A hand gripped Annie’s ankle and tugged. It wasn’t strong enough to drag her out of the cage, but any motion in the oddities wagon was cause for concern. Her eyes snapped open and she sat upright, banging her head on the top of the cage. She made a wordless sound of pain and dismay. Behind her, Tranquility grumbled, the low, deep muttering of a discontented predator.
The wagon wasn’t moving anymore. Annie squinted through watering eyes, trying to see what had grabbed her. Nothing was biting at her flesh or attempting to devour her alive, which meant that it was probably human; other than Oscar, Tranquility, and a few of the nameless snakes, there was nothing else in the wagon that would be so kind.
Her vision cleared. She realized that she could see surprisingly well: sunlight was oozing in around the edges of the closed windows, driving most of the wagon’s occupants deeper into the shadows of their enclosures. Very few of the things in the wagon of oddities cared for direct sunlight—especially Oscar, whose pale flesh could burn just like a human’s.
Adeline was crouching in front of the cage, her fingers still wrapped tight around her mother’s ankle, watching her unblinkingly. Annie let out a sigh of relief.
“Hello, my Delly,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I must have fallen asleep while I was checking on Tranquility.” After so many nights spent running with the lynx asleep at her head and the baby asleep at her breast, the purr of the lynx was a soothing thing. She didn’t succumb to its lure as often as she once had, but still, there were times when the promise of peace was more than she could ignore.
‘I woke up and you were gone,’ signed Delly, a reproachful expression on her face.
“I know, and I am truly sorry.” Annie reached behind herself to give Tranquility a final reassuring pat before pulling her ankle free of Adeline’s grasp and rolling onto her hands and knees. She crawled out into the open, her back protesting the motion. She was not a young woman anymore, to spend her nights sleeping on the floor of a cage without paying for it in the morning.
Adeline was not appeased. She waited until her mother was facing her again before signing, ‘I thought you were eaten.’
“Tranquility would never let that happen.”
Adeline fixed her mother with a disbelieving stare. If most of the things in the collection of oddities wanted to eat Annie, a simple lynx wouldn’t be able to stop them. Even if Tranquility’s loyalty were strong enough to make her join a fight, she couldn’t possibly win. They would both be devoured.
Annie sighed. “Again, my love, I am sorry, and I didn’t mean to leave you alone. We’ve stopped. Are we laying camp, or has Mr. Blackstone found us a stopping point?”
‘Camp,’ signed Adeline, and followed the word with, ‘Hungry.’
“Yes, my dearest. Come along.” Annie stood, turning to close and lock Tranquility’s cage behind herself. The lynx had already gone back to sleep, and didn’t so much as twitch an ear.
Looking down at herself, Annie wrinkled her nose. Keeping oneself clean on the road was a trial, made more difficult by their current unpredictable circumstances. They had run off their usual seasonal route a week prior, and although they had stopped several times for an afternoon of opening the exhibit wagons, they had yet to set up for a full show. Without a full show, there was no cause to set up either the big tent or the boneyard, and without the boneyard—their shared campsite and temporary home during a show—there was no bathing tent. It was enough to make a woman think of clawing her own skin off in the hopes of removing the filth along with her flesh.
“May I change my dress before we go for food?” she asked. Giving Adeline a frank look, she said, “We should do the same for you, lest we encounter townies who decide I beat you every night, and twice in the morning.”
Adeline giggled soundlessly, making a fist and miming punching herself in the jaw. Then she nodded.
“My thanks,” Annie said gravely. She offered her hand. After a moment’s contemplation, Adeline took it, and the two of them walked together out of the oddities wagon.
It would have been impossible for someone who saw them together to mistake the fact that they were mother and daughter. Adeline’s hair was the color of corn silk, while Annie’s was the darker, more mature color of corn. Both had naturally pale complexions, which tanned quickly in the sun, and eyes like chips of meltless winter ice. They shared a chin, and a nose, and a tendency to furrow their brows when frustrated, as if they could glare the world into submission, or at least into becoming comprehensible.
Adeline was shorter, of course, being only seven years old; her hair was longer and very rarely styled, although she would generally consent to having it brushed. Both of them walked quietly and stood straight-backed and proud, even when there seemed little to be proud of. There was always survival. Survival, under the right circumstances, was enough.
The wagon train was stopped at the side of a road that seemed barely worthy of the name: it was a trail, worn into the earth by wheels and hooves and feet, but never planned, nor tended by anyone who cared for its condition. They had moved onto the grass more out of courtesy than necessity; it seemed unlikely that anyone else would come riding through this particular stretch of desolation anytime soon.
