And sincere cries of \"Next Year\u2014with Wise Sons!\"\n\n### THE 2011 DYKE MARCH WIENER TASTE TEST\n\n### By Bethany Jean Clement\n\n### From _The Stranger_\n\n### The Fourth of July: The iconic American holiday, made for parades, fireworks, and cooking hot dogs on the grill. Seattle's wacky spin on this tradition is perfect fodder for _The Stranger_ managing editor Bethany Jean Clement's subversive, droll restaurant review style.\n\nAnd so we come to Independence Day, when Americans turn to thoughts of wieners.\n\nFact (according to a press release received by _The Stranger_ last week about something called \"Grillebration,\" which sounds like an emergency room procedure): Our countrypeople will enjoy seven billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day. On July 4th, we will engulf more than 150 million of them. One hundred and fifty million hot dogs: We must all do our part. So as a public service in advance of your patriotic barbecue, we present the 2011 Dyke March Wiener Taste Test.\n\nFor the purposes of the test, three representative weenies were selected. (We shall set aside the veggie dogs as a dangerous fringe element.) First, the low: the bottom-shelf supermarket dog. When I was a child, we were fed Bar-S\u2014containing, among other things, unspecified tidbits of pork and beef and mechanically separated chicken, as well as corn syrup (2 percent or less of the latter, the label hastens to reassure).While among a certain set nowadays, serving kids Bar-S would get you reported to Child Protective Services, it claims to be the number-one-selling hot dog in America (with the dubious corollary claim \"Only the best is branded Bar-S\"). Interpreting the runes on my supermarket receipt, it appears that last Saturday, a package of Bar-S Classic Franks was on special for just one dollar. That's 12 cents per dog. TWELVE CENTS. Is this a great country or what? (Or what.)\n\nThen there is what might arguably be called the middle way: Hebrew National, the kosher frank that brags about being all beef (unspecified \"premium cuts,\" riiiight), with no artificial flavors or fillers (animated buns on the website wave protest-style signs about this). It's worth noting, however, that Hebrew National\u2014just like Bar-S\u2014contains 2-percent-or-less of four kinds of sodiums, including our friend nitrate. Furthermore, while Hebrew National touts its \"humble beginnings in New York City's turn-of-the-century immigrant neighborhoods,\" it is now a subsidiary of food giant ConAgra, the _Wikipedia page of which_ \u2014with allegations of environmental irresponsibility, labor issues, health violations, salmonella and E. coli\u2013related product recalls, and delicious, delicious more\u2014truly merits all Americans' attention. The price of Hebrew National beef franks at QFC last Saturday: just about 43 cents each.\n\nLast but not least, and just in time for the taste test, Seattle has a brand-new high-class dog: Rain Shadow Meats' house-made wieners. When I phoned the all-local-meats Capitol Hill butcher to inquire what they sold that was most like a hot dog, they reported that after extensive research and development, they'd just debuted their own\u2014just like a regular hot dog, but made with reduced-guilt-and-ick-factor Carlton Farms pork, Painted Hills beef, \"a little bit of ham,\" and a proprietary spice blend, all inside a lamb casing. Rain Shadow proprietor and great-name-haver Russ Flint said that while he only eats a hot dog once in a blue moon (which is really how often you should be eating a hot dog, America), the people deserve a high-quality option. Rain Shadow's wieners are peachy-colored and pornographically large in both length and girth; they're about a quarter-pound each. Uncooked, they are redolent of traditional baloney. At $6.99 a pound, each weenie will run you about $1.65.\n\nThe obvious time to conduct the taste test, as a celebration of all things U.S. of A., was during a friend's annual barbecue along the route of the Seattle Dyke March last Saturday. A gas grill was fired up on the sidewalk; the three kinds of weenies were cooked until nice and hot, with good grill-markage (except the Bar-S, which due to an unforeseen grill hot spot obtained an all-over char to which no one objected). The dogs were ensconced in cheap, squishy buns (the only proper hot-dog conveyance, no matter what Macrina Bakery may offer). The smaller dogs were cut into halves and the Rain Shadow behemoths cut into thirds, as no one in their right mind wants to eat three entire hot dogs; ketchup and yellow mustard were made available, though if utilized, had to be applied to all three samples for test consistency. The dogs were fed, unidentified, to study participants (though without actual blindfolding, as that seemed too complicated). Now: the results.\n\n**Bar-S Classic Frank:** Most test subjects were administered this weenie first, and the general consensus was that, lacking any basis for comparison, it was completely adequate if \"not exciting\" (Ben K., attorney). One subject pronounced it \"an all-American, delicious hot dog\" (sound engineer and education coordinator Jeffery). Small-business-owner Greg theorized that, due to its highly processed look and squishy consistency, the Bar-S sample might be a veggie dog; upon sampling, however, he said, \"It tastes like it's real meat.\" His hypothesis briefly spread, leading Toshi (artist) to say that the dog \"looked fake . . . I don't feel like it's meat.\" Zac (another artist) reported simply, \"It tastes like a hot dog, straight-up.\" Greg, with the gimlet eye of a capitalist, offered the only real condemnation: \"If these were your hot dogs, I wouldn't invest in your business.\"\n\n**Hebrew National Kosher Frank:** Several test subjects whose parents were less skinflinty than mine identified this as the taste of childhood. Ben K. got a bit misty-eyed, saying, \"It's reminiscent of the classic hot dogs of my youth.\" It was judged less squishy than Bar-S, as well as saltier; \"Salty-delicious,\" said Sara (arts administrator), while another subject (me, not blind, but whatever) felt it was oversalted (and I like salt). Upon visual inspection, Greg pronounced this dog to have the appearance of real meat; after tasting, it was judged to have better flavor, \"a little smoky\u2014good texture\u2014I'm impressed.\" Jeffery cannily identified it as a kosher dog. \"It's real good,\" he said succinctly.\n\n**Rain Shadow Meats' Quality Dog:** Well, what do you know? This was hands down the wiener-winner. Jeffery reported (again, cannily) that it had \"lots of actual flavor\u2014less like a hot dog, more like a sausage. I feel like the pig was killed within 50 miles of here.\" Conjecturing about the methodology of the test, Zac said, \"I feel like we're going up in quality\u2014maybe it's psychosomatic, but I feel like we went up in meatiness.\" Ben B. (floor refinisher) admired both the crunch and the spice. And yet the gains in texture and taste were not at the expense of archetypal hot dog flavor; as Sara put it, \"Mmmmm\u2014hot dog.\" Greg liked the looks of both the size and the color, and after one bite said, \"This is it. This is the shit. This is in my refrigerator. It tastes like people just cared more, whether it's quality ingredients, craftsmanship\u2014it has more dimension. Someone cared.\" Informed about the added expense, he opined that if the hot dog was still only a couple bucks, it was entirely worth it\u2014you do get what you pay for. Ben K. concurred, lauding the Rain Shadow dog's \"multiple flavor notes.\" He then summed up the taste test thusly: \"Three wieners in my mouth\u2014what a perfect Pride weekend.\"\n\nNot long after, the Dyke March went by with beating drums, aglow with the fresh legalization of gay marriage in New York and the late-evening sun. March participants wore rainbows and trilby hats and gold lam\u00e9 shirts and no shirts at all, flashing peace signs and waving. The taste-testers screamed in support until all were hoarse. Is this a great country or what? (Great country!)\n\n### THE MISSING LINK\n\n### By Brett Anderson\n\n### From _The Times-Picayune_\n\n### After eleven years of covering New Orleans' food scene\u2014most memorably through the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill\u2014Brett Anderson recently took a year's leave from the _Times-Picayune_ (in the throes of a controversial downsizing) to accept a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.\n\nDonald Link barely gave the chickens a chance to stop sizzling before he put his hands around them, subjecting each to a tactile examination that looked like nothing so much as a quarterback blindly feeling his way to a football's seam.\n\nOne of the chickens looked like wild game, its flesh darkened by injected Cajun spices vivified by the flames in the wood-fired oven behind it. The other, which had been brined overnight, wore the more typical mottled gold-brown armor of roasted farm-raised fowl. Both stood upright in cast-iron pans, impaled by beer cans. Link appraised them while sucking the grease off his fingers. \"Turns out there are a lot of ways to cook a chicken,\" he said.\n\nThat statement of the obvious prompted laughter in the peanut gallery behind him, at the edge of the open kitchen inside Cochon in Lafayette.\n\nThe opening of the restaurant, a spin-off of the original Cochon in New Orleans, was still three weeks away, but on this hot August night, Link and his team had crossed the threshold where obsessive planning gives way to undressed rehearsals. Ryan Prewitt, until recently chef de cuisine at Herbsaint, Link's flagship New Orleans restaurant, explained, \"We talked about (cooking chicken) for like three hours last night.\"\n\n\"It got pretty heated,\" chuckled Stephen Stryjewski, who is, along with Link, chef and co-owner of both Cochon locations.\n\nCochon Lafayette has more than just a name in common with its New Orleans counterpart. The most important similarity is a concept that encapsulates Link's vision of what, to use his words, \"Cajun food has become.\" Not since Paul Prudhomme opened K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen more than three decades ago has New Orleans seen a new restaurant elicit such a phenomenal response from such an array of diners. That both happen to hang their hats on the food of Acadiana is a topic ripe for academic inquiry.\n\nEvidence of Cochon's success goes beyond the crowds that regularly congest the restaurant's corner of New Orleans' Warehouse District.\n\nSince Cochon opened in 2006, both Link and Stryjewski have won prestigious chef awards from the James Beard Foundation. In 2008, _The New York Times_ ranked Cochon the third best new American restaurant outside New York. Link also won a Beard for \"Real Cajun,\" his provocatively titled cookbook that delves deep into the pot that inspired Cochon's creation. \"Gossip Girl\" star Blake Lively was so besotted with the restaurant's sweet potato sauce at a recent visit that she tried to persuade staff to circumvent FDA regulations by sending her some inside a disemboweled teddy bear. (The response she received from Cochon, according to _Glamour_ magazine: \"We are not the drug cartel.\")\n\nStill, the new Cochon is a re-creation of the old one, not a straight replication. (An item not central to the New Orleans Cochon repertoire: roast chicken.) The fine distinction begins to explain why Link's journey back to his native Cajun country\u2014Lafayette is its putative capital\u2014has been filled with trepidation as well as joy.\n\nThe chef's family roots run deep in the region: He was raised in Lake Charles, on Cajun country's southwestern edge. But as much as Link identifies with the cooking of his\u2014and perhaps as importantly, his family members'\u2014youth, there is no erasing that he became a big shot in a city whose relationship to Cajun country has dysfunctional dimensions. As Billy Link, a Crowley soybean, rice and crawfish farmer, put it, \"New Orleans is New Orleans, and there's a line between New Orleans and here. They don't mix well, in a way.\"\n\nBilly Link, who is either Donald's third or fourth cousin (it depends on whom\u2014and when\u2014you ask), was leaning against the poured-concrete counter separating the restaurant's kitchen from one of two main dining rooms. He'd arrived with his wife, Becky, and their two young sons to feast on the dishes Cochon's chefs were fine-tuning while test-driving the new kitchen equipment.\n\nThe banquet included the two roast chickens, along with one that had been cooked in an outside smoker built by Dwane Link, another cousin; two darkly crusted pork shoulders; a whole ribeye roast cut into bite-size strips; a pan of shrimp in a butter sauce spiked with the Brazilian peppers that Donald Link grows in his Lakeview backyard; and smothered rabbit provided by yet another cousin, served with rice that Billy Link is supplying the Lafayette restaurant.\n\n\"That's the old Cajun style right here!\" Billy Link proclaimed, delighted by the sight of the rabbit, which he called, in an exaggerated French-Cajun accent, _lapin._ \"If they cook it like this, they'll be all right.\"\n\nBilly Link has known his cousin only as a successful chef, having first met Donald at a family reunion six or seven years ago, and relishes his role as an unofficial critic of Cochon's food. He's playfully dismissive of meat smokers as an influence of the Zaunbrechers, the Cajun family on Donald Link's mother's side. (\"The Link side? Non-smokers.\") He wore a Cochon T-shirt but actually prefers Herbsaint, where the food reflects European traditions as much as Louisiana ones.\n\nThe preference could be a simple matter of taste. It also could have something to do with the games Cochon plays on native Cajuns' memory and sense of pride. The phenomenon might be summed up by the review Billy Link said a group of his friends gave the New Orleans restaurant after visiting: \"We can cook better than that.\"\n\nDonald Link responds to his family's ribbings the way he responds to irritants both mild and severe: with a crooked smile that causes him to resemble a cat that just made a snack of a pet canary. While he's no stranger to cameras or laudatory press, by the standards of a moment where chefs can become television stars without ever running a restaurant, Link counts as a throwback to the days when chefs let the food speak for itself. He insists, \"I am not trying to be a celebrity chef.\"\n\nThe strategy has served Link well, and not just economically. Anthony Bourdain, the acerbic chef, television host and best-selling author, has said of Link, \"there's no one in the business with more credibility.\"\n\nThe challenge in Lafayette is that credibility earned for cooking Cajun food in New Orleans isn't exactly a recognized currency. In fact, it could be a liability.\n\n\"A lot of (Cajuns) know of him who haven't tried his food, but they know of him because he's up here,\" Billy Link said of his cousin, raising his hand up high to illustrate the chef's exalted status. \"And they're waiting for him.\"\n\nOne of the many ironies attending Cochon Lafayette is that its owners don't regard area Cajun restaurants to be their primary competition. Ask Link or Stryjewski what inspired them to open in Lafayette, as opposed to, say, Houston or Covington, both of which were considered, and they will invariably talk with amazement about the crowds at Pamplona Tapas Bar or the slick Japanese restaurant Tsunami in Lafayette's old downtown.\n\n\"You need to check that place out on a Friday night,\" Stryjewski said ofTsunami. The night-clubby restaurant is not the sort one would expect to impress Stryjewski, a tattooed, bearishly boyish man who in plain clothes often appears to have just stepped off a skateboard.\n\nBut Tsunami, like Pamplona, captured the chefs' attention because its crowd, particularly on weekends, exposes an indigenous population of young adults whose interests clearly go well beyond\u2014and possibly don't even include\u2014boudin and zydeco.\n\nThe opportunity Cochon's chefs see in Lafayette has as much to do with business as it does aesthetics, and it is similar to the one they road to fame and profit in New Orleans. While the level of attention Prudhomme had brought to Cajun food in the 1980s altered the way Americans eat, the Opelousas-born chef's fame was so widely felt\u2014and his food so widely misinterpreted\u2014that it sparked a debate over authenticity of the cuisine that has yet to quiet.\n\n\"Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine,\" a definitive book on the subject, debunks the myth that Cajun food was developed in a vacuum; authors Marcelle Bienvenu, Carl A. Brasseaux and Ryan A. Brasseaux call it a \"cross-cultural borrowing of the diverse ethnic and racial groups that have co-existed in the Bayou Country since the late eighteenth century.\"\n\nCochon entered into this historical fray by exposing one thing Prudhomme's revolution did not spawn: modern Cajun restaurants that uphold the highest standards of quality and service. The very fact that Link's team drew a bead on Lafayette suggests that this has been the case not just in New Orleans but in Cajun country itself, an implication that steers the age-old debate over authenticity into uncharted, potentially turbulent waters.\n\nLink and Stryjewski are intense students of Cajun cuisine and its evolution. And the chefs' idea of \"real\" Cajun food around Lafayette tends to be found in the same places Cajun food purists look for it: on home cooks' stoves or in decidedly blue-collar restaurants like T-Coon's and Laura's II, both order-at-the-counter, rice-and-gravy plate lunch places that have almost nothing in common, at least atmospherically, with Cochon.\n\nBut in the crowds found at the more modern non-Cajun restaurants, Link sees \"an indication of the desire of this city. If you want to feel metropolitan, if you want to go for a glass of wine and a decent meal, where do you go? It's usually fried food and beer and cocktails, and if there is wine, it's not good wine. I think there's a lot more sophistication going on in these small towns that's not being reflected in the restaurants.\"\n\nDemographic evidence supports Link's hunch. The 2010 Census data puts the median household income in Lafayette Parish at $47,901.That compares to a $35,505 median household income in Orleans Parish, according to data provided by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center.\n\nBut is it possible tonier Cajun-style restaurants are few and far between in Cajun country because Cajun diners don't trust restaurants with wine lists to properly represent a folk-art form born of subsistence living many people still remember?\n\nPat Mould was the chef at Charlie G's when the restaurant opened in Lafayette in 1985. He remembers raising eyebrows with the restaurant's contemporary Louisiana cooking and sleek interior, which was designed by a prominent Chicago architect.\n\n\"Because we had this perception of being a citified restaurant, we got a ton of (criticism),\" Mould said. \"People were suspicious. We have this jaded perspective that no one's going to cook it better than mama.\"\n\nThat Charlie G's remains one of the region's relatively few high-end restaurants interpreting Louisiana cuisine also points to persistent assumptions about the corrupting effects of elevated social status. In an oral history conducted for the Southern Foodways Alliance by the New Orleans historian (and Lafayette native) Rien Fertel, T-Coon's owner David Billeaud said, \"I'm not a chef. I'm a cook. Cooks work hard.\"\n\nIn New Orleans, Cochon proves daily that questions surrounding its food's authenticity are matters of semantics and style, not substance. The food's rusticity provides cloud cover to a technical proficiency that is the mark of professionals who regard the chef title as an honor earned through labor. The results\u2014the fried rabbit livers riding pepper jellied toasts, the hogs-head cheese shaved over fresh peas, the skillet-cooked rabbit and dumplings based on a Link relative's recipe for squirrel\u2014are almost always prettier than anything a Cajun grandmother has ever served.\n\nLink and Stryjewski, after all, are not Cajun grandmothers. They're chefs whose skill-sets and sensibilities were formed in restaurants as far away as northern California. But because the ingredients and recipes ground Cochon's food in Cajun country's bayous, prairies and marsh, Cochon cuts through the social baggage\u2014name another Beard-winning restaurant offering iceberg lettuce salad, unironically\u2014that has weighed on Cajun cuisine since its commercialization.\n\nDiners can reasonably argue that they've never had anything like Cochon's braised pork cheeks in Abbeville, or that it is heresy to charge $8 for an oyster-meat pie, flaky as Cochon's is. But it would be impossible to conclude after eating either dish at Cochon, perhaps with a bottle of Burgundy wine alongside a free cone of fried pigs ears, that the chefs regard their source of inspiration as a backwater.\n\nStill, theories that hold true in New Orleans are being tested all over again at Cochon Lafayette. And Link knows it.\n\n\"As a chef your (work is) always on the table. You're always up for discussion, \" Link said. The difference in Lafayette, he explained, is \"everybody is a food critic who could make or break you. It's a whole other level.\" You can't \"PR your way out of\" a bad night's performance when there are no waves of tourists coming in behind the diners you may have disappointed on an off night.\n\n\"I'm feeling way more pressure performance-wise,\" Link added, comparing Lafayette to New Orleans, \"because it's deeper.\"\n\nThe chef was sitting on the deck outside Cochon after dinner service on Sept. 15, the restaurant's opening night. The task of convincing Lafayette diners that the restaurant is adequately respectful of Cajun cuisine's hardscrabble roots is further complicated by its location in the city's River Ranch development, a model of mixed-use New Urbanism that architecturally looks more suburban than urban.\n\nT-Coon's is only three miles away, but Cochon Lafayette's closest and fiercest business competition may be the Bonefish Grill. Earlier in the night, the River Ranch outpost of the Florida-based national chain hosted overflow crowds, mostly locals angling for a good view of the LSU football game. (Bonefish is also where Link's father, who lives in Lake Charles, drove to celebrate his most recent birthday.)\n\nCochon Lafayette won't conjure visions of the rural idylls on full-color display in Link's cookbook, but it is beautiful, particularly at night, when its lights cast a soft glow on the Vermilion River running just below the herb-and citrus-tree-lined deck and terrace. At 6,000 square feet, the restaurant seats around 250, twice as many diners as its sister location in New Orleans. It also evokes the original, with its pigmented concrete floors, blonde wood accents and open kitchen.\n\nBeth Hebert ate her lemon-and-garlic-scented oven-baked shrimp at the restaurant's expansive bar, which overlooks the river and suggests what a fishing camp might look like if renovated by an architect specializing in urban lofts. Hebert was in Lafayette visiting relatives from her home in Los Angeles. She declared Cochon's food \"not unrecognizable\" from what she knew growing up. Still, she said, \"I couldn't take my parents here. They're old. They'd be confused.\" Hebert's friends in L.A.? \"They'd absolutely love this place.\"\n\nIf Cochon Lafayette succeeds, bridging this generational divide could be its greatest accomplishment. Cognizant of this challenge, the owners larded the opening-night staff with seasoned Link Restaurant Group operatives. Among them were Stryjewski and Prewitt, who was recently promoted to oversee all of the company's restaurants' kitchens, including Cochon Butcher, the sandwich cafe and Cajun-style butcher shop in New Orleans.\n\n\"One of the reasons we're doing this is to give our people new opportunities, provide them a career and a life,\" Link said. \"If we didn't have the talent to open this place, we wouldn't be.\"\n\nTogether with Kyle Waters III, Cochon Lafayette's chef de cuisine, the restaurant's team built a menu around Cochon classics while, as Link put it, \"trying not to appear like we're competing with anyone's grandma.\"\n\nThe smothered chicken nods to a regional mainstay, only Cochon's is smoked and gilded with pickled onions and mustard seeds. One older man told Link he enjoyed the grilled skirt steak \"but didn't know what to do with\" its side of collard green slaw. (Major difference between the slaw and traditional smothered collards, which are also on the menu: length of cooking.)\n\nThe fried redfish collar was certainly familiar to any Cajun fisher who has refused to waste any morsel of a day's catch\u2014never mind that other diners may recognize the dish as a staple of Japanese cooking, too.\n\nCochon Lafayette's boudin is smoked, its casing charred, the space in the cavity where it's split filled with a pinch of sliced pickled chile peppers. The dish represents a reversal of Link's original vow to stay away from boudin in Lafayette for fear of becoming ensnared in the contentious regional argument over whose is best. So what if his doesn't resemble anything anyone has ever eaten in the cab of a pick-up?\n\n\"There are a lot of cultures involved in Cajun food,\" Link said. \"No one can really lay claim to it. Why does it have to be one thing? Why can't it be different? Why can't it be in an entirely different context?\"\n\nOn opening night, Cochon Lafayette was already addressing these and other questions. The restaurant's parking lot was full.\n\n### FORAGING AND FISHING THROUGH THE BIG BEND\n\n### By Gary Paul Nabhan\n\n### From _Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands_\n\n### Long before it became a foodie mantra, \"eating local\" was a guiding principle of Gary Paul Nabhan's pioneering work as a farmer, food writer, and conservation biologist. In _Desert Terroir,_ he gives us a deeply personal look at how his life in the American Southwest forged that connection to the land.\n\nThere was a particular moment in my life when I knew I must live where I could fully taste the place in which I lived every week for the rest of my life, if not every day. I call it my Seek-No-Further moment, named for an heirloom apple that sometimes grows in old streamside orchards of the Desert Southwest. This revelatory moment did not occur exactly where I live today, but along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, where barren rocks and towering yuccas dwarf any gardens, fields, orchards, or pastures.\n\nIt was along the Big Bend that I learned the pleasure of making a meal of foodstuffs gleaned only from the surrounding landscape. I gained the urge to make such a meal by meeting some poor Mexican families who had to eat off the land in order to survive. My time among them humbled me, for it suggested that I should never again ignore or waste the harvestable foods within reach of where I stood. To do otherwise would certainly dishonor the borderline families that so generously shared with me the little foods that they had, but it would also dishonor the plant and animal foods that emerged from some of the driest reaches of this earth.\n\nMy revelatory moment of homing took place some twenty-one years before I write this, but it has taken me all this time to fully acknowledge how that epiphany has guided my life since then. Before Big Bend, I had moved along listlessly, without much of a place or taste of my own. I meandered through life like a disengaged visitor, strolling through the garden of earthly delights merely reading the signs in front of each plant rather than reaching out to pluck the ripest among them.\n\nAnd then, as I broke out of the chaos of cactus and brambles on that day of epiphany, I could at last see, as well as savor, the fruits of the tree of life growing right before me.\n\nIronically, my Garden of Eden was devoid of apples (no Seek-No-Furthers nor any other heirloom varieties). Instead it tasted of cornmeal-crusted catfish, wild oregano, chile pequin, and a few poisonous nightshade berries tossed into some goat's milk to make it curdle. If you can wait a little longer for me to cast the rest of this story, I think you'll understand how a catfish, some goat cheese, chiles, and oregano came to lead me home.\n\nOddly, I can't remember much about my life at that time. I had been living rather unhappily in the sprawling metropolis called Phoenix, working at a botanical garden filled with desert plants that seemed to be assaulted on all sides by asphalt, concrete, plywood, wallboard, and two-by-fours. Fortunately, someone suggested to me that I should study the edible flora of the Big Bend, and that I might be able to get a deal serving as a guest guide with a rafting outfit that regularly ran through the canyons there. I had never spent much time in the wilds of Texas nor in the _monte_ of Coahuila, but portions of those areas had recently been conserved as biosphere reserves. I knew little about biosphere reserves except that they allowed the local, more sustainable uses of edible and medicinal plants to continue within their boundaries. I needed to get out of the city, and Big Bend was the ticket.\n\nThe Big Bend, as you may know, is a raggedy dogleg of the Rio Grande. That river\u2014hardly more than sixty yards across and four feet deep through much of the Big Bend\u2014briefly cuts through a series of canyons with walls four hundred feet tall. The population density of that region of the U.S.\/Mexico border rivals that of the bleakest reaches of North Dakota. There are more cacti than people along the Big Bend, and more emptiness than busy-ness.\n\nPerceived by most folks as an empty, desolate, and desultory place, Big Bend has also been neglected by wild food enthusiasts, but is held in great esteem by desert rats. I myself had not thought much about nor thought much of the Tex-Mex borderlands until I was granted the chance to float and eat my way through Big Bend on a raft trip with Far-Flung Adventures in the autumn of 1988. When the proprietors of Far-Flung sent me a postcard of their six-month-old baby smiling, sitting naked in a pile of jalapeno peppers, I became intrigued.\n\nThere was a lot more than jalapenos, however, among the groceries when I and the other rafters arrived at the \"put-in\" site known as Solis, where we loaded the rafts with waterproof river bags, grills, canteens, and coolers with a half ton of canned food and beer. I began to wonder whether the familiar foods we'd brought along might serve as a disincentive for discerning the unique flavors of the Big Bend, but I readily accepted a cold one when someone popped open a beer and offered it to me.\n\nMexico's Sierra San Vicente was in sight as the trip began, and as we glanced downstream, we saw the glistening river disappear into a three-mile \"tunnel\" called San Vicente Canyon. Its limestone walls rose above us in subtle shades of grays, buffs, and creams; where the sun shined upon them, they were so barren and bright that we could have gone stone-blind by simply staring at them for more than a minute's time.\n\n\"This ain't Eden,\" I grumbled to myself, wondering how in the hell I was going to lead an \"edible plant walk\" later in the day when everything in sight looked as though it might bite at _me_ before I could take a bite out of _it._\n\nIf there was anything edible along that first stretch of San Vicente, it remained hidden from me. However, Marcos Paredes, our head guide, reminded me that we were visiting during the season of hunger weather, when food was hard to come by. That's why Mexican cowboys brought the cowhides they cured and _candelilla_ wax they refined across the river to get cash so that they could buy canned groceries and beer. Yes, there were some desert foods out there, but they would be slow to reveal themselves. Instead, we turned our immediate attention to all the other plants that poked their thorns and spines and stickers out from the otherwise naked canyon walls.\n\nAfter our first riverside lunch of cold cuts, chips, and beer in the shade of an old mesquite tree, we put the rafts in and began to float the Rio Grande in earnest. Like the Rio Colorado, the River Nile, and most other desert rivers I have floated, the Rio Grande has its banks choked by a dense thicket of shrubby tamarisks and a canebrake of bamboo-like grass that the Mexicans call _carrizo._ As the sinuous river curved and looped back on itself like a coiled snake, grassy curls of _carrizo_ offered a minimalist's hint of greenery in swirls and corkscrews and commas on the water's edge. Beyond this narrow little lip of lushness, the limestone slopes of San Vicente Canyon appeared barren, that is, unless you got down on your hands and knees beneath the creosote bushes and took a good hard look at the ground. There, hunkered down amid the dull-colored stones, were beautiful \"rainbows,\" highly prized by cactus collectors, along with a dozen other species of cryptic cacti unique to the Chihuahuan Desert. In some places, as many as thirty-five kinds of spiny gray cacti were hiding out on each acre, some of them bearing delicious strawberry-like fruit. To recognize the cacti and to eat their succulent fruit, I first had to learn how \"to get over the color green\" (as Wallace Stegner once urged us to do) so as to take note of _their world._\n\nDown on the river, the most obvious objects other than our rafts were two-liter Coke bottles bobbing up and down, especially in the eddies just downstream from where the river bent.\n\n\"Holy _mole!\"_ one of my raft companions exclaimed, pointing and frowning. \"The Mexican folks around here must toss all their Coke bottles into the river with no respect for the river itself.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not saying they're pretty, but at least they're functional,\" explained Sammy, a boatman from the Far-Flung crew. Sammy was skinny, leathery, gray-haired, and goofy, and wore as few clothes as possible, rain or shine. He rowed as he spoke:\n\n\"A lot of those bottles . . . I guess they've been scavenged from our camps or rescued from the river. The Mexican folks retrofit 'em, turn 'em into floats for jug-lines to catch catfish.\"\n\n\"What do you mean . . . they're not all free-floating trash?\"\n\nSammy shook his head. \"No, not at all. Especially during the drought, people need to eat from the river cuz, well, they can't eat a helluva lot from the land. So they gather up four or five of those two-liter Coke bottles, put a little gravel in them, sometimes paint 'em white, caulk them closed, screw the caps back on, and they've got some pretty cheap floats for their jug-lines. Then they tie some braided twine tight around the bottlenecks. They might extend the line, oh, maybe some twenty feet or so, and start adding hooks, leaders, or sinkers, or anchor them with bricks. Or tie them to a lead line tied to a tree off the bank. Now, when a catfish hits, the bottle dips, the gravel rolls to one side, and weight shifts to the end with the cap. They come by and see the jug has shifted position, check it, and find a big of catfish on the hook.\"\n\n_\"Muy suave._ Pretty slick. Wish we could do it,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, hell, just keep your eye out for one of them jugs that has got loose.\" Sammy put one oar in his lap and pointed over toward an eddy, where the drift lines tend to get waylaid. \"We like to pull in the drifters, anyway. Maybe it'll already have a fish on it, maybe it won't, but you can float it behind the raft for a while. As long as you don't let it drift loose again, and check it every half hour or so, I doubt anyone will bother you.\"\n\nLate that afternoon, after we had set up camp in San Vicente Canyon, not far above the town of Ojo Caliente, I found a ghost line drifting along with a jug behind it. I pulled it in, refurbished it a little, and set it out. Within fifteen minutes of placing it in the water, I saw my Coke bottle float by, bobbing. I grabbed some gloves out of my pack, and a bucket from the cooking area, and went over to pull up my first fish of the trip.\n\nIt was most likely a Chihuahua catfish, close kin to the widespread channel cat, but a species more common on the middle and lower Rio Grande. Its tail has a shallower fork than those of both channel and headwater catfish, and the Chihuahua seldom reaches a full foot in length. Differences aside, they are all good eating, as we learned later that evening after gutting and grilling four or five more that we had caught (by rod as well as by jug).\n\nWhile the Far-Flung crew reheated a pre-prepared pan of enchiladas, poured out a can of beans into a skillet to refry, and mashed some avocados into guacamole with the bottom of a beer bottle, a couple of us sat in the sand next to the grill and pan-fried our catfish. We passed around nuggets of catfish as finger food just after dark, and most everyone agreed that fresh catfish was much tastier than canned beans. The catfish was soon forgotten, however, as more beer appeared out of the coolers\u2014Dos Equis, Tres Esquis\u2014all the X's you could count or drink. A little beat-up guitar was passed around the group, and we tried our best to remember the words of songs by Gary P. Nunn, Doug Sahm, Steve Fromholz, Butch Hancock, and other Texas songwriters.\n\nWith the jagged lines of the canyon rim above us, I put my sleeping bag on a tarp ten feet from the river and looked up at the sky to watch for the moonrise from my sleeping bag. As usual, I faded off to sleep before the moon arrived.\n\nIn the twilight time the Mexicans call _la madrugada,_ I awakened to roosters crowing not all that far away. The stars were still visible in the slot of sky framed by the canyon, but I could see from a rose-colored patch of the Sierra del Carmen in the distance that the day was coming on. I pulled on my jeans, slipped into my huaraches, put on my straw cowboy hat, grabbed my plant collection bag, and began to walk toward the sound of the roosters, where I presumed I would find the little spring-side settlement of Ojo Caliente.\n\nThe hot springs had been tapped to irrigate a few small fields, and they were in the last throes of being harvested. There were melons and squashes, corn and beans, broom sorghum, sugar cane sorghum, and pasture grass. It was hard to tell who had harvested more of the crops, the Mexicanos or the grasshoppers. Grasshoppers were everywhere, hopping around as if they had bit parts in a motion picture about biblical plagues. I wondered if these _grillos_ were ever grilled and eaten when other foods were scarce. (Later in life, I carried _grillos asados_ from Mexico along with me as a trail food whenever I ran rivers.)\n\nJust as the dawn's light spilled into the canyon, I met a young Coahuiltecan woman who was going to fetch some drinking water from the springs. She carried two beat-up plastic water jugs. She had three small children in tow, and another one or two on the way, judging from her bulging shape. She was willing to talk for a while in exchange for me carrying the water back to her house. Her name was Maria de Lourdes.\n\nWhen we were going back to her place, she stopped to rest in the shade of a big mesquite, so I opened the bag of plants I had been collecting and dumped them in the sand before her and the children.\n\n\"Would you mind telling me if any of these are eaten here?\" I queried her.\n\n_\"Pues,\"_ Maria said haltingly, as she sorted through the plants freshly picked from the river's edge. \"Well, you should really talk to an older, more knowledgeable woman like the _yerbera_ downstream in Boquillas del Carmen.\"\n\n\"The _yerbera_?\" I asked.\n\n\"You know, well, she's the _curandera._ Her name is Isabela. Everyone knows her in Boquillas. Even the gringos come to see her.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll try to find her when I get to Boquillas, but perhaps there are plants here too that you yourself use as food . . .\"\n\n\"Well, yes, there are some, but most of these plants you have picked this morning are medicines, not foods. I can tell you a little about them, but Isabela knows them better.\"\n\nMaria de Lourdes paused for a second to rummage through the pile, and her children crowded in around her.\n\n\"Look, you have the _gobernadora_ [creosote bush]. Very good for stomachache and for kidneys. You have _calabacilla loca_ [buffalo gourd]. That's not good to eat. It's good for bleaching out our bowls and towels and pots and pans. And there, you have the _hierba de la golondrina. We_ give it to the babies to stop their diarrhea.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you have got a lot of plant medicines around here that can help you deal with stomach problems,\" I noted.\n\n\"What would you expect?\" Maria said flatly, running her fingers back through her braided hair. Her mouth closed tightly before she began again. _\"Asi es la vida_. That's how it is where you have bad well water. Here, you got river water contaminated with _mierda_ from the cows. The meat and the vegetables spoil quickly in the heat if you don't have any refrigeration. On top of that, the drought all the time, too. It can keep you hungry, too.\"\n\n\"Well, what do you try to grow over here?\" I asked.\n\n\"The _nopal_ and the _tuna_ \u2014what you call the prickly pear cactus\u2014that's the most reliable thing we got. Even in drought, we can rely on it. Not so the beans and the corn and the squash and the melons over there in the field. Even if we irrigate them, maybe we get something two, maybe three out of five years. If the heat doesn't get them then it's the grasshoppers. Or else the cattle break in. I'll show you what we grow, what we keep inside the fence around our house. . . . I can always grow some onions there. Sometimes the plants of chiles, tomatillos, and cilantro survive. You know, I just throw the dishwater on them. That's all they get.\"\n\nMaria de Lourdes got up to go, motioning the kids and me to follow. I grabbed the water jugs she had filled at the springs.\n\n\"What else can you eat when the corn and beans fail?\"\n\n\"You know, you have some of them here in your pile [of plants], but it takes work to pick enough of them to eat. Like this one here, the _garambullo_ [hackberry]. Or that other red berry, _agrito_ [wolfberry]. Sometimes, we'll even make a drink from the mesquite bean pods. Not too often anymore. Like anybody else, we'll eat the wild greens if they come up in the fields. _Qaelites. Verdolagas._ But some years, they don't even sprout\u2014too dry here.\"\n\nWhen we approached her little adobe house\u2014one of only five left in the village\u2014I was ready to drop the jugs of water from my shoulders. I looked at her, so young, pregnant for the fourth time, and wondered how she did it each day. Of course I had guessed that it wasn't easy to fill the larder from this stretch of desert, but I had never realized that a shallow well, some edible wild greens, and berries might be the only buffers against thirst and starvation.\n\n\"So how do you make it? Do the men here gain much cash from the livestock? I mean, do you gain any income from your own work\u2014cooking, crafts, sewing?\"\n\n\"With the children this age? I can't do much more than keep them fed and clean. The men proudly say they are just poor _vaqueros._ You know, they don't really keep enough _vacas_ to gain much cash. If a cow gets hurt, we have to butcher it right away, no matter what the size. Butcher and jerk and dry the meat for later. My husband, he cuts _candelilla_ for wax, cuts _lechuguilla_ for fiber, cuts the _sotoi_ for the bootleggers, picks oregano or _chile pequins._ It's whatever people will buy. Anything so we can keep the kids fed.\"\n\n\"You have wild oregano and wild chiles here?\"\n\nShe pointed to the backyard as I set the water jugs down for her. \"We have a plant or two in our _huerta_ behind the kitchen. But you'll see them down by the river, up on canyon walls, if you know how to look.\"\n\n_If you know how to look_ . . . as I had to learn to look for the ground-hugging cacti and their fruit on the canyon slopes. If you're hungry enough, you _have_ to learn how and where to look for them. You would have to learn how to pick them with as much speed as you could possibly muster. You would have to learn how to dry them so that they wouldn't spoil before the buyer arrives. You would have to learn how to do all of this as efficiently as possible because your family needs food and the drink and the medicines, as well as the cash for the things you can't grow or forage. This desert is not for wimps. It exacts its price. I looked at Maria's hands: a few scars, a few burn marks, chipped fingernails . . .\n\n\"So how much might they pay you or your husband for the harvest of chile pequins?\"\n\n\"Two dollars a pound,\" Maria whispered, as if trying to keep her neighbors from knowing what a deal she received from the buyer who came from the other side of the border.\n\n_Two dollars a pound?_ The same chiles retailed in stores from West Texas across New Mexico and sometimes into Arizona for _sixty dollars a pound_! The harvester\u2014the poorest player in the entire value chain, since the chiles changed hands five or six times before reaching a kitchen table\u2014received only one-thirtieth of the final market value. With the entire economic deck stacked against them, no wonder Maria de Lourdes and her husband could hardly keep their children fed and clothed.\n\n\"Do you have any _chile pequins_ I can buy from you?\"\n\nMaria motioned for me to stay on the porch, and she went inside. She brought me back a glass Nescafe jar filled with small bright-red wild chiles, some of them round, but some of them beaked. I couldn't easily guess their weight, so I just handed her a hundred-peso bill.\n\n\"No, that's too much, and I don't have any change.\" She sighed, looking embarrassed. \"You just take them as a gift. After all, you carried my water.\"\n\nNow I was the one who was embarrassed, if not humbled. \"Keep it all. Get something for the children. . . . I can eat chiles, but they need something else to eat that isn't hot.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, relenting. \"I've had to stop eating so many chiles now that I'm pregnant since it makes the baby inside me kick. . . . Here, if you're going to give me money, why don't you take all of our chiles?\"\n\nI heard Marcos or Sammy whistling for everyone to come back into camp, get some coffee and breakfast, and pack up. _\"Es la hora para embarcar_ ,\" I explained, and she nodded.\n\nAs I picked up my plants and turned to go, Maria de Lourdes put a small gunnysack of _chile pequins_ in my hands. She then tucked the hundred-peso bill into her blouse and shooed me out the door. I bowed to her, departing from her ramshackle home with enough wild chiles to last me for a year.\n\nThe next village we visited, Boquillas del Carmen, was many times larger than Ojo Caliente, claiming some fifteen houses down below a mesa, another nineteen houses up on top, and five more intermingled among a few tourist stores. In Boquillas, they will try to sell you anything that can move, that has moved since the time of the dinosaurs, or that will appear to move if you ingest enough peyote to send it into flight. When I was there, I could get bootlegged sotol for five dollars a quart, and false peyote (the star cactus) for the same price. If I had persisted, I might have been able to find some real peyote for far more than that per button. I could also purchase petrified wood, ponchos, ammonites, crystals, leather purses, sombreros, leather vests, baskets, miniature _huapango_ guitars, gallon jugs of cheap tequila, Christmas cacti, cheeses, tortillas, and hot sauces galore.\n\nWhile my rafting companions decided whether or not to try a shot of sotol or to purchase various and sundry curios, I walked around the village until I noticed an elderly woman making something in big bowls on her porch. Thinking that she might be Isabela the Curandera, I approached her and asked if she was an herbalist.\n\n\"No, I'm not her. But is it that you are interested in plants? I am using a little poisonous berry to make cheese right now.\"\n\n\"A berry? May I see what kind of berry?\" I asked.\n\n\"Sure, come on up here onto the porch. I am using the berries of trompillo . . . making a batch _of queso asadero._ See, the trompillo berries are in that bowl,\" she said as she wiped her hands on an apron that covered her flowered cotton dress. Her gray hair was largely covered by a scarf of the same flower pattern.\n\nI stood behind her and peeked into the bowl. There were five little golden berries of trompillo, a deadly nightshade that I guessed to be _Solanum eleaginifolium,_ which is sometimes called buffalo berry in English. It is a thorny, poisonous weed that colonizes overgrazed or recently flooded areas.\n\n\"I crush two fresh berries and three old ones in a half of a cup of tepid water. See? Let them soak until the water is yellow. Like this. See? I strain out the seeds and skins of the berries,\" she explained. \"Then I use it to congeal the curds out of the whey.\"\n\n\"Is the cheese made from cow milk or goat milk?\"\n\n\"Our cows aren't here no more. They're being impounded on the other side. So this batch is from our goats. Bi-national goats,\" she said with a smile. \"They browse on this side of the river, then they sneak over to that side too. They are too fast and crafty for those _Rinches de Tejas_ to catch them and put them in jail. What do you call them? Texas rangers? Park rangers?\" She laughed.\n\n\"Watch. I put the half cup of trompillo water in with three gallons of goat's milk. Here, I stir it for ten seconds. I'm using one-day-old _leche de agria_ [sour milk] for half of the mix, and fresh _leche dulce_ [sweet milk] for the other half. I can't tell you how long before the milk will have begun to curdle. If I leave this batch in the sun, it will turn to curds in three hours! Later in this afternoon, that's when I'll separate the curds from the whey. That's when I'll concentrate the whey. Make into a cream cheese we call _riquezon.\"_\n\n\"But why do they call what they do with the curds _queso asadero_?\" I asked, having wondered why the cheese is said to be \"grilled.\" \"Do they say that the berries cook the cheese?\"\n\n\"No, it's because we actually take the curds and melt them. We do that by kind of roasting or grilling them\u2014haven't you ever seen it?\u2014by heating them on a comal griddle over a wood fire. As they begin to melt on the griddle, we pick them up. Shape them into something like a fat tortilla, you know, a gordita. We turn them over on the griddle and leave them 'til the texture is even. Then we pick them up. We stack them, you've seen them that way, between wax paper in a pile. That's how we make the true _queso asadero.\"_\n\nMilk from bi-national goats. Berries from a deadly nightshade. Cheese tortillas that are grilled as if they were hamburger patties. I had to buy them and try them for dinner.\n\n\"How much does it cost for two dozen of them?\" I asked. She named her price and I complied. She went into her house and brought me out two neat stacks of _queso asadero,_ wrapped them both in a paper sheet, then enveloped the piles within the paper sheet in a pale cotton cloth. She pulled the ends of the cloth over the cheese, then braided them together and tied the braids into a knot that also served as a carrying device.\n\n\"Will I get sick if you put too many trompillo berries into the milk?\" I asked as I counted out my money to pay her.\n\n\"No,\" she said with a straight face, \"you'll be dead! Why do you gringos worry so much about getting sick and dying? By the grace of God, it's to happen to all of us sooner or later. Just enjoy the few days, the ones you have left with us here in this desert,\" she said matter-of-factly. And then she went inside and closed her door. That was the last I saw of her. . . .\n\nOf course, I could not undo the absurdity of floating down a river at a hundred dollars a day through a place where the few remaining residents would make only three dollars an hour for most of their lives. My catching a couple of fish did not make the loads of store-bought groceries in the eight coolers suddenly disappear. I had been floating down the River of Inequity, and all of its blatant juxtapositions were still immediately before me.\n\nBut that catfish, _queso asadero,_ chile, and oregano gave me a way to be nourished by both sides of the river, and by the life of the river itself. I would no longer privilege one side over the other, nor let myself be fed by something utterly remote from where I actually stood.\n\nThe next day, as we floated out of Big Bend National Park and arrived at our \"take-out\" location, one kind of journey came to a close, but another one had started. My imagination and my palate had been sown with the seeds of a Seek-No-Further sensibility that would soon germinate in the desert soil of the Southwest borderlands, where wild chiles and oreganos still grew whether we noticed them or not. But I had noticed them, and I decided to put my own roots into the same soil.\n\n### ITALIAN AMERICA\n\n### By John Mariani\n\n### From _Saveur_\n\n### John Mariani's eclectic tastes in food and wine have for years informed his reviews in _Esquire, Bloomberg News,_ and his weekly Virtual Gourmet newsletter. In his latest book, _How Italian Food Conquered the World,_ he comes home to the cuisine he grew up on: New York City Italian-American.\n\nAt my family's home in the Bronx, we ate slices of fresh, milky mozzarella with seeded bread from the Italian bakery down the block, macaroni shells stuffed with Polly-O ricotta, lasagne with little meatballs between the layers, baked rigatoni, eggplant parmigiana, chicken cacciatore, beef braciola. We drank chianti that came in a straw-covered flask and espresso from a drip pot, with a sliver of lemon peel. This was the 1950s and '60s, and though Mom was always cooking for our family and friends, Dad knew his way around the kitchen, too. He took to the stove on weekends, concentrating on a single dish: lobster fra diavolo, because my mother hated handling live lobsters.\n\nWe thought we were eating authentic Italian food, because the dishes were the same ones all the other Italian families we knew cooked and ate. But in reality, our cuisine was an American invention: an amalgam of hearty, rustic dishes brought here, primarily by southern Italian immigrants (my grandparents came from Abruzzo and Campania), then adapted and embellished upon in American kitchens. By the time I started writing about food in the mid 1970s, this homegrown cuisine had fallen out of favor as northern Italian\u2014inspired dishes, deemed (sometimes erroneously) lighter and more authentic, became all the rage. I can't say that I didn't welcome the new trend of delicate fresh egg pasta, or celebrate the fact that grilled branzino had replaced shrimp scampi on so many Italian menus. But I will never deny my love for a supersize plate of spaghetti with homemade meatballs, or an eggplant parmesan hero, with its ample breading and sauce and molten mozzarella. There's a beauty and succor to Italian-American food, and it's for a good reason that so many chefs have been returning to those classics recently, preparing them with a newfound zeal and sense of respect.\n\nThe story of the rise and fall and rise again of Italian-American food is a fascinating one; it's an American story, its plot interwoven with the entrepreneurial drive, embrace of pop culture, proliferation of convenience foods, and creativity of home cooks that has informed our country's culinary spirit. It began authentically enough, with Italian immigrants who were skilled at making the very most from the very least. The _abbondanza_ for which Italian-American cooking is known stems from the fact that these immigrant cooks, most of whom came from dire poverty, took pride in being able to feed family and friends sumptuously on the kinds of foods they couldn't afford back home. Ingredients like mozzarella and ricotta were no longer used as accents, or as meals in themselves: They were added to dishes with abandon. My father's lobster fra diavolo, which was likely inspired by tomato-based seafood stews made with small spiny or inexpensive rock lobster in Italy, was another example: When it was popularized in the 1950s in Italian-American restaurants, it became a lavish dish\u2014far bigger in size and flavor than its predecessors\u2014of fat New England lobsters cooked in a fiery tomato sauce. Another ingredient considered an extravagance in southern Italian cooking, veal, could be found on early Italian-American menus in myriad forms: _alla parmigiana_ (breaded and covered with sauce and cheese), _alla marsala_ (doused with fortified wine), and as massive one-pound veal chops, often stuffed with mozzarella and prosciutto, then smothered with tomato sauce.\n\nFoods from the homeland became springboards for invention in the States. Take pizza, which evolved from its simple Neapolitan roots into styles unlike anything found in Italy (see _Any Way You Slice It_ ), with more cheese, more sauce, and more toppings. Or, tomato sauce, for that matter: When my wife and I first traveled across Italy, on our honeymoon in 1977, we saw neither marinara (that quickly cooked sauce of just tomatoes, garlic, and oil) or the long-simmered \"Sunday sauce,\" stocked with all kinds of meats, which most families I knew while growing up served on Sunday. Of course, tomato sauce exists in Italy; the irony is that tomatoes were brought to Italy from the Americas in the 16th century and considered poisonous by all but southerners, who found them a delicious addition to their meager diet and discovered that they flourished in their sunny clime. Which explains why when more than 4 million Italians, a vast majority of them from the south, immigrated to America between 1890 and 1910, they brought tomatoes, and tomato sauce, with them. Every cook had a version, and it became the food on which immigrant mothers staked their eminence within their neighborhoods. Growing up, we would no more insult a friend's sauce than we would his mother or grandmother. The sauce was sacred.\n\nSoon enough, red sauce became emblematic of Italian food in the United States, embraced by Americans from every ethnic group and marketed by savvy restaurateurs as part and parcel of the cuisine's abundance. My family dined out at least once a week, usually at a place called Amerigo's in the Bronx, which began as a pizza stand in the 1930s and evolved into a restaurant of extraordinary breadth, with a menu that ranged from antipasti to zabaglione, and a dining room decked out with an illuminated waterfall and a mural of the nearby Throgs Neck Bridge. It was at restaurants like Amerigo's that we feasted on the kind of fancy dishes that Mom didn't make on weeknights: I always had the gnocchi with tomato sauce and my brother, the manicotti. My father would order a massive New York strip steak, introduced to the city's steakhouses by Italian-American butchers, and my mother would have filet of sole \"Livornese,\" a dish with clams and mussels, white wine, and a moderate amount of garlic. Portions were huge, including the cheesecake and cannoli for dessert. A waiter came to the table to whip zabaglione in a big copper pot.\n\nThe epitome of this style of dining was Mamma Leone's on 48th Street in Manhattan. That multistoried spectacle of Italian kitsch, with nude statuary and blocks of mozzarella and provolone cheese on every table, opened in 1906 and was operated by the same family until it was sold to a restaurant group in 1959, eventually closing in 1994. Had Verdi lived to eat there, he would have written an opera about it, and Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini\u2014both of whom were immortalized in pasta dishes that bore their names\u2014would have sung the leads.\n\nAs much as Americans adored places like Mamma Leone's, Italian-American food was often referred to as grub for \"greasers\" and \"garlic eaters.\" It wasn't until the arrival of first-rate Italian ingredients\u2014many of which had been kept out of the U.S. by trade laws\u2014in the 1970s and '80s that Italian-American cooks were able to reproduce the regional flavors that travelers to Italy complained they could never find in the States. This included prosciutto di Parma, extra-virgin olive oil from different locales, parmigiano-reggiano, arborio rice, funghi porcini, balsamic vinegar, and outstanding Italian wines from producers like Angelo Gaja and Giovanni di Piero Antinori.\n\nBy that time, many Italian-American restaurants had become tired and tiresome, and some restaurateurs tried to refine the clich\u00e9s\u2014and justify higher prices\u2014by turning to northern Italy for inspiration. In New York there were Romeo Salta (opened in 1953), Nanni (1968), and Il Nido (1979); in Santa Monica, California, Valentino's (1972).They all downplayed the red sauce factor, substituting butter and cream sauces and adding\u2014at $20 a plate\u2014risotto and, of all things, polenta, a dish that had been the thrice-a-day staple of poor northern Italians who could afford to eat little else. This food was welcomed as authentic regional Italian: Lasagne with meatballs and meat sauce was dismissed in favor of _lasagne alla Bolognese,_ with _besciamella_ and spinach pasta. Italian-American cheesecake and cannoli were replaced by tiramis\u00f9 and _panna cotta._ The old chianti bottles in straw _fiaschi_ baskets were abandoned in favor of expensive barolos, barbarescos, and \"super-Tuscans.\" Murals of Mount Vesuvio were painted over in favor of blown-up photos of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.\n\nRed-checkered tablecloths disappeared; now the tables were set with Frette linens.\n\nThe zeitgeist looked north for another reason: Italian fashion and design (centered in northern cities like Milan and Florence) was all the rage in the 1980s. The chicest new restaurants in the U.S. proclaimed they were Tuscan-style trattorias or grills (even if they didn't serve Tuscan food). Among the first to promote their Tuscan origins were Da Silvano, opened in 1975, and Il Cantinori (1983). Both, still operating in New York's Greenwich Village, became darlings of magazine editors, art gallery owners, and other members of the cultural elite. Before long, their menus were copied across the country, and extra-virgin olive oil became the new red sauce.\n\nThese northern Italian\u2013inspired places adopted the tenets of the Mediterranean Diet, named for a book written in 1994 by cookbook author (and _Saveur_ contributor) Nancy Harmon Jenkins. The basic argument was that what _real_ Italians ate\u2014a diet abundant in vegetables, seafood, grains, and olive oil\u2014was far more healthful than the meaty, rich, fried, cheese-laden, red sauce\u2013drowned food of Italian-Americans. Quick saut\u00e9ed greens and _farro_ were in; chicken parmesan and meatballs were out.\n\nBut who doesn't love meatballs? As influential as the Mediterranean Diet has been, the Italian food you are most likely to encounter in London, Berlin, Moscow, or Mumbai will be far closer to the old \"red sauce\" archetype than to regional Italian menus featuring Alba's white truffles, Sardinia's cheeses, or Venice's cuttlefish ink risotto. Even the most trailblazing purveyors of modern Italian cuisine in America, while proudly serving regional specialties, still champion the good old-fashioned Italian-American classics, even if they change the names. The addictive, confectioners' sugar-dusted fried doughballs known in the Italian-American canon as _zeppole_ often show up as similar _bombolini,_ and what used to be called plain macaroni is now broken down into specific subclassifications, whether it's rigatoni rigate, garganelli, or casarecci. At Osteria Morini in New York City, Michael White\u2014born in Wisconsin and trained at San Domenico, the Michelin 3-star outside of Bologna\u2014serves mostly Emilia-Romagna-style food, but he also offers meatballs in tomato sauce and pasta with white clams.\n\nMoreover, traditional Italian-American restaurants are opening in higher profile, trendier spots. The 10-table, infamously hard-to-get-into Rao's in New York City opened in Vegas in 2006, serving classics like meatballs and veal chops. And, Rubirosa, owned by the same family that runs the 51-year-old Staten Island pizzeria Joe and Pat's, recently opened in downtown Manhattan, serving the kind of food I grew up on, in a dining room painstakingly designed to evoke the classic midcentury neighborhood red-sauce joint. The chef, Albert Di Meglio, and owner Angelo Pappalardo, both worked at the Manhattan restaurant Circo in the 1990s, owned by Sirio Maccioni, the man responsible for inventing pasta primavera and making it one of the most popular dishes of the 1980s at his celebrated Le Cirque. Rubirosa is returning to the Italian-American classics by serving the likes of saut\u00e9ed broccoli rabe and stuffed clams.\n\nPerhaps the place offering the most creative take on Italian-American cooking is the widely praised\u2014\"aggressively Italian-American,\" as Sam Sifton, former restaurant critic for _The New York Times_ put it\u2014Torrisi Italian Specialties. In a storefront on Mulberry Street, Little Italy's main drag, Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi typically serve more than 300 Italian-American-style hero sandwiches at lunch, and at the neighborhood's annual San Gennaro festival, they set up a booth hawking mozzarella sticks. But where they really capture Italian-American food's melting pot qualities and spirit of innovation is at dinner. In a dining room decorated with a poster of Billy Joel, fifty bucks gets you five courses, which may include their inspired take on garlic bread, slathered with tomato-garlic butter; bowls of still-warm, made-to-order mozzarella; _gemelli_ from Severino, a 40-year-old pasta company in New Jersey, in a hearty duck rag\u00f9; maybe tilefish with pickled green tomato relish or duck breast with broccoli rabe and mulberry mustard. The meal ends with a paper cup of Italian ice and a plate of cookies. That was last night; tonight it will all be different.\n\nWhat's also different is that Carbone and Torrisi, who often incorporate Asian influences from neighboring Chinatown into their menus, use only American products. Nothing's imported, not the prosciutto, not the tomatoes, not the spaghetti, not the bread crumbs\u2014because, what's wrong with Progresso? The message is clear: It doesn't have to be straight from Italia to be special. And if it was good enough for Italian home cooks, then it's good enough for us.\n\nWhenever I eat at these new school, or cheffy, Italian-American restaurants, I never expect the food to taste just like my mother's. These restaurants are a testament to the fact that Italian-American food is its own living, breathing cuisine; that can evolve just like any other. What I love most about where Italian-American cooking is now is that there's an equal respect for the tried and the true, as well as the changing tastes of the day: even at home, the dishes I prepare tend to be lighter, and maybe a bit brighter with fresh herbs, than they used to be. But they still embody all that is genuine, and generously wholesome, about Italian-American food. And they're served with gusto and with just one intention: to make me and my family and friends very, very happy.\n\n### WHAT MAKES SUSHI GREAT?\n\n### By Francis Lam\n\n### From GiltTaste.com\n\n### Francis Lam's incisive food writing for _Gourmet,_ Salon, and currently Gilt Taste deconstructs the cultural value of everything from cherries Jubilee to Chinatown roast duck. You may also know Lam as a commentator for the Food Channel's _Food (ography)_ and a judge on _Top Chef Masters._\n\nA friend of mine once met a delegation of revered Japanese chefs. There was a wizened gentleman among them who was clearly the leader. He spoke little, but the other star chefs deferred to him, paid him obvious respect. My friend finally asked, quietly, \"So, what does the old guy do?\" The response: \"He has mastered rice.\"\n\nTo be honest, I don't know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that's gluey, but there aren't a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes _rice_ better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it's a matter of _understanding,_ of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.\n\nSushi, of course, is the ultimate in simple food: mostly just rice and a piece of raw fish, it would seem that anyone with a knife and one functioning hand can make it. But take an impossible eye for detail and apply it to fish\u2014Where did it come from? How long should you age it before serving for best flavor? How long should you massage it to make it tender, but still have texture? Where should you cut a piece from, and at what angle, to highlight the flavors of different parts of the muscle? Since temperature affects aroma, how warm should you let the fish get in your hand before serving it? How hard do you press the fish into the rice to form a bite that has integrity, but is not dense?\u2014and you begin to see where a simple food is not so simple. You don't have to buy into all the minutiae a sushi master trades in to know that the pleasures of great sushi span from the animal to the emotional and the intellectual, which is a great trick for anything to pull off, let alone a piece of raw fish on rice.\n\nWhat animates a sushi master? What drives someone to be so focused, to be a god of small things?\n\nJiro Ono, 85 years old and counting, is a revered sushi chef who runs a restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station, and _Jiro Dreams of Sushi_ is easily the best, most beautiful movie about sushi you will see this year, or, let's face it, probably any other. The film is part documentary bio-pic, part food-blogger's wet dream. (OMG, did you _see_ the super-macro shot of that tuna??!? NOM NOM. Etc.) It doesn't take us into the world of technique: Jiro has mastered rice, too\u2014his rice dealer claims that he doesn't bother to sell his best stuff to anyone else because they wouldn't know what to do with it\u2014but while he describes how he does it, the film never shows us the whys and what-fors of his method. (Though, as Silvia Killingsworth reports for the _New Yorker,_ the French-American star chef Eric Ripert describes Jiro's rice as \"tasting like a cloud.\")\n\nInstead, the movie focuses on the life of a man who is utterly devoted to his craft. Jiro doesn't have a secret to why his sushi is more astonishing than anyone else's. What he says, over and over, is that great sushi\u2014and, by extension, greatness itself\u2014is the result of hard work, of dedication, of a commitment to excellence that, in the end, trumps everything else in life.\n\nHis search for perfection is eternal. At 85, he hasn't stopped working; he says he hates holidays because they are too long to spend away from the restaurant. Chefs, in particular, who have seen the film don't hesitate to call it \"inspiring.\" To watch the gorgeously shot scenes of him forming pieces of sushi, jewel-like and dripping with soy sauce and life, is to wish that you might one day make so much beauty. (Indeed, a film critic friend said that her reaction to seeing this was not hunger, but to want to go home and make jewelry.)\n\nStill, there is another side to this mastery, to this inspiring devotion. Jiro has two sons, and it's hard to tell exactly what their relationship to each other is, or to their esteemed father. The master admits to not being at home when they were young, telling a story of how one day he slept in, and his children complained to their mother that there was a strange man in the house. The younger one seemed, at first, to be the favorite, because the father helped him open his own restaurant. The older son, Yoshikazu, is still an apprentice to the father . . . at 50. But Jiro tells the camera, with a laugh, that when he helped his younger son open his restaurant, he told him, \"Now, you can never come home again.\" As he recounts his own life, leaving his home to begin his career at nine, it's not clear that he was kidding with his kid.\n\nWith an inflection of either humble pride or resignation, Yoshikazu says that in Japan, it's the oldest son's role to take over for the father. He works dutifully; he has taken over the selection and buying of fish since Jiro had a heart attack 15 years before. He, not the acclaimed master, was the one who served the inspectors who granted Jiro three Michelin stars, the highest recognition in the restaurant world. And yet, Jiro's restlessness keeps his son forever in his shadow, unwilling to let him stand for himself.\n\n\"You must fall in love with your work,\" Jiro says. He refers to himself as a _shokunin,_ literally an \"artisan,\" but more accurately someone who commits the entirety of himself to his work. It's a term with gravity; you won't find _shokunin_ bread in the grocery store. One of his young apprentices wells up when he tells the camera of how he finally earned the term from his master. It was after he'd worked for Jiro for 10 years. He's signed up for a life of dignity and honor and hard work. He's signed up for the life of Jiro's sons, men who may or may not have their own sons to mentor and pass their restaurants down to. He's signed up for a life given\u2014or lost?\u2014to the making of beautiful things.\n\n### FOOD FOR THOUGHT\n\n### By Jeff Gordinier\n\n### From the _New York Times_\n\n### Bringing a cultural critic's sensibility to his food writing, Jeff Gordinier writes often for the _New York Times_ Dining section. He has also published essays and interviews in _Esquire, Details, GQ, Elle, Spin,_ and _Outside,_ and authored X Saves _the World,_ a manifesto for the slacker generation.\n\nTry this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn't matter what the food is, but make it something you love\u2014let's say it's that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.\n\nNow comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You're hungry.\n\nToday's experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright color of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.\n\nContinue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you'll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.\n\nThe concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.\n\nLately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts\u2014eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite\u2014could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.\n\nMindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It's about experiencing food more intensely\u2014especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.\n\n\"This is anti-diet,\" said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of \"Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.\" \"I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.\"\n\nThe last few years have brought a spate of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. A Harvard nutritionist, Dr. Lilian Cheung, has devoted herself to studying its benefits, and is passionately encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it.\n\nAt the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Prof. Brian Wansink, the author of \"Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,\" has conducted scores of experiments on the psychological factors that lead to our bottomless bingeing. A mindful lunch hour recently became part of the schedule at Google, and self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Freston have become cheerleaders for the practice.\n\nWith the annual chow-downs of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday behind us, and Lent coming, it's worth pondering whether mindful eating is something that the mainstream ought to be, well, more mindful of. Could a discipline pioneered by Buddhist monks and nuns help teach us how to get healthy, relieve stress and shed many of the neuroses that we've come to associate with food?\n\nDr. Cheung is convinced that it can. Last week, she met with team members at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and asked them to spend quality time with a chocolate-covered almond.\n\n\"The rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster, so we really don't have the same awareness and the same ability to check into ourselves,\" said Dr. Cheung, who, with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, co-wrote \"Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.\" \"That's why mindful eating is becoming more important. We need to be coming back to ourselves and saying: 'Does my body need this? Why am I eating this? Is it just because I'm so sad and stressed out?' \"\n\nThe topic has even found its way into culinary circles that tend to be more focused on Rabelaisian excess than monastic restraint. In January, Dr. Michael Finkelstein, a holistic physician who oversees SunRaven, a holistic-living center in Bedford, N.Y., gave a talk about mindful gardening and eating at the smorgasbord-friendly headquarters of the James Beard Foundation in New York City.\n\n\"The question isn't what are the foods to eat, in my mind,\" he said in an interview. \"Most people have a general sense of what the healthy foods are, but they're not eating them. What's on your mind when you're eating: that's mindful eating to me.\"\n\nA good place to try it is the Blue Cliff Monastery, in Pine Bush, N.Y., a Hudson Valley hamlet. At the serene refuge about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, curious lay people can join Buddhist brothers and sisters for a free \"day of mindfulness\" twice a week.\n\nAt a gathering in January, visitors watched a videotaped lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh (pronounced tik-nyot-HAHN), who founded this and other monasteries around the world; they strolled methodically around the grounds as part of a walking meditation, then filed into a dining room for lunch.\n\nNo one spoke, in keeping with a key principle of mindful eating. The point is simply to eat, as opposed to eating and talking, eating and watching TV, or eating and watching TV and gossiping on the phone while Tweeting and updating one's Facebook status.\n\nA long buffet table of food awaited, all of it vegan and mindfully prepared by two monks in the kitchen. There was plenty of rice, herbed chickpeas, a soup made with cubes of taro, a stew of fried tofu in tomato sauce.\n\nIn silence, people piled their plates with food, added a squirt or two of condiments (eating mindfully doesn't mean forsaking the hot sauce) and sat down together with eyes closed during a Buddhist prayer for gratitude and moderation.\n\nWhat followed was captivating and mysterious. Surrounded by a murmur of clinking forks, spoons and chopsticks, the Blue Cliff congregation, or sangha, spent the lunch hour contemplating the enjoyment of spice, crunch, saltiness, warmth, tenderness and like-minded company.\n\nSome were thinking, too, about the origins of the food: the thousands of farmers, truck drivers and laborers whose work had brought it here.\n\nAs their jaws moved slowly, their faces took on expressions of deep focus. Every now and then came a pause within the pause: A chime would sound, and, according to the monastery's custom, all would stop moving and chewing in order to breathe and explore an even deeper level of sensory awareness.\n\nIt looked peaceful, but inside some of those heads, a struggle was afoot.\n\n\"It's much more challenging than we would imagine,\" said Carolyn Cronin, 64, who lives near the monastery and regularly attends the mindfulness days. \"People are used to eating so fast. This is a practice of stopping, and we don't realize how much we're not stopping.\"\n\nFor many people, eating fast means eating more. Mindful eating is meant to nudge us beyond what we're craving so that we wake up to why we're craving it and what factors might be stoking the habit of belly-stuffing.\n\n\"As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don't need to eat as much,\" said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. \"Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.\"\n\nIt's this byproduct of mindful eating\u2014its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating\u2014that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.\n\n\"Thich Nhat Hanh often talks about our craving being like a crying baby who is trying to draw our attention,\" she said. \"When the baby cries, the mother cradles the baby to try to calm the baby right away. By acknowledging and embracing our cravings through a few breaths, we can stop our autopilot of reaching out to the pint of ice cream or the bag of chips.\"\n\nThe average American doesn't have the luxury of ruminating on the intense tang of sriracha sauce at a monastery. \"Most of us are not going to be Buddhist monks,\" said Dr. Finkelstein, the holistic physician. \"What I've learned is that it has to work at home.\"\n\nTo that end, he and others suggest that people start with a few baby steps. \"Don't be too hard on yourself,\" Dr. Cheung said. \"You're not supposed to be able to switch on your mindfulness button and be able to do it 100 percent. It's a practice you keep working toward.\"\n\nDr. Bays, the pediatrician, has recommendations that can sound like a return to the simple rhythms of Mayberry, if not \"Little House on the Prairie.\" If it's impossible to eat mindfully every day, consider planning one special repast a week. Click off the TV. Sit at the table with loved ones.\n\n\"How about the first five minutes we eat, we just eat in silence and really enjoy our food?\" she said. \"It happens step by step.\"\n\nSometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, \"and then, O.K., I've got to go do my work,\" she said. \"Anybody can do that. Anywhere.\"\n\nEven scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. \"Mindful eating includes mindless eating,\" she said. \"'I am aware that I am eating and driving.'\"\n\nFew places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but when Thich Nhat Hanh dropped by for a day of mindfulness in September, hundreds of employees showed up.\n\nPart of the event was devoted to eating thoughtfully in silence, and the practice was so well received that an hourlong wordless vegan lunch is now a monthly observance on the Google campus.\n\n\"Interestingly enough, a lot of the participants are the engineers, which pleases us very much,\" said Olivia Wu, an executive chef at the company. \"I think it quiets the mind. I think there is a real sense of feeling restored so that they can go back to the crazy pace that they came from.\"\n\nIt's not often, after all, that those workhorse technicians get to stop and smell the pesto. \"Somebody will say, 'I ate so much less,' \"Ms. Wu said. \"And someone else will say, 'You know, I never noticed how spicy arugula tastes.'\"\n\nAnd that could be the ingredient that helps mindful eating gain traction in mainstream American culture: flavor.\n\n\"So many people now have found themselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is very tragic,\" Dr. Bays said. \"Eating should be a pleasurable activity.\"\n\n## Dude Food\n\n### LEARNING TO BARREGUE HELPED MAKE ME A MAN\n\n### By Joel Stein\n\n### From _Food & Wine_\n\n### In _Man-Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity,_ humor columnist Joel Stein\u2014an often controversial contributor to _Time_ magazine, the _Los Angeles Times,_ and many other magazines\u2014adroitly deconstructs American manhood. Here he tackles the most manly of all arts: Outdoor barbecuing.\n\nLike most of what I do, my cooking is not manly. I fuss, apologize and occasionally\u2014embarrassingly\u2014look at recipes. But for the past two years, I've been trying to boost my masculinity, working on a book for which, finally, at age 39, I learn how to be a man. I've gone one round with Ultimate Fighter Randy Couture, done three days of basic training at Fort Knox, earned a badge on a Boy Scouts camping trip. But I still prepare bouillabaisse like a little girl, crying over onions and talking in French.\n\nThe manliest form of cooking that doesn't involve mounting the animal's head on a wall is barbecue; if I were really going to learn to be a man, I'd have to master it. So I went to Houston, a town that specializes in the manliest meat, beef. My plan was to eat as much barbecue as was physically possible, so I could understand life-changing 'cue. Once I knew what I was aiming for, I'd get lessons from a barbecue expert and then test my new knowledge at a barbecue contest.\n\nI go straight from the airport to Catalan Food & Wine restaurant, where, for the moment, Chris Shepherd is chef. This fall he'll open his own restaurant, Underbelly, which will feature a full-scale butcher room (he's so manly, he calls butchering pigs his \"happy place\"). Shepherd is a heap of a man, incredibly friendly and passionate; the kind of guy who can get away with calling both men and women \"baby.\" Last year, he helped create \"Where the Chefs Eat\" tours of Houston. And now he's going to take me on the barbecue tour, his favorite.\n\nWe head to Gatlin's Barbecue & Catering, where the pit boss's mother, Mary Gatlin, tells customers to \"have a blessed day.\" Sitting outside at picnic tables, we eat soft, rich brisket from the pointy side of the cut, known in most places as \"fatty meat.\" Because so much of the tip is exposed to the smoke, it has the most \"bark\"\u2014the blackened, tarry bits where smoke, fat and meat mix together. To Shepherd, this is the asparagus tip of barbecue. He prizes the top, boneless cap of the sparerib for the same reason.\n\nWe eat our way around the city, making a detour to the legendary BBQ Pits by Klose, where Shepherd bought his $1,800 home pit. David Klose speaks quickly, delivering entirely unprovoked self-proclamations such as, \"I'm a real quick draw.\" He is the most Texan person I've ever met, in his Wrangler jeans and brown camouflage cap that says \"Deer Predator.\" Klose has made barbecue pits out of a phone booth, a mailbox and a police car. The more steel in the pit, the steadier the heat will be, and that, he insists, is the trick to good barbecue. This seems to justify why men are happy to spend thousands of dollars to cook $1.75-per-pound meat.\n\nOur final stop is Pierson & Company Bar-B-Que, where we get a mixed trinity of brisket, ribs and sausage links that are smokier and sweeter than some we've tried elsewhere and nearly as satisfying. Texans believe that, just as you wouldn't cover Kobe beef in b\u00e9arnaise, you don't smear barbecue sauce on brisket that's been cooking for 12 hours in an oven you'd need to put a down payment on. You want to taste meat, salt and spice. This is such a basic idea that I cannot believe there isn't a Doritos flavor named Meat, Salt and Spice.\n\nThe other lesson I learn is that barbecue is about timing: The brisket at Gatlin's wouldn't be nearly as delicious a few hours past its prime. Barbecue exists in time as much as it does in space. It's why so many great, small places run out of meat by 11 a.m. Why they don't get a bigger pit and buy more meat is something that leads me to many more questions about the South than I can possibly answer.\n\nMy eating tour complete, I am ready to actually try cooking. I wake up early the next day to meet curmudgeonly Robb Walsh, a recently retired restaurant critic and author of the _Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook._ He recently opened a Tex-Mex restaurant, El Real Tex-Mex Caf\u00e9, with _Food & Wine_ Best New Chef 2009 Bryan Caswell right across the street from the space that will become Underbelly. And for the past year, he's been running a barbecue course out of his home. He's going to give me the simplified version. The one for Northerners.\n\nThere are three grills in Walsh's backyard. He's got a pricey offset smoker\u2014in which you light a wood fire in a small cylinder called the firebox, which is below and off to the side of a big grill with an exhaust pipe on top. He's got a \"Mexican hibachi,\" an oil drum cut in half\u2014you build a fire on one side and put the meat on the other. And he's got a gas grill, just like I do. Walsh makes it clear that I am never, ever to refer to anything I do on the gas grill as \"barbecuing.\" Barbecuing is cooking with smoke. Grilling is what you do to your children's hamburgers.\n\nHe teaches me to put some charcoal in a starter chimney, which looks like a big metal travel mug, and light it with a burning newspaper. We drop the charcoal in the offset smoker's firebox, then add oak logs along the sides, not in a pile\u2014exactly the opposite of the way the Boy Scouts taught me\u2014so the fire smokes instead of roars. By controlling the amount of fuel and oxygen inside the smoker, we aim to keep the heat at around 275 degrees\u2014a nice, slow, long cook to break down the tough, fatty cuts of meat that work best in barbecue.\n\nOnce the temperature hits 275 degrees, we place some pork ribs, brisket rubbed with just salt and pepper and a chicken marinated in Kraft Italian dressing on the grate. Walsh explains that bar-becue people are \"weird,\" spending wildly on gadgets but using inexpensive supermarket rubs and marinades. What he means is that barbecue people are men.\n\nUnlike the brisket my Jewish family eats at Passover, this one is half fat. We set it on the grate fat side down for two hours, then flip it fat side up so it self-bastes for the next eight hours. Because we don't have to be there while all this cooking goes on, we head out on a long drive to pick up supplies and a breakfast taco.\n\nD. W. Vasbinder's, where we stop to buy logs, looks like a junkyard, with metal sculptures of cowboys, cow skulls and a sign with wood prices that explains the honor system of payment. We pick up some oak, which Walsh says is the purist's choice, since it imparts a neutral smoky flavor. (Mesquite can be tangy and resiny, whereas pecan gives a sweet, sooty flavor that can blacken your food.) As Walsh stops a welder to ask for a piece of metal mesh for the bottom of his hibachi grill, he says, \"Places like this are why you can make great barbecue in Texas. It's like car culture in L.A.\" I pretend I am manly enough to be part of car culture in L.A.\n\nWhen we get back, we check on the meat. The chicken and ribs are done, but the brisket has stalled out at an internal temperature of 165 degrees, about 20 degrees shy of what we need. We wait another hour, during which we work hard opening and drinking local Saint Arnold beers. But the brisket is still at 165. It's a classic barbecue phenomenon\u2014the meat gets to a point where the internal temperature just won't budge. We have a few choices: We can keep waiting and hope the problem fixes itself. We can wrap the brisket in foil, which will raise its temperature but might make it soggy. Or we can bring it inside and put it in the oven at 275 degrees, which could dry it out. I refuse to bring it inside, because inside is for womenfolk. Walsh decides to wrap the meat in foil for just 1 hour and leave it in the smoker. Which works. We lop the giant fat cap off the parts we're going to eat first, leaving the rest on to keep the meat moist.\n\nLike most men, I feel that one day of training makes me qualified to compete, so I am headed to the World's Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, where more than 400 competitors fill the parking lot of Reliant Stadium with tents bearing giant corporate logos. I join team Drillin' & Grillin', which won for the best ribs last year. The seven-man team is run by Ernest Ramirez, a pipe fitter who has built his own enormous pit. Ramirez has a good oak fire going, but he shows me a bag of pellets made out of hickory, cherry, hard maple and apple that he sprinkles on the flames to sweeten the smoke. He hands me a syringe so I can inject chickens with marinade to keep them moist; for the same reason, we place a pan of water and chicken broth on the bottom rack. But we're mostly focused on the spareribs, which are cooking with a simple rub. There is a lot of hanging out and chatting, but we've got to pay attention: If we screw up by letting the fire get too hot, too cool or too smoky, there's no chance to recover. Because starting over takes 14 hours.\n\nRamirez believes ribs need a glaze to balance the sugar and saltiness, so when they're just about finished, he pats some brown sugar on top and puts them back in the pit. Then, 30 minutes later, he brushes on a glaze of brown sugar, melted butter and pepper jelly, puts the ribs in a Styrofoam container and takes them to the judges' tent.\n\nI help slice the brisket, stealing several pieces of bark for myself. At 5 p.m., a committee member tells Ramirez that our team didn't place in the top 10 to compete for the finals. Ramirez thanks her, smiles politely and goes right back to being the caterer for his corporate sponsor's rodeo tailgate, slicing a huge brisket against the grain to keep it tender. This is what I've learned about being a man. We've come to call it repression, but it's really self-control. It's a respect not just for the contest and the people you compete with, but for yourself.\n\nI'm going to start barbecuing at home. Not on an $1,800 pit that takes up half my yard, but on a little Weber with the wood off to the side. Mostly because nothing really tastes like smoked meat. But also because, unlike women, men need an activity as an excuse to talk. And we're not going to talk about salad.\n\n### MEMPHIS IN MAY: PORK-A-LOOZA\n\n### By Wright Thompson\n\n### From _Garden & Gun_\n\n### ESPN senior writer Wright Thompson writes mainly about sports, though as a native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he's occasionally lured into food writing by his love of Southern food. And what could be more Southern than barbecue?\n\nBefore a man with one leg got women to take their shirts off while he poured liquor into their mouths via an ice luge; before the wild-eyed guy who provides the pigs to the French Laundry walked around the party slipping packages in people's hands, which at least two of us thought were drugs but turned out to be bacon; before Donald Link's boudin for lunch and John Currence's andouille for happy hour and Sean Brock's soft-shell crab for dinner; before ten-year-old Jess Edge asked his daddy, the Southern food guru John T. Edge, \"What's a Jell-O shot?\"; before we waited to hear if we'd made the finals of the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest; before the revolutionary act of creating an all-star team that included four James Beard Award\u2013winning chefs, three old-school Southern pit masters, and one boozehound writer; before any of that, there was a pretentious but earnest idea: Could we rescue a barbecue contest, and maybe even barbecue itself, from a crushing sameness?\n\nThe line was drawn. On one side, us: a cooking team called the Fatback Collective, organized by barbecue industrialist Nick Pihakis, who founded the Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q chain of restaurants. On the other, Memphis and its world-famous barbecue contest, entering its thirty-fourth year and drawing an estimated 100,000 fans. Now, Memphis in May is many things: a place for Parrotheads to gather between nautical-pun tours, a grown-up frat party with a hundred thousand pledges, a place where friends commune over a smoking pig, and, maybe most important, a driver of where our barbecue culture will go. Here's what it isn't: a reflection of where our barbecue has been. We wanted to turn back the clock.\n\nMaybe that's silly. Maybe that's an idea fueled by ten cases of whiskey and two thousand Jell-O shots, but from the belly of the beast, surrounded by what many of us consider to be a threat to authentic barbecue\u2014lean pigs, tricked out with injections, cooked not as a reflection of a family or place, not as a connection to our past, but, rather, gamed to the strange tastes of the Memphis judges\u2014we all realized the mission of the Fatback Collective: redemption.\n\nRedemption and about seventeen thousand calories a day, most of them liquid.\n\n##### **Ready, Set, Strip**\n\nIt all starts with a screaming buzz saw and the smell of burning pig bone.\n\nA hog is splayed out and gutted, with a half dozen hands reaching inside its carcass. Pat Martin, a Nashville pit master, revs the blade and digs into the backbone. Pig shrapnel flies around the tent.\n\nWhen the job is done, the truly heartbreaking part begins, trimming out pounds of glorious, expensive, and carefully cultivated fat. Our team is consulting with a former grand champion, someone who is gracefully helping us understand the intractable customs of Memphis in May. He points at the thick layers of white.\n\nThe chefs look at each other, then at the pig. Reluctantly, they start stripping. Every so often, they'll make eye contact with one another and shake their heads. Someone mutters. Brock stands to the left of the pig, and Link on the right, each cutting back ribs to expose more shoulder meat. A pile of fat forms on the table.\n\n\"Too much,\" says Ryan Prewitt, the chef de cuisine at Herbsaint in New Orleans.\n\nStephen Stryjewski, the chef at Cochon who won his Beard award just four days ago, asks the expert once more if he's sure.\n\n\"They don't want marbling?\" he asks.\n\n\"You don't find that in other hogs,\" the former grand champion says. \"Technically, they don't want to see that.\"\n\n\"That's so 180 degrees to what I do every day,\" Stryjewski says.\n\nLink, the mind behind Cochon and Herbsaint, watches in silence. This is what he's thinking: Arrrgh! There are all these Beard winners with their hands in the hog, but something is being lost in translation. A chef's job is to cook food that stays true to the essence of the ingredients. The job of a Memphis in May contestant is to deliver what the judges want, and, more important, to stay away from things they don't. Here, as best as I can tell, are some of the things the judges don't like:\n\n1. Fat\n\n2. Spice\n\n3. Pork that tastes like pork, as opposed to pork that taste like it got pistol-whipped by MSG and sugar\n\n4. Puppies\n\n##### **Gaming the System**\n\nThe more I learn, the more I realize that winning this thing has less to do with great barbecue and more to do with anticipating the judges. They like sweet. They don't like spice. They like tenderloin. They don't like belly. On and on. So competitors study past winners, then go Mr. Wizard on the pigs. They fill the cavity with bricks of cold butter. They pack iced pillowcases around their tenderloins to stop the cooking. Some pigs are souped up with culinary nitrous oxide: liquid fat\u2013laden injections.\n\nThis isn't happening in a vacuum. For many, these traveling cooking teams are the face of Southern barbecue. Not the guys, like the pit masters on our team, who cook pigs in the same pit three hundred days a year. The most wonderful thing about barbecue has always been its regional differences. Each pig told a story. Rodney Scott, pit master at Scott's Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, South Carolina, uses wood he chops himself. Pat Martin was born in Mississippi but worked as a bond trader in Charlotte before realizing his calling, and his Beach Road 12 sauce, with the Carolina tang and a touch of the Memphis sweet, is a reflection of his own journey to the pit. Barbecue changes from town to town, an entire style morphing at the Tennessee River, or at the Piedmont, or when you sweep down onto Highway 61 from Memphis to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Memphis in May, the most important barbecue event in the world, rewards homogeneity. If you live in the South, maybe you've noticed how hard it's becoming to find a good, simple barbecue sandwich. Traditional barbecue is fading as competition barbecue is rewarding smoke and mirrors.\n\nSo while we do cut away some of the fat, more than the chefs would have liked, there is still plenty left on the hog. I've never seen a pig like this. It's marbled, laced with thin lines of fat. It looks like a rib eye steak. There are fewer than a thousand Mangalitsas in North America, and this is the first time, to the best of everyone's knowledge, that one has ever been barbecued. (We're putting two on the coals.) It could put a new face on barbecue or, more accurately, give barbecue its old face back. The guys shake on a rub, the extent of the doctoring, and look down at the pit-ready pig.\n\n\"I think we should do a shot of bourbon,\" says Drew Robinson from Jim 'N Nick's.\n\nThere are murmurs of agreement. Hell, yeah. Breakfast.\n\n\"I'll get the Pappy Van Winkle,\" says Brock, chef\/owner of Husk in Charleston, South Carolina.\n\nPappy is poured into those flimsy cone-shaped water cups. I hold mine over the pig and knock it back.\n\n\"Bourbon and pigs,\" Link says.\n\n##### **The Wee Hours**\n\nBourbon and pigs. That fairly sums up my next twenty hours. The pit doors shut and smoke rolls out. Nothing to do but wait. The chefs and pit masters hold little summits, conversations that food nerds would freak out over. There is laughter. There is boudin and soft-shell crabs and oysters and crawfish. There are trays of Jell-O shots, and big cups of bourbon, and people dance until the speakers overheat. There is some drama at the pig; the fire gets too hot, but Rodney Scott finesses the coals, brings the temperature down. There's no pit problem he can't fix. You've seen Pulp Fiction? He's the Mr. Wolfe of pork.\n\nI fall asleep in a chair by the pit and later move to a couch. I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to find Scott and Brock still awake. Brock and I tag out, and I settle in next to Scott. He's bulletproof. I'm not. The Pappy is gone. There's a dead tall boy of Pabst and a cashed bottle of Patr\u00f3n on a table, along with the empty shell casings of Jell-O shots.\n\n\"We look rough,\" says Sarah Johnson from Jim 'N Nick's.\n\n\"I feel rough,\" Brock says.\n\nScott puts R&B on the speakers. Al Green brings us back to life. We've been goofballs for the past two days, but when the end comes, it's all business.\n\n\"Do you feel good about this?\" Nick Pihakis asks.\n\nBrock nods.\n\nIt's time to create the Box. We've talked about the Box endlessly, lending it the importance of an advanced policy initiative, which seems slightly ridiculous, given that the Box is a Styrofoam container of cooked pig. But the Box is for the most important part of judging, the blind taste test, so there are four Beard-winning chefs on the Jim 'N Nick's mobile smoking rig. Everyone is calm, quiet, with a few jokes and short, precise comments. The Box has to go at noon. Link has a knife in his hand. Some of the Beach Road 12 sauce is in a jug; abstract ideas and theories are great, but these guys didn't become who they are by trying to lose. Some of my snark evaporates as I realize every team is doing this exact same thing.\n\n\"It's 11:50, guys,\" John Currence, from City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, says quietly.\n\nWhat follows is a damn impressive ten minutes. My boys are stone cold. Nobody ever raises his voice or appears to rush, and I realize that before these guys were famous, they spent their lives in hot kitchens, cranking out dinner night after night. All thirty-four other whole hog teams are equally concerned with sticking the landing.\n\nThe Box is off, and three in-person judges are coming through. They are given the Gospel According to Fatback. Pat Martin does most of the talking. They hear about the Mangalitsas, about the pit masters and the chefs, about Martin's dream of a win at Memphis in May changing the arc of the pig industry, replacing the flavorless factory hogs with ones more like our grandparents ate. His son, he testifies, might one day enjoy the results of our work today. Finally, the last judge leaves, and Scott walks back to the pit. Sam Jones, whose joint, the Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, grew out of a family barbecue tradition that dates back two hundred years, is standing there.\n\n\"We are so full of it,\" Scott says.\n\n\"Full of what?\" Jones asks.\n\n\"Truth,\" Scott says.\n\n##### **Fatback Glory**\n\nPihakis is worthy of love for many reasons, for his generosity, for his terrible dancing, and for his creation of the Fatback Collective. But the moment I really want to spoon him is when he arranges for $500 worth of Gus's World Famous fried chicken to be delivered to the tent just after the judges leave. People make love to that chicken, coming up for air with faces and fingers covered in grease\u2014\"That's my last meal,\" Brock gushes, orbiting the tables like some sort of bird of prey\u2014and I eat, very quickly, four chicken thighs and two pieces of Wonder bread. So, we're pigging out, and someone is telling Drew Robinson that bad news comes via a messenger on foot, but if you make it to the finals, a judge will arrive in a golf cart. At that exact moment, a golf cart pulls up.\n\n\"You mean like that?\" Brock asks.\n\nThe Fatback Collective is in the final three.\n\nThe last group of judges arrive, four this time, and the show is smooth. They eat the pig and head out to make their decision. The confidence is palpable. People are flocking to the pit to pull out meat. Word has spread that the team of ringers has the greatest barbecue ever cooked. There are judges coming by just to eat. One tells me: \"You've got it in the bag.\" A feeling arises.\n\n\"If we win this thing,\" Pihakis says, \"people are gonna look at pork differently.\"\n\nWe go stand by the stage. Someone there has a pig's head on a stake, with a cigarette in its mouth, a picture of excess that defines much of Memphis in May.\n\n\"This is the old model,\" Edge says.\n\nHowever, we are not entirely innocent. We consulted a past champion. We did a taste test on various sauces. We tried to game the judges, too, while preserving our integrity. We came here wanting to change this competition, but now, in the last moments, we want to win it. I haven't even cooked anything\u2014my role is to be a hyper-partisan observer\u2014and even I want to win. I've rolled my eyes for the past two days at the other teams, and now I realize my ire is misplaced. Everybody else isn't trying to educate the judges\u2014they are trying to kick ass. And, as a look at the tense Fatback Collective confirms, so are we. Finally, the results are announced. The winner is Yazoo's Delta Q, the same team that won last year.\n\nFatback Collective is third.\n\nWe shuffle to the stage, trying to smile. The crowd cheers, and all our hopes of stopping the homogeneous 'cue train suddenly feel like sour grapes. We are lots of things, but we are not sore losers. Martin takes the microphone and tells the other cooks that we all respect the hell out of what they do. Those are his exact words, and after, teammates slip up to him to tell him he nailed it. We go back to the tent, and there is talk of how great it is to finish third in our first year, and hugs, and drinks, but the DJ cuts to the heart of the feelings in the tent. We are serenaded with \"Auld Lang Syne.\"\n\n##### **Truth in Barbecue**\n\nAfter Sean Brock grew up \"dirt, dirt, dirt poor,\" with a dream that seemed impossible from the forgotten corner of Virginia he called home; after he won his Beard medal at age thirty-two and hid with his cell phone in a Lincoln Center bathroom, weeping, calling to tell his mama, I did it; after Donald Link did for boudin what Arnold Palmer did for golf; after Sam Jones tended his pit the same way his ancestors did two hundred years ago; after Rodney Scott showed up to man the fires at midnight the night he graduated from high school; after John Currence learned to cook on a tugboat the morning after he graduated; after we traveled to Memphis to try to change the way people think about barbecue; after we succeeded, and also failed; after all that, I can't shake an image that I'll cherish long after my cardiologist buys a new ski boat with the money he'll make off the weekend: Pat Martin, our loud, opinionated mouth of the South, sitting in the corner, waiting to find out if we'd won.\n\nHe's quiet now, with his little boy on his lap. They have the same haircut. Martin gives his son a kiss and rubs his forehead. He holds him tight. Something becomes clear in this moment. The real barbecue we love, that we pretentiously and earnestly came to save, might be under siege, but it isn't dead. It lives in anyone who believes in doing things the way their grandfathers did, who believes that what we eat tells a story about who we are. It lives in anyone who cares enough to sit all night with a hog. It lives in the fading notes of \"Auld Lang Syne\" and in the sparks popping off the burn barrel past midnight. It lives in the way a father holds his boy when the cooking is done.\n\n### TRUFFLE IN PARADISE\n\n### By John Gutekanst\n\n### From _Gastronomica_\n\n### The proprietor of Avalanche Pizza Bakers in Athens, Ohio, John Gutekanst has worked as everything from a pot scrubber to a sommelier, but his great passion is pizza. His creative pies have won numerous awards, including several in Italy, pizza's homeland. He blogs about pizza on PizzaGoon.com.\n\nOur car climbs the mountainous roads above the northern Italian spa town of Salsomaggiore. It is late March, and we have a job to do. I've convinced my three teammates\u2014Tony, Bruno, and Justin\u2014to accompany me on my quest for _tartufi bianchetti,_ Italian spring truffles. The _bianchetti_ aren't the hardest truffle to find in all of Italy, or the most fragrant, but they are the best at this time of year because they're fresh. By now, the white truffles have lost their intensity, and the blacks, all of their flavor. I need the _bianchetto_ to make an award-winning entry for the 2008 World Pizza Championship, and these elegant truffles, paired with sweet Maine diver scallops, are perfect partners. The judges will be looking for taste, innovation, and execution. If I can find the truffle guy, I'll nail the championship.\n\nThe town of Salsomaggiore Terme, located in the Parma region of Emilia-Romagna, dates from the time the Etruscans first found mineral springs nestled in this snug valley. Today, people come for massages and bathe in the brown stink of the healing egg water, thanks to Benito Mussolini, the fortieth prime minister of Italy, who built a palatial building around the springs, called the Berzieri Spa. The waters are famed for healing.\n\nBut I am a pizza man with just one purpose: to win first place, USA, at this year's competition. Normally, I confine myself to my small pizzeria in Athens, Ohio, and suffer no illusions as to my business's place in a small college town: customers are locals and college kids; business is brisk until 4:00 A.M.; volume is high and profit is small. My customers love my products, and I'm happy but not complacent. I know the next three days won't bring me any fame, but just maybe they'll bring some validation that even a small guy can win sometimes.\n\nThe championships are held annually in a huge stadium just outside Salsomaggiore. Blooming flowers and squawking pheasants on the steep, vine-covered slope outside the building belie the intense human conflict within. This year I'm entering four pizzas: scallop and truffle pizza in the Pizza Classico category; spinach, feta, chicken, and sun-dried tomato pizza in the Pan Style category; fresh mozzarella with basil and San Marzano tomatoes in the Neapolitan category; and in Non Gluten, a new category, an onion-linguine and sweet potato orecchiette-topped pizza with dough made from rice and garbanzo-bean flour. All culinary scores are figured from 800 as perfect, with each contestant rated by cooking prowess, sanitation, presentation, taste, and knowledge of the pizza. From prior year competitions, I have also learned the unwritten rules: look Italian, cook the Italian way, make your presentation short, have confidence and a pinch of arrogance. My show of detached condescension must make the judges think I am the most knowledgeable pizza maker ever, and, as a gift, I am going to turn them on to the best pizza they've ever had. Once I get my truffles, that is.\n\nWe see the worn sign in front, Ristorante Al Tartufo, flickering across the white gravel parking lot, and we turn, circling to the back of the building. Tony Gemignani, founder and president of our American team, leans across the front seat to get a better look at the building, dark bangs falling across his forehead. He has just driven Justin Wadstein, Bruno di Fabio, and me on this four-hour expedition. He is probably weary from the winding roads and the jetlag, but Tony looks calm, as usual, and intense.\n\n\"We're here, I think.\" A quick smile accompanies his classically handsome Italian looks and puts us all at ease. Tony is an international legend in the pizza industry. With his brother Frank, he owns Pisano's Pizzeria in Castro Valley, California. He has won more acrobatic and culinary awards for pizza than any other person in this country and probably the world. Tony and Bruno recently opened Tony's Pizza Napoletana, a successful pizza school and pizzeria in San Francisco. Tony has already driven us around to purchase radicchio, zucchini flowers, and broccoli rabe. These truffle guys are our last stop.\n\n\"So, John,\" Bruno says to me. \"This is the place with your amazing truffle guy, huh?\" Bruno beams. He can't help himself. There on the gravel he looks like an actor about to go on stage. Both he and Tony live for strange new situations; after hearing of my last visit to the truffle guy in 2006, they had to see for themselves.\n\nJust like last time, the quest began with creepiness, a James Bond moment by the hotel front desk when we asked for directions to the truffle guy's restaurant. Two men in pressed blue suits asked why we wanted these truffles and how we knew of the truffle guy. It seemed more like an impending drug deal than a stinky fungus inquiry. If we could get fresh truffle at the local stores, life would be simpler, but that's not how it works in Italy.\n\nTruffle hunters gather the _bianchetto,_ also known as the Tuscan truffle, from January to March, from Tuscany north to this part of Emiglia-Romagna. Its lobes, unlike the round, sandpaper-like skins of the black truffle, look like bulbous bumps on a small animal brain thrown in the dirt. It's tough to nail down the exact aroma and taste of the spring truffle: cheesy, woody, earthy, and garlicky are the usual adjectives. While not as aromatic as the white or black truffle, the _bianchetto_ is particularly suited to pizza\u2014at low, warm temperatures it gives off a mildly pungent aroma. Introducing strong flavors to a pizza can be disastrous. A great _pizzaiolo_ (pizza dude) has to make sure that the competing flavors of bread, sauce, cheese, protein, and vegetable are compatible and not overpowered by another element.\n\nNow I'm just moments away from a stash of _bianchetti._ I can almost smell them. But Justin turns and looks off into the dark green hills beyond the parking lot. \"I'm not gonna get whacked for a truffle,\" he says. \"I'm staying in the car.\" Justin is no coward. He's a world-class pizza-dough-tossing acrobat who once tossed three rounds of pizza dough high into the air while jumping up and down on a soccer ball. When Justin won the World Pizza Championship of 2007, the crowd jumped out of their seats, screaming in adulation and surprise.\n\nBruno leans in toward Justin, who's still sitting in the car. \"Okay, Justin, this is the deal. If you hear some loud pops, then see me hauling ass to the van with a big bag of truffles and John's and Tony's brains splattered on my face, start the car, and we'll be gone.\" Bruno laughs his usual high, nasal guffaw and kicks the loose gravel. He then punches my arm and nods a \"let's go\" toward the back of the restaurant. We crunch our way through the parking lot. The sunlight is waning now. Clouds moving in make the mottled and muted blue sky meld with the valley below.\n\nThe restaurant's door is a huge slab of beaten, scratched wood that to my mind looks like a door to a gladiator ring. Tony, in the lead, stops to face me. \"Hey, John, how do you know that this guy's your buddy? This area was a Mussolini stronghold in World War II, and there's still lots of ill will toward Americans. I've also heard of some strange deaths attributed to the truffle black market. It's a big business here, taken very seriously. Why don't you go in first and I'll back you up?\"\n\nI hesitate. Perhaps I overstated how familiar I was with the truffle guy, having met him only once, and that was two years ago. What if Justin is right and the truffle mafia decides we're interlopers?\n\nBruno chimes in with a chuckle. \"Yeah, dude, we're right behind you. Anything happens, we'll be the first to run and get the cops or the ambulance.\"\n\nI stop at the threshold and sniff the air. \"Smell that?\" I ask.\n\n\"Porcini, cepes. Unmistakable. Food of the gods,\" Tony mumbles. \"You sure this is the place you visited last time?\" My hands grip the near-mythical brass doorknob. I smile nervously and throw open the door.\n\nI have indeed been here before. I'm transported back two years ago, to a late March night in the marble lobby of the Grand Hotel et de Milan in the heart of Salsomaggiore Terme. Feeling a little like Jack Nicholson at the start of _The Shining,_ I had blurted out, \"I need to find some truffles. Do you know where I can buy some?\"\n\n\"Who wants to know?\" a slender, elegant man in his mid-fifties asked. His perfectly pressed blue suit with white lapels was more suited to a movie than a hotel. He looked beyond me with such curiosity that I turned and looked myself. No one there.\n\n\"Follow me, please,\" he said as he clicked his way across the marble, circling behind me and out the door. The lights of downtown and the disco across the street twinkled as we walked through a black-green garden filled with huge marble statues. The fence around it reminded me of a cemetery.\n\n\"My name is Giorgio.\" He tapped a cigarette on his pack. \"I can get you _tartufi_ ,\" he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper. \"It is . . . how do you say? Not simple.\"\n\n\"Complicated,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes.\" Giorgio lit his cigarette and took a deep puff. He pulled out his card, wrote an address on it, and said, \"Take a taxi, give him this address. When you get there, go in the back door. Ask for the owner of the restaurant and give him this card.\" I looked down at the cursive Italian writing. The only word I could distinguish was the last one, _tartufo._\n\nAs I walked away, Giorgio cautioned, \"Be careful, Giovanni . . . John. And keep your hands out of your pockets.\"\n\nThirty minutes later my cab reached the mountain restaurant. I walked across a parking lot under the yellow glare of its sign and opened a big wooden door\u2014the same one I had just opened with Tony and Bruno behind me. The room was not well lit. Pale green walls showed splotches where the plaster had chipped off. Shelves all around held jars of unidentifiable brown things floating in liquid.\n\nA dozen or so locals were bantering with their friends. Four old men at an old wooden tabletop played cards to my right. Middle-aged waitresses lounged and cackled at a small bar on the other side. I stepped into the middle of the room.\n\n\"Hi,\" I blurted out to no one in particular. A drop of sweat trickled down the side of my face.\n\nEverything stopped. The abruptness was so intense that it could only have been better choreographed if someone had taken a record player and scratched the needle hard: _RRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIP._ I looked around, my hands and brow sweaty. Even my brain seemed to sweat. All the faces were hard and expressionless. It was one of the longest silences I've experienced in my life. I looked down. \"Oh shit,\" I thought. There were my hands, in the pockets of my coat. The oldies at the card table had their hands under the table now. I removed my hands slowly.\n\n_\"Buona sera.\" A_ man appeared from behind a patterned curtain, arms outstretched in the clothesline position. He was over six feet tall, with graying, balding hair and a bushy unibrow held up in a \"what do you want\" look. He cracked his neck with a snap and cocked it to one side, expressing, in timeless guy language, \"Gimme what you got, punk.\"\n\n\"I came to get some truffles,\" I squeaked, cursing myself for sounding like a little girl.\n\n_\"Americano?\"_ he asked.\n\n\"Yes, er, _si,\"_ I replied. \"I need them for my pizza at the World Pizza Competition.\"\n\n\"Who send you?\" the tall man demanded.\n\n\"Giorgio, at the hotel.\" I pulled out his card, trying to keep my hand steady.\n\nA smile flashed across the guy's face. It was like someone had put the needle back on the record. All was good, all was right, just a stupid Americano.\n\nThe tall man shook my hand. From the back room he brought out a large, plastic container, covered with a cloth. He looked around again, and then summoned me with his hand. He grabbed the cloth and stared at me as though he was about to show me my future or the meaning of life. Then he lifted the lid.\n\nThe truffle fumes were overpowering. I smelled black pepper and garlic with a hint of gunpowder, cashews, and ozone. The truffle guy nodded his chin for me to take a closer whiff.\n\n\"Heaven,\" I muttered appreciatively.\n\n_\"Tartufi bianchetti,\"_ the truffle guy said.\n\nI paid forty dollars for three large, marble-sized truffles and a big bag of dried porcini, and I made a new friend. We completed our deal with a toast of _limoncello,_ and I dashed to the waiting taxi. Considering that the porcini go for fifty dollars a pound in the United States, I calculated I was holding over two hundred dollars' worth of great mushrooms. Not to mention the truffles.\n\nI used the truffles to create a pizza with American bison, _fontina di Aosta,_ arugula, and a b\u00e9chamel sauce. I scored in the upper echelon but did not win.\n\nBuying truffles this time around is bound to be different. I have Bruno to translate and Tony to back me up. But as I open the heavy door, I'm hit with a major d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: four old men at the same table turn to stare at me. \"No freakin' way. Not the same guys in the same chairs,\" I say to no one and everyone. I stand there with my mouth open. Tony and Bruno push me into the pale green room with the jars. Nothing has changed. We get the same silent treatment, the same record player scratch, only this time I'm armed. My weapon is Bruno di Fabio.\n\nBruno sidles up to a waitress at the bar. _\"Buona sera.\"_ I watch her face closely as he continues, because Bruno, besides being a consummate pizza aficionado and fluent in Italian, never hesitates to have fun at my expense. For all I know, he could be saying, \"My two Hungarian friends over there are lepers. They want to know if the dishwasher found a finger in a soup bowl last night.\"\n\nBruno turns. He must have noticed me boring holes into the back of his head. \"What! I just asked her where the truffle guy was.\"\n\n\"Those guys staring at us look harmless,\" Tony says, nodding toward the old guys. \"Why do they all have their hands under the table?\"\n\n\"They're probably holding old rusty shotguns under the table ready to blow us to smithereens,\" I whisper. \"Didn't you ever see _Godfather II?\"_\n\nI'm interrupted by a loud _\"EEEEEEEEEEAAAAAYYYYYY\"_ that sounds more like a shotgun blast than a greeting. Tony and I jump. It's my truffle guy, appearing from behind the curtain. _\"Buona sera,_ my pizza friend!\" The truffle man hugs me with his lanky arms. His gray unibrow now seems welcoming. I beam. Now my buddies know who's the real pizza guy, I think. Truffle guy mutters something to the old men and they relax, but they still keep their hands under the table.\n\n\"You want _tartufi_? Porcini?\" he asks as he walks to the front door, where he pokes his head out and scopes out the parking lot. Bruno takes over communications and explains what I want, accurately for once.\n\n\"Wait,\" the truffle guy says, disappearing behind the worn tapestry.\n\n\"I wonder what these guys would do if I grabbed this jar of porcinis and ran to the door?\" Bruno asks playfully. Tony and I giggle.\n\n_\"Tartufi bianchetti,\"_ the truffle guy announces. He puts a two-by-one-foot plastic box on the bar, and we all crowd around. I'm surprised to see the waitress crowding too. The grand presentation begins with a _bbblllllurrrrp_ from the vacuum-sealed plastic container. Musky, pungent truffle fumes waft out. I imagine shucking an almost rotten ear of corn, popping a can of Planters nut mix, then sticking my nose next to diesel truck exhaust for half a second. I smack my tongue against my upper palate and breathe out slowly. I experience disgust and fascination, repelled and attracted in perfect, intense equilibrium.\n\nWith the pressure of the contest tomorrow, all I want is to get my truffles, nod in ignorance, drink my _limoncello_ and haul ass out of there. I hold up three large truffle marbles and ask how much.\n\nThe truffle guy holds up fifteen fingers (not all at once), indicating fifteen Euro.\n\n\"Less than thirty bucks for all that?\" Bruno exclaims.\n\n\"Great deal,\" Tony said. As a bonus, the truffle guy gives me half a bag of dried porcini that he has handpicked.\n\nThe next day, as we enter the stadium to register at the Pizza Championship, we see our competition\u2014the world. The world sees us, too. To enter with such a pizza legend as Tony Gemignani is like being a bodyguard for the president. Heads turn to stare at him. I am proud to be on his team.\n\nAll countries are represented: Iran, Bangladesh, Ireland, Scotland, Brazil. The French show up and try to bribe the judges with some of their kick-ass Champagne. Each contender wants the title of \"Best Pizza in the World.\" Now in its ninth year, the World Pizza Championship makes _Iron Chef_ look like a yoga class at a retirement center.\n\nThe best pizza dough I've ever tasted is from Bruno's _biga._ He's such a fanatic that he'd probably stand at the mixing bowl all night telling bedtime stories to his _biga_ if he knew it would make his pizza crust better. _Biga_ is pre-fermented dough, Italian style\u2014basically, a batch of dough left at room temperature for twenty-four hours or more and added to a new batch. This approach concentrates the flavor, adds complexity, and leads to better digestibility and taste.\n\nBruno's goal at this year's competition is to become the \"World's Fastest Pizza Maker.\" Five dough balls rest in a pile of fine-grained Italian flour on his table. He has to stretch them faster than all his competitors. Bruno walks three feet to the back wall, facing it as if in greeting, then pulls up his checkered cook's pants and squats, sumo style. His nose is just inches from the surface; his face is gnarled in knotted confidence as he beats his chest with closed, flour-covered fists. Puffs of flour shoot up the wall with every beat. Back at the table, he pushes each dough ball with both hands, stretching the gluten strands outward as fast and economically as possible. Bruno makes the time of 48.93 seconds, beating his close Italian friend Salvatore Salviani's 52.68-second score. When he hears the news, Bruno's primordial yell of \"Yeah!\" is probably audible in Bulgaria. He struts to the edge of the stage, gazes out at the crowd, and crows, \"That's gold, baaaaaaby!\" as only a New Yorker can.\n\nMy other USA teammate, Justin, progresses to the finals of the acrobatic championship with a great score. He places third in the world in acrobatic dough tossing.\n\nAs for me, my _biga_ is ready for the fire, just twelve hours old, and incorporated into my seven-ounce dough ball that rests on the marble pizza table near the oven. Three Italian contestants burned the bottoms of their pizzas just before me. This is not promising: they are all better wood-fired pizza men than I am. The optimal temperature for baking a traditional Neapolitan pizza, 905 degrees Fahrenheit, is set by the Verace Pizza Napoletana, an organization founded to protect the way true Neapolitan pizzas are made. In this traditional method, the pizza can bake for only up to ninety seconds. But the actual temperature depends on whether the oven judges stay with an existing 900-degree temperature or whether they throw another couple of oak logs on the fire. The latter is obviously the case, as bottom bricks are burning every pie. The oven temp must be well over 1,000 degrees.\n\nThe oven judge watches as I hand stretch the _tipo 00_ flour, a more refined and higher-gluten flour perfect for making high-temperature, wood-fired pizzas. I jab the tips of my fingers into the soft dough and create my eleven-inch disk, spreading Italian goat cheese from the Piedmont _(caprino di Rimella)_ over it. Next, I shred fresh _asiago pressa_ (un-aged, unlike the cheddar-like _asiago d'Allevo_ more common in the United States) over the pizzas, followed by small squares of _mozzarella di bufala._ I add thinly sliced braised baby fennel, fresh thyme, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and my par-cooked Maine diver scallops cut in half horizontally. I sprinkle a fine chiffonade of roasted red peppers over all.\n\nOne of the pitfalls for many contestants is not making certain that the ashes are brushed out from the previous pizza or from fallout of the burning wood. Ashes ruin the bottom of a true Neapolitan pizza. Any good Italian oven judge can see the ashes, because they stick to the dough and turn the crust gray. Some oven judges see a chump coming to the final bake and \"accidentally\" forget to brush the oven bottom. Any contestant must remember that this guy docks points for just about anything, scratching away at his little scorecard at the tiniest screw-up. Too much flour on your dough? Scratch. Put sauce on the wrong way? Scratch. Forgot to pull the dough onto the pizza peel? Scratch. Neglect to clean your area? Scratch. Hail from Ohio? Scratch. I nod to the judge and grab the oven broom. He takes it from me and sweeps the oven himself.\n\nI use the dome method to cook my pizza. I lift the pizza off the too-hot bottom bricks with the long pizza peel and hold it aloft into the domed upper roof of the pizza oven. This technique ensures an even bake and would have saved previous contestants from their burnt bottoms. Ninety seconds, and I withdraw my pie from the oven and place it on a plate, then pull out my truffle slicer and glide my _tartufo bianchetto_ across the razor-sharp blade, depositing small, fragrant slices onto my pizza. The heat of the pizza enhances the scent. Finally, I garnish my pie with a fresh arugula and sunflower-sprout salad, and then a spritz of lemon. A great pizza, if I say so myself.\n\nBut it's Tony who wins \"Best Pizza in the USA\" in the Pizza Classica category, with a whopping 713 points out of 800, for his pie of white asparagus wrapped with prosciutto, Parmigiano-Reggiano, San Marzano tomato sauce, fresh _buffalo_ mozzarella, and fresh basil.\n\nStill, I end up scoring higher than any other American for all categories, having successfully completed every culinary competition at the World Pizza Championship. My pan pizza with feta, chicken, sun-dried tomato, and spinach scores a respectable 607. I place first in the USA with a 550 score for my Neapolitan pizza. Even my last place in Non-Gluten garners 438 points. The 600 for my truffle and Maine diver scallop pizza puts me in First Place USA with a total of 2,195 points.\n\nI see my American team of Bruno, Tony, and Justin only once a year, but we always bond, despite the prickly circumstances and stress that break us down to exactly who we are inside. Our shiny varnish and outward personas vanish with the jetlag, lack of space, surly hotel-kitchen chefs, hostile competitors, and the mere fact of being at the toughest pizza competition in the world. A smart guy once said, \"In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends.\"\n\nAs our last night in Italy winds down and Bruno's pathetic karaoke version of \"Baby, We Can Talk All Night\" wafts across the disco, I think about our _tartufo_ adventure. Was there really danger or impending doom at the hands of the truffle mafia? The intrigue made the trip more exciting. Besides, I've saved the biggest truffle for myself. It's stinking up my hotel room, along with a big bag of dried porcini mushrooms. After I smuggle them home, I can tell the story of the truffle guy to my family while shaving my white beauty over freshly made risotto. Then, as we taste the memory of the World Pizza Championship, I can exclaim, \"That's gold, baaaaabby!\"\n\n### A SLICE OF FAMILY HISTORY\n\n### By Daniel Duane\n\n### From _Food & Wine_\n\n### Hobbies have a way of turning into book subjects for San Francisco\u2013based novelist\/lifestyle writer Daniel Duane\u2014surfing, rock-climbing, and now food and wine. His latest book: 2012's _How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession._\n\nSeveral months ago, I received an unexpected UPS delivery: a cardboard box from my wife Liz's Aunt Mary in Omaha, Nebraska. Inside, buried among the packing peanuts, I found an old black leather knife roll\u2014a huge one\u2014heavily worn and without a note. But I knew instantly what it was: the knives of my wife's grandfather, Mary's father. And I wondered if it might not carry a message from the past, if only I could figure out what.\n\nI never met my wife's grandfather. He died relatively young, back when she was in second grade. But when I first met Liz, a picture of the man chopping vegetables hung in her kitchen, as well as in the kitchens of all her food-besotted cousins. \"Papa\"\u2014his name was Bernard Schimmel\u2014loomed like Moses in that family; over time, I grew more and more curious about him. A professional chef who had trained at the world's oldest and finest hotel school, in Lausanne, Switzerland, Bernie seems to have had an outsize, gregarious personality, a natural party host who loved his Scotch, his lemon drops and his three daughters, one of whom was Liz's mother, Judy.\n\nBernie was also the head chef and dining consultant for the hotels that his own father had built along the rail lines south of Chicago in the mid-20th century. At one of those hotels, Omaha's Blackstone, family lore has it that Bernie invented the Reuben sandwich for one of his father's regular poker buddies, Reuben Kulakofsky. (A competing origin story credits an earlier \"Reuben Special,\" from a New York deli, but that sandwich had neither sauerkraut nor pastrami and was not grilled.)\n\nI'm something of a knife geek, so my first hope, as I opened Bernie's knife roll, was that I would find treasures\u2014maybe a collection of midcentury carbon-steel Sabatiers, from Bernie's time in Switzerland. Instead, I found run-of-the-mill American stuff: stainless steel slicers for bread and big roasts; a lightweight boning knife for lamb and poultry; a long fish-filleting knife; and a bunch of accessories, like a melon baller, a butter curler, an orange peeler, an oyster-shucking knife, old salad tongs, a carving fork and a plain wooden spoon. What I found, in other words, was the functional tool kit, heavily used but well maintained, of a working Midwestern hotel chef from the 1950s.\n\nTools are for using, even heirloom tools, but I felt a little stumped: If I dumped all of Bernie's things into my own kitchen drawers, the collection would get lost among my many implements, fast losing their identity. If I left them all in the knife roll, they would stay there forever, unused and under-appreciated.\n\nAll this mattered to me because I never cooked before I met Liz. In fact, I never thought much about food. But after we got engaged, Liz's parents started taking us along on their competitive restaurant-going, hitting every great San Francisco spot: Zuni Caf\u00e9, Gary Danko, Spruce, Charles Nob Hill, Aqua. In their company and on their dime, I ate my first foie gras _torchon,_ my first fresh truffles.\n\nI knew I would never be able to afford regular Michelin-starred fabulosity on my own, so I taught myself to cook. By the time Liz and I had two daughters, cooking had become my primary pastime. I blew the first few meals I made for Liz's parents\u2014some through poor menu selection, like serving a main course of pig's liver _caillettes_ (sausage patties made from liver and spices), wrapped in lacy caul fat and baked. Other meals flopped through my sheer ineptitude, like the time I opened the oven, with dinner already an hour late, to find my chickens raw and cold. But I fought my way toward triumph, culminating in a nine-course menu from _The French Laundry Cookbook,_ prepared with help from my then-seven-year-old daughter Hannah, a cheerful and brilliant assistant.\n\nAfter that, Judy began to say that \"Dad\" would have loved knowing me, that he would've loved my fascination with the craft of cooking. I felt flattered by this, and I suspected that I would have loved knowing Bernie, too\u2014not just the chance to learn from him, but also the chance to eat, drink and party with a man whose appetites apparently matched my own. The gift of the knives, I thought, might reflect nothing more complicated than that. They were just knives\u2014less fancy and less materially thrilling, to be honest, than all the handmade Japanese blades I'd accumulated on my own. The talismanic power of all this stuff, if it had any, came from its integrity as a collection, and the link that it provided to Bernie himself.\n\nFor this reason, I felt grateful when Judy asked me one day to bring the knife roll to a family reunion. She was going to serve Reuben sandwiches at a picnic dinner, and she thought it would be fun to let her cousins cut those sandwiches with Bernie's big slicers. So I did, handing them over before the meal and receiving them back again afterwards. On the way home, in the car, liking how the day had felt, I thought perhaps this was the answer: As Guardian of the Knives, I would store the collection in my home as a complete entity, but I would bring it out for key family functions.\n\nMy daughter Hannah, wise beyond her years, found this ridiculous: \"Daddy!\" she said, exasperated. \"Stuff is supposed to be used. You're not supposed to just hide it somewhere!\"\n\nI did not own a 12-inch chef's knife, so I figured I would add that one first to my regular rotation, if only for slicing big piles of leafy greens into chiffonades. Pulling that hefty knife from the roll, I noticed a few fine, bright scratches near its blade edge, as if it had been sharpened only days earlier. This caught my eye because the knife had not been touched at the luncheon. So I scraped the blade softly sideways across my forearm, a standard sharpness test: Arm hairs flicked free, effortlessly, one after another. The blade was an absolute razor, so finely honed it wouldn't have stayed that way through more than a few days' cooking.\n\nI phoned Judy first, assuming she had paid to have the knives sharpened after her father passed away. Judy had no idea what I was talking about. So I called Mary, who laughed out loud. \"Dad must have left them like that,\" she said, chuckling. \"I haven't touched those knives since he died.\"\n\nAnd that's how it happened\u2014that's how I felt Bernie reaching through time, making contact with me. Every chef drags a fingertip sideways across the blade edges of his knives, testing their sharpness; Bernie's own fingers, therefore, had felt precisely the edge I was feeling.\n\nHannah, by this point, was poring over the contents of the knife roll, marveling at all these little tools from her great-grandfather, the legendary cook. \"And what's this thing?\" she asked me.\n\nShe held a battered old steel tasting spoon. It was stamped, on its face, with the names of the Schimmel hotels in curiously tiny lettering: Omaha's Blackstone, of course; but also the Cornhusker in Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Lassen in Wichita, Kansas; and the Custer in Galesburg, Illinois. Not one of these hotels remained in business, and yet this spoon had served in Bernie's most personal, intuitive act: tasting. Holding it in my hands, thinking of all the times I'd brought a sauce to my own lips, I felt a link to Bernie, and to the simple love of food he had passed along to his daughters. And, through them, to me.\n\n### [BARBECUE ROAD TRIP:  \nTHE SMOKE ROAD](contents.html#ch29)\n\n### By John T. Edge\n\n### From _Garden & Gun_\n\n### Social historian, food writer, and tireless promoter of Southern culture, John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a columnist for _The New York Times, Garden & Gun,_ and _The Oxford American._ His most recent book, _The Truck Food Cookbook,_ was released in May 2012.\n\nJess shook his head, tapped his nose, and mouthed the words No smoke. But I insisted. How often do we get to Covington, Tennessee? I thought, as we pondered our third barbecue pit stop of the day. We might as well give their sandwich a shot.\n\nMy boy remained dubious. He stepped to the counter and asked the gentleman in charge how they cook their pigs. \"With charcoal,\" the fellow said. \"Gets it tender, and the sauce does the rest.\" Jess looked up at me with all the world-weariness a ten-year-old with a shock of blond hair and a snaggletoothed grin can muster. He didn't have to say a word.\n\nAs we drove away, bound for the last stop on our semiannual road trip through rural western Tennessee\u2014a region I've come to think of as a Land of the Lost for hickory-cooked pork barbecue believers, where roadside purveyors still fuel masonry pits with hickory and oak logs and undiscovered treasures always seem to lurk around the bend\u2014I caught his eye in the rearview mirror. Jess smiled, shook his head, and tapped his nose again.\n\nJess knows barbecue. He ate his first solid food, a shoulder sandwich with slaw and sweet red sauce, in the parking lot of Spruce's Bar-B-Q in Griffin, Georgia. Through the years, on family trips to Alabama, where my wife grew up, and Georgia, where I was born and raised, he's learned to case a joint. In addition to working his nose, he knows how to survey the woodpile, ferret out freezer case menu conceits, and spot steam table pork at twenty paces.\n\nA couple of years back, Jess and I began to take just-the-guys jaunts north, from our home in Oxford, Mississippi, through the small Tennessee towns that sprawl between Jackson and Memphis. Jess discovered how to scan for armadas of martin houses, made from whitewashed gourds. He wondered, rightly, what really goes on inside tanning salons, twirling academies, and taxidermy studios. And he learned to eat, with discernment, intelligence, and gusto.\n\nOn one of those trips, I tried to get Jess to read the text of a historical marker, erected in tribute to some long-forgotten graybeard statesman. He feigned interest, as any dutiful son would. Five minutes later, he recovered his gumption. \"What if I could play laser tag and you could get a really good barbecue sandwich in one place?\" he asked. \"That's what we really want, right?\"\n\nOver time, Jess and I have learned each other's palates. I'm a thin vinegar sauce guy. Jess likes molasses and ketchup-thickened concoctions. I prefer whole hog, pulled into long strands. Jess likes shoulder meat, hacked into shards and piled high on a white-bread bun.\n\nMore important, we have developed a shared love of western Tennessee barbecue and the people who cook it. As he grows from a goofball boy, who sings in the shower and hugs me good night, to a querulous teenager, who questions my authority and demands the keys to the family sedan, I hope we're also honing an enduring friendship that won't depend solely on blood and genes.\n\nOn our most recent expedition, Jess and I hit two stellar spots before that misstep in Covington. (We also did a drive-by of the Mindfield, a skyscraping folk art environment on the edge of downtown Brownsville, and made a quick tour of the Alex Haley Museum, an homage to the author of _Roots_ tucked in a modest neighborhood in nearby Henning.)\n\nHelen's Bar-B-Q in Brownsville came first. Set in a metal hutch, on a hard curve north of the courthouse square, the six-seat caf\u00e9 sits next to a retailer of discount jewelry and hair extensions. Across the street is a derelict tourist-court-style motel. Inside, Helen Turner, one of the few female pit masters in the South, stokes the fire and works the sandwich board. She's a dervish. Behind the caf\u00e9, in a screened pit room, she burns hickory and oak down into coals between two sheets of corrugated tin. With a long-handled shovel, she slides those coals into a concrete block berth. After they spend ten to twelve hours in a swirl of smoke, she pulls pork shoulders from that pit, chops them with a cleaver, piles the meat high on buns, and douses all with a red sauce that straddles the line between ketchup and vinegar, between sweet and hot.\n\nJess ate his sandwich in four greedy bites. He moaned as he ate. Literally. But he also kept glancing up at Ms. Turner, who was wearing a blue floral-print hairnet and pink hospital scrubs. As she loped about the pit room, Jess watched. As he chewed through smoke-blackened hunks of pork flesh, his eyes tracked her movements. And his mind engaged.\n\nWhen we drove away, Jess was cradling a pickle jar of Helen's sauce and plotting the many ways he could employ it when we got back home. His eyes were wide. And so was his smile. He got it, I told myself. I didn't have to make some fatherly point about how women can do anything men can do. About how women work as hard as men. Ms. Turner had made those points for me. And she had dished a stupendously great sandwich, too.\n\nSam's Bar-B-Q in Humboldt was next. When Jess spied the woodpile, just south of downtown, he yelled for me to brake. A jumble of hickory trunks and oak stumps\u2014delivered by friends and neighbors as they cleaned up from last spring's tornadoes\u2014that wood served as a kind of free-form art installation and a de facto advertisement that announced HONEST BARBECUE COOKED OVER WOOD HERE.\n\nThe building is made of white block, patined with soot. The pit, set in an adjacent building, is an iron-lung-shaped double-decker, with wood burning down to coals on the bottom and shoulders smoking on racks up top. It's a feat of country-boy engineering, designed by the founder, Sam Donald, and now manned by his son-in-law John Ivory. The efficacy of that design gets proved every time customers heft a sandwich to their maw.\n\nAnd that's just what Jess and I did. We hefted two beautiful sandwiches and a slice of chocolate chess pie, still hot from the oven. And we listened as locals came streaming in. \"Now, you're the baby girl, aren't you?\" Mr. Ivory asked a woman who ordered a barbecue bologna sandwich. \"Give me a sandwich with fatty meat and slaw,\" said a fireman with soot on his hands.\n\nWe could have stayed all afternoon, rubbing our bellies and listening to the dulcet tones of happy eaters. But we motored on, bound for Covington. Two stops don't make a barbecue road trip, I told Jess. Three is the minimum. Everybody knows that.\n\nBy the time we left Covington, we didn't need another sandwich. We had eaten well and often. But we pushed on. That's what you do on a barbecue road trip. You push on, no matter how full you might be, goaded by the promise that the next experience might prove to be the best.\n\nAs rain began to splatter the windshield and night began to fall, we pulled into Millington, Tennessee. Our goal was Woodstock Store N' Deli, a cinderblock rectangle where Anthony Bledsoe serves a green-hickory-smoked shoulder sandwich, piled perilously high and capped with slaw. He calls it the Sleeper.\n\nThe source of the moniker became clear when Jess and I stepped back into the gloam and spread paper towels on the hood of our station wagon. Our sandwich was an overstuffed behemoth. Fatter than fat. Stacked like a napoleon of meat, slaw, and sauce. Wretched and lovely excess. Enough to put any eater to sleep.\n\nAs we picked at stray bits of meat that had fallen from the sandwich and worked up the courage to take yet another bite, a woman approached us. She was stooped. And slight. She carried a ragged umbrella. Her hand was out. She said her belly was empty. She looked directly at Jess. I reached into my pocket for some cash. Jess folded the sandwich back into its tinfoil pouch and asked if she would accept it. She did. And then she was gone.\n\nFive miles from home, I asked Jess what he learned on our barbecue road trip. \"Respect what you have while you have it,\" he said. That insight applies to issues of hunger and poverty. And to the barbecue traditions of the South. Not to mention father-son relations.\n\nThough our barbecue buzz had faded by the time we rolled back into Oxford, my road-trip-fueled appreciation for Jess had grown, as had my conviction that we needed to plot another expedition. Before his hunger fades. Before he grows up.\n\n## _The Family Table_\n\n### THE FOOD-CRITIC FATHER\n\n### By Todd Kliman\n\n### From _The Washingtonian_\n\n### Every new parent knows how a new baby upends family life. But what if you're a restaurant reviewer, obligated to dine out several nights a week? Todd Kliman, award-winning dining critic for the monthly _Washingtonian_ magazine, chronicles his heroic efforts to accommodate the new addition.\n\n\"Welcome to my world,\" my friend Laura said when I called to tell her my wife and I were having a baby.\n\n\"You mean the world of early-morning feedings and interrupted sleep?\"\n\n\"I mean,\" she said, \"the world of chicken tenders. You're in for a rude awakening, my food-critic friend.\"\n\nThere are things every parent-to-be fears. The grand, existential worries: Let him be breathing, I said to myself at the moment of delivery. Let there not be a cord wrapped around his neck. Let him be normal. Then there are the little, quotidian matters, the myriad concerns of getting along with what is, let's face it, a new housemate. A wailing, demanding housemate. A housemate who makes the slob you once roomed with\u2014the one who raided the fridge and lounged on the couch in his underwear\u2014look not half bad by comparison.\n\nIn the months preceding our son's arrival, I kept hearing that life was about to change, that being a parent would alter my reality in ways big and small. But it wasn't until Laura framed the terms of my soon-to-be life that the existential abstraction\u2014change\u2014became quotidian and concrete.\n\nI thought I had prepared myself. Long before our son was ever a notion in our heads, my wife and I sat down one night and figured it all out\u2014discussing, with the certainty of people for whom nothing is at stake, how we'd raise our Hypothetical Kid. We'd never buy a minivan, we wouldn't build our existence around our Hypothetical Kid's world. Hypothetical Kid would enter ours.\n\nBut what was this world I'd created? As a food critic, I ate dinner out every night\u2014often following a long lunch. Sometimes I went out to two dinners in a single night, and the wine sometimes meant that those nights stretched into the morning.\n\nI understood when I accepted this job that I was to think of myself as a kind of public functionary\u2014a Designated Eater. I endured the caloric overload and the punishments to the body so readers could spend their time and money more sensibly. Not that I ever complained. This was the other thing I accepted\u2014griping was bad form when you were eating out nightly on someone else's dime.\n\nIf it wasn't all Champagne and truffles, the fact remained that every meal was a restaurant meal. I lived a fantasy life, and I nurtured one, too. As much as I existed to feed my readers tips, I existed to feed their fantasy of the bon vivant. Some bon vivant I was about to be, I thought, spooning strained carrots and mashed peas to a newborn.\n\n\"You have to sacrifice certain things now,\" an obstetrician said, preparing us for our new life.\n\nBut there were sacrifices I wasn't sure I was prepared to make.\n\nIn the beginning, things were a relative breeze. In their first few months, most babies sleep 18 hours a day or more. The car seat was an ungainly purse we carted everywhere, leaving it on a chair beside us or on the floor next to our table. Jesse slept in his protective pod or stared blankly and drooled. Half the time we brought him with us to restaurants, I didn't even notice he was there until it was time to leave.\n\n\"Wait,\" my wife said. \"It gets harder.\"\n\nWe hit more than 100 eateries in those first three or four months\u2014white-tablecloth spots, dives, and everything in between. By our son's first birthday, he had been to more than 250\u2014a fact I shared with the friends and family who gathered at our house to eat cake and watch Jesse open presents.\n\n\"You're kidding,\" someone said.\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Two hundred fifty,\" she said. \"You're keeping a total?\"\n\n\"Actually, 272,\" I said. \"But who's counting?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You're such a guy.\"\n\nIn a sense, we entered a new phase when Jesse graduated from the car seat, where he mostly slept, to a high chair, where he mostly didn't. But it was the night I took my one-year-old son out for barbecue for the first time that we truly entered a new stage of parenthood.\n\nBarbecue has always held a certain primacy for me among all the foods I cook and crave, and I wanted it to be special the first time my son dug into a pile of smoky 'cue.\n\nIt was a long drive. My wife had expressed doubts about chancing a place this far from home in rush hour, and now as we hit a patch of traffic on the Beltway, she worried we'd be getting home too late. Jesse wailed and wailed. I told her we could bail at the next exit. \"Stick to the plan,\" she said, slipping Jesse animal crackers.\n\nI suspected she encouraged me to keep going only so she'd have the ideal incriminating illustration to use against me the next time I suggested we venture out too late for a restaurant.\n\nTraffic eased up. We managed to be only 40 minutes late. Fortunately, the food\u2014ribs, pulled pork, beans, cornbread, coleslaw\u2014came quickly. Jesse, despite the in-car appetizer, was ravenous. He attacked his plate, shoving bits of spare rib into his mouth as if satisfying some deep need. I'd never seen him go at any food like this. But I'd never turned him loose on barbecue. He's got it in his genes, I thought, marveling at his sauce-smeared face. I took pictures.\n\nWe drove home in one of those warm, expansive moods when your earlier fears have been exposed as premature and overstated and life feels loose and easy. We laughed and celebrated his initiation into the culture of barbecue and the world of adult eating.\n\nAnd then at 3 in the morning, my son, snugly sleeping between Mommy and Daddy, spewed the contents of his stomach all over himself, our bed, and us. Even after we changed the sheets, the smell of wood smoke and stomach acid was unmistakable.\n\nYay, solid foods!\n\nMy wife laid down certain rules after that: In a high chair by 6 at the latest. If traffic is bad and we have to bail, so be it.\n\nDinner became something to prepare for twice. There were the preparations I needed to make for him and the preparations I needed to make for me, to ensure that my stealth mission\u2014my anonymous visit to a restaurant as a critic\u2014came off without a hitch.\n\nAfternoons usually went like this: Make a reservation under an assumed name\u2014my nom de mange, I like to call it. E-mail my wife to be ready to leave the house at the appointed time. Choose all of the dishes we'd order. E-mail our guests the \"rules\" for the night: what can and can't be talked about at the table, when and how to pass plates so that I'm able to sample each dish, how to quiz the waitstaff about the Syrah and the veal without lapsing into an SS-style interrogation.\n\nAt the same time: Load his bag with necessities\u2014change of clothes, diapers, sippy cup. Choose an assortment of books along with crayons and paper. Fill and pack Tupperware containers with Cheez-Its, Cheerios, and animal crackers while relishing the irony of sneaking cheap processed food into a restaurant that charges $16 for a glass of wine.\n\nSometimes I prepared in vain. One night as we were nearing the restaurant, I glanced into the rearview mirror. There he was, a limp pile of limbs. \"What should we do now?\" I asked.\n\nThe look on my wife's face said: Tell me that's a rhetorical question.\n\nWe'd already taken him out three nights in a row. If it were just any restaurant, I said, I'd understand. But this was Important Restaurant X. I'd been waiting five weeks to get in. I proposed we give it 15 minutes, that maybe he'd wake up then and we could have our meal. I drove around the block three times.\n\nHe did not wake up.\n\nFive more minutes, I said.\n\n\"No,\" she said, peeved that I'd thought to push through.\n\nMy son, if he'd known I had put my needs as a critic above his, would probably have been peeved, too.\n\nThe hostess professed understanding when I called to cancel five minutes after we were supposed to be there, but her blithe, sing-songy tone oozed the opposite. It was all peeve. As for me, I had left peeved and was approaching pissed. Dinner at Important Restaurant X turned out to be takeout pizza from Chain Restaurant Y. It was cold by the time we got it home.\n\nIt was rare that we missed a meal. But there were many I wished we had. One night when Jesse was almost two, we were at an Italian restaurant in Alexandria. The waitress was excellent, and we put in orders for drinks and appetizers. All was well until my son dropped his fork.\n\nHe was inconsolable.\n\n\"It's okay,\" I said, \"they'll get you a new one.\"\n\nYou would have thought a stranger had snatched his Elmo doll. Tears streamed down his pinched red face.\n\nI handed him my fork.\n\nNo. He wanted his fork.\n\nHow did he know this wasn't his fork? He just knew.\n\nThe stares were coming from every corner of the restaurant as he wailed. It dawned on me: I've become the diner I used to despise. I once shot dirty looks at tables with kids who wouldn't pipe down. I never thought twice about asking to be moved to another table, away from the offending baby. Now I always found myself scanning the room for tables with small children, curious to know how their dinner was going. Reading online reviews, with their frequent, raging criticism of parents who brought young children to restaurants, made me cringe. \"Who do these arrogant, entitled yuppie assholes think they are?\" went a typical review on Yelp. \"What makes them think their oh-so-precious princes and princesses are welcome at every goddamn restaurant in the city?\"\n\nMy wife, at the limit of her frustration, gathered Jesse up and took him outside. Ten minutes later, he returned . . . and remembered why he'd been so upset.\n\n\"My fork!\" he cried.\n\nHe and my wife spent the remainder of the meal outside while I ate parts of two appetizers, three entr\u00e9es, and two salads.\n\nIn American culture, there are restaurants for adults and there are restaurants for kids, and the two are not expected to mix. It's different at Latin and Asian restaurants, where no such divide seems to exist.\n\nThe first time I took Jesse to a roadside joint in Bladensburg's Little Mexico\u2014he was probably six months old\u2014the waitress fussed over him for a minute or two before extending her arms like a forgotten aunt. The expression on my wife's face was priceless: diplomacy vying with primal anxiety. You want me to hand over my baby? But she relented. The waitress scooped him up, cuddled him, cooed over him\u2014and whisked him out of the dining room.\n\nNow my wife's alarm was palpable.\n\nWe found our waitress in the kitchen, parading Jesse around as the cooks entertained him with their shiny tools.\n\nEven better was the restaurant in Annandale's Koreatown where the co-owner descended on our table as if she were his bub-bub and hadn't seen him in weeks. She took him to a nearby table where her staff was chopping vegetables. For the next 20 minutes, she bounced him on her knee and dangled scallions in front of him as if they were car keys, entreating us to seize the chance to eat in quiet, just the two of us.\n\nThese were among the most extraordinary restaurant experiences I've ever had. Not only was our son showered with affection, but we were made to feel like part of an extended family. We were being embraced, too.\n\nBy contrast, whenever I walked into an American restaurant with him in those first two years, there was seldom a smile, much less an embrace. My son was a problem to be solved. \"You can't bring that in here,\" the general manager of a popular restaurant commanded us one afternoon.\n\nWe think he was referring to the stroller.\n\nAround the time Jesse turned two, my wife made a decision. Her decisions are never the result of minor epiphanies. They never involve switching cell-phone providers or choosing a new doctor. When she says, \"I've made a decision,\" I brace myself.\n\n\"It's too hard taking us along,\" she said. \"And I don't enjoy it if he doesn't enjoy it, and who can tell if he's going to? There are just so many things that can happen.\"\n\nThe precipitating event had occurred a few nights earlier at a restaurant in DC's Palisades I was reevaluating. She was feeding Jesse a hunk of bread and butter, and he began to choke and then cry. Every head turned. My wife quieted him after several moments, enabling us to hear all the disparaging things everyone around us was saying\u2014condemnations of our parenting style, of our effrontery in taking him out to eat at a place like this. (Never mind that the restaurant had a high chair!) We spent the late-summer night taking turns with him out on the sidewalk, one of us holding down the table, the other walking him back and forth on the pavement, all three of us bitten by mosquitoes. At least somebody ate.\n\n\"You've got a job to do, and you're trying to make everybody happy and making nobody happy,\" my wife said. \"So just forget it.\"\n\n\"What about one of the noisy places?\" I suggested.\n\nI'd come to love the noisy places, those casual midlevel restaurants with exposed ceilings and cement floors that had been popping up in DC. Young people loved them, finding in their cool industrial aesthetic a validation of their decision to live in the expensive but bustling big city; older people hated them, despairing of ever having a normal conversation. As a food critic, I saw the merits of both arguments. But as a new parent, I was a fierce partisan. I loved the protective cover they offered. My son could screech like an electrocuted cat, as he did one night at a clattering bistro, and no one would glance up from the scallop crudo. If only every new restaurant that opened had decibel levels akin to that of a construction site, I sometimes thought.\n\n\"No,\" my wife said, \"not even the noisy places.\" The only exception she'd make was for a Latin or Asian restaurant.\n\n\"How about we revisit this again in a few months?\" I said.\n\nShe didn't agree; she didn't disagree. \"Look, we're learning,\" she said. \"He's going through phases, but we're going through them, too. This isn't forever. And that doesn't mean you can't go out with him, just the two of you. It'll be good for you to have that time together. Daddy-and-Jesse time.\"\n\nThings were harder without my wife there\u2014like being-denied-the-use-of-my-limbs harder. I hadn't realized just how smooth and skilled she was until I was forced to handle it all myself. How did she do it? How did she attend to all his needs\u2014cutting his food into small bites, reading him a story, swabbing him down whenever his face became one big schmutz\u2014while also serving as a sounding board for my impressions and ideas?\n\nIt took all of half a meal for me to realize that being a daddy and being a food critic were incompatible, like pairing foie gras with ice cream. I couldn't make mental notes about the red wine that was served too warm, the sauce that hadn't been properly reduced, the waitress who neglected to fill the water glasses . . . and also read him a story, color with him, and cut his food into 47 pieces.\n\nRestaurant visit number 466: I ducked into the bathroom to make notes. I figured the sanctuary of the stall would reduce the static in my head. I began pecking out letters on my iPhone: \"Scallops = slight translucence in center, dark crusting on top. Microgreens, dabs of corn sauce. Gazpacho blended smooth, a thickness there\u2014bread or bread crumbs?\" But I still had my son with me.\n\n\"Daddy, whatcha doin'?\"\n\n\"Making notes,\" I said.\n\nI heard someone enter the bathroom. \"Making notes,\" Jesse sing-songed as the door to the next stall slammed shut. \"Daddy's making notes.\"\n\nMy son the mole.\n\nMy stall-mate could have been a manager, a waiter. I imagined walking back to my table to the stares of the staff as the news made the rounds: critic in the house.\n\nAmong the first laws of being a food critic is not to take things personally. Our recourse is our column. A bad night is writing material. But my dinners out with Jesse several nights a week were an exercise in double consciousness. I was both the discerning critic and the anxious father. The critic in me focused on the server's knowledge of the menu and of food generally, his ability to keep the flow of the meal smooth and steady. The father in me was fixated on the waiter's regard for the little person at the table. Servers were either with you, I was learning, or they were against you. There was rarely an in-between.\n\nOne night a waiter set down a giant steak knife in front of my son. Servers routinely gave him stemware. A few brought him apple juice or milk in a wine goblet.\n\nI'll never forget restaurant visit number 684 and the cast-iron skillet of mushrooms and polenta. \"Hot\u2014careful,\" the waiter warned. He walked away, leaving the scalding handle much too near my son's face. Jesse's little fingers drifted toward it. I grabbed his forearm and squeezed hard. He began to cry at the pain I'd caused\u2014a pain to forestall a nastier, more lasting one.\n\nHoping to avert disaster, I created it: I knocked over a glass, spilling water all over. The waiter materialized with napkins and stood watching as I blotted while the spill, moving as inexorably as floodwaters, dripped onto Jesse's lap. The manager swung by, and the men stood watching. Doing nothing. Like men do.\n\nThe male staff at restaurants were, almost without exception, awful. That's not to say all the waitresses were superior at their jobs, just that the women were more inclined to understand that having a toddler at the table meant taking care of things other than drink requests and asking if everything was seasoned properly. More inclined to improvise entertainments to distract Jesse\u2014spoons and straws to play with, pen and paper for drawing, even a cookie fetched from the petit four plate. Some people prefer a female doctor\u2014believing, rightly or wrongly, that a woman will be more sensitive to their needs. I had never understood that position until now. I didn't ask to be taken care of by a waitress and not a waiter when my son was with me, but the father in me pleaded silently to be given a waitress.\n\nIt was hard with him. It was hard without him. The nights that neither he nor she came with me felt strange, as if I had one life and they had another. I sometimes felt like a traveling salesman.\n\nThe texts my wife liked to send me while I was out at dinner were meant to impart a sense of closeness but only reinforced this feeling of being alone on the road. Restaurant-going had been a huge part of our dating life. Our first dinner date had been at Red Sea, the now-defunct Ethiopian place on 18th Street in DC's Adams Morgan. Nothing fancy. I'd wanted to see whether she was my kind of woman\u2014a real eater, up for an adventure\u2014or a princess in need of pampering.\n\n\"How's dinner?\" she would text me. If the food was good, I downplayed it. If it was mediocre, I made her think I had spared her from something awful. I declined to give dish descriptions, rendering my meal in single-word summations: chicken, polenta, sorbet.\n\n\"I made Jesse some mashed yams with cinnamon, which he seemed to love,\" she texted one night. \"I had the rest of the chicken from Friday plus heated up some ramen.\" Ramen! The last resort of the penny-pinching college student. I felt a stab in my stomach.\n\nI often brought home leftovers, which my wife dug into the next day at lunch, or sometimes in the middle of the night. Whether veal cheeks over polenta from a French restaurant or pollo a la brasa from a carryout rotisserie, it didn't matter. All distinctions were erased by refrigeration. Everything tasted like fast food. \"I guess you had to be there,\" she'd say.\n\nStill, I persisted: \"Let me bring you something.\"\n\n\"Whatever you want. Enjoy yourself. I love you.\"\n\n\"Tell him Daddy loves him and misses him. And I love you, too.\"\n\nThinking I might persuade my wife to relax the rules, I told her one night about a new non-Asian, non-Latin place that advertised itself as kid-friendly. I had already done my homework, calling ahead to ask the manager about the menu (hot dogs and chicken tenders) and the provided-for distractions (a coloring book and crayons). What a parent is paying for in patronizing a kid-friendly restaurant is immunity from the dirty looks of other diners. Nobody who comes to a place with coloring books and crayons ought to complain about a kid acting up at the next table\u2014or so my wife contended. \"If they have a high chair,\" she said, \"they've made the decision that kids are welcome.\"\n\nNot that she trusted restaurants to understand that that's what they'd decided. My wife no longer took restaurants at their word when it came to children. \"What makes this place kid-friendly?\" she wanted to know, pouncing on the phrase like a prosecutor.\n\n\"Besides the menu, I don't know. A high chair? Coloring books?\"\n\n\"Just because they have a high chair,\" she said, \"doesn't mean they're going to be competent.\"\n\nMy God, I thought. It's happened: My wife has become a mother.\n\nI knew the moment she pushed him out into the world that her life had changed and that ours, together, had changed along with it. But for some reason it wasn't emotionally real to me until now. This fierce protective instinct\u2014where had it been hiding all these years? She'd always been willing to give things a try, always relished the opportunity to turn a bad situation into something good. I was under no illusion that she believed it was her job in life to make me happy, but if there was anyone, before, whom she sought to comfort or appease or please, it was me.\n\nWe never did visit that \"kid-friendly\" place.\n\nThe line between discernment and snobbery can seem razor-thin in the world of food. I've never wanted to be the kind of critic concerned chiefly with handing out demerits and judging dishes according to some Olympian notion of correctness. I've never wanted readers to feel that I equate a discriminating palate with a sense of my own superiority.\n\nIn my reviews, I've always strived to remember I'm writing for all sorts of readers and that my goal in critiquing a restaurant is to craft an interesting piece that diners who might never get to the restaurant would want to read. It hasn't always been easy, because to talk with any degree of specificity about food is to lapse necessarily into a kind of inside baseball. And to engage professionally in any form of artistic criticism is to choose a life in which you're constantly working out your theories and ideas\u2014intellectualizing experiences that most people never bother to analyze.\n\nI felt a version of this tension playing out in me as Jesse racked up the restaurant visits\u2014not as many as in his first year but still two, three, even four times a week.\n\n\"Your son's going to be such a foodie!\" people would say when they learned what sorts of foods he considered normal.\n\nI would cringe.\n\nSome years ago for this magazine, I edited a story about prepubescent food snobs\u2014kids who sneered at fish sticks and pined for bacalao and who knew to order off the secret menu. My Hypothetical Kid would never be like those kids, I remember vowing. He'd eat widely and learn to love food and gain exposure to all the cultures and cuisines of the globe. He wasn't going to be one of those children whose sophistication comes across as a party trick. I wasn't going to let him become an adult in kiddie clothing.\n\nIt was, of course, premature to tell what sort of kid he would become\u2014he was three.\n\nA parents' group met in our neighborhood once a month, with mothers, fathers, and children coming together for a couple of hours at a playground or someone's home. Inevitably, talk of sleeping routines gave way to talk of food. Emma was a very good eater and had recently discovered broccoli, which of course she adored, while Sebastian not only ate hummus but actually liked to eat the chickpeas themselves, and Gabriella, who had only recently weaned herself from the bottle, had developed an inexplicable taste for pickles. Can you imagine? I preferred to downplay Jesse's catholicism in these sorts of conversations. I was leery of characterizing him as a precocious toddler foodie.\n\nThere was another reason I kept quiet: I feared exposing myself as the food-world equivalent of the arrogant Little League coach. I liked to joke to my wife that, eating out as often as he did and being exposed to such an astonishing array of cuisines, Jesse had already surpassed his peers who were blissfully munching away on McNuggets, ignorant of what they were doing to their bodies and (of greater concern to me) their taste buds.\n\nBut all humor conceals a darker truth.\n\nI was proud.\n\nIn his three years on this earth, Jesse had pretty much devoured it. Thai, Indian, Salvadoran, Vietnamese, Afghan, Cuban, Greek, Turkish, Ethiopian, French, Brazilian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Armenian, Peruvian, Bolivian, Kazakhstani, Bosnian\u2014there was nothing he hadn't tried. The list of foods he loved and asked for was long: edamame and mango lassi and chicken tikka and char siu bao and grilled stuffed grape leaves and kanom jeeb and chicken curry puffs.\n\nHe made the other kids from the parents' group look like pikers. He made me look like a piker. I had been writing professionally about food for a decade but had never tasted many of these things until I was in my mid-twenties.\n\nWas there a correlation between trying so many kinds of foods at such a tender age and becoming a richer, more broad-minded person? I liked to think so. Jesse wasn't being dragged out to dinner night after night at Daddy's whim, I told my wife; he was getting an education. And what an education it was. You couldn't buy an education like this.\n\nAs I made this point one night in the car after restaurant visit number 872\u2014the third night in a row I had kept him out two hours past bedtime as I worked feverishly to finish my work for a dining guide\u2014Jesse, giddy with tiredness, was belting out songs in the back as if he'd just discovered Ethel Merman on YouTube.\n\n\"Daddy? Sing?\"\n\n\"You like to think you're the guide, in control,\" a friend with two kids in their twenties told me. \"But you're not. All you can do is direct them a little. You're not the bike. You're more like the training wheels. And what you have to remember is eventually the training wheels come off.\"\n\nWe were on our way to restaurant visit 924 when my son pointed out the pair of golden arches looming ahead. This is what's commonly referred to as a teachable moment, a chance to put forward a philosophy of food and, in this way, install a belief system that will last a lifetime. \"McDonald's,\" I said, \"is yucky.\"\n\n\"It's not yucky,\" my son replied.\n\n\"Ick,\" I said. \"Ugh.\" I shuddered.\n\nJesse became agitated, thrashing against the constraints of his car seat. He was crying. \"It's not yucky,\" he said and then, gathering himself, uttered the words with an almost sinister deliberation, driving the dagger in more deeply: \"McDonald's is delicious.\"\n\nIt required every ounce of concentration on my part not to hit the car in front of me.\n\nIt required every ounce of concentration on my wife's part not to burst out laughing.\n\n\"How'd this happen?\" I demanded. \"Did someone take him to a McDonald's? One of the babysitters?\"\n\nSilence. A guilty silence.\n\n\"I mean,\" my wife said cautiously, \"he's had fries a couple of times.\"\n\n\"You've taken him for fries?\"\n\n\"A couple times.\"\n\n\"A couple\u2014\"\n\n\"Okay, a few. Maybe a burger once or twice.\" She winced, cutely.\n\n\"How could you?\"\n\nNumber 1,000 loomed, a figure I'd been pointing to for nearly a year. But it seemed ridiculous now, all that number-keeping. All that striving.\n\n\"He's three, you know,\" my wife said.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Do you?\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"He just enjoys being with you.\"\n\nMy son had had a rough week: two doctors' visits, an upset stomach, and\u2014either because he'd just turned three or because the gods had decided to complicate our life even more\u2014a growth spurt that made him cranky. I hadn't been around much, having been cramming in final visits to several restaurants before an upcoming family trip. That Saturday, I decided, would be Daddy-and-Jesse day.\n\n\"Aww,\" my wife said. \"He really could use some Daddy time. What's the plan?\"\n\nI told her.\n\n\"You mean,\" she said, \"you plan to take him to work with you.\"\n\n\"No. To dim sum.\"\n\n\"You're sure about that.\"\n\n\"He loves dim sum.\"\n\n\"I meant you're sure this isn't work? This isn't a place you're reviewing, or checking up on? What's the restaurant?\"\n\nI told her.\n\n\"I've never heard of it.\"\n\n\"It's new.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" she said. That tone again. \"Just try to have a good time, okay?\"\n\nIt was noon when we arrived for restaurant visit 1,027. The place was a scene of happy chaos. Extended families huddled around big circular tables with lazy Susans, servers dashed through the room like rush-hour commuters in pursuit of a departing subway train, the hawkers with their metal carts circled in search of a sale, lifting lids and sending up little clouds of steam.\n\nOur table was a scene of happy chaos, too. Steamed pork buns and roast pork buns. Shrimp dumplings and shrimp balls. Rice-noodle crepes stuffed with shrimp and stuffed with ground pork. Tiny custard pies and pineapple buns for dessert. I don't think I had ever seen Jesse eat so much at any one meal. For a feeder descended from a long line of feeders, there's nothing quite as gratifying as seeing someone you love eat with gusto.\n\nSomewhere between the shrimp balls and the shrimp noodle crepes, my wife texted me: \"How's it going?\"\n\n\"He's loving it,\" I wrote back. \"He looks relaxed and happy, and he's eating like someone who hasn't seen food in a week.\"\n\n\"I'm glad he's getting his fill. He loves being with his daddy.\"\n\nA triumph.\n\nBack home, I couldn't help myself. Before I had unstrapped the diaper bag from my shoulder, before I had helped him out of his shoes, before I had even stepped ten feet into the house, I began exulting. I was dangerously skirting the line of gloating. There were, I said, all sorts of ways to have a good time and all sorts of venues. It didn't always have to be a zoo, a park, a playground. He could come into our world, I said; we didn't have to go into his.\n\n\"I'm glad it went so well,\" my wife said, walking into the living room only to be crushed by my son's running, lunging hug.\n\n\"Amazingly well,\" I corrected.\n\n\"Jesse, did you have a good time with Daddy?\"\n\nFor the next ten minutes, as my wife helped him into a new set of clothes and then all three of us went into the playroom, I listened to my son tell the story of the day. It came in bursts, a little at a time, and what he said wasn't as interesting as what he didn't say.\n\nThe afternoon, according to Jesse, amounted to the following: Sitting next to Daddy. Eating with Daddy. Blowing bubbles in the water glass with Daddy. Laughing at the waiter with the funny glasses with Daddy. Making the bunched-up straw wrapper into a snake with Daddy.\n\nHe didn't mention a single dish. He didn't mention any food at all.\n\nMy son is up to something like 1,300 visits by now.\n\nI don't know how many exactly.\n\nMy wife and I just had another child, a son, and life is busier than ever.\n\nIn any case, I've stopped counting.\n\n### [THE LEGACY THAT WASN'T:  \nWONTON SOUP](contents.html#ch31)\n\n### By T. Susan Chang\n\n### From _A Spoonful of Promises_\n\n### Cookbook reviewer, blogger, and essayist T. Susan Chang looks through a prism of food memories to meditate on her many families\u2014the emigrated Chinese clan she grew up with, the young singles tribe of her 20s, and the nuclear family she and her husband have begun.\n\nThe secret of the wontons, I think, was always in the smell. It was only ground pork, with maybe some shrimp, and it was seasoned with all the usual suspects\u2014dry sherry, soy sauce, scallions, a little ginger, a little sesame oil. But when you finally had it just right, you'd know it instantly, because it didn't smell like raw meat any more. It smelled different\u2014fresh, sweet, and good.\n\nMy mother learned to make wontons from her mother. It's possible her mother learned it from hers. It's possible that there, beneath the misted camel-hump caves of Guizhou, generations of women related to me made wontons just like my mom's. I really can't say. What I do know is that nobody has to learn to eat a wonton. That just sort of takes care of itself.\n\nThe wonton wrappers came from the Chinese grocery store, and since this was the '70s, that meant an excursion to Chinatown, in the city. My mom would park our ugly-yet-iconic beige Plymouth Volar\u00e9 station wagon and stroll from store to store, returning only to check in on me and feed the meter. I would lie in back, trying to make sense of _David Copperfield_ while slowly being imprinted with the vinyl pattern of the seat. It never struck me as odd that I could better comprehend the idiom spoken in a nineteenth-century London factory than the sidewalk Cantonese being shouted just outside the window. My sister, incidentally, had named the station wagon Ouagoudougou, after the capital of then\u2013Upper Volta (Burkina Faso now), and that seemed pretty normal too.\n\nMy mom made the filling at home. How, I couldn't tell you. I was probably busy reading the essay on Indo-European roots in the back of the dictionary, another favorite pastime. In any case, as I lolled bookishly under the bed, the smell of wontons would travel down the hallway to my room, followed with momlike efficacy by an exhortation to come to the kitchen, where the bowl of filling waited.\n\nThen, as in Chinese families everywhere, everyone would sit around the table and wrap wontons. Even my dad sometimes helped. We'd talk about violin and piano practice, about the books my dad's company was publishing, about who was doing well in school. It was sort of like a shareholders' meeting, but with better food.\n\nWhat we didn't talk about so much was the past that brought us here. Or rather, that brought our grandparents here\u2014in a hurry, and for good.\n\nBetween 1938 and 1949, the Chang family and the Pu family, like so many other families, were on the move. My dad's dad was a financier, antiques dealer, millionaire, governor, mobster (probably), and, for less than a year, the Chinese premier. He even had a mobster nickname\u2014the \"Reclining Cicada.\" My mom's dad came to study English literature in Michigan, where he came by his own nickname: \"Mr. Pu from Kalamazoo.\" My dad's family brought precious antiques, and a brilliant, perilous political past. My mom's family came with hardly anything but its resilience, and its considerable wits.\n\nI wish I could say that the wonton soup recipe was a tangible inheritance, that it arrived on the plane in New York in the suitcases of my fleeing family (for the Reclining Cicada, it wasn't so much flight as \"strategic relocation,\" I like to think). Maybe in my grandfather's steamer trunk, which was stamped \"CKC\" in gold.\n\nBut no, there was no physical recipe to puzzle over, divine, and interpret, and in any case, the wonton soup didn't come from my dad's family at all. It came from my mom's, and somehow or other, it got here safely, as did my mom's mom, my Po Po. She made wonton soup for her children, and she made it for an increasing array of grandchildren\u2014two, five, eight, ten, finally thirteen in all. Then she started in on her great-grandchildren. Their hair might have been a little lighter colored, the eyes a little more Caucasian, but for fifty years the scene remained pretty much the same: a little head bent over a steaming bowl, focused on a small regiment of wontons staring back up from the spoon with wrinkly, Shar-Pei-like faces. An indelicate slurping provided the soundtrack. Unlike my grandfather's antiques, Po Po's wonton soup was typically gone within ten minutes of being served. But it was not hard to interpret.\n\nIt's the nature of inheritance to stick close in some places and fall free in others. As our family propagated and throve in its new home, bits of our cultural heritage dropped away. Gradually, we lost our panic, our notoriety, our accent. Our names commingled with a United Nations of new names: Yudkovsky, Fasquelle, Eramian, Barnum, McLean, te Velde. Two generations after Ellis Island, our family's China stories are evolving into myths\u2014the last stop of a memory before it vanishes for good.\n\nFor me, the greatest loss was language. My parents spoke different dialects, and when they spoke Chinese, it was a secret language, for keeping things from the kids. By the time I tried to learn it at school, I couldn't pick it up easily. What I learned, I was too shy to practice, and therefore quickly lost.\n\nSome of my cousins did better, becoming fluent in Chinese. To learn a language, you have to be willing to make mistakes\u2014big, loud ones sometimes. Being a shy perfectionist with a taste for Dickens is a recipe for learning a lot of one language; it's not a recipe for learning a second or a third. So Po Po and I sat at the table smiling at each other and eating wonton soup in more or less silence, divided by language. I could taste the plain fact of my grandmother's affection, which didn't require translation into English. But I could no more ask the questions that would help me learn how to make it\u2014however much I might wish to\u2014than I could question the affection itself. Even a simple question like \"Should you use shrimp in the wontons?\" was out of the question, especially the \"should\" part.\n\nLearning to make wontons didn't seem to matter much when I was studying ancient Greek at eighteen, or learning the saxophone at twenty-two, or salsa dancing at twenty-six. But when my own children were born, I began to lecture myself: Surely, I thought, your family didn't come all this way only for the wonton soup to be forgotten in two generations. And so, setting aside the problems of language for the time being, I began.\n\nI started with a Joyce Chen recipe (written in English), dutifully measuring a teaspoon of this, a teaspoon of that. But then, after a while, I ditched the teaspoons and just sniffed and splashed my way back to what I remembered.\n\nThe smell of wonton filling evolves as you make it. First it just smells porky, with a high overtone of shrimp if you used it. When you add the rice wine, the smell staggers a bit and opens up. Then you add the soy, and it takes on salty, definite edges. You add in a bit of stinging scallion and a bit of bracing ginger, and the smell sits up at attention. You throw in a pinch of sugar, to mollify it a bit. You put in a bit of oil to spread the word, and a little chicken broth to loosen up the attitude. And then you have that final smell that I most remember: fresh, sweet, and good.\n\nLike life, it's a series of sequential approximations. If you trust the famous parable from Herodotus\u2014and why wouldn't you? the old liar\u2014you never know if you've had a good life until it's over. So it is with wontons, but thankfully, the wait's a little shorter. It's only an hour or two of sniffing and folding before you arrive at a steaming pot of certainty.\n\nIt's strange to produce something so concrete from so imprecise a sense. You can't record a smell on a hard drive; you can't upload it from a server. The exactness of the written word means nothing when you don't speak the language. But smell, however vague, is indelible. It's never turned off, and it's not erasable.\n\nWhen it comes to culture, the lines of transmission are never continuous. Yet, from nothing more than a smell you can patch together broken bits and pieces of memory and common sense and find, to your shock, years later, that you have something your children recognize as their own, as if it were always whole and perfect. Like it or not, you're not just a descendant\u2014you're a forebear too.\n\nToday, Po Po is ninety-seven, still alert and smiling, though very deaf and certainly too frail to cook. Having had my fill of Dickens\u2014at least for the moment\u2014I am finally learning Chinese the Information Age way: with Rosetta Stone, while walking a treadmill. I've still not going to ask about the shrimp, though. I would say something incomprehensible, and Po Po would laugh and shake her head at me, the mutest of her granddaughters. Knowing she loves me that much is enough. I know it for a wordless fact, just as I know that the wontons I eat from this point forward will all be my own.\n\n**_Best Guess Wonton Soup_**\n\n_I try to double the wonton part of the recipe when I feel up to it. They're so good, and you can freeze them in little quart-size ziplock bags for a later lunch. I freeze them raw, but it's also possible to blanch them\u2014cook them in boiling water for just a couple of minutes, till half-done\u2014drain them, and then freeze them that way. If you do this, you also have the messy but outrageously good option of deep-frying them, which everyone should try at least once._\n\n_Serves 4_\n\n**For the filling:**\n\n1 pound ground pork, or pork butt\/shoulder (if you have a grinder)\n\n\u00bd pound shrimp, peeled and deveined\n\n2 tablespoons Shaoxing cooking wine or dry sherry\n\n1 tablespoon soy sauce\n\n1 teaspoon minced fresh ginger\n\n1 teaspoon minced fresh garlic\n\n2 fat or 4 skinny scallions, whites only (reserve the greens for later use), minced\n\n1 \u00bd teaspoons cornstarch\n\nIf you have a meat grinder or a meat grinder attachment for your mixer, run the pork and shrimp through it, using a disk with medium-sized holes. If you don't, you are probably working with ground pork and whole peeled and deveined shrimp, and you'll need to mince the shrimp as finely as you can; it's easier if you freeze them for 10 minutes first. Cut the shrimp into 1\/8-to 1\/4-inch slices, then turn them crosswise and slice the other way. When you have minced all the shrimp in this manner, hash them a bit finer by holding the knife tip down with one hand and seesawing the blade through the shrimp mass against the cutting board. Precision isn't as important as thoroughness here.\n\n1 tablespoon chicken broth or homemade chicken stock\n\n1 \u00bd teaspoons vegetable oil, canola oil, or corn oil\n\n\u00bd teaspoon sesame oil\n\nPinch of sugar\n\n1 package wonton wrappers (about 45\u201350)\n\n**For the soup:**\n\n\u00bd head Chinese (napa) cabbage\n\n6 cups chicken broth or homemade stock\n\nGreens reserved from 4 scallions (see above)\n\n1-inch piece fresh ginger, unpeeled and crushed\n\n1. Place the pork and shrimp in a large mixing bowl and add the rest of the filling ingredients. Toss gently but thoroughly with a fork or chopsticks; the mixture should remain loose and smell fresh, briny, and gingery.\n\n2. To fill the wontons: Set the filling and a small bowl of water next to your work area. Take out a wonton wrapper and set 1 teaspoon (more if you dare, and as you get better at it) of filling in the center. Dip your finger in the water and trace along the top edge and halfway down the sides of the wrapper. Fold the wrapper in half so that the dry edges meet the wet edges. You should have a rectangle with a big lump of filling in the middle. Moisten one corner of the folded edge. Draw the other corner of the folded edge over it\u2014not face to face as if you were closing a book, but front to back\u2014and press them together firmly. Set your finished wonton aside and repeat until you've exhausted the filling.\n\n3. Chop the cabbage roughly into pieces about 1 inch square.\n\n4. For the soup: Bring the broth, scallion greens, and crushed ginger to a simmer. Add the wontons. If the broth doesn't quite cover them, add a bit of water. Salt to taste. Add the cabbage, and any extra wrappers if you have them, atop the broth and return to a simmer. As it simmers, tuck the thickest bits of cabbage into the broth with a wooden spoon to help cook them through. The wontons should be cooked through, with the wrapper puckering around the filling, and the cabbage tender within about 8 or 9 minutes at a steady simmer (if you had more broth, you would see the wonton float to the surface, but I prefer a less brothy soup). Serve immediately, with Special Sauce.\n\n**Special Sauce**\n\n1 tablespoon finely minced ginger\n\n1 clove garlic, finely minced\n\n1 tablespoon finely minced scallions\n\n\u00bd teaspoon white sugar\n\n\u00bd teaspoon black vinegar (Chinkiang vinegar)\n\nA few drops white vinegar (rice vinegar)\n\n1 teaspoon dark sesame oil\n\n\u2153\u2013\u00bd cup dark soy sauce (e.g., Kikkoman)\n\n1. In a small bowl combine the ginger, garlic, and scallions. Add the sugar, vinegars, and sesame oil. Crush the mixture lightly with a fork or chopsticks to help release the flavors. Let it rest for at least 5\u201310 minutes.\n\n2. Add the soy sauce gradually to taste. Less soy makes for a thick, pungent sauce; more for a milder dressing.\n\n### CURIOUS COOKIES\n\n### By Eagranie Yuh\n\n### From _Edible Vancouver_\n\n### Vancouver-based Eagranie Yuh teaches classes about chocolate\u2014a logical focus for a pastry chef with a master's degree in chemistry. As a copywriter, blogger, and freelancer, she is a frequent contributor to _Northwest Palate_ and _Edible Vancouver_ and edits IACP's newsletter _Words._\n\nHere's how most chocolate-chip cookie recipes go: in a mixing bowl, cream sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Dribble in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, then sprinkle in chocolate chips and stir just to combine. Drop identical dollops of cookie dough onto a baking sheet, leaving gaps between neighbours. Bake into perfectly golden-brown cookies, evenly studded with chocolate chips.\n\nHere's my mom's method for making cookies: In a saucepan, melt margarine and sugar. Crack in an egg, and stir furiously to minimize scrambling. Dump in a mixture of whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Toss in a few handfuls of miniature carob chips, then mix roughly until the batter comes together. Slap the batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet, glossing over instructions like \"place the cookies two inches apart\" and bake one enormous frankencookie that covers the entire pan. Snap off the blackened edges, and divide it into rough squares.\n\nI was the only kid at school with square cookies, but it didn't bother me. I didn't know the difference between creaming and melting the fat, that butter and margarine have different properties, or that whole-wheat flour can make baked goods dense and heavy. And I certainly didn't know that carob is a legume masquerading as chocolate.\n\nFor every recipe that begins, \"cream the butter and sugar,\" there's someone who looks confused. It simply means to mix the butter and sugar vigorously until light and fluffy, but it might as well be secret code, because there's no way for you to figure that out. By creaming, you incorporate air, thereby creating a lighter, fluffier cookie.\n\nWhen my mom melted, rather than creamed, the margarine and sugar, she set things up for flat, dense cookies. Even worse, the melted margarine resulted in a warm, fluid batter that gave the cookies no choice but to smoosh into each other as they baked into a crisp carob-chip pancake.\n\nHydrogenated vegetable fats\u2014like margarine and shortening\u2014lead to crisper, crumblier cookies with little flavour. When it comes to chocolate chip, I prefer butter. Aside from being tasty, it results in a cookie that spreads slightly when it bakes, leading to crispy edges and soft centres. So why did she use margarine?\n\nIn the '80s there was a backlash against saturated fats. Consumption of red meat plummeted, prompting pork to advertise itself as \"the other white meat.\" Sales of skinless, boneless chicken breast shot through the roof. And well-meaning people, like my mom, eschewed butter in favour of margarine. And not just any margarine\u2014hard margarine, sold in bricks, full of trans-fatty acids that have since been linked to heart disease. Whoops.\n\nWhile she was substituting margarine for butter, my mom also swapped out all-purpose flour for whole wheat. Whole-wheat flour, as the name suggests, is milled from the entire wheat grain and so contains the bran, germ, and endosperm. All that added stuff can throw off the balance of dry and wet ingredients in a recipe, so simply substituting whole-wheat for all-purpose flour can be risky. Dry, crumbly cookies weren't the only result; I also ate my share of hockey puck muffins.\n\nFinally, let's be clear: carob is not chocolate. It's a legume. In some countries, carob is a legitimate food, used as a sweetener and in hot drinks. When I was growing up, carob was faux chocolate, synonymous with health-conscious hippies. It came from a bulk food store that smelled like stale spices, and it tasted like dirt\u2014with a hint of cumin and coriander, common carob neighbours in the bulk food section.\n\nTo this day, my mom hates to cook and baking mystifies her. Still, my childhood memories are punctuated with a steady stream of square chocolate-chip cookies. When I was small, my mom sat me on the kitchen counter while she made them. From my perch, I stared intently at the kitchen floor, lost in the kaleidoscope of orange, brown, and avocado blotches on the linoleum.\n\nOne day, I was old enough to unwrap the pre-portioned bricks of margarine from their waxed paper. And when I could see above the counter, we made square cookies together. I remember scraping a spoon across the bottom of the saucepan, the crunch of the sugar, the smell of the margarine. Those cookies may have broken all the rules, but to me, they were perfect.\n\n**_Sneaky Whole-Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies_**\n\n_These handsome cookies are crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and full of melty chocolate goodness. You'd never guess that they contain whole-wheat flour, which lends a pleasant chewiness and nuttiness without being heavy or dense._\n\n_Patience is a virtue, especially where these cookies are involved. First, to avoid scrambled eggs, make sure your butter-sugar mixture has cooled to room temperature before you add the eggs. Second, chill the cookie batter for at least two hours before baking, to give the butter enough time to re-solidify. And if you are saintly enough to wait for the dough to rest overnight, the cookies are even better._\n\n_Makes 24 cookies._\n\n\u00bd cup (114g) butter\n\n\u00be cup (150g) brown sugar\n\n\u00bc cup (55g) granulated sugar\n\n\u00be cup (95g) all-purpose flour\n\n\u00bd cup (80g) whole-wheat flour\n\n\u00be teaspoon (4g or 3mL) baking powder\n\n\u00bd teaspoon (2g or 2mL) baking soda\n\n\u00bd teaspoon (2g or 2mL) salt\n\n1 egg\n\n\u00be teaspoon (3g or 3mL) vanilla\n\n3 oz (81g) dark chocolate (70\u201380% cocoa solids), coarsely chopped\n\nIn a medium saucepan, heat butter, brown sugar, and sugar over low-medium heat. Stir occasionally until the butter melts. Remove from the heat and set aside for 15 minutes or until it cools to room temperature.\n\nIn a medium bowl, combine all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate. Set aside.\n\nWhen the butter-sugar mixture is room temperature, add the egg and vanilla to the saucepan. (CAUTION: If the butter-sugar mixture is still warm, you will cook your eggs.) Using a spatula, stir to incorporate. Add the flour mixture and stir just until there are no flecks of flour remaining. Transfer the batter to a sheet of plastic wrap, wrap tightly, and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours until firm, and preferably overnight.\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Lightly grease two cookie sheets, or line them with parchment.\n\nBreak off teaspoon-sized balls of dough and roll them into balls, allowing at least 10cm between nearest neighbours. Flatten each ball to a thickness of 1.5 cm. Bake for 12\u201314 minutes until golden brown on top. Let the cookies cool for one minute on the cookie sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.\n\nNote: Refrigerated cookie dough will keep for three days. Alternately, you can bake and cool all the cookies, then freeze the extras.\n\n### CHICKEN BRICK\n\n### By Henrietta Clancy\n\n### From _Fire & Knives_\n\n### South Londoner Henrietta Clancy writes on food, drink, and travel for various publications such as _Imbibe, Square Meal, Fresh Escapes_ and DrinkBritain.com. A sometime beekeeper and hard cider fanatic, she trained at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland.\n\nBefore Dad married Mum, he lived in what he now refers to as his \"bachelor pad\" in Ealing; a place that I've painted a vague picture of from the small snippets I've gathered about his premarital existence. In the living room there was a moleskin sofa and a dark wooden bowl of walnuts with a nutcracker; in the bedroom he'd done a bit of late 70s man cave decoration and fashioned himself a waist-high mustard-brown border. This last piece of info is a fact that's often volunteered by my mother\u2014I gather she was quite impressed at the time, what with being 20 and still living in the parental home in Enfield, amid fake flowers and floral carpets.\n\nIn the kitchen, among some obligatory kitchen paraphernalia of the era\u2014most of it orange, brown or cream\u2014there was a chicken brick, not hidden behind the doors of a Formica cabinet, but proudly sitting on a Formica surface. This chicken brick got so much use that storing it in a cupboard out of arm's length would have been plain silly; however, that's not why it was on the surface.\n\nNo, it lived perpetually beside the oven because it was always cooling down having perfectly cooked one tender chicken\u2014presumably a hormone-munching monster of a thing, because being kind to edible livelihood hadn't been invented yet\u2014and awaiting the raw carcass of the next one. That's how much use it got: it literally never stopped. He fed moist chicken to the masses, and they were all impressed. The more he used it the better it, and consequently he, became. As that layer of chicken fat coating the brown clay interior of the brick developed and mollified, so he, by doing nothing more than staying faithful to his brick, became a better cook. Armed with the brick, there was nothing my father couldn't do.\n\nThat was until my mother moved in, and everything changed. She was a graduate of Leith's School of Food and Wine, and a maker of directors' lunches. Naturally she brought her tools with her. I can see her now, whirling around the kitchen brandishing a piping bag\u2014she had at least seven different nozzles\u2014whipping up all manner of decorative toppings for p\u00e2t\u00e9s and pavlovas. Anyone could use a brick, you see\u2014she had qualifications. Prue was lapping up the ways of her contemporaries and showing my mother the ways of the International Kitchen; there was duck _\u00e0 l'orange, b\u0153uf bourguignon,_ steak _au poivre._ When they ate chicken it was in goujons, or as Kiev; perhaps the occasional _coq au vin._\n\nNo doubt there were some roast chickens in there too, but by that point, Dad had handed over the reins, relinquished his kitchen power. Roast chicken was cooked the way mum wanted it\u2014on a tray, basted with lard, cavity filled with mushroom stuffing, sitting on the shelf above some courgettes, also stuffed. The chicken was separate from the veg, not inappropriately nuzzling them, and most importantly it was exposed to the crispifying roof of the oven.\n\nThe brick lay dormant for many years, in the back of a never-used utility room cupboard, sharing space with Tupperware lids who'd lost their better halves and things that looked like they might belong to a piece of kitchen equipment, but in reality didn't. Not that I ever saw it, nor seemingly ever did my father, but one post-millennial day its absence was noticed.\n\nI was but a fresh-faced fresher at the time, not long flown the nest, when I missed a phone call from my father, and beheld a voicemail that contained a roaring accusation: \"You have stolen my chicken brick!\"\n\nI listened to it several times. Breathless, outraged, desperate and confused, he was indeed talking about a chicken brick.\n\nI had done no such thing, of course; the brick was, to me, a mythical piece of kitchenware that was only referenced once every three years when, on the rare occasion that the subject of my father's cooking skills came up, it was put forward as evidence. I had never clapped eyes on the thing.\n\nI'm the eldest of five children and the pattern repeated itself: child left home, child received out-of-the-blue chicken brick accusation, Mum located brick in never-used cupboard, cupboard door was closed again.\n\nThe situation became farcical, but it did give me time to consider dad's perplexing relationship with the chicken brick. My mother's prowess in the kitchen had rendered the brick comatose, yes, but where did the brick burglary accusations stem from? I began to brew theories. Was this a flirting tool\u2014something he could fall back on if he was left alone? Was it sitting in our cupboard to keep Mum on her toes, silently reminding her that it had seduced many a fine lady before she came along, and if she misbehaved it was quite capable of doing it again? Or was it simpler than that: the brick represented independence for him, so maybe he assumed that in order to properly grasp ours, we'd need a tool?\n\nOr was it more of a practical thing: maybe on a subconscious level he assumed that, without our mummy around to fill our belly, we would need a brick to take care of us. He viewed it as the provider, the caretaker, the other.\n\nI theorized, but perhaps I overtheorized. Essentially he could have bought us all brand new bricks as \"off to uni\" presents. No, it was this specific brick to which he had a personal attachment.\n\nI paid an unannounced midweek visit to my parents' house not too long ago. I had hopes of being fed, but there was no car in the drive when I arrived and only a single kitchen light on. As I put my key in the door I half expected an alarm to go off, but no, I could hear the hubbub of sports noise coming from the TV room and the sound\u2014comforting and infuriating in equal measure\u2014of a happy dog's tail slapping kitchen cabinets.\n\nIn the kitchen, dinner had been started, just\u2014there was a whole chicken still hugged by plastic wrap, an unnecessarily large and perpetually blunt Sabatier, and a mess of onion and carrot\u2014but the cook was missing. And there it was, the brick, sat on the central unit. I don't think I'd ever actually seen it before, and it looked smaller, less able than the legacy that rested upon its shoulders. Almost like a sleeping woodlouse. I stopped suddenly: no car, no mum, a forlorn brick. . . .\n\nOh right, I thought, she's left him, and he's coping with it just how he always knew he would; he's following his well-made plan and he's dealing with it. Just as I began to seriously envision the painful and uncomfortable chicken dinner I was going to have to chew my way through, staring at a man who'd sadly and swiftly replaced the woman he'd loved for 36 years with a piece of insect-like terracotta, my apron-clad mother trotted in\u2014she never walks\u2014and amidst her salutations resumed chopping.\n\n\"So you're actually using the chicken brick?\" I said, unable to mask my intrigue.\n\nShe looked confused.\n\n\"The brick,\" I said.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"The chicken brick!\" I wailed, pointing.\n\n\"This!\" I slapped my hand on its lid.\n\nShe registered it, and promptly reeled with the sheer absurdity of the idea. \"NO! No, no, no, no, no. . . . No, I'm doing this new recipe from my, you know that book you bought me with all of the nice, different recipes in it, I've used it loads . . . the one with the caramelized garlic and goa. . . .\"\n\n_\"Ottolenghi.\"_\n\n\"That's it. It's a roast chicken dish from there. It's with honey, saffron and hazelnuts. . . . I just really fancied it. So, anyway, let me tell you, I was teaching that lovely little boy today. . . .\"\n\n\"Hold on, back to the brick\u2014why is it out?\"\n\n\"Erm. . . . Daddy was looking for it so I just left it out for him. What was I saying before?\"\n\nOf course, how silly of me. My youngest brother had recently left for university and the coming-of-age accusation had been hot on his heels.\n\nTelevised match over, dad sailed in and registered me _en route_ to a wine bottle, poured three glasses and handed them out, then started searching for a music video on YouTube (a fairly recent and incredibly odd phase my parents have found themselves in, eating dinner to a backdrop of pop ballads), settled for Adele and spotted the brick.\n\n\"Ah, great, you found it.\"\n\nThe time had come to ask him the question that had been perplexing me and my siblings for over a decade.\n\n\"Dad, why is it that you always think we're after your chicken brick?\"\n\nHe smiled, wiggled his eyebrows up and down on his face for a while, picked up the brick and did a little Irish jig or sorts (cue some silly laughter from mum) and just before placing it back in the cupboard\u2014presumably forevermore, the nest is now empty\u2014he said, \"It doesn't matter. It's mine.\"\n\n### ANGRY BREAKFAST EGGS\n\n### By Elissa Altman\n\n### From PoorMansFeast. com\n\n### Award-winning blogger Elissa Altman does a lot of things well: She's a humorist, political commentator, cookbook editor, and food columnist whose work has appeared everywhere from the Huffington Post to GiltTaste to _Saveur._ Her book _Poor Man's Feast: A Love_ Story will appear in 2013.\n\nShe has never slept, for as long as I can remember. First, there was the hair, which, when I was very small, was very tall; these were the days of teasing, and to keep her updo in place, she climbed into bed every night next to my father with three feet of toilet paper wrapped around her head, a six inch tail of Charmin hanging off the pillow, blowing in the air-conditioned breeze like a Coppertone banner dragged behind a beach plane. She lay there stiffly all night, immobile and exhausted, and sat up the next morning, her hair perfect.\n\nEventually, it was just plain pique that kept her awake\u2014the constant working of herself into a lather over imaginary transgressions, while my father and I and the world around her, ever the transgressors, slept soundly. When the black and white numbers on her bedside clock flipped over to 6:30 a.m. and the alarm went off, she swung her legs off the side of the bed and stood up, already furious and seething.\n\nAnd then she made eggs.\n\nA lot of eggs.\n\nAt first, when things were still good and happy, they were soft boiled, and sat in the broad end of our porcelain egg cups, their tips sliced away so that my father and I\u2014perched side by side at the breakfast counter half an hour before he dropped me off at the school bus stop on his way to the subway\u2014could dunk untoasted fingers of Pepperidge Farm Diet White into the runny yolk. As my parents' marriage wore on and she grew angrier, the eggs were medium boiled, their firm yolks like thick golden velvet, with spots of remaining tenderness just barely discernible.\n\nWhen I turned fourteen, my mother began hard boiling our eggs; she'd put them in a small pot filled with a shallow inch or two of water, set them on the stove, crank up the flame, and walk away. Eventually, they'd explode, their snow white glair erupting like Vesuvius through the fissures of her discontent. I'd refuse to eat them at that point, and when she came back into the kitchen, she'd grab the black plastic handle of the pot and dump its contents\u2014the water had long since evaporated\u2014directly into the trash.\n\nMy parents divorced the following year.\n\nMy mother still doesn't sleep, and she still cooks eggs every single morning, even with cholesterol that hovers near the 400s if she's forgotten her to take her Lipitor. She's been through a passel of saucepans\u2014the brown and white Dansk pan that followed her into the city after her divorce, and that she burned until its white enameled interior melted away into a noxious cloud; two Revere-Ware pans that we brought to her apartment from our basement stash\u2014they'd belonged to Susan's mother who had them for fifty years. My mother burned them until their insides turned black as coal. Now she uses a tiny butter warmer, big enough to hold exactly one jumbo egg.\n\nEggs are my mother's mood barometer: when she's happy, she'll deftly separate yolk from albumen, throw out the former, dump the whites into the one tiny stick-proof pan she owns, and while they bubble and spread, she'll lay a piece of Diet White bread right down in the middle of it, and top it off with a dollop of honey. This, she says, is her version of French toast, and she loves it. If Susan and I are staying there and she's feeling glad, she'll insist on scrambling some whites for us because, she says, they're low fat and good diet food, and together we'll sit at her dining room table, having breakfast, while the traffic rumbles down West End Avenue twenty-one stories below. Not overcooked and not runny, the eggs bear no evidence of seasoning; it's just them and us, a piece of bread, and my mother's favorite morning cup of hot water. If we're staying there and she's furious, she'll boil the eggs until a sulfuric haze wafts out into the living room; we'll leave while the pan is still rattling over the flame.\n\n\"I _had to throw them OUT_ ,\" she'll tell me later.\n\nThe correlation between cooking and scorn is a fraught, famous one; food created by angry people seems, somehow, to be bitter, and so attuned to their off flavors and textures am I because of my mother's eggs that once, when a conversation with a well-known cookbook author took a sudden and surprising turn south, I had to get rid of her book, because every one of the dishes I cooked from it after our argument tasted of her rage; no matter what I did, none of the recipes worked anymore. Food cooked in anger becomes collateral damage; meat is carbonized, pasta becomes starchy mush, vegetables go limp and sad, and it's not like you can\u2014or even want to\u2014revive them, to coddle or comfort them, or to save them for another meal. You simply can't do it. If the optimum way to cook and live and run a kitchen is, as Tamar Adler says, with economy and grace\u2014use everything, every shard and peeling and drop of fat with care, kindness, and thoughtfulness\u2014scornful cooking results in the opposite: profligate waste and clumsy distraction.\n\nIt was six in the morning last Sunday; I lay in bed, listening to the ticking of the ignition on my Viking's pilot light. There was the sound of running water, the clank of a pan on a burner. When my mother came to visit us last weekend and awoke in the throes of pre-dawn Bad Mood, she rifled through our refrigerator, pulled out four eggs, set them in shallow water, turned the burner on high, and cooked them until they burst with fury.\n\n\"I couldn't sleep,\" she barked from the guest bed where she'd laid back down after preparing the breakfast she decided I needed to eat, \"so I made you eggs. THIS is what you should be eating for breakfast\u2014not the _heel of a baguette_ and a piece of cheese.\"\n\nShe had been watching me _that_ closely the previous morning; to my mother, a piece of bread\u2014no matter how small\u2014spells o-b-e-s-i-t-y. She was in a rage.\n\n\"But I don't have any eggs,\" I answered, suddenly remembering the half-crate of six local duck eggs that were hovering in the back of the fridge, waiting for a recipe test.\n\n\"They're in the SINK\u2014\" she shouted from the guest room.\n\nI walked into the kitchen and there they were, in a now-dry All-Clad saucepan, the shells cracked and broken, their whites extruding like Elizabethan collars. Susan broke one into a cup to see if the yolk was hard-cooked, and somehow salvageable; it was raw and cold. The eggs had been sitting out at room temperature for over two hours.\n\nMy mother marched into the kitchen behind me and watched Susan put on the tea kettle; I stepped on the pedal of the trashcan and tossed each duck egg out, one by one, like small grenades.\n\n### SWEET SOUTHERN DREAMS\n\n### By Ben Mims\n\n### From _Saveur_\n\n### It's been a long journey from Koskiusko, Mississippi, to his current home in New York City for associate food editor Ben Mims, along a sweets-paved road passing through the French Culinary Institute, the Saveur test kitchen, and an Ice Cream Takedown victory in Brooklyn.\n\nPrior to October 7, 2010, my mother and I were the best of friends. A consummate Southern lady, Judy Mims is a fantastic cook, gossiper, and mom\u2014and in her relationship with me she had always drawn on all those talents. But on that October day, I flew from New York City to my childhood home in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to come out, at 25 years old, as a gay man to my parents. As anyone who grew up in the Bible Belt can imagine, the outcome was heartbreaking. My mother and I used to talk at least weekly; now months go by without a call. I miss her. And I can't help feeling like I've lost touch with not only my mother, but also my lifeline to the world I grew up in. Thank goodness I still have the cakes.\n\nLayer cakes originated in the South, and with their over-the-top grandeur and unapologetic sweetness, they're inextricably linked to the culture I grew up in. The drama, excitement, and praise\u2014they all speak to the South.\n\nMy childhood in rural Mississippi was filled with fantastic bakers: my mother, of course; her sister, Barbara Jane; my paternal grandmother, Carol; and Mom's friends, those church ladies decked out in hats who produced a never-ending procession of astounding cakes. My grandmother's neighbor Louise Hodges made a cake three yellow layers tall, draped in warm caramel fudge icing, which exuded a fragrance of vanilla and browned butter that could knock you over. Carol, who bought those cakes from Mrs. Hodges, served one to our family virtually every Sunday after church. We would sometimes have two slices each, and when I'd tease my grandmother, asking her who made the cake, she would primp her curly blonde hair, give me a wink, and reply, \"Why, who do you think?