Page 92 of The Trick of It

It startled the audience enough that there was the creak of wood from the chairs skittering a little against their tenuous grip on the floors below.

“Who are you?” Rhys demanded. “Where is the other girl?”

Seph gave a gentle, eerie smile, pacing in circles around him, the flowers in her hair glinting in the light. “I don’t know what you mean. I have only ever been myself. And you? Are you one boy or both?”

She grabbed for the lantern and Rhys was gone again, just shoes in his place.

“That’s what I thought,” Seph observed, setting the lantern down and turning to the audience. “Sometimes they try to catch us in the act, you know. There are tests. Watchers. The fearful. Iron in the pockets. Gold in their sleeves.”

She produced the handful of fool’s gold, glittering in the light, and discarded it with a scoff.

Rhys shot up from amidst the audience, scaring half the soul out of Father Yuri and the Breton mesmerist, who were seated on either side of him. “It is not fearful to want the truth!” he shouted, his kerchief redder than it had been before.

He stomped up to the stage, his shoes making noise enough that it made eyes go back to where the empty pair should have been.

Gone again.

“The problem with trying to force the truth from a lie,” Seph said as Rhys produced a pair of red ropes and took her hand from the table, lashing his skin to hers while she continued speaking as though it were no bother, “is that perception has always been stronger than both.”

He knotted tightly, pulling on their bound hands to show that they were cleaved now.

“And is there anything stronger than perception?” she marveled, looking indulgently at the ropes.

“Belief!” called Father Wheeler.

“Determination!” Madame Ivanova guessed.

It made Seph giggle. She paced around Rhys, wrapping the dangling remains of rope tighter around her own body and his. “Perception is weak in the face of one thing only: distraction.”

She kissed him hard on the mouth and then pushed herself back, leaving nothing behind but dangling, loose ropes, held softly around Rhys’s form, and again, her shoes, empty on the stage.

He shook the ropes off, leaving them on the ground. “You had better come back!” he shouted. “You cannot spend too long in the other realm, or you will find yourself changed.”

“‘Changed’?” Seph asked, her flowers now peonies, streaked red and orange, suddenly standing back inside the discarded shoes. “Or improved?”

“Perhaps both,” Rhys answered, crossing closer to her. “Perhaps neither. Who but a changeling could say?”

They mirrored one another, in the wary dance of someone who was uncertain if they were the monster or the hero.

And then, suddenly, the light doused.

There was a breath of silence, and then the wall lamps were raised back to burning high, and only two pairs of shoes were left on the stage, still half in the process of circling one another.

The first two people to applaud in the audience stood.

Rhys and Seph themselves, somehow right in the center of everyone else.

Their feet were bare.

Everyone stared at them for a moment, silent.

“Excellent trick,” Seph said to Rhys in her normal voice. “I wonder who they were, those performers.”

“Not sure,” Rhys answered. “I’ve never seen them before in my life.”

*

They mingled in the ballroom for a time after, absorbing praise and good-natured admonishment.