Pantomime (8 page)

  Her body moved in time with the music. The snake, as thick as a tree branch in its middle, curled about her neck and arms. I had never seen a snake like this before, even in books, and did not know whether or not it was poisonous. Men and women alike sat still and silent as she danced, mesmerized by her movements.

  Nina untwined the snake from her neck and arms and slid it hand over hand into a wicker basket on the stage. Those in the front row backed away. From somewhere under her scarves, Nina pulled out a small wooden flute stylized to look like a snake and began to play. Her fingers danced along the rainbow of scaled reptilian keys. The snake poked its head up from the basket and swayed with the slow tempo she built. My own eyes grew heavy. Nina and her snake mirrored each other's movements as gracefully as any court dance.

  The music stopped and I shook my head, taking a moment to remember just where I was. I wanted her to keep playing and the snake to keep dancing, to hypnotize me into forgetting my troubles. Nina bowed and passed a hat around. I would have given her some money, but I had none to offer.

  I left the tent, the snake music still echoing in my mind. I found myself humming the tune as I explored the carnival. I came upon a tent that had escaped my notice the previous night: the Pavilion of Phantoms. The black canvas tent hunkered behind the others. Another Vestige fog machine or, more likely, the far more economical card-ice in water must have been spirited away inside it. Fog unfurled from the bottom of the dark tent, as though it had just been set aflame and then extinguished.

  Again, I did not pay at the door. Fewer people attended this tent. The air felt colder inside, and another gramophone played echoing, ghostly music. Thin scraps of ragged grey veils fluttered in an unseen wind. I walked through ankle-deep fog. Haunting motifs in luminescent paint decorated the interior of the canvas, depicting pale ghosts with nothing but black holes where their eyes should have been. There were twisted trees, whose branches seemed to grasp the tattered clothes of the ghosts. A full moon with the hint of a sad face in its craters. Two solitary candles, set well within the middle of the tent and surrounded by small fences, were the only source of light, and their flickering flames made the ghosts painted on the walls appear to move.

  Five others were with me in the tent – two coal miners, the soot forever stained into the grooves of their hands; a middle-aged couple who were probably merchants, judging by their tidy but unassuming dress; and an older man with a beard halfway down his chest who I could not quite place.

  Another gust of wind caused the candles to sputter. The music grew more wailing, and then a disembodied voice began to speak. Though I knew it must be another bit of Vestige, it frightened me terribly – a high, thin voice that spoke in three tones at once, using a language that hardly anyone in the world knew how to speak anymore: Alder, the dead language of the Old Ones.

  Fog swirled into a thin cyclone between the two candles. The voices grew louder, the different tones overlapping with each other until they did not even sound like they could be words anymore. The merchant's wife clutched the arm of her husband. The coal miners and the old man seemed unperturbed by events.

  The fog cleared, and a ghost of a girl stood among us. Though not superstitious nor particularly religious, I whispered an incoherent prayer to the Lord and Lady, just in case. I nearly ran out of the tent, but I knew that the circus was all about illusion. This could not have been a ghost, as much as she looked like one.

  I have seen false ghosts before. Mother once attended a séance at her friend's summer estate and forced me to come. The ghost that had appeared had obviously been made using an illusion. I researched it afterwards, and it involved mirrors and light, smoke and shadows.

  But this girl did not look like an illusion; instead, she looked so alive, so
present,
aside from the fact that she was nothing but shades of white and blue and I could see through her. I looked about to see if there was any sort of projection, but if there was, it was too cleverly hidden. I could see every hair on her head and the down on her cheek. I wanted to reach out and touch her, to see if I would feel warm flesh, or only air.

  She was not human. She was taller than I, and looked to be in her twenties. The proportions of her face were more Alder – larger eyes, higher cheekbones, elongated limbs. Strange tattoos dotted her hairline and traced the line of her neck. She wore a simple white gown that trailed the floor and disappeared. But she was not entirely Alder. She was a Chimaera. Behind her rose the giant, gossamer wings of a dragonfly. They were glistening and iridescent, and she flapped them soundlessly. She stared straight ahead, looking thoughtfully at something above our heads. The recorded voices lowered and disappeared.

