Shadowbridge

SIX



Most days, by the time Leodora had finished her session with Soter, Tastion had returned and was waiting for her.

He and his father usually had good luck in their fishing. Sometimes she even passed them on the path to Fishkill as she was returning to the boathouse—either hauling their catch or returning with the net rolled up between them. Tastion would pretend to disregard her, as his father did. Later he would sneak into the boathouse to meet her. Where his family thought he had gone, she didn’t know. His work was done for the day, so perhaps no one was watching, no one noticing his absence. He risked a great deal to meet her, but not as much as he pretended. The risks had limits. Any punishment meted out would affect her more than him.

His marriage had been arranged years earlier, to a girl named Vosilana. If he’d been found alone in the boathouse with Leodora, the marriage arrangement might have been nullified, and his family would be humiliated by the revelation. He would certainly be whipped, most likely banished from his home for a time. But he was strong and handsome, his family one of the most powerful on the island. Punishments would be temporary, and if reparations could not be made with the bride’s family some other girl would be happy to take Vosilana’s place. Leodora could not replace her even had she wanted to. Tenikemac’s response to her in that event would, by comparison, make their bare tolerance of her now seem tender and loving. It would be she who had led him astray, she who had corrupted him. Gousier would have a new witch in his household. And her uncle…well, the whipping Tastion got would be far preferable to anything Gousier would do.

Given all that, she could not quite explain even to herself why she continued to see Tastion, except that she had done so for so long.

There was kissing, of course—she could hardly have denied her own lips their sweet fulfillment. Kissing scorched them both, but when the heat of passion consumed him, and although she had loved Tastion forever, a small whisper of reason stopped her from relinquishing control. In his importuning she thought she heard a tone that said once satisfied, he would go off in search of other fruit. Because she loved him she did not deny him some familiarity, and sometimes she became dizzy with him. Because she knew her place in his world, she stopped short of drowning in pleasure—which served only to frustrate and further incite her would-be lover. To his credit, he had never sworn falsely to marry her—that is, if one discounted that the two of them had been promising to run off together since they were children. Tastion never claimed that he could defy his parents, his village, or the assignment of his bride. He never pledged to give it all up, only to find ways around the rules. She wouldn’t have believed him if he had.

Today, angry and frustrated, she entered the boathouse with an urgent need for Tastion that had nothing to do with passion. She needed to ask questions if only to hear herself ask them so that she would know what her questions were. She needed him, but Tastion wasn’t there, and her spirits plunged further. She sat on her bed, took off her boot, and rubbed her toes that she’d bruised when she kicked the stool.

The force of her rage caught up with her, exhausted her. The warmth of the room added to her torpor. She leaned back on her elbows, and finally lay back to stare at the beam over her head. She saw in the grain of the wood weird faces and creatures she’d identified years before, when she was tiny; once recognized, they could never be random patterns again. One of them she’d decided was her father’s face. Another was the torso of her mother, twisting out of strings of seaweed like a mermaid. A weight like that of gathering tears filled her head with a kind of forlorn pressure but without enough weight for the drops to fall. The thick air hung about her, pressing down upon her, and she drifted to sleep.

When she awoke it was dark in the room. The sky outside was purple, streaked with the last glory of sunset at the very edge of the sea. Her head ached when she sat up. She knew that she was hungry, and that the evening meal must be ready soon. Hunger at least was easy to think about.

She got up and drew on her boots. She left the trapdoor to her room open in case Tastion turned up.

The sea rice in its broth was salty. Leodora chewed and tried not to make eye contact with Dymphana, which was facilitated by Dymphana’s preoccupation with the empty stool where Gousier usually sat. While Leodora wondered about Soter’s ghosts, so her aunt appeared preoccupied with where her uncle might be. Their unease they shared as if it were a condiment; but neither could speak of it.

Finally, when they were halfway through their portions, Gousier arrived. The smell of sweat fermented in fish and liquor accompanied him like a homunculus. Had they missed the liquor’s stink, neither of them missed the looseness in his stride and the flush to his face as if he’d run home from Ningle. Gousier drunk was too familiar a sight—it was the timing of it that was peculiar.

Dymphana stopped eating to watch him. She was watching, Leodora knew, to see how he reacted to their having begun without him. If his day had gone poorly he could explode without warning, angered by meaningless things. More than one dinner had been brought to a halt by his unprompted anger, and drunkenness did not necessarily augur well.

This night he fairly beamed at them, however. In particular, when he looked Leodora’s way, his eyes grew sly. It was clear he would not lose his temper, but the cagey, slow smile with which he considered her twisted knots in her stomach.

He took his place at the head of the table, and Dymphana spooned a serving into his bowl. While he waited for her to finish, he remarked, “What a grand day I’ve had. Just grand.”

“The fish sold well?”

“Yes, yes they did. We hardly had to throw any away.”

“But you had to stay late up there?”

“Late? Ah, no.” Another darting glance at his niece. “No, we come down about sunset as usual. I don’t like to navigate those steps in the dark, you know that. No, I been back awhile.” He considered Leodora again with hooded eyes. “I went over to settle up first.”

In a voice from which she couldn’t mask suspicion, Dymphana said, “They invited you to drink with them?”

He smiled. “They did that, yes. One of them in particular wanted to toast with me. A widow, she is.”

This last piece of information seemed so entirely superfluous that the two women exchanged glances to see if either of them understood the reference.

Obviously enjoying their perplexity, Gousier offered up another clue. “The poor creature has a terrible burden to bear. Her husband is dead.”

“Is there a different kind of widow than that?” Dymphana asked in a distinctly icy tone.

“I didn’t finish. Dear.” A hint of his true nature punctuated the syllable. “Alone, she’s burdened with a son. Her only child. A man must fish to provide for his family here. This one, though, can’t fish. Can’t be trusted with a net. Why, he’d be pulled right off any dragon and drowned.”

“You’re speaking of that poor imbecile, Koombrun.”

“Right you are.”

“And why should his circumstance matter to us now? Are you going to put him to work? Is he going to haul your fish?”

Gousier chose that moment to begin eating. He chewed the rice as if he had years to finish. Then he drank some water, cleared his throat. “Tenikemac would never allow such a thing. Why, that would only alienate the poor woman further. She’d be a pariah if anyone in her family went onto the spans.”

“So, he’s to help me in the cavern, then, Uncle,” Leodora guessed.

“Oh, I do hope so, after his fashion. As best he can, being what he is. You’ll have to teach him. Once you’re married, of course, I expect you’ll have to teach him everything from gutting fish to where to stick his—”

“Once I’m married? To Koombrun? To an idiot?”

“Just because he is mentally deficient don’t mean your children must be. Probably, they’ll all be normal. I’m sure they will and so’s his mother.” He beamed at her with affected bonhomie, beneath which an edge of malice glittered.

Her first instinct was to throw her bowl at him, but she grabbed the table instead and tried to maintain control over her terror and hate. “I’m not marrying anyone,” she said.

“Oh, but you are, Leodora, my little niece. You’re in my house, and my keeping. And I’m telling you that your only hope on Bouyan is to marry into that village. The normal ones there would never even consider you. You’ve been up on the spans yourself and the fact that you were a toddler, not aware of the rules, the choices, that cuts no fish with them. This widow—she needs providing for, she’s a burden on her neighbors, and you can fix that with your share of the takings every morning. The three of you’ll live in the boathouse for a time, till we can build something more substantial. Or better, maybe I can toss that old bastard Soter out and you can have his shack. That’s roomier.” He turned to his wife. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get rid of him in the bargain, won’t we?”

When neither woman said anything, he gave a shrug, took another bite of his food, and with his mouth half full added, “This is the opportunity for our family finally to join the village. This imbecile—call him what you want—your children will be their children. You’ll have to guide him in that, too, won’t you? But he’s equipped.” He smiled and chewed. “You ask him and he’ll show you. Happy he is to show you.” He laughed and shook his head.

Softly, almost kindly, Dymphana rebutted, “They won’t see it your way in Tenikemac. They won’t bring us in.”

“Of course they will. They’ll have to.”

“How long have you been working at this, Uncle? All the little things you’ve said, the funny little looks—you’ve been winding up this woman’s hopes for weeks now. This didn’t just happen tonight.”

His eyes narrowed although his smile remained. “I don’t know that I care to be accused, my girl. Especially with all I’ve done for your future. You’d see that if you—”

“Liar,” she snapped. She rose to her feet, and now her control deserted her. She heaved the bowl of rice into his face.

Gousier erupted from his seat with a howl of anguish. “My eyes!” His hands swiped at the rice stuck to his cheeks. He shook his head, pressing palms into eye sockets, and lunged all at once across the table, knocking over a pitcher and a bowl, which shattered, spreading more rice underfoot. But his hands closed on nothing.

Leodora’s place was empty.

