On This Unworthy Scaffold Read online

  Hauling himself halfway into the room, he gives me a twisted smile as he sits on the edge of the hatch, one leg dangling through the opening. Another side effect of my bringing him back is his compulsion to obey any order I give him, in a way he never had to when he was in the armée. As such, I’m careful not to give commands—I don’t even like to contradict him.

  “Fontaine’s own orders made reference to Le Roi Fou sending supplies to stock the Prix de Guerre,” Camreon says, but Theodora shakes her head.

  “I doubt it’s true,” she says. “Even before the battle at the temple, my uncle was loath to spend more money on Chakrana. Besides, if he was sending supplies, why not send passenger ships?”

  “Fontaine apparently felt the same,” Camreon says. “Partially because he had come from Aquitan so recently. Apparently he was among the last recruits bound for Chakrana.”

  “I can fetch a bucket if we want to send him back,” Akra says.

  Leo looks at him, aghast. “We can’t let the Prix de Guerre sail.”

  “Between the decree from the King of Chakrana and orders from the general d’armée, we don’t have a choice,” Akra says. “Unless you come up with the manpower to defeat the armée or take the throne.”

  “The manpower is already there,” Camreon says slowly. “All we have to do is stop it from being loaded aboard the Prix de Guerre.”

  Akra’s eyebrows shoot up. “You think the Aquitans will join the rebellion?”

  “Some of us already have,” Theodora says pointedly, but he waves the claim away.

  “You knew Cam for years before you switched sides,” Akra says. “The rest of the Aquitans think he’s either a usurper or a murderer.”

  “They might change their minds if we save their lives,” Camreon replies. “But we don’t have much time. The Prix de Guerre leaves in three days.”

  “What about the Audrinnes?” I say then.

  Camreon raises an eyebrow. “The what?”

  “The Audrinnes.” I stand, going to the window as Miu swirls around my feet, annoyed at losing access to my lap. Outside, the setting sun turns the sky bloodred; the river shimmers at the edge of the paddies, winding its way south to the sugar fields. “They own the plantation where Fontaine found Le Trépas’s message. We should check there first. If we can catch the monk, there’s no need to fight our way through Nokhor Khat.”

  “How so?” Theodora says, and I turn back, the excitement building in my chest.

  “If Le Trépas dies, so do his minions,” I say. “The Boy King and the general, not to mention any other revenants he’s left in his wake. With the throne empty and the armée leaderless, you and Cam are clear to step into the breach and figure out what to do with the Aquitan civilians.” I take a breath—the words are beginning to fall over one another. Then I look at Camreon askance. “Why are you shaking your head?”

  “You assume Le Trépas will be easy to find,” Cam says. “But why would he linger at the plantation?”

  “What if he left clues behind?” I insist. “More messages?”

  “You mean traps?” Camreon makes a face. “I don’t want to find out.”

  “If I could get hold of one of his revenants, I could ask it where he’s hiding!”

  “Even if you could find him, how do you plan to kill him?” Akra adds. “He survived a fall from midair. I don’t think a bullet will do the trick.”

  Frustrated, I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut, but when I do, I see the monk’s smile as he falls: down, down, down. Shaking it off, I turn back to my brother. “I don’t know how he did it,” I say. “But we’ll never find out if we don’t go after him.”

  “We will,” Camreon says, and my heart leaps—too soon. “But not yet.”

  “When?”

  “When you’re in better shape to face him,” he replies, and the answer takes me aback.

  “I told you, I’m fine—”

  “No, you aren’t,” Camreon says, and his tone has that particular crispness it always has when he is dealing with something unpleasant. “You’re combative. Impulsive. Distracted. Obsessed. You’re in the grip of your malheur, and it’s not safe to—”

  “What do you know about my malheur?” I roar, and in the sudden silence, I feel everyone staring. Suddenly I see myself through his eyes: shouting, furious, impatient, with the blood only just washed from my hair. Shame dims the fire of my anger, and I stalk toward the hatch. “I need some air.”

  “Jetta . . . ,” Leo calls after me, but I do not wait.

  “And some space!”

