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 fuck 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 fucking 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.
30
Tierce fell, and that was the beginning of the end for all of us. Heliora told us it was to happen, and there was a moment when we thought — all of us — perhaps we could stop it. We looked to Garnet to see what we should do. He walked away, up into his rooms alone, and drank himself into unconsciousness.
‘At least he still has a soul,’ Livilla said to me, when no one else was listening. Then she laughed. ‘Not sure I do. Who gives a frig about Tierce really? We have our own city to worry about.’
It was one of the last times she spoke to me as if we were friends.
When Garnet didn’t emerge for several days, I took my life into my own hands and went in after him. Made him drink water and one of the healing tisanes we used in the theatre to keep our voices fresh and our heads clear for performance.
He sighed, and leaned into me. ‘Have you ever had to make a terrible choice, little rat?’
I thought of the stagemaster of the Vittorina Royale and the way his throat had felt breaking under my hands. One of many dreadful things I had done, but that choice had been so simple and mundane. I still heard the voices of the dead every time I closed my eyes and slept with Saturn’s pocket watch beneath my pillow.
‘Yes, my Power,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he muttered. ‘Let us be monsters together, then.’
I wanted to give him something, a keepsake, a treasure. Something to show him that he wasn’t alone, that no matter how many times Ashiol and Livilla broke his heart, there was someone who would always be his. I only had one treasure, apart from the faded playbill that meant something only to me. I stroked Garnet’s damp hair back from his face, and made him cup his hands, then dropped the fob watch into them. The chain slithered against his skin, and for a moment I felt lighter, as if I’d done the right thing.
He sighed again and smiled at me. The best of smiles. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s yours,’ I said in a quiet breath of a voice, meaning something else.
He drew me close and kissed me, his mouth brushing my forehead and then my lips. ‘I will never forget,’ he said softly, ‘that you stayed.’
I wanted to be warmed by those words, but his face crumpled as he remembered that the ones he had loved best didn’t love him enough.
Garnet had bad dreams after that, worse than ever. They tormented him. It’s hard to remain sane on so little sleep, especially in a world like ours, where death must be constantly fought against.
I had no courtesi to worry about (nor ever would, that was my promise to myself; we all have to choose our own paths to stay as human as we can) and so would sometimes visit him in the Haymarket when Livilla or Ashiol were sleeping elsewhere. I would curl up as rats on the foot of his bed and keep him company so that someone would be there when he screamed himself awake.
Yes, I was in love with him. That much must be obvious by now.
‘Poet,’ he whispered one day in the darkened bedchamber. ‘Do you hate me?’
‘Never,’ I sighed, shaping back into human the better to talk. ‘Hush, don’t be stupid.’
‘The bitch Heliora won’t see the futures for me.’
‘I know. Doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters, Poet. Everything matters. I’ve been to every fortune-teller in the city. Hacks and charlatans, most of them. And yet … twelve of them have said the same thing to me. It must be true.’
‘What must be true?’
‘That I will die by fire.’
That woke me up. ‘You won’t die. I won’t let you.’
‘Sweet boy,’ he sighed, and reached down to grasp my hand. He tugged me to lie beside him, the blanket tangled between his body and mine. ‘We screwed you up good and proper, didn’t we?’
My life separated into two halves. At the Vittorina Royale, I was the lord and master, the Orphan Princel, stellar and stagemaster rolled into one. Some of them feared me — when I was displeased, I could channel Tasha or Garnet pretty damned effectively. Others looked up to me.
There were new children every year: pages and scrappers learning the trade, scrabbling to get a chance on stage. I saw myself in every single one of them.
Then there was the other nox, the one that lit up the sky after the theatres had closed. I became the Lord of Rats, though Garnet and Ashiol and even Livilla still thought of me as the lamb, the youngest one, not worth worrying about. They were at war, the three of them, and yet each thought me neutral.
