as we was thinking, though you somehow arrived at the right word anyway. Sometimes, boy . . . Diverus, you startle me.”
If Diverus caught the jibe, he showed no reaction. “I don’t mean to,” he said.
“Is that what you told your last owner before you ran off—I don’t mean to cause you trouble?”
“Stop it, Soter,” Leodora said.
“You doubted him the same,” he protested back.
“I was asking him to clarify, not belittling him.”
Soter made no reply, but finally shrugged off the criticism.
Softly, Diverus asked her, “Why don’t you ask your new counselor?”
“Ask it what?”
“About the name, what name you should use.”
She had laid the polished pendant aside while she ate, for all of them to see, but it hadn’t said a word nor even opened its eyes the whole time. Taking hold of the chain, she raised it in front of her, then turned the head so that it faced her. She wanted to ask it about the blight of Colemaigne, not about her name.
Soter pushed back his chair. “That’s right. Don’t listen to old Soter’s advice, but by all means get the contraption’s opinion. You will let me know what it says, won’t you, Lea.” He gave a polite nod to Orinda and the wooden men, and then marched off into the depths of the theater.
An uncomfortable silence ensued during which Leodora stared after him, Diverus stared at her, and Orinda looked at everything else.
Then the Brazen Head opened its eyes. “In answer to your principal question,” it said, “you can only continue to call yourself Jax.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You didn’t speak it, which is not the same thing.”
“Why must she call herself Jax?” Orinda asked. “She needs the reason.”
“It is the name the world knows. In time it will surpass that of Bardsham.”
“Please, don’t patronize me,” Leodora protested.
The lion looked as if it might just close its eyes again out of spite, but then it said, “Didn’t Bardsham’s name surpass that of Meersh?”
“But Meersh—”
“Meersh, Leodora, is as old as these spans and recognized by all of them.” And with that it did close its eyes, a plain and simple pendant once more.
“It sounded a little angry to me,” said Diverus.
“Testy,” Orinda observed.
Leodora sighed, “Wonderful. One Soter wasn’t enough.”
For an instant after she said that she saw the face of the other one again—the “Soter” from Edgeworld—before both image and memory collapsed, leaving her with a vague and disconnected sense of there being two realities in attendance, but one invisible and forever out of reach.
Carefully, Orinda told her, “I know you have differences with Soter, and I shouldn’t want to wade into the middle of that, but I must concur with him and with your remarkable adviser here. You have created a magical persona in Jax, and it is that which will be whispered and remembered. It also frees you to be yourself when you choose, to leave Jax on the stage, in the booth. In the boxes with the puppets.” The two wooden men nodded in agreement.
Leodora nearly confessed to her hostess that there was already someone in the boxes with the puppets—someone who manifested in her dreams to disturbing effect, as if a ghost watched her wherever she went, never revealing himself nor his desires concerning what she did. And yet it seemed this ghost waited for some particular event.
When she glanced down again, the pendant had opened its eyes anew. “Tophet,” it said. She had no idea what question she had asked this time, but the lion was already inanimate again.
Despite the quirky nature of her brazen counselor, later that morning Leodora wore the pendant as she and Diverus walked the crooked lanes of Colemaigne. It hung between her breasts, an insentient piece of brass.
Many of the lanes folded back upon themselves, cramped and dark. Already twice she had elected a narrow route out of a piazza only to find that they were returned to the starting point as if by magic. And twice, on the much wider, brighter boulevards decorated with fig trees, the two of them had come upon Bois—or was it Glaise?—pasting up posters announcing the premiere performance tonight of THE GIRL WHO HEALED COLEMAIGNE! This was the title conferred on her by Orinda and Soter after much debate, playing upon the obvious transformation of the span. The posters drew small crowds even as he was hanging them, and she was thankful that her image wasn’t on them.
The resurrected buildings lining the boulevard were perfect, glistening edifices, untouched by time, unworn and brightly colored, and