Hearts in Zenith (Four Husbands and a Lover)

17. The One-Man Show

Sharim had said that Divines themselves wouldn't be able to change Lydia's mind.

I radically disagreed. If a mere fortune-teller managed to pull wool over Lydia's eyes, the Divines should do the job without breaking the sweat. The trick was to get them to talk to Lydia. It took some time to explain Kozima's predicament to Parneres (omitting our nocturnal assignations), my plan, and who Anastasia was.

He listened quietly, wiping away his makeup all the while. The enthusiasm I felt for the idea grew in telling, so having to squeeze in next to him, balance the bowl on my lap and dodge squirts of water didn't slow down my narrative in the slightest.

"If Lydia witnesses Divine Gala shine bliss upon someone, if she believes that the words said by him are Divine, how could she resist?" I raved. "What's some fortune teller word worth against Gala's?"

My cheeks flushed with fire when Parneres remained unaffected. Did nobody understand how perfect the plan was? "What do you think?"

I sat straight up and-- "Sorry!"

That was because I chopped the air with my hand to emphasize the point. Forgetting that I held the bowl, so I splashed about a third of its multicolored contents onto Parneres.

He took the offending vessel away from me and set it on the floor. "The young man—Kozima—is Lydia's intended. You work for her and therefore you're a suspect. Anastasia is the priestess on standby to interpret the miracle. She can't deliver it herself without being a blasphemer. Therefore, you come to me, someone who is a complete stranger to Lydia and an actor."

"Yes, and yes, and yes." I nodded vigorously.

"Let me think about it."

"Oh." I swallowed my disappointment. "Meet me tomorrow? There is this place on the docks, we'll be safer there than here."

He traced the edge of the thick roll of paper with his elegant fingers. "The day after tomorrow. I need time to read this."

Between Anastasia's prolific pen and the looming threat of Parneres' homicidal cousin, I couldn't argue with giving him an extra day.

"Explain this one thing to me," Parneres asked once he had walked me to the back door and checked around the corner. "You hate Lydia because she doesn't love the unfortunate young man enough. Yet you hate Anastasia because she loves him too much. How do you reconcile these two things?"

Out of the mouth of man! I scrunched my face thinking about it, but in the end just threw my arms up in surrender. "It's easier to kill what you hate, than to explain why you hate it."

His amused chuckle sounded in my ears all night, even when I was with Kozima.

***

The teahouse we agreed on wasn't a completely disreputable place. Just the kind where if I had enough coin and, say, Parneres would have been willing, they wouldn't have asked questions Instead, they'd offer me dining options less in public view. Alas, neither was true, so we sat in the main room, private by the virtue of no one caring to give us a second look.

The room widened, then pinched in around the pitted or knife-slashed studs left to keep the ceiling from caving in after the walls had been taken out to win more space by someone long ago. When it first had opportunistically in-filled between warehouses nobody knew or cared to record.

Everything was smoky or greasy or both. The low ceiling beams, the spared walls, the driftwood tabletops balanced on the stone anchor wheels... they probably originated in the same ancient year as the construction itself. Some of the anchors even had barnacles. The candles wept into shaved off conch-shells. The candle smoke mixed with that of Ashanti, beer and fried garlic.