“I know it’s new,” Marco says. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”
“I haven’t had time to write you,” Isobel says. “And I wasn’t even sure whether or not it was something you had done yourself. It seemed like something you might have made. It’s lovely, the way wishes are added to it, by lighting candles with ones that are already lit and adding them to the branches. New wishes ignited by old wishes.”
“It’s hers,” Marco says simply, pulling the notebook back.
“How can you be certain?” Isobel asks.
Marco pauses, looking down at the sketch, annoyed that he could not properly capture the beauty of the thing in hastily rendered drawings.
“I can feel it,” he says. “It is like knowing that a storm is coming, the shift in the air around it. As soon as I walked into the tent I could sense it, and it is stronger closer to the tree itself. I am not certain it would be perceptible if one were unfamiliar with such sensation.”
“Do you think she can feel what you do in the same way?” Isobel asks.
Marco has not considered this before, though it seems it would be true. He finds the idea strangely pleasing.
“I do not know” is all he says to Isobel.
Isobel pushes the veil that is slipping over her face back behind her head again.
“Well,” she says, “now you know about it, and you can do whatever you want to it.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Marco says. “I cannot use anything she does for my own purposes. The sides need to remain separate. If we were playing a game of chess, I could not simply remove her pieces from the board. My only option is to retaliate with my own pieces when she moves hers.”
“But there can’t possibly be an endgame, then,” Isobel says. “How can you checkmate a circus? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s not like chess,” Marco says, struggling to explain something that he has finally begun to understand even though he cannot properly articulate it. He glances at her table where a few cards remain laid faceup, one in particular catching his attention.
“It’s like this,” he says, pointing out the woman with her scales and sword, La Justice inscribed below her feet. “It’s a set of scales: one side is mine, the other is hers.”
A set of silver scales appears on the table between the cards, balancing precariously, each side piled with diamonds that sparkle in the candlelight.
“So the object is to tip the scales in your favor?” Isobel asks.
Marco nods, turning through the pages of his notebook. He keeps flipping back to the page with the tree.
“But if you both keep adding to your sides of the scale, increasing the weight on each side in turn,” Isobel says, watching the gently swaying scale, “won’t it break?”
“I do not believe it is an exact comparison,” Marco says, and the scales vanish.
Isobel frowns at the empty space.
“How long is this going to go on?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” Marco says. “Do you want to leave?” he adds, looking up at her. Unsure of what response he wants to the question.
“No,” Isobel says. “I … I don’t want to leave. I like it here, I do. But I would also like to understand. Maybe if I understood better I could be more helpful.”
“You are helpful,” Marco says. “Perhaps the only advantage I have is that she does not know who I am. She only has the circus to react to and I have you to watch her.”
“But I haven’t seen any reaction,” Isobel protests. “She keeps to herself. She reads more than anyone I have ever met. The Murray twins adore her. She has been nothing but kind to me. I have never seen her do a single thing out of the ordinary beyond when she performs. You say she is making all these moves and yet I never see her do anything. How do you know that tree is not Ethan Barris’s work?”
“Mr. Barris creates impressive mechanics, but this is not his doing. Though she’s embellished his carousel, I’m certain of that. I doubt even an engineer of Mr. Barris’s talent can make a painted wooden gryphon breathe. That tree is rooted in the ground, it is a living tree even if it does not have leaves.”
Marco turns his attention back to his sketch, tracing the lines of the tree with his fingertips.
“Did you make a wish?” Isobel asks quietly.
Marco closes his notebook without answering the question.