I blinked at her, astonished at her obstinacy. Little monster.
The pulse in Falak’s throat beat like a galloping horse. His eyes narrowed, and he bared his teeth at her. “This is my circus, princess. Here, I am the king. And if I say you go...you go.”
Clearing my throat, I gave Karolina my best queen-of-the-realm stare, channeling the look on my father’s face when he was displeased and wanted me to understand the severity of his disapproval. “Never mind the selfishness or dangerousness of your actions. Never mind the resources being spent on the effort to find you. Never mind your sister’s fear for your life, or a nation’s panic. It’s late, we’re far from Prigha, and the road home is dangerous, especially at night.” I glanced at Falak, and the intensity of his glare nearly knocked me over. “In the morning, I will take her back to Prigha myself. For tonight, though, she should stay with me. I’ll watch her and make sure she doesn’t get into any more trouble.”
My offer to take her home sat like ice on my tongue. How could I get her to the city without endangering her or risking that Jackie and Le Poing Fermé might find me?
Falak shook his head, and a lock of dark hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it away and glared at Karolina. “No. Tonight she will stay in the menagerie wagon. She’ll be locked in with Sher-sah, and he will guard her.”
An angry flush flooded Karolina’s face, and she shoved a hand on her jutted hip. “I won’t sleep with that beast. It’s not like I’ll run away. This is where I want to be.”
Falak’s nostril’s flared. “What you want is no concern of mine.”
She pushed out her bottom lip and stomped her heel. “Why does Evie get to stay?”
“She’s useful to me.”
“I can be useful, too.”
His dark eyes scraped up the princess’s figure from her booted toes to the top of her head and back down again. His upper lip curled. “A spoiled brat is no use to a circus. Go back to your posh castle.”
She inhaled, probably to form another retort. I didn’t give her the chance. “Don’t waste your breath.” I locked my eyes on hers and drew on every ounce of my blood and ancestry that had known the weight of wearing a crown. “Right now, the best thing you could do is sit down and be quiet.” I shoved her toward the chair at Falak’s desk. She stumbled, lost her footing, and fell into the seat. Although she harrumphed and made an elaborate show of crossing her arms over her chest, she said nothing more.
“Now.” I arched an eyebrow at the injured ringmaster and pointed to his wounded appendage. “Maybe you can explain that.”
Falak grimaced but offered no argument. Heedless of propriety, he unfastened the remaining buttons on his shirt and slipped the fabric from his shoulders, careful not to strain his wounded arm. Nude from the waist up, Falak’s infirmity was clear. Long stripes of old, silvery scars mottled his slim chest and one shoulder. A thick ring of inflamed skin outlined the edge of a metal band, connecting a mechanized arm to his flesh-and-bone shoulder. The lion’s attack had mangled his biceps and forearm near the elbow. Several puncture wounds, presumably from the beast’s metal fangs, marked the arm’s smooth brass surface.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when a tigress is protecting her cub, she’ll attack any intruder, including children. Especially children.”
He held still and let me look, taking in my fill of him, and I didn’t realize I’d been holding in my breath until I almost swooned. “A tiger did that to you?” I gestured at his scars.
He nodded. “When I was a little boy. It’s a long story, and I’m not in the mood to tell it.” He wrapped his long fingers around his upper arm, gritted his teeth, and with a grunt, turned it with a click, pop, and hiss from the broken seal. The arm detached from his shoulder, and he set the mangled appendage beside him on the bed.
I schooled my face to radiate serenity and composure. If he expected his revelation to disgust or horrify me, I meant to disappoint him. Karolina gasped, but mercifully remained quiet. “You’re not the only one who has lost a part of themselves,” I said. “Not that I can completely relate, mind you.”
He arched a dark eyebrow. “Oh?”
Before I could explain my meaning, a knock rattled the door. Moments later, a little round woman with deep lines around her mouth and eyes stepped inside toting a large carpet bag. The contents of Svieta’s bag clanked and jangled as she squeezed into the wagon’s confined space and approached the young ringmaster. As though we were invisible, she ignored Karolina and me and rattled off a question to Falak.
“She asks if I’m in pain,” Falak translated before giving an answer in Svieta’s language.
“I assume the answer is yes,” I said. “Your eyes have that glassy look people get when they’re hurting.”
Svieta settled on the bed beside Falak and opened her bag. She withdrew a small jar and cracked open the lid. The scent of eucalyptus saturated the air as she rubbed the ointment into the ringmaster’s inflamed shoulder. “You’ve seen a lot of pain?” Falak asked.
I thought of Gideon’s black eye, broken rib, and bullet wound from his fight with my father’s Crown of Men on the road to Thropshire. I remembered the looks on the faces of the Fantazike men who had battled the politzen forces in Pisha. I recalled the way my own face looked in the mirror in the months after my father’s death. “I’ve seen enough.”
Not wanting to discuss my experiences with pain, I changed the subject. “What was wrong with that lion? Sher-sah, right?”
Falak nodded. “Nothing wrong with him. He was doing his job, patrolling the perimeter of the camp.”
Karolina made a rough sound deep in her throat. “Then why did he attack me?”
“His job is to keep outsiders from getting in.”
“He can tell the difference?” I asked. “He...it’s just a machine, right?”
Falak cocked a pained smile and glanced at the empty space his arm had formerly occupied. “Am I just a machine?”
“You can’t actually believe I would think that.” I folded my arms over my chest and narrowed my gaze. “One mechanical arm doesn’t annul your humanity.”
He bared a cold smile at me, one that was full of teeth. “Who said it was only one mechanical arm?”
I clamped my mouth shut, uncertain as to whether I wanted him to explain what he meant. When I glanced at Karolina she screwed her lips into a sideways pucker and shrugged. I’d managed to accept the miraculous truth of Falak’s infirmity with grace. Any further revelations might have strained my daily limit for tolerating the strange and extraordinary, so I put my questions away for later.
Svieta finished doctoring Falak’s shoulder and returned her ointment jar to her bag. She drew out a device that looked like a series of monocles attached to leather straps. She adjusted the strap to fit securely over her head, holding the lenses over her right eye. After flicking a glass in place, she gathered Falak’s dismembered arm into his lap. She removed a long, pointed tool from her bag and poked the joint at the inside of the elbow. Clucking her tongue, she exchanged the lens over her eye for a different one and poked the appendage again.
Something clicked, and a plate over the biceps slid open, revealing a complicated nest of tiny gears, pulleys, levers, and cables. I leaned forward, squinting to get a better look. “An amazing feat of engineering, isn’t it?” Falak asked.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“But you’ve been aboard a Fantazike airship.”
Karolina gasped, and her eyes went big and round. “You have?”
I ignored her outburst. “Those ships work on a different set of principles. Ones that favored my particular abilities.”
Svieta stroked her chin as she selected more tools from her satchel. Again, she prodded the arm, oblivious to our conversation. Falak rubbed his wounded shoulder and pursed his lips. “How’s that?” he asked.