  As I hurry down the ladder, their voices drift after me. “I’ve been telling you we need to go to the lytheum mine,” Theodora says.

  “It’s in Le Trépas’s territory,” Camreon replies. “And we’re shorthanded as it is—”

  I almost shout back up to them that I don’t need the elixir, but even I know that’s a lie. I’m only tired of having to rely on it. Better to learn to live without it than to live in fear of running out.

  I’ve done it before, haven’t I? In fact, I survived without the elixir for most of my life. I close my eyes and take a slow breath, then let it out, trying to focus only on the air moving through me. It’s a simple tactic, but one that served me well preparing for performances. But in the dark, the monk’s smile looms. My eyes snap open again, and I let out the air in a frustrated sigh.

  Night has fallen while we laid our plans. The village unfolds before me in swathes of light and shadow: the silhouettes of stilted huts and grass thatch, the steeply pitched rice barns with their upswept eaves. The coronation feast is set up in the central square, on a little hillock where the rainy-season water won’t pool. Paper lanterns are strung on bamboo poles, and cookfires flare under steaming pots of rice and meat and curry. Smoke and music drift on the wind. The drizzle has stopped, but the evening air is damp and cool, and my hair is still wet.

  Ignoring the chill, I start toward the square, suddenly eager to join the crowd. Even when I was a small girl, I loved the closeness of strangers, especially after a show. Maman was always tired by curtain call, but Papa and I were eager to set aside our fantouches and join the audience. To hear their praise, join their chatter, share their excitement. After being in the spotlight, I could lose myself in something even greater—something outside my own mind.

  But as I try to join them, the villagers part around me. I feel their eyes on the back of my head, like centipedes crawling through my hair. Of course. I am no longer a shadow player, but a nécromancien.

  But as the crowd parts, I see a familiar smile at last: Tia, standing behind a table that holds a small supply of imported champagne.

  The erstwhile singer is pouring glasses for the assembled crowd; she and Cheeky had insisted on hauling the last of the Boy King’s bottles all the way to Malao, and now I’m glad they did. I’m equally glad that Tia is alone; I’m not quite ready to face Cheeky again.

  When Tia sees me approaching, she passes me a glass, lifting her own in an Aquitan toast. “Santé!”

  “À la vôtre.” I’d learned the reply long ago, at Madame Audrinne’s table. Lifting the glass, I take a sip. Champagne sparkles in the cup and fizzes in my nose. Before I know it, I’ve drained the glass.

  “Champagne is meant to be savored.” Tia gives me a look that isn’t quite reproach, but is far from approval. “I’m no politician, but I doubt the import rates will be favorable for a while.”

  “Then I should enjoy it while it lasts,” I say, holding out the glass for a refill. Tia is raising the bottle when Leo’s voice floats over the revelry.

  “Jetta?”

  Suddenly I see my thirst for what it was: another symptom. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d sought calm in a bottle. “Excuse me,” I say to Tia, leaving the glass on her table as I push through the crowd. But I can’t outrun the feeling that Camreon was right: my malheur has crept back after all.

  “Jetta?” Leo catches up with me near the cookfires. I turn reluctantly, hopin
g the flames hide the color of my cheeks. When he sees the look in my eyes, he reaches out to cup my face, then hesitates with his hand an inch away. A smile plays on his lips. “How much space did you need?”

  With a sigh, I lean into his hand. He wraps his other arm around my shoulders, then steps back, surprised. “Your hair is still wet,” he says, shrugging off his jacket.

  “You don’t have to take care of me, Leo.”

  “Let me do it anyway,” he says, draping the jacket over my shoulders. It is warm, and smells like rosin and varnish. “At least until you’re ready to do it yourself.”

  I try to smile. “That might be awhile, considering the elixir is out of reach.”

  Leo raises an eyebrow. “Is it?”

  “You heard Camreon,” I say. “We don’t have enough time or people to send them for the lytheum.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I don’t have any plans tomorrow morning.” The corner of his mouth twitches upward, and my own eyes widen.

  “You think we should go by ourselves?” I look back at the hut, silhouetted against the night sky, then out over the paddies and at the dark jungle beyond. “Camreon would be furious.”