\"\n\nMy mother, for her part, turned out mammoth sour cream Bundt cakes, domed lemon and cream cheese pound cakes, and a ludicrously rich cheesecake that was my staple birthday cake. I spent my childhood at her elbow, watching her pour glaze down the grooved sides of a Bundt cake, mirroring her smile as she passed me a beater with batter barely clinging to it. Unlike Mrs. Hodges, Mom was never big on making layer cakes. Maybe she didn't have the patience to stack and frost all those layers, though she liked them just fine as an effortless treat baked by someone else. The only layer cake in her repertoire was red velvet, for just as most Southern women have a subscription to _Southern Living_ magazine and at least one gilded holiday wreath in their attic, most also have a red velvet cake up their sleeve. The deep crimson cake against the luminous white frosting is pure Southern drama. It's Shirley MacLaine in _Steel Magnolias_ hacking into the blood-colored tail of an armadillo-shaped groom's cake. It's my mother's ceramic-white skin contrasted by her lips, always burnished with brick-red lipstick.\n\nMy mother stacked her red velvet only two layers deep and almost always made it with cream cheese frosting. One Christmas during my teen years, though, she got adventurous with a whipped cream frosting consisting of cooked flour, sugar, and milk beaten into butter. When executed correctly, a frosting like this holds up like a dream and provides just the right balance\u2014not too sweet or rich\u2014for the slightly acidic, chocolate-flavored red velvet layers. She labored over that cake all day, and we carried it in our car two hours away to my grandfather's house in Holly Springs. After dinner, once the coffee was perking, the cake dome was lifted, and my mom sliced into the scarlet layers and snow-white frosting. Everyone took bites, and then spit them out. The frosting was as chalky and tacky as wallpaper paste; my mom was nearly in tears.\n\nShe never tried her hand at it again, but that whipped cream icing had a profound effect on me. Motivated by my mother's failure, I made it my mission to learn how to make the cake she had envisioned. Schooled at her apron strings, I was already an avid baker, and nailing that recipe helped direct my life's path. In my current job, I'm able to hone my skills every day to produce the platonic ideals of the cakes my mother raised me to love.\n\nSome of my best recipes were passed down from my mother's own mother, Jane Newson, who died the year before my birth. The very morning following the red velvet cake disaster, my mother sat with Barbara Jane and me on my grandfather's living room floor and sorted through hundreds of her mother's recipe cards. By all accounts, Jane was a fantastic maker of layer cakes: prune and fig in a cinnamon meringue; Lane cake filled with boozy nut and raisin custard; walnut spice laden with cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. It was the coconut cake recipe, though, that the sisters agreed was the one to save if ever the house caught on fire. The first time I tried the recipe, it exceeded all my expectations. The cake was filled with freshly grated coconut, the sweet water seeping into the yellow layers surrounded by fluffy Italian meringue. Left for a day to \"mature\" in the refrigerator, every inch of it was suffused with rich coconut flavor.\n\nStill, of all the Southern layer cakes I have known, the one that sticks with me the most these days is lemon. It goes back to the summer before my senior year of college, when I moved to Vicksburg, home of the Miss Mississippi Pageant, to work as a reporter for _The Vicksburg Post._ Toward the end of my stay, just before the beauty queen pomp began, my mom came to visit, and we took a walk along the riverfront. When we ducked into a little caf\u00e9 for coffee, we noticed a case full of beautiful layer cakes. We ordered a pastel-yellow slice of lemon cake to share. It was a stunner: four layers of citrusy butter cake drenched in lemon syrup and enrobed in a lemon buttercream frosting. We sat and chatted, and every bite of cake tingled our cheeks with delicious tartness. Now, whenever I get nostalgic for the South, I break out my cake pans, butter, and sugar, and whip up a lemon cake like the one we shared; it buoys my hope for a future in which my mother and I are as close as we once were. The result\u2014bittersweet and beautiful\u2014reminds me of that afternoon, four years before our lives changed, when we sat together in that caf\u00e9 without a care in the world and just talked about cake.\n\n**_Coconut Cake_**\n\n_Serves 10\u201312_\n\n**For the Cake:**\n\n16 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans\n\n2 \u00bd cups cake flour, plus more for pans, sifted\n\n1 tsp. baking soda\n\n1 tsp. kosher salt\n\n1 cup buttermilk\n\n1 tbsp. vanilla extract\n\n2 cups sugar\n\n5 eggs\n\n**For the Frosting:**\n\n4 egg whites\n\n\u00bd tsp. cream of tartar\n\n2 \u00bc cups sugar\n\n\u00bc cup light corn syrup\n\n1 tsp. kosher salt\n\n2 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n\u00be cup fresh coconut water\n\n3 cups freshly grated coconut\n\n**Instructions**\n\n1. Make the cake: Heat oven to 350\u00b0. Butter and flour two 9\" cake pans, and set aside. Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl; set aside. Whisk together buttermilk and vanilla in a bowl; set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, cream butter and sugar on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, alternately add dry ingredients in 3 batches and wet ingredients in 2 batches. Increase speed to high, and beat until batter is smooth, about 5 seconds. Divide batter between prepared pans, and smooth top with a rubber spatula; drop pans lightly on a counter to expel large air bubbles. Bake cakes until a toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Let cakes cool for 20 minutes in pans; invert onto wire racks, and let cool. Using a serrated knife, halve each cake horizontally, producing four layers; set aside.\n\n2. Make the frosting: Place egg whites and cream of tartar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk, and beat on medium-high speed until soft peaks form; turn mixer off. Bring sugar, syrup, salt, and 1\/2 cup tap water to a boil in a 2-qt. saucepan over high heat, stirring to dissolve sugar; attach a candy thermometer to side of pan, and cook, without stirring, until thermometer reads 250\u00b0, 4\u20135 minutes. Turn mixer to medium speed, and very slowly drizzle hot syrup into beating egg whites. Add vanilla, and increase speed to high; beat until meringue forms stiff peaks and is slightly warm to the touch, about 3 minutes.\n\n3. To assemble, place one layer on a cake stand, drizzle with 3 tbsp. coconut water, spread with 1 1\/2 cups frosting, and sprinkle with 1\/2 cup grated coconut; top with another cake, drizzle with 3 tbsp. coconut water, spread with 1 1\/2 cups frosting, and sprinkle with 1\/2 cup coconut. Place another cake over frosting, drizzle with 3 tbsp. coconut water, spread with 11\/2 cups frosting, and sprinkle with 12 cup coconut; top with remaining cake and drizzle with remaining coconut water. Cover top and sides with remaining frosting, and cover outside of cake with remaining coconut, pressing it lightly to adhere; chill cake to firm frosting. Serve chilled or at room temperature.\n\n**_Lemon Layer Cake_**\n\n_Serves 10\u201312_\n\n**For the Cake and Syrup:**\n\n16 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened, plus more for pans\n\n2 \u00bd cups cake flour, plus more for pans, sifted\n\n2 \u00bd tsp. baking powder\n\n1 tsp. kosher salt\n\n\u00bd cup milk\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n1 \u00be cups sugar\n\n1 tbsp. lemon zest\n\n4 eggs\n\n\u2153 cup fresh lemon juice\n\n**For the Frosting:**\n\n1 \u00bd cups sugar\n\n\u00bc cup cornstarch\n\n\u00bc cup lemon zest\n\n1 tsp. kosher salt\n\n10 egg yolks\n\n1 cup fresh lemon juice\n\n1 \u00bd cups unsalted butter, softened\n\n1 tsp. vanilla extract\n\n**Instructions**\n\n1. Make the cake: Heat oven to 350\u00b0. Butter and flour two 9\" cake pans, and set aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl; set aside. Whisk together milk and vanilla in a bowl; set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, cream butter, 1 1\/2 cups sugar, and zest on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. On low speed, alternately add dry ingredients in 3 batches and wet ingredients in 2 batches. Increase speed to high and beat until batter is smooth, about 5 seconds. Divide batter between prepared pans, and smooth top with a rubber spatula; drop pans lightly on a counter to expel any large air bubbles. Bake cakes until a toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean, about 30 minutes. Let cakes cool for 20 minutes in pans; invert onto wire racks, and let cool. Using a serrated knife, halve each cake horizontally to produce four layers; set aside. Bring remaining sugar and juice to a boil in a small saucepan over high heat. Remove from heat, and set syrup aside.\n\n2. Make the frosting: Whisk together sugar, cornstarch, zest, and salt in a 4-qt. saucepan. Add yolks, and whisk until smooth; stir in juice. Stirring often, bring to a boil over medium heat; cook, stirring constantly, until very thick, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat, let cool, and transfer to a bowl; chill the lemon curd. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle, beat butter and \u00bc of the curd on medium-high speed until fluffy and smooth, about 1 minute. Add half the remaining curd, beating until smooth, and then add remaining curd and vanilla. Increase speed to high; beat frosting until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes.\n\n3. To assemble, place one cake layer on a cake stand, drizzle with 2 tbsp. syrup, and spread with \u00be cup frosting; top with another cake, drizzle with 2 tbsp. syrup, and spread with \u00be cup frosting. Place another cake over the frosting, drizzle with 2 tbsp. syrup, and spread with \u00be cup frosting; top with remaining cake, and drizzle with remaining syrup. Cover top and sides with remaining frosting; chill cake to firm frosting. Serve at room temperature.\n\n## Someone's in the Kitchen\n\n### THE KING OF POP-UP\n\n### By Brett Martin\n\n### _From GQ_\n\n### Brett Martin's profiles, food and travel pieces, and essays appear regularly in _GQ,_ as well as _Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Bon App\u00e9tit, Food & Wine,_ and public radio's _This American Life._ Connoisseur of the edgy and trendy, here he parses a modern dining scene phenomenon: The pop-up restaurant.\n\nThere is, naturally, a truck. Just as surely as there are the tattoos, the facial hair, the coif, the Twitter feed, the reality-TV show, the silent _pop pop pop_ of the bloggers' cell-phone cameras. He who has these\u2014all the signs and signifiers that have replaced whisk and toque as emblems of modern chefdom\u2014is 40-year-old Ludovic Lefebvre, a classically trained, preternaturally handsome Burgundian who's become Los Angeles's most talked-about cook. What he doesn't have is a restaurant. Instead, Lefebvre and his wife, partner, and brand manager, Krissy, run a series of wildly popular pop-ups called LudoBites, which occupy, hermitcrab-like, the off-hour shells of other eateries\u2014first in obscure corners of L.A. and, more recently, across the United States for the Sundance Channel's _Ludo Bites America,_ debuting July 18. Lefebvre is a kind of walking, talking, preening manifestation of all the blessings and damnations, transcendence and silliness, that mark this moment in American dining.\n\nIn any other context, Gram & Papa's, a soup-and-sandwich spot in L.A.'s Garment District, would hardly suggest culinary adventure. Nevertheless, that's where the Lefebvres staged the fifth iteration of LudoBites\u2014LudoBites 5.0\u2014for six weeks last summer. By day, this area downtown was crowded with shoppers at rows of fabric stores and zipper distributors; after dark, it was all but deserted\u2014save, in those weeks, for questing foodies dubiously checking their GPS units.\n\nThe production of high-end food in low-end and otherwise improbable settings is, of course, part of the pop-up phenomenon. But that doesn't mean a chef raised in the great kitchens of Paris won't grumble. On this morning, the Lefebvres arrived with Ludo in full temperamental-artist mode. The immediate object of his pique: the state of the walk-in fridge.\n\n\"It's like fucking Baghdad in there,\" he muttered to Mike Ilic, Gram & Papa's owner.\n\nBehind the register, Ilic raised his eyebrows. He had invited the Lefebvres to assume weeknight squatter rights in exchange for a fee, a cut of the profits, and the publicity; it was obviously a sufficient trade-off to make him tolerant of his tenant's moods.\n\n\"They cleaned up Baghdad, Ludo,\" he said. \"It's gonna have to be like Afghanistan.\"\n\n\"Every morning, the same routine,\" said Krissy, rolling her eyes. She was sitting at a nearby table, looking over that night's reservation list.\n\nUpstairs, in a tiny storage area, it wasn't difficult to tell which shelves belonged to Gram & Papa's and which to LudoBites: On one side, ketchup and La Choy Chinese noodles; on the other, kombu seaweed, industrial-grade gelatin, star anise. Nearby was a pile of Lefebvre's niftier gadgets: an immersion circulator, which looks like the mating of a heating coil and a medical device, and a Gastrovac, which first cooks ingredients in a vacuum and then reimpregnates them with flavor the moment the seal is broken.\n\nIn the kitchen, Lefebvre's skeleton staff was assembling. One sous-chef was cutting perfect rectangles of pork belly, uniform and creamy as frosted sheet cake. Lefebvre runs his kitchen in a manner in keeping with his French education. That is, he yells. And the staff is expected to yell back. \"I want the kitchen clean before I start!\" he hollered now. \"Use your fucking heads!\"\n\n\"Yes, Chef!\" came the chorus.\n\nLefebvre's eye fell on a young cook named Joon Sung.\n\n\"Joon!\"\n\n\"Yes, Chef!\"\n\n\"Do we have dashi made?\"\n\n\"No, Chef!\"\n\nLefebvre made a face that suggested it might be easier simply to end it all via Gastrovac right there. The dashi broth, infused with kombu, was for a dish he had woken up intent on adding to that night's menu. It would act as a poaching liquid for oysters that would then be served with a froth of butter infused with the briny taste of their own smashed shells. All this he patiently explained to Sung.\n\n\"You understand, Joon?\"\n\n\"Yes, Chef!\" Sung thought it over for a moment.\n\n\"Chef!\"\n\n\"What, Joon?\"\n\n\"The oysters. They'll be poached _\u00e0 la minute_?\"\u2014meaning \"to order.\"\n\n\"Of course!\" said Lefebvre. \"Or else it's no fun!\"\n\nHe came out front, where Krissy was still at work, and wiped his forehead with a kitchen towel.\n\n\"This is my last LudoBites,\" said Ludo.\n\n\"Nice try,\" said Krissy.\n\nThey are a pretty couple, in an easily alliterative way: he Gallically goateed, she classically Californian (or blonde and buxom, if you prefer).With his pierced ears and arms covered in ink, Ludo could be an instructional diagram for the Metrosexual Pirate look that has dominated kitchens for the past decade. Both Lefebvres are camera-ready, and even before the Sundance show, both did time on reality TV: Ludo as a contestant, and designated villain, on _Top Chef Masters,_ Krissy on a season of _The Apprentice._ (She subsequently posed for a _Playboy_ cover.) They met, in an oft-told story, when Krissy, at the time an intellectual-property attorney, was dining at L'Orangerie, the late old-guard French restaurant that was Ludo's first stop in Los Angeles; she thought the amuse-bouche was a flirtatious gift just for her. In addition to running the front of the house, she anticipates his moods, minds his malapropisms (\"I cook through instant.\" \"Instinct, honey\"), and acts as adoring PR agent. That the adoration is obviously genuine and reciprocated isn't inconsistent with a parallel impression she gives: that of a business-savvy cat with a particularly telegenic bird in its teeth.\n\nNot that star looks are necessarily good for a man's culinary cred\u2014just as a _Playboy_ spread doesn't result in instant respect for one's litigation skills. This is especially true in Los Angeles, where the local eatocracy has an uneasy relationship with the rules of celebrity that dominate the rest of town. Woe to the big-name chef who arrives from somewhere else and is perceived to worship at the altar of Scene over that of Food. Take San Francisco's Michael Mina, whose L.A. outpost, XIV, a barn on the Sunset Strip, might as well be Olive Garden for all its reputation among local foodies. Likewise, Rick Bayless's Red O, which has been pummeled with unequaled ferocity since opening last year. Bayless's crime, in part, was daring to offer \"authentic\" Mexican food to a town that thinks it pretty well knows its Mexican. But one got the feeling that the bigger sin was the fedora-wearing valets.\n\nAngelenos are, of course, susceptible to the status-seeking inanity that infects eaters everywhere. But the logic of the moment demands that their culinary heroes\u2014Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Animal and Son of a Gun; Sang Yoon of Father's Office and Lukshon\u2014be immune to the usual course of Hollywood power, that they be in some sense of the People.\n\nLefebvre walks this line closely. A crucial element of LudoBites is its reservations system\u2014a characteristically savvy confluence of idealism and show business. There is no phone number, just a Web site that opens at a random hour posted on Twitter. When LudoBites 5.0 was announced, 3,000 hopeful diners crashed the page within six minutes.\n\nThere have been missteps on the path to fame and credibility. The most egregious is Lefebvre's cookbook, _Crave: The Feast of the Five Senses_ , published by Judith Regan in 2005. On the cover, Ludo stares intensely into the camera, holding forth a split pomegranate and a spoon. He looks like nothing so much as Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks's short-lived Goth alter ego. Most infamously, there is the Fish Photo, in which a bare-chested Lefebvre, dressed in tight jeans, stands shin-deep in the surf, a large, glittering striped bass in each hand.\n\nAmong other things, the image presented logical problems: Were we to believe he'd _caught_ the fish with his bare hands? If so: Both simultaneously? Or was he so used to catching fish in this manner that it was hardly worth heading in with just one? If not: Had he brought the fish with him? Or had he found them floating there already dead?\u2014a notion that detracts substantially from the overall sexiness of the picture.\n\nMore to the point: It made him look like a world-class douche.\n\nBoth Lefebvres now express appropriate embarrassment at the Fish Photo. Krissy recalls that it could have been worse; Regan, she says, had already demanded three new photo shoots, each \"sexier\" than the last.\n\n\"She wanted him to be rolling around in the sand with the fish,\" Krissy says.\n\nThese are the kinds of semiotic negotiations that have become de rigueur in the era of the celebrity chef. It helps that Ludo's path has taken him to both extremes. He arrived in L.A. in 1996 as starstruck as any would-be actor getting off the bus. \"I had never tasted sushi! I discovered jalape\u00f1os! Green tea! It was crazy,\" he says. Paradoxically, he had a more difficult time exploring such wonders at conservative L'Orangerie than he would have back in Paris, where he had worked under acclaimed and innovative chefs including Alain Passard and Pierre Gagnaire. \"I was a very typical French chef. No tattoos. Short hair. Perfect for the army,\" he says.\n\nThat changed when Joe Pytka, the mercurial commercial director and impresario, decided to fire the beloved chef at his restaurant Bastide and installed Lefebvre in his place. Up went the sleeves, revealing a chiaroscuro of Hawaiian girls, dragons, and Sanskrit he had secretly accumulated, and out came the liquid nitrogen, gelatins, and other accoutrements of molecular gastronomy. Some critics were smitten by dishes like chicken crusted with popcorn and foie gras pi\u00f1a colada, others less so\u2014 _L.A. Times_ restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila wrote, \"I feel as if I've been mugged,\" and busted Bastide down from four stars to one. (She now says that two stars may have been more appropriate, but stands by the rest of the review: \"He was trying interesting things, but it just wasn't very good.\")\n\n\"She was so mean,\" Ludo says, clearly still angry. \"I decided I won't cook for critics anymore.\"\n\nThat decision was one half of the epiphany that led to LudoBites; the other\u2014not to cook for investors, either\u2014came soon after. That's when Lefebvre was lured to Las Vegas to open a 300-seat restaurant at the Palazzo casino. Named Lavo, it came with a \"Mediterranean\" menu (which, oddly, included a Reuben-stuffed knish \"slider\") already set in stone; Lefebvre wasn't even allowed to add nightly specials.\n\n'\"Money,\"' he says sadly, when asked what the investors could possibly have said to lure him into such a creative disaster. \"They said, 'Money.' I used to go home at night and cry.\"\n\nSo what's a tortured-artist chef to do? Why, throw off the yoke of the restaurant altogether! LudoBites 1.0 and 2.0 took place in 2007 and 2009 at BreadBar, a bakery on the border of Beverly Hills, and were immediate sensations. Iteration 3.0 was staged at a cavernous Culver City gallery-caf\u00e9 called Royal\/T. Krissy set up a professional light box at one end of the room, the better for the stream of bloggers to photograph each dish. \"If they were taking pictures anyway, why not make them as beautiful as possible?\" she says.\n\nNext came the LudoTruck, a thirty-foot-long beauty wrapped in lurid red, decorated with roosters and called the Big Red Coq. In keeping with the lowbrow obsession of the moment, it serves fried chicken\u2014albeit fried chicken whose recipe begins, \"Day One.\" (There are three in all.) When the LudoTruck debuted at the L.A. Street Food Fest, a three-hour line developed, surprising even the Lefebvres. \"There's nothing three-hours-and-$5 good,\" Krissy says.\n\nSince, the couple set up shop for six weeks in an Italian restaurant in Sherman Oaks, and LudoBites 7.0 is expected to happen this summer. The Lefebvres spent the intervening time filming _Ludo Bites America_ , for which Ludo took on barbecue in North Carolina, chilies in Santa Fe, and, quite literally, buffalo outside Denver: Krissy tweeted a photo of the chef sinking his teeth into a freshly killed bison's heart.\n\nThe pop-up life has its drawbacks. Lefebvre never gets to work in a kitchen he's designed for his own needs. He has trouble keeping quality staff at either the front or the back of the house. He can't build lasting relationships with butchers, fishmongers, and the like.\n\nIn return? No permit issues. No dishwasher and refrigerator maintenance. No electric bills, oil-disposal problems, breakage costs, laundry bills, venting-regulation compliance\u2014all the bullshit that comes along with running a permanent restaurant. And of course, there's the freedom to cook whatever his heart desires, to treat each night as a piece of harrowing theater, a magnificent fire that only he can extinguish.\n\n\"Joon!\"\n\n\"Yes, Chef!\"\n\n\"The dashi!\"\n\n\"Done, Chef!\"\n\nWith service approaching, the kitchen was in full swing. An intern scooped whole steaming octopi from a bubbling pot. Another was monitoring the circulator; the eggs inside would be used in one of the evening's less obviously pyrotechnic but most sublime offerings\u2014a dish of feathery-smooth potato mousseline capping, shepherd's-pie style, the barely poached egg and a warm bed of chorizo. As with most of Lefebvre's food these days, it made use of technology and imagination without seeming to do so for its own sake. The stuntiest item on the LudoBites 5.0 menu\u2014a cheese \"cupcake\" frosted with chicken-liver mousse\u2014was also the least successful.\n\n\"It's a miracle what we do every day, working in these conditions. You see that?\" he said, pointing to the beat-up four burner stove. \"That's magical.\"\n\nIt _is_ magical. It could also, one worries, become a dodge\u2014a perpetual deflection of the question of what someone with this much talent might do with the kitchen and staff of his dreams. Krissy says as much, remembering the thinking that went into LudoBites 1.0: \"Just using 'Bites' diminished expectations. It could never be a failure, because it had a beginning and an end.\"\n\nJonathan Gold, the Pulitzer-winning dean of L.A. food writing and one of Lefebvre's earliest and most consistent champions, likens LudoBites to a series of first records, with all the excitement, energy, and rough edges first records entail. Eventually, though, you want your favorite band to risk it all with a double-length theme album.\n\nPut another way, the question is this: Is it possible to be a great chef without a great restaurant? The kind of place, as Animal's Jon Shook memorably puts it, where \"you go back after it's been open ten years and it's still fuck-your-mouth good\"? The question matters, because at the very heart of celebrity chefdom there lies a problem that may prove irreconcilably hostile to the future of the restaurant: the boredom of chefs.\n\nRemember that the stars of the dining world used to be in the front of the house. They were the great maitre d's, wizards of the seating plan, social impresarios who got their names above the door. That made sense, since every night in the dining room was like a freewheeling improvisational concert, complete with an ever shifting lineup and the ever present potential for disaster. The kitchen was more of a stellar rhythm section: steady, reliable, above all consistent.\n\nNowadays, chefs have completed the radical shift from anonymous laborers to celebrated artists. For some, that's meant leaving the kitchen altogether, traveling the world, expanding their brands. But for those who can't give up the particular adrenaline rush of being behind the stove, there's no getting around the fact that the essence of the job\u2014turning out the same dish over and over again, night after night\u2014is deeply, profoundly dull. And that means we may soon be living in a pop-up world.\n\nAt Gram & Papa's, it was almost curtain time. French rap played over the sound system as Krissy's team of young waitresses set tables. Taking his position in the open kitchen, Lefebvre carefully laid out his tools: a silver quenelle spoon, a tiny grater with bamboo brush, a Sharpie. At the head of this little shrine, he lit a Mexican prayer candle.\n\nThe doors opened, and the first seating poured in. At one table, each of five diners held cameras or camera phones. One customer presented Lefebvre with a bundle of locally picked Spanish garlic. \"Tomorrow we have garlic soup,\" the chef announced. \"With escargots.\"\n\nOrders came in. Dishes flowed out: a cheese \"cupcake\" frosted with chicken liver and foie gras; a feathery-smooth potato mousseline capping, shepherd's-pie style, a barely poached egg and a warm bed of chorizo; a version of a classic French _fris\u00e9e aux lardons_ reimagined as a tower of greens teetering in a bowl of smooth, rich goat-cheese soup. (When I tried the dish at dinner with Gold, I nervously approached it with knife and fork. \"It's hard to cut soup,\" the critic deadpanned.) All but the oyster dish, which nobody had yet plated or tasted\u2014leaving no assurance that Lefebvre's morning inspiration would even work.\n\nOne by one, the tickets for oysters piled up. Lefebvre hovered over the simmering dashi, watching as a test run poached. Krissy looked on in a state of bemused panic. Finally, Lefebvre lifted two of the oysters from the water and pried them open, revealing the pair of perfectly swollen iridescent bubbles within. He swiveled toward the counter where Joon Sung was supposed to be assembling the dishes.\n\n\"Joon!\"\n\n\"Yes, Chef!\"\n\n\"Why haven't you fucking prepped for the oysters?\"\n\nSomething in Sung snapped: \"Because I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do, Chef!\"\n\nThe kitchen came to a halt. The chef spun slowly in his clogs. Sung waited, blinking. Then Lefebvre grinned, clapped his cook on the shoulder, and screamed right back:\n\n\"Well, neither do I!\"\n\n### HOT PLATE\n\n### By Rachel Hutton\n\n### From _Minnesota Monthly_\n\n### One index of a regional restaurant culture's vitality is the number of talented food writers it supports. Among the leading lights of the Twin Cities' lively dining scene is Rachel Hutton, formerly of _CityPages_ and newly named food editor of _Minnesota Monthly._\n\n**7:00 a.m.**\n\nIt's going to be another big night at The Bachelor Farmer and Marvel Bar.\n\nThe cooler is stocked. The reservation book is full. And the overnight cleaning crew just eradicated the last trace of yesterday's service. On this chilly morning, 50 North Second Avenue looks much as it must have a century ago, when the brick-and-timber warehouse was new to Minneapolis's North Loop. The streets are deserted and the sky is dark except for the florescent lights streaming from the building's kitchen\u2014a beacon for the hottest thing going in the neighborhood.\n\nThe former Northwestern Hide and Fur Building wasn't attracting much attention until Eric Dayton, son of Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, purchased it in 2008. Its most recent occupant was an industrial wire-cutting business called Marvel Rack, so architect James Dayton (yes, he's a relative) faced no small task in converting the space into a modern restaurant, bar, and retail shop, while preserving its historic character.\n\nWhen Eric and his brother, Andrew, conceived of their contemporary Scandinavian restaurant and subterranean speakeasy, they imagined an intimate neighborhood hangout. But as soon as the kitchen served its first plate of Swedish meatballs, patrons flocked from near and far, packing the place night after night. How were a couple of hospitality greenhorns able to pull off such a feat?\n\nThe Bachelor Farmer's baker and pastry chef are the first to arrive, as always. Their first stop: the storage room. The restaurant makes almost everything from scratch using premium ingredients\u2014even growing some produce on the building's roof, which is buried in snow. The pastry chef bypasses a tub labeled \"Top Secret Pickle Project\" and half a hog carcass to collect dozens of Larry Schultz eggs, pounds of Hope butter, and gallons of Organic Valley cream. She has less than six hours to create a dessert that will earn a spot on tonight's menu.\n\nBack up in the kitchen, the two feed bread starter, melt chocolate, heat milk for fresh cheese, and roll dough into long sheets of flatbread. It's too early for conversation, so they work in near silence, save for the hum of the ovens, vents, and refrigeration units.\n\n**8:58 a.m.**\n\nChef Paul Berglund enters looking rather like a lanky graduate student with his narrow glasses and day's worth of beard growth. Rather than rely on Eric's experience with line cooking at Good-fellows restaurant back in high school, the Dayton brothers called upon Paul, an alumnus of Oliveto, a highly respected restaurant in Oakland, California, to lead The Bachelor Farmer's kitchen. Paul starts his day with a clipboard in hand, reading through the to-do list: ducks, lentil base, pat\u00e9; render pork fat. His first task is to fillet last night's shipment of rockfish\u2014beautiful specimens, with red-and-white skins, clear eyes, and resilient flesh.\n\n**9:35 a.m.**\n\nEric and Andrew arrive. Although they're both already clutching Dunn Brothers cups, Andrew starts the coffee maker. Their preppy outfits look as if they might have come from the same closet. The brothers' similar taste in clothes has become something of a running joke. If they accidentally dress alike, Andrew says, \"We do rock-paper-scissors to see who has to go home and change.\"\n\nAs if the brothers didn't have enough to do between overseeing the bar and restaurant, they followed in their forefathers' retail footsteps and opened a men's shop in the building's storefront. It's called Askov Finlayson, a name that should sound familiar to anyone who's driven I-35 between the Twin Cities and Duluth and paid attention to the exit signs.\n\nThe restaurant and the store often share clients: fans of farm-to-table cuisine seem to appreciate the classic clothing and accessories. One night, the Daytons sold two handcrafted leather iPad cases when a Bachelor Farmer guest showed the one she'd just purchased to her dining companion, who promptly went down and did the same.\n\nWhile they wait for customers, Eric and Andrew meet with the retail manager to plan their itinerary for the menswear shows in New York and time an order of British umbrellas. The shop is minimally furnished with leather chairs and an area rug pulled from Andrew's emptying apartment. Eric, too, has sacrificed home d\u00e9cor for the business, having lent the restaurant several of his photographs by local-boy-made-good Alec Soth. \"My apartment looks like it's been robbed,\" Eric explains. \"There are bare hooks where art used to be.\" The brothers spend far more time at work than home these days, so at least here they can enjoy their possessions.\n\nAskov Finlayson's merchandise tends toward timeless pieces: dress shirts, slacks, Danish wool sweaters, sailcloth duffel bags. The common denominator, Andrew explains, is quality, partial justification for the $125 price tag on the store's most casual item: sweatpants with their brand name, \"Warriors of Radness,\" spelled out down the leg in rainbow-colored cursive script.\n\n**11:14 a.m.**\n\nIn the office upstairs, the general manager sits at his computer and scans the evening's reservation list, which already shows 150 diners on the books. He's going to need every last table in the dining room, including the corner booth that went out of commission last night due to an icy draft, so he heads downstairs armed with a caulk gun.\n\nAt Andrew's computer, the brothers update the Marvel Bar's Facebook page. Today's post describes a new drink called the Strong-water, which the Marvel Bar's head bartender, Pip Hanson, recently invented. Bourbon, cognac, thyme liqueur, and lemon zest are mixed together and then highly diluted. It's a surprisingly pleasurable technique: the water smooths out any harshness and highlights the spirits' subtleties. Pip developed a reputation for precise, innovative bartending at his previous position at Caf\u00e9 Maude, where the brothers recruited him after he poured the best Manhattans they'd ever sipped.\n\nNa\u00efvet\u00e9 more than confidence may have spurred the Daytons to tackle their ambitious project, but what the brothers lack in entrepreneurial experience, they seem to make up for in diligent management. (Presumably they have picked up a few tips from their father's overseeing of the entire state of Minnesota.)\n\nThe brothers plan to add brunch service to the restaurant as well as private events, but they have prioritized fine-tuning their current operation versus expanding\u2014don't expect to see The Bachelor Farmer franchises out in Bloomington and Maple Grove. Building wealth would seem less of a motivator to the Daytons than creating a restaurant experience that proud locals show off to out-of-towners. Considering the Dayton family's legacy in retail and political leadership, thinking small would be uncharacteristic. And who better to understand the collective consciousness of Minnesotans than the Daytons? They practically invented our aspirations of what it means to be one.\n\n**1:02 p.m.**\n\nThe kitchen staff gathers in the dining room for their daily meeting. Paul instructs one of his cooks on how to prepare an appetizer made with small fish called sand dabs. \"You're going to need capers, white wine, olive oil, and mullet roe,\" he says in confident rapid-fire, like Brad Pitt trading baseball players in _Moneyball._\n\n\"You need a shaver for that,\" he adds, talking the cook through the steps. \"Microplane. Same one you're using for the Bibb.\"\n\n\"Large flake?\" the cook asks, furiously scribbling in a notebook.\n\n\"I don't want a microplane-microplane,\" Paul clarifies, in language only cooks can understand. \"But a microplane is preferable to really large flakes.\"\n\n**1:43 p.m.**\n\nPaul and his sous chef have just finished testing a new shrimp appetizer and roast-chicken entr\u00e9e. It's now the moment of truth for the pastry chef's dessert: a flourless chocolate cake with salted-caramel semifreddo, lingonberry p\u00e2tes de fruit jellies, and a dollop of cream. Paul takes a bite and says he loves the flavor combination, but he's concerned about the p\u00e2tes de fruit sticking to the plate. The two discuss a few options before deciding to simply plop the gummies into the cream.\n\nAfter they've finished, Paul sets forth on one of the kitchen's lowliest tasks: dicing an array of onions with mechanical precision. The former naval officer isn't exactly _Food Network_ material\u2014he's too calm, too disciplined.\n\n**2:35 p.m.**\n\nA deliveryman wheels a 300-pound block of sculptor's ice into the Marvel Bar. When even the world's purest ice cubes can't give the Marvel bartenders the drink-cooling control they desire, they chip their own ice from large blocks. Two bartenders help the deliveryman heft the thing onto the counter and immediately start attacking it. One scores the block into eighths with what looks like a large putty knife, while the other splits it with a hammer and chisel. The first bartender breaks the block down further by aggressively stabbing it with a metal pick, like he's a human sewing-machine needle. The smaller blocks are neatly stacked in the freezer within a matter of minutes. \"It reminds me of a cave man taking down a mammoth,\" Pip remarks.\n\n**3:59 p.m.**\n\nAfter a staff meal\u2014a substantial spread that includes the roast-chicken tester, two types of potatoes, popovers, salad, and a hearty split-pea soup\u2014the front-of-the-house staff gathers upstairs for their pre-shift meeting, which takes place in one of the restaurant's private dining rooms. The walls are covered with a funky collage of crocheted afghans, which lends the otherwise modern space a warm familiarity.\n\nFirst on the agenda: the sous chef explains the new dishes. After subjecting the servers to a beer-list pop quiz, the general manager issues a warning: \"Do not cap the stack.\" More than one blank look results. \"When stacking similar dishes for the dishwashing crew,\" he explains, \"you should never add a different dish to the top of the pile\"\u2014not only is it inefficient, but the whole thing could topple.\n\nAndrew previews some exclusive new Alec Soth merchandise for the store, including coloring books from Soth's publishing company that may be the first in the genre to feature Bronko Nagurski and the Coen brothers. The general manager then pours the staff samples of a hard-to-find new wine he's acquired. \"I buy wine like they buy Soth,\" he says of the Daytons. \"Take it all so nobody else can get it.\"\n\n**4:45 p.m.**\n\nSeated in the Norsten Bar, next to the dining room, the assistant general manager undergoes her daily ritual of reviewing the comment books that the servers drop off with the check. She initials each remark, incorporating the feedback in her mental databank. \"Coming from a bachelor farmer, we love this place.\" \"Uffdah! Very good.\" \"It's not Manhattan, but it's surprisingly hip, delicious, and cool.\" Minnesotans always seem to find the need to make coastal comparisons, don't they?\n\nThe books contain poems, a fake mustache, a lipstick kiss, and, inexplicably, what appears to be someone's senior-class photograph. One of the servers has received multiple marriage proposals from anonymous guests. Books that have recently received \"edgier\" messages\u2014\"I f\u2014-ing love you guys,\" for example\u2014circulate in the bar. Only a few book pages with \"inappropriate\" sketches (a group of the Dayton brothers' friends are prime suspects) had to be removed.\n\n**5:20 p.m.**\n\nGuests with 5:30 p.m. reservations are already peeking through the windows and the assistant general manager doesn't want them to wait in the cold. \"We're opening the doors,\" she announces to the kitchen. A cook makes shots of espresso for the entire line. \"Double? Or triple?\" she asks.\n\n**5:24 p.m.**\n\nA server cuts butter pats for the restaurant's complimentary appetizer of flatbread and radishes and ferries the first plates to the dining room. Restocking the butter pats is among the hundreds of details that front-of-the-house staff has to track. Dozens more tips are posted on a list called \"Service 101\" near the servers' order terminal. No. 1 is a no-brainer: \"Acknowledge all guests with eye contact and a smile immediately.\" But others are more obscure, like \"12. Level the art.\" Several deal with appropriate guest interaction: \"18. Do not react to the amount of the tip; 30. Do not ask a question while a guest's mouth is full; 31. Do not enter a guest's conversation unless clearly invited.\"\n\n**6:00 p.m.**\n\nThe sous chef stands at the pass, a counter that divides the kitchen from the dining room, lining up tickets and calling out orders to the various cooks. She's essentially playing air-traffic controller so each table's orders will be ready at the same time. \"Fire Camembert, no shallots,\" she hollers. Two old tickets are taped to the wall with messages scrawled on top, \"10-top in 23 minutes,\" and, \"9-top in 20 minutes\": house records in putting together big orders, the kitchen equivalent of scalps.\n\nPaul runs his kitchen like the Daytons run their business: hire people you trust and let them do their thing. He lets his staff handle tonight's dinner service as he scores the fat on dozens of duck breasts and makes other preparations for the upcoming days. From the back of the kitchen, he can watch the orders flow and anticipate any problems\u2014demonstrating strong \"field awareness,\" as they say in team sports.\n\n**7:04 p.m.**\n\nMuch like The Bachelor Farmer's dining room, the accompanying Norsten Bar has a mellow vibe despite being nearly full. No matter the guest's dress\u2014lumberjack plaid and sequins inhabit adjacent barstools\u2014they seem to appreciate the food and beverage. A man approaches the bartender and gruffly asks her what's in one of the drinks. She shows him the bottles: aquavit, gin, orange bitters, and Cocchi Americano, an aperitif wine. \"Is that your favorite cocktail?\" she asks. \"It's delicious,\" he says. \"In fact, I should probably tip you.\" He pulls a stack of folded bills from his pocket and tosses $5 on the counter.\n\n**8:32 p.m.**\n\nThe kitchen is running full tilt. Eggshells pile up. A stove burner flares. The cooks fill the pass with plates and servers rush to distribute them. Meanwhile, in the relative serenity of the basement cooler, Paul deconstructs the pig carcass with a hacksaw.\n\nIn the dining room, guests appear rapt in conversation, enjoying the evening and blissfully unaware of all these activities. The lights are low, the music is soft, and wine glasses cover nearly every table. Diners may never make a conscious note of all the tiny details that made their meal great versus simply good\u2014the house-butchered pork, the hand-chipped ice, the plating of the p\u00e2te de fruit, the minute difference between a \"microplane-microplane\" and a \"large flake.\" When they next recall this meal, all they will remember is that they ate well and enjoyed themselves.\n\nIn fact, The Bachelor Farmer's secret to success may be that its food isn't necessarily the star: the cooking is novel enough to discuss, but not at the expense of other topics. It's the restaurant's vibe\u2014its contemporary spin on nostalgic comforts and Volvo-like sense of understated luxury\u2014that accounts for its enduring appeal. Sure, a few guests may have been hoping to rub shoulders with politicians and scions, but mostly they are drawn in by the way the place reflects their own sophisticated populist sensibilities. And besides, who doesn't love the idea of hopping from shop to restaurant to bar without the hassle of re-parking the car?\n\n**10:49 p.m.**\n\nEric and Andrew finally sit down to eat dinner in the Norsten Bar. Paul comes in to say goodbye, sporting a new Band-aid on his finger\u2014he pricked himself with the giant syringe he was using to pump brine into cuts of pork. Trying to brine himself, it seems.\n\n**11:26 p.m.**\n\nEric stops in the kitchen and says goodnight. Andrew will leave a few minutes later and both will be back tomorrow morning by 10 a.m. to open Askov Finlayson. The cooks clean up as the servers start to cash out, counting their tips and dispensing a few appreciative bills to the hostesses and food runner.\n\n**12:05 a.m. Sunday**\n\nA guest is upset that his party can't get into the packed Marvel Bar and a couple staffers gracefully smooth his ruffled feathers. Restaurant diners are given priority access, but walk-ups must take their place in the queue\u2014no VIPs, no favorites. Supposedly, even Governor Dayton doesn't get to cut the line, but that scenario has yet to arise.\n\n**1:52 a.m.**\n\nThe Marvel Bar's last patrons head out the door and someone flips on the lights. A bartender pours a round of beers and passes out a loaf of homemade banana bread. (The only food the bar serves is Cheetos, and often the bar staff doesn't stop to eat during their shift.) After nearly 12 hours spent thinking about booze, two devoted bartenders discuss the merits of 110-proof gin as they clean up.\n\n**2:56 a.m.**\n\nThe last of the crew bundles up\u2014one bartender pulls on an Askov Finlayson sweater\u2014and spills out into the cold, dark night. The kitchen emits the same florescent light it did 20 hours earlier, a reminder that in roughly four hours, the cycle will start all over again.\n\n### AUSTRIA'S CULINARY AMBASSADOR\n\n### By St. John Frizell\n\n### From _Edible Manhattan_\n\n### St. John Frizell has an insider's perspective on the restaurant biz, as the proprietor of Brooklyn's popular bar-caf\u00e9 Fort Defiance. Meanwhile, he plies his trade as a food-and-drink writer in such publications as _Bon App\u00e9tit, Saveur, Islands, The Oxford American, Edible Brooklyn_ and _Edible Manhattan._\n\nHigh above the Austrian village of Ratsch, on a hilltop overlooking a sun-soaked valley planted with rows of grapevines, I'm all set to tuck into the biggest plate of fried chicken that I've ever seen. Walnut trees shade the deck of Weinlokal Maitz, a restaurant on the Southern Styrian wine route, where I sit with Kurt Gutenbrunner, the Austrian-born chef-owner of five restaurants in Manhattan, and Michael Gross, the charming young scion of a local wine family. The chicken, served with lemon wedges and a salad made with purple-specked k\u00e4ferbohnen\u2014\" beetle beans,\" what we know as \"scarlet runners\"\u2014is a local specialty called backhenderl, and a dream come true. Just under a crust that has the airy crispness of a perfect Wiener schnitzel, the meat bursts with gamy juice that makes me want to find the chicken farmer and shake his hand. And I could, without much trouble; at this point in my travels in Austria, I know the country is a locavore's fantasy\u2014and that the chicken I'm about to eat was clucking in someone's yard the day before yesterday. (The English menu reinforces my belief in plain language: \"Needless to say, we know all of our distributors personally.\")\n\nThe wine we're drinking is local, too\u2014on the hillside across the valley is the Gross winery and vineyards, where Michael lives and makes wine with his brother, Johannes, and their father, Alois. From here we can see the terraced slopes where they grow gr\u00fcner veltliner. Down in the valley, we can make out the roof of the buschenschank that Michael's grandparents still run. The buschenschank is a glorious Austrian tradition\u2014a little tavern where winemakers, with special governmental permission, serve their own vintages and a small selection of hot and cold dishes to tourists and locals alike. \"In the fall, we live to go to the buschenschanks,\" Michael says. \"People come for the leaves\u2014every tree you can see in this valley turns a different shade of green, gold and red. And they come for the sturm.\"That's the newest wine of the year's harvest, the grape juice that's just started to ferment. The men at the table smile and let out a collective groan, as if they've all gotten into plenty of trouble drinking sturm, and can't wait to do it again. \"I think it continues to ferment in your stomach,\" Kurt says.\n\nJust then, the server brings Michael a plate of schafkase im mantel\u2014sheep's milk cheese wrapped in speck. What, no backhenderl? \"It's delicious, but no. I had it for lunch yesterday,\" Michael says, sheepishly. \"And the day before.\"\n\nSince he opened Wallse, his Michelin-starred homage to Viennese cuisine, in the West Village in 2000, Kurt Gutenbrunner has been turning Manhattanites on to schnitzel, spaetzle and gruner veltliner. He's the primary advocate and most recognized representative of Austrian food culture in America, and in Austria, a country with a population about the same size as New York City's, he's something of a local hero. For six days, Kurt and I scoured the country in search of new ingredients, producers and dishes that will inspire his menus in the year to come at Wallse and his other restaurants: Blaue Gans, the Austrian bistro in TriBeCa; Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky, the Viennese caf\u00e9 at the Neue Gallerie; Caf\u00e9 Kristall, at the Swarovski Building; and his wine bar, the Upholstery Shop. To kick off the week, we meet at Plachutta, one of Vienna's most respected traditional restaurants, for a crash course in Austrian Cuisine 101.\n\nLooking at the menu, Kurt explains how Austria has always been a crossroads, a place in the middle. Once the seat of power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was also the easternmost city in Western Europe during the Cold War. Centuries of trade, diplomacy and conquest have left their mark on the city's cuisine. \"Gulasch? From the Hungarians,\" explains Kurt. \"Schnitzel, that's essentially a Milanese, from Italy. A lot of these pastries are Czech. And the coffee in our famous caf\u00e9s? From the Turks.\"\n\nBut since the end of the Empire, the major influence on Austrian cuisine has come from within. In the early 20th century, Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner provided the philosophical underpinnings for what would become the organic farming movement.\n\nNaturally, Austria has become one of the world's leaders in organic farming; it was one of the first countries to set official organic guidelines, and its government continues to subsidize ecological farming practices. As a result, close to 20 percent of its farms are organic, more that in any other European country (except tiny Liechtenstein).\n\nFrom the hippest Viennese nightspot to the most rustic small-town gasthaus, we see these two forces working in harmony, and they define contemporary Austrian cuisine\u2014traditional dishes, like Wiener schnitzel and krautsalat, are thoughtfully prepared so that the flavors of the fresh, local meat and produce shine through. Kurt is tickled by the recent rise of Austrian cuisine in New York's dining scene, where Midtown's Seasonal now has a Michelin star, and dozens of beer gardens have sprouted up over the past 10 years.\n\n\"When I put tafelspitz on the menu in New York, people said, 'You're serving us boiled beef?' It wasn't very cool,\" Kurt says. Plachutta is famous for this quintessential Austrian dish, which is essentially a simple boiled dinner; the name refers to the cut of beef, which comes from the round. Other cuts\u2014kavalierspitz, tafelst\u00fcck and so forth\u2014are commonly used, but \"tafelspitz in particular is accompanied by a myriad of legends, and no other dish has a comparable historic significance,\" according to the Plachutta cookbook. The service is warm and formal; the food, simple and hearty as corned beef and cabbage. Kurt serves kavalierspitz at Blaue Gans, his casual Austrian bistro in TriBeCa. Does he lighten it up a bit for his downtown Manhattan crowd? \"No, of course not,\" he says, between forkfuls of beef. \"Does the Viennese Philharmonic play Mozart any differently when they come to New York?\"\n\nAfter getting through almost a pound of beef, I put my fork down, while Kurt continues to eat. He is a man of voracious appetites and seemingly boundless energy\u2014it's no wonder at all that his little hometown of Wallsee, a little village in Upper Austria, couldn't hold him.\n\nIn 1988, after a two-year stint at Munich's then-Michelin-Three-Star restaurant Tantris, he was introduced to Hermann Reiner, chef of Windows on the World in New York, who hired his 26-year-old fellow Austrian as sous chef. Gutenbrunner fell in love with New York, but found the experience of cooking at the top of the World Trade Center disconcerting. \"I was used to buying produce off a truck in back of the restaurant; now, we were buying produce 110 floors below. It was like working on a submarine,\" Kurt says.\n\nIn the meantime, an American chef with ties to Austria and impeccable French training was earning rave reviews in TriBeCa; before opening his eponymous restaurant, David Bouley had worked at the then four-star restaurant Vienna 79 with chef Peter Grunauer. In 1990, Gutenbrunner found his first real home in the States in the kitchen at Bouley, and started a working relationship with chef David Bouley that would last, off and on, for 10 years. The restaurant Bouley has become a proving ground for American chefs\u2014Eric Ripert, Dan Barber and C\u00e9sar Ramirez all passed through in the 1990s, to name a few. Gutenbrunner was suitably challenged and invigorated by the other chefs in the kitchen. \"We were a great team. No one could beat us. It was a shitload of work, and there was a lot of pressure, but when people push each other like that, a lot of extreme things can happen,\" Kurt says, before turning wistful. \"I think if things happened on schedule, David and I would still be working together.\"\n\n\"What are you doing, Johnny?\" Kurt asks, gesturing at my half-full plate as he scoops the last bites of kavalierspitz from his own. At our first meeting, Kurt started calling me Johnny, and after a couple of days, I stopped correcting him. I told Kurt I was stuffed; I probably should have passed on the chanterelle omelet that we had as an appetizer. \"What's the matter? You only ate half a cow,\" he says. \"Let's get dessert.\"\n\nWhen we meet early the next morning, we have dessert again. \"I love cake,\" Kurt tells me as he quickly demolishes a slice of Landtmann torte, with its decadent layers of walnut cream and marzipan. Vienna's caf\u00e9s are justly famous for their extravagant cakes\u2014like sachertorte, linzertorte and apfelstrudel, to name a few\u2014and during our week in Austria, Kurt never misses a dessert. His trim silhouette can only be explained by his inexhaustible energy and outright speed; I often have to jog to keep up with him as he navigates the twisting streets of Vienna like he's being chased. He only stops to eat, as he is now, at Caf\u00e9 Landtmann, a fabled Viennese caf\u00e9 a stone's throw from Vienna's University, the City Hall and the monumental Burgtheater.\n\nAn hour later, we stumble onto a frozen yogurt shop called \"Kurt\" on a cobblestone street; Kurt warmly greets the owners (\"You're Kurt? I'm Kurt!\"), drops business cards on all of the shop's patrons and orders a blueberry-acai yogurt, in the \"Classic Kurt\" size. \"Once, I went to Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky for a business meeting, and I ate four apricot cakes before it was over,\" he says. Kurt opened Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky in the Neue Gallerie, Manhattan's museum of Austrian and German art and design, in 2001. Kurt had met the museum's founder, Ronald Lauder, when they both ordered Thonet chairs from the same Austrian company. After visiting Vienna, the likeness of Caf\u00e9 Sabarsky to its Viennese cousins is almost eerie\u2014from the waiters' uniforms to the Thonet hat racks to the menu, with its Staud's jams and sachertortes and grosser brauner (coffee with steamed milk), it's all the same.\n\nGutenbrunner comes to Austria several times a year, in part to see old friends and family, and in part to source new ingredients for his New York kitchens. This is what has brought us to Heimschuh, a sleepy town in the southern state of Styria, near the Slovenian border. It's home to the Hartlieb mill, where some of the world's best pumpkinseed oil is pressed. \"This was once oil of the poor,\" says Thomas Hartlieb, whose great-grandfather opened the Hartlieb mill in 1896, when they used river power to mill lumber as well as grain. \"People thought it was low quality, because of its dark color.\" In the bottle, pumpkinseed oil is a dark, almost purplish green; when Hartlieb holds a bottle high and pours it so that the afternoon sun shines through the oil, it's a vivid crimson. Now, it is to Austria what EVOO is to Italy; in a week, I think I had it at every meal, dressing greens, tomatoes, cheese and fish with its distinctive nutty flavor.\n\nHartlieb keeps a collection of antique pumpkinseed presses in a makeshift museum on the mill's second floor, but on the ground floor, high-tech presses and grinders do the work today. Local farmers grow special Styrian \"oil pumpkins,\" whose seeds grow without hulls. This squash's harvest is the inversion of its American cousins: they keep the seeds and discard the flesh. At Hartlieb, those prized seeds are ground and roasted, which causes the proteins in the seed puree to separate from the oil. That mixture is pressed, the oil collected, and what's left behind\u2014a protein-rich puck of pressed pumpkinseeds\u2014becomes livestock feed on nearby farms.\n\nOver a seidel of Puntigamer, the go-to lager in Styria, at the caf\u00e9 across the street, Gutenbrunner and Hartlieb talk about pumpkinseed oil's appearance on the gourmet food scene; until about 20 years ago, it wasn't even common in upper Austria, though it's been used in Styria for centuries. \"It wasn't that we didn't want it; you Styrian guys just didn't want to give it to us,\" says Kurt. It's an ingredient Kurt has always showcased to great effect. Ruth Reichl, in typical for-mature-audiences-only prose, reviewed Gutenbrunner's food when he was chef at the Monkey Bar, a clubbish Midtown restaurant then owned by steakhouse czar Peter Glazier, in the New York Times in 1998: \"Just take a spoonful of his butternut squash soup. Hold it in your mouth, rejoicing in the deep richness of the pumpkinseed oil on top. . . . It is irresistible.\"\n\nEight years earlier, when his first son was born, Kurt had left Bouley and moved to Germany\u2014he thought Europe would be a better place to raise a family\u2014but returned to New York to work with his old boss whenever time allowed. In 1996, he moved to New York for good and hatched plans with Bouley to open the Austrian restaurant that would become Danube. But plans stalled, Kurt became impatient and steakhouse czar Glazier made Kurt an offer he couldn't refuse\u2014his first executive chef gig, at Monkey Bar. \"He gave me everything and beyond. I didn't want to do it at first, but it's hard to see everyone else moving ahead when you're standing still,\" Kurt says. After two years there, he met the investors who would help him fund Wallse\u2014parents of a kid on his son's soccer team\u2014and a restaurant empire was born.\n\nFrom the roof of the Gegenbauer vinegar factory, we can see the broken roof tiles of the surrounding apartment blocks in this unglamorous neighborhood of Vienna's 10th district. We've come to check in on an old friend of Kurt's, Erwin Gegenbauer, whose grandfather Ignaz started making sauerkraut and pickled vegetables in this building in 1929. In the 1990s, Erwin sold off most of the company's assets to focus on his true aspiration: to make the world's best fruit vinegars. Gegenbauer makes vinegars from every kind of foodstuff imaginable: apples and grapes, but also honey, figs, cucumbers and asparagus. These are not the vinegars on your typical grocery shelf, flavored with raspberries or other fruit. \"Those vinegars are made by adding fruit flavors to wine vinegar. That is chemistry, and I don't do that,\" Gegenbauer says, in near-perfect English. \"My raspberry vinegar is all raspberries, no other ingredients. You could say it's more simple this way. But the simplest products can be the most complicated.\"\n\nGegenbauer starts his process by working with local farmers, selecting fruit with the careful attention of a winemaker. \"How many leaves per branch is optimal? When do we harvest? How do we press the fruit to get the juice? These are the questions we ask,\" he says. The fruit juice is allowed to ferment, creating a wine; Gegenbauer then introduces specific strains of bacteria\u2014he keeps several hundred on hand\u2014which will, over several weeks, convert the alcohol in the wine to acid, creating vinegar. Some vinegars are then aged in oak wine barrels, either in his cellar or on his roof, exposed to the elements. I ask why there's no tradition of making this kind of vinegar in Austria, or anywhere else. \"There's a popular perception that vinegar must be cheap, that vinegar is wine that's gone bad,\" Gegenbauer says. \"That's changing.\"\n\nGegenbauer brings out his newest project to show Kurt, an oil made from pressed raspberry seeds\u2014a by-product of his vinegar process. \"I love working with Kurt,\" Gegenbauer says. \"I give him vinegar, we taste it and discuss. Sometimes I work with him in the kitchen, and together we create a new dish. I'm the craftsman; he's the creative, pushing me to experiment with new flavors.\"\n\nHe places a few drops on the back of Kurt's hand and mine; Kurt licks it off and stares at Gegenbauer as he rolls it around in his mouth. The flavor is subtle and woody at first, then slowly blossoms into something like raspberry jam on toast. \"The berry flavor comes late,\" Kurt says.\n\n\"But it stays a long time,\" Gegenbauer says. \"That's amazing! Can I take this with me?\" Kurt says. Our hands will smell, pleasantly, like raspberry bushes for the rest of the day.\n\nA photographer from an Austrian society magazine arrives; she asks the two men to pose between the batteries of casks on the roof. Gutenbrunner is totally relaxed in front of a camera, posing for pictures like an aging rock star, to which he sometimes compares himself (\"You know what they say about British rock and rollers? They don't fucking die! Keith Richards. Robert Plant. I'm like that. You can't kill me.\"). His body totally relaxed, Kurt looks directly into the camera, eyelids heavy, his lips slightly curled in the suggestion of a smile.\n\n\"Let's go see Claus, Johnny,\" Kurt says. The open fields of Burgenland, planted with chest-high cornstalks and sunflowers, whip past the windows of our Mini Countryman, as Kurt drops gears to pass another ambling truck. \"You'll like this guy. He's a little crazy.\"\n\nClaus Preisinger's winery is a strikingly modern poured-concrete bunker filled with strikingly low-tech equipment\u2014just a bunch of stainless steel tanks and wooden barrels. There's not even a pump in sight\u2014when Preisinger needs to move his wine from tank to barrel, he uses a length of tubing to siphon it, concerned that mechanical pumping will disturb his wines. In the corner, there's a stack of crates of mineral water (\"Good for breakfast,\" Preisinger says.) and Budweiser Budvar (\"Very important after a day in the vineyards: cold beer.\") and, off to the side, the winery's most advanced piece of machinery: a 500-liter teapot, where he makes chamomile tea to feed his vines during times of stress. He hasn't used pesticides or herbicides in years and cites Rudolf Steiner as a direct influence.\n\nKurt includes a wide swath of Austrian winemakers on the lists at his New York restaurants, from the most traditional old houses to the newest, most cutting-edge vintners, like Preisinger. With the tousled good looks of an emo rocker, Preisinger is, at 31, the youngest member of Pannobile, a group of nine local winemakers who have banded together to form their own appellation\u2014like a French AOC, which controls what grapes can be used in what wines, but without the government. Each year, the winemakers in the group submit their wines to a tasting panel of their peers; to be considered a Pannobile wine, all nine winemakers must unanimously approve.\n\nHe pours his 2008 Pannobile, a blend of zweigelt, blaufr\u00e4nkisch and a little bit of St. Laurent, a rare, highly aromatic grape. \"It's tricky to grow,\" says Preisinger, \"but sometimes the trickiest grapes make the best wines.\" It's lovely stuff, light-bodied and subtle, with flavors of black currant and earth. As we drink, watching the sun set over Lake Neuseidl into a bank of clouds, a burly farmer with mud-spattered boots walks in\u2014it's Paul Achs, another Pannobile winemaker, carrying a bottle of his 2000 blaufr\u00e4nkisch, and the glasses are filled again. The two winemakers are eager to take him out to dinner, to a restaurant called Blaue Gans\u2014the same as Kurt's TriBeCa bistro. But Kurt begs off, and we get back on the road. \"I know these guys,\" says Kurt. \"We go out with them to dinner and it'll be sunrise before we get to our hotel.\"\n\nErich Stekovics, with his round red cheeks, deep-set eyes and red polo shirt covering a round belly, fits his nickname: Kaiser der Paradeiser (the emperor of tomatoes). In the fertile plains of Burgenland, he raises more than 800 varieties of tomatoes every year; in his stores, he keeps the seeds for 2,000 more. \"I think he named one of his daughters Tomato,\" Kurt whispers, as we follow Stekovics into his greenhouses.\n\nAs we stalk quickly through rows of six-foot plants heavy with fruit, he pulls tomatoes off the vines for us to taste. With his knife, he splits a small, dark tomato and shows us the purplish flesh. \"Black cherry,\" he says, before popping half in his mouth and motioning for me to do the same. The flesh is lush and flavorful; the juice is thick and heady, like a swig of Achs's blaufr\u00e4nkisch. The tomatoes follow in quick succession, and Stekovics rattles off the names; he can identify hundreds of varieties by sight. There's de Barao, yellow and plum-shaped; Russian pear, sweet and smooth, as fragrant as a ripe peach; vibrant red Schlessian raspberry\u2014each more flavorful and succulent than the one before.\n\nHis secret? He doesn't water his plants. Ever. Bred for hardiness, they're forced to sink their roots ever deeper into the earth, giving them greater access to resources and, he believes, producing the world's most flavorful tomatoes. His methods buck conventional wisdom, which dictates that tomatoes need plenty of water, and baffle experts; a research team from the University of Innsbruck took three days to excavate the root-ball of one of his plants. Home gardeners from all over Europe visit to see Stekovics's plants and hear his gospel\u2014but their hearts are not strong enough to follow him. \"They're afraid,\" he says, obviously a little hurt. \"They go home and water their plants.\"\n\nAs Kurt tries to convince Stekovics to visit the U.S. (\"I want to introduce you to some of my farmers,\" he says), Stekovics brings us to one of his favorite plants: the Firework tomato, a Russian variety that's 450 years old, its carmine flesh streaked with the yellow and gold flecks that give it its name. As he cuts into it, red juice drips down his hand; the flesh is dark red to its core. It's just delicious, fruity and aromatic, like summer savory and wildflowers, the Platonic ideal of a tomato. \"You want a restaurant?\" Stekovics shouts, flourishing the knife in his seed-stained hand. \"Bring your table in here. I'll make you a feast you won't forget. Seven courses of tomatoes.\" He leans in close, and fixes his hound-dog eyes on mine. \"If you write about this, no one will believe you.\"\n\nWithin minutes of arriving in the town of Axberg in northern Austria, Hans Reisetbauer, perhaps Austria's most respected distiller, is making us coffee, and after hours on the road, we need it. We started the day just past dawn in the farmers market of Graz, where Kurt loaded my arms with sunflowers, tiny raspberries, dry pork sausage studded with pumpkinseeds, a huge bag of ripe apricots, and some slices of poppy-seed cake as he flitted from stall to stall, chatting with the vendors. \"It's good to talk to these old ladies,\" he told me, as he handed me a squash. \"They know best. This pumpkin? She told me you can cook the whole thing, leave the skin on. Makes good soup.\"\n\nIt's the start of Reisetbauer's busy season\u2014he makes his living turning Austria's best fruit into award-winning eaux-de-vie, or schnapps, and as we saw in the market this morning, the first fruit of the summer was already ripe. He distilled his first batch of raspberries the week before our visit; through the porthole in one of his copper stills, I see his first batch of apricots cooking away, bubbling like a pot of jam.\n\nReisetbauer grows all of his own apples and pears on his estate, just outside the distillery; other fruit, like these apricots, he sources from farmers who grow fruit especially for him. \"I have to find farmers who are as crazy as I am,\" Reisetbauer tells me. He doesn't look crazy, he looks like fun\u2014like a retired actor, with an easy smile, graying hair pushed back, and shoulders as big as a bear's. \"Most customers want to see the perfect color of an apricot. Me, I want the perfect taste. I need the best fruit to make the best schnapps.\"\n\n\"It's the same in the kitchen,\" Kurt says. \"You have to work with the farmers to get what you want. See, Johnny? It's always the same.\"\n\n\"Once we have the perfect fruit, it's up to us not to make any mistakes,\" Reisetbauer says.\n\nSchnapps are not always pretty spirits\u2014some are just fiery moonshine, roughly distilled by farmers and drunk by same to fend off cold, fatigue and boredom (and forget the cinnamon-and watermelon-flavored liqueurs called schnapps in the U.S.\u2014they're completely unknown in Austria). But schnapps can be magical; clear, high-proof spirits, enjoyed after dinner, that somehow evoke through taste and smell the sensation of biting into a ripe fruit, at the peak of its season, right off the vine\u2014or better.\n\nReisetbauer's pear schnapps is better than any French poire Williams I'd ever had\u2014as the flavors spread across my tongue and waft up through my sinuses, I have the illusion of tasting a pear with the backs of my eyes. His elsbeere (\"serviceberry\") schnapps is the most expensive in the world; he needs more than 35 kilos of the rare fruit to make one liter of spirit. Last year, the only three bottles exported to the U.S. went to Wallse. It tastes like blueberry marzipan, in between layers of God's own wedding cake.\n\nAfter an amble through his orchards, it's time for lunch; we head to his kitchen in time to see his entire staff\u2014farmhands, still operators and marketers alike\u2014sitting down to eat with his young children. His wife plates slabs of the pork neck she's been roasting all morning with hunks of browned cabbage, herb dumplings and a good ladleful of dark brown jus. Everything is perfectly cooked, and the gem\u00fctlichkeit, that sense of warm hospitality in which all Austrians take pride, has never been stronger. We all help ourselves to glasses of apple juice from the orchards outside.\n\n\"Here's where I fished for semling, that fish you had the other day,\" Kurt says, standing on the grassy banks of the Danube in Wallsee, his hometown, a quiet village of about 3,000. \"Up there, by those reeds, I caught eel and catfish.\" While fishing as a child, Kurt would watch the river cruise ships pass by, some on their way to Vienna. He didn't know much about them, but he knew they had cooks, and they seemed as good a way as any out of Wallsee. In the 1970s, aspiring Austrian chefs didn't aim too high; if he paid attention and worked hard in culinary school, he might even make it to the kitchen of a hotel in Switzerland. Before Kurt, Wallsee's only claim to fame was a castle that was once home to Archduchess Marie Valerie, daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph. Now it can claim a famous American chef, too. This fall, Kurt's cookbook _Neue Cuisine_ will be published by Rizzoli, and this fall he'll return to Austria to receive the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria, a prestigious award given by the Austrian president to citizens who promote Austrian culture abroad.\n\nHis parents still live in town; so do his brother and sister. When we stop by his old family homestead, his mother, as hospitable and charming as her son, brings out a homemade plum cake and some coffee. I grill her for embarrassing stories from her son's youth, but she comes up short. \"When he was about 10, he made me a cake for Mother's Day. After dinner, his brother said, 'Kurt, where's the cake?' but Kurt just shushed him. It turns out he had hidden the cake under his bed.\"\n\n\"It didn't come out right! I had high-quality standards, even then,\" Kurt says.\n\nOur stay isn't long; we have dinner reservations in Vienna that night. Before we leave, Kurt carries in bags bursting with the bounty of Austria's fields, orchards, cellars and shops, and starts to unload them onto the kitchen table, despite his mother's protestations: the market sunflowers; sausage studded with pumpkin seeds; bottles of Gegenbauer's vinegar and Hartlieb's pumpkinseed oil; fresh apple juice from Reisetbauer's orchard; tomatoes from Stekovics's miraculous vines; and from the farmers market in Graz, a small mountain of apricots. \"We love it when Kurt comes to visit,\" his mother says. She beams with pride for her son, the chef, who has made good in New York and is the reason Americans have heard of Wallsee. Then she looks distractedly back at the kitchen table. \"But now I have to do something with all of these apricots.\"\n\n### REMEMBERING SAVOY\n\n### By Rachel Wharton\n\n### From _Edible Manhattan_\n\n### North Carolina native Rachel Wharton has become immersed in New York City food culture since earning a master's in food studies from New York University. A former food reporter for the _New York Daily News,_ she is now deputy editor _of Edible Manhattan_ and _Edible Brooklyn_ and a contributor to GiltTaste.\n\nWhen Peter Hoffman announced that on June 18 he would shutter Savoy\u2014the SoHo restaurant he has run for 21 years at the cobblestoned corner of Prince and Crosby\u2014Manhattan learned it would lose more than just a fine dining landmark, a longstanding icon of its culinary landscape. Hoffman, you may have heard, promises to open a more casual, up-to-date place in the space by September. But when Savoy's golden glow goes dark, with it goes the urban version of our very own hearth, our collective spiritual home\u2014the kind of place where people gather around the fire not just to eat, but to commune with kin and take the long view of life.\n\nThe hearth, after all, is a literal one: Until the end of next month, at least, the restaurant boasts two fireplaces, both used for cooking. The restaurant's many regulars will long mourn the loss of Savoy's cassoulet suppers simmering away inside the fire each fall in embertopped cast-iron Dutch ovens, and the shad feasts celebrating the return of that fish to the Hudson River each spring. For this year's shad dinner, Hoffman and his executive chef, Ryan Tate, nailed the boned and bacon-larded fish to planks inserted right into the flames the way the Colonists did. In true Savoy style, they served those fillets with smoked shad fritters and a charred spring onion aioli; a briny-sweet bite of house-pickled fish tucked between a buttery crisp of bread and a layer of green garlicky omelet; and a wedge of its creamy roe with brown butter cream in a lemony sorrel broth.\n\nIf you'd been paying attention at Union Square Greenmarket just a few days before, you'd have seen Hoffman tuck the sorrel into the back basket of his trademark giant tricycle, emblazoned with a sticker reading \"The revolution will not be motorized.\" That line is exactly the kind of idea those family-style, special-occasion dinners are meant to highlight. Savoy has long been Manhattan's place not just to share in one season's harvest and plan the next, but to critically evaluate what we eat, how we live and the American state of home economics, in the Wendell Berry sense of those words. (Berry, for decades regarded as the back-to-the-land poet laureate, has personally spoken during one such Savoy dinner, as have Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Mark Kurlansky and just about every other living luminary in the farm-to-table world.)\n\nSavoy has always been a Greenmarket-showcasing pioneer, starting in 1990 when Hoffman and his wife, Susan Rosenfeld, opened its doors in what had been a shiny luncheonette. (And before that, a barber shop: The old painted pole still stands guard in the downstairs dining room.) Savoy has since steadied city souls with its \u00fcber-sustainable sustenance: A crusty wedge of real bread redolent with rustic local grains and slathered with cultured Vermont butter; a snarl of saber-toothed dandelion greens slicked with anchovy dressing and crowned with a slow-poached egg laid by a hen Hoffman may have even met.\n\nTrue, if farm-to-table awards were given out by how much product a chef buys from local farmers, Hoffman wouldn't win. Even combined, the volume at his two restaurants (Back Forty, his more casual spot, opened on Avenue B in 2007) couldn't come close to a place like Gramercy Tavern, which could serve a hundred hungry locavores at lunch alone. He wasn't Manhattan's first cook to obsess over Union Square, nor would he score first-place for flat-out farm-driven deliciousness, either. Which is understandable: Many of the best city chefs regard ingredients with integrity as a win-win, but their main goal is taste; for Hoffman, one gets the feeling it's the other way around.\n\nBut Savoy never sought to be a Fine Dining Experience, as Blue Hill or Del Posto or Gramercy Tavern all are. It's the kind of place to order a pint of local suds and a few fat slices of housemade mortadella at one of the city's loveliest little bars, or where your Eileen Fisher\u2013wearing aunt can come after her environmental book club for a wedge of silky, oil-poached wild-caught striped bass, perhaps paired with house-pickled ramps and spring's first spinach with walnut-mustard dressing. And Back Forty is decidedly down home, an Alphabet City outpost serving outstanding burgers, berry crisps and beer milkshakes\u2014dishes that Dan Barber, who long ago supplanted Hoffman as the locavore spokesmodel, would never offer on his extraordinary\u2014and extraordinarily refined\u2014menus.\n\nBut while Hoffman's fare may be more rustic than rarified, it's often wonderful\u2014and if you're hungry for a heaping helping of meaning, he serves up multiple kinds of satisfaction. That's because for him, farm-to-table is not a cooking style or a purchasing preference: It's a belief system that's just one piece of his progressive worldview. Ask him what he ate for lunch, and he'll likely connect the answer to healthcare reform or congestion pricing or this morning's op-ed about fracking in our foodshed.\n\nThis is a man who would never willingly miss a single day at Union Square Greenmarket, and not just for the grub. Other chefs may drop in for a frenetic Saturday spree before hailing a cab (or simply send their sous-chefs), but Hoffman's approach is to savor the experience. He'll park that giant trike and lean against box trucks and benches for hours, discussing pests, peapods and parenting, what the Japanese nuclear crisis means for Obama's energy agenda and whether it's possible to taste the difference between maple sap collected in metal buckets and sap that ran through plastic tubing. (Hoffman claims he can.)\n\nThere are hellos to the grad student working Flying Pigs' stand (ever the mensch's mensch, he asks after her dating life); a chat with the president of Abrams publishing company (\"your bar was the best thing about working at Scholastic,\" he says wistfully of his time in that SoHo office); and a stop to score ricotta at Dancing Ewe, a sheep dairy whose owners, like so many farmers here, credit Hoffman with their success. Hours later, the chef has still not bought the sorrel he originally came for.\n\n\"That's part of the whole point,\" says Hoffman of all these exchanges, \"there's a conversation that doesn't happen at Whole Foods.\" Here you don't just read a sign that tells you how much sea scallops cost; you spend 20 minutes talking with the fisher about the social-political-ecological meaning behind their place in history.\n\nThese are all ideas he's been pondering since adolescence. As a 16-year-old in Tenafly, New Jersey, in the early 1970s, he knew he wanted to do something \"intellectually stimulating but still physical,\" he says: \"I didn't want a desk job.\" Seeking work connected to the natural world, he considered forestry and biology, but was set on a culinary path by an unlikely friendship with a retired commercial fisherman and a shot of a chef clutching vegetables to his chest on the cover of _Time._\n\nThe fisherman was Chris Letts, now a Hudson River Foundation frontman in his 70s who long ago introduced the teenage Hoffman to his lifelong love of the sea and to the concept of foraging via Euell Gibbons' _Stalking the Wild Asparagus._\n\nThe chef was Paul Bocuse, the Frenchman famous for his farm-forward food. \"I think the title was _Cuisine du March\u00e9,\"_ recalls Hoffman of the _Time_ cover. \"I was like, 'that's it.' I don't think I even read the article.\" (Skimming is not standard practice for Hoffman, who's celebrated Proust with a four-course meal and counts _New Yorker_ writer Adam Gopnik as a friend.)\n\nHoffman decided to fast-track high school and took an entry-level job at a resort restaurant in Stowe, Vermont. The continental cuisine didn't thrill him but the kitchen energy did. \"I loved the theater of it, the community, the performance and the climax of Saturday night at 8:30.\"\n\nWhen the weather warmed, Letts landed him a fishing gig back home, plucking writhing shad from nets off 138th Street, when the waters were still alive with the herring cousin heading up the Hudson River to spawn. (Hoffman chronicled the experience in this magazine in 2009.) But before he could go back to cooking, there was college to attend, as per parental demands. So Hoffman enrolled at UC Santa Cruz, where he counted gray seals for a professor and learned about the perils of the green revolution before dropping out to cook at a local restaurant. He again loved the line but, ready to come home, ignored a friend's advice that he should go work at this place in Berkeley called Chez Panisse.\n\nInstead, back in Manhattan, he cooked at La Colombe d'Or, one of the first French restaurants in New York to serve rustic Proven\u00e7al cooking rather than haute cuisine. That sensibility appealed to Hoffman\u2014simpler food that wasn't \"Frenchie La French,\" as he puts it. So did John McPhee's 1979 _New Yorker_ piece Brigade de Cuisine, about a European-trained chef in a tiny town in Pennsylvania raising his own trout and cooking what grew nearby.\n\nWhen the opportunity to master that kind of cooking arose, Hoffman jumped at the chance. He had wanted to study in Paris with chef Madeline Kamman after reading her book _The Making of a Cook_ but her classes were full. \"I got a phone call on the pay phone at [La Colombe d'Or],\" he recounts: '\"There's been a cancellation,' a voice informed him. 'If you can be in France in two weeks, you can be in Madeleine's class.'\" He made it, and spent the last of his college money on three months cooking with Kamman, whose core concepts have formed the framework of his cooking since: that regional foods were rooted in geography and social history, and that the true way to cook was using, he recalls, \"what was in the moment and what was in the market.\"\n\nThose seem like no-brainers now that everyone has turnip tattoos, but at the time, the approach was just taking root stateside, coalescing as something called New American cuisine. Back home, Hoffman immersed himself in it, reveling in the food of trailblazing restaurants like An American Place, originally opened on the Upper East Side by chef Larry Forgione\u2014\"I ate my first morel in his restaurant,\" Hoffman dreamily recalls\u2014and the Quilted Giraffe, the quirky French farmhouse-y spot in Turtle Bay where Hoffman cooked alongside Ray Bradley, who would go on to be one of the Greenmarket's most beloved farmers. He moved to the kitchens of Hubert's on 22nd, a townhouse turned New American bistro where he met Susan Rosenfeld, who would eventually become his wife.\n\nThey knew they wanted to open a restaurant, but first he would complete two more stints abroad\u2014one in Provence with Richard Olney, the Iowa-born author of cookbooks on French country fare, the second at a restaurant in Japan. (\"I saw an aesthetic that would bring the natural world to the plate,\" says Hoffman of the latter trip, counterbalancing the French penchant for what he calls \"manipulation of the natural world: dots and cubes and brunoise.\")\n\nHoffman married Rosenfeld in 1988, and they set out in search of a space to open the restaurant they'd been imagining together. When they stumbled on that shuttered SoHo luncheonette, Hoffman looked up the lease in the city's records. It was coming up for grabs, and thus Savoy was born in a fledgling artists' outpost in the wasteland east of Broadway, a lifetime before direct trade macchiatos proliferated and shoppers' stilettos provided the sidewalk soundtrack. Susan worked the simple, 40-seat dining room, behind which guests could glimpse Peter in the tiny kitchen. He made connections with local farmers and fishers and foragers, cooking their harvests into dishes like marinated halibut with cucumber salad and braised duck with Concord grape puree. In 1995 they annexed the upstairs apartment, got a liquor license, and put in a bar and a working fireplace. The Times noticed, and critic Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant two stars.\n\nHoffman was still Savoy's sole chef, and his handiwork would go on to become signatures of a scene: He has an \"instinctive understanding of vegetables,\" Reichl wrote, a way with salads (\"you will instantly be seduced\"), plus a penchant for breaking rules: \"Who would expect that rosy slices of grilled peppered tuna in a vinaigrette based on the classic Catalan romesco sauce (ground nuts, peppers and tomatoes), would be served with good old American onion rings? Fabulous onion rings, I might add, made of sweet red onions.\" Reichl nailed the feel of the place itself: \"The small restaurant is so casual, so comfortable and so unpretentious,\" she wrote, \"that it is hard to believe it is in Manhattan.\"\n\nMany restaurateurs have taken the same approach, and several have done it better, but Hoffman's serious study of farm and food issues remains a rarity. Which makes it easy to see why, when Frank Bruni gave Savoy its second glowing two-star _Times_ review in 2009, he called the restaurant New York's Chez Panisse, an East Coast answer to Alice Waters's Berkeley-based birthplace of the good food revolution.\n\nBoth Waters and Hoffman drew inspiration from youthful tours of France and Italy, but both ultimately formed consistent allegiance to Americana\u2014from half-wild cress foraged on a Hudson Valley riverbank to wild salmon caught by Native Americans off the Alaskan coast. (\"It's a delicious fish, and it's supporting indigenous fishing communities,\" says Hoffman, for whom the latter is as important a trait as the former.) Both kitchens have served as springboards, their line-cook lineage traced like one big family tree across the country's locavore landscape. Hoffman's culinary offspring all but created what _New York_ magazine dubbed \"New Brooklyn Cuisine:\" Minds behind RoseWater, Diner, the Grocery and Franny's were all sparked at his stoves.\n\nBut moreover, like Waters, Hoffman has long been happy to leave the stoves to hired hands like Ryan Tate at Savoy and Shanna Pacifico at Back Forty, freeing him up to save the world. While others pursue television spots and lucrative advertising sponsorships\u2014Hoffman has turned down both\u2014this guy is after another kind of action, the kind whose payoff is a different kind of change.\n\nHe's always been much more than a chef, even back when he was still the one cooking. The man spent 10 years as the only chef on the Greenmarket's advisory board, helping guide and grow the city's market system to the marvel and model it is today. He is a founding member of Chefs Collaborative, the national network of professional cooks working to teach their colleagues where, how and why to find sustainably sourced products. And when he's not considering the concept and a name for his new restaurant\u2014it will balance his philosophy with a price point and feel that fits Soho's touristy clientele, he says\u2014he's hard at work on a marketdriven memoir (with recipes) that we can't wait to read.\n\nThose projects are only possible when you delegate the day-to-day: Having traded his whites for brown cords and button-downs, he still shows up at both restaurants nearly every day with new product and new ideas, but insists on changes only when something's really wrong. (Missteps, like a basil cocktail from a new bartender in February, are pretty rare.) \"I'm not the chef anymore,\" Hoffman freely admits, \"but I'm still the culinary director. I hold out a set of guidelines by which the restaurants operate.\"\n\nThose go beyond sourcing to stuff like caring about your staff: \"One good thing about Peter,\" says Tate, \"is he wants his employees to have a life.\" For the most part, he lets Tate and Pacifico do what they want if they follow his heart. \"It doesn't have to be his food,\" says Tate, \"it just has to be his philosophy.\"\n\nThis summer he'll focus that philosophy at Back Forty, which he named after the hidden quarter of land on the Midwestern parcels doled out by the Homestead Act of 1862. The government gave away 120-acre blocks, Hoffman explains, sketching rectangles on a scrap of paper, and the quarter farthest from the road was most likely to be left wild and wooded. It was also the place, he adds with a smile, \"where you would go to make out.\"\n\nThat's maybe true of his own Back Forty, too, thanks to its sweet backyard, communal tables and that laid-back menu\u2014\"great ingredients in casual delicious ways,\" as Hoffman puts it\u2014that will likely inspire what happens at the space where Savoy now stands.\n\nBack Forty's menu is largely driven by the butchery skills Pacifico mastered in order to break down whole carcasses from Fleisher's Grass-Fed Meats upstate. While her vegetables shine\u2014roasted roots and tangles of the sweetest spring greens\u2014Back Forty is a carnivore's delight: fried pork jowl nuggets with pepper jelly; fat housemade sausages that change nearly every week; a terrine with stoneground mustard; grilled flatbread made with lard and topped with a mouthful of pig's trotters, bacon, melted onions and thyme. Yet Back Forty is best known for Pacifico's contender for best-in-city patty, transformed from trimmings of her two weekly deliveries of a half steer, served on a buttered sesame bun with spicy ketchup and a housemade pickle. (Tomatoes, too, says Pacifico, but only in season).\n\nDespite the handiwork of his chefs, Hoffman is still master of ceremonies, especially during those idea-centric fireside feasts held for 18 years at Savoy. At those family-style nights of dinner and discussion, all manner of tastemaker\u2014from Betty Fussell to Joel Salatin to Stephen Jay Gould\u2014have held forth in front of the upstairs fireplace and, between each course, discussed the fate of local fisheries, the flavors of the Riviera, the follies of the Farm Bill or the forestry skills of Umbrian truffle hunters. Way back in 1995, Michael Pollan spoke about the history of apples in America\u2014a decade before his Omnivore's Dilemma would hit nearly every nightstand in the nation.\n\nAs much about philosophy as they are about food, those communal hearth-side chats are what we'll miss most about Savoy, those nights when the place transcended typecast and become nothing less than a salon. Savoy's final shad dinner this March featured a lecture on the species (and a recipe for the pickled fish) by none other than Chris Letts, who took Hoffman fishing for shad back in 1974 and put him on the path to Prince Street. When he and Hoffman took the floor that night it became a pulpit, as they re-inspired eaters that when it comes to voting with your fork, hell yes you can, and hell yes you should.\n\nStill, while Hoffman is often called the ur-locavore, he doesn't identify himself as such: \"It's a simplistic look at an extremely complex topic,\" he says of the term. Citrus, olives, chocolate and countless other foods from afar share pride of place on both his menus, just as long as his sustainable sensibilities\u2014that those foods come from independent groves or eco-enlightened fishers\u2014stay true. Moreover, Hoffman claims the question of what to call his culinary philosophy isn't what matters. \"You don't think Jackson Pollock called himself an experimentalist, do you? He was too busy painting. I could talk about it,\" he says of his life's work, \"but mostly I was just doing it.\"\n\nAs it happens, for once we disagree. It's not so much Hoffman's cuisine that draws us back time after time, or Savoy's menu that we will miss most, but his fireside wisdom, and his longstanding role in illuminating our place in the world. \"Savoy has been my life for the past 21 years,\" he says wistfully, \"that place, that style and all the rest . . . but now I am getting excited about what it will become.\" If that includes conversation by the hearth, then we are, too.\n\n### APPETITE FOR PERFECTION\n\n### By Ed Leibowitz\n\n### From _Los Angeles Magazine_\n\n### Writer-at-large Ed Leibowitz has profiled everyone from actor Charlton Heston to controversial defense attorney Gloria Allred for _Los Angeles Magazine._ He has also written about culture and politics for _The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Men's Journal, Money, BusinessWeek,_ and _the New York Times._\n\nRobyn Sewitz is almost done flipping through the latest _Bon App\u00e9tit_ this Sunday afternoon when she makes a discovery she just has to share with her son. Brushing back a lock of her auburn hair, she calls to him across her spacious kitchen. \"Jon,\" she says, \"here's boar hunting for beginners!\"\n\n\"Oh yeah?\" he says, halting his knife's progress. Several weeks shy of his 16th birthday, Jon is tall and lean, his full cheeks not yet ready for their first serious shave, but after all those months he's spent studying cookbooks, mastering culinary modernism, and apprenticing in professional kitchens, he's a more capable cook than either of his parents will ever be. Jon's a sophomore at the Oakwood School, a private progressive academy in North Hollywood. His mother is a psychotherapist, while his father, David, designs furniture and window treatments for clients of enormous net worth.\n\nLike many Oakwood parents, the Sewitzes regard their child's artistic ambitions not as some passing teenage fancy but as a creative flowering that could lead to great things. When Jon thought he wanted to be a musician, they signed him up for lessons and invested in a Bellafina double bass. He plays in the school orchestra and jazz band, but much of the time now his instrument sits on its side in the deserted music parlor of their Encino home, like a dejected mastiff.\n\nJon's food epiphany came during a family trip to Spain a couple of years ago. Robyn wasn't trying to make a chef out of him when she booked dinner reservations at El Celler de Can Roca, which earned three stars in the 2011 Michelin Guide. She wanted to expose him to something that would pique his interest more than the art museums were. Jon's palate still carries the sensations of that meal: oysters served in the bottom half of a wine bottle with carbonated _cava_ sauce; eggplant souffl\u00e9 wrapped in white sardines; a lineup of mussels, one bathed in bergamot foam, another in nectarine jelly and caramelized rose petal, and another in \"distilled earth jelly,\" a clear sauce derived from a dab of mud that was boiled for hours at low temperatures in an evaporator. \"It tasted like dirt you'd try when you were a kid,\" he says, \"when it didn't taste bad.\" Dessert was even more spectacular. \"It had apple in it, cinnamon, and vanilla cr\u00e8me,\" he says. \"They brought out a DKNY perfume bottle and had us taste the dessert as we smelled the perfume, and the dessert tasted exactly like the perfume's aroma.\" In nine courses Jon was transformed. \"I would always go back to that experience in my mind,\" he says, \"how food could be so amazing you could remember it forever.\"\n\nAs Jon continues with his knife at the marble-topped kitchen island, he's joined by 17-year-old Sam Yehros and 18-year-old Macklin Casnoff, both seniors at Oakwood. They dice and pulverize, clarify and puree, strain and scour. For almost two years the friends have been collaborating on original multicourse dinners, charging only for ingredients, that they prepare for special occasions\u2014a brother pushing off to college or a mom celebrating a birthday along with a tableful of relatives and friends.\n\nIf there were any single event that brought these three together as a cooking collective, it would be the Oakwood winter immersion program of 2009. While other students headed out with teachers to roam China or photograph Death Valley, Macklin found himself with 15 classmates in a cabin in Utah contemplating Euclid's Golden Ratio. They cross-country skied and discussed whether the ancient Greek concept of beauty and proportion could apply to their world. Macklin's world had been sharks, then skateboards, but lately he had rekindled an old passion for food. Back home, when he wasn't watching _Iron Chef,_ Macklin and his friend Henry Kwapis would explore how to apply the Golden Ratio to fine cuisine. They tried cold-calling some of the best chefs in L.A. to see if they could come in and ask them about their craft. Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s, meeting them at his Beverly Hills restaurant the Bazaar, was so impressed by the philosophical sweep of their questions that he answered in a 45-minute stream of consciousness, punctuating his thoughts with a liquid olive and molecular _caprese_ in a pipette. \"Look at the light above your head,\" he commanded, loud and jolly. \"Now try to eat it. This is how I look at food.\"\n\nWhen Jon heard about what Macklin and Henry had been doing, he asked to tag along for their talks with Michael Cimarusti at Providence and David Myers at his now-defunct dining room, Sona. Before long Jon was an unpaid apprentice in Sona's kitchen, and Macklin was learning by Cimarusti's side. As the two boys began cooking meals for friends and family, Macklin started experimenting in the kitchen with Sam, his Hancock Park neighbor, who had his own apprenticeship with Neal Fraser of Grace. Within a few months the two operations merged.\n\n\"See, look how cool,\" says Jon's mother, holding up the magazine article, which has shots of the hunter and roasted pork, but no dead pigs. \"This is a vacation you should take. You can get in touch with your inner Michael Pollan.\"\n\n\"What?\" says Jon, distracted.\n\n\"You haven't read _The Omnivore's Dilemma_?\" asks Sam, referring to Pollan's book, a James Beard award winner that ends with the author trying his luck at hunting and gathering.\n\n\"I did,\" Jon says.\n\n\"You didn't read all of it,\" Macklin says with a smile.\n\n\"Yeah, I did.\"\n\n\"You admitted to me you hadn't read all of it.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Jon says, \"I read a _lot_ of it.\"\n\n\"Jon is dying to kill an animal, which I don't approve of,\" Robyn tells me. \"I don't like the idea of holding a gun and killing anything, to be honest. It goes against my whole belief system, but it's better than suffering on one of those terrible farms.\"\n\nOften Sam, Macklin, and Jon seem more like they're members of a teen rock group than three exceedingly capable cooks. One moment they'll be chomping blueberry Airheads or playing basketball on the Xbox or downloading Toto's \"Africa\" from iTunes just to goof on it. The next they'll be transfixed by a YouTube video of Chicago chef Grant Achatz demonstrating his solid-sauce technique or discussing the radical foraging philosophy of Ren\u00e9 Redzepi, the chef at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen. Like a band, the boys have given themselves a name: Samacon (Sam, Macklin, and Jon squished together). For their gigs they even bring in backup players\u2014Henry, who's 17, and another Oakwood friend, Brendan Garrett, who's 16, to help out as sous-chefs.\n\nUnlike teen rockers, though, the Samacon chefs have taken up an art form thoroughly rooted in the adult world and have mastered it with an idealism and fellowship that usually disappears with age. They aren't cocky about their work or egomaniacal\u2014they are constantly challenging each other but never competing for supremacy. I could tell they knew they were good, but they had no way to measure _how_ good. The friends and relatives at their dinners were cheering for them regardless of what came out on the plate, and the chefs they've worked for hadn't tried the boys' creations.\n\nSo one afternoon over burgers I asked them if they'd like to put together one of their nine-course meals for the chefs they admire most. \"It would be nerve-racking,\" Jon told me, \"probably the most nerve-racking thing we've ever done. But it would be amazing if we could cook for great chefs.\"\n\nAfter wresting a blank check from my editor to pay for ingredients, I asked the boys for their ultimate guest list and began making calls. Five agreed to attend: Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery and Osteria Mozza; Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook of Animal and the recently launched Son of a Gun; Fraser, of Grace; and Ludo Lefebvre, creator of LudoBites pop-up restaurants, an occasional judge on _Top Chef,_ and starting next month, the star of his own reality show on the Sundance Channel. Now all the boys needed to do was pull off the best meal of their young lives.\n\n**A La Carte**\n\nA week and a day before their big dinner, the Samacon chefs gather at Jon's kitchen table to hammer out their menu. They agree on the squid kimchi _amuse-bouche_ ; the scallop with radish and black sesame; the hay-roasted, kale-wrapped pork medallions; and a whiskey-tangerine-nutmeg palate cleanser. Consulting the list in Macklin's disintegrating Moleskine notebook, they even agree on the raw oyster with bittersweet chocolate\u2014admittedly a risk. They only have to settle on one more entr\u00e9e. To Macklin, what their meal lacks is a strong narrative, and he has a solution: \"Chefs, I think, are less concerned about being served the type of food they might be doing in their own restaurants,\" he says. \"I feel like a chef's favorite thing to eat is, like, a roasted chicken or a fatty piece of pork.\"\n\n\"That would be _so_ good,\" says Sam, his brown eyes almost moistening behind his horn-rimmed glasses. It's as if he's just turned 70, not 17, and has bitten into Proust's madeleine. \"My mom makes roast chicken, and then you add quartered sweet potatoes and then potatoes and carrots, and the fat from the chicken soaks them as you're roasting.\"\n\n\"We roast a chicken and bring it to the table,\" Macklin says, \"and they pull it apart. It's not like we're serving people who want everything to be done for them. Chefs love to get involved.\"\n\nJon is aghast. \"We'd have to carve it for them,\" he says with the crumpled brow of somebody whose universe is near collapse.\n\n\"No, we don't,\" Macklin says. \"I see one of the chefs cutting it. It can be a communal thing, and we can even be out there talking because that's sort of where there's a little bit of a break in the meal.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" says Jon, \"but they're not coming to this dinner for that. They're expecting teen chefs who've worked at some of the best restaurants. I know it's cool, but there's no restaurant that has beautiful, sophisticated plating, and suddenly it goes family style and back to beautiful plating. The menu _is_ all about a story, and it has to flow. If it doesn't flow, the diners are not happy, and they just leave confused.\"\n\nLike many Macklin concepts\u2014the seemingly impossible wheat grass puree he executed for their last dinner, the rosemary soda company that hasn't gotten off the ground\u2014his homey chicken interlude could lead to counterintuitive triumph or the abyss. Jon brings to the enterprise his expertise in modernism and molecular gastronomy, and Sam, his more traditional approach. But Samacon wouldn't be what it is without their combined talent for managing Macklin.\n\n\"I believe,\" Macklin says, \"that doing a dish that's family style and the most simple, perfect thing in the world would show our reverence for what food is. What food means. The fact that it brings people together.\"\n\nEventually Macklin loses his ally. \"If we're trying to make the whole meal communal,\" Sam says, \"then we have to change the entire menu.\" Instead they opt for _loup de mer,_ which will evoke the simplicity of country French cuisine, though Macklin has trouble letting go. \"I don't want to argue about roast chicken anymore,\" he says. \"Because I have very strong feelings about roast chicken. OK?\"\n\n**Locally Grown**\n\nHis generation of L.A. teenagers has taken to food like no other before it. They've grown up in a messy, polyglot city where often only the shared experience of eating Vietnamese _pho_ and Salvadoran _pupusas_ and Ethiopian lamb cakes can seem capable of holding everything together. They've spent countless hours watching the culinary blood sport of _Top Chef_ and _Iron Chef_ and (for those whose parents can swing it) learned their way around the menus of high-end restaurants. They'll opine authoritatively on Yelp about tripe soup just as quickly as they'll wince when Grandpa asks the waiter what the hell a _pappardelle_ is.\n\nBut Sam, Macklin, and Jon are a category unto themselves. Of the five guests at their chefs' dinner, only Ludo Lefebvre hasn't met at least one of them before. Shook and Dotolo got to know Jon, Macklin, and Henry the way many other L.A. chefs did: a series of phone calls and e-mails, unanswered in this case, followed by a teenage siege on their restaurant. \"We kind of blew it off at first,\" says Shook. \"Then we saw a couple of bicycles parked outside. 'Like, it's so cool that somebody stopped in on a bike ride here,' we thought, and the manager was like, 'Oh, it's those kids.'\" Shook and Dotolo invited them into the kitchen to observe and help out. By closing time there was a steady rain. \"And I was like, 'Put the bikes in the back of the Jeep, and I'll drive you home,'\" Shook recalls.\n\nJon and Brendan, the Samacon sous-chef, met Nancy Silverton through Oakwood. They're close friends with her son, who also attends the school. In fact, they're all spending time together with Silverton at her house in Umbria this summer as soon as Jon and Brendan finish the two-week apprenticeship she's arranged with Dario Cecchini, Italy's most famous butcher. \"Jonathan Gold is going to be in town working on a _Saveur_ article they're doing about Umbria,\" she says of the food critic. \"So it will be fun for those guys to eat with Jonathan.\"\n\nMacklin may meet them there, too. The Silverton influence reaches far back into his past, when he carpooled with her son to kindergarten. At the time Silverton and Mark Peel were married, running Campanile and La Brea Bakery together. Picking up Macklin in the morning, they were already well into their workday. \"They would come from the fish market or the vegetable market,\" he says. \"I was always interested in their double life.\" When Macklin was 13, he bumped into Peel at school. \"I was like, 'Hey, I've been thinking about it,'\" he remembers, \"'and I'd love to come in and work.'\"\n\n\"He spent one day peeling garbanzo beans,\" says Macklin's father, Philip Casnoff, an actor who had his breakthrough playing Patrick Swayze's nemesis in the 1985 miniseries _North and South. \"I_ never saw him look so exhausted in his life. His second day he cut his finger badly, and after the third day he was gone.\"\n\n\"I was too young to appreciate it,\" Macklin tells me, \"and I didn't force myself to stay there long enough to really get it. I thought, 'This isn't for me\u2014it's too much.' I really loved it, though.\"\n\nHe's had an easier time working on Sundays with Cimarusti at Providence. \"Coming out of cooking school, three or four years into a career, people can be making great progress, but they may also have developed bad habits,\" says Cimarusti, who will be in France the night of the chefs' dinner. \"They believe what they've learned so far is gospel. But Macklin came here to be programmed, and whether it's the sous-chefs teaching him or myself, we've molded him to be exactly what we wanted. Also, he realizes quality\u2014what are good ingredients, what are great ingredients, and what are bad ingredients\u2014and that's something that doesn't come naturally to most people.\"\n\nNeal Fraser says much the same thing about Sam. \"I've had people who've come in from culinary school who were very game, then they'd get their Gucci loafers dirty,\" he says. \"With Sam, he'd burn or cut himself, and all you would see was him in the corner taping himself up.\" From that first conversation, when Sam cold-called Fraser, they hit it off. \"I rode my bike down to Grace,\" he says. \"Neal had told me to ask for Jason, the sous-chef. I got there at about two o'clock and started chopping carrots.\" He began as a prep cook, then graduated to garnishing salads before Fraser let him work the fish station and the grill.\n\nSam's success in landing a job at Grace shocked his father. \"When he said, 'I'm going to call these restaurants and ask for an internship,' and mentioned some highbrow ones in Los Angeles, I just rolled my eyes,\" says Ilan Yehros, who waited tables and worked in the kitchens at several restaurants in Toronto. \"There's no way in hell that somebody would let a 15-year-old in with all the knives and equipment around. Kitchens are busy places. No one has the patience.\"\n\nIlan still liked to cook after he became a banker. He would wake up at four in the morning and pad into the kitchen to check his beef stock for some bravura French meal weeks in the making. Back then Sam and his siblings would occasionally serve their parents breakfast in bed and cook simple dinners. Without cable TV, Sam didn't have the Food Network for inspiration, so he turned to his father's copy of _Larousse Gastronomique,_ the classic-French culinary encyclopedia.\n\nDuring the Yehroses' vacation in Provence last summer, Sam and his dad took a seven-and-a-half-hour excursion to chef Edouard Loubet's two-star Michelin restaurant at the hotel La Bastide de Capelongue. \"I wanted Sam to be enlightened about food,\" says Ilan, \"to understand it as a chef clearly at the top of his profession understands it.\" They got there early, and Loubet gave them a tour of the kitchen. Sam worked his way through 14 courses on a hilltop patio, awestruck. \"The first course was a really light vinegary soup and escargots,\" he tells me. \"It was amazing, with this beautiful bouquet of tiny flowers on the edge of the bowl.\" He loved the snails and the frogs' legs but not the veal kidneys. \"I could only eat one and a half of them,\" he tells me. \"It's an acquired taste.\"\n\n**Garnishing**\n\nOne more day until dinner is served. The Lakers are fighting hard against the Celtics and their own lethargy, which isn't good for saut\u00e9ing vegetables. \"Henry,\" Jon yells. \"You haven't been watching your oil, and now it's burnt.\" Henry springs from his seat in the den and sprints to the Thermidor range in his skinny jeans and distressed leather shoes. The damage turns out to be minimal. They all watch part of the game during lunchtime, when Brendan, gentle faced and built like a linebacker, refuels everybody with helpings of his home-cooked stew.\n\nEarlier this morning the chefs went shopping at the Hollywood Farmers' Market. They knew right where to find the vendors with the plumpest Kumamoto oysters, the most recently harvested pea tendrils, and were gone within an hour. From there they visited McCall's Meat and Fish Shop in Silver Lake, whose owner had cooked in several highly regarded restaurants before becoming a butcher.\n\n\"I swear,\" Macklin told me earlier, \"McCall's is like the best butcher shop in the world, probably.\" At which point Sam offered a little perspective. \"They are not the best butcher shop in the world. There are so many instances where Macklin says, 'This is the _best_ thing I've ever had.'\"\n\n\"I was just excited,\" Macklin explained.\n\n\"You just haven't had a lot of life experience,\" Sam said.\n\nAll week, with lesser ingredients, the chefs had rehearsed almost every dish. Today they work the kitchen with practiced efficiency and no trace of nerves. They don't use measuring spoons or timers, and aside from Henry's incident with the oil, they don't lose any ingredients to mishaps or crossed signals. Jon, Samacon's youngest and most focused chef, assigns Henry and Brendan tasks that send them scurrying across the bamboo floor. Sam tosses two scorched eggplants into Jon's Vitamix 5200 and grinds them to a sweet, smoky paste. He tries a teaspoonful, letting it settle on his palate. \"Needs sherry,\" he says.\n\n\"Don't put too much sherry in it because of the red pepper,\" Jon warns.\n\nMacklin drops a slotted spoon into a tall, steaming pot and captures a sweetbread. He gives it a jab with his finger and then throws it back in.\n\n\"They're being poached,\" Henry tells me, his blond bangs wilting in the steam. Then turning to Macklin, \"Did I use the right terminology?\"\n\n\"Poached in lime and lemon juice and chicken stock,\" says Macklin. He's dressed in a vintage short-sleeved shirt with thick red and white stripes\u2014standard issue for selling saltwater taffy on the Atlantic City boardwalk in 1952. \"This is how they do sweetbreads at Animal,\" he explains. \"They said that when you're pre-blanching sweetbreads, you have to cook them to the consistency of. . .\" he trails off.\n\nOf what? I ask him.\n\n\"Silicone breast implants.\"\n\n\"Macklin, Jesus,\" Jon says.\n\n\"I had visions of lots of things other than that, when he was so circumspect about talking about it,\" says Jon's mother, Robyn, at her usual post in the kitchen. The boys have slept at her house for the past couple of nights. Twice they've tried to watch the Disney movie _Ratatouille_ on Jon's flat screen, and both times they've fallen asleep before Remy the Rat becomes the greatest chef in all of France.\n\n**Table for Five**\n\n7 p.m. The table has been set in the Sewitz dining room, with its polished limestone floor, antique Chinese doors, and high-backed seats designed by Jon's dad. To psych themselves up, Sam, Macklin, and Jon are sporting white headbands, the kind favored by Ginsuwielding chefs at those rock-and-roll sushi palaces of the '90s. The look clashes with the Zen-like tranquillity they've maintained as they've prepped the dinner. They might be more anxious if they were able to read the thoughts of the guests now trickling in for the meal.\n\nNancy Silverton is the first to arrive, in chunky eyeglasses and a dark coat, her hair a mass of curls gathered tightly on top of her head. She plants a big kiss on Robyn's cheek and gives the boys a maternal hug. All the while she's puzzling over how she's going to give the boys honest feedback about a meal she doesn't expect to be spectacular.\n\nA few minutes later come Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook, hirsute and stocky in respectable dark sweaters. Dotolo has been worrying about the food as well. On the ride over he'd asked Shook what they should do if the meal bombs. \"I think it's going to be pretty good,\" Shook assured him. \"They didn't do that bad when they were in the kitchen at Animal.\"\n\nThen Ludo Lefebvre strides in, the rolled-up sleeves of his plaid shirt revealing a riot of tattoos, his hair thick and stylishly cut. As the boys awkwardly shake his hand, he's not sure what to make of them. He just knows that he wouldn't have felt comfortable cooking for a bunch of chefs when he was their age. In fact, Neal Fraser is the only chef who comes to the dinner table with high expectations.\n\nThe guests don't have much time to settle into their seats before Sam, Jon, and Henry swoop down in dive-bomber formation with the amuse-bouche. Brendan follows, filling the glasses halfway. Sly and the Family Stone play on hidden speakers. \"So this is sort of an amuse,\" Macklin says with an adrenaline grin. \"It's squid marinated in kimchi, and there's a little bit of kimchi at the bottom. There is lime zest and parsley, and then we have unfiltered sake. I don't know much about pairing, but we went to a wine place, and they told us that this would go well with it.\"\n\nThe chefs wait until the boys are safely back in the kitchen before anyone gives the dish a try. Silverton scoops up the squid, finishes it in a bite, and scans the table for reactions. _\"All right,\"_ she says. \"I'm impressed.\"\n\n\"As an amuse,\" Lefebvre says, \"it's good.\"\n\nThe mood dampens with the arrival of the second course, which Jon introduces as a Kumamoto oyster with buttermilk sauce, a disk of dark chocolate, radish, and fennel fronds on top. The guests spend a few moments contemplating the glistening bulk on their plates with the gallowslike expression of that Dr. Seuss character compelled to try a mouthful of green eggs and ham. \"The first time I cooked an oyster for my family,\" Lefebvre says, \"I was 14 years old. I didn't prepare the oysters very well. I kept them out all day.\"\n\n\"And everyone got sick?\" Silverton says, laughing. Lefebvre gives her a sheepish nod.\n\n\"Are you trying to warn me?\" Fraser asks Lefebvre, looking up from his dish. \"Is that what you're telling me?\"\n\nWhen they finally put it in their mouths, most seem astonished to find that the combination isn't awful. Fraser is almost enthusiastic. \"The fattiness of the chocolate is completely different from the fattiness of the oysters, you know what I mean?\" he says. \"Usually you just swallow oysters. Because of the texture of the chocolate, though, you can almost chew them together.\"\n\n\"You know what I appreciate?\" says Silverton. \"That the chocolate is so thin.\"\n\n\"I don't taste the chocolate,\" says Lefebvre. \"I don't know about the dish, but I like the risk. I love risk in cooking. And it's not bad.\"\n\nThe third course\u2014cubed scallop, radish, and black sesame\u2014is a hit. \"It's cool that they have that edge, to think of that combination at this age,\" Lefebvre says. By the time she's tried the sweetbreads with burnt eggplant puree, almond marshmallow, and two-toned parsley bread crumbs, Silverton is verging on exuberance. \"These bread crumbs are beautiful,\" she says. \"And their technique from start to finish is spot-on.\"\n\n\"It's a solid dish,\" Lefebvre says. \"I have some cooks working for me for a long time\u2014I don't know if they could do a dish like this. And the sweetbread is cooked perfectly. It's very pink inside and crispy. Perfect! To see this technique at this age . . .\"\n\n\"You know what I think we need? We need a photo of our plates,\" Silverton says. She waves over the photographer who's shooting the meal for this story. Turning to me, she says, \"We're not being polite.\"\n\n\"I am from France,\" Lefebvre says. \"I'm _not_ polite.\"\n\nIn the kitchen there's no clattering, no commotion, no voices raised in panic or frustration, no rushing feet or bodies bumping into each other. Macklin rests his knuckles against the loup de mer on the cooling rack. \"The fish is done,\" he says. \"The skin could be a bit crispier.\" He gently lowers each fillet back into the frying pan. The seasonal vegetables in their butter glaze are bright as protoplasm beneath the lights. Sam, Jon, Brendan, and Henry plate them in a tight circle. The loup de mer is placed atop, slightly cantilevered, skin side up.\n\nIt's fallen to Jon again to introduce the dish. \"On the bottom is our attempt to have a traditional French sauce, and it's a sauce _bercy_ ,\" he says, pronouncing it \"ber- _say_.\"\n\n\"It's what?\" Lefebvre asks.\n\n\"Ber- _say_ ,\" Jon says.\n\n\"Ah, ber-see,\" Lefebvre says. Then, like a schoolteacher: \"Remember it the next time when you speak French.\"\n\n_\"Oui, oui_ ,\" says Jon, backing out of the room.\n\n\"So why do you think he said 'attempted' to do a sauce?\" Silverton asks after the boys have gone.\n\n\"'Cause Ludo's sitting here,\" Fraser says.\n\n\"It's cool that they do a classic like this,\" says Lefebvre. \"It's well balanced. You have molecular dishes and then a little classic. And what I'm impressed with is really their technique, and the fish is cooked perfectly. The skin is crispy.\"\n\n\"The vegetables are cooked really nice,\" says Dotolo.\n\n\"I like this even better than the sweetbreads,\" says Shook. \"I wish I could get a dish this caliber at most restaurants in the city.\"\n\n\"This city?\" says Silverton. \" _Any_ city.\"\n\nThe dishes the boys had cooked during their practice sessions looked beautiful, and what I'd tried tasted pretty amazing. But just as Silverton came to this meal worrying about the euphemisms she'd have to come up with, I was concerned about having to hear praise that would betray itself as little more than a pat on the head. Nonetheless this is getting ridiculous\u2014five of the city's leading chefs cleaning their plates, raving about the food, and as best as I can tell, meaning every word. Seeking shelter from the hosannas, I return to the kitchen. Sam asks how they like the meal. After I repeat some choice quotes, the boys are hugging each other and high-fiving.\n\n\"We should all stick together,\" Sam says. \"I don't really want to graduate anymore.\"\n\n\"I just want to cook for chefs,\" Jon says.\n\n\"I just don't want to go to school tomorrow,\" Macklin says. \"Let's just open a restaurant.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Sam says. \"Can we open a restaurant now?\"\n\n\"Hey,\" says Henry, \"we're getting way ahead of ourselves.\"\n\nTonight will be the culmination of their work together. Jon, though he'll have two more years to decide, is thinking of skipping higher education, since it would be too big a detour from his goal of becoming a professional chef. This fall Macklin is bound for Bard College, in the Catskills, and Sam might take a year off to travel before beginning at Reed College, in Oregon. They may still end up opening restaurants, or they'll be pulled away by fresh possibilities. Jon will be getting his driver's license soon, able to transport himself to a new restaurant job\u2014wherever it may be\u2014on weekends. But it seems certain that none of the chefs they've worked under or might work under, and none of the other friends they've made or will make, are likely to have nearly the same impact on their creative growth as they've had on each other.\n\nThe next dish\u2014hay-roasted pork medallions with coleslaw, minimalist barbecue sauce, and mahogany-tinged roasted potatoes on a cat-eye-shaped plate\u2014seems to flow right out of them. So too the whiskey-tangerine-nutmeg palate cleanser and the hazelnut streusel with coffee soil, hay ice cream, and caramel broth. In the dining room Fraser admires the spare Scandinavian beauty of the final course: pear sorbet, sponge cake, apricot puree, lemongrass, lemon rind, and chamomile gel. \"This,\" he says, \"is the essence of winter. It's kind of stoic. Like if Ingmar Bergman made a dessert, this is what it would taste like, right?\"\n\n\"I'm glad that there is one smart person at this table,\" says Shook.\n\nTentatively the teen chefs peek in, then pull up a few chairs.\n\n\"You're the calmest cooks I've ever seen,\" Silverton says. \"We think you did . . .\"\n\n\"An amazing job,\" says Shook.\n\n\"To cook a fish perfectly,\" says Lefebvre, \"or do a sweetbread perfectly, or cook pork perfectly\u2014that's not easy.\"\n\n\"Everyone at this table was so blown away by the technique that you guys put into the dishes,\" says Dotolo, \"and the thoughtfulness of them all\u2014even though we all taste the food differently. If you stay in this business, it will constantly happen where some people taste something and they might love it, and some people might hate it, especially if you guys are taking risks, which you're obviously doing, which is cool. Definitely don't stop doing that.\"\n\n\"We all said that we could have been eating at anyone's restaurant as a contemporary,\" says Silverton. \"Anywhere, easily . . .\"\n\n\"Now we're going to do one of the most embarrassing things,\" says Shook. \"The applause.\"\n\nSlumped in their chairs or over the table, the Samacon chefs absorb it all, exhilarated but beyond exhaustion, their faces still flushed after the clapping dies down. \"So,\" says Macklin, grinning at the dinner party. \"Now are you guys going to cook for us?\"\n\n### SUPPER CLUBS IN DENVER\n\n### By John Broening\n\n### From the _Denver Post_\n\n### Having worked in various big-name kitchens in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, John Broening is now the executive chef of three Denver restaurants, Duo, Olivea, and Spuntino. An ex-English major and son of a foreign correspondent, he keeps his writing skills honed with a weekly column for the _Denver Post._\n\n\"If Paul Prudhomme were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave,\" says Chris MacGillivray as he seasons his gumbo with a few decidedly nontraditional ingredients: sherry vinegar, agave syrup, and butter.\n\nThe gumbo is a sauce for what MacGillivray calls an \"Asian-Cajun dish\"\u2014Andouille sausage and shrimp-filled shumai dumplings garnished with a cross-section of fried okra.\n\nIt is the third course of Noble Swine Supper Club's August dinner, hosted by the owners of Crema, a scruffy luncheonette\/coffee shop in the heart of Denver's warehouse district north of Coors field.\n\nThe Noble Swine Supper Club, a loose collective of line cooks, chefs, managers, servers and sommeliers, has been around since 2010. Liz Batkin, a front-of-the-house manager who calls herself the Club's \"cat herder,\" describes Noble Swine as a \"floating dinner party.\" Batkin prefers to limit the events to about 30 people and mix half regulars with half newcomers.\n\nNoble Swine events feature place cards with assigned seating (\"we aim to inspire unexpected community\" the website declares). Democratic, informal, inexpensive to mount, spontaneous, and often wildly varying in quality, supper clubs are the perfect culinary vehicle for the Internet age\u2014they are the culinary equivalent of blogs. Unlike pop-up restaurants, which usually offer an a la carte menu and can run as long as several months, a supper club offers one fixed menu and a single seating. But both formats give otherwise unheralded cooks the opportunity to flex and shine.\n\nBatkin's husband, Andrew Van Stee, a slender, bearded wood-oven cook at Potager who helped found Noble Swine, enjoys the freedom to experiment and the freedom from having to run Noble Swine as a for-profit business.\n\nTraditional restaurant kitchens are usually the expression of the vision and personality of one person and value consistency and obedience to that vision. In a supper club, mistakes, experimentation, involved group discussion, and last-minute, improvisations are not frowned upon but actively encouraged. The menus are, more or less, conceived and executed collectively.\n\nA group e-mail about the event goes out about two weeks beforehand, listing the date and the site. Previous sites have included warehouses, empty apartments, and backyards. The menu is unknown to the guests until they sit down, but most of the regulars like that just fine. \"You're going out on a limb, but it's a controlled limb,\" says Carl Nixon, a regular who describes himself as an Internet abuse analyst.\n\nAn hour before a recent 7 o'clock dinner, the dining room at Crema is empty of people and furniture. But by 6:30, two folding tables and a few dozen mismatched chairs have been set up, a few rumpled tablecloths have been smoothed out and decorated with clumps of dried lavender, flowering dill and eucalyptus branches. Red-and-white wine glasses are set on the table, flanked by Mason jars for water.\n\nIt's been a hot day, and by the time the guests start to trickle in, the dining room thermostat reads a sweltering 83 degrees. Andrew Burch, the Supper Club's sommelier, has toweled off his glistening shaved head and changed his sweat-soaked T-shirt for a marginally dressier plaid button-down.\n\nNoble Swine does \"concept\" dinners: a Mexican dinner, a vegetarian dinner, an all-tomato dinner; and the Breakfast for Dinner menu, which featured a now-notorious take on chicken and waffles made with a huge slab of guinea hen. Tonight's dinner is a market menu, eight courses plus a cocktail, five wines, and coffee for $50.The menu features late-summer fruits and vegetables from the farmers market.\n\nThe vibe in the kitchen is chatty and casual. The food simmers away on makeshift equipment, camping stoves balanced on narrow counters, a three-tiered plastic steamer from Bed Bath & Beyond that looks like something you'd find at a yard sale. Stubby bottles of beer appear on workspaces after the second course goes out. A call for fresh herbs on a chicken liver dish demands a quick foray through a tenant's apartment to reach herb boxes behind the restaurant.\n\nMost of the cooks wear street clothes and sneakers. The best-groomed Swiner is the dishwasher, a barista at Crema who works in two-tone wingtips and sports a complicated hairstyle. (\"We pay him in high fives and beer,\" Van Stee says.)\n\nThe first course is a chilled soup made with Rocky Ford melons, garnished with slivers of yellow Peach tomatoes and shavings of pinkish Coppa salami from Il Mondo Vecchio. The dish pulses with color in the bowl, and on the palate, it tingles with farm-freshness. The soup brings out, surprisingly, the melonlike notes in the tomato. (MacGillivray admits that the combination of melons and tomatoes came from California chef David Kinch.)\n\nIf I've had a better restaurant dish in Denver, I can't remember what it was.\n\nThe chef in me wonders if a few dishes could have been improved by the intercession of a single, authoritative guiding hand. But the batting average is high. Crispy, pungent buttermilk-battered chicken livers with a deeply flavored jam made of heirloom peppers are followed by a moist grilled quail with pickled tomatoes and a sauce made from charred peaches.\n\nIn the long wait between the livers and the quail, BlackBerrys, cellphones, and digital cameras are taken out at the dinner tables. A few of the guests wander over to Crema's coffee nook, which doubles as the plating area, and chat easily with the cooks.\n\nDessert courses appear. A simple, vibrant dish of Red Heart plums marinated in Meyer lemon juice and sweet basil. A rectangle of zucchini cake garnished with pecan praline and brown butter ice cream. The zucchini cake is super-moist and more deeply flavored than most quick breads: Van Stee has replaced the traditional neutral oil in the recipe with cold-pressed hazelnut oil.\n\nFor the Noble Swine Supper Club, this is success\u2014cachet in a small corner of the food world and an opportunity to do the food they want without shortcuts. And enough money to buy equipment and beer and, occasionally, to pay themselves.\n\n### WHY CHEFS SELL OUT\n\n### By Richie Nakano\n\n### From Chow. com\n\n### After several years as a line cook at San Francisco dining hotspot NOPA\u2014a high-octane existence chronicled in podcasts, tweets, and his entertaining blog LineCook415\u2014Richie Nakano launched his own trendsetting noodle shop, Hapa Ramen, a pop-up based at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market.\n\nI used to think I was a real cook, legit: burnt arms, late nights, and an unusually high tolerance for whiskey. I believed I was part of something, a generational stance on cooking that was a strange mix of punk ethos and military discipline\u2014a savage precision. It felt like the food I cooked was real food. Honest food.\n\nOn any given night you could find me spouting off over a shift drink about all the food world's bullshit. I would rant about cooking shows I hated, restaurants that were corny, and above all which chefs were sellouts. Guys who pandered to critics made me crazy. And whenever I found myself at another glossy event plating bites of yellowtail crudo, I would scowl and mumble disdain for all the elite foodies I was serving.\n\nIn my days as a line cook there was no degree of compromise I found acceptable. I had come up reading _White Heat_ by Marco Pierre White. Anthony Bourdain's _Kitchen Confidential_ informed and usually validated my behavior. Rick Bayless was the crazy guy talking Mexican food in his bathrobe on PBS.\n\n**CHEFS, INC.**\n\nThen came _Top Chef_ and the rise of foodie blogger-ism, Bayless endorsing a shitty chicken sandwich for Burger King, White bending over to do a reality show, and suddenly it was all Bourdain, all the time. Tom Colicchio was hawking Diet Coke, and chefs who'd won James Beard Awards were taking jobs at Chipotle. Just a few weeks ago I saw Thomas Keller (the brand, not the man) in an American Express commercial.\n\nWhat does it mean to sell out when you're a chef? Consulting for a chain restaurant on the side? Sellout. Being slathered in makeup for a TV appearance? Sellout. Pebble Beach\/Aspen\/South Beach food festivals for the elites? YOU ARE A SELLOUT. And it got worse. Guys I knew who became personal chefs, caterers\u2014they were all compromised. I was righteously purist even with my own kind.\n\nThat is, until I sold out.\n\n**The Fame Racket**\n\nKitchen lifers are notoriously underpaid. It's part of the game, what you signed up for. In the beginning, this is fine: You get hooked up at friends' restaurants, live in a rough neighborhood that compensates with good banh mi. You scrape by. Then you get older. And when a child enters your life, all of a sudden things look very different.\n\nSo when some ad agency for a housewares manufacturer contacted me to appear in a new \"edgy\" magazine campaign, I listened. They said: Here's the equivalent of a few months of line-cook wages; all you have to do is fly to New York and have your picture taken for the ads. That's how I found myself with an endorsement contract in hand, getting caked in makeup for the photos, and plotting out monthly cooking demos I'm legally obligated to do for the next year.\n\nBack in San Francisco, I ran into a chef I know at a market one day and told him what I'd done. His judgment was quick: \"Sellout!\" But other chefs\u2014guys who are also dads\u2014they understood. Corporate chefs get to spend evenings home with their kids, make a better life for their families. Shit, with that money I was going to be able to pay off my Diapers. com bill and put some away for the restaurant I'm planning to open. Selling out is always a calculation, a weighing of benefit against cost.\n\nI have limits. I won't do any endorsement for food corporations, especially for industrial or fast foods. I refuse to appear at those mega-exclusive events in Aspen and Pebble Beach\u2014I have no idea who those festivals are for, or why they exist.\n\nBut I do know that selling out comes with new responsibilities. Will I totally lose any credibility I've built to this point? It's one thing for an ad executive to look at my tattoos and think I'm edgy; it's another thing for my food to live up to the hype. The result: I'm under new pressure to be a better chef. The truth is, I took the cash for my kid, but money's never free. Sometimes the sellout is the realest guy in the room.\n\n### A CHEF'S PAINFUL ROAD TO REHAB\n\n### By Kevin Pang\n\n### From _Chicago Tribune_\n\n### As the _Tribune's_ feature writer and Cheap Eats columnist, the prolific Kevin Pang works a dual beat: food and popular culture. Though his approach is usually snappy and humorous, this cautionary tale of a chef's self-destructive downward spiral reveals the darker aspects of life on the line.\n\nHere the man falls, all gruff and bravado, falling like a rocket that exploded midflight. One week he's poised to be the wunderkind chef of a big-time downtown restaurant; the next, he's slipping away from the success he'd hoped to achieve, falling from the grace he's yet to taste.\n\nBrandon Baltzley slides into the middle seat of a taxi. Sitting by the door might give him second thoughts about what he's about to do. The cab swings out the driveway of the Gold Coast high-rise where his girlfriend lives and onto southbound State Street.\n\nIt is 8:35 a.m. His belly feels scorched from the bottle of Jim Beam and the nearly entire deep-dish pizza consumed the night before, when the thought of the cab ride and where he was heading filled him with such anxiety that he stayed up all night. Arriving at rehab exhausted and hung over isn't the best idea, but Baltzley has been through this before and is keenly aware of what he is about to face.\n\n\"I definitely don't want to go,\" Baltzley says to his girlfriend, Emily Belden, 24. He exhales loudly, clears his throat. \"These 30 days are going to be f\u2014\u2014\u2014rough.\"\n\nA week earlier, Baltzley, 26, was the head chef at Tribute, an ambitious, 170-seat restaurant set to open in the Essex Inn in the South Loop. He spent months developing his menu, crafting a document to tell the world: This is who I am. Instead, on this morning in late May, he will check himself into a drug rehabilitation program on the Southwest Side.\n\nThe night before, he paid $100 he owed his dealer. He gave his apartment keys to a friend with instructions on locating his cocaine paraphernalia. Throw it all away, he told him.\n\nIn his duffel bag are clothes, two cooking books, toiletries and paper for letters he promised to write Belden every day.\n\nThe pressures of the kitchen drive an untold number of chefs into substance abuse. \"Aside from officers and firefighters that put their lives on the line, there's no other profession that puts demands on an individual and sets (its workers up) so well to fall into substance abuse and failed marriages,\" said chef Phillip Foss of the forthcoming El restaurant. \"And the vast majority of substance abusers just let it slide.\" But Baltzley sought treatment voluntarily, and in the process let go of a high-profile position many cooks would kill for.\n\nThe cab will arrive at the rehab center in eight miles, 26 minutes.\n\nIn the mid-1990s, years before he frittered away what he called his dream job, 9-year-old Brandon needed a stepping stool to reach the kitchen counter. He'd cut corn from the cob, mom would slice cabbage.\n\nIt was the two of them\u2014always the two of them in life\u2014working in The Whistlestop, the cafe Amber Baltzley owned in Jacksonville, Fla., where Baltzley made his first bowl of white corn turkey chowder. His mother sought ways to spend time with her only child and cooking held his attention like no other.\n\nHe was less devoted to his studies, and he dropped out two weeks into high school. Amber Baltzley knew forcing her son to return was a waste of energy, so she cut him a deal: If you don't go to school, you work full time. By 16, Baltzley was cooking at one of the toniest restaurants in Jacksonville, Stella's Piano Cafe.\n\nBaltzley found parallels with cooking and his other love, playing drums. Both provided immediate and intense tactile gratification. For two years he toured with the metal band Kylesa, and he submitted to all the rock star vices\u2014booze, girls, weed, his first line of cocaine. Amber Baltzley first realized her son was dabbling while watching a show. He looked as if he'd been awake for a week, she recalled. After the last song, Baltzley collapsed onto his drums.\n\nTired of traveling and eager to cook again, he landed at an Italian restaurant in Savannah, Ga., at 21, but the drug habit lurked. He said he stayed clean in Georgia but lapsed when he moved to Washington, D.C.\n\nMoving to New York only made things worse. Getting cocaine was as easy as pizza, Baltzley said\u2014you called and they'd deliver in 30 minutes. He was making good money at restaurants like Allen & Delancy and Bouley Upstairs. But the jobs were more pit stops: six months here, nine months there. On days off, he'd disappear from the world, snorting cocaine alone in his apartment, always fearing the crash that followed the high. In a single four-day binge, he recalled going through $2,000 of product.\n\nBaltzley was, however, lucid enough to check himself into a rehab facility early last year. He called it the worst 30 days of his life. The withdrawals were hell. His three roommates were legally obligated to be there, he said, and offered no support. And for a chef\u2014the indignity of hospital food! Square slabs of fish served on compartmentalized trays, well, that just put it over the top.\n\nHe emerged a shaken man, with a result that would not hold.\n\nThree miles, 14 minutes in, the cab turns onto the Eisenhower Expressway on-ramp. He stares down at nothing in particular; Belden is looking out the window. Their arms are hooked at the elbow.\n\nAs Baltzley describes what he's feeling, the conversation turns to vaccinations, and the feeling of knowing a needle's coming. How the nurse removes the plastic cap and you catch a glimpse of metal, and every muscle tenses up, and you know the needle's coming, and your heart's pounding, and you're rubbing the tops of your knees for distraction, _and still you know the needle's coming . . ._\n\n\"That's exactly what it's like,\" Baltzley says.\n\nHe sent his resume to Alinea on a whim. Not a chance, Baltzley thought. So when he was hired in September, Baltzley was over the moon. He moved to Chicago, and his trajectory was headed in one direction: to the skies.\n\nBut two weeks after he started at Alinea, his mom's Jacksonville home was hit by bullets. She lived in a part of town plagued by gang violence. Baltzley flew down to comfort his mother, knowing fully well that if he went home, his old friends would come around, and the urge . . .\n\nWhen he returned to Chicago a week later, Baltzley was in bad shape. He'd taken up drinking again. He wrote chef Grant Achatz, and, in one of his most humiliating moments, apologized and said he wasn't in any state to continue.\n\nA month after Alinea, Baltzley took over the head job at Mado in Bucktown. He didn't realize the mess he was in for: He was told he had 48 hours to open, so he scrambled and assembled a kitchen crew mostly of culinary school students. When squabbles with the owner over finances began to boil over, he and his staff walked out right before Thanksgiving.\n\nAround this time, restaurateur Simon Lamb was looking to open a restaurant at the Essex Inn on Michigan Avenue. (Lamb oversaw daily operations at Gioco and Redlight.) Lamb called Baltzley and suggested he apply, and, from 100-plus applicants, Baltzley made it to the round of a dozen finalists. Then came the cooking tryout.\n\n\"Brandon blew everybody away,\" Lamb said. \"He cooked food where I was later dreaming about the dish.\" Baltzley wowed him with a modern take on Carolina barbecue: pork belly confit with Brussels sprouts coleslaw, sweet potato panna cotta and mustard barbecue sauce. \"He was driven, entertaining, nontraditional, very relaxed and very funny. I thought, I gotta give this guy a shot.\"\n\nBaltzley landed the highest-profile job of his career\u2014a tattooed dropout heading a restaurant on Chicago's most famous avenue. But his newly steady paycheck also enabled his drug habit. Gaps of time appeared in the otherwise constant chatter on his Twitter feed; phone calls went unanswered.\n\nIt is difficult to quantify substance abuse among chefs, or, when it comes to drinking, at least, even to define it. Television would have you believe that cooking is a glamorous industry when a reality of 14-hour days and $350 a week is closer to the norm.\n\nBefore Rick Gresh became executive chef at David Burke's Primehouse, he witnessed friends strung out during service. At one restaurant, Gresh recalled asking a line cook working next to him, \"Dude, are you alive?\"The cook collapsed moments later.\n\nAnecdotes suggest a combination of factors that make work in the kitchen conducive to substance abuse after hours: a high-pressure environment, the type of people the job attracts and a social hour that begins after midnight.\n\n\"We're in a business where you can get anything you want, any time of day, any day of the week,\" Gresh said. \"It's just how it is.\"\n\nSeven miles, 23 minutes in. The cab turns off the Eisenhower and onto Independence Boulevard.\n\n\"Cooking gives me a gratification that nothing else gives me,\" Baltzley says. \"It's the fact that I'm so f\u2014\u2014-up and I do all these horrible things in my life, but when I can cook for someone they don't think about those things. Cooking is my mask.\"\n\nSilence inside the cab.\n\n\"I'm secretly wishing they'd turn me away . . .\"\n\nNervous laughter.\n\nBaltzley is asked if he's done his last line of cocaine. Seven seconds tick by.\n\n\"Yeah. I think I'm done.\"\n\nWhy the long pause?\n\n\"It's been in my life for seven years.\"\n\nOn the right, a three-story brick building appears.\n\n\"Oh God, we're here,\"he says. _\"Oh my God.\"_\n\nEmily Belden doesn't know why she fell for him. She was the product of a stable, drug-free household in the suburbs and dated clean-cut men with steady careers. An hour into their first meeting, three months ago, Baltzley gave his full disclosure\u2014\"I'm self-destructive. I'm an addict. I pretty much would ruin everything.\"\u2014and yet it developed into romance.\n\nBelden first saw him use on their second date. They spent a perfect Sunday together, but that night Baltzley said he needed to get high, and, being naive about cocaine's effects, she didn't protest. In hindsight, she said, it was a mistake.\n\nThe first sign of trouble came in late April. Baltzley, between apartments and staying at the Essex Inn, left work one night and started doing lines in his hotel room. It was a few days until anyone reached him, and by then, Baltzley was in cocaine's full grip.\n\nHis kitchen staff found him shaking, sweating, vomiting, suffering from chest pains. Belden walked into his room and found empty wine bottles, cigarette butts and drug bags strewn about. She was massaging out fist-size bumps of lactic acid built up on Baltzley's back.\n\nLamb entered and saw shame in Baltzley's eyes. They read, \"I let you down.\" Lamb was more concerned than angry\u2014by that time the two had become friends first and colleagues second. Still, Lamb had a lot of investors' money riding on Tribute. He made Baltzley sign an agreement saying he'd find help.\n\nBut it happened again in mid-May. He called Belden: \"I'm doing drugs tonight. You don't want to be around me.\"\n\nThe next five days were a blur for him. Baltzley simply vanished. Lamb said he left 20 messages for him and called around to all the hospitals. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday\u2014nothing.\n\nTuesday morning, May 17, Lamb got a text from Baltzley. It read: \"We have to talk.\"\n\nThe cab meter stops at $23. Baltzley arrives at the Gateway Foundation Alcohol & Drug Treatment center at 9:01 a.m. One week has passed since he and Tribute agreed to end their relationship. He and Lamb remain amicable. (On May 18, Tribute announced Lawrence Letrero, who worked under Baltzley, as its new chef.)\n\nBaltzley says he doesn't know which is more frightening: the next 30 days, or the first day he re-enters the world. He doesn't know if people will ever take him seriously again. But he says he's sorry for the people he has let down.\n\nSaid Belden: \"Seeing him do drugs has changed my opinion of what a drug addict is. Brandon does this alone on a Sunday night. Yes, he decides to take the first hit . . . but once he does that, he loses all control over it. I feel like he's trapped in a body that's convincing him that he needs it.\"\n\nA patient stares out the window, as if sizing him up. Then, he waves a friendly wave. Baltzley lights up one last cigarette.\n\n\"I don't want to be here for the next month, but I have to if I want to . . . if I want to be hirable. If I want the opportunity again for someone to put their trust in me.\"\n\nHe takes one final puff and extinguishes the cigarette. He rubs the back of Belden's neck with his hand. She drapes her arm across his back. Brandon Baltzley walks inside.\n\n### BITTER START TO A LIFE OF SWEETS\n\n### By Chris Macias\n\n### From _Sacramento Bee_\n\n### Then there's the other side of the coin: A chef whose life was turned around by the opportunity to perform in a high-end kitchen. _Sacramento Bee_ food reporter and wine columnist Chris Macias profiles an unlikely pastry chef and his against-all-odds success.\n\nEdward Martinez gently places a chocolate orb in the center of a white bowl. To the touch, this confection is hard and impeccably smooth, like a small eight ball.\n\nHis right hand, emblazoned with a skull tattoo, holds a small ladle of warmed chocolate-infused milk. He drizzles the liquid over the orb, accompanied by chocolate streusel and toasted hazelnuts. It soon breaks open, revealing a sumptuous filling of hazelnut and milk chocolate pudding, mixed with more crispy bits of chocolate and hazelnut.\n\n\"I like making pretty food,\" Martinez said. \"The first thing you do is eat with your eyes. You want it to be beautiful. If the flavors work, it brings that whole dish together.\"\n\nMartinez serves as executive pastry chef of Hawks in Granite Bay, which specializes in seasonal ingredients and is among the region's finest restaurants. Even in a chocolate-stained apron, Martinez doesn't look like a guy you'd want to mess with. He stands over 6 feet tall with a shaved head and a black widow spider on the back of his neck. His body is an evolving canvas of tattoos, some of which hark back to a past that he's since left behind: membership in one of California's most notorious street gangs.\n\nLearning to make pastries may have saved Martinez's life, or at least spared him a stretch in the state penitentiary. In 2005, facing three felony charges, Martinez promised to enroll in a pastry-making program, leading to a reduced sentence\u2014and perhaps a last chance at an honest life.\n\nMartinez's Facebook photos show a collage of the sweet and a bitter taste of his past. There's a shot of his moelloux of white chocolate, compressed mandarins, pistachio macaron and mandarin sorbet; an \"I heart foie gras\" T-shirt sported by his baby son; and the casket of one of Martinez's homeboys from his Fresno gang days being lowered into the earth.\n\n\"I never expected to get this far,\" said Martinez, who recently turned 27. \"I expected . . . (to be) in jail, or dead.\"\n\nNow, Martinez surrounds himself with sugars, ripe seasonal fruits and delicate desserts. He's devouring \"Modernist Cuisine,\" the six-volume book of cutting-edge cooking techniques. His repertoire at Hawks includes nitrogen-frozen chocolate mousse with gianduja cr\u00e9meux and hazelnut pudding.\n\n\"He's the best working pastry chef I've seen,\" said Pajo Bruich, midtown's Lounge ON20 executive chef, known for his complex cooking techniques. \"Hands down, nobody in the Sacramento market is doing the creative elements he's doing.\"\n\n**The Rise of Baby Gangster**\n\nBaby Gangster was always ready to fight.\n\nThat's what the Bulldogs gang members called Martinez, after he was \"jumped into\" the gang at age 13.\n\n\"I was at the homeboy's house, in the backyard,\" Martinez recalled, between sips of coffee at a midtown Sacramento cafe. \"I'm telling them, 'I want to be in. This is what I want. I want to be a Bulldog.' And they said, 'OK, let's do it.'They beat me up for about 30 seconds. It's weird. You're beating up your friend so they can hang out with you. I got \"FRESNO\" tattooed across my chest about six months after that.\"\n\nThe Bulldogs have few friends, except for those also inked with the dog paws and \"BD\" tattoos. Bulldogs are recognized as a violent California gang, based primarily in Fresno. Law enforcement estimates the gang has more than 6,000 members. The Bulldogs, who take the name and logo from the mascot at California State University, Fresno, have no allies and no leadership structure. Crips, Bloods, Norte\u00f1o and Sure\u00f1o gangs are all sworn Bulldogs enemies.\n\nBoth of Martinez's older brothers were Bulldogs; so were other close family members. One cousin was nicknamed \"Big Gangster,\" while an older brother was \"Lil Gangster.\" Baby Gangster Martinez was \"Baby G\" for short\u2014and had it tattooed into his left forearm.\n\nHe said his turf was on the east side of Fresno, where he claimed \"Mariposa Street Gangsters\"\u2014or \"MSG\" for short. He'd moved there from San Jose at the age of 9, about two years after his mother, Theodora, died in a car accident. He said he still thinks of her baking in the kitchen, surrounded by the smells of sugar and frosting.\n\nHis father, Joe Martinez, said his son didn't cope well after her death. The elder Martinez, who earned an economics degree from Stanford University, had hoped his four children would get educations, but his wife's death fractured the family spirit.\n\n\"With Edward, he kept a lot inside and started getting into trouble at school,\" said Joe Martinez. \"Prior to that, he was doing excellent in school.\"\n\nBaby Gangster developed a taste for stealing. He was charged and later convicted in 2004 with grand theft for stealing $2,000 worth of DVD players and other merchandise from a Blockbuster Video.\n\nIn April 2005, while at a Fresno fast food restaurant, Baby Gangster thought someone looked at his girlfriend the wrong way. He attacked, punched the victim and fled. According to documents in Fresno Superior Court, the victim identified his attacker as a gang member because of his tattoos.\n\nThe victim and two witnesses picked Edward Martinez out of a photo lineup. Martinez was already on parole for the second-degree burglary at Blockbuster. Baby Gangster went on the run for more than three weeks.\n\nHe knew he couldn't hide forever.\n\n\"I finally got tired of running and went to my dad's house,\" said Martinez. \"I knew they were going to get me there. When they came to the door, there were cops everywhere. I was going to jail.\"\n\n**Sweet Salvation**\n\nMartinez's dad had heard all the talk before about changing for good. So had judges. Martinez was 20 and had served stints in county jail.\n\nNow he faced felony charges of assault and battery, both with gang enhancements, and street terrorism. Facing eight years in state prison, he said he wanted to enroll in a local baking program.\n\n\"I pretty much begged,\" Martinez said. \"I knew if I was going to prison that I would do the whole eight years. It would be me gang-banging harder than ever before, trying to fight with everybody.\"\n\nMartinez pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery. The other charges were dropped, but he'd have to honor his parole and enroll in the pastry program as promised.\n\nBy this time, Martinez had spent nine months in county jail. He was ready to bid his Baby Gangster persona goodbye.\n\n\"I needed to prove I wasn't a (screw) up,\" said Martinez. \"I just had to prove to my dad that this is what I was going to do. Baking and pastries was something I could have fun doing. I remembered being happy doing that.\"\n\nIn the Fresno suburb of Clovis, Martinez enrolled at the Institute of Technology's baking and pastry specialist program. He felt self-conscious at first, still sporting a nearly bald head with a \"BD\" tattoo he had inked in county jail.\n\n\"When he came into my class he wasn't very talkative, but when he did talk he had a lot of questions,\" said Thomas Mendoza, a culinary mentor and instructor there. \"He was very inquisitive on things that were new, and when he got a basic technique down, he wanted to take it above and beyond, and make it his own.\"\n\nHis older brothers were still in the gang. In many cases, leaving a gang means \"blood in, blood out\"\u2014you can only leave with your life.\n\n\"There were times when I had a friend come over and tell me some stuff happened in the 'hood and we needed to go handle it,\" said Martinez. \"I'm like, 'I can't.' I'd never told anyone that. He kind of gave me a look like, 'Are you serious?' I said, 'I just can't.'\"\n\nMartinez dug into his textbooks and other reading, including \"The French Laundry Cookbook.\" He learned a new vocabulary: cr\u00e8me anglaise, mignardises, cr\u00e8me de farine and velout\u00e9 of bittersweet chocolate.\n\n\"I was loving it,\" said Martinez. \"When I was making breads for the first time, they would look exactly like the stuff in the book. I started showing my dad, 'Look what I made!'\"\n\nFor his final exam, after the nine-month program, Martinez presented a complex tuile cookie cone with garnishes and the point side down in the center of the plate. His attendance had been perfect, and Martinez made the dean's list.\n\n\"He had all the awards you could receive,\" said Mendoza. \"He was one of the leaders in the class. He's one of those students that just gets it.\"\n\nMartinez applied for a job at Slate's, one of Fresno's finest restaurants. The interview was the first time he'd ever stepped into a fancy restaurant.\n\n\"I took him on because no one would probably hire the kid,\" said Roy Harland, former executive chef of Slate's. \"A lot of the ultraconservative Fresno clientele would not be comfortable with a former Bulldog gang member walking through the dining room. I immediately knew this guy has talent and could create.\"\n\n**His New Persona**\n\nLike the chocolate orb, Martinez's \"Baby Gangster\" persona has melted away. When he's not working at Hawks, Martinez raises four children in Antelope with his wife of seven years, Michelle.\n\nMartinez moved his family to the Sacramento area two years ago from Napa, where he worked at the Michelin-starred Bistro Jeanty. He's had other job opportunities, but lost some after potential employers checked his background. Either way, Martinez says, Hawks and Sacramento are happy homes for him.\n\n\"My kids are happy and they're going to a good school,\" said Martinez. \"It's about my wife and my kids now. That's why I do everything I do. If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be working 14 to 15 hours a day.\"\n\nPast the restaurant's houndstooth chairs and blue walls, Martinez towers over the kitchen's pastry station. He keeps a tank of liquid nitrogen close to whip up new pastries. One looks like something from a mad scientist's laboratory: frozen coconut mousse with coconut sorbet and cilantro oil drizzle.\n\nThe infusion of liquid nitrogen to the coconut mousse adds a theatrical kind of fog as the dessert freezes, with the final product looking like delicate cauliflower. The dish's coconut flavors are perfectly pronounced, with Martinez's cilantro oil adding a pleasing herbal accompaniment.\n\n\"I like to do modern stuff, but with classic techniques,\" said Martinez. \"I can put some liquid nitrogen into a mousse, but I can also knock out some perfect crepes for you. People will say, 'Oh, this is so beautiful, can we speak to the pastry chef? Where is she?' They'll look at me like, 'You made these plates?'\"\n\nHe visits other restaurants for inspiration. In February, he and his wife traveled to New York City, dining at wd-50, Eleven Madison Park and Per Se. Over 14 courses at Per Se, dressed in a suit with his collar barely concealing his neck tattoos, he thought of how far he'd come.\n\n\"When I walked in, they were all, 'Hi, how are you, Mr. Martinez?'\" said Martinez. \"I'm pretty sure I'm the only one from my neighborhood that's ever going to do anything like this.\"\n\nSometimes he feels the shadow of his past. Before St. Patrick's Day this year, Martinez and others in the Hawks crew shaved their heads for charity. Everyone could see the \"BD\" tattoo. Two days later, he covered it with a giant skull tattoo.\n\nHis goal is to ink over all of his gang tattoos.\n\n\"I don't want to be somewhere, like at the beach with my wife, and all of a sudden someone's like, 'What's that FRESNO for?'\" said Martinez. \"I don't give off the same vibe that I used to.\"\n\nStill, in the rush of a packed night at Hawks, and especially if someone botches one of Martinez's desserts, he can snap. The difference now, Martinez said, is that he'll apologize.\n\n\"To some degree, I think he still has some issues there,\" said Joe Martinez. \"But, he's managed to control it quite a bit. . . . He's done pretty good, and I'm very proud.\"\n\nMartinez said that both his older brothers have also left the Bulldogs gang. A younger brother, Matt, lives in Sacramento now and works as a line cook at Lounge ON20.\n\nMartinez dreams of opening his own dessert bar, hoping to be known around the country for his pastries.\n\n\"I'm Edward now,\" said Martinez. \"I'm not a gangster. He's gone. He's no longer there. I don't look back.\"\n\n## Personal Tastes\n\n### [KITCHEN CONFESSIONAL:  \nBURNIN' DOWN DA HOUSE](contents.html#ch45)\n\n### By David Leite\n\n### From Leite's Culinaria\n\n### This award-winning website's title says it all: It centers on food and cooking, and its founder and editor-in-chief is David Leite, author of _The New Portuguese Table_ (among many other publishing credits). Leite's hallmark self-deprecating humor sparkles through an all-too familiar scenario of kitchen disaster.\n\nNow that the turkey leftovers are gone, the tryptophan torpor has receded, and we've physically and emotionally pushed away from the Thanksgiving table, I need to get something off my chest. A kitchen confessional, if you will: On the Holiest of Holy Days for culinistas all over the country, I failed miserably at the stove. Twice.\n\nIt was far and away the worst hatchet job I've ever committed\u2014and it was at baking, my bailiwick. In the 20-something years that I've been cooking Thanksgiving dinner, yes, I've forgotten to take the giblets packet out of the bird; yes, I've both under- and overcooked the turkey; and, yes, I've neglected to heat the stuffing to the ideal (read: salmonella-free) temperature. But I've never, ever failed to whip up gasp-inducing desserts. But I can't take full responsibility for my fumble: I mostly blame Twitter and Instagram, because if it weren't for me snapping pictures of my marvelosity in the kitchen for public consumption, I would've had a relaxing holiday, and the members of the Roxbury volunteer fire department would've been able to finish their meal undisturbed.\n\nLet me backtrack. Please.\n\nThe Tuesday night before Thanksgiving I was planning to make my pumpkin cake with maple-cream cheese frosting and Melissa Clark's spiced maple pecan pie for dessert. The One is a pumpkin freak and demands the cake every year. The pie was a concession, a peace offering to those poor friends of ours who've been politely eating the same dessert for nearly a decade. I thought they might need a change.\n\nKnowing that some of my blogging brethren, among them Ree Drummond, Shauna James Ahern, David Lebovitz, Gail Dosik, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, are quite adept at snapping cell phone pics of their kitchen hijinks and tweeting them while cooking, I decided I could, too. So with iPhone in hand, and iPad in its kitchen condom, I began clicking away. But instead of waiting until the cake was safely in the oven to upload the shots and check Twitter for the inevitable onslaught of kudos from you all, I decided to reply to every single response while baking.\n\nBasking in your immediate adulation and unconditional love with one hand while meticulously dividing, weighing, and smoothing the batter with the other, I noticed something odd. As in the batter spreading as thick as spackle. I had to work it into the edges of the pan, where the sides meet the bottom. _No big deal,_ I thought. _I've made this a million times, and it always comes out perfectly. Must be the dry weather._ With that, I slid all three pans into the oven and returned to my 4G iNeedConstantLoveMachine.\n\nForty minutes later, I pulled the cake layers from the oven to discover they hadn't risen much. _No big deal,_ I told myself again. _I'm using three nine-inch pans instead of the usual two eight-inchers._ They're bound to be a little thinner.\n\nI tipped the cakes out of the pans, and instead of steaming circles of spicy pumpkin loveliness, I was affronted by what can only be described as mutants. Each layer was riddled with worm holes. Entire sections were curdled and dry, with huge gaps in them. _No big deal, that's why God made frosting._ It was while reaching for my iPhone, to see who else liked my photos on Instagram, that I spotted them sitting on the counter, mocking me: a chorus line of three cans of unopened solid-packed pumpkin. I'D FORGOTTEN TO ADD PUMPKIN TO THE PUMPKIN CAKE.\n\nFor a brief, dark moment, I contemplated passing off this castrato of a cake as the real thing. Chances are my guests wouldn't know, and, most important, neither would you. I imagined millions of you sitting at your computers or holding your cellphones while watching \"Body of Proof\" just waiting for the final shot of my towering creation. Guilt, my constant sniggering companion, won out. I dumped the damn thing into a plastic trash bag like so many dead bodies on TV.\n\nThe next morning, refreshed but hours behind, I turned out what The One later called the best pumpkin cake ever. I tweeted its headshot, of course.\n\nThe cake redo slapped me all the way into the middle of Wednesday afternoon. If I worked quickly and efficiently, I could knock out the spiced maple pecan pie and prep my three side dishes: Virginia Willis's bourbon sweet potatoes, roasted carrots with an agresto sauce (a to-die-for mix of chopped nuts, lemon juice, vinegar, wine, parsley, and spices), and homemade green-bean salad.\n\nMelissa's recipe calls for maple syrup and demerara sugar to be simmered until reduced by about a third. Being in a hurry, I calculated I could save almost 20 minutes if I let it _boil_ down\u2014and who the hell has demerara sugar in the middle of rural Connecticut? So I used granulated sugar instead. It was then that I walked out of the kitchen into the family room to get a recipe. I'm talking all of 60 feet, people. I was flipping through a cookbook when what sounded liked a nuclear-disaster siren went off.\n\nI ran to the kitchen and from the pot billowed the blackest, foulest-smelling smoke I ever had the misfortune to encounter. Now, I'm good in emergencies. The One and I were like hopped-up Eagle Scouts on 9\/11, filling bathtubs and sinks with water; withdrawing huge sums of cash from all of our accounts; and shopping for food, flashlights, batteries, and the current issue of _People_ magazine. But on this day, as I ping-ponged between four fire alarms and three French doors, shooing out the smoke with my apron and a spatula ( _spatula_?), what's the one thing I forgot to do? Turn off the stove. So as soon as I got the air raid under control, it started again. And again. And again. Finally, I tossed the pan in the sink then thought better of it and flung it out into the yard.\n\nWith the bleating now over, the phone rang. _Holy go to war, the alarm company_. I smoothed my sooty apron and cleared my throat. \"Hello?\" I said, as if I were the top earner at a phone sex company.\n\n\"Sir, we have a report of an alarm trigger at this residence. Who am I speaking with?\"\n\n\"David Leite.\" My voice was all warm caramel and Cognac.\n\n\"Who else is on this account?\"\n\n\"_______________,\" I replied, using The One's real name.\n\n\"What's the passcode, sir?\" _Passcode? **What** passcode?_\n\nAnd as if reading a roll call, I listed every single password I could remember. (Note: None of these are real. What do you think? I'm crazy?) \"Ginger, Gilligan, Miss Piggy, Marcia Brady, Julia Child, Tom and Jerry, Mr. Spock.\"\n\n\"Sir . . . \"\n\n\"Murphy Brown . . . \"\n\n\"Sir!\"\n\n\"I DON'T KNOW THE FREAKING PASSCODE, ALL RIGHT? BUT IT'S ME, DAVID LE\u2013\"\n\nDial tone. He'd hung up on me. Then the most sickening sound pierced the air: the wail of the town's fire alarm. \"Noooooooooooo!\" _The One is going to kill me._ I could see the headlines in the _Litchfield County Times_ : \"Lauded Food Writer Almost Burns Down the House.\" Frantic, I called 411 and asked for the Roxbury Fire Department.\n\n\"Sir,\" said the operator, \"you don't need to call the fire department. You just need to dial 911.\"\n\n\"No, I don't need to report a fire\u2013\"\n\n\"Then why are you calling the fire department?\"\n\n\"Because . . . \"\n\n\"Sir, I'm required to connect you to 911\u2013\"\n\nI pressed \"End Call\" and dropped my iPhone on the couch as if I were letting go of a putrid piece of pork. Lying there, it chimed an alert: \"Instagram: Talon245 liked your photo.\" _Oh, how sweet of him._ I instinctively reached out to see what he'd written. \"No!,\" I shouted, shaking my head trying to gain perspective.\n\nAfter a few minutes, The One and our friend Caroline, who was spending the holiday with us, came home. He looked around the kitchen and out into the backyard at the tar-colored pot, slack jawed. \"Don't ask,\" I said before he could say anything. \"Please, don't ask.\" As we stared at each other the whine of another siren grew louder.\n\n\"Don't tell me . . .,\" he said pointing over his shoulder to the sound, realizing it had my name on it. I nodded my head. \"Oh, David\" was all he could get out before flashing red lights splashed across the family room walls. I rose to go to the door. \"Sit,\" he said. \"SIT!\" I obeyed.\n\n\"Think this will end up in the newspaper's police blotter?\" I asked Caroline, looking for some sympathy.\n\nEver immune to subtle interpersonal cues, she said flatly, \"Probably.\"\n\nI ran through the kitchen cutting off The One before he got to the door and opened it. A man in a flannel jacket and a bruised fire helmet poked his head in. \"Um, is there a fire here?\" he asked, unsure he got the right address.\n\nSuddenly self-conscious about what I looked like\u2014after all I was in my Warner Bros. pajamas and a sooty apron\u2014I smoothed my hair.\n\n\"Hi, officer,\" I said, smiling. Behind him was a fire truck and several men putting on gear. \"Um, is it _officer_ ,\" I continued trying to sound nonchalant, \"or _fire marshall?\"_\n\n\"John. It's John.\"\n\n\"John,\" I replied, emphasizing his name, \"this is rather embarrassing, but I kind of messed up my Thanksgiving dessert. Just a bunch of smoke and drama, but no fire.\" He looked at The One who was behind me for some kind of assurance. The One nodded.\n\n\"I hope I didn't pull you all away from anything important.\"\n\n\"Well, some of the guys were just having an early Thanksgiving at the firehouse.\" It's amazing how small a 295-pound man can feel.\n\n\"Stay away from the stove, will ya?\" he said as he jumped back on the truck. \"And happy Thanksgiving.\"\n\n\"You, too.\" I waved off my own personal fire brigade parade.\n\nExhausted, I curled up on the couch and fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon. I awoke after dark, shivering. The windows were still open; the kitchen still smelled acrid. I avoided The One's gaze as I quietly made my fallback chocolate pecan pie. When I pulled it from the oven, it was a picture of baking mastery. Forgetting myself, I held it out for him. \"Look!\" He just nodded. Realizing that the coolness in the room wasn't coming from just the windows, I slid the pie on a rack, and then I couldn't help myself.\n\nI took a picture and posted it.\n\n### DO I DARE TO EAT A PEACH?\n\n### By John Spong\n\n### From _Texas Monthly_\n\n### SM senior editor and Texas native son John Spong covers everything from dance halls and outlaw country to Texas Longhorns football and _Friday Night Lights._ Mulling over his childhood as a card-carrying Picky Eater, Spong ponders how his own children might escape a similar fate.\n\nI've never eaten a pickle, at least not on purpose. It's not a claim I make with pride, though it comes up somewhat often, especially in the summer months. Backyard-beer-and-burger-flip season. For much of my life, such occasions were actually harrowing affairs, hardly conducive to the relaxation for which they were purposed. The stress typically kicked in at the end of hour one, just as the congregants moved to the fixings table. The sun might shine and the birds might sing. A pi\u00f1ata might even hang in the yard. But the spread would stretch out like a minefield. Plates stacked with onions, tomatoes, and lettuce, items that, to my mind, had no more business on a burger than peanut butter. Bowls filled with potato salad and coleslaw, two concoctions whose very names I preferred not to let pass my lips. For dessert, the dreaded watermelon. My only solace would come when the chef called, \"Who wants cheese on their burger?\" at which point, if I was lucky, I'd spot a five-year-old wearing my same look of disgust. A compatriot. We'd get our burgers first\u2014less time was spent in their construction\u2014then go eat at the swing set. \"You know,\" I'd explain, \"I've never eaten a pickle, at least not on purpose.\"\n\nOn one such occasion a friend's son got curious. \"Does that mean you've had one on accident?\" he asked.\n\n\"Actually, your father once snuck four pickle slices and some mustard on a hamburger he fixed for me. It was at a cookout shortly after we got out of college, an engagement party for him and your mother.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I took one bite and spit it all over the table. I think your grandmother was pretty grossed out.\"\n\nHe looked up at me skeptically, causing me to worry for a moment that he might be pro-pickle. But as he turned to examine the burger on the paper plate in his lap, I knew it didn't matter. I could make him understand by likening the pickle to the beet. Or to broccoli. For that is the essence of the picky eater's dilemma: Whatever that foodstuff is that he finds most objectionable, nothing will be as terrifying as the thought of having it in his mouth.\n\nI say that with intimate authority. I grew up the worst eater I'd ever heard of, the kid that my friends' parents always sent home at suppertime, a sufferer of bizarre food phobias that were absolutely nonnegotiable. I'd refuse to eat cheese, except on pizza, and then only with pepperoni. Mac and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches were out. By a similar logic, french fries were in but mashed potatoes were out. Condiments were unthinkable, and so too soup, fruit, and any vegetable that wasn't corn. Those few foods I did eat could never be allowed to touch on the plate; \"casserole\" was the dirtiest word I could think of. I would eat a peanut butter sandwich but had no use for jelly and would refuse to take a bite within an inch of the crust. Chicken was fine, turkey was not, and fish was just weird. Essentially, all I ate willingly was plain-and-dry hot dogs and burgers, breakfast cereal with \"sugar\" in bold letters on the box, and anything with Chef Boyardee's picture on the label. Or, rather, almost anything. I didn't fully trust the shape of his ravioli; something told me cheese might be lurking within.\n\nSuch proclivities came at a cost. In elementary school, I was regularly disciplined for not eating enough of my lunch, sequestered to the \"baby table,\" where talking was forbidden and cafeteria monitors would loom overhead, pushing me to eat. When summer came, my parents would no doubt have loved to ship me off to camp but didn't out of a legitimate fear that I'd starve. That was fine by me. I was similarly terrified that some camp counselor would force me to drink iced tea.\n\nAt home, my parents did what they could but never had much heart for the battle. According to my dad, the opening skirmish was over a sweet potato, when I was two. Though I remember nothing of the encounter, my guess is\u2014given that my parents were children of the Depression and were neither adventuresome eaters nor particularly adept in the kitchen\u2014that the sweet potato had been boiled, probably for longer than it needed to be. I looked at it and told him that I didn't eat those. He responded that this was the first sweet potato I'd seen. At his strong insistence I took a bite, then airmailed it onto his chin.\n\nMeals became a combination of accommodation and subterfuge. My mom served dinner on steel cafeteria trays purchased at an Army surplus store. That allowed her to segregate my food. She'd sprinkle Jell-O mix on banana slices to make them seem closer to candy. She'd even turn a blind eye\u2014occasionally\u2014when I'd slide objectionable items to my two younger brothers, neither of whom suffered from finickiness. One of them actually ate crayons and cigarettes.\n\nMy palate did broaden as I got older, though none of these victories were won at my parents' table. And so ingrained were the food phobias that I can clearly remember each time I branched out. I first tried ketchup as a tenth grader, at the old Holiday House on Austin's Ben White Boulevard, in an effort to look sophisticated in front of two much cooler upperclassmen. I was a University of Texas sophomore standing on the corner of Speedway and what is now Dean Keeton when I became an acknowledged fan of caramelized onions. A friend argued that they were the primary attraction in the $1.50 fajitas we'd just bought from a campus vendor, then opened one up to prove it. I was shocked. At that point I'd been enjoying them unwittingly for more than a year.\n\nAnd then there were tomatoes. I'd long heard that garden-fresh tomatoes were nothing like the canned ones I'd picked out of my mom's spaghetti. I could even recite the lyrics to Guy Clark's celebratory hymn \"Homegrown Tomatoes.\" But I'd never been willing to try one until an afternoon twelve years ago at the home of the writer Jan Reid. The occasion was a reunion of sorts. Four months earlier some friends and I had been with Jan in Mexico City. Our cab had been hijacked by two pistoleros, and Jan had fought back, ending up with a gunshot wound in his belly and a bullet near his spine. While rehabbing in Houston, he had asked me to water his cherished tomato plants. When he finally got home, the Gang of Four, as he called us, met at his house for dinner.\n\nAs we sat down, he announced he was serving BLTs, casually mentioning how good it had felt to have been able to pick the tomatoes that afternoon. He thanked me for keeping them alive while he'd been in the hospital. It didn't seem an appropriate time to say, \"I don't eat those.\" They tasted as great as food served by someone who's saved your life should. And the affinity held up; the next time I encountered a homegrown tomato I bit into it as if it were an apple.\n\nBy then I was 33 years old. And though nowadays I'll eat just about anything\u2014and have never really wondered what my life would have been like if only I'd met tomatoes sooner\u2014a new concern has arisen. At 44, I've finally gotten married, and my wife and I are talking about starting a family. We've seen enough friends have children to know that wearing regurgitated yams will be part of the bargain. But we'd like to find a way to make that stop sometime before the kids go to college. Since my genes will get the credit for any picky eaters produced, the burden of learning why they happen and how best to deal with them has fallen to me. So I started doing some research.\n\nImagine a caveman is eyeballing a hamburger. His reaction will be as instinctual as going to the bathroom or looking for love. The sight and smell will alert his brain that proteins and calories are available. With the first bite, chemical reactions between the burger's ingredients and taste receptors in his tongue will send messages through his nervous system, primarily the chorda tympani nerve, which stretches around his eardrum to the stem of his brain. If there's a tomato on it, or maybe some ketchup, he'll get a sweet taste, which upon arrival upstairs will trigger a small dopamine release. His body will read that as good news. The same will happen with the salty fat in the meat and cheese. But if by chance there's some arugula onboard, a bitter taste will register, signifier of potential poison. He'll likely spit that out and pick it off the rest of the burger. As he continues, chewing and swallowing each bite, a second, internal smelling process will take place every time he exhales. This information will be more detailed than that from the tongue, which can read only the five basic tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and the newly discovered, ever-nebulous umami. The news will combine in the brain and be read as distinct flavors. He'll go about the rest of his day with a good supply of energy and remember that meal as a fine thing.\n\nNow picture the caveman eating at Austin's Counter Cafe, rightfully considered home to the city's best burger. Sitting next to him and regarding an identical lunch is a member of that class of Austinite that considers itself the town's most evolved: the trendy hipster. (Though they share the same bedhead and beard, the hipster will be identifiable by the pair of Ray-Bans folded next to his plate.) His relationship with the burger will be much more complicated. Assuming his parents were middle- to upper-class, he's at least one generation removed from foods of necessity, so he's known only the luxury of choice. If he grew up in the seventies or eighties, his earliest exposure to vegetables was probably via Del Monte and Green Giant, black-magic alchemists who, through canning and freezing, confused an entire nation on the meaning of \"garden fresh.\" If he suffered from chronic ear infections as a kid, his chorda tympani may have been damaged and his sense of taste permanently altered. Or he may even be a supertaster, one of that quarter of the populace whose tongues can have twice as many taste receptors as the average eater's. In that case, every taste will be magnified, particularly the bitter ones. Given all the variables, if the hipster chooses to leave everything off his meat patty but the bun, there'd be plenty of potential reasons why.\n\n\"When we talk about picky eating, we are talking about pleasure and people who don't get the same hit from eating that others do,\" instructs Linda Bartoshuk, the director of human research at the University of Florida's Center for Smell and Taste. She was one of the first experts I called, a legend in the tight circle of neuroscientists, psychologists, and nutritionists who study the way people eat. She's researched taste for 45 years, and among her discoveries is the supertasting phenomenon. \"There are major categories of things that affect how much pleasure we take from food. One is sensory, and that's where the supertasters fit in. We don't all taste things the same way. That's hardwired. The other is experience, the pathologies you have encountered. That is all learned.\"\n\nThose lessons come early. When Bartoshuk explained the fundamental nature of conditioned food preferences and aversions, she pointed to baby rats, who sniff their mother's breath to learn what is safe to eat. In finicky humans, the primary pathology is gastrointestinal problems. If a person of any age throws up shortly after eating, he'll automatically develop an aversion to whatever he just ate, regardless of any causal connection between it and getting sick. \"When I see a picky kid, the first thing I try to find out is his medical history. If the parents say he threw up a lot when he was young, I've got a pretty good idea why he finds many foods disgusting. It's a brain mechanism he can't help.\"\n\nThe neuroscientists I consulted stressed the same kinds of physical problems as Bartoshuk. Psychiatrists and psychologists, on the other hand, steered the conversation to the behavioral side of the equation. They said that many kids between the ages of two and four will experience some measure of pickiness. It's as natural as learning to say no. Timid children may have an ingrained distrust of things that are new. Tactilely sensitive kids, like the ones who need the tags cut out of their T-shirts, may have trouble with food textures. Others may live in the neon food world of a supertaster. In these instances, the key is the parents' reactions. If the parent forces the kid to eat food he doesn't like, meals will turn into power plays. With a strong-willed child, that's the kind of problem that can stretch well into adolescence. (The chefs I talked to, by the way, piled on the parents even harder. The problem, they said, is that most moms and dads can't cook.)\n\nAs the experts ticked off the things that typically go wrong, they sounded as if they had had access to my childhood scrapbooks. My first extended hospital stay came shortly before I turned three, during a frightful bout with epiglottitis. Because of a virus, my throat was closing shut, producing the kind of prolonged, painful eating trauma that the shrinks and neuroscientists said could lead a kid to reject a whole host of foods. But the sole connection my parents ever made to that event and my diet was of a different sort: They cited it as an example of how obstinate I could be. The hospital stay had been cut short because I wouldn't eat the food. My folks got tired of bringing me Spaghetti-O's.\n\nAs my teen years approached, every meal became a battle of wills. My parents would tell me to eat, I would refuse, and they'd wait me out. My brothers would finish dinner and be excused to their rooms before I could sneak them my green beans. The family dog, a supremely overfed basset hound named Bobo who was my greatest ally in such matters, would be shooed to the garage. While Mom cleaned the kitchen, I'd remain at the table. Eventually she'd sit and watch me, sometimes for as long as an hour. She never turned cruel. One doctor I talked to described parents who tell their children, \"If you don't want it for dinner, you'll have it for breakfast,\" then put the plate in the fridge to serve it again in the morning. That sounds like torture, and that didn't happen. Instead, I'd ultimately give in, choke down my two green beans, and wash off my plate.\n\nBut those wars were fought just once a week. My dad worked days and my mom worked nights; Thursdays were the only time we assembled for what we called \"sit-down family meals.\" Only years later did I recognize another dynamic at work. My folks split at the start of my senior year at UT, after 29 years of marriage. Suddenly it dawned on me that they'd never exactly been crazy about each other. That explained their work schedules and the tension around mealtime and the fact that my dad moved into my room when I left for college. It also provided a new name for the suppers he had cooked solo: Dysfunctional-Family Recipes. We ate a lot of fried bologna sandwiches and pancakes made with Bisquick and water when there was no milk in the house. A favorite among us three boys was something my dad called \"barbecued hot dog casserole,\" which consisted of butterflied foot-long wieners spread out in a glass dish, bathed in a full jar of hickory sauce, and baked. I'd always thought that eating a condiment and a casserole represented growth.\n\nOn weekends we'd occasionally hit the McDonald's drive-through as a full unit. I was, of course, unwilling to eat any of the already prepared items that give fast food its name. The burgers under the heat lamp sported mustard, pickles, and onions, and I wouldn't touch one, even with everything scraped off. Instead I'd insist on one specially made.\n\nThe cashier at the window would direct us to a corner of the parking lot, where we would sit in the station wagon and wait. My mom didn't believe in air-conditioning, and my dad didn't believe in bickering, so the interludes were quiet and uncomfortable. He might fiddle with the radio; she might comment that the car needed washing. My brothers and I would turn around to stare out the back window at the McDonald's front door.\n\nEventually an employee would emerge and bring out our order, then wait by the car while I inspected my burger. If so much as a hint of yellow mustard showed up on the outside of the wrapper, I'd send it back.\n\nChef Andrew Zimmern is the co-creator and star of a program on the Travel Channel called _Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern._ For six seasons, he's played the part of the cheerfully daring food tourist, landing each week in a new spot on the globe to sample local staples, always something that would shock any eater back at his Minneapolis home. He's become a devotee, for instance, of spoiled foods. \"Whether it's fermented skate wing in Japan, or h\u00e1karl [fermented shark] in Iceland, or stinkhead in Alaska, fermented and rancid foods are eaten all over the world,\" he told me. He's had bat meat on three continents. \"Fruit bats are actually really clean. You can even eat all the innards because they have a very small diet in a very-small-ranging area.\" He once stood with members of the Masai tribe in a corral inside the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, drinking cow's blood directly from the source. \"That was a big jump,\" he admitted.\n\nThe segments are essentially snuff films for picky eaters, the kind of TV that would have once given me nightmares. \"It's been amazing to watch my gag reflex get less responsive,\" he said over the phone after a weekend exploring Montreal's finest seal meat dishes. \"I was certainly more trepidatious about food when I started. But when you taste something that at first scares you, that you don't understand or just don't want to eat\u2014maybe you've had a bad version of it before\u2014if it's good you learn to stop practicing contempt before investigation.\"\n\nZimmern the world traveler blames limited diets on cultural forces. \"I've been running a kind of experiment with my son, who's six. I've tried to get to him before the cultural guardians can. He had a book called _Yummy Yucky_ , and it associated worms with yucky. So he won't eat worms, which is very interesting to me. Because he loves crickets and june bugs and all of the other funky little things that are edible in our garden in the summertime. Sometimes we just sit and eat them off the ground.\"\n\nZimmern makes meals in his household sound uncomfortably close to meals on his show. But assuming he's not telling his son that he can't go inside until he finishes his bugs, his experiment isn't far from the fix suggested by every expert I consulted on getting past picky eating: Kids learn to enjoy food from parents who model\u2014not demand\u2014healthy eating habits. There's no way to predict how a child will react to a food; identical twins can have completely different diets. But as soon as a parent tells a kid that his preference is something that needs correcting, the discussion stops being about food. Nutritionists say most children need to be exposed to an objectionable food twelve to fifteen times to develop a taste for it. Psychiatrists insist that every plate at the table should have the same foods on it, but in portions that reflect what each person wants. Chefs suggest giving the kid authorship of his meals. Let him pick an item or two, then encourage him to help cook. If possible, plant a garden together. But above all, don't create a problem where none exists. The key is to provide regular, stress-free family meals.\n\nIt's worth noting, however, that none of the experts said those family meals had to be with people you were actually related to. Shortly after my parents divorced, I started law school at UT, and a new economic reality set in. With nothing but a student loan to fund my first year, I had to make adjustments in every aspect of living, and particularly in eating. Most meals came from boxes of frozen chicken breasts that my mom bought at Sam's Club. But each Sunday night I had dinner at the table of Marisol Vidal-Ribas Brown.\n\nAn elegant, aging daughter of upper crust Catalonia, Mrs. Brown had moved to Washington, D.C., in the mid-sixties and gone to work for the CIA, where she fell madly in love with a spy named Glenn. They married almost instantly, then raised two sons at various Pan-American locales where he was stationed before settling down in Austin in 1979. But Mr. Brown died in 1990, while their older son, Carlos, a college roommate of mine, was off at medical school. I started stopping in Sunday evenings to tutor Glenn the younger and get a free meal.\n\nHer dinners were different from anything I'd ever known. The dining room walls were covered with black and white photos of her parents and twelve siblings from before she left Barcelona, the women in gowns and the men in morning coats, some with a hand tucked inside their lapel. They each had Mrs. Brown's same long, somber Spanish face and seemed to be watching to make sure she held to her Old World upbringing. She did. There was always a crisp white tablecloth and polished chargers, along with the rest of Mr. Brown's family silver. We said grace. We drank wine, but never to excess. And we never stacked plates when clearing the dishes.\n\nShe would hold court at the table's head, fingering her pearls and Mr. Brown's wedding band, which she wore on a long chain around her neck. Her stories were incredible, often summoned by the meal she was serving. If she had been lazy that day and only managed to fix chicken, it might be good, but never as good as the chicken roasted by her governess, Tata, on a beach in Genoa when her family fled Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. If she made Spanish rice, she'd point out that it wasn't Spanish at all but a variant of something she'd first tasted in Honduras, when Mr. Brown was keeping an eye on the Cubans.\n\nThe great lesson from her wasn't just to try food but to experience it. Well-mannered as she was, she wasn't above dropping her fork at a satisfying bite and grunting loudly, \"Oh, wow!\" And though she took an immigrant's pride in her American citizenship, she never let go of an ounce of her Spanishness. \"In Spain,\" she explained, in an accent that grew thicker as she got older, \"food is as big a part of who we are as Picasso or Gaud\u00ed.\" Gradually, because Carlos had been a picky eater too\u2014he and I didn't fully bond until he introduced me to the magic of late-night ketchup-only Whoppers at UT\u2014she started bringing out her native dishes. Paella made with saffron sent by one of her sisters. White almond gazpacho with frozen green grapes sunken in and topped with a dollop of aioli. She cleaned out the fridge like her mother had, by making what she called a \"tortilla apartment building\": four egg omelets, each with a different \"roommate,\" like potatoes, mushrooms, spinach, and shallots. She'd stack them one on top of the other, cover them with a simple red sauce, then cut slices, like a cake.\n\nI ate there once a week for the next ten years, continuing after Glenn left for law school, with a regular group of his friends that she called her \"stray dogs.\" As I started to experience adult life's little victories and defeats, she coaxed me through career changes and romantic entanglements, and our relationship became about more than meals. But food was how we expressed it. Before she moved away in 2001 to join Carlos's family in Los Angeles, we determined that our last outing together should be a trip to Central Market, where she would teach me how to \"buy Spanish.\"\n\nOn the day after Christmas 2006, I joined her and Glenn in Barcelona for a week of meeting her family and seeing her country. All I remember are the meals. Each day a three-hour afternoon feast was scheduled at someone's apartment, every one a rerun of our Sunday nights. But we decided to skip out on the final day's invite. Mrs. Brown wanted to take me to a famous restaurant near the harbor called Les Set Portes, which is Catalan\u2014not Spanish\u2014for the Seven Doors. \"I know it is touristy now,\" she said, \"but this is where my family came when I was a little girl.\"\n\nIn a huge formal dining hall with two attendants at our table, Glenn made the boring order, a simple seafood paella. Mrs. Brown had monkfish roasted in romesco sauce, a traditional Catalan accompaniment that looked like a creamy tomato sauce but was actually made from almonds, pine nuts, olive oil, and roasted sweet peppers. But I ordered best. I had a fideu\u00e0 negra, a paella variant with tiny Catalan pastas that looked like minced straw. They were soaked in squid ink and cooked with mussels, oysters, shrimp, and small, whole squid. The fish had clearly been caught that morning, and the taste was as rich as cake icing. It was the single greatest meal I've ever eaten.\n\nShortly before I left on that trip, my mother asked me to bring her back a gift. By that time, the nature of our food fights had changed, if not the outcome. When picking a place to eat, she would suggest something Southern fried and I'd push for sushi, just to get under her skin. She'd get as irritated at that torture as she once did the tantrums. But on this occasion she had a surprise: She asked me to return with a Spanish cookbook.\n\nWe flipped through it together when I got home, and I showed her some of the dishes I'd eaten. Most of them struck her as far too exotic. But then she saw a recipe for a lightly battered, pan-fried tilapia. We agreed that would be a meal we should prepare together.\n\nSweetly, she made no mention of pickles. To this day I've never tried one. Maybe I'll wait and do that with my own kids.\n\n### A PROPOSAL FOR FEEDING THE FAT AND ANXIOUS\n\n### By Josh Ozersky\n\n### From _Gastronomica_\n\n### Columnist ( _Time, Esquire_ ), founder of the Grub Street food blog, and star of his own web-based OzerskyTV, Josh Ozersky is the author of _Hamburger: A History_ and _Colonel Sanders and the American_ Dream. A man of prodigious appetite, Ozersky can be as entertaining as he is often controversial.\n\nI want to design a restaurant for fat people. You may be thinking, \"Wait, aren't all restaurants designed for fat people?\" They're not, not really. For one thing, almost all good restaurants are designed by slim androgynies wearing Buddy Holly glasses. Their friends are slim, and the people who eat there are slim. The servers are slim, and frequently slim and winsome. The cooks themselves, who in happier times were the very images of portly mirth, are now sinewy whippets, the cords of their young muscles visible beneath full-sleeve tattoos. Even the very chairs and tables themselves are designed for thin people. In short, what is needed is a full, radical rethinking of restaurants from the point of view of fat people\u2014something like what Temple Grandin did for beef cows, but further up the food chain.\n\nI believe that I am the man for that job. The fat have a fellowship, a shared knowledge that regular people can never grasp. Once Michael White, a chef of no small bulk himself, looked at my shoes and said, \"I see you have 'fat man laces.'\" \"Fat man laces?\" I asked. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"They're tied on one side of your shoe. Fat guys tie their shoes with their legs crossed because they hate to bend down.\" The inescapable truth of this hit me; a glimpsed image in a passing mirror, and I knew he was right. I did have fat man laces! Sherlock Holmes, cadaverous though he was, might have figured out such a thing\u2014but he would never have known the indignity of pushing and peering over his own stomach, of it getting in the way of his feet and knees like the gross, distorted imposition a fat man's stomach really is. Nor would the genius of Baker Street ever deduce the general unsteadiness that threatens a fat man on those rare occasions when he bends down, trying to hold bodies in balance when every law of physics seeks to topple him unhappily to the floor.\n\nI know about this because I've been varying degrees of fat for most of my life. I'm at a low ebb at the moment, and this has allowed me to reflect on how to make a restaurant for fat people. We're only really happy at restaurants, you know\u2014and then only for a few minutes. (We prefer to be at home, eating over the sink or munching away in front of a monitor of some sort; but the more gregarious of our race, when we do go out, generally head to restaurants\u2014or would, if they were better designed.)\n\nFor example:\n\n\u2022Fat people have bad backs and poor posture. They don't like to sit in narrow, hard-backed chairs. What they really want most is a padded La-Z-Boy or some such contraption. But since eating requires an upright posture, a well-padded chair, with rests for bulky broad arms and plenty of lumbar support down low, is a must. Fat people live in a world with twice the gravity of Earth, after all. That's why they wheeze and waddle the way they do. We're not saying it's OK. It's not.\n\n\u2022The restaurant should be cold, too cold for thin people. This will have the doubly beneficial effect of driving thin people out, because, really, who wants to look at thin people? And of course fat people, their swollen, unhealthy bodies working hard just to pointlessly stay alive, are fiery furnaces deep within, churning and chewing away beneath troubled brows. We require constant refrigeration just to keep going. Thermostats should be set for a frigid 55 degrees, with all fans set on high for maximum cooling.\n\n\u2022The servers need to be fat themselves, but fat in a non-threatening way. The last thing a fat person wants to see in his or her server is a sweltering, shameful wretch, wincing under the stigma of her body image. On the contrary! What's needed is a cheerful vulgarian, a postmenopausal mother figure with a ready smile and a sprightly line of patter. The sort of lady who might say, \"Do you want some more coffee, Hon?\" were you somewhere more downscale. I say, \"The last thing a fat person wants to see\"\u2014but of course, there is something a fat person wants to see less: a thin, long-limbed, carefree twenty-something, glorying in her sexual prime and regarding the customers as so many hideous zoo animals, waiting to be fed. (They don't need to actually have this attitude; just being young and attractive is enough.)\n\n\u2022Speaking of sexuality, there shouldn't be any. Dining here is a solitary and celibate experience, in which both sexes are protected from even a hint of having to socialize. For this reason, every table is a solo one, kidney-shaped\u2014its full space angled to the diner's sad eyes and ravenous maw, its shape allowing advanced convex gut docking, as well as maximal hand and arm reach in every direction.\n\n\u2022Certain design elements are mandated for the Fat Restaurant. Obviously, there will be no mirrors, frosted or otherwise, anywhere, and the lighting will consist of a dim and melancholy twilight interrupted only by chiaroscuro spotlights not on the table, indeed, but rather on the food itself. Always the food itself\u2014only the food.\n\nSpeaking of which, the menu will consist of, but not be limited to, the following:\n\n\u2022Large joints of meat\u2014most notably the shoulder, leg, buttock or round, saddle, baron, and ham, suitably burnished with a luminous glaze, to dazzle the weak, beady eyes of gourmands, and bring a temporary sparkle to them. The imposing size of large cuts dignifies the act of eating, and the fact of having one entirely to yourself gives a temporary sense of value and worth to the customer. Uneaten portions can be used for subsequent courses, their fat rendered for hash browns, the exposed pink flesh seared off in saucepans with olive oil or brown butter, the more difficult pieces ground up for hash, the bones split and seared for marrow (to then be used as a dressing on the hash).\n\n\u2022High-piled platters of fried foods, including chicken, cutlets, country-fried steak with cream gravy, crusty onion rings breaded with panko, matzo, fine flour, coarse flour, and\/or pork cracklings; non-vegetable tempura items; semi-boned chicken wings; untrimmed shoulder pork chops in joyously shatterable beer batter; cod filets; shoestring French fries; slow-braised short ribs; tender melting lamb breast; long-simmered veal stew chunks; and other softened meats, pressed and refrigerated and bound with their own collagen, and then plunged into cauldrons of the appropriate boiling animal fat; and tater tots, lots of them, dressed with fried garlic and Maldon salt. (These should also be available as bar snacks, petit fours, and bathroom mints.)\n\n\u2022Grilled cheese prepared on the airiest conceivable bread, thin and diaphanous to the point of abstraction, orgiastically slathered with oleomargarine, and containing nourishing viscous, mild and rich slices of bright-orange American cheese, such as gluttons remember from the faint mists of their childhood, when a future entombed in necrotic, immobilizing tallow still lay unimagined.\n\n\u2022Heavy stews, civets, porridges, congee, risotto, lush plovs, and pilafs, and other starchy, melting media for fat and flavor. Each bite is prized by the portly for their soporific effect and the brief periods of torpid slumber that result.\n\n\u2022All variations of the hamburger, including meat loaf sandwiches, sliders, meatball subs, leftover Salisbury steak served on slices of untoasted potato bread, massive steakhouse burgers with carbonized char marks and red bleeding interiors redolent of zinc and Roquefort; flattened coffee-shop discs, served on large toasted white buns, on each half of which a slice of tangerine-colored cheese (see above) has been melted; maid-rites; Jucy Lucys; sloppy joes; steak tartare on toast points; and Manwiches.\n\n\u2022High-piled layer cakes with copious amounts of lemon frosting, chocolate fudge, or coconut, depending on age and region of the diner, with or without heavy dollops of fresh whipped cream, and who's kidding who, it's obviously going to be \"with.\" (And let's have another dollop over here, too, thank you.)\n\nOnce the diner has finished eating, no further presence on his or her part is required: no labored shifting in the chair to accommodate a burdened body, no polite excuses to go out and take an \"air bath,\" no endless wait for the server to return. Fat diners, at the moment of having eaten a big meal, are at the absolute nadir of their day-to-day existence: their best and only pleasure and goal has been sated, leaving in its wake an aching, angry nausea and a self-hatred almost as deep as the pleasure they've just taken at table. They no longer wish to sit alone with their thoughts. They don't want to face the far side of the meal now working its way through the bilious labyrinth of their innards. All they really want is to get out, and quick. So an EZ Pass-type device, perhaps implanted in an earlobe or neck fold, will debit their bank account as they pass through the gate of the Fat Restaurant back out into the world, until they are ready to return.\n\n### BONE GATHERER\n\n### By Mei Chin\n\n### From _Saveur_\n\n### Essayist and fiction writer Mei Chin often stretches the bounds of food writing, mixing in elements of memoir and magical realism. Besides award-winning _Saveur_ articles, her writing has appeared in _Gourmet, Vogue,_ the _New York Times,_ and on her website bastethebook.com.\n\nI've always loved meat on the bone\u2014spicy, messy chicken wings; pan-fried pork chops; the beef ribs my mom used to bake, coated in bread crumbs and mustard butter\u2014but I never really thought about bones until a recent trip to South America forced me to take them seriously. I had signed on as a camp cook for a birding expedition to a remote part of Central Suriname. We were helicoptered onto a patch of bare rock several thousand feet above sea level, a place where, we were told, no human had been before. We were surrounded by jungle filled not only with birds, but venomous snakes. I was assured by my companions that any resident jaguars would mistake me for a small mammal and, hence, lunch. Torrential rains flooded camp every night, and our waterlogged satellite phone died, leaving us with no contact to the outside world.\n\nIt was a feral life. I hacked through bamboo with a machete, washed my hair in a stream. I cooked with peanut butter, rice, and from time to time, the roasted carcasses of the birds that we had collected. I had learned the weird but beautiful art of preparing specimens, a painstaking process in which you separate the bird's skin from its flesh while leaving much of the skeleton intact. We had set up bird-checking nets a bit higher on the mountain, and I would check these while my mates were out exploring. The rocks above camp were slippery with moss and rain. I have been clumsy since I was a child, but in the mountains, I got very good at falling\u2014indeed, I became kind of addicted to it.\n\nIt wasn't until a couple of weeks after my return to the States, when I took a spectacular spill on some hotel stairs, that my falls on the mountain came back to me with a vengeance. I found myself in excruciating pain, with a broken hip, and doctors were telling me that my left femur\u2014the leg bone between the pelvis and knee\u2014was so messed up, it would have to be replaced. I'd be off my feet for months. According to the older Chinese women in my life, I was supposed to eat a lot of bones, in keeping with the traditional Far Eastern belief that you should eat whatever body part is ailing\u2014owl eyes for myopia, pig lungs for emphysema. Condemned as I was to crutches and virtual house arrest, the old beliefs started to make sense.\n\nBesides, despite my own fragility, bones are powerful things. In ancient China, they were used to make prophecies. In the Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez novel _One Hundred Years of Solitude,_ a girl carries her parents' bones around in a sack, where they clank and groan until a spot is located for their burial. In my favorite fairy tale, the bone of a murdered man is carved into a flute, which plays a song that reveals the killer. There is a restlessness in bones, a personality that endures long after the owner has passed on.\n\nI began my convalescence by making a stock from beef necks and veal knuckles the color of old lace. When I saw them\u2014beautiful, haunting\u2014I was reminded of the animals from which they came. When you look at a steak you don't necessarily think of a steer, but the neck bones, shaped like giant jacks, conjured the massiveness of the animal and how it moved.\n\nNothing demonstrates the elemental magic of bones more aptly than a stock. Any Chinese child with the flu will know the taste of pork bone and ginger stock, hot, heady, and healing. Korean babies are weaned on _sullongtang,_ the milk-white soup made from beef bones simmered for anywhere from 12 hours to days on end. The French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that a great kitchen is founded on great stock; serious cooks approach their stocks with shamanic intensity. It's a matter of extraction. Protein, sugar, and fat break down during cooking and are released from the meat and bones into the water in which they steep. And while the meat contributes to flavor, the bones, loaded with collagen, impart body and a velvety mouth-feel.\n\nHome from the hospital, staring at the stove in my apartment's small kitchen, revisiting old volumes on my shelves\u2014the fairy-tale collections and cookbooks and photo albums\u2014I began to entertain a romantic notion of the perfect broth, based on the memory of a _brodo_ I had when I was 11 years old on a chilly March evening in Venice. Limpid, sweet, and nuanced, it was as fortifying as wine or tea\u2014a rich yet balanced infusion of meat, bone, and aromatics. Broth has always been part of my cooking repertoire, but I've frequently allowed mine to boil because I could not be bothered to watch the pot. If there's one thing all the cookbooks I now pored over agreed on, it's that should your broth ever so much as begin to boil, you should throw it away. During boiling, particles of fat and protein are agitated and become suspended in the liquid; a boiled broth is murky and greasy.\n\nIn pajamas and slightly stoned from daytime television and Percocet, I had plenty of time on my hands\u2014time enough, finally, to heed the experts. I set my stove to its lowest heat and prepared to wait a very long time: By all accounts, the water\u2014and beef bones and turkey wings, carrots, onion, garlic, celery, and bay leaf\u2014would take more than an hour just to come up to temperature. I left the pot on the stove overnight and all the next day. A _brodo_ should barely simmer; several seconds should pass between bubbles. At a very low and constant heat, unwanted impurities released from the meat and bones will coagulate and rise to the top or cling to the sides of the pot, and they can be easily skimmed off.\n\nWhen at last I strained the broth, the result was pure alchemy: a clear, golden liquid with a perfume much greater than the sum of its parts\u2014there were notes of caramel and nutmeg, butter and clove. It was one of the most thrilling moments I've experienced as a cook. How often do we manage to duplicate perfectly a romantic notion? I garnished my first bowl with curls of Parmesan and sipped it slowly, inhaling the sweet steam.\n\nOf course, these days it's trendy to be into bones, not only wings and ribs, but chicken necks and ham hocks and shanks. Much as many chefs can now be found flaunting their affinity for bones, they're still a fantastic bargain: At my local butcher, marrow bones go for $2.99 a pound. This is true of all sorts of bones and bony cuts. Sometimes, if a customer orders a noisette\u2014the meaty eye of the rack of lamb\u2014my butcher will even give me the bony remainder for free.\n\nYears ago, the same butcher had taught me how to french a rack of lamb, a technique that involves scraping some of the meat away with a long, thin knife to lay bare a fringe of elegantly curved bones. Now, laid up and armed with a boning knife, I found the taxidermy skills I'd acquired in Suriname useful. I started frenching everything in sight, and was alarmingly good at it. I turned chicken wings into chicken lollipops and frenched itty-bitty rabbit racks. I found out that the technique also worked wonderfully with shank\u2014the length of bone and meat just below the knee\u2014by far my favorite part of any animal.\n\nThe marrow was silk on my tongue, and yet the white bone on the plate retained an echo of the visceral and the wild.\n\nLamb shanks braised low and slow, until the meat is tender and the bones release their marrow to enrich the braising liquid, are always marvelous served with something starchy to soak up the sauce\u2014polenta, mashed potatoes, risotto\u2014but I like them best when they're set, gigantic and resplendent, on a bed of white bean pur\u00e9e. Frenching the shanks makes the presentation that much more spectacular, a hunk of meat beckoning at the end of a length of parchment-colored bone. When I tried it, I browned the shanks thoroughly before putting them in the oven, and I made sure to turn the meat every half hour or so for an evenly caramelized exterior. Cooking a shank in this way is virtually foolproof due to its high ratio of bone to meat; because the bone absorbs heat, the meat immediately surrounding it cooks slowly and is the most succulent. And let us again not forget the collagen that attaches the meat to the bone. Over the course of cooking it turns to gelatin\u2014a special treat to enjoy once you've dispensed with the meat.\n\nThen there's marrow. When the creamy, voluptuous stuff is scooped from the bone's hollow, it can be stirred into a sauce to add lushness. It is the best part of an osso buco\u2014that's Italian for \"bone with a hole\"\u2014and once you've stripped the meat from the long-braised veal shank and devoured it, inside that bone you'll find a final treat, a secret store, best coaxed out with a long, slender spoon.\n\nTo eat marrow\u2014the tissue that produces new blood\u2014is to indulge in an act that treads the boundary between the rude and the refined. There was, in fact, a time not too long ago when my supermarket was selling marrow only as a dog treat. But once I felt well enough to put on a dress and hail a cab, marrow was the first thing I sought. Together with my new hip\u2014a man-made bone fashioned from enameled metal\u2014I headed to a Manhattan restaurant called Ai Fiori.\n\nIf eating marrow is typically a messy, primal, hands-on affair, at Ai Fiori, chef Michael White has resolved the issue by halving the bone lengthwise. For the dish he calls _Mare e Monte_ (\"sea and mountain\" in Italian, a play on surf and turf), White lines the halved bone with celery root pur\u00e9e, nestles in overlapping disks of steamed scallop and black truffle, lays out a layer of marrow on top, and then broils the whole thing. It was silk on my tongue, marrow I could eat with a knife and fork, a subtle balance of flavors and textures\u2014and yet the white bone on the plate retained an echo of the visceral and the wild. It conjured what lurked in the shadows on that mountaintop where I fell so many times, and it evoked my mending body ensconced in that gleaming haute dining room, my crutch still at my side.\n\nWith bones, in other words, the possibilities for reincarnation are endless. A joint becomes a stock, which then becomes the base for _pot au feu,_ or another rich, meaty stew. I've even taken to roasting cuts from animals on racks made from their bones, a roast beef on a bed of marrow bones. It's culinary id. At some point, though, my fridge started to look like a boneyard, my hair smelled like veal, and I began to long for another life, one away from the stove and skipping on both legs. Still, I am grateful for the chance that being hobbled for a while presented me: to linger in the kitchen while things cooked slowly; then to grip the bones in my fist, use my teeth to strip the meat, and quietly relish the savagery\u2014and the delicacy\u2014of it all.\n\n### THEY DON'T HAVE TACOS IN THE SUCK\n\n### By Katharine Shilcutt\n\n### From _Houston Press_\n\n### In June 2010, blogger and web editor Katharine Shilcutt inherited Robb Walsh's mantle as food critic for the alternative weekly _Houston Press._ Since then, Shilcutt rarely has time to update her original blog SheEats, but she makes up for that on the Press's blog Eating our Words.\n\n\"Can I have the hot dog, please?\" I asked the woman inside the bright green Tacos D.F. truck on Long Point at Witte.\n\n\"You're ordering a hot dog?\" teased my friend Ryan with a chuckle. He'd already placed his order for a _pastor_ taco and a can of Coke at the window. \"I thought we were doing a taco truck crawl.\"\n\n\"I'm getting a taco, too!\" I grinned sheepishly, before placing an additional order for a taco _de cabeza._\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?\" asked Ryan as he eyed the cabeza. Shreds of fine beef from a cow's head a la _barbacoa_ filled the double corn tortilla that the woman handed through the window, topped with a handful of raw white onions and cilantro leaves. Despite his initial misgivings over its provenance, he ate his half of the taco with relish\u2014pronouncing it \"great\" when he was finished\u2014and I remembered why I'd missed him so much.