I don’t know what time it is when I wake. It could have been hours or days. The roulotte still clatters through the tunnels, the dark still presses in through the scrollwork. Maman and Papa have traded places, but everything else is still the same.
I lift my head—it seems to take all my energy. But as I move, Papa opens his eyes. “Are you all right, Jetta?”
“Yes.” The word comes out on a sigh—even nodding seems like too much work. Is it exhaustion? It makes sense after the show, the running, the monk in the temple. But I don’t feel tired. I don’t feel much of anything. Still, Papa is watching me, and the look on his face—it’s so different than Maman’s fear. It’s a look of love. So I force my lips into a little smile. “I’m fine. Just tired.”
He smiles back, but he shakes his head. “I’m not an audience, Jetta. You don’t have to pretend.”
The words are a balm. I want to go to him, to lay my head in his lap, but I don’t have the will. “You’re not angry with me,” I say instead.
“No.” He sighs. “But what were you doing up there?”
Now a spark of emotion stirs in me. A faint blush works its way to my cheeks: the memory of shame. “Not what Maman thought.”
“The boy told me you stopped for supplies.” Papa makes a face—the same face I must have made when Leo proposed stealing from the feet of the god. “But you know the temples are forbidden.”
“Then why were there so many offerings?” I hadn’t meant to say it—the words just slipped out. But I want to know. “Leo said that people come every day.”
I do not mention the monk, but her voice drifts through my head. I know what you are. But Papa only smiles a little. “What else did Leo say?”
“Papa.”
“I remember how it was, you know. I’m not so old.”
“Papa!” Now the blush is full-fledged, as is his grin. Disbelief propels me upright. It takes me another beat to realize what he’s doing. “Right,” I say, settling back against the wall of the roulotte. But now the smile on my own face—however small—is real.
And Papa knows it; his look softens as he drops the act. “It’s not so strange, you know.” Idly, he picks up Maman’s painted thom, running his fingers across the top before tucking it back in its spot on the shelf. “Romance isn’t always two lovers under a golden moon. Sometimes it’s stolen moments on the run.”
“There was no moment, stolen or otherwise,” I say—not for lack of my trying, I do not add. But even the embarrassment seems distant now—like something I overheard, not something I felt myself. Then I frown. “You never answered my question, Papa. If the temples are forbidden, why do so many people still go?”
Papa sighs, and I realize then . . . he wasn’t only trying to make me laugh. He was also trying to make me drop the question. I expect him to brush me off—to tell me that anyone who goes to the temple is a fool, or evil. But when he speaks, his voice is thoughtful. “They’re losing control—the armée. It’s not a good sign, for them.”
“For them?” Something about the way he says it tweaks my ear. “And for us?”
“It’s good that we’re leaving,” Papa says firmly, though there is regret in his voice—there always is, when he talks about going away. He passes a hand over the scrim on the side of the roulotte, where the bullet hole has torn through the silk. “It’s not safe here.”
“I know,” I say. “I meant for us Chakrans. For the country.”
“Ah. For that, who can say?” He drops his hand and gives me a little shrug. “It wasn’t all bad, before.”
I blink at him, taken aback. My uncle used to talk that way, but I’d never heard Papa say as much. “Maman hates the old ways.”
“It isn’t the old ways she hates, Jetta.”
“It’s Le Trépas.” I whisper the name, and though Papa purses his lips, he doesn’t try to hush me.
“Before he took power . . .” Papa’s voice trails off. Silence creeps back into the roulotte, and at first I think he won’t finish the story. I lean against the wall, letting my head rock gently as we rattle on through the tunnel. I have just closed my eyes again when he speaks. “When I was a boy, I spent rainy seasons at the temple. A lot of us did. The ones who didn’t have our own fields to work. We planted if we were able, but if we weren’t, we still had dry beds and full bowls. At night they taught us all to read, and at the end of the season, they sent us home with bags of rice. That’s how it used to be.”
I have not opened my eyes—instead, I see his story, as though on a scrim. The children tucking blades of young rice into the shimmering water, the monks with their turmeric robes pulled up through their belts to keep them dry. “What happened, then? What made Le Trépas different?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Papa says. “Even when I was a boy, there were problems. Land going over to sugar. People who craved riches more than rice. Boys started wanting to learn to smuggle and shoot more than to read and write. Do you want to know what I think?” Papa lowers his voice then, like he used to when he would speak to his brother, so his words wouldn’t go beyond the thin walls. But this time, it’s not the armée or the neighbors he is afraid will hear. It’s Maman. “I think the gods went a little mad when the Aquitans came.”
The word should chill me, but instead it saps the last of my energy. The silence returns as we roll on.