The match

It's Nezha's first time being guillotined, and he watches through a little hatched window as people shout and jeer from soiled streets. Two guards sit opposite him. Their uniforms remind Nezha of the red and blue ornamental candies the Queen kept on the arm of her throne, but they didn't seem to appreciate him pointing that out. Shuddering to a stop, he's hauled from the carriage, hands bound behind his back. 

The afternoon sun strikes him across the face, but even as he squints, he relishes the crude warmth after wasting away in the dungeon for three days. 

A few quieten down when they catch sight of his youth. With hollow cheeks and a scraggly mess of reddish hair, he fits the picture of 'criminal' as he peers over the crowd, eyepatch over his left eye, gold teeth glinting as he grins. They recoil, his smile slips, and the guards march him to his alter. 

Weaving through the crowd, a boy steals his hands into unsuspecting pockets, sifting through coats like a breeze. He's scraggly like a starved fox cub with sharp features, cropped black hair and big ears, and Nezha stands slightly taller because he isn't the only trickster in their midst.

A quiet bloodthirstiness accompanies him to the stage, which riles up exactly nobody. Even the Queen was a more receptive audience, proclaiming his magic tricks childish, gesturing for her butlers to clap derisively on cue, and even asking the mandatory question at the end - 'So how did you do it?' 

The ropes dig into his wrists, rubbing them raw as he's positioned over a bloodied stump and the back of his neck tickles with the sense of the heavy blade above.

But before the executioner reaches for the rope, he asks, "Any last words?"

"Could you announce the crime?" Nezha asks.

The executioner shrugs.

"According to the Queen, you're being executed for 'imitating the unnatural'." 

Her exact words were, 'Your magic is artifice only - and it has no place in my kingdom.'  

"The Queen insisted on knowing how to pull a rabbit from a hat," Nezha corrects, addressing his audience.

"Why didn't you just - tell her?" the executioner asks, reflecting the crowd's fanciful, morbid curiosity.

"A magician never reveals his secrets," Nezha says, and he'd waggle his finger if his hands were free, but beneath the surface, the catchphrase has never felt more banal.

Caught up in his exposition, Nezha forgets to keep breathing through his mouth and catches a whiff of the blood and rotting gore lacing the basket below. He gags.

"Let's get on with it then," he prompts as he finds the scrawny boy, the little thief from before, peering through the front row. Nezha winks with his good eye, and the woman beside the boy blanches. The child tilts his head. 

Before the executioner reaches again for the chord that lets the blade swing down, Nezha cuts in, "Actually, wait - wait!"

Grunting, the executioner asks, "What?"

"I forgot the match."

"What match?"

Ah, the spectacle. Nezha has danced with death before, but now the strings are silent, and all he has is a whistle of expectation in the boy’s gaze – one lone pretender to pretend for.

"This match." The tangle of ropes falls from his wrists. From his reclined position, Nezha strikes twice at some sandpaper before he hears a flame fizzle to life. Holding the match aloft, he clears his throat. "If you chop off my head, I'll drop this match through the floorboards and ignite the gunpowder below."

"Even if there is gunpowder down there, which I'm kind of mostly sure there isn't," the executioner counters. The front row eyes the stage distrustfully. "I'd wait until your match burns out before chopping off your head."

"You make a compelling argument, Sir." The small flame is already licking at his fingertips. "But I rather like my head."

With that, he flicks the match, and it spins through the air, small flame flickering, miraculously remaining alight, before landing - right on the verge of a gap in floorboards. Nezha swears, and before anyone can stop him, he's lifting the pillory off his neck, nudging the match so it vanishes below the stage.

"Ta-da!" he announces with practised splendour. A moment of tense silence. Then a soft sizzlingly sound suffuses through the audience, almost inaudible. Someone registers it, and suddenly it's drowned out by a deafening explosion of screams. 

Chaos erupts, people claw and crawl over each other, calamity catching like fire, and Nezha adores it. The executioner takes the stairs. A guard takes a dive, leaving him limping away from the stage. Within a minute, the square is empty, besides the boy, the thief, the fraud, who stands still and listens carefully. The fizzing continues, softer now, and as he climbs onto the platform, he finds a glass bottle wafting a familiar sour stench - vinegar. A white powder collects at the bottom. 

