But it didn’t feel like a vacation when, in every dark corner and out-of-the-way place, magicians could be found whispering together in worried voices.
Micah tried to eavesdrop on these conversations, but it was usually impossible. The adults at Circus Mirandus all spoke multiple languages, and when they thought Micah wasn’t around, conversations tended to switch to Mandarin or French or Hindi—whatever a particular magician enjoyed or needed to practice. And when they finally realized he was present, the talk turned much more pleasant and casual.
“Is there a potion that can make people learn languages faster?” Micah asked Rosebud one morning during lessons.
They were sitting at their usual table in the dining tent, heads bent over a first aid manual. The circus’s healer thought all knowledge was useful, so their classes focused on whatever Micah was curious about.
Rosebud slipped a bookmark between the manual’s pages and closed it. “There are potions that help with memorization,” she said. “But they won’t do you any good right now, duckling. They’re too dangerous for a growing brain. Do you want to spend more time practicing your Spanish?”
When Micah asked her for a long list of vocabulary words, she smiled knowingly.
He took the words back to his room and spent all night trying to tie a knot that would remind him of them whenever he wanted, but despite the new insight he had into his magic, the attempt was a failure. To tie information into a knot, he apparently had to know it well first, which meant he was going to have to study anyway.
“Don’t know why you’re botherin’ with all the eavesdroppin’,” Geoffrey said the next day when he found Micah skulking behind a set of cabinets in the kitchen. “Nobody’s sayin’ stuff you don’t already know.”
Micah didn’t quite believe him.
“Don’t believe me?” said Geoffrey, prying the top off a can of sardines. “Ask away. I’ll tell you whatever you like.”
Micah wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity like that. “Have the Sisterhood found Victoria? Or Conflagration? How are they tracking her if she can fly?”
“No. No. And they’re havin’ some trouble,” said Geoffrey. He licked sardine juice off his fingers. “The drakling’s a tunneler, so that should make trackin’ it easier, but she’s got it fed up so well that it’s tunnelin’ deep and movin’ fast.”
Micah wondered if he could get away with a few more questions.
“Sure,” said Geoffrey.
Micah was so startled to have his thought answered that his next set of questions fell right out of his head to be replaced by a much more pressing one.
“Geoffrey,” he said, aghast, “can you read minds?”
“Oho!” said Geoffrey. He slurped down a sardine. “Guess we won’t have to wait until you’re a hundred after all.”
Micah’s hands went automatically to the top of his head.
“Don’t be silly. I don’t have to look through your skull to see what’s on your mind. And I won’t pry as long as you think quietly.”
Micah’s thoughts were so loud right now that Geoffrey would probably be able to hear them from Mars.
“I think I’ll just leave,” he said, trying not to meet Geoffrey’s eyes in case that would make the mind reading easier. “I need to check on the Lightbender.”
“He’s at Porter’s,” Geoffrey offered.
Of course he would know.
Micah headed to the warehouse and found his guardian sprawled across Porter’s sofa, a cold cup of coffee on the floor beside him.
“He came by for a visit and didn’t get three words out before he fell asleep,” said Porter, shaking his head.
Even though he didn’t have to perform with the circus closed, the Lightbender was doing more than usual with his illusions to keep them hidden. Micah was glad his guardian was getting at least a little rest.
“Let’s leave him to it. I know how he feels,” said Porter. He had slept for two full days after reopening the Door to England. “I’ve got something to show you in the warehouse.”
Micah followed him out to the wall of mail slots.
“See anything new?” Porter said, gesturing at the wall.
Micah found it right away. It was a custom mail slot, like the one Firesleight had been using, but instead of etching flames into the metal flap, Porter had engraved this one with a square knot design.
“Since Chintzy’s temporarily grounded, I thought you might need a new way to send letters to your friend,” said Porter. “I put the matching slot in a box addressed to Jenny’s house and dropped it through a cat flap in her neighborhood this morning. I figure she’ll get it soon enough that way.”
“That’s perfect!” Micah said excitedly. A mail slot was even better than letters. He and Jenny would be able to talk face-to-face. “Porter, thank you.”
“Just try not to blow it up,” said Porter. “Or disconnect it. Or whatever it is you do. Even if it does look pretty.”
* * *
To everybody’s delight, Firesleight appeared in the dining tent the next day during breakfast.
She stepped through the entrance with a travel bag slung over her shoulder, and before she could say a word, the tent was in an uproar. Magicians cried out in welcome and ran to greet her.
Firesleight looked a little the worse for wear, her brown eyes weary and her clothes rumpled, but she brightened as she was surrounded by her friends. “I missed you all so much,” she said. “It’s good to be home.”
Micah raced toward her, too, wanting to reassure himself that she was fine. And as soon as Firesleight spotted him, she slipped around all the people who were clapping her on the back.
“Micah Tuttle!” She wrapped her arms around him in a strong bear hug. “Look at you! I swear you’ve gotten bigger in the past few weeks! And is that a ponytail?”
