He did not remember what he ate any more than he remembered if there had been conversation. He did remember that men in white robes caught round the waist with belts of bronze and women in silver gowns, their long shining hair caught up in nets like starlight, served him, and the King, and the Princesses, with many dishes; and he thought that he ate a great deal, for he was very hungry and had traveled far on dry bread and hard cheese, and that no one else ate much at all. He also remembered there was music, and music of a complexity, of melodies and drifting harmonies, that described a large number of musicians, and perhaps they played to mask the silence, to distract from the feast that none but the soldier ate, and none enjoyed.
At last the King rose, and with him the Princesses: behind them, on the long high walls of the Great Hall were hung tapestries of all the noble and beautiful and fearful things that had happened to the kings and queens who had lived in the castle for centuries upon centuries past. But nothing in those proud scenes of heroes and ladies and war and mercy was any more noble or fearful than the beauty of the twelve living Princesses who stood before them. The soldier watched the King as he looked at his daughters, each one in turn, and he saw how the sadness of his eyes was so deep that none knew the bottom of it; not even the King himself could reach so far. The soldier knew then the truth of what his friend the ostler had said: that the young noblemen who had had to meet those eyes and say that they had failed could have but little strength or purpose ever after.
Then the Princesses turned; and the youngest leading and the eldest last walked out of the Hall through the door the soldier had entered at, the door they themselves had entered by not long since; and yet, since these twelve passed through it, as light on their feet as hummingbirds resting on the air, so light that it was impossible to imagine their wearing holes in their shoes, be the soles of the thinnest silk: since the Princesses used it as a door the soldier felt suddenly that he must have come in some other, more substantial way. As the dark hair of the eldest, and the last primrose gleam of her gown, disappeared through the door, the soldier thought: “How do I know that she is the eldest? Or that the first of them is the youngest? For none has made me known to any of them. I have never heard their names.”
The King turned to him when the door of his daughters’ leave-taking was still and empty again, and said to him: “You need not take tonight as your first watch. You have traveled a great distance and deserve a night’s untroubled sleep. Tomorrow night is soon enough to begin.”
The soldier, standing, as he had stood since the King had risen and the Princesses silently left, felt the lightest of brushes against his ankles, barely a tremor against the heavy leather of his high boots; as if a cat had twitched its tail against him. He heard himself reply: “Sire, I thank you, but your meal has refreshed me enough, and I am anxious to begin the task and trouble your hospitality no further than I must to accomplish it.”
The King bowed his head; or at least his eyes dropped from the soldier’s face to the white tablecloth.
“One favor I will ask: and that a bath. I fear me travel is a dusty business at best, and I am not the best of travelers.”
The King’s smile touched his mouth again briefly; and at the raising of his hand, another of the bronze-belted men came up to the two of them, and stood at the foot of the dais so that his head came no higher than their waists, and bowed low, till his white robe swept the floor. “A bath for our guest,” said the King. “He then wishes to be brought to the Long Gallery.”
The man bowed again, the lesser bow the soldier was coming to recognize, if not resign himself to, as indicating himself; but the man still kept his eyes on the floor so the soldier could catch no glint of his thoughts. Then he turned and slid smoothly away from him, on feet as silent as a hare’s; and the soldier stepped awkwardly down from the dais, and followed him, listening to the clumsy thunder of his own boot-soles.
The soldier was appalled by the royal guest bathtub. It was like no indoor bath he had ever seen: it was a lake, and not even the smallest of lakes. As he approached it and looked into the steaming perfumed water, he half expected to see some scaled tropical fish, with fins like battle pennants, peer back at him. But the water was clear to the marble bottom. The steam played delicately with his dusty hair, caressed his cheeks. He closed his eyes a minute. The perfume reminded him of—He opened his eyes again, hurriedly, and began to take off his clothes.
He felt silly, floundering around in an indoor lake—an outdoor one was different, with minnows nipping one’s toes, and perhaps a squirrel for company, or a deer come to drink and wonder at the water-monster—and he did not dare stay long in the warm luxurious water, for he had a wakeful night before him. Just a moment he reconsidered the King’s offer of a night’s grace; regretfully he considered it, and then put it finally aside. He climbed out of the bath and unwound one of the long cream-colored towels that hung on a golden rack shaped like two mermaids holding hands. There were several of these towels, wrapped around the mermaids’ necks and lying across their outstretched arms, and the single one he held was big enough to wrap, he thought, all twelve Princesses in.
There was fresh clothing for him in the outer room: a dark red tunic and gold leggings and high soft boots—a soldier’s pay in a year’s time would not begin to account for the price of one of those boots—and a red cloak with a dark blue collar. He looked at the red cloak, lying in fluid ripples over the back of a silver chair, and then looked around for his bundle. He whirled the red cloak round his shoulder with a gesture, had he known it, that every high-blooded young nobleman had used before him, and picked up his bundle. It sighed at him.
The servant—if it was the same one: they were all white-robed and brown-haired and somber—appeared at the door as if he had waited for the chink of a belt-buckle as a summons to enter. That belt the soldier had found under the red cloak: the tails of two green dragons wound together at the small of his back, and their golden fangs locked in front. Their sapphire eyes glittered at him as he looked down at them. The bundle, hung idly over his wrist when he grasped the belt, shivered with impatience; and the serving man stepped through the door.
The soldier looked up and nodded; the man never quite met his eyes, but bowed his bow and turned again and left the room, and the soldier followed, his footfalls now as silent as the servant’s. This man led the way down a long corridor and up a flight of stairs that blazed with light as the Great Hall had; but at the top of these stairs the light abruptly ended. The servant seized a candelabrum from a niche at the stairhead and raised it high with a hand that did not tremble, and the light’s rays flew down the corridor as swift and straight as hawks. To the left was a plain wall, running from the stairhead to the end of the corridor, which was blind but for a tiny barred window a hand’s-breadth above man-level. “No escape that way,” thought the old campaigner’s part of the soldier’s mind. He looked left, at the wall: in it was set one door, only two steps from the head of the stairs where they stood. It was a door tall and broad, seven feet high perhaps and four wide, and bound with iron. There was no gap or break or fissure in it anywhere but for a keyhole so heavily wound around with iron that the opening seemed no thicker than a needle. From the keyhole a flake of white light shone from inside the door.