The Circus Rose

by Betsy Cornwell

  The blood wasn’t magic. It didn’t do anything to us when it hit our feathers and scales but glisten.

  Yet as the blood settled, I felt a kind of release, some power gone, and I felt my mind and body grow again.

  Feathers sucked into my skin, a beak pressed inside my own soft lips with a feeling like trying to swallow my teeth, pinfeathers and claws melted into nails and hair, and Tam shrank again beneath me—as I grew I shed fer body from around me as if fe were a too-small skin.

  I saw Bear, mouth and claws bloody, standing over Brother Carey’s corpse. I saw the broken chain at Carey’s wrist that had connected him to Mama.

  Apple watched us for a moment, his face twisted in terror, looking from the fallen body of Brother Carey to our changing forms. Then, before I was even myself enough to call out to him, he ran.

  Who else was watching him? The room was chaos, full of transformations.

  * * *

  I blinked some straggling down from my eyes. My mind stretched out in its true home, and I looked around the crypt.

  All the animals were changing. I heard the struggle of it: feathers shedding, fur sifting to the ground like snowfall, bodies creaking as they grew or shrank. I felt the pain of the change in the air, not just the echoes of my own—the tension of it, the way someone else’s pain always pulls the air tight, so that it’s hard for anyone to breathe.

  I knew Brother Carey was dead. I was relieved, but I didn’t want to look at him, oddly small, broken on the floor.

  I would rather look at my mother, who was stretching her naked bird-wing limbs, making a strangled half cry through a beak that was already growing the dark beard I knew and loved. How it had come back after the fire had burned it away I didn’t know, but the sight of it alone was enough to make me weep with joy.

  At our fathers pushing out of their cage even as they changed, beastly sinews turning human in their legs and arms.

  At Tam on the floor, shedding snakeskin, wincing as fe struggled to free limbs that were still stuck to fer torso as if by sutures.

  I would rather look at Miss Lampton rising from all fours, stroking the horsehair on her cheek before it vanished, a look on her face as if she was lost in a memory of a horse she’d once loved.

  At the Lampton girls, falling over one another with embraces as their kitten fangs receded into their gasping mouths.

  At the others, so many others. The catacomb extended outward from the room we were in, and as voices began to echo through the halls, I began to wonder just how much of the city, how many of the Brethren’s buildings—their churches and libraries and theaters, their Houses of Light—had underbellies that held people turned to animals. Where Brother Carey had entombed them, away from even their own bodies.

  And now his death had brought them home to themselves again.

  I wanted to offer all of them my help, but I remembered enough of the change—even though it already flitted, strangely buoyant and hard to capture, through some ill-fitting corner of my memory—to know that there was no help I could give, that remaking and returning to a body was something you could only do alone. That what I could do was be there for them when they had each come home into themselves.

  I could see that we were changing in the order Carey had changed us: I’d healed first because I had only just turned. Tam was ferself again soon after I was, and Mama a little while after that; and one by one, the animals in the crypt recovered their human forms.

  A hundred of us, at least. A menagerie of humanity. Hands that knew how to open cages.

  And Bear changed last of all.

  Rosie

  Bear reaches for me.

  I reach for Bear. I hold

  her. I will always

  hold on to this love.

  My scarred hands start bleeding.

  Bear

  starts bleeding in between

  the claws, the long black stabbing claws,

  Bear’s blood, my blood. Both red.

  I will hold on. To look at us you’d think

  Bear makes me bleed, Bear hurts me,

  Bear’s claws invade my skin.

  It is not so. It is not so.

  You do not know.

  This blood that’s mine, this blood that’s Bear’s,

  is not the blood of injury.

  I will hold on.

  I hold on.

  Bear bleeds

  until the claws come off.

  One by one, they fall

  cold, limp, and hollow on the floor,

  empty as discarded toe shoes,

  and the paws they leave behind,

  raw skinless stubs, as red

  as if they’re wearing polish.

  Blood painting us anew.

  I look up. I know Ivory is afraid.

  The smell of copper fills the room.

  I try to tell her with my eyes

  what we already know,

  my Bear and I.

  My throat is stopped and thick,

  and if I spoke, I think a roar or growl would

  come out.

  My voice for Bear,

  my skin for Bear, my blood, my life,

  whatever I can give for her,

  tear me open. Let it out.

  We multiply.

  My Bear and I,

  we bleed into new bodies:

  sweet bones, smooth

  skin like gold dresses, burnished

  and burning. Bright inside.

  I give her some of what is mine.

  The rest she takes from

  the spell itself, I think. I hear

  the princess speak to me, as if in dream

  again. She takes her body back

  from Carey: what he stole from her mother,

  long dead.

  Long dead.

  Long buried

  in the earth, long turned to loam,

  the lining of the womb that holds the sun.

  My hands grow

  clean again.

  My eyes, my throat,

  drink in the blood, and swallow,

  and open.

  I know without a sound that I could sing.

  I know before I look what I will see.

  Bear’s face is smooth, new

  skin baptized with sweat.