Micah felt himself blush. He’d tried the ponytail for the first time this morning, and it was so short he couldn’t decide if it looked interesting or just ridiculous.
“Are you okay?” he asked Firesleight. “Did you find Victoria?”
Firesleight let him go and shook her head. “I’m safe and sound,” she said. “And we didn’t find Victoria, but we did find this.”
She dropped her bag on the floor and pulled a scale the size of a serving platter out of it. It was oval, with sharp edges, and the charcoal gray color of it was overlaid with iridescence like an oil slick.
“We found it in a fresh tunnel in Northern Mexico. So, we know the drakling hasn’t fledged, and it’s not heading toward us right now. Victoria must have lost our trail.” She smiled. “I figured I would come home and share the good news. The Sisterhood will keep searching, and they’ll call if they need a hand.”
“What happens now?” said Micah.
“Well, since trouble isn’t headed our way, we can reopen. We’ll have to be extra careful, but—”
Whatever else she was going to say was lost in the general cheer that went up from the magicians. Apparently, Micah wasn’t the only one who’d grown tired of an empty circus.
* * *
Two weeks passed, and Circus Mirandus held its breath, though the crowds never noticed.
The music played day and night, strong and true. The Doors opened again in the meadow, and children ventured through from St. Albans and beyond, never quite understanding how they had arrived. The shows went on, and if anything, they were more spectacular than ever.
The Strongmen played a stacking game in the afternoons, building a tower of logs so high it seemed to brush the clouds, while Ten Hands roamed the midway, juggling polished coins instead of his usual knives. The coins fell around him, flashing like raindrops in the sunlight, never once touching the ground. All the performers were at their best, and sometimes, Micah found himself joining the audiences and gasping with every bit as much astonishment as the guests did.
When he asked Mr. Head why everyone was putting forth so much extra effort when they were already stretched thin by the circus’s new security measures, the manager said, “Because when evil asks us to bow before it, it is our job to stand taller.”
Micah thought Circus Mirandus was standing very tall indeed.
The magicians had a thousand extra tasks to perform each day now.
There were patrols in the meadow and frequent emergency meetings in the manager’s office, and whatever the Lightbender was doing with his illusions was taxing him. His shows were canceled, but still, he walked along like someone half in a dream. He answered questions ten minutes after people asked them, and he sometimes forgot his leather coat, which made him look so unlike himself that Micah always ran back to the tent for it, even if the Lightbender claimed he wasn’t cold.
Micah had also gotten into the habit of fetching the magician at mealtimes, just in case it didn’t occur to him that he might be hungry. They ate quietly together, Micah busying himself with knot-tying when he was finished eating so that he wouldn’t bother the illusionist with too much conversation.
He was working on resupplying himself with bracelets— replacing the old and making up new ones. It was different, now that he knew the point of his magic was connecting things. It was easier to decide what he wanted to do and exhilarating to understand that it wasn’t the physical knot he tied that mattered so much as the one that existed somewhere in that realm of golden threads.
Micah hadn’t managed to find that world—the overlay—again. He couldn’t see it the way he had when he’d been afraid Bowler was dead. But now that he knew it was there, it was like a whisper on the edge of his thoughts, nudging him in the right direction.
He’d replaced all the memory bracelets on his left arm in record time. Memories were a special kind of connection, he’d decided, one that joined then and now together. Once he understood that, his knots grew stronger, the memories turning clearer.
“If you become any more skilled at that type of knot,” the Lightbender said during a rare moment of alertness, “you will be halfway to an illusionist yourself.”
It was lunchtime, and though Micah had managed to steer his guardian to their regular table, the Lightbender had barely eaten a bite.
“You can’t go into the memories, though,” Micah explained, nudging a plate full of tacos toward him. “Part of you always knows that they’re not happening right now.”
“Ah,” said the Lightbender, blinking down at the food like he was surprised to find it on the table. “So, my job is secure after all.”
Micah was starting to realize that he wouldn’t want his guardian’s job.
When the Lightbender finally started putting food in his mouth, Micah went back to work. He reached under the table for his backpack and pulled out the gray thread he was using for the new locator knot.
He was pretty sure he understood why it had never worked before. You couldn’t use one knot to create a tracking device. He would need to use two. He would have to connect them somehow, so that one always knew where the other one was even when they were apart.
Micah had explained all this to the Lightbender. He’d been fairly sure the illusionist wasn’t listening at the time, but when Micah pulled out the spool of thread, he said, “Have you had any luck with it?”
“Not yet,” said Micah. “But I’m close.”
A couple of days ago, he’d managed to get two knots to vibrate whenever they were separated from each other, and that was definitely progress.
“I think maybe I should try to make them identical. Because that’s how Porter does it.”
Porter had once said that it was much harder to create a connection between doors if they didn’t match perfectly. It stood to reason that connections between knots might work the same way.
The Lightbender was silent for a couple of minutes. Micah assumed he’d drifted off again, but then he said, “Yes. That makes sense. Porter’s doors are tools he uses to make his magic easier to visualize and control. Your knots seem to be a similar kind of tool.”
