CHAPTER THREE
My stomach somersaults as Everest walks towards me, vest-less this time, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
Ender is so still he might as well be a translucent cutout.
Only Cillian stands up from the table and stretches, before jumping off to greet our newest guest, flopping onto his back in his continued quest for belly rubs.
That little traitor.
“Not announcing your presence is also rude,” I say, scrambling to gauge how much he’s heard.
“I just got here,” Everest says, getting on his knees to oblige our affection-hog of a feline.
I gesture frantically at Quill to get rid of the bowl.
Quill’s magic starts sliding the bowl towards a stack of books when an invisible force – the petulant fair – halts the bowl in its path.
Quill exerts even more force until the bowl jerks from side to side in a game of supernatural tug-of-war, splashing drops over the rim.
I can practically hear Quill’s shrieks despite the lack of contact with her pages.
Thankfully, Cillian purrs, distracting Everest long enough that the bowl eventually moves out of sight.
“But I imagine you were just begging Quill for a way to go home.”
“What, no comments about how exhausting it must be for me?” I ask, unable to stop myself from rambling in the midst of my worry. But had Everest seen or heard anything with the bowl, his tone would surely be different. “How I’m on a foolish quest to go back to a past that no longer exists?”
“Not this again,” Ender groans.
My desire to live out the rest of my life as I’d planned it – completing my residency, becoming a surgeon at the hospital Nova and I attended together, building my greenhouse library all while living within vicinity of my aging parents, close enough to sample my mom’s cooking on weekends but far enough to carve out my own peace – it’s not a secret to anyone here.
Everest knows I’ve asked Quill to help me go back, but he’s never understood it.
“Your words, not mine,” Everest says, shifting to give Cillian his favorite chin scratches. The cat’s eye closes in bliss.
“Your words that I’m repeating,” I remind him, relief slowly spreading through me.
I can deal with Everest not comprehending why I want to go back – after all, his family’s little more than a distant memory to him.
All Everest has concerned himself with in the centuries I’ve known him is, well, himself.
He has a kind heart, but the frivolities of human emotion (his words, not mine) are a mystery to him.
The god lives in constant pursuit of entertainment – poker with demons, dragon-riding contests, adventures across magical seas – and he has the freedom to go to whichever realm suits his fancy.
But despite his staunch refusal to take anything seriously, he cannot know about the tokens I’ve taken from time.
“I’m just saying, mortal relationships sound exhausting,” Everest says, ignoring how Ender burrows his head into his hands. “They’ve wound you up and ruled your every decision since you came here, and I just think you could relax more.”
“Oh, god,” Ender says.
“I relax.” I square my shoulders for a fight. “And it’s called caring–”
“About the people you love,” Everest says with a hint of jest. “I know. Nothing a god like me could possibly understand. I come in peace, though, I promise.”
I uncurl my tightly balled fists. As history would suggest, this conversation could turn ugly quickly, but Everest looks keen to wave a white flag. The events of today clearly have my nerves on puppet strings, and we’d be better off turning our attention towards a solution than on each other.
“Fine, fine. No arguing today,” I back down. “Thought you escaped while this place fell into disarray. Where were you off to?”
“Disarray may be a bit of an exaggeration. I just saw Geneva chasing Beam around with a broomstick. Standard affair.” He stands next to me, both hands clasped behind his back. Cillian has followed him and languidly rubs against our legs.
“I’m going to go see if Beam needs my help,” Ender mutters, making a quick escape.
This close, Everest carries the distinct smells of the forest; the woodsy scent of pine and fir, the brine of the river that runs about half a mile over. But there’s something sweeter mixed with it today. Something I recognize.
He smirks, reading my expression, and flourishes a bundle of lavender sprigs from behind his back. “Happy anniversary. It’s been a long and torturous four hundred and eighty-seven years with you.”
It’s like he’s stuck his hand into my gut and squeezed. I close my hands around the soft stems while internally chiding my heart for doing far too much. “You know we have bigger problems than bringing me flowers,” I croak out.
“Told you I’d be back soon,” he says. “Besides, it’s tradition.”
A laugh escapes me. “You’re a bit early with tradition.”
