the corner of the room that they had been guarding.
He lay on the bed. The top of his head faced her, his thin hair pushed up by the pillow, and even from that view she recognized him.
Soter rested with his eyes closed and his breathing shallow.
“Oh, no,” she said, though she’d had sufficient warning to guess. “The fire?” she asked.
“No, dear heart,” Orinda replied. “He started the fire—in the hope of escaping.”
“Escaping. I don’t understand.”
“Who is that?” Soter asked. His voice creaked like dried-out leather.
“It’s me,” answered Leodora. She pushed around Orinda to circle the side of the bed.
Soter’s feeble gaze followed her. Tears ran from his eyes. “Oh, you’re all right then.”
She sat on the edge and reached to take his hand. She noticed only then that his arm, lying straight by his side atop the covers, was as chalky white as the Coral Man.
“I don’t understand,” she said again. “How did this happen in a few days? Where’s Diverus?”
“It’s not been a few days,” Orinda explained. “Before Diverus returned, a month passed. We’d exhausted every effort to find you. Bois and Glaise traveled to other spans, we’d interviewed the stilt walker you spoke to and the tunnel seigneur as well, who swore you’d never crossed from here to Sacbé. Hamen and Pelorie and the rest all scoured the piers to learn if a ship had sailed you away. There wasn’t a trace.”
“There wouldn’t have been. We didn’t tell anyone, we didn’t know we were going. But a month?”
“Diverus said the same—only a day to you,” Soter rasped, “an eternity to us.”
She looked from him to Orinda. “Where is Diverus?”
“My dear,” he said wearily, “you have to listen to me now.”
“First, tell me what’s happened to Diverus?”
“They took him.”
“Who did?”
“Soter.” Orinda said his name anxiously.
“Orinda, my time is short now whether I speak or not. Better that she know everything than wonder ever after.” His rheumy eyes met hers. “The truth was kept from you for your own good as well as mine. If you’d never wanted off that damnable isle—if you’d had Tastion and married and had babies and become part of their village . . . but I should have known that wouldn’t happen. Not with your family history. I cursed Gousier for all this, but maybe it had to be. You’d never have lived inside anybody’s proscriptions.”
“No, I wouldn’t, but—”
“Give us a drink then, and I’ll tell you what you need to know, everything of Bardsham and Leandra. And Diverus.”
There was a tray on the floor with a clay pitcher. She poured him a cup of wine. When he didn’t take it from her, she realized he couldn’t move the stony arm. She reached under his head and pulled him up enough to drink from the cup. As he tilted up, the cover slid down and she saw that the paleness of stone colored his chest, blending back to flesh just beneath the collarbone. The most important thing, Shumyzin had tried to tell her, so long ago atop the tower of another span that it seemed like a memory of a dream. The sun that gave him life had been pushed aside before he could finish. And here it was, the demigod’s petrifaction but a harbinger of this moment in time, like an echo thrown ahead of the sound that made it.
He drank and then pressed his head back. Seeing the look of despair and recognition in her eyes, he wheezed, “Hardly any of me left, is there? Another day in your Pons Asinorum, you’d have missed me altogether.” He smiled, as if acknowledging that his approaching death were mere japery. “Now listen,” he said, “and afterward you can hate me as you see fit.”
SOTER’S TALE
“I hated your mother, Leodora. I hated her and did all I could to be rid of her. That’s the truth and now there’s no point in keeping it from you. I’m your friend, whatever you may think. I’ve always looked out for you. Always, child. More’n your uncle ever did or would have done. But I believe I share with him that hatred for his sister.
“I’d had Bardsham to myself for so many years, you see. There were hundreds if not thousands of indiscretions, assignations, and peccadilloes in that time, on every span probably. Bardsham and women . . . you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him, scarred and rawboned as he was, but he had such charisma, such presence, that when he spoke to you, it was