“They have their eye on it.” She said slowly, knitting her brows. “We’ve had uprisings before, like during the Unrest. They never get inside the walls.” Then she shrugged. “Nothing comes of it in the end.”
“This may be different. Maybe they’ve come because they know it’s the Return. Who knows? Maybe they’ve come because they want to be here when it happens,” Tygo said.
She bent forward excitedly. “What do you think will happen?”
Tygo took his place by John—he was clearly closing the interview. An acrimonious bile rose in John’s throat. Tygo had caught the queen’s eye and now was looking somewhat impertinently at her, in way that John distrusted, leaning in to meet her with barely restrained interest. Her own eyes seemed to search every corner of Tygo’s face, looking across the slope of his nose and up to those idiotic star tattoos, clustered like freckles on the left cheekbone. “Do we have your permission to keep at our magic?” Tygo asked. “Our work is important, John’s right.”
Her lips, full and small as two buttons, turned downward as she nodded. She said, “You know those tattoos look stupid on you. I just noticed you have no ears.”
He bowed a little and swung his arms as if to stretch them above his head, if they had been unchained. “Youth!” he laughed. “I had a good time. And then a very bad time. It’s a common tale.”
“You’ll come back in one day to tell me everything you’ve discovered?” Was she asking him? Her lips parted, resolved themselves again into a perfect bud.
“I’d tell you anything, my Queen.” He smirked delicately. Tygo took John’s sleeve and turned him physically toward the door. As they exited the chamber, they heard her giggling with her handmaiden, and then the dog was placed on the floor and they heard its jubilant scrabbling as it raced after them, but before it reached their heels the heavy white door slammed shut, and at John’s side Tygo had also begun laughing. “I think she liked me, eh?” he demanded. “What a gorgeous creature she is. I can’t stand it.”
John glowered.
Then they were walking alone past one of the immense windows at the top of the tower, and John stopped in a stupor, squinting. Wait, it was there. Just there, in the gleaming dark. A second arc, faint to be sure, but soaring high in the sky not more than a few degrees from the first light. And beneath them, a growing mass of people had convened an outlaw carnival—for what? What reason could there be besides the obvious?
There came over him the undeniable impression that all reason was leaking from the world, that he was a faucet, that through his miscalculations all things would slowly but surely upend themselves. What could these lights be, if not the shuttles? It seemed fitting that after decades of failure, John, who had his whole life long desired truth and order, should now be reliant upon a con-man who may well have real visions. Why shouldn’t the truth, when it finally came to John Sousa, be revealed by a liar?
CHAPTER 12
THE WEDDING
The way to the shoreline had been lit for them by a legion of the faithful. People lined the rocky path in a winding route that seemed meant to prolong their march to the sea. The surrounding crowd was innumerable in the half-light, face after face turned to the girl in a euphoria of shared belief: here a set of eyes that cried, there a pair of hands reaching to touch Mr. Capulatio or his betrothed. And somehow, she found she was on the cusp of sharing their hope. Excitement welled up inside her as she completed the final steps of the processional and arrived at the first dune, hand in hand with Mr. Capulatio. The ocean now was very loud, breaking only a hundred yards in front of them. They mounted a weatherworn set of steps that crossed the dunes and fell down again onto the soft pale beach. When their feet touched the sand, Mr. Capulatio whispered in her ear, “We’ve made it.” And she didn’t know if he meant to the sea or something else.
At the base of the steps, they removed their shoes. Piked Heads loomed all around, grinning deaths lit up by torches thrust in the sand between them, one after the other, all the way down to the foam of the ocean. The girl counted thirty, forty Heads at least, all lined up opposing one another to form a kind of aisle, and wafting around them a tangle of streamers in the colors of his carnival, purple, red, orange. Beyond this, the people were all waiting in the darkness, all watching her.
She was trembling—with excitement, confusion. Damp in her armpits. They were going to walk down the center of the aisle. That was how weddings went. Mr. Capulatio took her face in his hands while they still waited. Shadows, colored like the inside of an eyelid, bounced across the sand at her feet. Suddenly the crowd seemed quieter. There was whispering, the breathy sound of a wind instrument from someplace close by, and the murmur of the ocean. It was only then she fully realized she was back. He had taken her home, just as he said he would. He had kept his word—he had taken her to the sea. It lay black and silver in front of them like a wavering net. “Are you all right, Queenie?” he asked her softly.
How could she answer? Her mouth yielded up some formation of the word “yes,” and then he had his arms all around her in a happy daze. They swung together like dancers. As he spun her, she looked at everything. The beach beyond the throng of people was dark,
