I
BOUYAN

ONE

She was five years old the first time they let her go to Ningle. Ningle-in-the-Clouds, as Soter properly called it.

They carried their baskets of fish—her uncle and grandfather—on the path that wound beneath the canopy of trees, with the ever-visible span looming ever closer. Before then she’d only seen it from across the island, a great black stripe of cloud showing through the trees, which never moved, never broke apart, but hung in the sky like an omen. At night it transformed into a band of fairy lights coruscating in the sky. She wasn’t prepared for its true size. Almost an hour’s walk from her home, one massive leg of the span anchored somewhere deep in the bedrock of Bouyan beneath them. Steps had been carved into the side of it, each block so big that she had to clamber up with her hands—or would have if her grandfather hadn’t hefted her along with his baskets.

Soon he’d carried her so high that she closed her eyes and buried her face against his neck, smelling sawdust and varnish, the scents of his workshop, which clung to him even more tightly than she.

At the top he set down his basket and unwound her from his neck and back. Between them they had an old game where he swung her and swung her, and she laughed, screamed, giggled. This time, though, he only swung her once, then held her up, her feet resting upon stone. He said, “Now open your eyes, Lea.” She did, and was so awed by the view that she forgot to be terrified right away.

The island of Bouyan lay so far below her that wisps of cloud gauzed the treetops, and she could see clear across to a hint of their rooftops and even all the way to where a chimney of smoke signaled the location of the fishing village of Tenikemac, and farther still—to the sea itself, like a great sheet of glass upon which the whole world was set. She could see that the Adamantine Ocean stretched forever just like the stories said.

That day, standing upon the rail, with her grandfather’s hands enclosing her waist, she heard the call for the first time. It was not a voice exactly, not words, not something anyone else could hear. It whispered her name, spoke to her in the silences, invited her to find it, join it, embrace it. All without words. She thought then it was the ocean calling her. There was nothing else to see.

“Isn’t it fine?” her grandfather asked.

She turned her head to look at him, and now she was afraid. The wordless, communicating voice was frightening, and she didn’t know whether her grandfather was referring to it or to the view. He saw her fear and took her off the rail, assuring her softly, “It’s all right, child, it’s all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, you know.” She knew this to be true, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.

The moment he’d touched her, the ocean call had ceased. She listened hard, but it didn’t reappear.

She would not hear it again for years, but on that day—she was certain of this now—the caller had located her. It had sought her, knowing she was somewhere. Now it would be able to find her again.

Throughout the next year Leodora spent nearly every day on the span. It teemed and surged with life, with the noises of excitement, the smells of otherness, newness. Bright costumes and plumed caps dazzled her, and facial adornments from rapier-sharp beards to spiky stiffened eyebrows, beauty spots to shaved scalps drifted past to amaze her. One day she saw a man with wide and tightly waxed mustachios, the tips of which burned with blue fire that didn’t consume them. And on another evening a raggedy fellow walked the thoroughfare with a box dangling from a lanyard around his neck while he cranked handles on either side of it, which in turn caused two metal hooks facing each other through the top of the box to spark and burn and glow in the space where they didn’t quite touch. The ragged man looked lost as he went by, and she heard someone say, “From a Dragon Bowl, that. Ruined him.” But when she asked her grandfather about the man, he replied, “Nothing to do with us, Lea, so never you mind it.”

Her grandfather did not always accompany them. As often he stayed below, on Bouyan, in his workshop, crafting or mending their furniture. Like her uncle Gousier, he was a big man, barrel-chested and powerful.

The buildings on Ningle, all made of stone, were nothing like the structures she knew on the island. Her own house and those of the fishing village were mostly made of wood and woven thatch. Houses on Ningle were dark and roughly finished, and not quite true. Their angles, as her grandfather showed her, were all slightly off the square. He took her to one street not far from the market where the buildings were so crooked that she couldn’t understand how they didn’t fall over.

The market comprised a stretch of mismatched awnings, boxes, carts, and poles. In comparison with many of the others nearby, their own stall was clean and orderly. On three sides of the center, whole fish and cleaned fillets lay in ceramic boxes, atop ice chipped from the depths of Fishkill Cavern. Deep blue awnings kept the stall in shadow and cool.

Gousier usually had someone working for him, someone on Ningle who set up the stall before they arrived and took it down at night, as well as someone to help haul the fish and watch that the clientele didn’t steal. She could remember none of these men—for they were always men—during that year. None of them remained for long. The work was too hard. And—she would later learn—descending to the island for work was considered beneath the dignity of most of Ningle’s denizens; but there were much more reprehensible acts that were not.

Her uncle seemed to enjoy her company. While they walked and climbed to market each morning, he taught her the names of the fish in his baskets and described how they were caught, what they could be used for. Once the stall was set up he put her right up front, and when someone came by and inquired about one of the fish, Leodora would proudly repeat what she knew about it. Most of the time after listening to her recitation, a customer would buy the fish, and Gousier would tell her, “Why, you’re a fishmonger, child. Look at what you sold.” He would give her a coin and let her buy something for herself. Eventually he let her parade up and down the boulevard, calling out the names of the fish they were selling, and this led more people to their stand. Her uncle and grandfather treated her like a princess out of a story—like the girl Reneleka who emerged from an oyster, coiled around a pearl, and who had created the sea dragons. It was a story they told in Tenikemac. She felt as if she, too, had been magically created.

Then one afternoon when she was sitting to the side of the stand, a woman came over and spoke to her. It seemed the most natural of events, one more person asking her questions. The woman was fidgety and furtive, but Leodora didn’t appreciate the meaning of this. She had only known kindness.

The woman invited her for a walk, with a promise of an undisclosed surprise at the end of it. Leodora would have told her grandfather, but he was with a customer on the other side of the stall. She might have told Gousier, but he was haggling with still another person over the price of a halibut. The current assistant had wandered off.

She strolled along beside her new acquaintance for only a few moments before the woman took her hand and drew her suddenly into the nearest crooked little alley, with the promise, “Your treat’s up here.”

It was the same alley her uncle had shown her, full of tilting buildings, and she marched along bravely into the not unfamiliar gloom. Then a man unfolded from the deeper shadows, and she stopped. Leodora remembered him—he had passed by their stall two or three times and then asked her about the cod, listened with a wolfish grin to what she told him, and thanked her for her recitation. He hadn’t bought anything. He grinned at her again now. He had very good teeth.

The woman shoved ahead of her and said, “Give me my money.” But the man shook his head. “When I’ve made the delivery, when they’re happy with their new arrival.” Both of them glanced down at her, and that was the moment she knew something was wrong, but the woman still gripped her wrist. The two began to argue. Leodora pulled with ever-increasing urgency to get away. The woman was too busy squabbling to notice. Abruptly Leodora broke the hold, but it was so sudden and she’d pulled so hard that she spun against the wall. The man was on her before she could get up. “All right, darlin’,” he said. The stink of him smothered her. “You come along with me now to get your surprise. No more working in a fish stall for you, not a lovely girl like you. They’ll like you where we’re going. You’ll be the most popular girl they have.” Smiling though he was all the while, his sweet words were more ominous than anything she’d ever heard. She twisted, but his grip was much harder than the woman’s, and the wall was at her back, offering no way to put distance between them. She started to scream. The man clamped his hand around her face and hissed at her. He ordered the woman to do something to silence her, and they both closed in where there was hardly enough room for one of them alone, and the acrid sweaty stink poured over her like the stench from rotting meat. The woman crouched, cooing, trying to sound tender beneath her jagged, hungry sharpness. Leodora fought for breath beneath a mask of filthy fingers. She grew dizzy.

The grip abruptly lifted from her face; the stench and the man swept away as if by magic. The woman bit back a shriek, grabbed Leodora again, and tugged her down the alley and back out onto the boulevard.

A crowd was collecting. They blocked the woman’s retreat, so that she cried out, “Someone, someone stop him!” and then, almost as an afterthought, “My child, my baby!” She wrapped herself protectively around Leodora, and the crowd obligingly opened a space for the two of them. Even as they moved into it, the crowd moved with them, stepped back as if to accompany them; but they weren’t following the woman. They were fleeing something else. Leodora twisted her head around to see.

Her grandfather.

He caught the woman before she could get past the last of the people choking the boulevard. He tore Leodora from her grasp, then wedged himself in between them. Dreamily she looked back and saw her uncle in the alley. He was bent over and seemed to be gesturing fiercely. His fist raised high and held, hovered. It clutched a mallet. The hand and mallet were wet and dark. She had seen her grandfather holding a mallet that way as he drove pegs into holes he’d cut, but Gousier brought it down harder than Grandfather ever had.

People began shouting “Kuseks!” and she looked up at their mouths, their fearful eyes. Then the woman toppled beside her, knocking someone aside, skidding on her face upon the paving stones. Their eyes locked, just for a moment, before the woman’s expression went slack and the eyes fluttered shut. The crowd turned, roaring, and split in two directions. The space filled almost instantly with a swarm of police—the Kuseks, so named for the striped sashes they wore. They grabbed her grandfather immediately. She saw him struck with a stick, and she screamed.

Her uncle charged from the alley. Blood drenched his face and clothes. He bellowed at the Kuseks to release her grandfather. She watched it all as if from the rail of Ningle, as if it were all transpiring far below, far away from her—the mallet striking once, the police beating her uncle senseless, and beating him even after that. Her grandfather swaying on his knees, blood from his scalp covering his face like a membrane, as he tried in vain to stop them.

Everyone was taken into custody, including the woman. She wasn’t dead after all. She portrayed herself as the victim, and the wounds to her face lent her credibility. She claimed the six-year-old girl was her daughter, and kept touching Leodora, running trembling fingers through her hair. Of course she was not Leodora’s mother, nor looked anything like her, but the bold assertion smothered her denial with the warped aroma of hope, a possibility that was impossible. It surely would have tripped up no one other than a girl who had no mother, generating an internal conflict that terrified and silenced her when she most needed to speak. Finally the authorities had to send for her auntie Dymphana, hauling her up from Bouyan to prove that this hadn’t been something else, a lovers’ quarrel, a domestic dispute. The moment she saw her aunt she began to wail and flung her arms about Dymphana’s waist, and then the Kuseks knew absolutely. They set her grandfather and Gousier free.

The family were escorted back to the market to find their stall a shambles. The fish had been stolen; some of the ceramics were smashed. Apologies from the nearby vendors, who might have intervened but more likely had participated in the plunder, did nothing to mitigate the damage or curb Gousier’s anger. His ribs were broken, his face was bruised and swollen, and he’d lost a tooth. The police pointed out that he had been caught in the act of murder and should be thankful he was alive to complain.

For weeks afterward he could hardly walk along beside the laborers he had to hire to cart the fish up the steps. The workers were hardly better than beggars, but no one else wanted the work. Once his bones had knit, he visited the Kuseks and paid them to see that the pathetic kidnapper was banished to a prison isle called Palipon. It was a bare chunk of rock so far out in the ocean that it could not be seen from any of the great spirals of bridges. No one sent to Palipon was ever heard from again. When he announced this over dinner, the whole family stopped moving as if upon a signal. They stared; they paled. Gousier retorted, “It’s where all her kind should go.” Then he lowered his head and ate as if no one else shared the table with him and his heart was as light as a cloud.

Later, from her bed, she heard the family arguing. Gousier snarled, “Well, what sort of a woman would sell a child into perdition? Or maybe she’s an Edgeworld goddess, do you think? It was a better life she was going to give the girl, in a tiny cell, chained in filth to a bed frame, waiting for her next customer? Because that’s what was going to happen. These people are worse than anything you know, Dymphana, I don’t care if you grew up in the same house with them!” Her aunt said something too quiet for her to hear, but Gousier drowned out the last of it: “Then maybe you’d rather have stayed up there! Maybe the street has more to offer you!” After that it seemed no one spoke again until after she’d fallen asleep.

Her grandfather, although he’d only been struck the once, seemed unable to recover. He suffered spasms, numbness, and headaches that rendered him helpless. A few months later he was dead. Her grandmother died of grief less than a month after that. Leodora was no less devastated than anyone by their combined loss. Her world was shrinking, closing in on her. She dreamed of the two of them with her in an alley where the buildings were sliding together to crush them, and both her grandparents were pushing her, trying to get her out before the walls met, but she could see the space narrowing ahead, and she knew she would never reach the avenue in time, never reach it at all, and then the walls did slam together behind her, so loud that it woke her up. The dream proved portentous.

