“What has David done? What has he done this time? Who are you, is the question.”
“Who’s David?”
The woman squinted. She was slight but looked strong, with small, well-formed muscles like bits of rock crystal running along the insides of her bare arms. She wore a leather shirt, and her face was so small and her features so crowded together that the girl thought she appeared to be squinting even when she was not. Still, there was something lovely about her. Perhaps it was her very appearance of strength. Solidness seemed to gather around her like a wall. “O my. What has he told you? You don’t even know his name?”
The girl felt her cheeks burn even though she was not afraid. “Mr. Capulatio?”
The woman laughed. Though not much taller than the girl, she seemed to crowd out everything else in the tent. She bent toward the cage, the necklace hanging off her chest, and examined the girl more closely. The girl could see her better too. This near, her cheeks were still supple, but the skin around her eyes had tiny fissures like drought-ground. The girl smelled a citrus perfume. She swallowed. “Mr. Capulatio took my brother’s carnival. Everyone there is dead now.”
“Except you? Unfortunately?”
“I was alone. My brother is dead.” The words spilled out because she could sense this woman meant her evil. “He says I am going to be the queen.”
The woman tilted her head. “How’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“The queen? Or just a queen? There is a difference.” She ran her fingernail through the fronds of a feather on her necklace. “But how would you know that? You’re just a child.”
The girl felt her face tighten. “Why are you in our tent?”
The woman showed no expression. “Our tent? You are an our with him now? Says who?” She stepped very close and now the girl could see into her eyes, which were set deep in her face and appeared dark in a way that belied their actual color, which was the grayblue of a rock. But the eyes themselves in the riverbed of her face were awful to look at for some reason, so she looked away, until the woman called her back with a soft voice. “Little one, I’m talking to you. Explain to me this, if you can. Are you a prisoner? Perhaps a blessing and a charm to lend luck to our endeavors? Maybe through your honorable transformation from human to Head? Or are you some other part of our Great Work that is soon to transpire?”
“Great Work?”
“Hasn’t he told you that?” The woman smiled strangely. “What did he tell you? Anything at all? How awful for you.” She paused. “Where did you say he picked you up?”
“The field where my brother’s carnival was—”
“Was it perhaps a battlefield?”
“Not until he came and starting killing them all.”
The woman wrapped her fingers about the cage’s bars, just as Mr. Capulatio had done earlier. Perched on one finger was a gigantic blue glass ring. “I see. And you were just an unprotected fawn, as it were, innocently standing there waiting to be found? In the center of the poisonous continental desert?” She looked over her shoulder at the desk and all the books in their boxes, frowning. “You were a girl on a battlefield.”
“I guess I was.”
The woman tossed her hair behind her shoulders. “That is—at least to my ear—highly unlikely. Is it not more likely that he bought you from someone or someones who were hastening to be rid of you? For their own reasons, of course.” She clicked her fingernails on the bars.
“No.”
The woman’s hands were always moving. Now they were on her necklace, lifting and stroking the feathers, which were so glossy and long that they extended nearly to the center of her stomach. She wore a loose tunic, short-sleeved. Her knee-boots were constructed bloody-looking leather. Everything on her body was black but the feathers. “O,” was all she said.
They stared at each other. The girl had a very bad feeling indeed. She longed for him to come back and make this woman go away. “Who are you?” the girl asked again.
But the woman ignored her. Her expression was quickly gathering a darkness. “Has he told you that you are part of a vision?” Her face dropped and she closed her eyes wearily. The girl thought she had seen them tear up for just a moment before she shut them. “One of his visions was of a small girl upon a battlefield who would become queen, but we—or should I say I—had not taken that to mean his queen.”
“Why not?”
“Since he is lawfully married to me. He has been since he was sixteen years of age. That would mean that I am his queen already.” She shrugged. “A man can have only one legitimate wife. That makes you something additional. A concubine. What was your name again?” she demanded.
It made sense now, her jewelry. She was his wife.
The girl found her voice. “Aurora is what he calls me.”
“But what is your name?”
“I can’t remember.”
“How terrible for you,” she murmured. She spoke very much like Mr. Capulatio himself: with half-threats and vague intimations. She shared his cruel manner of a manipulative child. Still, though the girl saw through this behavior, the intended effect of which was to produce in her a great shame, it worked. She felt suddenly stupid for even trying to talk to this woman.
“Well, I was abandoned by my mother when I was a girl and then my brother died a terrible death I had to watch, so I have no family. So I have no name.” She glared at the woman. “Not that I would tell you, anyway.”
But she did have a name. She would never speak it. It was her mother’s name, and her mother had given her over to this life, whatever it was. How terrible or angelic of
