Edmond Margot stepped for the third time that evening into the spotlight, and tried to summon his voice.
Behind him on the stage, drums drummed low. A trumpet pealed one long, slow, high note, and sank to silence. The spotlight seared his eyes with dancing sparks. Faces hovered beyond the light, out there in the audience, watchers and waiters. He saw only suggestions of their presence: curve of cheek, jut of chin, black wells where eyes should be. In with the breath, then force it out.
Twice before he’d entered this burning light and each time recited old poems, picking at scabs and prying open scars for the crowd’s amusement. Each time they applauded. A woman even came to compliment him, to mock him.
Familiar, she had been, so familiar, a vision of vanished voices risen to taunt him with unanswerable questions.
His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. The room was hot, but his sweat was cold. Fear sweat, nerve sweat. Fine vintage.
Head up. Shoulders back. You may be broken, but don’t let them see you breaking. They knew his poems and liked them. Would applaud, even if he recited only his old lines from now ’til the world drowned.
Eve swayed toward him out of the shadows, all silk and slink and smile. He’d never seen her wear a low-cut dress, wondered again as ever on this island whether she really was a woman. Pressed the thought down, aside. Didn’t matter. His voice mattered, his voice long lost.
Eve drew near enough to whisper through her smile. “Do you have one more in you?”
“No,” he said through tight dry lips. “But I’ll do it anyway.”
Her nod was all the grace in the world, and when she rounded away from him to the stage’s edge, he followed her body with his eyes. Fear had helped him find his voice before fear and pain honed away his lesser elements until he became a single sound. Where could he find that fear again? In the spotlight. In the heat. In standing blank minded onstage. In the sway of Eve’s hip.
“Back again by popular demand,” Eve announced, her voice big, one arm raised like a torchbearer, “for the third time tonight, let’s hear it for Edmond Margot!”
Applause. He stepped forward, and the spotlight followed him to the edge of the stage. Eve vanished into the wings.
He opened his mouth. Opened his heart.
Nothing.
His scuffed leather shoes jutted over the edge of the stage. Below, the spotlight lit bare sand.
Inhale, deeply.
He closed his eyes.
Nothing new in his mind, nothing new in the whole vast world.
He sighed, summoned another old poem—strange that a poem written two months back could count as old already—
And screamed.
The world tilted sideways. His throat closed, strangling his cry. He hovered weightless before the stage. Images axed through his skull: a surging twisting cobbled street. A Penitent’s great stone hand held him, crushing out his breath. A squat watch station in West Claw, a smeared reflection in a dark window, a girl’s face that was also his. Breath ragged in his ears.
And underneath that breath, that fear … Underneath, he heard the voice of fire. The voice of the long nights of his soul. The voice that was not his, but spoke to him.
But tonight the voice bore no poetry, offered no divine inspiration, no holy dread. A word sliced bleeding letters into his mindflesh.
Help.
Then he hit the ground.
Awareness returned slowly. Torches blazed. A weight pressed against his shoulders. He realized after a second’s confusion that the weight was his own head. He breathed through heavy lips and a swollen nose. Eve crouched over him, shaking him by the lapels of his coat. “Margot? Edmond? Say something.” Behind her a circle of concerned faces and staring eyes limned the board roof of the Rest. He sat up so fast he hit Eve’s forehead with his own. His mouth was full of sand, more sand sweat-plastered to the right side of his face. He hurt. Running one hand down his body he found new rips in the shirt, blissfully hidden by jacket and vest. Eve pointed to someone out of his field of vision and snapped a finger. A waiter thrust a glass of water into Margot’s face. He took it, swished a mouthful in his mouth, spit onto the sand, coughed, and this time drank.
“Are you okay?” Eve again.
“I have to go,” he said, and lurched to his feet.
She held out a hand to stop him. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“I will.” He laughed when he realized what he was about to say. “I must find my Lady.”
She reached for his arm, but he pulled back. No one else tried to stop him as he forced through the staring crowd, away from the spotlight and the man-shaped depression in the sand where he’d fallen, out into the dark, questing. Eve watched him go. He glanced back over his shoulder once, when he reached the edge of the torchlight. She stood still, a vision in black—then waved the audience back to their seats. On with the show.
Margot stumbled into the night. His ankle hurt, but still he walked, drawn like a filing to a magnet by the voice he’d lost.