The Night Circus(70)

Mimicking Marco’s gesture, Celia taps the card and it snaps back together. She pulls her hand back and the card flips itself over. The queen of diamonds.

Then the entire deck hovers in the air for a moment before collapsing onto the table, cards scattering out over the red felt surface.

“You are better than I am at physical manipulation,” Marco admits.

“I have an advantage,” Celia says. “What my father calls a natural talent. I find it harder not to influence my surroundings, I was constantly breaking things as a child.”

“How much impact can you have on living things?” Marco asks.

“It depends on the thing in question,” Celia says. “Objects are easier. It took me years to master anything animate. And I work much better with my own birds than I could with any old pigeon taken off the street.”

“What could you do to me?”

“I might be able to change your hair, perhaps your voice,” Celia says. “No more than that without your full consent and awareness, and true consent is more difficult to give than you might think. I can’t repair injury. I rarely have much more than a temporary, superficial impact. It is easier with people I’m more familiar with, though it is never particularly easy.”

“What about with yourself?”

In response, Celia goes to the wall and removes a thin Ottoman dagger with a jade hilt from where it hangs with its partner. Holding it in her right hand, she places her left palm down on the billiard table, over the scattered cards. Without hesitating, she plunges the blade into the back of her hand, piercing through skin and flesh and cards and into the felt underneath.

Marco flinches, but says nothing.

Celia pries the dagger up, her hand and the two of spades still impaled on the blade, blood beginning to drip down to her wrist. She holds out her hand and turns it slowly, presenting it with a certain amount of showmanship so that Marco can see that there is no illusion involved.

With her other hand she removes the dagger, the bloodied playing card fluttering down. Then the droplets of blood begin rolling backward, seeping into the gash in her palm which then shrinks and disappears until there is no more than a sharp red line on her skin, and then nothing.

She taps the card and the blood disappears. The rip left by the blade no longer visible. The card is now the two of hearts.

Marco picks up the card and runs his fingers over the mended surface. Then with a subtle turn of his hand, the card vanishes. He leaves it safely tucked within his pocket.

“I am relieved that we were not challenged to a physical fight,” he says. “I think you would have the advantage.”

“My father used to slice open the tips of my fingers one by one until I could heal all ten at once,” Celia says, returning the dagger to its place on the wall. “So much of it is feeling from the inside how everything is supposed to fit, I have not been able to do it with anyone else.”

“I think your lessons were a great deal less academic than mine.”

“I would have preferred more reading.”

“I think it strange we were prepared in drastically different ways for the same challenge,” Marco says. He looks at Celia’s hand again, though now there is clearly nothing amiss, no indication that it was stabbed only moments ago.

“I suspect that is part of the point,” she says. “Two schools of thought pitted against each other, working within the same environment.”

“I confess,” Marco says, “I don’t fully understand the point, even after all this time.”

“Nor do I,” Celia admits. “I suspect calling it a challenge or a game is not entirely accurate. I’ve come to think of it more as a dual exhibition. What else do I get to see on my tour?”

“Would you like to see something in progress?” Marco asks. Knowing that she thinks of the circus as an exhibition comes as a pleasant surprise, as he had stopped considering it antagonistic years ago.

“I would,” Celia says. “Especially if it is the project that Mr. Barris was going on about during dinner.”

“It is indeed.”

Marco escorts her out of the game room through another door, passing briefly through the hall and into the expansive ballroom at the rear of the house, where the moonlight filters in from the glass doors lining the back wall.





*


OUTSIDE, IN THE SPACE the garden formerly occupied beyond the terrace, the area has been excavated to sit a level deeper, sunken into the earth. At the moment it is mostly an arrangement of packed soil and stacks of stone forming tall but rudimentary walls.

Celia carefully descends the stone steps and Marco follows her. Once at the bottom, the walls create a maze, leaving only a small portion of the garden visible at a time.

“I thought it might be beneficial for Chandresh to have a project to occupy himself with,” Marco explains. “As he so rarely leaves the house these days, renovating the gardens seemed a good place to start. Would you like to see what it will look like when it is complete?”

“I would,” Celia says. “Do you have the plans here?”

In response, Marco lifts one hand and gestures around them.

What had been little more than stacks of rough stone moments before is now set and carved into ornate arches and pathways, covered in crawling vines and speckled with bright, tiny lanterns. Roses hang from curving trellises above them, the night sky visible through the spaces between the blossoms.