food for a pastry that had caught his eye. “The burning question addressed to both of us is always, How is it done? Your craft looks like magic to we who lack the talent, exactly as my conjecture from observation looks like magic to those who don’t notice how it’s brought off.” He waved his treat in the air. “Of course no one sees the hours of practice, trial, and error that go into the final performance, hey? They see only the culmination. The rest can but be inferred . . . can be nothing else, just as all of our citizens hear my judgments but cannot discern to what extent I have anguished over them, weighed discourse and debate to arrive at my answer.”
Behind him Orinda was covering a smile. His servants were looking mildly embarrassed, too. Leodora intuited that, whatever the topic, he invariably brought the focus back to himself. She took a seat.
“The interdict on performance must have been a terrible burden, then,” she said.
“Ah, before my time, that, and enacted by a body of jurists in any case. Mind you, I was on hand to witness the blighting itself.”
“You saw it?”
His eyes looked inward for a moment, and he shuddered at the memory. “I was standing in the doorway of my house, no farther from Tophet than you are from the end of the room right now. I remember him huge and bright.”
Tophet—it was a word the pendant had spoken. So it was a name. “Who was he?”
“A fiend. Tophet the Destroyer, the god who drinks life. He came from the other side of the world—at least that’s what my father said. From a part of Shadowbridge where death reigns. He has drained the life from whole chains of spans, drunk their lives.”
“Bright,” she repeated. The image of him conjured by the governor was nothing like bright.
“Oh, yes,” said the governor. “So bright that you couldn’t look at his face, couldn’t make out his features at all, as if his face was a great shining mask of metal lit by the sun. And the blight, now, that unfolded in front of me. It literally spread along the street right before my doorway. The stones crumbling, the figs on the trees shriveling up, the people . . .” He closed his eyes. “Had I stepped out into the street for a better look, I would have been turned to stone along with them. That is how those distant spans died. He simply willed it and it was so.”
Leodora thought of Meg, pointing to the statue behind her: That’s me dad. She imagined him, below the street, oblivious to the events above, to the decay sweeping inexorably toward him. Did he realize at the last moment? She doubted it. His petrified pose was of someone reaching to take hold of something. Life had changed that fast. It did, after all, didn’t it? Outside of stories. Stories always painted the bigger pictures, showed you the terrible transformation approaching so that you, watching, listening, knew what was coming. It was more compelling that way, more horrible, really. People in the audience had been known to stand up and cry out warnings to characters—to the little thief in the Griffin’s Egg tale, to the vagabond who spent the night with the woman known as the Fatal Bride. They knew what the characters, embedded in the story like insects in amber, could not perceive.
She realized that she had been sitting in silence too long. She said to the governor, “It must have been very hard for you, then, to reverse the ban.”
“Indeed. The memory of that day haunts me still. But Tophet never returned. Neither he nor any of his ghoulish Agents has been seen since that day. Nor is the cause of his wrath present among us any longer.”
It took her a moment to realize that he was referring to her father.
“Still, yes, difficult,” he said. “I had to wrestle with the question of what was best for us all. All of Colemaigne. I decided that we’d hidden in the grayness of fear long enough.” He beamed at her again. “And now that I’ve witnessed your art, I know I chose right. So please, no more darkening the night with reflections of the Destroyer. Come, sit, and tell me how many stories you know. That is the real secret everyone wants to hear.”
For the second show Leodora and Glaise propped Diverus into a sitting position, handed him the shawm, and hoped