Gousier forbid her ever to set foot on Ningle again.

Over time she would learn that he blamed her for everything that had happened that day, including the deaths of his parents, which became the foundation for unlimited blame thereafter. Gousier remained as bitter as patchroot wine. His retribution was bottomless.

It was during one of his tirades that he inadvertently called her “Leandra.” He caught himself, but the realization of what he’d said only fueled his anger, as if she had cleverly diverted him. Provoked him. After that, almost her every error or act of defiance was equated with something Leandra had done, although he never spoke the name except in anger, because he refused to acknowledge that he had ever had a sister except when too angry to help himself.

Leandra. Her mother.

TWO

A name was almost the only thing she knew of her mother—but the lacuna hadn’t been apparent before her kidnapper had tried to assume the role. And while that was impossible because Leandra was dead, the impersonation lifted the pall on her knowledge and she saw that nothing lay beneath it, nothing of her mother beyond that name, spoken only in anger.

She was to learn nothing more of her parents until she ran away from home at the age of ten.

Running away had become something of a routine by then. Initially it was herself she fled from—part of her believed her uncle’s accusations, believed that she had been responsible for her grandparents’ deaths, and she tried to escape her guilt to no avail. Dymphana was sensitive to her pain, however, and comforted her when Gousier wasn’t around, telling her, “You are not to blame for this misery, and you mustn’t think that you are. You’re a little girl. You had no experience with such people as tried to hurt you, and those who are older than you ought to have been looking out for you. They should have protected you. Your grandfather knew this, and I think it wore him down. He blamed himself. Your uncle…his way of adjusting is to cast the blame on everyone else. And you are everyone else this time. It is not your fault, child. It never was.” The more times she heard this, the more she accepted it. For a while this was enough to compel her not to hate him for the things he said. But her compliance seemed only to anger Gousier more. When another worker quit and he condemned her to the odious job of cleaning the day’s catch in Fishkill Cavern, she ran away from him. The problem was, there was no place for her to run to. She didn’t dare run to Ningle again, and she knew only a little of the island. She’d long ago been scared off exploring its mysteries, too, with ominous warnings about things that lurked in trees, in bushes, in the dark. Her knowledge of the world was so small as to be nonexistent, and Gousier had only to wait for her certain return in order to effect retribution for her misconduct.

In the past when she’d run away, she had escaped to Tenikemac, where Gousier could always hunt her down. The village in general considered her tainted, contaminated by her association with Ningle and with a family that did business there daily; but most of the villagers overlooked this censure, since most of them did business with Gousier, too. She was, after all, a mere child. They always gave her up when he came looking.

She had two playmates in the village—a girl, Kusahema, and a boy named Tastion, neither of whom at that age would have understood the proscriptions against fraternizing with her. That would come later, or perhaps they were expected to discover it on their own. Within a few years Tastion would prove to be her only friend in that village.

However, on that particular day, she broke the pattern and didn’t flee to the village. Instead she ran to Soter, never imagining that this one element of change would alter the rest of her life.

Soter had taken up residence in an old smokehouse back in the woods, where he lived in relative seclusion. The family—her grandparents—had offered it to him as a reward for having brought Leodora home to them, and thank the ocean they had been alive back then. Her uncle surely would not have let Soter remain on the island.

Soter kept two vats brewing most of the time: His concoctions were always either cooking or fermenting. The main ingredients were fruits he picked himself. She knew that he sometimes went off by himself to the far side of Bouyan and returned days later, dragging bags of fruits behind him. Other items he purchased on Ningle. The product—those quantities he didn’t consume himself, for even then he was prone to imbibe—he sold to Tenikemac. Although they held him in no higher regard than her uncle, somehow Soter managed to be more tolerated. It may simply have been that he wasn’t related to the family—and that he was careful not to mention that what they were drinking included ingredients lugged down from the spans.

Before she even saw the gray hut through the wall of brambles, she smelled his cooking brew. The furious tang of fermentation clogged the air.

She crept around the brambles, listening for any sound of him. He was often irritable when sober, and had chased her away more than once when she’d interrupted him doing seemingly nothing. At first she thought to hide behind his hut, only to find that the accumulated sediment from one of the vats had been dumped out where she would have secreted herself, creating a noisome bog. Beneath the tiny rear window of the hut stood a line of small kegs he called barriks—half a dozen hogsheads of his wine. It was the first time she’d seen them all lined up—one entire vat’s worth. The window was unshuttered.

She climbed up on two of the barriks and poked her head in the window. The interior was dim and smoky. Maybe Soter was gone. She backed out and looked around.

The woods were empty of people. Overhead, leaves sizzled in a breeze. She heard no other sounds.

She put one leg in through the window, then had to double nearly all the way, head to knees, to ease herself over the sill. She felt with her toe for the floor, stretching so much that she slid off-balance. Almost immediately her foot touched the floor, which left her balanced on one foot with the other leg out the window and raised halfway to her ear. She couldn’t get her other foot inside until she had placed her hands on the floor as if about to perform a handstand. Then she folded her leg in through the window, crouched down noiselessly, and looked about.

She was inside Soter’s makeshift pantry. She had never seen inside the pantry before: It was larger than its narrow doorway implied. To her left hung a heavy tarp, which hinted at even more space. She stepped into the doorway, parted the curtain, and stuck her head into the main room. Almost at once she drew back.

Soter was there. His silhouette perched on a low stool, knees up high, his arms splayed, like some spider creature. He was muttering softly as if to a companion—whispery words that she was unable to catch. She didn’t see anyone else. He was not looking in her direction, so she stuck her head farther out. He gave a loud, abrupt curse, and she thought he must have seen her. She stepped back behind the curtain and glanced at the tiny window, certain that she would never get through it fast enough. She scrambled instead behind the tarp and, turning to pull it tight, backed into two black cases. As she stumbled, she twisted about and caught herself on the top case, but her weight made it slide. Something from a shelf farther back fell with an alarming crash.

Soter yelled, “Damn you louse-ridden rodents! How did you get in this time?” He marched into the pantry and flung back the tarp. He had a cleaver in one hand, poised to cut her in half.

She screeched and slid as far back on the cases as she could go. Half a dozen more items bounced and rolled and crashed onto the floor.

Soter closed his eyes and clutched his ears, nearly burying the cleaver in his own head in the process. “Oh, don’t squeal, Lea! Don’t shift about!” he hissed. He groaned and backed away, dropping the tarp. “Oh, I’ve got a Glauber’s head this morning,” she heard him say.

A minute later he returned without the cleaver. “What are you doing in there, anyway? Out, come out here now.” He gestured her from the room with one hand and pinched his temples with the other.

She told him about her fight with her uncle over the amount of fish she had cut up, valiantly trying not to cry while she did, and he nodded with care, rubbing his eyes, pulling at his nose. He offered her some biscuits.

“I’m surprised,” he said, “that he hasn’t come bellowing down upon me like the wind, hammering at my door. Then I might find a place for that cleaver. He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Just chased you off and gathered up his fish and went off to sell them to people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise on behalf of some other people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise.” He patted her head and told her, quietly, that she could stay as long as she liked, provided she made no more noise. He retreated to the outer room. She followed, and found him pouring a cup of his latest brew. After a few sips, he sighed. “Rejuvenation.”

Leodora nibbled at her biscuit awhile. Then she asked him about the long cases behind the tarp.

“The undaya cases, ah-ha, yes,” he answered, very conspiratorially. “Those are a secret kept from your uncle. He doesn’t know I have them, or he’d probably want to burn them, and me along with them.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he replied, and she thought that was all he would tell her. Then he added, “They belonged to your father.”

It was a revelation that tore the breath out of her. She set down her biscuit. She had always known that she’d had a mother, but no one, not even her aunt, had ever mentioned her father.

Soter, wincing against his headache, shifted his gaze, as if wondering whether he’d revealed too much.

“But you said—” she began, much more loudly than he would have liked.

Hissing violently, he raised a hand as if to ward her off. “I know what I said,” he whispered. “I know.” His gaze held her steady. “I promised your uncle, you see. He can be very insistent when he threatens. Which you know better than I. He did not want you growing up with a lot of dreams and ideas in your head about your father. Did not…want you to know.

“I gave in because I wanted to stay here, too, where your grandfather had permitted me. Gousier does have the power to remove me. He could banish me from this island if he didn’t find it more satisfying to be able to tell me that he can do it. All of this is his property, this dung heap amid the thorns, and so long as I keep to his path I get to remain.” He grinned unevenly, which made him press his palm to the side of his head and close that eye. “I seem to have stepped off today. Wonder how we should handle this? Discretion will be key, I think. No reason he has to know anything about anything—which anyway I’ve maintained for years.”

“But what’s in the cases?” she demanded.

“Oh, well, lend me a hand with them and we shall find out together, hmm?” He held up the curtain to let her enter the pantry again.

The two cases were as long as Soter was tall, and brown with dust, spattered darkly where wine or something else had slopped over them. The nub of the leather was worn off in places, too. One case was decidedly heavier than the other. Kneeling, one eye still squeezed shut, Soter fumbled at the hasp on the smaller one. He slipped the pin free, then pushed and prodded the top up. He didn’t remove the lid, but peered secretively underneath.

Then suddenly as if he wanted to drive her back, he shoved a clicking, clattering thing at her. She leaned away but refused to be startled. She stared at what he was holding.

It was a shadow puppet, the first she’d ever seen. The body was articulated: the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and knees all revolved on pins, and each segment was fitted with a hinged rod. She pinched one of the loose ones and the puppet’s jaws opened in a great leer. She pushed on another, and from behind his legs his penis emerged. It was almost as big as his thigh, and the tip was cut with small swirls that made it seem to have a face of its own. Despite the monstrousness of his anatomy, Leodora had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“His name is Meersh,” said Soter.

“Meersh,” she repeated. She moved his arms and legs, flexed his wrists, marveled at the green tissue-thin skin stretched over his form. She held him up admiringly, and with an ease that surprised her circled the rods so that the puppet appeared to give a gesture of welcome to Soter. Something stirred within her. She forgot her uncle, the cavern, the hatefulness of the rest of her life. Some shape that had possessed no shape until that moment collected and formed deep inside her, and drew its first breath. She leaned around the lid to look into the case. There in three compartments lay stacks of puppets as deep as her arm, and each unique. She looked up past Meersh to Soter; tears were already forming in her eyes.

Soter gaped in awe or terror at her fingers twirling the rods of the puppet, as if staggered by what he saw. She wanted to speak but only a croak emerged, and she sobbed. Soter looked her in the face and recoiled. He dropped the tarp, escaping the sobs, escaping her, escaping the future that in his drunken cleverness he had just cast. He did not in that moment understand that what he had pried open was her life.

Her life incarnate: the puppets of Bardsham.

THREE

It may have been ridiculous ever to have believed that she had no father, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Gousier and the villagers called her mother a witch, and Leodora had simply concluded that the witch had conjured her into being. If nothing else the explanation allowed her to be magical, and she liked being magical.

Suddenly she had not only a father, but a father of legendary stature. Even in Tenikemac, isolated from the tumultuous life of the bridges, she’d heard his name—the name of the greatest shadow puppeteer who had ever traveled the myriad spans of Shadowbridge: Bardsham. And there before her, in the care of a grizzled old drunk, lay the puppets Bardsham had used. As it had been with her mother, her father was a revelation.

Soter soon had all the compartments and both cases open. He judiciously selected more puppets and spread them around him. They belonged to a dozen different stories, but he assembled them to tell his own. Then he asked her for Meersh. The grotesque Meersh was going to represent her father. For her mother he picked a sinuous figure he called Orinda.

He began the performance, sometimes looking at her, sometimes squinting as though pained at having to squeeze his memory through the cracks in his hangover.

“Your father,” he began, “came from a span far to the south of here, and at least three spirals away. You do know about the spirals, don’t you?”

“They’re other bridges,” she answered uncertainly.

