So Silver Bright (29 page)

“Yes?” Suspicion crept into Ariel’s voice.

“We’ll act the pages from the journal into
The Complete Works of the Stage.
That ought to fuse the two theaters back together.”

“So that we’re trapped within the walls of the theater again?” Twitching tendrils of air gathered about Ariel’s clothes, pleading, plucking at his sleeves, begging him to fly far away.

Bertie’s lips went numb, and a faint buzzing filled her head. Hadn’t she vowed never to imprison him again? “I will free you the moment Ophelia is safe.” When he didn’t answer, she swallowed. “Please. It might be the only way to save her.” She held the journal out to the fairies, struggling to keep her voice even and her hands from shaking. “Mustardseed, the first line is yours.”

“Everyone hold on to your bums,” the fae muttered before reading the opening line from the script.

MUSTARDSEED

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT A FAIRY IN POSSESSION OF A GOOD APPETITE MUST BE IN WANT OF PIE.

There followed the sound of electric bulbs sparking, popping, burning out their filaments, but Mustardseed remained.

“It’s not enough,” Bertie whispered. “Keep going.”

COBWEB

YES, INDEED, THOUGH I AWOKE ONE MORNING FROM UNEASY DREAMS, I FOUND MYSELF TRANSFORMED IN MY BED INTO A GIGANTIC PIE.

MOTH

IT WAS THE BEST OF PIE, IT WAS THE WORST OF PIE.

The auditorium wavered, two pictures rendered on glass, one sliding atop the other.

“Nearly there.” Bertie could hardly draw a breath as she turned to Nate. “It’s your line.”

Eyes widening a bit, the pirate cleared his throat. “It is?”

“She was, apparently, thinking of you from the very beginning.” Ariel’s voice was distant, though he hadn’t stirred from her side.

Bertie shook her head, trying to signal he shouldn’t speak, but the pirate reached for her, his hand cupping her face, tracing the line of her jaw.

NATE

(OFFSTAGE WHISPER)

LASS.

PEASEBLOSSOM

(FRETTING)

WE SHOULD HAVE HAD A PROLOGUE, NOT ALL THIS NATTERING ABOUT PIE.

The air about them shimmered, growing heavy with greasepaint and the memory of applause.

Peaseblossom’s wings fluttered as she clasped her tiny hands together. “We need something more, something stronger.”

“My line, maybe?” Bertie ran her finger along the page, wanting to be absolutely certain of the wording. There was Peaseblossom’s valiant attempt at an iambic pentameter introduction, yes, then her own name stamped out in heavy typeface:

BERTIE

THAT WILL BE ENOUGH OF THAT, THANK YOU KINDLY.

She cast her opening line across the stage and waited to see if the silver fish would bite; in response, feedback crackled through the speaker system, accompanied by a whirring noise. The red velvet curtains rustled. Then the magic paused, as though the theater held its breath, refusing to exhale.

“What more does it need?” Mustardseed demanded, his entire face contorted into a scowl.

“It needs me,” Ariel said.

Bertie wanted to make promises, to reassure him of her good intentions. “Ariel—”

He wouldn’t let her finish. “Give me the journal.”

Forever after she would remember that moment: the way she hesitated; the look of resignation on his face; how she handed him the journal and wondered—as all actors must—what her motivation truly was, beyond her determination to save Ophelia. Bravery, inherited from a woman fearless enough to leave the theater and her written part behind? Cowardice, born from the fear that she could not set matters to rights?

In the end, it mattered not. He spoke with the conviction she lacked.

ARIEL

THIS IS THE FIRST MOMENT WE’VE HAD ALONE SINCE I RETURNED FROM YOUR DELIVERY ERRAND.

Everything hung in the balance, golden scales evenly weighted, every member of the troupe holding their collective breath, but still nothing happened.

“Why didn’t it work?” Moth stage-whispered to the others. “Did we do something wrong?”

With a sinking feeling in her middle, Bertie flipped through the pages. “It should have worked.”

Except there were blank spaces in the journal where not even dark smudges of ink marked the absence of certain words.

SEREFINA

(HOLDING OUT A CRYSTAL FLASK)

FILL THIS.

