She tried to shut everything out, the screams, the yells, the cold, the scratching underbrush. But she was more afraid here than she had been at the camp. Even on the battlefield. And she was more afraid of Orchid than she ever had been of Mr. Capulatio.
Or Argento.
Mr. Capulatio had killed her brother. Would his wife now kill her?
When they had walked a mile or so, Orchid turned slowly around. The moon overhead cast scant light onto her face, but enough that the shining glint of her eyes looked unearthly to the girl, like a rabid animal in a trashpile. She shrank back, but Orchid pulled the chain, forcing the girl’s head and neck forward. “We are in this together now,” she muttered, and reeled in the chain with her one hand. The girl could not believe how strong she was, even injured.
“No,” she said, her voice hoarse.
“Yes. I hate you nearly as much as I hate him, but we are in this together, little Sigil, and as long as you are mine, he will never have his kingdom.”
“You don’t even believe I am the sigil!”
Orchid pulled the girl to the ground, where they sat on a carpet of rotting leaves. The girl felt them sticking wetly to her thighs through her dress.
“He may have misinterpreted the passage. Or I may have. I … I don’t know. I need more time to read,” Orchid said. “To study the texts. My books—” She looked back in the direction of the carnival. For a moment it seemed like she might return for them. But then she let out her breath so slowly the girl wondered if she were trying to calm herself. “I would never get through the fray like this.” The chain. The one hand. “I am a cripple thanks to you. You will pay.”
“Would you rather I’d killed you?” the girl shrieked. She couldn’t help herself—they had walked a long way but they had not spoken. “I could have. If you kill me you’ll break the new Law of Mercy.”
“Shut up. Did you hear what I said? As long as you are mine, he will never be ascendant. It doesn’t matter what the passage says, or even what it means. He believes it. And so he is bereft without you.” She smiled. “His little fantasy of the girl on the battlefield will cost him his kingship.” Orchid spat on the ground and cradled the stump of her wrist. “O, not to worry, little Sigil,” she muttered. “I shall not kill you, not now. Who would be my servant if I did? I’m a queen, I cannot be without an attendant.”
The girl looked about for a rock. If only she could get the key from around Orchid’s neck. The woman had to sleep sometime. Then she would hit her and escape.
The moonlight made deep, ugly shadows under Orchid’s eyes. Orchid was watching the girl closely. A new expression rolled onto her face like a stormcloud, one of recognition. Her short hair dripped with moisture and blood. “Tut tut, little one. What of your Law of Mercy? How can you kill me in my sleep? Surely you are not so evil. Where would you even go? Back to him? Into the forest alone? A young girl will not be alone for long.” She laughed meanly.
She gasped. “Do you read minds?”
“Never once in all my life. But I know your heart, because all people are the same. Selfish, grasping, lustful, prideful.” Her voice was sly. “You cannot break your own Law, though, right? There is to be no killing.”
The girl could not confess she’d made up the Law of Mercy in order to spare herself the horror of de-heading Orchid, because then Orchid would kill her. But suddenly she couldn’t be sure if she’d made up the Law, or if it had been divinely sent; it seemed real now that other people had begun believing it. What would it feel like to be given a revelation?
Like this desperation?
Wonderblood had ended. She had ended it. There would be no more making Heads, no more carnivals, maybe. No more executions. She stared at Orchid. All around them were the wet smells of ferns and mosses, water flowing under the ground, the cries of night animals, shrill and sweet. The fear in the girl’s heart began to slow. The woman sitting across from her was without a hand. In the weak moonlight she could see darkness on the bandage; the wound was weeping. It was likely Orchid would die on her own. In the distance the girl heard not just the fighting, but the ocean, too, where she had been married only a day before on the barge, before the altar of shells and the phosphorescent fire.
Orchid turned her face toward the fires and the far-off glint of the towers. She shook her head. “I should have been king. I was Lois’s heir. Why not me?”
