The Bootlace Magician

by Cassie Beasley

  Victoria didn’t even look at him. “I’ve known it was near London for a couple of weeks now. Smart of them— moving it here. It’s so difficult for the Man Who Bends Light when they settle in cities. I didn’t expect it.”

  Micah went cold. Maybe she’s bluffing. Maybe it’s a test, and she doesn’t really know.

  “They’re not anywhere near here,” he said. “They’re hundreds of miles away.”

  Victoria set her menu on top of her plate.

  “You’re determined,” she said. “And not the worst liar I’ve ever met. Useful qualities, though wasted in this case. I know exactly where the circus is thanks to the mousebirds. Odd little things. I’ve never been able to control them, but I can sense them when I’m near enough.”

  She took a sip of water and smiled at him over the rim of the glass. “I can be there in five minutes by air, when I’m ready.”

  The waiter returned, and Victoria ordered three courses off the menu. Micah had never looked at his own copy, and the tiny print swam across the page when he tried.

  Five minutes by air. Even if he did get word to them somehow, five minutes wasn’t enough time to evacuate all the children. A plan. You need a plan.

  When the waiter turned to Micah, he thought of asking if it might be possible for the cook to poison Victoria’s food. Instead, he pointed randomly at a few things. The man raised his eyebrows and whisked the menu away.

  “To business, Micah darling,” said Victoria as soon as he was gone. “I have a proposition for you! I thought we’d lost the opportunity when I found out you’d gone to the circus, but here we find ourselves by happy chance. Tell me—your magic? Is it the same as Ephraim’s?”

  “All I can do is tie knots,” said Micah.

  Victoria nodded. “Good old Gertie said as much when I visited her, but I wanted to be sure. You see, I was rather hoping my grandson might have taken after me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  The Inventor was right, he thought. She wanted someone to help her control her birds.

  “Well, no matter,” said Victoria, tapping her fingernail absentmindedly against her glass. “You’re family after all. Have you put much thought into your future? I suppose you must have considered joining the circus on a permanent basis. Immortality is quite the job perk, I admit, but what good is it, if you’re a slave to a ridiculous purpose for the whole of your life?”

  “The circus isn’t ridiculous,” Micah said.

  Victoria smirked. “You think not? What would you call it then? Geoffrey could blackmail every businessman in the world. Rosebud’s potions could make her a billionaire. The Man Who Bends Light could topple governments. And what do they do instead?”

  Micah knew how powerful the magicians of Circus Mirandus were, but he’d never thought about it like this. In terms of governments and money and—

  “They fritter their endless days away, putting on pretty shows for children.”

  “They’re putting magic into the world. They give people—”

  Hope, he was going to say. He’d seen it himself. He’d felt it. Something about visiting Circus Mirandus made you believe that no matter how bad things were in the outside world, there was still a chance for them to turn out all right.

  But Victoria didn’t let him finish.

  “It’s practically a crime! The way they waste themselves—slaving away for the sake of inspiring and nurturing and listening to a parade of human children who will grow up to become every bit as insignificant as the countless generations that came before them.”

  Human children, thought Micah, as if Victoria imagined there was some other kind.

  “Do you know how rare magicians are? How precious our power is?” She pointed at him. Her fingernails were painted a pale shade of peach.

  Micah’s heart beat fast. Victoria was clearly working herself up now, and he didn’t want her to do anything. Not here with all these people sitting so close.

  “Do you know how many people can command more than a million birds from the other side of the world?” She let her hand fall onto the table hard. The glasses rattled.

  Micah jumped in his seat.

  Victoria blinked, and then laughed lightly, as if nothing she’d just said was that important.

  Micah was thinking frantically. She couldn’t possibly control birds from so far away, could she? Nowhere would be safe.

  “A million.”

  When Victoria’s smile widened, he realized he’d said the number aloud.

  “Impressive, isn’t it? And all for the sake of a little distraction. I learned how to do it from the Man Who Bends Light.”

  “The Lightbender wouldn’t teach you anything.” Micah said it quietly, but with absolute conviction. “He wouldn’t help you.”

  Victoria’s eyes narrowed into slits, and he thought for a moment that contradicting her might be an unforgivable mistake. But after a pause, she went on as if nothing had happened.

  “No. He certainly didn’t mean to help me. He has no ambition beyond performing tricks for snotty brats. And when I tried to show him how unimportant his precious circus is, how small it is in the grand scheme, he tortured me for it.”

  Micah thought torture was an extreme description. Victoria had been soaring around her tent, slaughtering birds for sport and crashing them into an audience full of little kids. All the Lightbender had done was illusion her into thinking she’d forgotten how to fly.

  But when Victoria spoke next, there was a vicious undercurrent in her voice.

  “He told me I was falling from the sky.” Her eyes burned with the memory. “I, who have never fallen. And he poured so much magic into the illusion that I couldn’t look away from it. Not for years. He stamped his lie deep in my mind so that every time I tried to fly the terror overcame me. He made me think I was nothing. He made me think I was human.”