“Other great long, unimaginable arms of bridges, yes, child. And each one, sooner or later, curls up like a nautilus shell, or so it’s said, because you can walk a thousand different spans, a thousand different great, wide communities filled with all sorts of people and creatures, and not ever reach that curled-up point where the bridge started or maybe ends. Who knows which. But your father, he came out of one of those places, one of those spiral ends. Or so he said…”

BARDSHAM’S TALE

His parents had their own troupe of traveling players, the Mangonel Circus. That was his real name, too. They played in public for money. They juggled and danced on cords strung high above the streets. They performed a skillful whip act with your grandmother holding up things like flowers or torches that your grandfather snipped the heads from or extinguished with a snap of his whip, until finally she held a jeweled ring lightly between two fingers and he snatched it without her fingers even moving—snatched it and with the same movement sent it into the audience, where a fight inevitably broke out over its ownership. It was a cheap ring, but a dazzling trick. The way your father told it, no one had ever seen such skill before Mangonel. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand in among the crowd, too, which had to be done most carefully if they wanted to avoid any trouble. The boy—that is, Bardsham, your father—he had a natural dexterity. Right from the time he could walk, he could steal coins from between your fingers and you wouldn’t feel so much as a breeze—just like his father did with that whip. Plus, he was so sly that anyone would have sworn he’d been across the avenue the whole time. He was a child, none too large, and who noticed him down around their hips when people were doing handsprings on a rope way up there?

The family did not overlook his talent. They trained him and trained him until he had the most skillful fingers in the world. His only limit then was how much he could make off with before the weight of his boodle pulled the pants off him.

One night another member of the troupe, a fellow called Peeds, took sick an hour before the performance. Peeds was the Mangonel shadow puppeteer and a great favorite of the boy’s as well as of the audience’s. Bardsham had heard Peeds’s stories hundreds of times, and was always transported by them. He sat through every rehearsal, absorbing all the details like any small child. Like you. When he wasn’t outside fleecing the audience, he even sat in the dark booth with Peeds. Mind you, he wasn’t supposed to be in the booth at all. His father had a temper to make your uncle look positively unassertive. But the boy took risks. And he and Peeds were friends.

So, Peeds took sick and there was nobody could do his part. Your grandmother sometimes narrated a tale for him, but she knew nothing of the puppetry itself. Nobody else had paid any attention to his old stories—they had their own acts to develop and refine. The family needed an act to link the other acts together—that’s what Peeds did with his stories, his puppets. He moved things along from the jugglers to the knife throwers, weaving the distance between the two with some tale that touched both. The boy decided to risk punishment. He confessed to his parents that he’d been studying secretly with Peeds and could do the act. He swore he knew it by heart. They didn’t have time to argue or fight or punish him—not right then. So they capitulated. That was when Bardsham the Great was born.

He’d followed how Peeds used colors to change mood, how he spun the lantern, the different ways he moved figures off the screen. For the rest—what he didn’t know—he had the instinct to invent.

His mother came up with the name. She told him, long after, that she had walked out to the end of the dragon beam sticking off the side of span where they were performing—every span has a dragon beam, Lea, not just Ningle. She stepped into the tiled Dragon Bowl at the end of that beam and asked the gods for the name, and it had come to her right then and there. That’s what she told him anyway. During his performance she stood outside the booth, telling the stories where they needed narrating, doing the introductions.

The thing about puppeteers is they’re invisible. Never seen. All you see is the handiwork, the skill. So any story she fabricated about Bardsham, it was the real story. Who he was, where he’d come from. Anything she felt like adding. If the story changed from night to night or span to span—as it did—that only added to the mystery of him.

It all began as a single provisional performance, but poor Peeds never recovered. He got sicker and thinner, till he’d grown as thin as a puppet skin himself. On his deathbed he bequeathed young Bardsham all of his puppets, his tools, his stage. His stories.

From then on the boy spent less time thieving from the audiences and more listening to them tell the stories of their spans, their people, their families. He did something no one else had ever thought of—he started collecting the heritage of Shadowbridge. Diverse elements he folded all together, making something that had never been before. It became a great giant of a story, a spiral of a tale, just like Shadowbridge itself, all linked and spun together into something bigger than any of us can see. Except for Bardsham. And such vision, you know, it makes you a little bit mad.

His father was none too happy about losing his talented little thief permanently. But he was no fool, either. The Shadowplays of Bardsham were soon bringing in the largest crowds. Nevertheless, pigheaded creature he was, he insisted that while the other acts went on, the boy must mingle with the crowd. After all, they didn’t know who he was. He was a stranger, and still small. And still a skilled pickpocket. But it was a risky and foolish proposition. Anyone could see that sooner or later the child would be caught. What pickpocket hasn’t been? And there were spans where the authorities cut off fingers if not a whole hand by way of punishment. The circus would lose far more than their little thief if that happened.

Finally it was his mother who confronted the old man to keep the son out of thieving. His hands were pure gold, she said. If he was caught thieving, the troupe would be ruined. Picking pockets brought in so little. Puppets brought in crowds. She was right, but her husband did not like being shown that he was wrong; as with many a man, it only made him insist on being wrong. He refused to listen to her. They argued. He threatened to stop the shadowplays, instead, which would have been sheer folly. He didn’t care. He wanted the boy to obey him.

The time came for them to perform their show, with the two of them still arguing and as far apart as could be. They went out with that disagreement hanging unfinished between them.

That night at the end of the whip act, Mangonel missed the ring his wife held up. It had never happened before. The whip snapped against her face instead. He swore it had been an accident, but I don’t think even he believed it. After that she had a scar across one cheek. Her husband couldn’t look at her without feeling the twist of guilt in his own breast. The only way he could expiate his crime was to capitulate on Bardsham. He released the boy from the duties of thieving.

Now on every span they came to, the boy disappeared. Wherever they went, he sought out the elders almost immediately, returning only when it was time for his performance. He asked them questions, sometimes describing versions of the stories he knew, and listened to the oldest tales they knew, hearing endless variations on the ones he told. He brought back no money now when he mingled with the crowds, but his act became more and more refined, precise, taut. He was the lure for the Mangonel Circus. Placards portrayed him as a faceless figure in a swirling purple cape. They announced his imminent arrival before the circus had even set foot upon a span. Audiences whispered his name. He was the mystery puppeteer of a million tales. Bardsham had traveled the whole world. Bardsham had been a librarian in the mythical Great Library. He was an Edgeworld god, because he knew every story on every span and only pretended at mortality—an ingenious argument given substance when an old man in one crowd claimed to have seen Bardsham’s performances when just a child. He was a shill for the circus, of course, but the story spread. People watched the troupe arrive, counted their numbers, but failed to find this mystical genius. And that, too, fueled stories of him. By whatever magic, Bardsham could look inside the audience and read the stories in their hearts. Bardsham.

And what was your father’s reward for all his work? To vanish.

His father took all the bows, receiving the kudos while the boy stayed hidden in the dark, listening to audiences shout his name, but unable to reveal his identity.

Mangonel may have given in to his wife’s demands, but he still had the means to keep the boy in his place. He got to acting as if he had performed the shadowplays, even hiding out during some performances to reinforce the impression.

Meanwhile the gulf between him and the other two family members deepened. He took performance money and went out on his own after shows, sometimes not coming home until the next day. His wife knew what he was doing but said nothing about it. After he’d scarred her, she had nothing to do with him beyond rehearsals anyway.

The world went on about its business. The Edgeworld gods blessed some spans, showering their Dragon Bowls with gifts, and completely ignored others. Women gave birth. Lovers quarreled and made up. Fish swam and ate smaller fish. The troupe traveled its circuit of spans and spirals. On each they might play four or five locales before sailing off to another arm of Shadowbridge, and sooner or later back again. It was a small circuit, hardly anything compared with all the possible spans, but enough to keep them moving all year round without returning to any particular span more than once every few years. Bardsham the child developed into Bardsham the young man. As he grew older, he also grew more frustrated. He choked at having to hide in the darkness of the booth while his father accepted his acclaim. He had great skill and he wanted to be recognized. The mysterious phantom Bardsham received letters and money from admirers, invitations to palaces, even proposals of marriage. His identity continued to attract speculation. He was a djinn kept in a bottle. No, he was horribly disfigured. He was deformed. That was why he hid his face.

While not particularly handsome or tall, the real Bardsham was not unattractive, either. As he grew older, he became a more conspicuous member of the troupe. Mangonel required him to pretend to be an idiot lest someone suspect him of being Bardsham. Now when he was old enough to be accepted as the puppeteer, it had become imperative that the mystery be maintained. The mystery of Bardsham was what filled the benches. He helped set up the acts. He assembled and broke down the platforms. But he had to pretend to be less, always less, than what he was. He was finding other people more and more appealing. Women interested him particularly. After all, they wrote him invitations. But what chance did he have with anyone he took a fancy to when he had to play the gibbering fool? Inevitably some people taunted him as he set up. They even jeered, “Hoy, there’s Bardsham!” at him while they pointed and laughed. He was doing twice the work of everyone else in the troupe. He had to be seen working like a lackey and looking like a fool. Secretly, he had to practice, to perform. Even more secretly he had to find ways to gather information on stories without revealing his identity. He donned disguises or masks when he spoke to the elders on the spans. The whole process was exhausting him.

The critical clash with his father was inevitable—a mere question of when the two tempers would flare in unison. His mother did her best to act as intermediary, but she must have known she couldn’t do it forever and dreaded the day when the two men would collide.

That day came: Bardsham had shirked some onerous chore in order to lurk about the span and gather up new stories. Mangonel saw him returning and called him. The old man had his whip.

He asked him something like “Where have you been and why haven’t you done what I told you to do?” You know the sound of it, your uncle brays the same way—when he tells you to do one thing and then damns you for not doing another. Mangonel knew perfectly well that his son had been out doing his job as Bardsham. But he hadn’t shoveled manure or swept off the stage, or cleaned some animal’s pen, which were his duties, too.

Now, Bardsham wasn’t big, but he performed so much of the troupe’s donkeywork that he was much stronger than he looked. And right then he’d had enough of trying to placate, of appeasing when it was himself being mistreated and maligned. Instead of apologizing, he walked over and told the old man that he could hire someone else to do the grunt work from now on. Bardsham had more important things to do and was tired of carrying the burden unnecessarily, just for show. Just—as he saw it—for Mangonel’s amusement. “I’m done!” he shouted, and started away.

The old man might have pretended that what he’d done to his wife was an accident, but what happened next was a hot-blooded assault.

His whip tore at Bardsham left and right, striping him with welts and blood, ripping his clothing, driving him back and back against a wall. He fell over some jugglers’ props that had been assembled—some braziers and flags and large wooden pins. When he scrambled up against the wall the whip tore his shoulder open. If he’d been a second slower, it would have been his nose. He had nothing to protect him, nothing to hide behind. The old man might have been trying to kill him, too—he snapped the whip at his son’s face, just missing an eye and leaving him afterward with a scar to match his mother’s. Maybe it was seeing that scar that made the old man realize he’d never lost control of the whip in his life, not even once, not for a second. Not with anybody.

He raised it again and snapped it, but slow enough that Bardsham caught it and pulled with all his might. Hauled off his feet, the old man flew toward him, and Bardsham, quick as lightning, let go the whip and snatched up one of the juggling pins and swung it all the way around, swung it with his arms stretched out, swung it with all his anger behind it. When it hit, that pin cracked and splintered, and bits of it flew off across the yard. It stove in the side of his father’s head.

Bardsham said he stood there afterward for the longest time, feeling a terrible fire in his throat, as if he might cry, but boiling with such hatred that he did nothing for the man who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground in front of him. Of course he was bleeding, too. His shoulder and back. His face was a mask of blood from the slash beside his eye. He dropped the broken pin and walked away.

He packed everything he owned, including the puppets left him by Peeds, and disappeared that night. Didn’t even say good-bye to his mother, which he regretted the rest of his life. But that was his choice.

Mangonel didn’t die, as it happens, but he was never any good for anything after that. He couldn’t speak right, and he couldn’t walk a straight line from one end of a room to the other between one day and the next. The Mangonel Circus is what Bardsham had killed. The Mangonel name.

The puppet that was her grandfather had jerked, stumbled, and fallen over. The figure of Meersh stood alone and somehow wretched.

Leodora had asked, “Did he ever go back?”

Soter shook his head. “He would send money to his mother whenever he had some and remembered it. But never a note, never a word. He was too ashamed to write, to say where he was. There was nothing he could say. He knew he would have killed his father. Happily. Of course his mother would have understood—you and I can see that, but not Bardsham. She must have known that she could find him, because he was famous, you know. Bardsham only grew in stature once he’d escaped from the circus. She could have found him anytime.”

“Like my mother.”

For a moment he looked alarmed. Then he smiled nervously and said, “Ah, I see what you mean—like your mother ran away from home. Yes. I often thought that his break with his family was the cause of much of his debauch—that is, his excesses. He drank and…well, drank more than any human being I’ve ever known. You could not be friends with him and not drink. He often said that he didn’t trust men who didn’t imbibe. They were afraid of something. Something inside themselves, and he felt he should be wary of it, too.”

