Merry doesn’t buy his act. “You don’t think it’s silly.”
“I think you’ve forgotten your plan.”
“I think that makes two of us.”
Anger sobers, his mood folding as he contemplates the world spinning outside the carousel, beyond the pocket of music and lights.
Merry backpedals before she loses him again. “I love neon art, and music, and skating, and clothes. I love playing hostess in the Ethereal Arcade. I’m afraid of the dark but not the night sky. And I love wandering this carnival alone, but I’d rather wander it with you.”
Curiosity directs him back to her, his gaze swinging sideways. “Neon art. As in, the words tacked to your bedroom walls.”
“Star-granted masterpieces, curated when I was a foundling of thirty. I’ve kept them since childhood. You never forget your firsts, which makes them eternally poignant. Don’t you agree?”
“I do,” he says, the gritty texture of a memory surfacing in his voice. “Why neon?”
“To have something bright of my own, something that shines in the dark and tells the truth. Something that isn’t a star.” She flaps a hand. “Not that I don’t love the stars, but I can’t pluck them like dragonflies and pin them to my wall—not that I’d ever, ever, ever do that to dragonflies. Anyhow, neon is moody and soulful, yet it’s incandescent and lively. It’s vivid and a little rebellious.”
He nods. “I like the sound of your light.”
So does she. “Tell me a word—a meaningful word, and I’ll request it for you in neon, via the stars.”
“Can I get back to you on that?”
“Will you be here long enough to do so?”
“I might be. Fates willing.”
“I wasn’t asking the Fates. I was asking you.”
“Then, yes.” He draws in a breath and blurts out, “I’m afraid of snowstorms.”
Quickly, he goes rigid from the confession. His joints fasten in place, impervious to the wind brushing his hair and rustling his shirt, and the lambent cords of light bouncing off his frame.
While that pageantry occurs, Merry promises, “But you don’t have to be afraid here.”
He studies her in a way that provokes her to squirm. Suddenly, she’s the center of the universe, simultaneously baffling and fascinating.
Merry’s unsure if she wants to be in this position, yet she’s never been surer. It’s miraculous, how stricken he appears, like nobody’s ever made such an offer to him, nor any offer involving his safety.
Hasn’t anyone ever been concerned about that? Concerned about his wellbeing?
He acts like she’s handed him an object that he doesn’t know how to operate, like he doesn’t know how it works. But he does start talking. While the carousel wheels, and while the music sways from one song to the next, days spill out of them. They share pastimes and wasted times, tastes and distastes. And those days turn into decades, filled with random musings, absurd dreams, and lucid nightmares.
They rest their heads against the oscillating bars and debate what makes the stars magical, and what makes them scientific, and what they mean to mortals, and what they mean to deities. They calculate what destiny could be, and should be, and might be.
Anger discloses why he chose iron for his arrows. “It’s responsive to human temperature. It reacts to heat, which is a mortal embodiment of fury.”
“That makes it pliable, able to change,” Merry says. “So maybe you’re not as inflexible as you think.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Iron doesn’t break.”
“But it bends.” Merry dismisses his growl and explains why she skates. “I’m my own shooting star.”
She stands upright on the stirrup, compelling to Anger to do the same, and they flip their heads back to observe their reflections in the ceiling. And the carousel keeps spinning, spinning, spinning.
When they’re ready, the whirligig stops. Merry hops off Sagittarius’s arrow seat, intoxicated by this whole experience. Anger stalks off the dais, his face slack with a conversation hangover.
She pulls him into another discussion, and the dizzied look vanishes, and he’s lucid once more. Down an avenue of phosphorescent stargazer lilies, they drift into quiet reflection, then become engrossed in dialogue.
He’d been unimpressed with the Carnival of Stars, but while they tour the place, she annotates the history of each ride. As she tells him stories about events that she’s witnessed here—a marriage proposal, a break-up, an elderly couple wishing upon a star, and a child’s first gelato—he judges it less and makes more inquiries.