  Micah held himself very still in his seat. It was ludicrous for Victoria to keep saying the word human like it was a dirty species that didn’t have anything to do with her. But he knew if he argued right now, she would hurt him for it.

  “I thought I would never be myself again. I left the circus and met Ephraim. Played at being a mother to Gertrudis. Gave birth to your father. But inside of me . . . oh, can you imagine the despair, Micah? Of knowing that you had such power and it had been taken from you? It was a kind of death.”

  It would be terrible to lose his magic, but Micah didn’t think it would be anything at all like dying.

  “I learned from it,” Victoria said, drawing in a deep breath. “I learned how a strong enough command can warp a mind so that it remains obedient long after it has left the magician’s influence. And I practiced once I regained my powers, so that I could do it, too.”

  She sighed. “No more sweet songs for the Bird Woman, but so much more impact. Of course, the trick won’t work on most of the magical species. They have to be handled directly. But ordinary flocks can be so easily overwhelmed. They’ll continue following my instructions even though they haven’t seen me in weeks. Oh! Appetizers!”

  Their waiter had appeared with plates.

  So that’s how she did it, Micah thought, staring down at the food that had been placed in front of him. Apparently, he’d ordered a salad, though the leaves and nuts and tiny drops of vinegar had been arranged until they looked more like abstract art than lunch. A poached egg was nestled in the middle of it all, oozing yolk.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” Victoria said. A bowl of pale soup steamed in front of her.

  Micah made himself take a bite. He felt like he was trying to swallow paper.

  She tucked into her soup, and he tried to use the few minutes of quiet to work out an escape plan. He stuffed salad and egg into his mouth without paying attention, chewing mechanically, and he thought, It’s important to do things in the right order.

  First,
sever Victoria’s connection to the dire hawk. Hope it doesn’t eat Yuri out of spite. Second, use the emergency bracelets. Last, run as fast as you can toward the Door.

  The bracelets were easy. And Micah thought he knew his way back to the china shop he and Yuri had arrived in.

  Porter would have the Door open the instant he called for help.

  But breaking Victoria’s connection to the dire hawk was going to be a problem.

  * * *

  “Conflagration’s a brute,” Victoria admitted, digging a spoon into a dish of ice cream. “But he’s my brute. Do you have any idea how much a dragon can eat? Feeding him has been a full-time job.”

  Micah was letting his own dessert melt in his bowl. He had been trying to distract Victoria with questions the whole meal, hoping she would go off on such a long monologue that he would have time to find the overlay he’d seen when he collapsed Porter’s Door. If he could just touch the connection that tied Victoria to the dire hawk, he could free the bird. But he couldn’t focus his mind.

  He’d learned more than he ever cared to know about his grandmother over the past hour or so, and he hadn’t caught even a glimmer of light at the corner of his vision. He was beginning to think he was taking the wrong tactic altogether.

  He crossed his eyes, hoping that might help, and Victoria said, “What are you doing?”

  Time. He just needed time. Ask another question. Ask a whole bunch of them.

  “So, is that why you attacked the circus when we were going through the Door in Argentina?” he said, trying to match the overly friendly tone Victoria was so fond of using. “You wanted a unicorn to feed to Conflagration? So that he would be able to fly and help you get revenge on all of us? Or do you only want to kill the Lightbender?”

  Micah figured he knew the answer to these questions. And he couldn’t believe the Bird Woman seriously thought he might join her “little team,” which apparently consisted of Victoria herself and the dragon. She believed that Conflagration would be more controllable when he grew his wings, but for now, she seemed to think of him as a large and badly behaved dog.

  Victoria pursed her lips. “I hope you weren’t frightened by the attack. It wasn’t intended to hurt anyone at the circus, you know. And I had no idea you were even there.”

  Micah didn’t answer. He was staring deeply into his bowl of ice cream, trying to see anything at all but melted dairy.

  She sighed. “No wonder you don’t want to join me. You seem to think my goals are so common.”

  Connections, thought Micah. Knots. Rivers and streams of light. Come on, please?

  “Well, there’s no harm in letting you see the big picture now, I suppose. Conflagration’s already in position. Micah, darling, I’m not out for revenge. And I hope you don’t imagine me to be some cinema villain bent on world domination. Revenge is for backward thinkers, and conquest is for people with wounded egos and too much free time. What I want is much simpler.”

  Her spoon clinked against the side of her bowl.

  “What I want,” she said, her voice fervent, “is something new. A fresh start. A big, bright, and shining chance to make my mark on things again. Oh, darling, you don’t know how hard it is, to reach old age and find yourself facing down obscurity. I should have been somebody—a name on every human tongue, a song in every mortal heart. And I would have been . . . but I have had to spend all my life in hiding for fear that the circus would come after me. No more. Soon, so very soon, I will be more powerful than ever before, and I will have something that not even the manager, not even the Man Who Bends Light, can take away from me.”

  So passionate was this speech, so filled with longing, that Micah couldn’t help but stare at her. “What are you even talking about?”

  Victoria’s lips curved up at the edges. “You’re so young,” she murmured. “Micah, I’m talking about starting over. About reinventing myself. About putting my name in lights for all the world to admire. All I need is a big enough idea.”

