He wondered what “they” she referred to and felt his blush ripen. “I—”
“Part of your job is to explain things to me when I wish them explained, right? But it’s like you’re speaking a different language. You do this thing where you start in the middle and then I’m lost.”
“Your Majesty…”
“You’re paying for these sheets. It’s coming from your salary.”
“I insist!”
“You were saying something about an assistant?
He was dazed. The handmaid still fussed with the sheets, using first her left foot and then her right to swab them into some unintelligible order. The heft and locomotion of them across the floor, all the blood—O! Might the women have died? Had Tygo magicked them after all? His mouth moved. “My assistant?”
She huffed. “This is what I mean! You were just saying!”
“Yes, my Lady Queen, of course. May I bring him in? I am sorry to say that only he can aptly explain it to you. Forgive me for everything. I’ll pay, a hundred times over, I’ll pay for all this.”
“Yes, okay,” she sighed, glancing at the door.
John called for the guard to produce Tygo, handcuffed again, but this time with his feet unbound. He came right into the room as though he had been waiting for just this chance to explain everything. His too-large pants gapped at the waist and dragged slightly on the floor. John noticed again then how uncommonly short Tygo was, and yet he did not seem short. Nor did he appear to have any misgivings about this or any situation John had yet observed him in. Tygo smiled at the queen, a quick and dazzling smile, and John could not understand the look that momentarily crossed her face: amusement?
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, still smiling.
She waited for Tygo to speak. But he said nothing. John wished he were standing closer so he could nudge him—didn’t he sense that Alyson did not like speaking first? But Tygo waited and waited. His smile slowly slid down his chin and left his body altogether. Alyson narrowed her eyes at him palely. John had often noticed she looked nothing like her rumpled, stocky father Marvel. He saw no hint of her father in her, except … except in her eyes, so very pale green, like diluted sulfurous nuggets, chalky and impermeable. They remained on her earless guest like veils, opaque partitions separating her soul from her face. Alyson gazed without blinking at Tygo, and at last, with no hint of retreat in her voice, she asked, “You are…?”
“Tygo Brachio. Or people have called me the Peacock, or William Tygo, or one of a hundred other names. Didn’t the Lord Astronomer tell you? I’m his new assistant.”
She laughed. Laughed? Her cheeks crowded upward and forced her eyes into small crescents. Now it was she who blushed as her laughter left off, and still she looked at Tygo most intently, unconcerned, it seemed, with the livid pulsation in her face. “You’re both dressed terribly,” she said. “Didn’t you have anything nicer to wear to visit the queen?”
Tygo pulled a handful of dull fabric free from his chest and let it fall back again. “Servant’s clothes was all they gave me, I don’t know his excuse. Also I didn’t expect the queen to be a smoker. You must smoke all the time. It smells like it.”
She ducked her head indignantly and waved her blue pipe with her other hand, dispersing the haze around her. “I can do what I want. I’m the queen.”
“I’m only saying it’s bad for you.” He smiled again.
John’s stomach dropped. “Your Beauteousness, I apologize again—”
Alyson ignored John and leaned forward. “You don’t know that.”
Tygo shrugged. “No, I do. I also knew you would all be bleeding, and here we are. You want to know why you’re all bleeding. Right?”
“Do you know?”
“The question you’re asking is really ‘did I do it?’ Am I right in assuming that? And the short answer is no, of course not, it’s not possible for me or any other person, ‘magician’ or otherwise, to fix it so you and all your ladies…” He looked pointedly at John then, but John would not meet his eyes. Tygo straightened and enunciated, “… Are bleeding at once. That’s the medical term. The discharge of blood from your bodies is not caused by magic. That’s not my opinion, it’s a simple truth. Now, I don’t want to have a discussion about politics, so we should agree to disagree here. But let me promise you, Queen Alyson, I don’t do ‘magic.’ The Astronomer and I have covered this at length.”
“Well, did he do it?” she said, with a cursory nod in John’s direction.
“From my admittedly short experience with him, I’ll say that he doesn’t do ‘magic’ either. He spends most of his time with his instruments—”
“His what?”
“Telescopes. Astrolabes. Charts,” Tygo replied, with a wink at the queen, so quick John could hardly believe he saw it. “Math.”
She smirked. “John Sousa, in my mind, is always doing spells or stabbing birds through the throat or something like that to make his predictions. But you’re saying he doesn’t?”
It was as though the little hideous man had put John over a burner, and steam rose up through the top of his head. “I perform calculations based on numbers our forefathers collected many years ago,” he said through a tight mouth. “I would have been delighted to show you. I could easily make up a simple series of predictions while you look on—”
“O god. No.” She was laughing again now. “No, please, it’s okay.” John’s face went slack. Tygo smiled openly, and greater still was the joy in his eyes, precise dark pools with a black sheen, water at the bottom of a well.
Alyson said, “At least Michael makes it sound interesting when he talks about it. Which is all the time, god.” She waved
