This is the first draft of the fantasy novel that I have been working on for the past few years. The book follows two teenage protagonists, each of whom is from a different side of a decades-long war. Both are outcasts from their respective societies, and as they travel further from their previous homes, they gain a better perspective on the places and people that both raised and rejected them.

Chapter 51: The Traveling Circus

Sam

Scrolls of wood peeled away from the hilt of the sword under Ash’s steady hands, littering the floor of the tent with little curlicued shavings. A lantern threw red light behind him, but did little to banish the shadows that bent along the draped canvas wall and dripped from the metal instruments Ash had borrowed from the councilors. They’d been eager to put him to work as soon as they found out they had an asvir deserter in their midst.

“From one army right to another?” he’d said to Scorpio, a crooked smile brushing his face. The Dragonwing wasn’t exactly someone he made a point of talking to, but they ended up together often enough that silence would have been stranger than the alternative.

The shadows rocked as Sam ducked into the tent. She flickered a hand over the lamp, making the fire inside shoot up and nearly burn the roof. She peered over Ash’s shoulder to see the work.

“Quite the artist.”

Sam rummaged in her pack, took out a book, then disappeared into the foggy evening. Even half-finished, Ash’s carving was smooth and deftly rendered. Carelessly, she let a skein of ice unbolt from her hand and shaped it into crude sculptures. Needles: Pine needles, sewing needles, needles with gaping eyes through which she could see the rain-sodden ground. She put the ice away and walked with purpose past the row of tents. Their encampment reminded her of the traveling circus that used to come to Juniper every fall before the rainy season. Caricatures of the Dragonwings were the most popular show, she remembered with embarrassment: asvir with wings carved from thin boughs and filled in with patchwork fabrics. There were trinket sellers like the ones that had accompanied the traders the day she manifested her magic, and sometimes craft magicians.

Juniper scared those off easily, or more accurately, the other way around. The magicians left with an air of superiority; Juniper’s business was beneath their arts.

Sam wove throughthe forest. The eucalyptus shivered above and clacked their branches together; fog boiled down through the boulders and poured into the camp. Half a mile from the tents, she found not exactly a clearing, but a place in the woods to sit on a stone, and took out the ice again. It pirouetted across her fingers, skittered up the lines of her palms, whispered across her face, a cold that didn’t quite touch her skin, a masquerade mask and then a crown. She added more detail to that one, sculpting points like minarets. Whorls of ornamentation, little bastions like battlements.

As her ice flickered through forms, she let her breathing slow. The fog hissed past her ears. Scraps of magic dispersed and followed it. Let it strip itself away, water to water. Could this be the secret to distilling pure asviren? The ice began to melt now that she wasn’t maintaining it consciously, and her hands grew stiff and cold. Slowly, the guise that covered the essence of her magic was gone. She began to locate what was left, that uncloaked asviren burgeoning and pulsing where the plain ice had been.

This was the closest she had ever come to a third element.. This, an evening seemingly plucked from hundreds, in a scrap of forest like any other! She marveled at this as she spun the sphere of asviren in her hands. She didn’t look at it for fear it wasn’t what she felt it to be, though a candle-like glow emanated from whatever she held, grazing the bottom of her chin like the reflected yellow of a buttercup.

The wind picked up again, and a branch snapped. It startled her, as she’dbeen close to falling asleep. The memory of the sword hilt stamped itself into her thoughts again, and still without looking at the magic, she leapt up and drove it without thinking into the nearest tree.

What had she expected? The branches to come bending to her call and trails of vines to follow her all the way home? Bark to slough off at her bidding, a carving to rival her brother’s? The tree trunk cracked vertically and she jumped back. A long, dark gap split open from the base to the first branch, and she retreated. Bent over, breath harried. Pains like a broken rib. Driving her into the ground. She knew better than to lie there, so she wrenched her pure magic out from the depths of the tree trunk. It fled back to her. Whatever it was, this formless asviren, it leaked from her palms. She couldn’t see where it went. When she looked back at her hands, all that remained were flurries of ice and ember once more.

