“I didn’t just earn onstage,” said Aristide. “My father said he beat me for singing, but we both knew what the blows were really for. What I got up to out the back door, against the wall.” His accent was slipping, pressing up against his teeth, and Cyril had heard this before: Ari’s hands tangled in his hair, spitting curses when he came. When he was startled. When he was afraid.

How had he never guessed that Aristide came from the north, from the mountains? Chuli, by his looks, or part—that piece fit neatly now. Wise of him to hide it: before, during, and after the Ospies. From what little Cyril had gleaned from old papers and overheard conversations, aid had been slow in coming to the shattered tribes up north. Acherby had fallen, but old prejudice died harder than dictatorship.

Still, why had Cyril never seen past the elaborate stage name, the carefully constructed persona?

Because he hadn’t wanted to know. He’d preferred some secrets then. Now he wanted light to shine in every darkened corner, so nothing lurking there could hide.

“Tips were better at Solstice,” Aristide went on. “For walking the boards. But I made less at the holidays, for all that. Folk aren’t after paid teeth on their tackle so much, that time of year. Made ’em feel ashamed, maybe. As if they oughtn’t to the rest of the time, knowing how my pa came after me about it.”

“Ari.”

The nickname stopped him cold, halfway through inhaling to continue his tirade.

“There.” Powder and silk returned to his pronunciation as it sank back toward his soft palate. “Now you’ve heard it. Did you find it quaint? Filled with rustic charm? I’d have thought you already had your fill of that, with your tweeds and your guns and your country house.”

Cyril realized he had pressed himself against the door so hard the panels were putting divots in his back. “Do you think you have some sort of monopoly on childhood horror?”

“I never said it was horror. It simply made me what I am.”

“As if this didn’t?”

“This?” Aristide sat forward in his chair and swept a hand through the air in front of him, as if encompassing the whole of Damesfort. The weight of the house, the family, tradition: It felt as though that hand had hauled them from the dust and laid them across Cyril’s shoulders. “It turned you into something, I’m sure.”

Cyril took a deep breath and bore up under the weight, then let it fall to force his next words out. “You have no idea.”

“Why don’t you tell me, then?” He flung it across the space between them as though it meant nothing, but Cyril heard the faintest nasal resonance beneath the rough edges of his anger: sadness, held hard in check. An aching, upturned end to the question.