That’s when Bertie saw the trees.
Hand outstretched, she caught hold of leaves. Branches enfolded her in tender welcome, and Bertie rooted herself to the ground with ivy tendrils that clung to earth and dust and rock. Tiny scuttling spiders spun floss to keep her tethered there, and she thanked them with a silent smile. In this place without wind—
Unless I summon a breeze.
Without water—
Unless I want it to rain. I am mistress here.
“This place is mine and mine alone.”
A low chuckle in her ear, as though someone heard the thought and was amused. Bertie turned, glancing over her shoulder at the largest of the trees.
“Who’s there?”
Another bit of soft laughter, like the brush of fur against bare skin. She took a step toward the nearest tree, her fingertips traveling the rough whorls of bark and fancying a face peering out of dense foliage. Vines sprouted from the places where nose, mouth, nostrils would be.
She brushed the worst of the overgrowth away. “Who are you?”
Puck, Pan, or Green Man, he could not answer, trapped as he was deep in the heart of the wood. Bertie knew without trying that she could reach in for him, past the rings of years-imprisoned, past sap sticky as blood, and break the binding spell as easily as another would have snapped a twig. There was something about his face she trusted, leaves or no, but—
“This place is mine and mine alone,” she said, taking a step back. The tree rustled, perhaps in protest, but she turned her back on the promise of company and moved with purpose into a clearing ringed with ferns. Upon a moss-bedecked tree stump she emptied the pockets of her verdant green gown; glittering flecks of sand and tiny bits of stone rushed through her fingers. Dipping her hand into the mound, she realized each one was a memory of this place, brought with her through the stone as gifts from the children of the earth.
Atop the pile sat an emerald. Holding it up to one eye, she could see a green jungle bowed under monsoon rains. Ripe fruit dripped from the canopy above, and the padding footsteps of large felines echoed the thud of her heartbeat. Bertie could hear bare feet slapping against pounded dirt, bodies launched off felled trees and limbs brushing under low-dipping vines.
The emerald cracked, shedding granular tendrils until it was reborn as a ruby, large and flawless. Through the red jewel’s filter, she saw a place of desert trees, thick with fronds. A puff of wind shifted the sand over her feet.
“I remember pyramids, sand, rich turquoise lighting … and a Danish Prince?” Bertie frowned. “That cannot be right.”
Then the ruby was transformed into a wreath of daisies intertwined with crimson ribbons. Through it, she could see a very different sort of landscape: rolling hills, dotted with bonfires. Brows wreathed with hawthorn and primrose, many gathered to celebrate the wedding of the god and goddess.
“Beltane,” she whispered. “May Day, the Jack-in-the-Green’s celebration.”
Upon the hill, a horned god fed marigold custard and oatmeal cakes to a woman white-clad to celebrate the Light Half of the Year. The red and white ribbons of a maypole fluttered overhead. Hand in hand, shadow-couples leapt one bonfire after another, faster and faster still, until the flames were the only streak of color against the night’s canvas.
A butterfly brushed against Bertie’s cheek, but she dismissed it with a laugh. The ferns circling her trembled as she knelt, cupping her hand to lift the sands. A sparkling cascade of shimmering quartz slipped through her fingers. “Where is my forest, my realm?”
Her hand closed around a chunk of plaster, gold painted: a bit of statuary, the same face that had peered from the tree. For a moment, she was surrounded by darkness, the blur of red velvet, the flash of gilt. Now the visage was part of a building’s edifice, carved in stone, trapped in time.
“I know this place,” she whispered.
A light came up behind a curtain of moss to reveal a scene most familiar: a four-poster bed, an armoire, a dresser. Each piece of pale wood was carved in the sweeping flourishes of the art nouveau style. Rugs of mint and crushed green grass were scattered on the forest floor.
“My room.” Delighted, Bertie circled it, touching things she knew to be hers: a small armchair of woven golden saplings, a jewelry box inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a stack of well-worn books in which each page was a pressed leaf.
A sanctuary, fit for a Forest Queen.
