She couldn’t reply. Terror twitched inside her and she was cold and hot again. Just do it.
“I’m Mr. Capulatio. You are?”
She shook her head.
“Name? Come on, you got a name. I won’t tell.”
She shook her head.
He took down the knife and slid his hand from her upper arm to her fingers, and clasped them. His skin was damp and callused. “Makes the heart glad to see a young girl. Makes me feel lucky.” He pointed across the field at the killing. “That’s my carnival. Better to be with me, don’t you think? With us? We got this whole circuit locked up and then some. And for a grander purpose. What’s your name?”
She felt tears and the powerful urge to tell him, but bit her lip until she tasted blood. He continued to smile. “That’s all right,” he said. He leaned toward her, blew sweet breath in her face. The air tasted like mint, like he’d been chewing herbs. She threw a desperate glance over her shoulder toward Argento, who was surely not watching, who was probably already dead, he was so stupid. Mr. Capulatio chuckled. “You look like a beginning, a sunrise. An aurora. A girl in white, on a battlefield? That’s hope for a new day, if ever I saw it. So that’s what I’ll call you.” Then he said frankly, “Nobody’s going to save you, Aurora. Nobody will even try. Not from me, not now. You know why?”
She kept quiet. He began ushering her across the field. In the air floated a silence, eerie and loud and filled with the erasure of life. Soon enough they were stepping over bodies, and her feet were covered in blood and worse. She kept catching her legs in her nightshirt. He marched her to a great tent festooned with banners and garlanded with Heads, some old and some fresh, still dripping, uncured, spinal bones spiking obscenely from their necks. In her ear, he whispered, “I am the future. The True King. You can call me King if you want. It’s what everybody is going to be calling me.”
* * *
Mr. Capulatio sent someone for her belongings, because she kept crying. She couldn’t stop, not once she understood what was happening. Her brother’s carnival was mostly dead—she’d stepped in their viscera at the edge of the field—and the captives would shortly become Heads, and though she didn’t care about that, she must’ve cared about something because she sobbed and sobbed in Mr. Capulatio’s huge tent while he watched her merrily, drinking and occasionally consulting a mysterious book. He took notes. This lasted hours, him watching her and smiling. She watched him back when she couldn’t cry any more: his eyes were mesmeric, suspended above the slashes of his cheekbones like leaping fish. He was some kind of king. People came to the tent and he told them what to do, many of them dressed in finer clothing than anyone in her brother’s carnival. They wore yellows and purples and blues deeper than the middle of the night. And other men came and went too, these just as ragged as Argento, but their eyes burned bright with what seemed like a mad love for him.
That night he didn’t touch her. She slept in a pile of blankets on the ground and he slept alone and once when he woke he yawned and said, “Aurora, you’re killing me, come here.” But she didn’t and he didn’t make her. He slept on his back all night and when dawn came, he bent down and kissed her eyelids.
That morning, the servant returned with her things. He brought the magic book and the black amber brooch and Cosmas’s Head and laid them before her like a meal. Then two men dragged Argento, twisting and spitting, into the tent and pushed him to the ground also. Her heart sank. They held him there with long knives, smashed his face into the dirty rug. He was so frightened he could not stop panting, and a bead of spit slid over his lip and hung like ice. O, why didn’t he have the sense to be dead? “That’s my brother,” she whispered. It was the first thing she’d said.
Mr. Capulatio, who was eating a shank of goat while sitting at an oversized desk, calmly gazed at her. She was still in her blankets, folded as small as she could get. “What a pretty voice,” he said. “Truly. I’m so overcome.” He sauntered across to Argento and turned him this way and that, inspecting him as though for parasites. He upturned Argento’s head with the very tip of his index finger and scrutinized his neck, then said, “This is your brother? Astonishing. They told me so but I simply couldn’t believe it.”
The servant nodded. “We found him at the girl’s tent.”
Mr. Capulatio’s face pulled into a smile, but not like his other smiles—it seemed mechanical, a curtain raised on an empty stage. He wheeled on his heels and knelt beside her. “Your brother, really? But you’re so young, a fetus. And that”—he flicked a hand at Argento—“is ugly. And you’re so darling.” He snapped his fingers. “You there, Her Brother. What’s her name?”
Argento always did the wrong thing—he was the kind of man who’d do anything, as long as it was wrong. If it was saner to die, he wouldn’t. Though it would’ve been kinder to leave her with his foreign wife and his foreign son, he’d taken her on the carnival circuit instead, and made her ride her own horse and carry her own gear, and if the circuit was too arduous or cold or dangerous and she died … well, at least he’d gotten what he wanted, which was to have his way in all things, even when his way made no sense. She hated him, hated him. But when he opened his mouth and moaned, she understood that her hate had not kept her
