Wonderblood

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by Julia Whicker


  She stood at the tent flap now, running her fingers over the watery texture of her dress almost obsessively as she gazed out at the land. Orchid had been forced by the crones to finish her preparations in her own tent, and had not taken the hardbound book because it did not belong to her. The girl felt the strange book at her back now, nearly pulsing with importance. She had been enjoying it, all the fantastical stories she had never heard before. But then she’d discovered it had been written by that woman.

  She went over to Mr. Capulatio’s desk and opened the book again, though she did not know why. The first page said:

  THE TRUE KING

  By An Executionatrix

  New ages shall be rung in like thunder, by a perfect mind.

  She flipped through the pages, the words spilling across them perfectly formed—the girl could read, but she could write nothing but the inane sigils her brother had forced her to learn, curses and charms. What could that verse mean? Where had it come from? What did any of it mean? Why had he had a wife already and not told her? She was jealous again.

  She closed the book.

  Soon, all around her came the low singing of the men and the sounds of cooking and eating as the carnivalers enjoyed their evening meals. But there was more: among the tents and booths there were other wagons, heavier ones, pulled by big horses that now stood hobbled here and there between campsites, with bags of feces swaying heavily at their backsides, and these wagons were loaded with clubs and maces and guns, and the girl knew (but O, hadn’t she known since the beginning?) that Mr. Capulatio’s carnival was here to make war, and that other carnivals had come to join him in the war, and all at once she felt a certainty that the war would begin tonight. It would begin with the marriage, because he had been waiting for proof of his own divinity and he believed she was that proof.

  Maybe if she did not marry him, there would be no war. Maybe he would give up and return to wherever he came from. A hut on a beach, maybe. He might slink off in the night and live out his life as an ordinary Executioner. Maybe she and Orchid wanted the same thing, for her not to be the queen. She tugged at her dress again. It was so tight and hot.

  Then a restless breath seemed to pour across the carnival at once, like a birdflock rising in a single heaving motion. The people were drawn like puppets from their fire-rings to the center aisle, and the girl squinted into the darkness and saw that it was Mr. Capulatio himself at whom they were staring, striding across the camp toward his tent. He seemed to wave when he caught sight of her silhouette in the doorway. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure he was not addressing someone else. But of course he was waving at her, she was about to marry him. When he came closer, she could see he was smiling.

  She thought she could number every tooth in his smile—they had touched their faces together so many times already in the early half-lit mornings, when he would rest his head under her chin and hold her very tightly. She felt she knew every place on him by heart. He was dressed for the wedding, in clothes she couldn’t have imagined before this moment.

  When he reached her, he took her hands in his. “Do you like my clothes, Queenie?” She couldn’t stop staring at them. He did a little turn for her and then bowed. “These are real sharkskin from a real marsh shark,” he said, pointing to the pants. They were smooth and dove-gray and so soft-looking. She nodded.

  He laughed quietly. “Do you like your dress?”

  She said nothing. He smiled wider. “That’s why I love you, my almost wife! You don’t need to talk to make your point. At first I was confused by it, but now I see this is precisely why we are a match made in heaven. It makes me gladder than you can know.” He hugged her close and she wrapped her arms around his body, which was strong and warm. She could feel the smoothness of their fabrics rubbing together. He gathered up a handful of the dress and shook it at her. “Silk,” he said, as though the word itself were magic, and who knew, perhaps it was? “Come, my bride. Let us be married.”

  They clasped hands again and he led her across the carnival, picking his way through tent poles and staked Heads and all the grotesqueries that accompanied the making of Heads, the basins of herbed water, the sand pits where they dried, and also they walked past ropes hung with curing meat, past herds of tiny goats, past a teenage boy with a bow and arrow who gazed at the girl with undisguised lust. She had just met eyes with him when Mr. Capulatio pulled her along more roughly.

  They passed many faces—hopeful, skeptical, kind, hungry. The insistent attention began to make her even more nervous, so she kept her face down, watching the flamelight and the shadows twisting together on the ground while they walked, and she concentrated on lifting her skirt high enough to keep from tripping. Onlookers soon began to follow them as they proceeded out of the camp. Suddenly, bewilderingly, a sizable group had fallen in behind them, following them toward the ocean. The people in these carnivals were wilder than the ones in Argento’s, with tangled hair and faces painted like stars. Some of them wore hardly any clothes, others were dressed in full robes and crystal crowns. They even seemed to walk with more purpose than the people in her brother’s carnival. Like they had something to lose.

