“What?”
“Your Vinculo. With the necromancer.”
Elloven didn’t ask what a necromancer was. She’d already ceded too much ground to someone she didn’t trust at all.
Velanthe gestured for Elloven to take a seat on a nearby blanket. A young man with an absurdly large metal platter knelt before them. “Your imbibements.”
Her aunt drew a small glass from the tray. She nodded for Elloven to do the same.
“I’m not drinking that,” Elloven said with a contemptuous laugh.
“You will if you want to see your father.”
“What does this have to do with my father?”
The attendant’s knees buckled in his awkward kneel. “Will you imbibe or not?”
“She will,” Velanthe answered for her, taking a second glass.
The man rolled his eyes before continuing on to the next blanket.
“You must enter an altered state to view the show in the sky. I can’t make you do anything, but if you want to see Laxius, this is the only way.”
“What’s in it?” Elloven held the cup away from her body.
“Nothing that can harm you. All things you’ve had before, just not in this arrangement.”
Elloven’s eyes narrowed, flicking between Velanthe and the orange-tinged drink. “That’s not an answer.”
“Do you want to see Laxius or not, Aelloven? Everyone else here does. If you don’t drink soon, you’ll miss the whole thing.”
“What will it do to me?” Elloven prepared for more annoyance, but Velanthe smiled.
“You’ve been drunk on spirits before?”
“Of course.”
“This is more pleasant, and with fewer regrets later.”
Her choice wasn’t complicated, but that didn’t make it simple either. Trust and drink and possibly learn about her father, or walk away and live in the same ignorance she’d been in her entire life.
I already took the biggest leap of faith in coming here. It’s all for nothing if I can’t even try to assimilate into a culture I’ve always wanted to understand.
Elloven swished the cup and drained it down her throat.
The effect was immediate. Her head swam with a pleasant lightness. Warmth traveled across her shoulders and hips, into her limbs.
Velanthe chuckled. “Now look up.”
What appeared to be a man, slumped in a chair four times his size, atop a cloud. He seemed as real as the marionettes but larger than life.
“This exibere is called the Cry of the Ancestors,” Velanthe whispered. “The stories of old are replayed here, through a mix of arcane and silver-tongue magic.”
“I don’t have the patience for another show like the last,” Elloven snapped, but she’d wanted to return to her initial feelings of purpose and light, that sense of rightness, and she was. Slowly, she was. “Just tell me where he is.”
“I am.” Velanthe tipped her head toward the man in the sky. “In each season of the Cirque, a different piece of our history is told, stories that shaped our world. This one serves as a cautionary tale to all who defy the laws of our land. This season is the story of Laxius’s Fall.”
Elloven’s next question disintegrated as the ethereal figures in the sky moved. The man—Laxius, she presumed—lifted his head and accepted an infant into his arms. His posture relaxed with joy. His mouth moved without sound.
