The Red House
She carried the invitation for three days in the inside of her sleeve, where its edge lay against her wrist every time she reached for a cup, and told nobody about it.
On the fourth night she showed it to Tessa. They were on the warm steps behind the old theatre, where the river slapped at the pilings below and smelled of weed and tar and frying oil, and Tessa had her coat across her knees and a needle between her teeth, because she had torn the sleeve on a nail in the wings and would not walk through the city, she said, looking like something a dog had got at.
Tessa took the needle from her lips, read the paper, turned it over, and handed it back. “A house. North of the canal. I’ve been once.”
“Who sent it?”
“Don’t know.” She drew her thread through. “Nobody ever knows, with that lot. Things just turn up.”
“Should I go?”
Tessa stopped sewing and looked at her over the coat with the patient, faintly sleepy look she wore when she thought a question was the wrong one. “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then decide before you go,” said Tessa, “not after,” and bent to her sleeve again, and that was all the advice she had.
Zarina sat on the warm step and turned the paper over in her fingers. She thought about the violet eye, and the neat dark hand, and the fact that whoever had written it had known a name she had given to perhaps six people in the world.
It ought to have frightened her. It did frighten her, a little. Underneath the fright there was something else, warm and quick and greedy, that she did not look at too closely: somebody had wanted Sera badly enough to find her.
The address belonged to a tall, narrow house above an old canal, its shutters closed and its door painted a green gone nearly black. No music came through the shutters.
Standing on the wet stones with the canal smelling of weed and cold iron behind her, Zarina wondered whether she had come on the wrong night. Then the door opened on a man she had seen at Karel’s without ever learning his name, and he looked at her and said “Sera,” and stepped aside, and did not ask a single question about Tessa.
There were perhaps twenty people inside, spread through several rooms in threes and fours.
A fire burned low in the front room although the night was mild, somebody had left their shoes under a chair, and two elven musicians in a corner were tuning against each other in a friendly, unending quarrel that seemed likely to last until morning.
A woman by the fireplace noticed her looking for a face she knew.
She was a few years older than Zarina, slight and straight-backed, with short dark hair and a narrow silver chain running from one ear to a cuff higher along it, and she had the stillness of a person used to being the calm one in any room she was in.
“Sera?” she said. “I’m Ilyne.”
“Do you know who invited me?”
“No.”
“Nobody seems to. Should that worry me?”
“If it does,” said Ilyne, “you can leave.” There was no challenge in it at all, and that, oddly, was what made Zarina stay. Ilyne held out a cup, and Zarina smelled it first, the old palace habit, and asked whether it was only wine, and it was.
Nobody asked her what she did. That was familiar from the curtained room. What was new was that some of them already seemed to know things about Sera, and the first of them was Carisse.
She came through from the back room in green over wine-red, with the ring of keys at her belt, and when somebody by the window lit a pipe she put two fingers on Zarina’s elbow exactly as she had at Karel’s. “You’ll want the next room, Sera. The windows actually open there.”
Zarina let herself be steered. “How do you know my name?”
Carisse’s eyebrows went up, amused. “It was on the outside of the invitation, wasn’t it? I should think everyone knows it by now.” She touched one key, and then the next. “You had a friend with you, at Karel’s. The one with the coat.”
“Tessa.”
“Tessa,” Carisse agreed, as though trying the name for weight, and set it down again. “She’s all right, Tessa. Plain.” She said it the way a person says that bread is plain, which is not an insult, quite, and then somebody called her from the hall and she went, and left Zarina in the room where the windows opened, breathing clean air and not sure why her face was hot.
Later a man asked her whether her shoes had survived, the brown ones from the Copper Market, and she looked down at her own feet as if they might be there. “Somebody mentioned them,” he said, when she asked how he knew, and shrugged, and went back to his argument about a play.
A long-limbed woman of about thirty stood at the edge of that argument, plainly dressed as a clerk except for an enormous necklace of little painted wooden faces that clicked together when she moved.
She turned one of the faces between her fingers while she listened to Zarina say she had never seen the play, nor the old version either.
“Then none of this means much to you,” the woman said. “I’m Veyra.”
“Sera.”
“I know. I’ve heard the name.” She could not remember from whom. When Zarina asked about the necklace she touched one of the faces, a crooked one with a painted moustache. “People. My brother makes them. He’s bad at it.”
