Night of Cake & Puppets by Laini Taylor
Authors: Laini Taylor
and every topic gets bigger, weirder, more fun. It’s the best kind of conversation. We’re laughing a lot. I tell her how I got kidnapped to hell when I was four. She tells me about the biting puppet. I want to meet this crazy grandfather of hers, and now I really want a golem toe, too.
And then I reach for the teapot to refill our cups one last time – the hourglass is up, the tea dregs are cold – and that’s when I notice: The mysterious ball of ice Zuzana hung up in the Lyceum courtyard has melted into a puddle. Well, half melted. The side resting against the teapot has gone flat, and the capsule inside is sticking out.
‘Oh.’ When I pick it up I see Zuzana go still, and I wonder: What’s in it? When I look inquiringly at her, she’s biting her lip. Nervous. ‘Should I open it?’ I ask, and she doesn’t answer right away.
Now I’m really curious. Her eyes consider me in silence – and more silence, and more – and I have this uncomfortable feeling that she’s seeing right into my locked-away guy nature, and somehow knows I thought of her as a Tootsie Pop center, and then – silence, silence, silence – finally, cautiously, she says…‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’ I hold it up, the partial ice ball with this little tube sticking out of it.
‘Okay,’ she repeats, and her eyes are very still and clear, very dark and watchful. This is something important.
I already can’t feel my fingers, and freeing the tube the rest of the way from the ice deadens them to the point that they feel like wooden finger prosthetics, and if you’ve ever tried to open a plastic tube and unroll a very small scroll using wooden finger prosthetics (and really, who hasn’t?), you know it’s not easy. And the whole time I’m fumbling around with it, the silence between us gets thicker and deeper, like the snow.
At last, I manage it. I unroll the message, and read it.
Carpe puella.
Seize. Seize the something. Damn. I don’t know what puella means. I know what I hope it means, but it’s not like I speak Latin. Noctem and diabolus were easy, but now I’m the one biting my lip. ‘Um,’ I say.
And Zuzana is still watching me with the intensity of a mind reader. Her jaw is clenched. I am messing this up.
‘I don’t…I don’t speak Latin?’ I hear myself ask it like a question, and as soon as the words are out, as if by magic, the tension leaves Zuzana’s face.
‘Oh. Me, either. I had to Google that. I was afraid it might be too obscure. Here.’ She reaches for the scroll and I hand it over, and then she gets a pen out of her bag and hunches over the note, screening it from my sight as she writes something more on it. Then she rolls it back up and solemnly hands it over.
Now it reads:
Carpe puella Zuzana.
I swallow, and it’s cartoonishly audible. ‘That was what I hoped it meant,’ I say. ‘But if puella meant, like, sandwich , or bicycle , it could have been pretty embarrassing.’
There’s a heavy pause from Zuzana, just long enough for me to realize how wrong of a response this is to a girl’s request – or, rather, command – to seize her, and then she asks, calmly, ‘Are there even Latin words for sandwich and bicycle ? I mean, did the Romans even have sandwiches and bicycles?’
‘Well, sandwiches. There have always been sandwiches. The same aliens who brought dinosaurs to Earth brought sandwiches, too.’ What am I saying? Am I supposed to just lean across right now and reach for her? ‘I don’t know about bicycles, though.’
‘I don’t think they had bicycles,’ Zuzana says. ‘Just unicycles.’
‘Unicycles.’ I want to reach for her, but it seems so abrupt, I don’t know, like there’s a lunar logic to things like this, a pull of the moon, and the timing isn’t right. ‘I did not know that. Did their togas get caught in the spokes?’
‘All the time. There’s even a mosaic of it in Pompeii.’
‘It happened to my sister,’ I say. ‘Not a unicycle, though. She was on
And then I reach for the teapot to refill our cups one last time – the hourglass is up, the tea dregs are cold – and that’s when I notice: The mysterious ball of ice Zuzana hung up in the Lyceum courtyard has melted into a puddle. Well, half melted. The side resting against the teapot has gone flat, and the capsule inside is sticking out.
‘Oh.’ When I pick it up I see Zuzana go still, and I wonder: What’s in it? When I look inquiringly at her, she’s biting her lip. Nervous. ‘Should I open it?’ I ask, and she doesn’t answer right away.
Now I’m really curious. Her eyes consider me in silence – and more silence, and more – and I have this uncomfortable feeling that she’s seeing right into my locked-away guy nature, and somehow knows I thought of her as a Tootsie Pop center, and then – silence, silence, silence – finally, cautiously, she says…‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’ I hold it up, the partial ice ball with this little tube sticking out of it.
‘Okay,’ she repeats, and her eyes are very still and clear, very dark and watchful. This is something important.
I already can’t feel my fingers, and freeing the tube the rest of the way from the ice deadens them to the point that they feel like wooden finger prosthetics, and if you’ve ever tried to open a plastic tube and unroll a very small scroll using wooden finger prosthetics (and really, who hasn’t?), you know it’s not easy. And the whole time I’m fumbling around with it, the silence between us gets thicker and deeper, like the snow.
At last, I manage it. I unroll the message, and read it.
Carpe puella.
Seize. Seize the something. Damn. I don’t know what puella means. I know what I hope it means, but it’s not like I speak Latin. Noctem and diabolus were easy, but now I’m the one biting my lip. ‘Um,’ I say.
And Zuzana is still watching me with the intensity of a mind reader. Her jaw is clenched. I am messing this up.
‘I don’t…I don’t speak Latin?’ I hear myself ask it like a question, and as soon as the words are out, as if by magic, the tension leaves Zuzana’s face.
‘Oh. Me, either. I had to Google that. I was afraid it might be too obscure. Here.’ She reaches for the scroll and I hand it over, and then she gets a pen out of her bag and hunches over the note, screening it from my sight as she writes something more on it. Then she rolls it back up and solemnly hands it over.
Now it reads:
Carpe puella Zuzana.
I swallow, and it’s cartoonishly audible. ‘That was what I hoped it meant,’ I say. ‘But if puella meant, like, sandwich , or bicycle , it could have been pretty embarrassing.’
There’s a heavy pause from Zuzana, just long enough for me to realize how wrong of a response this is to a girl’s request – or, rather, command – to seize her, and then she asks, calmly, ‘Are there even Latin words for sandwich and bicycle ? I mean, did the Romans even have sandwiches and bicycles?’
‘Well, sandwiches. There have always been sandwiches. The same aliens who brought dinosaurs to Earth brought sandwiches, too.’ What am I saying? Am I supposed to just lean across right now and reach for her? ‘I don’t know about bicycles, though.’
‘I don’t think they had bicycles,’ Zuzana says. ‘Just unicycles.’
‘Unicycles.’ I want to reach for her, but it seems so abrupt, I don’t know, like there’s a lunar logic to things like this, a pull of the moon, and the timing isn’t right. ‘I did not know that. Did their togas get caught in the spokes?’
‘All the time. There’s even a mosaic of it in Pompeii.’
‘It happened to my sister,’ I say. ‘Not a unicycle, though. She was on