“We never talk about you,” she said, turning to her little black dog and scrunching her brow absently. She took a puff of her pipe. “Michael has his obsessions.” A shrug. The dog caught her gaze and wagged hopefully, stepping out of its round bed. John’s hands seemed unable to sweat properly. They felt numb to him, weirdly flaccid. The dog crossed the room diagonally from the back, and when it reached Alyson’s couch in the center she kicked it playfully away, and when it would not retreat she waved at one of her servingwomen to hold it. “Michael talks about a lot of things. I just tell him to shut up.” She turned her head back to John. “I asked him about this bleeding, though, and he said I should ask you. So. Lord Astronomer. What can you tell me?” She held up her own hand and studied each knuckle carefully. “Wait, did you just say you have an assistant now? Is that what you were talking about?”
When John had been a boy, he’d spent many an hour in what could only be called hypnotic fascination, the study of tiny things: a garden lizard fear-frozen on a coral statue, a swatch of fabric on his trouserleg, an engraved medallion his mother often wore—which became his after her death. Objects obvious and present to a boy, woefully un-present to him as a grown man. He’d never concerned himself with time until it had already passed. When he was young, he’d nabbed that medallion from his mother for a few hours, studied the slender figures depicted upon it: two women seated on a chaise longue, a guinea hen, emblem of the family Sousa, scratching at the ground before them. John had dismissed easily the most obvious questions a child might ask about the scene—who the women were didn’t interest him, but how they got onto the medallion did, what person or tool had machined them there so smoothly, and then there was the matter of the age of the metal. He’d sent his boy’s fingers around and around it. So even and smooth it was. As though the medallion itself might answer him. The skill necessary to make such an object had astonished him, even then. John the adult was no different, only now he spent his time studying invisible magics. But had he not once studied his own knuckles as Alyson was just now doing, the marvelous utility of each bone-nub straining against the skin, and each mole, and each sparse shaft of hair? He stared at her.
She waited patiently, content, it seemed, to contemplate her hand and then him, watching him teeter from side to side, having got lost inside himself on his way to an answer. Her nails were painted, each one a different color, short and practical. At last she snapped her fingers to catch his attention.
John panicked. “Ah … yes, my assistant. He is … an unorthodox choice, I confess, and he has spent some time in prison. This prison in fact, only recently. Terribly recently. But I have cause to believe that his predictive abilities are remarkable. You see, it was Tygo who advised that I inquire about your … bleeding.” The word was difficult for him to say. “I asked him to perform a feat of prediction as a test. His, ah, employment, shall we say, was contingent on the fulfillment of his prediction. And before you ask, let me inform you that I have not, as of yet, proven that Tygo did not do some magic of his own to cause his prediction to become true, but as we speak I’m working on it. I am as certain as I can be that Tygo is honest. Would you like to meet him?”
“What?” she asked. Still she looked at her nails.
“Would you like to meet Tygo? He’s outside. Shackled, of course. Technically—you must be aware—he’s still a prisoner. I ask permission from you to take him before the Pardoness. A royal pardon would unburden me greatly and legitimize our work.” And keep the Hierophant away from him, he did not say. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat, felt a rip in the lining of the left one. He knew he would forget to ask Mizar to mend it until he lost something precious through the hole.
Alyson put her hands to her temples. “You’re so hard to follow. Are you telling me the man who caused the bleeding is here now, outside my chamber?”
“Not caused,” John piped. “Predicted.”
“Whatever. Yes, bring him in right now, I want to see him.” She held up a hand. “Wait.” She spoke to her handmaid. “Get the sheets.”
The handmaid returned, her arms piled high with white sheets stained with russet blobs; John stared, uncomprehending. The young woman cast the sheets onto the tiled floor, spreading them out with a toe so they were all more or less visible, hills and valleys in a circle around her own rose-colored dress. There were at least seven or eight sheets, each ruined by brown-red smears. John knew Alyson, always inexpressive, was watching him. As he realized what the stains were, a blush mounted his face.
“This is gross,” she said finally. “Just gross. You know it is.” The handmaid had at last spread out each sheet and John could see the extent of the havoc: could normal women bleed so much and yet be unharmed? Alyson said, “They can be washed but the laundress says they’ll never get completely white. I know I won’t want to sleep on these, and Michael won’t want to sleep or do anything on these, and other than the handmaids and servants I don’t know a single girl who won’t need new bedclothes, and who’s paying for that? Are you? And”—she pulled on one of the two straight curtains of her hair, which divided and fell onto each shoulder—“as a side note, Lord Astronomer, when you’re talking I immediately start
