by Kim Smejkal
Nope.
Then: laughter.
Then: laughter with some crying.
Then: some sound so alarming Anya blew in with a look of wild fright on her face, her top hat askew in a way that didn’t look right on her.
Celia tossed the order in the air, lay back, and stared at the candle beside her pillow. Anya scrambled for the plague doctor’s card as it fluttered through the air like a damaged butterfly.
“Don’t bother,” Celia whispered.
Always, Divine orders were the same: the message at the top of the card, often followed by specifics about size or location.
But the plague doctor had been right; there was no message for him at all.
His cream-colored card remained blank except for three words at the bottom.
Don’t bother, Inkling.
“What does that mean?” Anya whispered.
Celia kept making that terrible noise: part sob, part laughter. After Celia had convinced everyone in the troupe that the Divine’s ink meant nothing, Diavala could turn it around and still make it mean everything.
When she singled out one person for a most intimate and personal mindscrew.
“There’s a trap here.” Anya stared hard at the card, as if she might be able to spring it.
“Absolutely.”
Diavala had told them to do “every single one,” and Anya clearly had one in her hand for the plague doctor. If Diavala didn’t want ink on him, he shouldn’t have gotten a card.
“But I don’t know what it is!”
“Me neither.” Celia stared into the candle’s orange flame. It was still a Divine order for the plague doctor. They needed to choose between listening to the words on the card or doing something about the existence of the card itself. Neither option was truly safe. And if this was a trap, they may as well go with the more satisfying option and avoid othering the plague doctor when he already lived at the fringe.
“Don’t bother is different from Don’t, isn’t it, Anny?” Celia asked. A blank card was different from getting none at all.
“It is.” Anya’s hard exhale made the candle dance. “But this could be a bad idea.”
How nice to have Kitty Kay around for a tiebreaking vote. How nice that she agreed with Celia. “We’re a unit,” Kitty Kay said. “I won’t let her splinter us with her games.”
So Celia went to fetch some ink and a needle and a plague doctor.
Chapter 22
Anya scurried after Celia, repeating “bad idea” so often it transformed from two little words into a whole new land. Bad idea, badidea, Badidea.
Celia kissed Anya on the cheek. “You keep planning with Kitty Kay,” she whispered. “We’re so close.” In truth, she only vaguely understood their percolating plan because she’d been in an exhausted stupor for days, but they seemed pretty confident.
Once this was over with, maybe Celia could actually help.
She grabbed the plague doctor’s hand and yanked him down the road for privacy, reveling in the new world of Badidea. So in contrast to black, inky darkness, Badidea was a colorful quilt, a new frontier, a realm of upside down.
A place where they could push back against the ink by filling in a blank all on their own. The plague doctor had received an order, and she would most definitely bother.
Part of her wished she could have tattooed him in secret, as she’d done everyone else, but since he firmly believed he wouldn’t receive a Divine tattoo and she didn’t know the reasons for his certainty, receiving one might make him even more suspicious. She had to approach it from a different angle.
Plus, as Anya had pointed out, this offered the delicious opportunity to test for another loophole. They already knew that Diavala couldn’t see temporary ink transfers, so when, exactly, did she see the permanent ones?
“Anya, keep track of the time!” she called as they walked away. “If I’m not back in an hour or two, ask this one how I tasted.”
And, oh, she laughed for a good long while after that.
“You’re in a good mood tonight.” The plague doctor matched her delirium, skipping along next to her as if they were off to a fabulous party.
She tilted her face toward him, the dimming twilight tingeing his bone-white mask an ashy gray. “This smile”—she waved her hand dramatically by her lips—“is horseshit of the tallest order!”
He turned up the radiance on his own horseshit smile, nodding, skipping along. “I know. Any minute now you’ll pass out under the weight of it.”
“And then . . . you feast!”
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re little. Not much more than an appetizer. I’d probably carry you back to camp and tuck you into bed. I’d press a cloth to your forehead and pretend there was hope.” He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “You see, a plague doctor isn’t much of a doctor at all. We’re the ones left behind after all the real doctors leave. We tally the dead. We hold hands and stand sentry at bedsides. When the rest of the world flees, we become the unfortunate mask of any remaining humanity.”
Celia reared to a stop. Her smile fell to the ground.
“What?” he asked. His smile twitched, as if it wanted to join hers in the mud at their feet.
“That’s sort of beautiful,” she said, studying his mask with new eyes: the white sleekness of it, the birdlike angles, the dark contrast of the lenses.
After a moment he looked away. “I’ve always thought so.”
Without shame, she took in the rest of him with the same intensity. He embodied conflict—hard beak and soft feathers, straight spine and curled hair, strong shoulders and vulnerable lips—but maybe those opposites were his bookends. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, so slightly she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been watching so closely. At his side, his fingers twitched. He glanced up the street for no particular reason.
He had a hundred tells, companions to the twitches of his never-ending smile. They were both liars, but where she lied with words, he lied with his body. The part she’d never seen before was that, like her, he didn’t enjoy it. His tells said, I don’t want to. Not all the time.
“There you are,” she whispered.