“Do you tell him?”
“Often,” said Veyra, and asked whether she had eaten, and they went to find the kitchen.
She had spent so long delighting in the fact that nobody in the city knew Zarina that she had not noticed people beginning to know Sera. Not her father, or her blood, but things. What she drank. That she played cards badly. That she hated smoke and knew nothing whatever about shoes.
A person was forming around the name, a person who went on existing when Tessa was not there to vouch for her, and Zarina did not know how she felt about it until Carisse came back later with a cup of something cold and sharp and lemony that she had not asked for and liked very much, and she found that she was smiling.
Near two in the morning part of the gathering moved on to another house, and Ilyne came past with her coat over her arm and told her that she did not have to come. Veyra was going.
Nobody from the curtained room was going, and Zarina felt their absence not as fear but as a sharpened kind of awareness, like the moment before a dive. She put on her coat.
The second house was smaller and warmer, and somebody had painted the whole entrance hall blue, ceiling and all, so that coming in from the dark was like stepping inside a lantern. There were no servants and nobody who seemed to be hosting.
Somebody asked her to help carry cushions upstairs, and she went up with an armful of faded velvet against her chest and a fringe tickling her chin, and nearly laughed aloud on the stairs, because nobody in the palace had asked her to carry anything in years.
Upstairs three rooms had been opened into one. A woman was cutting somebody’s hair with kitchen scissors. Veyra lay flat on her back on the floor with her necklace spread across her collarbones, staring at the ceiling as if it owed her money, and a thin man by the window with a book open on his knee raised one hand without looking up when Zarina asked whose house it was. “Mine,” he said, and went back to his reading.
The talk in that room moved without any of the careful transitions she was used to, from theatre to food to somebody’s marriage to whether titles ought to be bought and sold. When somebody declared that every inherited title in Ashkar was absurd, she spoke before she could stop herself. “Not all of them. Some have duties attached.”
“Your family have one, then?” said the reading man, idly.
There was no suspicion in it at all, and still her stomach went tight. She found a loose thread on her sleeve and worried it with her thumbnail. “Something like that.”
He nodded, plainly uninterested, and somebody began on land taxes, and nobody ever came back to the question. She had come within a breath of saying something true, she thought, and the world had not cracked open.
She sat among the cushions with the sweet, heavy air of the blue house round her, and felt reckless and light and very far from home, and liked it.
At the door, when she was leaving, Veyra called after her from the stairs. “Sera. There’s something at the Red House on Thursday. Ask Ilyne.”
The Red House was not red. It stood behind the old glassworks — the third old glassworks, since Ilyne had neglected to mention that there were three — and it was pale stone, nearly white under the lamps, with narrow windows and a dark wooden door.
Ilyne was waiting beside it. Told about the glassworks, she said she had forgotten that, without smiling, and opened the door.
Inside, the name made sense. Everything beyond the hall was red: dark cloth along the walls, lamps behind tinted glass, carpets so heavy underfoot that her steps made no sound, curtains thick enough to hold back the street and the summer night and, it seemed to her, the whole of the city.
There were forty people, perhaps fifty, and the first thing she noticed was how quiet it was. Nobody was performing for the room. People talked in corners, and others had taken over the long table and were eating with their hands because there were not enough plates.
Somebody had put a woman from the mountains, down for the summer fairs and suffering in the city’s heat, in the coldest room in the house, and she had thanked them for it, sincerely.
She sat all night by the open window with her feet in a basin of well water and a circle of people round her who had come in for the cool, and told them stories about snow in a slow, deep voice, and nobody laughed at her for any of it.
After midnight more doors opened, though nobody announced it. Music grew louder in one room and stopped in another.
A woman came down the stairs in a man’s coat and, as far as Zarina could tell, nothing at all beneath it, and nobody reacted but Zarina, and Carisse, at the long table, saw her look and laughed and patted the bench beside her.
“First time here,” Carisse said. It was not a question. “You’ll get used to it.”
Zarina was not certain she wanted to get used to everything. The thought climbed the stairs with her when the others went up.
The upper floor was a warren of bedrooms and sitting rooms and odd narrow spaces. One room was full of mattresses.
Another held nothing but mirrors, tall and cracked and gilt, leaning against every wall, and Zarina looked in from the doorway at a hundred dim copies of herself and could not think what it was for.