“Am I a queen?” The thought pleased her, and she felt as at home wearing it as she would a dress of wheat-gold. Turning, she spotted a hart invading her realm, paused on the edge of the clearing. With a hiss, she took up a longbow that rested against the armoire. “You have no place here. This is mine and mine alone.”
She selected an arrow. Three fingers held the bowstring, drawing it back until her thumb touched her jawbone. Her index finger kissed the corner of her mouth. Every muscle in her shoulder and back stretched with the string. She held her breath as she let the arrow fly—
But something prompted her to close her eyes the moment it hit home. When Bertie opened them, both hart and arrow were gone.
A fanfare of trumpets sounded as a knight entered the clearing, riding astride a brilliant white horse. He raised his hand in a salute, colors rippling in an unbidden breeze. Much of the knight was hidden from view by his silver-chased armor; mouth and nose were indistinct, and the eyes that met hers with an unwavering gaze could have been those of either friend or enemy.
“Who are you?” Bertie still held the longbow, and over her dress she summoned a breastplate and arm guards of verdigris.
“Your Majesty, if it pleases you, I would take you away from this place,” the knight said. His horse shifted, as restless as he, and pawed at the ground. “You must return to your quest, milady.”
Milady.
“Do not presume to call me that.” With a look, Bertie summoned vines to bind him. Cords of variegated green dragged him from his horse, towing him through bracken and fern, bringing him to rest at the tips of her slippers. “I am no lady of yours.”
“You’ve forgotten the wind—”
“We have no need of wind here,” she told him, and meant it.
“You’ve forgotten the water.” A note of pleading now in the knight’s voice as her vines dragged off his helmet, loosing his silver hair, his silver gaze. “And the ocean.”
Bent to her will, the helmet became a hair comb. A knack, a toy, a trinket. “The ocean?”
The knight’s voice faded. “Have you forgotten him?”
“Nate.” When Bertie breathed his name, a saltwater wave slammed into her chest. She sank into the loam underfoot as though towed by an anchor. Falling through the darkness, she thought she could once again feel Ariel’s fingers interlocked with hers.
She stepped free from the granite into an explosion of a thousand stars. When the sparks cleared, Bertie and Ariel stood in enormous version of The Big Pop-up Book of Scenery. Bertie was dressed in the golden skirts of Columbine, while Ariel’s silver-patched Harlequin costume reflected the pale green light shining down upon them.
He kept his fingers laced through hers as he towed her Center Stage. “We’re not alone.”
Putting a hand up to cut the glare, Bertie could see rows of sandstone benches that curved around the edges of the book. A gathered crowd murmured in the universal undertone of an expectant audience, but every face in the amphitheater wore a pale, blank mask. Men, women, even the smaller figures of children were indiscernible from one another.
A ringmaster appeared atop a marble pillar, his face quivering gold-flesh and his eyes two gaping keyholes. “Ladies and Gentlemen! You are about to witness an act so extraordinary, it has never before been attempted in any otherworldly arena!”
When Bertie squinted hard and peered past the footlights, the masks were no longer void of expression. Heavy eyebrows were raised like query marks, foreheads had puckered, and mouths were rounded in anticipatory Os.
The stage plunged into a blackout, th
en twin spotlights came up behind them on a contraption that reminded her of a pair of fantastic opera glasses. A massive steel arm, like a propeller, was fixed upon a center shaft. At either end, enormous matching circles served as counterbalances. Only when they began to turn could she see the black-clad stagehands, one inside each hoop. Both facing Stage Right, they walked, spinning the mesh wheels counterclockwise. Someone in the audience clapped once, twice, not applause, but setting a rhythm that slowly increased. Soon the stagehands ran, the wheels spinning full tilt, each arcing around the other, both held forever captive by the center axis.
“It’s like The Big Pop-up Book of Scenery’s Wheels of Death.” Bertie stared up at it, doubly appalled when the stagehands decreased their pace. Counteracting their momentum by slowing the circles, they brought them into perfect balance, the silver at twelve o’clock and the gold at six.