The girl nodded, hesitant. “My mother was a Walking Doctor. Maybe I can make something for your—hand. So you don’t become fevered.”
“You’d poison me just as soon as to look at me,” Orchid snorted.
“I didn’t kill you before, did I?”
“That’s because you’re weak.”
“You haven’t killed me yet. Are you weak?”
To her astonishment, Orchid wiped her face with her good hand. Was she crying? The girl was much too frightened to touch her.
“My books. My texts. My carnival, which I took from my wretch of a brother by my own force. Gone. Every good thing I ever did in my life. Ruined. Or else it belongs to him now.” Her eyes roared at the girl. “I would have burnt it myself to keep him from getting it if I’d known it would turn out like this.” Her face closed all at once, as though on a drawstring. She cradled her stump.
“I’m sorry.” The girl did not know why she said it, but it was true.
They sat a long time in the wet forest, listening to the distant clamor of battle. The sounds grew dimmer and dimmer and the coolness swelled around them until they were both shivering in the fall air.
Then after a while the girl woke up. How could she have fallen asleep right next to that woman? But when she rubbed her eyes, she saw Orchid was sleeping too, her neck bent unnaturally and her face pinched as though she were having a nightmare.
Frantically, the girl searched for the key to the metal collar. It had been around Orchid’s neck, but now it was nowhere. She didn’t dare move more than a few inches, for fear that the chain connecting them would rattle. It was difficult to see in the dark. The only thing to do would be to hit her with a rock. Several small pebbles were within her grasp—big enough to stun her, if the girl hit her very hard.
She grew more agitated as the seconds passed. This might be her only chance. But still the girl could not pick up a rock.
At last she sat very still and let the breath go in and out of her body. She imagined she was a wind chime, air passing through her, transforming into beautiful sounds. She knew she would not kill Orchid. She’d had the chance before, and she had not taken it. She would not take it now. The Eon of Pain was over. The girl did not know why it was true but she had felt the truth of those words as soon as she had spoken them aloud, and so had everyone else. They had power. It was the Law of Mercy.
She knew something else, too. Orchid would not kill her.
She closed her eyes and slept.
When she awoke again it was still dark. Orchid’s face was inches from her own. The woman’s clear eyes, in the shine of the two comets as bright green as glass, for the moon had sunk below the tree line and the girl’s body was covered in chills, still blazed at her, but this time Orchid appraised her with more nuance, for finally she said, “You did not kill me.”
“I could have killed him every one of a hundred nights too,” she retorted. “But I didn’t do that, either.”
Orchid nodded. “Though one of us should have.”
“Is he the True King?”
“Yes.” Orchid sat back. Her thighs were muddy. Her hand. She wiped it on her dress but it did no good. “Of that I am most sure.”
“Will we die if we stay here?” The girl thought of the strange man from inside the palace who had told them the lights were meteors. She recalled her mother saying that word, meteor, but she did not know what a meteor was.
“I care not what happens to us,” Orchid sighed. “My texts are lost. My life’s work. Lois’s work. It’s all gone. How could I even begin to interpret what’s happened here? How will anyone know what to
believe?”
“Are there more texts?”
“In there.” Orchid pointed toward the compound with her good hand, the finger dirty. “And in Kansas. But those are guarded by insane sorcerers who are ruled by a despot. The Black Watchtower. No one goes to Kansas.”
“We could.”
Orchid’s laugh was hard. “O yes, the two of us, a handless executionatrix who cannot kill and the concubine who maimed her. We shall save the world.”
“I only want to save myself.”
Then, oddly, Orchid smiled, as though some private thought had cheered her. “The Walking Doctors have their maps, don’t they. For the saferoads. You know these?”
She shook her head. The maps she remembered from her childhood were as long gone as her mother’s comfort, swallowed up by the immensity of her circumstances. She hesitated, though. Finally, she murmured, “But there are markings on the trees.”
