As she climbed, buildings receded from the road and trees advanced to compensate. Spreading palm fronds’ needled shadows crosshatched streetlamp light on the sidewalk. Right foot, cane, left. Breeze blew against her neck, and leaves scraped leaves above. Bay windows shone like Penitents’ eyes in a small pink house set back from the road. A backlit figure stood in one window, a shadow playing a fiddle. The music was faint and foreign, an air from northern Camlaan. Claude had said once that Camlaan fiddlers used a different mode for their songs than other Old World musicians. She had not asked him to explain, because the thought frightened her. Music, she’d always thought, was music. But if music was only a convention, if notes were games of symbol, then music could lie, like words, like numbers, like the Craft itself.

The island is our prison.

For Margot, maybe. Not for Kai. Born here, raised here, in one of the few places on the planet where she could be herself. Even if more mainlanders moved here every year. Even if traditional dress robes gave way to suits and ties. Even if only a handful of priests had remade their bodies in the pool since Kai, even if those who should know better met their transformation with silence and suspicion.

Poor fiddler. Kai left him, or her, standing at her (or his) window, playing the sad song he (or she) might not even hear as sad, and climbed on. In reverie she’d covered more distance than she thought: ten blocks left to home. She walked in triple time away from the music.

Chapter 12

12

Edmond Margot stepped for the third time that evening into the spotlight, and tried to summon his voice.

Behind him on the stage, drums drummed low. A trumpet pealed one long, slow, high note, and sank to silence. The spotlight seared his eyes with dancing sparks. Faces hovered beyond the light, out there in the audience, watchers and waiters. He saw only suggestions of their presence: curve of cheek, jut of chin, black wells where eyes should be. In with the breath, then force it out.

Twice before he’d entered this burning light and each time recited old poems, picking at scabs and prying open scars for the crowd’s amusement. Each time they applauded. A woman even came to compliment him, to mock him.

Familiar, she had been, so familiar, a vision of vanished voices risen to taunt him with unanswerable questions.

His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. The room was hot, but his sweat was cold. Fear sweat, nerve sweat. Fine vintage.

Head up. Shoulders back. You may be broken, but don’t let them see you breaking. They knew his poems and liked them. Would applaud, even if he recited only his old lines from now ’til the world drowned.