  A crowd surrounded them now. Many of them kept looking from her to the sky, and when she too looked up she saw, almost directly above her head, a bend of light arcing toward the earth. A returning rocket, just as Mr. Capulatio had said? It was brighter than she’d imagined. Or a comet? She had never seen one, but she had not imagined it would look like this, purple-white and motionless. Like a held breath. She kept her hand loose in Mr. Capulatio’s as they walked. The soft mumbling of the crowd passed from her attention, as did all things except that light, and she watched it slowly burn for what felt like the longest moment, while inside her chest rose up a noise; in time, she realized it was the pounding of her heart. What terrible wonder could this be, what reckoning spilling over the heavens? And in spite of herself she felt of a piece with it, this light, for it had brought her with it to this place, on this night. As if it had been destined forever, as if it had existed always.

  CHAPTER 11

  QUEEN ALYSON

  John had met Queen Alyson many times, and yet each meeting renewed his terror of her, not because she was herself terrifying but because she burned with a need to understand—not him, no, and not his work, and nor did she seek a definite prophecy about the Return or the endless remedial horoscope calendars her husband Michael so loved. But there was something fixed and slow and deep about her that caused him to trip up his words, to poorly explain even the most explicable events, to stumble about her chamber like a hyperactive child, sweeping his arms along with the peaks and valleys of his lecture. He lectured her, he could not help it, and her appearance of boredom never failed to horrify him.

  She mostly called upon him to explain practical things: why, for instance, were all the ladies of the palace bleeding at once?

  Tygo waited in the hallway in the care of another lion-masked guard, who had yanked him hard by the arm to stop him from entering the queen’s grand chamber, as though Tygo posed some immediate threat, although it seemed plain to John that he did not. This evening, John faced Queen Alyson alone. She was gazing at him with her I-dare-you eyes, the way he assumed she must look at everyone, for what was he to her? A weak sneeze of a man. The king, although nearly middle-aged now, was broad and somewhat tall; Alyson was his second wife—the first queen, Rachel, had fallen from one of the palace minarets, or that’s what everyone said, and frankly John had not cared for her, either; she’d been inbred as a lapdog and ugly as well. Alyson seemed somewhat young, but John was not certain she was. She had the sort of face that could exist mostly untouched for several decades, with faint lines and freckles across the forehead exacerbated by smoking, which she did in excess and was doing at the moment, holding her slender moonstone pipe a foot and a half from her lips. Her hair was the darkest brown and straighter than a normal person’s hair—another artifact of inbreeding? He suspected. She was the daughter
of Marvel Parsons but cared little for magic or ceremonies. She preferred to spend her time at golf.

  “Your Beauteousness, forgive us. Your discomfort was not our intent.”

  She watched him. “Okay.” Her pipe adularesced when she drew smoke through it, a throbbing opal, blue with gem-light. “I didn’t say it was.”

  He squirmed. “O. Yes. Well…”

  The queen waited. She had a girl’s manner of waiting for him to speak first, a paroxysm of disinterest upon her even when she herself had asked the question. He wondered how she thought of him, if she thought of him at all—her life was in every way a mystery to him. What did she do all day? The vast room she occupied in the southeast tower, Columbia, was the same room her predecessor had lived in, but Alyson had removed every trace of the other woman (pinks, whites, sparkles on everything) in favor of a terrific and startling blue, an azure paint accented by cobalt rock crystal. Around the room, clear indigo geodes spilled light, from clusters of beeswax candles situated behind them. And there were more candles, candles everywhere. There must have been a hundred around her sitting area alone. Whenever John stood in her chamber he smelled something impossible to describe but that nevertheless described perfectly her entire existence, her experience since birth, a scent wholly hers and one he had never smelt in another place: a detached butterfly wing? The paint on the eyelid of a statue? Something powdery, something mineral. Alyson’s life, her tenuous hold on the truth of the world, the terrible stinking gross world that John admittedly only glimpsed on his infrequent journeys to the palace compound, at times struck him as unbearably frivolous. And yet she did fascinate him. In the corner one of her small black dogs slept in an elevated bed shaped like a saucepan.

  “Your Majesty, how shall I begin? We did not cause the bleeding.” His voice splattered into the space between them like vomit into a bowl. “It happened in spite of us. Believe me, I would’ve done anything I could to spare you and every lady of the court such extreme extra unpleasantness, had I known such a thing was happening.”

  “‘Us’? ‘We’? Who is ‘we’?” Her face like a wide freckled ancient head. A feminine votive.

  “My new … predictive assistant and myself. That’s the title I’ve given him for the moment. I’ve only lately acquired him.” He heaved his arm in front of himself in gesture of affirmation he recognized as overdrawn even as he performed it. Who was he in front of her, the palace fool? And still he could not stop grinning like a maniac. His dimples hurt. “This new assistant, he’s a damn sight more intuitive than I am, that’s for certain. You may not know, but I’m very, very poor at predictions myself. Or at least ones that aren’t strictly astrological—now certainly I could tell you if the day of your birth is auspicious, or I could tell you when it might be fortuitous to conceive a son—” Was he talking about her womb? Was he imagining her beneath the girthy heft of their blond king, a hairy-backed board of a man (John had read the king’s horoscopes to him in his bath many times), Alyson lying back under his spermy exuberance? He swallowed. “You might have asked Michael if I—”

