THE TYRANT set Lokum alight on their wedding day. Thanks to Arkady, fire had risen to the top of his list of elimination methods. He forced her to walk to the end of the longest bridge spanning the marshlands, and he drenched her in petrol and struck a flame. He’d given no real thought to decreasing his own flammability, so the event was referred to as an attempted murder-suicide. “Attempted” because when he tried to run away, the burning woman ran after him, shouting that she’d just that moment discovered something very interesting; he couldn’t kill her, he could never kill her . . . she took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he’d started. There was still quite a lot of him left when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went. She put on some other clothes and took food to the prison where Arkady sat alone contemplating the large heap of questionable publications the guards had left him on their departure. Before Arkady could thank Lokum for the food (and, he hoped, her company) she said, “Wait a minute,” and ran off again, returning an hour later with his two friends. Leporello shook Arkady’s hand and Giacomo licked his face; this was a joke they’d vowed they’d make the next time they saw Arkady, and they thought it rather a good one. Arkady called out his thanks to Lokum, but she had no intention of staying this time either: “We’ve got to get you out of there,” she said, and left again.
“It’s autumn, isn’t it?” Arkady asked Giacomo. He’d seen that Giacomo’s shoes and Leporello’s feet were soaking wet too, but he wanted to finish eating before he asked about that.
“Yes! How did you know?”
“I don’t know. Could you bring me some leaves? Just a handful . . .”
Giacomo brought armfuls of multicolored leaves, and Leporello rushed through them like a blizzard so that the richest reds and browns flew in through the prison bars.
“Giacomo?”
“Yes, Arkady?”
“Is it right for me to escape this place? Those people where we used to live—”
“There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. They would have got out if they could, but they couldn’t, and that’s what killed them. If you can escape then you should.”
“But am I to blame?”
Giacomo didn’t say yes or no, but attempted to balance a leaf on the tip of Leporello’s nose.
—
WHAT ABOUT EIRINI the Fair? For months she’d been living quite happily in a big city where most of the people she met were just as vague as she was, if not more so. She ran a small and cozy drinking establishment and passed her days exchanging little-known facts with customers in between attending to the finer details of business management. Her mother had drowned soon after their arrival in the new city: This might have been an accident, but Eirini thought not. The river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes. Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold . . .
Thinking of her mother’s words, Eirini the Fair had journeyed farther up the river and given the ashes into its care. Arrivals from her father’s territory frequented her bar and freely cursed the tyrant’s name as they told tales that intrigued her. If what these people were saying was true, then the tyrant’s drownings had come to an end. It was said that her father’s territory was mostly underwater now, that there was no king, no flag, and no soldiers, that there were only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down there. Eirini the Fair heard that one of the only pieces of land yet to be submerged was notable for having a large prison on it. The man who told Eirini this paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?
“Hi, excuse me, sorry for interrupting,” a glamorous newcomer said, as she took a seat at the bar beside the probable loan shark. “Can we talk in private?”
—
ALL LOKUM wanted to know was what Eirini the Fair had taken with her when she’d left the palace. Eirini had neither the time nor the inclination to provide a list of articles to her father’s plaything. But Lokum rephrased her question to ask if Eirini had taken anything of her father’s while leaving the palace, and then Eirini remembered the key. Just a metal shape on his dressing table, bigger than most keys she’d seen, but still small enough to pocket while she bade her father farewell and hoped she’d managed to inconvenience him one last time.
—
JUST BEFORE she and Lokum reached the prison gates, Eirini the Fair looked over the side of their boat and saw that her mother had found her way to the drowned city that now surrounded the building. She wasn’t alone; there was a man with her, the one Eirini the Fair had never met but wanted to. They both waved, and Eirini the First held up a finger and then wistfully rocked an invisible baby, motions easily interpretable as an appeal for grandchildren. “Lovely,” Eirini the Fair murmured, drawing her head back into the boat and pretending she hadn’t seen that last bit.
presence