A woman came up behind her in the doorway and looked at the copies too. One side of her head was shaved close, and a thin gold line ran from her temple to the hinge of her jaw.
“It’s for seeing yourself from every side at once,” Sabra said. “Most people hate it.” She looked at Zarina in the glass, and then at the real one. “You were at Karel’s. The good face.”
“Yes.”
“I thought so.” Sabra went on looking, with her head on one side, long enough that Zarina’s stomach began to turn over. “And somewhere else. I’ve seen you somewhere else.”
“People say that,” said Zarina, and held her face still.
“Do they?” Sabra smiled, a slow, lazy, delighted smile, as though Zarina had told her a joke she would enjoy later. “All right.” She took Zarina by the wrist, quite lightly, and drew her into the mirror room, and the hundred copies came in with them.
Candles had been set round the floor, so that every mirror took the flames and the faces and gave them back, and back again. People sat against the glass in twos and threes, talking low.
Somebody was passing a small wooden tray from hand to hand, and on it stood a dozen little glass vials no longer than a finger, with something dark and faintly cloudy in them that moved like oil when the tray tipped.
Sabra took one when it reached her. She held it up to the candle, so that it glowed a deep, smoky amber, and told Zarina what was in it — a name Zarina had never heard, and two more she had, from the physicians’ cabinet at the palace — and drank it in one swallow, and closed her eyes. Then she held out the tray.
“No,” said Zarina.
Sabra moved the tray along to the next person without a word, and lay back against a mirror with her eyes still closed, and that was all.
Nobody laughed. Nobody coaxed. The tray went on round the room, and the candles burned, and the hundred copies of Zarina sat stiffly against the glass with their hands in their laps.
That should have been the end of it. Ten minutes later she was still thinking about the vial. Nobody had pressed her. That was what kept her thinking.
There had been nothing to push against at all, only the choice itself, standing there in the candlelight on its little tray, patient as a cat.
She went down to the kitchen and found Ilyne leaning on the long table, eating cherries out of a bowl. Ilyne looked at her once and poured a cup of water without being asked, and Zarina drank it and found that she was very thirsty.
“People were taking something upstairs,” she said. “I said no.”
“All right.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?” Ilyne spat a cherry stone neatly into her palm. “You said no. Then you didn’t take it.”
The plainness of it irritated Zarina, and then, slowly, it steadied her. She had wanted a warning or a blessing. She had been given a description of what had happened.
It was Ansel who showed her what the Red House was for.
She did not know his name that night; she learned it later.
He was a young actor, thin and very young, with a line of old stage paint behind one ear that had not quite washed out, and he came to the door of the Red House near one in the morning in tears, with his whole life in a sack.
His landlord had found out that he was sleeping with another man, and had put him and the sack in the street, and kept his month’s rent.
Nobody called a meeting. Carisse found him a bed upstairs before he had finished telling it. Veyra went through her own pockets and then through two other people’s, and pressed what she found into his hand.
Ilyne sat down beside him on the bottom stair and stayed there, saying almost nothing, with her shoulder against his, until he stopped shaking.
Zarina stood in the hall with a cup going warm in her hand and watched it happen, and something in her chest went tight and hot.
She had sat through a hundred petitions in the audience hall. She had read the reports on lodging-house disputes in the river quarter, and could have quoted the clauses. She had never once seen anybody simply catch a person who was falling, with no form to fill and no secretary to send for, because he was falling.
Later, on a window seat in a quieter room, she asked Ilyne whether this was what the Veil was.
“Part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
Ilyne thought for so long that Zarina wondered whether she would answer at all. “Work,” she said. “People need somewhere to go. Somebody needs money. Somebody’s been thrown out of a house. Somebody gets arrested. Somebody needs a doctor who won’t ask questions.”
“And you help them. Why?”
Ilyne looked at her as if the question were slightly odd. “Because they need help.”
Zarina had braced herself for philosophy, for something about freedom or the court, the kind of speech she imagined people made in houses with violet eyes on their invitations. She got practicality instead, and she loved it for that.
Walking home under a sky going grey at the edges, she decided that the Red House was the best place she had ever been, and that Tessa had been wrong about Karel’s lot, and that whatever she had been afraid of on the warm steps behind the theatre had been nothing but the palace in her, still talking.
