Chapter 12
The Paradox of Wishes
Acheron was the spitting image of Gennady.
Same soulful eyes and slightly unruly hair.
Even his quick but heartfelt smile was a reminder of what happiness felt like.
Her heart caught up with her head as the man with the sandy-red hair rose from his seat in the pavilion box to come greet her.
Beside him sat a comely young woman with dark hair and a painted-on smile.
“Aelloven.” Acheron’s entire face illuminated with joy. His arms spread as he approached and folded her in. “At long last.”
She didn’t enjoy hugging strangers, but she needed no proof of lineage to know the man was kin.
It hadn’t really hit her that Wilder Hawthorne wasn’t her father until she met Acheron. Esmeray must have had a dalliance with Estelar’s brother, which might have even been the catalyst for her leaving. Maybe they’d had a falling out, and she feared losing her children?
But if golden-red hair was a gift from their father’s line, why did Gennady have it too?
Or had Esmeray really had three children with Laxius of Rivenholde and only taken two with her?
That didn’t sound like her mother, but she’d kept so much to herself, Elloven wasn’t sure she knew her as well as she’d thought.
And where was this Laxius?
She stared at her newfound brother.
“Prominence Ashwind,” Acheron said with a quick smile, guessing incorrectly what had caught her attention. “The ears.” Like Taven, Acheron’s ears came to the slightest point at the tops. He gave them a playful wiggle. “And this is Dasha, my consort. Prominence Grymwood. Arcana.”
The first thing Elloven noticed about Dasha was that her eyes were different colors. One was violet, the other a striking amber.
“Acheron’s sister. Hmm. I was beginning to believe you were just a myth.” The woman’s gaze settled briefly on Elloven before returning to the stage below. Her delivery was bland and monotone, like she was being put upon and couldn’t be bothered to pretend otherwise.
“It’s so wonderful to meet you both.” Each time Elloven said the words, they seemed to hold both more and less meaning. The pieces of her life were at last coming together, but the warning building in her chest reminded her that not everything she’d wanted had been good for her.
She wondered where Jesstin and Sesto were, if they would be joining them for the show. Jesstin, at least, couldn’t be far, because the tickle in her chest had dulled to nothing. But Ryquin and his consort, Daire, were also missing, as were Estelar’s consorts.
“It’s my hope you and your brother will make up for the time you’ve lost,” Estelar said. “Time we’ve all lost...”
Thanks to Esmeray seemed to be the trailing sentiment.
Acheron guided them all to their seats, high above the stage. Elloven was positioned between Estelar and Acheron, with Taven on the other side of Dasha.
“Have you ever seen a marionette show, Aelloven?” Acheron asked, leaning in.
“Puppets?”
“Close. Instead of hands to prop them up, they use a series of wires dangling from the top of the stage, which the marionettists control. Do you see?”
Elloven followed where he was pointing. Most of the area above the stage was blocked by the top of a colossal purple curtain, but in the space between the round rivets, there were men playing with large crosses of wood, testing wires attached for strength.
They looked as small as ants from her vantage point. “And they make them move that way?”
“The marionettists practice for years and years before their skills are worthy of the stage. Many mothers and fathers pass the skill to sons and daughters. The troupe conducting tonight is three generations of the same family. Darius, his daughter Sasha, and her son, Darius the Younger. We’re expecting his son, Darius Once More, to join them in a few seasons, and the boy is only seven. ”
“Where I come from it’s elder and younger.”
“It’s uncommon here to name your children after others in the same family, unless they’ve long passed on.
Individuality is lost in the uniformity of tradition.
You see this nomenclature primarily in families with a generational trade, such as theirs.
It becomes a part of their legacy as much as their work. ”
“Do you have family names?”
Acheron shook his head.
“Doesn’t it get confusing?”
“To differentiate us from others of the same name, we either have reputational or ancestral cognomens. I am both Acheron of the Twilight Lakeshore and Acheron, son of Laxius, son of Ibera. Either will lead only to me. If I’m in your world, I’ll sometimes use Acheron Riven, but it’s more for the comfort of others. ”
Every time someone spoke Laxius’s name, it brought him closer to being real, but how had she not met him yet? Would not the arrival of his daughter be important to him? Was he really still resting?
