At the start of our journey, it had seemed odd to see so many of the performers not just out of costume, but bundled up completely against the chill. Most of them liked to show off, whether an actual show was on or not.
Now we wore our heaviest coats. The airship Mama had rented wasn’t exactly first class, and heating was one of many luxuries it lacked.
The troupe had made do, though, as we always did. We’d unpacked tent canvas and curtains to use as extra blankets and to insulate against drafts.
For this game, an old red velvet curtain was spread out under us like a picnic blanket.
“Come on then, Mama, deal us in,” Vera continued. “Let’s find out what the cards have in store for us in Port’s End.”
Mama cut and shuffled a final time and, smiling fondly, began to deal us into the game. Everyone else watched each person in the circle as they received their cards, hoping to detect a tell, but I couldn’t look away from Tam.
Fe had signed Mama’s contract just before we left Faerie, and while fe wasn’t aloof or really even all that shy, something about fer seemed more refined than the boisterous circus troupe with whom Rosie and I had grown up. Something made fer different, something besides fer Fey heritage—and being neither male nor female, like all Fey—but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
I caught Rosie smirking at my side, watching me watch Tam. My twin raised her eyebrows and grinned. She had her own opinions about why I thought Tam was special. I could never keep my crushes from Rosie even if I tried; maybe I’d just had so many of them that she knew all my tells. My sister, on the other hand, was never one to fasten her dreams to particular people the way I did. She watched the other acrobat girls with heat in her eyes sometimes, but she never seemed to want to do anything to stoke that fire. She got enough romantic thrill from performing, maybe. She spent her off-hours with Mama and me, or with Bear, when Bear came into the caravan with us like the world’s biggest pet dog, as he sometimes did in the evenings or even occasionally to sleep. Rosie always said she never needed to see anything outside of the circus ring or the caravan walls.
Maybe she went so high up in her act that she never felt the need for a wider world, never felt the need to find it in a person.
Tam glanced at me and smiled a little, and I realized I’d been staring again. I snapped my gaze down to the first card Mama dealt me: the Seven of Cups.
Temptation.
Right. Fair enough.
I put Tam out of my head.
“Let me guess,” whispered Rosie, nudging my shoulder with the fluid grace that infused her every movement. “The Magician? Or, no, the Lovers!”
“Hush,” I grumbled at her, grateful to have skin dark enough to hide my blushes—and not for the first time, growing up in a household as loud and bawdy as this one. Rosie’s pale cheeks, on the other hand, blossom like her namesake flower—only I’ve never seen her embarrassed. Her face washes pink with excitement and pride when she’s performing, so that she hardly needs stage makeup.
Rosie smiled warmly at me. She didn’t have to tell me she was only teasing, just like I only had to glare at her to make the teasing stop.
Mama was circling back around to deal our second cards. I tipped my head to rest on my acrobat sister’s strong shoulder, and I kept my eyes strictly on my cards until the dealing was done.
“The pot starts at two crowns,” Mama said.
We each tossed our coins onto the curtain.
Vera quickly cleaned up on the first round with her set of all four knights, but she got cocky when Mama dealt again, and Tam took the whole pot with fer royal flush.
As Mama dealt us in a third time—more cups for me, just my luck—I got the unsettling lifting feeling in my stomach that meant the airship had begun to descend.
Around the circle, we held our cards to our chests and shared excited glances. Outside the circle, I heard glad murmurs and even whoops. In a few hours—just past dawn—we’d touch down in Port’s End, Esting’s bustling coastal city and the place where Rosie and I had been born seventeen years before. The place where our two fathers still lived; the place where Mama had founded the Rose.
The circus was coming home.
Rosie
Somewhere in the hold
my love sleeps
under shadow,
through moons.
The wind shifts,
the world lifts,
an old home
reaches up to take us.
Our ship moans
through the turn,
light spilling
through portholes.
Below us whales breach,
heavy, leaping free.
The ship bellies down
to earth. This is
how it is, to feel
something so big
turn its heart
to the sky.
Ivory
We were low enough that I could smell the ocean.
I breathed sea air as we descended from the sky, the airship sweeping down just fast enough that I could still feel the lift in my belly as I watched the coast of Esting rise to meet us.
I let go of the wooden railing and raised my hands above my head, imagining myself leaping down, perfect and beautiful, full of easy grace, like Rosie at the end of one of her routines. An angel touching earth, kicking up the sawdust of the circus ring.
To thunderous applause.
Someone’s hand grazed my back.
The touch was warm and gentle, but the surprise still made me jump.
“Happy to be home?”
I twisted around and saw Tam grinning down at me, eyes glinting happily in fer blue-freckled face. Fe hadn’t performed with the Circus Rose yet so fe was technically still new, but Mama had hired fer in Faerie over two months ago, and during the long voyage back to Esting, everyone had gotten to know one another—frankly, much better than I’d have liked sometimes.
Especially waiting in line for the baths.
But the circus is like that anyway. You get intimate fast, even though we are a band of itinerants and people join up and break away in almost every city we visit. Cuddles backstage; hugs for good luck; napping in piles in whatever ship or train Mama hired to get us to the next city or the next venue, or around campfires, with the empty circus tents and caravans circling us when nights are warm enough . . .
It’s normal for us to touch each other like this. Easy, simple, intimate.
Or it should be.
So I didn’t want Tam to know that fer touch made me shiver. “Home? Hardly. I’ve been a traveler since I was born, you know.” I smiled big, wide, and teasing—which would have given the game away if Rosie were there. She always says I’m too serious for teasing to make sense in my voice.
“I know.” Tam shook fer head. “I can hardly imagine. But it was in Esting you were born, and it’s where your mother is from. That surely means something.”
First in the litany of things I’d come to like about Tam: fe was just as serious as me. Even fer magic tricks were performed with all the gravity and precision of a scientist in a laboratory. I loved to watch those thoughtful, deliberate performances, even though I imagined some must find them slow—or they would, if Tam weren’t so beautiful. When Mama introduced fer to the troupe, before we even knew what fer act was, I overheard Vera whisper that fe was so beautiful, she’d listen to fer read scripture.