PART IX
The Stagemaster
29
‘Poet,’ whispered a voice, down low. ‘Poet, wake up.’
Four years had passed since the deaths of Tasha. The other cubs had matched Garnet’s Lordship frighteningly fast, as if it were a competition between them. Two years ago, Garnet had become a King, and then Ashiol, and then Lysandor. One year ago, Ortheus and Argentin had been killed in a skybattle that ended a hair’s breadth before the city was eaten whole. I was sixteen now, and Garnet … Garnet was Power and Majesty.
My bed was in the cupola up high in Priest’s cathedral. I hadn’t wanted to go to him, had refused to take another Lord when Garnet first became King. But a courteso can’t survive on his own in the Court. Sometimes stupid loyalty really is stupid. I was still skinny and not the most powerful; the other courtesi thought they could frighten me into choosing their various Lords as a master, and I had been beaten bloody more than once.
Eventually, Garnet had snarled at me, and bitten me lightly on the back of the neck, leaving marks. ‘I can’t protect you now, ratling. Old oaths don’t matter.’
‘I don’t want to be a courteso,’ I’d blurted to Priest when I placed myself at his feet. ‘When I’m a Lord, I don’t want to have courtesi under me. It’s a stupid system. It doesn’t work, and it just brings … pain.’
Priest had blinked slowly, then lit a cigar. ‘You stay out of my way, boy, and I’ll stay out of yours.’
We got along all right, after that. He had no interest in frigging me, and I had no interest in frigging his other courtesi, all pretty young demmes.
Eight years in the Creature Court and I was still alive; that made me a veteran.
We weren’t a family any more, not as we had been. The King cubs lived separately: Lysandor with Celeste in the Eyrie; Ashiol in his own territory, the museion; Garnet had taken over the rooms above the Haymarket. Livilla was there too, along with Mars, the courteso she had inherited from Ash. She liked to play the part of consort to Garnet’s Power and Majesty, but they fought dreadfully sometimes, and everyone knew she f*cked Ashiol any time she could. It didn’t seem to bother Garnet, but then Ashiol went to his bed on a regular basis, too.
‘Poet,’ the voice hissed again.
I muttered in complaint, but someone shoved my spectacles onto my face. I blinked until he came into focus. Lysandor.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
He looked miserable and tense. ‘I wanted to give you a chance. I know you have Priest to protect you, and he probably thinks he can —’
‘What are you on about?’
‘We’re leaving. Me and Celeste.’
Garnet had shown his dislike of Lysandor’s attachment to Celeste from the second he became Power and Majesty. He hated any allegiances the Court had with each other outside those of formal oaths. I suppose once you start playing the tyrant, it’s easy to assume everyone’s out to get you.
‘Leaving where? You’re not abandoning the Court?’
‘We have to go,’ Lysandor said miserably. ‘Garnet’s getting more unstable, don’t you see that?’
‘You swore an oath,’ I said furiously. ‘Do you want to end up like Tasha?’
‘I want to get out of this f*cking city with my head still attached to my body,’ Lysandor flared.
I sat up, peering at him in the near-darkness. ‘Go. Don’t tell me any more. If he finds out I knew, he’ll kill me.’
‘Is a monster like that really worth your loyalty?’
Anger flashed inside me. No one insulted Garnet to my face, not even one of the former cubs. I wouldn’t accept it.
‘You loved him before I did,’ I flung at Lysandor. ‘You belonged to each other before I came along. How can you give up on him now?’
‘Celeste is pregnant.’
Now that was a shock. ‘She can’t be. That doesn’t happen.’
Livilla had been convinced a year back that she was pregnant to Ashiol, but it came to nothing, and that was the closest thing to a scare anyone in the Creature Court had had in years. Most of them took the lack of pregnancies as an excuse to act like the animals they were, bedding anything that moved.
‘I don’t know,’ Lysandor whispered. ‘I know it’s not supposed to happen, but it has. She says it’s definite. So don’t you see? If Garnet finds out, it’ll be one more thing someone has that he doesn’t. He’ll kill her because of it, or me, or both of us.’
‘It’s not that bad,’ I said, because my first reaction was that it couldn’t be. But he rolled his eyes at me and I had to admit he was right. ‘You didn’t tell anyone else about this, did you?’
Lysandor hesitated. ‘I wanted to give Livilla a chance, too.’