And someone named Ibera was Acheron’s mother, which cleared up some of Elloven’s confusion. If she had it right, that meant she, Acheron, and Gennady shared a father, while only she and Gennady had the same mother. It at least explained why she’d left Acheron behind.
“So, Acheron, our father—”
He brought a finger to his lips with a devious grin. “Watch.”
What must have been a hundred torches winked to light at once. Elloven gasped, glancing at both Estelar and Acheron in wonder, but neither seemed affected.
A tall man in a velvet suit and a curved top hat spread his arms in front of the closed curtain. “Before we begin, we must open the veil between the worlds and let our stories flow with the vitalities of the spirits!”
Cheers and applause followed, though no one in her box did more than politely clap. She settled on a reaction somewhere in the middle.
“We have seen this show before, have we not?”
“We have!” chanted the crowd.
“We know why we must watch this show, do we not?”
“We do!”
A chill ripped down Elloven’s spine at the familiar cadence of the announcer.
“We use these nights to remind us what there is to lose, and how far we can fall, is that so?”
“It is so!”
“Very well.” The announcer bowed, his waistcoat lifting so high in the back, it seemed he would topple forward. “Let us not waste another moment wondering!”
With a screech of wheels and a roll of thunder from the curtain’s weight, the velvet slowly parted, revealing a modest set.
The left and right sides of the stage were darkly lit, but a dozen lumens hung just above a tilt barrier for jousts.
Nearby was a rack of lances. The back wall was painted to look like an audience.
When the announcer’s voice rang out, he was no longer visible.
“There were once four millworkers of different ages and burdens, all of them strangers to each other, until one fateful night. On that night, millworker Fenway murdered the foreman in a fit of rage when his hours were reduced because of poor work.”
The crowd booed.
“The other three could have gone on with their lives, just as they were, had they not aided him in concealing the brutal crime. But they, as well, loathed the foreman. They, as well, were indolent laborers who knew their hours would be next on the cut. They had a choice, and they chose the path of darkness.”
A billow of smoke filled the stage. Elloven’s inhale was loud amid the following silence, but not so loud she didn’t hear Dasha snickering.
When the smoke cleared, there were four marionettes standing in a row along the back. Their arms moved with the wires, and they bent neatly at the waist to bow at the crowd, who booed even louder. They seemed so agile and lifelike, the wires more hindrance than a help.
“Will murderer one please step forward on the left. Murderer two on the right!” called the announcer. On cue, two of the puppets moved in a disturbing tangle of joints and limbs lifting and falling. Acheron sanded his hands together in anticipation.
“Aelloven,” Estelar said quietly. “Relax and enjoy yourself. This is entertainment. Nothing more.”
Everyone around her seemed to agree, but the whole thing made her terribly uneasy. She just couldn’t say why.
The fictional murderers each picked a lance.
“They’ve already decided the winner.” Acheron’s smooth delivery indicated he was letting her in on an insider secret. “If only everyone in the crowd knew their bets were rigged... but fools are easily parted from their coin.”
“They’d still pay,” Dasha said. “They crave the rise and the fall. The crash one night makes the rise on another so much sweeter. If we didn’t know better, we would do just the same.”
Acheron sat back with a perturbed frown.
The marionettes were guided into place on either side of the joust barrier. Elloven leaned in for a better look when she thought she saw one of them crying. She squinted to get a better focus, but all she saw was its mouth moving, though not in the hinged way of a puppet.
Both “men” ran at each other with lances.
The words one and two were shouted in a ripple along the crowd, men and women waving their fists in support of whomever they’d spent their coin backing.
A lance pierced the chest of the second murderer, and very convincing blood bloomed on his shirt and spilled down his chest and back, where the tip protruded.
The other puppet struggled to free his lance, which made the crowd laugh, but it wasn’t funny, not to Elloven.
They weren’t real, so why did it feel real? Why could she not shake the terrible fear she was watching a man be murdered?
Estelar’s hand on her wrist caused her to look down and find she was digging her nails into her leather pants.
“Yes, Aelloven, they are real. Real men who committed real crimes. We have no prisons here, only consequences,” he explained, so calmly and evenly, she struggled to believe what he was saying was true, despite what her eyes told her, because how could anyone with a soul speak so neutrally about executing men for sport?