And oh, it was not over after all. For the spar was gone, the clinging place for what she was, for Jennifer.
He left the room. He left her with the Dwarf. What was left of her.
Blod wet his lips. “Get up,” he said, and she rose. She could not do otherwise. There was no spar, there was no light.
“Beg me,” he said, and oh, what sin had it been? Even as the pleading spilled helplessly from her, as his filthy abuse rained down, and then real pain, which excited him—even through it all she found something. Not a spar of light, for there was no light anymore, it was drowned; but here, at the last, the very last thing was pride. She would not scream, she would not go mad, unless he said for her to do so, and if he did that, it was still being taken, after all, she was not giving it.
But at length he tired and, mindful of his instructions, turned his mind to killing her. He was inventive, and it appeared after a time that pain did impose impossibilities. Pride can only carry one so far, and golden girls can die, so when the Dwarf began to truly hurt her, she started to scream after all. No spar, no light, no name, nothing left but the Dark.
When the embassy from Cathal entered the Great Hall of Paras Derval in the morning, it was with a degree of stupefaction quite spectacular that they discovered their Princess waiting to greet them.
Kim Ford was fighting a shameful case of the giggles. Sharra’s description of the probable reactions on the part of the embassy dovetailed so wonderfully with the reality that she knew with certainty that if she but glanced at the Princess, she would disgrace herself. She kept her eyes carefully lowered.
Until Diarmuid strolled up. The business with the water pitchers the night before had generated the sort of hilarity between the two women that cements a developing friendship. They had laughed for a long time.
It was only afterwards that Kim had remembered that he was a wounded man, and perhaps in more ways than one. He had also acted in the afternoon to save both Sharra’s life and her pride, and he had told them to crown his brother. She should have remembered all of that, she supposed, but then she couldn’t, she simply could not be serious and sensitive all the time.
In any case, the Prince showed no traces of affliction at the moment. Using the drone of Gorlaes’s voice as cover—Aileron had, a little surprisingly, re-appointed the Chancellor—he approached the two of them. His eyes were clear, very blue, and his manner gave no hint of extreme intoxication a few hours before, unless it lay in the slightly edged quality of his gaze.
“I hope,” he murmured to Sharra, “that yesterday discharged all your impulses to throw things at me.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Sharra said defiantly.
He was very good at this, Kim realized. He paused to flick her with a brief, sardonic glance, as to an erring child, before turning back to the Princess. “That,” he said simply, “would be a pity. Adults do have better things to do.” And he moved off, elegant and assured, to stand beside his brother, as the heir to the throne should.
Kim felt obscurely chastened; the water had been awfully childish. On the other hand, she abruptly recalled, he had been climbing into their rooms! He deserved whatever he got, and more.
Which, though manifestly true, didn’t seem to count for much. She still felt like a kid at the moment. God, he’s cool, she thought, and felt a stirring of sympathy for her newest friend. Sympathy and, because she was honest with herself, the slightest flicker of envy.
In the meantime, she was beginning to understand why Gorlaes was still Chancellor. No one else would have put such a flourish into the necessary rituals that accompanied procedures of this sort. Or even remembered them, for that matter. He was still going, and Aileron was waiting with surprising patience, when a second man, in his own way as handsome as the first, came up to her.