“But who sent you?” Marvel asked.
Tygo blinked. “You’ve known since you first saw me.”
Marvel sighed.
Juniper was looking at the balcony door. The Pardoness sighed too.
“Well, who sent you?” Marvel asked Juniper.
He shrugged. “The Mystagogue. I came to make sure Tygo didn’t get put in jail. Which he did. But I don’t know why the Mystagogue sent me. That’s the honest truth.” He frowned at Marvel. “There had been rumors about you, that you were alive here. But the Mystagogue didn’t believe them.”
“Rumors,” Marvel muttered. He felt a stinging, a sensation confusing and inexorable. The Pardoness smiled at all of them. Her golden robe shimmered. She settled herself back in her bed, as if to indicate the meeting had ended. Drained of all his energy, Marvel stabbed his fingernail into his callus again. “They call the Mystagogue’s tower in Kansas the Watchtower of the Universe. But maybe you see farther even than that, Pardoness.” He bowed.
She shrugged. “I see what you show me.”
Tygo came toward the Pardoness again, passing Marvel without a glance. He took her hand, which was as skeletal as a bird picked clean on a doorstep. Her expression was one Marvel could only guess at—the look was the kind one could see once and never forget, though in the past he’d often considered such sentiments to be maudlin. Within that exchange was contained the arc of lifetimes: love, hope, disappointment, acceptance. The Pardoness had looked at him with that expression moments before, and he had known the experience would never leave him. Now she looked at Tygo the same way, and Marvel understood forgiveness existed beyond a person’s capacity to accept it.
Tygo stared into her eyes. “The word from the angels, tellochvovin,” he said. “Maybe they meant it for you.”
She smiled again. She was gazing now at the balcony door.
“What a strange turn of fortune, to learn this word. You are all marvelous indeed.”
CHAPTER 21
THE PARDON
Mr. Capulatio blew back through the curtains in late afternoon, a murky look on his face. His hat was gone. His hair was undone, sad-looking. Blood on his forearms. She had been trying to sleep, but none had come for her. The crones had taken Orchid away. The girl could not decide if she wished the other woman would die of her injuries.
“Don’t stare at me like that!” he barked. “It’s a nice early winter day, let’s be happy!”
But he did not look happy.
She wanted to go closer to him but found she couldn’t budge from where she sat on the bed, among his blankets and furs.
“You should be in your cage,” he growled. “Where it’s safe.”
She said nothing.
“We’ll have our day, today. We are going to the palace to talk to the fools in charge. They have agreed to see us. It is truly hopeless for them to resist. And they won’t. Not after the magic I’m doing.” He began to take off his clothes, stripping out of his still-wet shirt and dark red pants. He stood naked, his member slightly swollen despite the chill in the air, and she couldn’t keep from looking. It was not as large as Argento’s, but more nicely formed. It bobbed when he walked. “There isn’t much time now,” he was saying. He began rummaging in one of his boxes. The shadows formed by the indented sides of his buttocks as dark as eyes.
His mobiles of sacred glass tinkled as he knocked against them while he gathered more things. She found him beautiful. When had it changed that she couldn’t stop looking at him? She wanted desperately for him to come over to her. For him to wrap his arms around her. He had a way of kissing her that drove a burning spike into her heart. But he wouldn’t look at her. “You have humiliated me. And maimed my wife,” he said after a long time.
“I thought you wanted me to kill her.”
“The Star Sapphire ritual is not about death. It’s about life!”
“You told me to cut off her head!”
He shook his head. “You are an idiot. ‘A new Law of Mercy’? You are weak. A coward. Orchid would never have hesitated to cut your head off.” He turned on his heel and bent close to her face. “But it’s no matter. We’ve put into motion our petrifying destiny. We’ve begun the spell which will grant us our kingship. We are ready, even if we are not ready, to take the Cape.”
Then he was at his washbasin, wiping down his arms and hands, removing the visible bloodstains, then his underarms, which he perfumed with a citrus-smelling talc he kept in a lidded dish on his desk.
“But I do think Wonderblood has ended,” she said, standing. “It must have.”
“What do you know? Have you even read the book?”
“A little.”
“Then tell me, girl, since you’re an expert now. Since you’re qualified to interpret the texts you didn’t even know existed until lately. Why did you cut off my wife’s hand? My Radiance, my Glassine Prism? My scribe. Why did you take from her that which she needs for writing?”
“I don’t understand.” Her voice was cold. “Why it matters. If you wanted me to kill her. Why don’t you just kill her, if you want her dead?”
“Because that’s not how the spell works!” he yelled. She shrank back and sat again on the bed. He followed her and spoke in her face, his breath hot. “When I killed our Prophetess Lois, Orchid’s own mother, I was little more than a child myself, though she called me a man. She gave her life to me so I might have this chance. She gave me her daughter, the heir of Huldah, so that our children might be legitimate heirs. My child with the aged Lois died in his sleep, not seven weeks old.” His voice softened, becoming almost sad. “But Orchid cannot have children.”
“So I was supposed to kill her?”
“To legitimate our line! Her death would have been a
