Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  They both stood motionless.

  She beckoned to Marvel. Against his better judgment, he went to her. She reached for his hand and cradled it in her own. “What do you want, Marvel Parsons?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  “For what?”

  “For—for leaving when there is a threat at our gates. For wanting to go home. For my nostalgia. For…” For everything. “My daughter will never be able to follow me, if I leave. The king will never know why I’ve gone. The outlaw carnival … For using those two”—he gestured at Juniper and Tygo—“for my own aims.” Then he took a heavy breath. “For all the murders.”

  She considered. “You were going to kill the Mystagogue, yes?”

  “Do you know of him? Is he alive?”

  “He lives, yes.”

  “He would never let me live if I return to Kansas.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.”

  He paused, defenseless. “Is it right to kill him? It’s the only way I can be free.”

  “All I want is to be free.” She lifted her bony shoulders into a shrug. “We all want the same thing.” She laughed—it was a light laugh, a girl running among flowers. “I cannot make you free if you are bound to do evil.”

  “But I’m not,” he whispered. “What I’m doing is right. I’m almost sure of it.”

  “How do you know they are not right, also?”

  “I—” He slumped a bit. I don’t know what to do.

  She held his hand ever so softly. “Marvel. The truth comes unbidden to us—completely without warning. Go to Kansas. Don’t go to Kansas. The truth will find you eventually.” She nodded. “You are forgiven for your past sins. You may forgive yourself for your future ones.”

  Marvel remembered suddenly a bright day from his boyhood. The summer sky like a wild flashing fish, his hands in his itchy cloak-pockets as he climbed to the top of a butte and looked with pleasure at all he could see. This land, so beautiful, poisoned ground and all. He stood with his bare feet on the dirt, gazing over the grasses and the fields, and in the distance reaching skyward was the Black Watchtower, its crenelated spire, its monkish austerity, where his own mother Nasa Whiteside had been thrown to her death for finally failing to conceive the True King. He’d struggled, even then, to understand the beauty and horribleness of their condition. How, amid all splendor, they had come to be wretched. Warm breezes had swept the plain, turning the rose-colored grasses this way and that, and Marvel was so moved that he could hardly stand the feeling, and climbed down again.

  Wandering away from their settlement alone had been a stupid thing to do, and when he’d returned, his nursemaid demanded to know which saferoad he had taken to climb the hill. When he told her he didn’t know, she fell to crying, certain that he’d contracted Bent Head. But somehow, Marvel had known that he had not. Just as, a few years later, he had known he would not die when he crossed the continent on his journey to the Cape.

  He had known then, just as he knew now. But this time he had needed to be told.

  He would meet the leaders of the outlaw carnival. He would advise Michael. Then he would leave.

  The Pardoness smiled.

  Tygo’s face was still red from his fall, but suddenly he came toward the Pardoness with an eager look on his face.

  “Tellochvovin,” Tygo said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “The angels told me that.”

  Marvel pushed him away. For a moment all he could think of was holding the Pardoness’s hand as long as possible, the papery skin so soft it could have been silk. He longed for her to smile at him again. But she said, “Let him speak.”

  “Tellochvovin. It means falling death.” Tygo stared pointedly at the door to the balcony, then at the Pardoness once again. “I’m sorry. I did lie about my abilities. It’s what I’ve always done. To get by. I had no idea it would lead me to Kansas, and certainly not back here. Or to you now. I meant only…” He glared at Marvel. The ear-holes gaped. Then his face showed only fatigue. “I only wanted to do the right thing. I came here for a man named David. I don’t know where he is. I’ve been trying to keep myself alive until I find him.” He chuckled. “It hasn’t been easy.”

  “But who sent you?” Marvel asked.

  Tygo blinked. “You’ve known since you first saw me.”

  Marvel sighed.

  Juniper was looking at the balcony door. The Pardoness sighed too.

  “Well, who sent you?” Marvel asked Juniper.

  He shrugged. “The Mystagogue. I came to make sure Tygo didn’t get put in jail. Which he did. But I don’t know why the Mystagogue sent me. That’s the honest truth.” He frowned at Marvel. “There had been rumors about you, that you were alive here. But the Mystagogue didn’t believe them.”