He blinked and squinted. “I’ll kill you, you ungrateful bitch, I will!” His words burst the walls, sped through the night, pursuing her like a maleficent spirit. “Get done with your petulance, girl—the ceremony’s in two nights and I’ll deliver you to it if I have to carry you there in a net like one of their catches! Two nights hence!” Then she heard his laugh, and she knew she’d been right to run. There’d been a knife right in front of her on the table. If he’d hit her, she would have stuck it through his eye.

She fled to the boathouse but not to her garret. If he followed, Gousier would have her all but trapped up there. She went halfway up the steps instead, ready to jump if the door opened. She stuck her head into the room above and called, “Tastion?” The silence of emptiness answered her.

She took a seat on the lowest steps, with the boat close by. If Gousier came in, she could squeeze through the rotten hull of the esquif before he even saw her.

She stared through the hole in its side. She and the boat were identical. Both helpless, trapped here at her uncle’s whim. Kept from the life they were meant to live. The boat was meant to be on the ocean—it should have been on the ocean. The boat had no recourse; but she did. She must.

Again she wondered where Tastion was. Twice today she’d needed to talk with him and he’d failed her. Now she had to concern herself with the prospect of bidding him farewell. Whatever had bound her to Bouyan before, whether it was the thing that called from across the sea or the impossible hope that she and Tastion might find a life together, it couldn’t hold her any longer. Tastion would marry his chosen wife just the way he was supposed to, and the dark, slithering call would have to find a new listener. There was—

The boathouse door swung open.

Leodora slipped from the step and through the hole in the boat. Footsteps skittered past—too quick to belong to her uncle. Then she heard her name called, her name sharp with excitement. Had he heard about the arranged marriage?

He came back down.

“I’m here, Tastion,” she said through the hole.

He jumped back against the stairs. “Zarya’s teeth! That’s a mean trick to play. What are you doing in there?”

“Hiding from Gousier.”

“Oh. What have you done this time?”

“Thank you for your confidence.”

“I didn’t mean—I meant that he always blames you for everything. The bastard looks for excuses to beat you.”

“I know that’s what you meant.”

“Right now you have to come with me,” he insisted.

“Why? Where have you been all evening? Did you stay out all this time?”

“We had a—it will be easier if I show you. Come on.” He held out his hand. “Come on. What I found can even make you forget about your uncle.”

She extended her hand but said, “I don’t think so.”

He found her fingers in the dark and drew her out of the boat. “Just wait.”

She shushed him then. They both stood listening, hardly breathing. She decided that she hadn’t heard anything after all.

Tastion, unable to keep still, began whispering to her. “We found it this afternoon. The net got caught the way it does sometimes. It wouldn’t come loose and I had to dive down to it.” He pulled her out of the boathouse while he babbled softly. “But it wasn’t caught. I swam all the way to the bottom, and there was this thing in the net. We’d been dragging it along, just like…like I’m going to drag you if you don’t speed your step.”

She looked around, back toward the house. There was no one there. Absently she asked him, “What was it?”

“That’s where I’m taking you. You’ll see.”

Soon she knew they were going to the cavern. The entrance was dark. Leodora complained that they’d brought no lamp.

“You won’t need one,” he told her, and tugged her inside. She thought he meant they would be kissing in the dark. But as her eyes adjusted, she realized that the deeper cavern was lit by a feeble bluish glow. “We put it in here,” Tastion explained, “to keep it from drying out too much. It seemed only right that it should stay with the fish. It took four of us with two nets to lift it from the bottom, and all the afternoon for our dragons to haul it back.”

They rounded the bend. The whole chamber was visible. The stone table where she cut fish was outlined in a blue halo. The source of the light lay hidden behind it.

She tugged free. Tastion released her hand, and she strode boldly to the edge of the stone. What she discovered made her inhale sharply and step back. She bumped against him. He was looking over her shoulder.

A body lay on the cavern floor.

It was not a normal—not a living—body. Its luminescence she had seen before: the color of the ocean at night when tiny sea creatures clustered, darting and swaying. The color of their radiance. It seemed to emerge from within the shell, the husk that had condensed, making the features into shadows, not unlike the puppets on their sticks when the lantern shone through them; but this body wasn’t hammered fish bladder. It was a crust—a coral grown into a human shape.

A coral man.

A lump defined the nose, and shallow cavities the eye sockets. Water pooled in them, creating an illusion of wet and shiny eyes rolled back in its head. The mouth might have been invisible were it not for a darker vein through the coral there. Swirls and ridges of accretion created the illusion of clothing, too. Maybe, she thought, beneath the crust there lay a statue, and the coral had merely built up and up over that original form, so that with each new layer the unknown sculptor’s work became less defined. Maybe…But it had no discernible feet, as if it was still growing.

When Tastion spoke again, she flinched.

“It weighed as much as if the whole of Shadowbridge had been poured inside it. I tugged at the net, but it wouldn’t budge with just me pulling. Finally I had to swim up for air, and I told my father what it was. We found Lemros and Sel on their dragons, and Sel and I dove down with their net and looped it beneath our own, and then the four of us hauled it. The dragons never worked so hard. Then in the shallows we four stood on the beach, and others came and helped, and we pulled it up out of the water. We unfolded the nets to see it, and then we just marveled. No one knew what they were looking at any more than you do. But here’s something more peculiar, as if the look of it weren’t enough. After it had lain on the beach awhile, when we went to pick it up—” He stepped around her and cupped his hands under the figure’s head. “—it weighed hardly anything at all.” And so saying, he lifted it upright as if it were a stick of driftwood. “It must have been the water that weighted it, in all the little holes.”

He prattled on about their being afraid of it, and who had argued for taking it back into the ocean and who was for keeping it; but Leodora barely listened. Gingerly, she raised one finger to its cheek, straight across from her own. On contact a current flowed up her arm. Sparks spun from where her finger touched. They circled her arm, danced upon her shoulder and up her neck, around her head—sparks that only she could see, for Tastion, though he stood just beside her, kept right on babbling about bringing the figure here. The sparks dazzled her. Penetrated her as if she were coral, too.

Tastion’s hands gripped her, and she recoiled, only to find herself incongruously dangling from his arms, as though she’d fallen.

“What happened to you? What made you swoon?”

“Did I?” she asked. Her mind was a vacant beach. She let herself be drawn upright, held on to.

“You just tipped over like you’d fallen asleep. Am I that boring?” A joke to disguise his worry.

She could only shake her head. Tastion drew her away from the upright figure and stepped between them. Now the glow surrounded him. In his shadow she blinked as if she’d been asleep. Where were her thoughts?

Tastion turned her and led her out of the icy chamber, away from the figure. She went passively, too confused to contest his judgment, although she muttered “I’m fine” to reassure him. She glanced back at the figure.

Out of the cave, he guided her down the path toward Ningle and then beneath a stand of fir trees, a spot they had come to more than once to be alone. No one traveled the path to Ningle at night, and no one could have seen them sitting on their bed of needles in any case.

He said, “You aren’t taking care of yourself, my girl,” and brushed her hair back. “You shouldn’t fight with your uncle until after you’ve eaten something.”

“But I—”

“You need to have someone look after you.” He kissed her neck. “Someone to care for you.” He kissed her cheek. “Someone to provide everything.” He turned her chin and leaned forward to kiss her.

Leodora pulled away. His shadowy face seemed to wear a smile of mild exasperation, as if he was saying to her, Well, I had to try.

“Someone to provide everything for me? Why, Tastion, how thoughtful. Who has been assigned the task?”

“Don’t mock me.”

“Why? You can’t fulfill any such role yourself, if I asked, which I haven’t and won’t. We both of us know to whom you’re already tied.”

“That’s just ritual. I have to pledge to her when she comes of age, but my heart, Lea—”

“Your heart. Your heart is not the part that throbs for me, Tastion. What am I to be? Your whore in the garret?”

“What is the matter with you all of a sudden? We’ve kissed like this, made these promises—I haven’t said a thing I haven’t said before, and you liked it before.”

“I wasn’t the bartered bride of Koombrun before.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that in two nights my uncle will have me married to the one creature in your village wretched enough to accept the tainted daughter of a witch.” She felt the heat of tears flooding her eyes, and swung her head sharply to fling them back. She would not cry over this.

“He has no right!”

“He has every right. I’m his ward. His property. He can sell me the same as any fish in his basket.”