  A man dressed in a black hood and cape stepped out of the darkness. All five of us started and stepped back. He looked like Death.

  "Friends of the afterlife," he intoned, and I recognized the gravelly voice of Wicket, a circus worker. I relaxed, despite my fear. This was nothing but another Vestige illusion. "I present to you the Phantom Damselfly. She was once a princess of the Chimaera, next in line to inherit the throne of the Dragonfly people. But she fell in love with the wrong man, the son of the rival family, and her parents would not condone the match. One night, the young prince flew into the castle of his lady love. But the king was waiting for him instead of his beloved. The king had a powerful temper, and challenged him to a duel.

  "They fought across the room; the only sounds the clash of steel sword on steel, the panting of breath, and the stomp of their feet. The prince lost. The king cut off his wings and threw him from the tower, and the suitor perished.

  "The princess never recovered from the tragedy. The night before her arranged wedding to another prince of her father's choosing, she tied her wings to her torso and jumped from a tall cliff, disappearing beneath the waves. But even death did not bring her solace, and her spirit wanders still, all these centuries later. She may never find peace."

  I had no doubt that the story was a fiction but it was sad nonetheless. And she did look mournful. The hooded man retreated into the shadows.

  The Damselfly shook her head, as though awakening. She paced in a slow circle, head bowed deep in thought, her wings flickering. One wing caught a candle flame, which did not waver. The other people in the tent backed away further from the ghost, their faces blank with wonder.

  I stepped forward. I could not shake the feeling that she looked almost familiar.

  "Oh, do be careful!" the merchant woman whispered from behind me. "She could steal your soul. They say that dragonflies weigh the soul for the Darkness."

  I ignored her and took another step.

  The ghost stopped her pacing and her head snapped up, her eyes focusing on me. My mouth opened in shock. She was definitely looking at me, not in my general direction. She cocked her head. I shook like a leaf.

  "My, but it has been a long time since a Kedi came to see me," she said, and I could not be sure if she was speaking Elladan or Alder. But I understood her. My breath came in gasps and I stumbled away from her. Her gaze followed me. She flicked her wings, once.

  "I thought you might hear me," the ghost said.

  "Did you hear that?" I asked the others.

  They looked at me curiously. "Heard what, dear?" the merchant's wife asked.

  "She… spoke. She said something to me. You didn't hear her?"

  They shook their heads. "She… spoke to you?" the old man asked, his voice wavering. "Just now?"

  "They won't hear me, little Kedi," the Chimaera ghost said. "Very few can hear me when I speak. You are the first in such a long, long time."

  My breath left my lungs in a rush. I clapped my hands over my ears. "No!" I ran from the tent, leaving the ghost and the shocked customers behind.

  I sprinted to Arik's cart, locking the door behind me and diving under the covers, shivering in abject fear. I almost expected her to follow me, to see the ghost shimmer in the cart. I tried to control my breathing, but it was a long time before I stopped gasping.

  I must have imagined it. There was no possible way a Vestige ghost actually spoke to me. It was some sort of cruel prank from someone in the circus. She was a real woman in makeup and mechanical wings that had been projected into the tent with mirrors. But how would they ever have heard the term Kedi, the term I had so recently learned myself?

  I rifled in my pack and took out the little soapstone figurine a man named Mister Illari had given me, not long before I joined the circus. He told me a story about a being that was worshipped as a minor god in the backwaters of Byssia. A being called a Kedi.

  I ran a thumb over its crude features before tucking it back into the bottom of my pack.

