bed. Bois and Glaise. You know what he did to them. He could have destroyed the whole span, but gods are chimerical, who knows what—”
“He’s not a god,” Leodora scorned.
“Oh, Leodora, you don’t know, you haven’t faced him.”
“What god chases a mortal woman across the world?”
“In stories, girl—”
“Only in stories, Soter. Nowhere else.” She drew a deep breath. “What happened, then? What did she do? Did she give herself up?”
Soter tried to look her in the eye, to hold ground one final time against her ever-challenging sureness, but he finally lowered his gaze. Blanched tendrils crawled like worms up his neck as she awaited his answer. He squeezed his eyes against the pain. Tears leaked from the corners.
“No,” he said at last, then gasped a breath. “I gave Leandra up. Out of my own terror. I’m a coward, Leodora. I gave her to them. I betrayed everyone. I made up a story, led her outside, and they took her. She looked at me . . . like she’d foreseen it all and had already accepted it. Like she was forgiving me. That was worse—infinitely worse—than if she’d spat on me.”
“My father?”
“Asleep after his performance. Exhausted. By the time he came around, they were long gone, and there was Agents left behind to keep him from ever trying to leave Emeldora again. Two of them with another boat. He knew I’d been the one, sold him out. I couldn’t work up enough bile to lie to him. He made me swear to protect you, keep you away from them, keep you off the spans. Whatever happened, you were my responsibility from now on. Then we hatched a plan that used poor Grumelpyn as a decoy. We couldn’t tell him. Sent him down to our own little ship with one of the undaya cases. It was empty, but he didn’t know it. He was to make ready to sail back to Remorva. Of course those Agents went right after him. They must have tortured him awfully—Scratta said as much—but we’d told him nothing so he couldn’t tell them anything they wanted to know and I suppose they kept at him and at him, and meanwhile Bardsham had stolen their boat and gone after your mother. I never saw him again.
“Someone, a mangy fellow, recognized the undaya case quayside and brought it to me. The boat was gone, he said. I paid him and gave him some money to give Grumelpyn but for all I know he kept it or drank it and never even looked for Grumelpyn. For all I knew there was no Grumelpyn anymore anyway. I didn’t dare look for him myself. I had to look after you. If anything had happened to me, there was no one. I hid on Emeldora with you a full month before I bought a boat and sailed to Ningle. I knew that if either of them lived, your parents would know to find you on Bouyan. I buried my guilt, what I’d done, and it would have stayed buried but for your ambition and that damned coral ghoul Tastion found.”
“The Coral Man—”
“It’s your father, girl! Come back to haunt me, to plague me for all I did to him. To her!” He sobbed, and when he inhaled, his chest crackled and the tendrils slid into his jaw. “Oh, gods, it’s coming for me.”
Leodora pushed him back against the pillows. “Soter, the Coral Man isn’t Bardsham,” she said. “He’s not my father.”
He focused on her again. “What do you mean? Of course he is!”
“No. That’s your story, that you’ve told me now. The truth is, he’s part of another story, one that you stumbled into once and that I’ve now been given to know. But you have to tell me, where is Diverus?”
He shook his head, a gesture of pain and denial. “Gone. The Agents took him. Came for you and found him. He’s like your mother—he gave himself to them to save you, told them he was Jax.”
She clenched her jaw and doubled over, her head touching the cot. “Did they . . . did they do the same to him?”
“No,” he said. “Took him is all. They won’t harm him till they’re in front of Tophet. They acted as if they expected to find Bardsham in the booth.”
“How could they think that? They killed Bardsham.”
“I don’t know, Leodora. Maybe because they saw me. But they’ve found out about Leandra’s child, and they think Diverus is him. Is you. That’s why it was