"Happy birthday, Whimsy."

  Dalliance pushed the cinnamon pastry in front of her. It steamed gently along the half that Dalliance had cut, the translucent glaze deforming along lines like crumbling triangles. Dark, rich cinnamon dusted the plate where the pressure had ground it off.

  Dalliance lit the two tapers he had purchased for the occasion with a paper match from a wax packet of matches, and sat back as Whimsy looked at the smoke curling up from two beeswax candles, neither as thick as a pencil and already visibly diminishing from the flame. They were, after all, mostly intended for lighting gas lamps and chandeliers.

  "I wish . . ." said Whimsy.

  Dalliance shushed her and put a finger to his lips, but she shook her head.

  "No, Dalliance," she said.

  This time, he let her finish.

  "I wish," she said, "that none of this shit happened, and you had known Da on his better days, more than you knew him on the other ones. And I wish that Mom had come with us. I know I see you a lot more than some girls see their brothers, but I wish we still lived on the same farm and played with arrows in The Place. And I wish we could go back," she said, after a long sigh, "to corn husk doll parties and trying to catch Earnest smoking. And I wish you wanted to smile more. And maybe I know that I can’t go back, and I wish that Da hadn’t hurt you, and me, and probably Ma."

  A tear trickled down her pale cheek. "Sometimes I’m really worried, Dalliance," she said. "I know you’ve got all these good friends. . . ."

  Her voice got low here, low and still and hesitant. "And your friends are trying to help me, but I don’t really want to be like them," she said. "Effluvia is going to marry someone because it’s good for her family, and she doesn’t even know who. Just like Durance Pants back in Talbotton. Nothing's any different; it’s just got a whiter coat of paint. And Charity acts like nothing bad ever happens in the world. And I think Circe’s gone mad."

  He almost broke a smile when she made that admission, but she kept talking, her voice getting increasingly hollow.

  "And I was never nice to Earnest, but he’s been really nice to me." Her voice shook on the admission. "But then he read the cards and called me tragic, and I wish I hadn’t asked. And I just wish I was home, Dalliance."

  Dalliance opened his mouth to respond, but she blew out the tapers. "Why two?” she asked.

  "Well, they don’t make elevens," he said. "And eleven is two ones."

  She nodded half-heartedly. "You’re doing your best," she conceded. "But this isn’t what it would have been at home."

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  He didn’t argue the point. "We can’t go home," he said.

  "I know what he did wasn’t right," Whimsy said, as seriously as a newly minted eleven-year-old could be. "But people can change, I know they can." She sounded very certain on this point. "He wasn’t like that before, and then he was. Why do we have to think he’s gonna stay that way?"

  Dalliance thought about arguing why people wouldn’t change, the low-hanging fruit so tempting in the moment, an easy win. But instead, he said, "Da is dead."

  Her face froze: startled, horrified.

  His face, he felt, was immobile.

  Resigned.

  "Whimsy," he said. "Remember the letter?"

  She nodded, unwilling but listening.

  "Da . . . read one like it.”

  “Is Ma okay?" she asked immediately.

  Dalliance thought back for a split second to Charity asking if he thought his mom would be okay. He felt like a heel.

  "She’s with . . ." he began.

  "Mister P. P?," she finished for him. Dalliance hadn’t heard the implicit kindergartenism in the man’s name said aloud before, but felt no urge to smile. Not now.

  He nodded silently.

  "Well, I’m glad she’s okay."

  A man with a large cheroot cigar passed their table, smoke leaving his mouth like a breath of fog spell and washing over everything it touched with the lingering aura of weariness and grime.

  Dalliance tried a fork-full of cinnamon bun. The fork was coming more easily to him, these days. It was the practice that did it. But the food had little taste, and the tobacco fume was still sour in the air.

  "How did it happen?" she asked, her voice by this point devoid of emotion, steeling herself for what she didn’t want to hear.

  Dalliance looked at his sister’s eyes, brimming with as-yet unfallen tears, and lied to her.

  "There was a duel," he said. "I don’t think he even knew what was happening, in the end."

  He had. But she would never need to know.

  She was crying now. "He should’ve known better than to fight a wizard," she sobbed. "Everyone knows better than to fight a wizard."

  Dalliance let her empty herself. Waited, until her tears subsided, and she took her own tentative try at her slice. Speech felt too heavy, anything more too much all at once.

  But there was more to say.

  "They didn’t invite us," Dalliance said eventually, "to the funeral. Because Ma was with Parsimony now, and they probably knew that we weren’t kin."

  Her porcelain features crumpled, then angry eyes opened to slits.

  "Flora says I’m kin.” Fierce, the statement. "I didn’t know why she was talking about it. I thought you’d told her something. Why didn’t you tell me?"

  "I was there," Dalliance said. "I didn’t like what I saw, and I didn’t really want to talk about it. And that was selfish of me, and I’m sorry I told you on your birthday."

  She pushed back and stood up, celebration abandoned.

  "I love you, brother," she said. "But sometimes you’re a cowardly piece of shit."

  Dalliance watched the slight novice robes threading their way angrily through the crowd to the door, and then out into the darkening city, alone.