He issues requests. “Let’s go this way.”
And then he follows her own requests. “Come see this!”
The hours tick by. The Ferris wheel is idyllic but too obvious. Instead, Merry escorts him through the Serendipity Tunnel, a crystalline chasm for lovers, and the Levitation Dome, a cylindrical encasement enabling a person to defy gravity and ascend to the cosmos.
She picks a trail sparkler and takes it with her to the comet ride, holding the stick as they free fall from the meringue of clouds. To her amazement, Anger screams all the way down. “Whaaaaaat theeeeee Faaaaaates!”
The sparkler remains intact, still blazing when they touch down.
They lose each other a few times, then find each other by whistling or guessing. Merry turns their search into a game of hide-and-seek, taking cover in the Globe Garden bushes while Anger searches for her. The archer pretends to issue threats, partly in earnest, partly in jest.
Merry challenges him to a race—his feet versus her wheels—through the Enneagram Maze, both of them propelling at exquisite speeds, knocking shrubbery out of the way. At the finish line, her cheeks turn into rosettes, and his skin flushes. He accuses her of cheating.
At one point, she attempts a sultry pose against a lamppost while Anger’s not looking. It’s fortunate, since she slides right off the pillar and almost twists her ankle. Technically, she should be a specialist in wooing, naturally attuned to the intricacies of courtship, but she’s a dud for a reason.
That doesn’t mean she can’t keep trying.
Merry uses magic to churn blueberry lemonade in the fountain of a vendor’s kiosk. When she gets Anger to try some by shoving the cup in his face, he sucks on the straw in annoyance, and gives a meh shrug. A nonchalant second later, he takes another long sip and then hands it back, their fingers momentarily sliding together. In the reflection of the refreshment cart, Merry sticks out her indigo tongue, which matches the rims of Anger’s lips.
They find a spot on the picnic lawn. Dropping onto the grass, they drink while chatting.
What are the most grandiose myths on earth? Are their deities amidst other planets?
Merry doesn’t like his pessimism. Anger doesn’t like her optimism.
This disparity gets in the way during a debate about fate versus free will, whether there should be a greater balance, whether humans deserve to make their own luck and choose their own destinies.
“Fate is an illusion,” Anger quarrels. “Your birth, your appearance, your kin, your name—they’re assigned to you. From the start, you don’t have any say in those components.”
“That doesn’t mean free will is impossible.” Merry slaps her thigh. “You can’t control or choose everything, but that doesn’t mean you can’t control or choose anything. It doesn’t mean choice can’t evolve and grow. It starts with fate, but it can expand with free will, and it can be a union of the two, and it can be that way for humans and deities alike. What?”
“That’s called naive,” he states.
“And that—,” she jabs a finger at his nose “—is called pretentious.”
“I’m not being pompous!”
“You are soooo being pompous, the most pompous, the king of pompous!”
The feud escalates to the point where she endures the sting of it, the hairs on her arms rising. It’s extraordinary, this commotion fizzing through her. They snap at each other, then they growl at ea
ch other. She dumps the rest of the lemonade, slams to her feet, and marches away. The rubber of her high-top sneakers squeak, and her corset bodice digs into her ribs, and the back of her neck itches.
What happened to the sparkler? When had she stopped carrying it?
Anger and she haven’t harmonized on much thus far. However, there’s a certain delirium in hearing him object, in anticipating his points, half of which are valid and unexpected, just like half of her protests stupefy him.
Anger’s boots strike the lane. Meanwhile, she swings one arm in a huff, the other clasping the skateboard to her bosom. For a solid half hour—in their case, a millisecond—they give each other the silent treatment.
They ascend a central knoll to the summit of Stargazer Hill, which marks the city’s core. In the heart of this place, a single oak tree stretches to the firmament while a pair of telescopes tilt upward, their exteriors glossed in shimmer paint. Merry hadn’t meant to bring Anger here yet, but she hadn’t been concentrating on direction or elevation.