When Garnet started torturing Ashiol, punishing him in public and in private, locking him in that dark room and using the net or the blades to show him just who was Power and Majesty, Livilla chose a side. Suddenly her love for Garnet was eternal. She stopped running to Ashiol when Garnet was in a temper with her; instead, she amused herself with her courteso, who at least treated her like she was important. I knew she was frigging Mars long before anyone else did. I don’t know why people tell me these things.
It bemused me, the way the Lords and Court and Kings opened themselves to each other so easily. Did they have so little regard for their safety that they would let a wolf, snake, panther into their bed for the sake of a quick tumble? I remembered the cleverness of Argentin and took no lovers from the Creature Court. Why should I, when there were so many eager boy actors desperate to catch the eye of the oddly young stagemaster and stellar of the Vittorina Royale, each hoping I would give him a part in our latest pageant.
Sometimes I even brought the boys down to the Shambles, to the cozy grocer’s-shop apartment that I took for myself once I was a Lord. It was easy enough to dodge the rest of the Creature Court as I had the Shambles to myself, and a glass of doped imperium after the fact ensured that my lovers never found their way back down into the tunnels.
It added to my mystique, I like to think.
It was my seventeenth birthday, and I was feeling nostalgic. I bought oysters at the docks and wandered along the embankment, eating them until my mouth dripped with salt water and lime juice. It was a strange life I had made for myself, though, to be fair, I knew of no sensible alternative.
I would never return to my seaside town, I knew that then as now. We would hardly recognise each other, Oyster and I. For a moment, I wondered what it might have been like if we had never left. If Madalena had been there to play mam and give me a new shirt to celebrate the day, or at least buy me a pot at the alehouse.
Certainly I would not be stagemaster if I had stayed there. But what would I be? Perhaps I was always meant to be a monster even if my life was mundane. I might drink too much and beat my wife, demand sugared almonds and orangeade before every performance. Perhaps I would have died of a cold before I turned ten. There is no sense wondering about such things. The futures are endless possibilities, and all we have is who we are from one moment to the next.
When I returned to my warm nook above the grocer’s shop, I found Livilla waiting for me, drunk on my most expensive imperium. From the smell of her, she’d found some herbal remedies to ease the passage of the drink.
‘What’s all this, sweetling?’ I asked, trying not to show how annoyed I was by her presence. No sleep for me now if I had to cart her across the Arches and dump her back in Garnet’s bed.
‘He doesn’t love me,’ she said into her glass.
Oh, one of those mornings indeed.
‘If you wanted love in the traditional way, you should have chosen worthier objects,’ I said, which was true and yet applied to me as well as her.
‘I should be everything to him. I should be everything to someone,’ she said, the last of her drink slopping out of her glass and onto my expensive rug.
I relieved her of her glass. ‘Is it Ashiol or Garnet making you miserable?’
‘Both of them.’
Ah, and wasn’t that that a fine problem?
‘They’ll never love anyone the way they love each other,’ I said, and threw a blanket over her. ‘Something we all have to live with.’
I had a choice then: to drag drunken Livilla home, or to wait and deal with cranky, hungover Livilla sometime in the future. I chose the latter.
The other choice would have found Ashiol healing from his latest punishments in Garnet’s bed. The outcome, with a miserable Livilla thrown into the mix, would almost certainly have been different. But how was I to know that?
Once Livilla woke, groaning and complaining before she even opened her eyes, I forced her to eat bread and honey, which she threw up in my kitchen. I sponged her face and dressed her in a suit of my own, vaguely recalling the times I had tended to Madalena after she had been in her cups.
Livilla said little about Ashiol and Garnet, though it was clear from her melancholy the two had at least temporarily reconciled from their latest fight and neither had a thought for her. It was tempting to ask whether she preferred it when Garnet had Ashiol chained up as punishment for some imaginary rebellion, but she was too miserable for sarcasm and I took pity on her. Silence suited us both for once.
We reached the Haymarket eventually, and when she stared at the steps with an utter lack of recognition as to how to use them, I helped her up as far as the balcony.