\n\nRyan was my best friend in college, where we fancied ourselves a couple of misfits at a highly conservative university that made both of us itchy and desperate with discomfort. We met on the first day of school our freshman year, both of us shunted into an off-campus apartment complex because the dorms were overflowing in the late '90s and, somehow, releasing 17-year-olds into the wild seemed like a good idea at the time.\n\nRyan couldn't cook. I had roommates that I hated. We bonded over shared meals in his apartment and nights spent commiserating with each other about the limited kinds of politics and religious dogma that teenagers understand while the other kids rushed sororities or went to Bible study. Until last week, I hadn't seen him in ten years.\n\nAfter a few minutes, the woman in the Tacos D.F. truck handed over my hot dog. It was a small frank inside a small bun, but the whole thing was topped with a confetti blast of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, diced tomatoes, raw onions and pickled jalape\u00f1os that packed remarkably little heat. While I mused over the surprisingly sweet peppers, Ryan finished his other taco with gusto.\n\n\"Where else can you get real meat that someone bought themselves for $1?\" he mused rhetorically. \"Where else can you get real meat that someone bought and then cooked right in front of you and handed to you for $1? You can't do that at Taco Bell.\"\n\nWhen he'd emailed me that he was coming to Houston for the day, I assumed that it was to visit some of his Texas family he'd left behind after joining the Air Force one day out of the blue during college.\n\nRyan had been attracted to EOD\u2014explosives ordnance disposal\u2014upon enlisting and quickly advanced to Tech Sergeant as he discovered within himself a serious and previously unknown talent for defusing bombs. He'd done four tours since 2002, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He married a lovely German girl in between and finally settled in Florida when he wasn't in some far-flung region with a terp at his side, sweeping for mines in vast deserts.\n\nBut the trip to Houston was for the tacos.\n\n\"What is the planned criteria\/theme of our hunt?\" Ryan wrote me in an email a few weeks before he came to town. \"Keep an eye out for goat tacos.\"\n\nWe didn't find any goat tacos on Thursday afternoon, but it didn't matter. It was as though a decade hadn't passed, and we fell into the same easy rhythms of bullshitting and storytelling that we always had.\n\n\"So, you're really a food critic?\" he asked as we finished our cans of Coke outside Tacos D.F.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I responded, with a little elaboration after some prompting on his part. Yes, it's my full-time job. Yes, I really do get paid to eat. No, I'm not anonymous. \"But I want to hear about _your_ job.\"\n\n\"Most of my friends are dead,\" Ryan responded immediately, point-blank. \"My boss was killed last year.\" His faced darkened briefly. I didn't know what to say and stammered softly until he started talking again.\n\n\"Let's go hit the next one.\"\n\nWe climbed back into my SUV and drove until he pointed another taco truck out, his eyes scanning both sides of the road in a practiced motion. \"Tacos Arcelia. Let's try them next.\"\n\nTacos Arcelia has two things going for it: The first thing is the 99-cent tacos that it advertises in bold black letters on the side of its second thing, a school bus that's been painted bright red and silver. There was already a line forming around noon on Thursday, so Ryan and I figured it was a sure bet.\n\nWe ordered a taco each\u2014 _lengua_ for me, _chicharrones_ for him\u2014and stepped back to await our orders. Even working in the larger-than-average confines of a school bus, the crew was moving at a slow clip.\n\n\"You know that part in _Black Hawk Down_ where an RPG gets lodged in a guy's chest but it doesn't go off?\" asked Ryan idly while we waited.\n\n\"Uh, yeah. Although I hadn't thought of that movie\u2014or that scene in years.\" I didn't ask why he asked me, wary of the answer. He told me anyway.\n\n\"That really happens.\"\n\nI thought back to the time when Ryan and I were making dinner at his apartment one night, both 18 years old, and I'd stupidly thrown a handful of frozen okra into a deep pan of hot grease to fry, not knowing any better. I started a minor grease fire which we quickly put out, but my face and hands were pockmarked with grease burns that took a few years to fade. The burns hurt terribly and I avoided frying anything at all for at least another five years, scared to death by such a minor injury.\n\n\"Have you considered moving out of EOD?\" I asked finally. \"I know there are other areas of the Air Force you could go into,\" I added with a little laugh, hoping he wouldn't be offended by the suggestion that he leave an area which poses clear and constant danger to his life every single day that he's on duty.\n\n\"No way,\" Ryan replied. \"If I stick it out another 10 years, I can retire on a full pension. Retired at 42. Can you imagine?\"\n\nI chuckled. \"No, I definitely can't.\" Just then, our orders came up.\n\nThe corn tortillas were listless and anemic-looking, a pale color that was closer in hue to flour tortillas. My pile of diced lengua was equally pallid, and a bite of the tongue confirmed that it tasted as bland as it looked.\n\nRyan's taco, on the other hand, was filled with more vibrant-looking pieces of chicharron. The fatty skin was puffy and thick with a spicy red sauce that made me mourn the terrible lengua even more. Ryan was clearly proud of his choice, too, grinning as he finished the rest of the tortilla off.\n\nThe grin never left his face as he told me about his EOD training, about the dozens of minute tactical decisions and assessments that have to be made before even approaching a bomb or a mine or an IED. He also told me about how he rarely wears the 90-pound bombsuit meant to protect him from the 132 explosive devices he's defused in his decade with the Air Force.\n\n\"Everyone knows the bombsuit and everyone associates it with EOD,\" he said. \"It's like everyone knows a firefighter's jacket and helmet. But it also weighs 90 pounds. So we make the choice: Carry around 90 pounds worth of equipment all day long, or be better and faster without it.\"\n\n\"And if I can be better and faster,\" he finished, \"that means a bunch of 18-year-old kids can go home safely from the war. I'd rather sacrifice one of me than a bunch of them. At least, that's the way I look at it.\"\n\nWe stood in silence for a few seconds after that. I contemplated the ways in which one makes a decision like this every day, and the ways in which so many of my own memories of Ryan are tied to us being 18-year-old kids ourselves. I balled up our trash to throw it away, then we walked quietly back to my SUV to continue the tour.\n\n\"What will you do when you retire then?\" I asked as we headed out. Would he and his wife enjoy their home in Florida, the new boat he just bought? He was briefly contemplative before answering.\n\n\"I want to do something quiet,\" he said. \"You know, like become a firefighter.\"\n\nWe both laughed, although I knew he was quite serious. And suddenly the conversation had turned back again to our old favorite subject.\n\n\"I ate at this crazy Puerto Rican buffet up in Dallas recently,\" Ryan began as we drove on.\n\n\"Let's get a palate cleanser,\" I told Ryan as we pulled into the parking lot of the New Flea Market on Long Point at Pech. On the weekends, you can't find a space to park in the asphalt lot. But today, on an overcast Thursday afternoon, it was empty except for a few trucks parked haphazardly around Refresqueria Rio Verde.\n\n\"What are we getting here?\" asked Ryan as we climbed out. \"Do they have tacos?\"\n\n\"Sure, they have tacos,\" I said. \"But I thought we'd get something different in between. Do you like _elotes_?\"\n\nElote, as I explained to Ryan, is basically corn on the cob. But instead of serving it with butter and salt, as us white folks tend to do, elote is served with _crema,_ chile powder, lime juice and a host of other condiments that only seem foreign until you taste them all mixed together. Elote in a cup, the shaved kernels topped with a thick dollop of cream and a rough shake of chile powder, is mystifyingly comforting even if you've never had it before.\n\nI ordered a cup for myself and a giant glass of _tamarindo_ for us to split, while Ryan went whole hog and got an elote-on-the-cob. \"I have corn on a stick!\" he called out to me like a little kid. And between swigs of the sweet, apple-like tamarind juice, Ryan bluntly asked: \"So, what happened? You were married for, like, a second.\"\n\nRyan himself has been married for six years. As so often happens with Air Force men, he met a pretty German girl while stationed at the Rammstein Air Base in southwestern Germany on the edge of the hilly, green _Pf\u00e4lzerwald_ forest. They were married in a castle. She is beautiful, with expressive blue eyes and a kind face.\n\nI gave Ryan a brief rundown of my own fumbling attempt at marriage, the millions of tiny ways in which my ex-husband and I both failed at the institution every single day until we were both relieved to finally call it quits a year and a half later. Ryan listened with a playful smirk on his face as I explained how I fell into the trap of being pursued by a good-looking athletic-type\u2014the weak spot of too many nerdy wallflowers the world over, men and women alike\u2014and refuted at least one point.\n\n\"You're not really a nerd,\" he laughed. \"You're more of a pop culture dork. You're a female Chuck Klosterman.\"\n\n\"I don't know that being a female Chuck Klosterman is such a great thing!\" I replied. The smirk was still on his face. He was waiting for his turn; I could tell. I promptly shut my mouth and let him have it.\n\n\"Well, the missus and I,\" he began grandly, \"have been together since day one.\" He told me the story of their brief courtship and the mutually agreed-upon eventuality that they were destined to be together, so why spend useless years dating? It was sweeping and romantic and beautiful and everything you could want for your best friend, or for anyone with a good heart who deserves to meet another good-hearted soul in this world.\n\n\"When we got married,\" he told me, \"I asked her: 'How much of what happens over there do you want me to tell you?'\" It suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn't know the answer to that question were I married to a military man myself. But Ryan's wife knew the answer immediately: She wanted to know everything.\n\nThose shared experiences became a bond between them, and Ryan grew even closer to her over time than he imagined possible. One day he told her: \"You're my reason.\"\n\n\"My reason?\" she wanted to know.\n\n\"You're the reason I want to come home after every deployment,\" he told her. \"When I'm sent away on a six-month deployment, I just picture myself walking home to you. It's what gets me through. I picture myself walking over a huge mountain for six months until I see you again.\"\n\nWe sat and grinned goofily at the mountain Ryan had traced in the air with his hands. His corn-on-a-stick was gone, my cup was empty.\n\n\"My palate is cleansed,\" he announced happily. It was time to move on.\n\nRyan and I had been driving for a while, for many blocks since our \"palate cleanser\" of _elotes_ at Refresqueria Rio Verde. I knew he was wondering why I passed other taco trucks and failed to pull up to them, but I had a plan.\n\nIn my mind, I knew this stop would be our last taco truck of the day. I had to pick my cousin up from the airport soon, and Ryan had to get back on the road.\n\nI pulled into our final destination: El Ultimo, a brightly decorated taco truck near Long Point and Wirt. Its parking lot was already busy, a line had already formed outside that was composed entirely of blue collar workers off for lunch, equal parts white, black and Hispanic. I've made no secret of the fact that El Ultimo is my favorite taco truck in town, and I have followed it over the years as it moves a few blocks up and down Long Point.\n\n\"On the weekends,\" I told an impressed Ryan, \"it has a waitress who takes your order, since the line gets so long.\"\n\n\"So this is your favorite, huh?\" he said, eying the simple menu and wondering what exactly made this spot so special.\n\n\"Yes. You'll see.\"\n\nThe wait at El Ultimo was the longest of the afternoon, and Ryan and I had run out of polite conversation. He told me about the few phrases he's learned working in Afghanistan, about how Pashto and Dari only sound alike on the surface. Once you get to know them, he said, you can immediately spot the differences when you hear them spoken, intermingled, on the streets.\n\nHe tried to teach me a few phrases in Pashto. \"Move it, asshole!\" was one of them. I couldn't pick it up. I was too busy laughing absurdly, thinking of Ryan in a wholly foreign country, yelling out practiced Pashto phrases like these to his terp in what must now seem like a completely normal occurrence to him.\n\nWe commiserated about how rusty our Spanish had gotten over the years, useful these days only for ordering food at taco trucks. Ryan was even more out of practice, blaming it on the sad dearth of taco trucks back home in Florida. \"There are only, like, two where I live,\" he grumbled. And he told me about how his German wife was startled one morning by the realization that she had started to dream in English.\n\nWhen our tacos came out, Ryan finally saw what I did in El Ultimo: The tacos here are on soft, homemade flour tortillas\u2014not corn, interestingly\u2014and come with more than just the standard handful of cilantro and onions. Green slices of avocado and white crumbles of _queso fresco_ fill the tacos, too, along with our chosen meats: fatty shreds of barbacoa and annatto-hued _pastor._\n\nRyan gulped his taco down, pausing only briefly to admire the avocado and cheese on top. Then he ordered three more.\n\n\"This is your favorite, huh?\" he asked again.\n\nI nodded once more, pleased.\n\n\"Well, it's my favorite too.\" He smiled. And then: \"I don't think I can eat any more tacos.\"\n\n\"Neither can I,\" I laughed back. We went back to the car with his extra tacos, and were nearly ready to go when Ryan said: \"Katie, aren't you forgetting something?\"\n\nOnly a few people call me Katie anymore; I thrilled to the sound of hearing the adolescent version of my name, as if time hadn't passed at all and I was still Katie, still 17-years-old and big-eyed and strong.\n\nI was forgetting something: I hadn't taken his photo in front of the truck, as I'd done with all the others. I dug my camera back out of my purse as Ryan posed, hand out and thumb up, grinning. I snapped one final picture, and we packed it in.\n\nThe car ride back to Ryan's truck seemed to last almost as long as the crawl itself had. I listened hard to every last one of Ryan's words, even the awful ones and the cruel ones that involved horror stories of friends killed in battle. I listened as he told me about watching as weeping fathers carried their children into makeshift hospitals, limbs absent and blood reeling out of charred wounds. I listened as he told me about fathers who strapped bombs to their children's thin chests and sent them out to fight the battles their cowardly parents could not. I listened as he told me about watching a young girl's leg blown off by a crudely designed IED that he had not seen, was not able to defuse.\n\nI listened as he told me about being blown up twice himself. He stared forward the entire time as he spoke, and I noticed for the first time what looked to be shrapnel wounds on his head. The curved wounds were barely noticeable except where the hair had stubbornly refused to grow back. I didn't ask about them. My chest burned as he spoke about being lucky enough to survive both times he was attacked. He'd never shot anyone, he assured me. But he'd shot _at_ them.\n\nI thought back to something he'd said earlier that day: \"I'm happy to get bad guys and help people,\" he'd put it, simply and succinctly. This terrifying job makes him happy. This job that could wipe him out of existence in one trembling second makes him happy. Instead of happy thoughts, my mind was filled with horrific visions of Ryan dying in battle. I was ashamed of myself for thinking such a thing.\n\nBefore I could get a word out, we were back at his truck. Ryan was unstrapping his seat belt. Here was 10 years, gone in an afternoon.\n\n\"You know, I looked for you,\" he said, suddenly and without warning. Ryan had entered the Air Force on a whim between our junior and senior years of college, finally disillusioned enough with college after three years to make the leap. And although we kept in touch for a while, we never saw each other again. We finally lost contact entirely after his first deployment.\n\n\"I looked for you everywhere. I looked on Facebook and even MySpace, back in the day, and Googled you and then one day I found you. It was totally by accident. I was reading an article, and you had written it.\" He had sent me a message on Facebook later that day. I had been thrilled to hear from him, with no idea of how long he'd searched for me.\n\nI had no idea what to say. Finally, all I could get out was: \"I'm glad you did.\"\n\nAnd then, because the hour was drawing so near: \"I've got to get going.\" And I tried to follow it up with a casual, \"What else are you doing to do in Houston today?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Ryan said. \"I'm driving back today. I really just came to see you.\"\n\nSo it wasn't just the tacos. And again, all I could manage was a short: \"I'm glad you did.\" A smile. Unblinking eyes, because if I blinked, the tears would spill over and I'd be done for. I couldn't see Ryan's eyes at all; he never removed his sunglasses all day.\n\nAnd just like that, his door was open. A brief hug and promises of a future visit\u2014this time with his wife\u2014and Ryan was gone. Here was 10 years and two hours, gone. I drove out of the parking lot, unable to look back, and drank the last of the apple-sweet tamarind juice until it was gone and I was home once again.\n\n### I WON'T HAVE THE STOMACH FOR THIS\n\n### By Anna Stoessinger\n\n### From the _New York Times_\n\n### Native New Yorker, advertising writer, and self-professed gastronome Anna Stoessinger inspired floods of blog posts with this moving op-ed piece in the Sunday _Times._ In it, she answers a question few of us will ever have to ask ourselves.\n\nI am a ravenous, ungraceful eater. I have been compared to a dog and a wolf, and have not infrequently been reminded to chew. I am always the first to finish what's on my plate, and ever since I was a child at my mother's table, have perfected the art of stealthily helping myself to seconds before anyone else has even touched fork to frog leg. My husband and I have been known to spend our rent money on the tasting menu at Jean Georges, our savings on caviar or wagyu tartare. We plan our vacations around food\u2014the province of China known for its chicken feet, the village in Turkey that grows the sweetest figs, the town in northwest France with the very best raclette.\n\nSo it was a jarring experience when, a few months ago, at 36 years old, I learned I had stomach cancer.\n\nI had only mild symptoms at first: a slight pain below the breastbone when I swallowed, discomfort that felt like nerves or indigestion. Two doctors told me it was nothing. \"Take some Prilosec,\" they said, which made sense. We had just returned from a trip to Italy. In Florence, we had eaten mounds of roast duck, crostini and rich fish stews; maybe I just had heartburn. But the feeling lingered, and the hypochondriac in me went to the gastroenterologist.\n\nIt was a tumor. We got the call early on Friday morning. My husband and I were still in bed, and it took more than a moment to register. At my age, I am not supposed to have stomach cancer. In the United States, it's a disease that most commonly afflicts older, Asian men, and I am none of these. I have also parted with all my vices, save the occasional sugar binge. But after years of worrying that I might have cancer, years of, \"Can you look at this? Is this a lump? What's this right here? No, here,\" I actually did.\n\nI had only one thought about the possibility of death: the fear that I would have to part from my husband a half-century too soon. We had just married in October. We had just moved into a cottage in Connecticut. We had just discovered the simple pleasures of a happy routine. A calendar on the fridge. Roast chicken with leeks for dinner. Losing our life together was what death meant to me, and that, I think, is love.\n\nThankfully, my doctors assured me that death was a remote possibility. But I wasn't getting off easily; there were things to lose. First, with three rounds of intense chemotherapy, I lost my appetite. But that was only temporary. Then my surgeon told me that I needed a total gastrectomy\u2014I would have part of my esophagus and all of my stomach permanently removed.\n\nWith nothing but a small intestine left to digest food, my gastronomic future would hold only small, frequent meals, consumed slowly and deliberately, without my characteristic gusto. Without abandon. Without\u2014there would be a lot of without.\n\n\"You can live without a stomach,\" my doctor told me. I have often thought about what I could live without, if I had to: a savings account, an extra bedroom, the new Prada suede platform pump in burgundy. But a stomach never entered my mind. And food? It was so much more. As a little girl, sharing food with my mother was a solace, a joy, and a way of communicating. Sharing it with my husband has been as intimate as anything I've experienced. We fell in love one taste at a time: roadside cheeseburgers, bonito with ginger sauce, hazelnut gelato. After the first bite had lingered on our tongues, we'd say to each other: Wait for it. And then: Did you get that? The smoke? The spice? The texture? We always did.\n\nAnd so, with just 10 days left with my trusted stomach, we set out to capture all that food meant\u2014all the memories it conjured, all the happiness it brought. We were determined to eat as much and as well as possible. We made lists. What categories of food needed attention? Which meals did we want to recreate? We went from lowbrow to high, and everywhere in between. Peanut butter and jelly doughnuts, ginger ice cream, sashimi, grilled porterhouse, wild blueberries. We came up with a plan. Travel options were limited (health, timing), but we would go from Connecticut to Maine to New Brunswick, and finish in New York City three days before my surgery.\n\nOn the road, we ate candy in the car like kids. Then, at the White Barn Inn near Kennebunkport, Me., we ate a foie gras and fig torchon, which was velvety, buttery and dusted with pistachios; we ate butter-poached smoked lobster, the summery steam wafting up from the meat; and we tasted scallops with passion fruit coulis, thinly sliced disks of silky pleasure in a sweet, tangy sauce.\n\nMy mother made scallops like nobody else. Perfectly seared and turned in butter. Simple and divine. And she served them at her hugely popular, often impromptu, dinner parties. Watching her cook was what I imagined it was like to watch Jackson Pollock paint. She hurled salt and spices. Spun sugar like a sculptor. Emptied a bottle of rosemary onto a leg of lamb, massaged it with butter into the meat, and turned out a masterpiece. I surged with pride when the first guests arrived and remarked on the wonderful smells sailing out of the kitchen, to whose creation I alone had been witness.\n\nMy father was something of a tyrant, and every year my mother and I went to southern France to escape him. We were like war buddies on leave there, and we ate like queens. We drank tea out of giant bowls and picked lavender and stayed at wonderful old inns with names like L'Hermitage. There were cheese courses and pastries and the most delicious filet of sole I've ever encountered. There was also a deep and unwavering friendship between my mother and me, the tastes and smells of the food we shared overpowering even our worst memories of my father.\n\nThose summers came back to me at our next stop: the Kingsbrae Arms in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which had an exquisite dining room, gardens full of lavender and a chef who studied in the south of France. There we sat down to a wild boar terrine and Guinness vegetable soup with rosemary whipped cream. It was sublime and hinted of beef, celery, sweet carrot and earth. Finally, there was a warm apple and cinnamon tarte tartin\u2014not too sweet, not too tart and not quite large enough. I ate mine and half of my husband's as well, and yearned for more.\n\nIt had been a long time since I had experienced such satisfying fullness. There was comfort and exuberance, a familiar feeling like a long embrace, a coming in from the cold\u2014that I fear I will not know again. I know I will mourn my loss. Because for me, food\u2014and eating it with abandon\u2014is about shared experience. It's about love and memory and the capacity to conquer even the worst hours with something warm and wonderful.\n\nBut let me be clear: I am unspeakably lucky. Had my diagnosis come even three or four months later, my prognosis would have been much, much darker. I had the surgery two weeks ago, and thankfully everything went smoothly. Once I've recovered a bit more, I will be able to eat again. In the future, my meals will be little intermissions throughout the day. Overtures, not full symphonies. They will be small, but I will try to make them grand. Even if it's just a spoonful of pudding. And I would give up all of my organs for the possibility of many more years with my beloved husband.\n\nWe had our last good meal together\u2014our last of the old meals\u2014in Manhattan, at Le Bernardin. It's the best place in the city for a final meal with a stomach, the best place in the city, arguably, for any meal. When I called the hostess for a last-minute table, I was told that the only seating they had was at 10:45. I pulled out the big guns: \"I have stomach cancer, and this is literally my last meal with a stomach.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said, irritated, \"I suppose we can seat you at 5:30.\"\n\nWhat a town. And what a magnificent meal it was.\nRECIPE INDEX\n\nFirst-Boil Syrup, (from \"Sweet Spot\"),\n\nMinestrone (from \"How to Live Well\"), 88\u201389\n\nHomemade Mayonnaise (from \"Still Life with Mayonnaise\"),\n\nLasagna Bolognese (from \"Lasagne Bolognese\"), 105-110\n\nPot-Roasted Celery Root with Olives and Buttermilk (from \"The Forager at Rest\"), 114-115.\n\nWalnut Cake (from \"The Forager at Rest\"), 115-116\n\nBest Guess Wonton Soup (from \"The Legacy that Wasn't: Wonton Soup\"), 234-236\n\nSneaky Whole-Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies (from \"Curious Cookies\"), 239-240\n\nCoconut Cake (from \"Sweet Southern Dream\"), 253-254\n\nLemon Layer Cake (from \"Sweet Southern Dream\"), 255-256\nPERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nGrateful acknowledgement is made to all those who gave permissions for written material to appear in this book. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. If an error or omission is brought to our notice, we will be pleased to remedy the situation in subsequent editions of this book. For further information, please contact the publisher.\n\nShaw, Hank. \"On Killing.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Hank Shaw. Used by permission of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Originally appeared on www.honest-food.net, December 7, 2011.\n\nJacobsen, Rowan. \"The Gumbo Chronicles.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Rowan Jacobsen. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Outside,_ April 2012.\n\nMurray, Erin Byers. \"Serving Up Sustainability.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Erin Byers Murray. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Edible Boston,_ 2012.\n\nO'Hagan, Maureen. \"Kids Battle the Lure of Junk Food.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by _The Seattle Times._ Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Pacific Northwest,_ June 2011.\n\nCunningham, Brent. \"Pastoral Romance.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Brent Cunningham. Used by permission of Brent Cunningham. Originally appeared in _Lapham's Quarterly,_ June 2011.\n\nGraham, Paul. \"Sweet Spot.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Paul Graham. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Alimentum,_ Winter 2012.\n\nLeMay, Eric. \"Snowville Creamery Has a Modest Goal: Save the World.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Eric LeMay. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Edible Columbus,_ Winter 2011.\n\nEstabrook, Barry. \"Matters of Taste.\" From _Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit._ Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Barry Estabrook. Used by permission of Andrews McMeel Publishing, pp: ix-xii, 139\u2013144.\n\nMueller, Tom. \"Olives and Lives.\" From _Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil._ Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Tom Mueller. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.\n\nZandstra, Laura R. \"This Little Piggy Went to Market.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Laura Zandstra. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Memoir Journal,_ Spring 2012.\n\nAdler, Tamar. \"How to Live Well.\" From _An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace._ Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Tamar Adler. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.\n\nAktinson, Greg. \"Still Life with Mayonnaise.\" From _At the Kitchen Table: The Craft of Cooking at Home._ Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Greg Atkinson. Used by permission of Sasquatch Books.\n\nEaton, Lorraine. \"The Fried Chicken Evangelist.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Leite's Culinaria. Used by permission of Leite's Culinaria. Originally appeared in Leite's Culinaria, June 26, 2011.\n\nPerelman, Deb. \"Lasagna Bolognese.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Deb Perelman. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared on www.SmittenKitchen.com, February 12, 2012.\n\nMuhlke, Christine. \"The Forager at Rest.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Cond\u00e9 Nast. All rights reserved. Originally appeared in _Bon Appetit,_ March 2012. Reprinted by permission.\n\nKummer, Corby. \"Better Cooking Through Technology.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Corby Kummer. Used by permission of Wrights Media. Originally appeared in Technology Review, July\/August 2011.\n\nBirdsall, John. \"The Pastrami Dilemma.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by CBS Intereactive Inc. Used by permission of CBS Interactive Inc. Originally appeared on CHOW. com, February 2012.\n\nLevin, Rachel. \"Passover Goes Gourmet.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Rachel Levin. Courtesy of _Sunset Magazine._ Sunset is a registered trademark of Sunset Publishing Corporation. Used with permission.\n\nClement, Bethany Jean. \"The 2011 Dyke March Wiener Taste Test.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Bethany Jean Clement. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _The Stranger,_ 2011.\n\nAnderson, Brett. \"The Missing Link.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Brett Anderson. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _The Times-Picayune,_ 2012.\n\nNabhan, Gary Paul. \"Foraging and Fishing Through the Big Bend.\" From _Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Boderlands_ by Gary Paul Nabhan, illustrations by Paul Mirocha. Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Gary Paul Nabhan. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Texas Press.\n\nMariani, John. \"Italian America.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by John Mariani. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Saveur,_ December 2011.\n\nLam, Francis. \"What Makes Sushi Great.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Francis Lam. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Gilt Taste,_ March 12, 2012.\n\nGordinier, Jeff. \"Food For Thought.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by the _New York Times._ All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Originally appeared in the _New York Times,_ February 8, 2012.\n\nStein, Joel. \"Learning to Barbecue Helped Make Me A Man.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Joel Stein. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Food & Wine,_ June 2011.\n\nThompson, Wright. \"Memphis in May: Pork-a-Looza.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Wright Thompson. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Garden & Gun,_ October\/November 2011.\n\nJohn Gutekanst, \"Truffle in Paradise.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by the Regents of the University of California. Used by the permission of the University of California Press. Originally appeared in _Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture_ vol. 12, no. 1, (Spring 2012), pp. 66\u201371.\n\nDuane, Daniel. \"A Slice of Family History.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Daniel Duane. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Food & Wine,_ December 2011.\n\nEdge, John T. \"Barbecue Road Trip: The Smoke Road.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by John T. Edge. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Garden & Gun,_ June\/July 2012.\n\nKliman, Todd. \"The Food-Critic Father.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Todd Kliman. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Washingtonian,_ February 2012\n\nChang, T. Susan. \"The Legacy That Wasn't: Wonton Soup.\" _A Spoonful of Promises: Stories & Recipes from a Well-Tempered Table._ Copyright \u00a9 2012 by T. Susan Chang. Lyons Press: pp. 33\u201340.\n\nYuh, Eagranie. \"Curious Cookies.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Eagranie Yuh. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Edible Vancouver,_ Spring 2012.\n\nClancy, Henrietta. \"Chicken Brick.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Henrietta Clancy. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Fire & Knives,_ Issue #9.\n\nAltman, Elissa. \"Angry Breakfast Eggs.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Elissa Altman. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared on www.poormansfeast.com, April 25, 2012.\n\nMims, Ben. \"Sweet Southern Dream.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Ben Mims. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Saveur,_ March 2012.\n\nMartin, Brett. \"The King of Pop-Up.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Cond\u00e9 Nast. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Originally appeared in GQ, June 2011.\n\nHutton, Rachel. \"Hot Plate.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Rachel Hutton. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Minnesota Monthly,_ March 2012.\n\nFrizell, St. John. \"Austria's Culinary Ambassador.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by St. John Frizell. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Edible Manhattan,_ September\u2013October 2011.\n\nWharton, Rachel. \"Remembering Savoy.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Rachel Wharton. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in _Edible Manhattan,_ May\u2013June 2012.\n\nLeibowitz, Ed. \"Appetite for Perfection.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Ed Leibowitz. Used by permission of the author. Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine, June 1, 2011.\n\nBroening, John. \"Supper Clubs in Denver: Informal, Spontaneous and Inexpensive.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by John Broening. Used by permission of John Broening. Originally appeared in the _Denver Post,_ September 14, 2011.\n\nNakano, Richie. \"Why Chefs Sell Out.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by CBS Interactive Inc. Used by permission of the CBS Interactive Inc. Originally appeared on CHOW. com, March 2012.\n\nPang, Kevin. \"A Chef's Painful Road to Rehab.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by _Chicago Tribune._ All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Originally appeared in _Chicago Tribune,_ June 6, 2011.\n\nMacias, Chris. \"Bitter Start to a Life of Sweets.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Chris Macias. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Sacramento Bee,_ 2012.\n\nLeite, David. \"Kitchen Confessional: Burnin' Down Da House.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Leite's Culinaria. Used by permission of Leite's Culinaria. Originally appeared in Leite's Culinaria, December 7, 2011.\n\nSpong, John. \"Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by _Texas Monthly._ Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Texas Monthly,_ July 2011.\n\nJosh Ozersky, \"A Proposal for Feeding the Fat and Anxious.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by the Regents of the University of California. Used by the permission of the University of California Press. Originally appeared in _Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture_ vol.11, no. 4 (Winter 2011), pp. 91\u201392.\n\nChin, Mei. \"Bone Gatherer.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Mei Chin. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Saveur,_ March 2012.\n\nShilcutt, Katharine. \"They Don't Have Tacos in the Suck.\" Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Katharine Shilcutt. Used by permission of the publisher. Originally appeared in _Houston Press,_ 2012.\n\nStoessiner, Anna. \"I Won't Have the Stomach for This.\" Copyright \u00a9 2011 by The _New York Times._ All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Originally appeared in the _New York_ Times, August 14, 2011.\nABOUT THE EDITOR\n\nHolly Hughes is a writer, the former executive editor of Fodor's Travel Publications, and author of _Frommer's 500 Places for Food and Wine Lovers._ She has edited the Best Food Writing series since its inception in 2000. Visit her website at hollyahughes.net.\n\n**Submissions for Best Food Writing 2013**\n\nSubmissions and nominations for _Best Food Writing 2013_ should be forwarded no later than May 15, 2013, to Holly Hughes at _Best Food Writing 2013,_ c\/o Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, Boston MA 02210, or emailed to best.food@perseusbooks.com. We regret that, due to volume, we cannot acknowledge receipt of all submissions.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**CONTENTS**\n\n_TITLE PAGE_\n\n_DEDICATION_\n\n_EPIGRAPH_\n\n_ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS_\n\n_PROLOGUE_\n\nNESTLING\n\nCHAPTER 1\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\nCHAPTER 11\n\nCHAPTER 12\n\nCHAPTER 13\n\nCHAPTER 14\n\nCHAPTER 15\n\nCHAPTER 16\n\nCHAPTER 17\n\nFLEDGLING\n\nCHAPTER 18\n\nCHAPTER 19\n\nCHAPTER 20\n\nCHAPTER 21\n\nCHAPTER 22\n\nCHAPTER 23\n\nCHAPTER 24\n\nCHAPTER 25\n\nCHAPTER 26\n\nCHAPTER 27\n\nFLIGHT\n\nCHAPTER 28\n\nCHAPTER 29\n\nCHAPTER 30\n\nCHAPTER 31\n\nCHAPTER 32\n\nCHAPTER 33\n\nCHAPTER 34\n\nCHAPTER 35\n\nCHAPTER 36\n\nCHAPTER 37\n\nCHAPTER 38\n\nCHAPTER 39\n\nCHAPTER 40\n\nCHAPTER 41\n\nCHAPTER 42\n\nCHAPTER 43\n\nCHAPTER 44\n\nCHAPTER 45\n\n_ABOUT THE AUTHOR_\n\n_COPYRIGHT_\n_To Jane Gunther for always asking\u2014did you get any writing done?  \nThere wouldn't be a book without you_\n_Why should you love him whom the world hates so? Because he loves me more than all the world._\n\n_\u2014Edward II,_ Act I, sc. iv Christopher Marlowe\n**\u00b7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS \u00b7**\n\n**N** OTHING IS CREATED in a vacuum. So, thank you to my family, who never once said, You want to do what? To Odyssey Workshop and Jeanne Cavelos for showing me that I not only could write day in day out, but love doing so. To Larry Taylor for endless patience and invaluable critiquing when I needed it most. Thanks also to Caitlin Blasdell and Fleetwood Robbins for their enthusiasm, support, and excellent efforts on my behalf. All of it is deeply appreciated.\n**\u00b7 PROLOGUE \u00b7**\n\n**_The Stirring of Wings_**\n\n**I** N THE SOUTHERNMOST TIP of the island kingdom of Antyre, a carriage set a rapid pace through the city streets of Murne. The horse-and-four racketed down the broken cobblestone street, shuddering and jolting on the uneven surface. Midmorning sunlight lanced off the blue-lacquered carriage, lighting it like a jewel in a tarnished crown. On either side, narrow houses listed and shed fragments of their fa\u00e7ades, littering the streets below with rubble. Once this had been a prosperous merchant neighborhood, the most common thoroughfare between the palace and the sea\u2014before a girl's prayer had been heard by Black-Winged Ani, that treacherous god of love and vengeance.\n\nOnce the road had been filled with horse carts and carriages, a throbbing artery pulsing with bustle. Now, corpselike, it rotted; the ground crumbled beneath the ruined buildings and cobbled streets, homes for those desperate enough to live in the merchants' Relicts.\n\nInside the coach, an elaborately dressed dark man clenched his hands into fists. Kritos stared at the far wall of the coach, ignoring the Relicts outside, his thoughts occupied entirely with his grievances. He cursed himself for an overobedient fool, and he cursed Last and the man's filthy sense of humor.\n\nKritos levered himself out of the quilted seat, reaching for his stout malacca cane, which had been flung, haphazard, across the coach. Recovering it, he pounded the roof of the carriage. \"Slow down, you damned fool. You'll have the wheels off and I'll have your hide.\"\n\n_Slow down,_ he thought. He was in no hurry to find the boy who meant an end to his comfortable position as Last's heir. He raised the cane, hesitated. He could order the carriage around now. Tell Last that there was no boy, that the bastard son had died, unwanted, in Antyre's Relicts.\n\nHe lowered the cane, indecision and fear warring in his belly. John Coachman would know, damn his eyes, and the boy might surface on his own, seeking his birthright. If the boy lived, Last would find him, no matter what Kritos told him. Last was too well aware of the creditors hounding Kritos to trust his word alone.\n\nHis hands knotted around the cane as he pondered more drastic measures. The boy was only a boy, and he was a strong man and armed. Hefting the cane, he swung it in short, brutal strokes, slamming it against the cushioned seat with a satisfying impact. If the boy were dead\u2014\n\nBut his hands clenched again in a paroxysm of stifled frustration. Last did not trust him, and Kritos knew well enough that the coachman had undoubtedly been warned to prevent such a thing.\n\nInevitability slumped his broad shoulders, made him discard his plans with a breath that sounded like a sob. Last was a treacherous bastard, he thought, wholly without irony.\n\nAhead of the coach, the cobblestones had been worn to a bare edge around what once was a central square, its pits filled in with scavenged rubble, smoothed over with dirt. In it, the Relicts children circled one lad with a stick, watching with an intentness that betrayed that this was no game the children played.\n\n\"So you hit 'im onna head, then inna cods, inna belly, and onna head again, 'til they don't never get up no more. Then you cut their purse, innit right?\"\n\n\"Right, Roach,\" they chorused. But Roach sought his approval from the two youths standing apart, in a closed circle of their own. He stood, shifting from dusty foot to dusty foot, waiting.\n\nWhat did they look like, these leaders of children? Children themselves, though not for very much longer. In a year or so, they'd be hunting up a new trade: highwayman, whore, gaolbird, or hangman's bait if they were particularly unlucky. Currently, they appeared much like the others. Rag-clad, barefoot, begrimed, and feral. One was, perhaps, blond under the dust and dirt. The other was as dark as night, with eyes of the same hue, startling and dramatic in a pale, pinched face. No amount of filth could darken hair like that any further.\n\nThe might-be-blond had vivid blue eyes and a placid face. He was bigger by a head than his snarl-maned companion. This was Janus, the unknowing object of Kritos's search.\n\nJanus ignored Roach's demand for approval, studying instead his friend's dusty, extended fists. Janus reached out, ready to choose, ready to tap one fist over the other, and paused. Raising his gaze to the smirking silent mouth, to the mocking eyes, Janus touched the brunette's lips, winning the game.\n\nThe brunette stuck out a pink tongue, and on it a ring quivered\u2014tarnished, but undeniably gold. The children's eyes lingered on it enviously. A man's ring, it was a little too big for his forefinger, but Janus slid it on, clenching his hand around it. He smiled.\n\nOnly then did he turn his attention to the waiting Roach. \"You'll never learn, Roach.\" His voice was roughened with the onset of manhood, and the accent was as different from Roach's as night was from day, elegant, cleanly spoken, not the gutter patois of the other.\n\n\"So what'd I forget?\" Roach asked.\n\nThe brunette, freed from silence, burst into speech. \"The same thing you forgot last time and the time before. The shoes. Always remove their shoes. Good shoes sell.\" Accented like Janus's, an aping of the aristocracy, her voice held a bite to each word that made it utterly distinctive.\n\n\"Sorry, Miranda.\"\n\n\"Regret will not put food in your belly when the stolen coin runs out. Then it's back to stealing and whoring again.\"\n\nThe pack tightened, shifting from predators to an assortment of frightened children.\n\nRoach stepped out of the circle. \"I'm no whore.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" Miranda said, unrelenting.\n\n\"Not never,\" he swore.\n\n\"It's his belly, let him learn,\" Janus said. He fingered the ring and stared at the other children, the fallen houses, the gaping sinkholes, like a young lord surveying the ruin of his empire, holding court one final time.\n\nCarriage wheels clattered, sparking unusual echoes on this forgotten street, and sprayed jagged shards of stone in their wake. At the carriage's approach, the children scattered, only re-forming the pack when it came to a sliding halt. The horses reared in their traces before settling down to heave giant, wet-flanked breaths.\n\nThe children perched in empty windows, on piles of broken cobbles. Their thin fingers clenched sticks and loose stone, waiting in silence.\n\nThe liveried coachman put one hand on his pistol, one on his whip, daring them to act. Freed of his touch on their reins, the horses danced and bridled until the coachman snapped his whip above their heads.\n\nKritos stepped from the carriage, sleek in his embroidered finery. Feral eyes grew warily speculative, and Kritos paused, boots still on the carriage rung. He pulled a linen handkerchief from his sleeve, damped with scent, and pressed it to his nose and mouth for a moment.\n\n\"Which of you miserable bastards is Janus, son of Celia?\"\n\nAt this sign of specific interest, Roach and the pack spooked and fled like a burst of hunted doves. Miranda and Janus stayed. Their faces might have been made of the same stone as the houses\u2014blank and still, hiding secrets.\n\nKritos took the last step down. His mouth twisted as his champagne-shined boots slid in the greasy dirt. \"Is one of you Janus?\"\n\nMiranda spoke first. \"How much to show you where he is?\"\n\nKritos didn't listen to her past his first start of surprise at her accent. His eyes fixed on Janus, on the echoes of Last in Janus's straight jaw and nose, in the gas-flame blue eyes. So this was the prize he was sent to secure. His replacement. The murderous temptation rose again, but Kritos, the strong man, felt distinctly leery of tackling this pair.\n\nWhile he contemplated, he watched Janus watching Miranda. Signals flowed like water between them, a code learned in faint lifts of eyebrows, of tightened lips and tilted chins, of twitched fingers. No, he had no intention of giving his back to these hellions.\n\n\"Pay you,\" he said, \"when I can thrash the information from you?\"\n\n\"Like to see you try,\" Miranda said.\n\n\"Like to see you catch us,\" Janus said.\n\nTheir lovely aristocratic voices made the words a taunt. Their bodies tensed like strung wire, poised for flight and the shelter of the labyrinthine alleyways. He would have to lull them, let them presume he abided by their rules, all the better to take them by surprise.\n\nKritos said, \"How much?\"\n\n\"Not so poor as copper. Not so dear as sols,\" she said.\n\n\"Lunas,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Silver? For a gutter-born bastard?\" Outrage thickened Kritos's voice and drew Miranda's lips into a cold approximation of a smile.\n\n\"Pay what is fair for us. Not for you,\" she said.\n\n\"One luna, then. When you lead me to him.\" Kritos pressed the scented linen to his mouth.\n\n\"Done,\" Janus said.\n\nKritos paused, wary. The haggling ended too soon; Kritos had expected them to demand the coin up front, expected them to lose him in the Relict's nooks and alleys. He knew they had no more intention of fulfilling the bargain than he did; for them to agree meant they were not content with the thought of a single luna. They wanted it all.\n\n\"We'll lead you.\" She eeled off, followed by Janus. Neither looked back, the challenge implicit as they entered the narrow, dark alley torn between two houses.\n\nKritos set his shoulders, judging their span against the gap. The coachman leaned off his perch. \"Sir, be careful.\"\n\n\"Do you think me feared of urchins?\" Kritos blustered. \"Hold the cattle for my return.\"\n\nKritos was not afraid, not now when the moment was imminent. Undoubtedly, they planned to trap him, but they had let him take their backs, left themselves at risk.\n\nCaught in his thoughts, squinting in the murky light of the alleyway, Kritos saw the girl brush by the wall, a shadow in the dark; a spill of stones tumbled free, driving at his head. _You'll need more than that, girl,_ he thought, leaping aside. The ground gave beneath his feet.\n\nThe cascade of stone hadn't been the ambush; the loosely covered pit had. Kritos hit the bottom hard, rolled to his feet, found himself chest-deep in the ground, with damp stone beneath. It was probably the only reason the pit didn't go deep enough to break a man's neck.\n\nHe raised his cane just as the girl swung her stick at him, striking the soft tissue beneath his chin. Kritos gagged with pain; his teeth snapped against each other. Slapping her legs with the cane, he made her dance away, but she reversed her grip on the stick, making up the distance, and jabbed the end of it at his face. Kritos jerked and took the blow meant for his temple in his eye instead. Pain flared, and fear. Howling in shock, he flailed with his cane, but couldn't avoid the blow from behind that forced him to his knees.\n\n\"His purse, Miranda, hurry,\" Janus said.\n\n\"He's not down yet,\" Miranda protested.\n\n\"Near enough to make no difference, and the coachman might come after him. With the pistol.\"\n\nMiranda pounced, fingers working on Kritos's purse strings. Janus squeezed beside her to help. Wheezing for breath, tears streaking his face, Kritos fumbled for a weapon and found rough stone at his hand, one of the little avalanche that betrayed him. He swung, felt satisfaction push pain away when the rock made contact.\n\nMiranda screamed, a banshee yelp of rage and shock, and her hands flew to cover the bloody gash along her jaw.\n\n\"Bastard!\" Janus brought his stick down again, knocking the rock from Kritos's hand, and reaching for the purse himself.\n\nKritos lunged upward, got a grip on Janus's white throat, and held on. After three stifled breaths, Janus's face started mottling with lack of air. Miranda scrabbled for her dropped stick, and Kritos leaned back against the supporting wall and kicked her in the stomach. She flew backward and stunned herself against the stone.\n\nJanus clawed Kritos's hands, then groped upward, gouging at the man's damaged eye. His thumb slipped along the same rut the girl's stick had made. Kritos screamed and slammed Janus against the earthen and stone wall, dazing him. Kritos kept the boy's slackening form before him, using him as a shield, and struggled to his feet, sobbing with pain and anger. His strangle-hold on the boy's throat loosened, and Janus showed signs of recovering.\n\nMiranda crept forward, barely visible against the pit's floor, her hands fisted. She reared back on her haunches; pebbles and dirt stung Kritos's face, and he kicked out again and caught her in the thigh. She tottered and fell at his feet. He kicked her in the face, and she made a small, sighing sound, eyes fluttering shut.\n\nKritos tightened his grip on Janus's neck, squeezing. The boy choked and spluttered, his nails leaving tracks on Kritos's wrists. Behind him, the girl muttered and swayed to her hands and knees. Kritos swore. If he took the time to kill the boy, she'd be on him again with the tenacity of a weasel.\n\nKritos pulled Janus after him, dragging him out of the pit, keeping his watering good eye on the dark shape in the dark pit. He backed up, dragging Janus into the uncertain sunlight of the Relicts. The coachman pulled his pistol and swore.\n\n\"Put that away,\" Kritos said. \"Get ready to go.\" Janus had a neck like a young ox, and Kritos's hands were slick with his own blood. Janus muttered and twisted, made every step a battle, digging at Kritos's hands with his own, fumbling at his face, slumping and dragging his weight to slow him. The ring, so newly acquired, slipped and fell into the dirt without a sound.\n\nKritos resolved his struggle by slamming Janus's head into the edge of the carriage doorframe and dropping the sprawling, limp form onto the floor of the coach. Janus fell half-in, half-out, his bare feet trailing in the gritty dust.\n\nThe coachman warned, \"Last never said nothing about half-killing nobody.\"\n\n\"Last never had to deal with that hellcat,\" Kritos said, panting for breath, shuddering all over with belated nerves and denied fear. His hands shook as he bent and forced Janus's slack limbs into the carriage. His face throbbed as the maltreated eye complained and continued its slow weeping of bloody tears.\n\nHe clambered into the carriage, uncertain in his balance, and paused, his back to the open door, to kick Janus once, then twice in the ribs, listening for the crack of bone. It was all the vengeance he could allow himself, and it was out of sight of the coachman.\n\nThe coachman's cry came nearly too late. Kritos spun, but too slowly, his vision too impaired to see more than a quick dark blur.\n\nThe stick caught him in the side, punched through the skin but no further. It was, after all, only a piece of well-worn wood. \"Let him go. Pervert. Thief.\" Even with her voice shrill and panicked, her accent remained unchanged, and for the first time Kritos wondered who the girl was.\n\nFrom his high perch, the coachman angled his pistol, trying to get a clear shot. He pulled the trigger; the gun exploded, the ball expelled forward, burning powder and shards of metal flying back to scald the coachman's hand. Kritos flung Miranda from him at the same moment, and the ball bypassed Miranda to add yet more stone chips to the earth.\n\nAs she lunged at him again, the coachman ripped the air with his whip and wrapped the lash around her chest, spinning her around, leaving her in the dirt, gasping, sniveling, nose running blood.\n\nThe sight of her sprawled in the rubble did more to restore Kritos's courage than the coachman coiling his whip for another blow.\n\n\"You must want your silver,\" Kritos said.\n\nHe flung his coin purse into her face; the leather pouch burst at the seams and scattered his own trap\u2014the silver lunas that were only painted wood. \"What he's worth. Coachman, drive on.\"\n\nThe carriage turned slowly in the open square and headed back the way it had come, faster and faster, as the coachman gave the spooked horses their heads.\n\nLEFT ALONE, Miranda gathered her stick and the tarnished ring with shaking hands. Her head spun and her jaw burned where grit had been ground into the open wound. The whip marks crossing her torso through the thin, ripped shirt seeped. And all of that pain was nothing to her. All she could think of was Kritos, carrying Janus away like a hunter's trophy.\n\nShe limped over to the edge of the street and fell, her blood dampening the dirt. She waited for the strength in her legs to come back, and she turned the tarnished ring over and over and over in her hands, peering in to see the words within. _Only each other at the last._ Heart pounding, breath seizing in her chest, refusing to cry, she clenched the ring in fisted hands and curled herself around it.\n\nWHEN HER BREATH RETURNED, she rose and stumbled home\u2014a room with two women, one old bed, a press of mismatched clothing, and some few bits of furniture salvaged out of some refuse bin closer to the civilized parts of the city and hauled back to the Relicts.\n\nNearest the door, a pale, enervated woman swayed in her seat, her hand loosely caging a bottle of Petal, a potent mixture of Laudable syrup and cheap spirits that turned any grief to a distant dream. She stared into the air as if she could see her past unfolding behind her, her days as the pampered daughter of a lord. Before Janus. Before the stigma of bearing a child, unwed, sent her to the Relicts to find a new life as occasional whore and mother, though she was dismal at both. Her customers only ever visited once, and that for the novelty of fucking an aristocrat. Her sole act of generosity had been to teach the children to read and write, though she leavened that by raining stinging slaps whenever their accents faltered into Relicts cant.\n\nThe other woman, Ella, sat on a rough footstool near the fire, coaxing it into life with callused hands. She had been at her peak of attractiveness when she birthed Miranda, fourteen long years ago, and her looks had faded to nonexistence. Her hair, coarse, gray, and unconfined, stood out in rough snarls. But unlike Celia, she could at least manage a gap-toothed smile and a bit of routine coquetry for her progressively more infrequent customers.\n\nMiranda banged the door shut and came in, leaning on her stick. When Miranda moved into the dim glow of the fire, Ella's mouth twisted in dismay. \"Not your face. What have you done, child?\" Ella cried.\n\nMiranda's rage simmered. Both women were too worn to be successful whores. But Miranda was meant to be a courtesan, meant to pass her earnings on to the older women.\n\nElla rushed to the clothespress and pulled out a wooden box. In a different world, it might have held a lady's less valuable jewels. Here it held the tricks of a whore's trade: powders and cosmetics, abortifacients, and a scattering of remedies. She dragged Miranda before the footstool, tutting and fretting.\n\nMiranda yanked her arm free. \"Celia, they took him.\"\n\nThe pale woman roused herself to a reluctant semblance of life, setting the bottle on the earthen floor. \"And who took him from you?\"\n\n\"A town buck in a blue and gold carriage with a crest.\" Miranda kept her voice calm, but tears welled with the effort. She was only waiting for the vital information\u2014a name. Without an identity, there was no one to fight.\n\n\"Last, it seems,\" Celia said, picking up her bottle and letting the thick fluid trickle into her open mouth.\n\n\"Last?\" Miranda said. The name meant nothing, a word in a ring. It should have sounded in her ears like a clarion. But her enemy's name meant nothing. Ella took the opportunity to pull her close, dabbing the long rip along Miranda's jaw with powdered alum before packing it with saved cobweb.\n\n\"How do I get him back?\" Miranda asked, breaking in that instant years of tradition. She and Janus had learned long ago that their mothers had no answers to the slightest of dilemmas.\n\n\"Hush,\" her mother said. \"Don't you talk while I'm cleaning this out.\"\n\n\"Get him back?\" Celia repeated. \"Why? He only caused us pain and trouble. Let he and Last spite each other and spare us.\"\n\n\"'Tis a pity about the scarring there'll be,\" Ella said, finishing her ministrations and turning Miranda's face in her hands, judging the results. \"Still\u2014such eyes, such a mouth...what a price you'll command and never mind the scar. And with Janus gone, well, you'll get over that stubbornness of yours and do as I say.\"\n\nMiranda screamed, an animal cry of wordless rejection and rage. She shoved her mother with enough force to send the older woman to the floor. Celia's hooded eyes widened even in her drug-induced haze. Miranda dropped her hand to the rough-edged knife her mother used to shave bits of wood for the fire, knotted her fist around the handle. How dare they simply dismiss him as if he were of no more importance than a customer? She would make them regret their callousness. She stood, hand shaking, body tensed, waiting for release; then, unclenching her fingers, she let the knife fall.\n\n_Why kill them?_ she thought. At this moment, they were dead to her, and she knew that without Janus, without her, the two women would fade away. The rage faded as fast as it came, leaving contempt. She despised their sickening passivity, their languid acceptance of their decaying lives. She would not accept the same.\n\nMiranda paused in the doorway, taking a long last look. She was leaving now. She would never see these women, this room again. She would not rue it.\n\nNight had folded over the Relicts, and the only lights were the small fires set by the desperate, conflagrations of wood and burning cloth. Miranda felt her way down the street with her stick, tapping before her like the blind beggars who worked the boundary between moneyed and poor.\n\nA name was all she had, and it was not enough, but she headed for the border of the Relicts as if she were welcome on the other side. In the worst section, while climbing over fallen masonry, she put her foot through a toppled door, spiderwebbed with rot, and tumbled headlong. She plummeted down the heap, scraping her hands, her shins, and landing with a painful crash against a stone slab. She fought tears, tried to rise, but stumbled and fell to one knee. Her breath labored and the wounds of the day, so long suppressed, made themselves felt with belly-wrenching intensity. Clawing at the stone slab, her fingers caught on rough frescoes, and she drew herself up, found it was a wall. Leaning close, she made out wings and knew what the building was, though she'd never seen it before.\n\nThe room was even more damaged than most Relict buildings; the walls had all fallen inward, making a precarious lean-to of stone, but then, this was a temple to Black-Winged Ani, She who had spread ruin through the Relicts. Carved wings created a slanted tunnel, which Miranda crept through. Her destination was the altar. But not to pray for a dead god's aid. Even in this extremity, Miranda was not stirred to begging.\n\nThe altar was the sturdiest place in the temple, sheltered deep within the wreckage. Miranda crawled beneath it, let her body relax. In the darkness, the grinning face of Black-Winged Ani stared down at her from every angle. Miranda tucked herself into a ball, wrapping herself around the stick, missing Janus's warmth with an ache greater than the throbbing wounds. She fell asleep to the whispering mutter of prayers, trapped like memories in the stone, fell asleep to Ani's looming scrutiny.\n\nOutside, a cold wind rose.\n\n**\u00b7 1 \u00b7**\n\n_Maledicte lived and Maledicte died And only at his birth did anybody cry. How many people did he kill? One, two, three..._\n\n\u2014Children's skipping song\n\n**B** ARON VORNATTI WAS AN OLD MAN, hunched in his chair, staring at the wonders of his extensive library with a jaded and bleary eye. A sable pelt poured over his wasted legs. Absently, he ruffled the furs while he flipped pages of the book of pornographic woodcuts on his lap. A hedonist and a sensualist, he was much withered by time and pain; on a cold winter's night, he fondled old memories as he once did flesh. But all his precious memories, of women's softly rounded shoulders and mounded breasts, the sweet juncture at their thighs, of young men's ripe buttocks, greedy mouths, and strong square hands, all these could not distract him as they used to do.\n\nHis back flared and spasmed. His glassy eyes flew to the old grandfather clock by the door. \"Gilly,\" he roared. \"Time!\"\n\nGrinding his teeth, Vornatti sagged forward in the chair to ease the strain. The book fell to the floor, splayed on opened pages. He wanted a distraction, something beyond the torment of his bones and illusory remembrances of the flesh. Once, he had found engrossment in the bloody game of court intrigue, but even that had palled with his mastery of it.\n\nIn the distant recesses of the library, beyond the firelight, beyond the lamps, glass broke with a sound like cracking ice. Slow, crunching footsteps echoed.\n\nA chill serpent of air wound around Vornatti's ankles, hissing with blown snow.\n\n\"My lord?\" Gilly said from the doorway. The large silver tray of drug and drink was dwarfed in his hands. His voice put a temporary stop to the footsteps.\n\n\"We have an intruder,\" Vornatti said, straightening with a wince.\n\n\"Who's there?\" Gilly said, as the footsteps resumed their slow progress, now thudding against the bare wooden floor. He squinted against the glare of the built-up fire, set the tray down on the thick carpeting beside Vornatti.\n\nThe footsteps gained the carpet and disappeared in the muffling softness. Gilly lifted a book pole, holding it across his chest, the hook facing the shadows.\n\n\"Put it down, damn it, Gilly. Put it down, and give me my Elysia. Let the bastard wait.\"\n\nGilly hesitated, but finally set the book pole back against Vornatti's chair.\n\nHe bent, turning his back to the shadows, and cradled Vornatti's withered arm against his own. He drew the Elysia into the glass syringe in a cloudy swirl that held something of its origin in it, the elixir left in Naga's serpent-scaled wake. Letting it settle long enough so that the contents stopped their eddying, Gilly pushed the needle into the old man's ropy veins. Vornatti closed his eyes as Gilly worked the plunger, hissed against the bite of it in his blood.\n\nWhen Gilly looked up, they were no longer alone in the circle of firelight. The intruder shared it with them. It was only a boy, shivering in his thin shirt, blue at the lips. He had shadowed eyes, made darker by a cropped tumble of black curls that seemed to spread shadow out behind him. A thin scar sliced along the left side of his jaw, and he held his right hand behind his back.\n\nVornatti's eyes opened and he smiled as if a bit of his past had come back in salacious detail.\n\n\"What young toothsome have we here?\" he murmured, lazy on a release of pain and burgeoning euphoria. \"Gilly, only look what the gods have brought me.\"\n\n\"Be silent, old man,\" the boy said, drawing his arm from behind him. In his hand was a sword.\n\nAnd such a sword. It was black-bladed, black-hilted. The pommel was a burnished mirrorstone, and the edges were so sharp as to seem blurred in human sight. The cross-hilt was made of stilled, dark wings with wickedly edged feathers more reminiscent of daggers than of flight. Like some remnant from the god-touched times, the sword radiated presence beyond its workmanship.\n\n\"Are you Last?\" The boy raised the sword, its glitter matched by the wildness in his eyes.\n\nVornatti wheezed into laughter, slapping Gilly's arm, startling him. \"Last.\"\n\nThe boy's face grew red temper lines around the jaw and nose. The scar flared to whiteness. \"Don't laugh at me.\" He pushed the blade forward; Vornatti parried with the book pole, still laughing despite the slice the sword had carved in the wood.\n\nGilly stepped between Vornatti and the blade, and Vornatti stilled his laughter. \"There is more than one noble house in Graston. No, boy, I am not Last. Look here.\" He thumped the end of the pole on the carpet. \"Gilly, get your big feet out of the way and fetch us all drinks.\"\n\nHe stabbed at the floor again. \"See that, boy?\"\n\nThe carpet was burgundy and blue, and in the center a fantastical creature writhed in golden embroidery.\n\n\"I am Vornatti, _Baron_ Vornatti, since you are not likely to know that. An Itarusine subject, now living in Antyre; Aris's brother-by-law, and accountant. The winged serpent is my crest; Last's crest is a twisted hourglass, and his motto is 'only a Last at the last.' Smug bastard.\"\n\n\"Who's Aris?\" the boy said.\n\n\"Our king,\" Gilly said, carrying the tray to the table.\n\n\"Oh. Him.\" The boy studied the elaborate embroidery on the carpet, the slippers Vornatti wore, the crest imprinted on the spine of the long-forgotten book.\n\n\"Are you listening, boy?\"\n\nThe boy didn't answer, but his dark eyes flickered to Vornatti's face, studying the sagging, spotted flesh, the dark rheumy eyes. He let the sword point lower to threaten the floor. \"Where do I find Last?\"\n\n\"What sends you seeking him, blade in hand? Answer me that, first.\"\n\nThe boy frowned, but visibly needed the answer too badly to play coy. \"Last took Janus from me, and left me for dead. I will return the favor, reclaim Janus and leave Last dead. Though I will be less careless and see his heart stop before I go.\"\n\nSo much emotion was invested in the reply that it seemed a cantrip or incantation, and as rote as a nightly prayer. It silenced Vornatti, and the only sound was Gilly and the chinking of crystal as he poured the requested drinks.\n\n\"I doubt that was Last himself,\" Vornatti said. \"He so rarely soils his hands, and is far more dedicated to a task once undertaken. If it were Last, make no doubts, you would be dead, boy. But who is Janus to warrant such attention?\" Vornatti took the goblet Gilly offered him, sipped at the steaming negus. He gestured to Gilly, and Gilly turned the second goblet, the glass meant for him more usually, toward the boy.\n\nDistrust furrowed the boy's features, and he finally said, \"The earl of Last's bastard son.\"\n\n\"Last has no living children,\" Vornatti said.\n\nGilly pressed the cup into the boy's left hand, spoke to Vornatti. \"There were rumors. You remember. Celia Rosamunde, the admiral's daughter.\"\n\n\"Oh. Her.\" Vornatti mocked the boy's earlier words. \"That weak-willed, wanton wench.\" He laughed at his own wordplay, and to Gilly's surprise, even the boy flickered a bitter smile.\n\n\"I thought she died,\" Vornatti said.\n\n\"She was disowned and abandoned when her condition became evident. I heard she made her way to the Relicts and died there.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" the boy said. Across the room, the boy's stomach growled audibly. He raised the goblet, and swallowed three great gulps of the sweetened, spiced wine, throat working. Making a face, he dropped the goblet to the carpet.\n\nVornatti shifted his slippers away from the spreading stain. \"If you didn't want it, all you had to do was give it to Gilly,\" Vornatti said, without heat, his mind occupied. \"He reclaimed his bastard son? I had heard that Last's newest wife died of childbed fever and the babe of milksickness.\"\n\n\"This talk means nothing,\" the boy said. \"Tell me where to find Last.\" He dragged the sword point up to menace Vornatti once more.\n\n\"Let's have less of that,\" Vornatti said. \"It grows wearisome. I will tell you what you want to know, for all the good it will do you. Last's estate is yet ten miles from here. Will you walk it in ice and snow?\"\n\nThe boy's face sagged into momentary despair, and then the determined mask slid back into place. He started for the door.\n\nVornatti caught his arm with a sudden movement, surprising in a man so seemingly infirm. \"Stay the night,\" Vornatti said. He stroked the boy's scarred cheek.\n\nThe boy jerked free, no longer listening, caught up in his own thoughts, bent on following some inner drive that denied obstruction.\n\n\"Gilly,\" Vornatti commanded.\n\nReluctantly, Gilly roused himself to comply, though had he a choice, he'd be relieved to see the boy's back. Still, obedience was ingrained, and he stepped before the boy, keeping a wary eye on the boy's sword hand. \"Come on then. Humor the old bastard and stay.\"\n\nThe boy halted, staring at Gilly. \"Get out of my way.\" Shadows danced in the depths of his eyes, and Gilly stepped out of easy harm's range. Still, he balked the boy at the door.\n\nGilly was good at anticipating his Lord's requests. From the moment that Vornatti smiled at the intruder, Gilly knew he desired the boy. Other intruders had been summarily and unpleasantly dealt with, the pistol fished out from beneath Vornatti's lap furs, not teased to flushing. With that in the forefront of his thoughts, Gilly had drugged the boy's negus, the Laudable's sticky sweetness masked by the honeyed spice of the heated wine. Gilly was surprised the boy still stood. A single mouthful should have been enough to incapacitate one skinny youth.\n\nStill more surprising was the force of the boy's presence. Gilly found it harder and harder to keep himself blocking the boy's egress. Only Vornatti's expression of cupidity and interest kept Gilly still. Vornatti's mood could shift like the tide; he'd grow bored soon enough with the filthy, bad-tempered lad, but until that moment occurred, Gilly had best obey or suffer Vornatti's own bad temper.\n\n\"I'll pay you,\" Gilly said, inspired. \"Enough to rent a hack to Lastrest in the morning.\"\n\nThe boy put out a hand, palm upward, waiting.\n\n\"In the morning,\" Gilly said.\n\nHis hand clutched the black hilt. \"I should trust you after you've drugged the wine?\"\n\nGilly saw it now, the slackening mouth, the loosening fingers. The signs he had expected long minutes ago\u2014but the boy was fighting the effects of the drug with the considerable force of his will. Gilly wondered how much longer the boy could stay standing.\n\n\"I'm tired, Gilly. Show our guest to a room and be done with it.\" Vornatti leaned forward, creaked out of his chair, and reached for his fallen book. \"The painted room, mind you.\"\n\nGilly nodded. He bowed to the young savage as if he were truly a guest, and said, \"Follow me.\"\n\nHis back was tense with his concern that the boy was not following, and tense with the cat-feeling that the boy _was_ following, albeit on footsteps too silent to hear. Gilly turned and found the boy paused in the long stone-paved hall.\n\nThe boy stared into the great, clouded mirror that hung on the gilded and flocked walls, a spot of uncertain shadow in the midst of rich colors and elaborate hangings. Touching the rippled glass, the boy leaned close, fingered his reflection.\n\n\"You are comely enough,\" Gilly said, wondering if the boy had ever seen his face in a looking glass before. Despite the jarring notes of sword and accent, Gilly knew the boy was no more of the aristocracy than he himself was. \"But it's no assignation we head to, only rest.\"\n\n\"There is nothing before me but a rendezvous,\" the boy said, his thickening tongue slurring his words. The boy pressed his face against the cool glass, closing his eyes.\n\nGilly took the boy's arm, and the boy leaned against him, looked up at him with enormously pupiled eyes. \"Have you seen Janus?\"\n\n\"I have not. Is he fair like Last?\"\n\n\"Fair,\" he agreed on a sigh. He tugged Gilly's blond tail of hair; his dark-fringed eyes closed, then flickered open in sudden awareness. \"Bastard. I'd better get my lunas in the morning.\" He shoved Gilly away.\n\nGilly led the boy away from the mirror, and looked back over his shoulder, expecting to see the boy's reflection lingering behind, as stubborn as the boy himself.\n\nAt the painted room, Gilly unlocked the door, went inside, and lit the gas lamps. The boy stared at the furnishings in a near stupor.\n\nThe room was shadowed. The gaslight illumined only a circle the size of a man's outstretched arms, and the chamber was easily thrice that, if not more. The bed itself was a small room, walled of swagged draperies, embroidered with gilded serpents. Even to Gilly's eyes, they seemed to undulate in the wavering light; how must they appear to the drugged boy? Thick carpeting underfoot stifled sound, turning each movement into a secretive whisper. Heavy, dense curtains draped the distant walls, though Gilly knew there were no windows behind them, only the murals that gave the room its name. One drape, drawn back, revealed nothing but the image of rushing water, full of movement without progress. This room was a well-appointed prison.\n\nThe boy shivered as if he had sensed Gilly's thought, but headed for the swaddled bed as if for a long-sought rest. Gilly watched the boy clamber up the bed steps and lie down. Only then did the boy release the sword from his grip. It sprawled over the counterpane beside him like a living thing.\n\nGilly closed the door, drew out the key, and locked it, sealing away the boy and his sword.\n\nThe click of the bolt sliding home sounded as final as a headman's ax in the silent hall. Gilly winced, expecting the boy to rouse, sputtering curses and making futile strikes against the heft of the oaken door, but the moment passed in peace. Tucking the key into his vest pocket, Gilly returned to the library.\n\nVornatti waited, slumped down in his chair, too worn tonight to make the walk to his chambers without aid.\n\n\"The boy?\" Vornatti said, without raising his rough-whiskered chin from his chest.\n\n\"Caged. Asleep,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Good. I'm not inclined to conduct business at this hour.\" Vornatti pressed his hands into the arms of the chair, trying to raise himself. Though his face grayed with effort and his hands whitened, his body stayed motionless. Gilly forestalled further effort, slipping the rug from Vornatti's lap, setting the pistol aside, and, his hands beneath Vornatti's shoulders, hefted the diminished weight of what had once been a big man. Vornatti fell against Gilly's side, muttering. \"Too much Elysia,\" he said.\n\n\"Too much winter,\" Gilly said. \"I measure your dose most carefully.\" He lifted the old man into his arms like a child, chary of his grip on brittle limbs, and carried him down the hall to his quarters.\n\nDespite the prevailing fashion for the master's quarters to be housed higher than the common riffraff of ground dwellers, Vornatti's rooms were on the main floor, dictated by his long illness, and guarded from intruders by Gilly. Gilly's footsteps grew muffled as he set foot to the thickly piled carpets of Vornatti's room.\n\nA barbarian's bedroom, Gilly remembered thinking, when he first came to stand wide-eyed and tentative on the sill. An oddity in the kingdom of Antyre\u2014Vornatti's bedroom had been furnished in Itarusine fashion, a carved, curved bed with high sloping sides, covered not only with Antyrrian linens, wools, and velvets, but the heavy pelts of winter snowbears, imported from Itarus at exorbitant cost.\n\nAfraid of falling in his later years, of exacerbating the swelling in his back, Vornatti kept adding carpets, until the floor had risen high enough to make Gilly step up into the room. The fireplace along the exterior wall glowed darkly, muted by ash and spent coal. Gilly frowned at it, at the ghost of his breath in the air. He set Vornatti down on the bed, and helped him remove his dressing gown, draping it over the bedstead. He knelt and removed the slippers from his feet. Despite the homely wool stockings, Vornatti's feet were white and cold to the touch. Gilly chafed them until Vornatti drew away. \"Enough, Gilly, leave me my skin.\"\n\n\"You're the one who complains that cold feet keep you from your rest,\" Gilly said, and Vornatti settled his feet back into Gilly's hands.\n\nVornatti tangled his fingers in Gilly's hair, pulled the tie loose, and combed his locks with gnarled motions. \"My Gilly,\" Vornatti said, and Gilly, still kneeling, assessed the tone. Amorous? He hoped not, thought not.\n\nHe straightened, took himself away from Vornatti's caress, and drew back the linens to the scent of hot earth. The heated bricks were still warm to the touch when he tugged them out, and helped Vornatti into their place.\n\nVornatti stroked the skin at Gilly's throat, the soft cotton of his shirt over his chest, but the caresses were cursory. Again he stepped away from Vornatti's touch where normally he would have allowed it, or even prolonged it, making such small contact the opening move in their barter of desire and favor. He didn't need anything tonight but information, and Vornatti had always been free with that.\n\n\"Are you going to send for the magistrate? Turn the boy over to him and his workhouse?\" Gilly's belly clenched with anxiety. He was worried by Vornatti's interest, by his own conviction that the boy's presence could alter the fragile balance of his life with the baron.\n\n\"That boy's too delicate for the workhouse,\" Vornatti said, wincing as Gilly folded back the bedding and his bones took the weight of the furs, linens, and quilts.\n\n\"You think him delicate?\" Gilly asked, remembering the boy's grip on the sword, the willful refusal to give in to the drugged wine. The boy and his sword raised the fine hairs on his neck. Vornatti would not find this boy as pliable as the city whores he used to collect.\n\nVornatti laughed, a harsh, quick bray. \"Perhaps not. But still, I intend to keep him.\"\n\n\"He's not a dog,\" Gilly said. \"You can't keep people.\"\n\n\"Kept you, didn't I?\" Vornatti said. \"Found you, liked you, took you home, and here you stay.\"\n\n\"You bought me,\" Gilly said, watching the red coals of the fire dim further, the room grow more chill.\n\n\"And what's keeping me from buying him? Who knows what he'd do for food, for warmth?\" Vornatti stroked the fur coverlet in a speculative fashion.\n\n\"What would you do with him?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"You saw his face and form and need ask? But don't fuss yourself; he won't replace you,\" Vornatti said, splitting his lips into a malevolent grin. \"I've trained you to a nicety.\"\n\n\"Another pet then?\" Gilly said, flushing.\n\nVornatti sighed and closed his eyes. \"You know my sentiments regarding Last. Do you think I would turn that boy away? When his desires so mirror my own?\"\n\nGilly paused in his restless tidying to sit on the bed, shaken. \"You plot treason....\" Gilly was hushed by Vornatti's fingers tightening on his thigh, by the malevolence in his dark eyes, unwinking.\n\n\"Plotting? I do no such thing. If I aid a starveling boy, that's charity. If I give him information, that's education. All I am doing is putting the piece in play.\"\n**\u00b7 2 \u00b7**\n\n**F** ULL DAYLIGHT SEEPED beneath the heavy, pooled draperies in Gilly's room, waking him from a familiar dream turned nightmare. He clawed free from the winding cloths his linens had become, shuddering at their clammy touch, reminded irresistibly of the catafalques. As was not uncommon, Gilly had dreamed deep and dark, and found himself alone among the tombs of the five dead gods. Familiar, the sight of the white-shrouded coffins, the vast room around them smelling of ancient dust and decaying opulence. The carvings beneath the restless shrouds peeked through as the linens shifted with his approach, revealing the aspects and symbols he understood only while dreaming, shaping the great names: Baxit, Ani, Naga, Espit, Haith. The dead gods.\n\nFamiliar and yet\u2014Some tremor lingered in the silent mausoleum, as if something had run through, leaving stirred air in its wake, as if something stood in the shadows of the tombs, holding an indrawn breath, preparing to speak. A single sudden thought took life in his skin, as chilling as ice water: What if the sound had been the gods Themselves, the echoes of Their final words?\n\nThe threat had been enough to wake Gilly into gasping awareness. To dream of the dead gods was a chancy thing at best; to hear Their words was a burden few mortals could bear. Gilly's mother had once lamented the timing of Gilly's birth, assuring him that such dreams should have seen him an intercessor. But the gods were gone, and Gilly's path had led him not to the contemplative life, but to a life as Vornatti's companion.\n\nA groan shivered into the day-lit silence; the sobbing of tortured wood, and Gilly's breath seized while he tried the sound against the one he hadn't heard. The echo offorced wood, a coffin shifting.... Sense reasserted itself. His room was next to the prisoned boy's. That was all he heard, the boy hunting a way out of his cage. Ignoring the bed steps, he dropped to the floor and hastened to pull back the curtains.\n\nThe old woman who acted as their housekeeper had been about her rounds. The fire was newly laid, but unlit; the morning tray of tea and toast was chill to the touch. Gilly sighed. The old woman had her way of making her disapproval felt. Baron Vornatti kept city hours\u2014late nights and later mornings. Chrisanthe might work for Vornatti's coin, but she would not compromise. The tray had been deposited with the dawn, many hours ago. Gilly hadn't seen dawn light since the time he attended court with Vornatti and they returned home with the paling grayness. The last time he woke with the dawn was before Vornatti, back on the farm, when he had dreamed in torn sheets, shared with the two brothers closest in age.\n\nGilly drank down the tea in a gulp; cold and overbrewed, it did nothing to soothe his nerves. Not for the first time, he considered dismissing Chrisanthe. He would do so in a heartbeat, were it not that Vornatti's reputation precluded a household of competent servants. The country servants were afraid of Vornatti; reputations were all servants had, and scandals lingered. A lad or girl who worked for Vornatti would find no other position after. The thought made Gilly shiver. Vornatti was an old man, after all, and Gilly still young. What would happen to him when Vornatti gave in to mortality?\n\nBut scandals, though they discommoded their household, also kept it a power in the king's court. One of Gilly's chores, when Vornatti could bear to part from him, was to ferret out the latest gossip, faint whispers of things not yet known. Vornatti used such information to keep himself a player in the game of politics. Bartered information and his considerable fortune kept Vornatti a welcomed presence in the Antyrrian court, rather than a shunned creature, the hated Itarusine warden.\n\nA longer, more shuddering moan drew Gilly's thoughts back to what he had been avoiding. The boy.\n\nVornatti would still be sleeping, unconscious with Elysia and drink; it fell on Gilly to care for this strange guest. Gilly poured another cup of tea, lifted the tray. Hunger had been the boy's downfall last night. He would still be hungry.\n\nInside the room, the activity had stopped. Gilly set the tray down and listened. Silence. Gilly fished out the key, slipped it into the lock. The latch drew back with a protest. Gilly pushed the door but it refused to budge.\n\nShoving, Gilly pitted his not-inconsiderable strength against it. The door yielded a scant inch, and yielded it with the shuddering groan of shifting furniture. Gilly peered through the crack into the dimness beyond, jerking back as the blade slid toward him with a slow shine.\n\n\"You've barricaded the door,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"A prison can also repel,\" the boy said, his voice fierce and quiet.\n\nGilly sighed with enough force that his shoulders rose and fell. \"And here I've brought you tea and toast.\" Exasperation laced his words. Overnight, he had forgotten the boy's bloody-mindedness, his irritability. Had he really expected to find the boy meekly waiting, grateful to be let out, and willing to help entertain Vornatti over a long winter? Gilly chastised himself because he had. Had thought only of the boy's hunger and obvious poverty, and not of his pride.\n\n\"You can't stay in there forever,\" Gilly said. He slid down and sat on the exquisitely tiled floor of the hall, tracing the leafy patterns, green and gold, with a forefinger, listening for a reply. Patience, he thought, would be the only way. As patient as he must be during Vornatti's worst megrims. But cautious, too; he took care to sit beyond the reach of the sword.\n\nHe heard a faint sound, the wild-animal complaint of a starving body, and said, \"You'll get hungrier if you don't come out. And you're too thin to miss meals.\"\n\n\"I can live at least a week on the mice you let infest this place. Crack their heads, drink their blood, chew their flesh. Gnaw their tails, their feet when there's no meat left elsewhere. I'd last at least a week, maybe a fortnight without any aid from you.\"\n\nGilly fought a reluctant smile, a little charmed by the boy's manifest obstinance. \"You'll waste that blade's edge on mice? Don't do that. Come on out,\" Gilly said. \"Have tea, have toast; we'll see what old Chrisanthe has left for us in the chafing dishes. There is no need to barricade yourself away.\"\n\n\"I don't know who you are or what you want,\" the boy said.\n\n\"I'm just a servant,\" Gilly said. The usual burn touched his throat at the admittance. \"I don't want anything, except for you to come out. And you have not been forthcoming yourself. Have you no name, no history?\"\n\n\"None to share with a servant,\" the boy said.\n\nGilly flinched, flicked on the raw, and peered through the crack in the door again. The boy sat, wedged in between the wardrobe and bed steps that barricaded the door. He had added strength by ripping down the drapes and tying them around the blockade. He sat now in a dim cavern of cloth and wood, just barely big enough to fit him, and shivered with cold and hunger in the thin bar of light that streamed in over Gilly's shoulder.\n\nSilently, Gilly passed a piece of toast through the crack, felt the boy take it, and waited for the complaint about the coldness of it. But either the boy's bravado was lacking, or his knowledge didn't go so far as to encompass toast and heat. He ate it in three silent bites.\n\n\"You owe me silver.\"\n\n\"Do I,\" Gilly said. \"Will you trust a servant's word then?\"\n\n\"You promised,\" the boy said.\n\n\"I did,\" Gilly said. \"Lunas enough to get you to Lastrest, but they won't help you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It's winter, and Last will be abroad, in the Itarusine court. It is his habit. Supposedly, he loves the ice and snows, but it's an open secret that he visits only to keep abreast of the Itarusine king's schemes. Last will have emptied his house of all but a few servants, taken the rest with him. He will not be there.\" Gilly smiled, getting a little pleasure in the boy's body curling tighter on itself; the lad wasn't the only one who could wound with words. \"You've chosen the wrong season for your hunt.\"\n\n\"Lies.\" A faint breath of air.\n\n\"I just hate to see lunas go to waste. When you could use them to buy food.\"\n\n\"Stop talking about food,\" the boy said, his voice cracking.\n\nRepenting, Gilly passed him the rest of the toast. \"I will take you to Lastrest if you must go, but you will see that I am telling the truth.\"\n\nThere was nothing but silence from the boy's side. Pity flared in him suddenly, seeing the boy's unwelcome choices: starvation or servitude. Was it any wonder he was uncivil?\n\n\"Stay with us,\" Gilly said. \"The old bastard's not so bad to work for. Feeds me well, and I sleep on warmed sheets.\"\n\n\"Not a whore,\" the boy whispered, going quieter, his words fading into a bare susurration. A hissed name? Janus.\n\n\"I'll call for Vornatti's coach. It will take you to Lastrest, faster than the stagecoach, faster than a hack, and you can see that I am only telling you the truth. Then it will bring you back here.\"\n\n\"No,\" the boy said.\n\n\"Where else will you go?\" Gilly said. \"Even if I gave you silver, it wouldn't last you the winter.\"\n\n\"A ship,\" the boy said.\n\n\"Go abroad? After Last?\" Gilly said. \"I don't have enough lunas for that. And even if you did get there, it's colder there, snow all year round, and they'd kill you for your sword. Listen, boy. Listen. Vornatti would see Last ruined. Vornatti sees his vengeance in you.\"\n\nFurniture stuttered into reluctant movement, and after a time, the boy eeled out the widened crack. His face was dusty and blanched beneath, his hands shaking with the effort of moving the furniture again. Gilly swallowed. Another thing he had forgotten\u2014the uncanny effect of those dark eyes against the pallor of his skin. Vornatti would devour him entire. The sword, unsheathed at his side, twitched as if it had read Gilly's thought. The boy leaned against the wall, raised his head, and said, \"You owe me lunas, still.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\" Gilly said, grateful for the distraction. \"I am loaning you Vornatti's coach.\"\n\n\"Your promise was enough lunas for a hack, without reliance on whether I took one or not.\"\n\nGilly paused a moment, surprised to find that even after what must be a severe setback to his hopes, the boy could haggle like a merchant and reason like a solicitor. Then he laughed, pleased at such an agile wit; he fished into his pocket and passed three lunas to the grimy hand.\n\nThe boy smiled, not the faint flicker from last night, but a slow thing that bloomed into a mockery of pleasure. \"How enlightening. To know what my price is. Some silver, the offer of food, and nebulous mention of vengeance. I just hope the food is good.\"\n\nGilly caught his breath at the self-loathing in the boy's voice, sought for words, and finally said, \"There's usually venison steaks, fresh-made bread, milk, and eggs.\"\n\nHe reached for the boy's elbow to escort him to the breakfast room, but the boy jerked away. Gilly gestured him down the hallway.\n\nThe boy's eyes widened in the breakfast room as Gilly handed him a loaded plate. \"Here. If you want more, look on the sideboard. I'll be back presently.\"\n\nIt was a gamble leaving the boy alone, but Gilly thought that the food, in such quantity, would occupy the boy long enough. After all, on that first morning in Vornatti's house, Gilly himself hadn't fled. And Vornatti offered the boy more than he had ever offered Gilly\u2014his vengeance.\n\nBaron Vornatti was only now rousing to querulous waking. He gave Gilly no time to speak, but began issuing complaints and commands. \"My hands are numb, Gilly. Rub them, get me warmed water, and some damned hot tea\u2014that raddled bitch left the trays too early again. I want my gold dressing gown today, and it's near time for...\" His voice trailed away and the dissatisfaction dragging his tone sharpened to anticipation. \"The boy, Gilly. The boy.\"\n\n\"The boy is eating, and will be doing so, I judge, for some time. He is starving.\" Gilly yanked the bell cord, and when Chrisanthe appeared, demanded hot tea and warmed water for the washbasin. Vornatti's fire was burning low, and Gilly stoked it to life again.\n\nGilly poured the tea, washed the old bastard's hands with the rest of the warm water, watched the knotted fingers uncurl. He helped him into the quilted robe, found slippers for his feet, and added yet another log to the fire until it blazed. When he would have aided Vornatti to his bath, the old man shrugged him off. \"I want to see the boy. See if he's worth the trouble I mean to expend on him.\"\n\nIn the breakfast room, the boy had finished his sampling of the chafing dishes, and paced the length of the room, pausing to stare out the windows at the blustering wind and snow. He spun at their entrance, poised to flee.\n\n\"Ah, come here, boy,\" Vornatti said, from the depths of the wheeled chair. \"Come and let me look at you.\"\n\nCatlike, the boy approached. He took his time, pausing to look at a portrait blurred with age, the ice-silvered windows, the pattern on the parquet, the engraved dishes still heating on the sideboard, making it clear that he was obeying only his own whim and that if he ended up before Vornatti, well, that was only happenstance. But he stood before Vornatti docilely enough, the sword hanging loose in his hand, waiting for the man's eyes to stop tracing his features.\n\n\"How old are you, boy?\"\n\n\"Near fifteen.\"\n\n\"Small for your age. And slight. Do you know how to use that weapon of yours?\" Vornatti said.\n\n\"Well enough to strike from behind,\" the boy said.\n\nVornatti laughed, delighted by this boy's audacity, by his blunt scheming. At least, Gilly thought, delighted by audacity in such a pleasant form.\n\n\"Don't laugh at me,\" the boy ground out.\n\n\"You've a lot of Itarusine blood in you, right enough,\" Vornatti said. \"More than just your looks\u2014it's in your very manner, that touchy pride. I don't suppose your heritage is anything more than the usual Relicts tangle of sailor and whore?\"\n\n\"If my mother thought my father Quality instead of a conscripted sailor, she'd have battened on him like a lamprey. One useless woman feeding off a useless kind. Aristocrats.\" He spat on the floor.\n\n\"Such an insolent tongue. Once, I would have challenged you for such in-civility, and you would have trembled. I was held a master of the blade in my youth,\" Vornatti said.\n\nIn the first act of courtesy Gilly had seen, the boy did not laugh, though Gilly saw the retort quivering on those curling lips. But perhaps it was not courtesy, only belated calculation. Gilly had invoked the specter of Vornatti's aid against Last, offered a coach to Last's estate. Would the boy jeopardize that for a retort better swallowed?\n\n\"What is your name?\"\n\nThe boy ignored the question, paced back to the windows, looked over his shoulder, a black shadow against the daylight. \"Will the coach travel in this snow?\"\n\n\"The open coach, in this weather?\" Vornatti asked. \"No. Gilly, go with him, take the carriage. Take hot bricks, and wine, and furs to keep warm. It's near a day's journey in this muck.\" He clutched his robe tighter about him as if he could feel the bite of the wind, the snow flung from the horses' hooves.\n\n\"I can't leave you,\" Gilly said, though the chance of a day free from Vornatti's demands tempted him. Even if it were spent nursemaiding an entirely too irritable boy.\n\n\"Give me my Elysia and I'll doze the day with wine and books,\" Vornatti said.\n\nGilly kept his eyes lowered as he nodded, but a quick series of thoughts had crossed his mind. The boy wanted coin and a trip to Lastrest. Gilly could provide both as payment to see the problematic boy gone, without Vornatti there to object.\n\n\"Gilly, I expect you to bring our lad back safe and sound,\" Vornatti said, and Gilly nodded again, mutiny fading. Vornatti always knew.\n\nHe called for the carriage to be brought around, the coachman rousted from his warm rooms in the stable. Vornatti insisted that they take every precaution against the cold, and Gilly set the housekeeper to heating bricks in her oven, to filling flasks with spiced tea and a basket with food. Gilly watched the boy's face, hoping to see some hint of appreciation that all this was done for him. But the boy's face stayed blank, as sublimely arrogant as the Quality he claimed to despise.\n\nAt Vornatti's instruction, Gilly brought Vornatti's best greatcoat out from the wardrobe, a supple thing of leather and fur. Throughout all this, the boy stared out the window, his breath clouding the glass, his hand knotted around the sword.\n\n\"May I see that?\" Gilly asked, his hand outstretched.\n\nThe boy twitched, his reverie shattered, the blade swinging up in startled reaction. Gilly caught it in his gloved hand, and the thick glove parted beneath the blade. A thin stripe of blood crossed his palm. \"Well, it's sharp enough,\" Gilly said, \"But you cannot continue carrying it like that. You need a sheath, or better still, leave it behind.\"\n\n\"And if Last is there, then what will I do? Pelt him with stones and snowballs?\"\n\n\"Last will not be there,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"So you say. I will keep the sword by my side.\" But he accepted the sheath Gilly found, even suffered him to strap the belt around his narrow hips. The boy shrugged into the heavy coat Vornatti offered, allowed the man to fumble the fastenings shut.\n\nVornatti stood on careful legs, his fingers at the top button, soft fur touching his hands, the boy's dark hair mixed with sable. He stooped, caught the boy's tense mouth with his own, and fell back into his chair. \"Travel well.\"\n\nVornatti had calculated well. The boy's face flushed red, but the sword was safely sheathed and buckled beneath the greatcoat, essentially unreachable. The boy scrubbed at his mouth with a gloved hand, stormed out of the room. Gilly followed, and despite the inherent unfairness of Vornatti, rich and powerful, controlling the boy, found himself suppressing a laugh at Vornatti's incorrigible nature, and at the would-be murderer's indignation. Perhaps they deserved each other.\n**\u00b7 3 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY REGAINED HIS CUSTOMARY PLACIDITY by the time he joined the boy inside the carriage. The boy sulked in the corner, face nearly buried in the fur collar, eyes shuttered by dark lashes.\n\n\"Drive on,\" Gilly called. \"The sooner there, the sooner back.\"\n\nThe coach lurched to motion. A strange, silent ride it would be, too, Gilly thought, traveling through the snowfall with a shadow for a companion. When the hiss of snow and silence numbed Gilly's ears, he determined to coax the boy out of his megrims. \"Are you warm enough?\" Gilly asked.\n\nThe boy turned his head to meet Gilly's eyes but made no answer, his face scornful. The boy, wrapped in fur, a hot brick at his feet, full-bellied, was probably warm for the first winter of his life.\n\nBasic civilities having failed, Gilly tried bluntness. \"Tell me about this Janus of yours.\"\n\nThe boy looked out at the falling snow.\n\n\"You intend to rescue him, so there must be some fondness there. Is Janus your protector? Your friend? Your brother? Lover?\"\n\n\"Stop saying his name like you have a right to it,\" the boy said, a frantic edge to his voice. His chest heaved, visible even beneath the bulky coat, and Gilly sighed.\n\n\"You are a nervy creature. I only thought to pass the time by getting better acquainted. Since I don't know you, I asked questions, but you may ask them of me, if you prefer.\"\n\nDrifting snow and the muffled rhythm of hoofbeats were the only response he got. Gilly shrugged, sank down into the seat, and composed himself for a nap.\n\n\"Are you his whore?\" The question jerked him out of his doze, made heat scald his face and ears.\n\n\"All servants are such,\" Gilly said, taking shelter in philosophy. \"We do as we're told for money, whether we want to or not. The most we can do is choose our masters.\"\n\n\"I'm my own master,\" the boy said. \"And semantics aside, you're a whore.\"\n\nGilly flinched at the weary contempt in the boy's voice, reminded of the only time he went home. His father had spoken to him in just that tone. Un-fair, Gilly had thought then. They'd sold him to Vornatti; what had they expected? \"I\u2014Vornatti\u2014I obey his whims and accept his advances. Why shouldn't I? He took me from a farm that couldn't feed me, and gave me a library, good food, a room to myself, and free license when in the city.\" By the end of his speech, Gilly had nearly convinced himself once more of the wisdom of his bargain. \"He will grant you similar gifts.\"\n\n\"If I please him,\" the boy muttered. \"Make myself a toy for his whims and desires. Make myself a thing rather than a person. A possession easily replaced when he tires of it. How long have you been with him?\" When Gilly choked on his answer, the boy smiled before staring out the window; his breath frosted on the cloudy glass.\n\nQuiet minutes passed with the only sound being that of the wet impact of snow spattering the carriage like sea spume.\n\n\"How uncivil you are,\" Gilly said. \"Vornatti's offered to aid you\u2014\"\n\n\"Catch me believing anything that an aristocrat says,\" the boy bit out. \"They all cleave together.\"\n\n\"And you know so much of their ways,\" Gilly said, gently mocking. \"Do you think you're the only one to hate Last? I promise you, Vornatti's distaste for the man runs to the bone.\"\n\nAt the boy's skeptical expression, Gilly said, \"It's true. They met more than thirty years ago in the Itarusine court. It's a dangerous place, rife with assassin princes and poisonous noblewomen. A frozen land of coldhearted people who pride themselves on their courage, their aggression, and their willingness to do anything to see their desires met. It makes our court seem milkwater in comparison.\n\n\"For Last, only a fourth son even if of royal blood, a season in the Itarusine court was his opportunity to marry well, to gain a fortune he would not inherit on his own, perhaps make an alliance between the two courts. But Last proved too stiff-necked, too conservative in his views to thrive there, and when he met Vornatti\u2014well, I believe they arranged a duel before they finished making their first bows to each other.\"\n\nThe boy gazed out the clouded glass again, seemingly uninterested, but his fingers sketched brittle shapes in the fog his breath left. Tiny crosses that could be daggers, could be swords. Gilly said, \"By the time the duel became fact, Last had absorbed enough of Itarusine ways that he paid Vornatti's whore to render him insensible. When Vornatti missed the duel, Last declared him a craven. It wasn't done out of fear; Last is an admirable swordsman. Rather, it was done out of spite. It ruined Vornatti, far more effectively than even a lost duel could. It took until Xipos for him to regain his reputation.\"\n\n\"One thwarted duel and you think Vornatti can hate Last as I do?\"\n\n\"There's more, there's always more. And far too much to explain now.\" It wasn't time so much that stilled Gilly's tongue as consideration. Vornatti had few weaknesses, but the reminder of his sister was one of them. Aurora Vornatti had been the old bastard's heart, the only person he loved purely. When Aris Ixion had chosen to wed her, Last had spread slander wide and far trying to dissuade him. Whispers of wantonness, of inbreeding, even of flesh turned poisonous. Aris had earned Vornatti's friendship by denying the rumors. But when the long-awaited heir proved damaged, when Aurora died of his birth, the slander rose again and followed her to the grave.\n\nSometimes, it seemed to Gilly that Antyre itself was trailing after her into the grave. Xipos the first blow, and Aurora a deadly second thrust. Aris seemed unable to recover from either.\n\nGilly frowned. If the boy hadn't known Aris, their king\u2014\"You understand about Xipos?\"\n\nAfter a blank, black look, during which Gilly recalled the utter self-absorption of his audience and the lack of education, he explained the Xipos War. As much as that prolonged and bloody decade could be explained. The cause was simple enough: Itarus attempted to seize Xipos and its winter ports from Antyre's grip. But the battling grew so protracted and vicious that even the gods grew sick of it, the cause of their vanishment.\n\nThe poisonous offshoot of battle, assassination, claimed the king and crown prince; the second son died on the front; and the third son, the quiet scholar, Aris Ixion, inherited a kingdom at war. Aris, who valued life more than land, acted decisively. He surrendered, no matter that the terms of concession were ruinous: tithes, taxes, forced exports to Itarus that were sold back to Antyre at a hefty profit. If it weren't for Antyre's colonies in the Explorations, Itarus would have conquered Antyre one coin at a time.\n\n\"Grigor, the Itarusine king, sent Vornatti to be Antyre's auditor and warden, which places him ideally to aid you.\" The boy raised his head from where he had been resting it against the cushions. \"I thought that might wake you,\" Gilly said, smiling.\n\n\"I don't need his aid,\" the boy said.\n\n\"You'd be frozen back at the first hedgerow without it,\" Gilly countered.\n\nThe carriage came to a halt, rocking gently on its wheels in the wind and snow. The coachman leaned his snow-crowned head in, pulled the ice-crusted muffler from his mouth. His breath plumed in the still air. \"Gates are closed to Lastrest, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Open them and drive on.\"\n\nA rush of cold air greeted Gilly's words. The boy had clambered out and was floundering through the deeper snow beside the road. Gilly framed himself in the door and called out, \"It's still a mile or more. Too far to walk, boy.\"\n\nThe boy stepped between the bars of the gate while the coachman shoved at them, trying to free the gate from the clutch of the snowdrifts. Gilly cursed and went to help. On the other side, the boy tripped over the long skirt of the coat, and sprawled, frosting the sable fur, then got up again, heading for the trackless white of the drive.\n\nOnce the gates were ajar, Gilly's longer legs allowed him to catch the boy. He grabbed the boy's shoulder and shoved him back toward the coach. \"Get in. You'll freeze and Vornatti will be angry with me.\"\n\nThe boy's face was white, blanched by strong emotion, and he shivered under Gilly's rough grasp. \"There will be no one there. Don't fuss yourself so.\" The boy sat with deceptive patience as the coach furrowed its way through the snow.\n\nAt the manor, the coachman pointed out the shuttered windows, the door knocker taken off the latch. \"No one's here, Gilly.\"\n\n\"We'll ask the servants, to be sure. At the least, they might offer us some hospitality from the cold,\" Gilly said. He pounded on the door. Snow crusted his shoulders, and his gloved fingers had gone numb before an old man answered.\n\n\"Last has gone abroad to join his son. He will not return until the spring.\" The old man spoke it all in one breath, as inanimate as a puppet, and as disinterested. He started to shut the door, but Gilly leaned against it.\n\n\"Join his son?\"\n\n\"Yes, the boy has been educated abroad these sixteen years, and the earl wishes to see how his lessoning has gone before he introduces him to the court.\" More puppetry speech, but irritation surfaced in the old man's eyes as the wind stung his exposed face.\n\n\"His _bastard_ son, Janus?\" Gilly said.\n\nThe butler's mouth primmed. \"It is my understanding that Janus is the son of a prior, unreported marriage.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Gilly agreed. \"My mistake.\" _An unrecorded marriage, and a new heir for the earl of Last, a new member of the royal family?_ The immensity of the news left him stunned. _A bastard\u2014heir to the earldom, to the throne?_ Gilly turned to see what the boy was making of all this, and found him gone. The door slammed at his back. \"Where is he?\" Gilly asked the coachman.\n\n\"Went round 'longside, like he knew what he was doing.\"\n\n\"You didn't stop him?\"\n\nThe coachman shrugged.\n\nFaintly, Gilly heard the chime of glass breaking. Exasperated, he hurried after the boy, stumbling in the deep footprints of his path.\n\nThe coat had been discarded, a dark blotch in the snow beside an ivy-covered wall. The ivy was brown and sere, withered by the cold, but up above a window flashed, and something weightier than ice fell to the drift beside him. Gilly stooped, picked up the shard of glass, and swore. He backtracked, pounded on the door until his hands stung with impact, but this time no one answered.\n\n\"Drive down to the gate, blanket the horses, and wait for us. I'd rather them not grow suspicious of our continued presence.\"\n\nHe returned to the wall of ivy and stared upward. Gilly estimated that he had at least eighty pounds over the boy, but the ivy showed no breakages from the boy's ascent. Maybe it would hold his weight, he thought. Or maybe he would plummet to the snow beneath and break a leg or his neck.\n\nGilly took off his coat, dropped it over the boy's, firmed his gloves around his fingers, and began to climb. Ivy leaves crumbled beneath his hands; the vines stayed firm, until, within an armspan of the window, they started to peel away from the mortar. Gilly lunged upward, hooked his hands over the sill, and pulled himself inward, landing on the dusty floor of an unused bedchamber. He wrinkled his nose, repressed a sneeze and a sneer that Last couldn't get good servants either, and set off tracking the boy's damp footprints.\n\nHe found the boy standing in the shadowed alcove of a long hallway. \"What are you\u2014\"\n\nThe boy put an icy hand over Gilly's mouth, drew him into the alcove. \"There's someone coming.\" His whisper warmed Gilly's ear.\n\nThey watched the maid carrying the bundles of whites pass them and head down distant, uncarpeted stairs.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Gilly repeated.\n\n\"Learning my enemy.\"\n\nGilly sighed. \"I can tell you about him. And in the comfort of Vornatti's library. Or at his dining table if you're hungry again.\"\n\nThe boy wandered into the hallway, looked down the stairs into a dim long room, near bare of furnishings. \"What is that?\"\n\nGilly peered over the boy's shoulder. \"Portrait gallery. Pictures of his ancestors.\"\n\n\"He knows what they all look like?\" The boy was impressed by that, by the simple fact that the earl of Last knew who fathered him, who fathered his father, and so on, and more, could trace images of himself in their features. \"I want to see.\" He descended the stairs and Gilly hastened after him.\n\nThe nearest panel was blank. The boy turned to Gilly, his face demanding explanation. Gilly, keeping a nervous eye and ear out, said, \"That's for the next earl, the current earl's son. The portraits go by birth order.\"\n\n\"So this is Last?\" The boy walked on to the next portrait, heading farther into the house, farther from the window and escape.\n\nGilly caught him up. \"Yes. This is Michel Ixion, the fourteenth earl of Last.\"\n\nThe boy's eyes narrowed. \"Is it like him?\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Gilly said. The boy touched the painting, put his palm flat against the canvas, then drew his hand into a claw as if he might start tearing at it, as if he could slake his bloodlust on a picture. Gilly tugged the boy away, memories of rural superstition making his skin crawl, thinking of pins stuck in dolls and left on altars for godly intercession, never mind that the gods could not answer.\n\nThe boy's wrist trembled against Gilly's hand, the fine bones taut under Gilly's fingers, but he didn't resist. His eyes fell on the blank panel again and his breath caught. \"This is for Janus?\"\n\n\"It's unlikely. He is a bastard, no matter the story they intend to put out. It's far more likely that Last means to use Janus as a bargaining chip in his next marriage\u2014a tangible, albeit scandalous, counter to the rumors of tainted blood.\"\n\nEven as Gilly said it, he wondered, _Why legitimize the bastard at all?_ It wasn't like Last, a stalwart traditionalist, to fly in the face of custom, to not only recognize his bastard son, but to legitimize him. But maybe someone had commanded him.... Gilly collected rumors for Vornatti, and at the heart of them was the king, that melancholy scholar who'd been saddled with the burden of the throne\u2014a burden he could set down only for an heir. Last was no solution\u2014only a year's difference lay between the two\u2014and Kritos, though younger, was a wastrel, a gambler, and a fool. Perhaps Aris, trapped on his throne, dreamed of Janus.\n\nBut the three counselors would be hard to convince. Like Last, the duke of Love was a traditionalist, and would condemn Janus for the irregularity of his birth. But perhaps he could be bought; he had a marriageable daughter. DeGuerre was a believer in blood and a military man; he might accept the bloodline, and ignore the lack of marriage papers. After all, Celia was an admiral's daughter. And Westfall, despite his trappings of egalitarianism, had a young man's awe of the royal blood, even watered down. _A bastard king?_\n\nThe boy murmured at his side, waking him from his political reverie. \"This could be his?\"\n\n\"It is impossible to allow him the earldom and not put him in line for the throne,\" Gilly said. \"So it's unlikely, but I suppose, if Last died suddenly\u2014\"\n\n\"He will.\" The boy touched the sword hilt, smiled a little, then stared at the empty spot again. \"The throne. This house?\" Incredulity laced the boy's voice at the idea of the house more than of the throne. Gilly understood that. The throne was so far distant from his experience it might as well be a dream, but the possibility that Janus could live in a house like this\u2014\n\n\"The king has but one child, and that one born simple. He whiles his time away in padded nurseries, playing with dolls. There are few members left in the house of Last. The king, the earl, and their nephew, Kritos.\"\n\n\"Kritos,\" the boy said, a bare whisper.\n\nFootsteps echoed down the hallway; Gilly snatched at the boy to drag him back up the stairs, but the boy eluded him, passed through another door. \"What's this room?\"\n\n\"Last's study,\" Gilly said. He closed the door behind them, turning the key in the lock.\n\nThe boy skimmed around the room, pocketing trinkets: an enameled snuff box, a gold-handled letter opener, a quill pen and an ink bottle, a silver paperweight, and a crystal carving of Baxit, the cat-headed god of indolence and reason. He unearthed a gilt-edged porcelain dish of old toffees and, after a quick sniff, put two in his mouth, closed his eyes, and chewed. Then he tilted the rest into his shirt. As a visible afterthought, he dropped the delicate dish into his sleeve as well. Gilly bit back a laugh. \"We must go. The horses\u2014\"\n\nThe boy investigated the books on the shelves, touching brightly colored leather bindings and tracing his finger over the gilded titles. Sitting at the desk, the boy used the letter opener to pry open the locked drawer. Sheaves of paper curled out.\n\n\"Let me see,\" Gilly said, reading. \"Creditors, debts, and bills from Kritos. Such a wastrel. Won't please Last, that's for certain.\" A smile quirked his lips. \"Perhaps Kritos will drive Last to apoplexy and spare you the trouble.\"\n\nThe boy's eyes sharpened, went black with rage, and Gilly felt the smile vanish from his lips as if it never existed.\n\n\"I dream of killing him,\" the boy said, \"his blood painting my blade, his cry in my ears as I touch his heart....\" His fist tightened around the hilt, fingers whitening as if he meant to withdraw it.\n\n\"Because of Janus,\" Gilly said, stepping back out of reach of the boy's sword, edgy again. He had almost forgotten this boy's vendetta in a strange enjoyment of this leisurely housebreaking.\n\n\"Janus,\" the boy echoed. Something softer warmed the bleak fury in his eyes, and his grip lessened. His face grew still and troubled; Gilly wondered what the boy was thinking on\u2014his bloody plans for Last, or the butler's unwelcome confirmation that his prey had slipped his grasp. In this quiet state, the boy was malleable, allowing Gilly to usher him out of the study.\n\nAfter a brief consideration of the state of the ivy, Gilly dragged the boy down another flight of stairs to find a ground-floor window. Gilly dropped out into the deep snow, and then held up his hands. \"Come on.\"\n\n\"I don't want your help,\" the boy said, flinging himself into the snow and frost.\n\n\"At least put on your coat,\" Gilly said, reclaiming them from the snow-bank, and flinging the boy's at him.\n\nThe boy snarled and Gilly walked on, leaving the boy to flounder his way through the drifts, hampered by the heavy coat. Gilly reached the coach long before the boy, climbed into it, and sat, sipping hot, whiskey-laced tea from the flask. The boy staggered up, white from head to toe with blown snow, and shuddering with chill. His eyelashes were frosted and his face showed signs of suspicious dampness. Gilly wondered if the boy had been crying as he fought his way down the drive.\n\nThe boy clung to the edge of the coach, panting, shaking, soaked through. Again, Gilly offered a hand. The boy flinched, put his hands over his face, and then let out a sigh. He reached out and Gilly tugged him into the coach, rapped on the roof to let the coachman know to start.\n\n\"What'd you do? Swim your way through the drifts?\" Gilly asked, peeling the sodden coat from the boy's arms and back. \"I've heard that in Itarus there are sports like that, where bored lordlings drag themselves behind sleighs, but I don't think even they manage to get so much snow packed into their skin.\" He pulled a woolen blanket from their basket, draped it around the boy, then passed him the flask. \"Drink this. It'll warm you.\"\n\nThe boy's teeth chattered on the edge of the flask, but a faint tinge of color seeped into his cheeks after the first few gulps. He looked up at Gilly with a cringing wariness. \"Can I get to Itarus?\"\n\n\"If you sell everything you stole from Last's house and that sword, you might have enough. But then what? You'd be alone, hunting Last, hunting Janus in a country where you didn't speak the language. In a country of poisoners and duelists who'd make mincemeat of you before you ever reached your goal.\"\n\nThe boy turned his face, drew in a breath and held it. In his lap, his hands clawed at each other. \"If I stay\u2014\"\n\n\"If you stay, you'll wait out the year in comfort, in warmth, fed well, with a man who can explain the ways of the court and the aristocracy\u2014who might even aid you.\" Gilly took the flask away from the boy, drank another draft, more for the whiskey in it than for the warmth. He felt like a procurer.\n\nThe boy wrapped the blanket tighter and tucked his head into it, like a bird ducking its head beneath its wing.\n\nThis time, Gilly found no need to break the silence of the ride and the ever-darkening sky.\n\nChrisanthe greeted them at the door with a sour \"He's been waiting for you. Having fits, thinking you was tipped into a ditch.\"\n\nGilly went straight into the library, shrugging off the lashings of snow that adhered to his sleeves and hair. The boy's footsteps followed, but Gilly didn't look back. The boy had to make his own decision.\n\nHe knelt down. \"How was your day, old bastard? Did Chrisanthe give you your Elysia?\"\n\n\"Near broke the needle off in my arm, stupid cow. But you've come back and you've brought the boy with you.\" He patted Gilly's cheek. \"We'll feast. Stir up Cook.\"\n\nGilly returned, the cook's grumbling ringing in his ears, to hear Vornatti speaking. \"Well, boy, did you find we were telling you true?\"\n\nThe boy didn't reply in words; instead, he opened his pockets and showed Vornatti the small valuables he had pilfered, laying them out like offerings. Vornatti reached forward and picked up the little crystal figure. \"Baxit. Not surprising. Some men are too stubborn to give up on the past.\"\n\n\"You can have it,\" the boy said. \"The other things too. For my board.\"\n\nGilly raised a brow, waited for Vornatti's response, to see if he would let the boy buy himself a position as guest.\n\n\"I don't take renters. And I have trinkets enough,\" Vornatti said. \"Keep these trifles to decorate your room.\"\n\nThe boy sucked in his breath, moved to the fireplace, stared out at the snow. Finally, moving as stiffly as a wounded man, he walked back toward Vornatti, hand on sword hilt. Gilly tensed, but the boy only scooped up the fallen toffees, the little dish, and took a step back.\n\n\"You're staying then?\" Vornatti said, reaching out to fold his fingers in the boy's hair, caressing the dark, snow-damp locks.\n\nThe boy remained still with a small but visible effort; his eyes flickered again to the fireplace, to the fur coat shedding its icy rills of melted snow, to Chrisanthe grumbling in under the weight of a laden tray, and said, \"Until spring.\"\n**\u00b7 4 \u00b7**\n\n**I** WON'T DO IT,\" the boy said, taking a step back, away from Gilly, closer to the door and escape.\n\nGilly, sweating with effort, emptied another iron kettle full of near-boiling water into Vornatti's bath. Pushing the steam-damp hair from his face, Gilly assessed the boy, standing as rigid as a nervy horse, looking at the sloping marble tub with every evidence of horror.\n\n\"You will,\" Gilly said. \"You stink. And you likely have lice. Two things Vornatti doesn't much care for. You're lucky he's been as patient as he has. He had me scrubbed the very first moment he brought me home, and I was far cleaner than you.\"\n\n\"You die if you wash in winter,\" the boy said, taking another step back at the next gush of water added.\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Gilly said. \"My mother scrubbed us all once a week, no matter the season. Vornatti insists on a bath daily, and you've seen his advanced age.\"\n\n\"I don't want a bath,\" the boy said, withdrawing like a repulsed cat. \"If my stink keeps him away, so much the better.\"\n\nGilly grunted as he hefted another of the water-heavy kettles. \"You'll have one. The only choice you have in the matter is whether you want to be held down and scrubbed\u2014\" He ignored the boy snarling and drawing the sword, and continued, \"or whether I leave you here with the soap and your dignity. Think, boy\u2014at best you'd avoid the waters tonight\u2014but you'd find yourself drugged again, and bathed all unwitting. The baron may be an old man, but his sense of smell is keen.\"\n\nLetting the last kettle fall with a clang, Gilly wiped his hands on his breeches, then opened an armoire. \"There are dressing gowns here. Put one on while you dry off and you'll catch no chill. We'll find you clothes later.\" The boy's eyes were still wild, and Gilly sighed, let the vexation in his tone ease. He supposed, to a boy like this, brought up city-poor, immersion in water might be frightening.\n\n\"I'll leave you the key to the door. You know, boy, some people, myself included, enjoy a bath after a cold day. The water is very pleasant\u2014as long as you don't let it grow chill.\" He laid the key beside the bath and left the boy, sword still drawn, staring at the steaming water.\n\nTHE CLOSING DOOR woke the boy from his stillness. Reaching forward, he closed the key in his fist, then turned to the door. He turned the key in the lock, tested the latch, then set the sword down on a wide bench. _Vornatti must sit there,_ he thought, _before his bath, drawing off his clothes. No,_ he thought, his mouth twisting, _Vornatti sits there and_ Gilly _draws off his clothes._\n\nThe boy touched the steaming water with cautious fingers, setting off small ripples. He put his fingers to his mouth, then sat in Vornatti's chair. Toeing off his boots, he hesitated, looking at the locked door once again. He leaned his head against the door, listening; the dense wood gave back only silence.\n\nGingerly, the boy rose and unfastened the rough strip of canvas that made his belt. His breeches sagged past his knees and he stepped out of them. His stained linen shirt cloaked him from neck to thigh, and after another wary moment, he pulled that off as well with the air of a conjurer.\n\nAnd with a conjurer's touch, the moment changed. One moment a grubby, skinny stripling boy stood before the bath\u2014the next, a young woman, unbinding another strip of dirty canvas from across her budding chest. Her side was mottled dark with old blood, spilled from a wound that had healed long since. She touched the flaking residue, touched the pale pink weal of the whip mark, frowning.\n\nTaking up the soap, she held her breath, then stepped into the bath. After her first shuddering moment, when the heat of the water and the chill of the air warred over her, she calmed, sank down into the water.\n\nNerving herself, she took a breath and ducked her head; she came up to a sudden draft in the room. Spinning, water slopping over the edge, she clawed at the rim of the bath. Vornatti laughed, closed the door behind him. \"Looking for this?\" he said, taking cautious steps forward, holding her blade. His eyes glittered.\n\n\"Get out,\" she said, clutching the soap with shaking fingers.\n\n\"You have so much to learn,\" he said, voice full of amusement. \"You've learned two things now already. One\u2014a door that is locked can be unlocked. Guard your secrets accordingly. Two\u2014keep your sword by your side. A blade's no good, no matter how sharp, if it's out of reach.\"\n\nHe settled stiffly onto the bench, and leaned forward, his eyes lingering on her skin. \"A girl, then.\" He smiled. \"It's been too long since I've had a girl.\"\n\nShe threw the soap at him; he raised her blade and bisected the soap, then winced. \"Elysia only takes the pain away, my girl, it doesn't restore youth. This sword is a young man's weapon.\"\n\n\"It's mine,\" she said, surging out of the water, snatching it from his hand.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" Vornatti said. \"But tell me then\u2014was it chance or choice that made us take you for a lad?\"\n\nShe pulled on a dressing gown, sank into a sulky heap near the fire. \"I am not a fool. A girl with a sword is asking only for someone to take it from her.\"\n\n\"You intend to face Last as a boy.\"\n\n\"Would he face a girl? I think he would not. I think he'd call forth his coachman to beat me down again, and ride on.\" As she spoke, she tapped the tip of the blade on the hearth, chipping bits of brick loose like old blood.\n\nVornatti leaned forward and laid his hand on her shoulder. \"What's your name, girl? After all, we're to be intimates. I'd like to know what to call you, what _Janus_ called you\u2014\" He broke off, the sword pressing up against the crepey skin of his neck.\n\n\"What he called me is of no matter. That girl is dead. And you don't need my name, don't need it to call me to heel. After all, I'm rarely to be out of your reach. Unless\u2014\" The sword shifted a tiny, meaningful increment.\n\n\"Will you kill me? Then what? Flee my home back into the snows, as desperate as you came?\"\n\n\"I'll rob this place blind,\" she said, rising, the blade steady, depositing a line of brick dust against his pale skin.\n\n\"And what about Gilly? All I need do is call out\u2014then your secret would be shared with one more.\"\n\n\"He'd probably thank me for killing you,\" she said.\n\n\"Would he? If he had to go back to the farm where he came from, bury his wit in the soil? Till the fields alone, next to the graves of his family, dead of the plague? He has no one, no one but myself, and nothing but what I provide. I own him as surely as I own my horses, which would suffer if set free.\" Vornatti pushed the blade aside, touched her face, her neck. \"It's not so much I want from you. A name.\"\n\nShe shivered as his fingers spidered into the vee of the dressing gown, cupped her breast, touched the curling scar beside it. \"I will not give it.\"\n\n\"You're too thin,\" he said, withdrawing. \"Get Gilly to feed you more. If I wanted to stroke drawn skin and bones, I'd find my pleasure in myself and spare myself troublesome chits and lads.\"\n\nHe slumped back on the bench; she took advantage of the space to move away.\n\n\"So tell me, girl,\" he said, voice growing weaker. \"Shall I have Gilly find you breeches or a skirt?\"\n\n\"Breeches,\" she said.\n\nVornatti dozed, jerked awake. \"Well, I own I'm glad not to share your secret with Gilly. He's a devil with the maids. Thinks I don't know he spends his allowance on willing barmaids in Graston village.\" He coughed, breathed heavily for a moment, studied the heap of her fallen clothing.\n\n\"You bind your breasts? The scant handfuls that they are? Well, I can help you there. One of my\u2014friends was an actress who specialized in male roles. Her corset should fit you and be more secure than any length of linen. Come now, girl, aren't you going to thank me? It's not every man who'd help a girl find vengeance....\"\n\nHe patted his cheek, his mouth. Clutching the robe closer about her, she leaned forward, touched his cheek, his lips with her own. Vornatti smiled.\n\n\"Let me tell you one thing more, if boy you'll be: To play the part, you must believe the part\u2014forget who you were. Rumor and gossip are everywhere in this country, even when it involves insignificant little chits like yourself.\"\n\n\"That was the mistake Kritos made, thinking me insignificant enough to leave me alive,\" she said, _he_ said, the suppressed savagery in his voice enough to stifle Vornatti's smile.\n\nGILLY, WAITING OUTSIDE the baron's quarters, went in at the sound of the slamming door. Vornatti staggered over to his wheeled chair, panting. Gilly took the handles and drew him over to the bed. Vornatti laughed. \"Such a lovely surprise under the filth, Gilly, you've no idea....\"\n\nThe door to the bath slammed open; the boy stalked out, clad in Gilly's old breeches and shirt, long ago outgrown. He shot Vornatti a look composed of equal parts anger and wariness, but the black look Gilly earned was all rage. Gilly stepped back under the weight of it.\n\n\"I'm tired, Gilly,\" Vornatti said, holding up his arms. \"I won't want dinner.\"\n\nGilly put him to bed and went after the boy. He hadn't gone far; Gilly stepped out, and found himself skipping back against the door, the sword at his chest.\n\n\"There were two keys,\" the boy said. \"You let me believe\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Gilly said, too tired to be wary. He ducked the sword and, cat-quick, seized the boy's thin wrists in his hands. The boy kicked his shins, and Gilly, remembering squabbles with his hot-tempered little brother, twisted the boy's wrists sharply, making him drop the sword. When the boy still fought, twisting and biting, Gilly lifted him by his wrists, dangled him in the air. \"Enough,\" he repeated. It had always worked on his brother, on fighting dogs, and feral cats. It worked now. The boy sagged in his grip, wiggling only a little.\n\nGilly released him. The boy fell to the floor. Gilly winced as the boy turned a wary face up to him.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Gilly said. He picked up the sword; the curling hilt scraped his knuckles, and the whole thing seemed to whisper against his palm. \"Here,\" he said, \"take it.\" He thrust it out at the boy, regretted touching it at all. It hadn't felt quite like steel, felt born, not forged, and malign by nature. Perhaps it _had_ been god-created, but such artifacts were few and jealously hoarded. Gilly fisted his hand, ridding himself of the sensation it left behind. With growing concern, he watched the boy sheathe it: Where had the boy found such a blade? He knew better than to expect an answer were he to ask.\n\n\"Are you hungry? There's dinner waiting. It's venison again. It's mostly venison all winter. You'll be sick of it come spring.\"\n\nThe boy stood. \"I'm not hungry,\" he said.\n\n\"You're skin and bones,\" Gilly said, wondering if he was always doomed to argue with the boy.\n\n\"So he said. But why I should gain flesh simply to please his lecherous\u2014\" The boy's jaw snapped shut; his eyes blazed.\n\nGilly took the boy's elbow in his hand, walked him toward the library, wanting to be, if not friends, at least amicable, if the boy's temper could allow such a thing. To that end, Gilly said, \"I know something that might make you feel better.\" He drew the boy past the books to the frosted doors. They stepped outside into the winter night; their breaths fled from them like ghosts.\n\nGilly bent, pulled up a handful of broken marble, snow-dusted. \"It's the old facing from the house. I like to get my anger out this way.\" He hefted the fragments, tested the weight, and pivoted, hurling the missiles at the orchard. The rocks hit the nearest tree, scattering icicles.\n\nGilly collected another handful, thinking of Vornatti giving him precise instructions regarding keys and bathing rooms. He sent another tree-load of ice to the ground, letting the sound drown out his guilt.\n\nHe handed the boy the next stone, cold and damp with snow. \"Imagine you're throwing your anger, your frustration out.\" Another game he'd played with his brother, who could only be distracted from his tempers, rarely soothed.\n\nThe boy closed his eyes, his jaw clenched, the scar flared red, and then he threw. The stone sailed forward, effortlessly hitting the tree. Icicles cascaded, but before Gilly could hand him another stone, the next tree shed its icy teeth. Then the next and the next, until the entire orchard was crashing and shattering with one thrown stone. Gilly caught a shuddering breath at the glittering wreckage the boy had made.\n\nVORNATTI RUSTLED PAPER in his lap, unfolding the envelope. Gilly watched, intrigued. Usually the old bastard tossed Gilly his post, trusting Gilly to file away the gossip, the bills, Aris's reports on profits sent to Itarus, and to act on the few business letters he received. But this letter lacked the creamy color of Antyrrian vellum, was tinted slightly blue, nearly translucent. The thick lines of script shone through the paper.\n\n\"What think you of this?\" Vornatti said, passing the letter to Gilly.\n\nAcross the library, the boy looked up from his contemplation of Vornatti's book.\n\n\"Read it aloud, Gilly, since it concerns our young friend.\"\n\nThe boy shut the book, not bothering to mark his page. And why would he, Gilly thought, when he could only be looking at the pictures, and not the text?\n\n\"Gilly,\" Vornatti warned.\n\n\"Sir,\" Gilly said, began. \"It's from Itarus,\" he said, surprised. \"How did you\u2014\"\n\n\"I have my ways, Gilly. You'd do well to remember that.\" Vornatti closed his eyes. \"Read.\"\n\n\"It's a copy of a letter from Kritos to Last,\" Gilly said. The boy stiffened, silent. Gilly angled the letter to get the most of the firelight on the crossed words.\n\n_\"Michel, cousin, while I acknowledge that you have come to Itarus as I requested, I did not intend for you to dally within the foreign court, and leave me with your ill-begotten, ill-tempered bastard son. He is unmanageable. A feral dog would have more gratitude. A rabid animal would have shown less rage. We've had to lock him in the turret, to keep him from escape attempts. If we were not on Ice Island, he would have succeeded. I can not even enter his room without his attack._\n\n_\"It's all very well to suggest threatening him, to derive obedience through fear, but he's not so blind as that. He knows you want him alive, and what else have I to threaten him with? He cares not for hunger nor cold nor beatings, though at least those serve to weaken his outbursts._\n\n_\"No, cousin, if you have any hopes of firing him off among the Itarusine court, and then among our own, you will have to take a hand. As it is, I have the severest doubts he can ever learn our ways. I wash my hands of his education. I will be his jailer only. If you would have me do otherwise, you must take a hand yourself._\n\n_\"Kritos.\"_\n\nThe boy stood, his hands shaking. \"Kritos.\" The loathing in his voice darkened the atmosphere of the room, bringing winter darkness to the fire-lit circle.\n\n\"How did you get this?\" Gilly asked, turning the letter over in his hands, looking for some hint of the sender.\n\n\"A matter of enmity,\" Vornatti said. \"Last hates me. As does my heir, Dantalion. As such, they are acquaintances, at least during the days of the Winter Court. It's a small matter to pay one of Dantalion's servants to copy any interesting letters.\"\n\n\"Is there anything else?\" the boy asked. \"Did Last go to aid Kritos?\"\n\nGilly watched the tremor move from the boy's hands through his spine and disappear, leaving him as still as a crouching cat.\n\n\"So greedy,\" Vornatti said. \"Here I've worked one prodigious collection of information, from my chair, mind you, and you only ask for more. Will you thank me?\"\n\n\"You derive too much pleasure from your intrigues to need my thanks,\" the boy said. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"I did receive word that Last has retired to Ice Island,\" Vornatti said.\n\nThe boy's face shuttered, locking away emotion, but Gilly had seen a quick wash of perplexity cross his face, as if he didn't know whether to take Last's involvement as a good thing or bad.\n\n\"Come then, thank me,\" Vornatti said. \"Or are you as unmannered as Last's whelp?\"\n\n\"I'm worse,\" the boy said.\n\nVornatti laughed. \"How do you figure that, boy? You've been brought to heel, domesticated by food and a little frost. The only independence you have left is your stubborn refusal to grant us your name.\"\n\nThe boy looked to the barren trees in the orchard outside. This winter, they had not gathered icicles for more than a night without rocks being hurled at them. The black rage in the boy's eyes sank back; he dutifully crawled into Vornatti's lap and kissed him. Vornatti stroked the black curls, but the moment Vornatti's lips left his to draw breath, the boy was across the room, never mind that he left strands of his hair in Vornatti's clutching fingers.\n\n\"Gilly,\" Vornatti said, smiling. \"I'm tired.\"\n\nObediently, Gilly rose, folded the letter in neat quarters, and set it on the desk.\n\nWhen he returned an hour later, flushed and straightening his clothes, he found the boy still in the library. Gilly hastily tucked his shirt back into his breeches, embarrassed anew under the boy's dark eyes.\n\nSeeking distraction, he discovered it in the boy sprawled beside the fireplace, in the book spread open before him. Gilly remembered the frustration he had felt once, touching the incomprehensible secrets of letters and words.\n\n\"I'll teach you to read if you like. And write,\" Gilly offered.\n\nThe boy propped himself on his elbows. \"Do you think I come to look at the pictures?\" He passed the book to Gilly.\n\nThe book was not one of Vornatti's pornographic woodcuts. It was instead Sofia Grigorian's text-dense treatise on exotic poisons used in the Itarusine court.\n\n\"Are you suggesting you can read?\"\n\n\"I am telling you I can. And write.\" The boy's lips curled in a smirk that Gilly was beginning to recognize. It betokened the boy's worst tempers. The news from Itarus was not to his liking, Gilly thought. Despite everything, the boy had hoped for Janus's return this year.\n\n\"So you see how little I need you,\" the boy continued. \"I can read my own damn letters. And I don't need Vornatti's lecherous aid, either.\"\n\nGilly's own temper quickened as the boy's words woke the caresses Vornatti had pressed to his skin.\n\nHe yanked the boy to his feet. Gilly handed him a quill and the Itarusine envelope. \"Prove it. Write something for me then.\"\n\n\"Anything,\" the boy said, defiant.\n\n\"Anything?\" Gilly grinned. \"Promise?\"\n\nThe boy hesitated in the face of that smile. But then he raised his chin. The smirk deepened. \"Anything.\"\n\n\"Your name.\"\n\nThe boy's face froze and he whispered, \"Bastard. And you'll run off to tell him, won't you?\"\n\n\"If you are incapable...\" Gilly said, goading him.\n\nThe boy dipped the quill into the inkwell, shook the excess off, and bent over the paper with a faint awkwardness that spoke of inexperience. But the scrolling ink spread over the silky parchment smoothly and quickly, stirring Gilly's breath while he read the letters as they formed.\n\nThe boy stepped back, bowed, tossed the quill onto the desk with a spattering of inky drops, and left the room, all so smoothly done that he was gone before Gilly's eyes rose from the paper and the single word that the boy claimed as his name.\n\n_Maledicte._\n\nGILLY WOKE TO THE ROUGH sound of Vornatti's labored breathing in his ear and, from farther down the hall, the distant protest of moving furniture. Gilly wondered drowsily if something new had distressed the boy and he had built barricades in his room last night, or if he was thieving furniture from the other rooms. A settee had already disappeared into the boy's quarters, and once, Gilly had found the boy preparing to move an enameled table down the wide, slippery stairs. Gilly had carried it down himself, but the boy, as suspicious as a mother cat, had maneuvered it inside without Gilly's help. The boy\u2014 _Maledicte,_ Gilly thought, jerking awake all at once, unnerved again. The name rang in his ears like the voices of mad intercessors and witches, ill-omened.\n\nVornatti's gnarled hand sought Gilly's thigh. \"Who would have thought,\" Vornatti rasped, \"the boy would find such tame pursuits to amuse him through the cold season.\"\n\nGilly smiled, but when Vornatti's hands stroked higher, he pulled away, freed himself from the smothering weight of eiderdown and fur. \"I'll start the fire,\" he said.\n\n\"Linger yet,\" Vornatti commanded. \"It's rare enough I wake with you in my bed these days. It makes me wonder what sent you fleeing into my arms last night.\"\n\nGilly shrugged, fed the spills into the redly burning coals, grew a little flamelet, and fed the first log in.\n\n\"That's not an answer, Gilly,\" Vornatti said, mood souring along with his voice. He gasped, and Gilly knew the old man's pains had caught up with him once again.\n\nGilly stirred a spoonful of Laudable into the leftovers of last night's wine. \"Drink this.\"\n\nVornatti gulped it. \"Tell me why, Gilly. Do you want something out of the ordinary way?\"\n\n\"I'm not a whore,\" Gilly said, stoppering the lid so hard the seal cracked in his hands.\n\n\"Well, not _just_ a whore,\" Vornatti said, mocking. \"There are endless supplies of reasonably intelligent young men. There are endless supplies of reasonably willing young men. But there are few who are both. And gentle\u2014\" Vornatti touched the rough stubble on Gilly's cheeks, his tone losing its petulance. \"What was it that frightened you? The boy?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Gilly said. \"I didn't want to be alone in the dark, with only the boy in my head for company.\"\n\n\"But such fascinating company,\" Vornatti said, gloating.\n\nGilly knelt beside the bed, found Vornatti's slippers, and slid them onto his feet. Head still lowered, he said. \"Sir, have you never thought that this might be a dangerous thing? This boy\u2014sometimes he seems merely a youth with a temper; at other times, he seems uncanny, his rage unnatural, that sword with raven wings like Black-Winged Ani....\"\n\n\"Black Ani,\" Vornatti said. In his voice, Gilly heard old remembrances, and wondered what it had been like, to live under the eyes of the gods.\n\n\"The sword, the hunger for vengeance. His will. His determination. Even his name. Ani could\u2014\"\n\n\"The gods are dead, Gilly. Any man who fought at Xipos in the endgame knows that. Xipos proved it; men made offerings grim and great, and men died, churned into mud and blood, screaming for Haith's mercy and hearing _nothing._ That _sword_ is nothing\u2014stolen from some incautious aristocrat, nothing more. The boy has a magpie heart, we've seen that.\" Vornatti tugged his dressing gown closer across his shoulders; it sagged where his flesh had once filled it, revealing the great, pitted scars over his spine and hip, the source of his pains and problems, the place where a warhorse had danced across his back with rough iron shoes.\n\n\"But\u2014\" Gilly started, remembering the feel of the sword beneath his hand and shivering.\n\n\"The gods are gone,\" Vornatti said. \"Baxit Himself gave us that gift. Though some swear it was His curse. To live at our own behest. To answer our own prayers.\"\n\nGilly nodded, obediently.\n\n\"My superstitious Gilly, I am an old man,\" Vornatti said. \"I grew up in the god times. And I saw one god-possessed.... If this boy were Ani's, he would have slaughtered us both rather than falter in his forward steps. There is an old book of such histories in the library, should you doubt me. I think you merely mazed with nightmares. Haven't I heard you call out in your sleep while you dream of dead things?\"\n\nGilly nodded, this time with more belief. Maledicte was likely nothing but a clever actor, skilled in evoking dread. It would serve him well, should he ever come to grips with Last, Gilly thought. He refused to think on the sword and the feeling it left in his skin.\n\n\"But you learned his name?\" Vornatti said. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Gilly said.\n\nVornatti threw back his head and laughed.\n\nA SHADOW CROSSED GILLY'S LINE of sight as he crouched beside the shelves, pulling out the books rarely read. His hand closed on the spine of one old enough to have grown foxed and spotted, the leather cracking. _The Book of Vengeances._\n\nVornatti, Gilly thought, had never succumbed to the worst affliction of old age, that of a faulty memory. The book opened in Gilly's hands to an illustrated page black with ink and a raven's eyes, to a man battling, though knives pierced his flesh. The shadow moved over him again, and he twitched, closing the book reflexively.\n\nThe boy stood behind him, eyes calculating. \"You don't guard your back very well.\"\n\n\"I'm only a servant,\" Gilly said. \"I don't need to.\"\n\n\"I suppose that's true. And you don't have to fight for your food, your clothes, or your hair as Relicts children do.\"\n\n\"Is that\u2014\"\n\n\"Where I come from? Of course. You've known that all along,\" Maledicte said. \"Or did you think Ani birthed me from an egg?\" His lips curled in amusement.\n\nGilly sighed in embarrassment. \"Vornatti told you.\"\n\n\"Vornatti found it funny; you, fearing me.\" Maledicte's face darkened. \"I could take you, though.\"\n\nGilly said, \"I shook you once, and I can do it again.\" He kept his tone matter-of-fact, and the boy slid away from the confrontation.\n\n\"Your hair's all over cobwebs,\" he said. \"No one would buy it in that state, not even for pillow stuffing.\" The boy set the sword down, reached out, and tugged the ribbon from Gilly's hair with agile fingers. \"Turn around.\"\n\nHesitantly, Gilly did. Maledicte moved behind him, unfastened his hair, and stroked cool fingers through to Gilly's nape. Gilly tensed; the boy's gentler moods all too often presaged a sting so delicate that only later did it smart and bleed. \"What do you want?\"\n\nMaledicte backed away, spread his arms wide, and said, \"Tell me what you see.\"\n\nGingerly, uncertain of Maledicte's mood, Gilly said, \"A boy pretty enough to attract attention, disconcerting enough to repel, and very young.\"\n\nMaledicte's brows snapped down. \"Not dangerous? And why so young? I am near a man's age.\"\n\n\"You are not wearing the sword,\" Gilly said. \"And your slightness, coupled with your light voice, will always strike men as youthful.\"\n\nMaledicte sank onto the library stool, ran his hands through his hair, first pushing the curls back, then raking them forward to leave only his dark eyes visible. \"I would not want Last to laugh at me,\" Maledicte whispered. \"Tell me how to be feared, Gilly. You who know so much.\"\n\nGilly sat beside Maledicte, flattered that the boy sought his advice, a sign that perhaps he might think Gilly something more than just Vornatti's pet. \"You have time.\"\n\n\"The trees are budding, the songbirds sing, and daylight grows. It is almost spring. Last will return, though not Janus....\" Maledicte's breath flowed out and with it, seemingly his strength. He slumped against the bookshelf, restless hands knotting Gilly's ribbon, shaping the cloth as he could not shape the future. \"If I kill Last, what will it avail me with Janus still caged in Itarus? Last sent him there, and only Last will bring him back.\"\n\n\"Kritos would kill him if he could,\" Gilly agreed, \"rather than spend one copper on him. But perhaps Vornatti could be relied upon.\"\n\n\"Vornatti, least of all.\" Maledicte rose to pace the room. \"Vornatti has his own agenda for me, his own desires. I am but a reflection of what he wants me to be. He shelters me, indulges me, and whispers sweet vengeful fancies in my ears, but they are his fancies, his vengeance. Not mine.\n\n\"My schemes are...far from complete. And I know of no way to make them more so. I will not have Last mock me, a boy with a blade. I cannot face him at all; my skills are too uneven, and there is no satisfaction in being cut down by Last's men.\n\n\"So you see my dilemma, Gilly?\" The boy held his hands out in calculated supplication. \"You have all the answers for Vornatti; have you none for me?\"\n\nGilly's eyes fell before Maledicte's steady ones, startled at the boy's candor and need. The boy waited silently for Gilly's advice, seemingly patient, though Gilly could see the boy's hands twisting into fists.\n\nGilly hastened into speech. \"Wait. Learn to use the sword. Last is a swordsman of some skill. And you\u2014\"\n\n\"Vornatti has tried to instruct me, but he is too old, his directions meaningless.\"\n\n\"Vornatti will hire a master if you ask,\" Gilly said, fighting a sudden sense of disloyalty. It was more than advice Maledicte needed; he needed an ally. \"In the right way.\" He grabbed Maledicte's hands, pulled him near. \"Listen, and let me tell you how to manage him.\"\n\nHe bent his blond head to Maledicte's dark one and began to speak, voicing things he had never consciously plotted, small details of pleasure and drugs and wine, and when to ask, and how. The lecture made him cringe, made him realize he worked Vornatti like any paid companion. If Maledicte said anything scathing now, he'd never be able to speak so again, but the boy stayed attentive and blessedly silent. When Maledicte left, Gilly turned, scalded in his own skin, to distract himself with _The Book of Vengeances._ But it was gone in the boy's light-fingered wake.\n\nVORNATTI SAT IN HIS CHAIR in the library. The fire burned low, and a sure sign of encroaching spring was that Vornatti did not demand that it be built up at once. Gilly dusted the books; their butler had quit after entering Maledicte's room without knocking and finding his cravat ruined by a black blade and his own blood.\n\nMaledicte sat on the floor beside Vornatti's chair, reading aloud from the pages spread over his lap, pausing every other page to sip from the goblet beside him.\n\nVornatti's right hand rested in the boy's dark hair, fingers lost in the tumbled curls, moving in lazy increments.\n\nGilly looked back to his dusting and smiled a little sourly. So tranquil, so falsely domestic\u2014Maledicte had been heeding his advice.\n\nMaledicte paused in his reading. It was an account of a young girl's first visit to the court, supposedly true, but from the detailed and violent debaucheries awaiting her on the successive pages, hopefully false. Vornatti chose it this evening, saying, \"This is why one always wants a protector in the court, Maledicte. Of course, you have the sword, and you're no girl, so you'll find this tale more amusing than cautionary.\"\n\n\"Is the court really so decadent?\" Maledicte asked.\n\n\"Quite so. It's a hard time, this, though the nobles refuse to acknowledge it. And with the gods gone, there is little men fear. But for all of that, the court is beautiful: there is no time so lovely as twilight, after all.\n\n\"The courtiers meet in gilded ballrooms; they compete with each other to be the most beautiful, the most noticed.\" Vornatti smiled down at the boy and continued.\n\n\"Everything is gilt or silver; you'd want to thieve it all. The rooms, the furniture, the clothing\u2014their clothing is something to see. Every shade under the sun and moon, every stone under the earth and sea is there, burnished and made perfect.\n\n\"The courtiers' tongues seem gilded as well, their manners stiffened by the same embroidery that clings to their gowns and jackets. The men carry swords they may not draw in the ballrooms, to show fierceness many of them lack. And they whisper, like dry leaves in autumn, all the things they dare not say aloud.\"\n\nVornatti looked down and said, \"A savage, unrestrained tongue like yours, my boy, would scandalize them, raise their whispering into sounds of the surf rushing at your back.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled. \"They do love a good scandal. You've told me so yourself.\" He brushed his fingers over Vornatti's mouth, allowed the old man to press a kiss to his palm.\n\n\"Good night,\" Maledicte said, withdrawing his hand, his smiles. He left the room; Vornatti stared hungrily after his slim, retreating back.\n\nGilly joined Vornatti, levered himself down to the floor, and picked up Maledicte's near-empty goblet. He swirled the wine within, ruby against crystal, heart's blood on ice.\n\n\"He means you to take him to court. To wait for Janus's return there,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"I believe he does.\"\n\n\"Is he mad? It is one thing to aid him in his quest, to loose him like a falcon in the field, another altogether to set him in the king's court.\" Gilly chose his goad as carefully as Maledicte had chosen his.\n\n\"Why shouldn't I provide entree? It'll give me something new to draw his affections. And why not? It's been too long since I was there in the midst of it all.\"\n\n\"He's not even an aristocrat. He's...common.\" The word choked Gilly even as he forced it over his tongue.\n\nVornatti chuckled. \"There's nothing common about our boy, and well you know it, Gilly.\" He contemplated aloud, \"Still, he will need training in swordplay, dance, dress, and manners, of course, though you have rubbed off the worst excesses already, and some new clothes. His accent is already acceptable.\" He was as pleased with this idea as if he had thought of it himself.\n\n\"Best of all,\" Vornatti said, touching his lips as if he could still feel Maledicte's caress. \"Best of all, none of this can be accomplished overnight. Even should he prove an excellent student, it'll be next spring at the earliest. For some small outlay of lessons and wardrobe, I'll have him twice as long. And you doubted he could be tamed so easily.\"\n\nGilly swallowed the lees from Maledicte's cup, tasting their bitterness. Vornatti grinned, malevolent glee touching his eyes, livening his old face. \"Can't you see it? Their faces as he enters the court\u2014elegant, wicked, and entirely too beautiful.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Gilly said. Beyond the opened door, Maledicte lingered in the hall, listening. Maledicte touched two fingers to his mouth, and inclined them toward Gilly.\n\n\"He'll have to have some rank, some right to be there among them,\" Gilly said. \"And his antecedents do not bear scrutiny, no matter his appearance.\" Another soft guide.\n\n\"He'll be my ward, of course. Last thought Aurora base-born when she was not, thought me foisting an impostor on the court when I was not. I wonder what he'll make of Maledicte.\"\n**\u00b7 5 \u00b7**\n\n_Of all the myriad choices open to a clever poisoner, perhaps none is more versatile than the commonly scorned stonethroat. An aspyhxiant and paralytic, it is most often employed to rid one's home of rats, and oneself of enemies._\n\n_However, there are more subtle uses...._\n\n_\u2014A Lady's Treatise,_ attributed to Sofia Grigorian\n\n**M** ALEDICTE STOOD, MUTE AND REBELLIOUS, while Vornatti raged at him. \"You are impossible,\" Vornatti shouted. \"Bad enough you went through four dance instructors in two years, wounding two of them seriously, and scarring another, so that I ended up paying _Gilly_ to teach you. Now, you attempt the same on your newest swordmaster, which shows both disrespect and a serious lack of judgment. You may have learned more than your last master could teach, but Thorn has much still to show you. Do you know what it cost me to keep him here?\"\n\n\"He called me little _girl,_ mocking me,\" Maledicte said, voice shrill with outrage.\n\n\"And why shouldn't he?\" Vornatti snapped. \"I was a fool to think this could work. You've not learned anything, not dared anything. I think your vaunted vengeance is nothing more than an excuse to allow yourself to linger here, fed and pampered, indulged and petted.\"\n\n\"I will kill Last,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Master Thorn sent you sprawling. Last would skewer you without a moment's thought.\"\n\nMaledicte paced the floor, breath coming fast, regretting the sword left in his room, and hating the fact that he feared Vornatti would be rid of him.\n\n\"You've not learned anything so far as I can tell\u2014though I've paid dearly for the lessons.\"\n\n\"You've taken it out on my hide,\" Maledicte spat. \"Your hands on me\u2014\"\n\n\"You rate your charms too highly,\" Vornatti said. \"I could find the same in any brothel, and sweeter-tempered.\"\n\nMaledicte fisted his hands, strangled by emotion again, fear and rage warring in him.\n\n\"Show me you've mastered one lesson,\" Vornatti said. \"Make me believe your disguise can hold. A dance, a duel, or even the delicate uses of poison that I've taught you. Show me you've learned anything at all, or I'll send you back to the Relicts.\"\n\nMaledicte slammed the door behind himself and fled to the gardens, rage scorching his belly; he couldn't turn his ire on Vornatti, not without retribution he was unwilling to court, but the swordmaster\u2014 _little girl\u2014_ Rage reddened his gaze and he sought out the poison chest Vornatti had given him.\n\nNow he sat, coolheaded and cold-palmed in the grotto at the far edge of Vornatti's estate, watching the tenth cat lick up fish paste, oblivious of its nine dead predecessors. His temper had chilled, leaving the path clear. Master Thorn was no fool; he would not take food or drink from Maledicte's hand. Vornatti's proof would have to be found elsewhere. _Little girl._ Corsets and clothing could only take him so far.\n\nMaledicte watched the cat, hands chilled, white-knuckled around the crystal vial; he would sate the snake-eye glitter in Vornatti's face, would prove his worth. Hadn't risked anything? Maledicte would risk everything....\n\nThe cat staggered, mouth working in silent, pained outrage, and finally slunk, spitting, beneath the bench.\n\nMaledicte raised the vial, crystal warmed by his death grip on it, and tapped the last dose onto his tongue. The clay taste of cold graves filled his mouth, and he nearly gagged before swallowing. His breath fled; his throat seized; tears scalded his eyes as he choked. The sound, the pain reminded him of the Relicts battle, gasping for air, and Janus gone....\n\nHe clutched the pain tight, fought for breath. Miranda had lived through that battle, that pain: Maledicte would live through this one. Spots danced before his eyes, his need for breath frenzied now. \"Janus,\" he moaned, a bare thread of sound. \"Janus.\"\n\nGILLY TAPPED the door once more, listening to the sound of an empty room. Wherever Maledicte had hidden himself away, it wasn't in the painted room, that combination prison and shelter. Gilly turned the knob, the brass cold under his nervous fingers, and went in.\n\nThis was the first time in two years that he had been inside, the first time since the room had become Maledicte's, and he half expected it to be filled with remnants of the boy's bloody dreams of vengeance. Too many nights, woken from his own recurring nightmares, Gilly had walked the hall and heard the boy muttering behind the closed door. He always moved on quickly, imagining Maledicte within, wild-eyed and raving, a madman with a feathered sword. Some mornings it was a shock to see that the boy was not the savage of his imagination, but a youngster quick to tease, and equally quick to help Gilly defy Vornatti's more objectionable whims.\n\nStill, Gilly found himself thinking more of Maledicte as the would-be killer, as he encroached into his room. All the drapes had been drawn, baring contradictory murals of snowfall and spring, of velvet night and golden days. Gilly found the effect oddly unsettling, flinched at the unveiled image of a lurking wolf, eyes gleaming through a snowscape. Not for the first time, Gilly thought that Vornatti had uncomfortable tastes. No matter the luxury, the predator lurked beneath.\n\nLooking away from the walls, Gilly tallied furniture, thinking, _Oh, so that's what's become of the divan, the chinoiserie table, the best candlesticks. A magpie heart._ Gilly smiled, but lost his amusement as he looked closer at the low table near the high, four-postered bed. The sword lay there, mute testimony that Maledicte had returned after his lesson's abrupt cessation. Beside it, a lady's embroidery box rested, an elaborate thing of interlocking wood and small, carved flowers. Old, Gilly thought, and odd; he doubted Maledicte soothed his nerves sewing primroses onto linen.\n\nCloser, Gilly saw that it was a puzzle box. There had been a rage for the elaborate toys some years back. Gilly had always liked them, the reward of a sealed box blossoming beneath his fingers. He sat down on the edge of the bed, picked the box up; the lid gaped, left open, as if Maledicte, having agreed to wait, having bided not one but three winters, had no patience left to spare for small things.\n\nInside, where there should have been skeins of silk on ivory bobbins, there was a dazzling gloss of crystal vials, miniature works of glass-blowing art, each sealed. One space yawned, empty. Gilly pulled a vial free, turned it up to the light, peering into the smoky glass. Something that looked like coarse salt, grayed with ash. It sparked memories of rat poison and traps his father had set on the farm. _Arsenixa._\n\nGilly's fingers shook and he set the vial back. Vornatti had taught Gilly to read and to write, but Maledicte already knew both. And Vornatti liked to give lessons. Looking at the demure little chest again, Gilly's stomach roiled.\n\nSlumping onto the bed in distress, Gilly found something thicker than linens pressed against his palm. He pulled the coverlet back, then the ticking itself. The leather-bound book had lost some of its faded gilding: _of Vengeances,_ Gilly read. The long-missing book, squirreled away. Gilly collected the book and fled the room.\n\n\"THERE YOU ARE,\" GILLY SAID. The early-evening light blued the air, and made of Maledicte a hunched darkness crouched in the stony outcropping. Around his feet lay rigid shadows with stiffened tails and legs, opened mouths, and black tongues. The smell of must and murdered cats lingered in the enclosure.\n\nMaledicte rose unhurriedly, cradling a cat in his arms. In the pale, filtered sunlight, its color seemed the dusty gray of old cobwebs; its soulless amber eyes winked and gleamed.\n\nIts mouth gaped and its tongue curled back, its ears flattened, but no sullen complaint reached Gilly's ears. Maledicte touched his lips to its head, set it down on the stone and earthen floor. His hands slid into a sunbeam, showed forearms red with bloody gouges. For all that, Maledicte looked smug as the cat slunk from sight.\n\nGilly stepped closer to Maledicte; his boot struck glass and sent it scattering over the floor to splinter against a wall.\n\n\"So clumsy,\" Maledicte said. His eyes burned with wicked amusement when Gilly's head whipped back to him. The boy's light voice was changed, made furred, raspy, as if he had traded with the cat. Remembering the cat's silence, Gilly amended himself. Stolen.\n\nThe half-seen memory of curving crystal spurting away from him flickered back into his mind, and he said, \"Poison?,\" thinking of the empty space in the embroidery box.\n\nMaledicte said, \"Stonethroat.\"\n\n\"You tested dosages on the cook's cats? To see what would change but not kill?\"\n\n\"I would have used hounds, being more man-sized, but Vornatti doesn't keep kennels.\"\n\n\"Why do this?\"\n\nMaledicte coughed, hand flying to his neck. He dropped his hands to his side. \"I will not be mocked, not by Thorn, nor by Vornatti.\"\n\n\"You poisoned yourself to lower your voice?\" Gilly said. \"You couldn't wait for nature?\"\n\n\"I've done nothing but wait,\" Maledicte said, his face flushing. \"While Vornatti snarls and paws at me and time passes. A third winter approaches and Janus is as far from me as he has ever been.\"\n\nGilly folded himself onto the grotto bench, shivering at the clamminess of damp stone seeping through his breeches. \"Maybe his lessons go no more smoothly than yours.\"\n\nMaledicte shrugged, eyes still worried.\n\n\"Do you fear he will forget you?\" Gilly asked.\n\nMaledicte turned his face up, startled and horrified. Gilly shuddered. Had the boy never thought that time passed for Janus also?\n\n\"If he has forgotten...\" Maledicte said, his ruined voice as devastated as his eyes.\n\nGilly winced away from the raw pain, and Maledicte levered himself onto the bench with a cough and a sigh. Gilly smelled blood, sweat, and a pungency to both that reminded him of the poisonous trial Maledicte had inflicted upon himself.\n\nMaledicte turned a curved fragment of glass about in his fingers, stilled them, and looked at the glass. \"Am I forgettable?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly whispered. Maddening. Mercurial. Charming. Never forgettable.\n\nMaledicte coughed again, a series of quick outward breaths like a man puffing to liven a fire.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Gilly asked. His fingers trembled as he took Maledicte's damp wrist in his grip. Maledicte's pulse hammered steadily, more so than Gilly's. Gilly was all too aware of the boy's ashy pallor, the warm stickiness of blood on his hands.\n\n\"Well enough,\" Maledicte said. He freed his wrist, slid down to lean his head back on the bench. He kicked a dead cat from under his boot with a moue of disgust.\n\n\"Except the months speed by and I am no more forward.\"\n\nDaring, Gilly stroked the damp, dark hair. Maledicte sighed, rolled his head, settled it in Gilly's lap. Gilly froze, as startled as if a wild creature had unaccountably failed to bite. He twitched his fingers into life again, slid them over Maledicte's nape.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Gilly whispered, the word an invocation. \"Dark words, dark paths, a heart laden with secrets, and no one to rely on.\"\n\n\"There's always you,\" Maledicte said, so softly, so muffled by damaged throat, by the sweep of Gilly's sleeves curtaining his face, that Gilly felt that his trust was no more than a distant rumor, fragile and easily disproved. His fingers worked loose a tangle from the dark head.\n\nIt was with some reluctance that Gilly roughed his voice to speech, pointing out Maledicte's slow-bleeding arms, the bodies that needed to be disposed of before they lost a cook, and the lateness of the hour for sitting in a damp grotto.\n\nGilly would not allow Maledicte to help with the dead cats, concerned that some taint of death would sift free and unbalance Maledicte's fragile control over the stonethroat. So Maledicte watched, his arms bound in wide strips torn from Gilly's shirt, his eyes as flat and opaque as the stones Gilly cleaned. Still, Gilly thought he heard the soft falling weight of blood on earth. Maybe it was only ghostly steps from the dead creatures Gilly shoveled into a sack, or maybe\u2014maybe it was the faint ticking of an unseen clock, counting down the moments until Maledicte must act.\n**\u00b7 6 \u00b7**\n\n_Maledicte snooped and Maledicte pried._\n\n_No one escaped from Maledicte's spy._\n\n_How many secrets did he find?_\n\n_One...two...three..._\n\n**S** ORNATTI PUSHED BACK HIS DINNER PLATE, the roast hen only pulled apart, not eaten, and turned on Maledicte. \"Your appetite seems well enough.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't it be?\" Maledicte said, licking his fingers, his voice the mutter of a feral cat.\n\nVornatti slapped him. \"Manners!\" Maledicte surged out of his seat as if he meant to return the blow.\n\nGilly said, \"Mal,\" quietly in a warning. It seemed to him that in the cold months since the self-inflicted poisoning, Maledicte's temper had grown apace. Or perhaps it was only the uncanny rasp, a menace bred purely by sound. Gilly thought that Last would have little desire to laugh now, if he encountered the boy and his sword.\n\n\"To think I thought you could act as a courtier,\" Vornatti continued. \"Dogs lick themselves. People do not.\"\n\n\"But I am your dog, am I not?\" Maledicte said, visibly warring with his own temper. \"You've trained me to heel.\"\n\nBefore Vornatti could retort, Gilly knelt beside Vornatti's chair. \"Tell me, my lord, what have we done to displease you?\" There was something, some balance that had changed; ever since Maledicte had poisoned himself, Vornatti had veered between pride in Maledicte's lessons and rage at the smallest infraction. Gilly thought perhaps Vornatti had also been spooked by Maledicte's success with the stonethroat. He sighed. _Fanciful._ Vornatti's moods were, as ever, dictated by pain, Elysia, and events, not by superstition.\n\nVornatti's face, drawn into tight lines, eased at Gilly's conciliatory tone. He stroked the line of his jaw, his neck. Maledicte leaned up against the wall; the silent weight of his watchful presence heated Gilly's skin with embarrassment.\n\n\"I've heard from Aris,\" Vornatti said finally. \"I have his permission to present my ward to the court without the usual petty testing of manner and dress. Aris,\" Vornatti said, \"grants a favor for a favor.\"\n\nAt Maledicte's questioning gaze, Gilly said, \"On occasion, Vornatti...pads Aris's financial reports to Itarus and to Antyre's benefit.\"\n\n\"Still, it seems Aris's approval matters little,\" Vornatti said. \"I also received the broadsheets today. Look you at them, and tell me what you see.\" He fished the folded sheets out from his chair, passed them to Gilly. Gilly spread them over the tablecloth, smoothing the crumpled lines. His breath caught. The infamous artist Poole had turned his attention to the court.\n\nThe caricature claimed most of the front page, a myopically drawn king, a book in one hand, a trailing leash in the other. The hounds, named for members of the court and for political entities like Itarus and the antimachinists, ran freely around him, fighting, fornicating, and fouling the palace. It was titled \"The Learned King.\"\n\n\"Is Poole mad?\" Gilly asked. \"Was he arrested?\"\n\n\"No,\" Vornatti said. \"Aris couldn't be bothered. The disrespect of the court and papers is ingrained.\"\n\nGilly sucked in his breath, but it was Maledicte who said it for him, paying more attention than Gilly had thought. \"So the king's welcome does not insure my acceptance? Without such acceptance, I have no way to reach Last.\"\n\n\"Not only your vengeance is at stake, but my position. If they spurn my ward\u2014I have been shunned before, and I will not suffer it again. Gilly! We need to be assured of our acceptance. You will go to town and find such assurance. I want one of the counselors\u2014Lovesy, DeGuerre, or Westfall\u2014to greet us with open arms. Do what you must. Dig up what you must.\"\n\n\"Leave here?\"\n\n\"Maledicte can care for me, can he not?\" Vornatti traded a long look with Maledicte; after a time, Maledicte dropped his eyes and nodded. Vornatti smiled and gestured to his side. Maledicte came silently over, and nestled down, leaning against Vornatti's thigh. \"Good dog,\" Vornatti said. \"You can growl all you want, but you know better than to bite.\"\n\nGilly, watching the redness rise and fall in Maledicte's cheek, wondered if that was entirely true.\n\n\"Gilly, start with the betting books,\" Vornatti said. \"There's always scandal there, if you know how to look.\"\n\nHe nodded understanding and obedience, and left the room, glancing back once to see Vornatti leaning over Maledicte, biting at the marble curve of his neck.\n\nIN MURNE, Gilly found his duty more tedious than taxing, the obstacles many but responsive to his handling. While his target was apparent from the first study of the betting books at the Horned Bull, that rough tavern where the most disreputable bets were laid, the evidence proved more difficult to gather. Still, several weeks later, Gilly held proof of a scandal in his hand, not regarding a counselor himself, but a counselor's close kin\u2014more than potent enough for their needs. Vornatti, notified by letter, had agreed, and sent Gilly a bonus, as well as further instructions.\n\nA bonus Gilly felt well earned. Gilly left the meeting with their chosen victim feeling that only luck and good planning had kept him alive. The Marquis DeGuerre was a very angry young man; Gilly was glad to immerse himself in the less dangerous details of preparing Vornatti's town house after his long absence, taking care in the meantime to stay safely away from DeGuerre's reach. With such determination and little distraction, he was able to send word to Vornatti that the house was readied ahead of schedule.\n\n\"Welcome to Murne, my lord,\" Gilly said, greeting Vornatti at the door of the Dove Street residence. Vornatti, white with the strain of two days' travel, nevertheless walked across the threshhold, leaning on a stout cane. Maledicte pushed the wheeled chair behind and came in, dressed in city finery\u2014delicate lawn shirt, leather breeches, a satin vest, all the opalescent black of a raven's wing. Gilly helped Vornatti into his chair, and turned back, drawn like a magnet to the elegance of the boy.\n\n\"You look the part now,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte dropped into a bow, smiled up at him. \"Gilly.\" His voice held distinct pleasure, a purr beneath the rasp, and Gilly hoped it wasn't merely for his success. He hoped that the month apart hadn't undone their tenuous friendship, that a month alone with Vornatti hadn't raised Maledicte's temper to a razor edge.\n\n\"You're rather elegant yourself,\" Maledicte said, tugging Gilly's blond queue, eyeing his embroidered livery. \"But what's all this?\" He gestured to the collection of flowers and wrapped packages.\n\nGilly cast a cautious look around at the other staff, waiting along the wall for Vornatti's acknowledgment, and spoke quietly. \"Once DeGuerre folded, other courtiers remembered Vornatti's ways and sent tribute, an urging to look elsewhere.\"\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"Afraid of you and your watchful eyes. And they've not even met me yet.\"\n\n\"Gilly,\" Vornatti said, interrupting their chatter. \"I'm tired. Show me to my room, and supervise the unpacking. I don't trust the maids; they look a shifty lot,\" Vornatti said, then grinned. \"Especially that saucy one.\" His cane swung out, jabbed at her ankle-high skirts.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he asked.\n\n\"Livia, sir,\" she said, dropping a curtsy. Vornatti's cane stirred her skirts, revealing her calf. He patted her wrist. \"You weren't hired by the housekeeper, I'm sure. Not with those legs. I'll wager Gilly hired you personally. He has a weakness for red-haired maids.\"\n\nLivia nodded, dimpling.\n\nVornatti dismissed them all, letting his eyes linger on Livia's retreating skirts, and when Gilly moved to carry the baron's personal luggage, Vornatti put his cane in his path, slapping Gilly's shins with that always-deceptive turn of speed the old man had. Like his crest, the serpent, which struck at speed and without mercy, Gilly thought, wincing.\n\n\"Gilly,\" Vornatti said. \"Your dalliances stop the moment you fail to please me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, flushing.\n\n\"You've had free run for a month now. Don't forget who pays\u2014\"\n\n\"Leave off, old bastard,\" Maledicte said, stepping between the two, touching Gilly's hand in passing. \"You don't need to crack the whip.\"\n\n\"And you, youngling, need to recall that we're in town now, and the rules are different. Gilly, help me to my room.\"\n\nObedient and silent, Gilly did, guiding Vornatti's chair down the hallway to a room that had once been the second parlor, before Gilly's frantic redecoration. The last time Vornatti had lived in town, he could manage the wide, polished stairs to the upper floors.\n\nMaledicte, as ward to Vornatti, had been given the room Vornatti would no longer occupy, the master chamber on the second floor. Thinking of Maledicte's quick defense, Gilly was pleased that he'd taken the time and some of his bonus to fill a bedside dish with toffees of the kind Maledicte had pilfered from Last.\n\nGilly's room was also on the floor for family and guests, showing his position for what it was, neither fish nor fowl. The maids served him, Cook chivied him like a mischievous lordling, the butler grudgingly conferred with him. Yet his room overlooked the mews and the trash bins; the furnishings were pieces not good enough for the baron or his guests.\n\nBut late in the night, Gilly didn't dwell on arbitrary inequalities, though his eyes lingered on the scarred dresser opposite his bed. Instead, he listened to the peaceful silence of the sleeping house, wishing he could rejoin it. Sweat glistened at the neck of his nightshirt, damped his back and arms, catching the light of his bedside candle. A handful of spent matches attested to his failed attempts to light the candle with trembling hands. He had not dreamed this past month, and yet, the very day Maledicte set foot under the Dove Street roof, the nightmare returned.\n\nHe shook himself like a wet dog, shrugging off tendrils of nervousness and fear as if they were droplets of water. Settling himself into the sheets again, he reached to snuff his hard-earned flame. Then, instead, he rolled his back to the light, pulling the linens over his shoulders.\n\nThe nightmare returned as if he had never managed to wake from it. The catafalques again, and one tomb split asunder, the crushing, underground darkness, lightless save for the sullen bloody glow around Her. She perched, talons dug into a dead man's chest, Her beaked face stabbing into the soft, opened belly. Clotted gore blurred Her features. All Gilly could see were Her starving eyes and a few strands of pale hair gleaming in the offal smearing Her face. Gilly took hesitant steps, wanting to name Her victim, but She had been there already and the eyes were gone, the face ruined.\n\nThe unlight that showed him Black-Winged Ani coiled, shifted, and revealed Maledicte, down on one knee, leaning on the sword. He looked at Gilly with eyes as hungry as Ani's and said, \"Is this my vengeance completed? This is not how I expected it to be.\"\n\nAni rose up behind him, Her wings shutting out even that bloody light, a taloned foot reaching for Maledicte's shoulder. Maledicte's hand ghosted up, a pale spider in the darkness, and rested atop Her clawed foot; in protest or acceptance, Gilly couldn't tell. She bent Her face to Maledicte's, Her beak hovering closer and closer to Maledicte's eyes.\n\n\"Mine\" was all She said, but Her voice was as merciless as floodwaters.\n\nGilly woke for the second time with a racing heart and nausea stirring his belly. His ears rang with the aftermath of Her voice. The candle flame danced with the rushing wind of his breath and Gilly reached for it. As he moved, he saw someone standing in the doorway, a shadow blooming against the small flame.\n\nThe maid Livia? Gilly thought, hoping to lose his fear in the game of pleasure. But she wouldn't have come to his room, risking her position, not now that Vornatti had taken residence.\n\n\"Awake, finally?\" The rasp identified the speaker beyond any doubt. Maledicte strolled over to the bed, stopping a few feet from the edge.\n\nStill fully dressed in his fanciful black, the candlelight coiling around him, he woke some of the dream dread in Gilly. But instead of despair, Maledicte's current expression hovered toward offense.\n\n\"What were you dreaming, Gilly?\" he asked. \"You tossed and turned so, and you\u2014\" His voice, brittle, broke and faded.\n\n\"It was a nightmare. A most unpleasant one.\"\n\n\"You said my name in it. I thought you'd seen me come in, but you were sleeping. What were you dreaming?\" It was more than interest. It was an angry demand.\n\nGilly pushed his sweaty hair back, feeling worn beyond his measure, and not in any mood to decipher the why of Maledicte's anger.\n\n\"You have no right to dream of me,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly sighed. \"Dreaming is a magic beyond reason, Mal. I am sorry that your presence in my dream offended you. It doesn't mean anything.\" Except that Ani, supposedly dead and gone, lived well in his dreams.\n\n\"Are you trying to burn the house down?\" Maledicte said, changing the subject. \"Or have you taken to tippling the old bastard's opiates?\"\n\n\"Did you come in to cut up at me?\" Gilly asked. \"If so, please go away. I'm tired. While you explored your new territory, I worked.\"\n\nAs changeable as mercury, Maledicte said, \"My poor Gilly. I'll let you sleep, but I do recommend that you put out the candle. I can think of more pleasant deaths than burning in your bed.\"\n\n\"What do you need?\" Gilly said. \"I am quite awake and intend to stay so.\" To prove his point, he propped himself up into a sitting position against the mounded pillows.\n\nMaledicte drifted to the side of the bed, settled himself. The feather mattress shifted under his weight. \"I want to know what magic you worked to gain our entrance. Whose secrets were so interesting...?\"\n\nGilly mistrusted the dark humor in Maledicte's eyes and tried to delay. \"I met a boy who knew your Janus.\"\n\nMaledicte's face shuttered into blankness. \"Did you.\"\n\n\"A boy called Roach? Was working in the Bull and robbing their customers, given the chance.\"\n\n\"Roach,\" Maledicte said, recognition evident in the wariness of his voice. \"What had he to say?\"\n\nGilly shrugged. \"Our paths crossed only briefly.\" Roach, skulking in the alley, had tried to rob Gilly of his hard-won letter and the scandalous information within. Gilly, pleased with his success, had merely shaken Roach silly, and told him he was a fool to try to steal something he couldn't even read. \"He said Janus taught him to read. Said that Janus killed his girl.\"\n\n\"Roach is a fool,\" Maledicte said. \"Best forget him and his words, Gilly.\" Maledicte rose, and lit another candle from the first. But instead of warming the room, the second flame only added more shadows to lurk in the corners.\n\nGilly tore his apprehensive gaze from them, focused on Maledicte's acid voice. \"Didn't you have better things to do than listen to a Relicts rat?\"\n\n\"I had what I needed by then,\" Gilly said. He took the candle back from Maledicte and settled it firmly beside him once more, wondering what kept the dream still so close. His own fear? Or Maledicte's presence?\n\n\"Which was\u2014?\" Maledicte drawled. \"So far I've not learned what secret was so powerful.\"\n\n\"An indiscreet letter from the Marquis DeGuerre to his sister,\" Gilly said. \"Not a counselor himself, but a counselor's nephew. It sufficed.\"\n\n\"You played housebreaker?\" Maledicte asked. \"I cannot imagine you doing so. You're rather too big.\"\n\n\"I hired Livia away from DeGuerre,\" Gilly admitted. \"She pilfered the letter as she left his employ.\"\n\n\"Very clever,\" Maledicte said, his tone mocking. \"But Gilly, don't you think Vornatti's household is rather full of riffraff by now? The old profligate himself, his pet blackmailer, a thieving maidservant\u2014\"\n\n\"And a stripling killer,\" Gilly said. He had meant the words to be a gentle tease, but with Ani's presence lingering in his mind, the words came out like a taunt.\n\nMaledicte frowned, temper risen. \"We'll see whether Last finds me as amusing as you do. Go back to your dreams, Gilly.\" He snuffed the candle with quick, angry fingers, and Gilly caught his arm.\n\n\"Mal, don't,\" he said.\n\n\"Frighted of the dark?\" Maledicte said, freeing himself, stumbling over a book beside the bed. \"No wonder, if this is the nonsense you read.\" He tossed _The Book of Vengeances_ onto Gilly's lap and started for the door.\n\n\"Don't be so touchy,\" Gilly said. \"I meant no offense.\" But after three years of feeding and training, the boy hadn't grown much in truth.\n\nMaledicte slumped into a chair, put his feet up on Gilly's bed. \"Last cannot come too soon to suit me. This waiting palls.\" His eyes grew as dark as the shadows, and Gilly's mouth dried, imagining Ani reaching out to claim Maledicte from the gloom encircling him. Even once Maledicte left, Gilly watched the flame and found tenuous solace in its light until it burned down with sunrise.\n**\u00b7 7 \u00b7**\n\n**M** ALEDICTE STOOD, limned in the sulfurous candlelight that was de rigueur for formal occasions, flattering to the aged rou\u00e9s and dames, adding glamour to insipid youths. The nobles' ballroom was a half-moon bordered with elaborate gardens on the curving side, shuttered with gilded doors along the straight edge. For special nights, the king threw open the doors, folding them in on themselves, making a full moon of the ballroom. But the nobles' ballroom was there for their delectation; it was full from spring to fall and, if boredom weighed too heavily, through the winter as well.\n\nIn the antechamber behind Maledicte, Vornatti penned his signature in the guest book. Maledicte had already signed, and Gilly added his under the line of servant-attendant.\n\nVornatti snapped the book shut, to the irritation of those trying to read the name of the new attendee over his shoulder. \"Haven't the discretion to wait 'til we're in?\"\n\nMaledicte heard all this faintly, watching the ballroom. One or two dancers paused in their steps, their eyes slewing to the doorway. A cluster of young gentlemen began an endless night of betting and gambling. Jewels flashed like captured sunlight fed back to the sky. The inlaid marble flooring was patterned like broken seashells, and the drift of dresses and seafoam lace made the room sway like ocean waves. Blue-gray drapes fluttered and whispered at alcoves, at exits, at every furtive movement.\n\nMaledicte stood in the door, neither in nor out. If he stepped forward, the game became inevitable, even if the result remained uncertain. If he stepped back, he forfeited the prize he so dearly craved. He was wrong, he thought; the floor didn't resemble the sea, but shadowy wings rising in a twilight sky. At his side, the sword hilt brushed his shaking fingers; a shudder rippled across his nape, traveled down his rigid spine in a convulsive bout of nerve storms, and was done. He stepped forward.\n\nMaledicte wore dove gray tonight, a demure color, and yet all eyes moved toward him. He bowed to those who followed their gazes and came to meet him. One nobleman, fox-haired, broad-shouldered, and lean, glanced up, his eyes registering hatred. But he moved across the floor, made a clipped bow to their party, and said, \"Baron Vornatti.\"\n\n\"Ah, Marquis, I don't think you know my ward, Maledicte.\"\n\nThe marquis nodded. \"Maledicte. I bid you\u2014welcome.\"\n\n\"So formal,\" Maledicte said. He heard Gilly suck breath in beside him, and stifled a smile. \"When it seems we know you so well. Tell me, sir, how is your sweet sister?\"\n\nDeGuerre's face stiffened; he turned on his heel, walking away. Vornatti laughed.\n\nGilly rushed into speech. \"Be careful, Mal, he is a very angry man. And angry men are hard to hold by secrets. I do not know how long it will be before he strikes at you. If I'd known you would speak so, I would never have told you the contents of that letter.\"\n\n\"Don't fret, Gilly,\" Maledicte said. \"I only said it to amuse.\"\n\n\"Amuse?\" Gilly said. \"Amuse who?\"\n\n\"Myself,\" Maledicte said. \"Don't lecture. Tell me instead who these people are.\"\n\nVornatti smiled again, and said, \"Yes, Gilly. Show me how well you remember your faces.\"\n\n\"The gentleman in the corner is Dominick Isley, Lord Echo, Mal, and perhaps even you've heard of him. He heads Echo's Particulars, his private band of thief takers, bill collectors, and gallowsmen.\"\n\n\"I know them,\" Maledicte said, thinking of frantic scrambles in the Relicts, dodging the sound of Echo's bells.\n\n\"Our scrutiny has drawn his attention,\" Gilly warned.\n\nEcho strolled over, nodded curtly to Vornatti. \"Still alive, old reprobate?\"\n\n\"Solely to spite you, I've found myself an heir,\" Vornatti said.\n\nEcho surveyed Maledicte, nostrils flaring as if he scented the Relicts lingering on Maledicte's skin. \"Your kin?\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"In temperament, perhaps.\"\n\n\"Your parentage?\" Echo demanded. \"If not kin to Vornatti, then who? Who was your sire?\"\n\nMaledicte raised his brows at Echo's interrogation but drawled, \"A bit of a scandal there.\" Vornatti set his hand on Maledicte's arm, hand closing tightly, gloved fingers pinching the long nerve. \"And one my kind guardian would prefer I not discuss.\"\n\nMaledicte sighed; Vornatti wanted to cloak him in rumor and speculation, and had set Gilly to plant lies, slandering various dead noblemen. Maledicte wanted to spit the truth in their face, show them that a Relict rat was human, regardless of blood. He knew, though, that even had he done so, brought Ella cringing and fawning forward, the nobles would deny it, and turn their belief back to more-palatable rumor.\n\nEcho blinked, unused to being denied. \"Your mother, then?\"\n\nMaledicte tugged his arm free from Vornatti's painful grip, and leaned closer to Echo. \"I'll give you a hint. They called her Lady Night, and she collected men's tithes with a smile, a moan, and a curse,\" Maledicte said.\n\nNearby, a woman in a bronze-green gown laughed, her eyes meeting Maledicte's with wicked amusement. \"Such a scandal.\" She mimicked his earlier words.\n\nMaledicte smiled at her before turning to Echo once more. \"You seem perplexed. I will let you ponder her identity on your own.\"\n\nEcho flushed at the dismissal in Maledicte's voice, cast him a fulminating glance, and left.\n\n\"Be careful, Mal,\" Gilly said. \"He's more clever than he appears.\"\n\n\"He'd have to be,\" Maledicte said, frowning. \"That's twice tonight you've told me to be careful, Gilly. I think you don't want me to enjoy myself at all.\"\n\n\"Aris likes him,\" Vornatti said. \"That's reason enough to be cautious. Aris would have him head of the Kingsguard would Echo only agree. But Echo enjoys his thief-taking ways too well to change his prey from rats to aristocrats.\"\n\n\"Unless they're _poor_ aristocrats,\" Gilly said. \"He has jailed several of those, and so pretends to evenhandedness.\"\n\n\"Is that so,\" Maledicte said, watching Echo make his way across the room, inclining his head to some, and fetching up near a young man sipping moodily from his goblet. \"Who stands beside him?\"\n\n\"Can't you guess?\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Limp cravat, mud on his boots, hair disordered and yet\u2014people smile at him, bow to him. Lord Westfall.\"\n\n\"The same,\" Gilly said. \"The third of Aris's advisers and the only one here tonight. A financier of Echo's Particulars, and Aris's gesture toward the future. Westfall is machine-mad, his mind occupied with gears and levers that will miraculously insure Antyre's prosperity\u2014if he can keep the antimachinists from destroying his factories as he builds them. So far, they're winning.\"\n\n\"Why isn't Last one of Aris's counselors?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nVornatti answered, leaning back in his chair to take the wine Gilly offered him. \"He's a traditionalist past the point of sense. Had he ascended the throne, Itarus and Antyre would war openly yet. It's the gods, though, that did him in. His refusal to admit Their absence. Aris is a modern king, uninterested in the ways of dead gods.\"\n\n\"And of course, there _are_ whispers that Last attempted to wrest the throne from Aris in the first moments of his ascension. A hard thing to forgive, even for a kindly king.\" The new voice belonged to the noble lady in the bronze-green gown that burnished her auburn hair to a flame. \"You are new come to the court,\" she accused.\n\n\"I am,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Tell me then, is it gaucherie or insouciance that allows you to stare so scornfully?\"\n\n\"Insouciance, of course,\" Maledicte said, with the first pure enjoyment he'd had. \"What cavalier ever admits to gaucherie? But, Lady, a question in return. I thought it not the thing for a lady to approach a strange courtier. Is it lack of manners or audacity that drives you?\"\n\nThe lady laughed, a delicate trill of sound. \"Neither in my case, though what lady would ever declare herself mannerless? I am quite well acquainted with your guardian.\" She curtsied toward Vornatti, her skirts pooling outward in elegant sweeps. \"Will you introduce us then, sir? Or have you been so long from the court that you forget our friendship?\"\n\nVornatti kissed her pale hand a breath too long, and said, \"Only a madman or fool would allow himself to forget the charming Lady Mirabile. May I make my ward known to you?\"\n\n\"I think not,\" she said, her lips curling with amusement. \"His tongue is perhaps too rough, unless\u2014\" She paused to flash a dimpled cheek at Maledicte. \"Unless you've had him schooled in dancing.\"\n\n\"Expensively schooled,\" Vornatti said, glaring briefly at Maledicte.\n\n\"Then,\" Mirabile said, \"you may present me. And you may take my hand for the after-dinner dance set.\" She curtsied again, and departed.\n\n\"Gilly, I've been upstaged,\" Maledicte whispered, half smiling, half offended. \"Who is she?\"\n\n\"A woman, wicked and wild-natured enough to seduce a onetime intercessor. Darian Chancel's widow and murderess. As well as Vornatti's onetime paramour.\"\n\n\"Watch your tongue, Gilly,\" Vornatti cautioned. \"What courtiers prattle about could see a servant whipped.\"\n\n\"Echo jailed her,\" Gilly lowered his voice. \"But evidence was hard to come by. There was a matter of another man who she accused of the crime. It cost her everything to buy her freedom\u2014her estate, her fortune, her reputation. Now she leeches off friends and hunts a husband again.\"\n\nVornatti said, \"You see what wonders civility affords, Maledicte? Mirabile's dearest friend is Brierly Westfall, and so she lives on Westfall's estate, where Echo visits daily. I hear they often sit to tea together.\" He laughed. \"And I wager Echo is more uncomfortable than she. Mirabile is a most dangerous woman.\"\n\nGILLY RETURNED TO THE BALLROOM after ferrying a weary Vornatti to the Dove Street house, wondering if Maledicte's training had held without Vornatti to insure discipline, without Gilly to gesture disapproval. Peering around the room, he ignored the thump and rattle of a dowager tapping her cane on the tile. \"Servant,\" she said. \"Servant!\"\n\n\"Lady,\" Gilly turned, bowing hastily, recognizing the temperamental and inquisitive baroness they called Lady Secret for her inability to keep one.\n\n\"You're Vornatti's, are you not?\" The diamonds piled in her falsely dark hair winked in emphasis as she nodded in answer to her own question. \"His ward is Itarusine, is he not? Has the look of one, all dark eyes and bones. Like Vornatti in his youth. Like the queen.\"\n\nLike a lowly Itarusine sailor, Gilly thought, marveling again at the strange magic of flesh that created Maledicte. A creature fey and beautiful from blood as common as seawater. \"He is Antyrrian,\" Gilly said. \"He makes his bows to Aris, not Grigor.\"\n\nShe snorted, irritated at being corrected. Gilly bowed and escaped. Mulling what it meant for Maledicte's success that the baroness had taken an interest, it took him more time than it should have to notice the change in the air. A silent current ran the room, carried on whisper and scandal, as dangerous as a snake at twilight. Gilly tracked the source through widened eyes and bent heads, a trail of murmuring. At its center, of course, was Maledicte. Hastily, Gilly headed toward his charge, overcome with irritation. Not even a solitary hour; Maledicte was dangerously hard work.\n\nEven now, Maledicte leaned close enough to the Lady Mirabile to warm her marble flesh with his breath as he spoke. Her eyes widened and gleamed; her teeth flashed in a small, practiced smile.\n\nGilly, close enough to overhear Maledicte's words, took Maledicte's sleeve in white-gloved hands and tugged like a demanding child. Maledicte paused, his mouth hovering by the spider-shaped patch on Mirabile's cheek.\n\n\"Is something wrong, Gilly?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nLady Mirabile twined her arm around Maledicte's, forcing Gilly to move his hands or touch her skin. He let go his grip and met the wicked, jaded eyes of Lady Mirabile and, worse, the astonished gray gaze of Brierly Westfall. A servant interrupting his master? Mirabile laughed musically at his discomfiture.\n\nAcross the ballroom, DeGuerre heard Mirabile's triumphant voice, turned to look, and, espying Maledicte, turned his back.\n\nThe blackness of that brief glance restored Gilly's courage. \"Outside, please?\"\n\nEither the \"please\" mollified Maledicte or Mirabile had begun to bore him; Maledicte took Gilly's gloved hand in his own. \"Ladies. Forgive me.\" He sketched a bow; his hair, worn loose, fell curling over his shoulders. Mirabile's fingers twitched as if she would like to tangle those dark locks in her bloodless hands. She tossed her head in mechanical, charming disappointment, but Gilly knew her irritation and chagrin were real.\n\nGilly ushered Maledicte through the ballroom, toward the gilded antechamber, where heaps of discarded floral tributes perfumed the air and dusted the floor with bright, fallen petals.\n\n\"Have I been errant, Gilly? Mirabile seemed to admire my audacious tongue. Of course, I think she expects me to spend some time later with her, where my audacious tongue would be only for her enjoyment.\"\n\nGilly yanked Maledicte into the blue-curtained alcove that served as the cloakroom. Maledicte stumbled against Gilly and snarled, \"Surely my sins, whatever they are, do not merit manhandling.\"\n\n\"Shh,\" Gilly said. \"Be silent.\"\n\nMaledicte's lips thinned, his eyes blackened, but the rage never surfaced. \"You're angry at me.\"\n\nGilly shoved Maledicte toward a seat near the curtain.\n\n\"Temper, temper,\" Maledicte teased. His mouth opened; his tongue touched his teeth. He scented trouble and was pleased at the prospect. He folded himself down on a woman's fur-lined cloak, smoothing the pelt against his face. \"Tell me why you're angry?\"\n\n\"DeGuerre.\" Gilly tore the cloak from Mal's hands, hurled it over another hook.\n\n\"Everything is going quite well,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Well?\" Gilly said. \"Blackmail requires one person to hold a secret over another, and to keep that secret in exchange for goods, money, or services.\"\n\n\"I am passing familiar with the concept.\" Maledicte reached past the curtains to capture a goblet from a startled waiter, heading out toward the balconies and a rendezvous. He sipped, curled his lips in appreciation.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Gilly said. A single word containing three years of exasperation. He raked his hands through his hair, catching his fingers in the queue and leaving it in tufty disarray. \"You told Lady Mirabile and Brierly Westfall, the biggest gossips in the court, about Lilia DeGuerre.\"\n\n\"I hinted, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Every whisper you spread loosens our grip on DeGuerre. We need DeGuerre.\"\n\n\"No, we don't.\" Maledicte stood, pushed the goblet into Gilly's startled hands, the wine sloshing. \"Sit.\"\n\nGilly did, his anger draining away, fear leaving him weak. DeGuerre was a powerful man with a bad temper. A counselor's nephew. A man not to be taunted. Maledicte smiled, slow and smug, and Gilly's concern grew. \"If this is not some vicious whimsy, what is it?\"\n\n\"DeGuerre gained us admittance to the court. Lady Westfall will keep us here to please her friend Mirabile.\"\n\n\"That frees you to mock a dangerous man, to spill his secrets to his peers? Mirabile is undoubtedly at DeGuerre's side even now, whispering your oh-so-audacious words into his ears, saying of course there's no truth in the matter, is there, but she thought he should know what is being said.\"\n\n\"If she's not, I've been most misled as to her character.\"\n\nGilly drank the excellent wine in one long draft. Maledicte moved behind him, unfastened the drooping laces in Gilly's hair. He smoothed the wheaten strands, refastened the ties. \"There. All better. But really, Gilly, you should have more care for your appearance.\"\n\n\"DeGuerre will try to disprove your words with steel.\"\n\nMaledicte touched the frown lines etching themselves between Gilly's brows as if he could remove Gilly's fears by the smoothing of his flesh. \"I welcome it,\" Maledicte said. \"I have been trained to fight, Gilly, but have not yet dueled. How can I face Last without knowing how my skills, belatedly learned, stack up against one trained from birth?\"\n\n\"It's a foolish risk,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"But mine to take,\" Maledicte said, touching the hilt of his sword with contemplative fingers. \"Come, Gilly, I haven't much time if I'm to goad DeGuerre to a duel. Aris is coming, and I've heard he frowns on such activities.\"\n\n\"I told you that, if you'll remember,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Ah, that might explain why I believe it.\" Maledicte slid past the heavy drapes. \"Wait a moment or two before returning to the ballroom. To be circumspect.\"\n\nGilly sighed. \"I am your servant, Maledicte. I am beneath notice.\" He set the goblet on the floor of the cloakroom, followed Maledicte.\n\nIn the ballroom's wide doorway, DeGuerre stood, an arm outstretched as if he would bar Maledicte's reentry; his other hand hovered near the sword hilt on his hip.\n\nMaledicte stood before him, smaller, slighter, and smiling. \"Leaving the field of battle early?\" He slipped past the man's locked arm like a shadow, and looked back over his shoulder. \"My regards to Lilia. You have no idea how fondly I think of her.\"\n\nDeGuerre spun, snatched Maledicte's sleeve; the seam gave in a slow syncopation of popping thread. \"You're nothing. You're nothing at all. A common little catamite.\"\n\nMaledicte stepped closer to the angry, bull-like figure. \"Do you suppose that's what Lilia says\u2014writhing, moaning, under her husband's thrusting? He was nothing to me, my darling, nothing at all....\" Maledicte forced his ruined voice into a parody of a woman's high tones. The rasp lent an air of gasping breathiness to the words, the sound of a woman in the throes of ecstasy or torment.\n\nDeGuerre's face blanched. His eyes shone.\n\nMaledicte said, \"How it must gnaw at you. Loving her as you do, knowing she's lying with another, unable to protest. Knowing that there is one person for you, loving them through all hardships, and then, the sudden shock when it's all ripped away, like an unexpected gut wound that stinks and festers. Love rules you, Leonides DeGuerre, and torments you. We are not so different after all.\"\n\nGilly let out his breath, relaxing, but the sympathetic tone did what no taunt had. DeGuerre clenched his fist.\n\nIt was no openhanded slap that he landed, a gentleman's response to an affront, but a boxer's blow. Maledicte stumbled, head snapping to the side. The stiff cicatrix along his jaw cracked; a thin, red-beaded line welled up, touching the high edges of his lace collar. The violence rippled outward, quieting the court. Only the musicians continued, sawing out tunes for people no longer dancing.\n\n\"Not mannerly,\" Maledicte said. \"And worse, it leaves your intentions in doubt. Are you inviting me to duel? I warn you, I have a bad temper in the mornings.\"\n\n\"Duel over filthy lies that no one believes,\" DeGuerre said, raising his voice for the court's listening ears. \"I think not.\"\n\n\"You've killed to stifle those whispers before. Are you afraid of me?\" Maledicte smiled.\n\nGilly bit his lip; if Maledicte's words stung too harshly, DeGuerre wouldn't wait until dawn, but would strike now, heedless of the court's traditions.\n\n\"One doesn't duel with vermin,\" DeGuerre said. \"Or acknowledge their lies.\"\n\n\"You could sue me for slander,\" Maledicte said. \"If you could prove my words false.\"\n\nDeGuerre struck him again, backhanding him from the other direction.\n\nMaledicte raised his head. Blood rouged his mouth. \"If you intend to beat me to death, don't expect me to abstain from steel. Otherwise, declare the duel.\"\n\n\"Never with you. Relict rat.\" DeGuerre's breath came as fast and as hard as if he had been running; his hands shook. He took a stilling breath, then said. \"Everyone knows commoners lack the moral sense to understand honor.\"\n\nBefore him, Maledicte seemed composed and faintly amused. He lowered his voice, luring DeGuerre closer. \"But at least we don't fuck our siblings. It takes a nobleman to think of that.\" DeGuerre's face reddened in patches over his cheekbones, as if Maledicte's vulgarity had been an actual blow.\n\nDeGuerre drew his sword in one flash of economic motion. The metallic rasp of the drawn blade spread, and the whispers rose. Blade drawn in the court. Lady Westfall, the highest-ranking hostess present, stepped forward, but said nothing; Mirabile's nails dug into her friend's hand, her eyes avid.\n\nThe two men circled each other like angry cats, DeGuerre's grip steady under the long weight of his blade, Maledicte's arms held out to his side, flaunting his still-empty hands. \"Are you wronged or am I, DeGuerre? Do you claim affront? Or do I?\"\n\n\"Draw your blade,\" DeGuerre said, \"and stop your mouth.\"\n\n\"I will not draw until you admit I am your equal,\" Maledicte said.\n\n_Damn fool,_ Gilly thought. Anxiety rose in him like pain. _Draw your sword and have done with it. How will you take your vengeance from the grave?_\n\n\"You cower behind words. Draw your blade,\" DeGuerre repeated. He thrust his sword forward.\n\nMaledicte leaped back, as quick and precise as an insect. The second thrust he ducked under, his curls ruffled by the blade's passage. Gilly could hear his panting, and the sound of whickering horses from outside.\n\nDeGuerre's third thrust met steel. Maledicte rose from his half crouch, the black blade held before him.\n\nThis was the first time anyone within the court had seen the blade, the reality of it below the elaborate hilt. The sword might as well have flamed for all the horrified attention it claimed. It woke hungry shadows in the room, and changed Maledicte from merely another asp-tongued courtier to something much more, something dangerous.\n**\u00b7 8 \u00b7**\n\n**N** OW THAT I HAVE YOUR REGARD,\" Maledicte said, \"shall we agree to continue this at a more civilized time?\" \"I would rather see if you've earned that fancy blade,\" DeGuerre said. He stepped forward, silver flashing from his blade, from the argent lace on Maledicte's quick-moving sleeves. The bell-ring of steel against steel tolled once, twice, growing louder, more resonant. Maledicte evaded another slash with boneless grace, dancing six steps back, out of range.\n\n\"Tradition demands we fight in the dawn.\"\n\n\"I'll trade tradition to see you die,\" DeGuerre said, rushing forward. Maledicte pivoted, regained his distance.\n\n\"You aren't good enough,\" Maledicte said, smiling.\n\nThey closed again, the shuff of their boots over the polished tiles a whisper beneath the chiming rasp of metal.\n\nSmall flickers of triumph darted over Maledicte's pale features, small moments where a touch could have been made. Instead, Maledicte bypassed openings; he prolonged the duel, playing with DeGuerre, testing himself.\n\n\"A natural gift,\" Master Thorn had said grudgingly as he left Vornatti's employ, bandages wound the length of his arm, a white swath around his neck. \"His timing, his footwork, his extension, and his balance\u2014\" He touched his throat and said, \"deadly.\" Watching now, Gilly shivered. Didn't a gift imply a giver?\n\nA new sound entered the room\u2014hoarse panting, the clicking of nails on the marble tiles. Gilly blanched; the duel had gone on too long, and whether DeGuerre improved or not, Maledicte had lost. Only one man brought his hound to the ballroom.\n\nHe raised his head. The king stood in the wide doorway, his hand resting on the brindle mastiff 's withers, face layered with weariness and surprise. Beside him, the Kingsguard, clad in lapis and gold, hastily spread out, encircling him, pistols drawn. A sandy-bearded man pushed past them, cheeks flushing. \"Who dares this?\"\n\n\"Isn't that my question, brother?\" Aris asked, releasing the hound. The mastiff pushed through the two front guards, and Aris followed him through the space.\n\nGilly caught a wheeling glimpse of the room, the interest in jaded eyes, the ashen dismay on Lady Westfall's face, the two men wagering at the most distant point of the room, the musicians' silence.\n\nMaledicte, his back to the door, sucked in a breath as if Gilly's alarm had been transmitted, wordlessly, to him. He cast down his sword, though it seemed to writhe in his hand, and fell to his knees, lowering his head before the king's approach. Scarlet with rage, DeGuerre finished his extension, and his blade sliced the edge of Maledicte's shoulder. Maledicte hissed; his jaw clenched. Gilly's hands tore at his own sleeve, watching the wound's red tide rise.\n\n\"Sire,\" Maledicte said.\n\nDeGuerre dropped his sword. Blood spattered the pale marble. \"Sire.\" He knelt, as stiffly as an old man.\n\n\"To bare blades in the king's presence is treason,\" Last spoke, his eyes lingering on Maledicte, the stranger in the court's midst.\n\n\"Who drew first blade?\" Aris asked, through lips compressed and pale.\n\n\"I did, sire,\" DeGuerre confessed, at the same moment Lady Westfall, pinched by Mirabile, said, \"DeGuerre.\"\n\n\"Dueling in the ballroom is forbidden. As well you know, DeGuerre.\" Once more, the earl of Last spoke before Aris could. The earl's disapproval was marked in the downward sweeps of his brows, adding more rigid lines to his austere features.\n\n\"What matters where they duel, in the park or the courts? Blood shed is blood lost, be it on marble or dirt,\" Aris said, raking the assembled nobles with scorn in his face and voice. \"But to stab a man as he kneels in fealty, DeGuerre...\"\n\n\"How came you to do such a thing,\" Last said, \"you with the best of our blood in your lines? Your uncle a king's counselor? Were you mad?\" Last cast a wary glance at Maledicte's slender form. \"Or witched?\"\n\n\"Michel, search for your demons elsewhere. The court is mine, the offense mine. And the sentence _mine,_ \" Aris said. His brows drew down, so like his brother's, and Gilly felt a spurt of hope. If Last pushed, Aris would pull.\n\n\"Leonides DeGuerre, of late I have heard distressing things about you. I think perhaps you would be better off for several years abroad, away from the...temptations and miseries you find so readily here. Seek the Explorations or Kyrda and make your fortune elsewhere. You may rise and go.\"\n\n\"As for the lad\u2014\" The king swept his eyes over the dark, bent head, the slim form. \"Get the lad a physician and send him back to the schoolroom,\" he said, turning on his heel and tapping his thigh for the hound to follow.\n\nGilly, freed from his obeisance, darted to Maledicte's side, touched him with gentle hands, the red stain darkening the pale sleeve.\n\n\"Aris, the lad is guilty of more than\u2014\" Last trailed off as, beneath Aris's tensing hand, the mastiff growled.\n\n\" _My_ court, brother,\" Aris said, and then, with a spurt of open irritation, \"Oh, do get up, lad.\" He reached for Maledicte's shoulder, and paused as Maledicte raised his eyes to meet Aris's.\n\nThe king startled at Maledicte's blackly lashed eyes, at his curling hair, at his mouth, at the pale skin. He came closer, pushing the hound out of his way.\n\n\"You\u2014you are Vornatti's ward?\" Aris said, voice low.\n\n\"I am,\" Maledicte said.\n\nThe king's face grew shuttered. The silence in the room strained in Gilly's ears. Maledicte swayed, jerked himself to rigidity again. A few new drops of blood spattered on the marble.\n\n\"You seem guilty of nothing but impetuosity,\" Aris said, the words a bare breath, his eyes locked on Maledicte's dark ones. He cleared his throat, spoke again. \"You may return to this court as you will.\"\n\nMaledicte bent his head, hiding his strained face. \"You are kind.\"\n\nThe king's eyes never left the bowed, dark head. \"Get to a physician. Lad.\"\n\n\"Some lessons in manners would be more to the point, Aris,\" Last said. \"Or are we to have yet another foreign decadent making hash of our tradition? Is the court not tired of such?\"\n\n\"The court, Michel,\" Aris said wearily, \"is entranced at the wonderful entertainment we've had this night.\"\n\nLast stiffened, a marionette instead of a man. He bent at the waist, and left.\n\nThe king watched him go, and then said, \"And yet he is correct. Will you swear, lad, that you will never draw a blade again in my presence?\"\n\n\"I so swear, my liege.\" When the king proffered his hand, Maledicte kissed the crested ring.\n\nThe king turned and left, his guards following and half the court. The remaining nobles clustered in little knots of bright fabric, to discuss and whisper. Gilly heard a scrap of conversation as he drew Maledicte to his feet, moved toward the door.\n\n\"Last was right. DeGuerre must have been witched to so lose his senses.\"\n\nGilly turned, seeking the dangerous speaker. Witchcraft was not a word to be spread lightly, not when he'd seen Aris's face go so still and empty for that one moment, as if the page of his thoughts had been erased and rewritten. Not when witchcraft was the only force left that the nobles feared.\n\n\"Hardly a sign of bewitchment,\" Mirabile's elegant voice said. \"To be so goaded by an agile tongue and mind.\"\n\n\"But that sword, Mirabile, and if not witchcraft then what else can it be?\" Lady Secret asked, her voice pitched to carry while at the same time still pretending to a whisper. \"Your Chancel was a theologian, surely you must\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh la, Secret, what makes you think I ever had any interest in his prosing on about dead things?\" Mirabile laughed, but her eyes on Maledicte held speculation and a faint hint of surprise. Gilly dragged Maledicte toward the door, away from that too-intent gaze.\n\nMaledicte clutched Gilly's arm, halting their steps. \"The sword, Gilly. Let me go. I cannot leave it.\"\n\nIts blade had sunk into the marble floor nearly a finger's length; Maledicte yanked it free with an impatient grace that made the court widen the clearing around him.\n\nOutside, in the cool, damp air, their boots crunched unevenly over the oyster-shell drive as Gilly supported Maledicte. Gilly called out as they reached the entrance to the stables; their hired coachman rose from the grouping of his fellows and their game of dice. He lit the lanterns inside the coach and held the door for them.\n\nGilly ripped off his servant's cravat, only loosely starched, and pressed it over Maledicte's bloody sleeve. \"Hold this,\" he said.\n\nMaledicte's white fingers pressed the cloth tight. \"I know what to do. It's not much of a wound.\"\n\n\"Enough to make you stagger and faint,\" Gilly said. He fumbled for his handkerchief to pad the wound.\n\n\"Last came in with Aris. Within reach of my sword,\" Maledicte whispered through white lips. \"And I did nothing.\"\n\nGilly, securing the rough bandage of cravat and handkerchief with his hair ribbon, paused. \"Yes,\" Gilly said, taken aback, realizing that Maledicte's sudden weakness came from that rather than blood loss\u2014that pain was less to him than vengeance. Gilly's hands trembled; he stilled them.