Chapter 13 #3
She felt a kinship deeper than blood with the aerialists. Even as she’d protested, from embarrassment, from fear, she knew she could do what they’d asked of her. She wanted to do it, to trust the cool air to carry her flesh, to make her return to the deep sense of self nascent within her.
The moment the aerialists had introduced themselves, she’d already forgotten their names. Standing under a tent in her golden leotard, which fit just right, she didn’t think names mattered at all for what they were about to do. All they needed was instinct, trust, and awareness.
Instinct and awareness she understood. She was still working on trust.
“You will hear the moves in your blood. Heed them, surrender to the call, and your body will do what it must,” said one of the two males in the group.
“I know.” She hoped she didn’t come across as haughty, but she needed them to see she was already one of them.
He answered with a nod. “Every second of this show is one of deep knowing. Do not let the knowing drop. That is all there is to the magic of the Odeon. It’s all there ever was.”
Esmeray had said something like it before. You can practice all you want, my darling, but you already have everything you need. It was there all along and will be there when you need it.
She’d never performed at such heights before, but the instinct was the same whether she was ten feet off the ground or a thousand.
It wasn’t herself she needed to convince.
She shouldn’t give a whit what Jesstin thought, but she needed him to understand that while maybe none of it made sense to him as an outsider, it was innate to her.
She’d been so impatient to get back to him, to be close to him.
.. but then he’d treated her like a petulant child.
In his fixation with protecting her, with needing to be right about every damned thing, he no longer saw her, and it was unutterably devastating.
The cursed bond had done a number on her, but their bond could be broken—would be broken.
Then, and only then, would she be free of the spell of his approval.
Of anyone’s.
“Aelloven, have you any uncertainties before we call to the skies?” asked one of the other performers.
“No,” she answered proudly. “None.”
Hands from both sides linked with hers. The troupe formed a circle and murmured a chant she didn’t know but felt strongly that she should know, and her not knowing planted the first seed of doubt.
“To the Odeon,” one of them said.
“To the Heavens,” the rest answered.
Her mumbled words trailed theirs. Were they as disappointed in her as she was in herself? Like the talent, the instinct wasn’t learned. It was known.
A thunderous voice announced the show. Sweat greased her palms. She couldn’t entertain her last-minute jitters. Aerialism was a demonstration of instinct. There was no skill involved, no dust to knock off her joints.
“The stars await,” the man who’d explained things said, and he shot straight into the air, disappearing into the night above the tent.
One by one, the others followed. Elloven was last, surrendering to her compulsion and crying out as her body rocketed through the icy night and into the unknown.
Her upward momentum slowed when her hands connected with the hands of another, and the two somersaulted around each other in midair. She relaxed. The awe below seemed miles and miles away.
She’d done it. She’d taken to the skies with ease. The hardest part was behind her.
As she flew from one aerialist, she linked to another. Fingers encircled her ankles. She felt the formation in her mind. A star, we’re a star.
She was smiling, beaming from the inside, and the crowd, Jesstin... All of it fell away.
This is what it feels like to be truly free. To be home.
Her only awareness was the glide of one moment into another, the graceful timelessness. Weightlessness. Flesh brushing flesh, the precision force of grip and slip.
The sharp chokehold came on in one horrifying instant.
Her heart seized up like someone was grinding it in their fist. She wheezed, twisting and instinctively reaching for the source of the pain, but it broke the connection with the aerialist holding fast to her wrists.
She tried to fix it, to rejoin, but all she knew, all she heard, was a collective screech in her mind and soul, an absolute certitude she had failed in the worst way, and everything was about to dissolve into chaos.
The sky detonated with dazzling, searing light. Screams followed and, from somewhere nearer, the horrified cry of Elloven, no!
It was her. It had come from her. She was scorching from the inside out.
Hands left her ankles, and she went hurtling, tumbling through the sky. She plummeted toward the earth in agonizing slow motion, bracing for death.
Landing knocked the air from her, but instead of pain, there was nothing. She slid her hands over herself, then felt the rough canvas underneath her. The tent top had broken her fall.