“So when did you come to know him?”

Soter set down the last puppet figure. There would be no puppet for him.

With obvious relish he said, “I came across Bardsham while I was selling nostrums. He needed a reconnaissance man, a vanguard to make arrangements, make sure we had a place to perform and to sleep on every span, wherever we went. Make sure there would be no trouble. Likewise it must be someone with the necessary sophistication to announce him, a person of skill and wit to suss the nature of the place and its inhabitants. A person of reliable character and cunning and…” He paused, opened his hands as if tossing something in the air, and bowed slightly. “He had a need that I filled perfectly.

“Without such a person, Bardsham had to handle these things. He had to come out of the booth between each set and announce himself, interrupting the flow of the stories. That made him seem ordinary, and you can’t seem ordinary if you want to perform. Besides, he was Bardsham—ordinary wasn’t an option. The cloak of mystery was crucial.

“The two of us had been traveling parallel circuits, you might say. Every span’s different. Laws are different, permits are different. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll get arrested if you set up without bribing the right fellow. Sometimes you get arrested if you try to bribe them. It’s half your life keeping on top of such things. A great artist cannot be distracted by such petty matters.” He sounded to her as if he were quoting someone. “An artist’s head is full of tricks and tales, not the names of who to pay off and how to finesse the obdurate authorities.”

His tone was one of longing. They had been young men then, on an adventure together. She could hear it. “The world was all before us,” he told her, then fell silent. Warily, she asked, “What about my mother?”

The dreaminess in Soter’s expression pinched into a look almost of pain. His eyes darted her way for a second. Not encouraged by his reaction, she pressed her point: “Is what Uncle Gousier says about her true?”

He picked up the puppet figure of Orinda. It glided across the case as he spoke. “What your uncle knows of your mother on the spans, he’s pieced together like a quilt—a word here, a rumor there. He never spoke to anyone who knew her. That is, other than me; and he’d prefer not to know what I know because it might spoil the picture he’s framed. He knows nothing of how she lived or what she did to survive. His account’s a fabrication. When I arrived here with you, your existence only confirmed everything he’d invented about her. That she must have been a wanton to produce a child and then abandon it was all too clear to him, and he set it like a minaret atop the story he’d already invented. You’re the crowning piece whether you wish it or not. Here you are and Leandra nowhere to be seen.” He slid the puppet back inside the case.

“But she was dead!”

“Which made no difference to him. That she’d left you in my care, in Bardsham’s care, before she went off is what matters, you see. In his mind, she abandoned you. Her death’s a mere inconvenience after the fact. An orphan proved what he already believed. She was unfit. Unfit to be his sister. And that’s the real issue.”

“Was she—” and here she stopped, poised at the brink of asking the critical question that would either vindicate or damn the image she retained, her mind shaping words the specifics of which were beyond her, but the depravity of which she’d inferred from the way her uncle’s mouth twisted and his eyes went hard as he uttered the name. “Was she really the Red Witch? Did she have powers?”

“Red Witch?” The name troubled him, she could see. “Where do you”—he tried unpersuasively to sound amused—“where do you get such a name?”

“From you,” she answered, and she watched as he hesitated, tried to recall when he had let this slip.

He squeezed shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Oh. Well. It was just a name, that’s all, Leodora. A reputation. The same way that Bardsham was a name.” Orinda fell over and lay still on the box. “That’s enough now, I’m tired.”

But she would not be diverted by his pretense of exhaustion. This was too important. Her world was taking shape. “Was she the Red Witch? Did she lure men to their deaths?”

He stiffened. Slowly his hand uncovered his face. His bilious eyes distorted his haggard features into something inhumanly furious—gaunt and hard and evil. One corner of his mouth curled as he replied: “Ask your father. She lured him.”

He rose up, gathered the puppets, and shoved them back into the cases. Ignoring her as if she were no longer in the room, he carried the cases back to the dark pantry.

Although he let her stay through the night, Soter remained unapproachable, refusing to answer when she tried to speak to him. The subject was closed.

After that he tried never to mention Leandra again. If she asked a question, he wouldn’t answer with anything concrete or helpful. Mostly he feigned that he remembered too little to be of any use.

She couldn’t trust her uncle to tell her anything concrete because he did nothing but call his sister “the witch,” much the way the villagers did. To ask him was to invite trouble. Her aunt was especially reticent when Gousier was around, but even when he was absent she professed to have come to the island only after Leandra was gone and so be unable to provide any help. Leodora suspected this wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to accuse her aunt and lose the sympathy of the only person who ever sided with her.

Beyond Bouyan, her mother was nothing but a half-condensed phantom, a legend, a myth. On Bouyan she was a scourge, a harlot, an abomination.

While she couldn’t probe him for information, she did induce Soter to teach her about the puppets. He accepted her apprenticeship reluctantly at first, but with increasing devotion as, over time, her dedication and skill emerged. It wasn’t just a casual interest in puppetry she displayed. Nor were his first impressions of her dexterity off the mark. Leodora had her father’s gifts. Many times during the first years of her training, Soter proclaimed it.

The secret practice sessions gave meaning to her life. They made the indignities suffered at her uncle’s hands almost bearable. They gave her a goal to strive for—a means to leave the island, to strike out on her own.

The goal had no date. She didn’t know when or how she would leave, and she might not ever have gone at all. She really had no idea then what she was inviting—how much effort would be involved, how much of her life she would devote to practice. She would train and train while Soter forever reminded her that she wasn’t quite ready, that her skills still needed sharpening; that there was a world of detail she didn’t know, of subtlety she didn’t yet possess. As time passed, she began to think that she might spend her whole life preparing for just one performance.

FOUR

Life on Bouyan ran along with a tedious sameness.

Each morning she awoke in her small garret atop the boathouse. It was a room she had taken as a sanctuary after discovering it on one of her flights from her uncle. It had a small bed and sparse furnishings in it, suggesting that someone had lived there before her. Her aunt and uncle didn’t resist when she asked if she could move into the garret. In truth, she had asked Dymphana, who as always had acted as go-between for her; but she had watched the interchange, had seen her uncle’s hooded gaze shift to her with an incomprehensible look of relief, as though he wanted her gone. For once his desires and hers agreed. She was thirteen. Her body was changing and with it her emotional compass: She wanted privacy, she wanted her own places on the island. Her uncle’s one stipulation was that she cease all complaining about her assigned tasks.

Once she had arisen, she dressed and went down the beach to Tenikemac to watch the sea dragons surface. The village dotted the whole curve of the bay just over the north ridge. The ridge took half an hour to reach, and as she walked she watched the people already up and working, especially the half a dozen women gathering seaweed in baskets along the beach ahead of her. Soon she had reached them, but for the most part they ignored her, letting her by as if she didn’t exist. On the ridge, she stopped and watched.

The men in teams of two carried their rolled-up nets down beside the water, where they unfurled them. Tastion and his father made up one team. He pretended not to see her, so no one was suspicious of the true relationship between them.

Soon four younger boys waded into the water up to their waists, each carrying a large conch with pierced ends. In unison they raised the shells to their lips and blew a trumpet call.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to study the surface.

Farther out, the water rippled. Slithers of yellow appeared, darted beneath the grayish waves. Then the heads rose up, one after another, strange, long-snouted, magisterial heads with large, black, and protruding eyes. These were the sea dragons.

There were sixteen of them in all, and she knew every one. She had never ridden them, never touched them. As a female, she wasn’t allowed. But she’d given them names. Her favorite was Muvros, the youngest, his head yellow and black, freckled with the red spots of youth, and his snout as thin as a reed. The tiny mouth at the end of it seemed forever puckered, as if sharing a kiss.

The conch boys fed the dragons long strips of the gathered seaweed and would feed them again when they returned. Meanwhile the fishermen, dragging their nets, moved into the water two by two. The dragons seemed as fascinated by the men as Leodora was with the dragons. They bowed their heads and let their riders clamber over their necks and sit. They seemed not in the least encumbered by the riders.

With a storyteller’s inquisitiveness, she wondered when this ritual had begun, and who had tamed the first dragon. Even the village itself didn’t seem to know, or else she would have known the story, too. Soter had taught her every one of their tales with the intention of having her perform them for villagers—once he was satisfied that she was skilled enough.

The dragons snaked off into deeper waters, their riders rocking from side to side. Some of the men would return early with full nets. Others stayed out all day, hunting a more difficult catch but one that might earn them more money on Ningle. Tastion and his father were among those who hunted farther away.

She watched until he was gone from sight, then turned and set off into the trees to perform the most hateful task in the world.

Fishkill Cavern lay not terribly deep inside the hill—the entrance was barely out of sight behind her before the passage turned and widened into a broad chamber. Close to the outside or not, no matter what the temperature on the island might be, the cavern remained as cold as an iceberg. Water barely dripped from the stalactites; when she was little it had been fun to watch and watch until a single drop fell. Now she felt as if her life was measured out in those drops, slow and icy and suspended for eternity.

Halfway between home and the village, nature had created the perfect repository for the village’s daily catch. A congeries of fish and mussels and other, articulated creatures surrounded Leodora every morning, laid upon reed mats that covered most of the floor. A large table comprising boulders and one flat slab stood close to one wall. That was where she spent her mornings, gutting, cleaning, and filleting; cracking and splitting and deveining. The offal poured, cold and slick, into baskets beside her, most of which would be taken back by the fishermen and thrown into the sea, sometimes as bait for other fish. The product, ready for market, was heaped on other mats and placed inside round wicker panniers with straps.

She didn’t clean all, or even most, of the catch—most of it was sold as it was. Even so there was enough work to keep her busy through the morning.

She wore her ragged clothes in layers. They kept her warm even as they became spotted with gore. Her feet were well wrapped, too. She always made a point of drying them before entering the cavern. If she hadn’t, she could have lost her toes, like the fabled trickster Meersh, against the icy cavern floor. Her hands could not be so protected. Her nimble fingers grew chilled and red, and finally numb. Her greatest fear was that she would lose so much feeling in her hands that she would chop off a finger and not notice it until her own blood was mingling with that of the fish. It was a fear grown into a phobia. Outside the cavern she kept a basket of ocean water placed in the sunlight. When her fingers numbed, she ran out and plunged them in the water. The flesh tingled to life and soon felt as if it were ablaze, the ends of her arms boiling. She did this four or five times a morning, preferring discomfort to dismemberment.

At some point her uncle would arrive, sometimes alone, sometimes with whatever vermin he could hire from Ningle to help tote the fish up onto the span, another half an hour’s walk from there. Gousier’s assistants turned over almost as often as the tide. They tended to ogle her, this young girl whose body was developing its adult shape earlier than some they knew. While they might have been the lowest of creatures on Ningle, down here on the island they were in a place that they could consider below even their station; and she, being of the island, was a pleb at their disposal. At least, so Soter had warned her. He predicted that, sooner or later, one or both assistants would try to grope her. He told her what to watch for—those subtle, vulpine glances being one of the signs. But so far no one had harmed her.

When her uncle had taken the panniers full of fish onto the span, then Leodora was freed from servitude.

Sodden with fish blood, she left the cavern and followed a small path south of the house, past Dymphana’s garden, and up over a few weedy dunes to the far side of a low promontory there. His claim on the land ended with the dunes, where the grass turned quickly into brush too thorny to cut down and the beach beyond narrowed to a footpath. The brush might have been a wall to fend off invaders from the sea—it was that thick. But if one continued along the strip of beach to the far side of them, the shore made an abrupt hook, creating a natural jetty of rock that doubled back upon the promontory like an index finger almost pressing against a thumb. When the tide was out, finger and thumb did close completely, and the small isolated inlet became a lagoon for a while. Even with the tide up and the waves coming across the hook, it remained free of strong currents and riptides, a hidden stillness. The dunes hid the lagoon from view on Gousier’s side, and the rocky hook rose inland like a low wall, as if a failed span had once upon a time attempted to push up out of the island, producing finally nothing but the thorny wildwood. No one had any use for it, and no one else ever went there.

On the sheltered strip of beach she peeled off the foul clothes. Underneath, ruddy patches marked her skin where the blood had soaked through. She immersed the clothes in the shallow water, and like coral smoke the blood swirled lazily out of them.

She left them soaking in the shallows and waded past them into the depths of the lagoon. Untied, her red hair fanned all the way to her waist.

