The Fortune Teller's Daughter (13 page)

“Not
really,” I said into the pillow. “Sort of.”

Not my
pillow
, I realized, though that should have been an obvious observation.

It was not,
also obviously, my bed.

And with
that, it all came rushing back as awful the second time as it had been the
first time.

The only
thing in the whole room that belonged to me was a pair of baby blue suitcases
and a backpack stacked neatly by the door. The rest of the room belonged to a
man, even the vanity and all its make-up and powders and a glass mannequin head
that wore a shiny black top hat.

A magician’s
top hat.

Eli.

And with
that, another memory -
Castel
.

I sucked in
a difficult breath, felt it in my guts where pain lodged inside like a steak
knife, sawing and sawing when I tried to move.

“The
magicians,” I whispered.

The girl,
Micah, winced and looked to the older woman for direction. She gave a small
shake of her head.

“Eli?” Micah
asked. “He’s our magician.”

I nodded
without raising my head. “And--”

“Don’t,” the
woman interrupted. “Please don’t say his name.”

Micah
climbed back onto her chair to kneel on it backwards. “Do you remember me?” She
mined juggling and it clicked. The girl acrobat from yesterday who’d met me at
the gate.

“I remember
you. You had more hair then.”

She grinned
a bit wolfishly, which seemed all kinds of wrong on her pixie face. “Name’s
Micah.”

“And a lot
of other names besides.” The woman snorted, though it was an affectionate kind
of abuse. “You probably do not remember me, love. You were out of it when Eli
brought you here. My name is Dr. Georgianne Smith, but most just call me Mama
George which is as good a name as any. We know you’re Serafine, Cora’s little
girl, and we know what happened last night - least as much as Eli was willing
to tell. You should know you took quite a hit to the head and I had to give you
three stitches here.” She tapped her left eyebrow, then her belly button. “And
six here. You’ll be okay, I suspect, in the next few days but you’ll have to
take it easy. No heavy lifting. No fist fights.”

“No fist
fights?” I sighed. “There goes my afternoon.”

Mama George
grinned. “I bet you’re starved. Horus could be persuaded to fix you something
if you like.”

At the promise
of food, my stomach growled. “I could eat. I could also love a shower.”

Micah
thumbed over her shoulder at a decorative door in the corner. “Eli’s got his
own, lucky dog. Steal his, then I’ll take you over to the cook house and we can
sweet talk Horus into fixing us some sandwiches.”

“You should
probably go see Annabelle before she complains to the boss that you’re not at
practice, girl.” Mama George gave her a stern look and the acrobat blushed.

“Yeah,
after. Annabelle will complain no matter when I show up. It’s her favorite
thing to do in the world.”

I was
reluctant to leave the warm comfort of the bed and the heavy quilt I’d woken up
tucked beneath. I couldn’t remember the last time I slept in a real bed, not
that my mother and I lived like paupers but we rarely splurged for a two
bedroom. She always had the bedroom and I took the couch since she did all the
work at the market and was about six inches taller than me. After her death, I
could never bring myself to sleep in her bed, so I never did.

This bed
though, Eli’s bed, was the softest in the world. Softer than regular
mattresses, supple like clouds. Not the sort of thing I expected to find in the
living quarters of a carnival magician. The room looked like the inside of a
gypsy wagon, tiny windows and undersized doors. The bed took up most of the
backside of the long room and had curtain panels drawn to the side to separate
it from the living area. The floor was carpeted and the furniture all felt
oversized, but cozy. The ceiling had been painted like the night sky.

Since I
couldn’t live in his bed forever, I pushed the quilt off and rolled to my feet,
an action that took more out of me than I expected. My side ached like I’d been
skewered through and every part of me felt greasy, dirty, lopsided.

I kind of
smelled.

Micah fit
beneath my arm and helped my hobbled body into the bathroom and the very modest
shower. I could have gotten more water pressure from a garden hose and the
water felt only lukewarm, but it was heavenly. I stayed inside until the water
went cold and slowed to a dribble. Even then I leaned against the plastic wall
and dozed.

