know the situation? Think I would have left her to the mercies of the spans if I’d known? You don’t understand devotion and never did—and you all moon-eyed and weepy with it yourself. For all that you could bedazzle your innumerable lovers, you never expected that hollow heart of yours might fill up, did you?”
He paused, head tilted, as if listening, then abruptly shook his head. “Ridden by your own demons? Oh, and so many of them, too, love. You could wrap anyone around your nimble fingers. And still you don’t ken how you can be enslaved and not be able to do anything but submit. Can’t imagine being on that end of it, even now and it’s over and you’re dead. But you were. You were. Don’t try to deny it to me. I was there!”
He flashed his teeth, shook his head, then seemed to perceive something else.
“Oh, I meant nothing. I was convenient. Just part of the troupe, easy to replace. Get rid of Soter, he’s becoming a nuisance, I don’t like the way he looks at me. Think I didn’t overhear that speech? Oh, the calumny I bore. Don’t you come floating in here this late with your demands, either. You’ve no claims on me. I protected your daughter from the darkness, you poxy…” He swung up the jug, swiped at the air. The jug, encountering nothing, spun him about. “Away! Away all dead plagues. You unrepentant ghosts—go back to the dark spans and the seabeds where you belong! I banish you! Begone!” As though sensing someone now at his back, he swung around, wielding the jug like a club. “I rescued her!” It was a broken cry, terrifying to hear.
He turned again, shoulders hunched, his head twisting with a canny look. Instinctively Leodora drew back into the shadows. When she peered at him again he had righted the overturned stool and sat down. The jug dangled from his hand. “No,” he said, “you’re wrong. That’s all I’m doing, it is. I’m keeping her from that danger. She’s safe down here on Bouyan. We’re all safe down here. No one comes looking nor ever will. A little lie keeps her safe, and when did the truth ever help us, heh? We were liars for a living. No. Better to be safe…down here on Bouyan.”
His head sank on his chest. He wasn’t asleep, nor could he be this easily drunk. It was more the position of someone dreading to see anything other than the floor before him. The boasting, besotted Soter had withered before her eyes into a spindly, tremulous thing. Rickety with age. An old man.
Leodora squatted awhile longer beside the window, her brain full of portentous imaginings. Had he been railing at her mother? He had been in love with her mother, and her mother, jealous of his influence over Bardsham, had tried to get rid of him—that was how it sounded. She couldn’t accept that there were real ghosts here. If her mother’s spirit truly roamed abroad on this isle, she would know it, wouldn’t she? She would have encountered it herself in all the places she shared with her mother’s past. Her mother could not come back without appearing to her. But then, could guilt and shame become so manifest as this—that Soter would punish himself with terrible visions and memories? Could guilt take such form?
He had rescued her, he said, but from what? Why were they—all of them, he’d said—in hiding?
She thought that he was spent, and she started to slide carefully away through the tangle of branches, when suddenly he spoke one last time, in a tone of abject defeat: “All right, all right. If the time comes, I swear. I promise. Yes. But not now. Please, not yet. Ask me later, can’t you? Let me get used to the idea awhile.”
She waited, crouching, holding her breath, straining as if she might hear the phantom answer. There was nothing but a final sobbing breath from Soter.
He sat on the floor, head bowed, his arms wrapped around the jug protectively. When he said nothing further, she withdrew.
SIX
Most days, by the time Leodora had finished her session with Soter, Tastion had returned and was waiting for her.
He and his father usually had good luck in their fishing. Sometimes she even passed them on the path to Fishkill as she was returning to the boathouse—either hauling their catch or returning with the net rolled up between them. Tastion would pretend to disregard her, as his