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.
He had not progressed much further along the path before he noticed another of his staff’s failures. A sleepy guard stood a fair distance away, one of the many posted to oversee the daily courtyard market. Merchants from beyond the walls came with their wares and sold them in booths. Magicked Heads, jewelry, leather. People pushed carts with wood for fires. Women carried water, men yanked horses through the mud, magicians shook their girdles of talismans. Still more carried fish and flesh and fabrics and pieces of found metal, balanced in gigantic baskets upon their heads. Courtiers, the families of the Cape who had lived here a thousand years, mingled in their finery and blew each other five kisses, the greeting their station demanded. Ochre robes, moonstone collars, blue glass rings on every finger in homage to the heavenly bodies. They were arrayed in splendor while their finely dressed children scrapped with each other and chased dogs.
But Marvel’s eyes were drawn to the young-looking guard. He stood beneath the eve of a booth. His uniform was all wrong. It might not even have been palace issue. He seemed almost comatose, but as Marvel watched, he snatched an orange from a passing cart. Without offering payment, he peeled it and began to eat.
The whole fruit was gone in a few bites, the peel tossed underfoot. The guard ground it into the mud. Marvel stopped. Frowned.
The man would need to be reprimanded. There was no one to do it but Marvel. He realized abruptly that he hated to be in charge—when had that changed? At one time he had enjoyed it, craved it. Now he wished he could leave the guard to his stupid fruit. Should a man not have the dignity of sorting out those ethics on his own? But it was not possible. Others had seen Marvel crossing the courtyard: what if they had also seen the guard steal the fruit? What if someone had seen Marvel see the guard steal and do nothing? He clenched his jaw.
He took a weary step off the path, but at that moment a trumpet sounded the public prayer. It was led not by Marvel, but by the Royal Pardoness, Green Butterfly. Marvel turned from the guard, grateful but then at once reluctant for the distraction. The Pardoness emerged, shrouded. None of her skin was visible, only clouds of weightless fabric topped by a crown of polished green rocks. Like tombstones, or teeth. Her face entirely covered by pale diaphanous silk. Drops of water pitted the fabric here and there.
She revealed herself upon her balcony for a few moments every day in order to assure the people there still existed a link between themselves and the divine. Green Butterfly stretched her slender hands over them all each morning, in sunshine and rain. She was a direct descendant of a man who had walked on the moon. A feeling of peace did emanate from the act, if one had a mind to feel it: often, Marvel did not. There were people who said Green Butterfly lived in a room paneled entirely in opals. That she kept the finger-bones from every soul she pardoned. He was sure those things weren’t true, but the people liked her nonetheless. Though she was now so frail her voice was nearly impossible to hear, though no one had seen her face in years, though she rarely granted pardons, still, she represented goodness. Kindness. Even love.
The spitting weather drowned her voice. The people in the courtyard stared at her anyway. Most of them. They knew what she would say, as did Marvel—she said the same thing every day. More important was to be seen looking at her. He supposed many of them admired her clothing, her headpiece, for he had authorized those, and knew how much they cost. Others were simply glad to stop working for a few moments. A few might even have wanted to feel her warmth, though from this distance it flickered like a candle across a bedroom. Marvel stopped along with them, splashes of rain on their faces together while they strained to listen.
She opened her arms, silks streaming off them.
A few murmurs, nothing discernible. Marvel knew the words because he’d written them. He found his mouth saying them, though he could not see her lips. One of his first acts as Hierophant had been to change all the traditional prayers. He had been young and passionate then.
He could remember many things, but could hardly remember himself. Who had
