Chapter Twenty-Two
“Will it be the Dancing Skeletons?” Father Wheeler wondered aloud as they were all ushered down the hall and to the left, toward the little ballroom that would be their performance space. “Or perhaps the Melting Lady …?”
“Do you think he will be so kind as to bequeath tonight’s trick to all of us?” Madame Ivanova wondered. “I haven’t much use for a book of acts for illusionists, but I do yearn to know their secrets.”
“Yearning,” said Master Yuri with an exaggerated wink at the lady, “is the spine of romance.”
It made Madame Ivanova blush a shade of soft pink and giggle the rest of the way down the hall.
“Do you remember the one with the toad?” Seph asked, spinning to take Rhys’s arm in both her hands, holding it by the bicep like a turkey leg instead of doing the dainty linking fingers at the elbow that he had expected.
He stumbled, laughing despite himself, and placed his fingers over her hand. “I think so,” he said, squinting to call back those long-ago summer days under the Grand Pavilion. “It was a naughty pet that kept hopping between objects, only to appear atop his head at the end, under a tall hat, right?”
“Right.”
“Oh,” said the mesmerist. “Please not frogs. Looking at them too close gives me the most awful thrill.”
“Just frogs?” Rhys asked, sounding genuinely curious as he glanced over his shoulder at the man. “Or snakes and lizards too?”
“Let us just say the green things,” he answered, giving a dramatic shudder. “Scaly or slimy or both. I cannot trust a thing with green skin.”
Seph disguised a little titter, drawing Rhys’s attention back to her. “What?”
“Osiris,” she whispered, then giggled again.
And how could he do anything other than smile back at such a beautiful sight and sound?
Servants threw the ballroom doors open ahead of them, leading into a cavernous room, arranged tonight as though for a private concert.
At the end of the room, there was a long, rectangular table with five wooden urns, all tipped upside down, arranged in an arc.
In front of the table was an assortment of chairs and settees, one of the latter already occupied by an elderly woman with a pink bow in her hair and a small, ringleted little one with the same ribbon over the same ear.
Their heads turned in unison as the other guests approached, each seeking out a place to sit.
Rhys pulled Seph’s tethered form by her grip on his arm, moving quickly to what looked like the puffiest, most luxurious set of cushions of the lot, and dropped them onto the prize before she could protest or attempt otherwise to sit away from him.
She landed with a little grunt, yipping like he’d surprised a puppy. And then without a single huff or harrumph or protest, she eased back into the comfort of the seat and leaned into the warmth of him at her side, her breath releasing in a soft sigh.
He admittedly ogled this for a moment, glancing up to ensure other people were indeed in the room with them and then staring back at her easy familiarity. Ultimately, he decided there was nothing else to be done but to relax into the seat himself and enjoy this miracle as it had occurred.
He would mention it to her later, he decided. When they were alone.
For now, he was satisfied to drape his arm over the backrest, his fingers settled on her sleeve, and to know that to the world as it was in this room, they appeared to be a fondly married pair.
Merlin was the last to enter, having apparently taken a short detour to don his mask and cape.
Much like he had appeared that night of the priory, he looked strong and healthy again without the tell of his face on display.
Even his gait was steadier as he strode between his assembled guests toward the table set in the middle of the room, a wry smile playing on the lips below the blue stone domino.
He spun, making his cape fan out around him and effectively silencing all who had gathered there for tonight’s performance.
“Tonight,” he said, holding his hands up, the liver spots and knobby knuckles covered with white gloves, “I will astound and surprise my contemporaries—a feat few should ever attempt and even fewer could achieve. It will be my final performance, my swan song, and so I ask that you listen gently and carefully, for every beautiful note.”
The lamplight around the room dimmed as several servants turned down the flames in unison. It sent a bolt of static excitement through the gathered audience, several of them shuffling or adjusting in their seats in anticipation.
“This,” said Merlin, whipping from his coat a small, white orb, speckled with blue paint, “is the ancient and mysterious magic known as …” He looked around, his brows seeming to rise under his mask, though they were still invisible. “The Cup and Ball.”
There was a pause, a brief confused breath as everyone stared at him and then glanced at one another, a few little titters escaping from person to person.
This trick was a classic. Ancient. And well known to anyone who had ever performed for a living. Even Libba, who was an actress, not an illusionist, had learned to perform it. Yes, it required skill, but it was a trick of mastery, not mystery.
