“You’re right to keep it to yourself, at least in these times,” said the woman. “I, for one, wouldn’t ever trust anyone with my real name. Except my husband.” She began to smile. “Who is apparently also your husband, or so you think. Have you told David your name?”
“He didn’t tell me he was called David.”
“Why would he? You’re not his real wife.”
“Not yet.”
“If you were perhaps slightly more beautiful, I would believe he did love you, but his other concubines have generally been attractive or at least fertile. Do you have some other talent I am not seeing? Are you particularly good at cooking? Your mother, maybe, taught you that. I would teach my daughter to cook if I had one.”
The girl scowled.
“You appear to have only recently, in cosmological time, mastered the ability to walk and talk. Tell me, can you menstruate? It’s a fair question for a future queen.”
“Go away.” She had never bled. She felt ashamed of herself, her body. Her mother had told her how it would happen when it happened, and she wasn’t afraid. She expected it soon, but there was the trauma of constant motion to contend with. And her thinness. The woman was nodding as though the girl had said all these things aloud. It was as if she could read minds. “Don’t be sad. You can’t help it.” She stopped nodding. “Do you wish you were dead?”
The girl made a face. “Of course I don’t. Who would wish for death?” In fact, the girl hadn’t wished for death since Mr. Capulatio took her from Argento’s carnival. Not since she’d hidden her eyes when Argento died. She straightened her shoulders.
“Many do. Many have.” The woman studied her more closely. “It’s a fact that I’ve killed more people than David. I am myself an executioner—an executionatrix. I took my carnival by violence from my own brother when I was not much older than you. In fact, it was a marvelous coup. Very bloody.” She looked the girl up and down again. “I would even go so far as to say it helped David to love me. He likes a strong woman.” Then she shrugged. “How does it feel to be in a cage?”
“I’m here to keep me safe. Not because I’m a prisoner. That’s what he said.”
“O, of course. And he always tells the truth, I’m sure you know that.”
She looked to the ground, embarrassed. The blankets and carpets in the bottom of the cage made her feel like a captive animal. But there had been a needle-poke when the woman said she was Mr. Capulatio’s wife. The girl felt it growing now, an envy so sharp and tiny she’d hardly noticed, but now it began to burn. This was his wife? This maniac? He had a wife? Other concubines? How many? She couldn’t believe she’d never allowed herself to wonder about other women. The pricking oozed inside her like blood under the skin. She made a dark face at the woman, who tapped the orange-shaped lock with a clean long fingernail. “O dear, now don’t be angry,” she said. “You can’t have thought you were the only one. What’s he told you about me?”
She squared her shoulders and jutted out her lip, she couldn’t help herself. “He never said anything about you. Or any wife. Except that I would be his wife.”
The woman appeared to think. Finally she went back to the desk and pulled out the chair and sat down. She kicked the wooden bucket of blood for effect. “That’s my offering. My thanks to the heavens for his successful return. Do you know how much blood that is? How many people? I’ve been very busy.”
“It’s grotesque.”
“Is it grotesque when David executes people?”
She remembered Argento’s dumb eyes as he was led to the block. Had he been drugged? She wanted to think Mr. Capulatio would have granted him—her—that mercy. She thought of her relief and sadness. She said nothing.
The woman began rifling through the papers again, this time with much more urgency. “My name is Orchid.” She spoke with her head in one of the crates. “My carnival is called Loss, this is my tent and David is my husband.” When she looked up, she was angry.
“What are you looking for?”
“A certain book.”
The girl clenched her hands. She had the very sure, very irrational feeling this book was the one she herself had been reading in her cage only moments before the woman arrived. She had not yet admitted to him that she could read, but he knew. Of course he knew. He could see her eyes fly across the pages of his own writing that he brought into their bed, where he sometimes read it aloud, holding the papers at an arm’s length as though this would give him greater clarity. When he hated it, which was all the time, he burned the papers with sulfursticks in a glass bowl set right between their legs on the blankets. They watched as the papers curled up like a dying centipede. He was destroying every evidence of his failures, no matter how small. He wanted to be very sure no one could ever accuse him of getting anything wrong.
The woman rummaged and searched. “Why do you need this certain book?” the girl asked, kicking it as slowly as she