She went back the next Thursday, and the next, alone and without an invitation, and nobody asked for one.
By the third visit she knew which room would be quiet and where the wine was kept, that Sabra kissed people when she had been drinking and was never once embarrassed afterwards, and that Carisse grew sentimental after the fourth glass of anything and kept the dark liquor in a locked cupboard in the kitchen, and the key to it on her own ring and nowhere else.
Zarina noticed that Carisse moved the decanter out of Sabra’s reach whenever Sabra came into the kitchen, without ever seeming to look at her. She noticed it the way she noticed everything, and thought it was kind, and thought no more about it.
The tray went round the mirror room most nights. She did not take anything. She went up anyway, because the mirror room was where Sabra was, and Sabra was the most interesting person she had ever met.
Sabra did not wait for anything. Sabra said what she thought the moment she thought it, and laughed at people who were rude to her, and once, at the long table, told a merchant in a velvet coat who had put his hand somewhere it was not wanted that he had the manners of a goat and the hands of a much smaller goat, so loudly that the whole room heard, and then went on eating.
Zarina had been taught since she could stand that every word she said in a room would be weighed by someone. Sabra’s words went out into the air and nobody weighed them at all.
Watching her, Zarina felt the same pang she had felt at Karel’s, sharp as a pin, and could not make it stop.
It was Carisse who gave her the coat.
It happened on a wet night early in the summer, when the rain had come down so hard on the way to the Red House that Zarina arrived with the brown shawl stuck to her shoulders and her hair in rats’ tails, and stood dripping in the red hall feeling like a drowned cat.
Carisse looked at her once from the long table, and put down her cup, and said, “Oh, no. Come with me,” and took her by the wrist up two flights of stairs to a room under the roof that Zarina had never seen.
It was a wardrobe room. Rails ran the length of it on both sides, crammed with clothes, and the air was thick with the smell of old silk and camphor and dust and greasepaint. Crowns of gilded card hung on hooks along one wall. A headless dressmaker’s dummy wore half a suit of painted armour and a lady’s hat.
“Costumes,” said Carisse, running her hand along a rail so that the hangers clashed. “Mine. From the theatres. Things that are too worn to go on a stage and too good to go on a fire. I keep them up here and give them to people who need them, and pretend I am being generous, when really I can’t bear to throw anything away.”
She went along the rail touching sleeves, the way she touched her keys, one after another, as if she were counting them, and stopped, and pulled out a coat.
It was green — a deep, soft green like moss under water — and long, cut close to the body and full in the skirts, with a high collar and horn buttons, and it had been beautiful once and was still very nearly beautiful.
The cuffs were frayed. There was a darn under one arm. Somebody had worn it a great deal, on a great many nights, and it had taken the shape of a woman a little taller than most.
“Put it on.”
Zarina put it on. It fitted as though it had been waiting for her.
Carisse turned her round by the shoulders to face a long spotted glass at the end of the room, and stood behind her with her chin almost on Zarina’s shoulder, and looked at her in the glass with that unhurried, pleased look that Zarina had seen at Karel’s and could still not account for.
“It was made for a girl who runs away from home in the second act,” Carisse said. “She goes out of the window in it, and the whole house cheers. We played it for two seasons.” She smoothed the high collar flat at the back of Zarina’s neck with one finger. “Brown is for people who don’t want to be seen. You don’t want that, Sera. You only think you do. You’ve been told so long.”
Zarina looked at the young woman in the glass. She had her mother’s eyes, by universal and tiresome agreement, and the green made them very dark, and she stood differently in it, straighter and looser both at once.
She looked like nobody she had ever been. She looked like somebody who might go out of a window and be cheered.
“I can’t take this.”
“You can, and you will,” said Carisse, “because I shall be offended otherwise, and I’m very tiresome when I’m offended. Ask anyone.”
She stepped back, and touched a key at her belt, and smiled. “Whoever keeps you, my dear, keeps you very carefully. I can always tell. It’s in the shoulders.” She said it lightly, as she said everything, and went off down the stairs before Zarina could answer, and left her alone in the wardrobe room among the dead crowns and the half-armoured dummy, in a coat made for a girl who ran away.
She wore it home under the shawl, and hid it in the cedar chest under the blankets with the brown dress, and after that she wore it every night she went out.
