it all, his head tilted.
“So, you were doing well when Bardsham found you,” Orinda prompted.
“Oh, better than well.” He broke off speaking, his brow furrowed. When he focused on her again, it was with a suspicious look. “I’m wondering, as you’ve never said, there’s something I’m curious about.”
“What would that be?”
“Why is it that, if everyone else who crossed the bastard Chaos’s path was turned to stone, your two actors were only turned to wood and got to keep their lives?”
The question seemed to catch her entirely off guard, and a look of fear crossed her face before she regained her composure, forming a brittle smile as she tried to laugh away the question. “Why,” she said, “distance, I’m sure. Some fluke, some accident of his attentiveness.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think that’s likely, now, is it?” He sat up, now suddenly quite sober in his actions and his gaze. “Distance had nothing to do with it. People under the span were turned, too. Leodora saw them. There aren’t any others like your two anywhere hereabouts, are there? Tell me, do they wonder how it is they survived, Orinda?”
“What is wrong with you, Soter?”
“I’m cursed by the gods, just as I said. Here I was thinking from the moment you took us in that you and I might share a bed one night, that we two might find one another’s company . . . amicable. But my dearest Orinda, there’s a nagging question no one has ever answered.”
She cleared her throat. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.
“Who told Tophet the Destroyer where we had gone? The Agents did come after us, to Remorva and then straight on to Emeldora. I wonder, as I always have, who set them after us in the first place? A lot of spans out there, a lot of spirals unfolding across the sea. Scattered islands, too. We were lying low, and then hardly showing ourselves. But they reached Emeldora not four nights after we did. No happenstance that.”
“It must be,” she offered, “that they asked along the piers, asked the boatmen, who would have identified a group such as yours.”
“Boatmen along the pier would have had no cause to lie to them. But the Agents never came looking after Bardsham’s little girl. Didn’t know she existed. Wharf rats would have given her up, no reason not to. If they’d been asked. If there’d been a need to ask them. Someone who cared about the girl, though, might not have mentioned her, even to save two members of her own troupe.”
“Soter—”
He held up his hand to silence her. He was wincing, as if pained. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t look at her but off in the distance at some memory. He displayed his hand with its missing fingertips. “He could be very persuasive.”
“The Agents were going to kill them,” Orinda explained. “Both of them.”
“I’ve no doubt of it,” said Soter. “The wonder is, really, that once you’d told them what they wanted, Tophet didn’t kill ’em anyway.” A crash followed upon his words, from the rear of the theater. Bois stood there, his expression an admixture of horror and outrage. The faience amphora he’d been carrying lay shattered on the floor, broken blue glass and wine like pooling blood. He turned on his heel and vanished into the wings.
Orinda cried, “No, wait, Bois!” as she climbed to her feet. She gave Soter one final helpless glance before hurrying after the wooden man.
Soter sank into a heap on the settee. There was no triumph in the learning of Orinda’s complicity. His own overshadowed it completely.
“Cursed,” he repeated. “As if it matters anymore.”
Late into the night the storytelling unfolded. For every story Leodora told, she heard a dozen new ones from the people of Epama Epam. She learned of the Green Snake’s terrible revenge, of the Milkbird that fed the starving, of the Armless Maiden and her hands of silver, of so many more stories that Diverus lost count and the details bled together. Each one seemed to carry her farther away from the desire to leave this wonderful place. In return she told them the story of the Fatal Bride and then how Meersh had lost his toes. As with human audiences, these people championed Penis at the end of it, while the flames danced merrily across her palms. Eventually, she admitted that she was surfeited with stories and one more would make her explode. Besides, she was exhausted, and