But then the girl had seen her mother looking at her new husband, at his muscles like round machine parts under his skin and his smile like a fish hook, and then back to the girl, and the girl understood she was jealous. They began the long journey to find Argento’s carnival in the deathscapes. Argento, her oldest brother, was also the most foolish and had turned religious for reasons unknown to any of them. He’d left for the carnivals before the girl was even born. She didn’t remember him. Argento was his nom de guerre. She didn’t know his real name, hadn’t asked, didn’t care. Her mother said the name she’d given him at birth was wasted on a lunatic.
But they went to him because he would be the only one stupid enough to take her. Just a pair of arms. The girl also saw that Gimbal hated Argento, or maybe she hated all religious men, and she meant the girl as a punishment for Argento’s idiocy. The Astronauts, hexagrams, Heads as charms against the Disease—it was all nonsense; weakness and misplaced piety, her mother said. But he was her brother all the same, and if he wouldn’t protect her, no one would. That, her mother told her in a sharpened voice, was life, that was living, get used to it.
When they’d finally arrived in the carnival country, in its cosmic wideness across which the girl sometimes thought she could see the curve of the world, and when her mother rode away home on her white mule, when she vanished across the grasses, when Argento used a hot iron to sizzle that six-pointed star on her upper thigh, where he licked her, when her mother was gone and the girl had nothing and no one to believe in, she traced the star and wished, hoped, wondered. The pain of it all—Wonderblood—made the unreal real and so sometimes magic didn’t seem so much like a lie after all, and that confused her.
She glanced at her brother, now. He waited, his breath in her ear surprisingly soft, odorless. He reached past her and touched the book. She sighed.
“Come on. What’s the book about?”
The pages were damp-heavy, words spidering across them, glaring up at her, but she loved them anyway because she knew she’d read this book again and again in the coming months, until she knew every word in it—she would read sitting under trees, hunched against the continental winds, she’d read it by the ponds where they’d stop to wash out their bedrolls. She’d read it in the timber cabin when they finally reached Manitoba, where the cold would freeze the eggs in her womb (her brother said), where she’d fall asleep thinking of crabs on the summer beach. O, lucidity, leave me, leave me. She turned the pages, full of words she didn’t understand and names she had never heard: Huldah, Lee, and yes, Kansas Cow. “It’s about the True King, I think.” She paused. “It’s written by an Executioner.”
“The True King of what?”
“I don’t know. It just says the True King. And then there are a lot of names and places.” She flipped more pages over gingerly. “It doesn’t look that old. Maybe someone made it.”
Her brother made an expression, not a smile. “Someone makes everything. Read it to me. Why do you think I got it?”
She read to him, a long and incomprehensible genealogy, and he seemed satisfied but she knew he understood not a word of it, because she didn’t. He was acting because he didn’t want her to think he was stupid. Then he leaned back and said, “Do you think the True King is one of the Astronauts? That’s got to be what it means.”
She closed the book. A sadness had begun in her. She wanted to go outside the tent. She wanted to be away from him.
His face bent horribly and he hunched forward. “You do believe that they’re coming back, don’t you? The Astronauts. It’s heresy if you don’t believe that.”
She began to panic. “Yes?”
He snatched the book from her and threw it into the corner, onto a pile of rags, where it sank like a fishing weight. With his other hand he pulled the cord on the tent flap, closed out the night and the glisten of dew on grass.
“No,” she said, and braced her knee in front of her body. “Stop.”
His almond eyes like unpolished metal. “No. Look.” And he took a little box from his pocket. “This too. This is the best thing. Here.”
A white paper box. Inside, sawdust. In the sawdust, a pin, black glass, jet maybe, or obsidian, liquid shiny and faceted. A black so black it was silver. He snatched it from her and rubbed it on his shirt, blew away the last shavings of wood, then needled it to her nightshirt. “Pin’s loose. It’s old,” he frowned. “But I’ll fix it.”
“Where did you get this?”
“Ma. She gave it to me when she brung you here, told me to save it. Well. I saved it two years.”
“I—” She felt numb. He called their mother Ma. The girl had never called her that. She wondered who Argento’s father had been, how he had become this. Her hand on the heavy brooch, pulling the fabric of her nightshirt down toward her nipple. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Don’t do nothing with it for all I care. Anyhow some loony crone would kill you for it if you ever wore it for real.” He lowered his voice. “It’s nightrock. Black amber they call it. Fuck if I know how Ma got it, maybe she stole it off the dead. Or out of some sick bastard’s house.” He touched her cheek.
“What’s it for?”
He pinched her.
