“It was meant for this evening,” Tillie answered, “when it is cooler.” But when Ama didn’t respond, Tillie said quickly, “Of course, lady. At once.”
She lit the fire. She fixed a pot of barley tea and poured Ama a cup of it, and Ama held it with both hands.
Then Tillie bustled around the room, shaking out the cloak and hanging it back in its place, kneeling at Ama’s feet to unbuckle her leather overshoes, then taking a brush to them to clean away dirt.
“Tillie,” Ama said, “sit and have a cup of tea with me.”
Tillie stopped, midstroke, brush in the air. “Oh, lady,” she said, “I couldn’t.”
“I insist,” Ama said, and after a moment more, Tillie set aside the shoes and the brush, poured herself a cup of the barley tea, and pulled a footstool up close to Ama and the fire.
They drank their tea. When Ama’s cup was empty, Tillie refilled it, and when Tillie’s was nearly dry, Ama reached for the pot to serve her.
“Oh, lady, no,” Tillie said, covering her cup with her hand. “Thanks to you, but you should not be serving me.”
Ama could have pressed, but she could see how uncomfortable Tillie was, the way she sat on the very front edge of the footstool, like an anxious little bird who was apt to fly away at any moment.
She withdrew her hand from the teapot, but after a moment she said, “Please, Tillie, help yourself to more.”
Tillie looked unsure about what she was supposed to do next, but at last she grinned, a real smile, and said, “Well, lady, if you insist.” She still would not let Ama pour for her, though.
Ama did not want Tillie to move from her seat beside the fire. She didn’t want to be alone.
Ama gasped.
“Lady?” said Tillie. “Are you all right?”
Ama stared into the fire and did not answer. She did not want Tillie to leave. She did not want to be alone. This was something, like her knowledge that she had never before heard music, that was a fresh, new thing, something she had no memory of, from before.
Before Emory had saved her from the dragon, Ama had never been lonely.
Ama’s Question
Sleep came for Ama in two parts: the first, after retiring from an uncomfortable meal in the great hall, where revelers and musicians were not enough to distract Ama from what had occurred that morning in the garden. Everyone, all up and down the table, and even the servants, looked at her with knowing eyes and whispered to one another behind their hands.
Her shame darkened her cheeks and caused her to cast down her eyes, but the queen mother said to her, “They will talk. They will always talk. It is your duty to hold your head up and not give them more to discuss than they may already have.”
Ama listened, and lifted her chin.
“And you,” the queen mother said in a low hiss, wagging her fork at Emory as if he were a boy who had been caught stealing cream from the pitcher, “you should know better than to treat Ama in such a fashion. As if she were a scullery maid and not your future queen!”
He was pretending to look contrite, Ama saw. He was not sorry, not really.
“Ama knows it was but a game,” he said. “She is not angry.”
The queen mother raised one eyebrow. “She does not look happy,” she said.
And so Ama arranged her face into a pleasant mask, whether to please the court or the queen mother or King Emory, she did not know. Certainly, it was not to please herself.
“You will have to show her you are sorry with a gift,” the queen mother said. “And you, Ama, must visit me in my chambers on the morrow. We have much to discuss, you and I.”
It was this that troubled Ama late in the night, after first sleep, after the warming stones in her bed had lost all their heat, but before Tillie had come to replace them. The queen mother wished Ama to visit. And so Ama would.
Would this be her life? A long, uncertain chain of answering when called upon?
Certainly not, thought Ama, rolling onto her side and taking care not to disturb Sorrow, who liked to sleep as if she were a person, head on the bolster beside Ama’s, the rest of her tucked warmly beneath the cover. When she was queen, Ama thought, then her life would be surer. Certainly no one—not even the king—would dare to hurt the queen.
She told herself this, but she did not believe it. And now she was wide-awake, despite the desperate darkness of the room.
Soon Tillie would come. She would take the cold stones away and replace them with hot ones, and she would rebuild the fire, as well, if Ama asked her to.
And soon—though not soon enough for Ama—Tillie did come.
Through the thick bed curtains that surrounded her, Ama could not make out even a hint of Tillie’s shape, but she knew it was Tillie in her chamber from the sound of her steps—light, even, quick.
Tillie pulled back the curtain at the foot of the bed, preparing to take the cold stones away, and her eyes widened when she saw, by the light of the candle she held, Ama sitting up in her bed. “You are awake, lady!” Her candle sent wavering shadows to dance on the walls all around.
“I am,” said Ama.
Tillie came to the head of the bed, pulled back the curtain there, and placed the candle on a table near the headboard.
“Do you thirst?” she asked, after she had taken away the cold stones and replaced them with hot stones from the fire.
“No,” said Ama.
“Do you need to use the pot?”
“No,” said Ama, again.
Tillie made to draw the curtains closed again. “Well,” she said, “peaceful dreams to you.”
“Wait,” said Ama. “Don’t go.”
There was a look on Tillie’s face, just a flash of an expression—irritation, perhaps?—but she smoothed it as surely as she had smoothed the wrinkles from the blanket. “Of course, lady,” she answered, and stood near the head of Ama’s bed, awaiting further instructions.
But Ama did not wish to instruct her. What she wished was that Tillie wanted to stay. What she wished was that Tillie was her friend.
“Would you care to sit on the bed with me?” Ama asked, but for this Tillie seemed to have no answer. Her mouth opened and then closed again, soundlessly. “Sit on the bed with me,” Ama said, rephrasing her question into a command.
Tillie obeyed, perching on the edge of Ama’s bed much as she had earlier perched on the edge of the footstool, prepared to rise in an instant if called upon to do so.
“Not like that,” Ama said, seating herself even higher on her bolsters and crossing her legs beneath the covers. “Like this.”
With an air of reluctant acceptance, Tillie scooted farther on the mattress, kicked her shoes away, and folded her legs beneath her. Sorrow slept throughout the whole procedure.
A question occurred to Ama. “Tillie,” she said, “where do you sleep?”
“In the servants’ quarters, on a pallet,” Tillie answered promptly.
“Is it comfortable?” Ama asked.
“It serves,” Tillie said.
“You sleep with others, then,” Ama said.
“I do.”
Ama considered this. Her feeling of loneliness, and the way it contrasted with her memory of the absence of that emotion, ballooned in her chest, creating a great inward pressure. “Is it nice to be so much with others?”
“It can be,” Tillie answered. She leaned back a bit onto her hands, relaxing. “There’s always some girl or other with a story or a joke to tell. And when I wake between sleeps, there is almost always someone else awake, too. On a cold night, there are bodies with whom to share heat.”