After new
bandages and a change of clothing, I followed Micah out into the sun.

*  *  *

 
Imaginaire
was most assuredly not in Chicago anymore.

Possibly not
even Illinois. I stepped out of Eli’s tidy little wagon and into a forest of
cedars and hemlocks and oaks that towered immeasurably into the clouds, it’s
very green canopy allowing flashes of sunlight through.

Instead of
birds and bugs, I heard calling. I heard hammers and shouts and the sound of
metal catching weight and clanging beneath it. Nearby there were small personal
tents, each very different in shape and color. Wagons surrounded the tents in a
protective circle, also all very different from one another. Eli’s reminded me
of a traveling medicine man’s wagon, square and ornate with lovely swirling
cornices and a crescent moon carved into the door and
The Magicians 
painted
but faded along one side.

High between
a pair of oak trees someone had strung up a fabric triangle, a sort of hanging
fort, each side of the triangle a different colored fabric with panels hanging
off each corner almost to the ground.

“Where are
we?”

Micah
wrinkled her nose. “Not sure. I slept through most of the trip. We’ve stopped
here before, a long time ago.”

She said
a
long time ago
wistfully and for a moment she got that look that Eli and
Rook both had that made her look young for a moment, then much older. With Eli
it was like a trick, but with Micah time just seemed confused. She was mostly
like a teenager and then that only in stature.

It was
something I’d wanted to mention before, but then there were thugs and swords
and it never seemed like the right time.

As we walked
between tents and trees, I hedged the topic carefully. “I thought the carnival
went dark twenty-two years ago.”

“It did.”

“So you must
have been here last when you were really young.”

She answered
me with a guarded smile and without warning traveled the next several feet by
way of cartwheel.

Beyond the
back lot I could see the shape of the carnival going up by dozens of hands. It
folded between the widely spaced trees organically, using them as supports or
frames for the patchwork tents and larger than life attraction banners.

Un, deux,
trois, un, deux, trois - no dammit! Wrong! If you can’t dance at least count!

All on
the ropes, hai! Up up! Now now!

The Ferris
was easily the tallest of all the carnival spectacles. It crested the treetops
and along its star-shaped struts and axels men shimmied about like monkeys
building the great thing.

“You’ll like
it here.” Micah wrapped an arm around the trunk of a tree and let momentum
swirl her around it. “I knew it the moment I saw you, lion charm be damned.”

I tore my
eyes away from the builders and followed her further through the back lot. “You
noticed I’d been given it but you didn’t act on it.”

I still wore
the colorful thread and absently I fingered the tiny charm. It reminded me of
Eli’s fire trick, the way the miniature lion walked and roared. That reminded
me of the snow globe and that reminded me of my Magician. I wondered where he
was in all this, what he was doing. If he was alright.

Castel’s
my brother,
he’d said.
My twin.

In his
place, I would not have been alright.

The memory
of Eli’s voice, his face turned into my open palm, his breath on my skin,
faltered against my memory of Castel. Crazy wide eyes, panicked laughter, his
kiss that suffocated rather than pleased. I could still taste him, a little
bit, like pickled ginger.

And, of
course, I remembered what it felt like to push him off a moving train.

I did not
say any of this to Micah.

Micah’s cheeks
colored. “Well, that’s not entirely true. Because of what we are, we attract
people who may not have our best interests at heart. There are other charms
too, but the lion is given to someone has openly lied to a carnival player for
their own gain. We are meant to trail the person, keep someone on them until
one of us manages to figure out what the liar is up to. Then the enemy can be
disposed of, usually out the back gate by the strongman with a stern lecture
about never coming back. Sometimes a black eye, depending on how much fight
they’ve got in’m. I pulled you aside to do my part in keeping you distracted
but it was clear pretty quick that the ticket master got it wrong.”

We stopped
in front of a hastily constructed fire pit and pavilion. A bald, bearded man,
not entirely unlike what I imagined a leprechaun might look like, turned great
slabs of ribs and very red cuts of meat over the flame. He wore and apron which
clashed with his heavily tattooed, muscular arms. He was a leprechaun who
seemed to have misplaced his biker gang.

