The Night Circus

“Tell me a story, please,” Poppet says after a while.

“What kind of story?” Widget asks. He always asks her, gives her an opportunity to make a request, even if he has one in mind already. Only preferred or special audiences receive such treatment.

“A story about a tree,” Poppet says, looking up through the twisting black branches above them.

Widget pauses before he starts, letting the tent and the tree settle into silent prologue while Poppet waits patiently.

“Secrets have power,” Widget begins. “And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it’s really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.

“This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit. It was inevitable, perhaps, but not unavoidable. Everyone makes mistakes.

“The greatest wizard in history made the mistake of sharing his secrets. And his secrets were both magic and important, so it was a rather serious mistake.

“He told them to a girl. She was young and clever and beautiful—”

Poppet snorts into her cup. Widget stops.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Go on, please, Widge.”

“She was young and clever and beautiful,” Widget continues. “Because if the girl had not been beautiful and clever, she would have been easier to resist, and then there would be no story at all.

“The wizard was old and quite clever himself, of course, and he had gone a very, very long time without telling his secrets to anyone at all. Maybe over the years he had forgotten about the importance of keeping them, or maybe he was distracted by her youth or beauty or cleverness. Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he had too much wine and didn’t realize what he was doing. Whatever the circumstances, he told his deepest secrets to the girl, the hidden keys to all his magic.

“And when the secrets had passed from wizard to girl, they lost bits of their power, the way cats lose bits of fur when you pet them thoroughly. But they were still potent and effective and magical, and the girl used them against the wizard. She tricked him so that she could take his secrets and make them her own. She did not particularly care about keeping them; she probably wrote them down somewhere as well.

“The wizard himself she trapped in a huge old oak tree. A tree like this one. And the magic she used to do so was strong, since it was the wizard’s own magic, ancient and powerful, and he could not undo it.

“She left him there, and he could not be rescued since no one else knew he was inside the tree. He was not dead, though. The girl might have killed him if she could, after she had coerced his secrets out of him, but she could not kill him with his own magic. Though maybe she didn’t want to at all. She was more concerned with power than with him, but she might have cared about him a little, enough to want to leave him with his life, in a way. She settled for trapping him, and to her mind it served the same purpose.

“Though really she did not succeed quite as well as she liked to think. She was careless in keeping her new magic secret. She flaunted it, and generally did not take very good care of it. Its power faded eventually, and so did she.

“The wizard, on the other hand, became part of the tree. And the tree thrived and grew, its branches spreading up to the sky and its roots reaching farther into the earth. He was part of the leaves and the bark and the sap, and part of the acorns that were carried away by squirrels to become new oak trees in other places. And when those trees grew, he was in those branches and leaves and roots as well.

“So by losing his secrets, the wizard gained immortality. His tree stood long after the clever young girl was old and no longer beautiful, and in a way, he became greater and stronger than he had ever been before. Though if he were given the chance to do it all over again, he likely would have been more careful with his secrets.” As Widget finishes, the tent settles into silence again, but the tree feels more alive than it had before he started.

“Thank you,” Poppet says. “That was a good one. Kind of sad, though, but kind of not at the same time.”

“You’re welcome,” Widget says. He takes a sip of his cider, now more warm than hot. He holds his cup in his hands and brings it to eye level, staring at it until a soft curl of steam rises from the surface.

“Do mine, too, please,” Poppet says, holding out her cup. “I can never do it right.”

“Well, I can never levitate anything right, so we’re even,” Widget says, but he takes her cup without complaint and concentrates until it too is steaming and hot again.

He moves to hand it back to her and it floats from his hand to hers, the surface of the cider wavering with the motion but otherwise moving as smoothly as if it were sliding across a table.

“Show-off,” Widget says.

They sit sipping their newly warmed cider, looking up at the twisting black branches reaching toward the top of the tent.

“Widge?” Poppet asks after a long silence.

“Yes?”

“Is it not that bad to be trapped somewhere, then? Depending on where you’re trapped?”

“I suppose it depends on how much you like the place you’re trapped in,” Widget says.

“And how much you like whoever you’re stuck there with,” Poppet adds, kicking his black boot with her white one.