\n\n\"What if I've missed my moment?\" Maledicte said, his color fading further.\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" Gilly said roughly, frowning as he saw a bloody line forming over Maledicte's ribs also. \"The summer-solstice ball comes in a month. And the moment will repeat itself: you can still run Last through in a crowd full of witnesses and get shot by the Kingsguard for your pains. That is what would have happened tonight, had you not held your\u2014\" Gilly jerked his hand from Maledicte's shirt buttons when Maledicte slapped at him.\n\n\"Leave it,\" Maledicte snapped. \"I've told you it's not much; it only stings and burns.\"\n\nAs the coach lurched to motion, Maledicte leaned back into the seat cushions with a wince, and no thought for his blood painting the embroidered fabric.\n\n\"You are fortunate,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"DeGuerre could never have touched me had I not thrown down my blade. I should have finished him first,\" Maledicte muttered.\n\n\"Not the duel,\" Gilly said. \"Fortunate that Aris forgave you. He could have banished you as easily as he did DeGuerre.\"\n\n\"He forgave me for Vornatti's sake,\" Maledicte said. \"Their paths are linked after all, kin by marriage, bound by money.\" He shifted in the seat. A small sound that might have been a groan stifled itself behind clenched teeth.\n\n\"We'll be home in moments.\" Gilly put his head out the carriage window and demanded the coachman's flask, passed it to Maledicte.\n\nMaledicte tilted the flask; his anticipatory wince gave way to startlement and a smile. \"He has raided Vornatti's good spirits, Gilly.\"\n\nGilly paid little attention beyond noting color seeping back into Maledicte's lips, thinking instead about the expression frozen on the king's face\u2014the interest heating the cool eyes. \"For Vornatti's sake only? I think there is more to it.\"\n\n\"What does it matter? He forgave me and that's enough. Aris is of no interest to me, save that he seems to hold Last in dislike. Still, not so much as I do....\" His lips compressed, his hand clenched on the hilt of the naked blade resting beside him. \"I should have struck instead of knelt.\"\n\nShivering a little at the hunger in Maledicte's voice, wondering if that hunger would be so intense if Maledicte were not touching the blade, his vengeful instrument, Gilly said, \"I thought you intended to wait on Janus?\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Maledicte said, his hand unknotting. \"I must see what they've made of him before I know how best to act. If he loves me not\u2014\" Maledicte's voice caught. \"If he loves me not, I will kill him, and Last for taking him from me.\n\n\"If he loves me, I will still murder Last for taking him from me. Either way it means blood.\" Maledicte sat forward, hunched himself over his knees, a restless savor in his eyes, clasping the sword hilt again.\n\nGilly's skin crawled, the hair raising along his arms. Surreptitiously, he made a little **X** of his forefingers, invoking the old country charm against the god-touched. He had not had time to peruse _The Book of Vengeances_ as he would have liked, but the little he had translated, slowly changing the Itarusine words for Antyrrian, had chilled him.\n\nHistory claimed that a compact, irreversible, could be entered into, binding Ani and Her devotee to a single task, but that the compact became active only after the first kill. Were Gilly's fears real, his dreams more than dreams, were Ani not so dead as She once was, those implications would distress him beyond measure\u2014that Maledicte, who hunted Last, would build strength in shed blood.\n\nGilly's mouth dried; he snagged the flask back and sipped. He was a fool, dreading the impossible. The gods were gone, and Maledicte\u2014Maledicte was merely a man. The dreams were not evidence, the sword's presence inconclusive, his dueling skills purchased\u2014if Maledicte survived poison, it owed only to caution; if he never sickened, it owed only to luck. All of it was sea-fire proof, prone to disappearing when Gilly sought answers, leaving him only with a knot in his belly and the taste of copper in his mouth where he had bitten his tongue.\n\nThe pleasure in Maledicte's eyes while dueling came back to him, that gloating joy as he danced around DeGuerre's strikes. Even while Gilly dwelled on nightmare possibilities, Maledicte smiled, stroking the feathered hilt, eyes black and clouded.\n**\u00b7 9 \u00b7**\n\n**I** T WAS A FINE DAY, just past the cusp of noon, and Gilly chose to walk to the baker's, escaping the cluster of noblewomen who had come to gossip again with the most scandalous courtier in several seasons. The first day the crush had arrived, Maledicte had found it amusing to parade himself. But a week into the season, Maledicte's temper sharpened as his interest waned; today he'd abandoned his guests to Vornatti's care.\n\nGilly, summoned to the formal parlor, found the room more crowded than before; the very walls, the spinet, even the small stage, seemed overlaid with women. Mirabile had seized the position of hostess and sat entirely too close to Vornatti, distributing tea and spite with an equal hand. When Gilly presented himself, careful not to tread on any trailing hems, Vornatti had dispatched him to roust Maledicte from wherever he had hidden himself.\n\nA lucky word with the cook had sent Gilly out-of-doors, hunting tea cakes as well as Maledicte. He stretched under the sunlight and found himself smiling. Of late, he'd been too much in stuffy, overcrowded rooms. The brisk wind and the faint smell of the sea were balm to his senses. He passed the Dove Square speakers, the men standing on rough-made pulpits, preaching egalitarianism, sedition, economics. In the midst of this, one man, dressed in country best, dared to speak for the absent gods, and was booed to silence.\n\nGilly dropped a few coppers into the intercessor's cast-off coat. The intercessor stroked the symbol of Baxit, the god of indolence and reason, above Gilly's head. _Let it stop the dreams,_ Gilly thought, nodding his head in thanks before moving on toward the shops.\n\nHis business done with the baker, Gilly paused, unwilling to go back. He had not found Maledicte and had no desire to be scolded by Vornatti or thrown into polite confines with women he could not touch. Sifting ideas and excuses, he kept walking, heading toward the quay. He would bring back fresh fish and crab for Vornatti, and some of the succulent oysters that Maledicte and Gilly shared an unfashionable taste for. He took the winding way, through the alleys behind the shops, the way the cart horses went.\n\nThe alleys were intermittently crowded; Gilly stepped aside for a cart bearing sacks of sugar and fine spices from the Explorations. The stamp on the bags, a blue moon, told Gilly that this was the best of the imports, destined not to be sold to Itarus and Dainand, but to be made into elaborate sweets for the Antyrrian court. The redolence of cinnamon and raw cocoa lingered.\n\nThe soughing of the waves, the spluttering suck of water around the pier and ship hulls, announced the docks before he saw them. The last twist of the alley dropped and provided a cobblestoned view that ran, illusory, into the gray waters.\n\nGilly went down, intending to watch the ships and sailors at dock, perhaps find his friend Reg's ship at berth, when a flutter of delicate cloth caught his eye. A sprig of the nobility stood on the quay, his pale shirt gold-shot in the sunlight, his hair black and wind-tossed. Gilly stopped. Not just any young noble, but his.\n\nMaledicte stared at the water, the ships coming in, the new ships being built, his body rocking slightly with the movement of the sea as if he were imagining himself on it.\n\n\"Planning on catching a ship abroad?\" Gilly asked.\n\nMaledicte shifted his gaze to a ship with a red and gold-spotted prow and a figurehead like a dolphin. \"Why should I make all the effort? Besides, I have Vornatti's assurance he'll return. I can trust that, can't I?\"\n\nThe bitterness in his voice slowed Gilly's approach. \"Of course,\" Gilly said. \"What's got you so cross so early?\" Gilly sat down on the pier, dangled his legs over the eddying water. This close to shore, the waves carried refuse: draggled gull feathers, floating fish, silver bellies up, and ropes of seaweed torn loose from their beds by rough anchors.\n\n\"Mirabile,\" Maledicte said. \"She shadows my every move, clinging to my arm, matching my clothes\u2014it's uncanny.\"\n\nGilly laughed. \"Mal, we broker in information, sift through servants' tales for our benefit, why not Mirabile? She must pay someone in the house.\"\n\n\"You?\" Maledicte said. Gilly looked up into sun dazzle and Maledicte's shadowed face.\n\n\"Livia, likely,\" Gilly said. \"She likes coin. It's harmless enough.\"\n\n\"Well, tell Livia to stop, or to feed Mirabile lies, that I'm wearing rose when I'm wearing blue. She's too vain to cling if she clashes.\" Maledicte kicked a small strip of tar-daubed wood into the water.\n\n\"If she learned you had misled her deliberately, she'd be offended, and she's not one to take offense lightly,\" Gilly said. \"She's courting you, Mal.\"\n\nMaledicte snarled. \"Why me? No, her reason doesn't matter. Stop her.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Gilly said, and Maledicte ceased his fidgeting.\n\n\"Just like that?\"\n\nGilly grinned; for once he had surprised Maledicte. \"I know what to say. It's only a matter of feeding the information to her.\"\n\nMaledicte let out a long sigh, his shoulders loosening. \"No one taught me how to repel the nobles. All my lessons were to fit in. It was easier before I learned proper etiquette.\"\n\nGilly stifled a laugh. \"How would you have rid yourself of her before you became such a pattern card of propriety?\"\n\nMaledicte shrugged. \"With a stick.\"\n\nGilly let the laugh free. But when the first wash of amusement had faded, he knew it was the truth. He'd seen the boy Roach and his rude weaponry, knew the damage a savage hand and a stick could inflict. And Maledicte wasn't just any Relict rat; a glossy dark feather washed by, and Gilly's good humor died with resurgence of his fears, waking something in its stead.\n\nGilly didn't understand it\u2014why that one drifting feather should spur him to the point that he had avoided for a week, for far longer, were he honest with himself. A dream of Ani. A boy with a feather-hilt sword and a thirst for vengeance. The words rose in his throat, the question, the need for an answer. Knowledge had to be preferable to this gnawing uncertainty. But Maledicte's moods were tricky, and Gilly swallowed the first simple question for a more cautious approach, attempting to creep up on truth. He cleared his throat of nervousness.\n\n\"You came from the Relicts,\" Gilly said. \"Have you ever heard the story of how they came to be?\"\n\n\"Of course I have. The noble girl, spurned by her merchant lover, prayed to Ani. Ani answered _her_ prayer by destroying the merchant, the shops, the streets, everything he ever loved.\" Maledicte sank down to sit beside Gilly, sheltering in the lee of Gilly's broader body. \"Just proves the power of the nobles, even over the gods.\"\n\nGilly shrugged, kept it casual with an effort. \"I know a different version. Should I tell you?\"\n\nMaledicte aped Gilly's shrug. \"If you must.\"\n\n\"The noble girl's name was Liana, the merchant was no merchant at all, being even more common than that. A delivery man named Edward. She loved him beyond all reason. She gave him everything\u2014her body, her heart, the jewelry she stole from her home. And when she had nothing more to give, he left her for another. The rage and pain she felt were too much to bear and she cried out to Ani to avenge her hurt, to deny that he could love someone else, that the other woman could exist.\"\n\n\"So the Relicts\u2014\" Maledicte said.\n\n\" _No._ Nothing happened. Ani didn't act Herself, but She crept into Liana's dreams, bartering love for vengeance, rage for power. Liana drowned her rival in a swan pond. Edward found his new love there, soaked in black feathers though all the swans were gray, and knew Liana had asked Ani for intervention.\"\n\nGilly fisted his hand; even in _tales_ the proof of Ani's touch seemed ephemeral at best, until it was far too late for any doubt. The rook feather eddied below them, riding the waves, and Gilly looked from it to Maledicte, wondering if Ani might be listening behind those black eyes.\n\n\"Go on then,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Once the deed was done, Liana found nothing left in her heart but grief. Ani muttered, reminding her that she had cried out against her lover also and their compact must be completed. But there was no hatred left for Ani to fuel; though Liana sought Edward, it was only to beg forgiveness.\n\n\"It was then that Ani roared to life, Her wingbeats leveling the Relicts. Liana and Edward disappeared beneath the rubble, entombed together in the city. Vengeance, once begun, cannot be stopped. Black-Winged Ani has no pity in Her, and Her wings are carrion wings.\"\n\nMaledicte watched the wavelets foam and fade against the pilings, wordless. Gilly tilted his chin up, peered into the dark eyes, his fingers trembling as he finally braved the question. \"Where did you get the sword, Maledicte? Why do I dream of Ani when you're near? Did you call out to Her? Did She answer?\" His fingers tightened as Maledicte's silence continued.\n\nMaledicte's eyes stayed enigmatic behind barring lashes. He tugged his chin free from Gilly's fingers, dropped a piece of shell into the water, watching the ripples overtake the waves and fade before answering. \"I never called Her.\" He flicked a quick glance at Gilly, cooling Gilly's burgeoning relief, and continued, voice low. \"Yet, while I was dreaming, She woke in me, whispered such things\u2014When I slept, it was summer. I woke to winter, the feel of feathers in my skull and skin, and a black sword at my side.\"\n\nIn that moment, Gilly knew he had expected Maledicte to laugh at him, to shelve his doubts behind a wall of scorn for his gullible nature. Gilly had expected to laugh at himself, and to compliment Maledicte's talents for acting. This impossible admission woke shock in his belly, set his blood to racing, and rendered him mute. The gods not gone. Maledicte bound to Black-Winged Ani. He shuddered, wanting to surge to his feet and flee, heedless that he might offend Mal\u2014or Ani!\u2014mortally. His breath seized in his chest.\n\nThe thing that balked him, cooled him, kept him from panic, however, was a memory of another quiet moment, and how lovely it had felt to hold Maledicte's trust, to be the one who could tease truth out from semblance.\n\nMaledicte shivered as if he would unsay his words, remove Her looming presence. Gilly dropped a wary arm over his shoulders, seeking something to take the chill from between them, to chase the nearly solid mass of fear from his belly.\n\n\"That ship, you see it?\" He pointed to a massive square-rigged ship entering the cove, setting up a frenzy of motion on a far pier. Its figurehead shone molten in the sunlight, a curled cat with a fish's flukes.\n\n\"It looks like gold,\" Maledicte said, ignoring the quiver in Gilly's voice, focusing on the ship with an avidity that suggested that he also hunted an escape from his confession.\n\n\"It is.\" Gilly found a shaky smile at Maledicte's astonishment. As always the ships soothed him as nothing else could. The fear unclenched; his voice evened out. \"That's the _Virga._ She sails to the Explorations and comes back with treasures\u2014spices, wood for our shipbuilders, and strange pets, birds, and small scampering monkeys that look nearly human. Someday I'll be on that ship. Headed for the new world, where people build ascending temples of dirt and stone to speak to their sky gods, see what they have to teach me. Though, according to most accounts, they're only savages.\"\n\n\"Why do we call them savages if they have temples and religion? That's more than we have,\" Maledicte said, his hair whipping in the sea breeze, his booted feet swinging off the pier, his frozen stillness broken.\n\nGilly laughed, drew closer to Maledicte, inclined his head in the studied manner of a professional gossip. He raised his brows, and exclaimed in falsely arch tones, \"Oh, my dear, haven't you _heard,_ don't you _know\u2014_?\"\n\nMaledicte's ease faded. He cast a slantwise glance at Gilly, testing for unexpected mockery.\n\nLaying his hand on Maledicte's arm, careful of the bandages beneath the full sleeve, Gilly dropped his voice to a penetrating whisper. \"My dear, they wear _feathers_ where we wear _leathers._ \"\n\nMaledicte's eyes widened and he laughed, a stuttering, raw thing in his ruined throat.\n\nGilly grinned, pleased with the result of his teasing. He had wanted Maledicte to laugh earlier; he shook back the shiver that wanted free, concentrating instead on their innocuous conversation.\n\n\"For breeches? Are the feathers ticklish?\"\n\n\"I suppose there's a hide backing. But they wear feathers all over. On their feet, in their hair, all shades of red, gold, blue, and green. They have birds down there bigger than our owls, and more brightly patterned than our pheasants.\"\n\n\"What else, Gilly?\"\n\nMaledicte seemed honestly interested, completely at ease, and Gilly wondered if perhaps he had only been teasing. But\u2014 _I woke, a black sword in my hand,_ Maledicte said, his voice drowned in memory. Gilly shuddered. He fell into the security of speech, nearly babbling. \"They find gold on the ground, in the waters, and they make soft, hand-malleable jewelry from it. Wide necklaces, armbands, earrings, rings. They even press gold between their teeth so that their smiles are as bright as their feathered clothing. They have dark eyes, like yours, but their skin is the color of strong tea, and they draw pictures on it with clays and dyes. They drink chocolate with every meal under warm blue skies.\" Gilly spoke mostly for himself, remembering the tales his sailor friend, Reg, told. Maledicte, rapt, watched the _Virga,_ resting his chin on his drawn-up knees, setting Gilly to wondering where Maledicte's interests lay: The gold? The tropical warmth? The images of strange cities and stranger men?\n\nMaledicte shivered and said, \"I'm hungry.\" The complaint was blessedly familiar, and Gilly relaxed into it.\n\n\"Cook said you missed breakfast, and I know you missed tea. Let's go get you an ice.\" Gilly stood, offered his hand.\n\nMaledicte took it, shook the dust from the pier off, and said. \"I have no money. Vornatti was angry this morning and wouldn't make me my allowance.\"\n\n\"A true aristocrat doesn't even think about money. He assumes all shops offer credit and are pleased to do so.\"\n\nMaledicte merely nodded, his face pale, his lips drawn.\n\n\"Your side? Your arm?\" Gilly asked, stopping in his tracks. Since Maledicte's injuries, Gilly had feared infection. The boy had not let him see to the wounds, instead had trusted his skin to Vornatti's suturing.\n\n\"Sore,\" Maledicte admitted.\n\n\"You'll be lucky if the wounds don't fester. Vornatti is no physician.\"\n\n\"It heals, regardless,\" Maledicte said.\n\nYes, Gilly thought, the knowledge assailing him again, a slap of frigid seawater, scouring and impossible to digest. Wasn't healing one of Ani's gifts? Something good turned to malign purpose; it was hard to stop a man immune to violence. But Maledicte had bled enough\u2014\n\n\"Stop staring,\" Maledicte said. \"You promised me food.\"\n\nGilly found them a table in the public rooms of the Glorious, the ice shop popular among the maidservants and merchants, secretaries, sailors, and laborers. It had once been a temple to Naga, the serpentine god of health and avarice, and the rooms still boasted elaborate murals of undulating waves and scale; the columns were Naga rising from the sea depths, fanged mouths gaping and holding coats.\n\nIn the midst of this they sat, eating tart lime ices and sugar pastries, drinking bitter coffee with sweet sludge at the bottom. Maledicte's lips reddened with the cold kiss of the confection, his cheeks flushed by the steaming drink.\n\n\"Vornatti must have grown bored with his company,\" Gilly said, looking at the carriage drawing up to a discreet storefront, marked only by three silver balls on a cord.\n\nFollowing Gilly's gaze, Maledicte turned his head. They watched Mirabile step out of the carriage, her dress loosely cloaked for anonymity, carrying a parcel. She disappeared into the dark recesses of the shop.\n\n\"A pawnshop?\" Maledicte said, shifting to shelter behind Gilly, out of sight.\n\nGilly said, \"She's popping her valuables. Or more likely Westfall's. I doubt she has anything left of value. But if she wed someone wealthy...\"\n\nMaledicte pushed his plate away. \"She can't think of anything else?\"\n\n\"There's nothing else for her to do,\" Gilly said. \"She's an aristocrat, not trained to do anything. Or allowed to. Women in this society are ruined so easily.\"\n\n\"You sound sorry for her.\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"She had a rich husband and killed him. You might keep that in mind when you speak with her.\"\n\n\"I don't have to,\" Maledicte said, recovering his appetite, stealing the rest of Gilly's pastry. \"My tasks require swords. This one doesn't. This task is yours.\"\n**\u00b7 10 \u00b7**\n\n_Throughout time, men have been driven by outraged pride or loss to commit terrible acts of vengeance, demonstrating how dangerous, how vile man can be when he chooses to turn intellect to malign purpose. But nothing man can do is so dreadful as one aided by Black-Winged Ani, the god of love and vengeance. Under Her aegis, a single man's vengeance can consume not only families, but cities._\n\n\u2014Darian Chancel. \"On Theology\"\n\n**M** IRABILE GLIMMERED in shades of orange and flame that brought warmth to her icy perfection, and echoed the fire and gilt of Maledicte's coat. At his entrance into the ballroom, she joined him as neatly as if they had planned it. Unusually, there was a faint tint of color in her cheeks; Maledicte, having heard the gossip, didn't wonder at it.\n\nA trill of laughter touched his ears. \"No, really my dear, Westfall had to pay for his own silver-backed brushes. Can you imagine\u2014\" Lady Secret and her listeners fell silent as Maledicte and Mirabile passed, stifling their smiles.\n\nOutside, Maledicte had heard much of the same, that Adam Westfall tired of his unwanted guest, and pressured his wife to be rid of her. Maledicte only wished the man would do it soon and spare him yet another series of encounters with her delicately acid tongue.\n\n\"Tell me, Maledicte, how fares Vornatti, that you missed the Lovesys' ball? I thought you had meant to attend.\"\n\n\"That's the difficulty with bribing servant girls,\" Maledicte said.. \"They cost you coin and are unreliable.\"\n\nMirabile laughed. \"You do say such terrible things.\" She leaned closer, offering a tantalizing glimpse of perfumed, powdered skin. \"But you haven't excused your absence, and to spurn a counselor's ball requires an apology at least.\"\n\n\"I, too, noted your absence. You sent no word.\" The pleasant voice dropped Mirabile into a curtsy, Maledicte into a bow, as Aris joined them.\n\n\"Sire,\" Maledicte said. \"Vornatti was ailing and I felt my place was beside him.\" It was as close as he would come to the truth, that after Gilly's and his disobedience that day by the sea, they had been punished. Gilly had been sent to sleep in the stables for a week, and Maledicte\u2014Vornatti had kept him so close he might have been wearing a leash.\n\nMirabile murmured, \"Yes, I believe I've seen what Vornatti considers your place.\" Maledicte felt a sudden crest of hatred for her tongue, for the fact that Mirabile, a favored visitor, had witnessed Vornatti's dominance with laughing eyes.\n\n\"You're pale tonight, lad. Do not let the idleness of town life cheat you of your health. You should dance more,\" Aris said, frown easing. \"Put color in those fair cheeks.\"\n\n\"As I have been urging him to do,\" Mirabile said, tapping Maledicte's shoulder with her fan. \"But will he dance? No, he will not.\" She held out her hand with expectant grace as the musicians began opening measures to a country dance, as if all the days of watching Maledicte obey Vornatti's whims made her wishes inviolate also.\n\nMaledicte stepped out of reach without thinking. Mirabile's perfect features etched a quick frown and smoothed again. \"You see, sire?\"\n\n\"Ill-done of you, lad,\" Aris said. \"We noblemen must never disappoint a charming and beautiful lady.\"\n\nMirabile claimed Maledicte's hand with a possessiveness that made his skin itch. \"Yet you do not dance,\" Maledicte said, irritation bleeding into his voice. Belatedly, he tried to mask it with flattery, as he would for Vornatti. \"And to be bold, my king, you are far more a maiden's dream than I.\"\n\nAris laughed, flushing a little. He reached for Mirabile's hand. \"We will assay the floor together, Mirabile, and teach this pup some manners.\"\n\nMirabile curtsied again, topazes winking in her ruddy hair. \"You honor me, sire.\"\n\n\"Come lad, find a partner,\" Aris said, smiling. He held up a gloved hand; the musicians paused.\n\nIn the silence, Maledicte's eyes slewed around. For a bare moment, they lit on Gilly, near hidden in the shadows of the balcony, before falling on a tiny, porcelain doll of a debutante whose chaperone had her head bent away in gossip. Maledicte took quick strides to her side. \"Lady?\"\n\nThe musicians surged into the involved patterns of the Labyrinthine. Maledicte and his partner moved neatly, with careful grace and the physical wariness of two people unacquainted. When Maledicte raised his eyes from the girl's downturned face, he found Aris's intelligent blue eyes fixed on him, and Maledicte stumbled.\n\nMaledicte dropped into the final bow, brushed his lips over his partner's hand. She faded away, rejoining her frowning chaperone.\n\nAris bent over Mirabile's hand, and Maledicte took the moment to escape toward the balcony's evening shadows. Gilly saw him coming, raised the flask from his coat pocket.\n\nA hand on his arm halted Maledicte. He spun and swallowed his bile. \"Sire.\"\n\n\"Maledicte, come with me.\" The king released his hold on Maledicte's silk-covered arm, walked on, sure that Maledicte would follow. The scalloped balconies and quiet alcoves were popular enough that Aris had to search several doorways until he found a vacant one.\n\nAris sank down onto one of the carved marble benches that ran the perimeter of the balcony. On either side, tree roses shielded them from view. Below, the gardens smelled of damp moss and night flowers opening. Maledicte stood before him, hesitant and worried. He knew his temper was foul tonight, knew also that it led him into incautious behavior.\n\n\"You are new to my court and with Vornatti as your only guide, perhaps less informed than you should be of the social niceties.\"\n\n\"I apologize for my reluctance to dance, sire. I will make amends and dance every set left this evening. If you will it,\" Maledicte said, despite his aversion for such things. He did not care to stand so close to the other men, to hold women his height, fearing that it would only point out his slightness, risking his mask. Was that all\u2014such a small thing to incur a king's displeasure. Maledicte bit his lips, closed his eyes, wishing again that he could simply reclaim Janus without all this mummery.\n\n\"You may do as you please, but Mal\u2014\" Aris's voice shifted as he assumed the intimacy of a friend. \"Mal, a word of caution. While it is understood that certain young men find the company of other men preferable to the ladies, I would not have the lines of the dance ruined by such a pair. It requires discretion. Can you be discreet?\"\n\n\"Do you find me so gauche as to expect such from me?\" His tone was more insulted than concerned, but he was irritated out of reason that the king's interest extended so far into his life.\n\n\"I find you\u2014\" Aris hesitated, pulling a rose from the tree beside him and breathing in its scent. Its petals were near blown and browning at the edge; they shed at the touch of his breath. \"I find you hard to predict. A creature of impulse in a rigid court, and I would not see my brother set against you. He has more power than I would like....\"\n\nMaledicte paused, listening to the silence of what Aris had not mentioned\u2014the effort it took Aris to tread the path between pleasing Vornatti, who held the purse strings of Antyre, and satisfying his ambitious brother.\n\nBefore Maledicte could speak, strains of music drifted outward, and Aris smiled. \"The Labyrinthine again.\" He rose.\n\n\"Shall I dance it?\" Maledicte asked.\n\n\"Not until you rectify your steps,\" Aris said.\n\nMaledicte flushed, annoyed that Aris had seen him stumble.\n\n\"It's not so hard,\" Aris said, \"But it takes some thought for one not brought up on it.\" He held out his hand.\n\nMIRABILE, THWARTED IN HER PURSUIT by Aris's easy theft of her partner, stalked toward a balcony. She faltered when she saw it occupied, but then, with a sudden smile, came forward. \"Such a moody creature, your master,\" Mirabile said, joining Gilly in the shadowed alcove.\n\n\"Lady?\" Gilly said, his eyes on Maledicte vanishing after the king.\n\n\"Don't look so foolish,\" Mirabile said. \"Sweet Livia tells me you're the man behind the scenes. Gilly, is it? Tell me about Maledicte.\"\n\n\"What do you want to know that Livia can't tell you?\" Gilly said absently. Maledicte had seemed ordinary enough tonight, or as ordinary as he could be. Ani's presence seemed more dreamlike now than in his nightmares.\n\n\"I want to know what all women want to know. How much he dotes on me.\"\n\nGilly's attention sharpened. \"Shouldn't you ask instead about his prospects? Or do you seek a marriage purely for love?\"\n\n\"Purely for love?\" Mirabile said, eyes flattening with wariness. \"Maledicte has more to offer than love alone.\"\n\n\"Not money,\" Gilly said, leaning against a pillar. \"Vornatti grants him an allowance, that's all.\" Her pleasant expression changed to one of slit-eyed anger.\n\n\"You lie. Livia says Maledicte has coin of his own.\"\n\n\"Livia,\" Gilly said, with a rush of anger, \"is a _servant._ She thinks ten sols is a fortune. Instead of the overlace on your dress.\"\n\nMirabile twitched, hands clawing at her long skirts as if she'd recoup the money spent on them. \"But his future prospects...Vornatti will settle a yearly allowance on him, surely.\"\n\n\"He prefers to keep Maledicte under his own roof. Should Maledicte wed, Vornatti will cease funding him, he's that possessive.\" Gilly's tone soured, the very bitterness in it adding weight to his words. But a week spent ostracized from the house, spent worrying about his own position, left him a pessimist. Alone in the stable with only the dreams for company\u2014dreams of Ani's laughter, waking to find the horses kicking and thrashing as if they, too, felt Her.\n\n\"You know nothing,\" Mirabile said, nearly spitting in her anger. \"You're just a servant.\"\n\n\"The one behind the scenes,\" Gilly retorted.\n\n\"Between the bedsheets. You're nothing but Vornatti's toy.\"\n\nGilly flinched. \"Nonetheless, what I tell you is true. Though Vornatti may be wealthy, he has no obligation to Maledicte. Indeed, he cut back his allowance a week ago.\"\n\nMirabile's face blanched, her green eyes closing. Her hands still twisted around each other. \"Good night, Mirabile,\" Gilly said.\n\nShe slapped him, curving her nails inward. He jerked back, saved himself from the worst of their sting, though his cheek burned.\n\n\" _Lady_ Mirabile. If I have nothing else, I have that, and you are only a servant.\"\n\nPushing past him, she hesitated in the ballroom doors, then, raising her head, returned to the court.\n\n\"LIKE SO,\" ARIS SAID, as the tune came around, his hand clasping Maledicte's. Maledicte took a breath, made the delicate feint inward, the retreat, then the elaborate pivot and bow, all the time aware of the king's hand on his. He tripped, and Aris, patiently, said, \"Again.\"\n\n\"You're quite the teacher,\" Maledicte said.\n\nAris smiled. \"I've always been thorough in my studies.\"\n\n\"And I, apparently, shirked mine,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You waltz splendidly,\" the king said. \"Your teacher should be commended.\"\n\nMaledicte hid a smile, remembering spinning Gilly in the waltz until he pled dizziness and shortness of breath.\n\nIn the ballroom, the measure came round again, and Aris held out his hand. \"Once more?\"\n\n\"Aris!\" Last said, looming behind Aris, body blocking the glow of the ballroom.\n\n\"My brother, the hound,\" Aris muttered.\n\nMaledicte stepped away from Aris, and Last's mouth, outlined by his pale beard, turned downward.\n\n\"Remember discretion,\" Aris said, stepping aside to let Maledicte return to the ballroom.\n\nMaledicte touched his sword hilt, stroked the feathers, considering Last's presence, anger eating through his veins. The earl had taken Janus, had sent Kritos to recover him as if he were nothing more than a strayed possession\u2014Wings fluttered in his chest, a heartbeat of rage and pain. To strike _now_ and be done with it...\n\n\"Maledicte?\" Aris's brows drew downward as Maledicte stood, his hand locked on the sword hilt.\n\nMaledicte's hand flew from the sword. He was badly startled. How long had he gaped at Last like a rabid dog? He sketched a hasty bow, gave it an elaborate fillip to make Aris smile, and fled into the ballroom. Ani shrieked within him. A second time, to be so close, and not to strike...\"Not yet,\" he said, speaking to that heat in his blood.\n\nComing onto the floor, he saw Gilly peering through a doorway and detoured again. This time he reached the safety of Gilly's side. \"I need a drink.\"\n\nGilly paused in his search for his pocket flask. \"What did the king want?\"\n\nMaledicte shrugged, slung himself down onto a bench, laid his legs along the length of it, precluding Gilly's joining him. \"To teach me to dance. To lecture me on my behavior. Between him and Mirabile, my card is full.\" Maledicte sulked, studying the toes of his polished boots.\n\n\"I've put a stop to Mirabile,\" Gilly said. \"And apparently she picked my pockets while I did so. No flask, Mal, I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Gilly!\" Maledicte said. \"What matters a flask when you've removed the huntress from my trail? Dare I ask how?\"\n\n\"Simple truth made you unsuitable,\" Gilly said, still touching his coat pockets with a faint frown on his face, as if trying to recall the exact moment the flask disappeared.\n\n\"Truth?\" Maledicte said, coldness shifting in his belly like a snake. \"What truth is that?\"\n\n\"That Vornatti's fortune is not your own.\"\n\n\"To think a lack of a fortune could ever be beneficial.\" His grim amusement faltered. He stepped closer, touched Gilly's cheek. \"What's this?\"\n\nGilly touched the scratch at the cheekbone. \"She wasn't best pleased with what I had to say.\"\n\n\"Should I repay her for that?\" Maledicte asked, his tamped-down rage resurfacing, redirecting. \"Spill the fact that I won't have her? If the duns are after her\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"Leave her alone. She's rat-vicious, best not cornered.\"\n\nMaledicte sighed. \"Take me home. I'm bored with the wonders of the court, sick of the people in it; I can't kill the ones I want to, so why stay?\" He tugged Gilly's hair, touched the red mark once more, wiping away a quick smear of blood from the thin scratch, and headed back into the ballroom and the main doors.\n\nTHE CROWD PARTED FOR THEM QUICKLY, and Gilly, unable to push his way through for fear of damaging noble flesh and feelings, watched Maledicte slip away.\n\n\"Going home to your master like a faithful dog?\" Mirabile said, appearing next to him. Gilly said nothing. On the balcony, unseen, he had been able to speak his mind. Here, a wrong word could see him whipped.\n\nShe circled him, radiating anger and danger, like a predatory beast. She stroked the length of his spine, and whispered, \"Do you wag your tail for anyone? Or just Vornatti?\"\n\nGilly bit his lip and tasted blood.\n\n\"He listens to me. I could spin him such tales\u2014he'd have you cast out....\"\n\n\"Mirabile,\" Maledicte said, returning, his face white, his eyes hot. \"Watch yourself. Gossip is a knife, and it's at your throat. Would you like me to push it closer still?\"\n\nGilly shuddered at the quiet rage in Maledicte's voice, at the surprise in Mirabile's eyes, the reassessment of Gilly's status in the Vornatti household.\n\n\"Come, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, seizing Gilly's hand and tugging him along, heedless of the nobles in their path.\n\n\"The main door's back that way,\" Gilly said when he could speak. \"Mal, you shouldn't have defended me.\"\n\n\"We'll go through the gardens and avoid any more display of noble manners. My temper is as sharp as my blade and eager to be loosed.\" He dropped from the rail of the curving balcony to the earth four feet below. Gilly followed, landing soundlessly in the soft moss.\n\nNear the entrance to the garden maze that lay between them and the road, Maledicte put his hand out to halt Gilly. Gilly stepped back until they were both in the deep shadow of statuary and hedge, looking up at a dark balcony on the king's side of the ballroom. Two men stood in the shadows, and at their feet a great dog raised its head, sniffing the night air.\n\n\"...eager to meet this boy of yours, Michel, no matter the irregularities of his birth. Bring him at once when he arrives. We need more young men in the court, men not spoiled as we are, with old secrets and schemes, soured by battles fought decades ago.\"\n\nLast said, \"Youth is no great thing, Aris. It masks threat and schemes as well as any old face.\"\n\nThe king said, \"You mean Vornatti's ward. Maledicte.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"He's but a young man with his own pleasures to seek, his own wants.\"\n\n\"He carries hate and hunger with him. His eyes burn with it.\" Last swung his cane, clipped roses from the hedge before him.\n\n\"Mmm,\" the king murmured. \"I see no such thing in his eyes. Yours though\u2014\"\n\n\"You're a fool, Aris. Shall I tell you what I hear, whispered in the air of the court? One word, blown like leaves: 'witch.' They know him for what he is, an accursed creature.\"\n\n\"You sound like a country intercessor, seeing the old gods in every shadow. But you forget, as the gods are dead, so are your witches. Without the gods' power to scavenge, a witch is nothing but caged spite. Maledicte seems a pleasant boy, albeit one with an unfortunate mentor.\"\n\nLast snarled. \"Fool, twice over. To have loved that Vornatti woman who brought neither healthy child nor power, and to defend his creature, now. Black-Winged Ani has touched him, made him Her lover\u2014\"\n\nBeneath them, Gilly shuddered and Maledicte moved closer, a gesture of support, or perhaps for shelter.\n\n\"Michel, superstition is the mark of a fool,\" the king said; Last drew his lips closed over set teeth and jaw. He stalked back through the doorway, setting the hound to growling after him. Aris brushed back his hair, displacing his circlet, and resettled it. \"Eavesdropping is a standard of the court. I see you're practicing noble manners.\" He looked into the shadows, pinning Maledicte and Gilly with his amused gaze. His eyes flickered downward. \"But remember discretion.\"\n\nMaledicte's hand, resting on Gilly's hip, recoiled. Gilly dropped into a hasty bow.\n\nThe king grinned like a young man and sauntered into the darkness, the hound rumbling to its feet with a sigh.\n\n\"Come on,\" Maledicte said, and they plunged into the green moonstruck darkness of ivy-covered stone and thick hedges. Tiny white flowers coiled around animal statues like a spattering of stars.\n\nGilly pointed to a small carving within a mortared niche. \"As long as we follow the mouse we should come to the center and then the exit.\"\n\n\"Do you know every secret, Gilly?\" Maledicte asked, taking that first turning, disappearing into shadows, leaving only his voice behind. The breeze painted each shaking leaf with moonlight and dappled the pathway so that it seemed silvered with frost.\n\nGilly trailed after him, on smooth grassy paths designed to be strolled in the night. Moonflowers spotlighted a lover's bench; a stone mouse leaped on its side and directed their next turn.\n\nThe trail opened into a garden, ringed with pathways like the spokes of a wheel, its shape an echo of the city itself. Night-blooming jasmine laced the air with heady fumes. Maledicte spun in the center of it, staring at the starry sky. \"Can you see Her, Gilly?\"\n\nGilly saw nothing, but heard the rasp and rush of feathers. Hoarse calls and rattles came from all around them, and the leafy walls of the maze gave birth to dozens of rooks. The air filled with the drumbeat sound of their wings, and the stars above flickered. When he could speak, his heartbeat slowing back to a normal pace, Gilly said, \"We must have disturbed their nesting.\"\n\n\"You don't think She's watching me?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"They're just rooks, startled to find intruders in the maze.\" The maze, which had seemed peaceful and secluded, now closed about him like a net. Was this how it would be? His eyes opened now? Not for the first time since the pier, Gilly wished for blindness, for his question to have died unspoken.\n\n\"This way, Gilly.\" Maledicte moved on, and Gilly followed. But somewhere in the maze of trails and turns, shaken by the soaring rooks and led astray by moonlight, they lost the correct path and found themselves in a cul-de-sac of whispering leaves. Frowning, Gilly headed back for the last turn, but Maledicte's stillness halted him.\n\nPaused, his feet no longer stirring the grass, Gilly heard it: the clipped, echoing sounds of hooves drawing closer on cobbled streets. He parted the ivy, revealing the training wires beneath, and peered through. \"It's a carriage,\" he said. \"A rented hack.\" Around them, the rooks settled like blight on the trees that lined the drive.\n\nMaledicte's face was bleached of color in the night. He drew his sword, slashed the ivy. It parted like paper, and Maledicte stepped out of the maze, though he kept to the shadows. A man stepped down from the hack, dark and well dressed, far too well dressed to require the services of a rental driver. A large man with glossy dark hair, and an elaborate malacca cane. Maledicte tensed like a dog on point. Faint chords of familiarity woke in Gilly, but it wasn't until the noble turned his head, exposing an eye filmed and scarred, that Gilly knew him.\n\nKRITOS MET THEIR GAZES and his face grew disquieted, as if there were some danger to seeing a tall blond and a slight brunette coming out of the shadows. He was slow to put his back to them, slow to climb the steps toward the court, though perhaps some of his deliberate pace was due to the heavy aroma of spirits that lingered around him like a cloud.\n\nMaledicte stood like marble, only his rocketing heart betraying him, sending a bloody flush to his cheek. The rooks' wings, shifting, whispered partite beats: Kritos. Hissing the name. Tolling the name. Maledicte had not thought he would feel anything but hate for this man, but a wild wash of joy made his mouth quiver. And why not? Kritos's return heralded Janus's. Janus was within reach at long last\u2014Maledicte clenched his hands, took steady breaths, and watched Kritos belabor the great doors. This drunkard had been a threat to him once?\n\nThe doors slammed back, the footmen scrambling to shield the delicate inlays from contact with the stone. Kritos stepped forward as if the doors had flung themselves wide for him, and was immediately distracted. \"Last, there you are,\" Kritos said. \"What do you mean, denying me your house? I am your blood.\"\n\n\"Where is Janus?\" the earl asked.\n\n\"At Lastrest. Recuperating from the sea voyage. Answer me. Why was I denied entrance to your house?\" Kritos's voice rasped with desperation.\n\n\"I am weary of your debts. I warned you that I would stand for no more of it. Yet, not returned a full day, and I hear you've lost your coach and its team to the tables. I will not have you as an anchor on my purse any longer. I have let the moneylenders know this.\" Last brushed past Kritos and was stopped by Kritos's grip on his arm.\n\n\"Aris won't stand for it. I'm blood kin,\" Kritos said.\n\n\"Oddly enough,\" Last said, \"this is the only action Aris and I have agreed on in years. But he thinks responsibility will make a better man of you, while I...doubt it.\n\n\"So were I you, nephew, I would not waste my limited time arguing. You had best find yourself an heiress to take on your debts.\" The earl shook off Kritos's clutching fingers, cast an inimical glance at Gilly and Maledicte, and lowered his voice.\n\nMaledicte closed his eyes, the better to hear words that were balm to his senses. _Let Kritos suffer,_ he thought. _Let him face the streets, the rats, the poverty._\n\nLast's voice, clipped with anger, slid into his ears, jolting him with one name. \"...Janus is more clever at card playing than you are at card sharping. I do have some family feeling. Consider those debts cleared.\" Ignoring Kritos's choleric flush, the earl proceeded down the stairs, signaling for his own coachman to pull up behind Kritos's waiting hack.\n\nBehind him, Kritos lashed out with his cane, the heavy wood meant to crush Last's fair head. Maledicte froze, imagining his chance at vengeance gone, but Last pivoted as smoothly as a serpent; the cane cracked into his gloved palm and he yanked it from Kritos's hands. Overbalanced and overwrought, Kritos tumbled down the wide stairs, landing in the oyster-shell gravel to the detriment of his skin and clothes. He moaned as he staggered to his feet.\n\n\"Take my nephew someplace to sober up,\" Last said, speaking to the coachman. The man shook his head, mute, unwilling, until Last tossed him a luna.\n\nLast looked on Kritos's limping form dispassionately. \"As always, you make poor gambles, Kritos. Attack the man who can and will disinherit you without further qualm? And to do so before Vornatti's catamite and his spy. How fast the word will spread of your straits, and you with no one to blame but yourself.\"\n\nMaledicte sketched the briefest of bows when Kritos turned a furious face toward them and said, \"Such delicious gossip it is, too. The family loyalty of the House of Last.\" He shivered in small spurts along his spine, the only outlet he afforded his rage. So close, and yet, Janus still eluded his grasp. Killing Last now when he could be caught before he reached Janus was\u2014unthinkable. He could not move; the urge to kill and the need to wait warred in him, keeping him frozen as Last paced forward.\n\n\"What is your game, boy?\" Last looked down his narrow nose; he was close enough that Maledicte had to look up to see those pale, icy eyes.\n\n\"Is this a game? I never thought it one. As for my conduct, I do as I see fit.\" His voice, raspy, covered the shiver in it.\n\n\"Were you not Vornatti's ward, you'd find out how little that arrogance would avail you,\" Last said. \"But tell me, boy, what do you want with my brother?\"\n\nMaledicte forced a smile, despite the ache in his guts that pointed out how close Last was, how sharp the black blade was, how quickly the deed could be done. A pastel froth of dresses spilled down the stairs as the youngest debutantes and their chaperones came outside, looking for their coaches. They stopped; one lady giggled uncertainly, sensing the charged atmosphere, the muttering rooks flanking the drive.\n\n\"I want nothing from Aris that he has not already given me, but what I want from you\u2014\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"I have done nothing to you, and yet I could swear to your enmity.\"\n\n\"Have you something on your conscience? Some wrong done? Shall I remind you? You gave me a gift once before you learned its value and took it back,\" Maledicte said, breath catching in anger. Careless, he thought. If Last understood, raised his mind from petty offenses to himself, from the confusion over Aris's support, would he not whisk Janus away once again?\n\nHe tempered the ragged edge from his voice and said, \"Your coach is waiting, your grace, and I have nothing more to say to you tonight.\" The cool dismissal whitened the skin around Last's nose even as it flushed his thick neck.\n\nLast reached out as if he would shake or strangle Maledicte, but his hands dropped to his side at a gasp from the throng of women. \"I will see you gone from the court,\" he said, as he stepped up into his coach. \"Revealed for what you are.\"\n\n\"What am I?\" Maledicte whispered as Last closed the coach's door. \"I wish you would tell me.\"\n\nLast gave the coachman a signal and the horses drew him away. Maledicte stood trembling, until Gilly took his hand and led him home.\n**\u00b7 11 \u00b7**\n\n**S** ORNATTI'S DOVE STREET RESIDENCE was lit against the silky fogs creeping inward from the sea, making itself a welcoming beacon in the twilight. Inside, that echo of hospitality continued as maids laid silver out, as the cook prepared her courses, as Vornatti waited for his dinner guests.\n\nIn his bedchamber, Maledicte paced, irritated that Vornatti staged this party now, when he wanted to flee the city and hunt Janus down at Lastrest. But Vornatti had insisted on the party; more, he had disabled the coach and disallowed Maledicte any coin. Once, Maledicte thought, such obstacles would have only slowed him, not stopped him. But now, he had grown soft\u2014or practical\u2014and knew there was no point attempting the forty-mile journey afoot. Not when Janus was destined to attend the solstice ball; not when morning might see Vornatti more agreeable.\n\nStill, his temper was bad, and at the sight of a carriage come unfashionably early, he slammed his window shut, cracking the glass.\n\nSince his bloodless confrontation of Last, Ani had gnawed at him, muttering and seething, until his entire body ached with fluttering wings and razor beaks. His mind, like feathers in an eddy, kept coming round and round, always returning to blood-drenched dreams. His hand cramped on the sword hilt, seized yet again to no purpose. Ani, restless, threatened to withdraw Her support, the compact annulled by his dilatoriness. _Coward,_ Ani jeered, Her message in his clenching fist on the hilt: _Last must die._\n\n\"He will,\" Maledicte muttered. \"I swore it. I swore.\"\n\nBehind him, the door, left ajar for Gilly, whispered open. Maledicte tensed his shoulders, pulled the drapes across the blank-eyed glass. \"Not yet,\" he said.\n\n\"Are you practicing your lines?\" The voice wasn't Gilly's low voice, husked with the indelible country accent, but a woman's, delicately arch. \"I thought your wit more ready than that.\"\n\nRage muted Maledicte's response. He turned. Mirabile lingered in the doorway, and as he met her eyes, she took a step inward, her hands trailing across the jambs, emphasizing her invasion of his room. Like the night sky, she swept inward, all in dark satin and fog-gray trim.\n\n\"Apparently, I was mistaken,\" she said. \"A flaw in your nature. You should correct it. Those who practice their thoughts are often caught flat-footed.\"\n\n\"Get out\u2014\" Maledicte whispered, then with effort removed his hand from the sword hilt again, and assayed a reasonable fa\u00e7ade of courtly speech. \"I have a care for my reputation, even if you do not. A man's bedchamber is no place for a lady.\"\n\n\"What _has_ the baron been teaching you?\" Mirabile said, her lips curving. \"Shall I show you otherwise? Prove that a lady indeed has a place in a man's bedchamber?\" She glided toward him, her dark skirts creeping ahead of her.\n\nMaledicte stepped back, bumped the wall. She laughed and settled herself on his bed, rested her cheek against the canopy post, stroked its length. \"As nervous as a virgin. How unflattering,\" she said. \"And feared for your reputation? Let me teach you this, Maledicte, that scandalous creatures such as myself, such as you\"\u2014she nodded toward him with a regal incline of her head\u2014\"need not fear the strictures of propriety. The peerage expects misbehavior from us. We are free in ways they will never be, granted license by their hunger for scandalous gossip.\"\n\n\"They don't need our actions to feed their gossip. I believe they make it out of whole cloth.\"\n\n\"Strong words from a man who owes much of his place to the collection and manipulation of rumor,\" Mirabile said, laughing. \"If you claim such disinterest, I will stifle a whisper I meant to share\u2014a gift of sorts, to mend this awkward dislike you bear for me.\" She rose, crossed the room, her presence as warm beside him as an animal's.\n\nMaledicte leaned against the window, wishing he were back in the ballroom with a low balcony and velvet grass behind him instead of a steep drop to a thorny garden. \"Dislike?\" he said. \"Is that what you term my feelings to be?\"\n\n\"Hush,\" she said, putting her hand to his mouth. Perfume rose from her skin, the dizzying, cloying attar of imported jasmine. She tipped her mouth toward his. He turned his head, and she, determined, followed, brought her lips to his. Again, he reached for the sword, but Mirabile caught his hand and brought it to her bodice, the scented intersection of flesh and satin.\n\nSnarling, Maledicte shoved her away, drew the sword in a long hiss. Evading its blade, Mirabile fell over her long skirts. Her eyes darkened; her face stiffened in insult. But her voice stayed sweet. \"So very gauche. If you were not so lovely, I wonder if I'd bother with you. Still, you might at least pretend to civility. Were I to report your behavior to Vornatti\u2014\"\n\n\"If you report this, Vornatti would see me cast out, which would gain you neither husband nor the wealth you crave.\" Maledicte sheathed the sword again, fighting the urge to see blood wet its blade. Any blood.\n\nMirabile rose, brushing at a creased panel on her skirt. \"But would gain me the satisfaction of seeing you so discommoded. Still, you're quite correct, that's not the result I wish.\" She shook out her skirts, then settled herself at his dressing table, sorting the discarded jumble of stickpins and fobs, leafing through _The Book of Vengeances,_ and smiling at the illustrations. \"So I'll return to my first purpose. Shall I tell you the gossip?\"\n\n\"I'll hear it from a dozen mouths by morning,\" Maledicte said, watching her hands, thinking of Westfall's stolen belongings, of Gilly's missing flask, but, unwilling to get closer, allowed her to set the book aside for his embroidery box.\n\n\"How you wrong me,\" she said. \"My gossip is never the ordinary. I am as clever as your baron when it comes to ferreting secrets.\" Her agile fingers sought the catch.\n\n\"Tell me if you must,\" Maledicte said.\n\nHer fingers stilled as she smiled at him. \"Last dislikes you very much; you return the sentiment,\" she said.\n\n\"Old news,\" Maledicte interrupted.\n\n\"But Kritos dislikes him beyond that. You'll not suffer Last for long. Kritos means to kill him before Last has a chance to disinherit him in favor of Janus. It is his only way to salvage his debts. So he raises coin, even now, to hire an assassin.\"\n\nOutrage scoured him, all unexpected. His vengeance\u2014stolen? And by the man who had done him such wrong before?\n\nMirabile's fingers found the catch; the lid opened. Her painted mouth made a delicate \"oh\" of surprise, and then her lips curled. \"Not what I expected,\" she said. \"But perhaps you and I can understand each other. Shall I make myself clear?\"\n\n\"I wish you would,\" Maledicte said, the rage fading slowly as he wrestled for control. He watched her select the vial of arsenixa, admiring it in the lamplight as if it were a gemstone.\n\n\"I need funds desperately,\" she said, \"thus a husband. But my reputation is such that the moneyed men, who can afford to be selective, will not be caught. And time grows short.\n\n\"My lord Westfall is a most impatient host, and Brierly has had the poor judgment to allow herself to become with child. Her vanity is so great that she will not be seen while she is increasing, and so we must rusticate with her. And I will not stomach a country clod for a husband.\" She ran her nails along the crystalline vials until they hummed.\n\nMaledicte reminded her, \"My fortunes are as negligible as yours.\"\n\n\"So your dog said, barking most convincingly. I see only one option left me,\" she said.\n\nMaledicte stiffened. \"Surely\u2014\"\n\n\"Hmm\u2014\" she said, interrupting him, tugging out a soft roll of cloth-bound powders. \"You are not so indifferent to the female sex as you pretend. Not and keep Harlot's Friend in such ready supply. I own I am glad to see it here.\"\n\n\"Potions be damned,\" Maledicte said. \"Make your point and be gone, Lady.\"\n\nHer hands clenched, then eased as she mastered her temper. \"Shall I be blunt? Even Vornatti must grow bored in his bed. He has his rough servant and he has your elegance\u2014don't try to deny it,\" she said. \"I know what they call you in the court when your back is to them\u2014Vornatti's catamite. And I must believe them, since you so nobly defended your fellow, Gilly\u2014you're both whores, one simply better dressed than the other.\"\n\n\"I am not a whore,\" he said, reflexively. His anger leaped but fell back beneath caution. She wanted something of him, more than the obvious. Her entire visit felt a sortie, its purpose cloaked in layers. She wanted his alliance in her schemes; he believed that. But his acceptance or denial was not the answer to quench the burning question in her eyes. Maledicte wanted badly to know what she truly sought; he would deny her everything he could.\n\n\"Whore or not, it doesn't signify,\" she said, \"except that lovely as you both are\u2014surely he's surfeited with male flesh. He's willing to pay and pay well for his desires. My price isn't so dear, a simple ceremony and ring.\"\n\n\"You think he'd wed you? He can find other women without wedding them,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"He will wed me,\" she said, the fury so long missing from her face flaring to life. \"Be careful, Maledicte. I would like to have you at my side, in my bed, a partner in this, but I will not tolerate your disrespect.\"\n\n\"Respect you? When my contempt grows apace?\" Maledicte said.\n\nMirabile's hand curled inward, her forearm tensed; that warning was enough for Maledicte. As her hand rose, fingers clawed, he freed the sword, using the blade like a shield.\n\nHer sharp nails sang along its length; her hand closed over his on the hilt. She shuddered as the steel feathers bit into her skin, raising blood on her white hands. The rage faded from her eyes, her face; her jaw slackened, lips quivered. \"What\u2014\" she gasped. \"I hear...whispers, a question\u2014\" For a moment, her face went slack, as her own driving question was answered with another.\n\nMaledicte jerked the sword away, her fingers welling blood. She brought her hand to her mouth, licked the wounds, her eyes never leaving his. \"It's true. Chancel, blight him, was right. All true,\" she said breathlessly. \"You _are_ Ani's creature\u2014the gods are no more gone than the sun at sundown.... Tell me how you did it,\" she said, her voice feverish, the white flesh of her breasts flushing. \"Tell me! Is it true? All true? Are you immune to poison, to injury? Such power you must have, perhaps enough to share?\" She leaned toward him, all fervor and white teeth bared in wild rejoicing.\n\n\"You're mad,\" he said. \"And long past your welcome.\" He pushed past her and fled, hating to leave her loose in his chamber, but equally loath to stay with Ani stirring to an interest beyond Maledicte's vengeance. Coldness grew in his belly, coiling, twisting; what if Ani, grown sick of his slow scheming, left him?\n\nWhat of Kritos? Though Maledicte had little respect for the man's ability, what if Kritos succeeded? What would Ani do then?\n\nPolite laughter rose from the floor below and he checked in his stairward movement, thinking the laughter directed at him, at his allowing Mirabile to cozen the truth from him that he had never meant to reveal. He growled, retraced his steps, and slipped down the servants's tairs, stroking his fingers for balance along the ill-lit walls.\n\nGILLY LOOKED UP from the household books. This, too, was his task, the endless daily budgeting and balancing of accounts. Of late, he found the minutiae soothing. So he sat now, lamp wicking down on the desk, one long leg curled back beneath the chair rungs. When Maledicte drifted into the study, a vision in dark silks, he found his first response not pleasure but dismay.\n\n\"Shouldn't you be with your dinner guests?\" he asked.\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" Maledicte said, sulking into the deep, plush chair that Vornatti usually claimed. \"What did you say to her, Gilly?\"\n\n\"Her?\" Gilly echoed.\n\n\"Mirabile,\" Maledicte said, kicking at the carved legs of the chair in bad temper.\n\n\"She's not still hunting you?\" Gilly said, surprised.\n\n\"No. Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"She's decided to wed Vornatti and make me her paramour.\"\n\nGilly scoffed, unconcerned with the black look Maledicte turned on him. \"And you deciphered this how?\"\n\n\"No effort at all,\" Maledicte said, rising smoothly, stalking the room. \"She told me so herself in my chambers.\" He growled wordlessly and for the first time, Gilly saw the knife edge beneath the familiar petulance and temper.\n\nGilly said, \"She was in your room?\"\n\n\"I left her there,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Gilly trailed off, thinking of Mirabile in Maledicte's room, snooping, finding more than she could have imagined. \"Go roust her out. You cannot withstand her scrutiny. Her husband believed in the gods' survival\u2014\"\n\n\"Gilly, don't be foolish,\" Maledicte said, \"The damage is most thoroughly done. She is now quite introduced to Ani.\" He settled down on the desk, careful of the ink bottle and the fallen pen, as if Gilly's outburst soothed his own.\n\n\"She knows?\" Gilly said.\n\n\"She cornered me until she provoked the response she wanted. And while I despise her, I must admire her boldness. It's quite inspired me.\"\n\n\"To what end?\" Gilly asked, closing the ledger over his fingertip. He misliked the angry precision of Maledicte's words, the fey light in his dark eyes.\n\n\"I thought to dedicate my night to gambling,\" he said, taking the ledger from Gilly and flipping through it.\n\n\"Your entire existence seems one gamble after another. You have a dinner party to attend and the old bastard to soothe\u2014what do you seek at the gambling tables?\" Gilly took the ledger back, set it in the drawer, and shut it.\n\n\"Kritos.\"\n**\u00b7 12 \u00b7**\n\n**K** RITOS?\" GILLY REPEATED. \"YOU ARE a gambler, then. Vornatti will be furious if you slight him again.\"\n\n\"I am well aware that Vornatti will not support me in this. Of late, he counsels temperance. So it must be done quickly. You'll have to raid the house box for me, Gilly.\"\n\n\"I thought you meant to kill Kritos. Not game with him,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"I want to beat him first.\" A brief, ugly light flared and smoldered in Maledicte's eyes; Gilly looked away, fed more of the wick into the lamp, chasing the clustering shadows from the desk, fearing more than simple temper in Maledicte's eyes.\n\n\"Do you even know how to play?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"Well enough to win,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly's breath snagged in his chest, not only at the resurgence of the smothering rage in Maledicte's eyes, but at his own realization that this was the moment he had been dreading, the moment when Ani's compact would be sealed with blood, no matter that it came cloaked in ridiculous questions of card games. Gilly sought something to dissuade Maledicte. \"You believe you can win at will?\"\n\n\"Of course. It's called card-sharping, Gilly; have you never heard of it? I assure you, it's all the rage in some circles.\" Maledicte smiled, sharp-toothed, as if he or Ani understood Gilly's attempts at delay.\n\n\"Why am I not surprised?\" Gilly sat back in the chair, tilted the seat for a less-shadowed view. \"Are you good enough, Mal? This will be different than rooking sotted sailors at the pier, or wherever you gained your experience. Kritos belongs to the worst hells in the city. Where getting caught sharping will see far more than a reputation ruined.\"\n\n\"Don't fret, Gilly,\" Maledicte said. \"I do excellently well. Shall I prove it to you?\"\n\n\"Go to Vornatti's dinner, Mal.\"\n\n\"No more delay,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly clenched his hands. \"Mal\u2014\"\n\n\"It will be done, with or without your aid,\" Maledicte said. \"Kritos has decided to deprive us of our prey. To kill Last for his own selfish desires. Did you expect me to grow bored of my enemies? My hatred? I am not Vornatti, content to nurture a grudge for years with no satiation in sight. Janus has returned. I could go to Lastrest this moment and slaughter Last; we could live like royalty until the Kingsguard or Echo's Particulars managed to bring us down. Be thankful I'm content with Kritos tonight.\"\n\n\"I'll call for a hack,\" Gilly said, his mouth dry.\n\nMaledicte bowed and left, claiming he needed to change into something more suitable, with all the airy insouciance of a man going out for a night's pleasure instead of a murder. Left alone, Gilly laid his head down on the desk, tangled his fingers in his hair, thinking. Short of drugging Maledicte, he saw no way to avert this. And Maledicte, though he trusted Gilly, would be unlikely to take food or drink from Gilly's hand tonight. The solution was as distant as ever by the time the hack arrived, and Gilly found himself following Maledicte into it in a brooding silence of his own.\n\nTHEY PAID THE HACK TO take them as far as it would, the driver loath to travel Jove Street at night.\n\n\"I do believe you, you know,\" Gilly said, watching Maledicte palm another card with a demonstrative flourish, and wishing he'd never expressed his doubts. Maledicte had made him play and lose hand after hand in the swaying carriage, until his head pounded. Gilly focused and caught the cheat this time, tapped Maledicte's wrist. \"Be careful, Mal. Sleight of hand relies on vision driven by expectation. Some men see more clearly than you think. The Fiery Hell is no place to be caught cheating.\"\n\n\"You'll be at my back,\" Maledicte said, smiling in a way that did nothing to soothe Gilly's nerves.\n\nThe hack rattled to a stop, the horses blowing out steam in the foggy dark. The last of the twilight was making way for the darkness seeping down from the sky. On other streets, the young boys employed as lamplighters would be running from post to post with their long tapers, making small, defiant blazes against the invading night.\n\nBut on Jove Street, light was unwelcomed. Only a small torch affixed to the jamb gave enough of a glow to allow a visitor to decipher the address: Fire 3 Jove Street\u2014known as the Fiery Hell to its regulars.\n\nThere were other gambling houses, more genteel in their fa\u00e7ades, more tempting to the dallying aristocracy, where women and men, lords and ladies went to be gently daring, frivolous, and above all, seen. But the Fiery Hell took its games seriously, unleavened with court manners or excess speech. No waiters circled, offering sweetened wines or spirits. No music played, and no whores waited for a lucky gambler. There were only the tables and the players, including impoverished aristocrats so desperate to recoup fortunes they would risk a knife in the ribs. The Fiery Hell was Kritos's best chance.\n\nGilly hefted the brass knocker in his hand, dropped it down on the face-plate. The sharp rapping left muffled cracks echoing down the cooling, darkening street.\n\nThe door opened; Gilly looked up, surprised at having to do so, but the man filled the doorframe as effectively as the oak door itself. Gilly nudged Maledicte. \"Stormy Jack,\" he whispered. \"The boxer.\"\n\nMaledicte looked at Gilly blankly and shrugged. Gilly sighed. \"Just don't irritate him.\"\n\nPausing in the foyer, Maledicte and Gilly studied the tables, while Jack latched the door behind them. The Fiery Hell had been stripped of any pretension of being a domicile. In every available space the tables dominated the house, each one surrounded by close-packed men, some muttering, some gray and silent.\n\nMaledicte headed toward the darkest corner as if he could sense his quarry. Gilly went after him, seeing not the crowds, but the pistols in coat pockets, the knives and swords hung on chairs or slung onto tables as prizes. All around the walls lurked employees as big as the doorman.\n\nMaledicte intended to cheat here? Gilly had known it was a foolish idea; now he found it a suicidal one.\n\nIn the corner of the room, at a small table, Kritos sat alone, his back to the wall and its peeling flocking. Maledicte slung himself into the chair opposite.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Kritos asked, his good eye bleared with drink and bitterness. Maledicte touched the table before him, as if feeling the games that had gone before.\n\n\"To gamble with you, of course,\" he said.\n\nGilly pressed in close behind Maledicte, listening, watching that slim, rigid spine.\n\n\"When Vornatti keeps you as short of coin as Last keeps me? I know who you are and I'll not waste my time,\" Kritos said, starting to rise. Maledicte shoved the table across the broken parquet and pushed Kritos back into his seat.\n\n\"You listen to too much gossip. That's the mark of a fool,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Watch your tongue,\" Kritos said, but wearily, as if he lacked the energy to take offense. Gilly, watching his face, thought that Kritos intended to parlay his entrance fees into a night's lodging.\n\n\"Surely you can come up with some small stake, or you wouldn't be here,\" Maledicte said, leaning across the table. \"I'm not as particular as these gentlemen. I'll wager for things other than coin.\"\n\nKritos laughed, hoarse and unamused. \"Why should I? What have I to win?\"\n\nMaledicte tipped a handful of coins out on the table. They gleamed with the moon's cool frost in the dark room. \"Not so poor as coppers,\" Maledicte said. \"Not so dangerous as sols. Lunas.\"\n\nKritos licked his lips. \"I've no coin.\"\n\n\"When has that ever balked an aristocrat?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nKritos hesitated a minute longer, looking at Maledicte. Gilly saw the moment when Kritos made his decision, saw the quick flash of scorn on Kritos's face as he relegated Maledicte to fool and fop. \"If you're that eager to play...\" He waved over one of the Hell's attendants, one with a curved scar through his mouth. \"A house stake for me, Smiles.\"\n\n\"Your hide,\" Smiles said, and dropped a roll of mixed coins to the table. \"House takes thirty percent of your winnings, plus the stake back.\" Kritos waved him off, though his lips tightened at the reminder.\n\nTwo hours later, Kritos was richer a tidy pile of coins, as well as the random miscellany Maledicte had allowed to represent coins when Kritos upped the stakes beyond his current coin: a palm-sized miniature meant for Aris, a sailor's compass, the jadestone buttons from his vest, and the Itarusine-made lace from his cuffs. Two of the room's guards, drawn by the scent of unusual play, prowled around the table.\n\nGilly thought Maledicte had let it run too long, had allowed Kritos to win too often and risked losing him from his net. As if in unity with his thoughts, Kritos made to rise.\n\nMaledicte sighed. \"One more?\" He eyed the table with an inexplicable avarice until Gilly realized that his attention focused on the miniature, and who the subject must be. The newest member of the House of Last, Janus Ixion.\n\n\"I think not,\" Kritos said, scooping the pile toward himself.\n\nWordlessly, Maledicte tipped the last contents of his purse out. Sols, this time, and Kritos halted where he stood.\n\n\"Very well,\" Kritos said. \"But I'll want a new deck. Just to be sure, you understand.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Maledicte said.\n\nHANDS LATER, Maledicte had lost sols to gain lunas and was frowning over his cards. Kritos smiled. \"My game again, I think,\" he said, laying out the elements. \"Land, sea, sky, fire, all mine,\" he said. \"Kings all.\"\n\nGilly peered into Maledicte's hands and stifled a wince. While he had a representation of all the suits, Maledicte lacked high cards enough to beat Kritos, but it was close. He had three queens to trump three kings, but the last suit, that of air, had only a scattering of seven seabirds as his high card. Not enough.\n\nMaledicte shifted in his seat, and the guards leaned closer, watching his hands; Kritos's eye narrowed. Maledicte smiled at them all, and set the cards down. \"Your fortune has waned. My hand.\" He laid down the fire cards and queen, the earth cards and queen, sea and sea queen. He set out the air cards one by one: butterflies and clouds and starry nights. The suspicion in Kritos's eye deepened. The seven-gulls card lingered in Maledicte's hand last, and Gilly shivered, wondering if Maledicte was going to try to cheat now, under all these eyes, but Maledicte merely smiled and set it down.\n\nThe queen of air, Black-Winged Ani, Her dark feathers filling the card. Kritos lunged to his feet. \"Impossible.\"\n\nBehind him, a pasteboard fluttered to the floor, unseen by the others\u2014a dark card. The queen of air, palmed to prevent Maledicte's win. But even as it fell, Gilly watched the color leach from it, the dark pinions traded for the sun-speckled backs of seven gulls.\n\nMaledicte shoved the table again, harder, knocking Kritos back against the wall, winding him. \"Are you calling me a cheat? I'm sure these gentlemen will tell you they saw no such thing.\"\n\nRising unhurriedly, Maledicte swept the coins and trinkets into his purse, and handed it to Gilly. The miniature went into his own pocket. \"Good night.\"\n\n\"Another game,\" Kritos demanded.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, heading for the door. Gilly stumbled after, still waiting for the protest to go up. His back burned with the heat of it. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw Kritos watching them, his face furious, even as the house guards closed in to reclaim their stake.\n\nHe hurried Maledicte outside, and started casting for a hack, looking down the dark streets, listening for approaching hoofbeats, but heard only Maledicte's stuttering laughter.\n\n\"I thought you meant to kill him,\" Gilly said, giving up the futile hunt.\n\n\"I do,\" Maledicte said, \"and I will, but Gilly, wasn't it wonderful? Such a foolish thing to please me so, and yet the games went so well.\"\n\n\"With Ani's aid,\" Gilly said. \"Or dare you say that the transformation of the queen was a cheat learned in the Relicts?\"\n\n\"Transformation?\" Maledicte said. At the pure incomprehension in his tone, Gilly's stomach clenched.\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said. \"Let's go home.\"\n\n\"Did you see his face, Gilly? Wasn't it perfect?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, casting cautious glances back over his shoulder at the near-empty street, at the disreputable building they had just left. He _had_ seen Kritos's expression; fury and barely cloaked desperation. It made him leery of the distance they must travel afoot to find a hire carriage. This late, no carriage would appear on Jove Street, in the shadow world of narrow, winding alleys and blinded gas lamps, no matter how he wished it. No god listened to his will. \"We need to be gone, before he manages to convince the Fiery Hell he can best regain their money by hunting you.\"\n\nMaledicte merely shrugged, his steps still slow.\n\nGilly turned his head again. Was that a man following in their wake, sidling along the dark walls? Was that the tap of booted heels trying for silence, or the drip of water condensing against stone walls and sliding to the street? Gilly was certain of one thing only: On this street, at this hour, no one they met would be a friend. He picked up his pace, hooking his arm through Maledicte's. \"Let's not dally. We're some ways yet from Sybarite Street, and there'll be no carriages closer than that.\"\n\n\"There's an alley through the houses,\" Maledicte said. \"It'll save us the entire walk up this street and then the walk back down to the carriage stand on Sybarite. Somewhere. Ah, here it is.\"\n\nGilly pictured the streets of the city, spread out like a spiderweb, the long sweep of the seven main streets, and the nameless curling crossings that linked them all. Maledicte was right. But only the change of sound, the lack of reverberation, told Gilly that the shadow Maledicte faced was more than a recessed door. The darkness swallowed his words and fed nothing back.\n\n\"This should bring us out near Clara's, and there are always hacks there, waiting for the men to stagger away. If you're nervous of the night air, the dark...\"\n\nMaledicte turned; the quick flash of teeth told Gilly Maledicte was mocking his fears. \"Not the night, the people in it.\" Gilly peered into the alley, saw the wall curve away into velvety darkness, and yet, as he studied it, a lambent glow traveled back, carrying the flushed color and acrid scent of the additives used in Syb Street gas lamps. \"Let me go first,\" he said, and stepped into the alley.\n\n\"Why didn't I think of that?\" Maledicte asked. \"It makes so much sense to let the unarmed man go first into danger. Are you sure you're as clever as you think?\" The rasp of his voice was leavened by a breathy amusement. They headed into the alley, their boots sliding on fog-slick cobbles and unseen effluvia.\n\n\"You're going to lose that tongue of yours yet,\" Gilly warned. The light ahead grew marginally brighter, coated the dark walls with blushed contours.\n\nMaledicte opened his mouth, and Gilly said, \"I think you want us to be attacked. Just hush now, I can't hear if we're being followed if you keep talking.\"\n\n\"Someone _is_ following you,\" Maledicte said, in a carrying mutter. \"Me. How you expect to hear anything but my boots stumbling around in this muck...\"\n\nGilly turned in laughing exasperation, ready to put Maledicte before him, just to shut his mouth, and the startled inhalation of breath was all the warning he could manage to give.\n\nIT WAS ALL MALEDICTE HAD been waiting for. He stepped aside, pivoted, drew the sword. There was barely room for its length in the narrow alley; the tip scraped, unseen, against the opposite wall, and Kritos's cane impacted on the sheltering steel of the blade rather than on Maledicte's vulnerable nape.\n\n\"Not very good with that thing,\" Maledicte said. \"You couldn't hit old man Last; what makes you think you can touch me?\"\n\nThe cane slid along the flat of the blade. Beyond words, Kritos continued to grind his cane against the unseen blade. In the shadows, the blade was only an extension of darkness; frustration knotted Kritos's jaw, bared his teeth as he fought what must have seemed like invisible forces bent on his failure.\n\nMaledicte's wrist trembled with effort, but he succeeded in turning his hand, and with it, the angle of the blade. The wooden cane gave against the sword edge, splitting, and Kritos stumbled forward, roaring.\n\nMaledicte skipped back, nearly falling over Gilly as he attempted to get between the combatants. \"Don't be a fool,\" Maledicte spared the breath to say.\n\nConcentrating on the weight at the end of his wrist, Maledicte thrust at Kritos, backing him away, cursing because he, too, was hampered by this dim light. Kritos avoided a lunge with a desperate effort. Maledicte, overextended, felt the rush of warm air on his throat, saw Kritos stretching one hand out for his neck. It ghosted toward him, pale and indistinct, then clear, the fingers clenching as if Maledicte's neck were already within their grip.\n\n\"Mal, watch out,\" Gilly cried.\n\n\"Hush, hush,\" Maledicte said, recovering his balance, raising the sword and batting Kritos's outreaching arm into the wall. Quickly, Maledicte threw his weight onto the blade, the wall, and the arm pinned between.\n\nA solid slap of flash against flesh exploded by his head. Gilly had reached over Maledicte's shoulder and caught Kritos's other fist in his own.\n\n\"I can do this without your help,\" Maledicte gritted out, though a small part of him sang at the comfort of Gilly's help, reminding him of days long gone. Thinking of them, Maledicte stepped forward and brought his knee up with brutal force into the man's belly; when Kritos curled forward, Maledicte slammed his left fist into his throat.\n\nGagging, Kritos folded to his hands and knees, blood splashing where the blade had ripped at his escaping arm. He scrabbled back and Maledicte thrust the blade at the pale target of his good eye. Kritos cried out, hurling himself backward, overbalancing, landing on his back, still struggling for air. Maledicte grinned, raised the sword, heard Ani moaning Her pleasure inside him, and drove it downward. Beside him, Gilly flinched.\n\nBut Maledicte only used the sword to pin the man to the cobbles and the earth below, through one ornate and now-ruined sleeve. \"I suppose I should let you up, fight you like a gentleman. But then, the first gentleman I ever met didn't fight fair either.\"\n\n\"Mal,\" Gilly said, reaching outward.\n\nMaledicte evaded his grip, dropping to put both his knees into Kritos's belly. He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a small purse.\n\nKritos's struggle increased. He shoved at Maledicte with his free arm, ripping at Maledicte's hair, reddening his jawline. \"You\u2014\" Kritos said, on a stifled breath.\n\n\"None of that,\" Maledicte said, dodging another blow, clamping his hand over Kritos's mouth lest anything secret slip out. But he had wanted Kritos to know him, and that the man did, at the last, when it was too late, made both him and Ani purr with delight. The loose hand tore at his face again, scrabbling. \"Gilly, get that arm, would you?\"\n\nThe feeble blows stopped. Maledicte upended the purse of wooden coins over Kritos's heaving chest. Faint glimmers of silvering still lingered on them. \"I saved them for you,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"No\u2014\" Kritos said, true fear reaching his face, past the outrage, the bluster, and the desperation. He tried to surge upward, and Maledicte ground his weight downward, stabilizing himself by gripping the sword's hilt.\n\nDone with words, Maledicte yanked at the sword hilt, not bothering to pull the tip of the blade from its earthen sheath, but rather slanting the entire blade sideways like the closing blade of a scissors. Kritos yelled but the blade silenced him in a rush of wheezy air and blood. Maledicte put his thinly gloved hand down on the blade edge and pushed, in a step that should have seen him lose fingers, but only made the sword edge sink deeper until it ground against bone.\n\nKritos convulsed; his hands, freed by Gilly's repulsed recoil, clutched at Maledicte's forearms. Maledicte rode the spasms until they ceased, until Kritos's grip fell slack. Blood ran down the sword, pooling in the feathered hilt. Maledicte pulled his gloves off, ran his finger down the same path, chasing the blood. The dim alleyway robbed some of his satisfaction; in the darkness, the blood looked black rather than crimson, but the tang of it in the air...He stood, feeling as unsteady on his feet as a newborn creature.\n\nGilly bent and picked his gloves up when Maledicte turned away from the corpse. \"Careless,\" he said. His voice cracked.\n\nMaledicte recovered his sword and wiped it off with the muddy remains of Kritos's cloak, humming tunelessly. He broke off to laugh, giddy with satisfaction. \"That will teach him to interfere in my life. Or would, if he weren't past any lessoning now.\"\n\nGilly's face whitened until he seemed a ghost in the dark alley; he bent over the cobbles, retching. Maledicte rose hastily, took him down the alley away from the body. \"What is it, Gilly? What's the matter?\"\n\n\"I've never killed anyone before,\" Gilly said, swallowing audibly.\n\n\"You haven't yet. Don't get greedy. Kritos was all mine, and I could have done it without you,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You'd have had your brains dashed out on the alley wall without me,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, \"But your aid was timely all the same.\" He reached up to touch Gilly's face. Gilly flinched, and Maledicte let his hand drop, scowling. \"Wallow in your conscience if you will. But remember, I told you when we set out that I meant to see him dead tonight. I am a man of my word and will after all\u2014\"\n\nGILLY CLOSED HIS EYES and ears to Maledicte's contented ramblings; he felt as if he had strayed into one of his nightmares. Behind his closed eyes, the alley felt overfull of presences and scents: the acid smell of his own sickness, the smell of turned earth and blood that lingered, and something else, something out of place in this dark world of cobbles and stone\u2014the scent of musty feathers. Opening his eyes, he saw Maledicte had returned to the body, admiring his work, saw the doubled shadow clinging to him in the low, fevered light, rough-edged like wings.\n\nGilly rubbed his face, the bridge of his nose between his eyes, and pulled his hand away, repelled. His fingers were damp and sticky, splashed with Kritos's blood. Ani's compact sealed in blood. He leaned against the wall and retched in dry miserable heaves.\n\nMaledicte came back and took Gilly's sleeve. Gilly shuddered, imagining something new within Maledicte, something hungry. But Maledicte's voice, raspy and cool, was his own. \"There's a rain barrel up ahead. Come on.\"\n\nThe shock of the cold water cleared Gilly's senses, and he washed his hands with steady fingers. Maledicte splashed happily about in it, rinsing his hands, the blade.\n\nGilly found a smile himself, a brittle thing, but Maledicte, delighted, was a charming companion, and Kritos\u2014Gilly managed to lose the iron weight that had settled in his chest, at least until the hack they found disgorged them into Dove Street Square.\n\nGilly felt the eyes on him as soon as he stepped out of the carriage. Looking around, he saw no one at first, then made out the dusty gray coat of the homeless intercessor, huddled up against the central fountain. The man nodded his head in greeting, but when Maledicte stepped out onto the cobbles, smiling, the intercessor's eyes widened and he sketched a symbol in the air.\n\nWith sudden dismay, Gilly recognized it, the inverted blessing of Baxit, the _avert_ against the god-possessed. As Maledicte passed the fountain, the intercessor disappeared into the deeper shadows with an alacrity that spoke of fear.\n**\u00b7 13 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY WOKE WITH VORNATTI'S BELL ringing in his ears, and the nagging sense that there had been earlier bells still, not only Vornatti's summoning bell, but deep, resonating tones. Perhaps it was only guilt; Kritos's body could not have been found soon enough for the palace bells to bemoan the loss of one of their own. The sunlight, though, streamed dark gold across the floor, the color of midmorning. Swearing, Gilly staggered to his feet, cursing himself for staying up past the time of their return, brooding over the murder, the intercessor's fear, and dulling those thoughts with drinking. A glance at the clock in the hall warned him it was nearer noon than morning, and again he was late with Vornatti's shot.\n\nVornatti hunched, still abed, sleep-bleared and roaring at Livia. She held the loaded syringe in trembling hands.\n\n\"Give it here,\" Gilly said, taking it from her. She passed it over with a gasp of relief, and Gilly bent to find an unbruised vein in Vornatti's arm. His guilt, malleable, shifted from Kritos to a miserable wondering of how dreadful it must be for Vornatti to wake to pain while Gilly slept, babying an aching head.\n\nVornatti's teeth gritted as the Elysia slid into his vein, and then, slowly, his body started to relax.\n\n\"Late again, Gilly\u2014\" Vornatti growled, seizing Gilly's collar as if to shake him.\n\nLivia, busying herself near the door, returned with a cup of tea, hot and steaming. \"Here, sir.\"\n\nVornatti wrapped his knotted hands around the teacup, distracted by Livia's skirts, inches shorter than propriety suggested, and damped besides, Gilly thought. Livia shot a quick conspiratorial smile at him as he backed away.\n\n\"Did you hear the news, sir? Such goings-on as the milkman brought us this morning. Kritos found stripped and gutted in the alleys near the wharves.\"\n\nVornatti set his tea down, untouched. \"Last night?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nIn the distant recesses of the house, the butler could be heard opening the door, and a clear, cool voice rising upward. \"Livia,\" Vornatti said. \"Go downstairs and bring the Lady Mirabile to my chamber.\"\n\n\"Here, sir?\" she repeated.\n\n\"Give me time to get him dressed,\" Gilly added.\n\nHe bent over Vornatti, undid the sash of the man's robe. \"Do you want the\u2014\"\n\nVornatti slapped him. \"I should give your job to Livia. Do you forget who pays you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said, kneeling beside the bed, head throbbing.\n\nVornatti put his hand into Gilly's hair, turned his face upward to meet his. \"Worse for drink, Gilly? My drink? While I held my dinner party, my faithful servant and my ward were where? Where was Maledicte?\"\n\n\"Lady Mirabile is impatient,\" Gilly said, slipping Vornatti's robe off. \"You wouldn't want her to find you still in bedclothes.\"\n\n\"Did he do it, Gilly?\" Vornatti said, voice low, maddened. \"Did he kill Kritos?\"\n\nGilly found a loose vest and coat that could cover Vornatti's nightshirt and settled him in his wheeled chair, hoping that the Elysia would erase Vornatti's temper, his inquisitiveness. His hands trembled as he continued dressing Vornatti, imagining what Vornatti might do to punish them.\n\nLivia scratched once on the door and ushered Mirabile in; Vornatti caught Gilly's hand and muttered, \"I'll have words for you, later.\"\n\nGilly bowed his head to Mirabile, avoiding the eager, wild light in her eyes, and fled.\n\nHer voice carried into the hallway. \"\u2014dead and by such vile means as one can scarcely comprehend\u2014\"\n\nGilly leaned against the wall, felt the silk wallpaper smooth and slick under his hot cheek, remembered the blood on his hands, and Kritos's death throes. But he also remembered Kritos coming after them, in the dark and from behind.\n\nLivia put a hand on his arm, startling him with her presence. \"He's in a right mood today, isn't he? And his party went so well last night, I'd've thought he'd be sleeping all the day.\"\n\nGilly shrugged, still irritated at the gossip she had chosen to bring. \"He's contrary. Have you seen Maledicte?\"\n\nLivia made a face at the abruptness of his tone, but answered readily enough. \"He's in the parlor with Lord Echo. Is it true Maledicte gamed with Kritos last night?\"\n\n\"Go back to your duties,\" Gilly said. He wouldn't be responsible for any more information slipping from Livia's tongue to Mirabile's ear. Livia sighed, but disappeared obediently.\n\nGilly hurried toward the parlor. Echo was not a foolish man, and Maledicte's temperament led too often to incautious words for him to feel sanguine about the two of them closeted away together. A sudden wash of guilt stopped him as he reached for the door, and he slumped against the wall instead, weakened by a pounding heart, and a face that he knew would betray him instantly.\n\nThrough the door, he heard Echo speaking. \"...realized you were acquainted enough with Kritos to play cards with him.\"\n\n\"How acquainted must one be to take another's coin?\" Maledicte said, in full court archness.\n\n\"True enough,\" Echo said, \"Still, to gamble with Kritos showed a distinct lack of caution. The man was a well-known scoundrel.\"\n\n\"You came to lecture me? Or did you have a higher purpose?\" Maledicte said.\n\nAfter a silent second where Gilly imagined Echo biting back his temper, he heard him say, \"Did you see anyone who might have wished Kritos ill?\"\n\n\"Have you been to the Fiery Hell?\" Maledicte asked. \"Even _I_ found it a veritable snake pit.\"\n\n\"You have nothing more useful to say?\"\n\n\"I so rarely do,\" Maledicte agreed, and Echo's quick-moving footsteps were the only warning Gilly had to back away from being an obvious eavesdropper. Still, the quickness of it insured that the guilt he felt written on his skin was overlaid with startlement. Echo's own temper did the rest for him; he left without further word.\n\nGilly tapped at the door and went in. Maledicte looked up from his seat, his boots propped on the hearthstone, and smiled. He set something small down on the chair arm beside him.\n\n\"Did you hear the bells this morning?\" Maledicte asked. \"A lovely way to wake.\"\n\n\"I missed them,\" Gilly said. \"Mal\u2014\"\n\n\"Vornatti?\" Maledicte asked.\n\n\"He knows now, whether he heard the bells or not. Livia brought the news, and Mirabile has brought the gossip. He's furious.\" Gilly paced, unable to settle, and picked up the miniature from beside Maledicte, holding it up toward the lamplight. \"He wants to see you immediately.\"\n\n\"And interrupt Mirabile's visit?\" Maledicte said, rising and claiming the portrait, tucking it away in his vest. \"Or worse, give her the pleasure of seeing me dressed down before her? No, Gilly. Vornatti can wait.\"\n\n\"They found Kritos in the Relicts,\" Gilly said. He lowered himself into Maledicte's vacated seat.\n\n\"Not surprising,\" Maledicte said. He picked up the blade and began stalking shadows with impatient stabs and thrusts. \"You don't think Kritos walked the streets unnoticed, do you? The scavengers would have started to work with their little knives, making sure they found all he had to hide. After the scavengers had at him, they would have discarded him as far from their territory as they could, unwilling to find Echo on their doorsteps. Probably the Relicts. The rats would have finished the job then, taking his laces and boots and hair, the pieces the scavengers left. If he'd near rotted before he was found, perhaps one of your rough sailor friends would have seen him chopped for chum\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Gilly said, the nausea swirling in his belly, churning, mingling with his dread of Vornatti's punishment.\n\nMaledicte paused, blade inscribing an uplift in the air, a stroke like a wingbeat. \"That is where I was born, Gilly.\"\n\nThey were sitting in near silence when footsteps paused in the hall outside. Maledicte rose to drop the latch on the door, but it opened before he could do so. Mirabile came in, smiling.\n\n\"Maledicte\u2014\" she said, holding her hands out. Gilly, making himself unobtrusive, watched Maledicte's muscles shift, as if he couldn't decide between flight or fight.\n\n\"Lady,\" he said, his voice neutral.\n\n\"So formal?\" she asked, her tone arch. \"When we are to be family soon?\"\n\nMaledicte stiffened like an affronted cat.\n\nMirabile trilled laughter, and held out her wrist again, showing the bright band of gemstones circling it. Emeralds, Gilly thought numbly. The old bastard's given her emeralds to match her eyes.\n\n\"From your so-generous guardian,\" Mirabile said. She leaned closer to let Maledicte admire the bracelet. \"I expect the rest of the set when I return from the country. The necklace, the earrings, the ring...\"\n\n\"You're deluded,\" Maledicte said, \"a woman who cannot discern the difference between a bridal gift and a whore's trinket.\"\n\nMirabile's green eyes darkened, but before she could speak, Maledicte continued, his voice as delicately acid as it had been the night he faced DeGuerre. \"Or are you telling me he offered for your hand? That Vornatti propelled himself from his chair and to his knees before you? I think not.\"\n\nHer smile held with effort. \"You had best watch yourself, Maledicte. He is most displeased with you, and I am as elegant and as lovely as you.\"\n\n\"But so much older,\" Maledicte murmured, and Gilly winced.\n\n\"I see you're in no civil mood,\" she said. \"Perhaps your guardian's lecture will teach you to mind your manners.\" She dropped a tiny curtsy toward Maledicte and turned, flirting her skirts as she left.\n\nLooking after her, Gilly missed Maledicte's first words, but the sullen rage in them reclaimed his attention. \"Did you buy that bracelet for Vornatti and not tell me?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said, hastily. \"No, Mal.\" At the black anger in Maledicte's eyes, Gilly stifled his next words\u2014that likely Livia had done it, and pocketed herself a few coppers as well.\n\n\"Think you that he favors her enough for marriage?\" Despite the rage cording his throat, tightening the silken lines of his cravat, Maledicte's voice was quiet.\n\n\"You said it yourself\u2014it's a whore's gift, a trinket he can use to keep her dancing to his tune. And a small price to pay for raising your doubts, I'd lay wager. He's angry, Maledicte. Not an idiot.\"\n\n\"If he wanted to wed Mirabile, he'd have to be, wouldn't he?\" Maledicte said, the flush leaving his cheeks, the tension slackening from his hands. \"A woman who's murdered one husband already and who plots to cuckold her second before the marriage lines are even written.\"\n\n\"Still,\" Gilly said, \"Best go to him now, and take your punishment. Soothe him if you can.\"\n\n\"Soothe him?\" Maledicte said. \"He gave her jewelry.\"\n\n\"He's so angry, Mal, please. Last time, I ended in the stables, while you only had to serve him as I do. He's angrier this time, and I always pay for it....\" He trailed off, unsure where the bitterness in his voice had come from.\n\nMaledicte's eyes widened and then he said, \"I'll go to him at once.\"\n\nVORNATTI'S CHAMBER SEEMED SUBDUED, AS if the death bells had shocked it to stillness. Maledicte looked at the room with new eyes, eyes that were looking into the uncertain future. Vornatti was a scarecrow of a man, hunched in a wing chair, drawn up before an unlit fire, dozing, but Maledicte knew better than to presume helplessness. Maledicte looked at the bed, plush heaps of featherdown and velvet and linen, followed the line of the posts up to the ceiling and its obscene fresco of fornicating cupids.\n\nHe found himself amused at Vornatti's unflagging concupiscence, at the determination that filled the man's hours. The smile was fragile, though. Though Maledicte flouted Vornatti's strictures, gave in to his own whims, still he dreaded displeasing Vornatti too greatly, wary of the man's vindictiveness and temper.\n\nVornatti woke, coughed, then said, \"Boy, come here.\"\n\nMaledicte turned. Surely he had done this already, the slender youth, the sword, an old man's lures. He dropped the sword on the cluttered bed chest, beside the potions and formulas, the shaving soap and scent. A bottle tipped with a crystalline ring, but kept its stopper. Maledicte crouched beside Vornatti. \"What do you want, Vornatti?\"\n\nThe baron's dark eyes fixed on Maledicte's upturned face. \"You killed Kritos.\"\n\n\"I did,\" Maledicte said. A denial would only feed Vornatti's anger. _Soothe him,_ Gilly had pled.\n\nTo that end, Maledicte stood, slipping off his coat, his boots, the stiff, brocaded vest, undressing piece by piece.\n\nThe baron's eyes softened a little, anger tempered by a more familiar appreciation.\n\nMaledicte settled gently in Vornatti's lap, resting his head against his shoulder, as falsely obedient as a young wife, allowing Vornatti's hand to slip along his thigh. \"Echo seems unsuspecting.\"\n\n\"Kritos was a fool and a bad gambler; such men come to bad ends routinely,\" Vornatti said, absently. His knotted fingers slid upward, traced circles over Maledicte's hipbones.\n\n\"See there, no harm done. Don't begrudge me Kritos's death. In turn, I'll\u2014\"\n\nVornatti put a gnarled hand to Maledicte's lips. \"A bargain, my boy.\"\n\n\"We struck one already. In the library of your country home.\"\n\n\"I am not doddering, Maledicte. I remember our agreement.\" Vornatti laid his hand on Maledicte's head, holding it to his shoulder. \"I was wrong.\"\n\nMaledicte waited, heart pounding, wondering whether Vornatti intended to be rid of him. Despite Gilly's words, Vornatti didn't seem angry, and that raised nervous hackles on Maledicte's neck. The old man plotted.\n\n\"You can only lose in this quest of yours. You will always be the outsider, always an object of suspicion, and they will turn on you without hesitation. Better I had let you stab Last in the back than teach you to think of honor and nobility. Antyre is not Itarus to admire the cunning of those trained like assassin princes.\"\n\nMaledicte nipped the fingers so near his mouth, and Vornatti pulled his hand away. \"Is that what you have taught me? And here I called your lessons vice.\"\n\nVornatti chuckled. \"Ah lad, your wicked, disrespectful tongue.\" The humor faded from his face, draining to melancholy. \"I am an old man, Maledicte, and I find myself prey to an old man's most insidious and foolish disease. I would keep you, your wicked mouth, your liquid eyes, your tempers and tempests, only for myself. Keep you mine alone.\"\n\nDisgust flared in him, twisting his lips. Stay here? Limit his touches to Vornatti's withered flesh when Janus awaited? Maledicte started to rise, patience gone, blood drumming in his veins; Vornatti tangled a fist in Maledicte's hair, sent him to his knees by his chair. \"Listen to me, boy. Bide your time. Last will keep until you are better established, or until I am gone and cannot watch you fall. My name grants you some safety but not enough for a direct attack. Such can only end in death or prison. Stay with me. Continue as we have been, and I'll make it worth your while. You know you can trust me to keep my word. Haven't I kept your other secrets safe, my _girl_? Stay and I'll reward you. Make you my ward in truth. My heir.\"\n\n\"Do you think I can be bought?\" Maledicte asked, fisting his hands in his lap. The sword slid from the chest with a protesting scrape and fell to the rugs below.\n\n\"Haven't I bought you once already? Now, all I'm buying is your time. You're a young...man. Last, curse him, is a healthy man. And I, Maledicte, am an old man. My blood fails beneath my skin, but even dying men have favors to bestow. Wait and you'll have money enough to escape from Antyre when they turn on you, teeth bared and bloody.\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"You swore you hated Last.\"\n\n\"And I am content to know you will destroy him. I have no need to see it. Perhaps my vengeance should have been taken when my blood first burned. However it occurs, that fire is cold now and I'd exchange chill for warmth. Yours would be preferable. If you persist on your impatient course, I will make do with Mirabile, and set you back to the streets.\"\n\n\"You speak to me of vengeance fading, yet you would have me balk and delay? I have not that luxury. You had not the spur to act that I have.\" Maledicte escaped from Vornatti's anchoring hand, seized up his shirt, and shrugged it on.\n\n\"Janus,\" Vornatti growled.\n\n\"Ani,\" Maledicte countered to Vornatti's scoffing laugh. He had woken, newly aware of Her, Her contentment that he had sealed their compact, satisfaction that more blood would be forthcoming. Vornatti's prattling of delay made Her shift like a snake coiling to strike.\n\nVornatti leaned forward in his chair, hands clutching the padded leather armrests. \"Forget the boy; he has surely forgotten you. What can he offer you? He's only a bastard nephew to a dreaming king. He'll never be earl, never inherit. Last will see to that, count on it. And he has never attempted to find you. Your desire is one-sided, boy. Stay your hand.\"\n\nMaledicte took refuge in the inane persiflage of Vornatti's favorite literature. \"Why sir, this is all so sudden.\" The acid snarl to his voice removed all humor from the words.\n\nVornatti's eyes squinched, peering at him. Maledicte stepped back farther into the shadows, out of Vornatti's sight, given over to an uncontrollable shaking. He trembled like a spooked horse, from head to toe, while he thought. It was too soon to dispense with Vornatti's patronage\u2014and inciting his wrath so near the solstice ball\u2014\n\n\"Is that a refusal?\" Vornatti asked. \"Casting you back to the streets not enough? I could expose you first, girl. Or cast Gilly out alongside you. He's begun to bore me anyhow, and I know others who seek his services, though they would not treat him as kindly.\"\n\nMaledicte's shivering ceased as quickly as it had come, his composure restored. \"Won't you even grant me the time to think on it? The heroines in your novels always have time to think on it.\"\n\n\"You're no heroine,\" Vornatti said.\n\n\"And you're no gentleman.\"\n\nVornatti laughed. \"Stay or go. Yes or no, Maledicte.\"\n\n\"Damn you,\" Maledicte said, plunged away from Vornatti as if he would flee, but then returned. \"Yes, damn you.\"\n\n\"As greedy and as fickle as I thought. After all, Janus is nothing but a boy you no longer know.\" Vornatti leaned forward, took Maledicte's hands. \"Thank me, boy. You've learned something it has taken me years to learn: We all outgrow our pasts. Now kiss me and cry friends.\"\n\nMaledicte kissed his dry cheek, amazed that the choked rage within him wasn't enough to scald Vornatti's skin. \"Shall I send for Gilly, let him dress you for court?\"\n\nVornatti said, \"Call Gilly by all means. We'll let him know you're staying. But first\u2014\" He drew Maledicte to his lap again, slipped the shirt away.\n\nMALEDICTE SEETHED QUIETLY while Vornatti tugged at the bell rope, his face carefully controlled while Gilly heard the news. He raised his eyes to see the expression on Gilly's face: pure, unadulterated alarm. But then, Gilly believed in Ani's presence, and Vornatti, fool several times over, did not. There was no future but vengeance for him.\n\nMaledicte ascended the stairs, turning the gas lamps down as he went, leaving a smothering trail of darkness behind him, hoping to balk Gilly in pursuit. Though it had been his choice to stay, the easy temper in his blood also blamed Gilly.\n\nBut Gilly, with longer legs, caught him at the first landing, seized his shoulder. \"What are you planning?\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Maledicte said, Ani already an angry presence in his blood. To be manhandled was more than he could stand. Heedless, Gilly shook him. \"Tell me why you agreed to put off your vengeance.\"\n\nMaledicte put his hand on Gilly's chest, shoved him away without effort, watched Gilly fly back and hit the far wall. Maledicte's hands shook, a resurgence of the eager trembling that had beset him in Vornatti's room, spreading over his entire body.\n\n\"Maledicte?\" Gilly said, rising, caution on his face.\n\nMaledicte slid down the wall, crouched in the shadows, ashamed of himself. \"Who else would I be?\"\n\nThe name hung in the air between them. Gilly hesitated, then dropped to his knees beside Maledicte. \"Lean on me. I'll help you upstairs. I'll bring you up some milk, warmed and scented with vanilla and almonds.\"\n\n\"As if Ani can be cured like a cold, or Vornatti's caresses made sweet,\" Maledicte said, acid in his voice, then in a different tone. \"Thank you, Gilly, my gentle Gilly....\" He lapsed into silence as they made their way up the dark stairs, Gilly looking back over their shoulders, as if he expected to see Ani sweeping after them.\n**\u00b7 14 \u00b7**\n\n**O** N THE EVENING OF THE SOLSTICE BALL, Gilly and Maledicte found themselves part of a line of coaches, wending their way through the city streets to the palace at so slow a pace that noblemen sauntered from coach to coach, visiting, chatting, flirting, admiring costumes. From his perch on the driver's bench, Gilly watched it all, and couldn't help but contrast the general giddiness with his passenger's stillness. Costumed forlornly as the Heartsore Chevalier, that tragic figure of legend, Maledicte drew the coach curtains whenever nobles drew near, sulking into silence.\n\nGilly hated the costume, the sleek white wrappings of vest and coat and pants, hated the crimson touches at wrist and neck; most of all he hated the expression in Maledicte's eyes, as if this moment might be too much to bear.\n\nGilly's nerves were strung tight enough as it was; hadn't they left Vornatti home, lost in a drugged sleep when he had meant to attend? Maledicte's doing, of course, and done so swiftly that Gilly had not understood until he tried to rouse Vornatti. His remonstrance had died when Maledicte turned on him, raging. \"Do you think I could have borne it? Hunting Janus with Vornatti draped over my skin? Touching me as if he had my welcome?\"\n\nAt the ballroom, Gilly tossed the reins to a waiting stableboy, and opened the carriage door. Maledicte stepped out like a ghost, one hand on the sword.\n\nMaledicte started up the stairs with Gilly behind, and paused at the great Book of Names. On the last page, recently scribed, his goal was marked.\n\nJanus Ixion, Lord Last: the name was scrawled with such black finality that Gilly was not surprised to see the next names rough and surrounded by splatters. Janus had destroyed the nib.\n\nMaledicte touched the ink with his gloved fingers. The ink sank in, still wet, black staining into the red silk gloves. Maledicte wiped his hand against his mouth, shoved past Gilly, and escaped into the night air, past the cloying sweetness of heaped violets and jasmine, lilies and heliotrope, and the slow-burning haze of beeswax candles. Gilly found Maledicte outside, pacing beside the ivy maze.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\"\n\n\"It stinks in there, like rot. Do you think anyone has ever told Aris that crushed flowers smell like a grave?\"\n\nGilly held out a gentling hand.\n\nMaledicte turned, retched into the leaves. Gilly stepped back when Maledicte looked up. His eyes were wild. His hands shook like those of a man with fever, and his voice trembled. \"Comes the moment when everything changes. This idyll dies, and it has been an idyll, hasn't it? Even with Vornatti's tempers and demands and threats? I'm feared to see it end.\" He stretched up and pressed his lips against the drawn corner of Gilly's mouth.\n\nGilly could smell Maledicte's skin, scenting faintly of lilac, could feel the smoothness of Maledicte's cheek against the stubble rising on his own. \"Feared of Last? Of Janus? I won't believe either with the course you've set.\"\n\n\"Not them. Last is a dead man, and Janus is neither alive nor dead 'til he speaks. I fear myself, Gilly, the brush of feathers in my mind. If Janus spurns me\u2014Her feathers urge me to darker hungers, and Her wings smell of death and bloody iron.\" He hid his face in Gilly's neck, but shied away when Gilly reached up a comforting hand.\n\n\"If Janus spurns me, or remembers me not, there will be nothing left of me. Only Ani's puppet. But still, there is no going back.\"\n\n\"Would you go back, if you could?\" Gilly asked, voice rough.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte answered immediately, without the need for thought, his eyes black and very cold. \"Why are we standing in the dark, Gilly, when the ball awaits? I've killed one Last already. Let's see how many this night holds.\"\n\nGilly followed him inside, where the nobles' ballroom had been doubled with the drawing back of the barriers between the king's ballroom and theirs. While the nobles' ballroom was painted in washes of blue and dust, Aris's ballroom was all rose and gold, and so the dancers whirled from twilight to sunrise. Maledicte walked on, unaware, his eyes flicking from one bare face to the next. The Bright Solstice required costumes but not masks; those were saved for winter's Dark Solstice, where one wore masks to shield identity from the hungry dead.\n\nGilly paced beside him, looking for a man he'd never seen, but felt sure he would recognize. As the moments passed, and Maledicte's expression grew fixed, Gilly whispered, \"Follow the gossip, the bent heads. A newcomer leaves such in his tracks. It will lead you to him.\"\n\nMaledicte granted Gilly a shaky smile, then stiffened like a hound on scent. Gilly followed his gaze.\n\nThe young man entering from the balconies could only be Janus Ixion; he was the butter stamp of Last, pale-eyed, gilt-haired, tall, and broad-shouldered. The brief impression Gilly had gleaned from the miniature had been of a vapid nobleman, but he had assumed it due to an artist overeager to please Last.\n\nBut the reality was no better; Gilly felt disappointment turn his stomach. This was the face that had driven Maledicte so far? This was Janus, this elegantly draped figure in blue velveteen and gold? His face was as empty as that of any longtime court rou\u00e9. Where Maledicte still carried a rat's wariness, Janus seemed pampered from birth, the perfect son of an aging aristocrat, with an expression as devoid of intelligence as it was of interest. Here, in the glittering heart of Antyre, Janus conveyed only boredom.\n\nGilly felt a shiver in the air, turned. Maledicte was no longer at his side, but had disappeared while Gilly gaped. He caught a glimpse of him, moving along the perimeter of the room, following in Janus's idle path like his shadow.\n\nGilly hissed, watching the game begin. Cat catch mouse, with both men playing. Janus was aware of his shadow, acted the complicit mouse, limited himself to small turns of his neck and head, trying not to catch sight of his pursuer. If he spotted the shadow too soon, too obviously, the game would end, and interest and amusement sparked in those incandescent blue eyes, livening the mask of his face.\n\nThe court grew progressively more silent, watching in avid delight.\n\n\"Must we continue with this roundaboutation?\" Janus spoke aloud, his voice laced with amusement, though he had yet to acknowledge his pursuer with even a glance. In his voice, Gilly heard the same careless arrogance that drove Maledicte's speech, but layered in tones like sculpted velvet. \"I'm but new come to this court, and fail to see how I have erred in your opinion. If I have offended your sister, mother, lover, I apologize. If it's other than that, let it wait. We have affrighted the musicians to silence.\"\n\n\"They sounded like cats strangling anyway, and I should know,\" Maledicte said. His raspy voice was shocking after Janus's polished one.\n\nJanus, startled, turned to confront his shadow, and the amused smoothness of his face shifted. Even Gilly, standing so near, could not name the sentiment, the emotion fleeing too quickly to identify, like a ripple over deep water and gone.\n\nJanus took a step toward Maledicte; the courtiers, the maidens caught between slipped away, and the whispering court found their eyes drawn not to either man but to the emptiness between them, the nexus of space that slowly closed.\n\nMaledicte took another step. His face was as pale as his shirt.\n\n\"Have we danced enough?\" Janus said. \"So come, then, declare yourself and have at me.\" His lips stayed parted after his words; his face tightened as Maledicte took the space between them and made it an illusion, not the impenetrable barrier it seemed.\n\n\"Janus Ixion\u2014\" Maledicte said, at the heart of the circle. His voice caressed the syllables, and again that flicker of emotion swept Janus's face.\n\n\"Lord Last,\" Janus said, dropping into a bow, his golden hair sliding, gleaming over sky-blue shoulders.\n\nThe sweeping arc of the black blade stopped his descent. He tilted his head up, pale throat like marble. \"Not in the mood, hmmm?\" Janus stood straight, spread his arms. \"Have at me then; I will not fight you.\"\n\nMaledicte wavered, visibly unable to move forward or back. Janus's arms closed; he caught Maledicte's wrist, his other hand caught the shoulder of Maledicte's embroidered coat and drew him closer. Then he released Maledicte's sword hand, all as smoothly done as if it were only the steps of a dance and not a potential duel.\n\n\"Will you strike me?\" Janus asked. His voice, which so far had been pitched for the horrified, fascinated, scandalized audience, dropped to a husk. There was the faintest sound of despairing entreaty in his words, as if Maledicte's enmity was too heavy a weight to shoulder.\n\nThe black blade shivered in the light, a shadow chased by candle flames, moving. Falling. It clattered to the marble floor and Janus smiled. He slid his hand over Maledicte's shoulder, into the dark hair, and bending close, put his kiss first on Maledicte's mouth, then on the silk-covered throat. Maledicte threw his head back, in a movement as voluptuous as any woman's.\n\nJanus murmured something too low for the riveted crowd. Gilly strained, but even his clever ears missed the word. A name? A prayer?\n\nWhat Janus said, of course, in his crushed-velvet voice, was _Miranda._\n\nThe silence faltered as whispers broke over the court like the tide. Janus stepped apart from Maledicte, dropped into a bow again, elegant and courtly. Maledicte returned it after a moment, and where Janus's bow was all Antyrrian languor, Maledicte's carried the stiff perfection of Vornatti's teaching. Maledicte spoke a few quiet words, drowned in the hiss of the court, and turned away.\n\nThe courtiers flooded inward, erasing the stage Janus and Maledicte had created with their presence; scandalmongers sailed from one side of the room to another, tongues preparing to wag. Trying to follow who might have the most dangerous words to spill, Gilly lost sight of Maledicte in the mass. A faint whisper in his ear, a quick scent of lilac, and Maledicte slipped by him and disappeared with an eerie grace. Gilly turned, trying to track him, and instead caught sight of Mirabile standing, frozen, her face a mere mask. Shock, Gilly thought, and worse\u2014 _betrayal._ Janus fit nowhere in her plans for Maledicte.\n\nStill near the epicenter of the storm, Janus accepted a glass from Westfall's hand, smiled his thanks, and headed toward the balcony doors.\n\nHis cue, Gilly knew. Maledicte's command ghosted through his mind. _Show Janus to the carriage. We're stealing him away._\n\nExcept Gilly could think of nothing he would like less than to take Janus through the romantic tangles of the king's maze where he had walked with Maledicte. He told himself it was relief that Maledicte was not launched on his erasure of self, his bloody vendetta without care for his own life.\n\nA quick movement, checked, drew his attention to the dais, to Aris staying the Kingsguard in their search for Maledicte, and wearing a fine, high flush on his cheekbones. Anger, Gilly feared. The king's eyes shifted to meet his. Gilly dropped his gaze immediately, caught staring at the king like a country fool. But more disturbing to his composure was the unwilling recognition of their shared emotion, the bite of unreasoning jealousy.\n\nThe voices of the court were roaring now, the musicians fighting to be heard, belaboring their instruments to make up for their earlier silences. Gilly, making his way out, collected comments like tiles from a mosaic. \"Sword in the court. Again. And yet Aris does nothing\u2014\"\n\n\"Last will not be amused that his son set us such a scene.\"\n\n\"It's enchantment, I tell you.\" Mirabile's face was livening finally to well-controlled rage, taking Maledicte's actions as an affront to her own charms. \"First he claims Aris's approval and now his nephew's. But _how,_ is the question. I have seen things he would not like me to tell, an altar, books of spells...\"\n\n\"A devotee of the dead gods?\" her hearer, Micah Chalefont, sneered. \"Only fools believe in them.\"\n\n\"Fools deny the evidence of their own senses. I am not so witless,\" Mirabile said, snapping her fan closed. The certainty in her voice stifled Chalefont and made Gilly hasten his steps.\n\nHe found Janus waiting silently in the dimness; when Gilly approached, those blank blue eyes showed only disinterest. \"This way,\" Gilly said, gesturing into the maze, and Janus's eyes burned with eagerness.\n\nMALEDICTE PULLED HIMSELF from Janus's embrace, settled on the opposite side of the carriage, leaned forward and knotted Janus's hands in his own. He laughed soundlessly, his constricted throat unable to voice the emotion. \"I dreaded this moment, feared I'd never see you again. That you wouldn't know me if I did...What a fool to forget how we fit together.\"\n\n\"I'd know you anywhere, Miranda\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte frowned, a fleeting thing, displaced by joy. \"Miranda's dead. Murdered in the Relicts like the rat she was.\"\n\n\"That's as Roach told me. That you were dead, and at my hand. Absurd. As if I could ever harm you....\"\n\nMaledicte was glad of the dimness of the carriage, the swaying that shadowed their faces and granted them a sweet intimacy, all too aware of the flush on his cheeks, the rush of pleasure at Janus's careless words. \"You went back?\"\n\n\"Soon as the _Kiss_ docked. Soon as I could convince Kritos that the voyage had made me ill. The only familiar face I found was Roach.\" Janus laughed and kissed Maledicte with a greedy mouth. \"And here we are.\"\n\nTheir noses bumped, their foreheads jarred each other's when the carriage bumped over rough stones. Janus, distracted, peered out the window at Dove Street passing by with its line of tall, trim houses and sculpted lawns. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"My town house.\" Maledicte slid on the seat, pushing his back into the plush warmth of the cushions, his fingers slipping from Janus's grip, then leaning forward again, unwilling to let go.\n\n\"This isn't just some raid on the nobles' court then?\"\n\n\"I told you. Miranda's dead. Despite the masquerade, I am much as you see me. I am Maledicte, ward to Baron Vornatti, a courtier and not a lady.\" Maledicte gave a little half bow, constrained by the seat. \"I warn you now. I am a known entity in the court, and you've undoubtedly blacked your reputation tonight.\"\n\n\"You always were the clever one, Mir\u2014Maledicte, was it? Quite a mouthful, love. But tell me, do you know that Kritos is dead now? Do you know that?\" Janus said, settling back. \"Struck down by an unseen hand, left for rat food.\" A smile played about his lips, the same secret communication in his eyes that Maledicte had missed so sorely.\n\n\"He took you from me. Should I have let that go unrevenged?\" Maledicte said. Ani grumbled beneath the joy in his blood, and he said, \"But let's not talk of vengeance now.\" He put himself into Janus's lap and kissed him again and again.\n**\u00b7 15 \u00b7**\n\n**M** ALEDICTE SECURED HIS BEDCHAMBER DOOR while Janus's teeth teased his nape. Janus raised his head, looked around at the sumptuous room, at the fireplace, still faintly red with burning coals, the wide chair beside it, the tall windows with their heavy crimson drapes, the plush, high bed. \"Your baron treats you well.\" The question lurked in his tone.\n\n\"For a price,\" Maledicte admitted, then skirted the pointed truth for a few lesser ones. \"The keeper of my secrets, and my own personal blackmailer. If I displease him, he threatens me with exposure in the court.\"\n\n\"Would that be such a dreadful thing?\"\n\n\"I would be ruined. A woman in Vornatti's house, unchaperoned? A woman with a sword? Not even Vornatti's novels tell such audacious tales. Besides,\" Maledicte said, \"I'm rather attached to my persona and the freedom it brings.\" It was all the explanation he could give on the matter, and he shivered, wondering what Janus thought, to find Miranda in a circumstance she had always sworn she would never be in.\n\nJanus kissed the silk cravat on Maledicte's throat once more, then loosed the knot with careful fingers. \"They truly believe you a man? With your sleek skin and smooth throat\u2014\" He traced the bared lines of chin and neck and collarbone. \"I expected a scar to match your voice. It is not an affectation.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, \"stonethroat.\"\n\nJanus kissed the pale skin at the base of Maledicte's throat, touched his tongue to the hollow there, a tiny flicker of warmth that sparked likewise in his veins. \"Such a gamble.\"\n\n\"Risks are necessary when one seeks a prize of inimitable value,\" Maledicte said, opening Janus's shirt, finishing the job begun in the carriage, easing the stiff, formal vest off, then the silken lawn. In the low-lit room, Janus's skin gleamed like gold, and heated Maledicte's blood like fine brandy. Maledicte shoved him toward the wing chair, and once Janus was seated, pulled off his boots, glad beyond measure that Vornatti seemed to have faded from Janus's thoughts. Maledicte looked again at Janus, at the lazy, hungry expression in those familiar eyes, and gave himself to the moment\u2014more, to their future, for the first time feeling he had more than a tentative grasp on it. He found himself smiling again.\n\nJanus tugged him into his lap, unbuttoned Maledicte's shirt, slipped the silk away, and paused, amused. \"A corset?\"\n\n\"Padded,\" Maledicte said, touching his sides, his belly, his back. \"Throughout here, to bulk up my waist, flatten my breasts. This masquerade would be less successful otherwise. Unhook me.\" He presented the elaborate back to Janus's waiting hands.\n\n\"How do you manage to lace this by yourself?\" Janus laughed. \"Every lady I've met needed a maid or a man.\"\n\nMaledicte moaned as the hooks parted with faint pops and the corset fell free. \"Practice. Necessity. And it needn't be as tight as the ladies' corsets. It needs only to disguise,\" Maledicte said into Janus's hair, nipping at his ear-lobes.\n\nJanus slid his hands around the exposed narrow waist, the curve of spine and hip, the small, soft breasts. Maledicte sighed, and leaned into his hands, arching back as Janus kissed each tender tip. Things did change, he thought a little deliriously. Janus had changed, grown taller, broader, stronger, harder. Maledicte basked against him, the scent of his skin rising over the court colognes, and smiled hungrily.\n\nHe stroked his hands down Janus's ribs, the sleek, muscle-padded heat of them, trailing light fingertips down Janus's belly. Janus's breath grew a little more rapid, and Maledicte chose to slide away from a more intimate touch, even as Janus shifted his hips toward his hands. A delightful thought occurred: This time, they had all the time in the world\u2014no stolen moment made fragile by Ella's importunate callers, by Celia's drunken rages, by Roach's jealous dogging of their heels. This time was theirs alone, and he intended to savor every moment, to relearn the feel of Janus's skin against his own.\n\n\"What's this?\" Janus asked, stopping his caresses to touch the red lines on Maledicte's left arm and side.\n\n\"Sword strike from the Marquis DeGuerre.\" Maledicte studied it again, briefly bewildered by a history not shared.\n\n\"And this one?\" Janus traced the long, serpentine scar that wrapped her left hipbone, veered around her back, and licked the base of her right breast.\n\n\"Whip,\" Maledicte said. \"Kritos, in the Relicts.\"\n\n\"Bastard,\" Janus muttered, bending to kiss the upward curl of the weal, a wash of breath and heat that made Maledicte gasp, draw him closer.\n\n\"Just another dead aristocrat now,\" Maledicte said, clutching Janus's shoulders as his lips left the scar and moved down the pale, soft skin of Maledicte's belly.\n\nJanus untied the laces in Maledicte's hair, setting it tumbling free, framing Maledicte's face and shoulders in whispery tendrils that made him shudder with sensation. \"None so blind...\" Janus murmured. \"You look like no man I've ever seen.\"\n\nMaledicte preened. \"Gilly calls it vision driven by expectation.\"\n\n\"Gilly knows?\" Janus asked. His lips paused in their brushing over Maledicte's skin, tightened in a frown.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, flushing at the very thought. \"The fewer to know this secret, the fewer to tell it.\"\n\n\"Are you so sure he is unaware?\" Janus asked. \"If he has mentioned\u2014\"\n\n\"He was referring to cheating at cards, and simple sleight of hand. He has not thought to apply his rule to me, I assure you.\" Maledicte ran trembling fingers through Janus's hair, admiring the sparks of sunlight captured in the golden strands.\n\n\"He's aided you, acted your partner,\" Janus said. He slipped away from Maledicte, paced across the room to poke at the coals, sending sparks upward in swirls of angry heat.\n\n\"My partner on my path to retrieving you,\" Maledicte said. \"You must be my partner now as well.\"\n\n\"Like secrets, partners are often best kept to two,\" Janus said. \"Vornatti knows\u2014\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Maledicte said, impatient with the subject, only aware of the flickering firelight over Janus's skin, and the answering heat in his own. \"Come here and free me of these boots and breeches, unless you fancy taking me as if we were gentlemen in the stables, fumbling and baring only what we must.\"\n\nJanus grinned, mood sweetened. \"Another time, perhaps.\" He knelt, and tugged Maledicte's boots off; he ran his hands up the thin leather of Maledicte's breeches, began sliding them down, lingering to kiss the inside of his bared thighs. \"Very nice legs...for a gentleman of the court.\" The words tickled against his skin, made him shiver, made him writhe.\n\n\"I admit the court finds me a rather girlish young man in appearance.\" But his good spirits chilled. First Vornatti, now this. He felt that every moment exposed pitfalls he hadn't imagined, every moment revealing a threat to this fragile joy. He touched Janus's mouth, halting further banter, and stepped out of the entangling leather. \"But Janus, they do believe me a man, and while it is understood, so says Aris, that some men have appetites only for their own, it is not a fashionable thing. And I will not give up this role. I am Maledicte now, and so I think myself male, all evidence to the contrary aside.\" Maledicte gestured, encompassing bared flesh. \"Your reputation may suffer if you are seen in my company overmuch.\"\n\nThe last words were pained; only now did Maledicte realize the trap he had laid for himself. To become female again was unthinkable, and yet his guise could cost him Janus.\n\nHe turned, studied himself in the mirror, distracted from worrying in the shock of self-exploration. It had been so long since he had taken the risk of loitering unclothed, or even thought of himself as Miranda; though he had all her desires, her dreams, he spoke truly to Janus when he declared her dead. Maledicte could not put himself back in her position, could not re-make time, unable to remember how it felt to not carry this secret.\n\n\"I suppose I should be grateful I don't resemble Ella,\" Maledicte said, \"or this rebirth would have been impossible. My lines are more male than female.\"\n\nJanus laughed, snaked an arm over her shoulders; she shivered in relief and want at the sight of his form alongside her in the glass. \"You are blind yourself. You are barely taller than most women of the court. Your voice is your most believable attribute, but this\u2014\" He cupped one breast, then the other, stroked his fingers over her nipples, making them stiffen. \"This is purely female.\"\n\nMaledicte's heart raced; he leaned back against Janus's chest, playing now, directing his attention. \"My hips are not broad enough.\"\n\nJanus slid his hand downward, splaying his fingers down Maledicte's belly, lingering, teasing, his voice furred by desire. \"The women of the court wear corsets, boning, bustle, and padding to make them shapes different from their own.\"\n\nHis fingers slipped into the warm cleft of her thighs, moving in gentle patterns, growing warm, her skin growing slick against his touch, and Maledicte trembled. \"Do you still think yourself male?\" Janus whispered. \"Do you fear I will leave you at the say-so of the court? What care I for their approval when I have you in my arms again?\"\n\nAgain Maledicte flushed, the pale skin staining pink over cheeks and throat. Maledicte turned in Janus's arms, kissed him as if to devour the taste of him. Maledicte guided Janus's steps until he tumbled backward onto the bed, a golden expanse over rich crimson. Maledicte crept up Janus's body, touching, kissing, tasting, with the same greedy, gloating hunger a starving man mustered for a sudden feast.\n\nJanus arched his body into a bow, let Maledicte slide his breeches off and to the floor. Maledicte nestled warmly between his legs and allowed himself a leisurely reacquaintance with Janus's body. Measuring tongue tip by tongue tip how Janus had grown, how he continued to do so, until Janus gasped and strained against Maledicte's teasing kisses. Janus drew him up, and they tangled, each trying to map the other in touches and kisses and the shiver of skin against skin. Janus licked the shell of Maledicte's ear, stirred gentle fingers through her heat. In return, Maledicte lapped at Janus's throat, tasted their mingled salt, and chased the taste up to his jaw. Janus obliged him, tilting his head back, and then erupted into choking laughter. Maledicte raised his head.\n\n\"There are some quite perverse cupids watching,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Vornatti's obscenely fond of them. He had them commissioned for every private room of the house,\" Maledicte said, flinching even as Vornatti's name slipped his lips.\n\n\"Vornatti,\" Janus breathed, catching Maledicte's hands, stilling the caresses. \"What are we to do with him? I gather he will not be pleased to share you. Come to think on it, neither am I.\" Though the words were indifferent, the tone was not.\n\nAgain, Maledicte hovered on the brink of explanation. Again, he slid away\u2014what could he say? That to regain Janus, Miranda would have done far worse than forswear oft-stated avowals and barter her body? Surely Janus knew that already. So instead of an explanation of how this came to be, he found himself murmuring an explanation of why it would continue, sweetening the sting of it with a meandering touch that teased nipples, traced ribs, delved into his navel, and wrapped warmly around his shaft.\n\n\"I have no name of my own, no funds that he has not granted. To leave him would be to leave with nothing save what we could carry.\"\n\nJanus laid his hands over Maledicte's, slowing the pleasure so he could find words. \"I have no funds either, save for what I won from Kritos. And we can't risk your exposure, so you say\u2014still, something must be done. You killed Kritos....\" Janus lay back, rested his head on his hands, silently urging Maledicte's caresses to resume.\n\n\"A gambler with a multitude of foes,\" Maledicte said, frowning. He traced swords and feathers across Janus's skin.\n\n\"One old man should prove little challenge. Especially one who grants you such access to his person.\" Janus's jaw tightened; Maledicte licked; the tension in Janus's face traded anger for pleasure.\n\n\"True enough,\" Maledicte said slowly, letting his thoughts turn dark, his movements still, sifting memories of Vornatti's demands, his threats, comparing rewards and chastisements, against the lure of money to hand. He shuddered a little and climbed up to nestle into Janus's strength, soaking in his surety, the pleasure of scheming with him once again.\n\n\"Is there any reason to wait?\" Janus asked. \"If not\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte kissed him again, stopping his words. \"He's promised me an inheritance. I'm minded to collect it.\"\n\n\"Then I'll not stop you. Not when you look so fierce. So mercenary,\" Janus said, toying with the black curls that lay over Maledicte's shoulder. He raised the lock to his mouth, kissed it. \"So bewitching. I've missed you....\" He rolled them both over, pinned Maledicte between his arms, under his thighs. \"But inherit soonest, Mal.\"\n\nMaledicte drew Janus's head down to kiss him. \"Anything for you.\" He gasped, parted his thighs, and lost his hold on his courtier's mask. This physical definition was so much more real than the shadowy grasp of personality and will.\n\nWith Janus sliding in, possessing her, there was nothing left but Miranda, clawing Janus still closer. \"Janus\u2014\" she breathed, her voice caught by the damage in her throat, muted.\n\n\"Shh,\" Janus said, \"my love, my courtier, my dark cavalier...\"\n\nMaledicte's fingers tensed and dug into Janus's back, scraping the sleek indentation of the spine between muscle, the gas lights streaming and filtering through the pale gold mesh of Janus's hair, the cherubs watching, coaxing, laughing. Maledicte closed her lashes against the incandescent blue flame of Janus's eyes, lost in this blissful heat of touch and friction, of scent and sound. Janus's panting was in her ear, and for a brief moment it sounded like the rasp of feathery wings, and Maledicte's eyes flew open, trading quick startlement for rushing pleasure in the wash of blue and gold and velvet voice that was Janus in ecstasy.\n\nJanus's moan gave way to a breathless laugh, his blond hair drifting like spiderwebs. \"And they think you a man....\"\n\nMaledicte ran speechless fingers up Janus's chest, tugged him down to lie beside her, and slowly reassembled the guise she lived within.\n\nJanus continued, \"You always were good at misdirection, though. Remember when you bullied all the rats into pretending to be street players at the market? While we muddled along, shouting our lines, jeered at by everyone within earshot, you and Roach stole a feast for us all.\"\n\nMaledicte turned his face in the pillow; his lips quirked. \"Small potatoes only. I have a larger scheme now.\"\n\n\"How can that be? Am I not your end-all and be-all? Are you not completed now that I am here?\" Janus said, looking at Maledicte with apparent sincerity. \"Are we not bound together from childhood to death?\"\n\nMaledicte broke into a rasping laugh. \"False sentimentality from you? I'd say you were disguised, and yet I know you are sober.\"\n\n\"Drunk on you,\" Janus said. The archness that underlaid his last set of pretty words was missing, though his expression never changed.\n\nMaledicte touched Janus's pale lips, slid from the bed in a sleek line of white flesh. He pulled the drapes back from one wall.\n\nThe curtain pull revealed not the outside world, glazed through silvery glass, but a small alcove with a tall, narrow table. After Mirabile's visit, Maledicte had stored the poisons chest out of easy sight. Maledicte dug through the bottles, and retrieved a small bit of bright gold.\n\nMaledicte approached, hands held out, fisted before him, to play their long-gone guessing game. At the last second, as Janus reached forward, he opened his right hand to reveal the ring. He could not bear to have Janus misguess.\n\n\"I saved it; Kritos let it fall. It's not much now, but it's still for you.\" Maledicte looked at it once more, remembering it through Relict eyes, the treasure that had fallen into his hands. Gilly said such rings were common during the war\u2014bits of jewelry melted down, reshaped, and engraved with some false trumpery, extolling the glories of battle and the hearts left at home. Knowing now the gold was of questionable quality, and the sentiment looted from a dead man's hand, Maledicte still found it apt.\n\nJanus took the ring, rolled it in his hands, chasing the chill of the metal away, measuring its width against his forefinger. Once, it had been too big. Now it was almost too small; it required some effort to slide it down to sit above his signet ring. He took it off again, tilted it so he could see the inscription. \"I remember this. _Only each other at the last._ \" He turned the ring around in his hands. \"It was warm where you had kept it in your mouth and when I put it on, it felt like a kiss. My signet reads: _Only a Last at the Last._ \" His mouth twisted, and he tugged his crested signet off, trading it to his left hand. \"I like this motto better,\" he said, sliding the plainer ring on in its place.\n\nHe reached for Maledicte, drew him back into the nest of linens, stroked the dark head resting on his chest. \"It's been so long, I don't want to loose my grip for fear you'll slip away. All this because I wanted to rob Kritos before he was properly out, steal his gold for you. And still, I haven't any gold to give you, nor jewelry.\" He grinned lazily. \"Probably for the best. I would never have thought of stickpins, watches, and cuff links.\"\n\n\"Can you get jewelry?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nJanus laughed again. \"Some, I suppose. Greedy?\"\n\nMaledicte leaned close, listening to Janus's heartbeat, a steady sound, a companion from long ago, listening to the quiet sound of Ani's wings answering. \"It's only that I mean to kill him, you understand. And if Vornatti's promises are lies, we'll be penniless.\"\n\n\"Last,\" Janus said, his voice flattening.\n\n\"The jewels I own will be needed for our flight. If we're careful, we could stay in Antyre,\" Maledicte said, voicing plans he had barely allowed himself to think through, too afraid to plan beyond this reunion. \"We could live in the country, away from this rat-hunted city. But if the murder goes badly, we'll have to flee Antyre completely and that takes funds.\"\n\nJanus's supple mouth frowned, his pale eyes narrowing.\n\n\"What is it?\" Maledicte said, frightened. For one moment everything had been as planned, but in the wolf-pale eyes of his lover, something forced changes. \"Never tell me you love him,\" Maledicte said. \"I've sworn to kill him. I must kill him.\"\n\n\"You need not scruple otherwise on my account,\" Janus said, pushing himself up against the pillows, propping his chin on his knee. \"I bear him no fondness, but his title, his land\u2014\" Janus's tone dropped to an intimate whisper. \"It's a tricky business being a nobleman's bastard, especially if one has ambition. To allow me access to the courts, Last pretended the past had happened otherwise, that Celia and he had wed, that I am legitimate. No one believes him, of course. Whoever heard of an earl not searching for an infant heir stolen away? But Aris supports me, and if I can gain the support of the counselors, then\u2014\"\n\n\"Then what?\" Maledicte interrupted. \"How will this see Last dead?\"\n\n\"It won't, you'll have to do that,\" Janus said, \"but it will give me his title if done at the right moment. You crave Vornatti's money. I want the title.\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"It's only a word\u2014\"\n\nJanus shook his head. \"A title is power. Listen, Mir\u2014Mal, listen. This position of ours, of _yours,_ is precarious.\"\n\n\"I'll kill Last; we can rob his coffers and flee.\"\n\n\"And then what?\" Janus said. \"Money runs out. You used to teach that to those rats of yours. What happens then? Stealing? Starving? Whoring? Hasn't Vornatti been enough for you? I suppose we could take up a profession, but what are we suited for?\"\n\nMaledicte trembled; Janus stroked her belly, soothing.\n\n\"You used to cry,\" Janus said, sliding back down to lie beside Maledicte. \"In the cold, when the hunger was so bad. I'd bleed myself just so you could have something warm in your mouth. I swore every year it would be better and it never was. I never want to feel so desperate again.\"\n\nTurning, Maledicte kissed Janus's throat and whispered, \"I must kill him.\" As if in counterpoint, the sword, resting against the bed, fell with a hiss of scraped velvet.\n\n\"With your pretty little blade?\" Janus asked. \"Last is a brute but a damn good swordsman. And I mistrust the steel in painted blades.\" Janus reached out a long arm, picked up the sheathed sword, and drew it. \"Too often the paint dulls the edge.\"\n\nJanus fell silent, studying the blade, his fingers caged in the feather hilt. He raised a hand, curled it around the thin edges of the blade, and flinched. Blood beaded up along his fingertips and thumb and dripped to the sheets. \"Where did you get this?\"\n\nWhen Maledicte hesitated, afraid to wake Ani from Her cautious slumber by invoking Her name, Janus shrugged. \"Vornatti? Generous of him.\" He attempted to sheathe the sword; the feather hilt clung and bloodied his knuckles. He dropped the blade.\n\n\"Ani gave it to me,\" Maledicte said, the first time he had acknowledged Her gift aloud, a small act of worship. But far better to wake Her attention than to let Janus think Vornatti's touch reached so far into his life. Another frisson licked his nerves\u2014would Janus share this, the specter of a vengeful god?\n\n\"Black-Winged Ani is a myth meant to frighten superstitious bastards like my father. The dead gods returned? They never existed at all.\"\n\nMaledicte clambered over Janus, recovering sheath and sword and mating them with a practiced motion, albeit with a tinge of temper. \"Ani exists. I swore I would kill Last. I swore it to Her.\"\n\n\"All I ask for is delay,\" Janus said. \"Time to insure myself the earldom. After that it doesn't matter what happens\u2014we'd be as safe as we never were before.\"\n\nMaledicte trembled again, not in half-remembered dread of the Relicts, but at Ani listening to Janus's casual blasphemy, at the thought of staying his hand when She yearned for the kill.\n\n\"So you'll wait?\" Janus said, lying back, licking the tiny cuts on his fingers closed.\n\n\"Ani willing,\" Maledicte whispered, too low for Janus to hear.\n\n\"I think I'd make a splendid earl,\" Janus said, smiling. He snuffed out the last low-burning lamp and dropped them into darkness.\n**\u00b7 16 \u00b7**\n\n**I** T WAS EARLY AFTERNOON BEFORE Janus and Maledicte bestirred themselves. Maledicte, hunting Gilly, found him reading in the parlor. He leaned over Gilly's shoulder, eliciting a start, a flush, and a guilty twitch. Tweaking the book from Gilly's unresisting hand, Maledicte sighed. \" _The Book of Vengeances_ again? You spend more time thinking on Ani than I do.\" He flipped the book into the ashy fireplace, avoiding the snatch Gilly made, and shifted to stand before the hearth.\n\n\"Come, we're going to Whitspur Street. Janus wants to explore the city. We'll stop at Rosany's Booksellers and you can buy something less inclined to bring nightmares.\"\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Gilly started, but Maledicte, hearing footsteps in the hall, turned, his skin warming as Janus approached. Janus met his eyes and smiled, leaning in and kissing his temple. Maledicte wove his fingers in Janus's hands, content, Gilly's dark dreams and Ani's rage insignificant.\n\n\"Ready, Mal?\"\n\n\"We both are,\" Maledicte said, releasing Janus to pull Gilly to his feet.\n\n\"Without luncheon? What kind of host would I be if I allowed my unexpected guest to leave hungry?\" Vornatti rasped, drawing three heads to where he rested against the doorjamb. Maledicte stepped away from Janus, unnerved by the intensity of Vornatti's gaze, by the simple fact that, though Vornatti's morning dose of Elysia would have worn off, the man confronted them on his feet. He should have been a pitiable sight, all grayed age and aches; instead, he radiated the wary strength of a veteran soldier.\n\nMaledicte's thoughts raced. He had assured Janus that Vornatti would be still abed, had played up the baron's poor flesh and feebleness to soothe Janus's jealousy, and more, to keep Janus from slipping out at dawn. He had believed it himself; this moment found him flat-footed. Janus was more sanguine than he. A bare flicker of distaste crossed his lips before he smiled at Vornatti. \"Too gracious of you, sir. I hope my presence hasn't troubled you overmuch.\"\n\n\"Visitors are always a pleasure. Trouble only comes from allowing them to stay past their welcome,\" Vornatti said. He limped heavily into the room, and said, \"I do warn you it is only bachelor fare. I have no hostess, though this is a lack I mean to remedy.\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"If it's Mirabile you mean, she leaves today with the Westfalls to the countryside. You'll have to be quick, old man, or chase after her like a hound on a scent.\" He tried for insouciance though his lips were cold with dread and his body crackling with nervous energy. Vornatti had the power to throw him to the streets, to throw Gilly out; did he have the power to finish the blow and see Janus sent away also, when it was Aris who wanted him in Murne? But Aris preferred lives to land once; he might put the kingdom's fortunes above his own this time, if Vornatti made it too costly to do otherwise....\n\n\"A message will suffice to bring her to my side,\" Vornatti said.\n\n\"Messengers are often unreliable,\" Maledicte said.\n\nVornatti grimaced at him, then glared at Gilly, who lowered his gaze in wordless agreement. Janus studied the bookshelves with polite courtesy.\n\n\"Perhaps you could spare me the trouble,\" Vornatti said, \"of hunting a reliable messenger, and play hostess yourself. I could find you a dress\u2014\" He crooked an arm; Maledicte saw no alternative other than an immediate unmasking, so with a quick look at Gilly, he took Vornatti's arm in his own.\n\nVornatti leaned on him, wrapping a possessive arm about his waist, and pressed his lips to Maledicte's cheek.\n\nIn silence, Maledicte led Vornatti into the dining room, all too aware of Janus's watchful eyes on his back, on Vornatti's stroking fingers. Maledicte settled Vornatti into his seat and attempted to slip free of his grasp. Vornatti only shifted his grip, tugging. Face scalding, Maledicte sat before him, pressed tightly against Vornatti's chest and wandering hands. Janus sank into the seat opposite and Maledicte shivered at the placidity in Janus's face, wondering what the mask hid. Rage at Vornatti's manhandling? Or, worse, kindling disgust at Maledicte's obedience?\n\nVornatti bent him back, hand in his hair, and tasted the hollow beneath Maledicte's ear, overlaying the bruise Janus's kiss had made. Maledicte jerked free, rocking the chair, and winding Vornatti. \"Our bargain,\" Vornatti warned.\n\n\"Still holds,\" Maledicte said, biting back rage, trading it for calculation. \"But surely your generosity will allow me one day with my old friend.... Like a bride-to-be bidding her old life farewell.\"\n\nVornatti chuffed with disgust, but let Maledicte claim an empty seat, out of his reach. Janus drank tea as if their conversation were only the usual pleasantries. Once served, the three dined in silence, Vornatti pushing his food around the plate, his eyes never leaving Maledicte; Janus eating steadily and with appetite. Maledicte removed bones from the fish without eating anything, finding solace in the steady ruination of flesh before him.\n\n\"'Tis a pity I had no way of knowing I would be at your table,\" Janus said. \"Your cousin Dantalion asked if I could relay a message, but having heard that you were rarely in Murne, I denied him. I do apologize.\"\n\n\"Dantalion has nothing to say of interest to me,\" Vornatti snapped. \"His only interest lies in knowing how near I am to dying, and how close he is to his presumed inheritance.\" Vornatti grinned malevolently at Maledicte. \"But that is my business, and none of his.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled vaguely in response, all the while feeling the sharp bite of anxiety in his belly as he twisted his long-held scheme into new configurations. To kill Last, to do so in a way that enabled Janus to inherit, to do so from a position of power\u2014it all rested on Vornatti's whim. One wrong word, and Vornatti might change his mind on the importance of kin, might recognize the truth Maledicte felt naked in his eyes: He would never relinquish Janus. Time was short. With Janus's kiss so recent on his skin, his warmth still lingering between his thighs, Maledicte could not imagine accepting a caress from Vornatti, never mind feigning welcome.\n\nJanus mopped his roll over his plate in the Itarusine fashion, chasing savory juices from the smoked fish. \"I suppose I should have expected that. After all, my father and Dantalion are rather cronies. And I've heard of the enmity between my father and yourself. He swears you a craven, running from a duel.\"\n\nVornatti slapped the table beside his plate, making his glass jerk and teeter. \"He dares\u2014\"\n\n\"But then,\" Janus added hastily, \"the nobles of two courts can attest to Last's easily offended nature. I am quite prepared to find you unobjectionable.\"\n\n\"How very kind of you,\" Vornatti said. \"Mal, isn't it wonderful\u2014such condescension from Last's bastard?\" Maledicte felt the blood rush to his face, his tongue leap to defend Janus; instead he fisted his hands beneath the sheltering cloth. Vornatti had to believe that Maledicte was his. The scheme aborning in Maledicte's mind demanded such.\n\n\"Don't,\" Vornatti said abruptly, turning his gaze from Maledicte to Janus, \"labor under the impression that you're fooling me with your agreeable manners, Ixion. I, too, was taught in the Itarusine court. I, too, know how to smile and spit poison. But having lived so long, I've found I much prefer bluntness. So I tell you\u2014you are not as clever as you think, and this is the last time an Ixion will run tame beneath my roof.\"\n\nJanus dabbed at his mouth and rose. \"So manners yield to candor and temper; I'm vanquished, sir. I will quit your house and never bother you more. Mal? I'll see you on the promenade.\" Without waiting for a response, he kissed Maledicte leisurely and left.\n\nMaledicte licked his lips, savoring the taste left behind like a promise, like absolution. He opened his eyes to find Vornatti glaring. \"That smacked of later, not farewell. Did you dismiss him or no?\"\n\n\"A day only,\" Maledicte said, facing Vornatti and turning to his meal with more appetite. \"You were correct, after all. Janus is not as I remember him.\" That was even true, Maledicte thought complacently, at least in the details. The Janus he had known was an impulsive, temperamental boy; this Janus\u2014Maledicte's lips curved against his will\u2014this Janus was subtle, and infinitely more dangerous. \"I will see him out,\" Maledicte said. \"Given your obvious disdain, you'll want me to make sure he hasn't lifted any of the silver....\" He escaped before Vornatti could laugh or protest.\n\nJanus caught him up as Maledicte reached the hall, leaned him against the wall and kissed him. Maledicte twined his arms around Janus's neck, keeping a wary eye on the closed door of the dining room.\n\n\"You must kill him,\" Janus whispered. \"It's intolerable.\" He took Maledicte's wrists in his hand and caged them against the wall above Maledicte's head. Closing his eyes, Maledicte shivered, gave himself over to Janus's confident touch. Let Vornatti come out; if he complained, Maledicte would spit him on the sword without another thought. Janus nipped at his throat, and murmured against his pulse, \"Do it soon.\"\n\nLINGERING IN THE KITCHEN, Gilly heard the front door open and close, and wondered who had left, and who had won. Whether Janus had gone with Maledicte by his side, or whether Maledicte was closeted with Vornatti, spitting useless anger. Gilly bit his lip; Vornatti was willfully blind if he thought Maledicte would tolerate his ownership much longer. No matter Vornatti's influence and strength of will, Maledicte was every inch the savage creature Vornatti liked to call him. And Vornatti was old now.\n\nGilly remembered the first time he'd met Vornatti\u2014the tall, elegant man complimenting Gilly's parents on their fine crop. Even then Gilly had been aware of undercurrents. While his father preened at Vornatti's praise for his fields, Gilly had seen the dark eyes assessing them all, and knew the crop Vornatti meant was himself and his brothers.\n\nThe bell rang fiercely in the kitchen, jangling on the board, barely stilling before it rang again.\n\nMaledicte the victor, Gilly thought, and Vornatti left alone and angry. He shuddered. While Janus and Maledicte had been here, Vornatti's attention and outrage had centered on them. Now the man's violent whims would turn to him.\n\n\"Best go to him before he has the bell from the board,\" Cook said, turning from her assessment of the pantry, looking at him with pity. \"He'll only get worse.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Gilly said, knowing he'd be kneeling before him, choking in the close scent of age and Elysia, all in the name of soothing the man's outraged pride. For a moment, he envied Maledicte and his bloody approach to life, the certainty that Vornatti was only a temporary affliction.\n\n\"Why do you put up with his ways? My boys wouldn't stand for it. You should find a new place, though I'd miss you sorely, Gilly lad.\"\n\n\"No one will have me, knowing the uses I've been put to. At least, no one who won't expect the same,\" Gilly said.\n\nCook turned back to her inventory, her silence only confirmation of his fear. She made a note or two, and finally said, \"Kettle's on. Take some tea afore you go.\"\n\nThe bell rang again, and Gilly shook a handful of tea leaves into a mug of steaming water before leaving.\n\nBut knowing Vornatti, knowing his moods, Gilly detoured first to the library, searching for something to distract him. He gulped the tea while skimming the shelves for something Vornatti hadn't read recently, or for new purchases not read at all. Grimacing at the acrid cling of tea leaves on his tongue, Gilly dribbled them back into the cup.\n\nLike the nobles he dined with, Gilly rarely had his tea unstrained, and the damp leaves woke lingering superstitions. He swirled the dregs around once, twice, then once again. Mindful of the varnish on the shelves, he found a sheet of blotting paper, and with an almost forgotten motion, upended the mug. Raising it, he stared at the blurred heaps of leaves, trying to read the pattern. But there was no symbol he recognized in the L-shaped spread, no chair, no hourglass, no raised hand.\n\nSuperstitious foolery, he chastised himself. What had he expected? He picked up the book he had laid aside; when he looked back, his breath caught\u2014not a symbol, but the thing itself. The leaves made a perfect gallows tree.\n\nWHITSPUR STREET WAS A FRANTIC cluster of millinery shops and tailors, divertissements, and gossip. Janus studied the broadsheets pinned above the boy hawking them, the images of courtiers at play, and incendiary articles urging Aris to shun the most recent trade delegates from Dainand. \"Don't buy that,\" Maledicte said. \"It's only gossip, and days-old gossip at that.\"\n\nJanus tossed the boy a copper anyway, and folded the sheet under his arm. \"I'm more interested in the news. Westfall mentioned a potential treaty with Kyrda, one that might offset some of the damage done by Aris's Xipos surrender. The broadsheets run several pages\u2014surely there must be some substance to it.\"\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"You'll be disappointed.\" He took Janus's elbow in his hand, and they strolled the raised walkway along the shop entries, while carriages clattered by on the cobbles below. From the distant green paths of Jackal Park, faint shouting came across the still air, the chanting of angry citizens protesting Aris's new ban on Itarusine imports. Janus listened to them for a minute and sighed. \"Shortsighted.\" Whether he meant Aris or the protesting men, Maledicte didn't know or care, simply pleased to have Janus at his side.\n\nJanus's clothes, still the fine wear of the evening before, spoke quiet scandal and drew several glances from passing nobles. Maledicte teased, \"A good thing you didn't go in costume.\"\n\nJanus leaned close as if to leave a kiss, but whispered instead, \"I did. I went as Last's dutiful, obedient son.\" His words warmed more than Maledicte's nape, set Black-Winged Ani to heated delight.\n\nLord Edgebrooke and his wife stepped from the walkway and threaded the crowded street rather than be forced to acknowledge them. For the open scandal of it, or for something less tangible? Maledicte shrugged. Let Gilly worry about that; he would filter the rumors and feed back all Maledicte needed to know.\n\nMaledicte paused in Rosany's doorway, at the display in the windows, looking at books. \"I should select something for poor Gilly, left to Vornatti's mercies.\"\n\n\"He's a servant. You needn't reward him for doing his duty,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte laid a hand on his arm. \"Gilly's my friend.\"\n\nJanus sighed, the temper fading from his eyes. \"I apologize. It's only that he's had your companionship while I've been deprived of it. I find myself envious of all the moments I've missed, of all the moments he had with you.\"\n\nMaledicte's lips curved. \"Pretty words. You've been trained well in courtly ways.\" His smile faltered. \"I suppose you had occasion to practice such things with the Itarusine ladies.\"\n\n\"As if I could ever care for vapid noblewomen who think of nothing but gossip.\"\n\nAs they dallied, a shadow fell across them, an approaching nobleman who chose not to step from the path. Maledicte looked up and his face stiffened to feral stillness. \"Last.\"\n\nJanus smiled, lips curling to malicious amusement. \"This should prove entertaining,\" he said, voice low in Maledicte's ear. \"But do restrain yourself, hmm?\"\n\nAny response Maledicte would have made was stymied by Last's nearness. \"Father,\" Janus said, tipping his head. \"Have you met Maledicte?\"\n\n\"To my chagrin,\" Last said, his face darkening above his high collar. \"Is this the kind of companion you seek? A scandalous courtier?\"\n\n\"I am not the only scandalous one, surely,\" Maledicte said. \"Or is my presence so overwhelming that the court can think of nothing but me?\" Maledicte felt a vicious triumph when Last's color intensified. Janus might force him to postpone the kill, but he would not give up baiting the man for anything. Janus's hand closed on his nape in warning, and Maledicte realized that Aris approached.\n\n\"Surely, Michel, you will not add to scandal by enacting a scene on Whitspur Street. After all, what happens in the court can only be reported secondhand in the scandal sheets, implausible hearsay. But lose your temper here, and there are a dozen witnesses who work for the broadsheets. Do try to leash your temper. For once.\" Aris joined them, two of the Kingsguard idling at his back and the brindled hound pacing beside him.\n\nLast turned. \"Aris?\"\n\n\"Am I unrecognizable without my crown, brother?\"\n\n\"You will acknowledge this creature on the streets? In front of the same audience you warn me of?\"\n\n\"I will,\" Aris said, turning his faded eyes on Maledicte. \"Though, my impetuous courtier, I remind you that I urged discretion; instead you create the season's greatest scandal,\" Aris said. \"How come you to know my nephew?\"\n\n\"Last's spurning of Celia Rosamunde sent Janus to me,\" Maledicte said, with a little bow in the earl's direction. \"I thank him for it. As for scandal, sire\u2014though I am loath to say it, your court thrives on scandal and spite. Mirabile, and others like her, sell tales to the scandal sheets purely so they can see their gossip in print and picture.\"\n\nLast spluttered, and Janus laid a warning hand on Maledicte's sleeve. Maledicte shook him off, aware of Aris's gaze on them both.\n\n\"Scandal and spite, perhaps. But it also thrives on decorum and rules. My rules, Maledicte. Do you realize they wait to see me banish you? You have put me in a difficult position. To flout my own rules or to displease your guardian when I need his goodwill\u2014\"\n\n\"Banish me?\" Maledicte echoed, his heart skipping for the first time since their conversation began. Banished. Away from Janus? He clutched Janus's sleeve.\n\nAt Aris's side, Last smiled, savoring the moment. It sparked such bloodlust in Maledicte that he felt his eyes must be reddened with it. The sword could have Last before anyone could pull him back. The world narrowed to red simplicity.\n\n\"Did you not swear me an oath that you would never draw your blade in court again? After I stayed your punishment once before?\" Aris's words came from a distance.\n\nMaledicte looked away from Last, his thoughts calming, turning. He rested his hand on the hilt. \"I swore...I would never draw it in your presence, sire.\"\n\n\"You would sidestep my strictures so carefully? Laws are more than the words composing them, Maledicte.\"\n\n\"I did not think at all, acted the impetuous youth you called me,\" Maledicte said, trying to shape words fast enough to soothe Aris. At his back, Janus's steady breathing brushed his nape, and the sound, the sensation staved off his growing alarm.\n\n\"That is no excuse, nor even an acknowledgment of wrongdoing,\" Last said.\n\n\"Father,\" Janus said, his respectful courtesy never faltering. \"It is King Aris's offense, his decision. But should you be allowed a say, so should I.\"\n\nLast purpled again at the unexpected insolence.\n\nAris's face relaxed at his brother's discomposure; the tightness left his voice. \"What would you say in Maledicte's defense?\"\n\n\"Only that deeds are misunderstood all too often. Only that if I took no offense, saw no wrong, and had the blade at my throat, perhaps there was no wrong meant.\"\n\nMaledicte would have smiled were he not afraid it would be misinterpreted. But he was pleased and surprised; not at Janus's defense\u2014he expected nothing less\u2014but at the sweep and subtlety of the words. Janus had changed, had learned the discretion Maledicte forgot when his temper was raised.\n\n\"You are presumptuous, Janus. You set your wrongs above the king's,\" Last said. \"Perhaps you are not as ready for the court as I assumed, and require another year's training.\" Maledicte went cold. He could not allow Last to take Janus from him again.\n\n\"Leave him be, Michel,\" Aris said. \"I, for one, am pleased to find someone so loyal to a companion. Tell me, Janus, would you be resentful if I removed Maledicte from the court?\"\n\n\"Saddened, say instead. You are my king, my uncle, my kin, and as such, incapable of wrongdoing.\"\n\nMaledicte wanted badly to applaud. Janus had mastered what he could not\u2014the art of cynical humor without the edge that offended.\n\n\"Have his words won me a reprieve?\" Maledicte asked, unable to keep silent longer.\n\nLast started to speak, but Aris overrode him: \"If you swear, without reservation, without duplicitous intent, that your blade stays sheathed within my court. And the gods alone know what the papers will have to say.\" Aris lowered his voice, stepped closer. \"But Mal, remember discretion.\"\n\n\"I swear,\" Maledicte said, bending his head. He felt the king's hand hover above it, barely touching his dark curls. He heard Last's chuff of disgust, watched him stalk off without further word, and raised his eyes to Aris's. The pale eyes flickered from his to Janus, standing so close, and a quick frown crossed his mouth. He reached out and pulled Maledicte a pace away.\n\n\"I accept your oath for a second time, and yet I await an apology,\" Aris said.\n\nMaledicte felt his temper stirring and stifled it. Too much was at risk and yet...he could not be other than he was, and his words came out edged. \"Shall I kneel before you, here and now, begging you to show mercy, sire? Speak the word and I will prostrate myself before you. My future is in your hands.\"\n\nAris tilted Maledicte's face up to his own. \"Michel would have your tongue removed for speaking so\u2014\" He released Maledicte's chin. \"But I am not my brother; I do not seek insult in every speech. I will forgive you, but as penalty, I will steal your companion from you. Janus and I have had little chance yet to speak.\"\n\nAris gestured ahead of him. \"Nephew.\"\n\nUsing the king's body to shield them from most of the watchers, Janus pressed his lips to Maledicte's palm before following his uncle. Maledicte shivered, chilled by Janus's absence, his mood plummeting. He wanted to run after them, refuse to let Janus from his sight. \"Restraint,\" Janus had whispered, his breath warm in the shell of his ear. \"Discretion,\" Aris had demanded. Maledicte watched Janus board the king's carriage and did nothing. When the carriage was gone, he thought of home, the delight gone from the day with Janus. But at the thought of Dove Street, of Vornatti, his plan shifted. He had other tasks to complete before he could return home.\n**\u00b7 17 \u00b7**\n\n**W** ILL YOU TAKE WINE?\" ARIS asked, waving away the young page who brought a sheaf of papers toward him, and closing Janus and himself into his sitting room. \"Please,\" Janus said, accepting the crystal goblet with graceful hands. Aris studied the lad, liking what he saw\u2014the unmistakable stamp of family blood, the confident manner. He found it hard to believe that the young man had spent most of his life in the worst slum Antyre had.\n\n\"Did Celia teach you the ways of the court?\" Aris asked, sitting down in a dark, velvet-upholstered chair. The mastiff settled on his boots with a groan, and Aris groaned back. \"Off my feet, dammit, Bane.\"\n\n\"Celia?\" Janus said, lowering his goblet and swirling the claret; a ruby whirlpool formed and faded. \"She taught me to speak properly, when she remembered my existence,\" Janus said. \"Her world is bounded by her supply of the old Laudable.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to hear it. Perhaps that explains her absence. I rather expected her to return once your name appeared in the broadsheets, claiming her bloodright, or sols for her part in keeping your past quiet,\" Aris said. \"You have not seen her since your return?\"\n\nBlue eyes met Aris's, and he was aware that he had startled Janus; yet Aris himself found surprise in Janus's reaction. Had the boy no family feeling at all?\n\n\"I went back,\" Janus said, finally. \"They were gone.\"\n\n\"They?\"\n\n\"Her compatriot,\" Janus said. \"Another whore. I presume they found a patron, or died of rat fever.\"\n\nJanus's words were empty of emotion, and Aris was bothered by this; surely it was natural for a boy to mourn his mother. But then, whores and addicts did not make for comfortable family.\n\n\"How do you and Michel get on?\" The door swung open as another mastiff sought out its master, pushing the door with its heavy head. Bane raised his lip, rumbled, and the newcomer settled down near the fireplace.\n\nJanus smiled. \"I like his dogs immensely.\"\n\n\"Only his dogs?\" Aris laughed. \"My poor brother. But have you no other response to his care?\"\n\nStanding, Janus paced the room. \"I do not love him. His reclamation of me was too clumsy for that. Yet I am grateful to him for this new life. Should I tell you how I feel for my uncle?\" He sat on the floor beside the fireplace and stroked the fine stripes in the bitch's fur. \"Or will you tell me something instead\u2014what you would say that requires such privacy? While I am honored to bear you company, I sense a motive beyond socializing.\"\n\n\"Of course you're right. But can you not think of anything you've done that might require discreet discussion?\"\n\nJanus bent his head over the hound, rubbed her soft ears. Her tail thumped against the granite hearth. \"Maledicte,\" he said.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Aris agreed. \"Your father would have me command you cease relations with the lad. Make it a matter for law, not family.\"\n\n\"Will you?\" Janus asked, as if it were only a matter of small importance.\n\nAris didn't answer right away; he watched his placid nephew and found himself wondering what Maledicte admired in him, what fire, what source of desire. Aris thought Janus a pleasant addition to their dwindling family, but milk-watered for his taste, and, he would think, for Maledicte's. A tiny thread of suspicion arose; perhaps Janus played a part. Earnestness and honesty were not common traits for men trained in either royal court, nor, he would think, for the Relicts. But then, he recalled Janus's arguments with Last and sighed. A man playing the part of utter amiability would work not to offend anyone.\n\n\"Uncle?\" Janus said.\n\n\"Do you love Maledicte?\" Aris asked.\n\n\"Beyond all reason,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Rumor declares you bewitched.\"\n\n\"Only by the oldest magic, that of lover and loved.\"\n\nAris could not help but smile at the romantic simplicity of the declaration. He remembered arguing with Michel in the great ivy bower of Lastrest, arguing his reasons for marrying Aurora Vornatti, an Itarusine noble, and moreover, kin to a man his brother despised. \"With Kritos gone, you are Last's heir,\" Aris pointed out.\n\n\"I am not heir as yet,\" Janus said. \"Father feels my progress incomplete.\"\n\n\"You could aid him,\" Aris said.\n\n\"By giving up Mal?\" Janus said. \"Please do not ask that of me.\"\n\n\"I will not,\" Aris said, surprising himself. \"You will not be the first nobleman to keep company with a courtier. But you must convince Michel that you mean to honor our line. Do you understand?\" Aris leaned forward, resting his hands on the great dog's back as if it were a lectern, he the tutor and Janus the student.\n\n\"I must marry,\" Janus said. \"Produce an heir. A healthy one.\"\n\n\"Marry _well._ A girl of impeccable lineage to offset the irregularity of yours,\" Aris said. \"I have heard of your exploits in Itarus. If there is any accuracy to them, you should have no difficulty with a wife.\"\n\n\"With the bedding, you mean,\" Janus said. His mouth, so long sober, slid into a grin. \"No difficulties. But choosing a wife\u2014\"\n\n\"I could name one for you,\" Aris said.\n\nDiffidently, Janus said, \"Grant me some time to choose my own?\"\n\nAris set his goblet down. \"If you select a bride by the close of the year and present her for approval, you may find your own. If you do not, I will choose for you, and you may be thankful it will be my task and not Michel's.\" The dogs, at Aris's subtle signal, rose and stretched, their tongues lolling.\n\nJanus stood and waited for dismissal.\n\n\"Have you\u2014\" Aris paused. \"Have you met your cousin yet?\"\n\n\"I have not,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Come then, he likes visitors.\"\n\nAris opened the door, releasing the dogs, and the page, slumped against the wall, hastily stood. \"Sire, Captain Jasper says will you\u2014\"\n\n\"Not at the moment, Marcus.\"\n\nJanus said, \"If there's something that demands your attention, Uncle...I understand there are some accords to be made.\"\n\nAris strode down the hall, talking over his shoulder, his words clipped. \"The Dainanders seek to renew our trade agreement, but like Itarus, they want it all to their benefit and none to ours. They think to take advantage of my ban on Itarusine imports. But they discount the Explorations, which are beginning to bear fruit\u2014the nobles may exclaim all they like over exotic fripperies and sideshow spectacles of savages, but the last six ships from the Explorations brought us corn, rice, and wheat, far dearer to my heart. So, I see no need to cede to Dainand's unreasonable demands. Let them wait and rethink their avarice.\"\n\n\"And the Kyrdic delegation?\" Janus said.\n\nBefore him, Aris stopped, and looked back. \"You seem to be well informed.\"\n\n\"I am Last's son,\" Janus said. \"Am I not supposed to take an interest in Antyre's affairs?\"\n\nAris smiled. \"I'm pleased you are. But the Kyrdics may wait also\u2014to be blunt, I am not so sure that they are not a stalking horse for Itarus, with Grigor grown weary of our failure to be annexed. I see no other reason for Kyrda's interest in our shipbuilding.\"\n\nThe dogs loped up the stairs ahead of them, rushing down the long hallway. Aris smiled at the sight, his good humor restoring itself in fondness for the brutes. \"They're Adi's hounds really, and grudge the hours I keep them beside me.\"\n\nThe nursery guard had let the dogs in and Aris could hear their wagging tails thumping the carpet. The guard opened the door, bowing.\n\n\"Papa,\" the boy said, rolling on the thick carpet with the hounds. He rose to his knees, saw Janus, and went silent.\n\nAris tried to see his son from different eyes, and yet the tragedy was still there\u2014the good-looking lad of twelve, who could not be made to think, learn, or even clean himself as a two-year-old might. Thin-boned for his age, he lacked the gawkiness that preceded adolescence. For Adiran, there would be no adulthood, only this fairy-child existence in a boundless present.\n\nThe boy darted to Aris, clung to his side, and stared at Janus. Janus bowed. \"Your highness?\"\n\n\"Blue.\" The prince advanced, hand outstretched. At the last moment, Janus caught his hand gently.\n\n\"Yes, my eyes are as blue as yours.\" Janus's nostrils flared slightly, as if he could smell it as an animal could, the wrongness in his boy.\n\n\"Adiran, this is your cousin, Janus,\" Aris said. \"Will you greet him?\"\n\nTen years of training, ten years of repetition, ten years of concentrated effort on the part of Aris, and Adiran responded to the cue with a clumsy bow.\n\nThen he whirled and claimed his boiled sweet from Aris's pockets. Aris pulled his son into his lap. The boy tucked his head under Aris's chin and worked on the candy, taking it out to look at it, putting it back in. \"He has a sweet nature,\" Aris said, \"which makes it easier for us and for him. But sometimes I wonder if he's not aware, imprisoned within his own mind....\"\n\nJanus raised his hands, dropped them; his words died away and Aris liked him the better for it.\n\n\"My poor son will be king, at least in name,\" Aris said. \"Itarus will devour him entire.\" He shuttered his heart against the pain of that. On the fireplace mantel, the icon of Espit, god of creation and despair, mocked him from Her tangled web, Her laughing mouth at war with Her veiled, teary eyes. Aris, who had removed all other traces of the gods from his quarters, had let this one remain, perhaps simply because it was the loveliest version of Weeping Espit he had seen. It had something of his wife in it, in the way tears caught on Her smile.\n\nJanus lowered his eyes, then said tentatively, \"Uncle, you are not an old man. Will you not marry again?\"\n\nAris rocked the child, hearing in Janus's words the echo of Michel. \"I will not risk prisoning another child in a broken mind. You must take that risk for me, Janus. Do not deny me that.\" He stood, shifted Adiran's weight to more even distribution along his hip and side. The boy tangled his thin arms around his father like spiderwebbing, fragile and yet binding. \"Can you find your way out, Janus, or shall I have Marcus guide you?\"\n\n\"Please,\" Janus said.\n\nThe door opened again and Jasper, the head of his Kingsguard, entered with a cursory bow. \"Sire, the antimachinists have burned Westfall's newest engine, and he expects the Kingsguard to act. We need your command\u2014\" Aris sighed at the frustration pinking Jasper's fair face, and sighed again at Marcus peering around Jasper's solid form, papers still clasped close. \"Of course,\" he said, letting Adiran down to play.\n\nDismissed, Janus bowed, and followed Marcus out, retracing their steps down quiet corridors, stone overlaid with wood and plaster, and was let out into the courtyard, illuminated with hung lamps and candles. From his vantage point in the nursery over the yard, from behind barred windows, Aris watched him go.\n\nIT WAS LATE EVENING BEFORE Maledicte returned, and Gilly, hearing his footsteps in the hall, crept away from a dozing Vornatti. He found the hall deserted, Maledicte's coat abandoned over the stair railing. He finally ran Maledicte to earth in the formal parlor when he heard the sound of quiet laughter.\n\nTo his nameless relief, he found Maledicte alone, kneeling before the stage; he had expected Maledicte to return in Janus's company, braving Vornatti's wrath.\n\nOn the little stage, a toy puppet theater rested. Without looking back, Maledicte said, \"See what Janus has sent me?\" Maledicte dragged the tiny crow-god across the false world, laughing. Within Ani's beak dangled the threads of a smaller puppet, jerking as Ani twitched, strings within strings within strings. Gilly raised his eyes, saw the strings extending beyond the theater, saw them stretching beyond Maledicte and himself and Vornatti, stretching to encompass the far reaches of the city.\n\n\"Only a fool plays puppets with gods,\" Gilly snapped. The day had been one well-devised torment after another; Vornatti still kept his Itarusine inventiveness as well as his temper.\n\nMaledicte only said, \"Then many people are fools. These theaters are apparently quite popular.\"\n\n\"They were meant to tell the gods' tale,\" Gilly said, remembering his mother telling the story.\n\n\"Tell it to me,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"You know it already\u2014our demands and dreams drove the gods first to quarreling, then to fighting, and finally, on Baxit's command, to Their own oblivion. The only way They could escape us.\"\n\n\"If you think Ani dead, then I wonder that you fear Her at all,\" Maledicte said, taking the figure from Gilly's hand. \"Still, I suppose it stands to reason. Baxit seems much like Aris, trying to guide those who, while crying for help, disregard his words.\"\n\nGilly hesitated, a frisson touching his spine. \"Baxit? You've encountered\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you think Ani shares?\" Maledicte said. \"Don't be a fool. I was merely speculating.\"\n\nIn the distance, they could hear the bell shrilling as Vornatti, woken, yanked the bell rope.\n\n\"Come soothe him,\" Gilly said, taking Maledicte's arm. \"And don't mention Janus.\"\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"Don't fret so, Gilly. I brought him gifts. Won't he be pleased to know I thought of him?\"\n\nGilly hesitated, alerted by something off in Maledicte's tone. He seemed entirely too blithe, a child with a gleeful secret. \"Mal?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"I brought something for you too,\" Maledicte said, selecting a small parcel layered in translucent cloth.\n\n\"For me?\"\n\nMaledicte passed him the flat package. \"I bought it off your sailor friend, Reg. He swore you would like it, as if I had any doubts.\" He took the remaining packages and went toward Vornatti's room.\n\nGilly peeled back the gilt-edged organza until the object came clear. It was an etched piece of whale ivory, the lines filled in with ink and gold leaf, detailing an elaborate scene. A feather-clad man climbed stairs toward the clouds, a streak of golden sunlight leading the way.\n\nGilly smiled, touched out of all proportion. He placed the engraving in his room, amid his small collection of treasures: an elaborate puzzle box Vornatti gave him that held his meager savings, his four books, edges fuzzed with repeated readings, a curved piece of sea glass cradling a twisted seashell, gold on the outside, luscious pink within. He touched the whale ivory at the pinnacle of sun and sky, the gilt warming beneath his fingers.\n\nThen, recalling Maledicte's strange cheer, he hastened to Vornatti's chamber. Vornatti was still echoing variants of Gilly's own unvoiced question. \"But where have you been?\"\n\nMaledicte shrugged. \"I've told you and told you.\" He dropped a nosegay of lilies and evening primroses on the bedside table. \"I even brought you flowers, since you spent all day closeted inside, and missed the gardens in bloom. Though, I admit, they're nothing like as lovely as the bracelet you gave Mirabile.\"\n\nVornatti said, \"So she showed you my gift.\"\n\n\"Yes, and a foolish thing it was,\" Maledicte said. \"Like any beggar, she'll come back for more.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I'll disappoint her?\" Vornatti asked, leaning back against his pillows, smirking. \"Perhaps there will be a wedding upon her return to the city. Didn't I say as much earlier, or were your senses too taken up with Last's whelp?\"\n\nMaledicte's eyes darkened, then he shrugged. \"You're far too wily to be caught by the kind who'd see you cuckolded on your wedding night. Besides, we have our bargain, and as I abstain from Janus, so you must abstain from Mirabile.\" He seized Vornatti's grayed head in his hands, kissed his forehead and lips. \"Don't be irascible, you'll spoil my good temper.\"\n\n\"You are done with Janus?\" Vornatti asked, skeptically. \"Your grand passion burnt out in a day?\"\n\n\"I solemnly swear,\" Maledicte said, \"to any god you care to claim, that you will never see me dealing with an Ixion again. Not Janus, not Last. Do you know, Janus has no interest in gossip at all? It's all news and trade agreements, and the plight of ex-soldiers. He has as many dreary opinions as Westfall. He asked my opinion of Aris's ban on Itarusine imports. I ask you\u2014\"\n\nVornatti smiled and Maledicte brought up the remaining packages. The first one, lumpen under lashings of gauze, revealed a statuette in the best brothel art tradition, which Maledicte danced along Vornatti's bedsheets. \"I thought of you at once when I saw it.\"\n\nGilly choked on a gasp. The little monkey leered up at Vornatti, its hands locked in a lewd self-caress.\n\n\"Impudence,\" Vornatti said, but there was laughter lurking beneath. \"And paid for with my name, no doubt.\"\n\n\"I had to resort to it; you've kept me short of coin of late. If you'd given me jewelry, I could pawn it, as Mirabile undoubtedly has done with your bracelet,\" Maledicte said. \"But here\u2014\" He brought up two silver-wrapped boxes, one small, one large, both ribbon-bedecked. \"Chocolates from the Explorations.\"\n\nHe laid the big box on Vornatti's lap, untied the ribbon, and parted the tissue. Maledicte chose a chocolate for himself, popped it into his mouth with delight. \"They're wonderful\u2014try them, Vornatti. You too, Gilly.\" Maledicte tossed the small box to Gilly, who fielded it with quick hands. \"Go on. Have it before dinner, be indulgent with us.\"\n\nHe held another to the old man's mouth. \"A peace offering, my lord?\" Vornatti's eyes met Maledicte's over the confection before accepting it; it collapsed under his tongue, and Maledicte let Vornatti lick the chocolate from his fingers without protest.\n\nMaledicte sprawled across the velvet coverlet, his lacy sleeves foaming over the candy box. He crossed his booted feet, and fished for another chocolate. Vornatti smacked his hand. \"Mine. But I'll share.\" Maledicte accepted a sweet from Vornatti's shaking hand, trapped it neatly with tongue and teeth, and sucked the sweet filling out from the darker coating. Vornatti watched him eat, and took another chocolate himself.\n\nGilly turned the package over in his hands; the label was DELIGHT'S, the confectionery shop where Aris bought the prince's candy. He held a piece in his hand and the smell rose temptingly and yet\u2014\n\n\"Don't you want it?\" Maledicte asked, lolling his head onto Vornatti's shoulder, letting Vornatti kiss the lingering traces of confection from his mouth.\n\nGilly took a bite. Sweetness spilled over his tongue, rich, smooth, cloying. He swallowed hard, as suddenly sickened as if he had found a worm in an apple. The gallows image lingered in his mind.\n\n\"Not to your taste, Gilly?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Never mind about him,\" Vornatti said. \"He's just ungrateful.\" At the warning note in the baron's voice, Maledicte curled closer to Vornatti.\n\n\"I'm grateful,\" he said, passing him another chocolate.\n\n\"Pretty little liar,\" Vornatti said, but the old man's thin-skinned cheeks flushed with pleasure. Gilly finished his chocolate in one bite, seeking distraction from Vornatti stroking the juncture of Maledicte's thigh and hip.\n\n\"Don't force yourself, Gilly,\" Maledicte said. \"I sent oysters for our suppers. Will you join us, Vornatti?\"\n\n\"I think not. I'll stay abed, eat chocolate and be an indulged old fool,\" Vornatti said, brought to a rare good humor by Maledicte's obedience. \"But stay and let me feed you chocolates until the dinner bell sounds.\"\n\n\"Like a Kyrdic harem, only much less sandy,\" Maledicte said. \"Should we invite Gilly to join us?\"\n\n\"No,\" the two men said as one, and Maledicte laughed, even while Vornatti curled greedy hands around his shoulders.\n\nGilly's stomach churned at Maledicte sprawled so in Vornatti's bed, and yet he was afraid to go. Maledicte's giddy, uncharacteristic behavior struck him as dangerous.\n\nThe gong rang; Gilly jumped, the small foil box tumbling from his lap to the carpet. Maledicte disentangled himself from Vornatti's hands, lips rouged with chocolate liqueur, face flushed with something that might have been pleasure. Or well-masked rage.\n\n\"Come on, Gilly. Let's leave Vornatti to his desserts.\" Maledicte tugged Gilly from the room.\n\nIN THE DINING ROOM, Gilly picked at his meal, eyeing the stuffed oysters with repugnance.\n\n\"Aren't you hungry?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nHis face seemed luminescent in the candlelight, and dark wings spread out from his shoulders. Gilly rubbed his eyes, his aching head, and the vision was gone. But the room felt wavering and fluid, as if the walls were only curtains about to be drawn. He shook his head, the taste of chocolate strong in his mouth.\n\n\"What did you give me, Maledicte? What was in the chocolate?\" Gilly asked, his voice rising.\n\n\"Shadowplay,\" Maledicte said, setting his fork down. \"It's not harmful. It's only a sedative, though some claim it has visionary qualities.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you'd recognize the taste of Laudable.\" Maledicte's voice was faintly surprised. The answer was not to the question Gilly meant\u2014why drug him at all\u2014but the room shivered; the overhead beams grew sputtering halos as if they were the masts of a ship beset by seafires. Gilly cupped his hands over his eyes.\n\n\"Are you seeing things? Tell me what you see.\"\n\nGilly peered through the swirling brightness that leaked from the candles, watching feathers sprout from Maledicte's skin like spring blossoms.\n\nMaledicte crossed the space between them and sat on the table. Gilly looked up into his face. \"Death in your eyes,\" he whispered.\n\n\"But not for you, never for you.\" The touch on his cheek was light and Maledicte was gone. Gilly rose; the floor fell away from him and he tumbled down, sliding across the room, rolling against the closed door. Scratching traveled through the wood, the scrabbling of a large bird. Gilly knelt, clawing at the knob. The door opened, and darkness rushed in on great black wings.\n\nShe crouched on the table, mouth agape, Her breathing like the gasps of a dying man. With each exhalation, the room darkened until the only light was one guttering candle, the flame streaming high and thin. The table became an altar, the disrupted meal Her offerings. Gilly crawled backward, trying to escape Her notice. She leaned over the edge of the table, Her pale feet dangling like gibbet corpses, Her wings upraised. \"He is Mine. He will worship Me. He will love Me. Nothing you do will keep him from My kiss at the end.\" Her voice, a god's voice, seared his mind.\n\nGilly cried out and woke, head on the table, neck stiff, numb hands dangling off the sides of his chair. He touched the plate nearest him and found it cool. The candles had burned to half their length, spreading wax into the spillways below. The clock hands had jumped; hours had passed. He shoved back the chair with a shudder of protesting effort, ears still ringing. Staggering, he made his way from the dining room and down the hall.\n\nVornatti's door was closed. Gilly touched the blank, dark wood, and hesitated. He opened the door to darkness and cringed, but this darkness was only that of a room dimly lit. In the center of the room, Vornatti's bed was shrouded by the drawn bed curtains and the deafening silence within them. Gilly stumbled forward in the low light, reaching for the cloth. His fingers clenched velvet, but he could not bring himself to fling the panels back and accept their revelation. A clinking of glass on glass made him twitch galvanically.\n\nMaledicte rose from the shadows of the wheeled chair, a goblet in his hand. The wine had darkened his lips to the color of old blood.\n\n\"Did you kill him?\" Gilly said, his voice a rasp to match Maledicte's. \"Tell me the truth, Mal....\" Gilly slumped against the wall, shivering. \"Is he dead?\"\n\nMaledicte poured a small snifter of brandy and handed the glass to Gilly. \"Your hands are shaking.\"\n\nGilly thought of murder done, and murderers caught red-handed, of cornered rats and poisons, but raised the glass to his lips and gulped the liquid without hesitation. The brandy warmed his tongue, his throat, his belly.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said, taking his seat again, setting his feet up on the bed, boots parting the hangings.\n\n\"How?\" Gilly asked. \"Poison? Or like _Kritos_?\" His voice cracked, imagining the sheets sodden with blood.\n\n\"Peacefully.\" Maledicte drained his glass, poured another.\n\nGilly set his snifter down and yanked the drapes back, still expecting Vornatti to wake into furious complaint. He lifted the feather-heavy pillow from Vornatti's face, the fabric as malleable as liquid and as drowningly lethal. Vornatti's mouth was open, his eyes shut, his gnarled hands limp with a relaxation life and drugs had not granted. Gilly rubbed his wet face. \"I should have warned you.\"\n\n\"When did he ever listen, Gilly?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You know why.\" Maledicte leaned his head on the back of Gilly's shoulder, took his hands in his. Panic spiked him beyond brandy's ability to soothe. This murder might have freed Maledicte, but it cast Gilly into unemployment.\n\n\"You couldn't wait?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"To have Janus at hand and beyond my touch? Impossible. And time is fickle, Gilly, as was Vornatti. He would have grown bored with the victory handed him, might even have thrown me over for Mirabile, despite his promises. I thought him near death, but every month he seemed to improve. I could not chance it.\"\n\n\"You've gambled on other things,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Not this,\" Maledicte said. \"Gilly, I am in your hands. A murderer. What will you do?\"\n\nGilly turned, freeing his hands from Maledicte's cool touch. He tilted Maledicte's face to meet his, to see what the dark eyes held: fear, hope, pain, the lashes spiked with dampness.\n\n\"Do you regret this?\"\n\nMaledicte met Gilly's eyes. \"No.\"\n\n\"What would you have me do?\" Gilly whispered.\n\n\"Nothing.\" Maledicte's voice was tight. \"His death should pass without scrutiny; his habits were known to be precarious\u2014drinking mixed with Elysia. But do find me his will. I need to be sure he didn't append some recent codicil. I wouldn't put it past Mirabile to finagle one out of him.\"\n\nGilly nodded, feeling oddly numb, as if the Shadowplay lingered yet and this was only another dream. He knelt and prised up the floorboard near the hearth, revealing the strongbox beneath.\n\nGilly lifted the parchment out, smoothing the creamy vellum from its rolled shape. He weighted one end with the strongbox, the other with his hand.\n\nMaledicte knelt beside him, so close they were nearly bumping heads. Above them, the pillow Gilly had taken from Vornatti's face shifted and Gilly jumped to his feet, heart pounding.\n\nMaledicte flattened the curling edge that Gilly's abrupt movement had allowed, and skimmed the elaborate language, sorting and reading. Gilly, turning back, thought again that Maledicte had the instinct of a solicitor.\n\nMaledicte smiled for the first time since Gilly had entered the room. \"Seems he was not so much a fool as that,\" Maledicte said. \"Mirabile is nowhere mentioned. Nor are his Itarusine relatives. I suppose he held that grudge right and true enough.\"\n\nGilly slid the document away from Maledicte, sought out his own name, fearing, hoping. It was with the other servants'. Though his bequest was by far the largest, it still knotted his belly with resentment and fear. Tired of him, Gilly thought, his dismissal imminent. The sum allotted was a year's salary, no more. Enough to buy himself a berth to the Explorations, but not on the swift _Virga._ Enough to take him slowly away, and set him down in the Explorations, penniless, with no funds to return. Alone and friendless, he thought, as chilled as if a dash of blown snow had touched him; it would leave him without Maledicte.\n\n\"Don't worry, Gilly. You'll stay with me,\" Maledicte said, reading over Gilly's shoulder. \"I told you. I'll take care of you.\"\n\n\"As a servant,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"As a friend.\" The quiet word resonated in this room, this city of purchase and patronage, manipulation and deception. The silence gave weight to the word, and Gilly realized with sudden disbelief that this was the measure of the city's moral decay\u2014that his closest ally and dearest friend was a murderer, with more bodies yet to reap.\n\n**\u00b7 18 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY AND MALEDICTE HAD BEEN returned from the funeral for only minutes; in silence both of them fled to the dining room and the warming comfort of the liquor on the sideboard. Maledicte poured two glasses, and raised a toast. \"Done and be-damned,\" he said. Gilly swallowed his whiskey without a response, too shaken by Mirabile's conduct at the funeral. They had not expected her to attend at all, considered her safely rusticating in the country. But Brierly Westfall's sudden miscarriage had kept the Westfalls in the city, and Mirabile with them.\n\nStill, funerals were not the ceremonies they once were. With the gods gone, there was no one to impress with their piety but themselves, and Vornatti's funeral was sparsely attended: Mirabile, Echo, two representatives from the palace, indistinguishable from each other, and Vornatti's solicitor, Bellington. There was no ritual, nothing but two cemetery workers covering the hole in the earth, shadowed by a chapel now used for harvest storage, and overlooked by the great stone god chairs, overgrown by weeds.\n\nIt was when the grave was nearly full that Mirabile had whispered, \"You murdered him. To keep him from me. I would have shared everything with you\u2014now we'll see what rumors I can spread, see how fast your welcome disappears.\"\n\n\"Do so, and I will comment on the timeliness of Brierly's miscarriage, your access to Harlot's Friend, and your hatred of the countryside. Whileeveryone knows of your murderous past, they know nothing of mine,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Bastard,\" she hissed, trembling with frustrated rage, then as suddenly as a shadow chased by sunlight, her face cleared. \"I'll strike a bargain with you. We'll keep each other's secrets, each other's counsel, and each other's company\u2014\"\n\n\"No. I've made one dangerous bargain already and it's consumed any desire to make another.\"\n\nShe growled under her breath, a distinct animal sound, and Maledicte cast a wary glance at her. She dimpled and said, her voice sweet again, \"Mal, remember me, and this, the moment you've spurned me. I told you once before\u2014I am as clever and as determined as you. I have been playing too gently, but that's done now. I have a mind to level the field. I know what you fear\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte seized her shoulders, grip bruising, suddenly washed with rage at her nebulous threats, but instead of the fright he hoped to see, she laughed, honestly amused. \"Such a savage,\" she said. \"Is unthinking force always your solution when there are subtler resources to draw on?\"\n\nHeads were beginning to turn, and Maledicte felt trapped, unwilling to back away, conceding her this round, and equally unwilling to keep Echo's scrutiny on him. Gilly put his hands on Maledicte's arms, and Maledicte relaxed, given a reason to release her. Mirabile leaned forward, closing the distance between them once more, even as Maledicte attempted to back away and was blocked by Gilly.\n\nMirabile kissed his mouth, her lips cold on his, and he shivered. She left the gravesite, the only sign of her anger the fisted hands at her sides. Maledicte turned back, aware of Gilly muttering quietly to their coachman, and the man slipping away. Then it was done, and Maledicte and Gilly had come home, Gilly taking up the reins of the coach.\n\n\"You sent the coachman after her?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"She seemed too confident. I want to know where she goes,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte agreed. Unsettled, he took refuge in peevishness granted by the front door opening, heralded by its usual creak and Livia's voice as she played butler. \"Who's that now? All these cards and flowers, all this fuss for one old man\u2014\"\n\n\"It's Bellington,\" Gilly said, looking into the hall. \"With Echo at his side.\" He set down his glass; it clattered on the tray. \"With Vornatti's death so sudden, with Last's dislike of you, with Mirabile spreading her venom, Echo will be looking for something actionable.\"\n\n\"I don't fear Echo,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You should. He has followers beyond that rabble of Particulars. Powerful men like Westfall and Last. Even Aris listens to him.\"\n\n\"So what do you counsel?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Attend to Bellington's reading of the will without any asides or insults. Be silent as best you can and pretend to grieve. Please. Or Echo'll have you in jail.\" He ushered Maledicte into the hallway. From the library, Gilly heard the stilted tones of Echo conversing with Bellington.\n\n\"I could remove his threatening presence for good,\" Maledicte said. \"A doctored drink\u2014some of my stock is quite tasteless. It would be a small matter to\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly yelped. \"Are you mad?\" He dropped his voice to the barest whisper. \"And to discuss such a thing so close to Echo.\"\n\n\"He's nothing but a man. Not some avenging creature of a dark god,\" Maledicte said, a faint smile curling his mouth.\n\nBy the time Gilly had his panicked urge to laugh under control, Maledicte was greeting the two men, Echo first as was due his rank. \"Lord Echo, what brings you here? I find it hard to imagine that you intend to pay your respects to Vornatti since you had none for him while he was alive.\"\n\nEcho's dark eyes narrowed. \"I find it odd that Vornatti took you in, and suspicious that he died so abruptly.\"\n\n\"The ways of the heart are not easily understood,\" Maledicte said. \"Neither why he cared for me, nor why his heart stopped. But if it gives you pleasure, you may join me for the reading of the will.\"\n\nBellington started into speech, portly form rocking back onto his heels. \"If it's your will that Lord Echo be privy to the contents, then I withdraw my objection.\"\n\nMaledicte settled himself as Bellington took the will from his worn leather valise. Bellington coughed, face reddening. \"You are familiar with the late baron's will?\"\n\nA tap on the door interrupted Maledicte's response, and drew a snarl from Echo. \"Your servants don't know their place.\" He yanked the door open, startling Livia.\n\nBehind her, Janus stood, elegant in the color the court called Last blue. Echo mimicked Livia's startlement and stepped back. \"You visit a house of mourning?\" Maledicte's smile bloomed, and Bellington coughed again.\n\n\"Aris sent me,\" Janus said, with a half bow in Echo's direction, \"to carry his condolences.\" He held out a letter sealed in gold-edged blue. Echo moved to take it, and Maledicte forestalled him.\n\n\"First you pry into the will, now my correspondence? How deadly dull your life must be, Echo, to find mine so fascinating.\"\n\nHe claimed the missive from Janus, and Janus bent and brushed his lips over Maledicte's fingers. \"He waits on a response, my dark cavalier.\"\n\nBellington stood, \"Perhaps I should return\u2014\"\n\n\"Sit,\" Maledicte said, \"read away. Let us hear my guardian's last thoughts.\"\n\n\"In broadest outlines, the entailed properties in Itarus and his title go to his next of kin, Dantalion Vornatti; his Antyrrian country estate, being a residence for life, reverts to the Crown; the Dove Street residence and his considerable fortune fall to you, Maledicte.\"\n\nEcho grew more intent. As if sensing their master's mood, the Particulars in the garden straightened.\n\n\"Perhaps we should take another look at his cadaver,\" Echo said. \"To leave a fortune to a stranger and slight his own blood\u2014\"\n\n\"If it pleases you. Only make sure you tamp down the grave dirt well after, or you'll find him up yet again, and burgled,\" Maledicte said, even while Janus stiffened minutely. Gilly's throat felt thick, and he concentrated on looking merely miserable, rather than guilty.\n\n\"By the gods, your tongue is foul\u2014\"\n\n\"Tell Aris,\" Maledicte said, his voice overriding Echo's. \"Tell him I am only too glad to accept his condolences, and to accede to his request. With pleasure.\" The opened letter whispered stiffly in the close room, the vellum brushing Maledicte's sleeves.\n\n\"Perhaps Echo can deliver your reply,\" Janus said, \"if he truly intends to petition Aris for an exhumation.\"\n\nEcho stormed for the door, and Maledicte said, \"Gilly, it seems Lord Echo has had a surfeit of our company. Show him out, and Bellington as well, please.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" Bellington said, hesitating. \"We should go over the details. Besides the usual estate matters, there's the Antyrrian audit books to be dealt with. They need to be sent abroad to wait for the next auditor.\"\n\n\"Another day will suit, surely,\" Maledicte said.\n\nBellington nodded. \"It may take some time for Itarus to name a replacement for Vornatti's post. I understand the court abroad is most competitive. Though I believe Dantalion Vornatti is in the running, if only for familiarity with the baron's script.\"\n\nGilly herded the men to the door. Bellington stepped out with the step of a man relieved of an onerous duty.\n\nJanus nodded to Echo and said, \"Shall I walk you to your coach, my lord?\"\n\n\"No,\" Echo said, letting his gaze linger on the letter in Maledicte's hands.\n\nGilly shut the door and slumped against it, slid down to rest on the cool tiles of the foyer, exhausted.\n\nA shadow came between him and the light and he looked up. Maledicte hesitated on the stair. \"Are you well, Gilly?\"\n\n\"Well enough for having Echo in the house three days after a murder.\"\n\n\"Watch yourself,\" Janus snapped. \"Echo will be snooping for days. Only Aris's interest sent him off so soon.\"\n\n\"And sooner or later, someone will tell him of my chest of poisons and potions. It will be a sore disappointment to him that Vornatti died of nothing so exotic,\" Maledicte said.\n\nHe drifted up the stairs after Janus, paused again. \"Gilly, I'll need your help.\"\n\nGilly nodded, wondering what Maledicte wanted now.\n\n\"Vornatti's Antyrrian ledgers need to be copied. The private ones that detail all the funds diverted back to Aris. You needn't worry about copying Vornatti's hand, just the information,\" Maledicte said, continuing up the stairs, untying his black cravat, slinging his black coat over the banister.\n\n\"It may take days,\" Gilly said. The private ledgers filled nearly an entire shelf.\n\n\"Then it takes days,\" Maledicte said. \"Aris wishes to see those ledgers gone, and as he barters so nicely for them, I cannot help but think they may have other uses in the future. And don't fret, Gilly, I'll stay out from underfoot while you work.\"\n\n\"You're in mourning, Mal. Your activities must be curtailed\u2014\"\n\nHis only answer was the flutter of tossed paper as Maledicte continued on his path up the stairs.\n\nGilly smoothed the paper out, the thick foolscap, the weight of the seal against his palm letting him know that this was Aris's letter in truth, and not some convenient forgery.\n\n_Maledicte,_\n\n_Let me express my condolences for your loss, and relay an unusual request. As you have no doubt been aware, a financial agreement existed between myself and your guardian, wherein he arranged certain figures to the benefit of us both. As I cannot rely on the next auditor to be so amenable, please bring me those ledgers. In recompense, I am prepared to grant you dispensation from whatever scandal-broth your impetuous heart contrives to create._\n\n_Aris_\n\nThe request, couched so openly, in a letter passed hand to hand, left Gilly breathless. The king was perhaps the fool the newspapers called him to think Maledicte's behavior might always be so easily condoned. Maledicte's own nature stirred trouble, but with Ani's wings urging him on, Maledicte was capable of anything. And Aris thought to dismiss all trouble with a smile and a gracious word. It went beyond foolishness and into madness.\n\nARIS ENTERED THE THRONE ROOM from the king's entrance at the rear of the dais. By the main door, two of the Kingsguard stood to attention, dressed in the armor the palace etiquette required, enamel over steel, Last blue over silver. The elaborate gate that closed off the anteroom was drawn back, showing Aris his petitioners\u2014two Dainanders in their customary gray cloaks, and on the receiving end of their horrified gazes, Maledicte. Though he was dressed in gray as they were, it was entirely evident that he held none of their abstemious views: His grays were silk and satin, his hair curled and glistened; they wore wool and linen, and kept their hair cropped close.\n\nAris hid a smile as he nodded greetings. With Maledicte a visible reminder of Antyre's decadent court, the straitlaced Dainanders' eagerness to return home might outweigh their avarice. Aris waved Maledicte forward, and once he had entered, the guards shut the anteroom gate on the waiting emissaries.\n\nMaledicte dropped into a bow as he approached Aris; it felt amused to Aris, as if Maledicte mocked the role of court and courtier, the positions of king and servant, when they were only two men.\n\nAris settled himself on his throne, conscious of his own smile. \"You came. My request done?\" His gaze flicked to the single book held in a gloved hand.\n\n\"Delivered to your quarters, I believe. Your Captain Jasper seemed most eager to relieve me of the burden.\" Maledicte offered up the ledger he held.\n\nAris opened it, and Maledicte said, \"Careful, the ink may still be damp.\"\n\nWariness replaced the pleasure Aris had felt. He tapped the open book with an agitated finger, smudged the ink, and said, \"So I see.\" He waited for an explanation.\n\n\"Vornatti's hand was crabbed and nigh unreadable, quite gave me the headache looking at them. I thought to spare you that pain.\"\n\n\"The originals?\" Aris asked.\n\n\"Quite safe,\" Maledicte said. \"I am careful of my possessions.\" The dark gaze that met his was confident, and under its power, Aris bit back his first instinct to shout for the guards.\n\nAris tore his eyes from those dark ones, and said, \"My brother thinks you dangerous.\"\n\n\"What courtier is not?\" Maledicte said. \"I have a sword to let men's blood, and a wit to make them wish their wounds fatal. But I am hardly the only such in your court.\"\n\n\"I could wish otherwise,\" Aris said, impetuous himself. \"It makes me feel less a shepherd of my people and more a serpent charmer.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled, and uninvited, dropped to sit on the stair, looking up at Aris. \"I am charmed,\" he said.\n\n\"And yet you deny me what I asked for.\"\n\nMaledicte sighed, traced the horned image of Haith worked into the side of the throne. \"Vornatti had the training of me, sire, and so I am constitutionally unable to part with anything of such potential value.\"\n\n\"Your intentions?\" Aris's anger roiled, turning belly-up, and exposing that thread of betrayal and hurt that lay beneath it. This young courtier had drawn his liking from the first. Aris had imagined the sentiment returned.\n\n\"I have none.\"\n\n\"Then give them to me,\" Aris commanded.\n\n\"I will not,\" Maledicte said.\n\nAris let his breath out, stung and chilled at once. \"Little fool. I am your king. Should I so command, you must obey. To do otherwise is treason.\"\n\n\"I will not,\" Maledicte repeated.\n\nAris put his hand beneath the mulish jaw and tilted the dark eyes to meet his own. \"I could have the guards take your stubborn head from your shoulders.\" Aris slid his other hand around Maledicte's jawline, into the silken curls. \"I do not think your stiff neck will prove obstacle enough for steel.\"\n\n\"Can you truly fault me for my caution? My craving for security in a world where I've known so little?\" Maledicte met Aris's eyes without fear or apology. Aris contemplated the face turned up to his, his fingers moving idly through Maledicte's hair, feeling the fineness of his neck and skin, the sleek curve of the skull, the rough touch of the boy's scarred cheek against his fingers. Maledicte smelled of lilacs, and Aris found himself staring into the wide, dark eyes as if they were the only thing in the room.\n\nAris was suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he was breathing faster, that his touch had turned to a caress, that Maledicte had woken long-dormant desire he thought gone with his dead queen. He started to withdraw his hands, and Maledicte caught one in his own gloved hand, caged the palm over his mouth.\n\n\"Please, Aris.\" Maledicte's breath warmed Aris's palm, and Aris was wholly mindful of the soft brush of lips against his skin. The rasping voice was as intimate as any Aris had ever heard; that agile tongue swept out, licked ink from Aris's fingertips.\n\nAris took his hand away, hid the warmth of it against his side. Maledicte's lips curled.\n\n\"Leave us. We dismiss you from our presence.\" Aris took his refuge in unusual formality of speech, uncomfortably stirred.\n\nMaledicte rose and bowed. He backed down the dais stairs, then bowed again and turned toward the door and the guards, the slim line of his back a gray smudge in the white room. Only after he had left was Aris able to recall the ledgers denied him. A brief spurt of bewildered irritation rushed his veins: Maledicte thought he required the ledgers to protect himself from Aris? When he had just proven to his satisfaction that words and touch alone would suffice?\n**\u00b7 19 \u00b7**\n\n_Women, by their nature, are more susceptible to sudden nerve-storms, to crying out to the gods for succor. However, they are also fickle creatures, no more able to hold to one course than a ship without its sail, and their petty outrages often die stillborn on their lips, forgotten as the next emotion crests. Though there are histories of women summoning the aid of gods, few are substantiated, and indeed, I have never met the woman determined enough to deserve a god's attention._\n\n\u2014Darian Chancel, \"On Theology\"\n\n**G** ILLY, TELL ME ABOUT THE debutantes this year. The king has it in mind for me to wed.\"\n\nJanus was in smallclothes only, his hair sleek along the thick column of his neck. Gilly held the shaving basin and mirror steady for him, studying Janus surreptitiously. Janus's skin was marked with scars, wounds neglected and healed without care. The young noblemen of the court had hides of gilt and marble; Janus recalled to mind the older generation, the ones who had fought and bled, the ones who had their history etched into their skin. Gilly wondered if Maledicte's skin carried that same violent history.\n\nWatching, Maledicte lounged amid rumpled sheets, fully dressed, admiring Janus.\n\nJanus nicked himself and flinched at the spot of bright blood. \"You keep this thing too damn sharp,\" he said.\n\n\"What purpose has a dull blade?\" Maledicte said. \"But I'll act your valet.\" He sat and smoothed the bedsheets, reaching for the razor.\n\n\"You're too fond of sharp edges to play barber,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte subsided back into the massed pillows, propping himself on his elbows. \"And so I find out how much you trust me.\"\n\nJanus pounced, rolling Maledicte into his arms for a lazy kiss.\n\n\"You're bleeding on me,\" Maledicte said, rubbing the smear near his mouth. Janus bent, licked the smudge away.\n\n\"There are several acceptable candidates, depending on your intentions,\" Gilly said, unwilling to watch more of this play.\n\n\"I want my birthright,\" Janus said, voice muffled by the soft skin of Maledicte's throat. \"The title and all it entails.\"\n\nMaledicte wrestled free of Janus, sat behind him, tilted Janus's head back. \"Consider while I shave him.\" Maledicte collected the basin and razor over Janus's objection.\n\n\"Amarantha Lovesy,\" Gilly said, after several moments of reflection.\n\n\"The duke of Love's daughter? She's no debutante, too old and serious-minded, mad about books and horses. Father told me of her,\" Janus said, nearly getting a mouthful of soap.\n\n\"And above a bastard's touch,\" Gilly said. \"Except she's blotted her book, got caught with her skirts up with a stablehand. But she's got breeding, and she has a reasonable dowry. Besides being a counselor's daughter.\"\n\n\"Aris expects an heir. Is she barren?\" Janus said.\n\nGilly shrugged. \"Nothing's been said. But she's not so old as all that.\"\n\n\"Is she pretty, Gilly?\" Janus asked. \"I've not laid eyes on her yet.\"\n\nMaledicte's fingers tensed about the razor.\n\nGilly recalled his first court attendance with Vornatti and his first sight of Amarantha. A girl near his own age and as far removed from his farming sisters as to be a separate race. Lady Perfection, the court called her. When her skirts had foamed over Gilly's boots in passing, he had nearly melted with desire.\n\n\" _Very_ pretty,\" Maledicte said, before Gilly could.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" Gilly amended.\n\nMaledicte snarled; his hands clenched about the razor's handle, and Janus put a hand up to keep the blade away.\n\n\"I suppose a beautiful wife is more palatable than an ugly one. Why hasn't she wed, Gilly?\" Janus asked, still caging Maledicte's hand and the razor.\n\n\"Her father's holding out for a title. Even now. Rumor has it he's been thinking of an Itarusine duke, and so regain some of his money that's fled abroad with the Itarusine tithe. But your title might prove more tempting with its hint of the throne for future generations.\"\n\n\"Still, she's old,\" Janus said.\n\n\"If you don't want her, Gilly can bed her. He's already admitted to finding her desirable.\" Maledicte's voice was edged.\n\n\"I won't share with Gilly,\" Janus said.\n\nHis light eyes met Gilly's and Gilly deciphered the warning as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud. \"I might find myself saddled with a farmboy's brat for heir.\"\n\nMaledicte slapped him, a blow that reddened his newly shaved skin and filled the room with its impact. Janus winced and seized the razor again, tugging it from Maledicte's hand.\n\n\"Oh, then bed your beautiful wife yourself.\" Maledicte shoved Janus forward and surged off the bed. Soapy water splashed Janus's lap.\n\nJanus ignored his tantrum and said to Gilly, \"Amarantha it is, then.\" Wedding the Lovesy chit turns a necessary marriage into more than a way to please Aris. Love's support would be invaluable in my quest for the title.