  Her bearskin circles

  around her like a caul,

  the remnants of the beast a crumpled gown,

  hair like snow, limbs fine and curved,

  graceful as she curls up

  off of the floor where we bled, died,

  and

  rose.

  So long

  in this body

  that its traces

  litter the floor like scars.

  The others, their feathers,

  their scales, their fur,

  are already gone. How long

  it will take to vanish Bear’s,

  I do not know. I do

  not mind. I see

  her now.

  Her

  now.

  She looks at me through sea-glass,

  white-lashed eyes, my snow-white

  girl. My princess.

  Bear, my love.

  I clasp her close and take her mouth to mine.

  Ivory

  Bear told us the story after.

  After we escaped the crypt.

  We weren’t the only ones; as we emerged onto the street, I heard a hushed sound like a thousand voices whispering, a thousand feet stepping on stones. I looked behind us and saw people, mostly women, trailing out of Houses of Light all down the street, all over the city, still shaking the animals out of themselves.

  Apple was not among them that I could see. I had a vague memory of his tall form running down a catacomb hall, but it was so hard to recall the things that happened while I was a bird . . .

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was the people who were free.

  As I wondered how far the catacomb network extended, I overheard my father sharing similar thoughts w
ith Mr. Valko and Miss Lampton.

  “So many,” he murmured, “a whole rotten root system. Everyone at court thought the catacombs had been closed for centuries. Who knows how long the Brethren have been using them or for what other reasons?”

  “The king will deal with it,” Miss Lampton said, “and well. You’ll see. He removed the Brethren from the government as soon as he was coronated, and he’ll root them out again.”

  “I hope so,” Mr. Valko said. “I’d like to think Port’s End could be a safe place for our family, if . . .”

  He clasped my father’s hand.

  I pushed ahead, found Mama, and clasped hers.

  Bear told us her story after.

  After we were back in Carter Park.

  After Mama, her burn scars vanished since she’d come back to herself, insisted on starting a new campfire.

  After Bear and Rosie managed to stop kissing.

  Which, in itself, took a long time.

  And Rosie still nestled on Bear’s lap even as she talked—and it was strange to see the change between them. Bear was tall, as most of the Nordsk were, but she was thin and weak, as if she’d never used her human muscles before—which, I supposed, she hadn’t. Sturdy acrobat Rosie was shorter, but she still looked like a bigger girl than Bear.

  Bear, who was a princess.

  “I feel like I should . . . curtsey to you, or some such,” I’d told her shyly as we’d made our way back to the park. “It feels as strange now as it did when you were . . . well, when I thought you were . . .”

  The princess had stopped me with a long, elegant, unearthly soft finger pressed to my lips.

  “What is your name?” Tam asked her now.

  The question stunned the rest of us silent, it was so obvious. How had none of us thought to ask?

  The princess shook her head, and her long silvery hair spilled over her face. She tucked it back with a slender hand, fumbling over the shape of her own skull.

  Rosie stroked her hair, smiling, and started to braid it.

  “My mother never gave me one,” she said. “I was born a bear. I was changed in the womb, as a curse on her. She didn’t want to name me when she saw my body.”

  “The matinee,” Tam murmured.

  I was sitting in front of Tam, leaning back against fer with fer arms around me and fer legs on either side of my hips, and I glanced back at fer, surprised. “What?”

  “The play in the Brethren theater. The woman running away, the priest, the bear . . .”

  I remembered the animatronic beast I’d barely glimpsed as Tam led me out. I was sure the version of the story told in a Brethren-sponsored play would be very different from Bear’s version, but I thought I could imagine it well enough.

  “My mother was a Nordsk queen, an unmarried ruler of a very small and wild kingdom. We had our own beliefs there, once, before the Brethren came. They converted my grandparents the same way they tried to do in Faerie”—she nodded at Tam—“and they tried to convert my mother. She resisted at first. Then she became pregnant out of wedlock, and the Brethren decided to make an example of her. One of their priests cursed me in her womb and told her that her unmaidenly behavior meant that I would be no maid myself, but a beast.

  “I was her burden, you see, from the minute I was born. She couldn’t stand the sight of me and sent me to live in the woods, with a real bear, as soon as she could.”

  Bear fell silent, overcome, recounting the loss of her mother.

  Rosie took up the story.

  “Bear had always known she was a princess and a girl. And she’d felt drawn to the circus, all those years ago, after watching the bright glow of us from the wilderness, wanting to be part of it but still not knowing why she came until she met us, Mama, Ivory. Until she . . . met me. I saw her in my dreams sometimes or when I . . . went to that place in my head where I go. The princess. We didn’t speak much, in our dreams, but I came to know her.”

  I swallowed painfully.

  “Bear found us, and she loved us, and she loves us. And we love her.” Rosie laid small delicate kisses along the braid she was making. “And I love her.”

  They smiled at each other, so full of sweetness that my heart both ached and soared.

  “Do you want us to call you Bear still?” I asked.

