Circus of the Unseen by Joanne Owen

Author:Joanne Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471401152
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Published: 2014-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

The door opened. I sat up, still half in my dream. In it, I’d been back at home, in my room in the cellar – only Scarlet and Fabian had been there too, and we’d found another envelope of Granny’s things, more pieces to her puzzle.

‘Stir yourself, girl. You’re leaving.’

‘What?’

Mother Matushka’s words catapulted me awake. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to laugh and cry and dance and even hug her. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to Scarlet first.’

‘No need for goodbyes. You’ll see her soon enough. Her and all the others. Accordienka, we’re ready,’ she called. ‘She will take you to the Big Top. Her father will be your guide there. I shall find you later.’

I felt totally flattened. I shouldn’t have let myself get carried away like that. ‘Why do I have to go there?’

‘I know how the marsh shrank back for you, and I saw for myself how the birds came to you, so let us see how you fare in the Circus of the Unseen.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. The thought of being forced to do some kind of circus act as a test turned my stomach.

‘Let us see what you can do,’ she said. ‘Let us see what you learn,’ she went on, which didn’t help me at all. She blew onto one of the skull-capped fence-posts and a flame ignited. She uprooted the whole post and handed it to me. ‘In case you need to light your way; in case the sun fails. But do not stray from any path,’ she warned, as if she knew what I was thinking. ‘All paths return to me.’

Accordienka took my hand, like I was the little sister she’d been told to take care of, and the wind whipped up and jostled us away. I just kept telling myself, over and over, to stay calm and sharp and not fall to pieces. What else could I do? At least I wasn’t locked up. I glanced back at the cottage, with its stilts and skulls and the blast of blue roses round the door, and I saw Mother Matushka flapping her arms at the sky, and I swear it looked like she was making the wind herself. As Accordienka led me to the crossroads, that familiar mist closed in around us.

‘Is the weather always so strange here?’ I asked. ‘It’s like you have your own climate.’

She didn’t reply to that, or to any of my questions, like why I had to go to the Big Top, and what I was supposed to do there, and if she’d always lived here. She just looked at me with her big, dark eyes, as if she was speaking, but no words came. I don’t know if Mother Matushka had told her to keep quiet, or if she was shy, or maybe she just didn’t like me because I’d gone to pick up her doll, but she didn’t say a single word. I almost jumped out of my skin when someone else did.

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