  “Rumors,” Marvel muttered. He felt a stinging, a sensation confusing and inexorable. The Pardoness smiled at all of them. Her golden robe shimmered. She settled herself back in her bed, as if to indicate the meeting had ended. Drained of all his energy, Marvel stabbed his fingernail into his callus again. “They call the Mystagogue’s tower in Kansas the Watchtower of the Universe. But maybe you see farther even than that, Pardoness.” He bowed.

  She shrugged. “I see what you show me.”

  Tygo came toward the Pardoness again, passing Marvel without a glance. He took her hand, which was as skeletal as a bird picked clean on a doorstep. Her expression was one Marvel could only guess at—the look was the kind one could see once and never forget, though in the past he’d often considered such sentiments to be maudlin. Within that exchange was contained the arc of lifetimes: love, hope, disappointment, acceptance. The Pardoness had looked at him with that expression moments before, and he had known the experience would never leave him. Now she looked at Tygo the same way, and Marvel understood forgiveness existed beyond a person’s capacity to accept it.

  Tygo stared into her eyes. “The word from the angels, tellochvovin,” he said. “Maybe they meant it for you.”

  She smiled again. She was gazing now at the balcony door.

  “What a strange turn of fortune, to learn this word. You are all marvelous indeed.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THE PARDON

  Mr. Capulatio blew back through the curtains in late afternoon, a murky look on his face. His hat was gone. His hair was undone, sad-looking. Blood on his forearms. She had been trying to sleep, but none had come for her. The crones had taken Orchid away. The girl could not decide if she wished the other woman would die of her injuries.

  “Don’t stare at me like that!” he barked. “It’s a nice early winter day, let’s be happy!”

  But he did not look happy.

  She wanted to go closer to him but found she couldn’t budge from where she sat on the bed, among his blankets and furs.

  “You should be in your cage,” he growled. “Where it’s safe.”

  She said nothing.

  “We’ll have our day, today. We are going to the palace to talk to the fools in charge. They have agreed to see us. It is truly hopeless for them to resist. And they won’t. Not after the magic I’m doing.” He began to take off his clothes, stripping out of his still-wet shirt and dark red pants. He stood naked, his member slightly swollen despite the chill in the air, and she couldn’t keep from looking. It was not as large as Argento’s, but more nicely formed. It bobbed when he walked. “There isn’t much time now,” he was saying. He began rummaging in one of his boxes. The shadows formed by the indented sides of his buttocks as dark as eyes.

  His mobiles of sacred glass tinkled as he knocked against them while he gathered more things. She found him beautiful. When had it changed that she couldn’t stop looking at him? She wanted desperately for him to come over to her. For him to wrap his arms around her. He had a way of kissing her that drove a burning spike into her heart. But he wouldn’t look at her. “You have humiliated me. And maimed my wife,” he said after a long time.

  “I thought you wanted me to kill her.”

  �
��The Star Sapphire ritual is not about death. It’s about life!”

  “You told me to cut off her head!”

  He shook his head. “You are an idiot. ‘A new Law of Mercy’? You are weak. A coward. Orchid would never have hesitated to cut your head off.” He turned on his heel and bent close to her face. “But it’s no matter. We’ve put into motion our petrifying destiny. We’ve begun the spell which will grant us our kingship. We are ready, even if we are not ready, to take the Cape.”

  Then he was at his washbasin, wiping down his arms and hands, removing the visible bloodstains, then his underarms, which he perfumed with a citrus-smelling talc he kept in a lidded dish on his desk.

  “But I do think Wonderblood has ended,” she said, standing. “It must have.”

  “What do you know? Have you even read the book?”

  “A little.”

  “Then tell me, girl, since you’re an expert now. Since you’re qualified to interpret the texts you didn’t even know existed until lately. Why did you cut off my wife’s hand? My Radiance, my Glassine Prism? My scribe. Why did you take from her that which she needs for writing?”

  “I don’t understand.” Her voice was cold. “Why it matters. If you wanted me to kill her. Why don’t you just kill her, if you want her dead?”