The sound sputters and dies. There is silence until the boy chuckles, then applauds an empty square.

Emerging from around the stage, Nezha skips two stairs at a time and snatches the bottle from before the boy's grasp before tossing it into the square. It smashes. "Don't ruin the magic."

"Powder in the bottle while people watch the match. Clever."

Grimacing, Nezha plucks the boy's flat cap from his head and jams it on his own. "My price for the show. Now scram - I don't do autographs."

But the boy tails him down the stairs. "A cap won't help you. You'll be arrested the second someone sees you in that."

The boy is referring to Nezha’s coat. It's long and silky, with snake tongue flaps at the end and shiny black buttons. It's also the most preposterous shade of purple that's not exactly subtle - but that's why he likes it.

The boy's shirt hangs off his bony shoulders, almost swallowing him whole, and he gives Nezha a worldly, knowing look. Nezha sighs.

"I suppose we can make a trade."

Slipping the coat off his shoulders as he walks, Nezha drapes it over the boy's head, who stumbles and slips his hands through the sleeves, letting the tail end drag behind him in the dirt.

The streets won't stay empty for long, so Nezha has to complete his disappearing act soon. 

"Can I ask you something?" the boy says, trying to match Nezha’s stride as he follows at a cautious distance. Stuffing the too-long sleeves into the pockets hanging at his knees, he almost trips.

Nezha is silent, but the boy asks anyways. 

"Why didn't you just tell her?"

"I said it already - a magician never reveals his secrets."

The boy scrunches his nose. "That's dumb. Magic doesn't even exist, and you just gave it all up? She could've let you go!"

Nezha stops, and the boy almost runs into him. Spinning around, he kneels, gripping the child's shoulders, but the boy flinches away.

He lets go. "What did you say?"

"She could've-"

"Before that."

"Magic doesn't exist?"

"No!"

"But that's what I said."

"Yes. No - I mean, why not?"

"We'll there isn't magic. There are tricks, but not magic." The audacious boy looks him up and down. "What's there to believe in?"

Narrowing his eyes, Nezha turns on his heel to continue down the street, but the buildings get bigger and the streets fuller, and he's rather sure he's going in the wrong direction. "Aren't you just a lump of fun," he mutters. 

"So I should trust everything I see because it's more 'fun' than the truth?"

The boy clearly has nothing better to do than torment hapless strangers. 

"Trusting your eyes and your ears is your first mistake."

"Then what do you trust?"

"That you can't trust anything."

As he speaks, a huddled group of townsfolk emerge from a dingy restaurant to their right, clutching bottles like swords. Containing their shifty gazes, Nezha nods tersely as they pass. Taking the next turn, and the next, he keeps a practised watch for anything behind his shoulder. Again, the back of his neck tingles. 

Nudging the boy in the opposite direction, Nezha mutters, "Go find your parents, little one."

"Don't have any. Or if I do, their heads are probably on spikes."

"Morbid." But Nezha gets it - abandonment breeds all kinds of scenarios until you find one that gives you the most peace of mind. 

Before another turn into a teeming street, a troop of soldiers round the corner. Nezha shifts back into the alley, drawing the flat cap over his eyes, and the boy, so swallowed by the coat, stumbles, but Nezha yanks him back into the shadows by the lapels.

They hold their breath as the soldiers pass.

"You still haven't answered my question properly," the boy grumbles, ripping himself free of Nezha's grip, who huffs as he glimpses the outer walls behind a bell tower. "You won't escape unnoticed the way you're going," he pipes up, crossing his arms comically as Nezha tries another alley. 

Nezha grimaces and stops. "Oh?"

"One more right turn and you'll find yourself opposite the soldier's barracks. Here," the boy grabs his hand, and Nezha looks down at it with a frown. The boy tugs. "I'll show you a better way."

Down an alley across a main road, the boy drags him to a crumbling wall between two buildings, and he hops up the more dilapidated side to crawl over to a gutter, now in reach, which he uses to drag himself up and onto the roof. 

