“Someone lower th’ fire curtain so th’ flames don’t spread t’ th’ stage!”
A member of the Gentlemen’s Chorus ran for the heavy lever in the Stage Manager’s corner, pulling it with a grunt. The iron curtain began to slide along the steel channels that would hold it in place.
The theater might well be doomed already, but I’ll be damned if it takes Ariel with it.
Bertie threw herself under the yet-moving curtain, skidding to the front of the stage as it slammed down behind her, nearly felling half the Ladies’ Chorus.
“Ariel?” With a grunt and a heave, Bertie slid into the orchestra pit, bouncing off a chair and a music stand, scorched sheet music fluttering around her like autumnal leaves. Though he was only a few feet away, it took countless precious breaths to find him, to crawl to his side, to drag him into her lap. The burning in her lungs was even worse than when she’d drowned. Everything about her was going hazy around the edges, but when Ariel exhaled a ragged breath, it cleared the worst of the smoke around them.
“You have to make her stop,” he managed to say between wracking coughs.
Trying to escape her own flames, Varvara leapt from the dress circle to the ledge on the upper balcony. Framed by an enormous glittering window, the fire-dancer twisted about to face them. Shooting-star sparks fell from her hands, and the truth raged from her lips like so much lava. “This was not my choice.”
“The Theater Manager can’t trap you again, Varvara!” Bertie screamed in return, holding up the ring. “But you have to stop, before you destroy everything!”
“He’ll use a different word-spell to put me back in the dark. I’d rather perish!”
“I can use the words to free you!” Clutching Ariel, Bertie tried to summon the silver light that yet lingered behind her eyes. “I wish for your freedom, Varvara! You will never be a prisoner again.”
The Queen’s gift swelled, filling her entire head, the words swirling like ink on the surface of a scrying mirror. Sweat poured down Bertie’s face; when a ruby droplet spattered her right hand, just over the handfasting mark, she realized her nose had started to bleed.
“Perhaps,” Ariel managed to wheeze, “it’s not as easy to use a wish-come-true as I thought.”
“I can’t force it to obey me,” Bertie said, falling back against the wall. “The Queen said the wish had to be worthy, but I’m the one who’s not worthy! I’m not strong enough!”
“You are!” Ariel gripped her shoulders, trying to transfer his strength to her, though it too was flagging. “You have to be!”
“I wish for your freedom, Varvara!” But Bertie’s ragged scream was lost to the back draft of heat and light that enveloped them. Wrapping her arms about Ariel, Bertie built a tiny shelter from the pieces of theater not yet burning, their world reduced to bits of oak and mahogany, splinters of cherrywood and pine, fitted together like a puzzle with all its pieces. Tiny vines unfurled from the wood, releasing precious oxygen, and Bertie managed to draw half a breath.
“I always knew it would come to this,” Ariel said finally.
Bertie couldn’t see his face, sensing instead when he rolled over onto his knees. As another bit of the theater’s ceiling landed somewhere nearby, she knelt next to him, unable to feel anything more than numb. Face pressed against Ariel’s shoulder, Bertie wished for Nate, for the cool waters of the ocean, even for Sedna, who could have saved them all and must be laughing somewhere.
“What did you know?” When she spoke, it was into the silk of his sleeve. “That we would die today? Did that information come in a misbegotten fortune cookie?”
“Leave it to you,” he said with a wheeze, “to summon sarcasm at a time like this.”
The shelter about them fractured, its destruction held at bay only by the matrix of vines running through the wood like stitches. Firelight wormed through infinitesimal cracks, waltzing orange and yellow and red over Ariel’s face like a lighting special. Blood trickled down his cheek, dark in the unreliable illumination, and his eyes sparked with something far more frightening.
Bertie wanted to scream, but air was too precious for that, and so she whispered instead, “What did you know, then?”
“That you would be the one to free me someday.” When their handfasting scars met, there was no misunderstanding his excitement; it took flight alongside his butterflies, painting their wings silver to reflect bits of his face on fluttering mirrors. “I can stop the fire as surely as I fed it: with the winds. Release me. Take from me this flesh, the blood and the bones. I will suck the air from the room and smother her flames.”