“Well, then we’ll just…” He hesitated, finally grunted in defeat. There was no idea he could come up with that she hadn’t visited already in the boathouse. So long as both parties wished to see the union through, she would be married. Unless the village interceded. Which it wouldn’t. “Fine, then,” Tastion said. “It’ll be perfect. You can live with Koombrun and still meet me. No one will be the wiser—certainly not Koombrun. It’s the perfect camouflage, even better than the boathouse—”

She got to her feet. “I’m really nothing to you, am I? Just convenient. If I’d given in to you before, you wouldn’t even be here now. You’d have had your ride and finished with me and passed me on to your friends. Lemros and Sel could have a turn. I could carry your child and there’d be no consequences for you. Oh, maybe a rebuke from the elders, a retreat until you came to your senses, were purged of my spell. I’m not of the people. What happens to me can be kept outside the village. It won’t embarrass anybody, will it? Outside. You can’t be made to marry me. You can’t share with me what you can share with any other woman on this island.”

“That’s not so, Leodora.”

“It is so. We’ve pretended for so long that something would simply appear when we needed it to change everything. We made our pact as children, Tastion, and we’re still trying to be children. But we’re feeling things beyond what children feel, and almost doing them. Sooner or later we’re going to do them, because we want to. There never has been a solution. Not on Bouyan. The whole world here would have to change for us.”

“Where, then?” His uneasy question.

She turned, pointed through the trees to lights no brighter than stars. “Up there.”

“Lea, you know I can’t go up there.”

“I can.”

Tastion seemed lost then, as if he’d never before considered the real limits imposed upon her and upon him, as if for him things were always going to roll along, allowing him the freedom to glide through the imposed rules. She was sorry for what she’d said because of what could not, as a result, happen between them, but what she’d said was the truth, and they both had to acknowledge it now. She had. Tastion was not prepared to, and he left her.

She called to him but he didn’t stop. The darkness swallowed him up.

Leodora returned to the path and followed it to Soter’s hut.

He didn’t seem to be home. She entered anyway, going straight to the rear. In the doorway to the back room, she lingered, regarding the two stretched undaya cases lying in the recesses. She’d always had a plan of sorts, unformed but lurking at the edges of her life. Now she must shape it. She needed Soter’s help to do that.

She left the hut and continued on the path to Tenikemac.

The long house lay at the center of the village. All the other abodes were built along paths radiating from it. It had a low, nearly flat roof containing smoke holes for three different fires. Off the side facing the ocean, a huge carved merwoman figure reached with both arms as if she had been transformed in the midst of jumping through the wall, though her presence there, Leodora knew, was supposed to represent the bestowing of her blessing upon the whole village. Meetings, ceremonies, and entertainments took place in that house, and the goddess’s name was never spoken except inside it. Leodora had performed there numerous times. In two nights she was to be married there.

Soter brought his fermented product to the long house to sell. Often, after he’d bartered the liquor for food, clothing, or utensils, he would linger to drink with the men. “Absorbing my expenses,” he called it.

Tonight he seemed to have absorbed rather a lot. She walked in on him regaling half a dozen others with a rude story about a hermaphroditic mermaid. Leodora entered at the far end of the long house and had passed the first two, untended fires before anyone noticed her.

A couple of the men turned at once. One of them was Agmeon. His eyes were bloodshot. They went wide as he recognized her. He jumped up, barring her way. She nodded, making the requisite shallow, respectful bow, but when she looked up again anger still burned in Agmeon’s eyes, and he still blocked her way. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

Soter had stopped talking. He gazed at her, bleary and unfocused.

“I came to get him. I need to talk to him.”

“Have you no decency, girl?”

She looked at herself as if expecting to find she’d forgotten to wear clothes. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I come here all the time. I was here only a few nights past, performing for you. You saw me.”

“That was before. Now you’re betrothed to Koombrun. You do know you’re betrothed?”

“Yes.”

“It’s unseemly to be found in one man’s house with him, even worse to be here. It’s the behavior of a mispel. You leave now.” He thrust a finger past her and spoke with such vehemence that she started to turn, to leave; but her will overrode her instinct and she stopped. She had never been a part of their world, nor governed by any of their rules. Now suddenly she was required to submit, even though she would gain the respect of no one for it. Their women had to ask permission to enter the long house. She had seen it enough times to know. After the shadowplays the men stayed and the women left. She wondered if they would even consent to her using the puppets afterward. To consort with Soter. He was a man, too, however besotted, and to practice she must enter his house. They would brand her a mispel for that, most certainly. No, they would never allow it, maybe not even if Koombrun accompanied her. She could imagine the pleasure Agmeon would take in controlling her, the same as Gousier. There wasn’t a soul on the island who wasn’t allied against her.

She stood considering long enough that Agmeon circled her. “What’s the matter with you? Leave!”

“Not without him.”

Agmeon looked as if he would strike her then. Soter suddenly lurched upright and stumbled in between them, slurring his words: “What’s all this nonsense, you two? Agmeon, this is Leodora, you know who she is. Lea, what is so urgent?” He hung there like a great tortoise, with his head pushed out and swinging back and forth. When he received no reply from either of them, and the two continued to stare each other down, he waved his hands loosely and said, “All right, all right, I’ve had too much hospitality anyway. I’d get lost on the way home without a guide. Come on, child, help me with my goods and let’s go.”

Agmeon’s glance flicked between them. He seemed to weigh the matter. She could almost hear him thinking that at least with Soter she would be gone. He released an exasperated sigh and sharply withdrew, allowing the two of them to collect Soter’s payment. She gathered up loaves of bread, dried seaweed, and a shirt, stuffing them into his net bag along with a few empty jugs. He shuffled up beside her carrying his own jug and nothing else. For once she didn’t mind being his drudge. He kept turning and bidding everyone good night the whole length of the house.

Outside they had barely gone a dozen steps when he said quite soberly, “Now, what was all that business about, Agmeon not letting you in? What did he mean, you’re betrothed?”

By the time they reached his hut, she’d told him the whole story and he had launched into his own verbal assault upon Gousier: “The utter fool. Does he truly believe the village will warm to him for this? Or to you? Link with his family? They can’t possibly have told him that. He’s made it up from what they didn’t tell him.”

He stumbled approaching his hut, quickly caught himself, then stopped and stared at his own feet for a moment. “Some of us are foolish,” he said, “you from youth and I from drink. And we try to compensate for our weaknesses when we’re not giving in to them. But your uncle, Lea, is the worst kind of fool—the cocksure fool. Malicious and proud in his certainty. No one can tell him anything, and the more he stands on his points, the more wrong he is. And the more vicious.”

He entered the hut, then spun around to face her, his arms flung wide. The jug in his hand tugged him sideways. “Look at your mother!”

Not following his train of thought, she glanced about. “Where?”

“On the spans, of course!” He set down the jug. “Your uncle chased all over trying to locate her. Would not be dis…dis…wouldn’t be put off from it. Never once did he consider she might not wish to be found, and that he could’ve better used his time selling his damned fish. Idiot. Idiot.” He collapsed on a stool, repeating the word now almost as if chiding himself.

She put down the netful of crockery. “Soter,” she asked, drawing closer.

“Mmm?”

“You have to tell me now, no more dodging. No more maneuvers.”

“What?” He looked up. Though she was right in front of him, he seemed to have to search for her.

“You have to tell me now, am I any good.”

He said, “Dunno what you mean.”

Apprehension colored his attempt to fall back upon being drunk as an escape. His eyes glistened with such fear that she found herself glancing around, expecting to discover the ghosts of his conscience condensing behind her. Those ghosts, whether she saw them or not, would keep him in check unless she rattled his world enough to dissolve them. She said, “I have to know, Soter, because no matter what the answer, I’m leaving the island. Now. Tonight. I don’t have a choice anymore.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“You know there isn’t. I won’t marry Koombrun, but I have to marry Koombrun. What choice does my uncle leave? If I stay, he and the village control my life forever. I will never be allowed to come here and train, to work the puppets, to learn. So I’m taking the puppets with me. All of them. They’re mine—you said so—and I’m taking them. But I have to know now: Am…I…any…good?”

She watched the fear drain out of him as he assessed what she’d said. She had broken the wishful bubble in which he lived—the lie he perpetuated to keep things as they were, which he’d admitted to her mother’s specter. He was no different from Tastion. Or Gousier, for that matter. The three men dwelled in fantasies of their own devising, with never a thought for her as anything other than an object within the frame. One after the other, she was showing them that she neither shared nor accepted their worlds.

When Soter answered her, it was in the quiet, attentive voice of a man focused upon a single, critical issue; one who had reasoned out his course of action before this night.

“Where do you intend to go? Ningle?”

“Of course.”

“How will you hide from your uncle? He knows many people up there. How will you know whom you can trust?”

“I—I don’t know. I won’t trust anyone.”

“And you’ll carry both cases by yourself? You couldn’t carry them both from here to Tenikemac, much less up that stairway. Do you know how long a span is?”

“No.” Worry warped the syllable.

