“I had wanted it so I could record the names and numbers of the carnivals that have met here today on the plain. To support him. To crown him. To defend him. But now I want it to prove to him that he was in error to have brought you here.” She eyed her. “Grievous error.” When she was met with the girl’s uncomprehending grimace, she returned to the desk chair. She spun it around and threw her slender limbs over it, sitting like a man but much more beautifully. “I am his scribe.”
“Did you write the book?”
“Do you know the book I’m talking about?”
The girl shook her head.
“Let me tell you a story, since you are just a child.” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. The girl could feel herself beginning to hate this woman. “Only I trusted him in the beginning. Because I loved him. He was just an orphan once upon a time, with strange visions that would possess him body and soul. And I was a girl, not much older than yourself. We had made our covenant already, passionately and many times, upon the green grass, in the streams and brooks of the countryside. Yes, we were careless. In our desire to be alone together, we strayed from the saferoads. So you must understand that at first we worried his visions might be a raving illness. Maybe Bent Head, who knew? We were on the land so often, and who could account for his frightening premonitions without at least considering a medical causation? We came from a settlement where they still ate cows. A backward place. Not far from here. Even I wondered if he was sick—I admit my faith was tested then.”
“We ate cows in my settlement too,” the girl whispered. “At least the other people did. My mother said it was bad.”
“Florida, land of the cow-eaters. Only idiots and magicians are from Florida.” Orchid kicked her heels on the carpeted ground and rolled her eyes. “How he does love strange women.”
“I’m not strange.”
Orchid ignored her. “The point is I trusted his divine knowledge. He told me he wasn’t sick, and I believed him. Only me. Because I loved him. Do you know how he felt all those years? When it was only me who believed he was the True King?” She leaned back again, waving her hand. “Who are you, anyway, to comfort him? You’re a child, you have no thoughts of eternity.”
“I—”
She put her finger to her lips. “When he would go out with the carnivals preaching and cutting heads, before we ever had a carnival of our own, I would wait at the settlement, transforming his scribbles into legibility. His writing is unformed, it is…” She reached for the papers and shook one in the air to make her point. “I made sense of what he saw in the visions.” She paused thoughtfully, her hand lingering on the paper. “I’ve been with him through all that.”
The girl crossed her arms.
“Do you love him?” She came over to the cage again and picked up the orange-shaped lock and let it fall loudly against the bars, once, then twice. In her thin hand the gold lock bulged nearly obscenely and the girl tried to imagine this woman with a sword, hacking off heads before a windblown crowd, and found she could see it better than she would’ve liked. And then the girl felt a stirring in her chest that was difficult to bear: a renewed awareness of her captivity. The woman clanged the lock again and leaned her face in very close to the bars. “Love is impossible without history.”
That was the very moment when Mr. Capulatio himself strode back into the tent and beheld them at odds—the girl standing on her guard at the center of the cage, and the strange woman with the necklace rattling the lock. He did not meet the girl’s eyes or even look at her. He stared directly at Orchid, who sucked her cheeks in and pursed her lips. They formed a narrow “o.” “You’re here,” he said easily to her, after a long silence. “I was out looking for you.”
“I was looking for you. But instead I found this.” She fanned her hand at the cage but her face remained impassive.
“You won’t even come kiss me? It’s been a whole six months, Radiance. Come here.” He opened his arms. That day he had worn his most spectacular cape, which was the color of goldenrod on the outside and lined with midnight blue, to greet his constituents at the meeting. The girl had watched him pluck the cloak from a trunk, shake it out, and admire himself in the small mirror above his writing desk. He swept this cape behind his shoulders, smiling handsomely. Evidently his meeting had been a success.
Orchid was not smiling. “O, but you had many other touches I’m sure in the meantime.”
“That’s the first thing you say to me after six months?”
Orchid’s expression became a frown. “I shouldn’t be saying a single thing to you. I’ve spent this last half-year at my desk working on the revelations you left in such a half-formed glob, making sense of them and circulating them here, at the risk of my own life and certainly at the expense of my own happiness. I’ve spent this last half-year readying all this that you see around you, this entire gathering, your constituents from all the corners of the land and who have met here to defend your cause because they believe in you and love you, despite dangers and troubles and unknowns! And I come to your tent to find this? This child?”
“Yes.” He was nodding. “Another queen. Not any queen, but the queen. Of our revelation. My queen.”
“What?” The girl saw her fingers knotting and unknotting behind her back.
“The fulfillment of my prophecy. This girl is a solid piece of our destiny.”
“That is the stupidest thing
