Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [59]
“Some tourist will rue the day,” Zuzana said, upending her tutu and pursuing the tights tug-of-war with surly determination.
“Would you leave those poor tights alone? They’re fine.”
“I hate tights.”
“Well, let me add them to the list. This morning you hate, let me see, men in hats, wiener dogs—”
“Wiener-dog owners,” Zuzana corrected. “You’d have to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.”
“Wiener-dog owners, hairspray, false eyelashes, and now tights. Are you finished?”
“Hating things?” She paused, reading some inner gauge. “Yes, I think I am. For now.”
Mik peered through the opening. “We’ve got a crowd,” he said. It had been his idea to take Zuzana’s semester project to the street. He sometimes played his violin for change, donning a patch over his perfectly good left eye to seem more “romantic,” and he promised Zuzana she could make a few thousand crowns in a morning. He had his eye patch in place now, and looked somehow both roguish and darling.
“God, you’re adorable,” he said, his visible eye on Zuzana.
Usually adorable was not a word Zuzana relished. “Toddlers are adorable,” she’d snap. But where Mik was concerned, all bets were off. She blushed.
“You give me wrong thoughts,” he said, slipping into the crammed space, so Karou was trapped against the puppet’s armature. “Is it weird that I’m turned on by a marionette?”
“Yes,” said Zuzana. “Very weird. But it explains why you work at a marionette theater.”
“Not all marionettes. Just you.” He seized her around the waist. She squeaked.
“Careful!” Karou said. “Her makeup!”
Mik didn’t listen. He kissed Zuzana lingeringly on her painted doll mouth, smearing the red of her lipstick and the white of her face makeup, and coming up at last with his own lips rosebud pink. Laughing, Zuzana wiped it away for him. Karou considered touching her up, but the smear actually suited the whole disheveled look perfectly, so she left it.
The kiss also worked wonders on Zuzana’s nerves. “I think it’s showtime,” she announced brightly.
“Well, all right, then,” said Karou. “Into the toy box with you.”
And so it began.
The story Zuzana told with her body—of a discarded marionette brought out of its trunk for one last dance—was deeply moving. She started out clumsy and disjointed, like a rusty thing awakening, collapsing several times in a heap of tulle. Karou, watching the rapt faces of the audience, saw how they wanted to step forward and help the sad little dancer to her feet.
Over her the puppeteer loomed sinister, and as Zuzana twirled, its arms and fingers jittered and jumped as if it were controlling her, and not the other way around. The engineering was cunning and didn’t draw attention to itself, so that the illusion was flawless. There came a point, as the doll began to rediscover her grace, that Zuzana rose slowly onto pointe as if drawn up by her strings, and she elongated, a glow of joy on her face. A Smetana sonata soared off Mik’s violin strings, achingly sweet, and the moment went beyond street theater to touch something true.
Karou felt tears prick her eyes, watching. Within her, her emptiness pounded.
At the end, as Zuzana was forced back into the box, she cast toward the audience a look of desperate yearning and reached out one pleading arm before succumbing to her master’s will. The lid of the trunk slammed shut, and the music bit off with a twang.
The crowd loved it. Mik’s violin case filled fast with notes and coins, and Zuzana took a half dozen bows and posed for photos before vanishing inside the puppeteer’s trench coat with Mik. Karou had no doubt they were doing grievous damage to her makeup job, and she just sat on the trunk to wait it out.
It was there, in the midst of the school-of-fish density of tourists on the Charles Bridge, that the wrongness crept back over her again, slow and seeping, like a shadow when a cloud coasts before the sun.
27
NOT PREY, BUT POWER
You’re gonna live like prey, little girl.
Bain’s words rang in Karou’s ears as she looked around, searching faces in the throng surrounding