I straighten up so fast I nearly hit my head on Leo’s chin. Then I shove him, hard, my hands connecting with his bare stomach. “I trusted you!”
Leo staggers backward, losing his balance, one hand out as though to defend himself—his actions. But when he straightens up, it’s there in his bleary eyes: the apology. “I took the rifles the night we met,” he says quietly. “The night of the explosion. I was supposed to send them south from Luda with the rebels after the dust settled. But the general had other plans for the Tiger’s men.”
There is regret on his face—it tugs at my heart, but I ignore it. My mind races, trying to put it all together. “You had the mechanic put them under the wagon,” I mutter. Then my eyes narrow. “You brought them out in Cheeky’s linen box! And you had the nerve to ask me what I had done?”
“I had to get the guns out of the theater! I was afraid the soldiers would search the place,” Leo says, desperate. “They were supposed to run toward the explosion, not wait at my door while you drove my couriers into their hands!”
“You said you weren’t a rebel!”
“I’m not,” he says wearily. “I only made a deal—”
“A deal with the rebels!”
“A deal to keep the girls safe!” Leo’s cheeks are flushed, his eyes wild. He runs a hand through his hair. In his other hand, the gun gleams as he gestures. Is it a threat? “Look, cher. Everyone knows the Tiger is coming south. Everyone also knows who my father is, and that the girls have made quite a bit of money from the soldiers. But the rebels swore they’d overlook it all if I only did them this favor. And I would do anything to protect the girls!”
“Anything?” I can’t help it—my eyes cut to the gun. I don’t think he’d shoot us to take the wagon . . . but I never imagined he’d strapped guns beneath the axle, either.
But Leo’s face falls. “You think so little of me?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
With a grimace, he opens the chamber and tips the bullets out into his hand. The tightness in my chest eases. “I have money,” he says softly, but I shake my head.
“Money won’t buy our way out of prison. And you said it yourself, they’ll be giving the wagons extra scrutiny. They’ll find the guns in a search.”
“Then the secret route.”
“Maman said the wagon won’t fit through the passage, and you can’t carry a dozen rifles by yourself.”
“You could help me carry them.”
“And risk my life?”
Leo grits his teeth, rolling the bullets across his palm—six of them. Most of them are only casings, I can see now. “I could get you a place on the boat to Aquitan.”
There is silence in the clearing, so long that a bird nearby starts to call. I watch Leo; he sounds so earnest—but he has fooled me before. “You’re lying.”
“I never lied,” he says, but at my look, he drops his eyes. “I . . . may have kept things from you. But I’ve never gone back on a deal.”
I bite my lip, thinking it over—but this, at least, was true. And it isn’t so unbelievable that Leo Legarde would have a way aboard the ship where his sister will spend her honeymoon. “What about the recherche? There are bound to be soldiers on the boat.”
“The wagon is the real problem. Cover your scar and that description could be of a thousand other girls. You can use a different name. And no one will suspect a wanted criminal to be La Fleur’s special guest. Is it a deal?” He tucks his gun into his belt and holds out his hand, Aquitan style. “You help me bring the rifles through the passage, and I’ll get you a place aboard Le Rêve.”
I look into his eyes, hoping for a sense of clarity. All I see is his own apprehension; he needs my help at least as much as I need his. “It’s a deal,” I say, and the relief on his face is like the dawn breaking.
We shake, once. The copper casings jingle like bells in his other fist. “How are you going to convince Meliss?” he says, and I sigh.
“Because it’s the only way.”
“I know that feeling.” He turns my hand over and pours the empty shells into my palm. “These should work for rivets, by the way.”
“Rivets?” It takes me a moment to understand what he’s talking about. Was it only yesterday he held my work in his hands and called it beautiful? I close my fingers over the metal, still warm. What else he could want in exchange?
Before I can ask, the door opens, and Maman peeks out at me, worry written all over her face. “What’s taking you so long?”
