“He’s always escaping from his crib and making his sister worry herself sick. Aren’t you, you little fiend?”
Toby beamed with the wide, somewhat crazy grin kids got, and lifted his arms to be picked up. Alan did so at once, the baby cradled carefully in the crook of one elbow, his head bowed down over the smaller head.
“You really like children, huh,” Mae said, mystified but charmed as well. There was no denying that Alan with a kid was about as adorable as a basket of kittens wearing tiny kitten bonnets, and it also meant that she wasn’t going to have to mind Toby.
It occurred to her that this might be why women went for men who were good with kids: It meant they wouldn’t have to be.
“Hmm? Oh, they’re all right,” said Alan, obviously besotted.
The baby squirmed, and Alan knelt with some difficulty so he could let him down and still keep him safe in the circle of one arm. Toby made a grab for something shining up Alan’s sleeve: Alan produced the knife for him and flipped it, making sure the hilt caught the fairy lights and keeping the blade always trapped between his deft fingers, away from the child’s small reaching hands.
“There, Toby,” he said. He flipped the knife again and smiled, and Toby laughed, either for the knife or the smile. “I remember Nick at this age,” Alan continued, his voice gentle as his free hand stroked the child’s hair.
Mae looked down at Toby’s small, bright face. The lights of the Goblin Market danced in his fuzzy curls and seemed to create light, gold irradiating his hair like a hazy halo. It was hard to think of Nick as anything like this.
“Was he cute?” she asked doubtfully.
She thought Alan might be offended, but he laughed. “No, I suppose he wasn’t. But he was mine.”
Toby made a spirited lunge for the knife, and Alan blocked him.
“No, I won’t let you hurt yourself,” he informed him, pocketing the knife and turning the child around in his arms so they were facing each other. Toby regarded him solemnly for a moment, and then reached up to curl a fat fist around one of the lenses of Alan’s glasses. “Speaking of belonging to people, I suppose I should return you to the people you belong to. That’ll be fun.”
He gathered the child back up and rose as he did so, using a ruined wall to help him stand. His eyes traveled to Mae.
“Do you want to go see the dancing?” he asked, with a small smile, a little wicked, that was for her and not the child. “I’ll catch up.”
“Well,” said Mae, because it seemed tactless to say that she wanted to run to wherever the dancing was more than anything in the world.
Alan’s wicked smile became a wicked mind-reading smile. “Have fun,” he told her, and limped away with Toby in his arms still negotiating over the possession of his glasses. Mae smiled after his retreating back.
Then she turned and walked through the beautiful ruins, reaching a part of the castle that was paved over for tourists, stone smooth and modern as a brick road. Even that was iced over by the goblin lanterns. Light turned a brick road into something like a path cast by the moon, leading the way to magic.
She knew which way she was going. She could hear the singing over the sound of the sea.
Mae followed the music and reached a place where the ruins were cut almost in two by a crevasse with a river rushing through it to crash into the sea and foam against the rocks below.
Across the crevasse was a bridge made of ropes, spangled with lights and tied to the crumbling ruins at either end. It looked like glittering gossamer. It looked like it could snap at any moment.
There were four couples dancing on the bright threads suspended over the rocks.
Mae saw the girl right away.
She was unmistakably the leader again, with a red crown of flowers in her hair. She’d been like a vivid forest creature in the woods, and now she was like something born from the sea foam.
She was wearing white that reflected the moonlight, material that the night wind sent clinging and fluttering down her body, so thin you could almost see her skin dark and soft beneath it. Her hair was threaded with silver ribbons, and her skirt was slashed into silver ribbons as well, trailing over and wrapping around her legs as she danced. Her feet landed light as air, perfectly balanced in the strange web above the waters.
The ropes trembled whenever a foot touched them, shivering over the abyss. The boys were all in black, shadows following the brightly colored girls, none of them as arresting as Nick had been when he danced. The girls in red and yellow and blue looked like shadows as well, next to the girl in white.
Lanterns were swaying over Mae’s head. She looked up and saw the thin, steely flash of the wire supporting them, and then down, all the way down the cliffs that the light laid bare. They were jagged and cruel-looking, stone sharp as knives and going on for miles, and Mae’s stomach sank even as a thrill chased up her spine.
By lantern light the sea below looked a strange, clear turquoise. Mae wondered if that was more magic.
There were people singing on the other side of the abyss, their voices high and rising as the girl in white was thrown up easily as a white flower into the night sky and came tumbling down like an acrobat, feet curving onto the exact same strand of rope she’d been standing on before.
The audience murmured, voices warm as the sound of the waves was cold. The girl paused, hanging there, being still in beauty as much a part of the dance as hurtling through the air. Her dark hair streamed out with her silver ribbons, like a flag of shadows and light.
Then she lowered the arms held in a triumphal arch over her head and dismissed her audience by simply turning away, walking along a tightrope more lightly than Mae could have walked along a street. She leaped from the rope to the edge of the cliff and stood facing Mae, her dark eyes suddenly wide.
“Oh,” said Sin of the Market, red lips curving back from her white teeth. “It’s you.”