“The Sun and the Moon, Ladies and Gentlemen!” the ringmaster cried.
The crinoline under Bertie’s massive skirts swayed as she tried to back away. “The scrimshaw whispered the journey to me, and I put it in the Innamorati’s play: the Ice Wheels, the Cauldron, the Hall. It’s how we’ll get to Nate. This is the way to Sedna’s kingdom.”
“How is that even possible?” Ariel sounded as dismayed as she felt. “You wrote it on ordinary paper with that ridiculous quill pen…. I sat there and watched you.”
“How else do you explain this?” She held out her day-brilliant skirts. “Or that?!” She pointed at the mesh wheels, the silver one in the sky and the gold nearest the floor. “The sun and the moon. Only one can be in the sky at a time. That’s what I wrote.”
“Winter days and nights, you also said.” As though he’d cued the special effect, snow began to fall in earnest, swirling about the stage floor and shoving them with fingers of ice toward the edge of the book. Crystals cascaded into a nonexistent orchestra pit, lost to a vast nothing that separated the stage from the audience. Ariel raised his arms; Bertie expected a wind to push back at the snow, but nothing happened.
“Ah, ah, ah,” the ringmaster chortled. “No cheating. You left your winds in the other world, air elemental.”
Ariel lowered hands that were now fists. Every muscle tensed, but that was the only movement he wrought with the effort. “He’s right, Bertie, I can’t fly.”
The ringmaster capered atop his marble column. “It’s true, it’s true, and our dear Beatrice is without her enchanted pages!”
Bertie knew he spoke the truth; there were no pockets in the Columbine’s tightly cinched bodice. Her hands reached for her throat, reassured to find the medallion still hanging there, even after their costume change. “Which way are we supposed to go?”
Overhead, light poured through a brilliantly lit square, and a few feet of rope ladder unfurled. “Into the light with you. It is the first leg of your journey.”
Ariel made a hissing noise as he looked up at the trapdoor. “I don’t know how you managed to do this, Bertie, but when the curtain falls on this demented production, let’s have a long conversation about the power of your words, all right?”
“You won’t say anything I don’t already know.” She’d have to use the wheel to reach the ladder. Thankful she wore ballet flats and not chorus girl high heels or, worse yet, pointe shoes, Bertie stepped inside the circle of gold.
The first black-clad stagehand grasped the edges of her circular cage and pushed it off the ground. Her stomach leapt as the wheel rose to the top of the arc. The moment it reached its zenith, Bertie could see its silver twin precisely underneath her. Above her, the light from the trapdoor taunted; the rope ladder swung lazily, too far to reach from inside the hoop.
The audience sounded their appreciation—or impatience—with a lion’s roar of applause. Arms aloft, Ariel bowed Stage Right, then ran to the opposite side to drink in their adulation. Aghast that he would take time to work the crowd, Bertie started to ask, “What are you doing?” when, against her will, she struck a self-assured pose, like one of the Innamorati bird-girls in a gilded cage, arms gracefully outstretched and toes pointed.
The show must go on.
Acknowledge the audience. Wave. Smile. Bow.
I wonder if I can fly. . . .
Clutching the side of her wheel, Bertie peered down at Ariel, not as afraid of heights as she was of falling, not as afraid of falling as she was of smashing into the floor. She cursed the irony of being her father’s daughter, of having spent her childhood in the catwalks of the theater only to get vertigo now. Wishing she was the one prancing about on the ground level, she managed to shout, “Now what?!”
The snow waited for Ariel to take yet another bow before it gleefully shoved at him. He skidded several feet, falling to his knees. The sugared grains skittered over the edge of the stage, trying to drag Ariel with them.
“Can you reach the rope ladder?” His words were half garbled, and it appeared to cost Ariel something to utter a line she had not written.
Bertie shook her head. “Not from the inside of the wheel.”
“Give me a moment to think.”
Her first line spilled from Bertie alongside her panic. “The day is my domain. You do not belong here.”
Don’t look down, don’t look down. . . .
“I am an admirer, milady.” Ariel struggled against the snow, trying to make his way back to Center Stage. “Would that you belonged to me.”
