The Circus Rose

by Betsy Cornwell

  “Excuse me,” I heard a soft voice say from behind me, “do you have a warrant?”

  The sound of fer voice made the pain in my head lessen just enough that I could look the officer in the eye again. “Do you?” I echoed Tam.

  “Carter Park is a public space,” she said tersely. “We don’t need a warrant.”

  “But the tents and caravans are our homes,” I said. “Those are private.”

  Tam had come to stand beside me, shoulder to shoulder. Fe nodded. “We’re concerned about Lord Bram ourselves,” fe said. “He’s been an immense help in the wake of the fire.”

  The officer’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, been giving you and yours a lot of his resources, hasn’t he?” she said. But when neither of us responded, she sighed. “Right. Goring!” she called, and the other officer was back at her side quicker than I would have thought possible.

  Tam and I kept standing together until they were well out of the park; until they had vanished down the road.

  “I should have thought to ask them for a warrant right away,” I said. “I don’t know how many times we’d be in some city and something would happen, a theft or an attack, and the circus was the first place people looked for those who were guilty. No one likes to think the danger comes from their own, not with someone else around to blame.” I looked over at fer. “How did you . . .”

  “You should have seen the police force Esting had in Faerie when it was occupied,” fe said. “You have to know how it works, and sometimes even then . . .” Fe shook fer head. “These two were nothing.”

  Tam’s expression was still neutral, still gentle, but something in fer eyes had gone hard.

  I reached out, and as lightly as I could, I touched fer shoulder.

  * * *

  I’d thought at first that my father just hadn’t kept his promise.

  That in itself had been no surprise.

  At least, I’d kept reminding myself that I shouldn’t be surprised.

  But I had wanted my father to leap in and save the day, even though I knew that was such a foolish, predictable wish that it verged on boring.

  “I should have been too smart for this,” I told Tam, who had been sitting in shared silence with me for a long while after the dinner I couldn’t make myself eat, watching the stars appear in the evening sky as the sunset slipped away.

  Fe twined fer fingers through mine. “Too smart for what?”

  “I shouldn’t have let myself believe my father could help. What has he ever, ever done to make me think I could?”

  “Oh, Ivory,” Tam said. “It doesn’t make you foolish to hope, to trust someone. It makes you good.” Fe brought our heads close together, and I felt fer eyelashes flutter briefly against my forehead.

  The contact felt good, grounding, and I leaned into it. “I still don’t see why you like me so much, Tam,” I said. “You’re so . . . you’re magic, and gorgeous, and I’m . . . a backstage girl. Not that I’m not happy about all this, but . . .”

  Tam didn’t say anything to that; fe just looked at me, but fe looked in a warm, steady way that grew slowly darker, deeper, more quietly admiring, and that told me, if not why fe liked me, at least that fe absolutely did.

  And for the first time since the fire, when I felt the answering warmth blossoming through my body, I didn’t push it away. I reached up and stroked Tam’s hair, tucking a curl behind fer slightly pointed ear.

  Our faces were still so close together that it only took the smallest movement, after that, to bring my lips to meet fers.

  I shivered as fe returned my kiss, shivered with how much I’d missed just this kind of warmth.

  The sweetness of Tam’s breath mingled with mine, and fer soft mouth was like a healer’s touch. I closed my eyes and became, for a moment, only a kiss.

  When warmth had filled every corner of my body, I touched fer face again and pulled away.

  “That’s the first time we’ve kissed since the fire, you know,” I said. Part of me felt it was time to stop talking, wanted to lose my thoughts inside Tam’s kisses again, now that I felt I could. But my thoughts were less painful when I could talk them through with fer. They turned bearable, and sometimes, even sweet.

  “I know,” fe said. “I figured you’d let me know when you were ready.”

  “Yes.” I laughed a little.

  We took long, matching breaths. It was something Rosie and I used to catch ourselves doing accidentally—matching our breaths to each other. In the caravan with Bear, she wasn’t far away . . . and yet she was, and I missed her.

  “Oh, Ivory,” Tam said suddenly, “trusting your father, whether he deserves it or not . . . it makes you brave. Where would I be if I hadn’t trusted your mother and joined the Rose and come here, to a country that has been cruel to mine over and over? I’d be nowhere I want to be. I’d be nowhere near you.”

  “I’m not as brave as that, Tam. Setting off from Faerie with us, it seems amazing to me. Leaving the only life you’d ever known . . .”

  “Like you did when you left the circus for engineering school? Was it foolish to chase a dream then, to have a little faith? And is it any less foolish, really, to hope your father was becoming the kind of parent he always should have been? If there’s stupidity there, Ivory, or fault, it’s his. When someone hurts you, it’s their fault, not yours for letting them.” Fe took my face in fer hands and kissed me gently . . . and then not so gently. “Ivory, you are so, so brave.”

  About then, I became very aware of the presence of other troupe members nearby, and I led Tam away to a quiet edge of the park that the fire had never reached.

