He thought about that, about the pool, about her. It seemed a fine distinction that carried the same result. “If we’re safe from this battle here, then why shouldn’t we stay?”
“However long she remains, it won’t matter. Her enemy will devour steadily everything else, encroaching span by span, until all but this interstitial world is lost, and no one who leaves it will ever return. Then you are as prisoners of nonexistence.”
“How do we leave here, then?” he asked. “How do I convince her to go?”
The lion gave him a look as if it thought him imperceptive. “You seek escape from the wrong source, from inside their spell. Use your own formidable powers, Orfeo, if you want to change the script.” Then it closed its eyes and was silent.
The name it had spoken shook him to the bone. He slid from his crouch and as he sat, the chain of the necklace slipped through his fingers and the pendant clattered to the stones, and with it the second object, which he’d taken off her accidentally, the two cords intertwined. It lay in his lap but he was oblivious.
In all the time that had passed, he’d not heard that name—not since before she had been wrapped in her winding sheet and cast into the water, a corpse that had taken his identity with her, snatching away the self she had gifted him with but that he could not hold on to.
His true name had returned.
A tickle about her neck woke Leodora, fingers in her hair. She opened her eyes and his bottomless black ones were right beside her, watching as if Diverus could not see enough of her, as if even as she slept he had watched; and she was reminded of a time she had done the same beside him.
She could not be certain what it meant, his closeness. Was it in the aftermath of some welcomed intimacy? But no, she still wore the purple robe from the feast.
The feast.
Her mind tumbled with a riot of images drawn from all the stories she’d heard last night: the clever Green Snake swallowing its larger adversary, the boar, with jaws that hinged impossibly wide; the melancholy maiden who sacrificed her hands to save her father and nearly lost her whole body as well; the girl whose feet were snagged by a seemingly innocuous loaf of bread that dragged her down into an infernal underworld; the king who turned all that he loved into cold metal; the conniving girl who drowned her elder sister to gain her sister’s privilege only to have the sister’s ghost return and denounce her through the strings of a harp. These and more clamored for her attention, too many to contemplate but still not enough, never enough. Stories filled her and she hungered for more, and they had them all.
“Are we starting again?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied.
As she sat up, his fingers threaded through her hair, and her pendant slid into the front of her robe; its chain caught around the back of her neck. His hand withdrew.
“I’m going to perform with you this time,” he said. “Accompany you. I want to.”
“It’s my turn to tell them another then?”
“Your turn,” he agreed. Then after hesitating as though making up his mind, he added, “We’ll miss another day’s performances if we linger.” His eyes, almost sly, watched her.
“It’s only another day.” She would have missed a week, a month, if it meant more stories from these dark creatures.
He nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed something for him. “You’ll tell them to let me play this time, yes?” he requested.
“If you wish.” She rose and stepped over him, out the curtain and toward her passion.
Fire still burned in the feast pit beyond the columns and she started toward them without thought, drawn by what they promised. She looked at her palms, already imagining the flames dancing there, taking shape. They would want a story. Which one should she tell them? One they hadn’t told her. Turning back, she asked which he thought would be the best.
“Tell them of how the zmeu stole the sun and moon.”
“Isn’t that one they told me?”
“It won’t matter,” he promised, and she tried to understand that.
When she reached the fire, it was as if the feast had never stopped. All the people were still there. The king rose to greet her, and her attendants scampered out from behind the columns to assist her as if she were old and frail and