“I suppose
though, I was wrong in the end. You did have another agenda, it just wasn’t an
evil one.”

“Micah Marie
Margaret McKenzie!”

We spun in
unison towards the angriest tiny blond girl I’d ever seen in my life. She stood
five foot nothing, cheeks as red as cherries, shoulders scrunched up to her
earlobes.

“You useless
lazy selfish self-centered talentless backstabbing uncoordinated
stumbler!
I’ve got one word for you.” Micah gasped as if slapped while the sprite sucked
in a new lungful of insults. “
Fired
.”

“Annabelle,”
Micah huffed. “You can’t fire me. I am a
main stage
attraction.”

“You’re
about to become a main
trash
picker. We have been in the air for three
hours while you’ve been gallivanting around with,” the girl flailed
dramatically at me as if I were some gigolo Micah had taken up with. “Whatever
this is.”

I frowned
and, oddly enough, had to remind myself that Mama George had specified no fist
fights. Who knew such medical advice would actually become relevant?

“This,” now
it was Micah’s turn to flail in my general direction, “is Serafine. We are not
gallivanting.”

Annabelle
screwed up her face like she smelled something foul. “I don’t care if she’s the
queen of fucking Sheba. We are
acrobats
. Held to a
higher
caliber. We put in double practice hours and perform feats three times as
breathtaking. We do not waste our time with
foundlings
.”

Micah balled
up her fists and took one step forward. Annabelle took one too. Several
lilting, girlish giggles gave away that we were no longer alone and a quick
glance showed that several girls from the pavilion had shown up to surround
Micah and me. One of them I recognized as Eli’s assistant Katya, though without
all her make-up she was considerably less glamorous than I remembered.

I returned
my attention on Annabelle. “What is that supposed to mean -
foundling
?”

The spritely
girl crossed her arms over her chest and finally steadied her hot-headed gaze
on me. There was something sort of venomous about her the way I remembered
girls in high school could get. A cultivated sourness that set the world in two
categories -
mine
and
not one worth my time
.

Annabelle
kindly punctuated her words in case I didn’t get it the first time. “It was an
insult.”

“Yeah, I got
that. I’m just wondering why
foundling
. If it’s supposed to hurt, you
should try again.”

Annabelle
opened her mouth and Micah stepped forward again. “Please don’t, Anna, come on.
It’s not right.”

“It means
you couldn’t possibly be the fortune teller’s daughter, because Cora was tall and
beautiful and powerful. And you…” Katya moved around us like a dancer and came
to stand beside the much smaller acrobat. She tucked one arm across her stomach
and flicked her wrist pointedly with each ugly word. “You’re pudgy and freckly
and very simple. So you must be some poor woman’s mongrel left in a box on
Cora’s doorstep.”

I shoved
past Micah and Annabelle and crowded into Katya’s personal space. The ballerina
didn’t back down and had at least four inches on me, but each of her words felt
crammed down my throat. They gave saturation to some of the worst things I’d
ever said to my mother when I was angry with her but out to make her sorry for
it.

Katya,
dumbly, did not back off.

I stilled my
voice, lowered it for her and her alone. 

“That,” I
said quietly but close enough that Katya would not mistake me, “will be the
last time you ever speak of my mother ever again, but if you insist, I will
gladly make you regret it, you catty, soulless cow.”

This was
what I learned from being a chronic new kid all my life. The bullies only bully
in gangs, they know all the best insults, they don’t care if you cry, and they
never expect you to actually fight back.

Especially
the pretty ones.

Annabelle
laughed, but she laughed by herself. Everyone had gone quiet, including Katya.
I felt Micah nearby but couldn’t see her.

“She’s got a
nasty mouth on her, doesn’t she?” Annabelle said. “How very
baseborn
.”

“Oh shut
up,” Micah snapped. “Who are you to judge? For being the supposedly head
acrobat you can’t even walk the tightrope. We know your secret. You have two
left feet and the balance of a drunk roustie.”