Chapter Thirty-One
Once the old trick had been mastered, they began to build in the new elements. The updated patter. The ropes. Even the bits of fool’s gold both had brought without telling the other from Seph’s shop.
By the time the thirtieth had arrived, after countless nights of wonders and a few of simple games and conversation, Seph was finally ready to step into a changeling’s skin again.
She was ready to become, and be undone, and become again.
The night she had reclaimed her costume had given her an idea for enhancing the performance as well, and when they set up all five black velvet curtain frames in the ballroom that evening, before dinner, they set mirrors between them.
They didn’t hide the mirrors. What would have been the point in a room of professionals?
One did not need confusion to feel disoriented by a mirror in the dark, after all. Seph always avoided the ones in her own apartment when she had to get up in the night for water or to relieve herself.
No one likes an uncertain reflection, and that was the entire point of this trick.
She hadn’t eaten much at dinner. She needed to move quickly and lightly, and that was easiest on an empty stomach.
Rhys, in all his beautiful foresight, had quietly instructed the staff to cover their picked-over dinners and leave them upstairs in the master suite so that they could eat afterward, once the rush of excitement had drained from their bodies and full, round stomachs could be slept on, rather than avoided.
They dressed with their backs to each other, Rhys dabbing kohl over his lashes and shaking out his arms in the loose tunic he wore for this performance—provincial and flexible.
Seph loosened her hair and combed it to a sheen, weaving in the palest of the flowers, the golden ones, at her brow while Rhys tied the matching kerchief around his throat. She tied her medieval dress tight to her ribs, to keep her upright and precise throughout what was to come.
They wore one pair of shoes.
The others were hidden, along with the flowers and kerchiefs downstairs.
Every switch would very subtly change these accessories.
The flowers would shift to a darker shade and then back again, but as lilies rather than roses.
Rhys would do the same with his kerchief, fabric and pattern and hue all changing just enough to be unsettling without being obvious.
They faced each other, mirroring a quick series of stretches, and then counted together and exhaled as hard as they could.
An old ritual for dispelling nerves.
A good one.
And then, it seemed to Seph, that they traveled without walking and appeared in the ballroom, in front of their curtain frames, assembled before their audience. It seemed to her that they had skipped the journey and arrived just after their exhaling ritual.
The lights were dimmed.
The crowd was hushed.
And her extremities came alive. They came alive in a way she hadn’t felt in a decade, since the last time she’d performed on a stage rather than behind a till. Something lit inside her, sparkling and sweet, and she could not remember any nerves or uncertainties anymore because she was home.
“There is an old story,” Rhys began, carrying a lantern toward a small table at the front and center of the panels and setting it down, increasing the light until his kohl-lined eyes glowed, “in the hallowed and ancient hills of these lands, where things have never quite been tamed. You have heard this story, perhaps. You have heard whispers of Tylwyth Teg, or auf, or ‘the good neighbors.’ And whether you know it or not, you have met them too. Because among us walk the changelings.”
Seph passed behind him, her shadow and reflection bouncing and dancing in the dark and isolated light. He waited until that shadow passed over him and stepped backward, allowing her to loop around him.
“Infants taken from their cradles,” she continued, bracing her hands on either side of the lantern.
“Replaced with a lookalike from the other side. Why do the fae take our infants? Why do they give us their own? Some say it is not for us to know. Some say it is to learn, to watch, to listen. That is not the question you should ask, however. The question you should ask is not why or how, but instead examine the reasons we are allowed to be aware of it happening. Question the clues … because if the fair folk did not want us to notice, be assured, we would not.”
“For the satisfaction,” Rhys suggested, passing carefully to her left and walking behind her.
She jerked up the lantern, spinning to confront him, and found only his shoes, one in front of the other, as though he had vanished mid-stride.
She knelt, touching the heel of one of the shoes as the others gasped and his voice sounded, echoing from the other side of the room.
“Or perhaps for the fun?”
She stood quickly and spun to find him leaning against the wall, examining his fingernails, a smile wide on his face. When she swung the lantern back to the floor, the shoes were gone.
“Looking for these?” he asked, gesturing down at his own feet. “They are mine. You cannot keep them.”
There was a smattering of awe throughout the gathered, whispers and shifting in their seats.
Rhys strode across the room, hopping back up onto their elevated stage and stalking toward her. He snatched the lantern from her grip and gave her a gloating grin. “You think you’re so different to me?” he asked, crowding her so that she stumbled backward—one step, two, and—
There was a gasp from the assembled, loud and synchronized this time as Seph appeared to fall backward, to exist and not exist, and Rhys slowly, gloatingly lowered the lantern to the pair of half-stepped slippers at his toes.
“A prize,” he said, lifting the lantern to his face and leering ghoulishly at the audience.
“Not for you, it isn’t,” Seph’s voice told him.
He whipped around to find nothing there, just the shoes, then gave a relieved little laugh, like he had imagined it. Then he turned again to say something to the audience, only to find Seph nose-to-nose with him, somehow in front of the table.
It startled the audience enough that there was the creak of wood from the chairs skittering a little against their tenuous grip on the floors below.
“Who are you?” Rhys demanded. “Where is the other girl?”
Seph gave a gentle, eerie smile, pacing in circles around him, the flowers in her hair glinting in the light. “I don’t know what you mean. I have only ever been myself. And you? Are you one boy or both?”
She grabbed for the lantern and Rhys was gone again, just shoes in his place.