People began to know her by it. “Sera in the green,” they said at the Red House, and in the blue house, and once, to her great delight, in the street. It became, very quickly, the thing Sera was. She never once asked herself why Carisse had kept it, all those seasons, in a size that happened to fit her.
At the palace, that summer, the grey place came back.
It came in the second week of midsummer, in a run of audiences on the provincial roads.
The high windows of the audience hall were open on the heat, and the swifts went screaming round the eastern towers, and the petitioners came up one after another to stand on the worn place in the floor and say what they had come to say, and Zarina sat in her chair at her father’s left and listened to every word and could not feel her own hands.
It was a strange thing, and she had no name for it.
She knew the figures. She asked the right question of a road surveyor from the south, and caught a discrepancy in his mileage that the clerks had missed, and saw her father turn his head and look at her with the slow, warm pride he had always had for her when she was quick.
And she felt it from the far side of the thick glass, the way a person feels the sun through a window in winter: it was there, it was real, and it did not reach her.
At dinner he told her she had been very good that afternoon.
He said it simply, pleased, pointing at her across the table with his fork the way he did, and she smiled and thanked him and wished, with a violence that frightened her, that he had been angry with her instead. Anger would at least have been something she could feel.
She lay awake that night in the heat with the window open and the grey pressing down on her like a hand, and thought, very clearly: I cannot do this for the rest of my life.
Then — because she was practical — she thought of the Red House, and of the mirror room, and of the little tray going round in the candlelight, patient as a cat.
On the Thursday the Red House was quiet, and most of the mirror room was empty, and Sabra was lying on the floor between the candles laughing at the ceiling about nothing.
The tray went round once, and Zarina let it pass. It went round twice. The third time it came to rest on the floor by her knee, because the man who had been holding it had fallen asleep against the glass, and nobody said anything at all.
She looked at it for a long time. She thought of the refusal, and the relief of it, and of Ilyne saying you said no, then you didn’t take it. She thought of her father pointing at her with his fork.
She thought of the grey place, and the thick glass, and the audience hall, and of how she had not been able to feel her hands.
She thought that nothing bad had happened to Sabra, who took it every week, and who was the only person Zarina had ever met who seemed entirely awake.
She picked up a vial and held it between two fingers to the candle, and it glowed a deep, smoky amber. Veyra was sitting against the mirror opposite with her shoes off and her necklace in her lap, and she looked at Zarina, neither approving nor disapproving, only looking.
“How much?” said Zarina.
“Half,” said Veyra. “You’ve never had it.”
She drank half. It was bitter, with something sweet and resinous under the bitterness, like the smell of a pine wood in the heat. Somebody handed her water.
Nobody applauded, or laughed, or seemed especially interested, and the quiet talk went on round the room, and for several minutes she only felt foolish, sitting there with half a vial in her hand and nothing happening.
Then it began.
It came up from somewhere under her breastbone, slowly, like warmth coming back into hands that have been out in the snow. It went down her arms.
It went into her fingers, so that she could feel the edges of the little glass vial as though for the first time, cool and smooth and exactly the shape it was.
The candle flames softened and spread, and every mirror in the room filled with a gentle golden light, and in every one of them there was a young woman sitting against the glass with her lips parted, and Zarina looked at all hundred of her and liked every one.
The music from the rooms below came up through the floor and into her, so that she could hear every instrument separately and all of them together. The carpet under her palm was the softest thing she had ever touched.
Sabra’s laugh across the room was the loveliest sound in Ashkar. Veyra said something, and Zarina did not catch it, and began to laugh, and could not have said why, and did not need to say why, because nobody in the room needed her to say anything at all.
And the grey was gone.
She noticed that last, and it was the thing she would remember. It was not pushed back, or covered over, or made bearable.
It was simply not there, as though it had never been there, as though she had been walking all her life in a fog and had stepped out of it on to a hillside in the sun.
She sat in the mirror room with tears running down her face and could not stop smiling, and Sabra rolled over on the floor and looked at her, upside down, with the gold line catching the light.
“There you are,” Sabra said softly. “There you are.”
For the next hour Zarina did not think of the palace once. When she noticed, at last, that she had forgotten it, she did not feel guilty. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the cool glass, and stayed where she was.
She woke the next morning in her own bed with the sun on the coverlet, and for a long moment she did not know what was different.
Then she knew. She was not empty.
