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Around one, Merek pulls me back behind the bar and down the staff corridor, past the dish pit, to the quiet stretch of hall outside the staff room, and backs me into the wall.

“The boss,” he says. “Permanent. I’m going to have to ask your permission to change the bar menu now.”

“You’ve never asked anybody’s permission for anything.”

“I’ll start.” He kisses me, slow this time, his hand on my waist, warm through the green dress. When he lifts his head, the ember lines on his throat are bright. “How do you feel?”

“Like I’ll never escape Lenart’s calendar now.”

“Nobody escapes Lenart’s calendar,” Merek says. “That’s how he gets you.”

I laugh against his shirt. He holds on to me for another minute, and then he lets me go back out to my party.

The room’s still full. The music’s loud. Kit’s teaching the selkie how to make a Lammas punch, which is not a real drink, she’s making it up.

At two, Kit turns the music down again and starts opening champagne behind the bar.

It’s from Mr. Abernathy, the old selkie with the Canadian coins. He and Dez played cribbage every Sunday for forty years. The case came in through the dock this afternoon with his card on top. Tav checked the seals before Kit brought it out to the bar.

The servers come out with trays for the whole room. Priya brings me the first glass Kit pours.

“From Mr. Abernathy,” she says. “He says Dez would’ve wanted you to have the first one.”

Across the room, Mr. Abernathy lifts his glass to me. Around me, the trays keep going. Merek takes a glass. Tav takes one, and it looks like a thimble in his hand. Lenart holds his without drinking it. He never does. William takes his and keeps one eye on the door.

I lift mine a little toward the room. Toward the bar, and the stairs behind it, and the stone.

“To Dez,” I say.

“To Dez,” the room says back.

And I drink.

Chapter nineteen

Lenart

She drinks, and I watch her do it.

Her happiness has my full attention. Later, I’ll have to admit to the council and to myself that I’d stopped watching for danger. She has the glass raised toward the bar, and the stairs behind it, and the stone. The green dress. The silver on both arms, nearly to the elbow, catching the light every time she moves. Two hours ago she signed her name under Dez’s in a hand that shook, and now two hundred members of this house have just said his name back to her, and she’s smiling at all of them.

I hold my own glass and don’t drink it, and I let myself have this. A few seconds of it.

Then she lowers the glass and frowns.

“That’s bitter,” she says.

It’s an ordinary thing to say about champagne. Kit has poured worse. I almost answer her with a dry remark about Mr. Abernathy’s taste.

Tara looks down into the glass. She lifts her free hand and touches her throat, two fingers at the hollow of it, and I have seen that gesture before. On the Solstice. A woman in an emerald dress, at a high-top on the main aisle, saying I only had a sip.

Tara looks up at me. Her lips are losing their color.

“Lenart,” she says. “It’s the same.”

I understand her before she’s finished saying it.

Her hand starts to shake. I take the glass out of it before it falls, and I don’t let go of it, because someone will need to know what was in it. With my other hand I take her arm.