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I would have a husband. And I would be queen.

And I remember it all at once, Astolfo bellowing from below the stage, storming forward, pointing at John, shaking, enraged, unable to speak to accuse him. And I remember Qaspiel, its face so sad I wanted to die there, just to make it stop.

“I think he means to say: it’s not fair. I think he means to say: you cheated, John.”

And I remember lying back on the altar that is a throne that was a sacrificial mound before the al-Qasr was the Basilica, lying back with John above me, and how in the morning the world would be changed and when we woke, the throneroom was full of roses and partridges and orthodox hymns, and peacocks lay sleeping in the rafters. Their blue heads like bruises: the pulse of their throats, the witness of their tails.

“I did not cheat,” John said, and Astolfo whirled on me, his eyes blazing, pained, all the blame there: I left him, I left him and hadn’t I just wanted John all along.

“No, that’s not how it was,” I said faintly.

And I remember how John sat me on that ivory chair and knelt at my knees, the beauty that all supplicants possess sitting full and shining on his thick features. He closed his kiss over my navel-mouth and his tears were like new wax. “Say it,” he whispered.

And I said his prayer. Rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosā. Rex. Regis. Regi. Regem. Regē. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus—

“How could I have cheated?” I remember John saying, spreading his hands. “Only today did I discover how the Abir was conducted. It’s far too complicated to fix. And you, you mean to say Hagia cheated, too?”

And that was when I knew he had.

I remember that ivory chair in the night; it curls at its ends into arm-rests in the shape of ram’s horns, severed from the sea-goat when the first caravan settled in this endless valley, the first enclave of bird and monopod and gryphon and cricket and phoenix and collinara—and blemmye. And they camped on the beach-head and pulled from the sea with their silver spears a fatted kid, and ate the fat of its tail sizzling from the driftwood fire, and in time those first horns were affixed to the long chaise which became a sacrificial plank which became an altar which became a throne which became my pillow and it all happens at once as his weight pressed the small of my back against the cold ivory—

“I don’t want it,” I said, and thrust the diamond out to Astolfo. “Take it,” I said, tears pricking my eyes. “Marry him yourself. Let me draw again. I don’t want it. I want to go back to my mother’s fields and stretch parchment over hoops and feel her tree of hands on my face. What will it say for this year? No, no, no.”

And my mother, so young and lovely, stepped out of the crowd to put her hand, her real and warm hand, to me, to comfort, even though the rules did not quite permit it, the day of the Abir is liminal, and perhaps there is grace hidden there.

“You cannot give away your fate, my girl. Nor your luck.”

“Please,” John said later, and wept, for he had tried so hard not to, tried not to brush his palm against my eyelid, tried not to run his fingers across the teeth in my belly, tried not to glance at the soft place where my head is not. He had tried to resist his passion to come to that place when he lifted me onto the nacreous chair, and tried not to enter me like a postulant sliding his hands into the reliquary to grip the dry bone. Virginity confers strength, I remember he said when we all took our lessons with him and it was all a game. It is the pearl which purchases paradise.

“I love you, my daughter,” Ctiste said, and her smile cut me. I had refused my fate—that salved all question of dishonesty. No one could imagine it, anyway. The Abir was the pillar of the world. No one would even conceive the idea of harming it, of making it cheap and false. Then, I did not even quite understand what Qaspiel meant by cheated. How could you cheat the Lottery? I only thought: Now that he is king, what will happen to us?

Now, I understand. I know many wicked things, of which this