“Be gone with you. The sky is mine—” The line ended in a shriek as an inadvertent shift in her weight caused the sun’s wheel to fall back toward the stage. Bertie nearly tripped as she swung past him. “Ariel!”
He gestured frantically. “You have to run!”
More than that, she practically had to fly. Somehow, Bertie managed to orient herself; feet skimming metal, she chased her own shadow. The medallion thumped between her collarbones with every step, matched only by the jarring thud of Ariel catching hold of the opposite wheel. She could barely make him out, a silver-blur against the lights pouring over them in shades of amber, purple, magenta. Light on his feet, even without his winds, Ariel probably could have skipped rope atop the other spinning circle, run blindfolded, turned somersaults.
Then the temperature onstage dropped, and Bertie’s breath formed sparkling crystals in the air. Hundreds of pale blue ribbons fell from unseen rafters, manned by frost-bedecked acrobats. With faces and hands carved from ice, they hung in perfect stasis for a moment, fabric twined about them like the silk ribbons on a dancer’s pointe shoes. Then, by some unspoken cue, they pirouetted through the air in downward death spirals.
“This is no longer your world,” Ariel called out, his words following the same arc as the wheels. “I cast a long silver shadow, and the very air freezes.”
Stopping inches from the stage, backs arched, bare toes pointed, the ice-faced acrobats elicited gasps from the spellbound audience. Hoarfrost slicked the inside of Bertie’s wheel. Slipping, she fell against the frozen metal, face pressed to the bitterly cold mesh when the sun arced back into the sky. Spun sickeningly up and over, she fell back when the arm began its descent …
“Bertie!”
… and landed, somehow, on her feet. Sliding, sliding …
Mustardseed was right. We’re trapped in hamster wheels!
She looked up in time to see Ariel leaping from the top of the moon. Airborne, silhouetted against the stage lights, he hung in time and space for a moment. Crashing cymbals urged him to fall as he caught hold of the rope ladder’s bottom rung. Though it swayed, Ariel managed to hook one leg through it, then the other.
Flipping backward, he hung from his knees and held out his hands. “I’ll catch you!”
Even upside down, he was as she’d always pictured him: arms outstretched, luring her over the edge. “I can’t!”
An enormous rumble from below, and trapdoors began to open all over the stage. Snow cascaded through, leaving darkness in its wake. The ribbon dancers scampered up, only to have an unseen hand cut their silks. They f
ell like severed icicles, the emptiness swallowing their screams, a few smashing into the stage and shattering into a thousand pieces. Bertie’s wheel passed Ariel again.
“You have to jump the next time!” Another shudder below, and the entire contraption began to descend by inches. Ariel shouted to be heard over the drum roll, “It’s your last chance! You have to trust me!”
The wheel arced up, carried her over, right arm outstretched—
He caught her by the wrist, and Bertie dangled over the wheel as it spun on without her, disappearing below the stage with the muffled roar of glacial ice falling into the sea.
“Don’t you dare drop me, Ariel!” Her other hand shot up to catch his other arm, and she kicked her feet as though she could gain purchase on the air.
“Stop struggling, you’re making it worse!” His face had gone bright red with the effort of holding her, and Bertie realized just how much of the time he’d rested on the laurels of his winds, allowing them to transport him around the theater, tend to his hair and his clothes….
Do his heavy lifting.
She flailed harder.
“Bertie, so help me, you are going to kill us both. Look at me. Look at me.”
She stared up at him, eyes gone wide, panting from her exertions on the wheel. Cold sweat trickled along both sides of her face, in rivulets between her shoulder blades and her breasts. Her hands, similarly slick, slid a quarter of an inch down his wrists. A tight spotlight appeared on them. An unseen orchestra cued up the mocking strains of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
“Hold on to me,” Ariel whispered. “The show must go on.”
“The show must go on.” She sounded like a pirate’s parrot, but the mantra somehow helped. Bertie tightened her grip on Ariel’s wrists, forcing the rest of her muscles to relax.