The Circus Rose Read online

  A joy in the body,

  an embrace even watching them.

  I’m impatient to dance again,

  just seeing them, and even

  I can call them gorgeous.

  The priest can’t look away.

  The few faithful, or sinful,

  who fill the front pews

  stare too.

  Somewhere under

  this bright surface,

  our family lies trapped.

  Bear is going

  to lead them out.

  Ivory

  When Bear caught the scent and led us, sure as a hunting hound, to the vestibule door, I wasn’t thinking of everyone that we were going to save—I had only one person in mind. She would tell me to save the others first, but I was ringmistress now, in her absence.

  And I was going to save my mama. Save Tam. Save them all.

  Rosie lifted one, two fingers and slid them through the air as if she were stroking the music the dancing boys played, as if it were a cat winding invisibly around her limbs, supple and soft.

  I smiled. I knew music was as dear to her as Bear.

  I waited for a crescendo in the act, just as I would during a show, to hide the sounds of my footsteps. I gestured for us to move forward, and the three of us, even the huge bulk of Bear, slipped unnoticed through the door.

  When it closed behind us, I heard Rosie gasp at the sudden and enveloping change in our environment. It was incredibly dark, and the stone stairs we began to descend were uneven.

  “Close your eyes so they’ll adjust to the dark faster,” I told her in a whisper. “Hold on to Bear and me.”

  She took a deep breath, and I felt her strong fingers brush my back—whether in gratitude for the reminder or to find a guide in the darkness, I wasn’t sure.

  I never need to close my eyes. The world in darkness is just a vast backstage, and I know exactly how to manage it.

  From beyond the closed door, the dancing boys’ music sounded muted and underwater, and it was far easier to ignore than the blare of circus music or the rushing-ocean clamor of applause. I listened as I would for malfunctioning machinery. The next layer of sound I found was water, drip, drip, dripping down from the ceiling to a pool on the unseen floor. Bear had led us this far, but I was the one who saw best in the dark, and it was my turn to lead us now.

  As we wound our way down deeper underneath the church, through this narrow, damp space, I kept thinking of Brother Carey.

  He never once came inside the gate of Carter Park, never bothered to see the show he so confidently denounced. Never once saw for himself what was inside.

  No, he was happy enough to stand just outside and shout us down, or, when people who gave enough money to the church drew near, to speak with a lowered, polite vivaciousness. He would never deign to come inside, of course, he would tell such people. He did not see the need.

  Really, I think, he was afraid.

  Another door slipped open, and we breached Brother Carey’s last defense, Bear, Rosie, and I.

  We were there to get the others back. And I wouldn’t ever wish them away again.

  Even there, in the cathedral’s crypt, the glaring, unfeeling light the Brethren so valued thrust its way into every corner.

  Every corner of every cage.

  There were dozens of animals in padlocked cages—a hundred or more. Mice and rats huddling together for warmth, many types of birds: canaries and ducks; owls and falcons and magpies; both black and gray crows. Dark, water-filled tanks, in which scores of fish sleepily lurked. Cats. Dogs. A fox, a wolf, a huge red bull, and a gray mare each in their own barred stables; a bulbous brown toad that looked at me with eyes sadder than any I’d ever seen.

  And there, oh, there in a high, narrow glass terrarium—for a snake could fit through the bars of any of the cages—there was Tam. I knew fer at once.

  Fe shone in a sinuous dark green coil under the gaslight, sleeping away the hours, lazily still in a way that the Tam I knew had never been, could never be.

  I’d seen the change, of course, seen Brother Carey wrench fer down into this new body, but . . . I’d know Tam anywhere, in any form, whether I’d seen fer change or not. I pressed my hand to the glass, wishing I could send some warmth to the cold-blooded creature who was really the Fey I loved.

  I knew I loved Tam then, in a way I had never known before, never let myself know. Because didn’t I recognize fer, snake body or no? Didn’t I know the heart that radiated through the skin, cool and smooth as it was?

  And as soon as I knew Tam, the other animals rushed and clicked into recognition in my mind too.

  Here was Toro, the man I’d towered over since I was six, turned into a great reddish bull whose hulking shoulders nearly brushed the crypt’s ceiling, who could not lift his heavy head up straight for fear of lodging his horns in the soft, mealy wood beams overhead that, thanks to the Brethren’s harsh lighting, I could see were beginning to swell with rot. Even the lights could not dispel the damp down here.

  Here was Vera, a sweet white fluff of a little lap dog, the most innocent-looking creature in the world—had her snapping blue eyes not remained her own.

  I was sure I recognized all of our circus troupe, and that feeling grew more certain when a half-grown kitten chirruped a high meow at me and I knew at once that she was Dimity, and her littermates the other Lampton girls.

  The roan mare whickering next to Toro—why, that was Miss Lampton.

  Bear stood frozen just beyond the doorway, looking at each of the caged animals in turn, whites showing around the edges of his dark eyes. Rosie stood with Bear, a hand over her mouth.