Tiny creatures nipped at her toes, and she yelped and dove in, swimming out to the far rim of rocks, locating in them the gouge through which she could slip into the deeper water. She plunged headlong beneath the waves, kicked back up to the surface, and broke free with a gasp, in imitation of the sea dragons. She liked to play at being a dragon, at wriggling through the water with her feet together like a tail.

She had been born swimming, she thought.

The lagoon had been her private retreat for more than a year. She kept this secret even from Tastion; and, anyway, he was always out fishing or else working the fields on the distant side of the village when she went there, so there was no reason for him to know. She wanted—she needed—something to be hers alone. Even the puppets she had to share with Soter. And with the ghost of her father.

That day as on most days after swimming, she lay sunning herself, warm and muzzy and so nearly asleep that she didn’t hear any approaching footsteps. She had the impression of a sharp intake of breath, and then a voice poked through the membrane of dream with a single word: “Witch!” So loud and so near that she didn’t think it was real at all until she opened one eye and found him standing right beside her. He stepped up and his shadow blocked the sunlight.

She screeched and rolled away across the sand, scrambling for her wet clothing, draping the tunic over her budding figure before she turned to confront the intruder.

No one was there.

She roughly brushed the sand from her face, thinking she’d dreamed it all. But in the sand were his footprints, clear and cautious impressions in approach, wild gouges upon retreat. He’d fled past the wildwood and right up the rocks. She ran to them and climbed up high enough to look over the rise and saw him far away, still running in the shallows, not even daring to look back, his arms flailing ahead of him. A moment later he had disappeared around the curve of the beach.

She’d only glimpsed him for an instant—an impression of tangled, matted gray hair and ragged clothes. And that word—that word lined with horror. Witch.

She dressed in the sandy, sodden clothes then and ran to her uncle’s house. Dymphana was outdoors, digging corms from her garden.

Her aunt’s features pulled tight with concern at the sight of her. She asked, “What’s happened, child?”

Trembling, fidgeting, Leodora told her. A man had appeared, a stranger. He’d seen her and then run away. She clung to her aunt and cried, “But why witch! Why did he call me a witch? Why did he say that?”

Dymphana replied, “Oh, child, it’s not you, it’s your mother used to swim there, too, and I’m—”

Pressed against her, Leodora felt her aunt stiffen as both of them realized what had been said.

“How do you know that?” She pushed away, no longer frightened. “You said you didn’t know anything, that my mother was gone before you came to Bouyan!”

It seemed for a moment that Dymphana might try to bluff her way out of the trap, as if she weighed whether she should compound the denial with another obvious lie. Finally, however, she set down her hoe. “You must promise me never to tell your uncle nothing you hear from me. He’d know in a second where you learned it, because Soter doesn’t know a thing about Leandra’s life on this island. Gousier never told him nothin’, neither.”

“I promise,” she swore.

“You are so like her, you know that. More each day, to my eye. When I promised your uncle never to speak on your mother, it was when you was so tiny, and it seemed right then not to have you burdened with what we knew. Your uncle said he didn’t want you growing up like her. That seemed good wisdom then. But you are her daughter—and no one who knew her could ever mistake it.

“Your mother thought the ocean belonged to her, same as you—that lagoon especially, same as you. It was hers. Oh, you didn’t think anyone knew?” She smiled with tenderness through her exasperation then. “Dear heart, I keep track of you far more’n you realize. I know perfectly well that you lie about nude in the sand over past them dunes. Just like your mother did.”

A thrill ran through Leodora at the thought of her mother lying in that very same spot, seeing the same sky. The pleasure was followed a moment later by the realization that her private spot was no longer private. Like everything else, she shared it.

“The man you saw, he’d be an Omelune,” said Dymphana, as though that explained everything. “I expect he thought you were your mother.”

“Everyone calls her a witch. Everyone in Tenikemac. Uncle Gousier. Even Soter. He calls her the Red Witch.”

“Oh, does he now? To you he says this? That old fool. He has no right to talk on her at all, even if he does know such things as we don’t.”

“Well, at least he doesn’t lie,” she snapped, and for a moment she thought her aunt was going to weep.

Instead, her expression still pinched, Dymphana explained, “Red Witch is a name from the spans. No one ever called her that here. To be sure, the Omelunes called her worse. I always wondered if she adopted the name on purpose to mock Bouyan. Thumbin’ her nose at everything. That’d be like her.”

“What are Omelunes?”

Dymphana took her by the hand. “Come here and let me sit.” They walked over and sat on a broad stump in the shade. The breeze on her wet clothes quickly chilled Leodora, and she scooted off the stump and onto the ground, where she could face her aunt from within a warm patch of sunlight.

“You understand that I was no part of the household in her younger days. I didn’t meet your uncle till perhaps two years before she’d gone. She would have been a few years older than you are now when I arrived. Whenever I look on you, I can’t help seeing her like she’s a ghost right inside your skin. I’ve almost called you by her name more than once. You have so much of her—her body, her face. Your uncle sees it, too. I know he does. Even your stubbornness is your mother’s, although I’m inclined to think that being stubborn just runs in your family. For that brief while after I came, it was we two women and your grandmother living together in a small wood house all day long—it was smaller then. Your grandfather extended it three times with them extra rooms. He was a great carpenter, a builder.”

“I remember.”

“We all thought it would be filling up soon with more…” She paused, her face pinched, her eyes casting now toward the woods. Leodora knew that her aunt had given birth three times and that none of the babies had survived beyond a few months. She knew where the graves were, and that the final stillbirth had almost killed Dymphana. Her uncle would have no sons.

“Leandra told me all sorts of stories about herself. She didn’t mind telling them on herself, either. Didn’t mind looking the fool if it made for a good story. You might not have guessed, listening to her laugh at herself, make fun of herself, how much iron there was in her backbone. I came down from Ningle to live with your uncle, and I had certain airs when I first arrived here: thinking I was above this place, better than it was, and that I was above everyone born here. I needed to pretend that then. My family on Ningle—they’re all gone now—they were so poor that this life is much better than I could have hoped for there. I’d have been in a gutter or worse. Gousier was so fine and strong. He used to laugh. You wouldn’t know it now. He used to be like your mother that way. Or maybe she let him share some of her joy, so that he seemed happier than he was. All I know is, when she left, she took that joy away with her. I’ve missed it so long, it’s like something I dreamed of once that never really happened.

“It didn’t take me long to learn my limits. Your grandmother straightened me out about who I was and what was expected of me. Your mother, though, wasn’t about to be straightened out. She challenged everything.

“She used to swim out past your lagoon, where she weren’t supposed to—over the rocks and into the deep. One morning she vanished altogether out there. She was missing so long that your grandparents feared she’d drowned. Gousier went out in his esquif, paddling all over, looking everywhere. Even some of Tenikemac came out to hunt for her in sympathy. They’d lost swimmers of their own to the hidden currents and undertows—some was never seen again. And it was no balm to your grandparents’ spirits to have their standoffish neighbors come and console them over their loss. That was like the final proof that she was gone.

“It fell dark. Everyone had returned from the sea. Your grandmother was wailing now. They’d all given up. And in walked your mother. She came in stark naked and exhausted, and not a bit ashamed of her deed or her body. Proud, if barely able to stand on her own feet. Worse, in the eyes of Tenikemac especially, she claimed she’d ridden home on the back of a sea dragon. No one gave her much credence. They thought she was saying it to stir them up more. She didn’t mean to be evil. She didn’t do it to hurt them. She did it to tear down a limit. It was like she had to beat the gods of the ocean themselves. She would have been, I think, just as happy if they had destroyed her for the challenge. It would have meant something had happened, she’d gotten the gods’ attention at last.”

“Did her parents punish her? What did they do?”

“Oh, they forbade her to swim, but you know they never enforced it. They were happy that she wasn’t dead. It’s difficult to be angry when you’re so elated. And then she collapsed right there in front of them, so mostly they were too busy nursing her well to threaten her much. Her task was gutting fish, same as you. There was no worse punishment they could have inflicted on her, and none that would have done anyone any good. Couldn’t keep her from cleaning the fish unless someone else did it, and when you’re all covered in blood and guts, well, who’s going to forbid you to wash? They don’t want the stink of you like that, either.”

“So she went back to swimming?” Leodora rather liked the idea that her mother had bested them all.

“Yes, she did, child. In the end, though, that willfulness of hers boxed her in. No islander would have her. The family was even more cut off from Tenikemac then. It’s only in the past few years Gousier has opened them up a tiny bit again, at least some of the men. The women are harder. If there had been a chance for Leandra before with them, there wasn’t one after that night. Their own men had been out hunting for her, and if she’d drowned, they’d have all mourned her and made sacrifices to the sea in her name, but she weren’t drowned nor even in peril, and after that the women shunned her and made their men shun her. If she’d ever gotten into real trouble after that, they would have lifted nary a finger to help, an’ probably would have hoped the gods destroyed her.”

It was clear from the look her aunt gave her that she was supposed to take instruction from her mother’s folly. She said nothing, and Dymphana seemed to regard this as acquiescence.

“Leandra had already given up on that village anyway. I don’t know exactly when she began to look elsewhere on the island.

“The Weejar people were on the far side of Ningle as they are now, isolated by the legs of that span, and half a day’s walking around the beach unless you can find the paths, what I could never do. But back then there was a third group lived down around the southern tip a good three hours away—”

“The Omelunes,” guessed Leodora.

“That’s right. You’re so clever, you got there ahead of me. The Omelunes were a fishing village, the same as Tenikemac, only they didn’t have the skill with dragons. They used boats. Some of their people also took their fish up to Ningle, and so Tenikemac would have nothing to do with them. Weejar is more like the Omelunes were—boats for fishing, and rice swamps inland. The rice is the only reason Tenikemac trades with them.

“One day, while the men of Omelune were out fishing or selling fish, Leandra swam all the way around to their village. The women on the beach saw her splashing in the waves, and damn them if they didn’t pick up stones, every one of them, and walk to the edge of the water and start flinging them at your mother to keep her from coming in to land. They knew she didn’t belong to them. They thought she was one of the merfolk that overturn boats and drown the sailors.”

“What merfolk?” asked Leodora, half disbelieving and half curious, wondering if Soter had any figures of merfolk buried in his stacks of puppets.

“Tenikemac knows of them, too, you can ask someone there. It were such a long swim to Omelune, you can well imagine that no one from here had ever tried it before. It’s not like somebody was expecting her. What else were the women of Omelune to think?

“Leandra must have been very tired, but she turned back—they left her no choice. The problem was, the women chased her along the beach, throwing rocks wherever they found them. Finally there was this spit of land, a little peninsula sticking out in the water. Leandra wasn’t watching ahead—she was keeping her eye on them women and diving down when something looked like it would hit her. So then all of a sudden she found the women coming right at her as if across the water itself. They cut the distance in half before she understood what had happened and leapt to swim away. One of the rocks struck her in the head, and she floundered, and she sank. The women must have thought they’d killed her. They left her alone and went marching back home in triumph. They’d killed a merwoman, and wouldn’t that be something to tell the men when the men came back from fishing?

“It was pure instinct kept Leandra afloat. Pretty soon the currents had her. She kicked up her legs when she thought of it. When she was sensible. Blood stung her eyes, and it was about all she could do to keep her head above the surface. She was drifting, she didn’t know where.

“The next thing she knew there were hands on her body, and she was being dragged through the water. She said she thought that the gods of the ocean had finally got her for all the times she’d taunted them. She tried to fight, but she had no energy left and fainted dead away. Then she was being pushed up into the air and onto something hard.

“Some young fool—and a brave one, I expect, to chance rescuing a merwoman—saw her floating there and pulled her into his boat. He was from Omelune. He had no idea what had happened; he just saw this naked girl in the water and dove in after her. When he found out who she was, he paddled her back home. By the time he’d got her back to our beach, your mother had decided he was the one for her.”

“And that’s the man who called me a witch?” guessed Leodora.

“Hush, now. You want this story, don’t try and race around it.

“Afterward, the two of them met in secret. Even in Fishkill Cavern if your uncle can be believed—which he can’t. He thinks the worst of them both, of course, even though he doesn’t know anything at all. She didn’t tell him half what she told me. She was in love. She wasn’t going to tell her brother about that, was she?

“Now, the village of Omelune must have had some inkling what was going on, but maybe they didn’t know just where he was going. Surely they couldn’t have guessed that the red-haired creature they’d fended off was the same one he was visiting regularly.

