by Cari Z
As it turned out, someone else reached for the child instead. The boy was darting full speed ahead one moment and the next he was falling over a carefully placed stick, perfectly smooth and painted in black-and-red stripes. The boy hit the ground hard, knocking the breath out of him, and before he could get up and run again, a slender hand had wrapped around his wrist and hauled him upright.
“What have we here?” the man attached to the hand asked, coming out from behind the wagon he’d been leaning against and shaking the boy lightly. Colm stopped a few feet away from them, trying to catch his breath. “Ah, you’ve been thieving again…” the man leaned in and sniffed, “Kalo, isn’t it? How do you think your mama would feel about you thieving in this crowd and being poor enough at it to prompt a chase?” He nodded his head back at Colm.
“She wouldna like it,” Kalo the budding thief mumbled.
“No, she bloody well wouldna,” the strange man agreed. “Whatever you took, toss it to him.”
Kalo unclenched his fist and threw Colm’s purse back at him. Colm caught it and checked—every copper piece was still there. The man listened to him jingle the purse and shook his head despairingly.
“You’d risk your freedom for so little reward? Kalo, you truly are hopeless at this. Go back to firewalking with the rest of your family and leave the thieving to those who can actually get away with it.” He let go of the boy’s arm, and Kalo ran off as if Colm were still chasing him. “Ah, to be young and foolish again,” the man said sarcastically, then turned to Colm. “And who do we have here?”
“Colm Weathercliff,” Colm said automatically even though his mind was a thousand leagues away, trying to take in the picture that this man made. He looked like he had a few years on Colm: he was a bit shorter, a bit thinner, with hair the color of cast iron that hung down past his shoulders. He wore a white linen shirt with a short vest in riotous colors over the top, and black leather breeches that clung to his frame as if they had been painted on. His fingernails were painted crimson, matching the strip of cloth that was tied tight around his eyes. His toenails were crimson too, and as out of place as his bare feet on this cold, muddy ground. He held the red-and-black-striped cane loosely in one hand, and it took all of this put together for Colm to finally realize that the beautiful man must be blind.
“Weathercliff,” the man said, rolling the name around in his mouth like he was tasting it. “A famous name in these parts.”
“Not one of the Caresfall Weathercliffs,” Colm said, a bit tiredly.
“No? Are you sure? Because you haven’t lived here long, have you? I daresay there are plenty of things you don’t know yet about yourself or the name you hold.”
“How do you know that?” Colm asked.
“You don’t have the sound of a native of Caithmor, Colm Weathercliff. More like the high mountains, but not so far that you abuse your ‘r’s like a northerner…probably not far from Isealea, I’d expect.”
“That’s amazing,” Colm said, impressed despite himself.
“I’ve been living on the road my whole life. I’ve learned a thing or two in that time.” The man tilted his head in consideration. “You should let me read your future.”
“Is that what you are? A fortune teller?”
“Not at all,” the man replied. “If you want card tricks and crystal balls, Amielda does a lovely business closer to the Pinnacle. No, I’m not as much fun as her, Colm Weathercliff. I read the futures that are brought to my doorstep, as you have been. It’s Fate. There’s nothing to be done for it. Call me a seer, if you must call me anything. So, what do you say?” He smiled winsomely. His teeth were a little crooked but surprisingly white. “Will you sit with me awhile, or do I have to run in order to get you to tempt Fate?”
“I’d like to know your name first,” Colm said, a bit surprised that he was actually considering it. He knew Nichol would be looking for him, and he’d like to see some more of the show, but…this felt like something special. Perhaps there was an element of destiny to it, as the man claimed.
“My name? How very polite of you.” The man bowed with a flourish, sweeping his cane out to the side, which somehow managed to avoid the laundry lines and wagon walls. “Kiaran Brighteyes, most ironically at your service. Now.” He straightened up and gestured at the wagon he’d been leaning against. “Do you mind if we take this somewhere more comfortable? I didn’t have time to put my boots on before that little scamp ran by, and I’m afraid I’m rather colder than is comfortable.”