There were trees, but not many; their scrubby branches would provide little shelter if it happened to rain again. Annie gave the sky a wary look as they stepped down from the oddities wagon. The earth was soft, skirting the line between dirt and mud with an expert hand. One more good rainstorm would be enough to see them stopped for days. The earth out here took water easily. It gave it back slow.
There were no houses in sight—not so much as a shack. Whatever they’d stopped for, it wasn’t to put on a show. Most of the wagons had their windows open, which only drew attention to the lack of a crowd. They would never have risked townies seeing into their private places outside the boneyard. The fact that they were willing when they didn’t have the proper protections up only proved there’d be no entertainment for the masses. Not here, not today.
“Morning, Miss Annie,” said one of her freaks—a name she didn’t much care for, but which they bore as a badge of honor. She supposed the word was all in where you were standing while you looked at it. For her, a woman of decent breeding brought low by circumstance, being called a freak would have been an insult. For Edgar, born with hair on almost every inch of his body, so that he appeared in shorts for the amazement of the masses under the name “Arizona Werewolf,” well. “Freak” was a word that meant a place to sleep, and full bellies for himself, his wife, and all three of his children.
(The youngest of them looked set to take after her father, and had been born with a fine coat of downy fur covering her entire body. She was only three years old, and Mr. Blackstone had a firm policy of not displaying living children too young to understand what was going on. Dead children were another matter, and the show had its share of “abomination” babies in jars, infants born too flawed to have ever lived past the cradle. Dead children were simply residents of a graveyard with a view. Live children had rights.)
“Good morning, Edgar,” said Annie, trying to pretend she wasn’t wearing the previous day’s clothing, that she didn’t have straw and animal fur in her hair. Adeline continued tugging on her hand, urging her onward. Annie grimaced apologetically. “I would stop to chat, but…”
“Say no more, ma’am,” said Edgar, an understanding smile on his furry face.
Annie smiled back, as much out of relief at the conversation’s end as anything else, and allowed herself to be hauled onward, back to the safety of her own wagon.
The lantern had burned out during the night. Annie felt a pang of guilt as she looked at it. Once Adeline was actually asleep, it was virtually impossible to wake her. If there had been a fire …
If there had been a fire, she would have burned to death while her mother was sleeping soundly in her caravan of monsters. Annie would have woken to find herself alone in the world, and she didn’t think she would survive that. She had been many things in her life. She had never, as yet, been alone.
“You are a mess, my poppet,” she said, pointing at the chest of drawers that contained Adeline’s wardrobe. “I want to see you in clean clothes, and washing your hands and face, before I have my corset off. Hop to it!”
Adeline did not hop. She did give her mother a put-upon look before heading to the chest, presumably to follow directions. Annie turned her back to give her a little privacy. The child had been to the manor born, as had Annie herself; she should have had entire rooms for nothing but the changing of her clothes, and here she was, sharing a cramped wagon with her mother, forced to expose her body whether she wanted to or not.
At least it was only Annie who seemed to understand the difficulties of their situation. Adeline didn’t remember where she came from and had no trouble with the cramped quarters or the lack of privacy. She didn’t even seem to understand that she should care.
Quickly, Annie stripped down and unlaced her corset, dropping it on the floor and taking several deep breaths as she allowed her waist to expand to its natural dimensions. Some of the men who traveled with the show asked the women why they bothered with corsetry when there wasn’t a show. It was difficult to make them understand that when all your clothing was cut to fit over something, it could be hard to go without. Besides, a good corset was also good armor, and there were plenty of things to fear at the circus. Kicking horses, swinging doors, even the occasional fistfight between roustabouts—they could all be made less dangerous by the right corsetry.
Annie grabbed a clean corset and tied herself up with quick, sharp jerks, drawing the laces tight enough to allow her skirt to fit, while leaving them loose enough that she didn’t need to get a hook. They were stopped, for now; she didn’t need to worry about presentability, just modesty. She pulled on a patched shirt and an ankle-length red skirt that had started life as part of one of the smaller tents. She wasn’t the only one at the show wearing clothes made of that material. It could practically have been a uniform if only it hadn’t been remade into so many different shapes and types of thing.
“Are you ready, Delly?” she asked, turning, and barely managing not to jump when she discovered that Adeline was standing directly behind her, having crossed the wagon on silent feet while her mother wasn’t looking. She pressed a hand to her heart, trying to calm it. She had long since learned that there was no point in scolding Adeline for sneaking up on her; the child couldn’t help it. Some of the clowns even found it endearing, calling her a natural and beseeching her to don greasepaint and enter the ring.
(Those requests earned silent giggles from Adeline and shakes of the head from Annie, who knew better than anyone how important it was that her face never appear on a poster, even interpreted by an artist’s hand and concealed beneath a harlequin’s slap.)