“Then one night he and Leandra arranged to meet on that ridge of rocks that makes your lagoon. He was such a fool for her that he decided to swim from Omelune to the lagoon just to match her feat. To prove to her or to himself that he was worthy. He didn’t tell a soul, just set off.

“Leandra, she waited and waited and he didn’t come and his boat never appeared. She could have got into Gousier’s esquif, but not her. She had to swim off to look for him. I think she was still planning to tease him: She would creep up on his boat just to scare him. That was her intention.

“In the morning we couldn’t find her anywhere. The family looked all over. It hadn’t been so long since we’d thought her drowned, so we weren’t quite given over to panic this time. She wasn’t in the cavern. She wasn’t at Tenikemac. We had no idea where she’d got to, so it was late in the day before your grandfather thought to go looking for her in the direction of Omelune. He found her on the beach. Somewhere between here and there, not all that far from home. She was sitting, just sitting, cold and wet and rocking back and forth, with that poor dead boy’s head cradled in her lap. He’d drowned trying to match her. You see what happened—her willfulness undid her in the end.”

“He died?” Leodora couldn’t understand this turn of events. She had already jumped to the end of the tale, where her mother ran away with the boy from Omelune, and this development ruined that story.

“He died, yes, and afterward nothing was good for your mother on the island. Omelune blamed her for his death. When they saw her, when they realized who she was, the women accused her of being a water witch, a lorelei. A love-struck girl wasn’t enough for them. She tried to drown herself, tried to swim to the ends of the ocean and let the gods take her soul; but your grandfather had some sense of this. He was watching her close now, and he went after her, brought her back, locked her in the boathouse with only her grief for a companion, and wouldn’t let her out until he was satisfied she’d got the idea of drowning herself out of her head. Even I couldn’t see her or talk to her that whole time. He let nobody near her. And then, while she was locked up, a terrible storm struck the island. Nets and boats were tossed around and torn apart. Your uncle’s esquif was smashed up on some rocks, and that’s the hole what’s still in its side. Weejar and Tenikemac both suffered, but not like Omelune. That poor cursed village was stamped flat, and so many people died that you couldn’t have made a village out of what was left. The survivors blamed your mother for it all. They knew already she was some sort of ocean spirit. Now she was worse: Leandra the Red-Haired Witch, the Soul-Drinker. Either they couldn’t see her misery or they didn’t believe it. Weejar took in some of the survivors—of course, Tenikemac so typically refused to be a haven for those who’d sold fish on Ningle. The Omelune opinion of your mother, though, spread everywhere. Weejar traded with Tenikemac the same as now. Pretty soon your mother had nowhere to go at all. The whole island had set itself against her.”

“Why didn’t Grandfather…do something?”

“What could he do? We were already viewed as no better than a necessary evil by Tenikemac. It’s a role we’ve long accepted, because we make a good living by filling that niche. The taint of the spans was bad enough, and her jeopardizing their men worse, but now we harbored something cursed.

“When Leandra insisted on accompanying your grandfather and Gousier onto Ningle, the two of them agreed it was a very good idea. She was seventeen. She was a beauty. She ought to have been married. And it was clear that she could never find a suitable husband here. I think they hoped she would catch someone’s eye up there.

“A few times she went up, and I’m sure she must have been learning all she could of the place. Laying her plans. She said nothing to me or anyone. One morning she went up with the men and never came down again. Vanished right out from under their noses. That was the last time anyone in the family ever laid eyes on her.”

“She ran away.”

“That she did, and alone, too. No one thought she could get far, but they had always underestimated her distance. Gousier went looking for her up and down the span and found nothing, not a trace. She’d taken a full purse from the family coffers—we had as much then as now. No one begrudged her that; she would have been given more as a dowry had things gone right. The money meant she could buy herself into the shadows, though. Buy passage to some other great long stretch of spans, leaving no trail to follow, no way to guess which way she’d gone.

“The day Soter came down those steps, carrying you as proof of his tale of her, of her death, was the first we’d heard of her in years.

“Your uncle cried like a baby himself. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but it’s true. So long as he had no idea of his sister’s fate, he could make up whatever he liked, and even if it was awful and cruel and defamed her with every word, it was comforting somehow. Like he kept her alive by inventing a world of failures for her. The truth wiped it all away. It broke him. It went much worse on him than on either of your grandparents. They’d come to accept her choice. Gousier took to drink. What he made in the stall of a day he spent in the pursuit of his own undoing. Trying to erase her, hiding from her. I couldn’t talk to him, almost like he couldn’t see me. One time he fell partway down the steps from Ningle, he was so drunk. For a while he wasn’t allowed to go up. Soter and I filled in as much as we could. Of course then Gousier accused Soter of trying to usurp his position—Soter, who wanted nothing at all to do with fish, but felt he owed your grandfather something for letting him stay. Gousier was crazy awhile, and nothing he said during that time is worth recalling. When it went on past all reason, your grandfather locked himself and Gousier in his workshop for the better part of a whole day. Neither one of them ever told what went on in there, but when they came out your uncle was bruised, bloody, and sober. And quiet. Whatever his opinions were, he said no more about her. Never mentioned his sister afterward, as if he’d never had one. He went back to work and after a time, he eased up. He was good for a bit—you might even remember from when you was little. Then, when your grandfolk died, it all came out again, everything he’d bottled up, and he cursed her for their deaths, too, blamed her all over again, but this time it was different. He bellowed at her as if she were hiding in the woods and could hear everything he said. He told her she’d killed them by breaking their hearts as surely as if she’d murdered them by her own hand.”

The idea terrified her. “Is that true? Did she?”

Dymphana leaned forward and took her hand. “Now, you think on it. Years had passed between her going and theirs. She wasn’t no more responsible than you was. They were old people. Whichever of them went first, the other was going to follow. Them Kuseks up on Ningle had more to do with your grandfather’s going than your mother and you. No, Leodora, your uncle’s like the Omelunes—he needs there to be someone responsible for all the bad things. Someone he can point at. I think he was in love with your mother a little bit, and I think part of it’s envy. I think there’s a part of Gousier that’d like to roam the spans, but the dutiful part tells him he has to stay here and maintain the tradition that his father maintained. An’ if he has to, then so does everyone else.”

Leodora stared, dumbfounded. Her aunt’s story revealed a depth of comprehension and thought that she’d never suspected. How could Dymphana think and see and know so much, and keep it all to herself? Why didn’t she feel as Leodora did the need to express her feelings—to fight the restrictions that were placed on her?

Then Leodora’s face clouded with another puzzle. “If the boy from Omelune is dead, then who is the man who thought I was my mother?”

“I expect he’s one of the other villagers, someone who didn’t leave there with the rest. There was a handful, tried to rebuild. I daresay he won’t come our way again, not now he believes the witch is still with us.”

“But how can he have been there for so many years and not come here before?”

Dymphana shrugged. “Life’s full of mysteries. Not all of ’em have answers, Leodora. Why did a storm destroy Omelune when it did? And why not Tenikemac?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, and you won’t, neither. The world has its mysteries. The gods have designs into which we and the world are woven.”

“But—” She stopped herself. “But how can anybody know if the things they’re doing are part of that plan or not?”

Dymphana smiled. “And aren’t you the deep thinker?” She tousled Leodora’s hair. “Better be careful asking that sort of question aloud, or the archivists of the Library will hear and come take you away to teach them.” She laughed at the look of bemused terror on Leodora’s face. “Oh, it’s just a myth, dear heart. The Library’s just a story.”

“It is?”

“Of course.”

In that case, she wondered, why hadn’t Soter taught it to her?

Two years later she did know the story of the Library of Shadowbridge, and far more than that.

By the time she turned fifteen, Soter had given up all his stories, and there were mermen and archivists of the Library in among the tales, along with Meersh, and two brothers who coveted each other’s gifts, and brides who drowned their husbands and husbands who beheaded their wives—of course Bardsham could have spun even more stories, but Soter had attended so many performances that he remembered a great many of them.

Now, instead of teaching her stories, he taught her how to take the elements and mix them together to make new ones. “Not until you can improvise from all you know will you become a true shadowmaster,” he told her. “That’s where your father truly excelled.” The way he said it suggested that he didn’t anticipate her excelling there ever. Yet she was devoted to the craft. She had every intention of succeeding. The world of the spans was going to be her oyster. She had decided. But while she laid her plans and dreamed of far-spun fame, other forces were conspiring to demolish every dream and keep her a prisoner there forever.

FIVE

Even before she opened her eyes that morning, she heard the strange murmurous call. It woke her nearly every morning now, no louder—if such could be said of something silent—than when she’d first heard it as her grandfather held her at the railing of the span, ten years before; since she had moved into the boathouse it had become more insistent, urgent, although the urgency gave her no guidance, no advice, no real idea of what to do in response. She climbed from her bed and crossed the narrow garret to stand in the window, to stare across the water as if this morning she might spy the source. It—whatever it was—might suddenly top the horizon to reveal its shape, and in appearing explain why it called to her and no one else. What did it want of her? It wasn’t calling her to come to it, but by the same token it was not going to let her forget its existence.

The curtains flapped in the breeze. The light coming off the ocean was gray and vaporous. It smelled of rain, though there was nothing of rain in the sky.

Melancholy joined her then, a late-awaking twin. Leodora leaned out the window like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, and stared along the shore to the north, out across the point and past, where the call was strongest, like a smell on the breeze or a gull’s cry wrapped in the wind; loud in its silence, bright in its subtlety, overwhelming in its absence—the source of her soul’s unease. One day it would surely appear and she would have her answers. She had learned to accept the frustration of not knowing when. The call remained, but she let it recede into the sizzle of the surf, and withdrew from the window.

It took her a few minutes to dress in her ragged and stained clothes for Fishkill Cavern. She climbed down the steps into the boathouse, where her uncle’s small esquif lay on supports, the hole in its side aimed at her like an empty socket. He was never going to repair it—she understood that now. It was linked to her mother and now to her, because she lived here.

She walked barefoot across the planks and picked up a wicker basket as she pushed open the wide double doors. She jumped down the stone launching ramp then padded across the beach toward the water. Streamers of seaweed were scattered all along the shore, and she collected each one, shaking out the sand and debris and little perturbed creatures before placing it in the basket.

The sand was soft and sodden between her toes. She jumped when an irate sandcrab nipped her foot before digging in deeper. Most of the little crabs scattered and scuttled and burrowed before she reached them. Later, when the tide had withdrawn, the shore would teem with gulls, squawking and fighting over the same scurrying snacks. Yet there would be new ones tomorrow, just one more of life’s mysteries.

After walking awhile, she climbed to the top of the ridge and surveyed the village, concentrating on the figures there, forcing the ocean’s call out of her head.

Moving her way were the usual group of women collecting seaweed. She spotted Kusahema and headed down the slope to their beach. Kusahema was married now, and pregnant.

When they were face-to-face, Kusahema smiled and held out her basket, and Leodora took all the strands of seaweed she’d collected and gave them to her.

“I liked your shadows the other night,” said Kusahema. “They were very funny.”

Leodora closed her eyes and bowed her head in thanks. Then she reached out and placed her hand on Kusahema’s protruding belly. “Will it be today, do you think?”

“Only the ocean can know,” came the ritual reply. Both the touch and the interchange were considered propitious. They grinned at each other, but then Kusahema’s smile faltered and she took her basket and moved on.

As recently as two years ago they had been close friends, sometimes swimming together. But as Kusahema became nubile, her family had forced her to withdraw her affection and cease meeting her friend.

Only Tastion remained close now. And that, as she had suspected for some time, was due to motives of a different sort; and even he was betrothed, soon to be married. He still told her that he would run away with her, a plan they’d hatched when they were seven, but she knew it for an empty promise.

Soon her only connection to the village would be the shadowplays that she and Soter performed for them, and which by their very nature connected her with the spans—even though most of the tales they performed for Tenikemac were its own myths and legends.

She stood alone and watched Tastion and his father, the two of them looking like two versions of the same man. They unfurled their net and moved into the water. They even moved the same way. Tastion of course pretended not to see her, which he must, just as she could not stare directly at him for any length of time. She pretended to watch the crowd farther up the beach, and so happened to be staring at Koombrun when he suddenly lurched away from the crowd and grabbed hold of one of the nets. He was trying to help, desperate to take part in the ritual, to accompany the other men. Before he’d taken two steps, he’d put his foot through the weave and tripped himself. He sprawled onto his back and turned to get up. By then his mother had come forward, and she slapped him with a series of blows that had him cowering, ducking, crawling across the sand, his foot still stuck in the net. One of the other fishermen, Lemros, came to his rescue. The crowd was laughing, but Lemros calmly unsnagged the poor brute then, wedging himself between Koombrun and his mother, helped him to his feet.