“Of course,” Colm said, and found himself following Kiaran around the edge of the wagon, up a small set of removable steps and into a tiny little foyer with a glowing brazier in the center, his view of the rest of the wagon blocked off by thick, tatty curtains that smelled like smoke and incense.
“They keep the cold from sinking too deep into the rest of my little home,” Kiaran said, sitting down and crossing his legs elegantly. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” Colm sat with nowhere near the same grace, rubbing his hands over the brazier to warm them up a bit.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Kiaran asked as he pushed his cane away beneath one of the curtains. “It heats the place rather well. Now then, Colm. I know you don’t have much time, so why don’t you give me your hand, and I’ll find out what Fate wants me to see so badly?”
“You’re very certain about all this, aren’t you?” Colm asked, pushing his sleeve up even as he felt a frisson of—excitement? fear?—curl up his spine.
Kiaran smiled crookedly. “If you’d grown up the way I had, you wouldn’t question it either. Now. Hand.” Colm extended his hand, and Kiaran took it confidently. His fingers were surprisingly soft and warm.
“Anneslea. I was rather close, wasn’t I,” he murmured. “You’ve scarcely kicked the mountain snow from your boots yet, have you?” Smoke floated up out of the brazier, sweet and heady. Colm closed his eyes to keep them from stinging.
“What an interesting talent you have, Colm Weathercliff. And how desperate they are to keep you from using it.” Kiaran laughed briefly. “I know that feeling all too well. And here, oh, a sweet new lover… What a passion that is, how delightful it must be. A bit illicit, and not something I would have considered of you immediately.”
Colm pulled back on his hand reflexively, his eyes flying open, but Kiaran was already making tutting, soothing sounds. “No, no, I don’t judge. Some loves are simply meant to be, and this might be one of them. There’s nothing you or I or the Four or even the Two can do to fight the pull, so acceptance is always the best path in the end. He’s a bonny lad.” He tilted his head again, his fingertips smoothing over and over the palm of Colm’s hand.
“Why would that…no, it can’t be.” He shook his head and pressed harder, his absent smile turning into a focused frown. “How…no. No. Not good enough, I have to see it to be sure.” Kiaran reached up to his face and pulled down the blindfold. Colm started with surprise when he saw the pure white irises of Kiaran’s eyes, then felt his surprise give way to complete shock when the white drained out of them, leaving behind celadon circles pricked with brown, staring at Colm with matching astonishment.
“You’re not blind,” Colm said, his voice rising at the end as if to question the validity of what he’d just seen.
“It only leaves me at times like this,” Kiaran replied, squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them again, the astonishment still on his face. “When I’m seeing a great truth. Amazing…I never thought I would get the chance to both ruin and save the same person, especially not… Colm Weathercliff, do you have any idea what you will become?”
“You say that like I won’t be myself.” Even as Colm spoke, he saw the white cloud over Kiaran’s eyes again, and after a moment, Kiaran sighed and dropped his chin. “What will I be? What are you trying to say?”
“If I told you, it wouldn’t happen,” Kiaran replied, not as casually as before. His hand
s shook slightly as he retied the crimson blindfold across his face. “Not in the way Fate has planned, and let me be the first to assure you that only bad things happen when we go changing the course of Fate. The first option is almost always the best.”
“You can’t just leave me wondering,” Colm protested. Had Kiaran seen something about his sister? Was Colm going to do something that would land him in the Ardeaglais again?
“Ah, but I’m a performer! It’s our business to leave people wondering.” Kiaran smiled broadly and indicated the stairs. “Your friend is looking for you. I suggest you go and put his mind at ease. You’ll see him on the far side of the Pinnacle.”
“Please,” Colm said. He reached out and touched the back of Kiaran’s hand, which surprised the other man into freezing. “Please tell me what you saw. I can’t go without knowing more.”
