The messenger informed the room that Queen Alyson was very keen to hear the reason for their bleeding. Incredibly, Sousa turned to Marvel, as if for guidance. Tygo appeared to have sprouted a glitter of wetness in his eyes.
“What are you waiting for?” Marvel growled. “My daughter has summoned you.”
“I’m hardly ready to see the queen. My clothes—And I must take Tygo back to Urania so we can begin work. The Return—”
“You are an idiotic man, Sousa. If you’ve gotten what you wanted and yet still refuse to take it, I have absolutely no sympathy for you.” He stood and smoothed his cassock down over his legs. “Leave me.” They did not move. At last he stormed to the door, beckoning Juniper to follow him. “Tygo, you will answer to me after this interview. Mark that. My man will come for you. I will hear your story. I should have heard it in the jail when I first had the chance.” He slammed the door.
Should have, indeed. Marvel Whiteside Parsons decided in that moment that he hated John Sousa. He hated Michael. All of them. He wanted only to be a good man. To pray in peace at the center of the universe. He wanted to be away from them all, but through some confluence of duty and curiosity and filial love, he had not brought himself to leave.
When he reached the bottom of the tower and burst onto the world again, it was nearly dark. The sky above was the color of a rotten lime, striated with thin wintry clouds, and there was the comet, the stella nova, Sousa had called it.
Juniper looked up too, his face unreadable. “Do you think it could be the shuttles?” he asked. “That’s what folk are saying. Even the outlaws.”
“How do you know what the outlaws are saying?”
“I heard some other guards say that. I don’t know if it’s true.”
Marvel did not reply. For the briefest moment, he entertained the thought that the incredible light was a harbinger of deepest darkness, a comet, a last burn of radiance before a final calamity befell the earth and humankind. It must happen sometime, perhaps now. The thought was black and he liked its blackness, reveled in it for a few precious moments before he shook it off.
“Take Tygo to the Pardoness whenever Sousa is finished. Send me a message when you are there with him, and I’ll come.”
Juniper nodded. Marvel went to find Michael. The king would hear what Marvel wanted him to hear before he heard anything from anyone else.
CHAPTER 10
THE CARNIVAL
Upon the advent of darkness, the landscape of the camp was studded with bright diadems, each lonesome fire leaping up and up into the gathering dusk, inviting booth dwellers to gather around them, murmuring and warming themselves as they waited for the ceremony. The girl stared out on them from the warmth of their tent, which was set higher than the others because Mr. Capulatio would be the king. She listened to crones behind her fixing dandelion tea and then sipping it ponderously. Their slurping gave her comfort as she contemplated just how many people were spread out before her in this dimly lit carnival of carnivals. Waiting for her to become queen. She felt the weight of her iridescent black wedding dress, which flowed down her legs and pooled about her feet on the beautiful carpets covering the ground. She had never dreamt of anything so luxurious in her life.
She had never known things like this fabric could exist. All she’d owned herself had come first from her mother (and that was little enough), then from Argento, who never gave her anything of value except Cosmas the Head, whose forehead was now embroidered with the unicursal hexagram and the Third Eye spell, so she couldn’t even trust him not to tell her secrets. But Mr. Capulatio had given her so many things already: this dress, and jewels, and hats with feathers and even a pair of azure gloves he said were four hundred years old. Do you know how old that is, can you imagine that? he’d asked. And she had answered no, she could not imagine. He told her they were made from a kind of plastic fabric so delicate that she must never wear the gloves or even touch them, for fear they might flake away to nothing. He’d shown them to her one night while the carnival was still on the road; he opened a glass box inlaid with smooth bright blue rocks and displayed the gloves to her with great care. They lay upon a soft pillow. He lifted them ever so gently up, and turned them over and over in his hands, before finally placing them in a different box, this time the one where he kept her other belongings: the black amber brooch, the Head of Cosmas. He locked it and put it high on a shelf where she couldn’t reach it. He said she would wear the gloves only one time, when they ascended into the heavens, so it wouldn’t matter then if they disintegrated because they would disintegrate anyway because of the shining force of the light and beauty that would envelope them and raise them up. The girl thought the words insane, but beautiful when he spoke them.
She stood at the tent flap now, running her fingers over the watery texture of her dress almost obsessively as she gazed out at the land. Orchid had been forced by the crones to finish her preparations in her own tent, and had not taken the hardbound book because it did not belong to her. The girl felt the strange book at her back now, nearly pulsing with importance. She had been enjoying it, all the fantastical stories she had never heard before. But then she’d discovered it had