“Will you head north or south? Which is better?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s good, then, that you’ve thought this through, worked out the details.” He spoke without a trace of sarcasm. He didn’t need any to make his point. “Lea, dear, you can’t be a performer by yourself up there, either. Proper shadowplay needs three or four. I’ve told you this, I wasn’t making it up. Who’s going to play your music for you? We’ll have to find someone. Can’t be a girl puppeteer up there—the way they treated you in the long house just now will be nothing to how you’d be derided on most of the spans near here. How you go about by day’s no issue. But on stage…” He reached up and pushed his fingers into her long hair. “You’ll have to give this up. We have to disguise you. Do as your father did, starting out.”

“We have to do it? We?”

“You and me.”

“Soter, I don’t want anybody—”

“It doesn’t much matter if you do. Haven’t you been listening, or must I ask you the questions all over again? I’m coming along.”

“But why? Why do you want to?”

He pulled at his nose. “Well, first, because as I said you can’t do this on your own, no matter what you think. Second, because Gousier will make me pay in your absence once he’s done beating your aunt, and I don’t care to take your punishment when the whip comes down, thank you very much. Third, there’s no one better’n me at arranging these things. I’ve told you that.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m not finished,” he said testily. “Fourth, I’m coming along because, Leodora, you have in you the skill to be the greatest shadowteller that the whole endless spiral of Shadowbridge has ever seen. With my guidance you might achieve such recognition as no one has ever had. As for if you’re good”—he smiled slyly—“let us just see how you perform when the audience isn’t an inbred village of sea urchins.”

She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. She forgave him his need to dramatize the answer. She wanted to run and embrace him, thank him, but she did not let herself. She grinned but kept her passion in check. She had, after all, known she was great all along.

He drummed his fingers on the seat of the stool and said, “Now, when are we leaving?”

It was not a simple question, but a test. He wanted her to think about all she had to do. “Tomorrow night?” she ventured.

“He will come after us, same as he did your mother before you. You’ll have humiliated him in front of the village. He’ll be worse off than he was before he dreamed up this scheme. We must be careful how we go initially.” He relaxed, as if something had been decided. “Now you ought to get your sleep. He expects you to be at work in the morning, and you don’t want to give him a reason to suspect anything. He’s already angry with you. Don’t provoke him, however much you want to. Let him lord over you. Let him gloat. He doesn’t know what’s coming, which is how you want it to stay. I’ll make some arrangements meantime. Go on now.”

She shuffled her feet, made a lopsided bow, feeling idiotically in his debt for something she’d forced upon him. She withdrew before she could embarrass herself in some other way.

The boathouse was strange to her then. She lay in her bed, conscious that it would be her final night here, curling her toes against the coarse blanket as if she’d never felt it before, listening to the surf outside crackle and hiss upon the sand.

Sleep took forever to arrive. It had to catch her unawares.

The restive night delivered her to the morning tired, dreamy, and distracted. She saw everything as if in a mirror, all of it real but lacking its former substance—as if an interloping spirit had taken residence in her head. Her preoccupation blinded her, until she was climbing down the stairs, to the silence. She stopped.

Nothing called to her from across the sea.

She strained to listen. Gulls screeched. Waves spread upon the shore. Her curtains flapped. The sound beneath the sound was gone.

She was still listening for it as she wandered down the beach toward the village, not really aware of her surroundings until she saw Kusahema on the ridge. Quickly gathering a few strands of seaweed, she carried them to the pregnant girl. Kusahema refused to meet her eyes, and held her basket out shyly.

Perplexed but wishing to follow Soter’s admonition, Leodora asked, “How are you this morning?” and reached to place her hand on her friend’s belly. Kusahema jumped back, wild-eyed, shoving the basket between them. With her head tilted, she looked as if she were cringing from an attack.

“What’s wrong? What is it?”

The girl made no reply. She shook her head, shrank away, backing into the surf in order to get around Leodora. Then she hurried up the beach, a desperate waddle, while casting backward glances to make sure Leodora wasn’t pursuing her.

“Yesterday’s blessing is today’s curse,” she muttered—a line from a shadowplay that suddenly made sense to her. Gousier’s arrangement had altered her relationship to the whole village, even more than she’d imagined. Who knew how many proscriptions now weighed against her?

She walked over the ridge but refrained from approaching too close to the fishing party gathering their nets on the beach. She’d come to bid the dragons farewell, not the people.

Tastion had promised many times to take her with him to fish, but it had been another child’s promise made first in ignorance and later in mock-defiance. He would never have dared, not really.

The men unfurled their nets and waded into the choppy sea. Tastion glanced her way nervously, then kept his back to her. The women stared straight at her, a gazed barrier.

She saw Koombrun. He could only bring himself to look at her askance, shy now, maybe even fearful. His mother saw her and began slapping him, driving him away. He ducked and clutched his head and shrank back with the speed of someone who’d been beaten many times before. She regretted the misery she was bringing to him. None of this was his fault. When I’m gone, she thought, they’ll punish him for that, too. She’ll be more humiliated by that than by the union itself. The island’s no more your friend than mine, Koombrun. I’m sorry.

The other women watched him driven away. A few looked back at her as if to say, See what you’ve done? There was no point in remaining. All she was doing was defying some other rule that she was about to abandon anyway.

She glanced out at the dragons again. To her astonishment, the creatures had all turned and were facing her. Their riders, nonplussed, were gesturing helplessly. The dragons beneath them just floated in place. For a moment they seemed to acknowledge her estrangement. Then the moment passed, and the creatures swung about as one and headed out to sea. The women’s stare after that was furious. Leodora turned her back on them and set off for Fishkill Cavern.

The Coral Man stood upright in the back of the cave. The glow seemed to have left him altogether. The cold had probably killed all the tiny creatures living within him. His dullness should have made him less imposing, but she found that she could not work with her back to him. Despite the fact that he had no eyes, the sensation of being watched overpowered her. She couldn’t help looking to be sure he hadn’t come to life and edged nearer. When she couldn’t trust that he hadn’t, she went over and scratched a line on the floor in front of him. Even that corroboration failed to satisfy her in the end, and so she moved around the stone table and worked on the other side. It was inconvenient, because the cavern wall jutted out there, forcing her to hunch over her work as she beheaded and sliced and gutted each corpse. It put the mats on the wrong side, beyond her reach, and instead of placing each cleaned fillet in the basket, she had to let them pile up and then walk all the way around the stone to lay them in there.

Being able to see him didn’t improve her situation, either. Her attention kept flicking to him, as if he were moving in her periphery; but it wasn’t movement. It was more, she thought, as if he were singing to her, whispering at a level she couldn’t hear but feel.

And all at once she stopped and set down the knife and stared. She knew well the sensation she had just described. It had been absent in the boathouse, but it was back now. Only the call no longer came from across the sea.

It came from across the room.

By the time Gousier and his fool assistants arrived, she was ready to bolt. Her uncle took in the coral figure as if he’d seen it there every day of his life. Obviously someone had told him about it. He looked it up and down once—he towered over it—and then turned his attention directly to the business of the day.

She had cleaned perhaps two-thirds of the fish she should have prepared, and he saw that immediately. She anticipated a beating, and for a moment as he scowled she knew it was coming. But then he looked at her, and the scowl spread into a knowing smile and a narrow-eyed glance that said, Go ahead, enjoy your final act of defiance. The Coral Man loomed behind him in the shadows, and the two of them combined was more than she could stand. She put down the knives and turned, knocking one of the fools aside as she marched and then ran out of the cave. She heard her uncle’s savage laugh, heard him say, “She’s nervous before the event,” and heard the fools join in the laughter, but for all she reacted they might have been discussing someone else.

On any other day if she had walked out on him, Gousier would have dragged her back by the hair, cursed her, slapped her, whipped her. None of that was necessary now.

She washed and warmed her hands, then hurried away from the cavern before her uncle and his fools emerged. “Don’t provoke him,” Soter had said. For her that meant being elsewhere, and she went to her beach.

The tide was in, and the inlet lay open to the sea. She sat on the spit of sand, knees drawn up, the salty breeze ruffling her hair. Despite her impending escape, she felt as if a huge weight were tied to her. She could barely contemplate stripping off the bloody clothes and going for a swim for fear that the weight would pull her down and drown her.

It wasn’t Gousier. She wouldn’t miss him, nor the fish guts and the cold cavern to which he consigned her, any more than she would miss the marriage he’d arranged. She would miss Dymphana terribly, though. Her aunt would grieve when she’d gone, and weep for the girl who hadn’t even said good-bye. She didn’t dare, because Dymphana would stop her, even if such betrayal condemned her to marry an imbecile. However much her aunt loved her, she must follow Gousier’s way, having long ago succumbed to his governance.

This is what it was like for my mother before me, she thought. Who I hurt and whether I care—those are my choices.

