The Night Circus(97)

The sob that has been building in her chest escapes. Tears that she has been holding back for hours fall from her eyes.

Marco rushes across the room to reach her, pulling her close and holding her while she cries.

“I’m sorry,” he says, repeating it in a litany over her sobs until she calms, the tension easing in her shoulders as she relaxes into his arms.

“He was my friend,” she says quietly.

“I know,” Marco says, wiping away her tears and leaving smudges of ink across her cheeks. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what happened. Something threw off the balance and I cannot figure out what it was.”

“It was Isobel,” Celia says.

“What?”

“The charm Isobel put over the circus, over you and me. I knew about it, I could feel it. I didn’t think it was doing much of anything but apparently it was. I don’t know why she chose tonight to stop.”

Marco sighs.

“She chose tonight because I finally told her that I love you,” he says. “I should have done it years ago, but I told her tonight instead. I thought she took it well but clearly I was wrong. I haven’t the slightest idea what Alexander was doing there.”

“He was there because I invited him,” Celia says.

“Why would you do that?” Marco asks.

“I wanted a verdict,” she says, tears springing to her eyes again. “I wanted this to be over so I could be with you. I thought if he came to see the circus that a winner could be determined. I don’t know how else they expect it to be settled. How did Chandresh know he would be there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know what possessed him to go there, and he insisted that I not accompany him so I followed him instead, to keep an eye on him. I only lost track of him for minutes when I went to speak with Isobel and by the time I caught up with him again … ”

“Did you feel as though you had the ground removed from beneath you as well?” Celia asks.

Marco nods.

“I was trying to protect Chandresh from himself,” he says. “I had not even considered he might be a danger to anyone else.”

“What is all this?” Celia asks, turning her attention to the books on the desk. They contain endless pages of glyphs and symbols, ringed in text ripped from other sources, affixed to one another and inscribed over and over. In the middle of the desk there is a large leather volume. Pasted inside the front cover, surrounded by an elaborately inscribed tree, Celia can barely make out something that must once have been a newspaper clipping. The only word she can discern is transcendent.

“This is how I work,” Marco says. “That particular volume is the one which binds everyone in the circus. It’s the safeguard, for lack of a better term. I placed a copy of it in the bonfire before the lighting, but I’ve made adjustments to this one.”

Celia turns through the pages of names. She pauses at a page that holds a scrap of paper bearing the looping signature of Lainie Burgess, next to a space where an equal-sized piece has been removed, leaving only a bright blank void.

“I should have put Herr Thiessen in there,” Marco says. “I never even thought of it.”

“If it had not been him it would have been another patron. There is no way to protect everyone. It’s impossible.”

“I am sorry,” he says again. “I did not know Herr Thiessen as well as you, but I did admire him and his work.”

“He showed me the circus in a way I had not been able to see it before,” Celia says. “How it looked from the outside. We wrote letters to each other for years.”

“I would have written you, myself, if I could put down in words everything I want to say to you. A sea of ink would not be enough.”

“But you built me dreams instead,” Celia says, looking up at him. “And I built you tents you hardly ever see. I have had so much of you around me always and I have been unable to give you anything in return that you can keep.”

“I still have your shawl,” Marco says.

She smiles softly while she closes the book. Beside it, the spilled ink seeps back into its jar, the glass fragments reforming around it.

“I think this is what my father would call working from the outside in rather than the inside out,” she says. “He was always cautioning against it.”

“Then he would despise the other room,” Marco says.

“What room?” Celia asks. The bottle of ink settles as though it had never been broken.

Marco beckons her forward, leading her to the adjoining room. He opens the door but does not step through it, and when Celia follows him she can see why.

It may once have been a study or a parlor, not a large room, but perhaps it could be referred to as cozy were it not for the layers of paper and string that hang from every available surface.

Strings hang from the chandelier and loop over to the tops of shelves. They tie back upon each other like a web cascading from the ceiling.

On every surface, tables and desks and armchairs, there are meticulously constructed models of tents. Some made from newsprint, others from fabric. Bits of blueprints and novels and stationery, folded and cut and shaped into a flock of striped tents, all tied together with more string in black and white and red. They are bound to bits of clockwork, pieces of mirror, stumps of dripping candles.