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.