  Sleep would not come, and I lay awake with only my thoughts for company. I pretended to be asleep when Arik entered after the nightly bonfire. Near dawn, I finally drifted into a fitful doze. I dreamed of snakes twining about my arms and legs, hissing softly in time with Nina's music. But then the snakes tightened, strangling me, and I struggled to breathe. I tried to call for help. Help came, but not the kind I wanted. The ghost Damselfly from the Pavilion of Phantoms hovered above me.

  "I know your secret, little Kedi. And I know what your future will bring. You poor thing."

  Her ghostly finger touched my face, and then she was gone.

 
 

A YOUNG ELLADAN LADY'S PRIMER
,

Lady Elena Primrose

 

The room was full of smiling, laughing people, and all I wanted to do was flee.

  My mother's hand gripped mine like a claw as she steered me forward to our designated snow-white table. On my other side, Cyril wrapped his pinky with mine and squeezed. He winked, and I felt a little better, and better still when I saw Oswin at our table.

  The Hawthornes always held the last social event of the spring season, and it was an afternoon tea, followed by outside games. It was exhausting, having carefully regimented and modulated amusement all day, always taking care to say and act just so, as many eyes were watching. It made me melancholy, as well, for it meant that soon we would be returning to Sicion and its sooty, sandy buildings and ever-present rain.

   The Hawthornes prided themselves on their conservatory. It was large enough to easily host the twenty or so guests, with every wall paned in glass so clear that it would be easy to walk into it by mistake. The house perched on top of a low hill and the view was majestic. The dark conifer trees fell away toward a stream, and jagged snow-topped mountains cut into the sky.

  I sat at our table, taking care to face the window. I felt woefully self-conscious – Mother had forced me to wear a horrible confection of a dress, with froths of white lace and a wide pale-pink sash high around my corseted waist. My auburn hair had been curled and artfully piled on top of my head, Mother had smeared my cheeks with a bit of rouge, and I wore white gloves. Cyril looked very smart in his light brown afternoon suit.

  According to my ghostly reflection in one of the conservatory window panes, the overly feminine clothing emphasized the strong line of my jaw and my square temples. Mother rapped my knuckles when I stooped my shoulders and whispered in my ear to behave myself, disguising the words with a kiss on my cheek, before she went to the adults' table. I fought the urge to stick my tongue out at her retreating back.

  Oswin grinned at me and elbowed me in the side. "You look like a right lady today, Iphigenia."

  "I'd still whip you in a fight and you know it."

  "Don't let your mummy hear you say that," he said, holding his face primly in imitation.

  I glowered at him. Lucy, Oswin's little sister, giggled, covering her face with her hands. A plump, happy girl who was always very taken with me and I with her, Lucy was four years younger than me and was still fond of her porcelain dolls. The other members of our table were Darla Hornbeam, a girl very concerned with her self-importance and close ties to royalty, and her younger brother Damien, whom I liked very much. We were an evenly-matched table of three brothers and three sisters. If I counted as a sister.

  Oswin was spared a rude comment by the arrival of the tea. Each guest had his or her own little ceramic teapot, embossed with a certain type of flower. I had bluebells. Cyril had roses. We had to wait precisely three minutes for the tea to steep while Oswin's mother, Lady Hawthorne, gave a short speech thanking everyone for their attendance and hoping that we would have a pleasant afternoon. We all applauded softly, and then together we poured the tea.

  Lady Hawthorne had spared no expense; it was a fine quality brew from Linde. I breathed in the steam. As we stirred in cold milk and sugar, the serving girls, graceful in their starched aprons and hats, set down the tiered plates of cakes and sandwiches. The plates looked fit to break under the weight of the food.

  A string quartet played blandly appropriate music as we ate. The food was marvelous – sandwiches of the freshest white bread filled with various cheeses, cucumbers, crisp lettuce, salmon, smoked meats, and thinly sliced fruit. My favorite was one with a special ham and melon. All of the produce was grown right on the property. Lady Hawthorne spent as much time in the countryside as she could, though her children and husband spent most of their lives in Sicion and Imachara.