CHAPTER 11
QUEEN ALYSON
John had met Queen Alyson many times, and yet each meeting renewed his terror of her, not because she was herself terrifying but because she burned with a need to understand—not him, no, and not his work, and nor did she seek a definite prophecy about the Return or the endless remedial horoscope calendars her husband Michael so loved. But there was something fixed and slow and deep about her that caused him to trip up his words, to poorly explain even the most explicable events, to stumble about her chamber like a hyperactive child, sweeping his arms along with the peaks and valleys of his lecture. He lectured her, he could not help it, and her appearance of boredom never failed to horrify him.
She mostly called upon him to explain practical things: why, for instance, were all the ladies of the palace bleeding at once?
Tygo waited in the hallway in the care of another lion-masked guard, who had yanked him hard by the arm to stop him from entering the queen’s grand chamber, as though Tygo posed some immediate threat, although it seemed plain to John that he did not. This evening, John faced Queen Alyson alone. She was gazing at him with her I-dare-you eyes, the way he assumed she must look at everyone, for what was he to her? A weak sneeze of a man. The king, although nearly middle-aged now, was broad and somewhat tall; Alyson was his second wife—the first queen, Rachel, had fallen from one of the palace minarets, or that’s what everyone said, and frankly John had not cared for her, either; she’d been inbred as a lapdog and ugly as well. Alyson seemed somewhat young, but John was not certain she was. She had the sort of face that could exist mostly untouched for several decades, with faint lines and freckles across the forehead exacerbated by smoking, which she did in excess and was doing at the moment, holding her slender moonstone pipe a foot and a half from her lips. Her hair was the darkest brown and straighter than a normal person’s hair—another artifact of inbreeding? He suspected. She was the daughter of Marvel Parsons but cared little for magic or ceremonies. She preferred to spend her time at golf.
“Your Beauteousness, forgive us. Your discomfort was not our intent.”
She watched him. “Okay.” Her pipe adularesced when she drew smoke through it, a throbbing opal, blue with gem-light. “I didn’t say it was.”
He squirmed. “O. Yes. Well…”
The queen waited. She had a girl’s manner of waiting for him to speak first, a paroxysm of disinterest upon her even when she herself had asked the question. He wondered how she thought of him, if she thought of him at all—her life was in every way a mystery to him. What did she do all day? The vast room she occupied in the southeast tower, Columbia, was the same room her predecessor had lived in, but Alyson had removed every trace of the other woman (pinks, whites, sparkles on everything) in favor of a terrific and startling blue, an azure paint accented by cobalt rock crystal. Around the room, clear indigo geodes spilled light, from clusters of beeswax candles situated behind them. And there were more candles, candles everywhere. There must have been a hundred around her sitting area alone. Whenever John stood in her chamber he smelled something impossible to describe but that nevertheless described perfectly her entire existence, her experience since birth, a scent wholly hers and one he had never smelt in another place: a detached butterfly wing? The paint on the eyelid of a statue? Something powdery, something mineral. Alyson’s life, her tenuous hold on the truth of the world, the terrible stinking gross world that John admittedly only glimpsed on his infrequent journeys to the palace compound, at times struck him as unbearably frivolous. And yet she did fascinate him. In the corner one of her small black dogs slept in an elevated bed shaped like a saucepan.
“Your Majesty, how shall I begin? We did not cause the bleeding.” His voice splattered into the space between them like vomit into a bowl. “It happened in spite of us. Believe me, I would’ve done anything I could to spare you and every lady of the court such extreme extra unpleasantness, had I known such a thing was happening.”
“‘Us’? ‘We’? Who is ‘we’?” Her face like a wide freckled ancient head. A feminine votive.
“My new … predictive assistant and myself. That’s the title I’ve given him for the moment. I’ve only lately acquired him.” He heaved his arm in front of himself in gesture of affirmation he recognized as overdrawn even as he performed it. Who was he in front of her, the palace fool? And still he could not stop grinning like a maniac. His dimples hurt. “This new assistant, he’s a damn sight more intuitive than I am, that’s for certain. You may not know, but I’m very, very poor at predictions myself. Or at least ones that aren’t strictly astrological—now certainly I could tell you if the day of your birth is auspicious, or I could tell you when it might be fortuitous to conceive a son—” Was he talking about her womb? Was he imagining her beneath the girthy heft of their blond king, a hairy-backed board of a man (John had read the king’s horoscopes to him in his bath many times), Alyson lying back under his spermy exuberance?