“I’m afraid,” Kiaran said in an equally soft voice, “that you’ll have to. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Colm Weathercliff. Be assured that someday I won’t.” Kiaran pulled back and indicated the stairs again. “Go on, then.”
Colm could have pressed it further, but he wasn’t the sort of man who would resort to threats for almost any reason, and he sensed that even if he tried, he wouldn’t get anything more from the seer. He left the warmth of the wagon, not at all surprised when the entrance shut behind him. Colm shook his head to clear it of the smoke that lingered in his nose and eyes, then looked around for the spire of the Pinnacle. When he saw it, he headed in that direction, one hand tight around his money pouch.
Nichol was exactly where Kiaran had said he would be, around the back of the enormous tent with his neck craned back, searching for Colm. When he saw him, Nichol’s face broke out in a huge relieved smile, and he sprinted the rest of the distance between then.
“What happened to you?” he demanded, settling his hands on Colm’s shoulders. The touch steadied him, and just looking at Nichol made Colm feel better. “One moment, I’ve the best view in the crowd; the next, my perch is flying away without me.”
“A boy stole my money pouch,” Colm explained. “I went after him.”
“I bet he was long gone.”
Feeling a little smug, Colm lifted the pouch up and jingled it. “Not quite.” He enjoyed the look of surprised pleasure on Nichol’s face for a moment before continuing, “Although it wasn’t really my doing. Someone else actually caught the boy, and he told me some very interesting things.”
“What sort of things?”
They walked around while Colm relayed what had happened with Kiaran: the things he’d said, how his eyes had changed, even the fact that he’d known where Nichol was going to be. Nichol listened to all Colm’s impressions and lingering concern, and then immediately set about trying to make it better.
“You said there was smoke,” Nichol noted. “It’s possible he’d laced it with something to make you suggestible, something to change the way you perceived things. Plenty of fortune tellers use tricks like that to make themselves seem more omniscient. He might have been talking about how he likes to tickle himself with feathers, and it could still come off as mystical to you.”
“I don’t think it was like that,” Colm replied, but not with complete certainty.
“Maybe he had a knack, like you do. Maybe he really could tell a few things about you, but mostly it was just…just insinuating something big and then telling you to leave, right? And he didn’t charge you?”
“No.”
“It was a teaser, then. Something to capture your attention, something for you to dwell on until you’re driven crazy with having to know more, and that’s when he charges you in silver instead of time.” Nichol shrugged. “As for how he knew where I was…well, have you seen this place? Everyone is close to the Pinnacle. It didn’t matter what he said, you’d have found me nearby.” He glanced at Colm. “Does that help at all?”
“It does,” Colm told him, not entirely convinced, but how could he make Nichol believe without taking him there himself? And Colm didn’t want to do that.
“Look, here!” Nichol pulled him to a large, dark-blue tent with a sign above it that had no words, just a painting of a skeleton in a top hat, bony arms spread to welcome them inside. “It’s the House of Horrors! There are all sorts of strange things inside here. You’ve got to see them with me.” Nichol surged ahead, and Colm followed in his wake.
Inside the tent, the light was hazy, just clear enough so that they could make out the shapes of things but not enough to see a great amount of detail. A man with skinny legs and a round, enormous belly sat on a stool just to the left of the entrance, the fingers of one hand wrapped around a flask, the others stroking his gut soothingly. He looked up at them and said, “Four coppers to see it all.” Colm opened his purse and pulled out the money, which he took quickly. “Keep those hands to yourself, gents,” he added before turning his attention to the next person seeking entrance.
“Come on,” Nichol said, leading the way. “They have a glass tank here with a grundylow in it. It’s brilliant.”
The House of Horrors was packed with people, and making their way through it took time. Tables were set up here and there, with cages and jars lining them, all chained down and all containing strange and exotic creatures that Colm could barely make out in the faint light. Each one also had a label, which Nichol read off helpfully.
