Brother Tinpan inclined his head toward them. “Time,” he said courteously. Bubbles drifted up from his seaweed cowl.
Sepia rolled her sorrowful eyes. “Meet the Mysterious Monkfish, Only Two Bits! Forgive him. Conversation with a Monkfish takes some problem-solving skills. They don’t really talk, they just answer riddles, so you have to work backward and figure out the riddle he’s answering before you can get a spotlight on what he means to say. So time will be … ‘Until I am measured, I cannot be known, yet how you will miss me, when I have flown!’ He’s pleased to meet you and can tell you’re a jolly sort he’ll miss once you’ve gone and left him alone with this old pun-and-punchline girl again. Any great actress learns to speak the special language of stage managers if she wants her fins lit right!”
Saturday put his head to one side, his posture full of longing. “I miss it, too,” he said.
“Oh! Are you also a refugee of the stage? A mummer, a mugger, a knockabout rogue? Tell me, what did you play? Clamlet? Oedipod Rex? Tuna Tartuffe? Quayrano de Bergerac? No, wait! I want to guess! A quick-change act? A song-and-dance man?”
“I was in the circus,” Saturday said. The pride in his voice was a wild trapeze singing through the sea. “I only ever had one review, though. In the Almanack Tribune. Page twenty-two, bottom-left corner. In very small print.”
“No matter, no matter! It’s the praise that counts, my lad, not the page! Let’s have it!”
Saturday reached up to the blue-white stone he wore round his neck. He put his fingernail against one side and it popped open—a locket! Inside, a scrap of newsprint nestled safely under glass. It read: A promising newcomer. The Marid grinned jubilantly. His fingers shook a little as he closed up the locket again and let it fall where it belonged, over his heart.
The cuttlefish rippled happily. “Magnificent! Tip-top stuff! Ah, the circus! How stupendous. The circus is pure, I’ve always said. Nothing but spectacle. No squirrelly little words getting in the way of the rings of fire and the dancing bears. Were you a clown? I would so dearly love to talk shop with another practitioner of the comic arts! We could debate the rule of three or the horrors of improv!”
Saturday’s eyes dimmed and filled with shadows. He shook his head, his topknot floating upward in the seawater like a question mark. “I … I was … not a lion tamer. I don’t think. I have a fear of lions, you know. No!” Relief washed over his face. He’d caught the ragged edge of the answer as it tried to get away. “No, I was a trapeze artist! The trapeze. I flew through the air with the greatest of ease.”
September stared at him. How could Saturday forget his trapeze, even for a moment? He loved the Stationary Circus almost as much as the Sea itself. Almost as much as her and A-Through-L. How could he let it slip from his mind when he carried his only review in a locket round his neck? September remembered every job she’d ever done. Fixing Mr. Albert’s fence or battling her own shadow in the underworld—any of it sat at the tip of her tongue, ready to perform a death-defying leap of truthfulness as soon as anyone asked. But he had remembered, in the end. Perhaps it was only the excitement of coming home at last.
“Ah, well, never mind. It does my three hearts good to meet another thespian, whether or not he knows a catchphrase from a callback. Now, you say you’ve married this penguin. Come closer, birdie, let me get a look at those flippers.”
September swam down to Sepia Siphuncle, breathing easily, though the air tasted salty and thick. The cuttlefish’s spangled eyes roamed over her. She lifted her veils and ran them along September’s arms.
“Before I get started, princess penguin, tell me: What do you call your mother’s sister?”
“Aunt … Aunt Margaret!”
“Bzzz! Wrong! Aunt-Arctica!” Sepia guffawed. Her zebra stripes flushed a dazzling lilac. “You can clap now,” she allowed. September and Saturday did, politely. The Octopus Assassin glowered darkly and refused.
“Fair enough, one-liners are a chump’s game, after all. Like scrounging up pennies to pay for lunch. You may get what you need, cent by cent, but dollars fill you faster. Give me a role again! Let me be a protagonist once more! Let me trade alliterating insults with a squid for all seasons! Give me a script and I’ll give you anything you ask. A part, a part, my kingdom for a part!”