The doors flew open and Garnet burst out, looking worse than Livilla. He was wide-eyed, terrified, and hung over the balcony rail as if the sky itself were after him.
‘What have you done?’ said Livilla in a deadened voice, and it occurred to me that perhaps her misery was not at all about how much either of the cubs loved her, or how much they loved each other. Something had happened here, and I had been too distracted with my own life to see it clearly.
‘He’s dead,’ said Garnet in a gasp. ‘I’ve killed him.’
He was naked, and smelled of sex and animor, too much animor. He shone like a beacon, the power pouring out through the motes in his skin.
I couldn’t feel Ashiol. Not at all.
I went to the door of the room and saw him sprawled on the bed, his body unnaturally still. I heard the sob that caught in Livilla’s throat and stuck there. I could hear Garnet’s heart beating louder and louder, too fast.
‘You’ll have to make them think you meant to do it,’ I said, when I had a voice.
This was nothing. Garnet had killed Tasha. He was one of the beasts who had ripped Madalena to pieces. What was one more beloved corpse?
I made my way to the bed and stood over Ashiol. He didn’t breathe or move, and there was no animor in him. He was empty, like someone had carved out his insides, taken everything that made him himself.
This is what happens to the people Garnet loves, I thought, traitorously, and laid one hand on Ashiol’s bare chest.
He woke up, and started screaming with a pain and anger I’d never heard, not from any of them. He was still empty.
Garnet and Ashiol had been trained and punished by some of the harshest monsters the Creature Court had ever produced and yet no one could hurt them as deeply as they could hurt each other.
While Garnet buried his anguish in every potion he could get his hands on, and Livilla stayed at his side to lick up every fallen drop, it fell to me to cart Ashiol to the people of the daylight who might care for him.
Mars helped. He was Livilla’s courteso now, but he had served Ashiol once. He said little to me as we carried Ashiol’s inert body up through Saturn’s old Eyrie and towards the Palazzo on the top of the hill. Garnet had drugged Ashiol to dampen his screams, dosing him with so much poppy juice we were lucky he hadn’t killed him all over again.
‘I didn’t know it was possible,’ Mars said, breaking his silence as we laid Ashiol on the Palazzo steps. ‘To drain a man of animor. A King …’
‘There is much the Power and Majesty can do that we could never understand,’ I said.
We walked away and left Ashiol to be found by his daylight family and their servants. He lived, though it wasn’t long before we heard that he had left the city.
Mars had a point. No one had ever heard of a King being drained of his animor. It was possible to give and take animor, to share it when your Lord needed greater strength, to bestow it when your courtesi were wounded … but this was unheard of. The only conclusion we could reach was that Ashiol had given it of his own free will, but that hardly fitted with the facts known.
I went through Saturn’s books again, hunting for some answers as to what powers Garnet had, and what he had done to Ashiol, but they provided little.
There was one book missing. I counted and checked several times to be sure. I knew it; had once deciphered several pages of inane theories about creatures that lay beyond the sky and how we could communicate with them. I didn’t know what the rest of the volume held. But I found a single fine red hair in the chest and knew who had stolen it from me.
Apparently, my capacity for forgiveness is infinite. It’s important to know these things about yourself.
PART X
The Clockwork
Court
31
Four days after the Ides of Bestialis
The train journey south brought memories crashing in on Ashiol. He kept flashing back to that day five years ago when he had awoken, still half-drugged, miserable, broken, to find himself in a carriage en route to Diamagne. Three blank-faced lictors had been his only companions, charged with ensuring he arrive alive at his stepfather’s estate. (No, not stepfather; his brother’s estate. Diamagne was dead, there was a letter, but Ashiol had been so caught up in Garnet and his madness that he hadn’t even sent a card of consolation to his mother.) Ashiol had spent most of that journey trying to figure out how to steal one of those axes that the lictors carried, or to escape them long enough to throw himself off the train.
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