\"\n\n\"She has her pride. She might not accept,\" Gilly said, watching Maledicte's face. He touched Maledicte's wrist, intending to soothe, but Maledicte twitched away, all nerves and temper.\n\n\"Does she truly have a choice?\" Janus asked. \"With Aris urging me to wed, and her father eager to see her settled before she finds another stablehand to liven her days? Tell me, is she still considered respectable? I've no desire to be burdened with a socially unacceptable wife.\"\n\n\"She is Love's daughter,\" Gilly said. \"Her sins can be forgotten with a ring.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Maledicte said, voice cracking.\n\nJanus's face softened; he held out his arms. \"Come here, my dark cavalier.\" Maledicte dropped to his knees before Janus and put his head in his lap.\n\nJanus stroked his dark hair, then said, \"What else can I do, Mal? If not Amarantha, who then? Will there be anyone you accept?\"\n\n\"I hate them all,\" Maledicte whispered, voice edged.\n\n\"So will I, I promise,\" Janus said, brushing aside Maledicte's hair to kiss the back of his nape.\n\nMaledicte turned his mouth away when Janus sought it, but said, \"Gilly, arrange for Janus to meet Amarantha. Find out where she goes, what she does, what she likes. Treat her as any other enemy we mean to vanquish.\"\n\nGILLY RETURNED TO THE HOUSE in the afternoon after a series of meetings with his fellow servant-spies and informants. Though most of them had revolved around Amarantha, Gilly had taken the time to meet with a maid in the Westfalls' employ, to discover if Mirabile had yet returned. The answer had been no, but Gilly, watching the girl's eyes slip away from his, wondered if she were truthful. The last they had heard of Mirabile's doings had been the coachman's report. After Vornatti's funeral, he had followed her to the edge of the Relicts and balked while she delved farther in, her skirts vanishing into the winding rubble. The Relicts and their denizens should have been the end of her, but Gilly had uncomfortable doubts. Mirabile was a dangerous woman.\n\nThe castle of rooks on the roofline muttered growling agreement and Gilly shivered, slipping inside the house without looking upward, afraid of catching their black gaze. Inside, he found Livia waiting to intercept him. \"Watch yourself, Gilly. Once Lord Last left\u2014well, he's in a temper right enough. He threw the kettle at me. Broke the mirror on the landing, too.\"\n\nGilly looked up the dark stairs. \"Why don't you go out?\"\n\n\"Don't have to ask me twice,\" she said. Livia held out her hand, and Gilly, conscious that her pay wasn't due for another week, passed her a handful of coppers. \"I'll give you a luna also, if you take the other two maids with you.\"\n\n\"Those dull mice?\" she complained, but nodded.\n\nGilly took the stairs two at a time and paused. Livia hadn't said Maledicte had used the bronze serpent in the hall to break the mirror. The glass was still caged by the frame; only a few silvery fragments from the heart of the shattered mirror dotted the carpet. He stepped over them, tapped on Maledicte's door, and opened it on a curse.\n\nMaledicte sat on the bed, sawing cravats apart with the shaving razor. The floor around him was littered with scraps of mangled linens and thrown objects: a boot on the hearth, the water basin beside the wall, a long splash before the upended kettle near the door. \"Whose throat are you wishing cut?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"Mine,\" Maledicte said, his face blotched with tears and temper. Grief wrapped the sulky lines of his mouth. Gilly's heart turned over.\n\n\"His marriage,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte rubbed his swollen eyes. The razor moved perilously close to his skin and Gilly took it away, folding it closed.\n\nMaledicte's eyes darkened. \"I wasn't done.\"\n\n\"Why don't I pour you a drink instead?\" Gilly looked over at the liquor tray, littered with broken crystal. \"Or better yet, let's finish the job you've started, and frighten out Cook tonight. We'll raid her kitchen, find out what spirits she's been snaffling from your cellar.\"\n\n\"I'm not a child to be humored,\" Maledicte warned.\n\n\"Why shouldn't I humor you?\" Gilly said. \"You look like your heart is breaking.\"\n\nMaledicte let Gilly tug him to his feet. \"When he marries\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh,\" Gilly said. \"It's remarkable how much improved things seem after a drink.\"\n\n\"An attitude like that, it's a marvel you're not a sot,\" Maledicte said, but allowed Gilly to lead him down the stairs, past the grand, empty, and shadowed rooms into the warm recesses of the kitchen. The cook looked up from her chopping, startled.\n\n\"We won't need you tonight,\" Gilly said.\n\nThe woman eyed Gilly, flickered her eyes over Maledicte's face, and pulled off her apron. \"There's bread in the oven. Be a good boy, Gilly, and don't let it burn or you'll have no toast tomorrow.\"\n\nWhen she had bustled away, Maledicte said, \"She likes you.\"\n\n\"She's a motherly sort. If you weren't so off-putting, she'd never leave you be. She thinks you need feeding up.\"\n\n\"Is that motherly?\" Maledicte said. \"My mother wasn't like that.\" He settled down at the scarred wooden table, the unusual surroundings distracting him from his tantrum, and poked at the chopped almonds with the knife tip.\n\nGilly set a battered tin saucepan on the stove, checked the fire, and poured milk into the heating pan. \"No?\"\n\n\"She was just another Relicts whore. Like me.\" The tremble in the rasping voice sounded more like a rattlesnake warning than tears, but Gilly had memorized the nuances of his voice, and spun.\n\n\"Shh, shh, don't do that,\" Gilly said, daring to brush his lips over Maledicte's forehead as if he were no more than an unhappy sibling. \"You're not that; you're an aristocrat.\"\n\n\"When he marries\u2014all I become is his whore. Yet I chose this path. Vornatti didn't matter. I used him as he used me. But once I kill Last\u2014what will I be if Janus is married? Exactly what my mother intended. A rich man's pet.\"\n\nGilly poured out the milk, added brandy with a liberal hand, and set it before him. \"Never seen a pet with so many claws and teeth,\" Gilly said lightly. \"Drink, and I'll tell you tales of the court.\"\n\nMaledicte brought the cup to his lips, swallowed. \"I don't know why I listen to your sentimental stories.\"\n\n\"Because you know I'll put up with your tempers and moods in return,\" Gilly said. \"But if you're sick of love, I'll tell you about the sinking of the _Redoubtable_ and the _Deviltry._ \"\n\n\"Is there blood?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"It was war,\" Gilly said, \"There's always blood. This was during the first days of Xipos, when the gods were still with us. The _Redoubtable_ was captained by Bellane, and the _Deviltry_ by one of the Itarusine princes. Their cannons were loaded with iron, and their chests were packed with gold, the better to coax greedy Naga to their aid. They battled and bribed and bled, throwing sols overboard as often as they fired their cannons, and finally Scaled Naga, god of health and avarice, thrashing below in an agony of greed, raised Himself out of the sea and took it all. Ships, men, cannonballs, and two king's ransoms of gold. Bloody enough?\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Maledicte agreed on a hum of pleasure. \"No one tried to reclaim the gold?\"\n\n\"What the gods have touched is changed forever. Better left safely away from men's hands.\"\n\nGilly rose and fielded the hot bread from the oven, dropping it onto the cooling racks. He took one loaf to the table, found fresh-churned butter in the larder, and settled back at the table. He ripped a piece free, handed the warm bread to Maledicte. \"I wager you've not eaten today, but wallowed in your temper.\"\n\n\"Don't lecture me,\" Maledicte said, but he reached out and slathered the butter on his bread.\n\n\"Eat, and I'll tell you another story. An older story of a knight and his squire and their petition to Espit to grant them a child of their own.\"\n\nMaledicte rolled his eyes. \"And back to love. Gilly, you're a romantic.\"\n\n\"It's an incurable disease,\" Gilly said, judging Maledicte's mood. His eyes were shadowed, drawn with weeping, but the sulkiness had left his mouth; even now his lips curled faintly.\n\nMaledicte finished his cup of milk, walked over to the stove, and poured himself another. He sat down and ate chopped almonds and warmed bread, waiting. \"Love stories are too often dull\u2014\"\n\n\"Should I take a leaf out of one of Vornatti's pornographic stories, give you ribaldry instead of romance?\" Gilly teased.\n\n\"Whatever you want, Gilly, I am only your audience.\"\n\n\"There was a knight\u2014\" Gilly smiled as he told the story, not for the subject matter, but for Maledicte's reluctant attention, like a child coaxed into interest against his will. It was an old tale, and sad. The men's petition to Espit, the god of creation and despair, had been answered. A mare in the stables swelled with a human child. But during her birthing convulsions, the mare kicked the squire in the throat, and the sound of their daughter's first cry was mingled with the squire's death rattle.\n\nMaledicte's eyes were shadowed again when he finished, his mouth down-drawn; Gilly took a rueful breath and retold it as farce, where the men petitioned Espit, the horse was a stallion; the two men ended pregnant, and the horse...well satisfied. Maledicte's moodiness gave way to laughter.\n\n\"I never guessed you knew tales like that,\" Maledicte said when his breath returned.\n\n\"I lived with the old bastard for eight years,\" Gilly said, \"and before that I lived on a farm. It's only wonderful I don't talk like that all the time.\"\n\nMaledicte stretched his arms across the table, his hands open. \"Thank you, Gilly.\"\n\nWith Maledicte's bad temper assuaged for the moment, Gilly's thoughts turned to the wreckage upstairs. \"Let's tidy up so that you'll have someplace to sleep without worrying about glass shards in your sheets.\" He tugged Maledicte to his feet, and herded him up the stairs, ignoring Maledicte's complaints and mocking claims of being aristocracy.\n\nMaledicte held a handful of shredded lace, and Gilly had the linens stripped and piled neatly, still glittering with thrown porcelain, when Janus returned. Janus opened the door and paused.\n\nMaledicte dropped his bundle, kicked it beneath the bedsteps.\n\nJanus righted the hearthside chair and sank into it. \"Temper again?\"\n\n\"Better out than in, as Celia used to say.\"\n\n\"Celia used the axiom to excuse her drug fits,\" Janus said. He reached down, picked up the boot resting on the hearth, stroked the long scrape down its side.\n\n\"Are you angry?\" Maledicte asked, crouching before Janus.\n\n\"They're your things,\" Janus said.\n\nGilly picked up the kettle; its spout was cracked and he added it to the wastebin.\n\nAfter the effort Gilly had taken to soothe Maledicte, he was not inclined to let Janus rile him again so he busied himself around the room.\n\n\"What are you thinking about to make you so quiet?\" Maledicte said, settling into Janus's lap.\n\n\"About boots. This one is ruined.\" He dropped it from his hands, wrapped his arms around Maledicte's waist. \"At least, we consider it ruined. Now.\"\n\nMaledicte touched the supple, scarred leather with slow fingertips, tracing the damage. \"I haven't thought about that in years. We could have eaten off a pair of boots like this for a week.\"\n\n\"You ate boots?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"No, fool,\" Janus said. \"We sold them for coppers, maybe lunas, if Mal did the haggling. Ragmen painted the flaws over, sold them at four times what they paid us.\"\n\n\"Can't eat boots, Gilly. They don't digest, and if you use them to flavor water, it only tastes like feet,\" Maledicte said. \"If you could get the water at all. I was always thirsty in the Relicts.\"\n\nGilly sat down on the bedsteps.\n\n\"Had to put a pebble beneath your tongue to stave off thirst,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Rise in the dawn to wipe the dew from the walls. But so close to the sea, even dew tastes of salt,\" Maledicte said. \"I haven't woken at dawn now in years.\"\n\n\"I did, at first, no matter that I was in a gilded cage. I woke with the sun, but there was always a pitcher of fresh water by my bed, and later, the maids came to bring me tea.\" Janus sighed into Maledicte's neck. \"It seems so hard to recall being hungry.\"\n\n\"I remember hunger,\" Maledicte said. His mouth drew down as if he felt that bite in his belly now, bread and milk and nuts notwithstanding.\n\n\"You were always hungrier than I was,\" Janus said. \"It's amazing you haven't gone to fat with the feasts you can have now.\" He raised his hand, circled Maledicte's wrist, spoke in a voice near dreaming. \"It was so hard. And no one cared if we starved.\"\n\n\"Not our mothers,\" Maledicte said. \"We're well rid of them.\"\n\n\"They ate what they would out of our hoard, and if there was nothing left, well then, wasn't it past time for us to go get more? Never mind that we had to steal or beg for it.\"\n\n\"You make me hungry now,\" Maledicte complained.\n\n\"I can't help you with past want, but if you don't mind a simple dinner, I can make that,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Thank you, Gilly,\" Janus said.\n\nGilly startled at the lack of condescension in Janus's voice. Gilly nodded and went out the door, wondering what Janus was thinking. While Maledicte was all temper and secrets, Janus's apparent openness was still harder to read.\n\nMALEDICTE UNDRESSED IN THE NEAR darkness of his bedchamber, the lamps both turned low, watching his shadow flicker and shrink. If he listened carefully, he could hear Gilly and Janus discussing Amarantha below in the unusual silence of a house emptied of servants. Maledicte chose not to make the effort, and let their words fade into a pleasant murmur like the crackling of a low-burning fire.\n\nCarefully, he concealed his padded corset in the back of the wardrobe, trading it for a crisp white nightshirt. He caught sight of his reflection, ghostly in the mirror, and lingered, touching the snowy folds of cloth, the blunt cut of his unbound hair, and wondered, in a melancholy moment, if Amarantha hunted sleep attired in silks and lace.\n\nBut he wore silks aplenty during the day, and in the colors he chose. He went where he pleased; he carried a sword. The thought of the sword reassured him; the familiar lean length of it beckoned.\n\nUnsheathing it, he sparred with shadows until the sulky set of his mouth shifted into a fierce grin, until the dark hair on his nape grew damp with the effort. Two final, quick slashes sliced the wicks from the oil lamps.\n\nHe woke to sumptuous darkness interrupted by wavering golden light, a flame in the room. His hand opened and closed, found the surety of the hilt in his palm. \"Janus?\"\n\n\"Who else?\"\n\n\"I thought you were for home tonight,\" Maledicte said, opening the bed curtains to allow himself the sleepy pleasure of watching Janus undress by lamplight, all planes and angles, alternately shadowed and limned in flame. The fine hairs on his arms and legs gleamed.\n\n\"When I could be here?\" He slid into bed, all warm limbs and skin, and Maledicte sighed into the feel of him.\n\n\"And you've brought your wardrobe with you,\" Maledicte said, catching sight of a valise by the door. He smiled and pushed Janus back into the nested pillows, arranging him for his own comfort before resting his head in the juncture of Janus's neck and shoulder.\n\nJanus raised up enough to tug at the bed curtain, sealing them into a cocoon, then lay back again. \"I've scandalized the court once by wearing the same clothes when I should not. I won't do so again. Damn.\"\n\n\"Hmm?\" Maledicte said, half drowsing.\n\n\"I left the light burning.\"\n\n\"It will burn itself out,\" Maledicte said. \"We're rich. We can waste lamp oil.\" He yawned, rubbed his cheek over Janus's chest and finally chose the spot over his heartbeat.\n\n\"It's not the oil, nor the light that bothers me,\" Janus said, tightening his arm around Maledicte's shoulders. \"It's those cupids. Watching.\"\n\nMaledicte's slackening mouth quirked into a smile; he let out a few puffs of silent laughter that stirred Janus's hair on the pillow. \"I suppose we could hire someone to paint them over, but I loathe the smell of paint, and I hate the fuss and bother.\"\n\n\"You love fuss and bother,\" Janus said, tenting his elbow over his eyes. \"As long as you're inflicting it.\" His voice slowed, relaxed; his body slowly un-tensed, stretching out to fill the space. \"Rats take it!\"\n\nMaledicte jerked back to wakefulness. \"What now?\"\n\n\"Your damn sword bit me. Why in hell have you given it its own pillow?\" Janus sat up, dislodging Maledicte. A bleeding scratch etched the width of his biceps, a line of darkness against the paler skin, as if the night had left its own mark. \"Look at that.\"\n\n\"I wanted company,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You have mine,\" Janus snapped, pushing the sword out of the bed with all the distaste of a man removing vermin.\n\nMaledicte's mouth tightened as the sword hilt rasped along the edge of the bed before falling. \"Don't dump it there. You'll wake in the morning and tread on it, and that will be my fault too. Get up and put it away.\"\n\n\"It's your sword,\" Janus said, dabbing at the scratch with the lace edge of the pillowcase.\n\n\"You left the lamp burning.\" Maledicte drew the blankets more firmly about his neck, burrowing after warmth. After a moment the sheets rustled and the mattress shifted as Janus ceded. Maledicte rolled over, stared at the ceiling, his mouth curling. \"While you're up, will you\u2014\"\n\n\"Will I what?\" Janus interrupted. \"Make you tea? Bring you a biscuit?\"\n\n\"Since you mention it, I am hungry.\"\n\n\"You should have stayed to dinner then,\" Janus said. \"Gilly makes an acceptable cook.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled. \"Thank you, Janus, for being kinder to him.\"\n\n\"He has his place,\" Janus said. \"As long as he realizes it's not in your bed, I have no quarrel with him.\" His face, exaggerated by faint light, stayed grim, belying his words. \"Where do you keep this blade?\"\n\n\"As with all my favorite possessions, I keep it near to hand,\" Maledicte said. \"Set it beside the trunk. There are biscuits in the trunk also.\"\n\nJanus paused, his hand on the lamp, then sighed. \"Your sword by your bed, the sweets within reach\u2014I am surprised you do not have Gilly sleeping outside your door. After all, he is also one of your favorite possessions.\" He fished the tin out and tossed two biscuits toward Maledicte's outstretched hands. \"Will those suffice, or should I stay my hand on the lamp?\"\n\n\"Put it out,\" Maledicte said, nibbling on the first biscuit, cupping his palm to catch the tender crumbs, keeping them from the sheets. Belated recognition of Janus's words filtered through his mind. \"Gilly is no possession. You cannot own a friend.\"\n\n\"You own him as surely as you owned Roach,\" Janus said, moving through the darkness. He finagled his way beneath the sheets, drew the curtain shut. \"I do not understand it,\" he said, tugging Maledicte into his arms. \"I make friends easily. You offend people with every outborne breath, and yet you end with worshippers. Roach, Gilly, even Aris.\"\n\n\"And yourself?\" Maledicte asked, wiping his fingers on the coverlet.\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, catching Maledicte's hands, and kissing the crumbs away. \"I know you too well. I can only be your lover.\"\n\n\"Only,\" Maledicte said. \"Isn't that everything? Let them follow me as they will. I will follow you.\"\n**\u00b7 20 \u00b7**\n\n**A** T TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, the elaborate lawns and paths of Jackal Park swarmed with aristocracy exercising their mounts and strolling along the rows of honored vendors permitted to hawk their wares in this playground. Maledicte clutched the reins and tightened his legs about his steed, trying not to collide with anyone, tensing as they passed the barricade that kept the antimachinist protestors from encroaching. If they shouted or threw stones, as they were wont to do\u2014\n\n\"He'll have you off if you don't relax,\" Janus said, frowning. \"Vornatti taught you dancing, dueling, and etiquette, but not horsemanship?\"\n\n\"Vornatti tried,\" Maledicte said.\n\nJanus sighed. He slowed his horse, reached out, and drew Maledicte's hands back on the reins. \"Don't clench.\"\n\n\"They can't like being ridden,\" Maledicte said, but forced his hands to loosen. Beneath him, the horse stopped feeling like a pile of agitated muscle.\n\n\"Better,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Still, I don't see why we had to ride,\" Maledicte said. \"And at such an hour.\"\n\n\"This is the hour to be seen, you know that,\" Janus said, shaking his hair free from his collar.\n\n\"I'd rather not be seen falling off a horse, thank you,\" Maledicte said acidly, but followed Janus along the hedge. The hedges, carved into hounds and hares, alternately pursued and fled as they passed. Ahead, the trail broadened to incorporate the promenading aristocracy, the small, decorative carriages, and more riders.\n\nBeside him, Janus drove his horse into a sudden, flashy canter. At the end of the path, he slowed to a showy halt. Maledicte kept his horse to its nervous walk, glaring at the amused glances he garnered. A thin, dapper man in an Itarusine frock coat laughed aloud, teeth flashing within his neat ring of mustache and beard, and Maledicte spurred his horse forward, drawing up beside Janus. \"Was there a purpose to that display?\"\n\n\"Mating dance,\" Janus said, smiling. \"The air is sweet, and courting is everywhere.\"\n\nMaledicte's lips softened until he followed Janus's gaze and found it lingering on two well-attended women promenading along a side path. Their dresses were the height of fashion, and their eyes were raised, discreetly watching Janus.\n\nThe older woman was well into her fifties, Maledicte knew, but as un-lined as powder and potions could make her. The younger woman's beauty needed no such aid. \"And Amarantha Lovesy is easily impressed by horse-men,\" Maledicte finished.\n\n\"So they say,\" Janus said. \"Will you excuse me? I do not think my chances so good that you should come with me.\"\n\n\"Then tell me why I accompanied you at all?\" Maledicte said. \"Why I must rise and ride with you, when I hate horses and despise mornings?\" His horse crow-hopped beneath him, and Janus caught its bridle.\n\n\"I thought you'd prefer witnessing my wooing of Amarantha to imagining it.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. He kicked his horse and sawed on the reins, trying to turn its head. Janus cantered away. Maledicte's horse, as restless as he at being deserted, made an attempt to follow. Maledicte yanked the reins; the horse danced beneath him, and Maledicte slacked his grip, clutching its mane.\n\n\"Too much beast for you? Perhaps you should join me for a stroll instead.\" Mirabile dimpled at him and tucked her gloved hand over the curve of boot and stirrup. Lacking his sword, Maledicte's hands knotted around the riding crop; he was startled to find her alive and well after her disappearance into the Relicts. Maledicte had not dwelled much on her threats, but to run across her of a sudden\u2014he found himself remembering the animal fury in her eyes. To see her so poised now when he knew her enmity made him cat-nervous.\n\n\"No steed for you, Lady, or are the rumors true\u2014have you sold your riding habits for pin money?\" He was rewarded by the tightening of her rosebud lips.\n\n\"You'd best keep your grip on the reins, or you'll be at my feet before you know it.\"\n\n\"Take your hand away.\"\n\nShe stepped back, gloved hands spread wide, laughing. He was at a loss for her shifting moods, at her returning to his side time and time again, and the damn horse kept tugging at his hands. Maledicte could not keep himself from glancing over his shoulder, hoping for aid. But, now leading his steed, Janus was deep in conversation with the duchess of Love.\n\n\"He does the pretty very well,\" Mirabile said, leaning her weight against the horse's velvet side. \"I hear he was quite well versed as a lover of women\u2014do you suppose he's reverting to type?\"\n\n\"Perhaps he already has, and the ladies were the anomaly,\" Maledicte said, lured into speech. \"Some men lose all sense of self abroad, or so I'm told.\"\n\n\"So confident in his affections? I hope your loyalty is not misplaced. But let us not quarrel today. Instead, come and have tea with me.\"\n\n\"What have we to say to each other?\" Maledicte said, his jaw tight.\n\n\"At the very least, tea would grant you an excuse to dismount. Come now, Mal. Is that horse really preferable to my company?\" She leaned forward and blew into its flaring nostrils. The entire animal seized under him, going as rigid as a corpse, then it reared, hooves striking at the sky. Maledicte wrestled it down, panting, then dismounted with more haste than grace.\n\n\"I never did like having discourse on an unequal footing,\" she said, smiling.\n\nMaledicte wound the reins in his hands, reconsidering. There was rage in her voice, barely contained. But he was unwilling to back down, or worse, attempt to remount beneath her gaze. He hoped to see Janus returning, escaping the vapid confines of polite first conversation between suitor and sought, but Janus lounged against a tree, one boot propped on a mounting block, smiling down at Amarantha. Even from a distance, Maledicte could see him working to hold Amarantha's interest. The duchess was his, but Amarantha looked away, plucking fitfully at her gloves.\n\nMirabile insinuated her hand into the crook of his arm. \"Come and have tea,\" she said.\n\n\"It's early yet\u2014\" Maledicte said, looking at the angry shadows in her red-brown eyes. Something shifted and moved behind them, something sleek and dark, drowning his objections, as if her words were law.\n\n\"There, no protests,\" Mirabile said. \"Such kindred spirits as we should be allies.\"\n\nHe walked with her, her hand around his elbow and caged by his free hand. Walking as if they were lovers. The horse? he wondered briefly, dragging his gaze away to look back. Had he loosed it in the park?\n\n\"Here we are,\" she said, settling herself onto a marble bench in the shade of a beech tree. A small table, its top a maze of inlaid tiles, had been laid out with a teapot, two cups of wafer-thin china, and a covered tray. Maledicte sat beside her, took the cup she handed him.\n\nShadows fell from the tree above, one crow and then another, followed by a slew of rooks, all come to scavenge for scraps. The two sets of birds squabbled and jabbered while Mirabile laughed and threw them tea cakes. Maledicte watched their glossy wings, the slick emptiness of their dark eyes. What could drive a noblewoman to the Relicts? He very much feared he had the answer.\n\n\"Your tea's growing cold,\" Mirabile said.\n\nThe same slick darkness rested in her eyes, Maledicte realized, the blank gaze of a predatory creature. The cup hovered at his lips, smelling of sweet jasmine and warmth, and reflecting the crow-blackness of his own gaze. He set it down with nervous fingers. \"I am not thirsty,\" he said, standing.\n\nShe rose with him as if they were linked. She collected his cup and swallowed several mouthfuls. \"There. In case your fearful heart cried poison, I have drunk from it as well.\" She folded his fingers around the cup again.\n\nHer eyes on his, the hush of the leaves in the faint breeze, and the squabbling crows at his feet all conspired together, making him feel he had stumbled into a dream. But he looked at the shadows in her gaze and forced a smile. \"No.\" He set down the cup; without looking back, he walked away, ignoring the quiver in his spine that urged him to run before her mask fell again and showed him more than he could bear to know.\n\nGILLY WAS READING in the parlor when the front door shut with enough force to rattle a sour note out of the spinet. \"How was the park?\" Gilly asked, as the carved door opened.\n\n\"Vile,\" Maledicte said, settling down on a delicately curved love seat. \"Janus went haring after Amarantha; Mirabile leeched onto me and tried to feed me dismal tea.\"\n\nGilly folded the pages of his new book closed with casual fingers, hoping to distract Maledicte from it. A moment's reflection showed him that Maledicte was unlikely to notice anything. \"Mirabile? Are you well? You look...scared.\"\n\n\"I am no coward,\" Maledicte said, the words quick and hot, ragged in his throat. \"At least, I never was before. But something was wrong. Mirabile's...changed. She had shadows in her eyes, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Shadows,\" Gilly parroted, heart sinking.\n\n\"I know, such melodrama,\" Maledicte said. \"But I swear to you\u2014No, I will think no more on it.\"\n\nGilly shivered, thinking of other eyes, all too often shadowed. \"Mal, did you drink her tea?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, turning in his seat and gouging at the upholstery buttons. \"I know there's no rule against declining tea, so you needn't frown at me like that.\"\n\n\"It might have been poisoned,\" Gilly said. \"She hates you enough for that.\"\n\nMaledicte paused in his destruction of the chair. \"I sincerely hope it was. When I chose not to drink, she swallowed it. Perhaps she's ended herself?\"\n\n\"Or found herself,\" Gilly said. \"Shadows and poison. Mal\u2014you said that she had changed. Could she have sought out Ani's aid as you did?\"\n\n\"I never sought Her,\" Maledicte snapped. \"As for Mirabile seeking Ani\u2014\" His hands clenched on the chair, his voice tightening as he rose. \"It's those damned books you read. You see Her hand everywhere, when the simple fact is that I fled from Mirabile like a frightened child, afraid she'd pour poison down my throat.\"\n\nGilly seized Maledicte by the shoulders, stilled his restless pacing. Something moved over Maledicte's eyes, like the reflections of dark feathers, and Maledicte slumped.\n\n\"Let go of me.\"\n\n\"Ani supposedly protects Her own from poison,\" Gilly said. \"Even had you drunk\u2014\"\n\n\"You say that\u2014with stonethroat's effects branded in my voice? You have read far too many tales, Gilly.\"\n\n\"But that was before you sealed Her compact. Before you killed Kritos.\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"The only gift Ani brings is the only curse She brings, that of resolve and obsession. No more nonsense.\"\n\n\"And the sword?\" Gilly said, watching Maledicte retrieve it from the divan where Janus had forced him to leave it before exiting the house. \"She gave it to you. What might She have given Mirabile?\"\n\n\"Gilly!\" Maledicte said. \"Are you trying to make me fear Mirabile more or less?\"\n\nGilly sat, the book beneath him rustling as he did so, and Maledicte's attention shifted like a cat's. \"What's that? Another tract on the dead gods?\"\n\n\"It is,\" Gilly admitted, pulling it out and laying it on the floor between them. \"Written by Mirabile's husband, as it occurs.\"\n\n\"I should have it burned,\" Maledicte said, looking at the gaudy cover with an expression composed equally of wariness and contempt.\n\n\"You gave me the money that bought the book. I suppose it's yours. Everything is, even me.\"\n\n\"No.\" Maledicte turned, the shadows fading from his face. \"The money I gave you was only your share.\"\n\n\"An accomplice to murder,\" Gilly muttered.\n\nMaledicte touched Gilly's cheek and said, \"Don't fret, sweet Gilly. Or if you must, fret yourself to find something to entertain me until Janus returns.\"\n\nGilly's spirits lifted at the familiar petulance. Or so he told himself, dismissing the touch and casual endearment. Flushing, he cast about for diversion. \"Want to learn to play the spinet?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. \"Do you know how to play?\"\n\n\"Vornatti had me take lessons when he thought it might be pleasant to have private entertainment on command. Before he decided his private entertainments didn't involve music.\"\n\n\"Then play for me. It can't be worse than the amateur talent they have at the courts.\"\n\nGilly sat at the spinet, but shifted on the seat, ill at ease. \"Stop staring at my back. It's too much to ask of me, to play and to perform at the same time.\"\n\nMaledicte rose and joined Gilly on the bench. \"What if I sit here? Then you cannot mistake me for a critical audience.\"\n\nGilly set his hands on the keys and ran out a scale. The notes vibrated in the air, going flat as the untuned strings sounded. \"Vornatti said my hands on the keys were too big. He was right.\"\n\n\"Excuses,\" Maledicte said. \"I have found one thing you cannot do perfectly and you're ruining it by making reasonable excuses. Just play, Gilly.\"\n\nGilly turned his head to object and got lost in the sweep of dark hair sliding over Maledicte's cheek and throat. He took his hands from the keys, brushed Maledicte's hair away from his face.\n\n\"Are you going to play that instrument, Gilly?\" Janus said from the doorway. \"Or are you playing at fashionable music master instead?\" At the palpable edge in Janus's voice, Gilly stood, leaving Maledicte possessor of the bench.\n\n\"I hear you made contact with Amarantha Lovesy,\" Gilly said. Behind him, Maledicte picked out notes at random.\n\nJanus heaved a sigh, came into the room fully, and slung himself into a chair. \"What a harridan. Despite her mother's enthusiasm, she made it clear the only reason she would even consider me was that she coveted Lastrest. All that beauty cannot mask her greed.\"\n\n\"Choose someone else,\" Maledicte said, head still bent over the keys, adding trembling dissonances to the air.\n\n\"What other wife could grant me a counselor's support so neatly? Lilia DeGuerre is wed and bred already, and Westfall has no child. No, I'll wed the bitch, and leave her in the country house she admires so much.\" Janus levered himself out of the chair, paced between Gilly and Maledicte.\n\n\"I thought we were to live at Lastrest,\" Maledicte said, eyes fixed on the spinet keys.\n\n\"It only needs to be for a little while. So many of the Last countesses have died of childbearing, we can create one more tragedy without much suspicion.\" Janus dropped a kiss on Maledicte's bent head, and pulled Maledicte from the bench. He lifted him onto the low stage. \"But as for now\u2014her parents will push her to accept my suit, we'll put my father in the ground, and you'll be consorting with an earl before you know it.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled. \"You hate her.\"\n\n\"Utterly. Set your heart at rest.\" Janus bent Maledicte over his arm to kiss his throat. \"Gilly, give us a waltz.\"\n\n\"Please do,\" Maledicte added.\n\nGilly thumped out a waltz, ignoring his mistakes and the pitch of the untuned spinet.\n\nJanus and Maledicte tussled for a moment, hands shifting and regripping, until Janus laughed and said, \"Stop trying to lead, Mal.\" He raised his voice, carrying the tune himself, humming, a warm, intimate sound in the room. Maledicte leaned into Janus's arms.\n\nWhen the waltz ended, Maledicte said, \"Play something else, Gilly. Something that doesn't want an in-tune instrument.\"\n\n\"You don't ask for much,\" Gilly said. But he searched his memory for a folk jig of single notes at a time.\n\nJanus shifted his grip, and Maledicte laughed, and then they were swinging each other like children, clasping each other's wrists, pulling and spinning until there was no dance, only the dizziness and laughter, Maledicte's voice disappearing under stonethroat's leash. Then Janus stumbled over the sword and swore. \"Damn thing. Enough, Gilly.\"\n\nJanus limped over and settled himself on the edge of the stage. \"Why do you carry that in the house?\"\n\n\"I like to,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Savage tastes, my dark cavalier,\" Janus said, rubbing his shin.\n\nMaledicte rejoined Gilly and touched the keys with curious fingers. \"We really should have it tuned.\" He tugged Gilly's hair. \"Maybe even hire an instructor.\"\n\nGilly laughed. \"Is that your subtle way of telling me I'm an abysmal player? I'm not used to such from you.\"\n\n\"Say better than some, worse than many,\" Maledicte said. \"A thing of no moment since you are perfection itself in all other fields of endeavor.\" He tucked his legs up beneath him and sat on the floor.\n\n\"A compliment and a sting at once. I applaud you,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Gilly, it's not too soon to invite the Lovesys to Lastrest, is it?\" Janus said, interrupting their banter. \"I intend to ask them to Lastrest tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Sudden, but acceptable,\" Gilly said. \"They will be aware of Aris's command to wed.\"\n\n\"How long will you be gone?\" Maledicte said, laughter wiped away as quickly as blown sand.\n\n\"The standard visit is a fortnight,\" Gilly said. \"Add time for travel, laden with luggage and the stops noble ladies insist upon? Three weeks.\"\n\nMaledicte said nothing, still curled up like a boy on the floor. Janus went to his knee. \"Mal?\"\n\n\"I will go with you,\" he said, his voice a bare whisper, as if he recognized the impossibility even as he said it. Gilly heard Maledicte's breath coming faster, realized that somehow this step had caught him unawares. Maledicte would have to release Janus from his side, and Gilly, looking at Maledicte's stricken face, wondered if Maledicte would allow it.\n\n\"It won't be straightaway. Not only must I inform Lastrest's staff, and Father, but the spoiled chit probably will require a week to pack,\" Janus said, kissing the dark hair, tilting the pale face and kissing the tight lips. \"But I cannot bring you while I court her. For a title so close to king, the duke and duchess seem willing to overlook you, but that is far easier if you're not nearby.\"\n\nGilly caught Janus looking not at Maledicte, but at him, and with an expression very close to hatred. \"Gilly will be here. He can tell you stories, play the spinet badly for you, make you laugh. I'll be back as soon as I can. Rats take it, love, how long can I stand to be apart from you? You may have me running back within a week.\"\n\nMaledicte's shivering passed to Janus. Gilly saw their past in their trembling bodies, the pain that Maledicte felt when Janus was stolen from his side. Gilly was dwarfed by it, his own uncomfortable urges made irrelevant. He could not see himself anything but an unwelcomed interloper, and it was left to Janus to soothe Maledicte while Gilly sat, trapped at the bench.\n**\u00b7 21 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY WALKED INTO THE COOLING EVENING, seeking to clear his head, and found his steps taking a familiar path into the city. At Sybarite Street, he turned toward the brothel with the ship drawn above the door. As it catered to sailors, Gilly found more than simple carnal amusement there; his fantasies of the Explorations were fed. But tonight he bypassed the salon, with its laughing, drinking sailors, and headed upstairs. He tapped on a closed door. It was the night he usually reserved, but he hadn't let her know he was coming. Just as he decided she was with someone, the door opened and Lizette stood there, rubbing her red hair out of her face and yawning. \"Gilly, I thought you weren't coming.\" She kissed his mouth. He leaned into her warmth, her encircling arms.\n\n\"But you look so sad tonight,\" she said, drawing him into the room. \"That love of yours giving you trouble?\"\n\n\"Not mine at all,\" Gilly said. \"Never was. There's someone else.\" He kissed her neck and stroked her shoulders beneath her silken robe.\n\nShe took herself out of his reach and lit the candles by the bed while he set lunas down on the dresser. \"Well, she's a right fool then. You're sweet and gentle and generous.\"\n\nPaid compliments though they were, Gilly relaxed under them. \"My employer already gets those things from me, without needing my love.\"\n\nLizette drew back. \"Your master's that courtier, ain't it? Why would you want someone like that?\"\n\n\"I didn't know you followed the court,\" Gilly said, settling himself onto the smooth sheets. He paid extra for clean ones on his nights, and she'd been sure enough of his custom that they were freshly laundered, smelling of nothing more than the iron and a faint trace of her perfume.\n\n\"Not the courts, Gilly. Just you. I saw your man once. At a distance and all. Thinks he's a king, don't he, the way he walks. But pretty enough to be a girl.\"\n\n\"Watch yourself,\" Gilly said. \"He's fast with a sword and doesn't like being called a girl. No matter his tastes.\"\n\n\"Mmm, well maybe he'd make a bad girl at that. Too scrawny. Not like me.\" She guided his hand to her voluptuous breasts. He bent his head to greet them with a kiss.\n\n\"Lizette,\" he murmured.\n\n\"That's it, Gilly-boy. Don't waste your thoughts on the likes of him.\"\n\nHe stopped her mouth with his and she tickled his ribs until he laughed. She rolled him over, teased him with her trailing hair until he growled and tangled his hands in her locks, pulling her to him, merging his body with hers, thinking yes, Lizette was right. This was simple. This was easy. This was welcoming and warm, and the only shadows in the room were those from flickering candle flames, not unseen gods. But he kept his eyes open, to make sure he didn't trade the vision of her warmth and curves for the cool, austere, and oft-imagined lines of Maledicte.\n\nStill, once they'd finished, Gilly left her side after only a cursory attempt at sleep, haunted by the premonitory instinct that warned him he would only dream of Black-Winged Ani. Better awake than that. He slipped out into the night, wending his way home through the back streets, and came across Echo's Particulars rousting a drunken man from his stupor at the base of a fountain.\n\nAfter a passing glance, Gilly paused and went back, exchanging coins for the drunken man's freedom. Briskly, he walked the man back and forth until he moaned, \"At least in a cell, I could have obtained rest.\"\n\n\"I'm only trying to help,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Help? Buy me a drink,\" the intercessor said, staggering away toward the nearest pub. Gilly hesitated before following; he had heard the old man speak, had seen his eyes when he recognized Ani in Maledicte; this might be his only chance for answers beyond his books and pamphlets.\n\nGilly sat down in the seat opposite him, wincing at the smells of old stew and drunken leftovers. The intercessor sighed. \"The servant in Dove Street, correct?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, \"Your name, Intercessor?\"\n\n\"Not that anymore,\" the man said. \"I've given up shouting the truth to a city of the deaf and forgetful. I'll join them in their willful oblivion.\"\n\n\"I need your advice,\" Gilly said, gesturing to a barmaid when it looked as if the intercessor would walk away. The barmaid brought two ales to the table and the intercessor settled back.\n\n\"No one listens,\" the intercessor said, raising his drink, draining half of it.\n\n\"I listen. It's my job,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"It was mine once,\" the intercessor said. \"I spoke for the gods. Filtering their words until my ears bled. And now\u2014I'm forgotten along with them. You\u2014do you understand how it was? To be like a child, forced to hear his parents come to blows? Months of strife and no surcease\u2014only the visions of the gods battling each other. Intercessors died in their sleep. Others avoided sleep and went mad. Madder. Then came blessed silence\u2014a silence that rendered our lives without meaning, except to bear the blame of Baxit's final message. On Xipos, we were stoned. In Itarus, Grigor rounded up the intercessors, sick, mad, despairing, and plunged them into a frozen sea. So now, when the gods stir again, there's none to hear....\"\n\n\"I hear,\" Gilly said, his voice ragged, remembering Ani claiming Maledicte in his dreams.\n\nThe intercessor paused, set the drink down, and looked at Gilly. \"You do. But then, you should have been one of us. I can see it in your face. Do you dream of tombs, boy? Where the occupants lie sleeping, but restless?\"\n\nGilly took a gulp of the sour ale, and said, \"I do.\"\n\nThe intercessor pushed his empty tankard aside, and when Gilly would have gestured the barmaid back, the man shook his head, looking weary. \"What would you know?\"\n\n\"They're not dead, are they?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"They're gods and immortal,\" the intercessor said. \"They've only withdrawn. Was that your question, because I believe you knew the answer already.\"\n\n\"I need to know how to break a compact between Black-Winged Ani and Her follower.\"\n\nThe intercessor gaped, then said, \"She's a god, and Her compact is more binding than anything mortal man can understand. There is no escape save in fulfillment. Oh, perhaps you could distract Her with charms asking for Baxit's aid, Her opposing force, but even if He bestirred himself from His indolence, it would only buy you moments. It would not undo Her will.\"\n\n\"Nothing can be done?\" Gilly asked, aware of the desperate edge to his voice. He hadn't understood how much he had hoped for another possibility until the intercessor scoffed at it.\n\n\"If you truly have a care for your friend, you will help him accomplish Her bloody goal and complete the Compact.\"\n\n\"He'll die,\" Gilly said. \"I can't allow\u2014\"\n\n\"Die?\" the intercessor said. \"You've been reading _Vengeances_ by the sensation-monger Grayle. Nothing but corrupt scholarship there.\"\n\n\"He'll survive then?\" Gilly said, the relief enormous.\n\n\"Quicker he acts, the likelier it is. But Ani's compact takes a toll. She grants gifts. Grayle will have told you that in his own hysterical fashion. But She also takes. I once visited a woman who is kept walled in a country asylum. Years ago, she climbed a turret in her wedding gown, carrying a dagger in one hand. She should have fallen. She didn't. She killed her husband, waiting for his lover. But she was left with the mind of a child. Ani is a creature of instinct and emotion, violence and passion, not intellect.\n\n\"In Elisande's case, it was a kindness, I think. Her mindlessness. Others have taken their own lives after, unable to bear the remorse, the grief. Ani feeds on their triumph and leaves them nothing. Aid your boy or not, care for him after, but do not expect him to remain the same.\"\n\n\"There must be some way to fight,\" Gilly cried.\n\n\"There is none,\" the intercessor snapped. \"Do not treat the gods as if they are human.\" He snagged Gilly's ale and gulped it down, then when Gilly continued to sit in mute misery, said, \"Boy\u2014let me warn you of one thing further. I have seen several compacts play out, and never have I seen Her shadow so strongly as I did in your master. Grayle, for all his melodrama, is right in one thing. A certain type of follower, strong-willed, fierce-natured, clever, might be enough to let Her manifest, creating Her Avatar, a mingling of god and man. A creature who could destroy the city.\n\n\"Most of Ani's children hunger and kill, the compact finished before danger ever arises. But the longer they delay, the more Ani invests of Herself, and the greater the gifts: Immunity to poison. Immunity to hurt. Witchcraft. Finally, transformation of the flesh. If your master is as strong as I fear, you'll not only lose him, but likely your own life, and the lives of all those around you.\"\n\nGilly fled the man's bleak eyes and sought the tranquil dark waters of the nighttime pier, contemplating flight. But his panic paled in the memory of dark eyes and a mouth coaxed to sulky laughter. When dawn crept over the sea in streaks of gray and yellow, he turned his steps back toward Dove Street and Maledicte.\n\nThe house was silent when he returned, creeping through the kitchen door. The sun just risen, even Cook was barely awake. Setting the tea to steep, she jumped at the sight of him, and the teapot clattered from the hearth.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Gilly said, recovering it before it spilled.\n\n\"So you should be, sneaking up on a body like that,\" she said. \"Where've you been, Gilly lad?\"\n\n\"Out,\" Gilly said. Without his asking, she poured him tea. Gilly took the kitchen mug in his hand. He drank it in one scalding gulp, then tipped the cup over.\n\nIt was not what he wanted to see, but in the wake of his conversation with the intercessor, he was not surprised to find that again the leaves gave him no shape but the gallows. He shivered in the warming kitchen. There would be nothing but the gallows tree until Maledicte's vengeance was done. He knew that now. Another death approached? _Let it be Last,_ he thought, _and the end of it._\n\n\"You're too levelheaded a lad to believe in such things,\" she said, wiping the leaves up with a dishrag.\n\n\"Thank you for the tea,\" he said, escaping her scolding.\n\nA light limned the edge of the library door, spilled a faint dusting of gold over the dark, carpeted hall, and Gilly paused before pushing the door open.\n\n\"Maledicte?\"\n\n\"Come look at this, will you?\" Maledicte said, bent over the desk. \"Vornatti's solicitor, Bellington, brought it over last night after you'd gone. He wanted coin for it. I'm not used to paying for information, Gilly. I gave him what he asked without haggling. If you're going to be gone all night, you need to teach me such things.\" The look Maledicte sent him was faintly accusatory.\n\n\"How much did you give him?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"Ten lunas,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly winced. \"Oh, he'll be back then. I hope the information was worth it.\"\n\nMaledicte took his hand from the scroll of paper and it coiled again. \"It's from Vornatti's spies abroad. The same ones who told us of Janus's return. Read it, Gilly.\"\n\nGilly did so, fighting through the tight script. \"Vornatti's cousin, Dantalion, has an agent in Antyre?\"\n\n\"A solicitor, supposedly. Janus and I are torn on what it means that, though we know he's in the kingdom, he's made no attempt to challenge the will that disinherited his client. No one's heard of him at all.\"\n\nGilly sat down, nerves singing.\n\n\"Gilly, what do you call a solicitor who shirks the law in favor of secrecy and prying?\" Maledicte said, eyes dark. \"I have a word in mind.\"\n\n\"Assassin,\" Gilly breathed. \"Mal, you must be careful. An Itarusine lord is a dangerous foe on his own, and Dantalion is a crony of Last, and so will know more about us than perhaps is safe. Last could tell him your haunts and your favorite pasttimes.\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"Should I mew myself up behind these walls? I do not want to be a prisoner, kept away from all my hard-won freedoms.\" He was weary; Gilly saw it in the droop of his mouth, the pallor of his skin.\n\n\"We will hire agents of our own to find this man. Once found, he'll be no threat. Assassins thrive on secrecy, and Dantalion will have to find another route to recoup his losses,\" Gilly said, taking the letter. \"I'll send runners out, and you\u2014go back to bed.\"\n\n\"I could crawl into his arms and stay there forever, were it not that our enemies would find us,\" Maledicte said. \"I know the path I've taken, and yet it galls me that I have nothing but enemies at my back. Even I weary of the fight.\"\n\n\"You may have enemies to spare, but you have allies as well. Janus, myself, even the king.\" Gilly tugged Mal to his feet. \"It will be well, how can it not be? Are you not the scourge of the court, the terror of Last?\" He cupped Maledicte's face in his hands, and allowed himself to kiss Maledicte's forehead. \"Go to bed.\"\n\nMaledicte rubbed his cheek into Gilly's palm like a contented cat, then stiffened and freed himself. \"I trust you are right, that finding the man is as good as killing him. Because I intend to do so. I have no time for Dantalion's nonsense. I have an earl to kill, and an earl to create. Fortunately, though I may tire, Ani does not, and Her blade is sharp,\" Maledicte said, with a sudden surge of strength, an angry glitter in the black eyes.\n\nGilly, chilled again, watched Maledicte leave the room, and thought of the gallows tree and blood spilled beneath.\n**\u00b7 22 \u00b7**\n\n_Stillheart, mostly used to facilitate battlefield surgeries, is a chancy powder at best. The correct dosage is notoriously difficult to quantify, and many a surgeon has finished his task only to find that the corpselike stillness of his patient is nothing less than death in truth._\n\n_\u2014A Lady's Treatise,_ attributed to Sofia Grigorian\n\n**A** LITTLE PAST THE FASHIONABLE hour of the evening, Maledicte and Janus were still at home, sitting in moody silence in the library.\n\nFrom the dining room, they heard the maids laying the table for their last meal together. Without a word, Maledicte rose from his seat and straddled Janus's lap. Janus tugged Maledicte closer, resting his chin in the dark, loose curls.\n\n\"Sir,\" the newest butler said, entering. \"There is a solicitor to see you.\"\n\n\"Gilly said Bellington would be back. But so quickly? I must have over-paid him dramatically.\"\n\nThe butler coughed. \"It is not Bellington, sir, but another gentleman and, from the cut of his coat, foreign. Shall I show him in?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Maledicte stood, pushing away from Janus's chest. \"Perhaps he's heard I sought him and chose to save me the effort.\" Maledicte collected the sword, strapping it to his hip, ready for use. \"But show him into the dining room. I see no reason to hold back supper.\"\n\nJanus said, \"I mislike him coming to us. It seems counter to his mission.\"\n\n\"Never question fortune,\" Maledicte said. \"But I agree, he must be a most confident gentleman indeed.\"\n\nThe man stood in the dining room, the lean, well-dressed man Maledicte had seen in the park. Laughing at him. Maledicte's mood darkened.\n\n\"Maledicte, and Lord Last, is it not? How gracious of you to receive me.\"\n\n\"How obliging of you to come to us,\" Maledicte said, faintly startled to see that the man's wary eyes fixed not on Maledicte and his sword, but on Janus.\n\n\"I've had a task to do first,\" he said, \"but with that accomplished, I'm aware of how little Dantalion is paying me.\" Unasked, he took a seat at the table. Deliberately, he laid a pistol before him, like an unexpected part of their place setting. \"It is primed,\" he said. \"And quicker to hand than that blade of yours. Still, keep it sheathed and all will be well.\"\n\n\"You want money from me?\" Maledicte said. \"Like some distant relative come a-begging?\"\n\n\"You have no relatives,\" the solicitor said. \"Unless you count a Relict whore. Dantalion chose not to challenge the will outright, not with Ixion, and some say Aris himself, sotted on you. So I sought levers and found such a lovely one, I can barely believe it, even now.\"\n\nMaledicte sat down, leaned forward. \"Tell me.\"\n\nThe solicitor said, \"Not until Ixion takes his seat. I know his reputation and I don't want him at my throat. I doubt you'd grant me my pension if I had to shoot him.\"\n\nMaledicte's breath sailed out in a rush. When he took it back, there was nothing but rage filling him, pure, cold, and smelling of feathers. \"So far you've told me nothing worth a copper.\" He poured himself a glass of wine, settled himself, hitching his hip to allow for the sword's presence.\n\n\"I sought information on this black-haired boy from the Relicts and found nothing at all. As if he never existed. But I did hear stories about Janus. I found a quick talker in a Relict rat called Roach\u2014you know him? A useful boy, hungry for coin, and short on moral qualms. He agreed to act my courier for certain letters if I fail to return to him tonight.\" The solicitor reached out for a goblet. \"Will you quench my thirst, _Sir_ Maledicte?\"\n\nMaledicte poured the glass. The solicitor's eyes never left his hands. \"Do I have your attention?\"\n\nJanus said, \"Roach is a liar.\"\n\n\"Only an inadvertent one. He told me Miranda was dead. I thought nothing of it, until I saw you in the park, Maledicte.\"\n\nMaledicte shuddered, shaken to the core by hearing that name unexpectedly voiced.\n\nThe solicitor laughed. \"I couldn't believe it\u2014there you were, in a crowd of blind men. No one takes the time to look past expectation anymore. No one but me. So tell me, girl, what do I do now? Tell Dantalion that the will is invalid, or tell him nothing, and let you take care of me?\"\n\n\"I will kill you,\" Maledicte said, voice raw with outrage, nearly shaking. He sought control. Murder in an aristocratic house took concentrated effort and planning.\n\n\"You're nothing but a girl, and I won't let your man get close enough.\"\n\nGilly tapped and entered. \"Mal, Cook's waiting to serve.\" He paused, eyeing the stranger at the table. \"Mal?\"\n\n\"This is Dantalion's solicitor, come to blackmail us. I see no reason he cannot stay, so long as he understands that talking business during dinner is a killing offense.\" Maledicte's thoughts raced, calculating risk against risk, exposure versus letting the man disappear back into the shadows.\n\n\"Your house, _sir,_ \" the solicitor said. \"But I'm afraid I've taken someone's place; the table is set for three.\"\n\n\"I'll eat in the kitchen,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"I think not,\" the solicitor said. \"I will not trust any of you near my food's preparation. Come, sit beside me and share my plate.\"\n\nMaledicte lowered his head to disguise his sudden chagrin. He wanted the man dead, wanted it so badly he was willing to take any risk, with Ani spurring him on. He met Janus's eyes, read the communication there, that they could kill the solicitor before he could do more than wound one of them, but the servants were one wall away, and secrets were hard to keep. Best for the man to die silent and quick. If Dantalion's man could not trust them with his food, neither could they trust him to leave this house and keep to his word.\n\nMaledicte dropped his hand to his sword, and watched the solicitor's eyes follow the movement and narrow. Death wouldn't be by blade; the man was warier than his confidence painted him.\n\n\"What is for supper, Gilly?\" Maledicte said, buying time and thinking there was always poison, an Itarusine's love, but all Maledicte's potions were upstairs.\n\n\"Oysters from market.\"\n\nMaledicte leaned back as he was served, watching the solicitor, trying to judge whether his wariness was only the usual thing, weapon-focused, or something more troublesome. He picked up an oyster shell, feeling the sharp, rippled edge.\n\n\"Gilly, is it?\" the solicitor said. \"I'll let you have the first bite.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Maledicte said, dropping the empty shell to his plate. \"They're good, Gilly.\"\n\n\"So you say,\" Janus said, poking at his with open revulsion. \"If you loved me, Mal, you'd never serve them, no matter Aris's strictures on imported foods. I've seen the harbors here. The water's vile.\"\n\n\"The price of tablestuffs is ridiculous; Itarus gets the lion's share and leaves us to squabble over the rest, driving the price beyond reason. The nobles should learn to eat rats, as we did. Cure their impecunious ways.\"\n\n\"Must you bring the past into every conversation, Mal?\" Janus scowled. \"And we _never_ ate rats. Filthy animals.\"\n\nThe solicitor grinned. \"Hard to convince everyone you're Quality when they picture you in rags and rubble.\"\n\nJanus surged from his seat, hand tightening around his dull table knife. Gilly flinched. The solicitor's eyes swung in Janus's direction, even at that minimal threat; his hand found the pistol beside his plate.\n\n\"Sit down, Janus. Don't let him distress you. After all, your breeding, illicit though it was, is surely more genteel than his,\" Maledicte said.\n\nJanus nodded at Maledicte. \"Ever my voice of reason.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled back. The temper tantrum had done what he needed, shown the solicitor's predilections toward conventional weaponry. After all, he had focused on Janus and the dull knife, rather than Maledicte with a better edge to hand.\n\n\"Gilly, I'm done. And you've had to share. Would you like my last oyster?\" Maledicte rose; the solicitor watched him walk, watched Janus, and rested his hand on the pistol.\n\n\"Open your mouth, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, sitting on the arm of Gilly's chair. \"I'll feed you.\" Distantly, he trusted Gilly would play along, but Ani spread Her wings and the feeling of imminent bloodshed was so pleasurable, he smiled.\n\nGilly raised his head, parted his lips, and Maledicte tipped the oyster down. \"Good?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, swallowing, lips pale.\n\nMaledicte kissed his forehead, and as he did so, the solicitor said, \"Not content with one man? You are a wanton creature\u2014\"\n\nThe quick, slicing kiss of the ragged oyster shell across his neck shocked him into silence, into groping for the trigger. The wound was not deep; the breadth of Gilly's body and the chair robbed Maledicte of a killing blow. The solicitor shoved his seat back, a hand covering the bloody line. Maledicte swung again before the solicitor could bring the pistol to bear, and the second blow was messier, deeper, and quite fatal.\n\nMaledicte slammed the shell into the solicitor's gasping mouth, silencing any attempt at an outcry, and then shoved him over the back of his chair.\n\n\"Gilly, get the doors,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly started out of his shock and darted to the doors, locking them. Janus seized the pistol from the solicitor's thrashing hands. \"Mind the trigger,\" Maledicte warned. They stepped back; the man convulsed in silence, boots kicking at the overturned chair until Janus righted it.\n\nGilly's hands were at his mouth, shaking. He picked up Maledicte's wineglass, and drained its contents. Still, his hands trembled.\n\nMaledicte joined him, reached out for his hands; Gilly drew back, his eyes on Maledicte's bloody fingers. \"Go then. Flee if you must. But it had to be done.\" Maledicte toed the corpse; the solicitor made a spasming gasp. Maledicte wrinkled his nose in distaste. Gilly paled and fled.\n\nJanus settled back into his seat and began picking through his cooling dinner. \"I must do something about Roach. I should have done it when he told me I'd killed you. But I'll do it before I go. The solicitor was right about that. Roach does love his coin.\"\n\n\"Roach was my friend.\" Maledicte picked up a cloth, wet it in the finger bowl, and started washing his hands.\n\n\"Roach's tongue is a danger. Those letters are a danger.\" Janus's voice soothed and coaxed.\n\n\"Roach's probably lost them already,\" Maledicte said. \"Or drunk away the coin meant to frank them. But if you worry so, go find him and bring him back here.\"\n\n\"Then there'd be two who knew your identity and soon after, multitudes, when Roach slips your secret to Gilly, to the maids, to the gossips on the street.\"\n\n\"We could warn him not to talk.\"\n\nBut Maledicte knew that Roach's discretion was not to be relied upon. Even as a child, he let information slip at the worst moments. Might as well expect Ella to learn modesty. \"We could send him away?\"\n\n\"Where?\" Janus said. \"He can barely manage the skills of a Relict rat.\"\n\nMaledicte closed his eyes, his heart pounding. Janus could have been killed. Or Gilly, if the pistol had misfired. \"We haven't time to hunt him down. Not now. We have to dispose of the solicitor tonight.\"\n\n\"The timing is unfortunate,\" Janus agreed. \"But inescapable. Intercepting the letters before they're sent, taking them from Roach, is feasible. Intercepting them after they're sent is not. The solicitor gave us no word on the recipients. Dantalion, Aris, Echo, Last? Who knows how many? But Roach is easy; you could lure Roach out.\"\n\n\"Go back to the Relicts and chance being recognized? How many men do you want to see dead tonight? I've killed one man already.\" And night in the Relicts meant Ella would be trolling. What if she saw him, recognized him\u2014would she see Vornatti lingering on his skin, know what he had become? \"If you must go after Roach, you'll do it on your own.\"\n\nThe doors opened and Gilly returned, pale-faced but steady. \"I sent the butler on an errand.\" His mouth twisted. \"I blamed your eccentric desire for some _absente_ and never mind about the hour. We'll have to get the body out the door\u2014\" Gilly blanched again, and Maledicte went around the table to see what had disturbed him.\n\nJanus peered over the table and swore.\n\n\"What a mess. Indoor bloodlettings are so unforgiving without the earth to soak up the fluids.\" Janus joined them, and looked down at the corpse. \"Still, dead is dead. That's the crux of it. Gilly, get the floor cleaned before the blood sets. Mal, get his feet\u2014no, wait.\" Janus cleared the table, then yanked the tablecloth free and laid it out on the floor. \"Now.\"\n\nJanus and Maledicte levered the body onto the cloth; Janus went through the solicitor's pocket with quick, agile fingers, sorting coin and rubbish, before allowing Maledicte to wind the cloth tight. He handed the mixed pile of currency to Gilly, who looked at it with horror before dumping it onto the table.\n\n\"Where to?\" Maledicte said. \"The docks and the sea beyond?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said, his voice ragged. \"Too many eyes.\"\n\n\"Loath as I am to agree with Gilly, he's right,\" Janus said. \"The docks rarely sleep, or the Relicts. Wrap him tight and I will take him courting with me.\"\n\nGilly asked, \"Will you really do that?\"\n\n\"What else is there to do? Bury him out back? His ghost will not haunt me, I assure you.\" Janus bent, checked for seepage.\n\n\"Gilly, go confine the maids to their quarters so we can fetch water from the laundry,\" Maledicte said.\n\nWith the servants out of the way, the cleaning went faster; Gilly brought water and soap and removed the blood from the carpet, while Maledicte and Janus practiced winding cloths. When they had finished, they headed to the attic to locate a suitable trunk.\n\nAlone in the room, Gilly was aware of his hands shaking again, pale red to the wrists. He kept tasting the sweet firmness of the oyster in his throat, followed by the sound of the solicitor's blood-soaked gasp. Gilly swore off blackmail on the spot.\n\nJanus's casual appropriation of the solicitor's purse and pistol lingered with him, the absentminded way he wiped the smeared gore on his fingers on the man's shirt. He contrasted it to Maledicte's hungry stillness and sudden violence and wondered, not for the first time, which of them was more dangerous.\n\nThe slam of the trunk hitting the exposed floorboards jarred him from his thoughts.\n\n\"There,\" Janus said, hefting the body up across his shoulders with deceptive ease. \"Not a leak to be sprung.\" He forced the body into the trunk and snapped the lid closed. Bending, he picked up the trunk itself and carried it out toward the carriage house.\n\nGilly scrubbed at the carpet; the wet cloth, pink-tinged now, shredded.\n\n\"Gilly, it's enough,\" Maledicte said, kneeling beside him.\n\n\"I just don't want to be able to see the stain.\"\n\n\"A new rug is in order,\" Maledicte said. \"I find I no longer like the looks of it myself. But it could have been Janus's blood spilled there, or yours, or mine. The fact that he underestimated me made him no less of a danger. I acted as I had to. Forgive me for involving you?\"\n\nWadding up the cloth in his hands, Gilly nodded.\n\n\"Will you do one thing more for me tonight?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, hearing Lizette in his mind\u2014 _why love him?_ \u2014and he could not answer it now either, sick to his stomach and frightened, yet he met Maledicte's dark eyes, and the tallies began: freedom, friendship, money, and the strange workings that created desire where there should be none.\n\n\"Three deaths to my hand now, and I am no closer to killing the earl of Last than I was three years ago,\" Maledicte said, quietly. \"But I tell you, Gilly, no matter the outcome of this marriage, I will have Last dead within the cold season. But I must have my chance at him; Janus feels there is another danger. Will you go with him tonight? Aid him as you can?\"\n\nMaledicte's eyes were glossy; Gilly could not tell if they were wet with unshed tears, or with anticipation. But, bloody rags in hand, he swore again to aid Maledicte.\n\nGILLY LOOKED OVER HIS SHOULDER, eliciting an exasperated sigh from Janus. \"What are you expecting to see? The solicitor climbing free from the trunk? You'll have us off the road.\"\n\n\"Why did we bring it along?\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Do you think Mal wanted it underfoot?\" Janus said. \"We'll start with the docks. I wager Roach has his roots there. When I saw him, he was cleaning salt from his clothes. He's a skinny thing and dark, taller than Mal, but not nearly so pretty.\"\n\n\"I met a boy with that name some months ago,\" Gilly said. \"A would-be thief working in a tavern called the Horned Bull.\"\n\nJanus's hands tensed so tightly around the edge of the seat that they seemed carved of alabaster. \"You spoke to him?\" His voice, as quietly knotted as his hands, made Gilly nervous.\n\n\"Not much,\" Gilly said, trying to make that unaccountable anger disappear, feeling out his words in increments of Janus's stiffening or loosening hands. \"He offered to housebreak at DeGuerre's for a fee. I turned him down.\"\n\n\"Nothing else?\"\n\n\"He mentioned you. Said you taught him to read. He doesn't like you. Said you'd killed his girl. How are you going to get him to come to you?\" Gilly said, clopping his tongue at the horses as they shied from a drunk staggering down the cobblestone streets.\n\nJanus sighed. \"He's greedy and lazy and undoubtedly in need of coin. I expect he's whoring somewhere, passing time and waiting for the solicitor to return.\"\n\n\"You think him a whore?\" Gilly could not reconcile the feral, defiant boy in the street outside the tavern with a pliant whore. \"He seemed too thin for that.\"\n\n\"They're not all like your pretty one,\" Janus said, \"put in gilded rooms where they eat sweets and wait for their men. The Relict whores are so different you might not even recognize them as human. They're not.\" The bitter edge to Janus's voice kept Gilly silent.\n\n\"Mal fell ill once when we were children; I thought he would die. He couldn't stop coughing and shivered so violently that I could barely hold him. Ella dosed him with enough Laudable to damn near drown him because his moaning and shaking was scaring away her customers, who couldn't tell Relict fever from plague. I spent the night with him in my arms, curled beneath the bed, wondering if he was going to wake, and Ella spent the night fucking above us. One sailor after another. That was before she realized Mal was going to be beautiful. Then she cared. But I cared first, and Mal is mine.\"\n\nThe whole speech was a near rasp, so choked with rage that Gilly felt it was Maledicte telling him this slice of nightmare. He drove on wordlessly; he barely knew how to soothe Maledicte; Janus was a mystery still.\n\nBeside him, Janus's ragged breathing steadied, but he didn't speak again until they were at the Horned Bull. \"Go see if Roach still works there.\"\n\nGilly clambered off the bench and went inside. He nodded at the taverner and slipped into the kitchens.\n\n\"What do you want?\" A heavyset woman looked up from the hearth where she was stirring a fish stew so old and salty Gilly could smell it across the room.\n\n\"Looking for Roach,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"He don't work here anymore. Not that he ever did more than rob our customers when they got too castaway to notice. Lift your purse, did he?\"\n\n\"Something like that,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Try down by the cheap brothels. He's like to be trying his hand at robbing drunken sailors. Sooner or later, he'll try the wrong man, get hisself killed. If Echo's Particulars don't catch him first. Stupid rat.\"\n\nGilly nodded his thanks, and continued out the back door, circling around the building, checking the shadows. A black-haired young man in cheap clothing stepped out of an expensive carriage, drawing Gilly's attention. The boy tossed a luna from palm to palm, and blew a kiss after the retreating coach. \"Mal\u2014\" Gilly breathed, but even as he did so, he realized his error. The boy vamped at him, all painted lips and eyes, and headed into the tavern.\n\n\"Another Itarusine sailor's get, I'd imagine,\" Janus said, his voice velvet and sudden in Gilly's ear. \"But a startling resemblance, nonetheless.\"\n\nGilly jumped. \"Yes,\" he said.\n\nJanus flashed a quick, malicious smile. \"Though if I were you, I'd not tell Mal you mistook a rented boy for him.\"\n\n\"I'm not a fool,\" Gilly said.\n\nJanus raised a brow. \"What did they say, within?\"\n\n\"That he had turned to robbing brothel customers.\" He climbed up onto the bench. Janus joined him and took up the reins.\n\n\"I bet he's not even stripping them of their boots,\" Janus said, urging the horses into a bone-jarring trot across the cobbles. \"Let's finish this and go home. I shudder to think what Maledicte has done to the house this time.\"\n\n\"He has no regrets over the solicitor's death, and he's past the worst part of accepting your marriage. What is there to upset him?\"\n\n\"With Maledicte, sometimes I think it's the shifting of the wind.\"\n\nGilly turned his head as they came onto Sybarite Street, smiled at the sight of the familiar door painted with the sailing ship.\n\n\"Thinking of your girl?\" Janus said. \"What's her name?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Gilly said, leery of Janus's interest.\n\nJanus drove, avoiding the whores advertising in the street, avoiding the clusters of young men daring each other to bravery in the fields of love, the hired whisperers who haunted the street, murmuring of places where one could go to buy smuggled Itarusine whiskey or other illicit imports, and as the street grew darker and less well-kept, avoiding the rubble they could barely see. \"Gilly, get down. Look for him. If you find him, don't waste time chatting, but bring him back. I'd do it, but I think you would not like being left with the trunk.\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly agreed, dropping from the side of the carriage, and wandering into the dark alone, hunting for a half-remembered pickpocket. Abstraction lent an air of drunkenness he hadn't intended, and the first he knew of Roach's presence was the skinny wrist reaching for his purse, even as the stick missed Gilly's head entirely. \"Stop that,\" Gilly said, grabbing the stick, the thin-boned wrist with practiced quickness.\n\n\"I remember you. What do you want?\" Roach rubbed his wrist ruefully. \"Caught me just as quick this time.\"\n\n\"Information. I'll pay,\" Gilly said. He closed his fist, opened it, and a silver luna caught the light, a strayed bit of starshine.\n\n\"All right then,\" Roach said, snatching the coin. \"What do you want to know?\"\n\n\"Not me, a friend. He's a poet, wants to write verses about the Relicts, wants it to be romantic.\" Gilly was surprised he even bothered to lie. The hunger in Roach's eyes, the lack of caution, spoke volumes. Roach didn't care for anything but the sight of silver.\n\n\"Verses about the Relicts? Is he touched?\" Roach frowned. \"Going to write about rats and boots and fever, is he?\"\n\n\"No, he's another one who wants to write about Black-Winged Ani bringing down the Relicts for love,\" Gilly said, thinking he had been too long exposed to the court, finding it all too easy to envision his imaginary poet. He took Roach's arm in his hand.\n\n\"How much is he gonna pay?\" Roach said.\n\n\"He's a poet without a patron. Not much. Maybe two lunas.\" More and even Roach might find suspicion, but Gilly had given him coin before, easy earnings, and this looked the same.\n\n\"Can't take too long. I'm meeting someone,\" Roach said, even as he followed in Gilly's wake.\n\n\"Ain't that a fancy rig?\" Roach said as they approached the carriage. \"And your man ain't got more coins than that?\"\n\n\"Paper's expensive, as are quills,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"I bet they are,\" Roach said, turning over new thoughts. \"Where's your fancy man?\"\n\n\"He was here,\" Gilly said.\n\nThe reins were weighted with a cobble; the carriage door hung off the latch. Gilly wondered what had happened, a soundless struggle? Or had Janus simply grown bored with waiting?\n\nRoach opened the carriage door and peered inside. \"Ain't that fine.\"\n\nGilly picked up the reins and looked up to see Janus come out of a shadow, the knife aimed for Roach's nape. Gilly gasped, but Roach was already crumpling forward. Janus bent in the same quick economy of motion and shoved the body into the carriage, closing the door.\n\n\"Don't gape, get on the bench, and let's go.\" Janus swung himself up, setting the carriage to rocking, and held down his hand. \"Gilly! Let's not attract more notice than the carriage will have already. Get up, or I leave you here.\"\n\nGilly saw the temper flaring in Janus's pinched nostrils, in the swelling blueness of his eyes, but he could not respond. He remembered Roach's desperate insouciance, the thinness of his arm beneath his hand, and his awe of the carriage, all snuffed out in one moment.\n\nJanus snapped the reins and turned the carriage. \"Last chance, Gilly. There is still some night left and I don't mean to spend it haranguing you when I could spend it in Mal's arms. No? Fine.\" The carriage wheels spattered loose bits of sand and gravel over Gilly's boots. He watched it go, and only then started the long walk home.\n\nIt was nearer dawn than midnight when he opened the doors and crept through dark halls. As he approached the stairs, a light flared and smoked, setting shadows to dancing in the narrow stairwell. \"Do you realize you always use the servants' stairs when you're upset?\"\n\nMaledicte was still dressed as he had been for dinner; dark splotches remained where the blood stained his cuffs.\n\n\"Did you know he was going to kill him when you sent me?\" Gilly asked. His voice shook. He took a seat on the riser below Maledicte when the tremble in his voice reached his legs.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said, looking away.\n\n\"Why?\" Gilly cried. \"He was just a boy. The solicitor I understand, Kritos, even Vornatti, but this boy...\"\n\n\"He knew things Janus thought best left unsaid, a gossip as deadly as Mirabile,\" Maledicte said, setting the lamp on the stairs above his head, haloing them both.\n\nMaledicte's voice was all Gilly heard. He refused to look at him, not wanting to be distracted by the dark eyes, by the lush mouth, by his own desire. \"You killed the solicitor. Who else would think to talk to a rat? Why not pay him to go away? Or send him to the sea as aristocrats have done as long as there have been sailing vessels and inconvenient people\u2014\" Gilly's voice broke.\n\nThe lamp flared and popped as impurities in the oil burned, and in the silence after those small explosions, Maledicte said, \"There was more to it, Gilly. I was scared, and Janus was so sure. But he never liked Roach. Not ever.\" Maledicte let his breath out in a shivering gust, as if he had caught Gilly's quaking.\n\n\"Don't ever send me out again to lure someone to their death,\" Gilly said. \"I cannot do that. I will aid you in any other capacity I can. But please, Mal\u2014don't make me kill for you.\"\n\n\"Hush.\" Maledicte drew Gilly's head into his lap, stroked back the fair hair, streaked damp with night fogs. \"I promise. Never again. Not ever. I'm so sorry, Gilly. So sorry.\"\n\nHe smoothed the pale hair, spreading it over his lap like a gilt mesh, until Gilly's trembling ceased, and the lamp was beginning to gutter, unaware of Janus standing at the top of the staircase.\n**\u00b7 23 \u00b7**\n\n**A** RIS PAUSED IN THE FOYER of the Westfall city estate and watched Westfall's face, never as restrained as the other nobility, reveal his surprise as Aris nodded and moved on, dog and guards in tow. Aris smiled; he was surprised himself. Westfall's periodic afternoon parties were really no such thing. If the attendees found amusements, it was through avoiding Westfall, who used the occasions to argue his interest in the equality of the classes, his remarkable engines, and the future world to come.\n\n\"Sire,\" Lord Echo said, stepping alongside him. \"I didn't think to see you here.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that will be a sentiment I hear frequently this afternoon. And I'm equally sure that Westfall's cause will draw new interest. I do like to keep my counselors content,\" Aris said, and while true, it was far from the entirety of the truth: He had attended for one reason only.\n\n\"Thus you attend an affair you have little interest in,\" Echo said, with the ease of long acquaintance.\n\n\"It's the industrial aspect that flummoxes me, Dominick,\" Aris said. \"How Adam thinks that machines that increase the rate of production will aid us when the problem remains the same\u2014that our profits are not our own. I see little reason to benefit Itarus.\"\n\n\"Eventually the terms of surrender will end, our concessions fulfilled,\" Echo said.\n\n\"And in the meantime, Westfall's engines will replace the working poor.\" Aris shook his head. \"What both you and Westfall forget is that a country is not built on machines, but its people. All of them.\"\n\n\"The poor are\u2014\"\n\nAris put a hand up, halting Echo. \"If you'll excuse me, I came here to appease Adam, not listen to his ideas. And I think you spend too much time among the sordid types of our city. It makes you bitter, unable to see that good exists on all levels. My offer still stands. Join my Kingsguard and I'll see you at its head.\"\n\n\"Your Kingsguard, sire, is not a thinking thing, but an army. I prefer to solve problems.\"\n\n\"As you will, then,\" Aris said. When Echo would have followed, Aris shook his head, and Echo dropped back. Aris moved on, unimpeded, as the small crowd bowed before him. So many familiar faces turned toward him, and yet the one he wished to see eluded him. He frowned at the sight of Mirabile whispering into Brierly's ear, wondering what poison the woman cared to spread now, and if her presence meant Maledicte's absence. Aris tapped his fingers impatiently against his thigh, and Bane trotted forward to pant heavily by his side.\n\nAris slipped into the cool hallways, still seeking. He had expected to see more of Maledicte, now that the young man held the ledgers over his head. Until Janus had left Murne with Amarantha Lovesy, Aris had expected Maledicte to use the ledgers to derail Aris's requirement that Janus wed. Perhaps Maledicte had been in earnest after all, when he claimed he had no intentions of using the ledgers against Aris. Aris wanted badly to believe that, and not simply for the safety of Antyre.\n\nHe finally found Maledicte studying a portrait of a fair-haired woman in Westfall's family gallery. Maledicte frowned and spoke quietly to his servant.\n\n\"Lady Rosamunde, Celia Rosamunde's mother, and Janus's grandmother. I believe she was a distant cousin of the Westfalls.\" The servant's words came clear as Aris approached.\n\nMaledicte seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words, lips parting. He touched the painting. \"Celia looks much like her.\"\n\n\"The whole point of aristocratic breeding,\" the servant said. \"Put a stamp of heredity on the children's faces, even if it requires inbreeding and creates idiots.\"\n\nThe guard coughed, and the servant turned, paling. He dropped to his knee. Maledicte's smile faded, his eyes growing wary. He put a hand on his servant's shoulder.\n\n\"You may rise,\" Aris said. \"Your sentiments are not new, I assure you. If I spent all my time punishing them, I'd have no time left to rule.\"\n\nThe servant nodded and stood, uncertain.\n\n\"You may leave us,\" Aris said. The servant glanced at Maledicte for permission, caught himself, and bowed again before leaving.\n\nMaledicte shook his head. \"He'll be fretted for weeks about that. It's my fault entirely. I've allowed him to be as free with his thoughts as he likes.\"\n\n\"It's not his thoughts that will see him in trouble,\" Aris said, \"but his tongue.\"\n\n\"Still\u2014it's pleasant to have an honest opinion,\" Maledicte said. \"Rare and pleasant.\" He turned back to the wall of portraits.\n\n\"Yes,\" Aris said, nearly a whisper, startled again at the warmth he felt near this lad. He cleared his throat. \"I have to admit to some surprise at finding you here. Adam's afternoon entertainments are known to be deadly bores.\"\n\n\"Then why do you attend?\" Maledicte asked, frowning at another painting of a corpulent gentleman in furs.\n\n\"I asked for the attendee list,\" Aris said. \"Once I saw that you meant to attend\u2014\" Pleased, he watched a fragile blush touch Maledicte's cheek.\n\n\"Oh, and what have I to say that lures you to brave such dullness as egalitarianism and economics?\" Maledicte asked, his tone a little stiff.\n\nAris caught Maledicte's quick glance at the guard and changed the subject. \"I thought you might tell me how goes Janus's courting? Michel knows nothing. And Amarantha\u2014\"\n\n\"You ask me that?\" Maledicte said, his voice dropping to an offended hush. \"Do you think Janus pauses in his wooing to send me accounts of it?\"\n\n\"I don't know what to think,\" Aris said, his own temper sparking. \"Janus has sent no word. To be honest, I had not expected such a political choice of wife from him. I thought him unconcerned with court ways and yet...Amarantha is a difficult woman at best.\"\n\n\"But very beautiful,\" Maledicte said, his tone still distant. \"And perhaps he thought the choice would be pleasing to you. A counselor's daughter.\"\n\n\"You hold his wooing her against me,\" Aris said. The weight of his distress startled him. But what had he expected?\n\n\"We all do what we must,\" Maledicte said, and to Aris, the quiet weariness in his voice sounded like forgiveness.\n\n\"Still, I hate to think I played a part in making you unhappy. Were it in my power\u2014I'd grant your wishes.\" Daring, he stroked the soft curls clustered at Maledicte's nape.\n\n\"I don't believe you would,\" Maledicte said, lips curling into a slow smile.\n\n\"No?\" Aris said. \"Won't you tell me what drives you? What brought you to my court?\"\n\nMaledicte looked up through dark lashes, his eyes merciless. \"Janus.\"\n\n\"Just that,\" Aris sighed. He took a step back. \"Is it true what the gossips say? That you knew him before? That you were\u2014\"\n\n\"A Relict rat?\" Maledicte finished. \"I fear my secrets are no secrets at all. But I'd rather not discuss that, if you'll indulge this wish. The past is past, Aris.\"\n\n\"No,\" Aris said. \"It's never past. Not when everything reminds you of what you've done or lost.\" He cupped Maledicte's chin, brushed his thumb over the soft lips, and watched the dark eyes shade yet darker. \"Was I wrong?\" he whispered. \"To surrender Xipos to Itarus, to barter our future away for our present?\"\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"You ask me? The war was before my time, sire.\"\n\n_That young?_ Aris thought, finding it a strange relief that here was one person who could not force him to relive the pains of his past. He drew closer.\n\nMaledicte's eyes flickered over Aris's shoulder.\n\n\"He's only my guard,\" Aris said. \"He doesn't matter.\"\n\nMaledicte slipped from his grasp. \"Aris\u2014how can you say that here? In Westfall's home, where all men are equal?\" The mockery seemed evenly apportioned between Westfall's follies and Aris's own.\n\nA sudden shout tore the quiet, and the mutter of voices in the next rooms rose.\n\nThe guard swore; the mastiff lunged to attention, pushing between Aris and Maledicte, growling. His hackles bristled.\n\n\"Find out,\" Aris said, resting a hand on Bane's withers. \"I'm safe enough.\"\n\nAnother mocking smile bloomed in response. \"Do you think your counselors, your _brother_ would agree to that? Alone with me\u2014and safe?\"\n\n\"Why must it matter so much what they think?\" Aris said, answering the tone and not the words. He felt suffocated.\n\n\"Because, sire,\" Maledicte said, \"you belong to them, not they to you.\"\n\nAris knew the truth of that by the weight it left on his heart.\n\n\"Do you still think my company safe?\" Maledicte asked, reaching out. He laid his hand over the king's. Bane's growling ceased.\n\nAris couldn't tell if it were his hand trembling or the hound beneath it. \"Safe enough,\" Aris whispered. He leaned forward to taste Maledicte's lips, to see if they were as sweet as they looked, or as bitter as the words he spoke.\n\n\"Nothing of importance, sire,\" the guard said, returning. Maledicte stepped away. \"Lady Mirabile's hem was torn by a servant. Done deliberately, she swore. Your brother is taking the whip to him now.\"\n\n\"That temper of his,\" Aris said, shaking his head. \"Find out whose servant I will need to replace.\"\n\n\"It's yours, Maledicte.\" The guard acknowledged Maledicte's presence for the first time.\n\nRage washed Maledicte's face, transforming it so utterly that Aris froze and Bane keened uncertainly. Courtier or not, Maledicte ran from the room like an arrow in flight. \"Go!\" Aris said to the guard, but to protect Maledicte from Michel or the reverse, he didn't know. Hand wrapped around Bane's collar, he followed more discreetly.\n\nThe green lines of the garden maze were marred with the violence. Westfall dithered, plucking at Last's sleeve, while Last worked the whip back into his palm. Beside him, Mirabile watched, a tiny smile on her lips.\n\nThe servant knelt, half-fallen, pressed back against the hedge, his shirt torn and the skin beneath bloody. He put his hand to the wound, heedless of the whip being drawn back again, and the look of such utter shock on his face told Aris that whatever flaws Maledicte had, beating his servants was not one of them.\n\nMaledicte interposed his slender shape between Aris's sight and the servant. A faint growl of pleasure rose from Last's throat as he set the whip flying again. The whistle of it sang in the air. \"No, Michel, I forbid it,\" Aris shouted, but the stroke had been sent.\n\nTurning as if possessed of a snake's quickness, Maledicte moved to meet the lash head-on. Aris flinched, but when the snap-crack of contact sounded, the scene had changed. Maledicte held the lash's tip in his hand, firm against Last's tugging. The air darkened and drew close.\n\nLast put his weight into the effort to free the whip, his face purpling with rage and embarrassment. Maledicte stood unbudging, his face remote. His other hand dropped to the hilt of his sword and drew a fist length of steel.\n\nBane growled, low and uncertain, crowding against Aris's hip, nudging Aris's numb fingers.\n\nMaledicte's gaze, as black as city smoke, fell on him and Aris looked away, unable to meet the empty rage in it. Then Maledicte's dark lashes fell and rose and he was simply another courtier in a temper. He released his grip on the hilt; the sheath swallowed the blade.\n\n\"If this is a taste of your vaunted equality, Westfall,\" Maledicte said, \"and the people you choose to build futures with, I don't fancy your chances.\"\n\nWestfall flushed.\n\n\"You insult the king,\" Last said.\n\n\"Do I?\" Maledicte asked, tugging his servant to his feet and supporting him. \"I thought I insulted you.\"\n\nLast snarled, his hand clenched on the whip handle again. \"I will insure that Janus never sees you again.\"\n\n\"Janus cannot leave me alone. He's mad for the touch of my hands, my mouth; he begs for me at night. When you are dead, I will lie in your bed while you lie in the ground, one more unmourned ancestor, and I will be free to do as I see fit,\" he said, his voice so laced with venom that Aris half expected to see Last finally subject to apoplexy.\n\n\"May I take my leave, sire?\" Maledicte asked but turned away without waiting for an answer.\n\n\"Mal,\" Aris said, his voice rough. \"Are you\u2014hurt? Your hand is bloody.\"\n\n\"It's not mine,\" Maledicte said, closing his fingers over the clotting gore. He turned his head and said something softly to the servant, and then they made their way out of the garden. Mirabile dropped a curtsy as Maledicte neared her, and he widened his path to give her a wide berth. Aris watched and worried. Maledicte had faced Last without hesitation or the merest sign of fear, yet skirted Mirabile. Her expression was no longer that pleased half smile, content that a man was whipped for her whim, but something darker, and far more calculating. She swept back into the house, her skirts trailing behind her, undamaged despite her claims otherwise. Aris frowned.\n\n\"It's witchcraft,\" Last spat, drawing his attention. \"Did you not hear anything he said?\"\n\n\"I heard a young man in a temper, showing remarkable loyalty to a servant,\" Aris said. He turned his unease on his brother, and his tone was cold and unwelcoming.\n\n\"You are witched. Do you think I failed to notice you seeking him out? Ask yourself what draws you so?\" Last said again, and as if he meant it more than angry words. \"Ask yourself what kind of man can take the lash's touch unscathed?\"\n\n\"A proud one who refuses to acknowledge hurt,\" Aris said. \"What man brings a whip to beat a clumsy servant and turns it on a peer of the realm? I think you've been too much in the city, Michel. Some rest might suit you. Go home to Lastrest.\"\n\nLast grated out, \"As you command, sire.\" He turned toward the stables, and said, more temperately, \"He is dangerous, Aris. I hope you never have cause to regret the license you grant him.\"\n\n\"Michel,\" Aris said, his temper fading, but Last walked away. Aris sighed, and sat on a garden bench, taking care to choose one that did not overlook the hedge where blood still spattered the leaves and lawn.\n\nMICHEL IXION, EARL OF LAST, lay in wait. He had arrived at Lastrest to find that Janus and Lady Amarantha were riding the grounds, but his temper demanded instant expression. So instead of busying himself with his correspondence, his bills, his petitioners, he sat in his reading room, the double doors wide to the hall and the front door, the leaded windows opened over rosebushes and the smoothly clipped lawn, waiting for the first sound of their return.\n\nA day and a half 's hard travel and distance from Maledicte's insolent mouth had not eased his temper; firecracker spurts of rage still flared beneath his outward composure.\n\nHe heard the hoofbeats first, drumming toward the stable, hooves spattering the fine gravel of the drive, and he frowned. They should have more care for the tender hooves of his livestock. Even as he thought that, he heard a woman's voice raised and the horses slowed.\n\nSome minutes later, the front doors opened and two sets of footsteps rang against the marble floor of the foyer. He rose and went into the hall. Janus and Amarantha dallied there, shedding gloves. Amarantha's cheeks were flushed, and Last thought the heat under her skin due to temper and not exertion, judging so from the rigidity of Janus's smiling countenance, from the slap of her leather gloves striking the hall table.\n\n\"Janus, I must speak with you at once,\" he said, in lieu of greeting.\n\n\"If you must,\" Janus said.\n\n\"At once,\" Last repeated, irritated anew at Janus's laconic acknowledgment.\n\nAmarantha said, in a remote tone, \"Courtesy is owed to one's elders.\"\n\nJanus's face went brittle; then he recovered his smile. \"Father, have you met Lady Amarantha?\" Janus said, drawing her forward. \"I believe you well acquainted with her parents.\"\n\n\"It's been some time since I've last had the pleasure,\" the earl said, frustrated in his desire to speak his mind at once. He bowed with careful formality.\n\nLady Amarantha shrugged out of her riding coat, ignored Janus's waiting hand, and dropped it over her gloves. She curtsied and held her hand toward Last. \"I remember you, of course. Father speaks highly of you. I am most grateful for your hospitality, my lord. This is a lovely and well-ordered estate.\"\n\nLast took her hand in his and raised her curled fingers to his mouth, thinking that Lovesy's daughter had grown into an uncommonly pretty woman. \"I hope Janus has been making you welcome.\"\n\n\"He has done his best,\" Amarantha said. \"If you will excuse me, I will change.\" She nodded again in the earl's direction before ascending the broad stairs.\n\n\"She seems a bit short with you,\" Last said, bemusement doing what time had not, cooling his temper. \"What have you done?\"\n\n\"Nothing pleasing, according to her,\" Janus said, looking after the retreating tail of her riding habit. \"However, I have vowed reform.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Last said, his brows folding downward again. \"Come with me.\" He led the way into the study, closing the doors behind them.\n\n\"I am at your disposal,\" Janus said, sketching a bow, darkening the earl's frown.\n\n\"Perhaps she finds your manner flippant. It is remarkable that Lovesy will even consider a match. Were I you, I would not jeopardize my chances with mannerisms borrowed from a scandalous source.\" Last closed the windows, and turned the key of the gas lamp up to push away the resultant dimness.\n\n\"Maledicte, you mean,\" Janus said, sitting opposite Last's study desk.\n\n\"I do,\" Last said, his temper flaring like a wick touched by flame. He took his chair, aware of protesting stiffness in his hips and other joints. Once, the journey from the city to Lastrest took him a day, galloping on horseback. Now, a carriage trip left him stiff and sore.\n\n\"This marriage of yours is well thought,\" he said, testing Janus's mood, since the calm face revealed nothing. \"Despite the story we have put about, you are nothing but a bastard.\"\n\n\"And Amarantha is no longer virgin. Which is more scorned by the court? Bastard or slut?\" Boredom flashed over his face; he stifled a yawn.\n\n\"You will not speak of a lady in that fashion.\" The earl continued, \"I am not as unquestioning as Aris. To truly convince me of your sincerity to the line of Last, you must end your unsuitable alliance with that creature and eradicate the unfortunate influence he has had on your tongue and manners. Or I will take steps of my own.\"\n\nJanus smiled. \"Every boy sows his wild oats to the distress of his parents. Actresses, whores, dancers, peasants...scandalous courtiers. I daresay Mal's attraction will pall; for now, I find too much enjoyment in his company to be rid of him so precipitously. But I will endeavor to convince Lady Amarantha and yourself of my sincerity toward the line of Last.\"\n\n\"Your creature thinks to set up house here,\" the earl said, his tone darkening at the memory.\n\nJanus sighed. \"Such a wild mouth on him. He says things merely for effect and to watch people rage. You must have pleased him mightily.\"\n\n\"Until I took the whip to him,\" Last said.\n\nThe distant amusement in Janus's face vanished, then reappeared so quickly that if Last had not been studying Janus closely, he would have missed it. The realization chilled him. His son was not only a stranger, but an able liar. Last was forced to recognize that he could not believe anything Janus said. That phantom blaze in the pale eyes, that hot rage, convinced the earl of one thing: Maledicte, wretched creature that he was, spoke truth. More truth than he had from this stranger sitting across from him. Dread seeped into his bones, quenching his anger with caution.\n\n\"Go away,\" Last said, rising from his seat. To make too much of the conversation would be to reveal his shock, so he resorted to a simpler anger. \"Repair your tongue before you speak with Amarantha again. We will discuss your influences when you are in more of a humor to take this seriously.\"\n\n\"Sir.\" Janus bowed and left the room.\n\nLast sat alone in his study, thinking. Perhaps Maledicte, with his open enmity, was the lesser danger. Resolve tightened his mouth, shook the last trepidation from his mind. Janus would not find his way to the title so easy. Last would insure that.\n\nA folded letter caught his attention; discarded a week ago, now it beckoned him. Dantalion bemoaned that his agent had disappeared and asked counsel. Last had further advice for him now.\n\nLooking up from his work with quill and parchment, he saw Lady Amarantha descend the stairs in a wash of buttery yellow that set off her pale beauty like a diamond set in gold. Rising, Last went to the window, broke off the first scarlet blossom to hand, and met her in the hall.\n**\u00b7 24 \u00b7**\n\n**W** HAT SAYS JANUS?\" GILLY ASKED, twisting in his seat, testing the sting and pull of healing scabs. He glanced over the emptied plates and soiled silverware to Maledicte, lounging in his chair, boots on the table, letter in hand.\n\n\"Stop squirming, you'll have them open again. And as you were such a baby about their bandaging, I'd prefer not to do it again,\" Maledicte said without looking up. His booted feet knocked over his wineglass as he shifted; his brows furrowed as he squinted at the letter, a little beyond the range of candlelight.\n\n\"Janus says that all is well, save that Last and Amarantha are trying to drown him in examples of proper etiquette. He asks if I am well, after Last's assault with the whip\u2014hmm, some misunderstanding there, I see, though perhaps Last has rewritten his memories.\"\n\n\"I don't wonder at it,\" Gilly said. \"There seems to be a good deal of that in the court.\" Maledicte shrugged, leaving Gilly to his own dark memories, that he had not gone within ten feet of Mirabile, fearing her nails, her temper, and yet, they all believed her when she spoke against him. He fisted his hands, wishing it were only that her words had the weight of aristocracy behind them, and fearing it was more.\n\nMaledicte continued reading. \"He writes that Amarantha is a difficult woman but that Last seems inclined to make the match work, spending time with Amarantha when Janus cannot.\" Maledicte reached for his glass, chuffed in disgust when he found it tipped and his fingers wet. He rose and went to the sideboard to pour himself another glassful.\n\n\"I don't like that,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte agreed, concern pinching his features. \"Are you going out tonight?\"\n\n\"I meant to. I'll stay if you want me.\" Gilly reconsidered his visit to Lizette's. He felt as if he were back in the country, watching his family race to protect their crops from a looming storm.\n\n\"And deprive you of your fun? No, if I do that, you'll make do with Livia, and I'm running low on Harlot's Friend. I swear you are a worse rake than Vornatti.\"\n\n\"Quantity makes up for quality,\" Gilly said, startled as the words came out of his mouth, unsure of his own meaning. Belated awareness dawned red and hot on his face and neck. He pulled his glass back to him and drank, avoiding Maledicte's eyes, trying not to let Maledicte see his hunger. Quality, he thought, letting his eyes rest on Maledicte's pale hands.\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"And they think my tongue vicious. If that is the case, by all means, go to your girl.\"\n\n\"I can stay,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Don't be foolish,\" Maledicte said. \"Go on, then. She'll be disappointed, otherwise.\"\n\n\"Only at the lack of coin,\" Gilly said, conscious that he wronged Lizette, but torn between her softness and the odd coziness of being alone with Maledicte.\n\n\"You sell yourself short,\" Maledicte said. \"Those shoulders, that sweet face.\"\n\nHis gaze raked Gilly from head to toe in a speculative, appreciative fashion and a second flush of embarrassment rushed Gilly's skin.\n\nGilly remembered Maledicte bandaging the whip's stripe, bent so close that his hair had brushed Gilly's bared chest. It had been that touch that set him squirming. He stood, half-naked, with Maledicte's light fingers on him, and yet Gilly had never so much as seen the white lines of Maledicte's shoulders or the sinews of his back or thigh.\n\nGilly had shifted from foot to foot until Maledicte laughed. \"If you're that agile, you can't be much hurt,\" he had said, \"But really, Gilly, did no one ever teach you to step away from the whip?\" He stroked the last plaster into place; it tugged the skin taut over his ribs. Gilly winced, desire and embarrassment forgotten.\n\n\"This hurts out of all reason,\" he said.\n\n\"It's the hatred behind it that festers,\" Maledicte said. \"Be glad you were not born a sailor on one of your beloved ships, or you would have felt the whip long ago.\"\n\n\"Not I,\" Gilly said, \"I would have been a perfect sailor. They would have made me first mate by now.\"\n\nMaledicte laughed. \"With your hair bleached white, and your skin burned brown, running around in torn breeches\u2014\" He smiled at Gilly with a considering light in his eyes and Gilly felt warmth bloom deep within his body. Maledicte stepped closer, stroked Gilly's cheek, and Gilly's ardor cooled. He moved away from the touch, from Maledicte's hand.\n\nShadows chased themselves across Maledicte's eyes.\n\n\"Your hand,\" Gilly said. \"Where you caught the whip\u2014your injury's gone without a mark. I still bleed.\"\n\nGilly remembered that now, as he dithered between leaving and staying, the storm-cloud feel of fate in the air, and the lingering presence of Ani in Maledicte's eyes.\n\n\"What, a compliment renders you dumb?\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly flickered a smile, and nodded. \"I will go out.\"\n\nHe shrugged on his coat against the evening's coolness and opened the front door, startling a young messenger, hand upraised to knock. Gilly closed his eyes in acknowledgment. The storm, he thought, had come.\n\n\"Message?\" the boy squeaked, still nervous.\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, \"I'll take it.\" He handed the boy a coin, and went back in, holding the sheet sealed with blue wax as if the weight of the world hung from it.\n\n\"Not gone?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Janus sent this,\" Gilly said. He dropped it before Maledicte, on the white tablecloth marred with spilled wine.\n\nMaledicte broke the seal. He let the note fall to the table, his face white, his fingers clenching on open air as if he would do battle if he only had the blade at his side.\n\nGilly recognized Janus's black scrawl at once. There was only one line on the note.\n\n_Father wed Amarantha Lovesy last night._\n\n\"I should have killed him the moment he first stepped within my reach and damned the consequences,\" Maledicte said, surging to his feet.\n\n\"Only a setback,\" Gilly said, trying to keep the bloody light in Maledicte's eyes from flooding outward.\n\nMaledicte hurled first his plate against the door, then Gilly's; at the shattering china, a maid poked her head in and as quickly withdrew it. \"Setback? Last has wed. Had he ever intended Janus to follow him, he would never have married. It is more than a counter, Gilly, it's Last's declaration that he will stymie us any fashion he can. I've waited too long, too lulled by your talk of consequences and Janus's mercenary considerations and caution.\"\n\n\"And how will you kill Last? His murder will be treason, Mal. Janus might well inherit by murder, it's happened before, but you...you would be forced to flee. Alone. Or do you think Janus would give up a title for\u2014\"\n\n\"Get out, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, voice thinned to a thread. The sword bloomed in his hand and the black light rose in his eyes.\n\nGilly edged away from the blade that tracked him, from the insane anger in dark eyes, until he reached the door.\n\nIn the center of the room, Maledicte sparred with shadows that crawled out from the walls to meet him. Maledicte shivered as if in a fit, the shadows ripping at the touch of the blade, spilling slow darkness. Kritos's dark shape, last seen lunging toward them in an alley, rose up behind Maledicte, and Gilly gasped. But Maledicte turned like a somnambulist and struck him down once more. Remembered triumph lit his face and he slowed his swordplay, tension in his eyes slackening, his lips parting. He shuddered all over, and he pressed the sword into the floor, skewering Kritos's corpse. He slumped. The shadows hovered.\n\nGilly returned in a rush, bearing Maledicte away from the blade, grabbing the slender shoulders hard enough that he knew Maledicte would bear bruises tomorrow, if Ani allowed it. Maledicte emitted a wordless shriek of rage, a vibration in the ravaged throat, and then Gilly was holding a madman.\n\nGilly yowled as Maledicte's teeth bloodied his knuckles, as Maledicte's elbows found his sore ribs. But he held on, like trying to cage a raptor, pinning it without damaging the fragile bones, all the time aware of the beak and the talons and the snapping edges of wings pulled taut.\n\n\"You cannot give in to this,\" Gilly said, his mouth near choked with Maledicte's hair. \"Now, more than ever, you need reason and patience, not blind rage. You must be cunning, must be clever, must be careful.\" His breath was rapid, his words mere pants of air and sound, and he wondered if they still contained meaning. He pinned Maledicte's arms behind his back, unnerved at the bowstring tension in them. If he let go, what would happen?\n\n\"Ani loves blood for blood alone. Vengeance begets death and nothing more. You tell me She does not rule you\u2014make me believe it. Or you'll end as others have, mad or dead.\" In a desperate hope, he whispered one of the little paeans to Baxit, god of indolence and reason. Either aspect would aid Gilly now.\n\nMaledicte went limp in his hands, slumping forward like a puppet freed from its strings. Gilly, taking the sudden weight in his arms, found his pulse hammering with more anxiety. Was this a feint? If he let go, would he find Maledicte coming back at him and with the sword in his hand? Beneath him, Maledicte grumbled.\n\n\"Mal?\"\n\n\"Get off me,\" Maledicte said. \"What are you doing? Trying to wrench my arms out of true over a few broken plates?\"\n\nGilly slackened his vise-grip on Maledicte's wrists, feeling like a bullyboy, aware of how Maledicte's slender bones ground beneath his hands.\n\nGilly released him and Maledicte turned, his face filled with simple irritation. \"Rats take it, Gilly. If you're not even going to let me throw a tantrum in my own house, there'll be no fun left at all in being wealthy.\"\n\n\"A tantrum,\" Gilly said. \"Is that what you call it?\"\n\n\"Two broken plates. And you knock me down,\" Maledicte said. \"And my sword? Were you trying to break it, wedging it in the floor like that? You've bloodied your knuckles on it and serve you right. I need it to kill Last.\"\n\nMaledicte stepped over and put his hand on the hilt, tugging it free. Gilly flinched, but Maledicte only complained, \"I've lost the sheath again.\"\n\n\"It's probably still abovestairs in your room,\" Gilly said, his lips numb with shock. Did Maledicte remember nothing of the moments between broken crockery and Gilly's hold?\n\n\"I don't carry the blade unsheathed. I am not the callow boy I once was.\" Maledicte sat at the table, laid the blade out before him, ran his fingers down the steel, sheeting blood from the blade as if the shadows had been flesh enough to bleed.\n\n\"Gilly?\" Maledicte said. \"Did you hurt yourself badly on it?\" A faint tremor touched his fingers.\n\nGilly touched his own hands, scraped and bloodied, hands that had never touched the blade at all. \"You came down without the blade,\" Gilly said. \"It came down later.\"\n\n\"Ridiculous,\" Maledicte said, his tone so uninflected that Gilly had no way of telling if Maledicte believed him or not. \"It's only as word. But think how useful it would be to have one that heeled like a dog.\" Maledicte's lips lifted in a movement too faint to be smile or snarl, though it held something of both, and more, the death's-head rictus of a gallows corpse. Gilly, picking up the largest pieces of shattered china, flinched at his expression, and watched his blood roll over the porcelain. For the first time in a long, long while, Gilly found himself frightened of Maledicte and the violence that eddied around him like storm winds, merciless to friend or foe alike.\n\nJANUS ARRIVED JUST AFTER TWILIGHT. Gilly opened the door to him silently, still listening to the quiet voice within himself warning that Ani was gaining Her ascendancy with each passing day.\n\n\"Where is Maledicte?\"\n\n\"In his rooms.\"\n\nJanus hesitated on the stair. \"Angry?\"\n\n\"Possessed,\" Gilly said. The ugly word hung between them.\n\n\"Rats eat your nonsense.\" Janus turned. \"Maledicte is no one's creature; there is no god of love and vengeance anymore.\"\n\n\"Maledicte made his vow to Her. He's bound to Her as surely as he's bound to you.\"\n\nJanus's face flushed, quick temper rising in his cheeks, then fading. \"You know so little of him. Maledicte has an odd and morbid sense of humor, prone to elaborate charades.\"\n\n\"I know him well enough to declare that humor, like perspective, is something Maledicte lacks,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Perspective?\" Janus said, eyes paling further yet, until Gilly was minded of distant lightning.\n\n\"He is determined to see you earl, even at the cost of his own life, while you sit back and allow him the risk\u2014\"\n\nGilly didn't see Janus move as much as felt the rush. Then his back slammed against the flocked wallpaper with enough force to set little motes of color floating free. His head and ears rang with the impact. Like an insect pinned, he struggled until Janus's gloved fingers closed on his throat. Janus pinched the pulse on either side of Gilly's neck with delicate inquiry, his face placid, his eyes mad.\n\n\"I could choke your life away and Maledicte would forgive me. He would forgive me anything. Remember that before you speak so. You know nothing of me if you think I would endanger Maledicte. Do you not listen? I've told you time and time again. He's mine.\" Janus released Gilly, ghosted past him and up the stairs.\n\nGilly shuddered, left to himself in the empty hall. Again the _Virga_ crept into his mind, the siren song of sea and sail.\n\nMALEDICTE HEARD THE DOOR open and close, unheralded, and knew, without looking away from the window, that Janus had entered. Only he made himself so free in Maledicte's home. But numbed with rage, Maledicte waited for Janus to come to him. Janus's hands rested on his shoulders, turning him, drawing him close. \"Janus,\" Maledicte whispered.\n\nJanus buried his face in Maledicte's neck. \"I am sorry,\" he said, his voice roughed with exhaustion. \"Sorry I did not win her hand. Sorry I made mincemeat of my duty. Though by the gods, I am not sorry to see her tongue hitched to another.\"\n\n\"Will you loose me on him now?\" Maledicte said, raising his eyes to Janus's. \"He plots against us, Janus. He'll have you prisoner, soon enough, confined to Lastrest or the town house, watched and spied upon.\"\n\n\"He already does that,\" Janus said. \"Haven't I crept away from their wedding reception? But kill him? Not without a plan.\"\n\nMaledicte stepped out of the warm circle of his arms. \"My blade, his heart. What more plan do I need? Set me free to act. Didn't I rid us of Kritos?\"\n\n\"Kritos was a rogue and a gambler. That he died as he did was not worthy of comment or even much concern. To beard Last, who rarely leaves the courts, or his estates, is a far thornier problem.\"\n\n\"I want him dead. Need him dead. Blood flows the same regardless of one's surroundings. If it goes wrong, if suspicion brands us guilty, we can quit the earldom entirely. We'll gut his estate and live like kings in the Explorations.\"\n\n\"Flee like rats? Die like rats, when the money runs out?\" Janus said, shaking Maledicte. \"I'll not revisit that life again.\" His hands stilled on Maledicte's shoulders, caressed where they had bruised. \"You remember hardship. Even were you minded to risk it again, it would be worse than you think, knowing what we do now. The taste of fresh bread in the morning. The warmth of fireplaces in the winter.\" Janus kissed Maledicte's mouth when he started to speak again, sealing the words away with his tongue.\n\nJanus walked him back toward the bed, and when their lips parted, continued, \"The softness of silk on our skin, the luxury of sheets and velvet coverlets. It's more than luxury, Mal. It's safety.\"\n\nMaledicte fell back into the feather mattress, his shirt falling open, the corset sliding down to his waist. Janus pinned Maledicte's hands above his head, buried them in the soft drape of down pillows. \"I will endeavor to put Last in the path of your blade, winkle him out of his secure areas, but you must wait for it. I don't intend to lose you to a verdict of treason.\"\n\nMaledicte looked up at the pale eyes, kissed the fine scattering of gold down at the back of Janus's neck. \"Make it soon?\"\n\n\"Very soon,\" Janus whispered. \"My dark and bloodthirsty cavalier.\"\n\n\"Time is our enemy,\" Maledicte said. \"Amarantha must not\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh,\" Janus said, \"It's been near a fortnight without you.\"\n\nMaledicte gave himself over to the familiar, marvelous touch; sighing, moaning, biting where such response was called for, and all the time he thought of Last's machinations working against them. Again he found himself balancing the simple act of vengeance and flight weighed opposite this elaborate charade of parry and counterthrust, of politics and power. The rushing pleasure that lit Janus's face only dimly touched Maledicte, lost in his thoughts of blood and patience.\n\nJanus disentangled himself from the loose knot of their legs, stretched, and said, a little crossly, \"Even whores feign their pleasures.\"\n\nMaledicte stroked the furrow on Janus's brow. \"Whores do not have such schedules and schemes as I do. Amarantha is a threat to us. But to kill _her_ would be to only delay the problem. Until you deliver Last to my blade, she might quicken and deprive you of your birthright. We must keep her barren until I have Last's heart spitted.\" He slipped from Janus's grasp, the comforting softness of the bedsheets, and opened his chest of poisons. Dragging his finger along the vials until they sang, he found the first glimmer of pleasure. It wasn't death, but it was a small vengeance even if it moved through Amarantha instead of Last.\n\nHe pulled out a handful of waxed paper twists, each pale green at their heart, and returned to the bed, spilling the papers out between them. \"Harlot's Friend,\" he said. \"You recognize it?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Janus said. \"Our mothers used such to prevent pregnancy. But Mal, how am I to get her to drink it daily?\"\n\n\"Daily prevents. Monthly\u2014she'll miscarry if she's gravid. Rougher on her, but far easier for you. All you need do is slip it into her wine. Though I warn you now, Janus, I will not tolerate a wait of months.\"\n\nJanus tucked the twists of paper into his pockets, sat up and began straightening his clothes, fastening buttons and retying laces.\n\n\"Janus?\"\n\n\"I'd best be back before my absence is noted. Now that Father feels he has the upper hand, he has laid new strictures on me.\"\n\n\"Were he dead, he could set no such rules.\"\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Janus warned.\n\nMaledicte looked away. \"If you're bent on leaving, there are fresh linens in my armoire. You'd best have one. I've clawed your cravat past discretion.\"\n\nJanus searched out the snowy lengths of cloths, sorted through them while Maledicte watched with an amused eye. \"The one on the end is starched silk, if that's what your pampered skin demands.\"\n\n\"Tie it for me,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte let the sheets unwind and reached out. \"Ever the aristocrat\u2014lift your chin more, hmm? I wear my linens to disguise. You will not leave yours off even for a covert jaunt across town.\"\n\n\"Dress is the easiest aspect of rank to mimic and a visible sign of breeding,\" Janus said, rising to check his appearance. He ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing the sleek locks. \"Westfall may gad about town like a rustic in shirtsleeves and open collar...he has ten impeccable generations behind him. But if I appear with a veneer of dust marring the shine on my boots, it is because I am only a bastard, aping my betters.\" Janus curled his mouth in a smile unlike his usual pleasant one. \"But a title will change that. Or at least take the whispers from my hearing.\"\n\nMaledicte moved Janus's sweep of hair aside, kissed the nape of the neck, silk stiff under his lips. \"When will you be back?\"\n\n\"Two nights from now. Father and Amarantha attend another wedding reception,\" Janus said. \"I will creep out of my window like some lovesick suitor, and come courting.\"\n\n\"Promise?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nJanus turned, cupped Maledicte's face in his hands, pressed their foreheads together. \"I swear.\"\n\nLOOKING OUT over the crowded room, the Duke of Love turned to Last and said, \"Has your son forgiven you? I saw him only briefly and thought him a little grim.\"\n\n\"It matters not,\" Last said, sipping from his glass. \"His spirit has been too independent for my tastes. This may chasten him. He is too much Celia's son, willful and selfish.\"\n\n\"Some of that may be due to venal influences,\" Love said.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Last growled. \"That damned...I'd see him gone, only Aris is unaccountably fond of him.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Love said. \"Have you seen this week's paper? And Poole's scurrilous caricature? I've set Echo on the artist, but unless Aris objects, nothing will come of it.\"\n\n\"I missed it,\" Last said. \"But it can hardly be worse than Poole's previous images, my brother the king of slavering hounds.\"\n\n\"It's vile,\" Love said, drew Last aside, and into the quiet recesses of his study. He unfolded the broadsheet.\n\nLast's mouth parted and his cheeks flushed. The image was drawn with careful simplicity, not the usual cluttered style of the artist, but something designed to be quickly memorable. Maledicte, all dark hair and lush mouth, lounged on the throne, his sword naked in one hand, and in the other\u2014a long leash fastened about Aris's neck. Aris himself had been drawn so that his face was nearly witless, blindly turning away from the corpse labeled Vornatti at his feet, looking up at Maledicte with adoration. Last's hand crumpled the page. \"Tell Echo to jail Poole. We'll see if he has influence enough to free himself. And then we'll know who aids him in spreading such slander.\"\n\n\"Mirabile, no doubt, started the rumor; her whispers have increased tenfold in scope. And people believe where before they only listened,\" Love said. \"But that still leaves us with the ultimate source of your troubles and mine. Maledicte.\"\n\nLast sighed. \"I thought that problem solved once. Dantalion, Vornatti's displaced heir, sent an assassin, but either the man failed or was bought. I believe Dantalion plans to handle it himself once his position as Antyre's new auditor is official.\"\n\n\"A foreign assassin on our shores? Dantalion hunting our courtiers?\" Love said, scowling. \"Itarus is too free with their manners and too blatant in their hatreds. You should have mentioned such to me or Captain Jasper at once. Had he succeeded with Maledicte, he might have turned his attentions to the throne. Itarus would reward an assassin well for Aris. Still\u2014\" He raised his head and met Last's eyes. \"The idea is sound. Perhaps we can accomplish the task on our own. I have a manservant who might be of assistance. A man I've used before to rid myself of a troublesome stableboy. Why not a troublesome courtier?\"\n\nLast smiled. \"Do this thing, and I'll renegotiate Amarantha's bride portion.\"\n\nLove said, \"Let me grant you this as a wedding gift. All you need do is insure Janus's absence from Maledicte's side. Despite his posturing, I think the boy only a stripling. On his own, he should prove no threat.\"\n**\u00b7 25 \u00b7**\n\n**L** ATE TE NIGHT, the town house fell into silence as the maids retired, the cook settled to sleep, and the empty butler's chambers cooled. In his bedroom, Maledicte alone sat awake. In the hall below, the great clock tolled out the quarter hour, and Maledicte set his book aside. With every chimed note, Janus's promised arrival grew less likely. With every chime a new fear took hold.\n\nPerhaps Last had drugged Janus and sent him abroad, a prisoner until Amarantha's worthiness could be proved. Or maybe Last had chosen to gamble the future entirely on Amarantha and had drowned Janus like an unwanted cat. The old wounds on Maledicte's side and face burned, a scorching reminder that Last had defeated Miranda before, had robbed her of Janus before.\n\n_Before Me_ \u2014Ani's whisper throbbed in his blood, turning fears to fury, but without any comfort. Janus had no such protection. Ani's wings sheltered Maledicte only. Maledicte picked up the sword, dancing his way across the room with it, stabbing and slicing as if his fears could be defeated by bladework. Were Gilly home and dreaming, Maledicte would creep in to find solace in the placid face. He would wake him to hear him grumble and find his fears pushed back by the familiar voice. But Gilly was out, visiting the damned brothel girl.\n\nWith a flourish of the blade, Maledicte whirled and took his sudden temper out on the heavy mahogany door. Red wood peeled back like parting flesh and Maledicte sighed.\n\nHe discarded the sword, a little ashamed of his tantrums, ashamed of his doubts and fears. Janus would come.\n\nBehind him, the air shifted, the dark scent of the night fogs creeping in. Maledicte turned to see the windows parting and a man surging through. He leaped for the sword, his fingers falling short as the assassin lunged forward, and tumbled them both across the room. Maledicte fell to his knees beneath the brute's weight, and, snarling, turned to claw at his face.\n\nThe garrote caught him by surprise, still warm where the assassin had held it close. It fell over his head, and, sword forgotten, Maledicte strove instead to deter the closing noose. His hands changed direction, forcing panic away for planning. Instead of clawing at the assassin, he clawed at the wire, managing to slip a hand up between the tightening loop and his neck.\n\nMaledicte wheezed for breath, forcing his hand farther through the loop, skinning the flesh on his forearm, and nearing the elbow. If he could only get the wire past his elbow, he could slip out of it, its chokehold vanished with the inclusion of shoulder and rib. But the wire tightened, making it hard to muster the energy needed. Doggedly, breathlessly, Maledicte wormed his arm up another inch; the assassin rolled them both forward and put his knees in Maledicte's back.\n\nMaledicte could see the sword now, only a yard away, and thought if Gilly were right, if the sword could come to him at will, now would be the time above all. Maledicte's last breath faded and fled, scorching his lungs with its haste. Where was Ani's aid now? Or was this assailant unworthy of Her notice, being no part of their bargain.... Maledicte's blood drummed in his ears; he clawed backward, one-handed, trying to find leverage.\n\nThe door flew open and the assassin's grip slackened in surprise.\n\nMaledicte sucked in air, put his shoulder up, and squirmed through the garrote loop, heading for the sword. His hand was on it when he heard the crash. Turning on unsteady feet, he saw Gilly holding the downstairs poker and standing above the assassin. One look at the huddled form and Maledicte dropped the blade. \"You saved me the effort. Do I thank you?\" he croaked.\n\nWhite to the lips, Gilly held his death grip on the dripping iron of the poker as if frozen in horror and Maledicte repented his flippant words.\n\nHe took Gilly by the shirtsleeve and steered him away from the corpse, opening his fingers and letting the poker fall.\n\n\"I saw him, a shadow going through the window. I didn't think I'd make it.\" Gilly's voice trembled and faded like an amateur singer at her debut.\n\n\"You did,\" Maledicte said, pressing Gilly back into the softness of the chair, tucking a blanket around his shoulders. \"You're shaking.\" His own composure was returning, the familiar rush of breath and anger, both so essential to him.\n\n\"I just\u2014Did I kill him?\"\n\n\"He's not like to rise after you knocked that piece of skull loose. Tell me, did you ever play at stick as a child?\" Maledicte poured a glass of brandy for Gilly, curled his fingers around the heavy crystal.\n\nGilly raised the glass to his lips, managed a sip, and then let it settle in his lap again. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Only knocked about.\" Maledicte sat down on the bed and rubbed his throat with tentative fingers. His other hand drummed and twitched with residual nervousness and he started to his feet again.\n\nGilly passed him the brandy glass. Maledicte tossed it back, coughing as the liquor hit strained flesh.\n\n\"He's the duke of Love's man,\" Gilly said, shifting in his seat so that his head rested against the sheltering side. \"I recognized him as I struck. I forget his name, but not his face.\"\n\n\"The duke? What wrong have I done him?\" Maledicte felt as bewildered as a child, the clarity of battle gone.\n\n\"The king's favor, perhaps,\" Gilly said. \"The scandal of it. Or Last may have borrowed him.\"\n\n\"Last,\" Maledicte said, rather more pleased than not to gain another reason to hate the man. He knelt beside the body and began rifling the assassin's clothing. An inner pocket yielded a note on expensive parchment. He unfolded it, trying to keep the blood sliding down his arm from obscuring the words.\n\n\"What is that?\" Gilly said, roused from his shock by the sound of paper. He took it from Maledicte's hands. \"It's instructions, but no names, not even yours.\"\n\n\"Well then, if he can't be useful, let's get him out of here. I swear he's beginning to stink.\" Maledicte picked up the poker. \"Do you have a lucifer on you?\"\n\n\"You're not going to burn him?\"\n\nMaledicte found a reluctant smile at Gilly's evident horror. \"Only the blood and hair on the poker. He's far too fresh for that kind of thing. But I am open to suggestions, Gilly. The night will not last forever, and I am tired. You know everything; tell me what to do with him.\" Maledicte's tone was soft, conciliatory.\n\n\"I never had to know how to dispose of corpses until I took service with you,\" Gilly said. He stared down at the body, at the ruined head, and flexed his fingers. \"We bluff.\"\n\nTHEY STAGGERED QUIETLY down the dim, carpeted hall, past the sweeping main staircase, to the narrow attic stairs, the corpse hanging heavy between them. Gilly's hands, wet with sweat, slipped on the man's booted ankles, and he made a hasty catch to prevent them from banging on the stair riser. Maledicte, breathing harshly, signaled a rest, propping the corpse's torso up along the wall. Gilly looked away from the staring eyes, hating that this was his idea, and so disallowed him complaint\u2014his idea to turn the assassin into an unlucky thief who had fallen to his death.\n\nMaledicte, kicking speculatively at the cooling body, had suggested his bedroom window as the \"thief 's\" point of attempted entry, but Gilly pointed out the plush lawn and rose beds below. A man might break his neck, but not open his brain box in such a fall to such a surface.\n\nSo they carried his weight toward the high attic window, where the decaying trellis made plausible both an attempt at entry and the successive fall to the stone path below.\n\nMaledicte's other suggestion\u2014that they claim self-defense, and allow Echo the pleasure of removing the body\u2014Gilly had rejected out of hand, citing the inadvisability of allowing Echo within Maledicte's rooms at all, given the man's desire to prove Maledicte culpable of something, anything. Gilly had held his breath until Maledicte agreed, but knew from the look in the sharp, dark eyes that his real motive had not gone unnoticed: If it were a thief and an accident, then Gilly would not have to dwell on the thing he had done....\n\nGilly looked up to find the dull shine of the corpse's eyes fixed on him. Something slick and wet slid down the dead face, reminding him of a melting waxwork. Gilly fought bile. No wonder the aristocrats dueled; they could kill someone and be away, even as the body fell. They never had to tidy up after. Maledicte's cold fingers touched his wrist, startling him.\n\n\"Stop gawping. You've been blooded now and no distress on your part will undo it. Take his ankles and be done with your vapors,\" Maledicte said. \"But let me go up the stairs first. If we take him head down, we'll have to clean the stairs after. The night is long enough without that.\"\n\nDeath\u2014aristocrats turned it into sport, Gilly thought savagely. He took a step too fast and Maledicte stumbled.\n\nToo near the top and the maid's rooms to apologize, Gilly merely shrugged. Maledicte tugged again and started up, his hair and eyes slipping into shadows, then the shadows flowing forward and enveloping them entire.\n\nAt the top of the stairs, they hesitated, looking for thin lines of light that might betoken a maid still awake. But the darkness was near absolute; only the faint gleam of night sky sketched out the floor beams as they crept by the maids' rooms and up the last half stairs to the attic proper.\n\nMaledicte set the body down with a sigh, stretched his hands up to the roof, easing his back and shoulders. \"Why are the dead so damn heavy?\"\n\n\"Awkward, not heavy,\" Gilly said. \"You or I could have carried him alone, were it not for the stairs and our own squeamishness. Cradled like a lover, there'd be little difficulty.\" Though looking again at Maledicte's slight form, he doubted his words.\n\n\"He's stiffening,\" Maledicte said, prodding the corpse, then locking his grip around the assassin's chest so that his hands met and knotted into each other, white-knuckled. \"Let's finish this.\"\n\nGilly shifted his grip from dead ankles to thighs, trying to take more of the weight, seeing the tension in Maledicte's hands echoed in his neck and shoulders.\n\n\"I am going to make Love regret this,\" Maledicte panted as they maneuvered the body up to the narrow windowsill.\n\nThe corpse stuck for a moment, then it dropped with a rustle of ivy and the sudden burst of black wings. Maledicte and Gilly jumped back as a handful of rooks came in the window, their sleep disturbed, their wings beating like Gilly's startled heartbeat.\n\n\"Did you know they were nesting there?\" Gilly asked, when the last rook had found its way back into the sky.\n\n\"It's convenient. Gives him a lovely reason to have been startled and fall to his death. You've done well by me tonight, Gilly. My lucky piece, faithful friend.\" Maledicte brushed Gilly's cheek with his lips.\n\nGilly found himself wondering what all his distress had been for. An assassin who would have killed Maledicte?\n\nDown below, the blurred black shape of the assassin, broken on the pale stones, shifted and seethed. Gilly flinched, and looked at Maledicte, startled at the apparent movement and sick at the thought that perhaps they had dropped a living man. But Maledicte merely smiled and Gilly realized the moving blackness was not the man, but the man covered in feeding rooks.\n**\u00b7 26 \u00b7**\n\n**O** NCE AGAIN, MALEDICTE FOUND HIMSELF at the heart of scandal; the young courtier nearly burgled by the duke of Love's own valet. As if that were not enough to keep tongues wagging, the confrontation between Maledicte and the duke, which started with mutual recriminations and threats, ended in Love's apoplexy and death. And all, rumor had it, without Maledicte even needing to draw his sword, or raise his voice. There were bets laid, trying to guess what it was Maledicte had said. Some rumors said it wasn't words, but the rudeness that had kept Maledicte from allowing Love and Echo entrance, kept them standing in the cold, morning drizzle. Brierly Westfall, Mirabile's sweet-voiced mouthpiece, said she had heard that Maledicte cursed Love's family. Others claimed he mocked Love's pride and so sent him into apoplectic rage.\n\nWhen the bets grew high enough midweek, Maledicte entered the game himself, swearing he would tell them what he had said, if the victor would split the spoils. He visited the Horned Bull, over Gilly's objections of discretion and propriety, and went through the betting book himself, finally awarding a young poet the purse. \"It wasn't so much,\" Maledicte said, smiling at the wildest fancies of witchcraft and exotic poisons. \"All I did was bar my door and tell Love it was in fear that, as his man was a sneak thief, why should the master be any better? Love had a weak heart. His own temper undid him.\"\n\nPoole, the caricaturist, still ensconced in Stones, made the scene his next work when he heard of it: Maledicte, cloaked in shadow, ringed by sly faces, with coins spilled before them all. He captioned it \"Betting on Death,\" and behind Maledicte's image, the horned brow of Haith, god of death and victory, loomed. Gilly fussed when he saw it, but Maledicte only grinned.\n\n\"You must be more discreet, stay home and be\u2014\"\n\n\"Besieged by visitors curious to see where first Love's man and then himself died? No, Gilly, that's begun to pall.\"\n\nBut in the midst of all the notes Maledicte received, the invitations to scandalous gatherings, the reawakening interest in the dark cavalier who had been silent for a season, one omission stood out. From Janus, there had been nothing, and Gilly knew it was that which had driven Maledicte out and about, courting his attention.\n\nWhen Janus came, it was days later and late at night. He came cloaked in secrets and wearing all the signs of a late appointment to a lover's rendezvous, dark linens, newly applied scent, and barbered cheeks.\n\nGilly let him in and Janus swept into the parlor as if he knew that since the attack Maledicte had not slept well within his bedchamber. Gilly, following Janus, resented his glib assurance of welcome, even a week late; he was appeased at Janus's sudden pause at the sight of Maledicte stretched out on the chaise longue beside the spinet. All in dove gray, Maledicte embodied both demureness and danger.\n\n\"Was it an assassin? The duke's man?\" Janus said, dropping his cloak over a chair, ignoring the slow slide of velvet-trimmed wool as it puddled over the edge and fell to the floor. Gilly picked it up, draped it again.\n\n\"The duke's man. Your father's hand. Sit, if you're not going to drink; Gilly's teaching me to cheat at pennywhist.\"\n\nJanus bent to kiss Maledicte and Maledicte turned his head like an affronted maid, refusing to be turned up sweet.\n\n\"That's a servant's game,\" Janus said, seemingly willing to humor Maledicte's mood. He settled himself on the chaise, bumping his hip against Maledicte's.\n\n\"Victory is victory, no matter the stakes.\" Maledicte stood, stretched in another series of deliberate movements.\n\nWatching, always watching, Gilly was reminded of smoldering fires in Maledicte's stillness, of hot lampblack, of the mountainous volcanoes abroad, rumbling.\n\n\"The body,\" Janus said. \"Why the charade?\" He gripped Maledicte's hand, tugged him back to the seat, settled him between his thighs.\n\n\"I thought a dead burglar would be less commented on than a dead assassin,\" Gilly answered when Maledicte did not.\n\n\"I wish you had waited,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Wait, always wait. How you love that song. Should I have just propped him in a closet?\" The edge rose in Maledicte's voice suddenly. \"Or send a card, begging Last's pardon, but could Janus come aid me\u2014I seem to have a corpse in my bedchamber? I was sick of the sight of him, and Gilly was just sick. And you were not here.\"\n\n\"Father changed his plans and kept me at his side, late into the night, going over land management for land I may never own while I acted the obedient son. But I'm done with that,\" Janus said, nestling his face into Maledicte's hair. His eyes grew blue and bright. \"Is your sword sharp?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said, \"No.\"\n\n\"Don't tease,\" Maledicte said, after a frozen moment.\n\n\"I am in deadly earnest,\" Janus said. \"He tried to kill you. He cannot be allowed to try it again. I have flushed our quarry, Mal, goaded them into movement. It is time to hunt.\"\n\n\"You're hiding something,\" Gilly accused, meeting the gas-flame blue eyes with his own. He wouldn't flinch. Not anymore.\n\nJanus slapped his gloves back and forth in his palms. \"Only that I gambled on our plan, our odds of success, when I am not entirely sanguine of the result. I am not a gambler by nature. But after Father's attempt on Maledicte's life, waiting seemed even more of a fool's game.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"I poured Amarantha a drink, taking care that she saw\u2014\"\n\n\"What does it matter?\" Maledicte interrupted. \"Just tell me where\u2014\"\n\n\"The docks,\" Janus said. \"To the _Winter's Kiss_ and thence to Itarus, where they can ally with another who wishes you dead.\"\n\n\"Dantalion,\" Gilly said in Maledicte's place.\n\nMaledicte seemed uncaring, eyes half closed, a smile curling his mouth. A man lost in a delightful dream of murder. He opened his eyes, pure triumph simmering in their depths. \"You doubt those odds, Janus? I'll slaughter Last ere he ever sets foot on the _Kiss._ \"\n\n\"You cannot run into the night waving your sword like a barbarian,\" Gilly said, standing before the door into the hall and the city outside as if to bar their way.\n\n\"Don't fret, Gilly. It does you no good and cannot change what we do,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"We could hire footpads to kill Last for us. Take a page from his book,\" Janus said.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, rising again, as slim as his sword. \"What joy is there in blood spilled by proxy?\"\n\n\"But sword wounds look like nothing else. If you made it appear accidental, an attempted robbery or some such\u2014\"\n\n\"Burn it,\" Maledicte said, settling his sword around his narrow hips. \"I have been patient. I will be so no longer.\"\n\n\"I set a boy to watch the house,\" Janus said. \"He'll send word when Last leaves. You'll wait that long.\" Half command, half entreaty, it worked well enough that Maledicte stopped in his forward path toward the door.\n\nMaledicte paced the confines of the hallway, much like the caged animals of the city gardens, waiting, refusing to be drawn into further speech, though Gilly tried. It was nearly dawn before the message came, a one-word note. _Now._ Maledicte was out the door before the paper had fluttered to the tiles.\n\nThe rooks fled the roof, creeling and calling; in the stables, the horses shrieked as if their stalls were afire. Maledicte turned and walked into the retreating night, following the sting of salt in the air, and dragging shadows after him like the sweep of dark wings.\n\nTHE EARL OF LAST SWUNG down out of the carriage and gestured his coachman onward to the silent quay and the waiting Itarusine ship, distinctive with its ice-breaking prow. The tiger dropped from his post behind the carriage, not the usual skinny lad to run messages but a man Gilly's size. While Last looked after the coachman and crew now unloading his valises, the tiger kept watch, peering into shadows, a hand on his knife. In a dark niche of broken wall and alley, Maledicte's eyes narrowed. Did Last think a single, extra guard would be enough? Even one so large\u2014Maledicte had long ago stopped fearing men who outweighed him. They all bled the same. Insult lanced through him; that Last, who supposedly feared for his life, would rely on only one guard and his coachman for protection.\n\nThe dank, morning fogs hugging the streets and pier reached pale tendrils into Maledicte's lair and wrapped a cloak of obscurity around Last's form. Maledicte welcomed the warming trickle of hatred creeping through his heart and brain, Ani's shared rage eclipsing all else. The foggy fingers touching him slowly tinted to the ink of starless night. He stepped out of his lair, onto the pier, eyes focused on the tall blur that was Last, and the shadows in the alley followed him out, spreading soundlessly, blanketing the wharf in untimely dark.\n\nThe tiger, for all his jumping at shadows, was woefully unprepared when Maledicte emerged, blade already drawn and moving. The size, the strength, all for show, Maledicte thought dimly, as he moved past the man falling to the street, blood pouring from his ruined throat. Last would have done better to bring a hound, which at least could have been counted on to bark.\n\n\"Last,\" he said, when he was a swordstrike away.\n\nThe earl spun, one hand clenched the haft of his cane, the other the handle, while he quickly sought sign of the guard. Finding no one, he twisted the cane. It clicked and showed a faint gleam of metal. No surprise showed on his features, only resignation and rage. \"He set you on? So be it. You will not dispose of me so easily as you think.\"\n\nMaledicte lunged without response, thrusting the blade forward. It made an eager hiss all its own, and the earl parried, using his cane to deflect the blow. The wood split, revealing the sword beneath.\n\nThe earl shoved, using the steel core as a lever, and forced Maledicte's retreat, giving him a moment to strip the sword of its ruined sheath. Maledicte danced forward, and Last evaded the next blow by pivoting on one heel. Last called for help, but the words were swallowed by the black fogs. \"Witchcraft,\" he spat. \"You're nothing without it. You couldn't take me without the god's aid.\"\n\n\"All She does is hold the world at bay,\" Maledicte said, lunging. His sword bit into the bulky coat. Last winced, then clamped the fabric close, trying to use it to disarm Maledicte.\n\nMaledicte hung on to his blade, slipped back, and Last ripped the hampering greatcoat off with a quick agility that made Maledicte snarl.\n\nLast snapped the weighted edge into Maledicte's face. Maledicte ducked away with no space to spare and ripped the coat from Last's hand, enraged that the man thought to use it as a shield.\n\nAt this long-delayed moment, it became apparent that the earl of Last was a swordsman of some skill, and, of course, was possessed of the urge to stay alive. But Maledicte, shadowed and dark, moving as if he had no more limitations than the fog itself, was merely possessed. Gradually, strike after strike, he began to win.\n\nThe darkness was as complete as if the deepest sea had reached up and drowned the city. In its black embrace, Maledicte's world narrowed to the ring of steel on steel and their panting breaths. There wasn't even room for rage or triumph; with Last dancing so well with him, all Maledicte could feel was the enjoyment of physical exertion, and the breath-stealing anticipation of blood. The dark sword, ghostly in the fogs, swooped forward and took a bite; Maledicte moaned for Last, the pleasure deep in his belly surfacing. Last cursed and stumbled back, bleeding along his upper arm.\n\nThe fog carried the muffled prayers of frightened sailors. Nearby, the coachman called out but Last had Maledicte's sword pressing him, and no breath to answer.\n\nLast gained ground, took them from the treacherous slick wood of the quay to the cobbled edge of pier and street, but the effort left him bleeding from arm and thigh.\n\nHis face, set in lines of desperate concentration, broke and filled with a wild triumph as the coachman blundered into their duelists' circle. Maledicte danced back and turned, the blade flying from his hand to strike home in the coachman's chest. The primed pistol dropped from the coachman's hand, falling onto the cobbles with a crimson roar, its shot spent. Maledicte's pleasure turned to anger. The coachman thought to interfere; who might next?\n\nLast lunged forward, his blade aimed for the sweat-wet cravat at Maledicte's neck and Maledicte slipped away in time to save his neck, if not his waistcoat and shirt. The fabric ripped, the dark brocade, the pale linen, the dense cotton, all rent with one swift stroke, baring Maledicte's moon-white flesh and ending with one drop of blood blooming and fading at his collarbone.\n\nMaledicte growled at the touch of the fog on his skin. He was a body's length from the coachman's corpse and his sword, and his temper was turning foul.\n\nThis went on too long; every minute brought Last closer to reprieve. The pistol shot would have been heard, and though the fog played havoc with sound, eventually they would be found. Even now, Maledicte heard a woman shrieking, a high, shrill sound that set his teeth on edge. Last hesitated, his face confounded; Maledicte lunged in a long, low dive for his distant sword, even as Last shook the astonishment from his face, and returned to the fight.\n\nLast's blade missed his tumbling form by a hair's breadth. More silk ripped; the riband holding his hair slithered down his neck and pointed out how close the blade had come, but the coachman's body and Maledicte's sword were within reach. Maledicte's hand closed on the sharp-feathered hilt of his sword and it slipped from flesh and bone as if a human body were just another hilt.\n\nMaledicte shook the hair from his face and backed Last toward the pier. The duel was done. The set blankness on Last's face told Maledicte such, the fear unmasked in blue eyes. Maledicte darted out with his blade, a bird's quick stoop for prey, narrowed his vision to Last's throat. The man parried at the last, but Maledicte's blade shrieked over steel and sliced through Last's ear.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Last gasped.\n\n\"Is that what ails you?\" Maledicte laughed, trying to imagine what Last saw. His hair falling loose, shadowing his eyes, the feral snarl of teeth and tongue, the pale skin and delicate breasts bared to the night air.... Were Last less of an aristocrat, he would fear less, but in his experience, women were nothing but playthings and pawns. That one could wield a sword and more, fight him to the death, would be beyond his experience.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he cried again.\n\n\"Black-Winged Ani.\" The name forced itself free of Maledicte's throat without his willing it.\n\nLast staggered and Maledicte punched the sword into his chest, twisted the blade for the pleasure of hearing the man cry out as he fell. Blood welled, bubbling through Last's sweat-soaked linens, spurting against the fabric as blood and air fought to escape. Left alone, Last would bleed to death. Maledicte knelt beside him, touching the wound. \"Is it your heart I've hit, or your lungs? You took my heart once.\"\n\n\"I will not beg,\" Last said, a rough whisper, blood frothing his mouth.\n\n\"Nor did I, and it made little difference.\" Maledicte brought his hand to his mouth and nose, smelling the hot tang of blood. He licked his fingers; blood warmed his raw throat, meeting his thirst, but not slaking it.\n\nDizzy with rage, he stood. It was not enough. Maledicte swayed, wondering whose hunger he felt, whose bloodlust. Last was near dead and in a moment Maledicte would finish the deed, his revenge accomplished in blood and shadows. But he felt nowhere near sated, and inside his belly, wings fluttered.\n\nA bare gasp behind him reminded him of Last's physical presence and he turned, wanting to see the light fade in his eyes, the life leave. But Last was not alone. Another man had found his way to the heart of the fogs.\n\n\"Filth,\" Last gasped, \"come to see your leman kill me? I should have killed you at birth.\"\n\nJanus bent and slit his throat ear to ear.\n\n\"He was mine!\" Maledicte said, rage erasing his voice so that all he could do was whisper.\n\n\"You were too slow. I was worried about you. And rightly, I see, mooning about, half-naked,\" Janus said. He tugged the gaping sides of Maledicte's shirt together. Maledicte's fingers curled into a fist and, feather-blind, he struck. Janus reeled, licking his split lip, eyes darkening. \"What matters who killed him? You made him bleed, you made him fear you.\"\n\n\"He was mine,\" Maledicte said, \"Mine.\" He tightened his hand on the sword hilt; it seemed to surge in his hand. He lunged and buried the sword in Last's body once more. Janus spun, stepping out of range. Maledicte wrenched the sword through Last's guts, hoping for some final groan, some final hurt he could wring out.\n\n\"Enough, Mal,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte, not listening, pulled the sword from Last's chest, then sheathed it when he realized that all he wanted was to spill blood and that the only person within reach was Janus. He stared out at the sea, dark waters surging and receding, at the ships slowly becoming visible as the fog thinned and faded. The shining figurehead of the _Winter's Kiss,_ a young man seemingly carved of ice, glimmered as the fogs parted. Gilly would like that one, he thought, and with that the rage faded. The earl was dead. His vengeance done, Maledicte stared down into the blank eyes, the gaping, slack mouth. Ani's touch subsided into sulky confusion.\n\nMaledicte watched the body, waiting for some sign, his eyes never leaving the corpse, though Janus spoke his name twice, then finally in exasperation\u2014\"Miranda!\"\n\nShe turned, searching for words to explain her dismay. The earl of Last was dead and her victory was as meaningless as when she first heard his name. Last\u2014it had meant nothing to her then. Dead, he meant nothing to her now.\n\n\"Over your tantrum?\" Janus asked. \"Grab his ankles and let's sink him into the water; we'll weight his coat with cobbles and delay the discovery that much longer.\"\n\nMaledicte mutely did as Janus said. He watched the body drop by slow degrees deeper into the water, fading. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Aiding you,\" Janus said. \"Amarantha?\"\n\n\"She's here?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Aboard the _Kiss,_ I suspect,\" Janus said, lips thinning. \"Well, there's no help for that. Unless we want to fight the entire crew.\"\n\n_We could,_ Ani whispered. _Turn the waters red._\n\nMaledicte shook his head, and at Janus's imperious wave, went over to help him with disposing of Last's men.\n\nThey were still stooped, the sagging weight of the burly tiger held between them, when two sailors came out of the night, drunk and staggering. They blinked and one of them frowned. \"Milord Last, is that you?\" Janus pulled his cloak over his pale hair, and traded a glance with Maledicte, one that needed no special communion to be understood. The sailors had to disappear. Maledicte reclaimed his sword and flew at them, and they, panicking, headed not for the safety of the ship, but back into the dark streets. Janus yanked his cravat up over his nose and cheeks and followed as silent and supple as a cat. Maledicte still gained on the two sailors, moving as light and quick as a shattering of glass.\n\nHe darted through a shadowed alley and tore the shadows after him. Looking behind him, one sailor tried to sign an avert charm and stumbled. Maledicte pounced, jamming his head against the rocks. He freed his sword from the hilt, and Janus, flashing by, said, \"Not the sword.\"\n\nMaledicte snarled but balked, understanding. The sailor struggled to rise, and Maledicte picked up a rock. He brought it crashing down on the man's skull, heard the wet crack, and remembered Miranda's lectures. He bent over the corpse and plucked the few lunas left from the bag.\n\nJanus returned, out of breath, but dragging the second sailor behind him. He dropped the body near the other. \"Did you get his purse?\" he asked.\n\nMaledicte nodded.\n\n\"Then let's leave this. There's no great mystery to drunken sailors being set upon for coin,\" Janus said. \"And I need to be home, setting arnica to my mouth. A bruise might be hard to explain, should Last surface with the next tide.\" His tone invited apology, but Maledicte denied him that.\n\nIn truth, Maledicte wouldn't be able to apologize even were he so inclined. This final death stole his voice; he fought a surprising urge for tears. The sailor was no part of his revenge. Just a man visiting the city whores and finding his pleasure where he could.\n\nJanus glanced at him and said coldly, \"If Ella had had her way, you'd be bedding men like this.\" He tugged Maledicte closer, and wound a narrow strip of cording around his waist, cinching the fabric closed. \"Try not to run into Gilly, hmm?\"\n\nMaledicte touched the dead man's belt and nodded. He strode off into the darkness, heading for home, clinging to the shadows of the Relicts like a ghost, daring someone to confront him, to recognize him. Invoked by Janus's words, he almost expected to see Ella staggering out of an alley, shaking down her skirts. Maledicte wondered what would happen then. Would Ella even see Miranda in Maledicte's guise? Most like, she'd not even look, but scuttle away, recognizing danger, if not her child. Maledicte wondered briefly if Ella had grieved when Miranda left, if she had meant anything to her at all, beyond merchandise.\n\nSudden thoughts stilled his feet, left him numb. Miranda was nothing, a rat, but Janus\u2014Celia knew Last had taken him\u2014why had she not followed? Surely the gossip reached this far\u2014surely she knew that Janus had come into coin.... Her absence meant she was either dead or so far lost in her Laudable dreams she might as well be dead. And what befell Celia undoubtedly befell Ella. Maledicte shed a shaky breath and went on, dreading his past rising up to meet him. But alleys passed in these uncanny fogs, peopled only in his imagination; Maledicte saw no one.\n\nHe arrived home and crept in through the kitchen. Cook drowsed in her chair, and fresh dough rose on the counter. The dark, sour scent of the yeast made his stomach clench. He fled the kitchen, halting when he found Gilly dozing on the main stair, a guttering candle spilling wax over the riser. Maledicte backed away, and crept up the servants' stairs.\n\nIt was done, he thought as he stripped the bloody shirt from his flesh. Even now, Last plagued him, the cloth sticking to his skin, making its removal close to pain.\n\nDone, and Janus to be earl. Maledicte winced. If they escaped conviction. He ripped off the ruined corset and dropped it in the pile of stiffening cloth.\n\nNaked, he fumbled to the hearth, searching for lucifers. He thrust the fabric into the fireplace. Kneeling, he blew at the struggling flame and succeeded only in scattering the fine ash left behind from last season's fire. It stung his eyes and brought him to tears again.\n\nWhy this weakness? Why this grief? Maledicte could not understand it. No such thing had plagued him before.\n\nDaylight showed through the curtained glass of his rooms, and, despairing, he sloshed the brandy over the slow-singeing clothes. Then and only then did the room fill with the stink of burning blood and embroidery. Some of the rigidity left Maledicte's shoulders. He scrubbed his face with cold washwater, trying to wipe the ashes away. The cloth came away speckled with red as well as black, and he squeezed it out until the basin turned pink. The face, the figure that looked back at him from the glass was that of a madwoman and he refused to let his eyes rest on it. He was Maledicte, the dark cavalier, Last's scourge. Ani's servant. _Still_ Her servant. And with Last dead, whose blood could release him?\n\nDaylight reminded him that the maid would come to bring fresh water and morning tea. The clothes had best be burnt by then, burnt to ashes. He stirred them with the poker, set glowing sparks free to sting his bare arms and hands. These faint pains woke him from his stupor, and he dressed with his usual elaborate care. Fine leather breeches laced along the thighs and belly for the fashionable fit. Another corset, secreted in the space that once held Vornatti's will, bound his chest and thickened his narrow waist. He layered on the shirt, finest lawn, and the brocade vest, tied his cravat in a reasonable facsimile of the popular Leaffall, and called it done just as Gilly's familiar tap sounded on the door. \"Mal?\" Anxiety laced his voice.\n\nAt his invitation Gilly came in and coughed. \"What are you burning?\" he asked, flinging the windows open without waiting for permission. He poked at the black remains of the fire, and said, \"Oh. Did you do it then? Kill him?\" His voice grew tentative and pained. \"Were you seen? What happens next?\"\n\nMaledicte hefted the brandy bottle, but the liquor was gone, fed to the fire. \"It's all ashes,\" he said. \"Nothing but ashes. Can you tell me why this should be so unsatisfying?\" He took the poker from Gilly and stirred the fire, breaking the charred fabric into black dust. \"I plotted this death for years. Gloated over it, imagined it, fed my rage on it. And it's ashes in my mouth.\"\n\n\"Ani goads you, spurs you on to mad rages, and when you've done as She wished, She recedes, taking it all for Herself. And you're left with nothing but the aftermath of blood. Now that your vengeance is done, She'll have left you completely.\" Gilly let out his breath and studied the carpet beneath his boots, scuffing at soot that had spilled out with the withdrawn fire-iron. \"Most of Her previous children have gone mad with Her loss.\" His voice shook.\n\nMaledicte said, \"Gilly. Look at me and tell me She's left me. That Ani's mark is gone. You who see it so clearly. My compact completed\u2014that I am no longer Her stalking horse.\"\n\nGilly sucked in his breath. He touched the shadows under Maledicte's dark eyes, and then looked into the shadows in the eyes themselves. \"No. She rides you still.\"\n\n\"The earl is dead, but She lingers. Is this all my future holds? Blood and fighting? I wanted Janus back and I have that. I wanted riches enough to never starve. I have that. If this night's bloody work remains a mystery, Janus will be earl, and there will be nothing left to need.\" He wrenched his chin from Gilly's grip, and collapsed into the chair beside the fire.\n\n\"Janus will always want more. He's near as hungry as Ani Herself,\" Gilly said, bitterness in his tone. \"Why is Ani still with you? What happened, Mal?\"\n\n\"It's all ashes,\" Maledicte repeated. He slumped, his face in his hands, tears in his throat.\n\n\"I know something that is all ashes, without question,\" Gilly said, changing his mood with an audible effort. \"What did you do, clean the hearth with your hair?\"\n\nDistracted, Maledicte touched his hair, and frowned at the dusting it left on his fingers. Gilly collected the ivory-backed brush from the dresser and said, \"Lean forward.\"\n\nMaledicte bent his head, letting his hair dangle over the hearth, and Gilly brushed the ashes out, brushed until Maledicte's hair gleamed like a rook's wing.\n\n\"What color ribbon do you want?\" Gilly said. \"Your usual black, or something more dramatic?\"\n\n\"Black will do,\" Maledicte said. \"I am expecting Echo at any moment. Even if Last obliges by staying disposed of, his disappearance will cause comment. And that means Echo again. I never thought how apt his name was before\u2014he keeps returning, my words distorted on his lips.\"\n\nGilly gathered the dark strands into a queue, tied it off at Maledicte's nape, making a neat knot and letting the ribbons dangle. \"What will you say?\"\n\n\"It hardly matters,\" Maledicte said. \"I am not the only one with animus against Last, and until his body surfaces, Echo will be hard pressed to charge me with a crime. He'll assume I killed Last. But he'll have to prove it\u2014and he'll find no witness to the deed.\"\n\nGilly frowned, thinking beyond his immediate worries for Maledicte's sanity, for the compact still unfinished. \"I'll send out runners and spies, those who can differentiate whispered fact from wishful rumor. We'll know what Echo plans before he does. And Amarantha?\"\n\n\"On the _Kiss,_ we think,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"I'll send a letter in her wake, then, asking Vornatti's spies in Itarus to keep their ears open. If she's abroad, she'll seek Dantalion as Last would have done.\" Gilly sucked in a breath, beginning to hope that, Ani's lingering presence notwithstanding, Last's murder had been accomplished without jeopardizing Maledicte's neck.\n**\u00b7 27 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY PACED OUTSIDE MALEDICTE'S ROOM, waiting. It was the dark night of the year, and superstition held that the unshriven dead returned on the Dark Solstice. Once there had been solemn ceremonies to placate the dead, but in the bored hands of the aristocracy, the Dark Solstice had become another excuse to play.\n\nDid the dead come back and to the court, Gilly thought, they would return to their graves, ashamed for the antics of the attics-to-let and the debauched, for the gamblers who took advantage of their costumes to cheat with abandon. Though none was truly masked in the select crowd, caught in the nets of well-recognized foible and mannerism, they could pretend and act accordingly. Despite his creeping unease at the idea of Vornatti's ghostly step sounding in the hall, Gilly wished Maledicte had chosen not to attend, not when Mirabile had paved their path with rumors centering on Last's disappearance and Maledicte's possible role in it.\n\nThe Dark Masque, though, had put a spark into Maledicte's eyes, replacing the sullen temper and brooding fits Maledicte had been prone to since Last's death. Gilly had expected to see only release in Maledicte's eyes after the earl's death; everything the boy had craved was granted. Janus, his lover; the earl of Last, dead. Gilly knew where his own unease lay; Ani's continuing presence as obvious now as it had ever been, darkening Maledicte's nights, sending him into muttering rages and long bouts of sword practice against enemies only he could see.\n\nPerhaps, it was simply that the changes had proved fickle and fleeting. Janus was Maledicte's, true, but Janus was also at Aris's beck and call, and Aris still hunted him a wife. The earl was dead, but earl was a title and it could be bestowed else\u2014\n\nThe floorboards creaked along the stairwell; Gilly twitched but didn't take his eyes from the closed door. For one moment he even wished Janus here, waiting in this dim hall. On the darkest night, Gilly would prefer to spend it in Lizette's arms, letting the flame of her hair warm him like sunlight, letting the ampleness of her charms drive dead men from his mind. But Janus attended the masque as part of the king's entourage, and not Maledicte's escort. Gilly believed that it wasn't the masque itself that had brought the smile to Maledicte's face, but the simple fact that he would see Janus this evening, after a long month where Maledicte had seen Janus only rarely.\n\nThe stairs creaked again and Gilly turned his head in time to see a gray figure slip away. For a bone-shuddering moment, he believed in the dead as wholeheartedly as a child, but it was only Livia, stealing down the main stairs to avoid Cook's watchful eye.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Maledicte asked, ghosting from his room.\n\nGilly shivered, caught by the dark eyes behind the raven mask. It was as if he saw Maledicte for the first time, and he was surprised all over again at how lovely Maledicte was. The lush mouth beneath the jutting black beak curled in amusement, changing the shape of the face. For one dizzying moment, Gilly saw a woman in a mask, behind the mask.\n\n\"Speechless?\" Maledicte asked, the harsh rasp of his voice breaking the illusion. He stepped closer and the rook feathers sewn into his coat glimmered and shifted green, gold, and returned to black. The scent of dusty feathers washed over Gilly, the sweet pungency of lilac. He imagined touching the lush mouth, and the sudden violence of his desire made him quake.\n\nLizette teased him often about his love for Maledicte, and he allowed it, acknowledging his fascination, and acknowledging that Maledicte was not his. A bittersweet pang. But tonight, for the first time, he wondered if he could change that, wondered why his heart and body had run so counter to his tastes. He took Maledicte's slim shoulders in his hands, the feathers rustling against his palms, and drew him closer.\n\nMaledicte looked up, inquiring and impatient. \"Say something. I thought you would like the feathers. And what a time I had collecting them.\" Gilly imagined kissing the sulkiness from Maledicte's mouth, but the beaked mask was more than proof against such incursions.\n\n\"Do you think it wise to parade your allegiance with Black-Winged Ani?\" he asked instead.\n\n\"It's not the fashion to believe in gods, remember?\" Maledicte said, pushing away from Gilly. He paused in his path down the hall, and said, \"Come along, Gilly. We're running late, and we must get you a mask. Should Vornatti come hunting for someone to tend his needs, I will not have him find you.\"\n\nONCE AGAIN THE TWO HALF-MOON courts were opened to each other, Aris's sunrise half and the nobles' secretive twilight. But the whirl of time and sky was fractured, made into mazes with hanging mirrors, swaying gently in the press of bodies, reflecting dizzying views of gilded traceries on the walls and the movement of the revelers, clad in fantastic concoctions limited only by their pockets or sense\u2014lace and leather, masks and fur, and gems.\n\nSmall groups clustered near these illusory walls, where once they could have expected the gods' eyes to peer out at them, overseeing the Dark Solstice and its intersection of the living and the dead. Now the mirrors only served to double the attendees' numbers and the only ghosts were their own cloudy reflections. Masked royal servants, clad in gray velvet, moved like wraiths through the crowd, a reminder of the deaths the aristocrats evaded.\n\nIn the heart of the room, a raised dais stood, draped from above with a pale gray cloth that shimmered like rain in moonlight. The gilded chairs on it were empty, the backs of the chairs draped in black\u2014the only symbol of mourning Aris allowed himself for a brother not proved dead.\n\nMaledicte's face was stern behind the mask; his mouth, starred by a small velvet feather, grew tighter as he scanned the room, dismissing the crowd one costumed aristocrat at a time. In turn, Gilly noticed how few faces, even shielded, braved Maledicte's gaze.\n\n\"Janus will be on the dais with Aris,\" Gilly said. \"Do you know his mask?\"\n\n\"Do you think a mask can hide him from me?\"\n\nThe royal dais became a hive of motion, of servants moving back and forth. Through their smoky shapes, behind the silvery drapes, the diminished family of Last could be seen. Aris, in festival white, nonetheless wore black armbands, and his mask was shaped like Sorrow.\n\nAdiran sat at his father's right, in the queen's chair, which dwarfed his fragile body. On either side, the mastiffs, tongues lolling, watched the crowds, gulping foodstuffs that Adiran tossed them. A servant, clumsy with nervousness, stumbled over his own feet, and Hela chastised him with a deep, sudden bark. Adi giggled, tugged at her ears, holding his mask on with his other hand. He wore only a half-mask, white satin, trimmed with blue, and kept pushing it up his forehead, ruffling his hair.\n\nBehind him, hands on the high back of the throne, was a dog-masked man with blue eyes. Adi looked up at him and barked, echoing Hela with a curious, imitative precision. Janus smiled and straightened his cousin's mask once again. He raised his head and met Maledicte's gaze, smiling.\n\n\"Will you dance?\" a woman asked in Maledicte's ear, her hands on his shoulders, her breath on his nape.\n\nDespite the dulcet words, there was a edge to the voice that Maledicte recognized. He knew her, mask or no mask.\n\n\"What reason will you give me, lady?\" he asked, taking in her costume, the twin to his own in spirit if not in shade. Where Maledicte's feathers were un-seasonably black, Mirabile's were unnaturally white, though more in tune with fashion. Her beaked mask had rubies crusted around the eyeholes, the only spark of color about her. Even her hair had been powdered to whiteness.\n\n\"Think how well we will look,\" she coaxed.\n\n\"Is that more important than enmity and spite?\" Despite his glibness, her presence made him wary. He had not forgotten his atypical docility alongside her in Jackal Park, the way he had bent to the certainty in her eyes. Time had not diminished that strength.\n\n\"Infinitely,\" she said, holding out her hands. He had been wrong about the rubies being her only color. Her ungloved hands showed red nails, painted like any harlot's.\n\nMaledicte drew back, turned, and found his path thwarted by a swaying mirror. Reflected in it, Janus bowed over a young woman's hand, drew her into a dance with a smile while Aris looked on approvingly. Mirabile ghosted up, a shimmer of red-eyed white in the mirror, and Maledicte found his hands entwined with hers as the dance began.\n\nThey danced in silence, Maledicte fighting the drowning sensation of being nothing more than her shadow, of having as little mind as a shadow\u2014He forced through the numbness finally, his voice rough, \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Found your tongue, I see,\" Mirabile said. Her lips curled in approval. \"I was sure you would.\"\n\n\"Found my tongue, my will, and my senses,\" Maledicte said. He forced his steps to a halt, and freed his hands. \"I am done with you\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" Mirabile said, and fit herself back into his arms as if his rejection had only been a flirt within the dance pattern. \"You ask me what I want? Nothing so dire as to make you frown so. I only wish to aid you. And in doing so, aid myself. Our common goal\u2014\" Her eyes darkened as his grip tightened, grinding the small bones of her hands together, but showed no other sign of pain.\n\nMaledicte said, \"What have we in common? _Nothing._ \"\n\n\"Nearly everything,\" she said.\n\nMask to mask, Maledicte faltered a step, seeing Ani mirrored in her, and made no reply. She smiled sweetly, savagely at him, and said, swaying close, her voice a whisper, \"You think your task is done, your compact fulfilled? When Last's death is not on your hands, but on those of your impetuous lover, who stole your kill?\"\n\nFor one moment, Maledicte knew sympathy for Gilly, who preached caution with an ever-increasing avidity. For Mirabile to speak so in the king's presence, among witnesses, for her even to _know\u2014_ Maledicte shivered, suddenly unsure of who he held in his arms, Mirabile, the vicious-tongued harridan, or Ani Herself. The pale feathers on her costume brushed his, whispering.\n\nMirabile leaned in, warmed his cheek with her breath, and said, \"Intercessors dream of the gods through an imperfect window, but I am one of Ani's chosen, and I...I dream of you. I saw you in the blurred shadows of sleep, you and Ixion, killing him.\"\n\n\"How dull your wits have become,\" Maledicte said. \"To think to entertain me with past events that I experienced for myself.\" His mouth dried with unease. Once he had chastised Gilly for dreaming of him; to have Mirabile doing the same was far less bearable. Were they not the cynosure of the room, he would claw her eyes out that she not see him, tear her tongue out that she not speak of him.\n\n\"Now, now,\" she said. \"Ixion favored you when he struck, whether you know it or not. To keep Ani close, clutched in your heart, can only be a boon. She grants such gifts\u2014\" Mirabile's eyes fluttered, opened again, russet eyes red-tinted as if they had taken on some of the rubies' bloody splendor. \"Everything you ask, She grants, and all you need do is allow Her in as deep as She will go. You've asked so very little of Her, caught up in your petty obsession with Ixion. My advice is simple. Forgo this business of love and settle into power.\"\n\n\"Such things you say,\" Maledicte said. \"I believe you are mad.\" Over the wheeling of the dance, the flashing mirrors, the rustling of feathers meeting feathers, he saw Gilly watching, concern etched in his furrowed brow.\n\n\"Why play the fool?\" she said. \"We are kin, the children of the carrion crow. Be my complement, my comrade, and we will do as we will. Isn't it seductive, my dark cavalier, to see the knowledge in their eyes\u2014that their lives are in your hands or mine?\"\n\n\"Your hands are too dainty for such work,\" Maledicte said. \"You're only a spoiled aristocrat and delusional with despair. A gift of dreaming? Dreams are useless compared to a blade.\"\n\nShe tensed her fingers on his hands, digging her nails into the skin until blood welled.\n\n\"Weakling,\" she said. \"Gifted and you do nothing with it. Take power for yourself\u2014it will not satisfy you otherwise. Will you watch your lover rise, and stay weak as a woman, at his mercy?\"\n\nMaledicte stared at the distortion in her fine features as she shivered with rage. It touched ice to his bones, the realization that she was his mirror, or worse, his future. She had given herself wholly to Ani, and she was as terrible as a specter.\n\n\"Ani drives you mad,\" Maledicte said. \"I will not join you on that road. Your vaunted alliance would be only to lull me into complacency so you could stab me in the back.\"\n\n\"Knife work is your m\u00e9tier. I prefer subtler arts. But you doubt me, doubt my skills?\" She smiled, her eyes going distant. \"The ice,\" she said, \"breaks under the ship's prow. Shall I see what can be stirred to the surface? Bring your sins to light? I shall prove my skills to you, tonight,\" she said, curtseying and disappearing behind the nearest partition.\n\nSweat broke out along Maledicte's back and brow. Cold settled in his stomach. His hands shook, and he jammed them against his sides, striding purposefully for the doors and outside air. Gilly shadowed him, and Maledicte turned. \"Back off, Gilly. I'm in a killing mood.\"\n\n\"You're bleeding,\" Gilly said, flinching as Maledicte snarled.\n\nMaledicte forced his temper down, the pain radiating up his torn hands, and said plainly, \"I believe the bitch poisoned me. _Tested_ me.\" He moved onward to the balcony, shivering, hunching his shoulders against that spreading internal chill.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Gilly said, voice tight.\n\n\"I'm thirsty,\" Maledicte said. \"Bring me a drink.\" His hand swung again and again to his sword hilt; droplets of blood flecked the marble floor. Maledicte leaned over the edge of the rail, panting a little, then recovered his poise. \"Go on, Gilly. I'll be here. I've got my mask, after all, to protect me from death.\"\n\nOn the balcony, Maledicte watched the small wounds puff and swell with a near-indifferent eye, though he shook with chill and his feathers grew spiky with his sweat. Numbness swept over him, stiffening his legs, arms, and face, as if the chill in his veins had turned to ice. His breath labored. Then a convulsive shudder shook him and the small wounds spat back blood and something darker, something that trickled like a spill of greenish syrup. It pooled on the stone at his feet, and when it was done, he licked the scratches closed.\n\n\"Mal?\" Janus came out of the light, into the shadows on the balcony, and Maledicte rose from his crouch.\n\n\"Here.\"\n\n\"And hale? Gilly spun me a tale of poison,\" Janus said, setting the glass on the balcony railing. It chattered and clinked against the stone. The velvet quality to his voice was ruffled. \"I should have known he lied.\"\n\n\"Gilly so rarely lies,\" Maledicte said, picking up the glass and draining it. His raw throat eased.\n\nJanus sucked his breath in, grabbed Maledicte to him, touching his damp skin and peering into his eyes. \"You seem well enough.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said, curling into Janus's arms. Their hearts beat steadily against each other's: Janus's slowing as his fright eased, and Maledicte's speeding up from the dirge it had been dragged into by Mirabile's poison.\n\nJanus sighed into Maledicte's hair, bent to kiss him, and finding the mask's black beak in his way, pushed it off.\n\nMaledicte moved into Janus, pressing against him as if they could become one creature. Give up love for power? Mirabile was madder than he thought.\n\nToo soon, Janus broke the embrace. \"I must return.\"\n\n\"I have not touched you in weeks. A single kiss is all you spare me? Was this only an interlude in your quest for social acceptance?\" Maledicte's fear made him bitter. The poison came too close, woke fears long dormant, reminding him that the world could separate them at any time, and still, Janus chose to play games. \"Should I thank you for the time you've condescended to grant me?\"\n\n\"Mal,\" Janus said. \"I'm only trying to keep tabs on what is being said regarding Last, assuring Aris that you are blameless in Last's disappearance. And with Echo replacing Love as Counselor, I have much to defend against. But I'll come home tonight. I've missed you.\" He tugged Maledicte's hands to his chest, pressed them to his heart. Maledicte brought Janus's mouth to his again. The kiss lingered, but once more Janus broke it, this time walking away into the court.\n\nMaledicte stared after him for a hungry moment, wishing he could make Janus see that they needed none of this. Let them retire to Lastrest, out of Mirabile's threats and entreaties, out of sight of Aris and his attempts to continue the line. But he had sworn to aid Janus, and Janus wanted the court, the title\u2014Aris would likely reward a marriage with the title, once Last's death was accepted, and though that was what they wished, the idea of it woke some slow-burning worry in Maledicte's chest that he couldn't understand.\n\nSpying Janus's earlier dance partner, the tiny girl dressed as a wood nymph in green and gold, with a veil instead of a mask, Maledicte deserted the balcony abruptly.\n\nHe made his bow before the wood nymph's chaperone and took the nymph's hands. A mask was no aid to the little doll girl; her lack of inches made her obvious.\n\nThey danced in stifling silence for a full four measures before Maledicte said, \"If you hate me so much that you can't be bothered to be civil, I wonder why you agreed to dance at all. Surely no one would fault you for turning me away.\"\n\nShe looked up at him and flushed, the redness visible through the fine pale linen of her veil. Maledicte waited until the color had faded, then provoked it again. \"Can't you answer me? Or were you never trained to talk?\"\n\n\"Mother's desperate,\" she said in a breathless rush. \"I have six younger sisters waiting for me to wed.\"\n\n\"Does she think to attach me?\" he asked, incredulous. \"I might as well be the plague for a chit like you.\" Compared to these noblewomen, Ella was an amateur schemer when it came to profiting from her daughter.\n\nShe lowered her head and mumbled some words that, though unintelligible, made her flush again.\n\nImpatient, he tilted her head up, his bare fingers beneath the delicate veil. Her heart raced beneath his fingertips. \"Be brave, girl. You're masked. Perhaps I don't even know who you are\u2014as improbable as it seems.\"\n\nThe girl either took heart or umbrage, it was hard to tell, but the result was the same. She raised her head, a grim determination settling on her blurred face, and said. \"She wants me to wed Lord Last.\"\n\nMaledicte's temper turned in his belly. \"Brazen or desperate indeed. To use Janus's lover to meet him. Does she want me to tell you what pleases him? What makes him sweat and cry out? What his skin feels like under my lips? What he says to me while we're abed?\"\n\nThe girl's breathing quickened in shock. Such plain speaking was hard enough to hear for a maiden; for Maledicte to speak with such venom undid her composure completely. Her shoulders shook, and the veil over her eyes grew damp and dark with tears.\n\n\"Stop that,\" Maledicte said. \"I will not have you start another scandal with me at the heart of it.\"\n\nShe stopped struggling, and he loosened his painful tourniquet on her arm. They took another round of the dance without any speech; the spots of moisture on the veil shrank and dried, leaving only quivering lips and shaking hands to convey the shock she still felt.\n\n\"I think your mother must be mad,\" he said, though mad brought to mind not a matchmaking aristocrat, but Mirabile with her red eyes and bloody nails.\n\n\"Why\u2014\" The girl paused, then continued, her voice gaining strength, \"Why are you so cruel? I've never said a thing to hurt you. But you'll say anything to hurt me. You have every reason to be kind. You're handsome, and rich, and no one tells you what to do.\"\n\n\"You've never met my Gilly, if you think no one dictates to me,\" Maledicte said.\n\nThe dance ended and he bowed, but stayed at her side. She blanched as he drew her toward one curtained partition, a seat at the nexus of three mirrors. \"Your virtue is safe,\" Maledicte said. \"I merely want a word with you.\"\n\nShe nodded, biting her lips so hard that he thought the veil might darken with blood. He tugged it away from her face entirely, watched her eyes widen like morning-glories at sunrise.\n\nHe sat down in one of the quilted chairs, still holding her arm so that she had to bend with him. He drew her closer, put his lips by her ear. \"Your mother may want Janus for you. Aris may want the same. But if you take Janus from me\u2014\" His breath hissed out at the very thought. \"If you take him, I'll kill you. Best say no, should he come courting.\"\n\nShe whimpered and he said, \"We are understood?\"\n\nBacking away, she stumbled and nearly fell, stepping on her skirts in her haste to be out of his reach. Heads turned as she floundered across the floor, toward the shelter of her abigail and the cluster of debutantes drinking toasts to the dawn, safely arrived.\n\nMirabile passed through the debutantes with a word here, a touch there, and a smile for Maledicte cast over her shoulder as she bypassed the nymph sobbing in her chaperone's arms.\n\n\"That was not well done of you,\" Gilly said. \"Besides being a cousin to Westfall, Psyke Bellane is a gentle, inoffensive girl.\"\n\n\"Gentle, yes. Inoffensive?\" Maledicte said, \"No. But killing her would be like crushing a sparrow, so easy as to arouse more pity than satisfaction. By warning her off, I've done both of us a kindness.\"\n\n\"Only you could argue that way,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte pulled his mask off, dropped it to the marble floor. \"I've had enough. I'm going home.\"\n\nGilly's response was drowned in the sudden tolling of deep bells. This close to the palace, the sound was as powerful as the tide and as inexorable. Maledicte turned to catch Janus's eyes and met Aris's instead, and saw the quick shattering in them. Maledicte flinched.\n\n\"Last,\" Gilly whispered. \"The unshriven dead.\"\n\n\"Hush, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, taking his hand. \"Hush.\"\n\nOn the dais, Adiran, startled by the clamor, clapped his hands over his ears and wailed, his voice rising over the low pitch of the bells like a descant. Aris pulled him into his lap, soothing him. Jasper and Echo moved toward Aris at a trot.\n\nThe bells faded into silence though the mirrors still shivered with their echoes. In the sudden hush, a startled shriek rang out as a debutante fainted in her escort's grip. Gilly stepped closer to Maledicte, and Maledicte tightened his grip on Gilly's trembling fingers. \"Shh, Gilly.\"\n\nThe girl's abigail fanned her face, and her escort chafed her wrists, ever more frantically. He looked up with wide eyes. \"She's not breathing.\"\n\nBefore his words stopped sounding, a second girl fell, an heiress of some repute. By the time her people converged around her, the first debutante was dead.\n\nOn the dais, Aris stood and started as if he could see Death walking the floor. Jasper gestured madly and the Kingsguard enclosed the king, surrounding him. Hela barked, long, deep, and hoarse, the sound reminiscent of the death bells, and Janus closed her muzzle with his hand. Aris nodded his shaky thanks and they fled the court. As the king's doors sealed tight behind him, the chaos spread unchecked, as a third, then fourth girl collapsed.\n\nIn the doorway, shadowed by the rising sun, Mirabile smiled at Maledicte, and dropped the tiniest of curtsies, a performer acknowledging praise.\n\n**\u00b7 28 \u00b7**\n\n**A** RIS LOOKED DOWN AT THE wreck of a body resting on the marble slab, lying between Haith's sculpted hands, sheltering in the grasp of the god. Though pains had been taken with the corpse, the worst of the torn and waterlogged flesh hidden beneath the blue cloak, still the face was barely human. Only the chill of the winter sea had kept flesh and bone together, and Aris, remembering his first horrified look at the sea dreck his brother had become, knew that beneath the softening cloak were sections of bare bone.\n\n\"Sire,\" a kingsguard said, \"the courtier Maledicte has arrived. Where will you receive him?\"\n\n\"Bring him here,\" Aris said.\n\nThe guard's sandy brows rose nearly to his hairline, but he merely nodded. Aris turned his attention back to his brother's body, barely hearing the man leave.\n\n\"So it came to this,\" he said. \"Nearly alone, our family winnowed by time...You should have been the older, Michel,\" Aris said, feeling as if a weight had settled over his neck and shoulders, sinking toward his heart. \"You would have made a better king than I, I think, shortsighted and reactionary though you were. Antyre loves me not, and more, respects me not. You would have forced respect on them. Or fear. And I would not be left with this\u2014\" Footsteps echoed in the hall, the shuffle of feet on stone.\n\nAris raised his head. Few enough people came down the winding, dark hallways toward the chapel that he knew who it must be.\n\nMaledicte dropped a bow. \"You sent for me?\" Behind him, a guard lurked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Aris said, his throat rough. Maledicte's eyes were heavy-lidded, his hair loosely and hastily tied back. Small jet feathers sieved from them, and Aris remembered the two dancers, one black, one white, whirling around the ballroom, heads bent close together. His hands fisted.\n\n\"Come and see what has befallen my brother,\" Aris said, stepping away from the bier.\n\nMaledicte came forward, wavering like one of the shadows in the dimly lit room. He leaned over the ruined head, and stepped back, his pale face expressionless.\n\n\"Does it satisfy you to see him dead?\" Aris said. \"I know you hated him, though never the why of it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Give me your hand,\" Aris said.\n\nMaledicte proffered his right hand. Aris seized it and tugged him back to the edge of the bier. The sickly sweet odor of putrefaction washed over them, driving Maledicte's perfume back. His hand in Aris's struggled. Maledicte turned his face away, leaving Aris to speak to the wing of dark hair sheltering him.\n\n\"Touch him,\" Aris said, voice ragged. The guard leaned forward to watch, witness. Maledicte resisted, and Aris yanked his arm forward, stretching it toward the body. Tears started in his eyes.\n\nMaledicte turned, caged Aris's prisoning hands with his free hand, stopping him. \"A learned man so wild with grief,\" Maledicte whispered, his voice meant only for Aris's ears. Maledicte's dark lashes lifted; the black eyes met Aris's and Aris shivered. \"Which superstition are we chasing, sire? Is Last supposed to bleed at my touch?\" He freed his hand from Aris's grip, as gently and precisely as a pickpocket liberating coins.\n\n\"I doubt you can claim squeamishness.\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask me?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You must do it,\" Aris said, looking away from the sweet mouth turned down in distaste, hardening his ears to the intimacy of that raspy voice, so close, sounding so caring. False or not, it made Aris tremble.\n\nMaledicte stepped forward and touched his fingers to Last's forehead, then touched the sodden fabric over Last's heart. Then he spread his hand to show Aris the unmarked flesh. \"I did not kill your brother.\"\n\nAris no longer knew what to believe, his mind as cold and as numb as Last's corpse. As cold as the fallen debutantes, awaiting their spring burials. He only knew that death had come to his country on Maledicte's heels, that any member of his court must be an able liar, well versed in apparent sincerity, and that Maledicte had an unsavory reputation as a swordsman and blackmailer. The one Aris could testify to, thinking of the damning Antyrrian audit ledgers kept hidden by this boy's pale hands, weapons more worrying to Aris than the blade.\n\nAs for the sword\u2014those delicate hands were smooth, barely callused, and Aris knew that reputations were often based on gossip. Neither Aris, nor any of his guards, had ever seen Maledicte dueling. Even Echo, ready to condemn, had qualms imagining Last taken by Maledicte's sword. Last himself granted no aid; though he had spoken out against Maledicte in life, his body, caught up in the _Fleur_ 's anchor and dragged along the keel before breaking free, was too mangled to make any mute accusations.\n\nAris covered his eyes as if he could blot out the images, blot out the panic surging in his blood.\n\nAris shivered as Maledicte put his hand on his arm, unasked. He heard the guards shifting uneasily, but said nothing, instead allowing Maledicte to tow him away from the bier. He opened his eyes to see what expression he could catch on Maledicte's face, as if he could sneak up on verity when it eluded words, but learned nothing new, save that compassion sat uneasily on Maledicte's clever face.\n\n\"I thought you meant to question him, sire,\" Echo said, arriving in the doorway on an upswing of anger. Aris put another body width between himself and Maledicte.\n\nMaledicte said, \"Ask at will. I will give you no more difficulty.\"\n\n\"The debutantes,\" Aris said, his words overriding Echo's attempt to take control of the room. \"Had you anything to do with their deaths?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, startled and frowning. In the background, Echo scoffed, and it was to him that Maledicte addressed the rest. \"I am no killer of feckless girls.\"\n\n\"Whispers speak of a evil pact between yourself and Mirabile,\" Echo said, coming closer.\n\n\"Are you serving as counselor of gossip?\" Maledicte asked, his customary acid eating into his tone.\n\n\"You danced with her,\" Echo said, \"your heads bent close as if you shared secrets and schemes\u2014\"\n\n\"Never with her,\" Maledicte said. \"She's quite crazed. Send for her, Echo. I doubt she'll deny her wrongdoing.\"\n\n\"I sent Jasper to collect her,\" Aris said, noting the lack of concern in Maledicte's gaze. \"Echo, it's early. Let us continue this later, after we've spoken to Mirabile...\" He drew Maledicte away from Echo, closer to himself, and lowered his voice. \"I will see you out of this, but you will repay me with your discretion and silence this winter. I want no gossip to reach my ears of your doings.\"\n\n\"Such a thing you ask of me,\" Maledicte said. \"Surely, it is not within my power to still idle tongues\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" Aris said, in no mood for banter, not with his brother's corpse so near, not with the young man suspected of killing him. \"The court is closed. Until spring comes and wipes away death with life, there will be no balls, no celebrations, no masques. The nobles will rusticate in their country homes, or in town estates should they feel inclined. You will do likewise. Do so and I will give you Janus.\"\n\n\"He's not yours to bestow,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"But his absence is mine to command. I could see him mewed at Lastrest, trapped in mourning clothes and customs. Or I could keep him at my side exclusively\u2014\" Aris trailed off. In the dimly lit room, cold with death and pain, Maledicte's burgeoning anger felt huge, a looming, dark presence. Echo moved closer, hand dropping to his sword hilt.\n\n\"Little fool,\" Aris said, seizing Maledicte's shoulders and shaking him with all his pent-up frustrations. \"Do not force me to heed the whispers.\"\n\nMaledicte suffered the shaking meekly, his hair falling from its loose queue and hiding his face. His harsh voice came like a whisper of scale on stone. \"I will be discreet, sire, to the best of my ability, which is not inconsiderable, you'll agree?\"\n\n\"Aris,\" Echo objected. \"Better to hold him until we see what Mirabile has to say\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you so eager to keep me from my luncheon and my books?\" Maledicte asked. Aris felt like one of his dogs gone to point. The specter of the ledgers had been in the room since Maledicte's entrance. He had expected Maledicte to invoke their power sooner, and more bluntly. This reminder, so gently spoken, could be a threat, or merely a reminder that Maledicte could, indeed, be discreet.\n\n\"Go then,\" Aris said. His hand, still resting on Maledicte's shoulder, lifted and twined the dark hair around his fingers, turning his face up for study. It wasn't innocence that greeted him; Aris would have distrusted such an expression on Maledicte's face, but there was no triumph either. Its lack softened Aris's offense. \"Go on then. Off with you. Let me hear nothing of you but praise, and come back in the spring.\"\n\nMaledicte bowed, his hair slipping through Aris's grasp.\n\n\"Sire\u2014\" Echo objected, but never had time to finish. Jasper returned, white-faced, two guards walking behind him, their hands on their pistols, their gazes nervous, as if they had seen devils.\n\n\"Jasper?\" Aris asked, his voice unsteady. \"What's happened?\"\n\n\"Westfall's dead...his house afire\u2014\"\n\n\"The antimachinists? They dared to\u2014\"\n\nJasper wiped a hand over his mouth and his sweating face as he interrupted his king. \"Not them. Mirabile's run mad, sire. She's killed them both, poisoned Brierly and murdered Westfall. She took his eyes and heart.\" He shuddered. \"We saw her, gown bloodstained from hem to hip, as if she'd been wading through blood. But before we could lay hands on her, she was gone, like a shadow disappearing under the noon sun.\n\n\"Gone,\" Aris repeated, dumbly.\n\n\"It's witchcraft, sire, I swear. No matter that the gods are gone...she's found some way to touch power, and no one will be safe until she's stopped.\"\n\nAris sank onto the bench, looking up at the painted gods, and for the first time in thirty years offered a whisper of a prayer to Baxit, praying that reason would return to his kingdom.\n**\u00b7 29 \u00b7**\n\n**T** HE FIRST SIGNS OF SPRING inside the city limits were the groans and creaking of the ice breaking up near the docks, moaning like live things in torment. Maledicte had slept badly this winter, and would have slept a good deal worse, saving Janus's presence and the gossip mill turning from him to Mirabile. As the Dark Solstice deaths faded in urgent memory, his rumored part in it fell beneath the waves of Mirabile's continued depredations.\n\nThe slaughter of the Westfalls paled beside the subsequent deaths of the four kingsguards who had run her to ground. All four men were found rent and eyeless, and on that violent topic, tongues wagged. Mirabile, some cried, was a phantom, returned to plague the living. A witch, cried others, and one who meant to curse the aristocracy. Others, more cautious, whispered of returned gods and Ani's touch, whispered so quietly that only Gilly, sifting information, heard that rumor.\n\nOne further tidbit kept bored tongues busy. The whisper that Aris had chosen Janus to replace Westfall as counselor. The rumors claimed first that this was merely Aris's way of leashing his scandalous nephew and keeping the last of a line close. More acidly voiced rumors said that Aris always liked one of his counselors to be in touch with the common folk, and what was more common than a bastard?\n\nStill the season passed, with Janus often at the palace, acting as Aris's aide. It was Janus who greeted foreign merchants at the dock, haggling for Aris, and spurning the bulk of the Itarusine cargo. And it was Janus, or so it was murmured, who met with Captain Tarrant, that pardoned war pirate, to strike a surreptitious bargain, smuggling those same spurned Itarusine goods into the country, thus relieving the exorbitant prices on staples, and silencing some of the protesting poor. But if Janus spent his days at Aris's beck and call, his nights were Maledicte's exclusively.\n\nEven with Janus's near-constant presence, Gilly knew that Maledicte was more often haunted than not, nights given over to nightmares, and saw, with increasing regularity, the shadows drifting in Maledicte's eyes as Ani, stymied, made Herself felt in a hundred small black tantrums and nightmares. From the brittle tension that rose between Maledicte and Janus, from the near-resentful looks Maledicte cast Janus on occasion, Gilly thought he understood what had happened. As of yet, he had not found a tactful way to ask for confirmation.\n\nTonight, Gilly came in with the groaning of the ice, feeling as grave as if it were he doing the moaning. He had, in his hand, the instrument that would shatter their fragile peace.\n\n\"Do you know you have frost in your hair?\" Maledicte said, lounging in the hall with a glass of wine in his hand. \"And you look chilled through.\" Maledicte set his glass down on the empty receiving salver. As Aris had requested, Maledicte had refused to attend any of the makeshift festivities, though in truth, few had requested his presence. Maledicte dusted the frost from Gilly's coat and sleeves. Parchment crackled like breaking ice, and Maledicte tugged the paper from Gilly's hand.\n\n\"What's this? A note from Lizette? Does your ladybird know how to write?\" Maledicte teased. Gilly reached for the letter, but Maledicte evaded him.\n\nTaking up his glass again, Maledicte propped himself against the wall, and began to read the gathered gossip and speculation Gilly paid Bellington for.\n\nThe glass splintered in his hand. \"When did you know about this?\" Maledicte demanded.\n\n\"Just this afternoon,\" Gilly said. \"I got word from the solicitor and went down to the docks to talk to the captain of the _Kiss._ He confirmed it, said she was showing signs even on the journey out.\"\n\nMaledicte let out a strangled sound\u2014whimper, snarl, or both together, combined of rage and despair. \"We should have thrown her into the sea with her damned husband. But who would have calculated the odds to be so against us? Five years it took for Last to seed his previous wife, and several slips after that. But Amarantha\u2014wife for a bare sennight\u2014\" His breath sobbed in his chest, unequal to his rage.\n\n\"What's the matter now, the soup served cold?\" Janus asked, coming into the hall. As he looked from Gilly to Maledicte, the bored humor drained from his face.\n\n\"The countess of Last, Amarantha Ixion, is near to term with your father's child, and she returns to lay claim to the estate and title.\" Maledicte belatedly noticed the broken glass in his hand. He opened his clenched fist, let the shards patter down like rain from his unmarred skin.\n\nJanus blanched. \"A blow to be sure.\" He raised his hand to his forehead, rubbed the narrow spot between his eyes. \"Is it Father's child for sure? Not some bastard thing she's using to gain control of the estate?\"\n\n\"If it is not your father's babe, it is so close that we will never prove otherwise,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Maledicte said. \"If the child is born, if it is a boy, our plans are thrown over, Janus.\"\n\nJanus stroked Maledicte's dark hair. \"You'll just have to kill her before she gives birth. But be careful, Mal. Aris seems most...interested in your activities. Echo counsels mistrust, while I scoff, and yet we only attain stalemate. Best we heed Aris's obsession, and be discreet in her death.\"\n\nWHEN ARIS SENT A RUNNER to Janus, informing him that he would be sent to meet Amarantha's ship with the royal carriage and a slew of guards, Maledicte said, \"I don't suppose you could drown her by accident.\" He said it with no particular energy, lounging on the chaise, slowly moving to fill the area that Janus had vacated.\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, though his lips quirked.\n\nMaledicte marked the smile with one of his own. \"At least we know that Aris holds you innocent of your father's fate, to send you to fetch Amarantha.\"\n\n\"He sends me with an armed escort. That argues no particular trust,\" Janus said, pulling his coat on, settling the shoulders, and checking the lines in the mirror.\n\n\"Well, you did murder Last,\" Maledicte said.\n\nWatching from the chair beside the parlor door, Gilly raised his head sharply. Janus cast him a baleful look, and spoke to Maledicte. \"We are not discussing this again. You killed him, I merely sped him on his way.\"\n\n\"All your own way,\" Maledicte said, still lazily. \"The fun of patricide and treason and none of the blame.\"\n\nJanus stooped, pulled Maledicte up, and shook him, once. \"Enough. What do you want me to do to apologize?\"\n\nMaledicte smiled at him. \"I can't think of anything.\"\n\n\"I can,\" Gilly said, drawing two sets of eyes to him. \"Wouldn't it be appropriate to have a welcoming celebration? Urge Aris to hold one.\"\n\n\"She wouldn't attend,\" Maledicte said. \"The letters our spies sent said she had become quite mad with suspicion. To expect her to attend a ball, where others have died\u2014\"\n\n\"Take it up with the king. If Aris commands it, she will attend,\" Gilly said, his mouth dry as he argued for murder. But if Janus meant to see Amarantha dead, Gilly would do what he could to ensure Maledicte's survival. Without a plan, Maledicte would be far too prone to give in to Ani's careless bloodlust. And unlike Last, a pregnant Countess would rarely be alone.\n\nGilly let out a shaky breath. Perhaps this was a second chance to free Maledicte from Ani's touch. There was no earl of Last, but Amarantha was the titular head of the line\u2014perhaps her death would be enough; perhaps whatever had been done the first time to invalidate Last's death, Maledicte could undo. It came to him, suddenly, that he was hoping for the death of a woman with child, and his whole body rang with the shock of it.\n\nJanus paced the room. \"If Aris agreed, it would be a well-guarded thing, Mal. I doubt you could you kill her there.\"\n\n\"Mirabile did well enough,\" Maledicte said. \"You gave me aid when none was wanted, Janus. Give me aid now when I ask for it. Our enemies grow like the hydra. One dead, two created. Let's destroy this head before we have to kill an infant as well.\" Maledicte's voice shifted.\n\n\"Be as honest with yourself as you were with me when you accused me of patricide. Were Amarantha not gravid, you would not need to raise your sword. Infanticide is your goal, Mal. Can you stomach it?\"\n\n\"I have no choice,\" Maledicte said, \"if you would be earl.\"\n\nAfter Janus left, Maledicte sank onto the chaise and covered his eyes. Gilly went to his side, hesitant, then reaching out, took one hand. Maledicte's fingers curled around Gilly's.\n\n\"He killed Last?\" Gilly asked, shying away from future murders in favor of past ones. But the confirmation of his fear laced his heart with dismay. If Janus had done so, was it any wonder that Ani lingered, foul-tempered and growing? \"That could not have satisfied Ani.\"\n\n\"In all your books,\" Maledicte said pensively, \"all your pamphlets and gossip, have you ever heard that Ani can be satisfied? Mirabile seemed to think otherwise.\"\n\n\"Tell me what happened,\" Gilly asked. \"How you meant to kill Last, and instead had Janus kill Last and some sailors.\"\n\nMaledicte raised his eyes, ringed with sudden weariness. \"If you know that, you know it all. We should have taken Amarantha then. If I had, I would not be facing this now.\"\n\n\"You could wait,\" Gilly said. \"Perhaps the child will be female, or, like Adiran, will be born flawed, unable to inherit. Or it may die of its own accord, as Last's most recent son did. Murdering Last is one thing, this is another.\"\n\n\"Enough, Gilly, I am done with talking about it. If Amarantha attends the party, she dies.\" Maledicte burst from the chair, yanking his hand from Gilly's, and stormed toward the door. He paused at the last moment and turned back, his voice ragged and wild. \"I cannot have this, Gilly. I cannot take on your conscience. I need to be free to draw blood at will, be it man, woman, or babe. As there are deaths behind me, that is all that is before me as well. Do not weaken me.\"\n**\u00b7 30 \u00b7**\n\n_...he withdrew his knife and stabbed her thrice, seeking her heart, but she merely mocked his prowess with the blade, for Ani's unnatural children scoff at injury and fear no man. She clawed out his eyes with sharpened nails and when dawn came, she was found still feasting on his heart..._\n\n\u2014Grayle's _Book of Vengeances,_ \"The Savage of Issey\"\n\n**S** NOW SPOTTED THE FIRST BRAVE leaves of the spring crocus. Maledicte looked up at the leaden sky, and at the faint sparks of spiraling white drifting down to edge the palace grounds. \"Spring?\"\n\nGilly, attending him, said, \"Snow's not unheard of this early in the season. But it is damaging to silk. Best go in now.\"\n\nMaledicte smiled at him. \"Oh yes, because spotted silk is a terrible sin.\" The fey cheerfulness to his manner made Gilly's stomach ache. He had seen this before. It was as if Ani, knowing Maledicte's plans, was curled up in sulky approval, sated before the act as She never was after.\n\n\"I think you just don't want to be alone in the dark with a murderer,\" Maledicte said, tugging Gilly's tied-back tail of hair.\n\n\"Mal, hush,\" Gilly said, looking around. No one was within earshot, but his heart pounded all the same. Halfway to the king's court, in the winter-riven lines of the garden, with the stables at their back\u2014Gilly couldn't imagine what Maledicte was playing at.\n\n\"Admit it, Gilly. You fear me.\"\n\n\"Fear _for_ you,\" Gilly said, taking Maledicte's arm and pulling him deeper into the skeleton of the garden. He pressed Maledicte back into the prickly embrace of a hedge, its leaves only faint smudges of starting greenery, and said, \"What ails you?\"\n\nMaledicte closed his eyes, letting the snow lay ephemeral patterns on his skin. Gilly touched Maledicte's cheek. Had it not been for the quick, cold nip of snow melt, the dampness on his palm could have been tears. \"Mal?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Maledicte said, opening dark eyes. \"I am afraid to be alone in the dark by myself.\"\n\nTongue caught, Gilly could say nothing.\n\n\"I do things I never expected I could. And that's cause enough to fear, but more, I do not feel alone in my own mind, in my own skin. She's there, wanting out. It's getting crowded, Gilly. The person I was, the person I am, and the crow. We're all jostling for ascendancy, and I don't know who's going to win.\"\n\nGilly opened his mouth; Maledicte put his gloved hand over it. \"Listen, Gilly. If Ani wins, leave me. Don't stay. I would never hurt you, but She would devour you entire. Promise me.\"\n\nGilly shook his head, and Maledicte frowned. Footsteps crunched on the seashell paths as a coachman walked steadily into the dark, undoubtedly heading for the wall the stable staff used as a privy. \"Come on,\" Maledicte said, ducking under Gilly's caging arms.\n\nTurning in the direction of the court, Gilly found himself walking alone. Maledicte had gone back the way they had come, heading into the stables.\n\nGilly caught up, trying to move soundlessly, grimacing with the effort. Maledicte smiled at him when he arrived. \"Watch for anyone coming?\" He went down the silent rows of detached coaches. Twenty feet away, stableboys fed horses, rubbed them down, and cleaned the stalls.\n\nMaledicte ghosted along the rows of coaches until he reached the glossy blue of Last's coach, gone drowned and greenish in the flickering lamplight. Maledicte climbed onto the coachman's bench and insinuated his hand into the juncture of carriage and seat, recovering a worn flask. He joined Gilly again in the sheltering darkness of an unused stall. \"Hold this,\" he said. He stripped off his jacket and felt inside the seams. Gilly watched, mouth falling open. As Maledicte pulled out two tiny crystal vials, Gilly said in a furious whisper, \"You brought poison to court? After what happened to those girls? You are mad.\"\n\n\"We're not in court,\" Maledicte said, \"and these vials never will be.\" He levered out the wax stopper and trickled a thin syrup into the coachman's flask. Closing the flask's lid, he sloshed it gently.\n\n\"You're going to poison the coachman?\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Would you prefer me to stalk into the court and strike Amarantha dead by blade, or pour her a drink and have her fall at my feet? This way is more chancy, but far more likely to pass as accidental.\"\n\nMaledicte sloshed the flask a moment more, then opened it and sniffed. \"Perfect.\"\n\n\"And if he drinks it all now? While waiting for his masters?\"\n\n\"I'm counting on it,\" Maledicte said. \"Janus is supposed to goad Amarantha into flight. Failing that, my presence alone should do it.\" He looked over Gilly's shoulder and scowled. Two stableboys had skived off their chores and crept into the coach aisle, and were playing dice in the carriages' shadows.\n\n\"Rats take it,\" Maledicte muttered.\n\n\"We've time,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"That we do not,\" Maledicte said. \"Dantalion is too careful. He will not allow his coachman to linger in the yard with the others, playing cards. He'll want him here. Guarding the carriage against saboteurs.\"\n\n\"Give it to me, then,\" Gilly said. \"I look enough like a coachman. I'll return it; those boys won't remember me at all.\"\n\nMaledicte relinquished his hold on the flask and Gilly sauntered out into the lamplit alley between coaches. The two boys paused in their game, bodies wary, ready to bolt should Gilly show any signs of noticing them.\n\nGilly realized halfway to Last's coach that his was more than a little errand that Maledicte could not do, that what he was doing would result in at least one man's death, maybe more. But the fear that if he balked Maledicte would choose a more dangerous path kept him from freezing in his tracks. \"Don't ask me to kill for you,\" he had said once. Now it seemed he volunteered.\n\nFeeling as if he ascended the gallows, Gilly climbed to the bench. He had just reached to return the flask when he heard the cry. \"Hoy! What're you doing?\"\n\nHe turned, aware of the two stableboys scattering\u2014directed at them or not, the words were too close to the ones they dreaded\u2014and found Dantalion's coachman staring up at him.\n\n\"Get off of there\u2014hey, that's mine,\" he said, his indignation darkening to suspicion and anger. He held out his hand for the flask and Gilly, seeing no alternative, put it in his hand.\n\n\"What were you doing with that?\"\n\nGilly, reaching for a plausible explanation, was forestalled by Maledicte. \"I asked him to find me a drink,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"There's fancy guff inside. What d'you need mine for?\" The coachman scowled at the slim aristocratic shape.\n\n\"The last time drink was taken within those walls, people fell dead. Call me overcautious,\" Maledicte said, leaning against the stall.\n\n\"Mirabile killed fillies,\" the coachman said, but after another sneering look, he continued, \"though you've got more than a touch of the mare about you, don't you?\"\n\nMaledicte's cheeks flushed, and he dropped his hand to where his sword hilt would have been, had he not left it in the hay when he removed his jacket.\n\nAssessing that motion, the coachman paused. \"You're that one, aren't you? That cursed cavalier my master natters on about. Maybe you'd better have my flask after all. Take a drink of it, just in case.\" He tossed it to Maledicte.\n\n\"Too gracious,\" Maledicte said, tilting the tarnished metal to his lips.\n\nGilly's heart was in his mouth, choking back protest, as he watched for the trick, the movement that betrayed that Maledicte was not really swallowing mouthfuls of his own poison. A trickle of adulterated whiskey ran from the edge of his mouth, and it was too much for the coachman.\n\n\"Here! Leave me some. Gi' me that.\" He snatched it from Maledicte's hand. He shook the flask, and swore. \"Drank near half of it, damn you.\"\n\nMaledicte wiped his mouth with a lazy hand. \"That stuff 's rot; you really should get your employer to give you better.\"\n\nThe coachman spat on the floor, and Maledicte moved the tip of his polished boot away from the glistening, wet spot with a moue of distaste. \"And people find my manners lamentable? Gilly, bring my coat with you.\" He stalked off without waiting for reply.\n\n\"I don't envy you your master, boy,\" the coachman said.\n\nGilly jammed his shaking hands into his coat pockets. \"He pays well.\" His words were near as hoarse as Maledicte's, tight with dread. Dread that Maledicte drank his own brew. Dread that the coachman would drink and die and make Gilly a murderer.\n\nGilly cast a frantic glance into the gardens, but Maledicte had disappeared from sight. His stomach clenched to the point of pain, imagining Maledicte fallen, convulsing. Would Ani protect him? With Last's death denied Her?\n\nHe snatched up Maledicte's coat, hearing a faint rip as the embroidery snagged on the baled hay, and hurried toward the stable doors. Gilly looked back once to see the coachman take a great pull from his flask, making Gilly a murderer.\n\nAfter a few panicky moments, he found Maledicte back in the quiet shadows of the thorny hedge again. His eyes glittered like black water. \"Did he drink?\" Maledicte asked. Coatless, he seemed smaller, more fragile than he was.\n\n\"Did you?\" Gilly asked, his voice trembling, a bare whisper.\n\n\"You saw me,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly tugged at him. \"Let's go home. We'll find you the antidote. Or maybe you won't really need one. Ani protects Her own, right? But we can't risk it.\"\n\nMaledicte slipped from his grip. \"Gilly, I've already taken it. Two vials, remember? You were afraid I was dying? I don't trust Ani that far. And I'm not stupid enough to die in an attempt on Amarantha's life. Not when it's a chancy death at best. I think I'm offend\u2014\"\n\nGilly seized him close, held him, heart beating against his own. This close, Maledicte surprised him by not being awkwardly tall or broad; he fit as snugly in his arms as Livia did. Maledicte sagged against him, giving Gilly license to let his hands rove down across the narrow back and slender hips, pulling him closer still. Maledicte looked up at him, and Gilly bent; at the last, Maledicte avoided his mouth. Gilly's kiss ended on the slightly slick length of the scar on his jaw. He tasted the flesh there, a tongue tip at a time, and Maledicte made a faint sound in his arms, of appreciation or protest, Gilly wasn't sure.