“Eleven,” said Tillie, with a small smile. “And two daughters, though they are both long since married.” She paused, and then she said, “They are the first of what promises to be a nearly endless stream of wedding guests who will be arriving now, lady. It’s just a fortnight now until the nuptials. We should have spent this afternoon fitting you for your wedding gown, but instead . . .” Tillie’s eyes returned to Ama’s bandaged hand. Still dressed only in her undergarments, Ama could not hide it.
A knock came at the door. “A moment,” Tillie said, and she retrieved Ama’s dark crimson kirtle, which had the longest sleeves, and helped Ama into it.
“Enter,” Tillie said when she’d finished tying the laces, and Fabiana pushed open the door.
“The queen mother expects you in her chambers,” Fabiana said. Her sly expression had returned.
Tillie spat, “Did you run and tattle, you jade?”
Fabiana lifted her chin. “The queen mother deserves to know what all is happening in her castle, doesn’t she?”
Fabiana left, chin still high, and Tillie sighed, rubbing the line that had reappeared between her eyes. “So, it’s to the queen mother’s chambers, then, before the feast,” she said, perhaps to herself, perhaps to Ama; it made no difference. And then she set to the task of readying Ama.
The last thing Tillie did before sending Ama on her way was tug down on the sleeve of the gown, hiding the linen bandage beneath it.
Ama found the queen mother abed, pillows and cats all around. Her eyes were closed, her head dropped down in sleep, but the cat on her lap—small, dark—had its blue eyes wide open. They locked on Ama as she walked through the door, and its tail twitched.
When Ama looked up from the cat’s eyes, she found the queen mother’s eyes were open now, and as unblinking as the cat’s.
“Ama.” The queen mother’s voice rasped. “I hear you have injured yourself, child.”
“I did,” Ama answered.
The queen mother’s hand lifted from the bed, disturbing a tabby resting beneath it. “Come,” she said, and Ama went.
Ama put her hand in the queen mother’s. It was warm.
The queen mother picked loose the knot of Ama’s bandage and unwound it, then flipped her hand palm up. At the sight of the oozing wound coated over with Allys’s jelly, the tight pink skin, her mouth pursed unhappily. “Did you mean for this to happen?” she asked, her eyes still on Ama’s burn.
“Of course not.” Ama tried to pull her hand away, but the queen mother’s grip tightened.
“Speak the truth,” she said.
“I do speak the truth.” Ama forced her voice to be as steady as the queen mother’s. “Now, release my hand.”
The queen mother smiled. Slowly, her grip loosened. Ama withdrew her hand.
“Why would I want a burn?” Ama asked, reapplying the bandage.
“Everyone takes release somewhere,” the queen mother answered.
“Well, I did not intend to burn my hand,” Ama said. She was having difficulty retying the knot.
The queen mother gestured for Ama to let her help. After a moment’s hesitation, Ama relented. As she tied the bandage, the queen mother said, “The queen before me—the mother to my king—they say she found her release in pain. When she first came to this castle as damsel, she was too timid to try such things. At that time, she found her release in tears. She cried every day, they say, from the day she was rescued until the day of her wedding. Then came her son, who would grow to be my husband, and when he was a babe, when her breasts flowed with milk for him, her tears dried, for a time. But in later years—after her son was big and needed her no more, for that’s how it goes, that’s how it’s meant to go—then, she found her release in pain.”
“In pain?” Ama asked.
The queen mother nodded. “First it was little things. Refusals to nourish herself. Forced wakefulness for days on end. Then, when those pains no longer hurt, she moved on to sharper things. Embroidery needles slipped beneath her nails. Corsets pulled so tight as to crack ribs. Drops of poison to cramp the stomach, to empty the bowels.”
Ama’s palm throbbed as if it were a little heart.
“Eventually those pains stopped hurting too, they stopped bringing her the release she craved. And so, it came to the rope, wound around the post of the bed—there, that one,” the queen mother said, with a nod to the end post of her own curtained bed. “A rope knotted twice, once around the post, and once around her neck. Her final release.”
Ama blinked, and it was as if she could see the dead queen swinging there, by her neck, dressed in finery and with beautiful braids, but dead, just the same.
“If not in pain,” the queen mother continued, “you must be finding release somewhere else, that is certain. What have you been up to, I wonder? Your color is back, girl.”
Ama remembered her glass—her gray wave, cresting into foam.
Her sharp-edged tower growing from a cliff.
Her garnet rose, big as her hand.
Her blue-chested bird, perched on a delicate branch.
Her yellow orb, round and perfect as the sun—
And the queen mother read the memory on her face, the pleasure Ama felt. “As I thought,” she said, and she smiled. “You have found a way, haven’t you, clever girl, a way away.”
“And what of you?” Ama said. Her voice sounded loud, defiant. “What is your release?”
“My cats, of course,” the queen mother answered, stroking the tabby that curled at her side. The cat began to purr. “For me, it is always my cats.”
It was a day that would never end, so it seemed to Ama. Before Tillie would release her for the banquet, she made a fuss over Ama’s hair, tucking jewels into the braid, muttering “distraction” and “draw the eye up” over and over again.
Then, just as she was sending Ama from the room, she called her back. “The white of the bandage is too stark against the color of your gown,” she said, undoing the linen and hissing with discomfort when she saw the burn again. “Best to keep your sleeve down over your hand. With luck, no one will notice.”
They waited for her near the table—the nobleman Grant and his wife and their four attending sons, who bowed and curtsied and nodded and smiled, and who ate and drank and raised their glasses in a toast to her, and Ama smiled and dipped her head in acknowledgment, as she knew she must do, and she felt herself freezing inside all the night long, freezing inside a shell of pretense, of posturing and posing.
Pawlin was at the table too, sitting to Emory’s right, and it was he who had felled the pheasant that was now the meat on their plates, and he entertained the table by telling the story of the hunt.
“She is ruthless, my Isolda,” Pawlin said, ripping into the breast of the pheasant with his teeth. “Once she is set on her prey, there is no turning her back. Merciless. Single-minded. A true killer.”
With a shiver, Ama imagined Isolda’s sharp, curved beak piercing the feathers and flesh of the pheasant.
Oh, how she chafed at being at this table! How she wished she were somewhere else—down the many flights of stairs, through the twisting corridors, and back to the forging fire. Ama imagined what she might make with broken shards of glass, the thing she would make the next day, when she was free from all of this.
Perhaps she could have made it through the meal without her injury being noticed, had the table been sat only with men. It was the nobleman Grant’s wife who gave her away.
“That is quite a burn,” said the woman. She was deep into her third cup of wine, and her voice carried loud and booming across the table, cutting into the conversation that her husband and King Emory had been engaged in. “How did you manage an injury like that?” She reached across Ama’s plate and grabbed her injured hand, flipped it palm up and pushed away the sleeve that had been mostly covering it, then twisted it back and forth to better see it. “’Tis gruesome, that!”