  “Because that’s not how the spell works!” he yelled. She shrank back and sat again on the bed. He followed her and spoke in her face, his breath hot. “When I killed our Prophetess Lois, Orchid’s own mother, I was little more than a child myself, though she called me a man. She gave her life to me so I might have this chance. She gave me her daughter, the heir of Huldah, so that our children might be legitimate heirs. My child with the aged Lois died in his sleep, not seven weeks old.” His voice softened, becoming almost sad. “But Orchid cannot have children.”

  “So I was supposed to kill her?”

  “To legitimate our line! Her death would have been a sacrifice, an unparalleled gift to the heavens. Who knows where you are from, you came from a field! Who will your children be? We have no way of knowing. You’ve said yourself that one of our sons may kill me.”

  “I—I was just saying what I thought you wanted to hear.”

  He weakly closed his eyes. “Please don’t tell me that. I cannot bear it.” Then, still naked, he strode past her, toweling moisture away with a cloth. He opened another box and pulled out a new set of clothing. Mr. Capulatio stepped into the pants, these ones made of pale leather and stitched with gold thread, and pulled them halfway up. His thighs were covered in sparse black hair, the muscles standing out like cords. He tucked his member into them and adjusted it to his liking. “I made these. Do you like them? When I was a boy myself I sewed for our Prophetess. She liberated me from that soulless carnival I was born into. I sewed there, too. Bags for the Heads. Wretched Heads they made in that carnival, even worse than your brother’s—ugly and terribly magicked. Barely worth the effort.” He glanced up. “My other wife recorded all the events of my life for posterity. You should read it some time.” He went to the corner where the dripping sack containing Orchid’s severed hand was still oozing, picked it up, and placed it into another bag, this one made of a tough horse-hide that wouldn’t leak.

  She hardened her voice. “It’s better not to think about the past.”

  Mr. Capulatio, when agitated, had a cold mania that seeped into his voice, that same bland restlessness that had so terrified the girl in the first moment she saw him on the battlefield. Standing beside the striped tent. Like he owned the world. She tried to remember how he’d seemed in those first moments before she knew him, before she had begun to love him. Composed and unhinged all the same. How that combination had stopped the blood in her heart.

  Mr. Capulatio was now donning an eye-blue vest. He slipped his arms through the holes and dusted himself down, although he was impeccably clean. In the mirror, he frowned. “You can make it up to me. How do you think I might die, sugarplum? My Queen? Try again. Isn’t it likely I might die inside that massive castle, outnumbered a thousand to one?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  He sat beside her in the tumble of blankets, stroking her hair. “Tell me about the Law of Mercy. There will always be dissent, and dissidents are exempt from the Law of Mercy, I’m sure. For instance, what if a queen disobeys her king?”

  “I—”

  “There must be a codification of this new Law. Some way to understand its nuances, since surely it will be revealed to have many. Tell me, who will do that?”

  “I will.”

  “You? You are a fetus! A child.”

  “You said I was the queen.”

  “You’re beginning to act like a queen, I’ll say that.” He unbuckled his pants.

  “No,” she said, her breath speeding up. She did not think he would. He had never struck her. He had never even touched her when she did not touch back. The thin leather bunched as he pushed his pants down, and out sprang his member, already hard. He pushed her back onto her elbows, her skull striking the headboard. It didn’t hurt, but the surprise brought tears to her eyes. He pulled her dress up with the other hand, his fingers lingering for a moment on the bandaged spot. “It’s good we got rid of it,” he hissed. “It would have been a bad omen indeed, it would have cast all this into doubt. But there is no remnant of your past unfaithfulness now.” He swept aside the thin white skirt.

  Something in his face—it was like she wasn’t there. He had gone from familiar to ghastly in half a moment. It must be the magic he had done, she told herself. He couldn’t be like this. She tried to scramble away. “Don’t,” she said. “Please.”

  “There is another bit of magic we can do. Don’t you want me to succeed?”

  “Stop.”

  He held her neck to the bed, his other arm supporting his weight, the veins standing out from exertion.

  “You said sex magic was bad, that it was for degenerates!”

  “‘I was just saying what I thought you wanted to hear,’” he replied in a singsong voice. He rubbed himself against her leg.

