by Kim Smejkal
Two younger troupe members huddled together, organizing their newly procured collection of sweets in a lush patch of grass, arguing about whether they should save them for after the premiere.
Georgio rested with their head in the plague doctor’s lap. Leaning against a gnarled oak tree, the plague doctor stroked Georgio’s wispy brown hair off their brow and sang softly up to the leaves. Celia couldn’t hear his voice over the distance, but she imagined the notes dancing from his mouth into the air. A melancholy image, though one of them smiled as he sang. The intimacy of the scene—comfort, solace, calm your nerves, friend—tugged at something deep in Celia: a firm reminder that she was among them but not of them. Not yet.
She held the portraits up for her small audience to inspect. “Reality.” She gestured at the first, carefully watching Vincent’s reaction: pale hair and eyes, sharp angles, and that slight smile so powerful it should have combusted the paper. He met her eyes.
“And fantasy.” The second piece showed him as the Palidon. Infinite sadness. Dark lines and contrast. The image popped off the page more, but in Celia’s opinion it wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the first. “Both you.” She handed them to Vincent with a nervous smile.
After studying them for a beat, frowning, he said, “A moment of weakness, thinking of gigantic cakes” and shook his head. As everyone around them laughed, he tilted his eyes up and looked at Celia from under his light fringe of lashes. The corner of his mouth tilted up just a hair, enough for Celia to see the humor dancing there.
Celia’s audience grew slowly. Remy, one of the candy organizers, asked Celia to draw her. Beyond remembering that Remy was a contortionist, Celia didn’t know much about her. She’d come from the same Shiehan Rover troupe as Caspian, Grisilda, and Fawn (the siblings who played Passion), and at nine years old, she could already bend in ways that made Celia uneasy.
When Celia handed her the reality portrait—someone entirely made of ribs, wide eyes, dark skin, and short hair—Remy squealed, “It looks like me!”
When Celia handed her the fantasy—a shimmery eel with big, round eyes, swimming its way into a complex knot—she whispered, “It looks just like me” and tucked the second picture to her chest.
For Lilac, reality was long white hair in a thousand teeny braids, laughing eyes, twin crescent moon crinkles in the corners of her full pierced lips. And fantasy was a thick-armed deity holding the sun with no effort at all.
“Fantasy me has three eyes?” Lilac paused, then nodded. “That’s about right. Though I don’t know about the roundness of my rump. That’s a bit extreme, even for fantasy.”
Celia laughed. “You told me to get your best angle.”
Too late, Celia noticed the gloomy silence that had fallen. Daytime Kitty Kay swayed in front of her—hunched over, gray robed, long hair obscuring her face, so she looked more like a morel mushroom than a person—ready to have her portraits drawn.
Marco helped Kitty Kay to sitting. So blindingly handsome, Marco reminded Celia too much of Dante, and she’d avoided him as much as possible because of it.
Kitty Kay’s body made creaks and moans—like music—as she settled. Even so close, Celia couldn’t see her face from behind the gray veil of hair.
Celia looked to Anya for guidance, but Anya offered only a shrug. Lilac, Cas, and Sky hovered, trying to smile reassuringly. The plague doctor lay fast asleep, or feigned it well, with Georgio under the oak tree. Remy contorted her body, sucking on a candy and somehow not choking on it. Peering out from between her legs, Remy held up three fingers and mouthed Three, as if Celia would know what to do with that advice.
So Celia sketched the Kitty Kay she’d first met, the nighttime version, all glamorous sunset orange with an undercurrent of danger, and then the silent, hooded figure she transformed into during the day.
To break the awkward silence as Celia worked, Anya called out, “How about you, Georgio? Want your portrait done? Plague doctor?”
Dia, no! The plague doctor was even more confusing than Kitty Kay. Most of the time he was loud, abrasive, and easy to ignore, but other times . . .
