‘Jax’ all the time, why it had to be. You understand?”
“Where are the cases?”
“They took those, took his instruments. Everything.”
“Then the Coral Man’s on his way.” He stared at her without comprehension. “You and me,” she said, “we’ve become part of his story. It’s like Shadowbridge itself, Soter—yours, mine, Bardsham’s, Tophet’s, Orinda’s—all these stories, they’re all coiled together, braided.”
“No,” he said. “He came to me. He haunted me! Look what he did to my arm!” He lifted it to show her the sucker mark where the Coral Man had grabbed him, but the mark was gone.
She shook her head slowly. “Your guilt haunted you, that you’d tried to bury on Bouyan. When you returned to the tales to give them to me, I think you made it manifest. You’ve haunted yourself, Soter, all along. Back on the island, too. Those weren’t my parents’ ghosts. They were never there.”
Miserably, he looked up from his arm and stared at her. Then he began to cry, keening for the burden he’d carried for so long, which had made him mistreat Diverus and lie to her, and had twisted his every decency into an act of diversion and mendacity. He sobbed, and the anguish seemed to speed the effects of the jewel’s poison. The veins in his neck went powdery white. Suddenly he took one ragged breath and his back seemed to bow up. He looked at her with eyes that knew the time had come. “Forgive me, sweet child,” he said.
“Soter.” She fell across him. “You taught me everything,” she whispered to him.
He made a small dry sound, and it was as though the venom surged up into him. She felt the change and drew upright. The face below her was as blank and dead as Shumyzin’s at the top of a tower so long ago that it felt like years. Upon the bed lay a lifeless statue.
The Brazen Head opened its eyes, and softly it iterated, “Time is that which ends.”
She sat alone on top of the southern tower of Colemaigne. This one sported no statues, just the pennants seen from the street, hanging listless now. A storm had passed, its clouds scudding away across the sea in a single line, leaving her bathed in late-afternoon sunlight, all too reminiscent of Vijnagar where they’d all been alive, and surrounded by puddles of water. She knew she should go, but could not compel herself. Her thoughts churned through everything she’d shared with Soter—starting with all the tales she’d learned to perform, the people and traditions she’d defied on Bouyan; the gods and demigods who’d intervened along the way, and the avatars and tricksters she’d encountered; ending with the quiet musician she’d rescued from a randomly chosen paidika, who had now sacrificed himself for her. Closing her eyes, she could see Soter as he held up the figure of Meersh in his hut, dazzling her with the revelation of who her father had been and what powers might be hers. From then on, it was a jumble of events, disconnected and disparate, that had brought her here, and Diverus—what was Diverus? Did she love him? She wanted to but doubted the authenticity of her own feelings. What did she know of love, whose reliable examples were all from stories. Soter had perhaps loved her most, but he’d feuded with her at every turn, lied to her, tried to rein her in. It didn’t feel like love. Dymphana, she supposed, was a better model, but a surrogate one, and yoked to a bastard upon whom that tender word could not find purchase. Tastion? He’d been unable to distinguish love from lust. And what did Diverus have on his side of it? A mother he’d invented, conjuring her as a merwoman and a sphinx long after she was gone—fantastic illusions that couldn’t be credited. Not one reliable example between them, yet they proposed to love each other because they’d gone together to a place where the truth of the heart was revealed. He had acted on that to save her.
Soter had known Diverus loved her without the pool of true desire, because he’d recognized what he was jealous of. He’d seen Diverus look at her the way Bardsham had looked at her mother and had done everything he could to stamp out that passion before it caught fire. Soter had known so much and hidden so much more. In the end, he’d been protecting her from her own heart. Now that was over, the shield gone.