His face fell. “I don’t know how to dance.”
“Can’t dance!” she said. “Well, Montgomery, you’d best go and teach him. And you should go, too, Juliet, or else one of those girls is going to try to steal him from you.”
“Only if you come as well,” I said to her.
She jerked her head toward the bed. “I can’t leave Edward.”
“McKenna can watch Edward—it’s only for a few hours. Come on, we all need a bit of fun.”
She bit her lip in indecision, but then her stomach grumbled. “Roast pig, did you say?”
I grinned and grabbed her hand, pulling her downstairs and into the night. A gust of cold bit at our legs and I shrieked and pulled her across the fields toward the warmth of the fire. For a few hundred feet we were caught between the house and the bonfire with the stars overhead, and a sudden bolt of joy seized me. After days closed up in such a stuffy manor, my soul yearned for a moment of life. For an instant I loved it here, far from the rest of the world, in a place so wild and free.
The field was full of people, most of them strangers and performers traveling the winter fair circuit, but I recognized the servant girls and a few familiar faces from Quick. The fiddler was the tavern owner. He tipped his hat to us as one of the girls, Lily, passed us a tankard of warm cider. A belch came from the direction of the performers. With a start, I realized it came from the same old woman from the inn on the road to Inverness. I looked more closely at her companions and recognized the thin leader of the carnival troupe, acting out a play that seemed to involve a donkey. There was no sign of the fortune-teller.
I shivered at the memory. A child can never escape her father.
Was it chance that brought them to this particular festival, out of all the Twelfth Night celebrations happening in the north? The coincidence left me uneasy, but then Montgomery and Balthazar caught up to us, legs damp from the dew, and Sharkey trotted up to the fire trying to catch flames in his teeth. I relaxed. They were festival performers, after all, and this was a festival. Why should I be surprised to find them here?
I spotted Elizabeth through the flames. She wore a heavy fur stole out of the pages of a Viking history book, and with her hair down she looked like one of the fairy folk, strong and beautiful. No wonder she had left the city, when here she was queen.
“I didn’t think you’d join us,” she said as she walked around the fire, “or else I’d have invited you myself.”
“Well, don’t tell the vicar we’re here,” I said. “He’d never agree to preside over the wedding of two heathens.”
She smiled. “He’s over there.” She pointed her chin to a group of old men on the far side of the bonfire who were drinking in a very ungodly way. “He brought the ale.”
The night passed amid music and laughter, and I was able to let go of my worry over Edward, if only for a few stolen moments. Lucy disappeared for a while, playing games with the younger girls beneath the stars, and after some time I went looking for her. One of the servants pointed me in the direction of the carnival troupe’s temporary camp at the edge of the field. I walked through the high grass, hugging my coat tight, and eventually found her by a wood-and-silk tent. A dark-skinned man was reading her palm, muttering words that made her eyes go wide.
It was the fortune-teller.
He kissed Lucy teasingly on the hand. She laughed just as her eyes met mine. “Juliet! I’ve just had my fortune read. I’m going to marry a count. Doesn’t that sound divine?” She grabbed my hand, tugging me toward him. “It’s your turn.”
The fortune-teller didn’t flinch, nor show any sign of recognition, and my uneasy feeling returned.
“Your hands are freezing,” I said to Lucy. “Wait for me by the bonfire. I’ll be along in a moment.”
She grinned and skipped back to the rest of the merriment, leaving us alone. The night was heavy around us.
“It’s you,” I said. “From the inn.”
He reached out to take my hand in answer, his mouth curling in a mysterious smile. A shiver ran down the length of my back.
“You have the hands of a surgeon, pretty girl,” he said, laying out my palm atop his own. “Do you have the mind of one, too?”
I flinched at the mention of surgeons. “Lucy’s been telling you about me, has she? Well, it’s hardly fair that you know so much about me, yet you’ve never even told me your name.”
“Jack Serra,” he answered, giving a dramatic bow.
“It’s rather odd that this is the second time our paths have crossed. Are you following me?”
He let out a burst of laughter. “We travel the winter fair circuit. It’s the same path year after year.”
I glanced in the direction of the bonfire, whose music and laughter felt a million miles away. I could barely make out Montgomery by the fiddlers, trying to teach Balthazar to dance.
“I’d like to know the rest of my fortune. You started to tell me at the inn but never finished.”
He cocked his head. “Fortunes can’t be rushed.”
My heart started pounding harder—why was he able to read so much about me in a single look? Was it foolish to be here, when I knew there was no science to fortunes? Soft voices came from the woods, where a man and woman—two of the carnival performers—came back to camp with their arms around each other. My face flushed to think about what they must have been doing in those woods.
Jack Serra traced a long finger down my palm.
“A child can never escape her father,” he said, repeating his words from before. “You told me your father is dead, and yet you follow me to a cold field away from your friends because he isn’t dead to you at all, is he? His spirit lives on.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said, though my voice shook.
He scoffed. “Ghosts? Neither do I. Far scarier to know we carry the ghosts of our parents within us. Every decision we make, every mistake we make, is them working through us. One’s father is like the stream, from which comes the river. The river cannot set its own path. The stream runs downhill and so the river does, too. They both end in the same place—the ocean.”
Around his neck he wore at least twenty charms on twisted leather thongs. He removed one now and pressed it into my palm, a small iron charm in the shape of swirling lines like a river.
I stared at the charm, transfixed. “The ocean? Is that a symbol for madness?”
He smiled. “The ocean is merely the ocean. As far as symbols, it is what you yourself make of it.” He placed the charm around my neck, letting it fall against my chest, where it glistened in the moonlight like real water.
“I don’t understand. You’re saying it’s useless for me to try to change course?”
Amusement flickered in his eyes. He extended a hand toward the bonfire. “Your friends will miss you, pretty girl, if you