A few days earlier Celia had swerved around the back of a wagon, making the Kids and the plague doctor look up from their huddle. He’d paused mid-sentence. “In a rage, great Obi stomped on the bakery and—”
She’d frozen, stunned with the realization that when the Kids whined about “Oh-bee,” it meant they wanted story time—referring to the Bicklandian folk hero, Obi the Giant.
Six Kids were clustered around him, a masked plague doctor—a macabre friend of death who’d literally seen death himself—as if he were a human-size puppy. The child beside him rested their head on his upper arm, another absently played with the feathers on his cloak.
The scene had been too familiar, reminding her of her fleas. She knew exactly what happened next in the story, thanks to a picture book she’d found at Lupita’s: Obi’s massive foot would catch on fire from the baker’s oven, and he would go on to learn a valuable lesson about the dangers of believing town gossip. The ferocity of her want in that moment pinned her in place: she wanted to sit with them, she wanted to finish the story herself, she wanted Wallis and her fleas, she wanted the plague doctor—
“Would you like to join us, Celia?” he’d asked after a beat, before looking down and away.
Yes!
“I—”
The Kids nagged him to continue, but he shushed them, his smile unnaturally tight. Was he embarrassed himself? Or had he seen the moment of undisguised want on her face before she managed to shutter it and was embarrassed for her?
“I—I’m not good at stories,” she’d garbled out, and practically ran off. If it had been anyone else, she might have joined them, but the sudden awareness of this side of the plague doctor had been far too enticing, too frightening. Too much.
That was it: the plague doctor was altogether too much for Celia. Too much in every possible way and from every possible angle. And Anya knew it, so what was she doing calling him over?
Slowly, Georgio stood, stretched their long body like a cat, said something to the plague doctor, and walked over to join them. The plague doctor stayed put, his spine apparently merged with the oak tree, but his huge smile beamed at them from across the distance, watching. Celia’s hand shook under the scrutiny.
Swallowing, she held up the picture of glamorous Kitty Kay. “Reality,” she croaked. Then the mirror image of the person in front of her: “Fantasy.”
Not the right answer. Apparently, not even close. Kitty Kay moaned, long and low, and a few people, Vincent included, shook their heads. Marco helped Kitty Kay stand and led her back to her wagon.
Remy shoved her hand in Celia’s face. “Want a candy?”
“Sure, thanks.” She took it through eyes blurring with angry tears. If she couldn’t even understand Kitty Kay, was there any hope she’d ever fit in with the Mob?
“That wasn’t so bad,” Lilac said, casual.
“Why were you showing me three fingers, Remy?” Celia asked.
Remy sucked her candy, all casual. “You needed to do three pictures.”
Damn everyone for being so casual. Sky flipped up and began walking on their hands again, Cas laughing when they fell over.
“Three?”
Every time Celia had asked Lilac, Vincent, Seer, anyone, about Kitty Kay’s transformation from night to day, she’d gotten a vague non-answer—“That’s how she is,” “You’ll get used to it,” “She takes her show to the extreme. The plague doctor got his madness from somewhere.” That last statement had been from Lilac, only a day earlier.
“Yeah.” Remy pointed to both sketches. “You did fantasy and fantasy. You didn’t draw her as she is at all.”
Celia blinked, then flopped backwards, away from everyone’s eyes.
“You’re good.” Remy appeared, her round face and big eyes blocking Celia’s view of the gray sky. “Your pictures look a lot like you do:
black and white and swirly and sharp, all at the same time.”
Celia laughed.
“It’s a compliment. I meant they’re pretty and you’re pretty, Lalita. In a weird way.”
The shisha lounge owner had called her Lalita—fragile bird—but Celia didn’t mind it coming from Remy.
“I can teach you some things, if you want,” Celia said, casually waving in the sketchpad’s direction.
Remy’s eyes got a little bigger, but she shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to her either way. “That would be all right.”
Celia smiled at her.
After Remy had gone back to her friends, Anya let out the snorts of laughter she’d been holding in with effort. “What is it about you that always attracts fleas, Cece?”
