A large wave broke on the shore beneath the verandah, spreading a lace of foam halfway up the beach; the sound appeared to make Mirielle sleepy; her lids fluttered down, and she gave a long sigh that caused her robe to slip partway off one pale, poppling breast.
‘I tried to be honest with you,’ she said. ‘And I was. As honest as I knew how to be.’
‘Then why didn’t you tell me about your mother and Zemaille?’
Her eyes blinked open. ‘What?’
‘You heard me.’ She sat up, pulling her robe closed, and regarded him with a mixture of confusion and displeasure.
‘Why have you come here?’
‘For answers. I need answers.’
‘Answers!’ She laughed again. ‘You’re more a fool than I thought.’
Stung by that, he said, ‘Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m no whore.’
‘A lawyer who thinks he’s not a whore! Will wonders never cease!’
‘Tell me,’ he demanded. ‘Nothing can happen to you now, your father can’t be tried again. It was you, wasn’t it? This was all a scheme, a plot to kill Zemaille and avenge your mother. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but . . .’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Mirielle,’ he said. ‘I need to know. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I could never hurt you. It almost killed me to have to do what I did to you in court.’
She met his eyes for a long moment. ‘It was easy,’ she said at last. ‘You were easy. That’s why we picked you . . . because you were so lonely, so naive. We just kept you spinning. With love, with fear, with misdirection. And finally with drugs. Before I – or rather Janice – took you to the temple, I slipped a drug into your drink. It made you highly suggestible.’
‘That’s what made me hallucinate?’
She looked perplexed.
‘The hidey hole behind the bed. The snakes, the . . .’
‘No, that was Mardo’s illusion. It was real enough. The drug only made you believe what I wanted you to – that we were in danger, being pursued. All that.’
‘What about the scale?’
‘The scale?’
‘Yes, the image of the dead wizard in the scale above Zemaille’s bed. Archiochus, I guess it was.’
Her brow wrinkled. ‘You were so frightened, you must have been seeing things.’
She got to her feet, swayed, righted herself by catching hold of the verandah railing. He thought he saw a softening in her face, the trace of a longing equal to his own, and he also thought he saw her madness, her instability. She would have had to be insane to do what she had, to be in love and not in love at the same time, to inhabit those roles fully, to lie and deceive with such compulsive thoroughness.
‘If we’d presented our evidence in a straightforward way,’ she said, ‘Daddy still might have been convicted. We needed to orchestrate the trial, to manipulate the jury. So we chose you to be the conductor. And you were wonderful! You believed everything we handed you.’ She turned, let her robe drop to expose her perfect back and said in a northern accent, ‘I’ve no great love for dragons.’
It was Janice’s voice.
He gazed at her, uncomprehending. ‘But she fell,’ he said. ‘I saw it.’
‘A net,’ she said. ‘Rigged just below the bluff.’ This she said in a fluting voice, the voice of the old woman, Kirin.
‘My God!’ he said.
‘A little make-up can do miracles,’ she said. ‘And I’ve always been good at doing voices. We planned for years and years.’
‘I still don’t understand. There were so many variables. How could you control them all? The nine witnesses, for example. How could you know they would run?’
She gave him a pitying look.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right. There were no witnesses, were there?’
‘Only Mardo and I. And of course Daddy didn’t throw the stone. We couldn’t take a chance on him missing. We overpowered Mardo, and then he smashed in his skull with it. Then I took drugs to make it look as if I’d been laid out on the altar. The cult had already disbanded, you see. They were all afraid of the great work. It was already in process of breaking up when I joined. That was the heart of the plan. Isolating Mardo. I spent hours encouraging him in the great work; I knew the others would abandon him if they thought he actually might complete it. They were more afraid of Griaule than of him.’
‘Then that part of it was the truth?’
She nodded. ‘Mardo was obsessed with killing Griaule. He was mad!’
‘What about the knife, the hooded figure?’
She bowed. ‘I didn’t intend to injure your hand, merely to frighten you. I was so worried because I’d hurt you. I had to run around to the rear of the shop and climb the back stairs in order to make you think I’d been in the apartment, and I almost decided to forget about the plan, just to run to you and take care of you. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry! God!’
‘You haven’t got anything to complain about! Your life’s better than it’s ever been. And like you said, Mardo’s death was no great loss to anyone. He was evil.’
‘I don’t even know what that word means anymore.’