I stared at him in horror. Liv wasn’t the scrappy little wounded columbine any more, just as I wasn’t the theatre urchin. ‘For f*ck’s sake, we’re not lambs now. She’ll never take your side against Garnet. She’ll tell him!’
Screams cut through the silence outside. Livilla, it seemed, had already spilled the news.
Lysandor was still for a moment, then he shaped himself into lynx form and hurtled down the spiral staircase.
I pulled on breeches and shirt and followed him, meeting Priest on the stairs.
‘Such a commotion, dear boy,’ he said, his tone not quite light enough to belie its warning tone.
‘Garnet’s about to slaughter Celeste, my Lord,’ I said breathlessly.
‘Well, then. Let us proceed towards the show at a reasonable pace.’
Loyalty is a terrible thing. These were my friends, my family, but the only people I technically owed allegiance to were Priest, my Lord, and Garnet, our Power and Majesty.
By the time we got there, Celeste stood up to her knees in the canal that ran through the Haymarket, blood everywhere, her white dress soaked through with that awful redness. She had always been the cool, intelligent one, sarcastic, completely reserved. Now, she was screaming like a wild thing, her hair exploding around her into bright white feathers. Livilla’s wolves nipped at her ankles.
Garnet was in a fury, his own shirt drenched in Celeste’s blood. He held a knife between finger and thumb, one of the sentinel’s knives, the hilt wrapped with leather and the blade gleaming skysilver. The sentinels were lined up on the bank of the canal, flat-faced. Celeste would get no help from them; their allegiance was to the Kings.
She would get no help from me, either, though I had always liked her.
Lysandor leaped into the water, growling at the wolves until they backed off.
Celeste was clutching her white dress to her skin and I couldn’t see where the blood was coming from, but it made the canal run pink.
‘May you die alone and unloved,’ she shrieked at Garnet, shaking with fury. ‘You have no right to be Power and Majesty. You give us nothing and take everything!’
‘Lysandor,’ Garnet said, recovering his breath and his dignity. ‘Silence your woman. She talks too much.’
The lynx let out a fierce cry and leaped for him. Garnet shaped himself into his two gattopardi, and they tore at the lynx before Ashiol stepped in their way.
‘Stop this!’ he yelled. ‘We’re supposed to be family. We’re brothers!’
Garnet threw himself back into human shape, gasping for breath. ‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
The lynx just gazed at him.
‘Go!’ Garnet yelled. ‘You’ll be back. You have nowhere to shelter. You have nothing but this. Nothing but me. Leave and you will be an oathbreaker. You wouldn’t dare.’
Lysandor sent out his final message so furiously that we all heard it inside our heads. Anywhere but here. Any fate but you.
Celeste burst into blood-stained owls and flew away down the canal. Lysandor turned and ran after her.
We never saw them again.
Lysandor had left me a legacy. I didn’t discover it until I returned to my cupola in Priest’s cathedral. A familiar carved chest lay at the foot of my bed. Saturn’s chest.
I opened it slowly, breathing in the smell of sandalwood shavings and linen. Saturn’s clothes. I pulled out fine white cambric shirts, silk cravats, waistcoats and coats and breeches. A pair of boots that would never fit me, but the rest … A top hat, carefully cushioned by the other garments. A fob watch made of actual clockwork — a rarity in Aufleur, where mechanism was banned. Several volumes filled with sketches and tiny, perfect handwriting. Then, in a compartment right at the bottom of it all …
Gold ducs. Hundreds of them. More money than I had ever seen. No wonder his Lordship had thrown so much at the stagemaster so long ago.
There was a key in there, wrapped in a note in Lysandor’s handwriting. This opens a security box at the temple of Juno Moneta. We’ve taken our share, but Celeste says Saturn would want you to have the rest.
Then a line written in an unfamiliar hand that must have been Celeste’s: Saturn said once that we had taken you away from your people and someday we would have to give you back. It’s your choice now, Poet. Stay, or go. But remember who you are.
It was several market-nines before I got away from the Arches during daylight for long enough to visit my new security box. There was more gold there, stacked in so deep I could hardly see the end of it, and ownership papers not only to the Vittorina Royale but to the Mermaid Revue. Sheaves of paperwork. The company would have gone bust years ago, but Saturn had kept on supporting them, propping them up. A strange sort of loyalty to the theatre he had turned upside down for the sake of a failed Saturnalia gift to the woman he loved.