  Rosie

  Is this

  what it is

  for her:

  the body

  a painful

  stranger?

  I won’t go back

  without her.

  I dream

  the princess,

  here.

  Her long

  pale hair,

  like snow,

  like stars.

  Her eyes

  like ice.

  A delicate touch,

  a softness,

  in her

  lips.

  Oh, my

  princess,

  snow-night girl,

  never feeling

  but through

  fur,

  the body her

  rightful inheritance

  trapped in

  the bear they call

  him.

  I dream of her.

  I hold her, there,

  in dream, the body

  that hides

  in her

  heart.

  I know

  she dreams of me.

  I see her.

  I can see.

  Ivory

  Vera and Toro and Apple took turns with me by Mama’s side, now that Rosie’s and my fathers were gone.

  They’d vanished completely. Not a strange thing, perhaps, for Tobias Valko, a sailor from Nordsk who seemed to have known practically no one in Port’s End save my parents, but Lord Bram was an active presence in the city. There were plenty of people who wondered where he had gone.

  No one had any idea.

  It was strange how easy it was just to pretend I’d never seen him at all. Never felt that wild seasick rush of mingled resentment and hope when I saw the ring he and Mr. Valko gave Mama. Never woken up the dreams I used to cherish when I was a little girl. They were still there somewhere, hiding in the back of my mind, behind a wall of light I made so bright I couldn’t see past it.

  After a while, there were almost as many missing posters for Lord Bram papering the city as Brethren propaganda.

  I tried to ignore them both. All I let myself care about was the circus and when Mama and Rosie would get well.

  The doctors said Mama was healing, and her sleep, in the meantime, was easy. She always had one of us with her too.

  I poured myself into healing the circus, directing and delega
ting and doing all the things that I’d whispered to my father were just an act.

  At least, I thought, as I helped mark places for new tent posts one afternoon, I had people to delegate to. Five footmen and three housemaids from my father’s estate arrived on Monday morning and quickly fell to whatever task I asked them to do. Vera and Toro too. The more leadership roles I took over, though, the less pretense it became, and when my work was mostly done each evening and I was too tired to do more, there was the lovely sweetness of Tam’s arms to melt into, the joy I found in fer words and touch and kisses.

  It felt like fe needed that just as much as I did, and it was good to feel needed, longed for, when fe was asking for the same thing I wanted to give. The circus needed so much from me, things I found exhausting sometimes—things I did out of the kind of love that could just as easily be called obligation. What I did with Tam was . . . celebration. I couldn’t get enough.

  And still, fe started saying that one day fe would leave.

  It was the Brethren who were driving Tam away, I thought. Brother Carey and his soapbox. The flyers everywhere. The dirty looks fe got, that all the Fey got, all over Port’s End.

  The war is over, I wanted to say to my fellow Estingers, and the Fey didn’t start it to begin with.

  But I knew I couldn’t make it right, couldn’t even protect Tam from the way people called magic “tricks” or “curses,” from the hostility that could suddenly fill the air when someone saw that fe was Fey.

  A child of about ten came up to Tam while we were walking down the street one afternoon. “I saw you at the pier that day,” she said shyly. “You were my favorite.”

  Tam smiled and leaned down to talk to her. “Thank you so much. Performing magic is my favorite thing.”

  “My dad liked you too. He wanted to know . . .” She blushed.

  My hackles rose, but Tam’s face stayed serene. “To know what, darling?”

  “Do you think you’d be a man or a woman, if you were a person?”

  Just the smallest flinch from Tam, but that kind smile stayed on fer face. A true performer. “I am a person, just as I am. You can tell your father that.” Fe took a deep breath, straightening again. “Here.” Fer left hand moved in a small circle, and a sphere of purple light grew before the child’s face. It shimmered and broke apart, revealing a white bird inside.

  Tam gestured again, and the lights vanished. The girl blinked in wonder, her father’s question forgotten.

  “If I didn’t like you so much, I think I’d be gone already,” fe told me as we walked away. Once we were alone again, the anger in fer usually calm voice was palpable. “I thought it would be . . . The war is over. We’re supposed to be free.”

  “You are,” I said. “I’m—I’m sorry that happened. I’m sorry things like that keep happening. But Esting will get better. Give them time. Give us time.”

  Fe shook fer head. “I’m always a person in Faerie.”

  We tore down a few more Brethren flyers as we walked through the city.

  HELLFIRE COMES EARLY TO SINNERS one said.

  LET GOD’S LIGHT IN BEFORE IT BURNS YOU read another.

  I was shaking by the time we got back to Carter Park and the picketers at the gate.

  “Ignore them,” Tam murmured. “I’ve seen far worse.”

  Fe wrapped an arm around my waist, and I did the same to fer. I knew I had far less right to feel scared of the picket line than fe did.

  As we passed through the protesters, Tam stared down several of them, most of whom glanced away after a mere second or two; I wasn’t strong enough for that. I just kept looking at the still-hollow center of the circus grounds, where our huge, frilled tent had stood. Where Mama ought to be setting up for the night’s show. And the row of caravans and dressing tents, now half given over to makeshift sickbeds for the wounded.