Bertie jerked back as though he’d struck her. She could hardly fathom what he was saying. “What insanity are you mouthing?”
“The theater was never my prison. My body is the prison. ‘What dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?’”
“Don’t you dare quote at me now!” Around them, the shelter continued to fragment, the cracks between the protective wood planks widening. Smoke reached wispy fingers through the plants as though hookah-sent to fetch them, but Bertie wouldn’t heed the call. She fed her soul and her strength into the vines, willing them to hold, coaxing them to release more precious oxygen.
Ariel pressed his forehead to hers, the words spoken into her mouth. “It is not death I ask you for, but life. Life eternal. Life unfettered by anyone or anything, as I was meant to be. I am the only one who can stop this. I am the only one who can save you, but you are the only one who can free me. You are the one with the power over words.”
Bertie tried to twist away from him. “I will not.”
“You will do as you must.” Ariel’s other hand threaded through her silver hair so she could make no escape.
She circled the idea in her mind, unable to contemplate letting go of someone as much a part of her as Nate, as dear as any of the fairies, less of a stranger than Ophelia or the Scrimshander. “This is not the ending I wanted.”
“Nor I.” For a moment, Ariel saw not the destruction around them, but something very different. “What was in the mirror might have been for your eyes only, but I saw the dream-child clinging to Serefina’s skirts, Bertie. It might have had your eyes, but I think its silver hair was mine.” Here his voice broke, as though dropped from a great height and shattered upon marble.
“You can’t know that for certain.” Bertie stared at him, rage pouring through her; in turn, she fed it into the silver cloud of magic behind her eyes. “My hand will not be forced by something as heartless as Fate … I am not Juliet, even if you pine to take Romeo’s role!” Shoving him back, she broke free from their meager shelter, held her hands out to the flames, and screamed to the very heavens, “I wish you forever-free, Varvara!”
Unhindered this time by doubt or fear, the wish’s light poured out of Bertie, finally released to do her bidding. The hellfire surrounding the fire-dancer dwindled, drawn out of her like a fever. Within seconds, Varvara’s face was pale where it had been unnaturally flushed, her limbs trembling with shock instead of rage. Freed from the prison that was the flames, she faltered and collapsed in the upper balcony.
The fire consuming the auditorium immediately died, the various conflagrations snuffed out like a series of candles upon a windowsill. Wisps of smoke marked their passing, wending gray ghosts that gathered in the balconies and trailed faint fingers over the painted frescos. Where there had been the spitting and splintering crackle of flames, there was now only silence. Though something told Bertie that Nate called to her from behind the fire curtain, she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything save the rush of blood through her ears.
She turned to Ariel, giddy, filled with triumph that tasted of champagne bubbles breaking on her tongue. “I did it!”
Crouched in the wreckage, head bowed, he didn’t answer at first. When at last he spoke, anguish tinted his words. “Indeed you did. My heartiest congratulations, milady.”
The champagne went flat, its sweetness turned to vinegar. “Are you
hurt?” Scrambling back to him, she searched his face and limbs for blood, for wounds.
“Yes.”
“Show me where…” Her voice trailed off when he lifted his head and she saw his eyes. “You … you aren’t bleeding. Nothing’s broken.”
Both lies, she realized as another layer gathered upon her mask. He bled from a soul-wound, and she had one to match. “You scented your freedom in the smoke, didn’t you? It was the one-in-a-thousand wind.”
Several impossibly long seconds passed before he rose and answered her. “Yes.”
“Ah. I should have guessed as much.” Heart aching as though it had been burnt from her chest, Bertie reached out a hand and caressed his face. She couldn’t stop the tears, hot and stinging, from pouring down her cheeks.
“Come now, why are you crying?” Soot-smudged, Ariel still managed to summon the ghost of a smile for her. “The theater is saved. I’m still here with you. Isn’t this the happily ever after you wanted?”