“Just checking on Lani,” I call back. Under my breath, I murmur to Leo. “I’ll talk to her. You take the guns off the roulotte. Hide them in the jungle till we can figure out a better place. And then get some more betel leaves,” I add—I had dropped the others in my surprise. “You can make your own bandage this time.”
To his credit, he barely makes a face; he only nods and turns back to the roulotte as I follow Maman inside. It is warmer in the hut, almost cozy, and for a moment, my heart aches for our little cottage back in the valley. But this is not home, nor is Lak Na. Not anymore. I take a breath, trying to figure out what to say to Maman about the passage—how to phrase the request. But as she shuts the door behind me, I see a scrap of paper in her hand. It’s the wanted poster, dry now, and stiff from being near the fire. But the back is covered with markings—dark lines made with a charred stick. “I spoke with your father,” she says softly. “Leo was right.”
“About what?”
“The soldiers are looking for you. And if they find you . . .” She sighs, leaving the rest unsaid; my imagination is worse than her words. “Papa and I will travel through the gates, but you and Leo . . .” She shakes her head. “I can’t go back there, but you have to.”
Gingerly, I take the paper from her hand; it is a map, crudely drawn—a winding tunnel, a cavern, a stairway. “Back where, Maman?”
She takes a breath. She wets her lips. She lowers her voice. “To Hell.”
“Maman—”
“There is a path,” she says, her voice no louder than a whisper. “From the temple grounds to the middens. Outside the city. Where the dung carts haul the trash.”
I chew my lip. Her words are innocuous, but her voice . . . her face. “The path comes up inside?”
“To the gardens between the temple and the Ruby Palace,” she says, her voice shaking. “At least, it did sixteen years ago. You’ll have to be careful. The temple is a prison now, remember? There will be guards nearby, and maybe worse, depending.”
“Worse?”
“Fallen monks. Restless souls. His disciples.”
“Disciples?” The question is on the tip of my tongue—about the woman we met in the temple. Had Maman known that monks still brought offerings to the gods? “I thought Le . . . I thought all the monks in Nokhor Khat were killed.”
“They were,” she says, but the fact doesn’t seem to soothe her fear. I look down at the map, then up into her eyes.
“How do you know about this passage, Maman?”
She opens her mouth, but it takes her a long time to let the words past her teeth. “I lived there, Jetta. When I was only a little older than you.”
“You lived in Hell’s Court?” I blink at her. “You were there before Le Trépas was imprisoned?”
“Don’t!” She raises her hand to my lips; I press them together, but my eyes are wide. She must have seen him, known him. A monster, out of legend, when he was still roaming free with death at the tips of his fingers. No wonder she hated his name.
Then my brow furrows—Maman has no tattoos. “You weren’t a monk. What were you doing there?”
“I told you, Jetta. I’m not going back. Not even in my memory.” She turns away, slipping back into her room, but I am already putting things together. The only people who lived in the temple were the monks and the brides.
For Le Trépas kept a court, like any man who styled himself a king. Another break with what was holy: he had wives in his temple—though he never kept his children. People say he killed them for their souls.
My hands are shaking. Sixteen years ago, she’d said. She left the temple just around the time I was born. But Akra is three years older than I am. He has Papa’s eyes, his chin, his nose. And Papa was never a monk.
Alone in the room, I sink down by the remains of the fire. The soul of the kitten climbs into my lap, and we both watch the embers for a while. My mind is its own shifting hellscape. So many questions, but so much more makes sense. The souls . . . the magic . . . the malheur. But what of the shadow plays? The work and the art? The joy of the stage, the things Papa taught me—were they ever mine to share in?
Behind me, the floor creaks. Papa comes to sit beside me, as though I have summoned him. A thousand questions flit through my head, but at heart they are all the same—the one I asked Maman. What am I? But Papa has never been at a loss for words. “Blood may matter to the spirits. But what we share is even better.”
My words come slowly. “And what is that?”
