accepted it . . . She could have taken my life, he thought. If I’d agreed, she could have taken it easily.
The desire to follow his mother into oblivion, which had been his unacknowledged companion since before he’d left the squalid undercity of Vijnagar, he now acknowledged and rejected. A threshold had been crossed, one he hadn’t known he had to cross. He was Diverus now, free and complete and self-aware. Because of her, his human goddess.
“Diverus, you terrify me!”
“I didn’t mean to. They were supposed to tell you where I was. Bois and Glaise.” Diverus had given out the treats he’d brought back. Soter had glowered at him, but Soter always glowered. Sober, he seemed to have no other expression these days. But it was Leodora who chided him.
They’d gone into the booth, and she was setting up for the next performance. She chided him because his absence meant she couldn’t be in the booth. She could no longer endure the space by herself. Alone.
He answered her charge by pointing out, “You go off all the time. You mount the span towers and overlook the bridge. You told me so. You hunt up stories. Why shouldn’t I be free to go off, too, if I want? I mean, I could have run off and not come back. I’m free to do that now.” He spoke the words of defiance as if surprised by them.
She set down the rod puppet of the fisherman, Chilingana, a figure from the second story she would perform today. “You know, you’re absolutely right. Don’t listen to me. I was worried, but Bois did explain they’d left you down at the waterside. It just, when you didn’t come back . . . well, I don’t know what I thought. That maybe you’d found the inverted span, that something had come out of the water and swallowed you, that you’d decided not to come back at all. All of those things, I guess. And how could I sit in here without you? If you’d never come back, we’d never have known what happened.” She drew a breath, dismissing her careworn expression. “All the same, you’re right. I suppose I cause Soter such terror every time I go off.”
“So now you appreciate how Soter feels?” he teased.
“Let’s not presume too much. I still mean to climb towers if I’m so inclined.” “This one will prove a strange journey. It’s inhabited. It’s like a great wide palace dividing the two spans.”
She was intrigued. “Did you have any luck finding it, the Pons Asinorum?”
“The what?”
“That’s what it’s called, according to the porters down below—the inverted span is known as Pons Asinorum. The Fool’s Bridge. Did you see it again?”
“No.” He sighed, then muttered, “Fool’s Bridge, that’s what it is all right. Bois and Glaise told me they knew where it was, but it turned out what they really meant was that they’d heard about it being there, or heard of it being seen from there. Or something. But there’s not even space for an underspan down there—no one’s living there like on Vijnagar. It was just arches to let boats pass through. I don’t see how the Pons . . .”
“Asinorum.”
“I don’t see how it could ever have appeared there. Besides, we saw it in the middle of the span, you and I, where the Dragon Bowl hangs.”
“I think it doesn’t appear in just one place,” she answered. “It seems to come and go.”
“Come and go,” he repeated as if that had some other meaning. Then he brightened. “You probably will want to see the street fair. Where I purchased the buns, there’s a fair, with all kinds of performers. Fortune-telling and sword swallowing and the like. A lot of them are different, not exactly human. It must be a good place to find more stories, with all those creatures.”
“We should go this afternoon. You can take me there.”
“I would like to, Leodora,” he said, and tensed up. She heard the peculiar notes in his words, too, and stared at him curiously. He blushed under her scrutiny, and abruptly concentrated on arranging his instruments in order, an act that both of them knew to be superfluous: When she told him what story she was performing, he would grab the appropriate instrument regardless of what lay nearest.
She gently placed her hand on his shoulder. He turned to her much too fast. His features were twisted in misery. Before she could ask what was wrong, he took her face in his