Standing afterward the girl dried her with a towel and they crossed the room to where a dress hung over a wooden chair. Green, this one, like emeralds pressed into fabric. The same gold that the girl wore as trim. A long and flowing thing of silk and beauty. She stepped forward and allowed the girl to pull it over her head and down and then to begin tying the laces in the back.
“What is it this time?” she asked.
“I don't know,” the girl said.
“You don't know.”
“No.”
“Or you won't tell me.”
The girl was silent. She continued tying the laces with careful hands. When she finished she went to bring the shoes from next to the door. These a gold that matched the trim. She set them down and stepped back. Folding her hands in front of her.
The woman sighed and stepped forward and into the shoes. She had not worn shoes in weeks and they felt tight and confining but she stood in them all the same. Looking at the stone wall where a tapestry hung down and on it a symbol of a scorpion in red and all about a weaving of colors. The light in the room nearly blinding to her as it came in the windows and the smell somewhere of incense.
“Do they fit?” the girl asked.
“I'll worry about whether or not they fit.”
The girl didn't answer but instead went to the door and opened it. A heavy door of mahogany. Swinging on hinges oiled to silence. Outside a wide hall with more tapestries like the one in the room and down the hall the sound of music and people talking. Two men stood there and both had spears and one was looking down the hall toward the sound, but he turned back when the door opened.
“She's ready,” the girl said.
The men nodded and the one who had been looking down the hall grinned. The other motioned her forward with a hand young and strong. Leather bracers on his arms and a vest of the same. The scorpion there inscribed with crimson thread upon the center of his chest.
She went to them and the door closed and one went ahead of her while the other stepped behind. The one behind touched the small of her back and pushed just slightly and she walked. Along both sides the same stone and sconces on the walls with burning torches and the stones scorched black above them. A thin smoke against the ceiling and running along like an airborne river darkly moving toward the vents. The sound of her shoes and the guards' boots loud on the stones.
They walked and she thought of the person still imprisoned across from her and the sickly sound they made when eating, as if tearing the meat from bones and sucking up that skin through cracked lips. A sound that carried even in a room so large. The snap once as a bone broke and no one ever coming to take that faceless prisoner from the tomb they shared. And then for a moment she felt weak and she leaned to the side against the wall and the guard in back pushed her again and she straightened and walked on.
As they came into the room at the end of the hall the noise swelled. She blinked in the light of windows in the ceiling and torches on nearly every bare place on the wall and looked about. A group of men standing in bright robes before a raised dais and laughing as a jester in the middle of the room rolled. The jester's face a horror of scars and grinning merrily all the same as if his mind were broken and lightly coming up out of the roll to do three dance steps and bow and all the men laughing. Across from them a group of women sitting on pillows and a servant in leather and canvas handing down a bottle of wine to one of the women.
They all looked when they saw her, save for the broken jester who rolled again and laughed, a high and shrill sound. The din of the room falling away and just that terrible laughter remaining and rising to the vaulted stone ceiling and wood beams and coming back from them to double upon itself.
The young man at the heart of the group stepped forward. His hair long and perfectly kept and so bright in this light that it was almost blinding to her and she looked at her own hair for a moment and touched it and then put her hand down. He was holding a wineglass the color of smoke and half filled and he raised it to her. “You've come.” His voice light and careless like upon him there was no weight from things in this world or in any other.
She nodded and stood on the edge of the room and felt the guards step back from her. He crossed alone and the others' eyes on him. He did not look back at them but dismissed them as only he, of all their group, could do. The women watching and the jester dancing some jig with a leg stiff and half lame. That river of smoke moving in the center of the ceiling and just beyond her vision, but still felt there like some omniscient beast itself with its lifeblood everywhere in this place.
He stopped in front of her and did not touch her and took a drink of his wine. “Took long enough for you to get here.”
“I just do what they tell me.”
“Is that how it is?”
“Yes.”
“Well I'm glad you're here now. Do you like the dress?”
“Do I like it?”
“Do you like it.”
She nodded just so. Touched the fabric with a fingertip. It was a game as everything was a game and she knew that as well as anyone in this room and perhaps better and so she said: “Yes, I like it.”
“That's the one you told me you liked, you know.”
“I remember it.”
“Well then, come. Let's eat. Or did you eat before you came?”
She just looked at him and her face did not change and in that shared gaze was all of it, the core of it, though he smiled still. It that stretching moment he dared her and she fought it and did not rise up to it and finally said: “I could eat.”
“That you could.”
So they went across the room and the voices about them were picking up again now but were hushed and he led her to a small table that had been set at the foot of the dais. A thing of metal and wood with three legs and on it a small bowl of fruit and a loaf of some type of bread. Not warm but not that far from it. He took one of the chairs out and held it for her and she sat and he sat opposite her and picked up one of the pieces of fruit and took a bite.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“They're no one. Or just as close as you can get.”
“But they think they're someone. All of them.”
“The next time someone comes in here and doesn't think he's someone will be the first.” He grinned. “I let them think it. What's the harm?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Nothing ever. They're scum like all the rest and if they ever start thinking they're not scum I can kill them and they know it and I know it. And as long as we all know it, we get along. Don't you think?”
“I suppose you do.”
He leaned back and she watched him and his thin frame. He did not wear a sword but he sat like someone who had his already drawn and with a lazy confidence. She wondered how hard he worked to put it on, for it wasn't in his face. He watched everything, always, and yet still put out one leg like there was nothing to bother him and it was not for her, for she knew him, but it was for them. Each bite was for them and they watched and would not come over until they were told and not a moment sooner and if they died in the court before that moment came then so be it.
“Aren't you going to eat?”
“I'm not hungry.”
“I thought you said you were hungry.”
“Maybe I lied.”
“I don't have any place for liars in here.”
“Then why do you have a whole room of them just over there?”
He stopped chewing and looked at her a moment. Weighing something in his mind and feeling the heft of it and then setting it back down. Turning it perhaps to see all of the sides. The scorpion on his own robes moving with both heartbeat and breath. And then he tipped his head back and laughed and it was a golden laughter and behind him the tormented jester cackled and roared and threw himself on the ground with a shriek, rolling over and over and then scrambling to his feet to laugh once more.