He took her by the shoulders. “You are. Very.”
“Then you should ask me what I want.”
“All right. What do you want?”
“I want to know what everything means.”
He scowled. “How should I know?”
“Because you’re the king.”
“If I knew what everything meant, I wouldn’t be in this drafty tent getting ready to cut a brand off a little girl, would I?” he snapped.
“What’s the Great Work? Orchid told me about it. What is the Star Sapphire ritual?” She kept her eyes on one of the hanging mobiles of glass and chalk he’d hung from the eaves of his wagon. It did not turn; there was no wind inside the tent.
Mr. Capulatio lost his frown. “A good question. You’re bright! So bright, a sigil of knowledge. I’m still so happy I took you away from that idiot carnival full of raving idiots. Did you know I grew up in a place like that? A carnival just like your brother’s, with those backwards convoluted rites that went on for two weeks straight. And all of it was just sex magic, you know that? And it was lurid, it was repugnant. I left, that’s all you need to know. When I was fifteen. I came to the Prophetess Lois and I met Orchid. And that is a story for another time.”
“I wish you would tell me now.”
“The Great Work is the work we’ve done since Lois became the Prophetess. To reform the texts, the cosmology, everything. I’ve spent my life at this work. Lois designed the Star Sapphire ritual. She was my spiritual mother, the first one who divined that I was the True King. It’s a ceremony of power, where a woman may become one with Heaven. And only by performing this rite will you be truly fit to be the queen of Cape Canaveral.”
“What do I have to do?”
“The Prophetess passed from this earth eleven years ago. She named me as her successor over her own natural-born son. She was an aged woman of seventy-nine when she died. She took me in when no one would—I was raised by degenerates in circumstances not unlike your own. But,” he said. “The ritual is beautiful. Violently beautiful. Her ritual. She gave it to us because she knew I was the True King.” His eyes were far away; the clear brown of that first inch of seawater. “You know, I didn’t want to be the king at first.” Then he shrugged. “We all must make sacrifices.”
He moved toward her with the knife, and his voice was sad. “Queenie. Give me your leg. I must do it.” He paused. “You know I don’t want to.”
She cried, “I can do it myself!” Her head now felt strangely hot and cold, a flush of fear rising through up the web of her veins and pulsing into her cheeks. A thought intruded: this is the world. This is the world. She took his wrist in her own hand with such strength it surprised even her.
“I will burn it off. It was burned on, we’ll burn it off.”
Mr. Capulatio eyed her intently. “Burn it? I suppose we could burn it. Blood is better, though. It is only by our collective blood-rinse that the world will renew itself. That is Wonderblood. You know it well.”
But possessed by an inner vision, as if by dictating the terms of her pain she could control it, the girl recalled when her brother Argento had burnt the hexagram onto her thigh. How on her first day in his camp she was weeping angrily at Gimbal, her mother, heaving tears of pure, polished anger. Even after walking with her mother so many weeks overland through the wildness of the country, the rolling world a joyful sensual experience despite every ancient calamity that had befallen it, and even though her mother cursed it and called it contagious—even after anticipating her abandonment for the entirety of the journey, the girl had still failed to comprehend the scale of the betrayal. Only when she at last sat alone with her brother in his tent did she understand how alone she really was. Argento towered over her, this man she did not remember.
Her anguish had been enough to drown out even the sizzling of the hot iron on skin.
“But it’s the Return,” she said. “The shuttles are back. The Eon of Pain is over. I thought there should be no more blood spilled if the shuttles are back.”
He set down the knife, wiped his hand on the ends of his shirt. “It could be. I hadn’t thought of that.” And he looked at her with new respect. “You are a thinker. I’ll have to check the texts. But you may be right.”
In the end they agreed to the burning—the brand would be obscured by a hot welt that would over time become a pulpy scar that would over time become a skin-colored raisin. A blemish, a nothing. By then, she felt unafraid. She felt full of magic.
When he cut off her wedding dress and she held the heated iron—this iron was her husband’s own sigil, a rocketship, the brand that marked the bodies of his horses and goats, that was carved into the wagons and painted on all his canvas tents—he looked at her so lovingly, her pale naked body that was still not quite a woman’s body. When she held the iron above her skin for a long moment, he was quick to show her a place on his body she had not seen before. On the back of his left thigh, under a whorl of dark hair, he bore the same mark. When she did it, she imagined Cosmas the Uncrusher, with his diamond-studded face, her protector. She imagined he was undoing her
