I felt my shoulders hunch up defensively, and I made myself shake them loose. “I wanted to study so that I could do this better. I’m delighted to be back.” I heard a tram coming and turned quickly toward it, not wanting to meet Tam’s eyes. “Here, we’ll get to the town center faster.”
Fe followed me onto the car. I paid our fares and sat down, looking out the window.
Tam sat down beside me, and I flinched.
I was being absurd. I’d never been shy with Ciaran, the dancing boy I’d shared a few months’ dalliance with last year, or with any of the one-night flings I’d had with locals as the circus made its rounds.
It wasn’t Tam’s being Fey that made fer different, or fer extraordinary beauty either. Tam felt special in some undefinable, significant way, and that specialness made me nervous. Made me, to be honest, afraid.
I turned toward fer and forced myself to smile—a task made easy when fe smiled hesitantly back at me.
“I’m sorry, Ivory,” fe said. “I was just curious. I can tell you love the work you do as much as I love mine. It’s one of the things I like so much about you—your passion.”
I blinked. It felt strange to hear Tam say that word, passion, so softly and gently.
Fer gaze locked with mine.
The tram began to move.
I looked away. “Well, I do love it,” I said. “There’s a lot more involved in getting ready for a show than the audience—or even a lot of the performers—realize. The stage crew’s work starts long before the lights go up . . . and we’re in charge of the lights too. Everything from washing and setting up the tent walls, to the kind and quality of sawdust on the floor, to repairing the benches the audience sits on, to rigging the trapezes and tightropes and curtains . . . we do all of that. And that’s what was always the real magic of stagecraft to me. Not performing. All the things we do that, if we’re skilled and lucky and pull them off just right, vanish into nothingness as the show begins. All the shadows that no one watches while they’re busy staring at sequins and colored lights and beautiful bodies—those shadows are the real show.”
I paused and looked out at the terraced buildings lining the road. Close to the port itself, they were mostly storefronts, changing as the tram climbed up away from the ocean from fishmongers and airship mechanics to greengrocers, bakeries, and clothing stores. At the crest of Port’s End’s tallest hill was the white marble cathedral, glittering like a lighthouse and visible even from far out at sea. All of it felt familiar and strange, like a relative I hadn’t seen in years opening their arms to embrace me.
I ran a finger over the window glass. “When I stand in those shadows, making sure no matter how tired I am that even my breath is silent . . . then I’m the magician. Then I’m happy.”
“So you and Rosie really are a double act,” Tam said.
I felt something warm up inside my chest. “The whole circus is a double act,” I said. “Nothing operates alone. Take the airship we came on or the tram we’re riding now—it wouldn’t move without its engine, and the engine would be useless without something to move. The wheels need their tracks, and you wouldn’t lay tracks if there were no wheels to use them, and inside the engine itself even, one gear needs another, one piston—” I stopped myself, aware suddenly that Tam’s eyes were crinkling with amusement. “Sorry. If Rosie were here, she’d remind me to calm down when I start ranting about mechanics.”
Tam touched my cheek with one soft fingertip. “I think it’s charming,” fe said. “I think you’re charming.”
That spun me enough that I couldn’t think of another word to say. I managed to look at Tam for only about half a moment before my courage failed me and I slid my gaze back out the window.
The tram was taking us through one of Port’s End’s more stylish residential districts; sweet, narrow gray townhouses were lined up next to each other like books on a shelf, festooned with ivy and climbing roses and pale wisteria. I used to imagine living in one of those houses, when we were on the road. There was something so tidy and discreet about each of them, even though they shared walls with their neighbors. Surely the houses on these bookshelf streets had interiors as private as the pages of a closed book too. I remembered one with a lilac-colored door that I’d thought was especially perfect, and I wondered if it might be close by . . .
But when I started looking more carefully at the doors, I realized that many of them were papered with flyers. These weren’t gaudy, colorful advertisements like the ones for the Circus Rose that Tam and I carried; they were simple announcements, stark black words on a blank white background.
ONE WORLD
ONE LIGHT
ONE LORD
No, they weren’t announcements. They were warnings.
“I wonder what the Brethren would say about that?” Tam murmured beside me.
I frowned. “It’s them saying it.”
“What? No, not the posters—what you were saying about engineering and tracks and wheels and double acts. That nothing operates alone.”
“I truly do not care what the Brethren would say about absolutely anything,” I replied with more vehemence in my voice than I’d intended.
“I know.” Fe was looking at me in that warm, thoughtful way again, and it was undoing something deep inside me. “It’s just . . . I’ve spent more than my fair share of time listening to the missionaries droning on in Faerie, trying to save my savage soul. And their Lord certainly, as you would say, operates alone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re the most civilized person I’ve ever seen. They actually met you and still called you savage?”
“What, you think I’m not?” Tam bared fer teeth and gave a quick low growl.
It was a joke, but I still had to grab the tram seat to keep from pulling fer to me and finding out what it would feel like if Tam growled while I kissed fer.
The tram stopped.
We got out, posters in hand.
Tam eyed the nearest Brethren flyer. “I can show a little savagery when I like.” Fer hand flicked upward.