\n\nGilly's clever fingers transmitted a piece of information to him. \"You wear a corset?\"\n\n\"I eat too much,\" Maledicte muttered, and while he didn't take himself from Gilly's arms, nonetheless Gilly was aware of some wary withdrawal.\n\nGilly touched the line of his jaw, guided Maledicte's mouth toward his own, but even as he did, desire faltered to curiosity. The lean bones of Maledicte's arms and legs argued against such a need.\n\nMaledicte's sigh against his skin stifled curiosity, and Gilly pressed his suit, aware of his own hunger made evident in the fit of his breeches, his thighs against Maledicte's.\n\n\"Let me go,\" Maledicte said. \"Enough, Gilly.\" The whisper was faint enough that Gilly could ignore it if he chose. But while the tremble in Maledicte's back, the kneading of his hands on Gilly's chest urged him on, Gilly was all too aware that Maledicte's desire did not equal his own, that if they were to step apart, there would be no telltale swelling to mar the smooth fit of Maledicte's breeches.\n\n\"Gilly,\" Maledicte's voice was more urgent. \"Let me go, or I'll make a eunuch of you.\"\n\nStartled, Gilly released him. Maledicte staggered away, fell to his knees, and vomited in the hedges. Snow hares rustled and darted away from his sudden descent into their domain. Gilly crouched beside him and Maledicte gasped that he was well. Gilly drew Maledicte's hair from his face while he was sick.\n\nMaledicte rose and took steps back to the main path, sat down on a stone bench, covered with a thin drifting of blown snow. He wet his hands with it, the snow melting at his touch, and wiped his face. \"Sometimes the antidote is worse than the poison.\"\n\nGilly sat down heavily by his side, his heart feeling overtaxed. \"I thought you were dying.\"\n\n\"We've had this conversation,\" Maledicte said. \"And it led us\u2014\" He put snow in his mouth like a child. It reddened his lips.\n\n\"Led us where?\" Gilly asked. It hurt to do so, to probe at the disconnection between them, but he was no more capable of not asking than he was of walking away.\n\n\"Astray,\" Maledicte said. \"Decidedly astray.\" He leaned his elbows on his knees, traced images in the frost at their feet. Raven wings, eyes, a sword. \"I am his entirely, remember. What I do, I do for him.\" His mouth twisted, as if he found the fact not as much of a boon as it once was.\n\n\"And he'll be looking for you,\" Gilly said, standing and holding out an arm.\n\nMaledicte hesitated, then took Gilly's arm. As they walked toward the yellow glow of candlelight and warmth, the drifting voices that held an edge of fear, Maledicte said, \"Besides, Gilly, I'm no partner for you. You need a nice girl, one who'll give you babies, not ask you to kill them.\"\n\nGilly let out his breath. \"Lizette's a whore, and no fonder of me than she is of my money, and our little Livia's a spy. Yet I care for them both. So what's the addition of one murderer to my affections?\"\n\n\"Livia\u2014a spy?\" Maledicte said, his eyes hooded by speculation.\n\nGilly bit his lip, but words once said were impossible to cage again. \"She has far more coin than she should and she creeps out nights. And none of our trinkets or teaspoons are missing. Unless she's thieving other houses, it's information she's selling.\"\n\n\"A spy,\" Maledicte said, dismay in his voice. \"And we have such secrets to sell.\" He drifted up the lawn, boots leaving dark tracks in the rime, and paused. \"Perhaps we can turn it to our advantage. Do nothing directly until we know who's buying.\"\n\n\"Dantalion,\" Gilly suggested.\n\n\"Or Mad Mirabile, or even Aris, as unpalatable as that thought is. We'd best find out.\"\n\nGilly nodded, a little shamed that he had needed telling.\n\nMaledicte looked toward the lit rooms, spills of light raying out like slow lightning, flickering in the wakes of skirts and coats, and his mouth tipped into a deeper frown. This near, they could hear the forced gaiety, the musicians sawing out newly written tunes, lest anyone be reminded of the Dark Night deaths. \"Gilly, go prepare the coach. I will enter only long enough to spook Amarantha, if Janus has not already done so. Tonight, I prefer my nest.\"\n\nMALEDICTE WIPED HIS MOUTH one last time; the bitter taste of bile, tannic fluids, and belladonna lingered. He climbed the wide steps from the garden and gained access to the balconies, unwilling to enter under the watchful, fearful eyes of the other attendees. Seen through the open doors of the ballroom, Janus danced attendance on Psyke Bellane, his eyes alight with an amusement she didn't share.\n\nWhite around her rosebud lips, the china doll curtsied and attempted to take her leave. Janus stopped her with another question, a hand on her silkdraped arm, smiling down at her. Her chaperone watched with a smile. When Janus lifted his hand from her sleeve, she flew like a dove.\n\n\"What kept you?\" Janus said, turning as if he had sensed Maledicte's approach. \"I've had to entertain myself with sweet, scared Psyke. What did you say to her?\"\n\n\"Nothing she took seriously enough,\" Maledicte said, watching the slight girl slip through the crowds. He fought an absurd sense of betrayal, as if he had expected Psyke to forswear Janus simply because the time spent listening to Maledicte's threats had spared her from Mirabile's touch.\n\nHe swayed on his feet a moment, off balance by the imagined weight of his hatred. Janus smiled at him and led him back out to the seclusion of topiary and stone.\n\n\"You look so fierce,\" Janus said, kissing Maledicte's throat and cheek. Maledicte turned his head to avoid his lips, thinking of toxins on his, feeling as if he'd stumbled into an odd, repetitive dream world. Turn from Gilly's warmth, turn from Janus's arms; face the cold wind and the dark alone. He dreaded Ani rising up through his throat, stabbing out from his mouth, the long beak terrible and gore-smeared, Her wings scratching through his chest, pushing out past his lungs and ribs, dragging him up into the night sky, a soaring, bloody puppet. Distantly, Maledicte realized some of the belladonna must have lingered beyond the antidote, sparking hallucinations.\n\n\"What kept you?\" Janus asked.\n\n\"Gilly kissed me in the snow gardens,\" Maledicte said. \"He killed the coachman and kissed me....\" He shook his head, shaking the moment from his mind. \"I fear his ethics have been severely compromised by our association.\"\n\nJanus shook him. \"Mal, are you mad?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"I think I must be.\" Lips moving against the roughness of the brocade, Maledicte imagined the threads snaking out to drag him into Janus's skin.\n\n\"To let Gilly kiss you, I must agree,\" Janus snapped, pushing Maledicte away. He paced a quick circle and then came back, blue eyes smoldering. \"Do you want him, desire him? Is that it? Why you would risk all for a tumble? In the king's garden? Tell me, Mal\u2014do you love him?\"\n\nJanus's hushed words sounded wounded, stripped of strength, but Maledicte, dark-dreaming with the belladonna's aid, saw what the low tones disguised\u2014the red cloud settling around his bright form, splintering out from the steady flame of rage behind his pale eyes.\n\n\"You are all my desires,\" Maledicte said, twining his arms about Janus's neck. \"And so I told him. That I am yours and yours alone. Though you are not exclusive to me...you will marry.\"\n\n\"And why shouldn't you?\" Janus twitched within Maledicte's arms at the familiar deep voice. Maledicte felt near panic himself\u2014how long had Aris been listening? Behind the king, Psyke stood in the doorway. Maledicte fought a growl\u2014had she led the king to Janus?\n\n\"Sire,\" Maledicte said, sinking into a bow.\n\nBeside him, Janus nodded. \"Uncle.\"\n\n\"I would speak with Maledicte,\" Aris said. \"Janus, I owe Psyke this dance. Please take my place.\"\n\nJanus bowed and left, Psyke on his arm once more; Maledicte stood as still as a wild creature unexpectedly cornered. His heart pounded. Inside him, Ani stretched Her wings, whispering. His fingers itched for the sword hilt, for its cold security, with a desire not his own.\n\n\"Be easy,\" Aris said, settling himself onto a bench with visible weariness. \"You are in the fortunate position of the king requesting a favor.\" Aris patted the bench.\n\nMaledicte slipped over to him, sat on the very edge of the stone, among the carved vinework. \"You want me to marry?\"\n\n\"All men should marry, if only to see themselves through others' eyes. Wedding Aurora changed the way I saw my kingdom and myself. Under her tutelage, I saw my court as it was\u2014decadent, violent, concerned more with matters of style than of state. We have chosen to mirror Itarus, but we have chosen to reflect only their surface. Their courtiers vie and kill, but they further the kingdom as a whole, whereas my court\u2014cares only for entertainment.\" He sighed, breath loud in the night; frosty clouds carried his words away, scented with the sting of wine.\n\n\"Aurora was a queen to be revered. She knew we had to change, and I did so. I have attempted to make the court do so as well, and failed on that count.\"\n\n\"Such foolish heads can be led,\" Maledicte said. \"Make them bend to your will.\"\n\nAris laughed. \"I am merely a king and not a god.\" His laughter faded into bitterness. \"And while some kings can ape gods, make their will and their people's one and the same, I am all too aware that I am only a man. But I understand Baxit, who looked on His own court and despaired, who forced the gods into oblivion. Were it not for Adiran, for other innocents who would suffer, I could do the same. Stop the struggle and let us fall\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte shivered. Aris's face, so like Janus's in structure, might have been uncarved marble for all that Maledicte could learn of his mood in it.\n\n\"Were it not for love\u2014\" Aris said, his gloved hand touching Maledicte's chin, his voice thinned by exhaustion. Then his mouth claimed Maledicte's, his lips not tentative like his words, but so fierce that Maledicte felt Ani dwarfed beneath the sensation. It wasn't simple desire that Maledicte felt in Aris's hunger, but bleakness, a desperate attempt to quicken the blood.\n\nAris's tongue touched his, wine-rich, and Maledicte shoved him away, panic racing in his veins. It was done without grace or subtlety, but all he could think was what if the belladonna lacing his mouth was enough to kill a king? He fell off the bench, awkward in fright and dismay.\n\nMaledicte knelt on the cold, damp stone, silent and waiting, his agile tongue gone dry along with his bravado, tracing the tangling lines of the stony vines.\n\n\"It is bewitchment,\" Aris said, \"that feeds this fascination. But I think one of my own making.\"\n\nHis voice, empty of any emotion but despair, wicked some of the dread from Maledicte's spine. \"Aris,\" Maledicte breathed.\n\n\"Shh,\" Aris said, laying his hand over Maledicte's mouth, then taking it away as if desire would spill over again. \"I will be done with this nonsense, and ask my favor of you. The Lady Amarantha fears you. Fears your eyes on her belly, beyond all reason. I would have you avoid my court until her child is born.\"\n\n\"Exile?\" Maledicte said, striving to put some flippancy in his voice, striving to restore himself. He was Maledicte, the unflappable, dark cavalier. Why should a weary king and a despairing kiss have had the power to over-set him so? \"On a woman's whims\u2014you are a gentle man indeed.\"\n\n\"It is my brother's child,\" Aris said. \"Antyre's future.\"\n\n\"I will do as you ask,\" Maledicte said, rising to his feet and stepping toward the balustrade. \"But you know, Aris, you needn't have asked my compliance. You could have demanded it.\" Without waiting for leave, Maledicte dropped down the few feet to the garden and fled back to the stables, to Gilly, who was fiddling with harness straps and buckles.\n\n\"Done so soon?\" Gilly asked, without looking up from his hands.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. He leaned against a mossy wall and closed his eyes, stopped fighting the belladonna; it took him into the dark clouds above, a raven's-eye view of the city wheeling and spinning beneath him. He wouldn't want to be in any coach driven by a man hallucinating the way he was. \"Poor Aris,\" Maledicte murmured, thinking of the king with distant regret. \"If only I could trust it to be a girl\u2014\"\n\n\"Are we waiting for Janus?\" Gilly called back, busy with the harness.\n\n\"No. He'll have to chase Amarantha away. I've been banned,\" Maledicte said, sliding down the wall, pressing his back against it until the stone's dampness sank through the layers of silk and linen, touching his skin with the intimacy he had denied Gilly and Aris. Gilly spoke but Maledicte heard only the comforting sound of his voice, watching as coaches came and went in the spaces of his blinking.\n\n\"Come on now,\" Gilly murmured in his ear, pulling him to his feet. \"You've dozed enough to miss Amarantha on the move. Best we leave before her coachman spies us lurking.... Mal, you're shaking,\" he said, his calm slipping away.\n\nMaledicte's thoughts tangled in his mind, strangling the words of reassurance in his throat.\n\n\"The antidote _is_ working?\" Gilly said.\n\nAgain, Maledicte's response died stillborn. That the belladonna was more potent than he had thought, that the antidote was less effective than he had been led to believe, that Ani sulked and shirked Her aid.\n\nClutching the hilt of his sword, Maledicte staggered to the coach. Gilly caught him, his words lost in the rushing murmur of Maledicte's blood. Gilly bundled him into the coach, tucked him round with heavy warmth, and shut the door.\n\n\"Ani,\" Maledicte whispered. Inside his heart, his belly, his bones, the whisper of wings stirred and rustled, sounding their susurrant reassurance. Maledicte sprawled across the seat, wrapped in the rough leather of Gilly's greatcoat. Rocked by the movement of the coach, he slipped into waking dreams.\n\nAni pressed out through his ribs, sending out long feathers to row through the air. Rising, She soared above Maledicte's coach, the cold winds parting beneath Her strokes. She rose above the wide streets of the palace surrounds, the smooth cobbles glistening like scales beneath Her. Circling above the palace, She watched the coaches moving like bright beetles, finally spotting Her goal\u2014the glossy blue coach, its color robbed by darkness, trundling slowly along the cobbled road out of the city.\n\nHow afraid Amarantha must be, She gloated, to brave the overnight journey to Lastrest with a weary coachman. Flanking the coach, four kingsguards on gray horses and Dantalion on a blood-colored bay insured her safe passage.\n\nAs She neared, the coachman yanked on the reins, frightening the team into arrhythmic canters. His face blanched. The kingsguard wheeled their mounts and wheeled them again, confusion and concern written on their faces.\n\n\"She's there!\" the coachman screamed, his voice spiraling into the sky like a prayer. She reveled in it, dropping closer. The kingsguards gaped at the road, at the sky, at the trees alongside; Dantalion kept his eyes where it mattered\u2014the coach. He drew his steed nearer the door, preparing to dismount and climb aboard. But the coachman snapped the reins, lashed out with the whip, and set the horses to a panicked gallop, leaving Dantalion still reaching for the frame.\n\nCaught flat-footed, the kingsguards milled for a moment, a tangle of reins and stirrups and pistoning hooves, then they streamed after the swaying coach. Dantalion was a length ahead and gaining when She opened Her wings to their fullest extent, spreading the stench of carrion fields, the sweet rot of the grave. The horses reared and frothed. Two kingsguards were thrown, rolling hastily to avoid being trampled by their maddened horses.\n\nDantalion savagely held his horse to his will, but he lost ground, and the coach hurtled away, Amarantha's screams trailing in its wake. The coachman still peered over his shoulder, panicked, trusting the horses to stay on the road. Their hooves pounded out the cadence of a frantic heart.\n\nHer feathers sliced the air, driving Her over and beyond the coach. The coachman's head swiveled, his mouth slackened. She wheeled, soared, and came back at the coach. The coachman's face, seen head-on, was that of a ghost, gibbering and hollow-eyed.\n\nHe sawed on the reins and the stressed leather snapped. Kicking their heels, heads flat out and flecked with foam, the horses bolted. The coach tipped to the left, putting one edge in the dirt, skidding, rolling, broken wheels crashing through the enamel and gilt, and coming to a shuddering halt. Lying in the road, the coachman whimpered, \"Ani.\" She devoured his prayer, his worship.\n\nDantalion gained the scene, his mouth taut with rage. He dismounted his chastened horse, tied it to a piece of the wreckage, and started sorting through the remains of the coach. Lifting the door, he found Amarantha, her eyes staring at the sky, her belly huge. Dantalion knelt....\n\n\"Mal?\"\n\nThe voice distracted Her, and the scene faltered. Strong hands confined Her, dragging Her away, Her feathers dwindling, Her sight gone. She protested.\n\n\"Easy, Mal,\" Gilly murmured in his ear. \"Or you'll have us tumbling down the stairs.\"\n\nBlinking, Maledicte pieced the details together. That steady rush and thump was not the downbeat of wings, but Gilly's chest beneath his cheek, the swaying sense of flight nothing but Gilly's slow ascent up the staircase, cradling Maledicte in his arms. The shattering of wood and wheel was the damage done by Maledicte's trailing scabbard against the delicate ornaments in the railing. \"Put me down.\"\n\n\"Two more steps,\" Gilly said, tightening his grip.\n\nMaledicte tensed, uncomfortable with such proximity to Gilly, too aware of secrets, Janus's potential arrival, and his own weakness that urged him to slide his arms around Gilly's neck.\n\nAt the top of the stairs, Gilly set him down, patiently making sure he had his balance before stepping back. Throughout it all, his eyes never met Maledicte's. \"Are you well now? Your shaking has stopped.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"I thought you were immune to poisons.\"\n\n\"I'm not dead, am I?\" Maledicte croaked; his throat felt stiff, as if it wanted to voice words not his own, to finish Ani's triumphant cry.\n\nGilly nodded, eyes sluing toward the stairs and the front hall.\n\n\"Thank you, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, touching his cheek.\n\nBeneath his fingers, Gilly flinched. \"I'm going out,\" he said.\n\n\"Are you well?\" Maledicte asked.\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"I killed a man tonight. You nearly poisoned yourself, and all the way back, I listened to Ani ranting in your voice. All I want is to be someplace far from death. I know Lizette won't ask me to kill anyone.\"\n\n\"Gilly,\" Maledicte said, \"don't\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't what? Don't feel guilt? Don't dream of them? The coachman, Amarantha, the babe? My head is already full of Vornatti, Kritos, that assassin, Love's man, and poor Roach.\"\n\n\"I need you,\" Maledicte said. \"You agreed it had to be done. I didn't ask you to kill him.\"\n\nGilly sighed. \"I know. But tonight, I didn't kill for you, in your defense. Tonight, I killed to make Janus's path easier. And I can't think of a single reason I should let myself be used by him, the way he's using you.\"\n\nMaledicte shoved him, despair replaced with something stronger, hotter, more palatable. Gilly stumbled backward, missed the top step, and fell. He caught the railing with one quick hand before he fell more than a few risers. He righted himself, looked up at Maledicte.\n\nBreathing quickly, Maledicte waited, aching for the fight. For something he could win. Once, he would have been able to use words to sway Gilly, but he found nothing to say now, all churned under Ani's wings.\n\n\"And you worried that Ani would hurt me,\" Gilly said. \"That was all you.\"\n\n\"Gilly,\" Maledicte said, voice a thread of sound, forcing words through the rage that choked him.\n\n\"Think about what you want and need of me. I will not kill for Janus. If that's what you want, you'll have to find a new ally.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. He stretched a hand out, but Gilly had already turned and finished going down the stairs. The door shut with a bang.\n\nHis hands fisted. Gilly just didn't understand. He would apologize, explain that so close to their goal, he was unsettled, make him the promise he'd made before: that Gilly wouldn't have to kill for him. This time, he'd make sure it was kept. If Gilly returned. If the blood on his hands hadn't been too much for his honest nature.\n\nBlond hair gleamed in the light and Maledicte's breath caught. \"Gilly?\"\n\n\"No,\" Janus said. \"What are you doing on the stairs? Come down, let's wait out the night and see death in with the morning.\"\n\nMaledicte stretched his hand out, and Janus tugged him to his feet, kissed his temple, driving away his moodiness, his anger and fear at Gilly. \"What did Aris want of you?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Maledicte said, then laughed. \"He asked me to stay out of the court while Amarantha was attending.\"\n\nJanus smiled. \"You promised, of course.\"\n\n\"Knowing what I know, how could I not?\" Maledicte leaned against Janus, and they went down the stairs, through the quiet house, hand in hand.\n**\u00b7 31 \u00b7**\n\n**P** INK HAD JUST CREPT INTO the sky when the great bells of the palace began to toll. Maledicte, dozing against Janus's shoulder, sat upright, anticipation chasing the last sleep from his face. Janus turned his head, smiling. \"A sweet sound of funeral bells in the air. You've done it. Amarantha's dead.\"\n\nMaledicte didn't respond, too caught up in the deep, slow voice of the bells. When they came to a stop, like a faltering heartbeat finding rest at last, Maledicte let out his pent breath in a languorous sigh. \"It's done. Finally done.\" A bubble of lightness started in his belly, a seed of relief.\n\nJanus kissed his forehead, his mouth. \"Thank you, my cavalier, my dark swordsman. Now you may rest your sword.\"\n\nThe relief in Maledicte's belly refused to grow. Even as he murmured agreement, he wondered if Janus could sense his forebodings. Would Ani leave him now?\n\nWhen he closed his eyes and listened to the dark recesses of Miranda's body, he believed Ani had taken root like a child not easily ridded by potions and poison. \"What will I do?\" he said aloud.\n\n\"Anything you like,\" Janus said. \"We've won, Mal.\" At the hushed velvet quality in his voice, a tone saved for long moments between the sheets, whispers in the dark, Maledicte let the last of his tightwire energy drain away.\n\nWere Gilly in the room, he might see past the disguise now, see beyond his expectations. In Maledicte's softening limbs and giddy smile, in the way he folded himself into Janus's arms...all these had more in common with Miranda than any courtier. But Gilly was still gone from the town house, though no longer closeted in Lizette's sheltering embrace. Instead, he roamed the early-morning streets, seeking information the bells could not give him\u2014was the coachman alive?\n\nWhat he heard, in whispers from servant to servant, from merchant to customer, and finally from the broadsheet criers, sent him home, running through the narrow streets.\n\nMALEDICTE RESTED HIS HEAD in Janus's lap, let his eyes drift closed. Janus trailed his fingers through Maledicte's hair, planning aloud. \"I'll need to attend Aris. There may be questions. Amarantha made no secret of her fears\u2014\"\n\nThe sound made them both stiffen, made Maledicte raise his head, eyes flaring dark and wild. \"What is that?\" The bright carillon continued, ringing off stone and rebounding, filling the air. Tumbling off the chaise, Maledicte put his hands over his ears. Within him, Ani twisted, churned, waking to malevolence.\n\nGilly burst into the room, and Maledicte looked up, near blind with nameless anxiety. \"What is that sound, Gilly? What is it?\"\n\nGilly panted for breath, his chest shuddering, too distraught to mince words. \"A child has been born to the royal family,\" he said, staring at Maledicte's face, as white as milk or marble. \"Dantalion cut him from her belly. The bells mean they expect him to live.\"\n\nMaledicte screamed, the sound soaring up over the bells, ripping free of the confines of his maimed throat, beyond human range. Outside, the rooks burst into panicked flight, wheeling and setting dark flickers behind the window glass. Janus released him, face blank in alarm and chagrin.\n\n\"Gilly, are you sure?\" Janus said, but Gilly had no time for Janus, no time for anything but the swelling blackness in the slim form before him. Gilly stroked countercharms in the air with all the fervor of a country intercessor, but the empty wildness in Maledicte's eyes remained unchanged.\n\n\"The earl is dead...Long live the earl...I will not allow it.\" The voice was barely recognizable as human; it raised hackles along Gilly's nape, the rattle and rasp of it like old bones, like his dream of Ani brought to life.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" he breathed. \"Please.\"\n\nSword drawn, Maledicte moved toward the door, inexorably dragging the shadows after him. \"Stop him,\" Gilly said.\n\nJanus reached out with alarming casualness and seized Maledicte's arm, his face annoyed. \"Mal, enough with the melodrama. We need to\u2014\" He sucked in his breath and lunged back as the sword sliced toward his belly. Gilly leaped forward, taking advantage of Maledicte's half-turned body, taking that slim form in his rush and bearing it to the floor. Maledicte shrieked again, thwarted blood in his voice; the rooks crashed through the windows, shredding themselves on the glass, pelting them with bone and feather and blood.\n\n\"The sword,\" Gilly gasped, trying to keep Maledicte down, when it felt as if Maledicte was as muscular and as agile as a serpent. If the countercharms were worthless, removing the sword from Maledicte's grip might be the only chance left. Sliding over Maledicte's back, he pushed Maledicte's arm out, spreading the sword hand farther away from himself.\n\nJanus, assessing, shook himself and then stamped on Maledicte's out-spread hand. Despite his desperation, Gilly winced when the bones cracked. In an elegant motion, as well suited to a dance as to a duel, Janus swept the sword across the floor with a booted foot.\n\n\"Elysia, in the butler's pantry,\" Gilly panted.\n\nMaledicte, heedless or insensible of the pain, heaved himself to his hands and knees, reaching for the sword. Gilly exhaled, made himself heavy, thought of immovable boulders, of nets. Janus's footsteps moved swiftly away, and Gilly thought _hurry, hurry._ He could not hold him much longer; with every pulse of his heart, Maledicte gained on the sword.\n\nGilly yanked Maledicte's leading arm up and back, spilling him from his inexorable crawl. Then Maledicte slipped sideways, rolled, got his knees between his body and Gilly's, and kicked. The blow was all out of proportion painful; Maledicte shook free of Gilly's spasming fingers, and only Janus's quick grasp saved the sword from making its way back to Maledicte. Janus backed away, the sword held awkwardly in his grip, bloodying his fingers, the Elysia bottle in the other hand, the syringe slipping through the cage of his hand. Gilly made a gasping effort and caught it, rolling clear of the space between them.\n\n\"That's mine,\" Maledicte growled; as if Ani tired of the pretense, of the games, the sword twisted in Janus's hand and clattered across the floor, skidding up against Maledicte's boot. He scooped it up with his foot, kicking it into the air, and caught it with his sword hand.\n\nThe bones reknitted, the tendons flexed, and the sword shifted to a better grip. Janus dropped the Elysia bottle, staring at Maledicte's burgeoning shadow, at the drift of bloody feathers saturating the air. Maledicte stepped forward and broke the bottle underfoot.\n\nJanus met Gilly's eyes and for once, his poise was stripped from him. \"Keep him here,\" Gilly said.\n\nJanus stepped between Maledicte and the door. Faintly, a frown crossed the blank mask of Maledicte's face. Gilly wished it concern, but was far more afraid that the emotion was outrage.\n\n\"Hold him!\" he called, then ran for the stairs and Maledicte's rooms. Slamming the door back, heedless of damage, he started searching for the poison chest. Below him, steel crashed against steel, and Gilly wondered, his heart in his throat, how much time Janus could grant him. More, how little time would pass before Janus realized that he was preventing Maledicte from his goal, a goal that Janus wholeheartedly craved.\n\nThe chest in his hands, Gilly pawed through the contents carelessly. All the little crystal vials seemed maddeningly identical to his frantic eyes. But beneath them, a bottle, bigger than the others, caught his attention\u2014what had Maledicte planned for that? Shaking the question off, he snatched it and bolted for the parlor.\n\nJanus, backed against the door, panted, holding Maledicte at bay with the parlor poker; Janus's sword, notched and scarred, lay trembling across the room. Feathers littered the air as the maddened rooks spilled unceasingly into the room.\n\nGilly gritted his teeth and pulled off his shirt. He soaked the fabric with the bottle's contents. Janus lunged and ducked and parried, the poker thrust punching Maledicte's sternum. When Maledicte staggered, Gilly flung the cloth over Maledicte's head, pressing the fabric close to his face, his bared teeth.\n\nThe sword stroked back and Gilly leaned into Maledicte's body, trying to hide in the shelter of his back. In his arms, Maledicte contorted and fought. Gilly, holding his breath, had time for the single despairing thought that this was not going to succeed, that Maledicte would step free and slash his way to the palace.\n\nJanus took advantage of Maledicte's cloth blindness to strike another blow, breaking the delicate elbow joint and sending the sword spinning away. In Gilly's arms, Maledicte collapsed all at once.\n\nGilly fell with him, sprawled on the floor, nerves singing, shaking as with an ague. The living rooks fled. Janus kicked a few of their bodies out of their way with a fastidious foot and knelt beside Gilly and Maledicte. He lifted the cloth and wrinkled his nose.\n\n\"Ether,\" Gilly said, but Janus wasn't listening. He touched Maledicte's slack face, the hand that had been broken, the elbow that even now mended itself.\n\nFinally he looked up and met Gilly's eyes. \"What the devil was that?\" His voice was a near whisper, as if he feared Maledicte would wake. \"I hurt him. I broke his hand, I broke his ribs, his elbow, and nothing mattered.\"\n\n\"She's insane, and infinitely more powerful than we are.\" Gilly dragged the cloth back over Maledicte's face. \"Fortunately, Maledicte is not, being mere bone and blood like the rest of us...no matter how powerful She is.\"\n\n\"She?\" Janus said, his sword in his hand, though when it had been recovered, Gilly couldn't say. Janus's expression was blank.\n\n\"The danger's past, I believe. You can put that away,\" Gilly said. \"She, my lord Last, is Black-Winged Ani.\" He shifted his weight, dragged a dead rook out from beneath his knee, and settled back again. \"And She grants Her followers certain abilities. Freedom from poison, from injury, and all She asks is their bodies. The longer the vengeance takes, the stronger She grows. She has no cares beside the shedding of blood.\"\n\n\"But he fell to the ether,\" Janus said. \"None of your nonsense, Gilly....\"\n\n\"I think immunity from poison is a mistranslation,\" Gilly said. \"It affects him, but not for long.\"\n\n\"She can heal wounds? All wounds?\" Janus said, touching Maledicte's shrouded form again.\n\n\"Some say so,\" Gilly said. In his arms, Maledicte stirred, despite the ether-soaked cloth over his nose and mouth. Gilly put his hand back to the bottle and soaked the cloth again. Maledicte subsided.\n\n\"Be careful, Gilly,\" Janus snapped. \"He's not very big. You'll kill\u2014\" The wolf paleness of his eyes flickered, the shock of belief hitting home. \"Will he wake maddened?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I don't think so. I think it takes effort for Her to manifest Herself. I think it had to do with the belladonna Mal drank last night.\"\n\n\"Belladonna,\" Janus said, his voice low. \"How much of it?\"\n\n\"Enough to kill,\" Gilly said. \"All for you.\"\n\nJanus made a small, choked sound, his face whitening. He gathered Maledicte into his arms and put his face into Maledicte's neck, rocking them both.\n\nStiffly, Gilly stood, and surveyed the wreckage. Another mess too difficult to explain to the few servants they had remaining. He picked up one dead bird by its wing, dropped it out the shattered windows.\n\nBehind him, Janus whispered, \"I'm so sorry I hurt you.\"\n\n\"Didn't hurt.\" The ghost of a whisper turned Gilly about. Maledicte's eyelids flickered. \"Like pain in a dream. Not real.\"\n\nJanus grunted with effort but brought both himself and Maledicte off the floor in a single movement, Maledicte cradled in his arms. \"Real or not, you need to rest.\"\n\nMaledicte slipped from Janus's arms, and picked up the sword, flexing his hand around it, parrying with a few still floating feathers. \"See, not hurt.\"\n\nJanus and Gilly tensed, and Maledicte smiled at them both as acidly as he had ever smiled at his enemies. \"I would have had it done, had you two not balked me.\"\n\n\"You would have died,\" Gilly said. Despite the guilt this relationship had sparked, it was nothing compared to the pain of imagining the loss of it.\n\n\"Would I? With Her touch on me?\" Maledicte shrugged as if it were a matter of no import, and sheathed the sword. \"Perhaps, but not until the babe was dead. My release from Ani is contingent upon my vengeance.\"\n\n\"We want more than simple vengeance, remember,\" Janus said. \"We want the court, the title, the safety.\"\n\n\" _I_ remember,\" Maledicte said. He sat down at the spinet, flicked a wing from the stained keys, and pressed a few notes, oddly muted. He reached inward, tugged another bird free from the strings, and dropped it to the floor. \"Ani doesn't care.\"\n**\u00b7 32 \u00b7**\n\n**A** RIS STOOD BESIDE THE EMPTY CRADLE, rocking it with a trembling hand. In the chair next to it, the wet nurse, holding the infant against her, shot nervous glances at the king and the attendant guards.\n\n\"Adi was never so small,\" he said aloud. The woman opened her mouth and closed it again. Against her breast, the baby suckled. In the corner of the nursery, Adi played with Hela, uninterested in the new baby, or in the newly partitioned section of his domain.\n\n\"Speak, if you would,\" Aris said.\n\n\"Your son was a full-term child, and this one, this little one\u2014it is a miracle he survived at all.\" She rocked the child; his lips rolled back, showing pink gums and a milky tongue.\n\n\"He must be whole.\" His voice broke on the last word, as he wondered if his brother's child would be another Adiran. Sound of body, lacking mind. Right now, he could not decide which would be better. He needed an heir, a child of sound mind and blameless parentage, and yet\u2014if the babe were deficient, there was no danger to him. And Aris, who had seen the wreckage of the coach, the twisted wood and wheel, the coachman's broken body, Amarantha's gutted flesh, knew there was an undeniable danger.\n\nFleeing, he had sought the sanctuary of the nursery, away from the fearsome images evoked by the wreckage, away from the horror of Jasper's reports. Dantalion had come in with the child just after dawn, the infant still bloody in his arms, but alive. Jasper had brought Amarantha's body in and laid her respectfully down, his fair face flushed and distraught. \"He didn't wait, sire. Not for her to live or die. He just cut her open and took the babe. Left her body like refuse on the road.\"\n\nAt first, Aris had been nearly afraid to look on the child, afraid that Jasper's words would have left a taint of atrocity on the boy, but the child was an infant pure and sweet. Briefly, Aris let himself remember that too-short moment when Aurora had held Adiran up to him, smiling. Before they knew she was dying. Before Adi's flaws became apparent.\n\nGingerly, he touched the infant's soft skull, cupped it, warm and pulsing, in the cradle of his palm. He owed Dantalion's decisiveness for this moment, but still he could not trust the man. Last night, only last night, he had heard Dantalion extolling the virtues of culling the Itarusine children, insuring that only the fittest lived. The ones found wanting were plunged into the icy seas. Aris had thought of his sweet Adiran and had fled the court room.\n\n\"Sire,\" Jasper said, entering and dropping his voice to lower tones immediately on seeing the sleeping child. Echo followed him in and averted his gaze from the blushing wet nurse.\n\n\"Have you found the cause of the accident?\" Aris asked, but lost parts of their answers, studying the delicate veins in the child's eyelids.\n\n\"Coachman spooked...lost control of the reins, though why\u2014\" Jasper said.\n\n\"We've questioned the stablehands...\" Echo said. \"And found silver embroidery thread in an unused stall.\"\n\n\"Which means little,\" Jasper said. \"Could be off livery, could be signs of a noble girl's dalliance. Silver's popular this year\u2014\"\n\n\"Maledicte made it so,\" Echo said.\n\nAris took the child from the nurse with a careful hand. The infant curled his fingers around Aris's forefinger, and he smiled. \"A good grip. And I believe I saw a glimmer of awareness in his face.\"\n\n\"He's a right one,\" the nurse said. \"Small but perfect.\"\n\n\"He is,\" Aris said, veering between joy and worry. An heir. A release from his burden. But such a court to leave a beautiful child\u2014\n\nBehind him, Echo and Jasper's voices rose, growing harsh and brittle as they argued with each other.\n\n\"I tell you, you cannot blame your favorite in this matter,\" Jasper said. \"You cannot blame a death on a man who did not attend.\"\n\n\"And you\u2014I suppose you see the hand of witchcraft in this?\" Echo spat. \"Your Mad Mirabile creeping onto the palace grounds, still in her ballgown, poisoning the coachman with her spells? The same spells you blame for allowing her to escape your net?\"\n\n\"Perhaps if you could be convinced to share your resources with my men\u2014\" Jasper said. \"We are at home in the palace, and in the main thoroughfares of the city. The alleys and Relicts are your Particulars' job, and yet they've not found her either. But that has nothing to do with this. I think you must admit\u2014\"\n\n\"To you, nothing,\" Echo said.\n\n\"We need look elsewhere. Amarantha feared\u2014\" Jasper flinched under Aris's sudden gaze.\n\n\"Feared who?\" Aris asked.\n\n\"More than one man,\" Jasper said, refusing to meet the king's eyes.\n\n\"Your bastard nephew,\" Echo said, unafraid of Aris. \"Your newest counselor. She feared Janus but I still believe the blame lies where it is most obvious. Maledicte.\"\n\n\"Echo, you seem slow to learn. Maledicte did not attend the ball,\" Jasper said.\n\nAris laid the infant down, his throat suddenly numb and cold. He forced the words from his throat, but frozen, they did not carry above their argument. \"He was there.\" Aris rocked the cradle, all the while remembering the rough silk feel of Maledicte's lips against his. \"I saw him coming from the gardens and stable.\"\n\nJasper and Echo fell silent, staring at him.\n\n\"He was there, his eyes wild, his manner\u2014\" Aris trailed off, knowing himself for a fool at last. He sank down onto the padded bench that Adi often napped on, and covered his eyes. He had looked the other way when Kritos died, when Vornatti died, neither man long for the world, a debt-ridden gambler and an old rou\u00e9.\n\nEven when Last fell, Aris had sought other foes, had looked into the dark eyes and thought, shamefully, that perhaps Last was not entirely innocent of his own death. After all, the enmity had been mutual and undeniable. Maledicte might have only defended himself. Aris had even presumed that with Last's death, Maledicte had no one to hate, and so was defanged.\n\nBut hate, Aris knew, was addictive; why had he never considered that? Instead, he had accepted gentle blackmail from the lad with mute passivity, trusting Maledicte to need no more than diversion from scandal. He had even, Baxit forgive him, found it almost a game of wits between them.\n\n\"Echo,\" he said, his voice rough. \"You blame him. Tell me what motive he held.\" He had been a fool perhaps, but one capable of learning.\n\n\"Janus,\" Echo said. \"What he does, he does for him.\" He held up a hand at Aris's protest. \"I don't know that Janus understands what kind of man he's allied himself with.\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Aris said, \"is one of my counselors and my nephew. Your peer. He has never given me reason to distrust him. Perhaps, like me, he is only too trusting.\"\n\n\"I'll send the guard for Maledicte\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Aris said. The refusal came instinctively. There were the ledgers to worry about. They would have to be recovered before any steps could be taken. But Echo waited impatiently on an explanation. \"He thinks too quickly for that. I would deprive him of time to prepare glib assurances. Jasper and I will go to him and see if I can surprise truth from his lips.\"\n\nEcho said, \"If it were as easy as that, I'd have had truth from him long ago. We should simply arrest him, and let him prove his innocence.\"\n\n\"I'd rather you prove his guilt before I see a member of the court imprisoned,\" Aris said. Echo glowered, and Aris forced himself to the intricate steps of manipulation so necessary to his court. \"Find me incontrovertible proof of a crime committed, Echo, and you may have him. Talk to Dantalion, who knows more of poisons than I would like, being an Itarusine. Ask him if he knows of a potion to send a coachman mad. I will ask Maledicte the same.\"\n\nHe leaned over the cradle once more, breathing deeply, as if the child's innocence would not only grant him clarity and strength, but wisdom.\n\nARIS RETURNED from the Dove Street town house, having gone to confront Maledicte over Echo's objections. The visit had been fruitless and unsettling, Maledicte not at home and the house and hall so spattered with rook feathers and blood that it seemed a nigh-impossible task for the manservant left to clean them away. Shaken, Aris retreated without attempting a hunt for the ledgers. At the palace, he found one member of that eccentric household in the nursery, leaning over the sleeping infant, alone. Nearby, Adiran sang quietly and stacked blocks. \"What do you call him?\" Janus said, without looking up. \"My brother....\"\n\nHalf-formed fear melted at the interest in Janus's blue eyes. Aris came forward, and joined his small family.\n\n\"Auron,\" he said. \"After my wife.\"\n\nJanus touched the sleeping baby's soft mouth with a finger that dwarfed it. Aris watched as Janus rocked the cradle, setting it to sea-tide swaying until Auron opened cloudy blue eyes.\n\n\"Auron Ixion,\" Janus said, \"Welcome, your grace.\"\n\nAris let his breath out in a steady hiss.\n\n\"It's true, isn't it?\" Janus said. \"Little brother is the earl. I am only a bastard.\"\n\n\"Janus, you will always have a place at court, always be cared for,\" Aris said. \"My counselor.\"\n\n\"I know that, Uncle,\" Janus said. \"I wonder if Auron will feel the same....\" He smiled and said, \"If he's as sweet-natured as Adi, as kind as you, I will never want for anything.\"\n\nAris said, \"I thought to name you guardian to Auron and one of his regents, should I not live to see his ascension.\"\n\nHe saw sudden startlement in the pale eyes. \"I, guardian?\"\n\n\"Who better than family?\" Aris said.\n\n\"I think most of your court would say who is not better...but if it is your will, I am honored,\" Janus said, sinking to his knee before Aris.\n\n\"Two caveats,\" Aris said. \"Two conditions fulfilled before I name you guardian.\"\n\n\"Sire?\" Janus said, face growing still.\n\n\"Do you know where Maledicte is?\" Aris asked.\n\n\"At this moment?\" Janus asked. \"No.\"\n\nAris studied Janus, seeking honesty, seeking rebelliousness. Instead, he saw only resignation and a glimmer of anticipated pain. \"He will be questioned in Amarantha's death.\"\n\n\"He had no reason to injure her,\" Janus said.\n\n\"None at all?\" Aris said. \"Not even for you?\"\n\nJanus's eyes widened and he laughed. \"Once Amarantha wed Last instead of me, Maledicte ceased to notice her at all. As for more...elaborate motives...\" He paused, as if feeling his way. \"I am not unaware that had Auron died, it might have been seen as beneficial to myself. But this sequence of events? No, if you want inducements to violence, consider Dantalion himself. He saved the babe. He put Antyre in Itarus's debt. He will collect.\"\n\n\"You know what he will ask?\" Aris said, gesturing for Janus to rise. He grew dizzy looking into the pale depths of Janus's eyes, so like water shifting beneath thin ice.\n\n\"The Itarusine court is much occupied with honor. Dantalion's disinheritance must rankle like salt in an open wound. But if you owe him a boon, and if Maledicte is suspect and out of favor\u2014\"\n\n\"You think Dantalion would kill Amarantha merely to regain his inheritance?\" Aris leaned against the wall, jostling the cradle and setting Auron to fussing. Absently, he smoothed the blanket, stroked the soft skin until the drowsy complaint stopped.\n\n\"Men have done worse for less. Still, I think it more likely the accident was only that, and Dantalion capitalizes on it, cleverly shaping events to his benefit,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Maledicte hated Michel and he died. Amarantha believed he sought her death as well and she is dead. Elaborations aside, how do you know he did not kill them both?\"\n\n\"I was with Maledicte when Father died. I swear he did not strike the blow. As for Amarantha\u2014did Maledicte ride after the carriage like a highwayman, shatter their wheels all unseen and send them to their deaths? Or are you imagining poison in a court so fearful that no one partakes of refreshments since the Dark Solstice?\"\n\n\"If I had those answers,\" Aris said. \"There would be no need for this conversation. But Maledicte\u2014\"\n\nAuron made a sleepy sound of contentment, and Janus smiled down at him. \"He's perfect, isn't he?\"\n\nAris hewed doggedly to the topic. \"Janus. My first condition\u2014Maledicte holds some books for me that I would require returned.\"\n\nJanus nodded understanding. \"The Antyrrian audits. I believe I can put my hands on them. Your second stipulation, sire?\"\n\n\"Should you become guardian, you will not be allowed the freedom you have now. You will not live in Maledicte's house, but the palace only. You will never bring him here, and indeed I prefer you not see him at all. His situation becomes too\u2014irregular.\"\n\n\"A perfect model of a courtier,\" Janus murmured.\n\n\"With an empty house full of blood and feathers,\" Aris said.\n\nJanus flinched, his composure faltering. For once, Aris could read a thought in his nephew's face\u2014astonishment and dismay that Aris had visited Maledicte's house. \"An accident,\" he said. \"Startled birds, nothing of moment\u2014\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Aris said. \"It has been borne in on me that I've been a fool. I would like to see you escape that same realization. Of late, I have done nothing for Antyre but watch it, dreamlike, crumble. I've woken now; I have Auron and his future to protect. Do not think me blind.\"\n\nJanus worried his lower lip like a schoolboy, and Aris felt some of his anger mellow. \"Whatever hold Maledicte has on you, whatever has happened, with your knowledge or not, it stops now.\n\n\"If you must keep him, you may. But you will do so as men keep mistresses, discreetly, and never at the expense of your own responsibilities. I will find you a wife, and you will wed her. And should you misstep\u2014\"\n\n\"What, then,\" Janus said. \"Banishment?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Aris said. \"But not for you. Your slightest misdeed will see Maledicte sent beyond your reach.\"\n**\u00b7 33 \u00b7**\n\n**A** LONE AT A TABLE IN THE BACK, Maledicte surveyed the tavern with an incredulous eye. The Seadog had been the height of imagined luxury to him and to Janus not so long ago. They used to peer in at the smoky rooms, at the jewel tones of firelight on Naga's scales fetched up from the deeps, on sea buoys hanging from the crossbeams like necklaces of great sea creatures. The men themselves all seemed made of coin, scattering moon spills of silver over the teak bar with careless fingers. Miranda, who rarely held more than one luna in her palm, and that clutched tight, had leaned against Janus's shoulder and marveled at such wealth.\n\nNow the Seadog was evident for what it was, a run-down shanty near the edge of the pier, patronized only for its proximity to the salt-weary sailors and by nobles recovering from their visits at the cheapest brothels, the drug dens, and gaming tables so rigged that two nights running saw them in different surroundings. Even now, Maledicte watched two young nobles ruefully and dazedly taking stock of themselves, cataloguing damage done to their purses or persons.\n\nFools, he thought. They might think themselves beggared, but their clothes, their boots, even their perfumed hair meant money down here, and yet, they stood in the heart of the lamplight.\n\nHe sank farther back into his corner, into the dark shadows of his dimly turned lamp. It cast a dying glow over his table, made the bottle burn with hidden lights. Maledicte poured the contents into his glass, straining it through sugared mesh.\n\n\"You never got that here,\" Janus said, settling into the seat opposite him.\n\nMaledicte paused in his pouring and smiled, taking up a broken chunk of brown sugar, and grating it over the whole. \"No, _absente_ is definitely beyond the Dog's cellar.\" He took a sip, but the warmth that moved through him had less to do with the liquor than Janus's arrival. \"You found me.\"\n\n\"Always,\" Janus said. \"Though I admit to a few false starts before I remembered the Seadog. Vile place, really.\" Janus studied the smoky room with a contemptuous glance.\n\n\"We thought it so fine,\" Maledicte said. He closed his eyes, trying to overlay one image on another.\n\n\"We were fools,\" Janus said, taking the bottle from Maledicte's grasp. \"And _absente_ is nearly as vile. It drives men mad.\"\n\n\"I'm already mad,\" Maledicte said, a whisper in the lamplight. \"Haven't you realized? Gilly does. And as for the _absente_ \u2014I haven't offered you any, so you needn't sneer at it.\"\n\nJanus edged his seat around the table, drawing closer to Maledicte. \"Mal, I need you to listen to me.\"\n\n\"I always do,\" Maledicte said, taking another languid sip. Janus removed the glass from his hands, set it on the floor beside him.\n\n\"Aris went to Dove Street and found the house as we left it, bloodied,\" he said. \"Aris suspects that you caused Amarantha's death, more so than he ever did for Last. I don't understand why, but you must be prepared. What will you say if he charges you in her death?\" Before Maledicte could answer, Janus leaned in. \"I did my best, shifting his eye to Dantalion, but can you keep it there?\"\n\nMaledicte stroked the line of Janus's jaw, admiring the gold-stubbled sheen in the lamplight. \"I suppose. Best just to stay clear as long as I can.\" He frowned, reaching for his glass on the floor. Right now, its bitterness leavened with sweet suited his mood.\n\nJanus said, more to himself than to Maledicte, \"Who knew he would grow so suspicious so swiftly?\"\n\n\"We should have planned for it,\" Maledicte said. \"Even the most docile of men might choke on the death we served him. Still, had I known\u2014I would have let him kiss me longer, instead of fleeing like a virtuous maid.\"\n\n\"You let Aris\u2014\" Janus said, rage flickering in his eyes. \"You risked the intimacy, the scrutiny? He's no stripling to be blinded to the difference between man and woman. In his arms\u2014\"\n\n\"He discovered nothing, near drunk on his own unhappiness,\" Maledicte said, allowing Janus to tug Maledicte into sharing his seat. \"And I? I was thinking of you dancing attendance on Psyke. He took me by surprise and meant little of it. Unreasoning jealousy will be your downfall,\" Maledicte said, shifting his weight until he sat on Janus's lap. \"So possessive of what's yours...\"\n\nJanus cut his words off with a kiss, careless of spectators. Maledicte laughed against his lips and the triumph in it bled through. \"But you're mine too, aren't you? It's still just us against the world.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Janus said, drawing his mouth back to his. \"Of course.\"\n\nMaledicte turned his mouth up for Janus's kiss, closed his eyes at the familiar warmth of Janus's tongue touching his own.\n\n\"Such a tender moment.\" The voice cut into their intimacy, and Maledicte felt Janus stiffen with recognition. A dark man, heavyset and tall, his words accented in the Itarusine manner. Maledicte stood and smiled. \"You must be Dantalion, Vornatti's despised kin.\"\n\n\"And you, Maledicte,\" Dantalion said, eyes widening slightly. \"You, the dark cavalier of Aris's court? A puling youth with a sword too good for him?\"\n\nMaledicte's hand dropped to the sword hilt, even though he saw Echo appear behind Dantalion. \"Janus, next time, try to avoid leading the bores to us?\" Despite his easy words, he felt the surging wingbeat in his blood, the rage that they dared interrupt an all-too-rare moment of pleasure. He knew he should feel caution; Dantalion and Echo were an alliance that meant him nothing but ill.\n\n\"My uncle's catamite,\" Dantalion said. \"I'd heard such things about you. I nearly believed them, but you're barely worth my sword at all.\"\n\nThe other patrons, sailors and scattered nobles, watched with avid eyes in dulled faces.\n\n\"Mal,\" Janus said, laying a restraining hand on his forearm. \"You mustn't.\"\n\n\"But I _want_ to,\" Maledicte said. His eyes never left Dantalion's. He felt the dreamy tone lace his voice, the languor of the _absente_ reaching his head. All he wanted at this moment was the sound of steel and sweep of flashing metal. He savored the unwinding of Ani's coiled hatred, its warmth seeping through his bones.\n\n\"Waiting for an excuse?\" Dantalion asked, then struck. Janus tried to deflect the blow, but Dantalion was too close and too fast. Maledicte caught Dantalion's fist in his own. Dantalion's eyes grew thoughtful at the speed of it.\n\n\"That will do,\" Maledicte said, releasing the man's fist. \"Shall we duel?\"\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, rising, interposing himself between the two men.\n\n\"I never thought you a coward, Ixion,\" Dantalion said. \"And I had planned on spitting you next.\"\n\nMaledicte drew his sword in quick economy of motion, evading Janus's grasp. \"You have to take me first,\" he said.\n\n\"Mal,\" Janus said, voice low. \"I don't like this. It reeks of calculation. Echo is trying to\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte grinned at him. \"I don't care.\" He wondered what was in his face that made Janus blanch so, but lost that in the delight welling in him. To be free of another cur that nipped at his heels\u2014the lure was too great to deny.\n\n\"Outside, think you?\" he asked Dantalion.\n\n\"The cobbles are slick with dew,\" Dantalion said, shaking his head. \"And the alleys too full of those who would interrupt our sport for the coin we carry. No, we'll stick to tradition and the dueling grounds at the park.\"\n\nJanus grasped Maledicte's hand once more, held him back when he would have followed. \"It's a trap, Mal.\" As if to underscore his words, Maledicte noticed Echo slipping away, his task obviously accomplished.\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Maledicte said, touching Janus's cheek. \"Don't you see that? If not now, then later. Dantalion means to see us all dead.\"\n\n\"But now, when you're near drunk on _absente\u2014_ \"\n\n\"Drunk on blood,\" Maledicte whispered into Janus's ear, laughed at the expression on his face, the whisper of feathers in his mind. He pulled free of his grip and followed Dantalion into the gray-dawning sky.\n\nDAWN BATHED THE MEN in the park in pearly light and cast their shadows like spider-legged creatures over the lawn. Maledicte stood before Dantalion, sword unsheathed, dangling lazily from his hand.\n\nDantalion leaned close and spoke at length, his words lost in distance, but Maledicte's face darkened. All that, Aris saw as the carriage drew close, and more, Janus pacing madly behind the fighters. Janus drew forward and Maledicte pushed him back, his eyes never leaving Dantalion's blade.\n\nEcho was right, Aris thought. Maledicte did intend to duel Dantalion, flaunting his disobedience. But as they approached, Aris found himself dwelling not on the illegality of it, but the monstrously uneven odds. Dantalion was head and shoulders above Maledicte, and muscled with it.\n\nBeside him, Echo sank back into the seat, smiling. Dantalion's blade was of the Itarusine style, heavy and curved, the length of a man's arm. A savage weapon. And Maledicte's dark, slim blade seemed more a child's toy in comparison, though wickedly sharp.\n\nDantalion stepped forward, and the duel began.\n\n\"Should we intervene, sire?\" Jasper said. \"Before it goes further?\"\n\n\"We can always cry halt,\" Echo coaxed. \"I am interested in seeing Maledicte's ability.\"\n\nAris nodded, his eyes on the two figures. Maledicte made a sound like a laugh; it carried over the still air, and raised the hackles on Aris's neck. It wasn't a sound he associated with men, but the sound of feeding birds on a battlefield. Dantalion took a hasty step back as Maledicte darted in, as agile as a crow in flight.\n\nDantalion struck back, his great curved sword carving the air, but missed Maledicte entirely. His blade bit only Maledicte's black-fluttering sleeves.\n\nMaledicte danced forward, his sword skidding along the width of Dantalion's blade, raising sparks of outraged metal, and ending with a little flourish at the end that nearly touched Dantalion's shoulder. Dantalion jerked back, pivoted his weight, and came on again, thrusting, parrying, slicing at Maledicte's delicate form.\n\nDantalion dripped sweat, growing ponderous under his own weight. Maledicte, facing him, seemed as intangible as a shadow. His blade wavered, judged, and then they were moving again; Maledicte thrust forward, extending his arm, his blade, and kept himself out of range of the returned slash. His blade took the force of Dantalion's parry, unyielding. Aris let out his breath, watched the narrow focus of concentration on Maledicte's face, the dark glee in his eyes, and knew Dantalion was going to lose. That Maledicte had enough skill to have killed Last and anyone else he chose.\n\n\"End it,\" Aris said.\n\nMaledicte swept forward, danced under Dantalion's swing, not bothering to parry, and put his blade across Dantalion's throat. Dantalion jerked back at the last second, and the blade left only a wet red line behind.\n\n\"In the king's name,\" the guard called, spurring his steed forward. \"Halt!\"\n\nMaledicte fell back, out of the reach of Dantalion's sword, his teeth bared. \"Your salvation,\" he spat, spreading his arms like wings, inviting Dantalion's stroke. \"Too much a coward to finish this?\"\n\nDantalion lunged, and Maledicte flowed backward until Dantalion was overextended. The sword slipping past him, Maledicte reached out with his free hand and caught Dantalion's arm against his body, prisoning it, the sword useless. With agile fingers, Maledicte pinched the nerve inside Dantalion's elbow; Dantalion cried out and dropped his blade.\n\nAris breathed a sigh of relief to see the battle so neatly won, and then Maledicte reached forward with his sword hand and inscribed the same line over Dantalion's heaving throat.\n\nThis time, the blood was not content to spill over a thin trench, but spouted instead. Maledicte released Dantalion's arm and grabbed his hair, yanking his head farther back, widening that bloody smile. Blood sprayed Maledicte's face, his shirt, his sword, and ran in steaming droplets onto the fresh spring grass.\n\nAris froze; the duel had been won. Had Aris any remaining doubts about Maledicte as a killer, they were gone now. Watching the blood fountain under Maledicte's manipulation, he found it impossible to see any trace of the impetuous young cavalier he had so often declared him to be.\n\nWhen the blood slowed, Maledicte shoved Dantalion's body away. He wiped his blade on the grass, tore handfuls of the grass up to wash the mask of blood from his skin. When the guard put his sword at his back and commanded him to be still, Maledicte settled the sword on the ground. He stood, bloody hands dangling; the sword quivered on the grass.\n\n\"Your Majesty,\" he said.\n\n\"I cried halt,\" Aris said.\n\n\"He would have killed me had it been his chance,\" Maledicte said, his voice uninflected, a quiet rasp. \"He has tried to do so by proxy, and would have done so again. Should I have turned my back on a dangerous enemy?\"\n\n\"If you had proof, you could have petitioned me,\" Aris said.\n\n\"Proof is all too often hard to find,\" Maledicte said, his words a bitter echo of Aris's own.\n\nJanus said, \"Dantalion forced the fight.\" He put his arms around Maledicte, heedless of blood, heedless of the guardsman's expression.\n\nAris sat silent, and Janus said, \"Uncle,\" a quiet plea, his eyes eloquent.\n\n\"I asked for your discretion,\" Aris said. \"This is very far from discreet. A member of the foreign courts, murdered\u2014and it was murder I saw, Maledicte, you had him disarmed, and yet you struck....\" Aris rubbed his hands over his face.\n\nEcho said, \"I'll have him taken to Stones immediately.\"\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, his voice as abrupt, as commanding as Aris's was not. \"You set Dantalion on; you are as guilty of his death as Maledicte. Please, Aris, let me take Maledicte home. Let him be prisoned there until you decide his fate.\"\n\nAris could not think around the blood in his mind, this surfeit of death. But Echo had presumed\u2014that was as clear to him as Maledicte's act of murder. And the ledgers were not yet in his hands. To act now would risk them.\n\n\"No, I see no need for the cells. Not yet. Take him home, Janus. Remember our bargain. I am more desirous than ever of you fulfilling your end.\" Nerving himself, Aris stepped down from the coach, and joined the two men. He reached out and touched Maledicte's blood-spattered face. Blank black eyes looked back at him, as enigmatic as a starless night. \"Maledicte, tell me why.\"\n\n\"Death to us all,\" Maledicte whispered. \"My blood, then Janus's, then my poor Gilly's. That's what Dantalion promised.\" The gaze sharpened, lifted, held Aris's eyes with their intensity. \"He boasted of killing her, of granting you an heir. How long do you think you would have survived? Or the babe? After all, Adiran is the son of Aurora Vornatti, and if Janus died, if you died, then Dantalion was Adiran's nearest kin, an Itarusine nobleman, hungry for power and blood.\"\n\n\"You speak treason,\" Echo spat.\n\n\"Do I?\" Maledicte said, voice fading to a bare thread of sound. \"I thought I only repeated it.\"\n\nAris frowned, and nodded to his guards. \"My guards will see you home.\"\n**\u00b7 34 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY MET THEM at the door to the town house, blanching at the blood spray on Maledicte's clothing. \"What happened?\" Janus slapped him hard, twice, and would have done so a third time but for the sudden hiss of the black blade unsheathing. He lowered his hand. Maledicte lowered the sword.\n\n\"Don't take your temper out on him,\" Maledicte said, slipping past them and disappearing into the library. Their footsteps followed him in like distant drums, their words like the ocean, quiet, senseless, repetitive. He slung himself into a chair, and watched them argue, wondering if he would need to intervene again. He supposed he should be angry, but all he felt was the wet seep of blood through the linen shirt, and the numbed weariness in his soul.\n\nHe interrupted their quarreling to say, \"Gilly, run me a bath, please. I'm all over blood. And when you're done with that\u2014I have another errand for you. I want you to take our funds from the banks and hide them where Aris and his guards can't reach. I've heard enough of Itarusine ways to know they'll attempt to take recompense for Dantalion's death in a monetary way.\"\n\nJanus opened his mouth to object and Maledicte rounded on him savagely. \"You allowed Aris to send guards to follow me home. You cannot object to the steps I choose to take now.\"\n\nMALEDICTE LEANED FORWARD in the warmth of the bathwater, setting off small, tidal sloshes. Tinged red and perceptibly cooling, still the water was soothing, as soothing as Janus's slow detangling of Maledicte's blood-matted hair. Mindlessly, he trailed his fingers through the water, and grimaced at the bloody foam sheeting out of his hair.\n\n\"You were a fool to kill Dantalion,\" Janus said quietly, as if he kept close rein on his temper. He paused in his ministrations, trading fingers for a wide-toothed comb, ivory overlaid with silver. \"Twice a fool to kill him in such a manner\u2014to show Aris the blood on your blade. Aris could see you hanged.\"\n\n\"No fear of that,\" Maledicte said. \"Ani is more potent than kings. I'll slip the gallows knot yet.\"\n\nMaledicte reached for the sponge and rinsed his arm, removing a streak of blood that had so far evaded the water. Tension curled in his belly at the sight.\n\n\"You are mad,\" Janus said. \"I accept Black-Winged Ani as your patron\u2014I have seen the evidence myself\u2014but that's no reason to overthrow sense. I need you to be clever, and all you think of is blood.\"\n\n\"Your doing,\" Maledicte said. \"I would have been content with Last's death, had you not robbed me of it. Instead, I must kill again and again to keep the ground we've gained. Is it any wonder it's become habit?\" Ani's offense mingled with his own and his words grew edged; beneath the water, his hands fisted. \"But I'd give it all up in a heartbeat. For you. But you\u2014you made a bargain with Aris,\" Maledicte said, letting the sponge drift. \"You promised him\u2014What exactly did you promise him?\"\n\n\"Discretion, as he said,\" Janus said, but the shift of his eyes told Maledicte more than he wanted to know.\n\n\"How much discretion?\" he asked. \"To not live here at my side? To not walk beside me in the public streets? To not acknowledge me at all? Did you promise to set me aside?\"\n\nJanus stood and claimed a towel. \"The water's grown cold. You're all over gooseflesh.\"\n\n\"It's not the water's chill,\" Maledicte said, but rose and allowed Janus to wrap him in warmth. \"Tell me how things have changed with Amarantha's death. With Dantalion's. The longer you balk, the more I fear what you've done.\"\n\nJanus sat down on the edge of the tub, looked up with clear blue eyes. \"In exchange for staying third counselor and guardian to Auron, I am to live in the palace. I am not to see you more often than a man sees a mistress. I am not to take you about in public. I am to wed and\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte dropped the towel, wrapped himself in a dressing gown, tying the sash with angry jerks. \"You are to play Aris's lapdog. You ruled the Relicts, and yet you'll take such orders from the king, just to play second fiddle to a true-born infant?\"\n\nJanus said, lowering his face, his eyes blazing, \"To be kept at arm's distance when I am this close to power, to fortune, to everything we've ever wanted, galls me. But I must act the part. And act it well and for some time. Were little Auron to die so soon in my guardianship, it would ruin us far more than his survival. Aris\u2014\" He frowned. \"Aris doesn't trust me. So I will live in the palace, act the dutiful guardian, fond older brother. But I will visit you\u2014\"\n\n\"Like a whore set up in a bijou,\" Maledicte said. \"How Ella would laugh\u2014you, who she blamed for my recalcitrance to sell my body; you making me a whore when she could not. Except you don't have to pay for me or my rent. She wouldn't like that at all.... Please, tell me you'll set me up in a fashionable part of town, my dear. I would so hate to cross paths with my mother.\"\n\n\"Ella's long cold,\" Janus said quietly, hands dabbling in the bloodied water.\n\nMaledicte's breath caught, startled out of his rage for the moment. He had always known that Ella would not have survived to the fullness of old age, but had never thought of her as dead. Just gone. But Janus's voice held more than that simple understanding.\n\n\"You went back,\" Maledicte said, remembering. \"You told me you found R-Roach\u2014\" He couldn't help the tiny stagger in his voice, but he went on. \"Did\u2014did you find them too?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Janus said. \"It wasn't hard. Once I realized they could tell me nothing of you\u2014\"\n\n\"You killed them,\" Maledicte said, eyes on his blood-tinged bath. His heart gave a sudden, unexpected lurch; his ears rang.\n\n\"The moment Last reclaimed me, Celia's life was forfeit. I could not have her dogging my heels, begging for coin, for her precious rank, her Laudable-addled mind making hash of my plans. And Ella, who had the poor taste to scream when I killed Celia\u2014do not tell me you will cry for her; not that selfish woman who gave you nothing beyond your bare existence.\" Janus's blue eyes simmered with heat, the expression recalling kicks and curses, and days spent scrounging for scraps while the two of them plotted and seethed.\n\nUntrue, Maledicte thought numbly. Ella had given Miranda one precious gift, even unknowingly, when she had opened her door to an aristocratic castoff and her infant son. A gift so valued that some of its virtue rubbed off on the giver: Maledicte's heart, tangled in loathing and contempt, still held room for that spark of gratitude. He could not have killed Ella. But Janus\u2014\n\nMaledicte shuddered all over, temper surging back. \"How is it that you raise your blade to whomever you choose, and I\u2014I only garner censure and suspicion? You walk the courts and I might be banished, impoverished, or hanged.\"\n\n\"I will never let that happen,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte threw the robe off, began dressing with shaking hands. \"And how will you prevent it? Time may be on your side, allowing you to worm your way into acceptance, but it's my enemy. Banished, impoverished, or hanged; none of them appeals to me overmuch. Janus, let's give this up. We did in the Relicts, remember, when our plans went wrong or grew too dangerous.\" At the sight of Janus shaking his head, Maledicte tried entreaty though it stuck in his throat like dusty feathers. \"Janus, you're all I have. All I value.\"\n\n\"Be rid of Gilly, and I'll believe you. You trust him with everything. Sometimes I think you trust him more than me. Giving him control over your accounts, really Mal...\"\n\n\"This isn't about him,\" Maledicte said. \"It's about Auron, about claiming your birthright, about making our future. We've failed at claiming your title. I see no way to succeed.\"\n\n\"When you gained Ani's favor, you lost your mind,\" Janus said. \"There's always a way.\"\n\n\"So you say, and yet the babe lives, his future safeguarded by one who should be the wolf. You've been playing dog too long. Aris holds your leash, and you fawn at his feet, saving your teeth for those weaker than yourself, helpless women...\" Maledicte heard his voice, hoarse and ranting, taunting Janus as if he were one of his enemies, willing his words to bruise and sting, and wondered what was becoming of him. In the rippling water, he thought he saw the reflection of dark wings.\n\nJanus slapped him, knocking him back against the edge of the tub. Maledicte growled low in his throat and launched himself at Janus, knocking over the vanity, sending them sprawling. The shaving mirror broke, scattering their reflections across the floor, their tangled bodies distorted in its shards. Fighting for control, Janus twisted Maledicte's arm behind his back.\n\nPain erupted in his shoulder and Maledicte grabbed a handful of mirror glass, heedless of the stinging slice against his palm, and swung. For the second time that day, blood stained his hand. His own and Janus's. The pressure on his arm eased and Maledicte turned, remorse sickening him.\n\nJanus mopped his shoulder with his sleeve, blood dripping onto his forearm. \"That's two battles in one day,\" Janus said. \"A record even for your temper.\"\n\nMaledicte curled his fingers into his palms, aware of the blood sliding between them. He fumbled for words, tried to control his angry breathing. \"Let me see,\" Maledicte said, his temper vanishing under concern and shame. \"I'll get bandages.\"\n\n\"Don't bother,\" Janus said, blue eyes smoldering. He twisted Maledicte's hand over and studied the gash in the palm, watched the welling blood slow and stop with a calculating eye. \"You don't need it, and I'll get mine cleaned elsewhere. With the mood you're in, I'd get _arsenixa_ on the bandage.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. \"Janus, I'd never hurt\u2014\"\n\nJanus smiled, a thin, tight thing. \"Maybe not, but I can do it myself.\"\n\nMaledicte slumped back against the floor, watching as Janus raided his room for bandages, alum powder, and aloe.\n\n\"You're going back to the palace,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"I have to go play lapdog to Aris,\" Janus said, his tone savage as he bandaged the wound. \"You need to trust me, Miranda. Once you trusted me implicitly. Do so again, and all will be well. You forget that there is no separation between us. No plans for me, and plans for you. There's only us, though you seem to fear otherwise. Your job done, you must let me work, now. You must be patient. You used to know how.\"\n\nMaledicte trailed into the bedroom, sat down by the fire. \"I used to be someone else.\"\n\nJanus poured him a tumbler of whiskey and folded his fingers around it. \"You're becoming maudlin.\" He sat beside Maledicte, the temper still in his eyes, though less bright, less hot. \"We must lull Aris. You need to give me time to undo the damage you did by killing Dantalion.\"\n\nMaledicte nodded, drinking deeply. \"But you won't stay.\" He forced his voice level, when he wanted to beg. It felt like years ago, lying in the street rubble, watching Ella's gift, her Janus, taken from her; now Janus took himself away, and she was more powerless than before.\n\nJanus shook his head. \"I must prove myself to Aris.\"\n\nAfter Janus left, Maledicte tilted the rest of the whiskey past his lips, and then poured himself another. He stared into the empty fireplace until the darkness settled into the room, filling it with the sound of wings. The house creaked, Livia going on tiptoe out the door. In the kitchen, Cook sluiced down the tables. Eventually silence fell, and still, Gilly had not returned. Maledicte swallowed the last of a third whiskey and fled the house.\n**\u00b7 35 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY AND LIZETTE TUMBLED AND teased each other over the sheets, but Gilly's pleasure was leavened by guilt. He was all too aware that he should have returned to the town house, that Janus was not to be relied upon, and that Maledicte's temper was uncertain at best. But he dreaded the fraught rooms and the lingering presence of Black-Winged Ani. So when Lizette hailed him on the street, he gave in to temptation, and followed her home as shamelessly as an alley cat. Tonight, Lizette's simple charms were panacea for what ailed him. He was bent between her breasts, making her laugh, making her gasp, when she stiffened in his arms.\n\n\"Get out, you. Wrong room.\" She held Gilly's head to her chest, but the shiver up his spine had already warned him. There was no surprise in him when he heard the raspy voice responding.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. \"This is the right room. But there are too many people in it.\" His words still held their bite, but their customary precision had been traded for a drinker's slur. Gilly turned, drawing the sheets to his chest like a maiden under a lecher's stare, though Maledicte's gaze lingered on Lizette and not him.\n\n\"Well, she's clean enough, I suppose, if a little overripe. I expected the worst, it took me so long to get directions to this brothel. And she's redheaded. Predictable, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Mal\u2014what are you doing here?\"\n\nMaledicte ignored him. \"Go away,\" he told Lizette.\n\n\"He's paid for me. You leave.\" Her eyes were slightly protuberant; from the study of her throat, Maledicte considered squeezing her neck, making them pop.\n\nGilly intervened. \"It's all right, Lizette. The money's yours. Just leave us.\" His heart pounded in his chest, but for what cause? Fear for Lizette's safety, or anticipation at being alone with Maledicte?\n\n\"You still want the room? Cause Ma's going to want to know.\" Lizette drew her dressing gown on, and Gilly, seeing it through Maledicte's critical eyes, was aware of the clash of violet silk against her ruddy skin and hair.\n\n\"Go away,\" Maledicte repeated. He stumbled forward, ripped the sword from his belt, dropped it on the floor, sat down, and pulled off his boots. With a last moue, Lizette left, banging the door behind her. Maledicte shot the bolt, locking them in, and leaned against the door.\n\nThe silence grew, and Gilly, tiring of waiting, said, \"I thought you house-bound.\"\n\n\"The guards only watched me go,\" Maledicte said. \"Perhaps they followed and are downstairs, sampling the house delights on Aris's coin.\"\n\n\"Janus?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"The palace. But I came here to be away from all that.\" He crawled onto the bed, swaying, his balance shot, and lay down beside Gilly. He studied the draped shape of Gilly's body. \"I came to let you distract me.\"\n\nDrunk, Gilly thought, and wondered how much whiskey it took to override Ani's effect on poison. But even as he wondered, Maledicte's eyes lost the glassy quality they had held a moment ago, growing sharper, darker.\n\nGilly forced a laugh. Distract him. Maledicte had driven him to distraction and now all he could think about was the nearness of Maledicte's body to his. He could not think of a story now to save his life. \"How am I to do that?\"\n\nMaledicte rolled over in a swift move that belied his drunkenness, pinned Gilly, and kissed him, like the fierce first kiss of a child. Gasping, Gilly clutched Maledicte's neck, brought his mouth back down, and deepened the kiss. He tasted whiskey on Maledicte's tongue, like the sting within a liqueur-laced chocolate.\n\nMaledicte slid the sheet down, followed the retreating fabric with his mouth and tongue and teeth, no child's kiss this. Gilly groaned at the blaze of hot breath on bare skin, his hands clutching the thick layers of brocaded jacket and vest, embroidered shirt. He tangled his hands in Maledicte's hair, drew him up for another kiss, tasting the sweet, hungry mouth, as pliant as any woman's, but coupled with the sinew and strength of the body pressed to his.\n\nMaledicte shuddered against him, and Gilly bit at his neck, tasting starched silk. He lipped Maledicte's delicate fingers, ran his hands over the sleek shoulders knotted with muscle, and groaned again, nearly undone by the combination of female and male, of softness and steel. Maledicte laughed, a soft cat-rasp of pleasure, and rolled over, caging Gilly's hands beneath his flesh. Gilly knelt up, crawled over him, pressing his face into the black curls at his nape, licking, biting. Some blood scent still lingered in the dark hair, and Gilly moaned. Maledicte rocked back beneath him, rough embroidery scratching teasingly against Gilly's flushed skin. He gripped Maledicte's hips, pressed closer, and was rewarded with a breathy gasp that might have been his name.\n\nDrowning in the scent of his black hair, fumbling blindly, Gilly unwound Maledicte's cravat, kissed his bared nape, craned around, and tried for the divot at the heart of his collarbone. Maledicte turned, sought Gilly's mouth again, agile hands slipping down Gilly's flanks, pulling him closer. Gilly reached for the vest buttons between them, that maddening barrier of silk and wool, and Maledicte pulled away in a convulsive movement. \"Ugh. I can taste her on you.\" He rolled away from Gilly's questing hands, put his back to Gilly.\n\nGilly had no way of knowing that this was untrue, that the only thing Maledicte tasted was the warm salt of Gilly's flesh, the flavor of a beating heart. But belated caution skulked into Maledicte's mind\u2014if Gilly uncovered Miranda's secret, what would Janus do?\n\nAll Gilly knew, felt, was his pounding heart, his aching body. Breathing faster, he tried to tug Maledicte back into his arms, but Maledicte snarled, \"Get off me.\"\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Gilly said, his word a plea, a breath, a groan.\n\nMaledicte huddled himself up, a slim line condensing itself. \"Leave me alone. Let me sleep.\" Maledicte's voice was rougher than usual, thicker. Gilly wondered if he would see tears or desire as the cause if he forced Maledicte to face him. Belated recognition of the words filtered into his mind.\n\n\"Are you staying?\"\n\n\"Why not? It's late, I'm drunk, and the bed seems free of vermin. My apologies if I ruined your sport. But more fool you if you paid her before you took your pleasures.\"\n\nGilly stared at the ceiling, counting the crystal stars pasted on it. Lizette's client list. Each star a patron. In the center of the ceiling was his own favored patronage, marked out in spirals and dots, a constellation made of desire. Lizette swore the constellation was one seen in the Explorations, taught to her by a sailor, but Gilly had no proof of that. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.\n\nBeside him, Maledicte's breath steadied and quieted.\n\n\"Mal?\" Gilly said.\n\nWhen he was met with silence, he pulled the quilt off the floor where he and Lizette had dropped it, and draped it over Maledicte. He bent to tuck it around Maledicte's shoulders and hesitated, finding Maledicte watching him with steady black eyes. \"Here,\" Gilly said, awkwardly finishing the motion, aware of the rough silk of Maledicte's hair pinned between his fingers and the coverlet.\n\n\"I'm not cold.\"\n\n\"Colder than marble,\" Gilly said. He stroked the smooth cheek, feeling the dip and sway of the flesh between cheekbone and scarred jaw. \"You should go back to Dove Street.\"\n\n\"I don't want to.\"\n\n\"Petulant as a child,\" Gilly said. \"But if you won't, you won't. It would serve you right if I brought Lizette back in.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Maledicte said. \"Please.\"\n\n\"I won't. Best move over some, you're going to fall off the edge.\"\n\nGilly slid beneath the sheets, unwound them as best he could, allowing for Maledicte's weight atop them. Gingerly, he stroked the softness of Maledicte's hair fanning out over the pillows. When Maledicte didn't object, he tucked himself around that slim form, and felt the tension rise and fall in Maledicte's bones.\n\nSnuggled together in such surroundings, Gilly found himself wondering if this was how it had been for Maledicte and Janus. Away from the town house, this moment felt fragile, endangered by any opening door, by the rumble of voices down the hall, by the shouts of laughter and anger that rose from the streets. No wonder they clung to each other, he thought, they grew up with no haven but each other. Still, he thought, the situation was no longer the same.\n\n\"I've been thinking about the Explorations again,\" Gilly said, testing the waters.\n\nIn his arms, Maledicte made a sound of protest more felt than heard. It gave Gilly courage.\n\n\"I want you to come with me. The _Virga_ sails in five months, just before the fall. We could ride out beneath its tall sails, out through the harbor, into the deep waters where it's so blue you can't tell sea from sky. We could watch sea beasts at play; the great whales spouting and diving, and stranger creatures still, so strange that no sailor ever mentions them unless you've seen them already for fear of being mocked. We'd land in a new world. No Relicts, no court, just the land and the sky and the stars. The sailors say it's a different sky entirely down there, that it never goes black, just to darker and darker shades of blue\u2014\"\n\n\"And do what?\" Maledicte whispered. \"Live like paupers? Or fish for a living, at the mercy of storm and sea?\"\n\n\"I'd be a chocolate farmer,\" Gilly said, inventing on the spot. \"Feed you sweets for breakfast, until you grew fat or sick from them.\"\n\nMaledicte laughed, his warm breath brushing Gilly's forearm, raising the hairs on it and on his neck. \"Dreamer.\"\n\n\"But not a fool,\" Gilly said. \"Before I go, I'd buy up small luxuries here, to take with me. Sell them to the Antyrrian \u00e9migr\u00e9s over there, desperate for a taste of home, and use the money for things exotic to Antyre and send them back for sale. Feathers for gowns and hats, pelts for pelisses, illustrations. Maybe I'd even write a book for the libraries.\" His words came stiff and slow, awkward as his stories never were, fearful of being mocked. It was the first time he'd spoken aloud of his dreams. And even then he balked at spilling it all, that he would include Maledicte as more than a whim. That he couldn't imagine life without him.\n\n\"A trader overseas,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"I know, a dreamer,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte rose up, turned, and kissed Gilly's forehead, stroked his cheek. He slid back into Gilly's loose embrace, and only once his face was hidden again did Gilly hear him speak. \"What about Janus?\"\n\nIf Gilly's words of salt and sea and sky carried sunlight and tropical flavors, the mention of Janus brought the first taste of winter into the room.\n\nHeart pounding, realizing that Maledicte was tempted, Gilly said, \"Can't you forget him?\" His words were a whisper. Vornatti died for voicing a similar thought, but Gilly gambled that Maledicte was far fonder of him.\n\n\"I could easier forget my own name,\" Maledicte said. \"He needs me.\"\n\n\"I need you,\" Gilly said, sudden hunger darkening his voice to a growl, rolling Maledicte to face him.\n\nMaledicte scowled. \"You want me. Which is not the same thing at all.\"\n\nGilly started to protest and Maledicte put a hand over his mouth. \"Listen to me, Gilly. When you'd had me, what then? You'd be as weary of me as you were of the old bastard...you'd be longing for your sweet-fleshed, sweet-tempered maids and not a dark-natured creature like myself.\"\n\nGilly kissed the fingers overlying his mouth in soundless retort. Maledicte withdrew his hand. \"No, Gilly. Leave me be. I'm tired beyond belief....\" Hetried to unravel himself from the blanket but Gilly stopped him.\n\n\"Shh, just sleep. I'll guard your sleep. Even from myself.\" Gilly forced a lightness into his voice he didn't feel, was rewarded with Maledicte relaxing into his embrace. He lay with Maledicte a swaddled bundle in his arms, and tried to sort out the truth of it. Was Maledicte right, would he repent of this unseasonal desire? Gilly couldn't imagine doing so, but when he slept his dreams were full of Black-Winged Ani cradled in his arms, covered in blood.\n\nMALEDICTE WOKE, rubbed grit from his dry eyes, and took a startled breath at finding himself in the brothel. The corset pinched his ribs and he gasped. Untangling himself from the blankets, he staggered to the wash-stand, stared at his reflection in the still water. Gilly. Maledicte turned, breathing shallowly, breathing with small hitches of pain. In the emptiness of the room, he shucked out of the crumpled coat, the vest, and reached into his shirt to loosen the first laces on his corset. The relief was as sweet as the memory of his restraint. Janus would have killed him. Like Roach. Like Ella. Salt stung his eyes.\n\nHe splashed water on his face. The water was tepid but clear. Gilly must have asked them to bring another basin when he was done washing and shaving. Without Gilly's presence, the room seemed too full of the whore's trade, draggled lace, fine fabrics worn thin with use, the narrow bed and sagging mattress, the cloying odor of rose-scented powder and sweat in the air. If Maledicte had been less fortunate, less determined, without Janus to aid him, Ella might have sold Miranda to a place like this.\n\nNausea churned in his belly. Never to this, he thought. He would spill blood on the roads first, turn highwayman and waylay rich men's coaches. The thought calmed him; the sword on the bed soothed him with its bird's eye glitter.\n\nThe door opened behind him. In the mirror, water blurring his vision, he saw Lizette enter. \"What do you want?\"\n\nLizette grinned. \"Gilly said to make you comfortable. I came to offer you a razor.\"\n\nAware of the dampness at his throat and the loosened laces around his chest, Maledicte took up his vest, buttoning it with his back to her. \"I hardly think to be here long enough to require one.\"\n\n\"I would be amazed if you did,\" she said. She closed the door, leaned against it much as he had last night. He remembered that. The stability of the rough wood when his heart was pounding with possibilities.\n\n\"Have you something to say?\" Maledicte settled his coat as best he could, adjusting the shoulders. His head throbbed, imagining her laughing over how he had routed her from her bed to lie with his servant.\n\n\"Poor Gilly,\" she said. \"His head's in a swivet about you, desiring you, loving you.\" The scorn in her eyes took away any sweetness left in her face. \"And he don't know the first thing about you, does he, _my lady_?\"\n\nMaledicte's breath stopped. All his worries about Gilly knowing, about the court finding out, about Aris looking at him without preconceptions, just _once,_ and it was this whore who guessed. \"I've killed one man for suggesting I was effeminate. What makes you\u2014\"\n\n\"Whores know things, we've got eyes for artifice, don't we? Appearances is our trade, more'n anything else. How to look better, smaller, fuller\u2014each of us has played the man at least once, going out with a fellow where we wouldn't be wanted or escorting ourselves places where women don't walk alone. You're just better than most. Without that sword though, you're nothing but a tall, skinny\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut your mouth,\" Maledicte said. He grabbed the sword, yanked it free, then fought to resheathe it. He didn't need to murder her. Whores were easily bought.\n\n\"Or you'll shut it for me?\" She vamped at him, flashing her skirts, wrinkling her nose, fluttering her eyelashes.\n\nMaledicte grabbed her neck and slammed her into the door.\n\nShe coughed, then laughed. \"Rough play do it for you? You'll be disappointed with Gilly then. He's a sweetheart, through and through, my Gilly is\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Maledicte said, pinching his fingers inward like the claws of a crab, collecting her attention along with the air in her windpipe.\n\nWary now, she opened her mouth to cry out. As quickly as she did, he barred her mouth with his fingers. \"Listen to me, Lizette. Should you unmask me, I will make you suffer. I know Itarusine potions to make your blood surge and foam within your skin, seeking egress. You'll bleed and keep bleeding from your eyes, your mouth, your overused sex...and you'll suffer pain you can't imagine. You'll die slowly while your blood swells like the surf and your skin splits to make way for it. And when you're dead, even the crows won't touch your flesh.\" He released her. \"And no one will even care. Or investigate. You'll be just another dead whore.\"\n\nShe slid down the door, soiled violet silk and blotchy face. \"I wasn't going to say nothing. Whores don't say nothing.\"\n\n\"Not if they're wise.\" Maledicte stepped back. She wiped her teary eyes and nose with the edge of her gown, looking up at him. He put a hand to her shoulder and she flinched. \"I see you understand me.\"\n\nHe left the door sagging open, left Lizette huddled on the floor, and went home.\n\nGILLY, LOUNGING IN THE LIBRARY, looked up at the bang of the door. He folded the broadsheet, set it down at his feet. \"Did you sleep well?\" He doubted it, the way Maledicte clung to the shadows of the room, pulling curtains.\n\n\"Did you send Lizette in to me?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nGilly winced at the ugly edge in Maledicte's voice. \"No. But the greedy little cat probably liked the rich looks of you. Did she wake you?\"\n\n\"The screeching of the matron did, rousting some sailors who out-stayed their coin. Don't I give you enough to establish a bijou in a peaceful neighborhood?\"\n\n\"Woke up temperamental, that's obvious,\" Gilly said. Aware that Maledicte hadn't yet met his eyes, Gilly wondered what ailed him, embarrassment or anger. \"Come here.\" When Maledicte hesitated, he repeated himself. \"Come here.\"\n\nMaledicte stood before him, stiff and spiky like a child uncertain of chastisement.\n\n\"Woke with a head, I've no doubts,\" Gilly said. \"Poor Mal. You were very drunk last night. I am amazed Ani allowed it.\"\n\nMaledicte knelt before Gilly. \"You're not angry?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. Why should he be angry? He knew something he hadn't known before, that Maledicte desired him. That knowledge made him lazy and content. He stroked Maledicte's neck, his shoulders, his dark hair. Maledicte laid his head in Gilly's lap, sighing.\n\n\"I'm sorry you woke unpleasantly,\" Gilly said, separating strands of dark hair and twining them again. \"You looked so peaceful when I left.\"\n\n\"That was your mistake,\" Janus said. Gilly flinched in his seat, felt Maledicte carry the movement through. \"When Mal is peaceful, it's always deceptive. Usually means he's going to kill someone.\"\n\n\"I have to wash,\" Maledicte said. \"Those sheets probably had fleas.\" He pushed away from Gilly's loose embrace.\n\nJanus snagged his arm, studied him with a sapphirine gaze. \"Aris restricted you to these four walls. You went out?\"\n\n\"You disobey him at will. Why shouldn't I?\" Maledicte said, twitching his arm free.\n\n\"I am not on sufferance,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Aren't you?\" Maledicte said.\n\nJanus's face darkened, and Maledicte sighed. \"My temper is foul today, Janus, so go cautiously.\"\n\n\"I remind you,\" Janus said. \"Aris has guards watching the house, watching you. Remember that, should you feel the need to draw your blade.\"\n\nMaledicte shivered; his hands clenched, but he made no further response to the tightening noose of suspicion he found himself in. Instead, he drew Janus's head down and kissed him fiercely, after a quick, burdened glance at Gilly.\n\n\"I'm tired. You need to time your visits better. Until then, Gilly will take care of me.\" Maledicte slipped out of Janus's arms and went upstairs.\n\nJanus smiled thinly at Gilly, and prowled the room, unspeaking. Gilly rose to go and Janus forestalled him. \"Something you want to confess to me, Gilly? You're jumpy today. As if you had a guilty conscience.\"\n\n\"Is yours any more pristine?\" Gilly countered.\n\n\"Do I need to tell you again to stay away from Maledicte? He's more than you can handle.\"\n\n\"I handled things well enough last night,\" Gilly said.\n\nThe sudden blankness in Janus's face gave him enough warning to duck the blow. But then Janus seized his shoulders in a grip that trembled with rage; Gilly felt bruises starting.\n\n\"You dared,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Why shouldn't I?\" Gilly said. \"If you can change your appetite from women for Mal's sake, why can I not do the same? He was willing enough.\"\n\nThe tension in Janus's arms eased enough for Gilly to free himself. What he had said that defused the worst of Janus's temper, Gilly didn't know, and he found himself regretting it. This fight had been a long time coming, and he welcomed it as much as he feared it.\n\n\"Get out,\" Janus said.\n\n\"This is my house,\" Gilly said. \"You go.\" He grinned. His heart raced with exhilaration and fear. He found Maledicte's evil genius poking him, as if the night spent together had left him with more than frustrated desire. \"Of course, you could stay. Could hit me again, threaten to kill me. Again. But I know why you balk...you are not so sure that Mal would forgive you\u2014\"\n\nJanus struck and Gilly blocked, catching the fist in his own grip, twisting it. \"No more idle threats, Janus. I've gotten your measure. Maledicte's love protects me from you. And he does love me, whether he wants to or not.\"\n\n\"Then be honest with me,\" Janus said. \"You mean to steal him from me.\"\n\nGilly said, \"Your love will send him to blood and death.\"\n\n\"You don't care about the blood, about the court. All you care about is having him for yourself. Don't dress your motives in fine words. You want him.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"I'll kill you first,\" Janus said.\n\n\"And that brings us around to where we started this quarrel,\" Gilly said. \"Like two dogs fighting over a bitch in season.\"\n\n\"That's a flattering thought. Be sure to share it with Mal. He'll gut you for me,\" Janus said.\n\n\"He promised he'd never hurt me. I believe him. He may be many things, but he's not a liar.\"\n\n\"He'd forgive me anything,\" Janus said.\n\n\"Are you willing to test it?\" Gilly said. He stepped back, raised his arms wide, inviting Janus. \"Not that you'd have it all your own way. I may not be a swordsman, but I outreach you.\"\n\nJanus snarled. \"You forget your place. Maledicte may call you friend, but you are a servant born, and a servant until death.\"\n\n\"And you haven't forgotten yours?\" Gilly asked. \"You're so far out of your place that you're dangling from a rope marked treason.\"\n\nJanus hissed, his hand clenching around his sword, but as soon as his knuckles whitened, they relaxed, the rage cresting and disappearing as if it had never been. He turned a placid face to Gilly, leaving him off-balance. Where did the rage go? Where would Janus vent it? Not on Maledicte, surely; it was no longer safe to do so.\n\nGilly put his back to Janus and walked out, though his skin crawled. If Janus could be rid of him by accident or manipulation, Maledicte's protection would be useless. And Janus's anger, though better controlled than Maledicte's, always erupted in the end.\n\nHe listened for Janus's footsteps in the hall, in case Janus chose to continue their quarrel. But instead, he heard them going up the stairs, chasing after Maledicte.\n**\u00b7 36 \u00b7**\n\n_For a most enlightening murder, in times when subtlety is not as prized as spectacle, one can do no better than to seek out tincture Precatorius, imported from the Explorations. A single death by its means is always enough to open the eyes of the most recalcitrant subject._\n\n\u2014 _A Lady's Treatise,_ attributed to Sofia Grigorian\n\n**T** HE MESSENGER ARRIVED EARLY in the morning, rousting Gilly from his bed after a night full of stealthy leavings, first Livia creeping out yet again, then Janus seeking the palace. Sleepily, Gilly paid the boy and flipped open the note, curious to see which of their spies had something to report, or if perhaps the coachman hadn't lost Livia this time\u2014the girl was clever and careful. But the terse lines didn't involve Maledicte and his schemes at all. The note, straggling words written in a hand unused to a pen, read simply: _Lizette very sick. Need help._ Gilly crumpled the quarter sheet of cheap paper in his fist, releasing the scent of the brothel and desperation.\n\nGilly was torn between agitation and irritation. Lizette had been furious with Maledicte's intrusion and threats, had failed to meet with him last night, sent Ma Desire herself down to make her sentiments known. He half suspected this emergency mere stratagem, showing whether he valued her.\n\nWhen he entered, he smelled the hot tang of blood over all the other odors, and knew the need was real. The madam met him at the door, her skirts splotched with blood.\n\n\"It's too late,\" she said. \"She's gone.\"\n\n\"Gone,\" Gilly repeated, and went where the madam beckoned.\n\nLizette's boudoir was drenched. The blood, mostly stiff and browning, still had a few spots of freshness to it. One rivulet dripped slowly from the bed.\n\nHer back arched; her eyes were open but obscured by blood, her hands locked on the sheets in her last spasm. Gilly gagged. _Lizette._\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Poison,\" Ma Desire said.\n\n\"Poison,\" Gilly repeated, his ears numbing.\n\n\"She got a box of chocolates, last night, after she sent you away. She ate them up, didn't she, most of them at once. And a note\u2014didn't I read it for her.\" She spoke to the room at large, though Gilly was the only one listening. Over by the hearth, another whore, her hands gloved, shoved bloody sheets into the fireplace. A second girl scrubbed at the spots on Lizette's finest dress, attempting to salvage it.\n\n\"Said as how you were sorry. That she should forgive you. Real gentlemanly, it was.\"\n\n\"I didn't send it,\" Gilly said. But he might as well have, he thought. Somehow this blame fell at his door.\n\n\"Figured that out when she started to bleed. She knew then who done it.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Gilly said.\n\nThe madam turned her head, studied the room with a speaking silence. Gilly's breath shuddered out of him. Throat tight, he reached into his pocket for coins.\n\n\"'Tain't for me,\" Ma Desire said, as she tucked them into her bodice. \"For her. Someone's got to pay for the burying.\"\n\n\"Who did this?\" Beneath the grief, a flicker of anger grew. He was not Janus, was not Maledicte, to find forgiveness of anything.\n\n\"She raved about your other lover, your highborn lady, said the crows were at her, tearing her insides. She felt their beaks. Said your lover had warned her. Said she'd bleed. Said Black-Winged Ani was killing her sure. Said she stole the crow's man and doomed herself. That true?\"\n\n\"What?\" Gilly said, his mind quaking away from the ruined woman on the bed, the fevered words attributed to her. Maledicte? Maledicte found killing offenses entirely too easily, Gilly thought, sick at heart. And penned at home with watchful guards, unable to bring the sword to bear, a box of poisoned sweets would be all too easy to arrange.\n\n\"That you're one of Black Ani's creatures.\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"My master\u2014my friend\u2014\" His voice broke. He sat on the bed, touched Lizette's distorted face, cold, waxy, and faintly sticky.\n\n\"You want to protect yourself. There's charms and such,\" she said. \"You're a good boy. Don't get caught up in the crow's feathers.\" She reached out, touched his hair, the hardness fading from her face. \"You was good to my girl.\"\n\nTHE KINGSGUARDS POSTED near the house eyed him curiously as he pounded up the entry stairs, slamming the door open, but did no more than watch.\n\nInside, Maledicte, muted in gray wool with a scarlet shirt peeking out, sat to luncheon, his head bent over a book. Gilly paused, the anger in him churning, and he bypassed the dining room for the main stairs. He pushed open Maledicte's doors, ransacked drawers and wardrobe until he found the wooden case that held the poisons and dumped them across the bed, greenish-gray powder spilling out of white twists, dusting his hands. He rummaged through the small vials, looking for the one that could make flesh melt to blood.\n\n\"You've only been out for a few hours,\" Maledicte said from the doorway. \"Surely no one's offended you so badly in that time that you would turn to poison. But if they have, let me know, and I'll take care of it for you.\"\n\nGilly's hand closed around the vial. A scant few purple drops clung to the curved bottom. \"You didn't have to kill her. All you had to do was ask me to give her up. I would have done anything for you. I have done everything for you.\"\n\n\"Gilly?\"\n\nGilly threw the vial at him. Maledicte caught it easily, looked at it with wary eyes. \"Precatorius syrup. She bled to death, as you threatened.\"\n\n\"Lizette.\" Just her name drew Maledicte's supple mouth into a scowl.\n\nTo Gilly, it felt like confession. \"She bled out and your bottle is near empty. Why kill her like that? Why make her suffer? Why kill her at all?\" Gilly's eyes blurred with tears.\n\n\"Is she worth all this fuss? She was just a whore.\" Maledicte's face twisted. \"A creature without value.\"\n\nGilly's fingers clenched; he raised his fist, and dropped it. Maledicte hadn't flinched.\n\n\"I liked her. She was uncomplicated and mouthy. What did she do to you? What did she say? Did she laugh at you? Give me a reason\u2014\" He raised his hand to Maledicte's cheek. \"Please.\" He needed something, anything to stop the rage and pain churning inside him. He waited in frozen silence for Maledicte's response, waited to be freed to anger or bittersweet relief.\n\n\"I didn't kill the bitch,\" Maledicte said, slapping Gilly's hand away. \"Are you my hanging judge? Go away, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Chocolate and poison. A sweet with a sting. A note she couldn't read but had my name on it. It apologized for our interrupted sport. You expect me to believe you didn't do this?\"\n\n\"Burn your soul, I\u2014\" His voice refused to rise, the rasp giving way to forced silence. Thwarted, Maledicte bared his teeth and shoved past Gilly like a departing evil spirit. The parlor door downstairs slammed with a sound of cracking glass, leaving Gilly cut off from his answers. Small crashes shattered silence like distant cannonfire as Maledicte took his temper out on frangibles.\n\nGilly's own rage simmered and roiled. He fled the house, past the lurking guards, and into the city. He was nearly into the merchants's treets before the fog of temper and pain cleared way for a single thought. Maledicte had never denied his wrongdoings before. Still, it was Maledicte's bottle that had been emptied....\n\nGilly moaned, resting his sweating face against his hands. He forgot that he had enemies himself, one of whom resided under the same roof, privy to Lizette's existence, to her location, to Gilly's thrice-weekly visits. Grim, Gilly traced his way back in the twilight. He would ask once again, and this time, he would listen.\n\nThe door was not locked against him as he half expected it to be. The parlor was awash in wreckage, as if it was the spill point for the tides' refuse. The mirrored door was broken; winking glass met Gilly's gaze from every angle; the spinet stool lay beneath the lintel, one leg snapped.\n\nGilly's boot crunched in the soft pile of the rugs. A curled bit of porcelain stuck out from beneath his boot. He picked it up\u2014a small porcelain arm. The silk thread and dangling stick were all that told him he held the remains of one of a series of puppeteer figures. He raised his eyes to their shelf. Not one remained, and though he found more identifiable pieces, a dog's head with a high, ruffled collar, a serpent's rattle, a minuscule puppet's puppet with its arms snapped off, he found no whole survivor. Some of them had been broken so fiercely it seemed as if Maledicte had attempted to grind them underfoot.\n\nGilly set down his handful of parts on the curtained altar with a speculative expression. Janus had gifted Maledicte with these puppets. Maledicte held them dear. Or had. Likened himself to the puppeteer of the gods, but perhaps he felt more a puppet today.\n\nGilly ascended the stairs to the first level, turning the gas lamps to glowing life as he went.\n\n\"Maledicte?\" Gilly called. The house was as hushed as if Gilly was the only breathing thing within its walls, and his heart beat faster. \"Maledicte?\" In the hallway, Gilly hesitated, then chose to climb the dark attic steps. Faint glimmers of porcelain dust traced a footstep six steps before him and he took the rest of the stairs with more surety.\n\nCool evening air swirled down, whistled under the attic door. Gilly pushed it open. The attic window gaped with jagged glass. Maledicte sat before it, perched on a pile of trunks. The heavy sweep of his scarlet shirt, the sleeves uncorded, unrestrained by a jacket, draped like bloody wings. His knees were drawn up, wrists crossed over their peaks.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Gilly.\" Maledicte turned his head to look back over his shoulder; the heavy hair whispered and shifted. His face gleamed in the faint starshine and reflected gaslight straining through the city fogs.\n\nA scrabble and the brushed, whiskery sound of feathers kept Gilly from instant speech as the rooks hopped his foot and lifted off, one wheeling out the window, the other perching on the pile of discarded clothing. It dipped its beak, exposed a rent in an embroidered jacket, and flew out the window, trailing golden strands.\n\n\"I didn't know you cared so much about her,\" Maledicte said. His voice was muffled; he laid his head into the space between his arms. \"I hated her.\"\n\nGilly sat on a low trunk, peering up at the huddled shape. \"You didn't even know her. I barely knew her beyond her profession. How could you know her enough to hate her?\"\n\n\"She came in while I was washing, teasing me. I told her to go away. She wouldn't, just leaned against the wall, her dress falling off her breasts, flaunting herself. I tried to scare her away and she laughed at me. I only did it to make her stop.\"\n\n\"So instead of stabbing her there, you came home and sent her poisoned chocolates, leaving her time to spread the story. No, you came home. You spoke to Janus. And Janus killed her.\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. \"Gilly, you have all the evidence. What more do you want? I am a murderer after all, several times over.\"\n\nGilly let out his breath; it left blueness in the chill air. \"Tell me you killed her. Tell me you sent death to her, wrapped in pink paper.\"\n\nMaledicte stared down at Gilly. \"I killed Lizette.\"\n\nThe shadows made patchwork of his face, created dark holes where his eyes should shine, and his voice was as calm as ever. Yet Gilly felt his pulse jump, his breath catch as he recognized the lie. Maledicte, the competent killer, was a bad liar, more used to half truth and misdirection.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Gilly,\" Maledicte said. He levered himself to his feet, standing before the open window. He stretched forward, slipped a clenched fist out into the night sky, rainwater washing over his fist, and then he opened it. Small, and glittering malevolently, the carved puppet of Ani plunged to the street below. Maledicte swayed in its wake and Gilly put a steadying hand on his ankle.\n\n\"Sorry for something you didn't do.\" Gilly plucked Maledicte from the chests, and let him go, listening to him stumble down the stairs. Gilly looked out the window, down to where the statue had disappeared.\n\n\"You'd forgive him anything,\" Gilly said. \"Even making me believe you killed her. Trying to set us at odds.\" Bile twisted in his belly at the sheer callousness of it, at turning Lizette's life into a pawn move. In the attic's soothing darkness, Gilly, like Maledicte before him, crouched and wept. If he had any doubts before\u2014he had none now. Janus was a killer, and like his father, like Dantalion, preferred to smile and kill at a distance.\n\nGilly bowed his head. The fault, after all, was his. He had goaded Janus, knowing that the man would retaliate. But to imply that Maledicte was to blame\u2014Outrage settled the anger in his belly to a steady flame.\n\nHis fisted hands touched the stiff, dark patches of Lizette's blood, transferred when he sat beside her corpse, and he turned to seek his bath. But through the broken window, he heard the coach draw up outside, the horses' hooves loud on the cobbles. _Janus,_ he thought, and decided to put off his cleaning in favor of confrontation.\n\nWhen Gilly reached the entry hall, he found Maledicte, blank-faced and white, facing Lord Echo and a brace of Particulars.\n\n\"I have a warrant sworn out for your arrest,\" Echo said, smiling grimly, his hand on his pistol.\n\n\"In what matter?\" Maledicte asked. \"You've sought to blame me for so\u2014\"\n\n\"One incontrovertible death. The murder of Dantalion Vornatti.\"\n**\u00b7 37 \u00b7**\n\n**H** ARDLY MURDER,\" MALEDICTE SAID. \"A duel.\" \"His blood, your sword. You cannot deny that.\" \"Why would I deny it? When I enjoyed myself so much?\" Maledicte said, though in truth he had almost forgotten it. Dantalion's death swallowed under Ani's blood tide; to find himself accountable for it now\u2014His hands shook but his voice remained light. He tightened the small muscles in his hands, and they too obeyed his will, stilling. The sword hilt shifted against his palm, though he wasn't aware of seeking it out. The feathers coaxed and whispered against his skin. Gilly's clothes, scented with Lizette's passing, kept blood in Maledicte's mind.\n\nThere were only three men after all. He could have his sword through the protruding belly of the nearest Particular without much effort, spill the blood out and dance toward the young Particular to Echo's left. Already his dewy skin paled at the audacity of arresting a nobleman. If Maledicte gutted the first man, the youngster would bolt. He'd lay sols on the matter. Only Echo promised a fight.\n\nMaledicte sucked air through his teeth, felt it cool the furnace of his blood. Yes or no. Fight or fly\u2014he'd have to chase the stripling if he fled. He'd had enough of witnesses. But three were manageable.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Echo said. \"Lay down your sword.\"\n\n\"If I choose otherwise?\" Maledicte said, still listening to the clock of his blood, ticking away.\n\nEcho pulled his pistol, cocked it, and leveled it at Gilly's chest. \"Do I need to use your friend as a surety for your behavior? Should I see one gesture that speaks of weapon, poison, or even enchantment, I will kill him.\"\n\nRage reddened Maledicte's vision; his heartbeat, reacting, deafened him. _Kill them all,_ Ani whispered. _Bathe in their blood. Feast on their eyes. Even Gilly. He mistrusted you after all, accused you of something you never did._ The sword rose in the sheath; his fingers coiled down, touched the cool metal of the blade itself.\n\nThe violent simplicity of the idea held Maledicte hostage. _Kill them all._\n\nMaledicte felt the movement in the air and he spun on instinct, the sword free of the sheath, registering the shock in Echo's face even as he did so. It was Gilly moving, only Gilly, and instead of slicing skin and bone, Maledicte twisted the blade, letting the flat of the sword strike Gilly's broad wrist. It welted the skin and left a fine line of blood where the edge had nipped. But the hand was whole, the wrist entire, the fingers closing on his shoulder. Maledicte panted, watching that slow beading of blood on Gilly's fair skin.\n\n\"Maledicte,\" Gilly said. \"Be still.\" He stepped past him, blocked Maledicte's view of Echo. \"Does the king know you're here?\"\n\n\"The king can call me off\u2014he has that privilege. But he need not set me on. There were many witnesses.\" Echo smiled. \"Maledicte is mine.\"\n\nBehind Gilly's sheltering back, Maledicte started shaking again, this time beyond his ability to control. Stonegate Prison. How could he accomplish Ani's goal then? How could he even survive, locked in the dark, with constant company\u2014how could he be Maledicte?\n\nThe thin thought crossed his mind, a ghost of reason. Echo had not shot Gilly, though Maledicte had drawn his sword; Echo bluffed.\n\nMaledicte bolted for the stairs, for the scent of the sky, and Echo shouted. Behind him, Maledicte heard the report of a gun, but no outcry from Gilly. If he hadn't been so desperate, he could have wept with relief. But trying to think around the flapping blackness of Ani's rioting emotions left him little but the frantic intellect of a cornered rat.\n\nEcho's hard hands grabbed his shoulders and Maledicte kicked back in a Relict rat's dirty blow. But Echo, though he faltered, was wise enough to have anticipated such a trick. Maledicte twisted to bring the blade to bear, freeing himself from Echo's clawing grasp, and found himself borne back into the wall by Gilly.\n\nMaledicte fought Gilly's grip, breath sobbing in his throat. Ani whispered, _Kill him and be gone._ Maledicte gasped his refusal, even as Gilly pulled him closer, clutched him to his body, pressing him between his solid warmth and the unyielding wall.\n\n\"Mal,\" Gilly said. \"Maledicte, please. If you flee now, there will be no Janus, no future, only blood and death.\" Gilly's breath warmed his cheek; his fingers traced soothing patterns on his wrists and back.\n\nOver Gilly's shoulder Maledicte saw the two Particulars nervously watching, saw Echo's eyes narrow, and Maledicte hissed at him. Echo took an involuntary step back and Maledicte laughed.\n\n\"Hush,\" Gilly said. \"Hush, this is what we'll do. Where one man can be paid to do his duty, another can be paid to ease your way. Go with Echo. It'll be only temporary.\"\n\nMaledicte burrowed into Gilly's warmth, listened to the heartbeat pounding beneath his ear, not as calm as the words Gilly spoke. Beneath the patterns Gilly traced, Maledicte felt Ani retreat, muttering, leaving Maledicte drained but capable of thought.\n\n\"You won't leave me there?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"No,\" Gilly whispered, stroking Maledicte's hair, heedless of Echo's furious gaze. \"I promise,\" Gilly said, \"I will always come for you.\"\n\n\"Tell him.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"He'll get me free,\" Maledicte said.\n\nGilly nodded. Maledicte reversed his grip on the sword; Echo raised his pistol again, but lowered it as Maledicte handed the sword to Gilly hilt-first. \"Take care of this. I'll need it again.\" Then he stepped past Gilly's sheltering arms, and into the rough grasp of the Particulars.\n\nAN HOUR LATER, shoved into a filthy communal cell, Maledicte reminded himself of the satisfaction that had filled him when he had taken Dantalion's throat, reminding himself that the bloodlust had been worth the price he paid now. The remembered smell of blood kept away the stink of unwashed bodies, of rank straw, of fouled water and illness, soothed the panicky flutter of his heart.\n\nThe cell fell silent at his entrance. In his fine clothing, his perfumed hair, he was a world away from their existence. Usually the nobles met with Damastes, the jailer, handed over their valuables for a private cell, for fresh water, for a mouthful of bread not gone blue. But Echo had brushed by the jailer, ignoring the man's covetous looks at Maledicte's finery, and forced Maledicte into the common cell. The rattle and thump of the heavy door woke those who had learned to be wary, and made others flinch in their sleep. Maledicte's heart leaped again at the long rattle of chains being drawn through iron rings, the wooden bar sealing the cell door shut behind him. Caging him. His mouth dried.\n\nTwo women, huddled in the corner, averted their eyes, pulling ragged shawls up to cover their faces. Beside them, a man rose to his feet, bare arms showing the dark ink of a conscripted soldier, a survivor of Xipos Island, and undoubtedly an enemy of the aristocracy that had used him and discarded him. Wary, Maledicte watched him stand. \"You're even taller than my Gilly,\" he said aloud. The torchlight wavered through the grill on the door, casting ruddy shadows into the room.\n\n\"And you're dressed for pleasure, not prison,\" the man said, his voice equal to Maledicte's rasp. \"Those shiny buttons, that stickpin\u2014hope you won't mind sharing.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Maledicte said. His hand itched for his sword, but when he was Miranda he'd taken on grown men, unarmed, save for a stick. Though even Miranda, half-mad with starvation, might have balked at this fellow.\n\nThe man lumbered at him, meaty hands outstretched, and Maledicte laughed. Snatching up a handful of stiff straw, he lunged to meet him, stuck his makeshift weapon into the man's eyesockets, and twisted. The man screamed, his voice gone high and hoarse. \"You're too slow and fat,\" Maledicte said.\n\nHe pivoted, aware of others slowly joining the fray, eager for revenge on a noble, for the temptation of riches enough to pay off their petty crimes or debts.\n\nIn the back of his mind, Miranda began to panic\u2014she knew what happened to girls who got overwhelmed, torn down\u2014but Ani raised Her wings and Maledicte let his will slip away, gave himself entirely over to Her hungers.\n\nHe reached up to the thrashing giant, climbed his shirt, and bit through the skin at his neck. The man fell, whimpering, covering his bloody neck. Ani spat the tiny scraps of flesh out and they were lost on the floor.\n\nThe other men hesitated a moment, and Ani grinned a bloody smile at them. In the corner, the women gibbered, whether in support or terror he couldn't tell. Ani sucked in a breath, took in the foul vapors of the room, of the death lingering in corners, and spat it all back out. Black foam flecked the floor where his spit landed, splashed on their faces.\n\n\"Rot you,\" Maledicte said. \"Rot you all.\"\n\nThey backed off, hands touching their faces, wiping the spittle away as if it burned them.\n\nMaledicte's throat itched as if his saliva had been caustic. He reached for a water pail, skimmed the top of it, and drank the clearer water below. Where his lips touched the dipper, the metal blackened, Ani moving through him in waves of heat.\n\n\"What's all this?\" the jailer said from the doorway, keys jangling self-importantly. He checked on seeing the big man whimpering in the middle of the floor. Maledicte looked at Damastes blankly for a moment, trying to recover the courtly ways that Ani had eclipsed.\n\n\"He wanted to share the things I'm saving for you,\" Maledicte said, touching his jeweled cuffs, his gemstone-buttoned vest, the fine weave of his coat.\n\n\"You shouldn't be in here. Not with the likes of them. You're Quality,\" Damastes said. \"Quality\"\u2014he drew the word out again, raising his head to stare Maledicte down. His eyes were the color of dirty slate, and oddly opaque, his hair a faded brown, as if he took his coloring from the stone and earth around them.\n\n\"I've always thought so.\" Maledicte said. \"Shall we adjourn to your office? Maybe have some wine sent in. That water is foul.\" His flippancy felt strained.\n\nThe jailer nodded, his eyes assessing. \"Yes, let's talk about your situation.\" He bowed with as much mockery as Maledicte had ever managed, and gestured him out of the common cell.\n\nAs Maledicte passed through the doorway, guards fell in step beside him from the places on either side of the door, letting Maledicte see that as greedy as Damastes was, he was also wary.\n\nEcho and his damned interference again, Maledicte thought. The jailer was unlikely to treat his other noble patrons with such caution. Too often now, Echo had created obstacles for him. Maledicte, walking down the narrow hallway, ignored the stone walls, the damp, spending his thoughts on sweeter dreams of killing Echo. His fingers curled, seeking the hilt of his sword, and for a moment, the familiar memories of it were so strong, so real that he felt the weight of the blade waiting, smelled the steel tang of it in the dank air.\n\nHis hand snatched at empty air; he faltered in his steps as the sense of steel faded to nothing, like smoke in his grasp. \"Keep moving,\" a guard said, reaching out to prod Maledicte into motion. Maledicte evaded the careless hand and started up the uneven stairs he had been pushed down barely an hour before.\n\nThe jailer's office and quarters were only cells with their walls knocked out, leaving cut masonry edges visible. Narrow windows allowed an unbarred view over the approaching street, but were too thin to permit egress. Around the room, heaped on elegant furniture, jumbled piles of aristocratic castoffs gave the impression of a disorganized pawnshop. Small jewels spilled over the edge of a mahogany dresser, gleaming like water, pouring into the half-open drawers. A riot of chairs made the room a maze of gilded legs and scrollwork, of tapestry and velvet and leather. At the heart of the room, a clerk's desk, all pigeonholes and paperwork, rested. A fireplace peeked out from behind a stack of dust-felted books.\n\nIdly, Maledicte bent and picked up a pocket watch from a pile of others. Lapis sails, a nacre ship, enameled on washed gold. He swung it from his hands, the chain slipping through his fingers with the heft of a living serpent.\n\n\"Sit,\" Damastes said.\n\nTucking the watch and chain up his cuff with the same economy of motion that he had used while card-sharping, Maledicte felt more at ease. If the jailer and his guards missed his small theft, they were not so observant as he feared. He turned his attention to choosing a chair, looking at gilded legs, carved frogs, or lions rampant on leather.\n\n\"This is not a shop for your perusal,\" the jailer said, brows drawing down over hooded eyes.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. \"A shop would be better organized, and considerably cleaner.\" He hauled a lady's chair up, all delicate legs and filigree, took care to sprawl over it, overflowing it.\n\nDamastes sat in a velvet chair opposite, put his filthy boots up on a carved ivory footstool that creaked under their weight. Maledicte flickered his eyes downward, studied the worn soles of the jailer's boots.\n\n\"All this plunder and you need new boots,\" Maledicte said. \"Is it false economy that hinders you, or do you just not know a decent shop?\" Over the man's shoulder, he watched the night sky split by darting bats and the sleek flow of rooks.\n\nHe was minded to draw this bickering out as long as he could, lulled by the sight of the sky. Only underground for minutes and already he felt buried alive. It was Ani within him who loathed the dirt, he knew; the underground dark had always been Miranda's friend, her kingdom found beneath the beds, beneath the rubble, beneath the storm-cloud overhangs of stone eaves.\n\nDamastes grinned at him, brown teeth in a turned-down smile. \"Say what you want. I've been abused by aristocrats before\u2014but remember, you're here to beg for my favors.\"\n\n\"Is that what drives you?\" Maledicte said. \"All this stolen wealth and it means only humbled aristocrats to you? You're a fool. You could buy yourself a title abroad and live like a lord. If it's begging you want, I have nothing to offer you.\"\n\n\"Make him kneel,\" Damastes said, his strange, slaty eyes hardening.\n\nThey reached for him; Maledicte evaded their hands, stepping behind a wing chair, making them stumble over the heaped greatcoats he pushed from its seat.\n\n\"No need,\" Maledicte said. \"I'm tired of my clothes being manhandled. First my Gilly, who should know better, and Echo, then that oaf in the cells. I see no reason to add two more pairs of damp handprints to my coat. You want me to kneel?\"\n\nMaledicte searched out a clean spot on the floor, finding one just as the guards reached for him again. He dropped, letting them grope the air. He grinned at Damastes. \"Here I am. Kneeling before you...but very far from begging, I assure you.\"\n\nThe jailer surged out of his chair, a thin hand knotting into a fist, and paused, his shoulders rising and falling with a laden breath. \"I could break you,\" he said, his voice striving to match Maledicte's insouciance.\n\n\"My bones perhaps,\" Maledicte said. \"But what then? Will you gamble that I am to be incarcerated forever? Or will you strike me, and see me freed tomorrow, full of rancor? My lover does not care to see me abused.\"\n\n\"Your lover\u2014the king's nephew,\" the jailer said.\n\n\"No secret there, an old scandal in the court.\"\n\n\"You're as much a bauble as any of these jewels,\" Damastes said. \"A favored possession. Close to royalty. You've been bedded on crested sheets.\"\n\n\"Sometimes in crested carriages,\" Maledicte agreed, all silken tones, like steel withdrawing.\n\n\"A collectible and rare. They say even Aris has touched you\u2014\" The jailer's voice dropped to a whisper; he darted a quick glance at his guards.\n\n\"That would be indiscriminate of me, surely, to bed both nephew and uncle,\" Maledicte said, relaxing into the familiar thrust and parry of spite and gossip. Damastes was simply another fool to be manipulated.\n\n\"To add you to my collection, to have something that was theirs...I could\u2014\" The jailer paused, an ugly, triumphant light in his eyes. He touched Maledicte's throat, drew closer, a hand on his own breeches.\n\nMaledicte smiled. \"My teeth are as sharp as my wit.\"\n\nDamastes took his hand away. Maledicte shrugged, a loose liquid thing, as if he had been only chatting with friends. \"Are we not to barter at all? Or have you brought me here only to enact the worst examples of boring pornographies?\"\n\nHe made no attempt to lower his voice and Damastes snapped, \"Shut up, or I'll gag you.\"\n\n\"Back to the cell, then?\" Maledicte said. \"You'll never get your trophies that way.\"\n\n\"What have you got?\" the jailer said grudgingly, sinking back into his seat.\n\n\"No furniture, I'm afraid, I haven't been here long enough to have furnishings brought, nor do I intend to be. But then, this room is rather bewildered with furniture. All I have is the usual bric-a-brac of a gentleman's life.\"\n\nHe turned out his purse. \"Two sols, how lucky for you\u2014enough to get your boots resoled. After all, gold is no trophy, gold spends. A stickpin, ruby, jet, and silver.\" He dropped it onto the desk. \"Had I known I was to be arrested, I would have worn one I liked less. Jet buttons on my waistcoat. Cuff links, ruby again.\" They landed beside the stickpin, rolled, and fell to the floor with faint thumps.\n\n\"In my pockets, well, Gilly says it's the mark of a gentleman to have nothing marring the line of my coat, but luckily for you, I am not so much a gentleman as all that. A luna and a snuffbox\"\u2014he frowned\u2014\"that I stole from Dantalion's corpse. I'd be careful with it. Knowing the man's reputation, I'd expect it to be full of something that would do you no good at all to inhale.\" He tugged at his coat sleeves, and withdrew another handful of small objects. \"Broken porcelain, nothing to interest you there, I'm afraid. That looks to be it. What do you think? Enough for a solitary cell aboveground? That bottle of wine we discussed?\"\n\nDamastes jerked his head at the guards. One left and returned with an opened bottle, passed it to Maledicte. Maledicte sniffed, and made a face, acting the spoiled lord. \"Adequate, I suppose.\" He drank deeply, taking the dryness from his throat, the scratching sensation that the dirt was trying to crawl into his mouth. He craved the night air, fouled with fog as it was, yearned to go over and put his face to the windows.\n\n\"All right then,\" the jailer said. \"Bargaining's concluded. Guards, take him back to the common cell.\"\n\nMaledicte snarled, caught flat-footed long enough for the first guard to take hold of his arm. The second guard caught the bottle square in the jaw, and fell backward, teeth broken and bleeding.\n\nDamastes swung himself over the desk, and helped pin Maledicte, knees digging into Maledicte's back. He said, \"You're right. Sols do spend. And Echo gave me plenty of them to keep you caged with the other rats.\" He wrenched Maledicte's head up by his hair. \"If you want out of that cell, you'll have to beg.\"\n\nMaledicte struggled, clawing and kicking, until Damastes called for more guards to secure him. Even with the shock still ringing through his body that he had misread Damastes so, Maledicte growled, \"You'll be dead before I ever come begging to you.\" The jailer's hand swung around, crashing across Maledicte's face and ear. When the ringing stopped, Maledicte ran his tongue over his bloody lip, and spat the blood back at him.\n\nThey dragged him down the stairs and threw him into the cells. He crawled away from the door into a dark corner, his head swimming, his body aching, and in his chest, Ani and Miranda vying for panic. Miranda felt the corset loosening as a result of the rough handling, her bladder already protesting the water and wine, and wondered how long she could hold out, how she could repair the corset strings without attracting notice.\n\nA shadow crossed her. She raised her head and hissed; the men, allies of the earlier oaf, backed away. But she knew they'd watch and wait for their chance.\n\nAni flapped wings through him, setting his heart to racing, his blood pumping; he wanted to fly, but there was no escape from the surrounding earth and stone. He whimpered but swallowed the sound, and refused to make another.\n\nGilly would tell Janus. Janus would get him out. They wouldn't leave him here. Gilly hadn't believed him when he confessed to killing Lizette. He would come, tell him tales to soothe him, make him laugh. Maledicte sank back against the stone, felt a small impact in his forearm, and reached trembling fingers up his sleeve. The pocket watch spun on the end of the chain, catching the faint torchlight from the hall, making a small sun and sea in the dimness of the prison cell. He refused to acknowledge the pressing walls and earth, choosing to dwell on images of the sea and sky and Gilly's low voice telling him improbable stories.\n\nAni, displaced by Miranda's panic, by Maledicte's careful control, spread outward, seeking egress.\n\nAcross the room, one of the predatory men began to beat his head against the stone to the rhythm of Maledicte's imaginary oarsmen. The sleeping prisoners whimpered without waking. By the time the needs of his body sent him into knotted coils, no one was left to notice. The oaf staved his head in with a sudden last blow. Around his fallen body, his two allies stood and began to beat out the same fatal rhythm. One woman screamed, her face welting up with black bruises that burst when she touched them. People scattered away from her, shrieking, some of them already blistering.\n\nMaledicte dragged over a chamber pot and used it without worry, still imagining the blueness of the sea, and gulls reeling overhead, but sounding like rooks.\n**\u00b7 38 \u00b7**\n\n**A** T FIRST LIGHT, Gilly sought the palace, slipping through the maze to the dark side of the king's ballroom, skirting it until he saw the house servants at their morning chores. He followed a maidservant burdened by wet linens to the rear entrance of the residential side of the palace. Following her in, he was halted not by an upper servant, which he had expected, but by an armed guard.\n\n\"You're not employed here. What's your business?\" the guard asked.\n\n\"Message for Janus Ixion, Lord Last,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"You can leave a message at the front gate,\" the guard said, then scowled. \"Wait, I know you. Your master's Maledicte. I saw you going in and out of his home.\"\n\nGilly nodded when his startled hesitation made any other answer a lie. But he was dismayed at his own incompetence; he hadn't recognized the guard, though he had passed him more than once. Such notice used to be his task. He hoped the guard was less aware of Maledicte's current status, of his arrest\u2014or that, even if aware, had no reason to deny a message.\n\nThe guard said, \"Ixion's in quarters next to the nursery. You know where that is?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly lied, gambling that it was better to be familiar with the palace. He strode away, unwilling to give the guard a chance to decide that Gilly should wait, and wait, and wait for Janus. Not while Maledicte was prisoned.\n\n\"You,\" the guard said. Gilly turned. \"You take the servants' stairs.\" He pointed to the small doors Gilly had passed.\n\nGilly bent his head, and went into the labyrinthine world of the palace servants. Dark, ill-lit, and narrow, the stairs rose at a leg-burning angle, then suddenly veered. Heat flushed Gilly's skin, and he thought he must be behind a fireplace. He found himself dallying on the stairs, trying to map the castle in his mind. He acknowledged that he didn't want to see Janus at all. He shouldn't have had to, except that when Gilly had gone to retrieve the Antyrrian audit ledgers, intending to use them to buy Maledicte's freedom, he found them gone.\n\nHidden as they had been in the recesses of Maledicte's bedchamber, Gilly had no doubts that Janus had used them for his own purpose. Without the ledgers for leverage, Gilly had tried bribing the jailer directly, but the man refused his coin. So Gilly was left to beg aid from Lizette's murderer, from the man who had taken Maledicte's security for his own.\n\nCoupled with that loathing, fear crawled along his spine. If Janus had faulted Gilly for Maledicte's behavior before, what would he think now, when he learned of Maledicte's arrest?\n\n\"Be wary,\" Gilly whispered to himself. \"Be careful.\"\n\nHe found the nursery door by the simple expedient of the two guards flanking it. These guards wore mail as well as leathers, pistols as well as swords. Gilly shuddered. Aris knew the babe was still threatened. For a brief moment Gilly found himself heart-glad of Maledicte's imprisonment, the murderous plan stymied. But he had come to release Maledicte....\n\n\"Janus Ixion.\" Despite himself, he couldn't help the growl that came out. He had expected them to allow him to pass farther down the hallway, toward Janus's quarters, but the guards opened the nursery door with little more than a glance.\n\nGilly's unruly emotions, fear, loathing, and worry, gave way to a far simpler one. Wonder. So this was how royal children lived. The long room was appointed as richly as any room he had ever seen, adorned with tapestries and carpets, ornate furniture and shelves full of books tooled in gold.\n\nThe carpets piled thickly enough across the floor in a careless riot of scarlet, lapis, and gold that even the most clumsy child could find no injury in falling. At one end of the room, opened windows overlooked the gardens below, their panes barred with iron. But even the iron had been wrapped with batting to protect the children from hurt. A firescreen locked to the stone fireplace attested to more precautionary measures. At the opposite end of the room, wide doors, paned with mirrors, stood closed.\n\nNear them, reflected in bits and pieces, the heart of all these small worries, Adiran played with painted blocks, stacking them with an air of weary boredom. The mastiff beside him whuffed at Gilly, halting his approach.\n\nGilly had heard about Adiran, of course, had shared that knowledge with Maledicte long ago. Gossip about the king's son could fill every ear in the kingdom were all the rumors spoken at once, but he had never seen him so close. Disbelief shaded his thoughts. Adiran seemed hale and entire; then the boy looked up at him with such exquisite vacuity that Gilly's breath lodged in his throat.\n\nAdiran stood, and approached like an uncertain pup, cautiously pleased. Behind him, the mirrored doors flashed, scattering reflections as they opened.\n\n\"He thinks you're the servant who brings him his morning sweet,\" Janus said, standing framed within the mirrored doors.\n\n\"Oh,\" Gilly said, as Adiran reached out and tugged at his pockets, then held up an empty hand. Gilly obediently searched his pockets, finding coin, but no candy. His fingers closed on something smooth and cool, and he brought it out to look at it. The porcelain puppeteer, least damaged by Maledicte's temper, barely chipped by Her fall from the attic. He handed Black-Winged Ani to Adiran, who cupped Her wings in his hands and laughed. He returned to his building, placing the puppet atop the blocks.\n\nGilly watched the boy, horribly aware of Janus's eyes on him, of his own simmering anger in this peaceful place.\n\n\"So you came to give little Adi a toy Aris will surely dislike\u2014or is there another reason?\"\n\n\"Maledicte's been arrested. He was taken to Stones last night. Echo has seen to it that money alone will not free him; the guards turned my offering away without a moment's thought. It wants an influence that seems to have gone missing.\" Gilly turned to see the result of his blunt words.\n\n\"I'll see Echo gutted and spread on the docks for the gulls,\" Janus said, a whisper of rage. \"And you\u2014where were you that you allowed this to happen?\"\n\nGilly, unused to lying, found a lie on his lips now, a lie to serve two purposes, to shield him from Janus's wrath and a small, barbed retaliation for Janus's actions. \"With Lizette. Seeing what could be done to ease her passing.\"\n\n\"You should never have left him,\" Janus said.\n\n\"It's you he wants. Not me. And you're here.\" His voice cracked, bitter with the taste of it, and Janus curled his mouth into a smile. Gilly drove it away with his next words. \"Tell me, Janus, did you buy this position with the ledgers? Trade Maledicte's security for your own power?\"\n\n\"I had little choice. Maledicte's impatience has seen him ruined. What good would it do us to have me fall alongside?\"\n\n\"Ani rides him too fiercely for patience or reason. Your doing also, I believe.\" Goading Janus wasn't wise, Gilly thought, but he seemed unable to stop, and worse, unable to provoke the reaction he wanted: guilt.\n\n\"Maledicte and Ani are not the same creature. What he lacks in patience he should make up in trust. But he doesn't understand....\" Janus turned, looked back in at Auron's small, huddled form. \"Guardian to the earl is not so different from being the earl. By the time Auron is grown enough to take the title, well, boys of that age are notoriously careless. Carriage racing, dueling, drinking in the bad parts of town...It'll be as much a wonder if he survives his first year as a young man as it was that he survived the carriage wreck.\"\n\nGilly's breath knotted at the pale serenity in Janus's eyes, at the pleasant tone to his words. Surely there should be some outward taint, some hint of the viciousness beneath, but even knowing Janus as he did, knowing what lay beneath the mask, Gilly's first impression of Janus still lingered, a bored, amiable young aristocrat.\n\nThough aghast at Auron's coolly planned fate, Gilly refused to let it distract him from his current purpose. \"What about Maledicte? Will you free him or is he simply a casualty of your schemes?\"\n\n\"Don't be insulting.\" Janus said, frowning.\n\n\"Then you'd best go soon,\" Gilly said. \"Best sweep down on them like an avenging godling and remove Mal before they stop to think that king's nephew or no\u2014your influence is fragile, your breeding suspect, and your pockets to let.\"\n\nJanus's hands clenched, but his voice remained pleasant. \"You're aping your betters, Gilly. Trying to sound like him. You haven't the tongue for it.\"\n\nAny rejoinder Gilly would have made was stifled by the guards opening the door, not the crack they opened it for Gilly, but flinging it wide, stepping back.\n\nAris came into the room, dressed casually, breeches and linens under a dressing gown. Adiran cried, \"Papa,\" and flung himself on the king.\n\nGilly dropped to his knees, shivering, and when he looked up, Aris was watching him, startlement in his eyes, as if Gilly's master had been much on his mind.\n\nThe weariness and drawn lines of the king's face made Gilly's guilty heart turn over. How many of those lines had Gilly helped put there?\n\n\"You've brought the news, then,\" Aris said.\n\n\"Sire,\" Gilly said in agreement.\n\n\"Then you've done your duty and we need not keep you,\" Aris said.\n\nGilly bowed out and headed for the servants' stairs, shaken, and desperately worried.\n\nIn the darkness of the servants' stairwell, Gilly hesitated, seeing again the other doors. They would open into other rooms. Once, Gilly earned his pocket money by gathering secrets, by being unobtrusive and silent, by sneaking and prying himself, instead of paying others to do so. He should never have stopped his snooping, he thought bitterly now. He should have had word of the warrant signed for Maledicte's arrest\u2014but either his spies had failed or the message had been intercepted, his fault either way.\n\nGilly tried to judge which door would allow him to eavesdrop without being caught. He eased open the next door, the one that should be Janus's and therefore empty. The room was cool and dim; he listened for movement and heard nothing. He leaned up against the interior wall, near the hearth, and the white-clad maid he had taken for a curtain in the dull light made a quick squeak of surprise. Gilly put his hand over her mouth. \"Shh, I'm just here to listen. Like you.\"\n\n\"It's the only way,\" she said, keeping her voice low. \"That one has a temper on him, if you don't watch out\u2014best to know his moods well ahead.\"\n\n\"The king?\" Gilly said, though he knew the answer.\n\n\"He never notices us at all\u2014it's the bastard you've got to watch.\"\n\nGilly leaned closer to the wall, drowning her words in the rumble of voices filtered through plaster and brick.\n\n\"\u2014in charge, and his holdings seized,\" Aris said.\n\n\"With your approval? Echo is sure of himself, but not so confident as all that,\" Janus said.\n\n\"With my approval,\" Aris said, and Janus hissed out his breath. \"Maledicte cannot escape punishment, Janus.\"\n\n\"I'll secure his release.\"\n\n\"It will be impossible to do so without my permission.\"\n\nBehind the wall, Gilly gritted his teeth, trying to think of who he could bribe or blackmail and failing that, how to free Maledicte without permission at all.\n\n\"...prison,\" Janus said, in quiet tones. \"Is there no alternative?\"\n\n\"Want to watch?\" the maidservant said.\n\nGilly nodded again. She tugged at a brick, gingerly sliding it out.\n\n\"They'll see the hole,\" Gilly said, his hand on hers, halting her progress.\n\nShe put her hand to his lips, rough with brick dust, and shook her head. She pulled the brick out completely, cradled it in her apron pocket.\n\nGilly, picturing the infant's room from the narrow slice he'd seen over Janus's shoulder, recalled the extensive firescreen that spread beyond the confines of the hearth, encompassing much of the wall.\n\nHe peered through, saw the two men standing beside the cradle, their words clearer now.\n\n\"Janus, don't take on so,\" Aris said. \"I never meant his imprisonment to last. A few days locked alone in a cell, and Maledicte will be more amenable to his fate.\"\n\nSeen through the woven mesh of the firescreen, Janus's face was as still as marble, his eyes as blank as Adiran's blue-sky ones. The expression stirred familiar notes in Gilly's head.\n\n\"Enlighten me as to your plans?\" Janus asked.\n\n\"He will live,\" Aris said. \"Though for all practical purposes, he is dead to you.\n\n\"There's a village called Ennisere on the north coast. It's a cold place, and desolate, but I have comfortable holdings there. I will send Maledicte there with a competence to live on, servants to care for his whims and to watch over him. It will be a prison, Janus, but one far more pleasant than Stones. And you will never see him again.\" He raised a hand as if Janus had started to interrupt, but Gilly could see that Janus's face was as frozen as lakewater in winter. \"He should have been hanged, Janus.\"\n\nJanus let his breath out. \"May I at least take him from the cells, tell him what you've done for him?\"\n\n\"I would prefer...\"\n\n\"We fought, Uncle, the last time we were together. Will you deny me the chance to apologize to him? To leave us both with a sweeter memory?\" Janus's tendons were white in his neck, white in his hands as he dared to interrupt the king.\n\nAris turned Janus's face up to his, searched the open eyes for signs of rebellion, and then nodded. \"A brief meeting only. And my guards will go with you, should his temper hold sway.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Uncle,\" Janus said, and Gilly was horrified by the clear blueness in Janus's eyes. He had placed the memory, placed that empty exaltation in Maledicte's eyes in the moments when he turned to murder.\n\n\"Do not thank me,\" Aris said. \"I should have taken Michel's advice in this instance. Maledicte is not fit for civilized society. Take a wife, Janus, and if you crave your male flesh, take a lover, but one less disposed to mayhem and more disposed to discretion.\" His mouth firmed, then relaxed. \"Janus, it is for the best. Such a companion is not fit for a counselor.\"\n\n\"As you say,\" Janus said. His eyes reminded Gilly of heat lightning, and he wondered that the king couldn't see or feel the danger. All that rage, ruthlessly tamped down, until Janus found something, someone to release it on.\n\nGilly slotted the brick back into place, keeping his hands from trembling by the greater fear that if his hands shook, made the brick chatter, Janus would see him.\n\n\"Stay out of his way,\" Gilly urged the maid.\n\n\"No fear,\" she said. \"I've seen that look before. Do you know your way back to the street?\"\n\n\"I came by carriage,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Aren't you the one?\" she said. \"Your master treats you well then. It's a pity he's not likely to need another maid.\"\n\nGilly kissed her cheek and she giggled at him before ushering him down the stairs. Each step down, Gilly thought giddily, was one step closer to Maledicte's side. Aris meant to send servants of his own, but surely Gilly would be allowed to attend Maledicte's needs in Ennisere. Still, his happiness was bittersweet; Gilly knew Maledicte would rail at the prison, no matter how fine the cage, and Ani would drive him mad, and as for himself\u2014his distant dream of the Explorations died in his chest.\n\nHe rested against the dark walls, trying to sort the mixture of relief and glee, of pain and dismay, of fear and doubt into some more palatable sensation, and failed. Long minutes later, he let himself out of the servants' stairwell and headed for the stables.\n\nAt the carriage, the door was open. Gilly hesitated at the unexpected sight, and while he did so, Janus stepped out. \"You took your sweet time,\" he said. \"Get in.\"\n\n\"I'll walk,\" Gilly said, mistrustful of Janus's smile.\n\n\"Don't you want to help Maledicte?\" Janus said. Again the storm flickers washed his eyes.\n\n\"I don't see the guards Aris spoke of, your escort to the prison,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Eavesdropper,\" Janus said, without heat. \"But you dally. I thought you'd be chafing at the bit, ready to seek banishment with him all to yourself.\"\n\nGilly stifled all reply, mistrusting that hot light still luminous in Janus's gaze.\n\n\"Do come on. I have errands aplenty. Before we release Mal, lock him into the Kingsguard's care, I want to go to the town house to take what we can salvage. The king's competency is likely to be adequate, but Maledicte is most particular.\"\n\n\"He'll want the sword,\" Gilly said, thinking of it left waiting for Maledicte's return.\n\n\"Didn't Echo take it from him?\" Janus said.\n\n\"Maledicte gave it to me for safekeeping,\" Gilly said.\n\nJanus fingered his own sword thoughtfully. \"Well, I'm not one to take his toys from him. We'll collect it, and load the carriage with his possessions while we're at it. Or do you want to explain to him how he comes to be a hundred miles from the nearest tailor and without his favorite vest?\" Janus climbed back into the carriage, leaned against the seat, and said. \"Go up and drive, Gilly.\"\n\nGilly, relieved not to be closed in the carriage with Janus, did as he was told. The town house stable, when they arrived, was emptied of horses. The door to the house was marked with Echo's seal, but Gilly ignored it. In the entry hall, Maledicte's sword rested on the marble table where calling cards usually littered the surface, as if it too waited a response.\n\nJanus picked up the sheathed sword, swearing as the feathered hilt bit through his thin gloves. His voice echoed in the house, striking no response from the shadows. When Gilly looked into the kitchen below, Cook's belongings had gone. He wondered who the little maids would work for now, wondered if Livia had smelled this coming, as cunning as a rat, and had found herself a new place.\n\nJanus came into the kitchen after him, his boots ringing on the stone floor. \"Tell me something, Gilly. How could Maledicte give you the blade if you weren't here?\" The sudden storm feel of the room caught Gilly by surprise. Janus thrust Ani's sheathed sword at him hard enough to break ribs; Gilly flung himself backward, tripping over the raised brick hearth.\n\n\"You allowed his capture and blame me for it,\" Janus said. \"He'd be free now, fought through them all, but for you\u2014how did you manage it? Did you drug him again?\"\n\nGilly said, \"They would have killed him, Janus. This way he lives.\"\n\n\"Killed him, when he heals, when poison flees his blood? I have my own plans set in motion, and you had to interfere. You and he go north, banished together? Mal said you were intelligent\u2014did you plan this? Itarusines make long plans, and Vornatti had the training of you\u2014\" Janus dropped the sword, unsheathed his own. Gilly grabbed the abandoned rolling pin, and took the strike on its marble surface. The sword skidded, shrieking, and Gilly pushed back, throwing the pin at Janus.\n\nWatching the blade, he missed the bare-handed blow that hit his neck and shoulder, stiffening them into instant pain, and hurling him off balance. In desperation, Gilly threw himself forward, landing a blow of his own that split his knuckles and Janus's lip. Rage swept him and he forgot he was facing a man with a sword, bent on extracting at least a small measure of Lizette's pain from Janus.\n\nJanus's head rocked with the blow; he spat blood at him, and said, \"Fool. You'll break your hand before you hurt me that way.\"\n\nGilly punched out again, and Janus used his momentum against him, letting the rush take them both to the ground among a smashing of the cook's old chair. Rolling to land atop, Janus put his knees in Gilly's belly, bearing down, his hands sliding around Gilly's neck, the sword dropped and forgotten.\n\nAlready breathless from the exigencies of the fight, Gilly began to gasp in earnest. He pried Janus's hands away, doing his best to break the thumbs, and Janus let go. Gilly sucked in air, tried to push Janus's weight off of him, and barely avoided the elbow aimed at his face.\n\nJanus's hands wound through Gilly's hair, and pounded his head into the floor, then the edge of the hearth. The room reeled, spinning into a moment's dull blackness; his vision cleared to Janus risen above him. Janus kicked him in the jaw, setting off another bout of spinning dizziness. Gilly knew he had to rise\u2014another blow caught his shoulder as he tried to roll to hands and knees, tried to reach either sword.\n\nThe next kick cracked ribs and dropped him to his belly. There was blood in his mouth and dripping into his eyes; Gilly crawled up again, the kitchen spinning and dipping as if it were a galley in a shipwreck and not one safely at shore.\n\nThe explosion of pain in his side staggered him. He kept his balance, but barely, trying to pull himself up the table legs, wondering when Janus was going to remember the swords. The next blow, to the side of his knee, sent him writhing to the floor. Vision tunneling and clearing, pain a tide washing over him, he could barely make out Janus standing above him, incandescent as flame, grinning.\n\nGilly knew he was dead; it gave him breath enough to say, \"Maledicte\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm going to give you to the sea. He'll think you abandoned him, took his coin and fled to the Explorations. He'll hate you for it,\" Janus said.\n\nGilly struggled to his feet, rested his hands on his thighs, his right leg buckling, and said, \"Rot you, he'll know otherwise.\"\n\nJanus drew back a moment, and Gilly stumbled toward the kitchen door and outside, hoping for a witness, even for the Kingsguard or Echo. A faint rasp of metal set him to fumbling for the handle, the iron slick in his palms, when Janus stepped behind him, as patient and as mad as an outcast wolf. He raised his sword. Gilly closed his eyes, whispered, \"Mal.\"\n**\u00b7 39 \u00b7**\n\n**A** S THE DOOR TO THE communal cell opened, Maledicte looked up from his seat on the corpses of those who'd died overnight. Damastes slammed the door shut again and Ani, who'd seen the dark welts on his face, laughed through Maledicte's throat, flecking his lips with blood. Above him, in other cells, people screamed and wept as Ani's glee rose through the darkness and touched their dreams.\n\nThere were rough sounds of argument in the hall and then the door opened again.\n\n\"What a mess you've made,\" Janus said, holding the keys in a casual hand. \"Damastes is cowering in his quarters, muttering about rat fever and devils; the kingsguard refused to come inside at all, and here you sit, laughing.\" Though insouciant, his voice held a hint of tremor.\n\n\"Janus.\" The name worked some of its old magic, driving some of the madness back; he fled his throne of corpses, belatedly repulsed.\n\n\"I brought your sword,\" Janus said. \"Thought you might like to come out and use it.\"\n\nMaledicte joined Janus at the door, each slow step returning him to himself. He took the sword in his hand, grimaced at the blood on his skin, and said, \"I hope Gilly has a bath run. And despite his wishes, I am never wearing gray again, it's far too funereal.\" He forced the words out, trying to collect the courtier's mask about him, but finding that it didn't fit as well as it had.\n\n\"Are you unhurt?\" Janus asked.\n\n\"I am,\" Maledicte said. \"Some of these others cannot say the same. And I want my belongings back.\"\n\nJanus drew him into the hall, folded him into his arms. \"That jailer\u2014Damastes, he didn't find out?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said. He shivered in Janus's arms. \"Let's go. I want to see the sky.\" Tears streaked his face, ran through the dirt and blood; he only noticed them when they trickled into his mouth, bitter with dust.\n\n\"Of course,\" Janus said, kissing Maledicte's mouth, delaying their exit.\n\nMaledicte leaned against Janus, smelling the clean heat of the sun on his skin, tasting the sweetness of his tongue against his own. It pushed more of Ani's madness away, increased his shaking. \"Janus, call for a physician.\"\n\n\"I thought you unhurt?\" Janus held Maledicte at arm's length.\n\nMaledicte shrugged under that piercing gaze. \"For them. I don't know what I let loose in there.\"\n\n\"It's an outbreak of rat fever. Common enough in prisons. You're no witch, Mal, god-driven or not. And as for them? They're nothing,\" Janus said. \"They would have rotted here regardless. Come now, Mal, shelve such unreasonable concerns and dry your tears\u2014or do you want Damastes to see them?\"\n\nMaledicte let his breath out in relief as Janus reminded him of an enemy to face, shunted the poisonous guilt back, let Ani dissolve it with the clean heat of Her hatred. \"He put us underground.\" His fingers tightened around the sword hilt; his mouth drew into a hungry grin.\n\n\"Mmm,\" Janus said. \"Why don't _I_ go talk to Damastes, get your things back? Let you wait in the carriage.\"\n\n\"The Kingsguard,\" Maledicte said, the words filtering through slowly, as if he was still half lost in nightmares. \"Why are they here?\"\n\n\"Did you truly think there would be no penalty?\" Janus said. \"The town house is sealed against you. They are here to escort you to a hotel, and to make sure you don't leave it. We're just trading one cell for another.\" Bitterness seeped through his voice.\n\n\"I cannot live in a hotel forever,\" Maledicte said. \"What has Aris planned?\"\n\nJanus urged him up the stairs without answering, and Maledicte, sheathed in dirt and stone, was willing to allow evasion, eager to make the sky his own again.\n\n\"Look there,\" Janus said, laughing. \"Damastes is not such a fool as all that.\" The piled belongings near the door sparkled in the low light. Maledicte swept them up into his hands, then passed them to Janus, preferring to keep his blade ready.\n\nMaledicte stepped out into afternoon sunlight and winced. The Kingsguard standing beside Last's carriage stood to attention, then drew back as they saw the naked blade in Maledicte's hand.\n\n\"Where's Gilly?\" Maledicte asked. \"I thought sure he'd be here.\"\n\nJanus helped him into the carriage, and Maledicte picked up the sheath lurking on the seat cushions. He buckled it on and sighed.\n\nJanus gave the coachman the signal to go, and settled beside Maledicte. A kingsguard passed alongside the window, and Maledicte put his hand on the hilt of the sword.\n\n\"Take these back,\" Janus said, distracting him from contemplations of flight and murder.\n\nThe scatter of small stones and coins made him release the sword so he could catch them before they tumbled from his lap. Moodily, Maledicte sorted buttons from cuff links, stickpin from coins. The pocket watch fell into his fingers again and he pulled it out, setting it to spinning in the sunlight. \"You never answered me. Where is Gilly?\"\n\nJanus's silence went on a moment too long, long enough for Maledicte's interest to turn to concern. \"Janus, tell me.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen him,\" Janus said, tapping the watch in Maledicte's hands, making it swing. \"When Aris told me of your arrest, I went to the town house to collect your belongings. The house was empty. No one had stayed behind\u2014all the rooms were stripped. Your accounts too, undoubtedly. I told you your trust was misplaced.\"\n\n\"Gilly,\" Maledicte whispered, clutching that sudden hurt to his heart. Ani, Her attention diverted from the sky by his pain, turned the hurt around, studied it, and let it drop. There was nothing to be mined; Maledicte had already replaced the pain with wariness and hope. Gilly would return.\n\n\"He's fled,\" Janus said. \"Count on it. Gone to the sea as he threatened to do so often.\"\n\nJanus studied the guards maneuvering outside, his expression hidden. Maledicte turned Janus to face him, stared into the guileless blue eyes, and felt his heart constrict. Roach, Celia, and Ella\u2014all had been helpless before Janus. \"Did you...did you kill him?\"\n\n\"Burn it, Mal,\" Janus said, irritation drawing his brows down, his lips thinning. \"I begged Aris to free you, swore promises I hate to keep, and all you can ask is if I've killed your servant? I did not. Likely he's decided that our ways are too rough for his tender heart.\"\n\n\"Lizette died,\" Maledicte said. \"Seemingly at my hand. Why did you do it?\"\n\nJanus cast another glance outside the carriage, at the kingsguard nearest, and leaned forward. \"You know why. To punish Gilly, since you won't let me lay a hand on him. You should be glad of my restraint. And why you sought the brothel in the first place\u2014\"\n\n\"You murdered Ella, and kept it from me...I despise secrets from you,\" Maledicte said, waiting. When Janus only shrugged irritably, Maledicte asked, \"What is it that Aris has planned? You seem remarkably loath to mention it.\"\n\n\"Ennisere,\" Janus said. \"You're to live out your time there, on an estate staffed by guards.\"\n\nMaledicte thought of maps and distance, but his knowledge was sketchy. Vornatti had taught him about the city and its fashionable retreats. Janus had told him about Itarus, and Gilly had sweetened his dreams with descriptions of the Explorations. Ennisere meant nothing, a foggy blur on an unfinished map of the world. \"What of you?\"\n\n\"I stay at Aris's side, and work to further our plans.\"\n\n\" _Your_ plans,\" Maledicte said. \"My plan was always simple, god-guided. Kill the earl of Last, and reclaim you. And I have yet to do the first. That child survives\u2014\"\n\nJanus said, \"Listen Mal, listen to me. I have my schemes. You're correct. Maledicte is ruined. So let Aris send you to Ennisere, bide your patience only a little. I know of a black-haired boy with pale skin, a poor mirror of you. We'll kill him, leave his body at Ennisere, and you can become Miranda again, and return to my side.\"\n\n\"You're a fool,\" Maledicte said. \"Miranda with a ruined voice, a distinctive scar, and no antecedents? You may play puppets with the king but he is not so mindless as all that.\" He could not keep the threads of his argument together, losing them in the pale calculation in Janus's eyes, the clatter of hooves outside the carriage, the line of blood marring Janus's mouth. \"You're bruised.\"\n\nJanus touched his mouth. \"You struck me, don't you recall?\"\n\nThe blood was fresher than that, Maledicte thought, but that too was sucked away in the skirl of feathers within him. Above the coach, the rooks swarmed, darkening the sky prematurely with their wings. \"Where's Gilly?\" he asked again.\n\nThe coach drew up to the hotel; the horses milled uncertainly as the kingsmen conferred. Finally, two guards dismounted, flanked Maledicte as he and Janus went up the front stair. At the desk, the owner made a surreptitious charm against evil, and Maledicte smiled at him, showing all his teeth.\n\n\"The second floor,\" the guard said. \"Go ahead of us.\"\n\nMaledicte walked into the rooms without protest. The quarters were roomy enough, a bedchamber, a valet's chamber, sitting room, and bath. He peered out the window, drawing back the curtain. \"No balcony. No trellis.\"\n\n\"It's a prison, Mal,\" Janus said, taking a seat on the bed, and waving the guards out irritably. They shut the door, but Maledicte could hear the faint jingle of their mail as they leaned against the wall.\n\n\"So it is,\" Maledicte said, dropping the curtain. \"When am I transported north?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Janus began and Maledicte growled.\n\n\"So soon?\" He paced the room, boot heels muffled against the carpet, the blade swinging freely. \"For how long?\"\n\n\"Until Aris\u2014\"\n\n\"What? Until Aris dies\u2014\" Maledicte's voice rasped in the quiet room, and Janus pressed his hand close over his mouth.\n\n\"Hush,\" he said. \"The guards are just outside.\"\n\n\"You're taking it all from me,\" Maledicte said. \"I wanted the earl dead and you denied me, and I wanted you. Now you're walking away, because the king asks it of you. Why can't we just flee? Kill the guards and run for it?\"\n\n\"A Last doesn't run, he conquers,\" Janus said.\n\nMaledicte let his breath out in a hiss. \"You choose playing for power over me.\"\n\n\"Not over\u2014\" Janus said. \"With. I want both. You must be patient. Let me plan since your sense seems to have been buried with Amarantha. Trust me. I'll win through. See us both rich and powerful.\"\n\n\"It's all gone wrong in my head. It's all beaks and wings and blood.... Where's Gilly? He can make it better,\" Maledicte said, slumping back onto the feather mattress.\n\nJanus kissed his forehead. \"You're overtired, overwrought. You should never have had to go to Stones.\"\n\n\"Not underground,\" Maledicte said. \"Wings want sky.\"\n\n\"Not anywhere within those walls. But your discomfort will be repaid. I promise that.\"\n\nMaledicte nodded, the words washing over him like the empty chatter of songbirds, soothing but meaningless. He let Janus undress him like a child, stood docilely in the hip bath while Janus sponged the filth of Stones from his body. He tangled his hands in Janus's pale hair, kissed his mouth, and let his mind drift away entirely. Janus laid him over the bed, kissing, stroking, soothing, and Maledicte clutched him close. When they were done and dressed, Janus gone, Maledicte sat by the window, staring at the sky.\n\nGilly kept creeping into his mind, the earnest eyes, the worried half frown that had become his common expression; his image was displaced only by Janus, and the slow ache that grew inside Maledicte. He couldn't keep them in his mind at the same moment; when he tried, all he saw was blood.\n\nAcross the room, the sword muttered and whispered until he cradled it in his lap. \"I will, I promised you. In exchange for the sword. I'll spill his blood yet.\" Outside, the rooks settled atop the hotel, their chatter quieting.\n**\u00b7 40 \u00b7**\n\n**R** OCKING WATER, AND THE STINK of salt brine and tarred ropes, woke Gilly. He opened his eyes to a room made of shadows and lapping water, fractured and shivering with the pulsing of his aching head.\n\nAlive. Why? Gilly wondered. There'd been murder enough in his face and strength enough in his hands.\n\nGilly tried to raise himself on limbs that were too numb to support him, and fell forward, splashing face-first into dark water. Panic woke him from his stupor. He scrambled back on unwieldy legs, sucked in air, and reassessed. His hands were knotted in a nest of twine and hemp, his ankles likewise. He was in the bilge of a ship. Gilly let out his breath in horrified understanding. A conscripted sailor.\n\nWas death not enough for Janus; was it suffering he wanted? In the dark hold, dizzy and sick, surrounded by dank water and the strange oil scent of piled metal, Gilly found himself thinking with a clarity that surprised him. He'd been sold for a luna or two to line Janus's pockets, and more, the ability to tell Maledicte that he hadn't killed Gilly should Maledicte ask. Gone to sea finally, Gilly thought, and shuddered. Janus had piled the irony even higher; the strange metal shapes could only be bound for the Explorations, to build one of Westfall's engines there.\n\nHe started picking the ropes apart with his teeth, the tar and sodden hemp making him gag. They were still near shore; the slapping of the waves against pilings and other nearby hulls told him that. He had friends on nearly every pier, sailors, harbor clerks, dockworkers, who might aid him. If only he could get free....\n\nThe shadows in the bilge massed and roiled as if they were water, stirred by an unseen tide. In the distance, Gilly heard a crow's call carried on the shrieks of gulls. The shadows seemed to vibrate to its resonance; the pain in Gilly's head crested and blurred his vision.\n\nHe chewed diligently at the knots linking his hands until they gave, but didn't fuss himself with the tight, salt-sodden loops left about his wrists. Though they chafed and burned, they could wait. He bent to work on the cords around his ankles and a rook flew out of the shadows on silent wings.\n\nIt landed on a jut of scrap metal, its talons making no sound as they contracted. Its eyes were matte black, as empty as a doll's, lacking the shine of a living creature's, and Gilly swallowed. It opened its beak, fluffed its wings, and bloomed bigger, a crow now, birthed of shadows.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Gilly whispered. The bird fluttered to the edge of the bilge, to the narrow ladder that rose to the deck and freedom. It fluffed its wings, again, and waited, rasping its beak against the splintered wood.\n\nGilly bent back to the ropes at his ankles, though keeping his head down increased the spinning languor of his body. He wanted nothing so much as to lie down. Instead, he dragged himself to the other side of the bilge and the aid implicit in the metal scraps. The right tool would be quicker than teeth surely, and far more efficient than fingers numbed by swollen wrists.\n\nThe ropes parted, surrendered strand by tarred strand, shredding with maddening slowness. When Gilly looked to share his triumph with the crow, he was alone. A flicker of movement pulled his attention upward.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" he breathed again. The bird-shade, caught in midtransformation, flopped, wings unwieldy, folding inward, stretching itself tall and thin. A familiar human shape darted up the last rungs of the ladder, pausing for a bare moment to look back before flowing out onto the deck.\n\nGilly dragged himself to the ladder, up the first rung, sweat collecting on his abused body, chilling him like a layer of hoarfrost. His senses reeled and swam, nearly deserting him entirely. He felt as if he wandered in a dream.\n\n\"Mal,\" he whispered. Was it Last's window he was climbing to, hunting the nameless boy, ivy brittle under his gloved fingers, and snowmelt refreezing in his eyelashes, making him blink cold tears? Or was it underground, going further back, before everything he knew, following a staggering boy, newly hatched from Ani's wings, the sword naked and gleaming in his hands as he climbed into the Relicts.\n\n\"Mal,\" Gilly repeated, pulling himself up another rung, chasing that delicate phantom. Time stopped, sped up, shadows and light shifting across Gilly's vision left him standing at the king's palace, looking up at the high tower, at the slim shape, as black as the blade, standing at bay. Gilly reached up to climb to his aid, and his hand struck empty air. The salt smell of the sea woke him from his dreaming. \"Mal....\"\n\nNo vision this, but a fate he wanted to escape. The foredeck bristled with sailors, drinking away their last hours ashore, telling each other stories, and repairing the fishing nets that would keep them fed on the long journey. The gangplank lay stretched to the pier before them, for easy access to the Relicts' bars and whores.\n\nOnce Gilly would have considered the crew good company. Now, he could only think of them as enemies, and all he could hope was that they had drunk enough to be careless. But so castaway as to watch him escape before their very eyes? He doubted it.\n\nGilly clung to the top of the ladder, leaned his head against the salt-scoured planks, watched the sun burning down into the sea, setting shadows roaming over the deck. He had lost all sense of time. Were it not for the spider constellation sparking to life in the sky, he could believe he'd slept for years, lost in the bilge.\n\nThe shadow, _his_ shadow, divorced itself from its brethren on the deck, and flowed toward him. Not so human-shaped now, it bled outward like watered ink, growing fuzzed around the edges. It wafted toward him, swallowed him in an embrace chilly and dank, and a voice breathed into his skin, like no voice he'd ever heard before. _Hurry._\n\nStaggering like a drunkard, Gilly gave his fate to the shadow and wandered toward the sailors, toward the gangplank with its lure of safety beyond. Though it made his flesh crawl, and his heart pound as hard as his battered head, he made his way past the sailors and to the gangplank. They made no sign that they had noticed anything out of the ordinary way, not even when the worn plank sagged and moaned beneath his weight.\n\nThe water below him churned in odd eddies, dark and flecked with luminous foam, splashing upward toward him. He fixed his faltering vision on the pier, and at the end of it, waiting by a coach, a pale face in shadow.\n\nMaledicte, Gilly thought on a crest of relief, come to take him home, and showing a rare subtlety for once, coaxing him from beneath the eyes of the sailors, rather than forcing Gilly's freedom at swordspoint.\n\nThe water beneath him surged, a sudden high tide rising as he descended, and it slapped salt water over his feet, his ankles, and burned the shadow away. Naga's touch inimical to Ani's uncommonly delicate working.\n\nGilly urged himself onward, finally reaching the salt-weathered planks of the pier. He stumbled, pushed himself to his feet, concentrated on walking normally. With the cloaking shadow gone, he thought the illusion might have gone with it. The dark sky might hide his identity, but he was still too close to the ship to be anything but their prisoner escaping.\n\nThe shout went up, and Gilly staggered into the closest thing to a run he could approximate, a listing, limping thing that set his head and ribs to throbbing, the world shuddering like an opera curtain, whisking back and forth.\n\n\"Gilly,\" a low raspy voice called, \"hurry.\" Reaching the end of the pier, he found cool, smooth fingers on his arm; the pursuing captain drew to a halt.\n\n\"Lady,\" he said, wary.\n\nLady? Gilly craned his head to look but was defeated by the dizziness. The rasping voice took on a clear sweetness that Gilly had heard before. \"Why ever are you hunting my servant? Has he been brawling with the crew?\"\n\n\"He's mine. Four lunas he cost me.\"\n\n\"Forced labor is illegal,\" she said. \"Such a shame, too.\" Gilly tried to tug free; her nails slid into his skin, waking new pains, and Gilly subsided.\n\n\"Purchasing a man's services is not.\" But the captain's voice already faltered. Gilly, his eyes drifting, found himself staring at a sweep of tattered silk, stained dark around the hem. A ruined ballgown.\n\n\"When those services are already promised\u2014\"\n\nGilly moaned and she halted herself with a wild laugh. \"And here I am going on as if I need to win by words. He's mine, Captain. Do not argue further. I am most unpleasant when offended.\" As verbose as Maledicte, he thought, teeth chattering. But far more inimical to him.\n\n\"But still, you lost coin, and I know how dearly money can be needed. I'll repay you.\" She threw coins at the captain. While he scrabbled for them, keeping them from rolling through the cracks between the planks, she said in a tone like exposed steel, \"Any further complaints?\"\n\n\"No, my lady,\" the captain said, still kneeling, shivering. He knew who she was now, Gilly thought. Even the sailors had heard the tales of Mad Mirabile.\n\nMirabile laughed, the sound not as pleasant as it once was, like a bell cracked and off tune. She walked Gilly toward her carriage like a marionette. Wordless, he sprawled on its floor, dripping salt water and blood. She tangled her fingers in his wet hair, dragging her nails across his scalp, setting the long gash from contact with the hearth to bleeding again. \"So Ixion finally removed you\u2014or was it Maledicte who cast you into the sea?\"\n\nGilly winced, but did not reply, concentrating on regaining his equilibrium with the sway of the moving carriage.\n\n\"No answer, and I've gone to the expense and effort of saving you. I suppose that means you're not grateful either.\"\n\n\"Let me go,\" Gilly said, sick at heart. He'd followed her lure as blindly as a hound on scent, thinking only of Maledicte.\n\n\"You'll serve me now,\" she said.\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said.\n\n\"You will,\" she said. \"In one fashion or another. I've waited for my vengeance too long. Ani's beak has grown sharp, and I would share that pain with others.\"\n\nHe jerked away, reaching for the door handle, hoping to tip himself out onto the cobbles. The handle writhed in his hand, supple and scaled like a serpent, coiling around to strike him, and he let go in sheer horror. She laughed and he turned toward her, spoke the words of Baxit's countercharm. She winced, then slapped him across the face, sending him to the floor again. She slid closer, put her hand beneath his chin, forced his head up. \"Such a waste,\" she said. \"A comely young man doomed because of one man's refusal to share himself with me. I'd feel sorry for you. If I could.\"\n\n\"Maledicte will kill you,\" Gilly breathed.\n\nShe leaned closer, confiding. \"Black-Winged Ani granted your master a sword. She saw to it that I would never need one. Confused, my sweet Gilly? Shall I spell it out for you? She granted me power....\" In her eyes, red fires flared and sank back to a simmer.\n\nGilly turned his head away from the madness in her gaze, and she dragged it back, effortlessly. \"Look at me, Gilly. Am I not more beautiful than your master? More beautiful than those foolish debutantes?\" She rolled her fingers together, opened her palm, and blew dust into his face. Coughing, he tried not to breathe but the stupor in his head settled into his bones.\n\n\"You do love me, don't you, Gilly?\" She touched her lips to his; he shivered all over and felt the heat scorch from her mouth to his groin. \"Tell me you love me.\"\n\n\"Love you,\" Gilly said, the words dragged from his throat.\n\n\"You'll love me until the day you die....\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, his heart pounding under the twin stresses of fear and lust.\n\n\"More than you love him,\" she said.\n\nGilly closed his eyes. Maledicte. The image, dark hair, dark eyes, soft mouth against his own, did nothing to cool his body or his fear. Her nails tightened on his face, and he said, \"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'll let him know you said so, when I gift him with your body. Let him see what it's like to lose someone through the caprice of another.\"\n\n\"\u2014loves Janus more...\" Gilly said, as her mouth descended on his.\n\nShe drew back. \"I'll have him later. But Maledicte must come first.\"\n\nThe carriage drew to a halt, tumbling him into her skirts. \"Clumsy thing,\" she said. \"I'll expect better of you.\" She pushed him from the carriage; he got his feet under him just in time, and stood there, swaying. They were deep in the heart of Sybarite Street, past the brothels, beyond even the insalubrious dens that specialized in drug dreams and poison selling. This section of Sybarite bordered on the Relicts, the buildings more fallen than run-down. Still, if he fled, he could get to Ma Desire's, maybe to safety. If he could move.\n\nMirabile took his hand in her cold one, tugged him into movement like a puppet. Mirabile's coachman slipped off the driver's bench in a flurry of skirts and cloak, a familiar tail of red hair and brown eyes: Livia. Betrayed rage gave Gilly momentary strength, and he pulled away.\n\nMirabile snarled, \"Stop.\" His limbs locked up at her word. Livia drew her hood up about her face, and edged past him, shifting piled-up boards to reveal a low, dark opening. The ruined building looked as if no one but rats could fit within, yet with the opening revealed, Gilly saw clear rooms inside.\n\n\"Well,\" Mirabile said, guiding him in, \"Welcome to my parlor.\" His shocked gaze recognized the place, even as he started to shiver. The walls were covered with Her image; Mirabile dwelled in the ruins of Ani's temple, slept in the lee of Her wings. Livia lit lamps around the room, each one revealing another depiction of Ani. Some of them smelled new, smelled as if Mirabile had painted their rough shape with blood. On the altar itself, a dark shape muttered and croaked at their return.\n\nWhile he stood numb and helpless, she drew off the ruins of his shirt, his breeches, and smiled. \"Don't look so frightened, lambling. I'm not going to kill you right away.\"\n\nMirabile circled Gilly, her expression as proprietary as Vornatti's had ever been, and far crueler. Gilly felt fourteen again, remembered the dread washing over him with the soapy water, the dull light in Vornatti's eyes growing brighter with each limb washed clean. But the dread then had been fear of the adult world pressing in on him; he had trusted Vornatti not to hurt him. Gilly had no such illusion with Mirabile, not with her nail marks bleeding sluggishly on his cold flesh, or the hunger he saw in her face.\n\nLivia, after another averted glance, busied herself lighting the rest of the gas lamps, as silent as she never had been in the town house. The small flames caught and flared under her shaking hands, illuminating wet streaks on her face. Throughout her task, she twisted her head to avoid meeting Gilly's eyes.\n\n\"When you're done, Livia, you may go. Unless I am mistaken, you have no desire to watch me at my play.\"\n\nLivia shook her head, so mute that Gilly imagined atrocities\u2014that Mirabile had torn out Livia's tongue, or bespelled her to a future as a slave.\n\n\"Come back for your coins in the morning,\" Mirabile said. \"I'll need you to do the washing up, after. But don't return too early. I intend to be about this business until the late hours.\"\n\nLivia flinched; her eyes met Gilly's for a brief, scalded moment, then blurred and ran with tears. She left with a deliberate pace, as if she wanted to run, but controlled herself.\n\nNot enough fear, Gilly thought, and Mirabile would kill her. Too much fear and the result would be the same. Like a predator, Mirabile would hunt the fleeing creature out of instinct. Weakness spilled through him, and he slumped, unable to fall while her potions and will held him upright.\n\n\"She'll go for coin tonight. Go for Maledicte,\" Gilly said. \"Greedy little girl.\" Each word was an effort to push out through his stiff tongue and lips.\n\n\"I do hope so,\" Mirabile said. \"I doubted her for a moment there\u2014thought I might have to send a messenger less trustworthy, or one that Maledicte might kill on sight, and then where would I be? Without my audience.\"\n\n\"Maledicte's in Stones,\" Gilly said, finding a sudden perverse pleasure in the fact that had troubled him so greatly earlier.\n\n\"Was in Stones,\" she said. \"You used to be better at keeping abreast of the gossip, Gilly. The rooks have all moved again. They follow him, you know.\" She drew her hands along his flanks, trailed inward; his muscles jumped and flinched at her touch and she smiled. \"They nested at Stones while he was there, and now his little birds have flown to the Grand Hotel. They darkened the sky like a whirlwind. All that power at his will, and he refuses to reach out and grasp it. He could control them, their eyes, their secrets, would he only admit complete fealty to Ani.\n\n\"But no matter,\" she said, \"That he fails to reach his power is only of assistance to me. But think of it, Gilly, what a sight it would make, Maledicte in the ballroom with the rooks wheeling about him, calling and excreting over all the nobles.\" She grinned; were it not for the mad eyes, Gilly could have enjoyed the mischief in her face.\n\n\"A pity it will never happen,\" she said, laughing, and wrapped her hands firmly around his genitals.\n\nHe tried to force her hands off him, but she squeezed and his breath went short with unwilled pleasure. Her nails sliced into the tender flesh and he cried out, the pain lancing over his body, then settling back into steady throbbing.\n\n\"Gilly,\" she said. \"Take up my skirts.\"\n\nChary of her grip, her touch, he knelt, breathing more easily as her hand slid away to allow his descent. He folded her draggled skirts up about her waist. Under the finery, where the noblewomen wore their slips and petticoats, their lawn chemises, where even the poorest maids wore pantaloons, she was bare. Just above her sex, above the flame of hair, feathers had burst from her skin, small and black. At first he thought she had decorated herself as an honor to Ani, but when she urged his hands to her skin, he knew it was the inverse, that Ani was decorating her.\n\n\"My bodice,\" she said. He reached behind her; she knelt before him, pressed her hips to his as if she was nothing but an eager lover. Her bodice fell loose in his hands; she shrugged it from her shoulders, baring more white flesh, patterned with tiny black feathers so small they seemed like scales. He gasped, his hands flying away. She grabbed them, pressed them to her breasts, sank herself onto him. He groaned.\n\n\"You love me, Gilly.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, her words in his mouth. His own words drowned as she rocked herself over him.\n\nIn his head, he began whispering prayers though the only god present was Ani. Her teeth bit into the welts left by the barnacles on the pier, raised blood again; her nails dug into the deep bruises left by Janus's fists, scribed the edges of his raw wrists. She tongued the wound on his head, lapping the blood until it stopped, then biting until it bled again. His prayers dissolved into one internal plea. Maledicte.\n\nMALEDICTE PACED THE ROOM, agitated without cause. He had the sky now, through the high windows, and yet...the sword throbbed in his hands, seeking blood.\n\nA tap on the door sent him spinning around, sword bared.\n\n\"Sir, I've brought your dinner.\" The girl's voice, though tight with tension, was familiar.\n\nMaledicte drew open the door; the guards stepped back, out of reach of his sword, too cautious to let him use the maid as a distraction. One guard spoke. \"Are you certain you want to go in with him, miss?\"\n\n\"He's my master,\" she said. \"I brought the food from his own table, what's left of it, and he'll be hungry.\"\n\nThe other guard shrugged. \"It's your neck.\"\n\n\"May I go in?\" Livia asked. \"You've already looked me over, peered in the bowls. You know I have nothing to aid him.\" She shifted the heavy tray on her hip, and the guard nodded her in, latched the door behind her.\n\nMaledicte watched her red hair slide over the shoulders of her damp cloak like a scarf. He raised the sword and brought it winging to her nape, halting it at the very last.\n\nShe gave a stifled shriek, too frightened to move. Then the long braided tail of her hair slithered to the floor, cut. He picked it up. \"Get undressed,\" he said. \"And don't think of crying out. I've no need to hurt you but I must find Gilly.\"\n\nHer skin paled white as marble; her mouth worked, soundless. Maledicte read the word on her lips. \"Gilly?\"\n\nBehind his cold rage, the hunger, something as warm as baked bread rose, soothing his temper, then settled back into rage. Anything Livia knew, with her eyes like a dead woman's, was not going to please him.\n\nLivia licked dry lips.\n\n\"If you don't find your voice, I'll hunt it with my sword,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You have to help him. Mirabile will kill him.\"\n\nMaledicte put his hands around her neck, found a vicious satisfaction in making her flinch, and undid the knotted strings of her cloak. \"Get undressed,\" he said again.\n\n\"They'll never believe it\u2014\" she said, fumbling her bodice off, her skirts.\n\n\"They don't have to for more than a moment. It's vision driven by expectation, but never mind all that,\" he said, tugging her skirt up over his breeches, watching her blink astonishment when the buttons closed around him. \"Your bodice,\" he said. \"Your cloak.\"\n\n\"If you're taking my cloak, I don't see why you need\u2014\"\n\n\"Because a cloak over breeches looks like a cloak over breeches, and a skirt is an entirely different thing,\" he said. \"As glad as I am you found your voice, now I want you to be silent again.\"\n\nShe stood stripped to her chemise, shivering in the chill room.\n\n\"My dressing gown,\" Maledicte said, motioning to the bed and the heavy drape of quilted fabric lying across the bottom. \"Put it on.\"\n\nPulling it off the bed, she pulled it on, her hands shaking as she tightened the tie around her waist. He bit back the rage swelling in him, and, unwilling to risk the guard's overhearing, said with hushed impatience, \"For gods' sake, don't show off your narrow waist. Have you no sense at all? Tie it around your hips. Turn around. Stand in the window.\"\n\nShe did, visibly reluctant to turn her back to him. Maledicte snarled. Her hair, rough cut by his sword, stood out like flame in the dark glass. He looked at the fireplace, long cold, long cleaned, and turned to the oil lamps instead.\n\n\"Gilly,\" she said again. \"You have to go to him.\"\n\n\"I am endeavoring to do so. Or would you have me call a challenge to the guards in the hall, forcing me to dally in bloodlust until dawn? Gilly would be long dead by the time I fought my way clear.\" He pinched out the wick, pulled off the glass, ran his hands over the residue inside; his fingers came away streaked black. He scrubbed his hands into her hair, pushing her against the window. She grabbed the frame with shaking hands, clung to it as if she feared he would push her through it and onto the cobbles below.\n\nHe blew out another lamp, dimming the room, rubbed the lampblack into her hair again, and stepped back to look at her. \"Unconvincing. Stand up straight,\" he said. \"Like you're so frightened your spine is an icicle.\" She stiffened, her hands on the window frame whitening.\n\n\"Better,\" he said. \"A few lessons in comportment and you might be able to pass as a lady. Or a lord.\" One more thing was needed, one last piece to anchor belief, even fleetingly. The fireplace would aid him after all. He drew out the poker from its rack with a rasp that made her shudder. \"Take this,\" he said.\n\nShe clutched it.\n\n\"Like a sword, Livia, like a sword.\"\n\nHe threw the food into the fireplace, tucked the loose braid of her severed hair into the neck of the cloak, and drew the hood around his face, leaving only the flare of redness hanging out, the rustle of lace and skirt.\n\nMaledicte took the sword up by its blade, held it below the hilt, angled it so it lay under his forearm and extended only a foot past his fist. Picking up the dinner tray, he laid it over the visible blade, and then tapped on the door.\n\nThe guard opened it warily, gaze slipping over the tray, the hair, the cloak, and lit on the figure shadowed beyond. Maledicte stepped up to him, and slid the sword through his throat.\n\nThese guards were not the simple Particulars who had come with Echo to arrest him; the other guard had stayed out of easy reach, and even now turned to shout for aid. Maledicte threw the tray, caught him in the throat, and while he was reeling from that, brought the sword up and made him as mute as his thrashing friend.\n\n\"Livia,\" Maledicte said. \"Come.\"\n\n\"I thought I was to stay,\" she said, but hustled toward him anyway. \"I thought you were going to sneak out, and leave me behind so they wouldn't notice.\"\n\n\"They'll notice the bodies in the hall. And even had I time to dispose of them, I do not have time to scrub the carpet clean. When you came in, where were the main force of the guards? And where were the balconies? I foresee a climb in our future.\"\n\n\"The front,\" she said. \"Both at the front of the hotel.\"\n\n\"They would be together, of course. Still, no help for it. Let's find a front-facing room,\" Maledicte said. Despite the fear for Gilly, Maledicte almost enjoyed having a goal at hand with the promise of bloodshed at the end of it. For this moment, Ani and he moved in rare concert.\n\nHe darted down the corridor, pulling at the skirts and cloak, trying to keep them from tangling his legs in a hindering embrace. Behind him, Livia trailed, and he reached his hand back and tugged her alongside him. \"Hurry, Livia.\"\n\nThey turned a corner, startling a drunkard returning to his room. \"Are you lovely girls come to warm my bed?\"\n\n\"Of course we have,\" Maledicte whispered. \"A noble with a room with a view. You gladden my heart.\" He pushed past the man as he fumbled to close the door, threw open the glass-paned windows.\n\n\"Perfect,\" he said. He tucked the sword into Livia's skirt, and looked down. \"Livia, look, climbing roses, how lovely.\" He swung his leg over, settled his boots onto the thickest branch. \"Livia.\"\n\nShe dodged away from the drunk, pushed him back outside the room, and slammed the door. Maledicte began his descent, wincing at the sharp needle kiss of the thorns.\n\nLivia's face peered down at him. \"Oh, I can't.\"\n\nMaledicte called up in a hoarse whisper. \"You'll be hanged for helping me, if you don't come down\u2014\"\n\nAshen, she clambered over the balcony rail, tearing the dressing gown on its wrought-iron finials, and reached her toes out for a foothold. She let out a little shriek as her weight settled.\n\n\"Hush,\" Maledicte said. Above, he could hear the drunkard coming to at least a fraction of his senses, pounding on the door. The second story was going to be full of people soon and there were two dead guards waiting to be found. Maledicte looked down; the ground, dark with distance, seemed to recede. A droplet, warmer than rain, dripped onto his cheek, rolled toward his mouth. Salt and iron. Blood. He licked it up, looked up. Livia's soft slippers were wet with blood.\n\nMaledicte settled his hand on a wickedly large thorn, watched the blood well up and stop when he removed it, the pain vanishing. \"After all,\" he murmured, \"we can't hold a sword with damaged hands.\"\n\nHe dropped the last few feet, skidded on a rounded cobble, and fell hard, wrenching his ankle. \"Ani,\" he said. \"We can't fight with a bad limb.\" The soreness retreated, the swelling receded, and he stood.\n\n\"Drop, Livia,\" he said and she was either so exhausted or so frightened that her body obeyed without hesitation. He steadied her as she rocked on sore feet, muffled her cries in the cloak. \"Shh.\"\n\nLights flared on the second story, bobbed from window to window; faintly he could hear a woman screeching.\n\n\"Rot them all,\" Maledicte said. \"Does no one sleep anight anymore?\"\n\nHe dragged Livia forward. \"Tell me where he is.\" She was too slow to keep up with him, too fragile to fight.\n\n\"Her temple. Sir, it's my fault, all my fault,\" she moaned. \"I told her\u2014told her you loved Gilly. If he dies\u2014I never meant\u2014\"\n\nBehind them, the hotel doors were flung wide, disgorging the Kingsguard. Shouts rang through the night, including the one Maledicte had been dreading. \"There they are! By the wall!\"\n\nMaledicte reached out, intending to shove Livia toward the shadows and dubious safety, but Ani had other thoughts. His hands pulled her before him, into the torchlight; his rumpled dressing gown, the short sooty hair\u2014the guards fired at once. The shot sent her reeling backward, falling into the cobbles. Maledicte turned and ran, hands clenching at his side, shivering, refusing to feel guilt, not while Gilly needed him.\n\n\"Her temple,\" he muttered, thinking of the elaborate and twisted length of Sybarite Street between him and the ruined Relict temple, the only temple to Ani he knew. He had no doubt at all that Mirabile had made her quarters there where he had begun his own quest.\n\nMaledicte slowed his steps as he reached Sybarite Street and the evening's crowds. He drew the cloak tighter, keeping a wary eye out. The guards would know their mistake soon enough.\n\nLights bloomed in the windows of pleasure houses, and slow, drugged laughter spilled like syrup on a cold day. Maledicte moved on, hand clenching around the sword, seeking the darker shadows, tracking his way back to a place he had never thought to revisit. But as if he had mapped the route, he guided himself as steadily, as surely as if he were going home.\n**\u00b7 41 \u00b7**\n\n_And he gave his soul into Ani's keeping and became Her Avatar, winged and blood-mantled, a sorcerous nightmare in human flesh, who carved his way through the battlefields and laughed. And his words became ravens, and where he walked, men died of plague...._\n\n\u2014Grayle's _Book of Vengeances_\n\n**M** IRABILE ROSE FROM GILLY'S BODY, shaking her skirts down, stretching her arms above her head. Along her breasts, the feathers shivered. Gilly rolled onto his side, huddled on an earthen floor warmed with his heat and blood.\n\n\"Poor Gilly, but the sea captain might have used you as roughly. I spared you that at least.\" Mirabile knelt, turned his chin up to peer into his face.\n\nGilly tried not to meet her eyes.\n\n\"Such blueness,\" she said. \"So clear.\" She dropped her voice to a whisper. \"Do you see the gods with those clear eyes?\"\n\n\"Only Ani,\" Gilly said, wrenching his head away.\n\n\"Well, we can't have that. You spying on Her at all hours, watching Her, judging Her; it's the raven for you.\" Mirabile stood, walked away from him.\n\nGilly took a careful breath and rolled onto his hands and knees. Her spell, whatever it had been, cantrip or poison, had left him. His body was his again. Slow, weak as an infant, and hurting, but his.\n\nAcross the room, Mirabile tugged the weight of rotting fabric from the covered bulk on the altar. The raven in the cage beneath woke to raucous complaint.\n\n\"Easy, love, easy. Haven't I got the bluest eyes ever seen this side of the sea? And they're all for you.\" She freed the massive bird from the cage. It turned its head up to look at her with one glossy black eye and she dropped a kiss on its head. It clattered its beak and croaked at her.\n\nGilly rolled to his belly, wrapped his arms around his head. \"Please,\" he whispered, remembering Westfall and the others, found eyeless, their faces shredded until all that identified them were their clothes.\n\n\"None of that now,\" she said, toeing him in the side, trying to turn him from playing turtle, but he clenched himself farther into the floor, knotted his eyes closed.\n\n\"Gilly, I could bespell you again. But wouldn't you rather die your own man?\" she asked, pulling his hair until his scalp stung. When that didn't work, she slipped her hand beneath him, slashed her nails over his bare skin. He twitched; she levered him over and dropped the bird onto his chest.\n\nGilly recoiled as the stink of its blood-matted feathers washed over him. He tried to shove it away with leaden hands. Its talons scrabbled for purchase on his chest; its flapping wings slapped his ears, left them ringing, and its hungry beak stabbed at his defensive hands. Mirabile reached around the bird's wings and pinned Gilly's hands to his sides. He closed his eyes, waited, numb and sick.\n\n\"Go on then,\" she said. \"Peck, bite, maim.\"\n\nThe feathers rustled as the bird settled again, wafting stale blood and feather molt into his face. Gilly shuddered and opened his eyes, stared at the foreshortened beak.\n\nMirabile slapped the ground. \"Do it now, bird. I command you.\"\n\nBehind her, movement. Gilly's heart gave a great leap in his chest. \"Livia, please....\"\n\nMirabile shifted her weight, silencing him. \"Back already? Did you see him? Is he coming?\"\n\nLivia nodded, her disheveled braid slipping over her shoulder, her heavy cloak shielding her face from the sight.\n\n\"Your time is near, my pet,\" Mirabile told the raven. \"It's his eyes or yours.\" The bird jerked forward at her pinch; Gilly felt the beak rip the skin of his face, tracing a careful, delicate line along his jaw.\n\nMirabile hissed, following the gash with her finger. \"Maled\u2014\" The raven went wild in her grip, wings pelting them both, before it turned and clawed its way across Mirabile's face and hair. She leaped up, and slapped it down to the floor, crushed its body with her heels.\n\nGilly could only stare at Livia, at the braid sliding loose and limp to the floor, at the pale shine of the face beneath the hood and the black eyes. He knew those eyes, the rage within them, but not like this, not wrapped in woman's flesh. Maledicte, he thought, dizzy and worn past sense, made an almost convincing woman\u2014if it weren't for the spare lines of his shoulder and chest, the strength in the white hands, even now pulling the sword free.\n\n\"You came,\" Mirabile said, brushing her disordered hair back in long-ingrained habit, playing the coquette. On her face, the weals left by the dead bird sealed flawlessly.\n\n\"With such an invitation, how could I not?\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"But, my intemperate guest, you have come before the hostess is quite ready,\" Mirabile said. \"Still, I can find something to occupy you while I finish with your pet.\"\n\nMaledicte threw himself forward, the sword ripping through the cloak, the skirt, without effort; he dove toward Mirabile, sword extended, aiming at the dark blossom of feathers on her breast.\n\nMirabile raised her hands, cried a single word, and flew out of reach of the sword like smoke blown across the room. Maledicte's eyes widened, then grew thoughtful. The shadows in the room caressed Mirabile's ragged skirt, and she drew their darkness up her body.\n\n\"You're weak, Maledicte. You carry a remnant of conscience, and you'll never know vengeance or true power until it dies. Until you take Ani in fully....\"\n\nMaledicte shrugged out of the cloak remnants. \"Why all this advice\u2014you want me? Fight me.\"\n\n\"I have no desire to kill you,\" Mirabile said. \"I want to rule you. And in turn, you and I, ruling this kingdom, the sky dark with Her wings\u2014\" She stirred the shadows alongside her, her breath rasping.\n\n\"Mal,\" Gilly said, his warning caught in his throat, drowned by his heartbeat. The shadows shaped themselves under her command, taking familiar form. Something skinny and tall, someone holding a stick in a clenched fist.\n\nMaledicte's eyes narrowed. \"What is this?\"\n\n\"You want a fight, I'll set you fighting yourself first.\"\n\nThe shadow snapped into flesh, corpse-pale, with wild snarled hair, a ragged stick held like a sword. Gilly knew this image: a scarecrow boy standing in a pile of broken glass and snow in an old man's library, a feral child crawling from beneath an altar in his dreams. Maledicte's own childhood.\n\nMirabile swayed on her feet, panting, the feathers on her skin ruffling with exhaustion. Maledicte stepped forward again, the sword gleaming; the shadow child bared his teeth and charged at the sword, stick raised and fearless.\n\nTrying to gain his feet, Gilly stumbled, found himself clutching Mirabile's tattered skirts for support. She staggered beneath his weight and he yanked harder, wanting her to fall, wanting his hands around her neck. He brought her crashing down, and struggled to crawl up her body enough to put his hands to use.\n\nShe scrabbled at the floor and swung a piece of stinking darkness at his face; the raven's body, he realized, even as its beak scraped his neck and shoulders. Mirabile was laughing, high and wild, as she flung the bird at him again. He deflected it, and she kicked him in the stomach, sending him rolling back, giving him a surging view of the room. Of Maledicte diving at his shadow self, the sword barely missing the boy's head.\n\n\"No, Mal, no,\" Gilly said. \"No.\" If Maledicte killed that child self, what would he become, freed from the child's innocence? Ani would swallow him entire.\n\nMirabile grabbed his hair, reminding him of his own battle, and slapped his face. \"I'd wanted him for my audience, but I suppose it's going to be the other way around. You can watch if you like. A man with a sword against a boy with a stick. And when it's done...he'll kill you himself for all those whispered prayers, all those little warnings you dared to voice. Against _me._ \" Blood touched her lips for a moment as Black-Winged Ani surfaced and faded, leaving Gilly shaking in the presence of the god.\n\nThe sword flashed down, impacted on the boy's stick. Gilly winced, but the stick held firm, the stick and the sword grating against each other. The shadow boy kicked Maledicte on the shin, and Maledicte broke their clinch with a curse. Following the small advantage, the shadow boy slashed at Maledicte's head with the stick; when Maledicte reached up to block it, the boy darted the stick toward his stomach instead, and Maledicte jumped aside.\n\nGilly moaned, sick with dread. There could be no good end to this. For Maledicte to destroy his own conscience, or to lose Maledicte to a shadow of himself...Mirabile laughed, pressing herself against Gilly's side, excoriating his tender skin with her feathers. The boy wiped his face; his shoulders heaved with effort, but the stick, held out before him, never wavered. Maledicte's sword hand shook; the blade tip magnified that tremor into a palsy.\n\nThe boy danced forward and Gilly saw the confidence in his face, realized the boy's mistake: Maledicte was shamming. The boy had all of Maledicte's ferocity, the bloodthirsty desire to rush for the throat, but no idea of swordsmanship or strategy.\n\n\"No,\" he cried out. \"No.\"\n\nBut the boy was extended, the stick thrust out too far, and Maledicte knocked it aside. The stick, loosed from the boy's hand, disappeared into shadow, unmaking itself before it touched the floor. The boy gritted his teeth, eyes wild with panic and rage. Maledicte's blade, unhindered now, slipped through the boy's flesh without a sound, and passed through his throat. Maledicte's hand and hilt protruded from the boy's nape, dripping shadow plasm.\n\nHorrified, Gilly could only stare, the boy dead, trying to imagine Maledicte without even the smallest leavening of conscience or kindness.\n\nMirabile stood, hands outstretched, smiling. \"My compatriot\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte carried his forward momentum on, stepped through the dissolute shadow that had been himself, and took her head from her body, the blood spray splashing Gilly's skin.\n\nMirabile fell, her blood spreading outward in a tide. Gilly crabbed away from it, scuttling on weak limbs to avoid its touch. Maledicte stepped into it, unconcerned, and pierced her heart, then ripped her body open, spilling her guts out onto the floor. \"Need I do more?\" he asked, voice a wisp. \"Will Ani heal that?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Gilly said. The numbness of his limbs had spread to his lips; he felt as chilled as a corpse. His muscles, so long tensed in struggle, deserted him. He collapsed to the floor, sprawled out, face-to-face with Mirabile's head. He could see Mirabile's unwinking eyes staring back at him, and he retched drily.\n\n\"I quite agree,\" Maledicte said. He picked up the head and threw it into the raven's cage, covering it with the altar cloth.\n\nGilly curled up, shaking, tears scalding his cheeks. \"Gilly,\" Maledicte said, kneeling beside him. Gilly felt the soft warmth of Livia's ragged cloak en-folding him, felt the floorboards shift as Maledicte sat beside him. \"Gilly, are you\u2014\" The rasping voice cracked, resumed. \"Will you be all right?\"\n\nGilly had no words at all, nothing but the tears that streamed from him, as if anxious to wash away the spilled blood. He folded into Maledicte's lap, pressing his face against Maledicte's thighs, sobbing.\n\n\"My poor Gilly,\" Maledicte said, voice so soft that Gilly had to strain to hear it, stifling his tears. \"Vornatti should have cast me back to the snows, never disturbed the pattern to your days.\" Maledicte's fingers traced soothing lines on his back, bringing slow warmth to his frozen skin. So gentle. Gilly winced. But the shadow boy\u2014\n\n\"You killed\u2014\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Am I supposed to regret it? Woman or not, Mirabile was a monster.\"\n\n\"But the boy,\" Gilly said. \"Your own shadow.\" He forced himself to look into those dark eyes that he feared to see soulless now.\n\nThe black eyes were dark-ringed with fatigue and worry, but they were calmer than Gilly could ever remember.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"I should have done it long ago.\"\n\n\"But your innocence\u2014\"\n\nMaledicte laughed, as silent as a cat, his shoulders shaking, near hysteria. \"Did you think that Relict rat was innocent? That creature who knew no kindness, only hunger, fear, and rage\u2014whose only virtue was a love so mad that Ani could find purchase in my soul? I am not that thing anymore. How could I be, with you teaching me kindness? For all that I've corrupted you, my sweet Gilly, you've bettered me. I would not have made the same choice I did then, were I offered it now.\"\n\nGilly's breath let out on a gasp, his chest pounded. \"Mal\u2014\" Maledicte gathered him close, kissed his ear, his temple, drew back when his lips touched the wound on his head.\n\n\"She used you so hard,\" Maledicte said. \"How did you fall into her hands...did Livia entrap you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said, flushing with embarrassment and revulsion at the resurgent aches of his body. For a moment, he had forgotten pain in hope.\n\nMaledicte awkwardly rocked him in his arms, Gilly overflowing his narrow lap. \"Shh, I'll take you someplace safe.\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte stilled, waiting.\n\n\"He found out I let you go to Stones, instead of fighting them off; he beat me, and sold me to the sea.\"\n\n\"And Mirabile?\" Maledicte's voice was cool, as disinterested as if these names were those of strangers.\n\n\"She was on the docks when I escaped. I think she had been watching us all,\" Gilly said.\n\nMaledicte's lips thinned; absently he stroked Gilly's shoulders. \"We'd best get you someplace safe, then. I've escaped the Kingsguard. Echo will be hunting me. And Janus\u2014best not chance his temper again. Will the madam at Lizette's take you in, do you think? It's near enough.\"\n\n\"If we pay her,\" Gilly said, dismayed at Maledicte's cool abstraction, his willingness to ignore Janus's murder attempt.\n\n\"Mirabile will have coin somewhere,\" Maledicte said. \"It only remains to find it.\" Gently Maledicte set Gilly from his lap, and searched the room. He riffled through a stack of papers, pausing as he found the note from the palace spy warning of Maledicte's imminent arrest. \"Mirabile's been stealing our correspondence, Gilly.\" Gilly made no answer, and Maledicte bit his lip, turned back to searching with more urgency. He found the coin purse beneath the altar stones, and tucked it into his shirtsleeve. In another makeshift safe, he found her poisons and rummaged through, muttering to himself. Then he knelt back beside Gilly. \"Drink this\u2014it should fire your blood. I cannot carry you.\"\n\nGilly couldn't focus on the vial, only on the red-washed skin of Maledicte's hands. He flinched. \"Drink it,\" Maledicte said.\n\nThe liquid, bitter as gall, flamed down his throat, spreading heat to cold limbs. His heart drummed for a frantic, caged moment, then settled.\n\n\"Better?\" Maledicte asked, sliding his arm beneath Gilly's shoulders.\n\n\"Yes,\" Gilly said, kissing the frowning face bent so near his own.\n\nMaledicte pulled away. \"Not now, Gilly.\" He tugged, and Gilly raised himself into Maledicte's bracing arms. The temple wheeled around him; the trickle of blood on his cheek shifted direction, dripping over his collarbone and chest. \"What was that?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"Sailor's Dream, I think,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"You think,\" Gilly said, licking his lips.\n\n\"Gilly, don't fuss at me,\" Maledicte said, \"I'm bone-tired, and doing what I can.\" His arms trembled around Gilly's chest, and Gilly forced himself to his own support, aware again of Maledicte's slightness.\n\n\"As slight as a girl,\" Gilly said, patting the embroidery on Maledicte's cuffs.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"I am. And you're as big as an ox, and about as easy to steer.\"\n\nGilly nodded, forced himself to concentrate not on the wonderful warmth seeping through his mind and body, but on the blood-damp footprints they left on the temple floor.\n\nMALEDICTE SWORE Gilly had stopped again, and weariness was ripping through his bones, weighing him so that he felt he might sink into the earth at any moment. \"Come on, Gilly,\" Maledicte said, pulling.\n\nGilly still balked, and, overbalanced, Maledicte fell up against him, warm skin exposed by Livia's inadequate cloak. Gilly's hands wandered again, and Maledicte, trying to secure the cloak, didn't step away. Damn Mirabile, he thought with a snarl. If she'd wanted him so badly, all she had to do was give him a dose of Dream, and he would have been hers. But she chose to hurt him, instead.\n\nHe shook with a rage that was all his, without the taint of Ani at all. Where was Ani? Maledicte wondered. She'd been still and quiet since the shadow boy's death, since Mirabile's death, when he had expected Her to rise screaming from his belly, expected to have to fight Her. But She was silent; it made him nervous, like a sailor beneath a storm-clouded sky.\n\nGilly's hands were under his shirt now, Maledicte noticed with a sudden warmth of his own, tracing lazy circles on his back, slipping lower.\n\nBlood touched his face, and Maledicte looked up, watched another thin rivulet sneak past the slow crust forming on Gilly's head wound. Rising to his toes, he licked at it, hoping some of Ani's healing might be found in his spit. The copper taste woke him to the urgency of moving on, of not being found near Mirabile's body, of not being found at all.\n\nGilly fumbled at Maledicte's breeches and frowned in drugged puzzlement. \"Livia?\" Gilly whispered.\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte said, stung. He shoved Gilly into movement again, promising himself a confessional with Gilly as soon as he was sober. He had nothing to hide anymore; the unexpected freedom of it washed over his skin. Maledicte was a dead man, on the run, ruined. And he, who had changed his identity once, was free to do so again. The sword twanged against the doorjamb as they passed it, sparking a muttered response from Ani lurking within.\n\nNot free yet, Maledicte thought, sobered. He had his vengeance to complete, though he knew it was an empty gesture now. Last was long dead and buried, his enemies gone\u2014Kritos, Last, Amarantha, Dantalion, all fed to the crow-bitch, leaving him never sated. If he killed the child, would Ani leave him then, their compact finished with the infant earl's death? Maledicte felt Her whispering inside his blood, murmurs of agreement and coaxing. Just one more and then he'd be free.\n\nFree, Maledicte thought, to do what? Change his name, leave the city, leave Janus? The breath fell out of him; his heart throbbed. Janus\u2014back-to-back, fighting the world, only each other at the last. Maledicte, swaying under Gilly's weight as they shambled up the street like two drunkards, felt clearheaded for the first time in months.\n\nVengeance was a cold thing, and his prize...he had bartered his soul for Janus, and his prize was not all he'd expected. Golden Janus, his lover, his most trusted friend, had sent Gilly to the sea....\n\nRosy light washed over them, flushed their skin with a false health as they passed beneath the brothel windows. Maledicte dragged a protesting Gilly down the alley and hammered on the back door. When it opened, he drew his sword and levered himself and Gilly past the girls.\n\n\"A room,\" he said. \"Now.\"\n\nA butterfly flutter of silk told him one girl had run for the madam and likely for whatever protector she hired for the brothel. Maledicte intended to have Gilly ensconced before their arrival. He went toward the stairs, and Gilly, moving by muscle memory, stumbled up them, and chose a room without hesitation. Empty, thankfully, Maledicte thought. He could bribe the whores, but a customer might be another matter. And how long had it been since his escape? Had they posted guards on the streets yet?\n\nHe pressed Gilly back into the sheets, wrapped him in blankets, and sat down on the edge of the bed.\n\n\"Will you forgive him this, too? If he has killed me?\" Gilly whispered.\n\n\"You're not dying, Gilly.\" Spoken, the fear was real in the room. Maledicte took Gilly's hand in his own, sought out the steady throb of the pulse, the warmth of his fingers, and repeated, \"You're not dying. You're hurt. But you'll recover. Street urchins get beat worse than this by their parents in the Relicts, and look how well they grow.\"\n\n\"Stop crying then,\" Gilly said. \"If I'm not dying.\"\n\nMaledicte put his hand to his face; it was wet and stinging with tears that he hadn't noticed. He sniffed them back, letting them add to the pressure within him.