“Just so. Then be warned that the thing that unites also divides.”
“No clearer, beast.”
“You stand on but one side of a reflection, yet exist on both sides together.”
“That’s no answer, either.”
“Perhaps, but it frames the most important question.” Then, infuriatingly, the lion waited for her prompt.
She withheld it as long as she could, but clearly the lion could outwait her. With a loud sigh, she said, “All right, what would the most important question be, then?”
Smiling, the lion answered: “From the other side, can you see yourself before your reflection? From the other side, does the mother see the daughter?”
“I don’t understand. Do you mean does my reflection see me? Or something else entirely? Who’s the mother?”
“It’s a question of time. Time—”
“—is that which ends,” she interjected angrily. “Yes, I know!”
The lion’s brow lowered. “Not what I was going to say at all.” His eyes closed, and he was inanimate once again.
“What were you going to say? Tell me!”
She shook the chain, but the lion didn’t wake. She had a petulant urge to fling it at the wall, to smash it. But destroying it was hardly the way to get what she wanted. It would gain her nothing.
“I’m sorry,” she told it. “I didn’t mean to be impolite. Really.” But of course she had; she’d responded as she would have with Soter. Unlike him, the pendant didn’t have to abide her rudeness.
She understood that it had told her the truth in its fashion, and that she had to decipher what it had said. The head would argue, of course, that it wasn’t being perversely elusive, it had to answer that way, just as she was compelled to prove her cleverness.
When she’d coaxed and cajoled further to no avail, she gave up and put the pendant back around her neck. Maybe it would wake again before she took it off for the next performance. For now the governor of Colemaigne awaited an audience with the redoubtable Jax and had been kept waiting long enough.
The huge table at the rear of the theater lay buried beneath silver trays, copper tureens, bottles, earthenware mugs, wicker platters, and assorted cutlery, all lit by a circle of tall candles and outside that circle another formed of servants. It was obvious the governor had brought his celebration with him. He sat at the far end of the feast. When Leodora entered the room, he looked to Orinda and asked, “Is it she?” and Orinda replied, “Yes,” and he rose, beaming, as if Leodora in her gray tunic were royalty herself. He wore a powdered wig cascading in ringlets, and an embroidered salmon-colored coat with silver buttons down the front.
“I marvel,” he said, “I marvel. The hands that work the rods.”
Leodora flushed and lowered her eyes, embarrassed and thrilled, but he wasn’t having any of her modesty. He came around the table and extended both his hands to take hers. His fingers flashed with a dozen rings. She obediently held hers out to him. He cupped them on his palms and then busied himself studying them; brushed his hands across her palms, felt her wrists, peered at her short nails. “Clearly, the hands of a young woman, so you are no ancient, accomplished crone in disguise. I can feel the strength here in the wrists, but truly the calluses at your fingertips offer the only definite clue to your craft.”
Orinda, looking amused, explained, “M’lord is a student of hands.”
“Palmistry, is it?” Soter guessed.
“Not at all,” replied the governor, keeping Leodora’s hands clasped in his. “Palmistry is absurd, mere physiognomy focused upon the hands. The idea that how you are shaped reveals your deep nature is ridiculous. Should we say that if you’d been born without hands you cannot live because you lack a lifeline or heartline to chart? Of course not.
“No, this is the art of observation. I look, I touch, I discover. It tells me what you do but it cannot tell me how well you do it, do you see? Your skill, that is not apparent beyond a certain equipoise, a balance to both hands. No, to know your skill I would have to see the performances themselves, which as it happens I’ve done now thrice. Your gifts, m’lady, are extraordinary and were I not chaste in my vows I would certainly chase you.”
“Thank you,” she said uncertainly.
He released her hands to roll up the sleeve of his coat so that he could reach across the mounds of