Celia’s smile dropped away as though she’d been slapped. She turned to the horizon, where, far away, the temple still squashed inklings and little inklings-in-training.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Anya whispered, cutting off her laughter and flushing red. “I didn’t mean—”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Celia went back to her drawing as Anya kept apologizing. “It’s okay, Anny, really.” She looked to the horizon again and whispered, “But Remy’s a pretzel, not a flea.” There was only one of those.
Chapter 12
Despite everything, Celia and Anya performed well that first night. Even better the nights after.
The audience fell in love.
The devil stayed the devil, and the angel stayed the angel. The crowd didn’t get confused, and no glass shards littered the stage. With every performance, they settled further into their roles. Anya developed an organized system for her interactions with the people, and Celia embellished her responses with short, improvised skits. The back-and-forth between them became more coherent while still being entirely unscripted.
Now the Mob lured people in because of the amazing new devil and angel show, and a dedication to fashion that even Mama Treeza, the famous Kinallen designer, would have been proud of. Vincent and Georgio’s colorful take on the civil war had people laughing so hard they fell over themselves.
The Mob was definitely not traditional Commedia.
Kitty Kay extended the run in Sabazio by two extra nights. People had bought tickets for the next show as they left the gates, insisting the Rabble Mob relieve them of their coin.
As the after-show began on extra night number one, Celia found Anya for their ritual dance. A powerful image, they’d thought, for the people to see the devil in the arms of the angel at show’s end.
“There’s so much touching,” Anya said, shrugging off a lingering hand from her shoulder and smirking. “I’m all in favor of lusting and touching, but this is like living in a giant bubble of heat and sweat and anonymous fiery loins.” She shuddered with exaggerated conviction as Celia laughed. Fiery loins? Anya wasn’t wrong, though, and she had a worse time of it than Celia, having to move through the crowd while Celia was safe onstage.
Celia danced with Remy next, who’d been hovering at the sidelines waiting for Celia to notice her. “I did a self-portrait, like you suggested. It’s not very good. It looks nothing like me.”
“Sometimes mistakes make the best pictures. Show me after?”
Remy smiled from under her thick layer of face paint. “Thanks, Lalita.” Her skintight body suit held a million colors, so dazzling and sparkly under the stage lights, it was like dancing with a little star fallen from the night sky. She darted back to her friends before they realized that their human pyramid wasn’t pointy enough.
When someone tapped Celia on the shoulder for another dance, she turned and put her arms out. In her cheater’s mirrors under the brow of her mask, she registered the robes first.
“Interesting show.” The mistico gripped her waist as she took a reflexive step back. The reach of Profeta spread like tentacles, now twisted around her. Celia forced herself to bow her head in mute greeting and began swaying to the music woodenly.
“Ah, I see. You aren’t allowed to break character to speak. Trust me, I know all about rules and protocol.” He gestured to his clothing, making a light joke at his own expense, as if Celia had overlooked his profession.
He wasn’t local. Though she was blanking on his name, she recognized him from the temple. Which meant he’d followed the troupe from Asura and likely wasn’t alone.
Anya! Damn it! The music disguised her labored breathing, and the mask covered her swiveling eyes. Mistico often attended the shows, but they never came onstage! But he made no aggressive move against her, as if he only wanted a dance with a faceless, anonymous member of the Rabble Mob of Minos.
People are always so easy to fool, Celia. Remember, you did it for ten years.
But her body didn’t remember, not at that moment.
“I’ve always appreciated Commedia, but these new directions are quite worrisome.” He gripped her tighter, but his tone stayed light. “Passion’s tale needs the proper ending. No one should laugh at the idea of war, chaos, and disorder, however innocent the spin. And while I wholeheartedly appreciate the sentiment behind your own show, devil, there is some terrible potential for people to see the wrong message. That final Asuran show made a few of us quite nervous.”
He was here about the Mob’s messages and not because of runaway inklings? Could she trust his idiocy, or was he a good actor himself?
