Free Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost

slash beside his eye. He dropped the broken pin and walked away.
    He packed everything he owned, including the puppets left him by Peeds, and disappeared that night. Didn’t even say good-bye to his mother, which he regretted the rest of his life. But that was his choice.
    Mangonel didn’t die, as it happens, but he was never any good for anything after that. He couldn’t speak right, and he couldn’t walk a straight line from one end of a room to the other between one day and the next. The Mangonel Circus is what Bardsham had killed. The Mangonel name.

    The puppet that was her grandfather had jerked, stumbled, and fallen over. The figure of Meersh stood alone and somehow wretched.
    Leodora had asked, “Did he ever go back?”
    Soter shook his head. “He would send money to his mother whenever he had some and remembered it. But never a note, never a word. He was too ashamed to write, to say where he was. There was nothing he could say. He knew he would have killed his father. Happily. Of course his mother would have understood—you and I can see that, but not Bardsham. She must have known that she could find him, because he was famous, you know. Bardsham only grew in stature once he’d escaped from the circus. She could have found him anytime.”
    “Like my mother.”
    For a moment he looked alarmed. Then he smiled nervously and said, “Ah, I see what you mean—like your mother ran away from home. Yes. I often thought that his break with his family was the cause of much of his debauch—that is, his excesses. He drank and…well, drank more than any human being I’ve ever known. You could not be friends with him and not drink. He often said that he didn’t trust men who didn’t imbibe. They were afraid of something. Something inside themselves, and he felt he should be wary of it, too.”
    “So when did you come to know him?”
    Soter set down the last puppet figure. There would be no puppet for him.
    With obvious relish he said, “I came across Bardsham while I was selling nostrums. He needed a reconnaissance man, a vanguard to make arrangements, make sure we had a place to perform and to sleep on every span, wherever we went. Make sure there would be no trouble. Likewise it must be someone with the necessary sophistication to announce him, a person of skill and wit to suss the nature of the place and its inhabitants. A person of reliable character and cunning and…” He paused, opened his hands as if tossing something in the air, and bowed slightly. “He had a need that I filled perfectly.
    “Without such a person, Bardsham had to handle these things. He had to come out of the booth between each set and announce himself, interrupting the flow of the stories. That made him seem ordinary, and you can’t seem ordinary if you want to perform. Besides, he was Bardsham—ordinary wasn’t an option. The cloak of mystery was crucial.
    “The two of us had been traveling parallel circuits, you might say. Every span’s different. Laws are different, permits are different. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll get arrested if you set up without bribing the right fellow. Sometimes you get arrested if you try to bribe them. It’s half your life keeping on top of such things. A great artist cannot be distracted by such petty matters.” He sounded to her as if he were quoting someone. “An artist’s head is full of tricks and tales, not the names of who to pay off and how to finesse the obdurate authorities.”
    His tone was one of longing. They had been young men then, on an adventure together. She could hear it. “The world was all before us,” he told her, then fell silent. Warily, she asked, “What about my mother?”
    The dreaminess in Soter’s expression pinched into a look almost of pain. His eyes darted her way for a second. Not encouraged by his reaction, she pressed her point: “Is what Uncle Gousier says about her true?”
    He picked up the puppet figure of Orinda. It