Two of his compatriots jumped in with three more torches, three men juggling nine torches, each in turn thrown to the man in the middle, who then hurled them high, caught them, and spun them back to his friends. He tossed all but one of them away, the other performers extinguishing each in turn. With a fluid movement their leader caught the final torch, and, taking a swig of something from a flask that appeared in his hand, he rolled the lit torch along his open mouth.
The crowd screamed and Jordan pressed the hat close to her stomach, eyes wide.
Flame danced across his tongue and he snapped his mouth shut, snuffing the fire before taking another swig of the clear stuff in the metal flask.
He bent, leaning so far back his hair nearly brushed the veranda’s floor. He brought the flaming torch close enough to his lips he might have kissed it … but instead he sprayed liquid past its flaming head, and the crowd fell back, shrieking, as he breathed fire.
Swinging the torch, he passed it off to be snuffed and the screaming became wild clapping. With a gracious bow he grabbed his gear and he and his cohorts dodged away.
“Stunning,” Rowen murmured.
Jordan looked up at him. “It was a brilliant display.”
“I was referring to you,” he corrected.
She rolled her eyes.
His gaze drifted from her eyes to the place on the veranda occupied by a well-dressed man sporting a leather mask in the form of a fox’s face. At his side stood an attractive female assistant in a fine silk robe decorated with rolling waves. Her hair was long, straight, and as dark as ebony and her eyes were slanted in a distinctly Oriental style.
Between them rested a large and colorfully painted wooden trunk.
“So what is this, do you suppose?” Jordan asked, motioning to the man and woman. The crowd had quieted, seeming to wonder the same thing.
“Good evening, friends. I am the Wandering Wallace,” the man said, his arms sweeping wide to encompass the entire crowd as if they were all personally invited by him. “Tonight I will entertain you and challenge your senses and powers of observation with tricks that will both astonish and amuse.”
There was no response from the crowd. They withheld judgment, cautiously waiting. He looked suspiciously like something one would have seen before taking the boat to the New World. With his trunk painted brightly with stars and strange symbols and his beautiful assistant with her foreign features, he nearly stank of something they knew better than to become entangled with.
Magick.
“Let me first assure you that the tricks I perform tonight to entertain such fine folks as yourselves include no magick at all. Nothing will truly disappear and nothing will actually manifest. These things are but simple illusions brought to you as the result of years of training in sleight of hand. Can I make it appear that something has manifested out of thin air…?” He slid his hand across the empty space before them and opened it, a ball popping into existence between his finger and thumb.
A few ladies in the crowd jumped back and a few men bristled. Some even turned their faces to the rumbling sky overhead, disapproval obvious. “Yes, yes. But wait,” he instructed. “When I slow the move down…” He turned his back for a mere moment before starting all over again, hand flat and before them. “… and loosen my fingers…”
The same ladies who had gasped before gasped again, but this time in delight, as his fingers parted and they glimpsed something the color of the ball between them moments before he slipped it sloppily into his palm and showed them how it appeared in its final position. “I use no magick in my performances, merely well-practiced sleight of hand.”
The crowd clapped.
“But, as the hand is quicker than the eye”—with a flash of movement he launched three doves into the air and people shrieked—“I think I might yet be of some entertainment value.”
Rowen brought Jordan a little closer, getting comfortable for the show.
He grunted when something jabbed his ribs. “Oh.” Jordan’s mother withdrew her closed fan from his side and flicked it open before her face, leaving only her glaring green eyes visible.
Rowen corrected his slouched position.
She raised both her eyebrows and fluttered her fan slightly.
Rowen scooted Jordan a little away from him.
With a wink that made Rowen straighten further, Lady Astraea stepped back into the crowd.
“Some simple trickery now—my lady.” He beckoned to Serafina duBois. “You seem a clever lass. Might you assist me?”
Serafina nodded, flouncing her way to the illusionist.
