I said nothing; they could not see it. They would never see it. They would never see it, and I was sure I always would.
I focused instead on the smiling visage of the Prince, who seemed so strangely kind, though all of his proffered hospitality had a hidden distaste in it. Distaste or something worse.
He was looking at me with a studied interest, as he would at a hurting dog. He still needed me alive.
The muscles in my arms groaned as they pulled across the broken bones, anxious to clench my fists. My stupid heart, it kept beating; I could feel it against my chest as I was wheeled from the room.
§
Afterward, I was shown to my apartments, where I found trunks waiting for me. As the maids unpacked them, I shooed them away and sat in the corner under my new cape until the tenor came for me.
You haven’t even dressed, he said. Come, be quick. We cannot be late to dinner.
I only looked at him, empty of anything to say.
What’s wrong?
I shivered, not from the cold this time, but from fury.
My dear, I went to a great trouble for these. These are from Paris. From your dressmaker. He reached in and removed a dinner gown, unfolding it slowly. It was in the colors of the court, blue and white.
He snapped his fingers and maids appeared from outside the doorway.
Dress, and at dinner you will hear plans for the coming victory celebration. It is my hope you will be well enough to sing for our host then, for it will be partly in your honor.
My honor.
I waited for even the slightest recognition from him at what he’d done, but he avoided my eyes and was not looking at me even as he said this, looking to my side instead. As he bowed and left, walking past me to the door, I wanted to rage at him, to leap from this chair, grab the sword at his side, and stab him through.
All those nights while you slept, I should have killed you, I said to his back. I wish I had. Even if it would have meant my life, at least I would have died before losing him.
He stopped short.
I would have died before I met him, before I could have lost any of this.
I could see him in the mirror before me, his back still to me. He went to leave again and then paused.
I saved you, he said. You should have killed me? You owe me everything. I saved you, you belong to me, you belong here with me. Someday you’ll see why, and you’ll forgive me. And I, I will wait for that day. But remember: Anything you ever lost to me you had from me. Don’t forget this.
And with this, he turned the corner and was gone.
The maids brought me to the mirror to prepare, the one letting my hair down and beginning to brush it. My broken arms were setting still, and I could feel them at times, the bones reaching for one another across the break.
I shouted the maids away and took to the bed, where I stayed for days. When the tenor came to my door, I refused to respond to him. I refused the food and the water as well, taking only a little water when the maids held me down and the tenor poured it into my throat.
They began to tie me to the bed, forcing me to drink cool broth as well.
Has she gone mad then? I heard the Prince ask from the hall before one such session.
She is not mad, the tenor said. She is only stubborn. He sat down on the bed once my arms and feet had been bound to the posts. He reached to stroke my forehead and then pressed my hair back tenderly.
A new life awaits you in this place. You’re a guest of honor. New dresses wait in your trunks from your dressmaker in Paris, also furs, jewels. And an honor awaits you as well, he said. We could as easily bury you with it, but I would prefer to see the Prince pin it to your breast.
He took my face in his right hand. It was his sword hand, his trigger hand. He had killed with that hand, and I knew it every time he touched me. He met my eyes at last.
You don’t fool me, he said. You can’t make me kill you. You don’t want to die, not like this.
I wondered if I did.
That black tower of the dead I always saw behind the tenor seemed to change shape then, as if it were a shadow to something much larger, and then it shifted again, rising up until it became a storm—a storm of the dead, the river of dead I had seen that day, howling and shrieking as it wheeled about the room before changing again, suddenly somehow now a black horse and rider circling the room, rearing and turning.
It was the horse I had found the day of the massacre, surely dead now; this was its ghost—and the rider? I could not see his face, but as he came for me, I knew who I wished he was, and though I could not be sure, I reached for him, screaming as I did so, an inhuman howl that terrified me even as I could not stop making it. I could hear the maids shouting for the guards and feel the pain in my arms as I struck at them with all my strength, and said, Don’t let them keep me here, don’t let them! I begged, not here, not here, again and again, and then I was so very light, I could hear nothing but the hooves as I sat on the horse at last. I was gone into the blackness with my rider, for how long I am still uncertain.
Ten