Finally, Anya’s white form appeared when the lingering bodies parted just so. Her mask concealed less than Celia’s, so Celia saw the exact moment her lips parted in recognition. After a moment of hesitation she flicked her flingers and tilted her head, signaling to Celia that she’d do some reconnaissance.
Celia inadvertently groaned loud enough for the mistico to lose his stride.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much. If the Rabble Mob returns to Asura with us, I’m sure a good discussion will clear all this right up.”
Of course, sure, back to Asura we go. She nodded as her bees screamed.
“Something’s terribly wrong here,” the plague doctor said, slapping his hands on their shoulders as if he’d been part of the conversation from the beginning. And Celia would have been relieved—if she could read him at all, but that damn mask, that damn smile. “The devil promised me a dance tonight. But I’ve been forgotten!”
The mistico legitimately tittered. Celia had time to think, We’re safe if he says anything like, “I’d never forget . . .”
“Well, I can’t see how anyone could forget you.”
And Celia exhaled so fast she almost puffed everyone off the stage.
The plague doctor turned to her, held out his hand, and bowed deep. “May I have this dance, devil?” A whisper for her.
She took his hand.
The plague doctor swept Celia away, saying, “You’re welcome. Did you know him, or were his hands wandering?”
“What?”
“Painfully obvious you didn’t want that particular dance.”
“Right. Yes, his hands were wandering.”
The plague doctor didn’t look down. The smile stayed on his face. But he pushed their hips together as if he wanted to fuse them.
“You’ve been avoiding me.” His tone argued with his smile.
“Oh, most definitely.”
“Why?”
“Because I had to think things, and you distract me.” In trying to be clever, Celia heard some annoying truth there.
His lips quirked in a new way, as if trying not to smile a little wider at that.
“So you’re clear,” she said. “I’m mad at you for not helping me out in the field the other day. It doesn’t bother you that your mother was the butt of a joke?”
At that, he laughed loud, pulling sighs from a couple dancing close by. “I think you were the joke there, devil.”
She had to find Anya. Didn’t have time for his insults. “Well, thanks for the dance.” She caught a glimpse of white feathers. “But I have to find my angel.”
A low hum reverberated from his
chest and into hers like a purr. “You could already have him in your arms.”
Her mind darted to Anya’s words of fiery loins and lust bubbles. It rankled her that her body insisted on reacting to him the way it did, especially in these rare moments when he seemed to forget the stage. One hard ka-thump in her chest was all she allowed. “Save it. I’m smarter than that.”
He tilted his head down enough to give her that perfect angle, the one that showed the outline of his eyes behind his tinted lenses. “Too bad, Celia Sand. Too damn bad.”
She growled, her hand on his shoulder tightening into a small claw. “Dia, I hate your smile. So. Much.”
“Why?” And he set the full shine of it on the couple dancing next to them. Both responded with even louder sighs.
“I have nothing against smiles whatsoever—I happen to like them—but I definitely have a keen distaste for horseshit. Let’s call it a function of my upbringing.”
After a pause, his only response was a low, “Something we have in common, then. Which is why I’m surprised by all the lies you tell.”
She took a deep breath and tried to ignore him, her gaze flitting and fluttering over heads and around bodies.
Kitty Kay’s flaming orange dress sparkled like fire against the black velvet curtain backdrop at stage left. It was her usual spot, offering a good view of the dancers, her players and acrobats in the field, and the front door to every private wagon. As performance nights wore on, some audience members tended to confuse lines of propriety; if anyone forgot their manners with her troupe, she didn’t hesitate to call on the plague doctor and Ravino, who played the blood-soaked and brutal character Savant. Neither was particularly brawny, but no one, no matter how drunk or out of control, ever argued with them. The two of them, side by side and pointing to the gates, were a decent enough security force.
But instead of a stately overseer exuding a carefree manner, Kitty Kay stood in an uncharacteristic pose of power—feet planted, hips squared, arms crossed—as she stared down her nose at the mistico Celia had danced with. Her lips had disappeared, leaving nothing but a tight line.
