“A feeling for what?” she whispered. She was often still afraid to talk to him, especially when he spoke like this. His voice was soft. She found herself leaning into his touch. They stared out at the morning-wet landscape, and the girl felt hope stirring inside her. Hope for what? She said, “What kind of feeling do you mean?”
“That you yourself are important.”
She thought, everyone feels that way. Because if you don’t feel important, how could a person bear to go on? “I don’t know what ‘important’ means.”
He laughed sharply. “O my. I do.”
Shortly afterward, Mr. Capulatio left to go tramping about his new encampment. My final encampment ever, Queenie. Glorify! Soon we will live as we have been destined! He locked her inside a cage in his tent and ordered two men outside to guard her. He told her as he shut her inside that this cage had been constructed to house his treasures, and she was his most treasured treasure, and now Especially now! he could not let anyone steal her away. She was the future. She was the rightful queen of Cape. He placed a lock the size and shape of an orange on the cage door and clasped her fingers through bars and twined them around his own, and leaned forward and looked into her face with his clear eyes the color of shallow creek water. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “Truly. You are a gemrock.”
He turned and dropped the key into a skin bag that hung from his belt, but spoke again before leaving the tent. “If I were a stronger man, if I were less mindful of the ways of other men…” he began, running his finger down the golden fringe that edged the tent flap. The length of his fingers always surprised the girl, and also they were thin and somewhat yellowish but from what she did not know, tobacco or an illness or some magic substance he touched in his workings. She liked those fingers that always touched her so very gently. They had, in their time together, become something she looked forward to.
He went on, “I would like to know you were safe no matter what, if I locked you up or not.” He jerked his head back toward the guards outside. She imagined he might hand her the key through the bars of the cage. They both knew she wouldn’t leave. But he stiffened when he heard the men outside laughing softly. She wondered as she looked at him whether he trusted anyone at all. This was wise in a way, and sad in another way, and probably unavoidable. He shrugged and blew her a kiss and then he went away.
The cage was not a terrible place to be. It was made of decorated metal with iron-lace flourishes. To pass the time, she slept and read from the book Argento had given her, which Mr. Capulatio had let her keep. The book was written like a fairytale, and it had been so long since she’d read anything at all. The True King was full of stories she had never heard. The people in the book followed a religion that was hardly anything like Argento’s superstitious worship of the Astronauts: Mr. Capulatio’s religion had real scriptures, they had relics from the old times. She braided and unbraided her hair as she devoured the handwritten pages, wishing she might never come to the end of it.
But before long, a woman strode in carrying a wooden basin of blood, which she set beside Mr. Capulatio’s desk. The girl froze. The woman wore tall leather boots. She made straight for the crates of books and papers around the desk without even noticing the girl. She spent a long while bent over his desk, rifling through his stacks of papers, holding a few up for inspection and then setting them down again. Her back was to the girl, and her light brown hair disheveled but clean. Nearly the same color as the girl’s, and just as long. As she leaned and stretched around the desk in search of more papers, her foot kept bumping the basin of blood. The girl thought she should say something, draw attention to herself, but for some reason she didn’t. The woman had such a fierce expression.
She appeared to be searching for some particular piece of information, but other than the papers Mr. Capulatio had been recently working on, all his books remained in their crates. There had been little time yet to unpack. The woman took a pry-bar lying nearby and began jimmying the lid off a crate.
Suddenly she seemed to stiffen. She turned around like she’d heard a noise, though the girl had not moved. Maybe the woman had heard her breathing. Her age was impossible to decipher—twenty or thirty or even older—but her eyebrows were thick and darker than her hair, mussed slightly. Beneath them, her eyes burned with intelligence. She reminded the girl, for the slightest second, of her mother Gimbal.
A long moment passed before the woman smiled. A frightening smile, like a grotesque shadow on a wall. It contained many emotions, all of which the girl had seen before on different people at different times, but never all at once together. Anger, immediately. A shard of despair. She saw fear, too, in the woman’s eyes.
The woman set down the pry-bar and approached the cage. “Hello,” she said. The dimness obscured her eyes, but they were magnetic all the same. The girl stared at her.
“Hello.”
“Well. You are not what I expected at all. At all.” She blinked.
“Who are you?”
She came nearer. She wore a huge necklace of feathers. Each one long and brown and green and stained to look like blood. It was very well made. The woman