  “When has that stopped you?” Leo says, and I can’t help but laugh. “And it shouldn’t change his plans. If we take the avion, we can catch up with them in Nokhor Khat by tomorrow night.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” I say, but the words are odd in my mouth—echoes of someone else’s reasoning. “Isn’t it?”

  “Your malheur is dangerous.” Coming from anyone else, his frank assessment would offend me, but Leo learned the danger in madness long before he and I met. His own maman had a similar malheur, and it led to her death. He gives me a crooked smile. “If you’re going to take risks anyway, let’s make them worthwhile. Meet me at the avion at dawn?”

  “Why wait?” I counter, my heart beating faster as I start toward the edge of the village, where the avion is kept. But Leo catches my hand in his.

  “Slow down,” he says, laughing. “It’s been a long day, and the docteur said you should rest, remember?”

  “Right,” I say, disappointed. “Dawn, then.”

  “I’ll go stow some supplies in the avion,” he says, kissing me gently before he goes. I watch him wind through the crowd, but the fire is back in my belly—from the kiss, or the champagne? Or perhaps it is only the promise of finally being able to make my own plans.

  In the three weeks since my last dose of elixir, the warnings had echoed in the back of my head, and in the voices of my friends: be careful of your malheur. But perhaps I had been too careful—after all, it wasn’t as if I could avoid it. The only way to tame my madness is to treat it. Wasn’t it riskier, on balance, to do nothing?

  The thought is freeing . . . thrilling. In fact, perhaps I have paid Camreon too much mind. He may be a king, but this is the rebellion, not the armée. I don’t have to follow every order.

  Especially not when I know better.

  He wants to stop the deportation and take the throne, but the Prix de Guerre is only part of the show. It is Le Trépas pulling all the strings. And Le Trépas was last seen at the plantations.

  I gaze up at the moon. The night is young; there are hours before dawn. And while Nokhor Khat is half a day away by air, the plantations are much closer. With any luck, I could be back before the champagne runs out.

  Galvanized, I set off into the night—this time, away from the party. Passing through the village, I come to the paddies. The souls of frogs leap into the water as I cross the berms. In the shadows, it is hard to tell exactly where Fontaine died; the shadows hide the gore, and the mud has flowed back over the scar of the blast. But I can still smell it—the gunpowder. The blood.

  “Come,” I whisper, and out of the dark water, the bony head of my dragon rises.

  I keep an eye on the distant village, but no one notices us out in the field. I climb up on her back, wrapping my hands around the bones of her neck as we slip away into the night.

  Chapter Three

  Applause will always be my favorite feeling, but these days, flying is a close second. It isn’t just the wind in my hair or the thrill of speed, but the way Chakrana unrolls below me. The velvet jungle, the silver thread of the river, the souls glittering across all of it—the fabric of the landscape is a sequined gown on the lush body of my country. I wish others could see her as I do now.

  But amid the gleam of soullight, I keep an eye out for a lightless void, for a patch of darkness. For Le Trépas. I can’t shake the thought I’ll catch sight of him with every passing bend in the river.

  Traveling south, the jungle gives way to plantation estates as we pass into Le Sucrier—the rich fields around the Riv Syr that the Aquitans claimed for sugar. From the air, I can still see the outlines of the berms that used to divide the fields into paddies when rice was planted here. Now, cane stands like soldiers, stiff and stately and tall enough to harvest.

  The Audrinnes’ house is easy to spot from a distance. Outside the famed architecture of Nokhor Khat or the woven banyan temple of the Maiden, it’s the grandest building I’ve seen. The pale structure sits at the end of a long drive flanked by mimosa trees, lined with columns and archways over a wide veranda and fronted with a curved cul-de-sac. On the nights the Audrinnes hosted our shadow plays, fine families from nearby estates would pull up in stately carriages, spilling out onto the steps, and the air would buzz with laughter and anticipation.

  Of course, I was more familiar with the servants’ entrance at the back. We would make our way through the bustle of the kitchens, carrying our fantouches and our instruments unseen to the stage in the great room. Now the house is quiet, the only movement the wind in the grass and the souls drifting by. I am so used to their light that it takes me a moment to realize the lamps in the great room are burning.

