Funny, really, how the Salon had begun to feel like home.

Adam and Alraune had been mostly in Skara Brae preparing for the first performance of the Carnival of Endless Summer and the Salon had that sense now of dusty emptiness that afflicts abandoned places. Whoever had ransacked the place weeks before had not returned and, if there had been any visitors, they left no trace.

Adam stored the stack of painted signs from the Carnival’s midway and counted the wine bottles. Stores generally would need to be replenished and it would be good to be back in the Salon for a week or two before preparations began for the next Carnival. Alraune would hold a reading soon, for the folk of Trinsic and others who might come.

Though Adam had some doubts about Trinsic generally.

Some of the guard had been most supportive of the fair – Kaelyn sending Hildy and Joe to guard the event – but there had also been trouble now with two of the guards. Iljian had accused Adam and Alraune of graverobbing and, worse, had accused Decardo and Cherry as well. Then Orson, never the most agreeable of guards, had forced Alraune to stand by while he searched the Salon for illegal goods and somehow arrived at the idea that Adam had stolen gold from her. He had threatened to arrest Adam.

Orson needed the sort of mental health care an ogre’s club might provide.

Life here near Trinsic’s gate might be more trouble than pleasure, Adam realized.

And yet it was home.

Adam felt a sense of rootlessness, almost a kind of hangover after the Carnival, an emptiness that had nothing to do with Tammy’s accursed cake. All the preparation, the work and the parties – little riots of sensual indulgence – to culminate in the Carnival itself, the parade of wonder and delight, and now it was done, for a time.

Where would they play next, he wondered, turning over the possibilities? Vesper, Yew, Cove, Magincia, Spiritwood, and Britain had all been mentioned as places for the Carnival might travel. And, of course, Trinsic. Who would welcome them and who would refuse them permission?

Alraune was glad to be home, Adam thought, though she still seemed preoccupied with her dream of the Elder Arcane spirit she called Domination, and he knew her thoughts went often to the mysterious vessel Decardo and Cherry had unearthed. If, as Adam suspected, eldritch powers were seeping slowly from that ancient crypt, there might well be other spirits lurking in the depths beyond dreaming.

Pausing, struck by the thought, Adam remembered the spirits he had already met – Fire, Revenge, the killing chill of Winter and the warm radiance of Summer, its season upon the land, in the bright banners of the Carnival, and the woman who had been their partner, gone for now to who knew where?

Something had passed between Summer and Adam in Skara Brae, something lost to Adam’s exhausted memory and the wretched cake drug, something dark and wicked, that had awakened dreams within Adam he had not dreamed in a very long time.

A suit of flesh cloaking a soul not his own, feelings beyond the senses, the hunger of a thousand mouths, alive in the green world and in Darkness.

The golden eye, opening.

He shook away the feeling. Only weariness, he told himself, only delusion born of overwork and bad herbs. Summer was delightful; she was Adam and Alraune’s partner in delight and merriment, though she held secrets she would not share.

In time, she would surely reveal them, for good or evil, for pleasure or pain.

Time enough later, Adam thought, putting away his bright barker’s clothing, closing the trunk.

For now, it was simply enough to be home.