Maman goes back to her room to tell Papa the plan, and I find Leo in the bar, counting a fistful of money. The floor creaks as I approach—I know he can hear it—but he doesn’t acknowledge me. Still, I wait quietly, one minute, two, trying to be respectful. He keeps counting. “Leo?”
“How was the show?” His words are polite, but his tone is absent, nonchalant. His eyes stay on his money. There is so much of it.
My jaw clenches, but I won’t let him bait me. “It could have gone better.”
“Too bad.”
“I wanted to apologize for my assumption,” I say, a little too loud. Now he looks up, and hope creeps into my voice. “It wasn’t fair. But your offer is. An axle for a ride to the capital. We can leave as soon as you have the roulotte repaired.”
“Apology accepted,” he says, returning my tentative smile with a broad grin of his own. “But the deal is off.”
His words are at odds with his expression; it takes me a moment to understand. “Why?”
“With what I would pay for an axle, I could afford a ticket on a boat.”
“I thought you didn’t trust the river gods.”
“I don’t have to trust someone to make a deal with them.” His tone is pointed. I narrow my eyes, and his smile deepens.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“You aren’t? I’m not forcing you to stay.” Leo waves me away with his money, tossing the words at me like copper coins. “I don’t force anyone to do anything.”
I grit my teeth. “Can you at least introduce me to your source?”
“Give you the name of a friend selling contraband?” Leo shakes his head at the cash. “Why should I trust your discretion when you don’t trust my motives?”
“I thought you accepted my apology!”
“Oh, but I do!” He meets my eyes again, and his face is earnest. “Your assumption was unkind, but so is the world—especially to girls, I’m well aware. You have no reason to trust me. Of course I have no reason to trust you either. And an apology won’t buy a contact in the Souterrain.”
The Souterrain—the underground. Where you can buy what is rationed—or what is forbidden. If we were back in Lak Na, I’d know who to ask. But here in Luda, I’m stuck with Leo. I glare at him, but he seems to enjoy the attention as he finishes his count. “So,” I say at last. “What will?”
Leo leans across the bar with a grin. “Put on a show for me.”
I clench my fists, holding tight to my anger. “I’m not a dancer.”
“That’s for the best,” he says. “Your audience will be, and they’re very discerning.”
I frown. “The girls?”
“They love shadow plays.”
“Shadow plays?” I glance around the dirty room. “Here?”
Leo turns back to his money, laying it out across the bar in four stacks. His response, when he makes it, is a bit too casual. “Something wrong with La Perl?”
“No.” I take a breath, calculating; we could rig the scrim from the flies between the curtains—though we’d have to be extra careful with the flame. At least it would be easy to protect our privacy backstage—everyone usually in the wings would be seated in the audience. “No. But . . . why?”
Leo takes a deep breath before he answers. When he speaks, his voice is low and steady, balanced on the edge of a long dark drop. “Because I asked the girls to work the night of La Fête. Because I have to leave tomorrow and I will miss them. Because not everyone can afford a more permanent escape from this place. Or maybe because of the look on your face when you ask me why.”
I smother the next question: what look? Instead, I catalog my own expression: the curve of my eyebrow, the curl at the corner of my lip—perilously close to disdain. How long had that sneer been on my face? Carefully I smooth my features. “It will be an honor to perform here.”
“You’re a very good actor, cher.” His smile is grim as he slips the smallest stack of bills into his own pocket. He picks up the other three and gestures with them. “I’ll go tell the girls. They’ll be thrilled. When’s the show?”
“After sunset,” I say automatically. “Shadow plays always start at nightfall.”
“Bien.” Leo slaps the pile of cash against the bar with a grin, and hope stirs in my chest. Still, I’m cautious.
“So we have a deal, then?”
“Yes. No. One more thing,” he says then, narrowing his eyes. “Why on earth do you want to go to Aquitan?”
I open my mouth as all of the answers come to mind—I select the one that makes me least vulnerable. “We’ll be rich. Shadow plays are famous there, and we’re the best troupe in Chakrana.”
“Is that really all it is? Fame and fortune?”
I bite my lip. “There are no Tigers overseas.”
“There are wolves.”
“How do you know?” I say then, my frustration building. “Have you been there?”
Leo leans in with a laugh. “Look at me,” he says, gesturing to his face. “Do I look like I belong in Aquitan?”
It’s a question . . . but not one that I can answer. So I look at him, like he wants me to. His features—handsome, yes, but strange. Mixed. It was one of the first things I had noticed about him, I remember now—and is that why I don’t trust him? “It’s hard,” I say at last. “Not belonging.”