The bump on his neck dipped up and down with a swallow even as he made a grand show of looking around for whoever she was talking to. Now that she’d seen his lies so clearly, she couldn’t unsee them. They stacked—one on top of the next—like kindling on a fire.
Surprisingly easily, Celia picked her smile up off the ground before resuming the walk. Maybe, like her, he wanted to stop lying but had simply forgotten how.
The lights of the Rover field disappeared behind them as they turned a corner. Someone peeked through his front window, his tenor shining out like a faint lantern in the deep night, and promptly screamed at the sight of a plague doctor sauntering down his street. This section of Illinia had been particularly affected by the last plague, and that good soul was aged enough that perhaps he remembered.
Celia nudged her chin at where the figure had clamped his curtains shut. “You should tell him you’re humanity’s unfortunate face.”
“Alas, it’s my burden to be misunderstood.”
Celia cheeks hurt from smiling. She went on her tiptoes and slapped her hands on the plague doctor’s shoulders for leverage. In Badidea, he didn’t scare her at all. There in Badidea, she understood him perfectly. “You, plague doctor slash Griffin Kay slash judge, jury, and executioner, thrive on misunderstanding.” Her wide smile battled with his. “It helps you hide.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “I wear my costume to hide from a world I can’t handle. Yes. I’ve heard that theory, many times. Sorry to say, you’re not being original.”
She didn’t speak again for a long time. Only smiled as he smiled. He made a move to keep walking, as if the conversation were over.
“You know what’s unoriginal?” She stopped him again, pushing his beak down with one hand, seizing the angle that proved his eyes existed behind the goggles. “Your constant sm
ile is unoriginal. Pretending you possess only one emotion is unoriginal.” She smiled wider, her entire face alight. “I don’t think you hide from the world. I think you see it and understand it and love it.”
He cocked his head. “But . . .”
“But you try too damn hard.” His smile faltered. Still, Badidea had room only for truth. “You try too hard for mystery and adoration. You try too damn hard to sell the illusion that everything is wonderful and fun.”
One long moment passed—a moment where Celia thought he might have heard her—before he laughed in her face. “I see why we don’t know how to handle each other. You think I try too hard, and I’ve never met anyone like you—who doesn’t genuinely try at all.”
He pushed closer, nudged his beak between them, stared her down. Still, he chuckled, but nothing had ever sounded so patently hollow and false. “I’ve seen sparks of personality in you, Celia Sand. Onstage. When we went into Malidora. When I particularly annoy you or scare you or pull you. When you’re with Anya. But you’re the one who hides. You extinguish every spark before it has time to catch fire. Tonight, when you grabbed my hand and led me away from camp, I thought, Finally, she wakes! And tell me that’s not losing at life, tell me that’s not trying too hard, when tonight is the first time in weeks, months, years maybe, that you’ve passionately grabbed something you want instead of hiding from it.”
Celia sputtered, trying to work her shock into a glare of outrage. “Your ego is gigantic. I’m not, and have never been, like one of your fans, all fawning and desperate. I don’t passionately want you.”
He didn’t shake his head or step back. Breathing hard, he waited for her to look at him. Then he delivered a one-word truth. “Liar.”
Everything inside her shook, but she held his gaze, hating the necessity of blinking.
He cocked his head, assessing her. Gently, softening out, he put his hands on her upper arms. “But I meant something bigger. I may try too hard, but that’s infinitely better than living as a terrified observer, extinguishing everything before it has a chance to burn.”
Badidea had turned on her. Sunk its claws deep. Through her half-crazed delirium, she nearly shouted him down, wanting to beat him with words like temple, manipulation, mistico, lies, Diavala, until he understood why she extinguished sparks—so a raging fire didn’t consume her and everyone around her.
Panting breaths of sustained rage permeated the air. Since Badidea was such a strange place, she didn’t know if their showdown had illuminated more truths between them or built a final, impenetrable wall. She didn’t know whether the tightness in her gut tasted like shame or triumph.
His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides in a manic beat. “I’m so tired of this particular dance. It’s time to talk to me.”
“But that’s the trouble! I don’t know who the hell you are!” She laughed and put her hands on his chest to push him away. But she did no pushing.
His smile had vanished again. Bolstered by the power of Badidea, Celia placed her hand on the beak of his mask and waited for a second to see whether Whoops, he’d slip.
He didn’t.
So close, she felt him give his permission, though he spoke no words, didn’t nod.
The plague doctor’s hat fell away as she pulled off his mask.
“Hi, Celia.” Griffin’s eyes met hers for less than a moment before he turned his face away, his shoulders as tight as glass. For once, he awaited a verdict instead of delivering it. So close, so quiet, so still.
Cas had called him pretty, but he was more. His nose was a little on the long side and he had a jagged scar running toward one of his eyebrows. His eyes, as dark as midnight and just as deep, swallowed the world and then spat it back out. His black wavy hair, unruly, revolted against being tied back, thick strands of it drifting across his neck, ears, cheek.
On the left side of his face, tiny black stars stretched from his temple to the muscle in his sharp jawline. The constellation Leonus, nine stars strong.