He absorbs the scenery. The creases in his face are grisly to behold, ripe with sadness and loneliness, when he hadn’t been sad or lonely once tonight. She knows this impulse, understands this longing, shares this burden.
The residue of bickering lingers. In hindsight, she’d matched his hissy fit, getting just as riled up. She hates that he has so little consideration for free will, and she’ll go on hating that. But under the stars and surrounded by swaying grass, she deflates.
“I seem to be encountering telescopes everywhere,” he remarks.
“Not by accident,” Merry says, digging a toe into the soil. “The telescope is a symbol here. You’ll find them all over this city, even as fixtures in people’s homes, especially on their terraces and rooftops.”
“I’ve seen as much.” Anger indicates the sky. “Which one is yours?”
She mounts a stool to one of the telescopes, then waves him over. Divesting himself of his archery, he approaches the other scope, and when she cranes her instrument, he takes the hint and focuses his own cylinder. Together, they peek through the lenses.
Merry directs him toward a dot tinged in pink: the star that birthed her.
Anger must see it because he gasps, his exclamation rough around the edges.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, still peering.
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s just…if you bear to the right…”
Merry locates the other star he’s referring to. It flashes with light, thrashing in the sky.
Fates, that must be his star. It can’t get any closer to hers, the sheen around them almost touching, on the verge of eclipsing. She ponders which of the two is about to shield and protect its neighbor.
Her rumination has to do with kismet. They’re made for each other!
They don’t speak, getting lost in their own inspections, occasionally adjusting the lenses. She counts constellations, but she loses count, too distracted by the noises to her left.
After an intermission, Merry gets antsy. She twists the telescope toward him, tweaking the instrument in order to see how close she can get, zooming in to see how deeply she can observe. The world narrows to a hole, which veers—and lands on another lens fixed right on her.
Merry squeaks. Flustered, she jerks upright at the same time he does. Across the distance, they gawk at each other, then their sheepish chuckles scatter across the high grass.
A melodic composition thrums from the player in her denim vest pocket, the stars projecting it through the carnival speakers. It’s a song that she’s played on repeat in her room, a track graced with a gentle keyboard tune and transcendental lyrics that suit the moment.
Merry trembles. A set of graphite eyes trace her, the irises once vexed but now exuding a tame sort of lacquer.
Anger swallows. “I’m sorry about earlier. I could have taken our disagreement more calmly. I should have tried to.”
“Don’t apologize,” she replies. “It’s who you are, and I’m not sorry to know you.”
As a rage god, he’s retained his temper, which has a distinct effect on others. That part of him is still active like a volcano.
Without a word, Merry communicates that she knows, and that it doesn’t matter, and that it matters so much. He shouldn’t retract any part of himself, doesn’t need to withhold a thing.
Anger processes that. And a miracle happens.
His mouth lifts into a close-mouthed grin. It’s subtle, and it’s presumably rare. But it operates like a generator inside her, turning every vein into a beam, every atom into a bulb, electrifying to the point where her brain is about to experience an outage.
“You have a resplendent smile,” she idolizes.
He wavers. “Merry…I…”
Is this a declaration? Oh, let it be!
The tone of his voice, and the visual of his mouth sculpting her name, is a potent mixture of clammy and surreal.
Anger’s eyes sharpen but not with passion, nor with anything close to desire. No, they morph from that tame lacquer to a shrill ebony while flickering over her shoulder in alarm…in awareness.
Merry catches the sound. A thin and sharp noise splits the air, flying toward them.
The intrusion is unmistakable: an arrow.
8
Merry
The blade cuts through the distance. Its flight happens in slow motion, linear and perfect, like a foul dream or a brilliant nightmare. There’s a hitch in time, a speed bump in which she finds herself canting her head, watching the pointed tip coming toward her.
