She’d heard in his voice a trill of almost-laughter, which made her wonder if he was saying what he thought a king would say and not what he truly believed. She searched his face for lies and thought she saw many. Then he smiled cruelly and said, You should believe in magic. You are magic, so if you don’t believe in it, where will you be? Will you not exist? He mockingly put a hand to his lips and made a surprised face. Can a thing exist if we don’t believe it?
She had narrowed her eyes at this, unsure if he was making fun of her.
He hadn’t touched her. At night, he sat cross-legged on his bed with a lantern, gazing at his many books—often with a puzzled expression but always with a singularity of purpose that troubled her. He’d be flayed alive by his constituents, he’d mutter, if he did not have all the answers by the time they arrived at the Cape, but she didn’t know what he meant. He asked her direct questions that made no sense, like Can you see me dying? How do you think I might die if I were to die in, say, two months? Which was how long it was until they broke camp and headed south instead of north, until they broke the law and went forth to meet their destinies with brave hearts. He forced her to predict his death in as many ways as she could dream up, each more horrible than the last, until he sighed with a satisfaction that was nearly sexual and that frightened her because he’d never reached for her physically, never even tried. That troubled her. She began to believe he wanted something much more awful.
* * *
In October, they broke camp and marched over the plain. Fast, too fast, because they’d waited so late in the season, and soon they were riding in cold rain, against the wind, and she was miserable, wet, freezing, even in Mr. Capulatio’s wagon, where his charms hung from the ceiling, tinkling and catching the lamplight and casting prismatic shadows along the walls. She sat wrapped in blankets all day, beside the sack containing the Head of Cosmas, whom she now kept close because she felt like they were in this together, and also because he reminded her of her brother. She watched Mr. Capulatio, who read, took notes, screamed at people, and laughed. Most of all he spent his time writing long tracts on page after page of parchment that he then scrutinized furiously. Often he threw them away and other times he locked them in a trunk.
Water seeped through cracks in the old wagon and she tried to sleep most of the day but the shuddering and bumping kept her awake, and sometimes when she opened her eyes she caught Mr. Capulatio gazing at her intently and perhaps sympathetically, but she could not really tell because she couldn’t understand his face—it was written in a difficult language; the more she heard and saw of him, the less she understood. But forgiveness had been stirring within her a long while, perhaps since the moment he’d executed Argento, and when he looked at her she could not help but look back. He was a moon, pulling on the ocean of her pity. He was afraid, and she sensed that the first act of her womanhood would be to comfort him. Soon she would reach for him, not the other way around, and she knew then that was what he had been waiting for.
At a field of skeletal ruins, they camped for a day and a night. Still everywhere was flat, wide. Gaping holes in rusted cylindrical ruins. Metal scars in the fields. She overheard someone beyond the wagon saying “Arkansas,” and for the first time she wondered what that word meant—our-kansas. She glanced at Mr. Capulatio, in bed with closed eyes. He nevertheless chuckled. “Wrong. Still Missouri. Miserable Missouri. Fools never know where we are. I have a state-sense that’s never failed me.” He rolled over. “Today’s my birthday, did you know that?” He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “Do you know how old I am? How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Are you sure?”
“My birthday was the day before…” She trailed off and looked around the wagon. The day before you took me.
“That doesn’t mean you know how old you are.”
She stared at him. “I’m fifteen.”
He shrugged. “I was born on the anniversary of the launch of Cassini to Saturn. Today is a very important day, astronomically speaking. The book you have lists it out. It’s all there, it comes together just so, like a fairytale.” He noticed her eyeing him skeptically. “O, I’ve read that book you have, imagine that. It’s about me. Sugarplum, I am one blessed son of a bitch, nothing else you can call me. I can do no wrong.” He thoughtfully fiddled with his collarbone. “But you’ve never read the book, eh? Even though you had it.” Outside people rattled cooking pots and laughed and someone was singing. “Well,” he said at last. “What counts is what we do with our blessings, right?”
She remained quiet.
He took a deep breath. “What I’m saying is, I never get what I really want.”
She drew her knees to her chest. “What do you really want?”
“Ah! Do you really want to know?”
No. No. A drop of sweat fell down the center of her ribcage, between her breasts, and she realized she was trembling, and Mr. Capulatio swung his legs around and sat upright and light seemed to pour from his mouth when smiled—that was his knifing smile. “No, I thought not. Do you have a gift for me?”
“No,” she whispered.
He blinked. “Well, I have one for you. A secret.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” He bent forward and pushed a few of the hanging charms away, holding them back while he seemed to consider. Then he let them plunge before him, a jingling curtain. He spoke and his accent had disappeared, she tried to hear it but couldn’t—was she used to it or had it vanished? He said, “I know you think you’re running away sometime, once you’ve ridden this train back to Florida. Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I took you up just to lose you? Do you think I axed your brother for fun? Tell me what you think.” He blithely inspected his knuckles.
All the blood drained from her face; she felt it slide into her heart, where it thumped about like a suffocating fish.
