On This Unworthy Scaffold, Heidi Heilig [best books to read for success .txt] 📗

rushed and careless carving, but no less beautiful than the stories chiseled into the stone of the temple. I run my hands over the marks; I can read the words, but the notes are harder. Papa and Maman were the musicians of our troupe. Still, I can make out the melody. It runs on a loop in my head.

When I hear the cabin door open, I don’t bother looking up. “I told you to leave me alone.”

“You told me no such thing.” Cheeky—not Akra—is the one to reply, and her voice feels too harsh in the quiet cabin. “And how dare you think I’d listen?”

She barges in, Tia behind her, rushing to Leo’s side to touch him, to hold him, to whisper his name. I can’t bear the sight of their tears—the volume of their voices. Their open grief threatens the dull numbness I have wrapped around my heart, like a spark on a silk cocoon, with something tender and helpless writhing inside.

I turn away, but Theodora is hovering in the doorway, her face like a discarded page, crumpled and pale. Behind her, Camreon stands with his hand on her shoulder. Akra is behind them at a careful distance.

They all watch Leo—his final audience. But only I can see the bright light of his soul; the part that held his music and his jokes and the very essence of who he was. Why shouldn’t I bring him back? My eyes go once more to the song he had written, and I know I can’t.

I flex my empty hands. I feel like an outsider. Where is my power now? Going to the windows at the stern, I gulp fresh air as I stare out over the Hundred Days Sea. On the other side, Aquitan. I could go back. The king would have me if I groveled. There is very little that is familiar there, and nothing—no one—to remind me of what I’d lost here and now. I could live like Ayla did, my whole life a performance, my sins and secrets hidden away to everyone but me.

I am planning my escape when Tia starts to sing.

Her voice is richer with sorrow—like raw honey, like molten gold—and the sound of it washes everything else away. It is the song Leo wrote, but not the way it had looped through my head. It is not a dirge, but a love song.

Beside his body, his soul stirs. As Tia sings, I watch the golden light drift through the room, as though to greet all of us—or to say goodbye. And when he comes to me, I can almost feel the warmth of his arms, and the echo of his voice: au revoir.

“Au revoir,” I whisper as Tia moves to the chorus, and Leo’s spirit slips through the door and away toward the dock. Toward the temple. Toward his next life.

Theodora has seen me watching. “He’s gone, isn’t he?” she says softly, and with a start, I realize there are tears in my eyes.

Hurriedly, I dash them away. I could still call him back. I could. But I won’t. Instead, I take a deep breath, looking around at the people he loved—the people who knew him best. “No,” I say. “He’s still here.”

Chapter Thirty-One

The last month of the rainy season passes in a blur.

Camreon has given me a fine room in the palace, with intricate mosaic floors and ivory inlay on golden teak panels, but after my time in Lephare, it’s hard to see the beauty for the cost.

Luckily, Cam has always been a man of his word, and his coronation speech in Malao was not an empty promise. He and Theodora have started the endless work of tending the country.

They secure housing for the many refugees of the war—both Aquitan and Chakran alike. They bring the monks out of hiding to restore the temples and reopen the schools they used to run; Theodora even manages to let go of the Book of Knowledge, though I know she travels to the temple at Kwai Goo to consult the Keeper’s monks as often as she can.

The sugar fields are returned to Chakran farmers in time for the planting season to start, and the largest plantation houses are made into hospitals and homes for the wounded and disabled. Some of the Aquitans had the nerve to object to this theft of their rightfully stolen wealth, but Camreon managed to wrangle funding from Le Roi Fou to pay them off.

He also managed to reopen trade at more favorable rates than before, and while I’m sure it had something to do with the Tiger’s hard-headed negotiations, my own performance in Aquitan has certainly had an effect as well. Theodora and Camreon have gone back and forth a few times since, and she tells me that my skeletal fantouches have permeated local superstition—a threat for misbehaving children, or a curse bandied about between their elders.

Le Roi sent the fantouches themselves back aboard the ship he’d promised, and we’d sent the ship back to Lephare carrying quite a few living Aquitans. But others chose to stay, swearing fealty to the new king in their new home. The skeletal fantouches themselves have become part of Camreon’s palace guard—loyal and tireless, and a reminder of the link between the throne and the temples.

This news makes me smile, but not for long. I myself have made no new fantouches since then. My friends have come by with supplies—leather and paint and wood, bamboo and brass and brushes—to try to keep me occupied. Cheeky and Tia keep insisting that I need to put on a show at their new theater; Camreon has given them the Royal Opera House to run, although to hear Cheeky tell, she does most of the legwork while Tia spends every spare hour at the inn. Apparently the innkeeper’s eldest daughter is quite taken with her.

But both Cheeky and Tia have told me they want Chakran performances for their