Clark’s father died, like so many died, of cancer. A purple blotch swelled on his nose, then spilled across his cheek, a melanoma the doctors cut away, leaving a hole in his face, too late. He lost weight suddenly, lost his balance regularly, and soon began to lose his mind when the tumors took seed in his brain. Her mother did not marry again but a decade later became pregnant with York. He was Clark’s half brother but felt more like a son, as her mother died not much later, so blotched with melanomas she appeared splattered with some foul wine. The sun would kill them all, it sometimes seemed.
From a distance, for a few minutes, she watched him perform. He dipped daggers in linseed oil and set them on fire and tossed them in flaming ellipses. He was bareheaded so that people could see his face and so that he could see his daggers. His arms were a blur. His forehead was beaded with sweat. His smile so wide it reached his ears. His hands were too square and meaty for his arms, and his lean neck bunched into a fist of an Adam’s apple. She had tried to enlist him as a sentinel, but he resisted. “I don’t want another boss,” he said, “when I’ve already got you.”
She couldn’t lay off him. She tried, really tried, but couldn’t resist swatting the back of his head, bullying him with her words, every time he made a foolish decision. They shared the same blood. He was hers—that’s how she felt—like a hand or tooth. By taking care of him she was taking care of herself. He wanted to make people smile, give them some small escape, always goofing, whereas she was always serious. These days, most everyone is some shade of brown, but people still smile when the two of them stand beside each other as siblings, with his nut-colored skin and her fiery hair and freckled face.
She waited for him to catch the daggers—one, two, three—and extinguish them each in his mouth, waited for the applause and the coins people tossed his way, before approaching him and tugging his sleeve and saying they needed to talk.
“About?” He had a gap between his teeth he showed often in a smile.
“About the kind of thing that can get us killed.”
He packed his bag and swung it over his shoulder and blew kisses to three young girls before following Clark from the square.
She said, “You’re performing at Resurrection Day?”
“Yeah, but they want something different now. Not just for the feast, but before, too. Warm up the crowd before the execution.”
“Even better.”
“What’s going on?” He nudged her with his elbow. “Are we making a move? Is this it?”
They entered an alley, and its tight walls clapped away the sun. In shadow they walked and she whispered, “Consider this your final performance.”
*
In the stadium, hundreds of tables have been arranged into four squares, with two wide corridors splitting the space between them in the shape of a cross. At the center of the cross rises a freshly constructed gallows with a noose dangling from it that casts an eyelet shadow. The body will dangle there through the meal to follow, when people file from the bleachers to their seats and a band strikes up a merry tune.
York races out of a tunnel and along one of these corridors. A ripple of applause works its way through the crowd. He cartwheels and tumbles and finally pounds his way up the gallows and swings from its noose and then spins in a circle to survey his audience.
From his pants pocket he withdraws what looks like a black rope that he keeps pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling and then snaps like a whip. It unfurls then, ripples in the wind, opens up into a massive silk scarf, maybe twenty feet long and half as wide. He begins to manipulate its form, bunching it first into a storm cloud that dots the ground with rain. Then his hands slash and twist when he knots it into the shape of a giant raven. It caws and pecks at his hand before taking flight and fluttering one way and then another. His lips seem not to move when it calls out in its croaking way. Then he snaps the scarf and it unrolls to its full length, and he twists it into a rope, what appears to be a snake curling along the stage, before coiling up at his feet.
Again he reaches for his pocket. This time he produces a red stone, a blue stone, an orange stone. He transfers the stones one by one to his opposite hand until they fill his palm like a cluster of fruit. He shoots them into the air, spinning them upward in a colored blur. The stones rise higher and higher, ridiculously high, until they might scrape the sky. He adds to their rotation an apple he takes intermittent bites of, and the crowd erupts, crying out with pleasure, crashing their hands together in applause.
York can’t seem to help it—he smiles so widely his eyes vanish into folds—and then the smile vanishes and the apple core falls to the ground and the stones fall and clatter into his pocket, blue, orange, red, when the girl is escorted onto the field.
No one screams or boos or stomps their feet. Instead the stadium plunges into silence.
Her wrists are bound and she is led by two deputies who hold her by the elbows. Her face is puffed with bruises. She wears a scarf of bandages. Whether she is limping or resisting the deputies, it is unclear, but they drag and support her.
From her midfield suite, high above the rest of the crowd, the silence is such that Danica can hear the scraping echoes of their footsteps. A trail of dust rises behind them and ghosts away with the wind.
When the girl arrives at midfield, some of the people in the stands begin to yell, their voices swelling, some pitched high, some low, the many layers of sound eventually merging into one sustained note that seems to shake the air. Whether they are calling out questions or calling for mercy or calling for blood, it is hard to tell.
The girl appears so thin, like a piece of wood somebody whittled and gave up on. Though there remains something strangely vibrant about her. Her skin has an earthen richness. Her hair is the same black as the vultures that spin in the sky. Her posture is unyielding despite her circumstances. Danica watches her with grim curiosity when the deputies lead her up the steps of the gallows to the platform.