He nodded. “Yes. You are. And this girl is my gemrock, my possession of highest worth. We are all the things we are. I am the king. She is the living sigil who ushers in our success, who appears at the perfect time, and whose appearance heralded the Return. Glorify.” He spoke coldly.
Orchid turned to the sky with restless anguish. “There are two, now?”
“Yes,” he said, going nearer to her. He pointed at the second star. “Yes. It appeared late in the afternoon. It’s faint, but it will get brighter. You must know I consult minds other than yours. These wise minds tell me another and another and another rocket will come, until they are all here. Watch. Look.” He held his hand before her eyes, extending each finger rigidly in sequence. “Five, all together.”
“But—” she began.
“You are a translator,” he said. “A scribe. Before your accident, when your visions were accurate, you’d earned your place with me. I trusted you, when we used to look at auguries of the future to discover how I died. If I would die. Do you remember? This girl is no visionary. I’ve asked her to predict my death many times. She makes up answers. They are wrong, only fantasies, but they charm me. She’s charming. But you, wife, what do you do for me now? Find fault with what we’ve written? Tell me that I am not the best person to interpret my own visions? You hear how stupid you sound, don’t you?” His eyes, flickering in the green torch, were blank. “We will perform the Star Sapphire ritual with Aurora, just as I’ve planned. First thing tomorrow. You will attend. Happily.”
“No,” Orchid clenched her jaw. “Never.”
“Put down your dress. You are indecent.”
Though they spoke almost inaudibly, the girl wondered if anyone on the shore could hear their argument. Orchid’s hand hadn’t moved, her fist a tight rose against her thigh, with fabric bulging from the crevasses between her fingers. The girl noticed with alarm that hand was creeping slowly toward the grip of the knife. Orchid’s voice was throttled with jealousy. “David! My love. Say she is your wife if you have to, but say we will sacrifice her to the Great Work. Let me sacrifice her. I know what to do. I always know what to do!”
In Orchid’s eyes an inchoate rage began to boil, and the girl sensed she would strike out with the knife at any moment. The girl began to creep toward the side of the barge. She would jump into the black water if Orchid reached for the blade. Mr. Capulatio, an executioner after all, must have felt the swelling tension, or else he knew his wife’s nature well enough to predict what she would do.
In a single moment that passed almost too quickly to see, Mr. Capulatio darted at Orchid and pulled the knife straight out of her boot. He sliced her skin in the process. She howled a high and vivid scream but still managed to lunge after the knife with her fingertips. It slipped past. Mr. Capulatio had already swung it behind her, and in the same motion he grabbed her by the hair and turned her almost entirely around, until she was bent backward over his knee, where he held her, where at any moment he could break her back or slit her throat or stab her in the heart. Then, slowly, he pulled her long pale hair off of the hair-form and around his arm, and she was staring up at him with wide hate-filled eyes.
The three of them on the raft were at once alone in a world of their own making, roiling and rolling together like bubbles in a fountain. Mr. Capulatio raised the knife to Orchid’s neck. The girl watched, her breath trapped. Orchid closed her eyes. A look of hunger on her face. And strange courage.
Hovering motionless on the edge of the raft, the girl became aware of a new emotion roaring in her heart like a beast: she wanted to protect her husband. She thought of him that way now. Her body tensed like a single muscle. Orchid’s eyes remained closed in anticipation.
But when the blow came it was not to her neck, but to her hair. Mr. Capulatio sliced her hair off in four sawing thrusts, tossed it by handfuls over the side of barge. He was smiling now, a genuine smile, his head-cutting smile. But he was angry, too, she could see it. He pushed Orchid upright, steadied her, and then threw her knife into the sea as well with an angry grunt. It disappeared beneath the inky water.
“How is that for a sacrifice?” His voice frightened the girl.
A smear of blood stained the lower half of Orchid’s dress. Her hair now floated in a jagged cloud about her ears, released of its former weight. Calm closed in on them like a cotton veil; some spell he had done in the cutting must have momentarily subdued her—the girl wondered, was it really magic?
“That knife was from the launchsites,” Orchid whispered. “Where will I get another one?” It sounded as if she were trying to make a joke. Because of course she cared nothing for the knife, nothing for anything else she’d lost except her power.
Mr. Capulatio pulled the girl back into the center of the raft and wrapped his arms around her, tucking her in close. He laughed angrily. “O, but you won’t need a knife in the cages, woman. Which is where you’re going right after this.”
She