But when the other aerialists landed, the pain, at last, arrived.
Jesstin went from thunderstruck to horrified in the blink of an eye.
He saw the catastrophe unfold before it became one. He held his breath, praying she could recover it, but it wasn’t a problem of skill. Even he could see the aerialists were connected in some psychic, cosmic way.
It was that singularity that had broken in Elloven, and had sent the aerialists into a free fall.
He was on his feet before she hit the tent, but the slam of bodies on top of hers sent him careening to his knees, hit from all sides.
Ryquin didn’t move. Estelar hissed something under his breath and stormed off in a different direction.
From the corner of his eyes, Jesstin saw Taven flying down the steps toward the accident.
He had to get to Elloven before Taven did, before any of them did.
Tiny, electric sparks of flames rained onto the field and into the amphitheater. All around him, people covered their heads and ran.
His feet kicked out as he pitched forward, nearly toppling into the row underneath the box, but sheer momentum carried him where he needed to go, one defiant step after the next, until he was practically sailing over rows and colliding with people, defying physics without Elloven’s skill but with just as much determination.
Jesstin hit ground level in a sprint. A crowd had already amassed at the crash site. “Move. Move, move!” he hollered, shoving through and wrenching people to the side.
Men and women pulled aerialists from the pile and dragged them away.
The dense fabric of the collapsed tent bowed inches from the ground.
Those few inches had probably saved her life, and he knew she was alive because he still felt her, in the same way his heartbeat reminded him of his own existence.
He found her lying supine underneath a man, whose body was strewn perpendicular to hers. Blood pooled from his head, which must have smacked the hard canvas when he’d landed.
Jesstin crawled across the tent top and pushed the man aside. He didn’t check to see if he was alive. He didn’t care. They could all fuck off to the netherworld. They were all complicit.
The canvas was too unsteady to walk on, so he looped his arms under her shoulders and dragged her to the edge until she was close enough to take her in his arms. She flopped against him, limp and unresponsive.
“I need a room. Now,” he ordered the first person he saw.
The woman surveyed the scene dazedly. She was in shock. They all were. Presumably flying magi crashing to the earth wasn’t a regular occurrence. “Is she... Is she all right?”
“A room!”
“Yes. Ah. Ah, follow me. Come, come.” She pulled her shawl tight and hurried through a gap, headed toward the amphitheater, then ducked behind it.
Along the back side were three doors side by side.
She hesitated, then picked the middle one, flinging it open.
“It’s a... a dressing room for the performers.
I don’t know what’s in there. I don’t... I don’t know what you need...”
Jesstin kicked the door shut behind him.
Elloven’s head lolled against his chest. She was pure dead weight, arms and feet dangling, her body sliding.
“Elloven, please. Open your eyes,” he whispered as he laid her on a cushioned settee covered in discarded attire.
She finally stirred, slithering on the fabric.
Her flashy, tight gold uniform, which had covered her arms and legs when she’d started, had seemingly.
.. burst somehow, split up both sides like someone had taken shears to it.
It clung together by only the thinnest remnants of fabric.
He conducted a frenzied search of the dressing room for something he could put over her.
The racks were just costume after costume, but on a bench, he found a thick, formless dress, the kind Rhiain wore under her formal gowns.
He held it up in bewilderment, unsure if it would fit or how to even determine such a thing.
“Aren’t you going to check her for injuries first?” It sounded like Gennady, but he wasn’t there.
That was the first thing he should have done. It was why he’d brought her, alone, to the room to begin with, so there’d be space to breathe and think and assess and—
Voices gathered outside the door. He heard the woman who’d helped him say, “He took her there, asked for a room. I don’t know...”
Jesstin raced to the door and threw the bolt right as Taven pushed a scream through his teeth on the other side.
“Open the bloody door, Skylark! I know you have her in there!”
Jesstin punched the wood once in warning. Elloven’s eyes fluttered with her slow return to consciousness, shivers tearing through her.
“I can help her, you stupid boy!”