  A lean, ginger-furred wolf seemed unfamiliar to me—plenty of the animals here were people I didn’t know, just unlucky sinners who had crossed Brother Carey once too often, I was sure—but the lion that shared the wolf’s cage, his mane long and dark, and his eyes locked on me, only me . . . I knew who that was.

  I knew Lord Bram. I knew my father.

  I looked around—at the Lampton girls, at my circus family, at all these poor souls whom the Brethren had deprived of their bodies.

  We would change them back. There had to be a way. Our two years in Faerie had shown me the promise magic held.

  My heart filled with relief, but the more confident I became in seeing the human souls under those animal skins, the sicker I felt.

  Because I didn’t see Mama anywhere.

  Rosie

  “Mama’s not here,” Ivory whispers, and I shake

  my head in silent answer.

  “We’d know it if she were,” I say. “We’d know at once.”

  Neither of us say:

  What is the point

  of saving anyone else, if Mama is lost?

  Mama, who is the center of our world,

  the center of the ring,

  the first beat of our waltz.

  She never understood

  that Ivory and I could not be a double act,

  only a treble: twins and mother.

  She was so grateful when Bear came,

  thinking she was never enough,

  always grateful that we had each other.

  Not knowing where the center lay.

  Ivory

  I reached behind me to squeeze Rosie’s hand, but my fingers brushed Bear’s fur instead. His rumbling double-bass breath sent a vibration up my arm, just as comforting as it had always been when we’d snuggled on the hillock of his body in front of a campfire, Rosie and me.

  As I turned to look back at Bear, smiling a little even through my fears about Mama, grateful for his constancy, his loyalty, his love—

  I looked at Bear, and I saw the princess.

  I saw what Rosie had seen all along.

  And my heart broke—broke with shame.

  10

  Ivory

  My hands shook. I tore my attention away from Bear to focus on the task before me. We had to free the others before the Brethren discovered us.

  I knew this
, knew how to pick any lock you could present to me—locksmithing was one of the first lessons at Lampton’s—but you need a steady hand, a calm heart. And those were two things, at that moment, I absolutely lacked.

  I looked at Tam, trapped, and I missed fer true body so much it made my heartbeat stutter—a staccato pulse I could feel all the way out to my shaking fingertips. I could still feel fer hands on me, in me, warm ghosts haunting my body and making me shiver. And I despised Brother Carey for all he’d taken away—from Tam, from Mama, from the rest of the troupe, and from everyone he’d turned into an animal that he could keep silent and locked away and tidily labeled in this . . . this lair. For all he had taken from me.

  Rosie pressed her hand quietly against the wing bone of my shoulder.

  I took a shuddering breath. “Am I that badly off,” I whispered, “that you’re the one who has to steady me?”

  Her hand rubbed a small circle on my back. “You keep pretending we haven’t always been a balancing act,” she murmured.

  I smiled, and I found myself steadied after all.

  “All right,” I said. “Time for the final trick.”

  And before my hands had time to start shaking again, before I had any thoughts that might make them start to shake, I slipped my hairpin into the lock. I turned myself into a creature of listening, nothing more, until I heard the first click, and the next, and the last.

  I pushed gently upward, and the lock opened in my hand.

  Tam was free. Fer head rose slowly from the sleeping coil of fer body, and as fer eyes opened, fer black tongue feathered out, tasting the air. I saw the recognition in the snake’s eyes, in Tam’s eyes, that I had feared would not be there—I hadn’t known I’d feared that, hadn’t even let myself think about it before.

  Tam slithered out of the terrarium, coiled up my arm, and draped like a boa across my shoulders. Fer length was cool, but not cold, and heavy with muscle. The smooth stroke of Tam’s scales across the back of my neck was nearly as soothing as Rosie’s hand.

  I could feel my own skin warming the snake’s, even as fer touch cooled my anguish. An exchange. A balancing act, this too.

  With Tam draped around me, fer narrow head nuzzling my ear, and Rosie behind me and the great bulk of Bear behind her, my body forgot any notion of shaking. I moved to the next cage and unlocked it quickly, letting Vera out.

  The white dog trotted at my side like a trained show animal, and I heard Rosie giggle behind me.

  “I never thought I’d see Vera so obedient,” she said just loud enough for all of us to hear.

  Bear made the low rumble that is Bear’s version of laughing, and Tam’s black snake tongue flickered in and out a few times by my cheek. I expected a growl or a snap from Vera, but she stood up on her hind legs and made a neat little leap, then offered me her paw. A perfect circus dog—but I could see the snap of humor in her eyes too.

  Rosie and Vera teasing. Tam and Bear laughing. We were coming together again. We would bring the family home, and we’d figure out how to change them back. Even if we had to go all the way back to Faerie to do it.

  With every cage I unlocked, my confidence and relief grew. We would find Mama. We would fix them. No one would be abandoned. Not by me.

  “Well, Lord in heaven and light on Earth.”