  And, finally, Micah understood what Victoria wanted. What she’d wanted all this time. “Fish,” he said. “You want Fish.”

  That lightning strike last summer—it had been aimed at the center of the menagerie for a reason. If Fish’s tank had been damaged, the Inventor might have taken it away for repair. Fish would have been vulnerable.

  And when that hadn’t worked, Victoria had used the blizzard. She’d known it would prompt the circus to move. The dire hawk hadn’t been going after Terpsichore that day after all. It had been trying for the aquarium on the Inventor’s tool belt.

  Victoria didn’t want to fight the circus. She’d wanted to snatch Fish without doing battle at all.

  Then, Micah realized something else. Victoria might not want to fight, but she was willing to. She was prepared for it. The dragon and the huge magical flock were her backup plan in case everything else failed.

  “I told you,” said Victoria, dabbing her mouth with her napkin, “you have entirely the wrong impression of me. I’m not some frightful boogeywoman. I’m a visionary. The Idea will choose some random nobody if left to its own devices. It belongs in the hands of a magician. When its time comes, if I am the only one nearby, it will have no other choice to make.”

  The locator knot on Micah’s finger was still tugging toward the northwest. Not Fish, he thought. Not that.

  Fish had waited his whole life for his Someone. He had done everything he was supposed to do. He was here because he was meant to make the world a better place.

  And Victoria wanted to steal his power for herself. She wanted all of that inspiration and magic to be hers, so that she could have one last shot at glory, and she didn’t care what it cost everyone else.

  “That’s why you’ll have to wait a while to join up with me,” she was saying now, motioning for the waiter to bring the bill. “I hope you understand. I can’t have anyone else around confusing the Idea or taking a portion of its power. I’ll contact you again after the Moment has passed. Just stay out of my way today. This will all be over in a few hours, and as long as you don’t interfere, I’ll consider us allies.”

  She said the last part as if Micah had already sworn an oath of fealty to her. He opened his mouth to tell her exactly what he thought of being her ally, but then the rest of what she’d said registered.

  “What do you mean a few hours?”

  Victoria reached into some hidden fold of her enormous scarf and threw a handful of money on the table.

  “Well, I can’t hold off any longer,” she said in a reasonable voice. “Not now that you and your kitchen friend have seen me. Better to get a move on anyway. I’ve only been dawdling these past few days out of nerves.”

  “You’re going to attack Circus Mirandus now?” he said. “Like, right now, this minute?”

  Victoria winked at him and stood up. “Five-minute flight. Sorry, but I’m going to have to leave you here.”

  Out of time. Forget the plan.

  Micah stood up, too. “My magic isn’t quite the same as Grandpa Ephraim’s.”

  Victoria tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  He leaned across the table as if he were going to whisper in her ear. Victoria leaned in as well.

  “You should’ve wondered,” said Micah. “You should’ve cared enough to wonder what happened to your storm petrel.”

  Victoria’s eyes widened, but Micah’s fingers were already wrapped around her scarf.

  Tighten up, he thought.

  FIVE MINUTES BY AIR

  Micah hadn’t planned it, but he had meant it. The scarf tightened around Victoria’s neck in an instant, and she staggered back from the table, her hands clutching at the layers of soft gray fabric. She pulled at it, trying to free herself, but the giant scarf tightened even more.

  Victoria’s pale face was turning red.

  People in the restaurant shouted as they rea
lized something was wrong. The waiter and the woman who’d offered to take Micah’s coat ran toward the table. Someone was calling for an ambulance. Someone else was babbling about the Heimlich maneuver.

  That won’t help her, Micah thought.

  He realized he still had his arm stretched out toward his grandmother, and as she fell to her knees, scrabbling at the scarf so frantically that her painted nails left bloody scratches on her cheeks, he lowered it.

  I should save her. Numbness seeped into him as he realized what he’d done. I don’t want to see someone else die.

  But then he thought of Terpsichore with scratches from a dire hawk’s talons on her flanks. He thought of Bowler, bruised and broken on the ground. He thought, darling and humans and five-minute flight.

  And he took a step back. Away from Victoria.

  He reached under the sleeve of his coat and hooked a finger through his emergency bracelets—all of them—and pulled hard. He felt the snap.

  The waiter was kneeling over Victoria, yanking on the scarf. Her face was turning purple. So fast. It hadn’t even been a minute.

  Her eyes met Micah’s. She looked afraid.

  I could . . .

  What? He couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t stand here and watch her die. Where was the Lightbender? Where was someone who would tell him the right thing to do?

  Victoria’s movements were slowing. She was still fighting the scarf, but weakly now.

  And then Micah saw it—a flutter against her cheek. There was a little ball of desperate movement, a live thing trapped inside the scarf’s folds.

  The hummingbird, Micah thought. I’m killing it, too.

  It was too much.

  I don’t want this. I don’t.

  He felt something loosen in his mind and knew it was the scarf. But he didn’t stay to see what happened next. He ran, shoving past people, bumping into a table. He knocked over a glass and heard it shatter, and then he was out the door, on the sidewalk, his shoes slapping against the pavement.