“A marsh-faerie corpse,” he said as they examined the withered little husk in the cage. “Fire-bellied toads,” the next cage read, and after that, “A unicorn skull.”
“Why must everything be dead?” Colm asked, feeling a bit sick to his stomach.
“It’s probably hard to keep them alive, even if they could catch them that way,” Nichol said absently as he looked at the next few jars. “I imagine they eat all sorts of different things, and the Roving Spectacular travels all over the continent, so they’d pass out of each creature’s territory in—oh, here, here’s the mermaid head Blake talked about! You remember?”
Colm did remember that, Blake so insistent and Jaime so dismissive. It had been a moment that had cemented Blake in his mind as a real person and not just another follower of Jaime Windlove. Colm leaned in and peered at the jar.
That there was a head inside of it was certain. The neck had been poorly severed, leaving dangling tendrils of flesh and sinew to pool in the bottom of the jar. The mouth was propped open, leaving its teeth on display. The canines were sharp, as Lew had recounted, but the rest of the teeth were normal enough. Gills flared open on the sides of the neck, and the face…well, the face itself was a wreck, partially decomposed and hard to make out. The eyes themselves were completely gone, but a few decorative spines protruded from the sides of the face, and there had once been something like hair on that head, although most of it had been chopped away, probably to keep it from obscuring the features.
The gaping, empty eye sockets still seemed to glare, accusing every person who looked at the head of blasphemy, keeping the creature within from the proper burial that its own people might have given to it. Colm stood up quickly, not wanting to see any more. “Is the grundylow close?” he asked Nichol, because if it wasn’t, they were getting out of this place, this traveling desecrator of the dead.
“It should be just back here,” Nichol promised. They made their way along the path, denoted with hanging netting that obscured the view beyond the queue, until they turned the final corner and came into the part of the tent that housed the grundylow in its tank.
The tank was large, taller than Colm and equally as wide. It was filled with murky water, and within the depths of the water was a creature… It was hard to make out, but it seemed to have the lower body of an octopus and the torso of a child, with extra-long arms and an inhuman, fishy face. It swept from side to side in the tank, gnashing its teeth at the admiring crowd and occasionally splashing them with foul water.
“It’s just like I remember,�
� Nichol said excitedly. “Come on, let’s get closer.”
They hadn’t taken more than two steps before the grundylow looked their way and shrieked. It swept all its tentacles at the top of the tank, sending a massive spray of water over the edge, then curled up at the back of the tank in a ball, covering its body as best it could with a few water weeds.
The tent emptied in moments, the people driven out by the filthy water seeping across the ground. Colm was inexpressibly grateful to be outside again, even though it had begun to rain. He lifted his face to the sky and inhaled deeply.
“Well,” Nichol said, stamping his feet to clear a bit of the mud from them. “That wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.”
“Nor me,” Colm said on his exhale. It was starting to get dark. “Do you mind if we go?”
“Do you feel sufficiently distracted yet?” Nichol asked.
“Distracted from what?” Colm replied, enjoying the way his answer made Nichol laugh. “Fairly distracted, yes,” he added.
“Fairly! I take him to the greatest spectacular in the world, and he finds it ‘fairly distracting’!” Nichol threw up his hands in an elaborate why, gods, why? gesture. “You can be a hard man to please, do you know that?”
Colm slid a little closer, letting his hands creep beneath the edge of Nichol’s cloak to rest against his waist. “I think I’m a rather easy man to please, actually.”
“Really?” Nichol shifted closer as well. “Because I was thinking we might try a new way, tonight—of pleasing you, that is. Of pleasing us both.”
Colm knew what he was referring to, and just the thought of it made his cock begin to ache with anticipation. “Then I think we should get back to the Cove as soon as possible.” They set out at a rapid pace, leaving the chaos of the Spectacular behind. “Besides, Megg will want us to help with dinner,” he added, and Nichol groaned.