Finvarra's Circus

16- Falling Stars

The night was cold, and Leanna felt icicles stab at her lungs with each breath. She embraced this discomfort, however, and hauled in a deep breath, pushing this blade of pain further into her traitorous heart. She staggered forward, blindly into the empty Big Top and cast her cloak aside, fall where it may. Breathless, she bound up the ladder, needing the rope—needing another type of fear that would suffocate the hellish ache in her chest. It threatened to devour her alive.

She reached the platform on one gathered breath. Holding all thoughts at bay, she focused on the rope. Only the rope...

Luna, who Leanna had learned glowed brighter than the other pixies and was pinker in hue, floated down toward her. She whirred around Leanna, creating loops of light that glittered behind the tears Leanna forbade to fall. She would not cry.

Flying to Leanna's right, and then to her left, Luna floated out over the platform. She sought something, Leanna gathered when Luna returned to her with a long whir that sounded very much like yooo-yooo, followed by a question-like squeak.

Leanna realized then, "Kioyo isn't here," she said, and took a deep breath to steady her words. "But he said I should come and practice, that you knew what to do. All I want is to dance." Her voice failed her. "Please, I need to dance."

A pitched squeak and Luna flew up to her counterparts. On her piped call, the pixies detached from the crossbars and whisked down, lining the rope like little specs of fire. In position, Luna flew down to Leanna with a confirming whirr.

Whereas once her pulse would have quickened, Leanna's heart slowed with pleading pangs for her to step out onto that rope and abandon all she'd learned from Minerva on the platform—everything from curses to unrequited love to the damned duty of the Leanan Sidhe. Her body, however, warred. Weary and shaking, it resisted. It wanted to collapse onto the platform and mourn this waking nightmare it was being forced to endure.

Closing her eyes and retreating into herself, into her soul, Leanna hauled in a deep breath and made Vicente's tune a melody on her lips. Like the song of a siren, her body could not resist the lure, and awakened.

The unfinished dance picked up where she'd left it last—herself dying within the gilded cage that was her life before the circus. To the sighing whirr of the pixies, Leanna caressed the air with her arm in one vertical stroke, opening the door to this cage that had been unlocked by a cursed Ringmaster. Curling her hand back to her heart, Leanna abandoned the cage the way she'd abandoned her home, and stepped out onto the wire.

Her movements flourished again into a parallel imitation of her life. In the way she'd trespassed onto the circus, she crouched low and then straightened like a blooming flower. Her eyes widened and she reached longingly into the air, remembering seeing the striped Big Top for the first time. The pixies that flew around her floated down in slow, swaying motions, reminiscent of falling snow. Arabesque and Leanna reached up to one of the withering lights. She caught it in her hands the way Jin had caught her. Blowing it away gently as a phantom kiss, the rest of the fireflies ignited brighter. And under their iridescent light, so did the smoky memory of the one who sparked longing in her heart with a like kiss... the one whose life she was destined to take.