PART V
Demoiselles Are
Nothing But
Trouble
13
I was the one who brought Livilla to Tasha. Didn’t see that coming, did you?
Three-quarters of a year had passed since I first fell sick (since Tasha made me hers) and I hadn’t been back to the Vittorina Royale in all that time.
Saturn took an interest in me still, and Tasha let him. That was part of a deal between them. He took me with him sometimes when he went out during daylight. He bought and traded books, and supplied dusty leatherbound volumes to the city librarion as well as to some private collections — at the Palazzo, or in other fine houses. He made me practise my reading, reminding me that someday I might want to know how to read a script if I wanted the theatre life back. I humoured him in that, trying to mimick his perfect copperplate handwriting.
‘Knowledge is power,’ he told me once. ‘Books have far longer memories than people do.’
I knew he was wrong. Power was blood and heat and claws and Tasha’s smile of triumph when someone did exactly what she wanted. Books had nothing to do with anything real.
The first time I saw the sky fall, I was so busy trying to figure out the trick of it, I almost got myself killed. Even after I saw Garnet’s arm slashed and blackened from a cloudwight, I remained convinced that it was all some kind of grand performance. No one would do this for any other reason.
Only question was: who was the audience?
I got used to it, though. It became as normal to me as a pantomime. After a battle, the cubs were usually wired, bright eyed and fierce. They would swap war stories, teasing each other over who had slaughtered more devils, who had flown higher or harder, who was the best.
Tasha loved them at these times. She would loll on cushions, laughing throatily as they attempted to outdo each other. The prize, of course, was her. When one of them had suitably impressed her, she would drag him into the bedroom for a personal reward.
When Tasha wasn’t watching, the mood among the cubs was darker and their cups ran deeper. Sometimes Garnet wouldn’t return straight away from battle, but would turn up hours or days later, high as a kite, jumping at shadows or laughing hysterically at nothing. More than once, one of the other cubs distracted Tasha while the rest of us went to drag him out of some seedy club. I didn’t understand how he could be part of this life when he hated it so much. But then Tasha made him stay home with me one nox because his arm was wounded, and I saw the impatience in his face, the frantic movement of his foot bouncing back and forth, and I realised that he hated to be left behind even more.
It gets into your blood, this sky of ours. It captures your soul.
They wouldn’t let me fight yet. Not even Tasha was that much of a monster. They teased me about training me up to dance the sky, but I knew they thought of me as a pet rather than truly one of them.
Also, I suspected that Tasha thought if I spent much time in the city above, I might run away.
It was a bad season. Nox after nox, that familiar tug came and Tasha and the cubs went running out to save the city. Garnet’s arm didn’t heal well, and on the third nox in a row of being left behind, he cracked.
‘Come on, little rat. Let’s see what’s out there.’
We scampered along tunnels, emerging from the lock where the canal ran out of the side of a hill.
‘Stay low,’ said Garnet, already fierce and bright eyed, as if he’d been taking something. Perhaps he had and I’d missed it. ‘Don’t want the lioness to know what we’re about.’
We both shifted into creature form and ran up the slope together, my rat bodies keeping close to the paws of the two gattopardi. One of them limped badly, but I knew better than to refer to it. He was still angry he’d been caught in such a way.
Being outside made my skin tingle. I had been underground so long, and had no idea how much I’d been craving the sky. It called to me. To Garnet, too. As we crested the hill, he let out a sound halfway between a growl and a cry of triumph.
The sky was full of lights and colours and shapes swooping back and forth. Garnet’s eyes glowed with it. Something smashed into a nearby bush and exploded into flames and sparks, and Garnet leaped towards it rather than away, savaging the bush with his teeth. Something bright and cold squirmed in his jaws and he took off into the sky, dragging it with him.
I was alone. Part of me wanted to go after him, to see what it was really like up there. To please Tasha, and make her realise how useful I was. To be part of the family. On the other hand, this was the first time I’d been alone and free in the best part of a year.
I scampered back to where my clothes lay near the lock, and changed into boy shape. I didn’t know where I was, but this looked like a main street, and everything in Aufleur was connected. I followed the street around until I spotted a familiar piazza, and kept going.
