“An Ascendant among cooks!” Toby tossed another pigeon to Gitana. “Lalage, why don’t you join our troupe? Then we could eat like Governors every day!”
“And I could live like an animal, and sleep in a drafty theater, and wonder if my throat would be slit in the night.” Lalage stumbled to her feet. Mehitabel promptly took her place and began twirling Justice’s hair about her greasy fingers.
I averted my eyes. Toby leaned across the table to me, covering both my hands with his huge one (his nails clean and well shaped, I noticed with some surprise, and stained with crimson dye).
“You would have no such objections to our life, Sieur Aidan,” he suggested, and turned my hands palm-upward. “These hands would welcome hardening—” He brushed my fingertips. “Haven’t you ever wanted to see our City by night, when the old moon cuts broad milky avenues through the Narrow Forest, and aardmen swim across the Tiger to hunt swans and lazars?”
“No,” I said, and turned to watch Justice.
The new moon had risen. Lalage had gone to pace among the trees, lighting a series of metal torches that sputtered fitfully before leaping into golden light. After a few minutes the conversation was punctuated by the hiss and sizzle of moths’ Icarian flights.
“Ah, but there’s better than that!” said Fabian. A handful of candicaine pipettes lay scattered like jackstraws on the table before him. He broke one, inhaled deeply. “There are birds with the breasts of women, and trees that will sing you to sleep—”
“And then suck you dry as a dead leaf,” called Lalage.
Fabian ignored her. “And you should see how the Paphian women treat you! Men, too, I suppose,” he added and passed me a candicaine pipette.
I felt a small hand plucking at my sleeve and turned to see Miss Scarlet.
“Would you like to see our show?” she asked softly. She climbed onto the table so that her long skirts spilled around her. Before I could reply, Fabian and Gitana and Mehitabel had lunged through the shadows to where their huge, satchel lay by the gate. Toby stood and bowed to Lalage’, then took Miss Scarlet by the hand and assisted her down.
“You will excuse us while we prepare the entertainment,” he said. As he passed Justice I saw the two of them exchange knowing glances, and Toby winked broadly.
“Well!” said Lalage. She smoothed her hair and looked sideways at Justice, who grinned like a cat. “I suppose I’d better clear some of this.”
“Let me help you,” said Justice, carelessly gathering an armful of chipped plates and the pigeons’ carcasses, but being very careful not to upset a single wineglass or carafe. He paused in front of me to stack more plates, then dipped his head to brush my cheek. He turned away, scattering Miss Scarlet’s pyramid of plum stones. I watched them disappear inside.
By the outer gate Toby’s Players giggled and fought for costumes and scripts. I was alone for the first time since Justice had freed me. After several minutes I reached into my pocket and withdrew Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. I turned it over in my hands, then slipped it onto my shorn head, hoping that when she returned Miss Scarlet would notice it. I felt my heart stirred by all this cheerful ruckus. Closing my eyes, I sought within the knots of memory one that would tighten this thread of feeling.
And found it upon a small raised stage, some fifty years earlier, a stage lit by hissing gas lamps and smelling of cheap cosmetics and powder, where a boy and girl in matching broadcloth tunics and carrying matching blue books carefully followed marks chalked upon the scuffed floor reciting.
“ ’…I never had a brother;
Nor can there be that deity in my nature
Of here and everywhere. I had a sister
Whom the blind waves and surges have devoured …’”
This a memory of Emma’s slipped somehow within my own, a stray cell sailing through me until it bumped another. Then another scene flashed through memory’s aperture. Emma’s bed, Aidan and Emma and mumbling Molly knocking heads together above the stained counterpane. A rush of displaced thought, like a wind careening through a broken window; and this image too spun off its string to join the others jumbled inside me.
I shivered in anticipation, for an instant thought I lay upon my bed in the Home Room. But a hand drawn to my forehead touched only Anna’s hummingbird bandeau. The flare of memory cooled, coalesced into a firefly dropping through the air, a glowing green scarab. I opened my hand. It lit there, wings blurring as they clicked back into their sturdy casing. I recalled the huge bees hovering in the afternoon air, the trees that had devoured Tast’annin’s bodyguard. Fireflies and bees the size of hummingbirds. A talking chimpanzee. Even the Players seemed somewhat inflated, as if they all deigned to imagine one another wiser, lovelier, bolder, and braver than they really were; and by so dreaming had awakened to find it come true.
But now the firefly shakes its wings and buzzes from my hand. In the doorway Justice and Lalage embrace before rejoining me at table, Justice preening slightly, his long hair tangled and his lip bleeding again. Fabian moves several of the metal torches so that their light falls upon the dark grass before us, then with a bow and a flourish announces:
“‘The Romantic History of Algernon Moncrieff and Gwendolen Fairfax,’ as performed by Toby Rhymer, His Troupe, Featuring Miss Scarlet Pan as Lady Bracknell.”
And I am a virgin witness as the Players begin their show.
Part Four: Blood at the Butterfly Ball
1. The fragments of a repeatedly shattered world
WESTERING LIGHT MADE A burnished cathedral of the trees when I finally paused in my flight through the forest. In my madness I had fled the Museum, wearing once more the brocaded tunic and ribands that marked me of the House Miramar: these and my sagittal the only arms I bore against the night. And night it would be soon; and I had lost my way.
Rumors that the Ascendants planned vengeance for a murder had alarmed the Regents enough to place sentries at each Museum. But the Technician posted by the North Gate scarcely glanced at me, so intent was she upon a volume of archaic holograms depicting the life cycles of extinct primates. In my Paphian garb I must have looked as though I was to attend the ball at High Brazil that evening. I had passed several high-ranking Curators in the Rotunda, all dressed in sober robes as they made their way to the North Gate to meet the palanquins from High Brazil that would bear them to the masque. I could have followed them, commandeered a palanquin for myself; but that would have meant answering questions, dealing, with elders from High Brazil who would not have my name among those they were to receive. And I did not want to see Roland, not yet. So I left through the South Gate. The sentry raised her head. Seeing only myself, she returned to her reading, I strode purposefully down the steps, through the broke columns facing the Narrow Forest, and to the edge of the forest itself. Here I hesitated. In the late afternoon light it was easy enough to orient myself to the northwest, where our Houses stood. In the distance the Obelisk pierced the trees’ canopy, a somber point among all that glittering greenery. If I steered to its right I would eventually come to the Tiger Creek, or perhaps even a road leading to the Hill Magdalena Ardent. I imagined that I saw the river itself sparkling through the shifting leaves. Before my nerve could break I hurried beneath the trees.