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A Brief History of Falak Savin, Ringmaster
Falak Savin never knew a day in his life that hadn’t, in some manner, involved Le Cirque de Merveilles Mécanique. His mother, Priya, gave birth to him while the troupe was on the road, and although she told her husband she wished to return home, to the village where her parents lived in the country of Ahabar, the circus had scheduled numerous shows throughout the kingdoms and empires encompassing the far, Far East.
Falak’s father explained that the cost of cancelling their tour and backing out of promised performances would strain the circus’s financial health, possibly to the point of breaking. He vowed to take her home to see her parents as soon as possible. However, Falak was no longer a baby by the time the circus left the East and made the slow trek toward Ahabar through the southernmost nations of the eastern Continent.
Le Cirque de Merveilles Mécanique arrived on the outskirts of Priya’s home village on the eve of Falak’s fourth birthday, in the first humid and hot days of monsoon season. Together with his mother and father, Falak left the field where the circus had set up camp and walked the long dirt road to his grandparents’ home, a small tile-roofed house sitting on the edge of the village near a rushing creek and a thorny scrub forest.
With tears in their eyes, Falak’s grandparents greeted their daughter, her husband, and their beloved little grandson whom they smothered with hugs and kisses. They smothered him with food, as well. Falak’s grandmother had prepared a huge feast, and the family sat down to eat, passing plates of bread, bowls of rice, curried peas, fried vegetables, and hunks of homemade cheese swimming in spiced spinach. When he’d eaten until his stomach strained its limits, the boy excused himself and escaped the dull adult conversation in favor of investigating his grandfather’s garden outside.
The summer sun had started to set, and the shadows in the scrub forest had thickened and darkened like cane syrup cooking over a flame. Falak ignored those ominous shadows as he chased swarms of fireflies. Despite his mother’s warning not to stray from the house, the allure of capturing the flickering specks of light overwhelmed the boy’s better judgment. Besides, the fireflies glowed fiercer and in greater numbers within the forest’s shadows. He waded the fast-running creek and plodded up the bank, following fireflies as though they were will-o’-the-wisps, leading him into fairyland.
The scrub forest was not a fairyland, though—or at least not the harmless fairyland in the children’s stories that had been sanitized of blood and monsters. The original versions of the old fairytales had been vicious and violent, much like the tiger who scented Falak deep in the scrub.
Most tigers avoided humans, but the mother tigress who lived in the forest behind Falak’s grandfather’s house smelled the boy, and the boy smelled human, and humans were threats to her cubs. Only for a moment might she have noticed how small he was, how fragile, how tender. More than likely, thoughts of the boy’s vulnerability never crossed her mind.
If Falak’s grandfather had not grown suspicious of the quietness in his garden—in his experience, children were almost never quiet—and if he had not followed the boy into the scrub, the tigress might have eaten the boy whole. Even after his grandfather scared the tigress away with his booming voice, and after he’d scooped up the small body that had been savaged and mangled, Falak’s grip on life remained tentative and uncertain.
His death seemed imminent.
But Falak’s mother and father knew the secrets of the circus’s tinkerer. Svieta had confessed the truth about why she’d run from the collegium in Toksva. They had heard her accounts of her unthinkable experimentations with mechanical creatures and human souls. Despite the taint that had followed her from Toksva, Falak’s parents had let the odd engineer join their troupe. They had given her a home, acceptance, and belonging.
In return, they asked Svieta to give Falak his life, no matter the taboos or anathemas she had to violate to do it.
And so, Svieta reached across the veil and snared Falak’s spirit, as well as the spirit of a magpie. She removed the boy’s tattered and useless arm and replaced it with one made of brass and copper that ran on clockwork—pulleys, gears, and levers. She also removed the boy’s useless heart and replaced it with a steel one fueled by the spirit of a bird known for collecting scraps and castoffs and treating them like treasures.
When the heart was beating and his blood was pumping again, Svieta returned Falak’s spirit to his body. The boy was a miracle and a wonder, if only to those who knew the secret of his survival.