“I learnt a few once, from an old book.” Orchid nodded. “But—most foolishly—I entrusted navigation to others in my carnival, as did David. One can only perform so many duties.” She shook her head. “Do you know them? The markings?”
The girl shrugged. The chain clanked. “Probably some.” Then she stared. “Could we really get all the way to Kansas?”
“Others have. Why not us?”
“You just said no one goes there.”
“No one with anything to lose.” Orchid’s eyes glittered darkly. “I have always wanted to see a Kansas Cow. Perhaps those priests on the deathscape could do with such a learned scribe as myself. Perhaps they might see value where others have so callously discarded it.” She flung a rock toward the compound.
“What about me?”
“What about you? You are my hostage. You are my ransom. You are,” she breathed, “an apprentice of a kind. A sigil, yes. But not what he thought. Not an ornament. A law-giver.” She bent forward. “You will be a woman soon.” As though that explained everything. She looked toward the burning compound. “Do you really want to stay here?”
“What about Mr. Capulatio?”
“Tragic.” She pushed back the wet strands of her hair. “He chose worldly delight over Heaven. It’s a story for the ages. Not our problem.”
“I thought you loved him.”
Orchid yanked the chain, but gently. “More than you could ever know.”
* * *
They began walking before the sun rose. Orchid had not unchained her. The girl did not expect her to for a long time. A burst of doves from the brush on one side startled them and the girl shrieked, but Orchid laughed. The way they were going was unknown to both of them, until at last one of the Walking Doctors’ symbols appeared in the shady murk of the forest morning, on a tree trunk, when the sun had risen to just above the tree line but all the moisture was still trapped below it as under a dome. The mark was small, shaped like a weasel inside a wheel. The girl said, “I can’t read this one.”
“Try.”
“I was only a child when I would go around to the sick with my mother.”
“You are only a child now. Try.”
But it was useless. The weasel could mean anything. They might as well have been stepping onto a field soaked with the Disease. “I don’t know.”
They went helplessly forward, for what could they do, until many hours later they discovered another mark, this time on a narrow-trunked pine. Behind them was a flat field with white winter flowers. A mule walked unbridled in the grass, grazing, flaring his lips and chewing. The girl put her fingers on the mark. A square, plain, and a woman’s body floating above its left side. Something about the image weightless. She remembered it. “We go left. Right is the Disease.”
And so in this way they began to make their way toward Kansas, from tree to tree, pole to pole, leaving behind the countryside outlying Cape Canaveral. A myriad of changes to the landscape as they crossed it—even the ground became more solid, the low tree branches no longer twisted by ceaseless coastal winds, the piles of storm-shredded debris thinning out as they walked—they left the Cape behind, the girl and the woman, as they walked toward the Center of the World, what Orchid said was called the Watchtower of the Universe. “We will discover the truth in the texts there,” said Orchid as they walked, through tight lips. “The truth is knowable to those who would seek it.”
Maybe, thought the girl. She wished all of a sudden that she had managed to take Cosmas, the Head Argento had made for her. So they would look like magicians. It was stupid to travel without one. The girl still did not know if magic was real, or if her mother had been right and faith was a delusion. She did not know if Orchid would kill her. Or if she herself was a law-giver, a sigil, a concubine, or a queen. She felt like none of those things, and all of them.
She was a girl with feet walking toward Kansas.
She was a girl who had delivered the world from Wonderblood.
She was mercy, and mercy was a woman.
CHAPTER 26
THE BREACH
Marvel had thought he would have until dawn. In his wildest imagination, he hadn’t believed the outlaw carnival could mount so quick an attack. He’d barely left Michael to prepare his own flight when he heard, from his own tower chamber, an explosion as the outlaws blew up the water-gate. The only point where the wall was not ten feet thick.
When he heard the blast, Marvel had taken a deep breath. Yes. He would probably die now. Certainly. Not even as a deserter, or a martyr, but simply a casualty of an ordinary coup. The irony almost amused him.