Nezha pretends to stretch before suppressing a smile as he draws a long chain of napkins from his sleeve - somehow, even though there's no gold or guillotines involved - it seems appropriate as he tilts his head at just the right angle so it appears as if he's drawing it from his mouth. 

The boy snorts, and Nezha tosses the end of the chain to him. "To pull me up." Rolling his eyes, the boy complies, and Nezha twirls the napkin chain around his neck like a rich woman's scarf, swooning as he lifts himself onto the ledge, and the boy tugs the last of the napkins from his sleeve. 

"How old are you?" he asks, tilting his head in a way that conveys far too much judgement for someone so small.

"Older than you.”

The boy huffs.

"So, little one," Nezha starts as the boy expertly leads him around the chimneys and over chasms between houses. "What do you do for a living?" From here, Nezha can easily see the walls and the kingdom gates directly before the fading sun. Soldiers stir below them, mingling with those making tromping home from markets and bakeries and schools, oblivious to the ghosts of boys above. 

"Guess."

"Advocate? Doctor? Oh, I have it - you're a prince. From some faraway kingdom."

"Yeah, a kingdom of dirt."

"The coat is befitting."

A laugh bursts from the boy’s lips, but he screws them shut a moment later, although he can't completely conceal his grin. "You have a terrible sense of humour, so don't think I'm laughing because you're funny."

"You're laughing because I'm an entertainer."

"You're a liar. There's a difference."

They stop at the precipice of a slanted rooftop verging the edges of the kingdom, where the buildings are fewer and further apart, and to continue, Nezha will have to climb down - but he hesitates.

"What's your name?"

"I like Puck."

"Do you want to know how magic works, Puck?" The surroundings are beginning to be snatched away by shadow, and the skyline paints a temperate orange. "It's the trick behind all my ticks - so you can't tell anyone, yeah?"

He squats down on the roof before swinging his feet over the ledge, and Puck follows suit. Before them, the verges of the wall's battlements upset the peace of a perfect landscape, and Nezha wishes for the simple spread of trees. 

"Often, we get too sure of what is and isn't, but so much of what is is only perceived. It's like this - I show people a hat, a match, and promise them a rabbit and a boom, and the possibility that they never would've conceived before is now a reality because that is what they perceive. I make reality, Puck and that - that is magic."

Seeing Pucks frown, he tries again. "Take my purple coat. That is what I show an audience - but what does it promise?"

"That you're weird."

"Exactly! It promises the unconventional, the exotic, the strange. So people expect the unexpected from me - and I can do the impossible."

"So it's like when people look at me, they never think I'm sneaky or fast?"

"They see someone small and dismiss you - even when they shouldn't. The trick is figuring out how to use those false realities and overcome our own."

"So that you don't fall for your own tricks?"

"So that we don't fall for the world's tricks." Nezha sighs, kicking his legs over the abyss. "The Queen didn't want to know my tricks. The truth is - she didn't care at all. She offered me a choice: I could stop my magic or face execution."

Looking down at the strange familiar boy, Nezha reaches, unconsciously, to trace the scar extending above his eyepatch. "I used to steal, like you, before I took it further. It used to be something that I had to do that I couldn't just stop doing - to survive. But when the Queen gave me a choice to leave it all behind - I guess I just don't know what I'd be without it.”

The confession unlocks a door in his chest, and he can imagine a disgruntled little cardinal bird breaking free from his cage and fleeing into the rippling waves of the sunset. Nezha loses something and gains another in the same instant.

A breeze catches on, making the purple coat billow, and Puck seems even smaller in its throws.

"There's nothing left for me here, but I don't know what beyond the wall promises," he whispers.

"It's an adventure. It's a stage, but you can't close the curtains, and the crowds aren't kind," Nezha warns. Puck nods, and after a moment's hesitation, he leans into Nezha, who wraps an arm around his stick-like frame.

"We'll be fine," says Puck, as the moon becomes their spotlight. "There's always magic, after all."

Nezha laughs, and it's golden.