The rest of her burden the Coral Man provided. She knew that effigy would call her back to Bouyan, plague her with its siren song, and in that moment she made a leap of intuition: It had come from the sea, the same as the dragons. Like her they’d heard its call. That was how a dragon had brought Tastion to it, and that was what the dragons had been staring at. Not her. She’d been standing in direct line between them and the cavern. Magic thrived in that figure to which they and she were attuned because…and here her surmise failed her outright. Dymphana had told her that not all mysteries were explained, but on the cusp of one, she resented that she couldn’t find its final panacea.

She almost got up then, to go off and prepare whatever needed preparing. Then, looking across the inlet, she thought, This is the last time I’ll ever be here. Her mother must have thought that once upon a time, too, looking out from this spot to this ocean. It seemed important to acknowledge.

She pulled off her small boots, drew off her bloody clothing, then ceremoniously walked into the water.

She swam across to the far side of the inlet, where she pulled herself up on a rock and perched like a sea otter. Like the evil mermaid of Omelune.

A cloud rolled across the sun, and the wind riding the water turned chilly. She shivered with gooseflesh and slid back into the inlet, splashing, diving down in the crystal-clear water to the bottom, where she grabbed a handful of weeds and sand, and offered a prayer of farewell to whatever could hear her thoughts. It was what Tastion said the fishermen did on their final outing.

When she kicked off from the bottom she found herself face-to-face with a sea dragon. She darted back in surprise. The dragon moved with her. Its protruding black eyes swiveled, studying her. She surfaced and drew a deep breath, ready to dive back down; but before she could, the dragon’s yellow head popped up beside her.

It wasn’t full-grown. An adult sea dragon could never have fitted through the narrow mouth of the inlet even at high tide. But it wasn’t a baby, either. Its body was mottled the way an adult’s was. Close up, she could see small soft spikes protruding from its ribs—features not visible from the beach. Features that only fishermen ever saw. A feathery ruff surrounded its neck, as thin as a dragonfly wing.

The plumes off the back of its head ended in purplish fans—one at the top of the head and one lower on the back of the neck—that seemed to rest on the water. Below the surface, its gills fluttered daintily. A puffy reddish mound, speckled like the torso, encompassed each eye. Tiny needle-like teeth encircled the crumpled mouth at the end of the reedy, tapered snout. The mouth flexed, wheezed, and blew spray at her. She thought of Muvros, the smaller dragon Tastion rode, and how it looked as if it were forever puckering for a kiss. This one was like that, too. She couldn’t help but smile.

“Hello,” she said to it.

The dragon glanced aside as if considering whether it should answer.

“What are you doing here?” she asked herself as much as the creature. It exhaled another small jet of water.

One of its paddle-shaped feet slapped against her side, and she flinched before realizing what had touched her.

The dragon turned its head to face her straight-on, its eyes swiveling to find her. With its snout it nudged her, and its whuffling breath sprayed her face.

Abruptly it turned as if to go, but remained, paddling in place. Its tail snaked across her belly. She dared to touch it now, expecting the creature to dive, to flee from her. Its skin was slightly rough. The mottling across its back was bumpy. Far down its back a third plume lay folded along its spine—another feature not visible from land. Now she understood how the riders could perch in place: They fitted against the base of the plume and held on to the lowest fan on its neck.

The dragon glanced around at her, clearly impatient. The third plume fluttered in invitation. She swam up beside the dragon and pulled herself onto its back. The rough and oily skin chafed her belly and then the insides of her thighs as she sat upright. She bent her legs and clutched its sides with her knees. They fell between the larger ribs quite naturally. Whoever had first climbed upon a sea dragon would have thought the creature had been designed for them—as she did now. The dragon seemed to think so, too.

She leaned against the rear plume and held to its neck. Neither her weight nor hold seemed to inconvenience the dragon. She was thinking, Well, this is nice, when it suddenly dove. The surface slapped her chin, closing her mouth. Water jetted up her nose, but she held on.

The dragon made a swift circuit of the inlet, lunging forward with each oar-like sweep of its paddle fins. She leaned close to its back, hoping it wouldn’t stay under too long. And as if aware of her need for air, it immediately surfaced. Leodora flexed forward like a branch that had been pulled back and then released. She clung to the dragon’s neck, spitting, coughing, gasping. And then laughing.

She laughed with a joy as naked as she. The dragon craned its neck and observed her with one solemnly inquisitive black eye. Then with a flick of its tail it scooted straight out of the inlet.

The rocks to either side scraped against her legs. Another month, she thought, and the little dragon would be too big to fit through that opening. Another hour and there wouldn’t have been enough water to clear it.

“How did you know about this?” she asked, as if the creature might suddenly explain itself. The transparent ruff fluttered, no communication she could understand. She had never seen any dragon in or near the inlet before, and she swam there nearly every day. When had it discovered the opening? Had it heard her farewell prayer? No, it would have had to be there already. Then she recalled that Dymphana had said a sea dragon had brought her mother home the night everyone thought she had drowned. This surely couldn’t be the same one—it was too young. But how did it know to find her? “How did one know to find my mother?” she wondered aloud. “Oh, I wish you could talk to me.”

Soon she had adjusted to the dragon’s thrusting motion through the water and sat with her knees bent, her heels clutching its sides, riding erect, the way the fishermen did as they left in the morning. Proud.

They journeyed well beyond the safe haven of her inlet, and farther out, around the point that divided Gousier’s land from the village. She watched her boathouse go by, stared through the open window as if she might glimpse herself watching herself. The dragon seemed to have an objective, a purpose. It carried her steadily within view of Tenikemac. “This is not a good idea, dragon,” she cautioned, but it didn’t heed her. She could have jumped off at any time, but the dragon’s purpose fixed her in place. The idea of the violation tempted and excited her. She was a girl out of their own stories. She was Reneleka and she was riding a sea dragon.

The first villager to see her was a woman on the beach, whose distant shout of alarm reached her ears even as others appeared in doorways and started down the beach. The woman flailed at the air and pointed. Shortly a dozen other women stood at the water’s edge.

Only then did she remember that she was naked. She was violating practically every taboo imaginable. Public nudity on a dragon. It almost made her laugh. She still might have dived into the water, hidden from view behind the creature. Maybe they wouldn’t have recognized her. But she stayed.

Then the dragon began circling away from the shore.

When it had turned to face out to sea, she saw coming straight at her another dragon. On its back sat Agmeon. He had the ropes of a net wrapped around his wrists as he held on to his dragon’s plume. Agmeon’s son on a second dragon held the other end of the net. They were returning early with their catch. The son’s gaze traveled down her body and then up again, meeting her eyes with a look both of arousal and embarrassment.

Agmeon’s furious, bloodshot glare held her rigid. She couldn’t shrink away now, and his anger passed to her, fueling her defiance; pride and self-esteem mixing with resentment of all the rules he embodied—how arbitrarily her position changed when he chose it. Let them banish her. They were too late. She had already banished herself.

Agmeon’s mount swam past hers. From his look as he went by, she knew if he’d had a weapon and could have dropped his net he would have killed her on the spot. His son passed more closely but could only look at her from the side of his eyes. No one spoke. Only the dragons moved. Hers swam on as if it had encountered nothing. Nor had the other two seemed to notice it.

The dragon took her around the point again and back to her inlet. She rode proud and straight the whole way, despite a trembling in her limbs she couldn’t control even though there was no one to see her now.

“You meant to do this to me, didn’t you, clever little dragon?” she asked as they arrived. “You tricked me.”

The creature didn’t acknowledge that it had heard her.

“I think I’ll call you Meersh, how would you like that?”

The sea dragon drew up beside the opening to the inlet and paddled in place. It looked back at her expectantly. The tide had begun to ebb, and the dragon could not swim into the inlet any longer. It seemed to know this.

Everything that had just happened, she thought, had to have happened exactly when and as it did.

She slid off and swam to the submerged shelf of rock. The dragon hesitated, watching her. “Go on, Meersh,” she said. “Go back to the story you came from. You’ve done your work. There can’t be any marriage with Koombrun after this. I’d have to leave the island now even if I didn’t want to.”

The dragon extended its neck. Its puckered mouth whuffled in her face as though in reply, spraying her with gentle tears. Then it swung away and dove from sight. The sea immediately erased even the ripples of its going. She looked out across the water for a long time. The dragon did not resurface.

Finally, Leodora swam back to her clothes. She wrung the blood out of them and put them on. Then, with one last look across the inlet to the unbroken sea, she started up the beach to her garret. The only proof that she hadn’t imagined her voyage was the red chafing inside her thighs from the dragon’s skin. She knew, however, that Agmeon would provide all the proof necessary for everyone else.

She spent the rest of the afternoon out of sight in the boathouse.

At dinner she gauged Gousier’s mood before appearing, but he was ebullient and carefree. He didn’t know yet. “What a perfect day this was. Business was never better,” he said, adding, “I could have sold twice the fish I had”—which was as close as he came to upbraiding Leodora for what he perceived as her dereliction that morning. He rambled on about the stall, a wealthy family throwing a party who had taken every shellfish he had. He used the idea of a family to lead in to his delight with the village and how exciting it was going to be when they were united with Tenikemac in a “great big family.” Obviously, he hadn’t visited before coming to dinner, and with luck he wouldn’t have reason to before tomorrow. One more day was all she needed.