A sharp wind whisked between us, and the paper exploded.
Tiny fragments drifted down like snow.
With another small motion, Tam sent a poster from the top of my stack whisking up to the same spot where the flyer had just been. It smoothed itself against the wall, perfectly straight, held up by nothing but air.
“Leave it a little crooked,” I said. “Perfection never stands out—people notice flaws much more. That’s one of the first things a stagehand learns.”
“That can’t be right,” Tam said, closing one eye and squinting up at the poster with the other, “or I wouldn’t have noticed you.”
An obvious line. It would have made me roll my eyes . . . if anyone else had said it. Yet I was suddenly lightheaded, and the stack of posters, no real burden, grew heavy in my arms.
Tam twitched a thumb. The poster tilted just enough. Its metallic lettering caught the sun.
We looked at each other.
Fe raised a hand and beckoned, but not to me.
I felt a cool breeze at my shoulders, gentle but insistent, pushing me forward.
This time, as Tam’s gaze held mine, I kept looking right back.
Fer hands came up and touched my face. Reverently. As if I were sacred. “Ivory, I want to ask you something,” fe said.
I blinked. “Yes?”
“I’d like to kiss you. I know you like—I mean, I know you used to go with Ciaran, and I’ve seen the way that you watch the other dancing boys, but—”
I laughed, and the sound was huskier than I’d expected. “But you haven’t seen the way that I watch you?”
Tam’s grin rearranged the constellations of fer freckles, and fe kissed me.
I kissed right back. I’d had plenty of kisses, of course, probably more than my fair share, in my life with a traveling circus. It was true I’d never wanted to kiss the other girls at Lampton’s, and before I met Tam, I thought my heart melted for men alone, but .
. .
But all of me was melting now. Every bit of my body was going liquid until I didn’t know how I had bones left to stand on.
I heard Tam click fer fingers, and the whole bundle of posters rose out of my arms. Fe closed the space where they had been, fer chest pressed close against mine.
The breeze around us grew to a trembling wind.
I tasted sweetness and shadows and heat. A sigh escaped me before I could stop it, a tightness that pulled up from deep in my belly and brushed past my lips to meet Tam’s in a low breath that was almost a groan.
And fe answered—in my mouth, on my tongue, and curling in my ears, I felt the slow beginning of Tam’s growl.
Savage.
“You there!” snapped a cold voice.
We parted, startled. Tam’s lips were shiny with the traces of our kiss, and for a moment, I could not look away from them. But then I looked up at fer eyes, and I saw that they were afraid.
“Who on earth do you think you are?” the voice continued. “This is holy ground! This is desecration!” A robed priest elbowed his way between Tam and me.
I stayed still, although Tam stumbled several steps backward, fer eyes still fearful.
“What holy ground?” I said. “We’re on a public street!” I filled with anger, remembering the tender way Tam had touched me. “What desecration?”
“Young lady, you are standing in the doorway of a House of Light.” The priest gestured to the gray building before us, a tall, narrow townhouse like all the others on this road—only with a door painted bright white, instead of the softer colors of the others. Now I could see the iron sunburst that hung above it, the symbol of the Brethren Church; the priest wore the same image, but smaller and cast in platinum, at his collar.
“This is one of the Brethren’s many charity homes, child,” the priest said, his voice icy with condescension. “This house takes in fallen women. We give them employment as laundresses and a safe place to stay and a chance to restore their souls to brightness.” He sniffed. “Perhaps you have need of our services, or your young . . .”
The priest glanced back toward Tam, and I thought he was just pausing to emphasize the fact that he couldn’t call a Fey “young man” or “young woman.”
But he frowned and squinted, as if he couldn’t see fer at all.
Tam let out a long, slow breath of relief. Fe smiled at me, and for a moment, I swear I saw through fer, straight to the cobblestone street. The space where Tam had been shimmered, and fe became solid again . . . at least to me.
A trick of the light. What else could I expect from a magician?
It worked a treat; the priest looked right through Tam as if fe wasn’t there.
“Well,” he muttered, turning back to me. “How virtuous of that Fey to leave without you, and after using magic, too,” he sneered. “Still, I was a missionary, and I learned the hard way that you can’t expect much better from them. Perhaps you’ll come in, child, for a cup of tea, and I can show you the more wholesome ways that the young women here pass their time?”
Tam clapped fer hand to fer mouth to smother a laugh. The motion upset the stack of posters above our heads, and a half-dozen of them fell onto the priest’s head.
“Sorry, Brother, but I’m busy today,” I said. “If any of your fallen women need a bit of a lift, though, they should come see us at the Circus Rose tonight.”
The posters plastered themselves against the charity house’s door as if of their own free will.
I ran down the street with Tam, leaving the priest frowning.
* * *
I wanted to pretend that the propaganda we’d seen on that street was just due to the proximity of the charity house, but once I was looking for signs of the Brethren, I saw them everywhere. Posters on windows and doors, of shops as well as private homes, even a banner just outside the courthouse. And preachers, too, on practically every street corner as we got closer and closer to the heart of the city. I knew the Brethren had been mobilizing in Esting since King Finnian took away their official power, but it seemed to have gotten much worse in the two years that the Circus Rose had been touring abroad.