Rhys could feel himself starting to grin.
“This modest sphere was once the eyeball of a god,” Merlin informed them, “sculpted in alabaster and gold. It came to me as many such objects must, in a strange and terrifying twist of fate, along my travels of this wide world.”
Seph nudged him with her elbow, her own face breaking into a grin at this obvious lie. The ball itself looked to be nothing more than painted cork, rounded and polished to a sheen.
“Sometimes, one does not wish to be watched by the gods of the ancient world,” Merlin continued, tilting the center urn and placing the ball under it. He tapped the top of the urn and nodded. “There, now we are unobserved. Though it is true that the gods’ eyes wander unpredictably.”
He lifted the urn again and showed the room that the ball had vanished.
He gave a theatrical gasp, as though this surprised him more than anyone else in the room.
He searched beneath the urn to the left and the one to the right, sighing in relief when the ball was revealed to have traveled just one urn down.
“Perhaps double precautions are in order,” he mused, putting the urn back over the ball and reaching behind him to grab one of the edge urns, which he fitted overtop the first. “There, that should blind them. But alas …” He lifted the doubled-up urn and sighed heavily when nothing at all was beneath it.
This time, when he lifted the center urn, two identical white balls had appeared, winning a whoop of approval from Nini.
“It appears I am being punished for my hubris,” he lamented, continuing this trick with several flourishes, letting the balls duplicate and compact, vanish and reappear, all along the table and under all five urns.
The longer it went on, the more delighted the crowd became, many calling out guesses of what might happen next, most of which were incorrect.
In the end, Merlin laid out five identical cork balls and firmly slapped each urn over one singular ball, stepping back and shaking his head, his hands resting on his hair.
“A five-eyed god,” he murmured. “One must learn to always expect being watched, and to never think with such hubris, that any skill or trick could turn one’s primordial powers away.
I will accept them, I think, these five eyes! ”
And then, one by one, he lifted the urns from the outer edges. One, two, three, four, revealing that even while he had stepped away from the table, the balls inside had vanished.
People were already applauding before he got to the final urn, which Rhys knew would either have all five balls under it or none whatsoever.
“Tell me,” Merlin said, looking at them one at a time, “do you feel you have been watched? Do you feel the gods have seen you too? If they can lay eyes on us, why not hands? Hm?”
He waited to see if anyone would answer, but no one did. The guests and staff were all leaning forward a little, watching him toy with the final, upside-down urn on the table. “Did you feel the gods’ eyes or hands on you tonight? Madame Ivanova? Mr. Caradoc? Master Yuri?”
“Certainly not!” Yuri sniffed.
“No, sir,” Madame Ivanova replied.
“Not yet, anyhow,” Rhys answered.
Merlin grinned. He gripped the urn firmly in two hands and gave it a little wiggle, as though the things inside its beveled neck had gotten compacted.
All five balls, then, Rhys thought.
But when Merlin pulled the urn up, a clinking rattle of metal sounded instead as an assortment of jewelry fell out of the thing in a glinting pile at the middle of the table, gold and silver and brass melded together along chains and hoops.
“My ring!” Madame Ivanova gasped, suddenly flashing her wide-spread fingers up in front of her, realizing that her ruby had somehow traveled to the table.
“My pocket watch,” Rhys added, nodding to the dented brass timepiece in the center of the pile. He glanced down at Seph, whose hand had gone around her throat in search of the ribbon she’d been wearing there all day, charmed with the little oval tiger’s eye.
That was on the table too.
Somehow.
“But then,” Merlin said with a twinkle, “where have the eyes gone? Ah, Father Wheeler, you found one. How odd. It was right in your lap.”
One by one, the rest of them looked down at themselves, each one finding a painted cork ball somewhere about their seat, their own personal god’s eye.
Then, from the rear, one of the maids gasped, pulling a ball from her apron pocket and holding it up to her colleagues.
Each of them patted themselves down the torso, and each of them produced a little ball.
It had to have been over a dozen, all in all.
And truly, the only thing one could reasonably do in the face of such utter mastery was applaud.
So, applaud they all did, as Merlin the Magician took his final bow in costume, grinning widely, as though this were always the final turn he had imagined. He bowed thrice, in each direction, and folded his hands in front of him with a little sigh of contentment.
It was, as far as Rhys was concerned, the best finale people like them could ever dream of.