“Perhaps not. You should ask Sousa. He might know.”
“He would have told me if they were dangerous.” Michael leaned his chair back, catching his bare feet on the other side of the table, and folded his thick arms behind his head. He was a strong man from riding and walking everywhere; Marvel had always thought him beautiful in a certain coarse, active way. The son of thirty generations of Astronauts. The king gazed at the ceiling, wistful. “I must say a part of me doesn’t want to know.”
“I’m sure Sousa wouldn’t be able to tell you anyway.”
The king ignored Marvel. “Right now I’m not sure if I should be afraid or joyful. What a strange feeling,” he chuckled again. He looked at the Hierophant, his face a disaster of hope. “What does your instinct tell you, Priest? Give me guidance.”
But Marvel had hardened, already. “I don’t know what they are,” he said. “I don’t think anyone does.”
CHAPTER 16
A HEADACHE
John awoke late in the morning to a vile throbbing in his temples.
Leaks of light poked from around the edges of his curtains and John scrunched down into his bed and groaned into his pillow, muffling the sound. His bed was splendidly comfortable, but all he could feel was a heavy pounding over his brows. The curtains were thick and blocked out most of the morning light, and the vast bed was overstuffed with feathers and covered in silken blankets. If Mizar heard him stirring, he would inevitably bustle inside, and then John would be duty-bound to rise. John rarely drank too much—there had been only one or two other times since he was a boy that he could recall such a revolting lapse in his judgment.
He was certain, when he awoke, that he felt a good deal worse than he had the previous day, and not just physically. But why? When they had succeeded in contacting something otherworldly? It was more than John had ever achieved on his own. He barely opened one eye, but still could see by the light seeping beneath the curtains that it was far later than he normally rose. Was there any point at all to waking up and taking yet another very dangerous carriage ride back to the palace compound?
Their meeting with Queen Alyson—he dreaded it even though he had news to report. Tygo and Alyson’s flirtation had angered him. He hated the ambiguity of emotion: this was why he had no friends, only servants. The idea of them thrilling one another with flutters of their eyelashes. As though he were a child who didn’t understand.
John Sousa was many things, and he did know himself to be perplexingly unattractive to most people even though he had been blessed with a strangely handsome face and an equally adequate body and even a position he’d won through merit and heredity. And yet he remained unliked. There had been occasions when he did have some girl or another sent to him for pleasure, although the entire business was a distraction in the most base sense. What did he care what some low-born courtesan thought of his naked member? And yet always they seemed to judge him, rightly or wrongly, and enough of them had passed through his bedchamber that he’d decided there was no pleasing any of them. He had stopped trying. Now, it was only when his own physical urges reached a distracting pitch that he even remembered he could call for one of these girls. And it was always a different one. Did they wish never to return or was there some rule about courtesans visiting the same man over and over? John had never thought to ask, though it might have been nice to see the same one more than once.
He had given up the idea of a wife some ten years ago; no, longer. He found the prospect of living with a woman odd—he had shared his life with Mizar and no one else for as long as he’d been a fully formed and thinking human, and he saw no reason to upset that order. His health was weak enough. He needed significant rest and time to think. Truly, the arrival of Tygo was enough of an upheaval to cause a surge in John’s chronic unease. So much that the previous evening, he’d drunk nearly three times the amount he had ever consumed in one sitting.
And now he was paying the price.
He turned over in his bed and finally pulled the cord on the curtain. In rushed cool gray light—odd to see clouds, he’d imagined it would be sunny. The air was a limpid glaze over his coverlet, his arms hairy pastel tubes atop the fabric. He could not get that word out of his mind. Tellochvovin. Falling death. Had he been more superstitious, he might’ve assumed out of hand that the word portended evil.
But John was not superstitious.
Chronically skeptical, perhaps. Demanding of proof, certainly.
Because of this quality of his character, he had begun to suspect that no shuttles were returning, ever, because none had ever existed. Or if they had existed, it was in such a way that man would never unlock their secrets to understand what they had meant to the ancients. They were as mysterious as the angel’s language, artifacts of a past so distant now that it might as well have been a fiction.
In the morning light, John couldn’t believe he’d swallowed Tygo’s little show. Now that he was sober he saw it plainly.
Yet still there remained a niggling germ of belief. In the darkest part of John’s heart, a hope. Tygo’s word, tellochvovin, had remained with him, freezing his heart with fear even now, when he was no longer under the sway of Tygo’s unseeing eyes. Even after his faculties had returned to normal.
What had happened in that room?
Suddenly, he felt sick. As soon as Mizar appeared with a bowl of steaming porridge, John threw himself across the room toward the washbasin but missed it