Even the waiter at the café where we stopped for coffee and sinnum buns had a pendant with the sunburst of the Brethren dangling on it. He eyed Tam suspiciously as we left.
“He oughtn’t to look at you like that. He must get Fey customers every day,” I grumbled as we walked.
Tam glanced back. “That doesn’t mean he has to like us,” fe said.
I scowled. “Well, we’re going home to the circus now. Everyone likes you there.”
As we approached the striped skyline of the Circus Rose tents, though, it seemed that I was wrong. Black-robed Brethren dotted the crowds and lines of people who had come to see the performance, talking seriously with some and handing out flyers to others. Most of the flyers had been immediately discarded, judging by the number that lay trampled on the already-dusty and path-worn ground. That was something, anyway.
But as I watched, a few audience members listened to the Brethren, murmured seriously to one another, and then turned to leave.
I glanced to our left. We could see the ocean from there, and over it, the sun was beginning to set.
“I’d better get in to help Apple,” I said.
“Mm, and I need to do my makeup.” Tam straightened, suddenly seeming taller, and fe laughed. “I think what I put on this morning might have gotten a little smudged.”
I burned from the belly up. “You look beautiful to me,” I said.
Tam brushed two fingers across my mouth and then held them up, showing me the rouge fe’d left on my lips. “See you after the show.”
Fe turned and left.
Thank goodness. I wouldn’t be able to get anything done if fe stayed with me. And I needed to work.
Plenty of it to be done too: props to check and repair, ropes and gas lines to hook up, sawdust to sweep, Bear’s decorative harness to polish and help him put on (he wouldn’t let anyone do it but Rosie or me). I had to rush through all my jobs like a triage nurse. That’s opening night for you.
As I hurried by the park gate, I saw yet another Brethren preacher standing right there. This one wasn’t just any street preacher either; he dressed like an abbot. He wasn’t making conversation with a few people like the others—no, he’d set up a show of his very own. He introduced himself to his audience as Brother Carey. He stood on a whitewashed box he must have carried in with him and he projected his voice, trying to reach the whole crowd at once—and doing a fairly decent job of it too. He had the same charisma that good performers have, that compelling aura that makes people want to look at you, listen to you. No amount of makeup or training can fake that, I knew well. Even I found myself listening to him.
“You come here to be deceived!” he said, accusing the audience even as something in his voice suggested that he cared deeply about them. “You know what a circus is: smoke and mirrors! You know what any theater is: falsity! A distorted, lying mimic of true life. If you need proof—if the words of the Lord’s emissary are not enough for you—only look for the depravity, the mimicry, the doublings in the shows that you will see here tonight! Not a performer uncostumed, undisguised. Not an act unaugmented by sleight of hand, by distraction and misdirection. The marvelous things you will see here tonight are only marvels because they are lies! And sin, yes, sin of the most shadowy and darkest kind—”
I shook myself out of listening and marched right up to the preacher, my hands clenched at my sides.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You’re not welcome. We’ve rented this park for the next two weeks, to do our business here. And you are bad for business.” I pointed at one of the MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT OF ADMISSION signs scattered around the fairgrounds. I realized that my hand was shaking, and it occurred to me that I was still angry with the priest who had scolded Tam and me that morning. In truth, I was angry with every brother I’d seen since we arrived.
To find Port’
s End invaded in such a way, the closest place to a home that I remembered—
It stopped with my circus. I wouldn’t let them invade this too.
I felt my guts twist. The Brethren hugely valued Estinger-made technology—they’d been the most powerful patrons of the industrial revolution that had come a generation ago, after the last king had outlawed all magic. Esting had depended so heavily on Fey magic for our daily lives—cleaning and lighting our houses, aiding in transportation, all the infrastructure of a society—that we’d had to innovate or die when we were suddenly deprived of such a basic commodity.
And we had: there was steam power and gaslight now, trams in the cities, carriages pulled by lifeless automaton horses, airships, and even, it was rumored, something called a railway that would connect the three nations of our continent in ways we’d never imagined before.
Now that magic was legal again, the number of inventors and engineers had begun to drop. But since the Brethren still considered magic sinful—even though they didn’t also get to call it illegal anymore—they put a lot of their considerable money and influence behind libraries of engineering and technology, and even schools to train new inventors.
You just had to pledge fidelity to the Lord to join those schools. And they were only for boys.
I’d have recited any pledge they wanted to get to learn the things I wanted to know—and I probably would have dressed as a boy too, if I’d thought I could get away with it.
But the Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering, while not quite so well-funded as the whole Brethren Church could obviously make their schools, had been the perfect fit. They could combine science and magic at Lampton’s the way we did at the circus, and that thrilled me. I loved it. It felt right.
The preacher glared down at me from his soapbox. He wasn’t a remarkable-looking person at all, really: stodgily built, of average height, with the shaved head that most higher-level Brethren shared. That did surprise me; I always heard that those higher up in the Brethren’s chain of command lived lives of sequestered luxury in their abbeys.
The Circus Rose Page 6