Koombrun was a year older than Tastion, which meant he should have been riding dragons long ago. He was large and strong enough, but mentally feeble. He had always been. Even as a child he hadn’t been able to keep up with Leodora and her playmates, and none of them had treated him very kindly, something she regretted as she watched his mother attacking him. His deficiency would have been no more than a tragic burden upon the family, except that his father had drowned three years earlier. In any other family the son would have stepped in to do the father’s work, but Koombrun couldn’t be allowed to fish. She often heard him in the audience during shadowplays, his nasal bleating laughter drowning out other voices. He laughed at the obvious jokes, and sometimes added his voice to everyone else’s, as if he thought it wise to pretend to understand. As if they would accept him if he did.

The village made sure that he and his mother were looked after, of course, but this came with a price for her—always to be humbled, humiliated, dependent upon others. No one else had come forward to marry her. No one would. No one wanted Koombrun in their family, and his mother would never have another child. So she punished him for all the things he couldn’t control or comprehend. For being different. Leodora sympathized with his plight. It wasn’t that much different from her own.

She stood on the beach and watched until Tastion was gone from sight. He would likely be out all day, for he and his father fished farther out than many of the others. Where they went and how they found their way back on the vast and featureless sea was a mystery to her, and even though Tastion had tried to explain it to her, she didn’t understand. All she knew for certain about fishing was that she was forbidden to do it.

Later that afternoon, after dressing in clothes uncontaminated by blood, she emerged from the boathouse to find Soter awaiting her outside.

He observed her sternly, his expression grave, although she couldn’t think of anything she had done to warrant it. Maybe, she thought, he was unhappy that he was sober. Then he turned sharply, commanding her: “Follow.”

She smiled to herself as she obeyed. The imperious stride was all too familiar. Today Soter was acting the sage, the teacher, the wise old man whose pupil was a source of constant disappointment. She knew his roles: They had little to do with her, everything to do with him.

Where most people she knew were recognizably constant, Soter comprised a collection of posturings, guises, a composite of masks, so many that she had no idea if any one of them had ever been the true Soter, or if there had never been anything but masks.

He marched her across the island to his hut. They passed Gousier’s asymmetrical house and outbuildings, where the smell of Dymphana’s white root pie filled the air. Where the path split, they went right, away from the cavern, away from the trail to Ningle.

Soter made a show of sidestepping a large tree root that snaked out of the ground in the middle of the path. His dodging it reminded her of the night he’d fallen over it: less than a year ago, after he’d performed for the villagers without her and gotten roaring drunk as well. She had heard him yelling and careering through the woods with the two undaya cases and stole out to see what he was doing. He had tripped across that root and crashed to the ground, the cases landing atop him. She arrived in time to see two village elders, fairly pickled themselves, drag him to his feet. He was weeping, blubbering incoherently, and not at the two men but as if he were alone. The villagers took him by the arms and carried him and the cases the rest of the way to his hut. His behavior was so peculiar that she had followed along behind them. As the elders returned, she had ducked into the shadows. Passing close by, one of them told the other, “He’s ashamed to be alive.”

She glanced now at the scaly back of his head and wondered if that was true. Why had he fallen to weeping that night? Ashamed to be found so drunk? But he was drunk so often. It wasn’t something she could ask him about.

His hut stood hidden among an overgrown mass of vines and weeds so thick that only the glinting hexagons of the windows hinted at its presence. The roof had been rethatched not so long ago, and thick new windows added, bought from a Ningle glazier; but an ancient smell of charred, smoked fish remained. Even the fermenting vats behind the hut couldn’t obliterate it entirely.

He’d set up the booth against the back wall. Because of the smallness of the hut, it was only half as deep as a real booth. There was no room for an accompanist.

Within the curtains, on top of the undaya cases, Soter had laid out six puppets for her. He pushed into the confines behind her, moving to the side to watch as she considered the figures. Leodora knew every story Soter knew. His tests now probed whether or not she could formulate what specific tale or tales he expected her to perform based solely on which figures he’d selected. He was adamant that she be able to carry every single story and all of its nuances in her head; that she be able to take any elements and weave a performance from them.

“There are only a handful of true stories,” he said so often that she could parrot his exact emphasis. “The rest are simply embellishments, or reconstructions. Variations, my girl. When you walk the spans you’ll hear a thousand versions of the same story. Some are dark, others light. Tales get rewritten to suit people and place. What’s beheld as divine wisdom on one span will be mythic farce on another, with nary a word dividing the two. All depends on what is believed. I’ve seen stories revised from top to bottom, too, after the gods have sent something down to a Dragon Bowl. That one about the girl made of wood who receives a magic visit from an Edgeworld god who sends her off to find a prince and her wedding—well, it was once someone much lower than a god who granted her wishes, some local spirit somewhere. After a while that local spirit wasn’t recollected anymore and got replaced. Stories, you see, are alive, or else not worth the telling.”

As to which tales might be originals, she didn’t know. Perhaps everything was embellishment. Was the simplest the more fundamental? Or just a true tale stripped of true meaning? In the end she had stopped fretting over it. It was no more important than knowing on which span the story had begun. She was expected to know every one of them, regardless of their origin.

She now considered the puppets Soter had laid out for her on the case: the orange figure that was sometimes a beggar but most often a thief, a pair of winged dragons, a maiden, an emperor, an assortment of tiny weapons, two guards, a young man, and an old man. Soter had fitted a straight wand in the old man’s hand. From that she knew he was a wizard. Last of all was the resplendent figure of the handsome suitor.

The key object was missing, however. He had withheld it on purpose to challenge her. She smiled to herself for having recognized this, too. “It’s the tale of the Druid’s Egg,” she announced authoritatively.

Soter rocked on his heels. “You are positive?”

“Yes,” she replied, concealing the doubt his question let in. “But you have the title element.” She boldly held out her hand.

Soter’s gaze fastened on hers. “How did you identify the tale if I have the key?”

“The thief figure is also the beggar figure, so his limbs are detachable. In the Druid’s Egg tale the thief isn’t swift enough to steal the egg without being bitten by one of the twin serpents who hold the egg aloft, and he loses an arm to its venom. The old man is the wizard with the magic wand. He transforms himself into the handsome suitor to capture the heart of the princess, who is the true love of the thief. She’s the reason he stole the egg in the first place—to have her for a wife. The wizard wants her because he wants to rule the kingdom. He wants power. The thief fears she won’t want him with one arm, and so—”

“Enough! Here!” He handed her the prop of the translucent golden egg. “Show. Don’t tell.” Then he collected the figures of the guards and the emperor.

“Wait! I need them. How can I tell it right?”

As if the question were superfluous, he answered, “Improvise.” He pushed apart the drapery and left the booth.

The lantern was already lighted. She had only to rotate it to cast its beam upon the taut white silk screen. Beneath the screen was a narrow shelf. A groove ran the length of it.

She brought the figure of the wizard to the screen. Normally the trappings of a set would have been hooked in place around the puppet. But Soter forced her to rely on storytelling alone to convey situations.

It was theater without a stage.

She picked up her story: “The wizard disguised himself as a physician, and gained admittance to the palace in that form, taking a small room that overlooked the city. There he performed his dark arts. He used his powers to discover every suitor the princess had, worthy or not. He saw the thief’s passion for her. That was why the wizard, in the guise of the good doctor, had sent him on the impossible quest for the Druid’s Egg—for with that prize and his knowledge of how to unlock it, the wizard would gain remarkable powers, and as a reward would give the girl to the thief, after first stealing her love for himself.

“Other, more suitable if simpleminded suitors, he plagued with easy magics so that they would never arrive in the city at all. Some lost their bearings and wandered into other spans. Some fell in love with barmaids, hags, or even their animals.”

By rotating the puppet’s arm she made the wizard’s shadow sweep the wand above his head. At the same time she spun the lantern, and its light flashed and flickered, white and red, as the different lenses splashed the silk.

“Now he was unopposed for her hand. There remained but a final act to secure her. He must hide his true unwholesome nature.”

She caught the lamp. It stopped with its red lens glowing upon the screen.

“With a blast of magic he transformed himself.”

She gave the lantern a gentle twist. The red light slowly slid to the right, replaced by darkness—the blank side of the lamp. Then the dark, too, was pushed aside by the light of the clear lens. But in the instant that darkness covered the screen, she deftly swapped the old wizard’s figure for the young suitor, carefully fiddling the rods to keep the suitor’s arms in the same position as the wizard’s.

“He became the handsomest man in the world.”

She heard Soter’s grunt of approval. It was her embellishment of the text to make him not merely handsome, but the handsomest.

“Transformed, he paused to consider himself in a mirror.” The suitor touched his face, ran his hands down his sides, then held them up to look at them. “He was pleased with his handiwork. His power remained undiminished. No one could refuse him!”

The next scene she could not fully perform without the puppets Soter had withheld.

“He went before the emperor as if just arrived from another span. He bowed with a deep respect that he felt not at all, and then asked to be considered as a son-in-law.”

The suitor knelt on one knee, bowed low, and finally lay prostrate, with his hands outstretched as if to plead with someone beyond the screen.

“His clever disguise protected him from an emperor who would have killed him for all the evil he had created in that kingdom and others.

“The emperor sent the new suitor to his daughter. She knew already that he was in the palace—word of him had reached her through her servants. Now, with her chaperone behind the nearest curtain, she met the suitor. His face did take her breath away. He was smooth in every nuance. Calculated in every implied invitation.”

The princess, dressed in a purple gown, extended a hand; he kissed her, bowing. His gestures were graceful, and each one ended with the slightest pull, drawing the girl slowly across the screen, nearer with each flourish until she almost touched him. Then he reached out behind her, and his hand wove magic knots in the air.

“Soon the princess was caught in his spell. With a flick of the wrist, he put the chaperone to sleep behind her drapery. Then he was alone with his prize.”

The suitor stepped back. He touched the princess’s shoulder and swept her clothing away. The diaphanous purple gown caught on the puppet’s sharp fingertip, lifting off the tiny pin that had held it in place on her figure. It dropped from the screen onto the small shelf below.

Leodora thought she heard Soter stifle a gasp, even though he knew that Bardsham’s princess was designed for this shocking moment. The stripping and the presentation of the rape of the princess were Bardsham’s embellishments. No one else had ever performed it this way. No one else had ever constructed a puppet whose clothing could be torn away.

She stood revealed in all her translucent nakedness. The sharp nipples of her breasts, even the dark thatch in the meeting of her thighs, were plainly visible. In a full rendition of the story, the audience had heard her speak by now and had come to know her with affection, and often a cry of alarm accompanied the moment, protests of outrage ringing out as though a real girl had been stripped bare by the fiend.

The suitor glided up against her and pushed her roughly down. She vanished below the screen. The suitor lay on top of her. The top of him became the bottom line of the screen. Slowly his body began to move back and forth, telling the story in agonizing silence. The figures sank from sight while the red of the lantern passed harsh judgment upon the scene.

“What has happened to the poor thief meanwhile? Sent out by the wizard, he has lost his left arm and very nearly his life to the dragon’s venom. More than this, he has lost his hope. What princess will have a poor man consigned now to a life of begging?—for no other fate can await him. The egg is just an egg. He can find no power there. The thief’s quest is ended. He has no power to win the affections of so beautiful a creature as the princess; the kindly doctor who sent him will dismiss the trophy, claim that he took it from some huge bird, a roc perhaps, but not from the deadly serpents. He sees now that his dream has been pure folly. He would only want her if she wanted him; and what ever made him believe she would?

“He will, he decides, complete his task and afterward climb all the way to the top of the highest minaret and throw himself to his death.

“Outside the palace, he stood for a long time beneath the window of his beloved. He set his resolve to see her one last time, that her image might be with him when he died.”

The thief began his climb. But the same vines that had carried him before were not so navigable with only one arm. He lumbered clumsily up to the balcony of his beloved, but saw nothing from the ledge. She was not there. The puppet hung his head.

“Fate was cruel today, he thought.”

He continued with less enthusiasm on toward the higher apartment of the doctor, to bid him farewell. Whatever else, he was honorable, and he would leave the egg there as he’d promised.