\n\n\"I don't forgive him,\" Gilly said. \"Even if I'm not dying.\" He closed his eyes, blooming bruises and exhaustion spreading shadows under them.\n\n\"Nor do I,\" Maledicte whispered. \"Not this. Not you.\" The door opened again, and the madam stood there without the protector Maledicte had expected. A sudden dismay rose in him that he wouldn't have to fight anyone. He took a slow breath, forcing Ani back again.\n\n\"The girls said it was Gilly,\" she spat, seeing Maledicte seated on the bed.\n\n\"It is,\" Maledicte said, leaning back so she could see Gilly's sprawled form.\n\n\"And you've done this to him?\" she asked. \"Like my Lizette?\"\n\n\"No, to both,\" Maledicte said. \"I need a safe place for him to stay. To heal.\" He felt as if he were talking at a distance, the room seen down a telescope.\n\n\"He can stay. You try to, and I'll summon the guards.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to,\" Maledicte said. Gilly clutched his hand, and Maledicte returned the pressure absently. \"He's hurt, though. And on Dream. He'll need stitches for his head, and balm for the rest.\" Maledicte dropped the pouch of coins to the floor; the madam scooped it up and disappeared through the door.\n\n\"You can't go,\" Gilly said. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Away,\" Maledicte said. \"It seems that killing Mirabile was not wise, despite my satisfaction. I had not realized how much of Ani's concentration was focused on Mirabile. And now, there's only me to see to Her whims.\" Bile seared the back of his throat; he coughed it back. Gilly pushed himself up to his elbows, eyes going wide, even in his drugged state.\n\n\"Mal, I can hear Her in you\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"Ani's coming back. I can't stay near you. It's not safe.\" He stroked Gilly's arm, felt his other hand seize the hilt of the sword.\n\n\"Mal,\" Gilly said. \"Let's leave Antyre. Let's go to the Explorations, please.\"\n\nYes, Maledicte thought, yes. Away from the kingdom, away from Ani's tyranny and Her never-ending vengeance. But he was gagged by the taste of Her feathers and Her searing hatred.\n\nGilly touched his throat, traced the god- _avert_ over his flesh with trembling fingers, cooling his heated skin. The obstruction in his throat lifted.\n\n\"Yes,\" Maledicte said. \"Yes, I'm done with this. With this fruitless vengeance, with ashes in my heart, with\u2014\" The heat scalded him, raced up his spine, his throat, scorched back into his belly, his arms; the sword jerked and quivered, demanding that Maledicte remove Gilly's offensive, charm-using hands.\n\nMaledicte screamed under the weight of Ani's will, Her thundering voice demanding his loyalty, his promise completed, obliterating everything else in his mind. The shadows moved inward, blinding him.\n\n_Not Gilly,_ he thought. _Let me finish my compact instead. You are the god of love as well as vengeance; let me leave Gilly alive. Please._ Maledicte remembered Gilly saying Ani destroyed the Relicts when Her follower denied her. Maledicte shivered, trying to keep the image of the brothel slipping into the earth at bay. _Anything,_ he pled. _Anyone. I'll bring them to you._ Ani bent her head to his first prayer and Her wings fluttered in triumph.\n\nMaledicte stood, hand on sword hilt, and brushed by Ma Desire, who stood trembling in the doorway, hands full of clean bandages. Her shocked face was the last thing he saw before Ani took complete control.\n\nGILLY STRUGGLED WITH THE CLOAK, with the sheets, hearing again that stifled raw shriek, trying to get his stubborn legs sorted out so he could rise and go after Maledicte. Ma Desire hurried over and pressed him back. \"No, you let that one go to the hell he's headed for. You don't go with him.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Gilly said.\n\nShe covered his mouth with her hand. \"There's nothing you can do. He's wing-bent.\"\n\n\"No\u2014\" he said, and she tipped a glass against his open mouth, made him sputter even as he recognized the taste of the Laudable. Behind the window, in the night sky, he could see darker clouds flowing lowly across the sky, full of the feather-rasp of flying rooks. A dark cloud in the night, moving through the heart of the city, following their master toward the palace.\n**\u00b7 42 \u00b7**\n\n**M** ALEDICTE WOKE TO HIMSELF on the grounds of the palace, staring up at the brick wall of the residential house, with only a dreamlike idea of how he'd arrived. The sky was dark, he knew that, and the rooks were everywhere. Had he flown? He raised his arms, peeled back his sleeves, looking for feathers, but saw only smooth skin, unmarred.\n\nThe light in the window beckoned him; the bars on the frame told him it was the nursery. Maledicte sheathed the sword and reached upward. He pressed his fingers into the brick mortar and it gave, creating a fingerhold. Raising himself one handhold at a time, he climbed, the birds swooping around him, carrying shrouding darkness on their wings, delaying morning.\n\nOn the streets below he could see lamps guttering and being relit against the thick darkness. Being lit against him, loose in the night, and within those glows, the gleaming gilt of the Kingsguard, huddled close.\n\nA shadow moved across the window, and Maledicte clung to the wall with a predator's caution and patience. He shook his head, trying to clear this dreamlike sensation from his skin, trying to feel something other than Ani's fevered determination. Mortar and brick crumbled under his fingers, spat one hand into the air, left him hanging by the other. Below him, duller uniforms mingled with gold and blue: the Particulars with their pistols close to hand. Maledicte shifted his weight gingerly, trying to ease the cramp threatening to destroy his precarious grip on the wall.\n\nTrust Me. He heard Ani's whisper, not in his ears, or his mind, but in the tides of his blood. It strengthened him like a tonic, and he clawed another foot upward.\n\nSweating, gasping, Maledicte gave himself over to the simplicity of Ani's will, of climbing the wall. He crept up to the lighted square of the nursery window, braced one foot on the sill, and peered inward. A kingsguard leaned up against the glass, spreading his bulk between the light and Maledicte.\n\nHanging motionless, Maledicte watched, wondering why the guard never turned to look outside, then understood. This man was there to watch the inside of the room, secure in knowing that there were guards posted at every entrance, and that the window was barred and, moreover, three stories above ground.\n\nMaledicte, clinging with one hand to the stone sill above the window and braced by his feet, his ribs pressed against the sharp corner of the sill, reached for his sword. He slid the blade through the age-bubbled glass as smoothly and as cleanly as if it had been through paper, pressed it home before the guard could turn at the tiny chime of breaking glass. The sword bit deep into the guard's heart, and he stiffened against the pane. Maledicte withdrew the sword, leaving a ring of blood on the glass as the wet sword returned.\n\nThe guard slumped, and Maledicte, clinging to the bars of the window, waited a moment, to see if anyone within the room would object\u2014wet nurse, child, or another guard. But the minutes passed in silence, with only Ani's urging to be heard.\n\nHe measured his shoulders against the bars, measured his head; the bars were too narrowly spaced for him. Designed to keep small children within, they also kept larger predators out. But as he ran his hands against their iron length, waiting for Ani to act, he realized they didn't go all the way to the top; their pointed finials stopped before the window did, leaving a gap. Too high for a child to climb to, but for him on the outside\u2014it was the only way in, unless he expected Ani to peel back the bars one by one.\n\nThe gap wasn't much, a space of eight inches high, and only as wide as the window. Maledicte raised himself up, slid his legs past the iron prongs and slowly, gingerly, worked his way through, the sharp tips pressing against his rib cage, ripping a line through his shirt and spilling a tuft of padding from his corset. Pressed between the bars and the glass, he used the sword hilt to work up the latch.\n\nDropping into the room, he landed on the dead guard, and rolled away, came up with the sword extended. He bent and pulled the guard to his feet, using the man's belt to fasten him to the bars. A brief look in the night-dim nursery would see the man dozing against the window. But he hadn't played puppetmaster with the body unseen, he realized, as he heard the steady breath catch in surprise.\n\nAcross the dimly lit playroom, Adiran stared at him. Nested in blankets, surrounded by his blocks, he hadn't slept in his bed. Ani moved Maledicte's feet toward the boy. At the end of the playroom, closed in Adiran's room, a dog barked sharply.\n\nAdiran smiled up at him, fumbled in the blankets beside him, and held up a hand. Ani smiled and accepted the token, the little porcelain puppet with black wings. She touched Adiran's head, and said, \"Sleep, wingless one.\" As he had in Stones, Maledicte felt something transfer through him, not the same toxic wave of sickness, but something small and sharp, a crystalline seed. Beneath his hand, Adiran's eyes fluttered. Sighing, Adiran folded back into his blankets. The dog scratched madly at the door, and Ani hissed. It whimpered and fell silent.\n\n\"Hela?\" The main door started to open, and Ani fought a brief battle with Maledicte over the necessary movement. Blood or stealth? Maledicte won by a bare margin, and ducked behind the carved toy chest, sheltering in its shadowed bulk.\n\nThe guard looked in and about, saw Adiran sleeping, and shut the door again, oblivious of the scent of blood that filled Maledicte's senses.\n\nOn silent feet, Maledicte ghosted toward the other end of the room and the other bedroom door. He opened it, the sword slipping free, but the wet nurse snored in her chair, her gas light guttering.\n\nAni prodded her with the tip of the sword, drawing blood, but no flinch, no waking; surprise and thwarted bloodlust drove Her back again. Maledicte touched her cup; sniffed the dregs of tea. Drugged. He smiled, a lean, cold thing that had more of Maledicte in it than Ani. Janus had been here. Janus was working with him. But where was he? Maledicte turned to search and Ani showed him the crib instead.\n\n_The earl of Last. My enemy. The last death._ Maledicte bit his lip at the idea. The freedom from Ani, their goal met, but the idea warred with a simpler image\u2014Gilly's face, flushed with distress over murdering an infant. Ani snarled within him, reminded him that She had let Gilly live. \"I promised,\" Maledicte said, took a step forward; the cradle linens seemed crimson with blood, the copper tang of it rich in the air. He curled cold fingers around the hilt. One more, he thought, and inched forward.\n\nHe reached into the cradle and touched warmth and wet, and pulled his hand back. The blood on his hands was not the child's murder played out of time, not Maledicte's imagination, or Ani's vengeful illusion. The blood on his hands was real. And the infant lay in a sleep from which it would never awaken.\n\nMaledicte made a noise in his throat of utter protest, a double-throated thing, his choked cry of pity and revulsion, and Ani's harsh gasp of thwarted rage. A shadow detached itself from the wall, took his wrist. \"Shh, Mal, not yet....\"\n\n\"Janus,\" Maledicte breathed, the room shivering around him like something in a dream, like it might fly apart and show itself to be mere delusion.\n\nJanus touched his mouth; the odor of blood washed over Maledicte with the touch. It soaked Janus's cuff. Maledicte backed away, leaned against the closed doors. \"You killed\u2014\"\n\n\"Saved you the grief,\" Janus said, his voice low. \"I saw how it distressed you. The idea of killing Auron. But it had to be done. When I heard you'd fled the hotel, I knew you'd be coming here. I thought you'd be quicker, though.\"\n\n\"I had to retrieve Gilly,\" Maledicte said, numbly. He waited to feel something, but Ani's rage, though white-hot, only dimly touched him. He wished it would wash over him, comfort him, take this cold horror from his belly, that this man with bloody hands and cold eyes was his lover, his companion for years, his beloved.\n\n\"Gilly, again,\" Janus said, scowling. \"Timing is important, Mal. My plan\u2014\"\n\n\"To be earl, I know. You hated this child,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"It was only a child, unworthy of hate. I never hated Auron. And I don't care about being earl any longer.\"\n\n\"What?\" Maledicte whispered, startled out of his dream world, back to the solidity of this room, this moment, his breath fast in his chest, the ruined, wet texture of the baby's skin still warm against his hand. He shuddered all over, wanting out, wanting to run, but the guards were outside the doors and he couldn't imagine climbing down the way he knew he'd come.\n\n\"Janus,\" he breathed, seeking understanding and freedom from this room that had become a trap.\n\n\"I intend to be king,\" Janus said, the words cool and measured in the quiet of the room. \"My blood's good enough, and why not, there've been bastards on the throne before. I can rally some support already. DeGuerre, some of Westfall's friends. But I had to make a choice. Kill Aris, that vacillating, sentimental fool, or the babe? Assassination of a king's always a chancy thing. But kill Auron, and who's left for Aris to turn to but me, when the only blood left is mine or Adiran's?\"\n\nMaledicte leaned against the wall, chilled at the pale fire in Janus's eyes. Ani surged in him, screaming so harshly that nothing of Her words was distinguishable, only the shrieking desire to kill. At this moment, Maledicte didn't know who she hungered for. The earl of Last was his promise\u2014and the babe was dead.\n\n\"Ani still rides you,\" Janus said, stepping back and away, calculation in his face. \"Does She know, does She understand\u2014I am the earl of Last, now?\"\n\nMaledicte moaned, the sword leaping in his hands, darting toward Janus. Maledicte fought it, but Janus stepped closer, let the blade bite into his arm. Janus savaged his lip, but did not cry out.\n\nJanus danced back, hand clutching his wound. Blood rose and welled between his fingers, flowing down his sleeve and mingling with Auron's spilled blood. \"I knew you would understand. Perfect.\" His eyes widened suddenly and he rolled beneath the cradle to avoid the next swing, rose on the other side. \"Once is enough, Mal. You must control Ani. Use Her abilities for our ends.\"\n\nMaledicte gasped for breath, shuddering with exhaustion and dread that Janus thought to play puppets with the god. The sword burned in his grasp, the feathered hilt sinking into his skin. Janus's eyes narrowed, gas-flame blue, as the sword moved toward him like a needle on a compass. Maledicte lunged again and found Janus using the same gambit Maledicte had used in all his duels, stepping too close for the sword to be brought to bear. Janus grabbed Maledicte's wrist, holding it out like a pinned wing.\n\n\"Shh,\" he whispered into Maledicte's ear. \"You cannot kill me. I am both your Love and your Vengeance now. The thing you wanted and the thing you hated. Ani cannot kill me without breaking your compact. We've caged Her perfectly within you. After all, Her skills are far too valuable to lose.\"\n\nMaledicte dropped the sword, trembling all over, wordless. Kaleidoscope images burst behind his lids, of Last dying, of Auron's blood, of Mirabile's feather-studded skin. He whimpered, sobbing for air and reason. Janus's blood perfumed the air, the wound near his face. \"Miranda, trust me. I know what I'm doing,\" Janus said. \"Now pick up your sword. You'll need it.\"\n\nJanus stepped back, and Maledicte, blank-minded, did as his lover bid. As his fingers touched the hilt, there was a sudden shatter of glass from the other room as the crack made in the window by the sword raced side to side. Rooks blew through it, and the mastiff broke into frantic barking.\n\nJanus fell back against the cradle, bloody wound clutched in a hand, smiling. \"Go.\"\n\nMaledicte fled the pale, ecstatic light in Janus's eyes, the sword shivering at his side, ran through the swirling cloud of rooks, leaping over the crumpled guard. He made a leap for the barred window, but his hand, still slick with the infant's blood, slipped down its length without catching.\n\nThe guards burst into the room at Hela's barking, and Maledicte reacted, slicing into them, severing the first guard's arm from his body and driving the sword through the chest of the next one. Panting, he put his foot on the corpse, levered his sword free; it stuck on a rib, and he yanked harder. Dimly, he saw Adiran, awakened, standing beside him, blue eyes wide and worried.\n\nBefore the next guard could reach him, Maledicte freed the sword, and grabbed up Adiran. The guard faltered. Adiran clung to his neck and began to cry. Behind him, he heard Janus stumbling into the room and checking also, as if only waking from an assault.\n\nMaledicte swallowed hard, the child's wailing in his ear. He moved toward the door, and first one guard, then the next, stepped out of his path.\n\nAdiran pushed feebly in his grip, his wailing breaking into uncertain hic-coughs. Maledicte clutched him closer, his mind twisting ideas together, trying to think of escape and only imagining a noose. The guards would follow him to the ends of the earth as long as he held Adiran. He could set him down and flee\u2014he had nearly the length of the room on them\u2014could kick the door closed, delay them that second longer. But, to set Adiran down now\u2014the guards would surge after him like hounds, leaving Aris's beloved son, Aris's heart, behind in the nursery. Alone with Janus.\n\nMaledicte turned and raced the long hallway, found guards pelting up the main stairs nearly on him. Jasper headed them, his eyes fever-bright with anger. Seeing Adiran clutched so close, he waved the rest to a halt. They paused, piling into each other, but despite Maledicte's fervent wishes, stayed upright. The second mastiff, pushing through them, had no hesitation at all. Despite Jasper's snatch, Bane came roaring through, savaging his restraining hands.\n\nMaledicte dropped Adiran and bolted. The child, startled again and terrified at the rage in the air, began wailing. Bane gained his side, and, frantic, began slicing the air with his teeth, keeping everyone away from his charge, and obstructing the hall. Adiran clung to Bane and howled. The guards were stymied. For the moment.\n\nBut the floor shivered beneath Maledicte's feet with the arrival of more guards. He shuddered. The palace was worse than a beehive struck unthinkingly.\n\nWithin him, Ani whispered, let Me make it better, let Me make them all suffer. Give yourself to Me.\n\nNo, Maledicte thought, pushing away from a wall, taking the corner too fast, his boots skidding on the polished wood. He saw another stairwell and raced for it. Janus had a plan; Maledicte had to trust him. There was no alternative. It was only their old game, made more risky. Miranda had done the running before, dashed away with stolen goods, or the weapons to be hidden. She had always been able to outrun the blame, and Janus\u2014had always been able to deny it.\n\nThis was more of the same, all part of the plan. _Janus's plan,_ Maledicte thought, savagely. _Not mine._ His breath tore in his chest, his heart hammered; he grabbed the railing of the stairs, saw more guards coming up them, just two, roughly woken and still addled with sleep. He shrieked and dove forward. The first man took the blade in the face and collapsed instantly, blood bubbling through the wreck of his nose. Maledicte tumbled down the stairs on top of the other, using the man's body to cushion his own bones against the risers' edges.\n\nPanting, Maledicte slit the man's throat when he started, clumsily, to fight back at the base of the stairs.\n\nIf he could only get outside the palace, the night itself would hide him; the clouds of rooks would shelter him, as safe as any babe\u2014In the disused dining room, Maledicte leaned against the wall and retched, wiped his bloody blade clean on the shrouded table.\n\nTrust in Me, Ani whispered, coaxing, gentle, as compelling as Her first words to Miranda had been. Huddled beneath the altar, the salt burning her eyes, her skin, her scraped flesh, and Ani asking, What wrong has been done to you, little one? Tell Me what you want....\n\nNow Her words were gentle again, the strident, bloody harridan only a nightmare image in his heart. Why trust Janus? Everything you've done, everything you've been, you've done for him. And is he the man you thought him to be? Hasn't he lied to you? Can you trust him? There's only Me to protect you, now.\n\nMaledicte sucked in his breath, quieting its wheeze, ignoring Ani as best he could. They had lost him, albeit briefly. Best to make the most of it. Curtains draped the far wall, and Maledicte, hoping for windows, yanked them back. Painted gardens, sunlit, even in the dark of night. Maledicte laughed wildly; he hated this court, the overwhelming falsity of it all, where not even the architecture could be relied upon to be honest.\n\nFootsteps sounded outside the doors. He ran for the servants' entrance, yanked the door open at the expense of its hinges, and dashed into the dark corridor beyond, the door listing in the jamb, a clear pointer to his direction.\n\nDarkness and shadows and enclosed walls struck both Maledicte and Ani nerveless\u2014the specter of Stones again. If he were caught\u2014to spend the last moments of his life in a cell\u2014Maledicte ran blindly down the hall, toward a faint spark of light growing in the distance. A maid with a lantern crept out of a room to see what was happening. She opened her mouth to shriek, but Maledicte pounced, snatched the lantern, and pushed her into the center of the hall. Gasping for breath, shocked, she sprawled across the smoothed floorboards, watching as he retreated. Maledicte grinned. Let her lie there in a stupor; let the damn guards trip over her, and buy him a few precious moments.\n\nHe wanted more stairs, more windows, some hint of where he was. Why had Janus never given him a map of the palace when he had known it must come to this?\n\nMaledicte shivered, though his skin was hot with sweat, and the lantern's heat burned his left hand. He had no answer for himself. He was bent on escape, and thinking was for later.\n\nHis feet pounded along the hall; the servants' passageway, though narrow enough to prevent the guards from surrounding him, was stripped of carpeting, and his steps echoed like pistol shots. They could track him by that alone, and he had no idea which of the doors held more stairs, winding their ways, mazelike, through the palace. There had been stairs in the dining room, but he had fled mindlessly past them, and the pursuing guards, their cries audible now, made doubling back impossible. The dining room would have needed to be connected to the kitchens, and the kitchens always opened out to the world. Maledicte pushed open the next door, slid through it, and shut the door again.\n\nA woman repairing sheets looked up at him, the needle held in her mouth, the thread dangling. It dropped and Maledicte lunged at her. \"Not a word.\" He blew out the lantern, slid himself under the sheltering drape of the sheet she was sewing, pressed the sword tip up against her belly. \"Not a word,\" he said again, his voice rough with fear. Had he been in court, he would have done his best to disguise that weakness, but here his desperation could only insure her obedience.\n\nThe door swung open and guards spilled in like a piled mass of hunting dogs.\n\n\"What do you want?\" she said, her voice shrill, going shriller as Maledicte leaned his weight on the blade. A thin line slid down the blade, as thin as her linen thread, but dark, and forming a slow droplet at the end. Maledicte caught the drop on his fingertips, lest somehow the guards hear that small act of violence over their searching. They yanked open all the connecting doors, threw the loose piles of sheets around the room, until the seamstress cowered, bending her face near to her waist. Maledicte could see her features, distorted by fear, through her pale linens.\n\nThe guards left, slamming the door again, and Maledicte slid away from her. \"Please,\" she said. \"Please.\"\n\nMaledicte knew killing her would buy him time, prevent her from shrieking that he'd turned rabbit and bolted back the way he'd come, but her blood was already streaking his blade; the sight of it made his stomach churn. A fine time to lose the taste for it, he thought bitterly, but Ani only laughed.\n\nIf you won't come to Me, why should I help you? She asked.\n\nMaledicte put his hand over the seamstress's mouth, put the blade to her throat; the woman paled, her tongue licked out nervously to touch dry lips.\n\nMaledicte pulled away, the blade no more bloodied than before, and ran. He had reached the dining room again when he heard the muffled violence of her screaming.\n\nFool, Ani said within him. Betrayed fool. Lose yourself in Me and I will aid you. He clattered down the stairs, burst into the kitchen, and found it overfull of guards, watching the exits.\n\nMaledicte turned and fled back upward, aware of the upstairs contingent approaching. \"Help me,\" he whispered.\n\nYes, Ani said, Go always upward, and the rooks will aid you. He kicked the stair doors shut in the guard's face as the first man reached it, and he kept going up, past the landing to the servants' quarters, past the point where the stairs were kept in good condition, and became friable, bowed with time. He stumbled, but kept going, secure in the knowledge that these stairs were blind. There were no doorways to open up at his side, disgorging guards or Particulars. No maidservants to trip over, just a straight shot to the sky.\n\nAn explosion snapped through the air in the hall; the plaster near his face puffed into dust, and Maledicte spat. Pistols.\n\nHe turned and cursed them for cowards. The Particular drew another pistol and fired again, then screamed as the pistol exploded in his hand. Ani's doing, or pure luck. It didn't seem to matter. The stairs came to an abrupt end, spilling him out into a jumbled attic.\n\nUpward. In the shadowed ceiling, the door to the rooftop was hinted at by a darker patch, a square with a telltale latch. He climbed the pile of aristocratic refuse and forced the latch back, even as the guards swarmed in and spread out, creating a net of flesh and swords.\n\nMaledicte levered himself up and through, and found himself on the flat roof of the palace, the night air cool and crisp in his face, and the sky alive with wings. Within him, Ani spread Her wings, stroking his fears back.\n\nHe laughed, stood over the trapdoor, and took the head of the first guardsman to climb through, pushing the body back down onto his colleagues. Maledicte kicked the head through as an afterthought and dropped the trapdoor closed.\n\nThere was nothing there to hold it closed; the latch was on the other side, but the very fact that only one man could come through at a time acted like a weight on the guards below. Maledicte left the trapdoor, ran to the edge of the roof, and looked down. Dizzyingly far, the ground seemed as unattainable as the sky as a means of escape. He leaned over the edge, testing the wall for scalability. In this part of the castle, it was old stone, not soft mortar and jutting brick. More, Ani showed no inclination to grant him preternatural skills again, and only a fool tried to descend a sheer stone wall.\n\nBeneath his feet, the muttering panic of the guards went quiet and orderly; one voice cracked out above them all. Echo, taking charge. At least there was that at the end.\n\nHe watched the trapdoor lift, disgorging Echo, who rose like a stage demon, flung aloft by his guards, pistol in one hand, sword in the other, and a length of chain mesh guarding his throat.\n\nMaledicte danced toward him as Echo leveled the pistol, eyes narrowing. The puff of smoke, the ricochet of sound struck Maledicte a moment after the lead did. He stumbled, but the ball had only penetrated his leg; Ani chased it out, healing its intrusive heat, absorbing the hurt. Maledicte reached out with his sword and took the pistol from Echo's hand, flung it off the roof.\n\n\"I'm glad you came,\" Maledicte said. \"This wouldn't have been the same without you.\"\n\n\"I'll see you dead,\" Echo said. Behind him, the guards started to join them, and Maledicte pivoted, kicked the first one in the throat, and sent him backward. Echo's blade whistled in the sky, coming for his chest, and the air was suddenly full of rooks. Echo flailed his sword, trying to clear them from his face, the stabbing beaks, the snatching claws, and Maledicte screamed, \"He's mine.\"\n\nThe space between them cleared, the rooks pulling away into the sky like a windspout, flowing upward and then falling back toward them, circling them. \"All your tricks won't help you, now. Aris will see you hanged,\" Echo said, closing.\n\nMaledicte took the blow on his blade, skidded under the man's weight, and stepped aside at the last, forcing Echo off his blade. Maledicte thrust, aiming for Echo's exposed side, but the man pivoted and parried.\n\nMaledicte stepped back, trying to keep an eye on both Echo and the door to the attic. Echo was not any of the fools that Maledicte had dueled previously, buoyed by tradition and stupidity; should Maledicte be struck from behind by a guard, Echo would finish him from the front without hesitation.\n\nMaledicte jumped the low thrust Echo aimed in an attempt to hamstring him, and swept the blade outward, pushing him back. The trapdoor started to rise, and Maledicte leaped on it, his sudden weight forcing the guards back. But only for a moment. They shoved upward; Maledicte felt the wood shift beneath his feet, saw Echo's blade coming for him, and tumbled forward, going head over heels away from the strike.\n\nHe knelt, heart pounding, blood singing in his ears, listening to Echo's approach. Not an honorable fool, Maledicte thought, not loath to strike down a fallen man, but a fool nonetheless. Maledicte dropped from his knees to his thigh, rolling and turning. Echo leaned inward just as Maledicte pushed the blade up into his chest. He worked the blade through, then worked it free, letting Echo fall as the guards gained the roof.\n\nSuddenly leaderless, they hesitated. Echo bled out before them; the rooks swirled, filling the air with their cries and feathers, and Maledicte levered himself to his feet, panting through bared teeth. They spread out loosely, but none approached.\n\nMaledicte leaned back against the parapet, looking over them all. What now, he wondered. Fly, Ani urged him. Fly.\n\n\"I cannot,\" he said, not caring that he spoke aloud. The guards flinched and one, braver than the rest, stepped forward. Maledicte shifted his grip on his sword, and said, \"Don't do that. Your colleagues aren't going to support you and I'll kill you. We'll wait.\"\n\nThe trapdoor rose again, and Maledicte found a smile at the pale gilt hair, at the blue eyes. \"Janus,\" he said. Now the game could continue\u2014Janus's plan unfurl.\n\n\"Sir,\" the guard said. \"Be careful. He killed Lord Echo.\"\n\n\"And so you are all waiting for someone else to stop him. How brave of you all,\" Janus said, his tone caustic. \"Had you all rushed him, this would be done with by now.\"\n\nMaledicte felt his heart jerk and flutter, as if wings were beating in it. It was an act, he knew it was, but it felt\u2014\n\nHe's betrayed you, Ani crowed. You know he has. Thrown you over for ambition and a golden throne. Give your future to me. I'll bring their city down on them all.\n\nJanus would not turn on him\u2014Maledicte clung to that certainty as he had clung to the wall earlier. Janus loved him more than the world itself.\n\nJanus took a sword from the nearest guard and paced forward, his face set, as white as the marble busts that lined the king's hall.\n\nIt was not the sword, or the implacability of his face that seeded doubt into Maledicte's heart, but the clammy remembrance that Janus had waited for Maledicte to arrive before striking the child. That he had plotted to use the gods, and one so mad as that might dare anything. More still, the simple fact that Janus had had his wound dressed and his shirt exchanged for a fresh one. While Maledicte ran, Janus had been dressing for this moment.\n\n\"Ani,\" Maledicte called out to the sky, his voice a croaking plea, his pain choking him. \"Ani.\"\n\nThe sensation burst over his skin like a thousand needles stabbing; his hands shook, and the sword fell with a clatter on the stone. He could smell it, the rough scent of new feathers springing out, cloaking his skin, letting Ani free. Beneath his feet, the palace twitched, like an animal waking, like a horse shaking off a bothersome fly, like wings unfurling.\n\nThe guards rocked on their feet, their eyes wild. Two of the Particulars fled for the stairwell and disappeared into it.\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, stepping forward, his sword hand moving.\n\n\"Sir, the king wants him for a trial,\" a guard called.\n\n\"And risk the palace?\" Janus countered. \"Risk the ceilings crushing his son?\" He struck like a snake.\n\nMaledicte rolled away from the blow. He backed away from Janus, wishing Ani would hurry with this transformation, would hurry with his obliteration.\n\nA faint thought crossed his mind, shocking him to stillness\u2014Gilly, waiting for him. Gilly. Ani shrieked within his skin, the rooks flew into the ranks of guards, blinding one man, and causing chaos.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Janus said. \"Mal\u2014\" A warning in his voice, or entreaty. Maledicte didn't know which it was, only knew that his lover came for him with a sword, that Ani raged within him, and that the small quiet space left in him was weeping for Gilly. Then there was nothing in his mind but the black arrival of Ani, holding him immobile as She sought control of his body, making it over as She wished.\n\nThe moonlight reflected off the blade as Janus pulled his arm back and thrust forward. Despair let him break Ani's grip; Maledicte's hand flashed out, pressing the blade aside as it moved, blood spattering from his palm as he pushed, trying to shift the sword, trying to shift it away from his tender flesh. He moved it a bare half inch. Not enough.\n\nThe sword sank into him as if it had always belonged there, the slick heat of it intimate within his chest, nestled inside.\n\nJanus's eyes were wild; his mouth slack, as if he hadn't believed he could do it at all. The blade slid free despite Maledicte clutching at it, holding it to him. Blood sprayed over Janus's clean shirt, hit his face and mouth. Janus flinched, and closed his eyes. Maledicte, still standing, felt his body going numb and distant. He watched Janus wipe the blade clean with his hand, sheeting his blood from the steel to the stones of the roof. The guards' faces were stupid with shock, as if they hadn't believed Maledicte could be killed any more than Maledicte had.\n\n\"Ani,\" Maledicte breathed. Ani poured Herself into the wound and found it mortal.\n\nShe screamed, Her burgeoning power pushed back and redirected, fighting to stay ahead of Maledicte's death. The stones of the roof birthed ravens, and the guards stumbled, waving their swords blindly in a blizzard of black feathers.\n\nThe rooks skied away, shrieking, as the ravens rose. But as Ani's hold on the world faded, the ravens slowly became stone once more, shattering at the touch of a sword. Maledicte watched it all, sinking back against the edge of the roof, sliding down to lie on the surface.\n\nJanus knelt, pressing his hand to the wound. \"Mal\u2014\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have\u2014\" Maledicte whispered. Blood washed up and brushed his lips. \"You didn't have\u2014Why?\" His breath gave out, and he saw tears standing out in Janus's eyes. They made him angry, but his blood was too thin for the old fire to catch, too thin and spreading out over his shirt, Janus's hands, the roof tiles.\n\n\"Shh,\" Janus said, bending forward, pressing him close. It woke pain in the wound and Maledicte moaned in the dark shelter of Janus's shoulder. \"Drink this,\" Janus said, a small vial in his hand. \"Please. It'll ease the pain.\"\n\nMaledicte let the liquid trickle into his mouth, felt Janus rubbing his throat to make him swallow, and the pain receded into numbness. Ease it, he thought muzzily, when they hang him. A lover's last gift\u2014the gift of oblivion in the face of a slower death. He closed his eyes and welcomed it.\n**\u00b7 43 \u00b7**\n\n**D** O YOU SEE THE BIRDS?\" The whisper woke Gilly from his Laudable stupor. \"Did you hear the bells?\" another whore asked. Gilly could hear it now, through senses dulled and fogged, the deep tolling of the castle bell. He choked on an indrawn breath. He forced himself to his feet; something heavy and cool slithered down his legs. He caught it absently and staggered to the window. The women squeaked as he fell into the frame beside them.\n\nThe rooks were wild, flying without pattern, without sense, over the city, flickers of a dark night lingering into the dawn. _The rooks follow him,_ Mirabile had whispered. But now, they flew without purpose, without destination, and Gilly felt their panic and loss sinking into his bones. He knew, without words, without telling, that there was no one for them to follow now.\n\nHis hand clenched around the object that had been on the bed with him. He opened his palm, saw a watch engraved with sailing ships, and his breath left him, overwhelmed by despair.\n\nJANUS STOLE THROUGH THE HALLWAYS of the palace; those who saw him backed away. He couldn't blame them. He knew his temper, knew what it was like at the best of times, and this was far from being that. Those unafraid of his rages waited to see what his position would be, now that his lover had murdered the infant earl.\n\nPanic gripped his throat again. What if he had been wrong? What if he'd miscalculated? The threat of Aris deciding that Janus was to blame for Auron's death was nothing compared to this. Even had he calculated right, the window of safety was so narrow\u2014they meant to hang his body from the turrets in a few hours.\n\nThe chapel was silent and dark, empty except for Maledicte. Aris had refused to let Auron lie in the same room as his murderer, had kept Auron by his side. _But such only aids me,_ Janus thought, _keeps Aris stupid with grief, and Mal\u2014_\n\nHe hesitated near the marble bier. So white that even the dried blood on his mouth seemed scarlet instead of brown. No one had cleaned him, given him the courtesies granted the dead. No one would. But in denying the rites, they aided Maledicte one last time by keeping his secret. More, their neglect kept her life...Janus forced a smile at the irony, forced himself to believe that he had been right, that the books thieved from Gilly's possession had been accurate.\n\nJanus nerved himself to rest his hand on Maledicte's chest. It was cool to the touch, as still as marble. But when he pressed his fingers against the wound, they came away touched with fresh blood.\n\nJanus dropped to his knees. Thank you, Ani\u2014thank you. As possessive as the books stated, Ani would not relinquish Her hold while the compact remained undone. The relief unmanned him as the fear had not. It took him long moments to regain his composure.\n\nAni's strength would keep Maledicte from death, while the poison from the Itarusine court would mimic the symptoms of it. Janus had planned it to a nicety, all variables controlled, and still, it had gone wrong. Maledicte had moved. Had endured a far more lethal blow than the one Janus had intended, had let the blade bite into the heart itself.\n\nShaking, he wrapped Maledicte around with the shrouding cloth, lifted him into his arms, and headed into the hall.\n\nHe left the main halls for the servants' corridors, hurrying along, careless of noise. This deep into the old palace, the corridors were thick with dust and cobwebs. But once he reached more modern segments, he hesitated. Only one last stretch lingered between him and the stables and his waiting carriage. But a single servant now could see his plans ruined. Or a guard resting in the stables. He closed his eyes, trusting to chance and a castle steeped in mourning.\n\n\"Just a little longer, Mal,\" he said. \"Then it'll be all over. We'll have won and we'll be together.\" He forced his mouth shut; a whisper where none should be might bring a servant to investigate or overhear. And there would be mayhem enough when the discovery of Maledicte's disappearance was made. Better they think him mad with grief, determined to preserve dignity for his lover, than to even suspect that Maledicte might live yet.\n\nThe passage stayed silent, and Janus brought Maledicte out into the midmorning sunlight. Janus flinched at the brightness after the dark corridors, but Maledicte's face stayed fixed. Janus shivered.\n\nHe laid him on the seat of the carriage, and called up to the driver, \"To Lastrest, and stop for nothing.\"\n\nThe paid driver looked back at the bundle in Janus's arms and shuddered, but snapped the reins, spurring the team into a trot.\n\nJanus folded Maledicte's fingers about his own, but they refused to stay there, slipped away from him, limp and chill. Janus pushed panic away. Maledicte could still die. The wound was so deep, and if Ani's touch faded...If She forsook their bargain, Maledicte might wake only to bleed to death in his arms.\n\nJanus compared the risks of rough travel and the virtues of speed, and yelled up at the coachman to spring them. The horses surged into a gallop. In the jolting coach, Janus held Maledicte to him more tightly, shielding his body from the worst of the rattling, and thought, _Now, if only that damn boy has done what I asked._\n\nHis stomach clenched and roiled. When the rain started, he relaxed a little. The rain could only help. He wondered where the pursuit was now, whether Maledicte had been missed yet, and if so, if the guards had gone to Aris first, disturbing his solitude, or if they'd simply taken off after him. With Echo dead and Jasper dog-mauled, Janus assumed the Kingsguard would dither for some space of time before intruding on Aris.\n\nThe coach clattered through the gates of Lastrest, and Janus sprang out of it, carrying Maledicte into the house.\n\nHis sudden arrival startled the servants into action; Janus ignored them, headed for his bedroom. He laid Maledicte on the bed, then shut the door firmly behind him, latching it. \"Mal?\" he said.\n\nBut Maledicte was still white, still unresponsive, and cool to the touch. Janus winced; the serum should have worn off by now, and his control veered into panic again. What would he do if Maledicte were gone? If he had killed\u2014\n\n\"Sir?\" the boy said, the hidden door sliding open. \"You've been gone a long time.\"\n\n\"Did anyone see you?\" Janus asked, staring at the young man. Slim as a sword blade, dark-haired, and as pale as powder could make his skin\u2014he made Janus's heart clench.\n\n\"No, you said not to come out. And I've been so bored.\" The boy turned his lips down in a sullen pout and Janus laughed.\n\n\"Sorry, Mal.\"\n\n\"My name isn't\u2014\"\n\n\"It doesn't really matter,\" Janus said, standing. \"Does it?\"\n\n\"What's that?\" the young man asked, as curious as a cat, and as fickle with his attention as the whore he was.\n\n\"You,\" Janus said, unwrapping Maledicte with careful fingers. \"Come and take a look.\"\n\n\"It's a wax doll,\" the boy said, coming closer.\n\n\"No,\" Janus said, laughing as Maledicte's lips tightened, his eyelashes flickered at the light shining on his face.\n\n\"I don't like it,\" the boy said, backing away. \"I want to go back to the brothel.\"\n\nJanus fought the urge to just grab the sword. Chasing the boy around the room would do no good, but he burned to have the deed done, the time spent sealing Maledicte's wounds. \"Without being paid?\" Janus said, letting disdain slip into his voice. \"I haven't had you yet. But you've had my bed to lie in, the food and drink I gave you.\"\n\nThe young man came closer, licking his lips. \"You won't\u2014\"\n\n\"Won't what?\" Janus asked, leaning back against the bedsheets, slipping his hand onto the hilt of his sword, hidden by the shroud.\n\n\"Won't make me touch that\u2014\" The boy jerked his head toward Maledicte, still more corpse than living flesh. Janus found a hot ember of his temper left, and said, \"If you touched him, I'd have to kill you. I don't share him.\"\n\n\"Well, that's all right, then, 'cause I ain't going to touch it,\" the boy said, slipping around to Janus's side. Janus drew the boy close, kissed the soft mouth, and pressed the sword home. The boy jerked and gasped, blood spilling up into Janus's mouth, hot and salty.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mal, I'm so sorry,\" he whispered, licking the blood away. \"I never wanted to hurt you.\" A footstep in the hall woke him to the reality. Not the rooftop again, not Maledicte in his arms, but a paid boy. Janus let him drop, wiped his mouth, and bent his attention to Maledicte. He picked Maledicte up again, passed through the door the boy had used, entered the secret room. Aris would know about it, of course, having grown up at Lastrest, but he might not think to look in it. Not with a body to be found elsewhere.\n\nJanus laid Maledicte down, shoved the debris of the boy's meal away, and picked up the medical supplies he'd laid in. He stitched the wound closed, reaching in past the skin, beneath the small breast, to sew up muscle and tendon, working with shaking hands. What if it didn't work\u2014He poured whiskey over the stitching, and Maledicte arced his back, the tendons in his throat standing out.\n\n\"Shh,\" Janus said, kissing his forehead, wrapping a layer of cotton gauze around the damaged hands where Maledicte had tried to stop the sword. It made him uneasy that these smaller wounds hadn't healed yet. \"I'll be back. Just rest.\"\n\nHe shut the door behind him, and wrapped the whore in the shroud, carried it downstairs past the gaping servants and into the gardens, wet with rain.\n\nWhen he returned to the house, mud-covered and shaking with exertion, wound reopened and bloody, Aris was waiting for him.\n\n\"Where is his body?\" Aris said; his face was lined, wet with tears and rage. \"Where is it?\"\n\nJanus knelt. \"Find him yourself. Sire.\" Aris moved forward and struck him across the face, the blow knocking Janus back across the floor. Exhausted and in no mood to feign obedience, Janus still kept control enough not to strike back, to continue his schemes. Besides, the guards even now clustered around Aris. Instead, Janus let tears spring to his eyes, and whispered, \"I loved him too well to see his body displayed, to let them bet on when the crows would take his eyes, and which bones would fall away first, to see the rabble fight over his dropped finger bones.\"\n\n\"You've buried him on the grounds? Here, on the family property of the child he's slain? He cannot stay here. And he will be hung high. As all traitors are.\" Aris paced the room, peered out through the rain-streaked glass, gestured to the guards. \"Start searching. Look for turned earth.\"\n\nThey bowed and went out. Janus sank down to a crouch again. \"Uncle, please.\" He made himself think of Maledicte outside, in the earth, trying not to let any trace of his triumph show.\n\n\"Did you know?\" Aris said, tugging Janus's face up to meet his. A very different king, this, Janus thought. No longer passive and beaten, but charged with grief and rage. \"Did you know what your lover intended?\"\n\n\"No,\" Janus said. \"No.\"\n\n\"The only thing sparing your neck is that he came up the wall, like some damned demon. And he didn't know how to escape; had you aided him, I would have expected him to sneak in through the doors and flee with more ease.\"\n\nJanus wondered if another denial would be more or less convincing than the first. He kept silent, waiting.\n\n\"I trusted Maledicte too long, played the fool. You lived in his pocket and yet claim I should trust you\u2014I wish I could believe you,\" Aris said. \"Wish I could trust my own flesh and blood, but death seems overinterested in smoothing your path.\" Aris leaned against the table, his face older than Janus had ever seen it.\n\n\"I could have you imprisoned or executed, but there is no other left of our blood. If the line of Last is to continue, it must be through you.\" Aris's hands knotted and unknotted uselessly against his coat. \"As for banishment, Itarus would be only too glad to take you in, to use you against Antyre. How would Adiran fare then? I have not the stomach to fight another war over my throne.\"\n\nAris held out a hand, face grim. Janus cautiously took it. Aris clenched his hand tight, drew Janus close. \"This is my sin\u2014and my guilt. That I would prefer a conspirator on my throne to the bloodshed that would follow a war or my death without a viable heir. So you have won, Janus. To a degree.\n\n\"You will continue as a member of my court. My third counselor. But the moment you approach Adiran, I will have the dogs at your throat. Without hesitation. Your life is now linked to his. If he contracts fever, should he suffer hurt of any kind, you will pay for it. Do you understand me, nephew?\" Aris's eyes were the cold blue of winter skies, and Janus found himself looking away first for once.\n\n\"I would never hurt Adiran,\" he said, finding his voice. There was no need. Adiran's presence could only aid him. If he were regent for the simple young man Adi would be, it would be no different from being king in name. But all those thoughts passed in a driving need to return to Maledicte, to make sure the stitches were holding as the poison wore off, to ease his pain.\n\n\"Janus, I am sick of your meaningless words. Go upstairs; you are confined to your quarters until we have recovered his body.\"\n\nJanus fought a surge of angry temper, reminding himself again that it was the boy, the bait, that they hunted. Doors slammed upstairs, and he focused his eyes on the floor, dropping into a bow, though alarm shot through him. He had expected the guards to confine their seeking to the grounds of Lastrest, ignoring the house itself. Casting a final glance at Aris's ravaged face, at the guards in the drive passing out spades, he left the room as if reluctant, even while his blood whispered, _hurry hurry._\n\nUpstairs, he found the door to his rooms open, his armoire opened, guards looking through it. He parted his lips to object and his blood froze in his veins. The opened armoire door had blocked the wall from his sight, and the hidden room's door gaped wide.\n\n\"There's blood on the bed and the floor,\" the guard said.\n\n\"I was injured earlier. Defending Auron.\" His voice was without conscious control; the entirety of his being vibrated with the need to shut the door to the hidden room, though he knew it was too late.\n\nThe guards shrugged and left, locking him in as they did, and Janus stumbled into the hidden room, finding only shadows and darkness within its narrow confines, the candles gone out and cold.\n\nJanus fumbled his numb, blind way toward the dusty chaise where he had laid Maledicte. Surely he had not recovered, was not playing a second, lethal game of cat and mouse even now.... Janus's breath caught; he bit back a sob, imagining the guards finding so much more than they expected, not a corpse but a revenant, weak but alive. Easy prey. He dropped to his knees, reaching out in entreaty, and then his hands touched clammy, sweating flesh; a whisper of a moan reached him, and when he drew his hands back, blood marked his fingers.\n\nAni's doing, Janus realized; this empty room not empty at all. The same weaving of shadow that had snared Last now spared Her vessel. He burst into laughter, tinged with hysteria, and startled himself silent. But such power She held, and Miranda held. What he couldn't do with it at his side.... He and Maledicte would rule this country as surely as they had ruled the Relicts. If Maledicte lived.\n\nJanus pressed his body against the chaise, clutching those cool, twitching fingers in his own.\n\nTHE FLAVOR OF DUST and blood filled her mouth, and a faint tang of oiled steel, as if it had risen through her veins from the wound. Pain radiated out, central, devastating, lethal. Miranda opened her eyes with bleary effort. Dim shadows draped her, and steep walls surrounded her. Too steep to be those of a coffin, and too far away. But Maledicte was dead, she knew that; Janus had done that, chasing even Ani back down into the depths of her body, cowering.\n\nRaising her hand took all her will, and she let it drop on her chest, tangling in the stiff linen stitching at the heart of that pain. The shadows pressed in, and her eyes closed; the room promenaded around her, spinning her in elaborations as fanciful as the dance steps Aris had taught her in the gardens. When she could open her eyes again, the walls had returned to the static stone that they were.\n\nA pallid gleam swam toward her, a square of darkness pivoting to birth a white-shirted figure with gilded hair.\n\n\"Don't touch that. It's so close to your heart. I thought I'd lost you.\"\n\n\"Janus\u2014\" Miranda breathed his name out on a delicate exhalation. More than the faintest motion of her chest woke wet heat and lung-locking agony.\n\n\"Shh.\" He knelt beside her, took her bandaged hand in his own. It brought a new smell to her senses, the dark scent of turned, wet earth and leaves; it overwhelmed even the blood scent of her skin and the stale exertion of his. Black earth and loam, cold soil from deep beneath the surface where the sun could never reach. Miranda knew the scent, had sniffed it at Vornatti's interment. Janus had been digging graves.\n\n\"I had it all planned, Mal. Why did you move? I almost killed you.\"\n\nMaledicte breathed. Tried to. Forced his mouth into a rictus movement, put his tongue to his teeth, shaped words without breath. \"Ani never stops fighting. I couldn't stop fighting. Even you. Thought you meant to kill me.\" He let the darkness roll over him, muffling his senses, his fingers numb on his chest, his legs as inert as lead.\n\n\"I'd never hurt you.\" Janus's hand, so hot against his cold flesh, seared him to wakefulness once more.\n\n\"Hurts now....\"\n\n\"I thought She'd heal you faster than this. That it would be a matter of minutes. Not this.\" Janus dropped his head; his hair trickled muddy water onto the pillow, splashing Maledicte's face, startling him with little bursts of sensation. When Janus raised his head again, Maledicte could see wet tracks coursing through the begrimed skin. Janus fumbled a bottle out of his shirt. \"I brought you Laudable. Do you think you can swallow?\"\n\nMaledicte said, \"Elysia\u2014\"\n\n\"I haven't any, and with Aris here, I can't send for it. I'm sorry.\"\n\nPain swept over him again, stabbing outward, throbbing, setting sweat to slicking his side. \"Send Gilly,\" he said. The threat of continuing torment scared him as nothing else had, save being buried in Stones.\n\n\"Shh.\" Janus helped Maledicte raise his head, lifting gently at his nape. A bare inch from the pillow, the movement contracted tiny muscles along his neck, his rib cage, and Maledicte lost the room to an inner blackness.\n\n\"Mal?\"\n\nParting his lips, Maledicte tried to focus. Janus trickled the Laudable in; Maledicte choked, and rolled his head, spilling most of it back out onto the pillow. Rather that than a paroxysm of coughing as it burned down his lungs. Maledicte would rather drown on the syrup than deal with that anticipated agony. A bare taste sank down his throat, scorching it, and spreading a blaze in his chest.\n\nMaledicte breathed. The room throbbed dark and darker. Janus's hands stayed steady at Maledicte's nape. When he could see Janus's face again, Janus spoke. \"Another mouthful?\"\n\nMaledicte tilted his chin a little higher, waited. \"Slower,\" he breathed, felt the glass lip rest against his tongue, the liquid spreading thinly over his tongue, coating it. Maledicte swallowed, a deeper mouthful this time, managed another, before letting the rest trickle over his cheeks and chin.\n\nThe pinpoint heat of candlelight in Miranda's eyes brought her back to awareness. Numbness spread over her body like a shroud, and Janus, bent over her, seemed only a dream. He touched the bandaging on her chest and pain flared anew. He peeled back the bandaging, washed it with spirits and salve. Miranda shuddered, and wondered if time had passed or not. If this were her death, and it would repeat forever, Janus, the wounds, the pain, the words. But the dirt was gone from Janus's face, the hair dried in awkward waves.\n\n\"You had to move. I had it all planned, a simple stroke, a clean miss of everything vital, but you had to move. I thought you loved me more than that, Mal. Knew me better than that. You thought I meant you dead....\n\n\"I don't know if you'll heal. I don't know if I can save you....\" Janus's voice cracked and faded away.\n\n\"Love you?\" Maledicte said, his breath coming a little easier now. \"I do love you, loved you for so long, my Janus. My king. But I don't know that I trust you.\"\n\nJanus's hands paused in his ministrations. \"You can always trust me.\" The quick heat in his eyes seemed brighter than the candle flames. He smoothed the bandages back down, sealing the wound closed.\n\nThe counter to that was on Maledicte's tongue, a single name, Gilly, but he swallowed it instead, let the word nourish him.\n\n\"Here,\" Janus said, bringing the glass back up to his mouth. \"Rest.\"\n\nA faint sound reached Maledicte's ears, and Janus pressed the glass to his chest. \"Not a sound.\" He disappeared back through the door, sealing Maledicte into the shadows again. Gingerly, Maledicte tipped the bottle to his mouth, swallowed several deep drafts, before letting the bottle roll away over the sheets, soaking them.\n\nSHE WOKE AGAIN TO HEAT and fever, stretching walls and stone. Trying to piece together even the simplest things\u2014who was she now? Miranda was dead, had died in the Relicts, and Maledicte had met death on the palace tower. Janus had dug his grave. The wet earth smell lingered in his nose; the sheets were muddied with it where they swept the floor. Blood spattered the floor, his blood, and tear tracks on Janus's face. Maledicte must be dead; his body lay numb and mute, cold as clay. But he could think.... A ghost, then. Some pale half-life, not one thing or another, as dusty, as empty as this room. But the fever that burned in him made him feel alive. Death wouldn't hurt so much, surely?\n\n\"And yet, no proof either way.\" Rambling, muttering aloud, the room sent his raspy voice back at him like the skitterings of rats. And yet there were other voices in the air, whispers traveling through the walls, secrets overheard by stone. He got out of the bed, forcing numb legs to react, falling, swooning, stumbling until he leaned against that whispering spot in the wall. Words filtered through, meaningless to the ghost-creature, yet he stored them in his memory just the same.\n\n\"Janus, you must tell us where you've buried him. I will not have Auron's murderer lie here. We will find him. Why delay the inevitable?\"\n\nOther voices shouted outside, their voices spiraling away in clear air, creeping in through the shielded, narrow slit near the eaves. Maledicte raised his arms, gingerly.... Were he a ghost he would fly to that spot, peer down at the scramble of living soldiers, watch them unearth his bones from the raw earth, the spades slicing the soil as his sword had sliced him from the court.\n\n\"We've found it, sir.\" A new voice, closer by, respectful.\n\nAris sighed. \"At last. Bundle it up. Take it to the palace for display.\"\n\nMy body, Maledicte thought, the Laudable's effects fading with the weary pain in Aris's voice, the quiet defeat in Janus's. \"You will not allow him to lie here.\"\n\n\"He will not lie anywhere in Antyre,\" Aris said. \"When the birds are done with him, his bones will go to the sea.\"\n\nMaledicte slid down the door, unable to stand upright, but the shock that ran through him on hitting the floor stabilized reality for him, even as it washed him with waves of breath-stealing discomfort. If he were alive\u2014\n\nThe door opened, spilling him at Janus's feet. Janus swore, lifted him into his arms. \"Are you mad? That door could have opened at any time with you leaning on it. What a sight for Aris that would have been.\" He carried him over to the chaise, and with a grimace at the stained sheets, set him down beside it.\n\n\"Who was it?\" Maledicte asked.\n\nJanus stripped the sheet from the furniture, laid out another with the awkwardness of a man who rarely had to do such things. \"Just some boy. He looked enough alike, and four days in the dirt will have helped it along.\"\n\n\"Some innocent who died because he looked like me,\" Maledicte said.\n\n\"Don't\u2014\" Janus said. \"Gilly was the worst influence on you. Giving you a veneer of morality and conscience. The boy was nothing compared to you. The moment I saw him, I knew his fate would be to spare you yours.\" Janus lifted him onto the cushioned seat; Maledicte bit his lip with the pain, and then relaxed into the softness.\n\nJanus smiled at him, \"You're doing so much better. For a while there, I thought I'd lost you. That Ani had left you and you were vulnerable.\"\n\n\"Ani,\" Maledicte said. \"No, She's still within.\" But so small, so hidden; Maledicte had to search for the spark of her presence, that black well of anger buried under the weariness and ache of his bones. \"Have you won, then?\" he asked, drowsing. \"Has Aris forgiven you for loving me? Does he believe you blameless?\"\n\nJanus sank down beside him, stroking Maledicte's matted hair. \"I am not punished, but neither am I trusted.\"\n\nLacking the energy to move his head away from the stroking fingers, Maledicte tried to push him off with words. \"You cannot seem to hold trust for long, can you?\" The heat in his voice woke answering pain in his chest.\n\nJanus paused in his caresses, then continued. \"I'm sorry you doubted me. I'll teach you, and Aris, to trust me again.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter if I do,\" Maledicte said. \"I am a dead man after all.\"\n\n\"Shh,\" Janus said, bent close and pressed his mouth to Maledicte's. \"All will be well. We'll be where we've always wanted to be. You'll see.\"\n**\u00b7 44 \u00b7**\n\n**M** ALEDICTE WATCHED the blank walls moodily, pacing with his eyes since his body could not. His chest burned, but with the heat of healing wounds instead of outraged flesh. He stared at the window slit, back at the door. It had been silent for hours, or days; he was still not sure how much time had passed, lost in Laudable dreams and delirium.\n\nThe blood-heavy scent and the dark tang of deep grave dirt had gone from the room. The linens that draped him carried only the aromas of starch and the iron. A confectioner's assortment lay untouched beside him, one of Janus's attempts to nourish him. Maledicte opened it, but the chocolates only raised memories of drugging Gilly and Lizette's untidy death.\n\nA tray beside the bed was cold, despite the covering cloths, the teapot stained with tannin from the oversteeped leaves. The wine bottle was half full, the Laudable bottle near empty. A hunk of bread, still fresh enough to be tempting, lay beside the pot. He took a bite, though the effort to chew made his body ache. He dropped it back to the plate, and it rolled off, tumbling down a cliff of piled novels.\n\nThe whole room maddened him. It was like something out of one of Vornatti's mindless tales, the invalid girl beset by suitors' gifts and doomed to a tragic end.\n\nHe shifted gingerly to his side and when the pain, his most faithful attendant, stayed with him but pressed no closer, he foundered to his feet, breath whistling in his throat.\n\nHe stumbled the length of the room and rested against the door, seeking the catch. He forced it open with a whimper of exertion, letting himself out into Janus's empty chambers. The room was dark, the curtains drawn over the windows, and the door out of the room, when he tested it, resisted opening. Bending, Maledicte saw the key in the hole and sighed. A caged bird still. But where would he go\u2014when Maledicte had been so well-known?\n\nHe made his creeping way to the window, and pulled back the curtains a small inch. Sunlight sloping over the grounds gave him his first solid time\u2014it was early evening, with twilight closing in. A fitting time for a ghost to walk, he thought. Below, he heard carriage wheels on the oyster-shell drive, approaching without haste.\n\nIn the gardens, limned by the setting sun, servants' children, dressed neatly in patched hand-me-downs, whispered to each other and then scattered as the carriage swept by. Maledicte watched them race to their respective places, envying them their small freedoms; one boy paused and looked up at him, eyes going wide.\n\nMaledicte dropped the drape and stepped back, heart pounding. But what could the child have seen? Only a shadowy figure in a darkened room.\n\nThe key turned behind him, and Maledicte darted for the bed curtains, vision swirling with the sudden effort. He sucked his breath in, fought to stay silent when his body ached. When Janus stepped in, Maledicte released it in a rush.\n\n\"Mal\u2014\" Janus said, in a startled whisper. \"Someone might see you.\"\n\n\"In a locked room?\" Maledicte asked, sinking down onto the bed, holding the ache in his chest.\n\nJanus came to him, leaned over, and the chain of roses around his neck slipped free. Maledicte reached out and broke the string, sending petals and leaves over the sheets. \"A betrothal charm?\"\n\n\"I wed Psyke Bellane in three days, by special license and the king's decree,\" Janus said, biting back a grin. \"I presume Aris means to use her as a spy. Poor child, and how like Aris to mistake intelligence for competence.\"\n\n\"You're so clever,\" Maledicte said, lying back against the mounded pillows, slanting his forearm over his eyes. \"I always thought I was the clever one. And yet, you've gotten everything you've wanted. And I\u2014I am a ghost.\"\n\n\"Too much Laudable for you, love,\" Janus said. \"You're quite alive.\"\n\nAnger, as always, restored his strength and breath. \"But mewed up like a corpse. I am not your mistress, your lover, your courtier; I am your secret, kept behind stone walls, hidden from the servants and living on your stealthy leavings.\n\n\"Now you're to wed; you'll be off on your wedding tour, and tell me, my love, who will feed me? I am utterly dependent on your goodwill. Will you trust a man with your secret\u2014and such a dangerous, treasonous secret I am\u2014or will I creep like a rat through your home, stealing a loaf of bread here, a sausage there, and hearing the servants quarrel and split blame for their loss?\"\n\n\"Mal, enough.\" Janus kissed his mouth, sealed the complaints with his lips.\n\nMaledicte kissed back with teeth and protest, and tore his mouth away when he could, wishing he could stand and storm out.\n\n\"Haven't I made that room more a haven than a prison? The finest linens, the finest furniture, the newest books and treats. It won't be forever. Only until they forget.\"\n\nMaledicte drew himself up, long hair spilling over white flesh, livid scars on cheek and chest, acid in his voice. \"Am I so easily forgotten?\"\n\nJanus stroked the dark hair back from Maledicte's face, and Maledicte shook his head away, refusing Janus's touch.\n\n\"No glib answer for me?\" Maledicte said. \"I believe your son, should you have one, will still hear my name in whispers. I will be dead in truth long before they forget me. You've seen to that. I am the monster of ballads.\"\n\n\"There will be no wedding tour. Even could I stand to be gone from your side, Aris wants me under his eye. I will bring her here.\"\n\n\"Bring her here...\" Maledicte echoed. He stood and headed back toward the hidden chamber. \"Won't that be pleasant for you, dividing your time between your wife and your dead lover.\"\n\nHe worked the catch just as Janus approached, eyes wary, and had the satisfaction of closing the door in his face. Were Maledicte feeling stronger, he would push the table before the door and let Janus explain the noise away as best he could. As it was, he lay down on the mattress, and stared up at the bare ceiling. His hand shifted against the sheets, questing for a nearly forgotten comfort, and he sat in one quick movement, pain dismissed. Where was it?\n\nWithin him, Ani stirred for the first time since the night at the palace, hungry.\n\nHe lay back, closed his eyes, and remembered the way the hilt fit his hand, the roughness of the metal feathers caging his fingers, the easy weight of it balanced in his palm, along his arm. Maledicte closed his hand on the cold touch and opened his eyes, rolling to look at the sword. Dark with dirt and blotched with damp, it was as much a revenant as he. Maledicte wiped it off on the linens, leaving rusty trails of old blood and earth, and blew along its length. Where his breath touched, the mottled damp faded to matte black. The raven's eyes gleamed, and he curled himself around it, remembering how it had been. Miranda, under the altar, curled around her pain, and Ani's voice cresting in her mind.\n\nMALEDICTE HEARD UNEASY LAUGHTER in the air, distant but startling in the silent house, and drew himself away from his meal. The elaborate food and spun-sugar decorations had told him what day it was, even without Janus's unusual absence. Now he rose and went to the door, levered the catch open, just enough to release him from his cage. Sword in hand, he stalked through Janus's empty room, and braved the hall.\n\nThe door immediately opposite drew him. He had heard the servants moving furniture and gossiping, knew whose room it would be. Maledicte opened the door a bare fraction, giving him a narrow view of the chamber beyond. Janus teased Psyke, soothing her, leading her toward the bed. Psyke's cheeks flushed with wine and nervousness, and Janus paused to kiss the palms of her hands, making her laugh.\n\nMaledicte clenched the hilt of the sword as he watched Janus bed Psyke, enjoying himself, enjoying debauching her, teaching her things she hadn't imagined, until Psyke gasped and laughed and cried out. She kissed Janus's neck, and his eyes, bored, roamed the room, widening as he saw Maledicte. He pressed Psyke's face closer to his shoulder, blocking her view.\n\nMaledicte smiled and reached out with the sword. Not to touch bare flesh, but to push the gilded frame of the marriage portrait from the wall. It crashed to the floor; Maledicte had sealed himself back in the room before Psyke's first shrieks rang out, hiding his own laughter.\n\nWITHIN DAYS, Maledicte found himself glad of the marriage, glad to have something to occupy his time and attention. While it palled, the idea that the terror of the court was reduced to \"haunting\" a timid girl, it was more satisfying than watching her coo over Janus. Satisfying to wake her in the night by dropping a pillow over her face, touching her with a chilled hand, making her hate Lastrest, making her hate the husband who would not take her back to the city.\n\n\"You're driving her mad, Mal.\" Janus slammed the door back, burst in heedless of noise.\n\n\"Careful,\" Maledicte said. \"Do you really want your wife to hear you yelling at a ghost?\"\n\n\"Why are you doing this? I'm supposed to keep her content. Instead, she's jumping at shadows. Worse, Mal, she's beginning to ask questions. Clever ones. Little Psyke is not as foolish as she appears.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just kill her?\" Maledicte said, daring Janus to obey. The flame in Janus's eyes sparked one in his own chest, making his breathing rapid, making the wound sting and pull.\n\n\"She is a favorite of the court. She is Aris's pet. I cannot do such a thing.\"\n\n\"Will not. A harmless babe gave you no trouble. Or is it just that you fear you will have no one to blame for her death?\" Maledicte grinned.\n\n\"Mal! Stop.\"\n\nMaledicte raised the sword, tested his endurance by taking three quick fencer's steps. The pain tugged his lips back from his teeth; he let the sword tip drop.\n\n\"Where did you get that?\" Janus said, stepping away.\n\n\"It's mine,\" Maledicte said. \"You left it in the dirt.\"\n\n\"It's dangerous, Mal.\"\n\n\"Of course it is. It's a sword. You kill people with it; enemies, babies...wives.\" Maledicte set it down with a sigh. \"Unfortunately, I'm not up to strength yet. You'll have to do it yourself.\"\n\nJanus flinched, and Maledicte said, \"Too late to be squeamish, now. Is it fear that binds you? Or is the obstacle something else\u2014do you care for her?\"\n\n\"You're jealous....\"\n\n\"No,\" Maledicte denied, quick and hot, then, \"Yes. Of her position, her freedom. And she wastes it, blindly listening to you. She's a dog, not a woman. Obedient but mindless. Should I whisper in her ear at night, tell her what trusting you can lead to?\"\n\n\"I've given you everything. We have money and power, now. The safety and luxury we've always craved. What more can I do?\" Janus's temper sank, left him looking strained and miserable.\n\nMaledicte's breath caught, remembering the boy companion of the Relicts, his lover, his beloved. They had come so far, with nothing but each other.... But sentiment was not enough. He steeled himself and said, \"I have neither money nor power. I am relegated to being your prisoner. And you say you love me. If you love me\u2014\" Maledicte paused, rawness slipping into his throat, making his words more obvious than he meant. \"Find Gilly for me. Let him serve me. Be my eyes and ears while you are gone....\" Maledicte felt the tears start behind his eyes, blinked them back furiously; Gilly's absence worried at him like the wound, catching him at unexpected moments with pain.\n\n\"Gilly's dead,\" Janus said. The simple words seemed louder in the room than his previous shouting. Maledicte sucked in his breath.\n\n\"Think sense, Mal, do you really think Aris would have let him live? Your confidant, your eyes and ears.... His skull's up there next to yours.\"\n\nMaledicte shuttered his face, unwilling to let Janus see how much that hurt, how much he hated him in that moment, for telling him, for taking that last dream. He closed his eyes against tears. \"Go away.\"\n\n\"Mal, it's just you and me again. Only each other at the last, remember?\" Janus said, reaching out and pulling Maledicte into his arms.\n\nWeak with shock, Maledicte leaned up against Janus, rested his head on his shoulder, let him wrap his arms more securely about him. \"But it's not just us,\" he said in a whisper. \"It's you and the court and your wife and your king. I'm nothing now.\"\n\n\"You're everything,\" Janus said. \"Mal, this melancholy is only lingering effects of the Laudable. You've been ill, you've been hurt\u2014I confess, right now I see few paths to your freedom, but I found a way to dispose of Auron; I'll find a way to restore you to court. I depend on you. You'll stand at my side\u2014\"\n\n\"In your shadow\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014ruling Antyre yet, my dark cavalier.\"\n\nMiranda let Janus press her back against the sheets, touching her gently. He peeled up her gown, kissed the slow-healing scar over her chest. \"We'll have you back on your feet, a force in the world again, your blade at my command...even if we have to kill everyone who ever laid eyes on you as Maledicte.\" He kissed her mouth, and she closed her eyes, listening to his promises, his body moving against hers. She ran her fingers through his silken hair, trying to convince herself that Janus's love, Janus's schemes would be enough. Only each other at the last, she thought, biting her lips. It was everything she had fought for.\n**\u00b7 45 \u00b7**\n\n**G** ILLY PASSED BY THE PALACE, his collar turned up high around his face. Despite himself he looked up, stared at the sad remnants tattered by wind and rain. He had been there when they were hung; Ma Desire hadn't been able to dose him with Laudable enough to keep him away.\n\nSwaying on his feet, heart numb, Gilly had still found a faint surprise in him as the body was exposed. So ordinary. Just an assembly of ruined flesh and bones, the personality gone with the breath. And yet\u2014some suspicion so small he couldn't name it had surfaced and sunk without ever coming to light. All he knew was that the body displayed was the body of his master, fed on by the rooks and ravens that had once followed him. Outrage had welled in him at that, the anger that Ani allowed Her feathered disciples to feast on one of Her own.\n\nHe had picked up stones, intending to knock them away, but Ma Desire had tugged him back to the brothel, kept him there for days, drunk and despairing. Kept him there through the outcry of Mirabile's body being found, kept him there through the state funeral for the infant earl. Gilly couldn't imagine attending anyway, couldn't stomach the idea of seeing Janus standing at the king's side.\n\n\"He was a wrong one,\" Ma Desire said. \"You're better off without him.\"\n\nGilly had nodded in polite obedience, but inside, he rebelled. The infant\u2014he couldn't imagine Maledicte killing the infant, no matter how hard Ani had ridden him. Especially after his triumph over the shadow boy, his baser self. That quiet belief, bitter in the face of the charges laid to Maledicte's account, slowly woke Gilly from his stupor. Antyre held nothing for him now, and the _Virga_ shipped out soon. He meant to be on it.\n\nIt had taken some time, collecting money from the banks, careful in case the Kingsguard sought him. Wasted care, Gilly realized after the first few transactions. He was only a servant, after all, in a city full of servants, invisible.\n\nThe wind shifted, bumping the ragged body against the tower with a faint rattling as of wind chimes. Some children shrieked and laughed beside him, jumped to their feet, letting their ropes reach hand to hand.\n\n_\"Maledicte lived and Maledicte died_\n\n_Only at his birth did anybody cry_\n\n_How many people did he kill?\"_\n\nThe young girl tripped on the third skip and they all switched places, started again.\n\n_\"Maledicte snooped and Maledicte pried_\n\n_Not a soul escaped the notice of his spies_\n\n_How many secrets did he buy?\"_\n\nThe boy kept the rope moving so long that Gilly, after the first flinch, tuned them out.\n\n_\"Maledicte fought with a blade so black_\n\n_Can't be beat with Ani at his back_\n\n_How many duels did he win?\"_\n\nAnother girl took over the chanting, her voice as sweet as Mirabile's, as sweet as poison. Gilly watched her skip, her curls flying.\n\n_\"Maledicte fled and sought the sky,_\n\n_Ended bent and broken, hung on high_\n\n_How many times can Maledicte die?_\n\n_One!\"_\n\nShe stopped immediately and burst out laughing.\n\nGilly felt the tears start in his eyes, realized that a guard was looking at the playing children, at his distressed face, and he tugged his coat closer and turned away.\n\nOne. Even with Ani's aid, he was only mortal. Gilly made his way down the main street, past Vornatti's town house, still closed and dark, waiting the pleasure of its Itarusine owners. He let himself in, forcing the lock on the kitchen door, and drifted through the empty house, thinking, _Here I told him stories, and made him supper, and here I played the spinet and watched them dance. Here he made me try on all of Vornatti's clothes, for fit. And here, I killed a man for him._\n\nBut the house stayed cold and shadowed, refused to be peopled with his ghosts of memories. He left the door open, walked down to the docks, sat on the quay where he and Maledicte had sat once watching the _Virga_ come in. Then he rose, and went to the shipyards to buy his ticket to the Explorations.\n\nHe left the harbormaster with his ticket and a tight throat, fighting the urge to return and request a second, pretending just a little longer that Maledicte might be coming with him.\n\nA blue-lacquered carriage passed him by, and he turned to watch it go even as he stepped into a shadowed alcove. Janus, in town? Since the murder, Janus spent all his time at Lastrest, so much so that rumor whispered he'd been banished there. Gilly followed the carriage at a distance, watched Janus hand Psyke down and follow her into the DeGuerres' estate house, smiling.\n\n\"Is he visiting?\" Gilly asked the driver, stopping to pet the horse's nose.\n\n\"He and his wife. Stopping for a fortnight. Though he'll hare off home soon enough. Doesn't like to leave Lastrest, he don't. But she's like all wives, wants the city life, the shops, the culture.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Gilly said, handing the man a luna. A fortnight. The _Virga_ didn't leave for three days. Time enough to go to Lastrest. One final pilgrimage. The place where Maledicte had found rest, even briefly.\n\nWHEN HE REINED THE HORSE to a halt, he saw children skipping in the courtyard, as they had outside the palace. The children of farmers and house servants took the opportunity of Janus's departure to play over the grounds unhindered.\n\nGilly caught only a fragment of their skipping song, enough to know it was the same one making the rounds of the city. A housemaid in a starched apron came out and slapped the eldest boy. \"You know how Lord Last feels about that one,\" she said.\n\n\"He's not here, is he?\" the boy said.\n\n\"You'll forget and sing it when he's back and then we'll be out of a job. Mind your tongue.\" She marched back to the house.\n\nGilly swung down from the horse; the boy rushed up to hold it. \"The master's not here.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Gilly said. \"I haven't come to see him.\"\n\n\"You're one of the Kingsguard, aren't you?\" the boy asked. \"They come every time he leaves, and snoop around. Don't know what you're looking for, do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"Not really.\" He walked up to the front door, lifted the latch.\n\n\"Hey, mister,\" the boy said. Gilly looked back.\n\n\"Watch out for that ghost. It's a mean one. Ripped up the master's room something awful....\"\n\n\"Just watch my horse,\" Gilly said. He went inside; with Janus and Psyke gone, the main hall was dark and silent, all the liveliness of the house behind the scenes in the servants' quarters. Gilly drifted up the stairs; the long portrait hall had a new picture now. Janus and his wife, the frame chipped at one edge. Gilly turned his face away, wandered into the study where Maledicte had first shown his talents for petty burglary.\n\nFor spite, Gilly palmed a letter opener, and then, reconsidering, put it back. If the servants decided he wasn't a kingsguard, he didn't want to be found a thief, either. He went upstairs along the central hall, and opened a door, one of two master rooms. This was a lady's chamber, Psyke's: fussy, ornate, and boring. He closed the door, opened the opposite door.\n\n\"Ripped it up something awful.\" The relish in the boy's voice came back. Gilly stared. The window glass was cracked, the drapes sagging down in long tatters. The decanters on the dresser had been unstoppered and tipped over, allowed to spill into opened drawers, over clothes and furbelows. A chair, its tufted back sliced open, oozed stuffing. Gilly turned at a whisper of sound, almost expecting to see Maledicte, sitting shamefaced in the midst of his wreckage, tidying after his tantrum.\n\nBut it was only the shuff of pale feathers blowing across the floor, tangling in the bed curtains like fish in nets. Gilly pulled back the bed curtains and nearly choked.\n\nThe sword. Ani's sword. Gilly found his hands shaking. The sword was driven through the mattress, feathers bleeding out of the ticking, snowing the room.\n\nJanus kept the sword, Gilly thought, aghast. He touched the hilt, and twitched as if a spark had touched his skin. The sword was warm to the touch, and fluttered against his palm. Whispering.\n\nGilly could almost hear the words. Something of pain, something of loss, of love torn away\u2014if he listened harder, maybe he would hear what had driven Maledicte. If he listened long enough, maybe Ani would hear his pain as well. The cage of the hilt warmed, shifted, making room for his fingers and palm.\n\nGilly smiled, imagining taking the blade to Janus, destroying the smug, golden monster with a single stroke and erasing the raw burn in his chest that cried protest that Janus survived when Maledicte did not. Slow images trickled behind his closed eyelids, a visual parade of encouragement\u2014Janus, on his knees before him, that gas-flame blue of his eyes dulling, as Gilly pulled the sword back. In a sudden flash, the image forced itself wider, not Ani's doing, but Gilly's own, showing him more\u2014the carcasses strewn behind him, casualties of his quest.\n\nHe jerked his hand away, scraping his knuckles and bloodying his hand. He wouldn't share his hate with Ani, or his pain, wouldn't let it twist and distort his mind the way it had Maledicte's.\n\nHe licked the blood from his hand, turning around and around in the room, tracking Maledicte's presence. It seemed so strong in the room, a scent, a warmth lingering, here in this place where his sword stood, here where he never was in life. It drove Gilly to melancholy wonderings of Janus haunted as the boy said. Janus deserved it, but Gilly wished\u2014\n\nHis horse whickered outside and he fled the room. The boy looked up at his approach. \"Did you see the ghost?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gilly said. \"I saw nothing.\" He hesitated. The boy holding the horse looked at the other children, a little distance away, and lowered his voice.\n\n\"I bet I know what you really want to see.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" Gilly said.\n\n\"Where they dug up the murderer. I'll show you for two lunas.\"\n\nGilly closed his eyes. Did he want to see that? The pain in his heart said finish it, see it all, and go. But touching the sword woke an anger in him, raising the numb curtain he had been living behind. He wanted to leave a mark here, something to hurt and sting, a last message to Janus.\n\n\"One luna,\" Gilly said, reminded of haggling with Maledicte. \"And another verse to your skipping song.\"\n\nThe children stepped closer. \"You know the song?\"\n\n\"All the verses by heart,\" Gilly said. \"Including the real end one.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" the boy said. \"If it's good, I'll show you the grave.\"\n\nThe girls lowered the rope, started it spinning. A small boy jumped into it, and Gilly spoke his lines.\n\n_\"Maledicte loved and so Maledicte died._\n\n_He never saw the truth behind his lover's lies._\n\n_How many lies can blue eyes hide?_\n\n_One, two, three\u2014\"_\n\nThe children picked it up, chanting it, skipping its measures into their memories. It would pass on, Gilly knew, from one voice to the next. Even the palace wouldn't be exempt. Faintly, Gilly smiled.\n\nThe boy holding the horse's reins watched the skipping with a thoughtful gaze. \"But what does it mean?\"\n\n\"It means there are two sides to every story. Even this one,\" Gilly said. \"Show me the grave?\"\n\nThe boy tied the horse to the gatepost, beckoned Gilly into the shadows. The site was not too far from the curve of the drive, within a stand of trees, and within sight of Janus's bedchamber window. Gilly drew his lips down. Even dead, Janus didn't want Maledicte out of his sight. A stone marker lay there, left in the dirt. The boy went as far as the shadow of the trees, then balked, obviously afraid to go closer. Gilly went the rest of the way alone.\n\nGilly touched the stone. It was plain basalt with only a name carved into it, and some wearing of the stone that looked like feathering. \"I wish you were coming with me, instead of your memory,\" he said, voice rough. \"I always hoped you would.\" It wasn't enough; like an altar, the gravestone expected offerings.\n\nFumbling in his pockets, Gilly found the receipt for his berth on the _Virga,_ and a stub of a pencil. He hesitated, then put the words to paper that he had never been given a chance to say. He folded the parchment and put it at the base of the marker, weighing it with a rock.\n\nThe horse, restless, pawed at the ground. Behind him, the children sang the song again, starting at the beginning. Gilly looked over and up; he caught a faint movement in the window of the bedchamber. If he pretended, it could have been a dark-eyed, pale face, but the thought of Maledicte linked to Janus even in death was bitter, and he looked away. He unfastened the horse's reins, and swung into the saddle, left the children practicing their song with careful volume, wary of adult chastisement.\n\nGILLY RETURNED THE HORSE TO the tavernkeeper, and asked when the next coach to the city was coming through. When the answer was dawn, he chose not to take a room, not wanting to be alone. He sat in the main tavern room until the hour grew late, and then settled himself on the bench outside, sleeping among the others too poor to take a room, or too thrifty.\n\nWhen he woke to the sound of the team's hooves, his coat was wet with morning dew, and stiff with chill. He stretched, watching his fellow passengers loom out of the morning dimness. They gathered slowly, drawn from inside the inn and from the nearby fields by the music made in the jingling harnesses and stamping hooves. The coachman and his assistants unharnessed the first team, changing horses for the trip to the city. The youngest assistant crept inside. Gilly saw him coaxing bread from the innkeeper and returned his attention to the coach, looking toward the future, and not the past.\n\nA young family waited, one whining child shifting from foot to foot until his mother picked him up and held him. A young man, either tutor or clerk, stood stiff and self-conscious in a shiny new coat. Two young men waited, dressed like the nobility, and muttering about the cost of the coach. Gilly surmised a country romp, maybe a gaming hell, and their pocket money all but gone. They'd learn better, or not; Gilly couldn't find it in him to care.\n\nA girl in a much-turned dress of bottle green, clutching a case to her side, waited near the door of the tavern, visibly nervous; her chaperone, an old woman, glared at Gilly and he looked away. The last to take shape was a maid in a heavy dark dress, coming slowly down the tree-lined path. The shadows clutched at her, only resentfully relinquishing her to the thin morning sunlight.\n\nHer thick wool dress was too big for her; she seemed bent under it. Her face was obscured by an ugly bonnet, years out of fashion, and her dark hair spilled dully from behind it. She held herself with the fragile rigidity of sickness or hurt. Consumption, Gilly thought, or simple hunger, maybe a beating\u2014He wondered what her story was, whether she was waiting for someone to arrive, or going somewhere, and if she would be welcome when she got there. He welcomed the curiosity, indulged it, knowing it heralded healing, to feel interest beyond the scope of pain, love, and vengeance.\n\nGilly was the last to get on the coach, still studying his enigma, wishing he could see her face, know if she were young or old, worn or serene. All his conclusions could be dismissed with the face. He left the little mystery with reluctance and climbed the steps into the coach. When he looked back, he saw her approach, a passenger after all. From his height he saw only the top of her bonnet. She paused at the step, and held up a thin, sinewy hand.\n\nA faint whisper, like a voice from a dream. \"Help me up, Gilly.\" She tilted her face to his. So thin, so pale, the scar white as bone, her eyes dark as the grave.\n\n_Is this what Janus felt,_ Gilly wondered, _that first night at the solstice ball?_ This heart-racing immobility? This disbelief, this impossible joy?\n\nWordless, he stretched out his hand, jolted when her hand in his was real, and not some product of his grieving heart. She climbed up beside him, her weight mostly in his hands, managing her skirts with visible impatience. She folded herself into the space beside Gilly with a gasp and a wince. He found his voice, breathless but audible. \"Mal\u2014\"\n\nHer raised hand cut him off. The horses started, and, flinching, she rocked with their movement. He slipped off his coat and tucked it behind her back, trying to cushion her body. Run through, they'd said. Through the heart.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Gilly asked, the question of years ago, new again.\n\n\"Can't you guess?\" The rasping voice was an anomaly in the maid's throat. Her lips quirked downward.\n\nGilly shook his head. He couldn't put two rumors together at this moment. She only smiled at him, and he found he had an answer after all, a collection of pieces belatedly put together. \"Miranda,\" he said.\n\n\"Miranda,\" she agreed. She wove her fingers into his, sat upright, with only that tenuous connection between them.\n\nGilly could only stare, wondering at his blindness all these years. It was as if a painting had been blurred and out of focus, and he had finally found his spectacles. After a cautious glance at the other passengers, she said, \"I own I am surprised to find you live and hale. I had heard otherwise.\"\n\n\"Your surprise is nothing to mine, I assure you,\" Gilly said, smiling like an idiot. It hadn't been a ghost after all, peering down at him, but flesh and blood. \"But how?\"\n\n\"It wasn't complete,\" she said. \"Ani would not loose me, not while my vengeance lay undone. And Janus made it impossible.\"\n\n\"The babe?\" Gilly said, his voice a whisper. The coach seemed full of prying ears, and his happiness felt fragile.\n\n\"Not by my hand,\" she said.\n\nGilly brought her fingers to his mouth, kissed them, studied the veins standing out in such relief. \"You're so thin,\" he said.\n\n\"I need looking after,\" Miranda said. \"I admit as much. Maybe I can find someone to do so.\" She curved her mouth in a way that made him want to laugh. So falsely demure.\n\n\"Where are you journeying, Miranda?\" Gilly asked, teasing in return. \"Only the city? Or farther still\u2014\" The question, asked in amusement, ended in uncertainty. He was afraid to hope, though sense told him otherwise.\n\n\"I thought to seek the Explorations,\" she said. \"I want to see some savages. Did you know they wear feathers instead of leather?\"\n\n\"I told you that,\" he said.\n\n\"Ah, that's why I believe it then, but Gilly, I hope you have money. The pawnbrokers took ruthless advantage of me; I wasn't in any fit mood for haggling. All I've got are the clothes on my back, and I'd rather not have them.\"\n\n\"Anything you want. Just tell me, will it be breeches or skirts?\"\n\n\"Skirts until we reach the Explorations. I cannot chance recognition. After that,\" she said, smiling up at Gilly, \"breeches, I think. I had forgotten how unwieldy these things can be.\"\n\nGilly's smile grew wider as another thought touched his giddy mind. \"Ship captains are notoriously choosy about female passengers. Shall I claim you as sister\u2014?\"\n\nMiranda smiled back. \"I think not. Perhaps you'd best reassure the captain. Prevail on him to marry us. What's more common than that? A wedded pair seeking a new life in a new land.\"\n\n\"I will speak to the captain as soon as we step aboard,\" Gilly vowed, laughing. Then he sobered. A question burned in his mind, one he was loath to ask, loath even to mention. But it had to be asked. \"What about Janus?\"\n\n\"Janus\u2014\" She turned her head as if she could see her past behind her along the road. \"He was taken from me and I fought to reclaim him. I would have died for him without hesitation, were it not that he was not as I remembered. Were it not for my vow. Ani knows, Ani told me, but I didn't want to listen. Where there's love, there must be vengeance. But I'm done with vengeance now.\"\n\n\"You sated Ani?\" Gilly asked.\n\n\"Ani cannot be sated. I will bear Her company for the rest of my life. Janus, clever creature that he is, saw to that. I cannot wreak vengeance on the one I vowed to love. On the one I vowed to hate, when they are one and the same. Still,\" Miranda said, sighing, \"I can leave him, and find some small measure of satisfaction there. But be warned, you take a perilous creature to wife....\"\n\n\"I'd have no other kind,\" Gilly said. He kissed her closed eyes, tasting salt in the soft tangles of her lashes, and dreamed of the sea waves ahead of them.\n**_About the Author_**\n\nLANE ROBINS was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. When it came time for a career, it was a hard choice between veterinarian and writer. It turned out to be far more fun to write about blood than to work with it. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Beloit College, and currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas.\n_Maledicte_ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.\n\nA Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2007 by Lane Robins\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.\n\nDEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nRobins, Lane.\n\nMaledicte \/ Lane Robins.\n\np. cm.\n\n\"A Del Rey Books trade paperback original\"\u2014T.p. verso.\n\nI. Title.\n\nPS3618.03177M35 2007\n\n813'+6\u2014dc22 2006035571\n\nwww.delreybooks.com\n\neISBN: 978-0-345-50049-6\n\nv3.0\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n#  Reconstruction: A Very Short Introduction\nVERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way into a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been translated into more than 45 different languages.\n\nThe series began in 1995, and now covers a wide variety of topics in every discipline. The VSI library currently contains over 550 volumes\u2014a Very Short Introduction to everything from Psychology and Philosophy of Science to American History and Relativity\u2014and continues to grow in every subject area.\n\nVery Short Introductions available now:\n\nABOLITIONISM Richard S. Newman\n\nTHE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS Charles L. Cohen\n\nACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes\n\nADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry\n\nADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith\n\nADVERTISING Winston Fletcher\n\nAESTHETICS Bence Nanay\n\nAFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION Eddie S. Glaude Jr\n\nAFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone\n\nAFRICAN POLITICS Ian Taylor\n\nAFRICAN RELIGIONS Jacob K. Olupona\n\nAGEING Nancy A. Pachana\n\nAGNOSTICISM Robin Le Poidevin\n\nAGRICULTURE Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe\n\nALEXANDER THE GREAT Hugh Bowden\n\nALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins\n\nAMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila\n\nAMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS Andrew Preston\n\nAMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer\n\nAMERICAN IMMIGRATION David A. Gerber\n\nAMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY G. Edward White\n\nAMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY Craig L. Symonds\n\nAMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY Donald Critchlow\n\nAMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel\n\nAMERICAN POLITICS Richard M. Valelly\n\nTHE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones\n\nTHE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Robert J. Allison\n\nAMERICAN SLAVERY Heather Andrea Williams\n\nTHE AMERICAN WEST Stephen Aron\n\nAMERICAN WOMEN'S HISTORY Susan Ware\n\nANAESTHESIA Aidan O'Donnell\n\nANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Michael Beaney\n\nANARCHISM Colin Ward\n\nANCIENT ASSYRIA Karen Radner\n\nANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw\n\nANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Christina Riggs\n\nANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge\n\nTHE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Amanda H. Podany\n\nANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas\n\nANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom\n\nANGELS David Albert Jones\n\nANGLICANISM Mark Chapman\n\nTHE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair\n\nANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Tristram D. Wyatt\n\nTHE ANIMAL KINGDOM Peter Holland\n\nANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia\n\nTHE ANTARCTIC Klaus Dodds\n\nANTHROPOCENE Erle C. Ellis\n\nANTISEMITISM Steven Beller\n\nANXIETY Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman\n\nTHE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Paul Foster\n\nAPPLIED MATHEMATICS Alain Goriely\n\nARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn\n\nARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne\n\nARISTOCRACY William Doyle\n\nARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes\n\nART HISTORY Dana Arnold\n\nART THEORY Cynthia Freeland\n\nARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Margaret A. Boden\n\nASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY Madeline Y. Hsu\n\nASTROBIOLOGY David C. Catling\n\nASTROPHYSICS James Binney\n\nATHEISM Julian Baggini\n\nTHE ATMOSPHERE Paul I. Palmer\n\nAUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick\n\nAUSTRALIA Kenneth Morgan\n\nAUTISM Uta Frith\n\nAUTOBIOGRAPHY Laura Marcus\n\nTHE AVANT GARDE David Cottington\n\nTHE AZTECS Dav\u00edd Carrasco\n\nBABYLONIA Trevor Bryce\n\nBACTERIA Sebastian G. B. Amyes\n\nBANKING John Goddard and John O. S. Wilson\n\nBARTHES Jonathan Culler\n\nTHE BEATS David Sterritt\n\nBEAUTY Roger Scruton\n\nBEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS Michelle Baddeley\n\nBESTSELLERS John Sutherland\n\nTHE BIBLE John Riches\n\nBIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Eric H. Cline\n\nBIG DATA Dawn E. Holmes\n\nBIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee\n\nBIOMETRICS Michael Fairhurst\n\nBLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell\n\nBLOOD Chris Cooper\n\nTHE BLUES Elijah Wald\n\nTHE BODY Chris Shilling\n\nTHE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER Brian Cummings\n\nTHE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens\n\nBORDERS Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen\n\nTHE BRAIN Michael O'Shea\n\nBRANDING Robert Jones\n\nTHE BRICS Andrew F. Cooper\n\nTHE BRITISH CONSTITUTION Martin Loughlin\n\nTHE BRITISH EMPIRE Ashley Jackson\n\nBRITISH POLITICS Anthony Wright\n\nBUDDHA Michael Carrithers\n\nBUDDHISM Damien Keown\n\nBUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown\n\nBYZANTIUM Peter Sarris\n\nC. S. LEWIS James Como\n\nCALVINISM Jon Balserak\n\nCANCER Nicholas James\n\nCAPITALISM James Fulcher\n\nCATHOLICISM Gerald O'Collins\n\nCAUSATION Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum\n\nTHE CELL Terence Allen and Graham Cowling\n\nTHE CELTS Barry Cunliffe\n\nCHAOS Leonard Smith\n\nCHARLES DICKENS Jenny Hartley\n\nCHEMISTRY Peter Atkins\n\nCHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami\n\nCHILDREN'S LITERATURE Kimberley Reynolds\n\nCHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight\n\nCHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham\n\nCHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson\n\nCHRISTIAN ETHICS D. Stephen Long\n\nCHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead\n\nCIRCADIAN RHYTHMS Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman\n\nCITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy\n\nCIVIL ENGINEERING David Muir Wood\n\nCLASSICAL LITERATURE William Allan\n\nCLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales\n\nCLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson\n\nCLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard\n\nCLIMATE Mark Maslin\n\nCLIMATE CHANGE Mark Maslin\n\nCLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY Susan Llewelyn and Katie Aafjes-van Doorn\n\nCOGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Richard Passingham\n\nTHE COLD WAR Robert McMahon\n\nCOLONIAL AMERICA Alan Taylor\n\nCOLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rolena Adorno\n\nCOMBINATORICS Robin Wilson\n\nCOMEDY Matthew Bevis\n\nCOMMUNISM Leslie Holmes\n\nCOMPARATIVE LITERATURE Ben Hutchinson\n\nCOMPLEXITY John H. Holland\n\nTHE COMPUTER Darrel Ince\n\nCOMPUTER SCIENCE Subrata Dasgupta\n\nCONCENTRATION CAMPS Dan Stone\n\nCONFUCIANISM Daniel K. Gardner\n\nTHE CONQUISTADORS Matthew Restall and Felipe Fern\u00e1ndez-Armesto\n\nCONSCIENCE Paul Strohm\n\nCONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore\n\nCONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass\n\nCONTEMPORARY FICTION Robert Eaglestone\n\nCONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley\n\nCOPERNICUS Owen Gingerich\n\nCORAL REEFS Charles Sheppard\n\nCORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Jeremy Moon\n\nCORRUPTION Leslie Holmes\n\nCOSMOLOGY Peter Coles\n\nCOUNTRY MUSIC Richard Carlin\n\nCRIME FICTION Richard Bradford\n\nCRIMINAL JUSTICE Julian V. Roberts\n\nCRIMINOLOGY Tim Newburn\n\nCRITICAL THEORY Stephen Eric Bronner\n\nTHE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman\n\nCRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy\n\nCRYSTALLOGRAPHY A. M. Glazer\n\nTHE CULTURAL REVOLUTION Richard Curt Kraus\n\nDADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins\n\nDANTE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey\n\nDARWIN Jonathan Howard\n\nTHE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Timothy H. Lim\n\nDECADENCE David Weir\n\nDECOLONIZATION Dane Kennedy\n\nDEMOCRACY Bernard Crick\n\nDEMOGRAPHY Sarah Harper\n\nDEPRESSION Jan Scott and Mary Jane Tacchi\n\nDERRIDA Simon Glendinning\n\nDESCARTES Tom Sorell\n\nDESERTS Nick Middleton\n\nDESIGN John Heskett\n\nDEVELOPMENT Ian Goldin\n\nDEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY Lewis Wolpert\n\nTHE DEVIL Darren Oldridge\n\nDIASPORA Kevin Kenny\n\nDICTIONARIES Lynda Mugglestone\n\nDINOSAURS David Norman\n\nDIPLOMACY Joseph M. Siracusa\n\nDOCUMENTARY FILM Patricia Aufderheide\n\nDREAMING J. Allan Hobson\n\nDRUGS Les Iversen\n\nDRUIDS Barry Cunliffe\n\nDYNASTY Jeroen Duindam\n\nDYSLEXIA Margaret J. Snowling\n\nEARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly\n\nTHE EARTH Martin Redfern\n\nEARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE Tim Lenton\n\nECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta\n\nEDUCATION Gary Thomas\n\nEGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch\n\nEIGHTEENTH\u2011CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford\n\nTHE ELEMENTS Philip Ball\n\nEMOTION Dylan Evans\n\nEMPIRE Stephen Howe\n\nENERGY SYSTEMS Nick Jenkins\n\nENGELS Terrell Carver\n\nENGINEERING David Blockley\n\nTHE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Simon Horobin\n\nENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate\n\nTHE ENLIGHTENMENT John Robertson\n\nENTREPRENEURSHIP Paul Westhead and Mike Wright\n\nENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS Stephen Smith\n\nENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Robin Attfield\n\nENVIRONMENTAL LAW Elizabeth Fisher\n\nENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Andrew Dobson\n\nEPICUREANISM Catherine Wilson\n\nEPIDEMIOLOGY Rodolfo Saracci\n\nETHICS Simon Blackburn\n\nETHNOMUSICOLOGY Timothy Rice\n\nTHE ETRUSCANS Christopher Smith\n\nEUGENICS Philippa Levine\n\nTHE EUROPEAN UNION Simon Usherwood and John Pinder\n\nEUROPEAN UNION LAW Anthony Arnull\n\nEVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth\n\nEXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn\n\nEXPLORATION Stewart A. Weaver\n\nEXTINCTION Paul B. Wignall\n\nTHE EYE Michael Land\n\nFAIRY TALE Marina Warner\n\nFAMILY LAW Jonathan Herring\n\nFASCISM Kevin Passmore\n\nFASHION Rebecca Arnold\n\nFEDERALISM Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox\n\nFEMINISM Margaret Walters\n\nFILM Michael Wood\n\nFILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak\n\nFILM NOIR James Naremore\n\nTHE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard\n\nFOLK MUSIC Mark Slobin\n\nFOOD John Krebs\n\nFORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY David Canter\n\nFORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser\n\nFORESTS Jaboury Ghazoul\n\nFOSSILS Keith Thomson\n\nFOUCAULT Gary Gutting\n\nTHE FOUNDING FATHERS R. B. Bernstein\n\nFRACTALS Kenneth Falconer\n\nFREE SPEECH Nigel Warburton\n\nFREE WILL Thomas Pink\n\nFREEMASONRY Andreas \u00d6nnerfors\n\nFRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons\n\nTHE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle\n\nFREUD Anthony Storr\n\nFUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven\n\nFUNGI Nicholas P. Money\n\nTHE FUTURE Jennifer M. Gidley\n\nGALAXIES John Gribbin\n\nGALILEO Stillman Drake\n\nGAME THEORY Ken Binmore\n\nGANDHI Bhikhu Parekh\n\nGARDEN HISTORY Gordon Campbell\n\nGENES Jonathan Slack\n\nGENIUS Andrew Robinson\n\nGENOMICS John Archibald\n\nGEOFFREY CHAUCER David Wallace\n\nGEOGRAPHY John Matthews and David Herbert\n\nGEOLOGY Jan Zalasiewicz\n\nGEOPHYSICS William Lowrie\n\nGEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds\n\nGERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle\n\nGERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie\n\nGLACIATION David J. A. Evans\n\nGLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire\n\nGLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY Robert C. Allen\n\nGLOBALIZATION Manfred Steger\n\nGOD John Bowker\n\nGOETHE Ritchie Robertson\n\nTHE GOTHIC Nick Groom\n\nGOVERNANCE Mark Bevir\n\nGRAVITY Timothy Clifton\n\nTHE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway\n\nHABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson\n\nTHE HABSBURG EMPIRE Martyn Rady\n\nHAPPINESS Daniel M. Haybron\n\nTHE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Cheryl A. Wall\n\nTHE HEBREW BIBLE AS LITERATURE Tod Linafelt\n\nHEGEL Peter Singer\n\nHEIDEGGER Michael Inwood\n\nTHE HELLENISTIC AGE Peter Thonemann\n\nHEREDITY John Waller\n\nHERMENEUTICS Jens Zimmermann\n\nHERODOTUS Jennifer T. Roberts\n\nHIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson\n\nHINDUISM Kim Knott\n\nHISTORY John H. Arnold\n\nTHE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin\n\nTHE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY William H. Brock\n\nTHE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD James Marten\n\nTHE HISTORY OF CINEMA Geoffrey Nowell-Smith\n\nTHE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton\n\nTHE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Jacqueline Stedall\n\nTHE HISTORY OF MEDICINE William Bynum\n\nTHE HISTORY OF PHYSICS J. L. Heilbron\n\nTHE HISTORY OF TIME Leofranc Holford\u2011Strevens\n\nHIV AND AIDS Alan Whiteside\n\nHOBBES Richard Tuck\n\nHOLLYWOOD Peter Decherney\n\nTHE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE Joachim Whaley\n\nHOME Michael Allen Fox\n\nHOMER Barbara Graziosi\n\nHORMONES Martin Luck\n\nHUMAN ANATOMY Leslie Klenerman\n\nHUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood\n\nHUMAN RIGHTS Andrew Clapham\n\nHUMANISM Stephen Law\n\nHUME A. J. Ayer\n\nHUMOUR No\u00ebl Carroll\n\nTHE ICE AGE Jamie Woodward\n\nIDENTITY Florian Coulmas\n\nIDEOLOGY Michael Freeden\n\nTHE IMMUNE SYSTEM Paul Klenerman\n\nINDIAN CINEMA Ashish Rajadhyaksha\n\nINDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton\n\nTHE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Robert C. Allen\n\nINFECTIOUS DISEASE Marta L. Wayne and Benjamin M. Bolker\n\nINFINITY Ian Stewart\n\nINFORMATION Luciano Floridi\n\nINNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann\n\nINTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Siva Vaidhyanathan\n\nINTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary\n\nINTERNATIONAL LAW Vaughan Lowe\n\nINTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser\n\nINTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Paul Wilkinson\n\nINTERNATIONAL SECURITY Christopher S. Browning\n\nIRAN Ali M. Ansari\n\nISLAM Malise Ruthven\n\nISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein\n\nISOTOPES Rob Ellam\n\nITALIAN LITERATURE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey\n\nJESUS Richard Bauckham\n\nJEWISH HISTORY David N. Myers\n\nJOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves\n\nJUDAISM Norman Solomon\n\nJUNG Anthony Stevens\n\nKABBALAH Joseph Dan\n\nKAFKA Ritchie Robertson\n\nKANT Roger Scruton\n\nKEYNES Robert Skidelsky\n\nKIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner\n\nKNOWLEDGE Jennifer Nagel\n\nTHE KORAN Michael Cook\n\nKOREA Michael J. Seth\n\nLAKES Warwick F. Vincent\n\nLANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Ian H. Thompson\n\nLANDSCAPES AND GEOMORPHOLOGY Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles\n\nLANGUAGES Stephen R. Anderson\n\nLATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark\n\nLAW Raymond Wacks\n\nTHE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins\n\nLEADERSHIP Keith Grint\n\nLEARNING Mark Haselgrove\n\nLEIBNIZ Maria Rosa Antognazza\n\nLEO TOLSTOY Liza Knapp\n\nLIBERALISM Michael Freeden\n\nLIGHT Ian Walmsley\n\nLINCOLN Allen C. Guelzo\n\nLINGUISTICS Peter Matthews\n\nLITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler\n\nLOCKE John Dunn\n\nLOGIC Graham Priest\n\nLOVE Ronald de Sousa\n\nMACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner\n\nMADNESS Andrew Scull\n\nMAGIC Owen Davies\n\nMAGNA CARTA Nicholas Vincent\n\nMAGNETISM Stephen Blundell\n\nMALTHUS Donald Winch\n\nMAMMALS T. S. Kemp\n\nMANAGEMENT John Hendry\n\nMAO Delia Davin\n\nMARINE BIOLOGY Philip V. Mladenov\n\nTHE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips\n\nMARTIN LUTHER Scott H. Hendrix\n\nMARTYRDOM Jolyon Mitchell\n\nMARX Peter Singer\n\nMATERIALS Christopher Hall\n\nMATHEMATICAL FINANCE Mark H. A. Davis\n\nMATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers\n\nMATTER Geoff Cottrell\n\nTHE MEANING OF LIFE Terry Eagleton\n\nMEASUREMENT David Hand\n\nMEDICAL ETHICS Michael Dunn and Tony Hope\n\nMEDICAL LAW Charles Foster\n\nMEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths\n\nMEDIEVAL LITERATURE Elaine Treharne\n\nMEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY John Marenbon\n\nMEMORY Jonathan K. Foster\n\nMETAPHYSICS Stephen Mumford\n\nMETHODISM William J. Abraham\n\nTHE MEXICAN REVOLUTION Alan Knight\n\nMICHAEL FARADAY Frank A. J. L. James\n\nMICROBIOLOGY Nicholas P. Money\n\nMICROECONOMICS Avinash Dixit\n\nMICROSCOPY Terence Allen\n\nTHE MIDDLE AGES Miri Rubin\n\nMILITARY JUSTICE Eugene R. Fidell\n\nMILITARY STRATEGY Antulio J. Echevarria II\n\nMINERALS David Vaughan\n\nMIRACLES Yujin Nagasawa\n\nMODERN ARCHITECTURE Adam Sharr\n\nMODERN ART David Cottington\n\nMODERN CHINA Rana Mitter\n\nMODERN DRAMA Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr\n\nMODERN FRANCE Vanessa R. Schwartz\n\nMODERN INDIA Craig Jeffrey\n\nMODERN IRELAND Senia Pa\u0161eta\n\nMODERN ITALY Anna Cento Bull\n\nMODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones\n\nMODERN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Roberto Gonz\u00e1lez Echevarr\u00eda\n\nMODERN WAR Richard English\n\nMODERNISM Christopher Butler\n\nMOLECULAR BIOLOGY Aysha Divan and Janice A. Royds\n\nMOLECULES Philip Ball\n\nMONASTICISM Stephen J. Davis\n\nTHE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi\n\nMOONS David A. Rothery\n\nMORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman\n\nMOUNTAINS Martin F. Price\n\nMUHAMMAD Jonathan A. C. Brown\n\nMULTICULTURALISM Ali Rattansi\n\nMULTILINGUALISM John C. Maher\n\nMUSIC Nicholas Cook\n\nMYTH Robert A. Segal\n\nNAPOLEON David Bell\n\nTHE NAPOLEONIC WARS Mike Rapport\n\nNATIONALISM Steven Grosby\n\nNATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Sean Teuton\n\nNAVIGATION Jim Bennett\n\nNAZI GERMANY Jane Caplan\n\nNELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer\n\nNEOLIBERALISM Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy\n\nNETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro\n\nTHE NEW TESTAMENT Luke Timothy Johnson\n\nTHE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer\n\nNEWTON Robert Iliffe\n\nNIELS BOHR J. L. Heilbron\n\nNIETZSCHE Michael Tanner\n\nNINETEENTH\u2011CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew\n\nTHE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett\n\nNORTH AMERICAN INDIANS Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green\n\nNORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland\n\nNOTHING Frank Close\n\nNUCLEAR PHYSICS Frank Close\n\nNUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine\n\nNUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa\n\nNUMBERS Peter M. Higgins\n\nNUTRITION David A. Bender\n\nOBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger\n\nOCEANS Dorrik Stow\n\nTHE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan\n\nTHE ORCHESTRA D. Kern Holoman\n\nORGANIC CHEMISTRY Graham Patrick\n\nORGANIZATIONS Mary Jo Hatch\n\nORGANIZED CRIME Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou\n\nORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY A. Edward Siecienski\n\nPAGANISM Owen Davies\n\nPAIN Rob Boddice\n\nTHE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT Martin Bunton\n\nPANDEMICS Christian W. McMillen\n\nPARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close\n\nPAUL E. P. Sanders\n\nPEACE Oliver P. Richmond\n\nPENTECOSTALISM William K. Kay\n\nPERCEPTION Brian Rogers\n\nTHE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R. Scerri\n\nPHILOSOPHY Edward Craig\n\nPHILOSOPHY IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD Peter Adamson\n\nPHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY Samir Okasha\n\nPHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks\n\nPHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha\n\nPHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Tim Bayne\n\nPHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards\n\nPHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins\n\nPHYSICS Sidney Perkowitz\n\nPILGRIMAGE Ian Reader\n\nPLAGUE Paul Slack\n\nPLANETS David A. Rothery\n\nPLANTS Timothy Walker\n\nPLATE TECTONICS Peter Molnar\n\nPLATO Julia Annas\n\nPOETRY Bernard O'Donoghue\n\nPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller\n\nPOLITICS Kenneth Minogue\n\nPOPULISM Cas Mudde and Crist\u00f3bal Rovira Kaltwasser\n\nPOSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young\n\nPOSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler\n\nPOSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey\n\nPOVERTY Philip N. Jefferson\n\nPREHISTORY Chris Gosden\n\nPRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne\n\nPRIVACY Raymond Wacks\n\nPROBABILITY John Haigh\n\nPROGRESSIVISM Walter Nugent\n\nPROHIBITION W. J. Rorabaugh\n\nPROJECTS Andrew Davies\n\nPROTESTANTISM Mark A. Noll\n\nPSYCHIATRY Tom Burns\n\nPSYCHOANALYSIS Daniel Pick\n\nPSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus\n\nPSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis\n\nPSYCHOPATHY Essi Viding\n\nPSYCHOTHERAPY Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren\n\nPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy\n\nPUBLIC HEALTH Virginia Berridge\n\nPURITANISM Francis J. Bremer\n\nTHE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion\n\nQUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne\n\nRACISM Ali Rattansi\n\nRADIOACTIVITY Claudio Tuniz\n\nRASTAFARI Ennis B. Edmonds\n\nREADING Belinda Jack\n\nTHE REAGAN REVOLUTION Gil Troy\n\nREALITY Jan Westerhoff\n\nRECONSTRUCTION Allen C. Guelzo\n\nTHE REFORMATION Peter Marshall\n\nRELATIVITY Russell Stannard\n\nRELIGION IN AMERICA Timothy Beal\n\nTHE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton\n\nRENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson\n\nREPTILES T.S. Kemp\n\nREVOLUTIONS Jack A. Goldstone\n\nRHETORIC Richard Toye\n\nRISK Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany\n\nRITUAL Barry Stephenson\n\nRIVERS Nick Middleton\n\nROBOTICS Alan Winfield\n\nROCKS Jan Zalasiewicz\n\nROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway\n\nTHE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly\n\nTHE ROMAN REPUBLIC David M. Gwynn\n\nROMANTICISM Michael Ferber\n\nROUSSEAU Robert Wokler\n\nRUSSELL A. C. Grayling\n\nRUSSIAN HISTORY Geoffrey Hosking\n\nRUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly\n\nTHE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith\n\nTHE SAINTS Simon Yarrow\n\nSAVANNAS Peter A. Furley\n\nSCEPTICISM Duncan Pritchard\n\nSCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone\n\nSCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway\n\nSCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon\n\nSCIENCE FICTION David Seed\n\nTHE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Lawrence M. Principe\n\nSCOTLAND Rab Houston\n\nSECULARISM Andrew Copson\n\nSEXUAL SELECTION Marlene Zuk and Leigh W. Simmons\n\nSEXUALITY V\u00e9ronique Mottier\n\nSHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES Bart van Es\n\nSHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS AND POEMS Jonathan F. S. Post\n\nSHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES Stanley Wells\n\nSIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt\n\nTHE SILK ROAD James A. Millward\n\nSLANG Jonathon Green\n\nSLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster\n\nSOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just\n\nSOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Richard J. Crisp\n\nSOCIAL WORK Sally Holland and Jonathan Scourfield\n\nSOCIALISM Michael Newman\n\nSOCIOLINGUISTICS John Edwards\n\nSOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce\n\nSOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor\n\nSOUND Mike Goldsmith\n\nSOUTHEAST ASIA James R. Rush\n\nTHE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell\n\nTHE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham\n\nSPANISH LITERATURE Jo Labanyi\n\nSPINOZA Roger Scruton\n\nSPIRITUALITY Philip Sheldrake\n\nSPORT Mike Cronin\n\nSTARS Andrew King\n\nSTATISTICS David J. Hand\n\nSTEM CELLS Jonathan Slack\n\nSTOICISM Brad Inwood\n\nSTRUCTURAL ENGINEERING David Blockley\n\nSTUART BRITAIN John Morrill\n\nSUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell\n\nSUPERSTITION Stuart Vyse\n\nSYMMETRY Ian Stewart\n\nSYNAESTHESIA Julia Simner\n\nSYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies\n\nTAXATION Stephen Smith\n\nTEETH Peter S. Ungar\n\nTELESCOPES Geoff Cottrell\n\nTERRORISM Charles Townshend\n\nTHEATRE Marvin Carlson\n\nTHEOLOGY David F. Ford\n\nTHINKING AND REASONING Jonathan St B. T. Evans\n\nTHOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr\n\nTHOUGHT Tim Bayne\n\nTIBETAN BUDDHISM Matthew T. Kapstein\n\nTIDES David George Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts\n\nTOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield\n\nTOPOLOGY Richard Earl\n\nTRAGEDY Adrian Poole\n\nTRANSLATION Matthew Reynolds\n\nTHE TREATY OF VERSAILLES Michael S. Neiberg\n\nTRIGONOMETRY Glen Van Brummelen\n\nTHE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline\n\nTRUST Katherine Hawley\n\nTHE TUDORS John Guy\n\nTWENTIETH\u2011CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan\n\nTYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna\n\nTHE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhim\u00e4ki\n\nUNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES David Palfreyman and Paul Temple\n\nTHE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie\n\nTHE U.S. CONSTITUTION David J. Bodenhamer\n\nTHE U.S. SUPREME COURT Linda Greenhouse\n\nUTILITARIANISM Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer\n\nUTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent\n\nVETERINARY SCIENCE James Yeates\n\nTHE VIKINGS Julian D. Richards\n\nVIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford\n\nVOLTAIRE Nicholas Cronk\n\nWAR AND TECHNOLOGY Alex Roland\n\nWATER John Finney\n\nWAVES Mike Goldsmith\n\nWEATHER Storm Dunlop\n\nTHE WELFARE STATE David Garland\n\nWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Stanley Wells\n\nWITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill\n\nWITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling\n\nWORK Stephen Fineman\n\nWORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman\n\nTHE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar\n\nWORLD WAR II Gerhard L. Weinberg\n\nWRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson\n\nZIONISM Michael Stanislawski\n\nAvailable soon:\n\nSMELL Matthew Cobb\n\nTHE SUN Philip Judge\n\nAERIAL WARFARE Frank Ledwidge\n\nRENEWABLE ENERGY Nick Jelley\n\nEVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Maryanne Fisher\n\nFor more information visit our web site\n\nwww.oup.com\/vsi\/\nAllen C. Guelzo\n\n#  Reconstruction\n\n#  A Very Short Introduction\n\nOxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.\n\nPublished in the United States of America by Oxford University Press\n\n198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.\n\n\u00a9 Oxford University Press 2018, 2020\n\nPublished in hardcover as _Reconstruction: A Concise History_ in 2018\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.\n\nYou must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2019948412\n\nISBN 978\u20130\u201319\u2013045479\u20131\n\nebook ISBN 978\u20130\u201319\u2013045481\u20134\n\n1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2\n\nPrinted in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants.\n\n#  Contents\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nList of illustrations\n\nIntroduction\n\n 1 Vengeance: April\u2013December 1865\n\n 2 Alienation: December 1865\u2013March 1867\n\n 3 Arrogance: March 1867\u2013May 1868\n\n 4 Resistance: May 1868\u2013March 1869\n\n 5 Distraction: March 1869\u2013May 1872\n\n 6 Law: 1866\u20131876\n\n 7 Dissension: September 1872\u2013April 1877\n\nEpilogue\n\nTimeline\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nIndex\n\n#  Acknowledgments\n\nSeveral talented and thoughtful historians and commentators took away time from their own schedules and their own more important tasks to read and review the manuscript of _Reconstruction_ ; I regret to admit that I have no better means of recognizing their generosity and perspicacity than these simple acknowledgments. James Oakes (City University of New York) was the first on whom I tried out the idea of Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution, and his unfeigned interest fed the spark until it glowed. Louis Masur (Rutgers University) combed through each chapter, relentlessly sniffing out every gaffe and indiscretion, as did Jonathan White (Christopher Newport University). Michael Lind (New America Foundation), Steven Woodworth (Texas Christian University), Matthew Norman (University of Cincinnati), and Brian M. Jordan (Sam Houston State University) also volunteered themselves to read parts here and there. Any errors that might unfortunately appear in the interpretations and writing here must be blamed on me; however, any praise must be shared equally with all of those named above.\n\n#  List of illustrations\n\n[ 1 Andrew Johnson   \n_Library of Congress, LC-DIG-cwpbh-00112_](010_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-2-figureGroup-1)\n\n[ 2 Passage of the Civil Rights Bill, 1866   \n_Architect of the Capitol_](011_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-3-figureGroup-2)\n\n[ 3 Riots in Memphis, May 2, 1866   \n_Harper's Weekly_ , May 26, 1866](011_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-3-figureGroup-3)\n\n[ 4 Impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, March 4, 1868   \n_Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ , March 28, 1868](012_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-4-figureGroup-4)\n\n[ 5 Jury of whites and blacks   \n_Frank Leslie's Illustrated Magazine_ , November 30, 1867](013_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-5-figureGroup-5)\n\n[ 6 Democratic party campaign card for the 1868 presidential election   \n_Author's collection_](013_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-5-figureGroup-6)\n\n[ 7 Ku Klux Klan party in North Carolina, August 1871   \n_Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia, Union League of Philadelphia Archives, UL.VI.4.7_](013_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-5-figureGroup-7)\n\n[ 8 Murder of Philadelphia black political organizer Octavius Catto   \n_Washington Evening Star_ , October 12, 1871](014_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-6-figureGroup-8)\n\n[ 9 Free blacks trying to vote in the 1868 elections, Taylor County, Georgia   \nCharles Stearns, _The Black Man of the South and the Rebels_ (1872)](016_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-8-figureGroup-9)\n\n[ 10 Memorial to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner   \n_Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper_ , March 28, 1874](016_chapter.xhtml#actrade-9780190454791-chapter-8-figureGroup-10)\n\n#  Introduction\n\nThe era in US history known as Reconstruction forms a sort of coda to the traumatic years of the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. It embraces the twelve years of active effort to rebuild and reconstitute the American Union after the attempt by the Confederate States of America to secede from it, and in some sense (because it had no official starting or ending date) it spluttered on well into the 1890s.\n\nBut Reconstruction can also reasonably be characterized as the ugly duckling of American history. The twelve years that are the conventional designation of the Reconstruction period, from 1865 to 1877, teem with associations and developments that seem regrettable, if not simply baleful. They left a long legacy of bitterness, especially among Southerners who believed that they had fought an honorable war and were handed a dishonorable peace, as well as Southerners who refused to accept defeat and manufactured the myth of a glorious \"Lost Cause\" to justify themselves and their continuing belief in the rightness of the Confederate project. Reconstruction also coincided with an eruption of notorious levels of graft, corruption, and fraud in American civil governments\u2014not least in the ones erected by federal force in the former rebel states. But Reconstruction is probably best known, and least liked, as the greatest missed opportunity Americans ever had to erase the treacherous impact of slavery and race in a reconstructed and unified nation. There is, in other words, something in Reconstruction for nearly every American to regret.\n\nThe term \"reconstruction\" actually surfaced even before the Civil War began in 1861, although in its first form it was a way of describing how the Constitution would have to be amended in order to accommodate the demands of the Southern states and head off their secession. \"Sooner or later,\" predicted New York Democratic financier August Belmont, there must be \"a national convention for the reconstruction of one government over all the States.\" The term resurfaced in 1862, this time to describe the pacification policies that the federal government might deploy once the Union armies had suppressed the Confederate rebellion. Articulating these policies turned out to be no easy matter. Abraham Lincoln, the president whose inauguration had triggered Southern secession in the first place, was never at ease using the word \"reconstruction\"\u2014he qualified it with add-ons like \"what is called reconstruction\" or \"a plan of reconstruction (as the phrase goes)\"\u2014and preferred to speak of the \"re-inauguration of the national authority\" or the need to \"re-inaugurate loyal state governments.\"\n\nBut use it Lincoln did, however grudgingly, and he built all of his assumptions about the shape of Reconstruction on one single presupposition: the constitutional impossibility of secession. The Constitution granted no right to the states to secede; ergo, the Southern states had never really left the Union, and the so-called Confederate States were really only insurrectionary regimes. \"I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual,\" Lincoln said in his first inaugural address. On that basis, he sanctioned the creation of a Unionist Virginia government-in-exile and installed temporary \"military governors\" in areas of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, who proposed to carry on the usual functions of state government as though secession (and the secessionists) had never existed.\n\nBut whatever the legal and constitutional arguments, the Confederacy did not look at all like a mere insurrection, like the Whiskey Rebellion or the Dorr Rebellion. It comprised eleven contiguous states, with a population of more than nine million (Belgium, by comparison, had a population of less than five million, Scandinavia eighteen million), and it created a new government larger than most European nation-states, along with armies to defend it. The \"leaders of the South have made an army, and they have made what is more, they have made a nation,\" declared William Ewart Gladstone, the United Kingdom's chancellor of the exchequer.\n\nIronically, Gladstone's view was echoed by several of the most fervent members of Lincoln's own party, the Republicans. They had become known as \"radicals\" from the outset of the war, and though the term described only about half of the Senate's Republicans, and slightly more than that in the House of Representatives, they were unapologetic in asserting that the Confederate states had lost all title to statehood by seceding.\n\nWhat had really happened when the Southern states seceded, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner countered, was \"State suicide or State forfeiture or State abdication.\" Whatever the name, secession had converted the old Southern states into something less than what they had been. What was more, it was the prerogative of Congress, not the president, to define that status and create the policies which control any ideas of reconstructing the Union. Thaddeus Stevens, Sumner's counterpart in the House of Representatives, wanted to go even further: \"We propose to confiscate all the estates of every rebel belligerent whose estate was worth $10,000, or whose land exceeded two hundred acres in quantity.\" As for the Confederate leadership\u2014and \"how many captive enemies it would be proper to execute, as an example to nations\"\u2014Stevens would bleakly \"leave others to judge.\"\n\nLincoln, however, wanted no part of such a draconian reconstruction. For one thing, it was tantamount to conceding that the Confederates had been correct all along in claiming a right to withdraw from the Union. Lincoln laid out his first detailed strategy for \"Amnesty and Reconstruction\" in December 1863. He proposed to grant full pardons \"with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves\" to any inhabitants of Southern states reoccupied by federal military forces upon taking an oath of future loyalty (and keeping \"said oath inviolate\"). There were several categories of exceptions to this opportunity: \"civil or diplomatic agents\" of the Confederacy, military and naval officers, and those who had mistreated Union prisoners of war. But the purpose behind this apparent generosity was really political, because this strategy would grant Lincoln the authority to \"re-establish a State government\" as soon as the oath-takers numbered just 10 percent of the 1860 voting population in each state\u2014while also ensuring that the \"reinaugurated\" state governments abolished slavery.\n\nMany Republicans applauded Lincoln's plan as \"glorious\" and saw it as an enticement to Southerners not only to end the rebellion but to abandon slavery as well. \"The President,\" wrote Ohio Republican James A. Garfield, \"has struck a great blow for the country and himself.\" But so broad an offer infuriated Stevens and Sumner, who interpreted this approach to mean that traitors were being invited back into the Union with full privileges and with only one significant punishment, and by a president who meant to sideline Congress in overseeing the process. Opposition to Lincoln's plan within Congress (and within Lincoln's own party) was spearheaded by Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade and Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis, who designed a Reconstruction plan of their own: first, the required number of oath-takers was increased from 10 to 50 percent; then, a civilian provisional governor would be appointed, and the eligible voters would elect a state convention to write a new state constitution that would ban slavery and forbid rebel officers from serving in the legislature or as governor. Only then could these states resume their proper place in the Union and send representatives and senators to Congress. \"Until majorities can be found loyal and trustworthy for state government,\" declared Wade, the South \"must be governed by a stronger hand\" than either Lincoln or its own repentant Unionists.\n\nLincoln scoffed at the Wade-Davis plan, and at the criticisms of his own plan, as tantamount to conceding that \"states whenever they please may of their own motion dissolve their connection with the Union,\" the very constitutional issue that began the war. Moreover, Reconstruction was an executive branch responsibility, just as managing the war had been; Congress had nothing to do with it, any more than it had the authority to trespass on his military authority as commander in chief. (Lincoln said nothing about the role of the federal judiciary, which had been mostly silent during the war, but the judicial branch would soon seek to join the debate, too). So, although Lincoln protested that he was not \"inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration,\" he pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis plan on July 8, 1864. Congressional Republicans made an effort to mollify Lincoln later that year when the House of Representatives' Committee on the Rebellious States (chaired by Henry Winter Davis) produced a Reconstruction bill that left open a shared role for the president and Congress in the process of Reconstruction. But in February 1865, opposition from uncooperative Democrats and unappeased Radical Republicans tabled it.\n\nNot that Lincoln's own schemes for Reconstructing the Confederacy had shone with any success. When Union forces overran eastern North Carolina in the spring of 1862, Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly, a North Carolina Unionist, as \"military governor\" of North Carolina, and urged him to arrange the election of a Unionist member of Congress in the occupied zone. But Stanly could recruit only 864 voters for the election, and the House of Representatives refused to seat Stanly's candidate. Stanly was also at odds with Lincoln about the Emancipation Proclamation, and on January 15, 1863, Stanly resigned. Lincoln did not appoint a successor.\n\nThis inauspicious beginning was followed by another failure. Union forces recaptured more than half of Arkansas in 1862, and on July 19 of that year, Lincoln appointed John S. Phelps as military governor. A state constitutional convention met in Little Rock in January 1864 and elected Isaac Murphy as provisional governor. But the two senators and three congressmen they elected were also refused seats in Congress. The same pattern, with still more embarrassing developments, repeated itself in Louisiana. A military governor, George Shepley, was appointed by Lincoln for Louisiana after the US Navy captured New Orleans in April, 1862, and Lincoln urged him to organize congressional elections without waiting for a new state constitution.\n\nThe two congressman elected under Shepley's oversight on December 3, 1862, managed to persuade Congress to seat them. But after a Unionist state convention wrote a free-state constitution for Louisiana in 1864, the two senators elected by the Louisiana legislature were blocked from their seats by the Senate Judiciary Committee \"till by some joint action of both Houses there shall be some recognition of an existing State government acting in harmony with the government of the United States.\" One of Lincoln's military governors, Andrew J. Hamilton, never even set foot in his home state of Texas. Only Andrew Johnson, the lone US senator from a seceding state to remain loyal to the Union, enjoyed any kind of success after Lincoln appointed him military governor of Tennessee, and even then, Johnson did not convene a new state constitutional convention until January 1865. This did not look much like the reconstruction of anything.\n\nA second fundamental problem was the future status of the freed slaves. Not a single one of the haphazard experiments in Reconstruction conducted before the end of the war had specified what the future status of the freedpeople would be. Were they now supposed to sign contracts and be paid for their labor? Who would guarantee that the contracts would not turn out to be simply a newer version of bondage? Should provision be made out of the public purse to educate them? Should they be considered citizens, and entitled to all the \"privileges and immunities\" guaranteed to citizens by Article 4, section 2, of the Constitution? And what were those \"privileges and immunities\" anyway? Office-holding, jury service, bearing witness in court, voting, election to office?\n\nOne thing was politically certain: on the day slavery was abolished, the Constitutional rules on representation in the House of Representatives would undergo a complete change. The so-called three-fifths rule in the Constitution (which had prevented slaveholding states from counting more than three-fifths of their enslaved population as part of their total population in order to determine the number of representatives each slave state could send to Congress) would disappear, and going forward, every freed slave would be counted as a full person\u2014yet without any right to vote. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the defeated Southern states might send back to a postwar Congress, not only the same number of representatives they had been able to send before the eruption of war, but an additional thirteen representatives (by Thaddeus Stevens's reckoning) beyond what they had once elected. This unlooked-for increase in Southern representatives, if it was elected only by white Southern votes, would likely be composed entirely of old Southern Democrats who would find common cause with their old Northern Democratic allies. Together, they could put a swift end to the Republicans' wartime control of Congress and enable Congress to pass legislation repealing the Republicans' wartime domestic achievements (such as protective tariffs, government assistance to the railroads, the Homestead Act, and the national banking system), while burdening the US Treasury with the Confederacy's wartime debts. The idea of enfranchising the freed slaves would disappear entirely as a political possibility.\n\nFor that reason, Charles Sumner made a final desperate attempt to assert that \"there can be no power under the Constitution to disenfranchise loyal people... especially when it may hand over the loyal majority to the government of the disloyal minority.\" Lincoln signaled that he understood this in his last speech, on April 11, 1865. He simultaneously chided Congress for refusing to admit the Louisiana senators, and urged the Louisiana Unionists to reconsider granting at least limited black voting rights by \"extending the vote to the very intelligent, and... those who serve our cause as soldiers.\" They, at least, would be reliable safeguards for \"the jewel of liberty.\" Beyond that, however, beckoned a future he described in Richmond on April 4 as one in which free black Americans \"shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this republic.\" As for the Confederates, he instinctively erred on the side of \"malice toward none.\" He urged his generals to \"let them have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with.\" He \"wanted no one punished; treat them liberally all round,\" which he believed was the only way to get \"those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.\" Whatever else might have been contained in that strategy disappeared with Lincoln's assassination three days after his last speech.\n\nOne of the most-asked questions in American history must surely be, what would have happened in the Reconstruction era if Lincoln had lived? Lincoln was such a private person, and so tight-lipped a politician, that it is impossible to project what further plans he would have developed. And, if he had obeyed the unspoken two-term rule for occupying the presidency, he would only have been in office until March 1869, which is not a substantial period in which to effect something as momentous as Reconstruction. Nor were there any generally received models to guide Lincoln in such a process\u2014or, indeed, anyone else throughout history who had faced a similar dilemma. The Roman civil wars divided on postwar policy, with Sulla crushing his surviving rivals with an iron fist, but with Pompey and Caesar opting for clemency and reconciliation. Henri IV brought an end to the strife of the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion because he could advertise himself as an outsider, willing to conciliate all parties and eager to bring peace and prosperity to all. But across the English Channel, the restored monarchy of Charles II abandoned any notion of reconciliation, and hanged, drew, and quartered even the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, not to mention his living supporters. Closer in time to Reconstruction, the Taiping Rebellion in China was suppressed in 1864 in an orgy of massacres. Had Reconstruction been planned according to the Sulla, Stuart, or Taiping scripts, then proscription, trials, and executions might have continued for another generation.\n\nBut instead, American Reconstruction wears the garb of improvisation, uncertainty, and experiment\u2014which historians have difficulty containing within narratives that thrive on direction, purpose, and determinism. The first non-participant historians of Reconstruction, James Ford Rhodes and William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, bore down harshly on Reconstruction's missteps, largely because both were Democrats politically and had little sympathy for a Republican program. Although Rhodes and Dunning professed a kind of objective relativism, refusing to offer judgments on the faults or virtues of Reconstruction, the faults they found were usually with Republicans and the virtues Democratic. As a Progressive, Dunning (and those who followed in his train: Ulrich B. Phillips, J. G. Hamilton, Walter L. Fleming, Charles Ramsdell, and Merton Coulter) was suspicious of the follies and inefficiencies of democracy when spread too broadly. In his mind, Reconstruction brought not democracy to the South but mob rule and to Washington, nothing but vindictiveness and plunder.\n\nCriticism of the Dunning School made its first appearance in the 1930s, beginning with the attacks launched at the Dunningites by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in _Black Reconstruction_ (1935) and James S. Allen in _Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy_ (1937). Reconstruction might not have been a proud achievement, but, Du Bois objected, Reconstruction led directly \"to democratic government and the labor movement today.\" Allen agreed: \"The destruction of the slave power was the basis for real national unity and the further development of capitalism, which would produce conditions most favorable for the growth of the labor movement.\"\n\nUnhappily, neither Du Bois nor Allen possessed a broad platform from which to rally a countermovement, partly because of Du Bois's imperious self-isolation and Allen's identification with the Communist Party. It would not be until the 1960s, after the emergence of the civil rights movement as a \"second Reconstruction,\" that the idols of the Dunning School began to fall. John Hope Franklin's _Reconstruction after the Civil War_ (1961) and Kenneth Stampp's _The Era of Reconstruction, 1865\u201377_ (1965) started the trend, to be followed by John and LaWanda Cox, George Bentley, Richard Current, Allen W. Trelease, Herman Belz, and finally by Eric Foner's massive _Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863\u20131877_ (1988).\n\nNoble as their intentions were, the anti-Dunningites had their foibles, too. Du Bois and Allen were both writing from self-consciously Marxist frameworks that forbade any other understanding of Reconstruction but through class and revolution, with race sometimes deployed as a surrogate for class. \"The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor,\" Du Bois wrote, \"and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.\" Thus, Reconstruction should have been the moment when working-class blacks and whites together had an opportunity to create a new American economic and political order, only to have it yanked away by a nervous white Northern bourgeoisie who preferred making peace with the defeated Confederates to licensing a genuinely radical, biracial workers' movement.\n\nReconstruction was, in other words, seen as a typical bourgeois-democratic revolution, not unlike the initial phase of the French Revolution in 1789 or the liberal democratic revolutions across Europe in 1848. Like those uprisings, it pitted a capitalist, middle-class bourgeoisie over a slaveholding aristocracy, with the former striking up alliances with peasants on the land and workers in the tenements to overthrow the rule of the planter elite. This newly empowered bourgeoisie derived their authority, first, as the Southern Unionist allies of Union military victory, and second as the owners of capital and the possessors of professional and commercial income (rather than birthright or status). Alas, bourgeois revolutions frighten their own architects, who quickly come to see that in encouraging peasants and workers, they have created a Frankenstein monster that has no more respect for the bourgeoisie than it had for the aristocrats.\n\nAt that moment, \"the bourgeoisie,\" wrote Lenin, \"strives to put an end to the bourgeois revolution halfway from its destination, when freedom has been only half won, by a deal with the old authorities and the landlords.\" They strive \"to reach a tacit pact with the old-landed aristocracy in order to preserve their power.\" But the genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle; it is only stunned, and in time it will reawaken with renewed strength as the guide and leader of the socialist revolution, and finish off industrial capitalism, just as the bourgeoisie finished off the aristocrats. Du Bois in particular bears the impress of this notion of Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution, for in Du Bois's telling, Reconstruction's \"vision of democracy across racial lines\" was undone by a \"counterrevolution of property.\"\n\nThe principal difficulty with such a conventional Marxist narrative is that neither the Civil War nor Reconstruction fit neatly into it. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction belong to a chapter in American history in which the United States was still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, and the contest that was waged between 1861 and 1865 was largely an argument (in economic terms) between the free-labor family farm and the slave-labor cotton plantation.\n\nNor is there any evidence that the victorious Republicans who attempted to build a bourgeois South among the ruins of the old plantation order ever panicked at the prospect of empowering blacks or poor whites, or betrayed them by establishing a self-protecting alliance with the dethroned aristocrats. And the freedpeople hardly experienced a taste of Marxist alienation; they instead experienced bourgeois frustration at their exclusion from material accumulation and democratic and judicial process, and that was how they articulated it. If Reconstruction was indeed a bourgeois revolution, it was a _pure_ bourgeois revolution\u2014a self-contained revolutionary event outside the boundaries of Marxist theory. And if it failed, it was not because it sold out, but because it was overthrown by the resurgent political power of a bloodied but unbowed aristocracy.\n\nIt was also easy, in the midst of so many shortcomings and failures in Reconstruction, for the anti-Dunningites to overlook four important ways in which Reconstruction actually succeeded:\n\n\u2022 Reconstruction restored a federal Union, for which the North had been fighting from the start, and corrected the centrifugal forces of the American federal Union that had brought on the war in the first place.\n\n\u2022 Reconstruction followed the route of generosity\u2014it created no conquered provinces, no mass executions for treason. As Walt Whitman wrote, almost in self-congratulation, Reconstruction \"has been paralleled nowhere in the world\u2014in any other country on the globe the whole batch of the Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.\" Ironically, most of the violence that pockmarked Reconstruction was inflicted on the victors, not the vanquished.\n\n\u2022 The freedpeople made only modest economic gains in moving out of the shadow of slavery into freedom and self-ownership. But there were still beachheads for black Southerners all across the South in terms of property ownership and embourgeoisment, which would form the soil out of which the civil rights movement would flourish eighty years later.\n\n\u2022 In the same fashion, Reconstruction established, beyond a doubt, the legal equality of all Americans under the banner of citizenship. Much of that equality was compromised by racial prejudice, vigilante violence, and the twisting of law. But it was not extinguished, and the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) have together formed the last on which injustice, racial prejudice, and inequality have repeatedly been hammered down.\n\nNot everything that should have been gained was gained in Reconstruction; but not everything was lost, either.\n\nHistorical writing on Reconstruction has expanded exponentially since the 1960s, pushing the boundaries of Reconstruction historiography into new subfields of time, labor, geography, gender, family, and economics. The American West has increasingly become part of the Reconstruction schema, starting with the military subjugation of the Plains Indian tribes, but increasingly reaching to include the challenge posed to an American Protestant culture by the Mormon colony of Utah and the racial triangle formed by Cherokee slavery and segregation. There is now a greater sense of the continuity of Reconstruction backward to the war years (as in, for example, connecting the activities of Civil War guerrillas with the postwar insurgency of the Ku Klux Klan) and forward to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Studies of the experience of veterans, both Northern and Southern, in Reconstruction have only just begun to come to the fore, as have also inquiries into how, with a certain postmodern twist, Reconstruction influenced the memory of the Civil War and, in addition, generated its own historical memory. Even the conventional chronology of Reconstruction has been reworked, so that in some cases the starting point has been pushed back well into the Civil War years, and in others substantially far forward, to the beginning of Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s. For the purposes here, it will be easiest if Reconstruction is thought of as four discrete movements:\n\n\u2022 Early Reconstruction, from the first of Lincoln's experiments in 1862 until the announcement of Andrew Johnson's appointment of provisional governors for the Southern states in 1865;\n\n\u2022 Presidential (or executive) Reconstruction, covering the short-lived Johnson governments, from mid-1865 to the passage of the Congressional Reconstruction Acts in 1867, which attempted to curtail the liberties of the freed slaves and return ex-Confederates to Washington as members of Congress;\n\n\u2022 Congressional Reconstruction, which begins with the Reconstruction Acts and concludes with the readmission, under the terms of those statutes, of the last of the one-time Confederate states to representation in Congress in 1870, during which time the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution empowered the emergence of a black political leadership class; and\n\n\u2022 Overthrow of Reconstruction, from 1870, when the first white Democratic regimes were elected to \"redeem\" the southern states from Republican control, until 1877, when the last Southern Republican governments, in South Carolina and Louisiana, were extinguished.\n\nOne may also speak of an \"Aftermath\" of Reconstruction, from 1877 until 1896, to include the increasingly oppressive nature of the \"Redeemer\" regimes, the capture of both houses of Congress and the executive branch by Democrats in 1893, and the disastrous decision in the case of _Plessy v. Ferguson_ to give federal countenance to racial segregation. Some of these categories are porous: Virginia, for instance, was readmitted under the Reconstruction Acts in 1870, but had already returned the Democratic party to effective power four months before, only to witness the rise of a \"Readjuster\" movement in the 1880s which fused black Republicans and moderate Democrats; and Tennessee was never included in the Reconstruction Acts and was readmitted to Congress in 1866. But they will serve as a general timeline.\n\nAwareness of the increasing varieties of Reconstruction interpretation will not prevent _Reconstruction: A Concise History_ from committing some offenses, mostly in the interest of remaining short. Extensive explorations of gender, family, veterans, philosophy, literature\u2014all of them, unhappily, are beyond the scope of a series whose volumes, to be fair, are intended to each offer but a brief introduction to the topic at hand. This small offering will attempt no more than to fashion a basic scaffolding for understanding Reconstruction, leaving the vaster structures of elaboration and interpretation to improvised _ad libitum_.\n\n# Chapter 1\n\n#  Vengeance: April\u2013December 1865\n\n\"Today the city is wild with grief and anger over the report that President Lincoln was assassinated last night by a Southerner, John Wilkes Booth,\" wrote a newly discharged Union lieutenant in Lowell, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1865. \"All flags are at half-mast, public and private buildings draped in black, and business is suspended.... It is all a man's life is worth to show any feeling but sorrow or anger.\" The scene in Lowell was repeated across the North that day. In Philadelphia, \"old men bowed their heads in sorrow and wept like children.\" On every block of Chestnut Street, between Third and Thirteenth, \"the whole street, as far as the eye could stretch, was wailing the loss of the Chief Magistrate of the nation.\" And not the least in mourning was Washington, DC, where only a few hours were allowed to elapse in the capital before Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, was sworn in as the seventeenth president by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.\n\nJohnson had not been an obvious choice as Lincoln's vice president. When Lincoln was elected president in 1860, his vice president was Hannibal Hamlin, a Maine abolitionist who had left the Democratic Party for the Republicans. But Hamlin had not been a consequential figure, and in 1864 the Republican National Convention substituted Johnson, a lifelong Tennessee Democrat, on Lincoln's reelection ticket as a way of demonstrating the Republicans' bipartisan dedication to re-union. Although Johnson never openly embraced the Republicans, he had earned warm applause in the North for his lonely refusal, at the beginning of the war, to abandon his seat in the US Senate and follow Tennessee into secession. He also had the advantage of having been reasonably successful as Lincoln's military governor of Tennessee from 1862 to 1865, and he had commended himself to the most radical members of Lincoln's Republican Party for promising black Tennesseans in October 1864 that he would be \"your Moses, and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace.\"\n\nAt the same time, Johnson was also a loner, an outsider in Washington politics who concealed his insecurities behind a wall of quiet. Lincoln was taken aback when Johnson suggested that political business in Tennessee should excuse him from attending his own inauguration, and he nearly sank himself into political oblivion when he did show up for the inauguration, visibly intoxicated, and proceeded to deliver a rambling monologue that sent eyes rolling helplessly upward. \"This Johnson is a queer man,\" Lincoln remarked, and in April, when Lincoln visited Richmond, he ignored a suggestion that he and Johnson meet in the ruined ashes of the Confederate capital.\n\nAny uncertainties Johnson generated, though, were banished in the wake of Lincoln's assassination by Johnson's promises to deal harshly with the guilty Confederacy. Indeed, it was not only Lincoln's death that motivated Johnson; John Langdon Sibley, the librarian of Harvard College, was deeply depressed to see the swelling numbers of \"infirm men & cripples in the streets.... The terrible battles which have been fought have been turning out more & more, & it is painful to see the large number... who have lost an arm or a leg or are otherwise maimed & move on crutches.\" When the members of Congress's Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War called on Johnson the day after Lincoln's death, he assured them that he would deal harshly with the rebels who had been responsible for the war and the assassination. \"Robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; _treason_ is a crime, and _crime_ must be punished.\" The perpetrators of those crimes included many more than just John Wilkes Booth (who was still at large). Johnson continued, \"Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.\" Radical Republicans were delighted: the Confederacy, wrote Michigan senator Jacob Howard, \"should be made to bear the brand of dishonor & enduring shame.\"\n\nHow this sentiment was to be translated into policy was another question, however. Reconstruction of the Union would require dealing with a thorny hedge of legal, constitutional, and political questions. Were the eleven states that seceded to form the Confederacy in 1861 still states in any meaningful sense of the term? Radical Republicans certainly thought not, and now that Lincoln was no more, the way seemed clear for Congress to step forward and reshape the South in the same way the Constitution authorized Congress to oversee the federal territories in the West. And what was the standing of the Confederacy's ordinary legal actions? Was the federal government obligated to assume the debts that the Confederate states had contracted during the war? Above all, what was to become of the 3.9 million emancipated African Americans whose legal status as chattel had been extinguished by the war, by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and by the Thirteenth Amendment? \"Shall they be men; be clothed with the rights and duties of freemen,\" asked the Union League of Philadelphia, \"or shall they be returned to a worse slavery than that from which we have freed them?... Shall our old notions about race and color shut our eyes to the manifest march of the times or shall we accept and solve the problem with truth and reason?\"\n\nFor the moment, Andrew Johnson had to concentrate his attention on ending the war. The rebel army surrendered by Robert E. Lee, and the paroled by General Ulysses S. Grant, at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, was the most important, but not the only, Confederate army still in existence. Negotiations were already under way for the surrender of the next-largest Confederate force, in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the assassin Booth dodged federal pursuers until he was cornered in a tobacco barn in Virginia on April 26 and shot to death, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his cabinet would remain beyond federal reach until Union cavalry captured them near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. Two other Confederate commands in Alabama and Texas would not surrender until May 4 and May 26.\n\n1. In 1865, Andrew Johnson was described by the newspaper editor Alexander K. McClure as \"about five feet ten in height, rather stoutly and symmetrically built,... rather a cold grey eye that looks as if in its calmest glances there slumbers behind it quite enough to quicken it; a finely chiseled Roman face, usually sad in expression, at time relieved by a genial smile, and in manner and dress serenely plain and unaffected.\"\n\nUnlike the rebel parolees at Appomattox, few of these other defeated Confederates had much hope for mercy, especially from Andrew Johnson. The new president had already authorized the trial of John Wilkes Booth's collaborators in a military tribunal rather than in a civil court, and the only question seemed to be how many of them would be hanged. When Union general William T. Sherman appeared to have granted excessively lenient terms to the Confederate army in North Carolina that included \"recognition\" of the wartime Confederate state governments and the \"practical\" cancellation of \"the confiscation laws, and relieved rebels of every degree... from all pains and penalties for their crimes,\" Sherman was swiftly rebuked and ordered to renegotiate the surrender. It was \"clear and settled\" in Johnson's mind \"that no civil authority should be recognized which has its source in rebel election or appointment.\" This gave Johnson all the appearance of an avenging angel, and even hesitant Northerners suspected that \"the presidential chair is occupied by a man who has pledged himself to make the blood of the educated and influential rebels run in streams.\"\n\nBut despite his newfound radical reputation, Johnson's bark was very different from his bite. Lincoln and the leadership of the Republican radicals had been Whigs (before 1856, when the Whig Party collapsed over the slavery issue); Johnson was, as one English observer shrewdly perceived, \"a Democrat... of the [Andrew] Jackson type\" who believed \"that freedom in the United States ought to tend toward social equality\"\u2014although the equality Jacksonians had in mind did not extend across the divide of race. He \"had a latent hostility towards money-power, and the aggregation of property, as essentially aristocratic.\" But he had owned slaves himself and (as Indiana congressman George W. Julian discovered) \"was, at heart, as decided a hater of the negro and of everything savoring of abolitionism, as the rebels from whom he had separated.\" His real animus was directed at the plantation nabobs, and he extended his grudge against the planter class to Northern financiers. \"The aristocracy based on negro property disappears at the Southern end of the line,\" he snarled, \"but only to reappear in an oligarchy of bonds and national securities in the States which suppressed the rebellion.\" Although he did not mind promising to be the freedmen's Moses, he did not expect the Promised Land to make them the social or political equals of whites. \"I am for a _white_ Mans [ _sic_ ] Government in America,\" he told a Tennessee supporter.\n\nGradually, Johnson began rolling back the wartime measures Lincoln had improvised from 1861 onward. At first, these rollbacks were uncontroversial: on April 29, he lifted the sanctions on trade with the former Confederate states east of the Mississippi; on May 9, he formally recognized the Virginia government-in-exile (which had been established in 1862 under Francis Pierpont) as the new Virginia state government; and on May 22, he formally dissolved the US Navy's blockade of Confederate ports. He gave particular cheer to Radical Republican hearts on May 15, when he appointed the \"Christian soldier,\" the unapologetically evangelical Major General Oliver Otis Howard, to head the newly created Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (which became known simply as the Freedmen's Bureau) and begin redistributing to the freedpeople \"all the abandoned lands, and those in the Government's possession under the Confiscation Act, and all those acquired by Treasury tax sales or otherwise.\"\n\nThe cheer began to dissipate, however, on May 29, when Johnson issued a proclamation, built on Lincoln's December 1863 amnesty proclamation, granting \"to all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion....amnesty and pardon, with restoration of all rights and property, except as to slaves and except in cases where legal proceedings under the laws of the United States providing for the confiscation of property... have been instituted.\" There followed a long list of exclusions\u2014\"civil or diplomatic officers\" of the Confederacy, \"military or naval officers... above the rank of colonel in the army or lieutenant in the navy,\" and any Southerners \"who have voluntarily participated in said rebellion... whose taxable property is over $20,000.\" But even the most notorious could still make \"special application\" to Johnson for executive clemency.\n\nThe intent of the proclamation puzzled congressional Republicans. \"It was supposed that President Johnson would err, if at all, in imposing too harsh terms\" on the rebels, recalled Ohio US senator John Sherman. After all, Johnson himself repeatedly claimed that he wanted \"the prompt initiation of legal proceedings against the leaders of the civil war.\" But as it turned out, what he really wanted was for them to come to him on bended knee and experience some of the humiliation he had lived with as a \"plebian.\" After that, he was more than satisfied to trade the garb of Moses for that of Pharoah. When John Eaton, who had been the general commissioner of freedmen in Tennessee, pressed Johnson about \"establishing schools and organizing new industries\" for the freedmen, Johnson's habitual curtain of silence descended. \"He was quite obviously bored, and all that might have been said on the subject had no more inclination to stay by him than has water to stay on a duck's back.\"\n\nPuzzlement turned to anger with the release of a second presidential proclamation, this time authorizing the appointment of a civilian \"provisional governor\" for North Carolina. The person chosen for this new position was William W. Holden, who had voted in favor of secession in 1861 but then transformed himself into a \"peace\" candidate for governor of North Carolina in 1864. Holden was charged with \"convening a convention... for the purpose of altering or amending\" the state constitution and \"to restore said State to its constitutional relations to the Federal government.\" In short order, through June and July, Johnson proceeded to do likewise for Mississippi (where he appointed as governor William L. Sharkey, \"a man of mind and culture,\" a judge and former Whig, but \"offensive... on the subject of slavery\"), Georgia (where he installed James Johnson, a Unionist lawyer and personal friend from Johnson's days in Congress, in the governorship), Texas (where Andrew Hamilton, who had fumbled Lincoln's appointment as a military governor of Texas, now became provisional civilian governor), Alabama (Lewis Parsons, a New York\u2013born lawyer who had briefly held a Confederate army commission), South Carolina (Benjamin F. Perry, a Unionist newspaper editor who had also agreed to serve as a Confederate judge), and finally Florida (here the nominee was William Marvin, a former federal district judge who had actually spent most of the war practicing law in New York City).\n\nIt took some convincing to believe that these nominees were the best men to reestablish the vacant courts and the wrecked machinery of day-to-day governance, to summon state conventions, and to encourage the conventions to erase all traces of slavery from the state statute books. \"For Gods [ _sic_ ] Sake appoint a Sober man,\" erupted a fellow Tennessee Unionist, \"instead of A.J. Hamilton; better known as drunken Jack Hamilton.\" What was more appalling was the realization that Johnson's governors promised to do little more than return the South, and the freed slaves, to a status only marginally different from what had prevailed before the war. These \"quondam rebels,\" complained a Louisianan who had suffered real \"rebel persecution,\" may \"talk like union men and have ears like union men but they don't smell much like union men.\"\n\nWhat incensed Republicans in particular was that Johnson set up civilian governments without so much as a by-your-leave to Congress, which had closed the last session of the Thirty-Eighth Congress on March 3, 1865 (the Senate stayed in special session until March 14) and would not reconvene as the new Thirty-Ninth Congress until December. It was one thing to create military governors, since their authority came strictly from Johnson's constitutional position as commander in chief of the army and navy and would expire the moment Johnson declared the war emergency over. But appointing _civilian_ governors was a gesture ominously similar to Congress's authority to appoint civilian governors for the territories, and it implied that Johnson was reaching for much more power than Lincoln had ever dreamt or that Congress was willing to relinquish. \"How the executive can remoddle [sic] the _States in the union_ is past my comprehension,\" roared Thaddeus Stevens. He could see \"how he could govern them through military governors until they are recognized,\" but civilian governments were \"a question for the Legislative power exclusively.\" But worse still were the omissions in Johnson's proclamations: not a word about the Confederate and state war debts, nor any eligibility restrictions on ex-Confederates who had received amnesty or who would receive it after applying to Johnson, nor the slightest indication that the state constitutional conventions were obliged to consider the civil rights\u2014and especially voting rights\u2014of the freedmen.\n\nThe \u00e9migr\u00e9 Republican Carl Schurz, who had spent most of the war as a Union general, chided Johnson for proclamations that have \"been generally interpreted as a declaration of policy on your part adverse to the introduction of negro suffrage.... The old pro-slavery and disloyal element, I mean the oath-taking rebels,\" he predicted, would seize control. To Charles Sumner, it seemed pure political apostasy. \"Andrew Johnson is the impersonation of the tyrannical slave power. In him it lives again.\" But Johnson waved the protests away. He had never stopped considering himself a Southerner and \"cherished the kindest feeling towards the people of the Southern States.\" He told a South Carolina delegation that Reconstruction was really a \"question of restoration,\" and he expected that the procedures described in his proclamations would so accelerate that process that the entire work of Reconstruction might be finished by the time Congress reconvened.\n\nTo recalcitrant Southerners, the proclamations were like a second wind. In the weeks after Appomattox, Hannah Rawlins (of Orange County, Virginia) confessed to feeling \"as if it could not be reality, but... some hideous nightmare\" that the Confederacy was no more. Stunned into passivity by the surrender, Rawlins remembered that \"for three days after we learned of the fate of our devoted army, I don't think there were a dozen sentences spoken in the family where I was. A stranger would have thought there was a corpse in the house.\" But the passivity was only temporary and not the same thing as acquiescence. The war had pushed many Southerners beyond the point of reconciliation to their conquerors. \"A lady near by,\" recorded Confederate War Department clerk J. B. Jones, \"while surveying her dilapidated shoes, and the tattered sleeping gowns of her children, burst forth... 'I pray that I may live to see the United States involved in a war with some foreign power, which will make refugees of her people, and lay her cities in ashes!' \" One Virginia woman believed that \"the feeling here against the North is intense, tho' smothered.... Mothers will teach their young children to abhor the slayers of their fathers and brothers, they will teach it to them from their earliest infancy. Had I sons, this is the religion that I would inculcate from the time they could lisp.\" The Johnson proclamations revived Southern hopes for pulling some form of victory back from the abyss of defeat and seemed to the Cincinnati journalist Whitelaw Reid \"to have called into active utterance all the hostility to Northerners.\" Strategies of resistance now began to take substance, and Confederate veteran Reuban Wilson hoped that \"with the aid of the democratic party (which is bound to be very strong) of the north we will be able to check the republican party in their wild scheme.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Johnson unwittingly fed the tidal return of Southern defiance. Petitions for pardons came in by the hundreds, and were given the presidential signature by the hundreds, from General George Pickett (of \"Pickett's Charge\" fame at Gettysburg) and Alexander H. Stephens (the Confederate vice president) to James A. Cheatham, a Confederate postmaster and railroad station agent. Ultimately, Johnson would issue 13,500 pardons by the fall of 1867 and had to appoint a pardon clerk, Matthew Pleasants, just to deal with the correspondence.\n\nOnce Johnson's provisional governors had arranged for the election of their state conventions, Republican confidence turned to disbelieving fury, as offices and legislatures filled up with generously pardoned Confederates, who only a few months before had been striving to overturn the government they now expected to rejoin. William Holden called for the election of North Carolina's state convention on September 21, but when it assembled on October 2 in Raleigh, it was top-heavy with ex-Confederate officers: Dennis D. Ferebee, the colonel of the Fifty-Ninth North Carolina; Samuel H. Walkup, lieutenant colonel of the Forty-Eighth North Carolina; Giles Mebane, a member of the 1861 secession convention and speaker of the North Carolina state senate. Almost their first concerns were \"the State's assuming the debt contracted during the rebellion\" (as though North Carolina's Confederate expenses were as legal as any other debt) and granting immunity from prosecution to any \"person who have aided in the passage or execution of any law of the State of North-Carolina or of the Confederate States.\" This pattern was repeated in Mississippi's convention in August, over the protest of \"the colored citizens of Mississippi\" who feared \"that the Legislature will pass such proscriptive laws as will drive the freedmen from the State, or practically re-enslave them.\"\n\nNothing, however, offered more calculated defiance than the representatives and senators whom the newly revived Southern states proposed to send to the opening of the Thirty-Ninth Congress. The new Georgia legislature defied reason by dispatching as Georgia's two senators the former Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, and former Confederate senator Herschel V. Johnson; South Carolinians elected to the House of Representatives a Confederate general, Samuel McGowan, as did Alabama, which elected Cullen A. Battle. All told, Johnson's self-reconstructed states chose for senators and representatives (in addition to Stephens) six Confederate cabinet officers, four Confederate generals, and fifty-eight members of the Confederate Congress.\n\nThroughout all of these deliberations, not a single one of the rehabilitated legislatures took any step in favor of civil rights for the freedpeople. To the contrary, the new state legislature created by the Alabama state convention ratified the Thirteenth Amendment with the express reservation that \"it does not confer upon Congress the power to legislate upon the political status of freedmen in this State.\" Even worse, freshly elected state legislatures in six states created a hedge of \"black codes,\" designed to bind the freedmen into, for all practical purposes, peonage. Beginning in the Mississippi legislature on November 22, the \"black codes\" defined as \"vagrants\" or \"paupers\" any freedperson who appeared unemployed, and allowed local officials to bid them out (as they had once been at slave auctions) as laborers for up to a year. Other provisions of the codes forbade black-white intermarriage; curtailed free speech (including \"insulting gestures\"); and most ominous of all, banned freepeople from owning firearms, ammunition, and even knives.\n\nThis was not what Johnson had been expecting. He warned the provisional governors to mind their states' behavior, given that Congress would have the ultimate word on their future, and he even pressed his governor in Mississippi, William Sharkey, to \"extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars, and pay taxes thereon.\" In November, he tried to make it clear to Alexander Stephens that showing up for the next session of Congress as though he was only suffering from four years' worth of amnesia would be \"exceedingly impolitic.\" Above all, Johnson did not withdraw federal troops from the South. Although the Union armies began demobilizing at rapid rates, there were still ninety thousand soldiers in uniform at the end of the year, spread over three hundred posts across the former Confederacy, and exercising a dual jurisdiction with Johnson's self-reconstructed governments.\n\nThese cautions garnered Johnson no sympathy whatsoever from the Republicans, whose disenchantment with the president rose hand in hand with their incredulity at the actions of new Southern state governments. \"We almost believed him honest,\" charged the abolitionist and feminist journalist Jane Grey Swisshelm, but \"we now fall back upon first impressions\":\n\nThe first time we saw him was at the great Union meeting in the Capitol, in April 1863. His speech then was like all his succeeding speeches, all about Andrew Johnson, and him crucified, and every idea three times expressed. We greatly regretted his nomination, but friends persuaded us, almost, that we were mistaken, and we made our second effort at playing conservative by coddling poor Andy Johnson by way of aiding thousands of honest men in their vain efforts to troll him along the path of rectitude, as sheep are led by walking before with a pan of salt.\n\nParty conventions in Massachusetts and Ohio that summer saw barely restrained outbreaks of protest against the Johnson governments. By July, Charles Sumner was suspected by Navy Secretary Gideon Welles of \"organizing and drilling... to make war upon the Administration policy and the Administration itself.\" Ohio's Benjamin Wade worried about the practical effect of Johnson's decisions on the Republican Party itself. \"To admit the States on Mr. Johnson's plan,\" Wade confided to Sumner, would compromise the party's control of Congress and amount to \"nothing less than political suicide.\"\n\nRemembering the unhappy result of the Wade-Davis reconstruction plan, Ben Wade was not eager to engage in another political war with a president. Johnson, after all, had control of the vast web of executive patronage, and Wade feared that \"too many men... wanted their brothers and friends appointed to office, and knew that Andy was bidding high for votes.\" But when Wade called on Johnson at the White House, he found the president's \"ante-room full of rebels and Copperheads,\" and Wade soon concluded that Johnson intended to \"subordinate... Congress and the Judiciary\" to the \"Executive.\"\n\nMatters came to a head two days before the opening of Congress, as newly arrived congressional Republicans in Washington caucused in the Capitol. Thaddeus Stevens, who was convinced that \"we must put the rebel states under territorial governments at once,\" called for the creation of a joint House-Senate committee of fifteen members, modeled on the wartime Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, to determine whether the Johnson-appointed state governments were sufficiently sanitized of rebellion to merit the readmission of their representatives to Congress. The joint committee's report would decide the standing, not only of Johnson's rehabilitated states, but also Tennessee (which had reinstituted a civilian government in February 1865, and then elected eight congressmen in July), Louisiana, and Francis Pierpont's Virginia. Until such a report was submitted, \"no member shall be received into either House from any of the so-called Confederate States.\" But lurking at the back of Radical minds was a bigger question: would the political confrontation that was brewing tip the country back into a fresh civil war? That would very much depend on what happened on the day the new Congress assembled.\n\n# Chapter 2\n\n#  Alienation: December 1865\u2013March 1867\n\nThe Radical Republicans arrived in Washington for the opening of Congress on December 4, 1865, with two major weapons at their disposal. One was the party caucus, especially in the Senate, where, Minnesota senator Morton Wilkinson reported, \"Republican Senators used to meet almost every day... so as to leave no chance for hesitation, or division.\" The other was the lopsided majorities Republicans had won on Lincoln's coattails in both the House and Senate\u201437 out of 48 seats in the Senate, 132 out of 191 in the House\u2014both of them sufficient to override presidential vetoes. The caucus moved to protect those majorities by the simple device of instructing the clerk of the House of Representatives, Edward McPherson, to \"omit the names of the Representatives elect from all of the States heretofore declared in insurrection\" from the initial roll call of the House \"and close the doors of Congress to this rebel invasion.\" As McPherson called the truncated roll, Thaddeus Stevens was ready with the caucus's resolution to create a joint committee \"for the purpose of considering the condition of the so-called Confederate States of America.\" It was adopted by an outsize 129 to 35 vote.\n\nJohnson was not unaware of what Stevens and the caucus had been plotting. Nevertheless, he was still obliged to act as the head of the coalition that had dominated the wartime Congresses, and he hoped to defuse Radical wrath through the annual presidential message to Congress the next day. No one, he argued, should think that the solution to Reconstruction was to manage it from the Capitol. If \"it is not one of the rights of any State government to renounce its own place in the Union,\" then Congress does not have the right to demote them to territorial status or exclude their representatives from the US government. He also struggled to shut down the possibility of granting voting rights to the freed slaves. The federal government had no more constitutional power to require the enfranchising of Southern freedpeople than it had to enfranchise free blacks \"in the Northern, Middle, and Western States\"\u2014and he knew very well that three states (Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) had just voted such measures down, and that Congress knew it, too.\n\nThis was not an unreasonable appeal, and Johnson sought to add to it some of his favorite distractions\u2014\"monopolies, perpetuities, and class legislation,\" and a Jacksonian \"return to the standard of gold and silver\"\u2014to make it appear even more reasonable. He was wasting his words. A Republican juggernaut was already in motion that would produce, over the next seven months, a flurry of legislation, speeches, and reports designed to dissolve the self-reconstructed governments, extend voting rights to the freedmen by national authority, and reach past Johnson's hands to seize the reins of Reconstruction for Congress.\n\nThe first gestures were the easiest. The formation of a Joint Committee on Reconstruction was rolled through the House on the first day of the session. On December 5, 1865, William D. Kelley (a wartime Democrat-turned-Republican who was known as \"Pig-Iron Kelley\" for his efforts to shield Pennsylvania coal behind import tariffs) introduced a bill to legalize black voting rights in the District of Columbia\u2014one jurisdiction where there was no question about Congress's direct authority to legislate. When the roll was called on it five and a half weeks later, the District voting bill sailed through, 116 to 54, and, as the _Chicago Tribune_ reported, was \"greeted in the galleries and on the floor with loud demonstrations of applause, which the Speaker [of the House, Schuyler Colfax] was for some time unable to check.\"\n\nThen, on December 19, Lyman Trumbull introduced a bill in the Senate to extend the life of the Freedmen's Bureau beyond its original one-year authorization, giving it new support from the War Department and new responsibilities as the \"guardian\" of the freedpeople; it would arbitrate disputes; oversee the establishment of schools; \"set apart for the use of freedmen... unoccupied public lands in Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas\"; and subdivide land seized under the wartime Confiscation Acts into \"parcels not exceeding forty acres\" for \"the loyal refugees and freedmen.\" It, too, easily passed in the Senate on January 25, and in the House, on February 6, by a luxuriously comfortable margin of 136 to 33.\n\nA fourth proposal dealt directly with the nationalization of civil rights. Lyman Trumbull once more stepped forward as a legislative ghostwriter, introducing \"An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication\" on January 5, 1866. The bill opened by affirming that\n\nall persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude... shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.\n\nPart of this bill faced backward, to the US Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case of 1857. _Dred Scott v. Sanford_ denied that blacks, slave or free, could ever qualify as citizens, or enjoy any of the Constitution's other \"privileges and immunities.\" Curiously, the Constitution had never defined citizenship, either at the federal or state level. But this oversight only allowed Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the _Dred Scott_ decision, to insert his own definition, on the basis of _jus sanguinis_ \u2014that is, citizenship by specific birthright. The birthright Taney had in mind was whiteness, and he used it to deny citizenship to anyone of \"African descent.\" But in 1866, Taney was dead and gone, and Trumbull's civil rights bill aimed to bury Dred Scott with him by defining US citizenship by the rule of _jus soli_ \u2014or, by birth on US soil.\n\nNeither the new joint committee nor Trumbull's civil rights bill was designed to make Andrew Johnson happy, and Navy Secretary Welles heard him express \"himself... with sharpness\" in a cabinet meeting about \"the manner in which things had been got up by the Radicals before the session.\" But on the other hand, none of these bills exactly offered him a direct challenge. Trumbull had gone out of his way to mollify Johnson on the civil rights bill. Private interviews with Johnson had given Trumbull \"just expectations\" that the civil rights bill would satisfy the president, especially because Trumbull had cautiously avoided any reference to the act of voting itself as a \"protected\" right. When the Senate approved the bill on February 2, by a 33 to 12 vote, Trumbull had every reason to assume \"that the President's aims, like his own, were in the direction of peace and concord.\"\n\nIt was not the first time a politician had mistaken Andrew Johnson's moody silences for assent. The critics of Johnson's self-reconstruction regimes had lit a slow-burning fire inside of him, and the activities of the Freedmen's Bureau only fanned it. Disturbed by the \"small, endless, mean little injustice of every day\" for the freedpeople, Otis Howard created a system of bureau courts to handle magistrate-level cases\u2014and thereby take them out of the hands of Southern civil courts. In July, Howard issued a circular to his assistant commissioners in the bureau in July, authorizing them \"to select... such confiscated and abandoned property as they deemed necessary\" and designate it \"for the immediate use for the life and comfort of refugees and freedmen.\" Johnson saw that this would collide with his amnesty proclamation, and abruptly ordered Howard \"to return all abandoned lands to owners who were pardoned by the President, and provided no indemnity whatever for the occupants, refugees, or freedmen.\"\n\nJohnson expected Congress to take the hints he had so helpfully sprinkled through his annual message in December and curtail Howard's activities. When it did not, he followed those hints on December 18 with a second message, laying out a little more impatiently how his measures were the best strategy to persuade the restored states \"to confer upon the freedmen the privileges which are essential of their comfort, protection, and security.\" He finally applied the torch on February 19, by issuing a veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and following that a month later with a veto of Trumbull's civil rights bill. And when the District of Columbia voting rights bill finally emerged from the Senate later in the year, Johnson vetoed that, too.\n\nThe veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill touched off an uproar in Congress. Johnson, complained the _Chicago Tribune_ , had yielded to \"the whisperings of the tempting copperhead serpent, and... treacherously stabbed to the heart this measure of benevolence.\" Nevertheless, some Republicans in the Senate now wavered, rather than force an outright split with the president. Painfully, an attempt to override Johnson's veto fell two votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority.\n\n2. A modern mural in the Capitol rotunda portrays the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1866. In the foreground, Henry Highland Garnet, who had been born a slave in Maryland, speaks with newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who supported African American suffrage. The vote was greeted with applause and cheering that lasted several minutes.\n\nThese divisions emboldened Johnson: on April 2, he issued yet another presidential order, declaring that \"there now exists no organized armed resistance... to the authority of the United States.\" The wartime powers which had justified \"military occupation, martial law, military tribunals, and the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus\" evaporated at a click of the telegraph key. The new Southern governors would no longer have to cope with suspicious department commandants, and the Freedmen's Bureau would lose any enforcement power over the freedmen's land claims and working conditions.\n\nCongress usually avoided butting heads with a president of its own party; John Tyler had done likewise when he, like Johnson, inherited the presidency in 1841 from the deceased William Henry Harrison. But on this occasion, Johnson was listening to voices that prophesied that \"another civil war is pending and that the Radical leaders design and are preparing for it.\" Johnson imagined he could parry this blow by crossing the party aisle and uniting whatever Republicans could be persuaded or compelled to follow him with the old Northern Democrats to create a new political coalition\u2014a \"third, or Tyler party\"\u2014with himself at its head.\n\nThis was not an impossible strategy. Democrats had managed to win more than three hundred thousand more popular votes than Lincoln in 1860, and then 45 percent of the presidential vote in 1864; they were still a force to be reckoned with\u2014and clearly a force hostile to anything resembling black civil rights. \"We want no Negro equality,\" Wisconsin Democrats exclaimed, as \"it would degrade and brutify our race, giving Negro Husbands and Negro progeny to our fair daughters and sisters.\" A determined push-back by the president and a new bipartisan coalition to unseat the Radicals in the fall of 1866 elections might give Johnson the triumph he wanted, and the leadership of a new, postwar political world. At the prompting of Secretary of State Seward, on June 25 the _New York Times_ published a call for \"a National Convention, for the purpose of adopting... a platform of principles upon which the Northern and Southern States could take common political action.\"\n\nThe timing of the Johnson convention could not have been worse. By the time it met in Philadelphia on August 14, the fifteen members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, with the lofty William Pitt Fessenden in the chair, had finished recording six grueling months of witness examination and testimony from 144 individuals (ranging from Robert E. Lee to Clara Barton), and the published report they submitted on June 18 teemed with eyebrow-raising accounts of how the self-reconstructed states had done everything within their power to return the freedmen to little better than slavery. \"Congress,\" the report soberly concluded, \"cannot be expected to recognize as valid the election of representatives from disorganized communities\" or \"admitting such communities to a participation in the government.\"\n\nAs if on cue, white Southerners confirmed every bleak suspicion in the report in an eruption of race riots in Southern cities. For three days at the beginning of May, working-class whites in Memphis launched bitter and bloody attacks, first on mustered-out black soldiers whom they feared would become rivals for their jobs, and then at African Americans generally in South Memphis, which had drawn up to twenty thousand black fugitives during the war. It did not help Johnson's reputation that the federal commandant at Memphis, Major General George Stoneman, had been warned not to intervene \"until orders are rec'd from Washington\"\u2014orders that had not been forthcoming. By the time Stoneman finally moved in to disarm the rioters, forty-eight black Memphians were dead and \"every negro church and schoolhouse in the city\" had been burned to the ground.\n\nMore rioting followed. In Norfolk, a freedmen's parade degenerated into a shoot-out that left two whites and two blacks dead. In June, Charleston was \"disturbed and humanity shocked by serious and bloody riots, between white and colored citizens and troops.\" In July, rioting convulsed New Orleans. Since Louisiana already had a civilian state government in place at the time of Lincoln's death, under the governorship of James Madison Wells, Johnson allowed Wells to hold self-reconstruction elections in November 1865. But Louisiana had a larger share of Radical sympathizers than any of the other rebel states, and in June, they proposed to call the original 1864 state constitutional convention back to life in a meeting at the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans on July 30. Instead, a crowd of white police and suspiciously well-armed civilians tried to prevent the convention from taking place in the Institute, and a general melee broke out. By mid-afternoon, when federal troops at last arrived to restore order, 38 people had been killed and 146 wounded, most of them black Louisianans who been ruthlessly shot down by their attackers. It was, said federal Major General Philip Sheridan (who commanded the military district in New Orleans) \"no riot; it was an absolute massacre by the police.\"\n\nJohnson instantly accepted any explanations that blamed the violence on \"the Radical members of Congress,\" but the country thought otherwise. Nothing was more \"alarming in this sad affair,\" wrote E. L. Godkin of _The Nation_ , than \"the coolness with which he refrained from expressing one word of honest indignation at the slaughter.\" When the pro-Johnson Philadelphia convention met in August, the organizers did Johnson no service by inviting the two most notorious anti-war Democrats, Fernando Wood and Clement Vallandigham.\n\n3. On the morning of May 2, 1866, the city recorder urged the white citizens of Memphis to arm themselves and \"kill every Negro and drive the last one from the city.\" That night, _Harper's Weekly_ reported, \"the Negroes were hunted down by police, firemen and other white citizens, shot, assaulted, robbed, and in many instances their houses searched under the pretense of hunting for concealed arms, plundered, and then set on fire, during which no resistance so far as we can learn was offered by the Negroes.\"\n\nBut no one was more capable of doing harm to Johnson than the man himself. Each member of Johnson's cabinet was invited to the Philadelphia convention, and Johnson made acceptance of the invitation a condition of remaining in office. Three of them\u2014Attorney General James Speed, Postmaster General William Dennison, and Interior Secretary James Harlan\u2014refused, and then resigned. Then, a week after the close of the convention, Johnson set off on what was billed as a political pilgrimage to Chicago to dedicate a monument at the tomb of Stephen Douglas. The notion of honoring the man who had twice opposed the martyred Lincoln was as close as Johnson could get to announcing his defection from the Republican Party. Johnson proceeded to turn each stop on his \"Swing Round the Circle\" into a stump speech against Radical candidates, thus racking up further cumulative political errors.\n\nPeople who remembered Johnson's inaugural performance had good reason to fear that this was a mistake\u2014and indeed it was. In Cleveland, Johnson lashed out at the Radicals as \"this gang of office-holders, these blood-suckers and cormorants\"; in St. Louis, he dismissed the New Orleans massacre as \"substantially planned\" by the Radicals and called for \"the emancipation of the white men as well as the colored ones.\" Soon enough, his shotgun style attracted hecklers, and Johnson could not resist doing what they wanted him most to do, which was to descend into an insult match. When someone in the audience called out \"Traitor!\" Johnson shouted back, \"I wish I could see you,\" continuing,\n\nI will bet now, if there could be a light reflected on your face, that cowardice and treachery could be seen in it. Show yourself. Come out here where we can see you. If ever you shoot a man, you will stand in the dark and pull your trigger... Those men\u2014such a one as insulted me here tonight\u2014you may say, has ceased to be a man, and in ceasing to be a man shrunk into the denomination of a reptile, and having so shrunken, as an honest man, I tread on him.\n\nThe cost of this behavior surprised Johnson: \"the respect of the whole country and a hundred thousand votes.\" It was even more costly for his allies. Harvard students booed one of Johnson's apologists in Massachusetts, the venerable Robert C. Winthrop, at their commencement ceremony. As the congressional election tallies began to arrive in September, it was clear that Johnson-affiliated candidates, at both the state and federal levels, had lost New England; the elections in Pennsylvania and Ohio in October were even worse. When the political bloodletting had finished, the Republicans in the Fortieth Congress would have five more seats in the Senate and six more in the House\u2014and no reason in the upcoming final session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress to offer Johnson more than the frostiest welcome.\n\n\"If the President does not take the present terms,\" Iowa senator James W. Grimes gloomily informed Gideon Welles, \"harder ones will be proposed.\" But Andrew Johnson was no more inclined to yield in defeat than he had been in victory a year before. He kept vetoing legislation of various sorts\u2014bills covering everything from permission for a mining company to purchase public lands, to Colorado statehood\u2014and Congress merrily proceeded to override them. Congress did likewise with Trumbull's civil rights bill two weeks after Johnson's veto. A new bill for the Freedmen's Bureau, guaranteeing to the freedmen \"any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons,\" was vetoed by Johnson on July, 16, 1866; this time around, the Senate and the House overrode the veto within twenty-four hours.\n\nRelentlessly, Johnson kept banging his head against the Radicals' brick wall. In the annual message he sent to the second session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress in December, he criticized the failure \"to admit to seats loyal Senators and Representatives from... States whose inhabitants... had engaged in the rebellion.\" The rebel states \"are nothing less than States of the Union,\" he declared, and by refusing them recognition, Congress was standing in the way of \"the revival of fraternal relations, the complete obliteration of our past differences, and the reinauguration of all the pursuits of peace.\"\n\nHow Johnson could expect anyone to agree after the Memphis and New Orleans shoot-outs defied comprehension. But he continued to delude himself with the advice of cronies who whispered that Johnson's troubles were only the product of a conspiracy \"to thwart the President's great scheme of adjusting the Union.\" Ulysses Grant, now the general of the army, began to worry that Johnson would brand Congress as \"illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary.\" And there were vast rumors that Johnson was toying with the idea of preventing the Fortieth Congress from convening, after the pattern of the coup which brought Louis Napoleon to power in France in 1851, by employing the state militia of Maryland and putting \"Maryland and the District of Columbia under martial law.\"\n\nNothing came of this plan, however, because Johnson was weaker than he realized. Beginning in February 1867, Congress swept control of Reconstruction entirely out of executive hands with a series of four Reconstruction bills. The first dissolved the self-reconstructed governments and imposed an overlay of five military occupation districts on the one-time Confederate states (except for Tennessee). In each district, commandants would exercise plenary military and civilian rule \"to protect all persons in their rights of person and property, to suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence, and to punish... all disturbers of the public peace.\"\n\nThe second Reconstruction Act on March 23 made the commandants' principal responsibility the creation, for the first time in the history of American elections, of a registry of eligible voters whose qualifications\u2014namely, that they had \"never been a member of any State legislature, nor held any executive or judicial office in any State, and afterward engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof\"\u2014ensured that no ex-Confederates could participate. Only those eligible voters who met these requirements would then elect delegates to state conventions, and write state constitutions which would entitle them \"to representation, and senators and representatives\"\u2014but only if Congress agreed. The third and fourth Reconstruction Acts further defined how the commandants could unseat uncooperative civil officials, laid out schedules for the registration process, and established residency requirements.\n\nJohnson, of course, vetoed each bill, raging that they placed Americans \"under the absolute domination of military rulers.\" Congress overrode these vetoes, as well. Presidential-style Reconstruction was dead.\n\n# Chapter 3\n\n#  Arrogance: March 1867\u2013 May 1868\n\nFor the survivors of the defeated Confederacy, the first issue was simple survival. The war had wrecked the Southern economy beyond most implications of the word \"wrecked.\" \"Financial ruin seems to be universal,\" wailed the South Carolina planter, Henry William Ravenel. \"There was not a man in the place who was thirty years of age who had not fought in some capacity,\" wrote an up-country South Carolinian, \"and there was not a woman who had not gone hungry for weeks and badly clad for years.\"\n\nThe losses were so great that the numbers cease to register. In what Walt Whitman called \"the desolated, ruined South... nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty\" had been \"destroyed or maimed; the rich impoverished; the plantations covered with weeds; the slaves unloosed and become the masters; and the name of Southerner blackened with every shame.\" Emancipation alone had wiped between $1.6 and $2.7 billion of capital investment off the books. Per capita income in the South collapsed by more than 40 percent, and real estate fell in value, ranging from an 18 percent loss in Tennessee to a whopping 70 percent devaluation in Louisiana. A third of Southern livestock and half of the South's farm machinery had disappeared, and with them, the agriculture that depended on them, as land under cultivation shrank by 34 percent in South Carolina and 30 percent in Louisiana. Banking capital, much of it invested in Confederate securities, suffered losses of 28 percent, sending interest rates on what remained for borrowing through the few intact roofs. Total direct and indirect costs\u2014including the value of enslaved labor\u2014were probably close to $13.6 billion\u2014which does not even begin to convey the sense of demoralization that accompanied the losses. \"The whole country is alive with robbers,\" shivered one Tennessee woman. \"Every night we hear of a new robbery and sometimes murder.\"\n\nNo reconstruction would succeed which left the former Confederacy an impoverished shell, and victorious Northerners thought they knew exactly the sort of new economy that needed to be substituted for the old one. The great Republican goal of abolishing slavery was not entirely a crusade to right a racial injustice; abolishing slavery was not, in fact, much of a racial question at all, but rather an economic one. \"I see National glory in the future such as the past has never seen,\" rejoiced Benjamin Brown French, and not just because slavery is \"forever abolished,\" but because the South would soon be \"thriving under Free labor & Free rule! No more Cotton lords, but plenty of Cotton Commons, and all the land pouring out its productions & becoming immensely rich!\" The Union \"represents the principles of free labor,\" declared a New York pamphlet, and only when \"the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy\" was complete would the war be over.\n\nThe United States is truly the land\u2014the very paradise of labor.... Even capital, which in Europe controls labor, here becomes subordinate to and serves labor. It is the free and intelligent labor of the country that creates the Administration or the Government.... Whatever may be said against the doings and intrigues of the politicians, yet it is the highest honor of the system of government of the United States that Free labor\u2014that is to say, the equal right of all men to the pursuit of happiness\u2014has been recognized as the first natural and inalienable right.\n\nIn the most basic sense, \"free labor\" was simply a shorthand term for liberal economic democracy, of the same sort advocated by the \"Manchester School\" in Great Britain and by liberals in France, Italy, and Prussia in the mid-nineteenth century. Among free labor's fundamental tenets were the encouragement of small-scale manufacturing and industry, especially through government-sponsored \"internal improvements\" (in the form of canals, highways, and railroads); economic mobility, with constant movement up the ladder of classes; and the practice of a constellation of bourgeois virtues\u2014such as thrift, prudence, industry, religious faith, temperance, rationality, and nationalism\u2014which would thus dignify those whom the _New York American_ described as \"the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labors from the dust and turmoil of his workshop, to an abode of ease and elegance\" and \"the industrious tradesman, whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego the duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.\"\n\nIn the eyes of free-labor Republicans, the mistake of the South had been to allow the thousand-bale planters to turn the Enlightenment clock back, toward what was essentially a replica of medieval serfdom. \"Who knows,\" the _New-York Tribune_ had once asked, \"but we may see revived there the feudal tenures\u2014maiden-right, wardship, baronial robberies, the seizure of white children for the market, military service, and the horrible hardships of villenage which men have fondly deemed forever abolished.\" In the South, the ruling class of \"monarchists and aristocrats\" had shunned government-sponsored improvements, cultivated a style based on braggadocio, and held poor whites and black slaves in the grip of a permanent and oppressive hierarchy. \"There labor has been degraded,\" the _Chicago Tribune_ lamented, \"the laborer left untaught... thus converting half the Union into a charnel house of despotism, without a free religion, free speech, free press or free schools.\"\n\nThe war, however, had swept this \"despotism\" away, and the ash heaps that dotted the Southern countryside were blessings in disguise, since they could now be cleared for Northerners to introduce into the South a New England-style high type of culture\u2014what Republican periodicals like the _Continental Monthly_ described as \"the cultivated valley, the peaceful village, the church, the school-house, and thronging cities.\" The South \"under the old system\" was \"adverse to manufacturing and commercial enterprises.\" But now, the South's \"worn-out plantations will become thriving farms, its mines and inexhaustible water-powers will call into play the incessant demand and supply of vigorous industry and active capital.\"\n\nReconstruction would thus have twin aims: a \"reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black and white, in their persons,\" but, added Frederick Douglass, one which will also \"cause Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic.\" In John Greenleaf Whittier's vision, Reconstruction would\n\nThe cruel lie of caste refute,\n\nOld forms remould, and substitute\n\nFor Slavery's lash the freeman's will,\n\nFor blind routine, wise-handed skill;\n\nA school-house plant on every hill,\n\nStretching in radiate nerve-lines thence\n\nThe quick wires of intelligence;\n\nTill North and South together brought\n\nShall own the same electric thought,\n\nIn peace a common flag salute,\n\nAnd, side by side in labor's free\n\nAnd unresentful rivalry,\n\nHarvest the fields wherein they fought.\n\nThis was a vision captured by Thomas Nast's famous cartoon, \"Emancipation,\" whose ten vignettes hopefully pictured the full integration of the freedpeople into a middle-class future. Here was a bourgeois revolution\u2014not in the Marxist sense of being a necessary footstool to the \"real\" proletarian revolution, but an end in itself, as the triumph of rights and liberal democracy, an Enlightenment counterrevolution against what the Northern middle classes feared was the real wave of the future: namely, the renascence of oligarchy and monarchy.\n\nThe principal obstacle to realizing this dream was the refusal of the defeated Southern planter class to admit that it had been defeated. Whatever else had been lost, title to Southern lands remained in the hands of the same landowners who had owned them before the war. In western Alabama's \"Black Belt,\" 236 landowners possessed at least $10,000 in real estate in 1860 (with the median landholding amounting to 1,600 acres); by 1870, 101 of those landowners were still in possession\u2014which was about the same rate of persistence over time that had prevailed before the war. They, too, had lived by an ideology, but one composed of Romantic medievalism, Jeffersonian agrarianism, white supremacy, and a general suspicion of bourgeois ambitions. \"The typical Southerner,\" warned a contributor to the _Atlantic Monthly_ , \"possessed a... cast of character which was founded mainly on family, distinction, social culture, exemption from toil, and command over the lives and fortunes of his underlings.\" Free labor meant nothing to the planter, since \"it is the highest gentility in him not to work,\" and one Northern reporter believed that \"nine-tenths of the people must be taught that labor is not debasing.\"\n\nIf Johnson was fool enough to issue them a free pass, Frederick Douglass warned, Southerners would simply default to the prewar order of things, even after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment at the end of 1865, and especially if they were allowed to remain in possession of the lands they had owned before the war. \"Slavery is so strong that it could exist, not only without law, but even against law. Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South.\" Everything was governed by a pervasive and \"rigid spirit of caste.\" Black codes simply exchanged the legal reality of slavery for what Georgia planter William Hodgson called a \"state of serfage or ascription to the soil.\" In Georgia, \"colored people are not allowed to travel without passes from their former owners, while others still are afraid to acknowledge themselves free. In many places their meetings are broken up, and schools strictly forbidden... while in others murder and other horrid outrages are the ordinary suffering of our people.... Several who worked for a share of the crop were driven off, as soon as it was gathered.\"\n\nWorst of all, the great landowners seized on the Johnson amnesty to reclaim the lands the army had confiscated during the war and turned over to the freedmen. In 1865, William Tecumseh Sherman (through Special Field Order No. 15) set aside a thirty-mile-wide belt of four hundred thousand acres of prime rice- and cotton-growing land along the Georgia and South Carolina coast for forty thousand freedmen; in North Carolina, the military department commander ordered chaplain Horace James to \"take possession of all unoccupied lands\" on Roanoke Island \"and lay them out and assign them... to the families of colored soldiers... and other blacks in the employ of the Government\"; around Fortress Monroe in Virginia, contrabands simply set up for themselves on land abandoned by Confederate owners. \"The colored man is not content when given simple emancipation,\" lectured John Mercer Langston, \"he demands... to acquire, hold, and transmit property.\"\n\nThe end of the war, however, brought back the refugee landowners, and when they attempted to enforce legal title and evict the freedmen, angry confrontations ensued. George Benjamin West came home from the Confederate army \"without a cent of money,\" found \"30 axemen\" cutting wood on his father's land \"for Jerry Lee, a slave of my sister's,\" and chased them away. Elizabeth Allston's mother revisited her South Carolina plantation to demand the keys to the barns from the freedpeople who had occupied them. She had almost persuaded \"the head man\" to surrender the keys when a \"young man who had stood near, with a threatening expression sprang forward and shouted, 'Ef yu gie up de key, blood'll flow'... and a deafening clamor followed.\" The \"head man\" paused, then \"returned the keys to the depths of his pocket.\" On Edisto Island, in the Sherman Reserve, a group of landowners who tried to evict black squatters were told, \"You had better go back to Charleston and go to work there, and if you can do nothing else, you can pick oysters and earn your living as the loyal people have done\u2014by the sweat of their brows.