All the way to the Vittorina Royale.
The shops and houses along Via Delgardie were lined with boughs of green and I realised it was Saturnalia. Had I really been underground so long?
Finally I found myself standing in front of the theatre. It was too late for the lanterns to be lit, and the whole place seemed smaller and grimmer than I remembered.
Aye, I was such a wise old man at nine years old.
I crept around to the alley where Madalena had been found, and let myself in at the back, making my way past the dressing rooms and scenery. It smelled like home — of gin and cosmetick and the detritus of an audience. I made it to the stage, and found it set for the last scene of a saints-and-angel, with satin orange-blossom wreaths tossed over every prop. No one was about.
For so long this had been my world — the Mermaid back home, and then the Vittorina: layers of facade pretending to be something grand and exotic.
I’d always thought the theatre was my future. My dreams had been shaped by it — I wanted to be a mask, a songbird, a gaffer, a harlequinus, a tumbler …
My new world was smaller, darker, or at least it had been until I realised what the sky had to offer.
Standing on that stage, I remembered a song that Madalena used to sing to me. It was a number from the old days, when she and my mother dressed up as urchin boys and sang their guts out, turning the audience from laughter to tears on the change of a verse. I sang it there and then, remembering the steps, running through the old routine. My voice knew how to project to the gods. I could do this. I could live this life.
Halfway through, a creature padded into the theatre, then another. I half-expected a pair of gattopardi, and my voice faltered, but it was two half-grown wolves, ragged and matted. Come to bring me home, no doubt. I didn’t know how many Lords and Court were out there — I’d only met Tasha and the cubs, Saturn, Celeste and the snake man they called Power and Majesty.
I finished the song, then slid off the edge of the stage. ‘Are you one of them?’
Two pairs of deep, miserable yellow eyes stared back at me, and then they shifted into each other, forming a naked demme only a few years older than myself — old enough to be a columbine, but only just. She looked half-starved and she was shaking. I didn’t have the words yet for what she was — I’d heard the others talk about animor, courtesi, and the meanings hadn’t settled into my head like something that mattered — but I knew she was like me. Like Tasha and Garnet and the rest. I could feel it.
I reached out my hand to her and she flinched back. I recognised her then, though she had grown a bit in all directions since I’d seen her last. Liv. Saints, it was Liv. There were bruises all down her side. Someone had been beating her.
‘Is this your first time?’ I asked her.
She said nothing, just shivered all over. It reminded me of that fever I’d had, though she seemed cold and not hot.
I could have gone two ways. I had a choice. I could have taken her backstage and thrown her on the wardrobe mistress’s mercy, hoping the real world could make her better. But those bruises made me think that maybe she needed something else, a new life.
I took her to Tasha.
Livilla. I hadn’t even known that was her proper name. She was just Liv to me, the one who wasn’t as pretty as Ruby-Red, and didn’t talk as much as Kip and Benny, and could sing when she thought no one was looking but clammed up when she had an audience. She was broken and sad, and skinny and ugly enough that Tasha didn’t see her as a threat. At first, she withdrew from the rest of us, but the cubs treated her like a princessa and eventually she warmed up to that. No one at the theatre had thought she was anything special.
On the third day of Saturnalia, Ashiol brought her a sugar pig from the market, and she sucked every crumb of sweetness from it, rolling it around on her tongue like she’d never had such a feast.
On the fourth day of Saturnalia, Garnet and Lysandor brought paper sparrows to make her smile, and heaped her lap with them.
On the fifth day of Saturnalia, I snuck back into the Vittorina Royale and stole her a dress. It was red and shiny and I thought maybe it belonged to Adriane, if she was still there and a stellar and not off having babies or whatever. When Livilla smiled at me, her mouth was red and shiny, too.
The older boys became quite stupid over her — enough that it began to irritate Tasha — but Livilla liked me best. I enjoyed someone else being the pet for once. She would let me brush her hair and fetch things for her.
On the seventh day of Saturnalia, Tasha discovered that Lysandor was bedding Saturn’s courtesa Celeste, and all the seven hells broke open.