The light on the coverlet was simply light, warm and yellow and full of slow gold motes. Somewhere outside a blackbird was singing in the lime trees, and she could hear every note of it.
She was hungry — truly, plainly hungry, for the first time in weeks — and when Nalia came in with the tray she ate everything on it, and then sat on the window seat in her robe with her knees drawn up and watched the gardeners rake the gravel walks below, and found the sight of them so absurdly beautiful that she laughed aloud.
Nalia, folding yesterday’s gown, looked round at the sound. She had not heard Zarina laugh in the mornings for a long time, and something in her plain round face eased a little, and she smiled, and went back to her folding.
Zarina saw the smile, and was glad of it, and did not tell her why.
At the morning audience she felt her hands. She felt everything. She listened to a tanners’ guild petition about drainage in the river quarter as though it were the most interesting thing she had ever heard, and her father, glancing at her sidelong, raised one eyebrow.
After the audience he stopped her in the corridor with his hand on her shoulder and said she looked well, and she said she had slept, and he said, “Then sleep more often,” and went off pleased.
It was a whole day before the grey began, very faintly, to come back at the edges, like damp coming through a wall.
She knew exactly what it had been. She was not a fool, and she did not pretend to herself that she was.
She had felt, for one morning, the way she imagined other people felt all the time, and it had come out of a little glass vial on a wooden tray, and she wanted it again so badly that her mouth went dry when she thought of it.
So she made a rule, because she was practical, and because rules were the thing she knew.
Half, and only at the Red House. Never anywhere else. Never more than half. Never on a night before an audience, and never two Thursdays together. She set it down in her mind as neatly as a clause in a treaty, and looked at it, and was proud of it.
Sabra had no rules at all. Zarina had always had rules, and here she had made her own, for herself, and nobody had set it for her. That seemed to her, that summer, very nearly the same thing as being free.
Balif noticed things. He always had.
He noticed, in a history lesson, that she had stopped turning pages, and when he asked whether she was sleeping she said not very well, and chose poetry from his shelves to take away with her — Zarina, who had fallen asleep at every recital she had ever sat through, exactly as her mother had.
He did not keep it off his face. “You made a face,” she said, and he told her that he had a face and it did things, and she very nearly smiled. He did not ask anything else.
He noticed, in her sitting room, a pair of cheap brown shoes under a chair, one sole coming away from the upper, and he picked one up and pressed his thumb into the gap and said, with his lenses on the end of his nose, that whoever had sold her these had robbed her.
She took the shoe out of his hand and said, “I know,” and that she liked them anyway, and he looked at her over the lenses a moment longer than was comfortable, and let it go.
He noticed, in a carriage going down to the river terraces in the heat, when the driver said a road was closed, that she told him before she could stop herself that there was another way through, by the dyers’ lane.
Balif, opposite, watched her hear what she had said, and watched her choose what to say next — “I heard someone mention it” — and said nothing at all while the carriage took the long way round.
She saw him notice each time. She told herself each time that he had not. It was easier than she would have believed, that summer, to tell herself things, and to believe them.
On the Friday, at the curtained room, Tessa asked where she had been the night before.
They were sitting at the old table with the window open on the warm dark and the violinist murdering a reel, and Oren was explaining a disaster with a chimney to Leni, who did not care, and Rike was asleep in the corner with somebody’s lute across his knees.
Tessa asked it idly, dealing the cards, without looking up. “Leni came by for you Thursday. With bread. Said you weren’t here.”
“I wasn’t well,” said Zarina.
“Oh.” Tessa dealt the last card and looked at her then, briefly, and Zarina held her face still, the way she had learned to hold it in the mirror room. “Better now?”
“Yes. Much.”
“Good,” said Tessa, and picked up her hand.
Zarina picked up hers. She had lied to her father across a breakfast table, and to Balif, and to Nalia, and to a hundred people at the palace who had never asked her a real question in her life.
She had never once lied at this table. It had been the one place in Ashkar where she had never needed to.
She looked at her cards and did not see them. It had been easy.
It had been exactly as easy as the first one, at breakfast, in the spring, and she understood, sitting there with Leni’s lopsided bread at her elbow and the reel going wrong for the third time, that it would be easier still the next time, and that there was going to be a next time, and that she did not mind as much as she ought to.
Then Oren slapped down a card and crowed, and she laughed with the others, and played her hand, and lost it.