  Instantly I crouch over the dragon’s neck, as though to hide. Foolish—as if anyone watching wouldn’t notice the dragon herself, silhouetted against the moon. But as we pass over the house, nothing stirs except the dead.

  Then who lit the lamps? Could the Audrinnes have been spared? Somehow I doubt it. Their estate is by far the largest in the area, and very hard to miss. I circle one more time, trying to get a better view—or to see if there are corpses in the fields. But the sugar could easily hide a body, even if it was standing upright.

  I am banking for another pass when I see the horses. They stand on the wide drive: two matched mares, pale as cream. Monsieur Audrinne had them shipped all the way from Aquitan to pull his wife’s carriage. Now they wander free to roam—or to be eaten by an enterprising tiger. There is no way Madame would let them loose. Not if she was still alive.

  The horses flee as we drop lower, their white tails streaming like flags of surrender. The servants’ entry is closest, but I steer my dragon toward the curved driveway at the front of the house.

  In a clatter of bones, the creature lands, long claws gouging clods from the packed dirt. I throw my leg over her ridged back and slide to the ground. My dragon sniffs the air—or pretends to. After all, there is no flesh on her hollow skull, no lungs in the sinuous cage of her ribs. But her soul contains her memory, her habits . . . her instinct. As she lowers her head, she shifts on her claws, uneasy. I scan the estate, but there is no movement aside from the wind in the leaves and the clouds gliding across the stars. “Shh,” I murmur to the dragon. “Stay.”

  At my command, she hunkers down as though to hide, this great beast with bones that gleam in the silver starlight. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised she is nervous, out here in the open. But as far as I can see, we are alone except for the souls and the horses.

  I start toward the wide stairs. There used to be a Chakran porter stationed at the heavy mahogany doors, to welcome Madame’s guests to the show. Tonight the doors are shut tight, and the polished wood is marred by paint. No . . . blood. It drips, thick and clotted, across the paneled wood, in a now-familiar symbol: know your enemy.

  Le
Trépas has been here—is he here still? I try the handle, but the door is locked. I’ll be taking the servants’ entrance after all. Back down the stairs, I turn toward the north side of the house. My feet sink into the green grass of the soft lawn as I pass by the arched openings of the veranda. I falter when I reach the windows of the great room. The gas lamps are now off.

  My scalp prickles; I whirl, but there is no one behind me. My dragon waits for me on the drive—the horses have stopped, nervous, under the mimosa trees. And souls are still drifting by. Le Trépas is nowhere near. But the armée had said they’d seen other corpses. . . .

  If I can catch one and pull out the soul, it might be able to tell me where the old monk is. And if I find Le Trépas, the war is over, and so are my nightmares. I will finally be able to close my eyes without his knowing smile lurking in the darkness there.

  I creep closer to the rail of the veranda, but when I reach the windows, I’m not tall enough to see over the sill. Then a breeze stirs my hair, rippling through the night-blooming jasmine that cascades down the side of the house. Under the perfume of the flowers wafts a sweeter smell: the scent of rot. And still I feel eyes on the back of my head. Yet there is nothing on the lawn, and no one. Only the path, and the mimosa trees, and the carriage house off to the side . . . but its doors are shut. How did Madame’s horses escape?

  My mouth is dry; I wet my lips, wishing briefly for the glass of champagne I left on the table. Then I set out toward the carriage house, souls drifting in my wake.

  The squat building is made of brick and set with wide wooden doors; only Aquitans would build with brick in Chakrana. I look for a crack around the hinges or in the shuttered windows—some way to peer inside—but the building is well kept. Still, the smell wafts out, stronger now. Death.

  I grab the handle, then think better of it—I’ve learned my lesson about rushing in. Drawing my little knife, I make a shallow cut in line with the older scars on my left hand. Air hisses through my teeth as blood wells up, black in the moonlight, like spilled ink on the pale palette of my palm. Tucking my knife back into my belt, I dip a finger in the blood and mark the door with the symbol of life. Eagerly, the soul of a barn rat scuttles in. I step back into the shadows and whisper to it, “Open.”