Her look and smile were brilliant: Mae glanced backward to see who they were for and saw nothing but ruins and the sea by night.
“Yes,” she responded, disbelieving, a little breathless. “It’s me.”
Sin’s attention was like a spotlight. She smiled, and the whole world became brighter and more intense, seemed to hold the possibility of becoming another world entirely.
She said, “I was hoping you would come back.”
10
Sin on the Market
They stood at the edge of the cliff looking at each other for some time. Mae still could not quite manage to believe the surprised pleasure in Sin’s eyes.
“I liked your style,” Sin told her. “Most of the tourist girls don’t think much of dancers, and as for dancing themselves …” She snorted, scarlet mouth curling scornfully.
“I can’t dance like you,” said Mae, feeling shy for the first time in her life, like a new girl in school humbly lingering at the fringes of a group and wishing desperately to belong.
“You can be taught,” Sin said confidently. With an arch look back over her shoulder at the assembled watchers, she pushed back her hair and ribbons, letting them spill into the wind. “I’m a good teacher,” she continued, the practical words sounding strange and incongruous in her husky voice. “Are you dancing tonight?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” Mae said slowly, and then she smiled at Sin. “But maybe I will.”
“I would suggest you decide quickly,” said a voice behind Mae, and she turned around so fast she almost toppled off the cliff.
There, where she would have sworn nobody had been an instant before, was Merris Cromwell, her black dress flaring like raven’s wings as she walked toward them. The leader of the Goblin Market stood with fairy lights playing on her talisman brooch and on the white streaks in her black hair, making them glint like Sin’s silver ribbons.
Her dramatic appearance was a little spoiled by her voice, which was slightly rasping and distinctly sour.
“I remember you,” she told Mae.
Mae swallowed, keenly aware of the last time she’d seen Merris, at the House of Mezentius, which Merris wanted to keep secret from the Goblin Market people at all costs.
Mae smiled a small, careful smile. “It’s nice of you to remember,” she said. “We only met once, but I was really grateful that you let me dance. I was hoping I could do it again.”
Merris tilted her head, regarding Mae with what seemed to be a fraction less distaste and more interest. Mae’s message was obviously received loud and clear.
“I suppose it would do no harm,” she conceded eventually. “You do seem to have the right attitude. Who will you be dancing with, child?”
“Me,” said Sin, the single word warm and certain.
Mae looked into her laughing eyes.
“Um,” she said. “I thought that it had to be a girl and a guy.”
“Not necessarily,” Sin told her, that husky voice seeming about to tip into a laugh at every word. “It usually works best that way, but I think we could manage to tempt a demon or two together. Don’t you?”
The whole Market was humming and shining with magic, its leader had welcomed her, and now Sin of the Market reached out and offered Mae both her hands.
Mae let herself relax at last, almost at home amid all the wonder. She took up Sin’s challenge and touched the tips of the other girl’s fingers, which were outlined by fairy lights.
“I’m not totally convinced,” she said, grinning at Sin’s startled look. “But I’m willing to give it a try. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Sin threw back her head and laughed. She seemed more real suddenly; less like an ideal and more like someone Mae wanted as a friend.
“Try to keep up with me, tourist,” she said with the laugh still lingering in her voice. She swayed away from the cliff edge, already dancing, and called back over her shoulder, “If you can.”
Mae followed her to a place in Tintagel where there was no stone and only a grassy dip in the ground, like a forest grove—if forests were made of ruins instead of trees. There were dancers in the clearing already cutting circles in the ground with ceremonial knives, drawing the lines of communication and intersection between the worlds.
Mae had always had a knack for graphs and maps. She remembered these symbols.
“Hey, Sin,” she said.
Sin turned. “Yes?”
“Let me cut the circles.”
Sin’s eyebrows were the expressive kind, ones that could indicate surprise when the rest of her face was still. Just now the delicate black arches looked about to take flight off her face.
“Pretty confident, aren’t we?”
“Usually,” said Mae, and Sin reached around to the back of her dress and produced a long knife, which she tossed at Mae. Mae crushed down her instinct to duck away from the huge sharp thing hurtling toward her, and caught it easily enough by the handle.
She knelt down on the ground, the dew on the grass soaking the knees of her jeans, and her blade parted the earth easily, forming shapes and angles. It was like doing math equations or reading music, foreign at first glance but making so much sense in the end, and beginning to come naturally.
Once she was done with her own circle of summoning she did Sin’s, the second circle just touching hers.
Only then did she look up and see Sin’s intent eyes as she returned to Mae, holding a bright, firelike fruit.
“I’m impressed.”
“Thanks,” said Mae, and offered Sin her knife back.
Sin took it in one hand and then, fingers moving deftly, she cut the fever fruit in her other hand into gleaming, tempting slices. The golden juice spilled into her palm, then slid slowly down the inside of her wrist, shining in the faint fairy lights against the tracery of veins.
Mae remembered, with a sudden visceral pang of yearning, how the fruit had tasted. All other food had tasted like ashes in her mouth for days afterward.