BERTIE

WITH WHAT?

SEREFINA

WITH WORDS.

BERTIE

(REMEMBERING THE CHANGES SHE WROUGHT IN THE MARKETPLACE: RIVULETS OF RIBBON-COLOR, GOLDEN EARRINGS TRANSFORMED INTO EGGS)

JUST WORDS?

SEREFINA

(WITH A KNOWING SMILE)

IT’S NEVER JUST WORDS, IS IT?

It’s never just words.

“The mistake was mine,” Bertie said in disbelief. “Reckless. Silly and reckless. I’ve done more damage here than Sedna could have accomplished in her fondest dreams.” Dizzy with the revelation, Bertie realized there was a very good chance she might faint like any one of the girls in the Ladies’ Chorus.

Nate grabbed her by the arm before she could keel over. “An’ where d’ye think yer goin’?”

“The journal’s incomplete,” she said with a stagger. “It’s missing the words I traded to Serefina.”

Moth clapped his hands. “Back we go to the Caravanserai! I call shotgun on the caravan.”

“I call dibs on the contents of the cheesecake-on-a-stick stall!”

“We’re not going all the way back,” Bertie said, recovering her balance and her purpose all at once. “Waschbär?”

He snapped to attention. “Yes?”

“I need something from your pack. That vial of sand?”

Dropping to one knee, the sneak-thief set to rummaging, locating the requested article with haste. “Here you are. You want to be careful with that.”

“I know.” Bertie pulled the drawstring and immediately scented the many years contained within the leather pouch. The sands of time, he’d called it, but she knew better. Sand itself was time incarnate, microscopic particles of stone worn down by weather and years.

And Bertie could command the stone.

“Don’t move.” She walked around them, dribbling sand to form a ring. In an instant, it transformed into rich, brown loam. Moss bloomed upon it, and mushrooms opened like tiny parasols upon the green carpeting.

“A fairy circle,” Peaseblossom said, delighted, and began dancing behind Bertie. Her every hop summoned a fat toad until each fungal throne sat occupied. “‘Come now, a roundel and a fairy song.’”

“I’ll manage the circle if you can manage the song. You know my opinion about musical numbers.” Bertie completed the first loop and began the second, willing the earth to respond to her, willing a tunnel to open between here and there, then and now. After the third time around, the air within the circle shimmered. Scrims surrounded them, the iridescent netting trapping them like fish in golden mesh.

“This is no fairy circle.” Waschbär tried to take a step back, but he could not move beyond the boundary created by the mushroom-squatting toads. “It’s a witch’s circle. A
hexenring.
Will you gather your sisters here?”

When shall we three meet again?

Bertie shook her head and dismissed the witches from that Scottish Play. “I’m an only child.”

“Are you certain about that?” the sneak-thief asked with a sly glance at the Scrimshander.

Bertie’s father colored up to the roots of his hair. “She is … to the best of my knowledge.”

Having imagined six or seven siblings in
How Bertie Came to the Theater
along with the Family Dog, Bertie similarly blushed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Waschbär.”

“Can you imagine?” Mustardseed stared at her, goggle-eyed. “Half a dozen crazy-haired troublemakers? They could beat up the Von Trapp kids without thinking twice!”

“Be still.” Sweat gathered at the small of Bertie’s back, and she concentrated on the shifting curtains of light. This was no time to lose focus, especially not to the ridiculous notion that she had unknown brothers and sisters somewhere. Holding out her arms, Bertie tried to fix a picture of Serefina in her mind, painting a portrait of the herb-seller: skin roughened by sun and wind, hands stained green with herbs, robes the color of emeralds at midnight. Bertie struggled to remember the exact shade of Serefina’s eyes, the years of knowledge that lit their depths, each amber fleck in the iris a philter strained, a draught concocted.

The imagined eyes blinked slowly, pale lashes fluttering like one of Ariel’s butterflies as the herb-seller hovered between the two worlds, one foot inside the fairy ring, the other remaining in her stall at the Caravanserai. “It’s a fine magic that summons me here. Great must be your need, Teller of Tales.”