While her uncle ate and grunted and babbled this way and that, Leodora experienced once again the recognition that she was doing something for the last time. With a focused inner quiet, she gazed around the room, burning each detail in her mind—the horizontal lines of the reeds that composed the walls; the rough plankings underfoot; the blue-dyed, frayed mat by the door; the fish oil lamps with their curlicue handles of carved bone. And beside her, Dymphana. She saw her aunt detailed in guilt: brittle, thinning hair shot through everywhere with strands of gray; a face wrecked and ravaged time and again by a useless sagacity she wasn’t allowed to express against Gousier’s pigheaded presumptions and temper. She was tied to him forever and had no idea that Leodora might not be. It was their lot; escape was unimaginable—and wasn’t that implicit even in the way Dymphana told her of her mother? Leandra, who escaped to nothing. To doom. It had been a cautionary tale as much as anything else. Gousier imposed the limits, and the women must do the best they could within those limits. Defiance destroyed you.

Eventually Dymphana sensed her stare. While Gousier babbled, their gazes met, and for a heartbeat Leodora thought her aunt must see her plans as if painted upon her face the way wedding blessings would have been this time tomorrow. But Dymphana read something else in the look, smiled a worried, empathetic smile, and then pretended again to be attentive to Gousier’s chatter.

Later the two women carried the wooden bowls and utensils down to the water’s edge to rinse them. The moons were up and bright. The sea was calm. To the north the bridge spans glittered distantly their bejeweled solicitation. Emotion boiled up in Leodora. She found herself hugging her aunt and saying what she had fought not to say: “I love you, Dymphana. I’m sorry I have to go.” Horrified by her own confession, she could only wait for her aunt to destroy her.

Dymphana stroked her hair and said, “My sweet girl, it’s all right. You won’t be far. We’ll still have time together. And maybe…maybe it won’t be so bad.” In the midst of her reassurances she began to cry. Soon it was both of them in the throes of miscommunicated despair. Leodora couldn’t stand the lie—this was worse than the confession. Another moment and the truth would explode out of her. She broke away and ran before she could confess everything she intended.

Outside the boathouse she wept awhile longer. The tears now were for the future, for the pain Dymphana would endure. Gousier would take out his anger on her just as Soter had said. There would be no one else left to hurt.

Finally she wiped her eyes and, snuffling, went inside, climbing the stairs. In her grief she failed to appreciate that a candle was already burning in her garret. She was almost at the top before she realized, and by then she could see him lying on her bed as if with eternal patience.

Tastion. Naked.

When he saw her face, however, his smile of feigned nonchalance went flat. He sat up, covering himself. “Gods, he spoke to Agmeon. He’s beat you, hasn’t he?”

She shook her head, unable to communicate the events in any sensible way. He held out his hand. She didn’t take it. Remained where she was.

Finally, as if she had asked a question, he said, “I came here to see you because…To tell you that the ceremony’s off. They’re proscribing any contact with you.”

She was hardly surprised.

“Do you understand that I won’t be able to come here again for a while? Maybe a long time? Not until things settle down. Why did you do that—ride a dragon? You could have done almost anything else and it would have been better. Parading naked through the long house is nowhere near as bad, and it’s bad enough. How in the ocean did you get a dragon to take you?”

Unable to explain, she didn’t try. She said, “I won’t marry Koombrun.”

He smiled. “I knew that. And whatever happens, you’ll still be mine.”

“Yours?” After the emotional turmoil she had just put aside, his presumption was more than she could tolerate. “When have I ever been yours? When could I ever be yours? If I’m yours, Tastion, let’s go now and tell the village. Your father. Come with me, right now.” She offered her hand. “Come. Come on. Let’s see Agmeon for his blessing. You can go just as you are. It’ll be perfect.”

It was his turn not to move. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? Just being seen with you right now would be punishable by drowning. And still, here I am. But why do you want to reject what we do have? What we’ve had all along. You act as if it’s all been just me. But it hasn’t been just me. It hasn’t only been what I want. Or were you not there?”

“It’s too late for this argument.”

He leaned forward and tried to reach her, but she shifted back. He would have had to stand up to touch her. “How can it be too late? You’re not marrying him. This will blow over in time. They’ll forget, or at least they’ll get used to—”

“I’m leaving.”

“You keep saying that, and I don’t believe you.”

“I’m leaving Bouyan, Tastion.”

He snorted as if this were an impossibility. “Going to ride off on a sea dragon? Agmeon can’t talk about anything else. And no one knows the dragon you were on—no one’s ever seen it before. Or since.”

“It was almost a baby, not grown up.”

Tastion shook his head. “There aren’t any babies in our herd this season. So you don’t know where it came from, either. How can you expect it to come back and take you where you want to go. Believe me—dragons are headstrong. As moody as people.”

“Tastion—”

“Look, Lea, everything will return to normal for us in a few months, at most a year. You won’t ever have to marry Koombrun, you’ll stay where you are, and we’ll meet in secret like always.”

She shook her head. How could he be so obstinate, so blind? He was no different than Gousier: His mind was made up regardless of the facts. “You should get dressed.”

For a moment he sat in contemplation. Then he pulled his clothes from beneath the bed. He got up, standing brazenly in front of her in a state of half arousal. He sorted through the clothes as if unable to identify his trousers, offering her one last opportunity to have him. She held her position. When it became obvious that she couldn’t be coerced or enticed, Tastion shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter, and began to dress.

She saw as if for the first time his true nature. Although she had always desired to ride Tastion as fearlessly as she had the dragon, she would not succumb. She would have left it at that and let him go; but then, in a way that all but dared her to disagree, he muttered again, “You’ll still be mine.” His shirt was half over his head. Leodora grabbed his hand and yanked him to the steps.

“Wait, I don’t have my shirt on, Lea!”

She ignored his complaint, hauled him stumbling down the steps and through the dark below. “Lea!” he said again, but laughingly this time. He thought he had won.

Outside, on a path she could have found even on a moonless night, she led him into the deeper jungle. But she kept going, passing by their hidden spot, dragging him on. He was silent now, and even his hand in hers betrayed his tension behind her.

When she stopped, the tower of Ningle loomed overhead. Lights sprinkled on either side of it, a coruscation on the night sky, a glow suggesting lines and forms, solidity out of nothingness.

Leodora began to climb the stone steps. She still had hold of him, and he stumbled up onto the first step after her. “What are you doing? Stop it.”

She paused and looked down at him. “Climb up with me.”

His eyes traveled beyond and then back to her. He craned his neck to see if they’d been followed. “Do you want me to be banished? I can’t do this. You know I can’t—”

“It’s forbidden. Proscribed. Like me. Coming to my room and offering yourself to me naked is a crime, but you can do that. Why can’t you do this?”

“That’s different.”

“Because you want to do it. I want you to do this, but this you can’t—because you don’t want to.” She climbed another step and he tore free of her grasp. She let him go.

He slid back down a step. “Stop.”

“This is where I’m going.”

He looked at the tower, at the sky. He tried to laugh at her. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t know any more about up there than I do. You don’t know anything except stories.”

“It’s all I need to know. I can be whoever I want. You already are who you’ll always be. When my life moves forward, you won’t be part of it any longer.”

“But, Lea,” he tried desperately, “you don’t have to go now. Don’t you see? The marriage is finished. You’ve destroyed it.”

“Ah, and you don’t want to give up until you’ve had me completely. What you really want to say is that you’d have me remain on Bouyan for your pleasure.”

“And is that so awful?”

“Not for you. For you it’s idyllic. Just what you want. You ride out every morning, come back in the evening, drink and laugh with your friends, and then creep off to your kept whore. Of course you won’t be beaten to death on the morrow, either, or drowned if caught.” She climbed down past him and started back along the path. She heard him come crashing through the underbrush after her.

“It was what you wanted, too.”

She stiffened. Then she nodded. “Yes, you’re right, Tastion. It was what I once wanted, too. But it’s not what I want anymore.” She set off again. Soon he closed the gap between them again.

“I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them and they’ll keep you from leaving.”

She stopped so fast that he ran into her. She turned. In the shadows he might have been simpering, showing her how clever he was—she couldn’t be certain. She didn’t have to see his face. He had just told her what she had meant to him. They had both been teasing arousal from each other for so long, but the difference she saw now was that she might actually have loved him.

“Tell them, then,” she said. “Tell Agmeon, tell the elders. Be sure and tell them the means by which you learned it, and how many other nights we’ve spent together. Tell them everything we’ve nearly done and everything you want to do. All you’ll do is bring the stars down upon your head, as well.”

