Page 134 of Play of Shadows

‘—to give voice to the dead,’ I finished for her. ‘Forgive me, my Lady, but what was years ago for you was mere minutes for me and I’ve hardly had time to master my art.’

‘A pity,’ she said, kneeling to pick up a fistful of sand, then holding it up so that I could see it slowly slip through her fingers. ‘Time, like memory, is as limitless as the grains of sand on this beach, yet to each of us is given precious little, and none of us have the means to hang onto it. Have you not learned the lesson at last, Veristor? Your talent must be more than some self-serving means to journey into the past. Yours is a gift meant to be shared, Damelas.’ Her eyes met mine. ‘So long as you’re willing to pay the price.’

‘What price? What must I do?’ I asked. ‘The Iron Orchids are taking the city. The duke’s guards will soon be overwhelmed by their—’

‘Lies and loathing.’

‘My Lady?’

She wiped the sand from her hands and set off down the beach. ‘Lies and loathing, Damelas. These are the weapons of our enemy.’

Panic and irritation made me forget myself and I seized her arm to stop her. ‘They have rather a lot of swords and spears, too!’

She stared down at my hand as if it belonged to someone else.

My grandparents would have argued vociferously over which of them got to knock some sense into me for grabbing a woman’s arm without her consent. I went to withdraw, but Ajelaine placed her own hand over mine and held it there.

‘Fear,’ she said. ‘Remarkable, isn’t it?’

‘Forgive me, my Lady, I didn’t mean—’

She dismissed the apology with a shake of her head. ‘You fear for your friends, for the lives of the people you love– and yet fear makes us so much smaller than we ought to be. Do you suppose it can do likewise to an entire city? A duchy? A nation?’

‘I. . . Yes, I believe it can.’

She slipped her arm into mine and resumed her stroll along the shoreline. ‘Fear prevents us from listening to one another. Raphan loved me so much, but his adoration turned to fear for my safety, and that kept him from listening to me. I am rather done with men who cannot listen, Damelas.’

I was sweating now, and not only from the heat of the sun, for she was right: Iwasafraid, and that was making it hard for me to hear what she was trying to tell me.

‘Listening, my boy,’ Shoville would have reminded me, ‘is an actor’s most valuable tool.’

Mastering myself, breathing in slowly to still my pounding heart and forcing the frustration and panic from my voice, I said, ‘I attend you, my Lady.’

‘Good. What brief moments remain to us are a gift too precious to be squandered. Lies and loathing are the weapons of the enemy, which means truth and love must be ours. Let us begin with truth.’

Hope sparked inside me. ‘Then you did it? You discovered the secret of the Court of Flowers? You can tell me their names?’

The corner of her mouth rose in a smirk that was now utterly familiar to me. ‘I have indeed uncovered their secret.’

She stopped and reached into the pocket of her dress. She held out her closed hand to me as she’d done before, but this time, she turned it palm up. Her fingers unfurled to reveal the desiccated grey petals of a flower that should have turned to dust long ago.

‘An orchid?’ I asked. ‘That’s not a name, my Lady. It doesn’t tellme who’s behind all of this.’

‘It is a symbol,’ she replied. ‘A flower, foreign to our shores in my time, yet in yours it blooms throughout the duchy, perhaps even the entire nation of Tristia.’ She held it out as if it were some grand revelation.

‘My Lady, the Orchid Laws you uncovered are nothing but a jumble of asinine demands for the removal of restrictions on liquor, drugs, the lowering of the legal age of prostitution, these bizarre prohibitions against unpatriotic art, and bigoted punishments against refugees and the poor. There’s no—’

‘Exactly!’ she declared excitedly, closing her fist around the dried petals, crushing them with a vengeance. ‘I wastedyearsinvestigating the nobility and the criminal underclass alike, looking for those who might benefit from that precise assortment of laws. And in your time, not even the duke’s Dashini spy has uncovered the Iron Orchids’ leaders?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist—’

‘It meanspreciselythat, Damelas.’

I stared at her clenched hand. ‘The orchid,’ I whispered, catching her meaning at last. ‘A flower that has spread across Tristia and yet isn’t native. You’re saying the only people who would benefit from the Orchid Laws. . .’

‘. . . would be thosenotfrom our shores,’ she finished my words. ‘Conquerors who desire to see us weakened, defeated not through force of arms, but by twisting our own society against itself.’

‘Lies and loathing,’ I repeated.

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