“The vial of words I filled for you.” Bertie wished she could grab Serefina by the robes but did not dare touch her, not with the woman’s serpent gaze trained upon her. “Do you still have it?”

For a long moment, there was only the rush and bubble of a dozen kettles on an unseen hearth, the subtle movement of cotton curtains closing off the stall from the rest of the Caravanserai. Then there came the rasp of work-roughened fingers against smocking as Serefina pulled the crystal flask from her pocket. Lifting it to her face, she traced the facets with a fingertip as another woman might stroke the face of her lover. “I keep it with me always.”

Bertie trembled with the effort to keep from snatching it like a common thief. “What price would you put upon it?”

The herb-seller laughed low in her throat. “It is a most precious thing.”

“As I am now well aware,” Bertie said.

“Take care,” Ariel murmured. “The more eager you sound, the steeper her price will be.”

“Do not take me for a fool, air spirit,” Serefina hissed at him. Though she was careful not to move her feet, everything else about her surged forward: her hair, her clothes, the dagger gaze that could sever a soul from a body. “And do not interfere in this transaction.”

Ariel gave her a low bow, though arrogance prickled from every angle of his body. “I apologize, madam, both to you and”—here he bowed to Bertie—“to the young lady. Were it not for me, she would not have had reason to trade with you in the first place.”

“You speak the truth with a tongue more forked than my own,” Serefina said. “Now … shall we speak again about a price?”

Bertie hadn’t the patience or, judging by the fading glow of the curtains about them, the time to dance a buyer’s waltz. “What is it you want?”

“You know what it is I want.”

“The idea of a child,” Bertie remembered, feeling suddenly hollow and glass-fragile. “The child I will never have.”

Behind her, the Scrimshander squawked a single protest. Nate’s breath left his lungs in a rush, and Ariel caught hold of Bertie’s wrist, twisting her away from the herb-seller’s sharp gaze.

“What does she mean by that?” he demanded. “The child you will never have?”

“A dream-child,” Serefina answered for Bertie. “With every breath taken, with every decision made, the girl sets her course. Untold paths are left unwandered. I would have a child from one of those paths.”

“It’s not much, is it?” Gaze fixed upon the glittering contents of the crystal vial, Bertie spoke to no one in particular. “Trading something that will never exist for a mother I will otherwise never see again?”

Now Nate stood alongside her, shaking her roughly as though to jostle her from a nightmare. “Ye don’t rightly understand th’ terms o’ th’ bargain! She’s askin’ ye fer too much—”

“A small nothing,” Serefina argued.

Raising his cutlass, Nate took a step toward her. “We want different terms.”

“Terms?” The herb-seller raised her voice until the trees trembled. “Do you think me addled? The girl summoned me through time and space for this flask; she will pay what I ask, or she will not have it.”

Bertie had spent seventeen years trying to learn the trick of thinking before speaking; for once she was thankful the lesson hadn’t stuck. “Done.”

Serefina held up the mirror once more. “For your eyes only.”

Though she didn’t want to look, Bertie couldn’t help but obey. In the surface of the glass, she did not see her own reflection, but the wavering outline of a much smaller form. As she watched, it coalesced into bone and flesh, sturdy legs that lengthened with every passing second, arms that reached for the sky.

When the child’s eyes fluttered open, they were unmistakably Bertie’s eyes. Ophelia’s eyes.

The herb-seller lowered the mirror, revealing the wavering suggestion of a person that now clung to her skirts. Made entirely of fire and air and earth and water, the child peered up at Bertie with those familiar eyes, moonlight surrounding its head like a halo. Serefina held out the crystal vial, and Bertie’s fingers clenched about words and rainbows. She cradled it in her palm as she never would that little one’s cheek. Then the tears slid down; the last of the stars fell from Bertie’s eyes, drifted through the air, and settled into the child’s. Seeing them sparkle there, knowing that once Ophelia must have cried her star-tears into the infant Beatrice’s eyes, Bertie couldn’t stop a sob before it escaped her. The noise pushed the herb-seller and her prize out of the fairy circle and back into the Caravanserai, their forms gone in an instant.