As I walked through the caravan at midnight, I shared Criminy’s glowing pride. Our subpar calliope player bowed to make way for Casper, who flicked out his coattails and caressed the ancient keyboard before zooming into “We Are the Champions,” a song only Demi and I knew by heart. Ahnastasia growled something threatening at my children, who had inherited their father’s hero worship of the Freesian Tsarina and kept treading on her bejeweled hem. They ran away, giggling, and she sat beside her husband and smiled, possibly for the first time I’d ever seen.
Henry and Imogen had pulled out her butterfly circus to amuse the children, and she even honored them with a visit from her beloved Blue Morpho butterfly. Demi, Vale, and the daimons were huddled around Blaise, admiring his first wagon car, painted blue to match his skin and bearing the words The Magnificent Blaise, Master of Legerdemain. Frannie and Thom had gone off into the woods, hoping to lure some owls for her shop, taking Jacinda’s automaton hound for protection.
And that left Criminy and me as alone as two lovers could be in the midst of a lively carnival. When Criminy pulled me toward the large mechanical bird that guarded our entrance to the tent within the circle of wagons, I smiled and went willingly. We whispered the passcode together and sneaked past the magnificent machine. The other side was quiet, and I thought he might lure me into a private part of the tent to attempt more baby making, but instead he pulled me along the ring of wagons and began climbing the ladder on the outside of the dining car. I’d never been on top of any of the wagons before, so I followed, curious.
“Criminy Stain, you romantic!” I cried.
On top of the largest wagon, he’d laid out a picnic blanket, with pillows and teacups, his clockwork monkey waiting with a steaming pot of blood.
“Me, a romantic? Don’t tell anyone, love. I have a reputation to uphold.”
But I could see the old glint in his eyes, his brows and cheekbones just as sharp as they’d been the day I first saw him in a locket and his smile just as full of dark promise. He reclined gracefully and drew me down beside him, and I curled up among the sultan’s pillows and took the cup Pemberly offered me.
“It went rather well, didn’t it?” he asked, looking down with a fond smile at the clot of children still running about his kingdom way past their bedtime.
“It did. I’m so glad you invited them. It’s wonderful to see everyone together in the same place.”
“True enough, love. But that’s not what I was talking about. I meant . . . everything. Did you ever imagine, when you woke up in the forest all that time ago, that you might have such a happy ending?”
I looked up at the stars, which spun crazily and didn’t quite match up to the constellations I’d known on Earth. The night birds sang sweetly, but the birdsong was eerily off. Soft rabbits waited just beyond the strings of lights below, their eyes red and their mouths drooling for a taste of the humans playing beyond. Sang was a strange place but, by God, it was my place.
“Nope. I had no idea.”
“I told you it would all work out.”
“Well, if you want to be smug about it . . .”
He took my hand, sliding up my sleeve and kissing up my wrist. “Oh, I do. I want to be very, very smug about it. For at least a hundred and fifty years. Just like this.”
“You want to live happily ever after?” I asked.
His grin was sharp, but his eyes were soft. “Wickedly ever after, love,” he said.
And that’s exactly what it was.