“That’s what I thought,” Seph observed, setting the lantern down and turning to the audience. “Sometimes they try to catch us in the act, you know. There are tests. Watchers. The fearful. Iron in the pockets. Gold in their sleeves.”
She produced the handful of fool’s gold, glittering in the light, and discarded it with a scoff.
Rhys shot up from amidst the audience, scaring half the soul out of Father Yuri and the Breton mesmerist, who were seated on either side of him. “It is not fearful to want the truth!” he shouted, his kerchief redder than it had been before.
He stomped up to the stage, his shoes making noise enough that it made eyes go back to where the empty pair should have been.
Gone again.
“The problem with trying to force the truth from a lie,” Seph said as Rhys produced a pair of red ropes and took her hand from the table, lashing his skin to hers while she continued speaking as though it were no bother, “is that perception has always been stronger than both.”
He knotted tightly, pulling on their bound hands to show that they were cleaved now.
“And is there anything stronger than perception?” she marveled, looking indulgently at the ropes.
“Belief!” called Father Wheeler.
“Determination!” Madame Ivanova guessed.
It made Seph giggle. She paced around Rhys, wrapping the dangling remains of rope tighter around her own body and his. “Perception is weak in the face of one thing only: distraction.”
She kissed him hard on the mouth and then pushed herself back, leaving nothing behind but dangling, loose ropes, held softly around Rhys’s form, and again, her shoes, empty on the stage.
He shook the ropes off, leaving them on the ground. “You had better come back!” he shouted. “You cannot spend too long in the other realm, or you will find yourself changed.”
“‘Changed’?” Seph asked, her flowers now peonies, streaked red and orange, suddenly standing back inside the discarded shoes. “Or improved?”
“Perhaps both,” Rhys answered, crossing closer to her. “Perhaps neither. Who but a changeling could say?”
They mirrored one another, in the wary dance of someone who was uncertain if they were the monster or the hero.
And then, suddenly, the light doused.
There was a breath of silence, and then the wall lamps were raised back to burning high, and only two pairs of shoes were left on the stage, still half in the process of circling one another.
The first two people to applaud in the audience stood.
Rhys and Seph themselves, somehow right in the center of everyone else.
Their feet were bare.
Everyone stared at them for a moment, silent.
“Excellent trick,” Seph said to Rhys in her normal voice. “I wonder who they were, those performers.”
“Not sure,” Rhys answered. “I’ve never seen them before in my life.”
*
They mingled in the ballroom for a time after, absorbing praise and good-natured admonishment.
“I cannot imagine you focused enough for intensive rehearsals,” Nini was saying to Rhys. “You seem a distractible sort, if you don’t mind me saying. You’ve a unique disposition.”
“My disposition? Well, that is a sad story,” he answered, winking at Seph. “An odd gentleman I suspect was of the fair folk approached me once when I was a child and said, ‘Young man, may I have your attention?’ and, foolish lad that I was, I gave it to him.”
Seph rolled her eyes, swallowing down her own chuckle, and moved across the room to where she was being beckoned by Merlin, alone in his chair.
“I’ve a bit of a problem,” Merlin began as she took the seat next to him. “A quandary.”
“Oh?” she replied.
“Yes, I’m afraid I promised to choose a winner amongst this group. You recall?”
“I certainly do,” she answered, taking his empty cup from his hands and motioning for a footman to come refill it with ice. “Are you rethinking that promise?”
Merlin sighed. “Yes. How am I supposed to choose?”
“Pick a name out of your hat,” she suggested. “That’s what I would do.”
“I don’t have a hat,” Merlin replied, his eyes twinkling enough that she laughed.
“Well,” she said, “tomorrow is the seance. You can always ask for the opinion of the ghosts. Given our location and the stones this house was built from, I imagine there are many of them about, and all with opinions.”
“The ghosts of Lewes Priory?” Merlin asked, giving a dry chortle. “They will favor the Catholic priest, of course. That wouldn’t be fair at all.”
“Well, now,” she said, thickening the Irish in her accent, “I’m Catholic too.”
“We’re all pagans at heart, lovely,” Merlin said with a sigh, shaking his head. “What do you think we’re doing here?”
She tilted her head to the side, acknowledging this observation. It was fair enough.
“Are you going to keep that man of yours?” Merlin asked. “After?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, accepting the refilled glass of ice and handing it gently to Merlin. “He’s not getting away again. I’ve got ropes.”
“Excellent,” said Merlin. “You know, I think the only reason I was ever invited to perform in the Grand Pavilion was because the Baroness Selwyn thought the two of you would enjoy it. After you stopped performing there in the summers, I stopped getting invited.”
“Oh,” said Seph, frowning. “My apologies. That was my fault, you know. My folly.”
He shook his head. “It is all right. The whole point of being alive is to make folly and learn how to avoid it next time. The only injustice is that we only get one life for all those lessons. Imagine how well we could do if we got to keep eighty years of knowledge and start again as babes.”
“Merlin,” she said seriously. “That sounds horrible.”
It made him laugh again, thin and wheezing, his narrow shoulders shaking. “Maybe it does,” he conceded. “Maybe it does.”
She produced the fool’s gold from her sleeve, where she’d tucked it back in during the performance, and held it out to him. “For you,” she said. “For the love of folly.”
“And for protection?” he asked, holding a shaking hand out to accept them. “From the fair folk?”
“No,” she said, watching his fingers curl over the glinting nuggets and holding them tightly. “You don’t need protection from your own.”