  I stopped, my hands around the melon-sized lock on Toro’s cage. I knew that light, smooth voice too well—we all did.

  I turned around. Brother Carey stood in the doorway in his black robes.

  I’d expected that. I hadn’t expected to see Apple, with the freshly shaved head of a Brethren initiate, standing next to him.

  I stared, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  “He’s taking an ordeal of silence,” Brother Carey said. “He showed his faith and loyalty when he helped us start the fire, and I agreed to let him take his holy orders. He made sure to warn me first, though, of just how stubborn your family is. Never willing to let anyone else have a real run of things, he said.”

  I saw Apple blush.

  I opened my mouth to say a few choice words about Apple’s silence.

  But Brother Carey tugged on a thin white-gold chain at his wrist, and a drab little wren hopped out of a pocket and onto his hand. Tiny jeweled manacles linked the bird’s clawed feet to Brother Carey’s wrist.

  I’d have known her, I was sure, even if I hadn’t recognized any of the others—even Bear, who was a princess; even Tam, whom I loved.

  We had found Mama.

  Rosie

  When the bird sees us, she opens her beak

  and tries to call, to squawk, to crow, to sing,

  to make some sound—but nothing comes.

  She is so silent we can hear the scrabbling

  of her claws against the fine cloth on Carey’s shoulder.

  When the bird sees us. When Mama sees

  us working to save her,

  I watch as something breaks

  in her bird’s eyes. The feathers

  sinking flat against the skin, the nestling neck

  down on the downy breast. She does not look

  away. She sees it all, the longing

  and the need we have to save her. And I think:

  I know this now. The thing I always wondered.

  I see in Mama’s eyes her darkest fear.

  I think: Brother Carey has broken her.

  And with her, he has broken

  all of us.

  Carey raises one hand, the hand that holds the chain

  that binds our mama. With the other,

  he searches in the pockets of his robes.

  His second hand emerges

  clutched around a vial

  of liquid.

  He begins to speak:

  “Bless these, O Lord,

  with Your second baptism—”

  I’ve been holding

  it back as long

  as I can, but I can’t,

  can’t. My mind a blitz.

  My vision shudders,

  and all I can think

  is that I’m leaving her.

  Ivory

  Pain crept inside my body like an inverse ripple. It scraped into me anywhere it had an inlet, the corners of my eyes and mouth, my nostrils, ears, cuticles. Droplets from Brother Carey’s potion hit my skin and made strange firework patterns of small holes, little gaping mouths where the change could get in, the pain of the change like sparks all over my body, like a cold burning—

  What kind of animal will I become? I heard myself wondering, as if part of me were watching from far away . . .

  Tam’s weight on my shoulders grew heavier, until just holding fer up hurt too, and I wondered with a flinch of wild hope if somehow receiving the baptism again would change fer back.

  I tried to turn my head to look and found that I could barely move it—but when I caught a glimpse of my own body, I knew Tam wasn’t changing at all, wasn’t getting heavier or growing.

  I was shrinking.

  I could feel my mind getting smaller too. All the shades of meaning I sifted through all the time, all the overthinking I chastised myself for so often, all of it was vanishing into some small point of light, perfectly and terribly bright . . .

  As my thoughts and limbs shriveled in on themselves, I looked up and saw Bear charge Brother Carey.

  Rosie

  My brain takes me

  away to a quiet dream.

  She’s there. My

  princess. Bear.

  She tells me what she knows.

  In such a soft, dark voice,

  that I find my

  way

  back.

  I wake to changes, to

  animal cries

  as the drops

  of bright water

  hit home.

  Bear shields

  me from the spray,

  her body so many times

  the size of mine.

  Bear has been waiting

  for her moment.

  She
rears on hind legs,

  then leaps across the crypt,

  claws drawn.

  The seat of all gentleness,

  the great paw where I’ve laid my head

  since childhood,

  where I have dreamed

  our princess dreams,

  attacks him first.

  One hard blow, then another,

  claws whose length

  I never saw before

  rake Carey’s face.

  The teeth come next.

  He’s made his own death.

  Made it years ago.

  Did he know

  he courted it at Carter Park?

  If he had ever seen Bear,

  if he had come inside

  to see the show,

  would he have known?

  If he hadn’t tried

  to change us too,

  would Bear ever have felt

  that she could

  kill him?

  Ivory

  I was nothing, for a timeless time, but wings and a quiet song.

  I knew myself to be Ivory still, but the shape of me was so small. I’d become just a bird, tucked into the coils of a snake I loved. Prey nestling into predator, the self that contained my mind too small now to make room for any animal instinct, any animal fear.

  I felt Tam coil tighter around me, but only in protection. My wren’s pulse fluttered against fer scales. I knew fe wouldn’t let me go until we came through this, and I was glad.

  More wet drops hit us, warm this time.

  And while I was so small by then, and clutched in Tam’s sleek length, even my bird senses knew the red drops for blood.