\" On St. Catharine's Island, black farmers organized by a former hotel waiter named Tunis Campbell armed themselves to prevent the island's owner from regaining possession \"and would not allow any white person to land.\" In the lowlands of southern North Carolina, a mixed-race farmer named Henry Berry Lowry and a small band of fighters struck back at white landowners, raiding farms and disappearing into the swamps of the Pee Dee and Lumber Rivers.\n\nIt did little good. Samuel Thomas, who had commanded the Sixty-Fourth US Colored Troops during the war and in 1865 was named a Freedmen's Bureau commissioner in Vicksburg, Mississippi, warned that Southern whites \"still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the whites at large,\" and \"to take property away from a negro they do not consider robbery.\" The Roanoke Island freedmen lost control of their colony in 1866, and most of the freedmen moved away. Tunis Campbell was expelled to the Georgia mainland, and within ten years had been imprisoned on trumped-up charges. The Sherman Reservation shrank under lawsuits for reclaimed titles, until it amounted to no more than one-fifth of the original set-aside.\n\nIt did not help, either, that the freedpeople, at this early stage, had no press to advertise their needs or the injustices inflicted on them. Nor was there a large fund of politically experienced black leadership ready to take up the freedpeople's banner. In South Carolina, Robert Smalls made headlines during the war by boldly piloting the steamboat _Planter_ right past the noses of Charleston Confederates and into the hands of the US Navy; in Florida, Josiah Walls had served in the Thirty-Fifth United States Colored Troops; John Mercer Langston was born in Virginia, educated at Oberlin College, and actually won election as one of the first African American public officials in Ohio in 1855. But in many other places, black political leadership was condemned to emerge slowly, and in the teeth of white hostility as well as intra-racial jealousies and suspicion. \"In such a contest,\" sighed Mississippi's first black congressman, John Roy Lynch, \"they were neither organized nor armed.... They and their white allies were entirely at the mercy of their political adversaries.\"\n\nIf they could not defend their land, the freedmen found other ways to assert themselves. The one most often employed was simply to leave, especially for the towns and cities. Before the end of April, five thousand freed blacks were crowding into Montgomery, Alabama, and when Union soldiers \"advised them to stay with their old masters,\" they only replied, \"No, da was going to be free.\" A Boston correspondent near Macon, Georgia, discovered an old freedman living in a small hut, and when he found that the man had been born in Tennessee, the correspondent was curious to know why the man had come so far for so little. \"I likes to be a free man,\" the old man replied, \"whar Ise can go an' cum, an' nobody says not'ing.\"\n\nThose who did stay behind nevertheless wanted nothing more to do with \"the servile arts.\" Confederate general and would-be congressman Cullen Battle thought that James Alston, \"when he belonged to me... was quite an orderly negro.\" But since then, Battle was amazed to find Alston had become \"exceedingly turbulent and sometimes... over-bearing... and insolent in his manner toward white people.\" The Georgian, Frances Butler Leigh (the daughter of the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble), was furious to see that \"their whole manner was changed: they took to calling their former owners by their last name without any title before it... and tried speaking to me with their hats on, or not touching them to me when they passed me.\" Black women were particularly irritating to Southern whites, since \"the women do not like to work\u2014it is not ladylike.\"\n\nThe most remarkable improvisation of the freedpeople was the school. Northern abolitionists had been dispatching teachers as \"missionaries\" to runaways and contrabands since the first such contrabands had shown up at Fortress Monroe in 1861. By the end of the war, the American Missionary Association, the American Freedman's Union Commission, and the Methodist Freedman's Aid Society had become launching pads for teachers who endeavored to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children and adults alike. \"The pupils in Northern seminaries might often take a lesson from the pains with which these colored students... put into immediate use the lessons of the class-room,\" wrote Helen Ludlow, a teacher in the schools surrounding Fortress Monroe. In New Bern, North Carolina, \"nearly a thousand joyfully accepted the privilege\" of Freedmen's Bureau schools. Hostile whites \"chased and stoned\" teachers and pupils, but by 1866, there were 965 bureau schools across the South.\n\nBut nothing weakened the desire to own land. What the freedman wanted most, said Martin Delany, the black abolitionist, \"is a home\u2014one that he can call his own, and possess in fee simple.\" And the only agency likely to override the disaster of Johnson's amnesty and the truculence of the self-reconstructed state governments would be Congress.\n\nThis was exactly what Congress now proposed to do with the four Reconstruction bills it passed between February 1867 and March 1868. Andrew Johnson vetoed three of them; Congress overrode the vetoes and Johnson allowed the remaining bill to become law by refusing to respond, and the process of dissolving the self-reconstructed governments began. The Arkansas legislature adjourned on March 23, 1867, just as the Second Reconstruction Act was passed, and never reconvened; in Mississippi, the newly appointed commandant of what was now the Fourth Military District, Major General Edward O. C. Ord, allowed the state legislature to remain in session, but nothing could be done by it without his approval. With President Johnson's blessing, the Pierpont legislature in Virginia kept on sitting, too, but any further elections were suspended by the new commandant, Major General John Schofield, on April 2, and state offices were to be filled by military appointment.\n\nThe commandants, however, were merely a means, rather than an end. Under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, their principal task was to create an entirely new electorate in the South that carefully excluded recusant Confederates and their sympathizers among the white population, and certified the enfranchisement of the freedmen through the creation of vast registries of eligible voters. Major General John Pope began his registration program only a week after taking command in Georgia, dividing the state into forty-seven election districts and creating three-man registration boards (each was required to include two whites and one African American) to publish lists and issue certificates of registration. Pope's boards certified 188,000 voters in Georgia (as opposed to the 106,000 who voted in the 1860 presidential election), almost equally split between black and white; in Alabama (which also belonged to Pope's Third Military District), 165,000 voters were certified, split unevenly between 104,000 black voters and 61,000 white voters. General Ord completed registration in Mississippi by the beginning of September, certifying 106,000 voters in the state, 60,000 of them black. In South Carolina, 121,000 voters were recorded, with previously voiceless black South Carolinians now accounting for 79,000 and with black majorities in twenty-one of thirty-one election districts. Taken together, the registration process would identify 1.3 million voters in the five military districts\u2014and to the horror of white Southerners, 700,000 were black, with black majorities in five states.\n\nRegistration, in turn, was the signal for organization. In Georgia, the Freedmen's Bureau encouraged the creation of the Georgia Equal Rights Association, with its own weekly newspaper, the _Loyal Georgian_ , and a host of \"associations... in every town and neighborhood for the relief of [the] poor and suffering, and to see after the education of our children.\" In North Carolina, a statewide convention for a State Equal Rights league was called in October 1866. Union (or Loyal) Leagues, modeled after the wartime urban political organizations which had supported the Union war effort, appeared in Alabama and Mississippi \"and gave the negroes their first notions of parliamentary law and debating,\" as well as a taste of fighting back by creating Unionist para-military militias \"to murder or drive out... every man who sympathized with the Confederate cause.\"\n\nThe leagues then formed the foundation for organizing state Republican parties. Republican (or \"Union\") political conventions had met in Louisiana in 1865 and in Virginia in 1866; now, they sprouted biracial conventions in South Carolina a week after the passage of the first Reconstruction bill, in Houston in April, in Atlanta in May, and in Jackson, Mississippi, and Raleigh, North Carolina, in September. By October 1867, Republicans were congratulating themselves that \"there are forty thousand white men enrolled in the Leagues, and these, with the blacks, will give us the state in perpetuity if we are only wise.\"\n\nUnfortunately, they were too eager to believe. The principal defect of the Reconstruction Acts was that the five military districts were military, and thus presided over by commandants who had to be appointed by the president, given his position as commander in chief. Just how ready Andrew Johnson was to use this appointment power to his own ends became evident from the commandants he appointed: Ord, in the Fourth District, had once commanded black troops in the Army of the Potomac, but privately despised the Union Leagues and discouraged the freedmen's political gathering; John Schofield, in the First District (comprising Virginia), was convinced of \"the absolute unfitness of the negroes, as a class\" for \"an equal voice with ourselves in Government\"; Pope, who had threatened to close down all-white juries in Georgia, was abruptly removed from command in December 1867, and replaced by Major General George G. Meade, the hero of Gettysburg who was nevertheless utterly unsympathetic to the cause of black voting rights.\n\nPhilip Sheridan, who was installed at the head of the Fifth District (Louisiana and Texas), originally owed his appointment more to the concern of his chief and mentor, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant, for the possibility of war in Mexico to depose the French puppet emperor, Maximilian. Once in charge of the Fifth District, Sheridan acted swiftly to remove Louisianan officials whom he held responsible for the Mechanics Institute riot, starting with the mayor and police chief of New Orleans, twenty-two members of the city council, and finally the attorney general and the governor of the state. \"Game was scarce down that way then,\" Sheridan sarcastically remarked, \"and some gentlemen amused themselves by shooting negroes.... I stopped this sport and they loved me not.\" Johnson, likewise, quickly tired of Sheridan, and in August 1867 moved to replace him with Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, one of the most unapologetic Democrats in the Union army.\n\nCongressional Radicals had long suspected that Johnson would use his military authority to undermine the Reconstruction Acts, and Johnson did nothing to discourage the rumors by ordering the creation of a new military district to include the District of Columbia. \"If I should have trouble with Congress,\" Johnson had once asked Ulysses Grant, \"whose side would you support?\"\u2014a question loaded enough to confirm every suspicion the Radicals had about Johnson's plans for a coup. On the same day that Congress passed the first Reconstruction bill, it also overrode a presidential veto of a Tenure of Office Act, forbidding the president to dismiss civil servants \"until a successor shall have been in like manner appointed and duly qualified... with the advice and consent of the Senate,\" and then adopted an army appropriations bill that compelled the president to issue all orders to the army through the commanding general.\n\nSheridan was not a civil servant, but he did enjoy at least the limited protection of the army appropriations bill. So Johnson had to order Grant to perform the dismissal of Sheridan, which Grant was very reluctant to do. Only after arguing with Johnson and warning the president that Sheridan was \"universally, and deservedly, beloved by the people who sustained this government through its trials,\" did he finally obey.\n\nSheridan was only one target. At the same time, Johnson charged straight at the Tenure of Office Act by \"suspending\" his increasingly uncooperative secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and replacing him with Grant as interim secretary. Grant, who by now wanted nothing to do with anything that looked like cooperation with Johnson, tried to decline, and when the Fortieth Congress assembled on December 2, it quickly became clear that they would disallow Stanton's suspension. On January 14, 1868, with ill-concealed relief, Grant surrendered the keys to the War Department and Stanton returned to his office. Infuriated, Johnson ordered the adjutant general of the army, Lorenzo Thomas, to evict Stanton. The temperamental secretary instead barricaded himself in his office, defying repeated summonses from Thomas to surrender. In the end, though, it was Johnson who surrendered. On February 21, John Covode of Pennsylvania rose in the House of Representatives to offer a resolution, that \"Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors.\"\n\n4. On March 4, 1868, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presided as the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson opened in the Senate chamber. \"A large crowd filled the galleries and corridors, making the trial a public spectacle.\"\n\nCongress had used its impeachment powers (under Article 2, section 4, of the Constitution) on only five occasions; only twice had the House of Representatives ever considered impeaching a sitting president, and those discussions had been, in an eerie parallel, about John Tyler in 1843 and (by motion of the same John Covode) James Buchanan in 1860. But Radicals in (and beyond) Congress had been talking about impeaching Andrew Johnson for two years. \"The president should long ago have been impeached,\" declared _The Nation_ in 1866, and Ohio representative James Ashley made repeated motions for impeachment in January and March 1867. But the Radicals were not able to persuade the rest of the Republican caucus to trigger a constitutional crisis until Johnson, by sending Thomas to replace Stanton, clearly defied the Tenure of Office Act.\n\n\"The country was buzzing with rumors of iniquities which Johnson was meditating and would surely attempt if he were not disarmed,\" remembered Carl Schurz. \"There was a widespread feeling among well-meaning and sober people that the country was really in some sort of peril.\" Grudgingly, the reluctant yielded. After three days of \"excited eloquence\" and a final damning speech by Thaddeus Stevens, while \"a driving storm of hail and sleet\" raged outside, the House impeached Andrew Johnson on a straight party-line vote of 126 to 47. But Stevens and the House managers of the ensuing trial in the Senate were unable to elevate Johnson's disregard of the Tenure of Office Act to the level of \"high crimes and misdemeanors.\" By April, it was clear that the Senate would fail to convict, and on May 16, the Senate was unable to muster the necessary two-thirds majority to convict Johnson of the primary charge. Ten days later, the remaining charges also fell short.\n\nAndrew Johnson had survived, but barely, and his presidency, even with ten months remaining in his term, was from that point on as good as over.\n\n# Chapter 4\n\n#  Resistance: May 1868\u2013 March 1869\n\nThe year 1868 should have been the high moment of achievement for Reconstruction. The four Reconstruction Acts reversed the disastrous self-reconstruction initiatives of 1865, and Andrew Johnson had been resoundingly rebuked, if not actually convicted, by an impeachment trial. The Southern states, politically purged of disloyal whites and abundant with freedmen primed to assume a major role, now proceeded to organize a new round of state conventions (known with unintended humor as the \"black-and-tan\" conventions), which would write a new round of state constitutions, guaranteeing a new order of free labor and liberal democracy in the old Confederacy.\n\nIn Alabama, Republicans easily dominated the state convention called under General Pope's oversight. Ninety-six of the 100 delegates were Republicans, and 18 were black. The convention's president, Elisha W. Peck, was born in New York, moved to Alabama in the 1820s, and was forced to flee the state for Illinois during the war. Mississippi's new convention met in January 1868, with 97 delegates, all but 18 of them safely Republican, and chaired by Beroth Eggleston, a transplanted Ohioan and former Union general. North Carolina's convention also met in January, and also with a lopsided Republican majority, 107 to 13, 15 of whom were black.\n\nThe fall of 1868 would also mean another presidential and congressional election season. It was clear that Andrew Johnson had no political future with the Republicans, but few Democrats were eager to welcome him back to the party's ranks, much less nominate him for a second term. A few Tennessee admirers put his name up at the Democratic national convention in July anyway, but after twenty-two ballots the Democrats nominated former New York governor Horatio Seymour, and Johnson ended the convention with only four votes. \"I have experienced ingratitude so often,\" he complained, still in self-crucifixion mode, \"that any result will not surprise me.\"\n\nLike John Tyler before him, Johnson had become a pariah in the eyes of both parties. Meanwhile, the Republicans had the strongest possible presidential candidate waiting in the wings: the war-winning general Ulysses Grant, who had been edging closer and closer to the Radicals as Andrew Johnson grew nearer and nearer to impeachment. When the Republican National Convention went to balloting for a nominee, there was no question that \"there is not one loyal heart,\" declared the New York state delegation, \"that does not beat in unison with the sentiment that calls upon us to select that great chieftain.\" Grant was unanimously nominated by all 650 delegates, \"with swinging hats and waving handkerchiefs\" and a spontaneous chorus of \"The Battle Cry of Freedom,\" and went on in November to win the presidency by 300,000 votes and a 214 to 80 victory in the electoral college.\n\nEven before the election, congressional reconstruction was bringing Southern states back into the Union, this time firmly under Republican control. Between June 22 and July 15, Congress readmitted seven of the ten rebel states\u2014Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and North and South Carolina\u2014under new constitutions. South Carolina's constitution enfranchised any \"resident of this State\" who was also a \"male citizen of the United States, of the age of twenty-one years and upwards... without distinction of race, color or former condition,\" and forbade the state legislature from passing \"any law that will deprive any of the citizens of this State of the right of suffrage, except for treason, murder, robbery or dueling, whereof the persons shall have been duly tried and convicted.\" And there was serious discussion of appealing to the federal government for a loan of $1 million to be used in buying land for the freedmen. \"There is but one way to make a man love his country,\" argued Franklin J. Moses, an ex-Confederate who had transformed himself into a Radical Republican, \"Give them lands; give them houses.\"\n\nThe most startling aspect of the new state governments was the role played by African Americans. Of the eighty-four Republicans in the lower house of the Georgia legislature, twenty-nine were black. In Arkansas, eight were black, and the average age was thirty-seven; five were biracial, three were ministers, three were farmers, and one was a postmaster. Florida elected fifty-three members to its lower house, thirty-seven of them Republican, and of those Republicans, seventeen were African American. In North Carolina, sixteen African Americans were elected to the state House of Representatives and three to the state Senate. As a group, they impressed a _New York Times_ correspondent as possessing \"by long odds the largest share of mental calibre.\" By contrast, \"there is scarcely a Southern white man\" sitting in the state offices \"who has character enough to keep him out of the Penitentiary.\"\n\nOnly a little less startling were the numbers of Northerners who heeded the call for a culturally transformed South and reinvented themselves as missionaries of free labor. John Townsend Trowbridge, a journalist who journeyed through the South in 1865, warned that converting the white population to free labor principles would be an uphill battle. He found it \"impossible for the people of Mississippi\u2014and the same may be said of the Southern people generally\u2014to understand the first principle of the free-labor system.\" For generations, Southern whites had been taught to believe that labor was \"beneath the dignity of a gentleman.\" But Reconstruction, wrote Albion Tourg\u00e9e, now offered a means of refashioning the entire labor system of the South\u2014provided the South was \"desouthernized and thoroughly nationalized\" by importing a new white population to replace the old planter class and act as missionaries of the free labor cause.\n\n**Reconstruction by State**\n\nStates reconstructed under the Reconstruction Acts | Readmitted to the Union  \n---|---  \nArkansas  |  June 22, 1868   \nFlorida  |  June 25, 1868   \nLouisiana  |  June 25, 1868   \nNorth Carolina  |  July 4, 1868   \nSouth Carolina  |  July 9, 1868   \nAlabama  |  July 14, 1868   \nVirginia  |  January 26, 1870   \nMississippi  |  February 23, 1870   \nTexas  |  March 30, 1870   \nGeorgia  |  July 15, 1870\n\nTourg\u00e9e was an example of how eager Northerners were to help this process along. Born in Ohio and educated in New York, Tourg\u00e9e had served in an Ohio regiment, endured the sufferings of Richmond's Libby Prison as a prisoner of war, and settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end of the war in order to find relief in a warmer climate for a wound that had damaged his spine. He opened a law office and became president of a small wood-handle business, the Snow Turning Company, whose success left him \"perfectly thunderstruck at the profits,\" as well as the good wages paid to its largely black workforce. John Hay, who had been Lincoln's private secretary, was another example. Hay had been sent in 1864 to register Southerners willing to take the oath of allegiance, and came away sufficiently intrigued by Florida (\"It is the only thing that smells of the Original Eden on the Continent\") that he bought land to grow oranges near St. Augustine. Albert T. Morgan, who had been a student at Oberlin College at the war's beginning and served in the Second Wisconsin at Gettysburg, had a vision of \"a tide of thrifty emigrants and others with capital settling southward,\" and within twenty-five years making \"the two million people of the Mississippi lowlands twenty millions, and in a century a hundred millions.\" Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ , bought orange groves near Jacksonville, moved South, and created a free-labor colony around the village of Mandarin.\n\n5. Civil rights legislation under congressional reconstruction admitted blacks to jury service in southern states alongside whites for the first time. The _New York Times_ observed: \"The sensation is peculiar... to see a Court in session, where former slaves sit side by side with their old owners in the jury, where white men are tried by a mixed jury, where colored lawyers plead, and where white and colored officers maintain order. But this is done at every Court, and justice is not overwhelmed.\"\n\nDisgruntled Southern whites stigmatized the free-labor apostles as carpetbaggers, a nickname that sprang into usage in late 1867, after the first of the \"black and tan\" conventions met in Alabama, to describe a Northerner \"who turns up here and there and everywhere,\" like a cheap valise made from carpet remnants in-hand, \"ready to run for office or to do any other job that will pay expenses.\" Nevertheless, this Northern free-labor vanguard supplied twenty-eight of the fifty-one white delegates to South Carolina's constitutional convention in 1868 and another thirty-eight to the one hundred delegates at Alabama's constitutional convention. The new governors of Georgia (Rufus Bullock), Louisiana (Henry Clay Warmoth), and South Carolina (Robert K. Scott) were Northerners; of the two hundred office holders appointed by Governor Harrison Reed in Florida, fifty were Northern-born, and Reed himself had only arrived in the state in 1865. \"We are, in fact and from absolute necessity, transplanting the whole South with the higher Civilization of the North,\" rejoiced Frederick Douglass. \"The New England schoolhouse is bound to take the place of the Southern whipping post.\"\n\nIn hindsight, it is clear that it all happened too fast. Little more than a year elapsed between the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the readmission of the first seven Southern states, and during that time, voter registration had to be carried out, the old Confederate power structure dismantled or disabled, state constitutional conventions called and constitutions written, and elections held for both state and federal legislatures\u2014not to mention a presidential election as well. In the absence of any clear blueprints for rebuilding an entire political order, much was going to be overlooked, and the overlooking would provide uncertain foundations for further rebuilding. Worse, in the welter of political reordering, little was done to address the problem of land ownership, the restructuring of commerce, or the reorganization of public resources.\n\nNot that the new state governments would get much direction from the national executive. Andrew Johnson continued to stick stubbornly to the path of noncooperation, vetoing bills until his last day in office, issuing a blanket amnesty to former Confederates on Christmas Day 1868, and declining to participate in his successor's inauguration. At least there was little more harm Johnson could do by that point, apart from writing a stinging farewell address that described the Reconstruction Acts as a \"catalogue of crimes\" against the Constitution. His Christmas \"universal amnesty and pardon\" would only relieve the last ex-Confederates (including Jefferson Davis, still under indictment for treason but free on bail since 1867) of federal criminal penalties; the political exclusions written into the new state constitutions would remain in place.\n\nMuch greater difficulties were generated by fumbles in the actual implementation of the new Reconstruction regimes. For one thing, the exclusions in the Reconstruction Acts were intended to remove large numbers of disgruntled and disenfranchised ex-Confederates from political participation, but the registration process proved easy to game and most of the military governors indulgent. Only 14 state officials from self-reconstruction out of 342 were removed in Arkansas, and only 12 in North Carolina. In 1860, 62,000 votes were cast in the presidential election, all of them, of course, by white voters; in 1868, the total number of registered whites had shrunk to only 57,000, alongside 47,000 new black voters. White Louisianans had tallied 50,000 votes in 1860; the number of registered white voters in 1867 sank only to about 45,000, beside 84,000 black Louisianans.\n\nBut those ex-Confederates sidelined by the registration process could still find ways to bring public attention to their political positions. In Georgia, unbowed Democrats met to denounce \"the effort to establish the supremacy of the negro race in the South, and to place the destinies of those states in the hands of adventurers and irresponsible persons,\" and nominated the ex-Confederate General John B. Gordon (who had taken the Johnson oath in 1865) for governor. The Republican nominee, Rufus Bullock, defeated Gordon, 83,000 votes to 76,000. But it was worth noticing that in 1860, a total of 116,000 votes had been cast by white Georgians, which meant that Bullock had been elected largely on the strength of black voter turnout, and that 48 percent of the reconstructed Georgia electorate had chosen his opponent. Not that white Republicans always proved steadfast, either: no sooner had Georgia Republicans taken control of the Georgia legislature than, with the connivance of the military commandant, George Meade, they turned away three black state senators and twenty-nine black representatives on the flimsy assertion that the state constitution made no provision for black legislators; in Arkansas, the state constitutional convention enfranchised black voters but then debated criminalizing interracial marriage.\n\n6. The New York Democratic party distributed this campaign card to white voters during the 1868 presidential election. It advised \"White Men of New York\" that \"the Republicans, in Convention, declared in favor of Negro Suffrage,\" that \"they want Negro children to be educated in the same schools with White Children,\" and \"have exempted from taxation the Bonds of the rich [as] class legislation.\"\n\nA more direct problem was created by the determination of Southern whites to impose a kind of counter-disfranchisement on blacks through intimidation. In a hierarchical society, honor had always been a volatile component of politics, and Southerners displayed a cultural weakness for a rush to the sword whenever honor was challenged. Whipping, rape, starvation, and murder had long been the chief means of controlling nearly four million slaves, whether it was the routine application of physical punishment by owners or overseers, or the slave patrols organized from slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike to stop and investigate blacks found, for any reason, off the plantation. And, the war itself had immersed numbers of Southerners in guerrilla warfare, partly against Union forces but just as often against each other, and brought new recruits to a long-time strategy for settling regional differences across the South.\n\nThe practices of patrolling for slaves and guerrilla warfare now passed easily over into terrorism. \"If persecution and confiscation are to follow,\" Confederate clerk J. B. Jones heard one Confederate official prophesy in 1865, \"instead of organized armies we shall have bands of assassins everywhere in the field, and the stiletto and the torch will take the place of the sword and the musket\u2014and there can be no solid reconstruction.\" With over half a million paroled Confederate veterans at large\u2014mostly unemployed and smoldering with resentments\u2014large pools of clandestine white resistance easily sprang to life: the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Society of Pale Faces in Tennessee, the Regulators in Florida, and the Constitutional Guards in Virginia. They made no effort to conceal their intention to recapture control of their states by white Democrats. The mission of the White League, as \"the white man's party,\" was to \"rescue Louisiana from the polluting embraces of... a hybrid pack of lecherous pimps... brought forth in pollution, nursed by filthy horbies, and dropped in Louisiana to show to the world to what depth of corruption, disgrace and infamy human nature can stoop.\"\n\nFresh riots broke out in Georgia, where five cases of Henry repeating rifles were used by local Democrats to attack a Republican rally in Camilla, killing nine, and in Louisiana, accompanied by over a thousand murders between November 1867 and Election Day in 1868. In St. Landry Parish, in the town of Opelousas, between two hundred and three hundred blacks were killed, and black prisoners in the parish jail were marched out and executed. \"The negroes all over the Parish have been disarmed, and have gone to work briskly,\" rejoiced a Democratic newspaper. \"Their loyal league clubs and been broken up\" and \"St. Landry is quiet for the first time since the War.\"\n\nThe tactics of these white resistance groups could include economic bullying as well as political violence. \"Thousands of negroes had liens on their crops released, land rented them at nothing, supplies promised for next year, or money paid them outright in consideration of their turning democrats, or of staying away from the polls,\" reported the _Atlantic Monthly._ Those who could not be bought could be ruined, and at election times, \"the torch began its terrible work all over the country.\" Likewise, white Northerners who employed freedmen\u2014and who were thus drawing black Southerners away from labor peonage under the old masters\u2014could find their properties and improvements reduced to cinders in the night, or their workers waylaid and beaten to force them back to the cotton fields.\n\nThe most infamous of these white jacobins was the Ku Klux Klan, whose \"night visits and whippings and murders was the legitimate offspring of the patrol.\" Originally organized in Tennessee in 1866 as a carnivalesque club with a Greek-style name similar to a fraternity (\u03ba\u03cd\u03ba\u03bb\u03bf\u03c2 simply means \"circle\"), the club's hijinks concealed a profound racial hatred of blacks and a determination to overthrow Reconstruction. The Klan quickly became, by 1867, a night-riding posse, complete with graveyard costumes, bizarre ranks and titles, and a mission (as Nashville editor S. C. Mercer described it in 1868) to \"overawe union men, both black and white\" and \"put the negro in a semi-serf condition.\"\n\nDespite their grotesque rituals and preposterous outfits (in Alabama, Charles E. Robert saw them wearing \"a red gown, trimmed with white braid; pants of the same; high hat, with vail over the face; holes for the eye and mouth\"), the Klan spread by both extension and imitation. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the rough-hewn Confederate general who had presided over the massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow in 1864, and who became the unofficial head of the Klan in 1867, estimated that the Klan could count forty thousand members in Tennessee and more than half a million in the rest of the South. In \"small squads of masked men\" or in battalions of \"two or three hundred masked and mounted men,\" they broke into houses; shot, whipped, and raped the inhabitants; and warned any freedmen who \"thought we were all free; that we could vote,\" that \"we will stop all of that.\" In Tennessee, between three thousand and four thousand black refugees escaping Klan violence streamed into Nashville in 1868; on June 13, hooded Klansmen armed with pistols and ropes even hijacked a passenger train in Columbia, Tennessee, searching the cars for a Republican congressman.\n\nIt was hard to ascertain whom the Klan hated most: the freedmen, the carpetbaggers, or home-grown Southern unionists (who received their own title at the same time: \"scalawags\"). In most states, the scalawags were drawn from the tiny prewar Southern bourgeoisie\u2014lawyers, journalists, physicians\u2014and more often than not, they had received Northern educations. In Louisiana, out of 172 prominent unionists who turned Republican, 65 percent had been born in the North or other countries. Even though they had long resided in the South, to their unreconciled neighbors they were nothing but turncoats who had gone \"over to the republicans for the sake of office or plunder.\" But James L. Orr, who had once been Speaker of the US House and a member of the Confederate Senate, retorted that the South's past was nothing to be proud of, and that what he wanted for his home state of South Carolina was \"the material prosperity of New England. I would have her acres teem with life and vigor and industry and intelligence, as do those of Massachusetts.\"\n\n7. This Ku Klux Klan party was captured in eastern North Carolina in August, 1871, by Deputy US Marshal Joseph G. Hester as they were attempting to lynch \"a strict and earnest\" Republican, John Campbell. Hester had the group photographed in Raleigh so that \"the people at large may know... what a Ku Klux tribunal looks like.\"\n\nAt least scalawags like Orr could claim some prior political experience; it was, in the end, inexperience which proved a deadlier poison in Reconstruction's cup than murderous white violence. Of the twelve carpetbaggers elected to Congress from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, only one had ever held political office; all but two had been army officers who decided to stay in the South at the end of the war as merchants or landowners. Of the carpetbagger governors\u2014Powell Clayton (Arkansas), Adelbert Ames (Mississippi), Rufus Bullock (Georgia), Harrison Reed (Florida), Henry C. Warmoth (Louisiana), Robert Scott (South Carolina), and Gilbert Walker (Virginia)\u2014not a single one had previously been active in politics. This created a deep well of political amateurism, the mistakes of which would be held up as proof across the country of the political evil of the entire Reconstruction project and used to obscure the despotic behavior of Southern resisters. In Georgia, Rufus Bullock quarreled with John Emory Bryant, the president of the Georgia Equal Rights Association; the Mississippi scalawag governor, James Lusk Alcorn, tried to win over his one-time rebel friends, which brought him into direct conflict with the Maine-born Adelbert Ames. Louisiana's Republicans split over control of office appointments in the federal customs house in New Orleans, leading to the impeachment of Governor Warmoth, and the attempted assassination of Warmoth's successor, William Pitt Kellogg.\n\nInexperience also created manifold opportunities for factionalism, swapping political favors, and most dangerous of all, a willingness to seek alliances with ex-Confederates on the \"the enemy of my enemy is my friend\" principle. Corruption, too, was a problem: Florida's Republicans were \"solid citizens,\" recalled black journalist T. Thomas Fortune, whose father sat in the legislature; but they also had \"wide-open eyes to the main chance, which was not always reached by the straight and narrow, and much crooked business went on which helped to bring the Reconstruction government into disrepute.\"\n\nDominating all these political weaknesses was the political situation of the new president, Ulysses S. Grant. No one's reputation stood higher with Northerners after Lincoln's death than Grant's; \"The election of Grant as President of the United States\" was seen by John Langdon Sibley as the occasion for \"great rejoicings by the Republican party, in as much as it indicates a purpose to put an end to the unrighteous alliance of the Democratic party of the North with the rebel spirit at the South, which still lingers with the hope that this combination will again put the southerners in the political ascendance.\" Yet, even though Grant won the presidency with 58 percent of the popular vote, he lost New York by ten thousand votes, and New York City by sixty thousand votes. Five states had given him victory margins of less than 5 percent, and Democrats had gained twenty-two seats in the House of Representatives. Even where Republicans managed to hold seats in Congress, the margins of victory were unnervingly thin. Nor could it save some of Radical Republicanism's most favored sons. In Ohio, James Ashley (who had led the charge to impeach Andrew Johnson) was beaten with only 48 percent in his district, while Ashley's coadjutor in Radical Republicanism, John Bingham, survived by only 416 votes. Four governorships fell into Democratic hands; in Maryland, every state legislative district and all five US representatives went Democratic, while in New Jersey, three of the five congressional districts elected Democrats, and Democrats held the state legislature.\n\nThe Democratic Party was, in fact, already entering a period of recovery that turned out to be remarkable in its speed and extent, and both Northern and Southern Democrats would soon enough find common cause in shaking off the hated rule of Republicans. In another year, this would convince former Confederates to stop hammering their fists against Republican walls, and look instead to promoting fissures in Republican unity, and wooing the weak-kneed and disenchanted to some new banner.\n\n# Chapter 5\n\n#  Distraction: March 1869\u2013 May 1872\n\nUlysses Grant's 1868 presidential campaign slogan, \"Let us have peace,\" was a study in vagueness\u2014and not without reason, since Grant believed that \"in times like the present it is impossible... to lay down a policy to be adhered to, right or wrong, through an Administration of four years.\" This was intended as a statement of flexibility, but it could also be read as an attempt to duck hard decisions. His inaugural address on March 4, 1869, was only 1,100 words long; nearly half of it was devoted to his goal of liquidating the national debt: \"Principal and interest, as well as the return to a specie basis as soon as it can be accomplished without material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large.\" He spent more time on promising \"the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land\u2014the Indians\" than he did on \"the question of suffrage\" in the South.\n\nThe day after his inauguration, he sent his list of cabinet appointees to the Senate for confirmation, and the national gasp of dismay was almost audible. \"The announcement of the Cabinet has caused a general commotion,\" declared the _Chicago Tribune_ , and no wonder: his old political sponsor, Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, was given leadership over the State Department, despite his reputation as \"coarse, comparatively illiterate, a demagogue without statesmanship or enlarged views,\" and two political unknowns\u2014Alexander Stewart, a New York multimillionaire, and Adolph Borie\u2014were given the nod for treasury and the navy. At least, Grant nominated for attorney general the well-respected Massachusetts jurist E. Rockwood Hoar. But Borie was so little known that one editor burst out in frustration, \"The Hon. Adolph E. Bovie [sic], Secretary of the Navy, is\u2014is\u2014well, who in hell is Bovie, anyway?\" Stewart withdrew his own nomination on March 9; Borie was gone by June; and Elihu Washburne, after eleven days as secretary of state, resigned and was bundled out of the country as American minister to France.\n\n\"No one doubted that Grant's intention had been one of reform; that his aim had been to place his administration above politics,\" Henry Adams recalled. The real problem was with Grant himself. \"Grant appeared as an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake.\" But \"for stretches of time his mind seemed torpid,\" and at those times he appeared \"simple-minded beyond the experience of Wall Street or State Street.\" Grant did not initiate policies so much as react to crises. Never having held political office before, he displayed a fatal naivet\u00e9 about people and government and allowed his inner circle of advisors and secretaries to direct affairs until embarrassment over their corruption or their folly roused him to action. There was never any doubt that he was well intentioned, especially on the subject of the freedpeople's rights\u2014he declared the protection of black voting rights to be \"a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day,\" and he was the first president to employ black diplomats (to Haiti and Liberia). Yet he could also be inert in protecting those rights until they were actually assaulted and utterly blind to the incompetence and dissimulation of the officials he appointed to public trusts. Grant was, in the unforgiving eyes of Gideon Welles, \"a pitiable object, wholly unfit for his position, the duties of which he no more comprehends now, than when he was acting as porter in his brother's store in Galena, or carting wood in St. Louis.\"\n\nOn the day Grant was sworn in as president, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia were still under military rule, per the first of the 1867 Reconstruction Acts. Nor did it look like they would be making any significant steps toward restoration any time soon. In Mississippi, an election under self-reconstruction had installed former Confederate general Benjamin Humphreys as governor. The military governor under congressional Reconstruction, Edward Ord, kept Humphreys in place until a new constitutional convention could produce a fresh document, have it ratified by the registered voters, and hold elections. But already, anti-Republican resistance was stiffening. A convention of Mississippi Democrats meeting in Jackson organized themselves as the Democratic White Man's Party. They denounced the \"nefarious design of the Republican party to place the white men of the Southern states under governmental control of... the African negro,\" and called \"upon the people of Mississippi to vindicate alike the superiority of their race\"\u2014which they did, by rejecting the new state constitution, 63,000 to 56,000.\n\nMeanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan tracked down Northern-born schoolmasters (Allen P. Huggins was whipped and warned to leave Monroe County in ten days), invaded courthouses (and killed the judge, E. L. Bramlette, in Meridian), and kidnapped uncooperative blacks (in Sumter County). The situation came so close to chaos that in the summer of 1868, Humphreys was unceremoniously evicted from the governor's mansion by military order and replaced by Adelbert Ames, a Maine abolitionist and the son-in-law of Benjamin Butler, who had infuriated Southerners with his strict occupation policies as military governor of New Orleans during the war, and encouraged fugitive slaves by welcoming them as \"contraband of war.\" Ames went at his work with a vengeance, dismissing sixty sheriffs, seventy-two judges, fifty mayors, and even local constables. The state constitution was resubmitted, and James Lusk Alcorn, who had sat in the 1861 secession convention but was now (as W. E. B. Du Bois described him) \"the most advanced reconstructionist,\" was duly elected governor.\n\nBut instead of these confrontations signaling caution to him, Grant proposed to move ahead as swiftly as possible to restore the remaining Southern states. Although Reconstruction \"has not met with the success in all particulars that might have been desired,\" as he conceded in his first annual message to Congress on December 6, 1869, \"on the whole they have been more successful than could have been reasonably anticipated\"\u2014a judgment that might have surprised a number of people on the ground in the South. Nevertheless, Virginia's legislature, at least, had met all the technical expectations of Reconstruction, and thus was entitled once more to send representatives and senators to Congress. Texas and Mississippi were at that moment in the middle of holding elections, and Grant hoped that \"the acts of the legislatures of these States, when they meet, will be such as to receive your approval, and thus close the work of reconstruction.\"\n\nGrant might have had more difficulty in persuading Congress to readmit the last hold-out states had it not been for the changes Congress itself had undergone. The old Radical guard was still represented in the Senate by Zachariah Chandler, Jacob Howard, Lyman Trumbull, Charles Sumner, and Henry Wilson. But Benjamin Wade was gone\u2014the Ohio legislature had been captured by Democrats in the 1867 state elections, which doomed his chances for reelection\u2014as was old Jacob Collamer, who died in 1866, and William Pitt Fessenden, who died in the fall of 1869. In the House of Representatives, the single most Radical voice of them all was stilled with the death of Thaddeus Stevens on August 11, 1868. As one by one the veterans of the Radical struggle fell silent, the expectations for a radical Reconstruction shrank as well, and Grant himself became the new radical baseline. The _New York Herald_ 's reporter noticed that, during the reading of Grant's message aloud by the clerk of the House of Representatives, \"some one on the floor said, 'Well, that's radical enough.' \" And indeed it was, under these new circumstances. On January 24, 1870, the House passed an enabling bill to readmit Virginia by a lopsided 136 to 58 vote; Grant signed it two days later. Mississippi followed a month later, Texas a month after that, and Georgia, at last, on July 15, 1870.\n\nThis should have marked the conclusion of Reconstruction, and officially, it did\u2014except that the Republican governments in the Southern statehouses were fragile and unstable and led by political nonentities willing to do anything to retain their offices. In Georgia, Rufus Bullock forgot the promises he had made to black Georgians and courted alliances with Georgia Democrats; they, in turn, cheerfully used Bullock to obtain majorities in the Georgia legislature in 1870 and then moved to impeach him. Franklin J. Moses, the Speaker of the South Carolina House and later governor, was described by Josephus Woodruff, the clerk of the state senate, as \"a blackmailer\" with \"no conscience\"; Francis Cardozo, South Carolina's secretary of state and the first African American to occupy a state office in Reconstruction, was a man whom Woodruff said \"nobody ever knew to keep his word.\" They were more incompetent than corrupt; and the corrupt among them were not more corrupt than the slaveholding regimes that had preceded them. But incompetence and corruption were not what the hour called for, and the political corner-cutting that seemed routine under prewar state governments was now denounced as unholy fraud by disenfranchised whites and Democrats.\n\nThe Republican South was also economically shaky. During the five years since the end of the war, the crusade for a free labor economy in the former Confederacy had barely taken its first steps. The South owned only 12 percent of the nation's mills and factories, and employed only 7 percent of its population as laborers in those establishments. Cotton agriculture remained, as it had been before the war, the producer of the republic's single most valuable export commodity (some 32 percent of all exports as late as 1889). And no wonder: while commodity prices for wheat, corn, and coal had operated (except during the war years) within fairly narrow ranges, cotton was selling above all its prewar highs; in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, cotton acreage and production expanded, employing a black labor force indistinguishable from that under slavery. Great Britain still bought 58 percent of the cotton it imported for textile manufacturing from the United States, and that would continue to rise through 1876.\n\nStruggling to jump-start a New Englandized economy, Southern Republicans spent unprecedented amounts of money on internal improvements, including railroads, turnpikes, and public education. Alabama and Texas doubled their railroad mileage between 1866 and 1872; Arkansas, which counted only thirty-eight miles of railroad at the end of the war, had 258 by 1872. The number of elementary and secondary schools more than doubled in Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida between 1870 and 1879; in Georgia, the number quadrupled.\n\nBut the railroads were not, as it turned out, a magic bullet. Construction costs for railroads fluctuated between $30,000 and $50,000 per mile, and new rail lines built on speculation folded as fast as they were finished. In the Natchez district, six new railroad companies were established in the early 1870s; all of them failed. Georgia's state-owned railroad, the Western & Atlantic, plunged the state into $750,000 worth of debt in two years. And the Ku Klux Klan, seeing the railroads as the agents of Northern free labor, made railroad repair shops and new construction sites the targets of murderous raids\u2014not the least because the railroads hired freedmen. In North Carolina's Alamance County, the Klan accounted for twelve murders and fourteen arsons on railroad property in one twelve-month period.\n\nNor were the schools entirely successful. Literacy would be critical to the economic and political awakening of the freedpeople, and their Republican allies, in the form of the Freedmen's Bureau and the American Missionary Association (AMA) moved south even before the end of the war to open schools. But the resistance they met was intimidating. When the AMA's William L. Coan left Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1865 to open a freedpeoples' school in Lexington, Virginia, he was assaulted at a train station at Gordonsville. Coan persevered, and opened an AMA school in Lexington for three hundred freedpeople of all ages. But he was constantly harassed, his landlady was forced to leave Lexington, and the school's meetings were disrupted by rowdy cadets from the nearby Virginia Military Institute. Once Southern states were legally reconstructed, the costs of education were shifted to the new Republican legislatures, but they were frequently unprepared to accept the fiscal burden the schools represented. In Southern states where no public schooling systems had existed before the war, the construction and staffing costs were staggering. In Mississippi alone, 432 schoolhouses were built in just the 1871\u201372 fiscal year; the teaching staffs alone numbered 4,800, and the overall cost for funding the Mississippi system was just over a million dollars. Nor were the schools always welcomed by African Americans who could ill afford to pay fees and teachers. \"You preachers and teachers are hard on us,\" one old man complained to Charles W. Chestnutt, a teacher (and the grandson of a slaveowner who could have easily \"passed\" as white and later became a major American novelist). \"You want us to pay you thirty or forty dollars a month for sitting in the shade, and that is as much as we can make in 2 or 3 months.\"\n\nThese investments left Republican governments in Southern states mired in debt\u2014Louisiana, for example, held $2.2 million dollars in unfunded debt, tax receipts of only $4.3 million, and a budget deficit of $60,000. South Carolina was in even worse shape: it had $5.3 million in unfunded indebtedness and only $1.6 million in revenue. Only Georgia and Texas managed balanced budgets. The debt, in turn, added to the new tax levies of Reconstruction's state Republican governments and gave further fuel to resentment among Southern whites.\n\nAnd as if these were not obstacles enough in the path of a new culture of free labor, there was always the intractable problem of race. Former slaveholders, thanks in large measure to the Johnson amnesties and the failure to break up or confiscate Confederate property, were thus free to use cotton profits to maintain a version of the plantation system and force the freedpeople into peonage; this, in turn, gave white Democrats the power to control black voting; and control of voting would spell the end of Republican governments and free-labor economics, and, as a Vermont journalist put it, \"keep the negro in his condition of ignorance, that they may retain him as nearly as possible in his old state of slavery.\" Major General John Pope, who briefly supervised the Third Military District (comprising George, Alabama, and Florida) warned Grant that it would not take much before \"the Union men & Freedmen\" were reduced to being \"the slaves of the old negro rebel aristocracy.\"\n\n\"The relation of master and slave no longer exists here,\" wrote one Mississippi valley planter, \"but out of it has evolved that of patron and retainer.\" Nor were Republicans at all successful in appealing to small-scale Southern white yeomen, since the tax burden for schools, railroads, and infrastructure which, before the war, had been carried by taxes on slave ownership, now fell onto the shoulders of the small farmers and drove them into supporting the cotton elite. \"Here and there through all the cotton states,\" marveled _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_ , \"are reappearing the planter princes of old time, still lords of acres though not of slaves.\" Slavery might have been dead, but it was only being replaced by hutted serfdom. \"General,\" read a petition from the freedpeople of Edisto Island to Otis Howard, \"we want Homesteads.... We can only do one of three things Step Into the public road or the sea or remain on them working as In former time and subject to their will as then.\" This might be emancipation, but it \"is not the condition of really freemen.\"\n\nThe Southern Republican regimes might have had a better chance if the federal government could have suppressed the most direct threat to their survival, which was the violence, political intimidation, and terror inspired by the Ku Klux Klan and its fellow travelers among the White Leagues, Red Shirts, and Pale Faces. \"In my state since emancipation,\" complained Jefferson Long, Georgia's first black congressman, \"there have been over five hundred loyal men shot down by the disloyal men there, and not one of those who took part in committing those outrages has ever been brought to justice.\" Even if \"we take the men who commit these outrages before judges and juries,\" added Long, \"we find that they are in the hands of the very Ku Klux themselves who protect them.\" Although the Klan had been active in Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama (where Edmund Pettus was its \"dragon\"), and Mississippi, it generated particularly violent collisions in North Carolina and South Carolina in 1870. South Carolina's Republican governor, Robert Scott, wrote to Grant in horrifying detail of \"colored men and women... dragged from their homes at the dead hour of the night and most cruelly and brutally scourged for the sole reason that they dared to exercise their own opinions upon political subjects.\" Scott called out the mostly black state militia to ensure peaceful voting in the October 1870 state elections. But a day after the election, a pitched battle broke out in Laurens County between the militia and 2,500 armed white Klansmen, followed by still more fighting in Spartanburg, Union, and York counties.\n\nThe prospect of what the _New York Herald_ called \"the lawless and malignant elements of the late rebellion\" on the rampage stirred President Grant into action. Grant first called the newly elected Forty-Second Congress into emergency session on March 4, 1871, demanding that the Speaker of the House, James G. Blaine, focus Congress's attention on \"the single subject of providing means for the protection of life and property\" in South Carolina. Grant then issued a cease-and-desist proclamation on March 24; when that seemed to make no impression, he declared nine South Carolina counties to be in a state of insurrection, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Congress, likewise, passed a series of three Enforcement Acts that guaranteed federal protection for those seeking \"to become qualified to vote without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,\" authorized the deployment of federal troops, and permitted individuals suffering harms to recover damages in federal court.\n\nThe federal government also had the advantage of being served by a tenacious attorney general, Amos Akerman (a former Confederate who had succeeded Judge Hoar in June 1870 and vigorously pursued the Klan for crimes in Louisiana and North Carolina), and a veteran solicitor, David T. Corbin, as federal district attorney. Akerman and Corbin wasted no time at all in obtaining 785 indictments and going to trial in the federal district court in Columbia, South Carolina. \"The courts are going on here,\" Akerman jubilantly announced, and \"There is trepidation everywhere.\" Or almost everywhere: the pursuit of the Klan induced a certain _schadenfreude_ among black Republicans. \"There is not one in fifty of them now but is uneasy and trembling at the sight of an officer or a blue-coat,\" chuckled Elias Hill, a Baptist preacher who had been beaten by the Klan, \"and they are staying out in the woods by day, and some by night, like we used to.\"\n\nStill, even in the face of federal authority, the Klan found ways to resist. Corbin was able to obtain only five convictions at the first round of trials in Columbia; he managed twenty-eight more at the next session of the district court in Charleston in April 1872, but only nine more in the third round back in Columbia the following November.\n\nThe volume of prosecutions strained Akerman's budget so severely that he had to turn down a US marshal's request for $200 to hire a detective. Worse still, Grant fired Akerman in December 1871 (Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had complained that Akerman had the Klan \"on the brain\"), and although his replacement, George H. Williams, continued to press for convictions in Klan cases across the South, the costs of the anti-Klan initiative were mounting. In 1872, Williams instructed Corbin to enter a _nolle prosequi_ (\"do not prosecute\") in his remaining cases \"for the sake of the public good.\" Nevertheless, the convictions Akerman and Corbin did manage to obtain under the Enforcement Acts allowed Grant to declare victory over the Klan insurgency\u2014and turn his attention to other insurgencies that required reconstruction.\n\n8. Large numbers of free blacks gathered in Taylor County, Georgia, to vote in the 1868 elections, only to be turned away \"on account that the voters (colored) had not paid their poll tax.... The whole crowd inside of the election room, the canvassers, challengers, or what their name may be, were composed of real Southern democrats, and their action a mere farce.\"\n\nBy 1870, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming all had territorial governments, and Kansas, Nevada, and Nebraska had been admitted to the Union as states. The wartime Homestead Acts unloaded publicly owned land there at fire-sale prices, often without much regard for the arability of lands where average rainfall fell undependably short of what was needed to sustain commercial agriculture. Nevertheless, settlers began moving into the new lands, and railroads laid track to open conduits to markets, beginning with the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. Almost all of the financing of the railroads came through federal grants which were the virtual equivalent of the Homestead Acts\u2014over 131 million acres west of the Mississippi. The chief hindrance to this expansion was the presence of the Plains Indians, who had been crowded westward by successive Indian removal campaigns between the Revolution and the Civil War. President Grant's impulses toward the Plains tribes were well-intentioned but paternalistic. \"The Indians require as much protection from the whites as the white does from the Indians,\" Grant sharply observed in 1865. \"My own experience has been that little trouble would have been had from them but for the encroachments & influence of bad whites.\" But at the same time, Grant's notion of protection included \"placing all the Indians on large reservations\" where \"they will live in houses, have schoolhouses and churches, and will be pursuing peaceful and self sustaining avocations\"\u2014which, in a word, meant that they too would become part of the new world of free labor. While still general-in-chief, he invited Ely S. Parker, his military secretary and a Tonawanda Seneca sachem, to create a national inspection board to oversee and enforce treaties with the tribes. In 1869, Grant persuaded Congress to create a Board of Indian Commissioners \"eminent for their intelligence and philanthropy,\" and in the summer of 1870, Grant took the unprecedented step of hosting a meeting in Washington with Red Cloud, the chief of the Oglala Sioux, and Spotted Tail, chief of the Brul\u00e9 Sioux.\n\nStill, little of what the commissioners recommended in their first report in 1869 would have struck the Plains Indians as especially philanthropic and the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory resented the suggestion that they were a racial problem similar to Southern blacks. (The Cherokee, in particular, complained that they were \"vastly superior, in every respect, to any portion of the Negro race\" and urged whites \"to draw the necessary distinction between Indians and negroes.\") Even Ely Parker dismissed the notion of signing treaties with the Plains tribes because \"the Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government.\" Moreover, whatever effectiveness the commissioners hoped to exercise was undermined by squabbling within the board, accusations of corruption (which led to Parker's resignation and a congressional investigation in 1871), bickering over jurisdiction between the Interior Department and the War Department, and an ongoing rumble of tribal war involving the Utes, Comanches, the Chiricahua Apache, and the Sioux (which in 1874 erupted into full-scale warfare). Only the comparatively small numbers of the Plains tribes\u2014fewer than four thousand Comanche, fewer than two thousand Pawnee, and fourteen thousand in the seven Lakota Sioux tribes\u2014made it possible for the US Army to suppress Indian resistance in the West in ways it failed to do so in the white South, and even then, armed resistance did not subside entirely until after 1890.\n\nThe Grant administration had no more success in dealing with the Mormon enclave in Utah. Mormonism was one of the more peculiar offshoots of American religious enthusiasm in the nineteenth century, and one of the more successful once it established its own quasi-independent colony around the Great Salt Lake in 1847. It was governed as a Mormon theocracy, with its prophet, Brigham Young, acting as virtual dictator. Like slaveholders, free-labor Republicans raged against Young as an economic despot who \"by espousing the interests of one class against those of the other, instead of attempting to reconcile them... introduced a new element of discord into his already inharmonious kingdom.\" But Mormonism offended bourgeois sensibilities even more with its espousal of polygamy, which the 1860 Republican platform had denounced as a gendered form of slavery.\n\nEven while the Civil War was still in progress, Radical Republicans in Congress demanded that Utah be de-Mormonized \"by force\" and passed a statute in 1862 to ban polygamy \"in a territory or other place over which the United States shall have exclusive jurisdiction.\" But again, budget restraints on federal prosecutors in Utah prevented aggressive action against the Mormon leadership. \"Brigham Young is rich,\" complained federal district attorney George Bates, \"but the US authorities are penniless.\" Utah remained a defiantly \"Theo-Democracy\" where \"the petrified truth\" is that the territory \"is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king.\" Meanwhile, calls for \"the moral power of bayonets\" to be used in subduing Utah were met with the same chill that was growing over the use of federal military intervention elsewhere. In October 1871, after a two-day fire devastated large portions of Chicago and generated \"murder and plunder on all sides,\" federal troops were sent in to restore order without informing the governor of Illinois, John M. Palmer. The governor at once accused the Grant administration of reaching for \"powers they did not possess, and that while free government endures cannot be conferred upon them.\" This delighted Democrats, who jubilantly insisted that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. \"A northern State now tries her hand against usurpation,\" rejoiced one Southern newspaper, \"We shall see whether circumstances alter cases.\" After all, \"Governor Palmer is asserting only what we are asserting every day.\"\n\nGrant's last insurgency was the only one he could be said to have triumphed over, and that was within his own party. Dissatisfied Radical Republicans who saw nothing in Grant but slow-footedness, and who suspected that Grant was using the Klan prosecutions and his penchant for appointing loyal nonentities to major federal positions to create a soft dictatorship, rallied around the call of Missouri's US senator Carl Schurz to dump Grant and nominate a \"liberal Republican\" replacement. Liberal Republicanism was largely an elite rebellion within the party ranks at the Radicals, whose racial egalitarianism they did not share and whom they blamed for the political chaos in the South. But even the Southern States Convention of Colored Men, which brought together the South's most prominent black leaders in Charleston, South Carolina, in October 1871, almost balked at P. B. S. Pinchback's motion to endorse Grant's reelection. Dissatisfied Liberals arranged to hold a national convention in Cincinnati on May 1, 1872, and assembled some of the bluest blood of Northern Republicanism: Charles Francis Adams, Lyman Trumbull, William Grosvenor, Morton Wilkinson, and Oliver Perry Morton. For many of them, the still-smoldering embers of the Chicago fire illustrated the error of Reconstruction's military ways. \"The war of the rebellion is ended,\" said Ohio Judge Stanley Matthews in one of the convention's opening addresses, and \"as the war has ended so ought military rule and military principles.\"\n\nThe problem in Cincinnati was that too many of the Liberal Republicans each imagined that they were best suited to receive the presidential nomination. The consensus heading into the Liberal Republican convention had been that Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of two presidents and the American minister to Great Britain during the war, ought to head the Liberal Republican ticket, with Lyman Trumbull as his running mate. But the platform committee was grievously divided, and Adams had no floor manager to round up delegate votes. On the sixth ballot, the convention nominated instead Horace Greeley, the editor of the _New-York Tribune_ and one of the flightiest political minds in the country.\n\nThe nomination of Greeley\u2014\"the worst political fiasco ever enacted in American politics,\" snarled one Chicago newspaper\u2014took the air out of the Liberal Republican movement even before the convention adjourned. When Schurz went to dinner afterward, a one-time Illinois political ally of Lincoln, Gustave Koerner, remembered that Schurz first sat down at the parlor piano and played Chopin's funeral march. \"The discontent with Grant was far-reaching,\" recalled George Frisbie Hoar (the brother of Grant's first attorney general), \"but the nomination of Greeley was ludicrous and preposterous.\" In July, the Democratic national convention made an even more startling decision by endorsing Greeley, who was now running, in the scathing estimate of William Lloyd Garrison, as \"a stool-pigeon for the Democracy to capture the Presidency.\" But there was never any serious hope that Greeley could prevail. It was, as _Harper's Weekly_ described it, an act of \"political suicide\" by \"a political assassin.\" Grant was unanimously renominated by the Republican national convention in June, and handily won reelection with 56 percent of the popular vote; Horace Greeley died three weeks after the election and won only three posthumous votes in the Electoral College. Republicans even gained back seats in the House of Representatives, increasing their majority to 203 seats.\n\nFor Grant, it was \"my vindication\"\u2014but it would not last long.\n\n# Chapter 6\n\n#  Law: 1866\u20131876\n\nSo much of Reconstruction is understood as a struggle over race, politics, and the nature of state sovereignty within a federal system that not enough attention is paid to the fact that it was also a constitutional struggle between the branches of the federal government. On the occasions when intra-branch conflict in Reconstruction actually does put in an appearance, it is usually in terms of the executive's clash with the legislature, whether in the figure of Lincoln versus Congress or Andrew Johnson versus Congress. The judiciary appears only in terms of isolated cases and their impact on the freedpeople's rights. But this incomplete analysis misses what is, in fact, a major part of the Reconstruction story.\n\nThe US Constitution apportioned various federal responsibilities among the three federal branches\u2014executive (the presidency), legislative (Congress), and judicial (the federal courts)\u2014but it did not do so evenly or with the same amount of detail. The Constitution gave the federal courts, beginning with the US Supreme Court, only the sketchiest of descriptions, and then, with a fine disregard for the separation of powers, left much of the construction of a federal court system in the hands of Congress. John Jay, sitting as the first chief justice of the United States from 1790 to 1795, wrote opinions on only four cases and \"left the Bench perfectly convinced that under a system so defective it would not obtain the energy, weight and dignity which are essential... nor acquire the public confidence and respect which, as the last resort of the justice of the nation, it should possess.\"\n\nJohn Marshall, the fourth chief justice, pushed back strenuously against both state overreach and congressional encroachment on the judicial branch until his death in 1835; his successor, Roger Brooke Taney, sat as chief justice for another twenty-eight years, and in the opinion Taney wrote in _Dred Scott v. Sanford_ (1857), he overruled congressional authority to restrict slavery, even in the Western territories. If the executive and legislative branches could not solve the slavery question, then it was Taney's resolution that the judiciary would.\n\nThe case of _Dred Scott v. Sanford_ aggravated the national temper over slavery, rather than soothing it. But when the Civil War broke out, Taney did not hesitate to give the courts primary oversight of how the war should be waged by insisting, in Ex parte _Merryman_ (1861), that Lincoln had no power to deal with the rebellion by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. But _Merryman_ was only Taney's opinion as a circuit judge, not a full Supreme Court decision, and Abraham Lincoln simply ignored it. More than that, Lincoln invoked the presumption of a set of \"war powers\" in the executive branch that justified an emancipation proclamation and a general suspension of habeas corpus. This rendered the Supreme Court nearly mute; if anything, its wartime decisions in the _Metropolitan Bank v. Van Dyck_ (1863), Ex parte _Vallandigham_ (1864), and _Prize Cases_ (1863) tamely endorsed the administration's policies on paper money, military tribunals, and the US Navy's blockade of the Southern coast, respectively.\n\nNevertheless, Lincoln remained anxious that once the war ended, the rationale for emancipation which he had built around the \"war powers\" would evaporate, and a revived judiciary might attempt to dismantle what the executive and legislative branches had accomplished. \"The emancipation proclamation,\" Lincoln wrote in 1863, \"I think... is valid in law, and will be so held by the courts.\" But he could not be sure, especially with Taney as chief justice. So it came as a great relief to Lincoln when, first, Taney died in October 1864 and he was able to appoint the unquestionably pro-emancipation Salmon P. Chase in Taney's place, and second, Congress followed his promptings and passed a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, banning slavery entirely and putting emancipation beyond recall by the federal courts.\n\nStill, even though Lincoln was confident that Chase's appointment would render emancipation secure from the federal judiciary, Chase's tenure as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury had been marred by his unceasing schemes for self-promotion, and Lincoln feared \"that if I make him chief justice, he will simply become more restless and uneasy and neglect the place in his strife and intrigue to make himself president.\" Lincoln was not wrong to suspect Chase's ambitions, for Chase almost at once began a campaign to rebuild the Supreme Court's damaged reputation and reassert the prestige it had enjoyed under Marshall and Taney. The Reconstruction federal courts, under Chase (and then Morrison Waite) as chief justice, would expand federal judicial oversight at the expense of state courts, reassert the centrality of habeas corpus (to the denigration of wartime military tribunals), enjoy an expanded control of the award of money damages through the creation of the Court of Claims, and give federal courts increased jurisdiction over bankruptcy cases (and through that, increased powers over the national economy). At the same time, the federal courts would also become, in the name of restraining overreach by the executive and legislative branches, a potent agent in the undermining of Reconstruction.\n\nThe federal court system at the end of the Civil War was not large. Nine justices sat on the US Supreme Court, but beneath them were only fifty-four federal district judges in as many districts. Appeals from the district courts were heard in ten federal circuit courts (a jurisdiction that combined several districts, where the local district judge and a Supreme Court justice for that circuit presided); in turn, appeals from the circuit courts went to the Supreme Court. The membership of the high court itself had undergone some serious reorganization. Alabamian John Archibald Campbell resigned his seat as an associate justice at the outbreak of the war, and was replaced by Lincoln's old friend and judge on the Illinois 8th Judicial Circuit, David Davis. Justice John McLean, who had dissented from Dred Scott, died on April 4, 1861, and was replaced by Noah Swayne of Ohio; Samuel Freeman Miller was confirmed by acclamation in Congress to replace a seat left vacant for two years by the death of Peter V. Daniel; and Stephen J. Field was appointed to a new seat on the court created by Congress in 1863. But the most significant change was at the very top, as Salmon Chase assumed the role of chief justice on December 15, 1864.\n\nOriginally a Democrat, Chase had risen in Ohio politics as a fervent opponent of slavery, to the point where he had been tagged as \"the attorney-general for fugitive slaves.\" He moved to the Republican Party in 1855, and during the war he had agitated ceaselessly for a Radical Republican agenda in the Lincoln administration. Everything in his record suggested this would be the same path he would follow as chief justice. \"It will hereafter be counted equally a crime and a folly if the colored loyalists of the rebel States are left to the control of the restored rebels,\" Chase warned Lincoln four days before Lincoln's death; merely \"to confine the right of suffrage to the whites... will enable them to make all sorts of invidious and unjust discriminations; nor will they be slow to do so.\"\n\nBut Chase described himself as a Radical only \"in principle, and [I]\u200c have never disclaimed the name; but I have tried to be a conservative in working.\" This was not because Chase was indifferent to black rights but rather because federal jurists lived with a distinction between civil and natural rights, which saw the federal government as responsible for defending specific constitutional privileges and immunities, but not the wider scope of natural rights. \"Human Rights do not depend on the equality of Men or Races, but are wholly independent of them,\" declared the _New-York Tribune_ in 1862, which is to say that they exist independently of statutes and codes and even constitutions. The US Constitution was therefore a hybrid document, in that it vested the protection of some natural rights in the federal government, but left the bulk of them\u2014marriage, personal liberties\u2014with the states, and it would be up to the states to recognize the freedpeople as a new class having claim to natural-rights protections. As Lyman Trumbull explained in the debates over the Freedmen's Bureau, \"It is the policy of the Government that the rights of the colored men are to be protected by the States if they will, but by the Federal Government if they will not.\" But federal intervention was a secondary, compensatory step, not a primary one.\n\nThe design... is not... to consolidate all power in the Federal Government, or to interfere in the domestic regulations of any of the States, except so far as to carry out a constitutional provision which is the supreme law of the land....Let the people of the rebellious States now be as zealous and as active in the passage of laws and the inauguration of measures to elevate, develop, and improve the negro, as they have hitherto been to enslave and degrade him... and we shall all be moving on in harmony together.\n\n\"So long as the states\" did not attempt an explicit abolition of those rights, \"the national government had no more power in the areas of traditional state jurisdiction than it had before the war.\" Not until states deliberately acted to deprive (or neglect protection for) those rights did the national government have the constitutional power to intervene.\n\nThus, the court would display a perfect willingness throughout Reconstruction to protect the freedpeople's property rights and physical safety when the states refused, but hesitate at enforcing equal access to streetcars, schools, and public spaces unless the states had clearly abdicated that responsibility, and not just as examples of criminal malice. Chase would also draw similar lines of jurisdiction between the branches of the federal government. He refused to preside in the traditional seat of the chief justice in the Virginia circuit courts because \"it was neither right nor proper that the chief justice or any justice of the Supreme Court of the United States\u2014the highest tribunal of the nation, and the head of one of the coordinate departments of the Government\u2014should hold a court subject to the control or supervision of the executive Department.\" Even a justice as sympathetic to the Radicals as Samuel Freeman Miller felt it necessary to insist that \"there can be no liberty where the power of judging is not kept separate from the executive and legislative powers.\"\n\nThe first test of postwar judicial assertiveness arrived quickly. In the fall of 1864, the commandant of the Military District of Indiana, Alvan Hovey, arrested a former candidate for the Indiana governor's chair, Lambdin Milligan, who had been part of a hare-brained, pro-Confederate plot to raise an insurrection in the Midwest. Milligan was duly arraigned before a military tribunal, found guilty of treason on December 18, 1864, and sentenced to be hanged. Milligan seems to have been persuaded that Lincoln (who delayed signing Milligan's death warrant) would issue a pardon, so it was not until after Lincoln's murder\u2014and Andrew Johnson's mutterings about treason being made \"odious\"\u2014that Milligan became nervous and petitioned in the US Circuit Court for the District of Indiana for a writ of habeas corpus, so that he could be retried in a civilian (and presumably less bloodthirsty) court.\n\nMilligan's appeal for a writ was referred to the US Supreme Court, which heard arguments in March 1866 and announced a five-to-four decision in April. Written by David Davis (with a _caveat_ from Chase), the decision discharged Milligan and declared military tribunals unconstitutional in areas where the civil courts were open and operating. \"The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace,\" Davis wrote in ex parte _Milligan_ , \"and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.\"\n\nRadical Republicans treated ex parte _Milligan_ as a stab in the back, binding the ability of the army, and especially the Freedmen's Bureau, to intervene when Johnson's self-reconstructed regimes passed newer and more oppressive versions of the \"black codes.\" A group of Radical congressmen wrote a series of articles for the _Washington Daily Chronicle,_ protesting that \"This opinion of the Supreme Court\" shows a \"total want of sympathy with the spirit in which the war for the Union was prosecuted,\" and offered a path by which Reconstruction could \"be reversed by the very theory of construction which led to rebellion.\" Coming hard on the heels of Andrew Johnson's humiliation in the 1866 congressional elections, it now appeared that \"there will be a new conflict,\" this time between Congress and the judiciary.\n\nSuch a showdown seemed all too likely when, in the same month the Milligan decision was released, the Chase Court moved to strike down \"iron-clad\" loyalty oaths (\"iron-clad,\" meaning oaths which averred that the oath-taker would not only be loyal to the United States, but always had been). In January 1865, Missouri (one of the four slave states that remained loyal to the Union) adopted a new ordinance that outlawed slavery, but also added an oath to be taken by anyone acting in any public capacity, including clergy \"of any religious persuasion, sect or denomination,\" that they had \"always been truly and loyally on the side of the United States against all enemies thereof, foreign and domestic.\"\n\nThe Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Louis treated this ordinance as an unconstitutional trespass on religious freedom, and one of his priests, John A. Cummings, proceeded to say Mass and preach on September 3, 1865, without taking the oath. Cummings was indicted, tried, and imprisoned. He appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, then to the US Supreme Court, and in December 1866 the court branded the oath as a bill of attainder and an ex post facto law (because it imposed punishments for acts that \"previous to the adoption of this Constitution... had not been declared punishable or illegal\" and that had not been criminal at the time they were committed), violating the rule of presumption of innocence. This brought still more violent eruptions in Congress. \"That supreme tribunal of justice has no power in the premises,\" declared Ohio congressman John Bingham. Reconstruction policies \"are political not judicial questions, and can be decided only by the political department... and from that decision there is no appeal.\"\n\nBut Bingham needed more than fury to save Reconstruction from the hands of the courts, especially given that the Milligan and Cummings cases offered the possibility that the Supreme Court might send Lyman Trumbull's 1866 Civil Rights Act to the same dustbin. Bingham's solution, like Lincoln's on emancipation, was to cut the Gordian knot with a constitutional amendment that would place civil equality beyond the power of the courts to alter.\n\nBingham had proposed such a fourteenth amendment in December 1865, at the very opening of the Thirty-Ninth Congress. But it was not until after Andrew Johnson had vetoed Trumbull's Civil Rights Act (which Congress overrode) that Bingham's amendment was re-introduced, now expressly declaring that states were obligated to protect the \"privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.\" The Fourteenth Amendment was approved by the Senate on June 6, 1866, and by the House of Representatives the following week. But it took more than two years for the amendment to achieve ratification, partly because Andrew Johnson encouraged resistance to ratification at every point, and partly because the amendment itself was so awkwardly constructed. Of the amendment's five sections, only one dealt with the \"privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States\"; the others were an omnibus that forbade assumption of the Confederate debt, imposed a further ban on Confederate office holders, and threatened to proportion representation in Congress on the basis of actual voters (an indirect way to prevent Southern states from swelling their delegations in the House of Representatives on the basis of black citizens who were denied voting rights).\n\nThe weak link in the Fourteenth Amendment, however, was the failure of the amendment to specify just what was included in the \"privileges or immunities\" that the federal government now had authority to enforce. The court's 1823 decision in _Corfield v. Coryell_ had narrowly defined the \"privileges and immunities of citizens\" (Art. 4, sec. 2) as simply matters of comity that states extended to citizens of other states; in 1833, John Marshall himself had declared (in _Barron v. Baltimore_ ) that the \"privileges and immunities\" clause was designed to restrict the federal government, not the states. So it remained possible that, even after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, black voting rights could be kept at bay, since voting rights belonged to a category of rights over which the states, not the federal government, had primary jurisdiction.\n\nThe Fortieth Congress, assembling for its lame-duck session in December 1868, took up a resolution from the House Judiciary Committee, calling for a fifteenth constitutional amendment specifically to ban \"discrimination... in the exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold office in any State, on account of race, color, nativity, property, education or creed.\" This amendment was bitterly opposed by Border State Southerners who had never been subjected to Reconstruction, and by Northern Democrats who resented the extension of voting rights to African Americans in their own states. The lame-duck Republican majority settled for half a loaf, adopting a stripped-down version of the amendment that simply provided that \"the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.\"\n\nThe Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the executive and legislative branches' shoulders to the wheel of voting rights, but they did nothing to prevent the Chase Court from digging potholes in their path, or chipping away at the severities of the Reconstruction statutes. In February 1867, Texas state authorities under the Reconstruction Acts brought suit against three brokers to recover US bonds that had been conveyed to Texas before the war as part of the financial settlement of Texas's affairs once it was annexed to the United States. In January 1862, the Confederate state of Texas authorized the sale of $634,000 worth of the remaining bonds to purchase stores and ordnance. But once Johnson's self-reconstructed Texas regime was in place, the state set out to recover the bonds from the brokers, George White and John Chiles, who had purchased them. If, as Lincoln had always claimed, the Confederacy was a legal nonentity, then the state regimes under the Confederacy could have no better claim to legal existence, and all transactions conducted under their aegis were as invalid as Confederate government debts.\n\nBut when _Texas v. White_ landed in the lap of the Chase Court in 1867, the conclusion drawn by Chase was a good deal more complicated. Yes, Texas's secession was constitutionally invalid (which put paid, as far as any Supreme Court decision can, to all the elaborate arguments for secession). \"The Constitution, in all its provisions,\" wrote Chase, \"looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.\" But Chase also drew a line of demarcation between invalid rebel actions like the bond sale, and the everyday transactions needed \"to preserve the social community from anarchy and to maintain order.\" Whatever the Radicals' enthusiasm for a root-and-branch recreation of Southern society, \"acts necessary to peace and good order among citizens... which would be valid if emanating from a lawful government must be regarded in general as valid,\" and neither Congress nor the president had any authority to insert other substitute governments in their place.\n\n_Texas v. White_ was only the best known of the postwar claims cases that, in parallel with Andrew Johnson's amnesties, gradually gave back the legal ground that the Radical Republicans had claimed for reconstructing the Confederacy and presaged a more serious weakening to come\u2014on civil rights and the Reconstruction constitutional amendments. Salmon Chase suffered a stroke in August 1872, recovering sufficiently to rejoin the court but dying after a second stroke in May 1873. In his place, the newly reelected President Grant installed as chief justice another Ohio lawyer, Morrison Waite. But it would not be Waite who called the court's tune. \"Mr. Waite stands in the front rank of second-rate lawyers,\" snarled _The Nation_ , and he was easily overshadowed by Samuel Freeman Miller (\"the dominant personality now upon the bench\") and Joseph P. Bradley (who joined the court in 1869).\n\nThe direction of the Waite Court was set by Miller even before the new chief justice took the oath of office. In 1869, Louisiana's Republican governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, signed legislation restricting New Orleans slaughterhouses to the use of a single state-chartered \"grand slaughterhouse\" in order to control the dumping of offal into the Mississippi River. The Butchers Benevolent Association balked, claiming that the new law would deny non-cooperating butchers the \"privileges or immunities\" bestowed equally on all citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment. But when the Supreme Court heard the butchers' appeal in 1872, Miller issued a majority opinion that (in April 1873) confined the application of \"privileges or immunities\" strictly to federal matters. \"There is a citizenship of the United States,\" Miller wrote, which guarantees equal access to all the \"privileges and immunities\" the Constitution implies; but there is also \"a citizenship of a state,\" and the two \"are distinct from each other.\" The Fourteenth Amendment, Miller continued, protects only those \"privileges and immunities\" pertaining to federal citizenship, and only from interference by the federal government. The Louisiana statute interfered with neither; it governed only a function of state citizenship, which only the state could define.\n\nMiller's intention in the _Slaughterhouse Cases_ was an enlightened one\u2014to allow Louisiana to prevent the contamination of New Orleans' water supply\u2014and Miller explicitly criticized Southern whites' attempts to impose \"upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens.\" But it also reinforced the Chase Court's proclivity for clipping the wings of Congress's federalization of \"every little petty case of a civil character.\" And _Slaughterhouse_ would have long innings in a case that began the same week, in the same state. In March 1873, black Republicans in Grant Parish, a Unionist Louisiana parish, occupied the county courthouse in Colfax to ensure that the newly appointed county sheriff, recorder of deeds, and police jurors were sworn in without challenge. On April 13, a hastily assembled white militia, 140 strong, attacked Colfax, setting fire to the courthouse and gunning down more than 150 blacks, many of them after they had surrendered to the whites. The federal district attorney for Louisiana, James Roswell Beckwith, energetically used the Enforcement Acts to indict ninety-eight of the Colfax massacre's participants, beginning with the ringleader, Christopher Columbus Nash, and his lieutenants, James and John Hadnot, William Irwin, and William Cruikshank.\n\nHowever, the first trial of the Colfax defendants ended in deadlock before a mixed-race jury; a second trial in 1874 found only three of the defendants\u2014Cruikshank, James Hadnot, and Irwin\u2014guilty, and then only of conspiracy. When even that result was appealed to the Supreme Court as _US v. Cruikshank_ , Chief Justice Waite concluded that the original indictments had no ground whatsoever. The crimes in Colfax were committed by private individuals against other private individuals in malice (not statute), and involved local Louisiana issues; the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, protected the \"privileges or immunities\" only of people acting as US citizens, and only against official state encroachments.\n\nThe _Slaughterhouse Cases_ , and then _Cruikshank_ (in consort with _Blyew v. US_ in 1872 and _US v. Reese_ in 1876), hobbled the power of both the Enforcement Acts and the Fourteenth Amendment to protect individuals from the actions of other individuals, and in many cases, to protect individuals from the actions of the states if no clear intention to violate federal law, or misconduct by federal actors, was involved. But it magnified the authority of the federal judiciary, even as it rang hollow for many of the people who had hoped that the federal courts would enlarge their rights, rather than merely the court's. John Mercer Langston, addressing a protest meeting that also featured Frederick Douglass and former Mississippi senator Blanche K. Bruce as speakers, was infuriated to find \"the Supreme Court... desirous of remanding us back to that old passed condition.... How long must we wait for State action to give us our rights.\" The editor of the African American newspaper the _New York Globe_ , T. Thomas Fortune, compared the court's decisions to being \"baptized in ice water.\" \"In the name of God, where now are the last two amendments to the federal constitution?\" wailed the _Natchez Brotherhood_. \"Will an American Congress permit a state to set up an oligarchy by reversing the intents and purposes of the organic law of the land?\" Waite's intentions were traditional and circumspect and concerned themselves more with the authority of the federal courts to prevent other areas of government from overextension. But the Waite Court nevertheless created the beginnings of an arc that successor courts in the 1880s and 1890s, under Chief Justice Melville Fuller, would use to abandon civil protections for African Americans entirely. The eclipse of Reconstruction was at hand.\n\n# Chapter 7\n\n#  Dissension: September 1872\u2013April 1877\n\nIt has become an unwritten political assumption that second presidential terms are marked by a steady decline of presidential authority and an increase in presidential scandal. That was not necessarily the expectation in 1872, as Ulysses Grant entered his second term, but the four years that followed did a great deal to provide the template for that pattern. And the price Grant would pay for a rise in scandal and a concomitant decline of credibility during his second term would, in turn, accrue to the lasting harm of Reconstruction.\n\nGrant survived a brush with scandal early in his first term, when two New York financiers, Jason \"Jay\" Gould and James Fisk, tried to use their connections to Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, to gain insider information on gold trading; he was embarrassed again by charges of corruption lodged against Ely Parker as commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1871. Grant had no direct involvement in either imbroglio, but the ooze of corruption fouled the political atmosphere all the same. Then, in September 1872, the _New York Sun_ published revelations about Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier of America, the financial corporation that handled the subcontracting for the construction of the transcontinental railroad. On paper, Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier channeled the purchasing and contracting for the Union Pacific Railroad corporation; in reality, it was a dummy edifice that billed the railroads for its services at hugely inflated prices, while passing the profits back to Union Pacific's officers\u2014and to twelve members of Congress, who accepted a bribe of shares in Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier and, in return, agreed to ignore Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier's shady dealings.\n\nThe Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier scandal did not touch Grant directly, but it set the wind blowing in a direction that did not bode well for him. Interior Secretary Columbus Delano had to be dismissed after charges of fraud were leveled at him; Grant's private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted for collusion with tax evaders; and Grant's secretary of war, William Worth Belknap, hurriedly resigned in advance of charges that he had taken bribes (only to have his replacement, George Robeson, charged with having profited from procurement deals for the navy). Before the Civil War, Mark Twain would write, \"there was nothing resembling a worship of money or its possessor\" among Americans. But the politicians and financiers \"reversed the commercial morals of the United States.... The people had desired money before his day,\" but now they had been \"taught... to fall down and worship it.\"\n\nTwain, who was not guiltless of his own money-lust, was exaggerating at both ends of his recollections. The American world of the 1870s was still one in which more than half the manufacturing firms of a city like Boston employed fewer than seven laborers and a third employed fewer than twenty, where shop owners in Cincinnati \"are generally men who are thoroughly acquainted with the practical features themselves. They are mechanics themselves.\" Lewis Latimer, who had enlisted in the Union navy at age sixteen, began work as an office boy, taught himself mechanical drafting, and assisted Alexander Graham Bell in patenting the telephone in 1876. Latimer's ascent could have been the textbook for the genius of free labor:\n\nHe believed then that whatever a man knew he had put in a book, so when he saw the [draughts]man making drawings he watched to find out what tools he used, then he went to a second hand book store and got a book on drawing and soon had a set of drawing instruments. He then looked over the draughtsman's shoulder to see how he used his instruments, and practiced with them at home until he felt thoroughly master of them, then one day he asked the draughtsman to let him do some drawing for him, the man laughed at him but finally consented to look at what he could do on another piece of paper and to his surprise found that Lewis was a real draughtsman, so he let him do some of his work from time to time and one day the boss saw him at work and was so pleased that he let him work everyday and gradually raised his wages so that from three dollars when he went to work he rose in eleven years to twenty dollars a week.\n\nWhat Twain had right, however, was that the world of American finance had changed. The Civil War had caused a stampede of withdrawals from the American economy by European investors, a vacuum filled by an array of self-invented brokers, bond-sellers, and bankers\u2014Jay Cooke, Jesse Seligman, George Higginson, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, Junius S. Morgan, Jacob Schiff, Harvey Fisk, Alfred S. Hatch\u2014many of them newly arrived immigrants who aroused the hauteur of both northeastern Brahmins and Southern julep-sippers. When the new financiers were caught distributing bribes and kickbacks to Grant's officeholders and his party, their follies fed a nativist xenophobia and achieved a visibility never before seen in American economic life. The ensuing revulsion fueled the Liberal Republican Party's insurrection in 1872, and it paved the way for Democrats to regain control of the House of Representatives in the 1874 elections for the first time in twenty years, trading a Republican majority of 114 seats for a Democratic majority of 61. Connecticut elected a Democratic governor and a Democratic state legislature; New York elected a Democratic governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and majority in the state assembly; Indiana and Massachusetts elected a Democratic governor; and New Hampshire and Ohio gave both houses of their state legislatures to Democratic majorities.\n\nThe stench of political corruption easily drifted over into Reconstruction, since it became easy to portray Southern whites as yet more long-suffering victims of the new-model financial rapacity. In 1873, James Shepherd Pike, a veteran abolitionist and associate editor of the _New-York Tribune_ , began publishing \"The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government,\" based on his own observations of South Carolina politics, as a serial for the _Tribune_. Pike's \"The Prostrate State\" was a sort of reverse _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ , and it had approximately the same sensational effect. Standing in the state house in Columbia, Pike watched \"old aristocratic society\" replaced by a \"Black Parliament\" in which _arriviste_ carpetbaggers and treacherous scalawags, in league with their black dupes, created a carnival of corruption: legislative appropriations intended to purchase land for the freedpeople ended up in the pockets of the politicos; a special appropriation was made to reimburse the speaker of the state house, Franklin Moses, for his losses on a horse race; taxes had risen by 500 percent since 1860, even as the value of taxable property in the state had fallen by a third; and the governor, Robert Scott, \"spent $374,000 of the public money to get himself rechosen.\"\n\nPike's lurid account made no allusion to the prevalence of corruption in the South's prewar state governments, where \"expert transfers of balances to undiscovered bournes\" and \"august defalcations\" had been the order of the day. E. L. Godkin, the crusading editor of _The Nation_ , simply concluded that the Republican governments of South Carolina and Louisiana were \"a gang of robbers, making war on civilization and morality,\" and presidential intervention of the sort licensed by the Enforcement Acts was increasingly seen as just another species of corruption itself.\n\nNot that Grant or Congress could have easily paid the public costs for such interventions after 1873, even if they had wanted to. The transcontinental railroad spun off a network of smaller trunk lines into vast stretches of the West, on the assumption that railroads would generate demand for their services by their mere presence. But of the seventy-nine major railroad lines in the United States in 1872, twenty-eight had never managed to pay a dividend to investors. On September 18, 1873, the banking house of Jay Cooke & Co., which had invested heavily in the railroads, ran out of money: it could not meet the demands of its depositors, and closed the doors of its Philadelphia and Washington offices. New York stocks dropped 10 percent and the _New-York Tribune_ reported that \"general demoralization... characterized the transaction of business in Wall-st.\" By the end of the month, 101 banks across the nation had gone under, dragging down savings and erasing pools of capital for investment. As the economy struggled and slowed, so did government income. Federal budget receipts fell by 13.5 percent between 1873 and 1875, while spending followed it downward by 5.5 percent. Thanks to the Panic of 1873, there would be less and less room to finance federal oversight of Southern affairs.\n\nThe Panic fed Reconstruction fatigue. \"Let us have done with Reconstruction,\" the _New-York Tribune_ cried in 1870, \"The country is sick and tired of it.... We cannot forever keep the boy out of the water because he has not learned to swim.\" Much of the political energy behind Reconstruction had been generated by the public backlash against Andrew Johnson in 1866 (which led to Lyman Trumbull's 1866 Civil Rights Bill and the Reconstruction Acts), and through the election of Grant, who was determined to ensure voting rights through the Enforcement Acts. But Northern Democrats had never despaired of recovering their prewar hegemony in Washington. They bitterly opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, and even after the amendment's ratification, they employed Klan-like intimidation to suppress black votes at the polls in Northern cities. In Philadelphia, the black civic leader Octavius Catto was shot to death at Ninth and South Streets by a Democratic assassin on the day of the 1871 Pennsylvania state elections.\n\nNevertheless, many Republicans remained dedicated to the possibilities of a new racial egalitarianism. \"We believe the whole human race are one family,\" wrote Theodore Tilton in the _New York Independent_ , and \"we will have no permanent settlement of the negro question till our haughtier white blood, looking the negro in the face, shall forget that he is black, and remember only that he is a citizen.\" The Forty-First and Forty-Second Congress witnessed the arrival of six black congressmen (Benjamin Turner, Josiah Walls, Joseph Rainey, Robert Brown Elliott, Robert DeLarge, and Jefferson Long) and one black senator (Hiram Revels), elected by Republicans in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. Overall, sixteen Southern blacks would serve in the Reconstruction Congresses; another six hundred would fill seats in state legislatures.\n\nBut for other Northern Republicans, black people remained something of an abstraction. \"The Northern people,\" smirked Confederate War Department clerk J. B. Jones at the end of the war, \"did not really like negro equality any better than we did,\" and John Emory Bryant was warned at the time he joined the Freedmen's Bureau that \"the North is no more concerned for the African than the South.\" Even the staunch Radical Republican Benjamin Wade never rid himself of the habit of referring to black people as \"niggers,\" and he complained that so much of the food in Washington was \"cooked by Niggers\" that \"I can smell and taste the Nigger.\" Northern blacks were disproportionately concentrated in urban areas (61 percent in towns of over 2,500, 55 percent in towns of over 10,000), which meant that for many Northern whites, it was entirely possible to live most of one's life without ever meeting a black person. One member of the Arkansas constitutional convention in 1868 remarked that \"I have seen, within fifty miles of St. Louis, the little children crowding the fence-rails, to look at a negro, and examining him with as much curiosity as if he had been a wild beast.\"\n\n9. The murder of Philadelphia black political organizer Octavius Catto on October 10, 1871, from _The Trial of Frank Kelly for the Assassination and Murder of Octavius V. Catto_ (1888). \"Mr. Catto, having closed down his school, was passing down South street, between 8th and 9th streets, when he was approached by a white man....Prof. Catto put his hand behind him as if to draw a pistol, when a car came up and he passed down the street a few paces....Catto again advanced and attempted to cross the street, when the assassin leveled his pistol again and shot at him three times....The first shot caused his death almost instantly.\"\n\nIt did not help, either, that the Northern free-labor apostles grew discouraged by the poor inroads they had made into Southern culture, and thus returned home disillusioned. They were, sighed a contributor to the _North American Review_ , only \"merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, manufacturers, speculators, brokers, bankers\" and not \"barons after the fashion of the South.\" They were shunned and harassed, sometimes violently, \"a fashion set by the aristocracy,\" said John W. DeForest, a transplanted Union army veteran and Freedmens' Bureau commissioner. John Richard Dennett, a correspondent for _The Nation_ , discovered, \"When I am known to be a Northern man... I am made to feel that my company is not desired\"; a Southern physician sharpened the economic edge of Southern contempt by showing him a newspaper misprint\u2014\"Grand chance for Yankee enterprise and _thift_ \" (emphasis added)\u2014which the doctor thought would have better read \"grand chance for Yankee enterprise and theft.\" Harriet Beecher Stowe's colony in Florida, where she hoped to train \"immature minds such as those of our negroes\" to become a new version of \"the laboring class of England,\" limped along, battered by white suspicion and unexplained arson, but Stowe's presence gradually diminished, until by 1884 she and her ailing husband left for good. Albion Tourg\u00e9e lost his bid for a North Carolina congressional seat, and left his faltering law practice in Greensboro to write an embittered fictionalized memoir of his time in Reconstruction, appropriately titled _A Fool's Errand, By One of the Fools_. Having given up his hope of making headway for the \"dignity of labor, in liberty and equality before the sovereign law\" against the \"feudal civilization\" of the South, John Emory Bryant likewise departed Georgia for a new life in New York as a lawyer and realtor. The truth was, Benjamin Butler concluded, that \"capital is timid\":\n\nNo man will risk his capital where he does not believe he can get Justice before a Jury; where he does not believe that the community would look favorably upon his enterprise; and where he does believe every advantage will be taken from him and every wrong done him. And he now believes all that in the Southern States....New England is dotted all over with men who have gone down to Virginia, and bought farms... and who have been absolutely driven out by their neighbors.\n\nThe Reconstruction governments contributed mightily to their own demise with their incessant, self-weakening infighting. \"The Republicans are seriously weakened by faction,\" complained the _New-York Tribune._ \"Their leaders charge each other with all manner of treacheries and misdemeanors.\" In Mississippi, Republican governor James Alcorn tried to establish alliances with both the freedpeople and poor whites, only to be undermined by Klan violence on one side and Radical criticism of his perceived soft-handedness on the other. When Alcorn was elected to the US Senate, his most vocal critic, Adelbert Ames, snatched the gubernatorial nomination from Alcorn's would-be successor, thus forcing Alcorn to enter the 1873 governor's race himself\u2014which he then lost to Ames.\n\nBut Ames was himself embarrassed politically in December 1874, when Vicksburg's corrupt Republican mayor\u2014\"a white man at the time under indictment for twenty-three offenses\"\u2014was toppled by an alliance of reforming \"White Liners.\" Emboldened, the White Liners marched on Vicksburg to demand the resignation of the county's black sheriff, Peter Crosby. A pitched battle between Crosby's black supporters and the White Liners broke out, and Governor Ames was forced to call on President Grant for federal troops to restore order. The following November, Ames again asked Grant for federal troops to ensure order during the state elections. This time, Grant hesitated. His newest attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont, warned that any further military interventions in the South would only play into Northern Democrats' plans to use the military \"encroachments\" accusation in the 1876 presidential elections. \"The whole public was tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,\" Pierrepont advised Ames, and the Democrats were ready to use intervention \"to condemn any interference on the part of the Government.\" That did not prevent white Democrats from intimidating voters with their own display of paramilitary force: John Roy Lynch, an African American congressman who had his Mississippi seat snatched from under him by clever redistricting, testified before a Congressional inquiry that in Jefferson and Claiborne counties, Democrats had organized themselves as \"an armed military organization\" and \"would allow no republican meeting to be held and no republican speeches to be given by anybody.\" The result was a landslide for the Mississippi White Liners, and five months later, Ames resigned. The \"terrorism was so intense,\" testified Lynch, \"as in my judgment to make life, liberty, and happiness perfectly insecure except to democrats. I do not think there is any such thing as law in that society.\"\n\nThe same disastrous divisions sank the other Reconstruction Republican governments, one by one. Weakened by disputes between the Warmoth and Kellogg factions, and paralyzed by the Colfax massacre in 1873 and a fresh eruption of lethal race rioting in New Orleans in 1874, Louisiana wound up with two rival governors, one Republican and one Democrat, each demanding recognition from the federal government. Arkansas, similarly, ended 1874 with two rival Republican governors, Joseph Brooks and Elisha Baxter, and a Democratic legislature. Florida's Republican governor, Ossian Hart, skillfully managed to navigate between Florida's Republican factions and its unredeemed white Democrats; however, he died in March 1874, and in 1875 Democrats seized control of the state legislature. By the spring of 1876, only Louisiana and South Carolina still had Republican governments. \"We have endeavored to protect law and property... by the force of provisional state, by the force of provisional congressional law, and by the force of the armies of the United States,\" Vermont Republican George Edmunds admitted, \"and the result\" has been that every tool had broken in their hands: \"We have totally failed to secure the administration of justice.\"\n\n**End of Republican Reconstruction by State**\n\nStates reconstructed under the Reconstruction Acts | Effective ending of Reconstruction  \n---|---  \nVirginia  |  October 5, 1869   \nNorth Carolina  |  November 28, 1870   \nGeorgia  |  November 1, 1871   \nTexas  |  January 14, 1873   \nArkansas  |  November 10, 1874   \nAlabama  |  November 16, 1874   \nMississippi  |  January 4, 1876   \nLouisiana  |  January 2, 1877   \nFlorida  |  January 2, 1877   \nSouth Carolina  |  April 11, 1877\n\nBut it was not Republican factionalism alone that crippled the Reconstruction regimes. The freedpeople themselves were anything but a political monolith, and they wasted political energy on internecine quarrels as vigorously as white Republicans had. The first fault line was the reluctance of Southern blacks to accept white Republican leadership as unquestioningly as whites had expected. Northern white schoolteachers found that Southern blacks did not want whites to run either their politics or their schools. The teachers from the American Missionary Association who descended on the occupied Port Royal Sound to educate and uplift the freedpeople discovered, as Austa Malinda French noted, that \"nothing is more evident to those who actually know the Colored, than that while they respect, value, and revere, the good, they want little companionship with the whites.\"\n\nLawrence S. Berry, a freed slave turned journalist, urged his readers to \"forget our sable complexion\" and close ranks with progressive whites. But, as one Freedmen's Bureau agent discovered, \"their long experience of slavery has made them so distrustful of all whites, that on many plantations they persist still in giving credit only to the rumors set afloat by people of their own color, and believe that the officers who have addressed them are rebels in disguise.\" Moreover, the freedpeople resented the paternalistic tendencies of well-intentioned whites, especially when assistance calcified into orders and sympathy into control. When Georgia's short-lived Republican legislature tried to ban the admission of black state legislators, black Methodist leader Henry McNeal Turner frankly said, \"My colored friends, the white men are not to be trusted. They will betray you.\" And Hiram Revels, the first black US senator to be elected from Mississippi, denounced white Adelbert Ames and white Mississippi Republicans as \"notoriously corrupt and dishonest,\" and actually applauded the downfall of Adelbert Ames as a triumph over \"corruption, theft, and embezzlement.\"\n\nBut just as divisive were the fault lines that separated blacks from blacks. A racial hierarchy that bestowed privilege along a carefully graded spectrum of color had long existed in the black South. \"There is in the Southern States a great amount of prejudice in regards to color,\" the African American abolitionist and novelist William Wells Brown admitted in 1867, \"even among the negroes themselves. The nearer the negro or mulatto approaches to the white, the more he seems to feel his superiority over those of a darker hue.\" Louisiana's politics were more than sufficiently twisted by white factionalism, and made even worse by rivalries among factions led by Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (one-quarter black, and married to a white woman), Oscar James Dunn (born a slave, to a slave mother and a free black carpenter), and Caesar Carpentier Antoine (a one-time business partner of Pinchback's, his father was a free _gens du couleur_ and his mother was West Indian).\n\nIn postwar Savannah, Aaron Bradley mounted a political smear campaign against his rival for a seat in Congress, Richard White, a mixed-race Union army veteran from Ohio. White, sneered Bradley, was a \"hybrid\" who did not deserve the support of true African Americans. \"What color will he represent himself?\" asked Bradley, who then answered his own question: \"The greasy color.\" Even Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany sparred, with Douglass (himself biracial) bitterly criticizing Delany's black racial purism for \"going about the same length in favor of blacks, as the whites have done in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.\" Delany was right to assert African Americans' \"need for dignity and self-respect,\" but not, Douglass warned, to the point where \"he stands up so straight that he leans back a little\" and ends up in a version of black racial triumphalism little different from white supremacy. Douglass also parted company with John Mercer Langston, despite Langston's agreement that \"this is no more a white man's country and government than it is the country and government of the black man.... It is the country and government of the American people.\" Nevertheless, Douglass accused Langston of \"mad political ambition.\"\n\nThese interracial feuds were a key factor in the most singular absence in black Reconstruction in the South: namely, the lack of a single commanding leader who could bind together the disparate threads of African American identity into a single movement. Slavery was certainly no useful training-ground for the game of politics, and the marginalized experience of free Northern blacks did not present much more in the ways of practical opportunities for honing political savvy. Given that only Louisiana and South Carolina had developed any substantial prewar populations of blacks who were property owners, business proprietors, and skilled craftsmen, the likeliest quarter from which such leadership could have developed was the Northern black community\u2014but even then, few Northern blacks made the attempt. And no wonder; it was doubtful if Southern blacks would feel obliged to follow Northern leadership, a reluctance the National Conference of Colored Men demonstrated when it debated a resolution \"That we pay no heed to such men as Fred. Douglass and his accomplices, for the simple reason that they are well-to-do Northern men who will not travel out of their way to benefit the suffering Southern Negro.\"\n\nAnd it was certain that Southern whites would make aggressive Northern blacks a target of choice. \"Write as you please, but _never go south_ , or killed you _most assuredly_ will be,\" warned Julia Griffiths Crofts, Douglass's British friend and supporter. \"You are, in many respects, _a marked man_.\" So, when Douglass was invited to set up a newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1866, he politely declined: \"It is not my duty to court violence or martyrdom or to act in any manner which can be construed into a spirit of bravado.... I think it wise to remain where I am, at least until the public mind of the South shall attain a more healthy tone than at present.\" Martin Delany and John Mercer Langston played highly visible roles as African American political leaders in the Reconstruction South, but those roles were plagued by division and distraction. Langston was only active in Reconstruction politics as an agent for the Freedmen's Bureau and the National Equal Rights League from 1865 till 1868, when he took up a faculty appointment at the new Howard University in Washington, DC. Delany grew so impatient with his white Republican allies in South Carolina that he accepted a judicial appointment from Democrats. \"What benefit,\" he asked in 1874, \"have the colored people in South Carolina derived from the propagation of Republican sentiments.\" None, in his estimate: \"Such a party is not worth the effort to keep it in existence.\"\n\nCharles Sumner might not have disagreed. Dumped by Grant and the Republican caucus from the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner retaliated by leading the defection of the Liberal Republicans in 1872. He could sense a tidal wave of reaction heading toward Washington, and as his health deteriorated, he labored to persuade Congress to adopt a new civil rights bill. He died in March 1874, begging, \"Don't let my bill fail\"; the last session of the Forty-Third Congress passed it before the new Democratic majority in the House could assume power, but only by a tie-breaking vote in the Senate provided by Vice President Henry Wilson, and a disrespectful margin of 135\u2013114 in the House, with 38 abstentions. It was Reconstruction's last hurrah (and would be duly overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883).\n\nIn June 1876, the Republican National Convention met in Cincinnati, and this time a plethora of candidates battled one another over the course of six ballots, until on the seventh, the convention settled on an outsider, whom _The Nation_ deemed \"a man by no means conspicuous in public affairs\": Rutherford B. Hayes, a Union army veteran and second-term governor of Ohio. Hayes had loyally supported congressional Reconstruction and included black voting rights in his platform in his bid for the Ohio governorship. But by 1875, Hayes came to the conclusion that Reconstruction issues were costing him votes, and he backed away from endorsing Sumner's posthumous civil rights bill. The Democrats countered two weeks later with the nomination of Samuel Tilden, the reforming governor of New York, and almost at once the \"outbreaks\" Grant no longer felt eager to restrain with federal troops erupted in full force. The governors' races in Louisiana and South Carolina became violent referenda on Republican rule in those states. East Baton Rouge witnessed eighteen political murders in the month before the election. In Hamburg, South Carolina, an argument over right of way for a parade mushroomed into a skirmish between incumbent Republican governor Daniel Chamberlain's black militia and \"Red Shirts\" loyal to Democratic candidate (and ex-Confederate general) Wade Hampton; the fighting ended in the execution of four captured militiamen. Governor Chamberlain appealed to Grant for federal troops \"to repress the violence in this State during the present campaign.\"\n\nGrant, denouncing \"the late disgraceful and brutal slaughter of unoffending men in Hamburg, S.C.,\" issued a cease-and-desist proclamation and sent in three companies of infantry. \"The scene at Hamburg, as cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked, and as uncalled for as it was,\" Grant wrote to Chamberlain on May 26, \"would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to civilized and Christian people.\" Nevertheless, Chamberlain informed the president that \"every republican meeting was interrupted by armed multitudes of democrats\" and \"the republican orators jeered at, interrupted, vilely insulted, and hissed down.\" More shoot-outs followed in Charleston on September 6, in Ellenton on September 15, and in Cainhoy on October 16. \"Who commit [ _sic_ ] these undeniable crimes against the very order and existence of society? Democrats,\" railed _Harper's Weekly._ \"Who condone [ _sic_ ] those crimes by silence, by incredulity, by calling them 'negro riots,' or by sneering at the bloody shirt? Democrats.\" In Edgefield County, Burton Stroud, a sharecropper, was told by his white employer that \"by this time another year there would not be a God damned radical found, and that we are determined to make away with every God damned one.\" When he persisted in attending \"the republican speech,\" white Democrats tracked him to his house, shouting:\n\n\"O, Burton, look out, God damn you, we are coming for you. We have been talking about you all year and telling you to come over on the Lord's side, and you wouldn't come; and now you shan't be a radical, and you shan't be a democrat, for, God damn you, we mean to kill you and cut your head off and put it up on a stick and make a mark to shoot at, and you will vote your next ticket in hell, God damn you.\" And about this time they were shooting about seventy-five yards from my house. I run, and there was a ditch by the side of which there was some weeds, and I went down the hill... and they went on past me and missed me.... My wife afterward came to me, after I got out in the body of woods, and I went over to a neighbor's of mine by the name of William Collins, a colored gentleman, and my wife brought my boots and hat to me; and I asked her where was the men, and she said around there yet; and I says, \"You come away from there, and come with me.\" Then I made for the village, and it was four weeks before I went back there any more.\n\n10. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner died on March 11, 1874; in this memorial tableau, Columbia lays a wreath of laurel on his casket as freed slaves kneel in sorrow and an angel, leading an angelic chorus, carries a tablet with the motto \"Equal rights to all,\" a reference to the Civil Rights Bill that Sumner had been guiding toward passage at the time of his death.\n\nWhen voters went to the polls on November 7, in the largest voter turnout to that point in US history, Democrats appeared to have scored their greatest victory in two decades, starting at the top with Samuel Tilden. Even Grant admitted the next morning, \"Gentleman, it looks to me as if Mr. Tilden is elected.\"\n\nBut Grant was uncharacteristically premature in his judgment. Tilden carried New York by a whopping fifty thousand votes, but in other states, the vote count was much closer. Republican election judges in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida voided enough Democratic ballots to claim the electoral votes of those states for Hayes, and then to award him the election, 185 to 184. The howl of electoral robbery echoed loudly, so loudly that the editors of the _Atlantic Monthly_ feared that \"the national House of Representatives and Mr. Tilden have it in their power to cause an explosion in the South so terrific that the outbreak of 1860\u201361 will be almost forgotten.\" But the Democratic House and the still-Republican Senate could not agree on how to count the electoral votes, because rival totals were submitted in the three contested states, and in January 1877 Congress created a joint House-Senate Electoral Commission to determine the winner. After six weeks of bickering, Hayes was awarded all twenty contested electoral votes, just in time to be inaugurated. \"I have not yet seen a single Republican who had the face to stand up and defend the act,\" wrote Washington lawyer James William Denver in disgust. \"There will be no use in ever again holding an election.\" But as an olive branch to coax congressional Democrats into cooperation, Hayes signaled that he would recognize the election of Democratic governors in South Carolina and Louisiana\u2014namely, Hampton and Francis T. Nicholls\u2014and forbear the use of federal troops to intervene on behalf of Republican candidates and voters.\n\nThe Compromise of 1877 is often considered the end of Reconstruction\u2014and it was, in the sense that it finally closed the door on the possibility that the federal government would play a significant role in ensuring voting rights and fair elections in the South for another eight decades. But in truth, Republican Reconstruction was as good as dead even before Hayes's inauguration. Democratic control of the House ensured that, from 1875 onward, no funding for enforcement would be forthcoming, regardless of who occupied the presidency. Federal troops in the Department of the South comprised only thirty-seven companies from five regiments, numbering no more than 1,600 officers and men, and there were only 165 federal soldiers on duty in South Carolina, and 123 in Louisiana, in 1877. In fact, Hayes did not actually have to move any troops out of the South; he merely ordered the guard company assigned to the state capitol in Columbia and the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans returned to their quarters.\n\nHayes soberly believed that his administration could \"be a government which guards the interests of both races carefully and equally.\" But it would have to operate \"by the united and harmonious efforts of both races, actuated by motives of mutual sympathy and regard\" which would \"forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line.\" Where Hayes expected that upwelling of mutual sympathy and regard to come from was unclear, but no Republicans in the South expected it to come from the Democrats, who had now completed their redemption of the old Confederacy. Daniel Chamberlain surrendered the governorship he claimed to have won in South Carolina to Wade Hampton on April 10, 1877, with what could be taken as the epitaph of Reconstruction: \"Today... by order of the President whom your votes alone rescued from overwhelming defeat, the Government of the United States abandons you.\"\n\n#  Epilogue\n\nOn June 15, 1869, Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore lifted his baton before an audience of forty thousand Bostonians and gave the downbeat for ten thousand singers and one thousand instrumentalists to open the National Peace Jubilee. The five-day festival had been Gilmore's project for two years, and it gave all those performers what Boston's premier music critic, John Sullivan Dwight, hailed as a \"new taste of the joy of unity of effort, a new love of co-operation, and a deeper sense of the divine significance and power of music than they ever had.\" Harvard's John Langdon Sibley thought it was \"exceedingly exciting... & nearly all have gone away jubilant over what they have seen and heard.\" It was also depressingly premature. On the day the festival opened, congressional Reconstruction had been in operation for only two years, and four of the one-time Confederate states were still under military rule. By the time Gilmore had organized an even bigger World Peace Jubilee in June 1872\u2014featuring a chorus of twenty thousand and orchestras and bands amounting to two thousand musicians\u2014all ten of the reconstructed states had been readmitted to the Union, but three of them had already fallen back into the hands of Democratic \"Bourbons\" and \"Redeemers,\" who were eagerly dismantling many of Reconstruction's accomplishments.\n\nGiven that dismantling, it is easy to miss what Reconstruction actually did manage to accomplish. Principally, it did, for better or worse, achieve the political reunion of the rebellious South with the rest of the nation, and did so with the basic shape of constitutional federalism reasonably intact and the chief object of the war\u2014the elimination of legalized slavery\u2014decided beyond challenge. The idea that states had the power to withdraw from, or break up, the American Union went down to a decisive defeat, but the importance of states within a federal republic did not. Charles Francis Adams Jr. admitted that \"what is known as the doctrine of States rights... fell into much unmerited odium through its abuse during the progress of the irrepressible conflict,\" but \"the American people still hold it in strong affection, and cling tenaciously to State lines and State authority.\" In time, \"when the wounds of Civil War are healed... and the republic restored to its normal condition,\" Wisconsin Republican senator James Doolittle predicted in 1879, \"the burdens of the federal government, now so crushing in their weight, will once more... rest as lightly upon our people, and its blessings will be as great to all sections as they were before that terrible convulsion\" and in \"our true normal condition, the burdens of the federal government will be as light as the air we breathe, though its blessings may be as vital to our well-being.\"\n\nEven the strongest measures taken by the US government, during both the war and Reconstruction, were deployed less with a view toward subjugating the states to a centralized authority, and more toward nudging them back into a federal alignment. Even Lyman Trumbull's Civil Rights Bill in 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment were largely constructed so as to prod the states to carry out the work of equal rights themselves. Trumbull assured the Senate that his bill \"will have no operation in any State where the laws are equal, where all persons have the same civil rights without regard to color or race.\" All this was accomplished without resorting to the grimmer, retaliatory strategies of treason trials or military tribunals\u2014and even more to the point, without triggering a renewed civil war. \"Before I went South,\" wrote one British traveler in 1879, \"I expected to find that the Southern States had been for some time in a sort of Pandaemonium in which a white man could hardly live\"; instead, \"to my great surprise I found exactly the contrary.\"\n\nThe great losers in this process were Southern blacks who, in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase, \"went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back into slavery.\" But even then, it was not entirely comparable to slavery; the Reconstruction amendments did recognize black citizenship and black voting rights, even if the Supreme Court acted swiftly to curtail their protection and enforcement. Black landownership not only became a reality, but increased from just 2.2 percent of Southern blacks in 1870 to 24 percent by 1910. Literacy rates rose over the same years, from 20 percent to 69 percent. These increases were not spread evenly: in the coastal plains and the mountains, 45 percent of Southern blacks owned their own land; in the Mississippi Valley and the vast \"Black Belt\" of northern Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas, only 8 percent of blacks owned their own land. In South Carolina, more than 75 percent of the lower Piedmont's twenty-four thousand tenant farmers were black, and fully half of them were sharecroppers by 1900. Even so, these circumstances, although far from ideal, were not slavery; indeed, the situation of blacks actually outstripped the condition of freed slaves and serfs in Brazil, Jamaica, and Russia.\n\nWhat Southern blacks lost in wholesale amounts was political agency. The tidal return of white Democratic rule to the South by 1877 allowed the disfranchisement of black Southerners through the imposition of literacy tests, poll taxes (starting with Georgia in 1871), physical segregation, property requirements, and sheer intimidation. Disfranchisement was a surprisingly slow, incremental process. There were 9 black legislators in South Carolina in 1882, and 11 in Mississippi; as late as 1890, there were 18 blacks in the Louisiana legislature. And Republicans in Virginia and North Carolina staged brief resurgences through alliances with poor white farmers in the 1880s and 1890s, campaigning, as Thomas Settle did in North Carolina, for \"no white man's party or colored man's party, but a party of principle; a party on whose banner is inscribed Liberty, union and Equality before the law; a party that proposes to elevate mankind of all races and colors.\" But after the turn of the century, only 1,300 blacks in Louisiana were managing to vote, and only 3,000 in Alabama and 5,000 in Texas. \"Here public opinion tolerates, when it does not justify, all crimes for the maintenance of the supremacy of the Democratic party,\" grumbled one federal supervisor of elections for North Carolina, continuing, \"Oligarchy sits enthroned by Fraud and Violence and dominates one-third of the Republic.\"\n\nAfter the Supreme Court overturned Sumner's Civil Rights Bill in the _Civil Rights Cases_ decision of 1883, Southern states began enacting statutes that banned interracial marriage, and segregated streetcars, trains, schools, dance halls, libraries, and hospitals\u2014all of it further sanctioned by the Supreme Court's _Plessy v. Ferguson_ decision in 1896. By 1920, black landownership had fallen to less than 20 percent; the 1930 census showed that of fifteen thousand locomotive engineers in the former Confederacy, only fifty were black, while 90 percent of the workers in furniture, textiles, and printing were white; by 1940, there were only eight black lawyers in Georgia and no black judges; not a single black policeman served in any of the deep South states. \"The colored man is the Jean Valjean of American society,\" Frederick Douglass protested on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. \"He has escaped from the galleys,\" but \"the workshop denies him work, and the inn denies him shelter; the ballot-box a fair vote, and the jury-box a fair trial. He may not now be bought and sold like a beast in the market, but he is the trammeled victim of a prejudice, well calculated to repress his manly ambition, paralyze his energies, and make him a dejected and spiritless man, if not a sullen enemy to society.\"\n\nThe Civil War redressed the unbalancing of federalism that had been threatened by nullification and secession; but federalism thus preserved rendered the federal government unable to ensure the political stability of Reconstruction and the incorporation of the South into a national free-labor system. Instead, federalism not only tied the hands, so to speak, of Radical Republicans for political purposes, but also guaranteed the persistence of Southern peonage. \"Although emancipated,\" John Mercer Langston warned in 1879, the freedman \"has not been given practical independence of the old slave-holding class, constituting the land-proprietors and employers in the section where he lives and labors for daily support.\" Southern elites saw little of benefit for themselves in the free-labor ideology that they wanted to embrace, nor were there many incentives for them to do so. \"Southerners used to look on the Northerners as coarse, money-getting people,\" complained the editors of the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1877. \"Their contempt for the commercial character of the North originated... in the aristocratic training of the plantations, and their hatred of the liberty and equality doctrines... arose from the intolerance natural to all aristocracies.\" But it was not just the elites. Southern yeomen like Confederate apologist Leigh Robinson bundled together white supremacy and denunciations of the lure of the marketplace:\n\nWhat if the future shall say, that what the world called slavery, railed against as such, rolling up the whites of quite worldly eyes, in horror that such a thing should exist, stands forth as a patriarchal, beneficent relation, the kindest for the slave, as he came to us, not as France's \"rights of man\" fain would have him come; and what is now lauded to the skies, as \"freedom,\" be exhibited, as a cruel, grasping sauve qui peut, and Devil take the hindmost, the most sordid, the most heartless of all tyranny, the one which most degradingly, and least pitifully, shoves the weakest to the wall, and keeps him there.\n\nFree labor could even inspire a peculiarly gendered disdain, since (declared the Southern novelist Augusta Jane Evans in 1867) free labor made Northerners \"effeminate, selfish, most unscrupulously grasping\"; even their children were \"pitiable manikins already chanting praises to the Gold Calf.\"\n\nRedemption was an anti-free-labor strategy as much as it was a strategy of political exclusion. \"The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live,\" prophesied one white Alabamian to John Townsend Trowbridge in 1865. \"It won't need any law for that.\" And not only blacks suffered from these exclusionary tactics: fully a quarter of all eligible whites in Virginia could not vote because they lacked the money to pay the state poll tax. When it was pointed out that South Carolina's \"eight box law\" (which required a voter to be able to read the names of candidates and the respective offices they were running for in order to place the correct ballot in one of eight ballot boxes) would disfranchise poor whites as much as blacks, the major general of the South Carolina militia merely replied, \"We care not if it does.\" The leader of the Republican minority protested that this law had no other purpose than \"keeping the middle classes and the poor whites, together with the negroes, from having anything to do with the elections,\" and he was not wrong. In North Carolina's Union county, not only agricultural acreage increased in the post-Reconstruction years; so too did the number of cotton plantations over one thousand acres (in Mississippi's Claiborne County, for example, the number of landholdings in the 50- to 199-acre bracket jumped from 73 to 170). Outside the principal cities, the use of cash as a medium of exchange entered only fitfully into Southern calculations. The New York Cash Store in Greenville, Alabama, advertised (despite its name) that \"we will take in exchange for goods, country produce, particularly Eggs, Chickens, Bees Wax, Dry Hides, Peas, Corn Meal, and anything else that we can dispose of.\"\n\nReconstruction aspired to be a bourgeois revolution, and it expected to triumph as effortlessly as the liberal notions of progress had promised. But time sometimes does indeed go backward. In the South, the bourgeois revolution was repelled. To have achieved a different outcome would have required two ingredients\u2014time and force\u2014that circumstances denied Reconstruction. Wendell Phillips certainly believed that Reconstruction could hardly last less than forty years. \"We have to... annihilate the old South, and put a new one there,\" and the best plan Phillips could imagine was long-term military occupation. \"When England conquered the Highlands, she held them,\u2014held them until she could educate them; and it took a generation. That is just what we have to do with the South.\" But Phillips was almost the only one willing to campaign for long-term military occupation. Instead, the same Romantic feudalism that had created the old Southern order reasserted its hegemony, and in another decade, the New South would link hands with Northern Progressivism in a comprehensive critique of the free-labor ideology. The bourgeoisie in this \"bourgeois revolution\" scenario did not flee to the aristocrats to create a \"counterrevolution of property\"; quite the opposite, the postwar Southern aristocrats ensured the destruction of the pure bourgeois revolution by appealing to a set of cultural and racial biases which safely defused the importance of property and sharply restricted access to it. Josephus Daniels, a North Carolina Progressive who would later serve in Woodrow Wilson's cabinet, hectored North Carolina's last black Congressman in the nineteenth century:\n\nIt is a sad commentary upon the political conditions that have obtained in this state... that North Carolina should have the only nigger Congressman....So far as this particular negro is personally concerned, he may be dismissed as beneath contempt....The negro in office regards himself as the enemy of the white man and is anxious to have his race share in that sentiment. Therefore he becomes a menace to the peace of the Commonwealth and a danger to the safety of both races....Venomous, forward, slanderous of the whites, appealing to the worst passions of his own race, he emphasizes anew the need of making an end of him and his kind.\n\nIn its passion for the organic notions of nationalism, Progressivism had scant patience for bourgeois rationalism. \"Very little reflection will serve to make it clear that a community which is striving toward individual liberty as an ideal is laboring to make it easier for the strong to exploit the weak,\" declared North Carolina Progressive and Duke University professor William Thomas Laprade in 1916, thus intersecting racial oppression with organic progressivism. In words that could have reawakened Jefferson Davis from his tomb, Laprade said, \"Nothing is more familiar to thoughtful persons than the practical antithesis between democracy and liberty,\" especially for a race characterized by \"docility\" and \"untrained minds.\" Slavery, Laprade had written in 1911, was a system of \"obligation or responsibility.\" While \"the freedom of a slave was... seriously limited, every such limitation had a definite basis in the practices of the community [and] protected him from the cruelty of his master.\" As a system of reciprocity, slavery had rendered the slave \"a free agent capable of acting for himself,\" even if the slave lacked bourgeois political rights.\n\nRather than a Union-approved narrative of triumphant _embougeoisment_ , the overthrow of Reconstruction allowed the South to develop a series of organic nationalist myths of its own, beginning with the cult of the \"Lost Cause,\" which argued that slavery had never been the real issue in the Civil War. \"The common belief that slavery was the cause of civil war is incorrect,\" announced former Confederate general Richard Taylor in his 1879 memoir, _Destruction and Reconstruction_ , \"and Abolitionists are not justified in claiming the glory and spoils of the conflict.\" Instead, Southerners had been rallying to defend a unique sectional culture, and had fought a noble, heroic, and constitutionally legal war, only to be overwhelmed by Northern might. The Lost Cause became a self-sealing narrative in which heroic Southrons, \"native to the soil,\" struggled to hold off a rapacious Yankee capitalism, and it was not unrelated to the emergence of another ideologically driven narrative of the nineteenth century, the Paris Commune. Both the legend of the Lost Cause and the legend of the Commune were expressions of a Eurocentric nostalgia for organized economies; both imagined themselves as the protectors of the oppressed, when in fact they were instruments of mayhem, leveling, and murder. Lost Causers ventured so far as to annex Abraham Lincoln, treating Lincoln's cautious political prudence as evidence that (as Kentucky journalist Henry Watterson claimed in 1902), \"if Lincoln had lived there would have been no era of reconstruction, with its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation.\"\n\nThe Lost Cause was matched by a rival but cooperating myth: that of the \"New South,\" which claimed, in Atlanta journalist Henry W. Grady's famous 1887 manifesto, that \"there is a New South, not through protest against the Old, but because of new conditions, new adjustments and, if you please, new ideas and aspirations.\" New Southerners feigned an admiration for markets, striving to persuade Northern investors that the South had learned its lesson, that \"we have found out that in the general summary the free Negro counts more than he did as a slave,\" and \"that one Northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners, and have smoothed the path to south, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon's line used to be, and hung our latch-string out to you and yours.\" Adolphe J. Lafargue, who represented Avoyelles Parish in the Louisiana House of Representatives, assured all hearers in 1887 that the South was \"new in brains, new in business enterprises, new in diversified industries and varied commercial pursuits, new in a reawakened agriculture, and an activity, push, thrift and a growth that is almost marvelous.\" This conviction allowed Woodrow Wilson to insist in 1896 that, \"There is nothing to apologize for in the past of the South... There is a great deal, however, cordially to accept in the present, and that is the consummation for which I pray and the consummation which has largely been brought about.\" But the assurances were hollow: the industrial renovation of the South was always an event of the future; per capita wealth in the South was less than half that of the North, and only 6 percent of the Southern labor force was involved in manufacturing by 1900. The New South was also the South of Jim Crow. And lynchings became the new way that blacks could be \"counted\" in the South: between 1885 and 1900, 210 lynchings took place in Alabama, 219 in Georgia, 253 in Mississippi, and 247 in Texas.\n\nThe end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in psychological terms, as a collapse of white Americans' nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction, much less a bourgeois one. No such organized political opposition had arisen in Russia to obstruct Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs. Yet Democratic resistance played nearly as great\u2014if not greater\u2014a role in the demise of Reconstruction as Republican paralysis. From the time of Andrew Jackson, the \"Democracy\" had never been enthusiastic about market revolutions or bourgeois culture\u2014those had been the property of the Whigs and then the Republicans\u2014and they were no more enthusiastic after the war. Northern Democrats, wrote the veteran Baltimore politician John Pendleton Kennedy, \"flattered the lordly ambition of the aristocratic South, courted its favor, obeyed its behests, and found a satisfactory compensation in being permitted... to make it subservient to the selfish and sectional purpose of putting the whole Union at the foot of its slaveholding master.\" The Panic of 1873, the scandals of the Grant administration, and the reckless bubble of postwar finance all conspired to give new credence across the nation to the old Democratic complaints, and after the 1874 elections, Republicans would enter into more than twenty years of divided government, with neither party in control of the presidency and Congress at the same time and no hope of a rejuvenated effort to establish a national civil rights baseline along the lines of Sumner's Civil Rights Bill. The ability of the Democratic Party to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of near-self-destruction in 1860 to reconquer the House of Representatives in 1874, the Senate in 1878, and the presidency in 1884, is one of the least considered aspects of Reconstruction's demise, but it is also one of the most potent.\n\nIt may be too much to have expected Republicans, even Radical Republicans, to muster the political power to resist these forces. Much had been expected from Ulysses Grant as president. But Grant, while he was long on sympathy with the freedpeople, was temperamentally inclined to react to threats to civil rights rather than designing an overarching strategy for anticipating those threats; and in any case, his inauguration as president in 1868 came after three years of Andrew Johnson in which Reconstruction's momentum lost critical pressure. Much had also been expected of Southern Unionism, but Southern Unionists turned out to be too bruised, too racist, and too willing to strike compromises with the old plantation elite. Sumner and Stevens's plan to territorialize the Confederate states might have kept any reinvigorated Southern elite from storming back into Congress and joining forces with their one-time Northern Democratic allies. However, this could scarcely have been done without the continued maintenance of a sizeble military occupation force\u2014although given that such an occupation force would be responsible for 750,000 square miles and 9 million inhabitants, it would have required at least as many troops as were committed to pacifying the West.\n\nAs it was, the actual strength of the US Army had decreased dramatically since the last shots of the war were fired. The combined strength of the regular and volunteer forces had fallen between April 1865 and January 1866 from over 1 million men to just 90,000. Those who did remain were unenthusiastic about occupation duties. By July 1871, the army's strength stood at only 30,000, with most of those posted to the Western frontier; only 4,300 soldiers were on duty in posts in the South, and even then, mostly in major port or railroad cities. Grant used no more than 1,000 of them under the Enforcement Acts, but even that minuscule deployment did nothing to quell paranoia about \"military rule,\" and in 1878 House Democrats would ban the use of \"any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus\" in most domestic cases. (The supreme irony of this gesture was that, before the war, posse comitatus was exactly what slaveholders had been demanding as a mechanism for retrieving fugitive slaves).\n\nIt is dubious whether any Congress, Republican or Democrat, would have authorized the spending needed to support an effective army of occupation, capable of suppressing Southern white insurgencies, especially with the awesome debt of the war years looming. Nor was it likely, in simple ideological terms, that Republicans could have been persuaded by anything less than outright civil war or anyone less than Abraham Lincoln to have adopted transitional military dictatorships as an acceptable way of securing republican government for any significant length of time. Military occupations strained both the patience of taxpayers and the ingrained suspicion of military rule in American minds. After the Panic of 1873 and the Democratic takeover of the House the following year, the unlikelihood shrank to the vanishing point.\n\nIf it were possible to establish a scorecard for Reconstruction, the most promising tallies would be the successful restoration of the Union as a federal Union, the legal extirpation of secession as a political tool in settling national disputes, the raising of the freed slaves to citizenship through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the avoidance of mass executions and imprisonments. That Reconstruction fell short of fully implementing most of these accomplishments is its tragedy, and that tragedy can be briefly and bluntly accounted for by six factors: the sheer unpreparedness of the victorious Union to undertake something as unprecedented as a political reconstruction of a third of its territory; the insurgent resistance of the defeated South; the unwillingness to prolong a military occupation to deal with that insurgency; the deaths and removal of the Radical Republican leadership (starting with Lincoln); the resurgence of the Northern Democrats; and, finally, the shortsighted decisions of the federal courts.\n\nIt is also possible to say that Reconstruction might have turned out a good deal worse than it did. Both the Civil War and Reconstruction were remarkable for their limited durations. By the standard of civil conflict, the American Civil War was comparatively short\u2014the English Civil Wars lasted seven years, and sporadic fighting continued in Scotland and Ireland for another five; the Taiping Rebellion lasted for fourteen; Sulla was the trigger for continual outbreaks of civil conflict for half a century, down to Octavian and Marc Antony. Indeed, some never seem to find any endpoint. Reflecting on the English Civil Wars, T. S. Eliot once remarked, \"The Civil War of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded.... I question whether any serious civil war ever does end. Throughout that period English society was so convulsed and divided that the effects are still felt.\"\n\nBut the American war did end, and in the span of only four years, and Reconstruction twelve years after that, and while it is always possible to wonder what might have happened if Reconstruction's issues had been pressed more firmly, or its overthrow contested more vigorously, it also has to be admitted that it might have spiraled onward in agony and insurgency for decades, and with every chance for a far more damaging, perhaps even genocidal, outcome. To assume that what was eventually achieved by federal authority in the \"Second Reconstruction\" in the 1960s would have taken no more real effort from federal authority in the 1870s pays insufficient attention to what had changed in the American experience as a whole over those nine decades. Any proper epitaph for Reconstruction must acknowledge that at least it managed to avoid the fate of other post\u2013civil war eras.\n\nMoreover, the good fight of Reconstruction was not overthrown entirely. Post-Reconstruction Republican presidents continued to appoint attorneys general who prosecuted voting-rights violations (although the number of convictions remained ludicrously small: 20 guilty verdicts out of 282 suits during the Hayes administration, 147 out of 692 cases under presidents James Garfield and Chester Arthur), and prosecutions of the Klan won a minor victory before the Supreme Court in ex parte _Yarbrough_ in 1884. For another generation after 1877, the struggles for black civil rights continued, albeit sporadically. (Union army veterans, for instance, organized the first racially integrated national society, the Grand Army of the Republic, and criticized the government's failure to give what was \"promised to our colored brethren, 'forty acres and a mule.' \")\n\nRepublican administrations also used the patronage they possessed for appointments of black Republicans to federal postmasterships and customs houses (especially along the long line of Southern coastal cities). As late as 1907, 244 black men and 36 black women held federal postmasterships from Republican administrations. Democrats repeatedly attempted to repeal the Enforcement Acts, only to be stymied by Republicans in the Senate and by President Hayes's vetoes, until the _Civil Rights Cases_ rendered them useless by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment gave no power to guarantee \"social equality.\" Senate Republicans made valiant attempts to absorb equal funding for schools into the federal budget, only to have them beaten back by House Democrats. And in 1890, Massachusetts Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge's elections bill (a revived Enforcement Act to provide federal oversight for mostly Southern elections) died a slow death, this time in the Senate.\n\nBut other Republicans wavered. The pressure to yield to reconciliation, to abandon black civil rights, to prevent defections by voters, and to concede talking points about race corroded the Reconstruction project. \"A new era of feeling and sympathy, the ties and associations of a common ancestry and a kindred destiny\" were what the _Atlantic Monthly_ hoped could now be \"fostered until the wounds of the past shall be cicatrized and forgotten\"\u2014by which was meant a common _white_ ancestry. Benjamin Harrison, another Midwestern Republican governor and Union army veteran who was elected president in 1888, assured the all-black Harrison League of Indianapolis that Republicans were dedicated to \"making all men free, and gave to you equal civil rights.\" But Harrison preferred, in the face of Democratic opposition (and with a view to swaying border state voters), to speak only of the \"common rights of American citizenship.\" When a Southern delegation confronted him in 1889, Harrison hastily promised to do nothing that would place \"them in positions where race instinct is sure to brew personal bitterness and social discord.\" He added, \"I would not like to see a Negro mayor or postmaster of Indianapolis,\" nor would he find it \"agreeable to me to practice my profession before a Colored federal judge.\"\n\nMerely to call Reconstruction a failure is too simplistic. Reconstruction was overthrown, subverted, and betrayed\u2014and then replicated, since many of the same hesitations over costs, internecine politics, and xenophobia led to dreary repetitions of these mistakes after the First World War and after the two Gulf Wars. In none of those cases would anything but lengthy and expensive occupations have sufficed to reinvent regimes that began conspiring to reverse battlefield defeat before the guns were barely cool; in none of those cases was enough of the country willing to use the force necessary to accompany liberation. \"Looking back over the whole policy of reconstruction, it seems to me that the wisest thing would have been to have continued for some time the military rule,\" said Ulysses S. Grant:\n\nThat was our right as a conqueror, and it was a mild penalty for the stupendous crime of treason. Military rule would have been just to all, to the negro who wanted freedom, the white man who wanted protection, the Northern man who wanted Union....The trouble about military rule in the South was that our people did not like it. It was not in accordance with our institutions. I am clear now that it would have been better for the North to have... held the South in a territorial condition.\n\nHe was surely right, but right will not stand as right if it is realized too late. \"I wonder if our white fellow-men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood?\" demanded Susie King Taylor, a slave-born teacher and military nurse. \"Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless.\" A century and a half later, her question still echoes horribly.\n\n#  Timeline\n\n1865  |   \n---|---  \nApril 9 | Surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House  \nApril 14 | Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth  \nApril 15 | Death of Abraham Lincoln\u2014Andrew Johnson sworn-in as 17th President  \nMay 10 | Capture of Jefferson Davis by federal cavalry near Irwinville, Georgia  \nMay 15 | Johnson appoints Oliver Otis Howard to head Freedmen's Bureau  \nMay 29 | Johnson's amnesty proclamation  \nJune 13-July 13 | New self-reconstructed state governments established  \nNovember 22 | Passage of Mississippi \"black code\"  \nDecember 4-July 28, 1866 | Meeting of 39th Congress (1st session)  \nDecember 13 | Establishment of Joint Congressional Committee on Reconstruction  \nDecember 18 | Secretary of State Seward announces ratification of 13th Amendment  \nDecember 19 | Passage of South Carolina \"black code\"  \n1866  \n---  \nJanuary 5 | Lyman Trumbull introduces bill to extend term of Freedmen's Bureau and a Civil Rights Bill  \nFebruary 19 | Johnson vetoes extension of Freedmen's Bureau Bill  \nMarch 27 | Johnson vetoes Civil Rights Bill  \nApril 2 | Johnson proclaims ending of military hostilities  \nApril 3 | Chief Justice Chase announces Supreme Court's decision in _ex parte Milligan_  \nApril 9 | Congress passes the Civil Rights Bill over Johnson's veto  \nMay 1-3 | Memphis, Tennessee, massacre  \nJune 13 | Passage of the 14th Amendment by House of Representatives  \nJuly 30 | New Orleans riot at the Mechanics Institute  \nAugust 14-16 | National Union Convention meets in Philadelphia  \nAugust 27-September 15 | Johnson's \"Swing 'Round the Circle\"  \nDecember 3-March 3, 1867 | Meeting of 39th Congress (2nd session)  \n1867   \n---  \nMarch 2 | Congress passes 1st Reconstruction Act over Johnson's veto  \nMarch 4-December 1  | Meeting of 40th Congress (1st session)  \nMarch 23 | Congress passes 2nd Reconstruction Act over Johnson's veto  \nApril 1-20 | Special session of 40th Congress  \nApril 12 | Chief Justice Chase delivers Supreme Court's opinion in _Texas v. White_  \nJuly 19  | Congress passes 3rd Reconstruction Act over Johnson's veto  \nDecember 2-November 10, 1868 | Meeting of 40th Congress (2nd session)  \n1868   \n---  \nMarch 2 | Articles of impeachment of Johnson approved and managers appointed by House of Representatives  \nMarch 11 | 4th Reconstruction Act becomes law after Johnson fails to sign or veto  \nMay 16 | First article of impeachment fails of guilty verdict in the Senate  \nJune 22-July 15 | Congress re-admits seven Southern states under the Reconstruction Acts  \nJuly 28 | Secretary of State Seward announces ratification of the 14th Amendment  \nAugust 11 | Death of Thaddeus Stevens  \nSeptember 19 | Camilla, Georgia, massacre  \nSeptember 28 | Opelousas, Louisiana, massacre  \nNovember 3 | Election of Ulysses S. Grant as 18th President  \nDecember 7-March 3, 1869 | Meeting of 40th Congress (3rd session)  \n1869   \n---  \nMarch 4 | Inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant as 18th President  \nMarch 4-April 10 | Meeting of 41st Congress (1st session)  \nMay 10 | Leland Stanford drives ceremonial \"golden spike\" to open transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory  \nJune 15  | Opening of National Peace Jubilee in Boston  \nDecember 6-July 15, 1870 | Meeting of 41st Congress (2nd session)  \nDecember 6 | Grant's first annual message to Congress  \n1870   \n---  \nJanuary 24-July 15 | Re-admission of remaining Southern states  \nFebruary 25 | Hiram R. Revels, first African American to be sworn-in as a U.S. Senator, takes seat once occupied by Jefferson Davis  \nMay 31 | President Grant signs the 1st Force (or Enforcement) Act  \nJuly 19 | War declared between France and Prussia  \nOctober 12 | death of Robert E. Lee  \nDecember 5-March 3, 1871 | meeting of 41st Congress (3rd session)  \n1871   \n---  \nJanuary 8 | King Wilhelm I of Prussia proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles  \nFebruary 28 | Grant signs 2nd Force (or Enforcement) Act  \nMarch 4-April 20 | Meeting of 42nd Congress (1st session)  \nMarch 24 | Grant issues cease-and-desist proclamation to restrain political violence in South Carolina  \nApril 20 | Grant signs 3rd Force (or Enforcement) Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act  \nJune 10 | U.S. Navy flotilla lands sailors and Marines in a punitive action against Korea  \nJuly 15 | Death of Thomas \"Tad\" Lincoln, fourth child of Abraham and Mary Lincoln  \nOctober 8-10 | Chicago's Great Fire  \nOctober 23 | Resignation of Rufus Bullock as governor of Georgia to avoid impeachment  \nOctober 27 | Arrest of William Marcy \"Boss\" Tweed in New York  \nNovember 10  | Henry Morton Stanley \"discovers\" Dr. David Livingstone near Ujiji, in east Africa  \nDecember 2 | Grant dismisses Amos Akerman as attorney-general  \nDecember 4-June 10, 1872 | Meeting of 42nd Congress (2nd session)  \n1872   \n---  \nFebruary 20 | Opening of New York City's Metropolitan Museumof Art  \nMay 1-3 | Liberal Republican national convention meets in Cincinnati and nominates Horace Greeley for president  \nSeptember 4 | Cr\u00e9dit Mobilier scandal published by the _New York Sun_  \nNovember 5 | Re-election of Ulysses Grant as President  \nNovember 29 | Death of Horace Greeley  \nDecember 2-March 3, 1873 | Meeting of 42nd Congress (3rd session)  \n1873   \n---  \nMarch 29 | James Pike begins serialization of _The Prostrate State_ in the _New-York Tribune_  \nApril 13 | Colfax, Louisiana, massacre  \nApril 14 | Justice Samuel Miller issues Supreme Court decision in _Slaughterhouse Cases_  \nMay 7 | Death of Chief Justice Salmon Chase  \nSeptember 18 | Jay Cooke & Co. closes doors of its Washington and Philadelphia offices\u2014beginning of Panic of 1873  \nOctober 10 | Assassination of Octavius V. Catto in Philadelphia  \nDecember 1-June 23, 1874 | Meeting of 43rd Congress (1st session)  \n1874   \n---  \nJanuary 4 | Inauguration of Adelbert Ames as Republican governor of Mississippi  \nMarch 11 | Death of Charles Sumner  \nApril 15-May 15 | 1st Impressionist exhibition opens in Paris  \nJune 1-September 7, 1875 | Congressional elections give Democrats 183-106 majority in the House of Representatives for 44th Congress  \nDecember 7-March 3, 1875 | Meeting of 43rd Congress (2nd session)  \n1875   \n---  \nMarch 1 | Grant signs Sumner's Civil Rights Bill  \nMarch 5-March 24 | Meeting of 44th Congress (special session)  \nMay 17 | Running of the 1st Kentucky Derby  \nJuly 31 | Death of Andrew Johnson  \nNovember 22 | Death of Vice-President Henry Wilson  \nDecember 6-August 15, 1876 | Meeting of 44th Congress (1st session)  \n1876   \n---  \nMarch 10 | Alexander Graham Bell conducts first successful experiment with Telephone  \nMarch 29 | Adelbert Ames agrees to resign as governor of Mississippi rather than face trumped-up charges by the Democratic state legislature  \nMarch 27 | Supreme Court, with Justice Waite writing for the majority, announces decision in _U.S. v. Cruikshank_  \nMay 10 | Opening of Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia  \nJune 16 | Republican national convention nominates Rutherford B. Hayes as its candidate for president on the seventh ballot  \nJune 25  | Battle of the Little Big Horn  \nJune 28 | Democratic national convention nominates Samuel Tilden as its candidate for president  \nJuly 8 | Hamburg, South Carolina, massacre  \nNovember 7 | Election day fails to produce a clear presidential winner  \nDecember 4-March 3, 1877 | Meeting of 44th Congress (2nd session)  \n1877   \n---  \nJanuary 25-26 | Creation of Electoral Commission to determine winner of presidential election  \nMarch 2 | Designation of Rutherford B. Hayes as 19th President  \nApril 10 | Removal of federal protection for Chamberlain government in South Carolina and surrender of state capital to Wade Hampton the next day\n\n#  References\n\n#  Introduction\n\nAbraham Lincoln's comment on the idea of reconstruction are in his \"First Inaugural Address\" (March 4, 1861), \"Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction\" (December 8, 1863), and \"Last Public Address\" (April 11, 1865), in _Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln_ , ed. R.P. Basler (New Brunswick, 1953), 4:252, 7:53\u20134, 8:403.\n\nCharles Sumner, \"Our Domestic Relations; or, How to Treat the Rebel States,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 12 (October 1863), 521.\n\nThaddeus Stevens, _Reconstruction: Speech of the Hon. Thaddeus Stevens, Delivered in the City of Lancaster, September 7th, 1865_ (Lancaster, 1865), 5, and \"Reconstruction\" (December 18, 1865), _Congressional Globe_ , 39th Congress, 1st session, 74\n\nThe so-called Wade-Davis Bill is the \"Bill for Reconstruction,\" in _The Political History of the United States of America, During the Great Rebellion_ , ed. Edward McPherson (Washington, 1865), 317\u20138.\n\nCharles Sumner to John Bright (January 1, 1865), in _The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner_ , ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Boston, 1990), 2:262.\n\n#  Chapter One: Vengeance\n\nJacob Howard to Andrew Johnson (April 18, 1865), John W. Gorham to Johnson (June 3, 1865), and \"Interview with Charles Halpine\" (March 5, 1867), in _The Papers of Andrew Johnson: 1864\u20131865_ , ed. LeRoy P. Graf (Knoxville, 1986), 7:580, 8:173, 12:111.\n\n_Proceedings of the Union League of Philadelphia Regarding the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States_ (Philadelphia, 1865), 19.\n\nThe beginning of Andrew Johnson's slide toward reconciliation with the defeated Confederate states is in \"By the President of the United States of America\u2014A Proclamation\" (May 29, 1865), in _A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789\u20131897_ , ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, 1897), 6:312\u2013314.\n\nThaddeus Stevens to Andrew Johnson (May 16, 1865), in _The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, Volume 2: April 1865-August 1868_ , eds. B.W. Palmer & H.B. Ochoa (Pittsburgh, 1998), 5.\n\nSumner, \"One Man Power vs. Congress\u2014The Present Situation\" (October 2, 1866), in _Charles Sumner: His Complete Works_ (Boston, 1900), 14:198, 202.\n\n\"Interview with George L. Stearns\" (October 3, 1865), in _The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction_ , ed. Edward McPherson (Washington, 1875), 49.\n\n\"Laws in Relation to Freedmen,\" 39th Congress, 2nd session, Senate Executive Doc. No. 6 (1867), 192\u2013199.\n\nHans L. Trefousse, _Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian_ (1997; Mechanicsburg, PA, 2001), 175.\n\n#  Chapter Two: Alienation\n\nThe growing crescendo of opposition to Johnson can be seen in \"Reconstruction\" (December 4, 1865), \"Organization of the House\" (December 5, 1865), James Doolittle, \"Joint Committee on Reconstruction\" (December 12, 1865), Lyman Trumbull, \"Civil Rights\u2014Veto Message\" (April 4, 1866), and John B. Henderson, \"Reconstruction\" (June 8, 1866) in _Congressional Globe_ , 39th Congress, 1st session, 4\u201310, 26, 1755, 1760, 3034.\n\nJohnson's riposte to the Radicals begins with his \"First Annual Message\" (December 4, 1865), in _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ , 6:353, 357, 360\u2013361, 365.\n\nLyman Trumbull's civil rights proposals appear in his \"An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication\" (April 9, 1866), in _Statutes at Large_ , ed. George P. Sanger (Boston, 1868), 14:27\u201328.\n\nAndrew Johnson, \"Interview with a Colored Delegation respecting Suffrage\" (February 7, 1866), in McPherson, _Political History_ (1875), 53, 55.\n\n\"The Memphis Massacre,\" _Chicago Tribune_ (May 9, 1865).\n\n_James Speed; A Personality_ (Louisville, KY, 1914), 92\u201393. Underscores the disenchantment of members of Johnson's cabinet with the president.\n\n\"The President on the Stump,\" _North American Review_ 102 (April 1866), 532.\n\n\"Congress--Passage of the Civil Rights Bill in the House,\" _Chicago Tribune_ (April 10, 1866).\n\n\"The President's Message Vetoing the Freedmen's Bureau Bill--The Bill Immediately Passed Over the Veto by Both Houses,\" _New York Times_ (July 17, 1866).\n\n\"The Conspiracy at Washington,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 20 (November 1867), 634, 636\u201337.\n\nThe Congressional Reconstruction legislation is contained in \"An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States\" (March 2, 1867), \"An Act Supplementary to an Act entitled 'An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States' \" (March 23, 1867), \"An Act Supplementary to an Act entitled 'An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States' (July 19, 1867) and \"An Act to amend the Act passed March twenty-third, eighteen hundred and sixty-seven\" (March 11, 1868), in _Statutes-at-Large, Treaties and Proclamations of the United States of America_ , ed. George P. Sanger (Boston, 1868), 14:428, 15:2, 14, 41.\n\n#  Chapter Three: Arrogance\n\nOn the costs of the war for the South, see Claudia D. Goldin and Frank D. Lewis, \"The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications,\" _Journal of Economic History_ 35 (June 1975), 317, and Jenny Bourne, \"Double Take: Abolition and the Size of Transferred Property Rights,\" in _Lincoln, Congress and Emancipation_ , eds. Paul Finkelman & Donald R. Kennon (Athens, OH, 2016), 228\u2013229.\n\nWhittier, \"Snow-Bound,\" in _American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume One: Freneau to Whitman_ (New York, 1993), 488\u2013489.\n\nSidney Andrews, \"Three Months Among the Reconstructionists,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 17 (February 1866), 238, 245.\n\nFrederick Douglass, \"Reconstruction,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 18 (December 1866), 762.\n\nOn the imposition of \"serfdom,\" see \"Report of an Assistant Superintendent, in Virginia\" (February 26, 1866), in Walter Lynwood Fleming, ed., _Documents Relating to Reconstruction_ (Morgantown, WV, 1904), 41.\n\nJohn Mercer Langston, \"Citizenship and the Ballot\" (October, 1865), in _Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses_ (Washington, 1883), 99\u2013100.\n\nExamination of Cullen A. Battle (October 18, 1871), in _Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire Into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States_ (Washington, 1872), 11:1061.\n\nFrances Butler Leigh, _Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War_ (London, 1883), 133.\n\n\"South Carolina Morals,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 39 (April 1877), 474.\n\n\"The Political Condition of South Carolina,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 39 (February 1877), 192\u20133.\n\nFor the Tenure of Office Act, see \"An Act regulating the Tenure of certain Civil Offices\" (March 2, 1867), and \"An Act Making Appropriations for the Support of the Army\" (March 2, 1867), in _Statutes at Large_ , 14:430\u201332, 485\u201387.\n\n\"Impeachment of the President (February 22\u201324, 1868), _Congressional Globe_ , 40th Congress, 2nd session, 1336\u20131369, 1382\u20131400.\n\n#  Chapter Four: Resistance\n\nOn the nomination of Grant, see _Official Proceedings of the National Republican Conventions of 1868, 1872, 1876 and 1880_ (Minneapolis, 1903), 28, 78.\n\n\"South Carolina\u2014The Reconstruction Convention,\" _New York Times_ (January 21, 1868).\n\nTourgee, \"Speech on Elective Franchise\" (February 22, 1868), in _Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourg\u00e9e_ , eds. Mark Elliott & J.D. Smith (Baton Rouge, 2010), 39.\n\nAlbert T. Morgan, _Yazoo: Or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South_ (Washington, 1884), 25.\n\n\"The Mission of the War\u2014A Lecture by Frederick Douglass,\" _New-York Tribune_ (January 14, 1864).\n\n\"The Political Condition of South Carolina,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 39 (February 1877), 186.\n\nExamination of Leander Bigger (July 15, 1871), in _Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquiry into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States_ (Washington, 1872), 1:276.\n\nDepositions of Spencer Griffith, Charles E. Robert, S.C. Mercer and H.H. Aynett (August 27 and 29, 1868), in _Report of Evidence Taken Before the Military Committee: In Relation to Outrages Committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Middle and Western Tennessee_ (Nashville, 1868), 55\u201356, 59.\n\nT. Thomas Fortune, _After War Times: An African American Childhood in Reconstruction-Era Florida_ , ed. D.R. Weinfeld (Tuscaloosa, 2014), 17.\n\n#  Chapter Five: Distraction\n\nUlysses S. Grant to Joseph Hawley (May 29, 1868) and to Edward R.S. Canby (June 26, 1868), in _The Papers of Ulysses Grant_ , ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale, IL, 1991), 18:264, 296; \"Inaugural Address,\" in _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ , 7:6\u20138.\n\nOn Adolph \"Bovie,\" see William Livingstone, _Livingstone's History of the Republican Party_ (Detroit: Wm. Livingstone, 1900), 1:244.\n\n\"His mind seemed torpid\" appears in _The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 263\u2013264.\n\nGrant, \"First Annual Message\" (December 6, 1869), in _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ , 7:28\u201329.\n\nOn the re-admission of Southern states, see \"Right of Representation\" (January 25, 1870), in _Congressional Globe_ , 41st Congress, 2nd session, 720, 759; \"An Act to admit the State of Virginia to Representation in the Congress of the United States\" (January 26, 1870), in _Statutes at Large_ , 16:62\u201363.\n\nOn landownership patterns, see Jonathan Weiner, \"Planter Persistence and Social Change: Alabama, 1850-1870,\" _Journal of Interdisciplinary History_ 7 (Autumn 1976), 237\u201338, 241, 257.\n\nThe Force Acts are itemized as \"An Act to enforce the Right of Citizens of the United States to Vote in the Several States of this Union, and for other Purposes\" (May 31, 1870), \"An Act to enforce the Rights of Citizens of the United States to Vote in the Several States of this Union\" (February 28, 1871), and \"An Act to enforce the Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States\" (April 20, 1871) in _Statutes-at-Large_ , 16:140\u201346, 433\u201340 and 17:13\u201315.\n\nTestimony of Elias Hill (July 25, 1871), in _Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into The Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States_ (Washington, 1872), 3:1411.\n\nEdward Townsend to Alfred Terry (September 11, 1871) and Grant to Akerman (December 12, 1871), in _Papers of Ulysses S. Grant_ , 22:180, 288.\n\nGeorge Ward Nichols, \"The Indian: What Should We Do With Him,\" _Harper's New Monthly Magazine_ 40 (April 1870), 733.\n\nConcerning Reconstruction in Mormon Utah, see \"The Mormons,\" _New York Herald_ (March 25, 1872), John Hay, \"The Mormon Prophet's Tragedy,\" _Atlantic Monthly_ 24 (December1869), 679, and \"Polygamy in Utah\" (March 23, 1870), _Congressional Globe_ , 41st Congress, 2nd session, 2181.\n\nOn the Liberal Republicans, see \"The Failure of the Confidence Game,\" _Harper's Weekly_ (November 9, 1872).\n\n#  Chapter Six: Law\n\nOn the reconstruction of the federal judiciary after the Civil War, see William M. Wiecek, \"The Reconstruction of Federal Judicial Power, 1863-1875,\" _American Journal of Legal History_ 13 (October 1969), 333.\n\nFor the role of Salmon Chase as chief justice, see Chase to J.M. Reid (January 29, 1865) to Lincoln (April 11, 1865), to Henry Hilliard (April 27, 1868) and to J.W. Schuckers (September 24, 1866), in Jacob W. Schuckers, _The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase_ (New York, 1874), 514\u20135, 520, 528, 541; see also Chase to William S. Rosecrans (August 16, 1869), in _The Salmon P. Chase Papers: Correspondence, 1865\u20131873_ , ed. John Niven (Kent, OH, 1998), 5:314.\n\n_Cummings v. The State of Missouri_ , in _Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, December Term, 1866_ , ed. J.W. Wall (Washington, 1870), 4:285.\n\nOn the 15th Amendment, see \"Suffrage\" (January 11 and 29, 1869), in _Congressional Globe_ , 40th Congress, 3rd session, 285, 723, and \"The Suffrage Amendments in Congress,\" _New York Times_ (February 15, 1869).\n\n_Texas v. White et al_ , in _Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, December Term 1868_ , 7:703.\n\n_Slaughter-House Cases_ (The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company), in _Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States in the December Term, 1872, and October Term, 1873_, ed. Stephen K. Williams (Newark, NY, 1884), 21:408.\n\n_United States v. William J. Cruikshank et al_ (1876), in _Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Terms, 1874, 1875, 1876_ , ed. Stephen K. Williams (Newark, NY, 1885), 23:588\u201397.\n\n#  Chapter Seven: Dissension\n\n\"The King of Frauds\u2014How the Credit Mobilier Bought Its Way Through Congress\" and \"The Credit Mobilier and the Bribery of Members of Congress,\" _New York Sun_ (September 4 and 10, 1872).\n\nJames S. Pike, _The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government_ (New York, 1874), 12, 14.\n\n\"Wall-St. Panic-Stricken,\" _New-York Tribune_ (September 19, 1873).\n\nDaniel R. Biddle & Murray Dubin, _Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America_ (Philadelphia, 2010), 428\u2013429.\n\nTilton, \"One Blood of All Nations\" (February 27, 1864), in _Sanctum Sanctorum; or, Proof-Sheets from an Editor's Table_ (New York, 1870).\n\nDennett, \"The South As It Is,\" _The Nation_ (January 4, 1866). See also Current, _Those Terrible Carpetbaggers_ , 369\u201370 and Ruth Currie-McDaniel, _Carpetbagger of Conscience: A Biography of John Emory Bryant_ (Athens, GA, 1987),148, 176, 178.\n\n\"The Week,\" _The Nation_ (September 23, 1875).\n\n\"State of Georgia\" (March 15, 1870), in _Congressional Globe_ , 41st Congress, 2nd session, 1956.\n\nOn dissension within Reconstruction's ranks, see Mrs. A.M. French, _Slavery in South Carolina and the Ex-Slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission_ (New York, 1862), 136, 138, and Turner, in Currie-McDaniel, _Carpetbagger of Conscience_ , 95, and Jones, _A Dreadful Deceit_ , 177\u2013178.\n\nJulia Crofts to Douglass (April 13, 1863), in Douglas R. Egerton, _Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments that Redeemed America_ (New York, 2016), 77.\n\nSumner's Civil Rights Bill is contained in \"An Act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights\" (March 1, 1875), _Statutes-at-Large_ , 18:335\u2013337.\n\nJerry L. West, _The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction_ (Jefferson, NC, 2011), 69\u201372.\n\nChamberlain's farewell is part of \"To the Republicans of South Carolina\" (April 10, 1877), in Walter Allen, _Governor Chamberlain's Administration in South Carolina: A Chapter of Reconstruction in the Southern States_ (New York, 1888), 481.\n\n#  Epilogue\n\nC.F. Adams, \"The Government and the Railroad Corporations,\" _North American Review_ 112 (January 1871), 35, 51, and J.R. Doolittle, \"Law Address of Ex-Senator James R. Doolittle, Delivered before the Union College of Law at Chicago, June 6th, 1879,\" _Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society_ 19 (April-July 1926), 84.\n\nFrederick Douglass, \"National Colored Convention\" (April 15, 1872), in _The American Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1872_ (New York, 1873), 775.\n\nJohn Mercer Langston, \"The Exodus\" (1879), in _Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses_ (Washington, 1883), 238.\n\nW.T. Laprade, \"A New Epoch,\" in _Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Session of the State Library and Historical Association of North Carolina, Raleigh, December 5\u20136, 1916_ (Raleigh, 1917), 51\u201353, 55, and \"Some Problems in Writing the History of American Slavery,\" _South Atlantic Quarterly_ 10 (April 1911), 138\u201339.\n\nOn the formulation of a \"Lost Cause\" and \"New South\" mythology, see Richard Taylor, _Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War_ (London, 1879), 2, and Henry W. Grady, \"The New South\" (December 22, 1886), in Joel Chandler Harris, _Henry W. Grady: His Life, Writings, and Speeches_ (New York, 1890), 15\u201316.\n\n\"Over 3,000 Lynchings in Twenty Years,\" _Chicago Tribune_ (September 1, 1901).\n\nOn Grant's reflection on military occupation, see John Russell Young, _Around the World with General Grant_ (New York, 1879), 2:362\u201363\n\nSusie King Taylor, _Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33 d United States Colored Troops_ (Boston, 1902), 61.\n\n#  Further reading\n\n#  Introduction\n\nWilliam Archibald Dunning gave birth to the school of Reconstruction interpretation which pictured white Southerners, not the freed slaves, as the victims of vengeful Northerners. Dunning's view, in _Reconstruction: Political & Economic, 1865\u20131877_ (1905), was challenged by W.E.B. DuBois in _Black Reconstruction in America_ , (1935), by Kenneth M. Stampp in _The Era of Reconstruction, 1865\u20131877_ (1967), and Eric Foner in _Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863\u20131877_ (1988), all of which were shaped in varying degrees by Marxist influences. Barrington Moore, _Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World_ (1967) proposed interpreting Reconstruction as a bourgeois revolution.\n\nLincoln's ideas on Reconstruction are treated in Louis P. Masur, _Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion_ (2015) and William C. Harris, _With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union_ (1997). A more expansive view of Reconstruction is contained in Heather Cox Richardson's _The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865\u20131901_ (2001) and _West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War_ (2008). Douglas Egerton's _The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era_ (2014) and Mark Wahlgren Summers' _The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction_ (2014) illuminate the political upheavals of Reconstruction.\n\nFour important anthologies bring together an array of important primary sources on Reconstruction: Edward McPherson, _The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction_ (1875), Walter L. Fleming's _Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial_ (2 vols.,1906), John David Smith's _We Ask Only for Even-Handed Justice: Black Voices from Reconstruction, 1865\u20131877_ (2014), and Brooks Simpson's _Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality_ , in the Library of America series (2018).\n\n#  Chapter One: Vengeance\n\nThe most revealing memoirs of individuals at the center of the events in Washington which launched Reconstruction are _John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet_ (1895), George Boutwell's _Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs_ (1902); James G. Blaine's _Twenty Years of Congress: from Lincoln to Garfield_ (1886), George W. Julian's _Political Recollections, 1840\u20131872_ (1884), the _Diary of Gideon Welles_ , ed. E.T. Welles (3 vols., Boston, 1911), and Chauncey M. Depew's _My Memories of Eighty Years_ (1922).\n\nAmong the first-hand views of the South immediately after the end of the war, Sidney Andrews' _The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas_ (Boston, 1866), John Townsend Trowbridge's _The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities_ (1867), and Whitelaw Reid's _After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865, to May 1, 1866_ (1866) are the most comprehensive.\n\nThe principal biographers of Andrew Johnson are Eric L. McKitrick, in _Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction_ (1960, 1988) and Hans L. Trefousse, in _Andrew Johnson: A Biography_ (1989). Gregory Downs, _After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War_ (2015), offers the fullest survey of Union military occupation of the South.\n\n#  Chapter Two: Alienation\n\nThe Freedmen's Bureau still begs for a comprehensive history, but John and LaWanda Cox's \"General O.O. Howard and the 'Misrepresented Bureau',\" _Journal of Southern History_ 19 (November 1953) remains a fine introduction. Paul H. Bergeron, _Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction_ (2011), is an important guide to the steady deterioration of Johnson's authority in 1866\u201367. On the horrendous race riots in New Orleans and Memphis, which played a significant role in undercutting that authority, see Hannah Rosen, _Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South_ (2009), James G. Hollandsworth, _An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866_ (2001), and Stephen V. Ash, _A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year After the Civil War_ (2013). Joseph G. Dawson's _Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862\u20131877_ (1982) is a model in describing the difficulties in implementing Congressional Reconstruction. Mark Wahlgren Summers's _A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction_ (2009) untangles the rumored plan of Andrew Johnson to stage a military coup of his own against Congress.\n\n#  Chapter Three: Arrogance\n\nFor the meaning of free labor, see Eric Foner, _Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War_ (1970), Michael S. Green, _Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War_ (2004), and Heather Cox Richardson, _The Death of Reconstruction_. The struggles of the freed slaves to establish economic independence for themselves in Georgia and North Carolina are handled in Paul A. Cimbala, _Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865\u20131870_ (1997) and Patricia C. Click, _Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony, 1862\u20131867_ (2001). The standard works on the impeachment of Andrew Johnson are David O. Stewart, _Impeached: The Trial of President Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy_ (2009) and Michael Les Benedict's classic, _The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson_ (1973). James Ashley's lead role in the impeachment itself can be followed in Robert F. Horowitz, _The Great Impeacher: A Political Biography of James M. Ashley_ (1979).\n\n#  Chapter Four: Resistance\n\nFew groups in American history have been more utterly misrepresented than the 'carpetbaggers,' whom the Dunning school routinely represented as Northern harpies who, in league with ignorant blacks and opportunistic Southern 'scalawags,' appeared at the end of the war to rip out profit from the body of a prostrate South. Revision of this farcical picture begins with Richard M. Current's _Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation_ (1988), David S. Cecelski, _The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War_ (2012), Canter Brown, _Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867\u20131924_ (1998), Mark Elliott, _Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourg\u00e9e and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson_ (2006), Nancy Koester, _Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life_ (2014), and Ruth Currie-McDaniel, _Carpetbagger of Conscience: A Biography of John Emory Bryant_ (1987). The 'scalawags' in particular have benefitted from sympathetic treatment through James Alex Baggett, _The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction_ (2003), Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, _The Scalawag In Alabama Politics, 1865\u20131881_ (1977), and Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough, _Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction_ (2008).\n\nThe recreation of a resistant Southern sectional identity, continuous with the Confederacy, has been ably analyzed in Anne Sarah Rubin in _A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861\u20131868_ (2005). The terrorist insurgency mounted by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist militias can be followed in Wyn Craig Wade, _The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America_ (1998), Stephen Budiansky, _The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox_ (2006), Edward John Harcourt, \"Who Were the Pale Faces? New Perspectives on the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan,\" _Civil War History_ 51 (March 2005), Lee W. Formwalt, \"The Camilla Massacre of 1868: Racial Violence as Political Propaganda,\" _George Historical Quarterly_ , 71 (Fall 1987), James G. Dauphine, \"The Knights of the White Camellia and the Election of 1868: Louisiana's White Terrorists,\" _Louisiana History_ 30 (Spring 1989), and Carolyn E. DeLatte, \"The St. Landry Riot: A Forgotten Incident of Reconstruction Violence,\" _Louisiana History_ 17 (Winter 1976), 47\u201348.\n\n#  Chapter Five: Distraction\n\nOn the economic conditions which prevailed in the South during Reconstruction and after, the primary work is Edward L. Ayres, _The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction_ (1992). But there are also a number of useful studies of specific components of that economy, starting with William J. Cooper, \"The Cotton Crisis in the Antebellum South: Another Look,\" _Agricultural History_ 49 (April 1975) and Robert Tracy McKenzie, \"Freedmen and the Soil in the Upper South: The Reorganization of Tennessee Agriculture, 1865-1880,\" _Journal of Southern History_ 59 (February 1993).\n\nThe reputation of Ulysses Grant as a president has suffered nearly as much obloquy as the 'carpetbaggers,' and with as little justification. Substantial work in retrieving Grant's reputation has been done by Brooks D. Simpson in _Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861\u20131868_ (1991) and _The Reconstruction Presidents_ (1998), H.W. Brands, _The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace_ (2012), Charles W. Calhoun, _The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant_ (2017), and Ron Chernow, _Grant_ (2018). On Grant's suppression of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, see Lou Falkner Williams, \"The South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials and Enforcement of Federal Rights, 1871-1872,\" _Civil War History_ 39 (March 1993), and Jerry Lee West, _The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan in York County, South Carolina, 1865\u20131877_ (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002).\n\nOn the unhappy and short-lived Liberal Republican movement, see Andrew L. Slap, _The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era_ (2006), and Hans L. Trefousse, _Carl Schurz: A Biography_ (1982).\n\n#  Chapter Six: Law\n\nThe federal courts were consigned to a curiously diminished role during the Civil War, as explained by Mark E. Neely, _Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War_ (2011) and Jonathan W. White, \"The Strangely Insignificant Role of the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War,\" _Journal of the Civil War Era_ 3 (June 2013). The determination of the jurists to re-capture their lost standing can be seen in Joseph G. Gambone, \"Ex Parte Milligan: The Restoration of Judicial Prestige,\" _Civil War History_ 16 (September 1970).\n\nThe dominant figures of the Reconstruction Supreme Court begin with Salmon Chase, as Chief Justice. Chase has benefited from several comprehensive biographies and studies, by Michael Les Benedict in \"Salmon P. Chase and Constitutional Politics,\" _Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era_ (2006), Jacob W. Schuckers, _The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase_ (1874), Frederick J. Blue, _Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics_ (1987) and John Niven, _Salmon P. Chase: A Biography_ (1995). Chase's papers (principally correspondence) have also been collected by Niven in five volumes, covering 1829 to 1873, and published by Kent State University Press. Michael A. Ross's _Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court during the Civil War Era_ (2003) and Willard L. King's _Lincoln's Manager: David Davis_ (1960) capture the lives of two other influential justices of the Court, but Joseph P. Bradley, who played an outsize role in the decisions in _Slaughterhouse Cases_ and _U.S. v. Cruikshank_ still goes a-begging for a biographer. Those cases have been dramatically handled in Ronald M. Labb\u00e9 and Jonathan Lurie, _The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment_ (2003), Charles Lane, _The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction_ (2008), and LeeAnna Keith, _The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction_ (2008).\n\nThe 14th and 15th Amendments have found skillful examiners in John Mabry Mathews, _Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment_ (1909), Pamela Brandwein, _Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction_ (2011), Kurt T. Lash, _The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship_ (2014), Gerard Magliocca, _American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment_ (2013) and Michael Les Benedict, \"At Every Fireside: Constitutional Politics in the Era of Reconstruction,\" in _Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War_ , eds. Paul D. Moreno & Johnathan O'Neill ((2013).\n\n#  Chapter Seven: Dissension\n\nThe final stages of Reconstruction's overthrow, especially in Louisiana and South Carolina after the Hayes-Tilden presidential contest, have been told well and often in\n\nA.J. Langguth, _After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace_ (2014), Stetson Kennedy, _After Appomattox: How the South Won the War_ (1995), Nicholas Lemann, _Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War_ (2006), and Michael Perman, _The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869\u20131879_ (1984). Some of the wounds were self-inflicted, among both black and white Republicans, and these are described in Michael W. Fitzgerald, _Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860\u20131890_ (2002), Philip B. Lyons, _Statesmanship and Reconstruction: Moderate versus Radical Republicans on Restoring the Union after the Civil War_ (2014) and Jacqueline Jones, _A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America_ (2013). The crises in Louisiana and South Carolina are chronicled in Jerry L. West, _The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction_ (2011) and William Gillette, _Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869\u20131879_ (1979). Paul Leland Haworth laid out a detailed account of the contested 1876 presidential election in _The Hayes-Tilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876_ (1906), to be followed by Roy Morris in _Fraud Of The Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden And The Stolen Election Of 1876_ (2004) and Michael F. Holt in _By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876_ (2008).\n\n#  Epilogue\n\nMight-have-beens cluster thickly around Reconstruction, especially concerning economic issues. Land re-distribution, as described by Claude F. Oubre, _Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Land Ownership_ (1978), might have been one solution; more aggressive federal defence of voting rights might have been another, as can be seen from Michael Perman, _Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888\u20131908_ (2001).\n\nPeter Kolchin has provided the important reminder, though, that not everything in Reconstruction was a failure, especially when compared to other 19th-century emancipations, which he does in \"Comparative Perspectives on Emancipation in the U.S. South: Reconstruction, Radicalism and Russia,\" _Journal of the Civil War Era_ 2 (June 2012) and \"Thoughts on Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: Russia and the United States South,\" _Slavery and Abolition_ 11 (December 1990).\n\nOn the formulation of Southern regional myths after Reconstruction, the basic texts have long been Paul Gaston, _The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking_ (1973) and C. Vann Woodward, _The Burden of Southern History_ (1968).\n\n#  Index\n\nA\n\nAdams, Charles Francis,\n\nAdams, Charles Francis, Jr.,\n\nAdams, Henry,\n\nAfrican Americans,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013\n\nAkerman, Amos Tappan (attorney general), \u2013\n\nAlabama,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nAlcorn, James Lusk,  , , \u2013\n\nAllen, James S.,\n\nAllston, Elizabeth,\n\nAlston, James,\n\nAmerican Freedman's Union Commission,\n\nAmerican Missionary Association,  , ,\n\nAmes, Adelbert,  , , ,\n\nAntoine, Caesar Carpentier,\n\nAppomattox Court House, Virginia,\n\nArizona,\n\nArkansas,  , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nArthur, Chester Alan (twenty-\u200bfirst president),\n\nAshley, James Mitchell,  ,\n\n_Atlantic Monthly_ ,  , , , ,\n\nB\n\nBabcock, Orville,\n\n_Barron v. Baltimore_ (1833),\n\nBarton, Clara,\n\nBates, George,\n\nBattle, Cullen Andrews,  ,\n\nBaxter, Elisha,\n\nBeckwith, James Roswell,\n\nBelgium,\n\nBelknap, William Worth (secretary of war),\n\nBell, Alexander Graham,\n\nBelmont, August, 2\n\nBerry, Lawrence S.,\n\nBingham, John Armor,  .\n\n\"black codes,\"  , ,\n\nBlaine, James Gillespie,\n\nBooth, John Wilkes,  , , ,\n\nBoston, Massachusetts,  ,\n\n\"Bourbons,\"\n\nBorie, Adolph Edward (secretary of the Navy),\n\nBradley, Aaron,\n\nBradley, Joseph Philo,\n\nBramlette, E. L.,\n\nBrooks, Joseph,\n\nBrown, William Wells,\n\nBruce, Blanche Kelso,\n\nBryant, John Emory,  , ,\n\nBullock, Rufus,  , , ,\n\nButler, Benjamin Franklin,  ,\n\nC\n\nCaesar, Julius,\n\nCamilla, Georgia,\n\nCampbell, John Archibald,\n\nCampbell, Tunis,\n\nCardozo, Francis,\n\n\"carpetbaggers,\"  , , ,\n\nCatto, Octavius Valentine,  ,\n\nChamberlain, Daniel Henry,  ,\n\nChandler, Zachariah,\n\nCharles II (king of England),\n\nCharleston, South Carolina,  , , , , ,\n\nChase, Salmon Portland (chief justice),  , , , , ,\n\nCherokee (tribe),  ,\n\nChestnutt, Charles Waddell,\n\nChicago, Illinois,  , \u2013\n\n_Chicago Tribune_ ,  , , ,\n\nCincinnati, Ohio, \u2013 , ,\n\nCivil Rights Bill (1866), \u2013 , , , ,\n\nCivil Rights Bill (1875),  , , ,\n\n_Civil Rights Cases_ (1883),\n\nClayton, Powell,\n\nCleveland, Ohio,\n\nCoan, William L.,\n\nColfax, Schuyler (seventeenth vice president),\n\nColfax (Louisiana) massacre,  ,\n\nCollamer, Jacob,\n\nColumbia, South Carolina,  , ,\n\nConfederate States of America,  , , , ,\n\nconfiscation,  , , ,\n\nConnecticut,  ,\n\nConstitutional Guards,\n\nConstitution of the United States,  , \u2013, , , , , , ,\n\nand Fifteenth Amendment,\u2013, , , ,\n\nand Fourteenth Amendment,\u2013, \u2013, , ,\n\nand natural rights,\n\nand Thirteenth Amendment,\u2013,\n\n_Continental Monthly_ ,\n\nCooke, Jay,  ,\n\nCorbin, Abel,\n\nCorbin, David T., \u2013\n\n_Corfield v. Coryell_ (1823),\n\ncotton,  , , , , \u2013,\n\nCovode, John, \u2013\n\nCr\u00e9dit Mobilier, \u2013\n\nCrosby, Peter,\n\nCummings, John A., \u2013\n\nD\n\nDaniel, Peter Vivian,\n\nDaniels, Josephus,\n\nDavis, David,  , \u2013\n\nDavis, Henry Winter, \u2013 ,\n\nDavis, Jefferson,  , ,\n\nDeForest, John William,\n\nDelano, Columbus (secretary of the interior),\n\nDelany, Martin Robison,  , , ,\n\nDemocratic Party,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nDennett, John Richard,\n\nDennison, William (postmaster general),\n\nDenver, James William,\n\nDoolittle, James,\n\nDorr Rebellion,\n\nDouglass, Frederick,  , , , , , ,\n\n_Dred Scott v. Sanford_ ,  , ,\n\nDu Bois, William Edward Burghardt, \u2013 , ,\n\nDunn, Oscar James,\n\nDunning, William Archibald, \u2013 ,\n\nDwight, John Sullivan,\n\nE\n\nEaton, John G.,\n\nEdisto Island,  ,\n\nEdmunds, George,\n\nEggleston, Beroth,\n\nEliot, Thomas Stearns,\n\nEmancipation Proclamation,  , ,\n\nEnforcement Acts,  , , , , , , ,\n\nEvans, Augusta Jane,\n\n_ex parte Merryman_ ,\n\n_ex parte Milligan_ , \u2013\n\n_ex parte Yarborough_ ,\n\nF\n\nFessenden, William Pitt,  ,\n\nField, Stephen Johnson,\n\nFish, Hamilton (secretary of state),\n\nFisk, James,\n\nFlorida,  , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nForrest, Nathan Bedford,\n\nFortress Monroe, Virginia,  ,\n\nFortune, Timothy Thomas,  ,\n\nFreedmen's Bureau,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nfree labor ideology, \u2013 , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nFrench, Austa Malinda,\n\nFrench, Benjamin Brown,\n\nFuller, Melville Weston (chief justice),\n\nG\n\nGarfield, James Abram (twentieth president),  ,\n\nGarrison, William Lloyd,\n\nGeorgia,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nGeorgia Equal Rights Association,  ,\n\nGilmore, Patrick Sarsfield,\n\nGladstone, William Ewart,\n\nGodkin, Edwin Lawrence,  ,\n\nGordon, John Brown,\n\nGould, Jason \"Jay\",\n\nGrady, Henry Woodfin,\n\nGrand Army of the Republic,\n\nGrant, Ulysses Simpson (eighteenth president),  , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , \u2013, , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nGreeley, Horace, \u2013\n\nGrimes, James Wilson,\n\nGrosvenor, William,\n\nH\n\nhabeas corpus,  , , , ,\n\nHamburg, South Carolina,\n\nHamilton, Andrew Jackson,  ,\n\nHamlin, Hannibal,\n\nHampton, Wade,  , ,\n\nHancock, Winfield Scott,\n\nHarlan, James (secretary of the interior),\n\n_Harper's New Monthly Magazine_ ,\n\n_Harper's Weekly_ ,  , ,\n\nHarrison, Benjamin (twenty-second president),\n\nHart, Ossian,\n\nHay, John Milton, \u2013\n\nHayes, Rutherford Birchard (nineteenth president),  , , , ,\n\nHenri IV (king of France),\n\nHill, Elias,\n\nHoar, Ebenezer Rockwood (attorney general),  ,\n\nHoar, George Frisbie,\n\nHodgson, William,\n\nHolden, William Woods,  ,\n\nHomestead Act (1862),  ,\n\nHouse of Representatives,  , , , , , , \u2013, , , , , , , ,\n\nHovey, Alvan,\n\nHoward, Jacob,  ,\n\nHoward, Oliver Otis,  , , ,\n\nHoward University,\n\nHuggins, Allen P.,\n\nHumphreys, Benjamin,\n\nI\n\nIdaho,\n\nIllinois,  , , , ,\n\nIndiana,  , , ,\n\nJ\n\nJames, Horace,\n\nJay, John (chief justice),\n\nJim Crow,  ,\n\nJohnson, Andrew (seventeenth president),  , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , , , ,\n\nand amnesty proclamations,\u2013, , , , , ,\n\nand impeachment,\u2013,\n\nand provisional governors,\u2013, \u2013, , ,\n\nand rumors of coup,, \u2013\n\nand \"swing round the circle,\"\n\nJohnson, Herschel Vespasian,\n\nJohnson, James,\n\nJoint Committee on Reconstruction,  , , , ,\n\nJones, John Beauchamp,  , ,\n\nJulian, George Washington,\n\nK\n\nKelley, William Darrah,\n\nKellogg, William Pitt,  ,\n\nKennedy, John Pendleton,\n\nKnights of the White Camellia,\n\nKoerner, Gustave, \u2013\n\nKu Klux Klan,  , \u2013, , , \u2013, , ,\n\nL\n\nLafargue, Adolphe Joina,\n\nLangston, John Mercer,  , , , \u2013, ,\n\nLaprade, William Thomas,\n\nLatimer, Lewis, \u2013\n\nLee, Robert Edward,  ,\n\nLeigh, Frances Butler, \u2013\n\nLenin, Vladimir,\n\nLexington, Virginia,\n\nLincoln, Abraham (sixteenth president), \u2013 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, , , ,\n\n1863 plan of Amnesty and Reconstruction,\n\nLodge, Henry Cabot,\n\nLong, Jefferson,  ,\n\n\"Lost Cause\" ideology,  , ,\n\nLouisiana,  , , , , , , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nLowry, Henry Berry,\n\nLudlow, Helen,\n\nLynch, John Roy,  ,\n\nlynching,\n\nM\n\nMacon, Georgia,\n\nMarshall, John (chief justice),  , ,\n\nMarvin, William,\n\nMaryland,  , , ,\n\nMatthews, Stanley,\n\nMcGowan, Samuel,\n\nMcLean, John,\n\nMcPherson, Edward,\n\nMeade, George Gordon,  ,\n\nMemphis, Tennessee, \u2013 ,\n\nMercer, S.C.,\n\nMethodist Freedman's Aid Society,\n\nMexico,\n\nMiller, Samuel Freeman,  , , ,\n\nMilligan, Lambdin Purdy, \u2013\n\nMinnesota,  ,\n\nMississippi,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nMissouri,  , ,\n\nMontana,\n\nMontgomery, Alabama,\n\nMorgan, Albert T.,\n\nMorton, Oliver Perry,\n\nMoses, Franklin J., Jr.,  , ,\n\nMurphy, Isaac,\n\nN\n\nNashville, Tennessee,\n\nNast, Thomas,\n\nNatchez, Mississippi,\n\n_Natchez Brotherhood_ ,\n\nNational Conference of Colored Men,\n\nNational Equal Rights League,\n\nNew Bern, North Carolina,\n\nNew Jersey,\n\nNew Mexico,\n\nNew Orleans, Louisiana,  , , , , , , , , , ,\n\n\"New South\" ideology, \u2013\n\nNew York,  , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nNew York Cash Store (Greenville, Alabama),\n\n_New York American,_\n\n_New York Globe_ ,\n\n_New York Herald_ ,  ,\n\n_New York Independent_ ,\n\n_New York Sun_ ,\n\n_New York Times,_  , ,\n\n_New-York Tribune_ ,  , , , , ,\n\nNicholls, Francis Redding Tillou,\n\nNorfolk, Virginia,\n\n_North American Review_ ,\n\nNorth Carolina,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nO\n\nOberlin College,  ,\n\nOhio,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nOpelousas, Louisiana,\n\nOrd, Edward Otho Cresap,  , ,\n\nOrr, James Lawrence,\n\nP\n\nPalmer, John McAuley,\n\nPanic of 1873,  , ,\n\nParker, Ely Samuel,  , ,\n\nParis Commune (1871),\n\nParsons, Lewis,\n\nPeck, Elisha,\n\nPennsylvania,  , , ,\n\nPerry, Benjamin Franklin,\n\nPettus, Edmund,\n\nPhelps, John Smith,\n\nPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania,  , , , ,\n\nPhillips, Wendell,\n\nPickett, George Edward,\n\nPierpont, Francis,  , ,\n\nPierrepont, Edwards (attorney general),\n\nPike, James Shepherd,\n\nPinchback, Pinckney Benton Stewart,  ,\n\nPlains Indian tribes,  , \u2013\n\nPleasants, Matthew,\n\n_Plessy v. Ferguson_ (1896),  ,\n\npolygamy, \u2013\n\nPompey, Gnaeus, Magnus,\n\nPope, John,  , , ,\n\n\"posse comitatus,\"\n\nProgressivism,  , ,\n\nR\n\nrailroads,  , , , , , ,\n\nUnion Pacific,\u2013\n\nWestern & Atlantic,\n\nRavenel, Henry William,\n\nRawlins, Hannah, \u2013\n\n\"Readjusters,\"\n\nReconstruction, accomplishments of, \u2013 , \u2013, \u2013\n\nas bourgeois revolution,\u2013, , \u2013\n\nand Compromise of 1877,\u2013\n\nhistory and interpretation of,, \u2013\n\noverthrow of,\n\nterminology,\n\nReconstruction Acts (1867\u201368), \u2013 , \u2013, , , , , ,\n\nReed, Harrison,  ,\n\nRed Cloud,\n\n\"Redeemers,\"  ,\n\nRed Shirts,  ,\n\nReid, Whitelaw,\n\nRepublican Party,  , , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , \u2013, , , \u2013, \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , \u2013, \u2013\n\nand Liberal Republicans,\u2013, ,\n\nand Radical Republicans,, , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , \u2013, , , , , \u2013, , \u2013, , , , , , ,\n\nRevels, Hiram,  ,\n\nRhodes, James Ford,\n\nRichmond,  , ,\n\nRoanoke Island, \u2013\n\nRobert, Charles E.,\n\nRobeson, George (secretary of war),\n\nRobinson, Leigh,\n\nS\n\nSavannah, Georgia,\n\n\"scalawags,\" \u2013 ,\n\nSchofield, John,  ,\n\nSchurz, Carl,  , , , \u2013\n\nScott, Robert Kingston,  , , ,\n\nsecession,  , , , , , , , ,\n\nSenate of the United States,  , , , , , , , \u2013, , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , ,\n\nSettle, Thomas,\n\nSeward, William Henry (secretary of state),  ,\n\nSeymour, Horatio,\n\nSharkey, William Lewis,  ,\n\nShepley, George,\n\nSheridan, Philip Henry,  , \u2013\n\nSherman, John (U.S. senator),\n\nSherman, William Tecumseh,  , ,\n\nSibley, John Langdon,  , ,\n\n_Slaughterhouse Cases_ (1873), \u2013 ,\n\nSociety of Pale Faces,  ,\n\nSouth Carolina,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , \u2013, \u2013, , , , , , , , \u2013, ,\n\nSpeed, James (attorney general),\n\nSpotted Tail,\n\nStanly, Edward, \u2013\n\nStanton, Edwin McMaster (secretary of war), \u2013\n\nSt. Catharine's Island,\n\nStephens, Alexander Hamilton,  , ,\n\nStevens, Thaddeus, \u2013 , , , \u2013, , ,\n\nStewart, Alexander, \u2013\n\nSt. Louis, Missouri,  , , ,\n\nStoneman, George,\n\nStowe, Harriet Beecher,  ,\n\nStroud, Burton, \u2013\n\nSulla, Lucius Cornelius,  ,\n\nSumner, Charles,  , , , , , , \u2013, , ,\n\nSupreme Court of the United States,  , \u2013, , \u2013,\n\nSwayne, Noah,\n\nSwisshelm, Jane Grey,\n\nT\n\nTaiping Rebellion,  ,\n\nTaney, Roger Brooke (chief justice),  , ,\n\nTaylor, Richard,\n\nTaylor, Susie King,\n\nTennessee,  , , , \u2013, , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nTenure of Office Act (1867), \u2013\n\nTexas,  , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\n_Texas v. White_ (1869), \u2013\n\nThomas, Lorenzo Dow,\n\nThomas, Samuel,\n\nTilden, Samuel,  ,\n\nTilton, Theodore,\n\nTourg\u00e9e, Albion Winegar,  ,\n\nTrowbridge, John Townsend,  ,\n\nTrumbull, Lyman,  , , , , , , , , ,\n\nTurner, Henry McNeal,\n\nTwain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), \u2013\n\nTyler, John,  , , ,\n\nU\n\nUnion League,  ,\n\n_US v. Cruikshank_ (1875), \u2013\n\nUtah,  , \u2013\n\nV\n\nVallandigham, Clement Laird,\n\nand _ex parte Vallandigham_ ,\n\nVicksburg, Mississippi,  ,\n\nVirginia,  , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,\n\nvoting rights,  , , , , \u2013, , , , , ,\n\nDistrict of Columbia bill (1866),,\n\nand Fifteenth Amendment,\u2013\n\nand registration,, \u2013, ,\n\nW\n\nWade, Benjamin Franklin, \u2013 , \u2013, ,\n\nand Wade-\u200bDavis Reconstruction plan,\u2013\n\nWaite, Morrison Remick (chief justice),  , , ,\n\nWalker, Gilbert,\n\nWarmoth, Henry Clay,  , , ,\n\nWashburne, Elihu,  ,\n\nWatterson, Henry,\n\nWelles, Gideon (secretary of the navy),  , , ,\n\nWells, James Madison,\n\nWest, George Benjamin,\n\nWhiskey Rebellion,\n\nWhite, Richard,\n\nWhite Leagues,  ,\n\nWhite Liners,\n\nWhitman, Walt,  ,\n\nWhittier, John Greenleaf,\n\nWilkinson, Morton,  ,\n\nWilliams, George Henry (attorney general),\n\nWilson, Henry (eighteenth vice president),  ,\n\nWilson, Reuban,\n\nWilson, Thomas Woodrow (28th president),  ,\n\nWinthrop, Robert Charles,\n\nWisconsin,  , ,\n\nWood, Fernando,\n\nWoodruff, Josephus,\n\nY\n\nYoung, Brigham, \u2013\n\n# Table of Contents\n\n  1. Cover page\n  2. Halftitle page\n  3. Series page\n  4. Title page\n  5. Copyright page\n  6. Contents\n  7. Acknowledgments\n  8. List of illustrations\n  9. Introduction\n  10. 1 Vengeance: April-December 1865\n  11. 2 Alienation: December 1865-March 1867\n  12. 3 Arrogance: March 1867- May 1868\n  13. 4 Resistance: May 1868- March 1869\n  14. 5 Distraction: March 1869- May 1872\n  15. 6 Law: 1866-1876\n  16. 7 Dissension: September 1872-April 1877\n  17. Epilogue\n  18. Timeline\n  19. References\n    1. Further reading\n  20. Index\n\n## Landmarks\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title page\n  3. Table of Contents\n\n## Pages\n\n  1. i\n  2. ii\n  3. iii\n  4. iv\n  5. v\n  6. vi\n  7. vii\n  8. viii\n  9. ix\n  10. x\n  11. xi\n  12. xii\n  13. xiii\n  14. xiv\n  15. xv\n  16. xvi\n  17. xvii\n  18. xviii\n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}