He shrugged. There was a little upside-down moon, hanging like a backflip in the corner of the sky. “I got something else for you.” He marched her past his own five Heads and their streamers, maroon-colored, hazard-orange, caution-yellow, and into the warm mustiness of his tent. She opened her mouth, but closed it when he didn’t bother fastening the tent flaps. The blood in her heart slowed. From beneath a pile of blankets he pulled a square thing wrapped in paper, tied with a streamer and decorated with colored chalk. “I drew on it, lucky sigils,” he said. In the coldish light, the chalk whorls were phosphorescent like plankton at the seashore. She became aware of a curious feeling—not exactly sorrow but something near it, like the lonely cousin of sorrow, and she knew it was homesickness and she missed her old life and her mother. A lump rose in her throat as she sat on her brother’s bedroll and chewed her thumbnail. In her lap, the present felt heavy and she did not want it. The chalk rubbed off on her fingers and sparkled and her brother squatted next to her and punched her gently in the shoulder. “Open it,” he said.
She paused. “You shouldn’t have got anything.”
He laughed. To her it sounded crazy. “I just stole it. Out of some other carnival fuck’s wagon. He was riding around a month ago, five horses pulling this gigantic wagon, it made me mad. Who needs five horses? I would’ve shot his horses, but they were good horses. White and brown.”
“What did you do?” she whispered.
He actually smiled. “I let them go.” He made a motion of running.
“That was a stupid thing to do.”
Then he wasn’t smiling. “Open.”
When she’d untied the streamer and piled it like entrails in a puddle of moonlight, when she’d ripped the paper away, she saw he’d given her a book. A heavy, huge book. And did he know what book it was? No, not at all. He gazed at her face, watching for her reaction—she felt hot and cold, feverish; she knew what he was going to do afterward. “Thank you,” she said slowly.
“Do you not like it? What’s it about?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What’s it say?”
She squinted. Our True King, which meant little enough to the girl. The author was just as strange: An Executionatrix. She did not know what that word meant, but she saw within it another word she did know and fear. “It’s about magic,” she said.
“Well, every book is about magic, what’s it about?”
She ran her hand over the fabric board-cover, curled her fingers around the fraying corners. A Head and a book. And outside an ocean of grass between her and the place she wanted to be, the place she remembered best, the cradle of the panhandle and its powderfine sand, its sky arcing overhead like green glass. Then tears came to her eyes but they were stupid—motion was life, even stupid men like her brother knew that. The word to name how she felt was nostalgia, a beautiful word that her mother had taught her was made of other words, foreign words, from the language of magicians: it meant return-pain. The girl felt sure her brother didn’t know this, had never felt the feeling because he was too dumb, but she did, all the time, and suddenly her heart collapsed and she thought she couldn’t bear it. It seemed her life flowed past her like a stream. All the time she fought this melancholic recognition of her female destiny, which was to be carried farther and farther away, forever.
She looked up at her brother. “It’s about a king, I think.”
“Is it about the Astronauts?”
“What?”
“Haven’t I taught you anything? They were the Silver Stars, riding up into heavens, the kings of all magic once and for all. What have you been learning in this carnival if not that?” He stared at her goggled-eyed. She only looked at him. Her brother venerated the Astronauts like all the Head Makers in his carnival. Argento said these men had left the earth and now waited beyond the world until the land could be healed. But how do you know? she’d asked. Well, he’d answered. Somewhere, someone has evidence.
The girl knew nothing about other carnivals except that there were many, and they justified making Heads in various ways, because the Primary Law was bloodshed. Her mother had said the carnivals were a thousand factions of one idiocy. There are innumerable ways to make a grave mistake, she’d said, and they are working on discovering all of them.
Her mother was named Gimbal. Two years before, when Gimbal delivered her to Argento in the deathscapes in the center of the continent, Argento had taken her straight into his tent and burned a unicursal hexagram into her thigh. The unicursal hexagram was a sigil with no beginning and no end: the symbol of their carnival, the Silver Star. It meant many things, Argento had said, especially the six great towers in Cape Canaveral where they returned every year to pay tribute to the king. She hadn’t known then this mutilation wasn’t allowed—only those condemned to become Heads were supposed to bear the hexagram. So now she hid the scar, because it shouldn’t be there, and also she knew Argento had done it because he was stupid and crazy and didn’t believe he had to follow rules.
She hated her mother for giving her to him.
Often, when she had nothing to do and she was alone in her tent, she traced her hand over the mark, down the lines that fell inward forever, and thought that if there was magic in this sigil, it was in the spaces bounded by lines, in the blankness between divisions, in the emptiness that held apart borders of the world. She understood this with some core intuition. Magic, like nostalgia, was like a lie; empty and full all at once.
When Gimbal abandoned her to Argento, the girl