  “You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  He was nodding. “Yes, and then I said ‘except on the inside.’”

  “You’ll be breaking the Law of Mercy!” she whispered, as she felt him begin press into her. But then he stopped. She was not crying. He hovered over her, the slick knot of his hair undone now, and they both panted as they stared at each other through the revolving shadows cast by the hanging charms.

  “What would happen to someone who breaks the Law?” He sat back suddenly. “Do you think they would die?”

  She moved as far away from him as she could, pulling all the blankets over her lap. “I think anyone who hurts another person will regret it.”

  “Well, I must kill their king after we take the compound. There can be no other way.”

  “You’ll know the right thing to do when the time comes to do it.”

  His face softened. “Aurora. You are kind. You are the sigil of peace. A girl in white upon the battlefield. You are better than she is—” He gestured at the bag with Orchid’s hand. “She who is always grabbing for power, willing to do anything. But you stood your ground. You stand your ground. Against me. For me.” He gently kissed her. “If cutting off her hand was what the magic told you to do, it must be right.” He pulled up his pants, then cupped his own face in his hands. “What am I becoming? Who am I? Only degenerates work in sex magic, I did say that.” He shook her, a bit roughly. “You must forgive me. It’s this place. It’s … I’m losing my mind, Aurora. I don’t know up from down.”

  Cautiously, she caressed his knee.

  “Lead me to the truth.”

  She kissed him. He kissed her back. Again he took up the bag with the hand in it. He said, “Right seems wrong and wrong seems right.”

  She nodded. He left and she felt her heart, a feather, floating down from a precipice.

  She had thought he would save her, but now she understood she would have to sa
ve herself.

  CHAPTER 22

  FAITH

  Tellochvovin. It was the language of angels, so said Tygo. Falling death. Of course he might have made the whole thing up. It was very possible. With the two stella novae hanging above their heads, an ominous quality could well be ascribed to the word. But John was not so sure Tygo have ever “seen” anything more remarkable than the weaknesses of others. John’s own, for instance. John Sousa did admit that he was in search of a miracle, and had been for a long time. A vision of the Sublime that might, once and for all, convince him of its truth. Tygo need not have been a genius to see that John was a man who had always wanted to believe.

  If the stella novae were tellochvovin, they would all soon be dead and none of it would matter. John cast his eyes out the window of this great lower hall of the southeast tower, Columbia. There the lights burned, through the gray haze. He was seated at a long table with Tygo and King Michael and the Hierophant, flanked by four armed guards. They awaited the outlaw carnival’s faction—somewhat too jovially, John felt.

  The horoscope he’d drawn up had been predictably vague. He and Michael had taken their usual roles. John urged caution while Michael laughed and replied that John was far, far too cautious. There are so many ways to read that, John! Why do you always choose the worst? But there had been a worrisome aspect to the reading: two opposing planets, one ascendant, one on the wane. In his view the ascendant body did not represent Michael himself—but of course Michael had not taken it that way.

  He had pointed to the offending planet and its aspect, his narrow finger jabbing the chart. Michael had nodded eagerly. The horoscope showed at least one thing clearly: that the True King would be present at the meeting today. John’s thoughts had taken an odd turn: does Michael even believe he should be king? Would he be happy to be overthrown?

  The whole affair had unsettled him. Now John and Tygo were seated a bit to the right of Michael and the Hierophant, lower than the dais that elevated the more important men behind the table. Michael had changed out of his plain clothing into a robe of cosmic black, sewn with moonstones. John had also affixed a dress-collar onto his own astronomer’s caftan—moonstones, again, patterned like the constellation of Orion, repeating around the length of it: the collar was a very old Sousa family heirloom, with the hereditary peacock insignia engraved in miniature upon the surface of each gem. Lately the collar had become too loose and John felt it drooped unflatteringly. Mizar had been wise enough to pack the collar in the carriage in the first place (how did he always know what to bring? And yet he did; some servant’s wizardry), as well as an extra set of clothing for Tygo, who had finally been unchained. He wore a plain dark velvet robe—probably the finest garment he’d ever worn.