“Tell me: when I go off to do my magic, do you think I’m not spying on you?” He reached past her suddenly and grabbed the sack with Cosmas’s Head, upended it, and dumped Cosmas onto the bed. The glittering forehead-hexagram caught the light and shot it all over the wagon. “It’s called a Third Eye, Queen Stupid. It lets you see. Well, it lets me see. Even your idiot ugly brother could do a spell like the Third Eye. Thanks, by the way,” he said, looking upward with phony gratefulness. “Saved me the trouble.”
She could not stop blinking. How could he know? Was he just guessing, gauging her reaction? He couldn’t read her thoughts, she knew he couldn’t—it wasn’t possible. Was it?
“I’m just telling you,” he continued more softly. “Not to run away. Because I’ll always know where you are. Unless you want to destroy good old Cosmas here.” He extended the Head to her, dangled it by its straw-hair and swung it a little for effect. “Do you? Seems an awful shame to waste him. He gave his life for you. He’s not the only one.”
Her words were barely audible. “Are you lying?”
He shrugged. “Why would I lie? To you, I mean.”
It sounded petulant even to her and she sat in stunned silence for a long moment. No crying, none, she told herself. The silence became an awkward void and when a tear rolled over her cheek, he rubbed it away with his thumb and he was sorry, she knew. He’d felt scared, that was all, and he wanted her to be scared too. “Why did you have to kill him?” she asked thickly.
He appeared to think, and then faced her. She wondered if such tension meant he loved her. He dropped Cosmas into his bag, dusted off his hands. “Well. It’s not like you could have done it.” He said it honestly, and gratitude jolted her like static, hot and surprising, and when he stalked away to sulk, she missed him.
* * *
Dark night. She crawled into his bed and into his arms and he held her and he smelled like rain. Hours passed. He stroked her hair. He ran his hands down her spine and around her neck, and he kissed her a little, not much—enough to make her feel protected. He was awake, she was awake, all night, and she said, “Thank
you.”
“For what?”
She buried her face in his hair. More time passed and she asked, “Will it be different with you than with him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. She felt his hand trace the star-shaped scar on the inside of her thigh. “Probably. The difference is that I’m only going to hurt you on the inside.”
A new happiness had settled over him and he seemed relieved. She wondered if he’d been testing himself: how long until she trusted him, would she ever? A king must inspire trust. And for her, a miracle too: she’d chosen this, or felt like she had. He needed her. To keep him calm. To map out every one of a thousand horrible deaths that might befall him in the coming months or years. He was afraid of his destiny, chokingly, overwhelmingly afraid, and suddenly it didn’t matter whether he believed in magic or she did or if it was real or if her mother was right and they were all just fools walking in a pointless, bloody parade toward the end of time. Her eyes were open. She could run or not, she could love him or not, she could miss her brother or hate him forever. It was all going to hurt.
“You know what I really wish?” Mr. Capulatio asked wistfully.
“What?”
“That I’d never been born. That would be really great.”
She took a careful breath. “I think you’re going to die by boiling oil. Our seventh son will have you fried and fed to crows.”
Our.
She felt him smile. Sad, happy, deep, and dark. “O, sugarplum, I didn’t know you cared.”
CHAPTER 2
EARS
Marvel Whiteside Parsons walked across the palace courtyard in the morning rain, and paused for a moment to feel the drops on his cheeks. They wept sparsely from a marbled sky, and briefly he stopped to watch as they hurtled into the puddles gathering in the cart ruts. He’d once read that the oceans had formed drop by drop, from infinitesimally small amounts of water carried inside meteors until they struck the earth and released their contents. Each droplet a minor cataclysm. Men have held such strange notions of the world, Marvel thought, and wiped the water from his forehead.
Marvel had not spent much time thinking of nature. Rarely did he have occasion to experience it. He was a busy man, perhaps the busiest at the Cape. Certainly he was the most troubled. Although he had once crossed the continent on foot, he’d long ago counted himself lucky for that feat of survival and had never since tested his mettle against the elements. The elements could evaporate, for all they mattered in his life—the stars above were only lights to him now, no longer signifiers of the divine. Marvel passed his days signing letters, he appeared in public to grant blessings, he presided over beheadings, he advised King Michael, he concocted potions, and he managed all those matters that King Michael did not wish to manage. These were many. Marvel was tired.
And he had begun thinking of the weather again. He could not help himself.
He would be leaving soon.
Marvel Whiteside Parsons was the High Priest of Cape Canaveral, Hierophant and Head Magician. Born fifty and some years before in Dread Kansas, the Center of the World, he knew he was growing old, and yet still he felt like a younger man. Perhaps it was destiny that he should be robust. By design, his birth had taken place at the holiest spot in the holiest place in all the world: inside the Black Watchtower. His mother was a descendant of Huldah, the Mother Prophetess who had given the world the Primary Law. Wonderblood. His father had been a holy monk, one of the dark priests who prayed continually for the end of the world. Marvel was a man entirely of the deathscapes—he embodied their torment, so to speak, the way other men carried family names. His entire personage was to have been like those flat lands: alive with death, seething with righteous terror, unyielding and impartial.
