**CHAPTER 35 — Bom's POV**
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The circus grounds were called **The Velvet Snare** — a permanent structure built into the frozen rock of Iceswords' lower city, half underground and half towering above it. From the outside, it looked like a cracked cathedral someone had given up on halfway through construction. Iron gates. Faded painted banners snapping in the cold wind. The kind of place that looked abandoned until you listened closely and heard the creak of ropes and the distant sound of something swinging far above your head.
Inside was a different world entirely.
The main performance hall was a cavernous stone space with a ceiling so high it dissolved into shadow. Rigging lines crossed the upper dark like a spider's web stretched across the bones of something enormous. Platforms jutted from the walls at heights that made no practical sense. Faded silk banners — deep blue and silver, Klapitia's colors — hung between iron fixtures, some torn at the edges, some still holding their shape against the cold drafts that moved through the space like quiet breathing.
In the center of it all, suspended on a rope no wider than my thumb from somewhere in the blackness above, hung a single circular stage no larger than a dining table.
I didn't look at it yet. I was still processing the rest of the room.
Daphne walked ahead of us, hands clasped behind her back, tail swaying with the particular rhythm of someone who had already won an argument that hadn't started yet.
"So," she said, turning to face us with a smile that was ninety percent charm and ten percent something sharper underneath. "Before we begin — we should talk about payment."
Faye went very still beside me.
I turned to look at Daphne slowly. "Payment."
"For the training," she said pleasantly. "I want to be clear — I'm not charging for the plan. The plan is free. Getting you inside the castle is free. My loyalty to this mission?" She pressed a hand to her chest. "Completely free."
"But," I said.
"But professional circus training," Daphne continued, as if I hadn't spoken, "is a skill. A serious one. And serious skills have a price."
Faye turned to her with an expression I recognized — the specific look of someone who had extended trust and was now watching it be carefully removed from their pocket. "You told us you only wanted to help."
"I do want to help." Daphne's smile didn't waver. "I'm helping right now. I'm also charging for it."
"How much," I said flatly.
She held up ten fingers.
"Ten Silvors?" I asked.
Daphne's smile tilted. "Silvors," she repeated, with the tone of someone who found the suggestion both amusing and mildly insulting. "Seriously?"
"Ten Crownbrots," Faye said quietly, reading Daphne's expression before I did.
Daphne nodded once.
The number landed between us like a dropped weapon.
"Ten Crownbrots," I repeated.
"Yes."
I looked at Faye. She looked at me. In her eyes I could see the same calculation running — ten Crownbrots was one thousand Brots. One thousand bronze coins. Enough to feed a village for a month. Enough to buy a small boat. Enough to make me feel the loss of it in a way that was genuinely irritating for someone who had been alive for centuries.
"I knew it," I said, turning back to Daphne. "I knew it the moment you said you only wanted to help. Your species never helps without a price attached. It's biologically impossible for a foxy to do something purely out of goodwill—"
"Bom," Faye said.
"I'm making a point—"
"You're stalling."
I pressed my mouth shut.
She wasn't wrong.
"Let's go," I said instead, already turning toward the door. "We'll find another way to save Bob. There's always another way."
I reached for Faye's hand and pulled her with me toward the exit.
That's when they dropped from the rigging above.
Two foxies — landing with the casual precision of people who had been watching us for some time and found the whole situation mildly entertaining. The first was male, with the same sharp angles as Daphne, dark eyes gleaming with something between amusement and readiness. The second was female — shorter, with close-cropped silver hair and an expression like she was already three sentences ahead of wherever the conversation currently was.
The male one crossed his arms. "You're not going anywhere."
Daphne exhaled — the long-suffering exhale of someone managing a situation she had already mapped entirely. "Alex. Lena. Leave them."
"But Daphne—" Alex started.
"He'll come back," she said simply, not even looking at them. "When he realizes I'm the only option, he'll come back."
Alex looked unconvinced. He had the energy of someone who wanted to argue but had learned through experience that arguing with Daphne had a poor return rate.
Lena, meanwhile, had already drifted toward Faye with the quiet curiosity of someone examining something rare and trying to determine whether it was real. She reached out and touched a strand of Faye's pink hair — gently, almost reverently, tilting her head.
"Is she the immortal one?" she asked, mostly to herself. "The pink-haired girl Daphne described?"
"Lena, it's obviously her—" Alex started.
I moved before I finished the thought. My hand closed around Lena's wrist and I pulled it away from Faye in one sharp motion, stepping between them in the same movement.
"Don't touch her again," I said.
Lena yanked her hand back. "Ow—"
"Bom."
Faye's voice came from just behind my shoulder — quiet, steady. I turned slightly. She wasn't frightened. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn't entirely categorize, somewhere between something warm and something that meant she needed me to move aside and let her handle this.
She stepped around me.
"We don't have time for this," she said. Not angry. Just clear, in the way Faye had recently started being clear — like she'd decided that economy of words was more efficient than everything else. "Bob has been in that palace for days. He's wearing a wedding gown. He's running out of ways to delay a ceremony with a king who believes he's a dead queen reincarnated." She looked at me directly. "We're paying, Bom."
I opened my mouth.
She held my gaze.
I thought about Bob. His face. His blue eyes — genuinely kind underneath all the chaos and the popcorn and the screaming. The way he'd stood at the edge of the Forbidden Woods, terrified, and jumped off a tree anyway because someone needed him to. The way he'd looked in that newspaper photograph — naked, dignified, one hand strategically placed, telling the royal artist to focus on his eyes.
He is a complete idiot, I thought.
He will not survive another day in that palace.
I turned back to Daphne.
She was already holding out her hand.
I looked at it for a moment — at the easy confidence of someone who had known this was coming from the start — and then I counted out ten Crownbrots and placed them in her palm with the precise, deliberate energy of a man making a payment he intended to remember.
"So," I said, as the coins disappeared into her coat. "What exactly are we learning? For ten Crownbrots I am expecting something that justifies the price in a way I can accept emotionally."
Daphne's smirk returned — the full version, the one she'd been holding back. "Oh, it's straightforward enough." She paused just long enough to make it theatrical. "You dance."
Silence.
"We dance," I said.
"Yes."
I stared at her.
"Daphne. I have been alive for centuries. I have danced in courts and taverns and places you have never heard of and will never be invited to. I did not pay ten Crownbrots — one thousand Brots, ten Silvors each, one hundred times the base unit of currency in this entire continent — to learn something I mastered before your grandmother drew her first breath."
Alex coughed.
Lena looked upward.
Something about the way she looked upward made me stop.
"Look up," Lena said quietly.
I looked up.
The circular platform hung in the darkness above us — suspended from a single rope no wider than my thumb, swaying almost imperceptibly in the cold air that moved through the upper levels of the hall like slow breathing. Small. Distant. Terrifying in a way I was absolutely not going to acknowledge out loud.
"It's not normal dancing," Daphne said.
I stared at the platform.
Then I looked at Faye.
She was still looking upward, her pink hair falling back from her face, her expression completely still in the particular way that meant she was either very calm or had made a private decision to appear very calm and was not inviting commentary on which one it was.
For a long moment neither of us said anything.
The rope swayed.
"Ten Crownbrots," I said eventually, to no one in particular.
Faye said nothing.
Above us the platform turned slowly in the dark, waiting.
Author Note :
Long time no see, dear readers! ❤️
First of all — thank you for waiting. Thank you for every comment, every vote, every message asking when the next chapter was coming. It means more than you know.