“You say that like you know what you’re talking about.” The words are cocky, but his voice is gentle, sad. He holds out his free hand, as if to shake, Aquitan style, on our deal, but when I put mine in his, he kisses it. Startled, I pull my hand back, but Leo has already turned away. “I’ll go get the mechanic started. Maybe even drum up a bigger audience. Who knows? At the right price, tickets could cover the cost of the iron.”
Leo leaves to make his arrangements, and after a deep breath, I find Maman and Papa to make our own. “A show?” Maman asks, looking askance at me. “I thought he only wanted a ride.”
I make a face. “The price has apparently gone up.”
“It was already quite high,” Maman says. “I don’t like having strangers so close.”
“You liked the cost of boat tickets less,” I remind her. Still, she hesitates, and I brace myself for the questions—Can you control yourself, Jetta? Can you keep your secrets? But we haven’t always traveled alone—or been this lonely.
Before the Hungry Year, before the spirits, before Akra left and my uncle vanished, we used to travel with other troupes on the circuit during the dry season, when the roads were clear and the fields were fallow. Jugglers or ribbon dancers, contortionists or other shadow players. We would come together for meals on the road or roll in caravans between stops. Sometimes Akra would walk up and down the lines, trading stories or advice with the others—he was so good at making friends. So was I, during the bright times, when my malheur masqueraded as an expansive bonhomie. These days, we have too much to hide.
But Papa puts his arm around my shoulders. “Traveling together seems like our best option. But tell me. Why does he need to go to Nokhor Khat?”
“I didn’t ask,” I say blithely, but Papa’s brows draw down. “Should I?”
He takes a breath, but then he hesitates. After a moment, he shakes his head. “No. No. He’s certainly not the only one in Luda who wants to leave.” He drops his arm with a sigh. But then the ghost of his showman’s smile crosses his face. “It’s not quite La Fête, but we’ve done more with less. Come. Let’s get ready for the show.”
At his words, the thrill stirs in me again—a performance, an audience, an ovation. A collective breath held on my smallest gesture, a crowd in the palm of my hand. My heart drums in my chest—but first things first. It isn’t easy to convert the burlesque hall into a shadow theater.
The stage is fairly shallow for our needs, but an audience always wants to be closer to a scantily clad girl than to a scrim on which shadows are dancing. At least I will be alone behind the curtain. If we were a traditional troupe, we would need a dozen players to control such large fantouches, but there is no room for half so many here. Of course, before the fire, we used to perform in even smaller spaces, Akra and I kneeling side by side below the apron of the scrim, trying not to elbow each other or jostle each other’s fantouches. Our puppets were smaller, then, too. Less work for fewer hands—but so much less impressive. At least, to an audience.
When I first started casting souls as puppeteers, I worried that what I did was no longer art—a break from what Papa had taught me, and his parents had taught him. Some of our most prized fantouches were crafted by their hands. What would my ancestors say, watching me now? But Papa was the one who corrected me. “I taught you the traditions so you would know them,” he said. “Not so you would be bound by them.”
And lucky I am not, for this is not our traditional venue. But we find a rickety ladder in the wings and use it to stretch the thin silk scrim. It goes from the very front of the stage, just behind the footlights, all the way up the top of the proscenium. This is the screen on which the shadows will be cast by the flames.
Usually, we pile up wood to build a fire, making sure it’s dry and stripped of bark to keep the smoke down, but even that won’t work indoors. Cheeky comes to our rescue when she wakes, clearing old props from a short set of shelves backstage. She puts it against the back wall while Eve gathers candles; tucked inside glasses from the bar and lined up on the shelf, they will shed plenty of light.
Maman brings in the instruments—the drums, the flutes—while Papa goes through his warmups, his rich voice reverberating through the room. Tia harmonizes from the little kitchen as she makes congee, enough to share. I’m grateful again for their generosity, and not least because we’re low on rice ourselves. The camaraderie eases something in me: a tightness in my chest, a tension in my heart, and soon enough, a smile tugs at the corner of my lips. When Cheeky makes a joke about throwing Garter into the porridge, I have to bite back a laughing retort about borrowing the snake to clear the rat’s nest of my hair. It isn’t my place, in more ways than one, and Maman’s words hang over my head: never show, never tell. So I go back to the roulotte to prepare.