Jordan stiffened, watching her. Of all the girls in Jordan’s circle of friends it was readily agreed that Serafina was the prettiest. With her rosebud mouth, petite nose that turned up perfectly at its tip, and a head full of soft golden curls, she looked as angelic as her namesake. It could not be denied that Serafina was lovely to look upon. But clever? Hardly. This was the girl who had drunk ink, mistaking it for tea. If the illusionist could make Serafina appear clever it just might be the finest illusion ever witnessed.
Serafina dipped a little curtsy to the crowd and all the young men clapped.
Even Rowen.
Jordan’s too-wide lips pressed together in a frown.
Catrina tapped her own forehead lightly, her gaze drifting to Jordan, who forced herself to relax and erase the faint crease of worry that would eventually deepen into a wrinkle. Sighing, she focused on Serafina.
The illusionist’s assistant pulled a piece of paper from the decorated trunk, passing it to her master with a flourish. It was the same stuff used to wrap packages at Wilkinson’s. Nondescript, brown, and of a sturdy weight. Rectangular in its proportions. Another flourish and scissors were handed to the illusionist, their handles and body black except for the silver sheen of the blades themselves.
“I shall now issue a challenge,” the Wandering Wallace declared. “If anyone here can cut a perfectly proportional five-pointed star from this paper without drawing a single line and using these scissors, I shall allow him to choose any item from my trunk of tricks.”
His assistant gasped an obviously rehearsed response, her slanted eyes widening and her small mouth drawing into a perfect o in a parody of shock.
No one had successfully taken the illusionist’s challenge.
But, wine flowing freely and Rowen’s friends in attendance, it was only a moment before the challenge was accepted.
And lost.
Another accepted, another piece of paper was butchered, and another young man returned to the crowd perplexed.
They grew still and the illusionist grinned, waving another piece of paper, taunting them. “Is there no other taker? No other among you to take my challenge?”
“It cannot be done,” a disillusioned member of the aristocracy declared. “A perfectly proportioned star is too difficult a shape to construct without the aid of proper tools and appropriate mathematics.”
“That is nearly precisely the argument our country’s founding fathers used against dear sweet Betsy Ross when she suggested five-pointed stars to adorn our nation’s flag! But Mrs. Ross was an enterprising soul and, in the same spirit, with my help, the good lady—”
“Serafina,” she volunteered.
“The good lady Serafina,” he said, “will help me show not only that it can be done, but it can be done with only a single cut of the scissors!”
Skepticism flooded the crowd in barely audible gasps as the Wandering Wallace took one last piece of paper, waving it before the crowd. He handed it to Serafina.
“Now we shall fold this paper. Here,” he instructed, adjusting Serafina’s fingers on the paper. “And here. Now unfold … Now fold here … And here and here … Here, unfold. Here. Unfold. And cut from here to there!”
Serafina did each thing as he prescribed and with a hiss of the scissors and a moment of unfolding, the promised star was produced. Everyone clapped, and Serafina curtsied once more and danced her way over to Jordan.
“For the true star of the evening,” she said, handing over her paper prize.
Jordan smiled, finding Serafina quite clever indeed. Gently, Jordan refolded the star and slid it up her sleeve.
The illusionist, finishing some card tricks and a few more bits of bird work, glanced at Rowen, and cleared his throat.
Rowen leaned over Jordan, whispering, “Back in a moment.”
She tilted her head and watched as he strode out of the crowd and stood front and center with the illusionist.
Lightning crackled in the clouds overhead.
Rowen cast a wary look at the sky but grinned for the crowd. “I have studied with the Wandering Wallace and have learned a few things from him, but not, of course, the face of the man beneath the mask. Some things, it seems, are to remain secrets—but not all,” he said. “And this evening, as a tribute to the lady who has me bewitched—”
The crowd gasped.
Micah laughed at them, saying, “He speaks figuratively, not literally. Had he truly been bewitched he would be unable to talk about it. Everyone knows that.”