The lowest branch creaked, and she stood up to watch it fall. Eyes cold. She remembered another time, in another forest, when Safira had had to lead her back from the woods’ edge, whispering admonishments in such a soothing tone that she followed her all the way back to the camp and fell asleep on the banks of the Icthe. This was not then: the faint hush of two people, no one else for miles, and none of that bizarre comfort that came from being so helpless that Safira guided her without question.

Safira, the name whispered through her, and she stalked away from the site of yet another of her mishaps. Her thoughts ran themselves in a far-off corner of her mind, nattering on and on, a distraction that she locked onto savagely. Ignoring the larger part of her mind that clouded with Safira’s image. Have I learned nothing since my first days in the woods with you, Safira?

Not halfway back to the camp, she heard footsteps. They were soft in the way of someone practiced in silence, and she barely picked them up. A few paces later she rounded a bend and there was Ash.

“Was that you?” he said, out of breath.

“Yes,” she said without bothering to ask what he had seen or heard.

“What did you—” He cut himself off when he touched her shoulder and found it cold. Something changed in him and he put a hand on her back, leading her forward. Like Safira guided me back from the woods’ edge, a slice of her mind thought, and it laughed gleefully when the rest of her recoiled from the thought.

 “Sam, what did you think you were doing?” said Ash.

“Nothing. An experiment gone wrong.”

He laughed what she had come to know as his hopeless laugh. “Haven’t you experimented enough?”

You mean by the very existence of my magic? she thought. Part of her was flattered, but the majority of her itched with annoyance at the idea that all she’d been doing for months was experimentation. And she could only ever continue to experiment; there was no normal way of doing magic that would suit her.

So she excused her unintentional experimentation to Ash. “This one was necessary, I promise.”

But as she watched Ash navigate back to their camp, his stride sure through the tangled grasses, she was filled with loathing for this specialness that everyone, including herself, she realized, placed on her magic. Why did her every attempt at magic have to be laced with some kind of expectation, almost as if she were praying to asviren? Let me find you in your purest form.

Maybe if I’m skilled enough, I’ll have permission to be unconventional.

Ash gave her a skeptical look. She knew she was undermining all the work she’d done to make him take her seriously, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that yes, in fact, she went about practicing magic in backwards and baffling ways (to others). Because it always made sense to her, at least in the moment. Maybe not driving her pure asviren into the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, but disappearing far into the woods for it? Letting it gouge itself into her hands in the form of ice? Letting it flee back to her even though that left her incapacitated on the ground? Everyone she knew had lauded her magic at some point, in fear or appreciation. She herself had thought her magic spectacular and dangerous for so long that she obeyed whatever it did without question. Seeing Ash now, the mysticism of it all felt disappointingly childish.

She could not separate between real, potent methods of practicing magic, and the superstitions and rituals that apparently riddled her people. Ivy had corrected her time and again when she mentioned something she’d thought to be a standard belief, so who was to affirm anything she knew?

“What was it?” Ash asked. “What did you do?”

“You’d laugh,” she said.

“Tell me. I’ve heard worse.”

“I was—trying to carve something.”

“I thought you already knew how to carve ice.”

“Not ice. Earth.”

He knew about her plan to master the elements; this wasn’t news to him. He still took a little while to respond, though. “If you want to learn earth magic, you don’t start with a tree.”

“I thought that knowing other elements might give me a head start,” she said, voice dripping with self-disdain.

“That makes sense,” he said, surprising her.

“It does?”

“Of course. You know what I thought would give me a head start?”

“What?”

“Training with Octavius. I walked into basic training thinking I’d know it all.”

“I thought if I bent that tree to my will, then maybe, maybe I could get away with never being delicate again,” she said with an edge.

“Delicate? What do you mean?”

“Safira used to make me do exercises with little candles and cubes of ice. She called it delicate work, I wanted to go jump in the river. I thought, well, she’s dead and what use is a candle against the Dragonwing army?” Before Ash could speak, Sam started to correct herself. “No, you know what, I wanted to be delicate. I would’ve rather controlled a candle than the whole river Icthe, but for some reason the Icthe was easier, maybe because it was easier to get away with not knowing anything about it at all, and I wasn’t controlling the river of course but the other way around, but you know how it’s hard to tell sometimes?”

