I couldn’t fasten the buttons in back, so I took the long veil from the headdress, wound it twice around my waist and made a knot, just barely good enough to keep the whole thing from falling off me, and marched downstairs to the kitchens. I didn’t even try to keep myself clean this time: I carried the tray up to the library defiantly bespattered with egg and bacon-grease and splotches of tea, my hair in snarls, looking like some sort of mad noblewoman who’d run off to the woods from a ball.

Of course, it didn’t last long. As soon as I resentfully said vanastalem along with him, his magic seized me and shook off my stains, squashed me back into stays, piled my hair back upon my head, and left me once again looking like a doll for some princess to play with.

But I felt happier that morning than I had in weeks, and from then on it became my private defiance. I wanted him to be bitterly annoyed every time he looked at me, and he rewarded me with every incredulous scowl. “How do you do this to yourself?” he asked me, almost marveling, one day when I wandered in with a clump of rice pudding on top of my head—I had accidentally hit a spoon with my elbow and flung some into the air—and a huge red streak of jam going all the way down my front of beautiful cream silk.

The last homespun dress, I kept in my dresser. Every day after he had done with me, I went upstairs. I would wrestle my way out of the ballgown, drag my hair out of the nets and headdresses, scattering jeweled pins on the floor, and then I would put on the soft well-worn letnik and the homespun smock, which I kept washed and clean by hand. And then I went down to the kitchens to make my own bread, and I rested by the warm fireplace while it baked, careless of a few smudges of ash and flour on my skirts.

I began to have enough energy for boredom once again. I didn’t even think of taking another book from the library, though. Instead, I went for a needle, much as I loathed to sew. As long as I was going to be drained to the belly every morning to make dresses, I thought I might as well tear them apart and make something less useless of them: sheets, perhaps, or handkerchiefs.

The mending-basket had stood untouched inside the box in my room: there was nothing in the castle to mend but my own clothes, which until now I had been sullenly glad to leave torn. But when I opened it, I found tucked inside a single scrap of paper, written on with a bit of stubby charcoal: the hand of my friend from the kitchen.

You are afraid: don’t be! He won’t touch you. He will only want you to make yourself handsome. He won’t think to give you anything, but you can take a fine dress from one of the guest chambers and make it over to fit you. When he summons you, sing to him or tell him a story. He wants company but not much of it: bring his meals and avoid him when you can, and he will ask nothing more.
How priceless those words would have been to me, if I had opened the mending-basket and found them that first night. Now I stood holding the note, shaking with the memory of his voice overlaid on my halting one, dragging spells and strength out of me, draping me in silks and velvet. I had been wrong. He hadn’t done any of this to the other women at all.

Chapter 3

I huddled in my bed all that night without sleeping, desperate all over again. But getting out of the tower didn’t become easier just because I wanted it more. I did go to the great doors the next morning, and tried for the first time to lift the enormous bar across them, no matter how ridiculous the attempt. But of course I couldn’t budge it a quarter of an inch.

Down in the pantry, using a long-handled pot for a lever, I pried up the great iron cap that covered the refuse-pit and looked down. Deep below a fire gleamed; there was no escape there for me. I pushed the iron lid back into place with an effort, and then I searched all along the walls with both my palms, into every dark corner, looking for some opening, some entry. But if there was one, I didn’t find it; and then morning was spilling down the stairs behind me, an unwelcome golden light. I had to make the breakfast and carry the tray up to my doom.

As I laid the food out, the plate of eggs, the toast, the preserves, I looked over and looked over again, at the long steel-gleaming butcher’s knife with its handle jutting out of the block towards me. I had used it to cut meat; I knew how quick it was. My parents raised a pig every year. I’d helped at butchering-time, held the bucket for the pig’s blood, but the thought of putting a knife into a man was something else, unimaginable. So I didn’t imagine it. I only put the knife on the tray, and went upstairs.

When I came into the library, he was standing by the window-sill with his back to me and his shoulders stiff with irritation. I mechanically put out the dishes, one after another, until there was nothing left but the tray, the tray and the knife. My dress was splattered with oatmeal and egg; in a moment he would say—

“Finish with that,” he said, “and go upstairs.”

“What?” I said, blankly. The knife was still under its napkin, drowning out all my other thoughts, and it took a moment for me to understand I’d been reprieved.

“Are you grown suddenly deaf?” he snapped. “Stop fussing with those plates and take yourself off. And keep to your rooms until I summon you again.”

My dress was stained and crumpled, a ruin of tangled ribbons, but he hadn’t even turned to look at me. I snatched up the tray and fled the room, needing no more excuse. I ran up the stairs, feeling almost as if I were flying without that terrible weariness dragging at my heels. I went into my room and shut the door and tore off my silken finery, put back on my homespun, and sank down on the bed, hugging myself with relief like a child who’d escaped a whipping.

And then I saw the tray discarded on the floor, the knife lying bare and gleaming. Oh. Oh, what a fool I’d been, even to think about it. He was my lord: if by some horrible chance I had killed him, I would surely be put to death for it, and like as not my parents along with me. Murder was no escape at all; better to just throw myself out the window.

I even turned and looked out the window, miserably, and then I saw what the Dragon had been watching with such distaste. There was a cloud of dust on the road coming to the tower. It wasn’t a wagon but a great covered carriage almost like a house on wheels: harnessed to a team of steaming horses, with two horsemen riding before the driver, all of them in coats of grey and brilliant green. Four more horsemen followed it, in similar coats.

The carriage drew up outside the great doors: there was a green crest on it, a monster with many heads, and all the outriders and guards came rolling down off their horses and went into an enormous bustle of work. They all flinched away a little when the tower doors swung lightly open, those huge doors I couldn’t even shift. I craned my head to peer down and saw the Dragon step out from the doors alone, onto the threshold.