  When Tam and I finally had another moment together at the end of that long day, drinking tea under the cloudy night sky, I knew that fer heart was as heavy as mine. Fer dreams of what traveling the world would be like had fallen apart, and I . . . I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t started to have a few dreams of my own about what a future away from the circus might look like, a future that I could love. In one of those bookshelf-street townhouses, with ivy on the walls to show how long they’d stood in the same place. With a steady job that would keep my feet on the ground. And just maybe with someone like Tam—quiet and steady and lovely. We could be there for each other, always there, when we came home.

  The first step down that road was still Lampton’s. I had missed Mama and Rosie so much when I was there that I’d had to come back to the circus, but I found I missed the school nearly as much now. Was that what happened to anyone who loved two places: their heart was always torn in half?

  I thought of Mama’s ring, secreted away in the caravan. And I wondered if, maybe, I was starting to understand why she’d refused to choose between our fathers, even if that choice left Rosie and me without either of them.

  I hadn’t known to be grateful, growing up, that my whole heart had lived in one place. Now some small part of me lived always inside of Tam, and some larger part—a dream I still couldn’t let go of—was at engineering school . . .

  But I knew my only dream should be that Rosie and Mama would get better. And part of me still wondered whether the fire had been my fault; whether I had almost caused—

  I could barely even think it.

  I knew neither Rosie nor Mama would believe my negligence had caused the circus fire, so I tried not to believe it either.

  Slowly, I began to succeed—at leading, at believing. At everything.

  And then Rosie woke up.

  8

  Rosie

  I

  know

  that

  voice.

  Ivory

  I was going over the work schedule with Apple and Toro—enough of the crew were still nursing their wounds that everyone who could was working triple shifts, and no one was happy about it, either—when suddenly I heard a voice that I had never heard before.

  “Rosie,” it was saying, soft and low. “Rosie, Rosie.” A voice as gentle, as tactile as the wind through my hair.

  I didn’t bother to look up at Toro or Apple, didn’t bother to find out if they’d heard it too. I just turned and followed the voice I didn’t recognize as if I never knew how to do anything else.

  It was coming from the caravan where Rosie slept. I don’t know how I didn’t think, didn’t realize, as I moved toward it, but I didn’t . . .

  Inside, in the darkness that Rosie needed, I couldn’t see anything for a moment.

  Then, as shapes began to resolve themselves, at first I saw only one great circle, red, dark, breathing. That low voice came from the darkness, and so did a small yawning breath that I knew well. Rosie waking up.

  The whites of two human eyes flashed toward me.

  The redder part of the darkness became my sister, and the darker, Bear.

  I rushed forward and pulled Rosie to me, forgetting her injuries, forgetting everything.

  My sister put her half-healed arms around me.

  This body I held was one mine had known before I was born. My limbs had been so lonely for my sister.

  I shuddered and held her tight.

  But as soon as I lifted her off of Bear, she started to cry—small wheezing, mewling cries like a newborn baby. Her hands reached out toward Bear, and her cries escalated toward something that would have been screaming if she’d had more strength.

  “We’re here, Rosie, we’re right here! You’re all right!” I said. My eyes had accepted the dark now, and I could see the places where her skin was still raw, where the salt in her tears must have stung as it tracked down her face.

  She cried louder. A scab on her cheek split and wept.

  Bear pressed his nose on Rosie’s face again.

  But that did not stop her crying out, either.

  “Rosie,” that incomprehensibly gentle and deep voice
muttered. Bear pressed his muzzle more firmly to my sister’s face. “Rosie.”

  The voice was coming from Bear.

  The voice was Bear’s.

  My mouth went dry as air. I tried to swallow but could not.

  “Bear?”

  Bear looked at me with eyes as dark and deep as forests, his nose still pressed to Rosie’s brow.

  “Oh, Princess,” Rosie breathed, finally seeming to settle, to come back into herself. “You’re still here.”

  I stared.

  Rosie

  Ivory thinks

  I am the one

  who needs.

  Bear loves her too.

  Loves her too much

  to lie, except

  by silence.

  Enough to know

  how best to love.

  How could she take

  away a third father?

  Ivory

  I couldn’t move.

  How could I not have known? How could I not have been told?

  How could Bear not have wanted to talk to me?

  I’d felt so guilty, leaving Rosie to go to Lampton’s. I thought I’d broken the most profound promise I’d ever made: to never leave her alone.

  And all along, there was a place in her life, in her heart, that was completely separate from me. Even from Mama.

  There was something in our home that was not as it seemed. And it made Rosie not quite what she’d seemed either; it made me wonder if she needed me less than I thought she did.

  If I’d known she didn’t need me, maybe I would have stayed at school . . .

  I couldn’t finish that thought. It hurt too much.

  Bear blinked at me slowly. Lying next to him, still weak, Rosie looked at me too and nodded.