This room was more comfortable than the dungeon, at least, and although there were no windows, the guard had left a lamp burning, so I could look around at the unwelcoming furniture at my leisure. After an hour or so, I had memorized every ugly but intricate pattern of the various upholsteries.
I could have been there for hours. I slept for a while again, I know, because I encountered those old dreams about the vines and the long, black corridor. The patterns of the vines got tangled up with the ugly botanical embroidery on the fancy couches and sent me wandering through tunnels of misshapen maroon flowers and bulging velvet fruits. Even so, it was a relief to dream again after that stretch of nothingness the night before.
When I woke, there was still no sign of Cornelius, which I hoped was still a good thing. I found I had wet myself again, which wasn’t a good thing at all, but seemed unavoidable. The thirst was back, along with the ever-present heartsickness, and now hunger had joined it—a gnawing, painful hunger that made it feel like my belly was sticking to my backbone. My mouth became very dry again, so that I could feel every contour and detail of my tongue, palate and teeth without the softening of saliva, which was a lot more unpleasant than it sounds, I can tell you.
Eventually, the black-haired sorceress returned—but she was not alone this time. She sashayed in with ten others, differing in the color of their skin, hair, and eyes, but essentially just the same, with that same power to entice and enchant.
They filed into the room in a line, bringing sunshine with them, as I sat helplessly and stared. There were as many different colors among them as a bed of wildflowers, from slippers to shining headdresses, and the effect was dazzling.
All of them together was overwhelming. I adored them, haplessly, helplessly. I was bathed in a love that was motherly, sisterly, and loverlike, all at once, rocked by the gentle waves of an ocean composed of eyes in shades of gray, green, blue, brown, and hazel, and strands of hair that were golden, chestnut, brilliant red, and equally brilliant iridescent black. All sisters.
How could we not have noticed this before, back in the village? It seemed so obvious, now, seeing them together. I could not distinguish the sorceress I had met earlier from the other black-haired ones. That was how similar they were.
I searched for Clarissa among their ranks, but she was absent. And where was Sylvester? Why was he not among them?
“This is the girl?” said one.
“Yes,” said another.
I felt the burn of eleven pairs of perfect eyes assessing me for specialness and coming up with nothing. They could have harvested me in a second, all of them.
“Father is coming,” said one of them.
“He’ll deal with her.”
I felt dizzy, drugged, drunk. Their perfume and their presence filled me up like wine in a glass, so that there was no room for anything else. I felt myself smiling a wide, foolish smile. False well-being warmed all my limbs and fluttered in my stomach. It reminded me of those old tales of mortals who wander into a faerie glade, eat the enchanted fruit, and find themselves dancing until their feet become bloody stumps. The sorceresses gazed at me with loathing, and I gazed back with servile adoration.
Through my haze of enchantment, I noticed two more people enter the room: a final sorceress, this one with hair as yellow as a sweet lemon—Clarissa!—and a man.
Of course, I knew it was the king at once. Every public establishment in the kingdom has a painting of him on a wall somewhere, copied from the one perfect oil painting that I assumed resided in his palace.
Some were good copies, but others made him look like a goat in a robe—and those, I was discovering now, were possibly more accurate than the perfected versions.
He wore a gown that could have been an elaborate cake, it was so curlicued and decorated, set all about with bright jewels and woven with glinting, heavy thread. His headdress must have been a foot tall, wobbling about up there like a dab of cream on a jelly. And I had thought the sorceresses’ gowns were elaborate! I had no idea how they all moved about in those contraptions.
My head cleared a little as I looked at him, because he was certainly no unearthly beauty. Quite ordinary-looking, in fact, aside from the magnificent garb—and his shadow, thrown on the wall behind him by the lamplight, behaved strangely, seeming larger and more complicated than it should have been, and moving a little more than it should.
Clarissa flickered her green glance over me. I saw triumph there, and spite. Despite my bedazzlement, I roused myself enough to say, “Where is your brother?”
She smiled and said nothing. The king waved her over to the table and then walked to where I knelt chained to the stone wall.
His eyes were colorless and clouded, as if by cataracts, and his head moved with snappish speed as he looked this way and that. He could have been an automaton, for all the human warmth he exuded. Even his skin was colorless, shadowed almost blue under his jaw and in the gaunt hollows of his cheeks.
He was an unassuming, almost comical figure, if you took him at face value—skinny, pale, balding, with a pronounced belly and birdlike legs not concealed by his rich fabrics and jewels—and yet there was something about him that stopped my breath.
I suppose that was what real power felt like—not seductive, sinuous power like Clarissa’s magicks, or playful, erratic power like Sylvester’s, but the harsh, inhuman strength of the truest power that had spawned them both.
He smiled, showing his yellowed teeth. “You poor thing,” he said, looking at my soiled underdress and general state of disarray (to put it mildly). He didn’t have to speak or make a gesture; quick as thought, my underdress was as clean and fresh as the day it was made. I didn’t see this as any kind of charity; he just wanted to stop me from stinking up his fancy palace.
“Why am I here?” I asked. “Why bother with me? I just wanted to go back home.”
I still couldn’t quite believe I was talking to the king. The actualking, whose (inaccurate) picture hung in every tavern and shop, glowering over me since birth. No one I knew had ever even seen him in person; he rarely went on procession and seemed to stay within the confines of the city.
Yet here he was in front of me, talking almost like a normal human being and smelling faintly of perfume that even I could tell must be expensive, with a base note of perfectly ordinary human sweat.
There was something exceptionally odd about his face, though. Not its ugliness, because I was used to ugliness, and even found it a little comforting now, after the malicious beauty of the magic-workers—but a flickering in its expressions.
It was as if two beings occupied the exact same space, rather like the House and the Other House. Flick: a goatlike old man with a discolored beard. Flick: a grinning death’s head. Flick: an avuncular smile. Flick: teeth like knives in a cavernous mouth. It made me dizzy to look at him directly.
