oh—
oh.
I feel
my heart
lower. The ropes
lower. I know
the hands
that wait for me below,
the sister’s touch,
the grounded hand,
a bird’s own
nest.
Oh, Ivory.
You saw me.
Cool hands,
sweet blank.
She saw me.
She saved me.
I open
my eyes to darkness,
fur all along my side,
two shapes in the shadows,
worried, keeping me safe.
Two who love me.
Our fathers outside,
the crowd waiting,
but we are
here.
Alone.
Together.
There’s space
to breathe
between
my thoughts again.
Ivory
Thank goodness I looked up. Thank goodness I caught her.
Rosie, hanging frozen in the air.
It hadn’t happened that badly in years. Whatever it is that flinches in her mind, the overwhelm that freezes her up, we know the warning signs by now—and we know the things to help her avoid.
But seeing our fathers there on the pier, holding up that sparkling ring; it nearly stopped my heart too.
“Rosie!” I called, rushing to the ropes and ready to pull her down to safety—only these were the airship’s ropes, not the trapeze’s I had helped design. I didn’t know how to manipulate them to get her down.
But Tam saw, and fe was there with me too. One hand still herded fer lights around the circus troupe, and with the other, fe sent a soft current of silvery light up to Rosie, where it cradled her like a gust of wind, like a giant, luminous hand, and set her gently down in my strong arms.
I took her to Bear’s berth, where Bear was only just stirring from the hibernation in which he had waited out the trip from Faerie.
Without a word, only a look between us, Tam nodded and left me to my sister and our bear.
I laid Rosie down on Bear’s thick fur.
She shivered and began to stir.
5
Ivory
Supper that night, without Mama, was a raucous affair.
Not that Mama kept us quiet or even polite—there wasn’t much in the way of table manners or refinement of any kind at campfire dinners, which was just how the troupe liked it—but something about Mama’s very presence made the rest of us organize ourselves around her, like planets around a sun. Bees around their queen.
Without her, we were just a hive.
“Lord, what’s going to happen now? If Mama Angela takes up with the girls’ fathers after all this time, she’ll want to set up house with them.”
“Sure, wouldn’t anyone? Those two live in Lord Bram’s mansion and I’ve heard tell even the servants eat off gold plates there.”
“The circus is done for. We’re nothing without our Mama, and those two will lure her away from us for sure. What right do they have after letting her go for so long?”
In the din, I wasn’t sure who said those words, but they might as well have come from inside my own selfish, grasping heart. What would it mean for our fathers to come back into Mama’s life? I couldn’t even bear to think what it would mean for us, for Rosie and me.
I had never had a father, not really. I had Mama. I had Apple, quiet and thoughtful and capable, and Bear, steady and warm and there every single night if I had a bad dream. How dare two more fathers think they had a right to Mama, to our family?
“I’d go along with just one man that handsome, but two . . .”
There was a ripple of appreciative, slightly shocked laughter.
“You wouldn’t think people would be so scandalized anymore, what with the king himself and those two royal friends of his sleeping in the same bed every night—”
“And with more Fey families immigrating every day—”
“Sure, my da’s a joiner, and his letters are full of shock at the orders he’s had lately, the sheer size of the beds he’s been asked to build for fives, sevens, dozens of Fey who want to sleep together. Courtiers, too, who want to mimic the king.”
Vera’s laugh rang out across the fire. “Mama Angela will be writing to your da, then—she’ll need a good strong bed with two braw lads like that to—”
“Vera!” I cringed. “I don’t want to hear it!”
She just cackled. Vera had always been that way, bawdy and full of teasing, and usually I liked that about her. She’d been the Circus Rose’s first headliner, the Nordsk Strongwoman, and Mama’s best friend since before Rosie and I were born. I knew if Mama had heard what Vera was saying, she wouldn’t mind; of all the things to love about Vera, the best was how much she made our mama laugh.
But that didn’t mean that I had to laugh or to like hearing her jokes. Not then.
Rosie squeezed my shoulder. “Just Vera being Vera, Ives,” she said.
I took a deep breath. “Well. What about Mama being Mama? What do you think is going to happen, Rosie?”
She shook her head. “Mama being Mama . . .”
“She always said she couldn’t choose, and there they are, together. I would never in a million years have thought—”
“Those two will lure Angela away from the circus, clear as the Lord’s light,” I heard Apple mutter somewhere to my left.
They’re going to steal her from us, I thought. And even though Rosie and I have never read each other’s minds in the way people always expect twins to do—our minds work far too differently, hers following some kind of pattern I could never decipher if I tried—I suddenly had the feeling that she was thinking the same thing.
That the whole troupe was thinking it too.
Tam walked up, clutching a bowl of the communal stew. Fe straightened fer shoulders and smiled.
Rosie and I both looked up at fer expectantly. I felt my sister’s excitement on my behalf rising inside of her—I didn’t even have to look, just knew that it was there—and I gingerly pressed my foot down on top of hers, just in case she was planning to say anything unsubtle.
“Hi, Tam,” she chorused with me instead.
Our voices are identical, even if the rest of us aren’t. It usually startles people when we speak in unison.
Tam, though, seemed unruffled, as fe always did. I wondered if part of fer beauty was simply serenity—then thought, No, fe would be beautiful even racked with anxiety. But fer calmness was beguiling when my own mind—and the minds of most people I knew—seemed always to be frantically spinning, always thinking too much. Tam’s gaze was a circle of quiet.
“Hello,” fe said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, and I’ll go away if you like, but . . . I thought you might want company. Everyone’s watching you.”
I chanced a look around. It was true; all of the dozens of performers and stagehands at their fires or around the large circle of the central campfire were glancing and murmuring—in the case of the hands—or, if they were performers, outright pointing and staring as they gossiped.