  “We never talk about you,” she said, turning to her little black dog and scrunching her brow absently. She took a puff of her pipe. “Michael has his obsessions.” A shrug. The dog caught her gaze and wagged hopefully, stepping out of its round bed. John’s hands seemed unable to sweat properly. They felt numb to him, weirdly flaccid. The dog crossed the room diagonally from the back, and when it reached Alyson’s couch in the center she kicked it playfully away, and when it would not retreat she waved at one of her servingwomen to hold it. “Michael talks about a lot of things. I just tell him to shut up.” She turned her head back to John. “I asked him about this bleeding, though, and he said I should ask you. So. Lord Astronomer. What can you tell me?” She held up her own hand and studied each knuckle carefully. “Wait, did you just say you have an assistant now? Is that what you were talking about?”

  When John had been a boy, he’d spent many an hour in what could only be called hypnotic fascination, the study of tiny things: a garden lizard fear-frozen on a coral statue, a swatch of fabric on his trouserleg, an engraved medallion his mother often wore—which became his after her death. Objects obvious and present to a boy, woefully un-present to him as a grown man. He’d never concerned himself with time until it had already passed. When he was young, he’d nabbed that medallion from his mother for a few hours, studied the slender figures depicted upon it: two women seated on a chaise longue, a guinea hen, emblem of the family Sousa, scratching at the ground before them. John had dismissed easily the most obvious questions a child might ask about the scene—who the women were didn’t interest him, but how they got onto the medallion did, what person or tool had machined them there so smoothly, and then there was the matter of the age of the metal. He’d sent his boy’s fingers around and around it. So even and smooth it was. As though the medallion itself might answer him. The skill necessary to make such an object had astonished him, even then. John the adult was no different, only now he spent his time studying invisible magics. But had he not once studied his own knuckles as Alyson was just now doing, the marvelous utility of each bone-nub straining against the skin, and each mole, and each sparse shaft of hair? He stared at her.

  She waited patiently, content, it seemed, to contemplate her hand and then him, watching him teeter from side to side, having got lost inside himself on his way to an answer. Her nails were painted, each one a different color, short and practical. At last she snapped her fingers to catch his attention.

  John panicked. “Ah … yes, my assistant. He is … an unorthodox choice, I confess, and he has spent some time in prison. This prison in fact, only recently. Terribly recently. But I have cause to believe that his predictive abilities are remarkable. You see, it was Tygo who advised that I inquire about your … bleeding.” The word was difficult for him to say. “I asked him to perform a feat of prediction as a test. His, ah, employment, shall we say, was contingent on the fulfillment of his prediction. And before you ask, let me inform you that I have not, as of yet, proven that Tygo did not do some magic of his own to cause his prediction to become true, but as we speak I’m working on it. I am as certain as I can be that Tygo is honest. Would you like to meet him?”

  “What?” she asked. Still she looked at her nails.

  “Would you like to meet Tygo? He’s outside. Shackled, of course. Technically—you must be aware—he’s still a prisoner. I ask permission from you to take him before the Pardoness. A royal pardon would unburden me greatly and legitimize our work.” And keep the Hierophant away from him, he did not say. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, felt a rip in the lining of the left one. He knew he would forget to ask Mizar to mend it until he lost something precious through the hole.

  Alyson put her hands to her temples. “You’re so hard to follow. Are you telling me the man who caused the bleeding is here now, outside my chamber?”

  “Not caused,” John piped. “Predicted.”

  “Whatever. Yes, bring him in right now, I want to see him.” She held up a hand. “Wait.” She spoke to her handmaid. “Get the sheets.”

  The handmaid returned, her arms piled high with white sheets stained with russet blobs; John stared, uncomprehending. The young woman cast the sheets onto the tiled floor, spreading them out with a toe so they were all more or less visible, hills and valleys in a circle around her own rose-colored dress. There were at least seven or eight sheets, each ruined by brown-red smears. John knew Alyson, always inexpressive, was watching him. As he realized what the stains were, a blush mounted his face.

  “This is gross,” she said finally. “Just gross. You know it is.” The handmaid had at last spread out each sheet and John could see the extent of the havoc: could normal women bleed so much and yet be unharmed? Alyson said, “They can be washed but the laundress says they’ll never get completely white. I know I won’t want to sleep on these, and Michael won’t want to sleep or do anything on these, and other than t
he handmaids and servants I don’t know a single girl who won’t need new bedclothes, and who’s paying for that? Are you? And”—she pulled on one of the two straight curtains of her hair, which divided and fell onto each shoulder—“as a side note, Lord Astronomer, when you’re talking I immediately start thinking about something else. I used to think it was me but I actually think it’s you. Don’t they have some kind of class you can take to get better at it?”

  He wondered what “they” she referred to and felt his blush ripen. “I—”

 

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