He stood in the black night air on his own balcony. He’d been in the middle of throwing a few things in a sack when the blast rocked the ground. He had been, in fact, holding the drawing of his mother, Nasa Whiteside. At the explosion, he teetered unsteadily but caught his balance against his desk. The framed picture fell to the ground. His mother, the failure. Pushed to her death by the Mystagogue.
Her death would most likely go unavenged after all.
He went to his balcony and looked through a spyglass, trying to see a route of escape. The wind was blowing. Water had rushed in over the limestone streets. An icing of water, thin as a cake topping. Below him the world was awash with noise and flickering torches—screams, grunts, cries of pain. Fighting seemed to have sprung up without warning. The sound of it was both immediate and distant, like a noise one hears in one’s sleep and is reshaped by a dream. For a moment he didn’t care what happened to anyone, even himself.
The outlaws had gained the compound but were not near the towers yet. They were vastly underarmed, slashing forward only with their clubs and pikes. They kept exploding some substance—he suspected they had barrels of oil, scavenged probably from the same spots where the Cape got theirs, the hidden troves abandoned by the ancients all those years ago. When a head guard had come to him for guidance after the explosion, Marvel slammed shut the slot on his door and locked it. They would break it down to get at him, soon. Someone would.
At his desk he swept more of his bottles and droppers into a hard-sided case. Whether to take them with him, or to have something to do for the moment, he wasn’t sure. He had already packed his most important unctions. The bottles made a sound like water as they fell together. He could sort them out later, if he was alive. He knew each bottle by color and quality.
He looked down on the floor at the portrait of his mother. She peered back at him from behind cracked glass. Such a beauteous and terrible frown—the convention of the artist, perhaps. How she did look like his Alyson.
His mother had probably never been happy, either.
* * *
It was Juniper who got to him before the others. He called out to Marvel from behind the locked slot. Marvel fairly hugged him with delight once he’d opened the door. “My god, why didn’t you run away?” he almost cried.
Juniper paid him no attention. He held a finger to his lips and whispered, “Michael is ranting and raving for you. More guards will be here soon, they can’t understand why you don’t open the door. T
hey think you might have poisoned yourself.”
Marvel peered around the younger man into the hallway. A single body—a lion-faced guard’s—was sprawled at the head of the stairs like a carpet, run through with a pike. Blood had not even stopped pumping from the wound. Juniper’s cheek was smeared with red.
Marvel nodded, grabbing his bag and stepping into the hall. Only a few torches remained lit, the others had burned out. They cast wobbling shadows on the rounded walls. One of the decorative tapestries had fallen from its hanger and lay in a pile on the floor. Marvel toed the dead man’s arm. “You found a weapon, I see.”
Juniper joined him, glancing around them apprehensively. His shoulder brushed Marvel’s. “You said you’d pay me three times what the Mystagogue would.”
Marvel actually laughed. “I believe I said two times.”
“That’s not what I heard. I’ve got an exceptionally keen memory. That’s how I crossed the continent.”
“Really?”
“Everyone’s got a talent,” Juniper said as they crept down the stairs.
“How lucky for me.” Marvel attempted to sound restrained, but could not contain his pleasure. “You know, I was going to have you tortured for whatever information I could get about the deathscapes. But then I thought better of it.”
“A true statesman, you.” Juniper regarded him closely in the dim light. “Tygo will be going back, with or without David. A catastrophe is about to unfold here.”
“I’d say it already has,” replied Marvel. They took the steps two at a time.
“A different kind of catastrophe.”
When they reached a side door on the bottom floor, Marvel threw his hood over his head, though he knew it would make little difference—his figure was too well known to remain hidden. “I have my horses,” he offered.
“They’re not in the stable, I checked,” Juniper said. Even now he looked a bit as though he had just woken up. He’d found a helmet somewhere, probably on a dead man. He pulled the faceplate down. “You got any armor?”
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