Rowen smiled, adding, “She has bewitched my imagination, and so I shall share with you a special trick.” He motioned to Jordan. “Please step forward.”
Lowering her head, she did so.
Rowen threw a hand out to her and, as she took it, he proclaimed, “My lovely assistant!”
The crowd clapped and Jordan raised her head, straightened her spine, and put her shoulders back.
“I said I had a surprise for you.”
“Rowen.” Her eyes darted to the crowd and back. “Not here…”
“Have a little faith,” he said, the words tight. He grinned at the crowd, all showman, and said, “That is a lovely hairdo. Do you fine people not agree?” Clapping answered him. Rowen stepped up beside her to seemingly examine her hair. “Elegant. Wrapped very tightly and yet with so much body to it … Colorful ribbons weaved in…” He reached up and tugged one slightly, his grin tilting when the ribbon bounced. “But what’s this? One seems different…” He turned her so one side faced the crowd and his hand closed gently around one ribbon and then he yanked his hand back, trailing a long set of colorful handkerchiefs after it.
Jordan’s hands flew to her mouth and the crowd rioted with laughter.
“Look at you,” Rowen mused, “you’re so beautiful there’s beauty wrapped up inside you that no one has glimpsed until now.” He looked away from her then, addressing the crowd once more. “What would a young lady want on her seventeenth birthday but…” He drew the last word out so it became the longest single syllable ever uttered as he bowed before her and, on the ascent, produced a bouquet of “… flowers.”
Jordan clutched them to her and blushed.
“And, as I would not dream of doing anything but sharing such a delightful lady with all of her friends and family…” He towed her forward gently, lowering his face so his lips came level with her ear. “Be brave, Jordan,” he whispered, and swallowing, she held tight to the smile smeared across her face for the good of the guests. The crowd parted for her and, taking her hand, Rowen led them back inside, pausing in the main hall where three waiters held a large silver platter on which balanced a cake in three dramatic levels.
Seventeen candles burned in a fiery ring around the cake’s top tier and the waiters lowered it with aching care so the entire thing balanced just before Jordan’s smiling lips.
“A wish, a wish!” the crowd chanted.
Jordan blushed and nodded. She turned from the cake, clutching Rowen’s hands, closed her eyes and screwed her face up in her most thoughtful look before whipping around and blowing the candles out with a puff of breath that left her dizzy.
The guests burst into cheers and raucous clapping.
But everyone fell silent when the Wardens marched in.
Heavy boots slapped out an intimidating rhythm on the marble floor, drowning out every sound except the rush of blood filling people’s ears at sight of the Wardens invading their festivities.
Tall, broad, and dressed in hip-length charcoal-colored cloaks and sleek trousers tailored to slide over black boots, the Wardens were the most elite of guards. Unshakable, undaunted, and irreversibly silenced by a mysterious event rumored to be called “Lightning’s Kiss,” their faces were carved with crimson fern-shaped tattoos recalling their arcane path to power.
Behind the Wardens something else whispered with movement, things so tall they were more long than tall, more sleek than slender, and a more accurate description than saying that they walked would have been to say that they glided, they drifted, they haunted the space between the Wardens and the walls.
Until the Wardens parted and, black as a heartless sea, the Wraiths flowed forward.
Wearing relentless black, from their strange soft boots and long frock coats to their tall crowned top hats shrouded with mourner’s black, the Wraiths cut imposing figures against the backdrop of the crimson-and-bone hall. Still as stone they stood, faceless beneath the dark veils hanging along their hats’ brims; even their hands were robed in gloves the color of a moonless sky.
Deaf as doorstops, they were a sharp contrast to the Wardens. To many it seemed all they had in common was witchery. And the power of flight.
Everyone in the hall stood mute, their eyes fixed.
Everyone except Morgan Astraea—the man whose youngest daughter’s extravagant birthday party was being ruined.
“What is the meaning of this?” Jordan’s father stormed, his face purpling as a vein rose by his hairline.