Quickly he changed tack. “I’ll tell Gousier.”

Fear knifed her belly. Everything she had ever felt for or shared with Tastion evaporated. She took a step and he moved to block her. She kept coming nevertheless, impelling him backward by force of will until his heel caught against a root and he fell. He tried to grab her as he toppled, but she dodged his fingers and kept going. She expected to hear him shout his threat again, but there was silence behind her.

Where the paths branched, she turned left and went to Soter’s.

Oil lamps burned brightly within his hut. She stopped in the doorway.

One of the puppet cases stood open in the center of the room. All the puppets lay in a heap beside it, a congeries of articulated limbs and rods. From the rear Soter emerged, his eyes sparkling in the oil light, a smile on his lips at the sight of her. He looked uncommonly sober.

“Come see,” he urged. She crossed the room. “You see how the case is made?” He leaned over it and found a small black ribbon in its depths, which he ceremoniously pulled. What appeared to be the bottom of the case rose up like the trapdoor to her garret room.

“Extra compartments,” he said. “We put our belongings in this one, beneath the puppets. The other’s bigger, deeper. Your father used it for whatever came along. If pockets were picked and the boodle found its way to us, in it went. The moneys collected during performances, too. It pays to be careful on the spans. He was doing very well, and thieves lurked everywhere, in the most unexpected guises. That’s something to remember about the spans and spirals: You can be as intimate as you like with someone and the next thing, they turn on you.”

“Yes, they do, don’t they?” Through her fresh bitterness her thoughts were already leaping ahead, in another direction. “The other case is a little larger.”

“It is, yes. Like a coffin, big enough almost. Bardsham managed to fill it, though. We once carried a young…never mind.”

She hadn’t heard him. She was regarding the larger undaya case. “Do you believe in coincidence, Soter? Or do you think that some things just happen to take place at the right moment?”

He stared at her in perplexity.

“We need to take everything out of the case,” she told him, “all the puppets. I need it.”

“But I just packed it.”

She started past him, and he hurried after her, around her, muttering, “All right, all right.” He took hold of the case before she could and dragged it out of the small back room. Unfastening the lid, he carefully began removing the puppets. “They’re in proper order, be careful,” he advised when she reached in, too. Piled on the floor, there were so many, she couldn’t believe she had tried every one. Soter lifted the false bottom. “You don’t want to put anything heavy in here, you know. These cases will wear you down. In the morning they’re hardly an inconvenience, but you haul one along till sunset, and you won’t think you’ll ever stand up straight again.”

“It isn’t heavy, what I have in mind. It’s light as air.”

He dropped the bottom back into place. “Well, I hope it’s important. We can’t have anything frivolous on this escapade.” She closed the case and carried it out, leaving him bewildered between the puppet piles.

She didn’t dare light a lamp. She had to feel her way through the cavern.

Around the bend the Coral Man was glowing, but now no brighter than the farthest star. Just as well for her—she didn’t think she could have touched him again if he were brightly lit. This way, she could pretend that he was dull and harmless.

She stood the case up beside him to compare. As she had thought, he was smaller than the case, just like she was. Once it was open, she had to pat around in its depths to find the black ribbon. As she pulled up the false bottom, from the corner of her eye she thought she saw the Coral Man lean toward her. She jumped and looked straight at him. He hadn’t moved of course. It was, she insisted, her steaming breath in the air that had caused the illusion. “Why in the world am I doing this?” she muttered, and answered herself: Because he wants me to.

She had to summon every reserve of courage to touch him. She lifted him by the shoulders, and, just as Tastion had said, he felt as light as a handful of sand. She stood him in the case. It might indeed have been his coffin. She closed the false bottom; it fitted perfectly over him. As she started to shut the lid, she paused. The cave seemed to tilt, her stomach to flip. In the midst of the moment’s vertigo she experienced a premonition that this had been pre-ordained, that no accident had provided the perfect coffin for her enigma, just as no random sea dragon had swum into her lagoon. From her mother to her, from the sea to this empty figure, forces were at work, conspiring, aligning. She was supposed to go. She was certain of it now. Nothing was going to stand in her way, she couldn’t be stopped.

The moment passed but her fingers trembled as she snapped shut the lid. She tipped, lifted the case, almost expecting the thing inside it to rap on the bottom and kill her with terror. But it did nothing. It weighed nothing. The case might have been empty.

In utter darkness she shuffled back the way she’d come, traveling by instinct this last time through the uterine cave and out the narrow cleft.

Soter asked where she had been, but she said nothing to him as she handed over the case. He held it in puzzlement, and she imagined that he was trying to feel the weight of whatever she’d added, and couldn’t. He set the case down beside the puppets, opened it. Before she could stop him, he pulled up the bottom. A small sound emerged from him—the word “What?” He dropped the false bottom back into place and immediately began replacing the puppets. After a moment he said, “Later you’ll tell me what that is and where it came from and why it’s going with us. Right now you’d better hurry. We don’t want to arrive on Ningle too late, or no one will take us in. Get your belongings and hurry back quick as you can.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Go!”

Obediently she hurried out and along the dark path.

In the boathouse she saw that the light in her garret was lit, then chided herself for having left it burning. She hoped Tastion hadn’t come back.

She crept up the stairs, but it was impossible to be silent in that building. Every step creaked or groaned. She sensed rather than saw movement behind her, but before she could turn something caught the braid of her hair and yanked so hard that she was lifted off her feet. Her scalp blazed with pain. She dangled, swung like a bell once, and flew the length of the room. She slammed into the wall beside the windows. An arm’s length to the left and she would have plunged through it to her almost certain death. The wall didn’t kill her but it knocked her half senseless.

She didn’t have to see or hear him to know it was Gousier. She tried to react. Her mind screamed; her body refused to respond.

Gousier lurched across the garret, caught her hair again, dragged her across the floor to the post beside the stairs. He hauled her up again and, with his hand on her throat, crushed her hard against it.

His face was all but inhuman, and his sweat stank of liquor as well as fish, but he wasn’t drunk. Drunk, he might have been escapable. “Well, my girl, you’ve done me up good, haven’t you? Bare-tit riding their dragons? I’m lucky they haven’t just come and cut my head off and burned my house down. They’ve condemned you. No wedding. No anything. And worse. They say they’ll find someone else to haul their fish up to market. Unless—” He winced as if saying this hurt, and his head swiveled as if the room were moving around him; he let go of her throat, let go as though forgetting she was there; she sucked in a desperate breath, but before she could act he struck her so hard across the mouth that the back of her skull hitting the post exploded lightning in her head. Colors, lights, blackness spun together, shattered.

The floor scraped her chin. A splinter stung her awake. She tasted dirt but couldn’t focus on it. She wasn’t even sure how she’d fallen—the memory had been knocked out of her. She heard her uncle raving. He smashed the bed frame, tore the bedding into shreds. She ought to get up, but she still couldn’t find the means to drive her muscles to act. Not in time.

Gousier came back to work on her. He curled her braid around his hand and jerked her upright, where she dangled at his eye level. She screamed at the pain.

“I can save myself. They want me to give you up. And I’m going to. I’m going to give you to Tenikemac. Agmeon says they haven’t had to use the purging ritual you’ll endure in more than three generations. No female’s been so stupid as you. Not even…not even her.” While he spoke, he tore the clothes off her, pushing her to tug and rip them down, and finally dropping her again. He used the shreds of her bedding to gag her and tie her hands. He recited all the while. “First they carry you out into the water and hold you under as a purification, see, appeasing the dragons’ spirits, penance for your outrage. He says most people pretty much evacuate out every orifice before they’re finished, cleans out everything. But then they stop. They want you alive, see, at the end. From water to fire, that’s how it has to go. They burn you next. In the long house. Over the center fire. They cook you slow on a spit shoved right up your arse and down your spine. You go crazy from the roasting, the pain, the fire. But you don’t die then, either. You’re still alive when they cut you up into pieces. The flesh is still alive and singing with agony. And they sprinkle you out across the water to make amends for the way you’ve violated the honor of the sea. You become part of the sea and the world goes back to how it was. Fish don’t disappear, storms don’t come to smash them. No one else has to suffer. Oh, my, yes, I’ll do that, my dearest little Leandra, yes I will. But first, first I’m going to have you right here, the way everyone else did. Everyone on the spans, everyone…you gave yourself to everyone and not even a thought for me. I’m going to ride you till you’ve got splinters in your back, and you’ll be asking for the fire at the end of your night, little bitch. You show yourself to them that pays, you’ll show it to me, too.”

He dropped her and then untied his own belt. His face was contorted and he whined in the back of his throat, as if even in madness he couldn’t hide from himself what he was about to do.