My once-best dress goes in a heap in the corner—a terrible waste, all that expensive fabric. Perhaps later I can clean off the dust and the blood and make repairs—or more likely, use parts of it for scrap to make a new fantouche. But for now, I rifle through my other costumes—silk and velvet, brocade and damask—choosing my second-best outfit: a soft sarong of rose silk with a red corset laced over it, and a bright brass pin holding back my hair.
Back before we were so well known, I used to wear plain and faded black. Maman and Papa still do, but as our fame grew, more than one rich member of the audience simply had to meet the puppeteer after the show. I am not pale enough to be judged classically beautiful by the Aquitans, but an expensive dress goes a long way. Fancy clothes have become part of the show—it feels like a wanton indulgence, but I can’t say I don’t enjoy it. Besides, I have a feeling Leo would know if I cut corners tonight.
But more important than my outfit is the show itself. What story should we tell? The Shepherd and the Tiger seems irreverent now; Legarde is not some wily country boy, but a hunter in his own right, like the wolf on his banner.
Should we sing the story of the seven swans instead? Or tell the tale of the arrogant man? Or maybe one of the King of Death’s stories? I run my hand over the black leather of the fantouche; Maman had tossed it on the floor of the wagon, as if she didn’t want to touch it any longer than she had to. And now something about him makes me shudder too. Not tonight.
Under my hands, the puppet trembles—sympathetic. Gently, I take him up, wrapping him back in burlap, winding him in silk rope. Then I place the bundle back on the shelf, beside the spirit maiden. My hands still. Why not a comedy?
It seems incongruous, but after the horrors of last night, there might be nothing left to do but laugh. Nodding to myself, I take the puppets from their shelves—the spirit maiden and the hapless fool, the river, the rocks, the flame—unwrapping them gently and laying them next to the door. They rustle, moving ever so slightly, and not with the natural settling of gravity. “Quiet,” I whisper, and they fall still.
A giggle bubbles up in me—pure delight for these creatures of my own making. Or is it a touch of hysteria? I press my lips together and keep working.
As I’m gathering the fantouches, I hear voices in the alley. Two men—Leo and someone else. Peering through the curl of a dragon’s eye, I see the stranger carrying a thick bamboo pole over his shoulders. Two buckets hang from it, one on each end, both clanking gently. As he puts them down, I see they’re filled with tools. The mechanic.
They are deep in conversation pitched too low for me to hear, but Leo gestures to the wagon, the rattling wheel, Cheeky’s battered trunk. A burst of gratitude floods through me that Leo put the box beneath the roulotte to hold up the wagon, or at least to appear to. A prop . . . and a prop. Smothering another laugh, I put a hand on the scrollwork of the roulotte and whisper to the soul inside, “Stay down.”
The wagon creaks a bit as it settles; at the sound, the men fall silent. I take the opportunity to open the door, the maiden and the fool in my arms. “Hello,” I say, because no one else is speaking.
The mechanic only stares, but after a wide-eyed moment, Leo holds out his hands. Is it my imagination, or do the puppets move a little? “Can I help you carry anything?”
“No,” I say. Too quickly? “They’re delicate. I’ll come back for the others.”
“Then let me get the door.” He walks by my side, leaving the mechanic to start his work. The silence stretches half a beat too long. “You look lovely,” he says.
“You look nervous,” I reply, and he laughs.
“You might be too, if you had walked across town with seven feet of iron axle hidden in a bamboo pole,” he says smoothly. “There are soldiers in the street.”
At his words, I feel eyes on me; I can’t stop myself from glancing around, but there are no soldiers lurking—not that I can see. Still. “Is there a place to hide the wagon while the mechanic works? A stable, or . . . ?”
Leo shakes his head as he pushes open the door. “I’ll be keeping watch at the head of the alley. And it shouldn’t take more than a few hours. Besides, any soldiers hanging around La Perl will know the usual rules don’t apply here. Most of them are still hung over from their last run-in with my contraband.”
I press my lips together, taking in his posture—leaning against the door, so casual as he flouts the law. For a moment, jealousy stabs at me—what must it be like, to make your own rules? “You were right, you know.”
“About what, cher?”
“I have no reason to trust you.”
“Didn’t I tell you earlier? You don’t have to trust someone to make a deal with them.” He grins again, his teeth bright. “You only have to have something you know they want.”
“No,” I snap back. “You have to be out of other options.”
I regret my words as they cross my teeth. The mechanic has barely started his work, and already I’m risking Leo’s anger. But to my surprise—and my annoyance—he only laughs.
“C’est vrai,” he says as he lets the door swing shut between us. “It’s true.”