Already a great heat emanated from the fireplace, the crackle and hum of the flames the friendliest sound Ama had yet heard. Across the room was a high curtained bed, layered in fabrics and furs.
As Ama stood surveying her room, a dozen girls poured in behind her, each in a dark dress with white aprons over, bringing pot after pot of hot water, with which they filled a round deep tub. Someone else brought water for the lynx and a slice of meat as well and set the food and drink in a corner. Ama set Sorrow in front of the food, but the kitten would not eat it at first, skulking around the room’s perimeter, hackles raised, as if searching for a way out. But the door was closed tight to keep in the heat from the fire that was built up high, and to keep out prying eyes, and after circling the room, Sorrow set in to eat the meat.
A girl in a coarse gray gown, who told Ama to call her Tillie, reached to pull Ama’s tunic over her head. Ama allowed it, lifting her arms as if she were a child. Then Tillie pulled loose the knot in Emory’s leather belt, and the girls twittered to think of Emory riding all those miles with no belt around his waist, and imagining how it must have been when he found Ama in the lair, when she had been naked in his arms, for somehow they had heard already the roughest details of Ama’s rescue.
“’Tain’t every day we have a story such as yours,” Tillie said, a wide immodest grin on her young, pale, freckled face. “It’s like a fairy story, that’s what it is.”
Then Ama was naked, and all the girls averted their eyes as not to be caught staring, but of course they all snuck glances, one and then another, and they made their judgments.
At last Ama stepped into the tub and sunk down into the steaming water, the muscles in her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her legs relaxing and unwinding, muscles she hadn’t realized she’d held tensely, and she let Tillie unweave her tangled hair and soak it in the water, and she closed her eyes and filled her chest with air.
She breathed, and she settled into the bath, and she felt, though not at home, at least warmed through. Opening her eyes, she saw Sorrow sitting prettily in front of the fire, licking her whiskers and cleaning her face with her paw.
The Queen’s Gift
Ama did not want to ever leave her bath, but water does not remain warm forever, and too soon staying in the bath felt a less comfortable option than rising from it.
Tillie was there to receive her with a length of white linen, which she rubbed all over Ama’s body to dry her in front of the fire. Ama lifted her arms and Tillie rubbed dry the twin thatches of red hair there, as well as the matching thatch lower, between Ama’s legs.
Tillie squeezed Ama’s hair until it no longer dripped, and she wrapped it in another length of linen before she set to dressing Ama.
First came the underdressing—loose breeches, with a slit at the crotch, and a long plain chemise that fell from Ama’s shoulders to her ankles, with sleeves ending at her wrists. The underdressing fit well, but not perfectly, and as Tillie adjusted Ama into it, she called out notes to another girl whom she called Rohesia, this one dressed in blue: “We’ll need to add a half inch to the hem,” she said, “and take in the bust a bit. The sleeves are fine for this style, but for the other gown, with loose sleeves, we shall add an inch.”
Rohesia took notes in a leather-bound notebook, which she pulled from a pouch at her waist, scribbling with a graphite rod.
Sorrow had curled into a ball on a deerskin rug just at Ama’s feet, by the fire, and she, at least, looked content in this new home.
Underdressing settled, Tillie regarded the two dresses laid across the tall canopied bed. “I think the green is a color better suited to your hair,” she said, talking more to herself than Ama. “But the queen mother sent up the red dress just this morning, from her own wardrobe.” She pulled the linen from Ama’s hair and held the dress up next to it, considering.
“It is perhaps more important to please the queen mother with the red than the king with the green,” she said. “It is clear that the king is already pleased with you, even in men’s breeches.”
As Tillie and Rohesia lowered the dress over Ama’s head and fastened its buttons and stays, Ama made herself compliant. The fire blazed up red, and Ama stared into it with greedy eyes. The flush of heat on her face, the brilliance of its movement and its colors—red, yes, but orange, too, and yellow, and purplish-blue at the base of the flames—all of it together set Ama’s head to peace, and she felt as though she could stay just there, forever, even more willingly than in the bath, for it was this dry heat and the liveliness of the flame that she craved.
Then Tillie rotated her again, and Ama found herself in a tall, ovular mirror. There, at her feet, slept Sorrow. The dress, dark-red velvet, trimmed with white fur at the wrists and neckline. Hair, still damp, falling near to her waist and glowing red in the fire’s light.
“You are lovely,” said Tillie, and her voice held no jealousy, and no admiration, either. It was a statement of fact, no more. “Now, to tend to your hair.”
The only request Ama made was that they move a chair for her in front of the fire, rather than leaving its warmth to fashion her hair. Other than that, she left the decisions to Tillie—where to braid, what to leave loose, whether to place a circlet upon her head or leave her hair, as Tillie said, “devastatingly bare.”
Tillie chose a network of braids, some thick, some narrow, and she looped and pinned them across Ama’s head, tucking their ends under and pinning them at the nape of her neck.
By the time she had finished, it had been dark for several hours, and the tall canopied bed, draped with furs, seemed to call out to Ama. Oh, she was tired!
But there would be no rest for her, not now, not soon, for Tillie said, “The queen mother and the king await you in the great hall, my lady.”
She knelt at Ama’s feet, holding satin slippers for Ama to step into, and then she stood, flattening her dress with her hands, and regarded Ama as one would regard a well-prepared meal or a finely arranged bunch of flowers.
“You should please,” she said, and then she dropped a pretty curtsy and turned to go.
“Wait!” Ama called. “If I am to go to the great hall, who shall stay with Sorrow?”
“The cat?” Tillie asked. “She will be fine here, on her own. She has eaten, now she sleeps.”
“She has not been alone since parted from her mother,” Ama said. “And this is her first night in a strange room, and under a roof of any kind. It would set my mind to ease, knowing she was not left here on her own.”
“She is but a pet,” Tillie said, but then perhaps she saw something in Ama’s expression, for she lowered her head and said, “I myself will stay with your Sorrow.”
“My thanks,” Ama said, grasping Tillie’s hand in hers. “I will remember your kindness.”
“It is my pleasure to serve my queen-in-waiting,” Tillie said with another curtsy.
Ama almost curtsied in return, but then she remembered the confusion of the gatekeeper, and so she did not, instead raising her chin as a queen might do and turning to the door, careful with her skirts not to disturb the sleeping lynx.
Ama’s Stories
Rohesia led Ama through the maze of the castle, and Ama wondered, winding down yet another hallway, how long it would take her to untangle the architectural riddles of this place.