“Ah.” Marvel felt the ends of his mouth tug upward into a smirk.
“You’re used to getting your way. I do empathize. But you will be disappointed here.” She raised an eyebrow. “Shall we come to the point of your visit? Discovery and I are accustomed to spending our afternoons in relaxation and care of ourselves. Mornings are our work time, and this morning is quickly running out. In my older age, I am also somewhat protective of my health. Come to your meaning, please.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Sitting in an overheated cloud of smoke is good for your health?”
“Come to your business.”
Marvel tried to make out her body beneath the piles of shimmering fabric. He could see nothing beyond her emaciated arms, wrapped like tentpoles in carrying-bags. The Pardoness took a swallow of a dark liquid beside her bed, and placed the glass back on the table with a trembling hand, as though lifting it had been all she could manage. As he looked more closely at the protrusion of sweaty cheekbones beneath her large, dark eyes, it dawned on him that she might be starving to death, although he well knew from the account books the amount of food sent up to her chamber each week. Her fingernails were painted red. She might have been sixty. But she might have been forty, and just ill. He saw no malformations to speak of. There was something wrong, though, just out of sight—he could sense it, and was unsettled. She reminded him of an infant chick that could not quite hatch. That would shortly dry out in its enervated egg and die.
He took a breath. “I am here to ask your pardon. Your highest pardon. I ask you to forgive my future actions.”
“What are they?”
“They will most likely be awful.”
“I cannot forgive what hasn’t happened yet.”
“You must.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have to do anything.”
He sighed. “They will be treasonous. The highest treason. I plan to disappear, to leave King Michael’s service. Can you forgive me now?” He had not meant to reveal it, he was appalled that he had. But saying it relieved him. Beside him, Juniper tried hard not to react, though Marvel could feel the ripple of surprise pass through him. So Juniper had not known—at least, he hadn’t known Marvel was planning to leave.
What had he come for, then?
Marvel stared at the Pardoness and she looked back without pity. “After you have committed these actions, come tell me again, and I will or will not forgive you. I believe now we are finished.” Her eyes strayed to the door.
He shook his head. He had marched up this tower without a thought. That was his way when he decided on something. He wanted—needed—to leave the Cape. He would return to the darkness of Kansas with a clear conscience, and there he was certain he would find the Mystagogue alive. And he would kill him.
He wanted forgiveness for murder.
He had always been a zealous man, in whatever he did, even to the point of martyrdom; he needed to be sure he had the heavens’ favor. The Pardoness was held by every denomination still extant, every carnival on the land, and every sect that worshipped the shuttles, to be an infallible oracle of forgiveness. She was the only connection anyone on earth had to the heavens.
“Have you seen the light in the sky?” Marvel asked. The room had no windows.
“I have not. But I have been told of it by my dear Discovery.”
He wondered if they were lovers.
“What do you think it is?”
“It could be many things.”
He sighed again. “When I was a boy, living far away, I had a vision. Maybe not unlike the visions you have as an oracle.”
“Forgiveness requires no fortune-telling.”
“Well.” He grew restless. “I had a vision. Just one. I saw that the True King, the king who will sit on the throne when the shuttles return, the king whose ascendance would create the conditions for their return, if you will, would appear here. The Cape. So I did what I had to do to come here.”
“We all have megalomaniacal fantasies. It’s quite normal.” The Pardoness lifted her chin so her eyes were even more deeply in shadow, and she tilted her face toward Juniper, who went reddish with embarrassment. “Less normal to act on them, but you seem to have fared well.”
Marvel narrowed his eyes and began to dig at his thumb again. It was a habit that undercut his authority, and yet he had never been able to break it for more than a few months at a time.
“I killed a man so I could come here all those years ago. As you may know, I began my service here at the Cape as a lowly priest and rose on my own talents to the position I hold now.”
“Impressive.”
“You don’t seem impressed.” He cringed inside at his own petulance.
She laughed. “Not terribly. I’m sorry. Many men in many guises have lived this story, and none are more special than you. Or less special.” She gestured to her handmaid, Discovery. “When you hear as many tales as we do, they begin to seem similar. Which is for the best. We must cultivate perfect indifference in order to forgive wholly.”
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?” That smoke she inhaled constantly—surely that affected her judgment. “My vision of the True King reigning at the Cape was so strong that I killed a man. A very, very important man. I was young then—just a boy. And I put poison in his cup and he drank it, and he convulsed and he died, right before my eyes, and all I could think was, ‘I am free now!’ I felt no sorrow. No pain. I left that very evening and crossed the deathscapes to this selfsame palace compound, set myself up as a young apprentice priest, and I rose to power. The acme of power.” He spat his words out like food that repulsed him.
“Ah,”
