The Betrayals(104)

She has reached the staircase. She climbs it two steps at a time, breathing hard, and unlocks the door to the Biblioteca Ludi. Dust swirls and settles. It’s a relief to shut the door behind her, but the room is stuffy and airless, and somehow the old comfort of possession has lost its power. If this is hers, this chaos of overcrowded bookshelves and forgotten jetsam, what does that say about being Magister Ludi? And what sort of Magister Ludi walks out of a Midsummer Game? Her guts wring themselves tighter. It was unforgivable. The Magister Cartae will say that she is weak, spineless, neurotic: and he’ll be right. She goes to the desk and leans on it. She knows it’s her own body that’s trembling, but as the judders run up her arms she has the sensation that Montverre itself is trying to shake her off. She has never doubted her right to be here until now. There’s a glass paperweight, gritty with dust, next to her papers, and she picks it up and squeezes it. Solid glass against her solid bones, enough ache to keep the tears at bay …

There’s a spate of footsteps, running up the stairs – she scarcely has time to hear them, to turn – and then Léo is there, flinging the door open with such violence that it slams into the wall and lets loose a trickle of plaster. He says, ‘Aimé.’

‘How dare you?’ she says, and he flinches – stupidly, as if he didn’t expect her to be angry. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you—’ She starts to say bastard; but suddenly she sees the word scrawled on a wall in black ink, and it dies on her tongue. ‘Get out,’ she says, like ice.

‘I’m not going until you talk to me.’

‘What else do you want from me, Martin? You’ve destroyed my career. How dare you stand up in the middle of a Midsummer Game, my Midsummer Game, you stupid, self-absorbed, arrogant—’

‘I only – I thought – your game—’

She swings her arm. Glass shatters against the wall beside his head, with a crash. A second later, in the silence, she realises what she’s done. He glances at the round-backed fragments around his feet, the rough demi-semispheres still glinting with trapped bubbles, and swallows. A foot to the left, and the paperweight would have hit him. Was it too close for comfort, or did she miss? They stare at each other. Her breath is unsteady; trying not to cry is like trying not to be sick.

She’s never seen him like this: pale, blundering, his eyes fixed on her as if she’s the only steady point against a rocking horizon. In the pause she can hear ten years’ worth of reproaches.

He says again, ‘Aimé?’

‘Aimé’s dead.’

He shakes his head, but slowly. ‘You’re a woman. You always were. Yes? I mean, you’re not a man – pretending to be a woman?’

She laughs, incredulous. ‘Why would a man pretend to be a woman, here?’ He blinks, and an aftershock of fury goes through her: that casual blindness, that stupidity in the face of anything that doesn’t affect him personally. ‘It was the only way I could come here. Females aren’t allowed to be scholars, remember?’

She shouldn’t have said it. She should have denied it. But it’s too late, and the admission is like a pane of glass evaporating. Suddenly they are in the same room, for the first time. He says, ‘Yes. I see,’ and the tone of his voice is oddly humble. Maybe, if he thinks about it, he does see.

She draws in a long breath. ‘You didn’t imagine I’d fake my own death and then dress up as a woman? Why? To seduce you?’

‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘Hardly a foolproof tactic.’ And then he glances at her with a brief glint of amusement, and it comes back to her in a stinging rush, what it was like to be Aimé – especially, to be Aimé with Léo. The sparks that were never quite friendly, the hostility that was never quite disagreeable. The heat of it building, until that final night – good God, why would she remind herself of that?

She turns away. She has buried those memories for so long that they surge up like undigested fragments, tasting of bile. Another life. Another person. In one sense she was Aimé, yes, but not now, no longer, never again.

‘But your brother … Aimé did exist.’ He says it slowly, as if he’s working through a tricky quaintise. ‘You had a brother. Who would have come here, if you hadn’t taken his place. And he really did kill himself. I mean, you didn’t fake—’

‘Of course I didn’t!’ How can he be so obtuse? ‘Aimé’s gone.’ A breath later she adds, ‘I loved him.’

‘Yes. Of course. Forgive me,’ he says, each word like a weight. ‘I’m still taking it in. I’m sure you did, he was very …’ He trails off: she can almost see the effort it takes him to remember that the Aimé he knew isn’t the one they’re talking about now. ‘I should have known,’ he says. ‘Part of me did know. Why didn’t I see it before?’

‘Because,’ she says, ‘you never actually looked at me, did you?’

She doesn’t have to be watching him to know that he starts to speak. But he can’t protest, after all; he thinks better of it. She tries not to like him more for that. ‘You look like him,’ he says, ‘I mean – I thought it was a family resemblance … You’ve changed so much. And …’ He pauses, as if he’s expecting her to answer; but she’s not going to make it easier for him. ‘How did you do it?’ he says. ‘All that time, no one noticed. I suppose we all thought you were strange, but we never dreamt – it must have been difficult.’