Adeline was wearing a simple patched sundress with a shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders to ward away the end of summer chill. The hem covered her feet, making it difficult to tell whether she was wearing shoes. Annie decided not to ask. Adeline was a delicate child, but her constitution was good enough to handle a little mud, and it was best not to push too hard when there was no show to distract her.
“Very well,” said Annie. “To breakfast, then.”
Adeline smiled and took her mother’s hand, and the pair of them walked out into the morning air once more.
The Blackstone Circus was a small train, as such shows went: they had more wagons than was strictly required for transport of their equipment, but that was due to the number of families they had traveling with them. It had the benefit of making the circus seem larger than it was. Larger shows should have been a more tempting target for robbers, being more likely to have full coffers and healthy supply wagons, but somehow, the larger the circus, the more apt it was that raiders and the like would simply pass it by. Mr. Blackstone liked to say that it was a form of civic duty, the bad seeds of the badlands sparing the people who could take their minds off their petty woes for a few precious hours. Annie had a great deal of respect for Mr. Blackstone, but rather thought that he was talking out his nethers when he said that sort of thing.
Large circuses had powerful patrons. Powerful patrons didn’t like their toys being damaged by other people. Large circuses were thus substantially more likely to have dedicated security, gunslingers and the like who looked like ordinary roustabouts until they had reason to draw. A small show was less likely to have anything worth taking, but it was also more likely to be vulnerable. The extra family wagons were a form of camouflage, like a garter snake slapping its tail against rocks in an effort to sound like a rattler. They were trying to look more dangerous than they were.
There was no room along the road to set up the mess tent. That wasn’t enough to stop the chuck wagon from surging into action the moment they’d stopped. Annie and Adeline wove their way between parked wagons, following the smell of fatty bacon and honey-touched oatmeal, until they emerged into the clear band of space between the rest of the train and their temporary commissary.
They weren’t the first to come looking for breakfast, by a long shot. People sat on the porches of nearby wagons or on the ground; a few enterprising souls had even spread out picnic blankets. A group of circus orphans was clustered near the mess tent proper, eating their oatmeal as fast as they could, presumably in hopes of a second helping before the breakfast period ended. Adeline looked hopefully up at her mother.
“Of course,” said Annie, and let go of her hand. “Only please, attempt to eat like a lady, instead of like a wild thing found by the side of the road.”
Adeline wrinkled her nose and ran off to join her friends, kicking her skirts high enough in the process for Annie to see that the girl’s feet were, indeed, bare. She sighed. Autumn would come soon enough, with its thick socks and thrice-mended shoes. Best to let the girl have her fun now, while there was still fun to be had.
“Miss Pearl. Just who I was hoping to see this fine morning.” Nathanial stepped up next to her. He was nowhere near as quiet as Adeline, who could sneak up on Tranquility on some mornings, but he was quiet enough to startle two times out of three. “Did you sleep well? I was under the impression that you preferred your bed.”
“Does everyone know I spent the night in the oddities wagon, or are you simply reminding me that the ringmaster sees all, knows all, and has an opinion on all?”
“A few of the roustabouts saw you enter but didn’t see you leave. They came to me with their concerns when we stopped.” Nathanial smiled, the corners of his mustache flexing upward like the whiskers of a satisfied cat. “They did not, it seems, feel equipped to enter your chamber of horrors if it had already devoured you.”
“Seems they have a sense of self-preservation, then,” said Annie. “I fell asleep in Tranquility’s kennel.”
“You could take her into your wagon.”
Annie shook her head. “There’s no room for her, and she can be unpredictable where Delly is concerned.” Sometimes the big cat was Adeline’s fiercest protector. Other times, she would mutter and growl, eyeing the child like she thought that Delly might be a threat to her mistress. The loyalty of a lynx was not like the loyalty of a dog: it was not unshakable and inbred. It was a wild thing, as she was a wild thing, and Annie had lived through too many tragedies to go seeking another.
“Besides,” she added. “She has the loudest roar of anything short of those mangy tigers in the big tent. If there were actually a threat to the wagon, she would be able to notify me no matter where in the train I happened to be. That’s a powerful thing to have, given the other things she rides with.”
“All are fed and secure?”
“Yes, although I’ll need another dozen rats soon for the snakes, and more worms for Oscar. He’s getting bigger. Larger things need more food.”
“Yes,” agreed Nathanial, eyes on the chuck wagon. There were so many children clustered there that it seemed like a magic trick. How had they wound up with so many children?
In the usual ways. There were families traveling with the show; there were apprentices to be considered; there were the circus orphans, who could have been turned away, but who had nowhere else to go. If they were old enough to work, or came with a sibling who was old enough to work, he let them stay. That was how he had always run his show, and that was how he always would. It was a small thing, when set against the casual cruelty of an entire world. It was less than the world deserved.