“I know.”

“So I thought I was in control. I thought that could be my specialty and candles could rot in hell. I was going to try a carving, something…intricate, and difficult, I really was, but for some reason I changed my mind and went for that tree and—[God.] My magic must hate me by now.”

“You think yours would hate you?” After saying it, Ash winced as if he’d unintentionally opened the conversation to an uncomfortable topic.

“Why, you’ve got something worse?” Sam said.

“The story of the Silence itself says my magic would resent me, Sam.”

“Come on, we’ve been fighting the Dragonwings on and off for centuries and the second Silence hasn’t happened yet.”

“Is it worse than just being a soldier, then?” Sam said.

Ash was quiet.

“Tell me,” she said. “I told you about my magic, tell me.”

“I killed someone last year,” he said.

Now was Sam’s turn to be quiet. It was rare for her not to know what to say, or even to feel the need to hesitate before speaking, but she did now. Thankfully, Ash seemed to want to fill the silence.

“I wasn’t meant to actually fight. With my company in the south. I was just there to fix their weapons, dig their latrines and track people through the woods. But they had twenty trained weavers and ten of them could barely walk after the last attack. So they started pulling weavers from wherever they could find them, before the Dragonwings could find us again.”

“What happened?”

“They found us three weeks later. I’d been training tirelessly all that time, and then at the first sight of them, I still panicked. I almost gave us away. Then I tried to make it up by doing as much damage as I could. I sent vines out to snare their ankles as they came up on us, and one man pitched headfirst into a rock. I could’ve shifted it out of his way, but of course I didn’t, and…”

They emerged from the trees into a grassy area littered with boulders. Ash stepped nimbly around them.

“Do you…think about it a lot?” Sam asked.

“Used to. Now only sometimes,” he said.

 Something in his tone made it clear he didn’t want this to turn into an interrogation, and she respectected the boundary. They climbed awkwardly down the ravine of what had used to be a riverbed. A few streams of water still trickled down it, but only enough to make the silty ground soft and muddy. For someone who had just admitted to killing another person, Ash looked remarkably composed—more composed, Sam thought, than she was at any given time. He had always been that way. He was the mediator of any gang of children in Juniper. When the army had come to Juniper recruiting, he had done what needed to be done, gone through their tests and then went with them when they left. As ordered. Always, so easy for him to do what was expected of him. And to keep composure even when he had every right to break it.

Silence had fallen between them, a restless silence, filled by the wind and a thousand leaves rustling every which way like a frenzied school of fish. As they neared the camp, Sam’s mind wandered, and the memory of Safira threatened to claim her thoughts again. She remembered another piece of it: Fine, she’d said after waking from her stupor, I give up, train me.

The tops of their tents came into view beyond a few spindly trees.

“Ash?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re good at that delicate magic stuff. Right?”

“I didn’t want to say it earlier. But yeah, it’s probably what I’m best at.”

“Show me sometime.” 

I have to be serious now, she was thinking, able to follow orders and carry them out. I can’t keep doing…this, causing chaos because I don’t know how to do anything else. Tell me I’m dangerous, Juniper, and I’ll be dangerous, but no one has told me I’m elegant in a long, long time. Or thoughtful, deliberate, serious. Or even real. So of course the only magic I know is rooted in rituals that fall apart, in havoc that invades me like a parasite from the inside. My magic and I have only ever lived together in the woods, Safira. Of course I am uncivilized.

Saying aloud such eloquent words didn’t occurr to her, though they danced somewhere in the back of her mind. All she knew consciously was the desire: If I am to be deviant, I must at least be proper. Serious. Controlled.

Otherwise, people will see me, as you used to, Ash, as simply an actin the traveling circus. Curious, of course, but never more than an oddity.

“All right,” Ash said. His manner, easy as ever, soothed her even as it filled her with envy.