“We share history,” he says. “We share tradition. We share years and memories and everything that makes a family.”
“But not blood.”
“What is blood?” he says with a gentle smile. “We share a heart.”
I can hear it—my heartbeat, and the blood rushing in my ears. The blood that draws the spirits near. The blood that brings them back to life, the blood that sang in my veins when I considered killing a man. Who else shares it?
What am I?
I do not ask—Papa doesn’t know, not truly. The fire crackles before us, the charred wood collapses inward on itself, the coals glow and fade. Finally he pushes himself to his feet with a groan. “Come,” he says. “Let’s go unpack the roulotte.”
I follow him outside, and we spend the rest of the day sorting through our possessions. I throw myself into the hard choices—what to leave, what to take—and ignore the part of me that says that none of it is truly mine. It is easier to run my hands over silk and leather, paint and paper, than it is to wrap my mind around this new truth. So I pore over each item, savoring each memory as a past I never knew casts shadows in my head.
My third-best costume is a given—or my best, now that the first is torn and ashen and the second stained with blood. Maman had bought the fabric for it toward the end of our first season using souls in fantouches, just as our fame had begun to spread. We’d spent hours sewing together—unused to working with so much fine silk. And here—the little lighter my brother left me, to light the fires for our shadow plays. The letters he sent us, all seven of them. My makeup: bone black and lucky red. Our money, so hard earned.
Papa makes Leo a gift of a shirt and a pair of trousers. Maman packs the instruments and the old linen scrim; our silk one is still back at La Perl. The fantouches are more difficult—we have nearly fifty, and though they are light, many are bulky. We can’t bring them all. But which ones?
I dither for a long time—packing is delicious distraction—but the wisest choice is to start with the ones that would cost the most to replace, the biggest puppets, the most colorful. The Tiger, the Peacock, the King of Death, the Flame. And of course my dragon. It may be untested, unfinished, but it is beautiful, and too expensive to burn.
So I take up my hammer and the copper casings and set to work piecing it together. When I am through, I wrap it along with half a dozen other fantouches, making lumpy parcels topped with canvas to keep out the rain. At first, they writhe, protesting being packed so tightly, but I whisper as I load them onto Lani’s back. Be still, be still.
I could bring more with me if I wasn’t going to carry the rifles. But I keep my parents talking in the hut while Leo makes up our packs, with clothes and bedding wrapped around the weapons.
Everything else, we leave in the back of the roulotte, which is where we build the pyre.
Papa sings as he works, dragging old branches from the jungle, pulling bark into kindling, but though his voice is strong and brash, his smile wouldn’t fool a discerning audience. Still, Maman and I pretend along with him, and since the instruments are packed, we sing too. My voice is rough, untrained. Between the two of us, Akra was always the better singer. Still, I know the harmonies, and for a moment . . . sefondre. We have come together.
But Leo is standing a bit apart, and he does not pretend. After all, he has the least to lose. “Why?” he says. “Why not just leave it all here for someone else to find?”
“It’s tradition,” I say, and it’s not truly a lie: in our village, we burn the dead. “These fantouches belong to my family—to my ancestors. If we can’t use them, no one else should.”
He grits his teeth, but he doesn’t argue. I am grateful. It pains me far more than it does him—but I know the story of the third brother. It would be so much worse to condemn these souls to rot in their skins. Then, as I toy with the lighter, I remember how I’d tucked the soul of the kitten into the page for safekeeping. Do I truly have to leave them all behind?
There, under the branches and the dry leaves: the rest of the flyers—the ones we were going to use in Luda. I pull out the stack and set it beside me as Papa lights the kindling. The fire starts slow, tentative, but soon enough the paint of the roulotte starts to bubble, and the carvings to char. All the work—months, years—all that’s left of our touring, all that’s left of my uncle. Papa has stopped singing, but his lips still move in a silent prayer before he turns to go back into the cottage.