Leaning forward, she rested her forehead against his chest. “Whatever happens next, know that I love you.”
His hands tightened upon her. “What are you going to do?”
Bertie pressed a hand against his mouth, certain that if he said another word, she wouldn’t have the strength to do what she must. “‘My Ariel…’”
So began Prospero’s speech at the end of The Tempest, delivered by the magician to the airy sprite he’d ensorcelled and enslaved. Such a short monologue to mean so much; spoken untold times upon the stage, it never before had the effect it was having now, and Ariel trembled as the winds rushed forward to collect him.
“I will give you your freedom,” Bertie said, her words a fierce challenge. “Not because my hand was forced to it, but because it’s the right thing to do. Because I love you.”
He cupped her face in his hands. “And I, you.”
“Enough to harbor second thoughts?” She held close the hope that he would tell her it was no longer a gift he wanted.
“No,” was his softly whispered admission. “Make no mistake, I want this. I’ve always wanted this.” The way Ariel clung to her almost belied the words. “But you must know that I will hold your memory fast within my heart and soul. And you will feel me in every wind, every breeze, every exhalation of air from your lungs.”
“‘Then to the elements be free.’” Bertie choked upon the quote, trying to hold on to his hands, to press a final kiss to his fingers. The chandelier was broken, there was no one manning the spotlight, and yet illumination traced the beautiful planes of his face and neck, turning his hair to liquid mercury and lightning. “‘And fare thou well!’”
For a moment, everything about him that was silk and silver lingered in the air, the echo of laughter, a gentle touch upon the cheek. Then Ariel dissolved into a whipping rush of energy. The Exit door exploded outward and all the air in the room gave chase, desperate not to be left behind on this, his next grand adventure.
Bertie couldn’t breathe. There was no air left for her. Ariel was gone, and with him part of her heart, part of her very soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Of These Most Brisk and Giddy-paced Times
With the slow stagger of one bereaved, Bertie made her way down the carpeted aisle, into the lobby, and pushed through the revolving door. The air outside was blessedly clear and clean, like a sip of water to her parched throat. A snippet of crimson ribbon fluttered past her, most likely the lost hair bow of a child. It tumbled and twisted in a dying breeze, down the stairs, into the streets, lost between the cart wheels and the clopping hooves of a streetcar’s horse team.
“He could come back. I could find a way to make him human again.”
Except she knew such dreams were folly, that he’d never been human to begin with, and therein lay all the trouble between them. She stood with her arms wrapped about her for untold minutes, waiting for a whisper of wind that would suggest that Ariel yet remembered there was a Beatrice Shakespeare Smith.
You will feel me in every wind.
Closing her eyes, she shut out the sights of the city, the acrid scent of smoke, the shouts of passersby until nothing remained but the gentle breeze passing over her skin. At once snow driven and summer warmed, it contained the promise of rain and sunlight, the perfume of arid desert and salt breezes. It roused all her father-bestowed avian instincts so that when Bertie blinked, she suddenly viewed the world behind the graceful curvature of a sharpened beak. Fingernails transformed to talons. Her arms prickled with the possibility of feathers even as Ariel’s voice echoed in her head.
“Have you ever seen a falcon, hooded and jessed for the hunt?”
“It’s love that tethers me to you.”
“And I, you.” After all they had been through, Ariel would not want her trapped as he had been, bound in servitude to a body not truly her own. Bertie’s hands dropped back to her sides. When next the air caught hold of her clothes, her hair, she felt no need to succumb. She was herself again.
There’s another way to fly. Steeped as I am in fairy dust, all I need is my “happy thought.”
She set her memories of Ariel in stone: his beautiful face, the movement of his hair, the yearning for freedom that was his very soul. To embrace everything he had been, Bertie stretched her arms out wide and let the wind carry her skyward. Gravity had no hold upon her just now; she was a child-loosed balloon, held aloft by wistful joy.
“‘Farewell,’” Bertie whispered. “‘Thou art too dear for my possessing.’”
