The Night Circus

“What?” Marco asks.

“The one who survives is the victor,” she says. “The winner lives, the loser dies. That’s how the game ends.”

“That—” Marco stops, shaking his head. “That cannot be the intent of this.”

“It is,” Celia says. “It is a test of endurance, not skill. I’m attempting to make the circus self-sufficient before … ”

She cannot say the words, still barely able to look at him.

“You’re going to do what your father did,” Marco says. “You’re going to take yourself off the board.”

“Not precisely,” she says. “I suppose I was always more my mother’s daughter.”

“No,” Marco says. “You cannot mean that.”

“It’s the only way to stop the game.”

“Then we’ll continue playing.”

“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t keep holding on. Every night it becomes more difficult. And I … I have to let you win.”

“I don’t want to win,” Marco says. “I want you. Truly, Celia, do you not understand that?”

Celia says nothing, but tears begin to roll down her cheeks. She does not wipe them away.

“How can you think that I don’t love you?” Marco asks. “Celia, you are everything to me. I don’t know who is trying to convince you otherwise, but you must believe me, please.”

She only looks at him with tear-soaked eyes, the first time she has held his gaze steadily.

“This is when I knew I loved you,” he says.

They stand on opposite sides of a small, round room painted a rich blue and dotted with stars, on a ledge around a pool of jewel-toned cushions. A shimmering chandelier hangs above them.

“I was enchanted from the moment I first saw you,” Marco says, “but this is when I knew.”

The room around them changes again, expanding into an empty ballroom. Moonlight filters in through the windows.

“This is when I knew,” Celia says, her voice a whisper echoing softly through the room.

Marco moves to close the distance between them, kissing away her tears before catching her lips with his own.

As he kisses her, the bonfire glows brighter. The acrobats catch the light perfectly as they spin. The entire circus sparkles, dazzling every patron.

And then the immaculate cohesion stops as Celia reluctantly breaks away.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Please,” Marco says, refusing to let her go, his fingers holding tightly to the lace of her gown. “Please don’t leave me.”

“It’s too late,” she says. “It was too late by the time I arrived in London to turn your notebook into a dove; there were too many people already involved. Anything either of us does has an effect on everyone here, on every patron who walks through those gates. Hundreds if not thousands of people. All flies in a spiderweb that was spun when I was six years old and now I can barely move for fear of losing someone else.”

She looks up at him, lifting her hand to stroke his cheek.

“Will you do something for me?” she asks.

“Anything,” Marco says.

“Don’t come back,” she says, her voice breaking.

She vanishes before Marco can protest, as simply and elegantly as at the end of her act, her gown fading beneath his hands. Only her perfume lingers in the space she occupied moments before.

Marco stands alone in an empty tent with nothing but two rings of chairs and an open door, waiting for him to leave.

Before he departs, he takes a single playing card from his pocket and places it on her chair.

Visitations SEPTEMBER 1902

Celia Bowen sits at a desk surrounded by piles of books. She ran out of space for her library some time ago, but instead of making the room larger she has opted to let the books become the room. Piles of them function as tables, others hang suspended from the ceiling, along with large golden cages holding several live white doves.

Another round cage, sitting on a table rather than hanging from above, contains an elaborate clock. It marks both time and astrological movements as it ticks steadily through the afternoon.

A large black raven sleeps uncaged alongside the complete works of Shakespeare.

Mismatched candles in silver candelabras, burning in sets of three, surround the desk in the center of the room. Upon the desk itself there is a slowly cooling cup of tea, a scarf that has been partially unraveled into a ball of crimson yarn, a framed photograph of a deceased clockmaker, a solitary playing card long separated from its deck, and an open book filled with signs and symbols and signatures procured from other pieces of paper.

Celia sits with a notebook and pen, attempting to decipher the system the book is written in.

She tries to think the way she imagines Marco might have as he wrote it, picturing him inscribing each page, rendering the delicate ink branches of the tree that winds throughout the book.

She reads each signature over and over, checking how securely each lock of hair is pasted, scrutinizing each symbol.

She has spent so much time repeating this process that she could recreate the book from memory, but she still does not fully comprehend how the system works.

The raven stirs and caws at something in the shadows.

“You’re bothering Huginn,” Celia says, without looking up.

The candlelight catches only the edges of her father’s form as he hovers nearby. Highlighting the creases of his jacket, the collar of his shirt. Glinting in the hollows of his dark eyes.

“You should really get another one,” he says, peering at the agitated raven. “A Muninn to complete the set.”

“I prefer thought to memory, Papa,” Celia says.

“Hrmph” is the only response.

Celia ignores him as he leans over her shoulder, watching her flip through the inscribed pages.

“This is a god-awful mess,” he says.

“A language you cannot speak yourself is not necessarily a god-awful mess,” Celia says, transcribing a line of symbols into her notebook.

“This is messy work, bindings and charms,” Hector says, floating to the other side of the desk to get a better look. “Very much Alexander’s style, overly complicated and covert.”

“Yet with enough study anyone could do it. Quite the contrast to all your lectures about how I was special.”

“You are special. You are beyond this”—he waves a transparent hand over the pile of books—“this use of tools and constructs. There is so much more you could accomplish with your talents. So much more to explore.”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Celia quotes at him.

“Please, no Shakespeare.”

“I am haunted by the ghost of my father, I think that should allow me to quote Hamlet as much as I please. You used to be quite fond of Shakespeare, Prospero.”

“You are too intelligent for this behavior. I expected more of you.”

“I apologize for not living up to your absurd expectations, Papa. Don’t you have anyone else to bother?”