He sat looking after her for a moment, and then reached up to unfasten the dark red cloak. It was warm and wet to his fingers as he pulled it off; it came heavily now, sodden as it was, with none of the brisk furl and unfurl it had greeted him with when he picked it up first. He dropped it on the floor beside his cot; it steamed with the drugged wine, and he blinked as the clouds of it rose to his eyes.
He listened. The blood no longer pounded in his ears. The blaze of light from around the edge of the screen continued unwavering; and the silence was perfect. It waited. He wondered for what: and then he knew. So he sighed, and moved on the cot till it creaked; and as he did this, he opened his bundle, and lifted out the night-colored cloak the woman at the well had given him. He lay heavily down, full-length, on the cot, and noisily rearranged the linen-clad pillows with one hand; he held the cloak in the other, and it wrapped softly around his wrist and up his arm. Then he sighed once more, and lay still, crossing his hands on his breast. The cloak wandered over his shoulders and brushed his throat.
The silence still waited. The soldier snored once. Twice. A third time.
Then the rustling began: the sound of hasty bare feet, of skirts, of chest-lids almost silent but not quite; then of silks and satins and brocades, tossing together, murmuring over each other, jostling and sighing and whirling. And the sounds of bare feet were no more; instead the soldier, between snores, heard the sounds of the soles of exquisite little shoes: dancing shoes, made for princesses’ feet; and he knew that only haste, that caused even princesses to be careless of how they set their feet, enabled him to hear them at all. Then the soldier, with a last snore, stood up as softly as many years of the most dangerous of scouting missions had taught him, and whisked the black cloak around his shoulders. It blew like a shadow around him and settled without weight. Then he heard a laugh, low and brief, as if cut off, and not a happy laugh; a laugh from a heart that has not laughed for pleasure in a long time. It was the only voice he heard. He stepped around the screen.
The twelve Princesses huddled at the opposite end of the Long Gallery; and he walked toward them, softly as a scout in the enemy’s camp, softly as a fox in the chicken coop, softer still for what haunted things with quick ears might be listening. He heard a sound again like the lifting of a chest-lid; but this must be a massive chest, with a great lid. The Princesses all stood back and gazed toward the floor: there a great hatch had been uncovered, at the foot of the farthest bed, and beside it the eldest Princess knelt, with her hands at the edge of the trapdoor she had just raised. She stared downward with her sisters. The Princesses were all dressed in the loveliest of gowns; they shimmered like bubbles caught in the sun’s rays, that look clear as glass, but with every color finely in and through and over them, till the eye is dazzled. Like some faerie bubble the eldest Princess seemed as she rose to her feet and floated—down. Each of her sisters followed lightly after; and as the last bit of the rainbow skirt of the youngest disappeared through the trap, the soldier stepped down the dark stair behind her.
It was dark for only a moment. There was a light coming mistily from somewhere before them toward which they descended. It made its way a little even into the long black flight of stairs that sank below the King’s castle. The walls that clung close around those stairs were moist to the touch, as if they walked by the river. Down they went, and still farther down; the grey light grew a little stronger and the sullen air no longer felt like a cloud in the lungs. The soldier blinked, and looked at his feet, or where his feet should be, for he had forgotten his cloak; and at that he stumbled—and stepped on the hem of the youngest Princess’s dress. A tiny breathless shriek leaped from her, and she clutched at the glittering necklaces at her throat.
Her sisters paused and looked back at her, and the soldier recognized the same voice that had earlier laughed so mirthlessly. “Someone just stepped on the hem of my dress,” she said, trembling, but her hands still clutched at her jewels, and she did not, or could not, look behind her.
“Don’t be absurd,” said the eldest; her voice drifted back along the shadowy corridor, touching the walls, like a bird so long imprisoned it no longer seeks to be free, but flies only because it has wings. “That soldier drank the wine I gave him; you heard him snoring. You have caught your skirt on a nail.”
The soldier leaned against a dank wall, his heart pounding till he thought the fever-quick perceptions of the youngest Princess must hear it; but as her eleven sisters began their descent again she followed after, with only the briefest hesitation. One small hand clutched at her skirt, and pulled the edge up, so that it would not trail behind her; and she hurried to walk close at the heels of the eleventh Princess, as if she feared to linger; but not once did she look behind her.
Still they descended; but the dark walls rose up till the soldier could no longer see the ceiling; and these heavy brooding walls were now pierced with arches, and within the arches there were things that shimmered, red and green and blue and gold. The soldier peered into them as he passed; and then suddenly the walls fell away entirely, and still they descended, but the stairs were cut into what appeared to be a cliff of stone, black, with veins of silver and green; and the thin shining lines seemed to stir like snakes. And lining the stairs on either side were trees: but the trees were smooth and white, with a white that was frightening, for it was a white that did not know the sun; and in the strange branches of these strange trees, if trees they even could be called, grew gems, as huge and heavy as ripe plums and peaches. The soldier paused and thought: “A branch of a tree will help me tell my story to the King,” and he put a hand out, quickly, so his fingers touched the cool white bole before he was overcome again by the vertigo of not being able to see himself; and so his hand closed around a branch, and he did not fall. He let his fingers creep blindly to a twig’s end, and broke off a spray of young gems, delicate as rosebuds and no larger than the fingertips of the youngest Princess; but these rosebuds were purple and blue and the shifting greens of hidden mosses.
The crack of the breaking branch echoed terribly in that vast underground chamber; and again the youngest Princess shrieked, a high, thin, desperate sound. But this time she whirled around, her hands in fists, and her fists against her mouth, holding in the weeping. Her eyes stared back up, and up, the way they had come, and the soldier stood motionless, although he knew she could not see him. He held the branch as he had broken it, as if it still were a part of the tree; and he looked at the youngest Princess’s wide wild eyes, and he felt pity for her.