“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