Saints, he was still paying their wages. The bill was regularly siphoned out of this security box, despite the fact that the man who’d owned it was years dead.
The theatre wasn’t my life any more. My life was fighting the sky, serving Priest, keeping Garnet sane. I had nothing else; needed nothing else. My voice was a conduit for animor; my performances for a private audience only. Tasha and Saturn and Lysandor were gone, but I still had Ashiol and Livilla. My Lord Priest. Garnet, Garnet, Garnet.
I took the papers home, hid the key, ignored it beautifully for a month or two. But when the end of the year came around, I dressed myself in Saturn’s best suit and boots and hat, tucked his pocket watch inside my coat, and took myself to the Vittorina Royale to see their Saturnalia revue.
It was going to be so easy. I would hand the ownership papers and the key to the account to the stagemaster. I would make a gift of the theatre to the company that had once been my own; my best, my brightest, home. All in all, it was an excellent plan.
Their columbines were sloppy, their costumes ragged, their pantomime recycled and creaking at the edges. It was the worst performance I had ever seen. The cabaret of monsters was slapdash, and the harlequinade was a joke. I recognised few faces among the masks, the tumblers, the songbirds or the columbines. They had no stellar, and no one that I could see stood out as being worthy of that name.
Afterwards, I slipped backstage, past the spruikers and crew and up to the stagemaster’s office. The smell of cheap imperium hit me before I’d even opened the door. The stagemaster lay drunk on the desk, snoring.
The office was exactly the same, though there were no posters on the walls with sketches of the current troupe. He was surrounded by ghosts of the past, beautifully inked and lettered and frozen in time. He hadn’t bothered to watch the show. Why should he? They had been poor once, but honest, and there had been a greatness about them. Now they had nothing to believe in, nowhere to go. No one to lead them. The old man had lost hope, had lost heart, and failed them all.
I leaned over his stinking body, speaking in the clear, projected voice that he’d begun teaching me when I was five years old.
‘You had everything. The best job in the world. You even had a gracious benefactor sending you gold every year, no questions asked. How did you manage to f*ck this one up?’
He snorted a little in his sleep, as if breathing was a difficulty.
‘I have a vision,’ I told him, enjoying the way that my voice bounced off the walls. ‘A vision of the Vittorina Royale as the finest theatre in the city, home to a renowned company. A glory and wonder to behold.’
I leaned in. ‘Two very good friends gave you to me. I think they saw it as my redemption, a way out of the life I stumbled into so long ago. They think that I’m not a monster, that there’s still hope for me. But they’re wrong.’
His neck snapped so easily under my hands.
‘It’ll be easier without you,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to be spectacular. You’ll see.’
Backstage, the company were pretending to congratulate each other on their appalling performance. They were weary, half-starved and entirely unsurprised by how bad they’d been. This was normality for them, it seemed.
‘Oy, who the frig are you?’ one of the lackeys called out.
I gave him a superior look. It didn’t matter that I was only sixteen. I channelled Saturn, Ashiol, Garnet and Tasha as hard as I could. I might still be a courteso in the Creature Court, but in this theatre I could be a f*cking Lord. I could tear this poor excuse for a company to pieces if I chose to, but that wasn’t what I was here for.
‘I am the Orphan Princel,’ I said grandly. When I placed my hand inside my coat just so, it brushed Saturn’s pocket watch and it was as if I could hear the voices of the dead speaking through it. The stagemaster, Madalena, my mother, Lord Saturn himself, showing me the way forward. ‘I am your new stagemaster, your new stellar and your salvation. Rehearsals begin this afternoon. Those who arrive on time will eat supper. Those who do not may find employment elsewhere. It meant something once, to be a part of the Mermaid Revue, and it will mean something again.’
There have been many memorable performances in my life — those on a stage before hundreds of eyes, and those in the darkness or a blazing sky that have saved my life. This wasn’t my finest, but, of them all, it is the one that makes me happiest to recall. It was the beginning of my life starting again.
Lysandor would have been disappointed that I began my new life without letting go of the old. But it wasn’t as if he cared enough to come back and check on what I’d done with his gift.
As with any mask, my best performance will be the next one. Right around the corner. Not long now.