As she moved the puppet’s limbs with one hand, Leodora steadily lowered the vertical cutout of the vines beside him to create the illusion that he was climbing ever higher. The cutout folded in places so that it stacked neatly on the shelf as she drew it down.

“He hadn’t climbed far when his hand slipped for a moment and he twisted and grabbed a branch to save himself; but the violent movement caused the magic egg to fall from his pouch. Certain it would shatter, he dove to catch it before it struck the tiles on the princess’s balcony below. If he’d had both hands, he might have reached it, but with only the one he couldn’t. His fingers just brushed their target, and the egg hit the floor. The thief tucked his head and rolled as best he could to protect himself. It was not a long fall, but without his other arm to absorb the blow he struck the floor hard, bounced, and then lay there dazed.

“He sat up, horrified to be on this of all balconies. But it seemed that no one had heard him fall. The curtains remained drawn.

“He turned to snatch the egg and found it beside him, split in two. A fiery glow emerged from within each half.”

Leodora nimbly separated the two rods controlling the prop egg she had.

“The glow poured over him and through him. He felt as though he were the sun, burning.”

She took hold of the lanyard that secured the lantern and lowered it until its red lens was aimed straight through the translucent puppet. The skeletal structure etched lightly into the taut skins caught the light, gaining emphasis. His body seemed to have become glass. She pulled on the lanyard, raising the lantern again. The thief stood up. And now—for all eyes would follow the light as it moved—he had two arms again. The new one she had hooked into place as she pulled the rope past the screen and secured it below. The thief stood and marveled at his two hands, then danced a little jig of joy.

“He looked to the skies and thanked the gods for his good fortune. No one had seen him yet, so he fitted the two halves of the egg back together and prepared to leave. But at that moment he heard a noise, a terrible moan, emerge from beyond the curtains that closed off the balcony. His curiosity and his desire held him there. He crept across and ever so carefully parted the curtains.

“He beheld a horrible sight. His princess, the jewel of his life, lay naked and ravished. A handsome figure climbing off her turned to close its robes, faced him, and started as their eyes met. That moment seemed to last an eternity.”

The handsome suitor edged back from the princess. Her figure lay just visible, propped in place at the bottom of the screen by its rods, secured in the groove of the shelf below. The suitor suddenly sprang off screen.

“‘Guards! Guards!’ the magician cried. ‘Come quickly—a thief has broken in and attacked the princess!’ Never for a second did he imagine that the thief had succeeded in carrying out his mission. No one had ever met the twin dragons and lived. The wizard assumed that the thief had never really gone at all or had given up, as anyone else would have done. As he would have done. The plan fixed itself even as he cried out. The unconscious chaperone behind the curtain—the thief had struck her and hidden himself there. As for the girl, the wizard would magnanimously offer to marry her, thus securing her father’s eternal debt. The rape would remain a secret between them. The thief would be executed before day’s end, the shamed girl reduced to his docile slave. It was all too perfect, even better than his original plan.”

Leodora had no guards to bring onto the scene. But she did have their pikes among the weapons Soter had given her. The suitor’s figure she locked in place for a moment by setting its control rods in the grooved shelf. Then she picked up two pikes and leaned them in from the side, one above the other.

“The guards entered. The suitor thrust a finger at the thief. ‘There he is. Look at what he’s done!’”

She drew the suitor’s figure back slightly from the screen so that his shadow swelled in size while the thief leapt into motion.

“‘No!’ cried the young thief. ‘I didn’t do this—he did. I was climbing up the vines outside to fulfill my pact with the good physician who dwells higher up, but I fell onto the balcony trying to catch this!’”

He lifted into view the golden Druid’s Egg. Leodora swung down the lantern again and spun it red at the same moment that, with her pinkie, she coaxed apart the rods of the egg, splitting it open.

“‘Aiiieeee, I’m undone!’ cried the suitor. He tried to grab the egg, but the thief hopped back. The wizard stood trapped between the thief and the guards he had called. He quailed at the power of the egg. Its power would defeat any enemy—and most certainly he was the enemy of this thief. Even if the thief didn’t realize it, the egg knew.”

She gave the lantern a spin so that light became stars became red became darkness; and in that precise instant of darkness, she switched the suitor with the sharp-featured wizard.

“Helpless, the wizard watched himself transform, and in terror he ran to escape the deadly influence of the egg, ran blindly for the door—his only thought to get away from that hellish glow. But the guards reacted as guards should and lowered their pikes. They impaled the evil man.”

The pikes slid behind the wizard’s torso. She brought her middle finger to her thumb, and the figure doubled over. The pikes lifted him into the air.

“The thief knelt beside his beloved. The Druid’s Egg shone upon her. She stirred, awakened, to find herself clothed in light. A total stranger was at her side, and her wicked seducer was dead upon the pikes of her guards.”

The princess got to her feet, her body trembling. The young thief rose also.

“‘Who are you?’ she asked.”

The thief lowered his head.

“‘I’m no one. Just a common thief.’

“‘How can you say that when you have saved me?’ she replied.

“‘I saved one for whom I would willingly perish.’

“‘Don’t say such things. How could you feel that way for me when we have never met?’

“‘I could. I do. I can’t help it. But I must go now before your father finds me here. I don’t belong here.’

“‘Then take me with you.’

“‘How can I?’

“‘If you go, then I no longer belong here, either.’

“‘Oh,’ said he. ‘In that case, how can I not?’”

The princess reached to him, and he took her hand. The two shadow figures embraced in a long, lingering kiss. The egg slipped from the thief’s other hand and cracked open at his feet. The screen turned red with its light, and then, as Leodora unlooped and let slide the lanyard, the red light sank like an evening sun, taking all shadows with it. When it was below the silk screen, she blew out the light.

Outside the booth the room might have been empty, it was so quiet. She set down the figures, stood and stretched, then stepped through the curtain.

Soter seemed to gape at her, as if she were something he had never seen before. She swelled with triumph before he regained himself: His look clouded, became critical, and he said, “That’s not the way the tale ends. The emperor arrives, discovers what has happened, and gives the boy everything—the keys to his kingdom, his daughter, wealth.”

Leodora smarted at the criticism. She would not be robbed of her glory. “Improvise, someone said to me. Tales get rewritten—who told me that not an hour past? Who stole the figure of the king?”

Soter waved his hand, dismissing each point, but finding no way to contradict her. He gave a nervous laugh and tried to shift the discussion away from her objections. “Now, no matter, you did a truly fine job. A most worthy attempt in fact—”

“Attempt! Confess it, I took your breath away!”

“No, no, I’m sorry, never happened. You’re certainly getting there, but you are still a little clumsy with one thing or another—not very much, you understand, but there is always room for improvement. Those vines, not smooth enough. You are…coming along quite nicely, Leodora.”

“I’m ready,” she said with iron.

“Well, my girl, of course you want to be ready. You entertain me well enough, and the native islanders. But who are they? A far distant and less discerning cousin to the audiences on the spans. You cannot trust their simple approbation. No, no. Not reliable.”

She glared at him.

“Oh, I think, another year, perhaps. Possibly two?” He smiled like an uncle full of deep concern for her well-being—it was exactly the smile her own uncle had been giving her the past few days. It was not a look she trusted. It masked something else, something that did not have her well-being at heart.

Enraged by his false kindness, she kicked aside a stool and stormed across the hut.

“Now, Leodora,” Soter called. The voice of appeasement, another mask. She would have exited without a word if he hadn’t spoken.

She whirled about. “You pull off the role of the forgetful fool much better when you’re in your cups, old man. In fact, if you’re so stupid as to say, Oh, just two more years, my girl, you’d best be drunk. At least you’ll have an excuse for lying. Go ahead, pretend you can’t see! But I know. Understand? I know. I’m better than you say. I’m better than you can do yourself. I’m better than Bardsham!”

She flung his door out of her way.

Soter sagged in the chair where he had watched her performance. He sighed once, long and deep, as if he might expel all the air in his lungs. He hunched forward and picked up the puppet king. After staring it in the face for a long still moment, he began to roll the main rod loosely between his thumb and fingers. The puppet gyred to and fro, unable to settle on a direction. Its clattering arms swung loosely, embracing nothing.

“Back then she was only a child,” he said, as if responding to someone else in the empty room. “Of course I didn’t worry where it would lead. Why should I? Who knew what skills she had—or that she would even care.” He glanced up with a sickly grin, eyes focused on a point in front of him. “That’s right. Berate me for it now. You didn’t step in then, did you? You could have manifested, objected. Don’t set her on this path, Soter, you could have said. Did you? No.”

He dropped the puppet and picked up a clay jug from the floor beside the overturned stool. He took a long anxious drink, but even before he’d finished, his worried eyes opened, focused again upon something before him, and began tracking it. Whatever he followed, it was invisible to Leodora from her position outside his window. She’d come back with the intention of apologizing, provided that she could make him confess the truth about her abilities. She’d only meant to watch for the most propitious moment to make an entrance, and instead here he was engaged in a conversation.

Except no one else was there.

Soter’s hands trembled as he put down the jug. “Look,” he said, wiping his palm across his mouth, “I saved the child, didn’t I? Brought her back here. That ought to have been enough for you. After all, you owned my life, didn’t you? Had me in thrall, didn’t you? Used me any way that suited the moment. You think just because I was in the thick of it that I didn’t know the situation? Think I would have left her to the mercies of the spans if I’d known? You don’t understand devotion and never did—and you all moon-eyed and weepy with it yourself. For all that you could bedazzle your innumerable lovers, you never expected that hollow heart of yours might fill up, did you?”

He paused, head tilted, as if listening, then abruptly shook his head. “Ridden by your own demons? Oh, and so many of them, too, love. You could wrap anyone around your nimble fingers. And still you don’t ken how you can be enslaved and not be able to do anything but submit. Can’t imagine being on that end of it, even now and it’s over and you’re dead. But you were. You were. Don’t try to deny it to me. I was there!”

He flashed his teeth, shook his head, then seemed to perceive something else.

“Oh, I meant nothing. I was convenient. Just part of the troupe, easy to replace. Get rid of Soter, he’s becoming a nuisance, I don’t like the way he looks at me. Think I didn’t overhear that speech? Oh, the calumny I bore. Don’t you come floating in here this late with your demands, either. You’ve no claims on me. I protected your daughter from the darkness, you poxy…” He swung up the jug, swiped at the air. The jug, encountering nothing, spun him about. “Away! Away all dead plagues. You unrepentant ghosts—go back to the dark spans and the seabeds where you belong! I banish you! Begone!” As though sensing someone now at his back, he swung around, wielding the jug like a club. “I rescued her!” It was a broken cry, terrifying to hear.

He turned again, shoulders hunched, his head twisting with a canny look. Instinctively Leodora drew back into the shadows. When she peered at him again he had righted the overturned stool and sat down. The jug dangled from his hand. “No,” he said, “you’re wrong. That’s all I’m doing, it is. I’m keeping her from that danger. She’s safe down here on Bouyan. We’re all safe down here. No one comes looking nor ever will. A little lie keeps her safe, and when did the truth ever help us, heh? We were liars for a living. No. Better to be safe…down here on Bouyan.”

His head sank on his chest. He wasn’t asleep, nor could he be this easily drunk. It was more the position of someone dreading to see anything other than the floor before him. The boasting, besotted Soter had withered before her eyes into a spindly, tremulous thing. Rickety with age. An old man.

Leodora squatted awhile longer beside the window, her brain full of portentous imaginings. Had he been railing at her mother? He had been in love with her mother, and her mother, jealous of his influence over Bardsham, had tried to get rid of him—that was how it sounded. She couldn’t accept that there were real ghosts here. If her mother’s spirit truly roamed abroad on this isle, she would know it, wouldn’t she? She would have encountered it herself in all the places she shared with her mother’s past. Her mother could not come back without appearing to her. But then, could guilt and shame become so manifest as this—that Soter would punish himself with terrible visions and memories? Could guilt take such form?

He had rescued her, he said, but from what? Why were they—all of them, he’d said—in hiding?

She thought that he was spent, and she started to slide carefully away through the tangle of branches, when suddenly he spoke one last time, in a tone of abject defeat: “All right, all right. If the time comes, I swear. I promise. Yes. But not now. Please, not yet. Ask me later, can’t you? Let me get used to the idea awhile.”

She waited, crouching, holding her breath, straining as if she might hear the phantom answer. There was nothing but a final sobbing breath from Soter.

He sat on the floor, head bowed, his arms wrapped around the jug protectively. When he said nothing further, she withdrew.

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.