Under the plague doctor mask lived Celia’s personal dagger: sharp and cutting and crafted for her.
“Damn.” It came out as a squeak. Lifting his mask was the worst idea she’d ever had. “Hi, Griffin.”
Her fingers fluttered close to the constellation, but she didn’t touch it. The feeling of his skin under her fingertips might make her explode; the little air between them was already heat-wave heavy. “When did you get this?” She’d thought no one in the troupe had received a tattoo before she and Anya had come along, and she wondered if someone she knew had done it.
“I did it a few years ago.”
Her hand stopped fluttering as he looked at her. For the span of heartbeats they stared.
“You did it.” If he’d done it himself in the old way Ruler Luca the Ninth had banned generations ago, the subtle constellation under her lingering fingertips was heresy of the worst kind, every tiny star a twinkling death if a mistico ever had reason to look through records.
This proof of defiance against what she hated made her bees curl up and purr. Why would he do it? What did it mean for him?
Now that their eyes had met, they had some trouble letting go. The line of his jaw continued its flexing, making the biggest star, Revanen, move in a spastic beat. He smiled again, but this was a smile in name only: an upward slant of lips saying nothing of happiness. “You’re either my end or my beginning, Celia. I still have no idea how to tilt my head with you.”
Later, she wouldn’t remember whether she’d said her next words out loud or if they’d stalled on her tongue: This feels like a beginning.
Her breath hitched. “I’m a fairly skilled artist, and I came armed with a needle, ink, and a flame. You’re convinced you won’t get a tattoo like the others in the troupe, and I don’t think you should be left out.” Given what graced his face already, tattooing him in the old ways was not as novel a notion as she’d thought setting out. Her gaze went to his lips, waiting for his stage smile to return like a window slamming shut.
He didn’t turn away. He didn’t smile or reach for his mask. He inhaled all the air of Badidea into his lungs and held it there. “Well, that’s terribly disappointing.” He let the air out regretfully, slowly, his chest collapsing under the clasps of his jacket. “Of all the things I thought you wanted from this walk, that didn’t even make my list.”
Celia would have loved to see that list.
He locked eyes with her, dark on dark.
The silence stretched. She watched his new lips intensely. These real ones could give her clues, about him, his thoughts. She imagined the string of questions running through his mind: Is this a test? A gift? Why does she need this? Why would she do this? Why and why and why?
But all he asked was a simple, “This is the spark you grabbed on to tonight?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
He nodded and leaned in, bringing those new, secret lips even closer. His eyes, his brow, his scar, his constellation, her dagger. “Then let’s start a fire.”
* * *
Celia sat cross-legged on the patch of damp grass they’d found between some buildings and stared at the calf in front of her. His calf. Not much, only one leg exposed from the knee down, and certainly nothing as exciting as finally seeing his face, but enough to make her flush red, as if he’d stripped down naked for her.
Through all the touching that came with being in the Rabble Mob—strangers dancing in his arms, flirtations, and fantasy—his costume had always covered him head to foot. The darkness wrapped around him as if even his shadow wanted to stay as close to him as possible.
Now she got the top and the bottom of him at once.
Her bees screamed at her: Can’t back down now!
She screamed back: I’ve never gotten permission before! I don’t think I expected him to say yes!
The bees cuddled up again and purred: Bare skin, bare skin . . .
“Everything okay down there?”
Nope. She reached
her free hand out and ran her fingers over her canvas. They both inhaled sharply at the warm contact, and his calf quivered slightly under her touch. She traced the ridge of angled muscle, then swept around to his shin.
Whatever had happened between them now felt more like a truce than a stalemate. It needed delicate hands, or it would shatter.
Holding his leg, she made the mistake of glancing up. The long line of him stretched out in the grass, his feathered cloak pressed tight to his spine like a blanket. With his head turned away, curls of dark hair lapped against the nape of his neck with the soft breeze, offering her a glimpse of yet more skin. She smelled cloves, but whether the scent wafted down to them from someone’s baking or clung to him, she didn’t know.
The design was already completed, lingering patiently on her calf until she sent it to his. Celia had often had to wait for mistico to inspect her work, sometimes for hours, and she knew that as long as the ink had a host body, it was content.
But her current subject wasn’t.
He shifted to cross his arms under his head like a pillow. “This isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I remember,” he said. “Doesn’t feel like you’re poking into me at all, in fact.” The quiver in his leg when she’d touched him had moved into his voice.
Celia inhaled. Checked her borrowed pocket watch for the precise time. Cursed herself for forgetting alcohol. And commanded the ink to Griffin.
Through burning tears that she didn’t understand, she watched the image form on his calf. She’d never watched her work bloom on another person before. Not like this, from start to finish. She’d drawn parts of it in the old style, with more pokes and stabs to disguise her usual sweeping lines, so that it would feel more like receiving a traditional tattoo than a Divine one, and she was so close that she saw his every twitch of discomfort.
And for the first time, her art wouldn’t be anonymous.
Though she was still an inkling fulfilling an order, everything about this one was different.
