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