  The princess frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled. “No. I think . . . I think I’d like to name myself. There was a woman, one of my mother’s ladies in waiting, who used to come to the woods and sing me lullabies in secret . . .” Her eyes closed. Twin tears ran down her cheeks.

  Rosie let her hair go and embraced her again, and the princess buried her face against Rosie’s shoulder. When she raised her head, her pale eyelashes were thick with more tears.

  “Yuliya,” she said. “I always thought it was a pretty name. It’s very Nordsk, I know, but I’m . . . I’m from there, after all.”

  And you’re a princess there. I suddenly felt as if I’d stepped from the end of one story, the story of how the Circus Rose saved itself, and into the story of a lost princess named Yuliya.

  I wondered if she would want to claim her kingdom now.

  But there was time for that story to come. Today she had claimed her body and her name.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Rosie. My sister placed her hands on Yuliya’s cheeks, and the two girls looked into each other’s eyes. There was such clarity and warmth in both of their gazes that, for a moment, it stole my breath. They shared another long kiss.

  And in the firelight, all of us around them—the dancing boys, the clowns, the sword swallowers, the strongwoman, the contortionist, the Fey, the bearded lady, the engineers, and the stagehand—we all smiled.

  A girl who loved a girl who used to be a bear—that wouldn’t get near to top billing at the circus. It hardly even counted as strange.

  I looked around the circle we made, our bodies a rim between nighttime darkness and firelight. Our circus family was smaller by one, but we had grown by six, since Miss Lampton and the girls were still here.

  And perhaps it would soon grow by two more. I watched Mama, across the fire with our fathers, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  It still hurt, not to know what to expect. Not to be able to be sure of them.

  But then, I was learning to be all right with uncertainty.

  I was starting to think I might go back to Lampton’s next term. I still wore Tam’s glowing rose on my wrist, and it had made me feel sure about something in a way I never had been before: that I didn’t have to prove love with my presence. That I wouldn’t be leaving anyone lonely by leaving, for a while. That Mama, and even Rosie, would be all right without me. That I didn’t have to stage-manage our lives anymore.

  Tam would leave too. Soon. Fer contract was always going to end when the season was over.

  I knew that I wouldn’t ask fer to make plans or promises beyond that. We didn’t have to prove anything to each other. That uncertainty, at least, was sweet; it felt like freedom, and it let me be a little more generous with Mama too.

  Her ring was still waiting in the drawer where I’d left it in the caravan. And if she still wanted it, if she still wanted one or both of our fathers—and from the way the three of them leaned against each other, it seemed they all wanted one another—I was glad of it. Glad for all of them.

  Besides, there was a radiant glow coming from my beautiful sister and her princess, suffusing the whole circus grounds with a sweet blossoming that filled everyone’s hearts up at once, just looking at them—at a love we all should have seen coming.

  One happily-ever-after was more than enough that night.

  I pulled on the leather cords I was knotting into the bracelet Tam had asked for. As I worked, fe leaned over and brushed fer lips against my neck. My eyes fluttered closed and then open again.

  Tam. Mama. Rosie. Yuliya. Vera and Toro, Ciaran, Bonnie, Miss Lampton, Dimity and the girls, the rest of the troupe, and our fathers too. I could see the animal forms flickeri
ng still in those who had changed—what they had been, the knowledge that they, that we, were never only what we seemed. And I was glad of it.

  I leaned back into Tam, letting myself feel the strength and the softness in fer arms as fe held me. I closed my eyes and whispered:

  “We are what’s real.”

  Acknowledgments

  I wrote The Circus Rose during a particularly precarious high-wire act in my life, as I transitioned into single parenthood. I want to thank a few people without whom I wouldn’t have had the time, resources, or fortitude to finish this manuscript: Anna Boarini, Susan Burke and the Cox family, Trish Connolly, Josephine Fahy, Leah Gilbert, Danielle Hall, Joan and John Harte, Anne Jarrett, Eleanor Lane, Zoë Langsdale, Aoife Light, Kathrin Sauter, Anjelika Vayas, Natalia Yepez-Frias, Alex Zaleski, the survivors’ group at Waterside House in Galway, and the members of Friday Tea in the Cloud. I am lucky to know you.

  ONE

  Chasing the Hart

  The huntswoman sounded her horn, and hounds rushed like water around our horses’ feet.

  I leaned forward over my mare’s neck and let out a steady breath as we jumped the stream. She landed lightly, our speed barely breaking, and we plunged ahead with the rest of the party.

  I heard a falcon’s cry and looked back just in time to see the great raptor spread her wings and push off from Bird’s leather-gloved hand. Seraph flashed into the green ocean above us and my friend grinned, tucking the falcon’s hood into his sleeve.

  I felt the huge muscles under me tighten and I looked ahead to see the fallen tree my horse was about to jump. This time I wasn’t ready, and I had my breath knocked from me on her landing as punishment. One of her ears flicked back in reassurance or annoyance, and I felt a reminding tug on the reins I always kept as loose as I could. Pay attention, she was saying. You’re not sitting in any rocking chair, here.