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Then it all happens at once.

Tav needs to move every iron table out of storage and into the reinforced suite, because the trolls’ tables have to hold the cake. The storage room is on the service level. The tables are cast iron, eight feet long, and when two of the barbacks try to lift one, neither end leaves the floor.

Tav walks over, bends, and picks it up.

Without so much as a grunt or a hint of strain, he hooks his hands under the edge and straightens up, the table coming with him, all eight feet of it. He settles it against his shoulder like a man carrying a ladder. His T-shirt pulls tight across his back. He turns sideways in the doorway, tips his head to the left to clear his horns from the frame, steps through, and checks behind him before he turns, so the far end of the table doesn’t swing into the kid with the gills.

Then he goes back for the next one.

I stand there with a clipboard and watch him do it six times. I’m aware that I’ve stopped writing. I’m aware that one of the barbacks has noticed me staring and is grinning about it. I don’t care. I’ve seen a lot of big men in a lot of bars. I’ve never seen anybody built like that, or anybody that strong be that careful about where he puts his feet.

“Boss,” Tav says, the fourth time he passes me. “Clipboard.”

“I’m using it.”

“You’re holding it upside down.”

I’m not, but I check.

By seven, the Arches has a bar. It isn’t pretty. It’s two folding tables and a black tablecloth and every bottle of gin, elderflower liqueur, and prosecco I could carry down from the main bar in three trips, plus three bus tubs of ice and a crate of blackberries Tav brought back from Sauvie Island yesterday. Kit sends down Theo to help me, and I teach him the Lilith quickly.

At seven-fifteen, a troll gets stuck in the doorway of the reinforced suite. He’s the groom’s uncle, and he’s very broad, and the door is only a regular door. He goes in shoulders first and stops. Tav looks at him for a long second, lifts the whole door off its hinges, and leans it against the wall. The uncle steps through, sheepish.

“Thank you, Tav.”

“Don’t eat the cake before the bride does,” Tav tells him.

At seven-thirty, a harpy loses a handful of feathers into the ice. At seven-forty, one of them knocks over a candelabra with her wingtip, and Theo catches it. At seven-fifty, one of the younger harpies tests the acoustics of the Arches with one high, clean note, and every glass on my folding-table bar starts to hum.

Kit calls down at eight on my phone to say the trolls want a specialty mead from the back of the cellar that costs four hundred dollars a bottle, and can she sell it.

“How many bottles?”

“They want six.”

“Then they have authorization,” I say, “and tell them it comes with a toast from the owners.”

“Which owners?”

“Find Merek.”

At eight-oh-five, I realize my phone has a calendar alert on it. Roof. William. 8:15 p.m.

I stand at the end of my folding-table bar with a jigger in one hand and a harpy trying to order a drink over my shoulder, and I text him with my thumb.

I’m so sorry. Harpies and trolls double-booked, total disaster, I’m running a bar in the Arches. Can we move the roof?

His answer comes back in under a minute.

Thursday. Same time. Go fix it.

I look at that for a second longer than I need to. Then I put my phone away and pour the harpy her Lilith.

By nine-thirty, both parties are happy.

The harpies are dancing in the Arches with their wings open, gray and white and gold, twenty-six of them, the arches above them full of feathers and noise. The bride is on the platform in the middle of them with her lilies, laughing. They’ve ordered three more rounds of Liliths and four magnums of champagne and asked if they can stay until two. I tell them they can stay until two for the cost of the extra room hours, and the maid of honor doesn’t even blink.

In the reinforced suite, the trolls are on their iron tables, and the cake has survived, and the groom’s father has given two speeches and cried through both of them. Merek showed up for the mead toast in a black suit, put one huge hand on the groom’s shoulder, and made a speech in what I think was troll, and the whole room roared. Then he walked past me on the way out and murmured, “Nice work, Trouble,” against my hair, and kept going.