Micah nodded.
“When you finish your tracking device,” the illusionist said, “I have another project in mind for you.”
“What kind of project?”
“I would not dream of interrupting your current endeavor—”
“I want to be interrupted!” Micah protested. “What do you need me to tie?”
He’d been hoping, now that he’d started to figure things out with his magic, that he would find more opportunities to help out around the circus. But he kept drawing a blank when he tried to think of things that would make a real difference.
“I would like to have some way of knowing if you need help when you are away from the circus.”
With Victoria thousands of miles away, Micah’s field trips with Rosebud could resume. But he didn’t want to add to the Lightbender’s worries. “I won’t leave the circus if it bothers you.”
“It would bother me more if you were a prisoner here when you didn’t have to be,” said the Lightbender. “However, it would ease my mind to know you had a way of contacting me if need arose.”
Micah frowned. He didn’t have any clue how to make a knot like that. But the Lightbender had made a special request, and Micah wasn’t going to say he couldn’t do it.
“I’ll think of something,” he promised. “Just give me a while.”
THE LOCATOR KNOT
Two days later, Micah walked into the Lightbender’s room. “I’ve done it!” he announced.
The illusionist was sitting on the clothes chest at the foot of his bed staring off into space. He turned and blinked blearily at Micah.
“You really need to sleep.”
The Lightbender sighed. “You’re not the first to tell me so.”
He even sounded different.
“Why do you have an accent?” Micah asked. “Wait. Do you always have an accent?”
“Everyone does. It is merely a matter of the listener’s perspective.”
Micah supposed that was true, but though the Lightbender had always spoken formally, he’d always sounded familiar, too. Like he might have grown up in the house next door. Which was weird now that Micah thought about it. The Lightbender had been born in Scandinavia a long, long time ago. And he’d lived all over the world since then. He shouldn’t have sounded just like someone from Micah’s hometown.
“You use your illusions to change how people hear you!” Sometimes, Micah wondered if he knew anything real about his guardian at all.
“It is an unconscious habit,” the Lightbender said, a hint of apology in his voice. “A little like smiling to make someone you have just met feel comfortable.”
“It’s fine,” Micah said quickly. “I was only surprised.”
“What did you wish to show me?”
Micah held up a pair of knot bracelets. He had made them out of thin black cords, and they were identical. “Give me your arm.”
The Lightbender held out a hand, and Micah tied one of the bracelets around his wrist.
“Can you feel anything?” he asked, shoving the bracelets on his own arm apart to make room for one more.
The Lightbender touched the knot curiously. “I’m afraid not.”
“That’s okay. It’ll still work.” Micah could feel something. It was like an invisible string, thin as the thread of a spider’s web, connected the two black bracelets.
“You wanted a way of knowing if I ever got into trouble,” he said. “Watch this.”
He hooked his index finger under the bracelet on his own wrist and gave it a tug.
Come loose. He felt a small snap in the back of his mind, and the bracelet came undone.
At the same moment, the matching bracelet unknotted itself and fell off the Lightbender’s wrist onto the rug. The illusionist’s e
yes widened. He bent to pick it up.
I did it. Success was a warm rush in Micah’s veins. I really did it.
“I think it’s going to work over long distances, too!” he said. “I’ll send one to Jenny to test it out. But this is what you wanted, right? We’ll both wear one of these emergency bracelets, and if I’m ever in trouble, I’ll break mine, and you’ll know right away.”
The Lightbender was still staring at the black cord in the palm of his hand. In a soft voice, he said, “How extra-ordinary.”
* * *
Micah ended up making four different pairs of emergency bracelets. The Lightbender asked that he give one to Rosebud and another to Porter, just to be safe.
The final one was for long-distance testing purposes. When he’d finished it, Micah went to Porter’s tent and passed it through the new mail slot to Jenny in Peal.
“Micah, this is so cool!”
Jenny was standing in the kitchen with her own mail slot propped against a cereal box. She was so close to the slot that most of the time Micah could only see her eyes and her nose, but he could hear the hum of the refrigerator running. And whenever she backed up a little, he caught a glimpse out the window. It wasn’t dark yet in Peal, though it was nighttime in England.
Jenny slipped the coral shoelace he’d used for the test bracelet over her wrist and held her arm up to the slot so that Micah could see it.
“Try it out,” he said. “It’s supposed to work both ways, and I need to know how it handles distance.”
“But I don’t want to untie it,” said Jenny. “Then I won’t have it anymore.”
It hadn’t occurred to Micah that Jenny might want to keep the shoelace. “I’ll give you another one when we talk next week,” he promised. “I can’t tie these as fast as the memory bracelets.”
Jenny took a few steps back, and Micah saw she was wearing her new science club T-shirt. She’d been elected secretary, even though most of the other members were in seventh and eighth grade. Micah was so happy for her that he almost wished he still went to regular middle school, just so he could join her club.
The Bootlace Magician Page 18