Nathanial Blackstone had never been a slave. His parents had been freed before the accord that ended slavery across the continent: he had grown up being told over and over that it was the cut of his character, more than the color of his skin, that would determine his future. And that was all well and good, but when the white families around them had relatives back in the rich and settled East who were happy to keep sending money and care packages and everything else under the sun while his family and the families like them had to face the West without any support but what they gave each other, well. It was difficult not to see that as a lasting ripple from the great stone of slavery, still spreading outward, not yet reaching whatever wall would make it stop.
People liked to claim that once you pulled the knife out of someone’s back, everything was fine, but anyone who’d ever been stabbed knew that just wasn’t so. Knives made wounds. There was bleeding and infection to deal with long before the process of healing could properly begin, and even after the healing happened, there would always be scars. He’d bought his circus from a family that didn’t want it anymore, back when it had been three crumbling wagons, a rickety tent, and a handful of freaks who barely deserved the name—Wilma the Bearded Lady, with her spirit gum and her peach fuzz cheeks; Peter the Human Lobster, who should really have been called “Peter Who Never Learned Not to Grab Knives by the Blade,” and all their ilk—and he’d never looked back. He had painted and patched and bought more wagons, more attractions, expanded his tiny traveling empire until it almost seemed worthy of the name.
His mother, God rest her soul, had never been able to understand why her eldest son wouldn’t want to put down roots; would choose to be a tumbleweed rolling across the West instead of a safely rooted sycamore growing in fertile soil. What she didn’t understand and he had never been able to explain to her was that sometimes being a tumbleweed was the key to staying alive. As long as he didn’t set down roots, he could move on whenever there was danger.
But he had set down roots. Every wagon in the circus train, every person who depended on him for their daily bread, they were his roots. It was his responsibility to make sure they didn’t wither and die.
“Is something wrong?”
Annie’s voice snapped him out of his contemplation. He sighed, turning toward her and attempting to force a realistic smile—or at least a believable one. “What would make you think that, o pearl beyond price?”
“You’re never quiet for this long,” she replied, crossing her arms. “What is it?”
Annie was a good woman, with a solid head on her shoulders. There had been times when he’d considered courting her in earnest. Adeline didn’t bother him the way she did some of the men with the circus: she was a good girl, and her silence wasn’t her fault. There just never seemed to be time. Running a circus was a constant commitment. Even when he was alone in his wagon, he was looking at routes, calculating supplies, and figuring out what needed to happen next. There was no such thing as a truly free moment. Not for him.
“Our next two shows have canceled,” he admitted in a soft voice, not intended to carry. “They sent their apologies, and one of them paid the cancellation fee—which was mighty nice of them, under the circumstances—but the harvests haven’t been as good as they’d been hoping when they booked with us, and they simply can’t afford to have us disrupting the town for a week. Not with autumn coming and the last of the stores needing to be brought in.”
“But the children—” she began, and stopped when she saw him shaking his head. “The children will be working, too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Farm children generally need to.”
“How can anyone farm out here?”
“How can anyone not?” He spread his arms, indicating the rolling plains around them. “There’s no supply train here, no one coming to make sure the pantry is stocked and the larder is full. It’s hunt and farm and hope and fail, and pray that failure won’t be enough to see you in the ground.”
There was a hard edge to his voice that made Annie want to step away from him, fearing the sound. “What does this mean for us?” she asked instead.
He sighed. “It means we press on. We have to find at least one more show before the end of the season, or we’re not going to make it through the winter.”
Winter was when the circus stopped, at least until the roads thawed. Winter was when they rented rooms from suspicious townies, or slept six to a wagon and hoped that their bodies would be enough to keep the air from freezing. It was when they stabled the animals and repaired the tents and pretended, for a time, to be comfortable under a fixed roof, surrounded by strangers who grew more familiar by the day. They lost a few people every winter, when the lure of town life was too much for them to resist. They gained a few people, too, riding out in the spring with formerly respectable merchants and seamstresses clinging to their bunks, eyes full of stars and bones full of wonder.
“Do we have a destination?”
Nathanial hesitated.
That was never a good sign. When Nathanial hesitated, it was because he knew that whatever he was going to say was not going to be well-received.
“Nathanial,” she said.
He sighed. “Oregon,” he said. “There’s a town there. The Clearing. They have a reputation for being kind to outsiders; I know a puppet show that passed through there last summer, and they made five times their normal fees, in addition to gifts from the locals.”
“So why are you wary?”
“Because anything that sounds too good to be true almost certainly is.” He looked moodily at the crowd around the chuck wagon. “I just don’t see where we have a choice.”