It started off as a joke, Everest’s flower delivery.
Due to the nature of his wretched existence, he’s the only person here who can leave the bounds of the fair without using the carousel, which means he’s the only one who can bring us things from other dimensions.
On year ninety-four of my reign at the fair, Beam developed a fascination with flowers, and he took to bringing back fallen lilies and thorny roses, mostly for her amusement.
On my one-hundred-and-fifth anniversary, I returned from a particularly unpleasant trip to a mosquito-infested tropical forest to find a lavender sprig in my tent, with a note that said:
Beam says lavenders remind her of you and insisted I give you one.
I’d cried over that – a fact that mortifies me to this day.
Not because Everest had brought me flowers, but because I hadn’t had anything from the world outside the fair in all my years here.
It nurtured the deep ache in my heart, a bittersweet reminder of all I had unwittingly walked away from.
I didn’t think anyone had heard, since I was alone in my grief that night in my tent.
But Everest has brought me a few sprigs of lavender almost every year since, missing my actual anniversary by a variable number of months, usually after someone’s reminded him.
Not this year, though, since no one else has said a word.
“You know me, I’ll take any reason to escape a Geneva meltdown,” Everest says, falling into the chair next to Quill with a sigh, oblivious to my impending tears. He slides over some of my notes that I’ve flung haphazardly across the table. “You haven’t made a record of your trip today?”
My favorite book in the archives is the one thin encyclopedia on the carousel, author unknown, which speaks briefly to the types of time ruptures that a keeper may encounter.
I’ve taken to adding to it, accumulating notes on my various adventures, ranging from the kind of stitching that’s best addressed the more serious rots to the particular challenges that come with extracting inebriated folks who are abducted by their timeline.
Recently, I’ve been using this research to approximate space between timelines.
It’s a lot of math, which isn’t my favorite, but it’s a fun challenge for my brain to work out.
It makes me think of when I’d go to Stanford with my dad and watch him prepare his lecture materials on proofs and calculus.
“Not the priority right now.” I try to disengage with memories of my parents before they swallow me whole. “Besides, it was a fairly standard job until everything else happened.”
“So, you didn’t try that zipper move you were talking about?” he says, pulling at an invisible string with pinched index fingers and thumbs.
“It’s called a purse-string suture,” I correct him. I’ve been toying around with applying my surgical techniques to the carousel, and it’s not been as different as one might expect. “And no, I was in a hurry. We had an unsuspecting guest about a second away from barging in on us.”
Everest picks up a spare pen and starts making notes in the margin. I tug at the paper. “Are you going to doodle all over the pages again?”
“No, I’m writing what you told me,” he says, batting me away. “I’ll do your trip record while you use your big brain to solve our carousel problem. Although, there’s nothing in the old records that will help you. This thing with the carousel… It’s a first.”
I wait for some sort of reaction from the carousel, but the powers that rule us seem busy.
Cillian’s playing with the rope that dangles from the center pole of the archives; the fair’s invisible hand keeps pulling it up and out of reach, to the cat’s dismay.
Everest himself looks unnervingly relaxed, unfastening the top button of his shirt as he continues to write.
I catch the words “zipper is more apt than purse-string” and stifle a smile.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “You’ve been here, well, forever, and surely you can’t remember every single incident?” His memory has never been the strongest.
He puts the pen down. “I don’t remember every single incident, but I would remember this. Trust me, it’s never happened before.”
Unfortunately, I do have to trust him on matters concerning the carousel. I may be the longest-standing keeper, but he’s been here longer than I have, longer than nearly any ghost, as well.
“So what do I do?” I ask, collapsing on the floor. Cillian, spotting a spare lap, abandons play to trot over to me. He kneads my thighs and settles into a comfortable position, not caring that my body feels like it’s stuck under the Arctic permafrost.
“Do the same thing as always. Dive into the carousel, identify the source of the rot.” The look he sends my way brims with mischief. “I wouldn’t count on it being underwear-related this time, unfortunately.”
“Helpful,” I say sarcastically, then sigh. “We’re going to need a lot of time.” Both the thread kind and otherwise.
Everest gets to his feet. “On it. Come with me.”