But it had not happened that way.
Though Marvel was born to be a saving king from the great plain where the ruin of the world had begun—the True King, in fact—he was not. He was not even in Kansas.
He looked down the path at the busy courtyard. When people noticed him, they bowed perfunctorily. He often went about the palace grounds alone. He looked up again as another droplet splashed on his forehead. He was supposed interrogate a prisoner this morning, a job he preferred to delay.
The weather today, a spate of seasonal November drear. Rain had been falling from a sky the color of a kidney for how long? Maybe no more than a day, but if he were crossing the land, even a day of rain would be miserable. He must have the correct supplies for days and days of rain. And cold. The air today was uncomfortably windy and the gusts spat cold water blown in from the deathscapes. Marvel did hate the cold—he had grown to adolescence in the frigid stone rooms of Huldah’s Black Tower. Here at the Cape, cold was never truly cold, but over time he had grown more sensitive to it.
He trudged through the courtyard, his black shoes dirtying in the wet paste of straw and sawdust. And there, look! A carpet thrown over a puddle. For who? His daughter Alyson perhaps. O, most certainly for her. Michael would never consider using a carpet to cross a puddle. What a waste, Marvel thought, of a perfectly nice carpet, and how like Alyson to demand something so frivolous. He shook his head and blamed her although he had no evidence.
He was unfair to his daughter. It was not her fault she was as vapid as the deathscapes were vast. Marvel had not been a good father. Where had he gone wrong? To look at her was a delight, but to listen to her … Marvel could hardly stand it. She thought only of sport and smoking. She may have resembled Marvel’s pious mother Nasa Whiteside with her dark hair and round face, but she embodied everything he had wasted of himself during his years at the Cape: his virtue, his talent, his devotion. She embarrassed him.
But he was being petty. It was the weather, yes, his boots squelching in the mud; that sound made his skin crawl, the plump glug-glug of mud sucking at him. Something about it only just sickening. He was not by any means a precious man. He had some time ago discarded all the fine clothes his high office had afforded him and now wore only a plain brown cassock. He went barefoot to his prayers in warm weather. Marvel had shed nearly all the material trappings of his office over the years, yet couldn’t contain his annoyance at this muddy courtyard. The king’s courtyard. Did no one believe they were worthy of a clean and tidy courtyard any longer? Where was the man to lay down more straw? Marvel pulled his foot from the mud again and sighed.
When Marvel had first encountered the countryside outlying Cape Canaveral, he was struck by its utter inhospitality—and he had come from Kansas, Dread of the continent. He had been walking nearly a month. He was fourteen, perilously thin when he arrived, dirty. Like a scrambling vermin, his exhausted heart clawed at his insides, but still he lurched with wonder as he drew closer to the palace compound. He had crossed two stone bridges on pylons sunk into the shallow channel between the mainland and the Cape, their surfaces studded with fossilized shells and rocks—coral limestone, he learned later. When at last he sat in the sand at the Atlantic shore he sank to his knees. The sea here was so shallow and so lovely, like stained glass, with shallow panes of pale blue, its variegated green depths and its fleshpink sandbars gracefully lifting themselves like elbows above the water. The young Marvel had never seen anything so strange and darkly beautiful to his eyes, which had only ever beheld wide fields, dirt, skies. To his left and behind him was a sparse row of broken hexagrams, ancient cement markers in the scrub; these were the old shuttle launchpads, watched over now by palace guards with machetes. Still more patrolled in wagons drawn by mules. What they looked for, he hadn’t known then, but they hadn’t stopped him or paid him even a second glance as he’d passed them on his way to the water.
Now those guards did his bidding. Or rather, ignored it. This muddy courtyard.
He sighed.
The interrogation chambers were housed in Canaveral Tower. Its height was legend; the cylinder rose upward and upward, like a thin band of water siphoned into the sky, the most impressive construction yet built during the Eon of Pain. This was the spot where m
en had touched outer space. Marvel vividly recalled seeing the palace compound for the first time. He was a man tormented by a keen memory, embarrassingly old when at last he understood that many people simply forgot things, or—stranger still—didn’t care enough to notice them in the first place. His first visions of the Cape were burned into his mind’s eye. Perhaps more dynamic now than ever before.
After all, he was preparing to leave.
He would cross the continent again soon.
Marvel had first arrived at the Cape during the season when the carnivals returned to pay their tributes. Just beyond their lean-to camps, their cookpots filled with gruels, their casks of germed waters, was the great wall that surrounded the entire palace compound. Ten men high, encrusted with broken glass—greens and blues and browns cobbled together into a jagged mosaic that seemed at once to be depicting all the events in remembered history. Pieces of glass were thrust with their edges bared at the outer world, a spiked halo. Marvel knew that behind the wall lurked what he had come for: the seat of the magical world.
But nothing seemed magical here anymore. Not to Marvel. Not the wind from the sea or the glow of the stars. Certainly not this mud.
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