The weapon has been forged from azurite, a saturated blue scooped from the crusted belly of a mineral. The result is a gorgeous attack, so beautifully lethal that Merry’s fingers lift, eager to feel the weapon’s surface as it lances her way.
A wall of muscle pounds into her side. She smacks into the dirt, threads of grass mashed against her mouth, her vision a kaleidoscope as she tumbles across the knoll, with a masculine weight crushed against her.
Three full revolutions and a sudden curb causes them to stop. Merry lands on her back and gawks at the shock of stars. They’re flickering like mad, like a short circuiting installation.
Her gaze shifts to Anger, who’s on top of her, his pectorals squishing her breasts. His eyes probe hers for a second, checking on her. She recovers her senses, the truth refracting in his glare.
Someone just tried to shoot her.
That someone is hammering toward them. A pair of boots wallop the ground with the magnitude of a rupturing fault line, plates beneath the earth’s surface shifting. It’s a quake the likes of which no commoner can produce.
She hears the twang of a bowstring, the nock of another arrow. Anger vaults to his feet, snatches her hand, and the world tips. Merry wobbles as though she’s standing on a high wire, then jolts as Anger hauls her forward.
They race across the hill, ducking another arrow that spears overhead. The music that’s been playing throughout the carnival turns off like a switch, although the rides still pulse around them.
Reality kicks in. She rips her fingers from Anger’s in order to pump her arms and legs.
Another arrow releases. She yelps, her hip whisking to the side and dodging the rod that whizzes by. Her speed alongside Anger reaches critical mass, yet neither of them match the stranger’s velocity.
That can’t be just any archer.
Archers are fast, but they’re not that fast. Does that mean these stunning arrows are fatal?
Whoever it is, Merry hasn’t gotten a look, and she isn’t about to. She yanks on Anger’s wrist, lugging him off course. “Merry, what—”
“Come on!” she shouts.
They reach the skateboard just as the adversary’s silhouette bleeds across the grass. Frankly, Merry’s irked and dazzled. This night has been going so well, and while she enjoys stints of drama, this isn’t the sort that she’s been envisioning.
An arrow soars. Merry’s so terrified and frustrated that she swipes the skateboard off the
grass, then whips around. She lifts the board, blocking the arrowhead, which lodges into the surface and then vanishes.
With a single pirouette, she drives the board into the stranger’s face, taking him off guard because, really, it’s a skateboard. Since when does anybody use such an apparatus for battle?
The seismic figure staggers, the hill rippling in response. Merry pivots in the opposite direction, catching the nemesis across the ribs. Juggling the board between her hands, she evades the assailant’s fists once more, then thrusts the board’s nose into his jugular, clipping his voice like string.
The interloper crashes to the ground. She’s never seen him before, with that hawkish nose and the long braids at either side of his head. He’s got livid features, which is a pity considering what she’s just done to him.
She registers the jagged sound of Anger. “Everlasting shit!”
He takes in the intruder, his visage contorting with recognition. His head veers toward Merry, his reaction transforming from stricken to dumbfounded.
There’s a moment. And then there are tears. Merry drops the board and blubbers, flapping her palms wildly while bursting into a crying fit.
Anger sputters, “For Fate’s sake—”
“I’m sorry,” she weeps. “I don’t like to hurt people! I just feel so bad!”
He doesn’t know what to do with that information. She doesn’t blame him, because this always happens when she’s threatened. She goes the necessary mile, then gets hysterical. But she doesn’t have time to sniffle her way back to sobriety, not while backup has just released an arrow from a different vantage point.
More than one? Why hadn’t they expected that?
Before Anger can retrieve his bow and quiver, Merry wheels the board to prevent the arrow from denting her soul mate’s jaw. The second attacker sprints toward them, a feminine hourglass in a sheer gown, the butterfly-wing material fluttering from dark-skinned shoulders.
Anger doesn’t have time to aim, nor does it appear that he wants to. He’s gone pale, color leaking from his countenance. He gapes at the woman in supplication, about to sink to his knees and pay homage to her.
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