Tillie’s aunt came to Ama’s room, her face obscured by a veil. “You called for me, lady?” she said, dropping a deep curtsy. Her gown was not the rough-hewn hemp of the lesser servants, but a flat black of sturdy material. It was plain by design, her dress, severely plain.
“I did,” said Ama. “Tillie tells me that you served the queen mother when she first came to the castle. I hope you might be able to help me learn my place here, as you have seen a damsel arrive to the castle before.”
“It is not for me to tell a queen-in-waiting her place,” Tillie’s aunt said. “If anything, it is for her to tell me mine.”
“Your place,” said Ama, “right now, is here, at my ear. And I implore you to speak freely, and tell me what you can of the queen mother and the other damsels who have come before me.”
Tillie’s aunt said nothing. Ama felt as though she was being studied, very closely, through the veil that shrouded the woman’s face.
For a moment, she gave herself over to being examined, but she found she was tired of being the object of others’ gazes. “What is your name?” she asked Tillie’s aunt.
“Allys, it is,” Tillie’s aunt replied.
“Allys,” said Ama. “Please, remove your veil. If you shall regard me with such a look, then I wish to see your face just as clearly.”
Allys bowed her head and brought her hands to her veil. She took it up at its hem and folded it back across her head of steel-gray hair.
And then she raised her gaze, and Ama looked into her face—and into her one green eye.
Allys’s Advice
Where the other eye should have been, there was instead just darkness. A half-closed lid, sunken in, and nothing more.
Ama felt her mouth fall open, and forced herself to close it, to turn her gaze from the missing eye to Allys’s remaining eye, green and perceptive, watching now as Ama stared.
“Does it disgust you, lady?” Allys asked.
“No,” Ama said, and her voice was steady. “It makes me wonder.”
“Yes,” said Allys, “that it does.” But she did not offer an answer to Ama’s unasked question. Instead she said, “What can I tell you, lady?”
“Please,” said Ama, “tell me about the queen mother’s early days, when she was a damsel new to this place.”
“She was a beauty,” Allys began, as if this was unquestionably the most important piece of information she could offer. “Ink-black hair, and shiny, it was. Eyes of amber. A figure worth rescuing, no matter the risk. Bosoms, tremendous bosoms, a waist no bigger around than the king’s hands could hold. Small feet. Pretty hands.”
Her eye ran up and down Ama’s body as she spoke, and there was a tone to her voice that told a different story than the words she said aloud—her tone and her roaming gaze clearly said that the queen mother had been more beautiful than Ama, shapelier, more feminine, finer. Next to the queen mother when she arrived, Ama would have been but a shadow, if that.
But Ama did not mind. She found herself not terribly attached to her body or what others might think of it.
“What of her mind?” Ama asked. “What did she remember?”
“Remember?” Allys asked.
“Yes,” said Ama. “Remember. Of the time before her rescue. Of her life, before.”
Allys smiled, and her green eye twinkled. “Nothing, of course,” she said. “The damsels have no memory.”
“Never?” said Ama.
“Never,” said Allys, as if she dared Ama to tell her she was wrong.
“But . . . why?”
“I have learned, lady, that ‘why’ is a dangerous word.”
Tillie, who had stood quietly by, looking vaguely uncomfortable by the conversation’s path, stepped in to say, “If that is all, lady, we really must return to our preparations for the coronation. You will be expected to be elegant and well-coiffed.”
“This is an important day for you,” Allys agreed. “The court and crowds will take their first measure of you, and you mustn’t come up short.” She bowed and turned to take her leave.
“But you have told me nothing,” Ama said, and she was angry.
Allys turned back around. “There is nothing to tell you,” Allys answered. “The damsels are a legacy of nothing—no memory, no past, no family. Accept your nothing, and pray it stays that way.”
“Pray it stays that way, you say?”
Allys’s eye darted around the room.
“So you say there is something for me to remember,” Ama pressed.
Allys grimaced. She said nothing.
Ama waited.
At last Allys said, “Lady, you are the third damsel I have seen in this castle. I have seen one damsel who moved forward, and one damsel who spun back. I have seen great joy, and I have seen terrible heartbreak. I have seen power, and I have seen weakness. You ask me what I can tell you. And I can tell you this: The castle is your home. King Emory will be your husband. There is only forward.”
Ama looked into Allys’s one eye. She did not know what she searched for, there.
“Please,” she said to Allys, “tell me something, then, of the king.”
“Something of the king,” Allys repeated.
“Is Emory a good man?” Ama asked. She felt desperate now. Her dress was too tight. Her feet were cold. The place between her legs was tender, and her eyes filled with tears.
Allys did not answer straightaway. Instead, she looked at Sorrow, who had finished her morning meal and was batting about a length of fabric that Tillie had cut from the hem of one of Ama’s gowns.
“Tell me,” she said to Ama, “which makes a more pleasing pet—a cat or a rabbit?”
“A cat,” said Ama at once.
“Yes,” said Allys. “A cat. And do you know why?”
Ama considered. “Because they are more playful?”
“Perhaps,” Allys answered. “Or, perhaps, because they are more dangerous.”
Sorrow pounced on the fabric strip, pinned it between her front paws, and tore it in two with her teeth.
“Don’t be a rabbit, lady,” said Allys. “Everyone with a head about them prefers a cat. I should know,” she added wryly, “being but a rabbit, myself.”
Ama pressed on. “I have a third question—and the last, I promise.”
“About my eye, is it?”
Ama nodded. “Tell me,” she said, “what did you wish for when you took an Eye from the wall? What need had you, so great as to risk an eye?”
Allys blinked her one remaining eye. “It is not a nice story, lady,” she said.
“Yes,” said Ama. “That much I guessed.”
Tillie said, as if she wished to spare her aunt from having to tell the tale, “Years ago, before I was born, when she was in service to the queen, my aunt drew the . . . attention of a man here at the castle. It was unwanted, and often violent.”
Ama turned to Allys. “Violent?”
“The tastes of men are not all kind,” Allys said. “I was the unfortunate recipient of this man’s unfortunate predilections.”
Ama asked, “Who was this man?”
“It does not matter,” Allys answered. “Only to say that I had no power, and I feared for my life.”
“So you went to the wall,” Ama said, “and you took an Eye, and you wished for this man to die?”
Allys barked a laugh. “That may have been a wiser wish than the one I cast,” she said. And then, “But I told you, lady, I am a rabbit, not a cat. I did not wish for his death. I wished only for my safety. To be left alone by him, that is all I asked when I went to the wall and plucked out an Eye. It was a green one, I remember, the brightest green.” She paused for a moment, as if picturing the stolen Eye in her hand. Then she turned to Ama and fixed her in her singular gaze. “They caught me with the Eye almost as soon as I had managed to pry it from its mortar. There was no need for a trial. No one had ever been more plainly guilty than I was, and so they took the wall’s Eye from my hand, and one of mine from my head, and sent me on my way.”