Maman and Leo follow, but I can’t go—not yet. Through the open door, I watch for the fantouches to burn.
As the souls drift free with the bright embers, I draw each of them into a slip of paper. A pangolin freed from the leather puppet of the Swine, my hummingbirds from the two lovers, the old dog from the roulotte itself. The sweet scent of sandalwood weaves through the char of burning leather as it all falls to coal and ash. And as the pages fill with souls, I bind them with a ribbon—a collection to carry with me across the sea. The pages stir gently; anyone watching might think it was only the hot wind of the blaze. It wraps around me, smoky warmth, and dries the tears as they fall.
By dawn, I am exhausted, and the fire is too. The lingering wisps of smoke will not stand out, not now. As sunlight shines over the trees and raises the steam from the greenery, the little kitten approaches. My surprise is a distant emotion beneath the bone-deep weariness, but I smile when she makes a half-hearted attempt to bat at the pages.
She is as pale and wan as I feel—is it already three days since I freed her from the flyer? “Why haven’t you gone to a temple?” I say to her, but she only paces around the book.
I look for more pages, but I’ve burned the ones I haven’t used. Suddenly, fresh tears spring to my eyes. I dash them away. Ridiculous, isn’t it? After all I’ve let go? But when she puts a paw on my knee, I know I can’t just let her fade away.
Where to put her? A leaf? A scrap of cloth? Somehow I can’t bring myself to offer her such a crude skin. But I have one fantouche left unsouled, don’t I?
It is the matter of a moment to find my dragon in the packs—it is so large, it is hard to miss. A drop of blood, and the kitten has her claws in the leather. In a flash of light, the whole pack rustles with new life, but I rest my hand on the leather, and whisper to her. Be still.
She does—but now I am uneasy. The largest, most expensive fantouche I have ever made now houses the soul of a kitten. What is wrong with me?
But I already know that, don’t I?
And then Maman’s voice drifts to me from the cottage, along with the smell of breakfast cooking. I go inside and throw myself down beside the fire to sleep. But too soon, the food is ready, and after we eat, we grab our packs and leave the rest behind, taking the winding jungle track to the main road.
We move slowly south toward Nokhor Khat, past twisted falls of strangler figs where parrotlets scream at lemurs over ripe fruit, and stands of wild taro where raindrops pool like diamonds on the bright blue leaves. The road is never empty. There are always people traveling—farmers to market, performers to shows, armée soldiers on the march, or horsemen carrying messages. But passing from the jungle into the valley, where fields of cane whisper in the wind, we fall in with a different sort of traveler. Wagons loaded not with eggs or fruit, but with possessions, furniture, family. Grandmothers and grandfathers, riding in vegetable carts, children in their laps, nestled among their effects.
My family has traveled every year for as long as I remember; when we left home for good, we knew what we’d need to take, and what we’d have to leave behind. But these people—they have brought everything they could carry. Not just the everyday necessities like cooking pots and changes of clothes, but the fine things they couldn’t bear to let go. Fancy porcelain tea sets tucked into bamboo boxes, a copper washtub large enough to sit in, an Aquitan sewing machine on a wrought-iron base. Beautiful things, heavy things—like all reminders of home.
The first few groups we see, Papa stops to ask them why they’re on the move, but none of them agree. Many mention Dar Som, but some of them speak of rebels too. They give reports of blue-eyed demons—but do they mean n’akela, or foreign soldiers? They say they know of people who disappeared into the jungle and never came back—certainly the Tiger. Or perhaps the armée. No one knows anything, but everyone is sure of something, and they’re getting out before it’s too late. And though fear is invisible, there is a weight and size to it; it wraps round our necks, it drags at our feet, it sits on our backs like a sin, making every step a journey.
But all we can do is carry on. Toward the walls of the capital, the fort at Nokhor Khat, the docks at the edge of our country. Toward the certainty that what lies ahead cannot be worse than what we’ve left behind.