A single tear fell, recalling gravity, and she drifted down, aided by the weight of her grief. When her feet touched the ground, she took a moment to breathe, to simply be. With the passing seconds, the world coalesced around her, the buildings sliding into place like set pieces, the traffic resuming its frantic pace. Inside the ticket booth, a woman of flesh and blood had replaced the automaton.
“You’re back!” She flashed Bertie a crimson-painted smile. “Is the rest of the Touring Company with you?”
“They are.” Bertie stepped closer to the window and caught her reflection in the glass.
So this is what grief looks like.
Ash smeared her clothes, now darker than widow’s weeds. Her hair was twisted into a silver tangle, her eyes two holes burnt in a blanket. No doubt her appearance would send Mrs. Edith into an apoplectic fit.
“Shall I put the tickets to Following Her Stars on sale?” The woman’s eager hand hovered over the switch that would ignite the marquee lights.
“Not just yet,” Bertie said, drawn like a magnet to the revolving door. “There are still a few loose threads to tie up.”
Inside the lobby, the theater already sought to heal itself: wood had regenerated, the sparkling glass windows overhead wiped clean. Beeswax polish and roses couldn’t quite veil the acrid stench that clung to the drapes and the carpets, though Bertie had no doubt the scent of smoke, too, would soon fade to nothing, as though it had all been a Puck-induced dream.
“For once,” she murmured, “that menace had no hand in the mischief.”
Feeling much like a ghost, she entered the auditorium.
“Thank the heavens you’re all right!” Waschbär cried, meeting her halfway down the aisle. His coat yet smoldered but from it he drew The Complete Works of the Stage, thoughtlessly abandoned when the fire curtain had slammed shut. The skin on his hands was angry pink, blistered, and weeping clear fluid.
Bertie’s skin felt just as raw, though her wounds were deep inside her. “What are you doing with The Book?” Better to focus on such a curious anomaly than on what had just happened.
The sneak-thief swallowed hard. “I … I stole it. Snatched it from its pedestal when the ceiling started to yield to the flames.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“I could not let it burn. I waited as long as I dared, until ash drifted down like snow, and I could hardly think or breathe. At the very worst moment, I thought it would be destroyed, and then I broke my vow. I took a wan
ted thing.” With trembling hands, he held The Book out to her.
She accepted it, careful not to touch his tender skin. “It seems to have cost you dearly.” We’ve all paid harsh prices on this day, it seems. “But you have my thanks, Waschbär, and that of the theater. It was a hero’s deed.”
If possible, his nose turned even more pink. “I would not say that.”
“I would, and my word seems to be gold just now.” She hugged him then, as gently as she could, and led him onstage.
“I would have a small measure of forgiveness as well,” said a small voice behind them.
Bertie let go of Waschbär to better address the once fire-dancer. Deprived of her flames, Varvara ascended the stairs with great uncertainty, her loveliness perhaps more apparent now that she no longer threatened them with annihilation. Though Bertie wanted to condemn her, wanted someone to blame for everything—the destruction of the theater, Ariel’s absence—she knew such blame would be misplaced. “There is nothing to forgive, I think. It was an accident that Ariel’s winds fed your fire.”
“It was certainly not my intention.” Varvara indicated a small pile of ash at the base of The Book’s pedestal. “Yet there is no excusing murder, I think.”
The tarnished-gold gleam of the Theater Manager’s pocket watch glinted in the half-light, cover open, glass face cracked down the middle. Bertie stooped down; though she did not touch it, she noted the watch had ceased tick-tick-ticking. Like the clepsydra, it had marked the minutes of something now finished.
“It was self-defense,” she told the fire-dancer. “At last you’ll be safe from his machinations. As will my parents.”
“As will you,” Waschbär noted.
Behind them, the fire curtain began its unhesitating ascent, revealing a group of sodden but triumphant Players. Nate stood in a massive puddle, shirt hanging in tatters, eyes bleak. The moment he spotted Bertie, he crossed the stage at a flat run.