The Ring shifted, the Wardens took one stomping step to the side, and Astraea immediately recognized the Councilman. Though a range of emotions slid across his face in rapid succession, surprise was not among them. But rage? It settled on his features and he thrust a pointing finger toward the foyer. “We shall speak. There.”
The Councilman nodded, following old Morgan Astraea, the Wardens marching behind, and after the Wardens drifted the Wraiths, every piece of them swallowed up in fabric and unimaginable. The crowd hissed, seeing one last person in their ranks.
A man so thin he seemed nearly skeletal, ceremonial robes hanging off him like draperies from a pole, slunk in amongst the Wardens, a slender cane wrapped tight in his gnarled hand, his other hand sheathed in metal—a contraption more mechanism than man. For a moment he turned, icy eyes scanning the crowd.
They gasped again. Although most had never seen one before, all the party’s attendees knew him by his manner as much as his clothing.
Tales of the Testers were not easily forgotten.
Holgate
After he’d returned to the library adjoining his laboratory and withdrawn the journal he kept hidden in the false-bottom drawer, he tucked it into his belt, then stoppered his ink bottle, picked up his pen, and laid them both into his travel bag. The bag had served his father well as a rifleman’s pouch, but as Bran benefited from the lessons his father had imparted as the Maker before him, so he also benefited from the scant remainders of the dangerous wartime exploits that helped make his father’s name immortal.
Taking a lantern from off his wall he walked to the Tanks more slowly now, no need to rush as the dead certainly didn’t.
With barely a moment’s hesitation, Bran slipped his arms around the child and carried her out of the compound, beyond the unassuming door beside the main gate, and down to the small slope where the dead were buried. She felt lighter in his arms than he’d expected, like something had left her—some heaviness connected to life. He set her on the grassy ground and, raising the lantern that now shown with a steady white light, looked around for a shovel.
Briefly.
Burying the dead was not his job.
But filling her spot in the Tanks was and as suddenly as the request for a Tester and a Ring of Wraiths had come into Holgate, he knew at least one Tank wouldn’t remain vacant long.
He pulled the journal out, sat down only a few feet from the body, and began to write.
&nbs
p; The girl in Tank 5 has expired under strange circumstances. She was not in my care for long, showed strong potential and was most easily persuaded to work when introduced to the cat. Death was not fever-induced and yet she said the strangest thing and seemed quite convinced of the reality of her words. “They are coming and there is naught to be done for it.” It causes me to speculate on the cause of her untimely death. She was not broken to the point of d
The pen stilled in his grip, a breeze rallying and lifting off the water. It moved like a specter up the slope, slinking around the dead girl’s body and ruffling her dirty hair before stroking its cold, damp touch across the Maker’s face and dissipating.
He squinted at the corpse. Had she stirred? Setting aside his journal and pen he leaned across her, holding the lantern to her face. No breath moved within her. But the breeze came back, this time running icy fingers through his hair and stroking the back of his neck so its every hair stood straight up. Something slipped along his ears, chilling even the insides of them with what sounded distinctly like words. “Murrrrderrr.” He shuddered, tilting his head. “Murrrderr,” the wind sang again. Then something new followed and, heart racing, he listened. “They commmmme,” the wind hummed. He rubbed his ears. “Soooooonnnn they commmmme…” He pawed frantically at his ears and stood, the journal and pen falling into the grass, his gaze wary on the water.
Last summer’s cattails waved in the wind, whistling an eerie tune. Surely that was all it had been—the wind through the rushes. Still, he gathered his things and gave one last glance to the body before walking much faster to the compound than he’d walked on his way out.
His returning speed was not because he felt lighter being relieved of the burden of the body. It was rather because the wind chased him like a hound snapping at his heels.
Philadelphia
Pushing his way through the astonished party’s crowd, old Morgan Astraea addressed the uninvited men who now stood in his foyer. “What precisely are you doing here?”