Leodora felt blood spreading like the chill of death through her hair. If she lay here he would rape her, and everything he promised would follow. Without knowing quite how, she made herself get up on one knee and started to climb to her feet. Gousier saw it and, though his pants were half off, he kicked out savagely.

She dodged his foot and threw herself with all her strength against him, struck his hip but tripped against another support post, which knocked her back against him again. Gousier’s foot was still in the air. He nearly caught his balance from the first blow, but was no more ready than she for the rebound. She knocked him sideways.

He twisted and swung his descending foot to catch himself, but it slipped off the floorboard and into the stairwell. He made a desperate grab for the nearest post, shredding the skin on his fingers as he tipped through the opening and fell down the steps.

Leodora pressed herself against the post as if it were consciousness. Blood was in her face, stinging her eyes. Inside her head, the world burned bright, and she lost the sense of where she was, or why she’d been tied. When she opened her eyes again, the room held steady, and she tried standing on her own. She worked her hands to get free of the bedding, but it was so tight that her fingers had gone numb. She thought her wrist was moving, but there might have been no skin left on it for all she knew.

The steps creaked, and she whirled about to see Gousier, his face filthy with dirt and blood, come rising up out of the hole. He looked for her, turned and saw her, and grinned the most terrible, feral grin. “Leandra,” he growled, the name an emblem of all that he intended. Now he would do everything he’d promised and worse. He put his hands on the floor and continued up.

Leodora threw herself against the raised trapdoor. It snapped off its pin and slammed down onto her uncle’s head. His fingers slipped and he fell partway, and the door, with her riding it, hammered into his head a second time and then banged shut. She heard his body tumble down the stairs. She lay on her side, dust erupting out of the boards.

Silence followed while the dust settled. Streaked with dirt, sweat, and blood, choking on her gag, she strained to hear if he was coming back, praying to any gods who would listen not to let him. She was finished if he did now.

She might have lain there forever before she heard the stairs creak once more. She rolled over and tried to sit up, but her arm beneath her had fallen asleep. She lay back across the door, knowing that her weight would not deter him if he could still use his arms. If he got into the garret this time he would win.

The trapdoor thumped once. Twice, trying to rise. A pause.

A muffled voice called, “Lea?” It was Tastion.

She whined a ragged breath and rolled off the door. He pushed it open. The moment he saw her, he scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs.

“Oh, Lea, Lea, are you all right? Oh, what a stupid question, of course you aren’t. Is he coming back?” He untied her hands and helped her sit.

“He’s not…not on the stairs?”

“No.” He wiped his palm across her forehead, smearing away some of the blood that covered her entire face in a crimson mask.

“Close the trap, Tastion. Close and lock it.”

She leaned back against the wall and flexed her hands, rubbing her wrists together. Her head throbbed. Her jaw ached. She rested a moment and Tastion, to his credit, didn’t bombard her with questions. He observed calmly, “The door won’t latch. You’ve broken it.” Then after another moment had passed, he added quietly but defensively, “I didn’t tell him.”

“No.” Her fingers tingled now. She tried to get up, pushing against the wall. Tastion closed his hands around her waist and drew her to her feet. “Help me down to the water please.”

Saying nothing, he opened the trapdoor, then preceded her down the steps, but Gousier did not strike. At the bottom she said, “Wait.” The light from above revealed the shape of a leg behind the steps. She edged to it, bent down. Sparks jittered across her vision for an instant.

Gousier had careened off the stairs before reaching the bottom and somehow ended up halfway beneath them. He lay with his head tucked under one arm as if hiding from the light. Leodora nudged the arm; a groan escaped him, but he didn’t move. She backed away.

“He’s not dead?”

“Not yet.” She limped away from him, out of the boathouse and down the beach. The quiet sea was warmer than the air, and she entered the water, wading in until it reached her waist, then sat with it up to her neck. She lay back, letting the water wash her hair and clean her wounds. The salt burned, and though it made her hiss, she was glad of it. Glad to be alive to feel it. The inside of her mouth was cut. Her cheek felt stiff and puffy. She submerged her head, and listened to the sound of blood in her ears, her heartbeat thundering, her head and mouth stinging.

Coming up again she was dizzy. Tastion had to help her out of the surf. She shivered in the chill air; her naked skin prickled with goose bumps. She began to cry.

Tastion let her cling to him. After a while, he turned her, then guided her back to the boathouse.

The wound in her scalp was superficial—not from the pulling of her hair but from striking something as she fell. It had stopped bleeding and would be only a bruise and a headache on the morrow. She discarded the clothes her uncle had torn off her. She couldn’t wear them now, even if they weren’t a ruin. She thought, Just one less item I have to bring. She’d finished crying. It was time to act.

She put on other clothes, whatever was hanging on the pegs—she hardly noticed what, even as she was pulling them on. Wiping her eyes, she began picking up items from around the room: a pair of boots that she’d made herself; a few combs of bone, one of which Tastion had given her; sandals; a shell that she’d found on the beach many years earlier, which was nothing extraordinary but all the more precious to her for that and because it, like she, had survived her uncle’s assault. Everything she gathered into the center of a cloak, and tied that into a bundle. There was her whole life, weighing practically nothing. “Light as air,” she said, thinking of the coral effigy, which she was stealing from them. She would not tell Tastion. Then he wouldn’t have to lie. He watched her with eyes full of worry.

With the bundle slung over her shoulder, she leaned forward and kissed him. Her mouth twinged.

On the second step she paused to look around the garret, to make it a space in her mind, her memory. Tastion followed her down.

At the bottom she set aside the bundle. In her hand she carried strips of cloth, the same ones he’d used on her; she went to Gousier and rolled him onto his face. This time he didn’t make a sound. His head lolled. She tied his hands over his head as hard as she could, then gagged him so tightly that his back teeth showed. She attempted to haul him by the arms. One of them was twisted the wrong way, and she knew it was broken. He was too heavy. Tastion grabbed his legs then, and they picked him up and clumsily slung him over the lip of his rotted boat. He landed with a sharp report of snapping boards. The boat shook as if it might split. It tipped toward them, and Gousier’s naked buttocks abruptly protruded out the rotted hole in its side.

“Well, Uncle,” she said without humor, “you finally plugged her leak.” She had to lean against a post while sparks spun away in the darkness. Tastion touched her shoulder. “No,” she said, “I’m all right. Soter’s waiting, I can rest afterward.”

As they came through his door, Soter started to bellow at Tastion until he moved aside and Soter saw Leodora. He stared accusingly at Tastion, who shook his head and mouthed, Gousier.

Soter nodded. “In that case it’s good you’re here, boy.”

And so, despite her protests, the two men carried the cases and Leodora followed stiffly with only her small bundle of belongings. When they reached the steps, Tastion never hesitated, but climbed straight up. She called his name tenderly, knowing that he must be petrified, but he was deaf to argument. On the landing at the top, he placed the puppet case on the wall that edged the span. He gazed out over the island. Leodora came up beside him. She looked where he looked—at the lights of Tenikemac and the beautiful ocean beyond.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she told him.

He turned his head, surveyed the crumbling stone building on the other side of the wall. “So this is Ningle. Doesn’t look monstrous, does it? Just kind of seedy and run-down, and it smells like something rotten. I think it could use some mortar at the very least, don’t you ag—”

She touched his shoulder and he stopped talking. He faced her.

“I love you, Lea,” he said. “Everything I said before was because I couldn’t stand letting you go. You’ve always been here. There was never a time when you weren’t here with me.” He grimaced. “I wish I could take it all back. I wish you hadn’t heard any of it.”

She slid her arms around his waist and drew him against her.

When Soter finally reached the landing, they were still embracing. “Would have been damned nice if someone had come back down and helped me with my burden once he’d flown up the steps.” He dropped the case dramatically, but they still didn’t move. He wheezed at them, refusing to grant them any solace, and glowered as they kissed.

Then Tastion pushed himself back from Leodora. “It’s time you found…time you went.” His voice broke, and he lurched around Soter and hurried down the steps. Tears trailed silently down Leodora’s cheeks.

Gently, Soter patted her hair. He inadvertently touched the cut in her scalp, and she flinched. He withdrew his hand. “Your uncle?”

Snuffling, she wiped at her nose and replied, “I don’t know. He might be dead.”

“I wouldn’t grieve. I won’t so much as pour a drop of libation in his memory ever.” He picked up his case. “You’re following in your father’s footsteps in almost every detail. You do see that, don’t you? We’ll have to find a new name for you…on the next spiral. Come on now, grab your burden and bring it along. I know you’ll hurt all over come morning, but one thing’s certain: If he is still breathing, he’ll come looking. We need to be tucked away before the sun’s up.” He went through the gate.

Leodora remained standing there until Tastion had vanished into the darkness of the trees. “Reneleka, take care of Dymphana,” she said softly. She picked up the case and followed. Her final view was of the whole dark half of Bouyan, her home.

She was never to see it again.