Leave and you will be an oathbreaker. You wouldn’t dare.’
Lysandor sent out his final message so furiously that we all heard it inside our heads. Anywhere but here. Any fate but you.
Celeste burst into blood-stained owls and flew away down the canal. Lysandor turned and ran after her.
We never saw them again.
Lysandor had left me a legacy. I didn’t discover it until I returned to my cupola in Priest’s cathedral. A familiar carved chest lay at the foot of my bed. Saturn’s chest.
I opened it slowly, breathing in the smell of sandalwood shavings and linen. Saturn’s clothes. I pulled out fine white cambric shirts, silk cravats, waistcoats and coats and breeches. A pair of boots that would never fit me, but the rest … A top hat, carefully cushioned by the other garments. A fob watch made of actual clockwork — a rarity in Aufleur, where mechanism was banned. Several volumes filled with sketches and tiny, perfect handwriting. Then, in a compartment right at the bottom of it all …
Gold ducs. Hundreds of them. More money than I had ever seen. No wonder his Lordship had thrown so much at the stagemaster so long ago.
There was a key in there, wrapped in a note in Lysandor’s handwriting. This opens a security box at the temple of Juno Moneta. We’ve taken our share, but Celeste says Saturn would want you to have the rest.
Then a line written in an unfamiliar hand that must have been Celeste’s: Saturn said once that we had taken you away from your people and someday we would have to give you back. It’s your choice now, Poet. Stay, or go. But remember who you are.
It was several market-nines before I got away from the Arches during daylight for long enough to visit my new security box. There was more gold there, stacked in so deep I could hardly see the end of it, and ownership papers not only to the Vittorina Royale but to the Mermaid Revue. Sheaves of paperwork. The company would have gone bust years ago, but Saturn had kept on supporting them, propping them up. A strange sort of loyalty to the theatre he had turned upside down for the sake of a failed Saturnalia gift to the woman he loved.
Saints, he was still paying their wages. The bill was regularly siphoned out of this security box, despite the fact that the man who’d owned it was years dead.
The theatre wasn’t my life any more. My life was fighting the sky, serving Priest, keeping Garnet sane. I had nothing else; needed nothing else. My voice was a conduit for animor; my performances for a private audience only. Tasha and Saturn and Lysandor were gone, but I still had Ashiol and Livilla. My Lord Priest. Garnet, Garnet, Garnet.
I took the papers home, hid the key, ignored it beautifully for a month or two. But when the end of the year came around, I dressed myself in Saturn’s best suit and boots and hat, tucked his pocket watch inside my coat, and took myself to the Vittorina Royale to see their Saturnalia revue.
It was going to be so easy. I would hand the ownership papers and the key to the account to the stagemaster. I would make a gift of the theatre to the company that had once been my own; my best, my brightest, home. All in all, it was an excellent plan.
Their columbines were sloppy, their costumes ragged, their pantomime recycled and creaking at the edges. It was the worst performance I had ever seen. The cabaret of monsters was slapdash, and the harlequinade was a joke. I recognised few faces among the masks, the tumblers, the songbirds or the columbines. They had no stellar, and no one that I could see stood out as being worthy of that name.
Afterwards, I slipped backstage, past the spruikers and crew and up to the stagemaster’s office. The smell of cheap imperium hit me before I’d even opened the door. The stagemaster lay drunk on the desk, snoring.
The office was exactly the same, though there were no posters on the walls with sketches of the current troupe. He was surrounded by ghosts of the past, beautifully inked and lettered and frozen in time. He hadn’t bothered to watch the show. Why should he? They had been poor once, but honest, and there had been a greatness about them. Now they had nothing to believe in, nowhere to go. No one to lead them. The old man